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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

but its chips don’t make it out of the country because they’re largely used in products built for the Chinese government.

Very wise of them. Right now the UK needs to make a serious push to make ARM our primary choice, and fabbed here too. This is as strategic as nukes.

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You mean ARM Holdings plc, a wholly owned subsidary of SoftBank Group Corp.?

Well, quite. Didn’t the US block the sale of MIPS to a Chinese buyer?

It wouldn't really matter anyways since the Chinese have been making MIPS64 chips for more than a decade.

The current high end chip in China is actually new arch based on the DEC Alpha.

It's too late for that ARM is no longer a UK company.

The argument of national security goes a long way.

It certainly goes a long way towards redirecting money to favoured state companies and building protectionist barriers, yes. Whether it provides any actual security is another matter.

Are you aware of historical events like the 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion? It was allegedly caused by sabotaged software inserted by a Canadian company on behalf of the CIA.

Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government.

> Modern chips are certainly dense enough and have enough layers that you can hide Trojans in them. Buying e.g. routers with Chinese ICs is a credible threat to the US government.

Why bother hiding the malware in hardware? Most electronics are made in China these days anyway, and only a very, very small fraction of users ever replace or investigate the firmware on their devices.

Much easier and cheaper just to load a compromised firmware during manufacture and snoop that way.

> …only a very, very small fraction of users ever replace or investigate the firmware on their devices…

Remember that the users we are talking about here are US government agencies. Yes, they do investigate firmware. Yes, they do code reviews of your firmware source code. No, they won't let you just ship them a Chinese router with factory firmware on it.

There's a strange little collaboration between BT, GCHQ and Huawei going on at "Adastral Park" (Martlesham Heath). It's all top secret, but the person who told me about it hinted that it wasn't about removing the surveillance backdoors but making sure that GCHQ had access to them.

The explosion happened because Soviets stole control software and tried to run it on their system.

The software was not stolen, it was purchased from a Canadian company. The explosion happened because of the CIA's sabotage efforts.

This (and many other sources online) claim that the Soviets stole it from a Canadian company:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

Basically, the CIA learned that the Soviets were looking for this software, and got the Canadian company to plant a bug in it before the soviets could steal it.

Even before Softbank bought them, ARM weren't even a fabless operation: their whole business model is IP cores. There's very little strategic value in that; you'd be as well off founding a semiconductor manufacturer to build RISC V processors.

Drumming up national security for the UK? I guess if you're planning to go to war with the EU... Otherwise it's as useless as Trident.

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