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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Anybody know if these chips require anything like Intel's IME or AMD's PSP? Could this be the answer Libreboot has been looking for?

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I highly doubt one of the most authoritarian governments is going to produce a chip the libre community would use

I live under authoritarian government. The basic idea everybody here adheres to goes something like this: as long as you're going to be spied upon (and you are), it might as well be a country on the other side of the globe. We're in much greater danger from the shadowy types who are supposed to be protecting us from foreign actors (heh), than from the NSA. That's one reason why we proxy everything through US servers. So who knows…

I buy that logic so long as you:

1. never travel overseas.

2. the authoritarian govt doesn't run low on cash and start selling all this data to the highest bidder. very similar to fears about the Soviet nuclear stockpile after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The companies involved are Taiwanese, not from mainland China. The libre community couldn't avoid Taiwanese chips even if they wanted to, which I don't imagine they do.

Taiwan is involved yes, but it's a joint venture between the government of Shanghai and a Taiwanese company. So certainly mainland China has the influence here.

Well they can't use Intel or AMD so the options are kind of limited. If they can get full control over the rest of the platform then they can make it more difficult for a compromised chip to remain undetected.

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