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Comment by onepointsixC | Hacker News Reader

This specifically furthers the interests of a ruling class, the Chinese Communist Party. It is explicitly giving the CCP an American funded and developed technology which they can use for further development of racially profiled mass surveillance for the continued genocide of the Uyghurs. This is an awful move.

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lol that’s a huge jump from developing open source cpu without backdoors to genocide of Uyghurs.

It's not at all. RISC-V Foundation can develop open-source CPU's in the US as they have thus far. They are moving explicitly to circumvent US export restrictions to China. The CCP's mass surveillance in Xin Jiang is incredibly sophisticated[1]. It is simply not possible for them to accomplish this computationally without state of the art hardware which they will now have a new avenue to acquire.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill...

The impact on China's mass surveillance capabilities is negligible, because RISC-V work is open source already.

What the foundation avoids by moving to Switzerland is fragmentation of their ecosystem due to US foreign policy decisions.

Note that China is already among the technology leaders in the world. Even if cut off from the remaining world, they would have no issue in manufacturing and operating sophisticated surveillance infrastructure. So I can't see how the foundation would help suppressed minorities in China by staying in US.

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