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Comment by _w1tm | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it was possible to build chips in a way that they could disable themselves if used in a way not approved of by the manufacturer. Perhaps a set of pre-generated keys that have preset validity times. You would then need to contact the manufacturer to receive the next key in the set.

Probably too much effort for the gain though. For military chips maybe?

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You really want hardware DRM to support your political ideology? Good thing this sort of thing has never been abused!

I hope whichever country/company that champions this kind of DRM gets their infra compromised and permanently disabled. It's absurd that we're at a point where we are entertaining this level of control as a possibility.

This is not going to end well for anyone.

Then the manufacturer becomes a military target, since destroying their authentication infrastructure has the effect of disabling operational military hardware.

The military wants the simplest things possible. The only thing you could even reasonably want to have a way to disable would be crypto-related systems. For weapons, heck, even nuke missile codes are set to 0000 or something similarly stupid, because in crunch time you don't want to have to look up the code for launching a nuclear missile that is already secured by several doors of thick steel. A missile with a way to disable it would be a nightmare, some dumb military officer or enlistee would routinely destroy them by pressing the wrong button, guaranteed.

What do you think Microsoft's been pushing for the last ten years? The impulse for control generally has truly awful unintended consequences.

For anything programmable, _maybe_. But power management? Analog frontends? Very difficult...

I'm sure all your enemies would love for the US to add remote-disable to all the weapons.

On the other hand remote hardware disable being already in all military equipment the US sells to allies, just in case they ever change their mind, would be a cool conspiracy theory.

There are rumors that F35 has a daily changing unlock code. You need that code from the US to operate the aircraft.

imagine your phone turning into a rock because you loaded an image or song in your browser. Is that the future you want to have?

Yeah, just sell people computers that are completely owned straight off the factory. "Sell" it to them but keep all the keys and use them to enforce policy on what's supposed to be somebody else's property.

Computing is heading down a very dark path if people are seriously suggesting stuff like this.

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