Joking_Phantom

I won't pretend to intimately understand the Chinese sociopolitical atmosphere, but it's clear to me that China wants to establish some form of international hegemony. This isn't an initiative focused on improving the country itself either through parity or bleeding edge advancement, which is the tone in many European countries and societies that have no aspirations to significantly influence world politics. For example, Czechoslovakia doesn't want to dominate the world culturally, economically, or politically. They mostly stick to making their country and people happy and prosperous.

China sees its 1.4 billion person population, and wants to extend itself across the world with a similar magnitude to the British Empire of old, or the American world order of the past 70 years. The translation of this Chinese publication is full of buzzwords and phrases that read like a McKinsey white paper, but with a distinctly Marxist bent (the Chinese are REALLY fond of their pithy phrases, they have many more phrase "memes" with significant time spans).

This is the difference between China and the late Soviet Union. China understands that the way to global power isn't a particular ideology - it's all about being big, big, big. Some choice quotes stand out to me: "Online positive publicity must become bigger and stronger, so that the Party's ideas always become the strongest voice in cyberspace."

"The online and offline worlds must form concentric circles, and, under the leadership of the Party, mobilize the people of all nationalities, mobilize all aspects of enthusiasm, to jointly realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the struggle for the China Dream."

The Chinese Dream in particular is something everyone who is interested in Chinese society should understand. It sounds like the American Dream, but it's markedly different. Global hegemony is an explicit goal. The Century of Humiliation is thought of as something that should be left in the past, yet is still repeatedly brought up whenever Western powers are perceived to have done something violating Chinese rights. China deserves to be great, from both hard work and its numbers.

Whether or not this works, time will tell. The internet as a practical invention is American. The production of silicon based computers, the microcodes they interpret, the languages that compile down to microcode, its all English. Global trade language is English. International politics is in English. To become a superpower in cyberspace implies that on some level, the default conversation and framework should be set by China in Chinese. They've got a long way to go.

I won't dispute this - the private sector is composed of people just as the government is, and their attachment of sensitive data to vulnerable identifying information is just as abhorrent and many times more dangerous than anything the federal government could ever do.

In my mind, the novel problem here is that the Chinese government can use such information in order to socially police people that nominally aren't under their control. Google in Europe or America has no desire other than to collect info for commercial purposes, and there is no inherent desire to turn over private information to any government.

WeChat in America constitutes a potential extension of Chinese governmental control onto American citizens. This can be something as innocuous and reasonable as the denial of visas due to certain communications, or something worse. American citizens may get their Chinese friends and relatives in trouble for something they say. A few cases of these, and suddenly half the American WeChat user base knows they have to watch what they say unless they don't care about people they know. Moving out of the platform is not an option due to network effects.

China has long maintained that foreign tech services offer an opportunity for foreign countries to subvert their information controls, and has banned thousands of domains and companies under the guise of protection from foreign influence, commercial or gubernatorial. What's to say that China won't turn around and do the same thing to other countries?

To your point about no advertising BS in China, well you'd be right if it were 20 years ago. Unfortunately, advertising has become a booming industry in China. Take a walk in most significant Chinese cities, and you'll find the constant bombardment of information to be more garish than any American counterpart. The Chinese Internet is no different.

WeChat is the replacement for WhatsApp, fully compliant with Chinese censorship controls.

What's mildly disturbing is that many Chinese Americans, both American citizens and not, living in the US use WeChat. They use it because of their cultural and social ties with China. Chinese tourists as well have had increasingly better integration inside the US as well, which would only serve to spread the usage of WeChat to anyone who interacts with Chinese tourists. Tencent is slowly but surely gaining a foothold inside the United States as they roll out more features abroad that made it popular in China.

Are they suspect to these controls as well, despite not being within China? More importantly, whats the legal status of a Chinese corporation with the capability of invading its users privacy under Chinese law, if some users are neither not in China or not Chinese citizens?

Thank you for the reply, but these are refugees crossing into Canada. Not American citizens entering the United States. I don't see thousands of results either.

A quick google search revealed absolutely nothing fruitful - 3 articles about the refugees seeking asylum in Canada being deported after CP discovery, 1 American citizen charged with CP found in his residence, 1 American citizen charged by a Saskatchewan provincial court, and 1 former Border Patrol agent caught as part of a Texan initiative that counters crimes against children.

Not a single example comes to mind of an American citizen entering or leaving with illegal electronic information. If these searches were actually doing anything useful, I'm sure an organized effort to promote its success would've been underway.

Does anyone know of a case where a search of electronic material beyond physical inspection actually resulted in any illegal materials?

I don't doubt that our current body of legislation and judicial precedents make this practice legal, but I honestly can't see this policy actually doing anything.

The classic case of illegal electronic information would be child pornography - but who would be stupid enough to bring it with them to the border for consumption or for trafficking, when the Internet exists? If they were to bring it to the border, what's to stop them from encrypting it not divulging the key?

Beyond C.P., I can imagine certain trade secrets being illegal, like Samuel Slater back in the day. But that was to the benefit of America, and the British were right to suspect him due to his position giving him the capability to leak information that was held secret by state laws. American analogues obviously enforce the unwanted disclosure of state secrets and such based on identities and institutions prior to crossing the border - which makes what the CBP are doing redundant at best.

Terrorists do not need anything outside of this country to operate. We've seen domestic and foreign terrorists alike build their bombs with legal sources of information and material.

IMO, what happened was a power hungry busy body official in the CBP spearheaded this policy. Just another case of crappy people in crappy politics, making crappy solutions to nonexistent problems. It is fortunate that the rest of humanity will be reasonable enough to revert such egregious and useless wastes of resources.

Actually they are cheap - the reason why a significant amount of on chip resources can be assembled into the IME on all of Intel's chipsets is because IC process technology has advanced by many orders of magnitude. The Pentium 4 represented the edge of consumer grade CPUs 10 years ago, and it was around that time we reached practical limits on frequency. As hardware manufacturing shifted towards more cores and caches, SoC ICs became the standard. Slapping a cheap, low power system of CPU and memory on every chipset is easy, cheap and natural.

With extra hardware being cheap and easy, Intel put 2 and 2 together and tried to monetize this by offering businesses extra capabilities as a standard. Obviously this introduces new attack vectors, and the opaque nature of this new "standard" feature attracts attention from all sides.

IMO, the first step for people interested in promoting RISC V should be to get it into the hands of the universities' undergrads. Berkeley's EECS 151 lab final semester project was to implement a RISC V CPU at 50 MHz on a FPGA.

If EE/CS departments of colleges adopt RISC V hardware for teaching their students, providing cheap microcontrollers and boards to students at the start of their semester classes, those precocious little buggers are going to build Doom clones and help port their favorite flavor of linux onto them. When you've got a generation of top talent tinkering with an ISA that doesn't suck like x86, you're going to see adoption in actual industry.

When I took Berkeley's EECS151 class (Introduction to Digital Design and Integrated Circuits), the first lecture actually did not go over clocks. Instead, it goes over the simple building blocks of circuits - inverters, logic gates, and finally combinational logic blocks that are made up of the previous two. These components alone do not need a clock to function, and their static functions are merely subject to the physical limitations such as the speed of electrons, which we package into something called propagation delay. It is entirely possible to build clockless circuits, otherwise known as asynchronous circuits.

From the perspective of an electrical engineer and computer scientist, asynchronous circuits theoretically can be faster and more efficient. Without the restraint of a clock slowing down an entire circuit for its slowest component, asynchronous circuits can instead operate as soon as data is available, while consuming less power to overhead functions such as generating the clock and powering components that are not changing state. However, asynchronous circuits are largely the plaything of researchers, and the vast majority of today's circuits are synchronous (clocked).

The reason why we use synchronous circuits, which may relate to the reason why many students learning circuits often try to make circuits without clocks, is because of abstraction. Clocked circuits can have individual components/stages developed and analyzed separately. You leave problems that do not pertain to the function of a circuit such as data availability and stability to the clock of the overall circuit (clk-to-q delay, hold delay, etc), and can focus on functionality within an individual stage. As well, components of a circuit can be analyzed by tools we've built to automate the difficult parts of circuit design, such as routing, power supply and heat dissipation, etc. This makes developing complex circuits with large teams of engineers "easier." The abstraction of synchronous circuits is one step above asynchronous circuits. Without a clock, asynchronous circuits can run into problems where outputs of components are actually wrong for a brief moment of time due to race conditions, a problem which synchronous circuit design stops by holding information between stages stable until everything is ready to go.

The article's point of hardware design beginning with the clock is useful when you are trying to teach software engineers, who are used to thinking in a synchronous, ordered manner, about practical hardware design which is done entirely with clocks. However, it is not the complete picture when trying to create understanding of electrical engineering from the ground up. Synchronous circuits are built from asynchronous circuits, which were built from our understanding of E&M physics. Synchronous circuits are then used to build our ASICs, FPGAs, and CPUs that power our routers and computers, which run instructions based on ISA's that we compile down to from higher order languages. It's hardly surprising that engineers who are learning hardware design build clockless circuits - they aren't wrong for designing something "simple" and correct, even if it isn't currently practical. They're just operating on the wrong level of abstraction, which they should have a cursory knowledge of so synchronous circuits make sense to them.