The first and central provision of the bill is the requirement for tracking technology to be embedded in any high-end processor module or device that falls under the U.S. export restrictions.
As a coder with some hardware awareness, I find the concept laughable.
How does he think they (read: the Taiwanese, if they are willing to) would go about doing it?
Add a GPS receiver onto every GPU? Add an inertial navigation module to every GPU? Add a radio to every GPU? :D
The poor politician needs a technically competent advisor forced on him. To make him aware (preferably in the most blunt way) of real possibilities in the real world.
In the real world, you can prevent a chip from knowing where it’s running and you can’t add random shit onto a chip, and if someone does, you can stop buying bugged hardware or prevent that random addition from getting a reading.
If politicians had advisors then how would they justify doing the dumb shit their owners want them to, then they can’t plead ignorance.
How about locking all the advanced functions behind a hardware lock that requires an online key to unlock? Besides getting an IP address for geolocation, this approach would enable manufacturers to put a subscription on the features as well. Require users to provide a government issued ID that matches the name on the credit card used.
VPN! I hear you cry. But the driver is already running pretty close to the hardware, so good luck hiding a VPN client.
So while you can’t guarantee a street address accuracy, you can get country and overall regional subdivision.
But who would buy such hardware? :)
so good luck hiding a VPN client.
In my imagination, there is no VPN client. The whole network is behind a VPN router and the internet gateway is where it needs to be.
Between this, the tarrifs and the brain drain, why would any manufacturers consider operating in the US anymore?
They’ll still want access to Americans coz there are profits to be had, and they can price gouge under a fascist kleptocracy many orders of magnitude harder than elsewhere.
What they don’t understand is that the fascist leadership will backstab many/most of them eventually, especially if they possess any moral fiber whatsoever. Luckily for them, capitalism has already purged corporate leadership of morality and ethics.
But if we don’t have as much money due to increased prices on life essentials and assistance cuts, how are we supposed to buy all these things? Bad logic on their part, if this is their approach.
There is no bottom. They’ll continue crushing the working class all the way to slavery and feudalism.
Stop expecting logic. MAGA and fascism is a severely psychotic mental illness that is empirically a dead end. A death cult.
schizo
Nah you pretty much established the death cult in 2020. The first hundred days of this in administration you went about doing the most harm to the world that you possibly could in order to save a couple pennies to give back to rich people. The Republican Party is a death cult. Everyone obsessed with some nuanced return to slavery, ending healthcare, and poisoning everything you can. For a smol profitorino
i wish you were wrong so fuckin bad :(
There’s no real push for that to happen. This is about crashing an economy, stealing wealth and creating a a massive almost slave labor class at the bottom.
So it’s about communism? No the other guys wanted that.
Communism is exactly the opposite of that. You’re thinking of late stage capitalism.
Stealing wealth and creating a slave class is what happens in communism. Every. Single. Time.
Remember the slaves with 12+ public holidays a year, 20+ vacation days, free healthcare, free education, free child care and price controls for rent and food and no billionaires and job security?
Where?
East Germany and pretty much all other eastern block countries till ~1990.
Sounds like US capitalism in 2025… tax the poor (slave class) to give more money to the rich.
Yea I’ll share some down votes. I was laughing because the president was just threatening an American company yesterday, telling it how to operate. Telling it where to operate. Like isn’t this what they screeched legendary communist Obama would do? We just switched to a centralized planned economy over night. Welcome to USSR2
Somebody needs to learn to use Wikipedia.
Someone needs to learn not to blindly believe Wikipedia.
Which communist countries/states is this not the case btw?
Somebody needs to learn not to blindly believe a century of capitalist propaganda. At least Wikipedia cites sources.
You made the claim. You said every single time. Citation required.
Which other guys? The couple thousand people who voted third party because they didn’t view Harris as an acceptable compromise between fascism and humanity?
Why would any manufacturer want access to the biggest market in the world? Hmmm let me think about that……
Ah yes let’s try to stifle Chinese innovation by … checks notes … expanding our surveillance state. Usually we are the ones calling China a surveillance state, but it’s fine(it’s not) once we do it.
There is nothing more American than hipocracy my friend
Yeah. All the FUD about Huawei really solidified in my mind how stupid the average internet user is these days.
It’s like, everything they were bitching about has already been confirmed to be happening with US companies thanks to PRISM and the Snowden leaks.
You joke, but western governments regularly pull the “our surveillance is good because we aren’t an authoritarian regime” trope.
Why do gpus need geo tracking? They’re usually pretty stationary right?
It’s about not letting them be used in China, and any other future enemy countries.
Because China supposedly used Nvidia cards to train DeepSeek, which blew all of the US AI out of the water. And apparently that raised some eyebrows, because Nvidia wasn’t supposed to be selling to China (free market, right?). Since China was eating big tech’s lunch, they cried to republicans (and gave them a bunch of reelection money) and now we have this bill. The point is to be able to remotely disable cards if they’re outside of their sale region.
Such a well-conceived feature could never possibly be abused for unintended purposes.
Senator Tom Cotton
Ah. Yeah, that tracks.
Care to tell more?
Famously he declared that slavery was justified because it was necessary to create the US:
IMHO there are a few, very few, things that Usa should forbid their own people to say.
Glorifying slavery might be one of them. But sadly they are not ready for that, yet.
When Americans were supporting ISIS we look at them like they are crazy, but when they are supporting the confederacy, we give them high up political posts.
Also lied about being a ranger. Stolen valor anyone?
Laughs in Faraday.
Oh Senator Know-Nothing…
What are you going to do about firewalls and air-gapped networks? JFK you stupid asshole… GTFO
Next up GPUs require always-on connections and Nvidia requires a monthly subscription to pay for that.
For just $19.99 a month you can have us track your GPU*, or choose the premium ad-free upgrade for just $149.99 a months, so you can enjoy your favorite games without ad breakes.
^^^* ^^^failure ^^^to ^^^comply ^^^will ^^^be ^^^punished ^^^by ^^^deportation
Don’t give them any ideas.
This is absolutely insane and no one will want to buy those GPUs.
Unless, of course, they’re in all the GPUs that people want.
…It’s unfortunately more likely that the majority of people won’t notice or care, though.
Yeah if you think most people are going to care or even know about this, you haven’t been paying attention to the last 20 years.
Have some faith bud.
Faith in what? The unending march to tech dystopia?
Just like nobody is buying the current generation because it’s insane, right?
How is this even legal? I am not even american nor living there, so how would the US be allowed to operate massive and unregulated surveillance through GPUs ?
The US is becoming worse than those they call villain.
The US has very low engagement of its voters, so even things that are illegal are starting to happen regularly.
It’s the same as so many countries, once a few rich guys get into power, as long as the guys with guns will take their money, it doesn’t really matter what want, the government gets captured and corrupted.
There’s ways to fight it but it’s a slog. I might give up. It’s not my job to fix it, fixing things doesn’t pay.
How is this even legal?
That’s the neat part, if it isn’t no one will enforce it or protect you.
Senator Tom Cotton’s legislation seeks to “prevent advanced
AmericanTAIWANESE chips from falling into the hands of adversaries like Communist China.”FTFY
Nvidia, Intel, and AMD are all American companies. Yes, their GPUs are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan but they just follow the designs given to them. The layout of these GPUs and the architecture of the chips are all designed and controlled by these American corporations.
So why are they made in Taiwan then? Why not make them in america?
Why would they make their own products illegal in Europe?
…okay, so invest in Chinese GPU companies? Invest in Chinese GPU companies.
I looked into those recently, actually expected the GPUs to be a lot farther behind than they are. The things that are really pushing them back are the drivers and the outdated process node, but there are already GPUs comparable to the lower end current generation cards from the 3 big manufacturers on paper (and even those have 16GB of VRAM, Nvidia 😤).
The image of China as an uncreative, uneducated backwards nation of drones good only for assembling phones, hasn’t been the reality for at least a decade.
A lot of people in the West don’t realize this because to this day there’s a vicious cycle of people only import cheap Chinese crap because China has a reputation for only making cheap crap because people only import the cheap crap. They don’t realize that China is also making top tier products, because nobody’s trying to import top tier Chinese products.
because nobody’s trying to import top tier Chinese products
oh, but they do, they import it rebranded with western logos
They’re a loooooong way off being able to match any nvida card from the last like 7 years, at least.
You have been dead wrong with every reply. Why are you still trying?
I have him tagged. I see him everywhere, and continues to be wrong all the time. No idea why she even spends her time doing this.
Aww cute. Rent free.
Where are these Chinese GPUs with anything that can match DLSS and any RTX card?
Look like there’s lots of Chinese mini pcs using the 395+ Max APU
AMD is awesome ^^ they’ll rule the land of x86 for quire some while imho. But the problem of supporting hegemony is obvious.
AMDs upcoming GPUs are purportedly on par with NVIDIAs Maxwell, but as long as the prices are the same, we’re in the same boat.
Luckily the prices have been falling, largely because NPUs are replacing GPUs as the primary handler of AI workloads - since it’s more performative and saves on electricity costs.
But, in a “free market” competition mui importante.
Capitalism is a system of whores. And there’s nothing wrong with whores, but a whore is a whore. Good luck. It’s going to be like trying to hold a bar of soap that’s slipping out of your hands. You can keep grabbing at it, but it’s just going to keep slipping. I just recall when America leaked nuclear secrets because soldiers were using a private private flashcard program and they forgot to check mark the box that said private. And so they ended up leaking all these secrets all over the internet. And let’s not forget. The open source information that was used from some snot-nosed person on an osint account on twitter for targeting a supposed underground base, that cost the lives of innocent civilians via the Palantir and Peter Thiel’s stupid AI. They did not get an underground base. They just wasted millions of dollars on something that wasn’t there.
It’s like their plans are dystopic and terrifying, but they’re not going to be able to implement them in a way that’s worth a damn. And also, their actual product that they produce is so stupid that it’s even more terrifying than the original idea. It’s just straight up fucking madness. It’s like, look mom, no hands. Then you fall off the goddamn bike and you’re sitting there crying.
This still remains. There is so much corruption and greed in this country that we can’t even function as an empire. We can’t even get a chip’s factory figured out. We don’t make shit. Everybody in this country is so goddamn lazy and stupid. I can’t even find a noble cause because I feel like I’m just enabling stupid people. I’m sure we just operate off of bare necessities. Like the need to just stay alive one more day. But it gets to the point where it’s like, what’s the fucking point? This country is nonsensical. It’s absurd. It’s laughable. It’s weak. It’s limp dicked. And this happened way before Joe Biden or Trump. This has been a continuation ever since I’ve been alive for 40 fucking dumb ass years.
That’s some weird shit
Fascists are weird little guys. There is a podcast about that, it’s true.
And how do they plan to do this? even if they add (GPS) tracking hardware the Chinese will just cut the connection to the Antenna and the GPU is gone. If they do it in software (like driver) it will just be patched out.
Sure, but now a new company selling Geo tracking shit for GPUs is making billions per year. Problem solved!