On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 12:00 AM, deloptes <delop...@gmail.com> wrote: > [...] > As for some conspiracy chips with embedded rom .... if you have basic > engineering knowledge you could easily identify all of it and to my > knowledge it is not trivial to embed such a chip into a mass product, > especially a mobile phone.
Have you read Ken Thompson's On Trusting Trust? If it is true of software, it is true of hardware. > There were servers in the past, where NSA plugged in special chips before > those machines were shipped to china, but it did not last long and the > chineese found out. Either that was in the days when the NSA didn't really have a lot of skilled engineers, or they wanted the special chips to be found. I'd tend to guess at the latter, because I know how easy it would be to bundle a custom soc with an extra processor and private memory with any standard bit of circuit, package it in a standard-looking package, and label it with the name and package numbering of any company of choice. This has been easy for a long time. > So keep your eyes open and think twice before you buy something and use it - > this is my advise -- Joel Rees One of these days I'll get someone to pay me to design a language that combines the best of Forth and C. Then I'll be able to leap wide instruction sets with a single #ifdef, run faster than a speeding infinite loop with a #define, and stop all integer size bugs with my bare cast. http://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2017/06/reinventing-computers.html More of my delusions: http://reiisi.blogspot.com/2017/05/do-not-pay-modern-danegeld-ransomware.html http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html