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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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i assume by disable they probably mean, something along the lines of irreversibly contaminating the whole of the assembly line.
I'd be curious to know how specifically they're going about this.
Ok winnie the pooh, like they are going to tell you
i mostly asked because other people would almost certainly have better ideas.
Besides, if whatever they're doing wouldn't stand up to "being public knowledge" it's not a very sound plan lmao.
"The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
no, you're thinking about it wrong. The whole point of a doomsday machine is useless if it's countered by simply being known about.
China knowing how TSMC has their delete key working, shouldn't make a fucking difference, on whether or not it works. If it does, it's not a very good delete key, because china probably already knows how it works, as well as the US.
You need to watch Dr. Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by Stanley Kubrik friend.
probably, i'm just repeating standard rules of security practice though. If it's only secure because someone doesn't know about it. It's not secure.
I highly doubt TSMC is doing anything less than the state of the art practices with regards to this problem.
Or, this sounds like tactical planning in case of an invasion, to prevent access of valuable resources to the invaders. Making it "need to know" makes perfect sense.
Probably wiping process control code from the systems that contain tons of fiddly hard to find constants and other information.
Well that's less fun than detcord or mission impossible style self-immolating electronics.
Yes, but Taiwan is not China and they need to be able to do that even if there are people in the building.
i wonder if this also includes trying to physically damage the machinery in order to ensure one hell of a time getting it back online, because theoretically once you wipe it, you can just start smashing shit together that shouldn't be smashed together lol.
What would be better is polluting the software with invalid but still plausible constraints, so the chips would seem OK and might work for days or weeks but would fail in the field... especially if these chips are used in weapon systems or critical infrastructure.
this is, decent. The problem here is that it's almost always easier to reverse engineer a system that's partially constructed, than it is one that's completely deconstructed.
You would ideally want to delete ALL software, and ALL hardware running that software, that would be MUCH harder to reverse engineer. Or at the very least, significantly more expensive.
although i imagine building chips to fail is almost an impossible thing. Cpus almost never die, unless you blow them up with too much power lol.
I'm really hoping for thermite. A lot of thermite.
thermites a good one, not quite instantaneous, but still pretty good.
Would certainly be a good counter for hardware.
They could probably overload the circuitry to make it unusable. Or use like, IDK, mini explosives?
true, you could just blast the ever living shit out the circuitry, rendering it completely non functional. That's another good one for sensors and shit as well.
I would like to think we're further away from losing most modern technology than the world's only chip factory getting struck by lightning but the world is a fickle place I guess
There are something like a hundred chip factories across the world. TSMC itself has around 20 (mostly in Taiwan). One dying would definitely raise prices, but we won't be losing 'most modern technology'. And of course they'd have lightning cables; they aren't idiots.
They develop IC on iPhones?!!
Yes, TSMC makes the chips for iPhones, as well as Snapdragon processors used by many (but not all) high-end Android phones. Samsung has their own factory in South Korea, and Huawei has theirs in mainland China. Further, low-end smartphones and most dumbphones use Unisoc chips that are made in China.
As for desktop computers, Intel has factories in the US, and AMD (GlobalFoundries) in Germany and Singapore.
they almost certainly have lightning prevention measures on those fab buildings. It'd be stupid for them not to, stupid to the tune of 10s of billions of dollars, and a global collapse of the chip market.
First of all, it's not the "world's only chip factory". Maybe for some bleeding edge node like 2 nm, but most photolithography systems use larger feature sizes. Secondly, lightnings haven't been an issue anymore for more than a hundred years now.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovhclouds-sbg2-data-center-strasbourg/
🤷
servers generally aren't a fan of high temperatures, and soot. So yeah, that would make sense.
Probably wipe the firmware of the machines so they can't be used.
(Fun fact: FIRMware is the in-between of HARDware and SOFTware.)
moderately chubbed ware
As someone who spends a lot of their job testing and implementing firmware upgrades... I will do my utmost to slip this into at least one meeting.