“Please allow our machine to upload your development work directly to our servers in Schenzhen.”
I wonder if it’s possible to get a post about technology coming out of China without a “hurr durr they r spy!!1” comment. I don’t see the same every time there’s an article on a new Intel processor, for example.
Because China is not a normal country and all of its industry is controlled by the state. It desperately wants the world to forget that its the kind of country that runs over its citizens with tanks, uses forced labor and has hundreds of concentration camps, but it would be kind of silly to go along with that when it has not changed from that course.
Their long-term plan is to slow boil global opinion through a mass social engineering projects and propaganda into accepting that it’s ok and normal for a government to operate in the way that the CCP does.
As long as the CCP is in power anything it does should should be observed about with a healthy dose of suspicion.
Meanwhile the US has successfully made people forget about the revelations that Edward Snowden made.
The US rolled our democratically elected government in the 70s and we still lick their boots to this day. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was talking about a country in the third world, but I’m talking about Australia.
Edit, source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence
Midnight Oil made a song about it, “Power and the Passion.”
TIL
Yeah but whatabout the 30 million people Mao killed
Yeah, the post is about a new RISC-V laptop and someone came in with "butwhatabout china!!’
That’s not whataboutism.
You sound like a tankie. I bet you think the Tik Tok ban is unfair, while staying quiet on any of the dozen+ western companies and platforms that are outright blocked in China.
You got them mixed with Israel. From malicious spyware and surveillance to running over civilians with tanks.
Israel is quite bad, yes, and the genocide is horrible, but I’d argue China is illustrative of what comes after democracy fails in a place and it has passed through the stage that Israel is currently in.
China is a totalitarian state where information is so tightly controlled and the people so thoroughly decieved (or enslaved) that industrialized genocide is carried out at a scale unseen since the Nazis without the general population knowing or even caring.
That kind of “civilized” totalitarianism in which dissent is quite literally not possible is the terminus of any form of facism. When Orwell talked about a boot stamping on a human face forever, that’s what China is.
So no, as bad as Israel is and as much as they need to be confronted and are untrustworthy, China is far worse.
Israel and China are both authoritarian shitholes, but China is much worse. Boycott both of them, as well as all the other authoritarian shitholes on this planet
Tank man was not ran over.
The difference is that the CCP has a lot of control over Chinese companies operations.
In the US, the companies have a lot of control over the US government.
Ok that’s an oversimplification, but it sounded good
https://news.yahoo.com/google-facebook-cooperated-nsa-prism-145643099.html
It’s not a better situation.
Incentives vs direct board control Google and Facebook can and have said no before.
Is it unwarranted? Have Chinese tech companies turned a new leaf in their collective InfoSec practices?
Conversely, has Intel had a history of consumer privacy violations?
Intel Management Engine. Do you have an example of Chinese tech spying on consumers for the Chinese government?
Example from Networking Hardware:
Cisco has had multiple cases where they likely built exploits for Government spyware into their devices. And they have far to many vulnerabilities which are found. This leaves two options: Either their security is so bad that intelligence always has backdoors ready and governments shouldn’t use them, or at least some are backdoors built in accordance to NSA demands and goverments shouldn’t use them. https://thehackernews.com/2016/08/nsa-hack-exploit.html?m=1
On the other hand Huawei, far less security issues, even offered to open their code for checking of backdoors and to let goverments check all updates. They are shunned by western governments and partially even banned.
With reddit getting worse, these kinds of vapid “i only post snark about [insert US designated enemy]” users are gonna be all the more common.
Willing to bet money this was posted on hardware that actually does have backdoors to some 3 letter agency in the US, to much more personal consequence than any metaphorical Chinese government spyware
Yeah that’s exactly the thing, people freak out so much about China having access to their data, but act much less concerned when it comes to their own government potentially having access to said data. One of these options has the ability to affect your life if they don’t like your data, and it isn’t China.
(Not to get me wrong, I think no government should have access to one’s data, moreso pointing out the double standard)
Yup agreed.
China, like the US, hasn’t got the means nor the motive to track billions of people abroad; they both have a hard enough time keeping tabs on people domestically despite years of expanding their respective police states.
Of course there’s always the propaganda and soft power stuff but again, every single state is doing this, but the insinuation is that Europe or the anglosphere in general are the only propaganda-free places on Earth!
You mean you’re assuming that it will come with a backdoor in the hardware? Will that matter if the bootloader is FOSS?
Like… the Intel ME?? And no BIOS seems to allow the switch to disable it, even though that was literally required after the NSA sued Intel?
Coreboot disables most of Intel ME on x86 except the parts required for essential functions. It certainty cripples external access to Intel ME.
I believe it is a fair assumption that for embedded architectures like ARM and RISC-V, a FOSS bootloader will likely deal with state-sponsored backdoors if they haven’t been infiltrated themselves. This does not take into account baseband attack vectors because I simply don’t know much about wireless, but I’d imagine someone working on these projects likely has their eye on the funny stuff the NSA is likely to try here. RISC-V is FOSS, the NSA cannot legally require anybody to include a backdoor into the architecture itself.
finding RISC-V packages in standard repositories might prove problematic.
Gentoo would be ideal.
Idk, sounds too risky.
Can anyone explain the significance of this? I’m pretty technology-literate, but I am not seeing a big advantage of this over any other Linux machine? Genuinely curious.
This still runs Linux, or whatever else you want to run, it just has a RISC-V CPU instead of an x86 or ARM one
One of the implications is the development and popularization of the RISC-V architecture, which is open and can open the market for more competition and less monopolies, among other things.
RISC-V is an open source chip design. As of today, it’s still worse than x86 (a CISC—“complex instruction set” design) and ARM (a proprietary RISC—“reduced instruction set” design) but if history is any indication, open source will end up overtaking them in the same way that, for instance, 98% of supercomputers today run highly customized versions of Linux.
There’s also some political connotations surrounding it because some countries don’t want high-end chip designs to be available to their perceived competitors (whether for protectionism reasons or military reasons) but it doesn’t matter.
More info for anyone who wants it:
Linux, being open, can already run on RISC-V while Windows ARM laptops are only really coming out now. Not sure if they have plans for RISC-V. Apple has long used ARM in phones and now their M chip laptops. Reduced instruction sets tend to have better battery life and (originally) worse performance so were ideal for mobile but over time, Intel/AMD (desktops/laptops) and ARM (basically all mobile chips) have borrowed ideas from each other. So, Apple’s ARM chips can be powerful and Intel/AMD chips can be power efficient if that’s the goal.
So, the main advantage of RISC-V is that there’s no royalties or, in some cases, the baggage of aging designs that need backwards compatibility. RISC-I was originally designed as a teaching tool for universities that didn’t want to pay royalties for student toy models and wasn’t really a corporate thing. RISC-V is (the fifth version as the Roman numeral V implies), got good enough to be useful in the real world. And now there’s a consortium of companies funding it and hoping to one day not have pay royalties to make chips.
So, there’s a lot of momentum behind RISC-V. It could easily be the primary architecture someday or, if nothing else, reduce the royalty rates of the other architectures.
RISC-V is a CPU architecture, like x86 or ARM. You can run Linux on it.
RISC and CISC are two language which your CPU speaks, and which have different strengths and weaknesses. Reduced Instruction Set Computer vs. Complex Instruction Set Computer. It’s something like Chinese vs. English. Either have a word for everything but that means there is a lot of words to learn, or have a smaller amount of words but that means you need more words to describe what you mean.
Highly technical; both been around for a while, and iirc usually CPUs use CISC, but RISC always retained it’s strengths, so scientists are always looking into the difference in application for both.
Ngl I have no clue why this technology is so newsworthy rn but I know Western countries made a fuss about China activitely pushing the lesser used RISC architecture.
Ngl I have no clue why this technology is so newsworthy rn
It’s because of openness/royalties.
RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture based on RISC principles. RISC itself is just a design type. ARM is based on RISC too, but it’s proprietary.ARM even means “Advanced RISC Machines”. They changed the official name to ARM but I don’t think they actually reinterpreted it.
I have no clue why this technology is so newsworthy rn
Yes. You said that many times. :)
I assume you are familiar with what CPU architecture is. The famous one is x86 and ARM. This is just another one of those called RISC-V.
The significance is mostly political. US and allies have been trying to sanction China technologically. They even tried to block export of RISC-V, but since it is open source, they can just get fucked. Now, China can only get sub par GPU and limited CPU. Pushing for RISC-V means China is aiming to further develop it to be as capable as the CPU being sanctioned effectively making the sanction useless and even furthering Chinese manufacturing capabilities in the process.
The big advantage is that this is technically more standardized and free. Unlike ARM which require license, RISC-V doesn’t so anyone can make their own CPU and get the software support already in place. Hopefully more CPU manufacturers will be created from the advancement of RISC-V making more fierce competition.
This will give you a basic understanding. Sorry for the YouTube link. It’s from the channel called Explaining Computers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Ps0JFsyX2fU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot.
This IS a Linux machine. Do you know what a CPU architecture is?
Im quite surprised that this wasnt pine64 bringing this out.
They just casually throw it into things like the pinecil, which people actually do hack on.
And yes, they do have RISC-V SBCs: Star64 and Ox64. And if you want something a bit more complete, there’s the PineTab-V.
This has massive implications in tech and politics and im excited.
You lost me at Chinese startup
Hey! I got the new MarkBoork! It can drop in the air like my HayPad!
Can we please have some RISC-V chips that aren’t made in China?
Very nice tool for usage and development!
Can it run doom?
Looks too much of a cheap copy would like to see something from lenovo for exampleBased on the spec, it should even be able to run Quake 3 Arena.
