CCP is shit and bans tons of stuff, but this is not how it happened:
> Or when Xi told Trump, “no thanks” to buying NVidia cards
US banned sales of high-end compute tech to China for years. Now when they actually catching up on production of their own SSDs, DRAM and compute silicon they no longer need US offers.
Companies like Google and Microsoft pay top dollar to build special workstations to interact with production systems. These are not just special because of the software they run, but also the chips these machines are built with.
Sure, I'll take your comment at face value, not all consumer hardware has spyware, but it cannot be ruled out now, in the future, or at least now for targeted high value customers.
That’s… really not true or at least not as dramatic as that statement makes it sound.
Those “special workstations” are mostly about lack of features they view as potential attack vectors (external or internal motherboard ports, replaceable/non-soldered components, thunderbolt, anything extensible or “repairable”) and mandate certain hardware features (hardware tpm, locked secure boot, locked UEFI). Other than that, those workstations are Lenovo, Samsung, or Dell machines running typical chips. They may pick certain CPU models or chips but that’s mostly about avoiding new or “cool” features that may not have matured enough yet. Most of them are moving to thin clients though. Where you use that “special workstation” to remote into an VM that can access production systems. And that part is partially about controlling the software running in the VM and making sure updates can be forced “offline” on the VM even if you haven’t connected to it in few weeks.
For these kinds of operations, open source hardware won't save you unless you build it yourself, much like open source software. At the end of the day, you're hoping that the pre built thing matches what it claims to be.
The hardware case of TAO is still targeted and didn't rely on the manufacturer's compliance and secrecy for their entire line of products, though. The scale of that to my mind is quite the qualitative difference.
For people already owning an iPhone, you can make it a dumb phone if you own a mac.
Turn on iPhone supervised mode (requires factory reset), then create and load a profile with Apple Configurator on macOS.
You can disable installing apps, just certain apps, or just block certain websites. If you want to ban TikTok and Reddit but not give up your banking app, you can do it. You want no browser, you got it.
I thought you were going to say out of pocket costs are much much higher than that.
I’ll be lucky if I get a specialist for under 500 until I meet deductible of 3k+ for a family of 3. One emergency room visit and we reach it in one or two days.
Removing the watermark usefulness depends on your use case.
If you care to avoid detection, yes, it is useful. If you care about the best possible sequence of words, then the damage is already done once watermarked.
Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).
Also China bans US technology all the time. Remember the Great Firewall of China? Or when Xi told Trump, “no thanks” to buying NVidia cards
reply