[s-t] privacy and caution digest #2

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 14:49, Nick B wrote:

> Nobody, but nobody, builds _anything_ electronic from the ground up.
> Not me, not you, not Apple, not Microsoft, not Sony, not Intel, not
> the NSA.  [Apple,] Sony, Intel and the NSA get closer by fabbing their
> own silicon.

No Such Agency doesn't fab much of anything; they can't afford to.  They
and their ilk are far more interested in things like FPGAs and adapting
numerical algorithms to COTS SIMD hardware, such as graphics processors
(a la http://www.gpgpu.org/).

> Who knows
> what sort of spyware those tools are adding?

Don't be silly.  The amount of computation you need to do to get a
circuit of any useful complexity to do something predictable is
enormous.  You can't stuff a thousand CPUs and 200 engineers into an
Applied Materials mask etch machine, so that they can rig a WiFi card
and antenna onto your PS2's vector chip without Sony finding out.  Even
if you could, how would they talk to the evil animalcules inside the
Novellus metal deposition machine in the facility next door, so the
right traces get metallised?

Never even mind that automatically figuring out what a bunch of geometry
in a set of masks represents is vastly harder than reverse compilation
for software.

> It is actually quite hard.  And if anybody
> ever does implement it really well, they can win, in principle even
> against projects like Plan 9

No they can't.  Identifying something as "a compiler" and instrumenting
the right code is impossible for automated systems.

	<b


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