SoftIron now slinging servers with artisanal firmware and an auditable bill of materials

UK server-maker SoftIron has stumbled into a fast-growing niche for servers that include verifiably secure firmware and components with known provenance. The Register last covered SoftIron to consider its boxes that run the open source Ceph software-defined storage package, for its use of interesting accelerators, and as one …

[druck]

Wow, sounds too good too good to be true!

[Bitsminer]

Rewelding the supply chain

Had to buy a set of equipment for delivery to a certain highly paranoid customer. They insisted no parts be "made in PRC".

It was a problem since the disk drives had been very clearly labelled as made in that place.

So we asked a used-equipment dealer/reseller if they had the same model of disk drives but made elsewhere. Turns out they did. The OEM couldn't fix their own supply chain but a reseller could. (And yes we verified the point of manufacture of the drives carefully). (And the customer pointedly didn't care about receiving pretested hardware!)

[Chairman of the Bored]

How does one use an x-ray to verify functionality?

Question-

X-ray and acoustic microscope systems are routinely used for QA of printed circuit assemblies, particularly for dense IC packages such as BGA. They are also quite useful for counterfeit detection on ICs. But so far as I know you learn nothing of the state of running electronics

Now an IR imager can be useful in this role...