Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests Despite stiff export controls on the legitimate sale of AI accelerators to China, stemming the flow of gray market GPUs streaming into the Middle Kingdom remains a point of concern for American lawmakers. US Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark) on Friday revealed his bright idea for stopping chip smugglers in their tracks: What if we …
Buy tech designed for one-place use (desktops and servers, not laptops and phones) with built-in tracking devices? Why should I pay extra for an unnecessary "feature"? Have it routinely phone home with its location? Uh-uh, where I run my machines is my business. Then there's that info being passed to government, and probably sold to the rest of the planet? Absolutely not.
Why exactly is it a problem that other countries buy our tech? Isn't that a good thing, having good exports?
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Unfortunately, grumpy proles are voting for fascists, whilst the dispirited remainder of the electorate don't bother to vote for less extreme parties. And in fascist regimes, almost every aspect of your life has to be whitelisted by Glorious Leader before you are allowed to do it. It is the opposite of the more laid back regimes we have had in the past, where the state would blacklist what you couldn't do. We are seeing a lot of this in biosecurity and will see more in tech soon.
You could implement geo-verification, but it would be possible to hack it. Perhaps the only way of doing it is to have the chip commit suicide if it wasn't visited by a chip company employee, to reset it and keep it alive for the next few months, and even that might be hackable. It's fairly crazy, but paranoid, fascist regimes demand crazy stuff all the time. Not buying the same jacket as Glorious Leader, not listening to certain music etc.
The latest indications are that a flip from Biden-era bans to sell, sell, sell, may be on the cards. It may be too late to keep China etc hooked on US tech, where the NSA would quite like them to be, though. The Huawei ban and chip bans may already have made self-reliance a priority.
Most of the time, the locations they track would be pretty obvious datacenters because the denied chips are mostly only viable inside custom servers. The idea is stupid and probably not as feasible as the article, let alone the politician, thinks it is, because there's no magic tracker that would work the way the politician thinks and serial number tracking doesn't do much after the chip's been shipped somewhere else. If they did make a tracker, it wouldn't be good or helpful, but neither would it cause the problems I think you're implying since most places with a bunch of GPUs in them are already findable.
We're having slightly more trouble from the Houtis than you'd expect. Our news reports tend to be a bit quiet on the subject but apparently our Reaper drones are toast -- we've lost nine of them and we've had a bit of trouble with our carrier based planes.
Why is this important? The Houtis aren't even a country, they're a rebel group in Yemen. We rationalize their capabilities with the keyword "Iran-backed" but, seriously, if we're having so much trouble with a bunch of broke tribesmen then just think what would happen if we tried the "Team America, World Police" thing on a full sized country like China. Legislators like Tom Cotton are behind the curve, behind the times and generally living in an alternate reality (along with, unfortunately, a large chunk of the US's population).
Need to agree.
And I'm also surprised this does not get more actively reported.
There are clear signs the current setup of the west's armed forces ( manned, big, highly complex, highly expensive, multi-role planes, ships and tanks plus some 707-sized drones ) are degenerating into the equivalent of the Maginot line in the 21st. century.
They are built with extreme per-piece effort and cost during a 15-20-year dev cycles by very few big players.
Based on the idea of being nearly invincible, but in reality losing survivability and effectivity in actual battle by the day.
They are superseded by new battlefield technology like miniaturized, cheap drones (air, sea and land) and intelligent munition developed by startups and a multitude of smaller developers ( think: community developers in Ukraine) using 1-2 year or even shorter dev cycles.
Just like the relatively cheap, small and agile German tanks simply drove around the outdated Maginot line, then the mightiest fortification in Europe, in 1940, rendering it completely ineffective.
There are many techies who see a really stupid idea and accept the intellectual challenge of making it work.
Sadly, many of them succeed.
I question how well an Apple Airtag-like device would work inside a grounded, metal computer chassis, which is filled with radio-frequency interference.
"We must do better at maintaining and expanding our position in the global market…”
So those now running the USA want to improve their balance of trade whilst stopping sales of the things they make that the ROW might actually want. Yes, I know it’s not that simple but it’s becoming part of their convoluted logic. Mind you, anything that holds back this rush to add more power requirements to global warming; we’ve got Bitcoin mining that does nothing useful, AI data farms will only benefit those who already don’t need additional benefits at the expense of those who are struggling to survive.
As an aside, the rush to replace internet search engines with AI seems, to me, to be something to be done because there’s money to be made in doing it. “Progress” because we need to change things to justify our existence…
I had an issue of a Linux update showing an error in the download based on a failed checksum. I asked the question in Google, and the AI response provided the response which i could see was extracted from a forum entry.
The DNF documentation did not provide the details required.
If the forum entry was incorrect (possibly is), then the AI response would be incorrect.
Of course, people on this site know AI is a lot of bollocks, but how will a person know it is if they are unfamiliar with the subject matter ?
and enforcing this control with "tracking devices" and "audits" as if they were nuclear devices will probably do wonders to the US trade deficit in the high-tech sector.
Wonders as in "let it explode".
Do these people understand how trade works for high-volume goods like chips?
Trade as in "selling" stuff to a "customer"?
Do these people understand how trade works ...?
I think you can truncate the question to the above.
The short answer would be "NO"
The longer answer would be that they understand trade and semiconductors about as well as they understand any other complicated issue.
1) figuring out where the chip/board is - even if you ignore spoofing/jamming most servers are operated indoors where GPS signals can't reach!
2) communicating that information back to "home base" - you gonna transmit that information out the same magic way that GPS gets into a datacenter with a reinforced steel and concrete roof? Put an ethernet port into the board and has "this has to be plugged into the open internet for it to function"?
Hardware can't solve this problem, it would have to be software. You'd have to build the driver (sorry, closed source binary blobs only) to communicate with the outside world, and require that that communication isn't blocked, in order to get a code from home base that allows the board to operate for another time period (day or whatever) How do you know where you are though? Do they require you plug it into a GPS antenna that's on the roof? Do they use geolocation? (we all know how well that works) Do they try to guess how far you are away based on ping times (hope you don't have an overburdened internet link or they might think you're on the Moon)
This is completely impractical, but this comes from the same type of mind that thinks a law enforcement backdoor into encrypted messaging apps is totally possible without compromising security.
The magical thinking of politicians never ceases to astound. Ironically, this is one area where China do tend to have the US beat - they're far less hostile to the idea of letting experts weigh in on policy and shape it based on a pragmatic view of the world as it actually is, not as they wish it to be. The US was like that once too, as was the UK.
If this bill passes, the end result won't be to preserve US dominance in GPU design, it'll instead kill it. They'll be giving the rest of the world a huge incentive to invest in developing and building an alternative, given we've all seen before how this sort of thing goes. Whether it's more akin to region-locking of DVDs, or online registration of software, it'll inevitably inconvenience legitimate, compliant users far more than the ones it's intended to target.
I like my approach: Put tariffs on all companies in the USA that need to import anything from abroad. Force them to move out to other countries to stay in business. Make all high end scientific work in the USA prohibitively expensive: give people jobs screwing little screws in to things.
Bingo - the USA no longer needs to worry about China "stealing" our tech!
That is EXACTLY what you do! You INCREASE the die size and use more volts and amps to push those electrons though wider copper, aluminum or conductive polymer line traces all spaced farther apart on Borosilicate glass substrates for LESS cross-talk and RFI/EMI issues! At NCA (North Canadian Aerospace), we run our custom fully-ITAR-free, in-house designed and made 200 mm by 200 mm combined-CPU/GPU/DSP/Vector processor dies at 5 V at 10 amps or 12 V at 24 amps to ensure 2 THz performance which gives us 50 PetaFLOPS at 128-bits of sustained quad-precision floating point performance!
The LARGER the die the more Integer, Fixed-Point and Floating-Point Number-Crunching PROCESSING POWER you can make! Of course, since we are in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada we have BC Hydro to supply their hydroelectric power for us to use, so we pay only 8 cents to 12 cents per kilowatt/hour of electricity which is a LOT CHEAPER than yours in Europe and the USA!
V
Please do tell me WHY you downvoted simple FACTS: In the UK, the average electricity price is 27 pence per kilowatt/hour (kWh) or 48 cents CAD or 35 cents USD for those on the standard variable tariff and who are paying by Direct Debit. For those on other tariff plans, charges could be as high as 54 pence per kilowatt/hour or 99 cents CAD or 71 cents USD.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, the average household price for BC Hydro electricity in daylight hours is 12 cents CAD or 6.5 pence per kilowatt/hour. In off-hours or at pre-paid bulk prices I can get it down to as low as 8 cents CAD or 4.3 pence per kilowatt/hour! You are PAYING A FORTUNE for electricity in the UK and probably even MORE in certain parts of mainland Europe!
Downvoting ACTUAL FACTS is not OK! It just makes you look IGNORANT!
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I haven't bothered to vote, but sure, I'll tell you why they're downvoting. It's not because they disagree with the comparison of electricity prices. It's because the rest of your comment, promising miraculous developments that don't exist, is promising miraculous developments that don't exist.
Proof's in the pudding! Get Ready! I love this part when we show up at LTT (Linus Tech Tips -- He is a 30 minute drive from our offices!) with a big blue cube running at 50 PetaFLOPS at 128-bits wide! LTT doesn't know it yet, but his rather influential tech company is the FIRST we will be delivering a product to review AND he gets one of our 1000x1000 head electron beam etchers and vacuum deposition chambers and enough Borosilicate plates and deposition powder so he can make the Superchips chips at the LMG (Linus Media Group) office in Surrey, BC, Canada to showcase worldwide. Now THAT is a proper worldwide introduction demonstration!
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Electron beam etching using 1000 by 1000 heads at 100 mm per minute with a vacuum chamber vapour deposition where confinement beams based upon optical energy ensure the copper vapour ONLY goes into the etched line trace portions as each head etches a line-trace channel of about 100 microns deep and 60 microns wide. The deeper channel prevents the electrons from doing a skin or near-surface effect transport within the copper traces once we cover the channels with a thick layer of borosilicate glass insulator covering. (The electrons will NOT tunnel through the borosilicate glass!)
For the transistors (p-N junctions aka diodes), we use the same technology except you are depositing/diffusing an insulator, semiconductor and dopant in layers. The dopant is confined separately and DIFFUSES into the desired layer and depth due to the optical heating (i.e. basically a laser) which can ACCURATELY be controlled due to the beam size at red, green and blue wavelengths and the ability to control the pulsing duration to ensure a dopant or anode/cathode of Boron, Silicon or Germanium and you can layer and diffuse the insulator and dopants to get you a MOSFET/FINFET transistor in whatever configuration you like. (i should note that I am NOT an MSc.EE so this explanation may be a little wonky!)
I barely understand the process myself but it works and I will leave it to the eggheads for a better explanation and I will go back to coding 2D-XY and 3D-XYZ SOBEL edge detectors and pixel-to-vector convertors!
Kinda hard to refute a working superchip or million! While I do note I'm NOT an electrical engineer, I get/understand the general explanation of what is being done here, but I will DEFER to the real eggheads/boffins in their more detailed explanations once they release the designs, plans, documentation, CAD/CAM/CAE/FEA/Simulation files, etc as world-wide fully free and open source!
Saying it's unmitigated garbage DOES NOT make it so!
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Wait until the review at LTT -- You can download the designs yourself at North Canadian Aerospace (all one word in ca or com format) once it's up and running later this spring/early summer. We will be selling a finished product too but that requires the typical CSA/UL/FCC/DOC/EU/JP certifications, so while LTT/LMG (Linus Tech Tips/Linus Media Group) will do an initial review of the demo unit's number-crunching power and new 128-bits wide real-time multimedia-centric operating system, YOU can just download the design for the etcher/vacuum chamber (i.e. easy to do designs -- takes less than a week to build if you have some shop skills!) and build your own superchip for yourself.
A bag of high purity copper powder is less than $55 CDN ($45 USD) on Amazon and Borosilicate glass sheets are also less than $20 USD ($25 CDN) for 20 cm by 20 cm! The line traces are so wide and deep that DIY home-based systems can make this! When a modern $500 3D printer can now get down to 0.005 mm accuracy, it wasn't much of a stretch to use SOFTWARE to auto-correct for electron beam jitter, environmental vibrations, imperfect deposition, non-flat/rough-surface borosilicate glass sheets, general aerial contamination, imperfect vacuum deposition, confinement beam jitter, etc. In fact, we use all the mapped-out errors to our advantage to ensure that the final working product performs to specifications. Basically, we know that a home-based chip-making system is no-where near what a normal clean-room is BUT we intentionally combined and cancel-out all the accumulating errors so that the final product "Just Works"!
It sounds fantastic BUT it just works! Sometimes the eggheads/boffins CAN get the most crazy of ideas actually working in the real world!
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Sounds funny maybe but the size of a die did make it so that they didn't fit in a smart card anymore. In their day, Samsung did try to make a smart card with a whopping 1 MiB flash storage on chip, but it was so big that our production facility couldn't handle it, and if they did they would certainly break if you put them in your back pocket; a slice of silicon is definitely not the best at handling bending. For GPU's I don't think that they need to be able to handle that though and I think that they already don't fit besides that :P
Let's suspend the logic of getting a GPU to phone home for a minute and imagine they manage to do it. What next?
You found a batch of GPU's are in China. You know who sold the GPU's as they bought them initially. What's you next step? You can ask them who they sold them to. Great. What if they were exported to a country you are allowed to export to? What next? You would have to then force that country to obtain information for you or put systems in place with the tracking to prevent export to China or punish the company but what if the company sold them to another company? You would literally be going round in circles trying to find who exported them to China. Who do you punish?
We can see this is a monumentally stupid idea. That is until you consider the goal here maybe isn't to stop exports to China but to have tabs on the location of all these high powered chips. America wants to be number 1 in all this AI mumbo jumbo hocus pocus and knowing which countries are ramping up their processing abilities allows them to restrict them and gain an unfair advantage. That's all I can think of unless they really are as dumb as a bag of spanners.
Easy, folks in your jurisdiction, fine and potentially jail. Folks outside your laws, sanction. The hardware? Brick it remotely or nerf it.
Software already does this with greater and lesser degrees of success, just put it in microcode and viola it works in hardware too! Altera fpgas have a version of this in their old dev kits. Just a bit of maintenance to add to your SLA. Not really a big imposition.
"... a clueless idiot who wants to be seen to be "doing something"
Are you allowed to talk about the 'Golden One' this way ???
Expecting yet another 'Executive Order' to be arriving making any negative opinions about the 'Golden One' to be worth 25 years in Alcatraz ...
See all the dots are begining to join up !!!
:)
We already have the tech for this. Heck, we could even have a remote 'brick' ability. Just like Intel's cpu feature subscription hardware can turn features on and off.
Doesn't mean folks will flock to it though. Makes those vpn exitpoints way more interesting though.
A few issues with this:
- only works during transport, in which case real tracking is needed, not in the data center
- easy to foil by putting some kind of cage around it, if it doesn't block the GPS then it will block communication
- requires a GPS which is not in the chips and is entirely unnecessary
- requires a low power CPU which is, afaik not included, or it needs to be on a *separate* die, which allows for harvesting chips
- obviously requires a battery
- easy to foil by breaking the programming
- easy to foil by removing the antenna's
- easy to spoof the location (virtual antenna extension or simple spoofing, public GPS signals are not protected)
I'm sure I missed some. Stupidity abounds indeed.
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