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China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture
MrSeb writes "According to reports from various industry sources, the Chinese government has begun the process of picking a national computer chip instruction set architecture (ISA). This ISA would have to be used for any projects backed with government money — which, in a communist country such as China, is a fairly long list of public and private enterprises and institutions, including China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world. The primary reason for this move is to lessen China's reliance on western intellectual property. There are at least five existing ISAs on the table for consideration — MIPS, Alpha, ARM, Power, and the homegrown UPU — but the Chinese leadership has also mooted the idea of defining an entirely new architecture. What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
I don't think it is a question of a good or bad idea. As the summary surmises, a unified architecture could make it easier to build in a common backdoor for spying. This is an issue of making surveillance easier and this should hardly come as a surprise because a Communist country is entirely dependent upon controlling its citizens through the use of surveillance. Ultimately, by putting in place a mandate and enforcing it, it places additional costs and burdens on the businesses that must abide by these new regulations.
"What if China goes the DIY route and makes its own ISA or microarchitecture with silicon-level censorship and monitoring, or an always-open backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies?"
Then they will have yet again copied the West's products and then rebranded the designs for their own use. As they have been doing for some time now..... China knows for a fact that the US is using backdoors in technology for warfare (see: Iran) and to overthrow governments (see: Arab Spring) - and is not going to long term put itself at risk by using these American technologies that invite 'revolutions of the people' (see: coups).
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a Communist country is entirely dependent upon controlling its citizens through the use of surveillance.
Even if that were true, it'd be irrelevant as China is Capitalist. Read about their economy on Wikipedia and stop looking like a fool.
China has approximately 400 million people in its middle class, and growing.
Yes, people will develop applications for it.
Seriously. This is architecture stuff. You can't just write a backdoor into a chip that easily. You can't write censorship in, because there would be no way to update the censorlist. The most you could do is provide a code injection backdoor (If you see byte sequence xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, jump to the following byte), but with no way to disable it they would just weaken their own defence when it inevitably leaked.
This is an issue of making surveillance easier and this should hardly come as a surprise because a Communist country is entirely dependent upon controlling its citizens through the use of surveillance.
Does that make the US a communist country then as well?
Uh no... A Communist country would be built upon a Communist economy. Communism is an economic as well as political ideology. Abandon the economic side of the equation and you cease to have a Marxist state. China has not meaningfully been a Communist state since Deng Xiaoping began his radical reforms in the post-Mao era. It could best be described as a Capitalist Technocracy that has turned Chinese Communism into little more than empty flag waving.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Cryptographically. Windows requiring EFI is using cryptography to lock out Mac, BSD, & Linux because motherboard manufacturers will only let the cryptographically-right OS run. Extend that to incoming network requests and done.
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