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Skylake Has a Voice DSP and Listens To Your Commands
itwbennett writes: Intel's new Skylake processor (like the Core M processor released last year) comes with a built-in digital signal processor (DSP) that will allow you to turn on and control your PC with your voice. Although the feature is not new, what is new is the availability of a voice controlled app to use it: Enter Windows 10 and Cortana. If this sounds familiar, it should, writes Andy Patrizio: 'A few years back when the Xbox One was still in development, word came that Kinect, its motion and audio sensor controller, would be required to use the console and Kinect would always be listening for voice commands to start the console. This caused something of a freak-out among gamers, who feared Microsoft would be listening.'
Why does a CPU need backdoors such as VPro/Active Management Engine/ whatever they call it now?
No, because then you could disable it.
I would think one of the shiny new instruction features added to skylake could go horribly horribly wrong in basically the worst way you could possibly imagine:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.p...
Basically, imagine code running on your computer that you aren't allowed to see even at the binary level, which means anti-malware software cannot scan it, and you can't debug it if you suspect it is doing something malicious, and even worse, I suspect that groups like the NSA could NSL the keys so that they could write their own state sponsored backdoors. IMO this is a feature that really doesn't belong on consumer grade hardware.
The problem is that we have valuable die real-estate being taken up by this shit when additional L1/L2 cache, a core, or other SIMD instruction sets would be better. The market is full of DSP chips, why this, and why on the fucking die!
Life is not for the lazy.
Grown ups, huh? Is that what they're calling paranoiac, delusional nutters who think everyone is out to get them these days?
Shut the fuck up you neckbeard.