A nationwide firewall could always be bypassed (see: Russia, China, Iran), but what if they just went directly to the end user device and add a chip that constantly scans for anti-regime keywords? Especially when there is “AI” that could be embedded to just do basic OCR and close the browser when such “prohibited items” are detected.
Maybe for the aforementioned countries, its harder to create their own chips.
But I think an authoritarian USA definitely could.
Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple Silicon, are all in the US; Couldn’t the US government just order those companies to add such “censorship chip” to devices sold in the US? Checks and balances seems to be not really a thing anymore…
This way, no amount of “VPN” is gonna work. The censorship chip is gonna block any negative mentions of trump. And with the US’s cooperation, Russia, China, Iran could also acheive the same in their jurisdictions.
Am I just worrying to much.
Is a “censorship chip” even possible?
Right, because UEFI is open sourced and can be checked by anyone. Oh, wait, no, that’s why Libreboot is a thing: https://libreboot.org/ I will agree that TrustedComputingGroup and the way they use TPM have a more open standard, but I still don’t trust some of the companies behind it. Especially Microsoft, who have completely lost the plot with recent Windows versions. There is definitely a reason to be wary of it, as cryptographer Ross Anderson is quoted here on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing#Criticism Software Piracy is a direct answer to greedy publishers who burn out developers and force them to make crapware which they then force DRM on so people can’t play it even if they own the original release. Better people than me have written about how awful DRM is in games. See https://www.gog.com/blog/what-exactly-is-drm-in-video-games-and-why-should-you-care/ or https://expertbeacon.com/why-is-drm-bad-for-gaming/ for exaples. DRM is bad for game preservation purposes or simply to allow someone to install and reinstall the game they own several times. Better people than me have written out about the various issues which DRM caused in the past, most notably safedisc and securom which were well-reported upon. It does not belong in gaming. I can explain a lot, and can attribute a lot to stupidity and greed on either side of the argument. It’s not FUD when it’s a slow crawl to further enshittification and overzealous identification and exclusion of individual users and systems while giving false reasons for why we should put up with it.