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?
Edit: changed a word for style.
I guess you could force people to do firmware updates. Otherwise, your censorship parameters will get out-of-date. For example, criticism of Musk may go from forbidden to mandatory as he falls out of favor with the MAGA regime.
“Please restart your device for a required political update”
Jesus man, that sounds bleak. Sadly it also sounds entirely plausible for the dystopian nightmare we are currently living in.
Orwell really didn’t miss
Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.
Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.
Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don’t produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.
The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn’t get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn’t print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.
The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it’s not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.
So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It’s Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn’t just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It’s splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn’t pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.
Short answer: easier than most people think.
Read Ken Thompson’s article Reflections on trusting trust for some tangential hacks.
Technically possible? In the strictest sense, sure I guess?
Practically speaking though, it’d probably be a mess to manage and likely trivial to circumvent for anyone with a little knowledge and an IQ above room temperature.
That hasn’t stopped them from making idiotic laws before, look at all the US states that are trying to ban porn on the internet.
Sure, there’s been talk of banning encryption as well, but practically speaking, that would be an unmitigated disaster in terms of security alone.
Of course it would but politicians are famously stupid, they have no idea and little care if something is actually feasible.
There’s a reason Digital Rights Management techonologies are loved by corpofascists; control over the full communication channel, from file source, to OS kernel (TPM modules, trusted computing, signed OS images via UEFI), to transmission protocol, to physical channel (hdmi) to screen de rendering in the final device.
Once the tooling is laid out and people are forced into not owning their devices, nor being able to copy, nor consume media that hasn’t been cryptographically signed and approved, then it’s all fair game.
There’s ways to ensure digital rights and reduce privacy that don’t need forcing people to not own any part of the communication channel whatsoever (privacy is a UX problem, give people an easy way to consume media and they will pay for it).
It’s also why they are also scared of the “analog hole” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole) that they try for people to self-censor.
Edit: I kept scrolling through Lemmy to find this thread, were Cory Doctorov explains how DMCA enables control from corporations: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1021871/ffeed46818908c91/
It’ll almost certainly never work. You’d need to write high level software that can interpret pictures on any display manager, and even then Linux would never do it.
Would literally just speed up the adoption of RISC.
Or it’ll more likely turn me off computer usage all together, and I’ll go live in the woods.
for chinas case, people are using proxies and anti-detect browsers , vpn is mostly easily blocked by many
The V-chip is still in TVs.
I think they did this but they don’t use it loudly
