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After F-35 "Kill Switch", Now Europe Perturbed by Chinese "Kill Switch"(eurasiantimes.com)
9 points by speckx 10 hours ago | 4 comments
  • r72110 hours ago

    >Due to the lack of disclosed ownership information, inconsistencies in sourcing, and failed fact checks, we rate it as Mixed for factual reporting, suggesting that readers may benefit from consulting additional sources for verification.

    https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/eurasian-times-bias-and-credi...

  • duxup10 hours ago

    Does Europe caring really matter?

    European politicians as a whole seems happy to voice their opinions but as a whole uninterested in acting.

    • ggm9 hours ago |parent

      the EU has a complex structure. Who has power depends on context. Some things are devolved to EU bodies, some are considerations in session, some are subject to treaty, some national body.

      I don't know which ones apply here. I suspect there is no EU wide norm for determining how to act on kill switch threats, it's not a defined function of the parliament or the secretariat although if there was a risk analysis I think it should be.

  • ggm9 hours ago

    Routine inclusion of remote diagnostics in the chipsets and board designs means that you can have designed-in capability not enabled, you can have pinouts but no chips, you can have the full stack and not have consciously paid for it.

    It doesn't take a conspiracy to say there's a risk. I would argue outsourcing to least cost providers put a supply chain risk on the table which transcends killswitch questions: Some amount of tech infra in EU should be made from locally sourced products and diversity of sources is a cost which includes complexity and potential weaknesses, but probably offsets other problems.

    Its not a one-size-fits-all problem.

    People would be amazed how powerful things like USB keyboard chipsets are. SD cards can be reprogrammed to run a tiny Linux. All kinds of sub-components of a computer system are themselves made up of an ARM or MIPS core, some persisting memory and access to a bus. They don't function as an independent computer in the context of being a PCI bus controller for the main CPU (as a fictional example), but they are.

    If you have some complex machine and can plug a device into a USB port, the chances are the device has chips which are capable of doing a shitload more than you realise, but are runtime constrained down not to do it.