[rocketChair]

It's getting increasingly difficult to trust American-designed chips and systems for me at this point... and I can't help but feeling that people paid way, way too little attention to everything we learned from the NSA and CIA leaks a few years back.

[jason0597]

If you don't trust American chips, then what chips do you trust?

We certainly don't have much choice when it comes to choosing chips. It's an incredibly expensive process and only a select few superpowers can successfully maintain semiconductor industries.

[rocketChair]

I trust anything made by European companies, NXP, Philips, ST, Siemens etc., anything from Japan, South Korea, and most of the Taiwanese and Chinese companies.

Unfortunately, with some rare exception, they're not allowed to make x86-compatible chips, because the U.S. has worked long and hard to forbid the ISA, and everything used so far to implement it, from being standardised and thus kept under an unbelievable weight of patents.

Hopefully the build-up of more European fabs, and realisation that the EU has to make its own chips, will eventually remedy some of this.

[jeffbee]

What a bizarre pile of mystical euroism. NXP/Phillips sued a university to quash research about the garbage security of their contactless smartcard implementations. I'd rank NXP/Phillips way down at the bottom of the stack with state-owned Chinese semi firms.

[ChuckNorris89]

The modern NXP has a rotten company culture. Which is unfortunate since Freescale that got bought by them had a much better culture.

[coredog64]

My experience with ex-Freescale employees has been a consistent tire fire. If NXP is worse…

[ChuckNorris89]

The semi industry is really cutthroat. Outside of US giants, Intel, Nvidia, Quallcomm, and recently AMD, who cream the highest margins as their products are basically irreplaceable, the rest of the semi companies (including most EU ones) are just competing for cost (barring the current shortage where they could amp their prices too).

[rocketChair]

Your wording here clearly shows you have something against Europe and possibly Europeans. I won't be reading any of your comments from here on.

[AnimalMuppet]

And Chinese?

They seem... certainly not more trustworthy than US companies.

[rocketChair]

I disagree, an important difference is this: The U.S. has been proven definitely guilty of all accusations of espionage, sabotage, backdoors etc., while there have never been any clear proof presented for the Chinese counterparts -- only accusations, and overwhelmingly from the very country that has committed all the wrongs itself.

Take whatever side you want, but at least keep to the truth.

[astrange]

x86 isn't patented past AVX2 or so. It's too old, they've expired by now.

[hedora]

Welcome to the rabbit hole!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

The whole thing is worth reading, but be sure to read the section “The Irreplaceable Man” if you work anywhere near computer security. Once you understand the tactics used by crypto front companies to keep their employees in the dark, it should be pretty easy to spot such companies from the inside.

[rocketChair]

Good read, and it hints at just how absolutely nuts the situation is be today with almost everyone in the world having cellphones, tablets, laptops and what else running predominantly American-designed software and hardware.

Nothing is private or secure.

[jeffrallen]

See also, the story of allegations of attempted tampering of OpenVPN: https://lwn.net/Articles/420858/

[fomine3]

* OpenBSD