cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58764195
I was in the non-profit shop of a local charity. They accept donations of used computers then resell them to the public. The profit goes to charity. I asked for their oldest machine. It had an AMD chip from the 16h family. Thus, a spychip.
So their oldest machine was still too new for me. I asked why don’t you have anything older? They said the general public would not accept anything older, and so the shop also does not accept anything older. When machines are rejected, they go to a factory that destroys them and recovers the raw metals.
It’s sad to see that pre-spychip machines are being destroyed and that even 2nd-hand customers are being limited to anti-consumer spychip hardware.
Disliking OP is reason enough to want them out of your feed, you don’t have to try to get them by gatekeeping what counts as zerowaste or what counts as valid activism/hobbies. You can just block them and move on.
That’s a very individualist attitude. Even if OOP is doing nothing to combat the rise of fascism, the chip issue affects everyone, including investigative journalists, activists, and others that might get state-level attention without having state-level resources (i.e. being dependent on the likes of random charity shops).
This reasoning applies equally well to other “waste reduction” hobby projects like spending hours of labor (thus “wasting” the resources it takes to keep a person alive) to fix up an old article of clothing that would otherwise have been discarded, which you could simply have replaced with new mass-produced (and therefore resource-efficient) stuff.
If you genuinely want stuff that wastes labor - like getting ancient computers to work, mending clothes, or high-context living - gone from this community, that is a consistent opinion and we can talk about that.
For the individualist thing… If there are these concerns, OP should not be just rolling his own jank setup to do his work. There are groups that could provide him with secure hardware or validate the hardware he can get.
I checked and the h16 processor they mentioned uses an Arm a5 core for trustzone functions. There are tools to audit that.
All of this is unreasonable for a charity junk shop.
You should stop trying to block the zero waste movement and stop trying to make people dependent on others.
You mean the 16h, I suppose. Tools to audit that the closed source software does what I want? That’s amusing for sure. I wonder by what magic I’m not permitted to see the code but I can use probably another closed-source blob to verify whether my boot-licking product is doing what /the maker/ intends.
Your comment is useful but just not how you intended. The tools to audit the trustzone functions would at least tell me whether a spychip is present, so I can avoid it.
I have no problem with people spending their own labor time.
I do have a problem with dictating how a charity spends their labor time, specifically in a way that would reduce their ability to provide services. If OP offered their labor to handle this consistently for the charity, I missed that.
Failing to inform yourself about how a charity operates and to oppose the sharing of that info is utter foolishness. To oppose identifying problems, exposure of them, and making improvements is essentially openly hostile to social advancement.
It’s sloppy and reckless to neglect to do some basic homework before selecting charities to support. If they are being needlessly wasteful, they are inefficient.
It’s the contrary. Sales facilitates provision of services. You’re advocating needless waste.
Probably what you missed was that a customer was in the shop with money and prepared to spend it, but couldn’t because the shop manager made a poor decision on what to accept from donors.
Maintaining a product takes time and space. The lowest margin, least power efficient, and least in demand items cost the same to sell as everything else that’s easier to sell.
They made a decision about resources.
Correction:
You will have a hard time convincing me that they thought this through: “these 2013 AMD laptops are pre-spychip, so we could save a few of the latest pre-spychip models and advertise them as pre-spychip to boost interest”.
Your spychip thing is a made up problem.
The distinction is several processor architectures and compatibility.
Go ask them to give your number to the next person they turn away.
It’s on you to debunk the evidence that has been established. You are free to post counter evidence. No one is stopping you.
Luckily we need not upgrade the processor because that is precisely the thing we are keeping back. And we need not upgrade the motherboard in countless different collections of use cases, thanks largely to backwards compatibility.
I did. One of my local charities already knows what I am looking for. OTOH, they are not diligent. I walked into the shop once and found items they said they would contact me on. This is also not a me problem. It’s a global problem. Your ad hoc idea for just one person will not solve the problem of thousands of pre-spychip machines being needlessly destroyed.
(edit) But I must say it’s a bad idea to for the individual charities to have that task. The public waste management collects the e-waste and distributes to charities what can be used. A DB of what spare parts people need should be implemented at the central point of the collection first and foremost. Getting every charity in the loop would be a good evolution from there but it should start centrally.
The evidence shows it takes a higher level of knowledge and more specialized knowledge to exploit the thing you don’t want compared to the thing you do want.
I see no evidence from you here. Yes, it requires a big brain. But it does not require a nation state as you originally claimed (which is a composition of many well-paid big brains dedicated to the work professionally). Cybercriminals are not limited to nation states. They operate in all scales, some organised, some not. The evidence shows that a bug in a driver for the spychip is all it takes:
https://hackaday.com/2021/10/01/flaw-in-amd-platform-security-processor-affects-millions-of-computers/