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.
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/
Man this is some fearmongering.
Dude you are more likely to get viruses and exploited running the older hardware.
I understand that vulnerabilities pop up, but at least the within a decade recent stuff gets patched.
The evidence is in front of you. Hackaday.com is publishing facts. These facts do not make you fearful yet you call them fearmongering.
Nonsense. Vulns in the older hardware are mostly of the known variety. New hardware is rich in the unknown variety of vulns, which by their nature you don’t know about and cannot control for.
And new vulns get introduced. Even the patches themselves bring new vulns.