U.S. Inks Bill to Force Geo-Tracking Tech for High-End Gaming and AI GPUs
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/...ect-to-tracking

U.S. Senator Wants High-End Graphics Chips to Have Mandatory Geolocation
https://boingboing.net/2025/05/16/u-s-senat...eolocation.html

How is this going to be useful when China has Great Firewall to block all traffic going to the monitoring server? And if the machine is disconnect from the rest of the internet, it is not going to be detected. Any wireless technology can be easily defeated by jamming tech within the building.

Ah I see it now. They will keep a database of all locations of all units. And those units are required to be contactable via internet. When the units do not phone home, then it is a violation from the sites which are supposed to have them already. I guess this will mean if any unit break down or decommissioned will also need to be reported to USA and send back to USA to confirm the decommissioning of such units.


This post has been edited by vhs: May 18 2025, 03:06 PM

Cakap jer mau detect whether in China hands, but actually wanna spy and curi your data.

Encryption and data collection proxy servers within China itself.

TESLA and many other foreign companies have been doing it for their own internal data collection which they call for product improvement purposes.

Ah I see it now. They will keep a database of all locations of all units. And those units are required to be contactable via internet. When the units do not phone home, then it is a violation from the sites which are supposed to have them already. I guess this will mean if any unit break down or decommissioned will also need to be reported to USA and send back to USA to confirm the decommissioning of such units.

It's been implemented in your smartphone SOCs for a long time already.

That's who Android and Apple could trace back your loss phones and remotely disable them. Even blacklist those phones from connecting to your mobile operator.

scary eh... are they building a backdoor and later hackers inject trojans in? ops... maybe no need to inject... it came pre-installed in the gpu's bios.

The simplest method is to force burn a unique ID into the chip. When you install its drivers, the unique ID itself will be sent back to mothership servers as data collection to trace the unit.

Even more advance they can not place a GPS tracker unit into the SOC. That will give it instant location tracking as soon as you power up the device.

Lame excuse is we need it for product improvement purposes and debugging BS.

Trump don't know flygps

if chip is needed enough I'm sure they'll use fake gps signal to trick the chips somehow into thinking it's in murrica

Sending data back should get flagged by firewalls. And most data centers care like bunkers. How GPS signal gonna get through? Also there are open source drivers. How they gonna handle that? OS like Linux are famous for being anti backdoor. If its BIOS, there are even 3rd party BIOS for cards. Damn curious how they gonna workaround these things

When u cough, the next thing u see in google ads and youtube is cough syrup advertisement..

You think they need to send it out of the country or they cannot camouflage the data or encrypt it?
Just a short single line of code is all it takes to trace the unit.

Fake GPS don't work with high end modern trace equipment if the code is burnt into the chip when manufactured. In semicon businesses, they can even know if the card is tempered by reading the diodes configuration state whether they're burnt when tempering.

add to phone so no one will steal

Yes it's already happening today don't need to envision the future.

Even Andrew Tate hates Alexa few years ago saying who would bug your house listening to everything you say all the time?

Andrew Tate Hates Alexa


Today that feature is already well built in your smart phone. Not just the mic, what you type and post on socmed/messaging, user agents, GPS coordinates updates and your screen being read by apps with OCR text detection tech.

Already added more than 10 years ago.

That's why people don't steal phones for many years already.

All communication equipment using ip has a MAC address that is unique. So all equipment potentially can already be tracked. Spoofing is the only way to fake it. But if the detection mechanism already keep tracks of known locations and expect the equipment to acknowledge its location from time to time, then spoofing won't work.

On the other hand, by mandating such communication equipment also means the controlling countries can disable the unit at any point of time. So you have to know you are only renting the units in essence and the owner can anytime prevent you from using them at their own discretion. So if you are using it for military and defense purpose, then you know you will have to forever remain allied with the owner nation or don't count on your defense is going to be effective.



This post has been edited by vhs: May 18 2025, 03:36 PM

Now gpu want to know my location too

CIA wants you®.....data!

So means every GPU hv a backdoor now.....?

gg so if offline too long cannot play games using your ultra expensive gpu liao wtf

see murica also want to insert spying chip in gpu

Most likely cannot be implemented on gamer's grade GPU for this reason. But if really the top end of the gamer's GPU are forced to implement such feature, then it is likely very few people will buy it and the company will just end up not making and selling such GPU anymore.

I am quite familiar with semicon. Diode burning, fusable links, those have existed from the moment we started binning chips. But what drives all these things for tracking are embedded systems like micro CPUs inside a chip. A good example is your current CPU. There are microprograms running inside. And lets say there is a bug, manufacturer can fix it via microcode.

But what I am trying to figure out is for all this data crunching system, you can have systems that are fully offline and they still work. These systems are so offline that even update patches are manually installed offline. They also don't need frequent updating as their function is constant. So the passing of data can be done manually. A simple example is software like Solidworks. I know every time you install the program and boot up Windows, it sends information like license number and MAC address to factory server. But if I install on machine thats totally offline. How you wanna send info back? I create data inside and every file I output is a ASCII text file like STEP. How they wanna send info back? Thats my question.

They usually run Linux and thats fully open source so can see the backdoors. You wanna say driver level, there are open source alternatives. Even the BIOS in GPUs have 3rd party version. So I damn curious which road they gonna take? Maybe an encrypted key at the core level that requires frequent online updating? Then if buying isn't owning, then........ Jack Sparrow a server?

This post has been edited by sakaic: May 18 2025, 04:16 PM

Have you tried the latest Microsoft Office suite apps which once activated successfully, take the PC offline for months(>180days) and restart the app before?

It'll get deactivated and requires you to go online again for reactivation before you can open the app again. Records are stored remotely in the software company's servers, any changes to your hardware, you need to call them up directly to reset the registered machine ID.

Also how does it know that if you buy a one PC license and attempt to use the product key on multiple PCs it also couldn't work?

That's the whole reason for uniqs or unique identifier IDs for each machine/PC.

It they take it to next level, I'm sure in future your GPUs can't even be used with pirated games. They'll sell games which are fixed to specific GPUs with activation upon purchase.

If they can place location tracking in cheap devices such as Alexa speakers, more likely they'll in future high end GPUs that costs 5-digit prices that can afford you 2nd hand cars.