With a criminal penalty via the DMCA for bypassing it, because encryption is involved. That's why I'm so angry and want companies employing such encryption to be prevented from doing so or face prosecution.

So if I wanted to modify my car to unlock performance that's usually OK and certainly has been considered moral for decades. But if I wanted to unlock a core in my Ryzen CPU, or just hardware hack my GPU (Radeon Vega and above) to make it do neat tricks, I now technically risk a FELONY because of the PSP encryption and the DMCA - even though I want nothing to do with cracking copy protection. That is enough to have a chilling effect and prevent neat stuff from being released.

AMD have gone as far as signing the BIOS* on their recent GPUs, so tweaking it may be technically illegal (assuming you could crack the signature, though)!

This is unprecedented, nobody ever risked a potential felony for wanting to look inside their car to see how it works, or modifying their household appliances.

We need to get together (on Twitter and other social media) to fight this and let consumers know what is happening, because if people did, especially the more technically minded enthusiasts/gamers, that would put pressure on AMD and others to stop.

Specifically for gamers, let them know it's likely a FELONY to unlock a core in their Ryzen CPU or Radeon GPU due to PSP crypto. Just as with the ink cartridge recyclers who have been prosecuted for breaking cartridge chip security.

* = Radeon Vega and later GPUs have a Cortex-A5 PSP which runs autonomously, executing the Trustonic TEE from the SPI BIOS chip at boot, once the signature has been verified. Yes a whole DRM operating system running on the GPU - if you want to see for yourself, take a Radeon Vega or later BIOS and run binwalk -e to extract the compressed TEE.

And this doesn't solve the issue with PSP either. So not much actual progress with security. We need CPUs which do not contain black boxes and allow us to use open source (auditable) firmware (UEFI BIOS).

There are some realistic benefits. If my phone gets stolen, there is no way for it to be wiped and reused without my input. And if it makes it back to me, it is extremely unlikely that it has been loaded with malware which will send off my data when I log in again.

But yes, its really shitty how the downsides end up with the loss of user control and ewaste. Especially when it is possible to design something that is secure and that the user controls.

Really? What phone do you have? A decent number of the recent iPhones have a bootloader exploit now. So there’s no security, just a lot of bitchy software.

Mine is newer than that exploit so no. But also a flaw in the implementation doesn't invalidate the reason for implementing it in the first place. Anti theft features on android and ios have likely saved hundreds of thousands of phones from being stolen, if not millions.

But how often does a server gets stolen from a data center?

It surely makes sense for phones as it makes less profitable to steal them (as you could only sell parts of the phone and even that can be blocked). Maybe even for laptops but not for desktops and servers.

They’re not worried about stolen servers, they’re worried about flashing malware to the motherboard (possibly without physical intervention)

At least one attack they're trying to mitigate is firmware attacks on systems being shipped to the data center.

Well, the market is free for someone to offer a processor that doesn't care about "security" (whether it is or isn't the excuse you deem it to be), and we could see if that offering is successful. Maybe there's a new role for something like that. Cursing the situation won't do any good.

You mean that's going to surely happen, because the server CPU market has traditionally been easy to enter due to low R&D costs, steady avaibility of qualified engineers, cheap manufacturing equipment and customers eager to adopt unknown brands? /s

Well then, maybe you have to live with some inconveniences and higher costs than you would like, because of the natural market dynamics?

You pointed out all those factors to say that they're reasons why CPU OEMs should be able to make all your dreams about price, quality, speed, open hardware come true?

It was about the market being difficult to enter. If you disagree, prove me: I hereby pledge to buy one CPU (needs to be a custom design) + mainboard designed and manufactured by supernova87a, and am willing to pay 800 US$, due 3m after delivery, conditional: It runs my Linux &Windows software like a, and performs at least equally or better than a, then-new system costing up to 400US$ (for cpu+mb, so today something like a Ryzen 1600). This agreement expires on 1.1.2025 0:00 UTC. Your call, do you agree? - Edit, also for balancing reasons: What do I get from you if you fail?

(Since I know you're not getting a x86 license that's an easy call for me - I know for sure you're unable to tap into that market)

how about 800 million dollars US, it will be the same result.

You're right, but: In the unlikely case a random person on the internet succeeds (who knows what happens in the next 5 years, or who s/he is?), I am out of 800US$. For something that I think is a good idea. In case of 800m US$, well, I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that I can't afford that right now ;-)

Yeah just if you don't like a monopoly on a critical resource, its your fault for buying it.

Makes perfect sense.