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Chinese memory can now match the speed and latency configs of the RAM in our gaming PCs
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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Unfortunately because of the wonderful policies by sequential US governments, US citizens will not be able to buy Chinese chips because obviously the chips will spy on you just like Chinese EV's, routers, phones, toasters, drones, etc. But all the good things by American tech companies whom totally respect your privacy, like Google scrapping all spirit airlines communication, or Flock camera drones, is just fine.
Good, more for the rest of the world.
Pads tears with €
EU taxes the shit out of Chinese electric cars to protect the automotive industry that failed to innovate here. In fact they've only been adding more and more taxes and fees on anything that's imported, usually putting the costs on regular people.
Hopefully since the EU high density desktop/server RAM industry is pretty much nonexistent (as far as I know), they won't tax it to hell.
China RAM vs US RAM, they are both not EU "allies" now so there should be little reason.
There is more commercial proximity between China and the EU than China and the US.
The current taxation run is to curtail the online markets like AliExpress, Shein and Temu to flood the market with garbage. Shein got hit with their dumping practices very hard.
Taxing the import of vehicles, when an industry already exists just makes sense. European automakers were sleeping on their job, granted, but the other option is to let them fail and surrender another industry to non-EU territories.
Indeed. Its a complex topic, but import taxes aren’t a (likely) complete corrupt cheeto emabrgo lockdown.
China is in fact competing via something usually considered illegal in international trade: Production subsidies meant to enable their companies to sell products for under manufacturing cost so they can kill off all competition. Yes, all auto manufacturers have had help from their national govenrments, but Mercedes doesn't get paid by Germany to build more cars to sell in China. We do EV subsidies on the purchase side in Europe, so it's manufacturer-agnostic.
We regularly tariff things that other countries subsidize the production of. China does it as well. And China's had tariffs for foreign cars for decades.
Chinese companies like BYD have also been trying to kick off manufacturing in Europe, but unfortunately even in Hungary it's a bit harder to get away with slavery than in China. Hopefully they'll find a way around watchful eyes so we can get cheaper Chinese EVs in Europe too.
Maybe Germany should try that a bit, but with the condition that the wonderful AUTOSAR is killed.
Yes, nations are generally more lenient when it comes to domestic spying compared to foreign spying.
Kind of like how I'm allowed to say my sister is an annoying asshole but if anyone else talks shit about her, we're gonna have a problem.
Of course, but what would she prefer?
She prefers to be an annoying asshole. You're just not allowed to call her that.
I was angry with my sister when she "spied" on me. I took her to "court" for a "trial" and the "judge" gave her time out and a 4 hour supervised probation period.
But it would be a whole different ballgame of actions and consequences if some random person were to do it Neither is ok. But one of them is more severe than the other.
That's your preference for punishment.
What I was wondering was if your sister could prefer to be called an asshole by a friend over being called one by you. Perhaps she hopes that your disagreements don't escalate and that you perceive her needs not as annoying but as valid.
Or speaking about China, being able to feel safe in one's own country could be more valuable than the losses from leaked information to China.
Look, I'm not entierly sure what point you're trying to make. But I can assure you, you're not going to get there by putting words in my mouth, nor by trying to tell me what my own sister was thinking or hoping for when we were kids. Because you know absolutely nothing about us. So just stop.
I thought I'd follow through with the analogy since you engadged in it. But now you're clearly reaching too far.
Nothing I'm saying here is a justification or an excuse. It's an explanation of how it works.
People, and governments often have a very different set of worries.
As an individual, you might not care if it's the US or China that has access to your information. For the vast majority of people, it's not going to affect them personally.
But if you are American. The US government will care if China has access. And if you are chineese, then China will care if the US has access.
And if you're a russian politician, well, then you're probably more concerned about what Russia knows than US or China. Seeing as neither of those two will help you "fall out" of a window.
Sorry, that was meant hypothetically and not personal. I meant that the Russian situation is always possible. The state always thinks that his actions are justified while the citizens may have other preferences.
Fortune Cookies banned for being part of elaborate mind control operation.
They're actually an American invention
Pretty interesting history, actually. They were more or less brought over from Japan by Japanese immigrants, but adapted to American tastes and ingredients (sweeter, and wheat rather than rice -- the Japanese ones are more like rice crackers). During Japanese Internment, production was taken over by Chinese immigrants and they've been associated with Chinese-American food ever since.
A nationstate, whether a autocracy or even a real democracy, does have a genuine national security interest in preventing foreign spying. No matter how much that nationstate itself spies on its own citizens.
So the argument about domestic spying existing, to argue that Chinese spying does not matter, is quite a non sequitur.
To make a stick of RAM spyware, would cost $100k/stick or more, and the engineering to do so, could make HBM6 instead. By all means investigate the chips to see if magic chips are inside, but that is the approach we should take. Why aren't Chinese sneakers spying on you? Far easier to hide and do more cheaply.
The hysteria of foreign spyware is shaped by established monopolies who want to keep their monopolies. There is never a proposed solution of actually verifying/inspecting for spyware.
Well, you absolutelly can make digital products that run at least some built-in software and have network connectivity spy on people, but RAM is no such product in either sense - in neither runs software (and given it's performance constrainst it would be stupidly hard to add it as a feature) nor does it have any network connectivity.
Routers and motherboards, for example, yeah - both have network connectivity and both include and run software so shipping them with spyware is just a question of the factory or distributer putting the right software in them (for motherboards, in the BIOS and running inside as secure code, inside the CPU itself or even in certain peripherals).
(It would be possible to put it in places with more indirect access to networking - such as SSDs - but it's more complex at they would need to hack OS binaries on the fly)
Of course, even for the stuff were it's possible, it's seriously deluded to think only one of the nations with insane civil society surveillance levels that sells those things - China - would be adding spyware to it but not the other one - the US: devices with the capabilities to support spyware made in or designed in any nation which does a lot of surveillance are always suspect.
Motherboards/routers (these are motherboards too) require very careful inspection, specifically if bios chip is unusual, or extra chip connected to bios. There is concern trolling over routers because Huawei is best in world. There is no concern about Motherboards, because only Taiwan is the competitor to China. The point is that inspections instead of baseless hysteria over origin is the right policy.
It's not a question of concern, it's a question of what's technically possible.
It's technically possible to ship a motherboard with spyware capabilities in the BIOS.
There are experts, even stupid fat american ones, who could confirm the existence of such spyware capabilities.
Yeah, well, when was the last time common people and business paid attention to IT Security experts BEFORE their systems were broken into?!
Also, who would pay the people with the necessary expertise to decompile all BIOS of all motherboard shipments (if at all possible, in this day and age when a lot of shit is encrypted with the keys inside a TPM module)?
I mean, just go at it another way - notice how thousands of pager sent to Lebanon were altered by the Israelis and nobody were aware of it until the Israelis made them explode.
In this day and age it's pretty straightforward to just alter the software for some shipments and not others or add a weakness (like both Intel and AMD CPUs have) that can be used as a backdoor by software that's installed remotely (for example, pushed as a Windows update, something which certain American 3 letter agencies can most certainly do since the have the power to demand the signing keys from MS).
There are huge numbers of vectors for spyware to end up in certain computers that start with subtly backdooring the hardware itself.
You/America can be worried about spyware from China. So the US makes an inspection department, like it has for food and drugs, that certifies there is no spyware. That is a completely different approach than fabricating spyware hysteria, and then forcing everyone to believe it.
I think that at least when it comes to America it's more than widely proven that they have an insanely large digital spying infrastructure (not just the 4-eyes stuff but also all that the NSA does, a lot of which having been revealed by Snowden) and even very openly laws such as the Patriot Act and the Cloud Act that let them force American companies to spy for them.
No "hysteria" necessary to conclude that America will do whatever it takes to spy on everybody (both internally and internationally).
I agree the US spies. It is easy on a full general compute stack, ie. PCs/phones. Routers is harder, but NSA experts could probably find suspicious chips on hardware, and if those experts were part of a government for Americans, they could find violations installed at NSA's requests too.
how the fuck did you pull that number out of your ass?
the smallest, simplest embedded CPUs built onto the stick and wired in could do a lot. even if they can't handle the operating memory frequency, they could access contents through another channel, and also the memory bus.
Make it look like a dram module, make the other 7 dram modules look like ones that are 7/8ths the standard size, and make the set of 8 pins work with 7 actual dram modules while still performing like a cheap standard module. so people buy it. There are no microsopic CPUs or with no pin traces leading to them.
Do you know where all the iphones in the US were made?
The chips that goes into the iphones are not made in China.
iPhones are not made in china as much as they are assembled in China. The crucial components comes from the same place as everyone elses. Taiwan.
Whom do you consider to be more evil? Trump or JinPing? National states don’t exist anymore. There are two kings, they only lack the title.
The US is ruled by a junta of oligarchs like the Nerd Reich techofeudalists backing Trump. They believe in nothing, only wealth and power. Trump is no King, but a puppet and the US empire has competing interests.
Xi Jinping is similarly not ruling like a king or dictator. He is accountable to 1.4 billion people and part of what drives his party is ideology. THEY BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. That alone makes them far less evil. They are not benign but they do have a track record of improving the material conditions of billions of people, less predatory economic imperialism and no foreign wars or interventions or coups destroying other nations.
There is no doubt which one is more evil. China now leads in like 58 of 65 advanced technologies. Lets just hope the remaining socialist idealism holds and they stay less evil.
Sure, but if you're not a citizen of either i couldnt care less about which of the two evils, one will give me ram though
That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the US as well as certain other western countries are so obsessed and overreacting to anything made by the Chinese. Like the EV's for example. Most of the world is now letting go of prejudice and import multiple brands of of Chinese EV's. They actually pass European safety standards unlike the cyber truck. The only country now that keeps limiting its choice for its citizens, is the US. And using spying as an excuse to enrich the establishment.
Of course all countries spy. But the thought of putting spyware in memory chips is a stretch. Just costwise it's not feasible.