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Joined 20 days ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2026

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  • It’s really easy to come to that conclusion.

    Realistically speaking a team is trying to hit a set of requirements under a set of constraints when they design a soc (or any cpu if you wanna dive into the cisc world and see the wild variation in security featureset across even the same generation of chips). That means using existing designs with a die shrink or something is often the right choice when you’re shooting for the low cost portion of the market. The technology referenced here, enhanced memory tagging extensions, is a hardware implementation of tagging that requires a specific revision of the arm design and it’s a relatively new change (mte, the precursor to emte, is flawed and not used).

    So it’s not by dint of wanting to fuck you over that the designers of socs would make one without emte.





  • Because it costs more than it would make!

    Here’s how socs are: there’s some spec and some company develops a soc platform to address a portion of the spec. They come up with high priced top of the line socs to meet the full portion of the spec they’re trying to address and bottom of the barrel socs to address some much smaller portion of the spec they’re trying to address. They have some socs in between that fulfill different use cases.

    Now look at phones, a flagship phone can either be a value device (best screen, best camera, fastest processors with the most cores) or it can be a Swiss Army knife (completely waterproof, supports every protocol, has some now esoteric port). You might imagine a different kind of flagship phone but a flagship phone can’t be what you imagine because a flagship phone is by definition the phone people will pay the most money for.

    Of course people will only pay the most money for the phone that’s either the best thing or the most thing.

    Gimmie phones are the opposite end of that spectrum. They are intended to meet the absolute minimum requirements to be considered a cell phone that the provider can give to someone for free (the cost isn’t up front but is rolled into the contract, in this way the service provider is under intense pressure to sell the cheapest gimmie phones to maximize their margin and rejects those that are either marginally more expensive or not desirable by their customers) if that person signs a contract with them.

    Under those design constraints the featureful soc is verboten. You gotta go with the small very limited soc to meet the cost constraint.

    A very small very limited soc won’t have a to the letter implementation (or any implementation) of the security features required to run graphene. Things that are implemented but not required for the mast common use cases are not documented or troubleshot.

    Any cell phone will have at least three socs in it, all working like that.

    You can imagine a gimmie phone that supports graphene but it won’t happen because of the systemic forces at play.


  • Graphene requires flagship hardware.

    I don’t mean like graphene as it stands now requires flagship hardware, I mean that graphene as a concept requires what is priced and treated as flagship hardware.

    Compare the processors in flagship phones and those in gimmies by looking at their supported features and you’ll see a significant difference not just in cores and cache and onboard memory but in actual documentation and support for the kinds of hardware features (like memory tagging as referenced in this post) that graphene relies on.

    Flagship phones don’t integrate and support these features because the manufacturers would like to give you what you’re paying for, it’s because meeting the needs of organizations that require them for their device fleet is profitable. If that component of phone design and engineering didn’t exist then everything would be Samsung whose device line can be fully differentiated by their screen sizes, camera features, screen resolutions and battery lives.

    At the gimmie end of the spectrum it is already like that even for iphones although not as much.

    Google was using the pixel line as a reference implementation of the Android platform, with their goal of providing device manufacturers something to measure their own work against and pay attention to to the function of so their android os wouldn’t become a flash in the pan and they could extend onto mobile use as a company. Android use grew significantly and they had to shift to using the pixel line as a trellis for a vigorous garden plant.

    Bizarrely the pixel line was a money loser or a breakeven proposal for Google for several years. When you think about it that makes sense: they’re not playing the same game as the other Android manufacturers (make the cheapest thing, sell the cheapest thing!) so of course they’re not going to be looking good by the metric you use to measure that. The new Android phones represent a break with that plan and an attempt to move to competing directly with other major manufacturers so now their phones aren’t any good for graphene just like the Samsungs of the world.

    Now a person might say “why can’t the damn phone companies just give us a gimmie phone with advanced security features we want?!” Well such a thing is possible but it would be a money loser from the drawing board and wouldn’t fit easily into the rubric of phone sales and tie up a shit ton of resources and time. So even if someone at a hardware company decided to do that their boss would shitcan the project asap.

    That same person might say “well why can’t graphene support a gimmie phone?!” And that a great question too but it would mean diving into hardware that doesn’t have the capacity to meet the bar graphene has set for itself in terms of security. Hopefully the person who started that project would stop themselves when they recognize the situation.


  • I agree with you that some understanding can be helpful (I actually 100% disagree and at the moment people should just rely on the input of others they physically pay for their experience and expertise to give them purchasing advice but that’s neither here nor there. The thread is predicated on the assumption that a person can become informed enough to make a good decision so me undermining the premise isnt helpful to people who already accept it. I’m basically in future perfect tense damage control.), but the thread can’t meet that need.

    Like I said and you agreed, the replies are ass. If a person knows so little they will buy something on the input of a public Internet forum with awful reply quality then how can you reasonably expect them to sus out the wheat from the chaff?

    There’s a person in this thread suggesting people buy voron 3d printers. Those are good printers but you need a 123 block and a surface plate to put one together right and it’s ~$700 for the kit. To what end? That’s an absurd suggestion for even a person who’s interested in 3d printing or who has dipped their toes in already.

    Someone said guns and ammunition. Which guns and what ammunition? There’s a wild variation in laws, availability and best buying practices from county to county and that doesn’t even touch on accessories and use cases.

    I could probably rip into every reply making an actual suggestion itt because without useful background information they are all just no context suggestions to panic buy.

    The point isn’t to make you feel bad but to make it clear that this is really just an undirected consumptive message akin to what the bush administration said explicitly to the American people after 9/11.


  • I know your hearts in the right place but this thread is worthless.

    What will be useful or necessary to one person will be a waste to another. Without understanding what each persons needs are nothing even approaching good advice can come out of the question.

    The availability of stuff and the regulatory frameworks that stuff and its users exist under are super variable. The thread staying up for longer than a week means it’s gonna be outdated advice that amounts to consumption churn.

    Plus it’s a really bad format to be asking in because the upvote/downvote system means that old outdated input will have the most votes and therefore rise to the top and be what people see and act on.

    Even if all that weren’t true, the general quality of the responses on lemmy as judged by a combination of replies and downvotes is dogshit. There’s a front page thread where someone says we should just get rid of blackrock and the reply explaining that their etfs are widely held by retirement funds and getting rid of that company would have serious knock on effects for the average person has a 1:30 ratio and someone directly replying saying “you have lots of downvotes so you’re wrong”.

    You would be literally better off making purchasing decisions by flipping a coin.








  • Walt is in early access and hasn’t completed an audit yet and curve along with all the other middleman fintech companies has a storied history of data breaches and godawful customer service regarding chargebacks and fraud that skirts bank regulation.

    I’m not gonna fight you about this. If you wanna post a tankie wall of links style reply to convince everyone that the best of the fintech middlemen and the early access no employee company are on the up and up you should do it.

    I hope they work well for you and you encounter no negative consequences.



  • If you really want to get right with it, use cash in person.

    In person is the only reason to have nfc anyway so cash sidesteps all the data concerns and you don’t have to choose between trusting a particular big corporation, yoloing it with Jim’s third party processing app or raw doggin’ the possibly a skimmer payment terminal.

    People will say “well, what if they track the serial numbers of the bills dispensed at atms or deposited by a store?” but that just means they don’t understand how retail works and shouldnt be listened to.


  • I’m not sure you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

    You cannot do what you’re trying to do. I don’t know why. Other people can. I can. You can’t. There could be a lot of reasons for that and you’re failing to troubleshoot the problem. None of that is an indictment of you.

    Try to do something else: open a container tab (I am a firefox user, so I use Firefox’s container tabs), log into google and watch your videos. Open up a different container tab (again, I am a Firefox user so I have to make a different container to use) and see if the recommendations follow you there.