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Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years (www.theregister.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Memory-maker Micron has found a way to keep prices for its products sky-high for another five years, by signing 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.”

Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company’s Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.

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[–] 29 points 4 months ago (9 children)

How the hell does one hide and then use a backdoor in ram?

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    could have a chip that looks for a certain sequence of bytes then changes some other bytes as a result... it would probably introduce massive latency though...

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Hang on, I’m gonna add a suspicious new component onto a part that is incredibly expensive and heavily scrutinized specifically for speed and latency that will bit bash the I/o.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    yeah you'd have to disguise it as part of another chip, and use lower latency parts and then sell it as higher latency...

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Or you could just make a waifu gacha game that people install freely because, dude: anime tiddies! And it requires kernel level anticheat because you definitely don't want people getting their waifus and husbandos for free.

    I don't know that any of that is or could be connected to spyware, but it seems like if I wanted to orchestrate some kind of hidden state sponsored spyware network, targeting the gooners that will voluntarily install software on their phones and computers would be a lot simpler than hiding shit in RAM.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    tbh I think it doesn't need to manipulate the data on the stick for doing malicious things. it would just need a tiny processor consuming almost nothing, and doing its own communication on the bus it has access to. but I don't have any idea about the possibilities

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  • [+] -1 points 4 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago

    You add a piece of code (to ram, which famously does not hold information while unpowered).

    Which scans for a specific very big prime number (finding large primes quickly would completely invalidate the world’s cryptography and therefore banking, that’s why people are afraid of the quantum boogeyman).

    You look for any process and inject into stdlibc any backdoor of your choice (just any process, doesn’t need elevated permissions, assuming they use libc, assuming the backdoor hasn’t been patched out from the other end, defeated by any of the dozens of software integrity checks that have become standard).

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