Major chip flaws affect billions of devices

CNN ^ | January 4, 2018: 9:44 AM ET | by Selena Larson

[Red Badger]

Granted, the Russian, Chinese, Norks and Iranians are looking for military secrets, not your potato salad recipe or your grandkids pictures, but the criminal element of the world is looking for easy access to bank accounts.

All it takes is one.................

[jaydubya2]

“Spectre affects all modern processors, including those designed by Intel, AMD and ARM, but Meltdown is currently thought only to affect Intel chips manufactured since 1995, with the exception of the Itanium and Atom chips made before 2013.”

So my Itanium running OpenVMS 8.4 is safe...what a releif!

[wildbill]

Yeah, but what can you do? I hear the AMD processors aren’t affected I’m good on my old laptop. Maybe.

[Balding_Eagle]

It has 640K of RAM, which is all the memory Bill Gates said I’d ever need...

I find it hard to believe that Gates would ever say such a thing.

[WayneS]

Okay.

He apparently did say it at a trade show in +/-1981, but it is okay that you find it hard to believe.

[minnesota_bound]

NSA had it inserted : )
Now the Russians and everybody else knows.

[AFPhys]

Incredibly enough, the computer I am writing this on is running a 2011 Atom processor, and immune to the big nasty Meltdown.!

I invite your bids on this wonderful machine, whose time has come!

Let’s start bids at a nice round $777 (shipping included), OK?

[Swordmaker]

Another thread on "Meltdown" and "Spectre" vulnerabilities. Again, "Meltdown" impacts all Intel based computers built in the past 22 years including Windows, Linux, and Apple, while Spectre hits Intel, AMD, and ARM based devices. While the preceding is true, in the first week in December, Apple released software upgrades to prevent both of these from affecting Apple products including Macs and iOS devices so long as they are running the latest versions with updates. These updates are macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 for Macs (Meltdown),and iOS 11.2 for iPhones and iPads, and tvOS 11.2 for AppleTV (Spectre). The AppleWatch is not vulnerable. AMD devices (Spectre) are very hard to exploit as the look-ahead processing is vetted for non-privileged code, and for ARM processors (also Spectre), ARM says that only a minority of ARM devices are at risk per their testing of the three possible modes of attack plus one of their own devising. — PING!

MeltDown and Spectre AGAIN
Ping!

The latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword "ApplePingList" on FreeRepublic's Search.

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[Swordmaker]

Another thread on "Meltdown" and "Spectre" vulnerabilities. Again, "Meltdown" impacts all Intel based computers built in the past 22 years including Windows, Linux, and Apple, while Spectre hits Intel, AMD, and ARM based devices. While the preceding is true, in the first week in December, Apple released software upgrades to prevent both of these from affecting Apple products including Macs and iOS devices so long as they are running the latest versions with updates. These updates are macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 for Macs (Meltdown),and iOS 11.2 for iPhones and iPads, and tvOS 11.2 for AppleTV (Spectre). The AppleWatch is not vulnerable. AMD devices (Spectre) are very hard to exploit as the look-ahead processing is vetted for non-privileged code, and for ARM processors (also Spectre), ARM says that only a minority of ARM devices are at risk per their testing of the three possible modes of attack plus one of their own devising. — PING!

MeltDown and Spectre AGAIN
Ping!

The latest Apple/Mac/iOS Pings can be found by searching Keyword "ApplePingList" on FreeRepublic's Search.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me

[Mr Rogers]

I kind of figured as soon as I hooked up to the Internet, I was “at risk”.

[dayglored]

>>> It has 640K of RAM, which is all the memory Bill Gates said I’d ever need...

>> I find it hard to believe that Gates would ever say such a thing.

> He apparently did say it at a trade show in +/-1981, but it is okay that you find it hard to believe.

This old canard again?

Gates never said it, period. The 640KB memory allocation to RAM was the IBM-PC hardware designer's decision long before Microsoft was involved in the PC, and Gates hated it from the start, because he was a software guy who knew the future would require much more than the 1MB of memory space of the 8086/8088. Worse, the 384KB above the 640KB -- set aside for I/O and memory-mapped video -- punched a nasty hole right in the middle of the RAM space (assuming it would eventually extend above the 1MB limit).

Gates and Microsoft battled that unfortunate limit ever after. "Expanded memory", "extended memory", HIMEM.SYS, all that crap was because of the IBM-PC hardware designers' limited view of the future.

Don't get me started on Intel's damn "segment registers" either. :-)

Anyway, that wasn't Gates' statement. It's possible some IBM guy said it, but I dunno about that. Unless you can find reliable video of that "trade show in 1981", I'm sticking with "He never said it".

[dayglored]

And if you don't feel like taking my word for it, check Statements Misattributed to Bill Gates

[Balding_Eagle]

Thanks, Gates was more visionary than to say something like that.