How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown • Hacker News Board

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#11

Post by rodonn » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #4

brianwawok wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Intel made billions last year. They will make billions this year. They will make billions next year.

> Why? Because the fallout will cost billions over the next years. Intel as a company due to class-action lawsuits, recalls, rebates, and the shareholders because the drop in stock value after the announcement will cost them quite a chunk of money. In addition, more long-term, I sincerely hope that the cloud vendors (and maybe even Apple!) recognize that their total dependence on Intel (and NVIDIA in deep learning...…

Unclear that diversifying helps solve this sort of problem. More vendors could lead to the same number of bugs, but less investment in quality control per product e.g. if you make $1b and spend 1% on quality control, then you spend $10m checking your product for bugs. If the market fragments into 10 $100m vendors, then to get the same amount of money spent checking each chip for bugs, you'd have to spend 10x as much of your budget on quality control.

It gets even worse when you consider the incentives of private/academic/third party researchers to search for bugs, since there is a lot less prestige in catching a bug in a smaller/less well known product. e.g. I'm pretty sure no white-hat security researcher has checked for security problems in the cheap wifi light switches I bought on Amazon.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#12

Post by ed312 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #4

brianwawok wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Intel made billions last year. They will make billions this year. They will make billions next year.

> Why? Because the fallout will cost billions over the next years. Intel as a company due to class-action lawsuits, recalls, rebates, and the shareholders because the drop in stock value after the announcement will cost them quite a chunk of money. In addition, more long-term, I sincerely hope that the cloud vendors (and maybe even Apple!) recognize that their total dependence on Intel (and NVIDIA in deep learning...…

The problem is chip R&D is super capital-intensive and the space is highly competitive even with so few companies.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#13

Post by username223 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

ed312 wrote: post #7

username223 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO should probably spend some time in the pokey for all the stock he sold between when he knew about this problem, and when it was publicly known. I'm curious how many other Intel employees sold stock in the same period.

This has been debunked already - CEO sold the maximum amount of company stock he could from his yearly award every 4th quarter for the last 4 (5?) years in a row.

It's not clear to me that he's behaving like he did in the past:

> According to filings, on Nov. 29, Krzanich exercised and sold 644,135 options and sold an additional 245,743 shares that he already owned.

-- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-04/intel-ceo...

Sure, he sold most of his 279k grant, just like he sold most of his previous (much smaller) grants, but he also flipped a huge pile of options. This strikes me as the behavior of a man who never had much confidence in the company he ran, and suddenly had much less.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#14

Post by alainv » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:01 PM UTC

Saved you a click: by starting a shared Slack for their teams to collaborate.

Neat factoid but this article is not exactly information-dense.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#15

Post by paulzerkel » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:02 PM UTC

alanpost wrote: post #6

Prgmr.com has been participating on the Slack channel this article mentions. Being able to share notes gleaned from reaching out to vendors and sort through the information and mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown has been a huge help.

I work for a cloud computing company that would have benefitted (and hopefully contributed) from being on that Slack. If you have the time, would you mind reaching out to me with details? My email is in my profile.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#16

Post by wmgries » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:02 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #8

ed312 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been debunked already - CEO sold the maximum amount of company stock he could from his yearly award every 4th quarter for the last 4 (5?) years in a row.

This does not protect said CEO from breaking the insider trading laws. Nor does it protect Intel as a company from conveniently "omitting" the elephant in the room in their press releases and financial risk statements.

Rules against insider trading do not prevent executives from trading the company's stock. They can set rules with their financial advisors like "sell x amount of stock every y weeks" which will be executed regardless of insider knowledge the executive has.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#17

Post by alanpost » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:07 PM UTC

thepumpkin1979 wrote: post #9

alanpost wrote: post #6

Prgmr.com has been participating on the Slack channel this article mentions. Being able to share notes gleaned from reaching out to vendors and sort through the information and mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown has been a huge help.

What's the advantage of Prgmr?

You can manage your VPS over SSH using our management console.[1] Since most of our users access their VPS using SSH, it's nice to use the same protocol for powering a machine off and on or accessing the serial console.

By and large our customers know what they're doing. That lets us provide IRC and email-based support that has been described more as working with a colleague than interacting with a vendor. This can be helpful when, for example, a user self-hosting email receives a complaint or has a delivery issue.

Most of the time though we just get out of the way and let you work on your VPS.

1: https://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Management_Consol...

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#18

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:07 PM UTC

logronoide wrote: post #2

The more I know about how Intel has managed the information, the less I trust them. What a disaster. CEO and all the Press and Communication team of Intel should be fired

Can you be more specific? What aspect of how Intel managed this are you referring to?

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#19

Post by alanpost » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

paulzerkel wrote: post #15

alanpost wrote: post #6

Prgmr.com has been participating on the Slack channel this article mentions. Being able to share notes gleaned from reaching out to vendors and sort through the information and mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown has been a huge help.

I work for a cloud computing company that would have benefitted (and hopefully contributed) from being on that Slack. If you have the time, would you mind reaching out to me with details? My email is in my profile.

Here is where I asked to join:

https://twitter.com/prgmrcom/status/949023633581592576

Following up to @scaleway on Twitter in the same manner would hopefully work out.

I've sent you an email with a bit of elaboration on this.

Re: How Tier 2 cloud vendors banded together to cope with Spectre and Meltdown

#20

Post by jo909 » Sat, Jan 06, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

alainv wrote: post #14

Saved you a click: by starting a shared Slack for their teams to collaborate. Neat factoid but this article is not exactly information-dense.

I don't think the actual technical "how" is of much importance so the article doesn't spend much time on it. They communicated effectively, and more important openly, over company boundaries. Many tools would have worked for that.

This is about "how" they banded together to reduce their disadvantage compared to the big cloud providers that had advance warning and insider knowledge/access to the vendors long before the rumors started.