281–290 of 337 posts
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Their motivations are irrelevant. Consumers aren't datacenters.
> Consumers aren't datacenters Consumers have also shown zero intention of paying more for secure devices. Until we have a public ME hack with real consequences, I do not expect that to change.
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Their motivations are irrelevant. Consumers aren't datacenters.
You know that companies deploy these processors as well, right? I just finished a deployment of 10k Intel i5 machines.
Intel advisory: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advi... CVE-2018-3628 - "Buffer overflow in HTTP handler" Affected processor list (simplified reordered by me to reflect relevance and improve readability): • Core i3/i5/i7, generation 1-8 (that is, all of them) • Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 • Xeon Scalable • Xeon W • Core 2 Duo vPro, Centrino 2 vPro
Also worth noting that they're not patching it for 1st, 2nd or 3rd generation Core CPUs. I'm sure there's plenty of Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs in the wild, and it's not like you have an option to discontinue use of the Intel ME :(
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Except for those that happen to own an older card that used to work perfectly fine on the former AMD driver. Case in point, the ATI Radeon HD 6310 that came on EEE PC models, the video hardware acceleration no longer works as it used to be. Sure, I can probably hack the older driver into newer Ubuntu releases or track down someone that has already done it, but that is exactly what I don't want to spend my time doing…
FWIW, it’s a completely different architecture. GCN has support all the way down to 1.0. The graphics card in your EEE PC is upgradable, if you’re feeling adventurous[1]. [1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Asus+Eee+PC+1008ha+Graphics+Car...
The graphics card was working perfectly fine before they decided to reboot driver support.
Now with the legacy driver I have to force enable acceleration and even then I sometimes get the feeling it isn't really working, given how the fan behaves when watching movies on the go.
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The bug was part of the IME’s built in HTTP server, which is what the parent was alluding to.
Sure, but that's " in our CPUs " in, kinda, exactly the same way that nginx is. It's a microcontroller. It's not like the hardware implemented an HTTP server.
> It's not like the hardware implemented an HTTP server.
But yes, yes yes it is.
I don't mean "in our CPUs" in the sense of running nginx. I say "in our CPUs" because
- the Web server is physically inside the CPU die
- you can't remove or change it thanks to code signing, so (to me) it's truly wedged in there
In effect, it's as hardcoded as the electrical circuitry and the transistors are.
Andrew Tannenbaum penned an open letter of surprise and shock because the use of MINIX was an implementation detail ("the licensing works for us, and it's been stared at by tons of professors and a bunch of smart kids for about 20 years, it's good"). Okay, so it's running on 3 little 486-and-a-bit class x86 cores, and it isn't embedded into the main execution pipelines (...yet. I can see that being attractive, something something "software defined ICE").
These details don't change the bigger picture - until someone can break the ME signing infra in a way Intel can't easily fix, and we can disable (or, more ideally, take over/pwn) ME for good, it's as good as mask ROM.
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No real advancement after Sandy Bridge was made. Only incremental 10% with each gen. That means current gen is only 2x as fast when comparing the same lines (i7 to i7). If you can't make new things better, just gimp the old ones, like Spectre/Meltdown.
My Ivy Bridge laptop uses twice the power as my Apollo Lake laptop. Literally 2x.
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You know that companies deploy these processors as well, right? I just finished a deployment of 10k Intel i5 machines.
And yet, customers still aren't datacenters, but still they carry the risks.
Intel advisory: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advi... CVE-2018-3628 - "Buffer overflow in HTTP handler" Affected processor list (simplified reordered by me to reflect relevance and improve readability): • Core i3/i5/i7, generation 1-8 (that is, all of them) • Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 • Xeon Scalable • Xeon W • Core 2 Duo vPro, Centrino 2 vPro
I don't want a patch. I don't use that thing for anything. I want them to disable that thing by default! Leaving those backdoors open in older products should lead to a recall because the flaw was there all along.
The vulnerable components are off by default. It's very strange that most comments here suggest otherwise.
It's like a branch in your code that does an escalated execution of any input.
Yes it's good to put a fence and prevent it but the better route is to excise the logic from your code base completely.
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So, what's AMD doing these days? I'm hesitant to switch to AMD since Intel internal graphics play nicely with Linux. However that kind of doesn't matter if my machine isn't mine.
I have recently built a machine with Ryzen 2700X & geforce gtx 1050ti (GPU is required as Ryzen doesn't have an internal one but there are plenty of cheaper ones like mine), running Ubuntu and it's just fantastic. Docker builds, compilation takes seconds as compared to my macbook which has i7. Plus there's no overheating issues when I am running Kubernetes all the time and I can still code. TL;DR Ryzen 2700X is great…