“Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

Post by 29athrowaway » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #20

darzu wrote: post #17

I worked extensively with Pluton when I was employed on Azure Sphere (an IoT platform marketed as highly secure and composed of a linux-based OS, ARM SoC, and cloud service). I might be able to answer questions about this. Here’s a blog by the engineer lead on Azure Sphere that discusses Pluton: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/anatomy-of-a-secured-... Disclaimer: I still work at MSFT but in a different org.

The pressing concern for me: what does this mean for non-Windows operating systems running on Pluton-equipped systems? Will there be a possibility for non-Windows software to use Pluton's features?

It means that once most CPUs have the chip, they'll execute order 66 and other OSes will be blocked.

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 6:15 AM UTC

zinekeller wrote: post #161

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it could be worse. Python did the whole Py3k own-goal purely for the purpose of forcing everyone onto UTF-16. (Facepalm, yes.)

> for the purpose of forcing everyone onto UTF-16. Honestly, Py2 was a PITA when handling raw data, it could corrupt your data if you don't know exactly what you are doing. The goal was to separate (Unicode) text from binary data. It wasn't to UTF-16 though. In fact, you should just assume that text variables are encoded in Unicode points and not care whether it is UTF-16 or UTF-8 (and on Unix-like systems, it is def…

The easy and sane path would have been to just mandate that str is encoded as UTF-8. (Indeed, that's what every other sane language seems to do.)

Instead they tried to split every function into a 'wide' (str) and a 'narrow' (bytes) version, like in Windows.

The whole idea of 'wide' strings is predicated on the idea that Unicode charpoints are only ever two bytes and that two bytes is all you ever need.

This obviously doesn't work in 2020, and the Python folks tried to roll back their broken by design code that has immediately turned into technical debt right out the gate, but the warts still exist. (Like having to choose whether you open files with 'w' or 'wb', etc. No other language does this stupid thing, I think.)

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm

Re: “Microsoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs”: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm