skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. Quoting a fair-sized chunk for context:

> So far, there are three known variants of the issue:

> Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753)
> Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715)
> Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)

> During the course of our research, we developed the following proofs of concept (PoCs):

> A PoC that demonstrates the basic principles behind variant 1 in userspace on the tested Intel Haswell Xeon CPU, the AMD FX CPU, the AMD PRO CPU and an ARM Cortex A57 [2]. This PoC only tests for the ability to read data inside mis-speculated execution within the same process, without crossing any privilege boundaries.

> A PoC for variant 1 that, when running with normal user privileges under a modern Linux kernel with a distro-standard config, can perform arbitrary reads in a 4GiB range [3] in kernel virtual memory on the Intel Haswell Xeon CPU. If the kernel's BPF JIT is enabled (non-default configuration), it also works on the AMD PRO CPU. On the Intel Haswell Xeon CPU, kernel virtual memory can be read at a rate of around 2000 bytes per second after around 4 seconds of startup time. [4]

> A PoC for variant 2 that, when running with root privileges inside a KVM guest created using virt-manager on the Intel Haswell Xeon CPU, with a specific (now outdated) version of Debian's distro kernel [5] running on the host, can read host kernel memory at a rate of around 1500 bytes/second, with room for optimization. Before the attack can be performed, some initialization has to be performed that takes roughly between 10 and 30 minutes for a machine with 64GiB of RAM; the needed time should scale roughly linearly with the amount of host RAM. (If 2MB hugepages are available to the guest, the initialization should be much faster, but that hasn't been tested.)

> A PoC for variant 3 that, when running with normal user privileges, can read kernel memory on the Intel Haswell Xeon CPU under some precondition. We believe that this precondition is that the targeted kernel memory is present in the L1D cache.

If I'm reading this right, then the only POC that works against ARM is the first one, which lets you read data within the same process. Not too impressive. (Yes, I know that I'm reading into this that they tried to run all the POCs against all the processors. But the "Tested Processors" section lower down leads me to believe that they did in fact do so.)

The third and fourth POC seem to be Intel-specific.
See this blog post, which is some very informed speculation based on public Linux kernel patch activity. http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-myst...
does this mean the embargo is lifted?
https://spectreattack.com/

Information site with some more information, and links to papers on the two vulnerabilities, called "Meltdown" and "Spectre" (with logos, of course).

(https://meltdownattack.com/ goes to the same site)
React clean code best practices
Even if you wanted to, it's de facto illegal to do so. There's a very real risk of CPS being called on you or getting cited for child endangerment for this.

My parents live in a subdivision with several parks that are completely empty. I took my niece to one and discovered that's apparently suspicious behavior to use a public park in the middle of a weekend afternoon after a local PD officer stopped by to "have a chat."

The police also literally barricade the subdivision for Halloween. Nobody comes in or out between the hours of 7 & 9.
the left are constantly calling out Christians for certain behaviors, is this racist?
Why is it a Chrome extension instead of just a bit of CSS in one of the many custom CSS extensions that already abound?
If the processor is 30% slower, the same amount of work is going to take 43% longer - right? If I'm renting machines by the hour my costs just went up 43%.
I gave you plenty of examples. There are plenty of Android manufactures with some phones more locked down than others. There are plenty of routers - some more hackable than others. There are plenty of alternatives to dedicated game consoles.
Show HN: Threads for Node.js (learning how to use libuv)
> In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands.

The MTA. That's not at all an unusual amount for total compensation expenses for an employee.
Gucci Watch – Kanary Gifts – Saudi Arabia
And this song predates the Hippocratic oath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtaSiGD_SVI
Google Play, for the kind of music I listen to, seems to have the best radio feature.
True, though the fix for Meltdown requiring a performance hit might exacerbate bad incentives (people not wanting to upgrade) or bad publicity for major corporations (server hosts whose clients now have degraded performance). Whereas Heartbleed had a security cost, this has a possible financial cost.
To be fair, CS theory is basically just mathematics :)
DirectX had already been out quite a few years by that point. I think I was writing PC games in DirectX 6 or 7 (I forget which) around the time the Dreamcast was released, so it was already quite a few versions along.

That all said, I don't recall DirectX being hugely popular - or at least for games development - until around that era or not that long before. So it might have felt like it was pretty new back then. Particularly with how some of the new releases being quite a fundamental change from their previous releases (I seem to recall one version of DirectX (possibly 7?) dropped the previous version of Dx's DirectDraw APIs in favour of promoting Direct3D for all 2D rendering).
Sort of like how old guards like Rim and Nokia caught on with the iPhone when it was introduced?
so they almost hit 20% of their goal from 6 months ago?
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi...

We have discovered that CPU data cache timing can be abused to efficiently leak information out of mis-speculated execution, leading to (at worst) arbitrary virtual memory read vulnerabilities across local security boundaries in various contexts.

Variants of this issue are known to affect many modern processors, including certain processors by Intel, AMD and ARM. For a few Intel and AMD CPU models, we have exploits that work against real software. We reported this issue to Intel, AMD and ARM on 2017-06-01 [1].

So far, there are three known variants of the issue:

Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753)
Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715)
Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)
So there's a bit of an unknown if AMD's most recent generation of processor has the Spectre vulnerability?
Sounds like they are dicks to the blue collar guys, and are more worried about Union busting than making cars.
I don't mean to simplify your argument so much but is it essentially "well, some web apps don't follow that ideology so no one should"? I work regularly with codebases that have definite separations of concerns. Granted, I don't use react much.

I think that semantic design/development is hard and that's why people end up with jumbled messes of things. Commenting code is hard too, that's why most developers don't do it. We're not here because the DOM is crazy. We're here because the DOM is crazy and developers are too lazy/taxed/forced to do it the quick and dirty way instead of the way that works ideologically and is generally accepted as a best practice.

I agree that this is a realist vs. an idealist discussion, though. It's a very mild version of the gun control argument - the idealist in me thinks nobody should need guns, the realist in me realizes that people should be able to have them.
Another good article:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_fl...

"AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault."
https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-vulnerabi...

Yes, this explains why it was lifted.
The difference is scale. OpenSSL was on a lot of servers, but this affects literally every device manufactured in the last 9 years or so. A well-crafted virus could infect nearly any computer and exploit it reliably. We're talking billions and billions of devices, as opposed to millions by Heartbleed.
XSA-254: Information leak via side effects of speculative execution
Yes, relatively speaking. The difficulty of this sort of stuff ultimately can hit the margin, so you usually are fine and have ample time if you have a relatively high margin (and no competitor in line of sight). For operationally tight businesses, this could prove to be disastrous.
A viewpoint shared by the go-kit faq:
(https://gokit.io/faq/#dependency-injection-mdash-why-is-func...), which I tend to agree with.
Also the unpatched devices. Millions of phones don't receive patches anymore, whereas most servers do get patches. They're not really comparable in scale.
This basically kills cloud computing for anything sensitive using shared hardware. In the short term this will actually be good for cloud providers because the demand for dedicated instances will shoot up as there is no short-term alternative.
From wikipedia:

>"Alcohol consumption and alcoholism are major problems in Russia. It is estimated that Russians drink 15 litres (26 pints) of pure alcohol each year. This number is nearly 3 times as much as it was in 1990.[13] In Moscow on September 24 of 2009, Russia's interior minister Rashid Nurgaliyev cited the average intake at an estimated 18 liters a year; "In Russia, each person, including babies, accounts for about 18 liters of spirits per year. In the opinion of WHO experts, consumption of more than 8 liters per year poses a real threat to the health of the nation. Russia has long exceeded this level".[14] It has even been reported that excessive alcohol consumption is to blame for nearly half of all premature deaths in Russia.[15]

A recent study blamed alcohol for more than half the deaths (52%) among Russians aged 15 to 54 from 1990 to 2001.[16] For the same demographic, this compares to 4% of deaths for the rest of the world.[17]"

For the US in 2016, it looks like alcohol and drug related deaths were close to the 4% cited above, 3.56%.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia#Common_causes...
[2]http://www.drugwarfacts.org/chapter/causes_of_death
found the css https://github.com/carolinehermans/HNcute
> It happened 70 years ago.

Nazism and other German nationalist movements were repressed early on by (generally communist) mob violence and later on by the state. That led directly to the rise of brownshirts (to counter the mob) and the radicalization of the Nazis - when people see that their belief system as being oppressed by the law, some of them conclude that when legitimate paths to power are denied, violence is justified.

The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans covers the rise of the Nazis in great detail, and it didn't happen because Nazis were going around with hate speech.

This has been one of the many justifications for free speech for a long time. In general, I think the "but Nazis!" argument against free speech should be viewed with immense suspicion - it basically boils down to a pretty serious antidemocratic sentiment; you can't let people talk, because then they might convince the plebs to vote for Nazis.
> I will Net about $37k in profit

What timeframe was that profit made in?
"Compute Engine customers must update their virtual machine operating systems and applications so that their virtual machines are protected from intra-guest attacks and inter-guest attacks that exploit application-level vulnerabilities."

"Compute Engine customers should work with their operating system provider(s) to download and install the necessary patches."
It was mostly an attempt at self-deprecating humor, which admittedly wasn't particularly productive and was only marginally on-topic.
Are you saying facebook is ignoring court orders from the German authorities to have content removed?
Formally it is a bug in the spec, so indeed Intel products performs as designed. What is deceptive in the first part that the text does not tell that the design and specs were also done by Intel.
>running on the host, can read host kernel memory at a rate of around 1500 bytes/second,

I kinda get how it works now. They force a speculative execution to do something with a protected memory address, and then measure the latency to guess the content. They did not found a way to continue execution after a page fault as rumors were.

The fact that speculative execution branch can access protected memory, but not to commit its own computation results to memory in ia32 was known since pentium 3 times.

It was dismissed as "theoretical only" vulnurability without possible practical application. Intel kept saying that for 20 years, but here it is, voila.

The ice broke in 2016 when Dmitry Ponomarev wrote about first practical exploit scenario for this well known ia32 branch prediction artifact. Since then, I believe, quite a few people were trying all and every possible instruction combination for use in timing attack until somebody finally got one that works that was shown behind closed doors.

Edit: google finally added reference to Ponomarev's paper. Here is his page with some other research on the topic http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~dima/
Modern life means having an unprecedented probability of living past forty.
Is this saying that AMD is affected? Is this the same as the Intel bug reported earlier?
If it's an (initially) exponential ramp-up, yeah?

Relatively speaking, it's still a fast ramp-up rate.
This is more than a bit of revisionism, or possibly he just didn't know much about the German/Austrian interwar period.

It's well documented, and covered in most of the histories regarding the rise of Nazism, that a not insignificant part of why the party was able to gain traction was that there was already an environment of political violence and suppression. The SPD, KPD, and Freikorps were fighting in the streets well before the Nazis were relevant (the 20s. The fighting dates back to the end of WW1 and through the Weimar period).

There was similar violence in Austria at the time including a small civil war in the mid 30s, probably not what one would call a great and peacful environment for appreciating art and music.
That's the thing... I've been porting some of the functionality to Golang, and slicing out many layers of abstraction and baggage at the same time. There's some tradeoffs; e.g. I'm actually writing some SQL queries instead of just declaring interfaces that JPA auto-populates with methods, but overall it just feels like a way lighter and less magical codebase.

Edit: and very very fast startup.
aka "LOL zero day exploit needs to be patched ASAP thx"
From Google Security Blog [0]

>The Project Zero researchers discovered three methods (variants) of attack, which are effective under different conditions. All three attack variants can allow a process with normal user privileges to perform unauthorized reads of memory data, which may contain sensitive information such as passwords, cryptographic key material, etc.

> There is no single fix for all three attack variants; each requires protection independently. Many vendors have patches available for one or more of these attacks.

That would suggest the possibility of a third unnamed attack variant.

[0] https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-vulnerabi...
Also from the P0 blog post:
Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753)
Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715)
Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)

My checking doesn't show any of those three explicitly listed in Apple's security updates up through 10.13.2/2017-002 Sierra.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
Based on a link here yesterday, there was a patch to the Linux kernel and comments associated with it.
Twitter's TOS cannot be taken seriously when it comes to abusive speech. They apply their rules arbitrarily.

While I think it's never inappropriate to punch a Nazi (self avowed variety anyway), I'm definitely on the side of letting Nazis have free speech. It's best when the cockroaches are scurrying around in public, rather than hiding in the wood work. And as it turns out, the U.S. has a long history of fascists engaged in crimes, theft and murder, and have plotted the overthrow of the government - same as Germany where these ideas are illegal.

So which method actually inhibits Nazis? Neither. But at least one is cheaper, and at least with one you've got an example that most every one else, not merely just the government, will point to as what not to be. Unless you wanna get punched.
> If this allows code running in ring 3 to read from ring 0 protected memory then it's not an issue due to a lack timing guarantees, even if its internally caused by a timing issue.

I was never saying "the lack of timing guarantees was [or wasn't, for that matter] an issue" in itself. I said "given the lack of timing guarantees, this behavior is perfectly correct and compliant with their specs [as far as I know]". You're muddying the waters here as to what you mean by "the issue". People often (even rightly) have "issues" with things that go beyond, you know, actual issues with those things. They do this because they extrapolate and their assumptions turn out to be incorrect, and they get annoyed (again, in this case, rightly so). And that's what I'm saying here: yes, this is a genuine issue for people, but no, far as I'm aware, all Intel has guaranteed is a certain behavior for each instruction, and as far as I'm aware, no specification has been violated. Hence this is a very different situation from one where they are violating their own specs and producing incorrect output.

If you can point to one guarantee in their specs that they violate (this may not be hard -- I have barely read their specs, given that they are thousands of pages), then I agree, this is potentially like the FDIV bug, and I would more than love to be aware of it. Until then, I see the two as quite different.
Not just user memory reads. AMD CPUs won’t speculate loads from userland code directly to kernel memory, ignoring privilege checks (“Meltdown”). But they are still subject to the “Spectre” attack, which can disclose kernel memory by taking advantage of certain code patterns (which normally would be harmless) in kernel code.
They also stated it does not have the potential to cause deletion, modification or corruption which directly contradicts the "malicious purposes" statement.
Yes. This is so often forgotten when talking about stock prices (which those 2x or 3x daily derivatives are so dangerous).

For those confused: the math here is a 30% decrease puts you at 70%. To go from 70% back to 100%, 30% only gets you to 91% (0.70*1.3). 1/0.7 = 1.43 means you need 43% to recover.
Are you doing something similar like the http://5kids1condo.com/ guy is? With shared bedrooms and such?
I seems like some people buy a new screen, fridge, washing machine, speakers, etc etc, just because they feel like a change of scenery.
I feel like the Meltdown logo was done by a real designer, and Spectre was designed by a bored developer.
> We have some ideas on possible mitigations and provided some of those ideas to the processor vendors; however, we believe that the processor vendors are in a much better position than we are to design and evaluate mitigations, and we expect them to be the source of authoritative guidance.

Intel: "Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a “bug” or a “flaw” [..] are incorrect."

So much for "authoritative guidance", fuck these guys.
I think this is more an issue with the lack of nuance in a Left-Right political spectrum. The more axis and metrics used to define a political position the easier it tends to be to to compare it to other positions.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the crypto boom is going to produce a handsome windfall for tesla.
I think web apps are a little unique because there's huge parts of them that are not content and that's where the separation of concerns originally came to be. I vehemently disagree with you that all of these things have to be entangled and tightly coupled. I think they just end up that way because it's the easy way to get through a problem and people who do things like that are, generally, lazy or on a tight deadline (for no reason that to have a deadline) or stressed or any number of things. Unfortunately, if all you're given is noodles, sauce, and meatballs, you're probably going to make spaghetti.
Google security blog says it is.

> These vulnerabilities affect many CPUs, including those from AMD, ARM, and Intel, as well as the devices and operating systems running them.

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-vulnerabi...
The tide won’t change for years or decades.

Relatively few places have the ability to do ballot measures like this, and the feds will make it more and more onerous to comply with various regulations.
Could somebody please coin a name for this? Wikipedia currently calls it "Intel KPTI flaw", but that is very vague. It's quite difficult to talk about something without a simple easy-to-remember name.

Edit: has been settled, it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_bug) .
> This one requires local code execution …

… and nowadays almost everyone permits remote sites to execute code in their browsers. I don't know if JavaScript can be used to implement Meltdown though.
More detail on the "Office of the Future" http://elevr.com/the-office-of-the-future/

More examples of the Studio paradigm http://elevr.com/studio-metaphor-an-embodied-software-paradi...

And a lot more theory on the three scales http://elevr.com/the-three-scales/
> Meltdown breaks all security assumptions given by address space isolation as well as paravirtualized environments and, thus, every security mechanism building upon this foundation.

> On affected systems, Meltdown enables an adversary to read memory of other processes or virtual machines in the cloud without any permissions or privileges, affecting millions of customers and virtually every user of a personal computer.
The paper from the other people who discovered this says the same thing: "We also tried to reproduce the Meltdown bug on several ARM and AMD CPUs. However, we did not manage
to successfully leak kernel memory with the attack de-
scribed in Section 5, neither on ARM nor on AMD." The general purpose attack that leaks kernel memory, the one that KAISER fixes, only seems to work on Intel CPUs. Intel's press release was misleading.
Seriously though, how do you oppose immigration without criticizing the people who are immigrating? The comment may have been hyperbolic, sure. But it's completely reasonable to be concerned about immigrants raising the crime rate. Or having objectionable cultural beliefs and changing your country's culture.

Look at it from an outside view. Tibet was taken over by China and they are intentionally flooding it with Chinese immigrants. The goal is to destroy Tibetan culture and eventually assimilate or replace the Tibetan people. Liberals seem pretty upset by this and even consider it literal genocide. If a Tibetan is angry at Chinese immigrants and says something insulting to them, is that hate speech?
...I am mildly amused that in its logo, the Spectre is brandishing a stick. (And I am mildly chagrined at how long it took me to figure out why)
fascism != authoritarianism

fascism == authoritarianism && nationalism && racism

Censorship is done by authoritarians of all stripes.
Ah that’s likely.

In my mind I thought I only mentioned them here on HN, thank you.