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Security alert - "Meltdown" and "Spectre"
RE: Security alert - "Meltdown" and "Spectre"
#4
Aaaaactually, writing down passwords is fine, if you can keep them in a safe place. That advice about not writing down is mainly for people who think yellow sticky notes on the desk are acceptable places to keep passwords.

I'm really not sure where the cell phone password advice is coming from -- most cell chips are on ARM and Spectre isn't all that exploitable yet. That sounds a little like sky-is-falling paranoia.

The only problem being that the sky is actually falling. Every general-purpose CPU designed in the last 10 years is vulnerable, and there's no real solution available. There are some workarounds, which mostly involve slowing down your computer by 5-30%. Everyone from hardware designers to compiler writers to web browsers to web designers are affected. On the upside, games are probably the least affected of all, because they don't do a lot of kernel calls.

I guess, uh, just pretend like computers are the U.S. election system. We know that they can be all be infiltrated by Russian hackers, but let's just keep on using the system as if everything is fine, because the alternative is much worse.

Can I just add that CPU design is really, really hard? They have to deal with speed-of-light limits, thermal runaway, chemical purity, and a ton of other engineering problems on a super-tiny wafer.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto
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RE: Security alert - "Meltdown" and "Spectre" - by Labster - 01-05-2018, 03:20 AM

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