The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway All malicious attacks on digital systems have one common aim: taking control. Mostly, that means getting a CPU somewhere to turn traitor, running code that silently steals or scrambles your data. That code can ride into the system in a whole spectrum of ways, but usually it has to be in memory somewhere at some time, making it …
I can see what the author was trying to do, and I don't totally disagree.
However, even if the analogy as applicable, it was poorly presented; the article switches from a discussion of the microcode flaw in AMD processors (rehashing previous material a bit here), and is just looking like it is getting to a point about security of embedded systems, and wham switches to a discussion of what Musk is up to.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the assessment that what Musk is up to - and it is Musk, not Trump, although it is being done with Trump's tacit approval, Musk is clearly behind the gutting of the US government that is going on apace - and the analogy does hold some water, but it feels more than a little forced.
It gets even worse. The article does not discuss any particular vulnerability, just scares the audience by talking about how microcode can do stuff on the CPU (surprise!). Then when the attention of the public is caught, goes on with the agenda of blaming Trump & Musk for what they do.
The analogy is also bad, because with microcode, you can just undo it all, by ... loading new microcode. But the suggestion is what Trump & Musk do is somehow fatal, because it can't be undone just as easily.
But as they say... whoever pays, calls the music.
you can just undo it all, by ... loading new microcode.
I get the analogy - what happens if the 'trojan' microcode prevents the 'new' microcode from being loaded?
What happens if Trump/Musk/Whoever change the Constitution (or whatever) to prevent a return to the 'old' normal?
Segway /ˈsɛɡweɪ /
▸ noun trademark a motorized personal vehicle consisting of two wheels mounted side by side beneath a platform that the rider stands on while holding on to handlebars, controlled by the way the rider distributes their weight.
– ORIGIN early 21st century: an invented word based on segue.
How is reducing the power of Government facist? How is removing corruption and waste from government facist? They like to grow government, not shrink it.
It looks like they are uncovering the money train that illegally feeds the left.
FEMA money going to put illegals in luxury hotels, and not helping hurricane victims seems like something that should be uncovered. The amount of fraud and waste uncovered in USAID is staggering.
The president is the head of the executive branch. We hold CEOs to being responsible for what goes on in their companies (SOX audits anyone?)
The president is responsible for what the executive branch does, meaning all the executive branch agencies. The audits are a good thing.
TDS articles really should be in political sites.
I got some news for you. If you really, truly, from the depths of your heart believe that Musk is "reducing the power of the government", it might just be too late for you. Oh right, lets shut down a Congressionally mandated agency without Congress' approval. A masterstroke from the party that claims to be restoring "law and order", or whatever the dog whistle is these days. You want to talk Sarbanes-Oxley? Let's go, I didn't study finance for nothing. Oh yeah, Sarbanes-Oxley has also done shit-all for CEO responsibility, or whatever the hell you're talking about. CEO compensation rises year on year and is tied closer to market conditions rather than company performance. Argue with a wall otherwise, academia supports that conclusion. Yes, the President is responsible for federal agencies, but that doesn't mean he has some sort of big red button and can shut them down at will, much less a Special Government Employee. I hope you realize the error of your ways.
You don't appear to understand the basic premise of the US constitution, that of separation of powers.
You also appear to believe any old bollox spouted by Muskrat and Trumpty Dumpty, however demonstrably untrue it is
It seems people of your mindset don't, in fact, want a United States, you want 50 separate nations. Have at it.
I'm confused. Put aside Trump.
Do you disagree that Musk is doing unaccountable things that are likely against the law and removing and bypassing key controls designed to keep the American people safe?
And as a result aiming to leave a state apparatus behind that will be more corrupt because it won't have the controls it needs to be politically independent - remember that the apparatus is there to serve the people, not Trump (or any other political group).
The point is a general one about the controls and security needed in the state machine and the risk if these are purged and removed.
I'm definitely not a fan of the current Administration.....but......
The Register's tales of government software written by experts is a bit like a soap opera. In the UK if its not Horizon or the latest NHS debacle its West Sussex finding its got to sell its soul in order to pay rapidly escalating software development costs. Here in the US its likely to be no different so I'd welcome any kind of audit from outsiders who aren't part of the system. I think its a long shot that anything good will come out of it (especially given the characters in the Administration) but anything's better than the status quo. (....and we all should by now know the difference between 'systems' and 'data')
It hasn't happened on this scale before, with this little oversight, in this short period of time, or with that many important programs. It's like saying AI isn't new because we've always consulted computers for our questions. But it's an entirely new form of change.
Not to mention that DOGE staffers are mostly Elon's friends and they haven't been elected, so really nobody has approved them (except Those Two).
Not sure really. Actually part of the reason the state apparatus is so cumbersome is because it applies all these controls to itself to minimise the harm it might do. Unlike a corporate that only focuses on it's shareholders and couldn't care less for everyone else.
It's not clear to me that the state apparatus was particularly political in the US. Which is as it should be. It should be agnostic to who is in charge. It should aim to do the right thing for the American people and follow the law at all times, even if it's a bit expensive to do so.
That's why the people in charge of the different parts should be there to serve the people, not a party. You should judge them on that yardstick first. The most competent person is unfit for office if their first master is the president, not the people of the US.
High (and not so high) officials in the US swear an oath to support, defend and uphold the Constitution. Not the president, not the government, not the people - the Constitution.
Of course, the President himself swore that oath - twice, now - and shows no signs of letting it worry him, he's openly assaulted the constitution on some fronts (most notably the 14th amendment), and undermined it on others.
" but can do anything from making 2 + 2 = 5"
Microcode probably can't do that, such low level things like the add instruction are hardcoded. The random function that google altered to always return 4 is complex and was at least partially implemented in microcode.
Not to distract from the actual point of the article.
Every x86 ADD opcode - every x86 opcode, fullstop - is implemented as microcode.
That is the the whole point of microcode.
Aside from anything else, the microcode is what allows all the different addressing modes to be wrapped around ADD - and to allow those modes to be parallelised, loading both operands into the ALU asap[1].
Sending every ADD to microcode really improves efficiency.
[1] Not to mention all the weird-ass register scheduling that allows opcodevre-ordering or even hyperthreading to occur (these two sequential ADDs don't have any common sources or destination and we have two ALUs available right now, let 'em both run in parallel - or nope, that first ADD has to wait on BL to be available, but the one after it can start now).
I doubt your statement. What would be the point of a microcode implementation that couldn't do that? There might be some performance implications... but if you've managed to ship an ALU that gets addition wrong under certain circumstances, you need a way to detect the circumstances and take corrective action. Saying "No boss, we can't do *that* in microcode" is not going to cut it.
Some time in the '90s I went to a presentation (Science Museum? RI? Not sure) by some fossils from IBM Hursley who, in the mid '60s, had implemented the microcode for the /360 series, on bloody great sheets of Mylar covered in capacitors and address lines. A punched card that never wears out. About a decade earlier I'd seen these in an actual, production-though-incredibly-obsolete 360/40 (by looking over a friendly CE's shoulder with my hands in my pockets). The wizards from Hursley actually had the stacks of bloody great Mylar sheets and invited us to riffle through them. At least with bloody great Mylar sheets it takes tools and some time to effect a change. The box that replaced the /40 read an 8" diskette at IML time. So modern and convenient, until the diskette grew weary, when any amount of fun was possible.
In the wizards' account one of the problems they faced was convincing Galactic HQ in Poughkeepsie that a microcode approach was *even* *possible*. Managers who'd been raised on the thermionic valve/tube and were now flush with their marginal grasp of transistor logic found the idea hard to get their heads round. Evidently the wizards succeeded, and maybe they were playing the issue up for an appreciative, mainly Brit audience.
So, to return to our increasingly strained metaphor we may be up against a similar failure of imagination in the minds of the left-pondian public. I'm abandoning hope now, to save time.
Microcode probably can't do that, such low level things like the add instruction are hardcoded.
Half right. Data-related microcode basically enables and configures connections between function units and to/from memory, loops when necessary, and so on, and the ALU/adder itself is "hard coded". However, you could decode a simple ADD instruction, for example, into two or more operations, and simply increment the result (I've done a lot of microcode for a (graphics) CPU, where a single blit/fill/draw/whatever instruction could turn into hundreds of operations).
Once upon a time, microcode was quite the fashion. There were systems that allowed the user to change the microcode (DEC?) allowing the creation of new custom instructions more economical in execution time and resources, so speeding up the machine for signal processing and making more complex operations possible in the same memory, all because it didn't have to rely on the old fashioned bloated safety first architecture put in by the plodding....
I think you see where we're going here.
Beware of torturing something into a metaphor, it can swing round and clout you on the back of the head!
Once upon a time, microcode was quite the fashion.
Pretty much everything was microcoded and bit-slice back in the 70s. I've just dug out my Varian 72 System Handbook (dated March 74; my first job in the 80s was working on a V72), and it had an option for a 'Writeable Control Store' (we didn't have one). The V72 instruction set was in the readable control store; if you had a writeable one you could write your own microcode to extend the instruction set.
I did a bit-slice processor in the mid-80s and wrote all the microcode for it, but that was about the time when custom silicon was becoming relatively cheap, so microcoding largely died out. Fast forward 10 years, though, and it was back in fashion, because it was too difficult to verify complex processors.
It's really sad to see what The Register has become these days. It was once a superb tech news site for British IT professionals.
Now we get hate-filled Daily Mail style editorials wailing about Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the state of American politics.
Then the comment section fills up with hundreds of rabid democrat and republican supporters shouting nonsense at each other.
And while I don't care for American politics, I'd take Trump, over any of the worthless clowns that that been running Britain in the
last 30 years. Just be glad you don't have Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Kier Starmer.
You might have had a point about the politicised editorialising in the Reg (at least in the Software section, although I guess that's partially exonerated by the cute/clunky [delete to taste] extended metaphor) - then you went and blew it by neatly exemplifying the overwrought style you claim to deplore1.
1 Note for those confined to a bunker for the last decade: "hate" in modern political discourse actually means "deplore", "rabid" means "passionately disagrees with me", etc., etc.
If Trump annexes Greenland, he may well let Russia have Ukraine. If that happens, there will really be nothing stopping China taking Taiwan. You can expect that to disrupt the supply of chips to such an extent you will probably see a massive economic depression and a lot of redundant IT professionals.
So you're saying the new President giving the guy who nobody voted for (and who has sufficiently close ties to the Kremlin that he has intervened in their favour in the Ukranian invasion) access to all the computers and data the state runs on in spite of the fact that is not legal, is... good actually?
I'd love to hear how you figure this makes America or the world a better place.
"Now we get hate-filled Daily Mail style editorials wailing about Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the state of American politics.".
Agreed it's becoming extremely prevalent amongst a large percentage of the articles.
I don't understand the point.
If El Reg becomes a bastion of extreme left politics they will undoubtedly fail.
A time will come when they can't turn back and at that point failure will be omw imminent. And there will be no point in blaming anyone but themselves.
If you constantly alienate half of your readers you will see the same result as the Democrats.
In a world where pointing out that a hostile far-right takeover of the machinery of government is bad is seen as "extreme left", the Overton window is broken.
Maybe leave the childish hyperbole aside. It really is very tedious.
The extreme left have very little voice in mainstream politics or the media, and I've not seen any ranting Marxist "seize the means of production" speech here.
What a sick joke.
The democrats are right wing.
The Republicans today are nothing more than the party for the millionaires and corporations.
I suggest you read the Republican Manifesto of 1956, for example, to see how things have changed.
Warning, you'll think it's wokie left commie garbage: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956
Hardly! Nothing in the US is left. It's just a flavour of 'right'. Ultimately it's a question of common decency.
Ask yourself who, as a human being, is the better person. Can you honestly say that the bunch now in charge are 'good people'?
People advocating things that are against international law. There are other things, but this is the easiest example to give.
By using the easiest example you shine the light. If someone doesn't understand that you can't just bully your neighbours or take over someone else's land, the they have a broken moral compass and aren't fit for office.
Whether anyone else is better is moot. It's important to call things what they are. This lot have a clearly broken moral compass.
"Ask yourself who, as a human being, is the better person. Can you honestly say that the bunch now in charge are 'good people'?"
When you realise what the last bunch, between the COVID lies, the fact that th through out their President, that they accept the mutilation if children is oK.... And you think that that's ok...
I don't see any off that with the new crowd. In fact quite the opposite.
> If you constantly alienate half of your readers you will see the same result as the Democrats.
The Register readers are generally of higher intellect than your average twitter user.
It's nowhere near half of the readers here that are fascist cultist morons.
Don't confuse knowledge, compassion, truth-seeking, and fairness with "being lefty", although to be fair, these days it's a complete correlation.
There's something interesting about this, though. A lot of the more libertarian American exceptionalist free-market meritocracy weirdoes are likely to learn some hard truths about how working institutions, the rule of law, and honest systems are what allow innovation and free markets to work. It's much harder to become whatever kind of imaginary Ayn Rand steel magnate you think you'll be when men with guns (who may or may not be part of the government) show up to your office and demand a cut of your profits, or start breaking things because you're competing with somebody who gives them a better cut.
It's a kind of economic anti-vaxxer sentiment where the fact you've never had to confront the challenges of truly corrupt systems in your lifetime leads you to assume that you don't need to protect against corruption.
I can understand how they got there, though. I grew up thinking my grandparents' generation had beaten fascism and look where we ended up on that front.
It's really sad to see what The Register has become these days. It was once a superb tech news site for British IT professionals.
TheReg hasn't been exclusively British for a very long time. Tell me, what has Paris Hilton ever had to do with IT. Other than being drooled over by horny computer geeks. I have been coming here for decades and I wouldn't waste my time on a British only tabloid. Couldn't care less about your ex-pat royals either. While I would prefer a little less politics and a lot more new tech news, these are the articles that are getting the views. And here we are. I will say this article made such a hard turn my neck hurts. And I still don't know if microcode is going to be a serious threat in the future.
Maybe it's just the Internet out to destroy our lives in new ways. I remember refusing to buy new gaming systems when they introduced hard drives. At the time I said "this will just encourage companies to release half finished games because they can freely distribute bug fixes". I knew it would be bad for consumers, and I never thought about DLC or micropayments. If you ever feel like a slave to your technology due to spending so much time updating them, maybe it's the Internet's fault.
And while I don't care for American politics, I'd take Trump,
If you'd like Trump and his buddy Elmo, feel free to come collect them. I'd even buy you a Koffee, or contribute to a GoFundMe, if it would expedite the pickup.
Alternatively, please take good care of Belize. It's the only Central American country where English is the official language. And I may need to immigrate to a country where it's cheaper to live and has healthcare. If we keep going with the tariffs, inflation is going to go up faster than a Musky rocket.
You may, or may not, like the topic switch in this article, which had a sense of humour to it that fits on the site. With Trumpelstiltskin and Muscovy in charge of so much social media, digital (Fox) news and AI etc there is surely an IT interest to all this and El Reg should bite that hand.
The Pres-Bros are clearly extreme in what they are doing, whether that is what their electorate wanted or not. Whether it is fascist or right wing could be argued perhaps (as opposed to just destructive or bonkers). Holding a candle to it is quite clearly not an example of "extreme left" though. Many moderate and rational people oppose them.
I do not believe they will MAGA, and I fear the damage they will do to the rest of the world before anything can be done about it.
"I would venture most readers here know what a coup is and what fascism looks like, don't need it explaining to them."
You're right, we do know, and this is certainly neither a coup for fascist...
I think that any slanders that others by using the terms Nazi, Fascist, Rascist, Whatever phobe, are the problem, not the solution. Calling someone names does not provide a solution it just shows that you are not willing to make an attempt to make things work. T
Think back to being in the playground and you will understand how ironic that the name calling was just another form of bullying. But, and there's also a but, the name calling eventually gave the others a thicker skin and quite often they grew up to be the successful people.
Authoritarian leader, check
Calls for violence, check
Attacks on Free Press, check
Disembodiment of rule of law, check
Racism, check
Deportation of large parts of population (ethnic cleansing), check
Enthousiast followers from self-declared Nazis, check
Sounds Fascist to me.
Question to you...
Is efficiency more important than doing things correctly - especially for a State apparatus which has to serve everyone, not a minority.
And secondly, is a broken moral compass a bar from office? Everyone has 'defects', but publicly proposing things that are breaches of international law is something else and not even underanding that this matters is the worst of it.
After all, we are only safe at all if the law has some sort of meaning. And once you've signed up to that concept, the you can't pick and choose. You can change things by following the process. But you don't disregard it.
Without the law then anyone can kill and steal from anyone. I'm not sure that Trump wants that. He still wants the law when it suits him.
You aint seen nothing yet, Rupert, for the purges haven't really started yet with IT [Information Technocrats] and AI Programs for Novel Projects and Pogroms [an Almighty Intervention of Advanced Interference] currently just beta testing compatible steganographic protocols for secure secret quantum communication internetworking of future trials and tribulations and troubles and remote virtually controlled events resulting in necessarily alternative unusual consequences for progress to appear and to flow and to grow economies to scale naturally and supernaturally.
The die it is cast, Rupert. There is nothing to be done to stop the invasion and prevent the series of programs presenting absolutely fundamental radical change billions will have a great deal of difficulty believing possible and have even less of a chance of understanding the ways of its workings.
I Kid U Not.
It's a fun idea to use microcode, which we geeks understand, to introduce the idea of subverting the state by changing the rules from within.
Since half the mainstream media on the planet are busy pointing the putsch out already, the value of it as an informative metaphor is somewhat limited.
But I like the style. Let's have more, please!
Regulators are the microcode of the machinery of state, with infinite disruptive power. That's why Musk and DOGE are working so hard at taking over, closing down, and ignoring regulators. Once those are turned off, the machinery of state will be unprotected and institutionally corrupt. You don't want Trump to have access to the data that the state has about you? How about the mechanisms of money by which the Treasury works? All the interlocking components of the state, carefully designed to follow rules to protect that data, will be open to abuse.
To profess that current regulators do not abuse their elite executive access to power and information on all matters of command and control and that change of those historical regulators is not an excellent plan and giant leap for the good of mankind is akin to an admission of madness flirting with the putrid badness which accompanies all version of live diabolical evil ‽ . SCADA Administration Systems are broken and need replaced with SMARTR NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive Administrator Systems ..... an AI Colossus eclipsing its early successful Forbin Project manifestation test bed.
Yup, the bureaucracy is bloated, inefficient, definitely corrupt in places, slow...broken even. And, it's probably the best government you're going to get, in a somewhat outdated, "version 1.0" representative democracy. If we had a working Congress we could have upgraded to version 2 or something by now, but that's clearly not an option. But it had some safeguards, which look to some like "activist judges" and "bureaucratic waste." By the end of the year, we'll be really missing those things.
Thinking you're going to fix it by "burning it all down" and putting it in the hands of a super rich playboy who goodness only knows how much contempt he has for the masses is... it's the plan? That was the Genius's plan. That was his whole plan.
That was the Genius's plan. That was his whole plan.
Sadly, yes. Compare what he and Harris said about health care in the presidential debate, and weep.
Mango Largo will be older in his 4th year of his 2nd presidency than Joe Biden was when he left office. Decrepitude is upon him already, for anyone with observance enough to see the signs. His career has been showmanship throughout; anything solid accomplished in his name was outsourced. Anything the US government used to do is about to be either demolished or outsourced.
The likes of F. Elon Musk are the ones who recognised the power vacuum early. We have already seen the intent of the people who now hold the real power.
“Yup, the bureaucracy is bloated, inefficient, definitely corrupt in places, slow...broken even.”
It is a problem all over the world, we just can’t produce enough to support this kind of government any more. Enough people are hurting that they got together and put these guys in office on the promise they were going to do this.
77.3 million of them that is.
When FEMA is unlawfully paying for hotels in NY for migrants, you might guess there are going to be a few people in California that are going to care more about getting help for their families - help that they paid for - than data security. They want answers.
Anyone has a better idea how to fix this problem, love to hear it. If you don’t think there is a problem, you might be part of the problem. Or at least 77 million people might think so.
"It is a problem all over the world, we just can’t produce enough to support this kind of government any more."
This sounds like you never visited "all over the world" and got your info from Fox and Breitbart.
"All over the world" is doing fine with many having affordable health care, safe water, and save roads. Much of the world does this with smaller deficits and larger "bureaucracies".
Info can easily be found on Wikipedia, which luckily is not hosted in the USA.
Actually my comment is from visiting countries in Europe and talking to the people.
I was there during the yellow jacket riots. That only occurred because they felt the government had taken so much they could not live.
Or, a cabbie In Spain that it was taking everything she could do just to feed her family.
We can afford the government, but not the bureaucracy.
The famous cabby or yellow jacket.
Then Spain and France still voted for the left who actually do something to improve the lives of the poor. Much of the riots in France were to keep their government pensions. That is, "welfare" in US parlance.
European countries spend 40-55% of GDP on "government", mostly ~45-55%. The USA spends only 39%. And the Americans wail the loudest.
And when Europeans take to the streets, it is always because they want the government to spend more on pensions, increase wages, and spend more in general.
I would argue that there are far more than 77 million.
Many , many people here in the UK, Europe share the thoughts and ideas and we are starting to see a major push back now.
I don't want to see hard right or hard left anywhere. I just want to see some mild conservatism, the adult kind , that brings back family values and stability to a nation. I want to earn a wage in relation to my merit, I don't want to be see ridiculous bankers being overpaid and I don't want government handouts to those that don't intentionally work.
The extremists and utopians on either side are not welcome.
It's being revealed that tesla has full autonomous control over its vehicles. They have been monitoring you 24/7 and even watching it's cameras. They can see you walk around naked, talking on your phone, and even lock the doors and drive you off a cliff (political assassinations conspiracy anyone?)
These people have zero safety considerations. The point is to dismantle all regulations. Their systems are wide open and they have the keys (that now includes the US government).
When they speak of "original sin", what they mean is it's too late. What they are telling you is:
"we already unleashed it on the world, now we will deal with consequences of that come what may, but the evil is already done, you've been changed forever, and you largely signed up for it yourselves."
The A.I. is a generic term for many different types of models that have been unleashed on humanity. It's not just low level data bases, or the slew of new "agents" that are now infesting our world like a plague. Google has a quantum predictive brain that they have been building for DECADES. That filthy thing is about to be unleashed on everyone. We are here people. These things have been weaponized against us by individuals with bad intentions, and no regard for anyone, or anything. They are in fact using them against you.
I know that the piece is listed as Opinion, but good grief that was a bit much. Not the opinion itself (everyone has a right to an opinion) but the fact that it was shoved into this article like a square peg in a round hole using a sledgehammer. Not everything has to be about flippin' politics.
Not everything has to be about flippin' politics. ..... Trigun
There be A.N.Others, Trigun, who would vehemently disagree whenever their survival depends upon it
MainStream News Media Moguls and wannabe psychotic global influencers, desperate criminal elements and Blithe Brainwashing Corporations are reliant on its errant nonsense for the powerful remote televisualised command and control imagined generally possible and constantly available to them as noted in the following observation ....
"Those who are not interested in politics will be forever ruled by those who are." – G. Edward Griffin
And that naturally and logically results in following being vitally necessary .....
“Politicians are like diapers; they need to be changed often and for the same reason.” .. Mark Twain
Clearing the Swamp gets rid of the Stench and Putrefaction/Putrid Factions and delivers a Fresh START and SMARTR Programming Projects both for and with Agile Future Builders of Almighty Alien Means and Practically Limitless Failsafe Secure and Surreal Virtual Memes .... and now y'all here know what is happening and why ..... and if you are good at using your positive imagination you may even guess what next is in line to be undermined and comprehensively disrupted and creatively destroyed and reconstituted in a superior fluid phorm in and for these postmodern times and places and spaces which are rapidly a’changin.
What’s to dislike? It’s revolutionary progress, simply complex and perfectly natural.
"Politicians are like diapers; they need to be changed often and for the same reason.”
Hugo Chavez also claimed to be the change. We know how he saw "change" after he came to power.
Will the current administration ever leave? Or will this be The American Chavez & Maduro?
"Are you going to call him Hitler next? lol"
The American Chavez has said repeatedly he admired this dictator and other dictators and his immigrant buddy has even greeted this historical dictator in his characteristic way.
So, as another commenter already posted, "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...."
I suspect this opinion piece was a mildly cathartic undertaking. Tactful yet pointed. Technical yet political. Satire yet deadly serious. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.
Before the inauguration, in a comment, there was a small request that all those on the east side of the pond keep a close eye on what was about to take place on the other, because all indications were we would be in need of help and it would likely take all of us to navigate though this lowest point since the bombing of Great Britain. Looking back, that was one hell of an understatement. Then as now, isolationism is not the answer. The regulators, the rule-of-law will be tested. All depends on it holding. We shall never surrender.
It implies that some wide-scale microcode attacks are taking place, but there isn't any?
If an attacker has ring 0 access, they are just going to use that access to achieve their goal and will not waste the extra time and effort required to write microcode updates that achieves that goal.
There would be some interest for rootkits, but there are many easier methods to implement a rootkit.
If you want to fix the microcode security issue, the only solution is to make the microcode updates free software and then the users will collectively be able to verify if any update serves them or is proprietary malware.
At the moment the user has no way to tell, as official updates are probably proprietary malware (as the license notes that reverse engineering and finding the malware or backdoor and/or security vulnerabilities is not allowed) and are delivered in a object-code+encrypted form, identically to certainly proprietary malware updates.
"It implies that some wide-scale microcode attacks are taking place, but there isn't any?"
It doesn't. The "biggest microcode attack" refers to the political point in the second half.
"If an attacker has ring 0 access, they are just going to use that access to achieve their goal and will not waste the extra time and effort required to write microcode updates that achieves that goal."
That is true if it is as difficult to write a microcode update as it traditionally has been. If everyone could do it, they would do it to hide better and, if they could find a way, maintain their attack even when other things are booted.
"If you want to fix the microcode security issue, the only solution is to make the microcode updates free software and then the users will collectively be able to verify if any update serves them or is proprietary malware."
That won't work, especially as the microcode changes every time a processor manufacturer changes their internal model. Microcode for one chip versus another could be quite different even though the ISA is the same. Microcode as free software might help some people who could audit what is in it or write their own, but it wouldn't be as transformative as you're describing for a similar reason that the underpinnings of Android are theoretically free software too but yet most devices cannot have anything but the manufacturer's image flashed. Of course, it's also not going to happen because it is one of the major ways that processor manufacturers improve the speed of their chips, so releasing it would hurt their competitive position so they won't do it.
>That is true if it is as difficult to write a microcode update as it traditionally has been.
I suspect that it was easier in the past and is more difficult now due to increased complexity.
>That won't work, especially as the microcode changes every time a processor manufacturer changes their internal model.
I don't see how a few different, or even dozens of versions to check would stop the users from checking the software, as many users would be using CPUs from each generation.
>it wouldn't be as transformative as you're describing for a similar reason that the underpinnings of Android are theoretically free software too but yet most devices cannot have anything but the manufacturer's image flashed.
With the exception of Replicant (https://replicant.us/), all Android versions are proprietary software.
If there was actually a free software release of Android by default, that would be quite transformative, but that hasn't occurred.
Yes, many device manufactures infringe the GPLv2 and don't provide the user with; "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable", or a written offer for such and due to a lack of enforcement, such infringement will continue.
>it is one of the major ways that processor manufacturers improve the speed of their chips, so releasing it would hurt their competitive position so they won't do it.
The whole idea of a competition should be that you compete fairly and should not be about trying to hide absolutely everything from the other competitors, even if that requires attacking the customers.
I didn't write that the source code of the whole microcode should be released under a free license, although that would be welcome.
I wrote about microcode updates and most microcode updates are only applicable to a specific CPU and don't give a speedup, rather they cause a (usually negligible) slowdown to fix a hardware bug, which means that releasing the source code and installation information would have no negative impact on any competitive position (it could possibly rather be a competitive boon, as more people are going to buy your CPU if you actually tell them how to use it and make it possible to fix discovered hardware bugs even when you cease to develop updates).
In the interest of disclosure, did you receive any funding from someone who disliked USAID or stood to gain from its destruction? If you say no, should we believe you? After all, the articles and comments on a relatively niche tech-related news site are such valuable online territory, we should expect all authors and commenters to routinely receive thick brown envelopes for their writing. I'm mostly funded by the Paraguayan navy, the authors of FFmpeg, and the people who make SATA connectors. Who's bankrolling you?
Except that, yes, most of these components have been carefully designed by experts in the relevant fields to solve specific identified problems. The fact that there is no overall plan and that the components themselves are frequently hamstrung by political compromise is an entirely different matter. I suspect the failure to understand that distinction is why so many people just cannot see why there is a problem with Trump.
I imagined painfully evolved thought brutal selection. eg separation of powers evolved because that mixed strategy selected a system that supported the idea partly because such systems had greater adaptability and resilience when confronted with changing circumstances. A reasonable analogy would be composite materials.
"government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
"testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."
Not looking too likely at this juncture.
1. The will if the people can't be deduced from an election every 4th year.
2. Voter suppression seems to have been used aggressively to decide the last election. Clever. I wish the meek Dems weren't so non-clever. All the fast-thinking, coked-out, aggressive sociopaths are on the Rep side -no surprise there.
Enjoy the breakup of USA.
Democracy doesn't mean having to like the will of the people. "The people", as history confirms, can at times be, in various measure, stupid, vicious, immoral, gullible, seduced by demagoguery, blind to their own self-interest, and prone to scapegoating their nation's woes. Democracy may be the least worst option, but it is hardly guaranteed to deliver good governance. Its implementation may also be hopelessly skewed by the influence of wealth (sound familiar?), ethnic/cultural divisions or religion, and has even been known to vote itself out of existence.
For democracy to be safe and effective, the population must be educated. A prime facet of a good education is learning how to think critically and question effectively. Without this, democracy becomes the rule of the mob, and we all know how well mobs can be influenced by madmen.
The whole government machine is corrupt microcode. Trump and Musk are auditing it and finding all the backdoors. Hopefully, they'll rip the lot out and replace it with an old fashioned 8086 with baked in firmware that does its simple job and doesn't continually install bloatware
Trump and Musk believe in the principle that Might is Right. Britain went to war to defend against that principle but we are now a broken reed. Who will defend the world against it now?..... Dolvaran
What do you think AI is doing, and for, Dolvaran?
The only reason most people started reading this nonsense is because it sharaded as a tech article. Your divisive and bias comments are not welcome in the tech space. If you have some thoughts and news about tech and an actually stance from an unbiased perspective, I am sure people might enjoy for once news actually being news. Lets make news news again... Remove your nonsense bias and report on tech. Your opinion is not that important or interesting.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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From H.L. Mencken:
"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre. "
"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
All of these nouveau privacy experts jerking their left knees in unison have questionable standing. The Biden/Bama administration set up not just logging but canceling and filtering posts based on the premise that they are the sole arbiters of truth. With their Middle Eastern policies and data transfers, the Woke establishment extended their claims to be the decider of who should live and who should die. Their policies towards those they oppose are totalitarian.
In the meantime, Musk and Doge have exposed tens of billions of dollars and numerous interlocking programs that are outside the law and possibly criminal. Those opposing this are protecting all the misfeasance, malfeasance, and downright theft. I hope they've been cut in on the take. Otherwise it seems like a Pavlov dog response to fixed orders without regard to the facts, law or morality. Wokeism uber alles. , it seems like a Pavlov dog response to fixed orders without regard to the facts, law,
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