Posts by Doctor Syntax

Jocks in shock as Irn-Bru set to slash sugar and girder content

Re: How to be English in Three Easy Steps

"time to start on the Xmas single malt collection."

Why were you delaying?

Re: Lateral Thinking

"Can't the 'traditionalists' just add a teaspoon of sugar to it when they open it?"

That's what I thought. And then I saw the problem. They need to drink it to steady the hand enough to pick up the teaspoon.

Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs

Re: Dont for get supporting hardware..

"don't forget your routers, raspberry's, and all that wonderful IoT stuff many are based on (Broadcom) ARM Architecture"

ARM's site lists the affected processors. AFAICS Pis aren't amongst those affected. As per a previous comment about stuff you control - the embedded processors shouldn't be exposed to random stuff off the net.

Re: Maybe we dodged a bullet?

"Lots of fundamental development process rethinking required in the semi-conductor world required."

Or go back to some old ideas.

Does anyone remember the Z80? Two sets of registers and an instruction to swap between them. It made for quick context swaps. There were no security advantages, of course, because back then there was no concept of security rings on an 8-bit processor.

The same thing could be adapted to the modern world. Two sets of registers and two sets of cache (OK, for any given number of transistors it would mean reduced cache sizes for each half). That would mean that an independent address space could be kept for the kernel with only a single instruction to swap the context with one set having security privileges. Extra Brownie points if the cache split can be tuned to suit workloads. There might even be scope for adding more sets for quick changes between running processes.

Nothing posted on the BSD sites. Do they keep their kernels in a separate address space anyway and take the hit by design? If so you'd at least expect them to be pointing it out.

Re: Some real world results

"YMMV"

Pretty much what Linus said. If you don't make many kernel calls (computationally intensive, in other words) you shouldn't see much. If you make a lot of kernel calls then you get hit. It's the userland/kernel/userland transitions that are slowed down.

Re: Hmm, If I was working at a secret agency

"play God/quantum"

You raise an interesting point. Try mitigating this on a quantum computer taking all branches simultaneously.

Re: Hmm, If I was working at a secret agency

"ARM is British"

Was.

Re: " don't run untrusted code"

More likely

Now if we had some decent people at the W3C we would see Javascript being phased out them being ignored

Re: " don't run untrusted code"

"Disabling Javascript totally rather breaks the interwebs these days."

Most of the time I'll simply ignore a site that won't work at all without Javascript. If I think I really need it I'll see if I can selectively enable enough domains to make it work or see if the Google cached version is sufficient. Some sites manage to use so much Javascript as to break on some browsers even when fully enabled; eBay, I'm looking at your recent inability to display images in Seamonkey.

Re: Colour me surprised ....

"fly to wherever your correspondent lives and go for a nice walk and a chat in the woods."

Remember, even trees have ears: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/02/win_a_6tb_western_digital_black_hard_drive_with_iel_regi/

Re: Colour me surprised ....

"Now will people believe me ?"

You mean we should believe each and every A/C because they're you. Even when you contradict yourself multiple times in the same thread?

US Homeland Security breach compromised personal info of 200,000+ staff

Seems to me to be more in the "oops, no foul intended"

Except then when it was taken out of the office it wouldn't be subject to the strict and rigorous protection against unauthorised access and copying it would have had in the office. Or something like that.

Cool disk drive actuator pillar, Seagate – how about two of them?

How about increasing the throughput by using smaller drives and more of them, throwing in a few spares at the same time? We could call it Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives.

Re: So...

"Seagates's split actuator thing perform the same as two half-sized drives in striped raid-0?"

Yes, providing you don't mind both of them failing at the same time.

Wannabe W1 DOW-er faked car crash to track down reg plate's owner

"They have internal combustion engines in Bristol now?"

IIRC they used to have SOHC 2l engines back in the days when there were still side-valve engines in use.

Re: And what about the DVLA?

"the rigmarole of a check"

The "rigmarole" could include requiring the crime number as per the OP and making 1 in N checks with the police. It's called "having a process in place".

It raises the question of how DVLA will respond to further requests from this guy's office in future. If they really do make the thorough checks which now seem appropriate it could cost him a packet.

And we return to Munich's migration back to Windows – it's going to cost what now?! €100m!

"For example, proprietary formats such as MS Office that you cannot read on other packages."

Where, at least in the past*, that included older versions of the same MS Office application.

*I wouldn't know if that still applies. I haven't needed to use it for years but still find the LibreOffice opens any MS documents I get.

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

Re: What's Not Mentioned .....

"$30 billion charge on VW for their dieselgate affair"

That was an entirely different situation. VW isn't a US business.

Re: AMD not vulnerable

"Probably made a mistake while copying Intel microcode."

It's not microcode. It's hardware hardware. Do pay attention at the back.

Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets

It's not an area that greatly concerns me but from the descriptions I've read here I'd have thought existing fraud legislation might have dealt with a lot of it and has the added advantage of imprisonment as a deterrent. But introducing a new piece of legislation is easier for legislators than getting existing legislation enforced. Which raises the question of how the new legislation will be enforced.

Re: Prioritising the priorites

Government is responsible a lot of areas and not all the public have the same concerns. If the entire government machine was obliging you, Stuart, by concentrating on what you think they should be doing there would be a lot of other people complaining about neglect of other issues such as Xylella fastidiosa or asking why you left climate change or whatever off your list.

Big shock: $700 Internet-of-Things door lock not a success

Re: What if ...

"The thing probably runs on easily-replaceable batteries."

So there you are, standing on your doorstep with a large economy pack of batteries in your hand swearing at your door that's locked and the battery box is on the inside.

Re: I'm disappointed

the concept isn’t nearly as outrageous or useless as a Bluetooth-enabled toaster

Re: Bah!

"nuanced access"

Maybe your problem is that this is an oxymoron.

Re: Question and (hypothetical) answer:

"If you're not generating saleable personal information, you're not using IoT devices correctly, and therefore don't deserve be using them at all!"

Nice one. I like the implicit point that the real user is the vendor.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

"It depends on what's going on in a system."

Firing up top in Linux shows several processes, mostly daemons, actively using CPU with nothing actually being done with the system so even in the absence of IO there's context changes taking place even if it's just a matter of waking up daemons to find that there's nothing to do. I'd guess that much the same situation applies with Windows.

"Suggestions? Sincerely."

He's been pushing Talos. Providing they have a product in the format you need supported by the S/W you need...

Re: Phew!

"So you think the security problems in the world don't matter other than the influence of which processor you buy"

Focus. Tackle each issue in its own place. We've discussed other security issues in other contexts. Actually, in this context, the issue isn't so much the security issue, because like many others, it can be fixed, but the cost of fixing it.

Re: Genetic Diversity?

"So Gates would have still made a DOS for IBM."

Not "still made". Just "made" instead of "bought".

Re: Genetic Diversity?

"What would Intel be if IBM had picked a different processor for its PC back in 1981 (Motorola 68000?)?"

Z8000?

" If there was a CPU socket, the repair is simplified"

Never mind the quality feel the (lack of) width.

Re: How convenient

"When exactly did good sensible engineering go out the window in favour of marketing ideas"

Probably about the time model numbers were replaced by names.

Re: Can you hear it?

"Well, that just about wraps it up for blockchain mining!"

I'd have thought that something computationally intensive would be least affected as it would make fewer syscalls.

Re: Hmmm...

There are already plenty of non x86 derivatives out there that don't have this bug, all that's required is for vendors to make them as readily available so as to enable folks to make the move. :)

Re: Intel Inside...

" I bought a new PC just before Christmas and decided to go AMD after about a decade of Intel"

Just starting to think about a laptop replacement. Looked at PC Specialist. Not an AMD in sight.

Apart from the hit on performance what's the likely effect on power consumption and hence battery life and heat generation? Clearly the CPU is going to have to do more work to achieve the same result.

Re: How convenient

"Trust is only regained over time"

And a lot, lot more slowly than it gets lost.

Brazil says it has bagged Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean for £84m

"While this refit cycle could potentially continue for more years to come ... ever more machinery on the hard-worked old ship needs deep maintenance or replacing."

If we followed the F-35 sales model we could get to specify where this work gets done. I don't suppose we will.

"valued at £84m sterling."

That doesn't actually say that that's what's being paid.

Re: Few corrections Gareth

"the three Bay class landing ships can also carry 1 LCU each."

And a slight spelling change to the class name will make them easier to flog off when the time comes.

Was this the thinking behind the Amazon class?

SuperFish cram scandal: Lenovo must now ask nicely before stuffing new PCs with crapware

Re: 'I'm on my second Lenovo laptop at present and see no reason for using anything else'

"Install Linux ................................ BORING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

get a life"

Installing Linux is a step to getting a life unless you consider waiting for all those painfully slow Windows updates/reboots to be a life.

Re: before stuffing new PCs with crapware

"does that include Win-10-nic (as 'crapware')?"

And Intel ME?

Open-source civil war: Olive branch offered in trademark spat... with live grenade attached

Re: The most disturbing thing...

"How many identical twins both named John do you know?"

I came across a record of a pair of twins called Richard. It didn't specify whether they were identical.

Shopped in Forever 21? There was bank-card-slurping malware in it for, like, forever

Re: There's one born every minute ...

"Big business simply don't learn, eh?"

We're important. We don't need to learn.

UK security chief: How 'bout a tax for tech firms that are 'uncooperative' on terror content?

Re: Tax

"shipping our crap abroad is doing wonders for our plastic recycling industry, it's not like one day they will get fed up with it."

They already have. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42455378

Re: Tax Laws

"If you have a small indigenous economy ....

But we don't."

Exactly. If you're managing the Irish economy, say, you can gain more by bringing in large multinationals at low tax which is why Ireland do that. If the UK were to cut tax rates to tempt multinationals away from existing low tax areas they'd be unlikely to bring in more than they'd forego from existing UK businesses.

It's an international market place in taxation. The pile-it-high-sell-it-cheap approach only works if you don't have too much to lose from your existing domestic tax base.

Re: Tax Laws

"If governments want these businesses to pay more tax, they have to change the tax rules."

It's not that easy.

If you have a small indigenous economy you don't have that much to lose by inviting in multinationals by offering low taxation. What's more those indigenous businesses gain off the back of it by being lightly taxed. If you have a large economy the tax lost by taxing those lightly offsets the gains obtained by binging in those large multinationals. It's a trade-off. What you see happening is complaints about not being able to compete in what's in effect a free market in taxation of multinationals. Governments, as usual, wanting their cake and eating it.

We've heard of data gravity – we're just not sure how to defy it yet

Re: General Relativity Theory for data?

"And just as infotmation slowly seeps out of a real black hole in the form of Hawking radiation"

And occasionally explodes in the form of a data breach. Oops.

"ask is it solving a problem"

Of course it's solving a problem. It's just the vendor's problem (what can we sell?) and not one of the user.