Posts by Cl9

WTF, EFS? Experts warn Windows encryption could spawn nasty new ransomware

Re: Haven't tried Sophos Intercept X

Might be a bit painful if you've got your whole drive encrypted with it :P

Re: Haven't tried Sophos Intercept X

Isn't the point of this article that given it's Windows itself doing the encryption, nothing is stopping it?

Bus pass or bus ass? Hackers peeved about public transport claim to have reverse engineered ticket app for free rides

Give the .onion website a read through. They've done a fair bit more than that.

Post-Brexit plan for .EU tweaked: No dot-EU web domains for Europeans in UK, no appeals, etc

Re: Mail Drops

Surely you wouldn't even need to do that, you could just enter any old European address? It's not like anyone will actually send mail to your physically registered address.

Apple iPhone X screen falls short of promises, lawsuit says

Re: Excuse me a moment...

Gigibyte != Gibibyte

Washington Post offers invalid cookie consent under EU rules – ICO

Re: Other solution

Iirc, if you're using Firefox, it has a 'containers' feature which lets you isolate or group sites into different profiles.

Apple to dump Intel CPUs from Macs for Arm – yup, the rumor that just won't die is back

Re: Rosetta-a-like is absolutely necessary

I think he's saying that the application package itself could contain both code for ARM CPU's AND Intel CPUs, with the OS loading the correct code based on the current hardware.

'R2D2' stops disk-wipe malware before it executes evil commands

Re: Re-inventing the wheel?

Windows provides APIs for creating snapshots/tracking changes to files. Take a look at VSS/Windows Shadow Copy.

Teensy plastic shields are the big new thing in 2018's laptop crop

There's a psychological aspect to it which you're forgetting. I've got a USB webcam for my desktop, which I leave sitting on my monitor but unplugged most of the time, and I still find that unnerving sometimes, despite knowing that it's not plugged in. Having a physical thing blocking the lens puts that unease to rest.

Also, so what if it's a "little plastic shutter"? It's not like the webcams can see through plastic, and it's likely that you'd want to build the shutter out of the same materials as the laptop chassis (usually plastic). Size has no effect either, provided that it's fully blocking the lens.

Whilst I agree that a hard on/off switch would be best, it would probably cost more to manufacture, and I don't actually think that it would be as effective as resting peoples fears of webcams.

Here come the lawyers! Intel slapped with three Meltdown bug lawsuits

Re: Should Intel (and other chip makers) be held responsible for hardware flaws?

But both AMD and ARM are also vulnerable to related (both to do with speculative execution) flaws, such as Spectre. I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: Should Intel (and other chip makers) be held responsible for hardware flaws?

Food hygiene processes are relatively simple and there's a set list of guidelines and requirements that need to be met.

This is not the case with CPU design so you can't really compare the two. If a restaurant is breaching existing food safety standards, then of course they should be held liable. There are no such requirements or standards for CPU design.

Should Intel (and other chip makers) be held responsible for hardware flaws?

It's an interesting one, but I don't personally think that Intel should be held liable for this, as it's not an intentional bug. Modern CPUs are just so incredibly complex, containing billions of transistors, that I don't think it's feasibly possible to create a 'flawless' CPU, there's always (and always will be) bugs and flaws, discovered or not.

I'm also not sure if you could pin the potential performance loss on Intel either, as that's technically the operating system vendor who's implementing the slow down.

Don't get me wrong, I've got an Intel CPU myself, and I can't say that I'm too happy about this either. But I can't really blame Intel for it either. And yes, Intel's PR release was absolute BS.

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

Re: Hmmm...

Kernel memory is mapped to user mode processes to allow syscalls (a request to access hardware/kernel services) to execute without having to switching to another virtual address space. Each process runs in its own virtual address space, and it's quite expensive to switch between them, as it involves flushing the CPU's Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB, used for quickly finding the physical location of virtual memory addresses) and a few other things.

This means that, with every single syscall, the CPU will need to switch virtual memory contexts, flushing that TLB and taking a relatively long about of time. Access to memory pages which aren't cached in the TLB takes roughly 200 CPU cycles or so, access to a cached entry usually takes less than a single cycle.

So different tasks will suffer to different extents. If the process does much of the work itself, without requiring much from the kernel, then it wont suffer a performance hit. But if it uses lots of syscalls, and do lots of uncached memory operations, then it's going to take a much larger hit.

That's what I make of it from understanding of it, which might not be 100% correct.