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The more I know about how Intel has managed the information, the less I trust them. What a disaster. CEO and all the Press and Communication team of Intel shoul
by logronoide 9y ago
The more I know about how Intel has managed the information, the less I trust them. What a disaster. CEO and all the Press and Communication team of Intel should be fired
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- xupybd 9y agoShouldn't the CEO be investigated for insider trading?
- brianwawok 9y agoWhy? Intel made billions last year. They will make billions this year. They will make billions next year.
- mschuster91 9y ago> Why? Because the fallout will cost billions over the next years. Intel as a company due to class-action lawsuits, recalls, rebates, and the shareholders because the drop in stock value after the announcement will cost them quite a chunk of money. In addition, more long-term, I sincerely hope that the cloud vendors (and maybe even Apple!) recognize that their total dependence on Intel (and NVIDIA in deep learning...) is bad and they need to diversify their base.
- gaadd33 9y agoYou do know that INTC is up compared to 1 month ago? If it didn't drop that much on the initial announcement, why would it plummet in the coming months?
- mschuster91 9y agoBecause there is no quantifiable impact yet. Right now all that's known is "mh, it's bad, but the OS vendors are patching it"... now give the situation a couple weeks to brew, wait for more data on the CPU impact of these patches and the inevitable lawsuits. Plus, Intel might want to think about delaying the next CPU releases (or introduce a new stepping of existing CPUs) to fix the bugs in hardware... all stuff that ain't cheap.
- scarhill 9y agoIf the market agreed with you that Intel will suffer greatly in the future due to Meltdown/Spectre the price would have dropped already. Of course you might be correct and the market wrong. You’re short Intel, right?
- cm2187 9y agoUntil Intel fixes their architecture, wouldn't all the major cloud providers switch new purchases to AMD for the time being?
- brianwawok 9y ago> Because the fallout will cost billions over the next years. Doubtful. Intel has a near monopoly in data centers in 2017. They will have a near monopoly in data centers in 2018 and 2019 I predict as well. Really very few things they can do to lose their business at this point.
- rodonn 9y agoUnclear that diversifying helps solve this sort of problem. More vendors could lead to the same number of bugs, but less investment in quality control per product e.g. if you make $1b and spend 1% on quality control, then you spend $10m checking your product for bugs. If the market fragments into 10 $100m vendors, then to get the same amount of money spent checking each chip for bugs, you'd have to spend 10x as much of your budget on quality control. It gets even worse when you consider the incentives of private/academic/third party researchers to search for bugs, since there is a lot less prestige in catching a bug in a smaller/less well known product. e.g. I'm pretty sure no white-hat security researcher has checked for security problems in the cheap wifi light switches I bought on Amazon.
- raverbashing 9y agoDifferent vendors have different bugs. The aerospace industry has realized this a long time, and for some things they will have 3 different devices from 3 different vendors doing the same job
- naasking 9y ago> If the market fragments into 10 $100m vendors, then to get the same amount of money spent checking each chip for bugs, you'd have to spend 10x as much of your budget on quality control. But there's a much smaller attack surface and the incentives for attackers are significantly changed. Homogeneity is always more vulnerable to disaster, whether we're talking about food supply or chips.
- sitkack 9y agoAnd quality is not directly a function of money spent. Customers will start demanding to see the machine checked proofs that your hardware is correct. Intel has been cowboy coding CPUs for way too long.
- mschuster91 9y ago> Unclear that diversifying helps solve this sort of problem. At least having the option of another vendor as a fallback (e.g. in case there's a severe RCE vulnerability in ME/PSP) is a better alternative than having to shutter your entire business. I would not be surprised if these management engines have a backdoor that can be invoked from a guest VM... and then an all-Intel (or all-AMD) shop has a massive problem.
- ed312 9y agoThe problem is chip R&D is super capital-intensive and the space is highly competitive even with so few companies.
- Aloha 9y agoThe intel CEO took over in 2012 - some of these vulnerabilities go back as far as the Pentium Pro (Meltdown) and the other one, effects (I believe) as far back as the original Pentium (Spectre) - why would you fire someone for something that happened under a predecessors leadership (Andy Grove, in this case was CEO when the Meltdown attack was added) - it makes no sense - I see nothing here that doesnt jive up with similar efforts with other bugs.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoHim selling his maximum allowed grant and also options when he knew before everyone is plenty.
- sudhirj 9y agoThat would be clear insider trading, with SEC prosecution and jail time. Unlikely if the executive has half a brain.
- bartread 9y agoYeah, exactly: it's too easy for people to draw a direct line between the selling and the announcement (which, of course, people have done) for him to have been stupid enough to do it with that intent. He seems to have simply been following the pattern of previous trades. That being said, even though I don't think it's the case here, greed has been known to make people do some very stupid things.
- bostik 9y agoAccording to Matt Levine, Krzanich has a consistent history of selling the maximum or near-maximum amount of his stock grants every year.[0] If one wants to be truly cynical, you could say he has been expecting something like this all the time and cashing out to ensure his money isn't tied to Intel. I am inclined to being slightly less cynical - I'd say he has been just cashing out regardless of the the company's performance. 0: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-05/citi-forgot-to-fix-its-money-laundering-systems https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-05/citi-forg...
- username223 9y agoThe CEO should probably spend some time in the pokey for all the stock he sold between when he knew about this problem, and when it was publicly known. I'm curious how many other Intel employees sold stock in the same period.
- ed312 9y agoThis has been debunked already - CEO sold the maximum amount of company stock he could from his yearly award every 4th quarter for the last 4 (5?) years in a row.
- lawrenceyan 9y agoIncorrect actually. Though it is true that Krzanich has consistently sold stock every 4th quarter, for this recent transaction, he massively increased the amount he sold. Krzanich sold so much in fact that if he had sold any more stock, he according to Intel corporate mandate bylaws would no longer be allowed to continue as CEO. If you don't believe me, look for yourself: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-so... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/000112760217033679/xslF345X03/form4.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/00011276021703... And 'coincidentally', this massive increase in selling just seemed to somehow perfectly fit right in the middle of Intel being privately informed of Meltdown in June but before any public disclosure kept locked away all the way until now in January. This is blatantly illegal insider trading. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
- mschuster91 9y agoThis does not protect said CEO from breaking the insider trading laws. Nor does it protect Intel as a company from conveniently "omitting" the elephant in the room in their press releases and financial risk statements.
- wmgries 9y agoRules against insider trading do not prevent executives from trading the company's stock. They can set rules with their financial advisors like "sell x amount of stock every y weeks" which will be executed regardless of insider knowledge the executive has.
- discoursism 9y agoIt's not clear to me what the best approach is here. The wider the circle of those who know, the more likely it is that there will eventually be a leak. Three can keep a secret if two are dead and all that.
- TrueSelfDao 9y agoIf I'm not mistaken, this was the same approach taken when dealing with heartbleed.
- chinathrow 9y agoThere was a leak. Typing this from Ubuntu - still no updated kernels yet.
- lathiat 9y agoShould be coming on/before Tuesday: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/04/ubuntu-updates-for-the-meltdown-spectre-vulnerabilities/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/04/ubuntu-updates-for-th...
- discoursism 9y agoIt wasn't so much a leak as someone putting two and two together and the cat getting out of the bag. Anyway, this is a nonsense argument in the context of the thread. They tried to keep things quiet by limiting the size of the circle, among other things. Their attempts at secrecy did not entirely succeed, although they made it 90% of the way to the embargo date without things coming out. Their inability to make it 100% of the way does not inform us at all about whether they should indeed have limited the circle of those who knew.
- hugo0384729109 9y agoExactly. I assume if one of the smaller providers like Linode found an internal vulnerability that they thought was a big security risk to have widely know and had 3 giant customers and a large number of smaller customers, they’d work directly with the giant customers in advance in the same way.
- tptacek 9y agoCan you be more specific? What aspect of how Intel managed this are you referring to?