51 ms·

Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability

757 points by tomtoise 9y ago

chrisper 9y ago
Just checked for Updates, but there don't seem to be any?
- taspeotis 9y ago
  “If you are running an impacted device, this update can be applied by downloading it from the Microsoft Update Catalog website” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4078130/update-to-disable-mitigation-against-spectre-variant-2 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4078130/update-to-d...
  - chrisper 9y ago
    Thanks
- thg 9y ago
  Just in case you, like me, missed the memo where Microsoft said they'd stop supplying security updates if you have no AV / AV incompatible with the patches installed. The fix to the former is creating the registry entry manually. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/january-3-2018-windows-security-updates-and-antivirus-software https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/january-3-2...
  - morsch 9y ago
    Bizarre. Customers without Antivirus In cases where customers can’t install or run antivirus software, Microsoft recommends manually setting the registry key as described below in order to receive the January 2018 security updates.
    - testplzignore 9y ago
      Sounds like Microsoft can't tell the difference between "has AV installed that will break" and "has no AV installed", which makes sense. It's probably infeasible to reliably fingerprint all existing AV software.
      - Slansitartop 9y ago
        > Sounds like Microsoft can't tell the difference between "has AV installed that will break" and "has no AV installed", which makes sense. It's probably infeasible to reliably fingerprint all existing AV software. For something like this, I think best-effort bad-AV detection would have been best. Seems pretty insane to disable security patching because they can't be 100% certain that you have a compatibly AV.
        anonymfus 9y ago
        Incompatibility here means unbootable state.
        Slansitartop 9y ago
        But it also means that people with perfectly acceptable configurations are left in an insecure state, without an unexpected magic incantation (a registry hack) that most probably will never know about. Disabling security patches is not acceptable in current year without A LOT of nasty and annoying warnings.
    - sundvor 9y ago
      It makes sense though. Only AV programs that comply may set the setting. Without a compliant AV program, there's nothing to do that set - unless you do it manually.
    - speedie 9y ago
      Do I read this correctly ? M$ gave us the registry key with which we can convince winblows that we are runing AV , when infact , we uninstalled it ?
  - Santosh83 9y ago
    Microsoft won't supply updates even if you have no AV installed, including builtin Defender disabled?? I thought stopping updates was only for the case of unpatched AVs that did not set the registry key...
    - cesarb 9y ago
      If you have no patched AV, who's going to set the registry key?
      - ptaipale 9y ago
        If your AV is not patched, the kernel patches should not be installed because you might get a repeating bluescreen. So get a patched AV. If you haven't installed another AV, then Defender is there and counts.
      - simooooo 9y ago
        Nobody. That's the point.
    - T-N-T 9y ago
      Microsoft does not have any way of knowing whether you have an antivirus or not and because the Spectre patch causes a bluescreen on boot if you have an antivirus that's not updated, they require the antivirus set the registry key to say "hey, it's safe to update". Absence of AV means that registry key doesn't get set. MS doesn't provide an easy, GUI way of disabling built-in Defender by the way. If you 'disable' defender by using the control panel on windows 10, it only stops its activity temporarily and it can reactivate itself after 24 hours or something like that. You can permanently disable it through registry keys but it's not an officially supported, accepted method to edit the registry by yourself. There's a group policy for 10 Pro and other corp editions though. For a normal home user, Defender is never fully disabled. It will deactivate itself if you install a third party antivirus, and reenable itself when you uninstall them. Bottom line, the average user is not supposed to be AV-less.
cjsuk 9y ago
Not what I wanted to wake up to this morning. I suspect we’re in for a rough ride for a long time thanks to this mess.
- kzrdude 9y ago
  Your comment is even more fitting today (politics)
mm-vorticesoft 9y ago
Linus was right
- gsich 9y ago
  Like always.
  - Valmar 9y ago
    He generally is. His rants are almost always spot-on and pure gold. :)
- anfilt 9y ago
  Well he is known for calling a spade a spade. No matter how blunt that may be.
  - cat199 9y ago
    except for when he is wrong. Why he gets a pass for being the 'nice guy' and DeRaadt gets the bad rep is still a mystery to me
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  About what? Would you have a link?
  - bmon 9y ago
    Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html
    - mehrdadn 9y ago
      Oh, this is the same issue?
      - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
stinos 9y ago
"Here's a patch" - "Here's a patch to disable that other patch" - ... What's next? Repeat? Sounds like this could turn into a maintainance nightmare quickly. Also because I've introduced things like that myself in the past, and that was for normal applications and not a kernel or OS. Somewhere, someday, there's usually this one exception for which none of your rules hold true and the thing blows up in your face. Anyway, I'd love to see the actual code for this. Not a chance probably?
- hishnash 9y ago
  Im really wanding they had more than 6months to do these patches and they did not bother testing on a good number of systems. Its not like MS + Intel dont have enough money to buy a few 1000 testing machines and get some testers on it.
  - x0x0 9y ago
    I came here to ask the same thing. How did these folks squander six months?
    - peoplewindow 9y ago
      I think Spectre may have appeared later, after Meltdown? Remember the investigations into what's possible were proceeding in parallel with the attempted fixes. Also, CPU design changes take a long time. 6 months may seem a long time from the perspective of HackerNews node.js type hackers, but it's a bit harder to patch decades worth of CPU microcode than a website.
      - hishnash 9y ago
        Reading over googles project0 page it reads as if they told AMD about the issues on 2017-06-01 why would they do this if it were meltdown only? also look at the exploit numbering: Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753) Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715) Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754) according to https://cve.mitre.org/cve/identifiers/ https://cve.mitre.org/cve/identifiers/ this is sequence based so `Variant 2` was recorded to CVE before v1 and v3. I get it may take a long time (that is fine even if the patches took a few more days), what I don't get is that they released it to production (server) envs seemingly without testing. Surely even rudimentary testing (deploying on a few 1000 different server platforms for a few hours at least should be something that Intel does for all microcode updates, after all they are rather more important than js Node packages as you point out)
nippples 9y ago
Gee, if only they had a Linus Torvalds type around to block irresponsible commits.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  They did, once upon a time, after a fashion: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates-trustworthy-computing/ https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates-trustworthy-computi...
  - kyberias 9y ago
    I had to read that billg-review thing one more time. It's such a wonderful story.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Didn't Torvalds already accept Intel's "garbage" Linux kernel patches?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I don't think so, they're still under discussion on LKML, including an alternative proposal by Ingo Molnar.
- bonzini 9y ago
  Nah, it's just the well-known issue with the microcode being buggy. There's nothing new really.
- ksk 9y ago
  Microcode is not reviewed by anyone outside of Intel.
tjoff 9y ago
I lost many hours over this last week. The system was unable to boot and finally a thread on reddit came to the rescue ( https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7sbihd/howto_fix_inaccessible_boot_device_caused_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7sbihd/howto_f... ). This actually made the system boot but there are some leftovers being installed on first boot that I've been unable to disable that also causes the system to be unable to boot. So now, the machine is running but as soon as it is restarted we have to re-image the disk, go through the process of manually removing patches, and then pray that we don't have a power shortage as we'd have to do everything yet again on next boot. I'm not convinced that this patch will solve the issue either, because if this updates requires a reboot the fix won't be installed if we can't boot. I might try to install this update from the recovery console see if that works. Quite frustrating.
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  Speaking of which, why do so many things require reboot to update on Windows?
  - gaius 9y ago
    To force a reinitialisation of all security contexts. Same reason that many websites make you log in again immediately after changing your password (which interestingly Windows doesn’t) Historically (Windows 95 and earlier) reboots were required to reload DLLs and so on but that’s not really true anymore. Still a lot of installers and docs say to reboot when it’s not really necessary as a holdover from then
    - lucb1e 9y ago
      I was under the impression that the reason is what u/beagle3 mentions (in a sibling comment to yours): open system files. I'm curious to see your comment on what he describes, as what you mention (reloading some security context) does not seem to be the whole truth. That websites make one log in again after changing your password has nothing to do with this.
mehrdadn 9y ago
Anyone know if people who had disabled the mitigations via FeatureSettingsOverride = 3 were still affected?
megaman22 9y ago
I've not been impressed with my Windows 10 installations of late. All my machines that don't have the Long Term Servicing Branch have had wild instabilities and performance issues the past few months - crazy things, like the task manager taking minutes to launch, and the whole shell periodically crashing. The Fall Creators Update was so bad I had to wipe and start over on some boxes. It's not engendering a lot of confidence in their competence of late.
- dimmuborgir 9y ago
  Creators Updates (1703 / 1709) are the culprits. LTSB (1607) has not been upgraded to Creators Update yet and it runs like butter.
tallanvor 9y ago
By my reading of the article, Microsoft is disabling some mitigations for Spectre due to instabilities that Intel's microcode update have been causing. Intel certainly isn't making any friends these days...
- hishnash 9y ago
  I would love to see the message log between MS Apple and Intel on this.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
ComodoHacker 9y ago
>However, Intel does not appear too concerned that the incident will affect its bottom line - the company expects 2018 to be a record year in terms of revenue There is an interesting paradox in our industry. If you pay enough attention (read: money) to security, you will be late to the market, your costs will be high and you lose profit. If you don't pay enough attention, you take the market, get your profits, but your product (be it hardware or software) and reputation will be screwed later. And worst of all: there's never enough attention to security. So by simple logic, an optimal strategy is to forge your product quickly, take your profits within a [relatively] short period and vanish from the market. I guess we'll see this strategy executed from IoT vendors when market start to punish them for their bad sec. For Intel, that "long period" just happened to be REALLY long.
- doktrin 9y ago
  You conclusion isn't in agreement with the section you quoted, so are you saying that Intel will be punished by the market in the mid to distant future (after 2018)?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  I doubt Intel will see serious punishment in the market. As usual, there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth but when push comes to shove most people will prioritize nearly everything over security. All markets work like this. People bitch about the quality of products, but still buy the cheap stuff.
  - javajosh 9y ago
    This will be true until something uses Meltdown in the wild to cause massive damage. When a digital superflu comes, businesses and individuals will be faced with a choice: continue to use Intel and be vulnerable to a flu that is literally wiping out businesses, exchanges, hospitals, etc or replace ALL of their hardware with AMD. Interestingly, I think AMD has a lot of motive to create such a superflu, or at least encourage it's creation.
    - 9y ago
rootw0rm 9y ago
Ugh, is this the cause of the weird bugchecks I've been having this week? Just gave myself 64gb page file and enabled full memory dumps so I could track it down in WinDbg. I always forget something on fresh installs...
shultays 9y ago
Amount of fuck-up in this whole issue is mind blowing. I am getting more surprised with every new I get
- dotdi 9y ago
  Intel has been called out by Linus Torvalds several days ago for the crappy fixes they delivered for GNU/Linux. I would be very surprised if Intel actually shipped proper fixes for Windows. It's a shame, really.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Those were not delivered fixes, that was work in progress that is still work in progress. And the dude who was "called out" works for Amazon.
    - mrmondo 9y ago
      FYI - The “dude” from Amazon worked for Intel for 8 years before joining Amazon UK just over a year ago.
      - numbsafari 9y ago
        The “dude” is also probably working under an insane amount of pressure and being made to feel like he is somehow responsible or at fault for the whole situation. Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery.
        mrmondo 9y ago
        I did not, and do not lay any blame, I only provided context to the prior comment.
        sundarurfriend 9y ago
        > Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery. That's a very uncharitable interpretation of your parent comment, which was simply pointing out his connection and history with Intel.
HugoDaniel 9y ago
So much for the embargo period. I guess the bsd people were not so wrong after all. They might as well just had published it as soon as it was found.
- Valmar 9y ago
  Intel has had literally months upon months to test and stabilize their microcode and kernel-side patches for Meltdown/Spectre... but it seems like Intel just doesn't give half a shit, if they're having major issues now. Intel's actions seem to shout that they have cared far more about releasing Kaby/Skylake X and Coffee Lake in short order, as a response to Ryzen/ThreadRipper, than actually really digging into fixing their major security flaws. Their actions speak of them preferring to keep their market and mindshare over actually fixing any security issues. Intel is still so deeply entrenched that they likely believe that they can get away with their lazy approach. They make millions upon millions, if not billions of dollars ~ why should they give a shit, when their monopoly and half-hearted attempt at a solution will get them by? Intel is being strangled by their shitty management, seemingly...
notspanishflu 9y ago
It is not only Microsoft reverting this patch. HP, Dell or Red Hat are doing that as well. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-issues-windows-out-of-band-update-that-disables-spectre-mitigations/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-is...
cesarb 9y ago
In a related development, there are proposed patches to the Linux kernel (not yet merged) to blacklist the broken microcode updates: https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2707159.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2707159.html That patch disables the use by the kernel of the new IBPB/IBRS features provided by the updated microcode, when it's of a "known bad" revision. Since Linux prefers the "retpoline" mitigation instead of IBRS, and AFAIK so far the upstream kernel (and most of the backports to stable kernels) doesn't use IBPB yet, that might explain why Linux seems to have been less affected by the microcode update instabilities than Windows. Also interesting: that patch has a link to an official Intel list of broken microcode versions.
- Valmar 9y ago
  > In a related development, there are proposed patches to the Linux kernel (not yet merged) to blacklist the broken microcode updates Linus probably won't pull it until it's truly known to be stable, because of his attitude towards having decent quality code and not causing needless system instability. Without Linus... who knows what would have happened by now.
  - cesarb 9y ago
    They are on the "tip" tree (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/log/?h=x86/pti https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/...), so they'll probably be sent to Linus as soon as the merge window opens (Linux 4.15 has just been released, so the merge window should open soon). I expect these patches to be on 4.16, and also to be backported to the stable releases (4.15.x and others). But yeah, upstream Linux kernel development is taking it slow. As far as I can see, variant 3 mitigations (PTI) are already in, variant 2 mitigations are partially in (retpoline) and partially not (the microcode dependent ones), and variant 1 mitigations are still under discussion.
    - jerf 9y ago
      "But yeah, upstream Linux kernel development is taking it slow." Taking it slow seems very appropriate to me. This seems to me to have been a case of everybody grossly overestimating the short-term portion of the catastrophe, and underestimating the long term. In the short term, the only people who were going to be plausibly affected in the next three to six months are people on shared hosting of some sort where you may share a server with somebody else's untrusted code, where an accelerated fix is in order, but also something that can be centrally handled. I'm not that worried in the next three to six months that my personal desktop is somehow going to be compromised by either Meltdown or Spectre, and personally, if I see a noticeable performance issue I may well revert the fixes (I'm on Linux), because first you have to penetrate my defenses to deliver anything anyhow, then you have to be in a situation where you're not going to just use a root exploit, which probably means you're in a sandbox or something which means it's that much more difficult to figure out how to exploit this. For most users, uses, and systems, spectre and meltdown aren't that immediately pressing. Meanwhile, in the long term this may require basically redesigning CPUs to a very significant degree; there is no software patch that can fix the underlying issues. It is difficult to overstate the long term impact of this class of bugs. IMHO the real problem from the jousting match with Linus and Intel last week isn't that Intel's patches today aren't quality code, but that it makes me concerned that they're just going to sweep this fundamental problem under the rug. As I said in another post on HN, I fully understand that remediating this is going to be years, and I don't expect Intel to have an answer overnight, or a full solution in their next "tock". But if they're not taking this seriously, we have a very large long-term problem. We're only going to see more leaks in the long term.
Thimothy 9y ago
I never got them. The last update in my windows is from Dec 2017. My antivirus is compliant, the registry key correctly set up and yet it refuses to update. I still haven't had the time to debug it, but I wonder how many people are out there with their OS silently refusing to update.
- epistasis 9y ago
  I had huge problems with Win 10. Updates wold fail and install again and again without actually getting installed. Sometimes I would get an opaque error number but web searches revealed nothing for that number, and it was rare that I would be able to find even an error number. I don't do Windows, and just installed it for VR, and didn't spend that much time in Windows, so I would spend 15-30 minutes looking a month, before realizing I had spent more debugging time than VR time that week. After probably 9 months of this, and with Windows doing ever more intrusive pop overs whenever I launched it for updates that don't take, I wiped all boot sectors everywhere and installed from scratch. That seemed to work, but it was incredibly frustrating that the boot process was so buggy as was error reporting. I've never encountered a situation like it in the past 15 years of heavy Linux use. Problems there are usually solvable with a couple web searches, even for extremely obscure kernel bugs with obscure packages. Windows refused to tell me anything as did the web.
  - whywhywhywhy 9y ago
    I built a Windows machine for 3D work and VR just over a year ago, after being a Mac only user for 15+ years. Honestly my Win 10 experience has been the total opposite, it's been stable, fast, minimum update nagging. Overall I've actually been shocked how stable and hassle free the experience has been. Maybe I just got lucky with the right combination of hardware.
draw_down 9y ago
Just wanted to say I think it’s alright to be upset with Intel over this. As opposed to this attitude I’ve sometimes seen here of “hey don’t be so harsh on them, this stuff is hard.” They have handled many aspects of this issue poorly or outright incorrectly, and it is ok to expect better of a firm that profits so handsomely from this industry.
mark_l_watson 9y ago
A more accurate title would be that Microsoft disabled the specter mitigation’s due to a flawed Intel update, right? I thought this was all Microsoft’s fault until getting half way through the article.
- joemaller1 9y ago
  Even more accurate: Microsoft joins HP, Dell, Lenovo, VMware and Red Hat in disabling Intel's buggy Spectre patch. > HP, Dell, Lenovo, VMware, Red Hat and others had paused the patches and now Microsoft has done the same.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  It's really telling that even Linus Torvalds was not happy with their "fixes" and now Microsoft. Intel needs to start taking the situation completely seriously cause their actions don't imply they are.
  - segmondy 9y ago
    Intel doesn't care. What choice do we have?
    - kilburn 9y ago
      For the longest time there was no practical alternative, but nowadays... AMD is back! The whole Ryzen lineup has turned out to be pretty good. You may even save some money in the process.
      - giancarlostoro 9y ago
        This is why I always preferred AMD. They gave you either more or the same bang for your buck. I hope they don't slack off on pushing to innovate ahead of Intel now that they're "even" in a sense.
      - mseebach 9y ago
        Has AMD processors been confirmed as not vulnerable? As I recall the original investigation only covered Intel processors, but hypothesized that AMD would be affected as well, as they more or less have the same fundamentals around branch prediction.
ohiovr 9y ago
My brother was hit by a recent update to Windows 7 that prevented the machine from booting. He went to Microcenter to buy a hard drive. There were a lot of people doing the same thing for the same reason when he was there.
- quiq 9y ago
  I don't use the windows side of my machine very often, but decided to update it last night. Booted fine (OS on SSD), but one of the HDDs with all of the windows files was corrupted. No go with ntfsfix, chkdsk, partition table destroyed. Reformatted it as ext4 and windows doesn't get to touch it anymore. Haven't tested it too much yet but seems to be working fine. Remember to use backups!
  - ohiovr 9y ago
    My brother did have major data loss. And no real backup strategy.
mosselman 9y ago
So what can I do for my next self-built pc? Get some AMD equipment, or is that not enough?
- hishnash 9y ago
  AMD have released patches (to reduce the near-zero risk of exploit to 0 risk) and they are not having any instability issues! so yes go with AMD for server, Epyic is now finally available to purchase for desktop workstation Threadripper for desktop RyZen for mobile... not many newer cpus out yet.. need to wait :(
- ihsw2 9y ago
  AMD equipment should be fine, current-gen Ryzen/Threadripper is more than adept at workstation tasks and next-gen Ryzen (named Ryzen 2 and Threadripper 2) will edge out any advantage that Intel's CPUs have.
- ageofwant 9y ago
  I'll be getting a few high-end Intel CPU's that will soon flood the market on the cheap for home machines running arch.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Depends on what you are building it for.
  - mosselman 9y ago
    I have my macbook for work and programming, my PC has windows on it (much to my dislike) and I use it for occasional gaming. I will probably not get new parts anytime soon though as performance is currently fine. Just wondering for when someone asks me to build them a PC.
    - chrisper 9y ago
      Well, I built my PC with gaming in mind and chose the i7 8700k. But I got it a week before the spectre/meltdown spectacle. I decided to keep it because of its superior singlecore performance.
IanSanders 9y ago
Meanwhile Intel stock is at 5 year highest
kuon 9y ago
Anybody know what is the status of FreeBSD? I googled a bit and found nothing except "we wait", is it still the case?
speedie 9y ago
So , Linus was right for cursing at Intel ?
- akerro 9y ago
  UTTER GARBAGE
  - speedie 9y ago
    Sry , my cognitive abilities have been at real low of lately . Took me a while to comprehend your comment. Spot on m8 ;)
  - dang 9y ago
    Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - cm2187 9y ago
      It’s ironic that for all the praises Linus gets on HN, he would have been banned within minutes by these guidelines.
    - akerro 9y ago
      Dont do what https://hn.algolia.com/?query=UTTER%20GARBAGE&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?query=UTTER%20GARBAGE&sort=byPopular... ?
PerusingAround 9y ago
I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  Spectre affects AMD, too, so there's no competitor to run to... and CERT was saying at one point that only new processors would fully fix it. They're looking at everyone needing to buy a bunch of replacement products, aren't they?
  - Valmar 9y ago
    Spectre v2 affects AMD less drastically than it does with Intel, because of the architectural differences between Zen and Intel's processors.
- adtac 9y ago
  The recent jump is because they released a good earnings report. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/intc-intel-stock-jumps-to-highest-levels-in-17-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/intc-intel-stock-jumps-to-hi...
- collinmanderson 9y ago
  I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of demand for future Intel hardware that's immune to spectre and meltdown. I think it might cause _more_ sales of Intel chips in the future, not fewer.
  - xigency 9y ago
    Regardless of sales, I would think damage to their image would be a concern. Maybe it's not a concern to investors because their "PR nightmare" turned out to be softball for them, and it's been hard to pin anything on Intel when they keep pointing fingers in all directions. I think it's our responsibility as technology literate folks and decision makers to explicitly highlight their failures so that mistakes and poor handling like this are not normalized.
zingmars 9y ago
These updates most definitely could've been handled better. I was having a busy week with exams and I get a call about around 10 machines not booting (this was before the announcement). Sure enough, last thing everyone reported was updating. I call the supplier and apparently they have reports of at least 2000 machines (at that moment) that had to be reimaged across the city (from what I could tell, all were older AMD PCs) because of this dumb update. I was used to not being to able to trust software, but if I can't trust hardware now either, farming does suddenly appear much more appealing.
- KindOne 9y ago
  Become a goat farmer. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_text_file_at_work_titled_why_should_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_te...
  - lettergram 9y ago
    Fully support lol you can buy land in Colorado pretty cheap. Had a friend do that... He bought 3 acres, spent a couple years building a cabin in his free time. Then one day just quit and went off to the woods. Still visit him and he seems pretty happy with it. He doesn't need much income and makes enough money off odd jobs he seems to be doing pretty well.
  - astrange 9y ago
    But if you look into their eyes, you can still see the progress bars…
  - protomyth 9y ago
    One of the attempts at adding to the list "Nobody is ever going to sell you goats as a service." is actually wrong. Companies do rent goats for land clearing[1]. Go for beekeeper then you too can do "bees as a service"[2]. 1) http://rentagoat.com/ http://rentagoat.com/ 2) http://americanbeejournal.com/insights-honey-pollination-pacific-northwest/ http://americanbeejournal.com/insights-honey-pollination-pac...
- InvisibleCities 9y ago
dsign 9y ago
What a mess! The day this blew up we rented our first physical server for the express purpose of running secure critical workloads in unpatched environments. Yes, I know that there is nothing secure, but not everything we do is running a chunk of logic uploaded by an attacker, so we will take our chances.
calimac 9y ago
How about everyone take a rational look at Linus’s points on the subject. This is not going to get fixed with the normal sheeple “nothing to see here patch”. Wake up
bartl 9y ago
>Intel, AMD and Apple face class action lawsuits over the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. I sure hope Intel will face a class action suit over this botched update. Many professionals have wasted countless hours dealing with this junk.
debt 9y ago
I mean, is this an unmitigated disaster on Intel's part? It's like a train wreck in slow motion. A part of me feels this stories like this are going to keep getting worse until Spectre is finally used in the wild.
pmarreck 9y ago
Filing under "Windows has always been a clusterfuck"
Roritharr 9y ago
I'm pretty sure these patches were responsible for my notebook crashing everytime i hooked it up to our Thunderbolt 3 Dockingstations.
MATT_HACKS 9y ago
Are you desperate & dying to know what your business partners/rivals are really up to? Would unrestricted and unnoticeable access to key strokes, passwords, email accounts, even webcam without any knowledge give you some security and peace of mind? You want to spy on your spouses' cell-phones & gadgets? Do you need to access it anytime for location, text message data or even listen to calls? We can add remote access tools to networks & install keyloggers remotely. We can also spoof calls, and depending on the situation administer real-time mobile network interception. Below is a list of services offered by our professional team: * CYBER INVESTIGATION * PENETRATION TESTING * EMAIL HACKING * PHONE HACKING * PASSWORD HACKING * WEBSITE HACKING * SOCIAL MEDIA HACKING (ANY PLATFORM) * SCHOOL GRADES REPAIR * CCTV DATABASE HACKING * GAMING HACKS * CARDS/ACCOUNTS TOP UP (ANY PLATFORM) * HACKING TOOLS & PACKAGES FOR BEGINNERS * CREDIT SCORE HACKS * CRIMINAL RECORDS NULLIFYING * PROGRAMMING TUTORIALS "NOT ALL SUPERHEROES WEAR CAPES". Money back guarantee on whatever service you consider unsatisfactory. TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY. CONTACT: matthewbevangroup@gmail.com, +15622771782 (TEXTS ONLY)
hi41 9y ago
What does the Spectre bug mean for a person planning to buy a new windows computer? Should I buy an AMD CPU based computer instead of an Intel based computer?

757 points by tomtoise 9y ago

chrisper 9y ago

Just checked for Updates, but there don't seem to be any?

taspeotis 9y ago
“If you are running an impacted device, this update can be applied by downloading it from the Microsoft Update Catalog website” https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4078130/update-to-disable-mitigation-against-spectre-variant-2 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4078130/update-to-d...
- chrisper 9y ago
  Thanks
thg 9y ago
Just in case you, like me, missed the memo where Microsoft said they'd stop supplying security updates if you have no AV / AV incompatible with the patches installed. The fix to the former is creating the registry entry manually. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/january-3-2018-windows-security-updates-and-antivirus-software https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4072699/january-3-2...
- morsch 9y ago
  Bizarre. Customers without Antivirus In cases where customers can’t install or run antivirus software, Microsoft recommends manually setting the registry key as described below in order to receive the January 2018 security updates.
  - testplzignore 9y ago
    Sounds like Microsoft can't tell the difference between "has AV installed that will break" and "has no AV installed", which makes sense. It's probably infeasible to reliably fingerprint all existing AV software.
    - Slansitartop 9y ago
      > Sounds like Microsoft can't tell the difference between "has AV installed that will break" and "has no AV installed", which makes sense. It's probably infeasible to reliably fingerprint all existing AV software. For something like this, I think best-effort bad-AV detection would have been best. Seems pretty insane to disable security patching because they can't be 100% certain that you have a compatibly AV.
      - anonymfus 9y ago
        Incompatibility here means unbootable state.
        Slansitartop 9y ago
        But it also means that people with perfectly acceptable configurations are left in an insecure state, without an unexpected magic incantation (a registry hack) that most probably will never know about. Disabling security patches is not acceptable in current year without A LOT of nasty and annoying warnings.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    It makes sense though. Only AV programs that comply may set the setting. Without a compliant AV program, there's nothing to do that set - unless you do it manually.
  - speedie 9y ago
    Do I read this correctly ? M$ gave us the registry key with which we can convince winblows that we are runing AV , when infact , we uninstalled it ?
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Microsoft won't supply updates even if you have no AV installed, including builtin Defender disabled?? I thought stopping updates was only for the case of unpatched AVs that did not set the registry key...
  - cesarb 9y ago
    If you have no patched AV, who's going to set the registry key?
    - ptaipale 9y ago
      If your AV is not patched, the kernel patches should not be installed because you might get a repeating bluescreen. So get a patched AV. If you haven't installed another AV, then Defender is there and counts.
    - simooooo 9y ago
      Nobody. That's the point.
  - T-N-T 9y ago
    Microsoft does not have any way of knowing whether you have an antivirus or not and because the Spectre patch causes a bluescreen on boot if you have an antivirus that's not updated, they require the antivirus set the registry key to say "hey, it's safe to update". Absence of AV means that registry key doesn't get set. MS doesn't provide an easy, GUI way of disabling built-in Defender by the way. If you 'disable' defender by using the control panel on windows 10, it only stops its activity temporarily and it can reactivate itself after 24 hours or something like that. You can permanently disable it through registry keys but it's not an officially supported, accepted method to edit the registry by yourself. There's a group policy for 10 Pro and other corp editions though. For a normal home user, Defender is never fully disabled. It will deactivate itself if you install a third party antivirus, and reenable itself when you uninstall them. Bottom line, the average user is not supposed to be AV-less.

cjsuk 9y ago

Not what I wanted to wake up to this morning. I suspect we’re in for a rough ride for a long time thanks to this mess.

kzrdude 9y ago
Your comment is even more fitting today (politics)

mm-vorticesoft 9y ago

Linus was right

gsich 9y ago
Like always.
- Valmar 9y ago
  He generally is. His rants are almost always spot-on and pure gold. :)
anfilt 9y ago
Well he is known for calling a spade a spade. No matter how blunt that may be.
- cat199 9y ago
  except for when he is wrong. Why he gets a pass for being the 'nice guy' and DeRaadt gets the bad rep is still a mystery to me
mehrdadn 9y ago
About what? Would you have a link?
- bmon 9y ago
  Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.” http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.2/04628.html
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    Oh, this is the same issue?
    - 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

stinos 9y ago

"Here's a patch" - "Here's a patch to disable that other patch" - ... What's next? Repeat? Sounds like this could turn into a maintainance nightmare quickly. Also because I've introduced things like that myself in the past, and that was for normal applications and not a kernel or OS. Somewhere, someday, there's usually this one exception for which none of your rules hold true and the thing blows up in your face. Anyway, I'd love to see the actual code for this. Not a chance probably?

hishnash 9y ago
Im really wanding they had more than 6months to do these patches and they did not bother testing on a good number of systems. Its not like MS + Intel dont have enough money to buy a few 1000 testing machines and get some testers on it.
- x0x0 9y ago
  I came here to ask the same thing. How did these folks squander six months?
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    I think Spectre may have appeared later, after Meltdown? Remember the investigations into what's possible were proceeding in parallel with the attempted fixes. Also, CPU design changes take a long time. 6 months may seem a long time from the perspective of HackerNews node.js type hackers, but it's a bit harder to patch decades worth of CPU microcode than a website.
    - hishnash 9y ago
      Reading over googles project0 page it reads as if they told AMD about the issues on 2017-06-01 why would they do this if it were meltdown only? also look at the exploit numbering: Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753) Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715) Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754) according to https://cve.mitre.org/cve/identifiers/ https://cve.mitre.org/cve/identifiers/ this is sequence based so `Variant 2` was recorded to CVE before v1 and v3. I get it may take a long time (that is fine even if the patches took a few more days), what I don't get is that they released it to production (server) envs seemingly without testing. Surely even rudimentary testing (deploying on a few 1000 different server platforms for a few hours at least should be something that Intel does for all microcode updates, after all they are rather more important than js Node packages as you point out)

nippples 9y ago

Gee, if only they had a Linus Torvalds type around to block irresponsible commits.

duncan_bayne 9y ago
They did, once upon a time, after a fashion: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates-trustworthy-computing/ https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates-trustworthy-computi...
- kyberias 9y ago
  I had to read that billg-review thing one more time. It's such a wonderful story.
mtgx 9y ago
Didn't Torvalds already accept Intel's "garbage" Linux kernel patches?
- icebraining 9y ago
  I don't think so, they're still under discussion on LKML, including an alternative proposal by Ingo Molnar.
bonzini 9y ago
Nah, it's just the well-known issue with the microcode being buggy. There's nothing new really.
ksk 9y ago
Microcode is not reviewed by anyone outside of Intel.

tjoff 9y ago

I lost many hours over this last week. The system was unable to boot and finally a thread on reddit came to the rescue ( https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7sbihd/howto_fix_inaccessible_boot_device_caused_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7sbihd/howto_f... ). This actually made the system boot but there are some leftovers being installed on first boot that I've been unable to disable that also causes the system to be unable to boot. So now, the machine is running but as soon as it is restarted we have to re-image the disk, go through the process of manually removing patches, and then pray that we don't have a power shortage as we'd have to do everything yet again on next boot. I'm not convinced that this patch will solve the issue either, because if this updates requires a reboot the fix won't be installed if we can't boot. I might try to install this update from the recovery console see if that works. Quite frustrating.

thanksgiving 9y ago
Speaking of which, why do so many things require reboot to update on Windows?
- gaius 9y ago
  To force a reinitialisation of all security contexts. Same reason that many websites make you log in again immediately after changing your password (which interestingly Windows doesn’t) Historically (Windows 95 and earlier) reboots were required to reload DLLs and so on but that’s not really true anymore. Still a lot of installers and docs say to reboot when it’s not really necessary as a holdover from then
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    I was under the impression that the reason is what u/beagle3 mentions (in a sibling comment to yours): open system files. I'm curious to see your comment on what he describes, as what you mention (reloading some security context) does not seem to be the whole truth. That websites make one log in again after changing your password has nothing to do with this.

mehrdadn 9y ago

Anyone know if people who had disabled the mitigations via FeatureSettingsOverride = 3 were still affected?

megaman22 9y ago

I've not been impressed with my Windows 10 installations of late. All my machines that don't have the Long Term Servicing Branch have had wild instabilities and performance issues the past few months - crazy things, like the task manager taking minutes to launch, and the whole shell periodically crashing. The Fall Creators Update was so bad I had to wipe and start over on some boxes. It's not engendering a lot of confidence in their competence of late.

dimmuborgir 9y ago
Creators Updates (1703 / 1709) are the culprits. LTSB (1607) has not been upgraded to Creators Update yet and it runs like butter.

tallanvor 9y ago

By my reading of the article, Microsoft is disabling some mitigations for Spectre due to instabilities that Intel's microcode update have been causing. Intel certainly isn't making any friends these days...

hishnash 9y ago
I would love to see the message log between MS Apple and Intel on this.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ComodoHacker 9y ago

>However, Intel does not appear too concerned that the incident will affect its bottom line - the company expects 2018 to be a record year in terms of revenue There is an interesting paradox in our industry. If you pay enough attention (read: money) to security, you will be late to the market, your costs will be high and you lose profit. If you don't pay enough attention, you take the market, get your profits, but your product (be it hardware or software) and reputation will be screwed later. And worst of all: there's never enough attention to security. So by simple logic, an optimal strategy is to forge your product quickly, take your profits within a [relatively] short period and vanish from the market. I guess we'll see this strategy executed from IoT vendors when market start to punish them for their bad sec. For Intel, that "long period" just happened to be REALLY long.

doktrin 9y ago
You conclusion isn't in agreement with the section you quoted, so are you saying that Intel will be punished by the market in the mid to distant future (after 2018)?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
I doubt Intel will see serious punishment in the market. As usual, there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth but when push comes to shove most people will prioritize nearly everything over security. All markets work like this. People bitch about the quality of products, but still buy the cheap stuff.
- javajosh 9y ago
  This will be true until something uses Meltdown in the wild to cause massive damage. When a digital superflu comes, businesses and individuals will be faced with a choice: continue to use Intel and be vulnerable to a flu that is literally wiping out businesses, exchanges, hospitals, etc or replace ALL of their hardware with AMD. Interestingly, I think AMD has a lot of motive to create such a superflu, or at least encourage it's creation.
  - 9y ago

rootw0rm 9y ago

Ugh, is this the cause of the weird bugchecks I've been having this week? Just gave myself 64gb page file and enabled full memory dumps so I could track it down in WinDbg. I always forget something on fresh installs...

shultays 9y ago

Amount of fuck-up in this whole issue is mind blowing. I am getting more surprised with every new I get

dotdi 9y ago
Intel has been called out by Linus Torvalds several days ago for the crappy fixes they delivered for GNU/Linux. I would be very surprised if Intel actually shipped proper fixes for Windows. It's a shame, really.
- watwut 9y ago
  Those were not delivered fixes, that was work in progress that is still work in progress. And the dude who was "called out" works for Amazon.
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    FYI - The “dude” from Amazon worked for Intel for 8 years before joining Amazon UK just over a year ago.
    - numbsafari 9y ago
      The “dude” is also probably working under an insane amount of pressure and being made to feel like he is somehow responsible or at fault for the whole situation. Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery.
      - mrmondo 9y ago
        I did not, and do not lay any blame, I only provided context to the prior comment.
      - sundarurfriend 9y ago
        > Best not to make it personal from the peanut gallery. That's a very uncharitable interpretation of your parent comment, which was simply pointing out his connection and history with Intel.

HugoDaniel 9y ago

So much for the embargo period. I guess the bsd people were not so wrong after all. They might as well just had published it as soon as it was found.

Valmar 9y ago
Intel has had literally months upon months to test and stabilize their microcode and kernel-side patches for Meltdown/Spectre... but it seems like Intel just doesn't give half a shit, if they're having major issues now. Intel's actions seem to shout that they have cared far more about releasing Kaby/Skylake X and Coffee Lake in short order, as a response to Ryzen/ThreadRipper, than actually really digging into fixing their major security flaws. Their actions speak of them preferring to keep their market and mindshare over actually fixing any security issues. Intel is still so deeply entrenched that they likely believe that they can get away with their lazy approach. They make millions upon millions, if not billions of dollars ~ why should they give a shit, when their monopoly and half-hearted attempt at a solution will get them by? Intel is being strangled by their shitty management, seemingly...

notspanishflu 9y ago

It is not only Microsoft reverting this patch. HP, Dell or Red Hat are doing that as well. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-issues-windows-out-of-band-update-that-disables-spectre-mitigations/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-is...

cesarb 9y ago

In a related development, there are proposed patches to the Linux kernel (not yet merged) to blacklist the broken microcode updates: https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2707159.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2707159.html That patch disables the use by the kernel of the new IBPB/IBRS features provided by the updated microcode, when it's of a "known bad" revision. Since Linux prefers the "retpoline" mitigation instead of IBRS, and AFAIK so far the upstream kernel (and most of the backports to stable kernels) doesn't use IBPB yet, that might explain why Linux seems to have been less affected by the microcode update instabilities than Windows. Also interesting: that patch has a link to an official Intel list of broken microcode versions.

Valmar 9y ago
> In a related development, there are proposed patches to the Linux kernel (not yet merged) to blacklist the broken microcode updates Linus probably won't pull it until it's truly known to be stable, because of his attitude towards having decent quality code and not causing needless system instability. Without Linus... who knows what would have happened by now.
- cesarb 9y ago
  They are on the "tip" tree (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/log/?h=x86/pti https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip.git/...), so they'll probably be sent to Linus as soon as the merge window opens (Linux 4.15 has just been released, so the merge window should open soon). I expect these patches to be on 4.16, and also to be backported to the stable releases (4.15.x and others). But yeah, upstream Linux kernel development is taking it slow. As far as I can see, variant 3 mitigations (PTI) are already in, variant 2 mitigations are partially in (retpoline) and partially not (the microcode dependent ones), and variant 1 mitigations are still under discussion.
  - jerf 9y ago
    "But yeah, upstream Linux kernel development is taking it slow." Taking it slow seems very appropriate to me. This seems to me to have been a case of everybody grossly overestimating the short-term portion of the catastrophe, and underestimating the long term. In the short term, the only people who were going to be plausibly affected in the next three to six months are people on shared hosting of some sort where you may share a server with somebody else's untrusted code, where an accelerated fix is in order, but also something that can be centrally handled. I'm not that worried in the next three to six months that my personal desktop is somehow going to be compromised by either Meltdown or Spectre, and personally, if I see a noticeable performance issue I may well revert the fixes (I'm on Linux), because first you have to penetrate my defenses to deliver anything anyhow, then you have to be in a situation where you're not going to just use a root exploit, which probably means you're in a sandbox or something which means it's that much more difficult to figure out how to exploit this. For most users, uses, and systems, spectre and meltdown aren't that immediately pressing. Meanwhile, in the long term this may require basically redesigning CPUs to a very significant degree; there is no software patch that can fix the underlying issues. It is difficult to overstate the long term impact of this class of bugs. IMHO the real problem from the jousting match with Linus and Intel last week isn't that Intel's patches today aren't quality code, but that it makes me concerned that they're just going to sweep this fundamental problem under the rug. As I said in another post on HN, I fully understand that remediating this is going to be years, and I don't expect Intel to have an answer overnight, or a full solution in their next "tock". But if they're not taking this seriously, we have a very large long-term problem. We're only going to see more leaks in the long term.

Thimothy 9y ago

I never got them. The last update in my windows is from Dec 2017. My antivirus is compliant, the registry key correctly set up and yet it refuses to update. I still haven't had the time to debug it, but I wonder how many people are out there with their OS silently refusing to update.

epistasis 9y ago
I had huge problems with Win 10. Updates wold fail and install again and again without actually getting installed. Sometimes I would get an opaque error number but web searches revealed nothing for that number, and it was rare that I would be able to find even an error number. I don't do Windows, and just installed it for VR, and didn't spend that much time in Windows, so I would spend 15-30 minutes looking a month, before realizing I had spent more debugging time than VR time that week. After probably 9 months of this, and with Windows doing ever more intrusive pop overs whenever I launched it for updates that don't take, I wiped all boot sectors everywhere and installed from scratch. That seemed to work, but it was incredibly frustrating that the boot process was so buggy as was error reporting. I've never encountered a situation like it in the past 15 years of heavy Linux use. Problems there are usually solvable with a couple web searches, even for extremely obscure kernel bugs with obscure packages. Windows refused to tell me anything as did the web.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  I built a Windows machine for 3D work and VR just over a year ago, after being a Mac only user for 15+ years. Honestly my Win 10 experience has been the total opposite, it's been stable, fast, minimum update nagging. Overall I've actually been shocked how stable and hassle free the experience has been. Maybe I just got lucky with the right combination of hardware.

draw_down 9y ago

Just wanted to say I think it’s alright to be upset with Intel over this. As opposed to this attitude I’ve sometimes seen here of “hey don’t be so harsh on them, this stuff is hard.” They have handled many aspects of this issue poorly or outright incorrectly, and it is ok to expect better of a firm that profits so handsomely from this industry.

mark_l_watson 9y ago

A more accurate title would be that Microsoft disabled the specter mitigation’s due to a flawed Intel update, right? I thought this was all Microsoft’s fault until getting half way through the article.

joemaller1 9y ago
Even more accurate: Microsoft joins HP, Dell, Lenovo, VMware and Red Hat in disabling Intel's buggy Spectre patch. > HP, Dell, Lenovo, VMware, Red Hat and others had paused the patches and now Microsoft has done the same.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
It's really telling that even Linus Torvalds was not happy with their "fixes" and now Microsoft. Intel needs to start taking the situation completely seriously cause their actions don't imply they are.
- segmondy 9y ago
  Intel doesn't care. What choice do we have?
  - kilburn 9y ago
    For the longest time there was no practical alternative, but nowadays... AMD is back! The whole Ryzen lineup has turned out to be pretty good. You may even save some money in the process.
    - giancarlostoro 9y ago
      This is why I always preferred AMD. They gave you either more or the same bang for your buck. I hope they don't slack off on pushing to innovate ahead of Intel now that they're "even" in a sense.
    - mseebach 9y ago
      Has AMD processors been confirmed as not vulnerable? As I recall the original investigation only covered Intel processors, but hypothesized that AMD would be affected as well, as they more or less have the same fundamentals around branch prediction.

ohiovr 9y ago

My brother was hit by a recent update to Windows 7 that prevented the machine from booting. He went to Microcenter to buy a hard drive. There were a lot of people doing the same thing for the same reason when he was there.

quiq 9y ago
I don't use the windows side of my machine very often, but decided to update it last night. Booted fine (OS on SSD), but one of the HDDs with all of the windows files was corrupted. No go with ntfsfix, chkdsk, partition table destroyed. Reformatted it as ext4 and windows doesn't get to touch it anymore. Haven't tested it too much yet but seems to be working fine. Remember to use backups!
- ohiovr 9y ago
  My brother did have major data loss. And no real backup strategy.

mosselman 9y ago

So what can I do for my next self-built pc? Get some AMD equipment, or is that not enough?

hishnash 9y ago
AMD have released patches (to reduce the near-zero risk of exploit to 0 risk) and they are not having any instability issues! so yes go with AMD for server, Epyic is now finally available to purchase for desktop workstation Threadripper for desktop RyZen for mobile... not many newer cpus out yet.. need to wait :(
ihsw2 9y ago
AMD equipment should be fine, current-gen Ryzen/Threadripper is more than adept at workstation tasks and next-gen Ryzen (named Ryzen 2 and Threadripper 2) will edge out any advantage that Intel's CPUs have.
ageofwant 9y ago
I'll be getting a few high-end Intel CPU's that will soon flood the market on the cheap for home machines running arch.
chrisper 9y ago
Depends on what you are building it for.
- mosselman 9y ago
  I have my macbook for work and programming, my PC has windows on it (much to my dislike) and I use it for occasional gaming. I will probably not get new parts anytime soon though as performance is currently fine. Just wondering for when someone asks me to build them a PC.
  - chrisper 9y ago
    Well, I built my PC with gaming in mind and chose the i7 8700k. But I got it a week before the spectre/meltdown spectacle. I decided to keep it because of its superior singlecore performance.

IanSanders 9y ago

Meanwhile Intel stock is at 5 year highest

kuon 9y ago

Anybody know what is the status of FreeBSD? I googled a bit and found nothing except "we wait", is it still the case?

speedie 9y ago

So , Linus was right for cursing at Intel ?

akerro 9y ago
UTTER GARBAGE
- speedie 9y ago
  Sry , my cognitive abilities have been at real low of lately . Took me a while to comprehend your comment. Spot on m8 ;)
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't do this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - cm2187 9y ago
    It’s ironic that for all the praises Linus gets on HN, he would have been banned within minutes by these guidelines.
  - akerro 9y ago
    Dont do what https://hn.algolia.com/?query=UTTER%20GARBAGE&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?query=UTTER%20GARBAGE&sort=byPopular... ?

PerusingAround 9y ago

I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.

ceejayoz 9y ago
Spectre affects AMD, too, so there's no competitor to run to... and CERT was saying at one point that only new processors would fully fix it. They're looking at everyone needing to buy a bunch of replacement products, aren't they?
- Valmar 9y ago
  Spectre v2 affects AMD less drastically than it does with Intel, because of the architectural differences between Zen and Intel's processors.
adtac 9y ago
The recent jump is because they released a good earnings report. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/intc-intel-stock-jumps-to-highest-levels-in-17-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/intc-intel-stock-jumps-to-hi...
collinmanderson 9y ago
I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of demand for future Intel hardware that's immune to spectre and meltdown. I think it might cause _more_ sales of Intel chips in the future, not fewer.
- xigency 9y ago
  Regardless of sales, I would think damage to their image would be a concern. Maybe it's not a concern to investors because their "PR nightmare" turned out to be softball for them, and it's been hard to pin anything on Intel when they keep pointing fingers in all directions. I think it's our responsibility as technology literate folks and decision makers to explicitly highlight their failures so that mistakes and poor handling like this are not normalized.

zingmars 9y ago

These updates most definitely could've been handled better. I was having a busy week with exams and I get a call about around 10 machines not booting (this was before the announcement). Sure enough, last thing everyone reported was updating. I call the supplier and apparently they have reports of at least 2000 machines (at that moment) that had to be reimaged across the city (from what I could tell, all were older AMD PCs) because of this dumb update. I was used to not being to able to trust software, but if I can't trust hardware now either, farming does suddenly appear much more appealing.

KindOne 9y ago
Become a goat farmer. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_text_file_at_work_titled_why_should_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4l7kjd/found_a_te...
- lettergram 9y ago
  Fully support lol you can buy land in Colorado pretty cheap. Had a friend do that... He bought 3 acres, spent a couple years building a cabin in his free time. Then one day just quit and went off to the woods. Still visit him and he seems pretty happy with it. He doesn't need much income and makes enough money off odd jobs he seems to be doing pretty well.
- astrange 9y ago
  But if you look into their eyes, you can still see the progress bars…
- protomyth 9y ago
  One of the attempts at adding to the list "Nobody is ever going to sell you goats as a service." is actually wrong. Companies do rent goats for land clearing[1]. Go for beekeeper then you too can do "bees as a service"[2]. 1) http://rentagoat.com/ http://rentagoat.com/ 2) http://americanbeejournal.com/insights-honey-pollination-pacific-northwest/ http://americanbeejournal.com/insights-honey-pollination-pac...
InvisibleCities 9y ago

dsign 9y ago

What a mess! The day this blew up we rented our first physical server for the express purpose of running secure critical workloads in unpatched environments. Yes, I know that there is nothing secure, but not everything we do is running a chunk of logic uploaded by an attacker, so we will take our chances.

calimac 9y ago

How about everyone take a rational look at Linus’s points on the subject. This is not going to get fixed with the normal sheeple “nothing to see here patch”. Wake up

bartl 9y ago

>Intel, AMD and Apple face class action lawsuits over the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. I sure hope Intel will face a class action suit over this botched update. Many professionals have wasted countless hours dealing with this junk.

debt 9y ago

I mean, is this an unmitigated disaster on Intel's part? It's like a train wreck in slow motion. A part of me feels this stories like this are going to keep getting worse until Spectre is finally used in the wild.

pmarreck 9y ago

Filing under "Windows has always been a clusterfuck"

Roritharr 9y ago

I'm pretty sure these patches were responsible for my notebook crashing everytime i hooked it up to our Thunderbolt 3 Dockingstations.

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hi41 9y ago

What does the Spectre bug mean for a person planning to buy a new windows computer? Should I buy an AMD CPU based computer instead of an Intel based computer?