24 ms·

You might even say there's room for a startup to reinvent computers (and operating systems) from the ground up. Would you?

fooker 8y ago
With about a hundred billion dollars of funding and a ten years to market schedule, maybe?
niftich 8y ago
I don't know if I'd look at it with that lens. Clearly, knowledge and analyses of this topic are resident in academia and have been long present at various levels of industry, but other factors like performance and power consumption have received generous affordances by hardware designers, and makers of system software and application software had to step in where the hardware provided little help for leak-proof sharing. In retrospect, the market may have rewarded hardware makers' direction of pursuit -- until now, but the survivors of those past pursuits remain. Leak-proof sharing of resources may be a more marketable pursuit now, with cloud providers hosting code from mutually untrusted parties, and consumers running delivered applications and untrusted Javascript on the same machine, but I'd rather see the conversation about this topic improve across the board, independent from commercial forces.
Sophistifunk 8y ago
Not until the people who are building existing systems become (financially / legally) liable for their mistakes. Homogeneity is fragile, but it's also extremely cheap, which is how we got here.
- zoeysaurusrex 8y ago
  Do you think that people in the software field need something like the AMA to protect us so that we can have liability?
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Well let's think it through. It would seemingly have to follow the Disruptive Technology arc. That means it would start off as a crappy computer that had really great information leakage control. And it would be marketed to a small but enthusiastic market who really values that, and doesn't mind that most everything else is a PITA. Who might that market be?
- ryacko 8y ago
  Major cloud companies and VM providers? Most of these vulnerabilities come from speculative execution impacting a shared cache.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Nah, cloud providers are under enornlis pressure to optimize resource usage (real estate, electricity, labor). A hardware design without competitive performance has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted in that space. The economics of cloud datancenter mean that security only needs to be good enough, not perfect.
    - pferde 8y ago
      In that case, the perception that current hardware security is good enough needs to change. Or the cloud vendors could start offering compute running on new, more secure hardware - e.g. special VM types marketed accordingly.
      - gmueckl 8y ago
        I think that this is wishful thinking on your part unless the drastic performance per power drops are negated. I personally think that these performance drops leads to a horrific environmental impact because every performance drop means that more hardware needs to be provisioned and powered to counter it. So this directly results in more toxic waste from these elecronics and a higher carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere (cloud data centers are a major consumer of electricity). Compared to the long term impact of that, a extra few security breaches sound like the lesser evil to me personally.
ToolsDevler 8y ago
You'd have to be fast. HP is on it: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-hardware/hps-machine-will-fundamentally-redesign-computer-architecture-leading-100tb-phones/ https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-hardware/h... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/hp_memristor_2018/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/hp_memristor_2018/
- Latteland 8y ago
  4 more years till that 2013 plan reaches the 10 year threshold.

fooker 8y ago

With about a hundred billion dollars of funding and a ten years to market schedule, maybe?

niftich 8y ago

I don't know if I'd look at it with that lens. Clearly, knowledge and analyses of this topic are resident in academia and have been long present at various levels of industry, but other factors like performance and power consumption have received generous affordances by hardware designers, and makers of system software and application software had to step in where the hardware provided little help for leak-proof sharing. In retrospect, the market may have rewarded hardware makers' direction of pursuit -- until now, but the survivors of those past pursuits remain. Leak-proof sharing of resources may be a more marketable pursuit now, with cloud providers hosting code from mutually untrusted parties, and consumers running delivered applications and untrusted Javascript on the same machine, but I'd rather see the conversation about this topic improve across the board, independent from commercial forces.

Sophistifunk 8y ago

Not until the people who are building existing systems become (financially / legally) liable for their mistakes. Homogeneity is fragile, but it's also extremely cheap, which is how we got here.

zoeysaurusrex 8y ago
Do you think that people in the software field need something like the AMA to protect us so that we can have liability?

erikpukinskis 8y ago

Well let's think it through. It would seemingly have to follow the Disruptive Technology arc. That means it would start off as a crappy computer that had really great information leakage control. And it would be marketed to a small but enthusiastic market who really values that, and doesn't mind that most everything else is a PITA. Who might that market be?

ryacko 8y ago
Major cloud companies and VM providers? Most of these vulnerabilities come from speculative execution impacting a shared cache.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Nah, cloud providers are under enornlis pressure to optimize resource usage (real estate, electricity, labor). A hardware design without competitive performance has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted in that space. The economics of cloud datancenter mean that security only needs to be good enough, not perfect.
  - pferde 8y ago
    In that case, the perception that current hardware security is good enough needs to change. Or the cloud vendors could start offering compute running on new, more secure hardware - e.g. special VM types marketed accordingly.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      I think that this is wishful thinking on your part unless the drastic performance per power drops are negated. I personally think that these performance drops leads to a horrific environmental impact because every performance drop means that more hardware needs to be provisioned and powered to counter it. So this directly results in more toxic waste from these elecronics and a higher carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere (cloud data centers are a major consumer of electricity). Compared to the long term impact of that, a extra few security breaches sound like the lesser evil to me personally.

ToolsDevler 8y ago

You'd have to be fast. HP is on it: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-hardware/hps-machine-will-fundamentally-redesign-computer-architecture-leading-100tb-phones/ https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-hardware/h... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/hp_memristor_2018/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/hp_memristor_2018/

Latteland 8y ago
4 more years till that 2013 plan reaches the 10 year threshold.