6 ms·

If my washing machine suddenly decided it needed longer time to wash a load of clothes, that would be a change of specifications after the fact, and I'd be able

If my washing machine suddenly decided it needed longer time to wash a load of clothes, that would be a change of specifications after the fact, and I'd be able to return it to the store without issues. So... why not with CPUs?

showsover 5y ago
It's not a washing machine, it's a tiny motor inside the washing machine that only works with that model. What CPU are you replacing it with? Most if not all modern CPUs are vulnerable to this so changing it makes little sense. Even if you can change it, you'd need to switch motherboard as well.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I, as a consumer, don't care... I bring the whole washing machine to the store and get my money back, because they changed the specs after i bought it. Then with that money I can do whatever I want... eg. buy an AMD washing machine... or generally a newer, faster one, becuase some time has gone by. Or go on a vacation. Or drugs and prostitutes.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  To parent's point, currently the risk is all pushed on the customer. We wouldn't accept that on any generic customer product. We'd recall whole fleet of cars if they had severe flaws that directly affect their performance. There might not be viable alternatives, but there should be at least something from CPU makers to help swallow the pill.
trynumber9 5y ago
You can still operate it with the original specifications. Do not apply the microcode if it's that important to your workload. Just remember to avoid running untrusted code.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  So i have two options: - keep the old "firmware", and risk the machine catching fire - put the new firmware on, and make it wash slower Yeah... I'll choose returning it to the store.
  - trynumber9 5y ago
    Give it a shot, but for me it's simply one component in my laptop. I'm not going to bother unless there's a class action lawsuit.
  - jozvolskyef 5y ago
    You don't risk the machine catching fire by itself but rather someone setting it on fire by letting you wash their clothes that are designed to ignite it. Or perhaps more accurately, someone spoiling your clothes by putting a dye in their pocket and letting you wash it in the same batch.
  - Cerium 5y ago
    Situations like this happen often enough. The 2012 Nissan Leaf shipped with a regenerative braking configuration that stressed the battery too much leading to in-warranty replacement. Nissan issued a recall that patched the software to reduce regenerative breaking capacity leading to reduced range and reduced warranty replacements.
    - csours 5y ago
      And there are lawsuits quite regularly too: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099200_nissan-leaf-battery-capacity-lawsuit-court-approves-settlement https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099200_nissan-leaf-bat...
- gpm 5y ago
  The original specifications generally include "secure"... which you cannot operate it within without sacrificing other parts of the original spec. The problem isn't that they made the patch, it's that they made a defective part in the first place. The patch just fails to cure the fact that they made a defective part.
amalcon 5y ago
The issue here is that every washing machine of even remotely the same quality has more or less the same issue, regardless of manufacturer. So, you return it to the store. What do you do next? Spend even more going to the laundromat, even though you need to travel and it takes just as long once you're there? The remedy for an entire industry's product performing to a degree less than advertised is a class action lawsuit (good luck getting more than about five dollars for something like this), not returning the products for a refund.
- gpm 5y ago
  > So, you return it to the store. What do you do next? As someone said below (maybe after you posted) > Then with that money I can do whatever I want... eg. buy an AMD washing machine... or generally a newer, faster one, becuase some time has gone by. Or go on a vacation. Or drugs and prostitutes.
  - amalcon 5y ago
    So, your plan in this case is to go buy a competitor's washing machine with the exact same flaw, which will perform approximately the same as the thing you're returning? Or to demand a full refund on something you've been using for five years, so that you can buy a newer product that's been released since? These don't seem like great solutions (the latter would be fine if you could pull it off, but good luck with that). The other options here are "Well, I'll just not have a washing machine". Which you can do, but it will take more time to clean your clothes and cost more money after not very many washes at all (or you hand-wash, but then you're looking at 10x as long). Same for computers -- if simply not having one is an option for you, you probably haven't noticed the degradation.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      So you're just going to let manufacturers cripple the stuff you bought, because of their mistakes/incompetence, and silently let them? They should give you your money back, or replace the CPU with one that is as fast as your old one before they crippled it - ie. new CPU with eg. higher clock to compensate for the speed loss due to this fix. If you buy a 1000lumen lightbulb, and the manufacturer has to lower the output by 50% because of overheating, they should either give me my money back, or give me a 2000lumen bulb which was crippled to 1000lumen, to get the original brightness i bought the bulb for.
themodelplumber 5y ago
There was a security issue. In order to fix the issue, so that your washing machine doesn't do something crazy like take over your bank account, we had to slow your washing machine down a bit. We expect that this issue will be sorted out soon. In the meantime we hope you'll consider that speed and security are sometimes traded off, in this world of network-aware, gigahertz speed washing machines which you can also use to do banking, create spreadsheets and watch your favorite movies.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
CPUs are overwhelmingly more complex than a washing machine. Or at least, than a washing machine from the 80s with analog controls (new washing machines have CPUS inside them). The problem, IMO, is that a manufacturer of a high-quality washing machine has the human ability to go through and engineer out or (or economize in) every conceivable failure mode. There's no need to issue updates, because it only does the specific behaviors that it was designed to do. Each part has a wear characteristic, can corrode, can be mechanically stressed...but a pressed sheet metal bracket is fundamentally always going to be a bracket, either it corrodes, or wears, or yields, or it doesn't, or else it holds the things it's supposed to hold, there's just not that many ways in which the performance of a bracket can surprise the designer. The owner's manual says it's to be transported carefully, installed on a flat surface indoors, plumbed to water/wired to 120VAC/drained through a standpipe, and then you operate it by adding clothes and turning the knob. It's a fixed-purpose washing machine, that's what it does. In contrast, Intel employed very smart, hardworking designers to write the microcode and HDL that describe the `vmovdqu YMMWORD PTR [rax], ymm1` assembly instruction, they thought about what that meant, what side effects it could have, why it should do what it does, and they probably were quite pleased when they optimized it to be faster when doing zero stores. But while the hypothetical ME for our washing machine could probably comprehend every requirement for the bracket, the Intel designers didn't build a fixed-purpose machine, they built a general-purpose machine that runs both trusted and untrusted code of unknown, highly flexible contents. The state machine describing all possible results of a Turing complete processor even with storage limited to mere gigabytes instead of an infinite tape, is unimaginably large. I maintain that numbers over a few thousand are humanly impossible to fully imagine, but to put it in concrete terms, worldwide, literally every second on the order of 10^20 novel combinations of 64 bit instructions are executed by a CPU, and every second, millions of programmers and computer users are generating never-before-seen demands of the hardwrae. It's impossible to predict every side effect of every combination of instructions a CPU will run. Meanwhile, the brackets are simple brackets, handing the same requirements and performing the same functions that the designer should have known about when they designed it.
renewiltord 5y ago
Because CPUs don’t have performance immutably specified in their specifications. You’ve decided that x transistors should yield y performance and so when you get y’ performance you get upset. But you were promised x transistors and you have x transistors. No one gave you a guarantee that “there will never be any security issues with this product and if there are, mitigations will cause no performance degradation”. If you want that promise you’re gonna have to pay for it, man. And it’s not gonna be a flat fee. That’s an insurance model.

showsover 5y ago

It's not a washing machine, it's a tiny motor inside the washing machine that only works with that model. What CPU are you replacing it with? Most if not all modern CPUs are vulnerable to this so changing it makes little sense. Even if you can change it, you'd need to switch motherboard as well.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I, as a consumer, don't care... I bring the whole washing machine to the store and get my money back, because they changed the specs after i bought it. Then with that money I can do whatever I want... eg. buy an AMD washing machine... or generally a newer, faster one, becuase some time has gone by. Or go on a vacation. Or drugs and prostitutes.
makeitdouble 5y ago
To parent's point, currently the risk is all pushed on the customer. We wouldn't accept that on any generic customer product. We'd recall whole fleet of cars if they had severe flaws that directly affect their performance. There might not be viable alternatives, but there should be at least something from CPU makers to help swallow the pill.

trynumber9 5y ago

You can still operate it with the original specifications. Do not apply the microcode if it's that important to your workload. Just remember to avoid running untrusted code.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
So i have two options: - keep the old "firmware", and risk the machine catching fire - put the new firmware on, and make it wash slower Yeah... I'll choose returning it to the store.
- trynumber9 5y ago
  Give it a shot, but for me it's simply one component in my laptop. I'm not going to bother unless there's a class action lawsuit.
- jozvolskyef 5y ago
  You don't risk the machine catching fire by itself but rather someone setting it on fire by letting you wash their clothes that are designed to ignite it. Or perhaps more accurately, someone spoiling your clothes by putting a dye in their pocket and letting you wash it in the same batch.
- Cerium 5y ago
  Situations like this happen often enough. The 2012 Nissan Leaf shipped with a regenerative braking configuration that stressed the battery too much leading to in-warranty replacement. Nissan issued a recall that patched the software to reduce regenerative breaking capacity leading to reduced range and reduced warranty replacements.
  - csours 5y ago
    And there are lawsuits quite regularly too: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099200_nissan-leaf-battery-capacity-lawsuit-court-approves-settlement https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099200_nissan-leaf-bat...
gpm 5y ago
The original specifications generally include "secure"... which you cannot operate it within without sacrificing other parts of the original spec. The problem isn't that they made the patch, it's that they made a defective part in the first place. The patch just fails to cure the fact that they made a defective part.

amalcon 5y ago

The issue here is that every washing machine of even remotely the same quality has more or less the same issue, regardless of manufacturer. So, you return it to the store. What do you do next? Spend even more going to the laundromat, even though you need to travel and it takes just as long once you're there? The remedy for an entire industry's product performing to a degree less than advertised is a class action lawsuit (good luck getting more than about five dollars for something like this), not returning the products for a refund.

gpm 5y ago
> So, you return it to the store. What do you do next? As someone said below (maybe after you posted) > Then with that money I can do whatever I want... eg. buy an AMD washing machine... or generally a newer, faster one, becuase some time has gone by. Or go on a vacation. Or drugs and prostitutes.
- amalcon 5y ago
  So, your plan in this case is to go buy a competitor's washing machine with the exact same flaw, which will perform approximately the same as the thing you're returning? Or to demand a full refund on something you've been using for five years, so that you can buy a newer product that's been released since? These don't seem like great solutions (the latter would be fine if you could pull it off, but good luck with that). The other options here are "Well, I'll just not have a washing machine". Which you can do, but it will take more time to clean your clothes and cost more money after not very many washes at all (or you hand-wash, but then you're looking at 10x as long). Same for computers -- if simply not having one is an option for you, you probably haven't noticed the degradation.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    So you're just going to let manufacturers cripple the stuff you bought, because of their mistakes/incompetence, and silently let them? They should give you your money back, or replace the CPU with one that is as fast as your old one before they crippled it - ie. new CPU with eg. higher clock to compensate for the speed loss due to this fix. If you buy a 1000lumen lightbulb, and the manufacturer has to lower the output by 50% because of overheating, they should either give me my money back, or give me a 2000lumen bulb which was crippled to 1000lumen, to get the original brightness i bought the bulb for.

themodelplumber 5y ago

There was a security issue. In order to fix the issue, so that your washing machine doesn't do something crazy like take over your bank account, we had to slow your washing machine down a bit. We expect that this issue will be sorted out soon. In the meantime we hope you'll consider that speed and security are sometimes traded off, in this world of network-aware, gigahertz speed washing machines which you can also use to do banking, create spreadsheets and watch your favorite movies.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

CPUs are overwhelmingly more complex than a washing machine. Or at least, than a washing machine from the 80s with analog controls (new washing machines have CPUS inside them). The problem, IMO, is that a manufacturer of a high-quality washing machine has the human ability to go through and engineer out or (or economize in) every conceivable failure mode. There's no need to issue updates, because it only does the specific behaviors that it was designed to do. Each part has a wear characteristic, can corrode, can be mechanically stressed...but a pressed sheet metal bracket is fundamentally always going to be a bracket, either it corrodes, or wears, or yields, or it doesn't, or else it holds the things it's supposed to hold, there's just not that many ways in which the performance of a bracket can surprise the designer. The owner's manual says it's to be transported carefully, installed on a flat surface indoors, plumbed to water/wired to 120VAC/drained through a standpipe, and then you operate it by adding clothes and turning the knob. It's a fixed-purpose washing machine, that's what it does. In contrast, Intel employed very smart, hardworking designers to write the microcode and HDL that describe the `vmovdqu YMMWORD PTR [rax], ymm1` assembly instruction, they thought about what that meant, what side effects it could have, why it should do what it does, and they probably were quite pleased when they optimized it to be faster when doing zero stores. But while the hypothetical ME for our washing machine could probably comprehend every requirement for the bracket, the Intel designers didn't build a fixed-purpose machine, they built a general-purpose machine that runs both trusted and untrusted code of unknown, highly flexible contents. The state machine describing all possible results of a Turing complete processor even with storage limited to mere gigabytes instead of an infinite tape, is unimaginably large. I maintain that numbers over a few thousand are humanly impossible to fully imagine, but to put it in concrete terms, worldwide, literally every second on the order of 10^20 novel combinations of 64 bit instructions are executed by a CPU, and every second, millions of programmers and computer users are generating never-before-seen demands of the hardwrae. It's impossible to predict every side effect of every combination of instructions a CPU will run. Meanwhile, the brackets are simple brackets, handing the same requirements and performing the same functions that the designer should have known about when they designed it.

renewiltord 5y ago

Because CPUs don’t have performance immutably specified in their specifications. You’ve decided that x transistors should yield y performance and so when you get y’ performance you get upset. But you were promised x transistors and you have x transistors. No one gave you a guarantee that “there will never be any security issues with this product and if there are, mitigations will cause no performance degradation”. If you want that promise you’re gonna have to pay for it, man. And it’s not gonna be a flat fee. That’s an insurance model.