Free Republic

Is there anyone left who doesn’t see that Joe Biden is not the president? Joe Biden isn’t running the show. Everyone in Washington DC knows Joe Biden is for all intents and purposes brain-dead. Everyone knows he should be in a nursing home with a sign around his neck listing his name and phone number in case he wanders off. Everyone knows he wears diapers. Everyone knows he doesn’t know what year it is, or most of the time, where he is, what he’s reading on the teleprompter, or what he’s signing. This is the worst kept secret in history:...

When the globalist elites fly into Davos, Switzerland, in coming days to prepare for the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting, they will be far from alone as they step off their private jet transports and into the fleet of waiting limousines.Some 5,000-plus soldiers from the Swiss army are deployed to welcome attendees to the luxury ski resort and protect participants from any harassment, protests or dissenting voices.

VIDEOIn both physical appearance and global megalomania they are identical. World Economic Forum? Just say "SPECTRE." It's all the same. And you MUST comply! Why? Because you vill own nothing and you VILL be happy!

Ghost Riders in the Sky

The bleakly beautiful and intensely nerve-rattling “1917” (opening Friday) ostensibly is a war film set amid the brutal realities of trench warfare between England and Germany on the fields of rural France in World War I. And it is that, so much so that you can almost feel the mud and viscera ooze between your fingers when a soldier, who has landed in a pool of muck, mistakes a fallen fighter’s corpse for something sturdy and his hand plunges deep into a body cavity. But “1917,” the latest film from director Sam Mendes (who made the James Bond films “Skyfall”...

A report by German tech site heise.de says Intel's CPUs are affected by eight new "Spectre-class" vulnerabilities, including one found by Google's Project Zero, which identified the first set of CPU flaws known as Meltdown and Spectre. The site reports that the bugs have been assigned CVE identifiers and that at least one of them will be revealed by Project Zero on May 7, a day ahead of Patch Tuesday, which Microsoft recently begun using to distribute Intel's hardware patches or microcode updates.The site says it has concrete evidence that Intel processors are vulnerable to the new flaws and that...

Chipmaker AMD has released new microcode updates to mitigate the Spectre variant 2 side-channel attack, which Microsoft has supported with a Windows 10 patch for AMD systems. AMD's latest microcode update coincided with Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday fixes and comes just weeks after Intel wrapped up its Spectre 2 mitigations for all CPU families released over the past nine years. AMD's chief mitigation for its chips on Windows affected by variant 2 CPU indirect branch target injections is called 'indirect branch prediction barrier' (IBPB), which is only intended for cases when software switches from one user context to a context...

MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, found by Princeton and NVIDIA researchers, may require significant hardware changes to be mitigated. MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, new variants of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, could put PCs at risk of another type of cyberattack. The MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime exploits could be harder to protect against than the original Meltdown and Spectre flaws, because of how deep their flaws exist in the processor. Security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton have discovered new variants of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws that may be more difficult to tackle than the originals. Dubbed MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, these flaws were further...

Intel has started releasing new microcode updates that should address one of the Spectre vulnerabilities after the first round of patches caused significant problems for many users. The company has so far released new firmware updates only for its Skylake processors, but expects updates to become available for other platforms as well in the coming days. Customers and partners have been provided beta updates to ensure that they can be extensively tested before being moved into production. The chipmaker started releasing microcode patches for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities shortly after the attack methods were disclosed by researchers. However, the...

Out-of-band patch may assuage user anger over Intel crudware, closed-club disclosure process Microsoft has implemented Intel's advice to reverse the Spectre variant 2 microcode patches.Redmond issued a rare weekend out-of-cycle advisory on Saturday here, to make the unwind possible.Intel's first patch was so bad, it made many computers less stable, sending Linus Torvalds into a justifiable meltdown last week.Chipzilla later withdrew the patch, but it had made its way into a Microsoft fix, which the company pulled on Saturday.“Our own experience is that system instability can in some circumstances cause data loss or corruption,” Microsoft wrote, adding “We understand that...

Apple releases iOS 11.2.5 Tuesday, January 23, 2018 · 1:17 pm Apple today released iOS 11.2.5 which includes support for HomePod and introduces the ability for Siri to read the news (US, UK and Australia only). This update also includes bug fixes and improvements. HomePod support Setup and automatically transfer your Apple ID, Apple Music, Siri and Wi-Fi settings to HomePod. Siri News Siri can now read the news, just ask, “Hey Siri, play the news”. You can also ask for specific news categories including Sports, Business or Music. Other improvements and fixes Addresses an issue that could cause the...

Is Intel really planning on making this shit architectural? Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane? They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense. That makes all your [i.e. Woodhouse’s] arguments questionable and suspicious. The patches do things that are not sane. …So somebody isn’t telling the truth here. Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons. Sorry for having to point that out. ...Intel, for its part, offered the following statement: “We take the feedback of industry partners seriously. We are actively engaging with the Linux community, including Linus,...

Ah, speculative execution. Man’s ever needing desire to get more done in less time resulted in a similar design for microprocessors. With the third wave maturing and on the brink of fading, speed is all that matters today. Information is available in the blink of an eye and requires similar speeds for decision making. Hesitate, and you’re done for. However, in the microprocessor case, this didn’t serve us too well. Speculative Execution on microprocessor didn’t account for what would happen should past usage trends not materialize. When we talk about every day processes, such as reading the news, this matters...

As a performance junkie, I’m less concerned about the security risks of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities—after all, there are no known exploits in use today—than I am about a performance hit from the fixes.And from what I’m seeing, my concerns are warranted.My sole experience with a fully updated platform so far is with Microsoft’s original Surface Book. It’s based on an Intel “Skylake” Core i7-6700U and has 16GB of LPDDR3 and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive. The Surface Book is running the 64-bit Windows 10 Pro Fall Creator’s Update.[ Further reading: How to remove malware from your...

Apple just released iOS 11.2.2 with some Safari and WebKit improvements to mitigate the Spectre vulnerability. macOS is also receiving an update. It’s a supplemental update to macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 and it includes the same fix.As always, you should update your devices with the latest security patches. In this case, Meltdown and Spectre are serious vulnerabilities. With Meltdown, a malicious application running on an unpatched device can read the unencrypted kernel memory. You don’t want anyone to grab your password and private encryption keys.Meltdown was already addressed in previous updates. iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2 and tvOS 11.2 already...

Users have complained that the updates released by Microsoft last week for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities cause Windows to break down on some computers with AMD processors. Several individuals whose computers rely on AMD processors, particularly older Athlon models, say they are unable to start Windows 10 after installing KB4056892, an update released by Microsoft in response to the disclosure of serious flaws affecting Intel, AMD and ARM processors. The security holes have been dubbed Spectre and Meltdown and they allow malicious applications to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access passwords, photos, documents, emails, and other sensitive information. Both...

A series of flaws have been discovered in Intel, AMD, and ARM chipsets that allow speculative references to be probed for privileged data. "Meltdown" is a flaw currently believed to affect only Intel processors and "melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware". "Spectre" is a flaw that affects Intel, AMD, and ARM processors due to the way "speculative execution" is handled. Both could theoretically be used to read information from a computer's memory, including private information like passwords, photos, messages, and more. Apple has apparently already started patching Meltdown in macOS. Here's what you need to know....

What are Meltdown and Spectre? Do they only affect Intel chips? Will the fixes slow my computer … and what even is a processor? Meltdown and Spectre are the names of two serious security flaws that have been found within computer processors. They could allow hackers to steal sensitive data without users knowing, one of them affecting chips made as far back as 1995. What are Meltdown and Spectre? Meltdown is a security flaw that could allow hackers to bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer’s core memory, which is normally highly protected. Spectre is...

Two major flaws in computer chips could leave a huge number of computers and smartphones vulnerable to security concerns, researchers revealed Wednesday. And a U.S. government-backed body warned that the chips themselves need to be replaced to completely fix the problems. The flaws could allow an attacker to read sensitive data stored in the memory, like passwords, or look at what tabs someone has open on their computer, researchers found. Daniel Gruss, a researcher from Graz University of Technology who helped identify the flaw, said it may be difficult to execute an attack, but billions of devices were impacted. Related:...

Microsoft has warned some PC users they will not be able to apply an emergency Windows patch because their security software is incompatible. The out-of-bounds update was issued by Microsoft yesterday to address the Meltdown and Spectre flaws in Intel chips. These vulnerabilities affect most PCs and servers, and can be exploited to allow an attacker to read sensitive information, such as passwords, from protected memory. The Spectre flaw also affects AMD chips, but is considerably more difficult to exploit, as well as a small number of Arm-based processors. However, not every Microsoft system will be able to apply the...