Nvidia Blames Apple For Bug That Exposes Browsing In Chrome's Incognito (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader points out this story at VentureBeat about a bug in Chrome's incognito mode that might be a cause for concern for some Apple users. From the story: "If you use Google Chrome's incognito mode to hide what you browse (ahem, porn), this might pique your interest. University of Toronto engineering student Evan Andersen discovered a bug that affects Nvidia graphics cards, exposing content that you thought would be for your eyes only. And because this only happens on Macs, Nvidia is pointing the finger at Apple."

Comments

Re:Chrome?

[thegarbz]

Somehow, the idea that people would trust incognito mode in a browser made by a company whose profits mainly come from targeted advertising strikes me as really hilarious.

Why? They are two different and not incompatible processes. The company performs analytics and collects information about you to store on its servers. The incognito mode is designed to ensure a trace of the browsing session is not left on your PC.

There is a very big difference between the form of data collection here as well as the result of it. Mother is not going to know I search for dirty things based on Google's data collection.

Re: Except it's not.

[kthreadd]

I've seen it on GNU/Linux with Nvidia cards and their non-free driver for several years. This is not new and its not just Chrome.

Re: Except it's not.

[tibit]

The OS has very little control here, since the memory is not handled as memory, but as graphics resources. What's passed around isn't memory pages but texture buffers etc. These are managed by the graphics driver, and the OS expects the driver to do the right thing. I don't even think it's possible for the OS to handle this properly without there being clear API protocols that give the OS enough knowledge about what resources are passed around, and when they should be zero-initialized.