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Apple Updates macOS and iOS To Address Spectre Vulnerability (engadget.com)
Days after Apple disclosed how it would be dealing with the Meltdown bug that affects modern computers, it's pushed out fixes for the Spectre exploit as well. From a report: iOS 11.2.2 includes "Security improvements to Safari and WebKit to mitigate the effects of Spectre," the company writes on its support page, while the macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update does the same for your Mac laptop or desktop. Installing this update on your Mac will also update Safari to version 11.0.2.
You forgot to change the default settings for your apps. You can do the following:
1. For podcasts they default to checking and downloading every hour. Yes, every hour. Reset these to Every Day, or for weekly podcasts, Every Week. For podcasts that post during the day, consider Every 6 Hours. Each time it checks it will connect, search, and download.
2. Turn off apps you don't want running when you have Wireless or Cell service. A lot of times you only want one of these.
3. Turn off Sync for almost anything. The only exception tends to be Calendar.
4. Turn off Bluetooth if you're not using it.
5. Always turn things off in Settings. Never use the pull down pull up menus to turn things off. That will only turn things off for one hour.
6. Every patch, Apple resets everything. Go check again, they probably turned them on. They just turned on my Ring on Notification even after I had turned it off, once the patch was installed. Yes, it's a royal pain.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not seeing a macOS patch available for El Capitan or Sierra. (10.11, 10.12).
This is outrageous that Apple is rolling out some software update to "help" our processors function better without asking us! I demand to be asked whether I want this software fix to be implemented, because it makes my processor work slower! I want to do this myself. Apple sucks and don't get me started on batteries.
A joke, for sure, since System 9 and lower only had partial/half-assed memory protection (if you could call it that, and only for PowerPC code. 68k systems had none, IIRC).
However, it would be an interesting academic exercise to see whether PowerPC 603/604/750 have the same issues and to what extent.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
See? Apple delivered the update without bricking* any AMD CPUs! That's how you do it!
*the term is used here very loosely.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
68K didn't use memory protection, PowerPC used only just enough to get it to work.
In theory I believe the later PowerPCs did do OOO execution with branch preduction, but the early ones did not. It was deemed not necessary since it was a RISC processor and the instructions were very simple to not need such sophisticated techniques. Then we realized superscalar lets us do more than one instruction per clock and achieve even higher speeds.
Interestingly, Apple claims its Axx processors are also susceptible to Meltdown attacks - not just Intel. Though they're not fixing it via page table isolation (which their old 32-bit processors had - darwin was a 4G/4G system and the kernel always had its own memory map on 32-bit). Since Apple controls the whole stack, they're fixing Safari/Webkit to block that kind of javascript attack