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Intel Told Chinese Firms of Meltdown Flaws Before the US Government (engadget.com)
According to The Wall Street Journal, Intel initially told a handful of customers about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, including Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Lenovo, before the U.S. government. As a result, the Chinese government could have theoretically exploited the holes to intercept data before patches were available. Engadget reports: An Intel spokesman wouldn't detail who the company had informed, but said that the company couldn't notify everyone (including U.S. officials) in time because Meltdown and Spectre had been revealed early. Lenovo said the information was protected by a non-disclosure agreement. Alibaba has suggested that any accusations of sharing info with the Chinese government was "speculative and baseless," but this doesn't rule out officials intercepting details without Alibaba's knowledge. There's no immediate evidence to suggest that China has taken advantage of the flaws, but that's not the point -- it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place.
Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume
If you are BASED in the US and hold GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS, then the Chinese (STILL a US ENEMY) should be the LAST to be informed of Exploits. This was a ridiculous, and a DANGEROUS misstep on Intel's Part. They need to "FEEL" This mistake Monetarily.
Talk about a non-story. Vendors told of problems that only vendors can fix before non-vendors involved.
News at ... fuck it, this is not news. It belongs in the Daily Flail.
There's no immediate evidence to suggest that China has taken advantage of the flaws, but that's not the point -- it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place.
Not to mention it would have been really handy for NSA to take advantage of the flaws for a while to spy on the Chinese government.
They could have exploited the Chinese first, duh.
Intel has business relationships with companies in China.
It is totally un-American to have such reverence for Uncle Sam; the government is just another organization—it's not worthy of religious devotion.
Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume
Nice theory but it lacks any basis in reality. Intel is literally over 10X the size of AMD by revenue (~$60B versus ~$5B) and AMD is in no danger of catching up to Intel any time soon. Furthermore most of Intel's manufacturing sites are in the US. They have precisely ONE chip fab in China versus NINE in the US. Approximately 75% of Intel's chip fabrication occurs in the US.
People tend to think of AMD as a close competitor but they aren't. Intel spends over double AMD's total revenue on R&D alone (~$12B last year). Frankly AMD really has no means to catch Intel in the markets that Intel dominates. Intel simply has an insurmountable cost advantage over AMD.
because naturally it wouldn't dream of spying on everyone as China's would /s
it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place.
With all the NSA disclosures of the last years, the US government did not exactly proofed themselves as more reliable when it comes to fixing things as compared to keeping them private and using them to spy on others.
Please note that I'm NOT saying Chinese, Russian or any other government would be trustworthier, so skip those replies
bickerdyke
Telling the US government was redundant as it definitely has a number of agencies that had knowledge of intel's myriad backdoors, ahem pardon, flaws, way in advance of implementing them into silicon.
You mean, instead of NSA/CIA? I'm pretty sure that US agencies would know about these issues long before it was made public. If all the leaks learned me something, they knew about it, probably exploited it... and now they are only trying to bash Intel for allowing other sides the access to the same info.
but that's not the point -- it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place
That is also irrelevant for Intel since it was not the author of the disclosure. If the CERTs were notified, then the US and other governments were notified, as well as the critical industries everywhere where there are national CERTs. Maybe they did coordinate the disclosure but the time limit was met nevertheless, without fixes available.
He has to do it.
He has to NUKE EM NOW!
It's the RUSSIANS that we need to be xenophobic against, not the Chinese! Obama loved China and loved to throw the U.S. under the bus to show how much China mattered to him. Therefore, you are RACIST for saying anything negative about China.
That's an insane point of view. Who's in charge? If you want your world run by corporations you are a dangerous person.
Time and time again we've heard this argument that some incumbent has an "insurmountable advantage". Then what happens? Some competitor comes along and crushes the incumbent!
Web browsers are a good example of this. Netscape had huge market share for a few years. Then IE came along and rather quickly the tables had turned. IE became the dominant browser for a number of years. Then all of a sudden Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox comes along, and it takes a huge chunk out of IE. Of course, Mozilla didn't listen to its users and started making unwanted changes to Firefox, so Chrome came along and utterly destroyed both Firefox and IE. Now Chrome is the dominant browser by a huge margin.
Linux is another example of this effect in progress. Linux managed to see a lot of server and embedded use, and even a small amount of desktop use. But we've seen things like systemd ruin Linux's reliability in server environments, causing users to move to more reliable OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Linux has failed to provide a good desktop environment, so we see users using macOS or Windows instead. Linux is even failing in the embedded arena, with many users now choosing the better-licensed NetBSD, or the more reliable QNX, or even creating their own embedded OSes, like Google appears to be doing with Fuchsia. It's looking more and more likely that Linux, despite seeing significant use, will become a dead/irrelevant OS much like Windows XP now is.
An "insurmountable advantage" is often not insurmountable at all.
You're pissed that for a change a different secret service gets to spy on the world with a 0day?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They probably knew about Meltdown for years. They may even have ordered it in the first place.
Because, screw it its Monday, I'm going to one up you by giving all that plus the nagging suspicion that the flaws in the architecture were identified but "overlooked" by some individuals near the original time of implementation. Even in retrospect it's hard to imagine how absolutely no one caught onto either of the exploits, but doubly so meltdown.
calling the accusations "speculative and baseless" is not actually a denial.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What's to say last Summer was the first anyone knew of this flaw in chips? Very possible a government could have known about it for years since the hardware has been exposed to this flaw. We act as if Meltdown and Spectre were the first discovery and we don't know that for sure. In any case the fix is replacing the bad hardware not cobbling together patches and firmware. Unless Intel finally decides that offering a kill switch to the speculative loading is the only option. So much for Intel's transparency.
That's slightly misleading, because it assumes that all of Intel is competing with all of AMD. They have some competing business units, but they are not entirely direct competitors.
I don't think it is misleading at all. You are correct that it's not 100% apples to apples but let's not pretend that a vast amount of AMDs revenue isn't directly competitive with Intel.
AMD no longer owns its own fabs, so doesn't require the same economise of scale to get the cost per wafer down
Incorrect. AMD doesn't get to escape those costs by outsourcing. While it may be cheaper than they could accomplish on their own (AMD is likely too small to achieve minimum efficient scale) it doesn't mean they can achieve cost parity with Intel and in fact you can tell they haven't by reading their financial statements. Intel makes twice as much profit every quarter as AMD brings in in total sales so that means Intel's costs are lower than AMD's by a lot. In a price war Intel wins in a romp. Furthermore those third party chip fabs don't make stuff for free so AMD has to pay a non-trivial markup on every chip they sell. Intel doesn't have this problem as they are vertically integrated and can keep that profit. AMD basically has to compete with Intel on price and Intel has an insurmountable cost advantage. You don't have to take my word for it. Look at their financial statements for proof. AMD is winning business mostly by charging thinner margins and because Intel let's them alone to keep anti-trust regulators off their backs.
The vast majority of that is on process technology, which is no longer a business that AMD is in (and where the returns have been very low for the past 5 years).
That process technology isn't a cost AMD escapes. You are under the misapprehension that outsourcing removes these costs - it doesn't. They just pay another company to do it for them plus a profit margin too - at the end of the day they pay MORE. Plus you are missing the important point. Intel has WAY more resources than AMD. Intel's PROFITS are over double AMDs total sales. In fact Intel's profits last year were roughly equal to AMDs entire market capitalization (both around $12B). Intel could literally drop their prices to below cost for AMD on all the products they compete in and still make a profit. Intel could drive AMD out of the market any time they wanted. The only reason Intel doesn't is to avoid anti-trust scrutiny.
"When the last Capitalist is hung he will sell us the rope to do it" - Nikita Khrushchev While China is no longer a Communist state they learned the lessons well. The oligarchy that will rule the world will not be based in the West.
so they would _definitely_ have exploited it. Again, there has never been anything of significance presented to prove that China has engaged in the same kind of activities that America and its NSA and CIA do.
This wouldn't have happened under Digital/DEC or Sun/Tarantella or pre-Carley HP.
Why is it automatically assumed US would do good, but China bad? Haven't we seen Wikileaks? I am 100% sure US would keep it secret and use this however they could dream about. They are no Robin Hood. Works, not words define who you are. Both regarding person or country.
As if there were such a thing as "patriotism" or "repercussions" in Corp America.
Their basic motto is "Fuck all of you.".
I RTFA (the non-paywalled one). Was is 6 months sooner, 6 days sooner, or 6 tenths of a second sooner? A couple of days, when news has already broken of a major flaw, isn't nearly as bad as weeks, or months, of early knowledge.
Your unstated premise is the the US we have today is a good thing; you're also implying that the ends justify the means.
Both of those statements are dubious.
I, for one, would be interested in a society that grows through the voluntary adoption of values, rather than the coercive imposition of values.
I've been assured that American corporations are only friends of freedom(tm)?1?
WHORES. We should start shooting the executive class. SOON.
How does one ensure proper punishment for a Corporation?
Listen to my music.
... who is worse: Chinese firms or US government?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Time and time again we've heard this argument that some incumbent has an "insurmountable advantage". Then what happens? Some competitor comes along and crushes the incumbent!
AMD has had over 30 years to "crush" Intel and hasn't been able to get it done. Not a lot of reason to believe they are going to suddenly succeed after decades of playing a (distant) second fiddle. While it's not impossible that AMD invents something miraculous that Intel cannot match, it is deeply improbable. And while they would risk anti-trust litigation, Intel could put AMD out of the CPU business in very short order if they were given a free hand to do so. They could simply lower costs to below AMD's costs and hold them there. Intel wouldn't even have to take a loss to do it since Intel makes more in profit each year than AMD brings in in revenue.
Web browsers are a good example of this.
No they aren't because web browsers don't require billions in capital expenditures and billions more in R&D to make a product. Manufacturing a physical bit of hardware isn't really much like software development at all.
An "insurmountable advantage" is often not insurmountable at all.
Show me a credible path by which AMD conquers Intel in the CPU market and I'll concede the point and furthermore I'll buy AMD stock if I believe you. I have no dog in this fight and I don't care who wins. I'm just pointing out the economic reality which is that Intel can for the foreseeable future crush AMD and/or buy them out with figurative pocket change.
Well not a fine, just none of my $.
Who is selling a ARM8 laptop that can load current Linux kernels & be free of proprietary port drivers? The new Qualcoms with ARM cores will never be secure. What I want is a laptop with A53 or faster 64 bit multicore CPU and a graphic processor, all without proprietary code to run ports & memory access.
Seem like the accusations are based on the Chinese government intercepting these communications, so under the same premise we can assume that the US government did know, as the US government did intercept the communications. (Maybe it had a bit of technical speak in there and they didn't know what it meant).
If you want your world run by corporations you are a dangerous person.
Oh yeah sorry. I forgot the world is run on open source Windows on open source hardware with everything in the open at all times.
If you think that vendors solving vendor problems isn't perfectly normal in our world then you're delusional. But if not, now that the bug is in the open maybe you can send me updated microcode? Maybe the government can? Right? I mean you seem to think that that is the norm and everyone has access to vendor code and systems right?
I think you've been using BSD too long.
Companies around the world should be warned about this before the USG. If there is one group of people we all know will threaten the security of everyone it is the USG.
AMD doesn't escape them, but they get to share them.
Sharing them only helps if your competition cannot fully utilize their own production capacity. That is not the case here. Intel has substantial production capacity which they (so far) are able to utilize efficiently and don't have to pay any margin leakage. Furthermore there are substantial advantages to be had from being vertically integrated. Any time you rely on a third party to produce something there are a host of frictional problems that add costs. Sometimes these are worth dealing with but they aren't a good thing if your competition doesn't have them.
Let me give an example from my own company which is comparable. We make wire harnesses. One of our products is a simple lead (wire plus terminal and seal) we sell to one of our customer for about $0.15 each. Currently we buy these leads from a third party for about $0.11 each because we don't have quite enough business to justify the $100,000 price of the automated production equipment needed to make them ourselves. We would need to make about a million of these per year to justify the equipment with a reasonably short breakeven but we only have orders for about 300,000 per year. If we owned the equipment and operate it at scale we could make the leads for about $0.08 each. At our current scale it makes sense to outsource the production but a larger company that already owns the production equipment. A competitor that has enough business to own the machine and utilize it fully could easily undercut us on price and not even have to take a loss. In this case we are in the role of AMD and our theoretical competitor is Intel.
YThe cost of developing a new process tech is huge (on the order of $10bn+). If you're selling ten million chips, then that's $1,000 per chip. You need to get a good hundred million chips out of the fabs before they start to bring the cost per chip down low enough that you can sell them.
And to date Intel has been able to do exactly that.
Even Intel is struggling to get the required economies of scale. They keep trying to get other people to use their fabs, but no one wants to use a fab where they're always going to be lower priority than Intel and where Intel may suddenly decide that they're competitors. They event threw in Atom IP cores basically for free for anyone willing to fab their SoCs with Intel. It didn't work.
This is actually a real concern for Intel. They have a huge investment in production capacity and they have to be able to utilize it fully to continue to maintain their strategic position and cost advantage. So far they've managed the trick but if they have an Achilles heel where AMD is concerned, this is it.
Again, that's a nonsense comparison. It's including Intel NICs, Intel SSDs, and all of the other things where Intel has a huge presence and AMD has none.
It's not nonsense at all. Those additional profits matter because they can support Intel in a price war in a particular market segment. It's illegal to sell below cost but Intel doesn't have to do that to hurt AMD. Intel just has to price their chips below AMD's cost to produce and it is game over. And Intel can do that because they have a cost advantage. Intel could put AMD out of business and not even have to go into the red to do it. Now this won't happen for various reasons but it is the economic cloud AMD has lived under for decades. It's also why AMD has been diversifying away from their CPU business. They know they cannot beat Intel in the CPU market.
You really don't understand how economies of scale work in this market.
I'm a certified accountant and I run a contract manufacturing company for my day job. I assure you I understand the economies of scale better than most and you aren't thinking about it properly. You have the bits about the startup capital costs more or less correct but yo
...Didn't have crucial Intel from a company named "Intel"?