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Intel Told Chinese Firms of Meltdown Flaws Before the US Government (engadget.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the non-disclosure dept.

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.

9 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume

  2. This should lead to Fines for Intel by Zurkeyon3733 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:This should lead to Fines for Intel by AvitarX · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How is China a US enemy?

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    2. Re:This should lead to Fines for Intel by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Enemy? Was there a declaration of war from the Congress that everybody but you missed?

      I think the word you are looking for is "rival". And countries having rivals can sometimes be a good thing - it keeps everybody honest.

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      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    3. Re:This should lead to Fines for Intel by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're more like a "frenemy", as much as I dislike the word.

  3. And just what was the US government supposed to do by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Intel plants are in the USA by sjbe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Come again please? by bickerdyke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

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    bickerdyke
  6. "insurmountable advantage"! Heard that before! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Intel simply has an insurmountable cost advantage over AMD.

    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.