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Intel Did Not Tell US Cyber Officials About Chip Flaws Until Made Public (reuters.com)
Intel Corp did not inform U.S. cyber security officials of Meltdown and Spectre chip security flaws until they leaked to the public, six months after Alphabet notified the chipmaker of the problems, according to letters sent by tech companies to lawmakers on Thursday. From a report: Current and former U.S. government officials have raised concerns that the government was not informed of the flaws before they became public because the flaws potentially held national security implications. Intel said it did not think the flaws needed to be shared with U.S. authorities as hackers had not exploited the vulnerabilities. Intel did not tell the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, better known as US-CERT, about Meltdown and Spectre until Jan. 3, after reports on them in online technology site The Register had begun to circulate.
who exactly would trust them with this information? We all know they would have spent the last 6-months exploiting them and attempting to find more variations.
Netburst was Intel's utter x86 architecture disaster- but at the time every major tech outlet declared it FAR superior to AMD's infinitely better Athlon 64, cos of Intel's Payolla.
Netburst was going to 10GHz, didn't ya know, and that was all that mattered. But Intel knew the truth, killed Netburst, and rebooted the Pentium 3, crossed with AMD innovations available to Intel via its cross patent licence with AMD.
So CORE 2 was born (now just called core). Only problem was, the dreadful 'engineers' at Intel Israel had sabotaged the design by removing all data privilege tests- the process by which a thread is blocked from accessing data owned by another thread of different privilege.
By dropping these hardware data blocks, Intel's architecture got faster- MUCH faster. And the NSA, GCHQ etc were guaranteed a method by which any user code injection would have access to any data on an Intel part.
Here's the current risk table- Intel since Netburst vs AMD's new amazing Ryzen:
Intel (core2/Core) AMD (Ryzen)
Meltdown: 1000 0
Spectre 500 0.1
AMD is a LITTLE slower per clock per thread on current compiler output down to the fact that Ryzen has low level hardware data privilege circuits, whereas Intel does not. Intel relies on DOMAIN methods- a hybrid technique that relies on trust and the OS.
All current Intel chips are broken by design and unfixable unless you only run one thread at a time on the entire chip and flush every chip asset each time you time slice a new thread. But to do this would reduce Intel's performance by perhaps 80-95%.
Intel cannot fix its architecture within even two years from this date. It needs a from scartch redesign. So Intel instead floods outlets all across the net with anti-AMD FUD.
Smart move for Intel. Would you tell your government where you keep your secrets?
Of course intelligence agencies knew about it. While I'm not a huge fan (or detractor though) of Assange, he made a good case for Google being essentially an arm of the State Department. Why do you think that China has such an issue with Google? The US now warns about Chinese cell phone manufacturers and that their products are possibly unsafe, but this is very much a case of the fire pit calling the kettle black.
The NSA certainly knew of, and have likely been exploiting this for years. The only positive in this is that, unlike the last time, at least time time they didn't let their exploit out in the wild. That little gem, not telling the public about zero day vulnerabilities they failed to disclose, which they subsequently weaponized, then lost control of the code for, cost more billions in ransomeware attacks than any other single source.
The choice between trusting my US gov't, who supposedly answers to the American people, or a global multinational corporate that answers to no one, is no choice to me at all. I choose the US gov't
It doesn't, the US gov works for the banks and corporations.
That's why banks get bail outs and CEOs get big bonuses.