The responsibility for this man's death lies solely with the criminal who made the call.
Obviously not..... there's something wrong here, that a random person anywhere in the world can make a caller-id spoofed VoIP call to a police department anywhere in the US: impersonate the addressee/target, conjure up a pretend emergency, and incite sufficient panic that the police go on a shooting spree and kill people.
How about: The simplified proximate CAUSE of the death is unreasonable actions by the police, which the SWATter could not have entirely anticipated, But the police in this situation Violated their Duty to serve and protect the public and killed innocent people. What about that? Where are the consequences for that, for the officers' gross misconduct?
In the end, the prankster didn't pull the trigger and there is no reasonable world in which one should expect to be killed by police over a prank phone call.
Exactly. That's why the police/man who pulled the trigger ought to get Life imprisonment, and the person who did the SWAT'ing should get 20 years.
We do not live in a world where planes take off and land while pilots sit in the back and booze it up with the rest of the passengers
Of course not..... blazing through the 3-dimensional airspace with hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives at stake if a mechanical instrumentation failure occurs in flight and the one pilot is not there to compensate.
I don't think there will EVER be a time when a human flight crew is not required to monitor the operation of passenger aircraft, but the things that can go wrong in air navigation are much more complicated than the things that can go wrong in 2-d ground navigation.
They are not analyzing metadata, as most malware C&C now pretends to be web traffic.
They could look at the IP addresses of the connections (Check against blacklist of malicious IPs); SSL Metadata, e.g. the SNI hostname from TLS, then look at reputation data regarding the hostname; certificate and public key information, common crypto parameters (Maybe some malware configures a HTTPS client uniquely). They can detect whether the SSL connection "Looks like" a normal web connection, or whether it looks like a VPN or continuous stream of data such as C and C.
Also ironic given that the initial justification for bitcoin was to minimize transaction fees
This is called Bitcoin breaking. That doesn't mean it's irreparably broken though.... it just means BTC is broken for now and currently isn't offering the main advantage that should incentivize merchants adopting it.... IMO They should consider Litecoin instead.
If bitcoin is not currency, what is the driving force behind owning it?
Just think of it like this: Bitcoin is a viable currency, BUT the smallest spendable denomination is the $500 bill. You can make change easily, but you can't make a $5 payment easily, because getting a 5 note requires $15 in fees for some reason.
Give it 90 days for 100% SegWit adoption across the ecosystem and the Lightning network to get up to speed and see some adoption, and then re-evaluate Bitcoin's prospects (IMO).
JavaScript CAN do this by inferring the memory values through the side-channel, first of all because JavaScript is assembled into machine language (Just-in-Time compilation). Did you see the Javascript POC for Spectre?
LISTING 2: Exploiting Speculative Execution via JavaScript
1 if (index < simpleByteArray.length) { 2 index = simpleByteArray[index | 0]; 3 index = (((index * TABLE1_STRIDE)|0) & (TABLE1_BYTES-1))|0; 4 localJunk ^= probeTable[index|0]|0; 5 }
... To obtain the x86 disassembly of the JIT output during development, the command-line tool D8 was used.
Manual tweaking of the source code leading up to the snippet above was done to get the value of simpleByteArray.length in local memory (instead of cached in a register or requiring multiple instructions to fetch). See Listing 3 for the resulting disassembly output from D8 (which uses AT&T assembly syntax). The clflush instruction is not accessible from JavaScript, so cache flushing was performed by reading a series of addresses at 4096-byte intervals out of a large array. Because of the memory and cache configuration on Intel processors, a series of 2000 such reads (depending on the processor’s cache size) were adequate evict out the data from the processor’s caches for addresses having the same value in address bits 11–6 [38]. The leaked results are conveyed via the cache status of probeTable[n*4096] for n 0..255, so each attempt begins with a flushing pass consisting of a series of reads made from probeTable[n*4096] using values of n > 256.
LISTING 3: Disassembly of Listing 2
1 cmpl r15,[rbp-0xe0] ; Compare index (r15) against simpleByteArray.length
2 jnc 0x24dd099bb870 ; If index >= length, branch to instruction after movq below
3 REX.W leaq rsi,[r12+rdx*1] ; Set rsi=r12+rdx=addr of first byte in simpleByteArray
4 movzxbl rsi,[rsi+r15*1] ; Read byte from address rsi+r15 (= base address+index)
5 shll rsi, 12 ; Multiply rsi by 4096 by shifting left 12 bits}\%\
6 andl rsi,0x1ffffff ; AND reassures JIT that next operation is in-bounds
7 movzxbl rsi,[rsi+r8*1] ; Read from probeTable
8 xorl rsi,rdi ; XOR the read result onto localJunk
Meltdown is more serious, but the mitigation is straight forward with some degree of performance degradation.
I would say the word is acute. Meltdown is extremely acute because of the ease of quick results from exploitation but less serious overall than Spectre, because Meltdown will be easily addressed systematically by patches.... apply the patches, and the realistic concerns are mostly gone (although the current fixes have been rushed out too quickly and are thus causing major problems).
Spectre is more serious because it represents a major issue where process' can be made to leak sensitive credentials across boundaries, that is basically going to have the only option being hardware changes to fix fully.
If lawsuits will result against any chip manufacturers; probably Spectre will be the largest concern, although it's possible for some users the Meltdown fix has a particularly grievous affect on system performance, that seems less likely to be a class action situation.
It seems like you're basically asking for someone to have done 14 hours of editing work so you could avoid focusing on something significant for an hour or so .
I already gave you a TL;DW summary; the case history is essentially yet more evidence against Yelp sales team practices though.
Where does the constitution restrict the judicial branch from making a ruling in any matter involving either the legislative or executive branch?
A specific restriction isn't necessary, because the judicial is only empowered to do the things which the constitution and the law states the judiciary is empowered to do. The Judicial branch is ONLY able to make their rulings on what is law and Orders enjoining against furthering harm from violating the law or the constitution based on the dispute before them --- the Legislative and Executive branches have their own agency (Independent judgement), and the Judicials are not superior to the Legislative or the Executive branch in their power or authority: Fundamentally the judiciary IS RESTRICTED and cannot order around other branches, And if there is a disagreement --- it's called a constitutional crisis, because they are 3 equal branches of government.
Our constitutional form of government is NOT a hierarchy with the Judiciary branch at the top, and our supreme court is not a "Ruling Committee" who can hand down any order desired to alter or delete any law at will or increase or decrease or change the enforcement of any law in whatsoever manager as the committee desires. The Judicial branch makes orders based on law, and it is up to the elected leaders and bureaucrats in other branches of government to follow lawful orders (or to ignore them, as they have in some cases)
In the same manner that the president cannot order the court to rule X on case Y, or order the court to consider case Z, and the legislature cannot pass a law that the court must never review law Y and the feds can't pass a law that state laws about X be held unconstitutional; the Judiciary has its own independent agency that cannot be taken on by other branches of government -- its rulings on cases.
In exactly the same way the Legislative and Executive branches of government have specific agency in the powers granted them by the constitution -- the judiciary does NOT have the power to override the agency of other branches of government and take actions on their behalf, And the judiciary does not have the power to Order another branch of government to do X with their agency ----- for example, the court cannot order congress to pass law Y, or create tax Z. Although the court CAN invalidate law Y or provide taxpayer relief by declaring debts under tax Z invalid.
The Judicial branch is not empowered to take over any legislative or executive duty and exercise that role on its own.
If the law doesn't say the court can draw their own map, then the court does not have the power to simply draw their own map, and that is true even if the legislature fails or refuses to draw a new map on its own that satisfies the court.
That said, the fact that a state (or a voter) went for Obama and then Trump is no proof of nefarious meddling.
It's interesting that 2 of the 3 judges are democrat appointees, AND political gerrymandering has never been held unconstitutional before despite many challenges
--- the rules are your districts must each have near identical population, AND your districts must not be drawn so as to dilute the representation of racial minority groups.
Sort of..... I suggest watching Louis Rossman's Yelp-related videos; I saw a few years ago --- they were an eye opener regarding their Salespeoples' practices, to say the least.
SPOILER: There's a really aggressive sales person involved who was happy to violate users' privacy AND there are fake negative reviews involved that were posted against the business after the Yelp salesperson was told NO.
Since when did the US SENATE become an escalation contact for internal Customer Service issues between Apple and their customers?
overseeing business issues asked Apple to answer questions about its disclosure that it slowed older iPhones with flagging batteries.... the large volume of consumer criticism leveled against the company in light of its admission suggests that there should have been better transparency.
Sounds like Apple made a design decision to limit their costs: a less-performant or more fragile than originally expected battery will be tolerated and compensated for by the devices, with graceful degradation, and without showing an explicit notification to the user -- instead the end user will have to detect if their device is degraded below what they feel it should be and then contact Apple based on that.
It is the same story for MANY kinds of hardware issues ---- many failures can go undetected for years, Or only cause an occasional crash, and
the device automatically reboots itself to help reduce the impact of a periodic glitch. If the end user themself cannot identify that there's a problem, then there is no problem.
Apple is a huge technology player, but they're no monopoly on paper.
Although I am personally of the mind that these 5 companies should be broken up: Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Apple, and in that order.
Just because they're large and they therefore upset a LOT of people if they make a mistake, or make a decision that makes customers dissatisfied: does not suddenly mean that it is valid government business to poke into Apple PR and Customer issues.
Spectre is Variant 1 and 2. Meltdown is Variant 3.
No. ALL three variants enable Meltdown and Spectre.... you're kind of confouding the description of vulnerabilities with the name for the attacks they made possible
Meltdown is the attack that can read arbitrary kernel memory, and Spectre is the attack that lets you leak secrets from another program.
AMD is vulnerable to Spectre, and it's likely part of the way at least towards a Meltdown type attack being possible, But so far it seems unlikely there will be the direct comparable issue to what Intel has, and AMD goes even farther to say there's Zero risk of the rogue cache read... That should be highly re-assuring to AMD users, but some risk remains, especially until Variant 1 is addressed in hardware on AMD.
AMD checks the permissions BEFORE allowing access to the cache, Intel does not; therefore Meltdown is REALLY Intel only.
Apparently not; AMD is already known to be vulnerable to the bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753), so supposedly "checking permissions" before allowing access to cache didn't stop that.
The only question is does AMD have any kind of equivalent to the other issues --- the next dominos that fall over to further exacerbate and make Intel and some other platforms have especially high risk of attack, branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715), and then rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)
For the second... it seems probable. That doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent to rogue data cache load will be found.
As far as I know a heavy search, at least by the good guys, is Not underway; AMD will be presumed vulnerable only to the Bounds Check Bypass variant of Meltdown, for now.
That doesn't mean we should not assume there is a major risk here until the mitigations are in place for at least the first variant, and a more definitive assurance is made that the AMD issues especially regarding 'bound check bypass CVE-2017-5715' the most pervasive and difficult to fully close hole is completely patched ---- yeah Meltdown issues variant 2 and variant 3 will get the spotlight, but OS kernel changes can deal with those two variants But not the Variant 1 attack that has been reported as affecting AMD procs for sure.
It was only profitable in China because the government paid for everything.
No.... because the government paid for everything in China, they artificially inflated the hashrate and thus the difficulties to levels where you cannot compete ( which would not have been achieved if the government wasn't paying for everything).
Now if the Chinese government stops subsidizing renewable power resulting in cheap mining operations: presumably the market will correct over time.
it's around every 2 weeks for Bitcoin. So if a lot of power is suddenly removed, then the rate at which blocks are found will likely dramatically increase
Some alternative cryptos have differentiated themselves versus Bitcoin by having much faster difficulty adjustment periods
A problem is that trading in and out of differentiated cryptos generally has to be done in BTC. For the most part Fiat markets only exist for a few cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, if the hash power drops by a MASSIVE amount suddenly, then it's going to take a lot longer than 2 weeks to adjust, e.g. if the network's hash power goes down by 50%..... suddenly it's going to take twice as long on average per block, and that 2 week adjustment interval is now 4 weeks.
If 90% of the hash power is in China, then all that cutting out immediately could put the blockchain on ice for months..... it could be a freeze bad enough to seriously ding BTC's reputation and shake peoples' trust and confidence in it.
These bikes are unlocked, and available for anyone to use. Using such a bike and putting it in your shed is not theft.
Any use of the bikes outside Google's intended purpose is Conversion, and putting it in your shed IS theft, if your intention is to keep the bike there and not return it, especially if you have multiple Google bikes in your shed.
Also the clause is vague: What does "datacenter deployment" mean? If I create a special facility with 50 desktops stacked on top of each other with nVIDIA GPUs, is that a datacenter? If Yes, then how is an internet cafe or school computer lab with 1 desktop per student not a datacenter? If Not, then how is 1000 computers stacked a datacenter?
No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.
That is not contradictory information; it is just out of date. "Currently [as of the time the paper was written], we have only verified Meltdown on Intel processors.
The information cited does NOT support your claim that Meltdown is Intel Only; nor were the authors even claiming they believed Meltdown to be Intel-Only --- the authors showed information to indicate AMD/ARM would also be vulnerable, but they were primarily interested at the time in demonstrating the exploit on Intel processors and made minimal at best efforts to fully demonstrate and exposit the problem on ARM/AMD despite showing these affected.
Current security bulletins include more up-to-date information than the Authors' whitepaper.
False; Non-Intel platforms are affected by the same form of problems. The security issue related to Processor Speculation has been Acknowledged by ARM, and furthermore, even the Meltdown paper points out the same issues existing with at least several example attacks working reliably on the ARM and AMD platforms regarding out-of-order executions And instructions past illegal memory accesses.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called proximate cause
Only in a Civil case.
The responsibility for this man's death lies solely with the criminal who made the call.
Obviously not..... there's something wrong here, that a random person anywhere in the world can make a caller-id spoofed VoIP call to a police department anywhere in the US: impersonate the addressee/target, conjure up a pretend emergency, and incite sufficient panic that the police go on a shooting spree and kill people.
How about: The simplified proximate CAUSE of the death is unreasonable actions by the police, which the SWATter could not have entirely anticipated, But the police in this situation Violated their Duty to serve and protect the public and killed innocent people. What about that? Where are the consequences for that, for the officers' gross misconduct?
In the end, the prankster didn't pull the trigger and there is no reasonable world in which one should expect to be killed by police over a prank phone call.
Exactly. That's why the police/man who pulled the trigger ought to get Life imprisonment, and the person who did the SWAT'ing should get 20 years.
We do not live in a world where planes take off and land while pilots sit in the back and booze it up with the rest of the passengers
Of course not..... blazing through the 3-dimensional airspace with hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives at stake if a mechanical instrumentation failure occurs in flight and the one pilot is not there to compensate.
I don't think there will EVER be a time when a human flight crew is not required to monitor the operation of passenger aircraft, but the things that can go wrong in air navigation are much more complicated than the things that can go wrong in 2-d ground navigation.
They are not analyzing metadata, as most malware C&C now pretends to be web traffic.
They could look at the IP addresses of the connections (Check against blacklist of malicious IPs); SSL Metadata, e.g. the SNI hostname from TLS, then look at reputation data regarding the hostname; certificate and public key information, common crypto parameters (Maybe some malware configures a HTTPS client uniquely). They can detect whether the SSL connection "Looks like" a normal web connection, or whether it looks like a VPN or continuous stream of data such as C and C.
Also ironic given that the initial justification for bitcoin was to minimize transaction fees
This is called Bitcoin breaking. That doesn't mean it's irreparably broken though.... it just means BTC is broken for now and currently isn't offering the main advantage that should incentivize merchants adopting it.... IMO They should consider Litecoin instead.
If bitcoin is not currency, what is the driving force behind owning it?
Just think of it like this: Bitcoin is a viable currency, BUT the smallest spendable denomination is the $500 bill. You can make change easily, but you can't make a $5 payment easily, because getting a 5 note requires $15 in fees for some reason.
Give it 90 days for 100% SegWit adoption across the ecosystem and the Lightning network to get up to speed and see some adoption, and then re-evaluate Bitcoin's prospects (IMO).
JavaScript CAN do this by inferring the memory values through the side-channel, first of all because JavaScript is assembled into machine language (Just-in-Time compilation). Did you see the Javascript POC for Spectre?
LISTING 2: Exploiting Speculative Execution via JavaScript
Manual tweaking of the source code leading up to the snippet above was done to get the value of
simpleByteArray.length in local memory (instead of cached in a register or requiring multiple instructions to
fetch). See Listing 3 for the resulting disassembly output from D8 (which uses AT&T assembly syntax).
The clflush instruction is not accessible from JavaScript, so cache flushing was performed by reading
a series of addresses at 4096-byte intervals out of a large array. Because of the memory and cache
configuration on Intel processors, a series of 2000 such reads (depending on the processor’s
cache size) were adequate evict out the data from the processor’s caches for addresses having
the same value in address bits 11–6 [38]. The leaked results are conveyed via the cache status
of probeTable[n*4096] for n 0..255, so each attempt begins with a flushing pass consisting
of a series of reads made from probeTable[n*4096] using values of n > 256.
I.e. Yes javascript can read what it wants due to this bug, but good luck trying to get it to read what *you* want like the running encryption key.
Brute force read using an entropy estimation algorithm until you find an "interesting" blob of memory.
Once you find an interesting blob of memory start checking if that memory could be a valid secret key.
Meltdown is more serious, but the mitigation is straight forward with some degree of performance degradation.
I would say the word is acute. Meltdown is extremely acute because of the ease of quick results from exploitation but less serious overall than Spectre, because Meltdown will be easily addressed systematically by patches.... apply the patches, and the realistic concerns are mostly gone (although the current fixes have been rushed out too quickly and are thus causing major problems).
Spectre is more serious because it represents a major issue where process' can be made to leak sensitive credentials across boundaries, that is basically going to have the only option being hardware changes to fix fully.
If lawsuits will result against any chip manufacturers; probably Spectre will be the largest concern, although it's possible for some users the Meltdown fix has a particularly grievous affect on system performance, that seems less likely to be a class action situation.
It seems like you're basically asking for someone to have done 14 hours of editing work so you could avoid focusing on something significant for an hour or so .
I already gave you a TL;DW summary; the case history is essentially yet more evidence against Yelp sales team practices though.
Where does the constitution restrict the judicial branch from making a ruling in any matter involving either the legislative or executive branch?
A specific restriction isn't necessary, because the judicial is only empowered to do the things which the constitution and the law states the judiciary is empowered to do. The Judicial branch is ONLY able to make their rulings on what is law and Orders enjoining against furthering harm from violating the law or the constitution based on the dispute before them --- the Legislative and Executive branches have their own agency (Independent judgement), and the Judicials are not superior to the Legislative or the Executive branch in their power or authority: Fundamentally the judiciary IS RESTRICTED and cannot order around other branches, And if there is a disagreement --- it's called a constitutional crisis, because they are 3 equal branches of government.
Our constitutional form of government is NOT a hierarchy with the Judiciary branch at the top, and our supreme court is not a "Ruling Committee" who can hand down any order desired to alter or delete any law at will or increase or decrease or change the enforcement of any law in whatsoever manager as the committee desires. The Judicial branch makes orders based on law, and it is up to the elected leaders and bureaucrats in other branches of government to follow lawful orders (or to ignore them, as they have in some cases)
In the same manner that the president cannot order the court to rule X on case Y, or order the court to consider case Z, and the legislature cannot pass a law that the court must never review law Y and the feds can't pass a law that state laws about X be held unconstitutional; the Judiciary has its own independent agency that cannot be taken on by other branches of government -- its rulings on cases.
In exactly the same way the Legislative and Executive branches of government have specific agency in the powers granted them by the constitution --
the judiciary does NOT have the power to override the agency of other branches of government and take actions on their behalf, And the judiciary does not have the power to Order another branch of government to do X with their agency ----- for example, the court cannot order congress to pass law Y, or create tax Z. Although the court CAN invalidate law Y or provide taxpayer relief by declaring debts under tax Z invalid.
The Judicial branch is not empowered to take over any legislative or executive duty and exercise that role on its own.
If the law doesn't say the court can draw their own map, then the court does not have the power to simply draw their own map, and that is true even if the legislature fails or refuses to draw a new map on its own that satisfies the court.
That said, the fact that a state (or a voter) went for Obama and then Trump is no proof of nefarious meddling.
It's interesting that 2 of the 3 judges are democrat appointees, AND political gerrymandering has never been held unconstitutional before despite many challenges
--- the rules are your districts must each have near identical population, AND your districts must not be drawn so as to dilute the representation of racial minority groups.
Sort of..... I suggest watching Louis Rossman's Yelp-related videos; I saw a few years ago --- they were an eye opener regarding their Salespeoples' practices, to say the least.
SPOILER: There's a really aggressive sales person involved who was happy to violate users' privacy AND there are fake negative reviews involved that were posted against the business after the Yelp salesperson was told NO.
Since when did the US SENATE become an escalation contact for internal Customer Service issues between Apple and their customers?
overseeing business issues asked Apple to answer questions about its disclosure that it slowed older iPhones with flagging batteries .... the large volume of consumer criticism leveled against the company in light of its admission suggests that there should have been better transparency.
Sounds like Apple made a design decision to limit their costs: a less-performant or more fragile than originally expected battery will be tolerated and compensated for by the devices, with graceful degradation, and without showing an explicit notification to the user -- instead the end user will have to detect if their device is degraded below what they feel it should be and then contact Apple based on that.
It is the same story for MANY kinds of hardware issues ---- many failures can go undetected for years, Or only cause an occasional crash, and
the device automatically reboots itself to help reduce the impact of a periodic glitch. If the end user themself cannot identify that there's a problem, then there is no problem.
Apple is a huge technology player, but they're no monopoly on paper.
Although I am personally of the mind that these 5 companies should be broken up: Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Apple, and in that order.
Just because they're large and they therefore upset a LOT of people if they make a mistake, or make a decision that makes customers dissatisfied: does not suddenly mean that it is valid government business to poke into Apple PR and Customer issues.
Just a Literal correction. These kinds of things happen all the time with large markets.
Spectre is Variant 1 and 2. Meltdown is Variant 3.
No. ALL three variants enable Meltdown and Spectre.... you're kind of confouding the description of vulnerabilities with the name for the attacks they made possible
Meltdown is the attack that can read arbitrary kernel memory, and Spectre is the attack that lets you leak secrets from another program.
AMD is vulnerable to Spectre, and it's likely part of the way at least towards a Meltdown type attack being possible, But so far it seems unlikely there will be the direct comparable issue to what Intel has, and AMD goes even farther to say there's Zero risk of the rogue cache read... That should be highly re-assuring to AMD users, but some risk remains, especially until Variant 1 is addressed in hardware on AMD.
I expect them to give me a choice to install this patch or not.
I want a highly-visible ON/OFF switch in Control Panel.
For most servers it should default to OFF.
AMD checks the permissions BEFORE allowing access to the cache, Intel does not; therefore Meltdown is REALLY Intel only.
Apparently not; AMD is already known to be vulnerable to the bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753),
so supposedly "checking permissions" before allowing access to cache didn't stop that.
The only question is does AMD have any kind of equivalent to the other issues --- the next dominos that fall over
to further exacerbate and make Intel and some other platforms have especially high risk of attack,
branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715), and then rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)
For the second... it seems probable. That doesn't necessarily mean an equivalent to rogue data cache load will be found.
As far as I know a heavy search, at least by the good guys, is Not underway; AMD will be presumed vulnerable only to the
Bounds Check Bypass variant of Meltdown, for now.
That doesn't mean we should not assume there is a major risk here until the mitigations are in place for at least the first variant, and a more definitive assurance is made that the AMD issues especially regarding 'bound check bypass CVE-2017-5715' the most pervasive and difficult to fully close hole is completely patched ---- yeah Meltdown issues variant 2 and variant 3 will get the spotlight, but OS kernel changes can deal with those two variants But not the Variant 1 attack that has been reported as affecting AMD procs for sure.
It was only profitable in China because the government paid for everything.
No.... because the government paid for everything in China, they artificially inflated the hashrate and thus the
difficulties to levels where you cannot compete ( which would not have been achieved if the government wasn't paying for everything).
Now if the Chinese government stops subsidizing renewable power resulting in cheap mining operations: presumably the market will correct over time.
it's around every 2 weeks for Bitcoin. So if a lot of power is suddenly removed, then the rate at which blocks are found will likely dramatically increase
Some alternative cryptos have differentiated themselves versus Bitcoin by having much faster difficulty adjustment periods
A problem is that trading in and out of differentiated cryptos generally has to be done in BTC.
For the most part Fiat markets only exist for a few cryptocurrencies.
Furthermore, if the hash power drops by a MASSIVE amount suddenly, then it's going to take a lot longer than 2 weeks to adjust, e.g. if the network's hash power goes down by 50%..... suddenly it's going to take twice as long on average per block, and that
2 week adjustment interval is now 4 weeks.
If 90% of the hash power is in China, then all that cutting out immediately could put the blockchain on ice for months..... it could be a freeze bad enough to seriously ding BTC's reputation and shake peoples' trust and confidence in it.
These bikes are unlocked, and available for anyone to use. Using such a bike and putting it in your shed is not theft.
Any use of the bikes outside Google's intended purpose is Conversion, and putting it in your shed IS theft, if your intention is to keep the bike there and not return it, especially if you have multiple Google bikes in your shed.
Also the clause is vague:
What does "datacenter deployment" mean?
If I create a special facility with 50 desktops stacked on top of each other with nVIDIA GPUs, is that a datacenter? If Yes, then how is an internet cafe or school computer lab with 1 desktop per student not a datacenter? If Not, then how is 1000 computers stacked a datacenter?
That is not contradictory information; it is just out of date. "Currently [as of the time the paper was written], we have only verified Meltdown on Intel processors.
The information cited does NOT support your claim that Meltdown is Intel Only; nor were the authors even claiming they believed Meltdown to be Intel-Only --- the authors showed information to indicate AMD/ARM would also be vulnerable, but they were primarily interested at the time in demonstrating the exploit on Intel processors and made minimal at best efforts to fully demonstrate and exposit the problem on ARM/AMD despite showing these affected.
Current security bulletins include more up-to-date information than the Authors' whitepaper.
WRONG. The Meltdown attack ONLY AFFECTS INTEL
False; Non-Intel platforms are affected by the same form of problems. The security issue related to Processor Speculation has been Acknowledged by ARM,
and furthermore, even the Meltdown paper points out the same issues existing with at least several example attacks working reliably on the ARM and AMD platforms regarding out-of-order executions And instructions past illegal memory accesses.