Considering that some Antivirus programs are using undocumented API's and aren't compatible with the Windows Meltdown patch, this isn't really a bad idea. This isn't a great idea, but it's better than your system getting stuck in a crash/reboot loop after installing the patch. I hope that they throw up a warning to the end user to update your damn antivirus software as well, and then make the registry key go away once it is.
I also hope that they just use this as a temporary fix, or hackers will use this registry key to prevent their botnets from getting patched as well.
Did Microsoft actually hold Bitcoins, though? I thought that most people who took Bitcoin for payment used a payment service like BitPay, that converted it to USD almost instantly.
I thought that the spin is that Bitcoin is now a "store of wealth" instead of a currency now.
Or, at least that's the latest excuse I heard on the slow purchase confirmation transaction times and high transaction fees.
The funny thing is that if you actually want to use cryptocurrency as an actual currency, you're probably better off using a lesser known coin like Litecoin, where the network isn't as overloaded at the moment.
I wonder how many people actually requested a replacement processor from Intel back when they had a recalled the FDIV bug, and how many of those users actually replaced their processor once they got it. Are there any numbers out there on that? Replacing a CPU is a pain in the ass, so I wonder how many people went through the effort to do it.
If the topic comes up, I'll just mention that I keep all of my rack mounted "systems" (not gonna call them servers) in a 5000 square foot "storage closet" that just happens to have redundant UPS and cooling systems in it. How fortunate for me!
This seems like a pretty easy legal loophole to get around. If that doesn't work, I can say that I just used them for crypto mining since they already have a loophole for that.
It sounds like you should have kept the old 1960's era dial turn thermostat for grammy, so she actually knew how to use the damn thing without relying on a tablet.
Sure, but it's kind of like the Intel Pentium F00F bug. The underlying hardware issue will always be there, but the OS kernel can prevent that instruction from being run on the system.
Geez... You make it sound like this is the first ever time someone has had to write a software patch to bypass a hardware flaw. Driver developers have had to come up with clever workarounds to hardware defects since the the dawn of computing.
These Intel firmware fixes are just going to become part of yet another security update that will be required to keep systems secure.
Actually, I'd expect many businesses to use it as an excuse to outsource more of their outdated on-prem equipment to "the cloud". Guess who makes over 95% of the CPU's used by the cloud hosting providers? Not AMD's.
Sure, that might sound counter-intuitive considering that this vulnerability showed a huge potential security issue with shared hosting models. That said, spending more money on upgrading what's considered to be a "legacy" data center by senior management probably won't get you that "VP of Infrastructure" promotion you were hoping for this year.
Yeah, this will really only be useful for those few people who are replacing fairly new ASUS routers with slightly newer models. I think that most people try to squeeze 5 years out of their routers, and don't bother upgrading until a new wireless standard is released.
If you're like me, you probably still have some old 802.11n and 802.11g Wi-Fi routers in your closet that would be nice to add to a mesh network as well. I nope that the DD-WRT guys add this functionality in a way that's easy to set up.
iOS has a bad battery warning system as well, and has had it since iOS 10.2.1. Since there are a few stubborn Slashdotters here who fail to believe this, here is a link to the Apple tech support article for it:
What's been missing from this warning is a mention that you will get reduced CPU performance in this state in order to prevent the phone from randomly shutting off when the battery gets below a 40% charge. In my case, the throttling didn't seem to work and my phone (an iPhone 6) randomly shut itself off anyway until I got the battery replaced.
Unfortunately, I got by battery replaced back when they still cost $79. I think that someone at Apple owes me a refund.
Yeah, this is what semi anonymous career sites like Glassdoor are for. Publically flaming a former employer with your Google is career suicide, as you're going to get yourself tagged as a troublemaker.
I don't understand the whole Docker vs. Kubernetes analogy, considering that they are complimentary technologies. The whole point of Kubernetes is to add a better orchestration layer to containers, Docker containers in particular.
Sure, Docker EE with Docker Swarm is how Docker makes a big chunk of it's revenue, but they're playing ball with Google and adopting support for Kubernetes as well. Amazon is offering support for Kube as well, but they still offer their own Docker container orchestration solutions as well.
I'm actually surprised that Microsoft let them put Plex in the XBox store. Let's face it... most people use Kodi to install plugins for viewing pirated content, and that will likely cut into Microsoft's movie and show rental revenue.
Microsoft also has a bad history with these guys. Don't forget that Kodi started life as XBMC, an app that only worked on modded XBoxes. They tried block installation of this software for years!
Are you sure that it doesn't already have one? The "degraded" battery warning shows up under the Settings screen. They should probably make it show up in the notifications page as well, though.
The annoying thing is that Apple already had a notification saying that "battery performance is degraded" in the settings screen when the battery goes bad. I know, I've seen it. They just needed to add something alongs the lines of "this may cause decreased application performance until the battery is replaced", and they would have been golden.
Oh, and now I'm pissed off because I just paid $79 for my replacement battery a few months ago. Bastards.
Hell, even this post feels like an ad for the new Star Trek show.
I thought that the majority of Slashdot users decided that they weren't going to watch this show when they made it exclusive to CBS's new streaming service?
So, basically what we need a law punishing developers and system administrators for gross negligence in regards to security.
While I like the idea in theory, I don't like the idea of personally getting fined because I forgot to install a security patch or put a tough password on a system service account.
Yeah, I think that they're buying HTC for the same reason they bought Motorola Mobility and then quickly dumped it to Lenovo. They just want a bunch of new patents (cellular, VR, graphics) to protect themselves from Apple/Amazon/IBM/Intel/Microsoft.
Tech companies are quickly becoming like the phone and cable companies of yore. They're setting up huge barriers of entry, insuring that only a handful of businesses will ever have a chance to become competitive at a nationwide or global scale.
My old electric fan space heater was rated for 1,500W max, but in reality only drew 1,200W from the outlet.
I have a bunch that a board with 4 AMD EPYC processors could easily pull that much current when running under full load. Maybe they'll do that for the "deluxe" model space heater... you know, the one with the fake flickering flames on the front of it.
Personally, I want to know what the company is doing to prevent you from hacking the file system on these systems to prevent customers from screwing with customer data.
Considering the pro business government that it's charge right now, I doubt that Equifax will get more than a slap on the wrist for this breach.
I don't think that much will change here until a bunch of congresspeople get their own identities stolen and this becomes a personal issue to them.
Of course, even then they'll all have VIP numbers to call that let them skip the line and get a senior level caseworker to get their credit problems resolved.
Oh, and there is nothing wrong with the blockchain technology itself. It's a great idea, but many of the developers building on it seemed to have built some pretty half assed and insecure solutions so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that some Antivirus programs are using undocumented API's and aren't compatible with the Windows Meltdown patch, this isn't really a bad idea. This isn't a great idea, but it's better than your system getting stuck in a crash/reboot loop after installing the patch. I hope that they throw up a warning to the end user to update your damn antivirus software as well, and then make the registry key go away once it is.
I also hope that they just use this as a temporary fix, or hackers will use this registry key to prevent their botnets from getting patched as well.
Did Microsoft actually hold Bitcoins, though? I thought that most people who took Bitcoin for payment used a payment service like BitPay, that converted it to USD almost instantly.
I thought that the spin is that Bitcoin is now a "store of wealth" instead of a currency now.
Or, at least that's the latest excuse I heard on the slow purchase confirmation transaction times and high transaction fees.
The funny thing is that if you actually want to use cryptocurrency as an actual currency, you're probably better off using a lesser known coin like Litecoin, where the network isn't as overloaded at the moment.
I wonder how many people actually requested a replacement processor from Intel back when they had a recalled the FDIV bug, and how many of those users actually replaced their processor once they got it. Are there any numbers out there on that? Replacing a CPU is a pain in the ass, so I wonder how many people went through the effort to do it.
If the topic comes up, I'll just mention that I keep all of my rack mounted "systems" (not gonna call them servers) in a 5000 square foot "storage closet" that just happens to have redundant UPS and cooling systems in it. How fortunate for me!
This seems like a pretty easy legal loophole to get around. If that doesn't work, I can say that I just used them for crypto mining since they already have a loophole for that.
It sounds like you should have kept the old 1960's era dial turn thermostat for grammy, so she actually knew how to use the damn thing without relying on a tablet.
Sure, but it's kind of like the Intel Pentium F00F bug. The underlying hardware issue will always be there, but the OS kernel can prevent that instruction from being run on the system.
Geez... You make it sound like this is the first ever time someone has had to write a software patch to bypass a hardware flaw. Driver developers have had to come up with clever workarounds to hardware defects since the the dawn of computing.
These Intel firmware fixes are just going to become part of yet another security update that will be required to keep systems secure.
Actually, I'd expect many businesses to use it as an excuse to outsource more of their outdated on-prem equipment to "the cloud". Guess who makes over 95% of the CPU's used by the cloud hosting providers? Not AMD's.
Sure, that might sound counter-intuitive considering that this vulnerability showed a huge potential security issue with shared hosting models. That said, spending more money on upgrading what's considered to be a "legacy" data center by senior management probably won't get you that "VP of Infrastructure" promotion you were hoping for this year.
Yeah, this will really only be useful for those few people who are replacing fairly new ASUS routers with slightly newer models. I think that most people try to squeeze 5 years out of their routers, and don't bother upgrading until a new wireless standard is released.
If you're like me, you probably still have some old 802.11n and 802.11g Wi-Fi routers in your closet that would be nice to add to a mesh network as well. I nope that the DD-WRT guys add this functionality in a way that's easy to set up.
iOS has a bad battery warning system as well, and has had it since iOS 10.2.1. Since there are a few stubborn Slashdotters here who fail to believe this, here is a link to the Apple tech support article for it:
https://support.apple.com/en-u...
What's been missing from this warning is a mention that you will get reduced CPU performance in this state in order to prevent the phone from randomly shutting off when the battery gets below a 40% charge. In my case, the throttling didn't seem to work and my phone (an iPhone 6) randomly shut itself off anyway until I got the battery replaced.
Unfortunately, I got by battery replaced back when they still cost $79. I think that someone at Apple owes me a refund.
Yeah, this is what semi anonymous career sites like Glassdoor are for. Publically flaming a former employer with your Google is career suicide, as you're going to get yourself tagged as a troublemaker.
You're kidding, right? If you own a smartphone with the Google app installed on it, they always know where you are.
I don't understand the whole Docker vs. Kubernetes analogy, considering that they are complimentary technologies. The whole point of Kubernetes is to add a better orchestration layer to containers, Docker containers in particular.
Sure, Docker EE with Docker Swarm is how Docker makes a big chunk of it's revenue, but they're playing ball with Google and adopting support for Kubernetes as well. Amazon is offering support for Kube as well, but they still offer their own Docker container orchestration solutions as well.
I'm actually surprised that Microsoft let them put Plex in the XBox store. Let's face it... most people use Kodi to install plugins for viewing pirated content, and that will likely cut into Microsoft's movie and show rental revenue.
Microsoft also has a bad history with these guys. Don't forget that Kodi started life as XBMC, an app that only worked on modded XBoxes. They tried block installation of this software for years!
Are you sure that it doesn't already have one? The "degraded" battery warning shows up under the Settings screen. They should probably make it show up in the notifications page as well, though.
The annoying thing is that Apple already had a notification saying that "battery performance is degraded" in the settings screen when the battery goes bad. I know, I've seen it. They just needed to add something alongs the lines of "this may cause decreased application performance until the battery is replaced", and they would have been golden.
Oh, and now I'm pissed off because I just paid $79 for my replacement battery a few months ago. Bastards.
Hell, even this post feels like an ad for the new Star Trek show.
I thought that the majority of Slashdot users decided that they weren't going to watch this show when they made it exclusive to CBS's new streaming service?
I think that the 60 and the 75 shared the same battery. The battery in the 80/90/100 models is physically bigger.
So, basically what we need a law punishing developers and system administrators for gross negligence in regards to security.
While I like the idea in theory, I don't like the idea of personally getting fined because I forgot to install a security patch or put a tough password on a system service account.
Yeah, I think that they're buying HTC for the same reason they bought Motorola Mobility and then quickly dumped it to Lenovo. They just want a bunch of new patents (cellular, VR, graphics) to protect themselves from Apple/Amazon/IBM/Intel/Microsoft.
Tech companies are quickly becoming like the phone and cable companies of yore. They're setting up huge barriers of entry, insuring that only a handful of businesses will ever have a chance to become competitive at a nationwide or global scale.
They shouldn't just fire the admin, but the admin's boss for not having proper security audit procedures in place.
If they actually had an auditor for that branch, maybe they should fire them as well for not doing a basic password audit on admin accounts.
My old electric fan space heater was rated for 1,500W max, but in reality only drew 1,200W from the outlet.
I have a bunch that a board with 4 AMD EPYC processors could easily pull that much current when running under full load. Maybe they'll do that for the "deluxe" model space heater... you know, the one with the fake flickering flames on the front of it.
Personally, I want to know what the company is doing to prevent you from hacking the file system on these systems to prevent customers from screwing with customer data.
Considering the pro business government that it's charge right now, I doubt that Equifax will get more than a slap on the wrist for this breach.
I don't think that much will change here until a bunch of congresspeople get their own identities stolen and this becomes a personal issue to them.
Of course, even then they'll all have VIP numbers to call that let them skip the line and get a senior level caseworker to get their credit problems resolved.
Oh, and there is nothing wrong with the blockchain technology itself. It's a great idea, but many of the developers building on it seemed to have built some pretty half assed and insecure solutions so far.