Thanks so much for the deep dive. I love learning from such concise facts.
To add, also @[email protected] : There is only one known species of vertebrates without hemoglobin. The Crocodile Icefish, it once had it in its blood and lost some genes to synthesize it. The debate about why is still ongoing, with the currently favored theory that they adapted to a high oxygen and low iron environment.
Mind, that this is just the company which published the initial reports that the defects in desktop CPUs are systematic, so I can see why Toms Hardware deems their Post a reliable source.
I wouldn’t conclude that from an Intel Employee even if they did claim it because they(Intel) already lied multiple times in this afair.
But they didn’t even do that, they just said desktop processors are affected, this doesn’t say mobile ones are not.
Many companies have already reported that their telemetry records many crashes with the exact same symptoms and software on their laptops while AMD still isn’t affected.
With very little initial work, physical media is also very convenient.
I buy a disk, put it into a specific drive, get a instant message when its ripped, check its name and put it into a folder. From there my mediabox converts it to a managable size and adds it to the collection.
Whin I turn on my TV I see all these Movies and shows neatly presented by Kodi. I have a tiny Wireless keyboard and can start any in under a second. No buffering, no adds, no matter if the router is connected, and no fear of ever loosing access.
Its great.
Exeptions are there of couse, I would love to buy The Orville, but they just don’t want my money!
Because somebody has to create that media. And that person they have to live. (Or better that huge team when it comes to movies) So they have to earn money, so somebody has to pay them.
I also enjoy that today I can test if something fits me If I am skeptical. But I also always make sure to pay back creators for things I enjoy so that in the future there will be more things I enjoy.
Of course I understand anybody who can not afford media and am happy to subsidize them with the part I am paying for good shows. But if you have a Plex server, you can afford it. And If you say its close just start with things you like most and at least say “thank you” to them.
But in the details this attack is not that bad. E.g. NordVPN and I guess also other VPNs use firewall rules to drop traffic on normal network interfaces.
Their side channel is still routing traffic away from the VPN channel. Then they can observe that there is no traffic and guess that the user either didn’t make requests in that moment or that he wanted to visit a website in the range covered by the route. They can not spy on the traffic.
Also you can not quickly move into a network and apply this attack, as DHCP leases usually last 1 day or at least 1 hour. Only when they expire you can apply the attack (or you force the user to drop from the network, which is easy if they are using WPA2, but only possible by blocking the wifi signal if they are using WPA3)
It is a serious issue and should be mitigated, but not as huge as news articles make it.
Run
sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
right after an upgrade to the Kubuntu 24.04 beta on a semi production system.
This is right after the xz thing happened. Also while Ubuntu made the t64 migration (Replaced packages with a 32 time variable with a 64 bit one, the packages are renamed. E.g. lib2geom1.2.0 to lib2geom1.2.0t64)
Packages based on the compromised xz had been removed from the repositories, but I already had some newer ones installed which where dependent on them. Also they already wanted the packages with the t64 addition, which by now where nowhere present in the system.
So dist-upgrade did what it could to upgrade 5 packages and bring the system into a consistent state: It uninstalled half of the system including some somewhat essential packages.
I noticed one of them scrolling by and hit CTRL+C. Afterwards I had the choice of saving the data and restoring from a backup a few weeks ago, or to patch it up by hand. So I did the second and created transitional packages like an empty lib2geom1.2.0t64 which depends on lib2geom1.2.0 which was in the repositories back then. 20 of these later I could install packages to get the GUI somewhat working and now weeks later all the t64 migrations are back in the repos and the system is fully functional again :)
Lessons learned:
In now upgrade with
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -yV && read -p "Flatpak Update? (yj/n): " choice && [[ $choice = [YyJj] ]] && sudo flatpak update --noninteractive
and equivs-build ( sudo apt install equivs) came in really handy in building the transitional packages fast.
It does include it. The article list it in detail: 36.79% of the Linux users use the steam deck. And the number is falling, which means there are more users also using Linux on desktop PC (or other gaming handhelds)
But that may also just be statistical noise.