{"id":29623,"date":"2018-01-11T09:29:30","date_gmt":"2018-01-11T14:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29623"},"modified":"2018-01-11T09:29:30","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T14:29:30","slug":"big-brother-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29623","title":{"rendered":"Big Brother = You"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Big Brother = You<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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\nGiorgione The Tempest<\/b> 1508<\/center>Happy belated new year. Belatedly. Thought I\u2019d sit out a few days, since there wasn\u2019t much news to be expected. And it did pan out that way, other than Trump bogarting the limelight; but then, that isn\u2019t really news either. Anything he says or does triggers the expansive anti-Donald echo chamber into a daily frenzy. And frankly, guys, it\u2019s not just boring, but you\u2019re also continuously providing him with free publicity. At least make him work for some of it.<\/p>\n

Then, however, the big microprocessor (chip) security \u2018flaw\u2019 was exposed. And that\u2019s sort of interesting, because it concerns the basic architecture of basically every microchip produced in the past 20 years, even well before smartphones. Now, the first thing you have to realize is that we\u2019re not actually talking about a flaw here, but about a feature. We use that line a lot in a half-jokingly version, but in this case it\u2019s very much true. As Bloomberg<\/a> succinctly put it:<\/p>\n

All modern microprocessors, including those that run smartphones, are built to essentially guess what functions they\u2019re likely to be asked to run next. By queuing up possible executions in advance, they\u2019re able to crunch data and run software much faster. The problem in this case is that this predictive loading of instructions allows access to data that\u2019s normally cordoned off securely..<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And:<\/a><\/p>\n

Spectre fools the processor into running speculative operations \u2013 ones it wouldn\u2019t normally perform \u2013 and then uses information about how long the hardware takes to retrieve the data to infer the details of that information. Meltdown exposes data directly by undermining the way information in different applications is kept separate by what\u2019s known as a kernel, the key software at the core of every computer. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Big Brother = You\u00a0 Giorgione The Tempest 1508Happy belated new year. Belatedly. Thought I\u2019d sit out a few days, since there wasn\u2019t much news to be expected. And it did pan out that way, other than Trump bogarting the limelight; but then, that isn\u2019t really news either. Anything he says or does triggers the expansive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4068,2472,135,1493,17881,378,17882,17883,577,13924,15456,1169,5177],"class_list":["post-29623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-addiction","tag-big-brother","tag-cia","tag-facebook","tag-flaw","tag-google","tag-innocence","tag-microchip","tag-nsa","tag-raul-ilargi-meijer","tag-smartphone","tag-social-media","tag-the-automatic-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29624,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29623\/revisions\/29624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}