Yep

Then what is the challenge? National borders?

Oh, they can be tracked. That is definitely not the challenge.

Now that may be logical, as it makes us dependent on the "government" (who are actually very incompetent in many ways).

They give government another excuse to invade our privacy and demand more power. No incentive for government to pursue them.

Freedom, I am pretty sure that a lot of the hackers in the world are known to each other, and there seems to be 2 types, the "glory hounds" and the "money grubbers". The second are probably harder to find, and are the biggest danger to everyone. Even they get identified, it is just no one has yet said, "enough" and gone for it.

Yes, and ARM has basically blown it off....

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...

While that is true, simply from a media blitz standpoint, there still has not been one confirmed case of the exploit being used, basically because it is so hard to get to. They will fix it, but there has to be a balance between innovations to hardware and core software to get performance and security.

Well, laptops are a different beast from desktops, the amount of power you can cram in it is rather limited, although they continue to impress, the latest one is to add AMD graphics to Intel high end laptop chips, because Intel just doesn't seem to understand how to make their own.

For what it's worth, you can defeat Windows' forced upgrade mechanism by changing your network settings to tell it that your Internet connection (of whichever type) charges a toll based on the amount of data downloaded. Windows Update won't insist on downloading anything over a connection that has that setting.

I completely agree, and have done benchmark tests of this in workplaces. The slowest link in the chain, if you will, in most office PCs is not CPU speed but memory, so spending money on faster CPUs and motherboards is almost always a waste.

Of course Windows, through version 10, is not even configurable to use more than about 11GB of memory even if you install it. Which is a good reason to switch to Linux or one of the *BSDs.

Its 3 different security holes. As I understand it only one does affect AMD.

If it was economically possible to track the invaders to the source it would already be done, imo. I think it would require a redesign of the internet and much more invasive measures than many think are acceptable to the innocent user.

I use wsusoffline to get all the W7 security updates and then uninstall some that are invasive to my privacy.

In my experience with i5 and i7 Dell laptops, some video playback does go over 80% on single core though. That may be where the average user experiences the effects.
Its all just speculation at this point.

The point is to be undetected. If using it causes immediate unrecoverable instability that prevents extraction of information then it is not a security issue and hackers wouldn't waste time unless the point is to crash systems in crucial roles. Either way its a bug in the hardware that Intel has to fix or suffer the economic consequences.

I had read that it was not just Intel, but ARM too. I hadn’t heard that it was in AMD processors. I’ll have to talk to our cyber guys. They will be able to spend some time explaining it.

I have been wondering when someone would just say “Hacking breaches our boundaries, precisely like a physical intrusion, and will be treated identically”. (You guys figure out what that means). Then proceed as you describe.

Nope..not a virus, malware, root directory attack. Just a wee bit off the beaten path for most people and the antithesis of liberals...

I have rarely seen my 5930 break 20% usage, and I use Core Temp to monitor both loads and temps and nada, nothing, so there is an immense amount of headroom. Now, run StarCitizen, in full glory, and yep, bogsville.

There has been no detections of the use of either of the flaws, there is a lot of hype in the media by people who have no idea what they are saying, it just sounds good. It is a "you can do it if you really, really try hard" thing, and takes several other hacks to get that deep. Then, the OS will get wonkey because it will interfere with the normal execution of instructions, causing the system to basically implode. Hence: "meltdown".

I wonder if our hackers are already using this flaw better than their hackers.

"seems to stop everything"
Well, except Trump ;^)

I had already come to the same conclusion regarding affect to most users.
In my response to Thoritsu above I stated "Most won't perceive any slowdown resulting from the fix to the OS for this problem unless its due to the servers on the internet being slowed. " Most who have bought new computers in the past couple years have excess cpu power of 50% or more almost all the time.

Just remember, Old Man Al says this is all because of global warming!