Over the past two days the Internet has been full of news stories about Meltdown and Spectre and how horribly and devastating these issues are. Chipset vendors scramble to update their microcode, operating systems get patched and even web browsers get an update. What I found missing in pretty much all articles, however, was how these attacks that can extract data from the kernel and other threads, actually work. So I resorted to reading the lengthy but very informative whitepapers on Meltdown and Spectre and since I haven’t found a good source that gives an abbreviated and easier to understand version I will attempt to do so myself. I was tempted to call this post the ‘Technical Elevator Pitch’ but quite frankly the elevator would have to stop for a little while to be able to finish the story. But I think it can be told over lunchtime…
Author: Martin
34c3 Round-Up Day 4 – More ‘In Spite of Everything’ Required!
Congress is over, long live Congress, only 360 days to go before the 35c3 opens its doors! The Twitter stream after the closing session reflects the general two feelings of participants quite well: Sadness that Congress is over and a great thankfulness for all the great experiences, impressions, thoughts and fruitful conversations with old and new friends.
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34c3 Roundup Day 3 – Pictures
It’s surprising that despite of the enormous size of the Leipzig exhibition center it still gets crowded at times at 34c3 which is not necessarily a bad thing. Here are a couple of pictures that show the enormity and different facets of the Congress this year.
34c3 Roundup Day 2 – Use More Bandwidth!
Like every year at Congress, backhaul capacity has again risen to yet another galactic level. According to momo on Twitter, 400 Gbit/s of backhaul capacity is available this time for the 15.000 participants of the Congress. Interestingly, even this number of people has difficulty of filling the pipe.
34c3 Roundup – Day 1
There we go again, it’s the last week of the year and while most people are trying to recover from recent festivities, ‘the Congress’ has opened its doors again. As in the previous years I’m doing a mix of attending talks and helping out with various things and here’s my roundup of day 1.
Bitcoins And Pizzas
This week the price for 1 Bitcoin has gone beyond 14.000 euros. It must be the biggest bubble ever that will burst at some point and leave a lot of people wondering how they could have possibly ever fallen for this. The chart on the left says it all. Perhaps they should have bought tulips instead?
The Computer Must Be Earthed!
A few days ago on a sunny but freezing cold Friday afternoon I had a few hours to visit the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. I was very much looking forward to it as the first computer I ever programmed on was a Sinclair ZX80 that was built in the UK back in 1980 by Sinclair Research. Little did I know at the time where this computer was designed and that the UK was quite a phenomenon in Europe back then as it had a vibrant home computer industry. Sinclair and Acorn where the most well known Cambridge based home computer companies but there were dozens of others at the time.
Femto Cells On The Retreat – Long Live Small Cells?
For many years it has been an open secret in the industry that enhancing coverage inside buildings can’t be done well from the outside via the cellular layer but as to be done from the inside. One way this has been attempted by some network operators, especially for homes and small businesses were Femto cells. In this context I define femto cells as small ‘plastic’ routers with 3G functionality inside for home and small office use. But the concept hasn’t really caught on, at least not in Europe anyway, and one big network operator is now phasing out its old 3G femto cells without a replacement offer.
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Verizon Pushes Forward with mmWave Broadband Fixed Access
There have been many attempts over the past two decades to compete with fixed line copper, coax and fiber installations with Wireless Broadband Fixed Access. Pretty much all of them have failed on a larger scale as technology over copper has evolved and fiber has been deployed in many places. But Verizon thinks Fixed Wireless access can compete with the latest wireless technology and pushes ahead with its mmWave system it has forked from 3GPP specifications last year.
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A Thinkpad X230 And 3440 x 1440 pixels
A big display with a high screen resolution can only be replaced by a bigger display with an even higher screen resolution! In the past few years display resolutions have steadily increased and there are now affordable ultra-wide curved displays with an aspect ratio of 21:9 and a display resolution of 3440 x 1440 available that are great for programming or working on several documents simultaneously side by side. But do such displays work well (or at all) with my somewhat dated 2012 Lenovo X230 notebook?