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Vox Media website theverge.com reports that Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) wants answers about the recent computer chip chaos.
Congress is starting to ask hard questions about the fallout from the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Today, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) sent a letter [(pdf)] requesting a briefing from Intel, AMD, and ARM about the vulnerabilities’ impact on consumers.
[...] The two vulnerabilities are “glaring warning signs that we must take cybersecurity more seriously,” McNerney argues in the letter. “Should the vulnerabilities be exploited, the effects on consumers’ privacy and our nation’s economy and security would be absolutely devastating.”
Privately disclosed to chipmakers in June of 2016, the Meltdown and Spectre bugs became public after a haphazard series of leaks earlier this month. In the aftermath, there have been significant patching problems, including an AMD patch that briefly prevented Windows computers from booting up. Intel in particular has come under fire for inconsistent statements about the impact of the bugs, and currently faces a string of proposed class-action lawsuits relating to the bugs.
Meltdown can be fixed through a relatively straightforward operating-system level patch, but Spectre has proven more difficult, and there have been significant patching problems in the aftermath. The most promising news has been Google’s Retpoline approach, which the company says can protect against the trickiest Spectre variant with little negative performance impact.
The letter calls on the CEOs of Intel, AMD, and ARM to answer (among other things) when they learned about these problems and what they are doing about it.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:37PM (1 child)
No matter what label is attached to it, but that's how professionals work in this country. Programmers so far are not professionals and that's why we have all this. Yes, I know that every new profession started this unlicensed way but ones it became important it had to be licensed.
BTW, no, I don't believe they will do it - not until after the blackout. But the blackout could happen anytime and just may be it is in progress and the spectre exploit is in the wild wiping out everything in sight as we speak. Who knows... what I think is that the crash will look exactly like it looks right now. The bugs have all the necessary properties.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:40PM
No, it is electronic engineers who design the chips that are at the centre of this. The programmers are the ones who have spent the past 6 months creating the workarounds (not "fixes", despite what Intel would have you believe) for these insecure chip designs.