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Security Researchers Publish Ryzen Flaws, Gave AMD 24 hours Prior Notice
Through the advent of Meltdown and Spectre, there is a heightened element of nervousness around potential security flaws in modern high-performance processors, especially those that deal with the core and critical components of company business and international infrastructure. Today, CTS-Labs, a security company based in Israel, has published a whitepaper identifying four classes of potential vulnerabilities of the Ryzen, EPYC, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile processor lines. AMD is in the process of responding to the claims, but was only given 24 hours of notice rather than the typical 90 days for standard vulnerability disclosure. No official reason was given for the shortened time.
[...] At this point AMD has not confirmed any of the issues brought forth in the CTS-Labs whitepaper, so we cannot confirm in the findings are accurate. It has been brought to our attention that some press were pre-briefed on the issue, perhaps before AMD was notified, and that the website that CTS-Labs has setup for the issue was registered on February 22nd, several weeks ago. Given the level of graphics on the site, it does look like a planned 'announcement' has been in the works for a little while, seemingly with little regard for AMD's response on the issue. This is compared to Meltdown and Spectre, which was shared among the affected companies several months before a planned public disclosure. CTS-Labs has also hired a PR firm to deal with incoming requests for information, which is also an interesting avenue to the story, as this is normally not the route these security companies take. CTS-Labs is a security focused research firm, but does not disclose its customers or research leading to this disclosure. CTS-Labs was started in 2017, and this is their first public report.
CTS-Labs' claims revolve around AMD's Secure Processor and Promontory Chipset, and fall into four main categories, which CTS-Labs has named for maximum effect. Each category has sub-sections within.
Severe Security Advisory on AMD Processors from CTS.
Also at Tom's Hardware, Motherboard, BGR, Reuters, and Ars Technica.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday March 14 2018, @01:51PM (3 children)
You don't have to view it with the original fonts and layout.
Open it in your chosen PDF reader application.
Select All
Copy
Paste into your text editor of choice
Make any changes you wish
Read
Your problem is one experienced by blind and partially-sighted people the world over, however many people understand that documents should be made accessible. This normally means accessible to the software used by people with hindrances to their sight, but often has the side effect of making the text available to people who prefer to view it in other ways than the originator decided.
The above process doesn't always work, depending on what restrictions the PDF creators have wished to impose on the document, but in general, if documents are made accessible to the blind and partially sighted, you will be able to alter the format to your wishes too. So it makes sense to support making documents accessible, and encouraging other people to do the same.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 14 2018, @02:06PM (2 children)
Yep, that's my beef. Otherwise I'd just automate the conversion and only be mildly annoyed once in a while. It's not just creator's preference though, it's epically fucked up layout decisions as well. Less than half of the PDF files I've ever tried to convert to text have managed to be anything but FUBAR on output.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 14 2018, @03:16PM
That is my experience as well.
I suspect some of it is deliberate, to prevent easy copyright violations - things like random line breaks appearing in words, and random spaces added. I have even come across documents where there was a line break after each character. One of the worst was one where every pair of lines was swapped. People using screen-reading aids would have had no chance of making anything intelligible from those documents.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Thursday March 15 2018, @11:47AM
I work in printing. This pisses me off no end. The original purpose of PDF was a format that looked the same everywhere. Set it up on your screen, PDF it, check the PDF and then send it to me. The printed copy will look identical to what you saw on your screen when looking at the PDF. That was the purpose of PDF. (and up to PDF4 worked great)
Then fucking Adobe got greedy, tried to add shit to PDF that was not compatible with static formats to 'take over the web', fucked it up for printing, and it's still shit for everything else they try to foist it off onto. Arseholes the lot of them.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.