Categories
Technology

The CPU Bug: when being clever bites us in the butt

Update:

Ars Technica has produced the best write up on what’s happening with Meltdown and Spectre.

Earlier:

Two days ago, the tech world ran into a wall. Probably the best summation of the event is the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/948969633683558401

Yes, this is about the CPU bug. The CPU bug. The bug that demonstrates that sometimes being clever isn’t the same as being smart. The one that gave us Meltdown and Spectre.

I’m not going to repeat what others have reported, including The Register, the Verge,  Business Insider, and Google. But I wanted to specifically point out a New York Magazine piece because it does a good job of explaining why your IT person is currently under the desk, sobbing. Money section:

So basically every computer in the world is broken for the foreseeable future?
To quote Reverend Lovejoy: Short answer, “yes” with an “if.” Long answer, “no” with a “but.”

We’re likely looking at a world where there are pre- and post-Spectre processors. The lead time for new processors is measured in years, so there aren’t going to be quick fixes. There will be continuous software patches as new Spectre vulnerabilities are found in the meantime.

But the root of the problem for both Meltdown and Spectre is one of unforeseen consequences. Guessing what your computer is going to need to do next is a tremendously clever and relatively cheap way to speed up processors, and once it was discovered, Intel pushed aggressively to see how far they could go with it. (This is why Meltdown has hit Intel so hard.)

Designing processors and computers is an extremely difficult and extremely expensive proposition, and the market incentive for manufacturers is always going to be speed, not security. Even after Spectre disappears from the landscape, it’s a near certainty that some other vulnerability will show up on the scene.

In the meantime, stuff is getting patched. Not fixed…patched.

Microsoft just released an emergency patch (which just showed up on my PC, time to update), the current version of Firefox protects against vulnerabilities, upcoming Android and Chrome updates should help in these environments, Intel is putting out patches, and the fixes go on.

But we’re in this one for the long haul.

Categories
The Democratic Difference

The Republicans are going after Clinton again and Other Judicial Abuses

Update

To add to the judicial abuse, Congressional Republicans want the FBI to investigate Christopher Steele for the Russian “dossier”.

A veteran prosecutor, Peter Zeidenberg, said he had never heard of anything like the Grassley-Graham complaint and labeled it “nonsense” designed to detract from ongoing inquiries in to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“The FBI doesn’t need any prompting from politicians to prosecute people who have lied to them,” said Zeidenberg, a federal prosecutor for 17 years. While members of Congress make criminal referrals from time to time, they are usually related to independent congressional investigations, not to material already known to the FBI. “They should stay in their lane,” Zeidenberg said of the Grassley-Graham effort.

Earlier

I was astonished to see Clinton Foundation trending on Twitter. Even more so to read that yet more investigations have been opened into the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s emails. This, following the DOJ’s and FBI’s capitulation to Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes, related to Russian investigative documents.

Continue reading “The Republicans are going after Clinton again and Other Judicial Abuses”
Categories
Media

Updated: Vanity Fair demonstrates how to become the most hated publication in America

Vanity Fair decided to do a year-end video dedicated to Hillary Clinton.

It has not gone over well.

I particularly liked pushing the stereotype of women in technology. That was a nice touch.

One of the Hive editors, before she took her Twitter account private, expressed resentment that the video was taken out of context, as it was part of a series. What she and the others don’t seem to realize is that the other targets of a not-especially-funny set of videos are all still public servants. As such, they can expect to be the focus of year-end zingers.

More importantly, it wasn’t all that long ago when Time magazine featured women on its cover, and in a completely different context. How absolutely tone deaf can the Vanity Fair crew be to follow that elegant and profound piece with, at best, a juvenile, snarky piece targeting our country’s first woman Presidential candidate?

Even if you don’t care for Clinton, hell even if you voted for Trump, seeing six smug young people condescendingly telling a former Senator, Secretary of State, and Presidential candidate to take up knitting should piss you off. Not unless you’re the worst misogynist in the nation.

Donald Trump will love it.

Enjoy those magazine cancellations, Vanity Fair. Maybe with all that free time, you can take up crocheting. Or learning humility.

Update:

NYLON’s Sara Beauchamp writes about the backlash to the Vanity Fair video:

So next time you read a headline or watch a video that’s being quote-tweeted like crazy, before you’re quick to react, stop to consider what you’re getting outraged about. Look into the context before you join the pile on, because there are real people on the other end of our internet outrage. And, especially if they’re a woman, it’s important to remember that they’re already going through enough online, so maybe don’t make it worse.

I haven’t seen any tweets reflecting the editor’s weight, which is the backlash NYLON is responding to. If there are, then these need to be deleted.

However, the Vanity Fair people are professionals. They’re also adults. They’re learning about having to accept the consequences of their actions. If they’re feeling hurt about attacks against them, they might want to consider their attack against private citizen Hillary Clinton, particularly after years of Clinton being bashed the the media.

So no, they earned this pile-on. Best they just suck it up.

Categories
Media

Wanting Content, Publications on the Far-Left Easily Duped by Alice Donovan

The Washington Post published an in-depth piece about Putin’s misinformation campaign that impacted on the 2016 Presidential campaign. In it they mentioned a writer going by the name of Alice Donovan. Rather than the ‘beginning freelance writer’ this Donovan claimed to be, the individual was a fake, a contrived persona, and a source of misinformation.

Donovan duped several far-left sites into publishing ‘her’ material. CounterPunch danced all around the issue in its effort to excuse it’s lax vetting. Ultimately, it accepted some blame…after first blaming the FBI.

If the FBI was so worried about the risks posed by Alice Donovan’s false persona, they could have tipped off some of the media outlets she was corresponding with. But in this case they refrained for nearly two years. Perhaps they concluded that Donovan was the hapless and ineffectual persona she appears to be. More likely, they wanted to continue tracking her. But they couldn’t do that without also snooping on American journalists and that represents an icy intrusion on the First Amendment. For a free press to function, journalists need to be free to communicate with whomever they want, without fear that their exchanges are being monitored by federal agencies. A free press needs to be free to make mistakes and learn from them. We did.

No, CounterPunch, you don’t get off that easy. In your effort to continuously publish, you accepted work from a ‘journalist’ whose only qualification seems to be they’ll allow you to publish their work without being paid.

Online writers don’t have to publish under their own name, but if so-called ‘news’ sites want to be treated credibly, they have to know the actual person submitting the work. They have to vet not only the sources of the news they print, but the people writing the stories.

Another far left group, We are Change, also published Donovan’s work. It scrubbed her stories from their site, but you can see them in the Wayback Machine.

By scrubbing Donovan’s stories it would seem as if We Are Change is acknowledging its errors in spreading misinformation. But what’s We Are Change NYC’s lead tweet today? A link to a 2016 piece attacking Hillary Clinton using unproven information that lacked any vetting.

What’s in one of its lead stories? A video claiming that Clinton is in hot water over Uranium One. This, even though this story was debunked. And among the sources for the video is RT, a well known Russian propaganda organization.

For all of our valid criticism of mainstream media—in particular its obsessiveness with ‘both sides’—most of its members flatly acknowledge when they screwed up. And they promise to do better.

Sites like CounterPunch and We Are Change need to do the same.

 

 

 

Categories
The Democratic Difference

A New Sweet Home Alabama

I woke this morning to the fantastic news that Doug Jones won the Senate race in Alabama. It was a comfortable win, too—enough of a margin to preclude a voter recount.

The fact that the Republican candidate Roy Moore was a piece of garbage has less to do with Jones winning than his campaign’s and the NAACP’s outreach program during the election. Al Giordano created a Twitter thread listing all of the actions both took, and they were significant. Democrats coming up for election in 2018: pay attention.

https://twitter.com/AlGiordano/status/940657094050615297

The end result of this effort was outstanding. From the Washington Post exit polls, Jones captured the vast majority of the black vote, and enough of the white vote to win. Among the blacks, he captured over 97% of the black women’s vote—proving once again that black women are the most significant demographic for Democratic voters.

Continue reading “A New Sweet Home Alabama”