Prepare for your computer to slow down with your next OS update

Well Intel apparently knew of the vulnerability at the beginning of November, before Krzanich filed with the board to liquidate his holdings. Now, whether Krzanich was aware of it at the time he filed is the thing that needs to be looked at. I'm sure SEC will poke around a bit here. Knowledge of the vulnerability would absolutely be considered material, non-public information and open him up for an insider trading lawsuit. The oddity is that Krzanich sold everything he could; he liquidated all but the 250,000 shares he's contractually obligated to retain while he's CEO.

Worth noting: shareholders can pursue their own civil investigation separately from the SEC. Obviously, that can't land him in jail but it can lose him the job and cost him a lot of renumeration.

Intel, AMD, and ARM were informed of the vulnerability on June 1st.
 
Well Intel apparently knew of the vulnerability at the beginning of November, before Krzanich filed with the board to liquidate his holdings. Now, whether Krzanich was aware of it at the time he filed is the thing that needs to be looked at. I'm sure SEC will poke around a bit here. Knowledge of the vulnerability would absolutely be considered material, non-public information and open him up for an insider trading lawsuit. The oddity is that Krzanich sold everything he could; he liquidated all but the 250,000 shares he's contractually obligated to retain while he's CEO.

Worth noting: shareholders can pursue their own civil investigation separately from the SEC. Obviously, that can't land him in jail but it can lose him the job and cost him a lot of renumeration.

All of this is dependent on whether or not he know about the issue, which I highly doubt. Some CEO's might know the technical details to that level of granularity, but it's more likely that he's the last to know because if you had screwed up a product to that extent, you'd want to keep it as far away from the flag pole as possible. Intel is s huge company with 106K+ employees.

If the CTO or anyone else had made such moves within any kind of correlatable time period to what he did, then yeah they'd all fry I'm sure. But As the article said employees with stock options trade in and out all the time. Proving that he did anything wrong would take "smoking gun" emails and voicemails and witnesses attesting saying something really stupid like he was going to do X, Y and Z because of a defect in a chip.

That's unlikely.

That said, he probably will be resigning over this, but the parachute will be golden.
 
All of this is dependent on whether or not he know about the issue, which I highly doubt. Some CEO's might know the technical details to that level of granularity, but it's more likely that he's the last to know because if you had screwed up a product to that extent, you'd want to keep it as far away from the flag pole as possible. Intel is s huge company with 106K+ employees.

If the CTO or anyone else had made such moves within any kind of correlatable time period to what he did, then yeah they'd all fry I'm sure. But As the article said employees with stock options trade in and out all the time. Proving that he did anything wrong would take "smoking gun" emails and voicemails and witnesses attesting saying something really stupid like he was going to do X, Y and Z because of a defect in a chip.

That's unlikely.

That said, he probably will be resigning over this, but the parachute will be golden.

Sorry dude but I think you are way off. A vulnerability of this magnitude would have made it to his desk a long time ago. Intel was informed in June.

Nobody should be resigning over this. This is an industry wide issue that’s been a problem for like two decades. There’s no one person that is at fault here.
 
Sorry dude but I think you are way off. A vulnerability of this magnitude would have made it to his desk a long time ago. Intel was informed in June.

Nobody should be resigning over this. This is an industry wide issue that’s been a problem for like two decades. There’s no one person that is at fault here.
Well he's been there since 82, so you may be right. Maybe not. I'd let the feds take it from here.
 
Update installed here. Computer doesn't feel any slower. Compilation times seem about the same.

Not a fan, and never was, of the Intel architecture. One of the better general purpose chips I used was the PowerPC. Shame that didn't make inroads.

/rant on

My biggest pet peeve is that modern software simply sucks. Many programmers are lazy and write slow and bloated code. Much of what I do today is not much different than what I did 20 years ago yet the programs are slower now than they were back then.

Case in point: schematic capture. I use a program called OrCad. The best version ever of OrCad is 9.02. This was released in 2000 and runs just fine on Windows 7. It performed well on a PC back in 2000. It's blindingly fast on a modern PC. Shortly after OrCad 9.02 was released the company was sold to Cadence and development moved overseas.

For some of my latest work I was forced to update to the latest version OrCad 17.x. It sucks. It doesn't do much more than 9.02 yet's it's painfully slow. The OrCad 9.02 installer is a couple hundred MB. 17.x is five CDs. Five!!! You can tell much of what was added was done in Java or something on top of the original code as the dialog boxes look different than the standard Windows dialog boxes. If you open more than several pages of schematics you basically can't do anything because it takes 10 seconds to simply change a resistor value due to the program using hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of memory. The old version only uses about 40 MB opening the same design.

I called Cadence and complained and got a bunch of lip service. Eventually they scheduled a tech support session. That was useless. "Angela" (whose real name was probably Pasha or Pradeetha or something) who was using some sort of VoIP thing and some cheap GoToMeeting clone spent most of the time trying to tell me (when I could understand what she was saying between the thick Indian accent and glitchy VoIP quality) that I wasn't using the program correctly. "Why do you insist on opening 10 pages of schematics?" Uhhh, so I can see what's going on in the design.

For some of our embedded development we use Eclipse. One of the slowest and most bloated pieces of software on the planet. Again probably all written in Java. A single instance of Eclipse with less than a dozen files open uses nearly 1GB of memory. 1GB!!!!! for a glorified text editor.

/rant off
 
I don't know anything about computer programming. I'm more of a hands on jack of all master of none type. And as I read through this thread and try to comprehend what is going on it has me thinking that now I have to buy a new computer.

I can't help but think here, puts on the tin foil hat... Did someone do this on purpose? some Funyun eating Coke drinking geek plotting to do in whomever he wants or was it a bona fide blunder huge facepalm oups kind of deal?

The other thing I was wondering is this a type of deal that a huge money making corp machine is going to be scrambling to update all their operating systems and the person like myself shouldn't really worry about it that much and just go through and clearout all my passwords on my computer and chive on?
 
Yeah, I think that's an unfortunate side effect of hardware performance growing so fast. Modern processors can run the code so fast that lazy programmers can largely get away with such bloated code. Storage is cheap and plentiful now too, so they largely don't care anymore. There's far less incentive for them to write smaller more efficient software, except maybe in the app world where phone and tablet performance and storage is still a bit more limited.
 
/rant on

My biggest pet peeve is that modern software simply sucks. Many programmers are lazy and write slow and bloated code.
Oh, crap. I'm slipping. Here I go...somebody stop me...

This is so true. So much code is bluntly written, with no regard for efficiency. No sense of poetry.

Back in the '70s, I did coding for real-time machine control. We used the Intel 4004 — a four-bit processor with a 12-bit address space. Everything had to fit into 4 KB of RAM. If your code wasn't tight, you might as well go home. If it wasn't accurate, stuff could physically break — sometimes violently. It's amazing what you can do to streamline things when you have to.

Now, programmers just figure there are enough resources to do whatever they want, with whatever instructions occur to them first. They'll load a 100 MB library just to avoid excising that 50 KB screwdriver that's really what they need. And...and...


Okay, I'm done. Sorry, I just had to get that out. It's been bugging me for years. Suffice it to say, @FractalAudio , I totally get you.
 
Update installed here. Computer doesn't feel any slower. Compilation times seem about the same.

Not a fan, and never was, of the Intel architecture. One of the better general purpose chips I used was the PowerPC. Shame that didn't make inroads.

/rant on

My biggest pet peeve is that modern software simply sucks. Many programmers are lazy and write slow and bloated code. Much of what I do today is not much different than what I did 20 years ago yet the programs are slower now than they were back then.

Case in point: schematic capture. I use a program called OrCad. The best version ever of OrCad is 9.02. This was released in 2000 and runs just fine on Windows 7. It performed well on a PC back in 2000. It's blindingly fast on a modern PC. Shortly after OrCad 9.02 was released the company was sold to Cadence and development moved overseas.

For some of my latest work I was forced to update to the latest version OrCad 17.x. It sucks. It doesn't do much more than 9.02 yet's it's painfully slow. The OrCad 9.02 installer is a couple hundred MB. 17.x is five CDs. Five!!! You can tell much of what was added was done in Java or something on top of the original code as the dialog boxes look different than the standard Windows dialog boxes. If you open more than several pages of schematics you basically can't do anything because it takes 10 seconds to simply change a resistor value due to the program using hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of memory. The old version only uses about 40 MB opening the same design.

I called Cadence and complained and got a bunch of lip service. Eventually they scheduled a tech support session. That was useless. "Angela" (whose real name was probably Pasha or Pradeetha or something) who was using some sort of VoIP thing and some cheap GoToMeeting clone spent most of the time trying to tell me (when I could understand what she was saying between the thick Indian accent and glitchy VoIP quality) that I wasn't using the program correctly. "Why do you insist on opening 10 pages of schematics?" Uhhh, so I can see what's going on in the design.

For some of our embedded development we use Eclipse. One of the slowest and most bloated pieces of software on the planet. Again probably all written in Java. A single instance of Eclipse with less than a dozen files open uses nearly 1GB of memory. 1GB!!!!! for a glorified text editor.

/rant off
Amen
Hopefully c++ development is getting more and more interest
 
Update installed here. Computer doesn't feel any slower. Compilation times seem about the same.

Not a fan, and never was, of the Intel architecture. One of the better general purpose chips I used was the PowerPC. Shame that didn't make inroads.

/rant on

My biggest pet peeve is that modern software simply sucks. Many programmers are lazy and write slow and bloated code. Much of what I do today is not much different than what I did 20 years ago yet the programs are slower now than they were back then.

Case in point: schematic capture. I use a program called OrCad. The best version ever of OrCad is 9.02. This was released in 2000 and runs just fine on Windows 7. It performed well on a PC back in 2000. It's blindingly fast on a modern PC. Shortly after OrCad 9.02 was released the company was sold to Cadence and development moved overseas.

For some of my latest work I was forced to update to the latest version OrCad 17.x. It sucks. It doesn't do much more than 9.02 yet's it's painfully slow. The OrCad 9.02 installer is a couple hundred MB. 17.x is five CDs. Five!!! You can tell much of what was added was done in Java or something on top of the original code as the dialog boxes look different than the standard Windows dialog boxes. If you open more than several pages of schematics you basically can't do anything because it takes 10 seconds to simply change a resistor value due to the program using hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of memory. The old version only uses about 40 MB opening the same design.

I called Cadence and complained and got a bunch of lip service. Eventually they scheduled a tech support session. That was useless. "Angela" (whose real name was probably Pasha or Pradeetha or something) who was using some sort of VoIP thing and some cheap GoToMeeting clone spent most of the time trying to tell me (when I could understand what she was saying between the thick Indian accent and glitchy VoIP quality) that I wasn't using the program correctly. "Why do you insist on opening 10 pages of schematics?" Uhhh, so I can see what's going on in the design.

For some of our embedded development we use Eclipse. One of the slowest and most bloated pieces of software on the planet. Again probably all written in Java. A single instance of Eclipse with less than a dozen files open uses nearly 1GB of memory. 1GB!!!!! for a glorified text editor.

/rant off
FAS Software Solutions is the next venture, then?
 
Update installed here. Computer doesn't feel any slower. Compilation times seem about the same.

Not a fan, and never was, of the Intel architecture. One of the better general purpose chips I used was the PowerPC. Shame that didn't make inroads.

/rant on

My biggest pet peeve is that modern software simply sucks. Many programmers are lazy and write slow and bloated code. Much of what I do today is not much different than what I did 20 years ago yet the programs are slower now than they were back then.

Case in point: schematic capture. I use a program called OrCad. The best version ever of OrCad is 9.02. This was released in 2000 and runs just fine on Windows 7. It performed well on a PC back in 2000. It's blindingly fast on a modern PC. Shortly after OrCad 9.02 was released the company was sold to Cadence and development moved overseas.

For some of my latest work I was forced to update to the latest version OrCad 17.x. It sucks. It doesn't do much more than 9.02 yet's it's painfully slow. The OrCad 9.02 installer is a couple hundred MB. 17.x is five CDs. Five!!! You can tell much of what was added was done in Java or something on top of the original code as the dialog boxes look different than the standard Windows dialog boxes. If you open more than several pages of schematics you basically can't do anything because it takes 10 seconds to simply change a resistor value due to the program using hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of memory. The old version only uses about 40 MB opening the same design.

I called Cadence and complained and got a bunch of lip service. Eventually they scheduled a tech support session. That was useless. "Angela" (whose real name was probably Pasha or Pradeetha or something) who was using some sort of VoIP thing and some cheap GoToMeeting clone spent most of the time trying to tell me (when I could understand what she was saying between the thick Indian accent and glitchy VoIP quality) that I wasn't using the program correctly. "Why do you insist on opening 10 pages of schematics?" Uhhh, so I can see what's going on in the design.

For some of our embedded development we use Eclipse. One of the slowest and most bloated pieces of software on the planet. Again probably all written in Java. A single instance of Eclipse with less than a dozen files open uses nearly 1GB of memory. 1GB!!!!! for a glorified text editor.

/rant off

Time for a new architecture, The Mill CPU:

https://millcomputing.com/docs/

For IDE's, forget Eclipse, use JetBrain's tools:
https://www.jetbrains.com/products.html?fromMenu
 
Sometimes, poetry is vital. Just ask @CodePoet . ;)

I've known some truly poetic programmers who produced code at lightning speed. This saved their employers much time and money.

I know what you mean, but...

by and large poetical code (or anything) takes time and inspiration. Time is money, and management doesn't want to wait around for their code monkeys to be inspired. They have timelines, contract requirements and sales quotas to meet. Waiting around for lightning to strike doesn't keep the lights on. All the code monkeys can't be that amazing.

Also occurs to me that there's a too-many-cooks situation involved. You don't have just one person working on something. It's a cast of thousands. The more people you add to a project of any kind, the less artistic it's gonna be.

That's why the software Cliff was talking about earlier was better in the earlier versions. There was probably only a few people working on it. Now it's a revolving door of people mucking about in the works and management adding requirements until it becomes the bloated POS that he described.
 
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I know what you mean, but...

by and large poetical code (or anything) takes time and inspiration. Time is money, and management doesn't want to wait around for their code monkeys to be inspired. They have timelines, contract requirements and sales quotas to meet. Waiting around for lightning to strike doesn't keep the lights on. All the code monkeys can't be that amazing.

Also occurs to me that there's a too-many-cooks situation involved. You don't have just one person working on something. It's a cast of thousands. The more people you add to a project of any kind, the less artistic it's gonna be.

That's why the software Cliff was talking about earlier was better in the earlier versions. There was probably only a few people working on it. Now it's a revolving door of people mucking about in the works and management adding requirements until it becomes the bloated POS that he described.
There’s truth in that.

But I liken the situation to guitar playing. There’s poetry, and then there’s just crankin’ out the notes. It’s often a matter of talent.
 
possibly a dumb question but i'll throw it out there anyhow: so if i'm running an older iMac on El Capitan am I 'forced' to update to newest OS to 'be safer'? I keep older OS because my computer runs fairly smoothly with my hardware peripherals and various software.

Will adding antivirus programs really buffer my defense with these specific attacks?
 
Ah, coders these days...

Remember the good old times, when coders were five times as likely to be poets, trees were five times taller, sugar was sweeter, ladies prettier, vodka was stronger? Yeah... And we had Eleven Rack. No Quantum Schwantum modern gimmicks.
 
possibly a dumb question but i'll throw it out there anyhow: so if i'm running an older iMac on El Capitan am I 'forced' to update to newest OS to 'be safer'? I keep older OS because my computer runs fairly smoothly with my hardware peripherals and various software.

Will adding antivirus programs really buffer my defense with these specific attacks?

There's no antivirus that can detect usage of these vulnerabilities.
 
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