To put this in context,even all Broadwell based systems have any guarantee of getting BIOS patches - it essentially seems to be Intel systems from roughly the last two years which will get the patchs and the odd Haswell and Broadwell based one. The problem is due to overlap of Intel lines,even Haswell systems were still sold at the same time as Skylake ones.
The other issue is I gather sometimes people might need to run something other than Windows 10,if things don't play nicely with them which means even more systems which will only get partially patched.
Dude, nothing is as big a cock up as ME..... I once made my own GUI in BASIC. Even THAT wasn't as bad as ME, and I was 12 at the time.
As for Windows 10, the biggest issue for me is that every time they do a major update, something else breaks. Printer is playing up "no communication, enable this thing that no one can find to fix it". The latest one did in quite a bit of my mobo software and now I can't control fan speeds or overclocking through a software interface which I never used but it was a little helpful once or twice. My concern is that manufactures are going to not release driver updates for hardware that is old and I'm going to be forced to upgrade purely due to these big updates. I'm sure my sound card (a stupidly expensive X-Fi elite pro which would cost around £300 for a modern equivalent) is next on the list.
No code is completely trustworthy, you decide how much trust you place in it given it’s source and how much you know about it. You probably trusted Intel’ processors, but now your level of trust is somewhat reduced.
Sorry, the point I was making is that the unparched machines are no more vulnerable now than they were last year. What has changed is the threat, because the vulnerability has become public knowledge.
In some cases, the risk of the threat might be outweighed by the need to maintain processing speed, and additional measures to mitigate the threat might be prefereable to patching the machine.
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That's quite a bold statement - I wonder what the mean by 'notice'? Is it general responsiveness they're referring to or things likes like timed file transfers, because I doubt a lot of people would notice even a 20% impact on the latter. OTOH system responsiveness is somewhat harder to quantify...we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance
Played Witcher 3 at 1440p on my W7 i7 3770 before patch.
Played Witcher 3 at 1440p on my W7 i7 3770 after patch.
Subjectively noticed no difference. That's all that matters to me.
Mind you not tried anything else since and there's been no (and probably will be no) BIOS update.
Not updated my nvidia drivers either - there's a patch for them too now for Spectre (thanks given for that heads up Cat-T-F) - no idea if that will impact.
Grab that. Get that. Check it out. Bring that here. Grab anything useful. Take anything good.
afiretruck (11-01-2018)
Grab that. Get that. Check it out. Bring that here. Grab anything useful. Take anything good.
I've seen the story about people hacking smart meters.
I'm not convinced that it's as easy as that, becuase they don't face the internet directly. They communicate via the GSM network externally, and their own encrypted low-power WiFi locally.
Society's to blame,
Or possibly Atari.
I'm pretty sure I got the patch yesterday running win7 64, my processor is fairly old a 4790k and so far i've not noticed any difference in speed. Monday i'll be doing some video encoding which will be the true test !
One of the threats with the IoT is the potential for them to be used as bots which can then be used for things such as DDOS attacks, or in theory large scale parallel multiprocessing tasks (password hacking for example) although afaik there have not yet been any real world examples (happy to be corrected on that though).
Another threat is the potential for the further erosion of personal privacy.
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Hmm, the potential for a decent performance impact on my I7 4790k. Disappointing, i guess my next CPU will be an AMD processor thanks to intel's complete stupidity.
So there are benchmarks for i5 and i7 CPUs, some as old as 2015, but what about my little atom based media PC from 2013? Around the same time as this problem/patch it has become badly unresponsive and blue screens regularly. Coincidence?
First gen Atom isn't affected but the more recent OoO cores are AFAIK, so will likely have some performance impact with the latest updates. It shouldn't be unstable though - what OS are you running?
Oh, granted, leaving machines offline is no universal solution. That's why I said people with older machines should ask themselves the question. Some will surely need to be online, but many don't.
I see many small firms where ALL their PCs are online, regardless of what they're used for. Some need to be, but for the rest, the assessment should be what's gained, versus what's risked.
I have a couple of machines that really just drive old hardware, like printers. If I put them online, about all I gain is being able to web browse from them. But I have other machines to do that. Should one of those machines get hacked, well, firstly there's no personal or valuable data on them. Should they get hit with ransomware abd encrypted it'd take me, oh, an hour or two to format and reimage the OS, drivers and software in use. But even that is eliminated by simply having them not public-facing.
Take a typical accounts office. Lots of effort will go into the mundane business of invoices, credits, etc, and in some/many, but not all, cases no part of many clerical staff's work involves the internet. So why risk it?
Most home users with a machine or two probably want them online, but even there, for multiple PC households, it's worth asking the question. For many, the answer will be yes, they need to be online. But for others .... maybe not. And if not, then Spectre patches are unnecessary, so avoid the oerformance hit by simply not doing them.
Quite a few of my machines haven't bern patched, or OS-upgraded, in many years. Some still even run XP. And why not?
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