Unfortunately, the year 2018 starts with CPU hardware bugs of the century:
Meltdown & Spectre logo: CC0 Natascha Eibl
In IT security circles these CPU bugs are known as CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown), CVE-2017-5753 (Spectre Variant 1) and CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre Variant 2).
What does this mean for the CPU users out there? Well:
- all Intel CPUs made since 1995 are affected of all of the three mentioned CPU hardware bugs
- some AMD CPUs are vulnerable to Spectre Variant 2, but not to Variant 1 & never to Meltdown
- IBM didn’t mention which PowerPC CPUs are affected. All systems running PowerPC7 and up will be patched in February. All CPUs below PowerPC7 should be vulnerable
- ARM CPUs are also affected. Unfortunately Qualcomm didn’t release a list yet which Snapdragon Smartphone CPUs are affected against what. Raspberry Pis aren’t affected
The bugs were known to Intel at least since summer 2017 thanks to the Google Project Zero Project. Another team from Austria, Graz, discovered the same bugs in November/December 2017. Between Intel and Google there was an agreement to keep the vulnerabilities secret. This secret was broken and made public by the British website “The Register” on the 2nd of January 2018. Most of the confirmations came from the programmers working on the Linux kernel, their communication is public. They had to work over the holidays and couldn’t enjoy Christmas and New Years Eve. Thus, the Linux kernel is not vulnerable to Meltdown anymore since kernel version 4.14.x since the first week of January 2018.
Concerning Spectre, both variants; currently it could be these fixes won’t work. There is a proposal from the Google team called RETPOLINE, but so far these didn’t make it into the Linux kernel nor into Windows updates or MacOS updates. The other proposal from Intel side was “straight bullshit” according to Linus Torvalds. From what is known today, Spectre will be an IT security problem for at least months to come. Due to the fact this is a hardware bug, it’s almost impossible to fix this from a software side. For real, the only workaround with which you’re safe right now is: change your CPU. Cheers!
Why should you bother?
The problem isn’t really the local machine you’re working with: Meltdown and especially Spectre are incredibly hard to exploit even for skilled hackers. The problem is what kind of data is residing on a server. Whether it be your Emails, your visited websites, your bank account details, your photos of your loved ones, your social media profiles; with the accurate technique all of this data can be stolen without a trace 100% from Intel machines. And according to recent statistics these CPUs run ~70% of the Internet today. All operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc.) are affected anyway. As mentioned before, this is a hardware bug. Usually, hardware bugs are in no way fixable with software patches.
To make things worse and to give you an example of bad morale and integrity, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold 250,000 shares of his Intel stocks at the end of 2017. He knew what would lie ahead for him and his rotten company but didn’t think a bit about his customers. This is truly the f***ed up world in which we’re living right now. We hope you can deal with these facts and keep on.
We’re active in the IT sector since 2000 but never experienced anything similar severe to these bad news. Of course we knew that Intel is ahead of the pack regarding bad design and bad behaviour regarding computer processors. What we didn’t know was that Intel didn’t change at all. Since the marketing campaign for the i3/5/7 processors anyone thought they learned from their mistakes. Apparently they didn’t. Which makes Intel probably the most dangerous company in the whole wide world.
Never forget to update your computer in 2018. Good luck to y’all!
Sincerely,
the aethyx staff
“Over-specialisation means that there are more persistent vulnerabilities too. A deadly threat.” – “Ghost in the Shell”, Japan, 1995
Dear readers,
Christmas is over already and we hope you had a wonderful time with your loved ones!
2017 is gone now. As always, it was a difficult yet surprising year. Nevertheless it’s now the right time to look forward what lies ahead and the things to come!
We wish all of our precious readers, authors, clients & fans a Happy New Year!
May health, luck & satisfaction be with all of you.
Only the bestest,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers,
we still believe in free speech.
Though times get harder every day for those who want to find a voice for their opinion.
Thus, we created an Email post box which exists solely in the dark web since November: aethyx@torbox3uiot6wchz.onion.
From time to time we’ll check for new mails. Not on a daily basis but several times a month.
There were a few reasons why we chose TorBox as a provider:
* good reputation
* offer their services for a pretty long time already
* are not available through the clearnet
* 25 MB are free
* it’s easy to set up
Who knows, maybe we’ll widen the experiment some day in the future. Right now we’re taking part, observing. Today, it’s just an experiment.
We share the opinion that the dark web (or darknet, as it’s synonymously used) is still in it’s early stages of development. But as we stated above and elsewhere on our sites, things won’t get easier from last year on. Democracy is under attack and also its citizens. And for millions, who knows how many, the dark web became their one and only spot to communicate, to trade, and source of information. We are an independent online publisher, we support that. And want to be part of it. And no, we don’t think you’re paranoid: you are just normal.
Let’s fight for our freedom!
Sincerely,
the aethyx staff
If you want to know the entrepreneurial view of the Internet, visit Portugal: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088.
Usually we don’t link to stuff on Twitter, because they are working on dismantling the web as we know it too. But the majority accepted this fake news medium already and we as experts(!) can’t do nothing about it.
Welcome to reality.
There’s serious stuff going on right now.
Imagine an Internet of lanes, where the ones get the fastest lane who pay the most. That would be the death of net neutrality, a concept which the Obama administration tried to support but right now seems to fail miserably.
A lot of corporations tried to kill the Internet before: Comcast. Verizon. AT&T. To name only a few. And the NSA stuff about Edward Snowden didn’t mean that things would get any better, to say the least.
We live in a world of sick societies. Most of the people you meet, you work with, you like and appreciate, don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on in reality. In real time. Anywhere. They just don’t give a shit, all they care about is C.R.E.A.M. We live in a cold, misinformed, polarising world, where those are punished who try to educate, evaluate, really want to entertain.
Prefixes are inverted in this world, what appears “good” is bad, what they call “bad” is often good. Good for you as an individual, good for your future, good for your morals. If you want to dive deeper, just check the biography of one of the most important geniuses of our time: Aaron Swartz. For those who never heard this name: he was the one realising the semantic web for the ordinary users, who killed himself because he tried to publicise closed-source scientific records. Welcome to your real world. Do you feel comfortable in this world? Do you have the slightest clue what’s really going on?
Let’s remember Thanksgiving 2017 as the time in history of mankind when the Internet died.
2016 they took us the pride to live in electing a racist, misogynic, dumb-as-fuck, feckless, apolitical, aryan, retarded US president.
It won’t get better from here. That’s something we should have realised by now. Next step is: support goes to the FCC.
We never wanted nor approved this. We weren’t asked.
“Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!” – Bill Hicks
Update I, 11/27/17:
In the meantime, more than a million Emails repealing net neutrality were simply: fake email spam.
Good day,
as a follower of our work there may be the moment when you start asking yourself: “okay, I understand that AETHYX MEDIAE is an independent online publisher. But what do they mean with the strange word “semantic”?
Long story short, it’s mainly an update of the WWW we know and use today. As Tim Berners-Lee himself stated in 2001 already:
“The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”
This technique is in some sort already real today. Every website which provides an RSS/Atom feed let’s you create your own source(s) of information. Usually this file is an OPML file, containing RSS/Atom links named “feeds”. An application with which you can use the semantic web is simply an RSS/Atom feed reader.
If you as an individual or corporation are really interested in developing the web further, providing such a feed is definitely a must.
Thus, every individual or corporation which doesn’t provide such feeds is either not interested in the WWW itself (and probably never was) and/or simply emphasises exploitation of humans as well as machines.
Keep that in mind when surfing the WWW these days. Today it’s not that easy anymore to distinguish friend from foe.
Enjoy a colourful autumn,
the aethyx staff
P.S.: according to the W3C strictly seen only RDF (Resource Description Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language) & XML (Extensible Markup Language) are “official languages” of a semantic web. In reality, however, most of the time humans will get in contact with the semantic web is actually Atom, RSS & XML.