As far as them being applied, yes. The loaded microcode is volatile.
They can kind of persist across cold reboots, but it relies on them being applied again at some point. The motherboard vendor can apply microcode updates during platform initialization before POSTing. Or they can be applied from EFI (modern equivalent of BIOS) before handing control to the kernel. Or they can be applied very early in the boot process by the kernel.
> FAA prevents SpaceX from launching more rockets
> Musk guts the FAA
> FAA no longer stopping rockets
> Musk decries nobody will stop other people’s rockets
He has proven to know nothing about computers when he bought the twitter and he has proven it by this absolutely ridiculous claim.
He’s proven it a few times by now.
One of my favorite demonstrations of his lack of self-awareness is when he made a Twitter reply saying “the government doesn’t use SQL, [ableist slur]”. It’s easily and provably wrong while also demonstrating what a rotten pile of shit he is.
As always, this quote remains relevant:
“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing…”
In other words: a metrics query for ingress traffic by IP addresses and sorted by volume, followed by looking up the country of origin on some random IP geolocation website.
Anyone with a basic understanding of computer networking can do that. The only tracing going on there is Elon’s fingers as they try to find the ego they so desperate want to stroke.
Later on Monday, Mr Musk claimed on Fox News that IP addresses involved in the cyber attack were traced to locations “in the Ukraine area”.
A cool fact for those unaware: every packet of data that goes through the internet has a return address. If you don’t care about getting a response back, nothing stops you from lying about your return address. In fact, when being malicious, it can often be beneficial to lie about your return address.
That’s assuming the attackers intentionally tried to frame Ukraine or exclusively use Ukrainian servers for amplification. The more likely scenario is that Musk cherry-picked one of the many addresses from around the world to use as an example that supports his agenda.
Don’t give Musk a reason to tell his orange bitch to sign an order making lobby for the government to regulate and control internet traffic.
Using devices inside the country to DoS Twitter will give them an excuse to cry domestic cyber terrorism, and using devices from outside the country will give them an opportunity to justify creating an American equivalent of China’s Great Firewall. The time it would keep Twitter down for is comparatively insignificant to the potential consequences of losing online freedom and anonymity.
Is it too much to hope that they fuck up, redacting the names by drawing a box over text in a PDF?
Well, that’s disappointing. When trying to convince some less-culty conservatives that some kinds of regulations can be a good thing, I used this very thing as an example, thinking nobody in the right fucking mind would support dumping biological and industrial waste into water supplies.
In hindsight, I really set the bar too low.
Not the other commenter, but they likely meant stability with respect to device drivers. The kernel is great at not degrading with a high uptime, but there’s consumer stuff that’s just perpetually unimplemented, buggy, or minimally-functional:
None of this is the kernel maintainers fault, of course. The underlying issue is the usual one of shitty corporations refusing to publish documentation and/or strategically abusing the legal system to stifle reverse engineering for interoperability.
Hellwig was a bit crusty about being overruled by Torvalds, it seems.
Their approach leaves me with conflicting feelings.
On one hand, I dislike how the Steam Deck is among the weaker offerings for performance. On the other hand, I appreciate that it’s not a commodified device like phones, which keep increasing in price with only miniscule incremental improvements year over year.
It wouldn’t be as conflicting if they had better competitors following the yearly-improvement business model, as that would give more of a choice for those who prefer buying a new device each year. But, at least right now, the competing devices are pretty shit. None of them have dual track pads and 4 back buttons in addition to the standard inputs, and they’re all running Windows 11 with a bloatware bandage to cover up the fact that the OS is far from controller-friendly.
I’ll get it back another way.
Aye, matey.
It’s still the Chromium browser. Same problems, but now at the mercy of two corporations that are looking to turn a profit.
They’re absolutely not going to do that. What they’ll actually do is buy a couple of shares in his companies, then offer him a big government contact.
My policy has always been if you want me to use your crap, you provide the hardware. And if they still insist, they get to live with their garbage running inside a VM.
There’s exactly 0% chance I’m letting corporate spyware touch my data or have full access to my hardware. Between being able to lock down the operating system and remotely wipe the device, that shit cannot be trusted.
Yeh, the difference between being high value (twitter) and an actual high value (government) target are entirely different.
Exactly. Tesla or Twitter might be on a country’s radar for juicy IP theft reasons, but that’s a speck of dust in comparison to a network full of classified government secrets. A country doesn’t burn multiple zero-days and backdoor supply chains to find out the contents of the next Tesla firmware update. They sure as hell do when it gives them access to military information and civil infrastructure of a world power.
I wonder if DOGE have reputable hardware, or if they cheapest out on servers.
I doubt it. If the way Elon talks about software is indicative of his understanding of hardware or cybersecurity, he has absolutely no idea what the fuck he’s actually doing. Knowing that, it’s probably an off the shelf commercial rack-mount with IME enabled and the management port plugged into the same switch as the regular network interface.
Musk, maybe? Move fast and break things, limbs and skulls included. They can just fix it (the existence of workers comp) later, when the bills start rolling in.
the muSSk team learn from it, and figure out how actual internet security works, and harden their systems accordingly.
They won’t. Musk is a narcissist who thinks his every instruction is perfection, and his merry gang of racist goons are wet-behind-the-ears grads who have yet to be humbled by experience.
My predicted outcome is they fix this hole, send the FBI after the grey-hats to make an example out of them, and continue on business as usual while a foreign nation laughs from the shadows with a rootkit installed. DOGE is a treasure trove of data, and network security is a cat and mouse game that takes real manpower and time to set up, maintain, and actively monitor. I don’t think these chucklefucks know anything about being a high-value target of state actors, and they’re too prideful to admit it and get help.
Oh, great. So it’s also another regressive push towards recreating the mysognist shithole decades where married women were treated as the property of their husbands. What’s next, giving married men in heterosexual relationships two votes?
Lucky! You have hot singles in your
areaspam folder, and all I get is blatant blackmail scams telling me they have my (wrong) phone number and that there’s nation-state Spyware on my phone recording videos every time I dare to stroke some sausage.