Added 1 new A* page:Security vulnerabilities in popular PC CPU chips—especially ones by Intel—were announced today, and patches rolled out to many systems. My new-ish Windows 10 laptop—I got that so I could stream my daily A* art-making : )—got a surprise update today. Supposedly the fixes—by design, apparently—can slow the system down, so uh hopefully I won't have to lower the detail setting of my streams or something, ew.
It's all a bad and apparently pretty thorny problem, and at least one vulnerability in many Intel CPUs remains. (That's "Spectre"; the "Meltdown" vulnerability is apparently easier for hardware and software makers to address.)
I was worried that my old, Windows XP-running desktop machine would remain a problem, since Microsoft doesn't seem to be in any hurry to put out a fix on that ancient operating system. Almost every article on the problem said pretty much any Intel CPU was vulnerable, with many saying "any made in the last 20 years" or something like that, but after some hunting around, I finally found a PCWorld article giving Intel's list of the affected CPUs...and apparently mine is so old and crusty (2006! woot) that its venerable architecture does not have the problem—if I'm deciphering that list correctly, anyway ("Intel Core 2" is different (and older) than "2nd generation Intel Core processors," as far as I can tell from the internet).
And to think, my friends made fun of me for running such an ancient machine and operating system. Haha! Er. And heck, even my free antivirus program raising a fuss about not being able to renew its authentication (in a free version? : o) yesterday, and apparently no longer officially supporting Windows XP, doesn't actually seem to have stopped it from functioning. So yeah, no problems here, no sirree! : D o_o
Update 1/6/18: Nevertheless, some important notes on XP security and Meltdown and Spectre in my next blog article.
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