Hacker News Reader

Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

Great! Always gives me a little more hope for computing when these sorts of things are compromised, I know at some point in the future I'll be able to break/reverse some annoying piece of proprietary garbage because of this and I'm grateful. Each security barrier compromised is one less thing I have to deal with trying to run my software on my computers. I only have one life to live and I don't want to spend it fighting onerous security restrictions. (how many minutes have i lost waiting for 2FA or figuring out how to run unsigned drivers) I vastly prefer the world where the king of my computer is me and maybe also some hackers vs the one where it's Intel/Apple etc.

View on HN

Insecurity is freedom, as usual.

Intel already angered tons of enthusiasts who have no use for SGX by releasing a microcode update to lock out undervolting, due to that one exploit that relied on undervolting. Now everyone suffers from increased heat and power usage to protect against something they never needed protection from.

> Now everyone suffers from increased heat and power usage

Why?

And wasn't sgx removed from newer cpus anyways? At least in desktop/mobile space...

>Why?

because undervolting usually results in lower power draw/higher power efficiency

But they said "everyone" - I imagine undervolting would only be done by people trying to hack the sgx, or maybe try to save a bit of power. So I'd assume 99.99% of users would be unaffected? Or did the cpu undervolt automatically before the update?

FWIW I have undervolted every laptop I've ever had. It's a huge win in terms of battery life and often performance as well because you can avoid ever hitting the thermal envelope. It can be a 30% boost if you have good silicon.

Yes, and that also basically killed Blu-ray support on desktop, because DRM couldn’t be implemented in an acceptable matter otherwise. Fun thing of course is, that you can probably crack any Samsung or $random_cheap_brand Blu-ray player but there are too many of them so there isn’t any group focused on a “big fish to fry”.

Interesting how "security" these days almost always means securing corporations' bottom lines.

These days?

Intel, 1999: “The actual user of the PC — someone who can do anything they want — is the enemy.”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-biggest-security-threat-yo...

For some reason, I didn't really get your comment, and here is the quote from the article you linked that fixed it:

> Aucsmith said that more and more, software companies and content creators are targeting users as a major threat to security. The reason? With a few keystrokes, users could freely distribute "bits that have value," said Aucsmith -- copying such content as software, DVD video and other valuable data.

Ugh.

And that's not security. Nobody is compromised when someone copies those bits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com