Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good?
It was a bit like having a Pentium machine running Windows 95, with hardware-accelerated video and sound, but it was elegant and---probably most importantly---it was released 10 years earlier. It also happened to be able to be synchronized to an incoming NTSC/PAL signal, so it gave you a lot of interesting video production features an order of magnitude cheaper than the alternatives.
Imagine what it would be like if you had an iPad when the original BlackBerry was first released. That's what it was like to have an Amiga back then.
I'm guessing the only software fix here would be that if the software in question can detect that it's running on Intel, rather than AMD CPUs, it needs to substitute SYSENTER for SYSCALL and SYSEXIT for SYSRET, and run, until Intel fixes it in its next CPU spin.
The only software fix? That's rather complicated. All you need to do is to check if rcx is non-canonical and invoke IRET instead of SYSEXIT if it isn't, which is what Linux already does. Of course, you shouldn't *have* to do this, which is why it's a bug.
It is arguable whether it is a CPU bug or an OS/hypervisor bug. The CPU should not run the fault code with privileges, but on the other hand the OS should prevent the fault code from being called in the first place.
I think it's only arguable inside Intel's reality-distortion field. The whole point of SYSCALL/SYSRET is to create a *fast* syscall path. Requiring extra code before *every* SYSRET in order to prevent it from overwriting arbitrary memory is pretty clearly a design flaw in Intel's specification, especially since (as TFA notes) that specification was intended to be compatible with AMD's specification.
It's not a dupe, that one was based on Kichoffs's Law. This one is based on Johnson-Nyquist noise.
It's totally different.
Heh. It's the same thing, as far as I can tell. The title of the 2005 paper linked by the old Slashdot article was: "Totally Secure Classical Communication Utilizing Johnson (-like) Noise and Kirchoff's Law".
I think all of these physical "crypto"systems are snake oil. They claim to be unbreakable, but in reality, they're physical systems subject to the same engineering challenges (such as manufacturing tolerances) as any other system. I would never use one of these systems instead of, say, a point-to-point SSH tunnel, and I'm not sure that the added security (if any) justifies the cost, when a simple, authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange would do quite nicely.
Shush now.
...
The predominant use of freenet was untraceable child porn last time I looked.
Really? How did you determine that? Do you think the dissidents using it make their Freenet URLs public?
And crime is not the issue. Unlike you, I don't confuse morality and legality.
What are you talking about?
This is a matter of priorities -- do we want to protect dissidents, or do we want to make futile attempts to prevent child abuse images from being shared?
FTFY.
Child porn is the reason I can't in good conscience run a telephone network.
Child porn is the reason I can't in good conscience run an ISP.
Child porn is the reason I can't in good conscience run a shipping company.
Child porn is the reason I can't in good conscience run a camera company.
Your conscience needs adjustment. Every sufficiently useful and/or popular tool will be used for crime at some point.
Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear.
