The potential for abuse is insane. Say I'm rich. I simply hire some poor guy with zero income to break the law when I need it done (driving me around when I'm in a hurry is a good one). If he gets in trouble I give him a bonus. If he gets caught too many times then I hire some other guy. Really, this is a stupid idea, and will further lead to bias and all kinds of issues with the police. Want to bet people driving more expensive cars get pulled over more often there? Especially in jurisdictions that rely on traffic fine income to support their infrastructure. Cops have latitude in writing tickets, etc. Only going 5-10 over? It's their choice to pull you over or not. They are not *required* to by law, and because of that, the potential for discrimination based on wealth will happen. Maybe you've just a got a cop who financially is in rough shape and he wants to stick it to the man. Well, he'll just wait for a luxury car to come along and bust them for going 5-6 over the limit.

Stupid idea.

Hang on there a second. How do you colonize low earth orbit or the Lagrange points? By your analogy, you're saying the Roanoke colonists should have "colonized" the Atlantic on a big floating platform or something. That isn't colonizing. The point in either the moon or mars is to extract and make use of resources to build habitations, create fuel, food, energy, etc. Hanging out in space in a tin can is not "colonizing" anything, no more than sitting in a raft in the middle of the Atlantic.

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.

It really does look like Jomo did post this article, and it refers to another article of his.

What isn't to like about Ubuntu is that it's a commercial project with a significant unpaid staff. Once in a while I make a point of telling the unpaid staff that there really are better ways that they could be helping Free Software.

It's just that I object folks who would be good community contributors being lured into being unpaid employees instead.

Say how do feel about idiots working for corporations contractually enmeshed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex. Why no spittle-laced hate for them?

The GNU Radio project was funded in part by a United States intelligence agency. They paid good money and the result is under GPL. What's not to like?

Keep all of the idiots that want to work for a millionare for nothing. Fire the others.

Anyone with sense has by now joined a non-profit project.

I don't know who these "6.5 million monthly unique readers" are, but if the regular crowd at Slashdot has never even heard of their site, then they weren't really reaching 6.5 million people, or they were the wrong 6.5 million people. According to their careers page it looks like they had a lot of overhead and tried to run like an old fashioned news company with two offices in major cities. They certainly weren't lean-and-mean.

https://about.gigaom.com/caree...

Compare-and-exchange and mfence would be doing cache flush all of the way to RAM and global cache line invalidation, wouldn't they? So, they can potentially be used to hammer too.

Multi-threaded programs really do need those cache flushes to implement their interprocessor communications, don't they? It seems to me that they would be the ones most likely to hit this problem.

It has yet to be established whether hammer techniques can result in a correct data+ECC pattern. If so, it should be possible to permute the memory in a way that defeats this, either on the memory module or the memory controller.

That would make a good research paper for someone.

Yes, you beat me to it. A correctly-configured ECC motherboard with real ECC memory would defeat this. Watch out for fake ECC memory that just simulates the correction bits.

Once memory starts being vulnerable to row interference, having a machine without ECC becomes much more dangerous, regardless of this exploit.

I like the way this evolution guy did things. Great decisions. Maybe someday I'll get to meet him / her.