Photo: My friend Trevor Parsons celebrates a special birthday. Plenty of candles around.
I went to my friend Trevor Parsons’ birthday party yesterday, having decided it was too much (train hassle) to try going into London after getting back from Birmingham on Saturday. I took a 18:09 train from Reading but it experienced delays and took an hour to get to London – in time to miss various potential connections (see previous postings about getting annoyed with engineering work and its inspiration to get my driving license/a car sorted out). I took a tube over to London Victoria and then an overground service to Brixton. I needed to head towards Tulse Hill. After I few minutes, I decided to get a bus part of the way, and then used my trusty GPS to locate the party. I had earlier pulled some rough co-ordinates off streetmap.co.uk but they ended up being half a mile out (wrong end of a long road, probably further). Still, enough to find the right road – Google Maps need to offer co-ordinates (have I missed a feature that they already have?).
On the way back to Reading, Paul (who decided to randomly come along to Paddington – which was cool, I enjoyed the chance to talk about some bits and pieces we needed to discuss) and I ran across the “Jesus Guy” in London Paddington. This is the guy I’ve mentioned before, the one who will risk all manner of person injury by standing at the bottom of a tube escalator on a Friday/weekend evening and tell people to turn to Jesus. Although I have little interest in his choice of Religious practice, I do find him fascinating – simply that he spends so much time wondering around London without showing signs of bodily harm from drunken jobs is quite amazing.
Photo: The “Jesus Guy” at London Paddington Station Underground.
Tech News website meets Reality Distortion Field – film at 11.
This is a fantastical load of bollocks. Like, read the paper dudes. You linked to it, but did you actually read it? It would seem from your flawed discussion that you, like, didn’t. The SMT vulnerability doesn’t let you do “copying” of crypto keys, it’s actually a contrived and difficult to pull off side-channel crypto attack which exploits systems that have more than one path to memory.
Interestingly, having actually read the paper (no, I don’t claim to understand every aspect of the attack – I’m not a crypto expert and Colin Percival had many months to work on it since October), it would seem (to me) that any multi-processor architecture with multiple predictably weighted memory paths (e.g. with any caching) is vulnerable. This much is obvious. But it might not have been so obvious that such an attack would be possible against the G5 and other decent processors. Intel are in hot water because their Pentium designs share L1 cache (ewww, yuck, icky, sick) and so it’s a lot more practical to take the^W^W exploit.
Jon.