I wouldn’t conclude that from an Intel Employee even if they did claim it because they(Intel) already lied multiple times in this afair.
But they didn’t even do that, they just said desktop processors are affected, this doesn’t say mobile ones are not.
Many companies have already reported that their telemetry records many crashes with the exact same symptoms and software on their laptops while AMD still isn’t affected.
Sure, but please after a general solution. I don’t want to be forced to use Steam to mod my games. Many of my games aren’t even on Steam!
Also I want it optional, so can control if Steam gets to see my Playtime.
I very much welcome the Nexusmods solution in comparision
But in the details this attack is not that bad. E.g. NordVPN and I guess also other VPNs use firewall rules to drop traffic on normal network interfaces.
Their side channel is still routing traffic away from the VPN channel. Then they can observe that there is no traffic and guess that the user either didn’t make requests in that moment or that he wanted to visit a website in the range covered by the route. They can not spy on the traffic.
Also you can not quickly move into a network and apply this attack, as DHCP leases usually last 1 day or at least 1 hour. Only when they expire you can apply the attack (or you force the user to drop from the network, which is easy if they are using WPA2, but only possible by blocking the wifi signal if they are using WPA3)
It is a serious issue and should be mitigated, but not as huge as news articles make it.
Run
sudo apt dist-upgrade -y
right after an upgrade to the Kubuntu 24.04 beta on a semi production system.
This is right after the xz thing happened. Also while Ubuntu made the t64 migration (Replaced packages with a 32 time variable with a 64 bit one, the packages are renamed. E.g. lib2geom1.2.0 to lib2geom1.2.0t64)
Packages based on the compromised xz had been removed from the repositories, but I already had some newer ones installed which where dependent on them. Also they already wanted the packages with the t64 addition, which by now where nowhere present in the system.
So dist-upgrade did what it could to upgrade 5 packages and bring the system into a consistent state: It uninstalled half of the system including some somewhat essential packages.
I noticed one of them scrolling by and hit CTRL+C. Afterwards I had the choice of saving the data and restoring from a backup a few weeks ago, or to patch it up by hand. So I did the second and created transitional packages like an empty lib2geom1.2.0t64 which depends on lib2geom1.2.0 which was in the repositories back then. 20 of these later I could install packages to get the GUI somewhat working and now weeks later all the t64 migrations are back in the repos and the system is fully functional again :)
Lessons learned:
In now upgrade with
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -yV && read -p "Flatpak Update? (yj/n): " choice && [[ $choice = [YyJj] ]] && sudo flatpak update --noninteractive
and equivs-build ( sudo apt install equivs) came in really handy in building the transitional packages fast.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/dev-reports-that-intels-laptop-cpus-are-also-crashing-several-laptops-have-suffered-similar-crashes-in-testing
Mind, that this is just the company which published the initial reports that the defects in desktop CPUs are systematic, so I can see why Toms Hardware deems their Post a reliable source.