macplusplus

rogifan_new said:

Why is Apple still selling the cylinder Mac Pro? Who would buy it? This blog says Apple should have resurrected the cheese grater while they work on this new device. I think that’s ridiculous but if Apple is going keep selling the trash can it should contain the most up to date specs as possible.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/04/05/new-mac-pro-wont-arrive-until-2019/

... And to understand why the cheese grater may not come back we need to think about Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt is the standard that turns your PC inside-out.

The main components of your PC are tied together with a bus called PCIe. Your graphics card, your SSD communicate with the CPU over PCIe. Now consider extending that PCIe bus over a cable outside the case of your PC: this is Thunderbolt. With Thunderbolt you can attach a desk-load of peripherals (RAIDs, monitors, external GPUs, network interfaces…) and make all of these communicate at speeds previously only available internally on your PC. Without Thunderbolt, you’d have to build a PC the size of that desk to include all of those peripherals. Thanks to Thunderbolt you can isolate the core of your PC from the peripherals and get a more refined and modern configuration with better thermal management and virtually unlimited expandability.

The trash can Mac Pro is the power core at the center of such a modern configuration.

bkkcanuck said:

macplusplus said:

bkkcanuck said:

I disagree with the Federal Court.  

API is just the interface (e.g. add(operand1, operand2) - i.e. no implementation to that - and implementation is basically 99%+ of the code).

Being able to use an API for compatibility purposes is no different than for example Open Office being able to implement the file format for Word.  The need for competition outweighs the argument as an API protected IP.   Google's implementation uses the API (common) and then the implementation code which is probably more than 99% of the code base.  As long as Google did not copy the code itself the API itself should be fair use.  Languages and APIs should not be able to be protected as API.  

The court has already previously ruled that you cannot protect interfaces for hardware for the purposes of locking out the competition on things like printer cartridges etc.  An API is not much different than the software equivalent.  

API is not just the interface, it is everything. You can build some library this way or that way, what distinguishes your IP protected work is how you design your libraries. You are not obligated to replicate the exact libraries Oracle has built; write your own functions and collect them in your own libraries to build your unique IP protected API. That is the whole point of the lawsuit. Oracle is right.

If the API is protectable then there is a whole lot of stuff that is suddenly a violation of IP.  All sorts of emulators, Wine for Linux (which is used in other projects), any applications that translate language and APIs into C or C++ etc.  A language and the standard library API are inseparable.   Maybe I date too far back, but as far as I am concerned this change is really really bad.  One project I know of started with a huge code base in VB and started its life as language translation from VB into Java - this ruling would make the writing of that language translator illegal since the code would be implementing the parsing of protected API and language IP.

Yes, yes and yes. This is why there exist multiple license types.

"A language and the standard library API are inseparable" provided that you don't replicate but just use that language and that library in your project. But if you build a new virtual machine and put into that the libraries copied from the competing virtual machine then you crash onto the IP barrier.

Missing in the article is El Capitan and Sierra update against Spectre.

Safari 11.0.2

Released January 8, 2018

Available for: OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 and macOS Sierra 10.12.6

Description: Safari 11.0.2 includes security improvements to mitigate the effects of Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715).

We would like to acknowledge Jann Horn of Google Project Zero; and Paul Kocher in collaboration with Daniel Genkin of University of Pennsylvania and University of Maryland, Daniel Gruss of Graz University of Technology, Werner Haas of Cyberus Technology, Mike Hamburg of Rambus (Cryptography Research Division), Moritz Lipp of Graz University of Technology, Stefan Mangard of Graz University of Technology, Thomas Prescher of Cyberus Technology, Michael Schwarz of Graz University of Technology, and Yuval Yarom of University of Adelaide and Data61 for their assistance.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208403

So, machines back to 2007 are protected against Spectre thanks to El Capitan.

Finally a satisfactory description of the issue:

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-vulnerability-what-you-need.html

Why everyone is so panicked?

In order to exploit the flaw the "attacker gains physical access by manually updating the platform with a malicious firmware image through flash programmer physically connected to the platform’s flash memory. Flash Descriptor write-protection is a platform setting usually set at the end of manufacturing. Flash Descriptor write-protection protects settings on the Flash from being maliciously or unintentionally changed after manufacturing is completed.
If the equipment manufacturer doesn't enable Intel-recommended Flash Descriptor write protections, an attacker needs Operating kernel access (logical access, Operating System Ring 0). The attacker needs this access to exploit the identified vulnerabilities by applying a malicious firmware image to the platform through a malicious platform driver."

as explained by Intel:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000025619/software.html

In everyday's language, the attacker needs physical access to your computer's interior. And all the efforts for what? For accessing kernel VM pages into which macOS never puts critical information. Holding critical information in wired memory is the ABC of kernel programming in Apple programing culture. That wired memory is the one that cannot be paged to VM. When the computer is turned off no critical information resides anywhere in your storage media.