While I understand where you're coming from- I'd look at it slightly differently- Microsoft has a huge cloud business where people access outlook using web. If MS can secure it, apple won't be that far behind. Then again I don't know if apple has ever cared for user security much...
Sourcegraph is the same company that hijacked the langserver.org domain to almost completely remove credit for the original author of language server protocol.
I was wondering why one of the fastest upvoted articles on HN, ever, was on second page. Now i know, and of course. YC , like other tech firms want to keep their business interest in China come to fruition.
Surely they must account for too many anti-votes coming from a single region?
Not sure what we're being accused of here. To rattle off some things in the general vicinity: we didn't touch this story, other than to remove the flamewar penalty that HN's software put on it. That's not because the software got it wrong—it got it right. But we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Re "want to keep their business interest in China come to fruition"—ending one's business interest in China is a strange way to do that. How devious they must be!
One question- do these vulnerabilities , including spectre and meltdown only help in stealing information or can they also hijack your computer to do arbitrary things?
If you steal passwords, then you can use said password to hijack whatever the passwords are protecting.
If you steal private keys, you may be able to use said keys to impersonate the victim (like via ssh into their remote machines).
But if you're asking if speculative vulns could directly lead to remote code execution, then no (since you already have given the attacker a measure of control, as they are able to execute code already).
It can be used to defeat ASLR, which is a way to make exploiting code harder. However, defeating ASLR just makes it easier to deploy an exploit against a program, but you still need the exploit.
It doesn't immediately give code exec, but generally it wouldn't be very hard to turn arbitrary memory read capabilities into privilege escalation. As long as you know what the system is running.
The attacker needs some way to execute code on your machine. The code doesn't need any special permissions, although attacks are more difficult (but not impossible) if it doesn't have access to high resolution timing information. You can be a target by visiting a webpage with JavaScript enabled.
Being able to cause manipulate the control flow of code that already exists on the computer can be sufficient. See netspectre for an example that worked on real google cloud vms and local wired networks.
Don't get too excited. From the paper: "In the Google cloud, we leak around 3 bits per hour from another virtual machine." This is, of course, under ideal conditions.
Tagging on with a similar query. I am on Windows 10. If I were to run Firefox in sandboxie, would be the attacker have to deal with an extra layer of security or does it offer no help?
for context, imagine that the attacker has access to all memory on the system. It's not -exactly- like that for a bunch of reasons but realistically it's very similar.
