Detroit’s hottest dubstep DJs Spectre and Meltdown live at the Music Institute Thursday, January 4th 2018. Get your tickets today at ticketmeister.org. Spectre and Meltdown are actually two serious security vulnerabilities discovered in nearly every computer processor made since 1995. So what does it mean? Is this the end of computing? Should we throw our computers on the campfire and live among mother nature? I wanted to find out, so I talked to security expert Wu-chang Feng at Portland State University. The verdict? You might just want to break out the abacus, because we’re all in big trouble. Spectre takes advantage of something called speculative execution. Processors make educated guesses about what’s going to happen next, then run through those steps to save time. It makes modern processors much faster, but it turns out that malicious code can sneak in during this speculation and reveal whatever’s floating around in memory—usernames and passwords, for instance. Meltdown breaks the barrier between applications and system memory, again letting malware take a peek at system memory. The vulnerabilities were found by university researchers and the security team Google Project Zero. As far as anyone knows, no hackers have taken advantage of either vulnerability, but Microsoft, Apple, and Linux distributors have released patches for meltdown and are working on ways to counteract Spectre. For more information on Spectre and Meltdown, I recommend http://meltdownattack.com by Graz University of Technology in Austria. The site has a breakdown of both vulnerabilities for laypersons and technical documents for computer scientists.
How does James Webb telescope work? What will it see?
Did we just discover warp drive?
Where are all the aliens?
Can drugs give you superpowers?
Is wood the building material of the future?
Should You Wear a Mask?
How do squids change their own DNA?
Can you fix depression with magnets (TMS)?
How do drugs help depression?
How do hydrogen cars work?
Can we burn metal as fuel?
What‘s a pandora moth?
Can we go completely solar? With John McCone
Will climate change destroy humanity?
Superhero Science: Monica Rambeau aka Spectrum
What‘s an analog computer?
Superhero Science: Captain Marvel
What is reality?
Why is fusion power taking so long? With John McCone
What‘s the Deal with Dieselgate?
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Museum of the Missing
Strange by Nature Podcast
The Poetry of Science
Sasquatch Chronicles
Hidden Brain