[Fsuk-manchester] Follow-up: MFS Meeting. Tue, 16 January. "Meltdown and Spectre"

[Michael Dorrington]

On 09/01/18 20:44, Michael Dorrington wrote:
> Please feel free to forward this to those that would welcome it.
> 
> You can subscribe to the Manchester Free Software mailing list at:
> https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsuk-manchester
> 
> * Event: Manchester Free Software's January Meeting
> 
> * Talk: Meltdown and Spectre
> * Speaker: Michael Dorrington
> 
> * Date: Tuesday, 16th January 2018 (3rd Tuesday of the month)
> * Start time: 19:00
> * Finish time: 20:30 (social in Madlab until 21:00)

The fallout from Meltdown and, especially, Spectre continues.  This
includes predictions that Moore's Law (exponential growth in computing
power) will end:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/24/death_notice_for_moores_law/


Post-meeting exercises for <s>the reader</s> participants (based on talk):

* How much physical RAM does your computer have?

* How much 'swap' does your computer have?

* Use lscpu (from `util-linux` package), or look in /proc/cpuinfo, to
see what "flags" your CPU has?
** Which CPU flags are to do with memory virtualisation / isolation?
(WARNING: time consuming question)

* Run:
  uname -a
  to find your current running kernel.

* Run
  zgrep CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION -- /boot/config*
  to see if your running kernel has KPTI enabled.

* Run the `spectre-meltdown-checker` to see what your computer's
vulnerability level is.  On Debian, can be installed via backports:
** https://packages.debian.org/stretch-backports/spectre-meltdown-checker
*** https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/


Other topics discussed include the use of public Wi-Fi.  The Mozilla
Foundation has some safety advice on it:

https://advocacy.mozilla.org/en-US/safety/public-wifi

You might also want to checkout:

* https://noscript.net/
* https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
* https://www.eff.org/observatory


Any preference on next month's talk?


M.
MFS Chair.

-- 
FSF member #9429
http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=9429
http://www.fsf.org/about
"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide
mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all
free software users."

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