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I was in the non-profit shop of a local charity. They accept donations of used computers then resell them to the public. The profit goes to charity. I asked for their oldest machine. It had an AMD chip from the 16h family. Thus, a spychip.

So their oldest machine was still too new for me. I asked why don’t you have anything older? They said the general public would not accept anything older, and so the shop also does not accept anything older. When machines are rejected, they go to a factory that destroys them and recovers the raw metals.

It’s sad to see that pre-spychip machines are being destroyed and that even 2nd-hand customers are being limited to anti-consumer spychip hardware.

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[-] rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You act like you're the only one that understands information security. I took a security class for my computer science degree too. Productive conversation cannot be had when you strut around arrogantly dismissing everyone that disagrees with you.

The fix was made. And it was done without writing microcode.

Spectre was a microcode patch. Meltdown was a kernel patch, so in firmware. Only AMD bothered to fix chips that fit within your timeframe. The fix has not been made for the chips you want to use.

Patching is not the only way to control for a vuln

You aren't going to stop branch prediction with clever tricks. These are hardware level flaws. Patching is the only way to completely mitigate these flaws.

[-] evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 1 week ago

dismissing everyone that disagrees with you.

What’s being dismissed is irrelevant facts. You continue (for a 3rd time) to still fail to grasp the fact that Meltdown was not found to affect AMD chips. It’s wholly irrelevant.

Spectre was a kernel patch, so in firmware.

Those are two different things. There was a firmware patch. And separately there was a kernel mitigation. You don’t need both.

Only AMD bothered to fix chips that fit within your timeframe. The fix has not been made for the chips you want to use.

You mean AMD’s f/w patch was not made. Yet you’ve been told about the 15h.org project. If you absorbed that, then citation needed that Coreboot fails to mitigate. In the absence of Coreboot, the os mitigation was implemented in linux. So you’re pushing a bullshit problem.

[-] rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago

I'm aware of coreboot. I was not aware that the project managed to increase support to include configurations for all chips that predate IME and PSP. Last I recall when I looked at coreboot, there were chips that they didn't think could ever be supported, even without nannyware. I wasn't pushing a bullshit problem, I was raising legitimate concerns for problems that I didn't know had solutions. If you don't want people to raise honest, good faith concerns to you then you better be extremely vigilant that you don't step in shit.

this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2026
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