Re: OT: in the news

[Kari Eveli lexitec@xxxxxxxx]

Hello Jordan,

It seems almost everything around now is affected. While it is too early
to say what measures would be appropriate medium term (scrapping your
current gear?), the threats that are most serious seem to be servers
running multiple virtualized web servers, etc. As of now, there is not
much one can do, except apply patches and OS updates if available and
take care of firewalls and virus protection, including those of virtual
machines connected to the net (XP mode in particular). It seems that
Xeon processors are vulnerable, which means that servers on a wide front
are open to attack. The problem with older processors is that Intel and
others will not necessarily provide support for 'obsolete' equipment
(older than five years), meaning that patches, if they appear at all,
will arrive very late.


Here is a list of affected processors:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245508/components-processors/intel-responds-to-the-cpu-kernel-bug.html

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

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> My immediate curiosity is: just *where* is the dividing line ?  If my
> computers are mainly of 2006 to 2009 model vintage, would this _not_
> affect me, so long as I am able to continue running those ?  It would be
> nice if there was some table listing CPUs that are affected, and those
> that aren't.
>
>
>
>    Jordan