Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Well, I was feeling nostalgic for the goold ol' days of computing. Looks like we'll be living them again soon.

Perhaps that smurftower PowerMac G3 tucked into the back of the closet that's been gathering dust will be useful again.

It's affected by the bug and will never be patched.

Damn (though the G3 has a fairly short pipeline if memory serves), how far back do I need to go? I may have an old Amiga 500 somewhere around here...

You can get a Pentium 1. Or a 2012 Atom.

Or you can buy AMD Zen and use it with branch prediction disabled ;)

G3/750 have a 4-stage pipeline [1]. They were really cool chips actually, they used them in the GameCube (the 750CXe).

[1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2004/10/ppc-2/

The RAD750 PPC (radiation hardened variant) is also used in a ton of satellites. It was state of the art until about a year ago for space.

I wonder (my evil devil's advocate) if there are satellites or other hard-to-patch vital facilities that could be compromised with either of these vulnerabilities.

I know they made space-hardened x86 chips too.

Surprisingly, due to architectural limitations, it isn't affected by either of the issues in spite of having some speculative execution capabilities. The G5 might be but it appears the G3 and G4 are good to go based on this detailed writeup I found.

"...the G3 and the G4, because of their limitations on indirect branching, are at least somewhat more resistant to Spectre-based attacks because it is harder to cause their speculative execution pathways to operate in an attacker-controllable fashion (particularly the G3 and the 7400, which do not have a link stack cache). So, if you're really paranoid, dust that old G3 or Sawtooth G4 off. You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse." [1]

[1] http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-an...

> You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse.

Just not MacOS yosemite, more likely Linux/PPC or Open/NetBSD... :D

The way I read it, it's not immune, just harder to attack. Furthermore, Meltdown and Spectre are just two specific ways to attempt a whole class of attacks and could be improved upon especially now that the whole world's attention has been brought upon it.

So yeah probably you're not going to have issues in reality with a G3, especially given its small presence in modern computing, but I wouldn't choose it thinking it's immune either.

Only if you run proprietary software or unaccounted code like JavaScript/WebAssembly.

If you have a completely foss system and don't execute random code from the internet, you can very safely still enjoy the full power of the hardware.

So basically unless you're RMS you're fucked

Oh, you don't have to be another person just for taking care of your computer security hygiene.

It's not that hard. I don't browse the web from my computer. To look at pages, I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is a very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

How do you view the pages after they're mailed to you?

As raw HTML in a text editor, or in a browser?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com