nlgranger

We in France experienced a higher than usual participation rate during the last representatives elections. Turned out the extra voters had roughly the same distribution as the others. At least it was not game changing. In the US, the winner takes all voting system also demotivates voters, in some counties the argument that voting is useless is legit.

I'm not saying this is a small issue and nothing should be done. I just noted that the issue is not as big as some other hardware-based vulnerabilities we encountered in the past. And every threat model calls for a corresponding counter-measure.

You are assuming activists are well funded in some way, and that they are not repressed. I'm assuming they are repressed, which is why they have people that buy and configure their equipment and hand it to them so that it hasn't been tampered with. If you cannot afford that your should use your computer as if it was compromised.

You’re basically saying consumers don’t need any kind of antivirus either Where did I write that?

And what makes it so hard to release patches for consumer hardware. AMD focusing on where its money's at and OEM/motherboard manufacturers being cheap and lazy and not pushing forward updates when they have them.

Agreed, firmware security by chip manufacturers has been underwhelming to say the least and we can blame them for that. But in this specific instance I still don't see the benefit of a fix for consumer usage. Companies have a responsibility and accountability toward their users, so a fix is due, for personal laptops/PCs the threat is toward the owners themselves (activists, diplomats, journalists, etc.). The latter do not buy second hand equipment, and if the firmware is compromised while they own it, they are already in danger.

Consumer usage is not really concerned by the attack scenario of this vulnerability from what I understand. The prerequisite is to have access to the bios so it's already game over at this point.

I'm a bit dubious that revolutions can be effective nowadays against a well organised oppressive state with present tools (propaganda, police, surveillance, corruption). All revolutions have failed over the last few decades (Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Tunisia then Arab Spring, etc.).

amd-pstate gives me worse battery usage (when idle, hard to tell otherwise without a proper benchmark), which is strange because core frequencies were lower. tlp says the battery has 73Wh.