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A comment on AMD ships microcode update to disable some branch prediction. Parent comment

Re:AMD ships microcode update to disable some branch prediction by wvenable on Friday January 05, 2018 @06:17PM (#16082636)
It requires a lot of CPU so there isn't anything silent about it. If some bad advertisement absolutely kills the tab you're looking at, I hope you'd notice. If you're using a multi-process browser (like Chrome) the impact is pretty minimal.

That's not to say it's not bad -- the exploit works remarkably well -- but it's not fast or easy.

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Re:AMD ships microcode update to disable some branch prediction by acqq on Friday January 05, 2018 @06:33PM (#16082715)
Imagine: You open the browser, leave it open on some page and then leave your computer for a few hours or overnight. You can’t notice what a rogue ad did while you were away. Your passwords are maybe gone.
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Re:AMD ships microcode update to disable some branch prediction by LaGrange on Friday January 05, 2018 @08:34PM (#16083295)
Besides the "hiding" strategy (bots hide themselves under the windows clock. It's a wonderful world out there), I'm afraid it's unlikely you'll notice. Reliability of modern consumer software ain't all that great.
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