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Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years

(blog.invisiblethings.org)
276 points chei0aiV | 2 comments | 27 Oct 15 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | source
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n0us ◴[27 Oct 15 15:13 UTC] No.10458463[source]▶
I really could do without "considered harmful" titles. x86 has been one of the most influential technologies of all time and a clickbait title doesn't do it justice imo.
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wyager ◴[27 Oct 15 15:41 UTC] No.10458692[source]▶
So were PHP and goto statements.

How influential something is has nothing to do with how good it is.

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vezzy-fnord ◴[27 Oct 15 15:43 UTC] No.10458720[source]▶
goto is just a mnemonic for jmp. It's the primitive from which all higher level control flow is ultimately derived. It isn't harmful, and it's used a lot even in C.
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1. ska ◴[27 Oct 15 16:36 UTC] No.10459176[source]▶
That largely misses (Dijkstra's, originally) point. How control flow is implemented at a low level (e.g. jmp/lngjmp) is a completely separable from how it should be exposed in a language.

Wearing a c programmers' hat you may say "absolutely", a scheme programmers' hat, perhaps "no way". Horses for courses after all.

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2. vezzy-fnord ◴[27 Oct 15 16:43 UTC] No.10459238[source]▶
That's a more nuanced position than the one that is commonly understood, however. Though, you are always bound to your architectural model, so exploiting it more directly is not innately bad. Layers tend to be leaky.

Wearing a Scheme programmers' hat, call/cc isn't any less of a landmine.