[Arm-netbook] Meltdown and Spectre

[Jack Hill]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2018, Jack Hill wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Jan 2018, Adam Van Ymeren wrote:
>
>> The thing about Meltdown/Spectre is that they're really only problems if
>> you rely on sandboxing to run untrusted code.
>
> I'm not convinced that sandboxing is only useful for untrusted code. 
> Sometimes my trusted code has bugs (e.g. I would like to be able to look 
> at random images or documents or expose my webapp to the world), and 
> I would really like for it to not be able to be tricked into doing 
> something it shouldn't. I would also like to be able to compute in shared 
> environments.

Oh, I guess it might be helpful to explain a little bit more why I would 
like to be able to continue to use shared computing environments. I've 
been increasing amazed and intimidated by what it takes to understand 
modern computing. One of my outlets for these emotions is Hcoöp [0], which 
is an internet service hosting coöperative. We run services such as email, 
web, and file collaboratively, which saves any one person for having to do 
all that work on their own. I appreciate the work of projects like 
Freedombox, but why stop the collaborating after writing the code? I want 
to be able to collaborate on running it as well!

In addition, some things just don't make sense for all of us to own on our 
own. I might not often need a large memory or hundreds of core compute 
cluster, but when I do, it is nice to be able to use a shared resource 
rather than purchasing my own.

Best,
Jack

[0] https://hcoop.net