Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Kodak just keeps making news at CES 2018!

Kodak bitcoin miner on display at CES 2018

ZDNet – By: Corinne Reichert – “A Kodak-branded bitcoin miner labelled the ‘KashMiner’ has been displayed at the photography company’s booth at CES 2018, with Kodak Blockchain Project licensee Spotlite Energy Systems of California showcasing the product.

According to the Kodak licensee, an upfront payment of $3,400 for a two-year contract would lead to bitcoin production value of around $375 per month at current bitcoin value.

The partnership would provide the licensee with half of the resulting $9,000 made over the 24-month period.

Bitcoin production would reach around $25 per day on the Kodak Bitcoin HashPower Upfront Payment Plan.

The Kodak-licensed bitcoin miner was showcased on the same day that Kodak announced its own KodakCoin cryptocurrency utilising blockchain security technology, which it said is aimed at enabling image rights management for photographers.

The camera company’s ‘photo-centric’ cryptocurrency is being launched under a licensing partnership with Wenn Digital, and will also involve a blockchain-backed image rights management platform called KodakOne.

In an interview on the sidelines of CES 2018, Wenn Digital CMO Bruce Elliott told ZDNet that Kodak and Wenn have had a team of 20 people working on the KodakCoin project for ‘months and months’.

‘We can get a photo, lock it into our blockchain, then we can sort of assign the IP [intellectual property] to the individual, then we can look through the entire internet and find where that photo is being used, and if it’s not being used correctly, then we can reach out to them with an automated system that says, ‘hey, you might not have known that you’re using this photo without a licence, why don’t you get a licence to that’, and then that money comes back and gets paid back to the photographers, and that whole transaction happens with that KodakCoin cryptocurrency,’ Elliott told media at CES.

Elliott added that the companies have taken a highly regulated approach to its project and initial coin offering (ICO).

‘We’re US companies, we’re not from some far-flung place … it’s our company here in the US that’s issued it; we’ve filed with the SEC; we’ve put all of our regulatory pieces in place; we’re not a startup, either, so because of the companies we’ve brought together, we have revenues, we’ve got staff, all those things already, and now we’re going to fill out this platform. And then we have the trusted platform of Kodak, so you put those things together and we think that really differentiates us,’ Elliott explained.”

CES 2018 – TPN – 2018-Jan-10-PM Afternoon Recorded Live Report

CES 2018 – TPN – 2018-Jan-10-PM Morning Recorded Live Report

Microsoft has just confirmed that due to the issues arising from the recent security flaws in chips, it is requiring antivirus vendors to set a registry key in Windows to allow patching to occur. What this means is that if your particular antivirus does not set this registry key, or you did not set it yourself, then you will be BLOCKED from receiving security updates. That means security updates NOW, AND in the future! This is ridiculous! In effect, Microsoft is deciding that from now on unless you set this registry key your security will be compromised, regardless! Their heavy-handedness is getting out of hand!

Ouch! I hope you have newer systems!

Microsoft and Intel reveal just how much Meltdown and Spectre patches slow PCs

BetaNews – By: Mark Wycislik-Wilson – “The Meltdown and Spectre revelations have people around the world concerned about privacy, but there has also been great speculation about the reduction in performance that patches might bring. Now Microsoft and Intel have opened up about the sort of slowdown PC users and server operators can expect.

Having previously tried to play down the negative impact that bug patches will have on systems, Intel’s benchmark test now shows that — depending on the tasks — a slowdown of between 2 and 14 percent can be observed. Microsoft says that anyone with a computer dating from 2015 and earlier will notice a decrease in system performance.

Intel uses its performance test announcement to stress, once again, that there have been no reported instances of Meltdown or Spectre being exploited in the real world. The chip-maker says that it will share more information as it performs more tests, but wants to let its users know about its findings so far.

In a post in its newsroom, Intel says:

Based on our most recent PC benchmarking, we continue to expect that the performance impact should not be significant for average computer users. This means the typical home and business PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing digital photos. Based on our tests on SYSmark 2014 SE, a leading benchmark of PC performance, 8th Generation Core platforms with solid state storage will see a performance impact of 6 percent or less. (SYSmark is a collection of benchmark tests; individual test results ranged from 2 percent to 14 percent.)

These figures are intriguing. Firstly, it is interesting to note that the benchmark results are not really in line with Intel’s insistence that the performance hit would be minimal. Secondly, it is important to note that the vast majority of people are not running systems kitted out with 8th Generation Core processors and solid state storage. Intel continues to say that the impact on data centers will be small, but reveals no figures to back this up.

Microsoft has shared its own findings which break things down in rather more meaningful terms. Terry Myerson has penned a blog post in which he reveals that, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is older systems — although not particularly old — that will see the greatest negative impact.

Summarizing the company’s findings, Myerson says:

• With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don’t expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds.
• With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance.
• With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance.
• Windows Server on any silicon, especially in any IO-intensive application, shows a more significant performance impact when you enable the mitigations to isolate untrusted code within a Windows Server instance. This is why you want to be careful to evaluate the risk of untrusted code for each Windows Server instance, and balance the security versus performance tradeoff for your environment.

He goes on to explain:

For context, on newer CPUs such as on Skylake and beyond, Intel has refined the instructions used to disable branch speculation to be more specific to indirect branches, reducing the overall performance penalty of the Spectre mitigation. Older versions of Windows have a larger performance impact because Windows 7 and Windows 8 have more user-kernel transitions because of legacy design decisions, such as all font rendering taking place in the kernel. We will publish data on benchmark performance in the weeks ahead.

As more benchmarks are performed and there are more real world tests from users, the impact of Meltdown and Spectre patches will really start to be understood. There has been insistence from many sides that any negative performance hit will gradually be mitigated against, but it looks as though we’re in for a long and bumpy ride.”