Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 7, 2018

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SERIOUS SECURITY ISSUE IN ALL COMPUTERS MAY LEAD TO FED OUTAGES

by Hazed

If you have been following the news over the last few days you may have read about a very serious security issue that has been reported in Intel and AMD chips, which could allow bad guys to read what is stored in your computer’s memory. That means they would be able to grab login details for secure sites such as internet banking.

This article on the BBC news website explains what the bug is and how it could affect you: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42562303. Alan has also written a piece on the bug in this week’s Winding Down.

But there is another issue that will affect Fed. As you probably know, Fed runs in the cloud on a virtual server. But underneath that is a real, physical computer, and when patches to fix this security hole get released, the computer is going to need to be patched. That means it will need to be reset, possibly more than once, and when that happens Fed will go down.

We should get some warning about when the patches will be applied, and when we find out we’ll post the details on the noticeboard. So keep an eye on it so you will get the warning too.

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