[talk] Holidaze, AWS, and astounding "clock drift outage"

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

On Wed, Jan 3, 2018, at 3:41 AM, Charles Sprickman wrote:
> 
> > On Jan 3, 2018, at 3:09 AM, Isaac (.ike) Levy <ike at blackskyresearch.net> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > After weeks of nonsense (and boring long stories),
> > 
> > On Mon, Dec 18, 2017, at 3:39 PM, Isaac (.ike) Levy wrote:
> >> Hi All,
> >> 
> >> A bit OT from the pit of internet hell, but perhaps of interest to folks
> >> here: This weekend AWS has been doling out a disruption of service of
> >> the worst kind, clock skew insanity.  And when I say insanity, I mean
> >> true madness.
> > 
> > Updates, perhaps of interest in several categories,
> > 
> > Through continued holiday NTP/hardware adventure, we were told we were casualties of a Xen exploit to be publicly announced Thursday:
> > https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/
> > 
> > As of today, Intel appears to be prepping to get in the mix, with issues apparently *quite* related,
> > https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7nl8r0/intel_bug_incoming/
> > http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/169166980422/the-mysterious-case-of-the-linux-page-table
> > 
> > Thursday my Ops teammates and I will certainly be popping popcorn to watch this show.
> 
> <non security hot take>
> Security concerns aside, if there really is a 30%-ish performance hit 
> for “some virtualization workloads”, and we assume AWS is basically all 
> Intel, and that that 30% is now just datacenter-warming rather than 
> computing, and 30% more capacity will be added, consuming 30% more 
> power, is this like a whole “add a Denmark to the power grid” event?  
> 
> Like a security flaw is going to hasten global warming?
> </non-security hot take>

I love it.  I was more thinking about how *just the right virus* can hit a homogenious population of some biological entity, but your hot take is way more in line with recent events of 2017.

On the same side track, and apparently quite real, "Intel's CEO Just Sold a Lot of Stock",
https://darwininvestingnetwork.com/intel039s-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock-motley-fool/

Best,
.ike