Paul or Yousef: new Pentium Bug story! What do you all make of this?
Is this garbage?
Gary
news.com
Pentium bug surfaces
By Brooke Crothers
November 7, 1997, 2:20 p.m. PT
A new bug that crashes Intel (INTC) Pentium processors has
been found and is now being discussed openly on the Internet.
The bug has the potential to crash Pentium computers and could
be used as a weapon for sabotage, according to Robert Collins,
whose Intel Secrets Web site tracks inside information on Intel,
the world's leading chipmaker.
The "Pentium FO" bug can freeze up Pentium MMX and "classic"
(non-MMX) Pentium computers, according to Collins.
Worldwide, these machines number in the hundreds of millions.
Message traffic concerning the bug is starting to pick up in Intel
newsgroups on the Internet, just as it did for the Pentium FPU
bug a few years ago.
"This is for real. I've known about it for a couple of months,"
Collins said. "I actually think there's no excuse for [Intel] not
having found this," he asserted.
The company had not yet returned inquiries concerning the bug.
The bug is a single illegal instruction and not something that
would be deliberately coded into a software program, according
to Collins. Therefore, it will not be found in commercial software
or independently developed software.
Nevertheless, this instruction could be inserted into a C program
and used maliciously to bring down a company's server
computers, for example, according to Collins. |
