Completely unbiased news if, of course an impossibility. The article is however pointing out that due to the deliberate actions of the Indian govt, opposing viewpoints are increasingly found only on platforms that are outside the Indian government's direct influence.
Have you ever wondered what if time travel was possible and we were already living in one of the optimal worlds of possibilities corrected by time travelers? Suddenly such terrible things that happened in history were inevitable because the other alternatives would have been much worse?
I'm skeptical if that's design behavior, or if this article is in that category of "stories manufacturers write to trick people into not RMA'ing obviously defective product batches" ("A small number of DDR5 systems...")
It's not only the multiple 15-minute RAM boot times (!?) that are worrying: it's that I'd have zero visibility into what underlying cause is responsible for these "small number" of events, and what other symptoms could develop later on (outside the RMA window). I couldn't just take the manufacturer's reassurance at face value.
> This essentially involves measuring lengths of wires from memory controller to individual DRAM chips. The idea there is that it is impossible to make them well-enough matched for the frequencies involved, so the deliberate difference is compensated for in logic and software (also it saves space on PCB of both motherboard and the DIMMs themselves).
My initial thought: figure out what constitutes a high value file, then target those. It is probably safe to state that virtually everyone is swamped in low value files, things like web browser caches, that any rate limit that doesn't affect the legitimate use of the computer would also allow ransomware to encrypt all of the user's data. As an example, there are currently 195 open files in my home directory. (Okay, this is Linux, but I suspect Windows is similar.) It is quite easy to trim my home directory down to about 2000 potential high value files with simple criteria I came up with off the top of my head, based on directory names or file types, without ever opening a file. Someone who knew more about the behavior of users and software could trim more.
Not only is the level of protection questionable, the possibility of breaking existing software is real, and file access on Windows seems to be slow to begin with.
Malware might adapt, but “low and slow” isn’t viable for their business model. They need the “shock and awe” of everything being encrypted all at once.
A low-and-slow attack would need to transparently encrypt files over a long period, and pulling out they key material all at once. Something like Windows EFS could probably be leveraged to do that kind of attack, but stock EFS would show up in the UI. A malicious EFS replacement that hides in the filesystem filter stack would definitely do it.
That would be a ton more work and would probably be easier to detect (and have tons of compatibility issues, I’m sure).
