Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Friday, March 6, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, another flaw in Intel chips, this time unfixable.

Why Combinator demo day is going online only and I think you probably can guess why.

Sonos won't break your old hardware anymore.

Jack Dorsey probably won't be moving to Africa anymore and of course the weekend long read suggestions.

Here's what you miss today in the last five years has been discovered

that allows sophisticated attackers to access the Mask ROM, a piece of the chip that boots the very first piece of

CSME firmware and the vulnerability can't be patched with a firmware update quoting

Ars Technica.

The flaw resides in the converged security and management engine, a subsystem inside Intel

CPUs and chipsets, that's roughly analogous to Amd's platform security processor.

Often abbreviated as CSME, this feature implements the

firmware-based trusted platform module used for

silicon-based encryption, authentication of UEEFI Biose firmware,

Microsoft System Guard, and BitLocker, and other security features.

The bug stems from the failure of the input-output memory management unit which provides

protection preventing the malicious modification of static random access memory

to implement early enough in the firmware boot process.

That failure creates a window of opportunity for other chip

components such as the integrated sensor hub to execute malicious code that runs very early in

the boot process with the highest of system privileges.

Quote, this vulnerability jeopardizes everything Intel has done to build the root of trust and

...