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Technical Details Assignment

   

Added on  2021-06-14

14 Pages3393 Words68 Views
ICT 1Please fill in the following details:Student NameStudent NumberTutor’s Name

ICT 2WEEK 1Massive Intel CPU flaw: Understanding the technical details of Meltdown and SpectreJames, S 2018, ‘Massive Intel CPU flaw: Understanding the technical details of Meltdown and Spectre.’ TechRepublic [online]. Available from: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/massive-intel-cpu-flaw-understanding-the-technical-details-of-meltdown-and-spectre/[Accessed 16 May 2018].This article describes the emergence of critical architectural flaws in the central processing units, andthat which allows or dupes unauthorized applications to read from the kernel (part of the operating system). I chose this article for its clarity in explanation in the emergence, discovery and the differences between the two flaws that presents a serious havoc in the world of computing and computer data security. Additionally, the article gives a breakdown of processors heavily affected bythe flaws.Meltdown, one of the flaw, is described as a hardware-level flaw that allows programs to read from the operating systems following a behavior that is out-of-order on CPU executes instructions and accesses memory. The out-of order execution neutralizes security models that are based on paravirtualized software and address space thus ‘permitting’ applications to read from the physical memory, including the kernel, without any order.While current researches and studies have not promised if any updates on the CPU microcode will completely mitigate the vulnerability, it continues to wreak havoc on computer and computer systems at an astonishing speed of 120 KB per second.Key to note, is the paragraph in which the author describes the risks posed to the cloud computing world. While there is no indication and fingerprints to the usage of meltdown in the wild as the exploitation is never traceable in the system logs, some malware signatures are detectable using traditional means.The usefulness in this article is that it provides a clear description of what is and how meltdown

ICT 3occurs and its effects on computer systems. Most important is the part that describes who is vulnerable, and what could be the ultimate solution to the vulnerability, that is, architectural changes for future products. The fact that the article describes the core differences between Meltdown and Spectre make the article more useful.WEEK 2Graphical User InterfaceSteven, L. 2018. ‘Graphical User Interface.’ Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. [online]

ICT 4https://www.britannica.com/technology/graphical-user-interface[Accessed 16 May 2018].In this article, Steven Levy gives a detailed description of early operating systems that run on variouscomputers, and cascading researches and developments that led to the generally loved, easy to use and learn, user interface- the graphical user interface (GUI). I chose this article particularly due to thesimplicity used in accounting for the development and ‘discovery’ of graphical user interface. The account is described stepwise from early times of the interface to the present day interface with a detailed response by research and interest groups to great development soon after 1985- which marked a new way of human-computer interaction, other than the hard to learn and use, command line interface.What we find here is that there is no single person that can be traced to have invented the interface, but each, at their own time improved some already existing designs. The article credits Vannever Bush as the first theorist who in his article “As We May Think” envisioned how future computer userwould use a “computer-like device that was outfitted with buttons and levers to access information. The article gives a series of developments that followed, starting from the PARC –Palo Alto Research Center- wave of innovation on their Xerox Star workstation. Everything on this computer was represented as a picture, using an expensive bit mapping technique. Additionally, the computer had the capability of displaying exactly what outputs of a printer would be, an idea that was coiled as‘what you see is what you get.’What is more useful on this article is the description of how researchers picked up work done by theirpredecessors and finally realized their dreams. Moreover, the criticism that followed and its effects ofdevelopments of other interfaces such as voice recognition.WEEK 3

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