GitHub Incident Analysis Shows How to Improve Service Reliability

On October 21, 2018, GitHub users experienced a degraded service during 24 hours due to an incident caused by routine maintenance work. This led to the display of outdated and inconsistent information and to the unavailability of webhooks and other internal services for 24 hours. GitHub post-incident report shows where things failed and suggests how to improve site reliability.

Rust 1.30 Brings More Metaprogramming Support and Improved Modules

The latest release of Rust, version 1.30, extends procedural macros by allowing them to define new attributes and function-like macros. Additionally, it streamlines Rust module system by making it more consistent and straightforward.

PortSmash is the Latest Side-Channel Attack Affecting Intel CPUs

Researchers have devised a new kind of timing attack to steal information from a different process running on the same core with SMT/hyper-threading enabled. By carefully measuring port contention delays when sending instructions to a shared core, the researchers could recover a private key from a different process. Intel CPUs are probably not the only ones affected.

C2x Will Be the Next ISO Standard for the C Language

Expected to be finalized in 2022, the C2x standard has started its evolution, driven by the C committee. InfoQ had the chance to speak with Jens Gustedt, who is working within the committee to advance the new standard and author of the upcoming book Modern C.

GPUs Found Vulnerable to Side-Channel Attacks

Since Spectre and Meltdown were demonstrated at the beginning of 2018, researchers have been discovering many variants of side-channel vulnerabilities affecting both Intel and AMD CPUs. GPUs seemed instead to be immune to such attacks. Until now, that is.