"amdflaws.com" - What is this?

[Mockingbird]

what is put and what does all that mean?

Short covering:
http://www.investinganswers.com/financial-dictionary/stock-market/short-covering-2128

Put option:
http://www.investinganswers.com/financial-dictionary/optionsderivatives/put-option-1824

 

[turtile]

what is put and what does all that mean?

It's basically betting on future movements of a stock without actually putting out all of the money needed to purchase a stock.

So let's say they paid 50 cents for the $10 strike price. This means that they can sell AMD stock for $10 until it expires on Friday. If they don't execute, they lose 50 cents per share (they come in 100 share contracts which would be $50).

If the price of AMD falls to $9.00, they can buy the stock for $9.00 and sell it for $10.00 with the put option. Since they paid 50 cents for the option, they would get profit 50 cents per share.

So for every contract, they would double their money. $50 turns into $100.

Just to add in how profitable this can become, if they tanked AMD down to $8, they would make $150 for every $50 put in and it keeps getting better the lower it goes.

 

[deathBOB]

Serious question: if this is a short selling scheme, shouldn’t fans and investors who believe in AMD’s future be happy about being able to temporarily buy AMD stock at a discounted price?

The short sellers have made money off of their counter parties, but they haven’t really affected me if I believe in the long term value of AMD.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Serious question: if this is a short selling scheme, shouldn’t fans and investors who believe in AMD’s future be happy about being able to temporarily buy AMD stock at a discounted price?

The short sellers have made money off of their counter parties, but they haven’t really affected me if I believe in the long term value of AMD.

Serious answer (IMHO of course): don't buy any individual stocks, ever, even if you love the company more than life itself.

Buy S&P 500 index fund (mutual or ETF) or Vanguard Target <year> fund shares and hold the shares for decades. Betting on the continued success (as a group) of the 500 largest US companies is much, much safer than betting on the success of 1 company.

 

[zinfamous]

Serious answer (IMHO of course): don't buy any individual stocks, ever, even if you love the company more than life itself.

Buy S&P 500 index fund (mutual or ETF) or Vanguard Target <year> fund shares and hold the shares for decades. Betting on the continued success (as a group) of the 500 largest US companies is much, much safer than betting on the success of 1 company.

Yes but your indexes would have no value, and well, wouldn't even exist, if no one bought individual stocks.

 

[mattiasnyc]

heheheh..... and now I play the waiting game....

 

[DaveSimmons]

Yes but your indexes would have no value, and well, wouldn't even exist, if no one bought individual stocks.

How so? An S&P 500 index fund is a fund that buys and holds shares of all 500 companies. When you own one share of VFINX, you own fractional shares of all 500.

Then instead of betting that just AMD or intel specifically will do well, you are betting that civilization will not collapse and that the largest multinationals will continue to control the economic world. When one of the 500 falls, a new largest corporation just takes its place in the 500.

Some of the 500 do very well, a few do badly (and if that continues are cast out and replaced) and the rest do reasonably well. As a group, they grow.

 

[TempAcc99]

Seeing scum like this win, really pisses me off.

True. But sooner or latter the will either loose all the money or end up in prison. See Martin Shkreli.

It looks like they failed for now. There are a ton of put options (over 1,000,000 shares) that expire at $10.00 on Friday and even more at $11.00 next week. Now we will just have to see if they cover the short positions or come up with a new plan of attack.

That would actually be hilarious. After all the stock market is unpredictable and sooner or later you will lose a lot (=everything) with these kind of schemes.

How so? An S&P 500 index fund is a fund that buys and holds shares of all 500 companies. When you own one share of VFINX, you own fractional shares of all 500

off topic:

You are right. Index funds usually are the way to go. They have close to 0 fee, much less than managed funds, and history shows that they fare at least as good as managed funds in the long term. Managed funds easily have fees 1% higher than index funds meaning they need to consistently outperform the index fund by 1%. That is harder than it sounds.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Yes but this is most important, it today many ARM SoC-s most commonly used is Cortex A53(or his successor A55) he is not affected.

http://www.portvapes.co.uk/?id=Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps&exid=thread...scussion-thread.2532563/page-21#post-39245556

A53 does not do speculation.
Which is why the performance is a bit lower in comparison to speculation cores when executing general code.

Here is a lot more information :
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/

 

[Veradun]

Synopsis:

"To violate these systems you first need to violate these systems"

Laughable.

And anyone saying that while the company is shady the threats might be real, really really really has no clue about this staff. The "vulnerability" is basically that superadmins have superadmin powers and that is a tool to do whatever they want. Exactly as it should be by design, or the role wouldn't exist.

 

[zinfamous]

How so? An S&P 500 index fund is a fund that buys and holds shares of all 500 companies. When you own one share of VFINX, you own fractional shares of all 500.

Then instead of betting that just AMD or intel specifically will do well, you are betting that civilization will not collapse and that the largest multinationals will continue to control the economic world. When one of the 500 falls, a new largest corporation just takes its place in the 500.

Some of the 500 do very well, a few do badly (and if that continues are cast out and replaced) and the rest do reasonably well. As a group, they grow.

Hey I do the same thing as you do, but I recognize that there is real value driven by the people out there flapping about and guessing on individual shares. If value isn't being created through this activity when everyone takes the advice to stick to index funds, then that company that steps into the replace the next failing F 500 company wouldn't be able to do it.

 

[zinfamous]

If these exploits are true, then anyone that has ever touched your recent AMD PC potentially has had the ability to install unsigned code into the TEE. That is a major hole that makes every single Zen based system untrustable by default. If the further allegations are true then physical access isn't even required (chained attacks - which is how most exploits are weaponized).

Essentially the alleged vulnerability makes the Trusted Execution Environment - untrusted.

Yes, you did pick up on the knee jerk reaction of the usual people needing to come to AMD's defense without understanding what the vulnerabilities are.

So...basically every system is vulnerable if exploits can be enacted with middleman attacks in the distribution chain. Whoop-di-do.

Meanwhile, this fake shortseller hit company has specifically targeted AMD and set up some sham website, paid off a single reviewer that got privileged access to their attacks, blatantly ignored the industry standard when reporting these findings and, again, singled out AMD, arguing that this is as bed as Meltdown or Spectre.

Sure, it's the knee-jerk fanboy reaction that rushed to defend their AMD heroes; not that this obvious scam from a group of teenagers with a known reputation for this kind of activity is a big deal.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

If ASMEDIA has a similar system in the chipset that it provides for AMD, i wonder what is really the case.
And is this claim true ? Does ASMEDIA provide the X370/B350/A320 chipsets ?
But the strange thing is... The trustzone cpu is embedded into the apu/cpu.
And that is manufactured by AMD /GF.

Asmedia do indeed provide the "chipset" IP for Ryzen. It actually identifies as an ASMEDIA ASM2016(A, B or C depending on X370/B350/A320 I think it is).

But the "chipset" isn't really the chipset, as Ryzen is a full-on SoC with its own FCH on die (which coincidentally is all the X300/B300 would be). The "chipset" Asmedia provides is really just a glorified PCIe I/O breakout box. All the important stuff is happening on-die inside Ryzen.

 

[jpiniero]

So...basically every system is vulnerable if exploits can be enacted with middleman attacks in the distribution chain. Whoop-di-do.

I could see the NSA loving that though... use an exploit to get the exploit in that they really want.

That's not to say that this isn't shady at all by CTS. I have to wonder if you might see this in the future - disclosing flaws like this to manipulate the stock price.

 

[Stuka87]

Been a bit annoyed at Ian Cutress's tweats. Will have to wait and read what he got out of their interview. But it seems like he keeps backing them up. Like saying you can flash somebodies BIOS without physical access. And yes, you can on many machines these days. BUT, you still need to know the EXACT machine you are wanting to reflash, AND you need the source code for that piece of firmware, so that you can then modify it, compile it, and then flash it onto the target in question. This is EXTREMELY unlikely.

Same goes for the attack vectors that require vendor supplied, signed drivers. An attacker would not only need the source code, but they would also need the vendors cert in order to sign it. If either of these happens, the company in question has had one of the biggest security leaks ever.

 

[Malogeek]

Been a bit annoyed at Ian Cutress's tweats. Will have to wait and read what he got out of their interview. But it seems like he keeps backing them up. Like saying you can flash somebodies BIOS without physical access. And yes, you can on many machines these days. BUT, you still need to know the EXACT machine you are wanting to reflash, AND you need the source code for that piece of firmware, so that you can then modify it, compile it, and then flash it onto the target in question. This is EXTREMELY unlikely.

Likely AT were paid quite well to post the article and I'm sure Ian would prefer to keep some dignity and insist the only reason for the article was for the technical aspects. The problem is that the validity of the claims isn't as relevant as the purpose and timing of the claim, which was completely obvious from the way the paper was written. They didn't even hide why they were making these claims against AMD.

There are going to be some damaged reputations from this. I understand business's have to be run but there's such things as journalistic integrity and research.

edit: retracted. Re-reading article it doesn't seem to be pre-authored from prior contact. My apologies for comments if this was so.

 

[Kenmitch]

Likely AT were paid quite well to post the article and I'm sure Ian would prefer to keep some dignity and insist the only reason for the article was for the technical aspects. The problem is that the validity of the claims isn't as relevant as the purpose and timing of the claim, which was completely obvious from the way the paper was written. They didn't even hide why they were making these claims against AMD.

There are going to be some damaged reputations from this. I understand business's have to be run but there's such things as journalistic integrity and research.

Paid to post the article seems unbelievable too me at least. I'd think the reputation of the website and ones self would be worth more in the end.

 

[mattiasnyc]

True. But sooner or latter the will either loose all the money or end up in prison. See Martin Shkreli.

Unfortunately I think the Shkrelis are more the exception than the rule.

 

[Stuka87]

Paid to post the article seems unbelievable too me at least. I'd think the reputation of the website and ones self would be worth more in the end.

I am inclined to believe this as well. But, Anandtech is not self owned. So who knows what the parent company does.

 

[richaron]

I am inclined to believe this as well. But, Anandtech is not self owned. So who knows what the parent company does.

This whole thing appears more a PR event and investments rort than a tech article. See backgrounds of the entity and some of the most quoted "experts". Although I do admit AMD has to address this I don't see anything which may have been business as usual if the other players hadn't apparently sold out.

Obviously I'm visiting tin-foil hat country with my following link, and by no means am I saying it's evidence of collusion, but it might be interesting to some viewers of this thread (purch owns AT & Tom's):
http://www.purch.com/experiences/intel/

Again, not claiming anything. Just providing information about the owners of AT. People can make their own conclusions, and people are often stupid.

 

[Malogeek]

Paid to post the article seems unbelievable too me at least. I'd think the reputation of the website and ones self would be worth more in the end.

Yeah I'm retracting that, was unnecessary. I first thought it was a pre-authored article but re-reading that doesn't seem to be the case. Just put together with little information and released but that's their job here I guess.

 

[yulgrhet]

Occam's razor suggests a profit motivation.

That said, a former Unit 8200 member being involved does raise questions about the FUD being spread.

Although very low probability, it is not zero. It's possible that Israel has exploits against non-Zen CPUs which they'd rather continue using. If that's the case however, it is poor messaging to use such an obvious hatchet job. If anything, reading between the lines would suggest AMD processors are more secure and that physical access is required to breach them. Which would make Unit 8200's work more difficult if they can't remotely pwn it.

Excellent points.

Physical access being required makes it exponentially more difficult. In terms of remote global access to the most secured and desirable data, remote accessible hardware back doors on the CPU lines universally used worldwide, particularly by governments, corporations and server companies, would be no. 1 on the deep states shopping list. What would the U.S. government consider more important to keep on U.S. soil and under U.S. control?

That bring up the question ... how the heck did the capability to design such backdoors in such universally used processors, particularly and universally used across the U.S. government agencies and security establishment, end up in a tiny country on the other side of the atlantic ocean? And why?

Then there's AMD and establishment Hubris. As the U.S. deep state thought they had Russia permanently locked down and helpless when Putin came into power in 1999 so too did Intel think they had AMD permanently locked into a distant second place in the CPU market, particularly in the professional, business, governmental and big data markets.

They were blindsided. Compounding the problem are their 10nm woes. As bad as 2018 will be for Intel's market share, in 2019, when Intel is still peddling 14nm 10 gen monolithic chips against AMD's 7nm modular Zen 2 maximum 64 core line-up, that market share goes into meltdown. Intel will be substantially uncompetitive on manufacturing costs, single core performance, available cores, system performance, maximum performance, efficiency and pricing headroom.

The deep state was blind sided too. All of a sudden their back door lock is threatened, soon to be substantially threatened, and this will continue until Intel has a modular architecture and has their fab woes straightened out. That will be 3 to 4 years minimum. That's a SERIOUS erosion of their backdoor access capability, compounded if AMD gains the reputation as the CPU to buy for best security. THAT must not be allowed to take root and grow. CTI was clumsy, but it planted a seed and had massive deniability. Repetition creates reality and the deep state controls the MSM and lord knows how many internet sites. But they have to stay sly and maintain deniability. The idea all Intel CPUs have a secret hardware backdoor gaining traction is to be avoided at all costs.

 

[Kenmitch]

Conspiracy theories pop the X-Files slogan....Trust no one....in my head.

 

[richaron]

Conspiracy theories pop the X-Files slogan....Trust no one....in my head.

Man I'm on an X-Files binge right now. Mid season 7 and it's still quality stuff. But how did you know?

Personally I think a bit of skeptical thinking is reasonable here. Although with any good conspiracy theory there's unlikely to be solid proof.

 

[Dribble]

Thinking about it, if you have low morals the Israeli company is smart.
So you find an exploit, what are your choices:
1) report it to the company (AMD) get a pat on the back and maybe a few $$$ reward.
2) report it to your government spy agency, might get you a job other then that not a lot I guess.
3) use the exploit yourself to make money, you make some money but you're now a wanted man.
4) use it to manipulate the stock market. You make lots of money and it's not even illegal.

I'm surprised no one has done this before, particularly for a company with volatile stock like AMD you can't loose. I suspect we'll see more of this in the future, with more companies setup to give those who've found something like this a way to make a lot of money - you bring the exploit, they bring the money to invest and the stock market know-how. You both make money.