Editing 1957: 2018 CVE List

:Cafés often offer free access to WiFi as a service to patrons, as a business strategy to encourage said patrons to remain in the building and buy more coffee. Some use a password, so that only patrons can use the WiFi, and may display the password on signage inside. Since anybody could go into the cafe to read the post-it, and then use the network from nearby, the ability to read it from outside is, at most, a trivial problem. For systems that are supposed to be secure, writing passwords in a visible place is a major security flaw. For instance, following the [[wikipedia:2018 Hawaii false missile alert|2018 Hawaii false missile alert]] (see [[Hawaii]]), the agency concerned received criticism for a press photo showing [https://www.businessinsider.com/hawaii-emergency-agency-password-discovered-in-photo-sparks-security-criticism-2018-1?r=US&IR=T a password written on a sticky note] attached to a monitor.

:Some people pronounce "{{w|SQL}}" like "sequel", after SQL's predecessor "SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language)". The standard for SQL suggests that it should be pronounced as separate letters; however, the author of SQL pronounces it "sequel", so the debate persists (with even <s>more</s> <s>less</s> <s>more</s> <s>less</s> <s>MORE</s> justification than arguments about how to pronounce "GIF"{{citation needed}}). MySQL is an free relational database management system. The latest generally available version (at the time of writing) is MySQL 5.7.

:{{w|Privilege escalation}} refers to any illegitimate means by which a system user gains greater access privileges than they are supposed to have. The most highly-sought privilege is that of the root user, which allows complete access to an entire system&mdash; a ''superuser''. Any flaw that would allow an ordinary user to escalate to superuser status is a critical security threat, as they then have full control of the machine. This is what most crackers seek to achieve when attacking a device.

:This is a reference to a common problem of modern gadgets catching fire (usually related to flaws in lithium-ion batteries), as well as to Apple products crashing when attempting to display certain character sequences. Diacritics are the accents found on letters in some languages, for example the German {{w|Umlaut_(diacritic)|umlaut}} (ü) or the French {{w|cedilla}} (ç). They usually indicate a change to how the letter is pronounced. Diacritics are not normally found on emojis{{citation needed}}, but since emojis are part of the widely-used {{w|Unicode}} standard which also allows for combining diacritics, it is in fact possible to combine the two to create a diacritical emoji. 🔥̃ is such an example.

:A more complicated instruction set is more complex to implement.{{Citation needed}} The x86 architecture is considered "CISC" (a "{{w|Complex instruction set computer}}"), having many instructions originally provided to make programming by a human simpler; other examples include the 68000 series used in the first {{w|Apple Macintosh}}. In the 1980s, this design philosophy was countered by the "RISC" ("{{w|Reduced instruction set computer}}") design movement - based on the observation that computer programs were increasingly generated by compilers (which only used a few instructions) rather than directly by people, and that the chip area dedicated to extra instructions could be better dedicated to, for example, cache. Examples of RISC style designs include {{w|SPARC}}, {{w|MIPS}}, {{w|PowerPC}} (used by Apple in later Macintoshes) and the {{w|ARM architecture|ARM}} chips common in mobile phones. Historically, there was considerable discussion about the merits of each approach. At one time the Mac and Windows PC were on different sides; owners of other competing systems such as the Archimedes and Amiga had similar arguments on usenet in the early 1990s. This "issue" may be posted by someone who still recalls these debates. Technically, the extra instructions do slightly complicate the task of validating correct chip behavior and complicate the tool chains that manage software, which could be seen as a minor security risk. However, the 64-bit architecture introduced by {{w|AMD}}, and since adopted by {{w|Intel}}, does rationalize things somewhat, and all recent x86 chips break down instructions into RISC-like micro-operations, so the complication from a hardware perspective is localized. Recent security issues, such as the speculative cache load issue in Meltdown and Spectre, depend more on details of implementation, rather than instruction set, and have been exhibited both by x86 (CISC) and ARM (RISC) processors.

:Cloud computing is a system of networked computers wherein the client user's computer can offload some of its work load and storage to the other computers &mdash; known as "the cloud." Many businesses offer their networks for consumer use, and can be marketed as "{{w|Platform as a Service}}" ("PaaS") or simply "cloud service." As with any product companies are always tempted to overhype what they offer, promising cloud computing to be more powerful and wondrous than it actually is. Thus, protestors try to remind people what cloud services really are by referring to "the cloud" as "other people's computers." This is, at its core, entirely accurate, taking away the business jargon and simplifying the situation in such a way that it might cast doubt on the security, reliability, and general effectiveness of using "cloud" solutions.  In [[908: The Cloud]], it turns out that [[Black Hat]] is the "other people" whose computer ''is'' the Cloud.

:Mitre's CVE database is where all {{w|Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures|CVEs}} are stored. This log message forms the punchline of the comic, as it implies that all of the exaggerated error messages above might have been inserted by crackers exploiting the vulnerability. To pour salt in the wound, they then included in a typical spam link purporting to offer inexpensive {{w|Viagra|brand-name Sildenafil}}.

* Randall has previously referenced diacritics in [[1647: Diacritics]].

* Bruce Schneier was previously mentioned in the title texts of [[748: Worst-Case Scenario]] and [[1039: RuBisCO]].