I have two Windows 10 machines that have been already patched (both originally developer/insider mode) and have had no problems so far, and no noticeable performance issues though there are reports of some VM complications elsewhere. In the case of Linux this is another OEM hardware nuisance which like all such nuisances diffuses down to ordinary users with some over-reaction. Spectre is a threat to ordinary users but only on multi-user boxes i/e - do you trust your wife? I played around with this issue some years back on a Suse Linux system I administrated. It has been known in some form or another for quite a while, but developers never looked at it as particularly threatening. It's the nature of CPUs themselves to not be secure, and again this problem lies within the the whole idea of low level proprietary code. It should be a legal issue with tart recourse to the courts, but who's big enough to sue, maybe Google, or Amazon. Big business is a strangely esoteric political beast here in the US - The government bails out GM but upholds a billion dollar penalty against Ford for bad tires. I can't think of a company in recent history that deserved a class action suit against them more than Intel. As far as civil disobedience perhaps a well organized boycott of Google and Amazon would do the trick but in a lot of ways consumerism is an addiction so that would be awfully hard to organize. Buying a computer for your kids to use is a lot like taking your kids to the doctor. The difference is that most doctors live by a code of ethics, while OEM hardware is produced with an eye to insulating the developers from any liability. Intel developers don't need malpractice insurance. Intel is so big and internationalized that the US government must cast a wary eye on their hardware to protect itself. I have often thought that the first line of recourse for the government is to use the SEC to suspend trading of Intel, and then go from there.
TC
Additionally: "News" of this is hardly new. Only the exploit news part of it, which was held back by Google in agreement with Intel. I highly doubt that AMD is not vulnerable with a modified version. Any 64bit multt-core cached cpu is vulnerable. This has always been known of speculative processes. The bigger the processor the greater the possibility of stealing information. That is the only reason this has suddenly become important. CPUs are finally big enough to cough up and spew considerable information via the hack. Hilariously the hack will still work even with the patch by simply falling back to the old kernel address system. It is not a permanent solution. The permanent solutuion is full and complete free access to CPU microcode.
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