Linus Torvalds declares Intel fix for Meltdown/Spectre COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE

[earthshine]

1. " it makes the whole fix something the user or administrator has to opt into at boot"

Among the effects of these fixes are spontaneous crashes and slowing systems down. As such, for some, it could be desirable to make this choice at boot time.

For example, a system used for high-speed processing, such as video editing or computer simulations, would not need to be connected to the net. Therefore, such a system is not vulnerable to any kind of attack, so why slow it down?

My limited understanding is that such an attack would involve gathering many bits of data generated by other system processes and then interpreting them so as to steal something meaningful like a password or other identifying bit of info. It's a needle-and-haystack situation. An attack exploiting these weaknesses would have to be highly targeted, and very specific to the person or business under attack.

Many tech gurus say that low-profile, common users like me, should not rush to patch. High-profile people and businesses could be targeted.

Steve Gibson (of Tech.TV) has created a free program that informs you as to whether you are vulnerable to these attacks. Further, the program allows you to turn the patches on and off, which can be useful for testing and measuring benchmarks.

https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm