Security alert - "Meltdown" and "Spectre"

[robkelk]

No doubt everybody's heard the news reports about the newly-discovered security flaw in Intel chips. Guess what: there's two of them; "Meltdown" and "Spectre". And the same security flaw is in Arm Cortex CPUs - which are probably in your cellphone. A similar flaw also exists in AMD chips; they aren't vulnerable to Meltdown, but nobody's willing to say whether they're vulnerable to Spectre. EDIT: Update: They're vulnerable.

Patch your OS, no matter what you run (MacOS, Android, Linux, Windows, whatever).

If you use Chrome, patch it and turn on site isolation.

If you use Firefox, turn on site isolation.

If you use Xen Hypervisor, patch it.

If you use VMWare, patch it.

And if you have a password manager on your cellphone or you let your browser store your passwords... change all your passwords, and don't store the new ones in your password manager or your browser.