Security alert - "Meltdown" and "Spectre"

[LynnInDenver]

Aaaaactually, writing down passwords is fine, if you can keep them in a safe place.  That advice about not writing down is mainly for people who think yellow sticky notes on the desk are acceptable places to keep passwords.

Yeah, I get that part of it is because, if you don't go "NO BAD", there is the contingent that thinks it's fine to have passwords out in plain sight, rather than in a folder in the locked filedrawer that you have to roll backwards to access.

I'm really not sure where the cell phone password advice is coming from -- most cell chips are on ARM and Spectre isn't all that exploitable yet.  That sounds a little like sky-is-falling paranoia.

I mostly don't bank via my phone for other reasons... part of them having to do with "can clone your SIM card then use that to drain your bank account", and partly because "lose my phone and someone potentially gets access to my account data".

The only problem being that the sky is actually falling.  Every general-purpose CPU designed in the last 10 years is vulnerable, and there's no real solution available.  There are some workarounds, which mostly involve slowing down your computer by 5-30%.   Everyone from hardware designers to compiler writers to web browsers to web designers are affected.  On the upside, games are probably the least affected of all, because they don't do a lot of kernel calls.

Yeah, I'm NOT looking forward to the solutions for this, mostly because I'm sure this is going to wind up with me having to upgrade my computer - some of the parts in it are over five years old, so I'm expecting to take a speed hit when the update comes out on Windows 7, and I'll probably be forced to finally look at what it'll take to move over to Linux for my "daily driver". I play games and fiddle with Poser, so that's not going to be an easy thing to accomplish.

I guess, uh, just pretend like computers are the U.S. election system.  We know that they can be all be infiltrated by Russian hackers, but let's just keep on using the system as if everything is fine, because the alternative is much worse.

Can I just add that CPU design is really, really hard?  They have to deal with speed-of-light limits, thermal runaway, chemical purity, and a ton of other engineering problems on a super-tiny wafer.

I get that design is really hard. There have been rumblings that the way performance is optimized is going to have to change, and that no one is going to be happy because it's likely there will have to be compromises on how much performance can be gained.