Security alert - "Meltdown" and "Spectre"

[LynnInDenver]

Latestbug news: apparently some cheap Android phones, as well as the Raspberry Pi are completely unaffected because they're so underpowered. That is, they don't do any speculative execution.

Good, so I don't have to worry about dealing with 4 systems here at the house. (3 media devices, and an emulation station.) That still leaves my computer, my husband's computer, possibly his editing computer, and the pinball simulator build (which is only hooked up for Steam right now, I might just change that now). I'm not worried about the MAME box, since that's deliberately NOT connected to the internet.

Some workloads have increased quite a bit: Redis gets a 5% to 30% slowdown, ElasticSearch, etc.  So bad news on the caching layer, which might be the bottleneck for a lot of apps.  Cloud computing just got more expensive.

That's going to be irksome. I have to wonder if that's going to cause Intel to lose quite a bit of share in the cloud space, since you can't NOT patch those boxes. And if the performance hit is serious enough you have to consider swapping out, it might be worth swapping to something that's at least not as vulnerable out of the gate.

I still feel like there aren't any reasonable exploits for this publicly available.  That said, if you're the kind of person who might be targeted by a nation state, I wouldn't be surprised certain intelligence services have weaponized this exploit.  It's 17 years old now.  It's probably worthwhile to change passwords anyway.

That's the impression I was getting, that it technically requires either an existing malware foothold, or physical access, or intimate knowledge of what you're attacking. That said, yeah, I'll be changing passwords AGAIN. And keeping a notebook in a drawer in the house somewhere instead of storing them on the computer.

But I'll wait until there's a fix available for El Capitan.  Apple pushed a patch for the 3 newest OS versions, and then figured out that it didn't actually fix the issue on anything except the newest version.  Oops.  Not that I'm going to upgrade to High Sierra if freaking htop regularly crashes the kernel.

We have one Mac in the house. Every time we've upgraded at work, I've had new reasons to not like Apple. Although the last upgrade we did at least cleared up the "rolling seas" network server update issues I had been having prior.

It's just one of these days I wonder why I ever decided to take up computers for a living.

Believe me, there's been days that, if someone handed me a Big Red Button that would kill all the computers, no takebacks, I'd have to be physically held back from actually pressing it.