Stephen Downes

Good technical description of the recent security flaws in compter chips explaining why we haven't seen the end of them. Out-of-order instructions (such as a speculative calculation) "introduce an exploitable side channel if their operation depends on a secret value." The impact is permanent. "Hardware optimizations can change the state of microarchitectural elements... Both industry and the scientific community so far accepted this as a necessary evil for efficient computing… Meltdown changes the situation entirely."