Latest Intel security flaw in the news

[ceptimus]

This looks like a big one. All Intel processors from the last ten years or so are affected. Microsoft, Apple and Linux are all pushing out security updates over the next few days to work around the flaw. This will result in a performance hit of a few percent up to as much as thirty percent depending on the application. AMD processors aren't affected.

My understanding is that the flaw allows applications to probe kernel memory in a round-about way and this allows data from different processes to be read by other applications. In principle this could allow some code running in a browser to read passwords and similar being used by other programs running at the same time. Linus has christened the Linux kernel update with the acronym FUCKWIT. He's obviously not amused.