Independent discovery don't happen overnight. Intel must have been aware of these vulnerabilities for some time.

edit: I'm sure everyone involved acted responsibly. I'm just curious as how far apart these independent discoveries were made.

The bug has been around forever, but it must have been discovered relatively recently since it's not fixed in hardware yet.

I've always been baffled by the concept of simultaneous discovery.

The Spectre paper includes this line in the acknowledgements:

> We would like to thank Intel for their professional handling of this issue through communicating a clear timeline and connecting all involved researchers.

So Google people and the Germans were working on the same thing without knowing of each other until Intel connected them?

Graz is in Austria, but considering these things are usually kept quiet quite long: probably yes

Google project zero blog says: We reported this issue to Intel, AMD and ARM on 2017-06-01

We talked about NSA and how people are leaving for greener pastures. Wondered two things:

1) Have any of them ended up in Project Zero or working on stuff like this

2) Wonder if NSA knew about this vulnerability and now someone there in a windowless office is sighing saying to themselves "Welp, another backdoor we can't use".