Yeah... "Hey Mr. CPU-supplier, if I do these things then I can see with 100% certainty the contents of memory areas which I'm not allowed to read!"

"Well, that's an interesting hack, I guess you can! But everything works as designed, so there's no flaw!"

This reads like the Patrick Star's "Not my Wallet" meme.

"Works as coded"

I think what Intel is trying to say that this feature makes the chips insecure by design. It’s kind of like in Python where can get around the week protection for classes, methods, and variable to make them pseudo private by putting underscores in front of them.

Except that these CPUs were not designed to be insecure. CPU makers spent decades marketing their architectures as able to support the implementation of secure operating systems. All of a sudden it is clear that this is not possible without heavy dose of software stopgaps. It is a fundamental flaw on CPU architecture that was not disclosed by these companies.

Neither was anyone else aware of these class of security issues with CPUs until recently.

Oh people were aware, we just neglected the issues IBM and other time sharing systems learned in the 70s.

Was there anything like this back then? (Speculative execution, L1 cache, branch prediction all in the same ISA?)

If they were aware, why didn't anyone raise this issue till now?

The people that were aware were probably extracting value out of the fact that not everyone knew.

Could be not worth making a public stink, could be weaponizing the exploit, could be coordinated disclosure.

you mean all these security researchers kept it a secret for the last decade or two?

Until a few days, researchers couldn't prove that this was possible because there was no example of such exploits. But there was the idea that this could be possible. Also this doesn't mean that people with other interests didn't have their own versions of this exploit and kept it a secret.

I'm scarred by the CISC - RISC wars, which were serious for my business at the time. So in a year I'm anticipating Open VMS I'm x64 , having a indelible memory of the memory space rings and system calls depending on explicit separation, I remember thinking to myself, well only four rings in Alpha are critical to VMS, and Intel Pentium has that many rings...so why don't they port straight to the main Intel platform? Is this leaking mode the reason?

If you fall 10 floors and die, it's not the architect's fault for not putting a handrail around the balcony. It's your fault for improper use of gravity.

/s

I lived on the seventh floor, so always wondered if that meant I could safely keep a cat?

[Urban legend, afaik, cats can't right themselves with less than the seventh floor height to fall..]

Cats can right themselves in about 12 inches.

The problem is they land with legs extended down from floors 1 to about 7 (bad: impact is transmitted up through shoulders and hips), while higher than about floor 7 they spread their legs out and attempt to parachute (better: impact is uniform over entire ventral surface, terminal velocity is lower, mortality rate drops).

Source: am DVM and interned at AMC in Manhattan.

Very cool thank you! Also prewitt and Travis above and below..

Mortality rates.. Got it ,:-$ so, marketing for 7th floor Homes with kitty life policy in the service charge bill technically not the Blatant fraud I assumed, and if the building manager had run into trouble the lives of many injured kitties luckily lookalike to the residents could be the hardest sentencing hearing for any animal lover judge. English cities badly need dog license reintroduction. Asked to help a former neighbor become tramp beg court to return his dog. Second I met the man, who certainly was denied due process and on paper atrociously mistreated, he introduced the dog, unknown potential dominant bulldog mongrel, getting it to l so and lock it's jaw on his agitated arm. I passed him again, alone in rain, dog coat sodden, he was high and drunk careless no train still disgorge the fool he requires. Dogs need sorting out in London before brexit chaos

Actually not an urban legend. Veternarians in NYC have enough cats fall out of skyscrapers that they have actual data.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/22/science/on-landing-like-a-...

An interesting related video: Slow Motion Flipping Cat Physics [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtWbpyjJqrU

Can parachutes deploy automatically safely?

I mean in cities I keep imagining much greater extent of elevation, moment we figure how. Above the smog line... I'm sure I was in 94 but 16 same place, in the middle, ugh.

Could it become unlawful to rent (Live in generally) homes without harmful particle filtration?

I'm thinking of renting out my filters just before tenant viewings, because this eliminates the obviously fresh air chill, takes out fat or any food Smell beyond the kitchen, let's a visitor smoke even..(friend closed rental dear by offering a cigarette excused by filters, it's your residence now) but from flu season to the decoration next door, the cost needs a artificial boost. Wish was a swapHN channel..

Bad in the old days, IBM used to call this "BAD": Broken As Designed.

Not a bug, but a feature.