You miss the point. Theo wasn't just hand waving, he had identified specific issues that he believed would eventually get exploited.

"he had identified specific issues that he believed would eventually get exploited"

But those aren't the issues that were exploited. His post has absolutely nothing to do with the current issues. It's just uninformed dogpiling (the ignorance of the crowd).

All chips have errata. This post is not particularly informative or relevant to anything.

This is not the ignorance of the crowd, it is the insight of one informed individual. Dismissing as irrelevant all concerns except those that have already been exploited would be closer to being "the [self-inflicted] ignorance of the crowd" in these matters.

Everyone fishing around for anyone saying anything about Intel chips ever, and then trying to shoehorn it into a current narative is the ignorance of the crowd. Every single chip has errata. In this case Theo is pointing at Intel's own list of defects in a revision/chip, which is profoundly unilluminating, and is completely and absolutely irrelevant.

The issue is not that the errors existed, but the risk some of them presented. Theo correctly identified an area where the risks were greater than generally recognized.

No, he didn't. Intel specifically states that the errata can allow unauthorized access to protected memory. Theo then says "oooh, that sounds scary!". Yes, of course it is, which is why it appears in the errata list.

You are misrepresenting Theo's message, which looks beyond individual errata, saying that collectively they amount to a significant change in how the MMU operates, and from that predicts a high likelihood of a then-yet undiscovered flaw that would lead to problems much greater than were then being acknowledged by Intel (and he said AMD was heading the same way.)

He was less prescient when he implied that it would take Intel a year or two to get beyond this.

care to enlighten us about this statement, wise one?

> For instance, AI90 is exploitable on some operating systems (but not OpenBSD running default binaries).

if you know how the processor and OS behaves at a low level, and read specific hardware errata which you know will cause problems that logically cannot be worked around, developing a proof of concept (aka 'discovering') is simply a waste of time and effort..