A deeper look at Spectre/Meltdown characteristics and potential attacks, why it's necessary to patch cloud VMs even though the cloud service providers have already applied patches, the nature of the performance impact and how it’s affecting real world applications, the need for threat modelling, the role of anti virus, how hardware is affected, and what’s likely to change in the long term.

Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0 Bernstein, 2007 I find security much more important than speed. We need invulnerable software systems, and we need them today, even if they ar…