Image by 52schnecke, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:
1. Two flaws in modern CPUs, dubbed "Meltdown" and "Spectre", may cause billions of computers and smartphones to be vulnerable to security concerns. That's because modern processors use a technique called "speculative execution", which allows them to look ahead at the code they will execute in the future to predict and execute the tasks they will need to perform ahead of time, leaving a trace of that activity in multiple areas of memory. That data is supposed to be protected, but these flaws have shown that in some cases it can be accessed when the processor queues it up. Many device manufacturers have already begun to patch this issue, but it will be worth your while to keep an eye on this story for any future updates.
That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.