Simon Willison’s Weblog

14th January 2018 - Link Blog

How the industry-breaking Spectre bug stayed secret for seven months. It’s pretty amazing that the bug only became public knowledge a week before the intended embargo date, considering the number of individuals and companies that has to be looped in. The biggest public clues were patches being applied in public to the Linux kernel—one smart observer noted that the page table issue “has all the markings of a security patch being readied under pressure from a deadline.”