Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerability

Just found out that Gibson Research has released a free utility to check systems for vulnerability to Meltdown and Spectre. It is available at: https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

I suppose it's possible that one of these will be exploited in some serious way. But I won't hold my breath. The most fantastic thing about them is how universal they are, but the reality is that they're rather difficult to put to practical use. Here's my analogy: Guy walks into a shop and buys a lottery ticket. He picks his own numbers. He wins! He then goes on to claim that his opportunity to guess the winning numbers and test his guess amounted to an exploit of a vulnerability in the lottery. Everybody races to buy lottery tickets so that they can hack the lottery too. :rollseyes:

(Yes, I know it's not quite that ridiculous, but...almost.)

I view the discoveries of these vulnerabilities like I do the discoveries of new elementary particles at the Large Hadron Collider: "That's fuckin' amazing! Now what are we going to do with it?" Don't get me wrong. I really do love it. I just think we should be excited for the right reasons. In this case, fear that our computers are all going to be "owned" tomorrow is hard to justify. At least if you're expecting these new vulnerabilities to be the culprits. Look to the next thousand or so Flash and IE bugs for that.