Patch magic

Interesting to see the media reaction to the two recently discovered flaws in Intel, AMD and ARM based processors. For most people with personal computers it's highly unlikely that these vulnerabilities could or would be exploited, they've been there since 1995 in some cases so it's much more likely that any criminals scrambling resources to take advantage before fixes are widespread will focus those efforts on targets where the payoff is significant (i.e. financial institutions) However, it's wise to install the updates when they arrive, some hackers rely on the lethargy of users.

For most people outside the industry, serious design issues like this seem outrageous, even criminally negligent in extreme cases but for those of us inside, we're more surprised they aren't a much more regular occurrence. The complexity of modern machines, networks, applications and operating systems and all the intersections therein is such these days that the number of opportunities to overlook a vulnerability in the myriad layers, virtual and physical, is beyond comprehension. However, and, although you may not think it from the media reaction, the infrastructure to deal with and patch issues as they are inevitably discovered is pretty impressive these days. Products designed by human brains inside fallible people, will, of course, never be perfect, but if you'd had said to me even as recently as 10 years ago that it would be possible to patch almost every server, personal computer, tablet and even mobile-phone on the planet within days or sometimes hours of a security-flaw being discovered I would have shaken my head and simply laughed. When you think about it that's more or less what we've been able to achieve in what is an amazingly short period of history.