As a fan of Richard Stallman and who has watched the IME issue unfold in the professional IT world, where people have completely had their head in the sand about trusting inherently untrustworthy platforms like Apple/GoogleEnterprise/Android/MSFT/AMZN.
There has yet to be an instance of news that reinforced the naive assumptions about these companies' products being basically secure.
In EVERY case, EVERY product, eventually in its life cycle is revealed to have a major vulnerability that spies and law enforcement have been exploiting for some number of years/months. They have no credibility.
Researchers in Poland and Korea have ten times more credibiilty than any of these companies.
What I am waiting to see is some man in the middle wiresharking of these low level processor vulnerabilities in action. Can someone get a switch going on capture those stealth packets?
This whole meltdown/specter/wpa2/credit record disaster this year doesn't effect most people, who run operating systems, network hardware in mobile devices that are in wide open configurations for surveillance, making them primarily surveillance devices and then secondarily whatever else they might be doing ie farmville, reading a propaganda article as every keystroke is sent back to redmond with weak encryption through 10 routers owned by different international mafias.
In every case the tinfoil hatters have been not only correct, but predictive many years in advance. So when you get ready to install that 'patch' to fix it, maybe you should think twice.
Like, IME has been PUBLIC KNOWLDGE for a LONG time, do you not think it is a weeeee bit odd that there is a big huff to install a patch for it exactly today?
It's insane. Everyone is talking about Intel being held responsible by the government. Like they're going to come down hard on them for the C-suite employees selling their stock before the news broke. Who's going to go after them? The US Gov? Who do you think has been taking advantage of this security flaw? The US Gov has known about it as long as Intel has, and there's a reason they didn't force them to fix it back then. They're the ones benefitting from it. They're not going to hold anyone responsible. Best case they find a scapegoat to appease the public.