Meltdown and Spectre are hardware vulnerabilities affecting most computers. These vulnerabilities allow information to be divulged inappropriately. This could include passwords and encryption keys, for example.
The computing industry is applying software mitigations to reduce exposure to exploitation of these problems. The mitigations have already caused predicted performance loss, as well as having caused unexpected crashes of computer systems.
As mitigations continue to be deployed across the industry, we should expect that the web sites we care about might be slower and might be less available than what we are used to.
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