What Spectre Means for Lanugage Implementers [video] (opens in new tab)

It's called typoglycaemia. I actually wrote a library[0] the other day that will jumble up text in typoglycaemic fashion, mainly because I was bored but also because I want to try it out when having arguments <cough> sorry, healthy debate on social media <cough, cough> as (apparently[1]) it changes the mode of thinking the reader uses:

> In a final study, Gervais and Norenzayan used an even more subtle way of activating analytic thinking: by having participants fill out a survey measuring their religious beliefs that was printed in either clear font or font that was difficult to read. Prior research has shown that difficult-to-read font promotes analytic thinking by forcing participants to slow down and think more carefully about the meaning of what they are reading. The researchers found that participants who filled out a survey that was printed in unclear font expressed less belief as compared to those who filled out the same survey in the clear font.

[0] Typoglycaemic https://github.com/yb66/typoglycaemic

[1] How Critical Thinkers Lose Their Faith in God, Daisy Grewal, May 1, 2012, Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-critical-thin...

Edit: one day I'll remember which bits of markdown work on HN. That day is not today.

- Spectre is a well known vulnerability in speculative execution

- I know that speculative execution bugs had compiler workarounds involving how you do your jumps (retpoline etc.)

- "language implementer" is a common synonym or overlapping term with "compiler author"

I certainly understand how someone might read 'lanugage' and be thrown off by it, but I don't think it's as objectively terrible, or even weird, a typo as you're making it out to be.

Google was moving on that feature before Spectre. Confidentiality is a rather strong word here. Web pages literally include random 3rd party code to run within the same process and that isolation on top of process boundaries doesn't address that, it's only addressing some hypothetical threat of a tab or a child frame stealing data and I'm not sure whether they even isolate child frames (EDIT: they try). A tab stealing data is too remote of a possibility if at all practical and 3rd party child frames are usually created by 3rd party javascript already running within process boundaries, so no confidentiality there. It's possible that some 3rd parties may want to sandbox the code they let other 3rd parties run in your browser, but that does nothing to guarantee any confidentiality.

It's not that bad for newly designed languages or for languages willing to break compatibility. There are multiple approaches that can be used to protect from Spectre within the same process, plenty of ideas floating around.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-is...

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/ssca

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/07/mitigating-spectre-w...

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/site-isolati...