The guys from Hardware Asylum have just posted the latest edition of their podcast series. In Episode 83a we find Dennis Garcia and Darren McCain digging in to the recent news regarding the recent security vulnerabilities that have been to confirmed to affect the latest Intel processors. Seeing as we just enjoyed the arrival of the new year, the guys also discuss their plans for 2018, which include some big talk about getting down to some overclocking! Good to hear. Here are the show notes for this extra Episode 83a:

Meltdown and Spectre FAQ - By now many of you have been hearing about the Meltdown and Spectre exploits and might be wondering what those are all about. You can look at it two different ways. The first is a hardware flaw in how processors handle Speculative Execution. What happens is that attackers can exploit this flaw and access areas of CPU memory that are not currently allocated, at least to that program. The second is a software flaw that breaks the fundamental isolation between use applications and the operating system.

In a way they are both related and impact all modern processors but happen to be particularly damaging to Intel CPUs dating back to 1995. In this episode the duo go over a FAQ article published at PCWorld that does a great job at giving us a high level overview of the problem, what it can impact and what companies are doing to fix it.

State of the Hardware Asylum Address 2018 - In the days of Ninjalane Dennis would often post an end of year retrospective on how the website did in the previous year and what he has planned for the future. For this segment the duo go over what is planned for 2018 including things like more YouTube, Casemodding and a famed return to Overclocking.

You can find episode 83a of the Hardware Asylum podcast here.