Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Mostly OT, but is there an explanation for why the "Meltdown" vulnerability was named specifically as such, I mean besides the term's meaning when it comes to "melting" security barriers? Coincidentally, "meltdown" is currently a very popular term to describe reactions/revelations re: a soon-to-be-released politics book titled "Fire and Fury" [0]. I guess yet another example of "Naming things" being one of the hard problems.

[0] https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

View on HN

https://meltdownattack.com/

> Why is it called Meltdown?

> The bug basically melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware.

Not a bug according to Intel.

The term is ominous because it is the common description of what happens when the core of a nuclear reactor overheats and melts. The theoretical result is a molten puddle of fissioning material that melts through the containment vessel then continues down into the earth.

It melts down stuff implemented on bare metal?

What does this have to do with politics? 'Meltdown' is a very common term.

Right, that's the problem. Doing a social media search for "meltdown" brings up irrelevant (to me) messages about the purported Trump vs Bannon feud, nevermind anything else in which "meltdown" is used to describe celebrity drama (i.e. every reality TV episode wrapup ever).

Compare to "Heartbleed" and "Sandworm", which while at the time had a little mocking for being a bit too polished/branded [0], at least had the benefit of being relatively scoped. "Heartbleed" seems to have very few collisions period as a noun/proper noun [1]. And while "Sandworm" will perpetually collide with sci-fi fans of Dune (a subgroup that likely overlaps with security research), discussion of Dune's sandworms won't be trending on a weekly/daily cycle.

[0] http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-branded-bug-meet-the-people...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed_(disambiguation)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com