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Comment by BuildTheRobots | Hacker News Reader

As much as I hate to say it, I think the Intel PR machine is working stunningly.

Every geek I speak to will tell you the world's on fire. Every non-geek I speak to responds with "oh, really? if it's such a big problem how come no-one has heard about it? Oh, ok, well there might have been that one headline..."

I am infuriated by Intel's response no end, however I'm also somewhat impressed. They seem to have completely avoided a PR disaster and their stock price is largely unaffected.

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> Every non-geek I speak to responds with "oh, really?"

My take on it is that non-tech savvy people are now largely desensitized to any vulnerability discovery, as long as it hasn't been exploited in the wild. Computers have bugs? What's new?

Intel's PR, good or bad, doesn't matter that much.

There's a 'too big to fail' thing going on here I think, because what you've said about Intel is exactly how I felt about Equifax's breach. At a certain point of terrible-ness people just shrug and carry on.

Is that really good PR? Or just news that hasn't hit the mainstream because they don't understand it or doesn't affect them much.

It's good PR. If a mainstream media outlet looks into it they are predisposed to "hear" two views and weigh them equally. They'll get one from the OS/Security community saying "this is really bad" and one from Intel (via their spokespeople) saying "don't worry about it, we got it". Then their journalistic tendency will be to give more weight to what Intel say over what a bunch of "nerds" say, and the resulting headline will be "Intel fixing chip bug some say is puts the cloud at risk" or some such nonsense.

I thinks it's more a case of bad "marketing" from project zero. Had the stuck with a single name "spectre" (with 3 variants) then the media would have had a story that's much easier to understand and repeat/sell. When it's a case of "x affects a" and "y affects a, b and c" then the story gets to confusing for them and their readers.

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