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It's just the security cargo cultists. Some were arguing that I should be turning on Spectre/Meltdown mitigation on my Hadoop cluster. It's my cluster, dude. My engineers have the right to run code on it. If they don't and they're running code on it, I've already lost the game. If you can even contact one of my machines the game is up. What even is the threat model here for Spectre/Meltdown.

They have no sense of risk. Just security cargo-cultists.

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I don't know that it's cargo-cult behavior, but maybe it's a lack of perspective in general. I work in security, and yes, it's good practice to patch all the things, but only in that it's the easiest default policy that makes things happen. If you have to pick and choose, you need to understand things well enough to be able to judge.

As a security consultant, I think that kind of perspective is where I can help add value to our clients; our usual point of contact is a project manager, whose eyes tend to glaze over when given a big vulnerability report, or worse, a spreadsheet. To them, every line feels like some sort of crisis. Now if I can get them to patch in a timely fashion, there is at least no pile of years-old issues, and we can take the time to discuss the few that remain.

Very true. We have some cluster users on Gentoo, who are happy that they can simply flip off all those pesky performance-eating security mitigations system-wide. Not only in the kernel, but also userspace side PIC/PIE/SSP/etc.

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