But these attacks (Meltdown/Spectre) are on a fundamental design approach, which was conceived and developed and researched in the open. People in colleges all over the world study about them. Do you really think this would have been caught much sooner is Intel had released all schematics and layouts to the public?
I'm just saying that in general, the incentive for a scientist to put work into an open system is orders of magnitude higher than to put work into a closed system.
To provide a similar example:
The crypto experts around Daniel J. Berstein and Tanja Lange stated publicly at 34C3 that they refused to perform crypto analysis on a certain algorithm that was patented. But they (and others) published good crypto analysis results (working attacks!) just a few months after the patent expired.
> I'm just saying that in general, the incentive for a scientist to put work into an open system is orders of magnitude higher than to put work into a closed system.
They already do that, I'm sure you can find a multitude of papers on branch prediction and speculative execution if you simply took the time to look. Probably even some by the very same people who designed the Intel chips causing all the fuss.
Nobody said there is no research, just that openness would lead to more research. Even "a multitude of papers" was obviously not enough to catch this earlier.
On top of that, please refrain from personal attacks.
