Skyfall and Solace are hoaxes

We -- like most, I imagine -- didn't take this too seriously. On the other hand, the original site was quite explicit (claiming that it had disclosed information to chip and OS vendors), and given the highly asymmetric disclosure of Spectre and Meltdown from Intel, we did spend (waste) time verifying that this was a hoax; this was no more a "social experiment" than yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater.

Come on. Names are a necessity, even in research: call them "Speculative execution vulnerabilities One and Two" and everybody will get confused.

Of course there is no real need for logos, but then again, if the guys who find these bugs have some in-house art team, what's the big deal?

And by the way:

> If these particular vulnerabilities hadn't been given catchy names by the researchers that discovered them, would anyone have batted an eyelid ?

Maybe I'm the only one, but when they told me "Look, this process can read inside the memory space of any other process, without authorization" I batted my eyelids all the way, regardless of names.

The entire post on https://skyfallattack.com/ comes off as preachy and defensive.

> Skyfall and Solace aren't hoaxes as such, but more of a social experiment

"social experiment" is a defendable position, but saying that this wasn't a hoax is just incorrect. The site was a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth.

A few people got interested in the possibility of an attack, which is understandable given the current climate, but I doubt that anyone took this website seriously, more as just something to keep an eye on.

No kidding.

It was pretty obvious from the beginning.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175707