Category: UNCATEGORIZED

TomboyX, a direct to consumer, gender-neutral underwear brand, has today announced the close of an $18 million Series B funding round led by Craftory. With this deal, Craftory becomes TomboyX’s majority shareholder.

TomboyX develops gender-neutral, size inclusive underwear at a relatively affordable price point.

The company started when cofounder Fran Dunaway struggled to find herself a Robert Graham-style button down shirt. Tomboy X originally started selling fun, dress shirts that fit all body types, and eventually transitioned to underwear and swimwear.

The D2C startup offers sizes from XS to 4XL and the classic TomboyX briefs start at $20/pair.

The company raised $4.3 million in Series A financing last year, which brings total funding to more than $25 million.

Here’s what cofounders Fran Dunaway and Naomi Gonzalez had to say in a prepared statement:

We are very excited to collaborate with the team at The Craftory as we continue in our mission to design inclusive and gender-neutral underwear for our diverse global audience. We are confident that their expertise in branding and consumer goods will complement our own creativity and disruption of traditional products.

As part of the deal, Craftory directors will join the board of directors alongside Pauline Brown, lead investor for TomboyX’s Series A round.

Cool missions need cool names, and NASA’s new plan to establish a permanent lunar presence and put an American on the Moon again now has one: Artemis. It’s nod both to Apollo, the 50th anniversary of the culmination of which is this year, and to the fact that the program is likely to send the first woman to the Moon.

The name was announced on NASA’s social media channels, and casually mentioned by Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a call with reporters yesterday.

“It turns out that Apollo had a twin sister, Artemis. She happens to be the goddess of the moon. Our astronaut office is very diverse and highly qualified. I think it is very beautiful that 50 years after Apollo, the Artemis program will carry the next man — and the first woman — to the moon,” Bridenstine said.

Those familiar with Greek mythology will spot the hint NASA already placed in its nomenclature: Artemis was the Moon goddess, yes, but also goddess of the hunt. And her faithful hunting companion was named Orion — just like the multi-purpose spacecraft the agency is developing right now.

Being associated with the Moon, Artemis naturally already has a few associations with astronomy and spaceflight: More than one satellite or mission has used the name, and there are features on both Venus and the Moon itself that are named after her. But this would be by far the highest-profile application of the moniker.

Artemis would refer, presumably (I’ve asked NASA for clarification), to the major upcoming missions concerned with establishing a permanent presence on the Moon. That likely includes any major missions to explore the lunar surface, as well as any constructing infrastructure there or in lunar orbit, for example the planned Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway.

The announcement follows that of a new $1.6 billion budget increase for NASA earmarked for lunar missions — that ought to help get the ball rolling.

The femininity of the name is a deliberate choice as well: The Apollo missions were crewed exclusively by men, though they relied on many women for their success. This time around things are different: Both women and men have now explored and set records in space, and no doubt those of other identifications will do so soon as well.

Bridenstine said he’s counting on this for the next generation: “I have an 11 year old daughter, and i want her to be able to see herself in the same way that our current very diverse astronaut corps sees itself.”

“If we look at the history of moon landings, it was test pilots from the 1960s and 1970s, fighter pilots, and there were no opportunities for women back then. This program is going to enable a new generation of young girls like my daughter to see themselves in a way that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise see themselves,” he said at a Q&A after the announcement.

Expect Artemis to stick around for a decade or more — going to the moon is no simple affair, and even initial successes will only be laying the foundation for larger, more ambitious missions going forward.

—

(NB: NASA recommends that Moon be capitalized when it’s ours, and lowercase when referring to another moon or moons in general. The more you know!)

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s lawyer argued Tuesday in a court filing that the British cave diver who became embroiled in a public spat with his client and later sued for defamation can’t recover damages because his reputation was not harmed.

In court documents filed Tuesday, Musk’s new lawyer Alex Spiro of Quinn Emmanuel questioned the motive of Vernon Unsworth, the British cave diver, who filed a defamation lawsuit in September 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The suit was filed after Musk called him a “pedo guy” and made other statements insinuating he was a pedophile in a public attack on Twitter. The fight erupted last summer after the rescue of youth soccer players trapped in a cave in Thailand.

Musk denies the allegations of defamation in the latest response. Spiro became Musk’s lawyer earlier this month.

“One has to question Mr. Unsworth’s motive in turning this into a federal case,” Spiro wrote in a response to Unsworth’s complaint. “The libel laws exist to protect those whose reputations have been harmed by false assertions of fact. In the case of Mr. Unsworth, who made himself a public figure, those assertions have to be made with constitutional malice. Mr. Musk has already retracted what he said publicly. Mr. Unsworth’s claim is thus confined to what Mr. Musk said in private conversation. Regardless, Mr. Unsworth and his reputation are no worse off.”

Musk’s lawyer argues that Unsworth was motivated by a “desire to milk the media coverage over what he instigated to reap a financial windfall from Mr. Musk, despite the absence of any injury.” Musk will fight that, Spiro wrote.

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson recently denied a motion to dismiss the case and instead scheduled a date for trial. The trial is scheduled to begin October 22. The decision means that Unsworth’s case is strong enough to go to trial.

Musk’s lawyers argued that statements on the internet, and more specifically on unmoderated forums like Twitter, are presumptively opinion, not objective fact. Defamation law doesn’t apply to opinions or insults. But Wilson rejected Musk’s argument, in part because of an email interaction he had with BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Mac.

The lawsuit alleges that between July 15 and August 30, Musk periodically used Twitter and emails to the media to publish false and defamatory accusations against Unsworth, including accusations of pedophilia and child rape.

The initial “pedo guy” attack came after Unsworth gave a critical interview to the media saying Musk’s mini sub “had absolutely no chance of working.” The diving expert ended an interview segment by suggesting Musk should “stick his submarine where it hurts.”

Big tech is stepping in to patch newly disclosed security flaws affecting almost every Intel chip since 2011.

Researchers on Tuesday released details of the vulnerability, known as ZombieLoad — or microarchitectural data sampling as its technical name — which can leaked sensitive data stored in the processor, such as passwords, secret keys and account tokens and private messages.

You can read our coverage here. In short, don’t panic — but you should patch your systems. Here’s how.

Apple released macOS fixes

Apple has fixes out for every Mac and MacBook released during and after 2011.

The tech giant said in an advisory that any system running macOS Mojave 10.14.5, released Monday, is patched. This will prevent an attack from being run through Safari and other apps, but warned that some Macs could face up to a 40 percent reduction in performance given the changes needed to fix the vulnerabilities.

The security update will also be pushed to Sierra and High Sierra versions. iPhones, iPads and Apple Watch devices aren’t affected by the bugs.

Google patches Android, will update Chrome

The search and browser maker also confirmed it has released patches to mitigate against ZombieLoad.

Google said the “vast majority” of Android devices aren’t affected but Intel-only devices will need to be patched once device makers make updates available

Chrome OS devices, such as Chromebooks, are already protected in the latest version and permanent mitigations will be pushed to devices in the next version.

And, the company’s Chrome team has a technical advisory out but said users should rely on patches for their computer. “Operating system vendors may release updates to improve isolation, so users should ensure they install any updates and follow any additional guidance from their operating system vendor,” said Google. In other words, make sure your Windows PC or your Mac is patched.

Google also rolled out patches to its datacenters, so cloud customers are already patched but should be aware of the company’s guidance.

Microsoft rolls out Windows update

Microsoft has released patches for its operating system and cloud.

Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, said the software and cloud giant has been “working closely with affected chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations” for its customers. “We are working to deploy mitigations to cloud services and release security updates to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips,” he said.

In a TechNet article, the company said customers may need to obtain microcode updates for their processor directly from their device maker. Microsoft is pushing many of the microcode updates itself through Windows Update, but are also available from its website.

Software updates will be released Tuesday also through Windows Update. Microsoft also has a page with guidance for how to protect against the new attacks.

Microsoft Azure customers are already protected, the company said.

Amazon and Mozilla did not return a request for comment. We’ll update if we hear back.

Read more:

• New secret-spilling flaws affect almost every Intel chip since 2011
• Intel announces hardware fixes for Spectre and Meltdown on upcoming chips
• Apple issues Meltdown fix for Macs running Sierra and El Capitan
• Google claims its Spectre and Meltdown mitigation results in no performance degradation
• Intel tried desperately to change the subject from Spectre and Meltdown at CES
• Intel CEO: Meltdown and Spectre patches will come to 90%+ of chips in the next week

On Wednesday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will ask tech companies to sign a pledge called the Christchurch Call, as The New York Times previously reported. Digital ministers of the Group of 7 nations are meeting tomorrow to talk about toxic content and tech regulation.

The Christchurch Call is the first result on that work and a way to start involving tech companies with a nonbinding pledge. Named after the terrorist attack in Christchurch, the agreement should ask tech platforms to increase their efforts when it comes to blocking toxic content. In other words, democracies don’t want another shooting video going viral and also don’t want to block Facebook, YouTube or Twitter altogether.

According to people working for the French Economy Ministry, the Christchurch Call doesn’t contain any specific recommendations for new regulation. Countries get to decide what they mean by violent and extremist content for instance.

“For now, it’s a focus on an event in particular that caused an issue for multiple countries,” France Digital Minister Cédric O said in a meeting with a few journalists.

Companies that sign the pledge agree to improve their moderation processes and share more information about the work they’re doing to prevent terrorist content from going viral. On the other side, governments agree to work on laws that ban toxic content from social networks.

Tomorrow, a handful of countries are expected to sign the Christchurch Call. According to French government officials, members of the Group of 7 nations should sign it but the U.S. might not sign it. New Zealand, Norway and a handful of countries that are not part of the Group of 7 nations should also sign the pledge.

After that, it’ll be up to tech companies to side with those governments and say that they have heard their plea. It’s a nonbinding agreement after all, so I’m sure many social networks will see it as gestures of goodwill.

In addition to digital ministers and government officials, the French Economy Ministry says that representatives from Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Mozilla, Google, Qwant, the Wikimedia Foundation and the Web Foundation will be there on Wednesday.

So you can expect that some, if not all of them, will sign the pledge. The New York Times says that Facebook, Google and Microsoft have already agreed to sign the pledge.

Google today announced a major revamp of its travel planning tools on the web. After launching a similar set of tools on mobile last year, the company today announced that google.com/travel on the web will now let you see information about all of your previously reserved trips and easily switch between flight, hotel and package searches.

In many ways, this finally brings all of Google’s travel services under one hood — a process that has taken far longer than I would’ve anticipated after Google bought ITA nine years ago.

Google Trips is essentially the landing page for the new site and brings together your existing bookings and information about your destination. The service will then feed your travel information back into Google Search and Maps. To do this, Google.com/travel (which I think we can safely call Google Travel, even if Google itself doesn’t do so), will use the confirmation emails and receipts from your Gmail inbox to build the timeline of your trip.

Since both the web and mobile versions are now on feature parity, this also makes it easier to pick up your trip planning on any device. Like always, though, you won’t be able to make any reservations through Google’s systems. Instead, Google will send you to an airline’s or hotel’s reservation system to complete a booking.

The actual flight and hotel search engines are still the same, though if Google previously offered the ability to buy flight and hotel packages, it did a good job of hiding that. Now, this option gets first billing, together with the hotel and flight searches.

“Our goal is to simplify trip planning by helping you quickly find the most useful information and pick up where you left off on any device. We’ll continue to make planning and taking trips easier with Google Maps, Google Search and google.com/travel—so you can get out and enjoy the world.”

Sadly, Google hasn’t ported Inbox’s useful Trip Bundles over to Gmail yet, though, despite promises to do so before shutting down Inbox. For the time being, though, the new Google Travel site is a pretty good alternative.

It’s just over two years since Yext debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, and to mark the occasion, I sat down with co-founder and CEO Howard Lerman for an interview.

As Lerman noted, Yext — which allows businesses to manage their profiles and information across a wide variety of online services — actually presented onstage at the TechCrunch 50 conference back in 2009. Now, it boasts a market capitalization of nearly $2.3 billion, and it just revealed plans to take over a nine-floor building in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, turning it into Yext’s global headquarters.

My interview with Lerman actually came before the announcement, though he managed to drop in a few veiled hints about the company making a big move in real estate.

More concretely, we talked about how Lerman’s management style has evolved from scrappy startup founder to a public company CEO — he described holding five-minute meetings with every Yext employee as “one of the best management techniques” he’s ever adopted.

Lerman also argued that as online misinformation has become a big issue, Yext has only become more important: “Our founding principle is that the ultimate authority on how many calories are in a Big Mac is McDonald’s. The ultimate authority on where Burger King is open is Burger King.”

Vowing that he will remain CEO of Yext for “as long as this board will have me,” Lerman ended our conversation with a passionate defense of the idea that “a company is the ultimate vehicle in America to effect good in the world.”

You can read a transcript of our conversation below, edited and condensed for clarity.

TechCrunch: To start with a really broad question, how do you think Yext is different now than it was two years ago?

Howard Lerman: One of the things that’s defined Yext over the years is our continuous willingness to reinvent ourselves. You started covering us in 2009 [at] TechCrunch 50, we were a launch company there.

And here we are now. One of the cool things about being public is: It’s a total gamechanger. It’s a gamechanger not just for access to capital, but it’s particularly important in global markets. And I’m not talking about capital markets, I’m talking about the markets in which we sell software. We have offices now from Berlin to Shanghai.

TechCrunch Sessions is heading to San Jose on July 10 and we’re thrilled to announce our jam-packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the transportation industry. With Early Bird ticket sales ending soon, you’ll want to be sure to grab your tickets after checking out this agenda.

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from and partake in discussions about the future of transportation, the promise and problems of autonomous vehicles, the potential for bikes and scooters, investing in early-stage startups and more.

We’ll be joined by some of the most esteemed and prescient people in the space, including Dmitri Dolgov at Waymo, Argo AI Chief Safety Officer Summer Craze Fowler, Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson, Karl Iagnemma of Aptiv, Seleta Reynolds of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and Ford Motor CTO Ken Washington.

We’ll also spend time discussing how cities will adapt to meet the new demands of this technology, an entirely new way to keep this tech secure, and what new once-unimaginable forms of transport are around the corner.

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in mobility. And of course, it wouldn’t be a TechCrunch show without some incredible startups demonstrating the latest groundbreaking tech.

We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next month so keep your eyes open. In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:

TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility
California Theatre, San Jose // July 10

9:35 AM – 10:00 AM
Building Mobility-First Cities with Avery Ash (INRIX) and Seleta Reynolds (Los Angeles Department of Transportation). 

What does it look like to move around the city of the future? We’ll be talking with Avery Ash, head of Autonomous Mobility at INRIX and Seleta Reynolds, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to figure it out. More speakers to be announced

10:00 AM – 10:25 AM
Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility? With Michael Granoff (Maniv Mobility), Ted Serbinski (Techstars) and, Sarah Smith (Bain Capital)

Three leading early-stage investors will come together to debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.

10:25 AM – 10:45 AM
Waymo’s Way Forward with Dmitri Dolgov (Waymo)

We’ll talk to Waymo’s CTO about the state of AI, the company’s approach to developing, testing and validating its self-driving vehicle technology and what challenges remain for this Alphabet company and the rest of the AV industry.

10:45 – 11:05
Innovation Break with Softwheel Technology
Sponsored by Softwheel Technology

11:05 AM – 11:30 AM
The Last Mile: Challenges and Opportunities for startups with Stonly Baptiste (Urban Us) and Regina Clewlow (Populus). More speakers to be announced.

Populus founder and CEO Regina Clewlow and Urban Us co-founder Stonly Baptiste unpack what it means to be a last-mile innovation business, the dollars required for success, how data and technology will change how people move from Point A to Point B — and the hurdles that stand in the way.

11:30 AM – 11:40 AM
DEMO with Nils Wollny (Holoride)

Audi spinout Holoride will show how they aim to bring an interactive VR experience to the backseat of every car, no matter if it’s a Ford, Mercedes or Chrysler Pacifica minivan. Check out what this VR future in the car might look like.

11:40 AM – 12 PM
Delivering the Future with Dave Ferguson (Nuro)

Nuro is building a self-driving vehicle with a focus on local deliveries like groceries, food, and retail goods. We’ll talk with Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson to hear all about the strengths and challenges of their focused approach.

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Break

1:00 PM – 1:10 PM
Demo with Jay Giraud (Damon Motorcycles)

Damon CEO and founder will bring a motorcycle on stage to demonstrate the company’s rider protection system that uses a combination of radar, camera and other sensors to track the speed, direction and velocity of up to 64 objects at a time.

1:10 PM – 1:35 PM
Bringing Ethics to Self-Driving Cars with Oliver Cameron (Voyage) and Clark Haynes (Uber)

When you hear the words ethics and autonomous vehicles, the age-old and often overused “trolley problem” thought experiment might spring to mind. We promise this isn’t about that. Instead, Oliver Cameron and Clark Haynes will discuss ethical decision-making in autonomous vehicles, and detail how robot cars are designed to prioritize some objects over others.

1:35 PM – 1:55 PM
Where Intel’s $15 billion bet is headed with Amnon Shashua (Mobileye)

In the two years since Intel bought Mobileye, co-founder and CEO Amnon Shashua has scaled up the business beyond ADAS with an eye towards launching an autonomous vehicle platform in 2021. We’ll talk to Shashua about his vision for the company, future business pursuits and a progress report on the AV program.

1:55 PM – 2:20 PM
Scooter Wars with Katie DeWitt (Scoot), Tony Ho (Segway-Ninebot) and Ryan Rzepecki (JUMP Bikes)

Scooters have taken over cities, and there’s no sign that these deployments are slowing down.Three leaders on the front lines of this battleground will dig into what’s next for scooters, the sustainability of a shared model, unit economics and more.

2:20 PM – 2:40 PM
Rebuilding the Motor City with Ken Washington (Ford Motor Company)

Hear from Ford’s CTO and Vice President of Research and Advanced Engineering how the historic automaker is rapidly changing its culture and processes while it prepares for an electric future.

2:40 PM – 3:00 PM
Coming Soon!

3:00 PM – 3:15 PM
Break

3:15 PM – 3:35 PM
Rethinking Urban Mobility with Erik Buell (Fuell)

Motorcycle racing pioneer Erik Buell is back with a new company and vision. We’ll talk to Buell, now chairman of EV startup Fuell, about the Flow electric motorcycle and the Fluid electric bicycle.

3:35 PM – 4:05 PM
Autonomous Robotaxis vs Shuttles with Karl Iagnemma (Aptiv), Alisyn Malek (May Mobility), Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli (Aurora)

Some of the top minds trying to bring autonomous vehicle technology to the masses will debate what approaches makes the most sense, have the best chances for economic viability and what safety and security vulnerabilities and other challenges could throw these off track.

4:05 PM – 4:30 PM

The Future of Freight with Stefan Seltz-Axmacher (Starsky Robotics) and other speakers to be announced.

Trucking is the backbone of the economy; it’s also in peril. Startups and OEMs are scrambling to come up with the solution. We’ll debate whether autonomous trucks are the fix we need or if another near-term technology can pave the way to a more efficient and profitable industry.

4:30 PM – 4:50 PM

Uber Takes Flight with Mark Moore (UberElevate)

Uber wants to have flying taxis by 2023 and test flights are expected as early as next year. Mark Moore, a 30-year NASA veteran and engineering director of aviation at Uber, reveals what he and the ride-hailing company have been working on — and how they intend to take to the skies.

---

Save $100 with Early Bird Tickets ($195) when you book today before prices go up.

Startup Demo Packages (includes 3 tickets + a table) are still available here.

Students, grab your $45 tickets before we sell out.

The broader AR market is made up of a lot of hype and excitement, but fundamentally it’s all based around the promise that waveguide displays can continue to stay wafer-thin while getting better and cheaper.

Waveguide-maker DigiLens is aiming to stay aggressive in lowering the costs of the expensive component. It has just closed a $50 million Series C led by Universal Display Corporation’s venture arm alongside Samsung Ventures. The company had previously disclosed that Pokémon Go-maker Niantic and Mitsubishi were making a strategic investment in this round. This brings the startup’s total funding to $85 million.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. startup most recently raised a $22 million round in early 2017, with investments from Foxconn, Sony and Panasonic.

Waveguide displays allow projected images to be “loaded” in from the side of a sheet of glass, thanks to etchings that bounce the light around to form a complete image in front of your eye. This is ideal for augmented reality where you want as little hardware as possible directly in front of your eye. While optics that simply reflect an image onto a curved display are intensely cheaper, it’s going to take developments in waveguide tech to create consumer-friendly svelte designs that still showcase a high-definition image.

Aside from AR glasses, DigiLens is eyeing the automotive market as a market for its see-through displays.

In a statement, CEO Chris Pickett declared that his startup’s manufacturing process was building “the only waveguide that can get to a consumer price point..”

The startup will have to compete with major tech companies and other startups that are building their own technology. Magic Leap and Microsoft are designing their own waveguide displays for their latest AR headsets. Last year, Apple bought Akonia Holographics, a Denver startup building similar technology.

Security researchers have found a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel chips which, if exploited, can be used to steal sensitive information directly from the processor.,

The bugs are reminiscent of Meltdown and Spectre, which exploited a weakness in speculative execution, an important part of how modern processors work. Speculative execution helps processors predict to a certain degree what an application or operating system might need next and in the near-future, making the app run faster and more efficient. The processor will execute its predictions if they’re needed, or discard them if they’re not.

Both Meltdown and Spectre leaked sensitive data stored briefly in the processor, including secrets — such as passwords, secret keys and account tokens, and private messages.

Now some of the same researchers are back with an entirely new round of data-leaking bugs.

“ZombieLoad,” as it’s called, is a side-channel attack targeting Intel chips, allowing hackers to effectively exploit design flaws rather than injecting malicious code. Intel said ZombieLoad is made up of four bugs, which the researchers reported to the chip maker just a month ago.

Almost every computer with an Intel chips dating back to 2011 are affected by the vulnerabilities. AMD and ARM chips are not said to be vulnerable like earlier side-channel attacks.

ZombieLoad takes its name from a “zombie load,” an amount of data that the processor can’t understand or properly process, forcing the processor to ask for help from the processor’s microcode to prevent a crash. Apps are usually only able to see their own data, but this bug allows that data to bleed across those boundaries walls. ZombieLoad will leak any data currently loaded by the processor’s core, the researchers said. Intel said patches to the microcode will help clear the processor’s buffers, preventing data from being read.

Practically, the researchers showed in a proof-of-concept video that the flaws could be exploited to see which websites a person is visiting in real-time, but could be easily repurposed to grab passwords or access tokens used to log into a victim’s online accounts.

Like Meltdown and Spectre, it’s not just PCs and laptops affected by ZombieLoad — the cloud is also vulnerable. ZombieLoad can be triggered in virtual machines, which are meant to be isolated from other virtual systems and their host device.

Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers who discovered the latest round of chip flaws, said it works “just like” it PCs and can read data off the processor. That’s potentially a major problem in cloud environments where different customers’ virtual machines run on the same server hardware.

Although no attacks have been publicly reported, the researchers couldn’t rule them out nor would any attack necessarily leave a trace, they said.

What does this mean for the average user? There’s no need to panic, for one.

These are far from drive-by exploits where an attacker can take over your computer in an instant. Gruss said it was “easier than Spectre” but “more difficult than Meltdown” to exploit — and both required a specific set of skills and effort to use in an attack.

But if exploit code was compiled in an app or delivered as malware, “we can run an attack,” he said.

There are far easier ways to hack into a computer and steal data. But the focus of the research into speculative execution and side channel attacks remains in its infancy. As more findings come to light, the data-stealing attacks have the potential to become easier to exploit and more streamlined.

But as with any vulnerability where patches are available, install them.

Intel has released microcode to patch vulnerable processors, including Intel Xeon, Intel Broadwell, Sandy Bridge, Skylake and Haswell chips, Intel Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake and Cascade Lake chips are affected, and all Atom and Knights processors.

But other tech giants, like consumer PC and device manufacturers, are also issuing patches as a first line of defense against possible attacks.

Computer makers Apple and Microsoft and browser makers Google and Mozilla are expected to release patches in the coming hours. We reached out to all four prior to publication. We will update when patches and comments are available.

In a call with TechCrunch, Intel said the microcode updates, like previous patches, would have an impact on processor performance. An Intel spokesperson told TechCrunch that most patched consumer devices could take a 3 percent performance hit at worst, and as much as 9 percent in a datacenter environment. But, the spokesperson said, it was unlikely to be noticeable in most scenarious.

And either Intel nor Gruss and his team have not released exploit code, so there’s no direct and immediate threat to the average user.

But with patches rolling out today, there’s no reason to pass on a chance to prevent such an attack in any eventuality.

Read more:

• Kernel panic! What are Meltdown and Spectre, the bugs affecting nearly every computer?
• Intel announces hardware fixes for Spectre and Meltdown on upcoming chips
• Apple issues Meltdown fix for Macs running Sierra and El Capitan
• Google claims its Spectre and Meltdown mitigation results in no performance degradation
• Intel tried desperately to change the subject from Spectre and Meltdown at CES
• Intel CEO: Meltdown and Spectre patches will come to 90%+ of chips in the next week