[quotemsg=21421732,0,2641427]there is a logic that ties this cpu spectre and meltdown to search engines. there is the search engine adding in engineered results to searches that put the companies ideology first to then let the real search results below, sometimes way below at the bottom of the search page. the search engine then weeds out the real search results, to craft you clicking on an approved link.
the cpu errors called meltdown and spectre are an idea that the real search results arent being tuned to let only approved links in. then the user can click unapproved links and use the computer in an un-managed state as they please, for things like bit torrent or tor, or vpn, things that are hard to snoop on. so they need to fix the cpu so eventually all things the user does online is approved for them.[/quotemsg]
Strange analogy, But is it internet related?
Sometimes I step back and think of all the "features" that are added to processor's core, and how a person could exploit them. Say that for instance, a Hard drive controller driver that was always loaded was altered to perform iSCSI connection so that a logic bus is tied to a remote server and other compromised computers to form a type of parallel processing network. Since every machine has its own encryption, each computer would not respond to the data that is looped through in the round robin sync but there own. Of course, the hacker would program such driver to send them the key for each machine so that they can review the encrypted data from the victim's machine. This, I'm afraid is quite doable, even to the point of making a second encrypted layer on the HDD and hosting a site or a service illegally. Reason why I say illegal, is that they would be stealing the internet service from the victim (theft of utility). There is something about mac addresses that ties into this somehow in the above example.
Edit:
Stepping back a little to what you were saying about search engines. Let's say this hacker(s) spread pieces of its code across several pages where the victim goes to. Say shopping results on a search engine. when the victim clicks on any link it triggers a side code (that the browser escapes it in the gui, but executes in the background ) to execute. Sites that perform updates would be a highly suspicious victim, as an unaddressed XML security flaw allows unknowns web storage access.
Of course this is "hypothetical" , but possible.