Hello all,
Unless you live under a rock
(or switch off totally at anything more technical than wiring a plug for your lathe
), you will have no doubt heard
some news about a thing called "Meltdown" (which affects all Intel chips manufactured since either 1995 or 2005 or 2011 - depending on who you believe), and the unrelated but equally nasty "Spectre". These so-called "exploits" are causing much panic in the computer world, especially "Meltdown", as it turns out the only software fix available will slow your computer down by around 1/3rd. Which is a lot...
The first thing is, there's no need to worry, about the forum at least! This server is pretty well secured, and despite hundreds of thousands of attempts since it was started (about 1000 attacks per day, just on one entry point), no-one has yet got in. For "Meltdown" to work, the hacker has to run stuff on the actual machine he's hacking, and on a machine like this, that means someone gaining control of it.
Second - we are likely to experience some unscheduled downtime over the next few days & weeks, as our hosting company update their infrastructure. Any downtime should be short (5-mins or so, no more), but as with anything computery, things don't always come back from a reboot in good working order, so I'll try to keep a close eye on the forum for the next few days, at least until the virtual host tells me they're done with any rebooting. If I do get any advance notice of a reboot, I'll try to post it here, to keep you all up to date.
In the meantime, anyone with a CNC lathe is probably best sending it to me for evaluation, just to be on the safe side