Skip to main content
Home

Main navigation

  • Services
  • Accessibility
  • Partner Program
  • Blog
    • All Blog Posts
    • Ask Freelock
    • Dev Corner
    • Sustainable/Open Business
    • Off Topic
    • Newsletters
  • About
    • About Freelock
    • Meet the Team
    • Portfolio
    • Client Feedback
    • Typical Hosting Options
    • Invoice Payment
    • Advent 2025 - 24 days of accessibility
  • More ...
    • Topics
      • Reach
      • Engagement
      • Delivery
      • Security
      • Performance
      • Usability
    • Analytics
    • Support and Improvements
      • Drupal Development
      • WordPress
      • Migration
Evening Water Glow at Locks
January 2018

The Spectre of a Meltdown

Featured Story

The Spectre of a Meltdown

The news was supposed to come out Tuesday, but it leaked early. Last week we learned about three variations of a new class of attacks on modern computing, before many vendors could release a patch -- and we come to find out that the root cause may be entirely unpatchable, and can only be fixed by buying new computers.

Today Microsoft released a patch -- which they had to quickly pull when they discovered that it crashed computers with AMD chips.

Essentially Spectre and Meltdown demonstrate a new way of attacking your smartphone, your laptop, your company's web server, your desktop, maybe even your tv and refrigerator.

Meltdown - Animated
Meltdown in Action

This all sounds dreadfully scary. And it is... but don't panic! Instead, read on to learn how this might affect you, your website, and what you can do to prevent bad things from getting worse.

Read more

The web is changing so rapidly these days, and at Freelock we feel on top of those changes. With our new focus on a monthly topic for our Vision plan, we find ourselves at a sweet spot between the old web and the new, between intensive data-driven applications and slick animated websites that change what can be done on the web.

We (finally) updated our good old website to the latest and greatest Drupal 8, we're doing a lot of special enhancements and really cool Commerce customizations, and we're starting to do a lot more front-end development loosely coupled to back-end data -- really fun stuff!

We're looking forward to a great 2018! Expect to hear from us just a bit more often, as we find ourselves in a unique position to comment on current trends, topics you need to understand on the web, and newsworthy stories like Spectre and Meltdown.

Skip to content after comments

0 comments

0 total 0 new

Reading settings

Saved for comment discussions across this site in this browser. Apply saves your choices; Cancel discards edits. Selected comments and drafts stay open beyond the chosen depth.

No comments yet.

No new comments remain in this discussion.

Recent Rants

Drupal Meets Matrix 03
đź•‘Oct 13, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Drupal Meets Matrix 03 - Better Conversations with Advanced Comment Threads

Commenting in Drupal hasn't noticeably changed in 15 years. That changes now.

dev corner icon
Dev Corner
Dark presentation slide titled "Drupal Meets Matrix" with subtitle about the Matrix API.
đź•‘Oct 10, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Drupal Meets Matrix part 2: Live Comments with ECA and HTMX

A comment thread in Drupal works totally fine. You fill in a form, click submit, and your comment gets posted. Same way it has for over 20 years.

But if somebody else replies when you're on the page, you don't see anything change, you don't get any notification.

dev corner icon
Dev Corner
Active PHP process spikes with exponential backoff
đź•‘Oct 05, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Beyond Bigger Servers: Keeping Websites Online Under Bot Attacks

How layered caching, verified crawlers, and adaptive Anubis protection kept a WordPress publishing site available for readers and editors.
dev corner icon
Dev Corner
developer coding AI software performance review
đź•‘Sep 13, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬1

Using AI to review AI-Generated code: Astra vs. Opus vs. DeepSeek

Astra built an impressive amount of working code, but missed serious performance problems. DeepSeek found several of them for 22 cents. Opus cost dramatically more and found a substantially different set of problems, especially around UI and accessibility.
dev corner icon
Dev Corner
Dark banner graphic showing "Drupal" and "matrix" connected by a line.
đź•‘Aug 31, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Drupal Meets Matrix part 1: Setting up Matrix API

I've been maintaining the matrix_api module on Drupal.org since 2016, nearly a decade of it doing one thing well: posting Drupal events into a Matrix room. This year that changed.

dev corner icon
Dev Corner
software maintenance security patch vulnerability
đź•‘Aug 27, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

WordPress Has Thousands of Maintainers. Does Your Replacement?

Last month, a critical WordPress vulnerability triggered emergency patching across the web — and reignited a familiar argument: if WordPress keeps having security problems, why not let AI build something new instead?

It’s a reasonable question.

AI has made software dramatically cheaper and faster to create. But somebody still has to understand it, patch it, test it, and keep it running eighteen months from now.

That’s the part of the “AI instead of WordPress” pitch we think is getting overlooked.

sustainable business icon
Sustainable/Open Business
Drupal developer local environment setup tools
đź•‘Aug 01, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Zero to new Drupal site in 133 seconds

Gabor asked in Slack about how people contributing to Drupal manage multiple different Drupal versions, and different contributed module branches, when using AI agents:

dev corner icon
Dev Corner
WordPress security vulnerability hacker cyberattack website
đź•‘Jul 21, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬1

We Patched wp2shell in 4 Hours. On a Friday Afternoon.

On July 17, WordPress shipped an emergency security release for a vulnerability chain now being called wp2shell.

sustainable business icon
Sustainable/Open Business
hacker cybersecurity website breach recovery
đź•‘Jul 09, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Tempting Fate: What Happened When One of Our "Protected" Sites Got Hacked

A real client site got hacked and lost 35GB of files overnight. Here's how we diagnosed it, recovered in a few hours, and what we changed after.
sustainable business icon
Sustainable/Open Business
workshop board of old-school woodworking tools
đź•‘Jun 12, 2026 đź–‹John Locke đź’¬0

Against Inevitability

What Freelock is for, and what we're against
sustainable business icon
Sustainable/Open Business

Footer

  • Contact
    • +1 206.577.0540
    • Sitemap
  • Freelock Blog
    • Ask Freelock
    • Dev Corner
    • Newsletters
    • Sustainable/Open Business
    • Topics
  • Services
    • Website Maintenance
  • About Us
    • Our Team
    • Client Feedback
    • Portfolio
  • Policies
    • Acceptable Use Policy
    • Copyright Infringement Policy
    • AI Use Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    • Security Statement
    • Standard Contract Terms

Contact

We are located in beautiful Seattle, WA.

 Freelock LLC
 PO Box 9625
 Seattle, WA 98109

User Menu

Social media

  • BlueSky
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • YouTube

1995-2026 Freelock LLC. Neonbyte theme by Dripyard.