[effie]

Exactly this. Apparently, the details of the attack have been published in official paper(s) before the security teams of major OSes could prepare and make publicly available mitigating patches for the users. There is no patch for Debian 8.0 (Jessie), or for Qubes OS, for example.

The chatter is all about how CPU manufacturers screwed up, but there is a much more alarming issue here, I think: the apparent irresponsibility of the people who published the flaws before the security teams and the users could mitigate them. Perhaps there was a reason for accelerated public disclosure, but so far this makes no sense to me.