Forum Analysis

January 31, 2018 by Sage Thomas

Tech Crunch is known for being a leader in tech pop culture. They are often the go-to place for new and possibly impactful news. The Meltdown website that published the scholarly paper is not a normal journal or forum. The site is specifically for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that were discovered by Computer Scientists from Google, Cyberus Technology, and a number of other university professors. Their website is designed to help people with a range of technical knowledge understand what Meltdown is, while also hosting the original report on the subject for more scholarly audience members.

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Tech Crunch

Tech Crunch is not always the best source for detailed information, but it is great for getting anything that could be interesting for the average tech person. They are usually reliable, even though they sometimes embellish their stories. They cater to an audience who enjoys articles that are larger than average but don't drag on. This is a good structure to have with tech because there is always more to be learned if a reader is interested enough. A major difference between Tech Crunch and the Meltdown website is Tech Crunch is clearly made to make money. Ads and links to social media cover the page. Because of this, the forum is designed to favor quantity over quality and should not be trusted as a single source. Sadly, they usually don't provide sources to their articles, either, making it hard to verify their information.

Meltdown.com

It's hard to put this forum into a catagory. Because the website only hosts two scholarly papers, a reader has to go on the trust of the authors of the papers. The website itself only offers a small Q&A section, a logo for Meltdown and Spectre, and links to download the papers. From my analysis, the purpose for this choice comes from the "Open Source" culture. Open sourcing among computer scientists is a belief that information, especially information as important and Meltdown, should not be owned by a corporation and should be free for anyone to see. Having the paper published by a journal may have limited the number of people that could read it. By not having it published, however, the reputation of the article is harder to determine. Many reputable authors are attached to the articles in the forum, and readers are encouraged to tests the results of each article. The code to replicate the vultnerabilities is also provided. This helps to lower the required level of trust by making their results more accessible.

Unlike most scholarly journals, meltdown.com doesn't only focused on communicating with scholars. The site includes a helpful section to answer common questions quickly and without any field specific words or concepts. They provide links to blog posts that are easier to read and links to software fixes to protect your computer from an attack. Four youtube videos are also provided to aid the explanation and replication of Meltdown. The site caters to almost all possible audiences, including people that read Tech Crunch and field scholars

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