Eight years after Spectre exposed a fundamental tension at the heart of modern computing, MIT researchers have found that the defenses built in response carry a flaw of their own — a nanosecond-wide gap between when a processor cleans up sensitive prediction data and when it actually uses it. Named TONTOU, the attack exploits this almost imperceptible window to re-poison the very machinery chip makers thought they had secured. The discovery is less a story of a single vulnerability than a reminder that the trade-off between speed and security, baked into processor design decades ago, continues