Merry Christmas!

We are now at the 22nd of December, and it is time to take a break to spend time with family and friends (as well as prepping up a lot of work for next year). From my family to yours, we wish you the merriest of Christmas’, and a very happy new year.

Remember, at this time of year, “He who made the blind men see, and the lame men walk,” as Tiny Tim would say.

A bit of retrospect from 2018, and prospect for 2019…

  • I posted 295 items (not including worth reading) here on Rule11 in 2018.
  • Rule11 had more than 128,000 views in 2018.
  • I am shifting roles in the new year; you can expect to see more on this in early January.
  • I am planning to move rule11 off WordPress in 2019; I am trying to find a developer to help me do the initial work to move to either Ghost or Craft, but have not had any luck in finding someone to kick start the process.

As Marley might say: “Look to see me no more, and expect the first post in the new year…”

Posted in OTHER

Weekend Reads 122118

A recent phishing campaign targeting US government officials, activists, and journalists is notable for using a technique that allowed the attackers to bypass two-factor authentication protections offered by services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, researchers said Thursday. The event underscores the risks of 2fa that relies on one-tap logins or one-time passwords, particularly if the latter are sent in SMS messages to phones. —Dan Goodin @arstechnica.com

After a year rife with security scandals, high-profile hacks, and data breaches, Congress is starting to take steps toward protecting the privacy of people who use the internet or smartphone apps — in other words, nearly every single American. —Kari Paul @marketwatch.com

According to the APWG’s new Phishing Activity Trends Report released today, phishers are using new techniques to carry out their attacks and hide their origins in order to make the most of every phishing campaign. @circleid.com

With Microsoft’s decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That’s a worrying turn of events, given the company’s past behavior. —Peter Bright @arstechnica.com

The greeting starts out routine. You bump into a friend at the grocery store and they ask how you are. You find yourself thinking you aren’t that busy, at least, not enough to describe how you are. Things have settled down and work and family are status quo. Do you hesitate to say it… that you, in fact, aren’t busy? Are you embarrassed that it will sound as if you are dull, unimportant, or unmotivated? —Rosalinda Rosales @intellectualtakeout.org

It recently came to my attention that I was waging a war across multiple fronts and fatigue had struck — they were winning. For months I had battled, fighting their persistence with my propensity to click x. —Jye SR @freecodecamp.org

A belief in the cooking world says you shouldn’t have any tools in your drawers or any appliances on your countertops that serve a single purpose. Anything without multiple functions is a waste of space. It’s a belief that should extend to the IT world if we want some of these more leading-edge technologies to get a foothold and begin to take off, and I think that’s what you’ll see starting in 2019. —Bruce Milne @datacenterjournal.com

About a month ago, I came across an article that talked about IPv6 being a failure and should be abandoned due to it taking 25 years to reach 25% deployment. What struck me the most was the reference to it having been 25 years. —Jen Linkova @apnic.net

Posted in WEEKEND READS

On the ‘net: ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM, was widely seen as a compromise technology that would provide the best circuit and packet switching in a single technology. Data would be input into the network in the form of either packets or circuits. The data would then be broken up into fixed sized cells, which would then be switched based on a fixed label-based header. This would allow hardware to switch the cells in a way that is like circuit switching, while retaining many of the advantages of a circuit switched network. In fact, ATM allowed for both circuit- and packet-switched paths to be both be used in the same network. @ECI’s LighTALK

Posted in ON THE NET