Weekend Reads 020719

When the 2015 rules were passed, the FCC moved to regulate the internet as a telecommunications service, as opposed to the less stringent classification of an information service, a change that was then reversed in 2017. —Colin Lecher

Imagine this: an enormous tech company is tracking what you do on your phone, even when you’re not using any of its services, down to the specific images that you see. —Sydney Li and Jason Kelley

The new head of a congressional antitrust panel has vowed to take on big technology companies that “threaten our democracy”, the latest sign of a growing cross-party Washington consensus that Silicon Valley has grown too powerful. —David Smith

Moore’s Law has underwritten a remarkable period of growth and stability for the computer industry. The doubling of transistor density at a predictable cadence has fueled not only five decades of increased processor performance, but also the rise of the general-purpose computing model. However, according to a pair of researchers at MIT and Aachen University, that’s all coming to an end. —Michael Feldman

Deciding what products can improve an organization’s network security is a complex process. You must weigh a number of factors as part of the purchase decision, one of the most crucial of which is the impact of the product on network performance. —Brian Monkman

In May 2017, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst drew a stark conclusion in his keynote presentation at the annual Red Hat Summit event in San Francisco: “Planning as we know it is dead.” He said those same words again during a Red Hat planning session in October of 2018, when a cross-functional group of Red Hat leaders assembled to assess the current state of the business and discuss the roadmap for the coming year. —Sam Knuth

During the time that I’ve managed security teams and operation centres, it has always struck me that the understanding of security leadership in most organizations is either absent or vague. This in turn leads to difficulties in understanding the role of a security team in the organization, which can carry further cost, as this article by Brian Krebs points out. —Hinne Hettema

Don’t be fooled into believing digital transformation (DX) can justify your bucket list of technology innovations. As a way to support DX, technologies such as containers, microservices and edge networking – The New Stack’s coverage sweet spot – are each only a priority at about 37 percent of organizations, according to a just-released report by The Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BMC Software. —Lawrence Hecht