Weekend Reads 022120

This economic structure tends to limit satellite connectivity to high-margin, low-volume applications – although that is also partly governed by the cost of service providers’ “earth stations” and the need for end-users to have large antennas/dishes. The frequencies used also limit signal reach through walls or roofs, meaning that direct connection to devices isn’t possible without line-of-sight. —Dean Bubley

Networking software giant Citrix Systems says malicious hackers were inside its networks for five months between 2018 and 2019, making off with personal and financial data on company employees, contractors, interns, job candidates and their dependents. —Krebs on Security

Now, The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) have revealed — in “Vulnerabilities in the Core, a preliminary report and Census II of open-source software” — the most frequently used components and the vulnerabilities they share. —Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

A new report published by cybersecurity researchers has unveiled evidence of Iranian state-sponsored hackers targeting dozens of companies and organizations in Israel and around the world over the past three years. —Ravie Lakshmanan

It’s been fun watching real-world programmers react to a new study that challenges the idea of vast differences in the productivity of computer programmers. The study tries to suggest better ways for managers to assess and improve the performance of their developers. —David Cassel

Before AI — and, by AI, I mean broadly any computer system that implements a decision process — tools sat there until we put them to use. AI tools, on the other hand, are created to do something before we get involved. —Brendan Dixon

Policy doesn’t work that way; it’s specifically focused on use. It focuses on people and what they do. Policy makers can’t create policy around a piece of technology without understanding how it is used—how all of it’s used. —Bruce Schneier

The FreeMesh system promises to bring fully open source mesh networking to the masses. I recently had a chance to test it; it installed quickly, and the performance was great—especially for the price. —Spencer Thomason

What Anderson said, however, is that there is actually no agreement on what generates the aerodynamic force known as lift. “There is no simple one-liner answer to this,” he told the Times. —Ed Regis

The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. —Joseph Cox