Weekend Reads 030521


Between preparing letters for tenure and promotion cases, and serving on committees at my home institutions, I have read a lot of materials about teaching, research, and service. I evaluate teaching records differently than most of my colleagues. There is a method to what I’m doing, and I’m sharing it here.


Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The reason being “data is the new gold” in this digital world, and the more sensitive some data is, the more value it has.


OpenVault just released its Broadband Insights Report for the 4th quarter of 2020. The report shows continued staggeringly fast growth of broadband usage in the country. The growth has been so fast that OpenVault applies the word ‘exploded’ to describe the giant increase in customer usage.


Nearly two months after news surfaced about software updates from SolarWinds being used to distribute a backdoor Trojan called Sunburst/Solorigate to some 18,000 organizations worldwide, troubling questions remain about the scope and impact of the breach.


For ages now, every annual report on desktop operating system market share has had the same top two contenders: Microsoft’s Windows in a commanding lead at number one and Apple’s macOS in distant second place. But in 2020, Chrome OS became the second-most popular OS, and Apple fell to third.


According to the latest report, Intel’s 12th Gen processors could offer a sizable performance uplift, and the best news is that Alder Lake for the desktop is rumored to come later this year with a maximum of 16 cores and 24 threads.


Just as the targets of these attacks have shifted from individuals to corporations, so too has the narrow focus given way to applying force and pressure to pay.


I was recently looking through some of Google’s open source repositories on their GitHub. And I saw that they had a repository for continuous fuzzing. I had no idea what fuzzing even was, let alone continuous fuzzing.


High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is already fast. But Samsung wants to make it even faster. The South Korean-based technology giant has announced its HBM-PIM architecture, which will double the speeds of high-bandwidth memory by leaning on artificial intelligence.


If ever there was something to ruin Christmas in the cybersecurity industry, it’s a devastating data breach that is on track to becoming the largest cyberespionage event affecting the US government on record.


The Secondary Market in domain names plays a critical role in Internet commerce yet is often misunderstood. This article will attempt to clear up some of the myths that frequently arise when discussing the Secondary Market.


Users need to know that they can depend on the service that is provided to them. In practice, because from time to time individual elements will inevitably fail, this means you have to be able to continue in spite of those failures.


However, investing in cybersecurity is becoming even more important as these organizations undergo digital transformation.


In today’s high-speed data centers, servers make up a large proportion of the total power consumed. Choosing point-to-point cables at the server level instead of transceivers can quickly provide measurable energy savings.


The lines between a server, a SmartNIC, and a Data Processing Unit, or DPU, are getting fuzzier, and the good news is that definitions do not matter nearly as much as use cases.


When a brand goes so far as to ask a domain name registrar for Whois (the registration contact details) of a potentially abusive domain name, there’s likely a lot at stake.


A new attack framework aims to infer keystrokes typed by a target user at the opposite end of a video conference call by simply leveraging the video feed to correlate observable body movements to the text being typed


Microsoft has published a white paper on Tuesday about a new type of attack technique called a “dependency confusion” or a “substitution attack” that can be used to poison the app-building process inside corporate environments.


It was one of these efforts, and a historical one in this case, that brought down Emotet at the end of January 2021 — a feat that many considered impossible.


We do not mean that computers, taken together, will lose technical abilities and thus ‘forget’ how to do some calculations. We do mean that the economic cycle that has led to the usage of a common computing platform, underpinned by rapidly improving universal processors, is giving way to a fragmentary cycle, where economics push users toward divergent computing platforms driven by special purpose processors.