Weekend Reads 060818

Migrating to IPv6 will make you ready for the next stage of the Internet. I was the principal network design engineer and member of the project team for deploying native IPv6 for all residential home users at Vodafone New Zealand two years ago. As an outcome of that project, IPv6 has been deployed for about 80% of residential home Internet users now. —Mansour Ganji @APNIC

After being embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices, it turns out that Facebook had granted inappropriate access to its users’ data to more than 60 device makers, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, and Samsung. —Swati Khandelwal @The Hacker News

Over the past few years, researchers have started to choreograph vulnerability announcements to make a big press splash. Clever names — the e-mail vulnerability is called “Efail” — websites, and cute logos are now common. Key reporters are given advance information about the vulnerabilities. Sometimes advance teasers are released. Vendors are now part of this process, trying to announce their patches at the same time the vulnerabilities are announced. —Bruce Schneier

Yes, there are habits of highly effective cyber-criminals use to be successful! We can leverage the knowledge of these habits to better prepare, defend, and attribute attacks. —Barry Greene

There’s a newly announced set of issues labeled the “EFAIL encryption flaw” that reduces the security of PGP and S/MIME emails. Some of the issues are about HTML email parsing, others are about the use of CBC encryption. All show how hard it is to engineer secure systems, especially when those systems are composed of many components that had disparate design goals. —Adam Shostack @Dark Reading

Ireland is home to over 1,000 multinational companies and hyperscale providers for some of the biggest brands, including Google, Facebook and Amazon—all of which have a vast data center presence on the island. With many tech companies opting to make Ireland one of their bases, the country boasts a growing talent pool and tech community that makes it a top choice for multinational businesses to invest in. —Tanya Duncan @Data Center Journal

GDPR, the European Union’s new privacy law, is drawing advertising money toward Google’s online-ad services and away from competitors that are straining to show they’re complying with the sweeping regulation. The reason: the Alphabet Inc. ad giant, Google, is gathering individuals’ consent for targeted advertising at far higher rates than many competing online-ad services, early data show. That means the new law, the General Data Protection Regulation, is reinforcing—at least initially—the strength of the biggest online-ad players, led by Google and Facebook Inc. —Nick Kostov @Market Watch

Last Friday ICANN took German registrar EPAG to court in Germany. German courts seem to be pretty fast, so instead of having to wait weeks or months to see how they’d rule, we’ve already got the answer. The German court in Bonn has ruled that EPAG (Tucows) is not obliged to collect extra contacts beyond the domain name registrant. The decision, naturally, is in German, but there is a translation into English that we can use to understand how the court arrived at this decision. —Michele Neylon @CircleID

The Internet is composed of networks that rely on each other to provide global connectivity. Consequently, the reachability of a network depends greatly on the connectivity of other networks, and the understanding of interdependencies between ASes is essential for deployment decisions, routing decisions, and connectivity troubleshooting. Our new tool measures AS dependencies and addresses the following questions… —Romain Fontugne @APNIC