Weekend Reads 062620

A little late, but still…

In the recent GitHub Satellite online conference, one of the most exciting product announcements was GitHub Codespaces. The idea is to have a code button on every repository. —Michael Yuan

High impact vulnerabilities in modern communication protocol used by mobile network operators (MNOs) can be exploited to intercept user data and carry out impersonation, fraud, and denial of service (DoS) attacks, cautions a newly published research. —Ravie Lakshmanan

I want to explain the cost structure that firms, and in particular technology companies, must manage. I absorbed these lessons by studying the financial documents and annual reports of companies that perhaps you aspire to work for or whose products you may use and enjoy. —Adam Naor

As a search engine optimization (SEO) and domain name consultant, one of the questions I get asked most often about domain names is whether or not the domain name or TLD (Top-Level Domain) matters. Will the domain name ending have an effect on SEO or search engine rankings. Are certain domain name endings preferred by the search engines over other domain name extensions? I decided to answer this question based on search engine optimization testing and not just on my personal and professional experience. —Bill Hartzer

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Intel, the dominant maker of processors for servers on the planet, was rejiggering its product roadmaps behind the scenes in conjunction with its largest OEM partners as well the hyperscalers and large public cloud builders that drive about a third of its revenues these days. —Timothy Prickett Morgan

Cybersecurity is not a static world. You can say that it is a social system, it affects and is affected by its surrounding environment. For example, back in 2018, it was the GDPR that shook the foundations of security and privacy by making the protection of our personal data a fundamental human right. But that was then. What is shaping today’s cybersecurity? —Anastasios Arampatzis

The first wave of cryptocurrencies, starting in the 1980s, attempted to digitize government-issued currency (or fiat currency, as cryptocurrency enthusiasts say).8 The second wave, represented prominently by Bitcoin, provide their own separate currency—issued and operated independently of any existing currencies, governments, or financial institutions. Bitcoin’s currency (BTC) is issued in fixed quantities according to a hard-coded schedule in the protocol. —Communications of the ACM

The Data Science Life Cycle introduced here can be used as a framing principle to guide decision making in a variety of educational settings, pointing the way on topics such as: whether to develop new data science courses (and which ones) or rely on existing course offerings or a mix of both; whether to design data science curricula across existing degree granting units or work within them; how to relate new degrees and programmatic initiatives to ongoing research in data science and encourage the development of a recognized research area in data science itself; and how to prioritize support for data science research across a variety of disciplinary domains. —ictoria Stodden

From an economics perspective, this new market design solution provides some of the advantages of a centralized digital platform (for example, the ability of participants to rely on a shared network and benefit from network effects) without some of the consequences the presence of an intermediary may introduce such as increased market power, ability to renege on commitments to ecosystem participants, control over participants’ data, and presence of a single point of failure. —hristian Catalini, Joshua S. Gans

Planet-scale applications are driving the exponential growth of the Cloud, and datacenter specialization is the key enabler of this trend. GPU- and FPGA-based clouds have already been deployed to accelerate compute-intensive workloads. ASIC-based clouds are a natural evolution as cloud services expand across the planet.