Weekend Reads 071318: Nice to Haves

I had about four hours of highway driving yesterday. Even though I probably could’ve navigated it on my own, I opted to use Apple Maps, which is integrated with my car’s Apple CarPlay “infotainment center.” It was nice. It told me how many miles I had remaining and my expected time of arrival. But it wasn’t a life changer. @The Old Reader

More than ever before Internet users are now interacting with people living/working in other economies. And as a result of these interactions, there are an increasing number of ‘legal contracts’ (intentional or not). Internet policy researchers and academics debate about the changing landscape and the boundaries of the international and domestic laws, without conclusive agreements. —Yeseul Kim @APNIC

The plague that is Spectre continues to evolve and adapt, showing up in two new variants this week dubbed Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2 that follow the original Spectre’s playbook while expanding on the ways they can do damage. —Curtis Franklin Jr. @Dark Reading

These vast routing events that are propagated globally already provide a hint that some ISPs do not set filters at all, or there are vastly malformed AS-SETs. We decided to measure the number of filters that were already bypassed by routing anomalies. To do so, we checked the way route leaks were propagated: if a route leak is received from a customer link and it does not belong to the customer cone then IRR filters were malformed. —Alexander Azimov @APNIC

Recently, a CEO of a roaring unicorn in Silicon Valley drew my attention to the following: “If you compare Amazon’s stock price over the recent years against the cost of housing and the rise of homelessness in Seattle, the progression is identical…” —Frederic Filloux @MondayNote

Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever. —David Levari @The Conversation

Two web-based attacks against IoT devices made the rounds this week. Researchers Craig Young and Brannon Dorsey showed that a well known attack technique called “DNS rebinding” can be used to control your smart thermostat, detect your home address or extract unique identifiers from your IoT devices. —Gunes Acar