Weekend Reads 080919

Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. —Matthew Guariglia

Amazon’s surveillance camera company coaches local police departments on ways to obtain a customer’s video images, even if that person does not wish to provide such information, Vice reported Monday, citing documents and internal memos. —Chris White

Despite the clear shift toward mobile browsing, much of the web has been designed for desktop machines on a wired connection. —Byungjin Jun

A new variant of the Spectre (Variant 1) side-channel vulnerability has been discovered that affects all modern Intel CPUs, and probably some AMD processors as well, which leverage speculative execution for high performance, Microsoft and Red Hat warned. —Mohit Kumar

A series of critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in Qualcomm chipsets that could allow hackers to compromise Android devices remotely just by sending malicious packets over-the-air with no user interaction. —Mohit Kumar

In a way, the evolution of the textbook has mirrored that in every other industry. Ownership has given way to rentals, and analog to digital. Within the broad strokes of that transition, though, lie divergent ideas about not just what learning should look like in the 21st century but how affordable to make it. —Brian Barrett

When a major data breach occurs, security and business leaders running companies large and small are quick to ask the same familiar question: “How can we prevent this from happening to us?” —Kelly Sheridan

When software engineers mostly use shared code, they save time but risk losing understanding —Brendan Dixon