Weekend Reads 091820

As it turns out, the Power10 actually has 51-bit physical addressing and a cluster of its processors can indeed see an address space that is 2 PB in size – if enough nodes with enough DDR memory slots are lashed together in the right way. As far as we know, no other CPU out there can do that.

ViacomCBS has struck a deal to sell its CNET unit to Red Ventures for $500 million. The transaction, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020, is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

NTP (Network Time Protocol) messages are sometimes rate-limited or blocked entirely by Internet operators. This little-known “NTP filtering” was put into place several years ago in response to DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. NTP filtering may drop NTP messages based on rate or message size.

In Europe and beyond we struggle with effective policing of online communications. As generations before, we want to be both: free and safe when we interact with others, go shopping or get our news. While this balance is difficult, it is possible to achieve: the rapid development of online communications, often proclaimed the wild west of modern society, is clear evidence that an increasing number of users feel safe enough to move new aspects of their daily lives online.

Imagine a network operator wants to hire a new upstream provider, but they want a bit more information. They can go to NetOX and get background information about a particular Autonomous System (AS).

The DNS, though, is also dependent on the global routing system for sending DNS queries from resolvers to servers and then returning the responses. The integrity of the routing system is extremely important for ensuring DNS transactions are delivered efficiently to the correct destination, yet few DNS registries are implementing Routing Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) at present.

IT and healthcare providers were targeted in late 2019 by a new ransomware campaign calling itself Zeppelin, a variant of the Buran ransomware-as-a-service family. According to researcher Vitali Kremez, Zeppelin binaries are generated via a GUI wizard by affiliates who then distribute the malware in exchange for revenue sharing.

The first significant difference between the two types of firewalls lies in how they evaluate traffic. Most traditional firewalls are “stateful” firewalls while next-gen devices tend to do some form of deeper packet inspection. So what does that really mean?

So far, there has not been a perfect solution to ridding the world of software and hardware weaknesses. Keeping up-to-date with which weaknesses have are most common and impactful can be a daunting task. Thankfully, a list has been made to do just that the Common Weakness Enumeration Top 25 (CWE).

A system that allows companies to submit breach data anonymously and then benefit from the aggregate statistics for their industries could give executives and policymakers a more accurate understanding of how breaches impact businesses and give companies the timely threat intelligence they need to prepare for attacks.

Data privacy legislation and regulation implemented in the US in the mid-2000s drove demand for cyber insurance in the North American market, as businesses looked to protect their digital assets. We expected much the same trends to translate to Europe with the introduction of GDPR, with the enforcement of the legislation and prohibitive potential fines leading to an increase in cyber insurance uptake.

A recent extension that aims to add support for transport options to the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is already showing promise. Unfortunately, its deployment may be undermined by the way existing network devices process UDP length and checksum. In this post we at the Electronics Research Group, University of Aberdeen, show how using an ad-hoc option can help to overcome these limitations.

KPIs are industry-specific and should be aligned carefully with your AI strategy. My course at UC Berkeley drills down heavily on how to define success when implementing your AI strategy, and measurement, like anything else, is the top priority.

The idea of using light instead of electricity in computing has been around for decades. Boston-based startup Lightmatter Inc. believes the technology’s time has finally come.