Weekend Reads 09271900

While cloud services boast many welcome benefits – cost savings, fewer personnel, productivity gains – infosec professionals are bumping into some regular configuration challenges as they move more of their organizations’ security functions to the cloud, experts say. —Terry Sweeney

When AT&T proposed to merge with Time Warner in 2016, attorneys at the Justice Department argued against the merger and said that the combined company would have too much power since it would be both a content provider and a content purchaser. —Doug Dawson

The centerpiece of Microsoft’s upcoming October 2 press event will be the potential launch of the mysterious dual-screen project Centaurus. But the device isn’t what I’m most curious to see — it’s Windows Core OS, the rumored software interface it runs on. —Luke Larsen

There’s a well-documented crisis facing the domain name system: very few who rely on domain name registration data from the Whois database to perform vital functions can do so any longer, which is escalating consumer harm and abuse on the internet worldwide. —Fabricio Vayra

One of the ongoing recommendations to improve deliverability is to send email that is timely and relevant to the recipient. The idea being that if you send mail a recipient wants, they’re more likely to interact with it in a way that signals to the mailbox provider that the message is wanted. The baseline for that, at least whenever I’ve talked about timely and relevant, is that the recipient asked for mail from you in the first place. —Laura Atkins

In what may be a huge milestone in computing, Google says it has achieved “quantum supremacy,” an experimental demonstration of the superiority of a quantum computer over a traditional one. —Robert Hackett

To achieve semantic security, an attacker must have only a negligible advantage in guessing any plaintext value, but the cryptographic algorithms in TLS only meet the lesser goal of indistinguishability of the plaintext from messages of the same size. —Blake Anderson

At the beginning of what became a prolonged process for privatization, the U.S. Government established a framework of fundamental guiding principles for governance of the Internet’s root. These principles were designed to work to preserve a free and open nature for a global network that was to be elastic, extensible, and — at more than two decades — enduring. —Greg Thomas