Weekend Reads 111320

With so many organizations’ employees working remotely due to the pandemic, what security teams can do to help secure their home routers/firewalls is getting renewed attention.

PUE, thanks to its simplicity and universal applicability, has become the critical benchmark for scoring data centers for efficiency and “greenness” (environmental responsibility). But it is often used uncritically.

Google’s Project Zero says that hackers have been actively exploiting a Windows zero-day that isn’t likely to be patched until almost two weeks from now.

Every few years; some self-proclaimed academic imparts an article on the future of work, with conflicting information from various experts leaving many uncertain about its impact on jobs, skills, and wages.

The video downloading utility youtube-dl, like other large open source projects, accepts contributions from all around the globe. It is used practically wherever there’s an Internet connection.

Called NAT Slipstreaming, the method involves sending the target a link to a malicious site (or a legitimate site loaded with malicious ads) that, when visited, ultimately triggers the gateway to open any TCP/UDP port on the victim, thereby circumventing browser-based port restrictions.

Using this technique means that the manager is not a “boss” but a partner, someone who provides guidelines, but then provides associates freedom within those guidelines.

Will your data be stored in DNA and holograms? Microsoft is working on new storage technologies to house massive amounts of data. Some of them feel like science fiction, but could disrupt how we store and manage data. The biggest advantage: The potential to shrink Walmart-sized data centers.

The House Antitrust Subcommittee released a report accusing Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook of monopolistic behavior. The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Google alleging the company prevents consumers from sampling other search engines.

Windows 10 has a lot of overlapping version numbers and names. For example, the October 2020 Update is also called 20H2, version 2009, and build 19042.

Cybersecurity researchers over the weekend disclosed new security risks associated with link previews in popular messaging apps that cause the services to leak IP addresses, expose links sent via end-to-end encrypted chats, and even unnecessarily download gigabytes of data stealthily in the background.

Each associate has to be taken separately because of their individual differences, including perspectives, styles, cultures, values, educational backgrounds, and general cognitive differences—all of which mean that two people can have the same data and come to different conclusions.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity at various network operator meetings to talk about Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing security.

When Uptime Institute recently asked over 300 data center managers how the pandemic would change their operations, one answer stood out: Two-thirds expect to increase the resiliency of their core data center(s) in the years ahead. Many said they expected their costs to increase as a result.

One bad privacy idea that won’t die is the so-called “data dividend,” which imagines a world where companies have to pay you in order to use your data.