Weekend Reads 122118

A recent phishing campaign targeting US government officials, activists, and journalists is notable for using a technique that allowed the attackers to bypass two-factor authentication protections offered by services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, researchers said Thursday. The event underscores the risks of 2fa that relies on one-tap logins or one-time passwords, particularly if the latter are sent in SMS messages to phones. —Dan Goodin @arstechnica.com

After a year rife with security scandals, high-profile hacks, and data breaches, Congress is starting to take steps toward protecting the privacy of people who use the internet or smartphone apps — in other words, nearly every single American. —Kari Paul @marketwatch.com

According to the APWG’s new Phishing Activity Trends Report released today, phishers are using new techniques to carry out their attacks and hide their origins in order to make the most of every phishing campaign. @circleid.com

With Microsoft’s decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That’s a worrying turn of events, given the company’s past behavior. —Peter Bright @arstechnica.com

The greeting starts out routine. You bump into a friend at the grocery store and they ask how you are. You find yourself thinking you aren’t that busy, at least, not enough to describe how you are. Things have settled down and work and family are status quo. Do you hesitate to say it… that you, in fact, aren’t busy? Are you embarrassed that it will sound as if you are dull, unimportant, or unmotivated? —Rosalinda Rosales @intellectualtakeout.org

It recently came to my attention that I was waging a war across multiple fronts and fatigue had struck — they were winning. For months I had battled, fighting their persistence with my propensity to click x. —Jye SR @freecodecamp.org

A belief in the cooking world says you shouldn’t have any tools in your drawers or any appliances on your countertops that serve a single purpose. Anything without multiple functions is a waste of space. It’s a belief that should extend to the IT world if we want some of these more leading-edge technologies to get a foothold and begin to take off, and I think that’s what you’ll see starting in 2019. —Bruce Milne @datacenterjournal.com

About a month ago, I came across an article that talked about IPv6 being a failure and should be abandoned due to it taking 25 years to reach 25% deployment. What struck me the most was the reference to it having been 25 years. —Jen Linkova @apnic.net