Worth Reading 031320

In early 2017, I was mentally in a bad spot. It was the perfect storm of stress, the kind that no one asks for, but you deal with the hand you’re dealt. —Jason Hibbets

Tech investment firm Sequoia Capital told top Silicon Valley executives Thursday that the coronavirus could create opportunities for companies capable of weathering a potential economic downturn. —Chris White

The US-CERT today issued advisory warning users of a new dangerous 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability affecting the PPP daemon (pppd) software that comes installed on almost all Linux based operating systems, as well as powers the firmware of many other networking devices. —Mohit Kumar

In the last few weeks we witnessed a number of extremely interesting reflections on how the future of technology, the internet and marketplaces could play out, in a turbulent, hyperconnected and transformed society. —Simone Cicero

Kea is an open-source DHCP server developed by the authors of ISC DHCP (DHCPd) and the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It includes DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 servers; a dynamic DNS daemon; a REST API interface; MySQL, PostgreSQL and Cassandra databases; RADIUS and NETCONF interfaces; and related utilities. —Tomek Mrugalski

Our society is completely dependent on technology. And the supply chain to make a modern smartphone is unimaginably complex. —Kyle Wiens

There’s a growing sense that the major tech platforms aren’t up to the task of governing their users — something the companies themselves will occasionally admit. And while governments deliberate on new data privacy laws, most of the action is coming from government investigations and lawsuits. —Russell Brandom

US jobs in tech, arguably the dominant industry of our time, are increasingly concentrating in a handful of already prominent tech cities, according to the Brookings Institution’s new analysis of census data. This means that tech companies are sourcing employment from a more stratified portion of the country while vast swaths of America are missing out on the economic growth tied to the industry. — Rani Molla

The incident is a reminder that browser extensions — however useful or fun they may seem when you install them — typically have a great deal of power and can effectively read and/or write all data in your browsing sessions. And as we’ll see, it’s not uncommon for extension makers to sell or lease their user base to shady advertising firms, or in some cases abandon them to outright cybercriminals. —Krebs on Security

With SMB over QUIC – I don’t have a clever marketing name for this yet 🙂 – QUIC becomes the transport, optionally replacing TCP/IP and RDMA, as well as a tunnel securing all SMB payloads with encryption, even if SMB encryption is not enabled, all while multiplexing over port 443 to an enlightened share. —Ned Pyle