Just a friendly reminder that I keep the ‘net Neutrality page up to date with a selection of articles I find from all sorts of different viewpoints. I am trying to avoid the “this is what you can do,” and “the fight is not over” sorts of articles, and focus on arguments making points in either one direction or the other, or some perspective I have not seen before.

I just added three more articles today.

Collaboration and information silos are a reality in most organizations today. People tend to regard them as huge barriers to innovation and organizational efficiency. They’re also a favorite target for solutions from software tool vendors of all types. Tools by themselves, however, are seldom (if ever), the answer to a problem like organizational silos. The reason for this is simple: Silos are made of people, and human dynamics are key drivers for the existence of silos in the first place. —Guy Martin @ opensource.com

While many have already seen something on these two, this is the best set of articles I’ve found on these vulnerabilities and the ramifications.

Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents. —meltdownattack.com

Windows, Linux, and macOS have all received security patches that significantly alter how the operating systems handle virtual memory in order to protect against a hitherto undisclosed flaw. This is more than a little notable; it’s been clear that Microsoft and the Linux kernel developers have been informed of some non-public security issue and have been rushing to fix it. But nobody knew quite what the problem was, leading to lots of speculation and experimentation based on pre-releases of the patches. —ARS Technica

You don’t have to worry if you patch. If you download the Continue reading

Another installment in the History of Networking over at the Network Collective. This time we continue the conversation with Alistair Woodman on the history of Voice over IP.

The fragility of “smart homes” was brought to the forefront this week as a letter made the rounds allegedly sent by an ISP to its customers noting that those accused of repeated online copyright infringement activity could have their internet access suspended. Such a letter is hardly remarkable in today’s copyright aware environment, but what made this one stand out is the ISP’s notice that suspension of a user’s internet connection “may affect other services which you may have connected to your internet service, such as the ability to control your thermostat remotely or video monitoring services.” Does this really mean our ISP has the ability to cut off our heat in the middle of the winter? —Kalev Leetaru @ Forbes

The proliferation of mobile devices and the interconnectivity between them has created new application opportunities. These new applications are no longer limited to a single system space but are spread across many system spaces. This shift of application from single system-spaced, host-based systems to multisystem-spaced solutions is being hampered by software toolsets that are stuck in the older sequential computational models. —Antony Alappatt @The Association of Computing Machinery

Network Engineering and coding, like many other things in the information technology world, share overlapping concepts—even if we don’t often recognize the overlap because we are too busy making up new names to describe the same thing. For this week’s video, I turn my attention to the Application Programming Interface, or the API.

In the United States the debate between advocates of market-based resolution of competitive tensions and regulatory intervention has seldom reached the fever pitch that we’ve seen over the vexed on-again off-again question of Net Neutrality in recent weeks. It seems as it the process of determination of communications policy has become a spectator sport, replete with commentators who laud our champions and demonize our opponents. On the other hand, the way in which we communicate, the manner, richness and reach of our communications shapes our economy and our society, so its perhaps entirely proper that considerations of decisions relating to its form of governance are matters that entail public debate. —Geoff Huston @ potaroo