Articles

APNIC: Chromium Root Server DNS Traffic

Half of the traffic against the DNS root servers originates from Chromium-based browsers randomly generating fake domain names to detect DNS interception.

https://blog.apnic.net/2020/08/21/chromiums-impact-on-root-dns-traffic/

Russell Kirsch Passed Away Last Week

Russel Kirsch, the inventor of the pixel, died at 91.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell\_Kirsch

New Toyotas Will Upload Data to AWS

Your car’s data uploaded to AWS to get cheaper car insurance. What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/18/aws\_toyota\_alliance/

PDF: Coherent (OS) 4.2 Manual

https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/COHERENT-4.2.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent\_(operating\_system)

World’s Fastest Internet Speed: 178 Terabits a Second

A research team at UCL led by Dr. Lidia Galdino was able to use a bandwidth of 16.8THz to achieve the record.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/aug/ucl-engineers-set-new-world-record-internet-speed

The Golden Age of Computer User Groups

This article gives an excellent overview of how people interested in technology got together before the Internet.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/the-golden-age-of-computer-user-groups/

Recursive Queries in PostgreSQL

Laurenz Albe describes how recursive queries work in PostgreSQL and why they can be much more efficient than equivalent procedural code.

https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/recursive-queries-postgresql/

Videos

Introduction to OpenBSD

Video with an interactive introduction to OpenBSD.

https://blog.lambda.cx/posts/openbsd-introduction-talk/

Outages, Incidents, and CVE

Spotify Forgot to Renew Certificate

It happened to all of us at one point in time…

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/spotify-hit-with-outage-after-forgetting-to-renew-a-certifficate/

Cisco Default Credentials Vulnerability… Again

CVE-20203446: Another static password vulnerability, CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10, by Cisco, this time in their Virtual Wide Area Application Services (vWAAS).

https://threatpost.com/cisco-critical-flaw-patched-in-wan-software-solution/158485/

G Suite Outage

Many of the G* services were down on Thursday this week for hours. The cause still seems to be not publicly known, at least I could not find anything on the net.

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1597881600000

Projects

Umami

Umami is a lightweight web analytics solution with a clean and simple UI. I haven’t had time to test it but could be an alternative to Matomo.

https://umami.is/docs/about

Releases

VMware Desktop Products with local K8s support

With support for local K8s in the upcoming versions of VMware Fusion for macOS and VMware Workstation for Linux and Windows, VMware continues its container strategy.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/21/vmware\_updates\_fusion\_and\_workstation/

Mikrotik RouterOS 7.1beta2

Mikrotik’s latest RouterOS development version comes with WireGuard support.

https://mikrotik.com/download/changelogs/development-release-tree

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU24

The Solaris 11.4 Support Repository Update 24 release includes features and security updates for many of its components.

https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru24

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