Streaming Video Is 70 Percent of Broadband Use

Again, it’s not surprising to learn that broadband is moving from “the thing that brings you websites and email” to “the thing that brings you video.” But change over time drives it home: Sandvine says that five years ago, video/audio represented 35 percent of prime-time usage. Now it has doubled, to 70 percent.

Source: Streaming Video Is 70 Percent of Broadband Use – Sandvine | Re/code

Q-carbon: A new phase of carbon so hard it forms diamonds when melted

Diamond, being the world’s hardest substance, has a range of uses in creating cutting and polishing tools across industries from mining to medicine. The challenge is that diamond is expensive to mine and to manufacture, requiring high temperatures and high pressures. But by mixing up the substrates and controlling the rate of cooling, Narayan and his team have discovered they can create tiny diamonds within the Q-carbon.

Source: Q-carbon: A new phase of carbon so hard it forms diamonds when melted

Quest to drill into Earth’s mantle restarts

Normally, the crust–mantle boundary is thought to be marked by a feature known as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or ‘Moho’, at which seismic waves change velocity. But at Atlantis Bank, the mantle is thought to bubble up as far as 2.5 kilometres above the Moho, making it easier to reach.

Reaching these deep-Earth frontiers “is one of the great scientific endeavours of the century”, says Henry Dick, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and co-leader of the expedition.

Source: Quest to drill into Earth’s mantle restarts : Nature News & Comment

Lenovo patches serious vulnerabilities in PC system update tool

One of the vulnerabilities is located in the tool’s help system and allows users with limited Windows accounts to start an instance of Internet Explorer with administrator privileges by clicking on URLs in help pages. That’s because Lenovo System Update itself runs under a temporary administrator account that the application creates when installed, so any process it spawns will run under the same account.

Source: Lenovo patches serious vulnerabilities in PC system update tool

Two More Self-Signed Certs, Private Keys Found on Dell Machines

Dell Foundation Services installs the cert and its purpose is to quicken online support engagements with Dell staff. The certificate, Dell said, allows online support to identify the PC model, drivers, OS, hard drive and more.”

Source: Two More Self-Signed Certs, Private Keys Found on Dell Machines | Threatpost | The first stop for security news

So far, eDellroot has been found on Dell XPS 15 laptops, M4800 workstations, and Inspiron desktops and laptops.

“It means attackers are de facto certificate authorities, free to generate man-in-the-middle certs, or just direct phishing sites that won’t get flagged as illegitimate,”

The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away

“When you go to a webpage, and you make a request, that parses part of the data in the request back to a server,” Hunt said. “For example, you read a news article, and the news article, in the address bar it has, “id=1”, and that gives you news article number 1, and then you get another one with ID 2.”

But, “with a SQLi attack, an attacker changes that ID in the address bar to something that forces the database to do something it’s not meant to do,” Hunt said, such as returning a piece of private data.

Source: The History of SQL Injection, the Hack That Will Never Go Away | Motherboard

Another commonly used piece of software is sqlmap. “It crawls the pages on the website, similar to how a search engine crawler might, looks for input forms on the website, and submits the forms with inputs that might cause a MySQL syntax error,” Al-Bassam added.

Exploring the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-Winning Medicare Investigation with SQL

This is a SQL-based introduction to the data and analysis behind the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-winning “Medicare Unmasked” investigative project. It also doubles as a helpful guide if you’re attempting the midterm based on the WSJ Medicare’s investigation.

Source: Exploring the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-Winning Medicare Investigation with SQL | Public Affairs Data Journalism at Stanford University

To follow along in this walkthrough, you can download my SQLite database here:

Encrypted Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over Possible Role in Paris Attacks

Security experts counter that such arguments ignore the fact that even end-to-end encrypted technology leaves a trail of metadata behind that can be used to parse who is talking to whom, when and where. “Encryption is really good at making it difficult to hide the content of communications, but not good at hiding the presence of communications,” said Matt Blaze, a computer security expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Source: Encrypted Messaging Apps Face New Scrutiny Over Possible Role in Paris Attacks

AMD lawsuit over false Bulldozer chip marketing is bogus

AMD is facing a lawsuit over claims that it misrepresented the core counts of its eight-core Bulldozer products, but the lawsuit’s technical merit seems extremely weak.

Source: AMD lawsuit over false Bulldozer chip marketing is bogus | ExtremeTech

This lawsuit essentially asks a court to define what a core is and how companies should count them. As annoying as it is to see vendors occasionally abuse core counts in the name of dubious marketing strategies, asking a courtroom to make declarations about relative performance between companies is a cure far worse than the disease. From big iron enterprise markets to mobile devices, companies deploy vastly different architectures to solve different types of problems.