Tech News Roundup for December 16, 2020
Here are a few of the things I found interesting over the last couple days.
More Details Emerge on SolarWinds Orion breach
The New York Times has a big piece that offers more high level details of the massive security breach from SolarWinds. Here is a quote from that article.
“The company did not have a chief information security officer, and internal emails shared with The New York Times showed that employees’ passwords were leaking out on GitHub last year. Reuters earlier reported that a researcher informed the company last year that he had uncovered the password to SolarWinds’ update mechanism — the vehicle through which 18,000 of its customers were compromised. The password was “solarwinds123.””
That is…. Going to be trouble for SolarWinds. This massive breach may have been more a result of bad practices and/or incompetence from a very large company that serves the largest of companies in the world. There could be some regulatory and legal ramifications for SolarWinds, nevermind what it means in a practical sense in terms of the actual breach of data.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/us/politics/russia-hack-putin-trump-biden.html
Rogers Begins Rolling out Standalone 5G network
Rogers has turned on a standalone 5G network in 4 cities: Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. This is the next step in 5G rollout, as the networks that the carriers began to roll out this year essentially piggy-backed off of the 4G LTE networks, borrowing the wireless frequencies used by the older network. While that technically meant 5G was and is available, it is somewhat hamstrung by needing to share frequencies, and thus bandwidth, with 4G LTE. Over the long term, as 5G phones become more prevalent the carriers will take more of the 4G spectrum and convert it to 5G use, just like they did when moving from 3G to 4G.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/12/16/rogers-begins-rolling-out-5g-standalone-core-network-four-cities/
Twitter Will Start Removing Tweets Containing COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation
Starting next week Twitter will impose and enforce new rules around COVID-19 misinformation. The biggest change is that tweets that claim the vaccine will “intentionally cause harm” or mention widely disproved conspiracy theories will be removed.
Your move, Facebook and Google.