• Microsoft dumps notorious Chinese secure certificate vendor | ZDNet - I'm just learning about TLS certificates at this stage for internal 2-way authentication purposes at work.  It's neat to see how much work goes into maintaining trust for Certificate Authority services.
• The Guy Who Invented Those Annoying Password Rules Now Regrets Wasting Your Time - the publisher of NIST Special Publication 800-63. Appendix A comes out against our usual password practices as ineffective.  I'm sure it'll take the rest of the world a while to stop following that bad advice.
  • Hope for the future: "...the latest set of NIST guidelines recommends that people create long passphrases rather than gobbledygook words like the ones Bill thought were secure."

And for those following the controversy at Google on Engineer Damore bringing into question diversity initiatives at Google:

• Gizmodo's repost of Damore's text: "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" - personally, I think the author sounds measured even if you disagree with some of his views on gender and his inexcusably bad writing.
• Google fires employee who wrote anti-diversity memo - The Verge - ‘perpetuating gender stereotypes’
  • "The mounting backlash prompted Google CEO Sundar Pichai to send a company-wide email titled, “Our words matter.” The email, the existence of which was reported earlier today by Recode, definitively stated that Damore had violated the company’s code of conduct, crossing “the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” Pichai wrote. “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”"
• Google engineer fired over anti-diversity memo files labor complaint - The Verge