Three TED talks on Technology that will blow your mind

We’re living in an era that reveals new innovations on the daily. From automation to complex and brilliant security systems, the future of technology is being shaped by minds like these three whose ideas elevate our minds and spark our imagination.

Watch our top TED Talks on technology

These three speakers have tested the boundaries of how we can integrate the physical world and the digital one. Here are three must-watch TED talks on technology that have mesmerized us and left us wondering what the future holds.

Will automation take away all our jobs? | David Autor

As a company focusing heavily on automation and simplicity as a time-saving solution, we found David Autor’s paradox intriguing. He says that in the last century, despite having created machines that to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years.

So why hasn’t human work become redundant yet and how are our skills still not obsolete? In this talk about the future of work, economist David Autor addresses the question of why there are still so many jobs and comes up with a surprising answer. Do you agree with his theory?

Hackers: the internet’s immune system | Keren Elazari

Keren Elazari is a cybersecurity expert who claims that we actually need hackers in today’s day and age. Her shocking exclamation comes from her belief that hackers force us to evolve and improve. “They just might be the immune system for the information age”, she says.

Some hackers are fighting corruption and defending our rights. They also expose the loop holes and vulnerabilities in our systems and make us fix them.

But not all hackers use their superpowers for good. Would you take any chances with security loopholes? Let us know what you think about this video and learn more about Plesk security here.

 

Are you safe? Take the Plesk Security Quiz.

The mind behind Linux | Linus Torvalds

This is the guy who has transformed technology, not once, but twice. Linus Torvalds first gave us Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and then Git, the source code management system that developers use all over the world. This is more than a talk, but an interview where Torvalds discusses his personality traits which shaped his work philosophy and engineering. Plus, some useful open source tips for the developers watching.

“I am not a visionary, I’m an engineer,” Torvalds says. “I’m perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds … but I’m looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that’s right in front of me before I fall in.” Are you like Linus and do you agree with his philosophies?

Empowering you with TED talks on technology

As we got a glimpse of what these three researchers presented on stage, the common theme in all of the talks was making a better digital world together. Technology can empower people by educating them and giving them a voice, future designs succeed in bridging the two worlds together. A concept we at Plesk are on definitely board with.

Critical Kernel flaw discovered – Update your server

KernelCare as the fix for critical kernel flaw

Linux Kernel flaw that has existed for over 10 years in the code has been discovered by Andrey Konovalov, a security researcher at Google. The DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) implementation causes this flaw that can lead to kernel code execution from unprivileged processes. DCCP is a message-oriented transport layer protocol and enables the access to congestion-control mechanisms.

The good news first, the vulnerability is not executable remotely but requires a local account. The bad news is that a user can use the flaw to crash the system or escalate his privileges to get administrative access.

Andrey posted a detailed description about the bug:

In the current DCCP implementation an skb for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST packet is forcibly freed via __kfree_skb in dccp_rcv_state_process if dccp_v6_conn_request successfully returns [3].

However, if IPV6_RECVPKTINFO is set on a socket, the address of the skb is saved to ireq->pktopts and the ref count for skb is incremented in dccp_v6_conn_request [4], so skb is still in use. Nevertheless, it still gets freed in dccp_rcv_state_process.

The fix is to call consume_skb, which accounts for skb->users, instead of doing goto discard and therefore calling __kfree_skb.

To exploit this double-free, it can be turned into a use-after-free:

// The first free:
kfree(dccp_skb)
// Another object allocated on the same place as dccp_skb:
some_object = kmalloc()
// The second free, effectively frees some_object
kfree(dccp_skb)

As this point, we have a use-after-free on some_object. An attacker can control what object that would be and overwrite its content with arbitrary data by using some of the kernel heap spraying techniques. If the overwritten object has any triggerable function pointers, an attacker gets to execute arbitrary code within the kernel.

Andrey already committed a patch for the DCCP flaw to the main Kernel code and all major Linux distributions already provide updates to fix this issue.

Use KernelCare for automatic, rebootless updates

KernelCare by CloudLinux will update your servers automatically without having to reboot the system. It ensures that your kernel is always up to date with all security updates and helps to lower operating costs for server management.

KernelCare Plesk Extension - Fixes flaws automatically

Keep your servers updated with the KernelCare Plesk extension that deploys kernel security patches, installed as soon as they are released to maintain the safest Linux environment!

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