For roughly an hour this morning—6 am to 7 am EDT, give or take a few minutes—enormous swathes of the Internet were down or interestingly broken. Sites taken down included CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, PayPal, and Spotify, among many more—including The Verge, which resorted to reporting via Google Docs during the duration of the outage.
The US Department of Defense puzzled Internet experts by apparently transferring control of tens of millions of dormant IP addresses to an obscure Florida company just before President Donald Trump left the White House, but the Pentagon has finally offered a partial explanation for why it happened. The Defense Department says it still owns the addresses but that it is using a third-party company in a "pilot" project to conduct security research.
There's been a lot of buzz about 5G over the last year—much of it, sadly, none too coherent. Today, we're going to take a detailed, realistic look at how we can expect 5G to improve cellular broadband, with a focus on the impact we might be able to expect on gaming. Surprise: the news is actually not bad!
When it comes to the possibility of home broadband competition, we want to believe. And in the case of 5G mobile broadband, wireless carriers want us to believe, too. But whether or not technological and commercial realities will reward that faith remains unclear. As with 5G smartphones, the basic challenge here sits at the intersection of the electromagnetic spectrum and telecom infrastructure economics.
Traffic destined for some of Europe's biggest mobile providers was misdirected in a roundabout path through the Chinese-government-controlled China Telecom on Thursday, in some cases for more than two hours, an Internet-monitoring service reported. It's the latest event to stoke concerns about the security of the Internet's global routing system, known as the Border Gateway Protocol.
Law enforcement from the US, the UK, and the Netherlands, have seized the domains of 15 DDoS-for-hire services, ZDNet has learned. The domain seizures come days before the Christmas holiday, a period of the year when hacker groups have historically targeted gaming providers with DDoS attacks.
Developers have released a tool that allows security researchers to map out and explore the cyberspace environment established by IPv6, the next-gen internet protocol.
The ipv666 tool suite, developed by researchers lavalamp and Marc Newlin, identifies live IPv6 addresses in both the global IPv6 address space and targeted IPv6 networks.
L33tdawg: Google Wifi has essentially the same functionality.
Monitor-IO is a $100 IoT gadget that tells you whether your Internet is working well, poorly, or not at all. The idea is you put this little black box next to (and plugged directly into) your router, and a quick glance at its color-coded screen will let you know if the Internet's working solidly, if it's having some problems, or if everything is just plain out. Monitor-IO even promises to tell users granular details like how long a connection has been up, or sketchy, or out.
In this three-part series, I'll explain how to set up a simple, useful NAS (network attached storage) system. I use this kind of setup to store my files on a central system, creating incremental backups automatically every night. To mount the disk on devices that are located in the same network, NFS is installed. To access files offline and share them with friends, I use Nextcloud.
Distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers use a targeted hose of junk traffic to overwhelm a service or take a server offline, have been a digital menace for decades. But in just the last 18 months, the public picture of DDoS defense has evolved rapidly. In fall 2016, a rash of then-unprecedented attacks caused internet outages and other service disruptions at a series of internet infrastructure and telecom companies around the world. Those attacks walloped their victims with floods of malicious data measured up to 1.2 Tbps.
