Some of the most widely used BitTorrent applications, including uTorrent, Mainline, and Vuze are also the most vulnerable to a newly discovered form of denial of service attack that makes it easy for a single person to bring down large sites.
There’s been a lot of debate over whether the United States should treat Internet service as a utility. But there’s no question that Internet service is already a utility in Sandy, Oregon, a city of about 10,000 residents, where the government has been offering broadband for more than a decade.
An undersea, fiber-optic cable that supplies Internet connectivity to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) was reportedly cut more than 48 hours ago, taking tens of thousands of people offline. Access is being gradually restored to the US territory, located north of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean.
There has been a lot of interest—and a lot of skepticism—generated by privacy-oriented Internet gadgets recently. Many of them have focused on using Tor to anonymize network traffic completely, using inexpensive pocket routers and open-source software. But some of these projects have failed to launch or (like Anonabox and Torfi) have been outright pulled by the crowdfunding sites they were offered on, for a number of reasons—including serious doubts about whether they actually were secure, or if they were even products.
The internet is everywhere. In another, more concrete way, it’s inside massive, anonymous buildings and beneath city streets, marked by special manhole covers and cryptic, colorful symbols.
The Netherlands government’s websites were taken offline for around 10 hours on Wednesday following a DDoS attack.
The motive for the sustained packet-flinging assault – directed against the Dutch government website's hosting provider, Prolocation – remains unclear.
Darren Anstee, director of solutions architects at Arbor Networks, commented: “Based on the information currently available, it looks as if a variety of attack vectors may have been used in these attacks, which in itself is not that unusual.”
It was an interesting week for ideas about the future of the Internet. On Wednesday, satellite industry notable Greg Wyler announced that his company OneWeb, which wants to build a micro-satellite network to bring Internet to all corners of the globe, secured investments from Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Qualcomm. Then in a separate announcement on Friday, Elon Musk said that he would also be devoting his new Seattle office to creating "advanced micro-satellites" to deliver Internet.
Netflix is one of the many websites that can only be accessed in certain parts of the world or has region specific versions. Of course, where there's a will there's a way, and there are numerous tools that can be used to bypass any restrictions that may have been put in place.
America's assistant commerce secretary Larry Strickling has told domain-name overlord ICANN that without improvements to its accountability the US government will not hand over the crucial IANA contract.
IANA is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a department of ICANN that oversees the DNS system keeping the internet glued together, the allocation of IP addresses, and other crucial behind-the-scenes bits of online life.
The moment you say ‘net neutrality’ ISPs across the country start crying foul. “The costs of new regulations would halt innovation. It would kill the Internet. We’d have to raise our rates. Everyone will suffer. ISIS will steal our babies. We’ll all get Ebola. The world as we know it will cease to exist.” Etc.
But why, exactly are large ISPs so afraid of net neutrality? Well the obvious answer is money. In our current system ISPs can charge content providers premium fees to carry their content to the ISP’s customers (who already pay the ISPs for access to content).
