When the Entire Internet Seems to Break at Once
For more than two hours on Friday morning, much of the web
seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in
the United States.
More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and
other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site
downdetector.com. They included The
New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify,
PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others.
How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?
Someone attacked the architecture that held them
together—the domain-name system, or DNS, the technical network that redirects
users from easy-to-remember addresses like theatlantic.com to a company’s actual
web servers. The assault took the form
of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on one of the major companies
that provides other companies access to DNS. A DDoS attack is one in which an attacker
floods sites “with so much junk traffic that it can no longer serve legitimate
visitors,” as the security researcher Brian Krebs put it in a blog post Friday
morning.
(Related)
How Much Will Today’s Internet Outage Cost?
… For more than
one-third of companies, a single hour of a DDoS attack can cost up to $20,000,
according to a 2014 report by the
security firm Imperva Incapsula. (For
some companies, the cost of an attack can exceed $100,000 per hour.) Given that the majority of attacks continue
for more than six hours, these losses add up quickly. In a particularly stark example, the airline
Virgin Blue lost $20 million in
period of IT outages that spanned 11 days in 2010.
Other estimates have been even more dramatic. One 2012 study, by the Ponemon Institute, a
security and data protection researcher, found the average
company’s cost for every minute of downtime during a DDoS attack was
$22,000. (“However, the cost can range
from as little as $1 to more than $100,000 per minute of downtime,” the report
said.)
Another one bites the dust.
Lisa Vaas reports:
We already know that if you
threaten to shoot up a school on the ostensibly anonymous social media
messaging platform Yik Yak, the law will come knocking, and that gossamer veil
of not-really privacy will be shredded.
[…]
Now, researchers have found that
Yik Yak anonymity can be erased even without a warrant or Yik Yak’s compliance
with US laws that force it to turn over user information. The researchers did it by relying on publicly
available location data from the app, mixed with location-spoofing and
message-recording on a device outfitted with simple machine learning.
Read more on Naked
Security.
For my Architecture and Governance students. Would you have a way to prevent this?
Sulina Gabale and Jason Gordon of Reed Smith write:
This month, the Indianapolis
Colts, app developer Yinzcam, Inc., and ultrasonic technology provider Lisnr,
Inc., were hit with a federal class action lawsuit in Pennsylvania for
violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by allegedly allowing the Colts fan app to listen in on users’
personal phone conversations, and use that information for
advertising purposes without obtaining adequate consent.
The app provides Colts fans with
team stats, scores, and other relevant news. The app also uses Lisnr, a service that
utilizes web beacons, ultrasonic frequencies and audio signals in order to
allegedly track how users interact with advertisements. The complaint alleges that Lisnr’s software
determines a user’s precise location by activating the user’s built-in
microphone, and listening for nearby Lisnr audio beacons in order to allow the
Colts app to target specific consumers and send them tailored content,
promotions and advertisements based on their location.
Read more on Technology
Law Dispatch.
A cost/benefit analysis.
Gigabites: An Unexpected Gig Gift
… Who needs a
gigabit anyway? Well it turns out that
even if you're not planning to buy up every virtual reality application coming
to market, there's still a very good reason to hope gigabit broadband makes it
to your neighborhood. A new study by the Fiber-to-the-Home
(FTTH) Council finds that when a city gets gigabit service, the cost for
other broadband speed tiers goes down.
In the top 100 US markets, the FTTH Council reports that
the price for broadband speed tiers of 100 Mbit/s or more drops by about 25%
when there's also a gigabit service on offer. That percentage equates to about $27 per
month, and it goes even higher when more than one gigabit service is available.
According to the Council, when there are
two gigabit providers in a region, the average price of secondary speed tiers
drops in the range of 34% to 37%, or $57 to $62 per month.
Something to amuse my student geeks.
2017 will be the year of interactive email
… Virtually no one
knows interactive emails are even technically possible
Since emails have no JavaScript, the programming language
behind most web interactions, we tend to think of emails as a “read-only,”
one-way channel; good for sharing calls to action that get people back to your
website.
If you think this, you are completely wrong.
CSS3 does allow for basic interactions, like switching
tabs, without any JavaScript at all. Mark
Robbins of RebelMail describes a technique called “Punch Card Coding” that uses CSS alone to allow users to
click buttons that change what they see on screen, essentially by having every
permutation as a different “tab.”
The following GIF shows interaction within a shopping cart
inside the email client.
[…]
The “buy now” button takes the user directly to online
payment. This is a really big deal. There’s no need to download and
install a separate app. No need to
sign-in to an account. All you need to
distribute this simple application is an email address.
Is it just me or are we seeing a lot of mergers nearing
the $100 billion dollar mark?
That Was Quick: AT&T to Buy Time Warner for $85B
Late Friday, AT&T and Time Warner were reported to
have entered an agreement in principle for the former to take over the latter
for $85 billion.
Thomson Reuters cited unnamed sources who said AT&T
Inc. (NYSE: T) is set to pay $110 a share. With some legal jots and tittles left to take
care of, the deal could be finalized as early as Sunday.
Interesting how they can cling to (huge) profitability.
The real reason Big Tobacco is getting even bigger
British American Tobacco said on Friday that it has
offered to buy U.S. tobacco giant Reynolds American in a $47 billion deal that
would create the world’s largest publicly traded tobacco company.
… The new company
would enjoy a “leading position in the US tobacco market” and “significant
presence in high growth emerging markets across South America, Africa, the
Middle East and Asia,” the company wrote.
… Vivian Azer, an
analyst with the Cowen Group, said that tobacco companies are currently in a
strong position. In the US, “tobacco
profits have accelerated for three consecutive years,” she said. She attributes that primarily to the ability
of tobacco companies to raise prices in order to compensate for a diminishing
number of customers.
The deal also would help the combined company capitalize
on a growing customer base. British
American Tobacco said that the merger would also create “a world class pipeline
of vapour and tobacco heating products,” such as e-cigarettes.
Ah, it must be Saturday!
Hack Education Weekly News
… Via
The Chronicle of Higher Education: “A Closer Look at Income-Based
Repayment, the Centerpiece of Donald Trump’s Unexpected Higher-Ed
Speech.”
… Via
The New York Times: “The New Jersey State Senate on
Thursday unanimously approved a bill requiring the state’s student loan agency
to forgive the debts of
borrowers who die or become permanently disabled.”
… Anne Trubek
writes in the JSTOR Daily about “Student Writing in the Digital Age,”
drawing on a study by Andrea and Karen Lunsford. Among the findings: “Students in first-year
composition classes are, on average, writing longer essays
(from an average of 162 words in 1917, to 422 words in 1986, to 1,038 words in
2006), using more complex rhetorical techniques, and making no more errors than
those committed by freshman in 1917.”
… Via
Edsurge: “The Top Skills Employers Need in 2016, According to LinkedIn.”
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