The silencing of KrebsOnSecurity opens a troubling chapter
for the Internet
For the better part of a day, KrebsOnSecurity, arguably the world's
most intrepid source of security news, has been silenced, presumably by a
handful of individuals who didn't like a recent series of exposés reporter Brian Krebs wrote. The incident, and the record-breaking data
assault that brought it on, open a troubling new chapter in the short history
of the Internet.
The crippling distributed denial-of-service attacks
started shortly after Krebs published stories stemming from the hack of a
DDoS-for-hire service known as vDOS.
… On Thursday
morning, exactly two weeks after Krebs published his first post, he reported
that a sustained attack was bombarding his site with as much as 620 gigabits
per second of junk data. That staggering
amount of data is among the
biggest ever recorded. Krebs was able to stay online thanks to the
generosity of Akamai, a network provider that supplied DDoS mitigation services
to him for free. The attack
showed no signs of waning as the day wore on. Some indications suggest it may have grown
stronger. At 4 pm, Akamai gave Krebs two
hours' notice that it would no longer assume the considerable cost of defending
KrebsOnSecurity. Krebs opted to shut
down the site to prevent collateral damage hitting his service provider and its
customers.
For my Governance students.
Here’s How Microsoft Plans to Work Around Data Snooping
Data snooping by the US government has always been a major
concern for most tech conglomerates but Microsoft Corporation may have found
a way to turn things around to its favor. The Redmond tech giant just opened its two
newest data centers – located in Magdeburg and Frankfurt – to make it harder
for the authorities demand access to customer data.
… Microsoft’s
choosing of Germany as the site for its newest data centers was no accident. The country is notorious for its strict data
privacy and sovereignty laws. As
stipulated in the German law, no other country can demand access to customer
data; it will stay in the country. This
could be the reason why more and more cloud computing services are opening shop
in Germany, which is also one of the EU’s largest economy.
… Of course, such
move is hardly new.
Amazon.com, Inc.‘s Web Services were the first to take
advantage of Germany’s strict consumer access laws when the company unveiled
its data centers two years ago in Frankfurt. All the largest cloud computing service
providers are now building data centers in various parts of the world,
including Google-parent Alphabet Inc.
For my IT Architecture students. A new term: “DRaaS.”
Disaster Recovery: Confidence High, Experience Low
With everything moving to
the cloud, it is little surprise that Disaster Recovery (DR) is now also
offered as cloud-based DRaaS. The
majority of organizations still employ on-premise DR, but cloud usage is
growing. A new survey investigates how
and why UK businesses are employing DR; how they rate their existing DR
readiness, and whether they are considering a move to cloud.
An Opinion Matters survey,
which questioned 250 IT decision makers, was commissioned by iland. iland is a US-based cloud infrastructure
provider with eight data centers in the US, UK and Singapore. In Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for DRaaS it
was placed squarely among the leaders.
The majority of outages are still caused by system failure
(reported by 53% of respondents) closely followed by human error (52%). Cyber attacks are relatively low in comparison
at 32%, while environmental issues (flood, storm, fire and power outages) are even
lower at 20%.
What is immediately apparent from the survey is that DR is
a necessity rather than a luxury -- 95% of
respondents admitted to an outage over the last 12 months.
May be important in this year’s Presidential race.
Paul Alan Levy writes:
In Doe v. Coleman, a decision issued yesterday, the Kentucky
Supreme Court overruled a decision of the state court of appeals which,
considering the validity of a subpoena to identify defendants who had been sued
for defamation based on comments about a local official, had held that the
plaintiff officials’ conclusory affidavits attesting to the falsity of the
anonymous comments were sufficient to meet the standards for enforcing such
subpoenas set by Doe v. Cahill, the
Delaware Supreme Court decision that the Court of Appeals had endorsed in a 2014 decision in the same case. Instead, the Supreme Court held that Kentucky
courts are to follow the full standard adopted by the New Jersey Superior Court
Appellate Division in Dendrite
International v. Doe, which includes a balancing stage that weighs the relative
interests of the plaintiff in securing redress and of the defendant in
retaining his or her First Amendment right of speaking anonymously, given such
considerations as the nature of the speech at issue and any special dangers to
the defendant from being identified.
Read more on Public
Citizen.
I love reporting serious science!
Best News We've Heard All Day: Study Shows Beer Is Good for
Business
Almost as cool as beer.
The new version of a stud finder.
Look Inside Your Walls and take the guesswork out of your
next DIY construction project
See up to 4 inches/10cm in concrete
and drywall
Multiple sensing modes of raw data
and pipe
Adjustable sensitivity for optimal
calibrations to your specific construction
Easy snapshot taking for offline
analysis
Requires Android
phones running 5.0 (Lollipop) and above with OTG
Are you a Maker, Engineer or Builder?
Check out programmable versions of Walabot!
For the next time I teach Math.
Every Saturday, like clockwork.
Hack Education Weekly News
… “After Gayle
Manchin took over the National Association of State Boards of Education
in 2012, she spearheaded an unprecedented effort that encouraged states to
require schools to purchase medical devices that fight life-threatening
allergic reactions,” writes
USA Today. The move helped to give Mylan,
maker of the Epipen, a near monopoly in schools. And what a coincidence: the CEO of Mylan was
Heather Bresch, Gayle Manchin’s daughter. And Manchin’s husband: Joe Manchin, the senior
Senator from West Virginia.
… Inside
Higher Ed has more details on the University of California Berkeley’s
announcement that they’ll remove free online content rather than comply with a
Justice Department demand to make it accessible to those with disabilities.
… Via
AL.com: “Two more Alabama schools were on lockdown today
after a social media posts and phoned-in threat warned ‘clowns’ might show up
at two Birmingham area schools.” Clowns.
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