Miscellaneous Tech News
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@Pete-S said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@JaredBusch said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Interesting read from Cloudflare on yesterday's cluster from CenturyLink
Analysis of Today's CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage
Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and providers across the Internet. While we’re waiting for a post mortem from CenturyLink/Level(3), I wanted to write up the timeline of what we saw, how Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, why some of our customers were still impacted in spite of our mitigations, and what appears to be the likely root cause of the issue.
With the latest couple of outages I wonder about the availability, at least for some of Cloudflare's customers. It has to be way below 99.9% by now.
It's hitting them hard. But hitting other customers, too. It's hard to classify something as a CloudFlare outage when the outage is not at CloudFlare but "somewhere on the Internet" after it has left CloudFlare and before it gets to the customer.
Like.... McDonald's is closed when it's driveway is closed. But is it closed when the road in front of the driveway is closed? What about if the highway between your house and there is closed? Or what if your car won't start?
There's a clear demarcation that when it's on premises and there is an outage, it's their outage. And when your car won't start, it's a car outage. But in between, in road terms we consider all of it an infrastructure outage and it is not an outage to you or the vendor, but the public utility space that you share between yourselves.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
It's hitting them hard. But hitting other customers, too. It's hard to classify something as a CloudFlare outage when the outage is not at CloudFlare but "somewhere on the Internet" after it has left CloudFlare and before it gets to the customer.
If it's CF's job to route their traffic around the "outage" and they're not able to (for whatever reason), then as long as that is the case CF has an outage as well.
Only those that are single homed to CenturyLink's network should have been affected. Datacenters that are single homed are unusual though, because you have zero redundancy.
But whatever...
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@Pete-S said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
If it's CF's job to route their traffic around the "outage" and they're not able to (for whatever reason), then as long as that is the case CF has an outage as well.
That's not quite true. For example, in this case, they DID route around, but all other carriers were not working because of their connections to CenturyLink.
If the Internet is down, you can't route around. The Internet design doesn't allow for any company to just route around, everything depends on BGP level cooperation. If any player doesn't play nice, the only option is for ALL other carriers to drop them, completely. CF has no power over that.
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@Pete-S said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
Only those that are single homed to CenturyLink's network should have been affected. Datacenters that are single homed are unusual though, because you have zero redundancy.
That too, but they pointed out that all carriers were impacted. CL's outage hit everyone that shared BGP with them.
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TLS/SSL certs are dead after Sept 1st, 2020
A bit click baity I know, to summarize any cert that would be lived for 2 years or more will no longer be supported on Apple, Chrome or Firefox, come Sept 1st, 2020.
Time to get to renewing your certs on a yearly schedule (or use something like Let's Encrypt with certbot).
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@DustinB3403 said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
TLS/SSL certs are dead after Sept 1st, 2020
A bit click baity I know, to summarize any cert that would be lived for 2 years or more will no longer be supported on Apple, Chrome or Firefox, come Sept 1st, 2020.
Time to get to renewing your certs on a yearly schedule (or use something like Let's Encrypt with certbot).
More clearly, any 2 year cert issued on Sept 1, 2020 or later. Anything issued today (August 31, 2020) is is still valid to be a 2 year cert.
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Black Lives Matter: Ubisoft removes Tom Clancy image
Ubisoft has apologised for giving fictional terrorists the symbol of the raised fist, associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, in its new mobile game, Tom Clancy: Elite Squad.
The company faced a backlash after the video game's trailer was released.
Players have to kill members of the fictional group, Umbra, which fuels civil unrest with acts of terrorism. Ubisoft said showing the fist symbol at an Umbra meeting in an opening sequence had been "insensitive and harmful"."We have listened to and appreciate the players and the broader community who have pointed it out and we apologise," the games giant said. The image would be removed from the Android version of the game on Tuesday and from the iPhone version "as soon as possible", it added. A senior Ubisoft programmer had tweeted the trailer was "gross and extremely disrespectful". -
Samsung accidentally leaks details of its upcoming 980 Pro NVMe SSD
The PCIe 4.0-based 980 Pro looks fast—but it may not really be a “Pro” anymore.
Everybody makes mistakes sometimes, and it looks like Samsung made one yesterday: the product page for its upcoming 980 Pro NVMe SSD went briefly online before being discovered by TechPowerUp and then getting yanked offline again. The 980 Pro is a particularly interesting product, since it shakes up Samsung's lineup in several ways. We've known since CES 2020 that it would be the company's first consumer-available PCIe 4.0 SSD. The higher-bandwidth PCIe4 bus allows for a blistering throughput increase; the 980 Pro is rated by Samsung for up to 7000MB/sec of throughput, compared to the PCIe3 970 Pro's 3500MB/sec. Unfortunately, the 980 Pro's sharp increase in throughput comes with an equally sharp decrease in warranted write endurance. -
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Wow this is a bad article. Sorry to ZDNet but damn. Nextcloud, OneDrive etc arent clouds at all, let alone IaaS. And they act like they are finally introducing AV to this space, but weve had this in Nextcloud already for a long time.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nextcloud-incorporates-kaspersky-antivirus-security/
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Facebook caught in India political storm
Facebook's India executives have been grilled by a parliamentary committee over allegations of political partisanship and hate speech.
The social media giant is accused of going easy on ruling BJP supporters who allegedly violated hate speech rules. But the BJP is also irked with Facebook - it has accused it of bias against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The company denies the allegations, but the row puts it in a precarious position in its biggest market. The app is hugely popular in India, with more than 300 million users - and so is its messaging platform, WhatsApp, which has 400 million users. The parliamentary committee's closed-door hearing lasted several hours. There were no immediate details of what had been said. -
Facebook to freeze political ads before US presidential election
Facebook has announced that it will not take on any new political ads in the seven days prior to the US election on 3 November.
However, the firm will still allow existing ads to continue to be promoted and targeted at different users. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed the measure in a Facebook post. He said that he was "worried" about divisions in the country potentially leading to civil unrest. He added that Facebook would also label posts from candidates attempting to declare victory before the votes had been counted. The social network has faced criticism for allowing political ads to be "micro-targeted" on its platform so that they are only seen by small communities rather than debated more widely in the days after they appear. -
Oracle loses $10B JEDI cloud contract appeal yet again
Oracle was never fond of the JEDI cloud contract process, that massive $10 billion, decade-long Department of Defense cloud contract that went to a single vendor. It was forever arguing to anyone who would listen that that process was faulty and favored Amazon.
Yesterday it lost another round in court when the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the database giant’s argument that the procurement process was flawed because it went to a single vendor. It also didn’t buy that there was a conflict of interest because a former Amazon employee was involved in writing the DoD’s request for proposal criteria.
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The surprising secrets hidden in a pregnancy test
A teardown of a digital pregnancy test has created a buzz after revealing it contained a standard paper test, similar to those used by GPs.
The experiment has raised questions about whether the extra cost of digital pregnancy tests is justified. Some say the electronics give women a clearer answer but others point to the e-waste created by digital test kits. The experiment also found the digital test contained a microprocessor more powerful than early home computers. But the electronics themselves did not play a role in the hormone detection. -
Android 11 system update from Google adds privacy controls
New privacy controls and a screen-recording tool are among features being added to Android phones in the latest major update to Google's mobile operating system (OS).
Android 11 also makes it easier to keep track of chat messages across multiple apps, and control smart home gadgets. Google has made efforts to encourage third-party device manufacturers to roll out its system updates more quickly than they used to. But some brands lag behind others. Nokia has also tended to be an early adopter, while Samsung, Huawei and LG typically take a little longer to adapt new features to their own user interfaces. -
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Facebook 'profits from hate' claims engineer who quit
A Facebook engineer has quit the firm, saying they "can no longer stomach" being part of an organisation "profiting off hate".
Ashok Chandwaney is the latest employee to go public with concerns about how the company deals with hate speech. The engineer added it was "choosing to be on the wrong side of history". Facebook responded by saying it had removed millions of hate-related posts. Another of its ex-engineers has also come to its defence. The thrust of the post by Ashok Chandwaney - who uses "they" and "them" as personal pronouns - is that Facebook moves quickly to solve certain problems, but when it comes to dealing with hate speech, it is more interested in PR than implementing real change. Their five and a half years tenure at the firm meant "learning about a bug in a meeting, and fixing it before the meeting is over", they write. "The contrast between that and our approach to hate on the platform is astonishing. -
@mlnews ummm duh?
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Scotland's Covid contact tracing app downloaded half a million times
More than 500,000 people have downloaded Scotland's new contact tracing app since it went live.
It became available to download free onto a smart phone from Apple's App Store or Google Play on Thursday. The Protect Scotland app lets people know if they have been in close contact with someone who later tests positive. The Scottish government has said the software will support the Test and Protect system and is "another tool in the fight against Covid-19". Up until now, contact tracing has been done manually using a method followed for years to help control the spread of infectious diseases.
