Once again, large swaths of the Internet in the United States were affected by a major morning network outage today. This time, it was the Tier 1 network service provider Level 3 Communications that was at the center of the problem, which disrupted parts of the Internet’s backbone. But for the moment, it does not appear that the outage was triggered by a denial of service attack or other network attack, like the attack on DNS provider Dyn on October 21 . In a statement sent to the media, Nikki Wheeler, Level 3’s senior director of communications, wrote, “Our technical team is looking into this issue to determine the cause. Our priority is to ensure the reliability of our network and services. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.” A Level 3 spokesperson confirmed that the company’s networks had been restored to normal function by 1600 Greenwich Mean Time (noon US Eastern Time) but said that no other information was available yet. The outage had no major impact on major streaming services that use Level 3, including Netflix and the HBO Go mobile application. But it did affect some customers’ voice and Internet services. Level 3 suffered another brief outage a month ago, caused by a human error. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Level 3 drops its packets for hours, causing Internet traffic jam
itwbennett quotes a report from CSO Online: Following similar decisions by Mozilla and Apple, Google plans to reject new digital certificates issued by certificate authorities WoSign and StartCom because they violated industry rules and best practices. The ban will go into effect in Chrome version 56, which is currently in the dev release channel, and will apply to all certificates issued by the two authorities after October 21. Browsers rely on digital certificates to verify the identity of websites and to establish encrypted connections with them. Certificates issued before October 21 will continue to be trusted as long as they’re published to the public Certificate Transparency logs or have been issued to a limited set of domains owned by known WoSign and StartCom customers. “Due to a number of technical limitations and concerns, Google Chrome is unable to trust all pre-existing certificates while ensuring our users are sufficiently protected from further misissuance, ” said Chrome security team member Andrew Whalley in a blog post Monday. “As a result of these changes, customers of WoSign and StartCom may find their certificates no longer work in Chrome 56. Sites that find themselves on the whitelist will be able to request early removal once they’ve transitioned to new certificates, ” Whalley said. “Any attempt by WoSign or StartCom to circumvent these controls will result in immediate and complete removal of trust.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader shares a report on VentureBeat: Out with the old, and in with the new. Microsoft yesterday stopped providing Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 licenses to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), including its PC partners and systems builders. This means that, as of today, the only way you can buy a computer running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 is if you can still find one in stock. Two years ago, Microsoft stopped selling Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, and Windows 7 Ultimate licenses to OEMs. Now Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 are also out of the picture, leaving Windows 10 as the only remaining option, assuming you want a PC with a Microsoft operating system. This is Microsoft’s way of slowly phasing out old operating systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.