Netflix announced in a press release on Monday that the company would be taking on another $800 million in debt in order to create more original content. Netflix is already in $2.37 billion of debt to further Netflix’s vision of being 50 percent original content. Chief content officer Ted Sarandos announced in January that the company planned to invest $6 billion total in creating its own movies and TV shows. So it’s half way there. Read more…
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Netflix Pledges to Eat $3 Billion in Debt for Original Programming
Cisco says in just one week in February they detected 1, 127, 818 different IP addresses being used to launch 744, 361, 093 login attempts on 220, 758, 340 different email addresses — and that 93% of those attacks were directed at two financial institutions in a massive Account Takeover (ATO) campaign. An anonymous reader writes: Crooks used 993, 547 distinct IPs to check login credentials for 427, 444, 261 accounts. For most of these attacks, the crooks used proxy servers, but also two botnets, one of compromised Arris cable modems, and one of ZyXel routers/modems. Most of these credentials have been acquired from public breaches or underground hacking forums. This happened before the recent huge data breaches such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and VK.com. It’s apparently similar to the stolen-credentials-from-other-sites attack that was launched against GitHub earlier this week. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The ultimate expression of the lazy smart home is probably turning the lights off from your phone. It’s not necessary, and it probably doesn’t even save any time ; but damn it’s cool. This switch will let you do that, without needing to be an electrical engineer. Read more… 
rossgneumann writes Porn production companies are currently engaged in a scorched earth copyright infringement campaign against torrenting sites with URLs containing specific keywords and Github is getting caught in the crossfire. Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by companies representing various porn companies in the last month alone have resulted in dozens of legitimate Github URLs being removed from the search engine’s results, TorrentFreak first reported.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Not everything is bigger in Texas. The gargantuan LED display housed in the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium , and the even the slightly more humongous display in the Houston Texans’ stadium , have just been displaced by the mega-jumbotron debuting today in Jacksonville. Read more… 
itwbennett writes: The Federal Communications Commission, in a 3-2 party-line vote Friday, approved a plan to revamp the 17-year-old E-Rate program, which pays for telecom services for schools and libraries, by phasing out funding for voice service, Web hosting and paging services, and redirecting money to Wi-Fi. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler had proposed a $5 billion budget for Wi-Fi, but Republican commissioners and some lawmakers had questioned where the money would come from. Still, the E-Rate revamp (PDF) approved Friday contemplates a $1 billion-a-year target for Wi-Fi projects “year after year, ” Wheeler said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes “Even though it’s been a couple months since the Heartbleed bug was discovered, many servers remain unpatched and vulnerable. “Two months ago, security experts and web users panicked when a Google engineer discovered a major bug — known as Heartbleed — that put over a million web servers at risk. The bug doesn’t make the news much anymore, but that doesn’t mean the problem’s solved. Security researcher Robert David Graham has found that at least 309, 197 servers are still vulnerable to the exploit. Immediately after the announcement, Graham found some 600, 000 servers were exposed by Heartbleed. One month after the bug was announced, that number dropped down to 318, 239. In the past month, however, only 9, 042 of those servers have been patched to block Heartbleed. That’s cause for concern, because it means that smaller sites aren’t making the effort to implement a fix.”” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
alphadogg writes “In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs. Soon after that, unless everyone upgraded to IPv6, the world would be facing a crisis that would hamper Internet connectivity for everyone. That crisis would be exacerbated by the skyrocketing demand for IP addresses due to a variety of factors: the Internet of Things (refrigerators needing their own IP address); wearables (watches and glasses demanding connectivity); BYOD (the explosion of mobile devices allowed to connect to the corporate network); and the increase in smartphone use in developing countries. So, here we are three years later and the American Registry for Internet Numbers is still doling out IPv4 addresses in the United States and Canada. Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
The U.S. Army Research Office has just thrown some money the way of 4D printing —but what, exactly, is all the fuss about? This beautiful video goes a long way to showing us why the technology is so exciting. Read more… 
cold fjord writes “Is 40% anything to worry about? Sky News reports, ‘Worldwide internet traffic plunged by around 40% as Google services suffered a complete black-out, according to web analytics experts. The tech company said all of its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes last night. The reason for the outage is not yet known, and Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News Online. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google’s massive grip on the web. “That’s huge, ” said GoSquared developer Simon Tabor. “As internet users, our reliance on Google.com being up is huge.”‘ Read more of this story at Slashdot.