Tag: internet

Self-Updating LCD Grocery Shelf Labels Are Pure Genius

It seems the rumors of e-ink based displays’ imminent death at the hands of tablets were greatly exaggerated. Despite a glut of portable color screen devices now on the market, e-book readers are more popular than ever, and a company called ZBD Solutions now wants to use the e-ink technology as easily updateable store signage. More »

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Self-Updating LCD Grocery Shelf Labels Are Pure Genius

How Syria Turned Off the Internet

November 29, 2012, between 1026 and 1029 (UTC), all traffic from Syria to the rest of the Internet stopped. At CloudFlare, we witnessed the drop off. CloudFlare spent yesterday morning studying the situation to understand what happened. The following graph shows the last several days of traffic coming to CloudFlare’s network from Syria. More »

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How Syria Turned Off the Internet

Newzbin2 Closes For Good

AlphaWolf_HK writes “Newzbin2, one of the most recognized index sites for usenet, has closed for good. A statement reads: ‘It is with regret that we announce the closure of Newzbin2. A combination of several factors has made this the only option. For a long time we have struggled with poor indexing of Usenet, poor numbers of reports caused by the majority of our editors dropping out & no-one replacing them. Our servers have been unstable and crashing on a regular basis meaning the NZBs & NFOs are unavailable for long periods and we don’t have the money to replace them. To make things worse all our payment providers dropped out or started running scared. The MPA sued Paypal and are going at our innocent payment provider Kthxbai Ltd in the UK. Our other payment provider has understandably lost their nerve. Result? We have no more payment providers to offer & no realistic means of taking money (no, Bitcoin isn’t credible as it’s just too hard for 90% of people).'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Newzbin2 Closes For Good

Netflix Gives Data Center Tools To Fail

Nerval’s Lobster writes “Netflix has released Hystrix, a library designed for managing interactions between distributed systems, complete with ‘fallback’ options for when those systems inevitably fail. The code for Hystrix—which Netflix tested on its own systems—can be downloaded at Github, with documentation available here, in addition to a getting-started guide and operations examples, among others. Hystrix evolved out of Netflix’s need to manage an increasing rate of calls to its APIs, and resulted in (according to the company) a ‘dramatic improvement in uptime and resilience has been achieved through its use.’ The Netflix API receives more than 1 billion incoming calls per day, which translates into several billion outgoing calls (averaging a ratio of 1:6) to dozens of underlying systems, with peaks of over 100,000 dependency requests per second. That’s according to Netflix engineer Ben Christensen, who described the incredible loads on the company’s infrastructure in a February blog posting. The vast majority of those calls serve the discovery user interfaces (UIs) of the more than 800 different devices supported by Netflix.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix Gives Data Center Tools To Fail

HTTP Strict Transport Security Becomes Internet Standard

angry tapir writes “A Web security policy mechanism that promises to make HTTPS-enabled websites more resilient to various types of attacks has been approved and released as an Internet standard — but despite support from some high-profile websites, adoption elsewhere is still low. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) allows websites to declare themselves accessible only over HTTPS (HTTP Secure) and was designed to prevent hackers from forcing user connections over HTTP or abusing mistakes in HTTPS implementations to compromise content integrity.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HTTP Strict Transport Security Becomes Internet Standard