Technology scares the hell out of people, university survey finds

Technology-related concerns account for 3 of the top 5 biggest fears among Americans surveyed recently by Chapman University of Orange, Calif. -- and a couple of the other concerns on the top 10 list could be considered tech-related worries as well.Number 1 on the list, according to the online survey of more than 1,500 adults, is Corruption of Government Officials, while technology-related concerns ranked #2 (Cyber-terrorism), #3 (Corporate tracking  of personal information) and #5 (Government tracking of personal information). Numbers 7 (Identity theft) and #10 (Credit card fraud) could also be classified as tech-related worries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hackers exploit new zero-day in fully patched Adobe Flash

If you haven’t kicked Adobe Flash to the curb, and you should, then don’t feel secure even if you are running a fully patched version of Flash Player.Although Adobe released a mega-sized patch yesterday, including security fixes for 69 critical vulnerabilities in Flash, Reader and Acrobat, attackers are armed with a zero-day exploit that leaves fully patched versions of Flash Player vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Global Impacts of Recent Leaks

65.54.215.0_24_1444474800

Recent routing leaks remind us why monitoring Internet routing and performance is important and requires effective tools.  Routing leaks are the ‘benign cousin’ of the malicious BGP route hijack.  They happen accidentally, but the result is the same: traffic to affected prefixes is redirected, lost, or intercepted.  And if they happen to you, your online business and brand suffers.

In this blog, we look at examples of a full-table peer leak, an origination leak, and a small peer leak and what happens to traffic when these incidents occur.  As we will see, some events can go on for years, undetected and hence, unremediated, but extremely impactful never the less.  As you read this blog, keep the following  questions in mind.  Would  you know if the events described here were happening to you?  Would you know how to identify the culprit if you did?

 

iTel/Peer1 routing leak

Starting on 10 October at 10:54 UTC, iTel (AS16696) leaked a full routing table (555,010 routes) to Peer 1 (AS13768).  Normally, iTel exports 49 routes to Peer 1;  however, over the course of several minutes, it leaked 436,776 routes from Hurricane Electric (AS6939) and 229,537 Continue reading

Save some bandwidth by turning off TCP Timestamps

This is a guest post by Donatas Abraitis, System Engineer at Vinted, with an unusual approach for saving a little bandwidth.

Looking at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1323 there is a nice title: 'TCP Extensions for High Performance'. It's worth to take a look at date May 1992. Timestamps option may appear in any data or ACK segment, adding 12 bytes to the 20-byte TCP header. 

Using TCP options, the sender places a timestamp in each data segment, and the receiver reflects these timestamps back in ACK segments. Then a single subtract gives the sender an accurate RTT measurement for every ACK segment.

To prove this let's dig into kernel source:

./include/net/tcp.h:#define TCPOLEN_TSTAMP_ALIGNED    12
./net/ipv4/tcp_output.c:static void tcp_connect_init(struct sock *sk)
  ...
  tp->tcp_header_len = sizeof(struct tcphdr) +
    (sysctl_tcp_timestamps ? TCPOLEN_TSTAMP_ALIGNED : 0);

Some visualizations:

Worth Reading: Digital Content and the Fate of Businesses

There are two key differences between buying media in a physical format versus a digital one. First, there’s the technical aspect: Maintaining long-term access to a file requires a hard copy of it—that means, for example, downloading a film, not just streaming from a third party’s server. The second distinction is a bit more complicated, and it has to do with how the law has shaped digital rights in the past 15 years. It helps to think about the experience of a person giving up CDs and using iTunes for music purchases instead. —via the atlantic

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9 ways to celebrate “Back to the Future” Day

Another made up geeky dayWednesday, Oct. 21, 2015 marks the day in which time-traveler Marty McFly arrives from the past (from the movie “Back to the Future Part II”. The Internet is freaking out about this upcoming “holiday”, and in the tradition of fake geeky holidays like “Star Wars Day” (May 4), Pi Day (March 14) and “Talk like a Pirate Day” (September 19), we now have a day to celebrate everything related to the time-travel movie, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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