Posts

Showing posts from June, 2020

Facebook says many don't visit its platform with the intention of viewing news

Image
  It also says it is 'not healthy nor sustainable' to expect two private companies to be solely responsible for solving the challenges faced by the Australian media industry. The federal government is hoping to make tech giants such as Facebook and Google pay for Australian content if it is a source of profit, and the country's consumer watchdog is leading the charge on a mandatory code of conduct to address "bargaining power imbalances" between news media businesses and digital platforms. While Facebook doesn't agree that it possesses unequal bargaining power compared to some of the largest media companies in Australia, it said there is a level of merit in setting regulatory frameworks to provide confidence that it is contributing "appropriately" in the Australian news ecosystem. The social media giant used its submission to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC)  Mandatory news media bargaining code Concepts paper  to say i

AWS said it mitigated a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest ever

Image
  The previous record for the largest DDoS attack ever recorded was of 1.7 Tbps, recorded in March 2018. Amazon said its AWS Shield service mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, stopping a 2.3 Tbps attack in mid-February this year. The incident was disclosed in the company's  AWS Shield Threat Landscape [PDF] , a report detailing web attacks mitigated by Amazon's AWS Shield protection service. The report didn't identify the targeted AWS customer but said the attack was carried out using hijacked CLDAP web servers and caused three days of "elevated threat" for its AWS Shield staff. CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an alternative to the older LDAP protocol and is used to connect, search, and modify Internet-shared directories. The protocol has been abused for DDoS attacks  since late 2016 , and CLDAP servers are known to amplify DDoS traffic  by 56 to 70 times  its initial size, making it a highly sought-after protocol and

Programming languages: Rust enters top 20 popularity rankings for the first time

Image
  Memory-safe systems programming language Rust is finally capturing the attention of lots of developers. Programming language Rust has entered the top 20 of the Tiobe popularity index for the first time, but it's still five spots behind systems programming rival Go.   There's growing interest in the use of memory-safe Rust for systems programming to build major platforms, in particular at Microsoft, which is exploring it for Windows and Azure with the goal of wiping out memory bugs in code written in C and C++. Amazon Web Services is also using Rust for performance-sensitive components in Lambda, EC2, and S3.   Rust has seen its ranking rise considerably on Tiobe, from 38 last year to 20 today. Tiobe's index is based on searches for a language on major search engines, so it doesn't mean more people are using Rust, but it shows that more developers are searching for information about the language.  Rust was voted for the fifth year straight the most-loved programming la

From Earth to orbit with Linux and SpaceX

Image
  SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which flew NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station, is powered by liquid oxygen, rocket-grade kerosene, and Linux. In a terrible year, it was a great moment. On May 30, SpaceX's  Crew Dragon , the first private-manned spacecraft ever and the first US-manned spaceflight in nine years, successfully delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley into orbit. Taking them was SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, powered by rocket fuel and Linux. Like supercomputers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and many mission-critical devices, the Falcon 9 flies with Linux. SpaceX's software engineers explained several years ago how the  Falcon 9 programming works .  At the time, the developers said: "The Flight Software team is about 35 people. We write all the code for Falcon 9, Grasshopper [The Falcon 9 test rocket], and Dragon applications; and do the core platform work, also on those vehicles; we also