Month: October 2016

(credit: Jürgen Telkmann)

A distributed denial of service attack against Dyn, the dynamic DNS service, affected the availability of dozens of major websites and Internet services this morning, including Twitter and Reddit. The attack, which began this morning at 7:10am Eastern Time, is apparently focused on Dyn’s US East Coast name servers.

“This morning, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the east coast of the United States,” Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, said in an e-mail sent to Ars this morning. “DNS traffic resolved from east coast name server locations are experiencing a service interruption during this time.” By 9:20am ET this morning, Dyn had mitigated the attack and services returned to normal.

The attack increased the response time to DNS queries and in some cases delayed the propagation of some address changes. This also meant that some websites and mobile applications, such as Twitter, experienced intermittent outages. Posts to Twitter from some East Coast locations failed for a brief period this morning, and webpages for Twitter and Reddit have been slow to load as DNS lookups for addresses have added latency to Web requests. The DDoS attack also affected a number of major news sites, as Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the information security service company F-Secure noted:

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

On its twentieth anniversary, the UK's Internet Watch Foundation—propped up by Microsoft's PhotoDNA tech—is urging Web companies to use its list of digital fingerprints to help prevent the upload, sharing, and storage of child abuse sex images online.

The IWF hash list of the underlying code associated with child abuse images was distributed to Google, Facebook, and Twitter in August 2015. It is compiled by analysts at the charity, who have the gruelling task of sifting through photos and videos showing children being sexually abused. Every eight minutes they identify a new webpage containing horrendous images.

To date, 125,583 hashes have be added to the list—more than 3,000 of which involved the abuse of babies and toddlers.

Enlarge (credit: Peter Bright)

HP's Spectre x360 was one of our favorite laptops of the Broadwell generation. It was a thin, light, stylish ultrabook with solid battery life and a flippy hinge enabling it to be used as a (chunky) tablet or (more usefully) to hold the screen up in the kitchen or while watching movies on the plane.

The x360 received a minor refresh to upgrade to a Skylake processor, and this year HP added an optional OLED screen. Aside from these small changes, the Skylake model was little changed from its predecessor.

But now HP has a third revision, using Intel's new Kaby Lake processors. While Kaby Lake itself is not a major update on Skylake, HP has used the occasion of the processor upgrade to perform a more substantial overhaul of the Spectre x360.

Enlarge / Ridin' dirty on a horse. (That explosive tanker in the distance is always blowing up as field decoration, as opposed to being caused by multiplayer battlers.) (credit: DICE)

The Battlefield video game series has turned the clock backward and forward on its military-combat scenarios for nearly 15 years. Whether focused on wars of the past, present, or future, developer DICE has continually introduced different set pieces and weapons to the games. As such, the eras have ultimately been a backdrop for the same experience time and time again: big battles, big squads, and big machinery.

There are particular eras where'd it's be easy to envision DICE being forced to change the Battlefield formula drastically—maybe millennia into the past, where the only "vehicle" on offer is a giant Trojan horse, or so far into the future that the battles take place via telepathy (or something weird like that). But the latest rewind to World War 1 in the newest installment, Battlefield 1, isn't enough of a change, apparently.

Tanks, boats, airplanes, grenades, sniper rifles, shotguns, automatic pistols, mounted chain guns, and on and on and on—in many respects, you've played this Battlefield before. In fact, anybody charmed by an impressive advertising campaign, complete with horse-riding Ottoman warriors and era-appropriate bi-planes, should take a breath and plant their war-shredded boots back into the mud of a trench. In practice, horses are just slightly slower motorcycles. Bi-planes work as you'd expect a plane to work.