Month: November 2016

Once again, large swaths of the Internet in the United States were affected by a major morning network outage today. This time, it was the Tier 1 network service provider Level 3 Communications that was at the center of the problem, which disrupted parts of the Internet’s backbone. But for the moment, it does not appear that the outage was triggered by a denial of service attack or other network attack, like the attack on DNS provider Dyn on October 21.

In a statement sent to the media, Nikki Wheeler, Level 3’s senior director of communications, wrote, "Our technical team is looking into this issue to determine the cause. Our priority is to ensure the reliability of our network and services. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.” A Level 3 spokesperson confirmed that the company’s networks had been restored to normal function by 1600 Greenwich Mean Time (noon US Eastern Time) but said that no other information was available yet.

The outage had no major impact on major streaming services that use Level 3, including Netflix and the HBO Go mobile application. But it did affect some customers’ voice and Internet services. Level 3 suffered another brief outage a month ago, caused by a human error.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Department of Justice today sued DirecTV and its owner, AT&T, saying the satellite TV company colluded with competitors during contentious negotiations to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games.

Dodgers games have been blacked out in much of Los Angeles because pay-TV providers have been unwilling to pay the price demanded by SportsNet LA, the Dodgers channel operated by the baseball franchise and Time Warner Cable. But the DOJ's antitrust division placed the blame for this situation on AT&T and DirecTV. In a complaint filed in US District Court in California, it alleges that DirecTV was a "ringleader" in a coordinated scheme with cable companies Cox and Charter, according to a DOJ announcement.

"Dodgers fans were denied a fair, competitive process when DirecTV orchestrated a series of information exchanges with direct competitors that ultimately made consumers less likely to be able to watch their hometown team,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Sallet said in the DOJ announcement. The lack of a competitive negotiation process is especially bad for consumers in a market like cable television, where customers have "only a handful of choices," he said.

NEW YORK—Microsoft today unveiled Teams, its Slack-like chat service. Teams offers the same kind of Web-based IRC-like text chat experience that Slack users have come to know and love, with persistent storage of historic chats, integrations with third-party services, and of course emojis and memes.

Slack has become the darling of millennials, serving as a kind of digital water cooler for idle office chit-chat, as well as a workspace for teams to tackle projects. This is particularly valuable for geographically distributed teams, as it fosters a style of communication that's more fluid and informal than e-mail or conference calling.

Microsoft's first foray into corporate social media was its purchase of Yammer, which offers something along the lines of Facebook for organizations—a virtual noticeboard to broadcast to your team. While this is still ticking along, the IRC-like model of communications is looking like it's going to be the one with legs. There were suggestions that Microsoft might buy Slack, but the asking price (a $4 billion valuation) was likely too high for the amount of revenue and number of paying customers that Slack actually has.

In a stunning discovery, a team of archaeologists in Australia has found extensive remains of a sophisticated human community living 50,000 years ago. The remains were found in a rock shelter in the continent's arid southern interior. Packed with a range of tools, decorative pigments, and animal bones, the shelter is a wide, roomy space located in the Flinders Ranges, which are the ancestral lands of the Adnyamathanha. The find overturns previous hypotheses of how humans colonized Australia, and it also proves that they interacted with now-extinct megafauna that ranged across the continent.

Dubbed the Warratyi site, the rock shelter sits above a landscape criss-crossed with deep gorges that would have flowed with water when Paleolithic humans lived here. From extensive excavations conducted last year, the archaeologists estimate that people occupied Warratyi on and off for 40,000 years, finally abandoning the site just 10,000 years ago.

By analyzing layers of earth in the shelter, the scientists were able to construct a timeline of settlement in the space. They used carbon dating on nuggets of hearth charcoal and eggshells to discover that the shelter was first occupied about 50,000 years ago. They also used a a dating technique called optically simulated luminescence (OSL) on buried grains of quartz. This technique determines when those quartz grains last saw sunlight and heat. Both techniques returned similar dates, adding to the researchers' confidence in their findings.

Sega's teaser image about Daytona 3 Championship USA lacks screens, cabinet photos, or any sweet, cheesy theme songs. Still, we'll take it.

Rumors and rumblings about two major '90s arcade racing series panned out this week. Two companies separately announced plans to bring back both the Daytona USA and Cruisi'n series—as arcade-first cabinets, to boot.

A Tuesday tease on Sega Amusements' official Twitter account hinted at a reveal of a new Daytona game but suggested we had to wait until this month's IAAPA Attractions Expo to learn more. Clearly, Sega struggled with that kind of anticipation as much as fans did, so it went ahead and spilled the beans: Daytona 3 Championship USA is official and coming to arcades around the world.

This won't be a slouch of a release, either. It'll have all three original racetracks returning in "remastered" form, along with three brand-new tracks. One of those new tracks will recreate the recently renovated Daytona International Speedway. The cabinets, as announced, should be beasts, with 47" LED monitors, eight-player link compatibility, mounted cameras, and "moulded under-seat engines." The cameras are becoming more common in linked arcade racers, as they allow players to see each other reacting during major moments like passes.

A view of Amazon Books' magazine seating area in Seattle, dotted with Amazon Fire tablets that just so happen to be pre-loaded with magazines. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Seattle's flagship Amazon Books retail location has begun rolling out a new approach to sales: one book price for normal shoppers and a different one for Amazon Prime customers.

The store used to kinda-sorta hide its actual book prices from retail shoppers, forcing them to scan book bar codes either with an Amazon smartphone app or at a store kiosk. That would allow them to see the book's price on Amazon's website. This, of course, was the shop's biggest draw: that buyers could get a book at Amazon prices without waiting for shipping.

Now, as the Amazon stores' official site explains, the only shoppers that will get to do that are those who have active Prime subscriptions. All other shoppers will pay the list book price—which, of course, Amazon undercuts. A cursory check of the books I noticed at my first visit to the shop last year shows average discounts hovering around the 30 percent mark. Further cutting into the ability to offer a deal, Amazon Books does not offer bargain-bin sections where books are marked down due to age or other factors.