Month: November 2018

Enlarge (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bfishadow/5668460325)

Google lost control of several million of its IP addresses for more than an hour on Monday in an event that intermittently made its search and other services unavailable to many users and also caused problems for Spotify and other Google cloud customers. While Google said it had no reason to believe the mishap was a malicious hijacking attempt, the leak appeared suspicious to many, in part because it misdirected traffic to China Telecom, the Chinese government-owned provider that was recently caught improperly routing traffic belonging to a raft of Western carriers though mainland China.

The leak started at 21:13 UTC when MainOne Cable Company, a small ISP in Lagos, Nigeria, suddenly updated tables in the Internet’s global routing system to improperly declare that its autonomous system 37282 was the proper path to reach 212 IP prefixes belonging to Google. Within minutes, China Telecom improperly accepted the route and announced it worldwide. The move by China Telecom, aka aka AS4809, in turn caused Russia-based Transtelecom, aka AS20485, and other large service providers to also follow the route.

The redirections, BGPmon said on Twitter came in five distinct waves over a 74-minute period. The redirected IP ranges transmitted some of Google's most sensitive communications, including the company's corporate WAN infrastructure and the Google VPN. This graphic from regional Internet registry RIPE NCC shows how the domino effect played out over a two-hour span. The image below shows an abbreviated version of those events.

Enlarge / A pedestrian walks past a mural in the Long Island City neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York, U.S., on Friday, Nov. 9, 2018. (credit: Christopher Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Amazon has reportedly selected two joint sites for its second headquarters, or HQ2: Long Island City—a neighborhood in Queens, New York City—and Crystal City, Virginia, adjacent to Washington DC.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the news on Monday evening, the selection caps a process that lasted over a year to lure the Seattle-based retail giant.

In January 2018, 20 "finalist" cities were named, including Raleigh, Toronto, Chicago, Atlanta, among others.

Three film and TV studios elected to dump their latest trailers online on Monday, as opposed to spreading the love out over the week. Alone, each trailer is each intriguing, but their combined nerd power lets us glimpse what's to come from three world premieres.

The highlight of this year's Veterans Day trailer explosion is Detective Pikachu, a live-action (and decidedly Western) take on the odd video game of the same name. That title means a few things. First, like the game, this fork of the Pokemon universe appears to exist outside the collect-'em-all series' game and anime entries. That means there's no sign of familiar human characters like Ash, Daisy, Brock, or Team Rocket.

Enlarge (credit: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities)

Archaeologists discovered dozens of mummified cats in seven previously undisturbed tombs in a 4,500-year-old pyramid complex near Saqqara, south of Cairo. The cats were found along with a collection of mummified scarab beetles, gilded wood cat statues, painted animal sarcophagi, and other artifacts.

Sacred to Bastet

Today, dozens of intact mummies of any species are a relatively rare find for archaeologists, but mummifying cats and other animals was a common practice in Egypt for thousands of years. The Saqqara cats, like millions of others throughout Egyptian history, would have been bred and raised for eventual mass sacrifice to the protective goddess Bastet, who often appears in Egyptian art as a woman with the head of a lioness or, after about 1000 BCE, a domestic cat.

Most of those once-common mummies were lost to rampant looting across the centuries, which peaked between the 1700s and early 1900s. Europeans looted hundreds of thousands of animal mummies, including baboons, cats, crocodiles, and ibises, most of which were destroyed to make fertilizer.

Enlarge / French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the opening session of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on November 12, 2018. (credit: LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images)

For the first time, Facebook has agreed to allow French regulators to work closely with the company as a way to monitor what actions it's taking to combat hate speech. If necessary, France could impose further regulations on the social media giant.

In a French-language speech before the Internet Governance Forum held in Paris on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the two sides would work together for six months starting in early 2019 to come up with "joint, precise, and concrete" proposals that both Menlo Park and Paris could agree with.

LIVE l Ouverture du Forum sur la Gouvernance de l'Internet. #GovTechSummit #IGF2018https://t.co/fKXpXDjP4G

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) November 12, 2018

"There's a Californian Internet and a Chinese Internet," he explained, urging those in attendance to seek a middle-ground "European" model.

Enlarge (credit: Andy Maguire / Flickr)

The next version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)—the network protocol that defines how browsers talk to Web servers—is going to make a major break from the versions in use today.

Today's HTTP (versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2) are all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). TCP, defined as part of the core set of IP (Internet Protocol) layers, provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network. "Reliable" means that if some data goes missing during transfer (due to a hardware failure, congestion, or a timeout), the receiving end can detect this and demand that the sending end re-send the missing data; "ordered" means that data is received in the order that it was transmitted in; "error-checked" means that any corruption during transmission can be detected.

These are all desirable properties and necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP is designed as a kind of one-size-fits-all solution, suitable for any application that needs this kind of reliability. It isn't particularly tuned for the kinds of scenarios that HTTP is used for. TCP requires a number of round trips between client and server to establish a connection, for example; using SSL over TCP requires subsequent round trips to establish the encrypted connection. A protocol purpose-built for HTTP could combine these negotiations and reduce the number of round trips, thereby improving network latency.