Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Snek goes dark. (credit: Getty Images)

The successor to 8chan, 8kun, made a somewhat brief appearance on the public Internet thanks to what amounts to an attack on the Internet's routing infrastructure. The site's domain name server, hosted by a service called VanwaNet, offered up an Internet address for the site that was from an unallocated set of addresses belonging to the RIPE Network Coordinating Centre, the regional Internet registry authority for Europe and the Middle East. And the host for the new site, the Russian hosting company Media Land LLC, advertised a route to that address to the rest of the Internet, allowing visitors to reach the site for a while.

The advertisement of the address, made with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is what is referred to in the routing world as a "bogon" or "martian." Usually these happen when private network addresses mistakenly are sent out, or "advertised," from a network to the rest of the Internet because of a router misconfiguration.

But sometimes, they hijack existing addresses either accidentally or maliciously. A BGP "leak" in November 2018 caused Google and Spotify service outages. In 2015, for example, Hacking Team used a BGP bogon advertisement to help Italian police regain control of infrastructure used to monitor hacked targets. And a Russian network provider made BGP advertisements that hijacked traffic to financial services sites in 2017.

Enlarge / A truck full of Model 3 cars. (credit: Andrei Stanescu / Getty)

An impressive 99.6% of Tesla Model 3 customers describe the vehicle as a pleasure to drive, Bloomberg reports in a new survey. The first three installments of Bloomberg's four-part survey have been published in recent days.

Bloomberg talked to almost 5,000 customers about their experiences owning the Model 3. Many customers reported having specific problems with their cars—minor manufacturing defects, long wait times for repairs, mistakes by Tesla's Autopilot software.

Some of these problems related to the ramp-up of Model 3 production over the last two years. In 2018, Tesla struggled to manufacture the Model 3 in volume and without defects. More recently, the company has struggling to provide timely service as the number of Tesla cars on the road swelled.

Enlarge / A truck full of Model 3 cars. (credit: Andrei Stanescu / Getty)

An impressive 99.6% of Tesla Model 3 customers describe the vehicle as a pleasure to drive, Bloomberg reports in a new survey. The first three installments of Bloomberg's four-part survey have been published in recent days.

Bloomberg talked to almost 5,000 customers about their experiences owning the Model 3. Many customers reported having specific problems with their cars—minor manufacturing defects, long wait times for repairs, mistakes by Tesla's Autopilot software.

Some of these problems related to the ramp-up of Model 3 production over the last two years. In 2018, Tesla struggled to manufacture the Model 3 in volume and without defects. More recently, the company has struggling to provide timely service as the number of Tesla cars on the road swelled.

Enlarge / Chairwoman Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., conducts a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health markup on Thursday, July 11, 2019. (credit: Tom Williams | CQ Roll Call | Getty Images)

Congress is taking yet another stab at addressing the near-complete lack of federal laws covering the absolutely massive trove of data that companies now collect on every one of us, which forms the backbone of basically the entire big tech era.

Representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren, both Democrats from California, introduced the Online Privacy Act today. The act would create a new federal agency, the Digital Privacy Agency, to enforce privacy rights. The act would also authorize the agency to hire up to 1,600 employees.

"Every American is vulnerable to privacy violations with few tools to defend themselves. Too often, our private information online is stolen, abused, used for profit, or grossly mishandled," Eshoo said in a statement. "Our legislation ensures that every American has control over their own data, companies are held accountable, and the government provides tough but fair oversight."

Enlarge / The AT&T logo displayed at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on February 25, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Gabriel Bouys )

AT&T has agreed to pay $60 million back to customers to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over the carrier's severe throttling of mobile data plans advertised as "unlimited."

The FTC, which sued AT&T in 2014, announced the settlement today. The deal ends a long saga in which AT&T unsuccessfully tried to cripple the FTC's regulatory authority over telecoms. A court loss last year basically forced AT&T to settle the case.

"AT&T promised unlimited data—without qualification—and failed to deliver on that promise," FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Andrew Smith said in the announcement. "While it seems obvious, it bears repeating that Internet providers must tell people about any restrictions on the speed or amount of data promised."

Stylized image of a UPC barcode. (credit: xxdigipxx)

With a tip that came from one of the biggest breaches in US National Security Agency history, researchers have discovered a new hacking group that infected targets with a previously unknown piece of advanced malware.

Hints of the APT—short for advanced persistent threat—group first emerged in April 2017. That's when a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers published exploits and code developed by, and later stolen from, the NSA. Titled "Lost in Translation," the dispatch was best known for publishing the Eternal Blue exploit that would later power the WannaCry and NotPetya worms that caused tens of billions of dollars' worth of damage worldwide. But the dump included something else: a script that checked compromised computers for malware from a variety of APTs.

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab said one of the APTs described in the script started operations no later than 2009 and then vanished in 2017, the same year the Shadow Brokers post was published. Dubbed DarkUniverse, the group is probably tied to ItaDuke, a group that has actively targeted Uyghur and Tibetans since 2013. The link assessment is based on unique code overlaps in both groups' malware.

Enlarge / Here is one half of the payload fairing that SpaceX recovered after a Falcon Heavy launch in April. (credit: Elon Musk)

Nearly three months have passed since SpaceX flew a rocket—the company last launched the AMOS-17 satellite on August 6 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.

But now the company is returning to the launch pad to send its second batch of Starlink Internet satellites into low Earth orbit. On Tuesday, SpaceX completed a static test firing of the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage that is presently scheduled to launch on November 11 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Beyond the primary mission, this flight is going for two rocket reuse milestones.

This will be the first time that SpaceX has attempted to fly the same Falcon 9 first stage four times. This particular stage flew on July 25 (Iridium 7 mission) and October 8 (SAOCOM 1-A) in 2018 as well as February 22 (Nusantara Satu and Beresheet spacecraft) this year.