Month: April 2020

Enlarge / "Why do we have to sing 'Happy Birthday,' Mom?" "We don't, we can sing something else." "OK! Let it go, let it goooooooo..." (credit: Anton Petrus | Getty Images)

Basically everyone is some kind of mess right now, as the world seemingly runs away from us in the midst of a confusing, life-altering pandemic. We adults at least can look for solid, up-to-date facts and use our phones and other devices to stay in touch with friends, family, and co-workers near and far in our need to understand this chaotic new world.

But young kids—utterly robbed of schools, daycares, extended family, and even parks and playgrounds—are seeing their lives arguably even more upturned than their parents' lives have been. We as their caretakers can do our best to build new routines and schedules, stick to healthy habits, and to maintain their mental health along with our own, but one of the hardest things to grapple with right now is every small child's favorite question: "Why?"

Even the best-prepared parent may be faltering on that one when it comes to preschool and lower elementary-aged students. "I, like many others here, have a small child (kindergartner, to be exact) that has had life upended by school closings and shut-in laws," one Ars reader recently wrote in a comment. "I've been trying to explain to her the virus, and she's smart—she gets the gist of it—but I'm not finding a good 'kid' way to explain all the details (the social distancing, the testing, etc). She's a Girl Scout, and they're doing great badges for learning the virus and all we're doing, but as a 5-year-old, I'm having trouble with her 'getting' it all."

Enlarge (credit: Tommy Lee Walker | Getty Images)

For more than an hour at the beginning of April, major sites like Google and Facebook sputtered for large swaths of people. The culprit wasn't a hack or a bug. It was problems with the internet data routing standard known as the Border Gateway Protocol, which had allowed significant amounts of web traffic to take an unexpected detour through a Russian telecom. For Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, it was the last straw.

BGP disruptions happen frequently, generally by accident. But BGP can also be hijacked for large-scale spying, data interception, or as a sort of denial of service attack. Just last week, United States Executive Branch agencies moved to block China Telecom from offering services in the US, because of allegedly malicious activity that includes BGP attacks. Companies like Cloudflare sit on the front lines of the BGP blowback. And while the company can't fix the problem directly, it can call out those that are slow to contribute defenses.