Month: October 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

A few dozen QAnon and 8chan-related sites were knocked offline temporarily yesterday when a DDoS-protection vendor disabled their access, according to an article by security reporter Brian Krebs.

The websites—with names like 8kun.net, 8kun.top, 8chan.se, and qanonbin.com—are connected to the Internet via the US-based ISP VanwaTech, which in turn "had a single point of failure on its end," Krebs wrote. "The swath of Internet addresses serving the various 8kun/QAnon sites were being protected from otherwise crippling and incessant distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by Hillsboro, Ore. based CNServers LLC."

That changed yesterday when security researcher Ron Guilmette called CNServers, which apparently didn't realize it was providing security protection to the websites. "Within minutes of that call, CNServers told its customer—Spartan Host Ltd., which is registered in Belfast, Northern Ireland—that it would no longer be providing DDoS protection for the set of 254 Internet addresses that Spartan Host was routing on behalf of VanwaTech," Krebs wrote. Those 254 addresses included the few dozen related to QAnon and 8chan, which is now known as 8kun.

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  If someone is sharing their location with you, you'll see a map on the main page of the app. [credit: Google ]

Google has killed yet another product. RIP to Google Trusted Contacts, 2016-2020.

Trusted Contacts was a personal safety app for Android. It let you flag certain contacts as "trusted," and those people could then request your location in an emergency situation. The base functionality was not all that different from Google Maps location sharing, but when Trusted Contacts launched in 2016—the Google+ dark ages—Google Maps did not have location sharing built in. (Google Latitude, the original Google Maps location sharing functionality, debuted in 2009, but that was killed in 2013 in favor of Google+ location sharing. Google+ was on the way out by 2016, and location sharing returned to Google Maps in 2017.) The one addition besides a proactive location sharing was for a trusted contact to declare an emergency location request, which the other user would have to deny or it would automatically share.

The app has a 3.8 rating on the Play Store and over a million downloads, which is not good enough to save it from the Google grim reaper. Google sent out emails to users saying that since location sharing was now built into Google Maps, the Trusted Contacts app was no longer need. The app will shut down in just 43 days, on December 1, 2020.

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  On October 9, SSC North American took the production speed record away from Bugatti with a 331mph top speed run in the SSC Tuatara. [credit: James Lipman ]

If you want a car that can go really, really, really fast, forget about ordering that Bugatti and give the people at SSC North America a call. On October 10, racing driver Oliver Webb got behind the wheel of one of SSC's new Tuatara hypercars and, on a closed stretch of Nevada State Route 160, reached a top speed of 331.15mph (532.93km/h). When averaged with his 301.07mph (484.53km/h) run in the opposite direction, SSC North America set a new world speed record for production vehicles at 316.11mph (508.73km/h).

Until now, the record for the world's fastest production car belonged to Bugatti, which claimed it in 2019. Andy Wallace was behind the wheel for that attempt, driving a 1,578hp (1,177kW) Bugatti Chiron Super Sport to top speed of 304.77mph (490.48km/h) at Volkswagen's massive test track in Ehra-Lessien, Germany. The SSC Tuatara packs even more power than the Chiron: 1,750hp (1,305kW) of power on E85, and it all gets sent to just the rear wheels, too. The Tuatara also has a more slippery shape, with a smaller frontal area than the Chiron (1.672m² vs 2.072m²) and a lower drag coefficient (0.279 vs 0.319).

Those were conscious decisions during the Tuatara's design—SSC's founder Jerod Shelby has had his sights on the production speed record for some years now. "My goal was always to beat this record by such a substantial amount that maybe it's going to stand in for a little while. I felt like that's what McLaren did back in the late nineties, and they held that record a long time because they just smashed the record. That was my dream in a perfect world," Shelby said.

Enlarge / The cat is drawn from the side, with its head turned toward the viewer. (credit: Johny Isla via AP)

Workers at the Nazca Lines site recently found the faded, partially eroded outline of a cat stretching across a desert hillside.

The cat joins the ever-growing list of about 900 shapes and images that ancient people etched into the Nazca Desert soil. At 37 meters (121 feet) long, the cat is among the smaller geoglyphs in the desert; some of the largest shapes, down on the flat valley floor, span more than 500 meters (1,600 feet). Like other geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert, the cat’s ancient designers etched it into the ground by clearing away the dark surface sediment to form pale lines.

Geoglyph finds usually take months of trekking through the desert or poring over aerial photos, but the latest one was a happy accident. Workers were making improvements to a path leading up to a hilltop vantage point when they noticed the cat.