Tech News

• A further look at the Twitter hack. (Krebs on Security)
  
  
  
• And what Twitter themselves are saying. (Twitter)
  
  
• Attackers were not able to view previous account passwords, as those are not stored in plain text or available through the tools used in the attack.
  

I should bloody hope not.


• Attackers were able to view personal information including email addresses and phone numbers, which are displayed to some users of our internal support tools.
  
  
And let's pause a moment to reflect that Twitter will lock your account for the most trivial of reasons - or none at all - and force you to provide a phone number to unlock it again.


• In cases where an account was taken over by the attacker, they may have been able to view additional information. Our forensic investigation of these activities is still ongoing.
  
  
Safest to assume that everything on Twitter is now in the hands of the hackers.

Speculation is swirling that the Bitcoin scam was a smokescreen to divert attention from the actual target. Twitter have confirmed that full data for certain accounts was downloaded during the hack - but that those were not verified accounts.




Curiouser - as Alice would say - and curiouser.




• Cloudflare fell over. (Cloudflare)
  
  Well, sort of.

  The affected locations were San Jose, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Richmond, Newark, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre. Other locations continued to operate normally.

  That sounds like a lot of locations but Cloudflare has a lot of locations.

The event sounds like a replay of the Northeast blackout of 1965. An issue with one network link caused traffic to be re-routed, which overloaded that link causing the combined traffic to be re-routed, and so on until large parts of the core network collapsed.

The major difference being that it took less than two hours to fix everything.

The other side of this is that a lot of sites use resources - JavaScript, CSS, fonts - from CDNs that are actually provided via Cloudflare.  So it doesn't really matter if you host your own site unless you host everything yourself.

And by everything I mean everything.  Hetzner (a major German hosting company) uses Cloudflare's DNS, so the failure cascaded to them as well.



• Among the sites affected were GitLab, Patreon, Authy, Downdetector, and BleepingComputer.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  I use some of those.
  
  
  
  
  


• Apple Watch is apparently your mother.  (9to5Mac)
  
  
  
• The Asus PN50 contains the Ryzen 7 4800U, making it by far the most powerful NUC available unless...  No, pretty sure this one is real.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the full 8-core/16-thread version.  It's about 30% faster single-threaded and 20% faster multi-threaded than my current Ryzen 7 1700.
  
  The PN50 has HDMI, Ethernet, three USB-A ports (5Gbit), two USB-C ports (10Gbit) with DisplayPort support, dual built-in microphones, an IR receiver, WiFi 6, a headphone jack and a microSD slot.  Room inside for two SO-DIMMs, an M.2 SSD and a 2.5" disk drive, and a tiny option slot that supports a choice of VGA, serial, a full-size DisplayPort, or a second Ethernet port.
  
  4.5x4.5x2".
  
  
  
• You're not shadowbanned.  It's just a coincidence that every single search and activity listing on our site accidentally excludes your content.
  
  
  
  Also please ignore the leaked screenshots showing the huge SHADOWBAN button on our internal management software.  That's simply a spelling error.
  
  
  
• Smalltalk has been ported to the Raspberry Pi.  (GitHub)
  
  By which I don't mean that the Smalltalk language is running on Linux which in turn runs on the Raspberry Pi, because that was already available.
  
  Smalltalk 80 was effectively a complete operating system, and that is now running directly on the Raspberry Pi, with nothing between you and the bare metal.
  
  
  
• Oh, and one other thing: Fuck this shit.
  
  
  
  
  A significant percentage of my day job involves integrations with Ethereum. Ethereum is hopelessly broken right now, and has been for weeks, with no end in sight.  Basically any time that chart goes above, say, 4, Ethereum-based apps run into problems.  At 40 they're deader than a doornail.
  
  Centralised solutions suffer from single points of failure, but distributed solutions suffer from infinitely many points of failure.
  

• Andrew Cuomo killed so many people that he's lost Vox.
  
  
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 19 2020 06:29 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2020 12:43 AM (PiXy!)

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