Add Azure to the list. Its routing was down for about 2 hours yesterday.
Actually, I started wondering the last few minutes : what if the next worldwar would start on the internet? Or is this a common assumption already? I had not connected Huawei to my conspiracy theory yet, but just did.
You might love Neal Stephenson's latest book "Fall, or Dodge In Hell"
It's not quite about a world war on the Internet, but it is about what could happen if the Internet suddenly stops working somewhere.
This is effectively the idea behind the Ethereum blockchain model. You can make "smart contracts" (think APIs with persistent state) using languages like Solidity[1] and deploy them onto the blockchain. After that, you can invoke individual functions by paying "gas" (small amounts of ETH) that goes to the node operator's account. Smart contracts also get their own blockchain addresses, so they're capable of sending a…
I always wondered about this, so how do projects like CryptoKitties profit? Or do they give themselves the seed cryptocollectibles and profit off of those?
> give themselves the seed cryptocollectibles and profit off of those
In CryptoKitties' case specifically, yes. Some developers bake a fee directly into the smart contract.
Several european banks are also having issues with their login sites and online services. Backends are working though. I know, it's far fetched to throw them in the same bucket, and I won't, but it feels like there is happening some kind of reorganization on the net, which in the worst case would be some kind of global state-sponsored MITM-layer getting set up, maybe to prepare for new techs like 5G and TLS1.3.
My metaphorical tinfoil hat tells me that all the sudden security meetings yesterday (Putin, European Security Council, US VP Pence) were about this.
If I were going to buy into any theory other than coincidence my bet would be on an emergency patch situation where we're seeing the rushed deployment.
I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.
So the options are: 1) a secret cyber-war is going on... 2) Some entity is installing new spying slurps 3) An (critical) IX that we werent aware of is having major issues... and we dont know who to blame on that one...
Honestly, I think it's much simpler than that -- the last decade has been a general trend of building more centralized, less resilient systems. The global internet is in an inherently unstable state because of this (i.e. when problems occur, the internet is no longer able to route around them because the problems are internal to large organizations which both control huge portions of the internet and which aren't internally incentivized to separate components -- see e.g. the AWS status images living on S3). These outages are simply more and more frequent as the system's instability increases. And they will continue to become more frequent as time goes on, until organizations realize that they can't control their own uptime unless they run their own infrastructure, at which point the pendulum will start swinging back the other way. Rinse, repeat.
Browsing it right now is a good exercise for devs who need to make sure they think about low vision/blind users who browse via audio, etc. ie "Image may contain: a dog, sunglasses"
Looks like Facebook image store is having issues. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp use the same image store, so all the services are affected.
My concern there is my understanding has always been that WhatsApp implements end to end encryption through the Signal protocol, how can images be stored and be considered end-to-end encrypted? So are only text messages end-to-end? Ignoring logs being uploaded to the cloud. I wouldn't send any sensitive pictures over WhatsApp then.
All of my VPS servers have been slammed in the last 5 days with bruteforce SSH attacks. I've never seen anything this aggressive. One of my servers got PWNed, which has never happened to me before. There's definitely some wild, shady shit going on.
I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.
Solid advice. I had fail2ban installed and enabled. SSHD Root/password login turned off and only ssh key had access. My firewall was also airtight, or so I thought. Clearly I mucked up a config or setting somewhere because the odds of someone getting past all that are extremely low. One thing I had not prepared for was IP spoofing which I learned can be prevented with a few net.ipv4.conf tweaks. I also just purchased a static IP from my provider so I can lock down ssh access even further. Here's hoping I never have to deal with this headache again! fingers crossed
> some couldn't even buy gas. How culture changes perspectives! Over here in Europe I was thinking "doesn't sound so bad". Then I realised over in the US, gas means petrol, and without petrol America doesn't work. I'll reply to any replies after I've taken the electric train home.
You're not being fair to Europe's very impressive contributions. After all, European companies lead the way in the production of rolling pollution machines, aka ICE vehicles. Besides, the US has cleaner air than most of Europe, thanks to the intense diesel particulate pollution across European cities. Who can forget the infamous Paris smog photos from a few years ago (which is still an ongoing problem)? Don't worry t…