The reason the VPN connection went fast isn't that EEEVILLL Verizon was throttling the customer's Netflix connections by doing deep packet routing and didn't do that to the VPN. The pipes Netflix bought to deliver movies to their paying customers who use Verizon weren't big enough to carry all the demand, at least at the peering* point that customer's traffic went through, while the pipes they bought or peering they got for free were big enough to reach the VPN endpoint, and the VPN endpoint had bought enough bandwidth from their ISPs to get from there to their peering point with Verizon, so there was enough bandwidth on the whole route to carry the movie that way.

That's not to say that there aren't ISPs harassing particular content (there was at least one well-publicized case a few years ago of some telco ISP blocking VOIP, and of course most of the cable modem and some DSL providers block home web servers), but this ain't one of them.

(*Peering unfortunately means two different things here - it's giving each other service for free, and it's having BGP-managed interconnections, usually at the big internet exchange locations, to pass traffic, not necessarily for free.)

The problem isn't from Verizon's backbone to the customer - otherwise the VPN connection would have also been slow. It's the pipes from Netflix and their peering/transit providers to Verizon, which aren't big enough to handle all the Netflix customers on Verizon, at least in that region.

Also, what do you mean "has to set aside 8tb for sync"? Do you mean the ISP has to provide 8TB of some kind of storage hardware, or 8 terabits per second of traffic from somewhere to somewhere else? That's fairly huge, considering that most data connections aren't much bigger than 10 Gbps per wavelength (some carriers use 40, but it's not usually price-competitive.)

Netflix either buys bandwidth or convinces ISPs to give it to them for free as peering. Its peers / transit providers are either big enough to peer with Verizon for free, or buy bandwidth from Verizon, and they don't have fat enough connections to Verizon to carry all of Netflix's traffic to this customer, at least at the peering point that Netflix's traffic uses to reach that customer (Netflix may have enough bandwidth to reach VZ customers in the other part of the country, e.g. LA peering is full while Seattle or DC isn't.)

The customer's VPN provider may very well provide free/cheap connectivity to Netflix (or at least fast enough), maybe even one of the providers Netflix buys from, because they're cheap. And they may also get it from somebody who has good bandwidth to Verizon. But peering's just peering - it's not transit.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

(First of all, to reply to the parent article, the test isn't for people graduating from college, it's for people in high school who will get to use the results to place out of courses in college. In my case that meant I could start more advanced calculus classes a year early, which was really useful, and got some extra credits for biology that didn't affect anything but probably looked good, and if I'd been at a college where tuition prices were by the course instead of the semester, it would have probably saved me some money.)

So it's nice that 39,000 students had enough high-level CS courses in high school that they were able to take the test, but that's a pretty small fraction of the number of kids entering college, even just in the STEM fields, and it's also limited to those high schools that had a good enough CS program to make it worth taking the test, so the statistics are probably not all that representative*.

(*And the fact that I misspelled "representative" in the title doesn't mean I'm bad at English; I ran out of characters in the title box. :-)

Because nobody out there has "customers who bought X also bought Y and Z" features! (But maybe this one will let Apple take some more market share from Amazon.)

The Russians didn't shoot down that plane. Ukrainian separatists did, using missiles they got from the Russians.

And it's not like the US hasn't accidentally shot down civilian aircraft before, if you remember that Iranian plane the USS Vincennes shot down.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

Residential rates matter a bit if you're trying to get people to install low-flow toilets or drought-tolerant non-grass landscaping, but if you live near the Niagara river, you can afford a lot more land than almost anybody in LA (except the folks on unstable hilltops.)

But that's not where California's water goes. 80% is for agriculture, and about half of that is for feeding cattle. It's at subsidized prices one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than residential water. There's also a good chunk of it going to industry.

Most vegetables are seasonal, not perennials, and in most climates you'd want year-round ground cover. It's ok if that's grasses that go dormant in the summer or winter, as long as they still prevent erosion and mud, but growing zucchini not only won't do the job, but you won't be able to find enough grocery bags to leave it all on your neighbors' doorsteps. Most of the SF Bay Area isn't quite right for desert-style xeroscaping (even though prickly pear cactus grows really well here), but there's a lot of low-water native vegetation that does ok.

HOAs would have a fit. But boomers were the hippie generation - we approved of healthy food, organically grown veggies, all that stuff. (As long as somebody else does the hard work :-) In my case, I don't have ground-level dirt of my own, just pots on a balcony, and the squirrels have already stolen both tomatoes, but I liked doing extensive gardening back when I had a yard. And with a yard full of zucchini, I wouldn't have to tell you kids to get off my lawn.

Given what the actual authors of TOR have said about their system over the years, the likelihood that the talk was cancelled because they've suddenly become evil (or have suddenly revealed that they've been evil all along!) vs. the likelihood that it was cancelled because the lawyers at CMU were being overly conservative and paranoid, I'll go for the latter explanation. There are projects for which that wouldn't be the case.

TOR has its limitations and weaknesses, and the developers have always tried to be upfront and public about them, both for the threat model / design and for the code itself.

No, we wouldn't need our own live smallpox to construct a vaccine against a weaponized smallpox. The original vaccine was made from cowpox, and eventually the closely related vaccinia disease, and was much safer than smallpox-based inoculation which was the other prevention available at the time.

The only reason to keep the stuff around is to attack the Russians in case they attack us with their smallpox, and we can be better people than that. Time to destroy it, and convince Putin to destroy his stockpiles also.