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Networking

Submission + - Juniper at the root of Internet outage? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Juniper routers are reportedly behind an Internet outage that affected service providers and Web sites around the globe Monday morning. The blogosphere was abuzz on reports that a core dump of main memory on Juniper routers knocked off sites worldwide. The core memory dump, which affected routers running Junos 10.2 and 10.3, was caused by a BGP update bug, according to tweets from affected sites. Juniper acknowledged that its edge routers were experiencing a BGP anomaly and that it issued a software fix. Earlier, Level 3 reported outages due to its routers but did not name the router vendor.
Network

Submission + - Global BGP issues due to Juniper bug (phyber.com) 3

Submitted by
FST777
FST777 writes: "Many folks around the globe report Level 3 was down, however, the cause might be even more global. Apparently, a firmware bug in JunOS 10.3 (and possibly also 10.2) caused many, many Juniper routers to reboot upon an incoming BGP update (which might have been crafted to do just that).

Needless to say, all Juniper routers disappearing from the global BGP tables has quite an impact."
Android

Siri Gives Apple Two Year Advantage Over Android 800

Posted by samzenpus from the head-of-the-class dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Gary Morgenthaler, a recognized expert in artificial intelligence and a Siri board member, says that Apple now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best smartphone platform. 'What Siri has done is changed people's expectations about what's possible,' says Morgenthaler. 'Apple has crossed a threshold; people now expect that you should be able to expect to speak ordinary English — and be understood. Siri has cracked the code.' The threshold, from mere speech recognition to natural language input and understanding, is one that Google cannot cross by replicating the technology or making an acquisition adds Morgenthaler. 'There's no company out there they can go buy.' Morgenthaler's comments echo the recent article in Forbes Magazine, 'Why Siri Is a Google Killer' that says that Apple's biggest advantage over any other voice application out there today is the massive data Siri will collect in the next 2 years — all being stored in Apple's massive North Carolina data center — that will allow Siri to get better and better. 'Siri is a new interface for customers wanting to get information,' writes Eric Jackson. 'At the moment, most of us still rely on Google for getting at the info we want. But Siri has a foot in the door and it's trusting that it will win your confidence over time to do basic info gathering.'"
Medicine

Virtual Lab Rat Saves Human Lives 69

Posted by samzenpus from the break-out-the-pretend-cheese dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There is already a Virtual Physiological Human project going on in Europe, to program a simulated human that can serve as a guinea pig, but this National Institute of Health effort to program a Virtual Physiological Rat promises to help humans even more. It's too difficult to simulate humans with algorithms, but the simpler rat physiology can be easily programmed, and by hand-tweaking its virtual genes, these rats-in-an-algorithm can be set up to what-if about interventions that cure human diseases more easily that when simulating humans directly. Long live the virtual lab rat!"

Comment Re:The free market (Score 1) 203

by RabidMonkey (#36943754) Attached to: Hackers Could Open Convicts' Cells In Prisons

I politely disagree - when you have corporation that have their hands on lawmakers strings, or you have lawmakers who are on the boards of various corporations/etc, you have the 'free market' influencing who is a criminal.

Want proof - read the front page of slashdot today. Or any other day .. the BSA, RIAA, etc ...

So, more realistically, it's the government who decides, with the influence of the free market.

Comment Re:Best Buy tried to sell me an HDMI cable... (Score 1) 664

by RabidMonkey (#36665430) Attached to: Retailer Calls Rivals' Bluff On "HDMI Scam"

No the real mistake was thinking you could haggle with service-level employees at a multinational company. That's the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.

My fiancee has managed to swing deals in many big retail chains - it takes a little persistence, and the ability/desire to walk away. even if walk away means walking out the door, waiting 20 minutes, and coming back to get a different sales guy.

She's Chinese, and says that white people are nuts for paying full price ... and I've seen that it's true. Just asking a simple question ("Can you do anything on the price?") has saved us hundreds of dollars (or gotten us lots of stuff thrown in).

I'm a convert, but I still have a hard time with it. I look at the price tag, decide if I can afford to pay that, and buy it if I can. She looks at a price tag and sees a challenge.

Comment ... and then it went down (Score 1) 195

by RabidMonkey (#36554898) Attached to: Valve's <em>Team Fortress 2</em> Goes Free-To-Play

Last night I tried to sign in to play, and TF2 wouldn't even launch. It looks like their service was *massively* overloaded.

I bought the game 4 years ago now and I have gotten my money out of it in hours played, however it still irks me that a game I paid for is unavailable to me because of free players jumping on board.

TF2 servers were already frequently full of whiners and trolls, I'm afraid of what this new influx of players will mean. Hopefully the TF2 servers (yes, I know games aren't hosted on their servers, but login/etc is) can handle the new load.

How Apple's iOS Went From Insecure To Most Secure 312

Posted by CmdrTaco from the shaking-in-my-boots dept.
GMGruman writes "There's no such thing as a perfectly secure operating system, but security experts agree — somewhat grudgingly in some cases — that iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, is the most secure commercial OS today, mobile or desktop. It didn't start that way of course, and Robert Lemos explains what Apple did to go from insecure to most secure."
Books

Amazon To Let Libraries Lend Kindle Books 135

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-won't-give-it-back dept.
Last month we reported that Amazon was confronting lenders of Kindle e-books. Today, thebian writes "Amazon announced yesterday that it would allow 11,000 libraries in the US to lend ebooks. The press release doesn't say exactly when this will start. Amazon is trying to speed the adoption of the Kindles. If people are slow to flock to the device the reason is the high prices the publishers cling to. Amazon itself sometimes undercuts Kindle prices, and almost always some booksellers on the Amazon Marketplace undercut the Kindle. There's no indication about what books might be offered through this program."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft buys 666,000 IP addresses (internetgovernance.org) 1

Submitted by
RabidMonkey
RabidMonkey writes: "Microsoft has managed to purchase 666,624 IP addresses from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel for $7.5 million. This works out to $11.25/ip. An exact list of blocks isn't available yet. There has been a lot of discussion on NANOG about whether this allowed or not, and what the implications to the dwindling IPv4 pool may be. Is this the first of many such moves as IPv4 address space has run out? Will ARIN step in and block the sale/transfer? How long will such measures drag out the eventual necessity of IPv6?"

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