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Censorship

Libya Blocks Internet Traffic->

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes "After slowly returning to the Internet, Libya has gone again.

At about 7 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday Internet traffic coming in and out of Libya dropped to nearly zero, where it remains, according to Google's Transparency Report.

Libya had previously lost much of its connectivity on Feb. 18. The country's Internet activity returned at about 1 a.m. Eastern time after being out for about seven hours. Initially some analyst s thought it might be the Libyan government attempting a "dry run" of cutting off the Internet and other communications the way the Egyptian government did in January.

But James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, an information technology consultancy, said this time it is different from the case in Egypt, or even the previous service outages. "It's like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the roads are there, there just isn't any traffic," he said."
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Politics

Dirty Bomb in Genoa Harbor->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A freight container has been held in the port city of Genoa for 6 months. The authorities there found the highly radio active container by chance during a demonstration of the procedures. Genoa is a popular way-point for containers heading west from the Indian Ocean Ports like Yemen and Somalia."
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Censorship

Tunisian Government Using Javascript Injection?->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "The Tunisian Internet Agency (Agence tunisienne d'Internet or ATI) is being blamed for the presence of injected JavaScript that captures usernames and passwords. The code has been discovered on login pages for Gmail, Yahoo, and Facebook, and said to be the reason for the recent rash of account hijackings reported by Tunisian protesters. Will Tunisia (and Algeria?) use these steps to counter another Green Revolution?"
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Sci-Fi

Fermi scope spots antimatter from thunderstorms->

Submitted by abelian
abelian writes "In a beautiful piece of scientific serendipity, the Fermi space telescope has spotted streams of antimatter produced by thunderstorms just over the horizon on Earth. The streams of positrons — and their matter counterpart, electrons — seem to be related to terrestrial gamma-ray bursts, created in thunderstorms.

The BBC's article quotes Steven Cummer, an atmospheric electricity researcher from Duke University in North Carolina, who called the find "truly amazing".

"I think this is one of the most exciting discoveries in the geosciences in quite a long time — the idea that any planet has thunderstorms that can create antimatter and then launch it into space in narrow beams that can be detected by orbiting spacecraft to me sounds like something straight out of science fiction," he said.

"It has some very important implications for our understanding of lightning itself. We don't really understand a lot of the detail about how lightning works. It's a little bit premature to say what the implications of this are going to be going forward, but I'm very confident this is an important piece of the puzzle.""
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The Internet

How WikiLeaks Survived .. and Flourished->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "How has WikiLeaks managed not only to avoid takedown, but diversify its hosting to the point of virtual unstoppability? Renesys takes a look at the DNS mappings, routed IP prefixes, and service providers (and countries) that keep WikiLeaks on the air.

From the article:
"It's apparent that search and social infrastructure (Google and Twitter) now play a key role in re-spawning content that gets blocked in any one place, and drawing even more attention to the surviving copies. If suppressed content automatically goes viral, the Internet's construction basically guarantees that that content will have a home for the rest of time. If you attack DNS support, people will tweet raw IP addresses. If you take down the BGP routes to web content, people will put up more mirrors, or switch to overlay networks to distribute the data. You can't burn down the Library of Alexandria any more— it will respawn in someone's basement in Stockholm, or Denver, or Beijing.""
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The Internet

Afghan Government Turns to Iran for Internet->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "Renesys describes new evidence that the Iranian national telecommunications provider, DCI, is selling (uncensored?) Internet connectivity to customers in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan:

"The Internet connectivity outreach that we now see in the global routing tables seems like continuing evidence of Iran's long-term strategy: aggressively pursuing bilateral infrastructure and investment projects with its neighbors, in ways that will increase Iran's regional influence after the Americans have moved on.""
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Security

How To Build A Cybernuke->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "Could a single actor (state-sponsored or otherwise) crash the Internet and bring civilization to a halt? The Renesys Blog tries to bust the myth of the Chinese Cybernuke, explores 3 options for constructing one, and finds it Plausible (if only just)."
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The Internet

Russia Provides Internet Transit to Iranian Regime-> 3

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes ""Where does the Iranian government purchase its international Internet transit? Think for a moment about the constraints that they have to satisfy. They need enough capacity to sustain a 21st century information economy. They want to maintain centralized control over all that information. They have the challenge of maintaining adequate logical and physical diversity, so that a single point of failure can't take down the whole country's Internet access (unless they choose to do so themselves!). And they have the additional headache of choosing providers that are geopolitically diverse, to route around sanctions and military threats." Enter the Russians."
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The Internet

Visualizing the Iranian Web Proxy Cloud->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "Web proxies have played a key role this week in keeping the Internet open in Iran, despite the government's censorship and deep packet inspection. Now Renesys has used Google Earth to create a geographic visualization of Iran's domestic and international Internet connections, as well as nearly two thousand proxies spread over 87 countries worldwide. Open web proxies found on Twitter were drawn as parabolic arcs, "fountaining" out of a cable landing or Internet traffic exchange point that makes approximate sense for their Iranian Internet routing. For example, all of the contributed web proxies in Europe were drawn from the Marseilles termination of the Sea-Me-We-4 cable, and the web proxies in Turkey were drawn in light blue, radiating from Ankara, where the Iran-Turkey gas pipeline passes through on its way from Bazargan to European markets."
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The Internet

Startup threatened into settling over hyperlinking

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case. Under the agreement, real estate startup BlockShopper can no longer include hyperlinks anywhere on its website to Jones Day, a massive Chicago law firm, except explicitly on URL text. Essentially, jonesday.com is okay, but not blah blah blah. Rest of the story here"
Networking

Router Vendor Omits Range Check, Crashes Internet->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "A bug by router vendor A (omitting a range check from a critical field in the configuration interface) tickled a bug from router vendor B (dropping BGP sessions when processing some ASPATH attributes with length very close to 256), causing a ripple effect that caused widespread global routing instability last week. The flaw lay dormant until one of vendor A's systems was deployed in an autonomous system whose ASN, modulo 256, was greater than 250. At that point, the Internet was one typo away from disaster. Other router vendors, who were not affected by the bug, happily propagated the trigger message to every vulnerable system on the planet in about 30 seconds. Few people appreciate how fragile and unsecured the Internet's trust-based critical infrastructure really is — this is just the latest example."
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Security

What could you do if you pwn3d a root server?->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "It shouldn't be too hard to see that you could end up answering every DNS query from an organization that came to you for an updated list of root name servers. Every one. And you might end up doing this for a very long time, especially if your answers were largely correct. An attack like this would have no resemblance to the YouTube hijack, where the entire planet gets a blank page and it's immediately apparent that something isn't right. Obvious events like this will continue to occur, and we'll continue to resolve them relatively quickly. But as this incident demonstrates, DNS hijacks are far less obvious and potentially far more harmful."
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Security

Identity Theft Hits Root Servers: ICANN Responds->

Submitted by Barlaam
Barlaam writes "Quoting: 'ICANN has also been monitoring the results returned by these IP addresses through the entire time it was advertised, and believes it was always providing accurate root responses throughout its existence. ICANN continues to work with the root server operator community to improve monitoring and analysis of the root server system, aiming to ensure the continued security and stability of this critical component of the Internet.'"
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Executive ability is prominent in your make-up.