Cloudflare issued a blog post explaining how Verizon sent a large chunk of the internet offline this morning after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania. The outages affected Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others. The Register reports: For nearly three hours, network traffic that was supposed to go to some of the biggest online names was instead accidentally rerouted through a steel giant based in Pittsburgh. More than 20,000 prefixes -- roughly two per cent of the internet -- were wrongly announced by regional U.S. ISP DQE Communications: this announcement informed the sprawling internet's backbone equipment to thread netizens' traffic through one of DQE's clients, steel giant Allegheny Technologies, a rerouting that was then, mindbogglingly, accepted and passed on to the world by Verizon, a trusted major authority on the internet's highways and byways. And so, systems around the planet automatically updated, and connections destined for Facebook, Cloudflare, and others, ended up going to Allegheny, which black holed the traffic.

Internet engineers suspect that a piece of automated networking software -- a BGP optimizer called Noction -- used by DQE was to blame for the problem. But even though these kinds of misconfigurations happen every day, there is significant frustration and even disbelief that a U.S. telco as large as Verizon would pass on this amount of incorrect routing information. The sudden, wrong, change should have been caught by filters and never accepted. [...] One key industry group called Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) has four main recommendations: two technical and two cultural for fixing the problem. The two technical approaches are filtering and anti-spoofing, which basically check announcements from other network operators to see if they are legitimate and remove any that aren't; and the cultural fixes are coordination and global validation -- which encourage operators to talk more to one another and work together to flag and remove any suspicious looking BGP changes. Verizon is not a member of MANRS.

You can now download a preview version of the new Windows Terminal app from the Store on Windows 10. From a report: Microsoft released this application on the evening of June 21 after a listing showed up earlier that day. After downloading the Windows Terminal app from the Store, you can take advantage of all the new features-- including tabs, finally! You can combine tabs from the traditional Command Prompt, Linux Bash instances, and PowerShell in the same window. It's a deeply customizable environment, too.

Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet's smart city subsidiary, released its massive plan Monday to transform a slice of Toronto's waterfront into a high-tech utopia. From a report: Eighteen months in the making and clocking in at 1,524 pages, the plan represents Alphabet's first, high-stakes effort to realize Alphabet CEO Larry Page's long-held dream of a city within a city to experiment with innovations like self-driving cars, public Wi-Fi, new health care delivery solutions, and other city planning advances that modern technology makes possible. Previously, Sidewalk Labs called it "a neighborhood built from the internet up." But on Monday, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff went a step further to describe it as "the most innovative district in the world."

The plan includes: Ten new buildings of mixed-use development consisting primarily of thousands of new residential units, as well as retail and office spaces, all made from mass timber. A proposal to extend the city's light-rail system to serve the new neighborhood. Redesigning streets to reduce car use and promote biking and walking. Installation of public Wi-Fi, in addition to other sensors to collect "urban data" to better inform housing and traffic decisions, for example. Proposal to reduce greenhouse gases by up to 89 percent. Building the new Canadian headquarters of Google on the western edge of Villiers Island. Further reading: Former Firefox VP on What It's Like To Be Both a Partner of Google and a Competitor via Google Chrome; Sidewalk Labs' 1,500-Page Plan for Toronto Is a Democracy Grenade.

A group of more than 30 Microsoft employees is lobbying coworkers to stop donating to the company's political action committee in an effort to starve the PAC of funds, multiple Microsoft workers with knowledge of the efforts told OneZero. From a report: While Microsoft pitches itself as an inclusive and progressive company -- especially during Pride Month, with tweets and donations to LGBTQ+ causes -- employees who have donated to the PAC say they have no control over which candidates are being supported, meaning that they have no say when the PAC financially supports candidates whose views the employees don't want to support. Microsoft employees who spoke to OneZero -- on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals -- say that the PAC doesn't ask employees for input or supply avenues to suggest or control which candidates should be supported.

"Candidates that we dislike are those that advance policies contrary to the company's stated policies of diversity, inclusion, and growth mindset," one employee, who said they had persuaded about 10 others to stop donating to the PAC, told OneZero. The PAC is a voluntary, opt-in fund that's entirely supported by donations from more than 4,000 of Microsoft's 140,000 employees, according to a 2015 blog post. The goal of Microsoft's "MSPAC" is to "support and encourage the election to federal offices of persons who support the needs of business in a free and healthy economy," according to its website. In other words, the PAC exists to extend Microsoft's political influence and serve its business interests. It also brings prominent speakers to campus for employees who donate to MSPAC, and occasionally opens those events up to nondonors.

Apple today seeded the first beta versions of upcoming macOS Catalina update, iOS 13 update, and iPadOS update to its public beta testing group, giving non-developers a chance to try out the software ahead of their fall public release. Beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program will be able to download the macOS Catalina beta through the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences after installing the proper profile. Those who want to be a part of Apple's beta testing program can sign up to participate through the beta testing website, which gives users access to iOS, macOS, and tvOS betas. Similarly, beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program will receive the iOS 13 beta update over-the-air after installing the proper certificate on an iOS device. New features in macOS Catalina update includes: macOS Catalina eliminates the iTunes app, which has been a key Mac feature since 2001. In Catalina, iTunes has been replaced by Music, Podcasts, and TV apps. The new apps can do everything that iTunes can do, so Mac users aren't going to be losing any functionality, and device management capabilities are now handled by the Finder app. macOS Catalina has a useful new Sidecar feature, designed to turn the iPad into a secondary display for the Mac. For those with an Apple Watch set up to unlock the Mac, there's now an option to approve security prompts in Catalina by tapping on the side button of the watch. Macs with a T2 chip in them also support Activation Lock, making them useless to thieves much as it does on the iPhone. There's a new Find My app that lets you track your lost devices, and previously, this functionality was only available via iCloud on the Mac. There's even a new option to find your devices even when they're offline by leveraging Bluetooth connections to other nearby devices, something that's particularly handy on the Mac because it doesn't have a cellular connection. For developers, a "Project Catalyst" feature lets apps designed for the iPad be ported over to the Mac with just a few clicks in Xcode and some minor tweaks. Apple's ultimate goal with Project Catalyst is to bring more apps to the Mac.

Canonical has issued a statement on Ubuntu's 32-bit future, saying it will continue to build and maintain a 32-bit archive going forward. From a report: Of course, there was some negativity surrounding the decision -- as is common with everything in the world today. In particular, developers of WINE were upset, since their Windows compatibility layer depends on 32-bit, apparently. In a statement, Canonical said: "Thanks to the huge amount of feedback this weekend from gamers, Ubuntu Studio, and the WINE community, we will change our plan and build selected 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS. We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed. Community discussions can sometimes take unexpected turns, and this is one of those. The question of support for 32-bit x86 has been raised and seriously discussed in Ubuntu developer and community forums since 2014. That's how we make decisions."

A major telephone outage hit the Netherlands on Monday, taking down the country's emergency number and leaving many businesses and municipalities unreachable by phone. From a report: Police sent officers onto the streets so that people could approach them for emergency help and issued an alternative emergency phone number an hour after the outage began around 4 p.m. (1400 GMT). "We're appealing to everybody who wants to report an emergency and needs help to ... go onto the street. Police officers with walkie-talkies are taking to the streets as much as possible so they can be spoken to," police spokeswoman Suzanne van de Graaf told national broadcaster NOS. Telecom provider KPN reported on its website that the nationwide outage affected both landlines and mobile services. It said work was underway to find a solution.

The Trump administration is examining whether to require that next-generation 5G cellular equipment used in the U.S. be designed and manufactured outside China [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], WSJ reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The move could reshape global manufacturing and further fan tensions between the countries. From the report: A White House executive order last month to restrict some foreign-made networking gear and services due to cybersecurity concerns started a 150-day review of the U.S. telecommunications supply chain. As part of that review, U.S. officials are asking telecom-equipment manufacturers whether they can make and develop U.S.-bound hardware, which includes cellular-tower electronics as well as routers and switches, and software outside of China, the people said. The conversations are in early and informal stages, they said. The executive order calls for a list of proposed rules and regulations by the 150-day deadline, in October; so, any proposals may take months or years to adopt.

The proposals could force the biggest companies that sell equipment to U.S. wireless carriers, Finland's Nokia and Sweden's Ericsson, to move major operations out of China to service the U.S., which is the biggest market in the $250 billion-a-year global industry for telecom equipment and related services and infrastructure. There is no major U.S. manufacturer of cellular equipment. U.S. officials have long worried that Beijing could order Chinese engineers to insert security holes into technology made in China. They worry those security holes could be exploited for spying, or to remotely control or disable devices.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Stewart Butterfield loved the game, but not enough people agreed with him. He spent two years and raised roughly $11 million to build an online adventure game called Glitch that featured garrulous, blue-headed creatures and milk-drunk butterflies. Once people had a chance to play it and Butterfield could track the numbers, the verdict was clear: Glitch was a flop. "There was this night where I just lost faith," Butterfield said in a podcast interview. He decided in 2012 that it was game over. Butterfield made plans to shut down the company and give the remaining money back to his investors.

Andrew Braccia, a partner at venture capital firm Accel, wouldn't accept the refund. He and other investors urged Butterfield to keep the remaining $5 million and try something else. That turned into Slack Technologies, the maker of corporate chat software that went public Thursday. At the close of trading, Slack's market value was $19 billion. Accel invested about $200 million in Slack over seven years, largely driven by Braccia's unwavering faith in Butterfield. As of the stock debut, Accel held 24% of the company, the biggest VC stake in a newly public unicorn in recent history. Those shares are worth $4.6 billion today.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While plugging plug a mouse, a phone, or a thumb drive into your computer, you try to stick the USB into its slot, only to find it stopping prematurely. You flip it around, but it still won't go in. So you flip it back to the original position and it slides in without a hitch. We've all been there, and the inventor of the USB sees our pain. Ajay Bhatt, the leader behind the IBM team that gave us the USB in the mid-'90s, revealed in an interview with NPR Friday that he is well aware of the annoyances the public has with USB, or Universal Serial Bus, but there's a reason it's designed the way it is.

"The biggest annoyance is reversibility," Bhatt told NPR. For outsiders, it seems like designing the USB so it can be reversible would be an easy fix to everyone's problems, so no matter which way you stick it in it's a success. Bhatt told NPR that would have doubled the cost of the technology, requiring double the wires and circuits. Another option that the Intel team floated was a round design, but that would have been even more difficult to plug in correctly. Although the rectangle design we all know was ultimately chosen and adopted by pretty much every hardware manufacturer since Apple first put USB ports into its computers in 1998, Bhatt acknowledges that there may have been a better way. "In hindsight, based on all the experiences that we all had, of course it was not as easy as it should be," Bhatt said.

Raspberry Pi today introduced a new version of its popular line of single-board computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever, with the company promising "desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 PC systems." The specifications are: A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3x performance); 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM; full-throughput Gigabit; Ethernet; dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking; Bluetooth 5.0; two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports; dual monitor support, at resolutions up to 4K; VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x; 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video; and complete compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products. It starts at $35.

"Delta Air Lines announced it will give passengers who fly out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport the option to use facial recognition to board their flight instead of a standard boarding pass," reported a CBS affiliate this week.

The facial scanners will be installed this week at 16 gates, with availability on all international flights through Delta beginning in July. The airline is working with Customs and Border Protection on the process. The way it works is gate agents use facial scans for boarding passengers so that they don't need to manually compare their faces and their passport photos. They can skip to using the facial technology. Delta says the process saves about two seconds per passenger or about nine minutes for a plane with 270 people.
Delta says 72% of its customers have said they prefer facial recognition to standard boarding procedures. But James Lileks, a columnist for the Star Tribune, explains some of the ways this makes him uncomfortable: Here's the thing. You don't sign up for the facial recognition. You don't send them your face. They already have it. This part is just... glided over in the news reports, waved away like a minor detail you needn't worry your silly little head about.

The picture they probably have is my passport photo, taken in 2010... So I guess I'll have to stuff my cheeks with cotton before I lean into the machine that connects to a database of everyone's mug, and hope it doesn't go off
"I don't know what they do with people who grew a beard," Lileks adds, "but there's probably the option to shave on the spot."

Bill Gates "clearly hasn't got over his biggest mistake," writes Inc. columnist Chris Matyszczyk.

Speaking at a recent VC firm event, Gates told the audience: The greatest mistake ever is... whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard phone platform -- non-Apple form -- phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win...

There's room for exactly one non-Apple operating system, and what's that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M.
"You see? He couldn't even utter the word Google," quips Inc's columnist. "That's how much it hurts him."

The column also notes that Google "didn't create Android. It bought it in 2005," and "being open-source meant that Google could offer it to so many phone manufacturers around the world.... Would Microsoft have been so generous of spirit?"

schwit1 quotes SFGate: Airlines are squeezing as many passengers as they can onto their jets, but one seat manufacturer believes its product can help carriers push capacity to the absolute limit. And it may help push down fares.

Say goodbye to whatever personal space you had left.

At this week's Paris Air Show, lots of curious convention-goers eagerly wanted to try out Avio Interior's "SkyRider" saddle-like airplane seat, but that's probably not the reception it would get if people found it installed on their next flight.

SkyRider passengers would lean on a bicycle-seat type cushion that sits higher than your traditional airline seat. Legs sort of hang off the saddle, as they would if you were riding a horse. The seat back sits straight up, forcing good posture. A knee cut-out provides another precious few inches of legroom.

You're neither sitting nor standing — you're sort of leaning.
Airplanes can install the seats in part of their planes as an alternative to more expensive seating options, the article points out. But it also notes that the company "is still looking for its first buyer...and has been for nearly 10 years."

An anonymous reader quotes MarketWatch: Iran has increased its offensive cyberattacks against the U.S. government and critical infrastructure as tensions have grown between the two nations, cybersecurity firms say.

In recent weeks, hackers believed to be working for the Iranian government have targeted U.S. government agencies, as well as sectors of the economy, including oil and gas, sending waves of spear-phishing emails, according to representatives of cybersecurity companies CrowdStrike and FireEye, which regularly track such activity. It was not known if any of the hackers managed to gain access to the targeted networks...

"Both sides are desperate to know what the other side is thinking," said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye. "You can absolutely expect the regime to be leveraging every tool they have available to reduce the uncertainty about what's going to happen next, about what the U.S.'s next move will be...."
According to the article, one of the phishing emails "appeared to come from the Executive Office of the President and seemed to be trying to recruit people for an economic adviser position.

"Another email was more generic and appeared to include details on updating Microsoft Outlook's global address book."

Slashddot reader dcblogs quote Tech Target: Ten years ago, China had 21 systems on the Top500 list of the world's largest supercomputing systems. It now has 219, according to the biannual listing, which was updated just this week. At its current pace of development, China may have half of the supercomputing systems on the Top500 list by 2021.... U.S. supercomputers make up 116 of the latest Top500 list.

Despite being well behind China in total system count, the U.S. leads in overall performance, as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. The HPL benchmark is used to solve linear equations. The U.S. has about 38% of the aggregate Top500 list performance. China is in second, at nearly 30% of the performance total. But this performance metric has flip-flopped between China and the U.S., because it's heavily weighted by the largest systems. The U.S. owns the top two spots on the latest Top500 list, thanks to two IBM supercomputers at U.S. national laboratories. These systems, Summit and Sierra, alone, represent 15.6% of the HPL performance measure.
Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, says China is concerned the U.S. may limit its x86 chip imports, and while China may look to ARM, they're also investigating the RISC-V processor architecture.

Paresh Kharya, director of product marketing at Nvidia, tells Tech Target "We expect x86 CPUs to remain dominant in the short term. But there's growing interest in ARM for supercomputing, as evidenced by projects in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Supercomputing centers want choice in CPU architecture."

"In the last week, two different people have captured video of Tesla vehicles traveling down a freeway with an apparently sleeping driver behind the wheel," writes Ars Technica.

A reader shares their report: Both incidents happened in California. Last week, local television stations in Los Angeles aired footage from viewer Shawn Miladinovich of a Tesla vehicle driving on LA's 405 freeway. The driver "was just fully sleeping, eyes were shut, hands nowhere near the steering wheel," said Miladinovich, who was a passenger in a nearby car, in an interview with NBC Channel 4. Miladinovich said he saw the vehicle twice, about 30 minutes apart, as both cars traveled along the 405 freeway. The driver appeared to be asleep both times...

Another video of an apparently sleeping Tesla driver was posted to Reddit over the weekend -- this one from the San Francisco Bay Area. The Reddit user who posted the video, MiloWee, said that she tried "several times" to wake him up by honking. "It worked, but he fell back asleep," she wrote....

Last month, police in the Netherlands pulled over a Tesla driver who appeared to be asleep and intoxicated. Another video posted in January appeared to show Tesla drivers asleep at the wheel. In an incident last November, it took police in Silicon Valley seven miles to pull over a Tesla car with an apparently sleeping driver. He was arrested for driving under the influence. Another driver in early 2018 was discovered passed out behind the wheel of his stopped Tesla vehicle on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the man "attempted to reassure arresting CHP officers onsite that the car was 'on autopilot.'"

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: Mattermost, a startup developing what it characterizes as an open source messaging alternative to Google's Hangouts Chat, Atlassian's HipChat, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, today announced the closure of a $50 million series B funding round. The round was led by Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, with participation from new investor Battery Ventures, as well as existing investors Redpoint and S28 Capital.

The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company's total raised to roughly $70 million. As part of the round, Twitter COO Ali Rowghani will join Mattermost as board director and Battery Ventures' Neeraj Agarwal will join as a board observer. The raise comes as monthly downloads of the open source project pass 10,000. To date, more than 1,000 contributors have helped translate Mattermost into 16 languages.

This week the New York Times' Style section asked an interesting question. "Slack wants to replace email. Is that what we want?" The company says it has 88,000 paying customers -- a sliver of a sliver of the world's desk-and-phone-bound office workers, and fewer than work full time at, for example, Google's parent company, Alphabet. Speaking of Google, the company has a Slack alternative of its own, called Hangouts Chat, as does Facebook, in Workplace. Microsoft has Teams, which is bundled with its Office software and which the company says is being used by more than 500,000 organizations. This multifront attack on email is just beginning, but a wartime narrative already dominates: The universally despised office culture of replies and forwards and mass CCs and "looping in" and "circling back" is on its way out, and it's going to be replaced by chat apps. So what happens if they actually win...?

For the right office, it's a huge relief to chat. "I know for the engineering team it's a game-changer," said Shannon Todesca, an employee at CarGurus, an automotive shopping site. "It's used to keep track of code pushes," she said, as well as system errors. Workers also report dentist appointments and sick days to the #ooo (out of office) channel, preventing inboxes from getting clogged, or an early heads-up from getting lost. At Automattic, which runs Wordpress.com and a handful of smaller internet services, Slack is the glue that binds a fully remote "virtual office" of nearly 1,000 employees living in dozens of countries and working on vastly different products...

Rank-and-file employees were more likely to share concerns about the new era of office chat... Most common were mixed feelings, often related to privacy and productivity. "We've had to consciously discuss using Slack less often," said Lacey Berrien, who works at marketing startup Drift. "I had our IT team check a few weeks ago, and we were up to over 950 Slack channels," she said, "and that doesn't count the private ones...." I have also spent the last 10 years at companies where work chat was the norm and observed the arrival of Slack with both relief and suspicion. Finally, a better work chat app. Then: Oh god, this is really how people are going to work, now?
I remember using chat logs to trace back the discussions that led to buggy programs. (Though obviously you can do the same thing with archived emails.) So I'd be interested to hear how Slashdot's readers would answer the question.

Should Slack-like chat clients replace email?

"You open your browser to look at the Web. Do you know who is looking back at you?" warns Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler: Over a recent week of Web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web. This was made possible by the Web's biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software...

My tests of Chrome vs. Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker "cookies" that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality... And that's not the half of it. Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you're logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target ads. Don't recall signing in? I didn't, either. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail.

Chrome is even sneakier on your phone. If you use Android, Chrome sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. (If you turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just with less accuracy.)
The columnist concludes that "having the world's biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop," and argues that through its Doubleclick and other ad businesses, Google "is the No. 1 cookie maker -- the Mrs. Fields of the web."

He also reports that Firefox is now working on ways to block browser "fingerprinting".