Lifeboat Foundation

Early Tuesday morning, large portions of the web sputtered out for about an hour. The downed sites shared no obvious theme or geography; the outages were global, and they hit everything from Reddit to Spotify to The New York Times. (And yes, also WIRED.) In fact, the only thing they have in common is Fastly, a content-delivery network (CDN) provider whose predawn hiccup reverberated across the internet.

You may not have heard of Fastly, but you likely interact with it in some fashion every time you go online. Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, it’s one of the biggest CDN providers in the world. And while Fastly has been vague about what specific glitch caused Tuesday’s worldwide disruptions, the incident offers a stark reminder of how fragile and interconnected internet infrastructure can be, especially when so much of it hinges on a handful of companies that operate largely outside of public awareness.

GPU shipments were way up during Q1 as Nvidia, AMD, and others struggle to meet ongoing pandemic-driven demand.

Echolocation for humans. Original post https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article…

With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds, and interpreting the sounds of the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment.

In as few as 10 weeks, researchers were able to teach participants how to navigate obstacles and recognize the size and orientation of objects using the rebounding calls of their clicks. The experiment involved 12 participants who’d been diagnosed as legally blind during their childhood, and 14 sighted people.

Continue reading “Humans Can Learn How to ‘Echolocate’ in Just 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows” »

Relativity Space, a California-based aerospace manufacturer, has revealed a new rocket that is both 3D printed and fully reusable. The Terran R could serve as a competitor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and is planned for launch in 2024.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson could fly to space just a bit earlier than Blue Origin and SpaceX’s founders.

B.1.1.28.2 variant.

India News: The National Institute of Virology, Pune, has detected a new Covid-19 variant — B.1.1.28.2 — through genome sequencing of samples from international t.

The world is entering a new era of warfare, with artificial intelligence taking center stage. AI is making militaries faster, smarter and more efficient. But if left unchecked, it threatens to destabilize the world.

“Siloscape”, the first malware to target Windows containers, breaks out of Kubernetes clusters to plant backdoors and raid nodes for credentials.

Windows containers have been victimized for over a year by the first known malware to target Windows containers. The ongoing campaign pierces Kubernetes clusters so as to plant backdoors, allowing attackers to steal data and user credentials, or even hijack an entire databases hosted in a cluster.

The malware was discovered by Unit 42 security researcher Daniel Prizmant. He dubbed it Siloscape, which he pronounces “Silo escape.” The malware pries open known vulnerabilities in web servers and databases so as to compromise Kubernetes nodes and to backdoor clusters.

The rodents, which live at elevations of more than 15000 feet, have fluffy tails that act as rudders while they sail between rocky cliffs.