To launch an effective Denial of Service attack, your bots need to overwhelm your target with a flood of requests; the more bandwidth and computing-power your target has, the more you need to knock them off the internet.

With the rise of white nationalist groups whose allies in government extend all the way to the President of the United States, tech companies are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of deciding where tolerance begins and ends — where they have a duty to step in and silence certain kinds of speech.

Caltech posted video of a stable plasma torus, created by engineers using water and a dielectric plate: "lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle."

In addition, engineers working with the plasma noticed that their cell phones encountered high levels of radio frequency noise—static—while they were in the same room as the experiment.

"Something like ten percent of the web flows through Cloudflare's network," states Nick Sullivan, Head of Cryptography for internet "gatekeeping" service Cloudflare.

So, in order to keep their client's protected, they need to generate a lot of unpredictable, completely random numbers. — Read the rest

Cloudflare's joint research with "a large e-commerce site" and Mozilla found that between 4-10% of secure, encrypted web connections are "intercepted," largely by corporate antivirus software that inserts its own certificates into users' browsers, allowing it to scan all traffic entering workers' computers.

Cloudflare presents a primer on "anti-patterns" that have transformed IoT devices into ghastly security nightmares.

A group of security researchers from academe and industry (including perennial Boing Boing favorite J Alex Halderman) have published an important paper documenting the prevalence and problems of firewalls that break secure web sessions in order to scan their contents for undesirable and malicious content.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Snap, Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Dropbox, Cloudflare, Box, eBay, GitHub, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Medium, Mozilla, Patreon, Paypal, Pinterest, Reddit, Salesforce, Spotfy, Stripe, Wikimedia, Yelp, Y Combinator and many, many others (97 in all!) have co-signed an amicus brief filed with the Ninth Circuit to oppose Trump's Muslim Ban, as part of the ongoing litigation over the constitutionality of Trump's chaotic executive order.

A group of tech firms will meet today to plan the filing of an amicus brief in support of lawsuit to challenge U.S. President Donald Trump's "Muslim Ban."

Trump's order was issued on Friday, and restricts immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries in which Trump has no business interests. — Read the rest

Insecure desktop operating systems (and even server/CMS vulnerabilities) has led to the creation of enormous, powerful botnets comprised of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of machines — and thanks to the law of supply and demand, it's remarkably cheap and easy to rent time on a botnet and blast any site of your choosing off the Internet.

Jenna McLaughlin at The Intercept writes that Apple CEO Tim Cook "lashed out at the high-level delegation of Obama administration officials who came calling on tech leaders in San Jose last week."  — Read the rest

In the month since network security giant Juniper Networks was forced to admit that its products had NSA-linked backdoors, the company's tried a lot of different strategies: minimizing assurances, apologies, firmware updates — everything, that is, except for removing th Dual_EC random number generator that is widely understood to have been compromised by the NSA.

Internet harassment doesn’t just stay on the internet any more. Banned from 4chan, the 'net's worst trolls are making life hell for "social justice warriors."

Several high-profile speakers have bailed on RSA's annual security conference over the revelation that the company sabotaged its products at the behest of the NSA. There's even a petition to get Stephen Colbert to cancel his keynote.

Now, there's an alternative conference that will run at the Metreon down the street from RSA's show. — Read the rest

Last week, I blogged Brian Krebs's amazing piece on AsylumBooter, a cheesy denial-of-service-for-hire site apparently run by a 17-year-old Chicago-area honor-roll student named Chandler Downs, whose PayPal account was flush with more than $30,000 paid by people who'd launched more than 10,000 online attacks. — Read the rest

Brian Krebs delves into the world of "booter" services, low-level, amateurish denial-of-service websites where you can use PayPal to have your video-game enemies' computers knocked off the Internet by floods of traffic. Many booter services run off the same buggy codebase, and Krebs was apparently able to get inside the administrative interfaces for them and get some insight into their business. — Read the rest

Sam Biddle writes that this week's epic, internet-shaking DDOS was a lie. Spamhaus was indeed under a record-size denial-of-service attack, but the protection company it hired, Cloudflare, turns out to be the only source of the bigger story that went with it: that the internet at large was significantly affected.

The Internet has been groaning under the weight of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Domain Name Service, apparently aimed at anti-spam vigilantes Spamhaus, in retaliation for their blacklisting of Dutch free speech hosting provider Cyberbunker. At 300 mbps, the DDoS is the worst in public Internet history. — Read the rest