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IT downtime not itself going down, power failures most common cause

2022 in a nutshell: Missing SLAs, failing to meet customer expectations

Dan Robinson Wed 8 Jun 2022 // 18:32 UTC

Infrastructure operators are struggling to reduce the rate of IT outages despite improving technology and strong investment in this area.
The Uptime Institute's 2022 Outage Analysis Report says that progress toward reducing downtime has been mixed. Investment in cloud technologies and distributed resiliency has helped to reduce the impact of site-level failures, for example, but has also added complexity. A growing number of incidents are being attributed to network, software or systems issues because of this intricacy.
The authors make it clear that critical IT systems are far more reliable than they once were, thanks to many decades of improvement. However, data covering 2021 and 2022 indicates that unscheduled downtime is continuing at a rate that is not significantly reduced from previous years.

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Teeth marks yield clue to widespread internet outage in Canada

The chompers belonged to a beaver and offer a parable on the risks of a shared physical layer

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 15 Jun 2022 // 08:02 UTC

Here:s a novel cause for an internet outage: a beaver.
This story comes from Canada, where CTV News Vancouver yesterday reported that Canadian power company BC Hydro investigated the cause of a June 7 outage that "left many residents of north-western British Columbia without internet, landline and cellular service for more than eight hours."
That investigation found tooth marks at the base of a tree that fell across BC Hydro wires. Canadian mobile network operator shares the poles BC Hydro uses, so its optical fibre came down with the electrical wires.

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Cloudflare's outage was human error. There's a way to make tech divinely forgive

Don't push me 'cos I'm close to the edge. And the edge is safer if you can take a step back

Rupert Goodwins Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 09:30 UTC

Opinion Edge is terribly trendy. Move cloudy workloads as close to the user as possible, the thinking goes, and latency goes down, as do core network and data center pressures. It's true – until the routing sleight-of-hand breaks that diverts user requests from the site they think they're getting to the copies in the edge server.
If that happens, everything goes dark – as it did last week at Cloudflare, edge lords of large chunks of web content. It deployed a Border Gateway Protocol policy update, which promptly took against a new fancy-pants matrix routing system designed to improve reliability. Yeah. They know.
It took some time to fix, too, because in the words of those in the know, engineers "walked over each other's changes" as fresh frantic patches overwrote slightly staler frantic patches, taking out the good they'd done. You'd have thought Cloudflare of all people would be able to handle concepts of dirty data and cache consistency, but hey. They know that too.

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Always read the comments: Beijing requires oversight of all reader-generated chat

'Editing and review' teams will be required to read everything and report dissent

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Mon 20 Jun 2022 // 01:29 UTC

The Cyberspace Administration of China has announced a policy requiring all comments made to websites to be approved before publication.
Outlined in a document published last Friday and titled "Provisions on the Administration of Internet Thread Commenting Services", the policy is aimed at making China's internet safer, and better represent citizens' interests. The Administration believes this can only happen if comments are reviewed so that only posts that promote socialist values and do not stir dissent make it online.
To stop the nasties being published, the policy outlines requirements for publishers to hire "a review and editing team suitable for the scale of services".

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Another VPN quits India, as government proposes social media censorship powers

New Delhi now fighting criticism of eroding free speech and privacy with two proposed regulations

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Wed 8 Jun 2022 // 02:45 UTC

India's tech-related policies continue to create controversy, with fresh objections raised to a pair of proposed regulation packages.
One of those regulations is the infosec reporting and logging requirements introduced by India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) in late April. That package requires VPN, cloud, and numerous other IT services providers to collect customers' personal information and log their activity, then surrender that info to Indian authorities on demand. One VPN provider, ExpressVPN, last week quit India on grounds that its local servers are designed not to record any logs so compliance would be impossible. ExpressVPN will soon route customers' traffic outside India.
On Tuesday, another VPN – Surfshark – announced it would do likewise.

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Microsoft Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese terms

Research claims it fails to autofill certain names in Han characters, Microsoft says it's technical error

Laura Dobberstein Fri 20 May 2022 // 10:37 UTC

Updated Microsoft search engine Bing censors terms deemed sensitive in China from its autosuggestion feature internationally, according to research from Citizen Lab.
The University of Toronto research organization analyzed the search engine's autosuggestion system for censorship of nearly 100,000 names in the United States, Canada and China in both English letters and Chinese characters. Testing was done by modifying region settings, language setting and IP address geolocation.
Microsoft responded to a notification from Citizen Lab, and called [PDF] the lack of autofill terms a "technical error" and said they'd resolved the issue.

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Florida's content-moderation law kept on ice, likely unconstitutional, court says

So cool you're into free speech because that includes taking down misinformation

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Mon 23 May 2022 // 19:54 UTC

While the US Supreme Court considers an emergency petition to reinstate a preliminary injunction against Texas' social media law HB 20, the US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday partially upheld a similar injunction against Florida's social media law, SB 7072.
Both Florida and Texas last year passed laws that impose content moderation restrictions, editorial disclosure obligations, and user-data access requirements on large online social networks. The Republican governors of both states justified the laws by claiming that social media sites have been trying to censor conservative voices, an allegation that has not been supported by evidence.
Multiple studies addressing this issue say right-wing folk aren't being censored. They have found that social media sites try to take down or block misinformation, which researchers say is more common from right-leaning sources.

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China reveals its top five sources of online fraud

'Brushing' tops the list, as quantity of forbidden content continue to rise

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Tue 17 May 2022 // 03:31 UTC

China’s Ministry of Public Security has revealed the five most prevalent types of fraud perpetrated online or by phone.
The e-commerce scam known as “brushing” topped the list and accounted for around a third of all internet fraud activity in China. Brushing sees victims lured into making payment for goods that may not be delivered, or are only delivered after buyers are asked to perform several other online tasks that may include downloading dodgy apps and/or establishing e-commerce profiles. Victims can find themselves being asked to pay more than the original price for goods, or denied promised rebates.
Brushing has also seen e-commerce providers send victims small items they never ordered, using profiles victims did not create or control. Dodgy vendors use that tactic to then write themselves glowing product reviews that increase their visibility on marketplace platforms.

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Sina Weibo, China's Twitter analog, reveals users' locations and IP addresses

Sssshhhh! Nobody tell Elon Musk

Laura Dobberstein Fri 29 Apr 2022 // 08:02 UTC

To the surprise of many users, China's largest Twitter-esque microblogging website, Sina Weibo, announced on Thursday that it will publish users' IP addresses and location data in an effort to keep their content honest and nice.
In a post whose title translates as "IP Territorial Function Upgrade Announcement," the company stated it was taking the action to protect users' rights, and to make the service more pleasant to use.
"In order to reduce undesirable behaviors such as impersonating parties, malicious rumors … as well as to ensure the authenticity and transparency of the disseminated content, the site launched the 'IP Territory' function in March this year," announced the social media platform's official account in Chinese.

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At last, Atlassian sees an end to its outage ... in two weeks

Cloud collaboration biz says script deleted data that's so far been restored via backups

Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Mon 11 Apr 2022 // 23:50 UTC

The Atlassian outage that began on April 5 is likely to last a bit longer for the several hundred customers affected.
In a statement emailed to The Register, a company spokesperson said the reconstruction effort could last another two weeks.
The company's spokesperson explained its engineers ran a script to delete legacy data as part of a scheduled maintenance for unidentified cloud products. But the script went above and beyond its official remit by trashing everything.

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