* Posts by pd4361

3 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Aug 2020

CenturyLink L3 outage knocks out web giants and 3.5% of all internet traffic

pd4361

I think that the global impact was down to DNS servers being taken out - DNS caching kept most things going, but the outage was so long that by the end of it, cached entries were starting to expire - and presumably the least-used ones went first.

In my case, email stopped working, and I found that the name of my mail router wasn't resolvable on Virgin Media's DNS servers. However, it was still OK on Google's DNS service (8.8.8.8), so I switched to that. I tried dnschecker.org and found that my mail router wasn't resolvable on roughly half of the randomly-selected DNS servers - but e.g google.co.uk was still resolvable on all of them

Firefox maker Mozilla axes a quarter of its workforce, blames coronavirus, vows to 'develop new revenue streams'

pd4361

So with a bit of luck, FF should have 25% less useless new features and disabled previously-useful features. Could be a good move.

'We stopped ransomware' boasts Blackbaud CEO. And by 'stopped' he means 'got insurance to pay off crooks'

pd4361

Bit ironic that one of the organisations hit was the Bletchley Park Trust. Now in the good old days, they'd have sent a team of boffins round to Blackbaud and decrypted the files for them ;)