Tech News: Cloudflare Outage Disrupts the Internet

to it first. Up. Cloud Flare, which among other things, is a content delivery network or c d N, had a widespread outage earlier this morning that affected numerous services across the Internet, which included services like discord, O'meagel, nord VPN, crunchy roll, and door dash so quick refresher. A content delivery network's purpose is to speed up access to certain services.

So ideally, if you ran a big Internet based service, you would set up servers strategically all around the world in order to deliver your service to your customers with as little delay as possible. Right So that way you had servers close to your customer basis and you know, otherwise, if you had all your servers centrally located in one place, then some people are going to get really slow service. So that's where content delivering network services kind of popped up.

Most companies don't have the facility to build out these server farms all over the world, but these companies that specifically focused on that, like cloud Flare could. However, that means that whenever cloud Flare has an outage, which has happened a few times, then that disruption affects other big entities online and it might seem like the entity itself had an outage, right like it might seem like door dashes down, but really it's more that the content delivery

network that was carrying door dash went down. Fortunately, cloud Flare was able to resolve the problem within about an hour after users began having trouble accessing services. No word yet on what actually caused the outage. Last week, cloud Flare had some similar issues in other parts of the world. So hopefully whatever is going on has been resolved to a point where we were not going to see that again. Uh,

these sort of allergies do happen. It could be very frustrating when it happens, because you know, we we rely on these services. We start to get to a point where we just feel that they're always going to be there, but we have to be reminded occasionally that it's dependent upon technology that can fail for one reason or another,

and that that will occasionally happen. So a good thing to keep in mind, because you don't ever want to be so dependent upon services that could potentially go away that you are in a really bad situation when those services do go down. U S. Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts issued a letter raising concerns about Amazon's Ring products. So, looking at Ring one way, you would say it's a smart doorbell and it's a security system component. But if you look at it another way, you could say Ring

is really a network of surveillance devices. And Marky's letter was in part a reaction to a report from Consumer Reports that once a Ring doorbell's motion sensor goes off, the doorbell can record conversation level audio from up to twenty five feet away. Mark's concern, and I think it's a reasonable one, is that these devices pose a huge

threat to privacy. The doorbells could be recording private conversations, perhaps even conversations that are happening inside the house that has the Ring doorbell, and Marky wrote quote, since Ring has well over ten million device users, it appears likely that Ring products record millions of Americans activity without their knowledge every day. A This surveillance system threatens the public

in ways that go far beyond abstract privacy invasion. Individuals may use Ring devices audio recordings to facilitate blackmail, stalking, and other damaging practices. As Ring products capture significant amounts of audio on private and public property adjacent to dwellings with Ring doorbells, including recordings of conversations that people reasonably expect to be private, the public's right to as symbol, move and converse without being tracked is at risk end quote.

Hopefully Marky's concern will encourage other lawmakers to look into the topic and perhaps rain in some of the surveillance features of the Ring products. Mark Zuckerberg recently released a video showing off four prototype mixed reality headsets that Meta has been working on in its quest to bring the

Metaverse to life. Three of the four prototypes focused on specific goals that mixed reality headsets need to achieve in order to create a really compelling experience, which range from depth of focus too high resolution like retinal image level resolution to HDR support. That's high dynamic range, which is mostly about representing brightness and color representation as accurately as possible. The fourth was really a concept in making a very

lightweight headset. So these headsets are all focusing on critical components to the company's vision of the metaverse future. Presumably users will be dawning headgear to interact with these persistent online environments. There's still a lot of work to be done, not just on the headset hardware, but also building out the infrastructure that would support a robust online environment capable

of hosting tens of thousands of people. Zuckerberg himself said that we're quote pretty far off end quote from that future during a roundtable discussion. Francis Hogan, the former Facebook employee who handed over hundreds of internal documents to US authorities that showed how the company was being we'll say Lucy Goosey with Data Policies, is now putting together a nonprofit organization designed to train lawyers on how to fight

against big tech companies. Part of our goal is to build out a simulated social network so that you know lawyers, lawmakers, regulators, and more. Such folks can war game different scenarios that mimic the sort of things we encounter in real life, such as you know, body accounts that are violating misinformation policies, or the platform itself harvesting user data without permission. And we've been seeing a growing resistance to the rising power

of tech platforms around the world. I think this is just another example of that. Former Tesla employees have filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming it violated a federal law that requires companies to give advanced notice of mass layoffs before handing out pink slips. The layoffs happened at a Tesla Giga factory plant in Sparks, Nevada, reportedly affecting more than five hundred employees, and the law states that companies have to give sixty days notice before

conducting those kinds of layoffs. The lawsuit alleges that Tesla terminated employees on the spot with no advanced warning. Elon Musk has dismissed the whole matter, saying, quote, it seems like anything related to Tesla gets a lot of clicks, whether it is trivial or significant. I would put that lawsuit. You're referring to in the trivial category end quote, I'm pretty sure for the five plus folks who were fired

it was anything but trivial. And on a related note, among folks recently laid off by Tesla, where some employees who were leaders in diversity and inclusivity programs at the company, that includes the president of the l g B t Q plus community in Tesla and considering Elon Musk has talked about a quote woke mind virus in the quote that brings up the question of whether or not those employees were specifically singled out amid the layoffs, something that

would be very much illegal if that were the case. Variety reports that Netflix is getting ready to hold another layoffs itself. The company had laid off a hundred fifty employees back in May and where it has it that this next round should be around the same size. Netflix has had a remarkable change in fortune in twenty two.

Earlier this year, the company posted its first net loss in subscriber numbers in its history, and that precipitated a dramatic drop in investor confidence as folks began selling off Netflix stock, and that plunged the stock value in the process. In fact, Netflix is stock today is almost seventy lower in price than it was at the beginning of the year. Now, there is no denying that Netflix is in a very different environment than it was even just a few years ago.

So for a while, Netflix was the only major streaming service on the market, but gradually services like Hulu, HBO, Max, Disney Plus and more began to drink Netflix's milkshake. So while I still get a bit antsy over folks treating growth as the only metric that really adders, I have to admit Netflix isn't in the dominating position it was just a few years ago. All Right, We've got a couple more news stories that I want to cover before

we close this out. My apologies for this being so short, but as you could probably tell, a bit short on breath myself. But first, before we get to those last few stories, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back. South Korea has become the tenth country in the world capable of sending a satellite up into orbit on its own, and just the seventh country in the world that can

send up a satellite that's heavier than a ton. So the country launched a three stage rocket from the Niro Space Center and it's successfully guided a one and a half ton satellite into orbit. The country has some pretty ambitious goals set for the near future. I mean, considering this was the first time it was successful in launching a payload into orbit. It there had been a previous

attempt that was unsuccessful to launch a dummy satellite into orbit. Well, they're now planning on sending up a lunar rover to the Moon, obviously lunar in August of this year, which I think is really cool and like I said, really ambitious. They went straight from let's launch this, uh, this one payload into orbit to let's launch this and have it

land on the Moon. NASA meanwhile is choosing which instruments it needs to shut down on the Voyager spacecraft in order to keep the spacecraft operational for as long as possible.

The two Voyager probes were first launched into space way back in nineteen Their star Wars came out and they conducted flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, and then they both kept ongoing after their mission objectives were complete, and eventually the two Voyager probes passed out of the area that's generally considered to be our solar system, which means these two probes became the first human spacecraft to enter inter

interstellar space. So in order to conserve power and have them operate for as long as possible, NASA is gonna shut down some of the instrumentation aboard the probes and hopefully keep them running to at least and potentially beyond. Both probes rely on plutonium as a power source, and

they use low powered computer systems. A software engineer from Hungary named Nicola Chien demonstrated that he could harvest a chip from a cheap smart lamp that came out of Ikea for like fifteen bucks and use that chip to serve as a processor on a home built system that could run the first level of the classic first person shooter video game Doom. And I thought this was a neat story that showed how far processors have come in.

You know, you know, something that now powers a simple smart lamp is sophisticated enough to handle running a computer game that just a few decades ago was considered state of the art. Now I should add that Rachel did cobbled together other components to make this all work. It

wasn't like the one chip could power everything. Uh, the chip from the lamp really just served as a primitive CPU rachee and wired eight megabytes of flash memory to this and several other components as well, including a very low resolution screen. Um I think it had something like thirty or thirty five frames per second playback speed in order to make all of this work. Still really really impressive that you could harvest a chip off a lamp and have it play a classic computer game. And that's

it for the news for today. Tuesday, June twenty one, twenty twenty two. Hope you're all well. If you would like to get in touch with me, a couple of different ways you can do that. One is to use the I Heart Radio App's free to download. Just navigate over to the tech Stuff page on the I Heart Radio app and there's a little microphone icon. You can click on that and leave a voice message of up to thirty seconds and lengths if you like. You can even let us know if you would like us to

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