Jen breaks the Internet The Internet is currently slowed down because of a massive DDoS attack against one anti-spam organization. At least this is the story being reported everywhere, from the New York Times to The Guardian. Or is it? Spamhaus is a non-profit organisation dedicated to fighting unsolicited communications Read more
There is a saying in Spanish that I’ve always liked: “pueblo chico, infierno grande” (small town, big hell). The Internet is vast, but social media has brought us together in ways that constantly remind me of this phrase. Short social connection pathways lead to clusters of communities where a tiny Read more
Privacy is dead. There is no such thing as privacy. We are all under constant, unending, crushing surveillance. Depressed? You should be. This is the powerful conclusion reached by security guru Bruce Schneier in this brilliant op-ed for CNN. Schneier writes: “The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit Read more
Continuing on the series on Internet centrality, an important element of the argument that the web is greatly centralised rests on the fact that the Web’s architecture is becoming less distributed with time. The push towards the cloud has been translated into fewer name servers, and fewer hosting choices. Pingdom, Read more
Earlier today, the caching and security service provider CloudFlare went down, taking with it more than 700 thousand websites for over an hour (including our very own SCRIPTed journal). While downtime is to be expected even in the ever-connected world, what piqued my interest about this event is the nature Read more
The High Court of England and Wales has produced another blocking order for UK Internet service providers (ISPs) against three torrent sites. The action was brought by the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) against the main UK ISPs in order to obtain a blocking order against three torrent indexing sites, Read more