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- DDoS Attacks 🖥️ , Space Satellites 📡 , and the Passwordless Future 📱
DDoS Attacks 🖥️ , Space Satellites 📡 , and the Passwordless Future 📱
10/11/2023
Tech News 📡
In August and September, Cloudflare, Google, and Amazon mitigated what they described as the largest DDoS layer 7 attacks ever recorded, enabled by a zero-day vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol, dubbed “HTTP/2 Rapid Reset.” The HTTP/2 protocol, which allows multiple simultaneous requests to a website over a single connection, thereby speeding up page loading, was exploited by attackers who sent and immediately canceled “hundreds of thousands” of requests to HTTP/2-utilizing websites. This overwhelmed servers and took them offline, with Google recording the heaviest assault at over 398 million requests per second, a staggering seven times larger than any such attack it had previously recorded.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a low earth orbit satellite broadband initiative and a rival to SpaceX's Starlink, successfully launched its first two prototype satellites, marking a significant milestone for the project. Deployed 311 miles above Earth by an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, these satellites are the initial iterations of over 3,200 that Project Kuiper plans to manufacture and deploy within the next six years. The first production satellites are slated for launch in the first half of 2024, and Amazon anticipates beta testing with early commercial customers by the end of that year.
Trending Startups📱
AppManager leverages the power of AI to make app and user provisioning not only affordable but also effortless, especially for startups. The platform allows for streamlined user management, enabling the addition or removal of users across apps in a unified manner. It also facilitates subscription management by keeping track of app subscription costs and allowing users to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel them directly from AppManager. Additionally, it provides a clear breakdown of each employee's app subscription costs, helping businesses make informed decisions regarding app usage and spending.
Frigade provides a platform that allows developers to build better product onboarding experiences faster, utilizing React components and a robust API. The platform is designed to be loved by engineers, offering beautiful, unstyled components that serve as building blocks for product onboarding, enabling developers to get started in minutes. Frigade also provides a platform that includes integrations with various tools like Segment, Mixpanel, and Sendgrid, and features like content management, versioning, and customer journey tracking, aiming to grow product adoption while maintaining control over the frontend user experience.
AI 🤖
CallZen employs a sophisticated multilingual AI engine to transcribe and summarize calls across various languages and dialects, providing a comprehensive overview of customer conversations across all channels, including calls, chats, and meetings. The platform enables businesses to track key moments in conversations, score calls and chats with AI based on configured business parameters, collect and track customer feedback, monitor conversations between customers and partners, and validate agent actions on the CRM. It also offers automated quality management, agent performance monitoring, custom reporting, and analytics on conversations, aiming to boost business efficiency through AI-driven insights and actionable data.
Translate.Video, a product of Vitra.ai, offers a one-click solution to translate videos, aiming to help creators reach a global audience by providing automated transcripts, closed captions, instant subtitles, human-like voiceovers, and more. The platform is designed to simplify captioning, subtitling, and dubbing, offering features like generating captions, translating subtitles, video dubbing, AI voice-over, voice recording, transcription, and exporting in various formats like SRT, VTT, and MP4. It allows content creators to make their content accessible across platforms and translate and subtitle videos at a significantly faster pace, thereby scaling their content reach globally.
Coding & Development 🖥️
Bruno introduces itself as a fresh and innovative open-source API client, aiming to shake up the current landscape dominated by tools like Postman and Insomnia. It stores API request collections directly on your filesystem using a plain text markup language named Bru. Bruno operates offline-only, with a firm stance against adding cloud-sync, prioritizing data privacy and insisting that your data should remain on your device. The tool allows collaboration over API collections using Git or any version control system of your choice, and it is positioned as a fast, Git-friendly API client.
Madza, a developer, shares 65 insights and tips that they wish they knew when they started coding, aiming to prepare new developers for their journey ahead. The insights range from the importance of problem-solving, planning, and understanding that coding should be the last phase of a project, to the significance of being curious about how things work, and the value of understanding and learning from mistakes. The article also touches on the importance of not comparing oneself to others, learning to say no, and ensuring proper sleep and physical activity to boost productivity. Madza emphasizes that the coding journey is unique for every individual and that continuous learning and being adaptable are key to navigating through it.
Miscellaneous 🌀️
Google is amplifying its commitment to a passwordless future by making passkeys the default option across personal Google Accounts. Passkeys, which were introduced earlier this year, offer a simpler and more secure way to sign into accounts online, utilizing a fingerprint, face scan, or pin to unlock devices. They are touted to be 40% faster and more secure than traditional passwords. While the adoption of passkeys is being encouraged, Google acknowledges that passwords may linger for a while, and users will still have the option to use them for sign-ins and may opt out of passkeys by toggling off the “Skip password when possible” option.
Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, has been reported to make false claims regarding the 2020 presidential election, stating it was "stolen by a massive amount of election fraud" and citing platforms like Rumble and Substack as sources. The false information and the baseless allegations about widespread fraud in the election system have been refuted multiple times since the 2020 election. Amazon has acknowledged the issue, stating that the false responses were errors, delivered a small number of times, and were "quickly fixed when brought to our attention." The incident underscores ongoing concerns about technology's role in disseminating misinformation.
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