Daily Tech News 5 October 2021

• Mark Zuckerberg and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad day. (Bloomberg)
  
  All Facebook properties went down for six hours due to a BGP misconfiguration. When everything goes down at once across a giant cloud provider like that, it's usually BGP. Once you screw it up, you can lose remote access to the networking gear so you can't fix it, so a five minute solution can be stuck waiting for the right engineer to arrive on site with a serial cable.
  
  The outage caused Facebook apps to go bananas with DNS requests which caused problems for Twitter, Google, Amazon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon...
  
  

  Let's play who broke the internet today! pic.twitter.com/OCireYHFgv

  — Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) October 4, 2021

  
  
  The mee.nu server managed to crash all by itself. Actually, it's possible that it was related since I don't know why it keeps crashing. Just not probable.
  
  
  
• New South Wales has a new premier after Gladys B, the least worst of a bad lot, resigned due to an ongoing corruption investigation of her boyfriend or something. I don't know the details, it's petty stuff compared to what's happening elsewhere.
  
  I was waiting to see how much worse the new guy would be, and... Well.
  

  Dom Perrottet: “I want to be the premier of a state this is open and free…we are people born in a free country.”
  
  NSW premier says we must learn to live with the virus “it’s not going away” & locking down every time there is an outbreak is not sustainable.

  — Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) October 5, 2021

  It's not the most elegant formulation of the concept of negative rights I've ever read, but to have a politician - particularly an Australian one right now - saying this is refreshing.
  
  
  

• Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL. (Cloudflare)
  
  An explanation of just how Facebook shot itself in both feet and locked its keys in the car at the same time.
  
  
  
• What to expect with Windows 11. (AnandTech)
  
  The big day is here, and it's kind of meh.
  
  
  
• I mean, it's not actively terrible. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just, y'know, kind of meh.
  
  
  
• Android 12 is out too. (Thurrott.com)
  
  6 was the last version that mattered since it brought us adoptable storage - that is, you can take a 32GB device, add a 128GB microSD card, and it works as a single pool of 160GB of storage.
  
  Of course, the major device manufacturers and carriers hated this and immediately broke support.
  
  
  
• Don't trust SMS-based 2FA. (Motherboard)
  
  Syniverse, which handles three quarters of a trillion text messages a year for 300 different mobile networks, was hacked.
  
  Five years ago.
  
  They discovered the breach in May and just disclosed this a week ago.
  
  Everything sent from May 2016 to May 2021 was an open buffet for hackers.
  
  
  
• What happens when Google decides to break the web. (The Register)
  
  What happens is the web gets broken.
  
  
  
• RaidForums - a site where people buy and sell the personal data that is increasingly less aptly named - or not, as we'll get to in a moment - went abruptly if briefly offline after its domain name was yanked. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's back up for now on another domain.
  
  
  
• When I said or not, this is what to which I referred.
  

  Tip for all the reporters who covered this as an authentic breach over the past few days.
  
  If you don't see the data yourself, you should never publish.
  
  It's your job to remove words like "claims" and "unverified" from these stories. Not propagate scams as legitimate breaches.

  — Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) October 4, 2021

  Hey! This illegal data you sold me is fake! I want a refund!

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:56 AM

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