This latest event follows hot on the heels of Nov. 18, when Cloudflare was hit by a global outage for several hours. 

The post Cloudflare Suffers Global Outage appeared first on TechRepublic.

This latest event follows hot on the heels of Nov. 18, when Cloudflare was hit by a global outage for several hours. 

The post Cloudflare Suffers Global Outage appeared first on TechRepublic.

Handing over your personal information to sign up for a mobile carrier is expected, but what if it didn’t have to be that way? If you’re tired of your data being misused by the company that keeps you connected, then a new startup wireless service might be right up your alley.

Are you using a VPN and wondering why your internet connection feels slower than it used to? I wondered the same thing, so I set out to measure just how much a VPN affected my internet speed at home.

Home Assistant is amazing because it’s free, but it’s not always the easiest platform in the world to use. Though you can choose to pay for remote access by signing up to Home Assistant Cloud or go it alone with VPN access, there’s actually another easy way to add remote access to your smart home.

Home Assistant is a free, open-source, and independent smart home platform, but did you know there’s a company called Nabu Casa chipping in behind the scenes? If you want to pay to make remote access and cloud backup as easy as possible, that’s where your money goes.

Progress bars are everywhere, but we hardly ever give them a second thought. They have a little bit of mystery to them though. You might have noticed that downloads or file transfers sometimes get stuck at 99%. At times, they jump or stall. Sometimes they even fail at 99%. It happens because progress bars always lie, a little bit.

Google Drive is a storage solution, but most of us treat it like a digital junk drawer. Files end up in random folders, duplicates stack up, and finding anything becomes a pain. The good news? With a bit of cleanup, you can sort out the clutter and tidy up your storage in just one afternoon.

Google is adding 6GHz and 2.4+6GHz hotspot modes to Android, giving users faster tethering while keeping older devices connected.

The post Your Android hotspot is about to get much faster appeared first on Digital Trends.

When was the last time you upgraded your Wi-Fi router? If you can't remember because you've had your router for many years, there's a good chance that it's time for an upgrade.

You've heard that the world's infrastructure runs on Linux, and how important Free and Open Source (FOSS) software is to just about all the technology we enjoy every day, but there are some (to bring out the old cliché) unsung heroes of FOSS without which your stuff just wouldn't work—and you should at least know their names.

In his mid-20s, Lu Heng "got an idea that has made him a lot richer," writes the Wall Street Journal. He scooped up 10 million unused IP addresses, mostly form Africa, and then leases them to companies, mostly outside Africa, "that need them badly." [A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive and complex and many older devices still need IPv4. Companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Google still want IPv4 addresses because their cloud-hosting businesses need them as bridges between the IPv4 and IPv6 worlds... Africa, which has been slower to develop internet infrastructure than the rest of the world, is the only region that still has some of the older addresses to dole out... He searches for IPv4 addresses that aren't being used — by ISPs or anyone else that holds them — and uses his Hong Kong-based company, Larus, to lease them out to others. In 2013, Lu registered a new company in the Seychelles, an African archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to apply for IP addresses from Africa's internet registry, called the African Network Information Centre, or Afrinic. Between 2013 and 2016, Afrinic granted that company, Cloud Innovation, 6.2 million IPv4 addresses. That's more addresses than are assigned to Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. A single IPv4 address can be worth about $50 on its transfer to a company like Larus, which leases it onward for around 5% to 10% of that value annually. Larus and its affiliate companies, Lu said, control just over 10 million IPv4 addresses. The architects of the internet don't appear to have contemplated the possibility that anyone would seek to monetize IP addresses... Lu's activities triggered a showdown with Africa's internet registry. In 2020, after what it said was an internal review, Afrinic sent letters to Lu and others seeking to reclaim the IP addresses they held. In Lu's case, Afrinic said he shouldn't be using the addresses outside Africa. Lu responded that he wasn't violating rules in place when he got the addresses... After some back-and-forth, Lu sued Afrinic in Mauritius to keep his allocated addresses, eventually filing dozens of lawsuits... One of the lawsuits that Lu filed in Mauritius prompted a court there to freeze Afrinic's bank accounts in July 2021, effectively paralyzing the organization and eventually sending it into receivership. The receivership choked off distributions of new IPv4 addresses, leaving the continent's service providers struggling to expand capacity... In September, Afrinic elected a new board. Since then, some internet-service providers have been granted IPv4 addresses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google and Amazon are particularly good at selling the smart home vision, but these platforms have some big drawbacks, too. Consider switching to or starting out with a more capable and reliable alternative, which will save you money and frustration in the long run.

Amazon's drone-delivery program is under federal scrutiny after an MK30 aircraft clipped an internet cable in Texas. CNBC reports: The incident occurred on Nov. 18 around 12:45 p.m. Central in Waco, Texas. After dropping off a package, one of Amazon's MK30 drones was ascending out of a customer's yard when one of its six propellers got tangled in a nearby internet cable, according to a video of the incident viewed and verified by CNBC. The video shows the Amazon drone shearing the wire line. The drone's motor then appeared to shut off and the aircraft landed itself, with its propellers windmilling slightly on the way down, the video shows. The drone appeared to remain in tact beyond some damage to one of its propellers. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident, a spokesperson confirmed. The National Transportation Safety Board said the agency is aware of the incident but has not opened a probe into the matter. Amazon confirmed the incident to CNBC, saying that after clipping the internet cable, the drone performed a "safe contingent landing," referring to the process that allows its drones to land safely in unexpected conditions. "There were no injuries or widespread internet service outages. We've paid for the cable line's repair for the customer and have apologized for the inconvenience this caused them," an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC, noting that the drone had completed its package delivery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The roughly 500 fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor carry more than 95% of all internet data -- not satellites, as many might assume -- and they face growing threats from natural disasters, terrorists and nation-states capable of disrupting global communications by dragging anchors or deploying submarines against the infrastructure. The cables are protected by layers of copper, steel, and plastics, but they remain vulnerable at multiple points: earthquakes can disturb them on the seafloor, and the connections where cables meet land-based infrastructure present targets for bad actors. National actors including Russia, China and the US possess the capability to attack these cables. A bipartisan Senate bill co-sponsored by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John Barrasso is under consideration. The legislation would require a report to Congress within six months on Chinese and Russian sabotage efforts, mandate sanctions against foreign parties responsible for attacks, and direct the US to provide more resources for cable protection and repair.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This post lays out how we think about incidents like Cloudflare’s outage this week, why pure smart‑contract control planes with timelocks change the failure modes, and where zero‑knowledge proofs fit.

Tuesday’s outage summary

On Nov 18, 2025 at 11:20 UTC, Cloudflare’s edge began returning 5xx for a big slice of traffic. The root trigger wasn’t an attacker; it was a ClickHouse permissions change that made a query return duplicate rows. That query generated a Bot Management “feature file” shipped to every edge box every few minutes.

The duplicates doubled the file and bumped the feature count over 200. The bot module had a hard cap and a unwrap() that panicked on overflow. As nodes alternated between “old-good” and “new-bad” outputs every five minutes, the fleet oscillated until all shards were updated and stayed bad.

Cloudflare halted the publisher at 14:24, shipped a last‑known‑good file at 14:30, and reported full recovery at 17:06. The follow‑ups they listed: harden ingestion of internal config, add global kill switches, and review failure modes across modules.

See Cloudflare’s own postmortem for the full timeline and code snippets.

There are two separate problems in that story:

1. Control‑plane failure: a generator emitted an out‑of‑spec artifact (duplicates, too many features, too large).
2. Data‑plane fragility: the consumer crashed instead of degrading gracefully.

You still fix (2) in code reviews. But (1) is where blockchains shine: as a tamper‑evident, programmable gate in front of rollouts.

“Proof‑carrying config” on a public blockchain

If you compress the idea to one sentence: no config becomes “current” unless a smart contract says so, and the contract only flips that flag after a timelock and a proof that the artifact obeys invariants. That one sentence implies a complete architecture.

Turns out public blockchains, especially built on Ethereum, the EVM chains running the Ethereum Virtual Machine and consensus layer, offer a good solution to that problem.

An on‑chain Config Registry as the promotion gate

• A smart contract on a fast, credible EVM (often an L2) records each candidate artifact, and commitments to any proofs.
• Writes are gated by a timelock and a multisig; a pause/kill‑switch and rollback pointer are first‑class.
• Only hashes or even the full scripts can go on chain. If offchain, the blob lives in an object store but will provide lesser guarantees. A great idea if fully onchain is not possible due to size, and when data is temporary is to use EIP‑4844 blobs. Although a separate storage, you can pair a truly onchain hash and a blob with 18 days retention, which is great for a rolling rollback window.

Latency fit. Ethereum finalizes in epochs, but L2s confirm in seconds (OP Stack targets ~2s; zkSync ~1s; many systems expose fast attestation). It’s good enough for five‑minute control‑plane cadences, see for instance the OP block time discussion or Circle’s attestation timings).

Mandatory proofs: make the gate smart

Attach a succinct proof with every artifact and verify it on chain. That’s exactly what we do for our Chainwall protocol, although for a different kind of data!

The core goal is to prove basic properties: row_count <= 200, sorted + unique by key, schema matches regex and type rules, filesize <= N. You can either fit the whole logic onchain, or rely on Plonk/Groth circuits for larger expressions. For instance, a zk‑VM guest can parse CSV/Parquet/JSON and emits a SNARK. You don’t have to reveal the contents, only the commitment. Both research and production systems for regex in ZK exist (e.g., Reef and related zk‑regex work), which makes schema checks realistic.

There’s two practical paths:

• zkVM route: Run your checker inside a zkVM and verify receipts on chain; see RISC Zero verifier contracts and Succinct’s SP1 on‑chain proof wrapping.
• Circuit route: Small fixed circuits for the invariants above; for CSV/JSON + regex you can combine parsing gadgets with zk‑regex techniques.

Distribution that doesn’t introduce new trust

Edges poll the registry and only adopt artifacts that are green‑lit on chain. To avoid trusting a third‑party RPC, run a light client in your control plane (e.g., Helios) or plan for the Portal Network. That way, edges verify headers and inclusion proofs locally before they accept any “new current” state.

Kill switch & rollback are just bits in the contract, honored by the edge. Cloudflare explicitly called out the need for stronger global kill switches; putting that switch in a small, audited contract gives you a single source of truth under stress.

Would this really have changed the CloudFlare glitch?

• The duplicate‑inflated file blows through a count/size limit that’s enforced by a proof, not by best effort. The promotion fails.
• Even if someone manually uploaded the blob to storage, edges would refuse to adopt it without the on‑chain “current” flag and proof verification.
• You still fix the panic in the proxy, but you’ve moved the sharpest edge of the risk to a domain where proof systems and timelocks are very good.

Why we insist on pure on‑chain control planes for digital assets

CloudFlare event was not an attack, but they initially thought so and that was indeed likely! As we’ve seen in crypto security: attackers don’t just chase keys; they coerce the control plane.

• Front‑end or signer‑UI tampering: The Bybit theft showed how manipulating what signers see can push through a catastrophic approval. Analyses point to phishing and UI manipulation of the transaction approval flow, not a smart‑contract exploit. Read NCC Group’s technical note and coverage from Ledger Insights.
• Third‑party API authority: SwissBorg/Kiln wasn’t a solidity bug; it was an off‑chain API path that let an attacker reshuffle staking authorities and drain ~193k SOL as explained in Kiln’s joint statement.
• From developer laptop to cloud creds to everything: Lazarus/TraderTraitor keeps proving that compromised developer machines and tricked build flows buy you cloud footholds and the power to bend what the team sees and signs. See for instance CISA’s advisory or Elastic’s simulation of how AWS creds leak from dev boxes.

Conclusion

Our position: control of digital assets must live in smart contracts guarded by timelocks and multisigs, not in private credentials, CI tokens, cloud ACLs, or admin dashboards. If your deploy or “change owner” action must traverse a contract’s schedule() and execute() path, even a rootkit on a developer laptop can’t jump the queue. The time delay is a circuit breaker you can count on, and the on‑chain audit trail is objective. That only leaves the “what if the thing we’re promoting is malformed?” question, which is exactly what “proof‑carrying config” answers.

We also believe there’s a considerable market for trust-minimized applications. We’re only building the right foundations now for a first, well-defined use case at OKcontract Labs.

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When a Feature File Tripped the Internet was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It's even easier now to search for names like Trump, Chomsky, and Summers.

Cloudflare outage causes slow sites, login trouble and dashboard errors as users report problems even after the company says service is restored.

High-profile services affected include ChatGPT, Sora, Shopify, and Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

The post Cloudflare Outage Hits Major Websites appeared first on TechRepublic.

High-profile services affected include ChatGPT, Sora, Shopify, and Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

The post Cloudflare Outage Hits Major Websites appeared first on TechRepublic.