D-Silence

A Level 5 atmospheric river is set to unleash flooding across drought-stricken California. After nearly a year without rain, a series of potent Pacific storms are directed at Northern California this week, potentially bringing as much as a foot of rainfall and up to three feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada. For more, check…

Working at home raised new issues in computing, but when patches add to the frustration… Microsoft has resolved an issue in Windows 10 that would cause authentication failures when connecting to devices in an untrusted domain using Remote Desktop using smart card authentication. For more, check out this Bleeping Computer/MSN story.

Physicists have taken the first ever image of a Wigner crystal. Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner first theorized this crystal in 1934, but it’s taken more than eight decades for scientists to finally get a direct look at the “electron ice.” The fascinating first image shows electrons squished together into a tight, repeating pattern — like…

Azure successfully mitigated a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 2.4 Tbps. Dahan shares that the attack traffic originated from approximately 70,000 sources and from multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as from the United States. For more, check out this TechRadar/MSN…

Catchy title of this BBC story. “One of the things that we’ve seen in the last several years is an increased reliance on a small number of networks and companies to deliver large portions of Internet content,” says Luke Deryckx, Chief Technical Officer at Down Detector. “When one of those, or more than one, has…

This is crazy – I remember when a 300W power supply was a monster. Later, a 450W power supply was considered standard for a PC. Now comes word of an upcoming 450W graphics card power connector. 450W! Modern graphics cards are getting faster and faster, but they also need more and more energy. The GeForce…

C|Net takes a quick look at the upcoming airless tires. Nails become minor annoyances and sidewall cuts that usually render a tire unrepairable are no longer possible. There would be no need to check tire inflation (you’ve probably ignored my admonitions to do that anyway) and we’d say goodbye to spare tires, jacks and inflation…

Facebook revealed more about what caused 6-hour outage on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The incident occurred when an engineer doing routine maintenance work issued a command “which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally,” Janardhan wrote. For more, check out this USA Today story.

Hmm…let me count the ways this could be a bad idea… The U.S. Department of Defense is taking input on its plan to build an advanced mobile nuclear microreactor prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory in eastern Idaho. For more, check out this IEN story.

Is this the harbinger of the fall of western civilization? I need to come up with a cool, new idea! More than one billion people around the world now use TikTok, according to an announcement Monday from the app. For more, check out this USA Today story.