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…
Month: October 2021
Microsoft Azure repels whopping 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack
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…
Why does the internet keep breaking?
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…
New graphics card power connector coming
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…
Airless tires are finally coming in 2024
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…
Why Facebook went down
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.