Geek News

GitHub, a web-based code distribution and version control service, survived a massive denial of service attack on Wednesday. According to a report at Wired , a staggering 1.35 terabits per second (Tbps) of traffic hit the site at once. Within 10 minutes the company called for help from a DDoS mitigation service similar to Google's Project Shield , Akamai's Prolexic , which took over to filter and weed out malicious traffic packets. The attack, says Wired , ended after eight minutes. This may have been the largest DDoS attack ever; Wired notes the attack on domain name server Dyn in late 2016 reached 1.2 Tbps of traffic. The attack was apparently conducted via a non-bot technique called an amplification attack. These use memcached database systems, says Wired , that can be queried by anyone. Attackers spoof the IP of their target and send small requests to the memcached databases, which then send a massive amount of traffic to the target system, like GitHub in this case. T...

Companies are all about making sure you're working, and they're using increasingly high-tech solutions to do so. One firm in London uses AI to analyze your daily behavior, while the FreshTeam messaging app can track employee locations . Now, Amazon was just awarded a patent for a wristband that tracks warehouse workers' hand movements. The patents, originally filed in 2016, may likely never see the light of day. As Gizomodo points out, the wristband system has three parts, with an ultrasonic unit for the wrist, various ultrasonic devices placed around the work area and a module to manage all that data. The patent also points to a haptic feedback module, which could buzz employees for various reasons, including notifying them of breaks or to help them find items in the warehouse, Apple Watch navigation-style. While legal, of course, a system like this should likely raise privacy concerns, though as Geekwire notes, the patent itself positions such a wristband as a lab...