An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US President Joe Biden has made the shift to electric vehicles an early focus of his administration. Days after his inauguration, he vowed to replace hundreds of thousands of federal civilian vehicles with electric versions. On Tuesday, Biden held a virtual meeting with CEOs from companies building charging infrastructure. The administration has set a goal to build more than 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. Also on Tuesday, a coalition of six electric utilities announced a new initiative that will help Biden achieve his goal. The companies are planning to build a "seamless network of charging stations" in and around the American South. The group plans to build chargers near major highways in every southern state, stretching as far west as Texas and as far north as Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia. This is not a joint venture. Each utility will build and run its own charging stations. But the goal is to make them appear to the customer as a unified network.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threat actors have discovered a way to bounce and amplify junk web traffic against Citrix ADC networking equipment to launch DDoS attacks. From a report: While details about the attackers are still unknown, victims of these Citrix-based DDoS attacks have mostly included online gaming services, such as Steam and Xbox, sources have told ZDNet earlier today. The first of these attacks have been detected last week and documented by German IT systems administrator Marco Hofmann. Hofmann tracked the issue to the DTLS interface on Citrix ADC devices. DTLS, or Datagram Transport Layer Security, is a more version of the TLS protocol implemented on the stream-friendly UDP transfer protocol, rather than the more reliable TCP. Just like all UDP-based protocols, DTLS is spoofable and can be used as a DDoS amplification vector.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn't escape the fee? That fee is illegal as of yesterday. From a report: Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole as of June 20th, 2020 -- and though the FCC managed to extend the deadline six months by spinning up some bullshit about how cable companies didn't have the resources to stop charging you money, the law should take full effect Monday. Do note that the actual text of the law still allows some BS to occur. If your ISP sends you a router, you'll need to return it to avoid charges. Frontier in particular has been notorious for charging customers $10 a month for their equipment "whether you use it or not" -- the company's words, not mine -- but Frontier is clearly aware it won't be able to do that anymore. Starting this month, the company's equipment page has changed to remove the part where it talks about the mandatory fee.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

High-frequency traders are using an experimental type of cable to speed up their systems by billionths of a second, the latest move in a technological arms race to execute stock trades as quickly as possible. From a report: The cable, called hollow-core fiber, is a next-generation version of the fiber-optic cable used to deliver broadband internet to homes and businesses. Made of glass, such cables carry data encoded as beams of light. But instead of being solid, hollow-core fiber is empty inside, with dozens of parallel, air-filled channels narrower than a human hair. Because light travels nearly 50% faster through air than glass, it takes about one-third less time to send data through hollow-core fiber than through the same length of standard fiber. The difference is often just a minuscule fraction of a second. But in high-frequency trading, that can make the difference between profits and losses. HFT firms use sophisticated algorithms and ultrafast data networks to execute rapid-fire trades in stocks, options and futures. Many are secretive about their trading strategies and technology. Hollow-core fiber is the latest in a series of advances that fast traders have used to try to outrace their competition. A decade ago, a company called Spread Networks spent about $300 million to lay fiber-optic cable in a straight line from Chicago to New York, so traders could send data back and forth along the route in just 13 milliseconds, or thousandths of a second. Within a few years the link was superseded by microwave networks that reduced transmission times along the route to less than nine milliseconds. HFT firms have also used lasers to zip data between the data centers of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, and they have embedded their algorithms in superfast computer chips. Now, faced with the limits of physics and technology, traders are left fighting over nanoseconds. "The time increments of these improvements have gotten markedly smaller," said Michael Persico, chief executive of Anova Financial Networks, a technology provider that runs communications networks used by HFT firms. High-frequency trading is controversial, with critics saying that some ultrafast strategies amount to an invisible tax on investors. Industry representatives say such criticism is unfounded.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T and Verizon are worried about T-Mobile's vast spectrum holdings and have asked the Federal Communications Commission to impose limits on the carrier's ability to obtain more spectrum licenses. Verizon kicked things off in August when it petitioned the FCC to reconsider its acceptance of a new lease that would give T-Mobile another 10MHz to 30MHz of spectrum in the 600MHz band in 204 counties. AT&T followed that up on Friday with a filing that supports many of the points made in Verizon's petition. T-Mobile was once the smallest of four national carriers and complained that it didn't have enough low-band spectrum to match AT&T and Verizon's superior coverage. But T-Mobile surged past Sprint in recent years and then bought the company, making T-Mobile one of three big nationwide carriers along with AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile also bolstered its low-band spectrum holdings by dominating a 600MHz auction in 2017. "The combination of Sprint and T-Mobile has resulted in an unprecedented concentration of spectrum in the hands of one carrier," AT&T wrote in its filing to the FCC on Friday. "In fact, the combined company exceeds the Commission's spectrum screen, often by a wide margin, in Cellular Market Areas representing 82 percent of the US population, including all major markets." T-Mobile's large spectrum holdings demand "changes in how the Commission addresses additional acquisitions of spectrum by that carrier," AT&T said in another part of the filing. AT&T also posted a blog on the topic, saying that "Additional spectrum leases with Dish will cause T-Mobile to exceed the 250MHz screen by as much as 136MHz." Officially, AT&T said it "takes no position on whether T-Mobile's lease applications were properly accepted by the FCC," but the company said that the FCC "should provide an explanation of why it permitted T-Mobile to further exceed the spectrum screen." "The Commission's failure to issue a written order in a transaction allowing spectrum aggregation in excess of the screen to this degree is highly unusual... Moreover, without a written order explaining its analysis, there is no evidence that the Commission has carefully attempted to evaluate the potential for competitive harm," AT&T wrote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google and Facebook have withdrawn plans to build an undersea cable between the United States and Hong Kong after the Trump administration raised national security concerns about the proposal. On Thursday, the companies submitted a revised plan that bypasses Hong Kong but includes links to Taiwan and the Philippines that were part of the original proposal. One of the original project's partners, Hong Kong company Pacific Light Data Communication, has been dropped. Federal law requires a license from the Federal Communications Commission to build an undersea cable connecting the United States with a foreign country. When Google and Facebook submitted their application for an undersea cable connecting the US to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines, a committee of federal agencies led by the Justice Department recommended against approving the connection to Hong Kong, citing the "current national security environment." The Trump administration cited "the [People's Republic of China] government's sustained efforts to acquire the sensitive personal data of millions of U.S. persons" as a reason to deny the application. The proposed cable's "high capacity and low latency would encourage U.S. communications traffic crossing the Pacific to detour through Hong Kong before reaching intended destinations in other parts of the Asia Pacific region," the government argued.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Chromium browser -- open source, upstream parent to both Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge -- is getting some serious negative attention for a well-intentioned feature that checks to see if a user's ISP is "hijacking" non-existent domain results. The Intranet Redirect Detector, which makes spurious queries for random "domains" statistically unlikely to exist, is responsible for roughly half of the total traffic the world's root DNS servers receive. Verisign engineer Matt Thomas wrote a lengthy APNIC blog post outlining the problem and defining its scope. DNS, or the Domain Name System, is how computers translate relatively memorable domain names like arstechnica.com into far less memorable IP addresses, like 3.128.236.93. Without DNS, the Internet couldn't exist in a human-usable form -- which means unnecessary load on its top-level infrastructure is a real problem. Loading a single modern webpage can require a dizzying number of DNS lookups. When we analyzed ESPN's front page, we counted 93 separate domain names -- from a.espncdn.com to z.motads.com -- which needed to be performed in order to fully load the page! In order to keep the load manageable for a lookup system that must service the entire world, DNS is designed as a many-stage hierarchy. At the top of this pyramid are the root servers -- each top-level domain, such as .com, has its own family of servers that are the ultimate authority for every domain beneath it. One step above those are the actual root servers, a.root-servers.net through m.root-servers.net.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.