IPv4 Sparks Wide-Spread Internet Slowdowns; Twitter Reveals 23M of Its Users Are Actually Bots

Radical New Watson-Style AI Does Anything You Ask | Lawmakers Red-Taping SpaceX to the Ground To view a web version of this message, click here Send this message to a friend IPv4 Sparks Wide-Spread Internet Slowdowns Twitter Reveals 23M of Its Users Are Actually Bots Radical New Watson-Style AI Does Anything You Ask Lawmakers Red-Taping SpaceX to the Ground Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed? Hot Comment: "I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to..." From the Vault: Google CEO: Kids Will Have to Change Names to Escape 'Cyber Past' Watch It: Microsoft Open Source Explained Poll Booth: Of the following, I'd rather play ... Sponsored Resource: 10 Ways Flash Boosts Your Storage Performance IPv4 Sparks Wide-Spread Internet Slowdowns Due to a new set of routes published earlier this week, the Internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a Tertiary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600, have started randomly forgetting portions of the Internet. Cisco warned its customers in May that this Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) problem was coming and that a number of routers and networking products would be affected, ZDNet reports. Sound Off>> Twitter Reveals 23M of Its Users Are Actually Bots In its most recent quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Twitter disclosed that approximately 8.5% of its users are actually bots. Some of these 23 million bots were created to make revenue-generating URLs, others were created to collect followers that would later be sold to whoever needs a ready audience, and a few were created to mimic stereotypes just for fun. Sound Off>> Radical New Watson-Style AI Does Anything You Ask Wired reports that a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI. "Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function." Sound Off>> Lawmakers Red-Taping SpaceX to the Ground Phil Plait reports that a trio of U.S. Congressmen are asking NASA to investigate what they call "an epidemic of anomalies" at SpaceX. They sent a memo demanding that SpaceX be held accountable to taxpayers for mission delays stemming from the development of new rockets. Plait notes, "[A]s a contractor, the rules are different for them than they would be if NASA themselves built the rockets, just as the rules are for Boeing or any other contractor. Sound Off>> Why Are Online Job Applications So Badly Designed? GreyViking notes that the majority of job application forms are multiple screens long, and because they're invariably HTTPS, they'll time out after a finite time, which isn't always made known to the user-- among many other shortcomings. "Sometimes it seems that the biggest obstacle to getting a job can be being able to conquer the online application, and really, there has to be a better way: but what is it?" Sound Off>> Engineers do dress well "I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to dressing well, or to reasonable dress codes. They're mostly opposed to stupid dress codes that make them uncomfortable while working for no good reason. Reasonable dress for a meeting with outside customers is different from that for a group of engineers banging out a solution to a code problem, and what's reasonable when you've hauled someone in on their day off to deal with an emergency isn't the same as what they'd wear during a normal workday. Management tends to lose sight of all this because they've got much different jobs from the engineers and the dress norms for them are going to be different from those for engineers because the routine situations are going to be different." --by jxander Read More>>   Google CEO: Kids Will Have to Change Names to Escape 'Cyber Past' Four years ago, the then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said to the Wall Street Journal: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." And he said that people's private lives are so well documented now that the young will have to change their names when reaching adulthood to avoid their youthful indiscretions. Read More>> Microsoft Open Source Explained Microsoft does not immediately come to mind when many people think of open source. Timothy Lord caught up with someone at OSCON who aims to change that--Olivier Bloch, who works for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., not directly for the big bad parent company. Find out what he has to say about where Microsoft is going with its happy talk about open source. Watch the Video>>   Of the following, I'd rather play ... Gin Rummy Bridge Hearts Checkers Poker Black Jack Chess Falken's Maze Cast Your Vote>> 10 Ways Flash Boosts Your Storage Performance The demand for new storage capacity continues to grow at astounding rates and IT is being tasked to ensure that growth doesn't make performance an issue. Find out what you should be doing now to ensure the flash storage in your infrastructure gives the maximum performance boost while keeping users happy. Learn More>>  Follow Slashdot on Twitter and Facebook. To unsubscribe, click here or send an email to: unsubscribe-213087@elabs10.com To ensure delivery of this newsletter to your inbox and to enable images, please add slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org to your e-mail address book or safe senders list. Slashdot | 594 Howard Street, Suite 300 | San Francisco, CA 94105 To view our Privacy Policy click here.