DNS Error Caused AWS Outage

Amazon reported that its cloud computer service or Amazon Web Services, that powers many of the internet’s most popular apps and websites, has fully recovered from a massive outage that disrupted online activity around the world for more than 12 hours last 20 October.

The company said that the outage was likely caused by issues related to its domain name system, or DNS, which converts website addresses into numeric ones, allowing websites and apps to load on internet-connected devices. It’s like a “phone book for the internet,” or part of the "plumbing" for online connectivity.

Amazon has data centers all over the world. According to the company, the outage originated at its AWS plant in northern Virginia, in an area known as "Data Center Alley," where hundreds of such facilities are located.

Amazon Web Services, along with Google’s Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure, provide most of the world’s cloud computing infrastructure. Companies rely on them to store their data and make software and applications run smoothly.

So when there’s an outage, a lot of websites, apps and services go down.

According to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, users of apps such as Snapchat and WhatsApp and major websites, including Amazon, began reporting service disruptions shortly after 3 A.M. ET.

Soon dozens of apps and sites were reporting outages, including Google, Hulu, Lyft, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Verizon, Venmo and Zoom. Amazon’s own apps and streaming services, including Alexa, Kindle, Ring and Prime Video, were also affected.

The half-day outage was a stark reminder of just how reliant internet companies and users have become on just a handful of cloud computing companies.

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How Many Can Be Plugged Into One USB Port?

The USB port has revolutionized the way we used computers when USB 1.0 debuted publicly in 1996. The technology has become ubiquitous in the computing space, and chances are that a USB cable is within arm's reach of you right now. Before the advent of USB, computers used all manner of various ports, making connecting emerging peripherals a challenge.

Today, USB ports are everywhere, even appearing on monitors and coming in specific colors normally signifying speed and class. With nearly every peripheral today using USB, one might wonder what the limitations of USB in terms of load are. We know it's possible to add additional USB cards to expand the amount of USB drives available, but just how many devices can we theoretically plug into a single USB port before failure?

Only a single USB device can be plugged into a USB port at a time. In order to get around this issue, you will need to use several USB hubs and chain them together on a single USB port. The theoretical limit for USB is 127 connections on a single host controller. One might then assume that if you have 4 USB ports on a machine, you should be able to connect at least 32 devices to every single port. This isn't the case due to the limitations of the host controller.

There is a limit to how many USB hubs can be plugged into a single USB port, as demonstrated in a YouTube video by Doctor Shenanigan. After plugging in 5 USB hubs into a single USB port, he's presented with a Windows Explorer error. The error notes that a USB hub will not be able to function if it's connected more than 5 hubs away from the root port.

Each hub that's chained together can be cascaded only five levels deep as per the specifications of the USB protocol. This limit of five USB hubs persists even with the modern USB-C standard. Windows will throw an error when the hub limit is reached and may alert you if too many devices are plugged into a given port. More often than not, though, when too many devices are plugged into a single port, those devices will simply begin to fail without warning.

While connecting 127 devices to a machine is possible, the hard limit is usually set by the host controller built into the chipset of the motherboard. Practical limitations of a host controller tend to restrict users to about 10 devices that a single USB port can handle before facing bandwidth and throughput issues.

Stability, power, and signal degradation can also happen when more than 10 low-powered devices are in use at the same time. Staying under 10 devices per port and keeping those USB ports clean is your best bet to have everything plugged in and running smoothly.

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Experience Retro Phone Calling With "Tin Can"

Many of us who grew up before Y2K still remembers what it was like to make a phone call on a landline: You need to key in your friend’s phone number (which you had memorized), make awkward small talk with their mom or dad until your friend got on the line, and then see how far you could stretch that curly cord to get some actual privacy while you chatted.

While landlines never really went away, it’s been many years since their heyday. Most Americans — 76 percent of adults and 86.8 percent of children — live in wireless-only households, according to a 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that number has been increasing for the past 20 years.

But the landline may be making a comeback. Parents, concerned about their kids’ mental health and online safety, are seeking out ways to keep them off screens (an almost Herculean task these days). A growing number of them are trying to delay giving their kids a smartphone, knowing there’s no going back once they do. Landlines are a low-tech solution: They let kids chat with their friends without all of the distracting apps, pings and bright colors of a smartphone.

That’s where entrepreneurs like Chet Kittleson come in. Kittleson is the chief executive officer of Tin Can, which sells landline phones made just for kids. He’s also a dad of three. Like many parents, Kittleson became his eldest child’s de facto social director, constantly arranging play dates and coordinating with other parents.

At a school pick-up two years ago, Kittleson and a group of parents were lamenting this fact. "I think one mom made the comment, 'I feel like I’m an executive assistant for my kid,'" he tells Yahoo. Even though they were all frustrated over having to manage their children’s social lives, they were also worried about giving their kids smartphones to manage it themselves after reading psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book, "The Anxious Generation", which asserts that kids today spend too much time on screens and too little time being independent and having unstructured playtime.

Kittleson says he and the other parents felt "sandwiched between those two problems." But then it sparked an idea. All of a sudden it came to me: I was like, Man, when we were kids, our first social network was the landline, and our kids don’t have that," he says. "It was this lightbulb moment. The idea for a Tin Can was born in that conversation."

He thought it would be cool to have a "New Age landline" that worked off of Wi-Fi and also had parental controls. So Kittleson, an entrepreneur, took a crash course on hardware and the supply chain to create landlines with a modern twist. His company has two products: Tin Can (US$ 75 and currently on back order), a Wi-Fi landline for kids that comes in a variety of candy-like colors, and Tin Can Flashback (US$ 75), an '80s-inspired landline that plugs into your internet router. "No phone jack required," Kittleson says. "That was a must for us because most people don’t have those anymore."

An app allows parents to set "quiet hours" (similar to "do not disturb") and manage approved contacts, like grandparents and your kid’s favorite cousin.

"The most important thing to me was that kids could only call and receive calls from people that the parents trust," Kittleson says. And because it’s a fully private network, there are no spam calls, he adds. Calls between Tin Can phones are free, no subscription required. There’s also a party line plan (US$ 9.99 per month) that allows kids to call friends and family who don’t have a Tin Can (both phone types also support calls to 911).

Kittleson, who lives in Seattle, had some of his kids’ friends try prototypes of the Tin Can Flashback phone last year. Although he admits he was doubtful about whether the kids would be into the retro style, he was pleasantly surprised. "It was evident from the first install that kids love the look and feel of the landline phone," he says. "I was surprised by how excited they were by a phone that sat in a cradle, and all it had was buttons on it."

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Surfboard And Kayak Device That Collects Microplastics

As many of us continue to fight against microplastic pollution, a team of engineers has created an innovative solution that could have a massive impact through an unexpected activity: water sports.

According to Design Wanted, three graduates from IED Milan created Hauki, a project that turns board sports like surfing into microplastic cleanup efforts. Hauki is a system that attaches to surfboards, paddleboards, and canoes, and captures microplastics as the athlete aboard it travels through the water.

Hauki features a five-millimeter mesh net on the front to capture larger debris, before filtering microplastics toward a 330-micrometer filter, which catches and stores the offending plastics in a capsule with replaceable filters. It has a 500-watt motor attached as well to provide some extra thrust on the board to help cancel out any potential drag issues from Hauki itself.

Microplastics are a massive problem in our modern oceans and bodies of water, and the issue continues to grow with each passing year. While research about their impacts on humans is still ongoing, they've been linked to multiple health issues, and we're finding them in more and more places.

Scientists have found microplastics in the digestive tracts of fish in the Nile, and they have been found in naturally occurring, swiftly moving particles known as flocs, allowing them to travel great distances in the ocean.

Microplastics can have a devastating impact on wildlife; smaller animals like plankton or shrimp could mistake them for food, starving themselves of the nutrients they need to survive in the process. Then, when those animals are eaten, the plastic passes into the systems of larger predators and moves up the food chain.

Hauki's design combats this by turning sports enthusiasts into activists, making each time you partake in the activity you love serve the purpose of helping to clean up the place you love doing it in. The simplicity of the design helped it to win the iF Design Student Award, as well as a special prize from design firm Grohe.

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NY Officials Sue Social Media Companies For Addicting Content

The city of New York has filed a new lawsuit accusing Facebook, Google, Snapchat, TikTok and other online platforms of fueling a mental health crisis among children by addicting them to social media.

A 327-page complaint submitted last 8 October in Manhattan federal court seeks damages from Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms, Google and YouTube owner Alphabet, Snapchat owner Snap and TikTok owner ByteDance. It accuses the defendants of gross negligence and causing a public nuisance.

The city joined other governments, school districts and individuals pursuing approximately 2,050 similar lawsuits, in nationwide litigation in the Oakland, California, federal court.

New York City is among the largest plaintiffs, with a population of 8.48 million, including about 1.8 million under age 18. Its school and healthcare systems are also plaintiffs.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said allegations concerning YouTube are "simply not true," in part because it is a streaming service and not a social network where people catch up with friends.

A spokesperson for New York City's law department said the city withdrew from litigation announced by Mayor Eric Adams in February 2024 and pending in California state courts so it could join the federal litigation.

According to the complaint, the defendants designed their platforms to "exploit the psychology and neurophysiology of youth," and drive compulsive use in pursuit of profit.

The complaint said 77.3 percent of New York City high school students, and 82.1 percent of girls, admitted to spending three or more hours a day on "screen time" including TV, computers and smartphones, contributing to lost sleep and chronic school absences.

New York City's health commissioner declared social media a public health hazard in January 2024, and the city including its schools has had to spend more taxpayer dollars to address the resulting youth mental health crisis, the complaint said.

The city also blamed social media for an increase in "subway surfing," or riding atop or off the sides of moving trains. At least 16 subway surfers have died since 2023, including two girls aged 12 and 13 this month, police data show.

"Defendants should be held to account for the harms their conduct has inflicted," the city said. "As it stands now, (the) plaintiffs are left to abate the nuisance and foot the bill."

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