BGP
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Google accidentally broke the internet throughout Japan
Last week, nearly half of Japan briefly lost access to the internet because of an error made by Google. The mistake was noticed and corrected within just a few minutes, but its effects led to hours of slowed internet connections. The impact was so large that Japan's Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry initiated an investigation into the issue.
Iran censored porn so hard it broke the internet in Hong Kong
If you had trouble visiting explicit websites in the last few days, the fault may have come from an unexpected source: Iran. According to a new report from The Verge, a recent attempt to block pornography websites in the country's borders hampered access in Russia, Hong Kong and other nations in the region. What happened? Apparently, Iran's national telecom abused the honor system.
Hacking Team helped Italian police to hijack internet addresses
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used to route traffic across the Internet -- and it's a pretty old, creaky protocol that's open to abuse. Back in August 2014, an Italian web hosting company faked ownership of 256 IP addresses, under the direction of a special arm of Italy's Military Police and Hacking Team. The police were trying to use the latter's remote control system malware to monitor targets of interest, but certain IP addresses were unreachable as their true owners, Santrex, kept them locked down for criminal use. Then, when Santrex apparently went out of business, the police remained locked out of these addresses.
Here is a list of your PlayStation Vita developers
Eager to toot its horn on the vast third-party support the PlayStation Vita will apparently enjoy, Sony fired off a list of developers in a press email earlier today. The Japanese developers currently dwarf the North American studios who have signed up, but it's understandable: Sony has been doing well in Japan with the PSP for some time now, there's more confidence in the platform there. Anywho, hit the jump for the full list and give us your best guesses on what they're working on in the comments section!
