TLDR 2018-11-13

Google goes down ⚠️, China's moon mission 🚀, artificial hearts ❤️

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Big Tech & Startups

YouTube CEO calls EU's proposed copyright regulation financially impossible (2 minute read)

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki says that the EU's new proposed copyright regulations would make it impossible for Youtube to operate. The regulations would make Youtube liable for copyright violations in content uploaded to their site instead of the uploader. She says "EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90 billion times." The European Union will have its final vote on whether to pass the copyright directive in January.

Google traffic misdirected to China & Russia today, resulted in downtime for some services (1 minute read)

Google Search, Youtube, and Google Cloud all experienced intermittent downtime for about an hour, due to their traffic being misrouted to locations in China, Russia, and Nigeria. This incident was due to BGP's flawed design, BGP (the protocol that defines how internet packets are routed) was designed to be a chain of trust between well-meaning ISPs and universities that blindly believe the information they receive. However, malicious actors can sometimes take avantage of it to hijack traffic (hackers hijacked Amazon's Route 53 DNS traffic in April to steal a bunch of Bitcoin). All data was encrypted, and Google does not believe that this was the result of a malicious attack, but they are investigating the issue.
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Science & Futuristic Technology

Pricewise (Firefox Extension)

Firefox has launched an open beta for Pricewise, their price-tracking browser extension. You can add products to your watch list and it will give you a notification when the price drops. The extension currently works on Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot, eBay, and Walmart, and Mozilla plans on adding more stores in the future.

Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Software Engineer (1 minute read)

I'm a big fan of these rapid-fire type blog posts (you might want to check out Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution if you enjoy them too). This is basically a list of 20 things that Ana Ulin found surprising about being a software engineer, it's especially worth reading if you're just getting into the industry. I definitely agree with "CSS is the most complex modern programming language" and "appropriate use of emojis would become such an important communication skill".

Scientists Just Engineered Human Heart Tissue That Beats Like The Real Thing (1 minute read)

Scientists have grown a heart atria (the upper chambers of the heart that pumps blood) from stem cells. It can beat, express genes, and respond to drugs, so this is going to be really great for helping scientists develop treatments for various heart diseases.

XSStrike (Github Repo)

XSStrike is a next-generation Cross Site Scripting detection suite with four hand written parsers, an intelligent payload generator, a fuzzing engine and a fast crawler. It's written in Python, people seem very excited about this project so if you're into security you might want to check it out.
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