Unbeknownst to many people in the world, late last week one of the largest attacks in the history of the Internet was taking place—a massive nine-hour barrage that leveled an unrelenting 100 Gigabits of traffic at its peak.

"The most outstanding thing about this attack is that it did not use any amplification, which means that they had 100 Gigabits of available bandwidth on their own," Gaffan said. "The attack lasted nine hours, and that type of bandwidth is not cheap or readily available."

While Incapsula was able to repel this most recent attack, Gaffan cautions that the attack could have been much bigger and there have been some key takeaways from the experience.

Eventually, the service is expected to work with other instant-messaging accounts and be interoperable with SIP standards, but for now it requires a BitTorrent account.

Averill was unable to provide details on how the service logs your chats, so it's not clear at this time whether message logs are stored locally, or even available as an option.

When asked about what BitTorrent's response would be to potential requests from government agencies like the National Security Agency for a BitTorrent Chat back door, he said, "We're not familiar with specifics of NSA programs, so it's not something we can really comment on."

In the US alone, 40% of food is thrown out, partly because of confusing date labels, telling consumers to "use by", "sell by" and "enjoy by" a certain time.

Some of the dates are not about safety but taste, says Dana Gunders, a food scientist from the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), which has issued a report saying much of the food labelled bad is actually perfectly edible.

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate.

The NSA has released some details of 12 incidents in which analysts used their access to America’s high-tech surveillance infrastructure to spy on girlfriends, boyfriends, and random people they met in social settings.

One such analyst working on foreign soil started surveillance on nine phone numbers belonging to women over five years, from 1998 to 2003. He “listened to collected phone conversations,” according to a letter from the NSA’s Inspector General to Senator Charles Grassley released today.

The north african country of Sudan was almost completely cut off from the internet on Wednesday, as its government might have severed connections in the midst of rioting in the country and the nation's capital of Khartoum.

"From a technical standpoint, the fact that it involved multiple distinct internet service providers at the same time is consistent with a centrally coordinated action. However, it is impossible to tell solely from connectivity data whether this was government directed or a catastrophic technical failure."

Baraa Shiban, a respected human rights activist who works in Yemen as a project co-ordinator for the London-based legal charity Reprieve and was travelling to London to speak at an event, said he was held for an hour on Monday night and questioned about his work and political views.

He was detained under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act, the same legislation used last month at Heathrow to detain David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has written about mass internet surveillance by the US National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ.

Oracle has adopted the open source OpenStack cloud technology for its upcoming public cloud service, but though the company has made many tweaks and advancements to the technology, it does not appear to have yet contributed code back to the community.

Though Oracle has written its own additions to OpenStack, the company does not appear to have contributed any of that code back to the wider community. In fact, Oracle as a corporate entity has made zero commits to the mammoth codebase over all of its release, according to data put together by OpenStack commit watchers Stackalytics.

Opponents of genetic modification are up in arms again, this time over the proposed release of GM flies in Spain. The insects are designed to wipe out olive flies, a major pest.

Each potential release has to be considered on its own merits and risks, of course. But the previous trials provide confidence that the basic techniques are sound. These projects can easily be halted and their effects reversed.

A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided.

First, the fingerprint of the enroled user is photographed with 2400 dpi resolution. The resulting image is then cleaned up, inverted and laser printed with 1200 dpi onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting. Finally, pink latex milk or white woodglue is smeared into the pattern created by the toner onto the transparent sheet. After it cures, the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone.