This week in web performance news, Github victors over DDoS attacks, IE’s replacement gets clarifications, and IBM invests in the Internet of Things.
GitHub DDOS attack
This week GitHub endured a large scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) that began on March 26th and lasted for 5 days. GitHub said there were a number of vectors being used in this attack, including sophisticated techniques that used the web browsers of unsuspecting users to flood the GitHub site with traffic. While GitHub proclaimed the attack was the largest in company history, they were able to mitigate and deflect most of the evolving attack, maintaining stable service overall. In fact, watching the status messages from GitHub was kind of exciting.
The GitHub pages targeted by redirecting search traffic from Chinese search engine Baidu included a Chinese anti-censorship service GreatFire.org and a mirror site of The New York Times’ Chinese edition. Security experts analyzing the attacks reported that the machines attacking GitHub were located “on or near the Great Firewall of China”, and while other explanations were possible, “the overwhelmingly most likely suspect for the source of the GitHub attacks is the Chinese government.”
Clarifications on Project Spartan replacing IE
The head of Microsoft Marketing, Chris Capossela, recently announced IE would no longer continue as a brand and will be replaced by Project Spartan, their next generation browser.
Last week on the IE blog, the Project Spartan team announced there will be a clean distinction between the legacy and new browser in an effort to simplify the role of each browser. On Windows 10, Project Spartan will host an entirely new engine. Similarly, IE 11 will remain fundamentally the same from Windows 8.1 and will exclusively use the legacy engine.
“Project Spartan is our future” said Kyle Pflug, the Project Spartan program manager. Calls for help from developers were made to test their new rendering engine in the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
IBM invests $3 Billion in the Internet of Things
IBM announced that it would be investing $3 billion dollars over the next four years on a business model aiming to analyze the growth of data being generated by a surplus of devices containing sensors connected to the internet. IBM’s new Internet of Things foundation is a cloud software tool that gives clients and partner companies the ability to modify their existing apps, or even build new ones. IBM can then analyze the data collected from the applications from a large variety of devices. In addition to creating and selling software to help businesses analyze their data, IBM is also designing supercomputer hardware capable of efficiently storing and computing large amounts of data.