Fastly settles, Cloudflare strikes back and wins agains patent trolls

Blackbird Technologies, a firm founded by two ex-attorneys who previously worked for the world’s top tech companies, separately accused Fastly and Cloudflare of violating the same patent – U.S. Patent No. 6,453.335. “Providing an internet third party data channel”. Fastly decided to settle which is exactly what Blackbird wanted, but Cloudflare fought back – and won. Judge Vince Chhabria noted that “abstract ideas are not patentable” and held that the Blackbird’s bid to assert the patent “attempts to monopolize the abstract idea of monitoring a pre-existing data stream between a server”, and is invalid as a matter of law.

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Read more: Bizety

Author impersonation money laundering on Amazon

Patrick Reames, a credited author on Amazon recently received a 1099 form saying he’d made almost $24,000 selling books on Createspace, the company’s on-demand publishing arm. This was entirely not true and once he got around checking out what this is – he quickly found out someone has been using his name to peddle a $555 book that contains nothing but random gibberish. Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors. At $555 a pop, it would only take approximately 70 sales over three months to rack up the earnings that Amazon said he made.

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Read more: KrebsOnSecurity

Ex-MaxCDN team launches SecurityTrails

SecurityTrails is a multi-purpose (explained below) company founded in 2017 by CEO Chris Ueland, formerly the CRO for MaxCDN. They have 12 employees serving customers like PricewaterhouseCoopers and Microsoft. Their mission statement “make the biggest treasure-trove of cyber intelligence data readily available in an instant” is currently backed by their Forensicts API.  In Forensics, you can search via a domain name and find a great deal of information about that domain, including all the WHOIS information on record, which website technology was used to build it and historical data for many kinds of records. Using passive DNS, you can find all the subdomains on record. You can then scroll through them, or search by specific subdomain. To dig deeper into a domain, you can see which records are behind a specific IP address. SecurityTrails currently track over 200 million domains, 1,000 technologies and receive one billion passive DNS datasets per month and are adding more features, such as full API and site explorer.

The goal behind the company is to leverage the huge amount of data available on the Internet, which can be used for many purposes:

• Cyber forensics – track suspicious changes to DNS records
• Threat hunting – observe command and control servers and identify the latest malware
• Online fraud & crime investigation – research fraudulent and criminal activity
• Powering reputation scoring systems – know what domains and IPs bad actors use
• Brand protection – find out if your brand’s copyright or trademark is being used on spoof domains
• Domain security – use reputation scoring and indexed intel to help make your site more secure
• Aid in corporate decision-making, for instance during M&As – find out an entity’s online assets and hidden details

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Read more: Bizety

Baidu launches P2P CDN

At the end of November, 2017 Baidu quietly launched a peer-to-peer (P2P) CDN called Baidu Jinkuang, which lets users exchange idle bandwidth and storage for cash rewards. Unlike Xunlei’s cloud computing product built on blockchain, OneCloud, Baidu P2P CDN is not powered by blockchain, nor does it work in connection with cryptocurrencies. There’s also an option for users to be a “super machine” if they are able to provide idle bandwith of more than 1G helping supply internet capacity at peak times or sudden surges in usage.

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Read more: Bizety

CDN77 introduces their new live streaming platform

Earlier this month, CDN77 launched their Live Streaming CDN, a live streaming CDN platform which combines encoding, transcoding and security layers with “low-latency and buffer-free global video delivery”. It’s capacity is 7Tbps with 18 PoPs in Europe and North America.  It supports all HTTP streaming protocols to reach audiences on all platforms and devices (including desktop, mobile, IPTV and HbbTV models) using HLS, HDS and MPEG-DASH playback formats.

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Read more: Bizety

The post Patent Troll Attacks Against Fastly And Cloudflare, Author Impersonation Money Laundering On Amazon And More In This Weeks News appeared first on GlobalDots - CDN, Security and Performance Solutions.