Smart servers to combat DDoS attacks

Cyber-guerrillas, beware. A new breed of computer server can tell when it is under attack - and then do something about it, according to NewScientist.com.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the weapon of choice for people intent on disrupting Web sites.

Combating a DDoS attack is tricky because it is hard to distinguish botnet activity from that of ordinary users. "The most challenging issue is how to detect an attack that involves a large number of attacking hosts," says Jaydip Sen of Tata Consultancy Services in Kolkata, India.

The unpredictable nature of severe storms has always made weather predictions a bit of a guessing game, but experts say new computer models that factor in the inherent unpredictability of these storms are bringing meteorologists closer than they've ever been to a sure thing, writes Freep.com.

"Today, the technology has improved so that we get a really good idea of the magnitude of what is about to occur," says Richard Castro, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Chicago.

Computer modelling has improved, now taking the mean of up to 20 computer-generated scenarios of a storm's impact, says John Ferree, a severe storm expert at the National Weather Service in Oklahoma.

Twitter is great for making friends and sharing links, but researchers are also increasingly using it to study human interactions, according to NewScientist.com.

This is more difficult than it sounds, the report states, since privacy settings and caps on server access can make it hard to gather research data from social networking sites. It'd be much easier to have a virtual Twitter for researchers to experiment on, like a kind of '140-character lab rat'. So Vijay Erramilli and colleagues at Telefonica Research, Spain have built one.

Social Network Write Generator generates data that closely replicates the behaviour of genuine tweeters.