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There’s a lot of changes coming to THE FLASH season 3 premiere after Barry saved his mother’s life in the past and then subsequently messed with the timeline. After having viewed the premiere episode, we have a few teasers to share with you. Welcome to Flashpoint. Barry is settling in nicely to his new universe. […]

by Manuel

Mike Schur has been a big part of TV comedy in the past two decades, from his time writing on Saturday Night Live and The Office, to co-creating Parks and Recreation (where he served as showrunner) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Schur, who also is an executive producer on Master of None these days, just launched his newest series this week with The Good Place, which aired two preview episodes Monday night, before it debuts in its regular timeslot this Thursday. Kristen Bell and Ted Danson star in the high concept comedy about a woman (Bell’s Eleanor) who dies and goes to the heavenly “Good Place” by mistake, having lived a less than good life.

I spoke to Schur about how his idea for The Good Place came to be, delving into a more fantastical world -- and collaborating with Cabin in the Woods/Lost/Daredevil’s Drew Goddard on the pilot, which Goddard directed -- working with Bell and Danson and more.

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From Infinity Stones and the Illuminati to Kung Fu and the future of the MCU. Here's the coolest stuff we learned from its cast and crew.

On the latest Agents of SHIELD, actor Jason O'Mara’s character was introduced. But what is his bigger connection to Marvel history?

The commercial availability of coffee actually contributed to the advance of women’s rights!

After lengthy delays and no small amount of political opposition, it's official: the US has given up a key aspect of internet oversight. As of October 1st, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (the outfit that manages the domain na...

It seems like we hear about a new breakthrough using machine learning nearly every day, but it's not easy. In order to fine-tune algorithms that recognize and predict patterns in data, you need to feed them massive amounts of already-tagged informati...

The Flash and Arrow have decided it's time to introduce Supergirl to their fight club.

The CW has released a new ad featuring the DC superheroes, along with the Legends of Tomorrow. But instead of fighting each other to blow off steam, this time it's more of team-up training session, at least in the clip below.

The full, new Fight Club 2.0 promo is only currently available to watch on The CW's new app, which will also allow users to watch a number of episodes the network's shows for free.

Now to be clear, none of this footage is from the upcoming DC Comics four-show crossover. Though we did just learn that the Dominators will serve as the villains for the superheroes.

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During a prerun of the Baja 1000, one of the world's most treacherous off-road races, Michael McClellan rode his dirt bike out to the front. He traversed the rough terrain of Mexico's northwest peninsula, eventually coming up hard on a washed-up brea...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative last year with his wife, Priscilla Chan, in an effort to try to "advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation." The two pledged to donate 99...

The scientific world is developing a knack for reading texts without opening them. Researchers in Israel and the US have conducted the first "virtual unwrapping" of a heavily damaged scroll, the En-Gedi scroll, to read its contents without destroyin...

Hydrogen fuel cells aren't gaining a huge amount of traction in cars, where there's a steady move toward electric. But what about regional railways, where long ranges and a lack of powered rails makes electric trains impractical? Alstom thinks that...

Amazon has become home to millions of products over the years, but hand-crafted items weren't something you'd typically come across. That changed late last year when the online retailer launched its Handmade store in the US, giving artisan-goods comp...

Researchers from the University of Calgary demonstrated that photons' states could be teleported at a record 6 kilometer distance over "dark fiber." The team hopes this research could help them establish the fundamentals for a "global quantum internet."

Qubes OS version 3.2 was released with new management functionality, USB passthrough support, and a new Xfce4 desktop environment.

Doctors have succeeded in giving birth to a baby by using three persons. After five months, scientist publicized the out come of the new fertility technique to the rest of the world. The five-month old boy has DNA of his mother and father, and a tiny bit of genetic code from third person (donor).

It's great to be an AI developer right now, but maybe not a good time to have a job that can be done by a machine. Take image captioning -- Google has released its "Show and Tell" algorithm to developers, who can train it recognize objects in photos...

Marvel’s Luke Cage debuts its 13-episode season this coming Friday on Netflix, as the third Netflix/Marvel series so far puts the focus on Mike Colter’s bulletproof hero, after his debut in Jessica Jones.

I sat down with Colter and Luke Cage executive producer/showrunner Cheo Coker to talk about using Luke’s prior depiction in Jessica as a springboard, the appeal of the character and more.

IGN: Cheo, at what point in the Jessica Jones process did you become involved and begin developing the Luke Cage series while they were also making Jessica?

Coker: I think Mike had just been cast, and, like I’ve said before, I thank

Melissa Rosenberg every time I see her for casting Mike as Luke, because he is literally Luke Cage. I mean he isn’t Luke Cage… but he is Luke Cage! So my thing about it is, I couldn’t have asked for a better partner and a better lead actor and character. Mike is so incredibly talented, you can throw anything at him, and he can do it. And he can do it on the fly. He is the perfect person to build the show around.

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Frank Darabont, who developed AMC's hit television series The Walking Dead (and was the original showrunner), is moving forward with his lawsuit against the network, seeking a hefty sum from AMC that amounts to over $280 million in damages.

A certificate of trial readiness was filed on Monday, and AMC has since responded to Darabont's charges, providing The Hollywood Reporter with the following statement: "Plaintiffs' damages claim has no basis in reality and we will continue to vigorously defend against this lawsuit."

Darabont, who was fired during The Walking Dead's second season, is claiming that AMC owes him contingent profits by producing the series and then licensing it to their own cable network affiliate at a low fee -- lower than they would when paying for a show from an outside studio -- to ensure the show wouldn't make enough for those who have a stake in its profits. He also says AMC unfairly lowered his share of the profits by designating him as not fully involved in Season 2, while he insists he was involved in all of the episodes that season, in some capacity. Last year, it was said Darabont was also contending he was owed money tied to Talking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, as derivative productions of The Walking Dead.

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A team of researchers from China's Keen Security Lab were able to remotely hack into a Tesla Model S by exploiting the vehicle's in-car web browser. While the Keen group worked closely with Tesla's own security team to fix the vulnerability before it...

Today the History channel announced that VIKINGS will return to finish out its fourth season on Wednesday, November 30 at 9PM ET/PT, thus moving to a new night. After being defeated in a monumental battle in Paris against his brother Rollo (Clive Standen), Ragnar disappeared following his humiliating loss. VIKINGS then took an enormous leap […]

The USA series Mr. Robot has more than just surprisingly realistic hacking scenes, as it now can claim an Emmy win. Series star Rami Malek snagged the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series award tonight, beating out Kevin Spacey, Bob Odenkirk and...

A powerful biographic drama anchored by a tremendous performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

FBI director James Comey revealed during the Center for Strategic and International Studies conference that he knew he was mocked for admitting that he tapes over his webcam. But that didn't stop him from recommending that other people do the same. "...

America's most wanted hackers apparently think they've got some leverage over the US government. The ACLU last week began petitioning the Obama administration for a full pardon for Edward Snowden and, on Thursday, Julian Assange announced that he wou...

The US House of Representatives' intelligence committee just releasing a statement condemning Edward Snowden and recommending he be extradited to face justice. After two years spent reviewing the 1.5 million documents Snowden stole and interviewing e...

When Oliver Stone's Snowden was first announced, it seemed far too soon to be retelling the story of the infamous whistleblower. After all, it was only three years ago that the files Snowden leaked led to the world-shaking revelations of the NSA's ma...

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.

First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it's overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don't like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it's a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.

Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they're used to seeing. They last longer. They're more sophisticated. And they look like probing. One week, the attack would start at a particular level of attack and slowly ramp up before stopping. The next week, it would start at that higher point and continue. And so on, along those lines, as if the attacker were looking for the exact point of failure.

The attacks are also configured in such a way as to see what the company's total defenses are. There are many different ways to launch a DDoS attack. The more attack vectors you employ simultaneously, the more different defenses the defender has to counter with. These companies are seeing more attacks using three or four different vectors. This means that the companies have to use everything they've got to defend themselves. They can't hold anything back. They're forced to demonstrate their defense capabilities for the attacker.

I am unable to give details, because these companies spoke with me under condition of anonymity. But this all is consistent with what Verisign is reporting. Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains. Every quarter, Verisign publishes a DDoS trends report. While its publication doesn't have the level of detail I heard from the companies I spoke with, the trends are the same: "in Q2 2016, attacks continued to become more frequent, persistent, and complex."

There's more. One company told me about a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.

Who would do this? It doesn't seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do. Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering. It's not normal for companies to do that. Furthermore, the size and scale of these probes -- and especially their persistence -- points to state actors. It feels like a nation's military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US's Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.

What can we do about this? Nothing, really. We don't know where the attacks come from. The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with. On the other hand, it's possible to disguise the country of origin for these sorts of attacks. The NSA, which has more surveillance in the Internet backbone than everyone else combined, probably has a better idea, but unless the US decides to make an international incident over this, we won't see any attribution.

But this is happening. And people should know.

This essay previously appeared on Lawfare.com.

EDITED TO ADD: Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (9/15): Podcast with me on the topic.