Business

As Spring cracked the Moscow frosts and March rains doused the streets, a computer in an innocuous server farm somewhere in the heart of the city winked to life. It was 2007, a year when many people became truly invested in online life. Twitter was a year old and the most popular smartphone was the Blackberry Curve – a pure email machine. It was a year ripe with promise for cyber-everything. And a group of hackers, unnamed to this day, wanted to grab their piece. The server first sent a blast of emails containing a link to a piece of software that many around the world wanted to download. Once they grabbed the Trojan Horse, the infected program took over computer after computer, creating something security experts call a botnet – a collection of infected machines controlled by a central command and control unit (CnC). This Moscow server, hidden behind IP address 72.232.49.214, began receiving incoming messages from a number of computers around the world. A whole swath of California l...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Last month, Roku sent an email out to its developers, informing them that an exclusive deal with DISH meant it would be taking down independent apps for international content. [Hat tip to Zatz Not Funny!] With the launch of the satellite provider’s DISHWorld international channels, which are available for $19.99 a month, some 25 apps were taken off the Roku Channel Store. While a number of Roku developers are upset with the takedown and have begun questioning the open nature of the platform, Roku CEO Anthony Wood said the decision will mean more, and higher-quality content available to users through the DISHWorld channel. “In general, we still want Roku to be a super-open platform,” Wood told me by phone today. But he said that in the case of international conten...