On The Digital Life podcast this week, we discuss the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) that took down the Internet on the East Coast for a sustained period of time last Friday. Dyn, a Domain Name System (DNS) services company from New Hampshire was hit with multiple waves of attacks on its Internet directory servers.

This DDoS attack was propagated by an IoT botnet — essentially webcams, DVRs, and routers from all over the world — that were infected with malware. This is a very public example of an IoT outcome that was malicious rather than beneficial, an interesting case study for this emerging technology that raises serious questions about its future implementation.

 
Resources:
What We Know About Friday’s Massive East Coast Internet Outage

This week on The Digital Life we discuss innovation, game design, and the mind of Albert Einstein. Dirk Knemeyer has been working with the Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to create a new game based on the scientist’s life. We explore insights gained from Dirk’s research, his approach to designing the game, as well as takeaways helpful to today’s technology innovators.

 
Resources:
Einstein Game Kickstarter

This week on The Digital Life we discuss Jon Follett’s new book, “Marvin and the Moths”, a science fiction novel for young readers that takes a humorous look at life for middle school in a zany world impacted by emerging technologies. While “Marvin and the Moths” is Jon’s first science fiction release, he has already authored a variety of other published works. Among them is “Designing for Emerging Technologies” for O’Reilly Media, published in 2014. Looking across a variety of emerging technologies and industries, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology, Jon outlined an audacious vision for how the technology of recent science fiction will manifest as the science fact of our near future. Jon used his background in emerging technology as fodder for this new work of fiction, and science plays an important role in “Marvin and the Moths” which was published by Scholastic in September.

 
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Marvin and the Moths

This week on The Digital Life we discuss the recent announcement that the world’s first baby was born from new procedure using DNA of three people. Dr. John Zhang, from the New Hope Fertility Center in New York, led the team that attempted the mitochondrial transfer procedure. The procedure replaces faulty DNA in a mother’s egg with healthy DNA from a second woman — the baby inherits genes from two mothers and one father. This prevents certain, potentially fatal genetic diseases from being passed on to the child. The United Kingdom was the first country to legalize mitochondrial transfer in 2015, but, no other country has followed with a similar law. The procedure was conducted in Mexico where there are no rules in place for this kind of activity, with a team from the US. While this technique does not specifically impact the concerns about “designer babies”, it’s clear that the genomic technology is advancing far more quickly than governments are able to deal with it.

 
Resources:
Exclusive: World’s first baby born with new “3 parent” technique