If you noticed that your Internet was a little sluggish yesterday, you’re not alone: in what is being called the largest cyberattack in history by some, people around the world noticed that sites they were visiting were experiencing an unnatural slowdown.

According to a report by The New York Times, spam-fighting group Spamhaus allegedly added Dutch website hosting company Cyberbunker to its blacklist. The Times reports that Cyberbunker will offer its hosting services to any website “except child porn and anything related to terrorism,” which is still a very broad definition. After blacklisting Cyberbunker, Spamhaus began getting hit by denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

[ Related: The truth behind the ‘biggest cyberattack in history’ ]

According to Patrick Gilmore, the chief architect of digital Internet provider Akamai Technologies, Spamhaus pointing out Cyberbunker as one of the spammers of the world didn’t sit well, leading to the launch of the attack in the form of swarms of

Read More »from Massive Internet outage blamed on dispute between spam companies

(Getty Images)When it comes to competing with Apple’s iOS devices and Android devices, there’s one area where BlackBerry still falls short: it’s hard to compete with the massive app markets for the respective devices.

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced in October that there were more than 700,000 apps in the App Store, while the Google Play store is expected to cross the 1 million mark in June. Meanwhile, BlackBerry announced last week that BlackBerry World is now home to 100,000 apps, still behind the Windows Store (which has 130,000 apps for Windows Phone).

But it looks like BlackBerry has figured out a way to give itself a boost in the app market while giving developers an easy way to bring their Android apps to BB10. BlackBerry offers an emulation engine, All Things D explains, which allows Android developers to easily port their apps onto the BlackBerry 10 platform.

[ Related: BlackBerry bans Batman, Tigger and 104 other passwords ]

BlackBerry vice president for global alliances and business

Read More »from BlackBerry 10 apps not as they appear: one in five is an Android app

(Image via Manteresting.com)Pinterest has grown quickly since its launch in 2010, earning the title of the fastest growing social network of 2012. The concept is simple: find pictures of things you like online, “pin” it to your virtual board on Pinterest, then share your board with friends and strangers while exploring what they’ve “pinned” in turn.

The social network has been a runaway success for women, but hasn’t attracted men in quite the same numbers. According to comScore, 80 per cent of the users on Pinterest are women, mostly between the ages of 25 and 54.

[ Related: Online site drives up wedding expectations, costs ]

Enter Manteresting, the site for men. Instead of the light and airy feel of Pinterest, Manteresting goes for a dark, steely look. While there’s nothing stopping people from posting “manly” things on Pinterest, Manteresting has substantially more content that is typically thought of as male, which apparently includes scantily-clad women, cars, gadgets and geeky paraphernalia.

Instead of

Read More »from Manteresting: The Pinterest designed especially for men

FIFA 13 (Pocket-lint)A Toronto-area mother is footing the bill for some virtual soccer players her son didn’t actually get after his Xbox Live account was hacked.

According to CBC, Jennifer Stubbs’ son Dylan got her permission to purchase 7,000 Microsoft Points, the currency used to purchase in-game extras like players for his FIFA 13 game, which would normally cost around $100. But when Stubbs checked her credit card bill, there were charges for $409 from Microsoft, totaling about 25,000 points.

[ Related: Get into the game with the next generation of virtual reality headset ]

When 11-year-old Dylan checked his FIFA 13 game, the players he had bought for the team had all vanished, apparently stolen by whoever made the additional charges to Stubbs’ credit card.

“We hear these screams coming from the living room and we go, ‘My god, what has happened?!’” Stubbs told CBC. “He was beside himself.

“He was so proud… and all of his friends play as well. So it’s a really important social thing, and it’s good for

Read More »from Xbox, FIFA 13 virtual theft costs Toronto woman $300

Epiphany onE Puck (Kickstarter)If you’re one of many people who need a piping hot cup of coffee to get you going in the morning, or a cold drink to wind down at the end of a long day, you’re certainly not alone. And one company thinks they have an invention that will let your drink do double duty – it’ll also charge up your phone.

The Epiphany onE Puck is a project on Kickstarter by Epiphany Labs that takes your hot or cold beverage and converts the heat disparity into power by using a Stirling engine. Unlike an engine like you’d find in a car, the Stirling engine is a closed-circuit thermodynamic system that converts heat energy into power – in this case, electricity to power your cell phone.

[ Last week's Must-Have: Streamline your breakfast sandwich creation with a single machine ]

The premise for the device is simple: place your hot beverage on the red side, or cold beverage on the blue side, and plug in your device via the USB plug in the side of the coaster (which means you’re not limited to charging your

Read More »from Must-Have Monday: Keep your devices charged with a cold glass of beer

Google might just be changing the world again with its Google Glass product, albeit not in the ways the company expects.

There’s been plenty of hype so far about the potentially-revolutionary new Project Glass, a device that interacts with the Internet via voice commands and turns your daily experiences into a very basic version of augmented reality.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t personally stoked about Google Glass. I think the device has a ton of potential to change the way we interact online, as well as make the Web even more present in our daily lives. It may open the Web up to new kinds of communications, expanding our digital horizons to frontiers we couldn’t have imagined even five years ago.

Still, it’s understandable there have been some naysayers to Google Glass. This device is unlike anything we’ve seen before, so there’s going to be some people out there that will push back on a game changer like this.

Do they have legitimate reasons to be concerned? Probably.

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Read More »from Three potential pitfalls in the new Google Glass technology

What started out as some vaguely sexual jokes by a programmer has led to two people losing their jobs, after a tweet went out publicly shaming the joker.

At PyCon, a conference for those who use the programming language Python in California, two men were making jokes about “big dongles” and “forking” behind SendGrid developer evangelist Adria Richards. According to Richards, she heard the jokes go on for a while before feeling like she couldn’t take it anymore, and upon seeing an image of a little girl from a young coders event on the presentation screen, she was motivated to turn around, snap this image, and post it to her Twitter account with the caption, “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles. Right behind me.:”

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo's in a sexual way and "big" dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

Richards, who refers to herself as a technology evangelist, also

Read More »from Dongle joke turns into ugly situation as two tech workers lose their jobs

On March 21, 2006, Twitter founder Jack Dempsey posted the very first tweet that's probably more recognized today than in '06 when the fledgling service was trying to make a name for itself.

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

Seven years later, Twitter has become an ubiquitous extension of the Internet and part of its now 200 million users' daily lives. In honour of this milestone, the company created a video looking back at the major tweeting milestones of the past seven years.

[ Related: Facebook reportedly planning to mimic Twitter with hashtags ]

Happy 7th birthday Twitter. Here's tweeting at you!

Need to know what’s hot in tech?
Follow @yrightclick on Twitter!

Read More »from Twitter celebrates 7th birthday, 200 million users