Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Wednesday, November 14th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today. Why was Google's traffic routed from Nigeria through China?

Ford partners with Walmart on driverless cars?

Amazon's HQ2 stunt seems to be backfiring

and Uber gets a customer loyalty program. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

There was a story bubbling up in the feeds that I watch all the time on Monday about how for a period of several hours

several Google services were unavailable to a lot of users on Monday

Now I normally shy away from service outage stories because once they're

resolved there's no story basically right and indeed Google got things back up and

running that same day but there was one interesting wrinkle to this story.

Internet research firm Thousand Eyes said at the time that the reason you couldn't access

your Google services was because traffic to Google was being

redirected to Russian network operator Trans Telecom and most of it redirected to China Telecom Corp.

So people were wondering was there some sort of

actual geopolitical shenanigans going on?

Quoting from the Wall Street Journal about this on Monday, quote,

network engineers have warned for years that online platforms are vulnerable to network-based attacks that send data widely off course.

Such attacks are possible because large attacks that send data widely off course.

Such attacks are possible because large network service providers exchange

traffic through a system that is largely based on mutual trust

through protocols nearly as old as the internet itself."

Well, today, the story got a tad otter, maybe.

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