Now that Walmart and others are chasing Amazon’s convenience with shipping that’s nearly instantaneous, deep discounts for third parties and convenient in-store pickup of online orders, what’s next? According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Walmart might use its stores to go after AWS.

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently CEO Doug McMillon’s pitch is that the large footprint and locations of Walmart’s superstores gives it an advantage in “edge computing,” where servers are physically closer to where the data is needed. That could be crucial for services like autonomous cars and drones that need information with less lag, or maybe even for something like cloud gaming. The plan doesn’t sound like it’s a certain thing, but it is surprising, and strikes Amazon in the heart of a business that brought in $25 billion last year.

Other business opportunities include selling shopper data to digital advertisers. Your phone may not be listening to you, Walmart — and anyone willing to pay for access — could track exactly which products you stopped and looked at, or what you typically buy using a credit card. It could also follow Amazon in providing delivery services for other companies, and has reportedly looked into leasing space on its roofs for telecom companies to install 5G antennas. The one thing that apparently isn’t included in future plans? Digital video store Vudu, backing an earlier report from The Information that it’s up for sale — if Walmart can find an interested buyer.

The exploit was detailed at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas by Nathan Hauke and David Renardy security company Two Six Labs, as reported by Wired.

Rather than a traditional DDoS attack which overwhelms a server by sending thousands of junk traffic requests to it from hundreds of different computers until it fails, the new attack uses a related technique called Denial of Service (DoS). The DoS attack can originate from just one machine and targets the algorithms used by many sites for data processing.

The researchers found a common vulnerability across three sets of software, in which they could throw large amounts of data at algorithms which then try to process the data and crash out. This worked for PDF software, by uploading a single large PDF file which could crash a whole website, for virtual networking computers (VNCs) which could be filled with junk data until the servers crashed and for password strength indicating software developed by Dropbox which could be stalled when a user entered thousand-character passwords.

In each case, the attacks take advantage of the large amount of processing done by algorithms. If these algorithms are fed enough junk data, they can gum up a website and cause server outages.

The researchers say they want to bring awareness of this vulnerability to developers’ attention, and they have created a tool called ACsploit which developers can use to generate the “worst-case inputs for algorithms” and test against them.

Of course, this is hardly a new issue — servers for Burnout Revenge came down before Paradise even launched and Burnout: Takedown went offline in 2010 — but sometimes we’ve seen it go the other way, like when EA unexpectedly reactivated multiplayer for Skate 3. As it stands, a decade-plus is probably a pretty good run for multiplayer support, and certainly outlasts a game like Driveclub, which won’t even make it five years.

Still, if you need a fresh take on the genre, some of the “creative talent” behind Burnout released an all-new game, Dangerous Driving, earlier this month.

Burnout Paradise fans, after over 11.5 years of service, the servers for the original 2008 game will be closing on August 1st 2019. That affects Xbox 360, PS3 and PC versions. Offline play will still be available of course, and Burnout Paradise Remastered servers are unaffected.

— Criterion Games (@CriterionGames) April 17, 2019