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Links for 2017-03-20

Published March 20, 2017

  • Segment.com on cost savings using DynamoDB, autoscaling and ECS

    great post. 1. DynamoDB hot shards were a big problem -- and it is terrible that diagnosing this requires a ticket to AWS support! This heat map should be a built-in feature. 2. ECS auto-scaling gets a solid thumbs-up. 3. Switching from ELB to ALB lets them set ports dynamically for individual ECS Docker containers, and then pack as many containers as will fit on a giant EC2 instance. 4. Terraform modules to automate setup and maintainance of ECS, autoscaling groups, and ALBs

    (tags: terraform segment architecture aws dynamodb alb elb asg ecs docker)

  • atlassian/localstack: A fully functional local AWS cloud stack. Develop and test your cloud apps offline!

    LocalStack provides an easy-to-use test/mocking framework for developing Cloud applications. Currently, the focus is primarily on supporting the AWS cloud stack. LocalStack spins up the following core Cloud APIs on your local machine: API Gateway at http://localhost:4567; Kinesis at http://localhost:4568; DynamoDB at http://localhost:4569; DynamoDB Streams at http://localhost:4570; Elasticsearch at http://localhost:4571; S3 at http://localhost:4572; Firehose at http://localhost:4573; Lambda at http://localhost:4574; SNS at http://localhost:4575; SQS at http://localhost:4576 Additionally, LocalStack provides a powerful set of tools to interact with the cloud services, including a fully featured KCL Kinesis client with Python binding, simple setup/teardown integration for nosetests, as well as an Environment abstraction that allows to easily switch between local and remote Cloud execution.

    (tags: aws emulation mocking services testing dynamodb s3)

Links for 2017-03-15

Published March 15, 2017

  • Artificial intelligence is ripe for abuse, tech researcher warns: 'a fascist's dream' | Technology | The Guardian

    “We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.” In the Chinese research it turned out that the faces of criminals were more unusual than those of law-abiding citizens. “People who had dissimilar faces were more likely to be seen as untrustworthy by police and judges. That’s encoding bias,” Crawford said. “This would be a terrifying system for an autocrat to get his hand on.” [...] With AI this type of discrimination can be masked in a black box of algorithms, as appears to be the case with a company called Faceception, for instance, a firm that promises to profile people’s personalities based on their faces. In its own marketing material, the company suggests that Middle Eastern-looking people with beards are “terrorists”, while white looking women with trendy haircuts are “brand promoters”.

    (tags: bias ai racism politics big-data technology fascism crime algorithms faceception discrimination computer-says-no)

  • ASAP: Automatic Smoothing for Attention Prioritization in Streaming Time Series Visualization

    Peter Bailis strikes again. 'Time series visualization of streaming telemetry (i.e., charting of key metrics such as server load over time) is increasingly prevalent in recent application deployments. Existing systems simply plot the raw data streams as they arrive, potentially obscuring large-scale deviations due to local variance and noise. We propose an alternative: to better prioritize attention in time series exploration and monitoring visualizations, smooth the time series as much as possible to remove noise while still retaining large-scale structure. We develop a new technique for automatically smoothing streaming time series that adaptively optimizes this trade-off between noise reduction (i.e., variance) and outlier retention (i.e., kurtosis). We introduce metrics to quantitatively assess the quality of the choice of smoothing parameter and provide an efficient streaming analytics operator, ASAP, that optimizes these metrics by combining techniques from stream processing, user interface design, and signal processing via a novel autocorrelation-based pruning strategy and pixel-aware preaggregation. We demonstrate that ASAP is able to improve users’ accuracy in identifying significant deviations in time series by up to 38.4% while reducing response times by up to 44.3%. Moreover, ASAP delivers these results several orders of magnitude faster than alternative optimization strategies.'

    (tags: dataviz graphs metrics peter-bailis asap smoothing aggregation time-series tsd)

  • When the Children Crashed Dad’s BBC Interview: The Family Speaks - WSJ

    Mr. Kelly describes his reaction as a mixture of surprise, embarrassment and amusement but also love and affection. The couple says they weren’t mad and didn’t scold the children. “I mean it was terribly cute,” Mr. Kelly said. “I saw the video like everybody else. My wife did a great job cleaning up a really unanticipated situation as best she possibly could... It was funny. If you watch the tape I was sort of struggling to keep my own laughs down. They’re little kids and that’s how things are.” “Yes I was mortified, but I also want my kids to feel comfortable coming to me,” Mr. Kelly said.
    aww!

    (tags: cute family bbc interviews funny viral kids hippity-hoppity robert-kelly)

  • UN privacy watchdog says 'little or no evidence' that mass surveillance works | ZDNet

    The United Nations' special rapporteur on privacy has lambasted a spate of new surveillance laws across Europe and the US, saying that there is "little or no evidence" that mass monitoring of communications works. In a report published this week, Prof. Joseph Cannataci, the first privacy watchdog to take up the post, said he was neither convinced of the effectiveness or the proportionality "of some of the extremely privacy-intrusive measures that have been introduced by new surveillance laws." He also said that bulk records collection, such as call and email metadata, runs the risk of "being hacked by hostile governments or organized crime." Cannataci singled out recently-passed laws in France, Germany, the UK and the US, all of which have pushed through new legislation in the wake of the threat from the so-called Islamic State. He said that the passed laws amount to "gesture-politics," which in his words, "have seen politicians who wish to be seen to be doing something about security, legislating privacy-intrusive powers into being -- or legalize existing practices -- without in any way demonstrating that this is either a proportionate or indeed an effective way to tackle terrorism." A rise in public support of increased surveillance powers is "predicated on the psychology of fear," he said, referring to the perceived threat of terrorism.

    (tags: surveillance law privacy un joseph-cannataci watchdogs terrorism fear fud)

  • The Lord British Postulate

    One of the most famous attributes of Lord British is that he is almost invincible. In every Ultima game in which he has appeared, he is designed to be almost impervious to a player's character predations. However, there are ways for a player thinking outside the box to assassinate him. This phenomenon is the origin of the Lord British Postulate which states: "If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it."[7] Virtually every MMO game displays numerous instances of this, with players attempting to kill (or, in the case of friendly NPCs, cause the death of) virtually every NPC or monster, howsoever powerful, meek, friendly, or ethereal.

    (tags: npcs gaming games lord-british murder rules mmorpgs)

Links for 2017-03-13

Published March 13, 2017

  • Dinosaur Escape - BoardGameGeek

    good kid's board game -- age 4+, 2-4 players.

    The object of Dinosaur Escape is to get all three dinosaurs safely to Dinosaur Island before the volcano erupts! Work together to move the dinosaur movers around the board and uncover the matching dinosaurs under the fern tokens. On your turn, roll the die. If you roll a number, move any dinosaur mover the indicated number of spaces any direction on the path. Then turn over one fern token anywhere on the board. If you reveal rocks, bones or other items, flip the token back over. If you reveal a dinosaur, and the dinosaur mover of the same species is in the same habitat area, move the dinosaur moved and matching token to Dinosaur Island. You just helped a dinosaur escape! If you reveal a dinosaur but the dinosaur mover of the same species is not in the same habitat as the token, flip the token back over. Dinosaur movers and matching tokens must be in the same habitat to help a dinosaur escape! If you turn over the T-Rex, RUN! Move each of the dinosaur movers in play back to a start space. If you roll a volcano, place volcano piece number 1 in the stand on the board. If you can find and help all three lost dinosaurs escape to Dinosaur Island before completing the 3D volcano puzzle, you all win!

    (tags: boardgames reviews kids children co-op games gaming)

  • Fides Raising Gamers (age 2 - 5) | BoardGameGeek

    some good boardgame reviews

    (tags: games gaming boardgames kids children reviews)

  • [1606.08813] European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a "right to explanation"

    We summarize the potential impact that the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation will have on the routine use of machine learning algorithms. Slated to take effect as law across the EU in 2018, it will restrict automated individual decision-making (that is, algorithms that make decisions based on user-level predictors) which "significantly affect" users. The law will also effectively create a "right to explanation," whereby a user can ask for an explanation of an algorithmic decision that was made about them. We argue that while this law will pose large challenges for industry, it highlights opportunities for computer scientists to take the lead in designing algorithms and evaluation frameworks which avoid discrimination and enable explanation.
    oh this'll be tricky.

    (tags: algorithms accountability eu gdpr ml machine-learning via:daveb europe data-protection right-to-explanation)

Links for 2017-03-12

Published March 12, 2017

  • Tim Berners-Lee calls for tighter regulation of online political advertising | Technology | The Guardian

    “Targeted advertising allows a campaign to say completely different, possibly conflicting things to different groups. Is that democratic?” Berners-Lee said.

    (tags: politics trump law elections polling advertising facebook micro-advertising)

  • ctop

    Top for containers (ie Docker)

    (tags: docker containers top ops go monitoring cpu)

  • Communications data errors: UK police incriminating the wrong people due to data retention system screwups

    It seems there have been 34 with serious consequences since 2008. Causes include:

    - Omission of an underscore when transcribing an e-mail address led to the wrong subscriber information being provided and a search warrant being executed at the premises of an individual unconnected with the investigation. - A CSP's data warehouse system change affected how GMT and British Summer Time were treated. This was not communicated to staff using the data retention disclosure system. This led to a one hour error in subscriber information disclosed in relation to IP address usage. Of 98 potential disclosure errors identified, 94 were in fact incorrect and four returned the same results when re-run. Of the 94 incorrect disclosures, in three cases a search warrant was executed at premises relating to individuals unconnected with the investigation (and one individual was arrested). - Due to a technical fault causing a time zone conversion to be out by seven hours, a CSP voluntarily disclosed an incorrect IP address to a public authority.  That led to a search warrant being executed at premises relating to individuals unconnected with the investigation.
    In other words, timezones largely screw up everything, yet again.

    (tags: timezones uk law data-retention errors bst)

Links for 2017-03-09

Published March 9, 2017

  • Colm O'Gorman, on societal responsibility for Mother & Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries & various other church atrocities in Ireland

    Excellent twitter thread on the topic. Pasted:

    It is often said that everyone knew what was happening in such places, or about the rape of children by priests. That is not true. It is true that deep veins of knowledge existed across Irish society, at all levels, but not everyone knew. Or were allowed to know. Just like is always the case, the terrible things that were done were possible only because they were tolerated. They went unchecked. They were tolerated by those in positions of authority who either dared not, or did not wish to, challenge the power strictures that existed They were tolerated by those without power or position because they feared what speaking up might do to them and to their families That was an Ireland where challenging such vile abuse by power would see you become its victim. It was brutal and vicious. If you did not, or could not, conform to the demands of the powerful, you were in real danger. At best, ostracisation and excommunication. But many experience far worse than that. They found themselves in the very places we now acknowledge as hell holes. Locked up in institutions I always remember the late, great Mary Rafferty exposing the scale of such abusive institutionalisation. She pointed out that at one point in our relatively recent history, we led the world in one regard. Per capita, we locked up more people in psychiatric institutions than any other country on the planet. Only the Soviet Union came a distant second to us. That was how Ireland treated dissent or difference That what was happened to many who could not conform to a brutal demand to be somehow 'acceptable' to dogma & unaccountable power And it wasn't some ancient Ireland either. The last laundry closed in 1996. In 2002, when fighting for inquiries into child rape by priests and it's cover up by bishops, cardinals and popes, those same princes declared themselves above the rule of the law of this Republic insisting that the law of their church was superior to the law of this state. And their position was taken seriously by many. It took months of dogged battle by me and others to get past that bullshit. For our political and legal system to assert itself. The Ireland where the lives of women & children were controlled & brutalised by people who felt they had a God given right to do so is not some other country that existed back in some other time. It is this Ireland. We have changed a lot - but it is still this Ireland. The difference now is that we ALL know. That the truth is out, and that more is being revealed. And yes, undoubtedly there is more to come. So it is NOT true all past members of society, or even anything close to a majority, colluded with such abuses. That is a falsehood. It is also a falsehood to suggest that the church did what the state would not do, and provided as best it could. That is a lie. The Catholic Church captured control of what should have been arms of the state. Health, education and social care. And it exploited them. It used them to drive its own agendas, to enforce its own dogma. And at every turn it resisted any 'intrusion' into those realms by others. including the state. Look at the Mother & Child Scheme for eg, or the response to the first multi-denominational schools, and much more. Catholic orders defended themselves against accusations of appalling abuse of children in their institutions by claiming that the state did not give them enough money to feed, clothe and properly care for the children they detained in those places. This was a lie. in the same institutions where children went starving, clergy were well fed and housed. They went for nothing. Funded by the state and the forced labour of the children or women they detained. The Ryan Report debunked that lie in its entirety. Ryan found that religious orders maintained "bloated congregations" by bringing in more and more children, and therefore more and more money And now we know. Now the threat of brutal reprisal is lifted. Now is the time for truth, to own what has been done to so many vulnerable people in our Republic. To learn from it and ensure we identify how that same corrupting tendency manifests today. Because it does of course It may not be quite as vicious, but it prevails.Look at how power still treats a reasonable demand for accountability: Maurice McCabe for eg Look at how our education and health systems still allow religious dogma to exert extraordinary power over people's lives. We are a different Ireland, but are we different enough?

    (tags: mother-and-baby-homes tuam ireland catholic-church abuse colm-o-gorman twitter history priests)

  • Chatbot that overturned 160,000 parking fines now helping refugees claim asylum | Technology | The Guardian

    The original DoNotPay, created by Stanford student Joshua Browder, describes itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer”, giving free legal aid to users through a simple-to-use chat interface. The chatbot, using Facebook Messenger, can now help refugees fill in an immigration application in the US and Canada. For those in the UK, it helps them apply for asylum support.

    (tags: government technology automation bots asylum forms facebook)

Links for 2017-03-07

Published March 7, 2017

Links for 2017-03-06

Published March 6, 2017

  • A Programmer’s Introduction to Unicode – Nathan Reed’s coding blog

    Fascinating Unicode details -- a lot of which were new to me. Love the heat map of usage in Wikipedia:

    One more interesting way to visualize the codespace is to look at the distribution of usage—in other words, how often each code point is actually used in real-world texts. Below is a heat map of planes 0–2 based on a large sample of text from Wikipedia and Twitter (all languages). Frequency increases from black (never seen) through red and yellow to white. You can see that the vast majority of this text sample lies in the BMP, with only scattered usage of code points from planes 1–2. The biggest exception is emoji, which show up here as the several bright squares in the bottom row of plane 1.

    (tags: unicode coding character-sets wikipedia bmp emoji twitter languages characters heat-maps dataviz)

  • Martin Fowler's First Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t

    lol. I hadn't seen this one, but it's a good beatdown on distributed objects from back in 2003

    (tags: distributed-objects dcom corba history martin-fowler laws rules architecture 2003)

  • Spammergate: The Fall of an Empire

    Featuring this interesting reactive-block evasion tactic:

    In that screenshot, a RCM co-conspirator describes a technique in which the spammer seeks to open as many connections as possible between themselves and a Gmail server. This is done by purposefully configuring your own machine to send response packets extremely slowly, and in a fragmented manner, while constantly requesting more connections. Then, when the Gmail server is almost ready to give up and drop all connections, the spammer suddenly sends as many emails as possible through the pile of connection tunnels. The receiving side is then overwhelmed with data and will quickly block the sender, but not before processing a large load of emails.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: via:fanf spam antispam gmail blocklists packets tcp networking)

Links for 2017-03-05

Published March 5, 2017

  • The Occasional Chaos of AWS Lambda Runtime Performance

    If our code has modest resource requirements, and can tolerate large changes in performance, then it makes sense to start with the least amount of memory necessary. On the other hand, if consistency is important, the best way to achieve that is by cranking the memory setting all the way up to 1536MB. It’s also worth noting here that CPU-bound Lambdas may be cheaper to run over time with a higher memory setting, as Jim Conning describes in his article, “AWS Lambda: Faster is Cheaper”. In our tests, we haven’t seen conclusive evidence of that behavior, but much more data is required to draw any strong conclusions. The other lesson learned is that Lambda benchmarks should be gathered over the course of days, not hours or minutes, in order to provide actionable information. Otherwise, it’s possible to see very impressive performance from a Lambda that might later dramatically change for the worse, and any decisions made based on that information will be rendered useless.

    (tags: aws lambda amazon performance architecture ops benchmarks)

  • Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news

    omg the Obama coup one is INSANE

    (tags: google news lies fake-news obama facts)

  • The State already knew about Tuam. Nothing ever changes in Ireland

    Forensic archaeologists are combing through the soil in Tuam. Perhaps justice might be better served if forensic accountants were combing through the accounts of the Bon Secours Sisters. They sold healthy babies and let the rest to die.

    (tags: nuns bon-secours history ireland tuam-babies tuam horror)

Links for 2017-03-03

Published March 3, 2017

Links for 2017-03-02

Published March 2, 2017

  • "I caused an outage" thread on twitter

    Anil Dash: "What was the first time you took the website down or broke the build? I’m thinking of all the inadvertent downtime that comes with shipping." Sample response: 'Pushed a fatal error in lib/display.php to all of FB’s production servers one Friday night in late 2005. Site loaded blank pages for 20min.'

    (tags: outages reliability twitter downtime fail ops post-mortem)

  • Facebook, patient zero in fake news epidemic, proudly advertises ability to sway elections

    The online social network is highlighting the Toomey campaign's ability to make ads that performed exceptionally well on Facebook even as it downplays the ability of the site to influence elections. In the days following the President Donald Trump's election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to the potential influence of fake news on the election as "a pretty crazy idea." Taking Facebook at its word means holding two contradictory beliefs at once: that the site can sway an election on behalf of paying customers, but doesn't exert influence when it comes to the spread of misinformation by independent profiteers.

    (tags: facebook fake-news elections news pat-toomey republicans advertising)

  • S3 2017-02-28 outage post-mortem

    The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.  One of these subsystems, the index subsystem, manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region. This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects. Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart. While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable.  

    (tags: s3 postmortem aws post-mortem outages cms ops)

  • Phoenician Sun God in Eighteenth-Century Ireland? - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

    It is the most extraordinary inscription. This mill-stone rock, which once stood on the top of Tory Hill in County Kilkenny in Ireland, has been taken as proof of Carthaginian contact and settlement or at least trade with Ireland in antiquity. The words clearly read (give or take some distorted letters) Beli Dinose, a reference to the Carthaginian god Bel or Baal Dionysus. Extraordinary to think that Phoenicians, in the early centuries B.C. brought their nasty child-killing faith to the green hills of Ireland. Only of course they didn’t… At least not on this evidence. The stone celebrating ‘the lordly one’ actually has a rather different origin.
    excellent tale.

    (tags: phoenicia dionysus baal history tory-hill kilkenny carthage gods typos fail archaeology graffiti)

Links for 2017-02-28

Published February 28, 2017

  • Gravitational Teleport

    Teleport enables teams to easily adopt the best SSH practices like: Integrated SSH credentials with your organization Google Apps identities or other OAuth identity providers. No need to distribute keys: Teleport uses certificate-based access with automatic expiration time. Enforcement of 2nd factor authentication. Cluster introspection: every Teleport node becomes a part of a cluster and is visible on the Web UI. Record and replay SSH sessions for knowledge sharing and auditing purposes. Collaboratively troubleshoot issues through session sharing. Connect to clusters located behind firewalls without direct Internet access via SSH bastions.

    (tags: ssh teleport ops bastions security auditing oauth 2fa)

  • Manage DynamoDB Items Using Time to Live (TTL)

    good call.

    Many DynamoDB users store data that has a limited useful life or is accessed less frequently over time. Some of them track recent logins, trial subscriptions, or application metrics. Others store data that is subject to regulatory or contractual limitations on how long it can be stored. Until now, these customers implemented their own time-based data management. At scale, this sometimes meant that they ran a couple of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances that did nothing more than scan DynamoDB items, check date attributes, and issue delete requests for items that were no longer needed. This added cost and complexity to their application. In order to streamline this popular and important use case, we are launching a new Time to Live (TTL) feature today. You can enable this feature on a table-by-table basis, specifying an item attribute that contains the expiration time for the item.

    (tags: dynamodb ttl storage aws architecture expiry)

  • Zeynep Tufekci: "Youtube is a crucial part of the misinfomation ecology"

    This is so spot on. I hope Google address this issue --

    YouTube is crucial part of the misinformation ecology. Not just a demand issue: its recommender algo is a "go down the rabbit hole" machine. You watch a Trump rally: you get suggested white supremacist videos, sometimes, auto-playing. Like a gateway drug theory of engagement. I've seen this work across the political spectrum. YouTube algo has discovered out-flanking and "red-pilling" is.. engaging. So it does.
    This thread was in response to this Buzzfeed article on the same topic: https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/youtube-has-become-the-content-engine-of-the-internets-dark

    (tags: youtube nazis alt-right lies politics google misinformation recommendations ai red-pill)

  • The power of role models

    At dinner I asked some of the women to speak to me about this, how astronomy became so (relatively) egalitarian. And one topic became clear: role models. Astronomy has a long history of women active in the field, going all the way back to Caroline Herschel in the early 19th century. Women have made huge contributions to the field. Dava Sobel just wrote a book about the women who laid the foundations for the discovery of the expansion of the universe. Just a couple of weeks ago, papers ran obituaries of Vera Rubin, the remarkable observational astronomer who discovered the evidence for dark matter. I could mention Jocelyn Bell, whose discovery of pulsars got her advisor a Nobel (sic). The most famous astronomer I met growing up was Helen Hogg, the (adopted) Canadian astronomer at David Dunlap Observatory outside Toronto, who also did a fair bit of what we now call outreach. The women at the meeting spoke of this, a history of women contributing, of role models to look up to, of proof that women can make major contributions to the field. What can computing learn from this? It seems we're doing it wrong. The best way to improve the representation of women in the field is not to recruit them, important though that is, but to promote them. To create role models. To push them into positions of influence.

    (tags: software women feminism role-models gender-balance egalitarianism astronomy computing rob-pike)

  • When DNNs go wrong – adversarial examples and what we can learn from them

    Excellent paper.

    [The] results suggest that classifiers based on modern machine learning techniques, even those that obtain excellent performance on the test set, are not learning the true underlying concepts that determine the correct output label. Instead, these algorithms have built a Potemkin village that works well on naturally occuring data, but is exposed as a fake when one visits points in space that do not have high probability in the data distribution.

    (tags: ai deep-learning dnns neural-networks adversarial-classification classification classifiers machine-learning papers)

Links for 2017-02-27

Published February 27, 2017

Links for 2017-02-24

Published February 24, 2017

  • Cloudflare Reverse Proxies are Dumping Uninitialized Memory

    This is a massive bug. C considered harmful! See also jgc's blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/incident-report-on-memory-leak-caused-by-cloudflare-parser-bug/

    (tags: internet security cloudflare caching coding buffer-overflows c data-leak leaks)

  • In 1914, Feminists Fought For the Right to Forget Childbirth | Atlas Obscura

    Wow, this is creepy.

    Tracy and Leupp described twilight sleep as “a very fine balance in the states of consciousness,” which required “special knowledge of the use of drugs that cause it.” Once a woman had gone into labor, she was given a combination of morphine to dull the pain and scopolamine to dull her memory of the experience. (Today, scopolamine is sometimes called the “zombie drug” because its users become susceptible to suggestion but retain no memory of their actions.) These drugs had been used in the past as anesthetics, but few doctors had adopted them with enthusiasm. But the German clinic, the McClure’s article reported, had reached a technical breakthrough with scopolamine, which allowed the doctors to administer it with more precision and therefore with more success. Women who they treated with these drugs would retain muscle control and would follow orders from doctors, but would remember none of it. There were some strange conditions that went along with the use of these drugs. Because the women’s state of suspension was precarious, women in twilight sleep were kept in padded, crib-like beds, with eye masks blocking out the light and cotton balls in their ears blocking out sound. Sometimes they were fitted into straight-jacket-like shirts that limited the movement of their arms. When the birth was over, women also often experienced a moment of dissociation, as Carmody did: Had they really had a baby? Was the baby they’d been handed really theirs?

    (tags: twilight-sleep childbirth history freiburg morphine scopolamine anaesthesia birth)

  • At the cost of security everywhere, Google dorking is still a thing | Ars Technica

    I'd never heard of this term!

    (tags: dorking google security searching web)

Links for 2017-02-23

Published February 23, 2017

  • Maniac Killers of the Bangalore IT Department

    On "techies" and their tenuous relationship with Indian society:

    Technology was supposed to deliver India from poverty, but in Bangalore it’s also deepened the division between rich and poor, young and old, modern and traditional. As the city has grown richer, it’s also become unruly and unfamiliar. If the tech worker is the star of the Indian economy, then the techie is his shadow— spoiled, untrustworthy, adulterous, depressed, and sometimes just plain senseless. (“TECHIE WITH EARPHONES RUN OVER BY TRAIN.”) In one occupational boogeyman, Bangaloreans can see their future and their fears. [....] “TECHIE’S WIFE MURDERED” read the headlines in both the Hindu and the Bangalore Mirror. “TECHIE STABS FRIEND’S WIFE TO DEATH” ran in the Deccan Herald. To read the Indian newspapers regularly is to believe the software engineer is the country’s most cursed figure. Almost every edition carries a gruesome story involving a techie accused of homicide, rape, burglary, blackmail, assault, injury, suicide, or another crime. When techies are the victims, it’s just as newsworthy. The Times of India, the country’s largest English-language paper, has carried “TECHIE DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT” and “MAN HELD FOR PUSHING TECHIE FROM TRAIN”; in the Hindu, readers found “TEACHER CHOPS OFF FINGERS OF TECHIE HUSBAND” and “TECHIE DIED AFTER BEING FORCE-FED CYANIDE.” A long-standing journalistic adage says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In India, if it codes, it explodes.

    (tags: crime tech india bangalore pune society techies work jobs)

  • Why Aren’t Baby Boomers Eating Pho? – Medium

    'Their decidedly un-hygge reluctance to partake in comforting, clear-brothed Vietnamese soups most likely stems from the generation’s reckless spending habits?—?many bought homes in their early 20’s. Some even claim they have owned upwards of seven cars over the course of their lifetimes. Unbelievably, many have never ridden a bicycle post-childhood.'

    (tags: boomers funny jokes pho soup news lifestyle age)

Links for 2017-02-20

Published February 20, 2017

  • 10 Most Common Reasons Kubernetes Deployments Fail

    some real-world failure cases and how to fix them

    (tags: kubernetes docker ops)

  • How-to Debug a Running Docker Container from a Separate Container

    arguably this shouldn't be required -- building containers without /bin/sh, strace, gdb etc. is just silly

    (tags: strace docker ops debugging containers)

  • 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

    This is the best article on chan culture and how it's taken over

    (tags: 4chan 8chan somethingawful boards history internet trump alt-right)

  • pachyderm

    'Containerized Data Analytics':

    There are two bold new ideas in Pachyderm: Containers as the core processing primitive Version Control for data These ideas lead directly to a system that's much more powerful, flexible and easy to use. To process data, you simply create a containerized program which reads and writes to the local filesystem. You can use any tools you want because it's all just going in a container! Pachyderm will take your container and inject data into it. We'll then automatically replicate your container, showing each copy a different chunk of data. With this technique, Pachyderm can scale any code you write to process up to petabytes of data (Example: distributed grep). Pachyderm also version controls all data using a commit-based distributed filesystem (PFS), similar to what git does with code. Version control for data has far reaching consequences in a distributed filesystem. You get the full history of your data, can track changes and diffs, collaborate with teammates, and if anything goes wrong you can revert the entire cluster with one click! Version control is also very synergistic with our containerized processing engine. Pachyderm understands how your data changes and thus, as new data is ingested, can run your workload on the diff of the data rather than the whole thing. This means that there's no difference between a batched job and a streaming job, the same code will work for both!

    (tags: analytics data containers golang pachyderm tools data-science docker version-control)

  • How Space Weather Can Influence Elections on Earth - Motherboard

    oh, god -- I'm not keen on this take: how's about designing systems that recognise the risks?

    "Everything was going fine, but then suddenly, there were an additional 4,000 votes cast. Because it was a local election, which are normally very small, people were surprised and asked, 'how did this happen?'" The culprit was not voter fraud or hacked machines. It was a single event upset (SEU), a term describing the fallout of an ionizing particle bouncing off a vulnerable node in the machine's register, causing it to flip a bit, and log the additional votes. The Sun may not have been the direct source of the particle—cosmic rays from outside the solar system are also in the mix—but solar-influenced space weather certainly contributes to these SEUs.

    (tags: bit-flips science elections voting-machines vvat belgium bugs risks cosmic-rays)

Links for 2017-02-14

Published February 14, 2017

  • Riot Games Seek Court Justice After Internet Provider Deliberately Causes In-Game Lag

    Pretty damning for Time-Warner Cable:

    When it seemed that the service provider couldn’t sink any lower, they opted to hold Riot to a ‘lag ransom’. Following Riot’s complaints regarding the inexplicable lag the player base were experiencing, TWC offered to magically solve the issue, a hardball tactic to which Riot finally admitted defeat in August of 2015. Before the deal was finalised, lag and data-packet loss for League of Legends players were far above the standards Riot was aiming for. Miraculously, after the two tech companies reached an unpleasant deal, the numbers improved.

    (tags: ftc fcc twc time-warner cable isps network-neutrality league-of-legends internet)

  • Instapaper Outage Cause & Recovery

    Hard to see this as anything other than a pretty awful documentation fail by the AWS RDS service:

    Without knowledge of the pre-April 2014 file size limit, it was difficult to foresee and prevent this issue. As far as we can tell, there’s no information in the RDS console in the form of monitoring, alerts or logging that would have let us know we were approaching the 2TB file size limit, or that we were subject to it in the first place. Even now, there’s nothing to indicate that our hosted database has a critical issue.

    (tags: limits aws rds databases mysql filesystems ops instapaper risks)

  • 'Software Engineering at Google'

    20 pages of Google's software dev practices, with emphasis on the build system (since it was written by the guy behind Blaze). Naturally, some don't make a whole lot of sense outside of Google, but still some good stuff here

    (tags: development engineering google papers software coding best-practices)

Links for 2017-02-10

Published February 10, 2017

  • Why Shopify Payments prohibit sexual content

    Interesting background info from a twitter thread:

    @jennschiffer Breitbart uses Shopify Payments, which is built on top of Stripe, which is sponsored by Wells Fargo merchant services AFAIK. WF has underwriting rules that prohibit sexual content. The main reasons aren't b/c WF or Stripe are interested in policing morals. Historically there's a higher rate of chargebacks from porn sites, which is why banks are generally anti-sexual content. Imagine someone's partner finds a charge for pornhub on their credit cars and calls them out on it. The person will deny and file a CB. Once porn sites started getting shut down by banks, they would change their names or submit applications claiming to be fetish sites, etc So underwriting dept's decided the risk is too high and generally defer to no with anything sexual. Most processors aren't inclined to challenge this position on moral grounds since there's strong precedent against it... ...and it could jeapordize their entire payments system if they get shut off. There are exceptions of course and there are other prohibited uses that are allowed to continue.

    (tags: twitter porn shopify sex chargebacks payment)

  • Comparing Amazon Elastic Container Service and Google Kubernetes – Medium

    nice intro to Kubernetes and container orchestration

    (tags: kubernetes containers docker ops)

  • Minor Infractions — Real Life

    When our son turned 12, we gave him a phone and allowed him to use social media, with a condition: He had no right to privacy. We would periodically and without warning read his texts and go through his messenger app. We would follow him on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (though we wouldn’t comment or tag him — we’re not monsters). We wouldn’t ambush him about what we read and we wouldn’t attempt to embarrass him. Anything that wasn’t dangerous or illegal, we would ignore.
    Food for thought. But not yet!

    (tags: surveillance family kids privacy online social-media teenagers)

Links for 2017-02-09

Published February 9, 2017

Links for 2017-02-07

Published February 7, 2017

  • What Vizio was doing behind the TV screen | Federal Trade Commission

    This is awful:

    Starting in 2014, Vizio made TVs that automatically tracked what consumers were watching and transmitted that data back to its servers. Vizio even retrofitted older models by installing its tracking software remotely. All of this, the FTC and AG allege, was done without clearly telling consumers or getting their consent. What did Vizio know about what was going on in the privacy of consumers’ homes? On a second-by-second basis, Vizio collected a selection of pixels on the screen that it matched to a database of TV, movie, and commercial content. What’s more, Vizio identified viewing data from cable or broadband service providers, set-top boxes, streaming devices, DVD players, and over-the-air broadcasts. Add it all up and Vizio captured as many as 100 billion data points each day from millions of TVs. Vizio then turned that mountain of data into cash by selling consumers’ viewing histories to advertisers and others. And let’s be clear: We’re not talking about summary information about national viewing trends. According to the complaint, Vizio got personal. The company provided consumers’ IP addresses to data aggregators, who then matched the address with an individual consumer or household. Vizio’s contracts with third parties prohibited the re-identification of consumers and households by name, but allowed a host of other personal details – for example, sex, age, income, marital status, household size, education, and home ownership.  And Vizio permitted these companies to track and target its consumers across devices. That’s what Vizio was up to behind the screen, but what was the company telling consumers? Not much, according to the complaint. Vizio put its tracking functionality behind a setting called “Smart Interactivity.”  But the FTC and New Jersey AG say that the generic way the company described that feature – for example, “enables program offers and suggestions” – didn’t give consumers the necessary heads-up to know that Vizio was tracking their TV’s every flicker. (Oh, and the “Smart Interactivity” feature didn’t even provide the promised “program offers and suggestions.”)

    (tags: privacy ftc surveillance tv vizio ads advertising smart-tvs)

  • Inuit Cartography

    In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried in a mitten, represent coastlines in a continuous line, up one side of the wood and down the other. The maps are compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.

    (tags: maps inuit history sailing navigation coastlines greenland)

Links for 2017-02-06

Published February 6, 2017

  • Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles - The New York Times

    This sounds more like a medieval court than a modern democracy. Also this incredible gem:

    Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

    (tags: stephen-bannon trump us-politics nsc)

  • Beringei: A high-performance time series storage engine | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

    Beringei is different from other in-memory systems, such as memcache, because it has been optimized for storing time series data used specifically for health and performance monitoring. We designed Beringei to have a very high write rate and a low read latency, while being as efficient as possible in using RAM to store the time series data. In the end, we created a system that can store all the performance and monitoring data generated at Facebook for the most recent 24 hours, allowing for extremely fast exploration and debugging of systems and services as we encounter issues in production. Data compression was necessary to help reduce storage overhead. We considered several existing compression schemes and rejected the techniques that applied only to integer data, used approximation techniques, or needed to operate on the entire dataset. Beringei uses a lossless streaming compression algorithm to compress points within a time series with no additional compression used across time series. Each data point is a pair of 64-bit values representing the timestamp and value of the counter at that time. Timestamps and values are compressed separately using information about previous values. Timestamp compression uses a delta-of-delta encoding, so regular time series use very little memory to store timestamps. From analyzing the data stored in our performance monitoring system, we discovered that the value in most time series does not change significantly when compared to its neighboring data points. Further, many data sources only store integers (despite the system supporting floating point values). Knowing this, we were able to tune previous academic work to be easier to compute by comparing the current value with the previous value using XOR, and storing the changed bits. Ultimately, this algorithm resulted in compressing the entire data set by at least 90 percent.

    (tags: beringei compression facebook monitoring tsd time-series storage architecture)

  • St. Petersburg team operated a PRNG hack against Vegas slots

    According to Willy Allison, a Las Vegas–based casino security consultant who has been tracking the Russian scam for years, the operatives use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button. “The normal reaction time for a human is about a quarter of a second, which is why they do that,” says Allison, who is also the founder of the annual World Game Protection Conference. The timed spins are not always successful, but they result in far more payouts than a machine normally awards: Individual scammers typically win more than $10,000 per day. (Allison notes that those operatives try to keep their winnings on each machine to less than $1,000, to avoid arousing suspicion.) A four-person team working multiple casinos can earn upwards of $250,000 in a single week.

    (tags: prng hacking security exploits randomness gambling las-vegas casinos slot-machines)

Links for 2017-02-05

Published February 5, 2017

  • Data from pacemaker used to arrest man for arson, insurance fraud

    Compton has medical conditions which include an artificial heart linked to an external pump. According to court documents, a cardiologist said that "it is highly improbable Mr. Compton would have been able to collect, pack and remove the number of items from the house, exit his bedroom window and carry numerous large and heavy items to the front of his residence during the short period of time he has indicated due to his medical conditions." After US law enforcement caught wind of this peculiar element to the story, police were able to secure a search warrant and collect the pacemaker's electronic records to scrutinize his heart rate, the demand on the pacemaker and heart rhythms prior to and at the time of the incident.

    (tags: pacemakers health medicine privacy data arson insurance fraud heart)

Links for 2017-02-04

Published February 4, 2017

  • LandSafe.org: if you aren't safe, we'll make noise for you

    a Dead Man's Switch for border crossings; if you are detained and cannot make a "checkin", it'll make noise on your behalf so your friends and family know what's happened

    (tags: safety borders dead-mans-switch landsafe tools)

  • "what's the inside story on these young fascist nazis"

    Excellent explanatory twitter thread explaining where this movement came from (ie chan sites):

    "what's the inside story on these young fascist nazis" a lot of them ended up in shock humor/lonely dude forums that nazi recruiters joined. this isn't a fucking puzzle box, we have all the history right here. dudes ended up on various sites crossing nerdy hobbies & resentment. a buncha fucking nerds had their various dipshit teenage beefs, many starting with resentment of women, and got radicalized. "how did they end up nazis?" a bunch of real nazis whispered poison in their ears while becoming their only community, their only "friends". they also used multiple levels of irony to make bigotry and fascism more acceptable by drowning it in "oh we're just joking"

    (tags: nazis fascism 4chan 8chan extremism politics)

Links for 2017-02-03

Published February 3, 2017

Links for 2017-01-31

Published January 31, 2017

  • Supporting our Muslim sisters and brothers in tech - Inside Intercom

    This is simply amazing:

    Intercom is a dual-citizen company of a sort. We’ve had two offices from day zero. I moved to San Francisco from Ireland in 2011 and now hold a green card and live here. I set up our headquarters here, which contains all of our business functions. My cofounders set up our Dublin office, where our research and development teams are based. And we have over 150 people in each office now. We’d like to use this special position we’re in to try help anyone in our industry feeling unsafe and hurt right now. If you’re in tech, and you’re from one of the newly unfavored countries, or even if you’re not, but you’re feeling persecuted for being Muslim, we’d like to help you consider Dublin as a place to live and work. [....] – If you decide you want to look into moving seriously, we’ll retain our Dublin immigration attorneys for you, and pay your legal bills with them, up to €5k. We’ll do this for as many as we can afford. We should be able to do this for at least 50 people.

    (tags: intercom muslim us-politics immigration dublin ireland)

Links for 2017-01-30

Published January 30, 2017

Links for 2017-01-27

Published January 27, 2017

Links for 2017-01-24

Published January 24, 2017

  • Sankey diagram - Wikipedia

    'a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. Sankey diagrams put a visual emphasis on the major transfers or flows within a system. They are helpful in locating dominant contributions to an overall flow. Often, Sankey diagrams show conserved quantities within defined system boundaries. [....] One of the most famous Sankey diagrams is Charles Minard's Map of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812. It is a flow map, overlaying a Sankey diagram onto a geographical map.'

    (tags: sankey diagrams dataviz data viz)

  • Toyota's Gill Pratt: "No one is close to achieving true level 5 [self-driving cars]"

    The most important thing to understand is that not all miles are the same. Most miles that we drive are very easy, and we can drive them while daydreaming or thinking about something else or having a conversation. But some miles are really, really hard, and so it’s those difficult miles that we should be looking at: How often do those show up, and can you ensure on a given route that the car will actually be able to handle the whole route without any problem at all? Level 5 autonomy says all miles will be handled by the car in an autonomous mode without any need for human intervention at all, ever. So if we’re talking to a company that says, “We can do full autonomy in this pre-mapped area and we’ve mapped almost every area,” that’s not Level 5. That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?” And then what you’ll usually find is a little bit of hedging on that too. The trouble with this Level 4 thing, or the “full autonomy” phrase, is that it covers a very wide spectrum of possible competencies. It covers “my car can run fully autonomously in a dedicated lane that has no other traffic,” which isn’t very different from a train on a set of rails, to “I can drive in Rome in the middle of the worst traffic they ever have there, while it’s raining," which is quite hard. Because the “full autonomy” phrase can mean such a wide range of things, you really have to ask the question, “What do you really mean, what are the actual circumstances?” And usually you’ll find that it’s geofenced for area, it may be restricted by how much traffic it can handle, for the weather, the time of day, things like that. So that’s the elaboration of why we’re not even close.

    (tags: autonomy driving self-driving cars ai robots toyota weather)

Links for 2017-01-18

Published January 18, 2017

  • NetGuard

    Excellent network monitor app for Android, comes recommended by @redacted in the ITC Slack. Inserts itself as a VPN to capture traffic, and looks like it should work well. Supports ad blocking using a hosts file.

    (tags: android ad-blocking ads netguard apps)

Links for 2017-01-17

Published January 17, 2017

Links for 2017-01-12

Published January 12, 2017

  • Facebook is censoring posts in Thailand that the government has deemed unsuitable | TechCrunch

    Dictator-friendly censorship tools? no probs!

    (tags: facebook censorship royalty thailand politics)

  • Who killed the curry house? | Bee Wilson | Life and style | The Guardian

    This is fascinating, re "authenticity" of food:

    The objection that curry house food was inauthentic was true, but also unfair. It’s worth asking what “authenticity” really means in this context, given that people in India – like humans everywhere – do not themselves eat a perfectly “authentic” diet. When I asked dozens of people, while on a recent visit to India, about their favourite comfort food, most of them – whether from Delhi, Bangalore or Mumbai – told me that what they really loved to eat, especially when drinking beer, was something called Indian-Chinese food. It is nothing a Chinese person would recognise, consisting of gloopy dishes of meat and noodles, thick with cornflour and soy sauce, but spiced with green chillis and vinegar to please the national palate. Indian-Chinese food – just like British curry house food – offers a salty night away from the usual home cooking. The difference is that Indian people accept Indian-Chinese food for the ersatz joy that it is, whereas many British curry house customers seem to have believed that recipe for their Bombay potatoes really did come from Bombay, and felt affronted to discover that it did not.

    (tags: curry indian-food food chinese-food indian-chinese-food authenticity)

  • Banks biased against black fraud victims

    We raised the issue of discrimination in 2011 with one of the banks and with the Commission for Racial Equality, but as no-one was keeping records, nothing could be proved, until today. How can this discrimination happen? Well, UK rules give banks a lot of discretion to decide whether to refund a victim, and the first responders often don’t know the full story. If your HSBC card was compromised by a skimmer on a Tesco ATM, there’s no guarantee that Tesco will have told anyone (unlike in America, where the law forces Tesco to tell you). And the fraud pattern might be something entirely new. So bank staff end up making judgement calls like “Is this customer telling the truth?” and “How much is their business worth to us?” This in turn sets the stage for biases and prejudices to kick in, however subconsciously. Add management pressure to cut costs, sometimes even bonuses for cutting them, and here we are.

    (tags: discrimination racism fraud uk banking skimming security fca)

Links for 2017-01-11

Published January 11, 2017

  • How a Machine Learns Prejudice - Scientific American

    Agreed, this is a big issue.

    If artificial intelligence takes over our lives, it probably won’t involve humans battling an army of robots that relentlessly apply Spock-like logic as they physically enslave us. Instead, the machine-learning algorithms that already let AI programs recommend a movie you’d like or recognize your friend’s face in a photo will likely be the same ones that one day deny you a loan, lead the police to your neighborhood or tell your doctor you need to go on a diet. And since humans create these algorithms, they're just as prone to biases that could lead to bad decisions—and worse outcomes. These biases create some immediate concerns about our increasing reliance on artificially intelligent technology, as any AI system designed by humans to be absolutely "neutral" could still reinforce humans’ prejudicial thinking instead of seeing through it.

    (tags: prejudice bias machine-learning ml data training race racism google facebook)

  • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs

    Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handing, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored. Partially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I've decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs. I recommend my previous post for a more in-depth coverage on the pains of CSVs encodings and how the default tooling (Excel) will ruin your day.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: via:fanf csv excel programming coding apis data encoding transfer falsehoods fail rfc4180)

Links for 2017-01-10

Published January 10, 2017

Links for 2017-01-09

Published January 9, 2017

Links for 2017-01-08

Published January 8, 2017

  • PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation

    This documentation covers parts of the PagerDuty Incident Response process. It is a cut-down version of our internal documentation, used at PagerDuty for any major incidents, and to prepare new employees for on-call responsibilities. It provides information not only on preparing for an incident, but also what to do during and after. It is intended to be used by on-call practitioners and those involved in an operational incident response process (or those wishing to enact a formal incident response process).
    This is a really good set of processes -- quite similar to what we used in Amazon for high-severity outage response.

    (tags: ops process outages pagerduty incident-response incidents on-call)

  • The Irish Ether Drinking Craze

    Dr. Kelly, desperate to become intoxicated while maintaining The Pledge, realized that not only could ether vapors be inhaled, but liquid ether could be swallowed. Around 1845 he began consuming tiny glasses of ether, and then started dispensing these to his patients and friends as a nonalcoholic libation. It wasn't long before it became a popular beverage, with one priest going so far as to declare that ether was "a liquor on which a man could get drunk with a clean conscience." In some respects ingesting ether is less damaging to the system than severe alcohol intoxication. Its volatility - ether is a liquid at room temperature but a gas at body temperature -dramatically speeds its effects. Dr. Ernest Hart wrote that "the immediate effects of drinking ether are similar to those produced by alcohol, but everything takes place more rapidly; the stages of excitement, mental confusion, loss of muscular control, and loss of consciousness follow each other so quickly that they cannot be clearly separated." Recovery is similarly rapid. Not only were ether drunks who were picked up by the police on the street often completely sober by the time they reached the station, but they suffered no hangovers. Ether drinking spread rapidly throughout Ireland, particularly in the North, and the substance soon could be purchased from grocers, druggists, publicans, and even traveling salesmen. Because ether was produced in bulk for certain industrial uses, it could also be obtained quite inexpensively. Its low price and rapid action meant than even the poorest could afford to get drunk several times a day on it. By the 1880s ether, distilled in England or Scotland, was being imported and widely distributed to even the smallest villages. Many Irish market towns would "reek of the mawkish fumes of the drug" on fair days when "its odor seems to cling to the very hedges and houses for some time."

    (tags: ether history ireland northern-ireland ulster drugs bizarre)

Links for 2017-01-07

Published January 7, 2017

  • Hacking the Attention Economy

    Can't help feeling danah boyd is hitting the nail on the head here:

    The Internet has long been used for gaslighting, and trolls have long targeted adversaries. What has shifted recently is the scale of the operation, the coordination of the attacks, and the strategic agenda of some of the players. For many who are learning these techniques, it’s no longer simply about fun, nor is it even about the lulz. It has now become about acquiring power. A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.

    (tags: danah-boyd news facebook social-media gaslighting trolls 4chan lulz gamergate fake-news)

  • World's top 100 cocktails of 2016

    per Difford's Guide -- Amaretto Sour, Margarita, Bramble, Espresso Martini, Old-Fashioned, Negroni, White Lady and Manhattan up there.

    (tags: cocktails diffords 2016 review booze drinks)

Links for 2017-01-04

Published January 4, 2017

  • Raising the Roof: Comments on the recent Newgrange ‘roof-box’ controversy

    Instead of discussing recent site visits or photographs we’ll be looking at a recent controversy sparked by comments about the reconstruction of Newgrange and, in particular, three claims made in the media by an Irish archaeologist; 1. That the “roof-box” at Newgrange may not be an original feature, instead it was “fabricated” and has “not a shred of authenticity” 2. That two vitally important structural stones, both decorated with megalithic art, from Newgrange were lost after the excavation and 3. That the photographic evidence that backs up the existing restoration is either inaccessible or never existed at all. I hope to show why we can be sure none of these claims are sustainable and that in fact the winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange is an original and central feature of the tomb.

    (tags: history newgrange archaeology solstice ireland megalithic)

  • Leap Smear  |  Public NTP  |  Google Developers

    Google offers public NTP service with leap smearing -- I didn't realise! (thanks Keith)

    (tags: google clocks time ntp leap-smearing leap-second ops)

Links for 2017-01-03

Published January 3, 2017

Links for 2016-12-15

Published December 15, 2016

  • The hidden cost of QUIC and TOU

    The recent movement to get all traffic encrypted has of course been great for the Internet. But the use of encryption in these protocols is different than in TLS. In TLS, the goal was to ensure the privacy and integrity of the payload. It's almost axiomatic that third parties should not be able to read or modify the web page you're loading over HTTPS. QUIC and TOU go further. They encrypt the control information, not just the payload. This provides no meaningful privacy or security benefits. Instead the apparent goal is to break the back of middleboxes [0]. The idea is that TCP can't evolve due to middleboxes and is pretty much fully ossified. They interfere with connections in all kinds of ways, like stripping away unknown TCP options or dropping packets with unknown TCP options or with specific rare TCP flags set. The possibilities for breakage are endless, and any protocol extensions have to jump through a lot of hoops to try to minimize the damage.

    (tags: quic tou protocols http tls security internet crypto privacy firewalls debugging operability)

Links for 2016-12-14

Published December 14, 2016

  • Slicer: Auto-sharding for datacenter applications

    Paper from Google describing one of their internal building block services:

    A general purpose sharding service. I normally think of sharding as something that happens within a (typically data) service, not as a general purpose infrastructure service. What exactly is Slicer then? It has two key components: a data plane that acts as an affinity-aware load balancer, with affinity managed based on application-specified keys; and a control plane that monitors load and instructs applications processes as to which keys they should be serving at any one point in time.  In this way, the decisions regarding how to balance keys across application instances can be outsourced to the Slicer service rather than building this logic over and over again for each individual back-end service. Slicer is focused exclusively on the problem of balancing load across a given set of  backend tasks, other systems are responsible for adding and removing tasks.
    interesting.

    (tags: google sharding slicer architecture papers)

  • Cherami: Uber Engineering’s Durable and Scalable Task Queue in Go - Uber Engineering Blog

    a competing-consumer messaging queue that is durable, fault-tolerant, highly available and scalable. We achieve durability and fault-tolerance by replicating messages across storage hosts, and high availability by leveraging the append-only property of messaging queues and choosing eventual consistency as our basic model. Cherami is also scalable, as the design does not have single bottleneck. [...] Cherami is completely written in Go, a language that makes building highly performant and concurrent system software a lot of fun. Additionally, Cherami uses several libraries that Uber has already open sourced: TChannel for RPC and Ringpop for health checking and group membership. Cherami depends on several third-party open source technologies: Cassandra for metadata storage, RocksDB for message storage, and many other third-party Go packages that are available on GitHub. We plan to open source Cherami in the near future.

    (tags: cherami uber queueing tasks queues architecture scalability go cassandra rocksdb)

  • The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. - The New York Times

    This is scary shit. It's amazing how Russia has weaponised transparency, but I guess it's not new to observers of "kompromat": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat

    (tags: kompromat russia cyberpower cyberwar security trump us-politics dnc)

Links for 2016-12-12

Published December 12, 2016

  • Booking.com, MySQL and UTF-8

    good preso from Percona Live 2015 on the messiness of MySQL vs UTF-8 and utf8mb4

    (tags: utf-8 utf8mb4 mysql storage databases slides booking.com character-sets)

  • tdunning/t-digest

    A new data structure for accurate on-line accumulation of rank-based statistics such as quantiles and trimmed means. The t-digest algorithm is also very parallel friendly making it useful in map-reduce and parallel streaming applications. The t-digest construction algorithm uses a variant of 1-dimensional k-means clustering to product a data structure that is related to the Q-digest. This t-digest data structure can be used to estimate quantiles or compute other rank statistics. The advantage of the t-digest over the Q-digest is that the t-digest can handle floating point values while the Q-digest is limited to integers. With small changes, the t-digest can handle any values from any ordered set that has something akin to a mean. The accuracy of quantile estimates produced by t-digests can be orders of magnitude more accurate than those produced by Q-digests in spite of the fact that t-digests are more compact when stored on disk.
    Super-nice feature is that it's mergeable, so amenable to parallel usage across multiple hosts if required. Java implementation, ASL licensing.

    (tags: data-structures algorithms java t-digest statistics quantiles percentiles aggregation digests estimation ranking)

Links for 2016-12-05

Published December 5, 2016

  • A Yale history professor's 20-point guide to defending democracy under a Trump presidency — Quartz

    Good advice -- let's hope it doesn't come to this. Example: '17. Watch out for the paramilitaries: When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.'

    (tags: trump activism government politics us-politics right-wing history hitler nazis fascism)

  • Commentary: The ‘Irish’ Startup Attribution Problem

    Why don't Irish tech startup activity show up on a EU-wide comparisons? Turns out we tend to transition to a US-based model, with US-based management and EU-based operations and engineering, like $work does:

    Successful Irish tech companies have a skewed geographic profile. This presents a data gathering problem for the data companies but its also a strong indicator of the market reality for Irish startups. The size of the local market and a focus on software business in particular means many Irish startups are transitioning to the US (some earlier and with more commitment than others), and getting backed by a spectrum of local and international VCs.
    Correcting for this put Ireland's tech venture investment in the second half of 2014 at $125m, midway between Sweden and Finland, 8th in Europe overall.

    (tags: ireland tech startups investment vc europe eu)

Links for 2016-12-02

Published December 2, 2016

Links for 2016-11-29

Published November 29, 2016

  • Trump’s lies have a purpose. They are an assault on democracy

    Donald Trump's media strategy as a form of Surkovian control via post-truth 'destabilised perception', through deliberate flooding with fake news:

    By attacking the very notion of shared reality, the president-elect is making normal democratic politics impossible. When the truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision, there is no common ground to be reached and no incentive to look for it. To men like Surkov, that is exactly as it should be. Government policy should not be set through democratic oversight; instead, the government should “manage” democracy, ensuring that people can express themselves without having any influence over the machinations of the state. According to a 2011 openDemocracy article by Richard Sakwa, a professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent, Surkov is “considered the main architect of what is colloquially known as ‘managed democracy,’ the administrative management of party and electoral politics.” “Surkov’s philosophy is that there is no real freedom in the world, and that all democracies are managed democracies, so the key to success is to influence people, to give them the illusion that they are free, whereas in fact they are managed,” writes Sakwa. “In his view, the only freedom is ‘artistic freedom.’”

    (tags: post-truth lies donald-trump surkov breitbart pr media news propaganda fake-news)

Links for 2016-11-28

Published November 28, 2016

Links for 2016-11-24

Published November 24, 2016

Links for 2016-11-22

Published November 22, 2016

Links for 2016-11-21

Published November 21, 2016

Links for 2016-11-18

Published November 18, 2016

Links for 2016-11-17

Published November 17, 2016

Links for 2016-11-09

Published November 9, 2016

  • Pure Pharmacy

    a low-cost online vendor in Ireland, recommended by @irldexter on ITS (along with webdoctor.ie): 'For basic consultations I halved the cost €55 to engage a GP with https://www.webdoctor.ie/ down to €25 (for limited domains) and after paying €8.48 and €9.48 respectively for a Ventolin inhaler, I now get them for €3.50 at http://www.purepharmacy.ie/ (closer to mainland EU costs). I also benchmarked my parents medicine costs which worked out 40% cheaper too.'

    (tags: recommendations pharmacy ireland doctors health medicine)

Links for 2016-11-08

Published November 8, 2016

  • Rents dwarf Celtic Tiger era with ‘disastrous effect’ on society

    “The scale of the challenge here remains depressing,” says the report. “It has never been viable to build apartment blocks in the vast majority of this country.” [...] The report notes that the rise in living costs of almost three quarters in less than five years is “a symptom of strong demand for housing” as economic recovery continues and the population grows. “But there is nothing inevitable about housing costs rising with demand,” it says. “That only happens when supply fails to respond, and the complete absence of any meaningful level of construction over the past five years is a systemic failure in desperate need of policy solutions. “There is no more urgent task facing the Minister for Housing, his department and advisers, and the Housing Agency, than understanding why the costs of building, and building apartments in particular, is so dramatically out of line with our own incomes and indeed with the cost in other countries.”

    (tags: daft housing ireland fail homes rent building)

  • Video Games Are Boring

    I'm not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I'm not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding. My Facebook feed and Twitter feed are enough for that. Walking outside in summer clothing is enough for that. I'm interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I'm interested in connecting. As Miranda July said, "all I ever wanted to know is how other people are making it through life." I want to make games that help other people understand life. We are all overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change. The degree of interactivity in our lives is amazing and wonderful and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it is also shocking and overwhelming and it's causing us to dig in and try to find some peace by shutting each other out. On all sides of the political spectrum we've stopped listening to each other and I fear we are all leaning toward fascist thinking. We should be using this medium to help us adapt to our new, interactive lives. This is how we become relevant.

    (tags: essay feminism society culture games gaming life art)

Links for 2016-11-07

Published November 7, 2016

Links for 2016-11-05

Published November 5, 2016

  • Jeff Erickson's Algorithms, Etc.

    This page contains lecture notes and other course materials for various algorithms classes I have taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The notes are numbered in the order I cover the material in a typical undergraduate class, wtih notes on more advanced material (indicated by the symbol ?) interspersed appropriately. [...] In addition to the algorithms notes I have been maintaining since 1999, this page also contains new notes on "Models of Computation", which cover a small subset of the material normally taught in undergraduate courses in formal languages and automata. I wrote these notes for a new junior-level course on "Algorithms and Models of Computation" that Lenny Pitt and I developed, which is now required for all undergraduate computer science and computer engineering majors at UIUC.
    Via Tony Finch

    (tags: via:fanf book cs algorithms jeff-erickson uiuc)

Links for 2016-11-04

Published November 4, 2016

Links for 2016-11-03

Published November 3, 2016

Links for 2016-11-02

Published November 2, 2016

Links for 2016-11-01

Published November 1, 2016

Links for 2016-10-31

Published October 31, 2016

  • Here's Why Facebook's Trending Algorithm Keeps Promoting Fake News - BuzzFeed News

    Kalina Bontcheva leads the EU-funded PHEME project working to compute the veracity of social media content. She said reducing the amount of human oversight for Trending heightens the likelihood of failures, and of the algorithm being fooled by people trying to game it. “I think people are always going to try and outsmart these algorithms — we’ve seen this with search engine optimization,” she said. “I’m sure that once in a while there is going to be a very high-profile failure.” Less human oversight means more reliance on the algorithm, which creates a new set of concerns, according to Kate Starbird, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who has been using machine learning and other technology to evaluate the accuracy of rumors and information during events such as the Boston bombings. “[Facebook is] making an assumption that we’re more comfortable with a machine being biased than with a human being biased, because people don’t understand machines as well,” she said.

    (tags: facebook news gaming adversarial-classification pheme truth social-media algorithms ml machine-learning media)

Links for 2016-10-27

Published October 27, 2016

  • seriot.ch - Parsing JSON is a Minefield ????

    Crockford chose not to version [the] JSON definition: 'Probably the boldest design decision I made was to not put a version number on JSON so there is no mechanism for revising it. We are stuck with JSON: whatever it is in its current form, that’s it.' Yet JSON is defined in at least six different documents.
    "Boldest". ffs. :facepalm:

    (tags: bold courage json parsing coding data formats interchange fail standards confusion)

  • mjg59 | Fixing the IoT isn't going to be easy

    We can't easily fix the already broken devices, we can't easily stop more broken devices from being shipped and we can't easily guarantee that we can fix future devices that end up broken. The only solution I see working at all is to require ISPs to cut people off, and that's going to involve a great deal of pain. The harsh reality is that this is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg, and things are going to get much worse before they get any better.

    (tags: iot security internet isps devices)

Links for 2016-10-25

Published October 25, 2016

  • Founder of Google X has no concept of how machine learning as policing tool risks reinforcing implicit bias

    This is shocking:

    At the end of the panel on artificial intelligence, a young black woman asked [Sebastian Thrun, CEO of the education startup Udacity, who is best known for founding Google X] whether bias in machine learning “could perpetuate structural inequality at a velocity much greater than perhaps humans can.” She offered the example of criminal justice, where “you have a machine learning tool that can identify criminals, and criminals may disproportionately be black because of other issues that have nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of these people, so the machine learns that black people are criminals, and that’s not necessarily the outcome that I think we want.” In his reply, Thrun made it sound like her concern was one about political correctness, not unconscious bias. “Statistically what the machines do pick up are patterns and sometimes we don’t like these patterns. Sometimes they’re not politically correct,” Thrun said. “When we apply machine learning methods sometimes the truth we learn really surprises us, to be honest, and I think it’s good to have a dialogue about this.”
    "the truth"! Jesus. We are fucked

    (tags: google googlex bias racism implicit-bias machine-learning ml sebastian-thrun udacity inequality policing crime)

Links for 2016-10-24

Published October 24, 2016

  • Paypal 2FA Bypass

    Holy shit.

    Using a proxy, remove “securityQuestion0” and “securityQuestion1” from the post data.
    Massive facepalm.

    (tags: paypal 2fa security fail web html)

  • ArquitecturB

    amazing architectural-oddities Tumblr (via Present and Correct)

    (tags: tumblr art photography architecture weird odd)

  • Management levels

    I’ve had the privilege of experiencing a few different management levels (responsibilities? jobs?) at Etsy since I’ve joined. At each stage, I felt like the job of being a manager totally changed. What I did day-to-day changed, what was hard about it changed, how I measured my own success changed, and though I feel like the experiences built on one another, it continues to be an enormous shift in brainpower each time the gig changes a bit. Given how intangible (and often hidden) management work can be, I’ve outlined some highlights of what my work has been like as a manager over the last four years. (Obvious, major caveat: this is just my experience, and there’s lots in here that is unique to this particular work environment, hierarchy, requirements, and challenges!)

    (tags: business engineering management career lara-hogan managing)

  • JG Ballard, on the "pram in the hall"

    Cyril Connolly, the 50s critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally - it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about. My children were a huge inspiration for me. Watching three young minds creating their separate worlds was a very enriching experience.

    (tags: writing creativity jg-ballard quotes pram-in-the-hall children kids parenting biography)

Links for 2016-10-21

Published October 21, 2016

Links for 2016-10-20

Published October 20, 2016

Links for 2016-10-18

Published October 18, 2016

  • _Airport Noise NIMBYism: An Empirical Investigation_

    'Generally, a very small number of people account for a disproportionately high share of the total number of noise complaints. In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.' Somebody needs help.

    (tags: airports noise nimby nimbyism complaints dc)

Links for 2016-10-17

Published October 17, 2016

Links for 2016-10-13

Published October 13, 2016

Links for 2016-10-12

Published October 12, 2016

Links for 2016-10-11

Published October 11, 2016

Links for 2016-10-07

Published October 7, 2016

  • How Fucked Up is Your Management?

    Oh dear.

    Score 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following: We have an unlimited vacation policy; We don’t do regular 1:1s, but we have open office hours/are super available if anyone wants to chat; We don’t have a process for interviewing, we just hire awesome people when we meet them; We super care about diversity, but we don’t want to lower the bar so we just hire the best person for the job even if it means diversity suffers; We don’t have defined levels and career paths for our employees, we’re a really flat org; We don’t have formal managers for every staff member, everyone just gets their work done; We don’t have, like, HR HR, but our recruiter/office manager/only female employee is super good if you want someone to talk to; We don’t do performance improvement plans for employees that are struggling. We just have a super honest conversation about how they aren’t a good fit and fire them; We would have some hard explaining to do if our salary list accidentally became public.

    (tags: startups management culture work vacation hiring office-hours managers diversity careers hr)

  • Google and Monotype launch Noto, an open-source typeface family for all the world’s languages

    Great font factoid: 'The name “Noto” comes from the little squares that show when a font is not supported by a computer. This are often referred to as “tofu”, because of their shape, therefore the font is short for No Tofu.'

    (tags: tofu fonts i18n google design typography unicode)

Links for 2016-10-06

Published October 6, 2016

  • Simple testing can prevent most critical failures

    Specifically, the following 3 classes of errors were implicated in 92% of the major production outages in this study and could have been caught with simple code review:

    Error handlers that ignore errors (or just contain a log statement); error handlers with “TODO” or “FIXME” in the comment; and error handlers that catch an abstract exception type (e.g. Exception or Throwable in Java) and then take drastic action such as aborting the system.
    (Interestingly, the latter was a particular favourite approach of some misplaced "fail fast"/"crash-only software design" dogma in Amazon. I wasn't a fan)

    (tags: fail-fast crash-only-software coding design bugs code-review review outages papers logging errors exceptions)

Links for 2016-10-05

Published October 5, 2016

  • We are witnessing nothing less than a Tory reformation | Rafael Behr | Opinion | The Guardian

    An excellent explanation of what is going on in the UK right now. What a nightmare:

    Finally there are the self-styled buccaneers of the free-trade seas. Boris Johnson would probably cast himself as Sir Walter Raleigh – polymath, wordsmith, adventurer. That leaves Liam Fox to play Sir Francis Drake, looking for domestic glory in global circumnavigation but seen from abroad as a pirate. This is all myth and fantasy, of course. But parties have always been sustained by internal mythologies, and the task of exiting the EU is so complicated and fraught with danger that fantasy becomes a necessary comfort. As one former minister says of the puritan choristers: “They have spent their lives working towards this dream. Of course they don’t want to accept that it’s a nightmare.” Tory pro-Europeans are in the impossible position of using rational argument against faith. If they counsel compromise on migration or the single market, they are accused of talking Britain down or trying to refight the referendum. They have few reinforcements across the political water. Labour is a shambles. The Lib Dems are puny in parliament. Scotland has its own distinct politics, and in Nicola Sturgeon its own remainian queen with her own independence agenda. The Tories do not speak for all of England, but in the absence of credible opposition they feel as if they do, and will act accordingly. To those millions who did not vote to leave the EU, the message is clear: you are free to pray for whatever you like. Your antique rites will be tolerated. But do not expect your concerns to be represented in the court of Queen Theresa. Be humble instead. Swallow your doubts and take a pew in the reformed national church of Brexit.

    (tags: reformation uk politics brexit eu puritanism fanaticism)

  • The Technical Debt Quadrant

    Martin Fowler's take on the 4 kinds of tech debt

    (tags: programming design tech-debt technical-debt deadlines product ship)

Links for 2016-10-04

Published October 4, 2016

  • Charity Majors responds to the CleverTap Mongo outage war story

    This is a great blog post, spot on:

    You can’t just go “dudes it’s faster” and jump off a cliff.  This shit is basic.  Test real production workloads. Have a rollback plan.  (Not for *10 days* … try a month or two.)
    The only thing I'd nitpick on is that it's all very well to say "buy my book" or "come see me talk at Blahcon", but a good blog post or webpage would be thousands of times more useful.

    (tags: databases stateful-services services ops mongodb charity-majors rollback state storage testing dba)

  • Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech

    Excellent talk. I love this analogy for ML applied to real-world data which affects people:

    Treating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we don't accept that this should make us accountable. We're programmers—who else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying to help. Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.
    Particularly apposite today given Y Combinator's revelation that they use an AI bot to help 'sift admission applications', and don't know what criteria it's using: https://twitter.com/aprjoy/status/783032128653107200

    (tags: culture ethics privacy technology surveillance ml machine-learning bias algorithms software control)