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Category: Uncategorized

Links for 2016-01-29

Published January 29, 2016

Links for 2016-01-28

Published January 28, 2016

Links for 2016-01-27

Published January 27, 2016

Links for 2016-01-26

Published January 26, 2016

Links for 2016-01-25

Published January 25, 2016

  • Netflix Global Search

    handy -- search Netflix in all regions, then show where the show/movie is available. Probably going to be less handy from now on now that Netflix is blocking region-spoofing

    (tags: movies video netflix films tv world)

  • Why Eircode is a shambles, by someone who works in the transport industry

    This is full of good points.

    Without having a distinct SORT KEY for a geographically distinct area, a postcode is of no real benefit to any type of transport firm or agency.  To take one example, Eircode have used the same sort key, F92, for Arranmore (Donegal’s largest inhabited island) and the north western Donegal mainland.  Cill Rónáin, Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, has the same sort key H91, as Connemara and Galway City.  Galway city and the Aran Islands may be in a relatively small geographical area, but keen eyes may have noticed that the Aran Islands are separated from the mainland by a small section of the Atlantic Ocean.  Sort codes which ignore clear and obvious boundaries, like seas or oceans, need to be redesigned. In two seconds a [UK] website could tell a Hebridean that his delivery will take 4 days at a cost of fifty quid by using the first three characters of the postcode.  The Eircode-using Irish equivalent website would need to lookup a large database to tell an Arranmore resident the cost and time for delivery – and they’d need the full exact code.  Any mistake made here, and your estimated delivery time, and cost for delivery will be wrong.

    (tags: postcodes eircode loc8code fail couriers delivery geodata geocoding galway aran-islands)

Links for 2016-01-22

Published January 22, 2016

Links for 2016-01-21

Published January 21, 2016

Links for 2016-01-20

Published January 20, 2016

Links for 2016-01-16

Published January 16, 2016

  • Yosemite agrees to change the names of its significant locations to appease trademark troll / Boing Boing

    This is absolutely appalling. IP law gone mad:

    DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, Inc (a division of one of the largest privately owned companies in the world) used to have the concessions to operate various businesses around Yosemite National Park. Now that they've been fired, they're using some decidedly dubious trademark to force the Park Service to change the names of buildings and locations that have stood for as much as a century, including some that have been designated national landmarks. The Parks Service has caved to these requests as it readies the park for its centennial celebration. It will not only change the names of publicly owned landmarks -- such as the Ahwahnee hotel, Yosemite Lodge, the Wawona Hotel, Curry Village, and Badger Pass ski area -- it will also have to change all its signs, maps and guidebooks.

    (tags: yosemite ip trademarks law fiasco national-parks usa)

Links for 2016-01-12

Published January 12, 2016

Links for 2016-01-08

Published January 8, 2016

Links for 2016-01-06

Published January 6, 2016

Links for 2016-01-04

Published January 4, 2016

Links for 2015-12-31

Published December 31, 2015

Links for 2015-12-22

Published December 22, 2015

  • Amazon EC2 Container Registry

    hooray, Docker registry here at last

    (tags: ecs docker registry ops containers aws)

  • How to inspect SSL/TLS traffic with Wireshark 2

    turns out it's easy enough -- Mozilla standardised a debugging SSL session-key logging file format which Wireshark and Chrome support

    (tags: chrome ssl browser firefox wireshark debugging tls)

  • ImperialViolet - Juniper: recording some Twitter conversations

    Adam Langley on the Juniper VPN-snooping security hole:

    ... if it wasn't the NSA who did this, we have a case where a US gov­ern­ment back­door ef­fort (Dual-EC) laid the ground­work for some­one else to at­tack US in­ter­ests. Cer­tainly this at­tack would be a lot eas­ier given the pres­ence of a back­door-friendly RNG al­ready in place. And I've not even dis­cussed the SSH back­door. [...]

    (tags: primes ecc security juniper holes exploits dual-ec-drbg vpn networking crypto prngs)

  • Excellent post from Matthew Green on the Juniper backdoor

    For the past several years, it appears that Juniper NetScreen devices have incorporated a potentially backdoored random number generator, based on the NSA's Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm. At some point in 2012, the NetScreen code was further subverted by some unknown party, so that the very same backdoor could be used to eavesdrop on NetScreen connections. While this alteration was not authorized by Juniper, it's important to note that the attacker made no major code changes to the encryption mechanism -- they only changed parameters. This means that the systems were potentially vulnerable to other parties, even beforehand. Worse, the nature of this vulnerability is particularly insidious and generally messed up. [....] The end result was a period in which someone -- maybe a foreign government -- was able to decrypt Juniper traffic in the U.S. and around the world. And all because Juniper had already paved the road. One of the most serious concerns we raise during [anti-law-enforcement-backdoor] meetings is the possibility that encryption backdoors could be subverted. Specifically, that a back door intended for law enforcement could somehow become a backdoor for people who we don't trust to read our messages. Normally when we talk about this, we're concerned about failures in storage of things like escrow keys. What this Juniper vulnerability illustrates is that the danger is much broader and more serious than that. The problem with cryptographic backdoors is not that they're the only way that an attacker can break intro our cryptographic systems. It's merely that they're one of the best. They take care of the hard work, the laying of plumbing and electrical wiring, so attackers can simply walk in and change the drapes.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: via:fanf crypto backdoors politics juniper dual-ec-drbg netscreen vpn)

  • 2016 Wish List for AWS?

    good thread of AWS' shortcomings -- so many services still don't handle VPC for instance

    (tags: vpc aws ec2 ops wishlist)

Links for 2015-12-18

Published December 18, 2015

Links for 2015-12-16

Published December 16, 2015

Links for 2015-12-15

Published December 15, 2015

Links for 2015-12-14

Published December 14, 2015

  • Files Are Hard

    This is basically terrifying. A catalog of race conditions and reliability horrors around the POSIX filesystem abstraction in Linux -- it's a wonder anything works. 'Where’s this documented? Oh, in some mailing list post 6-8 years ago (which makes it 12-14 years from today). The fs devs whose posts I’ve read are quite polite compared to LKML’s reputation, and they generously spend a lot of time responding to basic questions, but it’s hard for outsiders to troll [sic] through a decade and a half of mailing list postings to figure out which ones are still valid and which ones have been obsoleted! I don’t mean to pick on filesystem devs. In their OSDI 2014 talk, the authors of the paper we’re discussing noted that when they reported bugs they’d found, developers would often respond “POSIX doesn’t let filesystems do that”, without being able to point to any specific POSIX documentation to support their statement. If you’ve followed Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen work, this may sound familiar, except devs respond with “filesystems don’t do that” instead of “networks don’t do that”.I think this is understandable, given how much misinformation is out there. Not being a filesystem dev myself, I’d be a bit surprised if I don’t have at least one bug in this post.'

    (tags: filesystems linux unix files operating-systems posix fsync osdi papers reliability)

  • [LUCENE-6917] Deprecate and rename NumericField/RangeQuery to LegacyNumeric - ASF JIRA

    Interesting performance-related tweak going into Lucene -- based on the Bkd-Tree I think: https://users.cs.duke.edu/~pankaj/publications/papers/bkd-sstd.pdf . Being used for all numeric index types, not just multidimensional ones?

    (tags: lucene performance algorithms patches bkd-trees geodata numeric indexing)

  • Kevin Lyda's mega pension post

    Cutting and pasting from Facebook for posterity... there are some really solid tips in here. 'Some people plan their lives out and then there are people like me who randomly do things and suddenly, in retrospect, it looks like a grand plan has come together. In reality it's more like my subconscious pulls in useful info and pokes me to go learn things as required. If you live/work in Ireland, the following "grand plan" might be useful. This year has apparently been "figure out how to retire" year. It started late last year with finally organising all my private Irish pensions (2 from employers, 1 personal). In the process I learned the following: * Many Irish pension plans allow you to start drawing down from them at age 50. There are downsides to this, but if you have several of them it allows you more room to avoid stock market downturns when you purchase annuities. * You can get 25% of each pension as a tax-free lump sum. I also learned a few property things. The key thing is that if you have a buy-to-let property you should *not* pay off its mortgage early. You can deduct 75% of the interest you pay against the taxes you'd owe for rental income. That means the interest you pay will essentially be close to or even under the rate of inflation. A residential mortgage might have a lower interest rate nominally, but the effective interest rate is higher. The Irish state pension is changing. If you are 68 after 2020 the rules have changed - and they're now much simpler. Work for 10 years and you get the minimum state pension (1/3 of a full pension). Work for 20, you get 2/3 of of a state pension. Work for 30, you get a full pension. But you can't collect it till you're 68 and remember that Irish employers can apparently force you to "retire" at 65 (ageism is legal). So you need to bridge those 3 years (or hope they change the law to stop employers from doing that). When I "retired" I kept a part time job for a number of reasons, but one was because I suspected I needed more PRSI credits for a pension. And it turns out this was correct. Part-time work counts as long as you make more than €38/week. And self-employment counts as long as you make more than €5,000/year. You can also make voluntary PRSI contributions (around €500/year but very situation dependent). If you've worked in Europe or the US or Canada or a few other countries, you can get credits for social welfare payments in those countries. But if you have enough here and you have enough for some pension in the other country, you can draw a pension from both. Lastly most people I've talked to about retirement this year have used the analogy of legs on a stool. Every source of post-retirement income is a leg on the stool - the more legs, the more secure your retirement. There are lots of options for legs: * Rental income. This is a little wobbly as legs go at least for me. But if you have more than one rental property - and better yet some commercial rental property - this leg firms up a bit. Still, it's a bit more work than most. * Savings. This isn't very tax-efficient, but it can help fill in blank spots some legs have (like rental income or age restrictions) or maximise another legs value (weathering downturns for stock-based legs). And in retirement you can even build savings up. Sell a house, the private pension lump sum, etc. But remember you're retired, go have fun. Savings won't do you much good when you're dead. * Stocks. I've cashed all mine in, but some friends have been more restrained in cashing in stocks they might have gotten from employers. This is a volatile leg, but it can pay off rather well if you know what you're doing. But be honest with yourself. I know I absolutely don't know what I'm doing on this so stayed away. * Government pension. This is generally a reliable source of income in retirement. It's usually not a lot, but it does tend to last from retirement to death and it shows up every month. You apply once and then it just shows up each month. If you've worked in multiple countries, you can hedge some bets by taking a pension in each country you qualify from. You did pay into them after all. * Private pension. This can also give you a solid source of income but you need to pay into it. And paying in during your 20s and 30s really pays off later. But you need to make your investments less risky as you get into your late 50s - so make sure to start looking at them then. And you need to provide yourself some flexibility for starting to draw it down in order to survive market drops. The crash in 2007 didn't fully recover until 2012 - that's 5 years. * Your home. Pay off your mortgage and your home can be a leg. Not having to pay rent/mortgage is a large expense removed and makes the other legs more effective. You can also "sell down" or look into things like reverse mortgages, but the former can take time and has costs while the latter usually seems to have a lot of fine print you should read up on. * Part-time work. I know a number of people who took part-time jobs when they retired. If you can find something that doesn't take a huge amount of time that you'd enjoy doing and that people will pay you for, fantastic! Do that. And it gets you out of the house and keeping active. For friends who are geeks and in my age cohort, I note that it will be 2037 around the time we hit 65. If you know why that matters, ka-ching!' Another particularly useful page about the state pension: "Six things every woman needs to know about the State pension", Irish Times, Dec 1 2015, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/personal-finance/six-things-every-woman-needs-to-know-about-the-state-pension-1.2448981 , which links to this page to get your state pension contribution record: http://www.welfare.ie/en/pages/secure/ RequestSIContributionRecord.aspx

    (tags: pensions money life via:klyda stocks savings shares property ireland old-age retirement)

  • Big Brother Watch on Twitter: "Anyone can legally have their phone or computer hacked by the police, intelligence agencies, HMRC and others #IPBill https://t.co/3ZS610srCJ"

    As Glynn Moody noted, if UK police, intelligence agencies, HMRC and others call all legally hack phones and computers, that also means that digital evidence can be easily and invisibly planted. This will undermine future court cases in the UK, which seems like a significant own goal...

    (tags: hmrc police gchq uk hacking security law-enforcement evidence law)

  • Why We Chose Kubernetes Over ECS

    3 months ago when we, at nanit.com, came to evaluate which Docker orchestration framework to use, we gave ECS the first priority. We were already familiar with AWS services, and since we already had our whole infrastructure there, it was the default choice. After testing the service for a while we had the feeling it was not mature enough and missing some key features we needed (more on that later), so we went to test another orchestration framework: Kubernetes. We were glad to discover that Kubernetes is far more comprehensive and had almost all the features we required. For us, Kubernetes won ECS on ECS’s home court, which is AWS.

    (tags: kubernetes ecs docker containers aws ec2 ops)

Links for 2015-12-11

Published December 11, 2015

Links for 2015-12-10

Published December 10, 2015

Links for 2015-12-09

Published December 9, 2015

Links for 2015-12-07

Published December 7, 2015

Links for 2015-12-03

Published December 3, 2015

  • Introducing Netty-HTTP from Cask

    netty-http library solves [Netty usability issues] by using JAX-RS annotations to build a HTTP path routing layer on top of netty. In addition, the library implements a guava service to manage the HTTP service. netty-http allows users of the library to just focus on writing the business logic in HTTP handlers without having to worry about the complexities of path routing or learning netty pipeline internals to build the HTTP service.
    We've written something very similar, although I didn't even bother supporting JAX-RS annotations -- just a simple code-level DSL.

    (tags: jax-rs netty http cask java services coding)

  • The Locals Xmas Gift Guide 2015

    some nice local gift suggestions from small businesses around Dublin. I'd love to get some of these, but I guess I'll have to settle for giving them instead ;)

    (tags: gifts dublin ireland shopping xmas christmas the-locals)

Links for 2015-12-02

Published December 2, 2015

  • Topics in High-Performance Messaging

    'We have worked together in the field of high-performance messaging for many years, and in that time, have seen some messaging systems that worked well and some that didn't. Successful deployment of a messaging system requires background information that is not easily available; most of what we know, we had to learn in the school of hard knocks. To save others a knock or two, we have collected here the essential background information and commentary on some of the issues involved in successful deployments. This information is organized as a series of topics around which there seems to be confusion or uncertainty. Please contact us if you have questions or comments.'

    (tags: messaging scalability scaling performance udp tcp protocols multicast latency)

Links for 2015-11-30

Published November 30, 2015

  • Control theory meets machine learning

    'DB: Is there a difference between how control theorists and machine learning researchers think about robustness and error? BR: In machine learning, we almost always model our errors as being random rather than worst-case. In some sense, random errors are actually much more benign than worst-case errors. [...] In machine learning, by assuming average-case performance, rather than worst-case, we can design predictive algorithms by averaging out the errors over large data sets. We want to be robust to fluctuations in the data, but only on average. This is much less restrictive than the worst-case restrictions in controls. DB: So control theory is model-based and concerned with worst case. Machine learning is data based and concerned with average case. Is there a middle ground? BR: I think there is! And I think there's an exciting opportunity here to understand how to combine robust control and reinforcement learning. Being able to build systems from data alone simplifies the engineering process, and has had several recent promising results. Guaranteeing that these systems won't behave catastrophically will enable us to actually deploy machine learning systems in a variety of applications with major impacts on our lives. It might enable safe autonomous vehicles that can navigate complex terrains. Or could assist us in diagnostics and treatments in health care. There are a lot of exciting possibilities, and that's why I'm excited about how to find a bridge between these two viewpoints.'

    (tags: control-theory interviews machine-learning ml worst-case self-driving-cars cs)

  • The End of Dynamic Languages

    This is my bet: the age of dynamic languages is over. There will be no new successful ones. Indeed we have learned a lot from them. We’ve learned that library code should be extendable by the programmer (mixins and meta-programming), that we want to control the structure (macros), that we disdain verbosity. And above all, we’ve learned that we want our languages to be enjoyable. But it’s time to move on. We will see a flourishing of languages that feel like you’re writing in a Clojure, but typed. Included will be a suite of powerful tools that we’ve never seen before, tools so convincing that only ascetics will ignore.

    (tags: programming scala clojure coding types strong-types dynamic-languages languages)

  • RobustIRC

    'IRC without netsplits' using Raft consensus

    (tags: raft irc netsplits resilience fault-tolerance)

  • Inside China's Memefacturing Factories, Where The Hottest New Gadgets Are Made - BuzzFeed News

    On a humid afternoon, Zhou went shopping for some of those very parts at a Bao An market. As he pulled his maroon minivan into a crowded parking lot, the full scale of Depu Electronics came into view: a three-story concrete behemoth roughly bigger than a Costco and roughly smaller than the Pentagon. Inside, it looked like the world’s largest Radio Shack going out of business sale: an endless series of booths with cables and circuit boards and plugs and ports and buttons and machines piled so high on tables that the faces of the clerks who were selling them were hidden from view. Each booth seemed to argue: We have exactly what you want and we have enough of it for all of your customers. Short of motorized wheels and molding, the market offered nearly everything an ambitious factory owner would need to build a hoverboard, just waiting to be bought, assembled, and shipped.

    (tags: hoverboards memes china manufacturing future gadgets tat bao-an electronics)

Links for 2015-11-28

Published November 28, 2015

Links for 2015-11-26

Published November 26, 2015

  • re:Work - The five keys to a successful Google team

    We learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google: Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time? Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us? Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

    (tags: teams google culture work management productivity hr)

Links for 2015-11-25

Published November 25, 2015

Links for 2015-11-22

Published November 22, 2015

Links for 2015-11-20

Published November 20, 2015

Links for 2015-11-18

Published November 18, 2015

Links for 2015-11-17

Published November 17, 2015

Links for 2015-11-16

Published November 16, 2015

Links for 2015-11-13

Published November 13, 2015

  • The impact of Docker containers on the performance of genomic pipelines [PeerJ]

    In this paper, we have assessed the impact of Docker containers technology on the performance of genomic pipelines, showing that container “virtualization” has a negligible overhead on pipeline performance when it is composed of medium/long running tasks, which is the most common scenario in computational genomic pipelines. Interestingly for these tasks the observed standard deviation is smaller when running with Docker. This suggests that the execution with containers is more “homogeneous,” presumably due to the isolation provided by the container environment. The performance degradation is more significant for pipelines where most of the tasks have a fine or very fine granularity (a few seconds or milliseconds). In this case, the container instantiation time, though small, cannot be ignored and produces a perceptible loss of performance.

    (tags: performance docker ops genomics papers)

Links for 2015-11-12

Published November 12, 2015

Links for 2015-11-11

Published November 11, 2015

  • Dynalite

    Awesome new mock DynamoDB implementation:

    An implementation of Amazon's DynamoDB, focussed on correctness and performance, and built on LevelDB (well, @rvagg's awesome LevelUP to be precise). This project aims to match the live DynamoDB instances as closely as possible (and is tested against them in various regions), including all limits and error messages. Why not Amazon's DynamoDB Local? Because it's too buggy! And it differs too much from the live instances in a number of key areas.
    We use DynamoDBLocal in our tests -- the availability of that tool is one of the key reasons we have adopted Dynamo so heavily, since we can safely test our code properly with it. This looks even better.

    (tags: dynamodb testing unit-tests integration-testing tests ops dynalite aws leveldb)

  • Alarm design: From nuclear power to WebOps

    Imagine you are an operator in a nuclear power control room. An accident has started to unfold. During the first few minutes, more than 100 alarms go off, and there is no system for suppressing the unimportant signals so that you can concentrate on the significant alarms. Information is not presented clearly; for example, although the pressure and temperature within the reactor coolant system are shown, there is no direct indication that the combination of pressure and temperature mean that the cooling water is turning into steam. There are over 50 alarms lit in the control room, and the computer printer registering alarms is running more than 2 hours behind the events. This was the basic scenario facing the control room operators during the Three Mile Island (TMI) partial nuclear meltdown in 1979. The Report of the President’s Commission stated that, “Overall, little attention had been paid to the interaction between human beings and machines under the rapidly changing and confusing circumstances of an accident” (p. 11). The TMI control room operator on the day, Craig Faust, recalled for the Commission his reaction to the incessant alarms: “I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel. It wasn’t giving us any useful information”. It was the first major illustration of the alarm problem, and the accident triggered a flurry of human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) activity.
    A familiar topic for this ex-member of the Amazon network monitoring team...

    (tags: ergonomics human-factors ui ux alarms alerts alerting three-mile-island nuclear-power safety outages ops)

  • An Analysis of Reshipping Mule Scams

    We observed that the vast majority of the re-shipped packages end up in the Moscow, Russia area, and that the goods purchased with stolen credit cards span multiple categories, from expensive electronics such as Apple products, to designer clothes, to DSLR cameras and even weapon accessories. Given the amount of goods shipped by the reshipping mule sites that we analysed, the annual revenue generated from such operations can span between 1.8 and 7.3 million US dollars. The overall losses are much higher though: the online merchant loses an expensive item from its inventory and typically has to refund the owner of the stolen credit card. In addition, the rogue goods typically travel labeled as “second hand goods” and therefore custom taxes are also evaded. Once the items purchased with stolen credit cards reach their destination they will be sold on the black market by cybercriminals. [...] When applying for the job, people are usually required to send the operator copies of their ID cards and passport. After they are hired, mules are promised to be paid at the end of their first month of employment. However, from our data it is clear that mules are usually never paid. After their first month expires, they are never contacted back by the operator, who just moves on and hires new mules. In other words, the mules become victims of this scam themselves, by never seeing a penny. Moreover, because they sent copies of their documents to the criminals, mules can potentially become victims of identity theft.

    (tags: crime law cybercrime mules shipping-scams identity-theft russia moscow scams papers)

Links for 2015-11-10

Published November 10, 2015

  • No Harm, No Fowl: Chicken Farm Inappropriate Choice for Data Disposal

    That’s a lesson that Spruce Manor Special Care Home in Saskatchewan had to learn the hard way (as surprising as that might sound). As a trustee with custody of personal health information, Spruce Manor was required under section 17(2) of the Saskatchewan Health Information Protection Act to dispose of its patient records in a way that protected patient privacy. So, when Spruce Manor chose a chicken farm for the job, it found itself the subject of an investigation by the Saskatchewan Information and Privacy Commissioner.  In what is probably one of the least surprising findings ever, the commissioner wrote in his final report that “I recommend that Spruce Manor […] no longer use [a] chicken farm to destroy records”, and then for good measure added “I find using a chicken farm to destroy records unacceptable.”

    (tags: data law privacy funny chickens farming via:pinboard data-protection health medical-records)

Links for 2015-11-09

Published November 9, 2015

  • Caffeine cache adopts Window TinyLfu eviction policy

    'Caffeine is a Java 8 rewrite of Guava's cache. In this version we focused on improving the hit rate by evaluating alternatives to the classic least-recenty-used (LRU) eviction policy. In collaboration with researchers at Israel's Technion, we developed a new algorithm that matches or exceeds the hit rate of the best alternatives (ARC, LIRS). A paper of our work is being prepared for publication.' Specifically:

    W-TinyLfu uses a small admission LRU that evicts to a large Segmented LRU if accepted by the TinyLfu admission policy. TinyLfu relies on a frequency sketch to probabilistically estimate the historic usage of an entry. The window allows the policy to have a high hit rate when entries exhibit a high temporal / low frequency access pattern which would otherwise be rejected. The configuration enables the cache to estimate the frequency and recency of an entry with low overhead. This implementation uses a 4-bit CountMinSketch, growing at 8 bytes per cache entry to be accurate. Unlike ARC and LIRS, this policy does not retain non-resident keys.

    (tags: tinylfu caches caching cache-eviction java8 guava caffeine lru count-min sketching algorithms)

  • What Do WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, OpenNMS, and Your Application Have in Common? This Vulnerability.

    The ever-shitty Java serialization creates a security hole

    (tags: java serialization security exploits jenkins)

  • Gallery - Steffen Dam

    Danish glassware artist making wonderful Wunderkammers -- cabinets of curiosities --- entirely from glass. Seeing as one of his works sold for UKP50,000 last year, I suspect these are a bit out of my league, sadly

    (tags: art glassware steffen-dam wunderkammers museums)

  • London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked

    If it goes ahead, people’s progress across the structure would be tracked by monitors detecting the Wi-Fi signals from their phones, which show up the device’s Mac address, or unique identifying code. The Garden Bridge Trust says it will not store any of this data and is only tracking phones to count numbers and prevent overcrowding.

    (tags: london surveillance mobile-phones mac-trackers tracking)

  • Red lines and no-go zones - the coming surveillance debate

    The Anderson Report to the House of Lords in the UK on RIPA introduces a concept of a "red line":

    "Firm limits must also be written into the law: not merely safeguards, but red lines that may not be crossed." …    "Some might find comfort in a world in which our every interaction and movement could be recorded, viewed in real time and indefinitely retained for possible future use by the authorities. Crime fighting, security, safety or public health justifications are never hard to find." [13.19]  The Report then gives examples, such as a perpetual video feed from every room in every house, the police undertaking to view the record only on receipt of a complaint; blanket drone-based surveillance; licensed service providers, required as a condition of the licence to retain within the jurisdiction a complete plain-text version of every communication to be made available to the authorities on request; a constant data feed from vehicles, domestic appliances and health-monitoring personal devices; fitting of facial recognition software to every CCTV camera and the insertion of a location-tracking chip under every individual's skin. It goes on: "The impact of such powers on the innocent could be mitigated by the usual apparatus of safeguards, regulators and Codes of Practice. But a country constructed on such a basis would surely be intolerable to many of its inhabitants. A state that enjoyed all those powers would be truly totalitarian, even if the authorities had the best interests of its people at heart." [13.20] …   "The crucial objection is that of principle. Such a society would have gone beyond Bentham's Panopticon (whose inmates did not know they were being watched) into a world where constant surveillance was a certainty and quiescence the inevitable result. There must surely come a point (though it comes at different places for different people) where the escalation of intrusive powers becomes too high a price to pay for a safer and more law abiding environment." [13.21]

    (tags: panopticon jeremy-bentham law uk dripa ripa surveillance spying police drones facial-recognition future tracking cctv crime)

  • Dublin is a medium-density city

    Comparable to Copenhagen or Amsterdam, albeit without sufficient cycling/public-transport infrastructural investment

    (tags: infrastructure density housing dublin ireland cities travel commuting cycling)

Links for 2015-11-07

Published November 7, 2015

  • Ignoring ESR won't do anymore

    I'm tired of this shit. Full stop tired. It's 2015 and these turds who grope their way around conferences and the like can make allegations like this, get a hand wave and an, "Oh, that's just crazy Raymond!" Fuck that. Fuck it from here to hell and back. Here's a man who really hasn't done anything all that special, is a totally crazy gun-toting misogynist of the highest order and, yet, he remains mostly unchallenged after the tempest dies down, time after time. [...] I'm sure ESR will still be haunting conferences when your daughters reach their professional years unless you get serious about outing the assholes like him and making the community a lot less toxic than it is now.?
    Amen to that.

    (tags: esr toxic harassment conferences sexism misogyny culture)

Links for 2015-11-05

Published November 5, 2015

Links for 2015-11-04

Published November 4, 2015

  • PICO-8:

    PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.
    So cute! See also Voxatron, something similar for voxel-oriented 3D gaming

    (tags: consoles games gaming lua coding retro 2d pico-8)

  • Why Static Website Generators Are The Next Big Thing

    Now _this_ makes me feel old. Alternative title: "why static website generators have been a good idea since WebMake, 15 years ago". WebMake does pretty well on the checklist of "key features of the modern static website generator", which are: 1. Templating (check); 2. Markdown support (well, EtText, which predated Markdown by several years); 3. Metadata (check); and 4. Javascript asset pipeline (didn't support this one, since complex front-end DHTML JS wasn't really a thing at the turn of the century. But I would have if it had ;). So I guess I was on the right track!

    (tags: web html history webmake static-sites bake-dont-fry site-generators cms)

  • Food Trucks Are Great Incubators. Why Don't We Have More?

    So is that kind of thriving food-truck scene something the city should work to encourage? Theresa Hernandez, one of the owners of K Chido Mexico, thinks so. “There’s a whole market there for a new culture,” she says. “There’s no doubt about it, the appetite is there. It’s just a matter for somebody who is innovative enough in Dublin City Council to say: ‘Right, let’s do this.’”
    Amen to that.

    (tags: k-chido food-trucks dublin food ireland dcc)

  • wangle/Codel.h at master · facebook/wangle

    Facebook's open-source implementation of the CoDel queue management algorithm applied to server request-handling capacity in their C++ service bootstrap library, Wangle.

    (tags: wangle facebook codel services capacity reliability queueing)

Links for 2015-11-02

Published November 2, 2015

  • Structural and semantic deficiencies in the systemd architecture for real-world service management, a technical treatise

    Despite its overarching abstractions, it is semantically non-uniform and its complicated transaction and job scheduling heuristics ordered around a dependently networked object system create pathological failure cases with little debugging context that would otherwise not necessarily occur on systems with less layers of indirection. The use of bus APIs complicate communication with the service manager and lead to duplication of the object model for little gain. Further, the unit file options often carry implicit state or are not sufficiently expressive. There is an imbalance with regards to features of an eager service manager and that of a lazy loading service manager, having rusty edge cases of both with non-generic, manager-specific facilities. The approach to logging and the circularly dependent architecture seem to imply that lots of prior art has been ignored or understudied.

    (tags: analysis systemd linux unix ops init critiques software logging)

  • How Facebook avoids failures

    Great paper from Ben Maurer of Facebook in ACM Queue.

    A "move-fast" mentality does not have to be at odds with reliability. To make these philosophies compatible, Facebook's infrastructure provides safety valves.
    This is full of interesting techniques. * Rapidly deployed configuration changes: Make everybody use a common configuration system; Statically validate configuration changes; Run a canary; Hold on to good configurations; Make it easy to revert. * Hard dependencies on core services: Cache data from core services. Provide hardened APIs. Run fire drills. * Increased latency and resource exhaustion: Controlled Delay (based on the anti-bufferbloat CoDel algorithm -- this is really cool); Adaptive LIFO (last-in, first-out) for queue busting; Concurrency Control (essentially a form of circuit breaker). * Tools that Help Diagnose Failures: High-Density Dashboards with Cubism (horizon charts); What just changed? * Learning from Failure: the DERP (!) methodology,

    (tags: ben-maurer facebook reliability algorithms codel circuit-breakers derp failure ops cubism horizon-charts charts dependencies soa microservices uptime deployment configuration change-management)

Links for 2015-11-01

Published November 1, 2015

Links for 2015-10-30

Published October 30, 2015

Links for 2015-10-29

Published October 29, 2015

  • Google tears Symantec a new one on its CA failure

    Symantec are getting a crash course in how to conduct an incident post-mortem to boot:

    More immediately, we are requesting of Symantec that they further update their public incident report with: A post-mortem analysis that details why they did not detect the additional certificates that we found. Details of each of the failures to uphold the relevant Baseline Requirements and EV Guidelines and what they believe the individual root cause was for each failure. We are also requesting that Symantec provide us with a detailed set of steps they will take to correct and prevent each of the identified failures, as well as a timeline for when they expect to complete such work. Symantec may consider this latter information to be confidential and so we are not requesting that this be made public.

    (tags: google symantec ev ssl certificates ca security postmortems ops)

  • Google is Maven Central's New Best Friend

    google now mirroring Maven Central.

    (tags: google maven maven-central jars hosting java packages build)

  • Apache Kafka, Purgatory, and Hierarchical Timing Wheels

    In the new design, we use Hierarchical Timing Wheels for the timeout timer and DelayQueue of timer buckets to advance the clock on demand. Completed requests are removed from the timer queue immediately with O(1) cost. The buckets remain in the delay queue, however, the number of buckets is bounded. And, in a healthy system, most of the requests are satisfied before timeout, and many of the buckets become empty before pulled out of the delay queue. Thus, the timer should rarely have the buckets of the lower interval. The advantage of this design is that the number of requests in the timer queue is the number of pending requests exactly at any time. This allows us to estimate the number of requests need to be purged. We can avoid unnecessary purge operation of the watcher lists. As the result we achieve a higher scalability in terms of request rate with much better CPU usage.

    (tags: algorithms timers kafka scheduling timing-wheels delayqueue queueing)

Links for 2015-10-28

Published October 28, 2015

Links for 2015-10-27

Published October 27, 2015

Links for 2015-10-23

Published October 23, 2015

Links for 2015-10-22

Published October 22, 2015

Links for 2015-10-21

Published October 21, 2015

  • How a criminal ring defeated the secure chip-and-PIN credit cards | Ars Technica

    Ingenious --

    The stolen cards were still considered evidence, so the researchers couldn’t do a full tear-down or run any tests that would alter the data on the card, so they used X-ray scans to look at where the chip cards had been tampered with. They also analyzed the way the chips distributed electricity when in use and used read-only programs to see what information the cards sent to a Point of Sale (POS) terminal. According to the paper, the fraudsters were able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack by programming a second hobbyist chip called a FUN card to accept any PIN entry, and soldering that chip onto the card’s original chip. This increased the thickness of the chip from 0.4mm to 0.7mm, "making insertion into a PoS somewhat uneasy but perfectly feasible,” the researchers write. [....] The researchers explain that a typical EMV transaction involves three steps: card authentication, cardholder verification, and then transaction authorization. During a transaction using one of the altered cards, the original chip was allowed to respond with the card authentication as normal. Then, during card holder authentication, the POS system would ask for a user’s PIN, the thief would respond with any PIN, and the FUN card would step in and send the POS the code indicating that it was ok to proceed with the transaction because the PIN checked out. During the final transaction authentication phase, the FUN card would relay the transaction data between the POS and the original chip, sending the issuing bank an authorization request cryptogram which the card issuer uses to tell the POS system whether to accept the transaction or not.

    (tags: security chip-and-pin hacking pos emv transactions credit-cards debit-cards hardware chips pin fun-cards smartcards)

  • How-to: Index Scanned PDFs at Scale Using Fewer Than 50 Lines of Code

    using Spark, Tesseract, HBase, Solr and Leptonica. Actually pretty feasible

    (tags: spark tesseract hbase solr leptonica pdfs scanning cloudera hadoop architecture)

  • Existential Consistency: Measuring and Understanding Consistency at Facebook

    The metric is termed ?(P)-consistency, and is actually very simple. A read for the same data is sent to all replicas in P, and ?(P)-consistency is defined as the frequency with which that read returns the same result from all replicas. ?(G)-consistency applies this metric globally, and ?(R)-consistency applies it within a region (cluster). Facebook have been tracking this metric in production since 2012.

    (tags: facebook eventual-consistency consistency metrics papers cap distributed-computing)

  • Holistic Configuration Management at Facebook

    How FB push config changes from Git (where it is code reviewed, version controlled, and history tracked with strong auth) to Zeus (their Zookeeper fork) and from there to live production servers.

    (tags: facebook configuration zookeeper git ops architecture)

  • Hyperscan

    a high-performance multiple regex matching library. Hyperscan uses hybrid automata techniques to allow simultaneous matching of large numbers (up to tens of thousands) of regular expressions and for the matching of regular expressions across streams of data.
    Via Tony Finch

    (tags: via:fanf regexps regex dpi hyperscan dfa nfa hybrid-automata text-matching matching text strings streams)

Links for 2015-10-20

Published October 20, 2015

  • Hologram

    Hologram exposes an imitation of the EC2 instance metadata service on developer workstations that supports the [IAM Roles] temporary credentials workflow. It is accessible via the same HTTP endpoint to calling SDKs, so your code can use the same process in both development and production. The keys that Hologram provisions are temporary, so EC2 access can be centrally controlled without direct administrative access to developer workstations.

    (tags: iam roles ec2 authorization aws adroll open-source cli osx coding dev)

Links for 2015-10-18

Published October 18, 2015

Links for 2015-10-16

Published October 16, 2015

  • Your Relative's DNA Could Turn You Into A Suspect

    Familial DNA searching has massive false positives, but is being used to tag suspects:

    The bewildered Usry soon learned that he was a suspect in the 1996 murder of an Idaho Falls teenager named Angie Dodge. Though a man had been convicted of that crime after giving an iffy confession, his DNA didn’t match what was found at the crime scene. Detectives had focused on Usry after running a familial DNA search, a technique that allows investigators to identify suspects who don’t have DNA in a law enforcement database but whose close relatives have had their genetic profiles cataloged. In Usry’s case the crime scene DNA bore numerous similarities to that of Usry’s father, who years earlier had donated a DNA sample to a genealogy project through his Mormon church in Mississippi. That project’s database was later purchased by Ancestry, which made it publicly searchable—a decision that didn’t take into account the possibility that cops might someday use it to hunt for genetic leads. Usry, whose story was first reported in The New Orleans Advocate, was finally cleared after a nerve-racking 33-day wait — the DNA extracted from his cheek cells didn’t match that of Dodge’s killer, whom detectives still seek. But the fact that he fell under suspicion in the first place is the latest sign that it’s time to set ground rules for familial DNA searching, before misuse of the imperfect technology starts ruining lives.

    (tags: dna familial-dna false-positives law crime idaho murder mormon genealogy ancestry.com databases biometrics privacy genes)

Links for 2015-10-15

Published October 15, 2015

  • Cluster benchmark: Scylla vs Cassandra

    ScyllaDB (the C* clone in C++) is now actually looking promising -- still need more reassurance about its consistency/reliabilty side though

    (tags: scylla databases storage cassandra nosql)

  • _What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors_ [paper]

    As we will see below, there has long been ample evidence that errors in spreadsheets are pandemic. Spreadsheets, even after careful development, contain errors in one percent or more of all formula cells. In large spreadsheets with thousands of formulas, there will be dozens of undetected errors. Even significant errors may go undetected because formal testing in spreadsheet development is rare and because even serious errors may not be apparent.

    (tags: business coding maths excel spreadsheets errors formulas error-rate)

  • Defending Your Time

    great post from Ross Duggan on avoiding developer burnout

    (tags: coding burnout productivity work)

  • How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

    If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But there was a very important detail that got lost in translation between the mathematicians and the practitioners: an adversary can perform a single enormous computation to “crack” a particular prime, then easily break any individual connection that uses that prime. How enormous a computation, you ask? Possibly a technical feat on a scale (relative to the state of computing at the time) not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II. Even estimating the difficulty is tricky, due to the complexity of the algorithm involved, but our paper gives some conservative estimates. For the most common strength of Diffie-Hellman (1024 bits), it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a machine, based on special purpose hardware, that would be able to crack one Diffie-Hellman prime every year. Would this be worth it for an intelligence agency? Since a handful of primes are so widely reused, the payoff, in terms of connections they could decrypt, would be enormous. Breaking a single, common 1024-bit prime would allow NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.
    (via Eric)

    (tags: via:eric encryption privacy security nsa crypto)

Links for 2015-10-14

Published October 14, 2015

Links for 2015-10-13

Published October 13, 2015

  • Chromecast Speakers

    Supports Spotify -- totally getting one of these

    (tags: spotify speakers music home google gadgets toget)

  • Where do 'mama'/'papa' words come from?

    The sounds came first — as experiments in vocalization — and parents adopted them as pet names for themselves. If you open your mouth and make a sound, it will probably be an open vowel like /a/ unless you move your tongue or lips. The easiest consonants are perhaps the bilabials /m/, /p/, and /b/, requiring no movement of the tongue, followed by consonants made by raising the front of the tongue: /d/, /t/, and /n/. Add a dash of reduplication, and you get mama, papa, baba, dada, tata, nana. That such words refer to people (typically parents or other guardians) is something we have imposed on the sounds and incorporated into our languages and cultures; the meanings don’t inhere in the sounds as uttered by babies, which are more likely calls for food or attention.

    (tags: sounds voice speech babies kids phonetics linguist language)

  • remind101/conveyor

    'A fast build system for Docker images', open source, in Go, hooks into Github

    (tags: build ci docker github go)

  • England opens up 11TB of LiDAR data covering the entire country as open data

    All 11 terabytes of our LIDAR data (that’s roughly equivalent to 2,750,000 MP3 songs) will eventually be available through our new Open LIDAR portal under an Open Government Licence, allowing it to be used for any purpose. We hope that by giving free access to our data businesses and local communities will develop innovative solutions to benefit the environment, grow our thriving rural economy, and boost our world-leading food and farming industry. The possibilities are endless and we hope that making LIDAR data open will be a catalyst for new ideas and innovation.
    Are you reading, Ordnance Survey Ireland?

    (tags: data maps uk lidar mapping geodata open-data ogl)

Links for 2015-10-12

Published October 12, 2015

  • SuperChief: From Apache Storm to In-House Distributed Stream Processing

    Another sorry tale of Storm issues:

    Storm has been successful at Librato, but we experienced many of the limitations cited in the Twitter Heron: Stream Processing at Scale paper and outlined here by Adrian Colyer, including: Inability to isolate, reason about, or debug performance issues due to the worker/executor/task paradigm. This led to building and configuring clusters specifically designed to attempt to mitigate these problems (i.e., separate clusters per topology, only running a worker per server.), which added additional complexity to development and operations and also led to over-provisioning. Ability of tasks to move around led to difficult to trace performance problems. Storm’s work provisioning logic led to some tasks serving more Kafka partitions than others. This in turn created latency and performance issues that were difficult to reason about. The initial solution was to over-provision in an attempt to get a better hashing/balancing of work, but eventually we just replaced the work allocation logic. Due to Storm’s architecture, it was very difficult to get a stack trace or heap dump because the processes that managed workers (Storm supervisor) would often forcefully kill a Java process while it was being investigated in this way. The propensity for unexpected and subsequently unhandled exceptions to take down an entire worker led to additional defensive verbose error handling everywhere. This nasty bug STORM-404 coupled with the aforementioned fact that a single exception can take down a worker led to several cascading failures in production, taking down entire topologies until we upgraded to 0.9.4. Additionally, we found the performance we were getting from Storm for the amount of money we were spending on infrastructure was not in line with our expectations. Much of this is due to the fact that, depending upon how your topology is designed, a single tuple may make multiple hops across JVMs, and this is very expensive. For example, in our time series aggregation topologies a single tuple may be serialized/deserialized and shipped across the wire 3-4 times as it progresses through the processing pipeline.

    (tags: scalability storm kafka librato architecture heron ops)

  • librato/disco-java

    Librato's service discovery library using Zookeeper (so strongly consistent, but with the ZK downside that an AZ outage can stall service discovery updates region-wide)

    (tags: zookeeper service-discovery librato java open-source load-balancing)

  • Tech companies like Facebook not above the law, says Max Schrems

    “Big companies didn’t only rely on safe harbour: they also rely on binding corporate rules and standard contractual clauses. But it’s interesting that the court decided the case on fundamental rights grounds: so it doesn’t matter remotely what ground you transfer on, if that process is still illegal under 7 and 8 of charter, it can’t be done.”
    Also:
    “Ireland has no interest in doing its job, and will continue not to, forever. Clearly it’s an investment issue – but overall the policy is: we don’t regulate companies here. The cost of challenging any of this in the courts is prohibitive. And the people don’t seem to care.”
    :(

    (tags: ireland guardian max-schrems privacy surveillance safe-harbor eu us nsa dpc data-protection)

  • After Bara: All your (Data)base are belong to us

    Sounds like the CJEU's Bara decision may cause problems for the Irish government's wilful data-sharing:

    Articles 10, 11 and 13 of Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995, on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, must be interpreted as precluding national measures, such as those at issue in the main proceedings, which allow a public administrative body of a Member State to transfer personal data to another public administrative body and their subsequent processing, without the data subjects having been informed of that transfer or processing.

    (tags: data databases bara cjeu eu law privacy data-protection)

Links for 2015-10-10

Published October 10, 2015

  • Outage postmortem (2015-10-08 UTC) : Stripe: Help & Support

    There was a breakdown in communication between the developer who requested the index migration and the database operator who deleted the old index. Instead of working on the migration together, they communicated in an implicit way through flawed tooling. The dashboard that surfaced the migration request was missing important context: the reason for the requested deletion, the dependency on another index’s creation, and the criticality of the index for API traffic. Indeed, the database operator didn’t have a way to check whether the index had recently been used for a query.
    Good demo of how the Etsy-style chatops deployment approach would have helped avoid this risk.

    (tags: stripe postmortem outages databases indexes deployment chatops deploy ops)

  • net.wars: Unsafe harbor

    Wendy Grossman on where the Safe Harbor decision is leading.

    One clause would require European companies to tell their relevant data protection authorities if they are being compelled to turn over data - even if they have been forbidden to disclose this under US law. Sounds nice, but doesn't mobilize the rock or soften the hard place, since companies will still have to pick a law to violate. I imagine the internal discussions there revolving around two questions: which violation is less likely to land the CEO in jail and which set of fines can we afford?
    (via Simon McGarr)

    (tags: safe-harbor privacy law us eu surveillance wendy-grossman via:tupp_ed)

  • CHICKEN COOP & RUN

    bookmarking as a potential future addition to the back garden

    (tags: chickens pets food garden ebay)

Links for 2015-10-09

Published October 9, 2015

Links for 2015-10-08

Published October 8, 2015

  • Fuzzing Raft for Fun and Publication

    Good intro to fuzz-testing a distributed system; I've had great results using similar approaches in unit tests

    (tags: fuzzing fuzz-testing testing raft akka tests)

  • EC2 Spot Blocks for Defined-Duration Workloads

    you can now launch Spot instances that will run continuously for a finite duration (1 to 6 hours). Pricing is based on the requested duration and the available capacity, and is typically 30% to 45% less than On-Demand.

    (tags: ec2 aws spot-instances spot pricing time)

  • The Surveillance Elephant in the Room…

    Very perceptive post on the next steps for safe harbor, post-Schrems.

    And behind that elephant there are other elephants: if US surveillance and surveillance law is a problem, then what about UK surveillance? Is GCHQ any less intrusive than the NSA? It does not seem so – and this puts even more pressure on the current reviews of UK surveillance law taking place. If, as many predict, the forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill will be even more intrusive and extensive than current UK surveillance laws this will put the UK in a position that could rapidly become untenable. If the UK decides to leave the EU, will that mean that the UK is not considered a safe place for European data? Right now that seems the only logical conclusion – but the ramifications for UK businesses could be huge. [....] What happens next, therefore, is hard to foresee. What cannot be done, however, is to ignore the elephant in the room. The issue of surveillance has to be taken on. The conflict between that surveillance and fundamental human rights is not a merely semantic one, or one for lawyers and academics, it’s a real one. In the words of historian and philosopher Quentin Skinner “the current situation seems to me untenable in a democratic society.” The conflict over Safe Harbor is in many ways just a symptom of that far bigger problem. The biggest elephant of all.

    (tags: ec cjeu surveillance safe-harbor schrems privacy europe us uk gchq nsa)

  • ECJ ruling on Irish privacy case has huge significance

    The only current way to comply with EU law, the judgment indicates, is to keep EU data within the EU. Whether those data can be safely managed within facilities run by US companies will not be determined until the US rules on an ongoing Microsoft case. Microsoft stands in contempt of court right now for refusing to hand over to US authorities, emails held in its Irish data centre. This case will surely go to the Supreme Court and will be an extremely important determination for the cloud business, and any company or individual using data centre storage. If Microsoft loses, US multinationals will be left scrambling to somehow, legally firewall off their EU-based data centres from US government reach.
    (cough, Amazon)

    (tags: aws hosting eu privacy surveillance gchq nsa microsoft ireland)

Links for 2015-10-07

Published October 7, 2015

Links for 2015-10-06

Published October 6, 2015

  • Marvin.ie: Order Takeaway Food Online

    new Dublin delivery service takes Bitcoin?!

    (tags: bitcoin food delivery takeaway payment ireland dublin wtf)

  • qp tries: smaller and faster than crit-bit tries

    interesting new data structure from Tony Finch. "Some simple benchmarks say qp tries have about 1/3 less memory overhead and are about 10% faster than crit-bit tries."

    (tags: crit-bit popcount bits bitmaps tries data-structures via:fanf qp-tries crit-bit-tries hacks memory)

  • Schneier on Automatic Face Recognition and Surveillance

    When we talk about surveillance, we tend to concentrate on the problems of data collection: CCTV cameras, tagged photos, purchasing habits, our writings on sites like Facebook and Twitter. We think much less about data analysis. But effective and pervasive surveillance is just as much about analysis. It's sustained by a combination of cheap and ubiquitous cameras, tagged photo databases, commercial databases of our actions that reveal our habits and personalities, and ­-- most of all ­-- fast and accurate face recognition software. Don't expect to have access to this technology for yourself anytime soon. This is not facial recognition for all. It's just for those who can either demand or pay for access to the required technologies ­-- most importantly, the tagged photo databases. And while we can easily imagine how this might be misused in a totalitarian country, there are dangers in free societies as well. Without meaningful regulation, we're moving into a world where governments and corporations will be able to identify people both in real time and backwards in time, remotely and in secret, without consent or recourse. Despite protests from industry, we need to regulate this budding industry. We need limitations on how our images can be collected without our knowledge or consent, and on how they can be used. The technologies aren't going away, and we can't uninvent these capabilities. But we can ensure that they're used ethically and responsibly, and not just as a mechanism to increase police and corporate power over us.

    (tags: privacy regulation surveillance bruce-schneier faces face-recognition machine-learning ai cctv photos)

Links for 2015-10-05

Published October 5, 2015

Links for 2015-10-02

Published October 2, 2015

Links for 2015-10-01

Published October 1, 2015

Links for 2015-09-30

Published September 30, 2015

Links for 2015-09-29

Published September 29, 2015

Links for 2015-09-28

Published September 28, 2015

Links for 2015-09-24

Published September 24, 2015

  • Byteman

    a tool which simplifies tracing and testing of Java programs. Byteman allows you to insert extra Java code into your application, either as it is loaded during JVM startup or even after it has already started running. The injected code is allowed to access any of your data and call any application methods, including where they are private. You can inject code almost anywhere you want and there is no need to prepare the original source code in advance nor do you have to recompile, repackage or redeploy your application. In fact you can remove injected code and reinstall different code while the application continues to execute. The simplest use of Byteman is to install code which traces what your application is doing. This can be used for monitoring or debugging live deployments as well as for instrumenting code under test so that you can be sure it has operated correctly. By injecting code at very specific locations you can avoid the overheads which often arise when you switch on debug or product trace. Also, you decide what to trace when you run your application rather than when you write it so you don't need 100% hindsight to be able to obtain the information you need.

    (tags: tracing java byteman injection jvm ops debugging testing)

  • Henry Robinson on testing and fault discovery in distributed systems

    'Let's talk about finding bugs in distributed systems for a bit. These chaos monkey-style fault testing systems are all well and good, but by being application independent they're a very blunt instrument. Particularly they make it hard to search the fault space for bugs in a directed manner, because they don't 'know' what the system is doing. Application-aware scripting of faults in a dist. systems seems to be rarely used, but allows you to directly stress problem areas. For example, if a bug manifests itself only when one RPC returns after some timeout, hard to narrow that down with iptables manipulation. But allow a script to hook into RPC invocations (and other trace points, like DTrace's probes), and you can script very specific faults. That way you can simulate cross-system integration failures, *and* write reproducible tests for the bugs they expose! Anyhow, I've been doing this in Impala, and it's been very helpful. Haven't seen much evidence elsewhere.'

    (tags: henry-robinson testing fault-discovery rpc dtrace tracing distributed-systems timeouts chaos-monkey impala)

  • The Best Bourbon Cocktail You’ve Never Heard Of

    The "Paper Plane", by Sam Ross of Chicago's "Violet Hour": .75 oz Bourbon .75 oz Aperol .75 oz Amaro Nonino .75 oz Fresh lemon juice ice-filled shaker, shake, strain.

    (tags: bourbon drinks cocktails recipes aperol amaro-nonino lemon)

  • Seastar

    C++ high-performance app framework; 'currently focused on high-throughput, low-latency I/O intensive applications.' Scylla (Cassandra-compatible NoSQL store) is written in this.

    (tags: c++ opensource performance framework scylla seastar latency linux shared-nothing multicore)

Links for 2015-09-23

Published September 23, 2015

Links for 2015-09-22

Published September 22, 2015

  • Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet from Google

    While Zopfli is Deflate-compatible, Brotli is a whole new data format. This new format allows us to get 20–26% higher compression ratios over Zopfli. In our study ‘Comparison of Brotli, Deflate, Zopfli, LZMA, LZHAM and Bzip2 Compression Algorithms’ we show that Brotli is roughly as fast as zlib’s Deflate implementation. At the same time, it compresses slightly more densely than LZMA and bzip2 on the Canterbury corpus. The higher data density is achieved by a 2nd order context modeling, re-use of entropy codes, larger memory window of past data and joint distribution codes. Just like Zopfli, the new algorithm is named after Swiss bakery products. Brötli means ‘small bread’ in Swiss German.

    (tags: brotli zopfli deflate gzip compression algorithms swiss google)

Links for 2015-09-21

Published September 21, 2015

  • Nelson recommends Ubiquiti

    'The key thing about Ubiquiti gear is the high quality radios and antennas. It just seems much more reliable than most consumer WiFi gear. Their airOS firmware is good too, it’s a bit complicated to set up but very capable and flexible. And in addition to normal 802.11n or 802.11ac they also have an optional proprietary TDMA protocol called airMax that’s designed for serving several long haul links from a single basestation. They’re mostly marketing to business customers but the equipment is sold retail and well documented for ordinary nerds to figure out.'

    (tags: ubiquiti wifi wireless 802.11 via:nelson ethernet networking prosumer hardware wan)

  • httpry

    a specialized packet sniffer designed for displaying and logging HTTP traffic. It is not intended to perform analysis itself, but to capture, parse, and log the traffic for later analysis. It can be run in real-time displaying the traffic as it is parsed, or as a daemon process that logs to an output file. It is written to be as lightweight and flexible as possible, so that it can be easily adaptable to different applications.
    via Eoin Brazil

    (tags: via:eoinbrazil httpry http networking tools ops testing tcpdump tracing)

  • ustwo Reimagines the In-Car Cluster

    Designers behind the cult mobile game, Monument Valley, take on the legacy-bound in-car UI

    (tags: ux ui cars driving safety ustwo monument-valley speed)

  • Little Drummer Boy Challenge

    'It's very easy: So long as you don't hear "The Little Drummer Boy," you're a contender. As soon as you hear it on the radio, on TV, in a store, wherever, you're out.'

    (tags: ldbc games funny xmas christmas music songs cheese)

Links for 2015-09-18

Published September 18, 2015

Links for 2015-09-14

Published September 14, 2015

  • Kate Heddleston: How Our Engineering Environments Are Killing Diversity

    '[There are] several problem areas for [diversity in] engineering environments and ways to start fixing them. The problems we face aren't devoid of solutions; there are a lot of things that companies, teams, and individuals can do to fix problems in their work environment. For the month of March, I will be posting detailed articles about the problem areas I will cover in my talk: argument cultures, feedback, promotions, employee on-boarding, benefits, safety, engineering process, and environment adaptation.' via Baron Schwartz.

    (tags: via:xaprb culture tech diversity sexism feminism engineering work workplaces feedback)

  • Michael Kagan | Prints

    'Heavily tinted blue paintings form space stations, spacesuits, and rockets just after blast. Michael Kagan paints these large-scale works to celebrate the man-made object—machinery that both protects and holds the possibility of instantly killing those that operate the equipment from the inside. To paint the large works, Kagan utilizes an impasto technique with thick strokes that are deliberate and unique, showing an aggression in his application of oil paint on linen. The New York-based artist focuses on iconic images in his practice, switching back and forth between abstract and representational styles. “The painting is finished when it can fall apart and come back together depending on how it is read and the closeness to the work,” said Kagan about his work. “Each painting is an image, a snapshot, a flash moment, a quick read that is locked into memory by the iconic silhouettes.”' Via http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/08/michael-kagens-space-paintings/

    (tags: paintings prints art michael-kagan space abstract-art tobuy)

  • Dark corners of Unicode

    I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a tragedy, because Unicode has a lot of… ah, depth to it. Not to say that Unicode is a terrible disaster — more that human language is a terrible disaster, and anything with the lofty goals of representing all of it is going to have some wrinkles. So here is a collection of curiosities I’ve encountered in dealing with Unicode that you generally only find out about through experience. Enjoy.

    (tags: unicode characters encoding emoji utf-8 utf-16 utf mysql text)

Links for 2015-09-08

Published September 8, 2015

Links for 2015-09-07

Published September 7, 2015

  • You're probably wrong about caching

    Excellent cut-out-and-keep guide to why you should add a caching layer. I've been following this practice for the past few years, after I realised that #6 (recovering from a failed cache is hard) is a killer -- I've seen a few large-scale outages where a production system had gained enough scale that it required a cache to operate, and once that cache was damaged, bringing the system back online required a painful rewarming protocol. Better to design for the non-cached case if possible.

    (tags: architecture caching coding design caches ops production scalability)

  • The Alternative Universe Of Soviet Arcade Games

    Unlike machines in the West, every single machine that was produced during Soviet-era Russia had to align with Marxist ideology. [...] The most popular games were created to teach hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, and logical, focused thinking. Not unlike many American games, these games were influenced by military training, crafted to teach and instill patriotism for the state by making the human body better, stronger, and more willful. It also means no high scores, no adrenaline rushes, or self-serving feather-fluffing as you add your hard-earned initials to the list of the best. In Communist Russia, there was no overt competition.

    (tags: high-scores communism russia cccp ussr arcade-games games history)

Links for 2015-09-03

Published September 3, 2015

Links for 2015-09-02

Published September 2, 2015

Links for 2015-09-01

Published September 1, 2015

  • What Are the Worst Airports in the World?

    this is a great resource when picking a stopover for a 2-stop flight. Pity "best kids play area" isn't a criterion

    (tags: airports comparison via:boingboing flying travel ranking world skytrax)

  • Using Samsung's Internet-Enabled Refrigerator for Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

    Whilst the fridge implements SSL, it FAILS to validate SSL certificates, thereby enabling man-in-the-middle attacks against most connections. This includes those made to Google's servers to download Gmail calendar information for the on-screen display. So, MITM the victim's fridge from next door, or on the road outside and you can potentially steal their Google credentials.
    The Internet of Insecure Things strikes again.

    (tags: iot security fridges samsung fail mitm ssl tls google papers defcon)

  • Malware infecting jailbroken iPhones stole 225,000 Apple account logins | Ars Technica

    KeyRaider, as the malware family has been dubbed, is distributed through a third-party repository of Cydia, which markets itself as an alternative to Apple's official App Store. Malicious code surreptitiously included with Cydia apps is creating problems for people in China and at least 17 other countries, including France, Russia, Japan, and the UK. Not only has it pilfered account data for 225,941 Apple accounts, it has also disabled some infected phones until users pay a ransom, and it has made unauthorized charges against some victims' accounts.
    Ouch. Not a good sign for Cydia

    (tags: cydia apple security exploits jailbreaking ios iphone malware keyraider china)

  • GoTTY

    'a simple command line tool that turns your CLI tools into web applications'

    (tags: cli terminal web tools unix)

  • S3QL

    a file system that stores all its data online using storage services like Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. S3QL effectively provides a hard disk of dynamic, infinite capacity that can be accessed from any computer with internet access running Linux, FreeBSD or OS-X. S3QL is a standard conforming, full featured UNIX file system that is conceptually indistinguishable from any local file system. Furthermore, S3QL has additional features like compression, encryption, data de-duplication, immutable trees and snapshotting which make it especially suitable for online backup and archival. S3QL is designed to favor simplicity and elegance over performance and feature-creep. Care has been taken to make the source code as readable and serviceable as possible. Solid error detection and error handling have been included from the very first line, and S3QL comes with extensive automated test cases for all its components.

    (tags: filesystems aws s3 storage unix google-storage openstack)