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Links for 2014-02-06

Published February 6, 2014

  • Realtime water level data across Ireland

    Some very nice Dygraph-based time-series graphs in here, along with open CSV data. Good job!

    (tags: open-data water-levels time-series data rivers ireland csv)

  • The Gardai haven't requested info on any Twitter accounts in the past 6 months

    This seems to imply they haven't been investigating any allegations of cyber-bullying/harassment from "anonymous" Twitter handles, despite having the legal standing to do so. Enforcement is needed, not new laws

    (tags: cyber-bullying twitter social-media enforcement gardai policing harassment online society law government)

  • QuakeNet IRC Network- Article - PRESS RELEASE: IRC NETWORKS UNDER SYSTEMATIC ATTACK FROM GOVERNMENTS

    QuakeNet are not happy about GCHQ's DDoS attacks against them.

    Yesterday we learned ... that GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, are performing persistent social and technological attacks against IRC networks. These attacks are performed without informing the networks and are targeted at users associated with politically motivated movements such as "Anonymous". While QuakeNet does not condone or endorse and actively forbids any illegal activity on its servers we encourage discussion on all topics including political and social commentary. It is apparent now that engaging in such topics with an opinion contrary to that of the intelligence agencies is sufficient to make people a target for monitoring, coercion and denial of access to communications platforms. The ... documents depict GCHQ operatives engaging in social engineering of IRC users to entrap themselves by encouraging the target to leak details about their location as well as wholesale attacks on the IRC servers hosting the network. These attacks bring down the IRC network entirely affecting every user on the network as well as the company hosting the server. The collateral damage and numbers of innocent people and companies affected by these forms of attack can be huge and it is highly illegal in many jurisdictions including the UK under the Computer Misuse Act.

    (tags: quakenet ddos security gchq irc anonymous)

  • PID controller

    Good to know; this generic anti-flap damping algorithm has a name.

    A proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID controller) is a generic control loop feedback mechanism (controller) widely used in industrial control systems. A PID controller calculates an "error" value as the difference between a measured process variable and a desired setpoint. The controller attempts to minimize the error by adjusting the process control outputs.

    (tags: control damping flapping pid-controller industrial error algorithms)

Links for 2014-02-05

Published February 5, 2014

Links for 2014-02-04

Published February 4, 2014

  • Yahoo! moving EMEA operations to Dublin

    Like many companies, the structure of Yahoo's business is driven by the needs of the business. There are a number of factors which influence decisions about the locations in which the business operates. To encourage more collaboration and innovation, we’re increasing our headcount in Dublin, thus continuing to bring more Yahoos together in fewer locations. Dublin is already the European home to many of the world’s leading global technology brands and has been a home for Yahoo for over a decade already.
    Via Conor O'Neill

    (tags: via:conoro yahoo emea dublin ireland jobs tech)

Links for 2014-02-03

Published February 3, 2014

  • appear.in

    zero-install, one-click video chat, using WebRTC. nifty

    (tags: conference webrtc chat collaboration video google-chrome conferencing)

  • Opinion: How can we get over ‘Pantigate’?

    The fact that RTÉ had agreed to pay damages (€80,000 in total, according to reports yesterday) to the ‘injured parties’, only came to light in an email from the [far-right Catholic lobby group Iona Institute] to its members last Tuesday. Given the ramifications of the decision to make any kind of payment – regardless of the amount – both for the TV licence payer and those who voice contrarian opinions, the lack of coverage in print media as soon as the Iona email came to light marked a low point for print journalism in Ireland. Aside from a lead story on the damages printed in this paper last Wednesday and ongoing debate online, the media has been glacially slow with commentary and even reportage of the affair. The debacle has untold ramifications for public life in this country. That many liberal commentators may now baulk at the opportunity to speak and write openly and honestly about homophobia is the most obvious issue here. Most worrying of all, however, is the question that with a referendum on the introduction of gay marriage on the horizon, how can we expect the national broadcaster to facilitate even-handed debate on the subject when they’ve already found themselves cowed before reaching the first hurdle?

    (tags: homophobia politics ireland libel dissent lobbying defamation law gay-marriage iona-institute journalism newspapers)

  • Home · linkedin/rest.li Wiki

    Rest.li is a REST+JSON framework for building robust, scalable service architectures using dynamic discovery and simple asynchronous APIs. Rest.li fills a niche for building RESTful service architectures at scale, offering a developer workflow for defining data and REST APIs that promotes uniform interfaces, consistent data modeling, type-safety, and compatibility checked API evolution.
    The new underlying comms layer for Voldemort, it seems.

    (tags: voldemort d2 rest.li linkedin json rest http api frameworks java)

  • Hardened SSL Ciphers Using ELB and HAProxy

    ELBs support the PROXY protocol

    (tags: elb security proxying ssl tls https haproxy perfect-forward-secrecy aws ec2)

Links for 2014-02-01

Published February 1, 2014

Links for 2014-01-30

Published January 30, 2014

Links for 2014-01-29

Published January 29, 2014

Links for 2014-01-28

Published January 28, 2014

Links for 2014-01-27

Published January 27, 2014

  • Extending graphite’s mileage

    Ad company InMobi are using graphite heavily (albeit not as heavily as $work are), ran into the usual scaling issues, and chose to fix it in code by switching from a filesystem full of whisper files to a LevelDB per carbon-cache:

    The carbon server is now able to run without breaking a sweat even when 500K metrics per minute is being pumped into it. This has been in production since late August 2013 in every datacenter that we operate from.
    Very nice. I hope this gets merged/supported.

    (tags: graphite scalability metrics leveldb storage inmobi whisper carbon open-source)

  • BBC News - Pair jailed over abusive tweets to feminist campaigner

    When a producer from BBC Two's Newsnight programme tracked Nimmo down after he had sent the abuse, the former call centre worker told him: "The police will do nothing, it's only Twitter."

    (tags: bbc bullying social-media twitter society uk trolls trolling abuse feminism cyberbullying)

  • If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox

    TorMail was a Tor-based webmail system, and apparently its drives have been imaged and seized by the FBI. More info on the Freedom Hosting seizure:

    The connection, if any, between the FBI obtaining Freedom Hosting’s data and apparently launching the malware campaign through TorMail and the other sites isn’t spelled out in the new document. The bureau could have had the cooperation of the French hosting company that Marques leased his servers from. Or it might have set up its own Tor hidden services using the private keys obtained from the seizure, which would allow it to adopt the same .onion addresses used by the original sites. The French company also hasn’t been identified. But France’s largest hosting company, OVH, announced on July 29, in the middle of the FBI’s then-secret Freedom Hosting seizure, that it would no longer allow Tor software on its servers. A spokesman for the company says he can’t comment on specific cases, and declined to say whether Freedom Hosting was a customer. “Wherever the data center is located, we conduct our activities in conformity with applicable laws, and as a hosting company, we obey search warrants or disclosure orders,” OVH spokesman Benjamin Bongoat told WIRED. “This is all we can say as we usually don’t make any comments on hot topics.”

    (tags: fbi freedom-hosting hosting tor tormail seizures ovh colo servers)

  • Sky parental controls break many JQuery-using websites

    An 11 hour outage caused by a false positive in Sky's anti-phishing filter; all sites using the code.jquery.com CDN for JQuery would have seen errors.

    Sky still appears to be blocking code.jquery.com and all files served via the site, and more worryingly is that if you try to report the incorrect category, once signing in on the Sky website you an error page. We suspect the site was blocked due to being linked to by a properly malicious website, i.e. code.jquery.com and some javascript files were being used on a dodgy website and every domain mentioned was subsequently added to a block list.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: via:fanf sky filtering internet uk anti-phishing phish jquery javascript http web fps false-positives)

  • Coders performing code reviews of scientific projects: pilot study

    'PLOS and Mozilla conducted a month-long pilot study in which professional developers performed code reviews on software associated with papers published in PLOS Computational Biology. While the developers felt the reviews were limited by (a) lack of familiarity with the domain and (b) lack of two-way contact with authors, the scientists appreciated the reviews, and both sides were enthusiastic about repeating the experiment. ' Actually sounds like it was more successful than this summary implies.

    (tags: plos mozilla code-reviews coding science computational-biology biology studies)

  • Caught with our Pantis down

    The views expressed by [the Iona Institute] – especially in relation to gay people – are very much at odds with the liberal secular society that Ireland has become. Indeed, Rory O’Neill suggested that the only time he experiences homophobia is online or at the hands of Iona and Waters. When they’re done with that, they can ask why Iona is given so much room in the media. In any other country in the world, an organisation as litigious as Iona would never be asked to participate in anything.

    (tags: homophobia ireland john-waters iona-institute politics catholicism religion libel defamation rte the-irish-times)

  • Scotch Whiskey flavour wheels

    mine's a Smoky/Spicy/Medicinal, thanks

    (tags: scotch whiskey whisky alcohol dataviz flavour)

Links for 2014-01-24

Published January 24, 2014

Links for 2014-01-22

Published January 22, 2014

  • Ukrainian government targeting protesters using threatening SMS messages

    The government’s opponents said three recent actions had been intended to incite the more radical protesters and sow doubt in the minds of moderates: the passing of laws last week circumscribing the right of public assembly, the blocking of a protest march past the Parliament building on Sunday, and the sending of cellphone messages on Tuesday to people standing in the vicinity of the fighting that said, “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” [....] The phrasing of the message, about participating in a “mass disturbance,” echoed language in a new law making it a crime to participate in a protest deemed violent. The law took effect on Tuesday. And protesters were concerned that the government seemed to be using cutting-edge technology from the advertising industry to pinpoint people for political profiling. Three cellphone companies in Ukraine — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages, the newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda reported. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.

    (tags: targeting mobile-phones sms text-messaging via:tjmcintyre geotargeting protest ukraine privacy surveillance tech 1984)

  • UK porn filter blocks game update that contained 'sex' in URL

    Staggeringly inept. The UK national porn filter blocks based on a regexp match of the URL against /.*sex.*/i -- the good old "Scunthorpe problem". Better, it returns a 404 response. This is also a good demonstration of how web filtering has unintended side effects, breaking third-party software updates with its false positives.

    The update to online strategy game League of Legends was disrupted by the internet filter because the software attempted to access files that accidentally include the word “sex” in the middle of their file names. The block resulted in the update failing with “file not found” errors, which are usually created by missing files or broken updates on the part of the developers.

    (tags: uk porn filtering guardian regular-expressions false-positives scunthorpe http web league-of-legends sex)

  • Register article on Amazon's attitude to open source

    This article is frequently on target; this secrecy (both around open source and publishing papers) was one of the reasons I left Amazon.

    Of the sources with whom we spoke, many indicated that Amazon's lack of participation was a key reason for why people left the company – or never joined at all. This is why Amazon's strategy of maintaining secrecy may derail the e-retailer's future if it struggles to hire the best talent. [...] "In many cases in the big companies and all the small startups, your Github profile is your resume," explained another former Amazonian. "When I look at developers that's what I'm looking for, [but] they go to Amazon and that resume stops ... It absolutely affects the quality of their hires." "You had no portfolio you could share with the world," said another insider on life after working at Amazon. "The argument this was necessary to attract talent and to retain talent completely fell on deaf ears."

    (tags: amazon recruitment secrecy open-source hiring work research conferences)

  • Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming House

    'That address — which is home to some 2,000 companies on paper — was the subject of a lengthy 2011 Reuters investigation that found that among the entities registered to the address were a shell company controlled by a jailed former Ukraine prime minister; the owner of a company charged with helping online poker operators evade an Internet gambling ban; and one entity that was banned from government contracts after selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.'

    (tags: china internet great-firewall dns wyoming attacks security not-the-onion)

  • James Friend | PCE.js - Classic Mac OS in the Browser

    This is a demo of PCE's classic Macintosh emulation, running System 7.0.1 with MacPaint, MacDraw, and Kid Pix. If you want to try out more apps and games see this demo.
    Incredible. I remember using this version of MacPaint!

    (tags: javascript browser emulation mac macos macpaint macdraw claris kid-pix history desktop pce)

Links for 2014-01-21

Published January 21, 2014

  • likwid

    'Lightweight performance tools'.

    Likwid stands for 'Like I knew what I am doing'. This project contributes easy to use command line tools for Linux to support programmers in developing high performance multi-threaded programs. It contains the following tools: likwid-topology: Show the thread and cache topology likwid-perfctr: Measure hardware performance counters on Intel and AMD processors likwid-features: Show and Toggle hardware prefetch control bits on Intel Core 2 processors likwid-pin: Pin your threaded application without touching your code (supports pthreads, Intel OpenMP and gcc OpenMP) likwid-bench: Benchmarking framework allowing rapid prototyping of threaded assembly kernels likwid-mpirun: Script enabling simple and flexible pinning of MPI and MPI/threaded hybrid applications likwid-perfscope: Frontend for likwid-perfctr timeline mode. Allows live plotting of performance metrics. likwid-powermeter: Tool for accessing RAPL counters and query Turbo mode steps on Intel processor. likwid-memsweeper: Tool to cleanup ccNUMA memory domains.
    No kernel patching required. (via kellabyte)

    (tags: via:kellabyte linux performance testing perf likwid threading multithreading multicore mpi numa)

  • Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

    Because Backblaze has a history of openness, many readers expected more details in my previous posts. They asked what drive models work best and which last the longest. Given our experience with over 25,000 drives, they asked which ones are good enough that we would buy them again. In this post, I’ll answer those questions.

    (tags: backblaze backup hardware hdds storage disks ops via:fanf)

Links for 2014-01-20

Published January 20, 2014

Links for 2014-01-17

Published January 17, 2014

  • Transport Minister planning to make hi-vis jackets mandatory for cyclists

    The minister also spoke of a number of new transport initiatives, such  as mandatory use of high visibility jackets by cyclists.

    (tags: cycling safety law ireland leo-varadkar)

  • The Malware That Duped Target Has Been Found

    a Windows 'RAM scraper' trojan known as Trojan.POSRAM, which was used to attack the Windows-based point-of-sales systems which the POS terminals are connected to. part of an operation called Kaptoxa. 'The code is based on a previous malicious tool known as BlackPOS that is believed to have been developed in 2013 in Russia, though the new variant was highly customized to prevent antivirus programs from detecting it' ... 'The tool monitors memory address spaces used by specific programs, such as payment application programs like pos.exe and PosW32.exe that process the data embossed in the magnetic strip of credit and debit cards data. The tool grabs the data from memory.' ... 'The siphoned data is stored on the system, and then every seven hours the malware checks the local time on the compromised system to see if it’s between the hours of 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. If so, it attempts to send the data over a temporary NetBIOS share to an internal host inside the compromised network so the attackers can then extract the data over an FTP ... connection.' http://www.pcworld.com/article/2088920/target-credit-card-data-was-sent-to-server-in-russia.html says the data was then transmitted to another US-based server, and from there relayed to Russia, and notes: 'At the time of its discovery, Trojan.POSRAM “had a zero percent antivirus detection rate, which means that fully updated antivirus engines on fully patched computers could not identify the software as malicious,” iSight said.' Massive AV fail.

    (tags: kaptoxa trojans ram-scrapers trojan.posram posram point-of-sale security hacks target credit-cards pin ftp netbios smb)

  • Full iSight report on the Kaptoxa attack on Target

    'POS malware is becoming increasingly available to cyber criminals' ... 'there is growing demand for [this kind of malware]'. Watch your credit cards...

    (tags: debit-cards credit-cards security card-present attacks kaptoxa ram-scrapers trojans point-of-sale pos malware target)

  • The Target hack and PCI-DSS

    Both Heartland Payment Systems and Hannaford Bros. were in fact certified PCI-compliant while the hackers were in their system. In August 2006, Wal-Mart was also certified PCI-compliant while unknown attackers were lurking on its network. [...] “This PCI standard just ain’t working,” says Litan, the Gartner analyst. “I wouldn’t say it’s completely pointless. Because you can’t say security is a bad thing. But they’re trying to patch a really weak [and] insecure payment system [with it].”
    Basically, RAM scrapers have been in use in live attacks, sniffing credentials in the clear, since 2007. Ouch.

    (tags: ram-scrapers trojans pins pci-dss compliance security gartner walmart target)

  • ISPAI responds to TD Patrick O'Donovan's bizarre comments regarding "open source browsers"

    ISPAI is rather dismayed and somewhat confused by the recent press release issued by Deputy Patrick O’Donovan (FG). He appears to be asking the Oireachtas Communications Committee (of which he is a member) to investigate: “the matter of tougher controls on the use of open source internet browsers and payment systems”  which he claims “allow users to remain anonymous for illegal trade of drugs weapons and pornography.” Deputy O’Donovan would do well to ask the advice of industry experts on these matters given that legislating to curtail the use of such legitimate software or services, which may be misused by some, is neither practical nor logical. Whether or not a browser is open source bears no relevance to its ability to be the subject of anonymous use. Indeed, Deputy O’Donovan must surely be confusing and conflating different technical concepts? In tracing illegal activities, Law Enforcement Agencies and co-operating parties will use IP addresses – users’ choice of browser has little relevance to an investigation of criminal activity. Equally, it may be that the Deputy is uncomfortable with the concept of electronic payment systems but these underpin the digital economy which is bringing enormous benefit to Ireland. Yes, these may be misused by criminals but so are cash and traditional banking services. Restricting the growth of innovative financial services is not the solution to tackling cyber criminals who might be operating what he describes as “online supermarkets for illegal goods.” Tackling international cybercrime requires more specialist Law Enforcement resources at national level and improved international police cooperation supported by revision of EU legislation relating to obtaining server log evidence existing in other jurisdictions.

    (tags: ispai open-source patrick-o-donovan fine-gael press-releases tor darknet crime)

Links for 2014-01-16

Published January 16, 2014

Don’t use Timers with exponentially-decaying reservoirs in Graphite

Published January 16, 2014

A common error when using the Metrics library is to record Timer metrics on things like API calls, using the default settings, then to publish those to a time-series store like Graphite. Here's why this is a problem.

By default, a Timer uses an Exponentially Decaying Reservoir. The docs say:

'A histogram with an exponentially decaying reservoir produces quantiles which are representative of (roughly) the last five minutes of data. It does so by using a forward-decaying priority reservoir with an exponential weighting towards newer data. Unlike the uniform reservoir, an exponentially decaying reservoir represents recent data, allowing you to know very quickly if the distribution of the data has changed.'

This is more-or-less correct -- but the key phrase is 'roughly'. In reality, if the frequency of updates to such a timer drops off, it could take a lot longer, and if you stop updating a timer which uses this reservoir type, it'll never decay at all. The GraphiteReporter will dutifully capture the percentiles, min, max, etc. from that timer's reservoir every minute thereafter, and record those to Graphite using the current timestamp -- even though the data it was derived from is becoming more and more ancient.

Here's a demo. Note the long stretch of 800ms 99th-percentile latencies on the green line in the middle of this chart:

However, the blue line displays the number of events. As you can see, there were no calls to this API for that 8-hour period -- this one was a test system, and the user population was safely at home, in bed. So while Graphite is claiming that there's an 800ms latency at 7am, in reality the 800ms-latency event occurred 8 hours previously.

I observed the same thing in our production systems for various APIs which suffered variable invocation rates; if rates dropped off during normal operation, the high-percentile latencies hung around for far longer than they should have. This is quite misleading when you're looking at a graph for 10pm and seeing a high 99th-percentile latency, when the actual high-latency event occurred hours earlier. On several occasions, this caused lots of user confusion and FUD with our production monitoring, so we needed to fix it.

Here are some potential fixes.

  • Modify ExponentiallyDecayingReservoir to also call rescaleIfNeeded() inside getSnapshot() -- but based on this discussion, it appears the current behaviour is intended (at least for the mean measurement), so that may not be acceptable. Another risk of this is that it leaves us in a position where the percentiles displayed for time T may actually have occurred several minutes prior to that, which is still misleading (albeit less so).

  • Switch to sliding time window reservoirs, but those are unbounded in size -- so a timer on an unexpectedly-popular API could create GC pressure and out-of-memory scenarios. It's also the slowest reservoir type, according to the docs. That made it too risky for us to adopt in our production code as a general-purpose Timer implementation.

  • Update, Dec 2017: as of version 3.2.3 of Dropwizard Metrics, there is a new SlidingTimeWindowArrayReservoir reservoir implementation, which is a drop-in replacement for SlidingTimeWindowReservoir, with much more acceptable memory footprint and GC impact. It costs roughly 128 bits per stored measurement, and is therefore judged to be 'comparable with ExponentiallyDecayingReservoir in terms of GC overhead and performance'. (thanks to Bogdan Storozhuk for the tip)

  • What we eventually did in our code was to use this Reporter class instead of GraphiteReporter; it clears all Timer metrics' reservoirs after each write to Graphite. This is dumb and dirty, reaching across logical class boundaries, but at the same time it's simple and comprehensible behaviour: with this, we can guarantee that the percentile/min/max data recorded at timestamp T is measuring events in that timestamp's 1-minute window -- not any time before that. This is exactly what you want to see in a time-series graph like those in Graphite, so is a very valuable feature for our metrics, and one that others have noted to be important in comparable scenarios elsewhere.

Here's an example of what a graph like the above should look like (captured from our current staging stack):

Note that when there are no invocations, the reported 99th-percentile latency is 0, and each measurement doesn't stick around after its 1-minute slot.

Another potential bug fix for a related issue, would be to add support to Metrics so that it can use Gil Tene's LatencyUtils package, and its HdrHistogram class, as a reservoir. (Update: however, I don't think this would address the "old data leaking into newer datapoints" problem as fully.) This would address some other bugs in the Exponentially Decaying Reservoir, as Gil describes:

'In your example of a system logging 10K operations/sec with the histogram being sampled every second, you'll be missing 9 out of each 10 actual outliers. You can have an outlier every second and think you have one roughly every 10. You can have a huge business affecting outlier happening every hour, and think that they are only occurring once a day.'

Eek.

Links for 2014-01-15

Published January 15, 2014

Links for 2014-01-14

Published January 14, 2014

Links for 2014-01-13

Published January 13, 2014

Links for 2014-01-11

Published January 11, 2014

  • Growing up unvaccinated: A healthy lifestyle couldn’t prevent many childhood illnesses.

    I understand, to a point, where the anti-vaccine parents are coming from. Back in the ’90s, when I was a concerned, 19-year-old mother, frightened by the world I was bringing my child into, I was studying homeopathy, herbalism, and aromatherapy; I believed in angels, witchcraft, clairvoyants, crop circles, aliens at Nazca, giant ginger mariners spreading their knowledge to the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Egyptians, and that I was somehow personally blessed by the Holy Spirit with healing abilities. I was having my aura read at a hefty price and filtering the fluoride out of my water. I was choosing to have past life regressions instead of taking antidepressants. I was taking my daily advice from tarot cards. I grew all my own veg and made my own herbal remedies. I was so freaking crunchy that I literally crumbled. It was only when I took control of those paranoid thoughts and fears about the world around me and became an objective critical thinker that I got well. It was when I stopped taking sugar pills for everything and started seeing medical professionals that I began to thrive physically and mentally.

    (tags: health medicine science vaccination disease slate)

Links for 2014-01-09

Published January 9, 2014

Links for 2014-01-07

Published January 7, 2014

Links for 2014-01-06

Published January 6, 2014

Links for 2014-01-02

Published January 2, 2014

  • Dogs like to excrete in alignment with the Earth's magnetic field

    Dogs preferred to excrete with the body being aligned along the North-south axis under calm magnetic field conditions.

    (tags: dogs poo excrement shit magnetic-field earth zoology papers)

  • Paul Graham and the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker

    Under Graham’s influence, Mark [Zuckerberg], like many in Silicon Valley, subscribes to the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker ideal, making self-started teenage hackers Facebook’s most desired recruiting targets, not even so much for their coding ability as their ability to serve as the faces of hacking culture. “Culture fit”, in this sense, is one’s ability to conform to the Valley’s boyish hacker fantasy, which is easier, obviously, the closer you are to a teenage boy. Like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s role of existing to serve the male film protagonist’s personal growth, the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker’s job is to embody the dream hacker role while growing the VC’s portfolio. This is why the dream hacker never ages, never visibly develops interests beyond hardware and code, and doesn’t question why nearly all the other people receiving funding look like him. Like the actress playing the pixie dream girl, the pixie dream boy isn’t being paid to question the role for which he has been cast. In this way, for all his supposed “disruptiveness”, the hacker pixie actually does exactly what he is told: to embody, while he can, the ideal hacker, until he is no longer young, mono-focused, and boyish-seeming enough to qualify for the role (at that point, vested equity may allow him to retire). And like in Hollywood, VCs will have already recruited newer, younger ones to play him.

    (tags: hackers manic-pixie-dream-girl culture-fit silicon-valley mark-zuckerberg paul-graham y-combinator vc work investment technology recruitment facebook ageism equality sexism)

  • The How and Why of Flapjack

    Flapjack aims to be a flexible notification system that handles: Alert routing (determining who should receive alerts based on interest, time of day, scheduled maintenance, etc); Alert summarisation (with per-user, per media summary thresholds); Your standard operational tasks (setting scheduled maintenance, acknowledgements, etc). Flapjack sits downstream of your check execution engine (like Nagios, Sensu, Icinga, or cron), processing events to determine if a problem has been detected, who should know about the problem, and how they should be told.

    (tags: flapjack notification alerts ops nagios paging sensu)

Links for 2013-12-27

Published December 27, 2013

  • Dublin Cycle Planner needs a health warning - Irish Cycle

    An extensive catalogue of shitty routing. Poor...

    It’s expected that any new mapping and routing systems will have errors which will need to be ironed out but the level of issues with the NTA Cycle Planner is far beyond what you’d expect in a light and quiet beta launch. It’s beyond acceptable for a public PR launch directing people to a route planner with no clear warnings. It looks like a rush job which allows junior minister Alan Kelly to get his name in another press release before the end of the year.

    (tags: cycling dublin commute mapping nta ireland maps)

  • Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil

    The pupil of the eye in a photograph of a face can be mined for hidden information, such as reflected faces of the photographer and bystanders, according to research led by Dr. Rob Jenkins, of the Department of Psychology at the University of York and published in PLOS ONE (open access).
    (via Waxy)

    (tags: via:waxy future zoom-and-enhance privacy photography eyes photos)

Links for 2013-12-23

Published December 23, 2013

  • Jesse Willms, the Dark Lord of the Internet - Taylor Clark - The Atlantic

    “It was an out-and-out hijacking,” LeFevre told me. “They counterfeited our product, they pirated our Web site, and they basically directed all of their customer service to us.” At the peak of Willms’s sales, LeFevre says, dazzlesmile was receiving 1,000 calls a day from customers trying to cancel orders for a product it didn’t even sell. When irate consumers made the name dazzlesmile synonymous with online scamming, LeFevre’s sales effectively dropped to zero. Dazzlesmile sued Willms in November 2009; he later paid a settlement.

    (tags: scams hijacking ads affiliate one-wierd-trick health dieting crime)

Links for 2013-12-21

Published December 21, 2013

Links for 2013-12-19

Published December 19, 2013

Links for 2013-12-16

Published December 16, 2013

Links for 2013-12-13

Published December 13, 2013

  • Karlin Lillington on DRI's looming victory in the European Court of Justice

    If the full European Court of Justice (ECJ) accepts the opinion of its advocate general in a final ruling due early next year – and it almost always does – it will prove a huge vindication of Ireland’s small privacy advocacy group, Digital Rights Ireland (DRI). Its case against Irish retention laws, which began in 2006, forms the basis of this broader David v Goliath challenge and initial opinion. The advocate general’s advice largely upholds the key concerns put forward by DRI against Ireland’s laws. Withholding so much data about every citizen, including children, in case someone commits a future crime, is too intrusive into private life, and could allow authorities to create a “faithful and exhaustive map of a large portion of a person’s [private] conduct”. Retained data is so comprehensive that they could easily reveal private identities, which are supposed to remain anonymous. And the data, entrusted to third parties, is at too much risk of fraudulent or malicious use. Cruz Villalón argues that there must be far greater oversight to the retention process, and controls on access to data, and that citizens should have the right to be notified after the fact if their data has been scrutinised. The Irish Government had repeatedly waved off such concerns from Digital Rights Ireland in the past.

    (tags: dri rights ireland internet surveillance data-retention privacy eu ecj law)

Links for 2013-12-11

Published December 11, 2013

Links for 2013-12-10

Published December 10, 2013

Links for 2013-12-09

Published December 9, 2013

  • Cyanite

    a metric storage daemon, exposing both a carbon listener and a simple web service. Its aim is to become a simple, scalable and drop-in replacement for graphite's backend.
    Pretty alpha for now, but definitely worth keeping an eye on to potentially replace our burgeoning Carbon fleet...

    (tags: graphite carbon cassandra storage metrics ops graphs service-metrics)

  • Twitter tech talk video: "Profiling Java In Production"

    In this talk Kaushik Srenevasan describes a new, low overhead, full-stack tool (based on the Linux perf profiler and infrastructure built into the Hotspot JVM) we've built at Twitter to solve the problem of dynamically profiling and tracing the behavior of applications (including managed runtimes) in production.
    Looks very interesting. Haven't watched it yet though

    (tags: twitter tech-talks video presentations java jvm profiling testing monitoring service-metrics performance production hotspot perf)

  • Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming

    [MMOGs], the [NSA] analyst wrote, "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.

    (tags: spies spying games mmog online surveillance absurd east-germany funny warcraft)

  • Ryan Lizza: Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.? : The New Yorker

    Fantastic wrap-up of the story so far on the pervasive global surveillance story.

    The history of the intelligence community, though, reveals a willingness to violate the spirit and the letter of the law, even with oversight. What’s more, the benefits of the domestic-surveillance programs remain unclear. Wyden contends that the N.S.A. could find other ways to get the information it says it needs. Even Olsen, when pressed, suggested that the N.S.A. could make do without the bulk-collection program. “In some cases, it’s a bit of an insurance policy,” he told me. “It’s a way to do what we otherwise could do, but do it a little bit more quickly.” In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.

    (tags: nsa gchq surveillance spying privacy dianne-feinstein new-yorker journalism long-reads us-politics probable-cause)

Links for 2013-12-07

Published December 7, 2013

  • Same Old Stories From Sean Sherlock

    Sherlock’s record is spotty at best when it comes to engagement. Setting aside the 80,680 people who were ignored by the minister, he was hostile and counter productive to debate from the beginning, going so far as to threaten to pull out of a public debate because a campaigner against the ['Irish SOPA'] SI would be in attendance. His habit of blocking people online who publicly ask him tough yet legitimate questions has earned him the nickname “Sherblock”.

    (tags: sean-sherlock sherblock labour ireland politics blocking filtering internet freedom copyright emi music law piracy debate twitter)

  • Smart Metering in the UK is FCUKED

    Most utilities don’t want smart metering.  In fact they seem to have used the wrong dictionary.  It is difficult to find anything smart about the UK deployment, until you realise that the utilities use smart in the sense of “it hurts”.  They consider they have a perfectly adequate business model which has no need for new technology.  In many Government meetings, their reluctant support seems to be a veneer for the hope that it will all end in disaster, letting them go back to the world they know, of inflated bills and demands for money with menaces. [...] Even when smart meters are deployed, there is no evidence that any utility will use the resulting data to transform their business, rather than persecute the consumer.  At a recent US conference a senior executive for a US utility which had deployed smart meters, stated that their main benefit was “to give them more evidence to blame the customer”.  That’s a good description of the attitude displayed by our utilities.

    (tags: smart-metering energy utilities uk services metering consumer)

  • Kelly "kellabyte" Sommers on Redis' "relaxed CP" approach to the CAP theorem

    Similar to ACID properties, if you partially provide properties it means the user has to _still_ consider in their application that the property doesn't exist, because sometimes it doesn't. In you're fsync example, if fsync is relaxed and there are no replicas, you cannot consider the database durable, just like you can't consider Redis a CP system. It can't be counted on for guarantees to be delivered. This is why I say these systems are hard for users to reason about. Systems that partially offer guarantees require in-depth knowledge of the nuances to properly use the tool. Systems that explicitly make the trade-offs in the designs are easier to reason about because it is more obvious and _predictable_.

    (tags: kellabyte redis cp ap cap-theorem consistency outages reliability ops database storage distcomp)

  • Building a Balanced Universe - EVE Community

    Good blog post about EVE's algorithm to load-balance a 3D map of star systems

    (tags: eve eve-online algorithms 3d space load-balancing sharding games)

  • Virtual Clock - Testing Patterns Encyclopedia

    a nice pattern for unit tests which need deterministic time behaviour. Trying to think up a really nice API for this....

    (tags: testing unit-tests time virtual-clock real-time coding)

  • We're sending out the wrong signals in bid to lure the big data bucks - Independent.ie

    Simon McGarr on Ireland's looming data-protection train-crash.

    Last week, during the debate of his proposals to increase fees for making a Freedom of Information request, Brendan Howlin was asked how one of his amendments would affect citizens looking for data from the State's electronic databases. His reply was to cheerfully admit he didn't even understand the question. "I have no idea what an SQL code is. Does anyone know what an SQL code is?" Unlike the minister, it probably isn't your job to know that SQL is the computer language that underpins the data industry. The amendment he had originally proposed would have effectively allowed civil servants to pretend that their computer files were made of paper when deciding whether a request was reasonable. His answer showed how the Government could have proposed such an absurd idea in the first place. Like it or not – fair or not – these are not the signals a country that wanted to build a long-term data industry would choose to send out. They are the sort of signals that Ireland used to send out about Financial Regulation. I think it's agreed, that approach didn't work out so well.

    (tags: foi ireland brendan-howlin technology illiteracy sql civil-service government data-protection privacy regulation dpa)

Links for 2013-12-04

Published December 4, 2013

  • wrk

    a modern HTTP benchmarking tool capable of generating significant load when run on a single multi-core CPU. It combines a multithreaded design with scalable event notification systems such as epoll and kqueue.  An optional LuaJIT script can perform HTTP request generation, response processing, and custom reporting.
    Written in C, ASL2 licensed.

    (tags: wrk benchmarking http performance testing lua load-testing load-generation)

  • Removing DRM Boosts Music Sales by 10%

    Based on a working paper from University of Toronto researcher Laurina Zhang

    Comparing album sales of four major labels before and after the removal of DRM reveals that digital music revenue increases by 10% when restrictions are removed. The effect goes up to 30% for long tail content, while top-selling albums show no significant jump. The findings suggest that dropping technical restrictions can benefit both artists and the major labels.
    more details: http://inside.rotman.utoronto.ca/laurinazhang/files/2013/11/laurina_zhang_jmp_nov4.pdf , "Intellectual Property Strategy and the Long Tail: Evidence from the Recorded Music Industry", Laurina Zhang, November 4, 2013

    (tags: ip copyright drm mp3 music laurina-zhang research long-tail albums rights-management piracy)

  • 100 Years of Breed “Improvement” | Science of Dogs

    The English bulldog has come to symbolize all that is wrong with the dog fancy and not without good reason; they suffer from almost every possible disease. A 2004 survey by the Kennel Club found that they die at the median age of 6.25 years (n=180). There really is no such thing as a healthy bulldog. The bulldog’s monstrous proportions makes them virtually incapable of mating or birthing without medical intervention.
    (via Bryan)

    (tags: dogs eugenics breeding horror science genetics traits animals pets bulldog pedigree)

  • SkyJack - autonomous drone hacking

    Samy Kamkar strikes again. 'Using a Parrot AR.Drone 2, a Raspberry Pi, a USB battery, an Alfa AWUS036H wireless transmitter, aircrack-ng, node-ar-drone, node.js, and my SkyJack software, I developed a drone that flies around, seeks the wireless signal of any other drone in the area, forcefully disconnects the wireless connection of the true owner of the target drone, then authenticates with the target drone pretending to be its owner, then feeds commands to it and all other possessed zombie drones at my will.'

    (tags: drones amazon hacking security samy-kamkar aircrack node raspberry-pi airborne-zombies)

  • Why Did 9,000 Porny Spambots Descend on This San Diego High Schooler? - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic

    Good article about emergent behaviour from networked malware: 'The metabot, therefore, is viral. You get followed because of who follows you. This tendency explains the strange geographical cluster among San Diego high school students. Perhaps one of those kids was being followed by a really popular account (like @Interscope records, perhaps, which follows hundreds of thousands of people), and through that link, the bot stumbled into this little circle of San Diego teens. All of this activity would have remained under the radar, of course, all part of the silent non-human web. Except something went awry. For some reason, Olivia got stuck in a weird loop, and the metabot kept spawning spambots that chose to follow her over and over, relentlessly. Maybe once the metabot reached the San Diego kids, a bug kicked in. Instead of negative feedback keeping her (and everyone else) from being followed too often, we got runaway positive feedback. The bots followed her because other bots followed her. And on and on. Which is, perhaps a kind of reasoning that we can understand: It's the core logic of fame and celebrity itself. Attention flows to Snooki because attention flowed to Snooki. Attention flows to Olivia because attention flowed to Olivia. Olivia and her friends weren't wrong when they thought she'd become suddenly famous. Her audience just wasn't human.'

    (tags: socialnetworking spam twitter bots fame alexis-madrigal)

Links for 2013-12-03

Published December 3, 2013

Links for 2013-12-02

Published December 2, 2013

Links for 2013-11-28

Published November 28, 2013

Links for 2013-11-26

Published November 26, 2013

Links for 2013-11-25

Published November 25, 2013

Links for 2013-11-21

Published November 21, 2013

  • Shadows in the Woods

    beautiful German boardgame, suitable for playing with kids -- an adult moves a tealight candle around the board, while kids take turns moving gnomes around in the shadows behind tall "trees". recommended by JK

    (tags: games boardgames german kids candles light)

  • 'No basis in law' : Gardai probe Ballyphehane group after raid

    Freemen wackiness in Cork.

    The house of one member of the group was raided by gardaí last week, but it is not thought that any arrests were made, according to an eyewitness. Gardaí broke down the front door of the house. The group, which appears to be part of the Freemen of the Land movement, which does not recognise the State, has attempted to hold 'trials' in Ballyphehane Community Centre. It attempted to summon HSE staff, gardaí, social workers, solicitors and others to appear to be tried by a self-selected jury earlier this month. The group handed out documents purporting to be a summons to HSE staff and garda stations, demanding that named people attend a trial by 'éire court' on Tuesday 5 November at 9am “to stand trial for their acts of terrorism against mothers, their offspring and others in our community”, according to the group's literature. This week the group has begun posting about UCC, saying the college is “a private for profit corporation, and a business partner of and partly owned by Pfizers and Bank of Ireland”. The group suggest that UCC bases its “authority” on Maritime Law. UCC has yet to respond to the group's allegations.

    (tags: freemen crazy cork politics ireland hse gardai ucc law)

Links for 2013-11-20

Published November 20, 2013

Links for 2013-11-19

Published November 19, 2013

  • Software Detection of Currency

    Steven J. Murdoch presents some interesting results indicating that the EURion constellation may have been obsoleted:

    Recent printers, scanners and image manipulation software identify images of currency, will not process the image and display an error message linking to www.rulesforuse.org. The detection algorithm is not disclosed, however it is possible to test sample images as to whether they are identified as currency. This webpage shows an initial analysis of the algorithm's properties, based on results from the automated generation and testing of images. [...] Initially it was thought that the "Eurion constellation" was used to identify banknotes in the newly deployed software based system, since this has been confirmed to be the technique used by colour photocopiers, and was both necessary and sufficient to prevent an item being duplicated using the photocopier tested. However further investigation showed that the detection performed by software is different from the system used in colour photocopiers, and the Eurion constellation is neither necessary nor sufficent, and in fact it probably is not even a factor.

    (tags: eurion algorithms photoshop security currency money euro copying obscurity reversing)

  • Factual/drake

    a simple-to-use, extensible, text-based data workflow tool that organizes command execution around data and its dependencies. Data processing steps are defined along with their inputs and outputs and Drake automatically resolves their dependencies. [...] Drake is similar to GNU Make, but designed especially for data workflow management. It has HDFS [and S3] support, allows multiple inputs and outputs, and includes a host of features designed to help you bring sanity to your otherwise chaotic data processing workflows.
    Via Nelson. Looks interesting, although I'd like to see more features around retries, single-executor locking, parallelism, alerting/metrics, and unattended cron-like operation -- those are always the hard part when I wind up coding up a data pump.

    (tags: make data data-pump drake via:nelson pipelines workflow)

  • AK at re:Invent 2013: Getting Maximum Performance from Redshift

    good Redshift tips

    (tags: redshift aws amazon performance scaling s3 rdbms sql ops analytics)

  • Tintin And The Copyright Sharks - Falkvinge on Infopolicy

    A rather sordid tale of IP acquisition and exploitation, from the sounds of it

    (tags: tintin moulinsart belgium history herge ip copyright royalties rick-falkvinge)

Links for 2013-11-16

Published November 16, 2013

  • IPSO representative trivialising impact of the Loyaltybuild data breach

    A very worrying quote from Una Dillon of the Irish Payment Services Organisation in regard to the Loyaltybuild incident:

    “I wouldn’t be overly concerned if one of my cards was caught up in this,” Dillon says. “Even in the worst-case scenario – one in which my card was used fraudulently – my card provider will refund me everything that is taken”.
    This reflects a deep lack of understanding of (a) how identity fraud works, and (b) how card-fraud refunds in Ireland appear to work. (a): Direct misuse of credit card data is not always the result. Fraudsters may prefer to instead obtain separate credit through identity theft, ie. using other personal identifying data. (b): Visa debit cards have no credit limit -- your bank account can be cleared out in its entirety, and refunds can take a long time. For instance, http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=174482 describes several cases, including one customer who waited 21 days for a refund. All in all it's trivialising a major risk for consumers. As I understand it, a separate statement from IPSO recommended that all customers of Loyaltybuild schemes need to monitor their bank accounts daily to keep an eye out for fraud, which is pretty absurd. Not impressive at all.

    (tags: loyaltybuild ipso money cards credit-cards visa debit-cards payment fraud identity-theft ireland)

  • Why GitHub is not your CV

    There is really astonishingly little value in looking at someone’s GitHub projects out of context. For a start, GitHub has no way of customising your profile page, and what is shown by default is the projects with the most stars, and the projects you’ve recently pushed to. That is, GitHub picks your most popular repos and puts those at the top. You have no say about what you consider important, or worthwhile, or interesting, or well-engineered, or valuable. You just get what other people think is useful. Aside from which, GitHub displays a lot of useless stats about how many followers you have, and some completely psychologically manipulative stats about how often you commit and how many days it is since you had a day off. So really, your GitHub profile displays two things: how ‘influential’ you are, and how easily you can be coerced into constantly working. It’s honestly about as relevant to a decent hiring decision as your Klout score.

    (tags: cv github open-source hiring career meritocracy work via:apyhr)

  • An Empirical Evaluation of TCP Performance in Online Games

    In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of TCP in of ShenZhou Online, a commercial, mid-sized MMORPG. Our study indicates that, though TCP is full-fledged and robust, simply transmitting game data over TCP could cause unexpected performance problems. This is due to the following distinctive characteristics of game traffic: 1) tiny packets, 2) low packet rate, 3) application-limited traffic generation, and 4) bi-directional traffic. We have shown that because TCP was originally designed for unidirectional and network-limited bulk data transfers, it cannot adapt well to MMORPG traffic. In particular, the window-based congestion control mechanism and the fast retransmit algorithm for loss recovery are ineffective. This suggests that the selective acknowledgement option should be enabled whenever TCP is used, as it significantly enhances the loss recovery process. Furthermore, TCP is overkill, as not every game packet needs to be transmitted reliably and processed in an orderly manner. We have also shown that the degraded network performance did impact users' willingness to continue a game. Finally, a number of design guidelines have been proposed by exploiting the unique characteristics of game traffic.
    via Nelson

    (tags: tcp games udp protocols networking internet mmos retransmit mmorpgs)

  • Column: The Loyaltybuild breach shows it’s time to take data protection seriously

    What is afoot here is a rerun of the Celtic Tiger era “light touch regulation” of financial services. Ireland has again made a Faustian pact whereby we lure employers here on the understanding that they will not subject to too-stringent a regulatory system. As the Loyaltybuild breach has shown, this is a bargain that will probably end badly. And as with the financial services boom, it is making the Germans nervous. Perhaps we will listen to them this time.

    (tags: fergal-crehan loyaltybuild celtic-tiger ireland dpa regulation data-protection privacy credit-cards)

  • mgodave/barge

    Looks very alpha, but one to watch.

    A JVM Implementation of the Raft Consensus Protocol

    (tags: via:sbtourist raft jvm java consensus distributed-computing)

Links for 2013-11-15

Published November 15, 2013

  • RocksDB

    ' A persistent key-value store for fast storage environments', ie. BerkeleyDB/LevelDB competitor, from Facebook.

    RocksDB builds on LevelDB to be scalable to run on servers with many CPU cores, to efficiently use fast storage, to support IO-bound, in-memory and write-once workloads, and to be flexible to allow for innovation. We benchmarked LevelDB and found that it was unsuitable for our server workloads. Thebenchmark results look awesome at first sight, but we quickly realized that those results were for a database whose size was smaller than the size of RAM on the test machine - where the entire database could fit in the OS page cache. When we performed the same benchmarks on a database that was at least 5 times larger than main memory, the performance results were dismal. By contrast, we've published the RocksDB benchmark results for server side workloads on Flash. We also measured the performance of LevelDB on these server-workload benchmarks and found that RocksDB solidly outperforms LevelDB for these IO bound workloads. We found that LevelDB's single-threaded compaction process was insufficient to drive server workloads. We saw frequent write-stalls with LevelDB that caused 99-percentile latency to be tremendously large. We found that mmap-ing a file into the OS cache introduced performance bottlenecks for reads. We could not make LevelDB consume all the IOs offered by the underlying Flash storage.
    Lots of good discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736900 too.

    (tags: flash ssd rocksdb databases storage nosql facebook bdb disk key-value-stores lsm leveldb)

  • Amazon Route 53 Infima

    Colm McCarthaigh has open sourced Infima, 'a library for managing service-level fault isolation using Amazon Route 53'.

    Infima provides a Lattice container framework that allows you to categorize each endpoint along one or more fault-isolation dimensions such as availability-zone, software implementation, underlying datastore or any other common point of dependency endpoints may share. Infima also introduces a new ShuffleShard sharding type that can exponentially increase the endpoint-level isolation between customer/object access patterns or any other identifier you choose to shard on. Both Infima Lattices and ShuffleShards can also be automatically expressed in Route 53 DNS failover configurations using AnswerSet and RubberTree.

    (tags: infima colmmacc dns route-53 fault-tolerance failover multi-az sharding service-discovery)

Links for 2013-11-13

Published November 13, 2013

Links for 2013-11-12

Published November 12, 2013

  • Reactor hits GA

    'It can't just be Big Data, it has to be Fast Data: Reactor 1.0 goes GA':

    Reactor provides the necessary abstractions to build high-throughput, low-latency--what we now call "fast data"--applications that absolutely must work with thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of concurrent requests per second. Modern JVM applications must be built on a solid foundation of asynchronous and reactive components that efficiently manage the execution of a very large number of tasks on a very small number of system threads. Reactor is specifically designed to help you build these kinds of applications without getting in your way or forcing you to work within an opinionated pattern.
    Featuring the LMAX Disruptor ringbuffer, the JavaChronicle fast persistent message-passing queue, Groovy closures, and Netty 4.0. This looks very handy indeed....

    (tags: disruptor reactive-programming reactor async libraries java jvm frameworks spring netty fast-data)

  • Backblaze Blog » How long do disk drives last?

    According to Backblaze's data, 80% of drives last 4 years, and the median lifespan is projected to be 6 years

    (tags: backblaze storage disk ops mtbf hardware failure lifespan)

  • Heirloom Chemistry Set by John Farrell Kuhns — Kickstarter

    This is a beauty. I wonder if they can ship to Ireland?

    To tell our story for this Kickstarter project, we really have to start in Christmas of 1959. Like many young scientists of the time, I received a Gilbert Chemistry set. This chemistry set provided me hours of great fun and learning as well as laying the foundation for my future as a research chemist. As I became an adult I wanted to share these types of experiences with my daughter, my nephews and nieces, and friends. But soon I became aware real chemistry sets were no longer available. Without real chemistry sets and opportunities for students to learn and explore, where would our future chemists come from? So .... I set out on a mission.

    (tags: chemistry science chemistry-sets education play kickstarter)

  • Philippe Flajolet’s contribution to streaming algorithms [preso]

    Nice deck covering HyperLogLog and its origins, plus a slide at the end covering the Flajolet/Wegman Adaptive Sampling algorithm ("how do you count the number of elements which appear only once in stream using constant size memory?")

    (tags: algorithms sketching hyperloglog flajolet wegman adaptive-sampling sampling presentations slides)

  • 3 Tacos or 4 Flautas Per Order Make a Healthy Diet in Greatest Scientific Study Ever

    "In reality, [tacos and flautas] aren't bad meals," the report argues. "The error that many of us Mexicans [Gustavo note: and gabachos] commit is including these types of dishes in our regular diet without an appropriate balance of them and falling into excessively eating them; accompanied by a lack of physical activity, it creates bad eating habits." The good docs go on to note that people can eat tacos and flautas without negatively affecting their health, but "the key resides in controlling the quantity and frequency of eating these types of meals." They also make the point that overall, tacos and flautas have less grease than doughnuts, french fries and even some health bars, although they didn't specify which brands in the latter. In a subsequent blog post, the scientists go on to describe flautas as an "energy food" due to their composition, and conclude by recommending that a healthy diet can include three tacos al pastor or four flautas per order, "controlling the frequency of intake." So have at it, boyos, but in moderation. And I can already hear the skeptics: What about tacos de chicharrones? Why not focus on carne asada? Did they take into consideration chiles de mordida? Did they factor in horchata? And whither the burrito variable?

    (tags: science tacos flautas mexican-food food eating yay)

Links for 2013-11-11

Published November 11, 2013

Links for 2013-11-08

Published November 8, 2013

  • Where your "full Irish" really comes from

    This is really disappointing; many meats labelled as "Irish" are anything but. The only trustworthy mark is the Bord Bia "Origin Ireland" stamp -- I'll be avoiding any products without this in future.

    Under European labelling law, country of origin is mandatory for beef, fish, olive oil, honey and fresh fruit and vegetables. Next month the EU will make it law to specify country of origin for the meat of pigs, chicken, sheep and goats, with a lead-in time of anywhere up to three years for food companies to comply. The pork rule, however, will only apply to fresh pork and not to processed meat, so consumers still won’t get a country-of-origin label on rashers, sausages or ham. In the meantime, the Bord Bia Origin-Ireland stamp is a guarantee that your Irish breakfast ingredients are indeed Irish.

    (tags: bord-bia labelling eu country-of-origin meat pork food quality)

  • Killing Freedom of Information in Ireland

    TheStory.ie will, in all likelihood, cease all FOI requests. And we will not seek funding from the public to support an immoral, cynical, unjustified and probably illegal FOI fee regime. We will not pay for information that the public already pays for. We will not support a system that perpetuates an outrageous infringement of citizen rights. The legislation was gutted in 2003 and it is being gutted again. More generally the number of requests from journalists from all news organisations in Ireland will fall as a result of these amendments, and the resulting efforts to shine a light on the administration of the State will certainly deteriorate. And secrecy will prevail.

    (tags: ireland politics foi information secrecy law)

Links for 2013-11-07

Published November 7, 2013

  • 10 Things You Should Know About AWS

    Some decent tips in here, mainly EC2-focussed

    (tags: amazon ec2 aws ops rds)

  • Tracing Brazil’s Guy Fawkes Masks

    really fascinating, from Ethan Zuckerman:

    The photo of workers making Guy Fawkes masks is something of a Rorschach test. If you’re primed to see the exploitative nature of global capitalism when you see people making a plastic mask, it’s there in the image. if you’re looking for the global spread of a protest movement, it’s there too, with a Brazilian factory making a local knock-off of a global icon to cash in on a national protest. Because the internet is a copying machine, it’s very bad at context. It’s easier to encounter the image of masks being manufactured devoid of accompanying details than it is to find the story behind the images. And given our tendency to ignore information in languages we don’t read, it’s easy to see how the masks come detached from their accompanying story. For me, the image is more powerful with context behind it. It’s possible to reflect on the irony of a Hollywood prop becoming an activist trope, the tensions between mass-production and anonymity and the individuality of one’s identity and grievance, the tensions between local and global, Warner Bros and Condal, intellectual property and piracy, all in the same image.

    (tags: anonymous globalization manufacturing piracy knock-offs brazil ethan-zuckerman global local hollywood capitalism)

  • ReCreate Ireland - Creativity through Reuse

    Great idea.

    For creative groups, we aim to offer easy access to a rich and varied selection of textures, colours and shapes. Members are also be able to participate in creativity workshops facilitated by fully trained professional artists either in-house or on your own premises. We intend to be the first choice of teachers, early childhood educators and arts animators in the community. For businesses, ReCreate reduces the costs of moving on end-of-line materials. We are a professional, credible and reliable partner organisation and our aim is to divert approximately 115 metric tonnes of clean materials from landfill annually. All collections are free of charge.

    (tags: recreate diy make-and-do recycling landfill art play scrap)

  • 3D-Print Your Own 20-Million-Year-Old Fossils

    When I get my hands on a 3-D printer, this will be high up my list of things to fabricate: a replica of a 20-million year old hominid skull.

    With over 40 digitized fossils in their collection, you can explore 3D renders of fossils representing prehistoric animals, human ancestors, and even ancient tools. Captured using Autodesk software, an SLR camera, and often the original specimen (rather than a cast replica), these renderings bring us closer than most will ever get to holding ancient artifacts. And if you've got an additive manufacturing device at your disposal, you can even download Sketchfab plans to generate your own.

    (tags: 3d-printing fossils africa history hominids replication fabrication sketchfab)

  • Makers & Brothers & Others

    'A Tiny Seasonal Department Store', featuring the amazing cakes of Wildflour Bakery among others, at 5 Dame Lane, D2.

    The tiny department store will be a wonderful seasonal gathering of Makers & Brothers favourite local and international brands. The Others in this project are a carefully considered bunch of partners from the worlds of flowers, food, fashion, beauty, homeware, gifts and more.  Makers & Brothers & Others, the tiny department store, promises to be a unique, exciting and engaging retail environment. A place to explore, a seasonal store alive with wonder and served by experts. Kindly hosted by the Fumbally Exchange.

    (tags: dublin shopping food cakes wildflour-bakery makers-and-brothers xmas)

Links for 2013-11-06

Published November 6, 2013

Links for 2013-11-05

Published November 5, 2013

Links for 2013-11-04

Published November 4, 2013

Links for 2013-11-03

Published November 3, 2013

  • There is NO spare capacity for Dublin's water supply

    The problem in a nutshell is that for an uncomfortable amount of the year the demand outstrips what the system can comfortably supply. In the graph below you’ll see the red line (demand for water) matches and regularly exceeds the blue line (what’s produced).

    (tags: drought water dublin mismanagement capacity dcc dublin-council graphs)

  • Old Fashioned 101

    Circa 1800, the Cocktail was a “hair of the dog” morning drink that tamed spirits with water, sugar and bitters (patent medicine). The late 19th Century expanded the use of the word “cocktail” to encompass just about any mixed drink. Since then, the Old Fashioned—literally, the old-fashioned way of making a cocktail—has been our contemporary expression of the original drink. During the 20th Century, various bad ideas encrusted the Old Fashioned. Here we will strip off those barnacles to expose the amazingly simple and sublime drink beneath.
    thanks to Ben for this one...

    (tags: recipe alcohol drinks cocktails old-fashioned bourbon bitters)

  • Metropolitan police detained David Miranda for promoting 'political' causes | World news | The Observer

    "We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material [...] the disclosure or threat of disclosure is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism."

    (tags: security david-miranda journalism censorship terrorism the-guardian)

  • A Brief Tour of FLP Impossibility

    One of the most important results in distributed systems theory was published in April 1985 by Fischer, Lynch and Patterson. Their short paper ‘Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process’, which eventually won the Dijkstra award given to the most influential papers in distributed computing, definitively placed an upper bound on what it is possible to achieve with distributed processes in an asynchronous environment. This particular result, known as the ‘FLP result’, settled a dispute that had been ongoing in distributed systems for the previous five to ten years. The problem of consensus – that is, getting a distributed network of processors to agree on a common value – was known to be solvable in a synchronous setting, where processes could proceed in simultaneous steps. In particular, the synchronous solution was resilient to faults, where processors crash and take no further part in the computation. Informally, synchronous models allow failures to be detected by waiting one entire step length for a reply from a processor, and presuming that it has crashed if no reply is received. This kind of failure detection is impossible in an asynchronous setting, where there are no bounds on the amount of time a processor might take to complete its work and then respond with a message. Therefore it’s not possible to say whether a processor has crashed or is simply taking a long time to respond. The FLP result shows that in an asynchronous setting, where only one processor might crash, there is no distributed algorithm that solves the consensus problem.

    (tags: distributed-systems flp consensus-algorithms algorithms distcomp papers proofs)

  • Find a separating hyperplane with this One Weird Kernel Trick

    Terrible internet ad-spam recast as machine-learning spam

    '37-year-old patriot discovers "weird" trick to end slavery to the Bayesian monopoly. Discover the underground trick she used to slash her empirical risk by 75% in less than 30 days... before they shut her down. Click here to watch the shocking video! Get the Shocking Free Report!'

    (tags: funny via:hmason machine-learning spam wtf svms bayesian)

Links for 2013-11-01

Published November 1, 2013

  • It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it?

    These companies and their technologies are built on data, and the data is us. If we are to have any faith in the Internet, we have to trust them to protect it. That’s a relationship dynamic that will become only more intertwined as the Internet finds its way into more aspects of our daily existences, from phones that talk to us to cars that drive themselves. The US’s surveillance programs threaten to destroy that trust permanently. America’s tech companies must stand up to this pervasive and corrosive surveillance system. They must ask that difficult question: “Is it worth it?”

    (tags: silicon-valley tech nsa gchq spying surveillance internet privacy data-protection)

  • Serf

    'a service discovery and orchestration tool that is decentralized, highly available, and fault tolerant. Serf runs on every major platform: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is extremely lightweight: it uses 5 to 10 MB of resident memory and primarily communicates using infrequent UDP messages [and an] efficient gossip protocol.'

    (tags: clustering service-discovery ops linux gossip broadcast clusters)

  • "Effective Computation of Biased Quantiles over Data Streams" [paper]

    Skew is prevalent in many data sources such as IP traffic streams.To continually summarize the distribution of such data, a high-biased set of quantiles (e.g., 50th, 90th and 99th percentiles) with finer error guarantees at higher ranks (e.g., errors of 5, 1 and 0.1 percent, respectively) is more useful than uniformly distributed quantiles (e.g., 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles) with uniform error guarantees. In this paper, we address the following two prob-lems. First, can we compute quantiles with finer error guarantees for the higher ranks of the data distribution effectively, using less space and computation time than computing all quantiles uniformly at the finest error? Second, if specific quantiles and their error bounds are requested a priori, can the necessary space usage and computation time be reduced? We answer both questions in the affirmative by formalizing them as the “high-biased” quantiles and the “targeted” quantiles problems, respectively, and presenting algorithms with provable guarantees, that perform significantly better than previously known solutions for these problems. We implemented our algorithms in the Gigascope data stream management system, and evaluated alternate approaches for maintaining the relevant summary structures.Our experimental results on real and synthetic IP data streams complement our theoretical analyses, and highlight the importance of lightweight, non-blocking implementations when maintaining summary structures over high-speed data streams.
    Implemented as a timer-histogram storage system in http://armon.github.io/statsite/ .

    (tags: statistics quantiles percentiles stream-processing skew papers histograms latency algorithms)

  • Statsite

    A C reimplementation of Etsy's statsd, with some interesting memory optimizations.

    Statsite is designed to be both highly performant, and very flexible. To achieve this, it implements the stats collection and aggregation in pure C, using libev to be extremely fast. This allows it to handle hundreds of connections, and millions of metrics. After each flush interval expires, statsite performs a fork/exec to start a new stream handler invoking a specified application. Statsite then streams the aggregated metrics over stdin to the application, which is free to handle the metrics as it sees fit. This allows statsite to aggregate metrics and then ship metrics to any number of sinks (Graphite, SQL databases, etc). There is an included Python script that ships metrics to graphite.

    (tags: statsd graphite statsite performance statistics service-metrics metrics ops)

  • 34 Irish pubs listed in Michelin good food guide

    if Linnane's and Cronin's are anything to go by, these will be worth a visit

    (tags: pubs ireland tourism food holidays michelin)

  • Fax vs Twilio

    A fax machine called my #twilio voice number, this is how @twilio transcribed it.... http://pic.twitter.com/RYh19Pg2pG
    This is amazing. Machine talking to machine, with hilarious results

    (tags: twilio transcription machine audio fax hey-hey-hey you-know-its-hey funny)

Links for 2013-10-31

Published October 31, 2013

  • Dark Mail Alliance

    Founded by Silent Circle and Lavabit. this is promising....

    To bring the world our unique end-to-end encrypted protocol and architecture that is the 'next-generation' of private and secure email. As founding partners of The Dark Mail Alliance, both Silent Circle and Lavabit will work to bring other members into the alliance, assist them in implementing the new protocol and jointly work to proliferate the worlds first end-to-end encrypted 'Email 3.0' throughout the world's email providers. Our goal is to open source the protocol and architecture and help others implement this new technology to address privacy concerns against surveillance and back door threats of any kind.

    (tags: privacy surveillance email smtp silent-circle lavabit dark-mail open-source standards crypto)

  • Ponies by Kij Johnson | Tor.com

    A rather dark short story about little girls, peer pressure, and childhood. no fun for this dad of 3 girls :( (via Tatu Saloranta)

    (tags: via:cowtowncoder writing fiction sf childhood peer-pressure tor ponies)

  • HdrHistogram by giltene

    A Histogram that supports recording and analyzing sampled data value counts across a configurable integer value range with configurable value precision within the range. Value precision is expressed as the number of significant digits in the value recording, and provides control over value quantization behavior across the value range and the subsequent value resolution at any given level.

    (tags: hdr histogram data-structures coding gil-tene sampling measuring)

Links for 2013-10-30

Published October 30, 2013

  • Counterfactual Thinking, Rules, and The Knight Capital Accident

    John Allspaw with an interesting post on the Knight Capital disaster

    (tags: john-allspaw ops safety post-mortems engineering procedures)

  • Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences

    This is exactly what you do NOT want to read about embedded systems controlling acceleration in your car:

    The Camry electronic throttle control system code was found to have 11,000 global variables. Barr described the code as “spaghetti.” Using the Cyclomatic Complexity metric, 67 functions were rated untestable (meaning they scored more than 50). The throttle angle function scored more than 100 (unmaintainable). Toyota loosely followed the widely adopted MISRA-C coding rules but Barr’s group found 80,000 rule violations. Toyota's own internal standards make use of only 11 MISRA-C rules, and five of those were violated in the actual code. MISRA-C:1998, in effect when the code was originally written, has 93 required and 34 advisory rules. Toyota nailed six of them. Barr also discovered inadequate and untracked peer code reviews and the absence of any bug-tracking system at Toyota.
    On top of this, there was no error-correcting RAM in use; stack-killing recursive code; a quoted 94% stack usage; risks of unintentional RTOS task shutdown; buffer overflows; unsafe casting; race conditions; unchecked error code return values; and a trivial watchdog timer check. Crappy, unsafe coding.

    (tags: firmware horror embedded-systems toyota camry safety acceleration misra-c coding code-verification spaghetti-code cyclomatic-complexity realtime rtos c code-reviews bug-tracking quality)

  • Forensic Topology

    The sounds were not, however, caused by ghosts but by a group of three or four men at least to some degree professionally trained, the FBI now believes, in tunneling: a close-knit and highly disciplined team, perhaps from the construction industry, perhaps even a disgruntled public works crew who decided to put their knowledge of the city’s underside to more lucrative work. After all, Rehder explained, their route into the bank was as much brute-force excavation as it was a retracing of the region’s buried waterways, accessing the neighborhood by way of the city’s complicated storm-sewer network, itself built along old creek beds that no longer appear on city maps. As LAPD lieutenant Doug Collisson, one of the men present on the day of the tunnel’s discovery, explained to the Los Angeles Times back in 1987, the crew behind the burglary “would have had to require some knowledge of soil composition and technical engineering. … The way the shaft itself was constructed, it was obviously well-researched and extremely sophisticated.” Rehder actually goes further, remarking that when Detective Dennis Pagenkopp “showed crime scene photos of the core bit holes” produced by the burglars’ boring upward into the vault “to guys who were in the concrete-coring business, they whistled with professional admiration.”

    (tags: cities crime architecture digging tunnels subterranean la lapd banks via:bldgblog sewers)

Links for 2013-10-29

Published October 29, 2013

Links for 2013-10-28

Published October 28, 2013

  • 14 Apple hacks from sugru

    I like the impromptu docking station hack

    (tags: apple sugru hacks hardware fixing repair diy)

  • Bruce Schneier On The Feudal Internet And How To Fight It

    This is very well-put.

    In its early days, there was a lot of talk about the "natural laws of the Internet" and how it would empower the masses, upend traditional power blocks, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet made a mockery of national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes were inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would undermine the media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order. Unfortunately, as we know, that's not how it worked out. Instead, we have seen the rise of the feudal Internet: Feudal security consolidates power in the hands of the few. These companies [like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook etc.] act in their own self-interest. They use their relationship with us to increase their profits, sometimes at our expense. They act arbitrarily. They make mistakes. They're deliberately changing social norms. Medieval feudalism gave the lords vast powers over the landless peasants; we’re seeing the same thing on the Internet.

    (tags: bruce-schneier politics internet feudal-internet google apple microsoft facebook government)

  • Russia: Hidden chips 'launch malware attacks from irons'

    Cyber criminals are planting chips in electric irons and kettles to launch spam [jm: actually, malware] attacks, reports in Russia suggest. State-owned channel Rossiya 24 even showed footage of a technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a "spy chip" with what he called "a little microphone". Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks. Other products found to have rogue components reportedly included mobile phones and car dashboard cameras.

    (tags: wifi viruses spam malware security russia china toasters kettles appliances)

  • Asteroid "mining" with Linux and FOSS

    Planetary Resources is a company with a sky-high (some might claim "pie in the sky") goal: to find and mine asteroids for useful minerals and other compounds. It is also a company that uses Linux and lots of free software. So two of the engineers from Planetary Resources, Ray Ramadorai and Marc Allen, gave a presentation at LinuxCon North America to describe how and why the company uses FOSS—along with a bit about what it is trying to do overall.

    (tags: lwn mining planets asteroids space linux foss open-source)

Links for 2013-10-26

Published October 26, 2013

  • Mac OS 10.9 – Infinity times your spam

    a pretty stupid Mail.app IMAP bug hoses Fastmail:

    Yes you read that right. It’s copying all the email from the Junk Folder back into the Junk Folder again!. This is legal IMAP, so our server proceeds to create a new copy of each message in the folder. It then expunges the old copies of the messages, but it’s happening so often that the current UID on that folder is up to over 3 million. It was just over 2 million a few days ago when I first emailed the user to alert them to the situation, so it’s grown by another million since. The only way I can think this escaped QA was that they used a server which (like gmail) automatically suppresses duplicates for all their testing, because this is a massively bad problem.

    (tags: osx bugs mail.app mail imap fastmail fail)

  • Google: Our Robot Cars Are Better Drivers Than Puny Humans | MIT Technology Review

    One of those analyses showed that when a human was behind the wheel, Google’s cars accelerated and braked significantly more sharply than they did when piloting themselves. Another showed that the cars’ software was much better at maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle ahead than the human drivers were. “We’re spending less time in near-collision states,” said Urmson. “Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers.”

    (tags: google cars driving safety roads humans robots automation)

Links for 2013-10-25

Published October 25, 2013

Links for 2013-10-24

Published October 24, 2013

  • Roma, Racism And Tabloid Policing: Interview With Gary Younge : rabble

    [This case] shows the link between the popular and the state. This is tabloid journalism followed by tabloid policing. It’s also completely ignorant. I wrote my article on the Roma after covering the community for a week. I thought, “that’s interesting – there’s a range of phenotypes, ways of looking, that include Roma.” I mentioned two blonde kids by chance. I mentioned that Roma are more likely to speak the language of the country they’re in than Romani, more likely to have the religion of the country they’re in. But they have the basic aspect that is true for all identities – they know each other and other people know them. It’s not like I’m an expert on the Roma. I was covering them for a week and after the second day I knew Roma children had blonde hair and blue eyes. These people who took that kid away knew nothing. And on that basis they abducted a child.

    (tags: roma racism ireland gary-younge tabloid journalist children hse gardai)

  • Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service

    This is what happens when you don't have strong controls on data protection/data privacy -- the US experience.

    While [posing as a US-based private investigator] may have gotten the [Vietnam-based gang operating the massive identity fraud site Superget.info] past Experian and/or CourtVentures’ screening process, according to Martin there were other signs that should have alerted Experian to potential fraud associated with the account. For example, Martin said the Secret Service told him that the alleged proprietor of Superget.info had paid Experian for his monthly data access charges using wire transfers sent from Singapore. “The issue in my mind was the fact that this went on for almost a year after Experian did their due diligence and purchased” Court Ventures, Martin said. “Why didn’t they question cash wires coming in every month? Experian portrays themselves as the data-breach experts, and they sell identity theft protection services. How this could go on without them detecting it I don’t know. Our agreement with them was that our information was to be used for fraud prevention and ID verification, and was only to be sold to licensed and credentialed U.S. businesses, not to someone overseas.”
    via Simon McGarr

    (tags: via:tupp_ed privacy security crime data-protection data-privacy experian data-breaches courtventures superget scams fraud identity identity-theft)

Links for 2013-10-23

Published October 23, 2013

Links for 2013-10-22

Published October 22, 2013

Links for 2013-10-21

Published October 21, 2013

Links for 2013-10-20

Published October 20, 2013

  • WISH: A Monumental 11-Acre Portrait in Belfast by Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada

    Must go up and visit this.

    Unveiled several days ago in Belfast, Northern Ireland as part of the Belfast Festival, WISH is the latest public art project by Cuban-American artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada. The image depicted is of an anonymous Belfast girl and is so large it can only be viewed from the highest points in Belfast or an airplane. Several years in the making, WISH was first plotted on a grid using state-of-the-art Topcon GPS technology and 30,000 manually placed wooden stakes in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. The portrait was then “drawn” with aid of volunteers who helped place nearly 8 million pounds of natural materials including soil, sand, and rock over a period of four weeks.

    (tags: belfast ireland art portraits jorge-rodriguez-gerada land soil)

Links for 2013-10-19

Published October 19, 2013

Links for 2013-10-15

Published October 15, 2013

  • How to Read a Scientific Paper (About That Researcher With a Nematode in His Mouth) - Wired Science

    Let’s rewind to September 2012. It was about then- according to this recently published report (paywall) in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine – that an “otherwise healthy, 36-year-old man” felt a rough patch in his mouth, a scaly little area his right cheek. It didn’t hurt. But then it didn’t stay there either. He started testing for it with his tongue. It traveled. It moved to the back of his mouth, then forward, coiled backwards again. In the language of science: “These rough patches would appear and disappear on a daily basis, giving the patient the indirect sense that there was an organism moving within the oral cavity.”

    (tags: nematodes parasites biology medicine paper gross funny wired mouth)

  • "High Performance Browser Networking", by Ilya Grigorik, read online for free

    Wow, this looks excellent. A must-read for people working on systems with high-volume, low-latency phone-to-server communications -- and free!

    How prepared are you to build fast and efficient web applications? This eloquent book provides what every web developer should know about the network, from fundamental limitations that affect performance to major innovations for building even more powerful browser applications—including HTTP 2.0 and XHR improvements, Server-Sent Events (SSE), WebSocket, and WebRTC. Author Ilya Grigorik, a web performance engineer at Google, demonstrates performance optimization best practices for TCP, UDP, and TLS protocols, and explains unique wireless and mobile network optimization requirements. You’ll then dive into performance characteristics of technologies such as HTTP 2.0, client-side network scripting with XHR, real-time streaming with SSE and WebSocket, and P2P communication with WebRTC. Deliver optimal TCP, UDP, and TLS performance; Optimize network performance over 3G/4G mobile networks; Develop fast and energy-efficient mobile applications; Address bottlenecks in HTTP 1.x and other browser protocols; Plan for and deliver the best HTTP 2.0 performance; Enable efficient real-time streaming in the browser; Create efficient peer-to-peer videoconferencing and low-latency applications with real-time WebRTC transports
    Via Eoin Brazil.

    (tags: book browser networking performance phones mobile 3g 4g hsdpa http udp tls ssl latency webrtc websockets ebooks via:eoin-brazil google http2 sse xhr ilya-grigorik)

  • Even the NSA is finding it hard to cope with spam

    3 new Snowden leaks, covering acquisition of Yahoo address books, buddy lists, and email account activity, and how spammer activity required intervention to avoid losing useful data in the noise

    (tags: spam spammers nsa snowden leaks anti-spam yahoo im mail)

  • "What Should I Monitor?"

    slides (lots of slides) from Baron Schwartz' talk at Velocity in NYC.

    (tags: slides monitoring metrics ops devops baron-schwartz pdf capacity)

Links for 2013-10-14

Published October 14, 2013

  • The trouble with timestamps

    Timestamps, as implemented in Riak, Cassandra, et al, are fundamentally unsafe ordering constructs. In order to guarantee consistency you, the user, must ensure locally monotonic and, to some extent, globally monotonic clocks. This is a hard problem, and NTP does not solve it for you. When wall clocks are not properly coupled to the operations in the system, causal constraints can be violated. To ensure safety properties hold all the time, rather than probabilistically, you need logical clocks.

    (tags: clocks time distributed databases distcomp ntp via:fanf aphyr vector-clocks last-write-wins lww cassandra riak)

Links for 2013-10-13

Published October 13, 2013

  • Reverse Engineering a D-Link Backdoor

    Using the correct User-Agent: string, all auth is bypassed on several released models of D-Link and Planex routers. Horrific fail by D-Link

    (tags: d-link security backdoors authorization reversing planex networking routers)

  • The US fears back-door routes into the net because it's building them too | Technology | The Observer

    one of the most obvious inferences from the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica recently is that the NSA has indeed been up to the business of inserting covert back doors in networking and other computing kit. The reports say that, in addition to undermining all of the mainstream cryptographic software used to protect online commerce, the NSA has been "collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products". These reports have, needless to say, been strenuously denied by the companies, such as Cisco, that make this networking kit. Perhaps the NSA omitted to tell DARPA what it was up to? In the meantime, I hear that some governments have decided that their embassies should no longer use electronic communications at all, and are returning to employing couriers who travel the world handcuffed to locked dispatch cases. We're back to the future, again.

    (tags: politics backdoors snowden snooping networking cisco nsa gchq)

  • Azerbaijan accidentally publishes the results of its election before the polls open

    The mistake came when an electoral commission accidentally published results showing a victory for Ilham Aliyev, the country’s long-standing President, a day before voting. Meydan TV, an online channel critical of the government, released a screenshot from a mobile app for the Azerbaijan Central Election Commission which showed that Mr Aliyev had received 72.76 per cent of the vote compared with 7.4 per cent for the opposition candidate, Jamil Hasanli. The screenshot also indicates that the app displayed information about how many people voted at various times during the day. Polls opened at 8am.

    (tags: azerbaijan corruption fix elections voting voter-fraud)

  • DNS registrars that complied with "shakedown" anti-piracy requests may now be in violation of ICANN Transfers Policy

    According to EasyDNS:

    Any registrar that has taken one of these sites offline that now impedes the registrants of those domains from simply getting their domain names out of there and back online somewhere else will then be subject to the TDRP – Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy and if they lose (which they will) they will be subject to TDRP fees assesed by the registry operator, and to quote the TDRP itself "Transfer dispute resolution fees can be substantial". This is why it is never a good idea to just react to pressure in the face of obnoxious bluster – in the very act of trying to diffuse any perceived culpability you end up opening yourself to real liability.

    (tags: tdrp easydns dns registrars domains piracy law due-process)

  • Schneier on Security: Air Gaps

    interesting discussion in the comments. "Patricia"'s process is particularly hair-raisingly complex, involving 3 separate machines and a multitude of VMs

    (tags: air-gaps security networking bruce-schneier via:adulau)

Links for 2013-10-11

Published October 11, 2013

Links for 2013-10-10

Published October 10, 2013

Links for 2013-10-09

Published October 9, 2013

  • pt-summary

    from the Percona toolkit. 'Conveniently summarizes the status and configuration of a server. It is not a tuning tool or diagnosis tool. It produces a report that is easy to diff and can be pasted into emails without losing the formatting. This tool works well on many types of Unix systems.' --- summarises OOM history, top, netstat connection table, interface stats, network config, RAID, LVM, disks, inodes, disk scheduling, mounts, memory, processors, and CPU.

    (tags: percona tools cli unix ops linux diagnosis raid netstat oom)

  • How much can an extra hour's sleep change you?

    What they discovered is that when the volunteers cut back from seven-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours' sleep a night, genes that are associated with processes like inflammation, immune response and response to stress became more active. The team also saw increases in the activity of genes associated with diabetes and risk of cancer. The reverse happened when the volunteers added an hour of sleep.

    (tags: sleep health rest cancer bbc science)

  • Kovet

    some great phone cases from an Irish company, with nifty art by Irish illustrators and artists including Fatti Burke and Chris Judge

    (tags: chris-judge fatti-burke illustrators art ireland iphone cases)

Links for 2013-10-08

Published October 8, 2013

  • What drives JVM full GC duration

    Interesting empirical results using JDK 7u21:

    Full GC duration depends on the number of objects allocated and the locality of their references. It does not depend that much on actual heap size.
    Reference locality has a surprisingly high effect.

    (tags: java jvm data gc tuning performance cms g1)

  • Rhizome | Occupy.here: A tiny, self-contained darknet

    Occupy.here began two years ago as an experiment for the encampment at Zuccotti Park. It was a wifi router hacked to run OpenWrt Linux (an operating system mostly used for computer networking) and a small "captive portal" website. When users joined the wifi network and attempted to load any URL, they were redirected to http://occupy.here. The web software offered up a simple BBS-style message board providing its users with a space to share messages and files.
    Nifty project from Dan Phiffer.

    (tags: occupy.here openwrt hacking wifi network community)

  • Whatever Happened to "Due Process" ?

    Mark Jeftovic is on fire after receiving yet another "take down this domain or else" mail from the City of London police:

    We have an obligation to our customers and we are bound by our Registrar Accreditation Agreements not to make arbitrary changes to our customers settings without a valid FOA (Form of Authorization). To supersede that we need a legal basis. To get a legal basis something has to happen in court. [...] What gets me about all of this is that the largest, most egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right now are our own governments, spying on their own citizens, illegally wiretapping our own private communications and nobody cares, nobody will answer for it, it's just an out-of-scope conversation that is expected to blend into the overall background malaise of our ever increasing serfdom. If I can't make various governments and law enforcement agencies get warrants or court orders before they crack my private communications then I can at least require a court order before I takedown my own customer.

    (tags: city-of-london police takedowns politics mark-jeftovic easydns registrars dns via:tjmcintyre)

  • Intellectual Ventures' Evil Knows No Bounds: Buys Patent AmEx Donated For Public Good... And Starts Suing

    The problem with software patents, part XVII.

    So you have a situation where even when the original patent holder donated the patent for "the public good," sooner or later, an obnoxious patent troll like IV comes along and turns it into a weapon. Again: AmEx patented those little numbers on your credit card, and then for the good of the industry and consumer protection donated the patent to a non-profit, who promised not to enforce the patent against banks... and then proceeded to sell the patent to Intellectual Ventures who is now suing banks over it.

    (tags: intellectual-ventures scams patents swpats shakedown banking cvv american-express banks amex cmaf)

Links for 2013-10-07

Published October 7, 2013

the coming world of automated mass anti-terror false positives

Published October 6, 2013

Man sues RMV after driver's license mistakenly revoked by automated anti-terror false positive:

John H. Gass hadn’t had a traffic ticket in years, so the Natick resident was surprised this spring when he received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked. [...] After frantic calls and a hearing with Registry officials, Gass learned the problem: An antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system that scans a database of millions of state driver’s license images had picked his as a possible fraud. “We send out 1,500 suspension letters every day," said Registrar Rachel Kaprielian. [...] “There are mistakes that can be made."

See also this New Scientist story. This story notes that the system's pretty widespread:

Massachusetts bought the system with a $1.5 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security. At least 34 states use such systems, which law enforcement officials say help prevent identity theft and ID fraud.

In my opinion, this kind of thing -- trial by inaccurate, false-positive-prone algorithm, is one of the most worrying things about the post-PRISM world.

When we created SpamAssassin, we were well aware of the risk of automated misclassification. Any machine-learning classifier will always make mistakes. The key is to carefully calibrate the expected false-positive/false-negative ratio so that the negative side-effects of a misclassification corresponds to the expected rate.

These anti-terrorism machine learning systems are calibrated to catch as many potential cases as possible, but by aiming to reduce false negatives to this degree, they become wildly prone to false positives. And when they're applied as a dragnet across all citizens' interactions with the state -- or even in the case of PRISM, all citizens' interactions that can be surveilled en masse -- it's going to create buckets of bureaucratic false-positive horror stories, as random innocent citizens are incorrectly tagged as criminals due to software bugs and poor calibration.

Links for 2013-10-04

Published October 4, 2013

Links for 2013-10-03

Published October 3, 2013

Links for 2013-10-02

Published October 2, 2013

Links for 2013-10-01

Published October 1, 2013

  • How an Engineer Earned 1.25 Million Air Miles By Buying Pudding

    An amazing hack. 'Air Miles are awesome, they can be used to score free flights, hotel stays and if you’re really lucky, the scorn and hatred of everyone you come in contact with who has to pay full price when they travel. The king of all virtually free travelers is one David Phillips, a civil engineer who teaches at the University of California, Davis. David came to the attention of the wider media when he managed to convert about 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice chocolate pudding [costing $3000] into over a million Air Miles. Ever since, David and his entire family have been travelling the world for next to nothing.' (via al3xandru)

    (tags: via:al3xandru hacks cool pudding small-print air-miles free)

  • Down the Rabbit Hole

    An adventure that takes you through several popular Java language features and shows how they compile to bytecode and eventually JIT to assembly code.

    (tags: charles-nutter java jvm compilation reversing talks slides)

Links for 2013-09-30

Published September 30, 2013

  • Model checking for highly concurrent code

    Applied formal methods in order to test distributed systems -- specifically GlusterFS:

    I'll use an example from my own recent experience. I'm developing a new kind of replication for GlusterFS. To make sure the protocol behaves correctly even across multiple failures, I developed a Murphi model for it. [...] I added a third failure [to the simulated model]. I didn't expect a three-node system to continue working if more than one of those were concurrent (the model allows the failures to be any mix of sequential and concurrent), but I expected it to fail cleanly without reaching an invalid state. Surprise! It managed to produce a case where a reader can observe values that go back in time. This might not make much sense without knowing the protocol involved, but it might give some idea of the crazy conditions a model checker will find that you couldn't possibly have considered. [...] So now I have a bug to fix, and that's a good thing. Clearly, it involves a very specific set of ill-timed reads, writes, and failures. Could I have found it by inspection or ad-hoc analysis? Hell, no. Could I have found it by testing on live systems? Maybe, eventually, but it probably would have taken months for this particular combination to occur on its own. Forcing it to occur would require a lot of extra code, plus an exerciser that would amount to a model checker running 100x slower across machines than Murphi does. With enough real deployments over enough time it would have happened, but the only feasible way to prevent that was with model checking. These are exactly the kinds of bugs that are hardest to fix in the field, and that make users distrust distributed systems, so those of us who build such systems should use every tool at our disposal to avoid them.

    (tags: model-checking formal-methods modelling murphi distcomp distributed-systems glusterfs testing protocols)

  • Is Trypophobia a Real Phobia? | Popular Science

    ie. "fear of small, clustered holes". Sounds like it's not so much a "phobia" as some kind of innate, visceral disgust response; I get it. 'As for who actually made the word up, that distinction probably belongs to a blogger in Ireland named Louise, Andrews says. According to an archived Geocities page, Louise settled on "trypophobia" (Greek for "boring holes" + "fear") after corresponding with a representative at the Oxford English Dictionary. Louise, Andrews and trypophobia Facebook group members have petitioned the dictionary to include the word. The term will need to be used for years and have multiple petitions and scholarly references before the dictionary accepts it, Andrews says. I, for one, would prefer to forget about it forever.'

    (tags: disgusting revulsion fear phobias trypophobia holes ugh innate)

  • Common phobia you have never heard of: Fear of holes may stem from evolutionary survival response

    "We think that everyone has trypophobic tendencies even though they may not be aware of it," said Dr Cole. "We found that people who don't have the phobia still rate trypophobic images as less comfortable to look at than other images. It backs up the theory that we are set-up to be fearful of things which hurt us in our evolutionary past. We have an innate predisposition to be wary of things that can harm us."

    (tags: trypophobia holes fear aversion disgust ugh evolution innate)