Category: Uncategorized

The Codeless Code: Case 234 Ozymandias

Love this:

I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: a stack of printouts, tall as any man, that in decaying boxes had been stowed. Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. Abandoned in the blackness to erode, what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. The language is unused in this late year. The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, a line of code and then these words appear: # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE The code beside persisting to the last— as permanent as aught upon this sphere— while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.

(tags: moon apollo coding history hacks comments funny poetry poems ozymandias)

Modeling the Mythical Man-Month using the Universal Scalability Law

turns out the USL can apply

(tags: usl scalability scaling brooks teams mythical-man-month estimation)

Reviewbot

posts GitHub pull requests that are ready to be reviewed into Slack. How does it know when a pull request is ready? We have a special label in our repositories, aptly named READY TO REVIEW (all caps so it’s easier to spot). When a pull request is ready for review, the author adds this label to their PR to mark it as finished. Meanwhile, all pull requests without this label are seen as works in progress and shouldn’t be reviewed. Next, an engineer can pick from the READY TO REVIEW pull requests and start reviewing — all code changes at PSPDFKit get reviewed by at least one other person. After the review is done, the pull request author incorporates the feedback and merges the PR.

(tags: github reviews code-review slack integration team)

Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019

Great writeup from jgc. Worth noting some important lessons: * config changes should be rolled out carefully and gradually, just like code; * particularly regexps, which are effectively code anyway; * emergency-use rollback systems need to work, of course!; * having emergency-only systems is a risk, too, since infrequently-used code paths are likely to atrophy and break without anyone noticing (as nsheridan said); * /.*/ in a regexp is pretty much always bad news, and would have been worth a linter to catch before commit.

(tags: cloudflare outages regex postmortems regexps deployment rollback via:jgc)

The Configuration Complexity Clock

This, so much this.....

Frustratingly there are still some business requirements that can’t be configured using the new [post-config-file] rules engine. Some logical conditions simply aren’t configurable using its GUI, and so the application has to be re-coded and re-deployed for some scenarios. Help is at hand, someone on the team reads Ayende’s DSLs book. Yes, a DSL will allow us to write arbitrarily complex rules and solve all our problems. The team stops work for several months to implement the DSL. It’s a considerable technical accomplishment when it’s completed and everyone takes a well earned break. Surely this will mean the end of arbitrary hard-coded business logic? It’s now 9am on the clock. Amazingly it works. Several months go by without any changes being needed in the core application. The team spend most of their time writing code in the new DSL. After some embarrassing episodes, they now go through a complete release cycle before deploying any new DSL code. The DSL text files are version controlled and each release goes through regression testing before being deployed. Debugging the DSL code is difficult, there’s little tooling support, they simply don’t have the resources to build an IDE or a ReSharper for their new little language. As the DSL code gets more complex they also start to miss being able to write object-oriented software. Some of the team have started to work on a unit testing framework in their spare time. In the pub after work someone quips, “we’re back where we started four years ago, hard coding everything, except now in a much crappier language.”

(tags: configuration scripting dsls script config rules-engines rules via:oisin dsl coding hard-coding)

Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops

The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide: If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period. With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database. The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too. All of this information is aggregated and synthesized in a way that gives law enforcement nearly omniscient knowledge over any suspect they decide to surveil.

(tags: police surveillance palantir creepy grim data-privacy privacy)

Ireland putting profit before people with genomic medicine strategy

From David McConnell and Orla Hardiman at TCD:

Much of the medical information sought by GMI [Genomics Medicine Ireland] has been collected from patients in public hospitals funded by the exchequer at great expense [...]. Clinicians are being contracted and asked to obtain consent from their patients to transfer clinical information to GMI, along with a tissue sample for WGS [Whole Genome Sequencing]. We understand GMI will pay for the additional hospital clinical costs required for the project. It will obtain the full genetic code for each patient (WGS), and it will analyse all the data. For the most part .... there is minimal tangible benefit to the patient who participates in this programme. It is important to realise that GMI will own all the clinical and WGS data that they have acquired from the health service, which is of considerable commercial value. GMI will also have complete control over the research and any outcomes. Participating patients do not appear to have access to their data held by GMI – and there does not seem to be a “right to be forgotten”, despite the commercial nature of the enterprise. Moreover, the genomic and clinical data may also be transmitted outside of the European Union, and thus will not be protected by the stringent data-protection laws within the EU.[....] The Government has made a very big investment in GMI. There may be a view that it is not necessary to provide any additional public investments in genomic medicine in Ireland. However, to those of us who care about the longer-term development of genomic medicine in Ireland, this would be a seriously short-sighted approach. One person in 20 will develop a genetic disorder in their lifetime and half of the Irish population will experience a form of cancer. These and many other patients should be able to benefit from a publicly-available genomics project that can drive new medical care in Ireland. Genomic medicine is here to stay. We urgently need a properly governed genomics programme in Ireland that will ensure that Irish genomics remains within the public (non-commercial) domain, and that data obtained from Irish citizens will be used to benefit the entire Irish population.

(tags: gmi wgs genome open-data data-privacy gdpr privacy health medicine ireland genomics)

Rossa McMahon re GMI

Rossa McMahon with a twitter thread on the legality of GMI's genomic data collection program in Ireland:

GMI is a big, expensive company. It announced planned investment injection of $400m last year. It is engaged in a hot industry - hot because of investor interest and hot because of regulatory/ethics concerns. GDPR is not new. It has been known since 2016. Data protection law is not new. It has been known since 1988. The impact of these laws on genetic data collection & use is not a surprise. So if you have a $400m+ business and this is a key business issue, you have taken advice. And you have, no doubt, been in a position to take that advice from some of the best and/or most expensive advisors available. Assumptions are dangerous, but I think it is fair to assume this has happened. So read the story again. Would you be looking for repeated meetings with [Department of Health], answers to questions on regulatory matters and assurances from the State, if you had legal advice of your own to the effect that you are operating or can operate as your currently are?

(tags: gmi genomics genetics data-privacy privacy gdpr ireland)

Terrifying thread of Google Maps fails

'This takes you over Hayden Pass Rd. "It’s a real challenging road and a true test of your vehicle and your stamina because the road abounds in twists and turns with wheels sometimes hanging above the precipice." "There is a very narrow section of shelf road before you get to the top that is very dangerous if icy. There are no rocks to stop you from sliding off the side. This section should not be attempted if there is any ice at all." I'm a little surprised that Google gave this route to me with no warning. It's also comical to say you can get the drive done in 30 minutes.' [....] 'A couple of years ago I did a drive from Port Headland (Northwest Western Australia) to Perth. When we got onto Nanutarra road (Near Paraburdoo), the maps decided we should take a road that was actually the Lyons River - if we were foreign tourists it would have led us into a spot where we could easily have died. Unfortunately in outback WA, many tourists have experienced this and succumbed to it.'

(tags: driving safety google-maps google mapping routing fail via:danluu)

excellent Twitter thread about Brexiteer attitudes to Ireland

as one commenter notes: 'Ireland as Britain’s Taiwan, not a real country but a renegade province that must be brought to heel and reclaimed for the Motherland'

(tags: brexit britain uk ireland politics)

Moving From Apache Thrift to gRPC: A Perspective From Alluxio

Good advice here:

Thrift served well as a fast and reliable RPC framework powering the metadata operations in Alluxio 1.x. Its limitation in handling streamed data has led us to a journey in search of better alternatives. gRPC provides some nice features that help us in building a simpler, more unified API layer. In this post, we discussed some lessons learned to move from Thrift to gRPC, including performance tuning tips that helped us achieve comparable performance for both one-off RPC calls as well as data streams. We hope this helps if you are looking at gRPC as an option for building high-performance services. Check out our blog for more articles on how we build Alluxio.

(tags: thrift alluxio java grpc protocols coding netty)

Gaffologist

'Homes for Sale and Rent (in Ireland), Mapped' -- neat dataviz site by Robert Lawson

(tags: dataviz mapping ireland homes rent home)

Guidance for Drivers on use of "Dash Cams"

guidance note from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on GDPR implications of dashcams.

(tags: dpc data-protection privacy dashcams driving gdpr)

Chernobyl True Story: What The HBO Miniseries Gets Right (& Changes)

A much more reasonable writeup of what the HBO series changed from what really happened -- notably the show trial in the final episode was largely concocted. This is much more accurate than the cinemablend.com article.

(tags: chernobyl fact fiction hbo tv fictionalisation ussr history)

Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War

ideologically, a core tenant of open source is non-discriminatory empowerment. When I was introduced to open source in the 90’s, the chief “bad guy” was Microsoft – people wanted to defend against “embrace, extend, extinguish” corporate practices, and by homesteading on the technological frontier with GNU/Linux we were ensuring that our livelihoods, independence, and security would never be beholden to a hostile corporate power. Now, the world has changed. Our open source code may end up being labeled as enabling a “foreign adversary”. I never suspected that I could end up on the “wrong side” of politics by being a staunch advocate of open source, but here I am. My open source mission is to empower people to be technologically independent; to know that technology is not magic, so that nobody will ever be a slave to technology. This is true even if that means resisting my own government. The erosion of freedom starts with restricting access to “foreign adversaries”, and ends with the government arbitrarily picking politically convenient winners and losers to participate in the open source ecosystem. Freedom means freedom, and I will stand to defend it. Now that the US is carpet-bombing Huawei’s supply chain, I fear there is no turning back. The language already written into EO13873 sets the stage to threaten open source as a whole by drawing geopolitical and national security borders over otherwise non-discriminatory development efforts. While I still hold hope that the trade war could de-escalate, the proliferation and stockpiling of powerful anti-trade weapons like EO13873 is worrisome. Now is the time to raise awareness of the threat this poses to the open source world, so that we can prepare and come together to protect the freedoms we cherish the most. I hope, in all earnestness, that open source shall not be a casualty of this trade war.

(tags: open-source business china economics huawei us-politics trade-war oss gnu linux)

jCenter is the new default repository used with Android's gradle plugin, I haven... | Hacker News

I am a developer Advocate with JFrog, the company behind Bintray. So, jcenter is a Java repository in Bintray (https://bintray.com/bintray/jcenter), which is the largest repo in the world for Java and Android OSS libraries, packages and components. All the content is served over a CDN, with a secure https connection. JCenter is the default repository in Groovy Grape (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Grape), built-in in Gradle (the jcenter() repository) and very easy to configure in every other build tool (maybe except Maven) and will become even easer very soon. Bintray has a different approach to package identification than the legacy Maven Central. We don't rely on self-issued key-pairs (which can be generated to represent anyone, actually and never verified in Maven Central). Instead, similar to GitHub, Bintray gives a strong personal identity to any contributed library. If you really need to get your package to Maven Central (for supporting legacy tools) you can do it from Bintray as well, in a click of a button or even automatically.

(tags: jars maven gradle java bintray via:lemire packaging distribution)

Russians used fake Foster email for disinformation – researchers

Facebook believes this is the first time fake information about Northern Ireland and topics concerning Anglo-Irish relations has been disseminated by Russian operators acting in concert. The Atlantic Council’s research centre found the campaign was “persistent, sophisticated and well-resourced” and said that “the likelihood is that this operation was run by a Russian intelligence agency”. The operation “appeared designed to stoke racial, religious or political hatred, especially in Northern Ireland”, the researchers said, disclosing their findings in an online article published on the Medium self-publishing online platform over the weekend.

(tags: ireland russia disinformation fake-news facebook dfrlab ira politics)

Why the BAI is not the body to regulate the internet

Simon McGarr makes a good argument, and I agree

(tags: bai ireland regulation internet web messaging crypto privacy)

TCP SACK PANIC - Kernel vulnerabilities - CVE-2019-11477, CVE-2019-11478 & CVE-2019-11479 - Red Hat Customer Portal

Three related flaws were found in the Linux kernel’s handling of TCP networking.  The most severe vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to trigger a kernel panic in systems running the affected software and, as a result, impact the system’s availability. The issues have been assigned multiple CVEs: CVE-2019-11477 is considered an Important severity, whereas CVE-2019-11478 and CVE-2019-11479 are considered a Moderate severity.  The first two are related to the Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) packets combined with Maximum Segment Size (MSS), the third solely with the Maximum Segment Size (MSS). These issues are corrected either through applying mitigations or kernel patches.  Mitigation details and links to RHSA advsories can be found on the RESOLVE tab of this article.

(tags: tcp sack ip security vulnerabilities kernel bugs)

Climate change: I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. - Vox

While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into. In fact, fossil fuels supply more than 75 percent of the US energy system. If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence. [...] But that doesn’t mean we do nothing. Climate change is a vast and complicated problem, and that means the answer is complicated too. We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, then take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable. In other words, we need to become many Davids against one big, bad Goliath.

(tags: activism climate environment green climate-change future fossil-fuels society)

A free Argo Tunnel for your next project

Argo Tunnel lets you expose a server to the Internet without opening any ports. The service runs a lightweight process on your server that creates outbound tunnels to the Cloudflare network. Instead of managing DNS, network, and firewall complexity, Argo Tunnel helps administrators serve traffic from their origin through Cloudflare with a single command. [....] Starting today, any user, even those without a Cloudflare account, can try this new method of connecting their server to the Internet. Argo Tunnel can now be used in a free model that will create a new URL, known only to you, that will proxy traffic to your server. We’re excited to make connecting a server to the Internet more accessible for everyone.

(tags: cloudflare internet tunnel servers ports tunnelling ops free)

Download Starburst Distribution of Presto

Starburst's free distro of Presto; there are additional enterprise features which require a license key but the basic distro is OSS. Docs at https://docs.starburstdata.com/latest/index.html

(tags: starburst presto aws ops software)

Soonish: The Lost Chapter

"Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything" -- Advanced Nuclear Power

(tags: nukes nuclear-power power future soonish smbc tech reactors)

Show HN: Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi – Environmental sensors

HN thread and linked Pimoroni gadget. UKP45 for a nice environmental sensor board

(tags: electronics iot projects sensors environment raspberry-pi gadgets)

The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America - VICE

Turns out the Thai government has taken a leaf from Guinness' book:

The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion [..] drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.” (Does your favorite Thai spot have objets d’art? The restaurant may have been built from a government prototype.)

(tags: cuisine culture food government marketing thai thailand guinness restaurants franchising)

Growing a moss garden

aren't these lovely

(tags: gardening home plants moss gardens thread twitter)

gaul/undocumented-s3-apis

Undocumented Amazon S3 APIs and third-party extensions: GET object by multipart number; AWS Java SDK partNumber; Multipart Upload ETag. (via Last Week in AWS)

(tags: via:lwia s3 undocumented hacks aws apis)

Why women leave academia and why universities should be worried

I couldn't agree more with this, having seen it happen first-hand:

The participants in the study identify many characteristics of academic careers that they find unappealing: the constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women. But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, solitary and as unnecessarily competitive. Both men and women PhD candidates come to realise that a string of post-docs is part of a career path, and they see that this can require frequent moves and a lack of security about future employment. Women are more negatively affected than men by the competitiveness in this stage of an academic career and their concerns about competitiveness are fuelled, they say, by a relative lack of self-confidence. Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female PhD candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless. As if all this were not enough, women PhD candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them. [...] Universities will not survive as research institutions unless university leadership realises that the working conditions they offer dramatically reduce the size of the pool from which they recruit. We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest. When industry is the more attractive employer, our credibility as the home of long-term, cutting edge, high-risk, profoundly creative research, is diminished.

(tags: women life university third-level careers research via:aoifemcl)

The New Wilderness (Idle Words)

Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational questions about the role of automation: To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior?

(tags: facebook google privacy future dystopia surveillance society)

Jigsaw Bought a Russian Twitter Troll Campaign as an Experiment

"Let's say I want to wage a disinformation campaign to attack a political opponent or a company, but I don’t have the infrastructure to create my own Internet Research Agency," Gully told WIRED in an interview, speaking publicly about Jigsaw's year-old disinformation experiment for the first time. "We wanted to see if we could engage with someone who was willing to provide this kind of assistance to a political actor ... to buy services that directly discredit their political opponent for very low cost and with no tooling or resources required. For us, it’s a pretty clear demonstration these capabilities exist, and there are actors comfortable doing this on the internet."

(tags: disinformation fakes disinfo fake-news russia trolls jigsaw social-media)

New Spam Campaign Controlled by Attackers via DNS TXT Records

Ah, Google, what were you thinking?

When decoded, this string is an URL to Google's public DNS resolve for a particular domain. For example, the above string decodes to https://dns.google.com/resolve?name=fetch.vxpapub.[omitted].net&type=TXT. The attachment's script will use this URL to retrieve the associated domain's TXT record. A TXT record is a DNS entry that can be used to store textual data. This field is typically used for SPF or DMARC records, but could be used to host any type of textual content. The nice part about using the Google's DNS resolver is that the information will be returned as JSON, which makes it easy for the malicious script to extract the data it needs.

(tags: txt dns google resolvers spam fail security via:paulvixie)

An Orbit Map of the Solar System

This week’s map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter - about 10000 asteroids - as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999. All of the data for this map is shared by NASA and open to the public.

(tags: astronomy dataviz map space visualization asteroids planets posters moons solar-system)

Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online

Fans tag the content, but then -- volunteers consolidate and aggregate those tags:

On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don't need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don't need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you.

(tags: folksonomy tagging tags taxonomy fans fandom archival archives fanfic)

Irish National Open Research Forum national framework published

"All Irish scholarly publications resulting from publicly-funded research will be openly available by default from 2020 onwards and will be accessible on an ongoing basis." (via Don Marti)

(tags: via:donmarti open open-access science public ireland funding research)

Internet-Scale analysis of AWS Cognito Security

Just published the white-paper for my latest research: Internet-Scale analysis of AWS Cognito Security. The white-paper contains the methodology and results of an internet-scale security analysis of AWS Cognito configurations. The research identified 2500 identity pools, which were used to gain access to more than 13000 S3 buckets (which are not publicly exposed), 1200 DynamoDB tables and 1500 Lambda functions.

(tags: aws cognito security s3 dynamodb scanning whitepapers)

Multi-Sensor IoT Environmental Sensor Box With CircuitPython

Just add a power outlet and a WiFi network and stream time and location stamped environmental readings to AdafruitIO.

(tags: adafruit sensors iot maker hacks air-quality temperature environment metrics)

The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times

Near the end of our interview, I told Mr. Cain that I found it odd that he had successfully climbed out of a right-wing YouTube rabbit hole, only to jump into a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole. I asked if he had considered cutting back on his video intake altogether, and rebuild some of his offline relationships. He hesitated, and looked slightly confused. For all of its problems, he said, YouTube is still where political battles are fought and won. Leaving the platform would essentially mean abandoning the debate. He conceded, though, that he needed to think critically about the videos he watched. “YouTube is the place to put out a message,” he said. “But I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.”

(tags: youtube politics nytimes racism right-wing dystopia)

two-thirds of cyclists with disabilities find cycling easier than walking

and other facts about disabled cyclists. This is very thought-provoking stuff.

According to a recent study by Wheels for Well-being, a British organization of disabled cyclists, 15 percent of people with disabilities cycle, compared with 18 percent of the general population. Moreover, two-thirds of cyclists with disabilities find cycling easier than walking, the group says. Clearly, bikes are not just a mode of transit, but function as mobility devices for many disabled people. I find it ableist, or prejudiced against the disabled, when we consider e-bikes and other adaptive-cycling methods as “inferior.” Many of us can ride a traditional two-wheeled bicycle, but others simply can’t.

(tags: cycling disability accessibility cities design cycles disabled)

Carnival Cruise Line to pay a $20M fine over pollution

Carnival’s pollution problem is so bad that across its fleet, the large boats pollute 10 times more than all 260 million of Europe’s cars. That tidbit comes courtesy of a study by the European think tank Transport & Environment, which looked at 203 cruise ships sailing European waters in 2017. The report also found that besides over-tourism and crashing into ports, there’s a good reason for European cities to dislike cruise ships: they are emitting sulfur dioxide all over the place. If you can’t keep your pollutants straight, sulfur dioxide causes both acid rain and lung cancer. Cruise lines, it turns out, have been dropping the gas all over Europe; the report says Barcelona, Palma Mallorca, and Venice were the cities worst affected by sulfur dioxide emissions. Per the FT, “sulfur dioxide emissions from cars was 3.2m kt versus 62m kt from cruise ships, with Carnival accounting for half that, the study found.”

(tags: carnival cruises cruise-ships pollution europe eu driving environment climate-change)

The Existential Crisis Plaguing Online Extremism Researchers

Oh god. This, so much:

Many researchers in the field cut their teeth as techno-optimists, studying the positive aspects of the internet—like bringing people together to enhance creativity or further democratic protest, á la the Arab Spring—says Marwick. But it didn’t last. The past decade has been an exercise in dystopian comeuppance to the utopian discourse of the '90s and ‘00s. Consider Gamergate, the Internet Research Agency, fake news, the internet-fueled rise of the so-called alt-right, Pizzagate, QAnon, Elsagate and the ongoing horrors of kids YouTube, Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of genocide, Cambridge Analytica, and so much more. “In many ways, I think it [the malaise] is a bit about us being let down by something that many of us really truly believed in,” says Marwick. Even those who were more realistic about tech—and foresaw its misuse—are stunned by the extent of the problem, she says. “You have to come to terms with the fact that not only were you wrong, but even the bad consequences that many of us did foretell were nowhere near as bad as the actual consequences that either happened or are going to happen.” [.....] “It's not that one of our systems is broken; it's not even that all of our systems are broken,” says Phillips. “It's that all of our systems are working ... toward the spread of polluted information and the undermining of democratic participation.”

(tags: future grim dystopia tech optimism web internet gamergate wired via:oceanclub)

France Bans Judge Analytics, 5 Years In Prison For Rule Breakers

‘The identity data of magistrates and members of the judiciary cannot be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analysing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices.’ As far as Artificial Lawyer understands, this is the very first example of such a ban anywhere in the world. Insiders in France told Artificial Lawyer that the new law is a direct result of an earlier effort to make all case law easily accessible to the general public, which was seen at the time as improving access to justice and a big step forward for transparency in the justice sector. However, judges in France had not reckoned on NLP and machine learning companies taking the public data and using it to model how certain judges behave in relation to particular types of legal matter or argument, or how they compare to other judges. In short, they didn’t like how the pattern of their decisions – now relatively easy to model – were potentially open for all to see.

(tags: censorship france analytics judgements legal judges statistics)

Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data

In this piece I’ll be talking about two particular bits of rhetoric that have found an apparently unlikely partnership in the past five years. The impending obsolescence of humanity locked eyes across the room with a utopian vision of all-powerful AI that sees to all our needs. They started a forbidden romance that has since enthralled even the most serious tech industry leaders. I myself was enthralled with the story at first, but more recently I’ve come to believe it may end in tragedy.

(tags: ai philosophy ubi future tech)

An update on Sunday’s service disruption | Google Cloud Blog

Google posting the most inappropriately upbeat post-mortem I've ever read...

In essence, the root cause of Sunday’s disruption was a configuration change that was intended for a small number of servers in a single region. The configuration was incorrectly applied to a larger number of servers across several neighboring regions, and it caused those regions to stop using more than half of their available network capacity. The network traffic to/from those regions then tried to fit into the remaining network capacity, but it did not. The network became congested, and our networking systems correctly triaged the traffic overload and dropped larger, less latency-sensitive traffic in order to preserve smaller latency-sensitive traffic flows, much as urgent packages may be couriered by bicycle through even the worst traffic jam. Google’s engineering teams detected the issue within seconds, but diagnosis and correction took far longer than our target of a few minutes. Once alerted, engineering teams quickly identified the cause of the network congestion, but the same network congestion which was creating service degradation also slowed the engineering teams’ ability to restore the correct configurations, prolonging the outage. The Google teams were keenly aware that every minute which passed represented another minute of user impact, and brought on additional help to parallelize restoration efforts.

(tags: gcp google odd outages post-mortems networking)

"Insert Coin" Key Chain

RepliCade Insert Coin keychains are constructed from a traditional blend of diecast metal and plastic. Push the coin return button to activate LED illumination for 30 seconds. This 1:1 scale arcade-accurate replica metal coin return key chain stands 2" tall and weighs in at a whopping 3.2 ozs.

(tags: insert-coin arcade keychain keys toys nifty)

The war on trees: insurance involvement denied by Cork County Council

Cork people have documented on social media examples of trees being removed from public spaces and have been critical of the practice. Last week, The Phoenix magazine claimed the insurance industry “has been identified as the dark force behind the slaughtering of thousands of healthy trees across Ireland”.t “It transpires insurance companies have offered lower premiums to county councils, if they remove any tree that poses even a remote threat to passing humans,” the magazine reported. This was put to Cork City Council, which denied the claim. “I refer to your query and can confirm that no contact has been made with Cork City Council by insurance companies, in relation to trees,” the spokesperson said.

(tags: trees greenery wildlife ireland cork insurance)

Skerries protesters attempt to stop felling of mature trees

The War On Trees comes to Skerries, with people organising day-long rotas and chaining vehicles to trees to stop Fingal County Council from cutting them down

(tags: trees skerries dublin fingal greenery wildlife)

Yes, you can feed bread to swans

“There has been a great deal of press coverage in recent months regarding the ‘Ban the Bread’ campaign which is confusing many members of the public who like to feed swans. Supporters of the campaign claim that bread should not be fed to swans on the grounds that it is bad for them. This is not correct. [....] There is no good reason not to feed bread to swans, provided it is not mouldy. Most households have surplus bread and children have always enjoyed feeding swans with their parents. The ‘Ban the Bread’ campaign is already having a deleterious impact upon the swan population; I am receiving reports of underweight cygnets and adult birds, and a number of swans from large flocks have begun to wander into roads in search of food. This poses the further risk of swans being hit by vehicles. Malnutrition also increases their vulnerability to fatal diseases like avian-flu which has caused the deaths of many mute swans and other waterfowl in the past.”

(tags: swans nature feeding wildlife bread)

What I Learned Trying To Secure Congressional Campaigns (Idle Words)

'on August 22, the DNC had a phishing scare, where they mistook a vulnerability assessment for an actual attack. The next day, DCCC Executive Director Dan Sena sent an email to all campaigns with the subject line "Reminder About Cybersecurity". That email included three attachments, including a file evocatively titled "2-20170712-Falcon.docx".'

(tags: politics security dnc democrats funny yubikeys gmail google auth phishing hacking congress)

British Far Right Extremism Manipulating Ireland

digging into the "Irexit" campaign and their extensive links to Nigel Farage and the British far right -- 100% astroturf

(tags: astroturf ireland irexit nigel-farage ukip brexit politics dirty-tricks)

Beating up on qsort

an entertaining dive down a low-level performance-optimization rabbit hole, diving into radix sort on an array of integers in particular

(tags: sorting sort performance optimization radix-sort qsort algorithms)

A Twitter thread about where P99s came from

"If you're wondering what "P-four-nines" means, it's the latency at the 99.99th percentile, meaning only one in 10,000 requests has a worse latency. Why do we measure latency in percentiles? A thread about how how it came to be at Amazon..." This is a great thread from Andrew Certain, who managed the Performance Engineering team at Amazon in 2001. Percentiles, particularly for latency and performance measurement, were one of the big ideas which hit me like a ton of bricks when I joined Amazon, as they had been adopted whole-heartedly across the company by that stage.

(tags: p99 percentiles quantiles history performance analysis measurement metrics amazon aws pmet)

The Fairy King’s advice on Trees. A poem from Early Ireland

This medieval Irish poem about trees is taken from a text known as Aidedh Ferghusa meic Léide (the Death of Fergus). In the poem, Iubhdán, the king of the fairies, advises the ruler of Ulster, Fergus mac Léide, on the special qualities of trees and which ones can be burned in the household fire.

(tags: fairies trees wood history fire poems poetry)

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet

The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia?—?where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness?—?ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). [...] The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there. Compared to the free market communication style of the mass channels?—?with their high risks, high rewards, and limited moderation?—?dark forest spaces are more Scandinavian in their values and the social and emotional security they provide. They cap the downsides of looking bad and the upsides of our best jokes by virtue of a contained audience.

(tags: culture internet dark-forests future web privacy abuse community)

Nixery

Nixery provides the ability to pull ad-hoc container images from a Docker-compatible registry server. The image names specify the contents the image should contain, which are then retrieved and built by the Nix package manager. Nix is also responsible for the creation of the container images themselves.

(tags: docker containers nix nixpkgs packaging deployment ops)

5G is the new antivax/chemtrails conspiracy theory

And Russia is pushing it. Expect to see a lot of this about soon

(tags: 5g conspiracies loons crazy russia propaganda disinformation wireless youtube)

The definitive guide to running EC2 Spot Instances as Kubernetes worker nodes

it really is quite definitive, good writeup

(tags: ec2 spot-instances cost-saving kubernetes clusters asg aws)

Revealed: controversial plan to boost religious lobby in Brussels, as far right pledges to fight for ‘Christian Europe’

Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness is reportedly involved, according to this

(tags: mairead-mcguinness religion secular democracy eu meps europe lobbying)

GeoHive

'a new national platform for accessing authoritative geospatial information which provides free, web-based access to authoritative Irish spatial data from multiple providers, including Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) and many more.'

(tags: ireland mapping maps geo ordnance-survey osi geodata)

Dublin Street Map, 1939

nice high-res scan

(tags: dublin maps mapping history 1930s 1939)

Facebook and Google pressured EU experts to soften fake news regulations, say insiders | openDemocracy

The EU’s expert group met last year as a response to the wildfire spread of fake news and disinformation seen in the Brexit referendum and in the US election of President Donald Trump. Their task was to help prevent the spread of disinformation, particularly at pivotal moments such as this week’s hotly contested European parliamentary elections. However some of these experts say that representatives of Facebook and Google undermined the work of the group, which was convened by the European Commission and comprised leading European researchers, media entrepreneurs and activists. In particular, the platforms opposed proposals that would have forced them to be more transparent about their business models. And a number of insiders have raised concerns about how the tech platforms’ funding relationships with experts on the panel may have helped to water down the recommendations. In the wake of numerous reports of massive disinformation campaigns targeting the European elections, many linked to Russia and to far-right groups, EU politicians and transparency campaigners have called these fresh allegations about the tech platforms’ behaviour a “scandal”.

(tags: google facebook disinformation russia eu democracy lobbying)

Teagasc map of commute times across Ireland

interesting data

(tags: commutes commuting life ireland transport)

_Efficiently y Searching In-Memory Sorted Arrays: Revenge of the Interpolation Search?_, Peter Van Sandt, Yannis Chronis, Jignesh M. Patel [pdf]

'In this paper, we focus on the problem of searching sorted, in-memory datasets. This is a key data operation, and Binary Search is the de facto algorithm that is used in practice. We consider an alternative, namely Interpolation Search, which can take advantage of hardware trends by using complex calculations to save memory accesses. Historically, Interpolation Search was found to underperform compared to other search algorithms in this setting, despite its superior asymptotic complexity. Also,Interpolation Search is known to perform poorly on non-uniform data. To address these issues, we introduce SIP (Slope reuse Interpolation), an optimized implementation of Interpolation Search, and TIP (Three point Interpolation), a new search algorithm that uses linear fractions to interpolate on non-uniform distributions. We evaluate these two algorithms against a similarly optimized Binary Search method using a variety of real and synthetic datasets. We show that SIP is up to 4 times faster on uniformly distributed data and TIP is 2-3 times faster on non-uniformly distributed data in some cases. We also design a meta-algorithm to switch between these different methods to automate picking the higher performing search algorithm, which depends on factors like data distribution.'

(tags: papers pdf algorithms search interpolation binary-search sorted-data coding optimization performance)

nearly every site running ads has an /ads.txt

Pinboard on Twitter:

'I just learned that nearly every site running ads has a standardized ads.txt file that helpfully shows you how badly it murders your privacy. The file is a whitelist of all authorized resellers for programmatic advertising. For example, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ads.txt '

(tags: ads.txt advertising pinboard privacy data-privacy adtech robots)

The one man behind all those slick, glossy, anti-abortion posters

If you were wondering where all those huge, glossy high-quality posters of foetuses came from during the abortion referendum campaign in Ireland last year: 'Graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, prayer vigils and protesters. It’s no coincidence that the anti-abortion movement looks the same from London to Dublin to Warsaw. It's mostly Gregg Cunningham. The California-based activist has been farming out his imagery and strategies to like-minded groups in Europe for more than five years.' 'if you see an abortion protester with one of those big, disturbing, graphic images, that says “CHOICE?” Or “ABORTION IS MURDER”, that’s Gregg Cunningham’s work, and that’s not a protest, that’s advertising.' It's a business. He sells this worldwide. He's also a climate change denier, naturally. There's even a 'Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform', mirroring the Irish operation. So now you know why right-wingers accuse lefties of being 'paid protesters' -- it's because that's what _they_ do. Of course, this tactic backfired dramatically in Ireland -- we don't like being told what to think by paternalistic, patronising, colonialist foreign influences these days....

(tags: gregg-cunningham abortion us-politics posters icbr ccbr)

A deep dive into the problems with the infamous Dublin Bus Real Time app | JOE is the voice of Irish people at home and abroad

Oh dear -- not a happy camper....

This is not a bug in the system, but a feature of the system. The app is not automated to the degree that a cancelled bus service can be flagged on the spot. It has to pass through at least two human decision-making processes before it's removed from the app. In the most simple terms, the system works in such a way that inaccurate information is an inevitable by-product. Similarly, the app struggles to account for buses that are held up in traffic: "When a bus is held in traffic, the predicted arrival time on the RTPI unit will reflect this as it is determined by the bus’ distance between its location and the bus stop and it is not possible to determine the duration of the period of congestion." So while your bus could be 10 minutes away, on a busy main road full of traffic, the app could tell you that it is two or three minutes away, based purely on its distance.

(tags: buses public-transport dublin rtpi dublin-bus rants apps mobile)

Federated Learning

Google demonstrates their (extremely cool) privacy-preserving machine learning train/test architecture with a comic

(tags: google comics ai ml federated-learning privacy data-protection encryption training)

The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 Max - The Verge

Had anyone [at the FAA] checked, they might have flagged MCAS for one of several reasons, including its lack of redundancy, its unacceptably high risk of failure, or its significant increase in power to the point that it was no longer just a “hazardous failure” kind of system. When asked for comment, the agency said, “The FAA’s aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs.” Boeing defended the process as well. “The system of authorized representatives — delegated authority — is a robust and effective way for the FAA to execute its oversight of safety,” a spokesperson told The Verge. But that system only works when someone actually reads the paperwork.

(tags: mcas boeing 737max fail safety faa flying regulation)

The Gold Standard

Reducing your climate change impact by funding offsetting projects worldwide; usable by individuals

(tags: climate-change climate offsetting donation crowdfunding offset)

Opinion | The Uber I.P.O. Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley - The New York Times

Uber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech I.P.O. since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.

(tags: startups uber silicon-valley morality ethics future work tech)

Youth Spies and Curious Elders - Austin Kleon

featuring Eno, John Waters and Stafford Beer:

The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.

(tags: kids learning fashion youth brian-eno john-waters stafford-beer children future music)

Tim Robinson's townland index for Connemara and the Aran Islands | NUI Galway Digital Collections

Legendary west-of-Ireland mapmaker Tim Robinson has an archive at NUIG -- including the maps themselves.

An extensive card catalogue compiled by Tim Robinson throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drawn from his field notes. The series has been arranged by Robinson into civil parishes, and further divided into townlands. For most of the townlands, there are several record cards that give a detailed description of the local landscape. These describe historical, ecclesiastical, geological, and archaeological features. Anecdotes and local lore also feature in these. Robinson adds the names of people who helped him compile his information, usually local people, and often correspondents who sent him information helping him identify the origins of placenames, or certain landmarks and artefacts. The cards also credit several secondary sources, including the OS maps and corresponding Field Name Books, Hardiman's History of Galway, Alexander Nimmo's map of the bogs in the West of Ireland, and many more. In all cases in this series, the placename Tim Robinson used as his title appears as the title here. Many are in Irish, and some are in English. The corresponding translation is provided in the description.

(tags: tim-robinson ireland history connemara via:voxhib galway maps mapping culture nuig)

Young Life Out Of Balance: The Impact and Legacy of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’

I found myself thinking about how 10-year-old Mike responded to these overwhelming images. The process of meaning-making for a 10-year-old kid watching a film containing a sophisticated symbolic critique of modern life fascinated me. I decided to watch Koyaanisqatsi in 2019 with a close eye towards the images and sounds that had stuck with me subconsciously in the intervening third of a century, the sequences that offered today’s me a direct connection to my younger self. In childhood I was surrounded by films, cartoons, and other educational programming that transmitted the profundity and complexity of human existence and the universe directly into my growing brain. What did Koyaanisqatsi‘s sensory bombardment, its sometimes overwhelming contrasting of nature and technology mean to me then? And how did that meaning change for me as an adult, now fully conscious of and conversant with the issues Reggio raises?

(tags: koyaanisqatsi godfrey-reggio film art 1980s)

Oh dear. Huawei enterprise router 'backdoor' was Telnet, sighs Vodafone

LOL:

Characterising Telnet as a backdoor is a bit like describing your catflap as an access portal with no physical security features that allows multiple species to pass unhindered through a critical home security layer. In other words, massively over-egging the pudding.

(tags: huawei vodafone funny security bloomberg overexcited drama us-politics china)

'Looping' Created an Underground Insulin-Pump Market - The Atlantic

By 2014, the hardware components of a DIY artificial pancreas—a small insulin pump that attaches via thin disposable tubing to the body and a continuous sensor for glucose, or sugar, that slips just under the skin—were available, but it was impossible to connect the two. That’s where the security flaw came in. The hackers realized they could use it to override old Medtronic pumps with their own algorithm that automatically calculates insulin doses based on real-time glucose data. It closed the feedback loop. They shared this code online as OpenAPS, and “looping,” as it’s called, began to catch on. Instead of micromanaging their blood sugar, people with diabetes could offload that work to an algorithm. In addition to OpenAPS, another system called Loop is now available. Dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of people are experimenting with DIY artificial-pancreas systems—none of which the Food and Drug Administration has officially approved. And they’ve had to track down discontinued Medtronic pumps. It can sometimes take months to find one. Obviously, you can’t just call up Medtronic to order a discontinued pump with a security flaw. “It’s eBay, Craigslist, Facebook. It’s like this underground market for these pumps,”

(tags: looping insulin diabetes health hardware open-hardware medtronic glucose medicine fda black-market)

Packets-per-second limits in EC2

By running these experiments, we determined that each EC2 instance type has a packet-per-second budget. Surprisingly, this budget goes toward the total of incoming and outgoing packets. Even more surprisingly, the same budget gets split between multiple network interfaces, with some additional performance penalty. This last result informs against using multiple network interfaces when tuning the system for higher networking performance. The maximum budget for m5.metal and m5.24xlarge is 2.2M packets per second. Given that each HTTP transaction takes at least four packets, we can translate this to a maximum of 550k requests per second on the largest m5 instance with Enhanced Networking enabled.

(tags: aws ec2 networking pps packets tcp ip benchmarking)

Brian Moriarty - "I Sing the Story Electric"

The history of interactive storytelling, including a classification system for branching narrative techniques: The Foldback, Quicktime Events, Sardonic Options, Achtung Options, Checkpoint Saves, and Bait-and-Switch Options, and an example of a computerized interactive narrative from 1955, GENIAC Project 23.

(tags: geniac kinoautomat borges narratives non-linear branching interactive-fiction games gaming ludology history stories storytelling talks)

When License-Plate Surveillance Goes Horribly Wrong - The New York Times

“They built a system to mitigate harm, and yet I ended up with guns pulled on me due to faulty data,” he said. “And it’s more proof that we’ve built this invisible layer behind the scenes that leads to real-world consequences.”

(tags: false-positives surveillance anpr license-plates automation)

Ireland Blocks The World on Data Privacy

Last May, Europe imposed new data privacy guidelines that carry the hopes of hundreds of millions of people around the world — including in the United States — to rein in abuses by big tech companies. Almost a year later, it’s apparent that the new rules have a significant loophole: The designated lead regulator — the tiny nation of Ireland — has yet to bring an enforcement action against a big tech firm. That’s not entirely surprising. Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee, having wooed top Silicon Valley firms to the Emerald Isle with promises of low taxes, open access to top officials, and help securing funds to build glittering new headquarters. Now, data privacy experts and regulators in other countries are questioning Ireland’s commitment to policing imminent privacy concerns like Facebook’s reintroduction of facial recognition software and data-sharing with its recently purchased subsidiary WhatsApp, and Google’s sharing of information across its burgeoning number of platforms.

(tags: ireland fail gdpr privacy data-protection data facebook eu regulation)

Who’s using your face? The ugly truth about facial recognition

In order to feed this hungry system, a plethora of face repositories — such as IJB-C — have sprung up, containing images manually culled and bound together from sources as varied as university campuses, town squares, markets, cafés, mugshots and social-media sites such as Flickr, Instagram and YouTube. To understand what these faces have been helping to build, the FT worked with Adam Harvey, the researcher who first spotted Jillian York’s face in IJB-C. An American based in Berlin, he has spent years amassing more than 300 face datasets and has identified some 5,000 academic papers that cite them. The images, we found, are used to train and benchmark algorithms that serve a variety of biometric-related purposes — recognising faces at passport control, crowd surveillance, automated driving, robotics, even emotion analysis for advertising. They have been cited in papers by commercial companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and IBM, as well as by academics around the world, from Japan to the United Arab Emirates and Israel. “We’ve seen facial recognition shifting in purpose,” says Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the EFF, who was shocked to discover that his own colleagues’ faces were in the Iarpa database. “It was originally being used for identification purposes?.?.?.?Now somebody’s face is used as a tracking number to watch them as they move across locations on video, which is a huge shift. [Researchers] don’t have to pay people for consent, they don’t have to find models, no firm has to pay to collect it, everyone gets it for free.”

(tags: data privacy face-recognition cameras creative-commons licensing flickr open-data google facebook surveillance instagram ijb-c research iarpa)

Tinder’s move to Kubernetes – Tinder Engineering – Medium

A solid technical writeup of Tinder's k8s migration. Some problems with Flannel, DNS and (worryingly) ELB, but good +1s for Envoy as a sidecar

(tags: kubernetes k8s flannel networking elb aws envoy ec2 ops tinder)

The Irish for spam

'turscar: from the old word for dead seaweed that's been dropped, uninvited, by the tide on the shore.'

(tags: turscar irish gaeilge spam etymology seaweed stinky)

Interesting thread on how trees should be managed by city councils, vs "topping"

'Dr Eoin Lettice on Twitter: "At the risk of repeating myself, a serious discussion needs to be had about how @corkcitycouncil and its agents are managing our mature trees in the public realm. This horror show from Ballyphehane today. Topping trees is bad practice for a whole bunch of reasons. [Thread]'

(tags: topping trees ireland maintainance dcc)

James Bridle / New Ways of Seeing

This will be a must-listen, starting this week on BBC Radio 4 and for download: 'New Ways of Seeing considers the impact of digital technologies on the way we see, understand, and interact with the world. Building on John Berger's seminal Ways of Seeing from 1972, the show explores network infrastructures, digital images, systemic bias, education and the environment, in conversation with a number of contemporary art practitioners.'

(tags: seeing vision machine-learning james-bridle internet digital future art)

_First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. III. Data Processing and Calibration_

'We present the calibration and reduction of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) 1.3 mm radio wavelength observations of the supermassive black hole candidate at the center of the radio galaxy M87 and the quasar 3C 279, taken during the 2017 April 5–11 observing campaign. These global very long baseline interferometric observations include for the first time the highly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA); reaching an angular resolution of 25 ?as, with characteristic sensitivity limits of ?1 mJy on baselines to ALMA and ?10 mJy on other baselines. The observations present challenges for existing data processing tools, arising from the rapid atmospheric phase fluctuations, wide recording bandwidth, and highly heterogeneous array. In response, we developed three independent pipelines for phase calibration and fringe detection, each tailored to the specific needs of the EHT. The final data products include calibrated total intensity amplitude and phase information. They are validated through a series of quality assurance tests that show consistency across pipelines and set limits on baseline systematic errors of 2% in amplitude and 1° in phase. The M87 data reveal the presence of two nulls in correlated flux density at ?3.4 and ?8.3 G? and temporal evolution in closure quantities, indicating intrinsic variability of compact structure on a timescale of days, or several light-crossing times for a few billion solar-mass black hole. These measurements provide the first opportunity to image horizon-scale structure in M87.'

(tags: papers data big-data telescopes eht black-holes astronomy)

Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets - Lars Blackmore

from 'Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering' from the 2016 Symposium, published by the National Academies Press, regarding the algorithms used by SpaceX for their autonomous landings:

The computation must be done autonomously, in a fraction of a second. Failure to find a feasible solution in time will crash the spacecraft into the ground. Failure to find the optimal solution may use up the available propellant, with the same result. Finally, a hardware failure may require replanning the trajectory multiple times. Page 39 Suggested Citation:"Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets - Lars Blackmore." National Academy of Engineering. 2017. Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2016 Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/23659. × Save Cancel A general solution to such problems has existed in one dimension since the 1960s (Meditch 1964), but not in three dimensions. Over the past decade, research has shown how to use modern mathematical optimization techniques to solve this problem for a Mars landing, with guarantees that the best solution can be found in time (Açikme?e and Ploen 2007; Blackmore et al. 2010). Because Earth’s atmosphere is 100 times as dense as that of Mars, aerodynamic forces become the primary concern rather than a disturbance so small that it can be neglected in the trajectory planning phase. As a result, Earth landing is a very different problem, but SpaceX and Blue Origin have shown that this too can be solved. SpaceX uses CVXGEN (Mattingley and Boyd 2012) to generate customized flight code, which enables very high-speed onboard convex optimization.

(tags: spacex blue-origin convex-optimization space landing autonomous-vehicles flight algorithms)

Amazon workers call for zero carbon emissions and cancellation of an AWS fossil-fuel friendly program

nice one.

Then the activists saw an article in Gizmodo, a technology news site, that outlined how Amazon’s cloud computing division was building special offerings for oil and gas companies. On its website, Amazon says its customers include BP and Royal Dutch Shell, and its products can “find oil faster,” “recover more oil” and “reduce the cost per barrel.” In a second meeting with Amazon, the workers raised the oil industry connections with the company’s sustainability team; its members did not seem to be aware of the business, according to several employees at the meeting. “That really showed us Amazon is not taking climate change seriously if the highest levels of the sustainability team are not even aware that we have an oil and gas business,” said Ms. Cunningham, who was at the meeting.

(tags: amazon aws fossil-fuels zero-carbon emissions climate-change sustainability)

Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions

Ian Nowland has written up the Amazon 6-pager strategy:

A challenge of organizations is the aggregation of local information to a point where a globally optimal decision can be made in a way all stakeholders have seen their feedback heard and so can “disagree and commit" on the result. This document describes the “6 pager” and “2 pager” document and review meeting process, as a mechanism to address this challenge, as practiced by the document’s author in his time in the EC2 team at Amazon, and then at Two Sigma. [...] The major variant I have also seen is 2 pages with 30 minute review; when the decision is smaller in terms of stakeholders, options or impact. That being said, there is nothing magical about 2 pages, i.e., a 3 page document is fine, it just should be expected to take more than 30 minutes to review.

(tags: amazon business decisions teams documents planning)

Europol Tells Internet Archive That Much Of Its Site Is 'Terrorist Content' | Techdirt

'The Internet Archive has a few staff members that process takedown notices from law enforcement who operate in the Pacific time zone. Most of the falsely identified URLs mentioned here (including the report from the French government) were sent to us in the middle of the night – between midnight and 3am Pacific – and all of the reports were sent outside of the business hours of the Internet Archive. The one-hour requirement essentially means that we would need to take reported URLs down automatically and do our best to review them after the fact. It would be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of relatively obscure items on our site, but the EU IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value.'

(tags: eu europol policing france archive.org archival web freedom censorship fail)

At wit’s end with my preschooler : Parenting

This /r/parenting thread has some good advice on dealing with kids' meltdowns. I wish I had this a few years ago

(tags: parenting kids tantrums anger reddit advice)

Spark memory tuning on EMR

'Best practices for successfully managing memory for Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR', on the AWS Big Data blog. 'In this blog post, I detailed the possible out-of-memory errors, their causes, and a list of best practices to prevent these errors when submitting a Spark application on Amazon EMR. My colleagues and I formed these best practices after thorough research and understanding of various Spark configuration properties and testing multiple Spark applications. These best practices apply to most of out-of-memory scenarios, though there might be some rare scenarios where they don’t apply. However, we believe that this blog post provides all the details needed so you can tweak parameters and successfully run a Spark application.'

(tags: spark emr aws tuning memory ooms java)

Serverless for data scientists

good write-up of Zappa, a helper lib for running serverless Python web apps on Lambda and API Gateway

(tags: zappa talks presentations python data-science serverless lambda api-gateway aws)

Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax. — ProPublica

Your regular reminder that lobbying by tax-preparation agencies has ensured that US taxation is an overcomplex mess which requires you pay a third party to operate:

Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.

(tags: intuit hr-block taxes us-politics lobbying sleaze irs)

S3 Throughput Benchmarks

This is really useful data. As expected the c5ns win, but good to validate that!

I used this to benchmark S3's performance from all 155 EC2 instance types in existence. I put all the data in an interactive spreadsheet. [...] Below is the max throughput I got from each instance type, but the spreadsheet shows you what object sizes and thread counts you need to get that performance.

(tags: ec2 instances instance-types hardware cloud s3 performance benchmarks ops)

ankane/strong_migrations: Catch unsafe Rails migrations at dev time

Strong Migrations detects potentially dangerous operations in [Rails database] migrations, prevents them from running by default, and provides instructions on safer ways to do what you want.

(tags: database migrations rails releases ops databases mysql ruby gems)

Claremont Court, Crescent and Close; Clareville Court and Grove; Claremont Lawns

A nice bit of local history

(tags: slutsend west-farm claremont clareville glasnevin history dublin d11)

ITSCO

super-cheap ancient Thinkpads etc., ideal for low cost linux laptop usage

(tags: cheap thinkpads laptops linux via:markdennehy hardware)

How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon - Vox

Gudetama isn’t so much about relaxation as about the unbearableness of the world around it. Gudetama, in its golden nakedness, questions the meaning of life. If idleness is true bliss, Gudetama asks, then isn’t anything more than that painful?

(tags: characters culture japan gudetama eggs odd ass yolks idleness laziness)

_Screens, Teens, and Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From Three Time-Use-Diary Studies_ - Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, 2019

Paper from Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, of the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford:

The notion that digital-screen engagement decreases adolescent well-being has become a recurring feature in public, political, and scientific conversation. The current level of psychological evidence, however, is far removed from the certainty voiced by many commentators. There is little clear-cut evidence that screen time decreases adolescent well-being, and most psychological results are based on single-country, exploratory studies that rely on inaccurate but popular self-report measures of digital-screen engagement. In this study, which encompassed three nationally representative large-scale data sets from Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom (N = 17,247 after data exclusions) and included time-use-diary measures of digital-screen engagement, we used both exploratory and confirmatory study designs to introduce methodological and analytical improvements to a growing psychological research area. We found little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement — measured throughout the day or particularly before bedtime — and adolescent well-being.

(tags: screens screen-time teens mental-health psychology papers research)

Waterford Distillery on Whisky "Finishing"

Here’s an inexpensive illusion for a whisky brand to acquire more shelf presence. Purchase three barrels of whisky from a generic pool of ex-bourbon matured stocks. Re-rack a couple of these barrels into new barrels – a sherry cask, or maybe you’d like the name of a French chateau to add more gravitas to a label and pull another rabbit out of the hat? Give it a few weeks, then bottle each of them in turn. Instead of one bottle on the shelf, you have three. You’ll more easily catch the eye of the whisky consumer as they walk by, pondering the nature of what ‘finishing’ actually means. These days, the shelves of retailers and at airports are rammed up with all sorts of fancy ‘finishes’ – which is to say a whisky that has been re-racked into another barrel and left to mature for a period of time; perhaps up to a couple of years, but usually just a few brief months.

(tags: whiskey whisky waterford-distillery booze finishing distilling barrels)

Formal GDPR complaint against IAB Europe’s “cookie wall” and GDPR consent guidance

Fantastic :) A formal complaint has been filed with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization:

Tracking and cookie walls: Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope.eu, are confronted with a “cookie wall” that forces them to accept tracking by Google, Facebook, and others, which may then monitor them. Dr. Ryan has complained to the Irish Data Protection Commission that this is a breach of the GDPR, which protects people in Europe from being forced to accept processing for their data for any purpose other than the provision of the requested service. “One should not be forced to accept web-wide profiling by unknown companies as a condition of access to a website”, said Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave. “This would be like Facebook preventing you from accessing the Newsfeed until you have clicked a button permitting it to share your data with Cambridge Analytica.” Simon McGarr of McGarr Solicitors, who has worked on data protection cases for Digital Rights Ireland, represents Dr Ryan in his complaint. Mr McGarr said “Where companies rely on consent to process people’s data it is critical that this is more than a box ticking exercise. For consent to be valid, it must be freely given, informed, specific and unambiguous. There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad in cookie technology – what matters is ensuring it’s applied in a way which respects individuals’ rights.” Challenging IAB Europe’s industry guidance on the GDPR: The complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commission will also test IAB Europe’s GDPR guidance to the online advertising industry. IAB Europe has put itself forward as a primary designer of the online tracking industry’s data protection notices. It has told major media organizations, tracking companies, and advertising technology companies that they can sidestep the GDPR, and rely instead on the ePrivacy Directive, which IAB Europe has interpreted as more lax in protecting personal data. IAB Europe has widely promoted the notion that access to a website or app can be made conditional on consent for data processing that is not necessary for the requested service to be delivered, despite the clear requirements of the GDPR, and statements from several national data protection authorities, that say otherwise. “This complaint will make it plain that the media and advertising industry should not rely on IAB Europe for GDPR guidance”, said Dr Ryan.

(tags: dpc ireland brave iab-europe iab cookies tracking gdpr law eu)

The 9 Categories of Reply Guys

"#WomeninSTEM get a lot of “Reply Guys” who repeat the same unhelpful comments. @shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) have attempted to catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time. presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS"

(tags: twitter thread humor mansplaining sexism misogyny reply-guys funny)

YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Let Toxic Videos Run Rampant - Bloomberg

As of 2017, YouTube’s policy for how content moderators handle conspiracy theories didn’t exist, according to a former moderator who specialized in foreign-language content.  At the end of the year, fewer than twenty people were on the staff for “trust and safety,” the unit overseeing content policies, according to a former staffer. The team had to “fight tooth and nail” for more resources from the tech giant, this person said. A YouTube spokeswoman said that the division has grown “significantly” since but declined to share exact numbers. In February of 2018, the video calling the Parkland shooting victims “crisis actors” went viral on YouTube’s trending page. Policy staff suggested soon after limiting recommendations on the page to vetted news sources. YouTube management rejected the proposal, according to a person with knowledge of the event. The person didn’t know the reasoning behind the rejection, but noted that YouTube was then intent on accelerating its viewing time for videos related to news. 

(tags: youtube google alphabet moderation conspiracy-theories news virality engagement)

April Fool's Day is upon us - What's your best prank given to or received by your kids? : Parenting

heh heh. revenge next year will be sweet

(tags: pranks april-fools kids parenting)

Tesla lane-recognition autopilot fooled by three small stickers

'Tesla autopilot module’s lane recognition function has a good robustness in an ordinary external environment (no strong light, rain, snow, sand and dust interference), but it still doesn’t handle the situation correctly in our test scenario. This kind of attack is simple to deploy, and the materials are easy to obtain. As we talked in the previous introduction of Tesla’s lane recognition function, Tesla uses a pure computer vision solution for lane recognition, and we found in this attack experiment that the vehicle driving decision is only based on computer vision lane recognition results. Our experiments proved that this architecture has security risks and reverse lane recognition is one of the necessary functions for autonomous driving in non-closed roads. In the scene we build, if the vehicle knows that the fake lane is pointing to the reverse [oncoming traffic] lane, it should ignore this fake lane and then it could avoid a traffic accident.'

(tags: adversarial-classification cars ml machine-learning tesla driving self-driving-cars)

We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.

The promise of the internet was that it was going to give voice to the voiceless, visibility to the invisible, and power to the powerless. That’s what originally excited me about it. That’s what originally excited a ton of people about it. It was supposed to be an engine of equality. Suddenly, everyone could tell their story. Suddenly, everyone could sing their song. Suddenly, that one weird kid in Helena, Montana, could find another weird kid just like them in Bakersfield, California, and they could talk and know they weren’t alone. Suddenly, we didn’t need anybody’s permission to publish. We put our stories and songs and messages and artwork where the world could find them. For a while it was beautiful, it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it. We were the ones who were supposed to guide it there, and we failed. We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough. We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer.

(tags: design ethics internet web twitter social-media)

Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime

Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development. We want to enable our customers to go beyond Fastly VCL and move even more logic to the edge, and use any language they choose. Lucet is the engine behind Terrarium, our experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly. Soon, we will make it available on Fastly’s edge cloud as well. A major design requirement for Lucet was to be able to execute on every single request that Fastly handles. That means creating a WebAssembly instance for each of the tens of thousands of requests per second in a single process, which requires a dramatically lower runtime footprint than possible with a browser JavaScript engine. Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs. With Lucet, Fastly’s edge cloud can execute tens of thousands of WebAssembly programs simultaneously, in the same process, without compromising security. The Lucet compiler and runtime work together to ensure each WebAssembly program is allowed access to only its own resources. This means that Fastly’s customers will be able to write and run programs in more common, general-purpose languages, without compromising the security and safety we’ve always offered.

(tags: lucet cdn edge-computing wasm webassembly fastly rust c c++ typescript)

What is cultural Marxism? The alt-right meme in Suella Braverman's speech in Westminster

Cultural Marxism is a theory that started in the early 20th century, which was popularised in the aftermath of the socialist revolution (this great piece in the Guardian explains it in depth). The idea was that Marxism should extend beyond class and into cultural equality and that, through major institutions like schools and the media, cultural values could progressively be changed. The theory was later adopted by the philosophers at the Frankfurt School who posited that the only way to destroy capitalism was to destroy it in all walks of life; where, not just classes, but all genders, races, and religions could live in society equally. While this may seem unimportant, the Frankfurt School’s adoption of – and modifications to – cultural Marxism is where the conspiracy theory truly begins. The Frankfurt School’s predominantly Jewish members of the school were forced to flee to America by the Nazis in the 1940s, where many went on to teach, write, and commentate in mainstream institutions. This, conspiracy theorists claim, is when cultural Marxists began to poison the West – and when cultural Marxists began their attempts to undermine its values. Cultural Marxism’s move from political theory to full memeification was fast-tracked when it was used by mass murderer Anders Breivik. Breivik was the sole perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks in which 77 people died across several sites. Before committing his attacks, much like the Christchurch shooter, Breivik sent an enormous personal manifesto to a group of friends and family which outlined his anti-multiculturalist, racist, and misogynist ideals. In the manifesto, he spends huge chunks of time crediting the writers who pushed cultural Marxist conspiracy theories into the mainstream. The 1,000-page document references “cultural Marxism” and “cultural Marxists” nearly 650 times.   For the growing audience of anti-Semitic, alt-right white supremacists online, his musings have turned him into an icon – and “cultural Marxism” has become a foundational alt-right belief. It became an easy label for those white supremacists looking for an umbrella term to describe the people at which their anger about diversity, feminism, and religious freedom was directed. Cultural Marxist soon became a signal to mean anyone vaguely left-leaning – in some cases, even if this simply meant those who didn’t agree with white supremacy.

(tags: antisemitism alt-right suella-braverman marxism nazis fascism history memes dogwhistles)

Why Is AI Art Copyright So Complicated?

Claims that AI is creating art on its own and that machines are somehow entitled to copyright for this art are simply naive or overblown, and they cloud real concerns about authorship disputes between humans. The introduction of machine learning as an art tool is ironically increasing human involvement, not decreasing it. Specifically, the number of people who can potentially be credited as coauthors of an artwork has skyrocketed. This is because machine learning tools are typically built on a stack of software solutions, each layer having been designed by individual persons or groups of people, all of whom are potential candidates for authorial credit.

(tags: ai art machine-learning ml copyright authors gan)

Pilots had 40 seconds to fix error in tests of Boeing 737 Max flight

During flight simulations recreating the problems with the doomed Lion Air plane, pilots discovered that they had less than 40 seconds to override an automated system on Boeing’s new jets and avert disaster. The pilots tested a crisis situation similar to what investigators suspect went wrong in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last fall. In the tests, a single sensor failed, triggering software designed to help prevent a stall. Once that happened, the pilots had just moments to disengage the system and avoid an unrecoverable nose dive of the Boeing 737 Max, according to two people involved in the testing in recent days.

(tags: boeing 737max mcas fail planes safety disasters)

lucagrulla/cw: The best way to tail AWS CloudWatch Logs from your terminal

It even supports "tail -f". Genius

(tags: tail logs cloudwatch aws ops)

Article 13 will wreck the internet because Swedish MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong voting button / Boing Boing

You have got to be joking.

a group of left-leaning Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they'd intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13. We lost on a technicality, and there is no recourse. This is the most significant piece of internet regulation ever undertaken by a democratic government (that is, excluding Russian and Chinese internet regulations). It will do untold damage to the whole internet. And it's because someone pushed the wrong button.

(tags: sweden meps fail voting evoting censorship article-13 eu europe)

"Baba Is You" is Turing-complete

'This video demonstrates my design for a mechanism in #BabaIsYou which implements Cellular Automaton Rule 110, which suffices to prove the game is Turing-Complete!' The write-up is here: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqrh1m

(tags: baba-is-you games turing-completeness computing)

Making Logic Gates With Crabs

Yukio-Pegio Gunji and Yuta Nishiyama from Kobe University, along with Andrew Adamatzky from the aptly named Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England decided they needed a new way to build logic gates using crabs [....] The colonies of soldier crabs that inhabit the lagoons of Pacific atolls display a unique swarming behavior in their native habitat. When in a swarm of hundreds of individuals, the front of the swarm is driven by random turbulence in the group, while the back end of the swarm simply follows the leaders. Somehow, this is a successful evolutionary strategy, but it can also be exploited to build logic gates using only crabs. The team constructed a Y-shaped maze for a pair of crabs to act as an OR gate. When two soldier crabs are placed at the top of the ‘Y’, they move forward until they meet and exit the maze through the output. This idea can be expanded to a slightly more complex AND gate, functionally identical to the electron-powered AND gate in a 7408 logic chip.

(tags: logic-gates logic soldier-crabs crabs computing hardware swarming nature animals via:theophite)

What causes Ruby memory bloat? – Joyful Bikeshedding

Another likely suspect is the memory allocator. After all, Nate Berkopec and Heroku remarked that fiddling with the memory allocator (either replacing it altogether with jemalloc, or setting the magical environment variable MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2) drastically lowers [Ruby] memory usage.

(tags: ruby memory rails linux malloc bloat jemalloc ops)

Fix glibc's MALLOC_ARENA_MAX variable

It seems that recent versions of glibc (up to glibc 2.25 at least) have some dysfunctional behaviour around malloc's arenas on multi-CPU systems, massively inflating the number of arenas allocated, which inflate reported VM sizes and (for multi-threaded Ruby services in particular) fragmenting memory badly. See also https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/testing-cedar-14-memory-use Presto issue reported with glibc malloc arena-per-thread behaviour resulting in Presto OOMs: https://github.com/prestodb/presto/issues/8993 Hadoop affected by the inflated VM sizes reported as a side effect: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-7154 Good detailed writeup from IBM's WebSphere blog: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/kevgrig/entry/linux_glibc_2_10_rhel_6_malloc_may_show_excessive_virtual_memory_usage

(tags: ops ruby memory malloc allocation arenas tuning fragmentation)

The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google

Talking to Podnews, a BBC spokesperson said that Google is required to sign a licence to link to their podcasts; and that the Distribution Policy also requires Google to supply user data to the BBC. There has been a “consultation with Google”, and the BBC “has no choice but to stop Google from making podcasts available via Google products.”

(tags: bbc facepalm fail google licensing podcasts radio)

‘A Swiss cheese-like material’ that can solve equations | Penn Today

This is incredibly cool.

“For example," Engheta says, "if you were trying to plan the acoustics of a concert hall, you could write an integral equation where the inputs represent the sources of the sound, such as the position of speakers or instruments, as well as how loudly they play. Other parts of the equation would represent the geometry of the room and the material its walls are made of. Solving that equation would give you the volume at different points in the concert hall.”  In the integral equation that describes the relationship between sound sources, room shape and the volume at specific locations, the features of the room — the shape and material properties of its walls — can be represented by the equation’s kernel. This is the part the Penn Engineering researchers are able to represent in a physical way, through the precise arrangement of air holes in their metamaterial Swiss cheese.  “Our system allows you to change the inputs that represent the locations of the sound sources by changing the properties of the wave you send into the system,” Engheta says, “but if you want to change the shape of the room, for example, you will have to make a new kernel.” 

(tags: computing analog computers hardware papers swiss-cheese equations)

Cloud Shell - Google Cloud Platform

I had no idea about this -- every google user has instant in-browser shell access to a Linux VM with 1.7GB of RAM

(tags: shell servers linux google gcp cloudshell)

Troubleshooting Problems With Native (Off-Heap) Memory in Java Applications

quite good advice on dealing with memory problems caused by off-heap DirectByteBuffers in java 8. 'Furthermore, the JDK caches one or more DirectByteBuffers per thread, and by default, there is no limit on the number or size of these buffers. As a result, if a Java app creates many threads that perform I/O using HeapByteBuffers, and/or these buffers are big, the JVM process may end up using a lot of additional native memory that looks like a leak'. 'java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Direct buffer memory' is the indicative error message.

(tags: java off-heap buffers memory memory-leaks gc jdk ops)

Syndrome K

The Fake Disease That Saved Lives:

On October 1943, the Nazis raided a Jewish ghetto in Rome, and many Jews fled to Fatebenefratelli, where Borromeo admitted them as “patients”. The refugees were given a new [fake] fatal disease—Syndrome K—in order to identify them from the actual patients.

(tags: wwii syndrome-k fakes diseases rome giovanni-borromeo hospitals jews resistance)

cel-go

The Go implementation of the Common Expression Language (CEL). CEL is a non-Turing complete language designed to be portable and fast. It is well suited to embedded applications expression evaluation with familiar syntax and features, protocol buffer support, and not needing the sandboxing needed for a runtime like JavaScript or Lua.

(tags: scripting golang go cel languages coding configuration config embedded)

XXH3

'a cross-over inspired by many other great hash algorithms, which proves substantially faster than existing variants of xxHash, across basically all dimensions.'

(tags: hashing algorithms xxhash xxh3 checksums performance)

2-hour-long meetings can impair cognitive functioning

'Study shoes three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so.' Well, I'd say that fatigue could also result in this, but it's interesting to see how unhealthy the typical office environment can be. (via Jeff Dean)

(tags: via:jeffdean meetings work offices brain co2 cognition)

The Oxygen of Amplification

Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, this report provides a snapshot of an industry [news media] caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology. After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm. As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.

(tags: media news harassment nazis fascism overton-window journalism racism press)

Ash Sarkar on how to counter the new right

'a) Acknowledge that the fascist threat has changed. It's political operations are far more nebulous and diffuse; it works in political institutions and dark corners of the internet; it will adopt and distort liberal tropes and talking points. b) Deal with the fact that traditional forms of policing will be of little effectiveness in countering it. Those with the most power to inhibit the dissemination of far-right and racist ideology are the digital platforms they rely on: reddit, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. c) Transform current affairs media. For too long, producers and editors have taken the alt-right at their word, and framed issues as free speech/limits of offensive humour. That must change. Unless you're willing to do rigorous research first, don't commission the debate. d) Overhaul the teaching of PSHE & Citizenship in education to prepare young people for the desensitising and extreme content they will see online. Create space for healthy debate and discussion in respectful environments. Don't let groomers take advantage of their curiousity. e) Get a very big bin, and put Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, and Douglas Murray in it. Then fire the bin into outer space.'

(tags: alt-right fascism media politics internet social-media twitter reddit ash-sarkar)

Why Do so Many Egyptian Statues Have Broken Noses? - Artsy

wow, TIL. 'The ancient Egyptians, it’s important to note, ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or, in the case of mere mortals, part of that deceased human being’s soul could inhabit a statue inscribed for that particular person. These campaigns of vandalism were therefore intended to “deactivate an image’s strength,” as Bleiberg put it.'

(tags: egypt culture art history noses)

Several Boeing 737 Max 8 pilots in U.S. complained about suspected safety flaw | Airlines | Dallas News

'one captain calling the flight manual "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient"' 'The disclosures found by The News reference problems during Boeing 737 Max 8 flights with an autopilot system, and they were all during takeoff and nose-down situations while trying to gain altitude.'

(tags: boeing planes safety autopilots 737max)

What (And Why) I’m Stockpiling For Brexit

Jack Monroe's shopping list. may be coming in handy soon, unfortunately

(tags: brexit fuck stockpiling prep food tins)

The "Tragedy of the Commons" was invented by a white supremacist based on a false history, and it's toxic bullshit / Boing Boing

Hardin's paper starts with a history of the English Commons -- publicly held lands that were collectively owned and managed -- and the claim that commons routinely fell prey to the selfish human impulse to overgraze your livestock on public land (and that even non-selfish people would overgraze their animals because they knew that their more-selfish neighbors would do so even if they didn't). But this isn't what actually happened to the Commons: they were stable and well-managed until other factors (e.g. rich people trying to acquire even more land) destabilized them. Hardin wasn't just inventing false histories out of a vacuum. He was, personally, a nasty piece of work: a white supremacist and eugenicist, and the Tragedy of the Commons paper is shot through with this vile ideology, arguing that poor people should not be given charity lest they breed beyond their means (Hardin also campaigned against food aid). Hardin was a director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white nationalist Social Contract Press, and co-founded anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund.

(tags: commons capitalism racism garrett-hardin tragedy-of-the-commons politics privatization public-ownership)

How Theranos used the USPTO to defraud investors and patients

When legendary grifter Elizabeth Holmes was 19 years old, she conceived of a medical device that could perform extensive diagnostics in an eyeblink from only a single drop of blood; she had no idea how such a device would work or whether it was even possible, but that didn't stop her from drawing up a patent application for her "invention" and repeatedly submitting to the patent office until, eventually, she was awarded a patent for what amounted to a piece of uninspiring design fiction. For Holmes, the patent was key to convincing investors, partners, and patients that her massive, years-long fraud (a company called "Theranos" bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars) was legit; the USPTO helped her out by trumpeting the importance of patents to "inventors" like Holmes, comparing her to Benjamin Franklin in their public communications. Patents are only supposed to be issued for devices with "utility" -- that is, they have to actually work before you can get a patent for them. But it's been decades since the USPTO has paid meaningful attention to this criterion when evaluating applications, handing out patents for imaginary "inventions" to con artists, delusional hucksters, and other "inventors" who are willing to pay the filing fees that keep the lights on at the Patent Office. And since most people only have a vague idea of the rigor used in patent examination, these patents for design fiction can be used as impressive "proof" when crooks set out to deceive their marks. [....] 'More than a decade after Holmes’ first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device. By then the USPTO had granted it hundreds of patents. Holmes had been constructing a fantasy world from the minute she started writing her first application, and the agency was perfectly happy to play along.'

(tags: fraud patents uspto theranos inventions boing-boing)

National Climate Assessment: How to deal with despair over climate change - Vox

The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. ... Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you. That same IPCC report revealed that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global climate emissions. These people are locking you and everything you love into a tomb. You have every right to be pissed all the way off. And we have to make them hear about it.

(tags: climate climate-change anger capitalism ipcc fossil-fuels future)

camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price tracker

'Our free Amazon price tracker monitors millions of products and alerts you when prices drop, helping you decide when to buy.' Supports amazon.co.uk, handily

(tags: amazon shopping deals buying money)

Why do remote meetings suck so much?

Unstructured, "caucus"-style meetings suck particularly badly for remote workers.

When audio/visual delays exacerbate the caucus problem for people who always get the floor in meetings, it looks to them like a new problem. It’s not new; it’s just normally experienced by people in meetings with lower caucus scores. Leadership doesn’t notice because people in leadership positions tend to have higher caucus scores, and being in a position of leadership also tends to boost your caucus score (basically because people interrupt you less). But that’s a weakness of the way we identify decision-makers: good ideas come from everywhere, and especially from people who do a lot of thinking and observing before they say anything. Making meetings more accessible to remote employees doesn’t just make meetings more accessible to remote employees; it makes meetings more accessible to everyone. 

(tags: team meetings remote communication management caucus-score remote-work)

Why did Sumerians use the sexagesimal system?

TIL that 60 is countable using the fingers of both hands, and this ancient Mesopotamian counting technique is still used in India, Pakistan, Indochina, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Egypt apparently

(tags: sexagesimal 12 60 counting fingers history sumerian mesopotamia)

Algorithms aren’t racist. Your skin is just too dark.

More than a few observers have recommended that instead of pointing out failures, I should simply make sure I use additional lighting. Silence is not the answer. The suggestion to get more lights to increase illumination in an already lit room is a stop gap solution. Suggesting people with dark skin keep extra lights around to better illuminate themselves misses the point. Should we change ourselves to fit technology or make technology that fits us?

(tags: ethics racism ai algorithms cameras melanin skin video videoconferencing)

"Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go" (paper)

'Go advocates for the usage of message passing as the means of inter-thread communication and provides several new concurrency mechanisms and libraries to ease multi-threading programming. It is important to understand the implication of these new proposals and the comparison of message passing and shared memory synchronization in terms of program errors, or bugs. Unfortunately, as far as we know, there has been no study on Go’s concurrency bugs. In this paper, we perform the first systematic study on concurrency bugs in real Go programs. We studied six popular Go software including Docker, Kubernetes, and gRPC. We analyzed 171 concurrency bugs in total, with more than half of them caused by non-traditional, Go-specific problems. Apart from root causes of these bugs, we also studied their fixes, performed experiments to reproduce them, and evaluated them with two publicly-available Go bug detectors. Overall, our study provides a better understanding on Go’s concurrency models and can guide future researchers and practitioners in writing better, more reliable Go software and in developing debugging and diagnosis tools for Go.' (via Bill de hOra)

(tags: via:dehora golang go concurrency bugs lint synchronization threading threads bug-detection)

Paper: Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs

a software based, large-scale regex matcher designed to match multiple patterns at once (up to tens of thousands of patterns at once) and to ‘stream‘ (that is, match patterns across many different ‘stream writes’ without holding on to all the data you’ve ever seen). To my knowledge this makes it unique. RE2 is software based but doesn’t scale to large numbers of patterns; nor does it stream (although it could). It occupies a fundamentally different niche to Hyperscan; we compared the performance of RE2::Set (the RE2 multiple pattern interface) to Hyperscan a while back. Most back-tracking matchers (such as libpcre) are one pattern at a time and are inherently incapable of streaming, due to their requirement to backtrack into arbitrary amounts of old input.

(tags: regex regular-expressions algorithms hyperscan sensory-networks regexps simd nfa)

Thought-provoking thread on Facebook/YouTube content moderation

Extremely thought-provoking thread on the horrors of Facebook/YouTube content moderation, from Andrew Strait:

My time doing this work convinced me there is no ultimate mitigation measure for the mental harm it causes. Automation is not a silver bullet - it requires massive labeled data sets by moderators on a continuing basis to ensure accuracy and proper model fit. There are steps to make this process less worse, but IMO it all comes back to a basic question - what technologies are worth the incredible human suffering and cost that moderators will inevitably experience? Is image search worth it? Is YouTube? Is Facebook? I don't have an answer. But these platforms create the need for this kind of horrific work and that must be considered at the forefront of design and deployment of any platform, not as an afterthought.

(tags: horror moderation youtube facebook video content mental-health andrew-strait image-search images labelling google)

Argo Workflows & Pipelines

Nice new workflow system built on Kubernetes and Docker

(tags: k8s kubernetes docker containers workflow pipelines architecture batch nightly-jobs ops)

databricks/devbox

interesting, a synchronization daemon from Databricks which they use to synch up dev repos with a remote "devbox" in EC2 for heavyweight compilation

(tags: remote-compiles compiling devbox databricks coding tools dev ec2)

The Woolsey fire started at the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory

'The speculative and non-credible have now happened. A fire burned through most of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a site contaminated with radioactivity and toxic chemicals allowed by decades of shoddy environmental controls.' This site is legendary as a place where dangerous, toxic and radioactive chemicals were experimented with - indeed it was where the 1959 sodium reactor partial meltdown occurred. I wouldn't want to have been downwind of this fire...

(tags: health santa-susana-field-laboratory nuclear fast-breeders atomic-energy meltdowns history toxic-waste california woolsey-fire wildfires)

'digital health will lead to forms of enslavement we can barely imagine'

Author and Consultant Gastroenterologist Dr. Seamus O'Mahony:

Perhaps most alarming of all is his analysis of the future of the world of digital health - "Anyone with a smartphone will be monitoring themselves, or - more likely - will be monitored by some external agency. Health and life insurance companies will offer financial inducements to people to be monitored, and big corporations will undoubtedly make the wearing of health-tracking devices mandatory. The danger of all of this is that in countries where health care is paid for by insurance, a new underclass of uninsured people will emerge. Digital health," he points out, "is presented as something empowering, but the reality is that it will lead to forms of enslavement that we can barely imagine. Facebook and Google have shown how easily people hand over their privacy and personal data in return for a few shiny trinkets. They have also shown how this personal data can be monetised."

(tags: health medicine tracking privacy insurance surveillance data)

Cocktail similarity by Levenshtein distance

Love it. 'I was recently figuring out a minimum-viable bar setup for making cocktails at home, and a system for memorizing & recording recipes. When I started writing down the first basic ingredients, I started noticing that cocktails are very close to each other - if you ignore fruit rinds and ice and such, an Americano is a Negroni with soda water instead of gin. An Old Fashioned is a Manhattan with sugar instead of vermouth. So I wondered - what’s a cocktail edit distance?'

(tags: edit-distance levenshtein-distance algorithms visualization cocktails d3 recipes booze)

Pinterest blocks vaccine-related searches in bid to fight anti-vaxx propaganda | Technology | The Guardian

The phenomenon on display in the Facebook search result screenshots is known in technology circles as a “data void”, after a paper by the Data & Society founder and researcher danah boyd. For certain search terms, boyd explains, “the available relevant data is limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic”. In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill with fear-mongering propaganda and misinformation. [...] Pinterest has responded by building a “blacklist” of “polluted” search terms. “We are doing our best to remove bad content, but we know that there is bad content that we haven’t gotten to yet,” explained Ifeoma Ozoma, a public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest. “We don’t want to surface that with search terms like ‘cancer cure’ or ‘suicide’. We’re hoping that we can move from breaking the site to surfacing only good content. Until then, this is preferable.”

(tags: data-voids danah-boyd pinterest antivax vaccination misinformation disinfo vaccines truth blacklisting)

The log/event processing pipeline you can't have - apenwarr

So good. Apenwarr knows how to design a system.

Simple things don't break. Our friends on the "let's use structured events to make metrics" team streamed those events straight into a database, and it broke all the time, because databases have configuration options and you inevitably set those options wrong, and it'll fall over under heavy load, and you won't find out until you're right in the middle of an emergency and you really want to see those logs. Or events.

(tags: logging scalability klog kernel log-processing events embedded ops)

[1902.04023] Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using t-Digests

'We present on-line algorithms for computing approximations of rank-based statistics that give high accuracy, particularly near the tails of a distribution, with very small sketches. Notably, the method allows a quantile q to be computed with an accuracy relative to max(q,1?q) rather than absolute accuracy as with most other methods. This new algorithm is robust with respect to skewed distributions or ordered datasets and allows separately computed summaries to be combined with no loss in accuracy. An open-source Java implementation of this algorithm is available from the author. Independent implementations in Go and Python are also available.' (via Tony Finch)

(tags: java go python open-source quantiles percentiles approximation statistics sketching algorithms via:fanf)

81 Megapixel image of the moon

I took nearly 50,000 images of the night sky to make an 81 Megapixel image of Tuesday's moon. Uncompressed image linked in the comments. [OC]

(tags: via:elliot art moon astronomy photography hd)

ColouriseSG

'Colourise your black and white photos - A deep learning colouriser prototype specifically for old Singaporean photos.'

(tags: color colour photography ai deep-learning ml colouriser colourisation singapore history black-and-white photos)

The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet | WIRED

"Eat independent sites, mostly not Facebook" as Anil Dash puts it. This is pretty much how I use Mastodon fwiw

(tags: facebook twitter internet web social-media mastodon fediverse anil-dash)

igloohome Smart Mortise

Now this is clever. A "smart lock" which doesn't require access to the internet; uses crypto to allow generation of transient time-limited access codes which you can give to other people, and a TOTP-style algorithm to generate one-time access codes. (via threeze)

(tags: via:threeze smart-locks locks iot crypto igloohome homes)

Functional 3D Printing

nifty subreddit for useful 3D print models

(tags: 3d-printing 3d printing gadgets maker)

The curious case of disappearing buses

Nice investigation into some dodgy pseudo-real-time bus location data in the Bristol real time passenger information system (via Tony Finch)

So what have we learned? One thing we are sure is that data of different qualities – genuinely real-time, pseudo real-time (Type 2 and Type 1), and non-real-time (scheduled) data – all present in the data stream. Among these the most interesting are Type 2 pseudo real-time data. They appear to be the root cause of the phenomenon of disappearing buses. Type 2 pseudo-real-time data are not totally bogus. One possible explanation of their existence can be this. The bus company has limited but not full tracking information on some of their buses. For example, it may know the location of a bus only when the bus leaves the bus terminal. Instead of not showing any data at all about the bus, the bus company uses interpolation to predict the locations of the bus, and reports these as if those are real-time data.

(tags: via:fanf bristol buses public-transport rtpi estimation open-data)

Blockchain: What's Not To Like?

'We're in a period when blockchain or "Distributed Ledger Technology" is the Solution to Everything™, so it is inevitable that it will be proposed as the solution to the problems of academic communication and digital preservation. These proposals typically assume, despite the evidence, that real-world blockchain implementations actually deliver the theoretical attributes of decentralization, immutability, anonymity, security, scalability, sustainability, lack of trust, etc. The proposers appear to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the infallible Bitcoin protocol to the world on golden tablets; they typically don't appreciate or cite the nearly three decades of research and implementation that led up to it. This talk will discuss the mis-match between theory and practice in blockchain technology, and how it applies to various proposed applications of interest to the CNI audience.'

(tags: talks bitcoin blockchain icos ethereum dao security)

Attack of the week: searchable encryption and the ever-expanding leakage function

In all seriousness: database encryption has been a controversial subject in our field. I wish I could say that there’s been an actual debate, but it’s more that different researchers have fallen into different camps, and nobody has really had the data to make their position in a compelling way. There have actually been some very personal arguments made about it. The schools of thought are as follows: The first holds that any kind of database encryption is better than storing records in plaintext and we should stop demanding things be perfect, when the alternative is a world of constant data breaches and sadness. To me this is a supportable position, given that the current attack model for plaintext databases is something like “copy the database files, or just run a local SELECT * query”, and the threat model for an encrypted database is “gain persistence on the server and run sophisticated statistical attacks.” Most attackers are pretty lazy, so even a weak system is probably better than nothing. The countervailing school of thought has two points: sometimes the good is much worse than the perfect, particularly if it gives application developers an outsized degree of confidence of the security that their encryption system is going to provide them. If even the best encryption protocol is only throwing a tiny roadblock in the attacker’s way, why risk this at all? Just let the database community come up with some kind of ROT13 encryption that everyone knows to be crap and stop throwing good research time into a problem that has no good solution. I don’t really know who is right in this debate. I’m just glad to see we’re getting closer to having it.

(tags: cryptography attacks encryption database crypto security storage ppi gdpr search databases via:ecksor)

Live Transcribe

Google's new live transcription app -- 'see instant captions anywhere. Whether you’re ordering a coffee or meeting someone new, Live Transcribe helps you communicate in the moment.' If this works, it'd be fantastic for the deaf and hard of hearing... nifty!

(tags: android google deaf hearing transcription accessibility)

Marc Brooker on leases

Good advice from Marc Brooker on using leases as a way to handle leader election in a distributed system: 'Leases are a nice primitive because they are easy to understand, easy (if subtle) to implement correctly, require very little co-ordination, optimistic, and don't require much load on the strongly consistent service.'

(tags: leases primitives distributed-systems distcomp networking coding marc-brooker algorithms)

using BGP to compute best paths across the London Underground

this is deeply silly, but also very impressive (via Tony Finch)

(tags: via:fanf bgp networking internet routing london-underground trains)

hrvach/fpg1

a PDP-1 implementation in FPGA:

DEC PDP-1 is a computer designed and produced in 1959. Considering the pace of change in computing, that might seem like the prehistoric age. However, it is also surprisingly modern and proves a point that the basic concepts still withstand the test of time. This project is trying to re-create this computer in FPGA and enable running the first real computer game, SpaceWar!, on a modern display and gamepad. It is designed to run on the MiSTer platform, a retro gaming system based on the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA board. The implementation is done in Verilog, a hardware description language specifying the structure and behavior of digital logic circuits. This is not a software emulation because there is no CPU executing it. Since this is my first Verilog project ever and its purpose was to teach myself about FPGA, don't expect too much. Beginners often make mistakes or break best practice. Please keep this in mind. Advice and suggestions are welcome!

(tags: pdp1 history computers spacewar fpga hardware verilog)

Revealed: The dark-money Brexit ads flooding social media | openDemocracy

Oh god, here we go again. Facebook ads need to be regulated.

Over the last four months, the People’s Vote and Best for Britain campaigns spent £266,369 and £183,943, respectively. Neither of these anti-Brexit groups is fully transparent either: both publish some details about themselves, such as addresses, but do not publish full details of all funders and donors. During the same time period, Britain’s Future [which does not declare its funders and has no published address] has spent more than £200,000 on Facebook ads. While anti-Brexit spending has slowed down in recent weeks, however, adverts pushing a ‘no deal’ Brexit have spiked. Britain’s Future has spent more than £110,000 on Facebook ads since mid-January. It is not clear where the money for this huge ad push has come from.

(tags: facebook advertising transparency brexit ads political-ads uk)

An In-Depth Guide to Nginx Metrics

decent list of what nginx offers in terms of instrumentation

(tags: nginx metrics ops graphing scalyr)

Google Hired Gig Economy Workers for Project Maven

Other tech giants are reportedly interested in engaging the military as it continues to deploy artificial intelligence technology. Much larger machine-learning projects may require vastly new engagement from gig economy workers, who may unknowingly engage in the work. “Workers absolutely should have the right to know what they are working on, and especially when moral or politically controversial activities are involved,” said Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College, in an email to The Intercept. “It’s a basic dimension of democracy, which should not stop at either the factory or the platform ‘door.’ For too long, the country has tolerated erosion of basic civil rights in the workplace, as corporations assume ever-more control over their workforces. It’s time to win them back.”

(tags: google project-maven ai training labelling work ethics military)

Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

omg. /usr/bin came about because Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie ran out of disk space on the root volume. Mind = blown

You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969? Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage. When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).

(tags: filesystem unix history ken-thompson dennis-ritchie disk-space usr)

NYC cops now using Chinese "Sky Net" video surveillance systems

This is absolutely scary. Systematic surveillance:

The surveillance tools are identical to those used in Sky Net in China, the largest video surveillance system on Earth, Chinese government research institutes and a company involved in the project said. At a time when China and the United States are locked in a rivalry on several fronts including trade and technology, Hikvision – the world’s largest surveillance technology company, which is state-owned and based in Hangzhou in eastern China – has supplied the equipment and software used by an American force that polices a population of about 8.6 million people. It has been claimed that Hikvision’s system can accurately identify faces regardless of race, whereas some Western-developed technology had previously been more accurate for white people than for black citizens – although the NYPD has not discussed its reasons for using the Chinese technology. The Sky Net programme, now renamed Pingan Chengshi, or Safe Cities, claimed to have connected 170 million cameras across China last year. By 2020, another 400 million units will be installed, it said, casting a watchful eye on every two citizens. Beijing plans to be able to identify anyone, anytime, anywhere in China within three seconds.

(tags: surveillance new-york nyc skynet china cctv hikvision)

Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration. – kentcdodds

Nice short summary of Kent Dodds' approach to testing, which I mostly agree with :)

(tags: integration coding testing unit-tests integration-tests system-tests)

One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With The FBI

Family Tree reveal that they are providing access to customer-submitted DNA records:

“We are nearing a de-facto national DNA database,” Natalie Ram, an assistant law professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in bioethics and criminal justice, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t choose our genetic relatives, and I cannot sever my genetic relation to them. There’s nothing voluntary about that.” Others aired similar concerns. “I would be very against Family Tree DNA allowing law enforcement to have open access to their DNA database,” Debbie Kennett, a British genealogy enthusiast and honorary research associate at University College London said. “I don’t think it’s right for law enforcement to use a database without the informed consent of the consumer.”

(tags: biometrics privacy dna family-tree via:antonio-regalado genealogy data-protection fbi us)

remote AC control for a Nissan Leaf using a Google Home

'OK Google, heat up the car' - nifty

(tags: ok-google google google-home nissan-leaf cars heating gadgets home)

The right-wing history of the urban models which inspired SimCity

Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today.

(tags: simulation cities society politics history simcity games jay-forrester will-wright sociology)

The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight at the Hoover Dam

This is amazing! I wish I'd noticed it when I visited Hoover Dam.

The center of the circle traced by the axial precession is actually the massive flag pole in the center of the plaza. This axial circle is prominently marked around the pole, and the angle of Polaris was depicted as precisely as possible to show where it would have been on the date of the dam’s opening. Hansen used the rest of the plaza floor to show the location of the planets visible that evening, and many of the bright stars that appear in the night sky at that location. By combining planet locations with the angle of precession, we are able to pinpoint the time of the dam’s completion down to within a day. We are now designing a similar system?—?though with moving parts?—?in the dials of the 10,000 Year Clock. It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now. Hopefully the Clock will still be ticking and Hansen’s terrazzo floor will still be there, even if it continues to baffle visitors.

(tags: hoover-dam history precession astronomy long-now polaris vega thuban stars clocks)

Facial Recognition Is the Perfect Tool for Oppression

'We believe facial recognition technology is the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented. It’s the missing piece in an already dangerous surveillance infrastructure, built because that infrastructure benefits both the government and private sectors. And when technologies become so dangerous, and the harm-to-benefit ratio becomes so imbalanced, categorical bans are worth considering. The law already prohibits certain kinds of dangerous digital technologies, like spyware. Facial recognition technology is far more dangerous. It’s worth singling out, with a specific prohibition on top of a robust, holistic, value-based, and largely technology-neutral regulatory framework. Such a layered system will help avoid regulatory whack-a-mole where lawmakers are always chasing tech trends. Surveillance conducted with facial recognition systems is intrinsically oppressive. The mere existence of facial recognition systems, which are often invisible, harms civil liberties, because people will act differently if they suspect they’re being surveilled. Even legislation that holds out the promise of stringent protective procedures won’t prevent chill from impeding crucial opportunities for human flourishing by dampening expressive and religious conduct.'

(tags: tech surveillance facial-recognition faces oppression future chilling-effects)

Amendment-apocalypse: Spineless MPs just voted against reality

... in a way, it was typical May tactics. She prioritised vague promises over content. She sabotaged something - anything - in order to fight another day. She made promises she could not keep on issues she knew to be false. Once again, she said anything, anything at all, to survive just a little longer. [...] it has significant medium-term implications too. Firstly, it shows why the backstop was needed in the first place. This country has become an unreliable negotiating partner. It will demand something one day then seek to detonate it the next. The events in the Commons today actually had the ironic effect of reaffirming to the EU the need for the backstop insurance policy. On a broader level, we are about to go around the world asking for trade deals. But we're seen, by everyone, on the largest stage imaginable, to be fundamentally politically insane. We've gone mad and everyone is looking. This is as bleak a day as we have had in the entire Brexit process. All roads now seem blocked. MPs won't back an extension to Article 50. They won't back May's deal. And they won't back no-deal. They've opted for fairy tales over action. Things are looking very bad indeed.

(tags: brexit politics uk eu backstop)

Security Things to Consider When Your Apartment Goes ‘Smart’

Good advice, and I'd be pretty unhappy about this if it happened to me too.

If you’re a tenant in the US, it’s very likely that a management-provided smart home system is headed your way in the near future. Carefully evaluate your family’s personal threat model, and consider the plausible digital ways which these systems could be exploited. Spend some time reading into the vendor. Respectfully and courteously encourage your property management company and their smart system vendor to adopt industry best practices in securing smart hubs physically and digitally, the networks they are connected to, and and resident data at rest and in transit in their infrastructure. Request your property managers clearly and decisively address privacy concerns such as data ownership and resale in writing. If solid answers in writing don’t assuage legitimate concerns, consider politely seeking an option to opt-out – and make your threat model clear to them, if you’re in a sensitive situation.

(tags: locks iot security internetofshit tenancy renting smart-hubs smart-homes smart-locks)

Daniel Edward Heffernan’s Map of Dublin, 1861

These maps are really remarkable work:

Heffernan’s map of Dublin, published 1 May 1861, is both highly unusual and very fine. No other map of the time gives such a bird’s eye, almost axonometric, view of the city’s edifices. It shows in exceptional elevational detail both a number of the city’s principal public buildings, but also its less vaunted institutions; prisons, hospitals, workhouses etc., all within the municipal boundary set by the two canals.

(tags: daniel-heffernan history 19th-century dublin ireland maps)

In praise of the sci-fi corridor

A lovely appraisal of classic 1970s SF set design

(tags: sets sf scifi movies corridors)

We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it

This is amazing:

If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease. That’s bad, as gum disease affects around a third of all people. But the good news is that a drug that blocks the main toxins of P. gingivalis is entering major clinical trials this year, and research published today shows it might stop and even reverse Alzheimer’s. There could even be a vaccine.

(tags: via:johnlooney gingivitis alzheimers brain health medicine teeth)

Brexit: debunking "trading on WTO terms"

a favourite brexiteer talking point demolished

(tags: wto trade brexit uk)

research!rsc: Our Software Dependency Problem

The kind of critical examination of specific dependencies that I outlined in this article is a significant amount of work and remains the exception rather than the rule. But I doubt there are any developers who actually make the effort to do this for every possible new dependency. I have only done a subset of them for a subset of my own dependencies. Most of the time the entirety of the decision is “let’s see what happens.” Too often, anything more than that seems like too much effort. But the Copay and Equifax attacks are clear warnings of real problems in the way we consume software dependencies today. We should not ignore the warnings. I offer three broad recommendations. * Recognize the problem. If nothing else, I hope this article has convinced you that there is a problem here worth addressing. We need many people to focus significant effort on solving it. * Establish best practices for today. We need to establish best practices for managing dependencies using what’s available today. This means working out processes that evaluate, reduce, and track risk, from the original adoption decision through to production use. In fact, just as some engineers specialize in testing, it may be that we need engineers who specialize in managing dependencies. * Develop better dependency technology for tomorrow. Dependency managers have essentially eliminated the cost of downloading and installing a dependency. Future development effort should focus on reducing the cost of the kind of evaluation and maintenance necessary to use a dependency. For example, package discovery sites might work to find more ways to allow developers to share their findings. Build tools should, at the least, make it easy to run a package’s own tests. More aggressively, build tools and package management systems could also work together to allow package authors to test new changes against all public clients of their APIs. Languages should also provide easy ways to isolate a suspect package.

(tags: dependencies software coding work)

PhoneNumbers.ie

'Do you want to find out information about an unknown caller?' -- reputation service for random callers in Ireland. Very useful to find out if others have received scammy calls from a given number

(tags: reputation phone telephone callers scams phishing ireland)

The Plot Against George Soros

The anti-Soros campaign was entirely artificial, as a means to elect Orban in Hungary:

Orbán was busy creating a new, more dramatic story of the nation. Hungary, which had collaborated with the Nazis, was painted as a victim, surrounded by external enemies, under perpetual siege, first from the Ottomans, then the Nazis, and later the Communists. Hungary’s mission was clear: to defend against its enemies, and to preserve Christianity against encroaching Islam and secular forces. Against this backdrop, Finkelstein had an epiphany. What if the veil of the conspiracy were to be lifted and a shadowy figure appear, controlling everything? The puppet master. Someone who not only controlled the “big capital” but embodied it. A real person. A Hungarian. Strange, yet familiar. That person was Soros, Finkelstein told Birnbaum. Birnbaum was mesmerized: Soros was the perfect enemy. [....] Despite everything that followed, Birnbaum is proud of the campaign against Soros: “Soros was a perfect enemy. It was so obvious. It was the simplest of all products, you just had to pack it and market it.” The product was so good, it sold itself and went global. In 2017, Italians started talking about Soros-financed immigrant boats arriving on the shores. In the US, some people suspected Soros was behind the migrant caravan entering from Central America. A Polish member of parliament called Soros the “most dangerous man in the world.” Putin referred dismissively to Soros during a press conference with Trump in Helsinki. Trump even claimed that the demonstrations against Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh were sponsored by Soros. Today Finkelstein and Birnbaum’s work in Hungary has echoes everywhere. Birnbaum denied the suggestion that he had run anti-Soros campaigns outside of Hungary. But perhaps he didn’t have to. Anyone could pick up the ideas and run with them. Finkelstein and Birnbaum had turned Soros into a meme. Right-wing sites like Breitbart, or the Kremlin-controlled Russia Today, could simply adopt the Hungarian campaign, translate it into other languages, and feed it with local arguments. If right-wing movements want to campaign today, they can source Soros material from the internet. Anti-Soros material is a globalized, freely available, and adaptable open-source weapon. Birnbaum said it was the common denominator of the nationalist movement.

(tags: george-soros conspiracies george-birnbaum antisemitism hungary arthur-finkelstein politics campaigning)

Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring - 2018 Edition

interesting to see how the other half lives, as Stack Overflow is a .NET shop

(tags: logging monitoring stack-overflow dotnet ops metrics)

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.” While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users.

(tags: advertising technology surveillance facebook google adtech capitalism business)

Instance Price Guide

Nicely done EC2 instance price comparison site, with spot instance and reserved pricing discounts taken into account; possibly better than ec2instances.info

(tags: ec2 instances aws pricing hosts spot-instances money)

mbasic.facebook.com

Super-basic HTML-only view of Facebook -- ugly but blisteringly fast with no HTML5 crapola

(tags: light facebook basic html javascript)

Opinion | The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class - The New York Times

Pankaj Mishra wastes no time getting the boot into the ineptitude of the ruling-class Brexiteers. it's glorious

Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Business people everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.

(tags: britain india brexit ireland pakistan asia partition history colonialism pankaj-mishra)

_Amazon Aurora: On Avoiding Distributed Consensus for I/Os, Commits, and Membership Changes_, SIGMOD '18

One of the more novel differences between Aurora and other relational databases is how it pushes redo processing to a multi-tenant scale-out storage service, purpose-built for Aurora. Doing so reduces networking traffic, avoids checkpoints and crash recovery, enables failovers to replicas without loss of data, and enables fault-tolerant storage that heals without database involvement. Traditional implementations that leverage distributed storage would use distributed consensus algorithms for commits, reads, replication, and membership changes and amplify cost of underlying storage. In this paper, we describe how Aurora avoids distributed consensus under most circumstances by establishing invariants and leveraging local transient state. Doing so improves performance, reduces variability, and lowers costs.

(tags: papers toread aurora amazon aws pdf scalability distcomp state sql mysql postgresql distributed-consensus)

On the association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. 'if we believe screens are destroying a generation [of kids] that would mean that so are potatoes, having asthma, not drinking milk, going to movies, music, religion, being tall, biking, and wearing glasses' [...] 'The take home from this new study is the evidence that smart phones are destroying a generation is not any stronger than potatoes and eyeglasses are destroying a generation. The moral panic surrounding the fear of screens is simply not supported by good science.'

(tags: potatoes funny glasses asthma milk movies music religion cycling screens screentime kids teenagers wellbeing mental-health)

Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back - Speaker Deck

So much agreement with this slide deck, particularly the list of limitations of current FaaS: 15 min lifetimes; I/O bottlenecks; no inbound network comms; no specialized hardware; and the general horribleness of using DynamoDB or S3 state as a platform for distributed computing protocols.

(tags: faas lambda serverless fail slides architecture aws dynamodb s3 cloud)

Some facts on immigration to Ireland

Handy to have to hand next time right-wing talking points emerge:

Let’s summarise: Ireland has a relatively high level of non-citizens in its population. But this is down to the high level of UK citizens and citizens from other English-speaking countries (US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Ireland has significantly fewer non-citizens from outside the English-speaking world than high-income EU countries. The proportion of non-citizens has remained stable over the last 10 years (i.e. there is no ‘surge’). Non-citizens in Ireland are more integrated into the labour market than any other high-income EU country – that is, there is lower unemployment among non-citizens. So much for the ‘sponging-off-the-state’ argument. We have had far fewer asylum-seekers and we grant asylum to far fewer than most other high-income EU countries. The claims of the Far Right and their allies collapse when we look to reality. 

(tags: immigration facts statistics ireland asylum-seekers)

The Embroidered Computer

an exploration into using historic gold embroidery materials and knowledge to craft a programmable 8 bit computer. Solely built from a variety of metal threads, magnetic, glass and metal beads, and being inspired by traditional crafting routines and patterns, the piece questions the appearance of current digital and electronic technologies surrounding us, as well as our interaction with them. Technically, the piece consists of (textile) relays, similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors. Visually, the gold materials, here used for their conductive properties, arranged into specific patterns to fulfil electronic functions, dominate the work. Traditionally purely decorative, their pattern here defines they function. They lay bare core digital routines usually hidden in black boxes. Users are invited to interact with the piece in programming the textile to compute for them.

(tags: electronics computers computing art embroidery craft gold 8-bit)

Crunching The Numbers: How Much Will Your Electric Car Really Cost? | CleanTechnica

some good real-world measurements from Germany. Ireland's residential electricity costs are roughly comparable to the Netherlands I think in price/kWh

(tags: evs cars driving costs home household electricity)

Apache Iceberg (incubating)

Coming to presto soon apparently....

Iceberg tracks individual data files in a table instead of directories. This allows writers to create data files in-place and only adds files to the table in an explicit commit. Table state is maintained in metadata files. All changes to table state create a new metadata file and replace the old metadata with an atomic operation. The table metadata file tracks the table schema, partitioning config, other properties, and snapshots of the table contents. The atomic transitions from one table metadata file to the next provide snapshot isolation. Readers use the latest table state (snapshot) that was current when they load the table metadata and are not affected by changes until they refresh and pick up a new metadata location.

(tags: presto storage s3 hive iceberg apache asf data architecture)

certain Irish surnames inherited ‘the cure’

This is quite an odd superstition -- the belief that people with a certain surname could cure a specific ailment.

Wicklow-born reader Mattie Lennon reminds me that certain Irish families used to hold monopolies over the treatment of individual disorders, based solely on their surnames. Mattie knows this from experience. As a child in the 1950s, he contracted shingles. And it was an article of faith then that anyone by the name of Keogh could cure that painful condition. There were no mysterious herbal concoctions involved: the power resided in their veins, literally. Thus a man named Darby Keogh was called, “bled his fingers, mixed the blood with holy water, and applied it”. Scoff all you like readers, but “it cured my shingles”, says Mattie,

(tags: health history superstitions ireland wicklow quackery the-cure)

PRNG-predicting bot ascends in Nethack in 7 minutes 15 seconds

This is a really amazing hack!

So, we could now go from starting inventory to RNG-seed in no time, but we still had to ascend. While we could write a simple “wish”-bot, get +127 Magicbane and then ascend by hand from there, achieving both fastest realtime and lowest turn count in the same game would not be easy. First idea was to start a NAO game, fetch the seed, then saving and perfecting the seed offline. It was quickly ruled out though as the game is reseeded each time it is started (i.e. when you load your game). Loooong story short, we wrote a bot. You had to play the first turns (offline) and move her to a non-magic fountain located next to a wall. If you died, no big deal, just retry on the same seed. This is why SWAGGINZZZ stood still for 6 minutes, we had absolutely horrible RNG when trying to get the specific fountain needed on dlvl2. The fountain is required for wishes. The wall is required to be able to offset the random state without advancing the game state – every time the character attempts to walk into a wall, it calls random() without wasting any in-game time. From the fountain, the bot ascends completely on her own.

(tags: nethack random prng games hacks cheats nao amazing)

glibc changed their UTF-8 character collation ordering across versions, breaking postgres

This is terrifying:

Streaming replicas—and by extension, base backups—can become dangerously broken when the source and target machines run slightly different versions of glibc. Particularly, differences in strcoll and strcoll_l leave "corrupt" indexes on the slave. These indexes are sorted out of order with respect to the strcoll running on the slave. Because postgres is unaware of the discrepancy is uses these "corrupt" indexes to perform merge joins; merges rely heavily on the assumption that the indexes are sorted and this causes all the results of the join past the first poison pill entry to not be returned. Additionally, if the slave becomes master, the "corrupt" indexes will in cases be unable to enforce uniqueness, but quietly allow duplicate values.

(tags: postgresql scary ops glibc collation utf-8 characters indexing sorting replicas postgres)

A UK police force is dropping tricky cases on advice of an algorithm

Wow, this is a terrible idea. It will definitely launder existing human bias into its decisions.

However, because the technology bases its predictions on past investigations, any biases contained in those decisions may be reinforced by the algorithm. For example, if there are areas that don’t have CCTV and police frequently decided not to pursue cases there, people in those places could be disadvantaged. “When we train algorithms on the data on historical arrests or reports of crime, any biases in that data will go into the algorithm and it will learn those biases and then reinforce them,” says Joshua Loftus at Stanford University in California. [...] Police forces only ever know about crimes they detect or have reported to them, but plenty of crime goes unreported, especially in communities that have less trust in the police. This means the algorithms are making predictions based on a partial picture. While this sort of bias is hard to avoid, baking it into an algorithm may make its decisions harder to hold to account compared with an officer’s. John Phillips, superintendent at Kent Police, says that for the types of crimes that EBIT is being used for, under-reporting isn’t an issue and so shouldn’t affect the tool’s effectiveness.

(tags: bias machine-learning ml ai cctv police uk kent policing)

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation

That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.

(tags: burnout life work workaholism millenials anxiety)

White Matter Integrity in Obstructive Sleep Apnea before and after Treatment

Sleep Apnea causes physical damage to the brain, particularly in white matter fibre integrity. Thankfully, it is reversible.

Results in pre-treatment OSA patients showed impairments in most cognitive areas, mood and sleepiness that were associated with diffuse reduction of WM fiber integrity reflected by diminished fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) in multiple brain areas. After 3 months of CPAP, only limited changes of WM were found. However, over the course of 12 months CPAP treatment, an almost complete reversal of WM abnormalities in all the affected regions was observed in patients who were compliant with treatment. Significant improvements involving memory, attention, and executive-functioning paralleled WM changes after treatment.

(tags: brain brain-damage sleep sleep-apnea snoring medicine papers)

"Cracking the Coding Interview" handouts

amazing handouts for interviewees looking to do well in technical interviews; there are 3, coding, PM, and soft-skills-oriented. I'm on the other side of the table these days but these are fantastic

(tags: interviews coding career interviewing hiring)

AWS Service SLAs

The goal of this page is to high-light the lack of coverage AWS provides for its services across different security factors. These limitations are not well-understood by many. Further, the "Y" fields are meant to indicate that this service has any capability for the relevant factor. In many cases, this is not full coverage for the service, or there are exceptions or special cases.

(tags: amazon aws services slas ops reliability)

Trek10 | From relational DB to single DynamoDB table: a step-by-step exploration

tl;dr:

Is modeling my relational database in a single DynamoDB table really a good idea? About a year ago, I wrote a fairly popular article called “Why DynamoDB isn’t for everyone”. Many of the technical criticisms of DynamoDB I put forth at that time (lack of operational controls such as backup/restore; a persistent problem with hot keys) have since been partially or fully resolved due to a truly awe-inspiring run of feature releases from the DynamoDB team. However, the central argument of that article remains valid: DynamoDB is a powerful tool when used properly, but if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s a deceptively user-friendly guide into madness. And the further you stray into esoteric applications like relational modeling, the more sure you’d better be that you know what you’re getting into. Especially with SQL-friendly “serverless” databases like Amazon Aurora hitting their stride, you have a lot of fully-managed options with a smaller learning curve.

(tags: dynamodb databases storage nosql sql relational aws relations)

Give Up the Ghost: A Backdoor by Another Name | Just Security

Now that GCHQ have asked for this, I suspect plenty of other government bodies around the world will be looking for similar.

They’re talking about adding a “feature” that would require the user’s device to selectively lie about whether it’s even employing end-to-end encryption, or whether it’s leaking the conversation content to a third (secret) party. Is the security code displayed by your device a mathematical representation of the two keys involved, or is it a straight-up lie? Furthermore, what’s to guarantee that the method used by governments to insert the “ghost” key into a conversation without alerting the users won’t be exploited by bad actors? Despite the GCHQ authors’ claim, the ghost will require vendors to disable the very features that give our communications systems their security guarantees in a way that fundamentally changes the trust relationship between a service provider and its users. Software and hardware companies will never be able to convincingly claim that they are being honest about what their applications and tools are doing, and users will have no good reason to believe them if they try. And, as we’ve seen already seen, GCHQ will not be the only agency in the world demanding such extraordinary access to billions of users’ software. Australia was quick to follow the UK’s lead, and we can expect to see similar demands, from Brazil and the European Union to Russia and China. (Note that this proposal would be unconstitutional were it proposed in the United States, which has strong protections against governments forcing actors to speak or lie on its behalf.) We must reject GCHQ’s newest “ghost” proposal for what it is: a mandated encryption backdoor that weakens the security properties of encrypted messaging systems and fundamentally compromises user trust.

(tags: crypto ghost gchq security backdoors uk)

FFmpeg, SOX, Pandoc and RSVG for AWS Lambda

OK-ish way to add dependencies to your Lambda containers:

The basic AWS Lambda container is quite constrained, and until recently it was relatively difficult to include additional binaries into Lambda functions. Lambda Layers make that easy. A Layer is a common piece of code that is attached to your Lambda runtime in the /opt directory. You can reuse it in many functions, and deploy it only once. Individual functions do not need to include the layer code in their deployment packages, which means that the resulting functions are smaller and deploy faster. For example, at MindMup, we use Pandoc to convert markdown files into Word documents. The actual lambda function code is only a few dozen lines of JavaScript, but before layers, each deployment of the function had to include the whole Pandoc binary, larger than 100 MB. With a layer, we can publish Pandoc only once, so we use significantly less overall space for Lambda function versions. Each code change now requires just a quick redeployment.

(tags: serverless lambda dependencies deployment packaging ops)

Allthefood

Decent new Dublin food blog -- reviews and news. Like a Harbo-free version of Lovin' Dublin

(tags: dublin food eating restaurants reviews)

We’ll Never Know Whether Monorepos Are Better

This makes sense to me where the monorepo-vs-polyrepo argument is concerned -- it's another religious war:

About six months after the project was declared “done” (but there was always more to do, more improvements to make to our homegrown dependency management solution), we had a retrospective meeting. The same engineers who had taken sides, for and against the project, were again assembled to discuss how it went. One of the main opponents went first. “Thank goodness we’re finally having this retrospective,” he said. “I think we can all see that this experiment has been a colossal failure and that it’s time for us to change course and roll back to monorepo.” “What do you mean?” one of the main multirepo advocates replied. “This was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made!” This really shocked me. We had access to all of the data you could possibly want to evaluate the decision. The same engineers working with the same codebase had seen what it was like in the monorepo model and the multirepo model. We knew exactly how much it had actually cost to switch. We had lived with the advantages and disadvantages of both models. But still we couldn’t come to an agreement. That retrospective taught me to be humble in my ambitions to “improve” engineering productivity. There’s no way to measure productivity in software, so there’s no way to know whether controversial, expensive “productivity enhancing” projects actually deliver on their promise, even in hindsight.

(tags: monorepo productivity dev engineering coding polyrepo)

I Accidentally Made Myself Lactose Intolerant With Whole30

A few years back, I had a nasty bout of food poisoning while travelling, which made me lactose-intolerant for several years. Sounds like this may be more common than you'd think, based on this article:

If you haven’t heard of Whole30, some information: It’s a month-long eating plan that aims to help followers hit “the reset button with your health, habits, and relationship with food.” For 30 days, you cut out soy, legumes, grains, sugars, alcohol, and, of course, dairy. [....] When you reach the end of the Whole30, you’re supposed to add the forbidden food groups back into your diet one at a time. The goal is to figure out which foods are making you feel sluggish, bloated, or just generally not great, so you can ostensibly keep on avoiding them forever. I didn’t do that part. I just jumped right back into eating what I wanted — but suddenly nothing was the same. That first bowl of ice cream I’d been looking forward to for weeks was quickly followed by sharp stomach pains and what can best be described (grossly, but accurately) as bubble gut. [....] The good news, according to gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, is that I’m not crazy. The bad news is that dairy no longer agrees with my body’s biology. Turns out, it is possible to suddenly make yourself lactose intolerant. “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”

(tags: diet food lactose lactase intolerance whole30 milk cheese)

The Hydrogen Fuel Cell Scam

The need to have a massive and costly buildout of [hydrogen refuelling] infrastructure remains one of the most glaring problems of a supposed transition to a hydrogen economy. The cost of a single hydrogen fueling station is likely to be over $2 million. This is in contrast to the relatively modest $50,000 cost of deploying a high-speed battery-electric car charging station. Another factor here is the reality of putting into place an all-new infrastructure from scratch versus building off of an already existing electrical infrastructure that exists in every developed nation.  The fact that every building, garage, and lamp post in the US is already electrified means we simply have to add one final component to the existing and established network.

(tags: hydrogen green driving cars fuel fossil-fuels decarbonisation)

Don’t buy a 5G smartphone—at least, not for a while | Ars Technica

wow, 5G sounds like it's going to be terrible

(tags: 5g 4g mobile-phones mobile tech hardware radio)

Risky business: linking _Toxoplasma gondii_ infection and entrepreneurship behaviours across individuals and countries | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Using a saliva-based assay, we found that students (n = 1495) who tested IgG positive for Toxoplasma gondii exposure were 1.4× more likely to major in business and 1.7× more likely to have an emphasis in ‘management and entrepreneurship' over other business-related emphases. Among professionals attending entrepreneurship events, T. gondii-positive individuals were 1.8× more likely to have started their own business compared with other attendees (n = 197). Finally, after synthesizing and combining country-level databases on T. gondii infection from the past 25 years with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor of entrepreneurial activity, we found that infection prevalence was a consistent, positive predictor of entrepreneurial activity and intentions at the national scale, regardless of whether previously identified economic covariates were included. Nations with higher infection also had a lower fraction of respondents citing ‘fear of failure' in inhibiting new business ventures. While correlational, these results highlight the linkage between parasitic infection and complex human behaviours, including those relevant to business, entrepreneurship and economic productivity.

(tags: science biology infection toxoplasmosis parasites humans behaviour entrepreneurs business brains economics)

"Thread on climate change & Irish agri lobbyists"

'The massive levy income raised on beef & dairy gives the IFA a financial incentive to promote beef & dairy expansion and a disincentive to support any fundamental changes to Ireland’s agricultural model, regardless the public interest.'

(tags: dairy beef ireland farming climate-change climate lobbying government)

slides from "Distributed Log-Processing Design Workshop", SRECon Americas 2018

Fantastic presentation discussing the kinds of design criteria used when architecting a large-scale data processing and storage service. Interesting to see some Google terminology, e.g. "dimensioning" -- ballparking the expected scalability numbers, bandwidth, qps, and limits.

(tags: distributed-systems coding design architecture google photon logs log-storage slides srecon)

Zstandard: How Facebook increased compression speed - Facebook Code

very cool; particularly the high level of support for external-dictionary compression

(tags: facebook compression zstd zstandard dictionary-compression)

The Holiday Drink of 2018: Cognac Punch

Looks tasty, albeit pricey and strong:

London Punch House Punch By David Wondrich Ingredients: 4 Lemons 6 oz (3/4 cup) White sugar 20 oz Hennessy Privilege VSOP Cognac 6 oz Jamaican rum 1 quart (4 cups) Cold water Glass: Punch cup Garnish: Freshly grated nutmeg Directions: The day before you serve the punch, fill a quart container with water and put it in the freezer. Peel 4 lemons in long spirals and put the peels into a mason jar with 6 oz (3/4 cup) of white sugar. Seal the jar, shake it and let sit overnight. Two hours before you serve the punch, unseal the mason jar, add 6 oz (3/4) cup fresh-squeezed, strained lemon juice, reseal and shake until all the sugar has dissolved. Refrigerate. To assemble the punch, unmold the ice block and place it in a 1-gallon punch bowl. Shake the contents of the mason jar and pour it into the punch bowl unstrained, peels and all. Add 20 oz (2-and-a-half cups) Hennessy Privilege VSOP Cognac and 6 oz (3/4 cup) Jamaican rum. Stir. Add 1 quart (4 cups) cold water. Stir again and grate nutmeg on top. Using a punch ladle, drape a few ends of the spiral lemon peels over the rim of the bowl. Grate nutmeg over the top.

(tags: punch cognac hennessy recipes rum)

CRDTs in Production

at PayPal (via Carlos Baquero)

(tags: via:xmal crdts distributed-systems distcomp prod coding data-structures)