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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2016-12-15

Published December 15, 2016

  • The hidden cost of QUIC and TOU

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

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

Links for 2016-12-14

Published December 14, 2016

  • Slicer: Auto-sharding for datacenter applications

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

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

    (tags: google sharding slicer architecture papers)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links for 2016-12-12

Published December 12, 2016

  • Booking.com, MySQL and UTF-8

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

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

  • tdunning/t-digest

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

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

Links for 2016-12-05

Published December 5, 2016

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

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

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

  • Commentary: The ‘Irish’ Startup Attribution Problem

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

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

    (tags: ireland tech startups investment vc europe eu)

Links for 2016-12-02

Published December 2, 2016

Links for 2016-11-29

Published November 29, 2016

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

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

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

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

Links for 2016-11-28

Published November 28, 2016

Links for 2016-11-24

Published November 24, 2016

Links for 2016-11-22

Published November 22, 2016

Links for 2016-11-21

Published November 21, 2016

Links for 2016-11-18

Published November 18, 2016

Links for 2016-11-17

Published November 17, 2016

Links for 2016-11-09

Published November 9, 2016

  • Pure Pharmacy

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

    (tags: recommendations pharmacy ireland doctors health medicine)

Links for 2016-11-08

Published November 8, 2016

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

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

    (tags: daft housing ireland fail homes rent building)

  • Video Games Are Boring

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

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

Links for 2016-11-07

Published November 7, 2016

Links for 2016-11-05

Published November 5, 2016

  • Jeff Erickson’s Algorithms, Etc.

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

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

Links for 2016-11-04

Published November 4, 2016

Links for 2016-11-03

Published November 3, 2016

Links for 2016-11-02

Published November 2, 2016

Links for 2016-11-01

Published November 1, 2016

Links for 2016-10-31

Published October 31, 2016

  • Here’s Why Facebook’s Trending Algorithm Keeps Promoting Fake News – BuzzFeed News

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

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

Links for 2016-10-27

Published October 27, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

    (tags: iot security internet isps devices)

Links for 2016-10-25

Published October 25, 2016

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

    This is shocking:

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

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

Links for 2016-10-24

Published October 24, 2016

  • Paypal 2FA Bypass

    Holy shit.

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

    (tags: paypal 2fa security fail web html)

  • ArquitecturB

    amazing architectural-oddities Tumblr (via Present and Correct)

    (tags: tumblr art photography architecture weird odd)

  • Management levels

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

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

  • JG Ballard, on the “pram in the hall”

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

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

Links for 2016-10-21

Published October 21, 2016

Links for 2016-10-20

Published October 20, 2016

Links for 2016-10-18

Published October 18, 2016

  • _Airport Noise NIMBYism: An Empirical Investigation_

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

    (tags: airports noise nimby nimbyism complaints dc)

Links for 2016-10-17

Published October 17, 2016