-
The UK’s version of the POD database project was used by the Home Office to track immigrants for various reasons — in other words, exactly the reasons why parents will choose not to provide that data
(tags: parents databases data pod uk home-office education schools)
How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages – The New York Times
One “outlier” voter—a 19-year old black Trump supporter—was weighted so heavily that it shifted the whole poll significantly. Stats fail
(tags: statistics nytimes politics via:reddit donald-trump hilary-clinton polling panels polls)
Kafka Streams – Scaling up or down
this is a nice zero-config scaling story — good work Kafka Streams
(tags: scaling scalability architecture kafka streams ops)
Medium’s DynamoDB Data Source for Apache Spark
nice approach
(tags: dynamodb spark architecture tools aws backups export)
-
‘a Mexican cerveza preparada made with beer, lime juice, and assorted sauces, spices, and peppers. It is served in a chilled, salt-rimmed glass. There are numerous variations of this beverage throughout Mexico and Latin America.’
-
a variation on the mimosa, with an IPA and grapefruit juice — sounds like Brewdog’s Elvis Juice
-
‘This crisp, refreshing beer and ginger beer cocktail is a Cuban favorite, and it’s super-simple to make.’
(tags: recipes beer ginger-beer cuba cocktails)
Justin's Linklog Posts
The “Alpha Wolf” notion is outmoded and incorrect
via Saladin Ahmed — the scientist who coined the term abandoned it as useless years ago:
The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book “The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species,” written in 1968, published in 1970, republished in paperback in 1981, and currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it. Although most of the book’s info is still accurate, much is outdated. We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years then in all of previous history. One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. “Alpha” implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents, and that’s all we call them today, the “breeding male,” “breeding female,” or “male parent,” “female parent,” or the “adult male” or “adult female.” In the rare packs that include more than one breeding animal, the “dominant breeder” can be called that, and any breeding daughter can be called a “subordinate breeder.”
(tags: biology animals wolves alpha alpha-males mra science wolf-packs society competition parenting)
The private monorail tunnel under North London
20km of private monorail owned and operated by the electricity grid, used to monitor and inspect one of the longest 400kV circuits in Europe
(tags: power monorail transport london underground tunnelling electricity cool)
AWS latency comparison: API Gateway vs Lambda vs Bare EC2
ugh, 213ms mean response overhead
(tags: aws latency lambda api-gateway architecture http)
Airfixers – Hosting without the hassle
Full AirBnB property management service in Dublin
(tags: dublin airbnb management rental services)
Mt. Gox had a chair worth $28,000
According to the bankruptcy documents, one of the assets listed is ‘a chair worth 2,902,119JPY, or roughly $28,000USD.’
(tags: chairs funny mtgox scams bitcoin furniture assets bankruptcy)
Ludicrous Patent of the Week: Rectangles on a computer screen
“Chinese internet giant Tencent” have been granted a USPTO patent for drawing a box on a screen.
(tags: boxes screen tencent patents uspto funny absurd swpats via:markdennehy)
-
This is the new fear — that FF/FG will accidentally and stupidly disengage Ireland from the EU as a side effect of trying to keep the UK happy and cross-border trade intact
How Fucked Up is Your Management?
Oh dear.
Score 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following: We have an unlimited vacation policy; We don’t do regular 1:1s, but we have open office hours/are super available if anyone wants to chat; We don’t have a process for interviewing, we just hire awesome people when we meet them; We super care about diversity, but we don’t want to lower the bar so we just hire the best person for the job even if it means diversity suffers; We don’t have defined levels and career paths for our employees, we’re a really flat org; We don’t have formal managers for every staff member, everyone just gets their work done; We don’t have, like, HR HR, but our recruiter/office manager/only female employee is super good if you want someone to talk to; We don’t do performance improvement plans for employees that are struggling. We just have a super honest conversation about how they aren’t a good fit and fire them; We would have some hard explaining to do if our salary list accidentally became public.
(tags: startups management culture work vacation hiring office-hours managers diversity careers hr)
Google and Monotype launch Noto, an open-source typeface family for all the world’s languages
Great font factoid: ‘The name “Noto” comes from the little squares that show when a font is not supported by a computer. This are often referred to as “tofu”, because of their shape, therefore the font is short for No Tofu.’
Simple testing can prevent most critical failures
Specifically, the following 3 classes of errors were implicated in 92% of the major production outages in this study and could have been caught with simple code review:
Error handlers that ignore errors (or just contain a log statement); error handlers with “TODO” or “FIXME” in the comment; and error handlers that catch an abstract exception type (e.g. Exception or Throwable in Java) and then take drastic action such as aborting the system.
(Interestingly, the latter was a particular favourite approach of some misplaced “fail fast”/”crash-only software design” dogma in Amazon. I wasn’t a fan)(tags: fail-fast crash-only-software coding design bugs code-review review outages papers logging errors exceptions)
We are witnessing nothing less than a Tory reformation | Rafael Behr | Opinion | The Guardian
An excellent explanation of what is going on in the UK right now. What a nightmare:
Finally there are the self-styled buccaneers of the free-trade seas. Boris Johnson would probably cast himself as Sir Walter Raleigh – polymath, wordsmith, adventurer. That leaves Liam Fox to play Sir Francis Drake, looking for domestic glory in global circumnavigation but seen from abroad as a pirate. This is all myth and fantasy, of course. But parties have always been sustained by internal mythologies, and the task of exiting the EU is so complicated and fraught with danger that fantasy becomes a necessary comfort. As one former minister says of the puritan choristers: “They have spent their lives working towards this dream. Of course they don’t want to accept that it’s a nightmare.” Tory pro-Europeans are in the impossible position of using rational argument against faith. If they counsel compromise on migration or the single market, they are accused of talking Britain down or trying to refight the referendum. They have few reinforcements across the political water. Labour is a shambles. The Lib Dems are puny in parliament. Scotland has its own distinct politics, and in Nicola Sturgeon its own remainian queen with her own independence agenda. The Tories do not speak for all of England, but in the absence of credible opposition they feel as if they do, and will act accordingly. To those millions who did not vote to leave the EU, the message is clear: you are free to pray for whatever you like. Your antique rites will be tolerated. But do not expect your concerns to be represented in the court of Queen Theresa. Be humble instead. Swallow your doubts and take a pew in the reformed national church of Brexit.
(tags: reformation uk politics brexit eu puritanism fanaticism)
-
Martin Fowler’s take on the 4 kinds of tech debt
(tags: programming design tech-debt technical-debt deadlines product ship)
Charity Majors responds to the CleverTap Mongo outage war story
This is a great blog post, spot on:
You can’t just go “dudes it’s faster” and jump off a cliff. This shit is basic. Test real production workloads. Have a rollback plan. (Not for *10 days* … try a month or two.)
The only thing I’d nitpick on is that it’s all very well to say “buy my book” or “come see me talk at Blahcon”, but a good blog post or webpage would be thousands of times more useful.(tags: databases stateful-services services ops mongodb charity-majors rollback state storage testing dba)
Remarks at the SASE Panel On The Moral Economy of Tech
Excellent talk. I love this analogy for ML applied to real-world data which affects people:
Treating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we don’t accept that this should make us accountable. We’re programmers—who else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying to help. Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It’s a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don’t lie.
Particularly apposite today given Y Combinator’s revelation that they use an AI bot to help ‘sift admission applications’, and don’t know what criteria it’s using: https://twitter.com/aprjoy/status/783032128653107200(tags: culture ethics privacy technology surveillance ml machine-learning bias algorithms software control)
-
So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet’s molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one.
As jwz says: ‘The Rosetta Disc is now safely installed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.’(tags: rosetta long-now history language comets solar-system space)
Airflow/AMI/ASG nightly-packaging workflow
Some tantalising discussion on twitter of an Airflow + AMI + ASG workflow for ML packaging: ‘We build models using Airflow. We deploy new models as AMIs where each AMI is model + scoring code. The AMI is hence a version of code + model at a point in time : #immutable_infrastructure. It’s natural for Airflow to build & deploy the model+code with each Airflow DAG Run corresponding to a versioned AMI. if there’s a problem, we can simply roll back to the previous AMI & identify the problematic model building Dag run. Since we use ASGs, Airflow can execute a rolling deploy of new AMIs. We could also have it do a validation & ASG rollback of the AMI if validation fails. Airflow is being used for reliable Model build+validation+deployment.’
(tags: ml packaging airflow asg ami deployment ops infrastructure rollback)
Commodore 64C going strong after over 25 years in production
C64C used in Polish auto repair shop to balance driveshafts, working non-stop for over a quarter of a century. I’d like to see a Spectrum do _this_ ;)
(tags: c64 c64c commodore history poland auto-repair production)
-
‘Build Negroni over ice, top with sparkling wine, stir briefly. They’ll get you messed up quick, but it’s a great way to go.’ aka. the Double Sbagliato. yum
(tags: negroni cocktails recipes campari prosecco sparkling-wine red-vermouth gin)
Snooping powers saw 13 people wrongly held on child sex charges in the UK
Sorry, Daily Mail article —
Blunders in the use of controversial snooping powers meant 13 people were wrongly arrested last year on suspicion of being paedophiles. Another four individuals had their homes searched by detectives following errors in attempts to access communications data, a watchdog revealed yesterday. Other mistakes also included people unconnected to an investigation being visited by police and delayed welfare checks on vulnerable people including children whose lives were at risk, said the Interception of Communications Commissioner. [….] A large proportion of the errors involved an internet address which was wrongly linked to an individual. Of the 23 serious mistakes, 14 were human errors and the other nine ‘technical system errors’.
(tags: surveillance ip-addresses privacy uk daily-mail snooping interception errors)
The best thing to mark National Stalking Awareness Week would be to scrap the law on stalking
“The Secret Barrister” explains a classic case of empty-gesture lawmaking in the UK:
in 2012, the coalition government, in a fit of virtue signalling, announced a bold plan to offer extra protection to victims of stalking, following a rash of reported cases where obsessive nutjobs had slipped through the net. Hence, via the 2012 Act, section 2A was shoved into the Protection from Harassment Act, creating a shiny new offence of stalking. What is stalking, you ask? Well here’s the clever bit. Stalking is…”a course of conduct which amounts to harassment…and [where] the acts or omissions involved are ones associated with stalking“. To inject some colour into the dull circularity of the definition, section 2A(3) provides “examples of acts or omissions associated with stalking”. In other words, you need to prove that the defendant is guilty of both harassment and stalking, in order to convict them of stalking. Therefore, proving stalking is by definition harder for the prosecution than simply proving harassment. And what do you get if you opt for the harder road? What prize awaits the victorious prosecutor who has slogged her way through the additional evidential burden thrust upon her by section 2A? The answer is….nothing. Or at least, nothing more than if you successfully prosecuted for harassment. The maximum sentence in each case is 6 months’ imprisonment. It is the very definition of empty gesture legislating. Section 2A is so very pointlessly pointless that I want urgently to go back in time to the day when then-crime prevention minister Jeremy Browne was hubristically prattling on about what a difference this law is going to make and shove a whoopee pie right up his schnoz. Section 2A does nothing other than create a new offence that is harder to prove than an existing offence that prohibits the same conduct, solely, it seems, to allow for the drawing of an entirely semantic distinction between “harassment” and “stalking”.
(tags: harrassment stalking law legislation uk police crime prosecution)
“Better truck design could save hundreds of pedestrian and cyclist lives”
European transport group, Transport and Environment, said that the Loughborough study shows that better design “could save hundreds of pedestrian and cyclists’ lives”. It added that the study “finds huge differences in the direct vision – what drivers can see with their own eyes – of best and worst-in-class trucks in all categories, and that ‘low-entry cabs’ like the Mercedes Econic out perform all of today’s best performing vehicles.” A P-Series truck, from truck maker Scania, was rated at the best of its class with zero blind spots — this could go a long way to explaining why the makers of a Road Safety Authority video using another P-Series truck reportedly had to fake blind spots last year. Mandatory extra mirrors has been EU policy to try to reduce collisions with people cycling and walking but researchers point out that blind spots remain on many trucks and improving direct vision may be a better policy than improving indirect vision using mirrors. […] The EU currently has a deadline of 2028 for improved vision in trucks but Transport and Environment said: “Given that better vision cabs are already available on the market and in all market segments (best in class, smarter configurations, low entry vehicles) a 2028 deadline is not justifiable.”
-
good page on the Universal Scalability Law and how to apply it
(tags: usl performance scalability concurrency capacity measurement excel equations metrics)
Artist Tricks Tourists With Elaborate Monument To Staten Island Ferry Octopus Attack
‘You probably don’t know much about the Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial Museum, which honors the 400 victims who died when a giant octopus attacked the Cornelius G. Kolff, a Staten Island Ferry boat, on Nov. 22, 1963. That isn’t because the event was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK that same day—it’s because, as you may have guessed based on the word “tricks” in the headline, there was no such octopus-induced tragedy.’
-
great idea — donate old, obsolete iPhone 4/4s phones to a charity which repurposes them for autistic/non-verbal kids
(tags: autism communication health phones recycling charity iphones)
Brian Krebs – The Democratization of Censorship
Events of the past week have convinced me that one of the fastest-growing censorship threats on the Internet today comes not from nation-states, but from super-empowered individuals who have been quietly building extremely potent cyber weapons with transnational reach. More than 20 years after Gilmore first coined [his] turn of phrase, his most notable quotable has effectively been inverted — “Censorship can in fact route around the Internet.” The Internet can’t route around censorship when the censorship is all-pervasive and armed with, for all practical purposes, near-infinite reach and capacity.
(tags: brian-krebs censorship ddos internet web politics crime security iot)
SMC Education Blog — Girls and Their Frenemies
on “relational aggression” among schoolkids
“The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise…”
I love this story — a wealthy couple buy a vineyard in the Languedoc for its theoretically-optimal microclimate for wine-making. Defying what one’s preconceptions would expect (mine included!), the results were fantastic.
In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead. If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm. No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.
(tags: books science languedoc wine academia microclimates preconceptions)
The Problem With Cul-de-Sac Design – CityLab
“A lot of people feel that they want to live in a cul-de-sac, they feel like it’s a safer place to be,” Marshall says. “The reality is yes, you’re safer – if you never leave your cul-de-sac. But if you actually move around town like a normal person, your town as a whole is much more dangerous.” This is the opposite of what traffic engineers (and home buyers) have thought for decades. And it’s just the beginning of what we’re now starting to understand about the relative advantages of going back to the way we designed communities a century ago. Marshall and Garrick took the same group of California cities and also examined all their minutely classified street networks for the amount of driving associated with them. On average, they found, people who live in more sparse, tree-like communities drive about 18 percent more than people who live in dense grids. And that’s a conservative calculation.
(via Tony Finch)(tags: cul-de-sacs cities city design layout simcity grids safety)
-
“A modern standard for event-oriented data”. Avro schema, events have time and type, schema is external and not part of the Avro stream. ‘a modern standard for representing event-oriented data in high-throughput operational systems. It uses existing open standards for schema definition and serialization, but adds semantic meaning and definition to make integration between systems easy, while still being size- and processing-efficient. An Osso event is largely use case agnostic, and can represent a log message, stack trace, metric sample, user action taken, ad display or click, generic HTTP event, or otherwise. Every event has a set of common fields as well as optional key/value attributes that are typically event type-specific.’
(tags: osso events schema data interchange formats cep event-processing architecture)
Highly Available Counters Using Cassandra
solid discussion of building HA counters using CRDTs and similar eventually-consistent data structures
(tags: crdts algorithms data-structures cassandra ha counters)
J1 2015 “Debugging Java Apps in Containers: No Heavy Welding Gear Required”
Some good slides with tips on running java apps in production in Docker
(tags: java docker ops containers)
Algorithmic management as the new Taylorism
‘its legacy can be seen in factories, call centres and warehouses today, although new technology has taken the place of Taylor’s instruction cards and stopwatches. Many warehouse workers for companies such as Amazon use handheld devices that give them step-by-step instructions on where to walk and what to pick from the shelves when they get there, all the while measuring their “pick rate” in real time. For Jeremias Prassl, a law professor at Oxford university, the algorithmic management techniques of Uber and Deliveroo are Taylorism 2.0. “Algorithms are providing a degree of control and oversight that even the most hardened Taylorists could never have dreamt of,” he says.’
(tags: algorithms labour work labor taylorism management silicon-valley tech deliveroo uber piece-work)
[Cryptography] Bridge hand record generator cracked
‘How to cheat at Bridge by breaking the tournament card-dealing random number generator’, via Tony Finch
(tags: crypto security rngs prngs random bridge cards via:fanf)
A Loud Sound Just Shut Down a Bank’s Data Center for 10 Hours | Motherboard
The purpose of the drill was to see how the data center’s fire suppression system worked. Data centers typically rely on inert gas to protect the equipment in the event of a fire, as the substance does not chemically damage electronics, and the gas only slightly decreases the temperature within the data center. The gas is stored in cylinders, and is released at high velocity out of nozzles uniformly spread across the data center. According to people familiar with the system, the pressure at ING Bank’s data center was higher than expected, and produced a loud sound when rapidly expelled through tiny holes (think about the noise a steam engine releases). The bank monitored the sound and it was very loud, a source familiar with the system told us. “It was as high as their equipment could monitor, over 130dB”. Sound means vibration, and this is what damaged the hard drives. The HDD cases started to vibrate, and the vibration was transmitted to the read/write heads, causing them to go off the data tracks. “The inert gas deployment procedure has severely and surprisingly affected several servers and our storage equipment,” ING said in a press release.
(tags: ing hardware outages hard-drives fire fire-suppression vibration data-centers storage)
Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table
“fuck your bookshelf with all of the spines facing in”
(tags: funny fuck-this noguchi coffee-tables furniture design)
-
‘All the information you need while traveling including visa requirements, currency, electricity, communication info and more.’
The Internet Thinks I’m Still Pregnant – The New York Times
This is pretty awful — an accidental, careless and brutal side effect of marketers passing on sensitive info to one another, without respect for their users’ privacy: ‘I hadn’t realized, however, that when I had entered my information into the pregnancy app, the company would then share it with marketing groups targeting new mothers. Although I logged my miscarriage into the app and stopped using it, that change in status apparently wasn’t passed along. Seven months after my miscarriage, mere weeks before my due date, I came home from work to find a package on my welcome mat. It was a box of baby formula bearing the note: “We may all do it differently, but the joy of parenthood is something we all share.”’
(tags: privacy pregnancy miscarriage data-protection apps babies parenthood)
Peco Beermakers Professional Boiler 32lt (Includes Hop Strainer) – The Homebrew Company
on the list
Tekkonkinkreet Art Book Shinji Kimura – White Side: Shinji Kimura: 9784870317659: Amazon.com: Books
Beautiful background art from a 2006 anime by Shinji Kimura, as a 10″ x 7″ full-colour hardback art book.
did Google blacklist their own site?
The leading theory that I’ve seen going around is that Google is actually blocking all links in any FeedBurner feed, because it’s a violation of its own terms of service. Seriously. The link-shortener “goo.gl”, run by Google, is blocking all URLs generated by Feedburner, run by Google. pic.twitter.com/IR7wrlv6xj — Great Again Also (@agentdero) September 6, 2016 That’s because Google’s URL shortener’s terms of service bans “URL re-directors” and it appears that the genius engineers at Google have decided that Google-run FeedBurner is nothing more than a URL re-director and killed off everyone’s links without notice or explanation. This despite the fact that they’re the same damn company and that FeedBurner unilaterally moved everyone’s RSS feed to use Goo.gl links in the first place.
(tags: urls url-shorteners history goo.gl google feedburner redirectors rss links)
-
Coda Hale’s new gig on how they’re using Docker, AWS, etc. I like this: “Use containers. Not too much. Mostly for packaging.”
Lessons Learned from Using Regexes At Scale
great post from Loggly on production usage of regular expressions on shared, multitenant architecture, where a /.*/ can really screw things up. “NFA isn’t a golden ticket” paragraph included
Auto Scaling for EC2 Spot Fleets
‘we are enhancing the Spot Fleet model with the addition of Auto Scaling. You can now arrange to scale your fleet up and down based on a Amazon CloudWatch metric. The metric can originate from an AWS service such as EC2, Amazon EC2 Container Service, or Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). Alternatively, your application can publish a custom metric and you can use it to drive the automated scaling.’
(tags: asg auto-scaling ec2 spot-fleets ops scaling)
How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow
Unfortunately the usual ML problem arises at the end:
One of the current challenges with deep learning is that you need to have a large number of training datasets. To train the model, Makoto spent about three months taking 7,000 pictures of cucumbers sorted by his mother, but it’s probably not enough. “When I did a validation with the test images, the recognition accuracy exceeded 95%. But if you apply the system with real use cases, the accuracy drops down to about 70%. I suspect the neural network model has the issue of “overfitting” (the phenomenon in neural network where the model is trained to fit only to the small training dataset) because of the insufficient number of training images.”
In other words, as with ML since we were using it in SpamAssassin, maintaining the training corpus becomes a really big problem. :((tags: google machine-learning tensorflow cucumbers deep-learning ml)
Northland man denies burning down house but insurer refuses to pay out
This is a mad story. The insurance company is accusing a guy in NZ of using remote-login software from 400km away to trigger a “print” command to a complicated Heath Robinson setup in order to light a fire to burn down his house
(tags: fraud insurance weird nz crime printers remote-login)
Google Intrusion Detection Problems
‘We have lost access to multiple critical data stores because Google has an automated threat detection system that is incapable of handling false positives.’
(tags: google security cloud false-positives intrusion-detection automation fail)
Engineering Intelligence Through Data Visualization at Uber
bloody hell, Uber have a 15-person dataviz team. More money than sense! The resulting output is pretty though
How the NSA snooped on encrypted Internet traffic for a decade | Ars Technica
In a revelation that shows how the National Security Agency was able to systematically spy on many Cisco Systems customers for the better part of a decade, researchers have uncovered an attack that remotely extracts decryption keys from the company’s now-decommissioned line of PIX firewalls. The discovery is significant because the attack code, dubbed BenignCertain, worked on PIX versions Cisco released in 2002 and supported through 2009. Even after Cisco stopped providing PIX bug fixes in July 2009, the company continued offering limited service and support for the product for an additional four years. Unless PIX customers took special precautions, virtually all of them were vulnerable to attacks that surreptitiously eavesdropped on their VPN traffic.
NPR Website To Get Rid Of Comments
Sadly, this makes sense and I’d have to agree.
Mike Durio, of Phoenix, seemed to sum it up in an email to my office back in April. “Have you considered doing away with the comments sections, or tighter moderation?” he wrote. “The comments have devolved into the Punch-and-Judy-Fest of moronic, un-illuminating observations and petty insults I’ve seen on other pretty much every other Internet site that allows comments.” He added, “This is not in keeping with NPR’s take-a-step-back, take-a-deep-breath reporting,” and noted, “Now, thread hijacking and personal insults are becoming the stock in trade. Frequent posters use the forums to duke it out with one another.” A user named Mary, from Raleigh, N.C., wrote to implore: “Remove the comments section from your articles. The rude, hateful, racist, judgmental comments far outweigh those who may want to engage in some intelligent sideline conversation about the actual subject of the article. I am appalled at the amount of ‘free hate’ that is found on a website that represents honest and unbiased reporting such as NPR. What are you really gaining from all of these rabid comments other than proof that a sad slice of humanity that preys on the weak while spreading their hate?”
Meeting the Free Speech Crusaders Who Want to End Political Correctness | VICE | United Kingdom
The ‘Young British Heritage Society’, aka gam*rgate as a college society
(tags: gamergate funny sad trolls ybhs reactionaries uk politics)
The Mattress Industry is One Big Scam
yes, yes it is
(tags: mattresses scams buying shopping consumer)
Unchecked exceptions for IO considered harmful – Google Groups
Insightful thread from the mechanical sympathy group, regarding the checked-vs-unchecked style question:
Peter Lawrey: Our view is that Checked Exception makes more sense for library writers as they can explicitly pass off errors to the caller. As a caller, especially if you are new to a product, you don’t understand the exceptions or what you can do about them. They add confusion. For this reason we use checked exceptions internally in the lower layers and try to avoid passing them in our higher level interfaces. Note: A high percentage of our fall backs are handling iOExceptons and recovering from them. [….] My experience is that the more complex and layered your libraries the more essential checked exceptions become. I see them as essential for scalability of your software.
(tags: exceptions java style coding checked-exceptions ioexceptions io error-handling)
TV detector vans may have been a con all along
This is shaking my world view — although I find it more plausible that (as responses to https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-22440,00.html claim) they _did_ work until about 10-20 years ago, by detecting RF emissions from the local oscillator inside the TV. Ross Anderson, at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-15.pdf , notes:
During [..] World War II, radio engineering saw advances in radar, passive direction finding, and low-probability-of-intercept techniques, which I’ll discuss in the next chapter. By the 1960s, the stray RF leaking from the local oscillator signals in domestic television sets was being targeted by direction-finding equipment in “TV detector vans,” in Britain, where TV owners must pay an annual license fee that is supposed to support public broadcast services. Its use has since expanded to satellite and cable TV operators, who use detector vans to find pirate decoders. Some people in the computer security community were also aware that information could leak from cross-coupling and stray RF (see, for example, [259, 791]).
(tags: rf radio tv bbc tv-licenses tv-license-detector-vans security emissions tempest)
“I Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body” — Backchannel
Sandler wants to be able to explore the code running her device for programming flaws and vulnerability to hacking, but she can’t. “Because I don’t have access to the source code, I have no power to do anything about it,” she says. In her eyes, it’s a particularly obvious example of a problem that now cuts across much of modern life: proprietary software has become crucial to daily survival, and yet is often locked away from public exploration and discussion by copyright.
(tags: copyright safety health pacemakers law proprietary-software life medicine implants)
-
‘Researchers learn about wire-fraud scam after Nigerian scammers infect themselves with their own malware.’
The researchers observed Wire-Wire scores of $5,000 to $250,000 with the average between $30,000-$50,000 from small- and medium-sized businesses. The scammers themselves were “well-respected and admired” in their communities.
I’ve heard about this scam — it’s nasty, and worst of all, banks won’t reimburse the losses. Showing bottle: one man’s vision crafted a revolution
A eulogy for Oliver Hughes, founder of the Porterhouse and Dingle Distillery, and arguably the progenitor of Ireland’s craft beer scene. I had the pleasure of sharing a table with him at a beer tasting in Sweeney’s off license a while back, and it was both educational and a good fun night. RIP
(tags: oliver-hughes porterhouse beer ireland dublin dingle-distillery rip deaths)
-
‘FakeTime is simulated time.”
When testing RealTime software a simulator is often employed, which injects events into the program which do not occur in RealTime. If you are writing software that controls or monitors some process that exists in the real world, it takes a long time to test it. But if you simulate it, there is no reason in the simulated software (if it is disconnected from the real world completely) not to make the apparent system time inside your software appear to move at a much faster rate. For example, I have written simulators that can verify the operational steps taken by industrial controllers over a 12 hour FakeTime period, which executes in 60 seconds. This allows me to run ’12 hours’ of fake time through my test cases and test scenarios, without waiting 12 hours for the testing to complete. Of course, after a successful fakeTime test, an industrial RealTime system still needs to be tested in non-simulated fashion.
-
‘Event driven Diagnostic and Remediation Platform’ — aka ‘runbooks as code’
(tags: runbooks winston netflix remediation outages mttr ops devops)
International Olympic Committee bans GIFs
hahaha. gtfo, IOC
Ratas – A hierarchical timer wheel
excellent explanation and benchmarks of a timer wheel implementation
(tags: timer-wheels timing-wheels algorithms c linux timers data-structures)
-
ECS, Docker, ELB, SQS, SNS, RDS, VPC, and spot instances. Pretty canonical setup these days…
The mytaxi app is also now able to predict daily and weekly spikes. In addition, it has gained the elasticity required to meet demand during special events. Herzberg describes a typical situation on New Year’s Eve: “Shortly before midnight everyone needs a taxi to get to parties, and after midnight people want to go home. In past years we couldn’t keep up with the demand this generated, which was around three and a half times as high as normal. In November 2015 we moved our Docker container architecture to Amazon ECS, and for the first time ever in December we were able to celebrate a new year in which our system could handle the huge number of requests without any crashes or interruptions—an accomplishment that we were extremely proud of. We had faced the biggest night on the calendar without any downtime.”
(tags: mytaxi aws ecs docker elb sqs sns rds vpc spot-instances ops architecture)
Exit Scam Survival Guide : Buttcoin
Bitcoin lols:
Honesty is most important. Be sure to carefully explain that (excluding the mountain of evidence to the contrary) there was no way to foresee the [Bitcoin] exchange hacking. Practice phrases like, “this operation was the most trustworthy exchange running out of a vacant building in Singapore” and “no we can’t just call the exchange, they don’t have a phone number”. If your significant other criticizes your decision to buy cryptocurrencies, be sure to fall back on technical merits of cryptocurrencies. Mention, “it’s backed by math” and “[insert cryptocurrency here] didn’t fail, people failed”.
(tags: bitcoin buttcoin lol funny cryptocurrency security exchanges)
-
awesome resource.
This WIKI collects information about prepaid (or PAYG) mobile phone plans from all over the world. Not just any plans though, they must include good data rates, perfect for smartphone travellers, as well as tablet or mobile modem users.
-
‘aw yiss comic generator’. AW YISS
(tags: aw-yiss memes meme-generators funny kate-beaton)
Photographer Files $1 Billion Suit Against Getty for Licensing Her Public Domain Images
Massive, massive copyright fail by Alamy and Getty Images.
Since each violation of copyright in this case allows the plaintiff to seek damages up to $25,000, the statutory damages for Getty’s 18,755 violations amount to $468,875,000. But because the company was found to have violated the same copyright law within the past three years — in 2013, Daniel Morel was awarded $1.2 million in a suit against Getty, after the agency pulled his photos from Twitter and distributed them without permission to several major publications — Highsmith can elect to seek three times that amount: hence the $1 billion suit. “The economic damage that Ms. Highsmith has suffered includes, without limitation, any and all revenue received by the Defendants based on purported licenses sold for the Highsmith Photos. These funds represent money that Ms. Highsmith could have received had she attempted to monetize her photos through the Defendants,” the complaint states. “The injury to Ms. Highsmith’s reputation has been … severe,” it continues. “There is at least one example of a recipient of a threatening letter for use of a Highsmith Photo researching the issue and determining that Ms. Highsmith had made her photos freely available and free to use through the Library website. … Therefore, anyone who sees the Highsmith Photos and knows or learns of her gift to the Library could easily believe her to be a hypocrite.”
(tags: getty alamy images copyright licensing relicensing public-domain carol-highsmith)