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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2016-01-28

Published January 28, 2016

Links for 2016-01-27

Published January 27, 2016

Links for 2016-01-26

Published January 26, 2016

Links for 2016-01-25

Published January 25, 2016

  • Netflix Global Search

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

    (tags: movies video netflix films tv world)

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

    This is full of good points.

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

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

Links for 2016-01-22

Published January 22, 2016

Links for 2016-01-21

Published January 21, 2016

Links for 2016-01-20

Published January 20, 2016

Links for 2016-01-16

Published January 16, 2016

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

    This is absolutely appalling. IP law gone mad:

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

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

Links for 2016-01-12

Published January 12, 2016

Links for 2016-01-08

Published January 8, 2016

Links for 2016-01-06

Published January 6, 2016

Links for 2016-01-04

Published January 4, 2016

Links for 2015-12-31

Published December 31, 2015

Links for 2015-12-22

Published December 22, 2015

  • Amazon EC2 Container Registry

    hooray, Docker registry here at last

    (tags: ecs docker registry ops containers aws)

  • How to inspect SSL/TLS traffic with Wireshark 2

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

    (tags: chrome ssl browser firefox wireshark debugging tls)

  • ImperialViolet – Juniper: recording some Twitter conversations

    Adam Langley on the Juniper VPN-snooping security hole:

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

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

  • Excellent post from Matthew Green on the Juniper backdoor

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

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

  • 2016 Wish List for AWS?

    good thread of AWS’ shortcomings — so many services still don’t handle VPC for instance

    (tags: vpc aws ec2 ops wishlist)

Links for 2015-12-18

Published December 18, 2015

Links for 2015-12-16

Published December 16, 2015

Links for 2015-12-15

Published December 15, 2015

Links for 2015-12-14

Published December 14, 2015

  • Files Are Hard

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

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

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

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

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

  • Kevin Lyda’s mega pension post

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

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

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

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

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

  • Why We Chose Kubernetes Over ECS

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

    (tags: kubernetes ecs docker containers aws ec2 ops)

Links for 2015-12-11

Published December 11, 2015

Links for 2015-12-10

Published December 10, 2015

Links for 2015-12-09

Published December 9, 2015

Links for 2015-12-07

Published December 7, 2015

Links for 2015-12-03

Published December 3, 2015

  • Introducing Netty-HTTP from Cask

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

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

  • The Locals Xmas Gift Guide 2015

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

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

Links for 2015-12-02

Published December 2, 2015

  • Topics in High-Performance Messaging

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

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

Links for 2015-11-30

Published November 30, 2015

  • Control theory meets machine learning

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

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

  • The End of Dynamic Languages

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

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

  • RobustIRC

    ‘IRC without netsplits’ using Raft consensus

    (tags: raft irc netsplits resilience fault-tolerance)

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

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

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

Links for 2015-11-28

Published November 28, 2015

  • One of the Largest Hacks Yet Exposes Data on Hundreds of Thousands of Kids | Motherboard

    VTech got hacked, and millions of parents and 200,000 kids had their privacy breached as a result. Bottom line is summed up by this quote from one affected parent:

    “Why do you need know my address, why do you need to know all this information just so I can download a couple of free books for my kid on this silly pad thing? Why did they have all this information?”
    Quite. Better off simply not to have the data in the first place!

    (tags: vtech privacy data-protection data hacks)

  • Senior Anglo bondholders revealed in department note

    In case you were wondering who Ireland’s economy was wiped out for:

    Among the major holders were a Dutch pension fund, ABP; another Dutch fund, PGGM; LGPI in Finland, which manages local government pensions; and a Swiss public entities pension. A number of major asset managers were also named, including JP Morgan in London; DeKA and ADIG, two German investment managers; and Robeco from the Netherlands. Big insurance companies, including Munich Re, Llmarinen from Finland and German giant Axa were also named, along with big banks such as BNP, SocGen, ING and Deutsche.

    (tags: bondholders anglo economy ireland politics eu senior-bondholders)

  • Is Dublin Busy?

    a bunch of metrics for Dublin xmas-shopping capacity

    (tags: xmas dublin metrics design stats)

Links for 2015-11-26

Published November 26, 2015

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

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

    (tags: teams google culture work management productivity hr)

Links for 2015-11-25

Published November 25, 2015