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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2014-12-05

Published December 5, 2014

  • Pubs With A Fire

    ‘Pubs & Bars With Raging Fires in Dublin’. This is important!

    (tags: pubs dublin fires fireplaces beer christmas)

  • Aurora for MySQL is coming

    ‘Anurag@AWS posts a quite interesting comment on Aurora failover: We asynchronously write to 6 copies and ack the write when we see four completions. So, traditional 4/6 quorums with synchrony as you surmised. Now, each log record can end up with a independent quorum from any other log record, which helps with jitter, but introduces some sophistication in recovery protocols. We peer to peer to fill in holes. We also will repair bad segments in the background, and downgrade to a 3/4 quorum if unable to place in an AZ for any extended period. You need a pretty bad failure to get a write outage.’ (via High Scalability)

    (tags: via:highscalability mysql aurora failover fault-tolerance aws replication quorum)

Links for 2014-12-02

Published December 2, 2014

Links for 2014-12-01

Published December 1, 2014

  • Speeding up Rails 4.2

    Reading between the lines, it looks like Rails 4 is waaay slower than 3….

    (tags: rails ruby performance profiling discourse)

  • Day 1 – Docker in Production: Reality, Not Hype

    Good Docker info from Bridget Kromhout, on their production and dev usage of Docker at DramaFever. lots of good real-world tips

    (tags: docker ops boot2docker tips sysadvent)

  • Lost avant-garde painting found in Stuart Little’s living room

    Two years later, he heard from Lisa S., an assistant set designer on [the movie] Stuart Little. She had bought the painting for $500 from an antiques store in Pasadena specifically for the movie because she thought its cool elegance was perfectly suited for the Little’s New York City apartment. Lisa S. had tracked it down in another warehouse and purchased it from Sony just because she liked it so much. When she contacted Barki, she had no idea of the history of the painting hanging on her bedroom wall. After Barki visited the painting in person and confirmed its identity, Lisa sold it to a private collector. That collector has now been persuaded to sell it in Hungary. It will go up for auction at the Virag Judit Art Gallery in Budapest on December 13th with a starting price of 110,000 euros ($160,000). Gergely Barki won’t make a dime off of his discovery, but he will have a great story to tell in his biography of the artist.

    (tags: stuart-little art history hungary pasadena movies set-design antiques robert-bereny post-impressionism)

Links for 2014-11-30

Published November 30, 2014

  • rjbs’s rubric: In Soviet Minecraft, server op you!

    wow, that is too much effort for a 7-year-old’s Minecraft server ;) Very impressive

    (tags: minecraft game-servers kids teleport gaming rjbs perl)

  • Rust borrow and lifetimes

    How Rust avoids GC overhead using it’s “borrow” system:

    Rust achieves memory safety without GC by using a sophiscated borrow system. For any resource (stack memory, heap memory, file handle and so on), there is exactly one owner which takes care of its resource deallocation, if needed. You may create new bindings to refer to the resource using & or &mut, which is called a borrow or mutable borrow. The compiler ensures all owners and borrowers behave correctly.

    (tags: languages rust gc borrow lifecycle stack heap allocation)

  • Java for Everything

    Actually, I’m really agreeing with a lot of this. Particularly this part:

    Programmers will cringe at writing some kind of command dispatch list: if command = “up”: up() elif command = “status”: status() elif command = “revert”: revert() … so they’ll go off and write some introspecting auto-dispatch cleverness, but that takes longer to write and will surely confuse future readers who’ll wonder how the heck revert() ever gets called. Yet the programmer will incorrectly feel as though he saved himself time. This is the trap of the dynamic language. It feels like you’re being more productive, but aside from the first 10 minutes of a new program, you’re not. Just write the stupid dispatch manually and get on with the real work.
    I’ve also gone right off dynamic languages for any kind of non-toy work. Mind you he needs to get around to ditching Vim for a proper IDE. That’s the key thing that makes coding in a statically-typed language really pleasant — when graphical refactoring becomes easy and usable, and errors are visible as you type them…

    (tags: java coding static-typing python unit-tests)

  • Facebook Fabric Networking Deconstructed

    whoa, this is incredibly in-depth

    (tags: facebook datacenter networking clos-networks infrastructure networks fat-tree)

Links for 2014-11-28

Published November 28, 2014

  • OS X doesn’t support ‘ndots’ DNS resolution

    “ping foo.bar” will not append the “search” domains configured in /etc/resolv.conf. Apparently this has been broken since OS X Lion, no sign of a fix. Nice work Apple

    (tags: apple fail bugs resolv dns domains osx)

  • TCP incast

    a catastrophic TCP throughput collapse that occurs as the number of storage servers sending data to a client increases past the ability of an Ethernet switch to buffer packets. In a clustered file system, for example, a client application requests a data block striped across several storage servers, issuing the next data block request only when all servers have responded with their portion (Figure 1). This synchronized request workload can result in packets overfilling the buffers on the client’s port on the switch, resulting in many losses. Under severe packet loss, TCP can experience a timeout that lasts a minimum of 200ms, determined by the TCP minimum retransmission timeout (RTOmin).

    (tags: incast networking performance tcp bandwidth buffering switch ethernet capacity)

  • Solving the Mystery of Link Imbalance: A Metastable Failure State at Scale | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

    Excellent real-world war story from Facebook — a long-running mystery bug was eventually revealed to be a combination of edge-case behaviours across all the layers of the networking stack, from L2 link aggregation at the agg-router level, up to the L7 behaviour of the MySQL client connection pool.

    Facebook collocates many of a user’s nodes and edges in the social graph. That means that when somebody logs in after a while and their data isn’t in the cache, we might suddenly perform 50 or 100 database queries to a single database to load their data. This starts a race among those queries. The queries that go over a congested link will lose the race reliably, even if only by a few milliseconds. That loss makes them the most recently used when they are put back in the pool. The effect is that during a query burst we stack the deck against ourselves, putting all of the congested connections at the top of the deck.

    (tags: architecture debugging devops facebook layer-7 mysql connection-pooling aggregation networking tcp-stack)

  • “Macaroons” for fine-grained secure database access

    Macaroons are an excellent fit for NoSQL data storage for several reasons. First, they enable an application developer to enforce security policies at very fine granularity, per object. Gone are the clunky security policies based on the IP address of the client, or the per-table access controls of RDBMSs that force you to split up your data across many tables. Second, macaroons ensure that a client compromise does not lead to loss of the entire database. Third, macaroons are very flexible and expressive, able to incorporate information from external systems and third-party databases into authorization decisions. Finally, macaroons scale well and are incredibly efficient, because they avoid public-key cryptography and instead rely solely on fast hash functions.

    (tags: security macaroons cookies databases nosql case-studies storage authorization hyperdex)

  • Richard Tynan on Twitter: “GCHQ Tapping Eircom owned cable”

    Cable listed as owned by Eircom and Cable and Wireless (now Vodafone?)

    (tags: vodafone cables tapping surveillance eircom internet uk)

  • Hermitage: Testing the “I” in ACID

    [Hermitage is] a test suite for databases which probes for a variety of concurrency issues, and thus allows a fair and accurate comparison of isolation levels. Each test case simulates a particular kind of race condition that can happen when two or more transactions concurrently access the same data. Each test can pass (if the database’s implementation of isolation prevents the race condition from occurring) or fail (if the race condition does occur).

    (tags: acid architecture concurrency databases nosql)

Links for 2014-11-27

Published November 27, 2014

  • Consul case study from Hootsuite

    Hootsuite used Consul for distributed configuration, specifically dark-launch feature flags, with great results: ‘Trying out bleeding edge software can be a risky proposition, but in the case of Consul, we’ve found it to be a solid system that works basically as described and was easy to get up and running. We managed to go from initial investigations to production within a month. The value was immediately obvious after looking into the key-value store combined with the events system and it’s DNS features and each of these has worked how we expected. Overall it has been fun to work with and has worked well and based on the initial work we have done with the Dark Launching system we’re feeling confident in Consul’s operation and are looking forward to expanding the scope of it’s use.’

    (tags: consul dark-launches feature-flags configuration distributed hootsuite notification)

Links for 2014-11-25

Published November 25, 2014

Links for 2014-11-24

Published November 24, 2014

Links for 2014-11-23

Published November 23, 2014

Links for 2014-11-21

Published November 21, 2014

  • Goat Simulator’s fake MMO

    This is classic. I love the “Rouge”:

    We also wanted the Rouge to actually look like a stealth-oriented make-up artist, but our 3D artist thought the goat looked ridiculous with a pink wig and a Gucci bag, so we remade the Rouge to actually look like a Rogue.

    (tags: rogue rouge goats goat-simulator funny satire mmos mmorpg games warcraft)

  • The boss has malware, again… : talesfromtechsupport

    Finally after all traditional means of infection were covered; IT started looking into other possibilities. They finally asked the Executive, “Have there been any changes in your life recently”? The executive answer “Well yes, I quit smoking two weeks ago and switched to e-cigarettes”. And that was the answer they were looking for, the made in china e-cigarette had malware hard coded into the charger and when plugged into a computer’s USB port the malware phoned home and infected the system. Moral of the story is have you ever question the legitimacy of the $5 dollar EBay made in China USB item that you just plugged into your computer? Because you should, you damn well should.
    (Via Elliot)

    (tags: via:elliot malware e-cigarettes cigarettes smoking china risks)

Links for 2014-11-20

Published November 20, 2014

  • Update on Azure Storage Service Interruption

    As part of a performance update to Azure Storage, an issue was discovered that resulted in reduced capacity across services utilizing Azure Storage, including Virtual Machines, Visual Studio Online, Websites, Search and other Microsoft services. Prior to applying the performance update, it had been tested over several weeks in a subset of our customer-facing storage service for Azure Tables. We typically call this “flighting,” as we work to identify issues before we broadly deploy any updates. The flighting test demonstrated a notable performance improvement and we proceeded to deploy the update across the storage service. During the rollout we discovered an issue that resulted in storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop, which had gone undetected during flighting. The net result was an inability for the front ends to take on further traffic, which in turn caused other services built on top to experience issues.
    I’m really surprised MS deployment procedures allow a change to be rolled out globally across multiple regions on a single day. I suspect they soon won’t.

    (tags: change-management cm microsoft outages postmortems azure deployment multi-region flighting azure-storage)

  • AWS re:Invent 2014 | (SPOT302) Under the Covers of AWS: Its Core Distributed Systems – YouTube

    This is a really solid talk — not surprising, alv@ is one of the speakers!

    “AWS and Amazon.com operate some of the world’s largest distributed systems infrastructure and applications. In our past 18 years of operating this infrastructure, we have come to realize that building such large distributed systems to meet the durability, reliability, scalability, and performance needs of AWS requires us to build our services using a few common distributed systems primitives. Examples of these primitives include a reliable method to build consensus in a distributed system, reliable and scalable key-value store, infrastructure for a transactional logging system, scalable database query layers using both NoSQL and SQL APIs, and a system for scalable and elastic compute infrastructure. In this session, we discuss some of the solutions that we employ in building these primitives and our lessons in operating these systems. We also cover the history of some of these primitives — DHTs, transactional logging, materialized views and various other deep distributed systems concepts; how their design evolved over time; and how we continue to scale them to AWS. “
    Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/spot302-under-the-covers-of-aws-core-distributed-systems-primitives-that-power-our-platform-aws-reinvent-2014

    (tags: scale scaling aws amazon dht logging data-structures distcomp via:marc-brooker dynamodb s3)

  • How Curiosity, Luck, and the Flip of a Switch Saved the Moon Program | Motherboard

    “SCE to off?” someone said. The switch was so obscure that neither of his bosses knew what he was talking about. “What the hell’s that,” blurted out Gerald Carr, who was in charge of communicating with the capsule. The rookie flight director, Gerry Griffin, didn’t know either. Sixty seconds had passed since the initial lightning strike. No one else knew what to do. The call to abort was fast approaching.  Finally, Carr reluctantly gave the order in a voice far cooler than the moment. “Apollo 12, Houston, try SCE to Auxiliary, over.”

    (tags: spaceflight stories apollo sce-to-aux power lightning weather outages simulation training nasa)

Links for 2014-11-19

Published November 19, 2014

  • Building a complete Tweet index

    Twitter’s new massive-scale twitter search backend. Sharding galore

    (tags: architecture search twitter sharding earlybird)

  • The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)

    ‘I went over to Japan right around the time Takeshi was deciding which emoji were going to make it into the first cut of Gmail emoji. The [PILE_OF_POO emoji] was absolutely one of the necessary emoji that Takeshi said we have to have. There was actually conflict because there were people back at headquarters who had no idea what emoji were, and thought that having an animated [turd] in their Gmail was offensive.’ ‘[The poop emoji] got very popular when a comic called “Dr. Slump” was broadcast in Japan back to the ‘90s. Such poop was not an object to be disliked, but it had a funny meaning. This was a very popular comedy animation where a girl played a trick on other people using the poop. The poop was this funny object to play with. It was never serious.’ ‘In Japanese that’s called “unchi.” It’s a child word with a benign meaning. ‘

    (tags: culture emoji google pile-of-poo turd poo japan gmail unchi dr-slump)

  • LUNAR MISSION ONE: A new lunar mission for everyone. by Lunar Missions Ltd — Kickstarter

    We plan to send an unmanned robotic landing module to the South Pole of the Moon – an area unexplored by previous missions. We’re going to use pioneering technology to drill down to a depth of at least 20m – 10 times deeper than has ever been drilled before – and potentially as deep as 100m. By doing this, we will access lunar rock dating back up to 4.5 billion years to discover the geological composition of the Moon, the ancient relationship it shares with our planet and the effects of asteroid bombardment. Ultimately, the project will improve scientific understanding of the early solar system, the formation of our planet and the Moon, and the conditions that initiated life on Earth.
    Kickstarter-funded — UKP 600k goal. Just in time for xmas!

    (tags: kickstarter science moon lunar-mission-one exploration)

  • Flow, a new static type checker for JavaScript

    Unlike the (excellent) Typescript, it’ll infer types:

    Flow’s type checking is opt-in — you do not need to type check all your code at once. However, underlying the design of Flow is the assumption that most JavaScript code is implicitly statically typed; even though types may not appear anywhere in the code, they are in the developer’s mind as a way to reason about the correctness of the code. Flow infers those types automatically wherever possible, which means that it can find type errors without needing any changes to the code at all. On the other hand, some JavaScript code, especially frameworks, make heavy use of reflection that is often hard to reason about statically. For such inherently dynamic code, type checking would be too imprecise, so Flow provides a simple way to explicitly trust such code and move on. This design is validated by our huge JavaScript codebase at Facebook: Most of our code falls in the implicitly statically typed category, where developers can check their code for type errors without having to explicitly annotate that code with types.

    (tags: facebook flow javascript coding types type-inference ocaml typescript)

  • Exactly-Once Delivery May Not Be What You Want

    An extremely good explanation from Marc Brooker that exactly-once delivery in a distributed system is very hard.

    And so on. There’s always a place to slot in one more turtle. The bad news is that I’m not aware of a nice solution to the general problem for all side effects, and I suspect that no such solution exists. On the bright side, there are some very nice solutions that work really well in practice. The simplest is idempotence. This is a very simple idea: we make the tasks have the same effect no matter how many times they are executed.

    (tags: architecture messaging queues exactly-once-delivery reliability fault-tolerance distcomp marc-brooker)

  • GpsMapIreland

    This topographic map represents Ireland. It is designed for “hillwalking”. The contour lines are extracted from SRTM public data provided by NASA. These files contain a digitized ground represented by points. The sample rate defines a grid resolution for Ireland around 90m in northing and 60m in easting. In major cases, digitized points do not correspond with summits. Carrauntoohil (1039m, the highest summit of Ireland) does not appear in SRTM data. The altitude reaches only 1018m. Data were obtain from space with a radar. Because of the relative position between the radar and the earth, a shadow appears in some conditions (along ridges, behind summits…). This shadow matches with a gap in data (Imagine you with a flashlight in a dark room. It is hard to see what is in shadow). To close these gaps, you need other data or you can do interpolation. The second solution is applied in our case. There is one square degree per SRTM file with a sample rate of 1200×1200 points/square degree at Ireland latitude. […] All in all you obtain contour lines pretty sufficient for walking.

    (tags: hillwalking walking ireland gps garmin open-data srtm maps hiking via:alan)

  • castnow

    Marcus Ramberg says: ‘If you have a chromecast and you’re not using castnow, I don’t know what is wrong with you.’

    (tags: chromecast castnow media movies tv video)

  • The Infinite Hows, instead of the Five Whys

    John Allspaw with an interesting assertion that we need to ask “how”, not “why” in five-whys postmortems:

    “Why?” is the wrong question. In order to learn (which should be the goal of any retrospective or post-hoc investigation) you want multiple and diverse perspectives. You get these by asking people for their own narratives. Effectively, you’re asking “how?“ Asking “why?” too easily gets you to an answer to the question “who?” (which in almost every case is irrelevant) or “takes you to the ‘mysterious’ incentives and motivations people bring into the workplace.” Asking “how?” gets you to describe (at least some) of the conditions that allowed an event to take place, and provides rich operational data.

    (tags: ops five-whys john-allspaw questions postmortems analysis root-causes)

  • the JVM now supports globbing in classpath specifications

    hooray, no more uberjars or monster commandlines!

    (tags: java jvm globbing classpath uberjars jars deployment)

  • Microsoft Azure 9-hour outage

    ‘From 19 Nov, 2014 00:52 to 05:50 UTC a subset of customers using Storage, Virtual Machines, SQL Geo-Restore, SQL Import/export, Websites, Azure Search, Azure Cache, Management Portal, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Visual Studio, Machine Learning, HDInsights, Automation, Virtual Network, Stream Analytics, Active Directory, StorSimple and Azure Backup Services in West US and West Europe experienced connectivity issues. This incident has now been mitigated.’ There was knock-on impact until 11:00 UTC (storage in N Europe), 11:45 UTC (websites, West Europe), and 09:15 UTC (storage, West Europe), from the looks of things. Should be an interesting postmortem.

    (tags: outages azure microsoft ops)

Links for 2014-11-18

Published November 18, 2014

Links for 2014-11-17

Published November 17, 2014

  • FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance

    The entire letter could have been taken from a page of GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG)—though perhaps as an email or series of tweets. The British spying agency GCHQ is one of the NSA’s closest partners. The mission of JTRIG, a unit within GCHQ, is to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt enemies by discrediting them.” And there’s little reason to believe the NSA and FBI aren’t using such tactics. The implications of these types of strategies in the digital age are chilling. Imagine Facebook chats, porn viewing history, emails, and more made public to discredit a leader who threatens the status quo, or used to blackmail a reluctant target into becoming an FBI informant. These are not far-fetched ideas. They are the reality of what happens when the surveillance state is allowed to grow out of control, and the full King letter, as well as current intelligence community practices illustrate that reality richly.

    (tags: fbi surveillance mlk history blackmail snooping gchq nsa)

  • WriterReaderPhaser

    A nice new concurrency primitive from Gil Tene:

    Have you ever had a need for logging or analyzing data that is actively being updated? Have you ever wanted to do that without stalling the writers (recorders) in any way? If so, then WriterReaderPhaser is for you.  I’m not talking about logging messages or text lines here.  I’m talking about data.  Data larger than one word of memory.  Data that holds actual interesting state. Data that keeps being updated, but needs to be viewed in a stable and coherent way for analysis or logging.  Data like frame buffers. Data like histograms.  Data like usage counts. Data that changes.
    see also Left-Right: http://concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.ie/2013/12/left-right-concurrency-control.html

    (tags: phasers data-structures concurrency primitives algorithms performance wait-free)

  • 3D Secure and Verified By Visa to be canned

    Yay.

    Mastercard and Visa are removing the need for users to enter their passwords for identity confirmation as part of a revamp of the existing (oft-criticised) 3-D Secure scheme. The arrival of 3D Secure 2.0 next year will see the credit card giants moving away from the existing system of secondary static passwords to authorise online purchases, as applied by Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode, towards a next-gen system based on more secure biometric and token-based prompts.
    (via Gordon)

    (tags: via:gsyme verified-by-visa 3d-secure mastercard visa credit-cards authentication authorization win passwords)

  • Aeron: Do we really need another messaging system? – High Scalability

    excellent writeup on Aeron

    (tags: aeron messing libraries java martin-thompson performance mechanical-sympathy queueing ipc tcp)

Links for 2014-11-15

Published November 15, 2014

  • IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality

    Newly designed protocols should prefer encryption to cleartext operation. There may be exceptions to this default, but it is important to recognize that protocols do not operate in isolation.  Information leaked by one protocol can be made part of a more substantial body of information by cross-correlation of traffic observation.  There are protocols which may as a result require encryption on the Internet even when it would not be a requirement for that protocol operating in isolation. We recommend that encryption be deployed throughout the protocol stack since there is not a single place within the stack where all kinds of communication can be protected.
    Wow. so much for IPSec

    (tags: ipsec iab ietf snowden surveillance crypto protocols internet)

  • Facebook’s datacenter fabric

    FB goes public with its take on the Clos network-based datacenter network architecture

    (tags: networking scaling facebook clos-networks fabrics datacenters network-architecture)

Links for 2014-11-14

Published November 14, 2014

Links for 2014-11-13

Published November 13, 2014

Links for 2014-11-12

Published November 12, 2014

Links for 2014-11-11

Published November 11, 2014

  • Life expectancy increases are due mainly to healthier children, not longer old age

    Interesting — I hadn’t expected this. ‘Life expectancy at birth [in the US] in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65. But life expectancy at birth in the early decades of the 20th century was low due mainly to high infant mortality, and someone who died as a child would never have worked and paid into Social Security. A more appropriate measure is probably life expectancy after attainment of adulthood.’ …. ‘Men who attained age 65 could expect to collect Social Security benefits for almost 13 years (and the numbers are even higher for women).’ In Ireland, life expectancy at birth has increased 18.4 years since 1926 — but life expectancy for men aged 65 (the pension age) has only increased by 3.8 years. This means that increased life expectancy figures are not particularly relevant to the “pension crunch” story. Via Fred Logue: https://twitter.com/fplogue/status/532093184646873089

    (tags: via:fplogue statistics taxes life-expectancy pensions infant-mortality health 1930s)

  • DynamoDB Streams

    This is pretty awesome. All changes to a DynamoDB table can be streamed to a Kinesis stream, MySQL-replication-style. The nice bit is that it has a solid way to ensure readers won’t get overwhelmed by the stream volume (since ddb tables are IOPS-rate-limited), and Kinesis has a solid way to read missed updates (since it’s a Kafka-style windowed persistent stream). With this you have a pretty reliable way to ensure you’re not going to suffer data loss.

    (tags: iops dynamodb aws kinesis reliability replication multi-az multi-region failover streaming kafka)

  • Help the GNOME Foundation defend the GNOME trademark

    Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon’s product is a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation.” The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here). To use the GNOME name for a proprietary software product that is antithetical to the fundamental ideas of the GNOME community, the free software community and the GNU project is outrageous. Please help us fight this huge company as they try to trade on our goodwill and hard earned reputation.

    (tags: gnome groupon trademark infringement open-source operating-systems ip law floss)

  • StatusPage.io

    ‘Hosted Status Pages for Your Company’. We use these guys in $work, and their service is fantastic — it’s a line of javascript in the page template which will easily allow you to add a “service degraded” banner when things go pear-shaped, along with an external status site for when things get really messy. They’ve done a good clean job.

    (tags: monitoring server status outages uptime saas infrastructure)

Links for 2014-11-10

Published November 10, 2014

  • Eircom have run out of network capacity

    This is due in part to huge growth in the data volumes and data traffic that is transported over our network, which has exceeded our forecasted growth. We are making a number of improvements to our international connectivity which will add significant capacity and this work will be completed in the next two or three weeks.
    Guess this is what happens when Amazon poach your IP network engineers. doh! More seriously though, if you’re marketing eFibre heavily, shouldn’t you be investing in the upstream capacity to go with it?

    (tags: eircom fail internet capacity forecasting networking)

  • Apple site lets you deactivate iMessage and solve your missing text problem

    FINALLY.

    (tags: apple imessage android switch hardware lock-in)

  • Yes, Isis exploits technology. But that’s no reason to compromise our privacy | Technology | The Observer

    From the very beginning, Isis fanatics have been up to speed on [social media]. Which raises an interesting question: how come that GCHQ and the other intelligence agencies failed to notice the rise of the Isis menace until it was upon us? Were they so busy hoovering metadata and tapping submarine cables and “mastering the internet” (as the code name of one of their projects puts it) that they didn’t have time to see what every impressionable Muslim 14-year-old in the world with an internet connection could see?

    (tags: gchq guardian encryption nsa isis technology social-media snooping surveillance)

  • This Canadian Artist Halted Pipeline Development by Copyrighting His Land as a Work of Art

    One of the really important pieces on my land was this white-picket fence. The picket fence is probably 100 yards or less, within 100 yards of where they wanted to build this pipeline. I [plan to] extend it 8 feet every year for the rest of my life and I’ve been doing that for 25 years. It got me thinking, where does this piece end? Does it end at the actual structure of the fence or the things growing around it, growing through it, that are part of the photography, the documentation of it? I realized at that point that [the fence], and the other sculptures and pieces and incursions and conceptual works, were actually integral to that piece of land and to my practice. I had not intended for it to be a political piece, it was just a piece, an idea the follow-through of which at some point became poetic, you go, “Wait a minute the fence actually stopped them!” But the fence doesn’t actually enclose anything. It’s just a straight line. And it’s marking something that’s actually unmarkable, which is time. And one day it’ll be gone, as will I. The land will be changed–but it was just this crazy irony that kicked into play when I was standing there with those oil negotiators.

    (tags: copyright art pipelines canada politics oil land conceptual-art ip)

  • wrk2

    ‘A constant throughput, correct latency-recording variant of wrk. This is a must-have when measuring network service latency — corrects for Coordinated Omission error:

    wrk’s model, which is similar to the model found in many current load generators, computes the latency for a given request as the time from the sending of the first byte of the request to the time the complete response was received. While this model correctly measures the actual completion time of individual requests, it exhibits a strong Coordinated Omission effect, through which most of the high latency artifacts exhibited by the measured server will be ignored. Since each connection will only begin to send a request after receiving a response, high latency responses result in the load generator coordinating with the server to avoid measurement during high latency periods.

    (tags: wrk latency measurement tools cli http load-testing testing load-generation coordinated-omission gil-tene)

  • The problem of managing schemas

    Good post on the pain of using CSV/JSON as a data interchange format:

    eventually, the schema changes. Someone refactors the code generating the JSON and moves fields around, perhaps renaming few fields. The DBA added new columns to a MySQL table and this reflects in the CSVs dumped from the table. Now all those applications and scripts must be modified to handle both file formats. And since schema changes happen frequently, and often without warning, this results in both ugly and unmaintainable code, and in grumpy developers who are tired of having to modify their scripts again and again.

    (tags: schema json avro protobuf csv data-formats interchange data hadoop files file-formats)

Links for 2014-11-07

Published November 7, 2014

Links for 2014-11-06

Published November 6, 2014

Links for 2014-11-05

Published November 5, 2014

Links for 2014-11-04

Published November 4, 2014

  • Zookeeper: not so great as a highly-available service registry

    Turns out ZK isn’t a good choice as a service discovery system, if you want to be able to use that service discovery system while partitioned from the rest of the ZK cluster:

    I went into one of the instances and quickly did an iptables DROP on all packets coming from the other two instances.  This would simulate an availability zone continuing to function, but that zone losing network connectivity to the other availability zones.  What I saw was that the two other instances noticed the first server “going away”, but they continued to function as they still saw a majority (66%).  More interestingly the first instance noticed the other two servers “going away”, dropping the ensemble availability to 33%.  This caused the first server to stop serving requests to clients (not only writes, but also reads).
    So: within that offline AZ, service discovery *reads* (as well as writes) stopped working due to a lack of ZK quorum. This is quite a feasible outage scenario for EC2, by the way, since (at least when I was working there) the network links between AZs, and the links with the external internet, were not 100% overlapping. In other words, if you want a highly-available service discovery system in the fact of network partitions, you want an AP service discovery system, rather than a CP one — and ZK is a CP system. Another risk, noted on the Netflix Eureka mailing list at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/eureka_netflix/LXKWoD14RFY/tA9UnerrBHUJ :
    ZooKeeper, while tolerant against single node failures, doesn’t react well to long partitioning events. For us, it’s vastly more important that we maintain an available registry than a necessarily consistent registry. If us-east-1d sees 23 nodes, and us-east-1c sees 22 nodes for a little bit, that’s OK with us.
    I guess this means that a long partition can trigger SESSION_EXPIRED state, resulting in ZK client libraries requiring a restart/reconnect to fix. I’m not entirely clear what happens to the ZK cluster itself in this scenario though. Finally, Pinterest ran into other issues relying on ZK for service discovery and registration, described at http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/77933733851/zookeeper-resilience-at-pinterest ; sounds like this was mainly around load and the “thundering herd” overload problem. Their workaround was to decouple ZK availability from their services’ availability, by building a Smartstack-style sidecar daemon on each host which tracked/cached ZK data.

    (tags: zookeeper service-discovery ops ha cap ap cp service-registry availability ec2 aws network partitions eureka smartstack pinterest)

  • Why We Didn’t Use Kafka for a Very Kafka-Shaped Problem

    A good story of when Kafka _didn’t_ fit the use case:

    We came up with a complicated process of app-level replication for our messages into two separate Kafka clusters. We would then do end-to-end checking of the two clusters, detecting dropped messages in each cluster based on messages that weren’t in both. It was ugly. It was clearly going to be fragile and error-prone. It was going to be a lot of app-level replication and horrible heuristics to see when we were losing messages and at least alert us, even if we couldn’t fix every failure case. Despite us building a Kafka prototype for our ETL — having an existing investment in it — it just wasn’t going to do what we wanted. And that meant we needed to leave it behind, rewriting the ETL prototype.

    (tags: cassandra java kafka scala network-partitions availability multi-region multi-az aws replication onlive)

  • Madhumita Venkataramanan: My identity for sale (Wired UK)

    If the data aggregators know everything about you — including biometric data, healthcare history, where you live, where you work, what you do at the weekend, what medicines you take, etc. — and can track you as an individual, does it really matter that they don’t know your _name_? They legally track, and sell, everything else.

    As the data we generate about ourselves continues to grow exponentially, brokers and aggregators are moving on from real-time profiling — they’re cross-linking data sets to predict our future behaviour. Decisions about what we see and buy and sign up for aren’t made by us any more; they were made long before. The aggregate of what’s been collected about us previously — which is near impossible for us to see in its entirety — defines us to companies we’ve never met. What I am giving up without consent, then, is not just my anonymity, but also my right to self-determination and free choice. All I get to keep is my name.

    (tags: wired privacy data-aggregation identity-theft future grim biometrics opt-out healthcare data data-protection tracking)

  • Linux kernel’s Transparent Huge Pages feature causing 300ms-800ms pauses

    bad news for low-latency apps. See also its impact on redis: http://antirez.com/news/84

    (tags: redis memory defrag huge-pages linux kernel ops latency performance transparent-huge-pages)

  • Please grow your buffers exponentially

    Although in some cases x1.5 is considered good practice. YMMV I guess

    (tags: malloc memory coding buffers exponential jemalloc firefox heap allocation)

  • How I created two images with the same MD5 hash

    I found that I was able to run the algorithm in about 10 hours on an AWS large GPU instance bringing it in at about $0.65 plus tax.
    Bottom line: MD5 is feasibly attackable by pretty much anyone now.

    (tags: crypto images md5 security hashing collisions ec2 via:hn)

Links for 2014-11-03

Published November 3, 2014

Links for 2014-10-31

Published October 31, 2014

  • Chip & PIN vs. Chip & Signature

    Trust US banks to fuck up their attempts at security :( US “chip-and-signature” cards are still entirely forgeable because the banks fear that consumers are too stupid to use a PIN, basically.

    BK: So, I guess we should all be grateful that banks and retailers in the United States are finally taking steps to move toward chip [and signature] cards, but it seems to me that as long as these chip cards still also store cardholder data on a magnetic stripe as a backup, that the thieves can still steal and counterfeit this card data — even from chip cards. Litan: Yes, that’s the key problem for the next few years. Once mag stripe goes away, chip-and-PIN will be a very strong solution. The estimates are now that by the end of 2015, 50 percent of the cards and terminals will be chip-enabled, but it’s going to be several years before we get closer to full compliance. So, we’re probably looking at about 2018 before we can start making plans to get rid of the magnetic stripe on these cards.

    (tags: magstripe banks banking chip-and-pin security brian-krebs chip-and-signature)

  • Elastic MapReduce vs S3

    Turns out there are a few bugs in EMR’s S3 support, believe it or not. 1. ‘Consider disabling Hadoop’s speculative execution feature if your cluster is experiencing Amazon S3 concurrency issues. You do this through the mapred.map.tasks.speculative.execution and mapred.reduce.tasks.speculative.execution configuration settings. This is also useful when you are troubleshooting a slow cluster.’ 2. Upgrade to AMI 3.1.0 or later, otherwise retries of S3 ops don’t work.

    (tags: s3 emr hadoop aws bugs speculative-execution ops)

Links for 2014-10-30

Published October 30, 2014

  • IT Change Management

    Stephanie Dean on Amazon’s approach to CMs. This is solid gold advice for any company planning to institute a sensible technical change management process

    (tags: ops tech process changes change-management bureaucracy amazon stephanie-dean infrastructure)

  • Stephanie Dean on event management and incident response

    I asked around my ex-Amazon mates on twitter about good docs on incident response practices outside the “iron curtain”, and they pointed me at this blog (which I didn’t realise existed). Stephanie Dean was the front-line ops manager for Amazon for many years, over the time where they basically *fixed* their availability problems. She since moved on to Facebook, Demonware, and Twitter. She really knows her stuff and this blog is FULL of great details of how they ran (and still run) front-line ops teams in Amazon.

    (tags: ops incident-response outages event-management amazon stephanie-dean techops tos sev1)

  • RICON 2014: CRDTs

    Carlos Baquero presents several operation, state-based CRDTs for use in AP systems like Voldemort and Riak

    (tags: ap cap-theorem crdts ricon carlos-baquero data-structures distcomp)

  • Brownout: building more robust cloud applications

    Applications can saturate – i.e. become unable to serve users in a timely manner. Some users may experience high latencies, while others may not receive any service at all. The authors argue that it is better to downgrade the user experience and continue serving a larger number of clients with reasonable latency. “We define a cloud application as brownout compliant if it can gradually downgrade user experience to avoid saturation.” This is actually very reminiscent of circuit breakers, as described in Nygard’s ‘Release It!’ and popularized by Netflix. If you’re already designing with circuit breakers, you’ve probably got all the pieces you need to add brownout support to your application relatively easily. “Our work borrows from the concept of brownout in electrical grids. Brownouts are an intentional voltage drop often used to prevent blackouts through load reduction in case of emergency. In such a situation, incandescent light bulbs dim, hence originating the term.” “To lower the maintenance effort, brownouts should be automatically triggered. This enables cloud applications to rapidly and robustly avoid saturation due to unexpected environmental changes, lowering the burden on human operators.”
    This is really similar to the Circuit Breaker pattern — in fact it feels to me like a variation on that, driven by measured latencies of operations/requests. See also http://blog.acolyer.org/2014/10/27/improving-cloud-service-resilience-using-brownout-aware-load-balancing/ .

    (tags: circuit-breaker patterns brownout robustness reliability load latencies degradation)

  • Photographs of Sellafield nuclear plant prompt fears over radioactive risk

    “Slow-motion Chernobyl”, as Greenpeace are calling it. You thought legacy code was a problem? try legacy Magnox fuel rods.

    Previously unseen pictures of two storage ponds containing hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods at the Sellafield nuclear plant show cracked concrete, seagulls bathing in the water and weeds growing around derelict machinery. But a spokesman for owners Sellafield Ltd said the 60-year-old ponds will not be cleaned up for decades, despite concern that they are in a dangerous state and could cause a large release of radioactive material if they are allowed to deteriorate further. “The concrete is in dreadful condition, degraded and fractured, and if the ponds drain, the Magnox fuel will ignite and that would lead to a massive release of radioactive material,” nuclear safety expert John Large told the Ecologist magazine. “I am very disturbed at the run-down condition of the structures and support services. In my opinion there is a significant risk that the system could fail.

    (tags: energy environment nuclear uk sellafield magnox seagulls time long-now)

  • The man who made a game to change the world

    An interview with Richard Bartle, the creator of MUD, back in 1978.

    Perceiving the different ways in which players approached the game led Bartle to consider whether MMO players could be classified according to type. “A group of admins was having an argument about what people wanted out of a MUD in about 1990,” he recalls. “This began a 200-long email chain over a period of six months. Eventually I went through everybody’s answers and categorised them. I discovered there were four types of MMO player. I published some short versions of them then, when the journal of MUD research came out I wrote it up as a paper.” The so-called Bartle test, which classifies MMO players as Achievers, Explorers, Socialisers or Killers (or a mixture thereof) according to their play-style remains in widespread use today. Bartle believes that you need a healthy mix of all dominant types in order to maintain a successful MMO ecosystem. “If you have a game full of Achievers (players for whom advancement through a game is the primary goal) the people who arrive at the bottom level won’t continue to play because everyone is better than them,” he explains. “This removes the bottom tier and, over time, all of the bottom tiers leave through irritation. But if you have Socialisers in the mix they don’t care about levelling up and all of that. So the lowest Achievers can look down on the Socialisers and the Socialisers don’t care. If you’re just making the game for Achievers it will corrode from the bottom. All MMOs have this insulating layer, even if the developers don’t understand why it’s there.”

    (tags: mmo mud gaming history internet richard-bartle)

  • Testing fork time on AWS/Xen infrastructure

    Redis uses forking to perform persistence flushes, which means that once every 30 minutes it performs like crap (and kills the 99th percentile latency). Given this, various Redis people have been benchmarking fork() times on various Xen platforms, since Xen has a crappy fork() implementation

    (tags: fork xen redis bugs performance latency p99)

  • A Teenager Gets Grilled By Her Dad About Why She’s Not That Into Coding

    Jay Rosen interviews his 17-year-old daughter. it’s pretty eye-opening. Got to start them early!

    (tags: culture tech coding girls women feminism teenagers school jay-rosen stem)

Links for 2014-10-29

Published October 29, 2014

Links for 2014-10-28

Published October 28, 2014

  • David Malone planning a commemoration of Dublin Mean Time next year

    Dublin had its own time zone, 25 minutes off what would become GMT, until 1916

    (tags: 1916 dublin rising time dublin-mean-time dmt gmt perfidious-albion dunsink)

  • Roshiak

    a Riak-based clone of Roshi, the CRDT server built on top of Redis. some day I’ll write up the CRDT we use on top of Voldemort in $work. Comments: https://lobste.rs/s/tim5xc

    (tags: riak roshi crdt redis storage time-series-data)

  • Vodafone UK, Verizon add mandatory device-tracking token on all web requests

    ‘Verizon Wireless is monitoring users’ mobile internet traffic, using a token slapped onto web requests, to facilitate targeted advertising even if a user has opted out. The unique identifier token header (UIDH) was launched two years ago, and has caused an uproar in tech circles after it was re-discovered Thursday by Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer Jacob Hoffman-Andrews. The Relevant Mobile Advertising program, under which the UIDH was used, allowed a restaurant to advertised to locals only or for retail websites to promote to previous visitors, according to Verizon Wireless.’

    (tags: uidh verizon vodafone privacy tracking http cookies advertising)

  • Cuckoo Filters

    ‘In many networking systems, Bloom filters are used for high-speed set membership tests. They permit a small fraction of false positive answers with very good space efficiency. However, they do not permit deletion of items from the set, and previous attempts to extend “standard” Bloom filters to support deletion all degrade either space or performance. We propose a new data structure called the cuckoo filter that can replace Bloom filters for approximate set member- ship tests. Cuckoo filters support adding and removing items dynamically while achieving even higher performance than Bloom filters. For applications that store many items and target moderately low false positive rates, cuckoo filters have lower space overhead than space-optimized Bloom filters. Our experimental results also show that cuckoo filters out-perform previous data structures that extend Bloom filters to support deletions substantially in both time and space.’

    (tags: algorithms cs coding cuckoo-filters bloom-filters sets data-structures)

  • Irish government in favour of ISDS court-evasion for multinationals

    This has _already_ been used to trump national law. As Simon McGarr noted at https://twitter.com/Tupp_Ed/statuses/526103760041680898 : ‘Philip Morris initiated a dispute under the Australia-Hong Kong Bilateral Investment Treaty to force #plainpacks repeal and compensation’. “Plain packs” anti-smoking is being bitterly fought at the moment here in Ireland. More from the US point of view: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-allowing-foreign-firms-to-sue-nations-hurts-trade-deals/2014/10/01/4b3725b0-4964-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html : ‘The Obama administration’s insistence on ISDS may please Wall Street, but it threatens to undermine some of the president’s landmark achievements in curbing pollution and fighting global warming, not to mention his commitment to a single standard of justice. It’s not worthy of the president, and he should join Europe in scrapping it.’

    (tags: isds national-law law ireland sovereignty multinationals philip-morris us-politics eu free-trade)

  • Jonathan Bergknoff: Building good docker images

    Good advice

    (tags: devops reference docker tips ops containers linux)

  • Game Day Exercises at Stripe: Learning from `kill -9`

    We’ve started running game day exercises at Stripe. During a recent game day, we tested failing over a Redis cluster by running kill -9 on its primary node, and ended up losing all data in the cluster. We were very surprised by this, but grateful to have found the problem in testing. This result and others from this exercise convinced us that game days like these are quite valuable, and we would highly recommend them for others.
    Excellent post. Game days are a great idea. Also: massive Redis clustering fail

    (tags: game-days redis testing stripe outages ops kill-9 failover)

  • The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED

    “Everybody hits the wall, generally between three and five months,” says a former YouTube content moderator I’ll call Rob. “You just think, ‘Holy shit, what am I spending my day doing? This is awful.’”

    (tags: facebook wired beheadings moderation nsfw google youtube social-media filtering porn abuse)

Links for 2014-10-27

Published October 27, 2014

  • PSA: don’t run ‘strings’ on untrusted files (CVE-2014-8485)

    ffs.

    Perhaps simply by the virtue of being a part of that bundle, the strings utility tries to leverage the common libbfd infrastructure to detect supported executable formats and “optimize” the process by extracting text only from specific sections of the file. Unfortunately, the underlying library can be hardly described as safe: a quick pass with afl (and probably with any other competent fuzzer) quickly reveals a range of troubling and likely exploitable out-of-bounds crashes due to very limited range checking

    (tags: strings libbfd gnu security fuzzing buffer-overflows)

Links for 2014-10-22

Published October 22, 2014

  • Jauter

    This Java library can route paths to targets and create paths from targets and params (reverse routing). This library is tiny, without additional dependencies, and is intended for use together with an HTTP server side library. If you want to use with Netty, see netty-router.

    (tags: java jauter scala request-routing http netty open-source)

  • “Viewstamped Replication Revisited”, Liskov and Cowling [pdf]

    classic replication paper, via aphyr: ‘This paper presents an updated version of Viewstamped Replication, a replication technique that handles failures in which nodes crash. It describes how client requests are handled, how the group reorganizes when a replica fails, and how a failed replica is able to rejoin the group. The paper also describes a number of important optimizations and presents a protocol for handling reconfigurations that can change both the group membership and the number of failures the group is able to handle.’

Links for 2014-10-21

Published October 21, 2014

  • BioBrick

    Holy shit we are living in the future.

    BioBrick parts are DNA sequences which conform to a restriction-enzyme assembly standard.[1][2] These Lego-like building blocks are used to design and assemble synthetic biological circuits, which would then be incorporated into living cells such as Escherichia coli cells to construct new biological systems.[3] Examples of BioBrick parts include promoters, ribosomal binding sites (RBS), coding sequences and terminators.
    (via Soren)

    (tags: via:sorenrags biobricks fabrication organisms artificial-life biology e-coli genetic-engineering)

  • Is Docker ready for production? Feedbacks of a 2 weeks hands on

    I have to agree with this assessment — there are a lot of loose ends still for production use of Docker in a SOA stack environment:

    From my point of view, Docker is probably the best thing I’ve seen in ages to automate a build. It allows to pre build and reuse shared dependencies, ensuring they’re up to date and reducing your build time. It avoids you to either pollute your Jenkins environment or boot a costly and slow Virtualbox virtual machine using Vagrant. But I don’t feel like it’s production ready in a complex environment, because it adds too much complexity. And I’m not even sure that’s what it was designed for.

    (tags: docker complexity devops ops production deployment soa web-services provisioning networking logging)

Links for 2014-10-20

Published October 20, 2014

  • Load testing Apache Kafka on AWS

    This is a very solid benchmarking post, examining Kafka in good detail. Nicely done. Bottom line:

    I basically spend 2/3 of my work time torture testing and operationalizing distributed systems in production. There’s some that I’m not so pleased with (posts pending in draft forever) and some that have attributes that I really love. Kafka is one of those systems that I pretty much enjoy every bit of, and the fact that it performs predictably well is only a symptom of the reason and not the reason itself: the authors really know what they’re doing. Nothing about this software is an accident. Performance, everything in this post, is only a fraction of what’s important to me and what matters when you run these systems for real. Kafka represents everything I think good distributed systems are about: that thorough and explicit design decisions win.

    (tags: testing aws kafka ec2 load-testing benchmarks performance)

Links for 2014-10-17

Published October 17, 2014

Links for 2014-10-16

Published October 16, 2014

  • Landlords not liable for tenants’ water bills

    What an utter fuckup. Business as usual for Irish Water:

    However the spokeswoman said application packs for rented dwellings would be addressed to the landlord, at the landlord’s residence, and it would be the landlord’s responsibility to ensure the tenant received the application pack. Bills are to be issued quarterly, but as Irish Water will have the tenant’s PPS number, the utility firm will be able to pursue the tenant for any arrears and even apply any arrears to new accounts, when the tenant moves to a new address. Last week landlords had expressed concern over potential arrears, the liability for them and the possibility of being used as collection agents by Irish Water.

    (tags: landlords ireland irish-water tenancy rental ppsn)

  • Irish Water responds to landlords’ questions

    ugh, what a mess….

    * Every rental unit in the State is to get a pack addressed personally to the occupant. If Irish Water does not have details of a tenant, the pack will be addressed to ‘The Occupier’ * Packs will only be issued to individual rental properties in so far as Irish Water is aware of them * Landlords can contact Irish Water to advise they have let a property * Application Packs are issued relative to the information on the Irish Water mailing list. If this is incorrect or out of date, landlords can contact Irish Water to have the information adjusted *Irish Water will contact known landlords after the initial customer application campaign, to advise of properties for which no application has been received * Irish Water said that when a household is occupied the tenant is liable and when vacant the owner is liable. Both should advise Irish Water of change of status to the property – the tenant to cease liability, the landlord to take it up. Either party may take a reading and provide it to Irish Water, alternatively Irish Water will bill on average consumption, based on the date of change.

    (tags: irish-water water ireland liability bills landlords tenancy rental)

Links for 2014-10-15

Published October 15, 2014

Links for 2014-10-14

Published October 14, 2014

  • Dublin’s Best-Kept Secret: Blas Cafe

    looks great, around the corner from Cineworld on King’s Inn St, D1

    (tags: dublin cafes food blas-cafe eating northside)

  • “Meta-Perceptual Helmets For The Dead Zoo”

    with Neil McKenzie, Nov 9-16 2014, in the National History Museum in Dublin: ‘These six helmets/viewing devices start off by exploring physical conditions of viewing: if we have two eyes, they why is our vision so limited? Why do we have so little perception of depth? Why don’t our two eyes offer us two different, complementary views of the world around us? Why can’t they extend from our body so we can see over or around things? Why don’t they allow us to look behind and in front at the same time, or sideways in both directions? Why can’t our two eyes simultaneously focus on two different tasks? Looking through Michael Land’s defining work Animal Eyes, we see that nature has indeed explored all of these possibilities: a Hammerhead Shark has hyper-stereo vision; a horse sees 350° around itself; a chameleon has separately rotatable eyes… The series of Meta-Perceptual Helmets do indeed explore these zoological typologies: proposing to humans the hyper-stereo vision of the hammerhead shark; or the wide peripheral vision of the horse; or the backward/forward vision of the chameleon… but they also take us into the unnatural world of mythology and literature: the Cheshire Cat Helmet is so called because of the strange lingering effect of dominating visual information such as a smile or the eyes; the Cyclops allows one large central eye to take in the world around while a second tiny hidden eye focuses on a close up task (why has the creature never evolved that can focus on denitting without constantly having to glance around?).’ (via Emma)

    (tags: perception helmets dublin ireland museums dead-zoo sharks eyes vision art)

  • Grade inflation figures from Irish universities

    The figures show that, between 2004 and 2013, an average of 71.7 per cent of students at TCD graduated with either a 1st or a 2.1. DCU and UCC had the next highest rate of such awards (64.3 per cent and 64.2 per cent respectively), followed by UCD (55.8 per cent), NUI Galway (54.7 per cent), Maynooth University (53.7 per cent) and University of Limerick (50.2 per cent).

    (tags: tcd grades grade-inflation dcu ucc ucd ireland studies academia third-level)

  • webrtcH4cKS: ~ coTURN: the open-source multi-tenant TURN/STUN server you were looking for

    Last year we interviewed Oleg Moskalenko and presented the rfc5766-turn-server project, which is a free open source and extremely popular implementation of TURN and STURN server. A few months later we even discovered Amazon is using this project to power its Mayday service. Since then, a number of features beyond the original RFC 5766 have been defined at the IETF and a new open-source project was born: the coTURN project.

    (tags: webrtc turn sturn rfc-5766 push nat stun firewalls voip servers internet)

  • Google Online Security Blog: This POODLE bites: exploiting the SSL 3.0 fallback

    Today we are publishing details of a vulnerability in the design of SSL version 3.0. This vulnerability allows the plaintext of secure connections to be calculated by a network attacker.
    ouch.

    (tags: ssl3 ssl tls security exploits google crypto)