Justin's Linklog Posts

Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make — and break — online video

Should ISPs be required to ensure they have sufficient upstream bandwidth to video sites like YouTube and Netflix?

“Verizon has chosen to sell its customers a product [Netflix] that they hope those customers don’t actually use,” Schaeffer said. “And when customers use it and request movies, they have not ensured there is adequate connectivity to get that video content back to their customers.”

(tags: netflix youtube streaming video isps net-neutrality peering comcast bandwidth upstream)

ISPAI Responds to Porn Filtering Debacle

Quite a strong statement:

The issue of access to age-inappropriate content is not a new matter and it is important not to have “knee-jerk” reactions which don’t solve the perceived problem and have major implications for the public’s right to access information in general. Notably the European Commission, as stated by vice-president Nellie Kroes [jm: sic], has come out strongly against blocking of the Internet, seeing it as an important platform for freedom of speech and she intends to “guarantee access without restriction.”  We in Ireland would do well to consider carefully the impact that any rash adoption or attempted copying of UK measures might have here in the light of current and future EU legislation and policy.

(tags: ispai filtering overblocking david-cameron porn internet ireland politics blocking web uk)

Forecast.io

Excellent weather site, displaying beautifully interpolated rainfall visualization, from the team behind the Dark Sky app

(tags: weather ireland dark-sky apps iphone ipad forecast rain dataviz mapping via:marcomorain)

Applied Cryptography, Cryptography Engineering, and how they need to be updated

Whoa, I had no idea my knowledge of crypto was so out of date! For example:

ECC is going to replace RSA within the next 10 years. New systems probably shouldn’t use RSA at all.

(tags: thomas-ptacek crypto cryptography coding design security aes cbc ctr ecb hmac side-channels rsa ecc)

When ‘Smart Homes’ Get Hacked: I Haunted A Complete Stranger’s House Via The Internet – Forbes

Hardware designers do their usual trick — omit the whole security part:

[Trustwave’s Crowley] found security flaws that would allow a digital intruder to take control of a number of sensitive devices beyond the Insteon systems, from the Belkin WeMo Switch to the Satis Smart Toilet. Yes, they found that a toilet was hackable. You only have to have the Android app for the $5,000 toilet on your phone and be close enough to the toilet to communicate with it. “It connects through Bluetooth, with no username or password using the pin ‘0000’,” said Crowley. “So anyone who has the application on their phone and was connected to the network could control anyone else’s toilet. You could turn the bidet on while someone’s in there.”

(tags: home automation insteon security hardware fail attacks bluetooth han trustwave belkin satis)

France Kills Three Strikes

Missed bookmarking this news —

After years of debate and controversy the French Government has finally backtracked on the law which allowed errant subscribers to be disconnected from the Internet. This morning a decree was published which removed the possibility for file-sharers to have their connections cut for copyright infringement. Instead, those caught by rightsholders will now be subjected to a system of automated fines.

(tags: france legal ip piracy filesharing three-strikes)

BBC News – Chinese firm Huawei controls net filter praised by PM

Talk Talk’s porn-filtering, system praised by David Cameron in the UK as a model for porn filtering for the country’s ISPs, is operated by Huawei. Of course, there’s no possible problems with allowing Huawei, with its alleged close ties to the Chinese government, operate a state-wide internet censorship system in the UK without any functioning oversight, right? ;) Also worth noting: all TalkTalk traffic passes through the Huawei filtering infrastructure, even when the customer has “opted in”.

(tags: huawei talk-talk oversight overblocking politics china uk david-cameron filtering censorship)

Branded to death | Features | Times Higher Education

The most abominable monster now threatening the intellectual health and the integrity of pure enquiry as well as conscientious teaching is the language of advertising, or better, the machinery of propaganda. Any number of critics from within university walls have warned the people at large and academics in particular of the way the helots of advertising and the state police of propaganda bloat and distort the language of thoughtful description, peddle with a confident air generalisations without substance, and serenely circulate orotund lies while ignoring their juniors’ rebuttals and abuse.

(tags: branding advertising newspeak universities third-level eolas higher-education education research university-of-california ucb patents ip swpats)

Twilio Billing Incident Post-Mortem

At 1:35 AM PDT on July 18, a loss of network connectivity caused all billing redis-slaves to simultaneously disconnect from the master. This caused all redis-slaves to reconnect and request full synchronization with the master at the same time. Receiving full sync requests from each redis-slave caused the master to suffer extreme load, resulting in performance degradation of the master and timeouts from redis-slaves to redis-master. By 2:39 AM PDT the host’s load became so extreme, services relying on redis-master began to fail. At 2:42 AM PDT, our monitoring system alerted our on-call engineering team of a failure in the Redis cluster. Observing extreme load on the host, the redis process on redis-master was misdiagnosed as requiring a restart to recover. This caused redis-master to read an incorrect configuration file, which in turn caused Redis to attempt to recover from a non-existent AOF file, instead of the binary snapshot. As a result of that failed recovery, redis-master dropped all balance data. In addition to forcing recovery from a non-existent AOF, an incorrect configuration also caused redis-master to boot as a slave of itself, putting it in read-only mode and preventing the billing system from updating account balances.

(tags: redis caching storage networking network-partitions twilio postmortems ops billing replication)

Tuning and benchmarking Java 7’s Garbage Collectors: Default, CMS and G1

Rudiger Moller runs through a typical GC-tuning session, in exhaustive detail

(tags: java gc tuning jvm cms g1 ops)

 Censum

[JVM] GC is a difficult, specialised area that can be very frustrating for busy developers or devops folks to deal with. The JVM has a number of Garbage Collectors and a bewildering array of switches that can alter the behaviour of each collector. Censum does all of the parsing, number crunching and statistical analysis for you, so you don’t have to go and get that PhD in Computer Science in order to solve your GC performance problem. Censum gives you straight answers as opposed to a ton of raw data. can eat any GC log you care to throw at it. is easy to install and use.

(tags: censum gc tuning ops java jvm commercial)

The Web’s longest nightmare ends: Eolas patents are dead on appeal | Ars Technica

Ding dong, the troll is dead! Ars Technica with a great description of the Eolas web patent fiasco, and the UC system’s sorry role. I blame Bayh-Dole for creating this insane mindset where places of learning are forced to “monetize” their research.

Under Doyle’s conception of his own invention, practically any modern website owed him royalties. Playing a video online or rotating an image on a shopping website were “interactive” features that infringed his patents. And unlike many “patent trolls” who simply settle for settlements just under the cost of litigation, Doyle’s company had the chops, the lawyers, and the early filing date needed to extract tens of millions of dollars from the accused companies. […] The role of the University of California is one of the most perplexing twists in the Eolas saga. The university kept a low profile during the lead-up to trial; but once in Texas, Eolas lawyers constantly reminded the jury they were asserting “these University of California patents.” A lawyer from UC’s patent-licensing division described support for Eolas at trial by simply saying that the university “stands by its licensees.” (Eolas was technically an exclusive licensee of the UC-owned patent, which also gives it the right to sue.) At the same time, the University of California, and the Berkeley campus in particular, was a key institution in creating early web technology. While UC lawyers cooperated with the plaintiffs, two UC Berkeley-trained computer scientists were key witnesses in the effort to demolish the Eolas patents. Pei-Yuan Wei created the pioneering Viola browser, a key piece of prior art, while he was a student at UC-Berkeley in the early 1990s. Scott Silvey, another UC-Berkeley student at that time, testified about a program he made called VPlot, which allowed users to rotate an image of an airplane using Wei’s browser. VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.

(tags: patents swpats eolas web patent-trolls ucb universities research viola plugins berkeley)

Irish Comms Minister Pat Rabbitte ignores calls for State role in blocking online porn

Good call.

Mr Rabbitte says that legal concerns attached to mandatory filters, as well as a fear of imposing censorship, have persuaded him against trying to force ISPs to impose mandatory pornography-blocking internet filters. “I remain to be convinced that blanket censorship or a default-on blocker is the correct or workable response,” he said. “Even if it were possible to ensure that such measures were not easily circumvented or didn’t inadvertently block perfectly acceptable content, the principled question of whether the State should be encouraging service providers to filter or block content to all users, regardless of whether there are children resident, would still arise.”

(tags: pat-rabbitte internet filtering censorship blocking porn overblocking default-on isps ireland)

Grove

Hosted IRC, 20 users for $50/month. Useful now that Google have fecked up Chat entirely

(tags: irc chat collaboration groupware hosted-services)

UK Internet censorship plan no less stupid than it was last year – Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow’s long list of articles describing how the UK’s censorware-for-all plan is going to fail. I like this bit:

When we argued our case to the vendor’s representative, he was categorical: any nudity, anywhere on [Boing Boing], makes it into a “nudity site” for the purposes of blocking. The vendor went so far as to state that a single image of Michelangelo’s David, on one page among hundreds of thousands on a site, would be sufficient grounds for a nudity classification. I suspect that none of the censorship advocates in the Lords understand that the offshore commercial operators they’re proposing to put in charge of the nation’s information access apply this kind of homeopathic standard to objectionable material.

(tags: daily-mail fail censorship censorware boing-boing michelangelo sculpture nudity uk politics filtering overblocking web internet)

Content Aware Typography

Photoshop’s “Content Aware Fill” applied to text. some very cool results

(tags: images cool art typography algorithms via:pentadact photoshop)

A Tour Inside CloudFlare’s Latest Generation Servers

great transparency from CloudFront! Looking at their current 4th-gen rackmount server buildout — now with HP after Dell and ZT. Shitloads of SSDs for lower power and greater predictability in failure rates. 128GB RAM. consistent hashing to address stores instead of RAID. Sandybridge chipset. Solarflare SFC9020 10Gbps network cards. This is really impressive openness for a high-scale custom datacenter server platform…

(tags: datacenter cloudflare hardware rackmount ssds intel)

3D-Printer Manufacturer Creates Software Filter To Prevent Firearm Printing

‘[Create It REAL], which sells 3D printer component parts and software, recently announced that it has come up with a firearm component detection algorithm that will give 3D printers the option to block any gun parts. The software compares each component a user is trying to print with a database of potential firearms parts, and shuts down the modeling software if it senses the user is trying to make a gun.’

(tags: blocklists filtering guns weapons 3d-printing future firearms)

Fund it :: Upstart Granby Park

help fund Granby Park, a pop-up park to replace a vacant site on the corner of Dominick St and Parnell St in Dublin 1: http://upstart.ie/

(tags: fund-it granby-park dublin d1 parks pop-up city funding grassroots)

Rooting SIM cards

the details of Karsten Nohl’s attack against SIM cards, allowing remote-root malware via SMS.

Cracking SIM update keys: [Over The Air] commands, such as software updates, are cryptographically-secured SMS messages, which are delivered directly to the SIM. While the option exists to use state-of-the-art AES or the somewhat outdated 3DES algorithm for OTA, many (if not most) SIM cards still rely on the 70s-era DES cipher. […] To derive a DES OTA key, an attacker starts by sending a binary SMS to a target device. The SIM does not execute the improperly signed OTA command, but does in many cases respond to the attacker with an error code carrying a cryptographic signature, once again sent over binary SMS. A rainbow table resolves this plaintext-signature tuple to a 56-bit DES key within two minutes on a standard computer.

(tags: des 3des crypto security sms sim-cards smartcards java applets ota rainbow-tables cracking karsten-nohl)

Machine Learning Speeds TCP

Cool. A machine-learning-generated TCP congestion control algorithm which handily beats sfqCoDel, Vegas, Reno et al. But:

“Although the [computer-generated congestion control algorithms] appear to work well on networks whose parameters fall within or near the limits of what they were prepared for — even beating in-network schemes at their own game and even when the design range spans an order of magnitude variation in network parameters — we do not yet understand clearly why they work, other than the observation that they seem to optimize their intended objective well. We have attempted to make algorithms ourselves that surpass the generated RemyCCs, without success. That suggests to us that Remy may have accomplished something substantive. But digging through the dozens of rules in a RemyCC and ?guring out their purpose and function is a challenging job in reverse-engineering. RemyCCs designed for broader classes of networks will likely be even more complex, compounding the problem.” So are network engineers willing to trust an algorithm that seems to work but has no explanation as to why it works other than optimizing a specific objective function? As AI becomes increasingly successful the question could also be asked in a wider context.  

(tags: via-dehora machine-learning tcp networking hmm mit algorithms remycc congestion)

Street Cuffs: L.A. Sees Big Jump In Bike Thefts

Some [LA] bike messengers last month took justice into their own hands when they caught two suspected thieves, teenage boys who attended a local Catholic high school. According to police, the messengers stripped down the teens to their boxer shorts before taking their cellphones, backpacks and clothes. “They meted out street justice. We don’t condone street justice. They never threatened them. But they made it clear: don’t mess with another person’s property,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Paul Vernon said. “This incident and the arrests are the tip of the iceberg when comes to people stealing bicycles.” Vernon said the two boys told police they were robbed by about 20 men on bicycles at 6th Street and Grand Avenue about 3 p.m. on Jan. 12. Investigators said they cannot prove the boys were stealing bikes and continue to look for the assailants.

(tags: cycling theft robbery bike-theft la crime vigilantes cycle-couriers)

ICO’s Tame Investigation Of Google Street View Data Slurping

“People will yet again be asking whether Google has been let off without the kind of full and rigorous investigation that you would expect after this kind of incident,” Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch, told TechWeekEurope. “Let’s not forget that information was collected without permission from thousands of people’s Wi-Fi networks, in a way that if an individual had done so they would have almost certainly have been prosecuted. It seems strange that ICO [the UK’s Data Protection regulatory agency] did not want to inspect the [datacenter] cages housing the data, while it is also troubling that Google’s assurances were taken at face value, despite this not being the first incident where consumers have seen their privacy violated by the company.”

(tags: privacy google ico regulation data-protection snooping wifi sniffing network-traffic street-view)

Mexican Pickled Potatoes

‘My researches on the pickling matter had lead me to conclude that Mexico was, in fact, one of the few places where pickled potatoes were “a thing” and, in discussing same with Lily last month at her Mexican food stall in the Honest To Goodness market, I discovered that her soon-to-be-visiting Mexican mama was, in fact, a maker of such pickles. Not long afterward, I watched as Lily sat down with her mother, querying the ways of her pickled potatoes, translating and scribbling instructions for me as the details were recalled, not in an orderly series of steps, but in a series of asides and by-the-ways, by one for whom the practice of pickling potatoes was entirely second nature.’

(tags: pickling yum food mexico potatoes spuds recipes)

Porn to be Blocked in the UK – “What’s new?” Say Pirate Bay Users | TorrentFreak

It seems likely that the ISPs will implement a system similar to the one currently being used by TalkTalk, as the prime minister will specifically single the ISP out for praise in his speech. TalkTalk’s HomeSafe is a system which filters out URLs based on a remote blocklist provided and maintained by…. well, no one quite knows. This is worrying since when things don’t go quite to plan there’s no one to complain to. As previously reported, when TalkTalk customers are asked whether they want to block file-sharing sites, TorrentFreak.com is rendered inaccessible. Despite our pleas and complaints that we are a news resource, the company said it would not remove us from their blocklist. We doubt we’re the only ones being silenced.

(tags: talktalk blocking uk isps torrentfreak politics filtering david-cameron porn overblocking)

The Trello Tech Stack

Good description of how Fog Creek built out their Trello product; client-side JS rendering, model synced across the wire, HAProxy, Redis, and WebSockets. Bookmarked notably for this paragraph, which doesn’t ameliorate my fear of WebSockets as a tech:

The Socket.io server currently has some problems with scaling up to more than 10K [jm: oh dear] simultaneous client connections when using multiple processes and the Redis store, and the client has some issues that can cause it to open multiple connections to the same server, or not know that its connection has been severed.

(tags: websockets javascript architecture fog-creek trello ajax push)

Log4j 2: Performance close to insane

Nice writeup on Log4j 2’s new AsyncAppender implementation, based on the LMAX Disruptor. sounds pretty excellent:

“One nice little detail I should mention is that both Async Loggers and Async Appenders fix something that has always bothered me in Log4j-1.x, which is that they will flush the buffer after logging the last event in the queue . With Log4j-1.x, if you used buffered I/O, you often could not see the last few log events, as they were still stuck in the memory buffer. Your only option was setting immediateFlush to true, which forces disk I/O on every single log event and has a performance impact. With Async Loggers and Appenders in Log4j-2.0 your log statements are all flushed to disk, so they are always visible, but this happens in a very efficient manner.”

(tags: logging java performance async disruptor low-latency)

Chronicle

an ultra low latency, high throughput, persisted, messaging and event driven in memory database. The typical latency is as low as 80 nano-seconds and supports throughputs of 5-20 million messages/record updates per second. This library also supports distributed, durable, observable collections (Map, List, Set) The performance depends on the data structures used, but simple data structures can achieve throughputs of 5 million elements or key/value pairs in batches (eg addAll or putAll) and 500K elements or key/values per second when added/updated/removed individually. It uses almost no heap, trivial GC impact, can be much larger than your physical memory size (only limited by the size of your disk) and can be shared between processes with better than 1/10th latency of using Sockets over loopback. It can change the way you design your system because it allows you to have independent processes which can be running or not at the same time (as no messages are lost) This is useful for restarting services and testing your services from canned data. e.g. like sub-microsecond durable messaging. You can attach any number of readers, including tools to see the exact state of the data externally.

(tags: library messaging performance java chronicle disk mmap)

Stayhold

a completely new patent pending product designed in Ireland that is going to change the way people use their cars for carrying goods.  It is a solid plastic product that grips the carpet in your car and acts as a barrier to hold loose items securely against the side wall in your car trunk or boot.

(tags: stayhold transportation cars boot gadgets toget)

Docker

‘the Linux container engine’. I totally misunderstood what Docker was — this is cool.

Heterogeneous payloads: Any combination of binaries, libraries, configuration files, scripts, virtualenvs, jars, gems, tarballs, you name it. No more juggling between domain-specific tools. Docker can deploy and run them all. Any server: Docker can run on any x64 machine with a modern linux kernel – whether it’s a laptop, a bare metal server or a VM. This makes it perfect for multi-cloud deployments. Isolation: Docker isolates processes from each other and from the underlying host, using lightweight containers. Repeatability: Because each container is isolated in its own filesystem, they behave the same regardless of where, when, and alongside what they run.

(tags: lxc containers virtualization cloud ops linux docker deployment)

Next Generation Continuous Integration & Deployment with dotCloud’s Docker and Strider

Since Docker treats it’s images as a tree of derivations from a source image, you have the ability to store an image at each stage of a build. This means we can provide full binary images of the environment in which the tests failed. This allows you to run locally bit-for-bit the same container as the CI server ran. Due to the magic of Docker and AUFS Copy-On-Write filesystems, we can store this cheaply. Often tests pass when built in a CI environment, but when built in another (e.g. production) environment break due to subtle differences. Docker makes it trivial to take exactly the binary environment in which the tests pass, and ship that to production to run it.

(tags: docker strider continuous-integration continuous-deployment deployment devops ops dotcloud lxc virtualisation copy-on-write images)

Pinterest’s follower graph store, built on Redis

This is a good, high-availability Redis configuration; sharded by userid across 8192 shards, with a Redis master/slave pair of instances for each set of N shards. I like their use of two redundancy systems — hot slave and backup snapshots:

We run our cluster in a Redis master-slave configuration, and the slaves act as hot backups. Upon a master failure, we failover the slave as the new master and either bring up a new slave or reuse the old master as the new slave. We rely on ZooKeeper to make this as quick as possible. Each master Redis instance (and slave instance) is configured to write to AOF on Amazon EBS. This ensures that if the Redis instances terminate unexpectedly then the loss of data is limited to 1 second of updates. The slave Redis instances also perform BGsave hourly which is then loaded to a more permanent store (Amazon S3). This copy is also used by Map Reduce jobs for analytics. As a production system, we need many failure modes to guard ourselves. As mentioned, if the master host is down, we will manually failover to slave. If a single master Redis instance reboots, monit restart restores from AOF, implying a 1 second window of data loss on the shards on that instance. If the slave host goes down, we bring up a replacement. If a single slave Redis instance goes down, we rely on monit to restart using the AOF data. Because we may encounter AOF or BGsave file corruption, we BGSave and copy hourly backups to S3. Note that large file sizes can cause BGsave induced delays but in our cluster this is mitigated by smaller Redis data due to the sharding scheme.

(tags: graph redis architecture ha high-availability design redundancy sharding)

Flower Filter

‘A simple time-decaying approximate membership filter’ — like a Bloom filter with time decay. See also http://eng.42go.com/flower-filter-an-update/ for some notes on the non-independence of survival probabilities, and how that imposes negligible differences in practice.

(tags: bloom-filter algorithms coding probabilistic approximate time decay)

Spybike

This is brilliant. ‘covert bicycle GPS tracker; Notifies you by SMS if your bicycle moves; Online tracking’. ‘Spybike is a covert tracking device that is hidden inside your bicycle steerer tube. The device is disguised to look like a normal head set cap to avoid suspicion. If someone steals your bike, you can use SpyBike to track their movements online and on your mobile.’ More details: http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/pdf/Spybike_Instructions_2.pdf

(tags: spybike cycling theft gps tracking)

No Time To Spare [infographic]

‘On August 2, 2005, a fully-loaded Air France Airbus A340 arriving from Paris crash-landed at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and caught fire. Only 4 of the 8 exits were usable, yet all 309 people on board made it off the aircraft in two minutes, before it was consumed by flames. Here, five of the passengers recount their escape.’

(tags: infographics travel air accidents fire airbus safety escape a340)

Merkel call for data protection rules puts Ireland in spotlight – Technology News

Irish Times on EU unhappiness with Ireland’s “light touch” data protection regime:

Hawkes’s appearance last month on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland regarding the US Prism surveillance programme, since posted to YouTube, reheated lingering resentment among many European data authorities. His admission that he “knew in a general way” about such programmes and didn’t “regard this particular revelation as particularly new” was a red rag to his European colleagues who fear Ireland is the transmission point of wholesale EU data to the US.

(tags: eu ireland data-protection privacy billy-hawkes regulation dpc)

Java Garbage Collection Distilled

a great summary of the state of JVM garbage collection from Martin Thompson

(tags: jvm java gc garbage-collection tuning memory performance martin-thompson)

Improved HTTPS Performance with Early SSL Termination

This is a neat hack. Since SSL/TLS connection establishment requires lots of consecutive round trips before the connection is ready, by performing that closer to the user and reusing an existing region-to-region connection behind the scenes, the overall latency is greatly improved. Works for HTTP as well

(tags: http https ssl architecture aws ec2 performance latency internet round-trip nginx tls)

How to secure your webapp

Locking down a webapp with current strict HTTPS policies.

It’s impossible to get to 100% security but there are steps you can take to secure your webapp for your users, to help mitigate against different types of attacks both against you, your webapp and your customers themselves. These are all things we’ve implemented with Server Density v2 to help harden the product as much as possible. These tips are in addition to security best practices such as protecting against SQL injection, filtering, session handling, and XSRF protection. Check out the OWASP cheat sheets and top 10 lists to ensure you’re covered for the basics before implementing the suggestions below.

(tags: https ssl security web webdev tls)

Breakthrough silicon scanning discovers backdoor in military chip [PDF]

Wow, I’d missed this:

This paper is a short summary of the ?rst real world detection of a backdoor in a military grade FPGA. Using an innovative patented technique we were able to detect and analyse in the ?rst documented case of its kind, a backdoor inserted into the Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 chips for accessing FPGA con?guration. The backdoor was found amongst additional JTAG functionality and exists on the silicon itself, it was not present in any ?rmware loaded onto the chip. Using Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA), our pioneered technique, we were able to extract the secret key to activate the backdoor, as well as other security keys such as the AES and the Passkey. This way an attacker can extract all the con?guration data from the chip, reprogram crypto and access keys, modify low-level silicon features, access unencrypted con?guration bitstream or permanently damage the device. Clearly this means the device is wide open to intellectual property (IP) theft, fraud, re-programming as well as reverse engineering of the design which allows the introduction of a new backdoor or Trojan. Most concerning, it is not possible to patch the backdoor in chips already deployed, meaning those using this family of chips have to accept the fact they can be easily compromised or will have to be physically replaced after a redesign of the silicon itself.

(tags: chips hardware backdoors security scanning pea jtag actel microsemi silicon fpga trojans)

small town council in Oz has been snooping on mobile phone records to catch litterbugs and owners of unregistered pets

Privacy advocates have slammed Wyndham council for spying on residents’ mobile phone data and email records almost 50 times in the past three years, “not to hunt down terrorists but to catch litterbugs and owners of unregistered pets”. Figures from the attorney-general’s department reveal Wyndham is the only Victorian council that has been snooping on personal data, seizing residents’ information 31 times during 2010-11 and 2011-12. Council’s acting chief executive Kelly Grigsby told the Weekly there had been another 18 authorisations in the past 12 months to chase people for unauthorised advertising, unregistered pets and illegal littering.

(tags: victoria australia oz privacy snooping data-retention metadata overreach)

Traditional AQM is not enough!

Jim Gettys on modern web design, HTTP, buffering, and FIFO queues in the network.

Web surfing is putting impulses of packets, without congestion avoidance, into FIFO queues where they do severe collateral damage to anything sharing the link (including itself!). So today’s web behavior incurs huge collateral damage on itself, data centers, the edge of the network, and in particular any application that hopes to have real time behavior. How do we solve this problem?

(tags: buffering networking internet web http protocols tcp bufferbloat jim-gettys codel fq_codel)

We interrupt this program to warn the Emergency Alert System is hackable | Ars Technica

Private SSH key included in a firmware update. Oh dear:

The US Emergency Alert System, which interrupts live TV and radio broadcasts with information about national emergencies in progress, is vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers to remotely disseminate bogus reports and tamper with gear, security researchers warned. The remote takeover vulnerability affects the DASDEC-I and DASDEC-II application servers made by a company called Digital Alert Systems. It stems from the a recent firmware update that mistakenly included the private secure shell (SSH) key, according to an advisory published Monday by researchers from security firm IOActive. Administrators use such keys to remotely log in to a server to gain unfettered “root” access. The publication of the key makes it trivial for hackers to gain unauthorized access on Digital Alert System appliances that run default settings on older firmware. “An attacker who gains control of one or more DASDEC systems can disrupt these stations’ ability to transmit and could disseminate false emergency information over a large geographic area,” the IOActive advisory warned. “In addition, depending on the configuration of this and other devices, these messages could be forwarded and mirrored by other DASDEC systems.”

(tags: ssh security fail emergency alert warning tv radio)

The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users, 300K QPS, a 22 MB/S Firehose, and Send Tweets in Under 5 Seconds

Good read.

Twitter is primarily a consumption mechanism, not a production mechanism. 300K QPS are spent reading timelines and only 6000 requests per second are spent on writes.

(tags: scale architecture scalability twitter high-scalability redis mysql)

Lightning Memory-Mapped Database

Sounds like a good potential replacement for Berkeley DB, at least for cases where LevelDB isn’t proving practical.

LMDB is a database storage engine similar to LevelDB or BDB which database authors often use as a base for building databases on top of. LMDB was designed as a replacement for BDB within the OpenLDAP project but it has been pretty useful to use with other databases as well. It’s API design is highly influenced by BDB so that replacing BDB is straightforward.

(tags: openldap lmdb databases bdb berkeley-db storage persistence oss open-source)

ssh – fabric appears to start apache2 but doesn’t – Stack Overflow

fabric fail. pty=False fixes the bug

(tags: fabric fail bugs pty ssh automation ops)

‘Copysets: Reducing the Frequency of Data Loss in Cloud Storage’ [paper]

An improved replica-selection algorithm for replicated storage systems.

We present Copyset Replication, a novel general purpose replication technique that signi?cantly reduces the frequency of data loss events. We implemented and evaluated Copyset Replication on two open source data center storage systems, HDFS and RAMCloud, and show it incurs a low overhead on all operations. Such systems require that each node’s data be scattered across several nodes for parallel data recovery and access. Copyset Replication presents a near optimal tradeoff between the number of nodes on which the data is scattered and the probability of data loss. For example, in a 5000-node RAMCloud cluster under a power outage, Copyset Replication reduces the probability of data loss from 99.99% to 0.15%. For Facebook’s HDFS cluster, it reduces the probability from 22.8% to 0.78%.

(tags: storage cloud-storage replication data reliability fault-tolerance copysets replicas data-loss)

Testing your database backups: the test environment database refresh pattern | #F80046

Great idea. I’m surprised I hadn’t come across this before

(tags: backups restoring ops sysadmin testing)

Clean Code Cheat Sheet [pdf]

‘principles, patterns, smells and guidelines for clean code, class and package design, TDD, Acceptance Test Driven Development, and CI’

(tags: clean-code code-smells coding tdd testing continous-integration patterns pdf)

Applegate’s Law

‘Over time, the probability of someone drawing a cock with your [user-generated content] app approaches one.’

(tags: cocks time-to-penis user-generated-content content ugc via:rob-manuel qwghlm funny applegates-law web b3ta lol)

Fat Tails

Nice d3.js demo of the fat-tailed distribution:

A fat-tailed distribution looks normal but the parts far away from the average are thicker, meaning a higher chance of huge deviations. […] Fat tails don’t mean more variance; just different variance. For a given variance, a higher chance of extreme deviations implies a lower chance of medium ones.

(tags: dataviz via:hn statistics visualization distributions fat-tailed kurtosis d3.js javascript variance deviation)

Google Cloud Messaging for Android

GCM is a service that allows you to send data from your server to your users’ Android-powered device, and also to receive messages from devices on the same connection. The GCM service handles all aspects of queueing of messages and delivery to the target Android application running on the target device. GCM is completely free no matter how big your messaging needs are, and there are no quotas.

(tags: gcm messaging android google push)

packetdrill – network stack testing tool

[Google’s] packetdrill scripting tool enables quick, precise tests for entire TCP/UDP/IPv4/IPv6 network stacks, from the system call layer down to the NIC hardware. packetdrill currently works on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. It can test network stack behavior over physical NICs on a LAN, or on a single machine using a tun virtual network device.

(tags: testing networking tun google linux papers tcp ip udp freebsd openbsd netbsd)

the TCP bounded buffer deadlock problem

I’ve wound up mentioning this twice in the past week, so it’s worth digging up and bookmarking!

Under certain circumstances a TCP connection can end up in a “deadlock”, where neither the client nor the server is able to write data out or read data in. This is caused by two factors. First, a client or server cannot perform two transactions at once; a read cannot be performed if a write transaction is in progress, and vice versa. Second, the buffers that exist at either end of the TCP connection are of limited size. The deadlock occurs when both the client and server are trying to send an amount of data that is larger than the combined input and output buffer size.

(tags: tcp ip bounded-buffer deadlock bugs buffering connections distributed-systems)

An excellent writeup of the TCP bounded-buffer deadlock problem

on pages 146-149 of ‘TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers’ by Michael J. Donahoo and Kenneth L. Calvert.

(tags: tcp ip bounded-buffer deadlock bugs buffering connections distributed-systems)

How The Copyright Industry Pushed For Internet Surveillance | TorrentFreak

Rick Falkvinge with a good point:

The reason for the copyright industry to push for surveillance is simple: any digital communications channel can be used for private conversation, but it can also be used to share culture and knowledge that is under copyright monopoly. In order to tell which communications is which, you must sort all of it – and to do that, you must look at all of it. In other words, if enforcing the copyright monopoly is your priority, you need to kill privacy, and specifically anonymity and secrecy of correspondence.

(tags: copyright privacy state data-protection rick-falkvinge copyfight internet filtering surveillance anonymity)

Aer Lingus set to resume flights to San Francisco from Dublin

Yay!

Google, Apple and Facebook have persuaded Aer Lingus to reopen the San Francisco to Dublin route, according to sources in the US. The technology giants have their European headquarters in Dublin and their American bases in San Francisco. According to insiders, Aer Lingus will make an announcement soon having received assurances that Silicon Valley companies will take up seats.

(tags: flights travel ireland san-francisco sf aer-lingus)

Comics For Children…. a visual list…. | The Forbidden Planet International Blog

some great recommendations here. Hildafolk has been popular with my 5-year-old, must pick up a few more

(tags: comics kids children books reading library toget toread)

_Measuring Mobile Web Performance_ [slides]

Notable slide is #13, displaying a graph of HSDPA packet RTTs measured from a train. Max RTT gets up to 20,266ms. ouch

(tags: rtt packets latency hsdpa mobile internet trains packet-loss)

Latest leak of EU Data Protection Regulation makes fines impossible

Well, isn’t this convenient. The leaked proposed regulation document from the Irish EU presidency contains the following changes from current law:

what is new is a set of prescriptive conditions which, if adopted, appears to make a Monetary Penalty Notice (MPN) almost impracticable to serve. This is because the [Data Protection] Commissioner would have consider a dozen factors (many of which will give no doubt rise to appeal). […] In addition, the fines in the Regulation require consideration of the actual damage caused; this compares unfavourably with the current MPN where large fines have been contingent on grave security errors on the part of the data controller (i.e. the MPN of the UK DPA does not need damage to data subjects – only the likelihood of substantial distress or damage which should have been preventable/foreseeable).

(tags: data-protection law eu ec ireland privacy fines regulation mpn)

Google Translate of “Lorem ipsum”

The perils of unsupervised machine learning… here’s what GTranslate reckons “lorem ipsum” translates to:

We will be sure to post a comment. Add tomato sauce, no tank or a traditional or online. Until outdoor environment, and not just any competition, reduce overall pain. Cisco Security, they set up in the throat develop the market beds of Cura; Employment silently churn-class by our union, very beginner himenaeos. Monday gate information. How long before any meaningful development. Until mandatory functional requirements to developers. But across the country in the spotlight in the notebook. The show was shot. Funny lion always feasible, innovative policies hatred assured. Information that is no corporate Japan

(tags: lorem-ipsum boilerplate machine-learning translation google translate probabilistic tomato-sauce cisco funny)

how RAID fits in with Riak

Write heavy, high performance applications should probably use RAID 0 or avoid RAID altogether and consider using a larger n_val and cluster size. Read heavy applications have more options, and generally demand more fault tolerance with the added benefit of easier hardware replacement procedures.

(tags: via:dehora riak cluster fault-tolerance raid ops)

Locally Repairable Codes

Facebook’s new erasure coding algorithm (via High Scalability).

Disk I/O and network traffic were reduced by half compared to RS codes. The LRC required 14% more storage than RS (ie. 60% of data size). Repair times were much lower thanks to the local repair codes. Much greater reliability thanks to fast repairs. Reduced network traffic makes them suitable for geographic distribution.

(tags: erasure-coding facebook redundancy repair algorithms papers via:highscalability data storage fault-tolerance)

Boundary’s Early Warnings alarm

Anomaly detection on network throughput metrics, alarming if throughputs on selected flows deviate by 1, 2, or 3 standard deviations from a historical baseline.

(tags: network-monitoring throughput boundary service-metrics alarming ops statistics)

My email to Irish Times Editor, sent 25th June

Daragh O’Brien noting 3 stories on 3 consecutive days voicing dangerously skewed misinformation about data protection and privacy law in Ireland:

There is a worrying pattern in these stories. The first two decry the Data Protection legislation (current and future) as being dangerous to children and damaging to the genealogy trade. The third sets up an industry “self-regulation” straw man and heralds it as progress (when it is decidedly not, serving only to further confuse consumers about their rights). If I was a cynical person I would find it hard not to draw the conclusion that the Irish Times, the “paper of record” has been stooged by organisations who are resistant to the defence of and validation of fundamental rights to privacy as enshrined in the Data Protection Acts and EU Treaties, and in the embryonic Data Protection Regulation. That these stories emerge hot on the heels of the pendulum swing towards privacy concerns that the NSA/Prism revelations have triggered is, I must assume, a co-incidence. It cannot be the case that the Irish Times blindly publishes press releases without conducting cursory fact checking on the stories contained therein? Three stories over three days is insufficient data to plot a definitive trend, but the emphasis is disconcerting. Is it the Irish Times’ editorial position that Data Protection legislation and the protection of fundamental rights is a bad thing and that industry self-regulation that operates in ignorance of legislation is the appropriate model for the future? It surely cannot be that press releases are regurgitated as balanced fact and news by the Irish Times without fact checking and verification? If I was to predict a “Data Protection killed my Puppy” type headline for tomorrow’s edition or another later this week would I be proved correct?

(tags: daragh-obrien irish-times iab bias advertising newspapers press-releases journalism data-protection privacy ireland)

_Bolt-On Causal Consistency_ [slides]

SIGMOD 2013 presentation from Peter Bailis, Ali Ghodsi, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Ion Stoica — adding consistency to an eventually-consistent store by tracking dependencies

(tags: eventual-consistency state cap-theorem storage peter-bailis)

Facebook announce Wormhole

Over the last couple of years, we have built and deployed a reliable publish-subscribe system called Wormhole. Wormhole has become a critical part of Facebook’s software infrastructure. At a high level, Wormhole propagates changes issued in one system to all systems that need to reflect those changes – within and across data centers.

(tags: pub-sub scalability facebook realtime low-latency multi-region replication multi-az wormhole)

gnuplot’s dumb terminal

Turns out gnuplot has a pretty readable ASCII terminal rendering mode; combined with ‘watch’ it makes for a nifty graphing one-liner

(tags: gnuplot plotting charts graphs cli command-line unix gnu hacks dataviz visualization ascii)

Liberty issues claim against British Intelligence Services over PRISM and Tempora privacy scandal

James Welch, Legal Director for Liberty, said:   “Those demanding the Snoopers’ Charter seem to have been indulging in out-of-control snooping even without it – exploiting legal loopholes and help from Uncle Sam. “No-one suggests a completely unpoliced internet but those in power cannot swap targeted investigations for endless monitoring of the entire globe.”

(tags: prism nsa gchq surveillance liberty civil-liberties internet snooping)

shades

A command-line utility in Ruby to perform (a) OLAP cubing and (b) histogramming, given whitespace-delimited line data

(tags: ruby olap number-crunching data histograms cli)

‘If I was your cloud provider, I’d never let you down’

This is the thing that’s put me off Joyent. They make claims like this one from October 2012:

We’ve given our other partners 99.9999% uptime.

(tags: joyent marketing uptime two-nines fail strongdisk)

js-hll

Good UI for exploration of HyperLogLog set intersections and unions.

One of the first things that we wanted to do with HyperLogLog when we first started playing with it was to support and expose it natively in the browser. The thought of allowing users to directly interact with these structures — perform arbitrary unions and intersections on effectively unbounded sets all on the client — was exhilarating to us. […] we are pleased to announce the open-source release of AK’s HyperLogLog implementation for JavaScript, js-hll. We are releasing this code under the Apache License, Version 2.0. We knew that we couldn’t just release a bunch of JavaScript code without allowing you to see it in action — that would be a crime. We passed a few ideas around and the one that kept bubbling to the top was a way to kill two birds with one stone. We wanted something that would showcase what you can do with HLL in the browser and give us a tool for explaining HLLs. It is typical for us to explain how HLL intersections work using a Venn diagram. You draw some overlapping circles with a border that represents the error and you talk about how if that border is close to or larger than the intersection then you can’t say much about the size of that intersection. This works just ok on a whiteboard but what you really want is to just build a visualization that allows you to select from some sets and see the overlap. Maybe even play with the precision a little bit to see how that changes the result. Well, we did just that!

(tags: javascript ui hll hyperloglog algorithms sketching js sets intersection union apache open-source)

Sketch of the Day: K-Minimum Values

Another sketching algorithm — this one supports set union and intersection operations more easily than HyperLogLog when there are more than 2 sets

(tags: algorithms coding space-saving cardinality streams stream-processing estimation sets sketching)

Skype’s principal architect explains why they no longer have end-to-end crypto

Mobile devices can’t handle the CPU and constantly-online requirements, and an increased reliance on dedicated routing supernodes to avoid Windows-client monoculture and p2p network fragility (via the IP list, via kragen)

(tags: skype p2p mobile architecture networking internet snooping crypto via:ip via:kragen phones windows)

Accuweather long-range forecast accuracy questionable

“questionable” is putting it mildly:

Now to to the point: Are the 25-day forecasts any good? In a word, no. Specifically, after running this data, I would not trust a forecast high temperature more than a week out. I’d rather look at the normal (historical average) temperature for that day than the forecast. Similarly, I would not even look at a precipitation forecast more than 6 days in advance, and I wouldn’t start to trust it for anything important until about 3 days ahead of time.

(tags: accuweather accuracy fail graphs data weather forecasting philadelphia)

Setting up Perfect Forward Secrecy for nginx or stud

Matt Sergeant writes up a pretty solid HOWTO:

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) and the benefits it can bring you, especially in terms of any kind of traffic sniffing attack. Unfortunately setting this up I found very few guides telling you exactly what you need to do. The downside to PFS [via ECDHE] is that it uses more CPU power than other ciphers. This is a trade-off between security and cost.

(tags: ecdhe elliptic-curve crypto pfs ssl tls howto nginx stud)

Java Concurrent Counters By Numbers

threadsafe counters in the JVM compared. AtomicLong, Doug Lea’s LongAdder, a ThreadLocal counter, and a field-on-the-Thread-object counter int (via Darach Ennis). Nitsan’s posts on concurrency are fantastic

(tags: counters concurrency threads java jvm atomic)

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe

Tic-Tac-Toe Inception. whoa

(tags: games tic-tac-toe inception recursion boardgames via:fp)

hlld

a high-performance C server which is used to expose HyperLogLog sets and operations over them to networked clients. It uses a simple ASCII protocol which is human readable, and similar to memcached. HyperLogLog’s are a relatively new sketching data structure. They are used to estimate cardinality, i.e. the unique number of items in a set. They are based on the observation that any bit in a “good” hash function is indepedenent of any other bit and that the probability of getting a string of N bits all set to the same value is 1/(2^N). There is a lot more in the math, but that is the basic intuition. What is even more incredible is that the storage required to do the counting is log(log(N)). So with a 6 bit register, we can count well into the trillions. For more information, its best to read the papers referenced at the end. TL;DR: HyperLogLogs enable you to have a set with about 1.6% variance, using 3280 bytes, and estimate sizes in the trillions.

(tags: hyper-log-log hlld hll data-structures memcached daemons sketching estimation big-data cardinality algorithms via:cscotta)

SSL/TLS overhead

‘The TLS handshake has multiple variations, but let’s pick the most common one – anonymous client and authenticated server (the connections browsers use most of the time).’ Works out to 4 packets, in addition to the TCP handshake’s 3, and about 6.5k bytes on average.

(tags: network tls ssl performance latency speed networking internet security packets tcp handshake)

McLibel leaflet was co-written by undercover police officer Bob Lambert | UK news | guardian.co.uk

The true identity of one of the authors of the “McLibel leaflet” is Bob Lambert, a police officer who used the alias Bob Robinson in his five years infiltrating the London Greenpeace group. […] McDonald’s famously sued green campaigners over the roughly typed leaflet, in a landmark three-year high court case, that was widely believed to have been a public relations disaster for the corporation. Ultimately the company won a libel battle in which it spent millions on lawyers. Lambert was deployed by the special demonstration squad (SDS) – a top-secret Metropolitan police unit that targeted political activists between 1968 until 2008, when it was disbanded. He co-wrote the defamatory six-page leaflet in 1986 – and his role in its production has been the subject of an internal Scotland Yard investigation for several months. At no stage during the civil legal proceedings brought by McDonald’s in the 1990s was it disclosed that a police infiltrator helped author the leaflet.

(tags: infiltration police mcdonalds libel greenpeace bob-lambert undercover 1980s uk-politics)

Project Voldemort: measuring BDB space consumption

HOWTO measure this using the BDB-JE command line tools. this is exposed through JMX as the CleanerBacklog metric, too, I think, but good to bookmark just in case

(tags: voldemort cleaner bdb ops space storage monitoring debug)

rendering pcm with simulated phosphor persistence

This is something readily applicable to display of sampled time-series metric data — it really makes regular patterns visible (and is nicely retro to boot).

When PCM waveforms and similar function plots are displayed on screen, computational speed is often preferred over beauty and information content. For example, Audacity only draws the local maximum envelope amplitude and (what appears to be) RMS power when zoomed out, and when zoomed in, displays a very straightforward linear interpolation between samples. Analogue oscilloscopes, on the other hand, do things differently. An electron beam scans a phosphor screen at a constant X velocity, lighting a dot everywhere it hits. The dot brightness is proportional to the time the electron beam was directed at it. Because the X speed of the beam is constant and the Y position is modulated by the waveform, brightness gives information about the local derivative of the function. Now how cool is that? It looks like an X-ray of the signal. We can see right away that the beep is roughly a square wave, because there’s light on top and bottom of the oscillation envelope but mostly darkness in between. Minute changes in the harmonic content are also visible as interesting banding and ribbons.

(tags: via:kragen pcm waveforms oscilloscopes analog analogue dataviz time-series waves ui phosphor retro)

stuff Google has learned from their hiring data

A. On the hiring side, we found that [interview] brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart. Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up. Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

Also, I like this:

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

(tags: google hiring interviewing interviews brainteasers gpa microsoft star amazon)

Java Garbage Collection Distilled

Martin Thompson lays it out:

Serial, Parallel, Concurrent, CMS, G1, Young Gen, New Gen, Old Gen, Perm Gen, Eden, Tenured, Survivor Spaces, Safepoints, and the hundreds of JVM start-up flags. Does this all baffle you when trying to tune the garbage collector while trying to get the required throughput and latency from your Java application? If it does then don’t worry, you are not alone. Documentation describing garbage collection feels like man pages for an aircraft. Every knob and dial is detailed and explained but nowhere can you find a guide on how to fly. This article will attempt to explain the tradeoffs when choosing and tuning garbage collection algorithms for a particular workload.

(tags: gc java garbage-collection coding cms g1 jvm optimization)

DRI needs your help

Appalled by mass surveillance scandals? So are we. We’re doing something about it – and you can too. In 2006 we started a case challenging Irish and European laws that require your mobile phone company and ISP to monitor your location, your calls, your texts and your emails and to store that information for up to two years. That case has now made it to the European Court of Justice and will be heard on July 9th. If we are successful, it will strike down these laws for all of Europe and will declare illegal this type of mass surveillance of the entire population. Here’s where you come in. You can take part by: making a donation to help us pay for the expenses we incur; following our updates and keeping abreast of the issues; spreading the word on social media. With your help, we can strike a blow for the privacy of all citizens.

(tags: activism privacy politics ireland dri digital-rights data-protection data-retention)

3-D Printer Brings Dexterity To Children With No Fingers

‘A South African man who lost part of his hand in a home carpentry accident and an American puppeteer he met via YouTube have teamed up to make 3D-printable hands for children who have no fingers. So far, over 100 children have been given “robohands” for free, and a simplified version released just yesterday snaps together like LEGO bricks and costs just $5 in materials.’ This is incredible. Check out the video of Liam and his robohand in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB53-D_N8Uc

(tags: 3d-printing 3d makers robohands hands prosthetics future youtube via:gruverja)

Open Rights Group – EU Commission caved to US demands to drop anti-PRISM privacy clause

Reports this week revealed that the US successfully pressed the European Commission to drop sections of the Data Protection Regulation that would, as the Financial Times explains, “have nullified any US request for technology and telecoms companies to hand over data on EU citizens. The article […] would have prohibited transfers of personal information to a third country under a legal request, for example the one used by the NSA for their PRISM programme, unless “expressly authorized by an international agreement or provided for by mutual legal assistance treaties or approved by a supervisory authority.” The Article was deleted from the draft Regulation proper, which was published shortly afterwards in January 2012. The reports suggest this was due to intense pressure from the US. Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding favoured keeping the the clause, but other Commissioners seemingly did not grasp the significance of the article.

(tags: org privacy us surveillance fisaaa viviane-reding prism nsa ec eu data-protection)

Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode kill 10-12% of your business

As Chris Shiflett noted: not only are they bad for security, they’re bad for business too.

12 percent of users consider abandoning [an online shopping transaction] when they see either the Verified by Visa or the American Express SafeKey logos, while 10 percent will consider abandoning when the see the MasterCard Secure card logo.

(tags: ecommerce vbv online-shopping mastercard visa securecode security fail)

The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death

an amazing account of near-death from hypothermia (via Dor)

(tags: via:dor hypothermia cold medicine science non-fiction)

Atelier olschinsky – “Cities III 05”

Fine Art Print on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag Bright White, 310g: 40x50cm up to 70x100cm. Some great art based on decayed urban landscape shots, from a Vienna-based design studio. See also http://english.mashkulture.net/2011/10/17/atelier-olschinsky-cities-iii/ , http://www.mascontext.com/tag/atelier-olschinsky/

(tags: olschinsky cities urban decay landscape art prints want)

Possible ban on ‘factory food’ in French restaurants

I am very much in favour of this in Ireland, too. The pre-prepared food thing makes for crappy food:

In an attempt to crack down on the proliferation of restaurants serving boil-in-a-bag or microwave-ready meals, which could harm France’s reputation for good food, MP Daniel Fasquelle is putting a new law to parliament this month. […] The proposed law would limit the right to use the word “restaurant” to eateries where food is prepared on site using raw ingredients, either fresh or frozen. Exceptions would be made for some prepared products, such as bread, charcuterie and ice cream.

(tags: restaurants food france cuisine boil-in-the-bag microwave cooking daniel-fasquelle)

On Scala

great, comprehensive review of the language, its pros and misfeatures, from Bill de hOra

(tags: scala languages coding fp reviews)

Introducing Kale « Code as Craft

Etsy have implemented a tool to perform auto-correlation of service metrics, and detection of deviation from historic norms:

at Etsy, we really love to make graphs. We graph everything! Anywhere we can slap a StatsD call, we do. As a result, we’ve found ourselves with over a quarter million distinct metrics. That’s far too many graphs for a team of 150 engineers to watch all day long! And even if you group metrics into dashboards, that’s still an awful lot of dashboards if you want complete coverage. Of course, if a graph isn’t being watched, it might misbehave and no one would know about it. And even if someone caught it, lots of other graphs might be misbehaving in similar ways, and chances are low that folks would make the connection. We’d like to introduce you to the Kale stack, which is our attempt to fix both of these problems. It consists of two parts: Skyline and Oculus. We first use Skyline to detect anomalous metrics. Then, we search for that metric in Oculus, to see if any other metrics look similar. At that point, we can make an informed diagnosis and hopefully fix the problem.

(tags: etsy monitoring service-metrics alarming deviation correlation data search graphs oculus skyline kale false-positives)

Paper: “Root Cause Detection in a Service-Oriented Architecture” [pdf]

LinkedIn have implemented an automated root-cause detection system:

This paper introduces MonitorRank, an algorithm that can reduce the time, domain knowledge, and human effort required to ?nd the root causes of anomalies in such service-oriented architectures. In the event of an anomaly, MonitorRank provides a ranked order list of possible root causes for monitoring teams to investigate. MonitorRank uses the historical and current time-series metrics of each sensor as its input, along with the call graph generated between sensors to build an unsupervised model for ranking. Experiments on real production outage data from LinkedIn, one of the largest online social networks, shows a 26% to 51% improvement in mean average precision in ?nding root causes compared to baseline and current state-of-the-art methods.

(tags: linkedin soa root-cause alarming correlation service-metrics machine-learning graphs monitoring)

Announcing Zuul: Edge Service in the Cloud

Netflix’ library to implement “edge services” — ie. a front end to their API, web servers, and streaming servers. Some interesting features: dynamic filtering using Groovy scripts; Hystrix for software load balancing, fault tolerance, and error handling for originated HTTP requests; fine-grained service metrics; Archaius for configuration; and canary requests to detect overload risks. Pretty complex though

(tags: edge-services api netflix zuul archaius canary-requests http groovy hystrix load-balancing fault-tolerance error-handling configuration)

CloudFlare, PRISM, and Securing SSL Ciphers

Matthew Prince of CloudFlare has an interesting theory on the NSA’s capabilities:

It is not inconceivable that the NSA has data centers full of specialized hardware optimized for SSL key breaking. According to data shared with us from a survey of SSL keys used by various websites, the majority of web companies were using 1024-bit SSL ciphers and RSA-based encryption through 2012. Given enough specialized hardware, it is within the realm of possibility that the NSA could within a reasonable period of time reverse engineer 1024-bit SSL keys for certain web companies. If they’d been recording the traffic to these web companies, they could then use the broken key to go back and decrypt all the transactions. While this seems like a compelling theory, ultimately, we remain skeptical this is how the PRISM program described in the slides actually works. Cracking 1024-bit keys would be a big deal and likely involve some cutting-edge cryptography and computational power, even for the NSA. The largest SSL key that is known to have been broken to date is 768 bits long. While that was 4 years ago, and the NSA undoubtedly has some of the best cryptographers in the world, it’s still a considerable distance from 768 bits to 1024 bits — especially given the slide suggests Microsoft’s key would have to had been broken back in 2007. Moreover, the slide showing the dates on which “collection began” for various companies also puts the cost of the program at $20M/year. That may sound like a lot of money, but it is not for an undertaking like this. Just the power necessary to run the server farm needed to break a 1024-bit key would likely cost in excess of $20M/year. While the NSA may have broken 1024-bit SSL keys as part of some other program, if the slide is accurate and complete, we think it’s highly unlikely they did so as part of the PRISM program. A not particularly glamorous alternative theory is that the NSA didn’t break the SSL key but instead just cajoled rogue employees at firms with access to the private keys — whether the companies themselves, partners they’d shared the keys with, or the certificate authorities who issued the keys in the first place — to turn them over. That very well may be possible on a budget of $20M/year. [….] Google is a notable anomaly. The company uses a 1024-bit key, but, unlike all the other companies listed above, rather than using a default cipher suite based on the RSA encryption algorithm, they instead prefer the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE) cipher suites. Without going into the technical details, a key difference of ECDHE is that they use a different private key for each user’s session. This means that if the NSA, or anyone else, is recording encrypted traffic, they cannot break one private key and read all historical transactions with Google. The NSA would have to break the private key generated for each session, which, in Google’s case, is unique to each user and regenerated for each user at least every 28-hours. While ECDHE arguably already puts Google at the head of the pack for web transaction security, to further augment security Google has publicly announced that they will be increasing their key length to 2048-bit by the end of 2013. Assuming the company continues to prefer the ECDHE cipher suites, this will put Google at the cutting edge of web transaction security.

(tags: prism security nsa cloudflare ssl tls ecdhe elliptic-curve crypto rsa key-lengths)

Record companies to target 20 more pirate sites after court ruling – Independent.ie

Looks like IRMA are following the lead of the UK’s BPI, by chasing the proxy sites next:

Up to 20 internet sites are to be targeted by an organisation representing record companies in a move to stamp out the illegal pirating of music and other copyright material. The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) said it would be immediately moving against the 20 “worst offenders” to “take out” internet sites involved in the illegal downloading of copyright work.

Last night IRMA director general, Dick Doyle said the High Court ruling was only the first step in “taking out many internet sites involved in illegally downloading music. “We will be back in court very shortly to take out five to 10 other sites. We have already selected a total of 20 of the worst offender sites and we will go after the next five in the very near future,” he said.

(tags: courts ireland law irma piracy pirate-bay bpi proxies filesharing copyright)

Building a Modern Website for Scale (QCon NY 2013) [slides]

some great scalability ideas from LinkedIn. Particularly interesting are the best practices suggested for scaling web services: 1. store client-call timeouts and SLAs in Zookeeper for each REST endpoint; 2. isolate backend calls using async/threadpools; 3. cancel work on failures; 4. avoid sending requests to GC’ing hosts; 5. rate limits on the server. #4 is particularly cool. They do this using a “GC scout” request before every “real” request; a cheap TCP request to a dedicated “scout” Netty port, which replies near-instantly. If it comes back with a 1-packet response within 1 millisecond, send the real request, else fail over immediately to the next host in the failover set. There’s still a potential race condition where the “GC scout” can be achieved quickly, then a GC starts just before the “real” request is issued. But the incidence of GC-blocking-request is probably massively reduced. It also helps against packet loss on the rack or server host, since packet loss will cause the drop of one of the TCP packets, and the TCP retransmit timeout will certainly be higher than 1ms, causing the deadline to be missed. (UDP would probably work just as well, for this reason.) However, in the case of packet loss in the client’s network vicinity, it will be vital to still attempt to send the request to the final host in the failover set regardless of a GC-scout failure, otherwise all requests may be skipped. The GC-scout system also helps balance request load off heavily-loaded hosts, or hosts with poor performance for other reasons; they’ll fail to achieve their 1 msec deadline and the request will be shunted off elsewhere. For service APIs with real low-latency requirements, this is a great idea.

(tags: gc-scout gc java scaling scalability linkedin qcon async threadpools rest slas timeouts networking distcomp netty tcp udp failover fault-tolerance packet-loss)

Why I won’t give the European Parliament the data protection analysis it wanted

Holy crap. Simon Davies rips into the EU data-protection reform disaster with gusto:

The situation was an utter disgrace. The advertising industry even gave an award to an Irish Minister for destroying some of the rights in the regulation while the UK managed to force a provision that would make the direct marketing industry a “legitimate” processing operation in its own right, putting it on the same level of lawful processing as fraud prevention. Things got to the point where even the most senior data protection officials in Europe stopped trying to influence events and had told me “let the chips fall as they may”. […] But let’s take a step back for a moment from this travesty. Out on the streets – while most may not know what data protection is – people certainly know what it is supposed to protect. People value their privacy and they will be vocal about attempts to destroy it. I had said as much to the joint parliamentary meeting, observing “the one element that has been left out of all these efforts is the public”. However, as the months rolled on, the only message being sent to the public was that data protection is an anachronism stitched together with self interest and impracticality. […] I wasn’t aware at the time that there was a vast stitch-up to kill the reforms. I cannot bring myself to present a temperate report with measured wording that pretends this is all just normal business. It isn’t normal business, and it should never be normal business in any civilized society. How does one talk in measured tones about such endemic hypocrisy and deception? If you want to know who the real enemy of privacy is, don’t just look to the American agencies. The real enemy is right here in the European Parliament in the guise of MEPs who have knowingly sold our rights away to maintain powerful relationships. I’d like to say they were merely hoodwinked into supporting the vandalism, but many are smart people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Is there a way forward? I believe so. First, governments should yield to common decency and scrap the illegitimate and poisoned Irish Council draft and hand the task to the Lithuanian Presidency that commences next month. Second, the Irish and British governments should be infinitely more transparent about their cooperation with intrusive interests that fuelled the deception.

(tags: ireland eu europe reform law data-protection privacy simon-davies meps iab)

Persuading David Simon (Pinboard Blog)

Maciej Ceglowski with a strongly-argued rebuttal of David Simon’s post about the NSA’s PRISM. This point in particular is key:

The point is, you don’t need human investigators to find leads, you can have the algorithms do it [based on the call graph or network of who-calls-who]. They will find people of interest, assemble the watch lists, and flag whomever you like for further tracking. And since the number of actual terrorists is very, very, very small, the output of these algorithms will consist overwhelmingly of false positives.

(tags: false-positives maciej privacy security nsa prism david-simon accuracy big-data filtering anti-spam)

Schneier on Security: Blowback from the NSA Surveillance

Unintended consequences on US-focused governance of the internet and cloud computing:

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue. We can’t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don’t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

(tags: internet freedom cloud-computing amazon google hosting usa us-politics prism nsa surveillance)

EU unlocks a great new source of online innovation

Today the European Parliament voted to formally agree new rules on open data – effectively making a reality of the proposal which I first put forward just over 18 months ago, and making it easier to open up huge amounts of public sector data.

(tags: osi mapping open-data open data europe eu neelie-kroes)

UK ISPs Secretly Start Blocking Torrent Site Proxies | TorrentFreak

The next step of cat-and-mouse. Let’s see what the pirate sites do next…

The blocking orders are intended to deter online piracy and were requested by the music industry group BPI on behalf of a variety of major labels. Thus far they’ve managed to block access to The Pirate Bay, Kat.ph, H33T and Fenopy, and preparations are being made to add many others. The effectiveness of these initial measures has been called into doubt, as they are relatively easy to bypass. For example, in response to the blockades hundreds of proxy sites popped up, allowing subscribers to reach the prohibited sites via a detour. However, as of this week these proxies are also covered by the same blocklist they aim to circumvent, without a new court ruling. The High Court orders give music industry group BPI the authority to add sites to the blocklist without oversight. Until now some small changes have been made, mostly in response to The Pirate Bay’s domain hopping endeavors, but with the latest blocklist update a whole new range of websites is being targeted.

(tags: bittorrent blocking filesharing copyright bpi piracy pirate-bay proxies fenopy kat.ph h33t filtering uk)

There’s a map for that

‘Not long ago, we began rendering 3D models on GitHub. Today we’re excited to announce the latest addition to the visualization family – geographic data. Any .geojson file in a GitHub repository will now be automatically rendered as an interactive, browsable map, annotated with your geodata.’ As this HN comment notes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5875693 — ‘I’d much rather Github cleaned up the UI for existing features than added these little flourishes that I can’t imagine even 1% of users use.’ Something is seriously wrong in how GitHub decides product direction if this kind of wankology (and that Judy-array crap) is what gets prioritised. :( (via Marc O’Morain)

(tags: via:marc github mapping maps geojson hacking product-management ui pull-requests)

Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday Is In The Public Domain; Demands Warner Pay Back Millions Of License Fees | Techdirt

The issue […] is that it’s just not cost effective for anyone to actually stand up and challenge Warner Music, who has strong financial incentive to pretend the copyright is still valid. Well, apparently, someone is pissed off enough to try. The creatively named Good Morning to You Productions, a documentary film company planning a film about the song Happy Birthday, has now filed a lawsuit concerning the copyright of Happy Birthday and are seeking to force Warner/Chappell to return the millions of dollars it has collected over the years. That’s going to make this an interesting case.

(tags: music copyright law via:bwalsh public-domain happy-birthday songs warner-music lawsuits)

graphite-metrics

metric collectors for various stuff not (or poorly) handled by other monitoring daemons Core of the project is a simple daemon (harvestd), which collects metric values and sends them to graphite carbon daemon (and/or other configured destinations) once per interval. Includes separate data collection components (“collectors”) for processing of: /proc/slabinfo for useful-to-watch values, not everything (configurable). /proc/vmstat and /proc/meminfo in a consistent way. /proc/stat for irq, softirq, forks. /proc/buddyinfo and /proc/pagetypeinfo (memory fragmentation). /proc/interrupts and /proc/softirqs. Cron log to produce start/finish events and duration for each job into a separate metrics, adapts jobs to metric names with regexes. Per-system-service accounting using systemd and it’s cgroups. sysstat data from sadc logs (use something like sadc -F -L -S DISK -S XDISK -S POWER 60 to have more stuff logged there) via sadf binary and it’s json export (sadf -j, supported since sysstat-10.0.something, iirc). iptables rule “hits” packet and byte counters, taken from ip{,6}tables-save, mapped via separate “table chain_name rule_no metric_name” file, which should be generated along with firewall rules (I use this script to do that).

(tags: graphite monitoring metrics unix linux ops vm iptables sysadmin)

Former NSA Boss: We Don’t Data Mine Our Giant Data Collection, We Just Ask It Questions

‘Well, that’s – no, we’re going to use it. But we’re not going to use it in the way that some people fear. You put these records, you store them, you have them. It’s kind of like, I’ve got the haystack now. And now let’s try to find the needle. And you find the needle by asking that data a question. I’m sorry to put it that way, but that’s fundamentally what happens. All right. You don’t troll through the data looking for patterns or anything like that. The data is set aside. And now I go into that data with a question that – a question that is based on articulable(ph), arguable, predicate to a terrorist nexus.’

(tags: data-mining questions haystack needle nsa usa politics privacy data-protection michael-hayden)

fastutil

fastutil extends the Java™ Collections Framework by providing type-specific maps, sets, lists and queues with a small memory footprint and fast access and insertion; provides also big (64-bit) arrays, sets and lists, and fast, practical I/O classes for binary and text files. It is free software distributed under the Apache License 2.0. It requires Java 6 or newer.

(tags: via:highscalability facebook giraph optimization java speed fastutil collections data-structures)

Big Memory, Part 4

good microbenchmarking of a bunch of Java collections; Trove, fastutil, PCJ, mahout-collections, hppc

(tags: java collections benchmarks performance speed coding data-structures optimization)

Spamalot reigns: the spoils of Ireland’s EU kingship | The Irish Times – Thu, Jun 13, 2013

The spam presidency. As European citizens are made the miserable targets of unimpeded “direct marketing”, that may be how Ireland’s stint in the EU presidency seat is recalled for years to come. Under the guiding hand of Minister for Justice Alan Shatter, the Council of the European Union has submitted proposals for amendments to a proposed new data protection regulation, all of which overwhelmingly favour business and big organisations, not citizens. The most obviously repugnant and surprising element in the amendments is a watering down of existing protections for EU citizens against the willy-nilly marketing Americans are forced to endure. In the US there are few meaningful restrictions on what businesses can do with people’s personal information when pitching products and services at them. In the EU, this has always been strictly controlled; information gathered for one purpose cannot be used by a business to sell whatever it wants – unless you have opted in to receive such solicitations. This means you are not constantly bombarded by emails and junk mail, nor do you get non-stop phone calls from telemarketers. Under the proposed amendments to the draft data protection regulation, direct marketing would become a legal form of data processing. In effect, this would legitimise spam email, junk print mail and marketing calls. This unexpected provision signals just how successful powerful corporate lobbyists have been in convincing ministers that business matters more than privacy or giving citizens reasonable control over their personal information. Far worse is contained in other amendments, which in effect turn the original draft of the regulation upside down.

(tags: eu law prism data-protection privacy ireland ec marketing spam anti-spam email)

Vagrant and Chef to provision dev test environments

We have recently switched from a manually configured development environment to a nearly fully automated one using Vagrant, Chef, and a few other tools. With this transition, we’ve moved to an environment where data on the dev boxes is considered disposable and only what’s checked into the SCM is “real”. This is where we’ve always wanted to be, but without the ability to easily rebuild the dev environment from scratch, it’s hard to internalize this behavior pattern.

(tags: dev osx chef vagrant testing vms coding)

Rapid Response: The NSA Prism Leak

‘The biggest leak in the history of US security or nothing to worry about? A breach of trust and a data protection issue or a necessary secret project to protect American interests? [Tomorrow] lunchtime Science Gallery Rapid Response event [sic] will pick through the jargon, examine the minutiae of the National Security Agency’s PRISM project and the whistle blower Edward Snowden’s revelations, and discuss what it means for you and everyone. And we’ll look at the bigger picture too. Journalist Una Mullally will chair a panel of guests on the story that everyone is talking about. ‘

(tags: science-gallery panel-discussions dublin nsa prism panel)

Music firms secure orders blocking access to Pirate Bay – Crime & Law News from Ireland & Abroad | The Irish Times – Wed, Jun 12, 2013

Four major music companies have secured court orders requiring six internet service providers to block access by subscribers to various Pirate Bay websites within some 30 days in a bid to prevent illegal downloading of copyright music and other material. […] Today, Mr Justice Brian McGovern said he was satisfied to make the order in circumstances including that new copyright laws here and in the EU permitted such orders to be made. He said he fully agreed with a previous High Court judge who had said he would make such blocking orders if the law permitted and noted the law now allowed for such orders. The form of the orders means the music companies will not have to make fresh applications to court if Pirate Bay changes its location on the internet.

(tags: pirate-bay blocking filtering internet ireland upc eircom vodafone digiweb three imagine o2 copyright)

Labour TD ignores tough questions on web case

I [Tom Murphy] have asked [Sean Sherlock] a question: Does he have any comment about the lawsuit between EMI and UPC (and a raft of other ISPs too btw) which is using his SI to attempt to block PirateBay? A court case he said would not happen. Now, I am blocked from following him on Twitter. This is not how a proper political system works.

(tags: politics ireland twitter sean-sherlock tom-murphy boards devore copyright)

PRISM explains the wider lobbying issues surrounding EU data protection reform | EDRI

The US has very successfully and expertly lobbied against the [EU] data protection package directly, it has mobilised and supported US industry lobbying. US industry has lobbied in its own name and mobilised malleable European trade associations to lobby on their behalf to amplify their message, “independent” “think tanks” have been created to amplify their message again. The result is not just the biggest lobbying effort that Brussels has ever seen, but also the broadest. Compliant Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and EU Member States […] have been imposing a “death by a thousand cuts” on the Regulation. Where previously there was a clear obligation to collect the “minimum necessary” data for any given service, the vague requirement to retain “not excessive” data is now preferred. Where previously companies could only use data for purposes that were “compatible” with the original reason for collecting the data, the Irish EU Presidency (pdf) has proposed a comical definition of “compatible” based on five elements, only one of which is related to the dictionary definition of the word. Members of the European Parliament and EU Member States are falling over themselves to ensure that the EU does not maintain its strategic advantage over the US. In addition to dismantling the proposed Regulation, countries like the UK desperately seek to delay the whole process and subsume it into the EU-US free trade agreement (the so-called “investment partnership” TTIP/TAFTA), which would subordinate a fundamental rights discussion in a trade negotiation. The UK government is even prepared to humiliate itself by arguing in favour of the US position on the basis that two and a half years (see Communication from 2010, pdf) of discussion is too fast!

(tags: edri data-protection eu ec ireland politics usa meps privacy uk free-trade)

Microsoft admits US government can access EU-based cloud data

interesting point from an MS Q&A back in 2011, quite relevant nowadays:

Q: Can Microsoft guarantee that EU-stored data, held in EU based datacenters, will not leave the European Economic Area under any circumstances — even under a request by the Patriot Act? A: Frazer explained that, as Microsoft is a U.S.-headquartered company, it has to comply with local laws (the United States, as well as any other location where one of its subsidiary companies is based). Though he said that “customers would be informed wherever possible,” he could not provide a guarantee that they would be informed — if a gagging order, injunction or U.S. National Security Letter permits it. He said: “Microsoft cannot provide those guarantees. Neither can any other company.” While it has been suspected for some time, this is the first time Microsoft, or any other company, has given this answer. Any data which is housed, stored or processed by a company, which is a U.S. based company or is wholly owned by a U.S. parent company, is vulnerable to interception and inspection by U.S. authorities. 

(tags: microsoft privacy cloud-computing eu data-centers data-protection nsa fisa usa)

IAB Europe awards MEP Sean Kelly for standing up for data privacy rights (video) – Ireland’s CIO and strategy news and reports service – Siliconrepublic.com

Irish MEP serving as a rapporteur on reform of the EU data protection regime, was given an award by an advertising trade group last month:

Sean Kelly, Fine Gael MEP for Ireland South [who serves as the EU’s Industry Committee Rapporteur for the General Data Protection Regulation], has been selected to receive the prestigious IAB Europe Award for Leadership and Excellence for his approach to dealing with privacy concerns over shortcomings in the European Commission’s data protection proposal. IAB Europe represents more than 5,500 online advertising media, research and analytics organisations.

(tags: iab-europe awards spam sean-kelly ireland meps politics eu data-protection privacy ec)

The CAP FAQ by henryr

No subject appears to be more controversial to distributed systems engineers than the oft-quoted, oft-misunderstood CAP theorem. The purpose of this FAQ is to explain what is known about CAP, so as to help those new to the theorem get up to speed quickly, and to settle some common misconceptions or points of disagreement.

(tags: database distributed nosql cap consistency cap-theorem faqs)

seeing into the UV spectrum after Cataract Surgery with Crystalens

I’ve been very happy so far with the Crystalens implant for Cataract Surgery […] one unexpected/interesting aspect is I see a violet glow that others do not – perhaps I’m more sensitive to the low end of the visible light spectrum.

(tags: via:fanf science perception augmentation uv light sight cool cataracts surgery lens eyes)

Instagram: Making the Switch to Cassandra from Redis, a 75% ‘Insta’ Savings

shifting data out of RAM and onto SSDs — unsurprisingly, big savings.

a 12 node cluster of EC2 hi1.4xlarge instances; we store around 1.2TB of data across this cluster. At peak, we’re doing around 20,000 writes per second to that specific cluster and around 15,000 reads per second. We’ve been really impressed with how well Cassandra has been able to drop into that role.

(tags: ram ssd cassandra databases nosql redis instagram storage ec2)

Council of the European Union Releases Draft Compromise Text on the Proposed EU Data Protection Regulation

Oh god. this sounds like an impending privacy and anti-spam disaster. “business-focussed”:

Overall, the [Irish EC Presidency’s] draft compromise text can be seen as a more business-focused, pragmatic approach. For example, the Presidency has drafted an additional recital (Recital 3a), clarifying the right to data protection as a qualified right, highlighting the principle of proportionality and importance of other competing fundamental rights, including the freedom to conduct a business.

The criterion for valid consent is amended from “explicit” to “unambiguous,” except in the case of processing special categories of data (i.e., sensitive personal data) (Recital 25 and Article 9(2)). This reverts to the current position under the Data Protection Directive and is a concession to the practical difficulty of obtaining explicit consent in all cases. The criteria for valid consent are further relaxed by the ability to obtain consent in writing, orally or in an electronic manner, and where technically feasible and effective, valid consent can be given using browser settings and other technical solutions. Further, the requirement that the controller bear the burden of proof that valid consent was obtained is limited to a requirement that the controller be able to “demonstrate” that consent was obtained (Recital 32 and Article 7(1)). The need for “informed” consent is also relaxed from the requirement to provide the full information requirements laid out in Article 14 to the minimal requirements that the data subject “at least” be made aware of: (1) the identity of the data controller, and (2) the purpose(s) of the processing of their personal data (Recitals 33 and 48).

(tags: anti-spam privacy data-protection spam ireland eu ec regulation)

LobbyPlag

wow, great view of which MEPs are eviscerating the EU’s data protection regime:

Currently the EU is negotiating about new data privacy laws. This new EU Regulation will replace all existing national laws on data privacy. Here you can see a general overview which Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are pushing for more or less data privacy. Choose a country, a political group or a MEP from the “Top 10” list to find out more.

(tags: europe eu privacy data-protection datap ec regulation meps)

EDRI’s comments on EU proposals to reform privacy law

Amendments 762, 764 and 765 in particular seem to move portions of the law from “confirmed opt-in required” to “opt-out is ok” — which sounds like a risk where spam and unsolicited actions on a person’s data are concerned

(tags: law privacy anti-spam eu spam edri)

EC2Instances.info

‘Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison’. a nice UI on the various EC2 instance types on offer with their key attributes. Misses out availability of EBS-optimized instances though

(tags: amazon ec2 aws comparison pricing)

HyperLevelDB: A High-Performance LevelDB Fork

‘HyperLevelDB improves on LevelDB in two key ways: Improved parallelism: HyperLevelDB uses more fine-grained locking internally to provide higher throughput for multiple writer threads. Improved compaction: HyperLevelDB uses a different method of compaction that achieves higher throughput for write-heavy workloads, even as the database grows.’

(tags: leveldb storage key-value-stores persistence unix libraries open-source)

EU Council deals killer blow to privacy reforms

‘In an extraordinary result for corporate lobbying, direct marketing would by default be considered a legitimate data process and would therefore – by default – be lawful.’

(tags: eu politics data-protection privacy anti-spam spam eu-council direct-marketing)

Care and Feeding of Large Scale Graphite Installations [slides]

good docs for large-scale graphite use: ‘Tip and tricks of using and scaling graphite. First presented at DevOpsDays Austin Texas 2013-05-01’

(tags: graphite devops ops metrics dashboards sysadmin)

Low-latency stock trading “jumps the gun” due to default NTP configuration settings

On June 3, 2013, trading in SPY exploded at 09:59:59.985, which is 15 milliseconds before the ISM’s Manufacturing number released at 10:00:00. Activity in the eMini (traded in Chicago), exploded at 09:59:59.992, which is 8 milliseconds before the news release, but 7 milliseconds after SPY. Note how SPY and the eMini traded within a millisecond for the Consumer Confidence release last week, but the eMini lagged SPY by about 7 milliseconds for the ISM Manufacturing release. The simultaneous trading on Consumer Confidence is because that number is released at the same time in both NYC and Chicago. The ISM Manufacturing number is probably released on a low latency feed in NYC, and then takes 5-7 milliseconds, due to the speed of light, to reach Chicago. Either the clock used to release the ISM number was 15 milliseconds fast, or someone (correctly) jumped the gun. Update: […] The clock used to release the ISM was indeed, 15 milliseconds fast. This could be from using the default setting of many NTP clients, which allows the clock to drift up to about 16 milliseconds before adjusting time.

(tags: ntp time synchronization spy trading stocks low-latency clocks internet)

the infamous 2008 S3 single-bit-corruption outage

Neat, I didn’t realise this was publicly visible. A single corrupted bit infected the S3 gossip network, taking down the whole S3 service in (iirc) one region:

We’ve now determined that message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message was still intelligible, but the system state information was incorrect. We use MD5 checksums throughout the system, for example, to prevent, detect, and recover from corruption that can occur during receipt, storage, and retrieval of customers’ objects. However, we didn’t have the same protection in place to detect whether [gossip state] had been corrupted. As a result, when the corruption occurred, we didn’t detect it and it spread throughout the system causing the symptoms described above. We hadn’t encountered server-to-server communication issues of this scale before and, as a result, it took some time during the event to diagnose and recover from it. During our post-mortem analysis we’ve spent quite a bit of time evaluating what happened, how quickly we were able to respond and recover, and what we could do to prevent other unusual circumstances like this from having system-wide impacts. Here are the actions that we’re taking: (a) we’ve deployed several changes to Amazon S3 that significantly reduce the amount of time required to completely restore system-wide state and restart customer request processing; (b) we’ve deployed a change to how Amazon S3 gossips about failed servers that reduces the amount of gossip and helps prevent the behavior we experienced on Sunday; (c) we’ve added additional monitoring and alarming of gossip rates and failures; and, (d) we’re adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state messages so we can log any such messages and then reject them.

(tags: s3 aws post-mortems network outages failures corruption grey-failures amazon gossip)