Blog Archive: November 2014
Why Renewable Energy (Alone) Won't Full Solve the Problem
Back in 2007, the audacious RE<C project was started. The goal of RE<C was simple: make renewable energy less costly than coal and let economics do the hard work of converting the worlds energy producers to go renewable. I blogged the project in Solving World Problems With Economic Incentives summarizing the project with the core idea is that, if renewable energy sources were cheaper the coal, economic forces would quickly make the right thing happen and we would actually stop burning coal. I love the approach but it is fiendishly difficult. Unfortunately, RE<C really was fiendishly difficult and the project was subsequently abandoned in 2011.
Why Renewable Energy (Alone) Wont Fully Solve the Problem
Back in 2007, the audacious RE<C project was started. The goal of RE<C was simple: make renewable energy less costly than coal and let economics do the hard work of converting the worlds energy producers to go renewable. I blogged the project in Solving World Problems With Economic Incentives summarizing the project with the core...
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Bikes
Squid Bikes is a California brand. Article from Velo News. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Economic Failures of HTTPS Encryption
Interesting paper: "Security Collapse of the HTTPS Market." From the conclusion: Recent breaches at CAs have exposed several systemic vulnerabilities and market failures inherent in the current HTTPS authentication model: the security of the entire ecosystem suffers if any of the hundreds of CAs is compromised (weakest link); browsers are unable to revoke trust in major CAs ("too big to...
NBN next week
Also heard from Aussie Broadband that my National Broadband Network antenna would be installed next week. Do the installers know what will await them? On the one hand it's the correct time to install the cabling, but we won't have any walls to attach the NTD to. Asked Aussie to confirm with the installers, but no, they have no contact with the installers, who work for NBN. But then I got a call from a Walter Bonilla from the NBN, who told me what they needed and explained that they had exact instructions on what to do, and they weren't allowed to diverge from them at all.
rsync problems
Lately I've had difficulty syncing my diary and photos to the external web server: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/public_html 5 -> syncgrog Thu 27 Nov 2014 12:54:54 EST +++ Transferring grog to www:www.lemis.com +++ rsync -lKzavP --delete-after --copy-unsafe-links --exclude=weather /home/grog/public_html/ www:www.lemis.com/grog ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9] === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/public_html 6 -> syncgrog (again) === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/public_html 7 -> syncgrog Thu 27 Nov 2014 12:55:01 EST +++ Transferring grog to www:www.lemis.com +++ rsync -lKzavP --delete-after --copy-unsafe-links --exclude=weather /home/grog/public_html/ www:www.lemis.com/grog building file list ...
"Cooperating with the Future"
This is an interesting paper -- the full version is behind a paywall -- about how we as humans can motivate people to cooperate with future generations. Abstract: Overexploitation of renewable resources today has a high cost on the welfare of future generations. Unlike in other public goods games, however, future generations cannot reciprocate actions made today. What mechanisms can...
GPU hang workaround
The GPU hang messages that I had earlier this month are back. They had caused me to restart X, and were thus particularly irritating. But the seemed to come from Google Chrome, so tried shooting it down. Success! Another X session saved. And probably another indication that it's high time to upgrade my system software. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Practical Time Travel
I just finished reading William Gibsons The Peripheral for the second time, and I recommend you do too: Read it twice, I mean. Gibsons always written densely; idiomatic, with good flow, but its really packed in. I remember decades ago, talking over the Sprawl books with my brother: Early on, he said, you have no idea whats going on. What with that, and beauty of the words, and the interesting people in the stories, and the big set-pieces& well, Ive never read any Gibson just once. But I left out the biggest deal with his books: the backgrounds, the flavors, the astonishing skill at mise en scène.
New Snowden Documents Show GCHQ Paying Cable & Wireless for Access
A new story based on the Snowden documents and published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung shows how the GCHQ worked with Cable & Wireless -- acquired by Vodafone in 2012 -- to eavesdrop on Internet and telecommunications traffic. New documents on the page, and here. Ars Technica article. Slashdot thread....
FBI Agents Pose as Repairmen to Bypass Warrant Process
This is a creepy story. The FBI wanted access to a hotel guest's room without a warrant. So agents broke his Internet connection, and then posed as Internet technicians to gain access to his hotel room without a warrant. From the motion to suppress: The next time you call for assistance because the internet service in your home is not...
Fibre: Yes? No?
Also finishing the specs for the electrical wiring of the house. At one point I thought that it was trivial to find cheap glass fibre. The more I look, the more it seems to be a can of worms. The only reason to put in fibre now is to save on installation expenses later, if I ever need it. But it's not clear that I ever will, and Cat 6A will be enough for 10 Gb/s, so I think I'll just take the easy way out and forget it for the time being. ACM only downloads articles once.
More lightning damage
Call from Tom of Bushmans todayfor about 5 seconds. Then the connection was dropped. That wouldn't be that unusual, except that it happened twice yesterday to other callers. Was there something wrong with my other ATA? Tried using a straight telephone without ATA, and it worked fine. Checked later: Daniel O'Connor called me on the Telstra line (passthrough through the Netcomm V210P) and on VoIP via the same ATA. Yes, it's repeatable: the VoIP circuits work well, but the PSTN connection repeatedly gets dropped after 5 seconds. That clarifies a number of things: first, it supports the hypothesis that the damage came in through the phone line.
Regin: Another Military-Grade Malware
Regin is another military-grade surveillance malware (tech details from Symantec and Kaspersky). It seems to have been in operation between 2008 and 2011. The Intercept has linked it to NSA/GCHQ operations, although I am still skeptical of the NSA/GCHQ hacking Belgian cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater....
Flash! Bang!
The bad weather was accompanied by lots of thunder and lightning. At one point I heard a spark right in front of meit sounded as if a monitor had arced. But a second later there was a clap of thunder, so it must have been a lightning strike. Surprisingly, nothing was obviously damaged. And then an hour later two of my monitors died. It took me a while to realize that the rest of the system was running on UPS, and that something had tripped the circuit breaker in the switchboard. In the afternoon, wanted to make a phone call. Phone was dead.
State of the art
Somebody on IRC found this on imgur today: I wonder who put it there? It's a JPEG image, but it doesn't have any EXIF information. How do you find the copyright holder? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
The Security Underpinnnings of Cryptography
Nice article on some of the security assumptions we rely on in cryptographic algorithms....
Defending The Mockingjay
I saw Mockingjay Part 1 yesterday and, having carefully avoided reviews, poked around afterward to see what other people thought. I was shocked to find them running more or less 50% negative. So heres why you should ignore the bad reviews and go see it. The gripes The critics seem to think that splitting the third Hunger Games book in two is a brazen cash grab, that the movie is dark and fashion-starved, and that theres not enough action. Why theyre wrong Because Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, and Philip Seymour Hoffman are all at the top of their games and theyve got a decent script to work with and if you like movies at all, why wouldnt you want to watch that?
Reviving my Mac Pro
Weve had this Early 2008 Mac Pro since, well, early 2008. Itd been showing its age but I fixed that. Long-time readers may recall the occasion when in 2008 I asked the Net whether I should hack this computer; with a hacksaw, I mean. Or perhaps its 2012 life-extension therapy. Its the family mainframe, does homework and Plexus and BitTorrent (legal stuff only, you betcha) and drives the big high-end audio system through a Benchmark Media DAC1 USB, also its my 15-year-olds gamebox, which means theres a BootCamp Win7 partition in there. How to I was encouraged by Bob Lees Six ways to breathe new life into an old Mac Pro, and Bobs was even older than mine.
Updates to my trip report
(this is an echo of what I also just posted on isocpp.org) I wanted to add a few more things to my meeting trip report. I updated the trip report in-place, but for those who want to see the “diffs” I’ll also post just the new parts here as a standalone post: There were 106 […]
Updates to my trip report
(this is an echo of what I also just posted on isocpp.org) I wanted to add a few more things to my meeting trip report. I updated the trip report in-place, but for those who want to see the “diffs” I’ll also post just the new parts here as a standalone post: There were 106 […]
New Kryptos Clue
Jim Sanborn has given he world another clue to the fourth cyphertext in his Kryptos sculpture at the CIA headquarters. Older posts on Kryptos....
New monitor
A few days ago I bought a spare monitor, in case one failed. But presumably it would be of better quality than my older monitors, so swapped out my oldest monitor for the new one. I can use the old one for machines that have previously been headless. That wasn't as simple as it sounded: yes, they have the same resolution and pretty much the same dimensions, but the old one was connected by HDMI, and the new one doesn't have an HDMI connection. So I ended up having to move monitors around, and since the other monitor with HDMI had a different resolution, I had to restart (but not reconfigure) X.
Trip Report: Fall ISO C++ Meeting
I just posted my ISO C++ meeting trip report over on isocpp.org covering our meeting in Urbana-Champaign earlier this month. The ISO C++ committee is shipping more work sooner via concurrent Technical Specifications, but it’s still fairly new to find ourselves doing so much work that the “new normal” is to issue an international ballot from every […]
Trip Report: Fall ISO C++ Meeting
I just posted my ISO C++ meeting trip report over on isocpp.org covering our meeting in Urbana-Champaign earlier this month. The ISO C++ committee is shipping more work sooner via concurrent Technical Specifications, but it’s still fairly new to find ourselves doing so much work that the “new normal” is to issue an international ballot from every […]
Friday Squid Blogging: Cephalopod Cognition
Tales of cephalopod behavior, including octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses. Cephalopod Cognition, published by Cambridge University Press, is currently available in hardcover, and the paperback edition will be available next week....
Little Brother middle school English curriculum materials
James Scot Brodie is a teacher at Presidio Middle School in San Francisco, where Jen Wang and I spoke last month on our tour for In Real Life; prior to my arriving, he assigned my book Little Brother to his students, and produced some curricular materials that he's generously given to me to publish. Little … [Read more]
Little Brother middle school English curriculum materials
James Scot Brodie is a teacher at Presidio Middle School in San Francisco, where Jen Wang and I spoke last month on our tour for In Real Life; prior to my arriving, he assigned my book Little Brother to his students, and produced some curricular materials that he’s generously given to me to publish. Little... more
Worst web site: new contender
Yvonne decided to go to Melbourne tomorrow to visit Equitana. We had really wanted to plan it with an overnight visit, but somehow that didn't happen, so Yvonne decided to go just for the day. Under those circumstances it probably doesn't make sense to go by car. 270 km at 10 l/100 km is 27 litres of petrol, or about $40. Then there's the pain of navigating through Melbourne and the probably horrendous parking fees. Wouldn't it be simpler to go by train? What does it cost? After fighting http://www.vline.com.au/ for 15 minutes, I still didn't know. I was able to establish the timetable, sort of, but nothing I could do divulged the fares.
Wide-ranging conversation with Portlands KBOO about Information Doesnt Want to Be Free
Last month, I sat down for a long conversation (http://kboo.fm/sites/default/files/episode_audio/kboo_episode.2.141120.1100.2682.mp3">MP3) with Ken Jones for the Between the Covers at Portland, Oregon's KBOO community radio station, talking about my book Information Doesn't Want to be Free. They've posted the audio so people from outside of Portland can hear it too!
Wide-ranging conversation with Portlands KBOO about Information Doesnt Want to Be Free
Last month, I sat down for a long conversation (MP3) with Ken Jones for the Between the Covers at Portland, Oregon’s KBOO community radio station, talking about my book Information Doesn’t Want to be Free. They’ve posted the audio so people from outside of Portland can hear it too!
Pre-Snowden Debate About NSA Call-Records Collection Program
Reuters is reporting that in 2009, several senior NSA officials objected to the NSA call-records collection program. The now-retired NSA official, a longtime code-breaker who rose to top management, had just learned in 2009 about the top secret program that was created shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He says he argued to then-NSA Director Keith Alexander that storing...
Citadel Malware Steals Password Manager Master Passwords
Citadel is the first piece of malware I know of that specifically steals master passwords from password managers. Note that my own Password Safe is a target....
Keybase Client
I got interested in Keybase.io the day I left Google in March, and Ive been evangelizing it, but even more the idea behind it: Using authenticated posts here and there to prove public-key ownership. Also Ive contributed Keybase-client code to OpenKeychain (lets just say OKC ), a pretty good Android crypto app. Im more or less done now. This report is too long, and will probably be of interest only to the twelve people in the world who care about crypto implementations, key discovery, and modern Android apps. What it does There are now three screencasts over on YouTube: Sending a message, Receiving a message, and Can I trust this key?
Where's my network?
I've been trying since Friday to get an National Broadband Network connection for Stones Road. Called up Aussie Broadband and spoke to Fabien, who told me that the trouble is the lack of a location ID. It seems that NBN has assigned location IDs to all houses, but since we don't have one (yet), they don't have a location ID. Why is it taking so long to assign one? NBN can be slow. Called up the NBN and spoke to Jane, who asked me for the geographical coordinatesgood thing I had themand told me that it could take up to a week, but would probably be here by the end of the week.
New monitor?
Into town this morning to pick up a new monitor for Yvonne, and while I was at it picked up a second cheaper one$129 for a 21| 1920×1080 monitorto be prepared for the next failure. My Tandem background must be showing. Later did some searching about the causes of monitor failures. Things aren't quite as clear-cut as I thought, but articles like this one suggest that power supply failure is one of the leading causes. ACM only downloads articles once.
Book Excerpt: Organizing Strategy for Operational Teams
When Esther Schindler asked for permission to publish an excerpt from The Practice of Cloud System Administration on the Druva Blog, we thought this would be the perfect piece. We're glad she agreed. Check out this passage from Chapter 7, "Operations in a Distributed World". If you manage a sysadmin team that manages services, here is some advice on how to organize the team and their work: Organizing Strategy for Operational Teams
Book Excerpt: Organizing Strategy for Operational Teams
When Esther Schindler asked for permission to publish an excerpt from The Practice of Cloud System Administration on the Druva Blog, we thought this would be the perfect piece. We're glad she agreed. Check out this passage from Chapter 7, "Operations in a Distributed World". If you manage a sysadmin team that manages services, here is some advice on how to organize the team and their work: Organizing Strategy for Operational Teams
A New Free CA
Announcing Let's Encrypt, a new free certificate authority. This is a joint project of EFF, Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, and the University of Michigan. This is an absolutely fantastic idea. The anchor for any TLS-protected communication is a public-key certificate which demonstrates that the server you're actually talking to is the server you intended to talk to. For many server operators,...
Whatsapp Is Now End-to-End Encrypted
Whatapp is now offering end-to-end message encryption: Whatsapp will integrate the open-source software Textsecure, created by privacy-focused non-profit Open Whisper Systems, which scrambles messages with a cryptographic key that only the user can access and never leaves his or her device. I don't know the details, but the article talks about perfect forward secrecy. Moxie Marlinspike is involved, which gives...
Snarky 1992 NSA Report on Academic Cryptography
The NSA recently declassified a report on the Eurocrypt '92 conference. Honestly, I share some of the writer's opinions on the more theoretical stuff. I know it's important, but it's not something I care all that much about....
Information Doesnt Want to Be Free interview with Baltimore morning radio
I'm heading to Ann Arbor, DC and Baltimore this week for a series of talks -- I did a a quick interview with Baltimore's WYPR (MP3) that came out very well!
Information Doesnt Want to Be Free interview with Baltimore morning radio
I’m heading to Ann Arbor, DC and Baltimore this week for a series of talks — I did a a quick interview with Baltimore’s WYPR (MP3) that came out very well!
The NSA's Efforts to Ban Cryptographic Research in the 1970s
New article on the NSA's efforts to control academic cryptographic research in the 1970s. It includes new interviews with public-key cryptography inventor Martin Hellman and then NSA-director Bobby Inman....
Dead monitor
Yvonne's monitor died today. Not the first monitor that has died on us, but since moving to LCD screens, there seems to be only one failure mode: the power supply dies. Why? We've had switching power supplies for decades, and while they have certainly evolved, you'd think it was well understood technology. LCD digital displays, on the other hand, are only now receding from the bleeding edge. You'd really expect them to be more likely to die than the power supply. The other obvious thing is that it's hardly worth getting somebody to repair it. A replacement costs $129 at Officeworks, and repair technicians can easily take that even for a simple repair.
Huxleyed into the Full Orwell
Huxleyed Into the Full Orwell is a new short story I wrote for Vice Magazine's just-launched science fiction section Terraform, which also has new stories up by Claire Evans, Bruce Sterling, and Adam Rothstein. "Huxleyed" is a story about the way that entertainment companies' war on general purpose computing could lead into a horrible mashup … [Read more]
Huxleyed into the Full Orwell
Huxleyed Into the Full Orwell is a new short story I wrote for Vice Magazine’s just-launched science fiction section Terraform, which also has new stories up by Claire Evans, Bruce Sterling, and Adam Rothstein. “Huxleyed” is a story about the way that entertainment companies’ war on general purpose computing could lead into a horrible mashup... more
Interpreting exposure meter output
The raw output from the exposure meter tests wasn't very helpful. Here the readings for the MK-300: 1 11:3 1/2 11:2 1/4 8:9 1/8 8:1 1/16 5.6:5 1/32 4:5 1/64 2.8:0 1/128 1:9 The first column is the power level, and the second column is the exposure meter reading, in aperture and tenths. That's really difficult to interpret.
Friday Squid Blogging: The Story of Inventing the SQUID
The interesting story of how engineers at Ford Motor Co. invented the superconducting quantum interference device, or SQUID. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
The Dock at Gibsons
Gibsons is mostly another strip-mall-along-the-highway town, but includes Gibsons Landing , a nice albeit touristy place mostly famous for starring in a Canadian TV show that peoples grandparents liked. Its got a big useful public dock we say government wharf round here which looks really good in mid-November slanting sun. None of the names for the town or any part of it seem to use apostrophes; I guess this makes sign-painters lives easier. Photogeek note: Its really hard to take that old (I mean really; its scratched and dented and looks old) 35mm prime off the camera.
How To Be Secret
Suppose you need to exchange messages with someone and you need to be really, really sure that nobody else reads them. Heres how Id do it. Background To keep this simple, lets call the person youre trying to communicate with Elvis , and the people wanting to invade your privacy The Firm . This discussion assumes: Neither you nor Elvis are a high-value target, for example Ed Snowden or a big-time weapon smuggler. You have a trustworthy device. For most of us a personal computer, properly set up, is acceptable. In my opinion, the same is generally true of modern mobile devices.
The Return of Crypto Export Controls?
Last month, for the first time since US export restrictions on cryptography were relaxed two decades ago, the US government has fined a company for exporting crypto software without a license. News article. No one knows what this means....
More chrome pain
It's been a few days since I last had the dreaded GP process hung message. Maybe a web page that I have since removed from the browser state? But today I got another message, not once but dozens of times: [27418:209744896:12854200258323:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(4856)] glDrawEleemnts framebuffer incomplete (check) Google confirms that this, too, comes from chrome. Unlike the other message, though, it wasn't associated with an X hang. It seemed related to some issues I had mounting an SDHC card; the message output came in bursts related to inserting and removing the card.
Pew Research Survey on Privacy Perceptions
Pew Research has released a new survey on American's perceptions of privacy. The results are pretty much in line with all the other surveys on privacy I've read. As Cory Doctorow likes to say, we've reached "peak indifference to surveillance."...
Vancouver Election
It happens Saturday, November 15th, 2014. Heres how Im voting. Theres one vote for mayor, a bunch for council, a bunch for Park Board, and another bunch for School Board. Im not voting a full slate; Im only voting for people I have feelings about. This is called plumping ; I believe psephologists say it increases the power of your vote. Mayor: Gregor Robertson Ive heard Meena Wong speak a couple of times and shes probably closer to me politically, but Gregor Robertson gets my vote anyhow; heres why: Its actually close, and Im unimpressed with Kirk Lapointe. This guys highest life achievement is middle management in the newspaper business famous for being badly run and his big idea is counterflow lanes.
20th anniversary of "the big Synopsys downtime"
Paul Evans writes: Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the "big" Synopsys downtime of November 18-20, 1994. It was the most ambitious one we attempted while I was at Synopsys -- a complete reconfiguration of the network in one weekend. It was also the first one we planned and carried out using the flight director and mission control model that Christine and Tom later made known to a wider audience in The Practice of System and Network Administration. Although not all of you were working at Synopsys in 1994, this is probably the best chance I'm going to have to thank all of you for what you contributed to the downtime process.
20th anniversary of "the big Synopsys downtime"
Paul Evans writes: Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the "big" Synopsys downtime of November 18-20, 1994. It was the most ambitious one we attempted while I was at Synopsys -- a complete reconfiguration of the network in one weekend. It was also the first one we planned and carried out using the flight director and mission control model that Christine and Tom later made known to a wider audience in The Practice of System and Network Administration. Although not all of you were working at Synopsys in 1994, this is probably the best chance I'm going to have to thank all of you for what you contributed to the downtime process.
The Easiest Way to Compute in the Cloud ? AWS Lambda
When AWS launched, it changed how developers thought about IT services: What used to take weeks or months of purchasing and provisioning turned into minutes with Amazon EC2. Capital-intensive storage solutions became as simple as PUTting and GETting objects in Amazon S3. At AWS we innovate by listening to and learning from our customers, and one of the things we hear from them is that they want it to be even simpler to run code in the cloud and to connect services together easily.
The Easiest Way to Compute in the Cloud AWS Lambda
When AWS launched, it changed how developers thought about IT services: What used to take weeks or months of purchasing and provisioning turned into minutes with Amazon EC2. Capital-intensive storage solutions became as simple as PUTting and GETting objects in Amazon S3. At AWS we innovate by listening to and learning from our customers, and one of the things we hear from them is that they want it to be even simpler to run code in the cloud and to connect services together easily. Customers want to focus on their unique application logic and business needs not on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of provisioning and scaling servers, keeping software stacks patched and up to date, handling fleet-wide deployments, or dealing with routine monitoring, logging, and web service front ends.
Expanding The Cloud - Introducing The Amazon EC2 Container Service
Today, I am excited to announce the Preview of the Amazon EC2 Container Service, a highly scalable, high performance container management service. We created EC2 Container Service to help customers run and manage Dockerized distributed applications. Benefits of Containers Customers have been using Linux containers for quite some time on AWS and have increasingly adopted microservice architectures.
Expanding The Cloud - Introducing The Amazon EC2 Container Service
Today, I am excited to announce the Preview of the Amazon EC2 Container Service, a highly scalable, high performance container management service. We created EC2 Container Service to help customers run and manage Dockerized distributed applications. Benefits of Containers Customers have been using Linux containers for quite some time on AWS and have increasingly adopted microservice architectures. The microservices approach to developing a single application is to divide the application into a set of small services, each running its own processes, which communicate with each other. Each small service can be scaled independently of the application and can be managed by different teams.
ISPs Blocking TLS Encryption
It's not happening often, but it seems that some ISPs are blocking STARTTLS messages and causing web encryption to fail. EFF has the story....
VS, Clang, cross-platform, and a short video
Today my team was part of the Visual Studio 2015 Preview announcement, and it’s nice to be able to share that Visual Studio is now going to support targeting Android and soon iOS, using the Clang compiler, from right inside VS. This is in addition to continued conformance and other improvements in our own VC++ compiler […]
VS, Clang, cross-platform, and a short video
Today my team was part of the Visual Studio 2015 Preview announcement, and it’s nice to be able to share that Visual Studio is now going to support targeting Android and soon iOS, using the Clang compiler, from right inside VS. This is in addition to continued conformance and other improvements in our own VC++ compiler […]
The Story of Apollo - Amazon?s Deployment Engine
Automated deployments are the backbone of a strong DevOps environment. Without efficient, reliable, and repeatable software updates, engineers need to redirect their focus from developing new features to managing and debugging their deployments. Amazon first faced this challenge many years ago. When making the move to a service-oriented architecture, Amazon refactored its software into small independent services and restructured its organization into small autonomous teams.
The Story of Apollo - Amazons Deployment Engine
Automated deployments are the backbone of a strong DevOps environment. Without efficient, reliable, and repeatable software updates, engineers need to redirect their focus from developing new features to managing and debugging their deployments. Amazon first faced this challenge many years ago. When making the move to a service-oriented architecture, Amazon refactored its software into small independent services and restructured its organization into small autonomous teams. Each team took on full ownership of the development and operation of a single service, and they worked directly with their customers to improve it. With this clear focus and control, the teams were able to quickly produce new features, but their deployment process soon became a bottleneck.
TPOCSA is the "eBook Deal of the Day"
To celebrate Usenix LISA, for 24 hours you can get The Practice of Cloud System Administration at an extra special discount: http://ow.ly/Ea7bH I'll be doing a book signing at LISA on Friday at 10:30 in the LISA Lab. If you have the eBook, I have something special for you! See you there!
TPOCSA is the "eBook Deal of the Day"
To celebrate Usenix LISA, for 24 hours you can get The Practice of Cloud System Administration at an extra special discount: http://ow.ly/Ea7bH I'll be doing a book signing at LISA on Friday at 10:30 in the LISA Lab. If you have the eBook, I have something special for you! See you there!
Audio from Seattle Hieroglyph event with Neal Stepehenson
Here's an MP3 of the audio from the Reigniting Societys Ambition with Science Fiction event that I did with Neal Stephenson and Ed Finn at Seattle Town Hall on Oct 26, to promote the Hieroglyph anthology, designed to inspire optimistic technologies to solve the Earth's most urgent problems. I had a story in it called … [Read more]
Stories are a fuggly hack
My latest Locus Magazine column is Stories Are a Fuggly Hack, in which I point out the limits of storytelling as an artform, and bemoan all the artists from other fields -- visual art, music -- who aspire to storytelling in order to make their art. There are other media, much more abstract media, that … [Read more]
Next DxO bug
Processing today's photos with DxO Optics Pro showed an interesting issue: I couldn't load presets. Why? Here I have tried to set a black and white preset (as the most obvious kind), and the image remains in colour. But the two smaller previews are black and white: Is this the result of my manually editing the preset files?
Narrowly Constructing National Surveillance Law
Orin Kerr has a new article that argues for narrowly constructing national security law: This Essay argues that Congress should adopt a rule of narrow construction of the national security surveillance statutes. Under this interpretive rule, which the Essay calls a "rule of lenity," ambiguity in the powers granted to the executive branch in the sections of the United States...
Amanda Palmers Art of Asking: art for the crowdfunding age
Amanda Palmer's new book Art of Asking is a moving and insightful memoir of her life performing music while making personal connections with her fans; I wrote a long, in-depth review of it for The New Statesman. There's a litmus test for how you will likely feel about Palmer's Kickstarter: Palmer invited local musicians in … [Read more]
Introducing Bosun, our new open source monitoring & alerting system
The monitoring system built for Stackoverflow was open sourced today. I've been using it since it was an internal beta and I'm really excited to see it shared with everyone. Congrats to Kyle and Matt on this release! http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/11/announcing-bosun-our-new-open-source-monitoring-alerting-system/ and check out: http://bosun.org
Introducing Bosun, our new open source monitoring & alerting system
The monitoring system built for Stackoverflow was open sourced today. I've been using it since it was an internal beta and I'm really excited to see it shared with everyone. Congrats to Kyle and Matt on this release! http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/11/announcing-bosun-our-new-open-source-monitoring-alerting-system/ and check out: http://bosun.org
Hacking Internet Voting from Wireless Routers
Good paper, and layman's explanation. Internet voting scares me. It gives hackers the potential to seriously disrupt our democratic processes....
Sophisticated Targeted Attack Via Hotel Networks
Kaspersky Labs is reporting (detailed report here, technical details here) on a sophisticated hacker group that is targeting specific individuals around the world. "Darkhotel" is the name the group and its techniques has been given. This APT precisely drives its campaigns by spear-phishing targets with highly advanced Flash zero-day exploits that effectively evade the latest Windows and Adobe defenses, and...
The Future of Incident Response
Security is a combination of protection, detection, and response. It's taken the industry a long time to get to this point, though. The 1990s was the era of protection. Our industry was full of products that would protect your computers and network. By 2000, we realized that detection needed to be formalized as well, and the industry was full of...
The way we were, 1982
This video is just going round the Unix Heritage Society mailing list: How times have changed in less than a third of a century. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Ignoring image problems
Yvonne went out riding with Chris today, and for some reason used Chris' camera rather than her own. Back home it was up to me to read in the card, for which I didn't have a cable. And at least 3 images didn't get read: Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): READ(10). CDB: 28 40 00 00 22 00 00 00 10 00 Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): SCSI status: Check Condition Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): SCSI sense: HARDWARE FAILURE asc:0,0 (No additional sense information) Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): Retrying command (per sense data) Nov 9 13:48:32 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): READ(10).
GPU hang cornered?
Another GPU hang this morning! This time I had left X server 1 active, but once again it was server 0 that was affected. Something to do with the clients? Ran ps and got hundreds of processes, including 300 zombie ssh-agents, to be inspected later. But that's not the way you solve a problem nowadays. Google is your friend. And, as it proved, also the enemy. This article describes a (perhaps only marginally) different issue, but it makes it clear that the problem is associated with Google chrome. That may mean that it's sufficient to shoot down chrome, and not the X server, if it happens again.
R and G and J
I just read Adam Jacobs Rust and Go, comparing two new hotnesses. Me, Ive been (unaccustomedly) working the last few months in a familiar codebase/toolset, on an Android app; so I thought Id and an &and Java. Is Java boring? Android is the only place where Java isnt boring. The big back-end systems at Google and the other Net giants are the only other places where new Java code might change your life; and most developers arent writing those. Interesting new server-side code is in Node and Go and Rails and Erlang and so on. Maybe Rust too, soon. Mobile apps are still interesting, and half of them, more or less, are Android/Java things.
Another GPU hang
Yet another GPU hang this morning! It's frustrating that it only appears on the console. I had hoped that the numbers at the beginning of the line would give some indication, but they don't make much sense. The first could conceivably be the PID; the second is the same as last time. On IRC, the opinion was that it was a hardware issue, maybe overheating. But the fact point elsewhere: I have an xearth process complaining about a missing marker file every 5 minutes. And the hang message is always at the bottom, so it must appear round the time I power on the monitors.
AWS re:Invent Conference
In the Amazon Web Services world, this has always been a busy time of the year. Busy, because, although we aim for a fairly even pace of new service announcements and new feature releases all year, invariably, somewhat more happens towards the end of the year than early on. And, busy, because the annual AWS re:Invent conference is in early November and this is an important time to roll out new services or important features. This year is no exception and, more than ever, there is a lot to announce at the conference. It should be fun. < ?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> I enjoy re:Invent because its a chance to talk to customers in more detail about what we have been building, learn how they are using it, and what we could do to make the services better.
AWS re:Invent Conference
In the Amazon Web Services world, this has always been a busy time of the year. Busy, because, although we aim for a fairly even pace of new service announcements and new feature releases all year, invariably, somewhat more happens towards the end of the year than early on. And, busy, because the annual AWS...
Configuring DxO
The new version of DxO Optics Pro has a number of improvements over the previous version: it can now display properly on medium resolution (2560×1440) screens, and hopefully also on 3840×2160 screens. It has reinstated the old image comparison function (original/modified), which they had previously put on the Ctrl-D key. But that repeats, so I ended up with a quick alternation of the two. Now there's a button you can hold down with the mouse. Best, though, they have finally found a (cumbersome) way of telling the crop function not to enforce aspect ratio, at least for the elite version: you can save the information with a preset .
Friday Squid Blogging: Dried Squid Sold in Korean Baseball Stadiums
I'm not sure why this is news, except that it makes for a startling headline. (Is the New York Times now into clickbait?) It's not as if people are throwing squid onto the field, as Detroit hockey fans do with octopus. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that...
Co3 Systems Is Hiring
My company, Co3 Systems, is hiring both technical and nontechnical positions. If you live in the Boston area, click through and take a look....
Testing for Explosives in the Chicago Subway
Chicago is doing random explosives screenings at random L stops in the Chicago area. Compliance is voluntary: Police made no arrests but one rider refused to submit to the screening and left the station without incident, Maloney said. [...] Passengers can decline the screening, but will not be allowed to board a train at that station. Riders can leave that...
Why Hyping Cyber Threats is Counterproductive
Robert Lee and Thomas Rid have a new paper: "OMG Cyber! Thirteen Reasons Why Hype Makes for Bad Policy."...
Don't Miss These Startup Activities at AWS re:Invent!
I?m excited to be heading to Las Vegas in less than two weeks for our annual re:Invent conference. One of the highlights for me is being able to host an extensive lineup of startup-focused events which take place at re:Invent on Thursday, November 13. Here?s a quick peak at the startup experience this year:
Don't Miss These Startup Activities at AWS re:Invent!
Im excited to be heading to Las Vegas in less than two weeks for our annual re:Invent conference. One of the highlights for me is being able to host an extensive lineup of startup-focused events which take place at re:Invent on Thursday, November 13. Heres a quick peak at the startup experience this year: Third Annual Startup Launches Im excited to host this event where five AWS-powered startups will make a significant, never-before-shared launch announcement on stage. Included in the announcements are special discounts on the newly-launched productsdiscounts only available to session attendees. And to top it all off, well have a happy hour immediately following the final launch announcement!
How the Internet Affects National Sovereignty
Interesting paper by Melissa Hathaway: "Connected Choices: How the Internet Is Challenging Sovereign Decisions." Abstract: Modern societies are in the middle of a strategic, multidimensional competition for money, power, and control over all aspects of the Internet and the Internet economy. This article discusses the increasing pace of discord and the competing interests that are unfolding in the current debate...
More lagoon migration
Yvonne wanted to print a document today, something she does so seldom that she needed my help. And in the process discovered that I hadn't configured the printers since last month's system upgrade, five weeks ago. Note to self: check /etc/printcap and that the spool directories exist. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
UK launch of In Real Life at Orbital Comics, London, Nov 12
I've just come back to the UK from my US tour for In Real Life, the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Jen Wang and I made; I'll be launching it in London at the incomparable Orbital Comics, near Leicester Square, on the evening of Weds, 12 Nov. The event is free, and I'll be … [Read more]
Arrested Devops Episode 23 with Tom Limoncelli
I'm the guest on the new episode of Arrested Devops. I had a lot of fun recording this podcast. I hope you enjoy listening to it! Check it out! http://adevo.ps/23
Arrested Devops Episode 23 with Tom Limoncelli
I'm the guest on the new episode of Arrested Devops. I had a lot of fun recording this podcast. I hope you enjoy listening to it! Check it out! http://adevo.ps/23
Verizon Tracking Mobile Internet Use
Verizon is tracking the Internet use of its phones by surreptitiously modifying URLs. This is a good description of how it works....
Another GPU hang
Another GPU hang today! What's causing it? This system has been running unchanged since February, and it's been up for 139 days. The hang only affects one of the two X servers, so it doesn't seem to be hardware. It's not logged anywhere except on the console, not helped by whining flash plugins: When I first saw the problem, the error message was still on the screen, but later it had long been flushed by these useless error messages. The resultant image is strange.
Web sites and ACID
I've finally decided on an exposure meter. After some backwarding and forwarding, decided on the Sekonic L-308S after all. The cheapest offer was from eGlobaL [sic] Digital Cameras, only AU $184 with postage. The cheapest price I could find on eBay was US $167.90, which corresponds to AU $198.40, and reputable US sellers are offering it for round US $235 plus postage. So I went ahead and fought my way through Yet Another Broken Website to finalize the purchase. Most web sites are too leet to accept phone numbers in standard formats (like (03) 5346 1730 in Australia). Instead they want all punctuation removed, like 0353461730.
Book Signing at Usenix LISA next week
I'll be doing a book signing at Usenix LISA on Friday at 10:30am in the LISA Lab. The first 10 people to arrive will receive a free (printed) copy of the new book The Practice of Cloud System Administration. (I'll also sign other books you bring.) For info about the new book, please attend my talk "Radical Ideas from the Practice of Cloud Computing" on Wednesday at 11:45am-12:30 pm in Grand Ballroom C. I'll also be teaching tutorials and mini-tutorials. Register for LISA today!
Book Signing at Usenix LISA next week
I'll be doing a book signing at Usenix LISA on Friday at 10:30am in the LISA Lab. The first 10 people to arrive will receive a free (printed) copy of the new book The Practice of Cloud System Administration. (I'll also sign other books you bring.) For info about the new book, please attend my talk "Radical Ideas from the Practice of Cloud Computing" on Wednesday at 11:45am-12:30 pm in Grand Ballroom C. I'll also be teaching tutorials and mini-tutorials. Register for LISA today!
X hang
Into the office this morning and found all my X windows empty, just with the background colour. Looking at the console showed: What's that? Nothing in /var/log/messages. The other X server was still running, but server 0 was using lots of CPU time and was otherwise unresponsive: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/19) ~ 53 -> ps au|grep X root 16471 82.9 1.5 3840764 500208 v0 R 7Sep14 1439:46.34 /usr/local/bin/X :0 -config xorg-0.conf -logverbose 6 grog 16470 0.0 0.0 19612 1816 v0 I+ 7Sep14 0:00.00 xinit /home/grog/.xinitrc -- /usr/local/bin/X :0 -conf grog 69613 0.0 0.0 19612 0 v4 IW+ ...
London, Tue night: Biella Coleman and I talk about Hackers and Hoaxers: Inside Anonymous
Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman (author of the brilliant Coding Freedom) spent years embedded with Anonymous and has written an indispensable account of the Anonymous phenomenon. I'm going to join Biella for a live appearance at Foyles Books in central London on Tuesday night at 7PM, in an event moderated by James Bridle. Tickets are £5 , … [Read more]