Blog Archive: July 2015
Happy SysAdmin Day! (July 31)
I hope you are fully appreciated today and every day. For more info about SysAdmin Day, visit http://sysadminday.com/ If you are in the NYC area, please come to SysDrink's SysAd Day event tonight at 6pm at The Gingerman in mid-town Manhatten. There will be an open bar. This year's event is sponsored by Digital Ocean.
Q&A from Clarion West benefit/reading in Seattle
Here’s the Q&A portion of the Cory Doctorow in Conversation event I did to benefit the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in Seattle on July 28, 2015. The audio was provided Frank Catalano, who also conducted the interview. MP3
Change of address, bureaucratic style
Since moving house, there are hundreds of people I need to inform about our change of address. It's not overly urgent: mail will be forwarded until the end of May 2016, but gradually we should do something about it. Today we received no less than 4 letters from Centrelink, probably a good candidate to start with. Based on my prior experience with their web site, I asked Google instead. And that took me to this page, explaining that I should go to https://my.gov.au/ instead and update addresses with multiple agencies with one fell swoop. It went into extreme detail about what could go wrong and what to do if it did.
Cranes
What happened was, Shane & Ally asked us to a rooftop barbecue with views in every direction. Most of them featured cranes, and I dont mean birds, which is not necessarily bad. Also, it would be unfair to omit the moon. Looming over us was this crane complex, not unattractive at all. If it looks kind of grainy thats because Id fat-fingered the camera into shooting at ISO6400. But the X-T1 is sufficiently resilient that this (like many other of my photo-miscues) came out OK. Which is especially true when you shoot through the stupidly-good Fuji XF35mm. But wait! There are more cranes and theyve got the mountains behind them.
LISA Conversations premieres on Tuesday!
Yes, I've started a video podcast that has a homework assignment built-in. Watch a famous talk from a past LISA conference (that's the homework) then watch Tom and Lee interview the speaker. What's new since the talk? Were their predictions validated? Come find out! Watch it live or catch the recorded version later. The first episode will be recorded live Tuesday July 28, 2015 at 1:30pm PDT.
Retail sales in the Internet age
To Masters today to pick up an eBay purchase. Huh? Masters is a normal Home Improvement shop, part of the Woolworths conglomerate. What do they have to do with eBay? They have a shop on eBay where they sell things that aren't in their normal catalogue, and they'll either send it to you normally, at a normal price, or you can opt to save money and pick them up at a shop of your choice. That's what I did today: I had bought a sprinkler controller for $55, while the closest comparable one in their catalogue cost $108. I suspect that mine is last year 's model, but that's OK; that applies to a number of things on eBay.
Getting information from Microsoft
People discussed yesterday's Microsoft adventures on IRC. Jamie Fraser came up with some information that I'll keep for next time: <fwaggle> grog needs pci ids under windows? i solved this problem ages ago. C+P from my notes: right-click My Computer and choose properties. Then, go to the Hardware tab, and pick Device Manager. Navigate to your unknown device, double-click it and then pick the Details tab. Find the Hardware Ids entry, and look for the most detailed entry. My shitty SiS network adaptors is PCI\VEN_1039&DEV_0900 . ACM only downloads articles once.
Installing Microsoft again
After yesterday's fun came the immense fun of installing Microsoft again. It started off badly: when it got to choosing the disk, once again it claimed that there were no disks. But I discovered that it works better if you plug it in, and after that it went off and did its installation. And of course I had to enter this license key thing. As instructed on the OEM box, the sticker was to be removed and attached to the computer somewhere, in this case on top of the case. How do you read that? It was in the shade, on its side, and in a small enough font (about 6 pt) that not only old fogeys like myself can't read it, especially when the font makes it difficult to distinguish between B and 8: ...
Recovering the Microsoft box
As Juha Kupiainen had suggested, took a look at Shaun O'Connor's computer today to see if it understood RAID. Yes! But as I had feared, that was just the first half of the problem: How do I bring the member back online? The menu offers Recovery Volume Options , but that just gives the option to create a backup. Once it's down, there seems to be nothing in the BIOS that can recover it.
Save on The Practice of Cloud System Administration
Pearson / InformIT.com is running a promotion through August 11th on many open-source related books, including Volume 2, The Practice of Cloud System Administration. Use discount code OPEN2015 during checkout and received 35% off any one book, or 45% off 2 or more books. See the website for details.
BigPond: Go away!
Got a message from Warren Ure today, reporting discrepancies in traffic measurement between his mother and her (unspecified) ISP. Not surprisingly, the ISP claimed more traffic. I thought it might be something like my experience last year, where the router was compromised and used to relay traffic. But no, it seems not: she's on satellite, and the traffic is measured even when the modem is turned off. That doesn't make sense. Neither does the response of the ISP, claiming that there can still be traffic. Sent him a reply. <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.189.122] said: 552 5.2.0 vj8v1q02L1sUVRc01j8wYc Suspected spam message rejected.
SysAdmin Appreciation Day in New York City
If you are in NYC, there is a SysAdmin Appreciation day event at The Gingerman, 11 E 36th Ave, New York City, NY, on Friday, July 31, 2015, 6:00 PM. This event usually has a big turn-out and is a great way to meet and network with local admins. RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Sysdrink/events/223896825/ Thanks to Digital Ocean for sponsoring this event, and Justin, Jay, Nathan and the other organizers for putting this together every year. Hope to see you there!
Schyntax: A DSL for specifying recurring events
There are many ways to specify scheduled items. Cron has 10 8,20 * 8 1-5 and iCalendar has RRULE and Roaring Penguin brings us REMIND. There's a new cross-platform DSL called Schyntax, created by my Stack Overflow coworker Bret Copeland. The goal of Schyntax is to be human readable, easy to pick up, and intuitive. For example, to specify every hour from 900 UTC until 1700 UTC, one writes hours(9..17) What if you want to run every five minutes during the week, and every half hour on weekends? Group the sub-conditions in curly braces: { days(mon..fri) min(*%5) } { days(sat..sun) min(*%30) } It is case-insensitive, whitespace-insensitive, and always UTC.
Remotely Hacking a Car While It's Driving
This is a big deal. Hackers can remotely hack the Uconnect system in cars just by knowing the car's IP address. They can disable the brakes, turn on the AC, blast music, and disable the transmission: The attack tools Miller and Valasek developed can remotely trigger more than the dashboard and transmission tricks they used against me on the highway....
Understanding bad language
It's nothing new that Microsoft has obfuscated understanding file systems by referring to directories as folders, but today, while trying to find out how to work around Microsoft blockages and move a file from one directory to another, I got the message: Leave the file in the destination directory? Surely they mean the source directory. Have they reversed normal meaning, or is it typical of the quality of their messages?
Understanding the boot problems
While looking at the information I had about Shaun O'Connor's computer, I checked about the disks he had. WD1002FAEX. And they're 1 TB disks. So why did the fdisk output show 2 TB? Did Shaun accidentally overwrite the partition table? Juha Kupiainen came up with the most likely answer: the two disks are combined as RAID-0. That explains a lot of things, in particular why he couldn't boot after resetting the BIOS to default values (and yes, it does offer some kind of RAID). Of course, for every complex problem there's a solution which is simple, elegant and wrong. I didn't have time today, and I won't have time tomorrow, but hopefully we'll see a result on Friday.
Neighbourhood computer help
Shaun O'Connor, whom I don't know, sent out a request on Facebook today, looking for a PC repairman. Not quite my line of business, but in the interests of neighbourly help, I offered to take a look. He had had error messages relating to the first disk, which he couldn't interpret, and somebody online had suggested that he reset the BIOS to default values. That made a big difference: he could no longer boot at all: Can't load operating system ; doesn't that help pinpoint things? The machine wasn't your run-of-the-mill system: big tower, 4 nVidia video cards (more than I have!)
Sitting down with Trudeau on C-51
A couple of months ago, ten people spent an hour sitting down with Justin Trudeau, Liberal Party leader and potentially Canadas next Prime Minister, to talk about Bill C-51, anti-terrorist legislation from Canadas Conservative government. I was one of those people, and perhaps readers might be interested in hearing about it. Sidebar: Why now? After the meeting I decided not to blog it, because I was worried about ethics; nobody had said the meeting was private but nobodyd said it was public either. Recently I mentioned this to a Liberal insider I know whod helped organize and he looked shocked: Why not?!
Malcom Gladwell on Competing Security Models
In this essay/review of a book on UK intelligence officer and Soviet spy Kim Philby, Malcom Gladwell makes this interesting observation: Here we have two very different security models. The Philby-era model erred on the side of trust. I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people. The "cost" of the high-trust model was Burgess, Maclean, and...
Malcolm Gladwell on Competing Security Models
In this essay/review of a book on UK intelligence officer and Soviet spy Kim Philby, Malcolm Gladwell makes this interesting observation: Here we have two very different security models. The Philby-era model erred on the side of trust. I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people. The "cost" of the high-trust model was Burgess, Maclean, and...
Air conditioners in sub-zero environments
We normally turn the air conditioner (heating) off at night. But yesterday morning it took several hours for the house to get warm. Last night we left it running overnight, and that was just as well. The temperature dropped to a measured -2.3°, only 0.1° warmer than the previous night, and the air conditioner had difficulty keeping the temperature. One clear reason is that it took forever to de-ice. De-icing is essential for air conditioners heating: ice collects on the coil and needs to be removed again by reversing the coolant flow and passing hot coolant through the coil. In my experience, it takes a few seconds to melt the ice, and a little while to blow the resulting water off the coil.
Organizational Doxing of Ashley Madison
The -- depending on who is doing the reporting -- cheating, affair, adultery, or infidelity site Ashley Madison has been hacked. The hackers are threatening to expose all of the company's documents, including internal e-mails and details of its 37 million customers. Brian Krebs writes about the hackers' demands. According to the hackers, although the "full delete" feature that Ashley...
Under the Hood of Amazon EC2 Container Service
In my last post about Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), I discussed the two key components of running modern distributed applications on a cluster: reliable state management and flexible scheduling. Amazon ECS makes building and running containerized applications simple, but how that happens is what makes Amazon ECS interesting. Today, I want to explore the Amazon ECS architecture and what this architecture enables. Below is a diagram of the basic components of Amazon ECS: How we coordinate the cluster Lets talk about what Amazon ECS is actually doing. The core of Amazon ECS is the cluster manager, a backend service that handles the tasks of cluster coordination and state management.
Under the Hood of Amazon EC2 Container Service
In my last post about Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), I discussed the two key components of running modern distributed applications on a cluster: reliable state management and flexible scheduling. Amazon ECS makes building and running containerized applications simple, but how that happens is what makes Amazon ECS interesting. Today, I want to explore the Amazon ECS architecture and what this architecture enables.
Google's Unguessable URLs
Google secures photos using public but unguessable URLs: So why is that public URL more secure than it looks? The short answer is that the URL is working as a password. Photos URLs are typically around 40 characters long, so if you wanted to scan all the possible combinations, you'd have to work through 1070 different combinations to get the...
Fully tested toner
My cheap ( premium ) toner cartridge for my laser printer has arrived: Good that it's 100% tested, but does that mean that it's now empty? I'm reminded of a Monty Python (I think) sketch from about 1972, taking off the fuel economy TV advertisements of the time ( how far can I drive with 1 gallon of petrol? ). In this case, the car carried on for 110,000 miles. Great enthusiasm on the part of the petrol company, but the driver said But look at my car!
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Giving Birth
I may have posted this short video before, but if I did, I can't find it. It's four years old, but still pretty to watch. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Data Compression
Data compression today is still as important as it was in the early days of computing. Although in those days all computer and storage resources were very limited, the objects in use were much smaller than today. We have seen a shift from generic compression to compression for specific file types, especially those in images, audio and video. In this weekend's back to basic reading we go back in time, 1987 to be specific, when Leweler and Hirschberg wrote a survey paper that covers the 40 years of data compression research. It covers all the areas that we like in a back to basics paper, it does not present the most modern results but it gives you a great understanding of the fundamentals.
Back-to-Basics Weekend Reading - Data Compression
Data compression today is still as important as it was in the early days of computing. Although in those days all computer and storage resources were very limited, the objects in use were much smaller than today. We have seen a shift from generic compression to compression for specific file types, especially those in images, audio and video.
Using Secure Chat
Micah Lee has a good tutorial on installing and using secure chat. To recap: We have installed Orbot and connected to the Tor network on Android, and we have installed ChatSecure and created an anonymous secret identity Jabber account. We have added a contact to this account, started an encrypted session, and verified that their OTR fingerprint is correct. And...
FreeBSD code of conduct
Recently the current FreeBSD core team announced a (new?) code of conduct. On the one hand, it's good to make it clear that people are expected to behave, and the wording is mildly amusing: We do not believe anyone should be treated any differently based on who they are, where they are from, where their ancestors were from, what they look like, what gender they identify as, who they choose to sleep with, how old they are, their physical capabilities or what sort of religious beliefs they may hold.
ProxyHam Canceled
The ProxyHam project (and associated Def Con talk) has been canceled under mysterious circumstances. No one seems to know anything, and conspiracy theories abound....
Meet Jude and Raziel
I recently read When Everything Feels like the Movies by Raziel Reid (A.K.A. @razielreid) and enjoyed the hell out of it. Then Raziel came to our book club meeting, which was weird but good. Sidebar: On Book Clubs I can feel the eye-rolling coming back through the Internet at me. The book-club notion had been opaque, but then I found myself exposed to my wifes because it was at our house sometimes. Seemed to center around wine and munchies and argument, with a lot of laughing. And Ive always been a bookworm, so now Ive been going for years. Anyhow, I recommend the book-club thing.
Crypto-Gram Is Moving
If you subscribe to my monthly e-mail newsletter, Crypto-Gram, you need to read this. Sometime between now and the August issue, the Crypto-Gram mailing list will be moving to a new host. When the move happens, you'll get an e-mail asking you to confirm your subscription. In the e-mail will be a link that you will have to click in...
Embrace event-driven computing: Amazon expands DynamoDB with streams, cross-region replication, and database triggers
In just three short years, Amazon DynamoDB has emerged as the backbone for many powerful Internet applications such as AdRoll, Druva, DeviceScape, and Battlecamp. Many happy developers are using DynamoDB to handle trillions of requests every day. I am excited to share with you that today we are expanding DynamoDB with streams, cross-region replication, and database triggers. In this blog post, I will explain how these three new capabilities empower you to build applications with distributed systems architecture and create responsive, reliable, and high-performance applications using DynamoDB that work at any scale. DynamoDB Streams enables your application to get real-time notifications of your tables item-level changes.
Embrace event-driven computing: Amazon expands DynamoDB with streams, cross-region replication, and database triggers
In just three short years, Amazon DynamoDB has emerged as the backbone for many powerful Internet applications such as AdRoll, Druva, DeviceScape, and Battlecamp. Many happy developers are using DynamoDB to handle trillions of requests every day. I am excited to share with you that today we are expanding DynamoDB with streams, cross-region replication, and database triggers.
Human and Technology Failures in Nuclear Facilities
This is interesting: We can learn a lot about the potential for safety failures at US nuclear plants from the July 29, 2012, incident in which three religious activists broke into the supposedly impregnable Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Fort Knox of uranium. Once there, they spilled blood and spray painted "work for peace not war" on the...
Tidying the garage
Continued working on the garage in Kleins Road today, and got close to finishing it. At least we have the skip full, so the immediate pressure is off. It's still immensely painful throwing all this stuff out. I salvaged the Tandem LXN some time back, but I still have a Microvax II, a MIPS-2000 and a Control Data Cyber 910 (really a rebadged SGI IRIS). Here are the first two: As computers, any smart phone would run rings round them.
Usenix Container Management Summit Announced!
The Call for Participation for the new 2015 USENIX Container Management Summit is now online.UCMS '15 will take place November 9, 2015, during LISA15 in Washington, D.C.ÿ
NSA Antennas
Interesting article on the NSA's use of multi-beam antennas for surveillance. Certainly smart technology; it can eavesdrop on multiple targets per antenna. I'm surprised by how behind the NSA was on this technology. It's from at least 1973, and there was some commercialization as far back as 1981. Why did it take the NSA/GCHQ until 2010 to install this? Here's...
Web browsing with FreeBSD
Since upgrading her system, Yvonne has been complaining that Facebook videos don't work. Finally they've ventured to say that the flash plugin needed upgrading. It was wrong, of course: none was installed. OK, we've been through that before. But now we have PKGng to do it all for us. Simply: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~ 2 -> pkg search flash dummyflash-1.0_5 ems-flasher-0.03_3 flash-0.9.5 flasher-1.3 flashrom-0.9.7_2 get_flash_videos-1.24.20120610 kipi-plugin-flashexport-4.2.0 py27-WebFlash-0.1a9_1 vrflash-0.20 xpi-flashblock-1.5.18 xpi-flashgot-1.3.7 Which of those is the flash plugin? None of them! For some reason, pkg doesn't supply it, and you have to install it the old way, from the Ports Collection.
CL XXXIII: Fire and Water
Weve had week after week of blue skies and warm air; which in the green/grey Pacific Northwest begins to feel oppressive, you can almost hear the plants, great and small, whimpering for water. After a while every mornings news told of new forest fires marching up one tinder-dry mountain or another. Which lent visual drama to the July 4th weekend but I have to admit soured the Cottage-Life ambience. The fires turned from up-country news story to local color; extremely local and very colorful. Heres the night before and the July-4th morning. A variation of the next shot was picked up by multiple media including the CBC and ABC; did anyone reading this see it on any ABC outlets?
Understanding DxO bugs
House photo day today, and lots of photos to process. One of them had an error while reading it in from the camera (why does this happen so often?) : only 2 MB of 18 MB got read. Not surprisingly, DxO Optics Pro complained. But I couldn't get it to forget, even after reading the correct image again. Finally something persuaded itmaybe it was just a timeout. And when I started processing, I got the message: Huh? Nothing obvious in the directory. Let it run, and at the end found: But there were only 69 images!
Bronze Fittings for Wolf's Tooth Dagger
Avoid BigPond mail!
I've had several mail messages bounce recently, with messages like: <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.168.122] said: 552 5.2.0 qWBp1q02u1sUVRc01WBr8n Suspected spam message rejected. IB704 (in reply to end of DATA command) Why suspected spam? I've seen this before: their mail filters are so stupid that they don't recognize digital signatures when they see them. Their customers are typical non-technical, so they don't even give them the chance to choose for themselves. What advantage is the service? They would be much better off using gmail. More rants here.
Introducing: LISA Conversations
Step 1: Watch a video from a past Usenix LISA conference. Step 2: Join the Hangout On Air and watch Lee Damon and Tom Limoncelli interview the speaker. Send Q&A during the show. Step 3: Watch and enjoy! Our first 4 are scheduled for the last Tuesday of July/Aug/Sept/Oct. The first one is July 28, 2015 at 1:30pm PDT. We'll be interviewing Todd Underwood about his LISA 2013 talk Post-Ops, A Non-Surgical tale of Software, Fragility, and Reliability. Watch the presentation head of time then join the the Google Hangout On Air. (Want a reminder? RSVP for the event)
Friday Squid Blogging: My Little Cephalopod
A cute series of knitted plushies. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
High-tech Cheating on Exams
India is cracking down on people who use technology to cheat on exams: Candidates have been told to wear light clothes with half-sleeves, and shirts that do not have big buttons. They cannot wear earrings and carry calculators, pens, handbags and wallets. Shoes have also been discarded in favour of open slippers. In India students cheating in exams have been...
Organizational Doxing
Recently, WikiLeaks began publishing over half a million previously secret cables and other documents from the Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia. It's a huge trove, and already reporters are writing stories about the highly secretive government. What Saudi Arabia is experiencing isn't common but part of a growing trend. Just last week, unknown hackers broke into the network of the...
My upcoming events in Seattle
I’m teaching the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle in late July, and you can come see me at two events, one on July 25, the other on July 28. Postcyberpunk and Paella: An intimate evening with Cory Doctorow and Peter Biddle to benefit Clarion West. July 25, 2015 at 7 p.m. Cory Doctorow in... more
The Risks of Mandating Back Doors in Encryption Products
Monday a group of cryptographers and security experts released a major paper outlining the risks of government-mandated back-doors in encryption products: Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications, by Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steve Bellovin, Josh Behaloh, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Susan Landau, Peter Neumann, Ron Rivest, Jeff Schiller,...
eBay: your postage charges or ours?
My camera is sold again, for the third time, this time to a legitimate buyer in Australia. But he didn't pay immediately, so I decided to send him an invoice. And that offered only some express option for about $27. I had offered standard shipping, which eBay calculated at $16.20. Yes, I could change the shipping option, but it didn't get applied. Went through the maze of twisty little menus and found another page, print postage label , which also offered a comparison of postage charges. But they didn't match the Australia Post prices. Some were higher, some were lower. And then I found an indication that the buyer had specified express shipping.
Amazon Is Analyzing the Personal Relationships of Its Reviewers
This is an interesting story of a reviewer who had her reviewer deleted because Amazon believed she knew the author personally. Leaving completely aside the ethics of friends reviewing friends' books, what is Amazon doing conducting this kind of investigative surveillance? Do reviewers know that Amazon is keeping tabs on who their friends are?...
More on Hacking Team
Read this: Hacking Team asked its customers to shut down operations, but according to one of the leaked files, as part of Hacking Team's "crisis procedure," it could have killed their operations remotely. The company, in fact, has "a backdoor" into every customer's software, giving it ability to suspend it or shut it down -- something that even customers aren't...
Destroyer of Sleep
I was less than 100% effective at work today, because I foolishly bought Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer and August Cole, and read till 2:30AM. I just now finished it. Is it a great book? No. But its a ripping naval yarn, an old-fashioned war story. Also: Rail gun! Warning: Spoilers! But I read a few spoilers in advance and found they didnt take the edge off, much. Tl;dr A near-future China with a government somewhat different from its current regime launches a war of aggression against the U.S.A. and scores big early wins, based in part on technological excellence and also plenty of back-dooring and root-kitting.
More about the NSA's XKEYSCORE
I've been reading through the 48 classified documents about the NSA's XKEYSCORE system released by the Intercept last week. From the article: The NSA's XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people's Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that...
Copying sparse files
I made the probably incorrect decision to copy my /home file system across the net, using a combination of tar to move large quantities of data and rsync to fill in the gaps. Speed was not a significant issue with tarI got up to 50 MB/sbut it was an issue with rsync, where speeds were closer to 3 MB/s. But it seems that rsync filled in the gaps too well: this morning I came in and found that the copied file system was 20% larger than the original. How could that happen? I have a number of files that are being loaded at a trickle by the BitTorrent protocol, which copies blocks at random.
Hacking Team Is Hacked
Someone hacked the cyberweapons arms manufacturer Hacking Team and posted 400 GB of internal company data. Hacking Team is a pretty sleazy company, selling surveillance software to all sorts of authoritarian governments around the world. Reporters Without Borders calls it one of the enemies of the Internet. Citizen Lab has published many reports about their activities. It's a huge trove...
NSA German Intercepts
On Friday, WikiLeaks published three summaries of NSA intercepts of German government communications. To me, the most interesting thing is not the intercept analyses, but this spreadsheet of intelligence targets. Here we learn the specific telephone numbers being targeted, who owns those phone numbers, the office within the NSA that processes the raw communications received, why the target is being...
Why were still talking about Terminator and the Matrix
My July 2015 Locus column, Skynet Ascendant, suggests that the enduring popularity of images of homicidal, humanity-hating AIs has more to do with our present-day politics than computer science. As a class, science fiction writers imagine some huge slice of all possible futures, and then readers and publishers select from among these futures based on... more
Default UFS parameters
Every time I create a new UFS file system, I go through lots of RTFM. What are the optimal parameters? UFS is now over 30 years old. When it was written, a big disk was 300 MB in size. Now a small disk is about 1 TB. But the default inode count bases on the assumption that the average file is 4 fragmentsin this case, 16 kB. And there are these two parameters which seem to duplicate each other: -g avgfilesize specifies the average file size.
System upgrade: success
I've been meaning to upgrade our main systems for a year and a half. In that time I've maintained a development system, stable, that has been getting closer to its name as time went on. Today I finally finished preparing the new disk for lagoon, Yvonne's system. The steps were: Create a new disk on stable with five partitions: boot, two root file systems (each 40 GB in size), swap, and the rest as the /home file system.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fishing in the Gulf of Thailand
Long article about a very lucrative squid-fishing industry that involves bribing the Cambodian Navy. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
Rabbit Beating Up Snake
It's the Internet, which means there must be cute animal videos on this blog. But this one is different. Watch a mother rabbit beat up a snake to protect her children. It's impressive the way she keeps attacking the snake until it is far away from her nest, but I worry that she doesn't know enough to grab the snake...
Clever System of Secure Distributed Computation
This is really clever: Enigma's technique -- what cryptographers call "secure multiparty computation" -- works by mimicking a few of the features of bitcoin's decentralized network architecture: It encrypts data by splitting it up into pieces and randomly distributing indecipherable chunks of it to hundreds of computers in the Enigma network known as "nodes." Each node performs calculations on its...
More upgrade woes
I've been dragging my heelsagainwith updating Yvonne's computer, but it has to be done. I now have a disk I can put in there, containing a not quite up to date version of her /home file system, but it needs a system on it. Problem: the partition with the system I want to copy is on stable, which only has connections for one disk. I've been building the other disk images on swamp, but I can't easily copy partition contents from one system to another. OK, I have a SATA to USB adapterin fact, the one that came with the disk.
Details of the NSA's XKEYSCORE
The Intercept has published a highly detailed two-part article on how the NSA's XKEYSCORE works, including a huge number of related documents from the Snowden archive. So much to digest. Please post anything interesting you notice in the comments....
Google's "Labs" features are DevOps Third Way
Someone on Quora recently asked, Why did Google include the 'undo send' feature on Gmail?. They felt that adding the 30-second delay to email delivery was inefficient. However rather than answering the direct question, I explained the deeper issue. My (slightly edited) answer is below. NOTE: While I previously worked at Google, I was never part of the Gmail team, nor do I even know any of their developers or the product manager(s). What I wrote here is true for any software company. Why did Google include this feature? Because the "Gmail Labs" system permits developers to override the decisions of product managers.
Highlife Rocks, iTunes Sucks
I have the good fortune to live near a good record store, where I shop often. One of my best scores this year was Highlife on the Move: Selected Nigerian & Ghanaian Recordings from London & Lagos 1954-66 . On Record Stores So, there are two things you find in record stores. The first, what with vinyls resurgence, are lots of foot-square packages advertising the music they contain, often with eye-grabbing visuals. The second, almost every time, is some pretty fucking cool music on the sound system. Record stores, theyre a good thing, and lets hope we have em with us for a while.
Summer reading lists!
Canada’s public institutions were very good to me today! The CBC included Little Brother on its list of 100 Great YA Novels that make you proud to be Canadian. Not to be outdone, the Toronto Public Library put the book on its Fight The Power: Books For Youth Activists. As if that wasn’t enough, TPL... more
Office of Personnel Management Data Hack
I don't have much to say about the recent hack of the US Office of Personnel Management, which has been attributed to China (and seems to be getting worse all the time). We know that government networks aren't any more secure than corporate networks, and might even be less secure. I agree with Ben Wittes here (although not the imaginary...
TOML vs. JSON
[This is still only draft quality but I think it is worth publishing at this point.] Internally at Stack Exchange, Inc. we've been debating the value of certain file formats: YAML, JSON, INI and the new TOML format just to name a few. [If you are unfamiliar with TOML, it is Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language. " Tom", in this case, is Tom Preston-Werner, founder and former CEO of GitHub. The file format is still not reached version 1.0 and is still changing. However I do like it a lot. Also, the name of the format IS MY FREAKIN' NAME which is totally awesome.