Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Stuff I'm reading

I've been busy at work recently.

Good busy, but busy.

But maybe I'll find some time to read...

  • Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications
    In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.
  • More about the NSA's XKEYSCORE
    E-mails, chats, web-browsing traffic, pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more: if you can figure out how to form the query, you can ask XKEYSCORE for it.
  • The CAP theorem series
    Let me introduce a new series of posts on the CAP theorem. CAP is a well known theorem conjectured and proven by recognized researchers in distributed systems, namely Eric Brewer, Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch. It is also widely used to categorize distributed applications.
  • You Do It Too: Forfeiting Partition Tolerance in Distributed Systems
    The CA--consistent, available, but not partition tolerant--category in CAP has a very specific history. Not only forfeiting “partition tolerance” can be understood as impossible in theory and crazy in practice (P--partition tolerance--as an illusion of a choice), but there is also an overlap between the CA and CP categories. As a result, many consider that it’s impossible to build a production CA system. This is wrong, both in theory--the CAP theorem does not say that--and in practice--you can build a system without partition tolerance, and sometimes you should.
  • Comments on "You Do it Too"
    The entire point of the CAP theorem is that such systems cannot exist. The existence of such a system, even theoretically, would disprove the theorem. You’ve got a paper to publish.
  • Is Linux TCP/IP Stack Really That Slow?
    In most cases, the answer is surprisingly simple: because the vendors ported their existing code to VM format, and replaced direct access to dedicated hardware with calls to Linux kernel (thus making every possible mistake they could). Vendors that spent time optimizing the code (Vyatta, Juniper) got the performance you’d expect (Juniper managed to push 160 Gbps through their vMX).
  • Routing Protocols and SD-WAN: Apples and Furbies
    You see, shifting traffic across alternate paths works very well in SD-WAN world, because the amount of shifted traffic represents a minuscule part of the overall traffic in the ISP network, whereas shifting traffic based on routing protocol decisions results in significant traffic shifts, which can result in interesting feedback loops in oscillations.
  • Don’t Be Fooled By Phony Online Reviews
    The Internet is a fantastic resource for researching the reputation of companies with which you may wish to do business. Unfortunately, this same ease-of-use can lull the unwary into falling for marketing scams originally perfected by spammers: Namely, fake reviews and dodgy search engine manipulation techniques that seek to drown out legitimate, negative reviews in a sea of glowing but fake endorsements.
  • Updating Probability of Damage Rolls
    One of my goals was to structure all of my pages so that I'd first give you the solution you were looking for, and then give you an idea that would change the way you thought about the problem. For the damage rolls page, the problem you're trying to solve is how to set up the rules for the dice so that you get a distribution of values that you like. You fiddle with the rules, look at the distribution, fiddle with the rules again, look at the distribution, and keep fiddling until you get the distribution you want. The big idea was that you should start with a distribution, and then work backwards towards the code. That way you don't have to keep fiddling with parameters.
  • Games vs Sports
    From a game design "formalist" point of view, they are not different. A rules-centric view of games doesn’t care whether the interface is computerized, mediated via apparatus, or physical, so it makes no distinction between computer chess and physical chess; similarly, it makes no distinction between the rules of, say, baseball, implemented within a computer or by players on a field. They’re both still recognizably baseball.
  • Episode 163: The Gruen Effect
    Retail spaces are designed for impulse shopping. When you go to a store looking for socks and come out with a new shirt, it’s only partly your fault. Shops are trying to look so beautiful, so welcoming, the items so enticingly displayed and in such vast quantity, that the consumer will start buying compulsively.

    This is the Gruen Effect.

  • Gruen Day 2015
    On July 18, the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory (BAIO) invites you to celebrate the lofty aspirations and historical legacy of the suburban shopping center at Gruen Day 2015.

    Festivities will include an afternoon of talks, tours, and hanging out in the food court at Bay Fair Center, which opened in 1957 as one of the first Gruen designed shopping centers in the country.

No comments:

Post a Comment