Author Archives: Russ
Author Archives: Russ
For anyone who would like to pick up a copy of Ethan and I’s latest work, it’s currently on prepublication special over at InformIT. Click on the image below for the sale price.
West Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBCWest Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBC
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States on November Continue reading
In this video, Russ White discusses what tunneling really is.
Are you a scientist, or an engineer? This question does not seem to occur to most engineers, but it does seem science has “taken the lead role” in recent history, with engineers being sometimes (or perhaps often) seen as “the folks who figure out how to make use of what scientists are discovering.” There are few fields where this seems closer to the truth than computing. Peter Denning has written an insightful article over at the ACM on this topic; a few reactions are in order.
Denning separates engineers from scientists by saying:
The first concerns the nature of their work. Engineers design and build technologies that serve useful purposes, whereas scientists search for laws explaining phenomena.
While this does seem like a useful starting point, I’m not at all certain the two fields can be cleanly separated in this way. The reality is there is probably a continuum starting from what might be called “meta-engineers,” those who’s primary goal is to implement a technology designed by someone else by mentally reverse engineering what this “someone else” has done, to the deeply focused “pure scientist,” who really does not care about the practical application, but is rather simply searching Continue reading
EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM… —Cory Doctorow @ Deep LinksEFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM… —Cory Doctorow @ Deep Links
When deploying IPv6, one of the fundamental questions the network engineer needs to ask is: DHCPv6, or SLAAC? As the argument between these two has reached almost political dimensions, perhaps a quick look at the positive and negative attributes of each solution are. Originally, the idea was that IPv6 addresses would be created using stateless configuration (SLAAC). The network parts of the address would be obtained by listening for a Router Advertisement (RA), and the host part would be built using a local (presumably unique) physical (MAC) address. In this way, a host can be connected to the network, and come up and run, without any manual configuration. Of course, there is still the problem of DNS—how should a host discover which server it should contact to resolve domain names? To resolve this part, the DHCPv6 protocol would be used. So in IPv6 configuration, as initially conceived, the information obtained from RA would be combined with DNS information from DHCPv6 to fully configure an IPv6 host when it is attached to the network.
There are several problems with this scheme, as you might expect. The most obvious is that most network operators do not want to deploy two protocols to Continue reading
The GNU Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is arguably the most important open-source license for one reason: It’s the license Linux uses. On November 27, three Linux-using technology powers, Facebook, Google, and IBM, and the major Linux distributor Red Hat announced they would extend additional rights to help companies who’ve made GPLv2 open-source license compliance errors and mistakes. —Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols @ ZDNetThe GNU Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is arguably the most important open-source license for one reason: It’s the license Linux uses. On November 27, three Linux-using technology powers, Facebook, Google, and IBM, and the major Linux distributor Red Hat announced they would extend additional rights to help companies who’ve made GPLv2 open-source license compliance errors and mistakes. —Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols @ ZDNet
On Tuesday the 5th, I’m participating in a webcast discussion about the future of networking over at Brighttalk. The details and registration linked below. I’ll be in a hotel room; I’m hoping the audio and lighting will work out correctly.
Re-Engineering Enterprise IT: A Blueprint for the Modern Infrastructure
There’s an “automation meteor” headed right at us, according to financial adviser and Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown, who used this troubling “chart o’ the day” from Wharton to show just “how quickly things have changed” over the past decade. And how they’re going to keep on changing. —Shawn Langlois @ MarketWatchThere’s an “automation meteor” headed right at us, according to financial adviser and Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown, who used this troubling “chart o’ the day” from Wharton to show just “how quickly things have changed” over the past decade. And how they’re going to keep on changing. —Shawn Langlois @ MarketWatch
Many historians believe that one of the main reasons why the U.S. won the Cold War was its decisive lead over the Soviet Union in computer and telecommunications technology, which, by the 1980s, made it virtually impossible for the Soviets to compete, either economically or militarily. Continue reading