Wait, what happened to my choices?

This weekend, I experienced one of those moments that make me question the value of information technology. My trusty windows phone, for whatever reason, failed. Given I was traveling in less than 24 hours, I needed to find a replacement. So I traipsed to the local phone store, and was told “I’m sorry, we don’t sell windows phones. They aren’t popular enough.” So there I stood, like the shopper in the proverbial aisle of cereal, trying to choose which new phone to get.

After staring at all the different phones for a while, it dawned on me that the apparent variety is fake. I really only had two choices.

The first is the iPhone. The iPhone is a throwback to the late 1990’s, at least one generation behind current hardware, and with a user interface that falls into the “cute retro gamified Windows 3.11/Xerox Star” sort of thing. Getting anything done requires jumping through multiple hoops. There is no way to pin anything you use on a regular basis to the screen, no information available without entering an app, the icons are tiny candies, etc. Sorry Apple fanfolk, but Apple hasn’t innovated in at least 10 years in Continue reading

Worth Reading: What if everything you know about passwords is wrong?

Every time there’s a notable cybersecurity breach, someone (even me) writes a comprehensive primer on the proper way to create “secure” passwords. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until a few years ago, everyone (including me) based their password advice on a 2003 paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the catchy title “NIST Special Publication 800-63.” The paper recommended that passwords be cryptic, contain special characters, and be as close to nonsense as possible. —Shelly Palmer

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Worth Reading: You Are Here Our Information Society is Not Yielding More Knowledge

In today’s world, modern celebrities and artists seem to be primarily concerned with their image and whether or not it is aligned with the politically correct thought of the day. It is for this reason that it’s easy to sit up and take note when a celebrity actually goes against the grain of today’s conventional wisdom and thoughtfully points out problems that are being overlooked. The most recent instance of this came from the lips of Charles Dutoit, a famous Swiss conductor who heads the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. —Annie Holmquist @ Intellectual Takeout

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Master of None

Should you be a johnny do-it-all, or so deep that no-one understands what you are saying? It’s time to talk about the shape of knowledge—and how important it is to be intentional about the shape of your knowledge.

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Worth Reading: On ISO standardization of blockchains

So ISO, the primary international standards organization, is seeking to standardize blockchain technologies. On the surface, this seems a reasonable idea, creating a common standard that everyone can interoperate with. But it can be silly idea in practice. I mean, it should not be assumed that this is a good thing to do. You don’t need the official imprimatur of a government committee for something to be a “standard”. The Internet itself is a prime example of that. —Robert Graham @ Errata Security

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Worth Reading: DNS query name minimization

One new thing you need to add your DNS security policies is “query name minimizations” (RFC 7816). I thought I’d mention it since many haven’t heard about it. Right now, when DNS resolvers lookup a name like “www.example.com.”, they send the entire name to the root server (like a.root-servers.net.). When it gets back the answer to the .com DNS server a.gtld-servers.net), it then resends the full “www.example.com” query to that server. This is obviously unnecessary. The first query should be just .com. to the root server, then example.com. to the next server — the minimal amount needed for each query, not the full query. —Robert Graham @ Errata Security

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Wooden Bridge

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Worth Reading: Supporting new DNS RR types

The Domain Name System has always been intended to be extensible. The original spec in the 1980s had about a dozen resource record types (RRTYPEs), and since then people have invented many more so now there are about 65 different RRTYPEs. But if you look at most DNS zones, you’ll only see a handful of types, NS, A, AAAA, MX, TXT, and maybe SRV. Why? A lot of the other types are arcane or obsolete, but there are plenty that are useful. Moreover, new designs like DKIM, DMARC, and notoriously SPF have reused TXT records rather than defining new types of their own. Why? It’s the provisioning crudware. —John Levine @ CircleID

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Worth Reading: Hacking through the random number generator

Late Last Autumn, a Russian mathematician and programmer named Alex decided he’d had enough of running his eight-year-old business. Though his St. Petersburg firm was thriving, he’d grown weary of dealing with payroll, hiring, and management headaches. He pined for the days when he could devote himself solely to tinkering with code, his primary passion. The time had come for an exit strategy. —Brendon Koerner @ Wired

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Worth Reading: Why you should document first

Programmers and project managers sometimes think the phrase “doc-driven development” means putting a lot of comments in code or working closely with doc writers as development happens. That’s because it’s hard to imagine how development can possibly happen after documentation, because surely documentation can’t happen until there’s something to actually document. —Seth Kenlon @ Opensource

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Worth Reading: The shape of HPC and AI iron to come

In the IT business, just like any other business, you have to try to sell what is on the truck, not what is planned to be coming out of the factories in the coming months and years. AMD has put a very good X86 server processor into the market for the first time in nine years, and it also has a matching GPU that gives its OEM and ODM partners a credible alternative for HPC and AI workload to the combination of Intel Xeons and Nvidia Teslas that dominate hybrid computing these days. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: We’re Still on Whois?

Here we are in a modern age, and yet the load on the public whois service at APNIC continues unabated. It’s believed they’re mostly queries from automatic systems, checking the authority over an IP address, almost certainly from firewall checks, an amount of manual data exploration by law enforcement and IPR agencies, and at the tail end, ISPs doing semi-automatic router configuration. —George Michaelson @ APNIC

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Worth Reading: The TCP Tortoise

As LinkedIn migrated to serving its pages on HTTP/2 earlier this year, it became imperative that we identify and use the most optimal transport layer strategy for our users’ network. Being a Transmission Control Protocol-centric (TCP) infrastructure, we initiated an effort to study the effects of different TCP congestion control strategies in different geographies. We found that with the right strategy, we could significantly improve our site speed, resulting in up to 7% faster content downloads. —Prasanna Vijayanathan @ Linkedin

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On the ‘web: What your momma never told you about OSPF

Nick Russo and I talk about the OSPF routing protocol, covering some of those things you’ve probably never thought about, and giving away one of my favorite interview questions in the process. You can see the original episode at the Network Collective here.

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Worth Reading: NVMe for Data Centers

The Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) specification defines a new method to access solid-state drives (SSDs) over a PCIe bus, and it’s forecasted to grow exponentially over the next few years thanks to its performance advantages and lower latencies compared with legacy protocols (such as SATA). NVMe-enabled storage infrastructures are not only seeing wide deployment, but they’re now entering other data center areas that were once typically reserved for legacy HDDs and SSDs. NVMe has become an agent for next-generation data centers. To understand this evolution, it’s important to review the history and examine some of the new application workloads that are being transformed by this protocol. —Anand Jayapalan @ The Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: The Coco Block Chain

Today I am proud to introduce the Coco Framework, an open-source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements—providing a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. Coco achieves this by designing specifically for confidential consortiums, where nodes and actors are explicitly declared and controlled. Based on these requirements, Coco presents an alternative approach to ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect. —Mark Russinovich @ Azure

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Thoughts on Grey Failures

In this video I work through some thoughts around grey failures—a big thanks to Ivan for discussing this with me, which was very helpful. The paper mentioned in the video can be found here.

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Worth Reading: Automated Safe Cracking

In the process of building his safecracking robot, which he will demonstrate live at the Defcon cybersecurity conference next week, Seidle discovered a series of real vulnerabilities in the relatively cheap, but popular, SentrySafe he tested. But the larger lesson of his work goes beyond his particular safe’s security flaws. It points instead to a new reality for vendors of physical security equipment: If automated tools can crack your locks or safes, the increasing affordability of those tools makes you more vulnerable than ever. —Andy Greenberg @ Wired

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Worth Reading: Deep dive into Sky Lake

The architecture of Skylake is very different from that of the prior “Haswell” and “Broadwell” Xeon chips, and will be carried forward with the next-generation “Cascade Lake” processors that will very likely be implemented in a highly tuned 14 nanometer process – what Intel calls 14++ nanometer in its chip manufacturing presentations. (We had not heard of Cascade Lake before, and assumed future Xeons would be based on the “Kaby Lake” design already implemented in the Xeon E3 chips for single-socket servers.) The point is, the Socket P form factor for Xeon SP processors will be used for at least two generations of server chips, and possibly more. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Japanese Temple

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