Administravia 20170703

Just a short note: I’ve updated the sixty book section of the site with a new plugin designed to keep track of book libraries. Along the way, I’ve added an Amazon affiliate code, so maybe I can buy a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of banana nut bread at some point in the future. The look should really be a bit nicer, though, and it is easier to add books to this system than manually adding them as I was doing before.

Remember that the idea of sixty books is not that there are actually 60 books on the list, but rather this is what I read in an average year—and hence what I am challenging you to work up to.

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Worth Reading: AMD and the Infinity Fabric

Starting with AMD’s Ryzen desktop processor and Epyc server architecture, AMD will implement their scalable Infinity Fabric across all its SoC and MCM products. Think of Infinity Fabric as a superset of HyperTransport, AMD’s previous socket-to-socket interconnect architecture, now managed by the HyperTransport Consortium. Infinity Fabric is a coherent high-performance fabric that uses sensors embedded in each die to scale control and data flow from die to socket to board-level. —The Next Platform

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Mickey Key

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Worth Reading: Is Decentralized Storage Sustainable?

There are many reasons to dislike centralized storage services. They include business risk, as we see in le petit musée des projets Google abandonnés, monoculture vulnerability and rent extraction. There is thus naturally a lot of enthusiasm for decentralized storage systems, such as MaidSafe, DAT and IPFS. —DHSR

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Worth Reading: Silicon Valley’s Overstuffed Unicorns

Here’s what’s happening: Young tech companies have been backed by unprecedented sums of investment money in the last three or four years. Those startup financiers in turn have collected record amounts of money from their own investors to buy pieces of future tech startups. All this money is going into the startup system, but it’s not coming out the other end. —Bloomberg

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Worth Reading: Identifying Intrusive Apps

Mobile apps entertain and assist us, make it easy to communicate with friends and family, and provide tools ranging from maps to electronic wallets. But these apps could also seek more device information than they need to do their job, such as personal data and sensor data from components, like cameras and GPS trackers. —Google

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Worth Reading: The Traffic Shaping Loophole

Since the disclosures of Edward Snowden in 2013, the U.S. government has assured its citizens that the National Security Agency (NSA) cannot spy on their electronic communications without the approval of a special surveillance judge. Domestic communications, the government says, are protected by statute and the Fourth Amendment. In practice, however, this is no longer strictly true. These protections are real, but they no longer cover as much ground as they did in the past. —The Century Foundation

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Worth Reading: Ethernet Getting back on Moore’s Law

It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Secure the Grid

Over the weekend, 140,000 people in Los Angeles spent 12 steamy hours without power when a local high-voltage transformer blew up. No one knows the cause of this particular disruption of service. But it’s the latest reminder of an ominous reality. —Free Fire

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Learn to Think

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Worth Reading: AI Forgeries are in the Future

Today, when people see a video of a politician taking a bribe, a soldier perpetrating a war crime, or a celebrity starring in a sex tape, viewers can safely assume that the depicted events have actually occurred, provided, of course, that the video is of a certain quality and not obviously edited. But that world of truth—where seeing is believing—is about to be upended by artificial intelligence technologies. —Wired

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Worth Reading: The Internet and Trust

This narrative refers to the understanding that trust mitigates the basic uncertainties that the Internet architecture has imposed upon its operators since its inception. To this day, network engineers cannot generally be certain about the validity of the routing announcements that they receive from interconnected networks, and they have little insight into the legitimacy of the traffic that they are mandated to transmit. Historically, network operators knew and trusted one another, and, as a result, the Internet worked in spite of its uncertainties. —APNIC

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Random Thoughts on Grey Failures and Scale

I have used the example of increasing paths to the point where the control plane converges more slowly, impacting convergence, hence increasing the Mean Time to Repair, to show that too much redundancy can actually reduce overall network availability. Many engineers I’ve talked to balk at this idea, because it seems hard to believe that adding another link could, in fact, impact routing protocol convergence in such a way. I ran across a paper a while back that provides a different kind of example about the trade-off around redundancy in a network, but I never got around to actually reading the entire paper and trying to figure out how it fits in.

In Gray Failure: The Achilles’ Heel of Cloud-Scale Systems, the authors argue that one of the main problems with building a cloud system is with grey failures—when a router fails only some of the time, or drops (or delays) only some small percentage of the traffic. The example given is—

• A single service must collect information from many other services on the network to complete a particular operation
• Each of these information collection operations represent a single transaction carried across the network
• The more transactions there are, the Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Value of DRM Locks

My co-authors and I at the University of Glasgow are investigating how restrictions on interoperability imposed by Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems might impact the market for goods. We are doing this as part of a larger project to better understand the economics of DRM and to figure out what changes would likely occur if the laws were reformed. Our recent working paper is titled ‘How much do consumers value interoperability: Evidence from the price of DVD players’. —EFF

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Worth Reading: Converge your network with priority flow control

Back in April, we talked about a feature called Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN). We discussed how ECN is an end-to-end method used to converge networks and save money. Priority flow control (PFC) is a different way to accomplish the same goal. Since PFC supports lossless or near lossless Ethernet, you can run applications, like RDMA, over Converged Ethernet (RoCE or RoCEv2) over your current data center infrastructure. Since RoCE runs directly over Ethernet, a different method than ECN must be used to control congestion. In this post, we’ll concentrate on the Layer 2 solution for RoCE — PFC, and how it can help you optimize your network. —Cumulus

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Herons

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Worth Reading: Implementing security as a set of services

In this post, I will focus on the implementation of the security services in terms of an ITIL-type framework. This is a blog post that took a long time to write — but some of the considerations here are essential if you are in the process of implementing security as a service, and especially if you are looking at ITIL as a service delivery methodology. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: New German law encourages censorship

Social media companies and other hosts of third-party content will soon face potential fines of €50 million in Germany if they fail to promptly censor speech that may violate German law. Last week, the German parliament approved the NetzDG legislation, which goes into effect 1 October and will require social media sites and other hosts of user-generated content to remove “obviously illegal” speech within 24 hours of being notified of it. —Center for Democracy and Technology

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Worth Reading: Journey into the hybrid cloud

“In the cloud” is more now than just a phrase that describes a feeling. Although the cloud began as a vision, over the past decade it has become an integral part of everyday business decisions, even being evaluated for an enterprise’s most critical high-value operations. Thanks to the public cloud, many startups find it quick and easy to set up their initial operation and product-development cycles. Some, such as Uber and Airbnb, even go to market entirely in the cloud. —The Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: Cutting through the segment routing hype

Segment Routing (SR) is a new traffic-engineering technology being developed by the IETF’s SPRING Working Group. Two forwarding plane encapsulations are being defined for SR: Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and IPv6 with a Segment Routing Extension Header. This article provides some historical context by describing the MPLS forwarding plane and control plane protocols, explains how Segment Routing works, introduces the MPLS-SR forwarding plane, and shows how the SR control plane is used. Finally, the article compares SR with legacy MPLS systems, and identifies its unique merits. —The IETF Journal

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