Future Thinking: Augusto Mathurin on Digital Divides
In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. In April 2018, we interviewed two stakeholders –Getachew Engida, Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and Augusto Mathurin, who created Virtuágora, an open source digital participation platform – to hear their different perspectives on the forces shaping the Internet.
Augusto Mathurin is a 25-year-old Argentinian who strongly believes in the need to enable all people to participate in decision-making which can impact them and their communities. With this in mind, Augusto developed an open source digital participation platform as part of a university project. The main goal of this platform, Virtuágora, was to create a common space in which citizens’ opinions and their representatives’ proposals could converge. The concept was derived from the Greek agora – the central square of ancient Grecian cities where citizens met to discuss their society. In 2017, Augusto was awarded the Internet Society’s 25 under 25 award for making an impact in his community and beyond. (You can Continue reading
Future Thinking: Getachew Engida on Digital Divides
In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. In April 2018, we interviewed two stakeholders – Getachew Engida, Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and Augusto Mathurin, who created Virtuágora, an open source digital participation platform – to hear their different perspectives on the forces shaping the Internet.
Getachew Engida is the Deputy Director-General of UNESCO. He has spent the past twenty years leading and managing international organizations and advancing the cause of poverty eradication, peace-building, and sustainable development. He has worked extensively on rural and agricultural development, water and climate challenges, education, science, technology and innovation, intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity, communication and information with emphasis on freedom of expression, and the free flow information on and offline. (You can read Augusto Mathurin’s interview here).
The Internet Society: You have, in the past, stressed the role that education has played in your own life and can play in others’ lives. Do you see technology helping to promote literacy and Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: A New Use for Blockchain
Blockchain takes on censorship: Students looking into sexual harassment accusations involving a professor at Peking University in China wrote a letter accusing the school of trying to silence one of them, but the letter was removed from social media outlets for “violating rules.” So some supporters distributed the letter using the Ethereum blockchain, reports Yahoo finance.
Why routing security matters: Hackers used a well-known weakness in Border Gateway Protocol routing to hijack Amazon Web Services’ DNS traffic for about two hours last Tuesday. Attackers were able to redirect an Ethereum wallet developer’s website to a phishing site and steal about $150,000 from MyEtherWallet.com users, ZDNet reports.
Hacking-for-hire site attacked: In this case, law enforcement agencies from 12 countries were the people who shut down hacking-for-hire site Webstresser.org. The site had 136,000 customers and its hackers launched more than 4 million DDoS attacks in recent years, according to Europol. GovTech.com has a story.
Inspecting the IoT: Researchers at Princeton University are launching IoT Inspector, an open-source tool designed to give Internet of Things users insight into the security of their devices. There’s even Raspberry Pi code for the project, says The Register.
Cryptocurrency for the suits: The Continue reading
6 Reasons SSDs Will Take Over the Data Center
Here's why you should expect to see solid-state drives supplant hard-disk drives for data center storage in the near future.
We Have to Learn How to Manage the Cattle
Not long after I published the blog post arguing against physical appliances, Oven wrote a very valid comment: "But then you'd have 20 individual systems to manage, add licenses to for additional features, updates etc."
Even though the blog post (and the comment) was written in 2013, not much has changed in the meantime.
Read more ...NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination
NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination Jin et al., NSDI’18
NetChain won a best paper award at NSDI 2018 earlier this month. By thinking outside of the box (in this case, the box is the chassis containing the server), Jin et al. have demonstrated how to build a coordination service (think Apache ZooKeeper) with incredibly low latency and high throughput. We’re talking 9.7 microseconds for both reads and writes, with scalability on the order of tens of billions of operations per second. Similarly to KV-Direct that we looked at last year, NetChain achieves this stunning performance by moving the system implementation into the network. Whereas KV-Direct used programmable NICs though, NetChain takes advantage of programmable switches, and can be incrementally deployed in existing datacenters.
We expect a lightning fast coordination system like NetChain can open the door for designing a new generation of distributed systems beyond distributed transactions.
It’s really exciting to watch all of the performance leaps being made by moving compute and storage around (accelerators, taking advantage of storage pockets e.g. processing-in-memory, non-volatile memory, in-network processing, and so on). The sheer processing power we’ll have at our disposal as all of these become mainstream is staggering to Continue reading
T-Mobile to Swallow Sprint and Form 5G Powerhouse
The combined company will be worth roughly $146 billion. T-Mobile CEO John Legere will lead the new firm and Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will serve on the board.
Cloud Not Just Someone Else’s Computer
Cloud computing is a lot more than “someone else’s computer” and it annoys the hell out of me when people keep trotting out this tired old excuse. There is much more to service delivery than compute power. You do yourself and your customers a disservice if you don’t do your research.
A few years ago it was fashionable to dismiss cloud as “just someone else’s computer”, e.g.:
There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer. pic.twitter.com/9d3S5chWQq
— David Whittaker (@rundavidrun) February 13, 2016
There’s T-shirts:
You can even buy coffee mugs.
In a time when most cloud computing was Infrastructure as a Service, there was an element of truth to it. But…
Times Change
The problem is that there’s still people thinking this. Check these recent tweets.
These people don’t realize that the world has moved on a long way. There is much more to cloud computing than just “someone else’s computer.”
Consider a simple example, like email. To provide email services from “my computer” I also need power, cooling, rack space, servers, storage, networking, operating system, software, application configuration and maintenance, etc…not to mention the operational expertise to keep it all going.
‘Balance’ Is An Excuse Not To Go All Out
When you have a goal in mind, sometimes work/life balance has to take a back seat to all-consuming effort.Getting started with Terraform and Cloudflare (Part 1 of 2)
As a Product Manager at Cloudflare, I spend quite a bit of my time talking to customers. One of the most common topics I'm asked about is configuration management. Developers want to know how they can write code to manage their Cloudflare config, without interacting with our APIs or UI directly.
Following best practices in software development, they want to store configuration in their own source code repository (be it GitHub or otherwise), institute a change management process that includes code review, and be able to track their configuration versions and history over time. Additionally, they want the ability to quickly and easily roll back changes when required.
When I first spoke with our engineering teams about these requirements, they gave me the best answer a Product Manager could hope to hear: there's already an open source tool out there that does all of that (and more), with a strong community and plugin system to boot—it's called Terraform.
This blog post is about getting started using Terraform with Cloudflare and the new version 1.0 of our Terraform provider. A "provider" is simply a plugin that knows how to talk to a specific set of APIs—in this case, Cloudflare, but Continue reading