Russ White Archives - Page 84 of 164

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

Wooden bridge in the mountains

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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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