Re-coding Black Mirror, Part I

In looking through the WWW’18 proceedings, I came across the co-located ‘Re-coding Black Mirror’ workshop.

Re-coding Black Mirror is a full day workshop which explores how the widespread adoption of web technologies, principles and practices could lead to potential societal and ethical challenges as the ones depicted in Black Mirror‘s episodes, and how research related to those technologies could help minimise or even prevent the risks of those issues arising.

The workshop has ten short papers exploring either existing episodes, or Black Mirror-esque scenarios in which technology can go astray. As food for thought, we’ll be looking at a selection of those papers this week. In the MIT media lab, Black Mirror episodes are assigned watching for new graduate students in the Fluid Interfaces research group.

Today we’ll be looking at:

• The rise of emotion-aware conversational agents, Mensio et al., and
• Digital Zombies – the reanimation of our digital selves, Tietz et al.

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, all of the papers in this workshop can be accessed either by following the links above directly from The Morning Paper blog site, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page).

Both papers pick Continue reading

Leaking securely, for White House staffers

Tracing System CPU on Debian Stretch

This is a heavily truncated version of an internal blog post from August 2017. For more recent updates on Kafka, check out another blog post on compression, where we optimized throughput 4.5x for both disks and network.

Photo by Alex Povolyashko / Unsplash

Upgrading our systems to Debian Stretch

For quite some time we've been rolling out Debian Stretch, to the point where we have reached ~10% adoption in our core datacenters. As part of upgarding the underlying OS, we also evaluate the higher level software stack, e.g. taking a look at our ClickHouse and Kafka clusters.

During our upgrade of Kafka, we sucessfully migrated two smaller clusters, logs and dns, but ran into issues when attempting to upgrade one of our larger clusters, http.

Thankfully, we were able to roll back the http cluster upgrade relatively easily, due to heavy versioning of both the OS and the higher level software stack. If there's one takeaway from this blog post, it's to take advantage of consistent versioning.

High level differences

We upgraded one Kafka http node, and it did not go as planned:

Having 5x CPU usage was definitely an unexpected outcome. For control datapoints, we Continue reading

Networking With Fish: YouTube Channel

Blogging, originally, was my go to and preferred method for sharing information to others – teaching, sharing, etc.  For a few corner case type things I found video (YouTube) to be a better tool for those specific items.  Recently, however, I am finding about half of my ideas of things I want to “pass on” to others… would be best (in my opinion) via video.

I’ve been trying to figure out and think about how best to have the two sharing tools – this blog site and the YouTube channel – best compliment each other.  So I have been experimenting with this.  What I have come up with that I like and works for me is the following…..

• “Standalone Video” – If the YouTube is really a “standalone” and blogging with additional text around it here doesn’t “help” communicate what I’m trying to get across… then I won’t be blogging about it here.
• “Video Series” – There will be series that will be building on each other – like the videos in the playlist “BGP Show and Tell: Beginners” and the playlist “Label Swapping Fun”.   Video series, I believe, would definitely benefit from larger big Continue reading

Worth Reading: Cognitive Dissonance

I always wondered why it’s so hard to accept that someone might not find your preferred solution beautiful but would call it complex or even harmful (or from the other side, why someone could not possibly appreciate the beauty of your design)… and then stumbled upon this blog post by Scott Adams describing cognitive dissonance (the actual topic they’re discussing in the mentioned video doesn’t matter – look for the irrational behavior).

You might say “but we could politely agree to disagree” but unfortunately that implies that at least one of us is not fully rational due to Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.

Link Propagation 118

Time To Get Back To Basics?

I’ve had some fascinating networking discussions over the past couple of weeks at Dell Technologies World, Interop, and the spring ONUG meeting. But two of them have hit on some things that I think need to be addressed in the industry. Both Russ White and Ignas Bagdonas of the IETF have come to me and talked about how they feel networking professionals have lost sight of the basics.

How Stuff Works

If you walk up to any network engineer and ask them to explain how TCP works, you will probably get a variety of answers. Some will try to explain it to you in basic terms to avoid getting too in depth. Others will swamp you with a technical discussion that would make the protocol inventors proud. But still others will just shrug their shoulders and admit they don’t really understand the protocol.

It’s a common problem when a technology gets to the point of being mature and ubiquitous. One of my favorite examples is the fuel system on an internal combustion engine. On older cars or small engines, the carburetor is responsible for creating the correct fuel and air mixture that is used to power the cylinders. Getting that Continue reading

SeaMeWe-3 Experiences Another Cable Break

Weekend Reads: 051118: New spectre-class vulnerabilities, scraping data, and no middle ground on encryption

A team of security researchers has reportedly discovered a total of eight new “Spectre-class” vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs, which also affect at least a small number of ARM processors and may impact AMD processor architecture as well. Dubbed Spectre-Next Generation, or Spectre-NG, the partial details of the vulnerabilities were first leaked to journalists at German computer magazine Heise, which claims that Intel has classified four of the new vulnerabilities as “high risk” and remaining four as “medium.” —Mohit Kumar @Hacker News

As cities get smarter, their appetite and access to information is also increasing. The rise of data-generating technologies has given government agencies unprecedented opportunities to harness useful, real-time information about citizens. But governments often lack dedicated expertise and resources to collect, analyze, and ultimately turn such data into actionable information, and so have turned to private-sector companies and academic researchers to get at this information. —Joseph Jerome @CDT

Despite this renewed rhetoric, most experts continue to agree that exceptional access, no matter how you implement it, weakens security. The terminology might have changed, but the essential question has not: should technology companies be forced to develop a system that inherently harms their users? The answer hasn’t changed either: Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Defining network performance with Google’s 4 golden signals

You’re supposed to meet someone for coffee. If they’re three minutes late, no problem, but if they’re thirty minutes late, its rude. Was the change from “no problem” to “rude” a straight line, or were there steps of increasing rudeness? Do we care why? A good reason certainly increases our tolerance. Someone who is always late reduces it.Network performance follows many of the same dynamics. We used to talk about outages, but they have become less frequent. “Slow” is the new “out.” But how slow is slow? Do we try to understand the user experience and adjust our performance monitoring to reflect it? Or is the only practical answer to just wait until someone complains?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Defining network performance with Google’s 4 golden signals

You’re supposed to meet someone for coffee. If they’re three minutes late, no problem, but if they’re thirty minutes late, its rude. Was the change from “no problem” to “rude” a straight line, or were there steps of increasing rudeness? Do we care why? A good reason certainly increases our tolerance. Someone who is always late reduces it.Network performance follows many of the same dynamics. We used to talk about outages, but they have become less frequent. “Slow” is the new “out.” But how slow is slow? Do we try to understand the user experience and adjust our performance monitoring to reflect it? Or is the only practical answer to just wait until someone complains?To read this article in full, please click here

Project Jengo Celebrates One Year Anniversary by Releasing Prior Art

Today marks the one year anniversary of Project Jengo, a crowdsourced search for prior art that Cloudflare created and funded in response to the actions of Blackbird Technologies, a notorious patent troll. Blackbird has filed more than one hundred lawsuits asserting dormant patents without engaging in any innovative or commercial activities of its own. In homage to the typical anniversary cliché, we are taking this opportunity to reflect on the last year and confirm that we’re still going strong.

Project Jengo arose from a sense of immense frustration over the way that patent trolls purchase over-broad patents and use aggressive litigation tactics to elicit painful settlements from companies. These trolls know that the system is slanted in their favor, and we wanted to change that. Patent lawsuits take years to reach trial and cost an inordinate sum to defend. Knowing this, trolls just sit back and wait for companies to settle. Instead of perpetuating this cycle, Cloudflare decided to bring the community together and fight back.

After Blackbird filed a lawsuit against Cloudflare alleging infringement of a vague and overly-broad patent (‘335 Patent), we launched Project Jengo, which offered a reward to people who submitted prior art that could Continue reading

Symantec Cops to Internal Investigation, Sends Stock Crashing 35%

The mysterious probe isn’t related to a breach or any security concern about its products.

SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — May 11, 2018

Oracle spreads AI across the cloud; Nokia makes successful 5G call in France; Cisco completes $270 million purchase of AI company.

How to Manage Cloud Expenses With a Solution You Probably Already Have

Over the years, Telecom Expense Management has helped organizations optimize and gain visibility into usage trends, expenses, and financial allocation — and now it can address a broader set of IT and cloud services.

You can Fly!

NTT DoCoMo Moves Toward 5G by Updating Existing Base Stations

NTT DoCoMo and NEC also trialed data transmission between a 5G base station and a 5G mobile station using a car moving at 189 mph.

Show 389: Using MPLS In The Enterprise

The post Show 389: Using MPLS In The Enterprise appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Minimizing Risk: How to Be Secure on Twitter and Other Social Networks

Last week’s news that the passwords of every Twitter user around the world had been exposed in plain text is a stark reminder of the sometimes-fragile nature of security in the online places we trust with our personal information.

In this latest example, Twitter says it was a technical error that led to the exposure of the passwords of the social network’s 330 million users. Twitter also says it’s fixed the bug and has no evidence that anyone’s accounts have been breached or misused.

While the error led to exposure only within Twitter’s internal systems, the social network has urged everyone to change their passwords anyway.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.”

It’s sound advice, and it’s a step we have taken at the Internet Society with our own social media channels.

Yet, you may wonder what the point is in changing your password if a mistake like this can happen. If it happened once, surely it can happen again.

Yes, it could, there’s no doubt. We have compelling Continue reading

Nvidia Hitting On All GPU Cylinders

Even if Nvidia had not pursued a GPU compute strategy in the datacenter a decade and a half ago, the company would have turned in one of the best periods in its history as the first quarter of fiscal 2019 came to a close on April 29.

As it turns out, though, the company has a fast-growing HPC, AI, and cryptocurrency compute business that runs alongside of its core gaming GPU, visualization, and professional graphics businesses, and Nvidia is booming. That is a six cylinder engine of commerce, unless you break AI into training and inference (which is sensible), and …

Nvidia Hitting On All GPU Cylinders was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.