Squinting at ASCII on Linux

Back when I started working with computers, understanding the nature of ASCII was exciting. In fact, just knowing how to convert binary to hex was fun.That was a lot of years ago — berfore ASCII had yet reached drinking age — but character encoding standards are as important as ever today with the internet being so much a part of our business and our personal lives. They're also more complex and more numerous than you might imagine. So, let’s dive into some of the details of what ASCII is and some of the commands that make it easier to see coding standards in action.Why ASCII? ASCII came about to circumvent the problem that different types of electronic systems were storing text in different ways. They all used some form of ones and zeroes (or ONs and OFFs), but the issue of compatibility became important when they needed to interact. So, ASCII was developed primarily to provide encoding consistency. It became a standard in the U.S. in 1960. Initially, ASCII characters used only 7 bits. Some years later, ASCII was extended to use all 8 bits in each byte.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: The Russian Alternate Internet

Actually practical and not necessarily a problem. The Security Council of the Russian Federation, headed by Vladimir Putin, has ordered the “government to develop an independent internet infrastructure for BRICS nations, which would continue to work in the event of global internet malfunctions.” (RT, the Russian government-funded news service.) RT believes “this system would be used by countries of the BRICS bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.” —Dave Burstein @ CircleID

Technical reading from the Cloudflare blog for the holidays

During 2017 Cloudflare published 172 blog posts (including this one). If you need a distraction from the holiday festivities at this time of year here are some highlights from the year.


CC BY 2.0 image by perzon seo

The WireX Botnet: How Industry Collaboration Disrupted a DDoS Attack

We worked closely with companies across the industry to track and take down the Android WireX Botnet. This blog post goes into detail about how that botnet operated, how it was distributed and how it was taken down.

Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production

The wall of Lava Lamps in the San Francisco office is used to feed entropy into random number generators across our network. This blog post explains how.

ARM Takes Wing: Qualcomm vs. Intel CPU comparison

Our network of data centers around the world all contain Intel-based servers, but we're interested in ARM-based servers because of the potential cost/power savings. This blog post took a look at the relative performance of Intel processors and Qualcomm's latest server offering.

How to Monkey Patch the Linux Kernel

One engineer wanted to combine the Dvorak and QWERTY keyboard layouts and did so by patching the Linux kernel using SystemTap. This blog explains Continue reading

Technical reading from the Cloudflare blog for the holidays

During 2017 Cloudflare published 172 blog posts (including this one). If you need a distraction from the holiday festivities at this time of year here are some highlights from the year.

CC BY 2.0 image by perzon seo

The WireX Botnet: How Industry Collaboration Disrupted a DDoS Attack

We worked closely with companies across the industry to track and take down the Android WireX Botnet. This blog post goes into detail about how that botnet operated, how it was distributed and how it was taken down.

Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production

The wall of Lava Lamps in the San Francisco office is used to feed entropy into random number generators across our network. This blog post explains how.

ARM Takes Wing: Qualcomm vs. Intel CPU comparison

Our network of data centers around the world all contain Intel-based servers, but we're interested in ARM-based servers because of the potential cost/power savings. This blog post took a look at the relative performance of Intel processors and Qualcomm's latest server offering.

How to Monkey Patch the Linux Kernel

One engineer wanted to combine the Dvorak and QWERTY keyboard layouts and did so by patching the Linux kernel using SystemTap. This blog explains Continue reading

A Cumulus holiday special: unboxing the Facebook Backpack Chassis

Season’s greetings from Cumulus Networks! We wish you all the happiest of holidays and hope they lead into a fantastic new year.

But before we take off for our holiday break, we’ve got one more present for you — a Facebook Backpack Chassis! Well, a video of a Facebook Backpack Chassis. Pour yourself a mug of hot chocolate and prepare yourself for some laughs as we unwrap this exciting new addition to our data center. Check it out:

The post A Cumulus holiday special: unboxing the Facebook Backpack Chassis appeared first on Cumulus Networks Blog.

Get 3 Years of NordVPN Service for Just $2.75 Per Month – Holiday Deal Alert

NordVPN promises a private and fast path through the public internet, with no logs and unmetered access for 6 simultaneous devices. They are currently running a holiday promotion, but you'll have to use this link to find it. Its typical price has been discounted to $99 for 3 years of service. That's a good deal at just $2.75 per month.  See the $2.75/month NordVPN holiday deal here. To read this article in full, please click here

Get 3 Years of NordVPN Service for Just $2.75 Per Month – Holiday Deal Alert

NordVPN promises a private and fast path through the public internet, with no logs and unmetered access for 6 simultaneous devices. They are currently running a holiday promotion, but you'll have to use this link to find it. Its typical price has been discounted to $99 for 3 years of service. That's a good deal at just $2.75 per month.  See the $2.75/month NordVPN holiday deal here. To read this article in full, please click here

New Seagate tech promises to double hard drive speeds

Unable to even come close to SSDs in terms of performance, hard disk makers have chosen to compete with capacity. A SSD over 1TB in size starts to become expensive, especially for consumers, so HDD makers Seagate and Western Digital have gone for massive capacity, introducing drives with up to 14TB of capacity.But now Seagate promises greater speed thanks to a new drive head technology. Dubbed the multi-actuator technology, it’s a simple idea that’s been around a while but wasn’t economically viable in the past due to higher component costs.Hard drive heads are connected to an arm called an actuator. This moves back and forth across the disk while the disk spins. Hard drives have multiple platters for storing data, and the actuator arms have drive heads on both sides of the platter, since data is written to both sides of the platter.To read this article in full, please click here

New Seagate tech promises to double hard drive speeds

Unable to even come close to SSDs in terms of performance, hard disk makers have chosen to compete with capacity. A SSD over 1TB in size starts to become expensive, especially for consumers, so HDD makers Seagate and Western Digital have gone for massive capacity, introducing drives with up to 14TB of capacity.But now Seagate promises greater speed thanks to a new drive head technology. Dubbed the multi-actuator technology, it’s a simple idea that’s been around a while but wasn’t economically viable in the past due to higher component costs.Hard drive heads are connected to an arm called an actuator. This moves back and forth across the disk while the disk spins. Hard drives have multiple platters for storing data, and the actuator arms have drive heads on both sides of the platter, since data is written to both sides of the platter.To read this article in full, please click here

2017 Internet Intelligence Roundup

With 2017 drawing to a close, year-end lookbacks litter media and the blogosphere like so many leaves on the ground. (Or piles of snow, depending on where you are.) Many tend to focus on pop culture, product/movie/music releases, or professional sports. However, given the focus of Oracle Dyn’s Internet Intelligence team on monitoring and measuring the Internet, we’re going to take a look back at significant Internet “events” of the past year, and how they have impacted connectivity for Internet users around the world.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria Cause Internet Disruptions

In late August, and through September, an active Atlantic hurricane season spawned a number of destructive storms that wreaked havoc across the Caribbean, as well as Florida and Texas in the United States. On the Caribbean islands that were hardest hit by the storms, the resulting physical damage was immense, severely impacting last-mile Internet infrastructure across the whole country. This was also the case in Florida and Texas, though on a much more localized basis. On September 25, we looked at the impacts of these hurricanes on Internet connectivity in the affected areas, noting that while some “core” Internet components remained available during these storms thanks to Continue reading

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