Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 19th, 2016


JPL is firing up their Exoplanet Travel Bureau . Reserve your space now.

 

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  • 200K : msgs send per second through iMessage; 750 million : xactions per week in App and iTunes store; 11 million : Apple Music subscribers; .7c : speed of light in silicon; 1.125Tpbs : fastest ever data transmission; 360TB : Superman memory crystal stores data forever;  $1bn : Uber’s yearly cost for market share in China;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Joseph Bradley : “Here is the takeaway. Blockchains must be massively more scalable than the current tech that supports Bitcoin. We start scaling slowly or quickly. And if we choose the latter, it will “require fundamental protocol redesign.”
    • @sigfpe : Nobody knows how to “program” DNA. They just copy-and-paste bits from other organisms. A bit like how most code is built from stackoverflow.
    • @evankirstel : Slack now has 2.3 million daily active users, 675,000 paid seats, and 280 apps in its directory
    • Jonas Luster : Money spoiled blogging. Why? Because people moved from doing great things for money and then talking about them on their free blogs, to people doing nothing but talking Continue reading

Your Docker Agenda for March

  This month is packed with plenty of great events including over 75 Docker Birthday #3 local celebrations to learn about all about Docker! From webinars to workshops, meetups to conference talks, check out our list of events that are … Continued

MIT’s new 5-atom quantum computer could make today’s encryption obsolete

Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they've created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes.In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or “qubits,” that can be simultaneously 0 and 1 -- a state known as a superposition that's far more efficient. It typically takes about 12 qubits to factor the number 15, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria have found a way to pare that down to five qubits, each represented by a single atom, they said this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DARPA moves ahead with radical vertical takeoff aircraft

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency took one step further in building a radically different vertical take off and landing or VTOL aircraft that can fly fast and carry a big load.Specifically DARPA awarded Aurora Flight Sciences the $89 million prime contract for Phase 2 of the agency’s Vertical Takeoff and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL X-Plane) program which looks to: Achieve a top sustained flight speed of 300 kt-400 kt Raise aircraft hover efficiency from 60% to at least 75% Present a more favorable cruise lift-to-drag ratio of at least 10, up from 5-6 Carry a useful load of at least 40% of the vehicle’s projected gross weight of 10,000-12,000 pounds +More on Network World: The iconic Boeing 747 is almost 50!+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP will Announce ProLiant Hyperconverged This Month

Just in case you wondered why HP doesn’t have an hyperconverged system, here is what Meg Whitman said this quarter investors call: Looking forward, you can expect this momentum and investment in innovation to continue. Later this month, we will announce a new market-changing hyper-converged offering based on our industry-leading ProLiant virtualization server. Our new […]

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A Deep Dive Into DNS Packet Sizes: Why Smaller Packet Sizes Keep The Internet Safe

Yesterday we wrote about the 400 gigabit per second attacks we see on our network.

One way that attackers DDoS websites is by repeatedly doing DNS lookups that have small queries, but large answers. The attackers spoof their IP address so that the DNS answers are sent to the server they are attacking, this is called a reflection attack.

Domains with DNSSEC, because of the size of some responses, are usually ripe for this type of abuse, and many DNS providers struggle to combat DNSSEC-based DDoS attacks. Just last month, Akamai published a report on attacks using DNS lookups against their DNSSEC-signed .gov domains to DDoS other domains. They say they have seen 400 of these attacks since November.

To prevent any domain on CloudFlare being abused for a DNS amplification attack in this way, we took precautions to make sure most DNS answers we send fit in a 512 byte UDP packet, even when the zone is signed with DNSSEC. To do this, we had to be creative in our DNSSEC implementation. We chose a rarely-used-for-DNSSEC signature algorithm and even deprecated a DNS record type along the way.

Elliptic Curves: Keeping It Tight

Dutch mathematician Arjen Lenstra famously talks Continue reading

Relatives of victims, law enforcement groups support FBI in iPhone unlocking case

Law enforcement groups and family members of victims of December's San Bernardino mass shooting have backed the FBI and opposed Apple in the court fight over an iPhone used by one of the shooters.Family members of the shooting victims "seek to remind all parties of the terrible crime -- an act of terrorism -- the United States must investigate to its fullest," wrote lawyers for family members of five victims and one witness to the shooting. "Ultimately, this is a situation where no stone can be left unturned."Much of the debate over the FBI's demands of Apple assistance has focused on the "potentially global ramifications" of Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym's Feb. 16 order requiring Apple to comply, but there's a law enforcement investigation to consider, the lawyers added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here