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Links for 2013-12-09

  • Cyanite

    a metric storage daemon, exposing both a carbon listener and a simple web service. Its aim is to become a simple, scalable and drop-in replacement for graphite’s backend.
    Pretty alpha for now, but definitely worth keeping an eye on to potentially replace our burgeoning Carbon fleet…

    (tags: graphite carbon cassandra storage metrics ops graphs service-metrics)

  • Twitter tech talk video: “Profiling Java In Production”

    In this talk Kaushik Srenevasan describes a new, low overhead, full-stack tool (based on the Linux perf profiler and infrastructure built into the Hotspot JVM) we’ve built at Twitter to solve the problem of dynamically profiling and tracing the behavior of applications (including managed runtimes) in production.
    Looks very interesting. Haven’t watched it yet though

    (tags: twitter tech-talks video presentations java jvm profiling testing monitoring service-metrics performance production hotspot perf)

  • Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming

    [MMOGs], the [NSA] analyst wrote, “are an opportunity!”. According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a “deconfliction” group was required to ensure they weren’t spying on, or interfering with, each other.

    (tags: spies spying games mmog online surveillance absurd east-germany funny warcraft)

  • Ryan Lizza: Why Won’t Obama Rein in the N.S.A.? : The New Yorker

    Fantastic wrap-up of the story so far on the pervasive global surveillance story.

    The history of the intelligence community, though, reveals a willingness to violate the spirit and the letter of the law, even with oversight. What’s more, the benefits of the domestic-surveillance programs remain unclear. Wyden contends that the N.S.A. could find other ways to get the information it says it needs. Even Olsen, when pressed, suggested that the N.S.A. could make do without the bulk-collection program. “In some cases, it’s a bit of an insurance policy,” he told me. “It’s a way to do what we otherwise could do, but do it a little bit more quickly.” In recent years, Americans have become accustomed to the idea of advertisers gathering wide swaths of information about their private transactions. The N.S.A.’s collecting of data looks a lot like what Facebook does, but it is fundamentally different. It inverts the crucial legal principle of probable cause: the government may not seize or inspect private property or information without evidence of a crime. The N.S.A. contends that it needs haystacks in order to find the terrorist needle. Its definition of a haystack is expanding; there are indications that, under the auspices of the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act, the intelligence community is now trying to assemble databases of financial transactions and cell-phone location information. Feinstein maintains that data collection is not surveillance. But it is no longer clear if there is a distinction.

    (tags: nsa gchq surveillance spying privacy dianne-feinstein new-yorker journalism long-reads us-politics probable-cause)

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