Skip to content

Archives

Links for 2014-01-27

  • Extending graphite’s mileage

    Ad company InMobi are using graphite heavily (albeit not as heavily as $work are), ran into the usual scaling issues, and chose to fix it in code by switching from a filesystem full of whisper files to a LevelDB per carbon-cache:

    The carbon server is now able to run without breaking a sweat even when 500K metrics per minute is being pumped into it. This has been in production since late August 2013 in every datacenter that we operate from.
    Very nice. I hope this gets merged/supported.

    (tags: graphite scalability metrics leveldb storage inmobi whisper carbon open-source)

  • BBC News – Pair jailed over abusive tweets to feminist campaigner

    When a producer from BBC Two’s Newsnight programme tracked Nimmo down after he had sent the abuse, the former call centre worker told him: “The police will do nothing, it’s only Twitter.”

    (tags: bbc bullying social-media twitter society uk trolls trolling abuse feminism cyberbullying)

  • If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox

    TorMail was a Tor-based webmail system, and apparently its drives have been imaged and seized by the FBI. More info on the Freedom Hosting seizure:

    The connection, if any, between the FBI obtaining Freedom Hosting’s data and apparently launching the malware campaign through TorMail and the other sites isn’t spelled out in the new document. The bureau could have had the cooperation of the French hosting company that Marques leased his servers from. Or it might have set up its own Tor hidden services using the private keys obtained from the seizure, which would allow it to adopt the same .onion addresses used by the original sites. The French company also hasn’t been identified. But France’s largest hosting company, OVH, announced on July 29, in the middle of the FBI’s then-secret Freedom Hosting seizure, that it would no longer allow Tor software on its servers. A spokesman for the company says he can’t comment on specific cases, and declined to say whether Freedom Hosting was a customer. “Wherever the data center is located, we conduct our activities in conformity with applicable laws, and as a hosting company, we obey search warrants or disclosure orders,” OVH spokesman Benjamin Bongoat told WIRED. “This is all we can say as we usually don’t make any comments on hot topics.”

    (tags: fbi freedom-hosting hosting tor tormail seizures ovh colo servers)

  • Sky parental controls break many JQuery-using websites

    An 11 hour outage caused by a false positive in Sky’s anti-phishing filter; all sites using the code.jquery.com CDN for JQuery would have seen errors.

    Sky still appears to be blocking code.jquery.com and all files served via the site, and more worryingly is that if you try to report the incorrect category, once signing in on the Sky website you an error page. We suspect the site was blocked due to being linked to by a properly malicious website, i.e. code.jquery.com and some javascript files were being used on a dodgy website and every domain mentioned was subsequently added to a block list.
    (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: via:fanf sky filtering internet uk anti-phishing phish jquery javascript http web fps false-positives)

  • Coders performing code reviews of scientific projects: pilot study

    ‘PLOS and Mozilla conducted a month-long pilot study in which professional developers performed code reviews on software associated with papers published in PLOS Computational Biology. While the developers felt the reviews were limited by (a) lack of familiarity with the domain and (b) lack of two-way contact with authors, the scientists appreciated the reviews, and both sides were enthusiastic about repeating the experiment. ‘ Actually sounds like it was more successful than this summary implies.

    (tags: plos mozilla code-reviews coding science computational-biology biology studies)

  • Caught with our Pantis down

    The views expressed by [the Iona Institute] – especially in relation to gay people – are very much at odds with the liberal secular society that Ireland has become. Indeed, Rory O’Neill suggested that the only time he experiences homophobia is online or at the hands of Iona and Waters. When they’re done with that, they can ask why Iona is given so much room in the media. In any other country in the world, an organisation as litigious as Iona would never be asked to participate in anything.

    (tags: homophobia ireland john-waters iona-institute politics catholicism religion libel defamation rte the-irish-times)

  • Scotch Whiskey flavour wheels

    mine’s a Smoky/Spicy/Medicinal, thanks

    (tags: scotch whiskey whisky alcohol dataviz flavour)

Comments closed