Archives

The Heartbleed Hit List: The Passwords You Need to Change Right Now

Good list

(tags: heartbleed security passwords web https ssl)

Mark McLoughlin on Heartbleed

An excellent list of aspects of the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug which need to be thought about/talked about/considered

(tags: heartbleed openssl bugs exploits security ssl tls web https)

Does the heartbleed vulnerability affect clients as severely?

‘Yes, clients are vulnerable to attack. A malicious server can use the Heartbleed vulnerability to compromise an affected client.’ Ouch.

(tags: openssl ssl security heartbleed exploits tls https)

R3: Announcing the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory-optimized instances

pricing announced, and available in most regions

(tags: aws ec2 pricing instances r3 memory)

Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions

Great new distcomp protocol work from Peter Bailis et al:

We’ve developed three new algorithms—called Read Atomic Multi-Partition (RAMP) Transactions—for ensuring atomic visibility in partitioned (sharded) databases: either all of a transaction’s updates are observed, or none are. […] How they work: RAMP transactions allow readers and writers to proceed concurrently. Operations race, but readers autonomously detect the races and repair any non-atomic reads. The write protocol ensures readers never stall waiting for writes to arrive. Why they scale: Clients can’t cause other clients to stall (via synchronization independence) and clients only have to contact the servers responsible for items in their transactions (via partition independence). As a consequence, there’s no mutual exclusion or synchronous coordination across servers. The end result: RAMP transactions outperform existing approaches across a variety of workloads, and, for a workload of 95% reads, RAMP transactions scale to over 7 million ops/second on 100 servers at less than 5% overhead.

(tags: scale synchronization databases distcomp distributed ramp transactions scalability peter-bailis protocols sharding concurrency atomic partitions)

Cambodian Rocks (MP3s)

wow, WFMU’s “Beware of the Blog” did a really good job of assembling these classic 1960s Cambodian psych mp3s, featuring Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea among others. I still love the start of Ma Pi Naok….

(tags: mp3 download music cambodia psychedelia wfmu 1960s sinn-sisamouth ros-sereysothea)