Layered Glass Table Concept Creates a Cross-Section of the Ocean
beautiful stuff — and a snip at only UKP 5,800 ex VAT. it’d make a good DIY project though ;)
(tags: art tables glass layering 3d cross-sections water ocean sea mapping cartography layers this-is-colossal design furniture)
Two traps in iostat: %util and svctm
Marc Brooker:
As a measure of general IO busyness %util is fairly handy, but as an indication of how much the system is doing compared to what it can do, it’s terrible. Iostat’s svctm has even fewer redeeming strengths. It’s just extremely misleading for most modern storage systems and workloads. Both of these fields are likely to mislead more than inform on modern SSD-based storage systems, and their use should be treated with extreme care.
(tags: ioutil iostat svctm ops ssd disks hardware metrics stats linux)
New AWS Web Services region: eu-central-1 (soon)
Iiiinteresting. Sounds like new anti-NSA-snooping privacy laws will be driving a lot of new mini-regions in AWS. Hope Amazon have their new-region-standup process a little more streamlined by now than when I was there ;)
How A Spam Newsletter Caused a Bank Run in Bulgaria
According to the Bulgarian National Security Agency (see here, for a reporting in English), an investment company that “built a network of associated companies for marketing services” that was used to diffuse panic by means of an alert, uncomfortably titled “Information Bulletin of on the Risk of Deposits in Bulgarian Banks”. The “bulletin” claimed – Bloomberg reports – KTB was undergoing a liquidity shortage. The message apparently also said that the government deposit guarantee fund was under-capitalised to meet possible repayments, that banks could go bankrupt and that the peg of the currency with the euro could be broken. Allegedly, the alert was diffused by text, email and even Facebook messages, thus ensuring a very widespread outreach. In a country that in 1997 underwent a very serious banking crisis featuring all these characteristics – whose memory is still fresh – this was enough to spur panic.
(tags: spam banking bulgaria banks euro panic facebook social-media)
New Russian Law To Forbid Storing Russians’ Data Outside the Country – Slashdot
On Friday Russia’s parliament passed a law “which bans online businesses from storing personal data of Russian citizens on servers located abroad[.] … According to ITAR-TASS, the changes to existing legislation will come into effect in September 2016, and apply to email services, social networks and search engines, including the likes of Facebook and Google. Domain names or net addresses not complying with regulations will be put on a blacklist maintained by Roskomnadzor (the Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications), the organisation which already has the powers to take down websites suspected of copyright infringement without a court order. In the case of non-compliance, Roskomnadzor will be able to impose ‘sanctions,’ and even instruct local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to cut off access to the offending resource.”
(tags: russia privacy nsa censorship protectionism internet web)