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Links for 2014-10-28

  • David Malone planning a commemoration of Dublin Mean Time next year

    Dublin had its own time zone, 25 minutes off what would become GMT, until 1916

    (tags: 1916 dublin rising time dublin-mean-time dmt gmt perfidious-albion dunsink)

  • Roshiak

    a Riak-based clone of Roshi, the CRDT server built on top of Redis. some day I’ll write up the CRDT we use on top of Voldemort in $work. Comments: https://lobste.rs/s/tim5xc

    (tags: riak roshi crdt redis storage time-series-data)

  • Vodafone UK, Verizon add mandatory device-tracking token on all web requests

    ‘Verizon Wireless is monitoring users’ mobile internet traffic, using a token slapped onto web requests, to facilitate targeted advertising even if a user has opted out. The unique identifier token header (UIDH) was launched two years ago, and has caused an uproar in tech circles after it was re-discovered Thursday by Electronic Frontier Foundation staffer Jacob Hoffman-Andrews. The Relevant Mobile Advertising program, under which the UIDH was used, allowed a restaurant to advertised to locals only or for retail websites to promote to previous visitors, according to Verizon Wireless.’

    (tags: uidh verizon vodafone privacy tracking http cookies advertising)

  • Cuckoo Filters

    ‘In many networking systems, Bloom filters are used for high-speed set membership tests. They permit a small fraction of false positive answers with very good space efficiency. However, they do not permit deletion of items from the set, and previous attempts to extend “standard” Bloom filters to support deletion all degrade either space or performance. We propose a new data structure called the cuckoo filter that can replace Bloom filters for approximate set member- ship tests. Cuckoo filters support adding and removing items dynamically while achieving even higher performance than Bloom filters. For applications that store many items and target moderately low false positive rates, cuckoo filters have lower space overhead than space-optimized Bloom filters. Our experimental results also show that cuckoo filters out-perform previous data structures that extend Bloom filters to support deletions substantially in both time and space.’

    (tags: algorithms cs coding cuckoo-filters bloom-filters sets data-structures)

  • Irish government in favour of ISDS court-evasion for multinationals

    This has _already_ been used to trump national law. As Simon McGarr noted at https://twitter.com/Tupp_Ed/statuses/526103760041680898 : ‘Philip Morris initiated a dispute under the Australia-Hong Kong Bilateral Investment Treaty to force #plainpacks repeal and compensation’. “Plain packs” anti-smoking is being bitterly fought at the moment here in Ireland. More from the US point of view: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-allowing-foreign-firms-to-sue-nations-hurts-trade-deals/2014/10/01/4b3725b0-4964-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html : ‘The Obama administration’s insistence on ISDS may please Wall Street, but it threatens to undermine some of the president’s landmark achievements in curbing pollution and fighting global warming, not to mention his commitment to a single standard of justice. It’s not worthy of the president, and he should join Europe in scrapping it.’

    (tags: isds national-law law ireland sovereignty multinationals philip-morris us-politics eu free-trade)

  • Jonathan Bergknoff: Building good docker images

    Good advice

    (tags: devops reference docker tips ops containers linux)

  • Game Day Exercises at Stripe: Learning from `kill -9`

    We’ve started running game day exercises at Stripe. During a recent game day, we tested failing over a Redis cluster by running kill -9 on its primary node, and ended up losing all data in the cluster. We were very surprised by this, but grateful to have found the problem in testing. This result and others from this exercise convinced us that game days like these are quite valuable, and we would highly recommend them for others.
    Excellent post. Game days are a great idea. Also: massive Redis clustering fail

    (tags: game-days redis testing stripe outages ops kill-9 failover)

  • The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED

    “Everybody hits the wall, generally between three and five months,” says a former YouTube content moderator I’ll call Rob. “You just think, ‘Holy shit, what am I spending my day doing? This is awful.’”

    (tags: facebook wired beheadings moderation nsfw google youtube social-media filtering porn abuse)

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