The World Is Getting Hacked. Why Don’t We Do More to Stop It? – The New York Times
Zeynep Tufekci is (as usual!) on the money with this op-ed. I strongly agree with the following:
First, companies like Microsoft should discard the idea that they can abandon people using older software. The money they made from these customers hasn’t expired; neither has their responsibility to fix defects. Besides, Microsoft is sitting on a cash hoard estimated at more than $100 billion (the result of how little tax modern corporations pay and how profitable it is to sell a dominant operating system under monopolistic dynamics with no liability for defects). At a minimum, Microsoft clearly should have provided the critical update in March to all its users, not just those paying extra. Indeed, “pay extra money to us or we will withhold critical security updates” can be seen as its own form of ransomware. In its defense, Microsoft probably could point out that its operating systems have come a long way in security since Windows XP, and it has spent a lot of money updating old software, even above industry norms. However, industry norms are lousy to horrible, and it is reasonable to expect a company with a dominant market position, that made so much money selling software that runs critical infrastructure, to do more. Microsoft should spend more of that $100 billion to help institutions and users upgrade to newer software, especially those who run essential services on it. This has to be through a system that incentivizes institutions and people to upgrade to more secure systems and does not force choosing between privacy and security. Security updates should only update security, and everything else should be optional and unbundled.
More on this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/863734133188681732(tags: security microsoft upgrades windows windows-xp zeynep-tufekci worms viruses malware updates software)
Fireside Chat with Vint Cerf & Marc Andreessen (Google Cloud Next ’17) – YouTube
In which Vint Cerf calls for regulatory oversight of software engineering. “It’s a serious issue now”
(tags: vint-cerf gcp regulation oversight politics law reliability systems)
don’t use String.intern() in Java
String.intern is the gateway to native JVM String table, and it comes with caveats: throughput, memory footprint, pause time problems will await the users. Hand-rolled deduplicators/interners to reduce memory footprint are working much more reliably, because they are working on Java side, and also can be thrown away when done. GC-assisted String deduplication does alleviate things even more. In almost every project we were taking care of, removing String.intern from the hotpaths was the very profitable performance optimization. Do not use it without thinking, okay?
(tags: strings interning java performance tips)
Moom removed from sale due to patent violation claim | Hacker News
Well this sucks. Some scumbag applied for a patent on tiling window management in 2008, and it’s been granted. I use Moom every day :(
(tags: moom patents bullshit swpat software window-management osx)
V2V and the challenge of cooperating technology
A great deal of effort and attention has gone into a mobile data technology that you may not be aware of. This is “Vehicle to Vehicle” (V2V) communication designed so that cars can send data to other cars. There is special spectrum allocated at 5.9ghz, and a protocol named DSRC, derived from wifi, exists for communications from car-to-car and also between cars and roadside transmitters in the infrastructure, known as V2I. This effort has been going on for some time, but those involved have had trouble finding a compelling application which users would pay for. Unable to find one, advocates hope that various national governments will mandate V2V radios in cars in the coming years for safety reasons. In December 2016, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation proposed just such a mandate. [….] “Connected Autonomous Vehicles — Pick 2.”
(tags: cars self-driving autonomous-vehicles v2v wireless connectivity networking security)
_Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases_
‘Amazon Aurora is a relational database service for OLTP workloads offered as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this paper, we describe the architecture of Aurora and the design considerations leading to that architecture. We believe the central constraint in high throughput data processing has moved from compute and storage to the network. Aurora brings a novel architecture to the relational database to address this constraint, most notably by pushing redo processing to a multi-tenant scale-out storage service, purpose-built for Aurora. We describe how doing so not only reduces network traffic, but also allows for fast crash recovery, failovers to replicas without loss of data, and fault-tolerant, self-healing storage. We then describe how Aurora achieves consensus on durable state across numerous storage nodes using an efficient asynchronous scheme, avoiding expensive and chatty recovery protocols. Finally, having operated Aurora as a production service for over 18 months, we share the lessons we have learnt from our customers on what modern cloud applications expect from databases.’
(tags: via:rbranson aurora aws amazon databases storage papers architecture)
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a guide for people who like travelling like a local and visiting hidden places off the beaten track. There are tips on where to rent a bike, the best bike path, the best coffee, the best craft shops, the coolest shops, the cheapest drinks, the most delicious pizza, the best izakaya, the cutest cafes, the best rooftop bar, the coolest hotels (and the cheap and cheerful hotels), the loveliest parks and soooo much more. It’s a list of all of the places I frequent, making it a local insiders guide to Tokyo. Also included in the Hello Sandwich Tokyo Guide are language essentials and travel tips. It’s the bloggers guide to Tokyo and if you’d like to visit the places seen on Hello Sandwich, then this guide is the zine for you.
(tags: shops tourism japan tokyo guidebooks)
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A script and python module to check your AWS service limits and usage, and warn when usage approaches limits. Users building out scalable services in Amazon AWS often run into AWS’ service limits – often at the least convenient time (i.e. mid-deploy or when autoscaling fails). Amazon’s Trusted Advisor can help this, but even the version that comes with Business and Enterprise support only monitors a small subset of AWS limits and only alerts weekly. awslimitchecker provides a command line script and reusable package that queries your current usage of AWS resources and compares it to limits (hard-coded AWS defaults that you can override, API-based limits where available, or data from Trusted Advisor where available), notifying you when you are approaching or at your limits.
(via This Week in AWS)