Hollywood Studios [attempt to censor] Pirate Bay Documentary

Probably not deliberate, but pretty damn inept.

Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK [the Pirate Bay documentary] by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows. The silent attacks come from multiple Hollywood sources including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate and are being sent out by multiple anti-piracy outfits. Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link to TPB-AFK on Mechodownload. Paramount did the same with a link on the Warez.ag forums. Viacom sent at least two takedown requests targeting links to the Pirate Bay documentary on Mrworldpremiere and Rapidmoviez. Finally, Lionsgate jumped in by asking Google to remove a copy of TPB-AFK from a popular Pirate Bay proxy.

(tags: funny inept hollywood lionsgate fox viacom paramount dtecnet tpb-afk piratebay piracy copyright movies google)

Flashback: How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

This is about the best tech journalism I’ve ever read on Flickr. nice one Mat Honan

(tags: gizmodo flickr acquisition mergers yahoo corporate-culture mat-honan tech journalism)

Resisting the lure of the Freeman movement | Workers Solidarity Movement

An anarchist critique of the Freeman movement from the WSM:

This has been a very brief overview of the Freeman movement that has tried to capture with broad strokes its nature and possible responses. There is room for much more work, including a more in-depth analysis of the various flaws in the approach to the law. The greatest danger however is allowing a movement to develop within anarchist circles that ignores the principle of mutual aid and implicitly promotes private ownership of resources, that by granting absolute right to individuals gives them the ability to ignore their responsibilities to the wider community and ecology that sustains them. In more traditional terms, the movement is one all about negative freedoms, ignoring positive freedom as a concept.

(tags: anarchism freeman-on-the-land politics ireland law wsm)

The Reactionary ‘Freeman-?on-?the-?land’ and a Political Fracture

Another leftie view on the Freeman movement

(tags: freeman-on-the-land politics ireland left-wing anarchism law)

memcached turns 10 years old

Well, apparently tomorrow, but close enough. Happy birthday to bradfitz’ greatest creation and its wonderful slab allocator!

(tags: birthdays code via:alex-popescu open-source history malloc memory caching memcached)

Newegg nukes “corporate troll” Alcatel in third patent appeal win this year

I am loving this. Particularly this:

At trial in East Texas Cheng took the stand to tell Newegg’s story. Alcatel-Lucent’s corporate representative, at the heart of its massive licensing campaign, couldn’t even name the technology or the patents it was suing Newegg over. “Successful defendants have their litigation managed by people who care,” said Cheng. “For me, it’s easy. I believe in Newegg, I care about Newegg. Alcatel Lucent, meanwhile, they drag out some random VP—who happens to be a decorated Navy veteran, who happens to be handsome and has a beautiful wife and kids—but the guy didn’t know what patents were being asserted. What a joke.” “Shareholders of public companies that engage in patent trolling should ask themselves if they’re really well-served by their management teams,” Cheng added. “Are they properly monetizing their R&D? Surely there are better ways to make money than to just rely on litigating patents. If I was a shareholder, I would take a hard look as to whether their management was competent.”

(tags: patents ip swpats alcatel bell-labs newegg east-texas litigation lucent)

Call me maybe: Carly Rae Jepsen and the perils of network partitions

Kyle “aphyr” Kingsbury expands on his slides demonstrating the real-world failure scenarios that arise during some kinds of partitions (specifically, the TCP-hang, no clear routing failure, network partition scenario). Great set of blog posts clarifying CAP

(tags: distributed network databases cap nosql redis mongodb postgresql riak crdt aphyr)

The $12 Gongkai Phone

Welcome to the Galapagos of Chinese “open” source. I call it “gongkai” (??). Gongkai is the transliteration of “open” as applied to “open source”. I feel it deserves a term of its own, as the phenomenon has grown beyond the so-called “shanzhai” (??) and is becoming a self-sustaining innovation ecosystem of its own. Just as the Galapagos Islands is a unique biological ecosystem evolved in the absence of continental species, gongkai is a unique innovation ecosystem evolved with little western influence, thanks to political, language, and cultural isolation. Of course, just as the Galapagos was seeded by hardy species that found their way to the islands, gongkai was also seeded by hardy ideas that came from the west. These ideas fell on the fertile minds of the Pearl River delta, took root, and are evolving. Significantly, gongkai isn’t a totally lawless free-for-all. It’s a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching. It’s very different from Western IP concepts, but I’m trying to have an open mind about it.

(tags: gongkai bunnie-huang china phone mobile hardware devices open-source)

Stability Patterns and Antipatterns [slides]

Michael “Release It!” Nygard’s slides from a recent O’Reilly event, discussing large-scale service reliability design patterns

(tags: michael-nygard design-patterns architecture systems networking reliability soa slides pdf)

Deep In The Game: Not The RTE Guide

Good interview with Alan Maguire, the satirist behind the very funny @NotTheRTEGuide on Twitter:

I’ve always been a huge fan of TV Go Home and Charlie Brooker in general and it seemed like Irish TV and culture was a good target for the kind of barbed surrealism that he does. (I’m not claiming I’m in his league or anything but he’s the main influence). I was really surprised that there hadn’t been a parody RTÉ Guide already. TV listings are 140-ish characters already and the RTÉ Guide has a kind of weird place in Irish culture where everybody knows it but nobody our age really has any idea of what’s in it anymore. We associate it with a small-c conservatism, or I did at least and I play that up occasionally with the account.

(tags: nottherteguide rte rte-guide ireland funny satire interviews)

My Philosophy on Alerting

‘based on my observations while I was a Site Reliability Engineer at Google.’ – by Rob Ewaschuk; very good, and matching the similar recommendations and best practices at Amazon for that matter

(tags: monitoring ops devops alerting alerts pager-duty via:jk)

Monitoring the Status of Your EBS Volumes

Page in the AWS docs which describes their derived metrics and how they are computed — these are visible in the AWS Management Console, and alarmable, but not viewable in the Cloudwatch UI. grr. (page-joshea!)

(tags: ebs aws monitoring metrics ops documentation cloudwatch)

Interpol filter scope creep: ASIC ordering unilateral website blocks

Bloody hell. This is stupidity of the highest order, and a canonical example of “filter creep” by a government — secret state censorship of 1200 websites due to a single investment scam site.

The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for other government agencies to unilaterally block sites they deem questionable in their own portfolios. The instrument through which the ISPs are blocking the Interpol list of sites is Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act. Under the Act, the Australian Federal Police is allowed to issue notices to telcos asking for reasonable assistance in upholding the law. [...] Tonight Senator Conroy’s office revealed that the incident that resulted in Melbourne Free University and more than a thousand other sites being blocked originated from a different source — financial regulator the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. On 22 March this year, ASIC issued a media release warning consumers about the activities of a cold-calling investment scam using the name ‘Global Capital Wealth’, which ASIC said was operating several fraudulent websites — www.globalcapitalwealth.com and www.globalcapitalaustralia.com. In its release on that date, ASIC stated: “ASIC has already blocked access to these websites.”

(tags: scams australia filtering filter-creep false-positives isps asic fraud secrecy)

Obfuscatory pie-chart from Garda penalty-points corruption report

“Twitter / gavinsblog: For sake of clarity here is helpful pie chart of the 95.4% of fixed charge notices not terminated #missingthepoint” Paging Edward Tufte: classic example of an obfuscatory pie-chart, diagramming the wrong thing misleadingly. By presenting it like this, it appears that the 95.4% of cases where fixed charge notices were issued by the guards are relevant to the discussion of the other classes; in reality, that means that 4.6% of cases, 37,000 cases, were terminated, some for good reasons, others for not, and it’s the difference between those two classes that are relevant. In my opinion, 2 separate pie charts would be better; one to show the dismissed-versus-undismissed count (which IMO could have been omitted entirely), and one to show the good-vs-not-so-good termination reason counts (which is the meat of the issue).

(tags: dataviz visualisation data obfuscation gardai police corruption penalty-points)

Berkeley DB Java Edition Architecture [PDF]

background white paper on the BDB-JE innards and design, from 2006. Still pretty accurate and good info

(tags: bdb-je java berkeley-db bdb design databases pdf white-papers trees)

one Canadian judge’s 192-page judgement eviscerating the Freeman-on-the-Land and related “Organised Pseudolegal Commercial Argument” litigants

This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant. As we shall see, while there is often a lack of homogeneity, and some individuals or groups have no name or special identity, they (by their own admission or by descriptions given by others) often fall into the following descriptions: Detaxers; Freemen or Freemen-on-the-Land; Sovereign Men or Sovereign Citizens; Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International (CERI); Moorish Law; and other labels – there is no closed list. In the absence of a better moniker, I have collectively labelled them as Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument litigants [“OPCA litigants”], to functionally define them collectively for what they literally are. These persons employ a collection of techniques and arguments promoted and sold by ‘gurus’ (as hereafter defined) to disrupt court operations and to attempt to frustrate the legal rights of governments, corporations, and individuals.   Over a decade of reported cases have proven that the individual concepts advanced by OPCA litigants are invalid. What remains is to categorize these schemes and concepts, identify global defects to simplify future response to variations of identified and invalid OPCA themes, and develop court procedures and sanctions for persons who adopt and advance these vexatious litigation strategies.   One participant in this matter [...] appears to be a sophisticated and educated person, but is also an OPCA litigant. One of the purposes of these Reasons is, through this litigant, to uncover, expose, collate, and publish the tactics employed by the OPCA community, as a part of a process to eradicate the growing abuse that these litigants direct towards the justice and legal system we otherwise enjoy in Alberta and across Canada. I will respond on a point-by-point basis to the broad spectrum of OPCA schemes, concepts, and arguments advanced in this action by [him].

(tags: via:ronanlupton law canada legal freeman opca court tax judgements)

Rusty’s API Design Manifesto

This classic came up in discussions yesterday…

In the Linux Kernel community Rusty Russell came up with a API rating scheme to help us determine if our API is sensible, or not.  It’s a rating from -10 to 10, where 10 is perfect is -10 is hell. Unfortunately there are too many examples at the wrong end of the scale.

(tags: rusty-russell quality coding kernel linux apis design code-reviews code)

Sup relaunched

hooray! Command-line gmailish goodness returns. And with a signed gem, to boot

(tags: gems ruby sup mail gmail mua)

Martin Thompson, Luke “Snabb Switch” Gorrie etc. review the C10M presentation from Schmoocon

on the mechanical-sympathy mailing list. Some really interesting discussion on handling insane quantities of TCP connections using low volumes of hardware:

This talk has some good points and I think the subject is really interesting.  I would take the suggested approach with serious caution.  For starters the Linux kernel is nowhere near as bad as it made out.  Last year I worked with a client and we scaled a single server to 1 million concurrent connections with async programming in Java and some sensible kernel tuning.  I’ve heard they have since taken this to over 5 million concurrent connections. BTW Open Onload is an open source implementation.  Writing a network stack is a serious undertaking.  In a previous life I wrote a network probe and had to reassemble TCP streams and kept getting tripped up by edge cases.  It is a great exercise in data structures and lock-free programming.  If you need very high-end performance I’d talk to the Solarflare or Mellanox guys before writing my own. There are some errors and omissions in this talk.  For example, his range of ephemeral ports is not quite right, and atomic operations are only 15 cycles on Sandy Bridge when hitting local cache.  A big issue for me is when he defined C10M he did not mention the TIME_WAIT issue with closing connections.  Creating and destroying 1 million connections per second is a major issue.  A protocol like HTTP is very broken in that the server closes the socket and therefore has to retain the TCB until the specified timeout occurs to ensure no older packet is delivered to a new socket connection.

(tags: mechanical-sympathy hardware scaling c10m tcp http scalability snabb-switch martin-thompson)

ec2-consistent-snapshot

This program creates an EBS snapshot for an Amazon EC2 EBS volume. To help ensure consistent data in the snapshot, it tries to flush and freeze the filesystem(s) first as well as flushing and locking the database, if applicable. Filesystems can be frozen during the snapshot. Prior to Linux kernel 2.6.29, XFS must be used for freezing support. While frozen, a filesystem will be consistent on disk and all writes will block. There are a number of timeouts to reduce the risk of interfering with the normal database operation while improving the chances of getting a consistent snapshot. If you have multiple EBS volumes in a RAID configuration, you can specify all of the volume ids on the command line and it will create snapshots for each while the filesystem and database are locked. Note that it is your responsibility to keep track of the resulting snapshot ids and to figure out how to put these back together when you need to restore the RAID setup.

(tags: ubuntu ec2 aws linux ebs snapshots ops tools alestic)

Measuring & Optimizing I/O Performance

Another good writeup on iostat and EBS, from Ilya Grigorik

(tags: io optimization sysadmin performance iostat ebs aws ops)

AWS forum post on interpreting iostat output for EBS

Great post from AndrewC@EBS on interpreting iostat output on EBS volumes — from 2009, but still looks reasonable enough

(tags: iostat ebs disks hardware aws ops)

Operations is Dead, but Please Don’t Replace it with DevOps

This is so damn spot on.

Functional silos (and a standalone DevOps team is a great example of one) decouple actions from responsibility. Functional silos allow people to ignore, or at least feel disconnected from, the consequences of their actions. DevOps is a cultural change that encourages, rewards and exposes people taking responsibility for what they do, and what is expected from them. As Werner Vogels from Amazon Web Services says, “you build it, you run it”. So a “DevOps team” is a risky and ultimately doomed strategy. Sure there are some technical roles, specifically related to the enablement of DevOps as an approach and these roles and tools need to be filled and built. Self service platforms, collaboration and communication systems, tool chains for testing, deployment and operations are all necessary. Sure someone needs to deliver on that stuff. But those are specific technical deliverables and not DevOps. DevOps is about people, communication and collaboration. Organizations ignore that at their peril.

(tags: devops teams work ops silos collaboration organisations)

Universal Music Group adding audible “watermarks”

including on paid-for, losslessly-compressed digital audio music files:

Why isn’t UMG’s watermark talked about more? Maybe people think the audio quality problems are due to some kind of lossy compression, as I did, and ignore it completely, or blame the streaming service/distributor. The problem here is that the UMG watermark degrades the audio to about the equivalent of a 96 kbit MP3. My guess is that if consumers were informed about what is going on, they would care. Especially those who pay full retail price for digital downloads advertised as lossless audio.

(tags: lame audio drm media music umg universal watermarks noise consumer mp3)

“Call Me Maybe: Carly Rae Jepsen and the Perils of Network Partitions”

Aphyr’s epic RICON talk, exploring distributed-database failure modes through music. and what a lot of fail there is! Bottom line: CRDTs win

(tags: crdts data-structures storage ricon apyhr failures network partitions puns slides)

Cloudera Impala 1.0: It’s Here, It’s Real, It’s Already the Standard for SQL on Hadoop

we are proud to announce the first production drop of Impala, which reflects feedback from across the user community based on multiple types of real-world workloads. Just as a refresher, the main design principle behind Impala is complete integration with the Hadoop platform (jointly utilizing a single pool of storage, metadata model, security framework, and set of system resources). This integration allows Impala users to take advantage of the time-tested cost, flexibility, and scale advantages of Hadoop for interactive SQL queries, and makes SQL a first-class Hadoop citizen alongside MapReduce and other frameworks. The net result is that all your data becomes available for interactive analysis simultaneously with all other types of processing, with no ETL delays needed.

(tags: cloudera impala sql querying etl olap hadoop analytics business-intelligence reports)

Alex Feinberg’s response to Damien Katz’ anti-Dynamoish/pro-Couchbase blog post

Insightful response, worth bookmarking. (the original post is at http://damienkatz.net/2013/05/dynamo_sure_works_hard.html ).

while you are saving on read traffic (online reads only go to the master), you are now decreasing availability (contrary to your stated goal), and increasing system complexity. You also do hurt performance by requiring all writes and reads to be serialized through a single node: unless you plan to have a leader election whenever the node fails to meet a read SLA (which is going to result a disaster — I am speaking from personal experience), you will have to accept that you’re bottlenecked by a single node. With a Dynamo-style quorum (for either reads or writes), a single straggler will not reduce whole-cluster latency. The core point of Dynamo is low latency, availability and handling of all kinds of partitions: whether clean partitions (long term single node failures), transient failures (garbage collection pauses, slow disks, network blips, etc…), or even more complex dependent failures. The reality, of course, is that availability is neither the sole, nor the principal concern of every system. It’s perfect fine to trade off availability for other goals — you just need to be aware of that trade off.

(tags: cap distributed-databases databases quorum availability scalability damien-katz alex-feinberg partitions network dynamo riak voldemort couchbase)

CAP Confusion: Problems with ‘partition tolerance’

Another good clarification about CAP which resurfaced during last week’s discussion:

So what causes partitions? Two things, really. The first is obvious – a network failure, for example due to a faulty switch, can cause the network to partition. The other is less obvious, but fits with the definition [...]: machine failures, either hard or soft. In an asynchronous network, i.e. one where processing a message could take unbounded time, it is impossible to distinguish between machine failures and lost messages. Therefore a single machine failure partitions it from the rest of the network. A correlated failure of several machines partitions them all from the network. Not being able to receive a message is the same as the network not delivering it. In the face of sufficiently many machine failures, it is still impossible to maintain availability and consistency, not because two writes may go to separate partitions, but because the failure of an entire ‘quorum’ of servers may render some recent writes unreadable.

(tags: failure scalability network partitions cap quorum distributed-databases fault-tolerance)

Big-O Algorithm Complexity Cheat Sheet

nicely done, very readable

(tags: algorithms reference cheat-sheet big-o complexity estimation coding)

Did Conroy’s AFP filter wrongly block 1,200 sites?

Looks like many Aussie network operators were legally required to block 1,200 websites (presumably, one target and 1199 false positives), in secret. Quoting http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/2013-April/017993.html : “You get a notice to block. You block or either get fined, go to jail or lose your carrier licence. It is a blunt instrument and it is a condition of being at ‘the big boys table’ i.e. you’re a carrier or a carriage service provider.”

(tags: australia law afp filtering internet blocking censorship secret eff)

Making sense out of BDB-JE fast stats

good info on the system metrics recorded by BDB-JE’s EnvironmentStats code, particularly where cache and cleaner activity are concerned. Particularly useful for Voldemort

(tags: voldemort caching bdb bdb-je storage tuning ops metrics reference)

Approximate Heavy Hitters -The SpaceSaving Algorithm

nice, readable intro to SpaceSaving (which I’ve linked to before) — a simple stream-processing cardinality top-K estimation algorithm with bounded error.

(tags: algorithms coding space-saving cardinality streams stream-processing estimation)

Darach Ennis on CEP, Stream Processing, Messaging, OOP vs Functional Architecture

good interview — lots of food for thought!

(tags: darach-ennis stream-processing messaging architecture qcon interviews erlang cep realtime rx comet events)

One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free

As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.

(tags: tor ebooks drm piracy copy-protection books)

Understanding Elastic Block Store Availability and Performance [slides]

fantastic in-depth presentation on EBS usage; lots of good advice here if you’re using EBS volumes with/without PIOPS

(tags: piops ebs performance aws ec2 ops storage amazon presentations)

Hey Judy, don’t make it bad

Github get good results using Judy arrays to replace a Ruby hash. However: the whole blog post is a bit dodgy to me. It feels like there are much better ways to fix the problem: 1. the big one: don’t do GC-heavy activity in the front-end web servers. Split that language-classification code into a separate service. Write its results to a cache and don’t re-query needlessly. 2. why isn’t this benchmarked against a C/C++ hash? it’s only 36000 entries, loaded once at startup. lookups against that should be blisteringly fast even with the basic data structures, and that would also be outside the Ruby heap so avoid the GC overhead. Feels like the use of a Judy array was a “because I want to” decision. 3. personally, I’d have preferred they spend time fixing their uptime problems…. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5639013 for more kvetching.

(tags: ruby github gc judy-arrays linguist hashes data-structures)

Kanban for MDN development

Mozilla’s experience with Kanban. We’ve had good results in Amazon, too. good intro links in this post — might start talking about it in Swrve…

(tags: kanban scheduling team agile mozilla)

Secret Bitcoin mining code added to game sparks outrage

Thunberg’s admission that [the E-Sports Entertainment Association client software] ran Bitcoin-mining software without explicit user consent is startling. Aside from potentially opening the company up to huge legal liability, the move is likely to engender distrust among some of the company’s most loyal fans. The nonchalance of some of Thunberg’s comments may only add insult to the betrayal many users are likely to feel. “But for the record, I told jag he shouldn’t be lazy and run the miner in a separate process,” he wrote in a post, referring to one of his software engineers with the screen name Jaguar, who didn’t take steps to conceal the Bitcoin miner. “Rookie move.” In the later post he wrote: “100% of the funds are going into the s14 prize pot, so at the very least your melted gpus contributed to a good cause.”

(tags: bitcoin abuse games malware esea gpus)

Gap’s application of Knockout.js and the MVVM model

Interesting, first time I’d heard of it; the Model-View-View Model pattern.

(tags: mvvm architecture javascript web ui knockout-js martin-fowler json)

Who is my TD?

very nice single-purpose site — figure out who represents any given Irish postal address

(tags: td ireland web democracy tds dail)