ramblings about spam, scalability, software development, the web

Parallelizing S3 Workloads with s5cmd

nice parallel download/upload tool for S3, developed by Peak Games, open source, in Go

(tags: golang go s5cmd open-source tools cli s3 aws)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics Tracked People By Their Mobile Device Data.

The ABS claims population estimates have a “major data gap” and so they’ve been a busy bee figuring out a way to track crowd movement. Their solution? Mobile device user data. “…with its near-complete coverage of the population, mobile device data is now seen as a feasible way to estimate temporary populations,” states a 2017 conference extract for a talk by ABS Demographer Andrew Howe. While the “Estimated Resident Population” (ERP) is Australia’s official population measure, the ABS felt the pre-existing data wasn’t ‘granular’ enough. What the ABS really wanted to know was where you’re moving, hour by hour, through the CBD, educational hubs, tourist areas. Howe’s ABS pilot study of mobile device user data creates population estimates with the help of a trial engagement with an unnamed telco company. The data includes age and sex breakdowns. The study ran between the 18th April to 1st May 2016. [….] Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Justin Warren also pointed out that while there are beneficial uses for this kind of information, “…the ABS should be treading much more carefully than it is. The ABS damaged its reputation with its bungled management of the 2016 Census, and with its failure to properly consult with civil society about its decision to retain names and addresses. Now we discover that the ABS is running secret tracking experiments on the population?” “Even if the ABS’ motives are benign, this behaviour?—?making ethically dubious decisions without consulting the public it is experimenting on?—?continues to damage the once stellar reputation of the ABS.” “This kind of population tracking has a dark history. During World War II, the US Census Bureau used this kind of tracking information to round up Japanese-Americans for internment. Census data was used extensively by Nazi Germany to target specific groups of people. The ABS should be acutely aware of these historical abuses, and the current tensions within society that mirror those earlier, dark days all too closely.”

(tags: abs australia tracking location-data privacy data-privacy mobile)

Use the GDPR to find who has advertised to you on Facebook, and get them to delete your details

Sometimes you get ads on Facebook and you are just not interested in what they’re selling. This is a way to find out who has uploaded your email address into facebook to target ads at you, and then- if you’re in the EU- how to use the new General Data Protection Regulation to get those advertisers to delete you from their system.

(tags: gdpr facebook privacy ads data-privacy eu)

Debugging Stuck Ruby Processes — What to do Before You Kill -9

good tips on using gdb to gather backtraces (via Louise)

(tags: debugging gdb ruby linux unix threads ops)

Palantir Knows Everything About You

This is so fucking dystopian:

Operation Laser has made L.A. cops more surgical — and, according to community activists, unrelenting. Once targets are enmeshed in a [Palantir] spidergram, they’re stuck. Manuel Rios, 22, lives in the back of his grandmother’s house at the top of a hill in East L.A., in the heart of the city’s gang area. […] He grew up surrounded by friends who joined Eastside 18, the local affiliate of the 18th Street gang, one of the largest criminal syndicates in Southern California. Rios says he was never “jumped in”—initiated into 18. He spent years addicted to crystal meth and was once arrested for possession of a handgun and sentenced to probation. But except for a stint in county jail for a burglary arrest inside a city rec center, he’s avoided further trouble and says he kicked his meth habit last year. In 2016, Rios was sitting in a parked car with an Eastside 18 friend when a police car pulled up. His buddy ran, pursued by the cops, but Rios stayed put. “Why should I run? I’m not a gang member,” he says over steak and eggs at the IHOP near his home. The police returned and handcuffed him. One of them took his picture with a cellphone. “Welcome to the gang database!” the officer said. Since then he’s been stopped more than a dozen times, he says, and told that if he doesn’t like it he should move. He has nowhere to go. His girlfriend just had a baby girl, and he wants to be around for them. “They say you’re in the system, you can’t lie to us,” he says. “I tell them, ‘How can I be in the hood if I haven’t got jumped in? Can’t you guys tell people who bang and who don’t?’ They go by their facts, not the real facts.” The police, on autopilot with Palantir, are driving Rios toward his gang friends, not away from them, worries Mariella Saba, a neighbor and community organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities like East L.A. are algorithmically scraped for pre-crime suspects, data is destiny, says Saba. “These are systemic processes. When people are constantly harassed in a gang context, it pushes them to join. They internalize being told they’re bad.”

(tags: palantir surveillance privacy precrime spidergrams future la gangs justice algorithms data-protection data-privacy policing harrassment)

_Building a Bw-Tree Takes More Than Just Buzz Words_, SIGMOD 2018

‘An account of our disappointing journey to build a open-source lock-free Bw-Tree for the Peloton DBMS.’ ‘In 2013, Microsoft Research proposed the Bw-Tree (humorously termed the “Buzz Word Tree”), a lock-free index that provides high throughput for transactional database workloads in SQL Server’s Hekaton engine. The Bw-Tree avoids locks by appending delta record to tree nodes and using an indirection layer that allows it to atomically update physical pointers using compare-and-swap (CaS). Correctly implementing this techniques requires careful attention to detail. Unfortunately, the Bw-Tree papers from Microsoft are missing important details and the source code has not been released. This paper has two contributions: First, it is the missing guide for how to build a lock-free Bw-Tree. We clarify missing points in Microsoft’s original design documents and then present techniques to improve the index’s performance. Although our focus here is on the Bw-Tree, many of our methods apply more broadly to designing and implementing future lock-free in-memory data structures. Our experimental evaluation shows that our optimized variant achieves 1.1–2.5× better performance than the original Microsoft proposal for highly concurrent workloads. Second, our evaluation shows that despite our improvements, the Bw-Tree still does not perform as well as other concurrent data structures that use locks.’ Finally: https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/986647389820747776 : ‘Our results show that @ViktorLeis’s ART index and @xexd’s MassTree and a non-fancy B+Tree are currently the best for in-memory workloads. Skip Lists are always terrible.’

(tags: skip-lists algorithms data-structures storage bw-trees mass-trees benchmarks performance multithreading lock-free locking trees)

Securing wireless neurostimulators

The latest generation of such devices come with remote monitoring and reprogramming capabilities, via an external device programmer. The manufacturers seem to have relied on security through obscurity (when will we ever learn!) with the very predictable result that the interface turns out not be secure at all. So we end up with a hackable device connected directly to someone’s brain.

(tags: security brain health medical devices iot exploits neurostimulators)

fedora – Should I disable accounts-daemon? – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

tldr: yes

(tags: accounts-daemon ubuntu debian gnome d-bus ops)

A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook’s new GDPR privacy changes | TechCrunch

Overall, it seems like Facebook is complying with the letter of GDPR law, but with questionable spirit. Sure, privacy is boring to a lot of people. Too little info and they feel confused and scared. Too many choices and screens and they feel overwhelmed and annoyed. Facebook struck the right balance in some places here. But the subtly pushy designs seem intended to steer people away from changing their defaults in ways that could hamper Facebook’s mission and business.

(tags: gdpr design facebook privacy data-protection data-privacy social-networking eu law)

Best Practices for DynamoDB

Amazon have updated this architectural tips doc for DynamoDB users — good reference

(tags: dynamodb nosql aws storage databases design coding)

“Tweeps! What’s the craziest infra incident you worked on at Twitter”

great thread of Twitter outages and production incidents. I would love to hear more details about these, I love hearing about other people’s outages ;) Even reading “over a month of cleanup and some permanent data loss” has me sweating….

(tags: infrastructure engineering twitter ops outages production)

Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles

Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug. The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”

(tags: plastic recycling enzymes science mutants pet bottles green)

“Facebook will implement a part of their transparency plan”

The Transparent Referendum Initiative writes:

Big News – Facebook will implement a part of their transparency plan – the ability to see the ads that a page has paid for- IN IRELAND FROM 25th. A positive first step. This will help us build out our database, as we wait for a platform fed offline list to be implemented. #8thRef

(tags: facebook ads transparency ireland repealthe8th referenda voting)

How to report graphic abortion imagery to the gardai under Irish law

I tried to report ICBR graphic abortion imagery to the Gardai today and met a lot of resistance. The following thread gives an account of what happened and how someone can effectively report this imagery. 1/x At 2pm on Friday the 13th of April I noticed the presence of ICBR graphic abortion imagery being displayed outside the Nassau street entrance of Trinity. I called Kevin Street Garda Station in order to make a complaint under Section 7 of the Public Order Act 1994 2/x I was told that the Gardai had been instructed by their superiors to not intervene with such imagery and that this direction had come from the Refendum Commission itself. I then called the Refendum Commission in order to query this, as they’d never been involved previously. 3/x A representative from the commission informed me that no such direction had been given to the Gardai as it is not in the commission’s remit to influence such imagery. The representative told me that they would contact with Kevin Street Station about this miscommunication. 4/x I then rang Kevin Street Station again to inform them of what I had been told by the Refendum Commission. I was then told that a complaint had to be made in person to either a Garda on the scene or to a local station (Trinity would be Pearse Street), which is understandable. 5/x I informed the Gardai of a similar experience in Dundrum in which the local station had dispatched officers to move along those displaying the imagery to prevent a breach of the peace without a complaint being made in person. 6/x I was finally told that Pearse Street Station would be contacted to have an available car dispatched to Trinity. 8/x TLDR: If you see this imagery, report it under Section 7. If you are told that the Gardai cannot intervene, let them know that other stations have before. If they say they have been directed by the Referendum Commission, let them know there is no such directive on record. 9/x I hope this miscommunication can be cleared up and that both @gardainfo and @RefCom_ie end up on the same page, so that Gardai can continue to do their jobs effectively and respond to public complaints of breach of the peace. 10/10

(tags: twitter threads abortion propaganda gardai law ireland public-order-act)

Thomas Mayne (politician) – Wikipedia

An illustrious ancestor, apparently! ‘Thomas Mayne (1832–1915) was an Irish Parliamentary Party politician. He was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Tipperary at a by-election in 1883,[1] and held the seat until the constituency was divided at the 1885 general election. He was then elected for the new Mid division of Tipperary,[2] and held that seat until he resigned in 1890 by becoming Steward of the Manor of Northstead.[3]’ He was known for helping Charles Stewart Parnell in a sticky situation — from http://www.online-literature.com/elbert-hubbard/journeys-vol-thirteen/6/ : ‘About six months after this, London was convulsed with laughter at a joke too good to keep: One Captain O’Shea [Kitty O’Shea’s husband] had challenged Charles Parnell, the Irish Leader, to a duel. Parnell accepted the challenge, but the fight was off, because Thomas Mayne had gone to O’Shea and told him he “would kick him the length of Rotten Row if he tried to harm or even opened his Galway yawp about Parnell.”‘

(tags: parnell thomas-mayne ancestors history ireland nationalism mps 1800s 19th-century kitty-oshea)

A Taxonomy of Tech Debt | Riot Games Engineering

Very sensible way to group/classify tech debt work — we did something similar in Swrve internally at one point, but this is much more evolved

(tags: engineering software coding)

Dodgy history of the firm behind “coal power plant reopening to mine blockchain”

Here’s the breathless CNet article: https://www.cnet.com/news/australian-coal-power-plant-reopened-blockchain-bitcoin-applications/ , but it seems Hunter Energy and IOT Group have quite a history going by this Twitter thread

(tags: twitter companies legal cnet blockchain bitcoin power coal fossil-fuels australia iot-group hunter-energy)

How to talk to your children about abortion care in the run-up to the referendum

She pointed out one of the “baby” posters the other day when we were in the car and passed one. I said “Actually that’s a baby seed but the people who paid a lot of money for those posters made it look like a baby on purpose, because they think everyone who has a baby seed should have to grow it into a baby whether they wanted to or not. And that I think that’s telling lies and shouldn’t be allowed.”

(tags: abortion pro-choice kids children education childbirth savita propaganda repealthe8th parenting)

Uses This / Leonard Lin

lhl describes the stuff he uses, day to day. Lots of travel gear, drones, Linux and a surprising lack of Macs

(tags: travel shopping hardware gear uses-this lhl drones vr linux vive chromebook tips)

#Repealthe8th | Are the Irish Media Up To The Job?

For years we were subject to speculation and debate about the emergence of new party in Irish politics. Endless coverage for Lucinda Creighton, Michael McDowell and whoever else. All the while, the most incredibly vibrant social movement touching every county in Ireland has emerged and the majority of journalists are unable to write about it. Media comment has concerned itself not so much with the issues but with grave concern that this is happening outside perceived boundaries of respectable politics. This is ordinary people getting together and putting a most unspeakable issue on the agenda and soon to vote – in spite of the Normal Rules. It is not just that regime journalists live in a bubble or don’t care to inform themselves. They genuinely do not understand how this campaign has played out. It is beyond their entire conception. This is what happens when your idea of politics only extends to the ritual of posters on lamp posts.

(tags: media ireland politics political-correspondents oireachtas-retort analysis society marref repealthe8th)

Gravis McElroy on Twitter: “The thing that really kills me about the silicon valley hypercapitalist hell spiral….”

Epic shouty thread about modern Silicon Valley software products.

We know that no company, regardless of size, can be trusted with this information. We KNOW it will not stay private, our photos of our partners genitals and tax documents will become public either deliberately or accidentally. We know that any company that tries to buck this trend can’t be trusted, and even if they are completely, absolutely transparent, it doesn’t matter because we will wake up one day to discover they were purchased at 2 AM and the data transfer /already started/ We represent billions in revenue but they hold our info in escrow and that means we don’t have enough money to buy their loyalty, because a business considers business money more real than person money.

(tags: money funding capitalism silicon-valley internet web google facebook banks banking)

The American Chopper meme, explained – Vox

“Maybe we should have been blogging in dialectics all along”

(tags: memes american-chopper dialectics academia discussion plato dialogue)

If iPads were meant for kids

A long list of the misfeatures that IOS/Android devices have regarding child use. 100% agreed with this

(tags: ios ipad iphone parenting devices kids android youtube)

A Closer Look at Experian Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Durham Police

‘UK police bought profiling data for their artificial intelligence (AI) system, deciding whether to hold suspects in custody, from … Experian.’ ‘The AI tool uses 34 data categories including the offender’s criminal history, combined with their age, gender and two types of residential postcode. The use of postcode data is problematic in predictive software of this kind as it carries a risk of perpetuating bias towards areas marked by community deprivation.’

(tags: experian marketing credit-score data policing uk durham ai statistics crime hart)

lemire/JavaFastPFOR: A simple integer compression library in Java

a library to compress and uncompress arrays of integers very fast. The assumption is that most (but not all) values in your array use much less than 32 bits, or that the gaps between the integers use much less than 32 bits. These sort of arrays often come up when using differential coding in databases and information retrieval (e.g., in inverted indexes or column stores). Please note that random integers are not compressible, by this library or by any other means. If you ever had the means of systematically compressing random integers, you could compress any data source to nothing, by recursive application of your technique. This library can decompress integers at a rate of over 1.2 billions per second (4.5 GB/s). It is significantly faster than generic codecs (such as Snappy, LZ4 and so on) when compressing arrays of integers. The library is used in LinkedIn Pinot, a realtime distributed OLAP datastore. Part of this library has been integrated in Parquet (http://parquet.io/). A modified version of the library is included in the search engine Terrier (http://terrier.org/). This libary is used by ClueWeb Tools (https://github.com/lintool/clueweb). It is also used by Apache NiFi.

(tags: compression java pfor encoding integers algorithms storage)

Austerity is an Algorithm

Fucking hell, things sound grim Down Under:

Things changed in December 2016, when the government announced that the system had undergone full automation. Humans would no longer investigate anomalies in earnings. Instead, debt notices would be automatically generated when inconsistencies were detected. The government’s rationale for automating the process was telling. “Our aim is to ensure that people get what they are entitled to—no more and no less,” read the press release. “And to crack down hard when people deliberately defraud the system.” The result was a disaster. I’ve had friends who’ve received an innocuous email urging them to check their MyGov account—an online portal available to Australian citizens with an internet connection to access a variety of government services—only to log in and find they’re hundreds or thousands of dollars in arrears, supposedly because they didn’t accurately report their income. Some received threats from private debt collectors, who told them their wages would be seized if they didn’t submit to a payment plan. Those who wanted to contest their debts had to lodge a formal complaint, and were subjected to hours of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major before they could talk to a case worker. Others tried taking their concerns directly to the Centrelink agency on Twitter, where they were directed to calling Lifeline, a 24-hour hotline for crisis support and suicide prevention. At the end of 2015, my friend Chloe received a notice claiming she owed $20,000 to the government. She was told that she had reported her income incorrectly while on Youth Allowance, which provides financial assistance to certain categories of young people. The figure was shocking and, like others in her position, she grew suspicious. She decided to contest the debt: she contacted all of her previous employers so she could gather pay slips, and scanned them into the MyGov app. “I gave them all of my information to prove that there was no way I owed them $20,000,” she says. The bean counters were unmoved. They maintained that Chloe had reported her after-tax income instead of her before-tax income. As a result, they increased the amount she owed to $30,000. She agreed to a payment plan, which will see her pay off the debt in fortnightly installments of $50 over the course of two decades. “I even looked into bankruptcy because I was so stressed by it,” she says. “All I could think about was the Centrelink debt, and once they upped it to 30k, I was so ashamed and sad and miserable,” she says.

(tags: austerity algorithms automation dystopia australia government debt-collectors robo-debt dole benefit grim-meathook-future)

The Irish Border’s Ladybird How It Works book on The Technological Solution

amazing

(tags: ladybird parody funny ireland politics northern-ireland brexit)

Mythology about security…

A valuable history lesson from Jim Gettys:

Government export controls crippled Internet security and the design of Internet protocols from the very beginning: we continue to pay the price to this day.  Getting security right is really, really hard, and current efforts towards “back doors”, or other access is misguided. We haven’t even recovered from the previous rounds of government regulations, which has caused excessive complexity in an already difficult problem and many serious security problems. Let us not repeat this mistake…

(tags: security crypto export-control jim-gettys x11 history x-windows mit athena kerberos)

Meet the people who’ve transformed Dublin’s streets into a colourful city-wide gallery – Independent.ie

great article about the Dublin Canvas project — great success

(tags: dublin painting street-art art)

plugin EVs outsell ICE-driven cars in Norway

56% of cars registered in March 2018 in Norway were plugin EVs rather than fossil-fuel burning ICE vehicles, with Nissan Leafs well in first place

(tags: evs pevs nissan cars driving norway green ev)

Another reason why your Docker containers may be slow

TL;DR: fadvise() is a bottleneck on Linux machines running many containers

(tags: linux fadvise filesystems performance docker containers ops)

Online mattress-in-a-box brands: Why are there so many? – Curbed

“People ask me what it takes to get into this space,” said Bryan Murphy, founder and president of Tomorrow Sleep. “If you have a [Google] AdWords account [to buy digital ads] and you know a subcontractor, you can sell a mattress online.”

(tags: mattresses business economics retail adwords online)

tomnomnom/gron

‘Make JSON greppable!’

(tags: json gron grep cli tools data hacking golang)

What worries me about AI – François Chollet – Medium

One path leads to a place that really scares me. The other leads to a more humane future. There’s still time to take the better one. If you work on these technologies, keep this in mind. You may not have evil intentions. You may simply not care. You may simply value your RSUs more than our shared future. But whether or not you care, because you have a hand in shaping the infrastructure of the digital world, your choices affect us all. And you may eventually be held responsible for them.

(tags: ai facebook newsfeed technology future silicon-valley google)

Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin – The Register

“As a result of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, a holder of a domain name does no longer fulfil the general eligibility criteria… the Registry for .eu will be entitled to revoke such domain name on its own initiative and without submitting the dispute to any extrajudicial settlement of conflicts.”

(tags: brexit domains dot-eu eu uk dns the-register)

Dalzells of Markethill

an Armagh-based home appliance retail shop, apparently doing good deals and with free delivery to Dublin. recommended by Karlin Lillington: “Superb prices, will do multi-purchase deals, FREE delivery to Meath/Louth/Dublin & bend over backwards to offer service & advice”

(tags: via:karlin armagh shopping appliances kitchen home import tips)

Earth’s Wonders Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before – Planet Stories – Medium

wonderful oblique views from space — these are fantastic (via Kokogiak)

(tags: via:kokogiak pics photos satellite mapping earth space wonders oblique)

rr: lightweight recording & deterministic debugging

aspires to be your primary C/C++ debugging tool for Linux, replacing — well, enhancing — gdb. You record a failure once, then debug the recording, deterministically, as many times as you want. The same execution is replayed every time. rr also provides efficient reverse execution under gdb. Set breakpoints and data watchpoints and quickly reverse-execute to where they were hit.

(tags: debug gdb mozilla debugging coding cli c++ c)

Timeline behind the #CopOnComrades controversy

A very exhaustive timeline of the online defence of feminism against a few left-wing men in Ireland, courtesy of Andrew Flood.

(tags: coponcomrades left-wing politics ireland twitter facebook irish-times)

How Good Is Spotify’s Audio Quality? · Baron Schwartz’s Website

Various streaming services (Spotify) use lossy formats (Ogg Vorbis); various audio-casting devices (Chromecast) use other lossy formats (AAC). Crappy audio quality issues ensue.

(tags: chromecast ogg-vorbis aac audio lossy-encoding compression noise fail spotify)

Forget Facebook, Russian agents have been pretending to be furries on Tumblr

whaaat the fuck

(tags: tumblr russia spies fake-news furries yiffing omgwtf)

‘Stop hosting GDC in SF’ twitter thread

Emre Deniz: ‘My GDC feedback was simple: Stop hosting it in SF. I’ll be going back for tourist stuff but for the conference it needs to go. SF is a dangerous city and America is not welcome to non western developers. The city hates us being there, we are worried being there, move it.’

(tags: san-francisco us safety gdc conferences travel)

Examine.com

Scientific review of nutritional supplements and vitamins, rounding up hundreds of papers and weighting them based on the level of evidence provided

(tags: health food nutrition vitamins supplements science medicine review vitamin)

Amazon DynamoDB Adds Support for Continuous Backups and Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR)

excellent! This is a much-needed feature

(tags: dynamodb storage databases aws ops architecture recovery)

Colm MacCárthaigh on TLS 1.3 and the risks of 0-RTT

here’s my advice: if you see a server supporting 0-RTT and that server doesn’t give you an iron-clad guarantee that when the key is used, it’s deleted, and that your EARLY CONVERSATION can’t be repeated … don’t use it.

(tags: colmmacc tls security ssl 0rtt risks networking crypto)

What’s in your migraine kit?

Good post on workarounds/pain relief/migraine-abortive treatments from the /r/migraine subreddit. Some of the things I’ve found helpful (ice-cold Coke, headache stick, and of course triptans), and I few I haven’t tried yet, so may give them a try. God damn migraines :(

(tags: migraine headaches medicine health pain reddit tips)

Brad Templeton’s commentary on the Uber robocar killing a pedestrian

At this point, it does seem as though a wrongful death lawsuit might emerge from the family of the victim. The fame for the lawyer will cause pro bono representation to appear, and the deep pockets of Uber will certainly be attractive. I recommend Uber immediately offer a settlement the courts would consider generous. And tell us more information about what really happened. And, if it’s as surmised, to get their act together. The hard truth is, that if Uber’s vehicle is unable to detect a pedestrian like this in time to stop, Uber has no business testing at 40mph on a road like this. Certainly not with an inattentive solo safety driver.

Arena

Film by Páraic McGloughlin A brief look at the earth from above, based on the shapes we make, the game of life, our playing ground – Arena. Created using Google Earth imagery. Pearse McGloughlin and I collaborated on the audio resulting in something between music and a soundtrack. Audio mastered by TJ LippleHear

awslabs/awscli-aliases

The AWS CLI tool supports aliases, a la git, so you can do things like “aws whoami” aliased to “aws sts get-caller-identity”.

The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

‘Part of the NSA’s Bitcoin access, codenamed MONKEYROCKET, involved essentially tricking targets into using privacy software (a VPN app?) that was actually feeding information directly to the agency.’

HTTP/2 Test

‘A simple HTTP/2.0 test tool’

SXSW 2018: A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System – IEEE Spectrum

Author Brian Dear on how these terminals were designed for coursework, but students preferred to chat and play games […] “Out of the top 10 programs on PLATO running any day, most were games,” Dear says. “They used more CPU time than anything else.” In one popular game called Empire, players blast each other’s spaceships with phasers and torpedoes in order to take over planets.

Another helpful feature that no longer exists was called Term Comment. It allowed users to leave feedback for developers and programmers at any place within a program where they spotted a typo or had trouble completing a task. To do this, the user would simply open a comment box and leave a note right there on the screen. Term Comment would append the comment to the user’s place in the program so that the recipient could easily navigate to it and clearly see the problem, instead of trying to recreate it from scratch on their own system. “That was immensely useful for developers,” Dear says. “If you were doing QA on software, you could quickly comment, and it would track exactly where the user left this comment. We never really got this on the Web, and it’s such a shame that we didn’t.”

(tags: plato computing history chat empire gaming code-review coding brian-dear)

Ten Reasons Why I Don’t Like Golang

When I first started programming in Go, my summary of it was, “The good things are great and the bad things are weird and I can live with them.” After another three years and a few large projects in Go, I no longer like the language and wouldn’t use it for a new project. Here are 10 reasons why, in no particular order.

(tags: golang go coding languages programming gripes)

A quantitive analysis of the impact of arbitrary blockchain content on Bitcoin

‘People put all sorts of things into the Bitcoin blockchain – some of it objectionable, some of it illegal. Now what?’

(tags: blockchain bitcoin ledger immutability internet law crime papers)

Cameras as Traffic Cops – Hacker Noon

Guy trains model on NYC traffic camera video to detect blocked bike lanes and bus stops. Estimates “the number of tickets being given represents less than .0001% of infractions”. (via lemonodor)

(tags: via:lemonodor future tickets traffic nyc cameras surveillance bike-lanes bus-stops traffic-law)

Ken Foxe’s Beginner’s Guide to FOI

This guide is designed to be read by members of the public or journalists looking to dip their toes into the world of Freedom of Information in Ireland. It is not designed to be an authoritative guide to FOI, a history book, or an academic text … it is simply a useful introduction to the first steps, the language, and the things you need to know before you start.

(tags: foia foi government ireland ken-foxe)

Apache Airflow at Pandora – Algorithm and Blues

sounds like they are pretty into Airflow

(tags: airflow python apache pandora open-source scheduling dags)

Who Targets Me

Microtargeting. Misinformation. Psychographic profiling. Install Who Targets Me [a Chrome plugin] to find out who’s trying to win your vote – and how they’re doing it.

(tags: ads advertising chrome extensions microtargeting politics facebook)

Interesting Twitter thread on email UI design, vs Slack

“When redesigning Outlook, we found two basic groups of users: pilers and filers. Pilers kept a single, ever-expanding list of mail in their Inbox and then worked it down to “inbox zero.” Filers wrote rules or manually filed mail into folders, creating an organizational system. Filers rely on their bespoke, highly customized knowledge of where things go in their email system, much like you might organize your kitchen in a way that makes sense to you. You know where the strainer or little corn-cob-holders go, and no one else does (or needs to.) Pilers rely on search to find things in their huge amassed pile. We moved Outlook from the fundamental organization unit of “message” to “conversation” (or “thread”) so that when pilers found mail via search, messages would return with the context of the surrounding conversation. Both pilers and filers have one key thing in common: their systems require an affirmative, discrete action to take a mail out of their list. Filers file to a folder when done with a message, and pilers archive/delete. This turned out to be essential for people to feel in control.”

(tags: mail ux ui pilers-and-filers filepile email slack outlook)

7% of Scott Kelly’s Genes Changed After a Year in Space – Universe Today

The study took into account possible genomic and cognitive changes between the two [twin] brothers. These findings were recently clarified by NASA, which indicated that 93% of Scott Kelly’s genes returned to normal after he returned to Earth while the remaining 7% points were missing. These were attributed to “longer-term changes in genes related to his immune system, DNA repair, bone formation networks, hypoxia, and hypercapnia.” In other words, in addition to the well-documented effects of microgravity – such as muscle atrophy, bone density loss and loss of eyesight – Scott Kelly also experienced health effect caused by a deficiency in the amount of oxygen that was able to make it to his tissues, an excess of CO2 in his tissues, and long-term effects in how his body is able to maintain and repair itself.

(tags: nasa space iss spaceflight scott-kelly zero-gravity future microgravity health via:elliot)

Iterating over hash sets quickly in Java

Interesting datum:

My numbers are clear: in my tests, it is three times faster to sum up the values in a LinkedHashSet [than a HashSet].

(tags: performance java locality memory cache-friendly data-structures hashsets linkedhashsets sets)

Charging the LEAF | Speak EV – Electric Car Forums

Excellent reference on charge times and connection types for the Nissan Leaf EV

(tags: nissan leaf ev cars charging nissan-leaf)

YouTube, the Great Radicalizer – The New York Times

It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

(tags: youtube culture politics radicalization crazy machine-learning google zeynep-tufekci)

BAD TRAFFIC: Sandvine’s PacketLogic Devices Used to Deploy Government Spyware in Turkey and Redirect Egyptian Users to Affiliate Ads?

This report describes our investigation into the apparent use of Sandvine/Procera Networks Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to deliver nation-state malware in Turkey and indirectly into Syria, and to covertly raise money through affiliate ads and cryptocurrency mining in Egypt. 

(tags: egypt espionage infrastructure turkey syria procera dpi malware hacking sandvine)

The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex

Overshadowed by barbecue in its home state, Tex-Mex is the most important, least understood regional cuisine in America

(tags: cuisine food tex-mex mexican texas barbecue)

The Great Igloos of Storm Emma – YouTube

in a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm, it appears the young Irish male’s mind turns to (checks notes) building an igloo and having a party in it

(tags: igloos funny ireland storm-emma snow wtf humans-of-the-sesh)

Git, complicated? Of course not! Commits map to isomorphic contours in source-code phase space

The inspiration for the classic tweet.

it’s simplest to think of the state of your repository as a point in a high-dimensional ‘code-space’,  in which branches are represented as n-dimensional membranes, mapping the spatial loci of successive commits onto the projected manifold of each cloned repository

(tags: git incomprehensible funny jargon topology dvcs)

From toilets to barbershops, Ireland has become visionaries in the igloo business overnight | JOE.ie

Igloos and bread are having a bit of a moment during Storm Emma

(tags: storms storm-emma funny igloos ireland)

how to deal with obnoxious political ads on Facebook

tl;dr: hide or report the ads. Both will drive up the cost for the advertiser and limit their reach

(tags: ads facebook social-media reporting antichoice repeal-the-8th)

Yes, bacon really is killing us – The Guardian Long Read

Nooooo!

Since we eat with our eyes, the main way we judge the quality of cured meats is pinkness. Yet it is this very colour that we should be suspicious of, as the French journalist Guillaume Coudray explains in a book published in France last year called Cochonneries, a word that means both “piggeries” and “rubbish” or “junk food”. The subtitle is “How Charcuterie Became a Poison”. Cochonneries reads like a crime novel, in which the processed meat industry is the perpetrator and ordinary consumers are the victims. The pinkness of bacon – or cooked ham, or salami – is a sign that it has been treated with chemicals, more specifically with nitrates and nitrites. It is the use of these chemicals that is widely believed to be the reason why “processed meat” is much more carcinogenic than unprocessed meat. Coudray argues that we should speak not of “processed meat” but “nitro-meat”. […] When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat (haem iron, amines and amides), they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer. The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. This, as Guillaume Coudray explained to me in an email, is known to be “carcinogenic even at a very low dose”. Any time someone eats bacon, ham or other processed meat, their gut receives a dose of nitrosamines, which damage the cells in the lining of the bowel, and can lead to cancer. You would not know it from the way bacon is sold, but scientists have known nitrosamines are carcinogenic for a very long time. More than 60 years ago, in 1956, two British researchers called Peter Magee and John Barnes found that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver tumours. By the 1970s, animal studies showed that small, repeated doses of nitrosamines and nitrosamides – exactly the kind of regular dose a person might have when eating a daily breakfast of bacon – were found to cause tumours in many organs including the liver, stomach, oesophagus, intestines, bladder, brain, lungs and kidneys.

In 1993, Parma ham producers in Italy made a collective decision to remove nitrates from their products and revert to using only salt, as in the old days. For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto di Parma. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-pink colour. We now know that the colour in Parma ham is totally harmless, a result of the enzyme reactions during the ham’s 18-month ageing process. […] the average British sausage – as opposed to a hard sausage like a French saucisson – is not cured, being made of nothing but fresh meat, breadcrumbs, herbs, salt and E223, a preservative that is non-carcinogenic. After much questioning, two expert spokespeople for the US National Cancer Institute confirmed to me that “one might consider” fresh sausages to be “red meat” and not processed meat, and thus only a “probable” carcinogen.

(tags: bacon sausages meat parma-ham ham food cancer carcinogens big-meat nitrates nitrites)

30 kWh Leaf Nissan Connect Issues

seems there’s some kind of firmware/importation issue with the Nissan Leaf app integration…. bit of a mess

(tags: nissan-leaf nissan leaf apps mobile cars driving)

Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology – The Verge

Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process. In fact, key city council members and attorneys contacted by The Verge had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract. Even James Carville, the political operative instrumental in bringing about Palantir’s collaboration with NOPD, said that the program was not public knowledge. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” Carville said.

(tags: palantir creepy surveillance crime forecasting precrime new-orleans us-politics privacy)

Huy Fong sriracha hot sauce label – Fonts In Use

The fonts of the iconic sriracha bottle, analysed. Interestingly, the Chinese serif text is typeset in a universally-reviled font, PMingLiu:

For East Asian designers, PMingLiu was probably as despicable as Papyrus. Many have publicly voiced their disdain for PMingLiu, and some even see the elimination of PMingLiu from public sight as a career goal. Julius Hui, then consultant for Commercial Type, exclaims: PMingLiu inhibits the type business, maims the public’s aesthetic judgment, and puts a bad face on the Minch? genre. As long as the public have not harbored a deep hatred against PMingLiu, it is futile to completely eliminate it from the world.

(tags: typography packaging sriracha pmingliu mincho fonts type food labels)

The Codex – I Do Not Like Go

Some gripes about Go from this blog, specifically around developer ergonomics (syntax highlighting and language-inherent error detection), politics, packaging and distribution, GOPATH, and the tuple-oriented error handling idiom. As R. I. Pienaar noted, the Go community seems full of “at-Google-wes”, which is an excellent way of putting it.

(tags: golang go criticism blogs syntax-highlighting coding languages google at-google-we)

Can I Extend and Renovate my “Fixer Upper” for €100,000? A First Time Buyer’s Renovation Budget Explained

In 2013, €100,000 was like a king’s ransom to most businesses in the Irish construction industry. Now clients approach us with budgets at this level and are shocked when we tell them how little can be achieved with such a large sum of money. We have decided to tackle this issue with a clear worked example. In 2018, rates for some types of construction have increased 50% since the recession, client expectations have increased, there is a shortage of competent construction workers, and subcontractors are now more accountable for quality. These pressures have inflated the many expenses which make up a typical renovation budget. Even the most seasoned commercial clients are struggling to achieve tenable construction prices, and first time buyers must understand the financial risk of buying a home in need of complete renovation.

(tags: renovation homes architecture houses building)

Artificial intelligence is going to supercharge surveillance – The Verge

What happens when governments can track huge numbers of people using CCTV? When police can digitally tail you around a city just by uploading your mugshot into a database?

(tags: ai surveillance privacy cctv big-data government big-brother anpr)

Containers Patterns

“There are a thousand ways to use containers” — broken down into Development, Distribution and Runtime Patterns (via Tony Finch)

(tags: docker containers design-patterns coding packaging deployment via:fanf)

First bit of Tubular Bells played three times with slight delays so it takes 40 mins to sync – YouTube

‘The intro of Tubular Bells played three times with slight delays so it takes 40 minutes to sync AND… randomly generated visual loops from the Exorcist. That’s what I’ve made happen tonight. No video editor, no music editor – all code. And it’s a trip.’

(tags: tubular-bells the-exorcist video art delay hacks trippy)

[Changelog] Republic of Ireland Patch notes for version 2.0.4.0 : ireland

Hello and welcome, I’m Leo Varadkar, lead developer of the MMO “Republic of Ireland”, which currently has 4,700,000+ players, and today we’ll be discussing changes coming eventually with the new 2.0.4.0 patch.

(tags: changelog funny mmo gaming ireland patches comedy)