SmugMug’s Don MacAskill on last week’s EBS outage : comme il faut
(tags: EBS outages aws smugmug)LRB · James Meek · In the Sorting Office : ‘The postwoman is paid a pittance to deliver corporate mail. She hasn’t done her job well, yet so few people have complained about missed deliveries that she hasn’t been found out. Across the world, postal services are being altered like this: optimised to deliver the maximum amount of unwanted mail at the minimum cost to businesses. In the internet age private citizens are sending less mail than they used to, but that’s only part of the story of postal decline. The price of driving down the cost of bulk mailing for a handful of big organisations is being paid for by the replacement of decently paid postmen with casual labour and the erosion of daily deliveries.’ (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf post mail postal-service holland dutch postmen work jobs business politics lrb)Amazon EC2 outage: summary and lessons learned : Rightscale CTO on last week’s outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too
(tags: ebs ec2 aws cloud availability slas rightscale amazon)Dropbox dedupe feature allows materialization of any file, if you know its hash : ‘allows users to exploit Dropbox’s file hashing scheme to copy files into their account without actually having them. Dropship will save the hashes of a file in JSON format. Anyone can then take these hashes and load the original file into their Dropbox account using Dropship.’ heh. that sounds very familiar, I seem to recall thinking about this problem on several occasions… ;) Dropbox certainly didn’t like it, going by this account
(tags: security filesharing dropbox online-backup online-storage p2p hashes sha dmca)Hacker News comments thread on the Dropbox dedupe bug : some good discussion on workarounds
(tags: dropbox hashes p2p filesharing tech security sha)DuoSecurity : well-packaged, well-designed, two-factor auth for SSH from Dug Song. free for small-scale use, too, it looks like. awesome! I’ve signed up (via Nelson)
(tags: via:nelson security authentication authorization two-factor-auth openssh ssh dug-song)