Worth Reading

we are herd creatures, naturally social. we have created many tools for remote communication and although the echoes of the electromagnetic wave of our radio transmissions travel fainter and farther into space, today one of the most used tools is the good old e-mail. it was born in around 1971 so already 47 years ago. contrary to the bigots shouting radical slogans louder and louder, i believe that humanity is created for an open exchange of ideas. without borders and difficulties. instead of building physical and digital walls, archaic and testifying only to a narrow mind and limited imagination, as societes we should focus on solving much simpler problems. ...

it should be. it’s kind of tricky to get right and may feel a bit like an abstract concept. random values should be random (unless you’re talking about Debian randomness). so, let’s try that - take a cube in hand and throw it three times. what’s the probability that you’ll get three times the same number? small, but there is one. similar experiment - your friend throws coin ten times, and eight times there’s eagle. is the coin ‘prepared’? no, it just follows very complex process of spinning number of times (yeah, and i know about ‘if you’d like enough time and throw coin so many times…’ - that’s not about it). ...

during one of the design discussions with one of our Customers, I had a chance to discuss a bit about using anycast to scale out delivery via CDN. unfortunately, as more ads served even on popular sites is malware or even miners for different cryptocoins it begs a question - how should you protect the site you’re maintaining? using reputable CDN is good first step. the other one, i didn’t know about (and it seems to be quite natural if you think about it) is to verify hash of the attached resources. this can give you powerful tool to verify and then take an action before page is loaded to verify images or for example JavaScript. ...

6:51 AM, 30 APRIL 1975: SWIFT 22 IS OUTBOUND WITH 11 PAX ON BOARD INCLUDING THE LZ COMMANDER. ALL THE AMERICANS ARE OUT REPEAT OUT. this traditionally short message from NSA signals intelligence, was everything that was needed to confirm that all US citizens left US embassy in Saigon. Saigon changed name to Ho Chi Minh a day later, taken over by North Vietnam army. signals intelligence changed significantly from that time, but the book i’m writing about right now was published way before Snowden era. James Bamford Body of secrets describes in amazing details last 60 years of NSA backstage operations. ...

have you thought recently how oversubscribed are acronyms you’re using daily if you’re in IT? i just spent the whole day listening about VPC, but not vPC or VPC - but about Virtual Private Cloud in AWS services. not about virtual Private Channel or Virtual Path Connection and neither about Virtual Packet Core. and i have to admit, i liked it. i’ve spent whole day on a Mirek Burnejkos training dedicated to clouds. as Robert Ślaski was preaching on recent PLNOG - every respectable network engineer should have good idea how cloud works, and what are capabilities of different providers - like AWS or Azure. that’s the way todays IT and OT world looks like. the better you are about understanding specifics, the better you’ll be at positioning them in your real-life projects. and advice to users or customers. ...

some of us know it better, some worse, and the rest haven’t heard or thought about it (or claims “i don’t need it”) work ‘in the zone’ got popular immediately after world ended being enchanted by open spaces and mandatory offices, and got back to using rooms or - in XXI century - in “home offices”. the fact that giants like Facebook or Apple still build huge offices and promote unconstrained mobility, availability and capability to forget about home given work is the most important thing you can do (hence “socializing” is as well), doesn’t change too much. most of us fares better when we can isolate ourselves from noise and constant interruptions (not to mention all kind of viruses, so proficiently distributed in todays offices by AC). ...

NASA spent recently a lot of effort (and i suspect - money) to find Fortran proficient developer to rewrite code working still on Voyager. ideal candidate was found finally at NASA. this begs a question - how much you can do in Fortran having 64kB of RAM and less than 3W of power? it’s completely different task than our typical computers, not to mention bad practices they learn to junior developers due to abundance of hardware resources. ...

how bad our current patent system needs to be broken, to allow building companies just to do business on patent trolling? we see more articles about it but capitalsm doesn’t care. even when law enters the game, there’s often nothing that can be done having SDN in mind, and developers influence on how todays internet works, i’m thinking what we’ll be doing in couple of years (and how pitfully unprepared are companies today to defend any sensitive data - financial, biological - in “web 17.0” world). will we be able to sustain development as a society, or it will be reserved only for those rich, at the helm of big corporations? ...

…resent encryption. in particular those that were caught red handed doing mass surveillance of its own and foreign citizens. it’s worth to read this article to understand how PR (written by Camerons speech author) is trying to turn everyone using security and encryption to those helping terrorist. it’s enough today to name somebody ’terrorist’ and suddenly every option is on the table. interrogation, wiretapping, dropping bombs or simply investigating without any specific reason is fair call. ...

Life is unfair. And the unfairness is distributed unfairly.