The Weekly Weird - 2016-09-16

Skorgu

2016-09-16 11:00

Administrivia: Expect no posts until at least 2016-10-07, I'll be on vacation.

Air travel is changing fast. Gone are the days of the super-jumbos: the A380 is not super popular and the iconic 747 is on its way out. Boeing seems to have called it correctly with the troubled 787 doing well commercially and the new 737 MAX can save enough fuel and fly from less popular airports to make a $69 transatlantic ticket possible.
"A critique of Rust's std::collections" made the rounds. The critique was itself critiqued at HN and /r/rust (including the author of the HashMap in question).
LA will soon be battery powered.
Continuing the disaggregation of all markets everywhere: Real estate. Point does ... something to aggregate real estate investment (HN comments) and AirBNB will hook you up with a superhost to manage your property (HN comments).
Someone is learning to take down the internet. I'm sure it'll all be fine. Not directly related but this tale of DDoS has a little nugget about 'defensive BGP hijacking' that sparked a bit of debate on nanog, leading to some more details on the hows and whys.
"Renovations" is the best/worst euphemism yet.
As much of an Elon Musk fanboy as I am, I'm still uncomfortably excited about Bezos' future giant rocket plans. 'Future' is definitely the operative word here as Blue Origin's current rocket is about the height of the Flacon 9 landing legs and as SpaceX has shown the way to an operative orbial launch vehicle is paved with rapid unscheduled disassemblies. Still, competition means cheaper launches means interplanetary species. Bring it on.

The Weekly Weird - 2016-09-09

Skorgu

2016-09-09 11:00

Quote of the day

<redacted> i just learned a really dirty hack.  
<redacted> exec &> >(tee -a x.log)   

<redacted> apparently that's in my codebase... god i'm a terrible tech lead  
<redacted> i thought my coworker was asking as a trivia question.

I like this story about a giant stockpile of alumin[i]um in the desert. HN Comments.
Why Modern Human Interactions Are So Hard To Film.
I don't really understand how neural networks are intimately tied to the laws of the universe but hey, now we have a theology to fall back on when the robots enslave us all.
Why I don't use a blog platform, volume XVII: the DMCA.
EEG-based identification systems, take two.
We know nothing, part elventy billion: there are four species of giraffe.
Cities are cool.
- What do those orange spraypaint markings on the ground mean?
- Did you know they're raising the Bayonne bridge because of the Panama Canal? (video)
- How the Japanese do zoning
- There's a musical about Robert Moses. I have no comment.

The Weekly Weird - 2016-09-06

Skorgu

2016-09-06 11:00

SpaceX had a little boo boo the other day. It's too early for a solid answer of what happened but some very clever analysis seems to indicate the a fuel-air explosion from just outside the second stage. This might make you uncomfortable about crew riding on top, fortunately Dragon has enough thrust to have cleared the explosion easily and the industry as a whole has a good idea how to make sure the launch escape system fires (video). Of course, there's also a Range Safety Officer with a big red button just in case. ~All of this is from the /r/spacex megathread to give credit where it's due.
Speaking of big red buttons, don't just push it by accident.
You know what makes me feel better about living in 2016? Nothing. Shorting medical equipment manufacturers because their pacemakers can be hacked (or maybe they can't?) is too much future for me.
Also, DNS is not secure but we all should have known that already.
Random links I haven't really read in detail: questdb high-performance time series database, Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited,
~3% of Korea's shipping just kind of ran out of money, stranding a few dozen giant container ships in the middle of the ocean because there's nobody to pay the port fees. And of course, shipping rates tanked in response.
A cool quora answer on how Jio's 'free' internet can make money

The Weekly Weird - 2016-08-26

Skorgu

2016-08-26 11:00

This ... is parody, right? Did bash really need exceptions and a type system? Well, here it is anyway.
Yes, we discovered a planet in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri. It's so close! It's tidally locked and we're never going to get there but it's cool I guess. Some good discussion on related scifi in the HN thread.
Pretty. Probably pretty expensive too.
Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels anyway?
There's a bunch of folks trying to make flying cars (or at least flying bus things) happen: Airbus is getting on board too now.
Well, I guess that's what Yodlee does with your precious secrets.
We all know that the distribution of latency is often more important than the 'best' or 'average' number, here's a nice set of reviews that track just that.
Soft. Octopus. Robot. 3D printed soft octopus robot!
Large-scale monitoring is close to my heart so I found "Pull Does Not Scale" enjoyable.
"A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype".
The NASA Engineering Systems Handbook.
The inimitable Aphyr discusses Serializability, Linearizability and Locality.
And the equally inimitable Dan Luu talks about Concurrency Bugs.
Rust: Idiomatic conversions, Secret Sharing, DNS, Garbage Collection, impl trait or something I'm not smart enough to understand.
It's impossible to read this article about a city-sized art piece in the desert without thinking of another large-scale construction to preserve meaning across generations.
I found this link in the draft of this week's Weird and I can't remember why I put it here. So, uh, here's a link to a book: Kill Process.

The Weekly Weird - 2016-08-19

Skorgu

2016-08-19 11:00

Oh man, flash density just don't stop: 100TB any day now.
Infosec Roundup:
- Pop quiz, hotshot: what can an adversary who can do some IP spoofing but is not otherwise in a privileged position do? A week ago you'd say something like 'ddos or something' but nothing scarier because TCP streams aren't vulnerable to muckracking unless you can listen in. Well, thanks to an improvement in security, Improving TCP's Robustness to Blind In-Window Attacks, the answer is now "learn the sequence number, window size, RST the connection and inject arbitrary DATA packets into the stream". This is being somewhat soft-sold as a javascript injection attack but of course it's actually quite a bit more severe. Fortunately, the fix is pretty straightforward as it relies on the nuances of a specific implementation in the Linux kernel. The lesson is clear: don't even try. Wait no, the lesson is "global state is the enemy". Many thanks to cp for bringing the full scope of this to my attention.
- Government agency gets hacked, yawn right? Well, this time it's the NSA (a.k.a. Equation Group (pdf)). Snowden -- who isn't dead -- provides some context. More coverage here and here with a (dead) link to the files and some indications that at least one of the exploits (against Cisco ASA) is functional.
- All zero-days should come with awesome soundtrack, even if they're not all as big as the root SecureBoot signing key for all Microsoft OEM devices. Seriously though, this is why you don't backdoor your own @#$% software.
- In similar news: VW, who cheated on emissions for like a trillion years, was nice enough to let pertty much anyone unlock their cars with an Arduino.
- Where do RSA keys come from? You might be surprised.
You know it's going to be an interesting semester when your Syllabus reads "Everything is Fucked".
CRISPR!
- I knew I should have gone into biology, Cas9 makes GCC look boring. (It also makes Reflections on Trusting Trust boring but that's a nightmare for another time). What, you ask, am I talking about? Let the dulcet tones of Kurzgesagt explain everything. What happens to the world when immortality has a price tag? There's no reason to suspect that our particular lifespan is more than a coincidence given that many species basically don't age and Sharks can live to 392 +/- 120 years.
Rust:
- Zero-cost futures in Rust. Includes a performant and pretty nice-to-read http library. Fans of async might see some similarities.
- Directly related: Tokio, and an example of building a server with it.
- Making Rust compiler errors prettier.
- nom, a rust parsing framework. NB, this is very reminiscent of well-built regexes: r'(?P<areacode>\d{3})[ -]+(?P<exchange>\d{3})[ -]+(?P<extension>\d{4})'
LYNX: Using page faults to speed up your SPSC queue
I was just talking about how bonkers the fixed-income market is and now here's Bloomberg to tell us how it's getting less nuts.
Everything old is new again, including digital money.
More about the Delta outage.

The Weekly Weird - 2016-08-12

Skorgu

2016-08-12 11:00

Let's start off with a pretty terrifying chart.
And, as a palate cleanser, an absolutely gorgeous slowmo highlight reel from SpaceX.
Nice to see some attention being paid to physical security of devices.
Flash is getting ridiculous, here's a 60TB (not a typo) 3.5" part, and that's not even counting what QLC flash will do to price and density.
What kind of a name is "superroot" anyway?
Misc blockchain nonsense: "DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with a Malicious Proof-of-Work" (pdf). The future of financial infrastructure: An ambitious look at how blockchain can reshape financial services (pdf).
Oh look, btrfs' RAID5/6 code is hilariously unsafe and will need to be rewritten. From the (predictably harsh) HN thread, here's Brian Cantrill expressing dismay at the concept of 'pubescence' in software (video).
Speaking of ZFS, if you want to build yourself a high-availability ZFS fileserver, here's a comprehensive guide to doing it with dual-port SAS enclosures and SCSI reservatsions.
Random papers I haven't really read: Hierarchical Timer Wheels. Making Lockless Synchronization Fast: Performance Implications of Memory Reclamation: (pdf), video. Riposte: An Anonymous Messaging System Handling Millions of Users (pdf).
Cubesats are neat, basically a small, modular-ish common form factor and bus brings the bar down for building your own space probe (PC architecture anyone?) Generally though, they don't have propulsion right now, they just orbit until they re-enter and are destroyed. Many folks are working to change that, most interestingly Deep Space Industries which swear they'll be launching a commercial asteroid mining mission this decade using their Comet-1 engine which is literally a steam engine with a charming I_sp of 175s. The idea of using water as your root propellant isn't crazy of course: it's inert, safe to handle and launch, safe to have hanging around on the ISS (unlike hydrazine which hates you) and extremely common in the solar system. It's such a good idea that there are a few other folks working on similar systems: HYDROS, which electrolyzes the water into H₂ and O₂ and burns that for a respectable 300s I_sp, and CAT (which might be the same as the one from this kickstarter!), which just turns it into a plamsa and claims a totally absurd 1623s I_sp. That's ion engine territory.
More about Plasma aerocapture.
I really enjoyed this (long) photo essay gallery thing about ferrying two piston-engined planes from Sweden to San Diego. It really makes you appreciate modern jet travel when you realize it took ten days! Of course, nothing compares to ferrying a single-engined Cessna across the Atlantic.
Yes, obviously the TV Detection Van needed a reboot.
Anyone lose an oil rig?
Easily printable USGS maps.

The Weekly Weird - 2016-08-05

Skorgu

2016-08-05 11:00

The Shenandoah real-time-ish garbage collector is in Fedora 24.
Ugly building gets less ugly, antenna.
I'm gratified to learn that Vampires are real and amused to learn that so are werewolves.
I, uh, what? It might not be so crazy, at least in China. Of course, it might just be a scam(Chinese only, other stories imply it says something about crowdfunding).
Ok, let's talk about Blockchains.
- I really thought we had seen the end of the giant-bitcoin-heist but no, $77 million from Bitfinex proves me wrong. Of course, it doesn't help when your regulator prevents you from securing your assets. It really is an infinitely deep pool of vulgar scammers.
- So, clearly Bitcoin is kill, what about Ethereum? It's the new hotness, it's got distributed turing-complete bytecode execution so you can create your own digital pyramid scheme without all the pesky intermediate systems. Or if that's too web1.9 for you, go ahead and create a decentralized autonomous organization to do..uh...stuff with ETH, the currency of the network. Stuff like get completely hacked to the tune of 3,641,694 ETH because you didn't handle errors properly.
- Of course, the BLOCKCHAIN being a libertarian paradise means there's no recourse here, the DAO screwed up and its investors screwed up by trusting it and the thief was just plain smarter than you are so them's the breaks, right?
- Don't be silly, of course they decided to go back in time and hard fork the network. Problem solved, right?
- Nope. Now you just have 2 Ethereums, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic! (Same great taste, less hypocrisy!) What happens next? ETH wins, ETC wins or everybody loses.
What we really needed was another config management system.
Rust: Hidden gems of the Rust ecosystem. I don't remember if I mentioned that there's a QuickCheck for Rust. _secret: ().
Dyson Spheres, what do they know? Do they know stuff? Let's find out. From this interesting HN thread.
If you have strong opinions about "OATS reporting", you probably already know about Barclays being fined for getting it wrong.
Ron Howard is making a semi-documentary fictional miniseries about Mars.
More NYC Subway Countdown Clocks, featuring Bluetooth!

The Weekly Weird - 2016-08-02 - I ATEN'T DEAD edition

Skorgu

2016-08-02 11:00

Formally verifying Rust!
Regexes, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Uh, is this a room-temperature qubit from freaking mothballs or am I being too credulous?
"How Vector Space Mathematics Reveals the Hidden Sexism in Language". arXiv paper. Choice quote: "One perspective on bias in word embeddings is that it merely reflects bias in society, and therefore one should attempt to debias society rather than word embeddings,” say Bolukbasi and co. “However, by reducing the bias in today’s computer systems (or at least not amplifying the bias), which is increasingly reliant on word embeddings, in a small way debiased word embeddings can hopefully contribute to reducing gender bias in society."
Related, "Internet trolls are even more hostile when they're using their real names". The study at PLoS ONE.
"Rigorous Benchmarking in Reasonable Time".
Python >3.5 supports static typing.
How do you get energy on Mars? Everything you bring to the surface costs (optimistically) $thousands per pound so you're not going to be lugging a tank of unleaded up there. Nuclear would be ideal but it turns out people don't like radioactive chunks falling on their heads if something goes wrong. Solar is tempting but since Martian insolation is only 42% of Earth's you already have to bring twice what you'd need on earth. If only you could manufacture the cells in-situ. Enter Perovskite cells:
- They don't need to be manufactured in a billion-dollar chip fab, in fact you can make them yourself in an undergrad chem lab.
- They're nothing more than a series of spin-coated layers of magic liquid on top of a generic glass substrate.
- ~40% of Martian regolith is Silicon Dioxide so you don't have to bring 99% of the mass of the panel.
- You're already doing Methalox ISRU so you need a large bootstrap power supply to cryogenically cool all that rocket fuel, once the tank is full you've got excess power on hand, why not use it to make some glass? Along with a small spincoater and some jugs of magic Perovskite juice you could be turning (lots of) energy into solar panels.
- It'll still probably be up to humans to do lots of the final assembly, though I'm eager to see what automation looks like when human labor is outrageously expensive instead of minimum-wage.