Month: October 2018

Wobble Palace

A comedy that centers on the trials of try-hard millennials, Eugene and Jane are a couple in the death throes of their relationship. They see other people, but they haven’t broken up because neither wants to move out of the apartment they share in downtown Los Angeles — an art-freak crash pad with AstroTurf carpets and curtains printed to look like a crowded Windows desktop, complete with the ubiquitous grassy knoll. To satisfy their desire for time to themselves, they decide to split the apartment over a weekend. Eugene’s day comes first, and he begins it by swiping through Tinder on the toilet. It would be impossible to miss that Eugene is balding. Around the shiny dome of his forehead, his remaining hair passes his shoulders. By the time Eugene’s date appears for brunch, he has fashioned a hair piece that is as fantastic as it is foolhardy: He wraps his stringy fringe into a bun and fastens it above his bald spot. It’s a style he calls the “floating toupee.”

Tail latency aware caching

RobinHood dynamically allocates cache space to those backends responsible for high request tail latency (cache-poor) backends, while stealing space from backends that do not affect the request tail latency (cache-rich backends). In doing so, Robin Hood makes compromises that may seem counter-intuitive (e.g., significantly increasing the tail latencies of certain backends).

Internal Use Only

Adventures in acquiring satellite imagery

The longest amount of time any area in the continental United States has gone without an update on Google Earth has been 8 years. From 2008 to 2016, a series of dry lake beds in Southwestern Nevada located in the Tonopah Test Range was a blind spot from the all-seeing corporate monolith continuously mapping the Earth. So we bought a satellite image ourselves. We would like to invite you to view image #103001000EBC3C00 yourself. Or — since the image is for internal use only — you can look at a painting of the image online.

Anti Solar Campaigns

In Arizona, however, where a recent poll found that 75% of the electorate wanted more solar energy, A.P.S. has spent $22m campaigning against Prop 127. “You’d think we were proposing something truly harmful and dangerous”. He hasn’t been shy in returning the blows, spending $18m supporting Prop 127 through Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona. Their biggest expense was a paid force of petitioners who spread out across the state to collect 480k signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, 2x the amount required by law. “We’re on the side of the angels. This is a black-hat, white-hat fight.”

BGP hacking

This article will show how this hijacking works, and how China employs its conveniently distributed points of presence (PoPs) in western democracies’ telecommunications systems to redirect internet traffic through China for malicious use. It will show the actual routing paths, give a summary of how one hijacks parts of the internet by inserting these nodes, and outline the major security implications.

Ben Thompson

Taiwan, I think, struggles from having 1000s of years of Chinese bureaucracy behind it. Plus they were occupied by Japan for 50 years, so you’ve got that culture on top. Then you have this sclerotic corporate culture that the boss is always right, stay in the office until he goes home, and that sort of thing. It’s unhealthy. Whereas China — it’s much more bare-knuckled competition and “Figure out the right answer, figure it out quickly.” The competition there is absolutely brutal. It’s brutal in a way I think is hard for people to really comprehend, from the West. And that makes China, makes these companies really something to deal with.

Good disguise

This video is loaded with lots of fascinating techniques of high stakes disguise. There’s light disguise, which uses glasses, caps, and facial hair, to hide in a crowd, says Jonna Mendez, the CIA’s former Chief of Disguise. And there’s advanced disguise, which is used to hide your identity in face-to-face encounters. And good disguise is more than just makeup and prostheses. It’s about behavior, too. For instance, an American posing as a European can give themselves away by holding a cigarette the wrong way, resting while standing on one leg, or holding a fork in their right hand.

Pagans against Genesis

The final great pagan opponent of Christianity was the emperor-philosopher Julian the Apostate (331-363 CE), so called because of his conversion from Christianity to Neoplatonism. He ruled the Roman Empire for only the final 2 years of his life, and during his short reign he did his utmost to restore and promote pagan Hellenism at the expense of Christianity. His major literary attack on the Church, Against the Galileans, underwent the same fate as the anti-Christian writings of Celsus and Porphyry: we have only fragments quoted by his later opponents (especially, in Julian’s case, the bishop Cyril of Alexandria in his Against Julian). In his polemics, Julian pays attention to the book of Genesis, particularly its early chapters. He admired Judaism because it adhered to its ancestral traditions and he castigated Christianity for its having abandoned these traditions, especially Judaism’s sacrificial worship. His attempt to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem was part of his program to restore ancient religious practices. Yet that did not prevent him from regarding many Old Testament passages as absurd.

Precision Engineering

Precision Engineering enabled Modernity.

This corresponding concept of “tolerance” turns out to be equally important. The ancient world was certainly capable of creating complex machinery (see the Antikythera Mechanism above), and the early modern period was able to put together the scientific method and new ways of conceptualizing the universe. But it’s the Industrial Revolution that created — or was created by — this notion that machines could be made in parts that fit together so closely that they could be interchangeable. That’s what got our machine age going, which in turn enabled guns and cars and transistors and computers and every other thing.