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Leon

395 karma · joined June 19, 2007

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Leon··on Inside Firefox’s DNS-over-HTTPS engine
There are lots of Open Source projects that will do what you are asking. Here is the first top hit on using bind to do that - https://github.com/wrouesnel/dns-over-https-proxy

However I disagree that it is a bad idea and that the implementation is bad. Regardless of how software _should_ behave, Firefox operates in how software is actually run for their users. DNS is a source of security vulnerabilities and headaches.

Demanding a higher level abstraction is not always an option for many, but using Firefox often is. This is especially important for mobile, where a lot of people don't have access or knowledge to set in place a system wide proxy after rooting their phones, but it is very easy to install Firefox mobile.

What about web browser usage on library or campus computers? Often they will have several browsers installed as well.

The point is that making security more available and easier to use where it matters most is a good idea.

Leon··on Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998)
> forced upgrades

I think the forced upgrades were a good thing. The security model on Windows 10 and continued support of updates to 10 is overall a Good Thing for the average Windows User. The majority of users on Windows run their systems in extremely non-secure ways and skip updates and upgrades completely. This is a danger to the internet as a whole.

To me it ultimately comes down to this: I can't force my older relatives to update their machines or even stop them from running ancient versions of Windows. On that front, Windows 10 made things better.

Leon··on Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
Usually Football pays for itself.
Leon··on Why some of the best developers keep quitting
In addition to more vacation days, maternity leave, etc
Leon··on Things to know before using AWS’s Elasticsearch Service
A simple solution in this vein is to white list your the EIP addresses of your NAT. This would give access to all resources in a private subnet (this is useful for Lambda's running in subnets).
Leon··on Introducing Docker Secrets Management
Vault is really wonderful to work with, and its integration with consul makes it phenomenally powerful.
Leon··on Trump’s F.C.C. Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules
> And somehow in the more affluent parts of the city where I live, Comcast, Google and AT&T are all competing. AT&T and Google are both offering gigabit internet for $70 a month.

Google is offering service in limited areas of 8 cities and have put on hold any future expansion. That is not comparative to the rest of the country and shouldn't be used as an example of competition. The country has no real competition for internet service providers.

Leon··on Psychiatrists Must Face Possibility That Medications Hurt More Than They Help
Can you cite this?
Leon··on ‘Diamond-age’ of power generation as nuclear batteries developed
That would actually be perfect for long range interstellar probes. A constant source of energy for thousands of years, even that small, would propel a craft to reasonably high speeds. Give a spacecraft a few pounds and you'd have something really great.
Leon··on Male birth control study cut short as some participants experience side effects

  > I was riding my bike the day after the procedure.
Please do not spread terrible medical advice which you were surely told not to do. That's great you turned out fine but it is not ethical to promote such behavior.

Think of it as someone saying their children turned out fine without immunizations. Your words can become incredibly dangerous once you begin questioning doctors if you are not trained or have added knowledge in the area of specialty.

Leon··on Infrastructure discovery with etcd
I think I'm a little confused by what you are asking - are you wanting to run a consul server and agent on the same instance? You can do that and specify an ID appropriate to the consul service type for multi-tenancy situations of master nodes and client nodes. But that would be up to you given your deployment environments.

Are you wanting to have a single consul service running for the whole environment (as client and server)? If you're running an HA environment you should really have dedicated master nodes and non-voting clients for service discovery on instances. The member states of consul clusters have an IP and ID, are you saying that the IP could be mixed with a different ID (it could in the cloud, but upon connecting to the leader it would update its registered information).

Are you talking about cleaning up old instances registered in the cluster? Or that there could be a single master node which has a broken network connection to the other master nodes, so sees different cluster status information? In that case, you should be monitoring all your services. Always. There are a lot of tools out there which will clean up and correct voting clusters in those situations. We use Sensu and Kubernetes checks / services for a lot of monitoring and automatic reaction to changes in cluster health.

Leon··on Infrastructure discovery with etcd
You are correct and I came here to say the same. Additionally I've seen issues working with etcd in that it is a pain to manage, with situations coming about of split cluster issues where the data becomes corrupted and needs to be manually merged together. That is a bad situation to be in, and usually it is better to develop for failure, especially in cloud environments. You can get split-brain problems on any clustered agreement replication, etcd is not a special case.
Leon··on Infrastructure discovery with etcd
You can specify a custom ID. I use ID's such as AWS instance ID for clusters in Amazon.
Leon··on Hackers say Friday's massive DDoS attacks were just a dry run
Also:

- Put up a caching DNS server on your local network to keep your regular sites functioning.

Leon··on Java 8 Method Reference Evaluation
Something to add that would help on your examples, would be a non-static counter to the static inner class. I think that would really help convey when when multiple objects are created but the reference to the first class instance is kept. With the static count variable new object instantiation is tracked, but misses a detail on object references that is interesting.

Specifically for this example:

        System.out.println("\nVariable in method reference");
        obj = new Counter(); // NPE if after method reference declaration!
        final Runnable varRef = obj::show;
        System.out.println("Running...");
        varRef.run(); obj = new Counter(); varRef.run();
obj::show was evaluated, so varRef should be pointing to the original instance method of show, even when called the second time. Which could potentially create a memory leak if someone is tracking the method references and recreating objects underneath unknowingly.

However if I am completely wrong about this please tell me! I have not gone through and run this code for confirmation, so I would be very happy to know if I'm mistaken. I'm going by memory without reference checking or testing. In either case if I am wrong or right - please put a note about this situation! It would help immensely and make your post even more interesting.

Thanks!

Leon

Leon··on When a Chinese PhD Student Meets a German Supervisor [pdf]
Good call on crimp / krampe, I was trying to identify the origin by phonetics on that one. Using krampe as a noun for the action of what something does or have happen to it sounds like a German language thing to do.
Leon··on When a Chinese PhD Student Meets a German Supervisor [pdf]
To be fair, "Flansch" sounds a lot like "Flange" which is exactly the same thing in English. I would easily assume it originated in German or they have a common root. The phonetics are spot on in similarity.
Leon··on Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers
Yeah, Gannett started limiting remote workers when Yahoo did. They followed in Yahoo's footsteps because to upper management it sounded like a good idea. Get everyone together!

...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time.

Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.

Leon··on The Free-Time Paradox in America
There is a difference in what the article presents as an escape for young men with no job vs someone who plays games in the evening to relax.

That free time you have is a luxury if you are working. It can still be very enjoyable to do interesting things after work, but I wouldn't look at them as investing time or learning new skills or hustling (i.e. working). That's a great way to get burnout. Burnout can be horrible if you never have leisure, but you can still make some that off time productive in some way without it feeling like work. For myself I like to put together projects in new tech that seem interesting for an idea that is absurd. It doesn't have to be even a full demo, just some examples where you poked at something and can talk about to coworkers. Arduino / Raspberry Pis are great too - super easy to get in to and you can make stupid fun little trick things. Same with chat bots and cloud infrastructure - slap something together and everybody can have fun.

I'm just wanting to say be careful how you look at your free time. That relaxation with video games and a beer is OK. But if you're wanting more out of it then turn it in to some way to get conversations and cool hacks working with coworkers or friends. Also - try switching up some video games with board games. There are some incredible board games out there these days and it'll be easy to get a group together at work for a quick round of some games.

Leon··on “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”
A lot of apps these days will not run unless they get access to the data they request. What I would like to see is android having the ability to give empty sets of information if so chosen instead of denying access, or to compartmentalize applications access to shared resources more.
Leon··on Announcing InfluxDB, Telegraf, Kapacitor and Enterprise 1.0 RC1
The mouse scroll override is extremely frustrating with a trackpad. Any site that does that just doesn't care about their users having a terrible experience. Mice and trackpads are already configured to a users preference - why push a custom movement, because the UX designer thought they knew better?
Leon··on Decommissioning Otto
I'm going to throw one thing in here about terraform over boto / etc, it's actually really nice to have a way to put together your own modules. I think they could do a better job with some common libs to make it easier, but overall it's super powerful.
Leon··on Decommissioning Otto
We've been using consul as well, it's just fantastic. Comparatively, zookeeper was a pain and didn't do all the things we wanted.
Leon··on Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction
I agree, but I'd take it one step further. This could be CIA or NSA exposing just enough information given already known public information on the equation group.

At that point it would look completely legit, but could be used to track back large amounts of Bitcoin. If the NSA knows through listening stations which adversary groups are sending how much BTC then they'll be able to follow the leads back significantly.

Combining technical knowledge of trades and BTC movement with CIA knowledge of on-the-ground information may net them some fantastic information.

With the addition of getting a large about of BTC for future funding. That would be a powerful move.

Leon··on Equation Group Cyber Weapons Auction
It can still be a scam if you don't receive the goods.
Leon··on I Love Go; I Hate Go
I believe it has worked well for me for undo. However some other Atom formatters have broken my undo in weird ways, namely the formatter for Node JS I had turned on to auto format on saves. I had to turn it off.
Leon··on Nintendo is up 35% on Pokemon Go success
It worked today for my coworkers and I. We were walking by a poke-stop that's beside a restaurant. One of the servers stepped out and said if we stopped in to eat he'd throw lures at the poke-stop. It got seven of us to stay and sit and eat.
Leon··on Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Castile shooting video: It was the police
She's in shock.
Leon··on Containers vs. Config Management
Would kubernetes be too much overhead? That would be able to meet all of your needs.
Leon··on Introducing SpotMini, a smaller version of the Spot robot [video]
It doesn't look like it was designed to be a face but a gripping hand that they put googly eyes on for fun.
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