Hacker News Reader

alexforsteron Using USB-VGA dongles as SDR transmitter

Not mentioned in the article: its range is apparently from UHF to 1.7GHz+

alexforsteron RedisGraph: A High Performance In-Memory Graph Database as a Redis Module

The latency doesn't sound that bad. It's 200ns to access memory on another local NUMA node, and 500ns to access memory on another machine using NUMAlink.

Fascinating tech. I had no idea this could be done with Xeons.

alexforsteron One File Linux – live linux distro combined in one EFI file

Link to (translated) blog post about how this was done:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

alexforsteron Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exploits

...by the much-harder-to-exploit timing attack that is easily mitigated by cropping timer resolution.

alexforsteron How do I permanently delete my account?

There's a one-click page to permanently delete your Facebook account here: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

alexforsteron Serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance

DPDK (userspace networking) and SPDK (userspace storage) seem like a perfect fit for this. Both even support FreeBSD!

alexforsteron Car Wash Hack Can Strike Vehicle, Trap Passengers, Douse Them with Water

We have to acknowledge that the underlying issues here won't ever be understood by the broader public. These kinds of "here's what happens when..." stories are among the most important ways that we can get your message across.

alexforsteron The earliest known versions of Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler

The keyword "auto" means int?

alexforsteron The earliest known versions of Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler

There's type inference everywhere!

alexforsteron MoonScript, a programmer friendly language that compiles to Lua

I believe this is because LuaJIT is 5.1-only.

alexforsteron Solid – Re-decentralizing the web

I think WebDAV would be a much more natural fit for this problem. When people think WebDAV they usually think Microsoft, but it's actually a very mature, open HTTP extension standard.

RDF has a high barrier to entry, and it's going to take a lot of work to get this REST API to even come close to what WebDAV already does-

  * Locking
  * Versioning
  * Expressive ACLs
  * Expressive search
  * Quotas
  * Simple distributed data structures

Granted, some of those features use an equally arcane XML syntax, but at least there's already tooling.

alexforsteron Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway

> Our datacenter is fed by redundant fiber feeds from Hurricane Electric, Cogent Communications, and the Kansas City Internet Exchange (KCIX).

Ouch.

alexforsteron Who Is Anna-Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author?

> 20-year-old [ProTraf] President Paras Jha, from Fanwood, NJ

alexforsteron Some DNS lookups causing 5xx errors due to leap second bug

Yeah, and Go doesn't expose a monotonic clocksource in its stdlib[1]. I'd bet that's what this boils down to.

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12914

alexforsteron Network Update: Multihomed, Increased Transit, Peering

We're usually around at nanog!

alexforsteron Network Update: Multihomed, Increased Transit, Peering

Welp, there's a lot that needs addressing in this comment, but I'll stick to the heavy-hitters.

> they've had near daily network interruptions due to DDoS attacks since Christmas of last year, with some outages lasting up to almost a day

Whoa, nope[1].

> It also leaves them highly vulnerable to DDoS attacks through exchanges.

We aggressively de-peer with networks that regularly originate attack traffic, allowing us to size our ports according to utilization rather than worst case attack sizes. Multilateral peering is actually a bit more expensive than transit these days - much more expensive if you intend to significantly overprovision capacity.

> Who else can you name that utilizes up to 7 transit providers in a given city

That's fair, but missing context. We're figuring out who works best for our traffic profile. We will scale back/remove the underperformers and scale up those that prove their worth.

> It's not cost effective, is sub-optimal for resiliency against attacks, and fails to leverage peering effectively.

All of this is dramatically incorrect.

[1] https://cloudharmony.com/status

alexforsteron Network Update: Multihomed, Increased Transit, Peering

> Linode is moving 200-300 Gbps globally. That is about 37.5 Gbps per location.

We're actually moving to 5-10x that figure per location. We aren't playing around!

alexforsteron All quiet in the IPv4 Internet?

The main justification for getting more space is to show projected usage based on past usage. So if I get a /19 and use it in one month instead of three, I'll get an /18 next time, because that's about how much I'll need to sustain my growth. Rinse and repeat. Speaking on DO, it's likely that they grew so fast in the beginning they were able to acquire an awful lot of space.

alexforsteron Linode Manager and API are under attack

I appreciate the kind words in many of the comments here, and I'm sure my colleagues do too.

For reference, our third party monitoring measured approximately 23 minutes of downtime–

  1m 46s @ 2016-09-08 01:37:53 EDT
  1m 10s @ 2016-09-08 01:38:14 EDT
  17m 4s @ 2016-09-08 01:40:28 EDT
  2m 11s @ 2016-09-08 01:58:29 EDT

We are now capable of absorbing most volumetric attacks toward our web infrastructure. This outage was a layer 7 attack that needed to be manually mitigated.

alexforsteron Why I Don't Like Golang

alexforsteron Two Australian University Students make a better Census in 54 hours

Thank you. I'm surprised where this discussion has headed.

Of course the kids didn't rebuild the ABS census system in 50-some hours, and I don't think the sensationalism in this article is meant to be taken so literally. The purpose of the hackathon project and of the article is more likely to help the average person understand that the ABS could have built this in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost, and given the technically trivial task at hand, it shouldn't have failed.

alexforsteron CIA watchdog ‘accidentally destroyed’ copy of ‘torture report’

Acting inspector general Christopher Sharpley uploaded the report to the office's internal computer network and then destroyed the hard disk, apparently following standard protocol, the news outlet reported. Then, someone else in the watchdog’s office reportedly misinterpreted instructions from the Justice Department not to open the file and deleted it from the server.

The CIA, in which the inspector general’s office sits, retains a copy of the full report, and is waiting for the conclusion of a legal battle over the document.

alexforsteron Google nabs Apple as a cloud customer

Average was $0.63/mbit in 2015, and I personally haven't seen lower than $0.40/mbit.

http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-H...

alexforsteron Introducing C++ experimental io2d (2D Graphics in the C++ standard library)

Give us more standard datastructures, instead. The answer to everything in C++ involves a boost library right now; focus on fixing that. This looks like an awesome library, but completely unnecessary as a core part of the language. Also Cairo is marred in LGPL. Are we going to get a standard that legally requires the use of a separate, dynamically loadable binary? The actual spec for this is just an ABI for their specific implementation.

alexforsteron An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks

You may want to reconsider. CoPP only goes so far, as we've learned the hard way.

alexforsteron An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks

You may want to go pinging around some of your own tier 1 crossconnects. I bet you'll be surprised.

alexforsteron An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks

Stopping them from directly hitting our routers has been the most difficult, because our routers have IPs on 1000+ /24's, which means RTBH can't work because no tier 1 will accept 1000+ null routes. The same is true when they attack our upstream provider's networks.

We've had a few false-starts, but we've finally gotten all of our datacenters dropping all traffic to these critical IPs at the edges. This should stop the most serious outages, so it's a big step.

alexforsteron An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks

We appreciate this more than you know. Many of us have had the holidays ruined by these utterly relentless attacks, and it's a difficult thing to try and explain to our loved ones. Support from the community really helps.

alexforsteron An update from Linode about the recent DDoS attacks

We know that we've dropped the ball here. To be frank, it's just been extremely difficult to take our people off of mitigation long enough to write something more coherent than "they're attacking our webservers", "they're attacking our core routers", etc.

> And it looks like the attackers decided to start things back up again, as Linode.com is unavailable...

They're watching our status page for updates and starting new attacks when we resolve previous ones. There's been an almost 1:1 correlation lately.

alexforsteron Linode is suffering on-going DDoS attacks

I would hope it is obvious based on the extent and duration of the attacks that RTBH is not an option in this case.