Salil Mehta is a statistician and well-known public intellectual. See his impressive bio. He has been cited in major publications, such as the NYT. But Google closed his email and website (Statistical Ideas) down without notice or explanation. When he submitted an inquiry he got this. “After review, your account is not eligible to be…
I foresee databases running on two-level stores and three-level stores, but I doubt they will be able to manage four-level stores because it is just too complicated to do the software. But there will be storage hierarchies and exactly what pieces will be in the storage hierarchy is yet to be determined. Main memory will…
Today, software development is built around APIs. Instead of embedding a vendor’s product into their application, developers can call an API to consume services from a vendor. The developers don’t need to know what’s responding to their calls on the backend; they simply need to know what the vendor’s API expects from their code and…
As much as we dislike it, large-scale Internet outages do happen, sometimes as a result of technical problems or sometimes even politically motivated. We’d like to be notified when these outages occur, ideally in real-time, as they can explain connectivity issues or other Internet phenomena (for instance, events seen at a NOC). They can also…
It appears that rather than effecting a slight improvement from IPv4, the manner of fragmentation handling in IPv6 appears to be significantly worse than IPv4. Little wonder that there have been calls from time to time to completely dispense with packet fragmentation in IPv6, as the current situation with IPv6 appears to be worse than…
There are lots of things you already test in prod—because there’s no other way you can test them. Sure, you can spin up clones of various system components or entire systems, and capture real traffic to replay offline (the gold standard of systems testing). But many systems are too big, complex, and cost-prohibitive to clone.…
How you see and interact with your online bank accounts is about to change. That’s because Europe is forcing change into the financial market. Digital transformation is a thing this decade. “Digital disruption,” startups who want to be “the Uber of X” in their industry, and going “mobile first” are not new trends. But the…
APNIC is in the process of transitioning from the current Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) trust anchor arrangement to a new configuration which has been agreed among the RIRs, and announced by the NRO. In this new configuration, each RIR will publish an “all resources” global trust anchor, under which its own regional resources (IP…
Every time there’s a notable cybersecurity breach, someone (even me) writes a comprehensive primer on the proper way to create “secure” passwords. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until a few years ago, everyone (including me) based their password advice on a 2003 paper from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the catchy title “NIST…
In today’s world, modern celebrities and artists seem to be primarily concerned with their image and whether or not it is aligned with the politically correct thought of the day. It is for this reason that it’s easy to sit up and take note when a celebrity actually goes against the grain of today’s conventional…