spit and baling wire: the internet's fragile underpinnings (20211130)

30-Nov-2021 524 words 3 minutes

‘Dune’ Has a Desert Problem

don’t quite know how i landed on this article. but i found it a fascinating read on the influences and whitewashing of dune over its various incarnations.
research!rsc: Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco - great read; passed along to me during a crypto discussion at $DAYJOB.

Who Controls the Internet? And should they? - Bert Hubert’s writings

gone are the heady dreams of my 20s.
The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

the 1950s-1960s were truly some bonkers times. this is on one hand terrifying and on the other, incredibly fascinating.

The ties that un-bind | Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

i’m a little behind on my SIGCOMM reading. this paper, in particular, is totally worth the read if you’re at all interested in internet architecture and how to build things differently. it does a nice job of showing how content delivery can be addressed (ha!) without requiring moar(!) IP space.
Latency Into Your Network - As Seen From RIPE Atlas | RIPE Labs

i enjoyed this. i’d done something similar for a customer several years ago as we were discussing where to place additional peering locations. the utility of RIPE atlas never ceases to impress me.
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published

remind me again why academic publishers get to set such insane rates for subscriptions and the value add they provide?
How To Fix Email … With Science! | WIRED

i don’t know about the “with science” part, but a useful reminder that our subtle behaviors when sending email can have knock on effects on the recipients and that i need to be more mindful when i use the scheduled send feature in gmail.

Here’s Why Rapid COVID Tests Are So Expensive and Hard to Find — ProPublica

a particularly irritating read with our recent need to scrounge up some tests over the past couple of days given an unexpected exposure.

when we were in iceland last month, it was interesting to see that they have endcaps full of at-home test kits. had we been thinking we would have brought a bunch of tests home with us.

The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire – Krebs on Security

people don’t really know the half of it. but seriously, still allowing MAIL-FROM? it’s not 1996 any more.