50 Years of the KIM-1

Supposedly the KIM-1 is 50 years old. Nobody seems to know the exact date it first shipped, but “January 1976” is the consensus so today seems as good a day as any.What’s a KIM-1 I hear some of you ask? Well history is strange stuff, written by the...

Everything’s a bug (or an issue)

What if I were to tell you that I had discovered a way to run software projects that’s efficient, effective, reliable, even pleasant? “Please continue…”, I hope you say. Up front I’ll let you know this isn’t a new discovery. In fact...

Congestion Collapse in Distributed Systems

I noticed this talk by my former colleague (at Netscape and AOL) Jim Roskind, who now works at Amazon.com. He gives a great introduction to the phenomenon of congestion collapse in complex queueing systems. His examples include familiar scenarios such as busy...

Yarnball: npm versions demystified

Most of the time, adding a library or package as a dependency to a JavaScript project using yarn (or its ancestor npm) is as simple as typing yarn add the-pkg-i-want to get the latest version. But this article is not about that. This article...

Digital Ocean adds Custom Image Support

Big news for those of us who like to go off-piste with our cloud hosted machines: until now “value” cloud provider Digital Ocean only allowed machines to be created from their curated set of OS images (although with some trickery and effort you could...

IoT Remote Radio Side Channel Attack Published

I noticed some amazing work published earlier this week by researches from EUROCOM, and to be presented at ACM CCS 2018. They were able to recover encryption keys from an IoT type SoC from noise leaked onto the chip’s Bluetooth radio’s RF output. This...