Artur Bergman
Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist at-large, is the CEO of Fastly and formerly the Chief Technology Officer of Wikia. He is also an enthusiastic apologist for federated identity and a board member of the OpenID Foundation. His current interests include semantic search, large scale infrastructure, open source development, federated instant messaging, neurotransmitters, and the future of cyborgs.
Movable Type 4 Released
After a year since the previous release, today Six Apart released Movable Type 4. (Disclosure: I am on leave-of-absence from Six Apart, Radar runs on MT3.) As with previous versions, there are both commercial and non-commercial licenses. New is the upcoming Open Source version, which contains the core functionality of MT under the GPL. Significant new features (som of which…
Wikipedia is only as anonymous as your IP
Virgil Griffith, a good friend and fellow hacker, reminds us today that anonymity on the internet does not really exist. With his newly released search tool Wikiscanner, you can search an index of 35 million Wikipedia edits by IP, allowing you to find edits coming from within organizations like the CIA or the EFF (bonus if you can find something…
Virgin America Inaugural
Today I had the pleasure of going on Virgin America's inaugural 'California Dreaming' flight number VX0846 from LAX to SFO. It was a pretty fantastic experience altogether, starting with taking off from the Imperial Terminals Flight Path Museum at LAX and ending with a reception by Mayor Newsom. I will post a bit more about the technical details later, but…
Law is code
Code-is-law, a term originating from Professor Lawrence Lessig, has been on the collective mind of Radar lately. Tim blogged about it, and the last issue of Release 2.0 explored it further. I found code-is-law on my mind at Foo Camp this year during a presentation on security by Dan Kaminsky. (Yes, the same renaissance hacker that made me fear my…
Your browser is a tcp/ip relay
I've been a longtime fan of fellow hacker Dan Kaminsky, best known for his work in tracking down the spread of the sony rootkit. Recently I spoke with him about his current work, and he summed it up by saying, "I can turn your web browser into an VPN concentrator." When I stared at him in disbelief he explained that…
Virgin America
Virgin America is Sir Richard Branson and the Virgin Group's second attempt to enter the US domestic airline market, and as a devoted Virgin Atlantic traveler I have been eagerly following their progress to approval. Every time I fly a domestic US carrier I feel miserable. How come I can go from San Francisco to London with food and and…
OSCON: Intel releases Open Source Threading Building Blocks
At OSCON today, Intel announced the the availability of an open source library designed to help developers tackle the future of multi-core development. A C++ library released under the GPL, the Intel Threading Building Blocks SDK attempts to present a high-level abstraction. Moving away from the raw threading model, it contains components such as thread-safe highly efficient algorithms, highly scalable…
Failure happens
What an exciting day, as services for hundreds of thousands of users and millions of readers disappeared from the internet. In a stunning but unsurprising event, a repeated power cycling caused by a blown power station disrupted the 365 Main datacenter, causing them to lose all power to two colocation rooms. I jokingly refer to 365 Main as the "Web…
365 Main datacenter power outage – Six Apart Technorati Craigslist
The Web 2.0 datacenter 365 Main, in the heart of SOMA, just lost power. Sites that are affected include Craigstlist, Technorati, Yelp and all Six Apart properties, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. The only information that seems to be available is at the quite innovative Six Apart twitter stream. I feel sorry for the operation staff that are going to do…
OSCON: Open Source Developer Toolkit
Where do you start building a large scaleable service? Chances are you will start with work done by Brad Fitzpatrick, Doug Cutting and Simon Peyton-Jones. Brad is the author of several core tools of Web 2.0, memcached, mogilefs and perlbal. Doug gives us Lucene, Nutch and the Open Source implementation of the Google MapReduce in Hadoop. Simon researches and contributes…