"china" entries

Four short links: 30 December 2014

Four short links: 30 December 2014

DevOps Security, Bit Twiddling, Design Debates, and Chinese IP

  1. DevOoops (Slideshare) — many ways in which your devops efforts can undermine your security efforts.
  2. Matters Computational (PDF) — low-level bit-twiddling and algorithms with source code. (via Jarkko Hietaniemi)
  3. Top 5 Game Design Debates I Ignored in 2014 (Daniel Cook) — Stretch your humanity.
  4. From Gongkai to Open Source (Bunnie Huang) — The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: the far-sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations is attained by standing on the shoulders of others, and as such there is a network of people who trade these ideas as favors among each other. In a system with such a loose attitude toward IP, sharing with the network is necessary as tomorrow it could be your friend standing on your shoulders, and you’ll be looking to them for favors. This is unlike the West, where rule of law enables IP to be amassed over a long period of time, creating impenetrable monopoly positions. It’s good for the guys on top, but tough for the upstarts.
Four short links: 18 December 2014

Four short links: 18 December 2014

Manufacturer Rootkits, Dangerous Dongle, Physical Visualisation, and Cryptoed Comms

  1. Popular Chinese Android Smartphone Backdoored By ManufacturerCoolpad is the third largest smartphone builder in China, and ranks sixth worldwide with 3.7 percent global market share. It trails only Lenovo and Xiaomi in China and is the leader of China’s 4G market with 16 percent market share. Coolpad outsells Samsung and Apple in China, and has said it plans to expand globally with a goal of 60 million phones worldwide. For now, its high-end Halo Dazen phones are the only ones containing the backdoor, Palo Alto said. Backdoor enabled installation of other apps, dial numbers, send messages, and report back to the mothership. The manufacturer even ran the command-and-control nodes for the malware.
  2. USB Driveby — dongle that plugs into USB, and tries to root the box. Specifically, when you normally plug in a mouse or keyboard into a machine, no authorization is required to begin using them. The devices can simply begin typing and clicking. We exploit this fact by sending arbitrary keystrokes meant to launch specific applications (via Spotlight/Alfred/Quicksilver), permanently evade a local firewall (Little Snitch), install a reverse shell in crontab, and even modify DNS settings without any additional permissions.
  3. Physical Data Visualisationsa chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts. (via Flowing Data)
  4. Dissentan anonymous communication substrate intended primarily for applications built on a broadcast communication model: for example, bulletin boards, wikis, auctions, or voting. Users of an online group obtain cryptographic guarantees of sender and receiver anonymity, message integrity, disruption resistance, proportionality, and location hiding. And a pony.
Four short links: 8 December 2014

Four short links: 8 December 2014

Systemic Improvement, Chinese Trends, Deep Learning, and Technical Debt

  1. Reith Lectures — this year’s lectures are by Atul Gawande, talking about preventable failure and systemic improvement — topics of particular relevance to devops cultural devotees. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Chinese Mobile App UI Trends — interesting differences between US and China. Phone number authentication interested me: You key in your number and receive a confirmation code via SMS. Here, all apps offer this type of phone number registration/login (if not prefer it). This also applies to websites, even those without apps. (via Matt Webb)
  3. Large Scale Deep Learning (PDF) — Jeff Dean from Google. Starts easy! Starts.
  4. Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (PDF) — Google research paper on the ways in which machine learning can create problems rather than solve them.
Four short links: 24 November 2014

Four short links: 24 November 2014

Magic Leap, Constant Improvement, Philanthropofallacies, and Chinese Manufacturing

  1. How Magic Leap is Secretly Creating a New Alternate Reality (Gizmodo) — amazing piece of investigative tech journalism.
  2. Better All The Time (New Yorker) — What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. […] Everyone works hard. Everyone is really good.
  3. Stop Trying to Save the World (New Republic) — What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket. (note: some pottymouth language in this article, and some analysis I wholeheartedly agree with.)
  4. Christmas in YiwuWe travelled by container ship across the East China Sea before following the electronics supply chain around China, visiting factories, distributors, wholesalers and refineries. Fascinating! 22km of corridors in the mall that dollar store buyers visit to fill their shelves. I had never seen so many variations of the same product. Dozens of Christmas stockings bearing slightly different Santas and snowmen. Small tweaks on each theme. An in-house designer creates these designs. It feels like a brute force approach to design, creating every single possibility and then letting the market decide which it wants to buy. If none of the existing designs appeal to a buyer they can get their own designs manufactured instead. When a custom design is successful, with the customer placing a large order, it is copied by the factory and offered in their range to future buyers. The factory sales agent indicated that designs weren’t protected and could be copied freely, as long as trademarks were removed. Parallels with web design left as exercise to the reader. (via the ever-discerning Mr Webb)
Four short links: 7 October 2014

Four short links: 7 October 2014

Chinese Makers, Code Projects, Distributed Data Structures, and Networked Games

  1. On the Maker Movement in China (Clay Shirky) — Hardware hacking hasn’t become a hot new thing in China because it never stopped being a regular old thing.
  2. A History of Apache Storm and Lessons Learned (Nathan Marz) — his lessons on building, promoting, releasing, maintaining, governance … all worth reading.
  3. Tango: Distributed Data Structures Over a Shared Logprovides developers with the abstraction of a replicated, in-memory data structure (such as a map or a tree) backed by a shared log. (via paper summary)
  4. Making Fast-Paced Multiplayer Networked Games is Hard (Gamasutra) — This may all sound like smoke and mirrors because that is exactly what it is – we are just maintaining the illusion the game is playing out in wall clock time even though updates are arriving from the past.
Four short links: 23 September 2014

Four short links: 23 September 2014

Alibubble, Reactive Manifesto, Lovely Logs, and Learning Design

  1. Thoughts on the Alibaba BubbleAlibaba is an offering that encourages the kind of negative Wall Street behavior none of us really want to see happen again. (via Tim O’Reilly)
  2. Reactive ManifestoWe believe that a coherent approach to systems architecture is needed, and we believe that all necessary aspects are already recognised individually: we want systems that are Responsive, Resilient, Elastic and Message Driven. We call these Reactive Systems.
  3. The Log: What Every Software Engineer Should Know About Real-time Data’s Unifying Abstraction (LinkedIn) — You can reduce the problem of making multiple machines all do the same thing to the problem of implementing a distributed consistent log to feed these processes input. The purpose of the log here is to squeeze all the non-determinism out of the input stream to ensure that each replica processing this input stays in sync.
  4. Method of Actiona collection of tools, games and articles to help you learn design.
Four short links: 3 September 2014

Four short links: 3 September 2014

Distributed Systems Theory, Chinese Manufacturing, Quantified Infant, and Celebrity Data Theft

  1. Distributed Systems Theory for the Distributed Systems EngineerI tried to come up with a list of what I consider the basic concepts that are applicable to my every-day job as a distributed systems engineer; what I consider ‘table stakes’ for distributed systems engineers competent enough to design a new system.
  2. Shenzhen Trip Report (Joi Ito) — full of fascinating observations about how the balance of manufacturing strength has shifted in surprising ways. The retail price of the cheapest full featured phone is about $9. Yes. $9. This could not be designed in the US – this could only be designed by engineers with tooling grease under their fingernails who knew the manufacturing equipment inside and out, as well as the state of the art of high-end mobile phones.
  3. SproutlingThe world’s first sensing, learning, predicting baby monitor. A wearable band for your baby, a smart charger and a mobile app work together to not only monitor more effectively but learn and predict your baby’s sleep habits and optimal sleep conditions. (via Wired)
  4. Notes on the Celebrity Data Theft — wonderfully detailed analysis of how photos were lifted, and the underground industry built around them. This was one of the most unsettling aspects of these networks to me – knowing there are people out there who are turning over data on friends in their social networks in exchange for getting a dump of their private data.
Four short links: 25 August 2014

Four short links: 25 August 2014

Digital Signs, Reverse Engineering Censorship, USB Protection, and Queue Software

  1. Greenscreen — Chromecast-based open source software for digital signs.
  2. Reverse Engineering Censorship in Chinese Cyberspace (PDF) — researchers create accounts and probe to see which things are blocked. Empirical transparency.
  3. USB CondomA protective barrier between your device and “juice-jacking” hackers.
  4. queues.io — long list of job queues, message queues, and other such implementations.
Four short links: 7 March 2014

Four short links: 7 March 2014

Distributed Javascript, Inclusion, Geek's Shenzhen Tourguide, Bitcautionary Tales

  1. Coalescecommunication framework for distributed JavaScript. Looking for important unsolved problems in computer science? Reusable tools for distributed anything.
  2. Where Do All The Women Go?Inclusion of at least one woman among the conveners increased the proportion of female speakers by 72% compared with those convened by men alone.
  3. The Ultimate Electronics Hobbyists Guide to Shenzhen — by OSCON legend and Kiwi Foo alum, Jon Oxer.
  4. Bitcoin’s Uncomfortable Similarity to Some Shady Episodes in Financial History (Casey Research) — Bitcoin itself need serious work if it is to find a place in that movement long term. It lacks community governance, certification, accountability, regulatory tension, and insurance—all of which are necessary for a currency to be successful in the long run. (via Jim Stogdill)
Four short links: 11 February 2014

Four short links: 11 February 2014

Shadow Banking, Visualization Thoughts, Streaming Video Data, and Javascript Puzzlers

  1. China’s $122BB Boom in Shadow Banking is Happening on Phones (Quartz) — Tencent’s recently launched online money market fund (MMF), Licai Tong, drew in 10 billion yuan ($1.7 billion) in just six days in the last week of January.
  2. The Weight of Rain — lovely talk about the thought processes behind coming up with a truly insightful visualisation.
  3. Data on Video Streaming Starting to Emerge (Giga Om) — M-Lab, which gathers broadband performance data and distributes that data to the FCC, has uncovered significant slowdowns in throughput on Comcast, Time Warner Cable and AT&T. Such slowdowns could be indicative of deliberate actions taken at interconnection points by ISPs.
  4. Javascript Puzzlers — how well do you know Javascript?