This hour-long presentation by Linus Torvalds on GIT was referenced in this thread here and it’s worth noting explicitly. It’s an oldie but goodie.
SourceForge Gets Attacked, Shares Experience
SourceForge, one of the largest places online that houses open source project files, community and more, was recently attacked starting last Wednesday:
The general course of the attack was pretty standard. There was a root privilege escalation on one of our platforms which permitted exposure of credentials that were then used to access machines with externally-facing SSH. Our network partitioning prevented escalation to other zones of our network.
They’ve documented the experience as well as their steps of resolving the issue and preventing it from happening again. It’s well worth a read for those that are may have to deal with things like this in the future (or for those that have had to deal with in the past).
Does the US Have an Internet 'Kill Switch'?
Egypt apparently does:
Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the Internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, experts said.
Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.
Pretty incredible. Experts say that it would be much harder (if not impossible) for this to occur in the US due to a number of different reasons.
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Netflix Uses NoSQL for Their Architecture
In a blog post today Netflix shared with their community the back-end of how things operate as well as sharing their reasoning behind it.
Being in the business of developing scaleable web apps I always appreciate things like this a lot since I want to learn from the best:
As Netflix moved into the cloud, we needed to find the appropriate mechanisms to persist and query data within our highly distributed infrastructure.
Our goal is to build fast, fault tolerant systems at Internet scale. We realized that in order to achieve this goal, we needed to move beyond the constraints of the traditional relational model. In the distributed world governed by Eric Brewer’s CAP theorem , high availability (a.k.a. better customer experience) usually trumps strong consistency.
There is little room for vertical scalability or single points of failure. And while it is not easy to re-architect your systems to not run join queries, or not rely on read-after-write consistency (hey, just cache the value in your app!), we have found ourselves braving the new frontier of NoSQL distributed databases.
Read the full article here for more a more in-depth overview.
Commercial Censorship: Google Blacklists BitTorrent
Insanity I tell you!
Google has begun censoring search term queries as it relates to anything “torrent” or “BitTorrent” related:
It’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA.
The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services.
The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.
Yikes. I’m pretty saddened by this since contradicts Google’s Mission:
Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Lame.
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Amazon Releases Simple Email Service
Amazon has released a new emailing service called SES (Simple Email Service). How creative.
But, from the looks of it, it appears to be a healthy enough of a choice to look to as an alternative if you’re in the market:
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.
Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service.
The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.
With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.
Check out the official site here as well as the pricing.