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Domain: acetio.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to acetio.com.
Stories · 60
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Data Safety In a Time of Natural Disasters
CowboyRobot writes "The National Weather Service has begun testing the way it labels natural disasters. It's hoping that the new warnings, which include words like 'catastrophic,' 'complete devastation likely,' and 'unsurvivable,' will make people more likely to take action to save their lives. But what about their digital lives? Recommendations include: Keep all electronics out of basements and off the floor; Unplug your hardware; Buy a surge protector; Enclose anything valuable in plastic. If the National Weather Service issued a 'complete devastation' warning today, would your data be ready?" -
State Department CIO Interviewed About Post-Wikileaks Changes
CowboyRobot writes, quoting Information Week: "Eighteen months after its diplomatic cables were exposed in the WikiLeaks breach, the State Department continues to lock down its confidential information, while increasing its use of using social media. The agency is deploying new security technology, including auditing and monitoring tools that detect anomalous activity on the State Department's classified networks and systems. State has also begun tagging information with metadata to enable role-based access to those who need it, and is planning to implement public key infrastructure on its classified systems by the summer of 2014. This is all taking place despite the recent announcement that the IT budget will be cut by nearly 5%." -
Navy Planning To Build Laser Cannon In Four Years
CowboyRobot writes "The US Navy is months away from requesting bids from contractors to construct a laser weapon for its ships, now that the technology is feasible. 'The key point came last April, when the Navy put a test laser firing a (relatively weak) 15-kilowatt beam aboard a decommissioned destroyer... the Martime Laser Demonstrator cut through choppy California waters, an overcast sky and salty sea air to burn through the outboard engine of a moving motorboat a mile away.'" -
A Taxonomy of Visualization Techniques
CowboyRobot writes "The ACM's Queue magazine has a new, comprehensive taxonomy of visualization techniques, drawing from the theories of Edward Tufte and citing examples from academia, government, and the excellent NYT visualization team. This list contains 12 steps for turning data into a compelling visualization: Visualize, Filter, Sort, Derive, Select, Navigate, Coordinate, Organize, Record, Annotate, Share, & Guide. 'For developers, the taxonomy can function as a checklist of elements to consider when creating new analysis tools.' The citations alone make this an article worth bookmarking." -
Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers In the Internet
Expanding on earlier work from Jim Gettys of Bell Labs with a new article in the ACM Queue, CowboyRobot writes that Gettys "makes the case that the Internet is in danger of collapse due to 'bufferbloat,' 'the existence of excessively large and frequently full buffers inside the network.' Part of the blame is due to overbuffering; in an effort to protect ourselves we make things worse. But the problem runs deeper than that. Gettys' solution is AQM (active queue management) which is not deployed as widely as it should be. 'We are flying on an Internet airplane in which we are constantly swapping the wings, the engines, and the fuselage, with most of the cockpit instruments removed but only a few new instruments reinstalled. It crashed before; will it crash again?'" -
OCaml For the Masses
CowboyRobot writes "Yaron Minsky of Jane Street argues that the time has come for statically-typed functional languages like OCaml and Haskell. He cites many reasons and illustrates what he says is the most important, concision: 'The importance of concision is clear: other things being equal, shorter code is easier to read, easier to write, and easier to maintain.'" -
Outlining a World Where Software Makers Are Liable For Flaws
CowboyRobot writes with this piece at the ACM Queue, in which "Poul-Henning Kamp makes the argument for software liability laws. 'We have to do something that actually works, as opposed to accepting a security circus in the form of virus or malware scanners and other mathematically proven insufficient and inefficient efforts. We are approaching the point where people and organizations are falling back to pen and paper for keeping important secrets, because they no longer trust their computers to keep them safe.'" -
Why Any Competing Whois Registry Model Is Doomed
CowboyRobot writes "In Paul Vixie's latest essay, he argues that the alternative to the Whois registry model is flawed and that we should be learning from the mistakes of the history of proposed alternatives to the DNS. 'Any proposal for a competing Whois registry model is as doomed by design and destiny as every alternative DNS system. Even if it succeeds at first, it would fail after copycatting occurred.'" -
Designing a Programming Language For Embeddability
CowboyRobot writes "The creators of the Lua language describe the process of designing a new language and the constraints that certain parameters, specifically embeddability, place on the process. 'Many languages (not necessarily scripting languages) support extending through an FFI (foreign function interface). An FFI is not enough to allow a function in the system language to do all that a function in the script can do. Nevertheless, in practice FFI covers most common needs for extending, such as access to external libraries and system calls. Embedding, on the other hand, is harder to support, because it usually demands closer integration between the host program and the script, and an FFI alone does not suffice.'" -
Google Chrome Developers On Browser Security
CowboyRobot writes "Developers of Google's Chrome browser have spoken up in an article describing their approach to keeping the browser secure, focusing on minimizing the frequency, duration, and severity of exposure. One tool Chrome uses is a recently open-sourced update distribution application called 'Omaha.' 'Omaha automatically checks for software updates every five hours. When a new update is available, a fraction of clients are told about it, based on a probability set by the team. This probability lets the team verify the quality of the release before informing all clients.'"