Makura no Soshi

Some older texts, all about blockchains …

• Bitcoin’s Academic Pedigree – ACM Queue, Arvind Narayanan and Jeremy Clark
  The concept of cryptocurrencies is built from forgotten ideas in research literature.
• Git, PGP, and the Blockchain: A Comparison – Netfuture, Marcel Waldvogel
  An attempt at technological genealogy.
• XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress – apenwarr
  XML solved syntax, which turned out not to be the problem. Blockchains [purport to] solve centralization, which will turn out not to be the problem. But they do create the incentive to slash and burn and invest a lot of money hiring consultants.
• 10 years of… whatever this has been – apenwarr
  I forgot one essential reason bitcoin has survived: Because people really, really, really want it to.
• Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain – Kai Stinchcombe
  After years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain—besides currency speculation and illegal transactions.
• Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster – Drew DeVault
  Cryptocurrency has invented an entirely new category of internet abuse.

Soup.io wird abgeschaltet. Ich habe der Seite schon 2017 den Rücken gekehrt als nach einem Ausfall drei Jahre Daten verloren waren. Auch damals hat die Finanzierung durch quasi-Spenden von Nutzern schon nicht für einen sicheren Betrieb gereicht.
Und doch trifft mich die Nachricht jetzt wieder weil vorher noch viele Jahre vorhanden waren; aber wenn das nun ganz offline geht, dann stirbt ein Stück meiner persönlichen Internetgeschichte.
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I still like Zabbix as a simple allround monitoring solution. With its agent and UserParameter configuration it is very flexible and can be used (and abused) in many interesting ways. Here I want to show and compare three different patterns of collecting metrics from a service:

1. simple item fetch
2. fetch and send
3. preprocessing

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On too big to fail tech …

• How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash, Rana Foroohar, The Guardian
  Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all.
• Absolute scale corrupts absolutely – apenwarr
  The Internet has gotten too big.
• Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They’re the Good Guys. They’re Not. | Erin Griffith, WIRED
  Will anyone ever write another positive story about a tech startup? I said probably not.
• How Evil Is Tech? – David Brooks, The New York Times
  Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction.
• Nothing Fails Like Success – Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart
  Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups.
• How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry, Dimitri Tokmetzis and Maaike Goslinga, The Correspondent
  The [EU] Commission has been trying to boost the security industry for ten years now, and nearly €2 billion has already been funneled into security research.

A few remarks on the AWS Summit in Berlin this April…

Thanks to several sponsors the event was free of charge and a welcome opportunity to visit Berlin. Given this background it is probably not fair to compare it to normal tech conferences. Although it did have several tracks with technical talks and presentations, most of them were on an introductory level so you might as well watch a few AWS webinar videos. So one has to see the summit as a pure marketing event, one you should attend to celebrate AWS itself, meet fellow AWS user group members, and see a few product demos as well as startup pitches.

Train Rides

The day before: “Oh great, several hours on my own. I will pack books and I am gonna get so much reading and writing done.”
On the train: “Argh, I am tired, and it is too loud, I cannot concentrate on anything.”
The day after: “Where went all that time? What did I do?”

Hotel Wi-Fi

The day before: “There will probably be some kind of Wi-Fi available. It is 2014 and it has to be better now than it was the last time.”
On site, after a painful experience including ridiculous prices and/or asking for silly access codes, counting it a success if there is decent signal strength (even without reasonable bandwidth) in the lobby: “Thank god for my smartphone data plan.”

Conferences

9am: “I wonder why they keep so many snacks and cake arround. I just had breakfast and I am fine till lunch.”
After 2-3h of talks or a workshop: “Hunger! I want sugar… and caffeine… and then some more sugar!”

Liebes Internet-Tagebuch…  manchmal sind die banalen Dinge die besten Anlässe das verwaiste Blog weiterzuführen. Und so verkünde ich der Welt: meine iPod-Kopfhörer haben nach gut zwei Jahren mal wieder einen Kabelbruch und ich musste mir neue kaufen. Read the rest of this entry »