Gilmore's List Posted on Mar 15, 2016
A pioneer identifies some deep fixes the Internet needs
While attempting to get a grip on the “Big problems” that we needed to solve with the Internet over the next 10 years, we’d exchanged email with a ton of Internet greats, trying to work out what to do, and how to do it. One response in 2013 - from John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF - who I had never met at that point - went into incredible detail.
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Star Wars of Wusses Posted on Mar 14, 2016
Han Solo was dead before he came on screen, damn it...
More than a few things stuck in my craw about the star wars reboot. But there were two things that really bugged me on my second viewing. Like everyone else I loved the rise of “Girrrl Power” - the lead character, Rey’s, perpetual rejection of a traditional gender role to her male champion, Finn - like where they met under fire - she yells “Stop holding my hand” - and then outruns him!
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Battling bufferbloat on the Odroid C1+ Posted on Mar 4, 2016
Better hardware, older software
My goal in life, generally, is to have a set of boxes with known characteristics to drive network tests with, that are reliable enough to setup once and ignore. Other people actually use these itty bitty boards to do more useful stuff on… me, I’m just trying to fix bufferbloat everywhere. So I’m trying to find a set of boards that can drive gigE wires at line rates. A) I definitely wanted variety, particularly in tcp implementations, kernel versions, ethernet and wifi chips - as it seemed like drawing conclusions from “perfect” drivers like the e1000e all the time was a bad idea.
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Hardware from hell Posted on Mar 1, 2016
It's not easy to do bleeding edge development
Every year I end up refreshing my hardware to save on taxes stay on the bleeding edge. It’s getting hard to spend a lot of money on anything but I had had a small cash injection, so I tried to find hardware that I would actually need for the coming year. Nearly all my other main hardware I left behind in Sweden, notably my hyperfast octa-core build/storage box, “snapon”. I basically returned home to san francisco with my laptop, and what I had in my storage unit - and as the kind of testing and work I do requires at least 5 machines to do right, I went shopping for new hardware.
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Securing the email interconnect Posted on Jan 25, 2016
Email is everyone's responsibility
In my frustration with getting basic bufferbloat fixes from a fractional percent of deployment to something fuller, I decided to take a break from it and tackle something else for a bit. Email interchange between providers is, nowadays, largely secured by STARTTLS - submissions, always! All the major email providers - google, yahoo, verizon, comcast, facebook - use starttls universally. Nearly all of my smaller providers - usually using pretty current code, did also.
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Holes in ssh are always a big deal Posted on Jan 14, 2016
As everything relies on it
I view holes in ssh as a “big deal”, so today’s announcement of a major hole in ssh sent chills down my spine. While any attack against it would have to be sophisticated - involving the compromise of the ssh server itself in the first place - there are plenty of attacks and high value targets out there. A single malicious server that I have talked to - say for example - one implanted at github - could have leaked my private keys for my own servers and services.
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The rebirth of my blog Posted on Jan 1, 2016
I been away a long time
For 3.4 decades now I’ve maintained multiple sites on the internet, hosting “my stuff”: music, writings, web sites, personal email server and so on. After 2002 it seemed less and less relevant to be “out there”, and I let most of them slip away, archived by archive.org, and most recently - most of my energies were sucked into working on bufferbloat and other projects like cerowrt. I maintained what was left of my original sites, wrote code and sent a lot of gmail instead.
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Airport Security Posted on Dec 28, 2015
Everybody bends the rules, so which rules matter?
Every so often the paranoia emitted by some privacy advocates gets to me. They don’t seem to get out often enough to check their assumptions - and those that do, complain about the theater of it all, more than anything else. I travel A LOT. Just by being me I’ve long figured I should be tweaking out everything that would set off an alarm from a big gov perspective. Certainly everywhere I go, bureaucracies malfunction, at least.
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Structured programming Posted on Dec 23, 2015
I can be too snarky sometimes
Once upon a time I was asked by a clueless HR person to describe what structured programming was. By that point in the interview I’d decided I didn’t want that job and started riffing. Structured programming, I said, is about how you plan your day in a world of shared cubical space. You have to time when you tackle the most complicated coding for when you were sure you wouldn’t be interrupted - either early in the morning, or late at night, when there was nobody there.
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What would you do with a billion dollars? Posted on Dec 12, 2015
My christmas wishes
What would anyone do with a spare billion dollars? If you had such a vast concentration of wealth, what would you do with it? How would you spend it? There’s only so many boats you can buy, so much caviar you can eat…. So I sat awake last night thinking about how I’d spend it, if I had it. I couldn’t spend it in a single year, and had to go for five!
Read MoreFind me elsewhere.
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space