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HPSHELTON

Programming, Privacy, Politics, Photography

Dec 8, 2021

Amazon's Dark Secret: It Has Failed to Protect Your Data →

Some pretty harrowing stories from Wired about Amazon's retail business's security and privacy culture.

Dec 7, 2021

CRISP: Critical Path Analysis for Microservice Architectures →

We have developed a tool, CRISP (named taking letters from critical and span), to pinpoint and quantify underlying services that impact the overall latency of a request in a microservice architecture. CRISP identifies the critical path in a complex service dependency graph and does so on a large number of traces.

Some really interesting work from Uber. I continue to believe that distributed tracing is a necessary primitive for understanding the behavior of microservice architectures and love to see new ways to use the data to generate insights.

Dec 6, 2021

'Trojan Source' Bug Threatens the Security of All Code – Krebs on Security →

Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. [...]

Specifically, the weakness involves Unicode's bi-directional or "Bidi" algorithm, which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders, such as Arabic — which is read right to left — and English (left to right).

Bidi strikes again!

Dec 5, 2021

Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It) →

/Film spoke with several Oscar-winning sound designers, editors, and mixers to learn why it has become tougher to understand what characters are saying.

Dec 4, 2021

The Case of the Recursive Resolvers →

On September 30th 2021, Slack had an outage that impacted less than 1% of our online user base, and lasted for 24 hours. This outage was the result of our attempt to enable DNSSEC.

It's always DNS.

But a great writeup from the Slack team on what went wrong.

Oct 19, 2021

Fraudsters Cloned Company Director's Voice In $35 Million Bank Heist, Police Find →

AI voice cloning is used in a huge heist in the U.A.E., amidst warnings about cybercriminal use of the new technology.

Sep 26, 2021

How Apple built the iPhone 13's Cinematic Mode – TechCrunch →

A great look into the capabilities of Apple's new Cinematic Mode for iPhone 13 as well as some of the technology behind it. Don't miss the demo video for real-world examples.

Sep 25, 2021

The NSA and CIA Use Ad Blockers Because Online Advertising Is So Dangerous →

The Intelligence Community has deployed ad-blocking technology, according to a letter sent by Congress and shared with Motherboard.

Today in not-surprising news...

Sep 24, 2021

What it was like inside Microsoft during the worst cyberattack in history →

Microsoft president Brad Smith describes Microsoft's efforts to detect and defend both itself and its customers during the Solarwinds attack earlier this year.

Sep 23, 2021

Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election, internal report shows →

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and achieved that reach not through user choice but primarily as a result of Facebook's own platform design and engagement-hungry algorithm.

I find the fact that Facebook was paying the troll farms through ad revenue very funny and very scary.

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H. Parker Shelton

I'm just an ordinary thirty-something who's had some extraordinary opportunities. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, work for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, code websites and applications, take the occasional photograph, and keep a constant eye on current events, politics, and technology. This blog is the best of what catches that eye.

 
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