Oliver Roup’s Blog

March 2, 2010 – Possibly the most gruesome way to go that I can imagine.

February 26, 2010 – Canada is awesome!

February 18, 2010 – Who wants to bet that this case never goes to trial? There will be a settlement involving the perpetrator agreeing to never describe what this code actually does.

February 18, 2010 – This is pretty creepy and fits in to my “hypothetical attacks we talked about in Grad school are very real” theme. Yikes.

February 17, 2010 – It’s amazing when these esoteric technical issues we talked about in grad school turn out to be real-life issues. What if the certificate authority is working in concert with your attacker? How do you know you’re really talking to GMail and not the Chinese Government? It’s still amazing to see this go from grad-student theory to real-life issue.

February 10, 2010 – Surprise, Surprise. Just as streaming music sites like Pandora look to be turning the corner, here come the music labels to move the goal posts. Again.

In theory Pandora is protected under the DMCA but expect posturing and perhaps litigation over what exactly constitutes an “interactive” stream.

February 8, 2010 – This is a somewhat old blog post from a Facebook engineer describing how they engineered the chat system in Erlang. It’s notable because it contains a description of a scale testing technique I’ve never heard of before – they did a “dark launch” where real users pages were simulating status update connections and even fake message sending without ever drawing a single element on screen. This seems like a very novel way to get realistic load testing (realistic because it’s real people with real data) but without exposing your users to a system with bugs. Clever!

February 6, 2010 – Hmm, not what I remember…

February 5, 2010 – Chris Dixon flexes some muscle. Hardcore.

February 5, 2010 – Very interesting view of the WEF