Oliver Roup's Blog » Shared Items

Shared Items – March 2, 2010

oroup — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:20:44 +0000

Wash. man electrocuted by urinating on power line

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

Shared Items – February 26, 2010

oroup — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:23:23 +0000

Vancouver Now – Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes – Post Sports

February 26, 2010 – Canada is awesome!

Shared Items – February 19, 2010

oroup — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:01:00 +0000

Ex-Goldman programmer indicted over HFT code theft | Reuters

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.

Shared Items – February 18, 2010

oroup — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:26:05 +0000

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home Boing Boing

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.

Shared Items – February 17, 2010

oroup — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:56:54 +0000

Mozilla Debates Whether to Trust Chinese CA | Freedom to Tinker

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.

Shared Items – February 10, 2010

oroup — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:17:27 +0000

BBC News – Warner retreats from free music streaming

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.

Shared Items – February 8, 2010

oroup — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 06:03:37 +0000

How Facebook uses Erlang for real-time chat – Off the Grid!!

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!

Shared Items – February 7, 2010

oroup — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:01:43 +0000

On College Campuses, a Shortage of Men – NYTimes.com

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

Shared Items – February 6, 2010

oroup — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:00:45 +0000

Backing out of a term sheet cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog

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

Shared Items – February 5, 2010

oroup — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:10:39 +0000

The disrupted of Davos « BuzzMachine

February 5, 2010 – Very interesting view of the WEF