It never stops to amaze me the the speed which P2P (BitTorrent) client can achieve with almost no server infrastructure! Heck, I can download conference videos as fast as if they were served up by Akamai’s carefully tuned architecture! Which brings me to my point: The current way of network design (aggregating connections with an…

If you haven’t heard: The Planet a big, big hosting provider from the USA had some unfortunate incident at one of their hosting facility (involving fires, explosions, etc). Fortunately it seems that no actual computing gear was damaged, however it will be some time until they get back 100% online. In the meantime, if you…

From Planet Perl I somehow ended up at a transcript of a talk about dynamic languages. It just so happens that during the same time I was reading the paper Eudaemon: Involuntary and On-Demand Emulation Against Zero-Day Exploits. The paper is an extension of the Argos project, which tries to identify zero-days by correlating network…

While reading the Luminous band-aids post over at the Universe of Disclosure blog, I was reminded of a similar event with a CD envelope a couple of years ago (the kind CD’s attached in magazines, with a round plastic window in the middle). I was opening it in the semi-dark (the kind of don’t wake…

I think usually of MySQL as a simpler alternative to more feature rich RDBMS’s like Postgres. However recently I listened to an interview with Brian Moon, the author of Phorum which is the oldest PHP and MySQL based forum software. The interview was very cool and demonstrated that you can do a lot if you…

I don’t like baseball all that much (it isn’t played very often on this part of the ocean), but I find the song by Kenny Rogers very inspiring. The story behind the song seems to be (according to Wikipedia) that a baseball player named Kenny Rogers (not to be confused with the country singer –…

I would be for my readers indulgence, but here is an other philosophical post. Recently I had the chance to try to teach somebody make dynamic websites and I realized that you must know an awful lot to do this. Just to enumerate a couple of things: (X)HTML CSS – which is by no means…

This is the HTML version of a paper I’ve written for school. Sorry for the poor formatting, but it was generated (semi-)automatically with Google Docs from an ODT document. You can download a nicer, PDF version of it here. Introduction Humans have a natural ability to correlate patterns from multiple sources to become aware of…

The RaceToZero has captured the publics imagination (or shall I say the medias) as the latest member of the AntiVirus is dead movement. As I tried to explain in my previous post, the results of the game are rather predictable (no detection after 5 minutes) unless the organizers are really mean (giving the contestants a…

When you want to forward a port, there are several possibilities from iptables to SSH. However I needed a low-latency link with no encryption or compression (because the protocol running over it was encrypted and double-encryption just slows things down without any substantial benefit in this case). My first idea was to chain two Netcat…