Interesting overview of Microsoft’s foray into the cloud computing world.
Windows Azure
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Climate Wars
A couple of years ago I attended a speech at UWO by Gwynne Dyer. As expected it was an interesting talk. One of things he mentioned was (paraphrasing) that he began to take climate change seriously when he realized that various military establishments were starting to plan for the its effects. Most notably mass population migration and starvation. Specifically, the British military was planning how it was going to stop people from migrating to the island when more southerly lands became unable to feed their populations. Interesting stuff.
Today while wondering around Chapters I discovered Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer. This is going to be an interesting read.
24 hour air traffic around the world
Maemo news
There have been a few interesting Maemo announcements lately. See the links below or Planet Maemo for a more complete story. The N810 form factor with HSPA, a faster processor and of course a open software stack could be an amazing device.
http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/09/osim-news-whats-up-with-maemo.html
http://tabletblog.com/2008/09/maemo-summit-fremantle-and-what-it.html
Sunday morning links
Busyness vs. Burst: Why Corporate Web Workers Look Unproductive: Different ways of working.
Don’t be afraid of change: An interesting description of business model changes at Chesspark.
BearHugCamp For Those Who Missed It: Notes from a recent meeting on Microblogging. Lots of good XMPP and OMB information.
A few east coast pictures
2018: Life on the Net panel
The above is a video of an interesting panel discussion at Fortune Brainstorm. The discussion ranges from governmental threats to the Internet to the value being captured by the carriers on the mobile Internet. Panellists include Lawrence Lessig, professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons and Chairman of Six Apart Japan, and Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Lab, (Second Life).
More fun with DNS packet captures
Following my last post on DNS query port usage, here are some more interesting DNS graphs.
The following graphs are based on a packet capture taken from the network interface of a recursive DNS server. This DNS server is one of the primary recursive DNS servers for a small Internet service provider. The capture includes all UDP DNS traffic to the DNS server as well as UDP DNS traffic from the DNS server to addresses within the local AS.
/usr/sbin/capinfos local.pcap File name: local.pcap File type: Wireshark/tcpdump/... - libpcap File encapsulation: Ethernet Number of packets: 200000 File size: 30702100 bytes Data size: 27502076 bytes Capture duration: 2659.328827 seconds Start time: Sat Jul 26 01:45:31 2008 End time: Sat Jul 26 02:29:50 2008 Data rate: 10341.74 bytes/s Data rate: 82733.89 bits/s Average packet size: 137.51 bytes
Scatter plot of DNS query source ports
DNS query UDP port usage histogram
Scatter plot of DNS query response time
Scatter plot of failed DNS query response time
Scatter plot of successful DNS query response time
DNS queries by type
DNS query response time
Failed DNS query response time
Successful DNS query response time
IP packet size histogram
DNS query UDP source port graphs
Recently Dan Kaminsky announced a new DNS vulnerability. This isn’t a vulnerability in a particular DNS implementation but a problem with the DNS protocol itself. You can find information from CERT here. The exact details of the vulnerability were kept quiet even after DNS software vendors simultaneouslly released patches to mitigate the problem. One of the main changes made by these patches was to increase the number of source ports used for outgoing queries to other DNS servers. From this information it was wildly speculated that the vulnerability is related to cache poisoning.
Perhaps partly due to an accidental, early release of information the full vulnerability details are now available.
I happened to have some DNS captures available from before and after the patch was applied so I thought it might be interesting to graph the UDP query port usage behaviour for before and after the patch. The graphs presented below come from a RHEL 5.2 based DNS server. The post-patch DNS server version is bind-9.3.4-6.0.2.P1.el5_2. I don’t have the pre-patch version number handy but presumably it is the previous Bind package released by RedHat. Both of the captures came from the same DNS server but note that the capture length is different.
The difference is quite dramatic. Bind appears to be making good use of almost the entire port space.
DNS server source UDP query port usage before patch
DNS server source UDP query port usage after patch
Also note the interesting banding in the second graph. This behavior is not limited to the new patch. I have noticed this in other pre-patch captures as well. More on that later.
Search Engine on CBC
This probably isn’t news to many people by now but CBC’s Search Engine will not be returning in the fall. What a loss. To me Search Engine is a great example of what a radio show and Podcast can be. The show had strong audience participation and felt almost more like a blog post than a traditional radio show. More importantly, Search Engine covered digital issues such as Copyright reform in a way that is greatly needed at this time.
I really hope that CBC will reconsider this cancellation. Public broadcasters need to bring in young people and new listeners. A new and experimental format like Search Engine is a great way to accomplish this. The huge amount of interest in this spring’s Copyright reform bill shows that many Canadians are becoming aware of the topics Search Engine covered. Now is not the time to give up on this show.
Fortunately it looks like Search Engine’s sister show, Spark, is still going to continue.