Category: technology
-
Define: security
When someone claims that one system is “more” or “less” secure than another system, what does that mean?
-
Aereo should sell antennas
Aereo got screwed by a bad SCOTUS decision that pretty much missed the point of their technology, what the service they provide is, and what people actually want. I’m not sure if they got the law right, but a number of people don’t think so. What Aereo does next is the topic of much conversation. …
-
Fixing a broken Internet
The Internet is broken. We know it is broken. We make money off the fact that is broken, which dis-incentivizes us to fix it. We should fix the Internet despite this.
-
Why you don’t need stateful middle-boxes or transport layer state in your network when you use IPv6 with Elastic Compute and Connectivity Infrastructure
Neither network state – like what TCP gives you – nor stateful middle-boxes – like advanced firewalls or load balancers – are necessary when you have IPv6 networks. This is a significant departure from the IPv4 world where both are a necessary, even fundamental, component of designing a safe, scalable, fast, and resilient network.
-
Doing ‘X’ in {some small number} Lines of Code
There have been enough of these in my information river lately that they have risen above the threshold of ‘annoying but ignorable’, so let me state for the record: If you are importing libraries and you aren’t counting those libraries in your ‘Lines of Code’ claims, you are a liar. And, as a corollary, claims…
-
The basics of a “slow demand” video service
Several years ago – call it 2004-ish – I spent a fleeting amount of time thinking about how to design a really good set top box that would facilitate a “slow demand” video service. This was around the time that I had permitted four things to enter my life – Netflix’s DVD by mail service,…
-
Centralized Doesn’t Scale
If there is one lesson I’ve learned from eight years selling Application Delivery Controllers, it it that centralized never scales, is a single point of vulnerability and failure, and promotes an authoritarian posture. Centralization is an anti-pattern. Don’t do it. Ever.
-
An unsolicted rant about solution selling
begin rant Solution selling is garbage… the entire premise that links the occasionally true assertion that “people don’t buy products, they buy solutions to business problems” with the notion that you can pre-package solutions to those business problems and build a marketing campaign around them is absurd. People are the cause of the aforementioned business…
-
identity, privacy, and technology
Let us agree up front that we (society) suck at all three. Now, what do we do about it? Identity is mostly about accountability and a little bit about trust and non-repudiation. Accountability for what you do is a foundation of a civil society, and without it we don’t really function very well. Knowing who…
-
Cookies, certificates, namespaces, and data
I’d like an operating system that lets me control cookies the way it lets me control certificates. What this means is that I want a little hacker window open on the side of my browser that shows me every cookie being requested by a site, every cookie being given to me by a site, and…