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The story we were told at a bank that I cannot name is that all their time synchronization was the domain of an engineer tucked away for 30 years in the home office, a fellow known as Professor Time. The system he had built was remarkable in its complexity and fragility. Nobody seemed to understand…
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Back in the day
This is an embarrassing confession when I think back on how little I knew and how much I thought I knew. At the height of the dot-com/Linux boom, maybe 1999, picture a restaurant in Palo Alto, one of the favored business dinner, super expensive, not-so-great Italian ones they have in the Valley. A group of…
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Heartbleed and open source
The Heartbleed bug was caused by a business model error. When we were in the real-time software business, our best customer was an old line manufacturing business that wanted to make sure before they qualified us as a vendor that we were making a profit from selling software to them. They did not want to…
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Measuring NTPd in the Cloud II
The problem with ntpd is the sudden performance degradations which can occur when conditions deviate from ‘ideal’. We have detailed these robustness issues of ntpd in prior work, including [17, 18]. Simply put, when path delay variability exceeds some threshold, which is a complex function of parameters, stability of the feedback control is lost, resulting in errors which can be large…
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Economics of Free Software
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Measuring Clock Synchronization in the Cloud- NTPd versus TimeKeeper
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At issue in Apple versus Samsung patent fight
A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data. The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor. The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as…
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Managed services (and cloud) for financial industry
The nature of data security is constantly changing for the financial industry. With the ever-growing need for tighter IT infrastructure security and the increasing prevalence of BYOD-friendly workplaces, financial institutions are turning to managed services to help handle these changes. In fact, a TABB Group forecast predicts that by 2016, 50% of financial institutions will be opting for managed…
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Cassandra Cluster Synchronization
Cassandra is a highly-distributable NoSQL database with tunable consistency. What makes it highly distributable makes it also, in part, vulnerable: the whole deployment must run on synchronized clocks. It’s quite surprising that, given how crucial this is, it is not covered sufficiently in literature. And, if it is, it simply refers to installation of a NTP daemon…
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NTPd DOS attacks
Miscreants who earlier this week took down servers for League of Legends, EA.com, and other online game services used a never-before-seen technique that vastly amplified the amount of junk traffic directed at denial-of-service targets. Rather than directly flooding the targeted services with torrents of data, an attack group calling itself DERP Trolling sent much smaller sized data…