Security Approach, Legal Snooping, Privacy, Finland, Slow Storage, Tiered Hybrid Storage

Post date: Jan 9, 2017 3:35:44 AM

It's interesting to notice how different security approaches different hotels got. I were in Spain, where there was a guy in reception complaining that everything from his room has been stolen, including passport etc, and he needed to call embassy and police. Only thing the reception was interested about, was if the guy can pay for the calls. - Points for that, very nice approach! - In Miami situation was quite similar, also the hotel room was broken. The guy in the reception was mostly interested who's going to pay for the broken door. - Then bit different approach in Hong Kong. We were really jet lagged so we wake up pretty late and just got up and went for breakfast. I guess the room was quite a mess when we just left shortly. When we were having breakfast, the hotel security called us and asked that we should return to the room because they suspect it might have been searched and stuff stolen. Yes, that's the way to do it. Yet I felt pretty ashamed when I told that nope, it's totally normal mess and you don't need to worry about it. I guess the cleaning stuff noticed that the room wasn't like it's usually supposed to be and contacted security instead of cleaning the room. - That's awesome, even if personally I wasn't very proud about the state we left the room in. We were just going to get back after the breakfast. As afterthought I should have left a very nice tip for that action. - I guess there are many more interesting travel stories out there to be told by people whom travel more than I do.
Read lot of discussion about Finnish new snooping law, which would allow intercepting Internet traffic and hacking & spying in Finland, as well as outside Finland when it seems necessary. Officially this is of course called reconnaissance / intelligence law. Of course Finland wasnt's NSA like spying capabilities because other states have shown what kind of benefits those can provide. There's nothing surprising about that. Maybe it has been done before that, but it has been against the constitution law. Of course law can be circumvented when situation demands it by entities "above the law". But in general, it's illegal. One reason for this legalization is protection of intelligence employees. Currently they 'might' be doing illegal stuff, and that isn't great if they happen to get prosecuted for that. Of course the norm is that it's being watched through the fingers, but you'll never know what can happen. In that case, it's highly likely that they claim that "this individual person" broke the law by doing illegal operations on his own, and we don't know anything at all about it. - Not great or cool at all, if it was organized by the chain of command. - But that might happen. - It would be less bad, than they just admitting that the whole organization has been breaking the constitution all the time. - Related news link
I think I've mentioned this earlier. But Finland is crafting legalization about Internet Snooping and Spying right now. It's interesting to see if we're going to see cases like this in future. UK spy agencies broke privacy rules. There are some references in past, which I'm not going to repeat, but shade strange light about Finnish legalization and how these things are handled in court.
Wondered how slow storage can be. Hitting just a very few slow I/O transactions will completely ruin system performance. As people should know, average performance is very bad measure. 99th percentile is much better. In this case 99th percentile is 1000 ms, but worst times are over 30000 milliseconds and median is 47 milliseconds and average is 10 milliseconds. - Using values like average it's very easy to forget that there are some extremely slow ops there. But this shouldn't be any kind of surprise with normal distribution to anyone.
It seems that almost all service providers are now offering tiered hybrid storage systems, which combine SSDs and HDDs to provide performance and capacity with reasonable price.