FTS, Tribler, NSA, Yandex Disk, Google Services, System security, Misc

Post date: Dec 21, 2014 1:05:21 PM

• Played with Full text indexes (FTS) when using SQLite3. This simple virtual table solution allowing MATCH searches seems to be working really well and provides lot faster search results than the traditional LIKE search which many programmers are unfortunately using. Based on tests FTS4 indexing works really well and quickly at least with databases which are just a few gigabytes of text.
• Checked out Tribler project. I don't really like their design. They're just copying how Tor works, even if everybody knows really well that Tor isn't designed for file sharing. Much older designs like Freenet and GNUnet would provide a lot better performance.
• A nice post about code quality. Do it using a quick fix or do it properly? Cost of quick fixes can be huge in the aftermath. This post compares software design & quality to financial markets.
• "NSA Has Undercover Operatives in Foreign Companies" - No surprise. It should be more like obvious thing. Many things are being lied about. I guess many anonymous VPN providers also lie about the level of anonymity they're providing. What if Sony Hacking would have been done via commercial VPN providers "anonymous" service? Would you believe that they would retain the anonymity? I wouldn't.
• Yandex Disk provides 10GB of free backup space with WebDAV support.
• Also checked out a few Google Serices: Managed VMs, Google Cloud Interconnect, Google Cloud Direct Peering, Google Cloud Trace and the Google Container Engine. Which is a fully-managed cluster manager for Docker containers using Google's Kubernetes. Network is managed by Andromeda a Software Defined Network (SDN). Using Docker & Kubernetes also really nice avoids the big bad thing of Google App Engine, called vendor lock-in.
• Read one article about companies with 100 specialized security engineers. Well, what about targets which got NONE. As well as systems are inherently misconfigured and there's no hardening what so ever.
• Other stuff: Cloud Security Assessment, Firebase, Security Architecture, Zero Day Attack, Automatic Forensics, Adaptive Deception & Defence, Measuring application performance, 50% and 95% latency. A system performance comment from Hacker News, this really made me smile. Clearly I'm not the only one having these experiences.