Bert Hubert

On IP address encryption: security analysis with respect for privacy Frequently, privacy concerns and regulations get in the way of security analysis. I’m a big fan of privacy, but I’m also a big fan of security and preventing people from getting hacked. If you are hacked you have no privacy either. Per-customer/subscriber traces are extremely useful for researching the security of networks. Specifically, lists of DNS requests per IP address make spotting infected users or infected devices very easy, especially if you look at “yesterday’s traffic” and compare it to today’s threat intelligence.

On Linux vDSO and clock_gettime sometimes being slow Like the previous post on this somewhat dormant blog, I want to share an oddity I discovered that no search engine could really find for me - even though once I found what the problem was, it turns out I was by no means the first person to discover this. Some system calls that are used extremely frequently in Linux can be speeded up by a mechanism called vDSO: a virtual dynamically linked shared object.

So no matter how pretty your code, eventually someone will benchmark it and demand top performance. Squeezing microseconds is a very addictive and even destructive activity. It ruins your evenings, destroys your ability to converse with human beings and typically leaves your code in a mess. No programmer can escape it however: the world demands speed, or a somewhat equivalent modern measure, longer battery life. Squeezing out more performance is not just a matter of “writing better code”.

A meandering walk through innovation that also reviews a book This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. I care deeply about innovation. It is literally where the future comes from, but it is a curious thing. Innovation and its more powerful partner, invention proceed at a snail’s pace. “In a world where change is the only constant” is a lie. It took this world 20 years to invent a decent can opener.

How many hours for multithreading the server? Or: dealing with overly detailed project planning Many developers, me included, dread that moment. Someone sits down with you and wants to know how many “hours” each step of the project will take. And of course the thing is, if you are doing something that has been done many times before, you might be able to provide a detailed estimate. People that build houses work like this, but they still often get it wrong.