ept

TRVE DATA monthly update: May 2016

Hi everyone, the month of May has flown by, and it's time for our second monthly update for the TRVE DATA project.

In case you missed it, last month's update is here: https://gist.github.com/ept/627b4f102a0a036cee0b941a8b8e31c2

Here's what's new in May:

• Stephan has been doing some measurements to determine the overhead of running a Tor hidden service on a smartphone, which could be used to exchange messages between devices directly in a privacy-preserving way. He found that just keeping the hidden service alive produces several hundreds of megabytes per month in traffic. To a large extent this seems to be caused by regularly downloading information about the status of all Tor relays. As this amount of overhead is not acceptable for many users with a limited data allowance, an open question is whether we can reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded, and what the trade-offs are.

ept

awk '{print $7}' access.log | # Split by whitespace, 7th field is request path
    sort                    | # Make occurrences of the same URL appear consecutively in file
    uniq -c                 | # Replace consecutive occurrences of the same URL with a count
    sort -rn                | # Sort by number of occurrences, descending
    head -n 5                 # Output top 5 URLs

ept

This is a copy of an email sent to the TRVE DATA mailing list.

TRVE DATA monthly update: April 2016

Hi everyone, thanks for subscribing to the TRVE DATA mailing list! We're going to try to build a habit of posting a monthly project update here, and this is the first one.

For background, we published a blog post explaining the rationale and goals of the TRVE project. And here's a little video showing our collaborative text editor prototype.

Today I'd like to briefly introduce the people in Cambridge who are working on various aspects of TRVE:

ept

Investigatory Powers Bill

Please email your MP

The UK government is currently trying to rush the so-called "Investigatory Powers Bill" [1] through parliament (the bill has its second reading today — 15 March 2016). The bill gives the police, intelligence services and various government agencies wide-ranging powers to collect the internet activity of everybody in the country, hack innocent people's devices in bulk, compel companies to hack their own customers [2], and collect intrusive databases of personal data on innocent people.

It is doubtful whether these powers would make us any safer [3]; but they would make the UK a police state, with a regime of mass surveillance on par with Russia or China. As one MP put it: “Because for the past 200 years we haven’t had a Stasi or a Gestapo, we are intellectually lazy about it [4].” 200 senior lawyers and barristers have called the bill “unfit for purpose” and “maybe illegal” [5]. The current Apple vs. FBI case in th

ept

$ ping google.com
PING google.com (173.194.34.104): 56 data bytes
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2
Request timeout for icmp_seq 3
Request timeout for icmp_seq 4
64 bytes from 173.194.34.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=47 time=5277.419 ms
64 bytes from 173.194.34.104: icmp_seq=1 ttl=47 time=5967.947 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 7

ept

#!/bin/bash -e
export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64"
export ZOOBINDIR="/home/zookeeper/current/bin"
export JMXFLAGS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.local.only=false"
export ZOOMAIN="org.apache.zookeeper.server.quorum.QuorumPeerMain"
export ZOOCFGDIR="/home/zookeeper/config"
export ZOO_LOG_DIR="/home/zookeeper/log"
export ZOO_LOG4J_PROP="INFO,ROLLINGFILE"
 
. $ZOOBINDIR/zkEnv.sh

ept

Giveaway of old computing equipment! Everything still works, as far as I know.

If you want anything, let me know ASAP (@martinkl on Twitter), otherwise
it's going for recycling. You can pick it up in Kingston upon Thames
(south-west London). Everything free, the sooner it's gone the better.


Desktop computers
-----------------

ept

module RegexTest
  LAMBDAS = {
    :one => lambda{|str| str[/(\w+)/, 1] },
    :two => lambda{ puts "$1 = #{$1}" }
  }
end

RegexTest::LAMBDAS[:one].call('foo')
# => "foo"
RegexTest::LAMBDAS[:two].call

ept

Ratio of mean to median household income, by country (2004)


Country             Mean     Median    Currency               Mean greater by
United Kingdom    16,685     13,637    British Pound          22.4%
United States     32,195     26,672    United States Dollar   20.7%
Italy             15,835     13,367    Euro                   18.5%
Poland            14,844     12,697    Polish złoty           16.9%
Australia         29,417     25,581    Australian Dollar      15.0%
Canada            33,785     29,394    Canadian Dollar        14.9%

ept

--- a/bin/storm	2012-05-30 19:57:54.265944289 +0000
+++ b/bin/storm	2012-05-30 20:36:25.516040172 +0000
@@ -82,12 +82,15 @@
     """
     print name + ": " + confvalue(name, [STORM_DIR + "/conf"])
 
-def exec_storm_class(klass, jvmtype="-server", childopts="", extrajars=[], args=[]):
-    nativepath = confvalue("java.library.path", extrajars)
-    args_str = " ".join(map(lambda s: "\"" + s + "\"", args))
-    command = "java " + jvmtype + " -Dstorm.home=" + STORM_DIR + " " + get_config_opts() + " -Djava.library.path=" + nativepath + " " + childopts + " -cp " + get_classpath(extrajars) + " " + klass + " " + args_str