The old method for embedding a Flickr slideshow in a WordPress blog no longer works after WP 2.1. Flickr creates really nice Flash-driven slideshows and there’s easy HTML code to embed these shows on regular web pages, but the code doesn’t work on WordPress-driven sites because the (tinyMCE) editor software removes the code. Now there’s a solution. [Read more…]
EDoS [Economic Denial of Sustainability] attacks
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is one in which a server or service is “overwhelmed” by traffic and consequently either disabled or made unavailable to its customers. Typically the effect on the target of a DoS attack is a loss of business, or in the less critical cases, just failure to get his/her message out.
However, cloud computing allows us to scale our servers up and up in order to service greater numbers of requests for service. This opens a new avenue of approach for attackers, which originally was labeled an Economic Denial of Sustainability attack by Christofer Hoff (November 2008), with a follow-up just recently. (I was introduced to the concept by Reuven Cohen’s description published just today.)
In short, if your cloud-based service is designed to scale up automatically (which some like Amazon EC2 are), then an attacker can grief you economically by sending a huge number of (automated) requests that appear on the surface to be legitimate, but are actually fake. Your costs will rise as you scale up, using more and/or larger servers (automatically) to service those fake requests. Ultimately you will reach a point where your costs overtake your ability to pay – a point at which your economic sustainability becomes questionable.
Ouch!
[The EDoS concept applies primarily to cloud-based services and not to people who own their own servers, because if you own your own servers and are the target of a DoS attack, you don’t immediately and automatically scale your operation up to a larger size, so the attack doesn’t immediately cost you money. It’s only when the scaling-up is automated and there’s no ceiling that you run the risk of economic damage.]
The Quantified Self
I was amused and delighted by the topic, but a schedule conflict prevented me from attending a meeting at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) about “the quantified self” a month ago. The topic, however, is completely intriguing to me as I find my life increasingly digitized – as if it weren’t already. (See The Quantified Self Group.)
I picked up an iPhone app called EveryTrail, and have been testing it against measured walking/running courses all weekend, and also tried to use it to measure a walk from my house to the Ferry Building and back on Sunday (it was way off due to GPS inaccuracies in the skyscraper canyons of downtown San Francisco, but it’s spot-on when the GPS satellites are unobstructed, such as on the waterfront).
New Ubuntu 8.10 (on OSX VMWare Fusion) – it works!
I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on an old Toshiba “tablet PC” whose touch-screen no longer functions (and Windows therefore malfunctions), and yesterday Ubuntu 8.10 was released so I jumped right on the bandwagon to try to install it so I could test it out.
My choice was to install using VMWare Fusion on Macintosh OSX, so I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.10 distribution, burned a CD, installed VMWare Fusion’s 30-day trial version for OSX, and then first installed 8.04. That installation went without a hitch, as Fusion detects the CD and the version of Ubuntu and goes right ahead and without any problem installs a virtual machine that seems to run flawlessly.
Installing the 8.10 distro, however, was odd. Fusion first warned me that it was a pre-7.0 Linux distribution, but allowed me to move forward.
Once installed (which I let run overnight because it just was a terribly slow process), 8.10 did run, but “VMWare Tools” didn’t install. So I found the VMWare Tools install volume and ran a “manual” installation from Terminal. It required (automatically) recompiling a lot of modules for the (upgraded Linux) kernel. Following that process, I was able to reconfigure the screen to greater than 800×600, which I guess means that the tools were successfully installed. I installed a few plug-ins (such as Flash for the browsers) and they work just great. A bit scary, but looks like it was a success.
I didn’t need to refer to other sources, but look around if you find you need help.
Twitter made me (not) do it
It’s been a whole month since I wrote anything in my blog? What happened? (Or rather, what did not happen?)
Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.
Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.
Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.
I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.
But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.
You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.
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