Four short links: 3 October 2018
Positive Chatbot, Inside Serverless, TimBL's Next Project, and Voting Machines
- Ixy — chat with a bot that helps you not descend into irate internet madness. Nifty idea! (via Evan Prodromou)
- Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms — interesting implementation details. We characterize performance in terms of scalability, coldstart latency, and resource efficiency, with highlights including that AWS Lambda adopts a bin-packing-like strategy to maximize VM memory utilization, that severe contention between functions can arise in AWS and Azure, and that Google had bugs that allowed customers to use resources for free.
- Solid — Tim Berners-Lee’s new open source project (and startup), building apps from linked data.
- DEFCON Voting Machines Report — tl;dr: online voting is a disaster-in-waiting, a calamity of vulnerabilities that shabby-suited shysters would be afraid to peddle but which our local and central governments have embraced. Those who are willing to trade the integrity of their democracy for the false promise of increased voter turnout deserve neither. It is noteworthy that this year the defenses of the virtual election office were fortified using Israeli military defense software, while attack tools were limited to what is available with Kali Linux
