No related posts.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Operating Profit By Division

Barada turns your phone into a two factor authentication device. It’s an implementation of the HOTP protocol in the form of a PAM module (the server) and an Android applicaton (the client).

Their approach solves several inconveniences, which they highlight:

…the problem with systems like SecureID or CryptoCard is that they’re often not convenient. They cost money to license, the hardware costs money, and they’re difficult to maintain. You have to setup a dedicated Solaris machine with RADIUS support just to deploy SecureID, which isn’t really great for someone with a small setup.

How it works…

Basically, in addition to a normal password, users are also assigned a PIN number and a 128 bit key. Every time you’d like to login using two-factor authentication, you open up the Android application, type in your PIN number, and get back a six character one time password that you can then use to authenticate remotely. The PIN number is not stored on the phone, and the the OTP can only be used exactly once. Thus, the loss of the phone does not result in leaked passwords, and the capture of an OTP does not result in remote access.

People are used to carrying their phones at all times, it seems much less likely that someone would forget their phone over their RSA token or smart card. It also removes the inconvenience of having to keep a token with you at all times.

No related posts.

No related posts.

Steve Huffman, co-founder of social news site Reddit, gave an excellent presentation (slides, transcript) on the lessons he learned while building and growing Reddit to 7.5 million users per month, 270 million page views per month, and 20+ database servers.

High Scalability produced an excellent summary from the presentation.

Related posts:

1. Digging NoSQL

The Digg staff in particular have been blogging their progress and use of this new database technology and their reasons for adoption. Basically, the penalties for using MySQL had become burdensome given the large amount of data Digg handles and the difficulties in scaling MySQL to meet the demand.

Our primary motivation for moving away from MySQL is the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced us into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead.

In September of 09 Digg evaluated Cassandra and were very successful. On the heels of their success they are replacing most of their infrastructure components and moving away from LAMP and towards NoSQL. Soon, Digg will unveil it’s overhaul of the site, presumably running on the new platform they’ve built.

No related posts.

As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct.

No related posts.

We’ve attempted to think out of the box a bit designing this system by not relying on central inventories and tools like SSH, we’re not simply a fancy SSH “for loop”.

If you’re a system administrator and have lots of systems to manage you will immediately see how this software could be useful. If you’ve ever used tools like shmux for parallelized execution of commands via ssh, you’ll note the benefit of being able to use discovered meta-data with mcollective. That means you can break from using hostnames or a centralized document as the ultimate source of truth about your environment when running a parallelized operation. With tools like Facter the information lives on the servers to which it is applicable. You’ll always be able to rely on the most up-to-date information about your environment.

No related posts.

…Its profits are still being generated by the same engines that have driven Microsoft for years: Office, Windows, and its server division. (Meanwhile, its entertainment and devices division is only recently profitable again, and its online division is a money pit.)

Related posts:

1. Puppet 2.6

I’m looking forward to trying one out at the local Apple store.

No related posts.