DevNews #101 – Return of the tin foil hat brigade

Chariot Developer News

It’s the long-awaited return of DevNews! Today, Jeff Labonski and I talk all things tech in our first ever live-streaming YouTube show.

Upcoming Events

• November 10th – Don Coleman’s Bluetooth Low Energy workshop. Walk away with your own Arduino hardware.
• Chariot is sponsoring Clojure Conj, to be held on Nov 16-18 at the Sheraton Dock Street in Philadelphia.

Show Notes

• [Tin foil hat brigade] Malvertising is on the rise – injections of Nasty Stuff Indeed are coming across the major players (Google, Yahoo). Mainly possible via SSL, real time bidding, and a general reluctance to do anything with their main revenue model. Realtor.com and Forbes.com compromised recently. The malware suites (Neutrino and Angler) have approximately a 40% success rate, and are constantly upgraded to include 0-day exploits.
• Airbus crash was a configuration control blunder. Another example of change control actually murdering people. See also: Therac-25. Learning from failures, especially fatal errors, is worthwhile. (This is also why I don’t work on flight control systems & medical devices). From Reuters:

  “Investigations are at an early stage but the key scenario being examined is that the data — known as “torque calibration parameters” — was accidentally wiped on three engines as the engine software was being installed at Airbus facilities.”

• Thought provoking academia: Dr. Michael Scott did a neat writeup on the current state of Transactional Memory – now present in Intel Haswell and Power 8 chips, coming soon(ish) to a language construct near you. Provides software developers the ability to specify operations as atomic without specifying how. Think a RDBMS’s optimistic locking and concurrency engine, but in hardware near memory access and cache lines. Already present in some Haskell and C++ extensions. (ACM SIGACT June 2015 vol 46 No. 2)
• I’ve been requested by my only fan to mention “shiny and chrome” at least once.

The post DevNews #101 – Return of the tin foil hat brigade appeared first on Chariot Solutions.