I am really excited, but really does everyone wants Google to track your path everywhere you go, everything single stuff you're watching? :-/ I am assuming the glasses themselves have nearly no cpu capabilities, thus it must be mandatory to export any computation wirelessly toward Google servers, right?
>>but really does everyone wants Google to track your path everywhere you go, everything single stuff you're watching?
I feel like the speedy proliferation of smartphones into the fabric of everyday life has answered your question with a resounding, "No one cares". The benefits of what essentially amounts to ESP (text, email, telephony) and fact-based omniscience (access to the internet, real time directions, weather, etc.) far outweigh any privacy concerns in the vast majority of people's minds. I have my reservations and concerns of course, but the mental empowerment is just too much to pass up.
The story tells: 'Nicholas Ostler [...] compares Latin's presence on the internet [...] to a small European language - it is comparable to "Icelandic, Lithuanian or Slovenian".'
They didn't think to remove "Lorem Ipsum" texts, otherwise it must even less than that ! .. :-)
Most of I time I run into the "Press Enter" mandatory "resume" option. I am starting to type in, but since I didn't hit enter first, the banner becomes red, and then a new exercise is selected. That's ok but a little bit annoying. It is just a feedback for the website author . :-)
Great article. Also I would like ton mention a point : implementing a "chaos monkey". As Netflix team nails it "We have found that the best defense against major unexpected failures is to fail often." [1]
I agree with you, it is quite annoying. I found an interesting quote from a PG's essay "Great Hackers" [1]:
"Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate-- their ability, as one put it, to "tune out everything outside their own heads.'' I've certainly noticed this. And I've heard several hackers say that after drinking even half a beer they can't program at all. So maybe hacking does require some special ability to focus. Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just that line but the whole program around it. John McPhee wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision. "Perfect'' eyesight means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision. Bill Bradley had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor. Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability. (I cheat by using a very dense language, which shrinks the court.)"
You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here: I remember high school courses teaches us that nature, through natural selection, influenced mankind. Until man empowered enough intelligence and influence back its environment, through Agriculture first, shaping the lands, steering water streams and so on. Then through industrial revolution. Generating green house gas emissions. I am not sure which one of a bushman or a agriculture lead to the best ecologic behavior then. :-/
I've got a question for security experts. I've always assumed that government should have enough cpu-power to decode a few encrypted emails and some https connection. So why don't China decode https traffics and perform the same filter as for simple tcp connection? And even tough they wouldn't have enough power to do so, why don't they break down the https connection when it is established?
Extremely strong 'military grade' encryption is commonplace nowadays. It doesn't matter whether what yo're encrypting is a casual email or the launch codes for a nuclear weapon, consumer grade encryption such as that in https is fine as long as it's configured and used correctly. The CPU power required to break it is greater than all the CPUs in the world put together running for millions of years.
The problem is that if a way can be found to disrupt the configuration, such as by compromising the certificate chain, then decrypting the message becomes trivially easy.
So reading such a message is usually either impossible, or simple.
> And even tough they wouldn't have enough power to do so, why don't they break down the https connection when it is established?
You have to understand the purpose of China's Great Firewall. A lot of techies think that it's an attempt at 1984-style total control of information. With this in mind, they see a vessel full of obvious leaks, and can't understand why China does things this way. Blocking any connection you can't spy on is a simple solution to these leaks that any techie could come up with, but China doesn't do it (in general). Why not?
It's because the Great Firewall is not intended to be an instrument of total information control. It's intended as an instrument of broad social influence. The Chinese government does not care if you can use ssh or SSL or whatever to bounce through a proxy in the USA to get to an article about the Tiananmen Square massacre. You want to put in effort to seek out that information, go wild. You don't even need to cover your tracks.
This information is out there. They can't stop it, and they know it, and they don't even try. The purpose of censorship is to shape conversation, not eliminate information. Anyone with a little determination can bypass the firewall and read about whatever censored stuff they're interested in. But the vast majority of people don't have a little determination for this stuff. They might hit a link or perform a search, but when it fails, they'll just move on. Thus, while they can't, don't, and don't even try to stop people from knowing about these things, they can and successfully do stop people in general from thinking about them, and guide their attention to other topics.
China doesn't care about a few people using crypto to bypass their censorship. China does care about attracting foreign business, and if travelers couldn't connect to their VPNs and secure web sites then there would be serious trouble with that.
> why don't they break down the https connection when it is established?
Apprently they do. Serveral Google domains port 443 were blocked, e.g. https://accounts.google.com so you can't use anything google related, especially Gmail.
This is the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) that was introduced in the 2.6 Kernel. It basically does round-robin scheduling with variable time quanta based on niceness/priority. Here is a good overview of the RBTree implementation it uses:
I don't know how this deals with distributing tasks across multiple processors however; the basic idea was to improve on the fairly naive runqueue implementation in 2.4 and prior.
The kernel will try to keep each process running on the same CPU. If one process is using a lot of CPU, it won't (shouldn't) generally switch it around just to keep the CPUs evenly busy.
