សួស្តីជាទីស្រឡាញ់, I am currently playing around with IPFS in a little weekend project and wanted to understand more about the inner workings of this peer to peer distributed file system. Especially how it differs in…
Perfect way of scaling images without loosing any content
tena koe tangata maere, When learning about this week’s paper, I was wondering why I did not think of something like that before: Resize images, but do not remove important parts. Most of the time…
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How the scheduler in Googles borg clusters works
你好神奇的人 We already learned a few weeks back that Google uses a tool called borg for running their cluster infrastructure and thereby the backbone of our modern internet. This weeks paper is about the Omega…
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How to protect browsers of being crypto jacked (forced to mine crypto in the background)
هيلو عظيم ماڻهو I already found out about crypto mining in the browser a few years back and find it a fascinating idea. While someone has your website open you can mine crypto in the…
In-set or not-in-set, that’s the question. Using bloom filters for probabilistic set operations
Ndewo egwu mmadu, The more I learn about probabilistic systems, the more they fascinate me. Bloom filters are a key mechanism in probabilistic systems: You can verify 100% sure if an element is not in…
How the big boys run their infrastructure
Ciao grande persona, somewhat troughout the week the name Borg came to my ears for google running their clusters with that. As it has the same name as my favorite backup tool, I was keen…
Onion routing, the basis of free speech online
ahoj báječný člověk, back to the roots, this week’s newsletter is about a fundamental routing technology being the de-facto backbone of free speech online: Onion routing. This routing technology was first proposed in this week’s…
How open source introduces risk to your software stack and enterprise
Sawubona muntu owesabekayo, being a producer and massive consumer of open source software in my private and professional live I am always wondering how this whole system still works. We use a massive amount of…
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How social media networks form habits
tena koe tangata maere, this weeks paper is a bit unconventional for the newsletter as it is not super technical. It discusses the psychological phenomenas behind the huge success of social media. For me it…
Tit-for-tat, how BitTorrent incentivizes uploading
Γεια σου υπέροχο άτομο, after using BitTorrent for some Ubuntu ISOs in the past myself I wanted to learn more about how the network works from a policy standpoint. I always tune down my uploading…
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How to reprogram your DNA
сәлем керемет адам, This weeks paper is not purely a computer science topic, but never the less super interesting. You may have heard about CRISPR Cas9 and how it quite likely will influence big parts…
How generating images from a sketch helps to improve your Zoom call
გამარჯობა დიდებული ადამიანი, Last week I promised you a paper about how to do video encoding via neural networks. To be frank, I will fail to deliver that paper as it does not exist in…
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Use machine learning to build super low data audio and video codecs
مرحبا شخص عظيم, this and next week you will get two papers about the following idea: How could we produce better audio and video encodings. (With better meaning, similar data quality but less bandwidth required).…
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How to lose files with your processor failing to calculate 1.1^53 correctly
Moin moin, this weeks paper discusses how silent hardware failure can lead to actual user facing errors. In the paper Facebook found that some files went missing because of a power function “1.1^53=0” failing due…
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BTRFS the reason to finally understand Binary Trees
Hallo geweldig persoon, as during the last week a xfs filesystem failed on me I did research what other filesystem options are out there and stumbled over the new kid on the block: BTRFS a…
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How to deploy your web service without crashing the cell network
Hello great person, this weeks paper came to me trough the interwebs. It covers the topic how Facebook does Hundrets of Releases to their services all around the globe. TBO most interesting was for me…
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How Cloudflare works…maybe
Using Cloudflare myself for my blog and my overall interest in DDoS protection draw me to this weeks paper. It discusses a design of an overlay network for DDoS protection. Quite interesting to learn about the considerations coming into play. Sure Cloudflare, Akamai, Google etc. evolved since then, but this paper gives quite nice fundamentals on how to design such a protection. Especially the computation powered puzzles is a nice concept (was programming one on the weekend actually)….most like Bitcoins proof of work 😉
Automatic code plagiarism detection
Hallo ihr Lieben, in Uni they always told us to not cheat during the programming homework as they will find out plagiarism with automatic systems anyway. As the programming part of my studies was always…
Locating yourself everywhere on earth
Ciao persona fantastica, this weeks paper is about one of my favorite usages of time in computer systems. With calculating time differences between radio signals we(our devices) are able to locate us all around the…
Some sort of time travel: Leap second smearing
Hello time travelers, the most difficult moments for clocks are the leap seconds. Additional to leap years we also have seconds that are injected into our time system from time to time (pun intended :P).…
The network time protocol
Hallo vrienden, the internet time protocol (NTP) is the basis of time synchronization in computer networks. This weeks paper explains the design principles behind it. As the paper is form 1991 you will find some…
Time is relative
Happy new year everyone, during the holidays I did think about my life as well as the past and future of human kind….just kidding 😉 But I went down the rabbit whole in one of…
Reaching distributed consensus
Hallo ihr lieben, this weeks paper came to me trough a reply to the Bitcoin paper in the Telegram group. One member did point out that Bitcoin is one of the first widely used technologies…
Winning in the Casino by solving the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem
Hey upcoming data science expert, this weeks topic caught my interest as I overheard some colleagues from the machine learning department. Multi-armed bandit theory is a quite old math problem from the 80s with still…
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The birth of Bitcoin
拝啓, (Japanese as Satoshi Nakamoto claims to be from Japan) this weeks topic is more on the hipster side of things: Bitcoin. Everyone is talking again about it as the price is rallying, but how…
“Never change a running system” is not an option anymore: Introduction of Chaos Engineering
Witam mojego ulubionego abonenta, this weeks topic is about my favorite devops/SRE hype topic: Chaos Engineering. With intentionally introducing chaos and failure into your systems you ensure that developers always think about the failure case…
Conflict-free replicated data types to archive eventual consistency
Hola persona grandiosa, after last weeks topic on the CAP theorem, this week is a lot more practical. A conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) helps you build a distributed system where all nodes converge to…
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CAP theorem
Dear awesome person, this weeks paper is about a topic that can be considered ancient in our CS world. The CAP theorem was first introduced in 2000 and this weeks paper is revisiting it in…
How Firecracker microVMs work
Dear awesome person, I found this week’s paper while working on my thesis on an AWS Lambda related topic. If you ever wondered how the inner workings of AWS Lambda are and how the container/VM…
Facebooks Configuration as Code Framework
Dear awesome person, as you can see from the newsletter being late this is not some automatic random paper picker I build but indeed me as a Human selecting the papers and sending them out.…
