Wireless devices are everywhere, at home, at the office, and on the street. Devices are bombarding us with transmissions across a wide range of RF frequencies. Many of these invisible transmissions reflect off our bodies, carrying off information about ou location, movement, and other physiological properties. While a boon to professionals with carefully calibrated instruments, they may also be revealing private data about us to potential attackers nearby.
In this paper, we examine the problem of adversarial WiFi sensing, and consider whether ambient WiFi signals around us pose real risks to our personal privacy. We identify a passive adversarial sensing attack, where bad actors using a single smartphone can silently localize and track individuals in their home or office from outside walls, by just listening to ambient WiFi signals. We experimentally validate this attack in 11 real-world locations, and show user tracking with high accuracy. Finally, we propose and evaluate defenses including geo-fencing, rate limiting, and signal obfuscation by WiFi access points.

Since 2013, we at the SmartData@Polito lab, Politecnico di Torino, have been conducting a large-scale measurement study from the perspective of a Tier-1 ISP based in Europe. We do this to better characterize Internet usage trends, as well as the technologies and infrastructure changes, that are being implemented by the industry for the benefit of forecasting potential changes and expenses.

The Goldilocks principle is named by analogy to the children's story The Three Bears, in which a little girl named Goldilocks tastes three different bowls of porridge and finds that she prefers porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold, but has just the right temperature.

We investigated the self‐regulatory strategies people spontaneously use in their everyday lives to regulate their persistence during aversive activities.

A syntax-aware linter for prose built with speed and extensibility in mind.

Here, we illustrate use of DTrace on a host system to observe activity within a Docker container, running on Oracle Linux using runC.

Streaming replicas—and by extension, base backups—can become dangerously broken when the source and target machines run slightly different versions of glibc.

The ongoing competition between IPv4 and IPv6 has big implications for the future of the internet. Is this mixed-standard Internet a passing phenomenon, or will we get stuck in it?

Malware and other applications may install persistent keyboard "event taps" to intercept your keystrokes.
ReiKey can scan, detect, and monitor for such taps!

PostgreSQL is the database management system that gained more popularity in our DB-Engines Ranking within the last year than any of the other 343 monitored systems.
We thus declare PostgreSQL as the DBMS of the Year 2018.

Artificial Intelligence gives us a uniquely fascinating and clear perspective at the nature of our minds and our relationship to reality. We will discuss perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness, selfhood, and how they can arise in a computational system, like our brain.

Rapid serial visual presentation is an experimental model frequently used to examine the temporal characteristics of attention. The RSVP paradigm requires participants to look at a continuous presentation of visual items which is around 10 items per second.

For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined.

Interactive Learning and Training Platform for Software Engineers. Helping Developers Learn and Companies Increase Adoption.

Critical but oft-neglected service metrics that every SRE and product owner should care about.

A tiny web auditor with strong opinions.

Pointing and calling is a method in occupational safety for avoiding mistakes by pointing at important indicators and calling out the status. It is common in Japan and railways of China.

encrypt/decrypt using ssh keys

A linter for prose.

Amazon Aurora is a relational database service for OLTP workloads offered as part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this paper, we describe the architecture of Aurora and the design considerations leading to that architecture. We believe the central constraint in high throughput data processing has moved from compute and storage to the network. Aurora brings a novel architecture to the relational database to address this constraint, most notably by pushing redo processing to a multi-tenant scale- out storage service, purpose-built for Aurora. We describe how doing so not only reduces network traffic, but also allows for fast crash recovery, failovers to replicas without loss of data, and fault-tolerant, self-healing storage. We then describe how Aurora achieves consensus on durable state across numerous storage nodes using an efficient asynchronous scheme, avoiding expensive and chatty recovery protocols. Finally, having operated Aurora as a production service for over 18 months, we share lessons we have learned from our customers on what modern cloud applications expect from their database tier.

NetBSD on the Danger HipTop/T-Mobile Sidekick Smartphone.

This is a clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license. It's compatible with a modern rsync (3.1.3 is used for testing), but accepts only a subset of rsync's command-line arguments.

Transport Layer Security Secure Remote Password (TLS-SRP) ciphersuites are a set of cryptographic protocols that provide secure communication based on passwords, using an SRP password-authenticated key exchange.

Pirlo was designed to eliminate and automate many of these manual processes. In this post we will describe Pirlo, a flexible system designed to validate and configure network switches and to ensure the reliability of servers before they enter production. We will explain the design of Pirlo and its components, and show how some of the design choices we have made enable Dropbox to manage our physical infrastructure operations efficiently and safely.

This post describes WePay's highly available MySQL architecture, and how we achieve short outage times during failures.

This web site presents one glyph for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 146 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode.

Monitoring one's current standing with respect to goals can promote effective self‐regulation. However, the present review suggests that there is an ostrich problem such that, in many instances, people have a tendency to “bury their head in the sand” and intentionally avoid or reject information that would help them to monitor their goal progress.

What is the role of PgBouncer in a Postgres High Availability stack?

This talk investigates fake science factories; international twilight companies whose sole purpose is to give studies an air of scientific credibility while cashing in on millions of dollars in the process.

g/regex/p -> /g/re/p -> grep

The principal–agent problem, in political science and economics, occurs when one person or entity (the "agent") is able to make decisions and/or take actions on behalf of, or that impact, another person or entity (the "principal")

Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success.

In this results book, we would like to present this out- standing research, publishing more than 110 reports on projects carried out in 2016 and 20171. Our “TOP 5” pro- jects in terms of allocated core-hours consumed 17% of the total available core-hours on SuperMUC in this time- frame and merit special mention:

1. Astrophysics: Janka et al. performed longtime 3D su- pernova simulations (page 32)
2. Computational Fluid Dynamics and Engineering: Lohse et al. performed simulations on thermal turbulence at extreme Rayleigh numbers (page 108)
3. High Energy Physics: Jansen et al. studied nucleon ob- servables as probes for physics beyond the standard model (page 202)
4. Earth, Climate and Environmental Sciences: Ludwig et al. research climate change and hydrological extremes (page 185)
5. Astrophysics: Dietrich et al. investigated binary neu- tron star mergers (page 18)