Thursday, March 28, 2013

Thursday Links

  • The NYT on why private sector involvement in Greek bond write-downs were a critical factor in the situation now in Cyprus.
  • Large scale distributed denial-of-service attacks going down on the Internet.  More here - this is a DNS reflection attack, first postulated as a possibility by Berkeley researcher Vern Paxson (a friend and sometime collaborator of mine).
  • Soy based biodiesel is much more energetically favorable than corn ethanol.  It still links food prices to fuel prices, however, so it's something to be done in great moderation.  High/rising food prices are very destabilizing to poor countries, which creates huge headaches for everyone (think Somalia, Afghanistan, Mali).
  • UC Riverside professor John Baez has a course on the Mathematics of the Environment, which looks to have some pretty interesting stuff in.
  • I got that link at the blog of Steve Easterbrook, Serendipity; another computer scientist learning about climate science.

1 comment:

Stephen B. said...

“'These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,' said Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare. 'It’s so easy to cause so much damage.'”

Me thinks Mr. Prince should revisit some pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped before he again resorts to his rather ridiculous hyperbole.

I appreciate that some people spend all day doing computer/Internet related things and that they might get an inflated sense of the Internet's importance, but we really should keep things in perspective. Heavy Internet traffic and delayed email is not quite the same thing as a hundred thousand or more dead and that many or more burned, wounded or suffering from radiation sickness.

Talk about First World problems!