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edutechnion

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The false Seelbach Cocktail story is repeated here:

Max “Scoopie” Allen was making an Old Fashioned in the Seelbach Hotel Rathskeller in 1917. Whether someone bumped him or was walking by with an open bottle, somehow champagne splashed into his mixing glass.

NYTimes wrote about this created history:

Shortly after being put in charge of the hotel’s bar and restaurant operations in 1995, Mr. Seger declared that he had discovered a recipe for a pre-Prohibition cocktail that was once the hotel’s signature drink.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/dining/seelbach-cocktail-...

For the many of us who have built businesses dependent on S3, is anyone else surprised at a few assumptions embedded here?

* "authorized S3 team member" -- how did this team member acquire these elevated privs?

* Running playbooks is done by one member without a second set of eyes or approval?

* "we have not completely restarted the index subsystem or the placement subsystem in our larger regions for many years"

The good news:

* "The S3 team had planned further partitioning of the index subsystem later this year. We are reprioritizing that work to begin immediately."

The truly embarrassing that everyone has known about for years is the status page:

* "we were unable to update the individual services’ status on the AWS Service Health Dashboard "

When there is a wildly-popular Chrome plugin to fix your page ("Real AWS Status") you would think a company as responsive as AWS would have fixed this years ago.

Changes made by large companies that relied 100% on DYN:

* us-east-1.amazonaws.com: split between internal, UltraDNS, DYN

* spotify.com: all internal nameservers now

* reddit.com: all Route53 now

* github.com: all Route53 now

* netflix.com: all Route53 now

* paypal.com: split between UltraDNS and DYN

No changes made:

* twitter.com: 100% with DYN

Short version: banker provides liquidity to the markets and buys up junk bonds from panicked sellers at 40 cents on the dollar. Banker then sells the bonds for more money as the panic dissipates. Some people wonder if important banks like GS should still be making volatile bets like this.

So if they sold at their true price via the Google-style reverse auction, they would have $9 * 10 million more to use for business growth. Instead lots of hedge funds and high net-worth individuals that are big clients of GS and JPM made an easy $100k this morning.

A few tips from setting up SPF/DMARC/DKIM for a SAAS service:

* SPF: limit your record and all includes to 10 DNS lookups (e.g., "A MX include:_spf.google.com" is 3 DNS lookups plus all of the lookups inside the include.

* DMARC: to see a strict reject policy, check out Yahoo:

  $ dig +short -t txt _dmarc.yahoo.com
  "v=DMARC1\; p=reject\; pct=100\; rua=mailto:dmarc_y_rua@yahoo.com\;"
* Mail forwarding: if your app sends mail as the logged-in user, make sure the user's actual email address is not in the FROM address as Yahoo does not authorize you to send FROM: xxxx@yahoo.com

* DMARC emails: use dmarcian.com to parse and process the auto-generated emails

* SPF: use the ~all for your first day of testing and then lock it down to -all after testing is complete

* DKIM: OpenDkim appears to be the most widely supported Linux software package.

* DKIM keys: setup a TXT entry you control and ask client to CNAME it. Then setup key rotation.

July 2009: Ballmer told the crowd, "I don't know if they can't make up their mind or what the problem is over there, but the last time I checked, you don't need two client operating systems. It's good to have one."

May 2010: Om Malik "Android Has Won — Time for Chrome OS to Move Along?"

... if you want to fund anything, you have to describe it as a weapon.

In 1955, the NY Times led with "United States has Secret Sonic Weapon-Jazz"

  http://thereisjazzbeforetrane.blogspot.com/2009/08/us-has-sonic-secret-weapon-jazz-nytimes.html
Why did they fund jazz like they funded abstract expressionism? Jazz was the ultimate display of democracy and integration, improvisation and the exchange of ideas.

I went down a similar road with etcd and fleet but abandoned it earlier this summer after testing failure scenarios with etcd. With a cluster of 5 etcd nodes in EC2, I started hard-killing etcd EC2 instances and noticed fleet inconsistency (e.g., nodes being restarted, not able to see the entire fleet).

Can you expand on the etcd growth pains you've been through?

Rent-stabilization is a flawed, lottery-based system that helps out a select few while sometimes having the unintended effect of helping out the wealthy:

  http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20140430/new-york-city/rent-stabilized-apartments-are-being-occupied-by-millionaires-records-show
A more equitable system would involve direct tax credits to all in need instead of relying on an antiquated system that helps out a few lucky enough to win the rent lottery.

From 2014-11:

“Networking is a red alert situation for us right now,” explained Hamilton. “The cost of networking is escalating relative to the cost of all other equipment. It is Anti-Moore. All of our gear is going down in cost, and we are dropping prices, and networking is going the wrong way. That is a super-big problem, and I like to look out a few years, and I am seeing that the size of the networking problem is getting worse constantly. At the same time that networking is going Anti-Moore, the ratio of networking to compute is going up.”

http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/14/rare-peek-massive-s...

Sakai continues to put out releases on a fairly orderly schedule, but it's lost several of the core, founding institutions as their IT departments move away from customized FOSS software hosted in local datacenters to SAAS software hosted by commercial providers.

For example: Indiana University was a core member of the Sakai Foundation that was rumored to have a $1mm+ budget devoted to heavily customizing Sakai for IU purposes and for running the software. IU seems to have moved away from the customized open-source approach to a consortial "buying club" approach to try to have influence in the commercial, higher-ed market. 10+ higher-ed institutions (many of them public institutions) have put $1mm each in a pot to try to better control their software destiny:

http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret-new-...

Isn't Canvas a classic case study of the Andreessen bundling/unbundling theory?

Canvas dominated the higher-ed market with a single, lean, focused, simple product. They unbundled the sprawling, unfocused Blackboard suite. Now Canvas is in the next phase: re-bundling.

  1/The flip side of unbundling: Later on, the unbundlers tend to try to rebundle in the image of whatever they unbundled.

  2/So Yahoo adds an ISP and Google adds email/IM/sports-scores/stock-quotes.
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/481554165454209027