LastPass Now Tells You Which Heartbleed-Affected Passwords to Change
Month: April 2014
The anternet
Stanford researchers discover the ‘anternet’
Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here’s how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.
This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.
It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.
A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.
Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon’s experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon’s experiments.
A tour of the British Isles in accents
A-Z of Dance
Yum Fast Downloader 0.6.0 Released!
Yum Fast Downloader 0.6.0 Released!
Gladly, I was able to devote some time to update yum fast downloader plugin to work much better with recent yum versions in Fedora 19/20. The plugin effectively disabled delta rpm support since the integration of presto into yum. To fix the issue, I reworked the plugin using the new download framework of yum/urlgrabber. The result is yum-fast-downloader plugin for Fedora 20, which not only fixes the problem but also brings better integration. As a result, the plugin is now responsible for almost all downloads including downloading drpm packages.
Besides, it is now possible to specify arbitrary command line arguments (e.g. -q) for aria2c in the plugin’s configuration file.