Because I can't climb for three hours straight, my shift at the rock wall included reading "Characterizing Residential Broadband Networks" (Dischinger et al., in Proc. IMC 2007). It's not the best-written paper ever, but their results are fascinating (at least if you're a networks geek and/or care why you get the performance that you do from your ( Read more... )

I wanted to chase some references from "My Botnet is Bigger than Yours," so I started typing the title into the search bar. After getting through "my botnet", Google helpfully suggested "my botnet brings all the feds to my yard". I can't even begin to imagine how that phrase got sufficiently popular to be returned by the suggestion engine...

Tomorrow's reading for my wireless networking class is Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet, by Clark et al., Proc. SIGCOMM 2002. It's a high-level look at the social and economic issues relevant to the Internet circa 2002, and how they should motivate protocol design. Well-thought out, well-written, and (not surprisingly) prescient ( Read more... )

float InvSqrt (float x) {
float xhalf = 0.5f*x;
int i = *(int*)&x;
i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1);
x = *(float*)&i;
x = x*(1.5f - xhalf*x*x);
return x;
}This function appears in the Quake 3 source. It's reportedly about four times faster than 1.0/sqrt(x). There's a paper on how it works, and whence the magic number. Wow. (Link ( Read more... )

"Holy... mother of... ebbeh... whoa." The cause of such mumblings? The author's summary of his soon-to-be-published paper "Hot or Not: Revealing Hidden Services by their Clock Skew." That, my friends, is a remote side-channel attack.

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Tech Report 666: A pact with the devil, by Mike Bond and George Danezis. (Published, of course, on 6/6/06.) The authors explore the idea of virus propagation via a system of rewards and threats communicated to individual users; e.g., the copy of the virus on Alice's machine emails Bob saying that it will ( Read more... )

See Quantum Cryptography in Practice (Chip Elliott, David Pearson, and Gregory Troxel, in Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2003). Why don't I get to play with Mach-Zender interferometers?

A Framework for Classifying Denial of Service Attacks, by Alefiya Hussain, John Heidemann, and Christos Papadopoulos. Not only do they develop some nice techniques (particularly the ACF DFT) and do a solid statistical analysis, but they actually do some validation of their results. After some of the godawful papers I've been trawling through this ( Read more... )