I really enjoyed this fully-charged podcast and will be reading some Cory Doctorow.

I especially liked the Bruce Sterling quote about the “grandfather problem”. This is the idea that if you can do something less well than your dead grandfather, then it’s probably not the eco-friendly behaviour you really ought to be pursuing.

I think this stems from the idea that we need systemic change in the world, and therefore realistically can’t recycle our way to that future.

I’ve been diving into golang recently, partly by accident, given that we decided to use an open source docker service registration bridge called registrator.  Registrator fills in a niche with docker containers - how to get them into an existing service registry such as (the excellent) consul. We plan to use this to keep our existing netflix eureka service registry updated with new container based services as they are brought online, and allow us to integrate containers into our existing VM based microservices environment. There was a great PR to provide eureka support to registrator which someone had already submitted.  However, we had additional requirements too:

After almost 10 years at Servelec-Corelogic I’ll be starting in a new position at Hudl on 1st June. I’m excited and nervous about the change and looking forward to meeting my new colleagues and learning about how they do things over there! Some of thethings to look forward to are their open-minded approach to technology, working culture and cutting edge continuous deployment processes. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot, and hopefully I can add some of my experiences to the team. It looks like I’ll be off to Lincoln, Nebraska in June to do some training and meet everyone. It’s going to be really tough leaving Corelogic. But it’s about time to see what the outside world is like - and I hope it will be a fun and positive move for me.

I found some interesting old news, back from 1999 that someone posted a link to in the SecurityNow newsgroups. I’ve recently started listening to this podcast - it’s a brilliant way to keep up with computer security news, and I feel a lot more informed having started to listen. http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html The articles were to do with NSA back doors in several pieces of software, Microsoft Windows and Lotus Notes. Both of these were verified back in 2009 by security researchers by reverse engineering software. They traced inbuilt keys to the NSA, by virtue of the fact that they were called by the stealthy name, ‘NSAKEY’. This came out of some debugging symbols mistakenly left in Service Pack 5 for Windows NT. To some, this might be extremely old news (well, it was 14 years ago). However, it does show that at least then, Microsoft and Lotus (now owned by IBM) were willing and able to install backdoors, for the NSA to snoop on their customers. If they were willing and able then - why not now? So, the chances of there actually being backdoors in Windows and Notes today, given the revelations last week - I’d say are pretty high. Microsoft have had years to develop a reputation for poor security in their products, and have been desperately trying to regain people’s trust since the bad old days. I wonder if the coming revelations from the Snowden files may set them back again in winning their customer’s trust.