Open Access and Surveillance

Recent events have greatly increased concerns about privacy online. Spencer Ackerman and Ewan McAskill report for The Guardian that during the campaign Donald Trump said:

“I wish I had that power,” ... while talking about the hack of Democratic National Committee emails. “Man, that would be power.”

and that Snowden's ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner said:

“I think many Americans are waking up to the fact we have created a presidency that is too powerful.”

Below the fold, some thoughts on online surveillance and how it relates to the Open Access movement.

More From Mackie-Mason on Gold Open Access

Back in May I posted Jeffrey Mackie-Mason on Gold Open Access, discussing the Berkeley Librarian and economist's blog post advocating author-pays open access. In September and October he had two more posts on the topic worthy of attention, which they get below the fold.

The Exception That Proves The Rule

Chris Bourg, who moved from the Stanford Libraries to be library director at MIT, gave a thoughtful talk at Educause entitled Libraries and future of higher education. Below the fold, my thoughts on how it provides the exception that proves the rule I described in Why Did Institutional Repositories Fail?.

Fixing broken links in Wikipedia

Mark Graham has a post at the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, Wikipedia community and Internet Archive partner to fix one million broken links on Wikipedia:

The Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Foundation, and volunteers from the Wikipedia community have now fixed more than one million broken outbound web links on English Wikipedia. This has been done by the Internet Archive's monitoring for all new, and edited, outbound links from English Wikipedia for three years and archiving them soon after changes are made to articles. This combined with the other web archiving projects, means that as pages on the Web become inaccessible, links to archived versions in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can take their place. This has now been done for the English Wikipedia and more than one million links are now pointing to preserved copies of missing web content.

This is clearly a good thing, but follow me below the fold.

Updates on the Dyn DDoS

In the aftermath of the Dyn DDoS attack too much is happening to fit into a comment on Tuesday's post. Below the fold, a roundup of the last two day's news from the IoT war zone.

You Were Warned

Four weeks ago yesterday I posted The Things Are Winning about the IoT-based botnet attack on Krebs On Security. I wrote:

And don't think that knocking out important individual Web sites like KrebsOnSecurity is the limit of the bad guys capabilities. Everyone seems to believe that the current probing of the root servers' defenses is the work of China but, as the Moon Worm showed, careful preparation isn't necessarily a sign of a state actor. There are many bad guys out there who could take the Internet down; the only reason they don't is not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Last Friday's similar attack on Dyn, a major US DNS provider, caused many of its major customer websites to be inaccessible, including Twitter, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, PayPal and github. Dyn's DNS infrastructure was so overloaded that requests for name-to-IP-address translations were dropped or timed out. The LOCKSS team uses github, so we were affected.

It is important to note that these attacks are far from the largest we can expect, and that it is extraordinarily difficult to obtain reliable evidence as to who is responsible. Attackers will be able to produce effects far more disruptive than a temporary inability to tweet with impunity. Below the fold some commentary and useful links.

A Cost-Effective Large LOCKSS Box

Back in August I wrote A Cost-Effective DIY LOCKSS Box, describing a small, 8-slot LOCKSS box capable of providing about 48TB of raw RAID-6 storage at about $64/TB. Now, the existing boxes in the CLOCKSS Archive's 12-node network are nearing the end of their useful life. We are starting a rolling program to upgrade them with much larger boxes to accommodate future growth in the archive.

Last week the first of the upgraded LOCKSS boxes came on-line. They are 4U systems with 45 slots for 3.5" drives from 45drives.com, the same boxes Backblaze uses. We are leaving 9 slots empty for future upgrades and populating the rest with 36 8TB WD Gold drives, giving about 224TB of raw RAID-6 storage, say a bit over 200TB after file system overhead. etc. We are specifying 64GB of RAM and dual CPUs. This configuration on the 45drives website is about $28K before tax and shipping. Using the cheaper WD Purple drives it would be about $19K.

45drives has recently introduced a cost-reduced version. Configuring this with 45 8TB Purple drives and 32GB RAM would get 280TB for $17K, or about $61/TB. It would be even cheaper with the Seagate 8TB archive drives we are using in the 8-slot box.