Notes from FAST18

I attended the technical sessions of Usenix's File And Storage Technology conference this week. Below the fold, notes on the papers that caught my attention.

Do You Need A Blockchain?

David Gerard's Do you need a Blockchain? Probably less than Wüst and Gervais think you do reviews an interesting paper, Do you need a Blockchain? by Karl Wüst and Arthur Gervais of ETH Zurich. Their abstract says:

In this article we critically analyze whether a blockchain is indeed the appropriate technical solution for a particular application scenario. We differentiate between permissionless (e.g., Bitcoin/Ethereum) and permissioned (e.g. Hyperledger/Corda) blockchains and contrast their properties to those of a centrally managed database.

Gerard is, for him, pretty enthusiastic about the paper:

This paper is worth your time. They explain the jargon at length, and discuss many commonly-advocated blockchain use cases — it’s a useful survey of the area — even as the authors are huge Bitcoin and blockchain advocates, and somewhat more optimistic for applying blockchains than is really warranted.

Below the fold, I look at both the paper and Gerard's review.

Preserving Government Information

Spotlight on Digital Government Information Preservation: Examining the Context, Outcomes, Limitations, and Successes of the DataRefuge Movement  by Eric Johnson and Alicia Kubas examines the issues around preserving access to government information through the lens of the DataRefuge movement. Below the fold, some commentary.

Correlated Cryptojacking

On February 11 at least 4,275 Web sites were found to have been simultaneously cryptojacked:

they include The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam's court information portal (uscourts.gov), Lund University (lu.se), the UK's Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service (financial-ombudsman.org.uk), plus a shedload of other .gov.uk and .gov.au sites, UK NHS services, and other organizations across the globe.

Manchester.gov.uk, NHSinform.scot, agriculture.gov.ie, Croydon.gov.uk, ouh.nhs.uk, legislation.qld.gov.au, the list goes on.

They were all running Coinhive's Monero miner in visitors' browsers. How and why did this happen and what should these sites have been doing to prevent it? Follow me below the fold.

Lessons From Arquivo.pt

Daniel Gomes' video

I'd like to draw your attention to Daniel Gomes excellent video entitled Improving the robustness of the Arquivo.pt web archive.

Arquivo.pt is the Portuguese Web Archive. It got started in 2007, and in 2010 was an early archive to support full-text search. In 2013 it suffered a hardware malfunction that took the service down and lost 17% of its content. This led to a complete re-think of the system architecture, implementation, and operations. Daniel describes this process and the encouraging results in detail. It is well worth the 20 minutes to watch it.

Daniel divides the re-think into 5 major sections:

1. Hardware and software architecture shifted to shared-nothing
2. Reinforced replication policies
3. Monitor the service
4. Quality assurance for software development
5. Document and test procedures

I'd agree with all these points. Many of the details correspond to things the LOCKSS Program focused on during preparation for the TRAC audit of the CLOCKSS Archive in 2014. This is especially the case for the last of Daniel's sections; the audit forced us to document our processes, which forced us to think about whether they were actually achieving their goals, which led to the discovery that in a number of cases they weren't.

Meta: Blog Switched To HTTPS (Updated)

Because From July, Chrome will name and shame insecure HTTP websites I followed the instructions Hamad Ansari provides in Blogger Released Free SSL (HTTPS) For Custom Domains and enabled both "connections over HTTPS" and "HTTPS redirect", so that:

http://blog.dshr.org/

gets redirected to:

https://blog.dshr.org/

Everything I've tried so far works. Please comment on this post if you find things that don't work.

Source

Update: Scott Helme points out that I'm just part of an encouraging trend. The graph shows the top million sites from Alexa in groups of 4,000. For each group, it shows the number of sites that are HTTPS (only, I believe). It shows that the pace of sites going HTTPS-only is increasing. The effect of Chrome's naming and shaming will presumably increase the rate of adoption further in July.

DNA's Niche in the Storage Market

I've been writing about storing data in DNA for the last five years, both enthusiastically about DNA's long-term prospects as a technology for storage, and pessimistically about its medium-term prospects. This time, I'd like to look at DNA storage systems as a product, and ask where their attributes might provide a fit in the storage marketplace.

As far as I know no-one has ever built a storage system using DNA as a medium, let alone sold one. Indeed, the only work I know on what such a system would actually look like is by the team from Microsoft Research and the University of Washington. Everything below the fold is somewhat informed speculation. If I've got something wrong, I hope the experts will correct me.