One of the major performance metrics I looked at when evaluating Linode vs. Slicehost was disk performance. Here are the stats for my two servers as of a few moments ago:

[ Performance taken with htparm -tT on both systems at the same time. ]

Slicehost

Cached Reads: 413.15 MB/sec
Buffered Reads: 7.27 MB/sec

Linode

Cached Reads: 5576.59 MB/sec
Buffered Reads: 120.59 MB/sec

That’s a 17X performance gain on non-cached read speed with Linode, and I really feel the difference when I’m doing things like adding large numbers of files to a git repository.

With the exception of snapshot backups, which Slicehost has and Linode does not, I am not seeing any reason to keep my Slicehost account. ::

I just migrated from Slicehost to Linode due to crappy performance over at Slicehost. Linode’s offerings are….compelling. Great price, great performance.

Let me know if anyone any speed difference on the site.

Posted via web from danielmiessler.com | posterous

The problem newcomers often make when thinking about social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is thinking about it as some sort of additional thing–as if there’s a separation between you, and it. There isn’t.

Social media is nothing disparate or foreign. It’s an arbitrary name we’ve assigned to “using technology to provide an interface to ourselves”. Your blog, or your Facebook–these are your avatars. They represent you in a way that makes you more accessible to the world.

Forget the words “blog”, or “tweet”, or…”whatever”. These are transitory terms assigned to specific implementations of specific technologies. It’s the concept that matters, and the concept involves only one thing: you. The technology is there to provide an interface to you–to enhance what you already are.

So if you enjoy being you, if you enjoy experiencing life, and if you enjoy sharing those experiences with like-minded people–in any setting–then you should embrace these new mediums. They are nothing more (or less) than a technological means to extend our experiences beyond the confines of our small physical worlds. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Quite simply, social media lets you be you…more. ::

I have known since Chrome came out that it would become dominant, but this is a rapid ascent.

Question: what stops companies like Facebook and Twitter from allowing the Posterous functionality within their own services?

So, you’re a Facebook user, with an email address, and you simply email a picture to post@facebook.com, and based on the from address Facebook knows to post it to your account.

Is Posterous protected by patent somehow, or is this a giant shoe that’s about to drop? ::

Basically, if you have an Android phone that you didn’t buy within the month, your phone is old news. Here’s a good example:

This device is the HTC Dragon, from Samsung, and it’s supposed to be awesome. Looks good, right? Nope. A true Google phone is coming, and it’s supposed to be much better.

Bottom line: with the iPhone most don’t have to deal with hardware envy for a solid year, whereas if you go with Android it’s likely to be a constant issue.

Posted via email from danielmiessler.com | posterous

There are a number of relatively underground technologies that, when people hear about them, yield a response of, “Holy crap! I wish I’d known sooner.”

Posterous is one of those technologies.

The idea is big because the idea is simple. You can post to all your social services using email. Posterous handles everything else for you–formatting, resizing, etc.

Want to post a picture of a landscape to Twitter? Just email twitter@posterous.com. Done.

Want to post that same picture to your blog as well? Just email twitte+blogr@posterous.com. Now it’s in both places.

Oh, and your pic was resized to fit nicely on your blog and not be too heavy to download. Now imagine that for all your services.

Basically, rather than messing with proprietary clients, you can post images and videos and all sorts of stuff to all your favorite services (and your blog) right from your email client–all by just addressing it to the service(s) you want to post to @posterous.com.

So. Nice.

Plus, you end up with your own very clean page with everything you’ve posted via this method. In fact, if you’re not blogging already, this is precisely how I would suggest someone start.

Go check it out. Seriously. ::

1. It’s Internet connected (which helps the rest on the list)
2. Intelligent voice search (go to the museum with the king tut display)
3. Live traffic
4. Reroute around traffic
5. Satellite view
6. Superior address identification
7. POIs viewed as layers right on the map
8. Overlay your turn instructions right over street view
9. Show you the street view of your actual destination

Completely sick. Check out the video:

I have only one question: when does this come out for the iPhone? Google says they’ll happily bring it to the iPhone, but they also said to “see Apple” about availability, which is clearly a shot at their previously close partner regarding the Google Latitude debacle.

Well, I tell you what: I’m getting a lot more enticed by Android as of the last few weeks. Right now the iPhone is keeping me here with the following:

• hardware feel
• apps quality / feel
• integration with OS X
• less upgrade envy (android phones release constantly)
• games (minor, but significant)

But there is only so much Google awesomeness that I can ignore before I am forced to switch. I am currently quite tempted to try a Droid on Verizon. Google innovation combined with Verizon’s network is highly compelling.

Apple better get its shit together regarding supporting Google’s advanced technology apps on the iPhone. If they don’t, they’re going to be looking at a mass exodus sooner rather than later. ::

Like 10 years ago there was a single thing that would help your system most from a performance standpoint–add more memory. This, at the time, meant going from 64MB to 128MB, or maybe from 128MB to 256MB.

The analog today, and for the next half decade at least, is switching from disk based storage to SSD based storage.

First of all there are the book numbers: SSDs have seek times under a single milisecond; in fact, they’re being measured in microseconds now. Disk-based drives are still up around 8ms for extremely fast drive systems. We’re talking factors of 10 here, and the technology is in its infancy.

But that’s not the cool part. The bigger deal is being able to access storage in parallel rather than in serial, which is described here.

If you want a fast computer the next time you’re in the market, do three things:

1. Get a 64-bit OS
2. Get at least 4GB of memory
3. Go SSD

::

And they’re being very forward in their marketing against the iPhone…

Competition rocks.

Videos do it right; they give the point in 2-3 minutes and the pitch is always the best version possible.

Here’s DropBox:

grrr

Then, if you’re super-hardcore, check out his blog: the Technium. His posts will overwhelm you. ::

They do this by constantly calculating the that various people are traveling, and since it knows where you are it can overlay that on a map and get the speed of traffic on any given street. So, the more the system is used, the better and more useful it becomes. I love technology. :::

Posted via email from danielmiessler.com | posterous

Plus, it could display properly branded POI icons above the things you’re passing.

Anyway, just a random thought before bed. ::

Humans are notoriously poor at weighing risk. We use emotion, rather than reason, to judge what’s truly dangerous, which is why most Americans being afraid of handguns in the home more than swimming pools when it comes to child safety.

And it’s the same with online security. People worry about scary hackers penetrating through firewalls and stealing passwords for websites they use, but the reality–just like with swimming pools–is usually much more mundane (and dangerous).

The Real Threat

Most people–and I dare say even most security professionals–don’t realize that the greatest vulnerability to online account security doesn’t come from having multiple passwords spread out over many sites, or even from proposed identity consolidation systems like OpenID. It actually comes from the mother of all single points of failure–the email-based password reset mechanism.

Systems like OpenID are potential points of failure, for some subset of online users, at some point in the future. Email, on the other hand, is a single point of failure for almost everyone–right now.

Think about it: when you forget your password, how do you reset it for the majority of the sites you use? Right, email. That means that the way into virtually all those different websites is through your email account. In other words, the single most important password you have is the password to your email account.

The Mother of All Backdoors

Unfortunately, gaping holes exist in our current online password security systems–including those on email accounts. The hole comes in the form of question-answer reset systems, whereby you are asked some questions like, “What’s the name of your favorite pet?”, or “What was the name of your first High School?” in order to reset your password. These systems constitute a major weakness in online security for the simple reason that guessing these answers is often much easier than guessing your actual password.

So the bottom line is that if someone can backdoor your email account through a weak reset mechanism, they will then own your single point of failure for all your other online accounts. This is the swimming pool of online attacks because it yields way more passwords per year than super-hackers, but it gets far less attention.

So What Can We Do?

Here are the things you can do immediately to improve your online security posture:

1. Go, right now, and change your email password. Make it as complex as possible and don’t use a scheme or pattern that you’ve used in the past. Make it around 8 characters (you get diminishing returns beyond that) and make sure to use upper-case, lower-case, numbers, and at least one special character.

2. Modify your password reset questions and answers for your email account (if you have them). If you have the option, create your own questions, and use answers that only you would know. Don’t be like Sarah Palin (solid advice on a number of levels) and use something that can be looked up (she got her email hacked by using her High School name). If you’re forced to use canned questions, be tricky: consider answering “Friday” for favorite food, or “7129″ for your favorite pet’s name.

3. Sign up for an OpenID account. I suggest PIP from VerisignLabs because they offer a number of two-factor options (I use their soft token). Make this password a good one, and don’t base it off of any patterns you’ve used in the past. Pay special attention to your reset mechanisms (see numbers 1 and 2), and enable the two-factor option if at all possible. Enable the requirement on your OpenID account (PIP) to require that you be signed in before the incoming authentication request be granted.

4. For your sensitive accounts (I’d say this includes social networking sites in most cases) use your OpenID account wherever you can. And where you do, be sure to change your local, website-based password (which you’ll be mapping your OpenID to) to something complex. Consider using a password-generator tool for generating and managing those passwords–something like 1Password or Password Safe. You hopefully won’t have to use them much, as you’ll be using your OpenID in most cases.

These four things should enhance your online security significantly, and doing just the first two will get you a solid measure of the benefits. In an upcoming article I’ll be looking at some of the password reset mechanisms used by major services, and evaluating the strength of each. ::

Links

[ OpenID | openid.net ]