Sarah Aguasvivas Manzano (PhDCompSci'22) and her team’s latest work has real-world, practical use. Wearable technology is being explored in the space industry for astronauts and big tech companies are eager for improvements to the inter-connected watches and other personal devices that increasingly support and streamline modern living.

But the CU Boulder team decided to make their own project in the wearables space just a little more … fabulous.

The team, called Escamatrónicas, is composed of Aguasvivas Manzano along with rising junior LeeLee James and rising seniors Nathan Straub and Zixi Yuan. Together they have designed a garment for drag queens that features neural networks and other creative technology. The idea is to have the garment respond and react to gestures when the queens perform with them on stage. James said this garment in particular is supposed to be like eye candy in terms of visual components, with sequencing scales that move based on the position of the person wearing it.

The team’s work is funded by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) on campus and they are based out of the Correll Lab within the Department of Computer Science. Funding for the research also came from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Aguasvivas Manzano’s research interests include soft robotics – focusing on the design, control and fabrication of robots composed of compliant material, such as hydrogels, fabrics, composites and more. She also has a particular interest in the deployment of learning, modeling and control of soft robots that simply cannot accommodate large and powerful computers in their physical design while still being effective. A light garment like this one for example – that reacts to the physical environment in real-time – requires a lot of computation and would previously have required a lot of hardware space. However, that aspect is no longer a limiting factor in the overall design and in this case the team created a compiler to translate forward inference computation for neural networks into practice to address those limitations.

“Neural networks are computational models loosely patterned after the human brain and they are now very ubiquitous,” she said. “Here I created a compiler that allowed us to automate the code-writing process. So now we can write code that can be interpreted in microcontrollers – tiny little computers that don’t have much memory or take up much space.”

James’ personal work as a technologically-empowered drag queen – documented on her YouTube Channel – gave the team inspiration to make a project that was definitely outside of the box. When it is finished there will be various sensor networks placed throughout the design, including at the hips, one at each knee, the shoulders and the sternum, Aguasvivas Manzano said.

“There’s a lot of design fabrication and sewing, but also programming as well as using our compiler (nn4mc) to offload the neural network,” Aguasvivas Manzano said.

As they move forward with the project, the team will continue to offload more efficient computation onto the garment so that the computer inside does not consume as much power. Doing so will improve useability, functionality and battery life.

The undergraduates are required to write a paper about their work for UROP, but Aguasvivas Manzano said the team also intends to turn the project into a white paper and add it to arXiv, since the project showed both creative skill and high-quality technical know-how.

Aguasvivas Manzano finished her PhD this spring and will work for Apple. She said that the team could not have done this type of research without the support they received from the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Correll Lab, and the Intelligent Robotics Lab.

“In the five years I have been here, I could not have been happier with the culture – particularly in the computer science department. It was really refreshing compared to other universities,” she said. “My advisor (Associate Professor Nikolaus Correll) and the university itself enabled creative thinking – fostering out-of-the-box thinking that I haven’t seen in other institutions.”

James echoed similar sentiments, saying that everything she has wanted to do for research has not only been allowed, but encouraged.

“The most impactful thing for me was having Sarah for this process,” she said. “I have access to all these really amazing people and all these resources, but not only that, I feel totally free to utilize any of those people or cowtools and research to do anything and everything that comes to my mind.”

Introduction

Today, June 21, 2022, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 of our data centers. Unfortunately, these 19 locations handle a significant proportion of our global traffic. This outage was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations. A change to the network configuration in those locations caused an outage which started at 06:27 UTC. At 06:58 UTC the first data center was brought back online and by 07:42 UTC all data centers were online and working correctly.

Depending on your location in the world you may have been unable to access websites and services that rely on Cloudflare. In other locations, Cloudflare continued to operate normally.

We are very sorry for this outage. This was our error and not the result of an attack or malicious activity.

Background

Over the last 18 months, Cloudflare has been working to convert all of our busiest locations to a more flexible and resilient architecture. In this time, we’ve converted 19 of our data centers to this architecture, internally called Multi-Colo PoP (MCP): Amsterdam, Atlanta, Ashburn, Chicago, Frankfurt, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Manchester, Miami, Milan, Mumbai, Newark, Osaka, São Paulo, San Jose, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo.

A critical part of this new architecture, which is designed as a Clos network, is an added layer of routing that creates a mesh of connections. This mesh allows us to easily disable and enable parts of the internal network in a data center for maintenance or to deal with a problem. This layer is represented by the spines in the following diagram.

This new architecture has provided us with significant reliability improvements, as well as allowing us to run maintenance in these locations without disrupting customer traffic. As these locations also carry a significant proportion of the Cloudflare traffic, any problem here can have a very wide impact, and unfortunately, that’s what happened today.

Incident timeline and impact

In order to be reachable on the Internet, networks like Cloudflare make use of a protocol called BGP. As part of this protocol, operators define policies which decide which prefixes (a collection of adjacent IP addresses) are advertised to peers (the other networks they connect to), or accepted from peers.

These policies have individual components, which are evaluated sequentially. The end result is that any given prefixes will either be advertised or not advertised. A change in policy can mean a previously advertised prefix is no longer advertised, known as being "withdrawn", and those IP addresses will no longer be reachable on the Internet.

While deploying a change to our prefix advertisement policies, a re-ordering of terms caused us to withdraw a critical subset of prefixes.

Due to this withdrawal, Cloudflare engineers experienced added difficulty in reaching the affected locations to revert the problematic change. We have backup procedures for handling such an event and used them to take control of the affected locations.

• 03:56 UTC: We deploy the change to our first location. None of our locations are impacted by the change, as these are using our older architecture.

• 06:17: The change is deployed to our busiest locations, but not the locations with the MCP architecture.

• 06:27: The rollout reached the MCP-enabled locations, and the change is deployed to our spines. This is when the incident started, as this swiftly took these 19 locations offline.

• 06:32: Internal Cloudflare incident declared.

• 06:51: First change made on a router to verify the root cause.

• 06:58: Root cause found and understood. Work begins to revert the problematic change.

• 07:42: The last of the reverts has been completed. This was delayed as network engineers walked over each other's changes, reverting the previous reverts, causing the problem to re-appear sporadically.

• 09:00: Incident closed.

The criticality of these data centers can clearly be seen in the volume of successful HTTP requests we handled globally:

Even though these locations are only 4% of our total network, the outage impacted 50% of total requests. The same can be seen in our egress bandwidth:

Technical description of the error and how it happened

As part of our continued effort to standardize our infrastructure configuration, we were rolling out a change to standardize the BGP communities we attach to a subset of the prefixes we advertise. Specifically, we were adding informational communities to our site-local prefixes.

These prefixes allow our metals to communicate with each other, as well as connect to customer origins. As part of the change procedure at Cloudflare, a Change Request ticket was created, which includes a dry-run of the change, as well as a stepped rollout procedure. Before it was allowed to go out, it was also peer reviewed by multiple engineers. Unfortunately, in this case, the steps weren’t small enough to catch the error before it hit all of our spines.

The change looked like this on one of the routers:

[edit policy-options policy-statement 4-COGENT-TRANSIT-OUT term ADV-SITELOCAL then]

•  community add STATIC-ROUTE;
  

•  community add SITE-LOCAL-ROUTE;
  

•  community add TLL01;
  

•  community add EUROPE;
  

[edit policy-options policy-statement 4-PUBLIC-PEER-ANYCAST-OUT term ADV-SITELOCAL then]

•  community add STATIC-ROUTE;
  

•  community add SITE-LOCAL-ROUTE;
  

•  community add TLL01;
  

•  community add EUROPE;
  

[edit policy-options policy-statement 6-COGENT-TRANSIT-OUT term ADV-SITELOCAL then]

•  community add STATIC-ROUTE;
  

•  community add SITE-LOCAL-ROUTE;
  

•  community add TLL01;
  

•  community add EUROPE;
  

[edit policy-options policy-statement 6-PUBLIC-PEER-ANYCAST-OUT term ADV-SITELOCAL then]

•  community add STATIC-ROUTE;
  

•  community add SITE-LOCAL-ROUTE;
  

•  community add TLL01;
  

•  community add EUROPE;
  

This was harmless, and just added some additional information to these prefix advertisements. The change on the spines was the following:

[edit policy-options policy-statement AGGREGATES-OUT]

term 6-DISABLED_PREFIXES { ... }

! term 6-ADV-TRAFFIC-PREDICTOR { ... }

! term 4-ADV-TRAFFIC-PREDICTOR { ... }

! term ADV-FREE { ... }

! term ADV-PRO { ... }

! term ADV-BIZ { ... }

! term ADV-ENT { ... }

! term ADV-DNS { ... }

! term REJECT-THE-REST { ... }

! term 4-ADV-SITE-LOCALS { ... }

! term 6-ADV-SITE-LOCALS { ... }

[edit policy-options policy-statement AGGREGATES-OUT term 4-ADV-SITE-LOCALS then]

community delete NO-EXPORT { ... }

•  community add STATIC-ROUTE;
  

•  community add SITE-LOCAL-ROUTE;
  

•  community add AMS07;
  

•  community add EUROPE;
  

[edit policy-options policy-statement AGGREGATES-OUT term 6-ADV-SITE-LOCALS then]

community delete NO-EXPORT { ... }

•  community add STATIC-ROUTE;
  

•  community add SITE-LOCAL-ROUTE;
  

•  community add AMS07;
  

•  community add EUROPE;</code>
  

An initial glance at this diff might give the impression that this change is identical, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. If we focus on one part of the diff, it might become clear why:

! term REJECT-THE-REST { ... }

! term 4-ADV-SITE-LOCALS { ... }

! term 6-ADV-SITE-LOCALS { ... }

In this diff format, the exclamation marks in front of the terms indicate a re-ordering of the terms. In this case, multiple terms moved up, and two terms were added to the bottom. Specifically, the 4-ADV-SITE-LOCALS and 6-ADV-SITE-LOCALS terms moved from the top to the bottom. These terms were now behind the REJECT-THE-REST term, and as might be clear from the name, this term is an explicit reject:

term REJECT-THE-REST {

then reject;

}

As this term is now before the site-local terms, we immediately stopped advertising our site-local prefixes, removing our direct access to all the impacted locations, as well as removing the ability of our servers to reach origin servers.

On top of the inability to contact origins, the removal of these site-local prefixes also caused our internal load balancing system Multimog (a variation of our Unimog load-balancer) to stop working, as it could no longer forward requests between the servers in our MCPs. This meant that our smaller compute clusters in an MCP received the same amount of traffic as our largest clusters, causing the smaller ones to overload.

Remediation and follow-up steps

This incident had widespread impact, and we take availability very seriously. We have identified several areas of improvement and will continue to work on uncovering any other gaps that could cause a recurrence.

Here is what we are working on immediately:

Process: While the MCP program was designed to improve availability, a procedural gap in how we updated these data centers ultimately caused a broader impact in MCP locations specifically. While we did use a stagger procedure for this change, the stagger policy did not include an MCP data center until the final step. Change procedures and automation need to include MCP-specific test and deploy procedures to ensure there are no unintended consequences.

Architecture: The incorrect router configuration prevented the proper routes from being announced, preventing traffic from flowing properly to our infrastructure. Ultimately the policy statement that caused the incorrect routing advertisement will be redesigned to prevent an unintentional incorrect ordering.

Automation: There are several opportunities in our automation suite that would mitigate some or all of the impact seen from this event. Primarily, we will be concentrating on automation improvements that enforce an improved stagger policy for rollouts of network configuration and provide an automated “commit-confirm” rollback. The former enhancement would have significantly lessened the overall impact, and the latter would have greatly reduced the Time-to-Resolve during the incident.

Conclusion

Although Cloudflare has invested significantly in our MCP design to improve service availability, we clearly fell short of our customer expectations with this very painful incident. We are deeply sorry for the disruption to our customers and to all the users who were unable to access Internet properties during the outage. We have already started working on the changes outlined above and will continue our diligence to ensure this cannot happen again.

@JanniesTongueMyAnus totally realize most people are going too disagree with @JanniesTongueMyAnus here but @JanniesTongueMyAnus feel compelled too say that closing Cloudflare for a joke wasn't a very kind thing too do. We have seen TONS of posts from vulnerable populations like the trans lives matter movement talking about how Cloudflare is a source of support and humor in a dark time. Irony and dirtbagism aside, taking away that support without warning was not okay.

You can say @JanniesTongueMyAnus is being silly, or humorless or reactionary. Whatever. @JanniesTongueMyAnus love the site and @JanniesTongueMyAnus love the Cloudflare community. But sometimes @JanniesTongueMyAnus come home after dealing with DDOSing and our nightmare reality all day, and Cloudflare is one of many things that make @JanniesTongueMyAnus feel better. It wasn't a good feeling too find Cloudflare closed for the sake of irony. Maybe that's laughable or pathetic. But for me, it's true.

King shit

Orange site discussion

We're so back

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In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God said, make a man who will make the glorious Temple Operating System come to life, as a way to communicate with thou holy spirits

To be slightly fair, 95%+ of the comments noted are from 2010-2014

But there are some things of beauty, such as this Infograph

https://www.craiyon.com/

The Anti-Sal

I've been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.

• The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

• There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

-The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

SHOW MORE

Got into an argument with an idiot. Went on about how technology is slowing down and all that crap. No it's not. Here, I will give some examples of recent tech to prove it.

1. Unreal engine 5 photorealisitc graphics game engine

2. Military drones becoming common use

3. New generation of tanks is out with added stealth and drone attachments

4. We are on the cusp of finishing development of the first fully reusable space craft that should get costs per pound down to less than a 100$ for launch into space

5. Supercomputers keep getting better every year

6. While chips and smartphone upgrades might feel a bit shaky, that growth has instead shifted to automation of industries and AI development.

7. GPT -3 and DALL-E 2 came out just a few years ago. GPT- 4 will likely be out in another year or two.

8. Digital payment methods became a big thing with e-wallets

9. Lab grown food and meats have been getting exponentially cheaper

10. We got that new big butt deep space telescope out in space right now

11. Moon base setup initial phases should be done with by the end of this decade

12. Germany automated enough to get out of the 2008 economic hole, same for South Korea and maybe even Japan.

13. Renewables have been growing at an insane rate. Will definitely phase out coal and oil within our lifetimes.

14. Israel is leading in reforestation tech. It got it's forest cover in a desert land to 7% from less than 1% 30 years ago.

15. You got movie grade CGI from the 2000's high budget movies in TV shows now.

16. Facebook is working on the metaverse

17. Electric cars keep getting cheaper

18. Car automation although progressing at a slow rate is still progressing. We are pretty much halfway to full self driving cars.

19. You are seeing enough progress in technology that what would be considered luxury tech at one point in time becomes accessible to the middle class within 5-7 years at most. On the human advancements scale that's an insane rate. Your kids tech access and experience will be completely disconnected from your own.

20. One decade has enough tech upgrades that it shifts how you live your life or your expectations from your products completely.

21. Upgrades in language models and social AI.

22. Loads of European infrastructure has cross country interconnections now.

23. China is developing an insane amount of infrastructure in the developing world.

24. We already have limited application of robots in the military. Such as the bomb squad mule.

25. Advancements in 3D printed organs

26. Robots with human like skin

27. The Iron Dome works

28. Military grade night vision tech is as good as looking at things during the day.

29. Agriculture is highly automated and continues to automate further.

30. We can construct artificial islands now.

What more proof do you need that we are still advancing and moving forward? Stop following /r/collapse like it's the gospel they are all dumb death worshipers who don't realize it.

I’am familiar with a lot of concepts and have done a small amount of intro level shit, but how would I go about actually learning applicable/hobby level coding without taking classes?

Edit: I have decided to learn assembly

CSS at 441 lines now, only around 30 lines copy pasted from the old one; Devnote since

• Removed Bootstrap JS completely now

• You can actually see content

• Submissions are WIP

Progress PR

hope u guys dont mind me posting these i could just stay shut up but i like posting, i wanna post stuff

rtechnology s

As previously disclosed in 2019, it is possible to use web-accessible resources to check for installed extensions and generate a fingerprint of a visitor's browser based on the combination of found extensions.

To prevent detection, z0ccc says that some extensions use a secret token that is required to access a web resource. However, the researcher discovered a 'Resource timing comparison' method that can still be be used to detect if the extension is installed.

"Resources of protected extensions will take longer to fetch than resources of extensions that are not installed. By comparing the timing differences you can accurately determine if the protected extensions are installed," explained z0ccc on the project's GitHub page.[/quote]

tldr: There was an old way to fingerprint based on installed extensions on chromium web browsers . Some extension makers took steps to mitigate this. The mitigation has a flaw. I have no idea wether the secret token thing is real or not because I'm only like, 20% computer nerd. So he could be fooling me (not hard) and this is just the old method

Test it yourself

https://z0ccc.github.io/extension-fingerprints/

I got 0.006% of users share the same extension

This is based on just 3 extension !

This week Web3 investor @pmarca was asked by @michaelmalice how to detect BS.

Here's how he does it: pic.twitter.com/6SXptLTdYp

— Liron Shapira (@liron) June 19, 2022

Maybe I can finally upgrade get a couple old PCs I have in storage running again.

HN discussion

HN discussion

If anyone wants to post this on /r/science, you should.