How to build static checking systems using orders of magnitude less code

May 31, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

How to build static checking systems using orders of magnitude less code Brown et al., ASPLOS '16 You start with something simple. Then over time things get more and more complex and before you know it, it's hard to know what's going on. Today's paper is a delightful reminder of the power of stripping back ... Continue Reading

Why do record/replay tests of web applications break?

May 30, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Why do Record/Replay Tests of Web Applications Break? - Hammoudi et al. ICST '16 Your web application regression tests created using record/replay tools are fragile and keep breaking. Hammoudi et al. set out to find out why. If we knew that, perhaps we could design mechanisms to automatically repair broken tests, or to build more ... Continue Reading

A DNA-based archival storage system

May 27, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

A DNA-Based Archival Storage System - Bornholt et al. ASPLOS '16 It's pretty cool that a paper on DNA-based storage makes a conference such as ASPLOS. And as you'll see, there are good reasons we should be taking it very seriously indeed. DNA has some very interesting properties - it's extremely dense (1 exabyte (109 ... Continue Reading

HCloud: Resource-efficient provisioning in shared cloud systems

May 26, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

HCloud: Resource-efficient provisioning in shared cloud systems - Delimitrou & Kozyrakis, ASPLOS '16 Do you use the public cloud? If so, I'm pretty confident you're going to find today's paper really interesting. Delimitrou & Kozyrakis study the provisioning strategies that provide the best balance between performance and cost. The sweet spot it turns out, is ... Continue Reading

StreamScope: Continuous reliable distributed processing of big data streams

May 24, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

StreamScope: Continuous Reliable Distributed Processing of Big Data Streams - Lin et al. NSDI '16 An emerging trend in big data processing is to extract timely insights from continuous big data streams with distributed computation running on a large cluster of machines. Examples of such data streams include those from sensors, mobile devices, and on-line ... Continue Reading

Efficiently compiling efficient query plans for modern hardware

May 23, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware- Neumann, VLDB 2011 Updated with direct links to Databricks blog post now that it is published. A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Reynold Xin and Richard Garris from Databricks / Spark at RedisConf, where we were both giving talks. Reynold and ... Continue Reading

The landscape of domain name typosquatting: techniques and countermeasures

May 20, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

The landscape of domain name typosquatting: techniques and countermeasures - Spaulding et al. arXiv upload 9 Mar 2016. We round up our series of posts on internet deceptions by looking at domain squatting. My "favourite" advanced technique is bitsquatting, which turns out to be a great demonstration of the inevitable failures that occur with sufficient ... Continue Reading

Understanding malvertising through ad-injecting browser extensions

May 19, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Understanding malvertising through ad-injecting browser extensions- Xing et al., WWW 2015. Be careful what browser extensions you install. Some ad networks have started to offer browser extension developers an opportunity to monetise their work, and in this study Xing et al. show that of the 292 Chrome browser extensions in their survey which inject ads, ... Continue Reading

Knowing your enemy: understanding and detecting malicious web advertising

May 18, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Knowing your enemy: understanding and detecting malicious web advertising - Li at al. CCS, 2012 ... hackers and con-artists have found web ads to be a low-cost and highly effective means to conduct malicious and fraudulent activities. In this paper, we broadly refer to such ad-related malicious activities as malvertising, which can happen to any ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Made delightfully fast by strattic

Month: May 2016