Author: Michael

Postdoc at Georgia Tech in Algorithms, Randomness and Complexity

The Algorithms, Randomness and Complexity (ARC) Center at Georgia Tech http://www.arc.gatech.edu/ is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to participate in research. Candidates with a PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Operations Research or a related field are encouraged to apply. The selected candidate will have the opportunity to work on any aspect of algorithms and complexity, broadly interpreted, and collaborate with the ARC faculty.

The position is for up to two years, with a start date between July 1 and September 1. There is no teaching requirement, but the postdoc is encouraged to lead a research seminar. Interested candidates should send a CV, research statement, and request 3 letters of recommendation be sent to: arc-postdoc@cc.gatech.edu.

More information here:

http://www.arc.gatech.edu/news/postdoctoral-position-arc-georgia-tech

Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming Building

In one of the more bizarre twists in recent Internet memory, much of the Internet traffic in China was redirected to a mysterious company in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Tuesday.A large portion of China’s 500 million Internet users were unable to load websites ending in .com, .net or .org for nearly eight hours in most regions of China, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based technology company.The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency that deals with Internet affairs, said it had traced the problem to the country’s domain name system. And one of China’s biggest antivirus software vendors, Qihoo 360 Technology, said the problems affected roughly three-quarters of the country’s domain name system servers.

via Chinese Internet Traffic Redirected to Small Wyoming Building – NYTimes.com.

Traceroute experiment

Giving the following command from home:

traceroute www.cas.mcmcaster.ca

yields this output:

traceroute to wwwmac.cis.mcmaster.ca (130.113.64.65), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1 vlan1.phub.net.cable.rogers.com (192.168.0.1) 0.864 ms 0.645 ms 0.971 ms
 2 7.11.162.245 (7.11.162.245) 9.885 ms 9.571 ms 15.516 ms
 3 24.156.137.81 (24.156.137.81) 12.221 ms 11.316 ms 12.042 ms
 4 69.63.248.181 (69.63.248.181) 13.643 ms 11.480 ms 19.948 ms
 5 69.63.250.93 (69.63.250.93) 9.883 ms 12.042 ms 9.749 ms
 6 gw-orano.torontointernetxchange.net (206.108.34.40) 10.289 ms 14.250 ms 13.036 ms
 7 be201.p01-toro.orion.on.ca (66.97.16.21) 13.250 ms 11.585 ms 11.657 ms
 8 be125.pe01-hmtn.orion.on.ca (66.97.16.142) 13.121 ms 11.883 ms 14.027 ms
 9 mcmaster-orion-rne.dist1-hmtn.ip.orion.on.ca (66.97.23.22) 12.736 ms 10.662 ms 14.350 ms
...

Note in particular the node corresponding to the Toronto Internet Exchange (TorIX):

6 gw-orano.torontointernetxchange.net (206.108.34.40)

More information can be found here: www.torix.ca where it can be seen that on November 25, 2013, TorIX broke the 141 Gbps mark (that is, 141 × 109 bits per second!) and check 0132856204www.torix.ca/news.php to see the different peer connections established at TorIX  – read top of page 34 in Kurose & Ross Computer Networking: a pair of nearby ISPs at the same lavel of the hierarchy can peer, that is, they can directly connect their networks together so that all the traffic between them passes over the direct connection rather than through upstream intermediaries.

Also note that nodes 7, 8, and 9 correspond to the Orion network:

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Seven Years Ago Today, Steve Jobs Introduced the iPhone

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone, a presentation that took place as part of the keynote of Macworld Expo 2007 in San Francisco. While the device would not launch until over six months later, that presentation offered the public the first glimpse of what Steve Jobs introduced as three devices in one: a touchscreen iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator.

via Seven Years Ago Today, Steve Jobs Introduced the iPhone – Mac Rumors.

Eric Allman and sendmail – nice post for programmers

Eric Allman developed sendmail and its precursor delivermail in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley. The program was designed to deliver email over the still relatively small ARPANET network, and supports a variety of mail transfer protocols, including SMTP, ESMTP, and DECnet’s Mail-11. In 1998, he founded Sendmail, Inc.

via January 9, 2014: People of ACM: Eric Allman — Association for Computing Machinery.

Quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption

The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields such as medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all current forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.

via NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption – The Washington Post.

Postdoc Positions available at CTIC Aarhus

A number of postdoc positions are currently available at CTIC, Department of Computer Science. The positions are for 1 year with the possibility of extension. The intended starting date is 1 August 2014. We are looking for applicants committed to playing an active part in continuously building strong research collaborations between the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University (www.cs.au.dk) and IIIS at Tsinghua University, Beijing. In particular, the successful applicants will spend significant time at IIIS, with funding for such visits being part of the post doc position.

via CTIC.