Archive of stories published by Impossible Dream

Final thoughts from reInvent

In my first blog post I listed some questions I wanted to explore so it seems like I should go back to them after a week of immersion in the madness.


Detecting Malware in encrypted https traffic

A fun paper from Cisco. Using a sandbox, they generate a large data set of connections from malware to the internet that uses https. They compare this with a set of https traffic data from an enterprise network (I assume Cisco’s!) and train a ML…


AWS reInvent. Some sessions

Alexa in Higher Ed

Amazon has run some contests for students: Hack-the-Dorm and Hack-the-World

John Rome, Deputy CIO of Arizona State presented. ASU has over 100,000 students. Aiming to become first voice enabled…


Reliable Cron Across the Planet

This paper by two Google engineers is a non-technical explanation of issues found in large scale distributed systems.

Starting with cron on a single machine, it nicely shows up the differences as a job runner is scaled out to a distributed system…