Participants of the courses "Aktuelle Themen Internet" are organizing so called "days" with a special focus on new and upcoming topics in computer science and society with a potentially disruptive force. The idea behind those events is to get students to think about possible trends and important future technologies by planning a workshop or an event. Besides the theoretical work the organization of such an event (approaching and inviting key representatives of a new technology) trains soft skills. The necessary media coverage (providing a live stream, chat, moderation etc.) leads to a media competence which is a requirement in todays workplace.
The themes for those workshops and events will be decided by the participants, work is done in groups. The following list gives some ideas for events or discussion topics. The questions for the final exam cover those topics.
The other half of the course is a weekly seminar where we discuss new technological trends and their impact on society. Participants are required to read papers and articles for each session.
If you don't like to read, don't take this course!!! There is a google drive folder where we will collect papers and other resources.
We will start with two sessions on the "digital revolution" that is currently happening and on the concept of disruption. After that we decide on further topics for discussion.
The Digital Revolution - work, technology and its consequences. See About unicorns, digital platforms and the future of technology (and society)
Disruptive Technology and the Christensen book (did not want to do this repeatedly but had to learn otherwise) Innovators Dilemma. This is mandadorty reading, because the concept of disruptive technology is so fundamental to this course. For an anti-dote to Christensen, see the critique by Jill Lepore . An alternative source:
Compare it with: "Here are the trends that will shape the next generation of disruptive start-ups". And while you are at it you might want to watch the following short talks by Christensen Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma) on How to Build a Disruptive Business | Startup Grind and Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma) on How to Build a Disruptive Business | Startup Grind. The last one is about the concept of conservation of modularity, which is important for understanding aggregators.
Optional topcis for the course: (feel free to offer your own ideas). And check out the other courses of previous summer terms! Not all topics handled there are outdated!
What makes modern digital corporations tick? What is expected? How are work/organization and technology aligned? Reed Hastings, Netflix Culture - Freedom & Responsibility, and (Henrik Kniberg & Anders Ivarsson, Scaling Agile at Spotify ) and see how social and technical organization of work interleaves. We will learn about Conways law and why Netflix believes it should be like Bayern München. On how to create an engineering team and how google does hiring etc. from a very experienced elder Google manager. What we did when our investors told us we weren't working hard enough (1/4). Well, some uncomfortable thoughts on high performance teams and startup expectations once you are done talking "psychological safety". How is software developed at Amazon?. Compare this with your experience. Onsite friendly - the story of 2 tech centers On how NOT to run a distributed company. Lessons from a Big Data Machine Learning Startup A rather long video clip with both technical and organizational stuff (extremely interesting). Dare Obasajo on Uber, Lyft, losses and corp.culture. About extreme losses in unicorn companies and how the corporate culture scandal hurt Uber. New clues emerge about Amazon’s secretive low-code_no-code project – GeekWire The creeping IT Apocalypse. Are you still in demand in a few years? Look at what Amazon is trying to do for non-technical people working with clouds! Developers Are The Problem, Not Monoliths - codeboje. That one points out correctly, that architecture can SUPPORT things, but it won't fix organizational problems. Culture & Methods – the State of Practice in 2019: Extremely interesting if you compare it what was said in 2018! Covers lot's of technical topics and shows the state they are in.
What is currently going on with aggregators, platforms and unicorns? Can we expect changes? What is a platform and how does it work? It all starts with platforms and aggregation: Aggregation theory by Ben Thompson and a nice working example of it: the cost of Apple news. For the deep dive about aggregators and platforms: The 2018 Stratechery Year in Review How did IPOs change? (Lyft/Uber etc.) Dare Obasanio twittered: going public without ever being profitable. and the final situation with unprofitable unicorns: https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1101703274300825600 Silicon Valley strategies: What is "blitzscaling" and does it work? A critique by Tim O'Reilly The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy. That is a tad longer but very interesting. Tim has been on the front of the Internet revolution ever since. You can't explain Silicon Valley and the big Unicorns without a look at money. A fascinating look behind the curtains: Money Machines: An Interview with an Anonymous Algorithmic Trader. It shows how automated algorithms make money. And business models in the Internet always include a geo-political component with respect to national advantages or disadvantages (Alex Stamos on Twitter). How "political" is the new EU directive towards copyright and linking? For a nice international view on this topic see: What is Article 13? The EU's divisive new copyright plan explained (wired magazine). Is the Internet a level playing field or do things like app stores create unfair advantages? See the law case Spotify (Daniel Ek) vs. Apple. Ek claims that Apply unfairly increases prices of competitors. The general question probably is if we see disruption (wanted) or protection (unwanted). While the Apple case is questionable, David Rosenthal mentions a few business models (crypto hacking and ad click fraud) which are clearly illegal but very interesting in the context of profitability of IT in general and GDP calculations: IT raises productivity! And business models are intimately tied to technological progress in the cloud area, due to speed and scalability advantages: Glue together your own SaaS shows how easy it is to assemble and offer highly usable services quickly to customers with serverless computing. The downside is possibly in large dependencies. You want it all? A look at growth tools and companies in the SaaS market: The Growth Stacks of 2019, Calvin French-Owen. Is the Internet only for the big guys? Take a look at Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL. By Piers Cawley on Feb 2, 2019 to see how much even very small businesses are already dependent on technology. What wil happen to the little guys in the future? Another look into the future: The top 20 Internet Giants that rule the world. What changed over the years? Any precdicitons? The vidual capitalist homepage has lots of fascinating information! Finally: What will be the impact of IoT on business models? Will it be used only conservatively to fight current problems or will it go for radically new options and possibilities? San Diego’s Smart Streetlights Yield a Firehose of Data - IEEE Spectrum But can we assume the same business models for IoT? The story of the Internet of Things is different from the story of the other Internet Alasdair Allan explains why subscriptions are necessary for businesses in IoT. Will Ford sell data in the future?. I've put the rest of the articles into our "doomsday scenarios" section" for later.
Just a look at something that might be big. Critique: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1-3: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine. A show case of WA: 20x speedup current developments in WA: Fastly/lucet, beyond the browser: Wasmer
Taking a look at current architectures found on the Internet. Shuffle Sharding. Serverless, BaDaas, Cell-based Reference Architecture for enterprises in the cloud. Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar Alexandra Noonan on Jul 10th 2018, Journey to Event Driven – Part 1: Why Event-First Thinking Changes Everything, Journey to Event Driven – Part 2: Programming Models for the Event-Driven Architecture, Heavy Networking 433: An Insider’s Guide To AWS Transit Gateways, How to build a Serverless Single Page App | OpenFaaS - Serverless Functions Made Simple, GitHub - GoogleCloudPlatform_microservices-demo: Sample cloud-native application with 10 microservices showcasing Kubernetes, Istio, gRPC and OpenCensus. Provided for illustration and demo purposes Four Techniques Serverless Platforms Use to Balance Performance and Cost, Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing, Building A Serverless IoT FinTech App with AWS and NodeJS, Connect AWS API Gateway directly to SNS using a service integration, Why Google Needed a Graph Serving System - Dgraph Blog Manish Rai Jain, Real-world Architecture Panel (The panelists discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in software / hardware architectures that interact with the physical world, with particular emphasis on data flow, control, and machine learning.), The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Event Sourcing, Cloud Native Application Architecture – WalmartLabs – Medium, The State of Microservices Maturity, Netdev 0x12 - Achieving super low latency for critical real world Internet applications - Workshop - YouTube, GraphQL: A Retrospective - Verve.co (good lessons learned).
Design of cloud native databases: aurora. AWS Event Fork Pipelines: E-Commerce Example. A nice example for billing using Webhooks. A look at networking at google. How API Gateway works: Architecture and use of API Gateway
Technology, politics and the future: The real reason America is scared of Huawei: internet-connected everything - MIT Technology Review, The Price Of America's Poor Internet Connection - Diane Rehm, the new ERCIM issue has 5G as its main topic. A list of papers and resources by Markus Wagner (many thanks!!)
Technical “5G radio access”- Things that need to be fixed first Detaillierte technische Analyse zu 5G. Gut, wenn man das aus technischer Hinsicht näher verstehen möchte. “AT&T defends misleading ‘5G’ network icons on 4G phones” Zeigt schön, wie der Hype um 5G von den Providern ausgenutzt wird und wie schwammig der Begriff tatsächlich verwendet wird - niemand hat 5G wirklich definiert. “5G Will Not Change the World” 5G ist nur eine Technologie - die alleine wird nicht für große Veränderungen sorgen. Es sind die Anwendungen, die etwas bewirken könnten. Diese werden jedoch mit dem mangelhaften Ausbau zu kämpfen haben.
5G Anwendungen “The internet of cows: 5G has already arrived for this herd” Beispiel wie Mobilfunknetze in der Landwirtschaft eingesetzt werden können. “Companies fed up with crappy Wi-Fi are deploying 5G instead” Die Unzuverlässigkeit von herkömmlichen Wi-Fi sorgt u.a. bei Audi dafür, in den Werken 5G für ihre Robotik zu verproben - es gibt vor allem sehr lokale Anwendungsfälle für 5G.
5G Digital Divide “5G is here! Can it deliver on Affordable Access to close the digital divide?” Auswirkungen von 5G auf den Digital Divide zwischen Land und Stadt. Zusätzlich wird ein Action Plan für die Politik vorgeschlagen um den worst-case zu verhindern.
5G im IoT vs. Narrowband-IoT “IoT braucht kein 5G” 5G bringt nicht die notwendigen Qualtitäten mit, die im IoT relevant sind. Als Alternative wird in ganz simplen Worten die Narrowband-Technologie vorgestellt “Cellular IoT Explained: NB-IoT vs. LTE-M vs. 5G and More” Detaillierterer Vergleich der verschiedenen Mobilfunktechnologien für das IoT. Wichtiges Zitat: “For LTE-based IoT networks to succeed, they need to have the following characteristics: 1) long battery life, 2) low cost, 3) support for high volume of devices, 4) enhanced coverage (better signal penetration through walls for example), and 5) long rage/wide spectrum.”
Auswirkungen von 5G auf die Gesundheit “5G networks: Are they dangerous to our health?” Die Auswirkungen auf die Gesundheit sind noch nicht hinreichend untersucht, aber es ist nicht allzu abwegig, dass es spürbare Konsequenzen haben könnte - aufgrund der höheren Frequenzen. Health and politics: Russia badmouthing 5G because of being late in the game?. But then again: Who ist this Venturebeat company???. Well, sponsored content...
IoT Security Zuletzt noch ein kleiner Ausblick in Richtung IoT Security. Sehr wichtiges Thema, das auch viel Tiefe hat. Dass das schon mit kleinsten Maßnahmen anfangen kann, zeigt dieser Talk: “115 batshit stupid things you can put on the internet in as fast as I can go by Dan Tentler” Viele Leute denken bei ihren IoT devices überhaupt nicht über Sicherheit nach. Das macht sie zu einem leichten Opfer, denn das IoT lässt sich leicht abscannen. Dan Tentler präsentiert hier seine - öffentlich einsehbaren und steuerbaren - Funde. Von Überwachungskameras über Krankenhausbetten bis hin zu Staudämmen und Tanks mit geschmolzenem Stahl, die sich ausleeren lassen. Das wird mit der Ausweitung von IoT durch NB-IoT und 5G definitiv nicht besser. “Shodan” Shodan ist eine Suchmaschine, die eben das Absuchen ungesicherter IoT Geräte erleichtern können. Die ist dabei sehr fortschrittlich und bietet zahlenden Nutzern allerhand Features, von Listen an CVE-Schwachstellen die für jedes Gerät im Internet automatisiert erstellt werden, bis hin zu OCR für die Bildschirme der Geräte. Unheimlich, was man da alles finden kann.
Article 13, civil resistance, copyright and patents, Online-Urheberrecht: Was Sie über die EU-Reform wissen sollten,
THE book on how corporations use our data. Goes way beyond "we are the product". Sam Biddle on A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice”: Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Here is the original by Soshana Zuboff. And for the Netflix generation: her talk at Forum Privatheit 2018: Shoshana Zuboff keynote speech on surveillance capitalism. And it is not only the big corporations feeding off our data: The influencers are getting paid well for being part of the surveillance industry: see the pricey war to influcence your instagram feed. Are influencers a means against aggregators? Is there a platform for influencers? Escapex What can we do about it? One thing is to use Tor as a browser. How does Tor work? is a short intro to Tor technology. Is it enough? A good guide to what you should do in general to stay anonymous from the Tor project: And some more advice on protection your pricacy: is it any good? How to stay anonymous online . And Things NOT to do. Full report hereRemember: we are NOT talking real hacking here (for an example search for "hacking hacking team"). And also NOT Tor hidden services. And finally we need to talk about some personal habits. After all, we are creatures of habit and that is where they will get us all the time: habits and comfort. For the overall effect of AI and Big Data on us see Reeingineering Humanity.Review by Lara Freidenfelds: Are Our Smart Devices Turning Us into Dumb Humans?. And now a look at the costs of GDPR for storage systems: Redis performance drops to 5% with full GDPR compliance. Location information and its effects on privacy: Googles Sensorvault helps law enforcement (and I thought only the Chinese violate privacy (sesame credit, (:-)).
What's going on in Zuckerberg land? Do we see changes? A look back and some predictions. The hackernoon article gives some surprising comparisons which make the size and impact of FB clearer. AI and Social Media incentives can form a vicious circle. Guillaume Chaslot (his twitter account) writes about Youtube AI and how it boosts alternative facts . He is an ex-googler who is now involved in algotransparency.org, a site which investigates recommendation systems etc. . Take a look at its results and try some themes. Some interesting bits on youtube and AI use. (read the whole thread about his friend Brian). A reaction from youtube on its recommendation strategy centered around watch time. Also interesting from Youtube's blog: Continuing our work to improve recommendations. Toxic content vs. the fight for engagement: Proposals to change recommendations and curb conspiracies were sacrificed for engagement, staff say. Finally, this becomes even a political problem: The Brexit, a Youtube product?. How youtube manipulated the opinion on Brexit.
When do people get sick? A fascinating look into the media diet of a guy who stabbed his brother to death with 4-foot sword thought he was a lizard, police say . His favourite channel was #secureteam10 .
Another author who writes on AI and recommendations is François Chollet. What worries me about AI
Some bits on the moral of youtube and facebook: An podcast and some good links on youtube moral and Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis - The New York Times. But is all this really new? Think about the infamous british Daily Mail and SUN .
Still a little bit of cybernetic and systems thinking: Going Critical, by Kevin Simler. How does the size and network structure of social media spread "mental" diseases - just like big cities increased infection rates due to their size. Found via Kevin Slavin's twitter account. Is there a link between fake news, education and geo-politics? Finnland's fight against disinformation.
moving from Ruby to Rust? The Go-Study. Typescript at AirBnB, Npm using Rust for performance.
Is AWS the new windows?. Subscripton mooching, data not the new oil, neural MMO, Asia and surveillance, CubeSats, Cloud bills and AWS, AI and consciousness. IT and productivity. AI is reinventing the way we invent - MIT Technology Review, A Bill of Rights for the Age of Artificial Intelligence, We should be concerned about the rights of all sentients as an unprecedented diversity of minds emerges, George M. Church, Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report - January 2019, Stratechery by Ben Thompson – On the business, strategy, and impact of technology, Aggregation Theory – Stratechery by Ben Thompson, After Epic 2018, Northern Virginia Preps for More Hyperscale Growth By Rich Miller - February 4, 2019 , The Urban-Rural Divide, Edge.org, Google AI Blog: Looking Back at Google’s Research Efforts in 2018.html, cdixon blog: Strong and Weak Technologies, do they arrive in pairs?, http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=2294 erooms law strikes again. 7 things to watch for in 2019, Oreilly, InfoQ’s 2018, and What We Expect to See in 2019, The Future of Work Is Female by ben Linders, InfoQ, https://granolashotgun.com/2018/12/08/the-infrastructure-long-play/, The Office of the future by Microsoft. Will autnonomous vehicles require law changes for pedestrians (see Peter Norton, Fighting Traffic, on the re-shaping of US culture through automotive corporations from 1900-1930 Eliminate 11.000 parking spots per year)Amsterdam. Big shifts ins multicore designs. Breakthrough technologies in 2019.
On Internet Standards, some effects of missing net-neutrality, internet censorship., QUIC - Developing and Deploying a TCP Replacement for the Web (Fastly/Google), The road to QUIC by Alessandro Ghedini, Cloudflare An easy intro to QUIC. A follow-up by Nick Jones is Getting a head start with QUIC.. Faster than TCP? Let's take a look at The QUIC Transport Protocol:Design and Internet-Scale Deployment by Adam Langley, Alistair Riddoch and others from Google. What makes the protocol faster than TCP? Is http/2 faster or does it have better throughput? And what happens in case of Network troubles?. The real stuff: Draft IETF: QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport (draft nr. 14). . And finally, for the Video afficionados: QUIC: Replacing TCP for the Web by Jana Iyengar of Google. A great article on Ossification describes the difficulties of upgrading protocol versions in the context of outdated middleboxes and downgrade attacks. For those unfamiliear with http/e, cloudflare has a short intro on http/2available. Did you hear about the Cluetrain Manifesto?. Here is an Update from the authors. Something technical on Building reversec proxies with sockmap.What should we change about Networking? Countries With Zero Rating Have More Expensive Wireless Broadband Than Countries Without It, By Ernesto Falcon, February 5, 2019 , GitHub - ibrdtn_ibrdtn: A modular and lightweight implementation of the bundle protocol, HTTP/3: From root to tip 24 Jan 2019 by Lucas Pardue. Google Takes Its First Steps Toward Killing the URL, WIRED, BGP in 2018 Part 1 - The BGP Table January 2019 Geoff Huston, The Internet Apologizes, Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it. By Noah Kulwin
I think AR is going to be bigger than VR: Another future oriented article from Wired magazine (Kevin Kelly): AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld, and it includes games as well (actually: how much will games and life merge?) Gamasutra: Edward Wu's Blog - a planet-scale real-world AR platform
https://www.infoq.com/articles/qcon-san-francisco-2018, https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/best-of-2018-in-tech-talks-2970eb3097af
state-of-the-internet-security-retail-attacks-and-api-traffic-report-2019 Akamai, You Do Not Need Blockchain: Eight Popular Use Cases And Why They Do Not Work, Europäische Standards-Organisation warnt USA vor TLS 1.3, heise online, Digitale Souveränität: Kommunale IT-Dienstleister rebellieren gegen Microsoft (DSGVO), Spectre will stay with us.., Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked - MIT Technology Review_files, SD-WAN_35C3, Perspectives on SD-WAN : networking, Investigating Apps interactions with Facebook on Android, Privacy International
The Unscalable, Deadlock-prone, Thread Pool - Paul Khuong: some Lisp, Design of a Modern Cache - High Scalability, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Feature Extraction,
Gigaom, Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: An Interview with Scott Aaronson, Winning the Race in Quantum Computing - American Affairs Journal
We will take a look at ourselves, how we work, with what kind of tools we work and how we integrate new technologies. Will we still use a programming language in the future? Will AI do away with us? How will our (social) future look like? Some interesting and sometimes troubling links ahead! Effects of the global workforce on older devs. How to rate programmers: 2 Years at facebook Will machine learning improve coding? Aroma:Using ML for code recommendations .The cloud skills shortage and the unemployed army of the certified, I'm not 54. I'm 22 with 32 years experience, Hacker News, Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset by Anna Irrera, AWS For Everyone: New clues emerge about Amazon’s secretive low-code_no-code project – GeekWire, Cloud Irregular: The Creeping IT Apocalypse, January 16, 2019 · 8 minute read, The Great Divide, Two front-end developers are sitting at a bar . They have nothing to talk about. January 2019 — Chris Coyier . How will AI influence programming? Peter Norvig's classic piece As we may program. Alternatively look a the Video . And Mike Loukides on The Future of Programming . Will it really be visual?. Finally I always liked Stephen Wolfram's ideas and now he brings the Wolfram Language as an SDK. Many PhD Students use the math support from Wolfram labs for their thesis. Wolfram talks about a Computational Language that they have built.
The scalable fabric behind our growing data center network, Dropbox Tech Blog
George Dyson: Nach der digitalen Revolution dreht das Rad weiter. Aber wer hat die Kontrolle? NZZ, Can Users Control and Understand a UI Driven by Machine Learning? by Raluca Budiu on December 16, 2018 (Nielsen/Norman)
Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the Collapse of the Tech Mythology - The Atlantic, The Age of Tech Is Over - The Atlantic, The Silent Crisis of Retail Employment - The Atlantic, Die Ursprünge der gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftskrise, Telepolis, George Dyson: Auf die digitale folgt die analoge Revolution,aws_killing_the_middleIT, Study: Over 20 years, Silicon Valley workers’ median wage has fallen by 14% Prof: "The returns to capital are significantly outpacing the returns to labor." Crazy/Genius Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? In a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how “technochauvinism” derailed the dream of the digital revolution. Open Source Business Models Considered Harmful, John Mark (good ideas on how NOT to monetize Open Source ..), I Sold My Data for Crypto. Here's How Much I Made, Cyrus Farivar - 11/23/2018, 1:47 PM
Distributed vs. centralized: what is better? The Internet has moved between both poles frequently. Lately, centralized servers seem to have an advantage. Is that so and why? A plea for distributed can be found by Chris Dixon Why Decentralization matters. He describes the various phases on the Internet. And if we talk about distributed and Internet the Interplanetry File System as a peer-to-peer based solution cannot be left out. Murat Demirbas did a nice Review of the IPFS paper in his distributed computing course and he points out the strength and weaknesses of p2p and servers. Very good read. Some more on IPFS: From the blockchain train journal. And an excellent explanation Understanding the IPFS White Paper part 2 Dan Rayburn, Net Neutrality is a Sham. A bit unrelated but very interesting: A discussion about google reader and its follower, google news. A big difference for media creators according to Anil Dash . By the same author: The lost infrastructure of social media . Going from things we lost to things we never had: is it possible to build a distributed or federated social network? Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS - and its problems by Matthias Beyer is an interesting read, and so are the Comments on YCombinator. Lots of things to learn about going distributed (e.g. moderation and other experiences). Or the world's largest marketplace OpenBazaar , a fully distributed shop with bitcoins, arbiter and everything. Or take totally distributed editing with ODTRs . Collaboration without network dependencies.
Net Neutrality and attacks on the internet. Well, Trump certainly is no friend of net neutrality. Will old-style telcoms kill the googles and amazons? http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Klartext-1965046.html Irrtümer in Sachen Netzneutralität http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/digital/netzneutralitaet-etno-itu-1.17231939 http://www.heise.de/thema/Netzneutralit%C3%A4t Dan Rayburn, Net Neutrality is a Sham Netzpolitik «Eine Verfassung für das Internet»http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/international/auslandnachrichten/brasilien-kreiert-eine-internet-verfassung-1.18272165
I have pulled this to the top because of current developments in the US. Looks like big old AT&T will be great again...
Load balancing and komplex protocols like gRPC. Always a topic for internet services. Using Envoy to Load Balance gRPC Traffic by Mike White gives you some hints on why balancing http/2 ain't easy. In case you are looking for more basic information on LB Introduction to modern network load balancing and proxying by Matt Klein should be on your reading list.
Current developments and trends in the Internet itself. Is the Internet still a disruptive force? What are the effects of IPV6 and will it solve the symmetry problems? This topic is tightly related to "distributed web" and "net neutrality".Geoff Huston on Adressing 2017 is an excellent source for internet topics like NATing, DNS, adressing, BGP and other core technologies the internet is riding on.
The Internet of the future: A big private Content Delivery Network? Geoff Houston, The Death of Transit and Beyond and Alan Mauldin adds additional information on submarine cables etc. Looks like the Internet is getting restructured and privatized even more. A good explanation and overview in German from Monika Ermert, Heise.de
Faster than TCP? Let's take a look at The QUIC Transport Protocol:Design and Internet-Scale Deployment by Adam Langley, Alistair Riddoch and others from Google. What makes the protocol faster than TCP?
. Is http/2 faster or does it have better throughput? And what happens in case of Network troubles?Blockchain has been all the rage lately. A sore spot in most protocols is the energy intensive way proof-of-work is done. Is there a reliable alternative like proof-of-stake? Next Generation Decentralised Ethereum Proof of Stake Pool .Or even some consensus protocol? And Do you need a blockchain?. Stellar is an internet level, open membership, byzantine consensus protocol. so there is more than blockchain...
Well, there is no denying that AI and machine learning are having a major impact on the world. How will they affect software development and internet services? Ambient AI Is About to Devour the Software Industry shows how Amazon ties cloud and AI technologies together into one seamless dashboard for developers. Other alternatives like The Coming Software Apocalypse -A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes. place a bet on formal methods to save software development.Machine Lerning Driven Programming
Frontend programming has changed dramatically over the last years. It used to be the case that light-weight developers (selfmade poeple starting with html, xml and slowly moving into javascript) were put into frontend development. (If they really were unable to do much, they had to go into testing..). Nowadays frontend development requires at least the same excellent skills like backend programming with the additional problem of multi-language, multi-paradigm development and being closer to the customer. Kaelan Cooter, Software Engineer at LogRocket wrote Frontend in 2017: The important parts It takes a look at current frontend technologies so that you don't miss the boat.
You want your new service to get really BIG. How do you get it e.g. on Google's application engine? How to Lift-and-Shift a Line of Business Application onto Google Cloud Platform by Andy Wu, Solutions Architect, Magenic, gives a nice example. And while we are looking at that, we might also take a look at how Netflix uses the cloud to become the number one video on demand corporation.Netflix: What happens when you press play?
If the future belongs to the cloud - what is YOUR future? . System engineering and software development between AWS and neuronal nets.
Strangeloop 2017: the latest on Technology. This is one way to make sure you don't miss important developments.
Internet access in times of trouble. How to use IPFS to circumvent censorship.Catalonia Referendum Voting
Serverless in the cloud and at the edge and everybody is a programmer. Let's take a look at future computing topologies and how services are tied together by regular people.
. A new paper on serverless by Rob Gruhl on Scaling ServerlessBiocomputing is getting hotter and hotter. Last year we had a talk on 3D-printing of organs. Should we get one on CRISPER/CASS?
Amazon wanted a key to my house..Let's take a look at the race for our house. funny: Use Alexa as development tool
. Let's not only look at the questionable aspects.High frequency trading systems: When a Microsecond Is an Eternity
Carl Cook explains high performance techniques and why they are so important in our world today.How To Make It In The Music Business . Another business that would not be possible without the Internet. Any new developments here? There is a lot of collaboration going on .
Intesting, how streaming changes album sizes!Internet Security: Template injection attacks. A nice example for a subtle attack on servers.
Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens, The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents, By Rachel Botsman, 21 Oct 2017 wired magazine.Die Big-Data-Diktatur
Laying REST to rest? Is it time now to retire REST APIs? The new GraphQL approach might just do that for certain classes of applications. Eric Baer, a GraphQL Primer Part 1 and 2).You can learn more about GraphQL in the Tutorial
Scalability is still king of the Internet. Kobi Hikri, Get Rid of that Bottleneck describes queuing techniques for internet facing services and applications. A nice example of a high-throughput process pipeline
Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective, MAURICE HERLIHY, Brown University. What can we learn about BC by comparing it with regular DS techniques?
LaunchDarkly: How to test in Production. Videos. Does not sound very sexy, but how do you deal with DLNNs, microservices etc. in production?
If you believe Harari, the future of humans is in bioengineering (whatever human will mean after this). Bert Hubert's DNA seen through the eyes of a coder can help you understand the basics which are - surprise - digital. An interesting comparison of codes, alphabets and sentences in computer science and biology. A 2 hour presentation is also available.. This could be a perfect primer for a Day on CRISPER/CASS. And remember: the guys who built the 3D-organ printer last summer were web engineers, not biologists...
. More on bio and computing on ycombinator and Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth . Are bio-design patterns really this much different from regular software design and architecture?Have you got an Alexa already? Amazon made lots of money with them last year. Is it disruptive? Perhaps the frontend topic above is already obsolete because nobody will need nerdy javascript/react gurus anymore? Let's look at some user comments before we get arrogant.
API design and usability. An extremely important and almost always forgotten topic. That is why we have to live with creepy stuff like a socket API. Five API Usability Lessons from Flutter (DartConf 2018) by Tao Dong has some nice tips. Look at the conceptual model diagram to capture the users model! Let me give you some extra advice: Let the users of your API design the interfaces and create test programs using your API first. This will prevent stuff like the socket API. If you are into programming languages you should also look at linear and behavioral types which can make the sequential use of APIs safe.
A nice example of integrating Deep Learning Services into an application. A scalable Keras + deep learning REST API by Adrian Rosebrock.
I am sure all of you are testing their web apps seriously. But do you use fuzzing to detect the unexpected? The art of fuzzing by Rene Feingruber is a nice introduction to this technology.
The Internet seems to be a breeding place for all kinds of bubbles and hype. Bitcoins, fake news, speculation and so on. But is this really something new? The Dutch Tulip Mania: The Social Foundations of a Financial Bubble describes a bubble in the 17th century in Holland. A. Maurits van der Veen investigated how a single tulip came to be as costly as a house. Any patterns to be found here?
How to make a dynamic site static with the help of a CDN. Leonardo Losoviz is the creator of PoP, an open source framework for building decentralized social networks. HQ Trivia suffered severe outages through Super Bowl - something that has to do with a lack of edge data and processing.
On the importance and difficulty of memory safety in languages: Memory Safety in Rust:A Case Study with C. Do you find the problems in the C code?.
Webhooks or the ability to collect real-time data from IoT devices is becoming a critical feature. The article on medim argues against the use of servers and favors a FAAS archictecture. Richard Moot, Stop Using Servers to Handle Webhooks. How does such an architecture look like?
The future of digital media seems to lead straight into fake-news, computational manipulation and human puppets. Generative adversarial networks can manipulate audio/video/image content to create believable "post-facts". This raises questions about the common information layer that keeps societies together and which has been traditionally maintained by mass media. Charlie Warzel, buzzfeed.com news reporter on Aviv Ovadya . In the same vein: Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield
With retargeting being more and more perfect you should probably start using TOR more frequently to avoid personalized pricing etc. How does TOR work?
Messaging is all the rage nowadays with whatsapp, slack and others. But how does e.g. Slack perform in development teams?. A critical article. "slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best. It has that in common with the open office. Goodhart’s law is the one where turning a metric into a target makes it a bad metric. Slack subverts valuable work by making productivity = availability on slack."
The Future Today Institute has published 225 trends for the future. AI, scurity and much more. The list of contents alone lets us speculate about cross-trend developments which could lead to even greater disruptions. download the report.
Interaction Design is getting more important than ever. When Paul Sonnentag returned from his off-site term, he told me about Bret Victor's ideas and we started a project for the summer term. His homepage is very interesting and there are lots of videos showing his projects.
The internet has given us massive scale data processing. Want to know how this evolved at Google? Tyler Akidau's presentation
Critical Infrastructure: Patterns and Anti-Patterns of Secure Systems. The internet exposes critical services to the whole world. What can/must be done to keep those services secure? To avoid getting blackmailed by trojans? I gave this talk at an electrical engineering conference and it fit perfectly to our course. Robust Systems
Arbeiten 4.0: Corporate Culture in Internet Times. The fast progress of internet companies requires a different corporate culture which values speed and independence over other things. We are looking at two typical representatives: Reed Hastings, Netflix Culture - Freedom & Responsibility, and (Henrik Kniberg & Anders Ivarsson, Scaling Agile at Spotify ) and see how social and technical organization of work interleaves. We will learn about Conways law and why Netflix believes it should be like Bayern München. One more hint is having a bench strategy:. On how to create an engineering team and how google does it. Further tips: the topic has been talked about at QCON and also Heise/Gunter Dueck gave a comment. And last but not least a new feature from Dueck on "Arbeiten 4.0" . This topic fits nicely to our Entrepreneur-Day later (see the schedule below). But ask yourself: who is interested in seing start-ups all over the place and why?
Microservices and Lambda Architecture. An example for a microservices approach is given by netflix (Adrian Cockcroft GOTO Berlin - November 2014, Migrating to Microservices ) . A good intro comes from Lewis/Fowler, (Microservices ). Practical insight comes from Kevin Scaldeferri's talk at OSCON 2015 (CONTINUOUS DELIVERY AND LARGE MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURES, Reflections on IonCannon. And finally a free book on Microservices from the NGINX guys. A good intro to serverless computing can be found at Amazon. You should at least understand the architecture examples given in the getting started doc. For those who want more: Martin Fowler talks frequently about it: . And for the friends of IBM
We did a thing on Bitcoins two summers ago. Last summer, the block-chain seemed to be the hottest thing in finance and there are lots of ideas on how to use it for other things as well. Unfortunately, there are quite severe scaling problems behind the protocol. An excellent book by Ed Felten et.al. allows us a good look at the internals of a working blockchain and its spin-offs (like name-coins etc.). Get it from here. I found the rat race for ever faster mining hardware an interesting case. We could discuss alternatives for the proof process which are not based on burning excessive amounts of energy ("proof of stake"). And the programming language integrated in Ethereum and its impact on smart contracts. Interesting mesh between distributed web and blockchain tech: A Decentralized Content Registry for the Decentralized Web
How do we find information? How the latest important papers? Where do we go for technologies? Which sites do we HAVE to read? Frequently I get asked about my sources of information and I think we should just throw together what we do in a best practice session. You should know at least one portal, one paper site and one conference for your special areas each. Some examples for good sources in distributed computing are HighScalability.com or infoq.com as a portal (read weekly updates). The famous "Morning paper" site by Adrian Colyer and the QCON Conference in London and SF, see a good writeup by Andy Butcher . For the hardware fan: mechanicalsympathy.com
The De-Centralized Web. Decentralized solutions - no longer viable? A vision or an illusion? We will talk about Brewster Kahle and his vision of a decentralized and free web and internet. What are the things we would need for this? What kind of technology is here to help us? Brewster Kahle's talk . Some technology parts: Named Data Networking Ipfs: - a good video on this page, Namecoin , a facebook alternative? Safebook (the interesting Matroshka design pattern), finally: what internet providers (the telkoms) know about us. And hot from the conference. And for some practical ideas on disrupting the big digital platforms: What happened to Austin, TX, after Uber and Lyft left town: . I guess the main thing here is the problem behind Man-in-the-middle like business models and whether they can be replaced with peer-to-peer approaches. See: Disrupting Uber, Driver-owned apps could end Uber’s exploitative reign over the ride-share market. by Vic Vaiana
Container Technology and Unikernels. One of the hottest trends in computing right now. Here is the talk from Kleindienst/Frey And go and look up some info on Rumpkernel or MirageOS. A must read: will containers replace hypervisors What is happening here? What could be the end of the line for some time? See: The answer is dynamic code generation instead of re-packaging huge modules!
Algorithms are no less disruptive than hardware-based technical revolutions. You should know at least some from the following groups (short descriptions can be found on wikipedia): Probabilistic algorithms/data structures (sketches). They work e.g. by observing bits in hashes. Bloomfilter, hyperloglog, count-min belong there. Another group deals with lock free algorithsms. LMAX is a wonderful example here, but there are many others too. A third group is ultra-fast algorithms running in CPU caches. You should know one and understand the differences between batch/online/one-shot Algorithms. Another group deals with scalability and provides extreme parallel processing capabilities. Map/Reduce is one example. We dealt with security in the blockchain technology already and you should be able to explain how it works and how it can be used. Another topic: algorithm based feeds And finally: distributed consensus, as it was mentioned in the course: DS consensus with Paxos explained. Fascinating: special algorithms for high-frequency trading
Finally, another potentially disruptive development: Smart Home and Internet of Things. The slides are on the google drive. For a security background on the problems Smart Home is facing: ENISA report on smart home security . How to program the IoT: How Lil Todo Syncs Tasks Across Multiple Devices Just Using Dropbox
The million things we did not talk about yet in this course:
Current developments and trends in the Internet itself. Is the Internet still a disruptive force? What are the effects of IPV6 and will it solve the symmetry problems? This topic is tightly related to "distributed web" and "net neutrality".Geoff Huston on Adressing 2016 is an excellent source for internet topics like DNS, adressing, BGP and other core technologies the internet is riding on. Is peer-to-peer the future of the Internet? see: Peer gewinnt, 28.08.2015 – Niels Boeing, Claudia Wessling, Technology Review.
Welcome to the matrix - the internet of things is about to become real - or?. http://www.heise.de/tr/artikel/Willkommen-in-der-Matrix-2551024.html
Scalability, performance and costs of running large scale internet sites: does it make sense to move away from Amazons cloud? What is feedback control and how does Netflix handle it? The slides from Uwe Friedrichsen, codecentric.de. highscalability.com How Github concquered everybody (network effects etc.) http://www.wired.com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microsoft-everyone-else/ and of course: microservices: http://www.indix.com/blog/microservices-what-are-they and an exciting distributed search architecture with dist. consensus and anycast DNS: http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/3/9/the-architecture-of-algolias-distributed-search-network.html
. There are three different types of internet traffic: regular, unplanned spikes and planned spikes (like Olympic games). How Facebook live video deals with those cases.Marketing in internet times: 30 Billion ads per day! http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/3/9/applovin-marketing-to-mobile-consumers-worldwide-by-processi.html
Love in the Internet Age: the user experience with online dating algorithms and sites.http://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2015-02/tinder-online-dating-hacks-erfolg
Cyborgs - from smartphone to wearable to implants: Internet driven enhancements to humanity. Let's develop a vision on google glasses, embedded sensors and actors and a new definition of where your body ends...http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/unter-die-haut-1.18485958 http://www.futuremag.de/interview/mensch-und-maschine-schon-heute-verschmolzen-interview-mit-stefan
Corporate Cultures of Unicorn Companies - How is it tied to continuous delivers, lean enterprise and agile development?
Messaging: the new paradigm. Will Slack etc. change the way we shop?
Crowds and Crowd-Funding -and when does it fail? http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Meilenstein-fuer-Crowdfunding-Plattform-Kickstarter-Insgesamt-eine-Milliarde-Dollar-zugesagt-2131171.html
Getting rid of information: Snapchat etc. http://www.heise.de/tp/news/Weg-mit-den-Bytes-2121769.html
Microservices - the architecture for scalable Internet Services
Darknets and Anonymity: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/39/39575/1.html and the getting started pages of the torproject.org
Router Attacks/ Anatomy of a DDOS http://www.heise.de/security/meldung/Grossangriff-auf-Router-DNS-Einstellungen-manipuliert-2132674.html
Internet Resilience: ENISA Study
Thinking Machines: https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_brockman-what-to-think-about-machines-that-think There seems to be a growing concern about humans losing to machines in the end. Anybody playing GO?
Neuroscience and Computer Science: I think, therefore I heal: the weird science of neurofeedback theverge.com http://m.heise.de/tr/artikel/Schrittmacher-fuer-das-Gedaechtnis-2092798.html?from-classic=1 http://www.kurzweilai.net/wearable-neurocam-records-scenes-when-it-detects-user-interest http://www.kurzweilai.net/neuroscape-lab-visualizes-live-brain-functions-using-dramatic-images
Inhouse-Navigation, Apple I-Bacon, Android
Eli Pariser, the filter bubble (and perhaps the price bubble..). On "echo chambers" and how the topology of networks can create a false feeling of majority.
The Master Switch - Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu
Campact und Co.: Demokratie durchs Internet - ein Erfolgsmodell? https://www.campact.de/netzneutralitaet/appell/empfehlen/
Internet Payment: http://www.heise.de/tr/artikel/Kreativer-Zerstoerer-2127847.html
Mesh Networks, open WLAN www.heise.de/tr/artikel/Die-Ruechttp://www.heise.de/tr/artikel/Die-Rueckeroberung-des-Internets-2127869.html?view=printkeroberung-des-Internets-2127869.html?view=print and http://www.heise.de/download/firechat-1194036.html
Dave Eggers, the circle: The Circle is the exhilarating new novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award.
The Algorithmic Age: The positive and negative sides of modern algorithms. We could start with Code-Dependent: the pros and cons of the Algorithmic age, by Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson and then tackle the famous Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, who pointed out that predictive analytics based on algorithms tend to punish the poor, using algorithmic hiring practices as an example.
More in that vein: “Why Should I Trust You? Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier Ribeiro et al., KDD 2016, Explaining Outputs in Modern Data Analytics, Zaheer Chothia, John Liagouris, Frank McSherry, Timothy Roscoe Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich, How the machine "thinks": Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms, Big Data & Society January–June 2016: 1–12, Jenna Burrell, European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making, and a “right to explanation”, Bryce Goodman, 1∗ Seth Flaxman. Now, this could easily form the basics for a very interesting "Digital Rights Day" with my colleague Prof. Veddern. see also: Algorithmic collusion and price-fixing January 9, 2017 Cathy O'Neil,
The brain and its computer. Should we model computations like the human brain? Well, do we even know how the brain works? How the Brain Might Work: Statistics Flowing in Redundant Population Codes, Xaq Pitkow 1,2 and Dora E Angelaki 1,2
Content Delivery Networks. Best Practices For Using A Multi-CDN Strategy: How To Balance, Prioritize and Optimize Traffic, Dan Rayburn
A critique of Machines: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace 1h | Documentary | TV Mini-Series (2011– ) Episode Guide 3 episodes All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Poster A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines we have built. Although we don't realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.
Engineering privacy on the internet: Engineering Privacy for Your Users, Session 709 Jessie Pease Privacy Engineering Julien Freudiger Privacy Engineering and: ANONYMIZATION AND RISK, Ira S. Rubinstein * & Woodrow Hartzog **
facebook and disaggregated networking: new approaches in networking: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1887543398133443/disaggregate-networking-recap/
Scalability in the internet age: The Infrastructure Behind Twitter: Scale Thursday, January 19, 2017 | By Mazdak Hashemi (@mazdakh), VP of Infrastructure and Operations Engineering [19:35 UTC]
Here are the dates for our days and special guests.
13.4.2018, Big Data Research at ETH Zurich, Prof. Karten Borgwardt at Uni Esslingen. 16.00 with apero.
20.4. "Industry Meets Interaction Design", Joachim Charzinski
Blockchain Technologies? Charzinski with Alumni:
TBD
TBD
TBD
Please watch this page closeley for changes in dates or topics. Most speakers work in the industry and sometimes need a change in schedule due to that fact.