I do not answer a phone call unless you are in my contacts. Because corporate surveillance companies like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google continue to attempt to add that data to their ever growing hoard, I have very few people in my address books. Perhaps less than fifty all up. I do not answer the phone for random strangers in the same way I would not talk to a stranger on the street.

Two years ago, I changed my phone number to block phone calls. I can easily be found via the Internet. There is no need for me to interrupt my life to answer a telephone call for their convenience.

But in the last couple years, there is a more specific reason for eyeing my phone’s ring warily. Perhaps 80 or even 90 percent of the calls coming into my phone are spam of one kind or another. Now, if I hear my phone buzzing from across the room, at first I’m excited if I think it’s a text, but when it keeps going, and I realize it’s a call, I won’t even bother to walk over. My phone only rings one or two times a day, which means that I can go a whole week without a single phone call coming in that I (or Apple’s software) can even identify, let alone want to pick up.

Why Doesn’t Anyone Answer the Phone Anymore? – The Atlantic : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/ring-ring-ring-ring/561545/

Microsoft officially announces acquisition of Github. Money can buy you cool friends.

Microsoft is looking to bulk up its cloud services. It can build data centres but it is desperate for services (applications). AWS continues to roll out new applications at a rapid rate. Microsoft isn’t able to keep up and spending some money keeps the portfolio in growth.

First, we will empower developers at every stage of the development lifecycle – from ideation to collaboration to deployment to the cloud. Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects – and will still be able to deploy their code on any cloud and any device.

Facts

1. $7.5Billion. Almost real money in the surreal world of tech valuations.
2. Six years ago A16Z invested $100M in a Series A round to get them off the ground.

Thoughts

1. A stunning corporate cultural turnaround continues. The current Microsoft is doing its best to become relevant in the cloud era and making big movies.
2. Microsoft reaches developers who aren’t well disposed towards them and gets another chance to make friends (yes, money can buy you friends in business)
3. Microsoft is ok with buying services to put into Azure. (AWS makes them itself, mostly by direct copying competitor businesses)
4. Microsoft hasn’t visibly damaged LinkedIn so far, so you might take some solace that GitHub will continue its path forward.

Microsoft + GitHub = Empowering Developers – The Official Microsoft Blog : https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/

Link: Microsoft Buys GitHub for $7.5 Billion – Andreessen Horowitz – https://a16z.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-buys-github-for-7-5-billion/

More details on the operation of BPF and why you want it.

Fundamentally BPF is still BPF: it is a small virtual machine which runs programs injected from user space and attached to specific hooks in the kernel. It can classify and do actions upon network packets. For years it has been used on Linux to filter packets and avoid expensive copies to user space, for example with tcpdump. However, the scope of the virtual machine has changed beyond recognition over the last few years.

BPF, eBPF, XDP and Bpfilter… What are these things and what do they mean for the enterprise? – Netronome : https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/

Excellent post on why BPF is replacing iptables in the Linux kernel. Note that Thomas Graf founded Cilium to be a networking policy engine for Kubernetes and having a better packet munging function is a good thing.

From humble roots as the packet filtering capability underlying popular tools like tcpdump and Wireshark, BPF has grown into a rich framework to extend the capabilities of Linux in a highly flexible manner without sacrificing key properties like performance and safety. This powerful combination has led forward-leaning users of Linux kernel technology like Google, Facebook, and Netflix to choose BPF for use cases ranging from network security and load-balancing to performance monitoring and troubleshooting. Brendan Gregg of Netflix first called BPF Superpowers for Linux. This post will cover how these “superpowers” render long-standing kernel sub-systems like iptables redundant while simultaneous enabling new in-kernel use cases that few would have previously imagined were possible.

Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF? — Cilium : https://cilium.io/blog/2018/04/17/why-is-the-kernel-community-replacing-iptables/