A very scary privacy fact :

But it was only an early mile marker in Sweeney’s career; in 2000, she showed that 87 percent of all Americans could be uniquely identified using only three bits of information: ZIP code, birthdate, and sex.

Latanya Sweeney’s (hard to find) draft research on the topic, seems to indicate 87% identifiable, however, Philippe Goll, revisted her study and was only able to reproduce 61-63% hit rate.

This is still a rather spectacular hit rate in my opinion.

I always thought data mining was boring.

This rings so true…

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

Over the months, I’ve blogged about Vodacom’s complete inability to develop a seemingly reliable web based system, and for quite a  few months now I’ve been surprised that I’m able to print my monthly statements online without hassle.

Thus, I guess I could be forgive to think that maybe they had sorted their shit out, or hired someone with a clue…

Today, when registering my son’s phone on their website of course, I get the following.

Is it possible for their website to do anything but serve gif's ?

I was actually quite surprised that I got the error so late in the process. I mean, I had actually already pressed the submit ONCE before reaching this error! This means that some code ran successfully on their server PRIOR to this message, which is actually AMAZING!

Muppets…

In reference to a post by Joe (quoting James Altucher), let me quote something from James too, that I found to be true, in exactly the time space-time-continuum that this article relates to… (Emphasis added by me.)

How I screwed Yasser Arafat ….

…

But I did learn several things that became incredibly important to me later. :

A) if you have to raise thirty million to start your business, its probably not a good business (at least for me). All of my good businesses (businesses that I started that I eventually sold and made money on) started off profitable from day one and never raised a dime of money.

B) Most M&A transactions don’t work. When you buy a company, its very hard to keep the owners of the old company incentivized. 90% of acquisitions don’t work. Build your business. Don’t buy it.

C) A lesson I learn repeatedly: traveling for business almost never generates more revenues. New York (and America) are big enough places to generate revenues. You should never travel. In the course of doing this business I traveled repeatedly to the west coast, Denver, England (to try and buy a company), Sweden (where Ericsson was based), Germany (Ericsson wanted me to show up at a conference for one day), Georgia, Florida, Boston, etc etc. Not a single meeting generated any revenues for the business but wasted hundreds of hours of my life.

D) Hiring smart people doesn’t work if you aren’t smart. Everything ultimately comes form the top down.

E) Spending a lot of money on branding and marketing materials is a waste of money for a startup. If you don’t know who you are, no amount of money will create materials explaining who you are.

F) If you are going to raise thirty million for a business, then raise a hundred million if you can. Don’t turn down Henry Kravis’s five million. It doesn’t matter how badly you get diluted. If you have to raise money, take in every dime you can.

G) MOST IMPORTANT: If you raise thirty million, spend none of it. Warren Buffett once said, “if you know a business will be around 20 years from now then its probably a good investment.” With thirty million we could’ve stayed in business for 20 years or more and eventually figured ourself out. Instead, I spent forty million in the first month or so. I learned a lot, and over a hundred million was lost.

Not-so-startup food for thought eh?. Apparently my blog is a great startup. Having to field around 10 to 20 spam posts (after kismetting) a day must mean something right ? Hah!

FreeRADIUS is a great RADIUS server, but custom integration with it has pretty much always left developers with the choice of rlm_python, rlm_ruby, or rlm_perl.

Understandably, rlm_python is not an option for me, so I’ve been doing some work with rlm_perl, and pretty much the first thing I did there, was to use Gearman, and serialisation to get a FreeRADIUS request out of perl as quick as possible, into a gearman queue, and then and into my chosen worker platform of choice — PHP.

Besides, does one REALLY want to drag an entire interpreter, business logic and it’s potential pitfalls into the FreeRADIUS core, and potentially affect it’s stability ?

FreeRADIUS also makes heavy use of threads, so to integrate a random language is quite a bit of a pain, and most of the language modules are non-thread safe so you cannot really benefit from FreeRADIUS thread scaling.

I don’t mind perl, and I’ve worked in it for long enough, but once one looks at the bridge that the above builds to get into a messaging layer, it kind of makes one think… Can it be better ?

Enter rlm_zmq

I’ve built this FreeRADIUS module over the last two days, firstly, because I haven’t really played with zeromq before, and secondly because I wanted to see if I can make the bridge a bit shorter, and faster.

Well, the results are pretty cool. 4500 requests per second for authorisation only in FreeRADIUS, and 3500 requests per second if I use rlm_zmq in every possible processing section in FreeRADIUS (such as accounting, post-auth etc).

ZMQ still requires a “broker” or “queue” manager of some kind if you’re doing the sort of fan-out to fan-out of multiple worker thing that’s required to get some nice scale.

The basic zmq socket architecture is request reply, along these lines:

freeradius_rlm_zmq(zmq socket pool) ----> queue.php <------ worker(s).php

queue.php is a simple message router, that routes between FreeRADIUS threads and worker processes.

In essence, very similar to a standard gearman architecture, but much more ‘native’. ZeroMQ sockets pretty much behave like sockets, except a bit more clever. Gearman has a lot more functionality than zeromq, and I might just attempt rlm_gearman next.

Either way, gone are the days of having to build language specific modules for FreeRADIUS, I think. If you can deserialize json, and can use any of the many language bindings for ZeroMQ, you can now do RADIUS.

rlm_zmq basically adds Mongrel2-like functionality to FreeRADIUS, giving you the option of 30+ languages and a number of N-to-N messaging patterns and load distribution capabilities.

rlm_zmq is pretty much alpha, but it’s fairly stable, and hasn’t yet eaten all my memory alive after hours of hammering with radperf which is always a good thing. In fact, I think it’s about as stable as rlm_perl

This was a fun project with pretty cool results.