August 2022: I am 30 years old (yikes) and apparently still going on holidays with my parents. Why? For the most part, I continued going on trips with my parents after moving out because of convenience (my Mom loves to plan trips whereas for me, the mere exposure to a travel guide blurb can induce narcoleptic attacks - probably because I have been raised as the incompetent offspring of an overprotective and intrusive matriarch smh! Read more...

So imagine you find yourself in Milpitas, California, United States of America, and you need to spend your time somehow. You might be wondering what to do, except maybe the ever-looming option of packing all of your belongings into the trunk of your car and going somewhere you would actually want to be, such as San Francisco, or Yosemite National Park, or the Pacific Coast1. Well, you’re in luck! After extensive research, i. Read more...

If you’re like me, you’re really into all of the great technologies that our overlords at the US west coast give us. Of course, I’m talking about Google and Amazon, who have graciously provided us with the Go programming language and Amazon Web Services, respectively. In our research project, we use mostly Go code to implement our fog-native data management solution. To work with bleeding edge tech in the cloud, we also provide an interface to work with DynamoDB, AWS' popular NoSQL Database-as-a-Service. Read more...

Starting a new blog post always feels like a lot of commitment. But now I’m sitting at home alone, isolated, waiting for death Christmas, trying not to get infected. And I’m kind of bored. So I thought I’d try to learn something new and write about, just for fun. I thought long and hard about what I would want to learn about and decided on my favorite application layer protocol: DNS. Read more...

So it turns out Sudokus are pretty fun, who knew.1 If you read a bit about their history on Wikipedia, you’ll find out that they’re not actually a Japanese invention but were invented by an American guy in the 80s. A quick recap of the basics: You get a grid of 9x92 squares, each can hold one number between 1 and 9. Each row and column should have all numbers between 1 and 9 exactly once, the same goes for the nine 3x3 grids that the main grid is also seperated into. Read more...

I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for a year now already.1 As a bit of background, I’m employed as what is called a Research Associate at the Technische Universität Berlin, managing a research project in the field of distributed systems, which is applied computer science. I was hired while still in the process receiving my master’s degree in computer science from that same university, so it’s my first full, real 40h/week job. Read more...

FReD uses etcd as a backend to persist configuration data.1 By default, every etcd instance is open to the world. In this blog post, the author describes how easy it is to discover open etcd instances that have not been configured correctly (i.e., their maintainers didn’t set up any authentication or authorization) and, subsequently, how he was able to simply access their data. Among that data, he found 8781 key-value pairs named password and 650 with the key aws_secret_access_key. Read more...

Nach dem Brand im Flüchtlingslager Moria auf der Insel Lesbos1 ist die Flüchtlingskrise wieder in aller Munde (und vor allem wieder breit in Meinungs-Seiten von SZ und NZZ thematisiert).2 Sofort baten viele deutsche Kommunen an, obdachlose Flüchtlinge aufzunehmen, doch Heimatminister und Ober-Grinsebacke vom Dienst Voll-Horst Seehofer3 lehnt entschieden ab. Aus Solidarität mit den anderen EU-Mitgliedsstaaten möchte er eine gemeinsame europäische Lösung abwarten. Ein wahrer Staatsmann. Heimatminister Horst Seehofer zeigt begeistert eine Miniaturversion seines Planes, zum Schutz der westlichen Wertegesellschaft Flüchtlinge mit 'Waggons' in konzentrierte Lager zu transportieren (Archiv) Indes gibt es ein weiteres großes Problem: wenn man die Leute einmal ins Land lässt, gehen sie nicht mehr weg. Read more...

Some time ago, I was hired by a young professor of computer science as a research assistant. At this point in time, I was a Master’s student in psychology, specializing in human-technology interaction. I had taken an Introduction to Programming in Java class intended for first-semester information systems management students for fun and done better than most of them (not a big feat considering the 80% failure rate - many students discontinue their studies after the first or second semester because they realize the degree isn’t for them, and I should have done the same back in the days when I commenced my Bachelor’s in psychology, which definitely wasn’t for me). Read more...

Welcome back to the chronicles of ISE-induced distress ISE-enabled personal advancements! We will build a RESTful backend for a Slack-inspired messaging application using the SpringBoot framework and a MySQL database to be run in a Docker container. Firstly, let’s drop all our fears and doubts for a moment, suppress the desire to ponder existential questions and inhale deeply in order to open up IntelliGayJ. I briefly contemplated which IDE to use and ended up choosing IntelliJ for these reasons: Read more...