Well this week's weird is extra long. This is what happens when I spend all week avoiding hanging the pot rack.

• I don't really have anything reasonable to say about Tianjin. Reading about it led me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Coleman_%28train_dispatcher%29 which is worth sharing I think.

• I guess Google is now Alphabet? Weird.

  • HN Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10037157
  • Mefi comments: https://www.metafilter.com/151985/We-go-by-G-now
  • Tyler Cowen presents some interesting links about conglomerates: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/alphabet-and-google.html
  • Matt Levine: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-11/abc-xyz-and-the-rmb
  • Vox: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/11/9130055/google-alphabet-big-deal

• In a previous Weird I mentioned Calico, using BGP to do warehouse-scale datacenter networking. Well, if that's the Layer 3 model, here's the layer-1 alternative: Plexxi

  • I think this is the best technical intro on their page: http://www.plexxi.com/2013/09/plexxi-paths-and-topologies-part-1-let-there-be-light/
  • The tl;dr is you plug these switches into each other with a fiber ring and they have a photonic engine that lets them move waves from being terminated on one switch vs another. Because they can dwdm on a single strand the inter-switch bandwidth is insane and because the photonics engine is plugged into the switching engine it can reassign those lambdas wherever the big-ring-of-switches needs tham at super low latency. Instead of acting at a TCP-level to move load around they do it at the switch-interconnect layer. Seems clever though I wonder if latency of reorouting is that important at scale vs determining what to reroute in the first place.

• Holy hell that's a big hard drive: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/ (I'll take 5)

• Infosec is the funnest part of tech.

  • Dear Oracle, never change: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/11/oracle_anti_security_research_rant/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040428 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202 )
  • Add UEFI to the list of "low level systems that are super vulnerable" alongside IPMI: https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike2_details
  • Dear Lenovo, Please stop (existing). Sincerely, everyone: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo-used-windows-anti-theft-feature-to-install-persistent-crapware/

• Matt Levine is on fire this week:

  • $95,000 (guys) http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-11/why-not-insider-trade-on-every-company-

  • All this for $124k? http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-12/itg-hid-a-secret-trading-desk-in-its-dark-pool

  • Web Design: The First 100 Years: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
  • I've mentioned Amazon's robots before, here's a slightly newer video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg2lcTdloIQ Apparently the big lifting robot at 1:34 is just loading pallets from trucks onto Kivas to presumably be re-packed onto the shelves you see being picked-from.
  • The US offered to buy Grenland after WWII apparently: http://www.gwern.net/Greenland
  • Yo dawg, I heard you liked cranes: http://giant.gfycat.com/EasyArcticAmericangoldfinch.gif
  • The Missile knows where it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ
  • This Fantastic Four movie is really lighting up my schadenfreude gland: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/fantastic-four-marvel-fox-review/400850/
  • How good are you at spotting someone who's drowning? http://spotthedrowningchild.com/ (good comments at https://www.metafilter.com/151719/Spot-the-Drowning-Child )
  • Sooo, AIM + paypal? https://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

Today's delayed weekly weird brought to you by the letters 'H' and 'angover'

• Fortunately there's plenty of Schadenfreude to make me feel better. Mark Karples of MtGox fame was arrested in Japan for being a giant idiot. Seriously, do you know how hard you have to try to give php programmers a bad name?

  • HN Comments on the arrest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9985664
  • A reddit thread of an early MtGox employee answering questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/
  • and HN comments on that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9988090

• Also firefox has been uploading your .bash_profile and .ssh keys to the Ukraine for a while now. No biggie. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/08/06/firefox-exploit-found-in-the-wild/

• I generally steer clear of politics in general but this is too juicy to pass up: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/08/donald-trump-and-bill-clinton-collide-best-conspiracy-story-ever

• THE MOON IS AWESOME!

  • Lagrange points are awesome: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/dscovrepicmoontransitfull.gif (also ZZ Top's favorite gravitational phenomenon)
  • Apollo 11 averaged about 7 inches to the gallon: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/2/9086791/buzz-aldrin-apollo-11-document

• Do you struggle to explain IaaS, PaaS, WhateveraaS to people? Try the pizza analogy: http://t.co/vWJQAAyTRM

• Well, I think we all know who's piloting this: http://gfycat.com/SnappyYellowGraywolf
• Sort of nsfw: http://interretialia.tumblr.com/post/27494054838/carpe-natibus-has-been-corrected-to-carpe-natem
• English is so dumb: https://i.imgur.com/qTaxHpI.jpg
• Today's example of why checking credentials is important: http://www.thelocal.de/20140625/fake-engineer-di-mauro-designed-berlin-airport-fire-system (From a long Bloomberg article about the airport that's a little long on Greece analogies but entertaining: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-23/how-berlin-s-futuristic-airport-became-a-6-billion-embarrassment )
• A great webcomic: http://www.viruscomix.com/page588.html (lots of reading. I vaguely recall other comics on that site not being entirely sfw but I didn't actually check. This page is entirely fine)
• Remember Rowhammer? Heere's javascript: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/dram-bitflipping-exploit-for-attacking-pcs-just-add-javascript/
• Cat tax: https://i.imgur.com/9PKQ7Rt.jpg

Wait, what?

Last August there was a great story about BGP hijacking a bitcoin mining pool. I though that was just the funniest thing ever so I decided to send it out to an internal mailing list at work along with a few other things that had accumulated in my browser tabs. I jokingly named it "The Weekly Weird" and promptly forgot about it. Six days later a coworker walked up and asked where the this week's weird was. Never one to dissapoint my adoring public, I continued writing these little snapshots of things that had happened that week and, now that I'm moving on, it's time to share with the wider world. Some of them have been edited to remove internal references and in-jokes and others now simply have no text right now. The format isn't what you'd call sexy owing to the fact that these were originaly emails and all emails should be plaintext.

I intend to continue putting these out roughly weekly on this blog. If there's sufficient demand I'll also rig some kind of mailing list.

Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of any current or former employer.

Oh boy do we have some weird for you this week.

• I don't think I can improve on the URL to this one: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1517884/Man-to-adopt-1000-in-revenge-on-Berlin.html
• Now this is dedication to a con: http://www.sportskeeda.com/football/carlos-henrique-kaiser-the-story-of-footballs-greatest-conman
• I may have already included this but it's good enough that I don't care. "Lateral thinking" questions: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/02/14/what-would-feynman-do.aspx
• What month you're born in has a statistically significant effect on your likelihood to develop certain conditions. This is an impressive breakdown of all of the different ones: http://jamia.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/06/01/jamia.ocv046
• Pushing the boundaries of starch-based security vulnerabilities: https://www.tau.ac.il/\~tromer/radioexp/ I look forward to a countermeasure called ATKINS.
• "Zero-point-six-eight seconds, sir. For an android, that is nearly an eternity." http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/26/google-delphi-two-self-driving-cars-near-miss
• Turns out the jokes in Seinfeld aren't very funny in foreign languages. (Or English /rimshot) http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/24/8809723/jerry-seinfeld-tv-show-international-translation