02-02-2010 22:47
My Thoughts on HipHop
To paraphrase Marco Tabini if you work with PHP you must be doing so in a pretty deep cave to have not heard of HipHop for PHP and the fervor around it the prior to its official announcement this morning by Facebook.
I had a fortune to be part of the small group of PHP community people who were invited to take a peak at its technology prior to its official release in January. And I must admit it had been quite amusing to read some of the conjectures people were making about what it actually, given how off the mark most of their guesses were.
So what is HipHop?
In the tersest of terms HipHop is a tool that converts PHP code into C++ code that when combined with a PHP compatible engine and extensions (ports of some native PHP extensions Facebook uses) library also written in C++ can be compiled using GCC into a binary. This binary can then be ran on a command line or as a web server daemon that utilizes libevent. According to Facebook this can speed up applications by up to 50%, which is a pretty impressive improvement.
It is not entirely surprising that world's largest PHP deployment, such as Facebook would look at solution that would allow them to halve their not inconsiderable count of servers or double capacity. Releasing this solution as Open Source is I think a great idea, and big kudos to Facebook for doing so.
From a technical perspective the PHP optimization approach of converting PHP into a compiled language is not a completely new one, Roadsend compiler, a commercial product has been around for a few years now and has been doing that with some degree of success. That said it is not a trivial task and from an engineering perspective presents a fairly tricky development challenge, especially when you want to allow regular, off-the-self scripts to work. Perhaps more importantly, HipHop not a theoretical solution, "for you to test", it actually works, with most of the Facebook's servers running it and doing it well, on millions of lines of converted PHP code on daily basis, very impressive.
At this point you are probably thinking, that if it is so great and it works, I'll deploy it on my servers as soon as I can get my hands on the source code. Well, unfortunately things are not quite so simple, there are few technical and deployment challenges you need to overcome.
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Ilia Alshanetsky
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08-13-2010 9:09
 Each summer when the weather is hottest, I pack my bags and head out to Las Vegas, Nevada. Why would I leave my nice home by the ocean and go to a blistering desert? Only one thing would make me and that is DEFCON. DEFCON and its more professional compatriot, Black Hat, is what amounts to the leading hacking conference in the world. Now, this might sound like it is less than legitimate in nature and, in some ways, it is. Blackhat hackers (the bad guys) are joined by whitehats (aka security researchers) and grayhats. What color is my hat? At a gathering like this, I wear strictly Mickey Mouse ears and I use them to listen to everyone else.
A massive range of topics is discussed during such a conference, which has grown to include thousands of people interested in wireless and ATM security, lock picking, Web hacking, and more. More than 100 lectures, workshops, hacking competitions, and a computing museum may give you a basic idea on what goes on at DEFCON. This was DEFCON 18, the 18th annual conference. There will be other DEFCON conferences in Asia and Europe and, soon, South America and the Middle East as well.
But Vegas is the daddy of them all. More than 10,000 hackers attended this year’s DEFCON and there I learned some startling facts.
WPA2, the current standard in wireless security, is broken.
Vulnerabilities have been found in nearly everything (too many to list here).
An ATM can actually be hacked to spit out money just like in the movies!
I will write more about the specific issues I saw this year later. Until then, if you have a professional or personal interest in computer security, you should join the government agents, system administrators, doctoral candidates, future angels and demons of the Internet, and me at DEFCON 19 next year. I’m easy to spot, I will be the one listening in. You can find out more at DEFCON’s official site.
Post from: TrendLabs | Malware Blog - by Trend Micro
Thoughts from DEFCON 18
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