ACM reading link dump (20250324)

i was able to catch up on a lot of communications of the ACM on the plane last night.

• Addressing the Data Storage Crisis | Communications of the ACM

  bring data densities up again. seriously though, we have a problem here. it’s going require a lot of hard materials science work.

• OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting

  interesting approach to passive filtering and detection for openVPN traffic. they conclude that something like this is well within the reach of state actors has a pretty strong hit rate.

  pair this with … Tracing the Network Traffic Fingerprinting Techniques of OpenVPN

• Questioning the Criteria for Evaluating Non-Cryptographic Hash Functions

  this was a surprisingly fun read on hash performance they assembled a handful of common data sets and evaluated various algorithms approaches and performance here.

• Program Merge: What’s Deep Learning Got to Do with It?

  using AI for doing 3 way merges. they thought this would be a straightforwrd analysis, were wrong on that front and ended up writing a bunch of tools to dig into things as well evaluate the results of the merge process.

  understanding the downstream implications of merges and merge conflicts is a thorny problem. it’s nice to see AI being applied to some of this.

• The Sustainability Gap for Computing: Quo Vadis?

  yeah, we’re not really doing ourselves (and the world at large) any favors with the proliferation of compute here.