On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 08:47:51AM -0700, Michael Dexter wrote: > Who: Tony Bourke > What: Why Packets Die > When: Thursday, June 6th, 2019 at 7pm
Tony presented an outstanding talk. The focus was on moving LOTS of packets efficiently, and how the internet uses packet loss to tune itself. I asked a lot of questions about "premium packets"; here's why: One "dark side" of the internet is high frequency stock trading, described in the recent nonfiction book "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis. High frequency traders (HFT) use dedicated high speed internet connections to exploit very brief (millisecond, microsecond) imbalances and delays in the internet-mediated public stock markets to insert themselves as middlemen in stock trades, shaving off the brief and tiny differences between stock price bid and ask on different stock exchanges. One of his examples was a dedicated fiber line from Chicago to New York, laid as absolutely straight as possible to minimize path delay, drilling through mountains and cutting across roads at 30 degree angles to shave microseconds and even nanoseconds off the trip time during bad weather. During good weather, dedicated microwave links are faster (the speed of light in air is faster than optical fiber). HFT packets do NOT share their network with public packets and are never delayed. However, other HFT shenanigans make sure your stock market buy/sell public internet packets take longer than expected to reach the markets. This means the stocks you sell out of your Schwab retirement account are bought at a slightly lower price by HFT outfits, and the stocks you buy are purchased at a slightly higher price from the same parasites. This behavior leads to "flash crashes", when the system noise created by these transactions makes the public stock markets unstable. Aggregated over a world of investors (and if you have retirement savings or a pension anywhere, you are an indirect investor), this costs ordinary folk like us tens of billions of dollars a year. There used to be one stock exchange in New York, and one in Chicago. Now there are dozens, including the private "dark pool" exchanges operated by the big investment banks and management companies (like Schwab). These are for-profit companies, and they earn more for their own stockholders and top managers if they let the HFT traders pay for direct access to their dark pools and prey on their customers. Needless to say, all this runs on Linux. Sometimes "dark linux"; Goldman Sachs uses linux tools, but has sent their coders to prison for sharing their code improvements with the linux community, or even bringing USB keys home with linux modules on them. Goldman Sachs puts their own boilerplate and proprietary claims on our code when they use it internally. This enslaves their own coders, making it very difficult to move to a different job. "Flash Boys" is an exciting read. Those of us who write code to share with the world could be enraged by the way our shared work is stolen and exploited. Instead, we can learn about new "fair" stock exchanges like IEX, and use our skills to encourage and support stock traders who share our principles. It is better to light a single "free as in freedom" optical fiber than curse the darkness. Keith p.s. this seems more like a plug-talk subject, but it affects core linux code, so I risk discussing it here. Coders who do not consider the ethics of their profession should change professions, not turn Linux into yet another enclosed commons. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
