I was thrilled to be on stage with the Tor Project for the 2023 edition of EmpoderaLIVE. Giorgio and I followed a strong segment from Joyce Dogniez of the Internet Society Foundation, which delved into the intersection of human rights issues and the Internet already. After Giorgio explained how the Tor project saves lives right now, my part was relatively simple – I mostly said that I want to make Tor project obsolete.

The recent issues with Google’s WEI proposal have provided for a few more views of this blog and website, which makes it worth diving into our work a little again. The previous post on resource access is quite old at this stage, after all. Quick Recap Under different grants, we’ve been working on a bunch of loosely related technologies. The highlights are: Channeler – a protocol that has can switch between UDP-like lossy and TCP-like lossless modes of connection, as well as novel modes suitable for live broadcast.

Previously, I wrote about how to use Valgrind for debugging memory issues – and today, I’d like to go into how to use the tool for profiling. As I wrote before, Valgrind is an instrumentation framework that provides a collection of tools. For profiling, we’ll look at the Callgrind tool together a GUI application called KCachegrind. As a quick historical note, the predecessor to Callgrind is called Cachegrind, and was mostly for examining CPU cache usage – but Callgrind was developed out of that.

A few days ago, I made a social media post about Google vs. the Open Web. It received some responses, so I’ll reproduce it below with some additional comments. Figure: “Open Web - Gnomedex 2008” by Randy Stewart is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 Google is trying to kill the Open Web. Using the proposed “Web Environment Integrity” means websites can select on which devices (browsers) they wish to be displayed, and can refuse service to other devices.