FS26 - Distributed Systems (DSy)

The admin part gives an overview over this lecture and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: FS26-DSy-01-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article describes a startup rebuilding its workflow around AI coding agents, a shift I experienced myself. The next article provides a mathematical framework for compression in databases, backing up my lecture point about optimizing for bandwidth. The third topic covers Discord's architecture using the Actor Model to handle trillions of messages at scale. The final article presents Backblaze's 2025 drive stats with a 1.36% failure rate across 340'000 drives, reminding us why we need redundancy and distributed systems. (Slides: FS26-DSy-01-news.pdf). The third video shows the first part of the motivation why distributed systems are necessary (Slides: FS26-DSy-01-intro-scaling.pdf). [100min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task repository invitations (Slides: FS26-DSy-02-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers an incident where GPT 5.3 Codex wiped an entire drive due to a PowerShell escaping bug, reminding us that AI coding agents must be sandboxed and paired with version control. The next article describes building a startup entirely on European infrastructure for data sovereignty, feasible but slower, with thinner ecosystems and some unavoidable US dependencies, illustrating how sovereignty requirements requires distributed architectures. The final article introduces WebMCP, a browser-native API letting websites expose structured tools to AI agents directly, potentially replacing complex scraping pipelines with simple tool invocations (Slides: FS26-DSy-02-news.pdf). The third video covers the second part of the motivation for distributed systems: location (Slides: FS26-DSy-02-intro-location.pdf). The fourth video addresses fault tolerance and redundancy (Slides: FS26-DSy-02-intro-hw.pdf). [93min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-03-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article shows how to test software on RISC-V via QEMU emulation without physical hardware. The next covers Red Hat's Podman Desktop as a Docker Desktop competitor with OpenShift integration. The third examines how two years after Broadcom's VMware acquisition, only 4% of customers fully migrated, illustrating the power of vendor lock-in. The fourth surveys sandbox isolation techniques ranging from Linux namespaces to microVMs to WebAssembly. Finally, several articles on GenAI and software development are discussed, with the lecturer arguing that development will become more goal-oriented and supervisory (Slides: FS26-DSy-03-news.pdf). The third video covers the introduction of containers and VMs (Slides: FS26-DSy-03-container.pdf). The fourth video dives into docker (Slides: FS26-DSy-03-docker.pdf) [131min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-04-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers Mozilla's finding that up to 10–15% of Firefox crashes stem from hardware bitflips, not software bugs, reinforcing the need for ECC and replication in distributed systems. The next article discusses how AI coding tools have paradoxically increased engineer burnout by shifting the bottleneck from writing code to reviewing, testing, and maintaining AI output. The next topic reminds us that LLMs still hallucinate, blending fact and fabrication indistinguishably. The next article reports on a stolen Google API key generating $82'000 in Gemini charges, caused by Google silently granting old public keys access to Gemini endpoints. The final article describes a supply chain attack on the Cline AI assistant via prompt injection, leading to a compromised npm package and highlighting the importance of containerized development (Slides: FS26-DSy-04-news.pdf). The third video discusses monorepos and polyrepos (Slides: FS26-DSy-04-repo.pdf). [58min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task. Please note, the audio is distorted but still understandable (Slides: FS26-DSy-05-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article reviews a decade of Docker, tracing its evolution from Linux-only to multi-platform and multi-architecture while remaining the dominant container tool. The next article benchmarks 44 VM types across 7 cloud providers, finding AMD EPYC Turin leads performance and Hetzner leads price-performance. The next topic covers Mozilla's push to make WebAssembly a first-class web citizen by eliminating JavaScript glue code through the Component Model. The next two articles discuss working with AI coding agents, arguing that spec-driven development and automated feedback loops matter more than growing documentation directories. The final two articles describe how AI is reshaping software development, shifting the job from writing to judging code and collapsing prices for routine work (Slides: FS26-DSy-05-news.pdf). The third video introduces load balancing (Slides: FS26-DSy-05-lb.pdf). The fourth video introduces web architectures (Slides: FS26-DSy-05-arch.pdf). [119min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-06-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a $50 million swap loss on CoW Swap via the Aave interface, where a user confirmed a trade despite a 99.9% price impact warning, illustrating why liquidity matters for large decentralized exchange orders. The next article describes GlassWorm, a supply-chain malware campaign using the Solana blockchain as an uncensorable command-and-control channel to coordinate attacks across GitHub, npm, and VSCode marketplaces. The third topic covers noq, a Rust QUIC implementation with native multipath support and independent per-path congestion control. The final topic argues through several articles that AI does not remove the need for engineering skill, as LLM-assisted coding fails when developers stop making design decisions themselves (Slides: FS26-DSy-06-news.pdf). The third video presests the model context protocol (MCP) (Slides: FS26-DSy-06-mcp.pdf). The fourth video is about authentication (Slides: FS26-DSy-06-auth.pdf). [99min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-07-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a supply chain attack on LiteLLM, where attackers compromised a CI/CD dependency to publish backdoored PyPI packages with credential harvesters and Kubernetes malware, highlighting the importance of pinning dependencies and container deployments. The next article stores the entire DOOM game in ~2,000 DNS TXT records, illustrating how bloated modern software has become. The third topic covers a company using AI to rewrite a JavaScript dependency in Go in seven hours, eliminating costly RPC overhead and saving ~500,000 dollars annually. The final article discusses GitHub's decision to use Copilot user interaction data for AI training by default, criticized as a dark pattern (Slides: FS26-DSy-07-news.pdf). The third video presests the categorization of dististributed/decentralized systems (Slides: FS26-DSy-07-cat.pdf). [65min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-08-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers Iran demanding Bitcoin payments from oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. The next article discusses a New York Times investigation building the strongest case yet for Adam Back being Satoshi Nakamoto. The next topic covers NASA's Artemis II fault-tolerant computer with redundant self-checking CPU pairs, illustrating designing for failure recovery rather than prevention. The final article addresses quantum computing as a threat to Bitcoin's cryptography, highlighting that upgrading a decentralized network is fundamentally harder than patching centralized systems (Slides: FS26-DSy-08-news.pdf). The third video dives into communication protocols (Slides: FS26-DSy-08-cproto.pdf). [77min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-09-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a crypto token linked to World Liberty Financial dropping 83% after using billions of its own tokens as loan collateral, creating a dangerous liquidation feedback loop. The next article describes how Spanish court orders blocking Cloudflare IPs to combat piracy took down Docker Hub, GitHub, and thousands of legitimate services, a real-world example of the fallacy that the network is reliable. The next topic argues Agile should be retired, noting that iterative development predates it by decades and that LLM-driven development is reviving the spec-first approach. The final article notes IPv6 briefly hit 50% of global traffic according to Google, though adoption remains uneven and Switzerland lags at 41% (Slides: FS26-DSy-09-news.pdf). The third video dives into application protocols (Slides: FS26-DSy-09-aproto.pdf). [108min]

The admin part is about the lecture content, the challenge task, and the exam preparation (Slides: FS26-DSy-10-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a zero-downtime migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner, cutting costs from $1'400 to $230/month using live replication and DNS tricks. The next article maps email providers of Swiss municipalities, reflecting a broader European push for digital sovereignty away from US cloud providers. The next topic involves a US soldier arrested for betting on Polymarket with classified intel, highlighting both crypto traceability and regulatory gaps in blockchain prediction markets. The final article argues for replacing long-lived cryptographic keys with ephemeral credentials to reduce accumulated security risk (Slides: FS26-DSy-10-news.pdf). [59min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-11-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers GitHub's scaling crisis, where AI-driven coding has forced a revision of growth plans from 10x to 30x, prompting classic distributed systems work like decoupling services and breaking up the monolith after recent merge queue and search outages eroded trust. The next article shows Uber burning its entire 2026 AI budget in four months on AI coding tools, with 95% of engineers using them monthly and 70% of committed code AI-assisted, raising the question of whether such productivity is affordable at scale. The final article reports that ICANN has reopened applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012, at a $227,000 fee (Slides: FS26-DSy-11-news.pdf). The third video introduces consensus in distributed systems (Slides: FS26-DSy-11-consensus.pdf). The fourth video talks about deployment (Slides: FS26-DSy-11-deployment.pdf). [93min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-12-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article introduces Typst and an OST bachelor thesis on a collaborative editor, with a "Tour of Typst" intro. The next argues plain Docker Compose can run single-node production if you close the operational gaps, warning against premature Kubernetes. The next follows a platform's move to a self-hosted auth library after a third-party provider caused rate limits and session-refresh outages, contrasting DB-backed sessions with JWT revocation trade-offs. The next covers the .de DNSSEC key rollover that produced mismatched signatures and broke resolution for hours — a clean "network is reliable" fallacy example. The next pushes back on the AI-deleted-database story, blaming the system that exposed a destructive endpoint without reviews, permissions, or backups. The next reports Tether froze over 500M USDT in 30 days via built-in blacklist and burn functions, showing stablecoins aren't solely controlled by the key holder. The final link is the open source book "WebRTC for the Curious," a vendor-agnostic protocol-level reference (Slides: FS26-DSy-12-news.pdf). The third video introduces blockchains and bitcoin (Slides: FS26-DSy-12-bitcoin.pdf). [72min]

The admin part is about the lecture content and the challenge task (Slides: FS26-DSy-13-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers Bun's AI-driven rewrite from Zig to Rust, raising concerns about reviewability and an ecosystem split with Zig's no-AI policy. The next article looks at Amazon's MeshClaw agent tool, where token-usage targets push employees to inflate numbers on pointless work. A related piece argues AI agents are eroding Python/TypeScript's default status since they handle Rust and Go well. The next topic is the TanStack npm supply chain attack, where a poisoned build cache produced validly signed but compromised packages. Another article explains why trace IDs are 128 bits, using the birthday paradox to show 64 bits collides at billions of IDs. The final article reports April as crypto's worst security month with ~$635M stolen, with 95% of losses from infrastructure and social engineering rather than smart contract bugs (Slides: FS26-DSy-13-news.pdf). [22min]

The last video in this lecture reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first topic announces the challenge-task winner that built a real-time distributed Kahoot-style quiz platform with WebRTC video on a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster. The next article covers Iran's attempt to monetize undersea internet cables, a likely-overstated threat given they carry under 1% of global bandwidth, but a reminder of how dependent we are on hard-to-repair infrastructure. The next topic reports a court win for Swiss provider Init7, which refused DNS-based blocking orders, arguing such blocks are trivial to bypass and lack a clear legal basis. The next article notes Amazon shut down its internal AI-usage leaderboard after employees gamed it with unnecessary tasks. The final topics observe that AI is quietly killing small code dependencies as LLMs generate snippets directly, and reflect on the decline of programming books as learning shifts toward AI chat. (Slides: FS26-DSy-14-news.pdf). [13min]