Set your brand up for success with a .tech domain extension

Imagine this. You’ve finally completed your brand new app that’s going to revolutionize the way we live. You’ve even come up with a catchy name that meshes perfectly with your app and no other company has laid claim to. Unfortunately, someone from the ’90s already built a .com website with the domain name you want to use. What’s worse, that website isn’t even in use anymore!You don’t have to be a mobile app developer to relate. Perhaps you’re a freelance coder with a generic name who wants to showcase your portfolio, or you might be an agency specializing in tech clients. Whatever the case, you need a domain extension that illustrates what you’re all about, and it needs to be available. So why not use “.tech”? Right now, you can get your own .tech domain extension starting at just $7.99 per year. To read this article in full, please click here

How We Solved a Report on docker-compose Performance on macOS Catalina

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash

As a Docker Compose maintainer, my daily duty is to check for newly reported issues and try to help users through misunderstanding and possible underlying bugs. Sometimes issues are very well documented, sometimes they are nothing much but some “please help” message. And sometimes they look really weird and can result in funny investigations. Here is the story of how we solved one such report…

A one-line bug report

An issue was reported as “docker-compose super slow on macOS Catalina” – no version, no details. How should I prioritize this? I don’t even know if the reporter is using the latest version of the tool – the opened issue doesn’t follow the bug reporting template. This is just a one-liner. But for some reason, I decided to take a look at it anyway and diagnose the issue.

Without any obvious explanation for super-slowness, I decided to take a risk and upgrade my own MacBook to OSX Catalina. I was able to reproduce significant slow down in docker-compose execution, waiting seconds for the very first line printed on the console even to display usage on invalid command.

Investigating the issue

In the meantime, some Continue reading

Announcing Built with Workers

Announcing Built with Workers

Ever since its initial release, Cloudflare Workers has given JavaScript developers a platform to enable building high-performance applications with automatic scaling.

As with any new technology, we know it can be a bit intimidating to get started. For one thing, running code on the edge is a paradigm shift—forcing us to rethink classic web architecture problems, or removing them altogether. For another, since you can build just about anything, it can be challenging to figure out what to build first.

Today we’re launching Built with Workers, a new site designed to help get those creative juices flowing and unblock you, by answering that simple but important question: What can I build with Cloudflare Workers?

Announcing Built with Workers

Some time in 1999, at age 11, I received my first graphing calculator. It was a TI-82 that my older sister no longer needed. It was on this very calculator that I learned to write code. Looking back, I’m not sure how exactly I had the patience or sanity to figure it all out.

It was a mess. Among the many difficulties were that I had to type the code out on the calculator’s non-QWERTY keyboard, the language I was writing in didn’t have Continue reading

JAMstack at the Edge: How we built Built with Workers… on Workers

JAMstack at the Edge: How we built Built with Workers… on Workers

I'm extremely stoked to announce Built with Workers today – it's an awesome resource for exploring what you can build with Cloudflare Workers. As Adam explained in our launch post, showcasing developers building incredible projects with tools like Workers KV or our streaming HTML rewriter is a great way to celebrate users of our platform. It also helps encourage developers to try building their dream app on top of Workers. In this post, I’ll explore some of the architectural and implementation designs we made while building the site.

When we first started planning Built with Workers, we wanted to use the site as an opportunity to build a new greenfield application, showcasing the strength of the Workers platform. The Workers Developer Experience team is cross-functional: while we might spend most of our time improving our docs, or developing features for our command-line interface Wrangler, most of us have spent years developing on the web. The prospect of starting a new application is always fun, but in this instance, it was a prime chance to ask (and answer) the question, "If I could build this site on Workers with whatever tools I want, what would I choose?"

A guiding Continue reading

Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions

Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions, Zhang et al., SoCC’19

"Narrowing the gap" was runner-up in the SoCC’19 best paper awards. While being motivated by serverless use cases, there’s nothing especially serverless about the key-value store, Shredder, this paper reports on. Shredder’s novelty lies in a new implementation of an old idea. On the mainframe we used to call it function shipping. In databases you probably know it as stored procedures. The advantages of function shipping (as opposed to the data shipping we would normally do in a serverless application) are that (a) you can avoid moving potentially large amounts of data over the network in order to process it, and (b) you might be able to collapse multiple remote calls into one if the function traverses structures that otherwise could not be fetched in a single call.

Shredder is "a low-latency multi-tenant cloud store that allows small units of computation to be performed directly within storage nodes."

Running end-user compute inside the datastore is not without its challenges of course. From an operator perspective it makes it harder to follow the classic cloud-native design in which a global storage Continue reading

You can now have a Mac Pro in your data center

Steve Jobs rather famously said he hated the enterprise because the people who use the product have no say in its purchase. Well, Apple's current management has adopted the enterprise, ever so slowly, and is now shipping its first server in years. Sort of.Apple introduced a new version of the Mac Pro in December 2019, after a six-year gap in releases, and said it would make the computer rack-mountable for data centers. But at the time, all the attention was on the computer’s aesthetics, because it looked like a cheese grater. The other bit of focus was on the price; a fully decked Mac Pro cost an astronomical $53,799. Granted, that did include specs like 1.5TB of DRAM and 8TB of SSD storage. Those are impressive specs for a server, although the price is still a little crazy.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco software fortifies industrial IoT security

Cisco is looking to better protect myriad edge-attached IoT devices with new security software that promises to protect industrial assets in one of the most disparate of network environments.The company rolled out what it called an overarching security architecture for Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments that includes existing products but also new software called Cisco Cyber Vision, for the automated discovery of industrial assets attached to Cisco’s extensive IIoT networking portfolio. More about edge networkingTo read this article in full, please click here

You can now have a Mac Pro in your data center

Steve Jobs rather famously said he hated the enterprise because the people who use the product have no say in its purchase. Well, Apple's current management has adopted the enterprise, ever so slowly, and is now shipping its first server in years. Sort of.Apple introduced a new version of the Mac Pro in December 2019, after a six-year gap in releases, and said it would make the computer rack-mountable for data centers. But at the time, all the attention was on the computer’s aesthetics, because it looked like a cheese grater. The other bit of focus was on the price; a fully decked Mac Pro cost an astronomical $53,799. Granted, that did include specs like 1.5TB of DRAM and 8TB of SSD storage. Those are impressive specs for a server, although the price is still a little crazy.To read this article in full, please click here

IT pros need to weigh in on that ‘sassy’ security model

Cloud services that provide both network and security intelligence are gaining popularity because they are easy to consume and they improve agility. Similarly, a model known as SD-Branch is providing network and security functionality at the WAN edge on a single platform.Both of these trends have contributed to the development by Gartner of a network architecture known as the secure-access service edge or SASE, which “converges network (for example, software-defined WAN) and network security services (such as [secure web gateways], [cloud access security brokers] and firewall as a service).” SASE (pronounced “sassy”) would primarily be delivered as a cloud-based service, Gartner says.To read this article in full, please click here

IT pros need to weigh in on that ‘sassy’ security model

Cloud services that provide both network and security intelligence are gaining popularity because they are easy to consume and they improve agility. Similarly, a model known as SD-Branch is providing network and security functionality at the WAN edge on a single platform.Both of these trends have contributed to the development by Gartner of a network architecture known as the secure-access service edge or SASE, which “converges network (for example, software-defined WAN) and network security services (such as [secure web gateways], [cloud access security brokers] and firewall as a service).” SASE (pronounced “sassy”) would primarily be delivered as a cloud-based service, Gartner says.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco software fortifies industrial IoT security

Cisco is looking to better protect myriad edge-attached IoT devices with new security software that promises to protect industrial assets in one of the most disparate of network environments.The company rolled out what it called an overarching security architecture for Industrial IoT (IIoT) environments that includes existing products but also new software called Cisco Cyber Vision, for the automated discovery of industrial assets attached to Cisco’s extensive IIoT networking portfolio. More about edge networkingTo read this article in full, please click here

Showing memory usage in Linux by process and user

There are a lot of tools for looking at memory usage on Linux systems. Some are commonly used commands like free and ps while others are tools like top that allow you to display system performance stats in various ways. In this post, we’ll look at some commands that can be most helpful in identifying the users and processes that are using the most memory.Here are some that address memory usage by process.Using top One of the best commands for looking at memory usage is top. One extremely easy way to see what processes are using the most memory is to start top and then press shift+m to switch the order of the processes shown to rank them by the percentage of memory each is using. Once you’ve entered shift+m, your top output should reorder the task entries to look something like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Daily Roundup: Cisco Joins On-Prem Kubernetes Party

Cisco joined the on-premises Kubernetes party; the U.K. banned Huawei from 5G core networks; and...

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There’s no evidence the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos’s iPhone

There's no evidence the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos's iPhone.

This is the conclusion of the all the independent experts who have reviewed the public report behind the U.N.'s accusations. That report failed to find evidence proving the theory, but instead simply found unknown things it couldn't explain, which it pretended was evidence.


This is a common flaw in such forensics reports. When there's evidence, it's usually found and reported. When there's no evidence, investigators keep looking. Todays devices are complex, so if you keep looking, you always find anomalies you can't explain. There's only two results from such investigations: proof of bad things or anomalies that suggest bad things. There's never any proof that no bad things exist (at least, not in my experience).

Bizarre and inexplicable behavior doesn't mean a hacker attack. Engineers trying to debug problems, and support technicians helping customers, find such behavior all the time. Pretty much every user of technology experiences this. Paranoid users often think there's a conspiracy against them when electronics behave strangely, but "behaving strangely" is perfectly normal.

When you start with the theory that hackers are involved, then you have an explanation for the all that's unexplainable. It's all Continue reading

VMware Loses $237M Patent Infringement Lawsuit

Densify, a startup that makes cloud and container resource management software, accused VMware of...

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How to decrypt WhatsApp end-to-end media files

At the center of the "Saudis hacked Bezos" story is a mysterious video file investigators couldn't decrypt, sent by Saudi Crown Prince MBS to Bezos via WhatsApp. In this blog post, I show how to decrypt it. Once decrypted, we'll either have a smoking gun proving the Saudi's guilt, or exoneration showing that nothing in the report implicated the Saudis. I show how everyone can replicate this on their own iPhones.

The steps are simple:
  • backup the phone to your computer (macOS or Windows), using one of many freely available tools, such as Apple's own iTunes app
  • extract the database containing WhatsApp messages from that backup, using one of many freely available tools, or just hunt for the specific file yourself
  • grab the .enc file and decryption key from that database, using one of many freely available SQL tools
  • decrypt the video, using a tool I just created on GitHub

End-to-end encrypted downloader

The FTI report says that within hours of receiving a suspicious video that Bezos's iPhone began behaving strangely. The report says:
...analysis revealed that the suspect video had been delivered via an encrypted downloader host on WhatsApp’s media server. Due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, the contents Continue reading
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