Free to code

This week at the Cloudflare Internet Summit I have the honour of sitting down and talking with Sophie Wilson. She designed the very first ARM processor instruction set in the mid-1980s and was part of the small team that built the foundations for the mobile world we live in: if you are reading this on a mobile device, like a phone or tablet, it almost certainly has an ARM processor in it.

But, despite the amazing success of ARM, it’s not the processor that I think of when I think of Sophie Wilson. It’s the BBC Micro, the first computer I ever owned. And it’s the computer on which Wilson and others created ARM despite it having just an 8-bit 6502 processor and 32k of RAM.

Luckily, I still own that machine and recently plugged it into a TV set and turned it on to make sure it was still working 36 years on (you can read about that one time blue smoke came out of it and my repair). I wanted to experience once more the machine Sophie Wilson helped to design. One vital component of that machine was BBC BASIC, stored in a ROM chip on Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Ecology of Web Browsing Engines

Early in my career when I worked at agencies and later at Microsoft on Edge, I heard the same lament over and over: “Argh, why doesn’t Edge just run on Blink? Then I would have access to ALL THE APIs I want to use and would only have to test in one browser!” Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be. —Rachel Nabors @css-tricks

WebAssembly on Cloudflare Workers

WebAssembly on Cloudflare Workers

WebAssembly on Cloudflare Workers

We just announced ten major new products and initiatives over Crypto Week and Birthday Week, but our work is never finished. We're continuously upgrading our existing products with new functionality.

Today, we're extending Cloudflare Workers with support for WebAssembly. All Workers customers can now augment their applications with WASM at no additional cost.

What is WebAssembly?

WebAssembly -- often abbreviated as "WASM" -- is a technology that extends the web platform to support compiled languages like C, C++, Rust, Go, and more. These languages can be compiled to a special WASM binary format and then loaded in a browser.

WASM code is securely sandboxed, just like JavaScript. But, because it is based on compiled lower-level languages, it can be much faster for certain kinds of resource-intensive tasks where JavaScript is not a good fit. In addition to performance benefits, WASM allows you to reuse existing code written in languages other than JavaScript.

What are Workers?

WebAssembly on Cloudflare Workers

For those that don't know: Cloudflare Workers lets you deploy "serverless" JavaScript code directly to our 153-and-growing datacenters. Your Worker handles your site's HTTP traffic directly at the location closest to your end user, allowing you to achieve lower latency and reduce serving costs. Continue reading

5 reasons eSignatures are the must-have tool you don’t think about

Many companies boast about going entirely digital, but continue to work with mountains of documents. Don't be that company.The bulk of said documents are normally those that require signatures, like contracts, tax forms, reimbursement sheets, and — well, the list is seemingly endless, which also means that the work allocated to creating and organizing them also never stops. A simple solution? Electronic signatures or eSignatures.Having the same legal weight as handwritten signatures, eSignatures could revolutionize the way you do business, and could potentially pave the way for more profit and innovation. And using a renowned tool like HelloSign can help ease your journey in the transition.To read this article in full, please click here

Gender Equality: A Mouse Click Away

This post reflects arguments made in a joint background paper published by the Internet Society and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) ahead of the G20 Women’s Group (W20) Summit in Argentina 1-3 October.

In our digital age, Internet literacy has become essential for, if not synonymous with, being employable in many fields. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) fuel business growth and countries’ economic development. They open new channels to communicate across great distances, as well as to organise people, raise awareness and spur activism.

But such promise can deepen existing inequalities offline if these technologies cannot be accessed and enjoyed by all.

Today, many women and girls are getting left behind in digital development. While in low- and middle-income countries, the gap between women’s use and that of men is 26%, in least developed countries (LDCs), women are 33% less likely than men to use the Internet.

In some cases, women simply don’t have access to the Internet, or it’s too expensive. In others, they have limited access with pre-paid services. There are also cultural factors that stop women from using the Internet or even owning a computer or a mobile phone.

This points to deeper issues. Globally, women Continue reading

Drone defense — powered by IoT — is now a thing

The Internet of Things (IoT) didn’t just create smart houses and enable predictive analytics for industrial applications. It’s also creating a wide variety of new business opportunities and spawning new threats and challenges. Sometimes, all those things happen at once.At least, that’s my takeaway from a new partnership between AT&T and Dedrone, a drone detection technology startup based in San Francisco. (De-drone, get it?)Using IoT sensor data to detect drone threats According an AT&T spokesperson, “AT&T and Dedrone are teaming up to deploy IoT sensor technology to protect against malicious drones. Powered exclusively by AT&T, and using sensor data like radio frequency, visual, and radar, Dedrone detects and classifies approaching drones, pinpointing their locations and triggering alarms to alert security.”To read this article in full, please click here

802.11ax preview: Access points and routers that support the Wi-Fi 6 protocol on tap

The latest update to the Wi-Fi protocol standard, 802.11ax, has been designed to transmit data even faster, to better negotiate bandwidth among several computers and other devices connected to a network, and to more reliably deliver high-bandwidth applications to them, such as streaming video, than the protocol standard it succeeds, 802.11ac.To take advantage of these gains, client and networking devices need to have hardware that supports the new protocol, of course. Many network device makers have announced 802.11ax products to come. They’ve also filed 802.11ax devices with the FCC for licensing, which reveal more technical information about them.To read this article in full, please click here

802.11ax preview: Access points and routers that support the Wi-Fi 6 protocol on tap

The latest update to the Wi-Fi protocol standard, 802.11ax, has been designed to transmit data even faster, to better negotiate bandwidth among several computers and other devices connected to a network, and to more reliably deliver high-bandwidth applications to them, such as streaming video, than the protocol standard it succeeds, 802.11ac.To take advantage of these gains, client and networking devices need to have hardware that supports the new protocol, of course. Many network device makers have announced 802.11ax products to come. They’ve also filed 802.11ax devices with the FCC for licensing, which reveal more technical information about them.To read this article in full, please click here

802.11ax preview: Access points and routers that support new Wi-Fi protocol on tap

The latest update to the Wi-Fi protocol standard, 802.11ax, has been designed to transmit data even faster, to better negotiate bandwidth among several computers and other devices connected to a network, and to more reliably deliver high-bandwidth applications to them, such as streaming video, than the protocol standard it succeeds, 802.11ac.To take advantage of these gains, client and networking devices need to have hardware that supports the new protocol, of course. Many network device makers have announced 802.11ax products to come. They’ve also filed 802.11ax devices with the FCC for licensing, which reveal more technical information about them.To read this article in full, please click here

802.11ax preview: Access points and routers that support new Wi-Fi protocol on tap

The latest update to the Wi-Fi protocol standard, 802.11ax, has been designed to transmit data even faster, to better negotiate bandwidth among several computers and other devices connected to a network, and to more reliably deliver high-bandwidth applications to them, such as streaming video, than the protocol standard it succeeds, 802.11ac.To take advantage of these gains, client and networking devices need to have hardware that supports the new protocol, of course. Many network device makers have announced 802.11ax products to come. They’ve also filed 802.11ax devices with the FCC for licensing, which reveal more technical information about them.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: Social Media Networks Sign onto Fake News Code

Fake news code: Google and several operators of social networks have signed a code of conduct to combat fake news, CNet reports. The code of conduct, pushed by the European Union, stipulates that they must work to disrupt advertising revenues of accounts and websites that spread disinformation. The code also requires that the websites empower people to report disinformation and access other news sources.

Government news vs. fake news: Indonesia’s communications ministry plans to hold weekly briefings to highlight examples of “hoax” news reports, Time.com reports. The briefs will also focus on digital literacy as the country moves toward a presidential election next year. The government also plans to have a 70-member content management team to determine fake news.

Fake news as cancer: Lots of news about fake news this week. The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times as called fake news the “cancer of our time,” CNBC.com says. Meanwhile, cancer still exists. Patrick Soon-Shiong blamed social media for the spread of fake news.

Too little regulation? California’s recently passed Internet of Things security bill may be “too little, too late,” says an opinion piece on Diginomica.com. “No one seems to believe that SB-327 will completely Continue reading

EIGRP Support in FRRouting 5.0.1

Recently, I have created Linux Core 9.0 x86-64 VMware Disk (VMDK) and installed FRRrouting suite 5.0.1 on the top of it in order to test current EIGRP support in Linux (RFC 7868).

The last time I tested EIGRP with FRR 3.1-dev installed on Linux Core, FRR suffered from many bugs. In fact, they were so serious so EIGRP was not ready for use. Unfortunately, they are also presented in FRR version 5.0.1. Therefore, I advise you to use another IGP routing daemons such as OSPF or IS-IS available in FRR until the issues are resolved.

Anyway, you can use my Core Linux VMDK disk with installed FRRouting 5.0.1 to practice routing in Linux. Thanks to using minimalistic Core Linux distribution, the size of image is only about 86 MB. The Core kernel is compiled with enabled option MULTIPATH so you can test equal cost multipath routing with OSPF. The image is available in Linux Core Router/Switch appliances.

Don’t Make a Total Mess When Dealing with Exceptions

A while ago I had the dubious “privilege” of observing how my “beloved” airline Adria Airways deals with exceptions. A third-party incoming flight was 2.5 hours late and in their infinite wisdom (most probably to avoid financial impact) they decided to delay a half-dozen outgoing flights for 20-30 minutes while waiting for the transfer passengers.

Not surprisingly, when that weird thingy landed and they started boarding the outgoing flights (now all at the same time), the result was a total mess with busses blocking each other (this same airline loves to avoid jet bridges).

Read more ...

Rosetta: large scale system for text detection and recognition in images

Rosetta: large scale system for text detection and recognition in images Borisyuk et al., KDD’18

Rosetta is Facebook’s production system for extracting text (OCR) from uploaded images.

In the last several years, the volume of photos being uploaded to social media platforms has grown exponentially to the order of hundreds of millions every day, presenting technological challenges for processing increasing volumes of visual information… our problem can be stated as follows: to build a robust and accurate system for optical character recognition capable of processing hundreds of millions of images per day in realtime.

Images uploaded by clients are added to a distributed processing queue from which Rosetta inference machines pull jobs. Online image processing consists of the following steps:

  1. The image is downloaded to a local machine in the Rosette cluster and pre-processing steps such as resizing (to 800px in the larger dimension) and normalization are performed.
  2. A text detection model is executed to obtain bounding box coordinates and scores for all the words in the image.
  3. The word location information is passed to a text recognition model that extracts characters given each cropped word region from the image.
  4. The extracted text along with the location of the Continue reading

DOH!

If you had the opportunity to re-imagine the DNS, what might it look like? Normally this would be an idle topic of speculation over a beer or two, but maybe there’s a little more to the question these days. We are walking into an entirely new world of the DNS when we start to think about exactly might be possible when we look at DNS over HTTPS, or DOH.

Real World Serverless: The Video

We held our second Real World Serverless event in London last week and filmed the four talks about Serverless technology to share with you here, on the Cloudflare blog. Check out the recording, featuring Henry Heinemann, Sevki Hasirci, and Stephen Pinkerton from Cloudflare and Paddy Sherry from gambling.com Group.

For details of our other upcoming Real World Serverless events in Austin, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne, scroll to the bottom.

Video transcript:

Moderator: Okay, welcome to Cloudflare, everybody. I'm so pleased that you're here. This is the second event of our real world serverless event series. We had our first one in San Francisco just last week, and we were so excited to fly over here, both me and Jade and some other Cloudflare employees, and tap into this community here, because this is our second largest office.

We also frankly, love coming here to London to visit and engage with the developer community here. Let me hand this over to Jade and she'll speak a little bit about Cloudflare, and then we'll get started with speaker number one.

[applause]

Jade: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cloudflare. It's on, okay cool. How many of you know Continue reading

Ansible – Don’t be Afraid of a Little Python

This year I’ve written several Ansible modules. It wasn’t that hard, yet some people claimed they had been waiting “years” for those modules. There was nothing stopping anyone else doing it, yet they hadn’t. There’s a weird reticence amongst network engineers to learn or write any code, even when it could make a large difference to their job. People either do nothing, or they create complex Ansible playbooks to work around their reluctance to write Python. It’s not that scary. Why don’t people put in a bit of effort?

Don’t be Afraid of a Little Python

Ansible playbooks use YAML, a somewhat human-readable markup language. These are instructions for “what” Ansible should do - e.g. “Use the Cisco ios_config module to ensure that this configuration line is present."

The underlying modules use Python. These are the “how” - they take the instructions from the playbooks, and turn those into device connections to devices, making configuration changes, checking state, etc.

Some people look at these modules as a mystery black box that only the vendor can write. They think that the only way they can interact with Ansible is via playbooks.

This leads to two situations:

1/ Twiddling thumbs Continue reading

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