Minecraft API with Workers + Coffeescript

Minecraft API with Workers + Coffeescript

The following is a guest post by Ashcon Partovi, a computer science and business undergraduate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He's the founder of a popular Minecraft multiplayer server, stratus.network, that provides competitive, team-based gameplay to thousands of players every week

Minecraft API with Workers + Coffeescript

If you've ever played a video game in the past couple of years, chances are you know about Minecraft. You might be familiar with the game or even planted a tree or two, but what you might not know about is the vast number of Minecraft online communities. In this post, I'm going to describe how I used Cloudflare Workers to deploy and scale a production-grade API that solves a big problem for these Minecraft websites.

Introducing the Problem

Here is an example of my Minecraft player profile from one of the many multiplayer websites. It shows some identity information such as my username, a bitmap of my avatar, and a preview of my friends. Although rendering this page with 49 bitmap avatars may seem like an easy task, it's far from trivial. In fact, it's unnecessarily complicated.

Minecraft API with Workers + Coffeescript

Here is the current workflow to render a player profile on a website given Continue reading

Research; HTTPS Interceptions

I have written elsewhere about the problems with the “little green lock” shown by browsers to indicate a web page (or site) is secure. In that article, I considered the problem of freely available certificates, and a hole in the way browsers load pages. In March of 2017, another paper was published documenting another problem with the “green lock” paradigm—the impact of HTTPS interception. In theory, a successful HTTPS session means the session between host and the server has been encrypted, which means no third party can read the contents of the packets passing between the two.

This works, modulo the trustworthiness of the certificates involved in encrypting the traffic, so long as there is no-one in the middle of the connection encrypting packets from the receiver, and re-encrypting them towards the transmitter. This “man in the middle,” or MITM, can read the contents of all the packets in the exchange, even though the data is encrypted on transmit. Surely such MITM situations are rare, right?

Right.

The researchers in this paper set out to discover just how often HTTPS (LTS) sessions are terminated and re-encrypted by some device or piece of software in the middle. To discover how often Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Are you winning the data intelligence game?

When big data was hyped as the next technology set to transform the business world many organizations began to collect as much of it as they could lay their hands on. Data centers proliferated as companies sucked in data points from customer interactions, supply chain partners, mobile devices and many, many other sources.It looked as though enterprises had jumped on board with the idea of big data, but what they were actually doing was hoarding information. Very few had any idea about how to unlock the insights contained within. Businesses that saw the value and pioneered analytics are beginning to see a major return on their investment.In a global, cross-industry McKinsey survey of 530 C-level execs and senior managers, almost half said that data and analytics have significantly or fundamentally changed business practices in their sales and marketing functions, and more than a third said the same about R&D. Big data can have a major beneficial impact, but realizing those potential benefits requires a winning strategy.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are you winning the data intelligence game?

When big data was hyped as the next technology set to transform the business world many organizations began to collect as much of it as they could lay their hands on. Data centers proliferated as companies sucked in data points from customer interactions, supply chain partners, mobile devices and many, many other sources.It looked as though enterprises had jumped on board with the idea of big data, but what they were actually doing was hoarding information. Very few had any idea about how to unlock the insights contained within. Businesses that saw the value and pioneered analytics are beginning to see a major return on their investment.In a global, cross-industry McKinsey survey of 530 C-level execs and senior managers, almost half said that data and analytics have significantly or fundamentally changed business practices in their sales and marketing functions, and more than a third said the same about R&D. Big data can have a major beneficial impact, but realizing those potential benefits requires a winning strategy.To read this article in full, please click here

Buenos Aires as a center of discussions on Internet Governance

Without a doubt, this will be a busy week for the Internet Society in Latin America and the Caribbean! Various activities will take place alongside the 11th edition of LACIGF, including discussions on gender and youth, as well as the Workshop for Chapter Leaders of the region. As usual, ISOC will have an important presence in several activities.

LACIGF 11: the maturity of the regional space

From July 31 to August 2, the regional community will meet in Buenos Aires to celebrate the 11th edition of the Regional Preparatory Meeting for the Internet Governance Forum (LACIGF). More than ten years after the first meeting took place, LACIGF is now an established event of high importance, where issues related to Internet Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean are discussed.

The agenda includes diverse topics, in which ISOC will be participate. Raquel Gatto will join the discussions on personal data protection, in addition to co-organizing the session on National and Regional Internet Governance Initiatives. In addition, Sebastián Bellagamba will join the debate around Community Networks. And let’s not forget about the keynote speech that will be given by Raúl Echeberría about the future of the global IGF.

The event will be Continue reading

Cloud computing just had another kick-ass quarter

If you’ve been around the tech industry long enough, recent market events held an eerie familiarity.When Facebook badly missed its numbers for the quarter ended June 30, 2018, the company’s stock took an unprecedented pummeling, losing 20 percent of its value and tanking many other tech stock along with it. Watching the carnage, it was hard not to think back to the spring of 2000 when Microsoft lost its antitrust case, losing 15 percent of its value in a single day and signaling the end of the dot.com boom and the beginning of a historic bust.But something is different this time.To read this article in full, please click here

Cloud computing just had another kick-ass quarter

If you’ve been around the tech industry long enough, recent market events held an eerie familiarity.When Facebook badly missed its numbers for the quarter ended June 30, 2018, the company’s stock took an unprecedented pummeling, losing 20 percent of its value and tanking many other tech stock along with it. Watching the carnage, it was hard not to think back to the spring of 2000 when Microsoft lost its antitrust case, losing 15 percent of its value in a single day and signaling the end of the dot.com boom and the beginning of a historic bust.But something is different this time.To read this article in full, please click here

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