Internet Access and Education: Transforming Lives in the Middle East

Internet access and the development of digital skills can transform lives of over 350 million people in the Middle East. With more than 60% of the population under 25 years old, the region is one of the most youthful in the world. However, at the same time, young people are the ones facing several challenges regarding education and employment.

In this context, it is imperative for the region to take actions, and the Internet is an opportunity to do it now. 

This week, I had the opportunity to speak at a panel entitled “Digital Skills for the Labour Force and Entrepreneurs,” at MENA Innovation 2018. The session was moderated by Selim Eddé, from Google, and had the participation of high-level representatives from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.

While it was clear that there are many ways to overcome the challenges of the region, all panelists agreed on one key aspect: the importance of education and entrepreneurship for building the future that the region needs.

For the Internet Society, three key factors need to be taken into account:

  • Internet access: the lack of access in the region is still a barrier that we need to overcome. However,access to the Internet not only Continue reading

Use Cloudflare Stream to build secure, reliable video apps

Use Cloudflare Stream to build secure, reliable video apps

It’s our pleasure to announce the general availability of Cloudflare Stream. Cloudflare Stream is the best way for any founder or developer to deliver an extraordinary video experience to their viewers while cutting development time and costs, and as of today it is available to every Cloudflare customer.

If I had to summarize what we’ve learned as we’ve built Stream it would be: Video streaming is hard, but building a successful video streaming business is even harder. This is why our goal has been to take away the complexity of encoding, storage, and smooth delivery so you can focus on all the other critical parts of your business.

Cloudflare Stream API

You call a single endpoint, Cloudflare Stream delivers a high-quality streaming experience to your visitors. Here’s how it works:

  1. Your app calls the /stream endpoint to upload a video. You can submit the contents of the video with the request or you can provide a URL to a video hosted elsewhere.
  2. Cloudflare Stream encodes the stream in multiple resolutions to enable multi-bitrate streaming. We also automatically prepare DASH and HLS manifest files.
  3. Cloudflare serves your video (in multiple resolutions) from our vast network of 150+ data centers around the Continue reading

Nutanix expands on-premises desktop offerings with Frame buy

Nutanix, maker of hyperconverged systems for building on-premises cloud-like environments, has agreed to buy Frame, a supplier of desktop apps as a service.Nutanix already supports virtual desktop infrastructure; adding Frame expands on the offering because Frame specializes in high-performance, specialized apps, rather than just a generic Windows or Linux desktop.Frame, also known as Mainframe2, was founded as a cloud workstation platform, providing desktop applications as a service but with the considerable scale from the server. Clients can get the performance of a super-powered desktop workstation from their laptop thanks to streaming of compute-intensive apps from the cloud to a browser.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: An internet for everyone? Not yet

It’s in our phones, TVs, toasters, cars, watches, toothbrushes – even in the soles of our shoes. The internet is everywhere. Right?Well, no. About 47 percent of the global population of 7.6 billion people doesn’t have internet access, as tough as that is for those of us in internet-rich locales to imagine. But companies are working on ways to bridge this digital divide, and systems based on low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites are becoming a big part of the conversation.The benefits of satellite internet are obvious in places where land-based network infrastructure doesn’t exist. But while systems based on high-orbit satellites need only minimal ground equipment to reach remote places, a range of complications – including cost, speed and performance – prevent them from being a global solution. LEO systems aim to get past the problems by getting closer to earth.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: An internet for everyone? Not yet

It’s in our phones, TVs, toasters, cars, watches, toothbrushes – even in the soles of our shoes. The internet is everywhere. Right?Well, no. About 47 percent of the global population of 7.6 billion people doesn’t have internet access, as tough as that is for those of us in internet-rich locales to imagine. But companies are working on ways to bridge this digital divide, and systems based on low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites are becoming a big part of the conversation.The benefits of satellite internet are obvious in places where land-based network infrastructure doesn’t exist. But while systems based on high-orbit satellites need only minimal ground equipment to reach remote places, a range of complications – including cost, speed and performance – prevent them from being a global solution. LEO systems aim to get past the problems by getting closer to earth.To read this article in full, please click here

BLeak: automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications

BLeak: Automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications Vilk & Berger, PLDI’18

BLeak is a Browser Leak debugger that finds memory leaks in web applications. You can use BLeak to test your own applications by following the instructions at http://bleak-detector.org.

Guided by BLeak, we identify and fix over 50 memory leaks in popular libraries and apps including Airbnb, AngularJS, Google Analytics, Google Maps SDK, and jQuery. BLeak’s median precision is 100%; fixing the leaks it identifies reduces heap growth by an average of 94%, saving from 0.5MB to 8MB per round trip.

Why are web application memory leaks so problematic?

Memory leaks in web applications are a pervasive problem. They lead to higher garbage collection frequency and overhead, reduced application responsiveness, and even browser tab crashes. Existing memory leak detection approaches don’t work well in the browser environment though:

  • Staleness detection assumes leaked memory is rarely touched, but web apps regularly interact with leaked state (e.g. via event listeners).
  • Growth-based technique assume that leaked objects are uniquely owned, or that leaked objects from strongly connected components in the heap graph. In a web application, objects frequently have multiple owners, and all roads lead back to window.
  • Techniques Continue reading

Check Out Our New Certified Information System Auditor Course





This 6 hour course is designed for those that are preparing for the CISA exam. Expert instructor, Etienne Poeder, explains what to expect from this course, as well as who the course is designed for below:

The amount of effort required to ace this exam will depend on both your relevant knowledge and experience. Mere knowledge is insufficient for passing the exam because the exam doesn’t just test your familiarity with exam topics, but also your ability to actually apply your skills and education. An accounting/non-IS auditing background prior to this exam will likely work, but it is going to be more challenging with regard to your technical IT knowledge. As for the more techie professional, you will probably already understand the security and technology basics, but still need to show whether you understand the do’s and don’ts within auditing and related area’s in different types of organizations and architectures.

Whether you are an auditor or security professional, you can benefit from this course. I have done my best making sure we hit the ground running with the preparation for your exam. If you lack both the auditing as well as the technical knowledge/experience, this course will still benefit you, but it will be more challenging. You will need to prepare properly for the CISA exam to ace it. Of course, I will give you exam tips along the way and practical examples within the IT Audit security job practice to make studying a less bitter pill to swallow.

I will cover all 5 domains, which will summarize the most current information from the revised book according to the 2016 CISA Job Practice. This book is the most comprehensive peer-reviewed IS Audit, assurance, security and control resource available worldwide.

I have added assessment questions so you can test your knowledge and become more familiarized with the question types, structures and topics featured in the CISA exam. I have made a fine representative selection of questions, extracted from a 1,000 multiple-choice study exam that has previously appeared in the CISA Review Questions, Answers and Explained manual 2015 and the CISA Review Questions, Answers & Explanations Manual 2015 Supplement, both current and in accordance with the newly revised 2016 Job Practice.

So you want to be a professional auditor?

Go get your proper assistance for the CISA exam today!

IDG Contributor Network: 4 ways to avoid cloud outages and improve system performance

When most people encounter headlines about high-profile cloud outages, they think about the cloud vendor's name, or how the negative publicity might affect stock prices. I think about the people behind the scenes—the ones tasked with fixing the problem and getting customer systems back up and running.Despite their best efforts, the occasional outage is inevitable. The internet is a volatile place, and nobody is completely immune to this danger. Fortunately, there are some straightforward steps businesses can take to guard against the possibility of unplanned downtime.Here are four ways to avoid cloud outages while improving security and performance in the process:To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4 ways to avoid cloud outages and improve system performance

When most people encounter headlines about high-profile cloud outages, they think about the cloud vendor's name, or how the negative publicity might affect stock prices. I think about the people behind the scenes—the ones tasked with fixing the problem and getting customer systems back up and running.Despite their best efforts, the occasional outage is inevitable. The internet is a volatile place, and nobody is completely immune to this danger. Fortunately, there are some straightforward steps businesses can take to guard against the possibility of unplanned downtime.Here are four ways to avoid cloud outages while improving security and performance in the process:To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Scalable groups tags with SD-Access

Perimeter-based firewalls When I stepped into the field of networking, everything was static and security was based on perimeter-level firewalling. It was common to have two perimeter-based firewalls; internal and external to the wide area network (WAN). Such layout was good enough in those days.I remember the time when connected devices were corporate-owned. Everything was hard-wired and I used to define the access control policies on a port-by-port and VLAN-by-VLAN basis. There were numerous manual end-to-end policy configurations, which were not only time consuming but also error-prone.There was a complete lack of visibility and global policy throughout the network and every morning, I relied on the multi router traffic grapher (MRTG) to manual inspect the traffic spikes indicating variations from baselines. Once something was plugged in, it was “there for life”. Have you ever heard of the 20-year-old PC that no one knows where it is but it still replies to ping? In contrast, we now live in an entirely different world. The perimeter has dissolved, resulting in perimeter-level firewalling alone to be insufficient.To read this article in full, please click here

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