The AdStage Migration from Heroku to AWS

This is a guest repost by G Gordon Worley III, Head of Site Reliability Engineering at AdStage.

When I joined AdStage in the Fall of 2013 we were already running on Heroku. It was the obvious choice: super easy to get started with, less expensive than full-sized virtual servers, and flexible enough to grow with our business. And grow we did. Heroku let us focus exclusively on building a compelling product without the distraction of managing infrastructure, so by late 2015 we were running thousands of dynos (containers) simultaneously to keep up with our customers.

We needed all those dynos because, on the backend, we look a lot like Segment, and like them many of our costs scale linearly with the number of users. At $25/dyno/month, our growth projections put us breaking $1 million in annual infrastructure expenses by mid-2016 when factored in with other technical costs, and that made up such a large proportion of COGS that it would take years to reach profitability. The situation was, to be frank, unsustainable. The engineering team met to discuss our options, and some quick calculations showed us we were paying more than $10,000 a month for the convenience of Continue reading

The differences among the white, grey, and black hats

The infographic below provides good, entertaining definitions of the terms white hat, grey hat and black hat hackers courtesy of Exigent Networks. As the infographic explains, there are some, well, grey areas between categories—for example, there is sometimes a fine line between grey hats and black hats.Some might also disagree with the choices of white hat hacker examples. The telecom industry, for example, might consider Steve Wozniak’s early hacking exploits theft of services rather than hacking for the greater good. And Julian Assange’s qualifications will be tinted by whatever political lens through which an individual judges his actions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The differences among the white, grey, and black hats

The infographic below provides good, entertaining definitions of the terms white hat, grey hat and black hat hackers courtesy of Exigent Networks. As the infographic explains, there are some, well, grey areas between categories—for example, there is sometimes a fine line between grey hats and black hats.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Introducing TLS with Client Authentication

In a traditional TLS handshake, the client authenticates the server, and the server doesn’t know too much about the client. However, starting now, Cloudflare is offering enterprise customers TLS with client authentication, meaning that the server additionally authenticates that the client connecting to it is authorized to connect.

TLS Client Authentication is useful in cases where a server is keeping track of hundreds of thousands or millions of clients, as in IoT, or in a mobile app with millions of installs exchanging secure information. For example, an IoT company can issue a unique client certificate per device, and then limit connections to their IoT infrastructure to only their devices by blocking connections where the client doesn’t present a certificate signed by the company’s certificate authority.

Or in the case of a mobile banking app, where the bank wants to ensure customers’ secure financial data doesn’t get stolen by bots spoofing their mobile app, they can issue a unique certificate to every app install and in the TLS handshake validate requests are coming from their mobile app. Client authentication is also useful for VPNs, enterprise networks or staging sites, where corporations and developers need to lock down connections to only laptops Continue reading

Greenbug’s DNS-isms

Over the past few months there has been a lot of research and press coverage on the Shamoon campaigns. These have been the attacks on Saudi Arabian companies where a destructive malware known as Disttrack was deployed. The malware, using stolen credentials, spreads throughout the […]

DockerCon 2017 Online meetup Recap

Weren’t able to attend DockerCon 2017 or looking for a refresher? Check out the recording and slides from the DockerCon 2017 Online Meetup highlights recap of all the announcements and highlights from DockerCon by Patrick Chanezon and Betty Junod.

Watch the General Session Talks

The videos and slides from general session day 1 and day 2 as well as the top rated sessions are already available. The rest of the DockerCon slides and videos will soon be published on our slideshare account and all the breakout session video recordings available on our DockerCon 2017 youtube playlist.

Learn more about the Moby Project

The Moby Project is a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement and help the ecosystem take containers mainstream. Learn more here.

Moby Project by Docker

Learn More about LinuxKit

LinuxKit is toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers. Read more about LinuxKit.

LinuxKit

Learn More about the Modernize Traditional Applications Program:

The Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA) Program aims to help enterprises make their existing legacy apps more secure, more efficient and portable to hybrid cloud infrastructure. Read more about the Modernize Traditional Apps Program.

Modernize Traditional Apps with Docker

Weren’t able to attend #dockercon? Watch this recap video for key highlights !
Click Continue reading

Nyansa introduces private cloud option for its network analytics platform

Having a full understanding of end user experience has been theorized in IT circles for decades but has remained as elusive as the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth. Some people claim to have seen it, but no one really knows for sure.Last year, an innovative startup, Nyansa, came to market with a new approach to end-user management. Its Voyance product continuously collects data, analyzes it and correlates every end user transaction across the wired and wireless networks and provides insights and actionable recommendations that can be taken to improve application performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: How to choose a sandbox

Businesses have become painfully aware that conventional approaches — virus signature scanning and URL filtering — are no longer sufficient in the fight against cyberthreats. This is in part because malware is constantly changing, generating new signatures with a frequency that far outpaces the updates of signature detection systems. In addition, malware today tends to be targeted to specific sectors, companies, or even individual members of a management team, and such targeted attacks are difficult to spot. It has become necessary to use state-of-the-art technology based on behavioral analysis, also known as the sandbox. This blog examines how a sandbox can increase security and it looks at what to consider when choosing a sandbox solution. —Coud Security Alliance

The post Worth Reading: How to choose a sandbox appeared first on rule 11 reader.

IDG Contributor Network: Wasabi serves up some spicy AWS-killer claims

What happens when you take a couple of very seasoned co-founders, investment from some high-profile investors, and an uber-dominant existing vendor? Well, in Wasabi’s case, you get some pretty outlandish claims. But before we got on to that, let’s look at the who and what for Wasabi.Wasabi is a cloud storage company founded by Jeff Flowers and  David Friend. Those names might ring a bell, since they’ve started, built and sold five previous technology companies. Most recently they co-founded backup company Carbonite and previously founded Pilot Software.RELATED: Engineering firm uses cloud storage to speed file loads, and then unplugs its MPLS net These two can’t seem to stop themselves, and for their latest idea, they’ve already raised a ton of cash—$8.5 million to date with key investors, including Bill Sahlman, Harvard Business School marketing prof and angel investor; Desh Deshpande, who donated $100 million to MIT for the Deshpande Center; Ron Skates, former CEO of Data General; Jeff Parker, founder of CCBN; and Howard Cox from Greylock Partners.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apparently, Wikipedia is a threat to public order and national security

It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apparently, Wikipedia is a threat to public order and national security

It’s easy to criticize Wikipedia for a lot of things. Besides being the source of many a plagiarized term paper, its crowd-sourced nature also means it’s occasionally subject to internecine warfare and political infighting over articles.Wikipedia the largest general reference on the net But now Turkey has blocked the self-described “largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,” under a vague law that allows the country to “block access to individual web pages or entire sites for the protection of public order, national security or the well being of the public,” according to The Guardian.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google focuses on a future of even better mobile cameras

Smartphone cameras are about to get even better.Peyman Milanfar, a Google software engineer who had worked in the computational photography group, posted a lengthy analysis about using a smartphone camera to shoot nighttime photos with the same quality of an expensive DSLR.Milanfar’s post chronicles his quest for high-quality nighttime images taken with a smartphone. DSLR cameras do well in this application, but smartphone cameras struggle. A DSLR can take good quality photos at night because it has a very large sensor that collects more light. The Nikon D500 DSLR boasts a 20.9 million pixel sensor with a pixel size of 4.2µm. The D500 sensor is enormous compared to the top ranked Google Pixel phone’s sensor with 12.3 million pixels that are 1.55µm. It also has a large, adjustable and precise lens that captures and focuses more light from the field of view on the sensor, reducing visual distortion, compared to the Pixel’s constrained, fixed camera lens assembly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook able to target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads

Facebook is so proud of its algorithms that it conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads.The Australian (paywall) got its hands on a 23-page Facebook document, dated in 2017, marked as “Confidential: Internal Only,” and authored by two Australian Facebook executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. While no screenshots were included, the report allegedly explained how Facebook could analyze posts, photos and interactions to help determine the emotional states of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary” (college) students and “young Australians and New Zealanders ... in the workforce.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook able to target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads

Facebook is so proud of its algorithms that it conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads.The Australian (paywall) got its hands on a 23-page Facebook document, dated in 2017, marked as “Confidential: Internal Only,” and authored by two Australian Facebook executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. While no screenshots were included, the report allegedly explained how Facebook could analyze posts, photos and interactions to help determine the emotional states of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary” (college) students and “young Australians and New Zealanders ... in the workforce.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Leaked document shows how Facebook can target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads

Facebook is so proud of its algorithms, it conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads.The Australian (paywall) got its hands on a 23-page Facebook document, dated in 2017, marked as “Confidential: Internal Only,” and authored by two Australian Facebook executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. While no screenshots were included, the report allegedly explained how Facebook could analyze posts, photos and interactions to help determine the emotional states of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary” (college) students and “young Australians and New Zealander ... in the workforce.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Leaked document shows how Facebook can target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads

Facebook is so proud of its algorithms, it conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads.The Australian (paywall) got its hands on a 23-page Facebook document, dated in 2017, marked as “Confidential: Internal Only,” and authored by two Australian Facebook executives, Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. While no screenshots were included, the report allegedly explained how Facebook could analyze posts, photos and interactions to help determine the emotional states of 6.4 million “high schoolers,” “tertiary” (college) students and “young Australians and New Zealander ... in the workforce.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA suggests using virtualization to secure smartphones

The U.S. National Security Agency is now suggesting government departments and businesses buy smartphones secured using virtualization, a technology it currently requires only on tablets and laptopsThe change comes about with the arrival of the first virtualization-based smartphone security system on the U.S. Commercial Solutions for Classified list.CSFC is a program developed by the NSA to help U.S. government agencies and the businesses that serve them to quickly build layered secure systems from approved components.An HTC A9 smartphone security-hardened by Cog Systems using its D4 virtualization platform is now on that list, alongside devices without virtualization from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and BlackBerry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA suggests using virtualization to secure smartphones

The U.S. National Security Agency is now suggesting government departments and businesses buy smartphones secured using virtualization, a technology it currently requires only on tablets and laptopsThe change comes about with the arrival of the first virtualization-based smartphone security system on the U.S. Commercial Solutions for Classified list.CSFC is a program developed by the NSA to help U.S. government agencies and the businesses that serve them to quickly build layered secure systems from approved components.An HTC A9 smartphone security-hardened by Cog Systems using its D4 virtualization platform is now on that list, alongside devices without virtualization from Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, and BlackBerry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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