AWS offers Alexa developers free cloud credits

Developers interested in extending the capabilities of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant have some more free tools in their arsenal, thanks to a program the company announced Wednesday.Developers with an active Alexa skill --  a service that expands the capabilities of the virtual assistant -- can apply for $100 in Amazon Web Services credits every month to help pay for what they’ve built. After that, they can receive up to $100 per month in additional credits if they incur usage charges for their skills.The credits are meant to build on AWS’s existing Free Tier, which offers developers a small bundle of free services every month, but charges them for any usage that goes over those low caps. According to a blog post by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, the move is supposed to make it free for developers to operate most Alexa skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Appeals court rules Americans have no legal recourse if hacked by foreign governments

Put aside the matter of Russian interference in our presidential election to instead consider this scenario: If Vladimir Putin ordered his government-employed hackers to plant spyware on your personal computer – stealing all your data and even recording your Skype calls – you would have no access to any legal remedy in the U.S. court system. Preposterous, you say? That’s the law, according to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which yesterday upheld a lower court decision denying even a day in court to an American citizen who moved here from Ethiopia 30 years ago and was victimized by that country’s government in the exact fashion described above.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Appeals court rules Americans have no legal recourse if hacked by foreign governments

Put aside the matter of Russian interference in our presidential election to instead consider this scenario: If Vladimir Putin ordered his government-employed hackers to plant spyware on your personal computer – stealing all your data and even recording your Skype calls – you would have no access to any legal remedy in the U.S. court system. Preposterous, you say? That’s the law, according to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which yesterday upheld a lower court decision denying even a day in court to an American citizen who moved here from Ethiopia 30 years ago and was victimized by that country’s government in the exact fashion described above.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Architecture of Probot – My Slack and Messenger Bot for Answering Questions

I programmed a thing. It’s called Probot. Probot is a quick and easy way to get high quality answers to your accounting and tax questions. Probot will find a real live expert to answer your question and handle all the details. You can get your questions answered over Facebook Messenger, Slack, or the web. Answers start at $10. That’s the pitch.

Seems like a natural in this new age of bots, doesn’t it? I thought so anyway. Not so much (so far), but more on that later.

I think Probot is interesting enough to cover because it’s a good example of how one programmer--me---can accomplish quite a lot using today’s infrastructure.

All this newfangled cloud/serverless/services stuff does in fact work. I was able to program a system spanning Messenger, Slack, and the web, in a way that is relatively scalabile, available, and affordable, while requiring minimal devops.

Gone are the days of worrying about VPS limits, driving down to a colo site to check on a sick server, or even worrying about auto-scaling clusters of containers/VMs. At least for many use cases.

Many years of programming experience and writing this blog is no protection against making mistakes. I made a Continue reading

Four charged, including Russian gov’t agents, for massive Yahoo hack

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has charged four people, including two Russian state intelligence agents, for their involvement in a massive hack of Yahoo that affected half a billion accounts.In September, Yahoo said hackers had managed to steal personal data on more than 500 million users during an attack in late 2014. The stolen data included names, email addresses, telephone numbers and hashed passwords. Blame for the attack was put on a "state-sponsored" group.On Wednesday, the FBI said that group was the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, and it identified agents Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin as leaders of the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Four charged, including Russian gov’t agents, for massive Yahoo hack

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has charged four people, including two Russian state intelligence agents, for their involvement in a massive hack of Yahoo that affected half a billion accounts.In September, Yahoo said hackers had managed to steal personal data on more than 500 million users during an attack in late 2014. The stolen data included names, email addresses, telephone numbers and hashed passwords. Blame for the attack was put on a "state-sponsored" group.On Wednesday, the FBI said that group was the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB, and it identified agents Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin as leaders of the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker to donate containerd to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Today, Docker announced its intention to donate the containerd project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Back in December 2016, Docker spun out its core container runtime functionality into a standalone component, incorporating it into a separate project called containerd, and announced we would be donating it to a neutral foundation early this year. Today we took a major step forward towards delivering on our commitment to the community by following the Cloud Native Computing Foundation process and presenting a proposal to the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for containerd to become a CNCF project. Given the consensus we have been building with the community, we are hopeful to get a positive affirmation from the TOC before CloudNativeCon/KubeCon later this month.  

Over the past 4 years, the adoption of containers with Docker has triggered an unprecedented wave of innovation in our industry: we believe that donating containerd to the CNCF will unlock a whole new phase of innovation and growth across the entire container ecosystem. containerd is designed as an independent component that can be embedded in a higher level system, to provide core container capabilities. Since our December announcement, we have focused efforts on identifying the Continue reading

PII of 33,698,126 Americans leaked online

The personal identifying information (PII)—names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, employers and job titles—for 33,698,126 Americans has been leaked online.The data, a 52.2GB CSV file, came from a commercial corporate database. Security researcher Troy Hunt determined that the breach came from NetProspex, a service provided by Dun & Bradstreet, which ironically was named as a 2017 world’s most ethical company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PII of 33,698,126 Americans leaked online

The personal identifying information (PII)—names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, employers and job titles—for 33,698,126 Americans has been leaked online.The data, a 52.2GB CSV file, came from a commercial corporate database. Security researcher Troy Hunt determined that the breach came from NetProspex, a service provided by Dun & Bradstreet, which ironically was named as a 2017 world’s most ethical company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Redundancy does not imply fault tolerance

It’s a tough life being the developer of a distributed datastore. Thanks to the wonderful work of Kyle Kingsbury (aka, @aphyr) and his efforts on Jepsen.io, awareness of data loss and related issues in the face of network delays and partitions is way higher than it used to be. Under the Jepsen tests, every single system tested other than ZooKeeper exhibited problems of some kind. But many teams are stepping up, commissioning tests, and generally working hard to fix the issues even if they’re not all there yet. —the morning paper

The post Worth Reading: Redundancy does not imply fault tolerance appeared first on 'net work.

Amazon Discounts its Fire Tablet Bundle an Additional $27.98 With This Code – Deal Alert

Through this Saturday, sink the 16GB Fire Tablet bundle's already discounted price to just $59.99 using the code FIREBUNDLE at checkout -- a significant deal considering its typical $107.97 value. The bundle includes the latest 16GB Fire 7" Tablet with special offers ($69.99), Amazon cover ($24.99), and Nupro screen protector ($12.99). Amazon's newest Fire tablet features a rich 7" IPS display and a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor. Integrated Alexa service lets you ask away with a button press. Enjoy millions of movies, TV shows, songs, Kindle e-books, apps and games, and enjoy them uninterrupted with Fire's long lasting 7-hour battery. See this deal on Amazon before it expires by adding to cart and applying FIREBUNDLE at checkout. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP adds new features to Vora and readies a cloud version

SAP has added some new capabilities to SAP Vora, its in-memory distributed computing system based on Apache Spark and Hadoop. Version 1.3 of Vora includes a number of new distributed, in-memory data-processing engines, including ones for time-series data, graph data and schema-less JSON data, that accelerate complex processing. Common uses for the graph engine might be analyzing social graphs or supply chain graphs, said Ken Tsai, SAP's head of product marketing for database and data management. One application that would benefit from the new time-series engine is looking for patterns of electricity consumption in smart metering data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Linux Systemd & Golang Services using Kardianos Service

This week I have done something new, but I found myself dealing with a ‘zero knowledge’ situation or something I like to call ZKS. This is one of those ones where it’s fun, but it also feels a bit stressy as there was enough rope to hang myself with.

That something new is Systemd, which is a Linux operating system thing that manages the initialisation of user things. To speak about this more technically, it is a drop in replacement ‘init’ system that starts services and sets up the user environment. Wikipedia has this to say about it:

Systemd is an init system used in Linux distributions to bootstrap the user space and manage all processes

For those lacking historic knowledge around systemd, it previously many upset devs and administrators, which in turn setup a site called ‘boycottsystemd’ which looks to be offline. They said it flies in the face of doing it the Unix way, which is (to summarise) do one thing and do it well. Systemd is now the default init system for Ubuntu 15x and newer releases. Can’t be that bad…right?

Whilst this is not a complete education around systemd, it’s popular and is reasonably easy to Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 4 ways to contain IT storage creep

In most businesses, data grows rapidly, voraciously consuming storage as it does so and ratcheting up expenses. Sometimes it seems impossible to keep it under control.However, there is a difference between the Blob and storage that puts you in the driver’s seat. Data didn’t arrive on earth courtesy of a meteorite. We create it by ourselves every day. If we produced the problem, we should be able to defend against it and its associated costs. Here are some ways you can improve storage efficiency.1.  Tier your data Wouldn’t it be nice if business unit leaders would come to you and say, “I need a sub-millisecond response time on my reads and writes for this application,” plus inform you of all their other requirements? That would make it easy to determine the IT resources you should assign to an application. The truth, however, is that in many cases, business leaders don’t know what they need. They just want to make sure that the application does not slow down operations in their department.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Desktop Linux the best it’s ever been—and keeps getting better

I can be a pretty pessimistic guy. I’m fairly convinced that the Internet of Things spells certain doom for mankind, and I’ve made a habit of standing in front of large rooms full of people simply to tell them how much I think “Linux sucks.” If you were to call me a Negative Nancy, you wouldn’t be far off.To make matters worse, I’m about to publish three new articles—each of them extremely pessimistic and gloomy—over the next week.  otal “sky is falling, we’re all gonna die” sort of stuff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM Antes Up For An HPC Software Stack

The HPC community is trying to solve the critical compute challenges of next generation high performance computing and ARM considers itself well-positioned to act as a catalyst in this regard. Applications like machine learning and scientific computing are driving demands for orders of magnitude improvements in capacity, capability and efficiency to achieve exascale computing for next generation deployments.

ARM has been taking a co-design approach with the ecosystem from silicon to system design to application development to provide innovative solutions that address this challenge. The recent Allinea acquisition is one example of ARM’s commitment to HPC, but ARM has worked …

ARM Antes Up For An HPC Software Stack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Introducing Zero Round Trip Time Resumption (0-RTT)

Introducing Zero Round Trip Time Resumption (0-RTT)

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a faster and more secure Internet. Over the last several years, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working on a new version of TLS, the protocol that powers the secure web. Last September, Cloudflare was the first service provider to enable people to use this new version of the protocol, TLS 1.3, improving security and performance for millions of customers.

Today we are introducing another performance-enhancing feature: zero round trip time resumption, abbreviated as 0-RTT. About 60% of the connections we see are from people who are visiting a site for the first time or revisiting after an extended period of time. TLS 1.3 speeds up these connections significantly. The remaining 40% of connections are from visitors who have recently visited a site and are resuming a previous connection. For these resumed connections, standard TLS 1.3 is safer but no faster than any previous version of TLS. 0-RTT changes this. It dramatically speeds up resumed connections, leading to a faster and smoother web experience for web sites that you visit regularly. This speed boost is especially noticeable on mobile networks.

We’re happy to announce that 0-RTT is Continue reading

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