The Platform Advantage of Amazon, Facebook, and Google

Where’s the mag­ic? [Amazon] The databas­ing and stream­ing and sync­ing in­fras­truc­ture we build on is pret­ty slick, but that’s not the se­cret. The man­age­ment tools are nifty, too; but that’s not it ei­ther. It’s the trib­al knowl­edge: How to build Cloud in­fras­truc­ture that works in a fal­li­ble, messy, un­sta­ble world.

Tim Bray, Senior Principal Engineer at Amazon, in Cloud Eventing

Ben Thompson makes the case in Apple's Organizational Crossroads and in a recent episode of Exponent that Apple has a services problem. With the reaching of peak iPhone Apple naturally wants to turn to services as a way to expand revenues. The problem is Apple has a mixed history of delivering services at scale and Ben suggests that the strength of Apple, its functional organization, is a weakness when it comes to making services. The same skill set you need to create great devices is not the same skill set you need to create great services. He suggests: “Apple’s services need to be separated from the devices that are core to the company, and the managers of those services need to be held accountable via dollars and cents.”

If Apple has this problem they are not the only Continue reading

Worth Reading: Gone in six characters

Today, we are releasing our study, 18 months in the making, of what URL shortening means for the security and privacy of cloud services. We did not perform a comprehensive scan of all short URLs (as our analysis shows, such a scan would have been within the capabilities of a more powerful adversary), but we sampled enough to discover interesting information and draw important conclusions. -Freedom to Tinker

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Worth Reading: Gone in six characters

Today, we are releasing our study, 18 months in the making, of what URL shortening means for the security and privacy of cloud services. We did not perform a comprehensive scan of all short URLs (as our analysis shows, such a scan would have been within the capabilities of a more powerful adversary), but we sampled enough to discover interesting information and draw important conclusions. -Freedom to Tinker

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The post Worth Reading: Gone in six characters appeared first on 'net work.

Google Calendar takes the headache out of scheduling work meetings

Google wants to take some of the pain out of scheduling work meetings with a new feature the company launched for its Calendar product on Wednesday. The new "Find a Time" feature in the Google Calendar Android app helps users pick out a time that works for everyone invited to a meeting without requiring them to spend ages going back and forth over email. Here's how it works: when a user sets up a meeting and adds people to the event, Find a Time will pick out a list of suggested times, along with who will be able to attend. Those suggestions will be built not only on the current state of an invitee's calendar, but also their historical scheduling trends. Once the organizer has picked a time, Google Calendar will send out invitations to everyone. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security Recruiter Directory

Looking for a qualified candidate or new job? CSO's security recruiter directory is your one-stop shop. The recruiters listed below can help you find your next Chief Security Officer (CSO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), or VP of Security and fill hard-to-hire positions in risk management, security operations, security engineering, compliance, application security, penetration testers, and computer forensics, among many others. If you're a security recruiting firm, we want your information! Our goal is to provide the most complete recruiter resource available, but to do that we need your assistance. Please send the name, contact info and a few sentences about your company and its specialties to Amy Bennett ([email protected]).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Man who hijacked HBO’s satellite signal 30 years ago would face far different fate today

On April 27, 1986, a Florida man with workplace access to a satellite transmission dish – and a financial beef with HBO -- pulled off the kind of audacious stunt that were it to happen today would likely land him in prison for a long, long time. From a 2011 Buzzblog post: John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO's decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Man who hijacked HBO’s satellite signal 30 years ago would face far different fate today

On April 27, 1986, a Florida man with workplace access to a satellite transmission dish – and a financial beef with HBO -- pulled off the kind of audacious stunt that were it to happen today would likely land him in prison for a long, long time.From a 2011 Buzzblog post: John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO's decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Man who hijacked HBO’s satellite signal 30 years ago would face far different fate today

On April 27, 1986, a Florida man with workplace access to a satellite transmission dish – and a financial beef with HBO -- pulled off the kind of audacious stunt that were it to happen today would likely land him in prison for a long, long time.From a 2011 Buzzblog post: John MacDougall, then 25, was the lonely pamphleteer of lore, only instead of paper and ink he was armed with a 30-foot transmission dish, an electronic keyboard, and a burning objection to HBO's decision in 1986 to begin scrambling its satellite signal and charging viewers $12.95 a month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are inter-container communications the Achilles’ heel of latency-sensitive cloud apps?

Containerization exploits the idea that cloud applications should be developed on a microservices architecture and be decoupled from their underlying infrastructure.That is not a new concept; software componentization dates back to Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the client-server paradigm. De-coupling applications from their underlying infrastructure aligns with today’s vision that efficient data centers should provide an on-demand resource pool that offers instances of various software-definable resource types spawned as needed. As demand for an application grows, requiring additional resources to support it, the services could span over multiple servers (a cluster) distributed within a data center or across a globally distributed infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Building the simplest Go static analysis tool

Go native vendoring (a.k.a. GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT) allows you to freeze dependencies by putting them in a vendor folder in your project. The compiler will then look there before searching the GOPATH.

The only annoyance compared to using a per-project GOPATH, which is what we used to do, is that you might forget to vendor a package that you have in your GOPATH. The program will build for you, but it won't for anyone else. Back to the WFM times!

I decided I wanted something, a tool, to check that all my (non-stdlib) dependencies were vendored.

At first I thought of using go list, which Dave Cheney appropriately called a swiss army knife, but while it can show the entire recursive dependency tree (format .Deps), there's no way to know from the templating engine if a dependency is in the standard library.

We could just pass each output back into go list to check for .Standard, but I thought this would be a good occasion to build a very simple static analysis tool. Go's simplicity and libraries make it a very easy task, as you will see.

First, loading the program

We use golang.org/x/tools/go/loader to Continue reading

Introducing the Docker Captains

We receive many requests from the Docker community for help identifying experts who can answer questions on different forums like Stack Overflow, share their knowledge in blog posts and online tutorials, and present at industry events like conferences and meetups. Today, … Continued

IDG Contributor Network: KubeCon donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a Linux Foundation project and organization dedicated to advancing the development of cloud-native applications and services, announced it accepted another "project" under its governance—KubeCon, the Kubernetes community conference. The donation of KubeCon to the CNCF is unique in that this isn't a software project, but a community conference, which will benefit from the "well-oiled (community conference) machine" that the Linux Foundation provides, according to Joseph Jacks of Kismatic, the original organizer of KubeCon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ISPs see big ingress by mobile operators for internet, study finds

A massive drop in the numbers of those using desktop computers is shown among the datasets released by the Commerce Department last month.That data, based on July 2015 figures, is just one facet of the extraordinary data dump.More juicy stuff includes that well over half of households (60 percent) who use the internet at home use "mobile internet service" while in the home.The government numbers come from a massive, 53,000-household Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau last year. The large size of the sample means the numbers are representative of the entire population, the department says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyberespionage group abuses Windows hotpatching mechanism for malware stealth

A cyberespionage group active in Asia has been leveraging a Windows feature known as hotpatching in order to better hide its malware from security products.The group, which malware researchers from Microsoft call Platinum, has been active since at least 2009 and has primarily targeted government organizations, defense institutes, intelligence agencies and telecommunications providers in South and Southeast Asia, especially from Malaysia, Indonesia and China.So far the group has used spear phishing -- fraudulent emails that target specific organizations or individuals -- as its main attack method, often combining it with exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities that install custom malware. It places great importance on remaining undetected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyberespionage group abuses Windows hotpatching mechanism for malware stealth

A cyberespionage group active in Asia has been leveraging a Windows feature known as hotpatching in order to better hide its malware from security products.The group, which malware researchers from Microsoft call Platinum, has been active since at least 2009 and has primarily targeted government organizations, defense institutes, intelligence agencies and telecommunications providers in South and Southeast Asia, especially from Malaysia, Indonesia and China.So far the group has used spear phishing -- fraudulent emails that target specific organizations or individuals -- as its main attack method, often combining it with exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities that install custom malware. It places great importance on remaining undetected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A mobile-first strategy improves employee productivity, study finds

A silent killer is running through companies today that most business leaders don’t know exists—employee disengagement.According to a recent Gallup survey, each disengaged employee costs an organization about $3,400 for every $10,000 in annual salary. Another interesting data point is that actively disengaged employees cost the American economy somewhere between $450 billion and $550 billion in productivity annually. This shows that creating more engaged employees needs to be at the top of every business leader’s priority list.Now that the problem is understood, how does an organization create a more engaged workforce? The answer is to become mobile-first. A new global study by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), sponsored by Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, discovered a measurable link between a mobile-first work environment and an increase in employee engagement. This should be no surprise, as the majority of digital officers I have interviewed have correlated mobility to customer engagement, so extending that paradigm to employees is logical.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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