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Mastodon – Part 1 – Installing

About this series

I have seen companies achieve great successes in the space of consumer internet and entertainment industry. I’ve been feeling less enthusiastic about the stronghold that these corporations have over my digital presence. I am the first to admit that using “free” services is convenient, but these companies are sometimes taking away my autonomy and exerting control over society. To each their own of course, but for me it’s time to take back a little bit of responsibility for my online social presence, away from centrally hosted services and to privately operated ones.

This series details my findings starting a micro blogging website, which uses a new set of super interesting open interconnect protocols to share media (text, pictures, videos, etc) between producers and their followers, using an open source project called Mastodon.

Introduction

Similar to how blogging is the act of publishing updates to a website, microblogging is the act of publishing small updates to a stream of updates on your profile. You can publish text posts and optionally attach media such as pictures, audio, video, or polls. Mastodon lets you follow friends and discover new ones. It doesn’t do this in a centralized way, however.

Groups Continue reading

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Worth Reading: Resolverless DNS

Geoff Huston published a lengthy article (as always) describing talks from recent OARC meeting, including resolver-less DNS and DNSSEC deployment risks.

Definitely worth reading if you’re at least vaguely interested in the technology that supposedly causes all network-related outages (unless it’s BGP, of course)

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Worth Reading: Resolverless DNS

Geoff Huston published a lengthy article (as always) describing talks from recent OARC meeting, including resolver-less DNS and DNSSEC deployment risks.

Definitely worth reading if you’re at least vaguely interested in the technology that supposedly causes all network-related outages (unless it’s BGP, of course)

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Controversial Reads 111922

So in terms of the daily lived experience of most people reading this, truly autonomous vehicles just aren’t going to happen.

When the federal government gets together with social media giants to censor critics of the government, is that free speech or censorship?

If you own an advanced Android phone, you may find that Google Assistant will interrupt conversations to offer its own “insights”. Google is also pursuing “prebunking” of what it considers “misinformation” with preemptive propaganda campaigns.

The outcomes of such a system are incentives to not be the new person on a team, to not ask questions, to not work on new and unfamiliar efforts, and to not work together at all generally. Those behaviors become embedded in an organization’s DNA, despite whatever is advertised publicly.

Today’s business headlines herald a harsh reality for Big Tech: tumult at Twitter; meltdown at Meta; atrophy at Alphabet; adjustments at Amazon. Layoffs, sliding stock and shrinking valuations are hallmarks of the moment.

To understand the sudden downfall of the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, you have to go back to the beginning.

Twitter was their home. Elon broke into their home. Then he kicked out their friends, and told everyone left to Continue reading

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Weekend Reads 111822

Internet users are being tricked into installing browser extensions that can hijack their web searches.

An offshore company that is trusted by the major web browsers and other tech companies to vouch for the legitimacy of websites has connections to contractors for U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement, according to security researchers, documents and interviews.

Silicon Valley startup Eliyan thinks its technology for enabling chiplet-based designs can best those from semiconductor giants Intel and TSMC by providing better performance, higher efficiency, fewer manufacturing issues, and more supply chain options.

While the number of cleartext passwords is an improvement compared with the 96,361 passwords exposed in 2020 and the more than 100,000 sent in the clear in 2019, there is still room for improvement, says Jessica Bair Oppenheimer, director of technical alliances at Cisco Secure.

Qualcomm and Arm have been engaged in one of those very entertainingly bitter court fist-fights that the industry throws up when friends fall out over money.

Unbound 1.16.0 adds support for Extended DNS Errors (EDEs) as codified in RFC 8914.

I suspect this reflects a significant change in the economics of the sector. For the last 20 years, Silicon Valley has had the Continue reading

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Worth Reading: Another Hugo-Based Blog

Bruno Wollmann migrated his blog post to Hugo/GitHub/CloudFlare (the exact toolchain I’m using for one of my personal web sites) and described his choices and improved user- and author experience.

As I keep telling you, always make sure you own your content. There’s absolutely no reason to publish stuff you spent hours researching and creating on legacy platforms like WordPress, third-party walled gardens like LinkedIn, or “free services” obsessed with gathering visitors’ personal data like Medium.

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Worth Reading: Another Hugo-Based Blog

Bruno Wollmann migrated his blog post to Hugo/GitHub/CloudFlare (the exact toolchain I’m using for one of my personal web sites) and described his choices and improved user- and author experience.

As I keep telling you, always make sure you own your content. There’s absolutely no reason to publish stuff you spent hours researching and creating on legacy platforms like WordPress, third-party walled gardens like LinkedIn, or “free services” obsessed with gathering visitors' personal data like Medium.

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Troubleshooting EVPN with Arista EOS (Control Plane Edition)

“It’s all fun and games until you can’t ping your default gateway.”

While EVPN/VXLAN brings a number of benefits when compared to a more traditional Core/Aggregation/Access layer style network with only VLANs and SVIs, it is different enough that you’ll need to learn some new troubleshooting techniques. It’s not all that different than what you’ve probably done before, but it is different enough to warrant a blog post.

This article is on how to troubleshoot EVPN/VXLAN on Arista EOS switches, and the command line commands will reflect that. However, as EVPN/VXLAN are a collection of IETF standards, the overall technique will translate to any EVPN/VXLAN platform.

The scenario this article is going to explore is endpoint to endpoint connectivity, though it can also be easily modified for endpoint to network connectivity. It doesn’t matter if the host is on the same VXLAN segment or a different one.

The primary strategy will be to verify the control plane. EVPN/VXLAN has a control plane, a data plane, an overlay and an underlay. Generally, I’ve found that most issues occur on the control plane. The control plane process looks like this:

• MAC address is learned on the ingress leaf VLAN
• MAC learning Continue reading

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ICYMI: Developer Week 2022 announcements

Developer Week 2022 has come to a close. Over the last week we’ve shared with you 31 posts on what you can build on Cloudflare and our vision and roadmap on where we’re headed. We shared product announcements, customer and partner stories, and provided technical deep dives. In case you missed any of the posts here’s a handy recap.

Product and feature announcements

Announcement	Summary
Welcome to the Supercloud (and Developer Week 2022)	Our vision of the cloud -- a model of cloud computing that promises to make developers highly productive at scaling from one to Internet-scale in the most flexible, efficient, and economical way.
Build applications of any size on Cloudflare with the Queues open beta	Build performant and resilient distributed applications with Queues. Available to all developers with a paid Workers plan.
Migrate from S3 easily with the R2 Super Slurper	A tool to easily and efficiently move objects from your existing storage provider to R2.
Get started with Cloudflare Workers with ready-made templates	See what’s possible with Workers and get building faster with these starter templates.
Reduce origin load, save on cloud egress fees, and maximize cache hits with Cache Reserve	Cache Reserve is graduating to open Continue reading

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Dell expands data-protection product line

Dell Technologies has announced new products and services for data protection as part of its security portfolio.Active data protection is often treated as something of an afterthought, especially compared to disaster recovery. Yet it's certainly a problem for companies. According to Dell’s recent Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) research, organizations are experiencing higher levels of disasters than in previous years, many of them man-made. In the past year, cyberattacks accounted for 48% of all disasters, up from 37% in 2021, and are the leading cause of data disruption.One of the major stumbling blocks in deploying data-protection capabilities is the complexity of the rollout. Specialized expertise is often required, and products from multiple vendors are often involved. Even the hyperscalers are challenged to provide multicloud data-protection services.To read this article in full, please click here

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Dell expands data-protection product line

Dell Technologies has announced new products and services for data protection as part of its security portfolio.Active data protection is often treated as something of an afterthought, especially compared to disaster recovery. Yet it's certainly a problem for companies. According to Dell’s recent Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) research, organizations are experiencing higher levels of disasters than in previous years, many of them man-made. In the past year, cyberattacks accounted for 48% of all disasters, up from 37% in 2021, and are the leading cause of data disruption.One of the major stumbling blocks in deploying data-protection capabilities is the complexity of the rollout. Specialized expertise is often required, and products from multiple vendors are often involved. Even the hyperscalers are challenged to provide multicloud data-protection services.To read this article in full, please click here

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Dell expands data-protection product line

Dell Technologies has announced new products and services for data protection as part of its security portfolio.Active data protection is often treated as something of an afterthought, especially compared to disaster recovery. Yet it's certainly a problem for companies. According to Dell’s recent Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) research, organizations are experiencing higher levels of disasters than in previous years, many of them man-made. In the past year, cyberattacks accounted for 48% of all disasters, up from 37% in 2021, and are the leading cause of data disruption.One of the major stumbling blocks in deploying data-protection capabilities is the complexity of the rollout. Specialized expertise is often required, and products from multiple vendors are often involved. Even the hyperscalers are challenged to provide multicloud data-protection services.To read this article in full, please click here

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Heavy Networking 656: Embedding Zero Trust Into Applications

On today's Heavy Networking we look at the idea of embedding zero trust into applications. The way we do cyber security these days has failed in significant ways. What if we could extend the AAA or RBAC model to all applications? Better yet, what if we take the RBAC model, make authentication more robust than username & password, assess endpoint security posture constantly, and evaluate each request individually up at layer 7 for all applications? Guest Galeal Zino has opinions on what embedded zero trust looks like. We discuss.

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Heavy Networking 656: Embedding Zero Trust Into Applications

On today's Heavy Networking we look at the idea of embedding zero trust into applications. The way we do cyber security these days has failed in significant ways. What if we could extend the AAA or RBAC model to all applications? Better yet, what if we take the RBAC model, make authentication more robust than username & password, assess endpoint security posture constantly, and evaluate each request individually up at layer 7 for all applications? Guest Galeal Zino has opinions on what embedded zero trust looks like. We discuss.

The post Heavy Networking 656: Embedding Zero Trust Into Applications appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Riding CXL Memory Up In A Down Economy

The jittery economy hasn’t been kind to most semiconductor companies, even those like AMD and Nvidia that are growing in the datacenter. …

Riding CXL Memory Up In A Down Economy was written by Dylan Martin at The Next Platform.

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How to Launch a Green Computing Initiative That Really Makes a Difference

A growing number of IT organizations are deploying green computing initiatives. Here's how to ensure sure that your project will actually meet its goals.

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Send Cloudflare Workers logs to a destination of your choice with Workers Trace Events Logpush

When writing code, you can only move as fast as you can debug.

Our goal at Cloudflare is to give our developers the tools to deploy applications faster than ever before. This means giving you tools to do everything from initializing your Workers project to having visibility into your application successfully serving production traffic.

Last year we introduced wrangler tail, letting you access a live stream of Workers logs to help pinpoint errors to debug your applications. Workers Trace Events Logpush (or just Workers Logpush for short) extends this functionality – you can use it to send Workers logs to an object storage destination or analytics platform of your choice.

Workers Logpush is now available to everyone on the Workers Paid plan! Read on to learn how to get started and about pricing information.

Move fast and don’t break things

With the rise of platforms like Cloudflare Workers over containers and VMs, it now takes just minutes to deploy applications. But, when building an application, any tech stack that you choose comes with its own set of trade-offs.

As a developer, choosing Workers means you don't need to worry about any of the underlying architecture. You just write code, Continue reading

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Twilio Segment Edge SDK powered by Cloudflare Workers

The Cloudflare team was so excited to hear how Twilio Segment solved problems they encountered with tracking first-party data and personalization using Cloudflare Workers. We are happy to have guest bloggers Pooya Jaferian and Tasha Alfano from Twilio Segment to share their story.

Introduction

Twilio Segment is a customer data platform that collects, transforms, and activates first-party customer data. Segment helps developers collect user interactions within an application, form a unified customer record, and sync it to hundreds of different marketing, product, analytics, and data warehouse integrations.

There are two “unsolved” problem with app instrumentation today:

Problem #1: Many important events that you want to track happen on the “wild-west” of the client, but collecting those events via the client can lead to low data quality, as events are dropped due to user configurations, browser limitations, and network connectivity issues.

Problem #2: Applications need access to real-time (<50ms) user state to personalize the application experience based on advanced computations and segmentation logic that must be executed on the cloud.

The Segment Edge SDK – built on Cloudflare Workers – solves for both. With Segment Edge SDK, developers can collect high-quality first-party data. Developers can also use Segment Edge SDK to Continue reading

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Network performance update: Developer Week 2022

Cloudflare is building the fastest network in the world. But we don’t want you to just take our word for it. To demonstrate it, we are continuously testing ourselves versus everyone else to make sure we’re the fastest. Since it’s Developer Week, we wanted to provide an update on how our Workers products perform against the competition, as well as our overall network performance.

Earlier this year, we compared ourselves to Fastly’s Compute@Edge and overall we were faster. This time, not only did we repeat the tests, but we also added AWS Lambda@Edge to help show how we stack up against more and more competitors. The summary: we offer the fastest developer platform on the market. Let’s talk about how we build our network to help make you faster, and then we’ll get into how that translates to our developer platform.

Latest update on network performance

We have two updates on data: a general network performance update, and then data on how Workers compares with Compute@Edge and Lambda@Edge.

To quantify global network performance, we have to get enough data from around the world, across all manner of different networks, comparing ourselves with other providers. We used Real User Measurements (RUM) Continue reading

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Improving Workers TypeScript support: accuracy, ergonomics and interoperability

TypeScript makes it easy for developers to write code that doesn’t crash, by catching type errors before your program runs. We want developers to take advantage of this tooling, which is why one year ago, we built a system to automatically generate TypeScript types for the Cloudflare Workers runtime. This enabled developers to see code completions in their IDEs for Workers APIs, and to type check code before deploying. Each week, a new version of the types would be published, reflecting the most recent changes.

Over the past year, we’ve received lots of feedback from customers and internal teams on how we could improve our types. With the switch to the Bazel build system in preparation for open-sourcing the runtime, we saw an opportunity to rebuild our types to be more accurate, easier to use, and simpler to generate. Today, we’re excited to announce the next major release of @cloudflare/workers-types with a bunch of new features, and the open-sourcing of the fully-rewritten automatic generation scripts.

How to use TypeScript with Workers

Setting up TypeScript in Workers is easy! If you’re just getting started with Workers, install Node.js, then run npx wrangler init in your terminal to Continue reading