My collection of vintage PC cards

Recently, I have been gathering some old hardware at my parents’ house, notably PC extension cards, as they don’t take much room and can be converted to a nice display item. Unfortunately, I was not very concerned about keeping stuff around. Compared to all the hardware I have acquired over the years, only a few pieces remain.

Tseng Labs ET4000AX (1989)​

This SVGA graphics card was installed into a PC powered by a 386SX CPU running at 16 MHz. This was a good card at the time as it was pretty fast. It didn’t feature 2D acceleration, unlike the later ET4000/W32. This version only features 512 KB of RAM. It can display 1024×768 images with 16 colors or 800×600 with 256 colors. It was also compatible with CGA, EGA, VGA, MDA, and Hercules modes. No contemporary games were using the SVGA modes but the higher resolutions were useful with Windows 3.

This card was manufactured directly by Tseng Labs.

Carte Tseng Labs ET4000AX ISA au-dessus de la boîte "Planète Aventure"
Tseng Labs ET4000 AX ISA card

AdLib clone (1992)​

My first sound card was an AdLib. My parents bought it in Canada during the summer holidays in 1992. It uses a Yamaha OPL2 chip to produce sound via FM synthesis. Continue reading

Strong Reactions and Complexity

In the realm of network design—especially in the realm of security—we often react so strongly against a perceived threat, or so quickly to solve a perceived problem, that we fail to look for the tradeoffs. If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough—or, as Dr. Little says, you have to ask what is gained and what is lost, rather than just what is gained. This failure to look at both sides often results in untold amounts of technical debt and complexity being dumped into network designs (and application implementations), causing outages and failures long after these decisions are made.

A 2018 paper on DDoS attacks, A First Joint Look at DoS Attacks and BGP Blackholing in the Wild provides a good example of causing more damage to an attack than the attack itself. Most networks are configured to allow the operator to quickly configure a remote triggered black hole (RTBH) using BGP. Most often, a community is attached to a BGP route that points the next-hop to a local discard route on each eBGP speaker. If used on the route advertising the destination of the attack—the service under attack—the result is the DDoS attack traffic no longer Continue reading

Nominations Now Open for 2021 Internet Society Board of Trustees Elections

The Internet Society Nominations Committee is now inviting nominations for candidates to serve on the Board of Trustees, effective at the start of the Annual General Meeting which is currently scheduled to be held 31 July-1 August 2021.
 
In 2020-2021, Organization Members and the IETF will each select two Trustees, and Chapters will select one Trustee. Following an orientation program, all new Trustees chosen by the IETF and Chapters will begin three-year terms commencing with the board’s Annual General Meeting. With respect to the two Organizational Members to be chosen, the candidate with the highest weighted vote count will be seated for a three-year term, while the candidate with the second highest weighted vote count will serve the final year of a three-year term initially served by a Trustee who resigned from the board in mid-term.
 
The Board of Trustees provides strategic direction, inspiration, and oversight to advance the Internet Society’s mission of preserving the open, globally-connected, trustworthy and secure Internet for everyone. Trustees also currently serve as members of the Internet Society Foundation’s board.
 
I encourage you and all of your community members to identify appropriate candidates for these positions. Further information regarding the positions, as Continue reading

ShiftLeft on Refactoring a Live SaaS Environment

 

This is guest a post by Preetam Jinka, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at ShiftLeft. Originally published here.

ShiftLeft NextGen Static Analysis (NG SAST) is a software-as-a-service static analysis solution that allows developers to scan every pull request for security issues. Earlier this year we released Secrets, Security Insights, and a v4 API. Secrets and Security Insights are two new types of results we extract from code analysis, and the V4 API is a brand new RESTful JSON API with an OpenAPI/Swagger specification that you can use to access all of your results. Read more about these features in our announcement post.

NG SAST was initially designed only for vulnerabilities. In order to implement Secrets and Security Insights, we either had to retrofit these new result types into our existing implementation or significantly refactor our back-end to support their unique characteristics. Even though it would take longer and be more difficult to implement, we decided to do the latter. We rewrote almost all of the storage used for storing code analysis results while maintaining backwards compatibility and without any outages. The analogy is that it’s like changing the engine on an airplane in flight without the passengers noticing.

We could’ve saved Continue reading

Pro and Team Subscriptions Embrace Docker Desktop

About a month ago we talked about how we planned to make Docker Desktop more first class as part of our Pro and Team subscriptions. Today we are pleased to announce that with the latest release of Docker Desktop we are launching support for Docker Desktop for Pro and Team users. This means that customers on Pro plans or team members on Team plans will be able to get support outside of the community support in our Github repository, this will include installation support, issues in running Desktop and of course the existing support for Docker Hub. 

Along with this, we have our first Pro feature available in Docker Desktop! For Pro and Team users who have scanning enabled in Docker Hub, you will be able to see your scan results directly in the Docker Dashboard. 

This is the first step in releasing unique features for Pro and Team users on Docker Desktop.

Along with this we are pleased to announce that in Docker Desktop 2.5 we have the GA release of the docker scan CLI powered by Snyk! To find out more about scanning images locally have a read of Marina’s blog post. 

For customers Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Tech Giants Face Hostile Lawmakers

Getting hit from both sides: Executives from Google, Twitter, and Facebook faced criticism from all sides when testifying in the U.S. Senate recently, the Washington Post reports. Democratic senators told the companies they should do a better job with moderating their sites for fake news and conspiracy theories, while Republicans called on the companies to take a more hands-off role with political speech.

Your money, or else: A wave of ransomware attacks have hit nearly two dozen hospitals and healthcare organizations in recent weeks, Wired.com reports. Even after those attacks, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Health and Human Services warned that more may be coming, with an “increased and imminent cybercrime threat” to hospitals and healthcare providers.

Safer Zooming: Videoconferencing provider Zoom has added encryption to free accounts, although the new protections come with a catch, TechCrunch says. With end-to-end encryption enabled for every user joining the call, some other features won’t be available. Users on encrypted calls won’t be able to use features like cloud recording and live transcription, and they won’t be able to chat one on one. Also, the encryption feature will only work with the Continue reading

Control your content with private Automation Hub

Private Automation Hub is now available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform release 1.2, providing an easier way for our customers to manage their Ansible content. Whether they produce private content, access trusted and supported content from Red Hat or obtain content from third party or other community sources, an internally controlled capability is essential to support the continued growth of automation. As automation becomes critical to managing IT activities, so too becomes the need to have a focal point where collaboration can be encouraged, content shared and trust reinforced. 

Private Automation Hub is a self-hosted Ansible content management system. Organizations can host private hubs on their own infrastructure and manage it themselves. Similar to how Red Hat Satellite enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to manage operating system content, private Automation Hub enables automation teams to manage Ansible automation content.  Private Automation Hub allows curation and distribution of Ansible content as close as possible to Ansible Automation Platform clusters. Private Automation Hub is included in the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription.

Hub blog 1

Ansible content can be broken up into three main categories:

  1. Community content found in Ansible Galaxy
  2. Red Hat certified and supported content Continue reading

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge (part II)

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge, Potharaju et al., PVLDB’20

Last time out we looked at the motivations for a new reference blueprint for large-scale data processing, as embodied by Helios. Today we’re going to dive into the details of Helios itself. As a reminder:

Helios is a distributed, highly-scalable system used at Microsoft for flexible ingestion, indexing, and aggregation of large streams of real-time data that is designed to plug into relationals engines. The system collects close to a quadrillion events indexing approximately 16 trillion search keys per day from hundreds of thousands of machines across tens of data centres around the world.

As an ingestion and indexing system, Helios separates ingestion and indexing and introduces a novel bottoms-up index construction algorithm. It exposes tables and secondary indices for use by relational query engines through standard access path selection mechanisms during query optimisation. As a reference blueprint, Helios’ main feature is the ability to move computation to the edge.

Requirements

Helios is designed to ingest, index, and aggregate large streams of real-time data (tens of petabytes a day). For example, the log data generated by Azure Cosmos. It supports key use cases such as finding Continue reading

What are the Elements of Effective Communication?

On a good day, there are different people around. The way we converse with them and communicate is completely different. There are ways we talk to those we are older than us, those younger than we are, those we respect, those who lose our respect with time, and it goes on and on. This article aims to talk about the elements of effective communication.

Elements of Effective Communication

Elements of Effective Communication includes the following:

1. Listen

Whenever we converse with people and we say something, we are simply speaking knowledge we already possess. But whenever we listen to others, most times we get the chance to absorb and learn something new.

Speaking and listening work together. As you communicate with other people, these roles are completely fluid. The speaker might not be talking the entire time. One of these important elements of communication is for each of us as speakers to listen with attention.

2. Try to Be Clear

These elements of Simplicity and Clarity are also two beans in a pod. But these aspects cannot be used synonymously. What one means by clarity is that you shouldn’t have any doubt about what you’re talking about. Speaking with confidence Continue reading

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge (part II)

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge, Potharaju et al., PVLDB’20

Last time out we looked at the motivations for a new reference blueprint for large-scale data processing, as embodied by Helios. Today we’re going to dive into the details of Helios itself. As a reminder:

Helios is a distributed, highly-scalable system used at Microsoft for flexible ingestion, indexing, and aggregation of large streams of real-time data that is designed to plug into relationals engines. The system collects close to a quadrillion events indexing approximately 16 trillion search keys per day from hundreds of thousands of machines across tens of data centres around the world.

As an ingestion and indexing system, Helios separates ingestion and indexing and introduces a novel bottoms-up index construction algorithm. It exposes tables and secondary indices for use by relational query engines through standard access path selection mechanisms during query optimisation. As a reference blueprint, Helios’ main feature is the ability to move computation to the edge.

Requirements

Helios is designed to ingest, index, and aggregate large streams of real-time data (tens of petabytes a day). For example, the log data generated by Azure Cosmos. It supports key use cases such as finding Continue reading

Running Isso on NixOS in a Docker container

This short article documents how I run Isso, the commenting system used by this blog, inside a Docker container on NixOS, a Linux distribution built on top of Nix. Nix is a declarative package manager for Linux and other Unix systems.

While NixOS 20.09 includes a derivation for Isso, it is unfortunately broken and relies on Python 2. As I am also using a fork of Isso, I have built my own derivation, heavily inspired by the one in master:1

issoPackage = with pkgs.python3Packages; buildPythonPackage rec {
  pname = "isso";
  version = "custom";

  src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    # Use my fork
    owner = "vincentbernat";
    repo = pname;
    rev = "vbe/master";
    sha256 = "0vkkvjcvcjcdzdj73qig32hqgjly8n3ln2djzmhshc04i6g9z07j";
  };

  propagatedBuildInputs = [
    itsdangerous
    jinja2
    misaka
    html5lib
    werkzeug
    bleach
    flask-caching
  ];

  buildInputs = [
    cffi
  ];

  checkInputs = [ nose ];

  checkPhase = ''
    ${python.interpreter} setup.py nosetests
  '';
};

I want to run Isso through Gunicorn. To this effect, I build an environment combining Isso and Gunicorn. Then, I can invoke the latter with "${issoEnv}/bin/gunicorn".

issoEnv = pkgs.python3.buildEnv.override {
    extraLibs = [
      issoPackage
      pkgs.python3Packages. Continue reading
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