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Rightscorp Bleeds Another Million, Borrows $200K From Customer BMG

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-bleeds-another-million-borrows-200k-from-customer-bmg-170819/

Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is one of the many companies trying to turn Internet piracy into profit. The company has a somewhat novel approach but has difficulty balancing the books.

Essentially, Rightscorp operates like other so-called copyright-trolling operations, in that it monitors alleged offenders on BitTorrent networks, tracks them to their ISPs, then attempts to extract a cash settlement. Rightscorp does this by sending DMCA notices with settlement agreements attached, in the hope that at-this-point-anonymous Internet users break cover in panic. This can lead to a $20 or $30 ‘fine’ or in some cases dozens of multiples of that.

But despite settling hundreds of thousands of these cases, profit has thus far proven elusive, with the company hemorrhaging millions in losses. The company has just filed its results for the first half of 2017 and they contain more bad news.

In the six months ended June 2017, revenues obtained from copyright settlements reached just $138,514, that’s 35% down on the $214,326 generated in the same period last year. However, the company did manage to book $148,332 in “consulting revenue” in the first half of this year, a business area that generated no revenue in 2016.

Overall then, total revenue for the six month period was $286,846 – up from $214,326 last year. While that’s a better picture in its own right, Rightscorp has a lot of costs attached to its business.

After paying out $69,257 to copyright holders and absorbing $1,190,696 in general and administrative costs, among other things, the company’s total operating expenses topped out at $1,296,127 for the first six months of the year.

To make a long story short, the company made a net loss of $1,068,422, which was more than the $995,265 loss it made last year and despite improved revenues. The company ended June with just $1,725 in cash.

“These factors raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern within one year after the date that the financial statements are issued,” the company’s latest statement reads.

This hanging-by-a-thread narrative has followed Rightscorp for the past few years but there’s information in the latest accounts which indicates how bad things were at the start of the year.

In January 2016, Rightscorp and several copyright holders, including Hollywood studio Warner Bros, agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over intimidating robo-calls that were made to alleged infringers. The defendants agreed to set aside $450,000 to cover the costs, and it appears that Rightscorp was liable for at least $200,000 of that.

Rightscorp hasn’t exactly been flush with cash, so it was interesting to read that its main consumer piracy settlement client, music publisher BMG, actually stepped in to pay off the class-action settlement.

“At December 31, 2016, the Company had accrued $200,000 related to the settlement of a class action complaint. On January 7, 2017, BMG Rights Management (US) LLC (“BMG”) advanced the Company $200,000, which was used to pay off the settlement. The advance from BMG is to be applied to future billings from the Company to BMG for consulting services,” Rightscorp’s filing reads.

With Rightscorp’s future BMG revenue now being gobbled up by what appears to be loan repayments, it becomes difficult to see how the anti-piracy outfit can make enough money to pay off the $200,000 debt. However, its filing notes that on July 21, 2017, the company issued “an aggregate of 10,000,000 shares of common stock to an investor for a purchase price of $200,000.” While that amount matches the BMG debt, the filing doesn’t reveal who the investor is.

The filing also reveals that on July 31, Rightscorp entered into two agreements to provide services “to a holder of multiple copyrights.” The copyright holder isn’t named, but the deal reveals that it’s in Rightscorp’s best interests to get immediate payment from people to whom it sends cash settlement demands.

“[Rightscorp] will receive 50% of all gross proceeds of any settlement revenue received by the Client from pre-lawsuit ‘advisory notices,’ and 37.5% of all gross proceeds received by the Client from ‘final warning’ notices sent immediately prior to a lawsuit,” the filing notes.

Also of interest is that Rightscorp has offered not to work with any of the copyright holders’ direct competitors, providing certain thresholds are met – $10,000 revenue in the first month to $100,000 after 12 months. But there’s more to the deal.

Rightscorp will also provide a number of services to this client including detecting and verifying copyright works on P2P networks, providing information about infringers, plus reporting, litigation support, and copyright protection advisory services.

For this, Rightscorp will earn $10,000 for the first three months, rising to $85,000 per month after 16 months, valuable revenue for a company fighting for its life.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Announcement: IPS code

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/08/announcement-ips-code.html

So after 20 years, IBM is killing off my BlackICE code created in April 1998. So it’s time that I rewrite it.

BlackICE was the first “inline” intrusion-detection system, aka. an “intrusion prevention system” or IPS. ISS purchased my company in 2001 and replaced their RealSecure engine with it, and later renamed it Proventia. Then IBM purchased ISS in 2006. Now, they are formally canceling the project and moving customers onto Cisco’s products, which are based on Snort.

So now is a good time to write a replacement. The reason is that BlackICE worked fundamentally differently than Snort, using protocol analysis rather than pattern-matching. In this way, it worked more like Bro than Snort. The biggest benefit of protocol-analysis is speed, making it many times faster than Snort. The second benefit is better detection ability, as I describe in this post on Heartbleed.

So my plan is to create a new project. I’ll be checking in the starter bits into GitHub starting a couple weeks from now. I need to figure out a new name for the project, so I don’t have to rip off a name from William Gibson like I did last time :).

Some notes:

  • Yes, it’ll be GNU open source. I’m a capitalist, so I’ll earn money like snort/nmap dual-licensing it, charging companies who don’t want to open-source their addons. All capitalists GNU license their code.
  • C, not Rust. Sorry, I’m going for extreme scalability. We’ll re-visit this decision later when looking at building protocol parsers.
  • It’ll be 95% compatible with Snort signatures. Their language definition leaves so much ambiguous it’ll be hard to be 100% compatible.
  • It’ll support Snort output as well, though really, Snort’s events suck.
  • Protocol parsers in Lua, so you can use it as a replacement for Bro, writing parsers to extract data you are interested in.
  • Protocol state machine parsers in C, like you see in my Masscan project for X.509.
  • First version IDS only. These days, “inline” means also being able to MitM the SSL stack, so I’m gong to have to think harder on that.
  • Mutli-core worker threads off PF_RING/DPDK/netmap receive queues. Should handle 10gbps, tracking 10 million concurrent connections, with quad-core CPU.
So if you want to contribute to the project, here’s what I need:
  • Requirements from people who work daily with IDS/IPS today. I need you to write up what your products do well that you really like. I need to you write up what they suck at that needs to be fixed. These need to be in some detail.
  • Testing environment to play with. This means having a small server plugged into a real-world link running at a minimum of several gigabits-per-second available for the next year. I’ll sign NDAs related to the data I might see on the network.
  • Coders. I’ll be doing the basic architecture, but protocol parsers, output plugins, etc. will need work. Code will be in C and Lua for the near term. Unfortunately, since I’m going to dual-license, I’ll need waivers before accepting pull requests.
Anyway, follow me on Twitter @erratarob if you want to contribute.

Porn Producer Says He’ll Prove That AMC TV Exec is a BitTorrent Pirate

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/porn-producer-says-hell-prove-that-amc-tv-exec-is-a-bittorrent-pirate-170818/

When people are found sharing copyrighted pornographic content online in the United States, there’s always a chance that an angry studio will attempt to track down the perpertrator in pursuit of a cash settlement.

That’s what adult studio Flava Works did recently, after finding its content being shared without permission on a number of gay-focused torrent sites. It’s now clear that their target was Marc Juris, President & General Manager of AMC-owned WE tv. Until this week, however, that information was secret.

As detailed in our report yesterday, Flava Works contacted Juris with an offer of around $97,000 to settle the case before trial. And, crucially, before Juris was publicly named in a lawsuit. If Juris decided not to pay, that amount would increase significantly, Flava Works CEO Phillip Bleicher told him at the time.

Not only did Juris not pay, he actually went on the offensive, filing a ‘John Doe’ complaint in a California district court which accused Flava Works of extortion and blackmail. It’s possible that Juris felt that this would cause Flava Works to back off but in fact, it had quite the opposite effect.

In a complaint filed this week in an Illinois district court, Flava Works named Juris and accused him of a broad range of copyright infringement offenses.

The complaint alleges that Juris was a signed-up member of Flava Works’ network of websites, from where he downloaded pornographic content as his subscription allowed. However, it’s claimed that Juris then uploaded this material elsewhere, in breach of copyright law.

“Defendant downloaded copyrighted videos of Flava Works as part of his paid memberships and, in violation of the terms and conditions of the paid sites, posted and distributed the aforesaid videos on other websites, including websites with peer to peer sharing and torrents technology,” the complaint reads.

“As a result of Defendant’ conduct, third parties were able to download the copyrighted videos, without permission of Flava Works.”

In addition to demanding injunctions against Juris, Flava Works asks the court for a judgment in its favor amounting to a cool $1.2m, more than twelve times the amount it was initially prepared to settle for. It’s a huge amount, but according to CEO Phillip Bleicher, it’s what his company is owed, despite Juris being a former customer.

“Juris was a member of various Flava Works websites at various times dating back to 2006. He is no longer a member and his login info has been blocked by us to prevent him from re-joining,” Bleicher informs TF.

“We allow full downloads, although each download a person performs, it tags the video with a hidden code that identifies who the user was that downloaded it and their IP info and date / time.”

We asked Bleicher how he can be sure that the content downloaded from Flava Works and re-uploaded elsewhere was actually uploaded by Juris. Fine details weren’t provided but he’s insistent that the company’s evidence holds up.

“We identified him directly, this was done by cross referencing all his IP logins with Flava Works, his email addresses he used and his usernames. We can confirm that he is/was a member of Gay-Torrents.org and Gayheaven.org. We also believe (we will find out in discovery) that he is a member of a Russian file sharing site called GayTorrent.Ru,” he says.

While the technicalities of who downloaded and shared what will be something for the court to decide, there’s still Juris’ allegations that Bleicher used extortion-like practices to get him to settle and used his relative fame against him. Bleicher says that’s not how things played out.

“[Juris] hired an attorney and they agreed to settle out of court. But then we saw him still accessing the file sharing sites (one site shows a user’s last login) and we were waiting on the settlement agreement to be drafted up by his attorney,” he explains.

“When he kept pushing the date of when we would see an agreement back we gave him a final deadline and said that after this date we would sue [him] and with all lawsuits – we make a press release.”

Bleicher says at this point Juris replaced his legal team and hired lawyer Mark Geragos, who Bleicher says tried to “bully” him, warning him of potential criminal offenses.

“Your threats in the last couple months to ‘expose’ Mr. Juris knowing he is a high profile individual, i.e., today you threatened to issue a press release, to induce him into wiring you close to $100,000 is outright extortion and subject to criminal prosecution,” Geragos wrote.

“I suggest you direct your attention to various statutes which specifically criminalize your conduct in the various jurisdictions where you have threatened suit.”

Interestingly, Geragos then went on to suggest that the lawsuit may ultimately backfire, since going public might affect Flava Works’ reputation in the gay market.

“With respect to Mr. Juris, your actions have been nothing but extortion and we reject your attempts and will vigorously pursue all available remedies against you,” Geragos’ email reads.

“We intend to use the platform you have provided to raise awareness in the LGBTQ community of this new form of digital extortion that you promote.”

But Bleicher, it seems, is up for a fight.

“Marc knows what he did and enjoyed downloading our videos and sharing them and those of videos of other studios, but now he has been caught,” he told the lawyer.

“This is the kind of case I would like to take all the way to trial, win or lose. It shows
people that want to steal our copyrighted videos that we aggressively protect our intellectual property.”

But to the tune of $1.2m? Apparently so.

“We could get up to $150,000 per infringement – we have solid proof of eight full videos – not to mention we have caught [Juris] downloading many other studios’ videos too – I think – but not sure – the number was over 75,” Bleicher told TF.

It’s quite rare for this kind of dispute to play out in public, especially considering Juris’ profile and occupation. Only time will tell if this will ultimately end in a settlement, but Bleicher and Juris seemed determined at this stage to stand by their ground and fight this out in court.

Complaint (pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Unfixable Automobile Computer Security Vulnerability

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/unfixable_autom.html

There is an unpatchable vulnerability that affects most modern cars. It’s buried in the Controller Area Network (CAN):

Researchers say this flaw is not a vulnerability in the classic meaning of the word. This is because the flaw is more of a CAN standard design choice that makes it unpatchable.

Patching the issue means changing how the CAN standard works at its lowest levels. Researchers say car manufacturers can only mitigate the vulnerability via specific network countermeasures, but cannot eliminate it entirely.

Details on how the attack works are here:

The CAN messages, including errors, are called “frames.” Our attack focuses on how CAN handles errors. Errors arise when a device reads values that do not correspond to the original expected value on a frame. When a device detects such an event, it writes an error message onto the CAN bus in order to “recall” the errant frame and notify the other devices to entirely ignore the recalled frame. This mishap is very common and is usually due to natural causes, a transient malfunction, or simply by too many systems and modules trying to send frames through the CAN at the same time.

If a device sends out too many errors, then­ — as CAN standards dictate — ­it goes into a so-called Bus Off state, where it is cut off from the CAN and prevented from reading and/or writing any data onto the CAN. This feature is helpful in isolating clearly malfunctioning devices and stops them from triggering the other modules/systems on the CAN.

This is the exact feature that our attack abuses. Our attack triggers this particular feature by inducing enough errors such that a targeted device or system on the CAN is made to go into the Bus Off state, and thus rendered inert/inoperable. This, in turn, can drastically affect the car’s performance to the point that it becomes dangerous and even fatal, especially when essential systems like the airbag system or the antilock braking system are deactivated. All it takes is a specially-crafted attack device, introduced to the car’s CAN through local access, and the reuse of frames already circulating in the CAN rather than injecting new ones (as previous attacks in this manner have done).

Slashdot thread.

Court Orders Aussie ISPs to Block Dozens of Pirate Sites

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-aussie-isps-to-block-dozens-of-pirate-sites-170818/

Rather than taking site operators to court, copyright holders increasingly demand that Internet providers should block access to ‘pirate’ domains.

As a result, courts all around the world have ordered ISPs to block subscriber access to various pirate sites.

This is also happening in Australia where the first blockades were issued late last year. In December, the Federal Court ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay and several other sites, which happened soon after.

However, as is often the case with website blocking, one order is not enough as there are still plenty of pirate sites and proxies readily available. So, several rightsholders including movie studio Village Roadshow and local broadcaster Foxtel went back to court.

Today the Federal Court ruled on two applications that cover 59 pirate sites in total, including many popular torrent and streaming portals.

The first order was issued by Justice John Nicholas, who directed several Internet providers including IINet, Telstra, and TPG to block access to several pirate sites. The request came from Village Roadshow, which was backed by several major Hollywood studios.

The order directs the ISPs to stop passing on traffic to 41 torrent and streaming platforms including Demonoid, RARBG, EZTV, YTS, Gomovies, and Fmovies. The full list of blocked domains is even longer, as it also covers several proxies.

“The infringement or facilitation of infringement by the Online Locations is flagrant and reflect a blatant disregard for the rights of copyright owners,” the order reads.

“By way of illustration, one of the Online Locations is accessible via the domain name ‘istole.it’ and it and many others include notices encouraging users to implement technology to frustrate any legal action that might be taken by copyright owners.”

In a separate order handed down by Federal Court Judge Stephen Burley, another 17 sites are ordered blocked following a request from Foxtel. This includes popular pirate sites such as 1337x, Torlock, Putlocker, YesMovies, Vumoo, and LosMovies.

The second order also includes a wide variety of alternative locations, including proxies, which brings the total number of targeted domain names to more than 160.

As highlighted by SHM, the orders coincide with the launch of a new anti-piracy campaign dubbed “The Price of Piracy,” which is organized by Creative Content Australia. Lori Flekser, Executive director of the non-profit organization, believes that the blockades will help to significantly deter piracy.

“Not only is there decreasing traffic to pirate sites but there is a subsequent increase in traffic to legal sites,” she said.

At the same time, she warns people not to visit proxy and mirror sites, as these could be dangerous. This message is also repeated by her organization’s campaign, which warns that pirate sites can be filled with ransomware, spyware, trojans, viruses, bots, rootkits and worms.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Artists Protest RIAA for Trampling on Their Moral Rights

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/artists-protest-riaa-for-trampling-on-their-moral-rights-170817/

Most people who create something like to be credited for their work. Whether you make a video, song, photo, or blog post, it feels ‘right’ to receive recognition.

The right to be credited is part of the so-called “moral rights,” which are baked into many copyright laws around the world, adopted at the international level through the Berne Convention.

However, in the United States, this is not the case. The US didn’t sign the Berne Convention right away and opted out from the “moral rights” provision when it eventually joined.

Now that the U.S. Copyright Office is looking into ways to improve current copyright law, the issue has been brought to the forefront again. The Government recently completed a consultation to hear the thoughts of various stakeholders, which resulted in several noteworthy contributions.

As it turns out, the RIAA doesn’t want artists, such as songwriters, to have moral rights. Crediting everyone who’s involved in making a song can be confusing and complicated the group notes, arguing against the addition of a new statutory attribution right.

The RIAA highlights that it would be costly for streaming services to credit everyone involved in the creative process. In addition, they stress that the likes of Spotify might not have the screen real estate to attribute all creators, without ruining the user experience with long lists of names.

“If a statutory attribution right suddenly required these services to provide attribution to others involved in the creative process, that would presumably require costly changes to their user interfaces and push them up against the size limitations of their display screens,” the RIAA writes.

These comments don’t sit well with songwriters and other creators around the world, who feel that the RIAA is putting trivial metadata issues above their rights. In a protest against the RIAA’s stance, several songwriter groups around the world are now joining hands to show their discontent.

The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC), Songwriters Guild of America (SGA), Music Creators North America (MCNA), Council of Music Creators (CMC), and several others, have sent a strongly worded open letter to the RIAA accusing the record label group of betrayal.

“The RIAA’s argument prioritizes the inconvenience of dealing with accurate metadata over the principle of the protection of the rights of the people upon whose work the music business is built,” the letter reads.

“More fundamentally, RIAA’s comments are taken by many in the music creator community as a betrayal of our joint commitment to expand opportunities for creators. Unfortunately, this divergence of views gives our common adversaries an opportunity to divide our community.”

The groups warn that without proper attribution, songwriters and other contributors risk not receiving any compensation for the work they do. This puts the RIAA in the same camp as those who want to weaken copyright in general, the letter notes.

“Without accurate metadata, contributors to a work risk not getting paid. That’s a moral dilemma intrinsically linked to the issue of moral rights — and on this issue the RIAA has now aligned itself with those who seek to enfeeble IP rights.”

The RIAA’s stance goes even further than that of Creative Commons and the “copyleft,” according to the groups.

“Even anti-copyright groups like Creative Commons understand the importance of attribution. If the RIAA is seen as less artist-friendly than Creative Commons, the copyleft and all who seek to undervalue our work will benefit.”

While Creative Commons has more flexible views on copyright than the average entertainment industry company, describing it as “anti-copyright” goes a bit far. Still, the groups send a strong message to the RIAA, that the organization’s stance on moral rights is abhorrent.

The songwriter and artist groups stress that the RIAA might shoot itself in the foot, as it’s distancing the people it needs to further its interests around the globe. As for the metadata problems, they believe that the streaming platforms and other services will come up with a proper solution eventually.

“We believe there’s no doubt music platforms will come up with innovative and effective ways to give credit. Certainly there’s no need to set expectations at rock bottom as the RIAA did in their comments,” the groups write in their letter.

The groups urge the RIAA to revise its views and start collaborating with creators to address specific implementation problems. The record labels and creators should stand together as one, instead of going against each other.

It will be interesting to see if and how the RIAA responds to the critique.

While the US Government has yet to decide on the moral rights issue, in other countries the attribution right is taken very seriously. Just recently, a District Court in Isreal awarded a local music composer $223,000 in statutory damages because his name was removed from the credits of an online kids animation series.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Raspbian Stretch has arrived for Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Simon Long original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspbian-stretch/

It’s now just under two years since we released the Jessie version of Raspbian. Those of you who know that Debian run their releases on a two-year cycle will therefore have been wondering when we might be releasing the next version, codenamed Stretch. Well, wonder no longer – Raspbian Stretch is available for download today!

Disney Pixar Toy Story Raspbian Stretch Raspberry Pi

Debian releases are named after characters from Disney Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy. In case, like me, you were wondering: Stretch is a purple octopus from Toy Story 3. Hi, Stretch!

The differences between Jessie and Stretch are mostly under-the-hood optimisations, and you really shouldn’t notice any differences in day-to-day use of the desktop and applications. (If you’re really interested, the technical details are in the Debian release notes here.)

However, we’ve made a few small changes to our image that are worth mentioning.

New versions of applications

Version 3.0.1 of Sonic Pi is included – this includes a lot of new functionality in terms of input/output. See the Sonic Pi release notes for more details of exactly what has changed.

Raspbian Stretch Raspberry Pi

The Chromium web browser has been updated to version 60, the most recent stable release. This offers improved memory usage and more efficient code, so you may notice it running slightly faster than before. The visual appearance has also been changed very slightly.

Raspbian Stretch Raspberry Pi

Bluetooth audio

In Jessie, we used PulseAudio to provide support for audio over Bluetooth, but integrating this with the ALSA architecture used for other audio sources was clumsy. For Stretch, we are using the bluez-alsa package to make Bluetooth audio work with ALSA itself. PulseAudio is therefore no longer installed by default, and the volume plugin on the taskbar will no longer start and stop PulseAudio. From a user point of view, everything should still work exactly as before – the only change is that if you still wish to use PulseAudio for some other reason, you will need to install it yourself.

Better handling of other usernames

The default user account in Raspbian has always been called ‘pi’, and a lot of the desktop applications assume that this is the current user. This has been changed for Stretch, so now applications like Raspberry Pi Configuration no longer assume this to be the case. This means, for example, that the option to automatically log in as the ‘pi’ user will now automatically log in with the name of the current user instead.

One other change is how sudo is handled. By default, the ‘pi’ user is set up with passwordless sudo access. We are no longer assuming this to be the case, so now desktop applications which require sudo access will prompt for the password rather than simply failing to work if a user without passwordless sudo uses them.

Scratch 2 SenseHAT extension

In the last Jessie release, we added the offline version of Scratch 2. While Scratch 2 itself hasn’t changed for this release, we have added a new extension to allow the SenseHAT to be used with Scratch 2. Look under ‘More Blocks’ and choose ‘Add an Extension’ to load the extension.

This works with either a physical SenseHAT or with the SenseHAT emulator. If a SenseHAT is connected, the extension will control that in preference to the emulator.

Raspbian Stretch Raspberry Pi

Fix for Broadpwn exploit

A couple of months ago, a vulnerability was discovered in the firmware of the BCM43xx wireless chipset which is used on Pi 3 and Pi Zero W; this potentially allows an attacker to take over the chip and execute code on it. The Stretch release includes a patch that addresses this vulnerability.

There is also the usual set of minor bug fixes and UI improvements – I’ll leave you to spot those!

How to get Raspbian Stretch

As this is a major version upgrade, we recommend using a clean image; these are available from the Downloads page on our site as usual.

Upgrading an existing Jessie image is possible, but is not guaranteed to work in every circumstance. If you wish to try upgrading a Jessie image to Stretch, we strongly recommend taking a backup first – we can accept no responsibility for loss of data from a failed update.

To upgrade, first modify the files /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/raspi.list. In both files, change every occurrence of the word ‘jessie’ to ‘stretch’. (Both files will require sudo to edit.)

Then open a terminal window and execute

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Answer ‘yes’ to any prompts. There may also be a point at which the install pauses while a page of information is shown on the screen – hold the ‘space’ key to scroll through all of this and then hit ‘q’ to continue.

Finally, if you are not using PulseAudio for anything other than Bluetooth audio, remove it from the image by entering

sudo apt-get -y purge pulseaudio*

The post Raspbian Stretch has arrived for Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Harmonize, Query, and Visualize Data from Various Providers using AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight

Post Syndicated from Ben Snively original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/harmonize-query-and-visualize-data-from-various-providers-using-aws-glue-amazon-athena-and-amazon-quicksight/

Have you ever been faced with many different data sources in different formats that need to be analyzed together to drive value and insights?  You need to be able to query, analyze, process, and visualize all your data as one canonical dataset, regardless of the data source or original format.

In this post, I walk through using AWS Glue to create a query optimized, canonical dataset on Amazon S3 from three different datasets and formats. Then, I use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to query against that data quickly and easily.

AWS Glue overview

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for query and analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and a crawler discovers your data, classifies it, and stores the associated metadata (such as table definitions) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. After it’s cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL. AWS Glue generates the ETL code for data transformation, and loads the transformed data into a target data store for analytics.

The AWS Glue ETL engine generates Python code that is entirely customizable, reusable, and portable. You can edit the code using your favorite IDE or notebook and share it with others using GitHub. After your ETL job is ready, you can schedule it to run on the AWS Glue fully managed, scale-out Spark environment, using its flexible scheduler with dependency resolution, job monitoring, and alerting.

AWS Glue is serverless. It automatically provisions the environment needed to complete the job, and customers pay only for the compute resources consumed while running ETL jobs. With AWS Glue, data can be available for analytics in minutes.

Walkthrough

During this post, I step through an example using the New York City Taxi Records dataset. I focus on one month of data, but you could easily do this for the entire eight years of data. At the time of this post, AWS Glue is available in US-East-1 (N. Virginia).

As you crawl the unknown dataset, you discover that the data is in different formats, depending on the type of taxi. You then convert the data to a canonical form, start to analyze it, and build a set of visualizations… all without launching a single server.

Discover the data

To analyze all the taxi rides for January 2016, you start with a set of data in S3. First, create a database for this project within AWS Glue. A database is a set of associated table definitions, organized into a logical group. In Athena, database names are all lowercase, no matter what you type.

Next, add a new crawler and have it infer the schemas, structure, and other properties of the data.

  1. Under Crawlers, choose Add crawler.
  2. For Name, type “NYCityTaxiCrawler”.
  3. Choose an IAM role that AWS Glue can use for the crawler. For more information, see the AWS Glue Developer Guide.
  4. For Data store, type S3.
  5. For Crawl data in, choose Specified path in another account.
  6. For Include path, type “s3://serverless-analytics/glue-blog”.
  7. For Add Another data store, choose No.
  8. For Frequency, choose On demand. This allows you to customize when the crawler runs.
  9. Configure the crawler output database and prefix:
    1. For Database, select the database created earlier, “nycitytaxianalysis”.
    2. For Prefix added to tables (optional), type “blog_”.
    3. Choose Finish and Run it now.

The crawler runs and indicates that it found three tables.

If you look under Tables, you can see the three new tables that were created under the database “nycitytaxianalysis”.

The crawler used the built-in classifiers and identified the tables as CSV, inferred the columns/data types, and collected a set of properties for each table. If you look in each of those table definitions, you see the number of rows for each dataset found and that the columns don’t match between tables. As an example, bringing up the blog_yellow table, you can see the yellow dataset for January 2017 with 8.7 million rows, the location on S3, and the various columns found.

Optimize queries and get data into a canonical form

Create an ETL job to move this data into a query-optimized form. In a future post, I’ll cover how to partition the query-optimized data. You convert the data into a column format, changing the storage type to Parquet, and writing the data to a bucket that you own.

  1. Create a new ETL job and name it NYCityTaxiYellow.
    1. Select an IAM role that has permissions to write to a new S3 location in a bucket that you own.
    2. Specify a location for the script and tmp space on S3.
  2. Choose the blog_yellow table as a data source.
  3. Specify a new location (a new prefix location without any existing objects) to store the results.
  4. In the transform, rename the pickup and dropoff dates to be generic fields. The raw data actually lists these fields differently and you should use a common name.  To do this, choose the target column name and retype the new field name.

    Also, change the data types to be time stamps rather than strings. The following table outlines the updates.

    Old Name Target Name Target Data Type
    tpep_pickup_datetime pickup_date timestamp
    tpep_dropoff_datetime dropoff_date timestamp
  5. Choose Next and Finish.

In this case, AWS Glue creates a script. You could also start with a blank script or provide your own.

Because AWS Glue uses Apache Spark behind the scenes, you can easily switch from an AWS Glue DynamicFrame to a Spark DataFrame and do advanced operations within Apache Spark.  Just as easily, you can switch back and continue to use the transforms and tables from the catalog.

To show this, convert to a DataFrame and add a new field column indicating the type of taxi. Make the following custom modifications in PySpark.

Add the following header:

from pyspark.sql.functions import lit
from awsglue.dynamicframe import DynamicFrame

Find the last call before the the line that start with the datasink.  This is the dynamic frame that is being used to write out the data.

Let’s now convert that to a DataFrame.  Please replace the <DYNAMIC_FRAME_NAME> with the name generated in the script.

##----------------------------------
#convert to a Spark DataFrame...
customDF = <DYNAMIC_FRAME_NAME>.toDF()
 
#add a new column for "type"
customDF = customDF.withColumn("type", lit('yellow'))
 
# Convert back to a DynamicFrame for further processing.
customDynamicFrame = DynamicFrame.fromDF(customDF, glueContext, "customDF_df")
##----------------------------------

In the last datasink call, change the dynamic frame to point to the new custom dynamic frame created from the Spark DataFrame:

datasink4 = glueContext.write_dynamic_frame.from_options(frame = customDynamicFrame, connection_type = "s3", connection_options = {"path": "s3://<YOURBUCKET/ AND PREFIX/"}, format = "parquet", transformation_ctx = "datasink4")

Save and run the ETL.

 

To use AWS Glue with Athena, you must upgrade your Athena data catalog to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Without the upgrade, tables and partitions created by AWS Glue cannot be queried with Athena. As of August 14, 2017, the AWS Glue Data Catalog is only available in US-East-1 (N. Virginia). Start the upgrade in the Athena console. For more information, see Integration with AWS Glue in the Amazon Athena User Guide.

Next, we’ll go into Athena and create a table there for the new data format.  This shows how you can interact with the data catalog either through Glue or the Athena.

  • Go into the Athena Web Console
  • Select the nycitytaxianalysis database
  • Run the following create statement:
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS nycitytaxianalysis.CanonicalData (
  VendorID INT,
  pickup_datetime TIMESTAMP,
  dropoff_datetime TIMESTAMP,
  passenger_count BIGINT,
  trip_distance DOUBLE,
  pickup_longitude DOUBLE,
  pickup_latitude DOUBLE,
  RatecodeID BIGINT,
  store_and_fwd_flag STRING,
  dropoff_longitude DOUBLE,
  dropoff_latitude DOUBLE,
  payment_type INT,
  fare_amount DOUBLE,
  extra DOUBLE,
  mta_tax DOUBLE,
  tip_amount DOUBLE,
  tolls_amount DOUBLE,
  improvement_surcharge DOUBLE,
  total_amount DOUBLE,
  type STRING
)
STORED AS PARQUET
LOCATION 's3://<YOUR_ETL_TARGET_SCRIPT_LOCATION>'
TBLPROPERTIES ('classification'='parquet')

Note: The table properties are important for Glue ETL to know the destination format.  More details can be found here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/glue-athena.html#creating-tables-using-ate-for-aws-glue-etl-jobs

Within the Glue Data Catalog, select the new table that you created through Athena under Actions, select “View data”.


If you do a query on the count per type of taxi, you notice that there is only “yellow” taxi data in the canonical location.  Convert “green” and “fhv” data:

SELECT type, count(*) FROM <OUTPUT_TABLE_NAME> group by type

In the AWS Glue console, create a new ETL job named “NYCityTaxiGreen”. Choose blog_green as the source and the new canonical location as the target. Choose the new pickup_date and dropoff_date fields for the target field types for the date variables, as shown below.

In the script, insert the following two lines at the end of the top imports:

from pyspark.sql.functions import lit
from awsglue.dynamicframe import DynamicFrame

Find the last call before the the line that start with the datasink.  This is the dynamic frame that is being used to write out the data.

Let’s now convert that to a DataFrame.  Please replace the <DYNAMIC_FRAME_NAME> with the name generated in the script.

Type this line before the last sink calls:
##----------------------------------
#convert to a Spark DataFrame...
customDF = <DYNAMIC_FRAME_NAME>.toDF()
 
#add a new column for "type"
customDF = customDF.withColumn("type", lit('green'))
 
# Convert back to a DynamicFrame for further processing.
customDynamicFrame = DynamicFrame.fromDF(customDF, glueContext, "customDF_df")

In the last datasink call, change the dynamic frame to point to the new custom dynamic frame created from the Spark DataFrame:

datasink4 = glueContext.write_dynamic_frame.from_catalog(frame = customDynamicFrame, database = "nycitytaxianalysis", table_name = "glue_blog", transformation_ctx = "datasink4")

Notice that it matches the last line in the commands that you pasted earlier. After the ETL job finishes, you can require the count per type through Athena and see the sizes:

SELECT type, count(*) FROM <OUTPUT_TABLE_NAME> group by type

What you have done is taken two datasets that contained taxi data in different formats and converted them into a single, query-optimized format. That format can easily be consumed by various analytical tools, including Athena, EMR, and Redshift Spectrum. You’ve done all of this without launching a single server.

You have one more dataset to convert, so create a new ETL job for that. Name the job “NYCityTaxiFHV”.  This dataset is limited as it only has three fields, one of which you are converting. Choose “–” (dash) for the dispatcher and location, and map the pickup date to the canonical field.

In the script, insert the following two lines at the end of the top imports:

from pyspark.sql.functions import lit
from awsglue.dynamicframe import DynamicFrame

Type the following line before the last sink calls:

##----------------------------------
#convert to a Spark DataFrame...
customDF = resolvechoice3.toDF()

#add a new column for "type"
customDF = customDF.withColumn("type", lit('fhv'))

# Convert back to a DynamicFrame for further processing.
customDynamicFrame = DynamicFrame.fromDF(customDF, glueContext, "customDF_df")

In the last datasink call, change the dynamic frame to point to the new custom dynamic frame created from the Spark DataFrame:

datasink4 = glueContext.write_dynamic_frame.from_catalog(frame = customDynamicFrame, database = "nycitytaxianalysis", table_name = "glue_blog", transformation_ctx = "datasink4")

After the third ETL job completes, you can query the single dataset, in a query-optimized form on S3:

SELECT type, count(*) FROM <OUTPUT_TABLE_NAME> group by type

Query across the data with Athena

Here’s a query:

SELECT min(trip_distance) as minDistance,
         max(trip_distance) as maxDistance,
         min(total_amount) as minTotal,
         max(total_amount) as maxTotal
FROM <OUTPUT_TABLE_NAME>

Within a second or two, you can quickly see the ranges for these values.

You can see some outliers in the total amount and distances that are = 0.  In the next query, don’t include those when calculating things like average cost per mile:

SELECT type,
         avg(trip_distance) AS avgDist,
         avg(total_amount/trip_distance) AS avgCostPerMile
FROM <OUTPUT_TABLE_NAME>
WHERE trip_distance > 0
        AND total_amount > 0
GROUP BY  type

Interesting note: you aren’t seeing FHV broken out yet, because that dataset didn’t have a mapping to these fields. Here’s a query that’s a little more complicated, to calculate a 99th percentile:

SELECT TYPE, 
       avg(trip_distance) avgDistance, 
       avg(total_amount/trip_distance) avgCostPerMile, 
       avg(total_amount) avgCost,
       approx_percentile(total_amount, .99) percentile99
FROM <OUTPUT_TABLE_NAME> 
WHERE trip_distance > 0 and total_amount > 0
GROUP BY TYPE

Visualizing the data in QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight is a data visualization service you can use to analyze the data that you just combined. For more detailed instructions, see the Amazon QuickSight User Guide.

  1. Create a new Athena data source, if you haven’t created one yet.
  2. Create a new dataset for NY taxi data, and point it to the canonical taxi data.
  3. Choose Edit/Preview data.
  4. Add a new calculated field named HourOfDay.

  1. Choose Save and Visualize.

You can now visualize this dataset and query through Athena the canonical dataset on S3 that has been converted by AWS Glue. Selecting HourOfDay allows you to see how many taxi rides there are based on the hour of the day. This is a calculated field that is being derived by the time stamp in the raw dataset.

You can also deselect that and choose type to see the total counts again by type.

Now choose the pickup_date field in addition to the type field and notice that the plot type automatically changed. Because time is being used, it’s showing a time chart defaulting to the year. Choose a day interval instead.

Expand the x axis to zoom out. You can clearly see a large drop in all rides on January 23, 2016.

Summary

In the post, you went from data investigation to analyzing and visualizing a canonical dataset, without starting a single server. You started by crawling a dataset you didn’t know anything about and the crawler told you the structure, columns, and counts of records.

From there, you saw that all three datasets were in different formats, but represented the same thing: NY City Taxi rides. You then converted them into a canonical (or normalized) form that is easily queried through Athena and QuickSight, in addition to a wide number of different tools not covered in this post.
If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Additional Reading

Learn how to harmonize, search, and analyze loosely coupled datasets on AWS.

 

About the Author

Ben Snively is a Public Sector Specialist Solutions Architect. He works with government, non-profit and education customers on big data and analytical projects, helping them build solutions using AWS. In his spare time he adds IoT sensors throughout his house and runs analytics on it.

 

 

 

Showtime Seeks Injunction to Stop Mayweather v McGregor Piracy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/showtime-seeks-injunction-to-stop-mayweather-v-mcgregor-piracy-170816/

It’s the fight that few believed would become reality but on August 26, at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Floyd Mayweather Jr. will duke it out with UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor.

Despite being labeled a freak show by boxing purists, it is set to become the biggest combat sports event of all time. Mayweather, undefeated in his professional career, will face brash Irishman McGregor, who has gained a reputation for accepting fights with anyone – as long as there’s a lot of money involved. Big money is definitely the theme of the Mayweather bout.

Dubbed “The Money Fight”, some predict it could pull in a billion dollars, with McGregor pocketing $100m and Mayweather almost certainly more. Many of those lucky enough to gain entrance on the night will have spent thousands on their tickets but for the millions watching around the world….iiiiiiiit’s Showtimmme….with hefty PPV prices attached.

Of course, not everyone will be handing over $89.95 to $99.99 to watch the event officially on Showtime. Large numbers will turn to the many hundreds of websites set to stream the fight for free online, which has the potential to reduce revenues for all involved. With that in mind, Showtime Networks has filed a lawsuit in California which attempts to preemptively tackle this piracy threat.

The suit targets a number of John Does said to be behind a network of dozens of sites planning to stream the fight online for free. Defendant 1, using the alias “Kopa Mayweather”, is allegedly the operator of LiveStreamHDQ, a site that Showtime has grappled with previously.

“Plaintiff has had extensive experience trying to prevent live streaming websites from engaging in the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of Plaintiff’s copyrighted works in the past,” the lawsuit reads.

“In addition to bringing litigation, this experience includes sending cease and desist demands to LiveStreamHDQ in response to its unauthorized live streaming of the record-breaking fight between Floyd Mayweather, Jr. and Manny Pacquiao.”

Showtime says that LiveStreamHDQ is involved in the operations of at least 41 other sites that have been set up to specifically target people seeking to watch the fight without paying. Each site uses a .US ccTLD domain name.

Sample of the sites targeted by the lawsuit

Showtime informs the court that the registrant email and IP addresses of the domains overlap, which provides further proof that they’re all part of the same operation. The TV network also highlights various statements on the sites in question which demonstrate intent to show the fight without permission, including the highly dubious “Watch From Here Mayweather vs Mcgregor Live with 4k Display.”

In addition, the lawsuit is highly critical of efforts by the sites’ operator(s) to stuff the pages with fight-related keywords in order to draw in as much search engine traffic as they can.

“Plaintiff alleges that Defendants have engaged in such keyword stuffing as a form of search engine optimization in an effort to attract as much web traffic as possible in the form of Internet users searching for a way to access a live stream of the Fight,” it reads.

While site operators are expected to engage in such behavior, Showtime says that these SEO efforts have been particularly successful, obtaining high-ranking positions in major search engines for the would-be pirate sites.

For instance, Showtime says that a Google search for “Mayweather McGregor Live” results in four of the target websites appearing in the first 100 results, i.e the first 10 pages. Interestingly, however, to get that result searchers would need to put the search in quotes as shown above, since a plain search fails to turn anything up in hundreds of results.

At this stage, the important thing to note is that none of the sites are currently carrying links to the fight, because the fight is yet to happen. Nevertheless, Showtime is convinced that come fight night, all of the target websites will be populated with pirate links, accessible for free or after paying a fee. This needs to be stopped, it argues.

“Defendants’ anticipated unlawful distribution will impair the marketability and profitability of the Coverage, and interfere with Plaintiff’s own authorized distribution of the Coverage, because Defendants will provide consumers with an opportunity to view the Coverage in its entirety for free, rather than paying for the Coverage provided through Plaintiff’s authorized channels.

“This is especially true where, as here, the work at issue is live coverage of a one-time live sporting event whose outcome is unknown,” the network writes.

Showtime informs the court that it made efforts to contact the sites in question but had just a single response from an individual who claimed to be sports blogger who doesn’t offer streaming services. The undertone is one of disbelief.

In closing, Showtime demands a temporary restraining order, preliminary injunction, and permanent injunction, prohibiting the defendants from making the fight available in any way, and/or “forming new entities” in order to circumvent any subsequent court order. Compensation for suspected damages is also requested.

Showtime previously applied for and obtained a similar injunction to cover the (hugely disappointing) Mayweather v Pacquiao fight in 2015. In that case, websites were ordered to be taken down on the day before the fight.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

What’s the Diff: Programs, Processes, and Threads

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/whats-the-diff-programs-processes-and-threads/

let's talk about Threads

How often have you heard the term threading in relation to a computer program, but you weren’t exactly sure what it meant? How about processes? You likely understand that a thread is somehow closely related to a program and a process, but if you’re not a computer science major, maybe that’s as far as your understanding goes.

Knowing what these terms mean is absolutely essential if you are a programmer, but an understanding of them also can be useful to the average computer user. Being able to look at and understand the Activity Monitor on the Macintosh, the Task Manager on Windows, or Top on Linux can help you troubleshoot which programs are causing problems on your computer, or whether you might need to install more memory to make your system run better.

Let’s take a few minutes to delve into the world of computer programs and sort out what these terms mean. We’ll simplify and generalize some of the ideas, but the general concepts we cover should help clarify the difference between the terms.

Programs

First of all, you probably are aware that a program is the code that is stored on your computer that is intended to fulfill a certain task. There are many types of programs, including programs that help your computer function and are part of the operating system, and other programs that fulfill a particular job. These task-specific programs are also known as “applications,” and can include programs such as word processing, web browsing, or emailing a message to another computer.

Program

Programs are typically stored on disk or in non-volatile memory in a form that can be executed by your computer. Prior to that, they are created using a programming language such as C, Lisp, Pascal, or many others using instructions that involve logic, data and device manipulation, recurrence, and user interaction. The end result is a text file of code that is compiled into binary form (1’s and 0’s) in order to run on the computer. Another type of program is called “interpreted,” and instead of being compiled in advance in order to run, is interpreted into executable code at the time it is run. Some common, typically interpreted programming languages, are Python, PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby.

The end result is the same, however, in that when a program is run, it is loaded into memory in binary form. The computer’s CPU (Central Processing Unit) understands only binary instructions, so that’s the form the program needs to be in when it runs.

Perhaps you’ve heard the programmer’s joke, “There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”

Binary is the native language of computers because an electrical circuit at its basic level has two states, on or off, represented by a one or a zero. In the common numbering system we use every day, base 10, each digit position can be anything from 0 to 9. In base 2 (or binary), each position is either a 0 or a 1. (In a future blog post we might cover quantum computing, which goes beyond the concept of just 1’s and 0’s in computing.)

Decimal—Base 10 Binary—Base 2
0 0000
1 0001
2 0010
3 0011
4 0100
5 0101
6 0110
7 0111
8 1000
9 1001

How Processes Work

The program has been loaded into the computer’s memory in binary form. Now what?

An executing program needs more than just the binary code that tells the computer what to do. The program needs memory and various operating system resources that it needs in order to run. A “process” is what we call a program that has been loaded into memory along with all the resources it needs to operate. The “operating system” is the brains behind allocating all these resources, and comes in different flavors such as macOS, iOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Android. The OS handles the task of managing the resources needed to turn your program into a running process.

Some essential resources every process needs are registers, a program counter, and a stack. The “registers” are data holding places that are part of the computer processor (CPU). A register may hold an instruction, a storage address, or other kind of data needed by the process. The “program counter,” also called the “instruction pointer,” keeps track of where a computer is in its program sequence. The “stack” is a data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program and is used as scratch space for the process. It is distinguished from dynamically allocated memory for the process that is known as “the heap.”

diagram of how processes work

There can be multiple instances of a single program, and each instance of that running program is a process. Each process has a separate memory address space, which means that a process runs independently and is isolated from other processes. It cannot directly access shared data in other processes. Switching from one process to another requires some time (relatively) for saving and loading registers, memory maps, and other resources.

This independence of processes is valuable because the operating system tries its best to isolate processes so that a problem with one process doesn’t corrupt or cause havoc with another process. You’ve undoubtedly run into the situation in which one application on your computer freezes or has a problem and you’ve been able to quit that program without affecting others.

How Threads Work

So, are you still with us? We finally made it to threads!

A thread is the unit of execution within a process. A process can have anywhere from just one thread to many threads.

Process vs. Thread

diagram of threads in a process over time

When a process starts, it is assigned memory and resources. Each thread in the process shares that memory and resources. In single-threaded processes, the process contains one thread. The process and the thread are one and the same, and there is only one thing happening.

In multithreaded processes, the process contains more than one thread, and the process is accomplishing a number of things at the same time (technically, it’s almost at the same time—read more on that in the “What about Parallelism and Concurrency?” section below).

diagram of single and multi-treaded process

We talked about the two types of memory available to a process or a thread, the stack and the heap. It is important to distinguish between these two types of process memory because each thread will have its own stack, but all the threads in a process will share the heap.

Threads are sometimes called lightweight processes because they have their own stack but can access shared data. Because threads share the same address space as the process and other threads within the process, the operational cost of communication between the threads is low, which is an advantage. The disadvantage is that a problem with one thread in a process will certainly affect other threads and the viability of the process itself.

Threads vs. Processes

So to review:

  1. The program starts out as a text file of programming code,
  2. The program is compiled or interpreted into binary form,
  3. The program is loaded into memory,
  4. The program becomes one or more running processes.
  5. Processes are typically independent of each other,
  6. While threads exist as the subset of a process.
  7. Threads can communicate with each other more easily than processes can,
  8. But threads are more vulnerable to problems caused by other threads in the same process.

Processes vs. Threads — Advantages and Disadvantages

Process Thread
Processes are heavyweight operations Threads are lighter weight operations
Each process has its own memory space Threads use the memory of the process they belong to
Inter-process communication is slow as processes have different memory addresses Inter-thread communication can be faster than inter-process communication because threads of the same process share memory with the process they belong to
Context switching between processes is more expensive Context switching between threads of the same process is less expensive
Processes don’t share memory with other processes Threads share memory with other threads of the same process

What about Concurrency and Parallelism?

A question you might ask is whether processes or threads can run at the same time. The answer is: it depends. On a system with multiple processors or CPU cores (as is common with modern processors), multiple processes or threads can be executed in parallel. On a single processor, though, it is not possible to have processes or threads truly executing at the same time. In this case, the CPU is shared among running processes or threads using a process scheduling algorithm that divides the CPU’s time and yields the illusion of parallel execution. The time given to each task is called a “time slice.” The switching back and forth between tasks happens so fast it is usually not perceptible. The terms parallelism (true operation at the same time) and concurrency (simulated operation at the same time), distinguish between the two type of real or approximate simultaneous operation.

diagram of concurrency and parallelism

Why Choose Process over Thread, or Thread over Process?

So, how would a programmer choose between a process and a thread when creating a program in which she wants to execute multiple tasks at the same time? We’ve covered some of the differences above, but let’s look at a real world example with a program that many of us use, Google Chrome.

When Google was designing the Chrome browser, they needed to decide how to handle the many different tasks that needed computer, communications, and network resources at the same time. Each browser window or tab communicates with multiple servers on the internet to retrieve text, programs, graphics, audio, video, and other resources, and renders that data for display and interaction with the user. In addition, the browser can open many windows, each with many tasks.

Google had to decide how to handle that separation of tasks. They chose to run each browser window in Chrome as a separate process rather than a thread or many threads, as is common with other browsers. Doing that brought Google a number of benefits. Running each window as a process protects the overall application from bugs and glitches in the rendering engine and restricts access from each rendering engine process to others and to the rest of the system. Isolating JavaScript programs in a process prevents them from running away with too much CPU time and memory, and making the entire browser non-responsive.

Google made the calculated trade-off with a multi-processing design as starting a new process for each browser window has a higher fixed cost in memory and resources than using threads. They were betting that their approach would end up with less memory bloat overall.

Using processes instead of threads provides better memory usage when memory gets low. An inactive window is treated as a lower priority by the operating system and becomes eligible to be swapped to disk when memory is needed for other processes, helping to keep the user-visible windows more responsive. If the windows were threaded, it would be more difficult to separate the used and unused memory as cleanly, wasting both memory and performance.

You can read more about Google’s design decisions on Google’s Chromium Blog or on the Chrome Introduction Comic.

The screen capture below shows the Google Chrome processes running on a MacBook Air with many tabs open. Some Chrome processes are using a fair amount of CPU time and resources, and some are using very little. You can see that each process also has many threads running as well.

activity monitor of Google Chrome

The Activity Monitor or Task Manager on your system can be a valuable ally in helping fine-tune your computer or troubleshooting problems. If your computer is running slowly, or a program or browser window isn’t responding for a while, you can check its status using the system monitor. Sometimes you’ll see a process marked as “Not Responding.” Try quitting that process and see if your system runs better. If an application is a memory hog, you might consider choosing a different application that will accomplish the same task.

Windows Task Manager view

Made it This Far?

We hope this Tron-like dive into the fascinating world of computer programs, processes, and threads has helped clear up some questions you might have had.

The next time your computer is running slowly or an application is acting up, you know your assignment. Fire up the system monitor and take a look under the hood to see what’s going on. You’re in charge now.

We love to hear from you

Are you still confused? Have questions? If so, please let us know in the comments. And feel free to suggest topics for future blog posts.

The post What’s the Diff: Programs, Processes, and Threads appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

AWS Partner Webinar Series – August 2017

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-partner-webinar-series-august-2017/

We love bringing our customers helpful information and we have another cool series we are excited to tell you about. The AWS Partner Webinar Series is a selection of live and recorded presentations covering a broad range of topics at varying technical levels and scale. A little different from our AWS Online TechTalks, each AWS Partner Webinar is hosted by an AWS solutions architect and an AWS Competency Partner who has successfully helped customers evaluate and implement the tools, techniques, and technologies of AWS.

Check out this month’s webinars and let us know which ones you found the most helpful! All schedule times are shown in the Pacific Time (PDT) time zone.

Security Webinars

Sophos
Seeing More Clearly: ATLO Software Secures Online Training Solutions for Correctional Facilities with SophosUTM on AWS Link.
August 17th, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

F5
F5 on AWS: How MailControl Improved their Application Visibility and Security
August 23, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Big Data Webinars

Tableau, Matillion, 47Lining, NorthBay
Unlock Insights and Reduce Costs by Modernizing Your Data Warehouse on AWS
August 22, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Storage Webinars

StorReduce
How Globe Telecom does Primary Backups via StorReduce to the AWS Cloud
August 29, 2017 | 8:00 AM PDT

Commvault
Moving Forward Faster: How Monash University Automated Data Movement for 3500 Virtual Machines to AWS with Commvault
August 29, 2017 | 1:00 PM PDT

Dell EMC
Moving Forward Faster: Protect Your Workloads on AWS With Increased Scale and Performance
August 30, 2017 | 11:00 AM PDT

Druva
How Hatco Protects Against Ransomware with Druva on AWS
September 13, 2017 | 10:00 AM PDT

Spinrilla Refuses to Share Its Source Code With the RIAA

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/spinrilla-refuses-to-share-its-source-code-with-the-riaa-170815/

Earlier this year, a group of well-known labels targeted Spinrilla, a popular hip-hop mixtape site and accompanying app with millions of users.

The coalition of record labels including Sony Music, Warner Bros. Records, and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit accusing the service of alleged copyright infringements.

Both sides have started the discovery process and recently asked the court to rule on several unresolved matters. The parties begin with their statements of facts, clearly from opposite angles.

The RIAA remains confident that the mixtape site is ripping off music creators and wants its operators to be held accountable.

“Since Spinrilla launched, Defendants have facilitated millions of unauthorized downloads and streams of thousands of Plaintiffs’ sound recordings without Plaintiffs’ permission,” RIAA writes, complaining about “rampant” infringement on the site.

However, Spinrilla itself believes that the claims are overblown. The company points out that the RIAA’s complaint only lists a tiny fraction of all the songs uploaded by its users. These somehow slipped through its Audible Magic anti-piracy filter.

Where the RIAA paints a picture of rampant copyright infringement, the mixtape site stresses that the record labels are complaining about less than 0.001% of all the tracks they ever published.

“From 2013 to the present, Spinrilla users have uploaded about 1 million songs to Spinrilla’s servers and Spinrilla published about 850,000 of those. Plaintiffs are complaining that 210 of those songs are owned by them and published on Spinrilla without permission,” Spinrilla’s lawyers write.

“That means that Plaintiffs make no claim to 99.9998% of the songs on Spinrilla. Plaintiffs’ shouting of ‘rampant infringement on Spinrilla’, an accusation that Spinrilla was designed to allow easy and open access to infringing material, and assertion that ‘Defendants have facilitated millions of unauthorized downloads’ of those 210 songs is untrue – it is nothing more than a wish and a dream.”

The company reiterates that it’s a platform for independent musicians and that it doesn’t want to feature the Eminem’s and Bieber’s of this world, especially not without permission.

As for the discovery process, there are still several outstanding issues they need the Court’s advice on. Spinrilla has thus far produced 12,000 pages of documents and answered all RIAA interrogatories, but refuses to hand over certain information, including its source code.

According to Spinrilla, there is no reason for the RIAA to have access to its “crown jewel.”

“The source code is the crown jewel of any software based business, including Spinrilla. Even worse, Plaintiffs want an ‘executable’ version of Spinrilla’s source code, which would literally enable them to replicate Spinrilla’s entire website. Any Plaintiff could, in hours, delete all references to ‘Spinrilla,’ add its own brand and launch Spinrilla’s exact website.

“If we sued YouTube for hosting 210 infringing videos, would I be entitled to the source code for YouTube? There is simply no justification for Spinrilla sharing its source code with Plaintiffs,” Spinrilla adds.

The RIAA, on the other hand, argues that the source code will provide insight into several critical issues, including Spinrilla’s knowledge about infringing activity and its ability to terminate repeat copyright infringers.

In addition to the source code, the RIAA has also requested detailed information about the site’s users, including their download and streaming history. This request is too broad, the mixtape site argues, and has offered to provide information on the uploaders of the 210 infringing tracks instead.

It’s clear that the RIAA and Spinrilla disagree on various fronts and it will be up to the court to decide what information must be handed over. So far, however, the language used clearly shows that both parties are far from reaching some kind of compromise.

—

The first joint discovery statement is available in full here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Roku Gets Tough on Pirate Channels, Warns Users

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/roku-gets-tough-on-pirate-channels-warns-users-170815/

In recent years it has become much easier to stream movies and TV-shows over the Internet.

Legal services such as Netflix and HBO are flourishing, but there’s also a darker side to this streaming epidemic. Millions of people are streaming from unauthorized sources, often paired with perfectly legal streaming platforms and devices.

Hollywood insiders have dubbed this trend “Piracy 3.0” are actively working with stakeholders to address the threat. One of the companies rightsholders are working with is Roku, known for its easy-to-use media players.

Earlier this year Roku was harshly confronted with this new piracy crackdown when a Mexican court ordered local retailers to take its media player off the shelves. While this legal battle isn’t over yet, it was clear to Roku that misuse of its platform wasn’t without consequences.

While Roku never permitted any infringing content, it appears that the company has recently made some adjustments to better deal with the problem, or at least clarify its stance.

Pirate content generally doesn’t show up in the official Roku Channel Store but is directly loaded onto the device through third-party “private” channels. A few weeks ago, Roku renamed these “private” channels to “non-certified” channels, while making it very clear that copyright infringement is not allowed.

A “WARNING!” message that pops up during the installation of these third-party channels stresses that Roku has no control over the content. In addition, the company notes that these channels may be removed if it links to copyright infringing content.

Roku Warning

“By continuing, you acknowledge you are accessing a non-certified channel that may include content that is offensive or inappropriate for some audiences,” Roku’s warning reads.

“Moreover, if Roku determines that this channel violates copyright, contains illegal content, or otherwise violates Roku’s terms and conditions, then ROKU MAY REMOVE THIS CHANNEL WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE.”

TorrentFreak reached out to Roku to find out how they plan to enforce this policy, but we have yet to hear back. According to Cord Cutters News, several piracy channels have already been removed recently, with other developers opting to leave the platform.

Roku’s General Counsel Steve Kay previously informed us that the company is taking the piracy problem seriously. Together with various stakeholders, they are working hard to address the problem.

“We actively work to prevent third-parties from using our platform to distribute copyright infringing content. Moreover, we have been actively working with other industry stakeholders on a wide range of anti-piracy initiatives,” Kay said.

Roku is not the only platform dealing with the piracy epidemic, the popular media player software Kodi is in the same boat. Kodi has also taken an active anti-piracy stance but they’re not banning any add-ons. They believe it would be pointless due to the open source nature of their software.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

BREIN is Taking Infamous ‘Piracy’ Hosting Provider Ecatel to Court

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/brein-is-taking-infamous-piracy-hosting-provider-ecatel-to-court-170815/

A regular website can be easily hosted in most countries of the world but when the nature of the project begins to step on toes, opportunities begin to reduce. Openly hosting The Pirate Bay, for example, is something few providers want to get involved with.

There are, however, providers out there who specialize in hosting services that others won’t touch. They develop a reputation of turning a blind eye to their customers’ activities, only reacting when a crisis looms on the horizon. Despite the problems, there are a few that are surprisingly resilient.

One such host is Netherlands-based Ecatel, which has hit the headlines many times over the years for allegedly having customers involved in warez, torrents, and streaming, not to mention spam and malware. For hosting the former group, it’s now in the crosshairs of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN.

According to an application for a witness hearing filed with The Court of the Hague by BREIN, Ecatel has repeatedly hosted websites dealing in infringing content over recent years. While this is nothing particularly out of the ordinary, BREIN claims that complaints filed against the sites were dealt with slowly by Ecatel or not at all.

Ecatel Ltd is a company incorporated in the UK with servers in the Netherlands but since 2015, another hosting company called Novogara has appeared in tandem. Court documents suggest that Novogara is associated with Ecatel, something that was confirmed early 2016 in an email sent out by Ecatel itself.

“We’d like to inform you that all services of Ecatel Ltd are taken over by a new brand called Novogara Ltd with immediate effect. The take-over includes Ecatel and all her subsidiaries,” the email read.

Muddying the waters a little more, in 2015 Ecatel’s IP addresses were apparently taken over by Quasi Networks Ltd, a Seychelles-based company whose business is described locally as being conducted entirely overseas.

“Stichting BREIN has found several websites in the network of Quasi Networks with obviously infringing content. Quasi Networks, however, does not respond structurally to requests for closing those websites. This involves unlawful acts against the parties associated with the BREIN Foundation,” a ruling from the Court reads.

As a result, BREIN wants a witness hearing with three defendants connected to the Ecatel/Novgara/Quasi group of companies in order to establish the relationship between the businesses, where their servers are, and who is behind Quasi Networks.

“Stichting BREIN is interested in this information in order to be able to judge who it can appeal to and whether it is useful to start a legal procedure,” the Court adds.

Two of the defendants failed to lodge a defense against BREIN’s application but one objected to the request for a hearing. He said that since Quasi Networks, Ecatel and Novogara are all incorporated outside the Netherlands, a trial must also be conducted abroad and therefore a Dutch judge would not have jurisdiction.

He also argued that BREIN would use the witness hearing as a “fishing expedition” in order to gather information it currently does not have, in order to formulate some kind of case against the defendants, in one way or another.

In a decision published this week, The Court of the Hague rejected that argument, noting that the basis for the claim is copyright infringement through Netherlands-hosted websites. Furthermore, the majority of the witnesses are resident in the district of The Hague. It also underlined the importance of a hearing.

“The request for holding a preliminary witness hearing opens an independent petition procedure, which does not address the eligibility of any claim that may be lodged. An investigation must be made by the judge who has to deal with and decide the main case – if it comes.

“The court points out that a preliminary witness hearing is now (partly) necessary to clarify whether and to what extent a claim has any chance of success,” the decision reads.

According to documents published by Companies House in the UK, Ecatel Ltd ceased to exist this morning, having been dissolved at the request of its directors.

The hearing of the witnesses is set to take place on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 at 9.30 in the Palace of Justice at Prince Claus 60 in The Hague.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

AWS Announces Amazon Macie

Post Syndicated from Stephen Schmidt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-announces-amazon-macie/

I’m pleased to announce that today we’ve launched a new security service, Amazon Macie.

This service leverages machine learning to help customers prevent data loss by automatically discovering, classifying, and protecting sensitive data in AWS. Amazon Macie recognizes sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, providing customers with dashboards and alerts that give visibility into how data is being accessed or moved. This enables customers to apply machine learning to a wide array of security and compliance workloads, we think this will be a significant enabler for our customers.

To learn more about the see the full AWS Blog post.

–  Steve

 

[$] Another attempt at speculative page-fault handling

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/730531/rss

While the best way to avoid performance problems associated with page
faults is usually to avoid faulting altogether, that is not always an
option. Thus, it is important that the kernel handle page faults with a
minimum of overhead. One particular pain point in current kernels comes
about in multi-threaded workloads that are all incurring faults in the
same address space. Speculative page-fault handling is an old idea for
improving the scalability of such workloads that may finally be approaching
a point where it can be considered for inclusion.

Upsert into Amazon Redshift using AWS Glue and SneaQL

Post Syndicated from Jeremy Winters original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/upsert-into-amazon-redshift-using-aws-glue-and-sneaql/

This is a guest post by Jeremy Winters and Ritu Mishra, Solution Architects at Full 360. In their own words, “Full 360 is a cloud first, cloud native integrator, and true believers in the cloud since inception in 2007, our focus has been on helping customers with their journey into the cloud. Our practice areas – Big Data and Warehousing, Application Modernization, and Cloud Ops/Strategy – represent deep, but focused expertise.”

AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) service that makes it simple and cost-effective to categorize your data, clean it, enrich it, and move it reliably between various data stores.  As a company who has been building data warehouse solutions in the cloud for 10 years, we at Full 360 were interested to see how we can leverage AWS Glue in customer solutions. This post details our experience and lessons learned from using AWS Glue for an Amazon Redshift data integration use case.

UI-based ETL Tools

We have been anticipating the release of AWS Glue since it was announced at re:Invent 2016. Many of our customers are looking for an easy to use, UI-based tooling to manage their data transformation pipeline. However in our experience, the complexity of any production pipeline tends to be difficult to unwind, regardless of the technology used to create them. At Full 360, we build cloud-native, script-based applications deployed in containers to handle data integration. We think script-based transformation provides a balance of robustness and flexibility necessary to handle any data problem that comes our way.

AWS Glue caters both to developers who prefer writing scripts and those who want UI-based interactions. It is possible to initially create jobs using the UI, by selecting data source and target. Under the hood, AWS Glue auto-generates the Python code for you, which can be edited if needed, though this isn’t necessary for the majority of use cases.

Of course, you don’t have to rely on the UI at all. You can simply write your own Python scripts, store them in Amazon S3 with any dependent libraries, and import them into AWS Glue. AWS Glue also supports IDE integration with tools such as PyCharm, and interestingly enough, Zeppelin notebooks! These integrations are targeted toward developers who prefer writing Python themselves and want a cleaner dev/test cycle.

Developers who are already in the business of scripting ETL will be excited by the ability to easily deploy Python scripts with AWS Glue, using existing workflows for source control and CI/CD, and have them deployed and executed in a fully managed manner by AWS.  The UI experience of AWS Glue works well, but it is good to know that the tool accommodates those who prefer traditional coding. You can also dig into complex edge cases for data handling where the UI doesn’t cut it.

Serverless!

When AWS Lambda was released, we were excited for its potential to host our ETL processes. With Lambda, you are limited to the five-minute maximum for function execution. We resorted to running Docker containers and Amazon ECS to orchestrate many of our customers long running tasks. With this approach, we are still required to manage the underlying infrastructure.

After a closer look at AWS Glue, we realize that it is a full serverless PySpark runtime, accompanied by an Apache Hive metastore compatible catalog-as-a-service. This means that you are not just running a script on a single core, but instead you have the full power of a multi-worker Spark environment available. If you’re not familiar with the Spark framework, it introduces a new paradigm that allows for the processing of distributed, in-memory datasets. Spark has many uses, from data transformation to machine learning.

In AWS Glue, you use PySpark dataframes to transform data before reaching your database. Dataframes manage data in a way similar to relational databases, so the methods are likely to be familiar to most SQL users. Additionally, you can use SQL in your PySpark code to manipulate the data.

AWS Glue also simplifies the management of the runtime environment by providing you with a DPU setting, which allows you to dial up or down the amount of compute resources used to run your job. One DPU is equivalent to 4 vCPU, 16 GB Mem.

Common use case

We can see that most customers would leverage AWS Glue to load one or many files from S3 into Amazon Redshift. To accelerate this process, you can use the crawler, an AWS console-based utility, to discover the schema of your data and store it in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, whether your data sits in a file or a database. We were able to discover the schemas of our source file and target table, then have AWS Glue construct and execute the ETL job. It worked! We successfully loaded the beer drinkers’ dataset, JSON files used in our advanced tuning class, into Amazon Redshift!

Our use case

For our use case, we integrated AWS Glue and Amazon Redshift Spectrum with an open-source project that we initiated called SneaQL. SneaQL is an open source, containerized framework for sneaking interactivity into static SQL. SneaQL provides an extension to ANSI SQL with command tags to provide functionality such as loops, variables, conditional execution, and error handling to your scripts. It allows you to manage your scripts in an AWS CodeCommit Git repo, which then gets deployed and executed in a container.

We use SneaQL for complex data integrations, usually with an ELT model, where the data is loaded into the database, then transformed into fact tables using parameterized SQL. SneaQL enables advanced use cases like partial upsert aggregation of data, where multiple data sources can merge into the same fact table.

We think AWS Glue, Redshift Spectrum, and SneaQL offer a compelling way to build a data lake in S3, with all of your metadata accessible through a variety of tools such as Hive, Presto, Spark, and Redshift Spectrum). Build your aggregation table in Amazon Redshift to drive your dashboards or other high-performance analytics.

In the video below, you see a demonstration of using AWS Glue to convert JSON documents into Parquet for partitioned storage in an S3 data lake. We then access the data from S3 into Amazon Redshift by way of Redshift Spectrum. Nearing the end of the AWS Glue job, we then call AWS boto3 to trigger an Amazon ECS SneaQL task to perform an upsert of the data into our fact table. All the sample artifacts needed for this demonstration are available in the Full360/Sneaql Github repository.

In this scenario, AWS Glue manipulates data outside of a data warehouse and loads it to Amazon Redshift, and SneaQL manipulates data inside Amazon Redshift.

We think that they are a good compliment to each other when doing complex integrations.

Our pipeline works as follows:

  • New files arrive in S3 in JSON format.
  • AWS Glue converts the JSON files in Parquet format, stored in another S3 bucket.
  • At the end of the AWS Glue script, the AWS SDK for Python (Boto) is used to trigger the Amazon ECS task that runs SneaQL.
  • SneaQL container pulls the secrets file from S3 then decrypts it with biscuit or AWS KMS.
  • SneaQL clones the appropriate branch from an AWS CodeCommit Git repo.
  • Data in Amazon Redshift is transformed by SneaQL statements stored in the repo.

The AWS Glue team also supports conditional triggers that would allow us to split the jobs, and make one dependent upon the other.

Final thoughts

Although, as a general rule, we believe in managing schema definitions in source control, we definitely think that the crawler feature has some attractive perks. Besides being handy for ad-hoc jobs, it is also partition-aware. This means that you can perform data movements without worrying about which data has been processed already, which is one less thing for you to manage. We’re interested to see the design patterns that emerge around the use of the crawler.

The freedom of PySpark also allows us to implement advanced use cases. While the boto3 library is available to all AWS Glue jobs, it is also possible to include any libraries and additional JAR files along with your Python script.

We think many customers will find AWS Glue valuable. Those who prefer to code their data processing pipeline will be quick to realize how powerful it is, especially for solving complex data cleansing problems. The learning curve for PySpark is real, so we suggest looking into dataframes as a good entry point. In the long run, the fact that AWS Glue is serverless makes the effort more than worth it.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

 

AWS CloudHSM Update – Cost Effective Hardware Key Management at Cloud Scale for Sensitive & Regulated Workloads

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-cloudhsm-update-cost-effective-hardware-key-management/

Our customers run an incredible variety of mission-critical workloads on AWS, many of which process and store sensitive data. As detailed in our Overview of Security Processes document, AWS customers have access to an ever-growing set of options for encrypting and protecting this data. For example, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) supports encryption of data at rest and in transit, with options tailored for each supported database engine (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Aurora).

Many customers use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to centralize their key management, with others taking advantage of the hardware-based key management, encryption, and decryption provided by AWS CloudHSM to meet stringent security and compliance requirements for their most sensitive data and regulated workloads (you can read my post, AWS CloudHSM – Secure Key Storage and Cryptographic Operations, to learn more about Hardware Security Modules, also known as HSMs).

Major CloudHSM Update
Today, building on what we have learned from our first-generation product, we are making a major update to CloudHSM, with a set of improvements designed to make the benefits of hardware-based key management available to a much wider audience while reducing the need for specialized operating expertise. Here’s a summary of the improvements:

Pay As You Go – CloudHSM is now offered under a pay-as-you-go model that is simpler and more cost-effective, with no up-front fees.

Fully Managed – CloudHSM is now a scalable managed service; provisioning, patching, high availability, and backups are all built-in and taken care of for you. Scheduled backups extract an encrypted image of your HSM from the hardware (using keys that only the HSM hardware itself knows) that can be restored only to identical HSM hardware owned by AWS. For durability, those backups are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and for an additional layer of security, encrypted again with server-side S3 encryption using an AWS KMS master key.

Open & Compatible  – CloudHSM is open and standards-compliant, with support for multiple APIs, programming languages, and cryptography extensions such as PKCS #11, Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), and Microsoft CryptoNG (CNG). The open nature of CloudHSM gives you more control and simplifies the process of moving keys (in encrypted form) from one CloudHSM to another, and also allows migration to and from other commercially available HSMs.

More Secure – CloudHSM Classic (the original model) supports the generation and use of keys that comply with FIPS 140-2 Level 2. We’re stepping that up a notch today with support for FIPS 140-2 Level 3, with security mechanisms that are designed to detect and respond to physical attempts to access or modify the HSM. Your keys are protected with exclusive, single-tenant access to tamper-resistant HSMs that appear within your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). CloudHSM supports quorum authentication for critical administrative and key management functions. This feature allows you to define a list of N possible identities that can access the functions, and then require at least M of them to authorize the action. It also supports multi-factor authentication using tokens that you provide.

AWS-Native – The updated CloudHSM is an integral part of AWS and plays well with other tools and services. You can create and manage a cluster of HSMs using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or API calls.

Diving In
You can create CloudHSM clusters that contain 1 to 32 HSMs, each in a separate Availability Zone in a particular AWS Region. Spreading HSMs across AZs gives you high availability (including built-in load balancing); adding more HSMs gives you additional throughput. The HSMs within a cluster are kept in sync: performing a task or operation on one HSM in a cluster automatically updates the others. Each HSM in a cluster has its own Elastic Network Interface (ENI).

All interaction with an HSM takes place via the AWS CloudHSM client. It runs on an EC2 instance and uses certificate-based mutual authentication to create secure (TLS) connections to the HSMs.

At the hardware level, each HSM includes hardware-enforced isolation of crypto operations and key storage. Each customer HSM runs on dedicated processor cores.

Setting Up a Cluster
Let’s set up a cluster using the CloudHSM Console:

I click on Create cluster to get started, select my desired VPC and the subnets within it (I can also create a new VPC and/or subnets if needed):

Then I review my settings and click on Create:

After a few minutes, my cluster exists, but is uninitialized:

Initialization simply means retrieving a certificate signing request (the Cluster CSR):

And then creating a private key and using it to sign the request (these commands were copied from the Initialize Cluster docs and I have omitted the output. Note that ID identifies the cluster):

$ openssl genrsa -out CustomerRoot.key 2048
$ openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key CustomerRoot.key -out CustomerRoot.crt
$ openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in ID_ClusterCsr.csr   \
                              -CA CustomerRoot.crt    \
                              -CAkey CustomerRoot.key \
                              -CAcreateserial         \
                              -out ID_CustomerHsmCertificate.crt

The next step is to apply the signed certificate to the cluster using the console or the CLI. After this has been done, the cluster can be activated by changing the password for the HSM’s administrative user, otherwise known as the Crypto Officer (CO).

Once the cluster has been created, initialized and activated, it can be used to protect data. Applications can use the APIs in AWS CloudHSM SDKs to manage keys, encrypt & decrypt objects, and more. The SDKs provide access to the CloudHSM client (running on the same instance as the application). The client, in turn, connects to the cluster across an encrypted connection.

Available Today
The new HSM is available today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), and EU (Ireland) Regions, with more in the works. Pricing starts at $1.45 per HSM per hour.

— Jeff;

AWS Migration Hub – Plan & Track Enterprise Application Migration

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-migration-hub-plan-track-enterprise-application-migration/

About once a week, I speak to current and potential AWS customers in our Seattle Executive Briefing Center. While I generally focus on our innovation process, we sometimes discuss other topics, including application migration. When enterprises decide to migrate their application portfolios they want to do it in a structured, orderly fashion. These portfolios typically consist of hundreds of complex Windows and Linux applications, relational databases, and more. Customers find themselves eager yet uncertain as to how to proceed. After spending time working with these customers, we have learned that their challenges generally fall in to three major categories:

Discovery – They want to make sure that they have a deep and complete understanding of all of the moving parts that power each application.

Server & Database Migration – They need to transfer on-premises workloads and database tables to the cloud.

Tracking / Management – With large application portfolios and multiple migrations happening in parallel, they need to track and manage progress in an application-centric fashion.

Over the last couple of years we have launched a set of tools that address the first two challenges. The AWS Application Discovery Service automates the process of discovering and collecting system information, the AWS Server Migration Service takes care of moving workloads to the cloud, and the AWS Database Migration Service moves relational databases, NoSQL databases, and data warehouses with minimal downtime. Partners like Racemi and CloudEndure also offer migration tools of their own.

New AWS Migration Hub
Today we are bringing this collection of AWS and partner migration tools together in the AWS Migration Hub. The hub provides access to the tools that I mentioned above, guides you through the migration process, and tracks the status of each migration, all in accord with the methodology and tenets described in our Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).

Here’s the main screen. It outlines the migration process (discovery, migration, and tracking):

Clicking on Start discovery reveals the flow of the migration process:

It is also possible to skip the Discovery step and begin the migration immediately:

The Servers list is populated using data from an AWS migration service (Server Migration Service or Database Migration Service), partner tools, or using data collected by the AWS Application Discovery Service:

I can on Group as application to create my first application:

Once I identify some applications to migrate, I can track them in the Migrations section of the Hub:

The migration tools, if authorized, automatically send status updates and results back to Migration Hub, for display on the migration status page for the application. Here you can see that Racemi DynaCenter and CloudEndure Migration have played their parts in the migration:

I can track the status of my migrations by checking the Migration Hub Dashboard:

Migration Hub works with migration tools from AWS and our Migration Partners; see the list of integrated partner tools to learn more:

Available Now
AWS Migration Hub can manage migrations in any AWS Region that has the necessary migration tools available; the hub itself runs in the US West (Oregon) Region. There is no charge for the Hub; you pay only for the AWS services that you consume in the course of the migration.

If you are ready to begin your migration to the cloud and are in need of some assistance, please take advantage of the services offered by our Migration Acceleration Partners. These organizations have earned their migration competency by repeatedly demonstrating their ability to deliver large-scale migration.

— Jeff;

Nazis, are bad

Post Syndicated from Eevee original https://eev.ee/blog/2017/08/13/nazis-are-bad/

Anonymous asks:

Could you talk about something related to the management/moderation and growth of online communities? IOW your thoughts on online community management, if any.

I think you’ve tweeted about this stuff in the past so I suspect you have thoughts on this, but if not, again, feel free to just blog about … anything 🙂

Oh, I think I have some stuff to say about community management, in light of recent events. None of it hasn’t already been said elsewhere, but I have to get this out.

Hopefully the content warning is implicit in the title.

I am frustrated.

I’ve gone on before about a particularly bothersome phenomenon that hurts a lot of small online communities: often, people are willing to tolerate the misery of others in a community, but then get up in arms when someone pushes back. Someone makes a lot of off-hand, off-color comments about women? Uses a lot of dog-whistle terms? Eh, they’re not bothering anyone, or at least not bothering me. Someone else gets tired of it and tells them to knock it off? Whoa there! Now we have the appearance of conflict, which is unacceptable, and people will turn on the person who’s pissed off — even though they’ve been at the butt end of an invisible conflict for who knows how long. The appearance of peace is paramount, even if it means a large chunk of the population is quietly miserable.

Okay, so now, imagine that on a vastly larger scale, and also those annoying people who know how to skirt the rules are Nazis.

The label “Nazi” gets thrown around a lot lately, probably far too easily. But when I see a group of people doing the Hitler salute, waving large Nazi flags, wearing Nazi armbands styled after the SS, well… if the shoe fits, right? I suppose they might have flown across the country to join a torch-bearing mob ironically, but if so, the joke is going way over my head. (Was the murder ironic, too?) Maybe they’re not Nazis in the sense that the original party doesn’t exist any more, but for ease of writing, let’s refer to “someone who espouses Nazi ideology and deliberately bears a number of Nazi symbols” as, well, “a Nazi”.

This isn’t a new thing, either; I’ve stumbled upon any number of Twitter accounts that are decorated in Nazi regalia. I suppose the trouble arises when perfectly innocent members of the alt-right get unfairly labelled as Nazis.

But hang on; this march was called “Unite the Right” and was intended to bring together various far right sub-groups. So what does their choice of aesthetic say about those sub-groups? I haven’t heard, say, alt-right coiner Richard Spencer denounce the use of Nazi symbology — extra notable since he was fucking there and apparently didn’t care to discourage it.

And so begins the rule-skirting. “Nazi” is definitely overused, but even using it to describe white supremacists who make not-so-subtle nods to Hitler is likely to earn you some sarcastic derailment. A Nazi? Oh, so is everyone you don’t like and who wants to establish a white ethno state a Nazi?

Calling someone a Nazi — or even a white supremacist — is an attack, you see. Merely expressing the desire that people of color not exist is perfectly peaceful, but identifying the sentiment for what it is causes visible discord, which is unacceptable.

These clowns even know this sort of thing and strategize around it. Or, try, at least. Maybe it wasn’t that successful this weekend — though flicking through Charlottesville headlines now, they seem to be relatively tame in how they refer to the ralliers.

I’m reminded of a group of furries — the alt-furries — who have been espousing white supremacy and wearing red armbands with a white circle containing a black… pawprint. Ah, yes, that’s completely different.

So, what to do about this?

“Ignore them” is a popular option, often espoused to bullied children by parents who have never been bullied, shortly before they resume complaining about passive-aggressive office politics. The trouble with ignoring them is that, just like in smaller communitiest, they have a tendency to fester. They take over large chunks of influential Internet surface area like 4chan and Reddit; they help get an inept buffoon elected; and then they start to have torch-bearing rallies and run people over with cars.

4chan illustrates a kind of corollary here. Anyone who’s steeped in Internet Culture™ is surely familiar with 4chan; I was never a regular visitor, but it had enough influence that I was still aware of it and some of its culture. It was always thick with irony, which grew into a sort of ironic detachment — perhaps one of the major sources of the recurring online trope that having feelings is bad — which proceeded into ironic racism.

And now the ironic racism is indistinguishable from actual racism, as tends to be the case. Do they “actually” “mean it”, or are they just trying to get a rise out of people? What the hell is unironic racism if not trying to get a rise out of people? What difference is there to onlookers, especially as they move to become increasingly involved with politics?

“It’s just a joke” and “it was just a thoughtless comment” are exceptionally common defenses made by people desperate to preserve the illusion of harmony, but the strain of overt white supremacy currently running rampant through the US was built on those excuses.

The other favored option is to debate them, to defeat their ideas with better ideas.

Well, hang on. What are their ideas, again? I hear they were chanting stuff like “go back to Africa” and “fuck you, faggots”. Given that this was an overtly political rally (and again, the Nazi fucking regalia), I don’t think it’s a far cry to describe their ideas as “let’s get rid of black people and queer folks”.

This is an underlying proposition: that white supremacy is inherently violent. After all, if the alt-right seized total political power, what would they do with it? If I asked the same question of Democrats or Republicans, I’d imagine answers like “universal health care” or “screw over poor people”. But people whose primary goal is to have a country full of only white folks? What are they going to do, politely ask everyone else to leave? They’re invoking the memory of people who committed genocide and also tried to take over the fucking world. They are outright saying, these are the people we look up to, this is who we think had a great idea.

How, precisely, does one defeat these ideas with rational debate?

Because the underlying core philosophy beneath all this is: “it would be good for me if everything were about me”. And that’s true! (Well, it probably wouldn’t work out how they imagine in practice, but it’s true enough.) Consider that slavery is probably fantastic if you’re the one with the slaves; the issue is that it’s reprehensible, not that the very notion contains some kind of 101-level logical fallacy. That’s probably why we had a fucking war over it instead of hashing it out over brunch.

…except we did hash it out over brunch once, and the result was that slavery was still allowed but slaves only counted as 60% of a person for the sake of counting how much political power states got. So that’s how rational debate worked out. I’m sure the slaves were thrilled with that progress.

That really only leaves pushing back, which raises the question of how to push back.

And, I don’t know. Pushing back is much harder in spaces you don’t control, spaces you’re already struggling to justify your own presence in. For most people, that’s most spaces. It’s made all the harder by that tendency to preserve illusory peace; even the tamest request that someone knock off some odious behavior can be met by pushback, even by third parties.

At the same time, I’m aware that white supremacists prey on disillusioned young white dudes who feel like they don’t fit in, who were promised the world and inherited kind of a mess. Does criticism drive them further away? The alt-right also opposes “political correctness”, i.e. “not being a fucking asshole”.

God knows we all suck at this kind of behavior correction, even within our own in-groups. Fandoms have become almost ridiculously vicious as platforms like Twitter and Tumblr amplify individual anger to deafening levels. It probably doesn’t help that we’re all just exhausted, that every new fuck-up feels like it bears the same weight as the last hundred combined.

This is the part where I admit I don’t know anything about people and don’t have any easy answers. Surprise!

The other alternative is, well, punching Nazis.

That meme kind of haunts me. It raises really fucking complicated questions about when violence is acceptable, in a culture that’s completely incapable of answering them.

America’s relationship to violence is so bizarre and two-faced as to be almost incomprehensible. We worship it. We have the biggest military in the world by an almost comical margin. It’s fairly mainstream to own deadly weapons for the express stated purpose of armed revolution against the government, should that become necessary, where “necessary” is left ominously undefined. Our movies are about explosions and beating up bad guys; our video games are about explosions and shooting bad guys. We fantasize about solving foreign policy problems by nuking someone — hell, our talking heads are currently in polite discussion about whether we should nuke North Korea and annihilate up to twenty-five million people, as punishment for daring to have the bomb that only we’re allowed to have.

But… violence is bad.

That’s about as far as the other side of the coin gets. It’s bad. We condemn it in the strongest possible terms. Also, guess who we bombed today?

I observe that the one time Nazis were a serious threat, America was happy to let them try to take over the world until their allies finally showed up on our back porch.

Maybe I don’t understand what “violence” means. In a quest to find out why people are talking about “leftist violence” lately, I found a National Review article from May that twice suggests blocking traffic is a form of violence. Anarchists have smashed some windows and set a couple fires at protests this year — and, hey, please knock that crap off? — which is called violence against, I guess, Starbucks. Black Lives Matter could be throwing a birthday party and Twitter would still be abuzz with people calling them thugs.

Meanwhile, there’s a trend of murderers with increasingly overt links to the alt-right, and everyone is still handling them with kid gloves. First it was murders by people repeating their talking points; now it’s the culmination of a torches-and-pitchforks mob. (Ah, sorry, not pitchforks; assault rifles.) And we still get this incredibly bizarre both-sides-ism, a White House that refers to the people who didn’t murder anyone as “just as violent if not more so“.

Should you punch Nazis? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m extremely dissatisfied with discourse that’s extremely alarmed by hypothetical punches — far more mundane than what you’d see after a sporting event — but treats a push for ethnic cleansing as a mere difference of opinion.

The equivalent to a punch in an online space is probably banning, which is almost laughable in comparison. It doesn’t cause physical harm, but it is a use of concrete force. Doesn’t pose quite the same moral quandary, though.

Somewhere in the middle is the currently popular pastime of doxxing (doxxxxxxing) people spotted at the rally in an attempt to get them fired or whatever. Frankly, that skeeves me out, though apparently not enough that I’m directly chastizing anyone for it.

We aren’t really equipped, as a society, to deal with memetic threats. We aren’t even equipped to determine what they are. We had a fucking world war over this, and now people are outright saying “hey I’m like those people we went and killed a lot in that world war” and we give them interviews and compliment their fashion sense.

A looming question is always, what if they then do it to you? What if people try to get you fired, to punch you for your beliefs?

I think about that a lot, and then I remember that it’s perfectly legal to fire someone for being gay in half the country. (Courts are currently wrangling whether Title VII forbids this, but with the current administration, I’m not optimistic.) I know people who’ve been fired for coming out as trans. I doubt I’d have to look very far to find someone who’s been punched for either reason.

And these aren’t even beliefs; they’re just properties of a person. You can stop being a white supremacist, one of those people yelling “fuck you, faggots”.

So I have to recuse myself from this asinine question, because I can’t fairly judge the risk of retaliation when it already happens to people I care about.

Meanwhile, if a white supremacist does get punched, I absolutely still want my tax dollars to pay for their universal healthcare.

The same wrinkle comes up with free speech, which is paramount.

The ACLU reminds us that the First Amendment “protects vile, hateful, and ignorant speech”. I think they’ve forgotten that that’s a side effect, not the goal. No one sat down and suggested that protecting vile speech was some kind of noble cause, yet that’s how we seem to be treating it.

The point was to avoid a situation where the government is arbitrarily deciding what qualifies as vile, hateful, and ignorant, and was using that power to eliminate ideas distasteful to politicians. You know, like, hypothetically, if they interrogated and jailed a bunch of people for supporting the wrong economic system. Or convicted someone under the Espionage Act for opposing the draft. (Hey, that’s where the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” line comes from.)

But these are ideas that are already in the government. Bannon, a man who was chair of a news organization he himself called “the platform for the alt-right”, has the President’s ear! How much more mainstream can you get?

So again I’m having a little trouble balancing “we need to defend the free speech of white supremacists or risk losing it for everyone” against “we fairly recently were ferreting out communists and the lingering public perception is that communists are scary, not that the government is”.

This isn’t to say that freedom of speech is bad, only that the way we talk about it has become fanatical to the point of absurdity. We love it so much that we turn around and try to apply it to corporations, to platforms, to communities, to interpersonal relationships.

Look at 4chan. It’s completely public and anonymous; you only get banned for putting the functioning of the site itself in jeopardy. Nothing is stopping a larger group of people from joining its politics board and tilting sentiment the other way — except that the current population is so odious that no one wants to be around them. Everyone else has evaporated away, as tends to happen.

Free speech is great for a government, to prevent quashing politics that threaten the status quo (except it’s a joke and they’ll do it anyway). People can’t very readily just bail when the government doesn’t like them, anyway. It’s also nice to keep in mind to some degree for ubiquitous platforms. But the smaller you go, the easier it is for people to evaporate away, and the faster pure free speech will turn the place to crap. You’ll be left only with people who care about nothing.

At the very least, it seems clear that the goal of white supremacists is some form of destabilization, of disruption to the fabric of a community for purely selfish purposes. And those are the kinds of people you want to get rid of as quickly as possible.

Usually this is hard, because they act just nicely enough to create some plausible deniability. But damn, if someone is outright telling you they love Hitler, maybe skip the principled hand-wringing and eject them.