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Implement continuous integration and delivery of serverless AWS Glue ETL applications using AWS Developer Tools

Post Syndicated from Prasad Alle original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/implement-continuous-integration-and-delivery-of-serverless-aws-glue-etl-applications-using-aws-developer-tools/

AWS Glue is an increasingly popular way to develop serverless ETL (extract, transform, and load) applications for big data and data lake workloads. Organizations that transform their ETL applications to cloud-based, serverless ETL architectures need a seamless, end-to-end continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline: from source code, to build, to deployment, to product delivery. Having a good CI/CD pipeline can help your organization discover bugs before they reach production and deliver updates more frequently. It can also help developers write quality code and automate the ETL job release management process, mitigate risk, and more.

AWS Glue is a fully managed data catalog and ETL service. It simplifies and automates the difficult and time-consuming tasks of data discovery, conversion, and job scheduling. AWS Glue crawls your data sources and constructs a data catalog using pre-built classifiers for popular data formats and data types, including CSV, Apache Parquet, JSON, and more.

When you are developing ETL applications using AWS Glue, you might come across some of the following CI/CD challenges:

  • Iterative development with unit tests
  • Continuous integration and build
  • Pushing the ETL pipeline to a test environment
  • Pushing the ETL pipeline to a production environment
  • Testing ETL applications using real data (live test)
  • Exploring and validating data

In this post, I walk you through a solution that implements a CI/CD pipeline for serverless AWS Glue ETL applications supported by AWS Developer Tools (including AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CodeBuild) and AWS CloudFormation.

Solution overview

The following diagram shows the pipeline workflow:

This solution uses AWS CodePipeline, which lets you orchestrate and automate the test and deploy stages for ETL application source code. The solution consists of a pipeline that contains the following stages:

1.) Source Control: In this stage, the AWS Glue ETL job source code and the AWS CloudFormation template file for deploying the ETL jobs are both committed to version control. I chose to use AWS CodeCommit for version control.

To get the ETL job source code and AWS CloudFormation template, download the gluedemoetl.zip file. This solution is developed based on a previous post, Build a Data Lake Foundation with AWS Glue and Amazon S3.

2.) LiveTest: In this stage, all resources—including AWS Glue crawlers, jobs, S3 buckets, roles, and other resources that are required for the solution—are provisioned, deployed, live tested, and cleaned up.

The LiveTest stage includes the following actions:

  • Deploy: In this action, all the resources that are required for this solution (crawlers, jobs, buckets, roles, and so on) are provisioned and deployed using an AWS CloudFormation template.
  • AutomatedLiveTest: In this action, all the AWS Glue crawlers and jobs are executed and data exploration and validation tests are performed. These validation tests include, but are not limited to, record counts in both raw tables and transformed tables in the data lake and any other business validations. I used AWS CodeBuild for this action.
  • LiveTestApproval: This action is included for the cases in which a pipeline administrator approval is required to deploy/promote the ETL applications to the next stage. The pipeline pauses in this action until an administrator manually approves the release.
  • LiveTestCleanup: In this action, all the LiveTest stage resources, including test crawlers, jobs, roles, and so on, are deleted using the AWS CloudFormation template. This action helps minimize cost by ensuring that the test resources exist only for the duration of the AutomatedLiveTest and LiveTestApproval

3.) DeployToProduction: In this stage, all the resources are deployed using the AWS CloudFormation template to the production environment.

Try it out

This code pipeline takes approximately 20 minutes to complete the LiveTest test stage (up to the LiveTest approval stage, in which manual approval is required).

To get started with this solution, choose Launch Stack:

This creates the CI/CD pipeline with all of its stages, as described earlier. It performs an initial commit of the sample AWS Glue ETL job source code to trigger the first release change.

In the AWS CloudFormation console, choose Create. After the template finishes creating resources, you see the pipeline name on the stack Outputs tab.

After that, open the CodePipeline console and select the newly created pipeline. Initially, your pipeline’s CodeCommit stage shows that the source action failed.

Allow a few minutes for your new pipeline to detect the initial commit applied by the CloudFormation stack creation. As soon as the commit is detected, your pipeline starts. You will see the successful stage completion status as soon as the CodeCommit source stage runs.

In the CodeCommit console, choose Code in the navigation pane to view the solution files.

Next, you can watch how the pipeline goes through the LiveTest stage of the deploy and AutomatedLiveTest actions, until it finally reaches the LiveTestApproval action.

At this point, if you check the AWS CloudFormation console, you can see that a new template has been deployed as part of the LiveTest deploy action.

At this point, make sure that the AWS Glue crawlers and the AWS Glue job ran successfully. Also check whether the corresponding databases and external tables have been created in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Then verify that the data is validated using Amazon Athena, as shown following.

Open the AWS Glue console, and choose Databases in the navigation pane. You will see the following databases in the Data Catalog:

Open the Amazon Athena console, and run the following queries. Verify that the record counts are matching.

SELECT count(*) FROM "nycitytaxi_gluedemocicdtest"."data";
SELECT count(*) FROM "nytaxiparquet_gluedemocicdtest"."datalake";

The following shows the raw data:

The following shows the transformed data:

The pipeline pauses the action until the release is approved. After validating the data, manually approve the revision on the LiveTestApproval action on the CodePipeline console.

Add comments as needed, and choose Approve.

The LiveTestApproval stage now appears as Approved on the console.

After the revision is approved, the pipeline proceeds to use the AWS CloudFormation template to destroy the resources that were deployed in the LiveTest deploy action. This helps reduce cost and ensures a clean test environment on every deployment.

Production deployment is the final stage. In this stage, all the resources—AWS Glue crawlers, AWS Glue jobs, Amazon S3 buckets, roles, and so on—are provisioned and deployed to the production environment using the AWS CloudFormation template.

After successfully running the whole pipeline, feel free to experiment with it by changing the source code stored on AWS CodeCommit. For example, if you modify the AWS Glue ETL job to generate an error, it should make the AutomatedLiveTest action fail. Or if you change the AWS CloudFormation template to make its creation fail, it should affect the LiveTest deploy action. The objective of the pipeline is to guarantee that all changes that are deployed to production are guaranteed to work as expected.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned how easy it is to implement CI/CD for serverless AWS Glue ETL solutions with AWS developer tools like AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild at scale. Implementing such solutions can help you accelerate ETL development and testing at your organization.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

 

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Implement Continuous Integration and Delivery of Apache Spark Applications using AWS and Build a Data Lake Foundation with AWS Glue and Amazon S3.

 

About the Authors

Prasad Alle is a Senior Big Data Consultant with AWS Professional Services. He spends his time leading and building scalable, reliable Big data, Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence and IoT solutions for AWS Enterprise and Strategic customers. His interests extend to various technologies such as Advanced Edge Computing, Machine learning at Edge. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family.

 
Luis Caro is a Big Data Consultant for AWS Professional Services. He works with our customers to provide guidance and technical assistance on big data projects, helping them improving the value of their solutions when using AWS.

 

 

 

RDS for Oracle: Extending Outbound Network Access to use SSL/TLS

Post Syndicated from Surya Nallu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/rds-for-oracle-extending-outbound-network-access-to-use-ssltls/

In December 2016, we launched the Outbound Network Access functionality for Amazon RDS for Oracle, enabling customers to use their RDS for Oracle database instances to communicate with external web endpoints using the utl_http and utl tcp packages, and sending emails through utl_smtp. We extended the functionality by adding the option of using custom DNS servers, allowing such outbound network accesses to make use of any DNS server a customer chooses to use. These releases enabled HTTP, TCP and SMTP communication originating out of RDS for Oracle instances – limited to non-secure (non-SSL) mediums.

To overcome the limitation over SSL connections, we recently published a whitepaper, that guides through the process of creating customized Oracle wallet bundles on your RDS for Oracle instances. By making use of such wallets, you can now extend the Outbound Network Access capability to have external communications happen over secure (SSL/TLS) connections. This opens up new use cases for your RDS for Oracle instances.

With the right set of certificates imported into your RDS for Oracle instances (through Oracle wallets), your database instances can now:

  • Communicate with a HTTPS endpoint: Using utl_http, access a resource such as https://status.aws.amazon.com/robots.txt
  • Download files from Amazon S3 securely: Using a presigned URL from Amazon S3, you can now download any file over SSL
  • Extending Oracle Database links to use SSL: Database links between RDS for Oracle instances can now use SSL as long as the instances have the SSL option installed
  • Sending email over SMTPS:
    • You can now integrate with Amazon SES to send emails from your database instances and any other generic SMTPS with which the provider can be integrated

These are just a few high-level examples of new use cases that have opened up with the whitepaper. As a reminder, always ensure to have best security practices in place when making use of Outbound Network Access (detailed in the whitepaper).

About the Author

Surya Nallu is a Software Development Engineer on the Amazon RDS for Oracle team.

Married Torrent Tracker Couple Settle With BREIN

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/married-torrent-tracker-couple-settles-with-brein-180420/

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has targeted operators and uploaders of pirate sites for more than a decade.

The group’s main goal is to shut the sites down. Instead of getting embroiled in dozens of lengthy court battles, it prefers to settle the matter with those responsible.

This week, BREIN announced another victory against a small torrent site, Snuffelland. The private tracker was targeted at a Dutch audience and the anti-piracy group managed to track down its operators.

According to BREIN, the site was run by a married couple from the town of Montfort, a 65-year-old man and a 51-year-old woman. In addition, the group also identified one of the uploaders, a 60-year-old man from Heukelum.

All three are unemployed and their financial position was taken into account in determining the scale of the settlement. The couple agreed to pay 2,500 euros and the uploader settled for 650 euros, with a threat of further penalties if they are caught again.

The private tracker itself was shut down and replaced by a message that was provided by BREIN.

“Making copyright-protected works available infringes the copyrights of the entitled rightsholder. Downloading from unauthorized sources is also prohibited in the Netherlands,” the message reads.

“For providers of legal content, snuffelland.org refers you to thecontentmap.nl and film.nl,” it adds.

These type of shutdowns are nothing new. BREIN has taken down hundreds of smaller sites in the past. However, only in recent years has the group has started to publish these settlement details.

That serves as a deterrent but also provides some more insight into how the group prefers to solve these cases, which appears to be relatively softly. In this case, it also disproves the notion that torrent sites are run by youngsters.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Get Started with Blockchain Using the new AWS Blockchain Templates

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/get-started-with-blockchain-using-the-new-aws-blockchain-templates/

Many of today’s discussions around blockchain technology remind me of the classic Shimmer Floor Wax skit. According to Dan Aykroyd, Shimmer is a dessert topping. Gilda Radner claims that it is a floor wax, and Chevy Chase settles the debate and reveals that it actually is both! Some of the people that I talk to see blockchains as the foundation of a new monetary system and a way to facilitate international payments. Others see blockchains as a distributed ledger and immutable data source that can be applied to logistics, supply chain, land registration, crowdfunding, and other use cases. Either way, it is clear that there are a lot of intriguing possibilities and we are working to help our customers use this technology more effectively.

We are launching AWS Blockchain Templates today. These templates will let you launch an Ethereum (either public or private) or Hyperledger Fabric (private) network in a matter of minutes and with just a few clicks. The templates create and configure all of the AWS resources needed to get you going in a robust and scalable fashion.

Launching a Private Ethereum Network
The Ethereum template offers two launch options. The ecs option creates an Amazon ECS cluster within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and launches a set of Docker images in the cluster. The docker-local option also runs within a VPC, and launches the Docker images on EC2 instances. The template supports Ethereum mining, the EthStats and EthExplorer status pages, and a set of nodes that implement and respond to the Ethereum RPC protocol. Both options create and make use of a DynamoDB table for service discovery, along with Application Load Balancers for the status pages.

Here are the AWS Blockchain Templates for Ethereum:

I start by opening the CloudFormation Console in the desired region and clicking Create Stack:

I select Specify an Amazon S3 template URL, enter the URL of the template for the region, and click Next:

I give my stack a name:

Next, I enter the first set of parameters, including the network ID for the genesis block. I’ll stick with the default values for now:

I will also use the default values for the remaining network parameters:

Moving right along, I choose the container orchestration platform (ecs or docker-local, as I explained earlier) and the EC2 instance type for the container nodes:

Next, I choose my VPC and the subnets for the Ethereum network and the Application Load Balancer:

I configure my keypair, EC2 security group, IAM role, and instance profile ARN (full information on the required permissions can be found in the documentation):

The Instance Profile ARN can be found on the summary page for the role:

I confirm that I want to deploy EthStats and EthExplorer, choose the tag and version for the nested CloudFormation templates that are used by this one, and click Next to proceed:

On the next page I specify a tag for the resources that the stack will create, leave the other options as-is, and click Next:

I review all of the parameters and options, acknowledge that the stack might create IAM resources, and click Create to build my network:

The template makes use of three nested templates:

After all of the stacks have been created (mine took about 5 minutes), I can select JeffNet and click the Outputs tab to discover the links to EthStats and EthExplorer:

Here’s my EthStats:

And my EthExplorer:

If I am writing apps that make use of my private network to store and process smart contracts, I would use the EthJsonRpcUrl.

Stay Tuned
My colleagues are eager to get your feedback on these new templates and plan to add new versions of the frameworks as they become available.

— Jeff;

 

Audit Trail Overview

Post Syndicated from Bozho original https://techblog.bozho.net/audit-trail-overview/

As part of my current project (secure audit trail) I decided to make a survey about the use of audit trail “in the wild”.

I haven’t written in details about this project of mine (unlike with some other projects). Mostly because it’s commercial and I don’t want to use my blog as a direct promotion channel (though I am doing that at the moment, ironically). But the aim of this post is to shed some light on how audit trail is used.

The survey can be found here. The questions are basically: does your current project have audit trail functionality, and if yes, is it protected from tampering. If not – do you think you should have such functionality.

The results are interesting (although with only around 50 respondents)

So more than half of the systems (on which respondents are working) don’t have audit trail. While audit trail is recommended by information security and related standards, it may not find place in the “busy schedule” of a software project, even though it’s fairly easy to provide a trivial implementation (e.g. I’ve written how to quickly setup one with Hibernate and Spring)

A trivial implementation might do in many cases but if the audit log is critical (e.g. access to sensitive data, performing financial operations etc.), then relying on a trivial implementation might not be enough. In other words – if the sysadmin can access the database and delete or modify the audit trail, then it doesn’t serve much purpose. Hence the next question – how is the audit trail protected from tampering:

And apparently, from the less than 50% of projects with audit trail, around 50% don’t have technical guarantees that the audit trail can’t be tampered with. My guess is it’s more, because people have different understanding of what technical measures are sufficient. E.g. someone may think that digitally signing your log files (or log records) is sufficient, but in fact it isn’t, as whole files (or records) can be deleted (or fully replaced) without a way to detect that. Timestamping can help (and a good audit trail solution should have that), but it doesn’t guarantee the order of events or prevent a malicious actor from deleting or inserting fake ones. And if timestamping is done on a log file level, then any not-yet-timestamped log file is vulnerable to manipulation.

I’ve written about event logs before and their two flavours – event sourcing and audit trail. An event log can effectively be considered audit trail, but you’d need additional security to avoid the problems mentioned above.

So, let’s see what would various levels of security and usefulness of audit logs look like. There are many papers on the topic (e.g. this and this), and they often go into the intricate details of how logging should be implemented. I’ll try to give an overview of the approaches:

  • Regular logs – rely on regular INFO log statements in the production logs to look for hints of what has happened. This may be okay, but is harder to look for evidence (as there is non-auditable data in those log files as well), and it’s not very secure – usually logs are collected (e.g. with graylog) and whoever has access to the log collector’s database (or search engine in the case of Graylog), can manipulate the data and not be caught
  • Designated audit trail – whether it’s stored in the database or in logs files. It has the proper business-event level granularity, but again doesn’t prevent or detect tampering. With lower risk systems that may is perfectly okay.
  • Timestamped logs – whether it’s log files or (harder to implement) database records. Timestamping is good, but if it’s not an external service, a malicious actor can get access to the local timestamping service and issue fake timestamps to either re-timestamp tampered files. Even if the timestamping is not compromised, whole entries can be deleted. The fact that they are missing can sometimes be deduced based on other factors (e.g. hour of rotation), but regularly verifying that is extra effort and may not always be feasible.
  • Hash chaining – each entry (or sequence of log files) could be chained (just as blockchain transactions) – the next one having the hash of the previous one. This is a good solution (whether it’s local, external or 3rd party), but it has the risk of someone modifying or deleting a record, getting your entire chain and re-hashing it. All the checks will pass, but the data will not be correct
  • Hash chaining with anchoring – the head of the chain (the hash of the last entry/block) could be “anchored” to an external service that is outside the capabilities of a malicious actor. Ideally, a public blockchain, alternatively – paper, a public service (twitter), email, etc. That way a malicious actor can’t just rehash the whole chain, because any check against the external service would fail.
  • WORM storage (write once, ready many). You could send your audit logs almost directly to WORM storage, where it’s impossible to replace data. However, that is not ideal, as WORM storage can be slow and expensive. For example AWS Glacier has rather big retrieval times and searching through recent data makes it impractical. It’s actually cheaper than S3, for example, and you can have expiration policies. But having to support your own WORM storage is expensive. It is a good idea to eventually send the logs to WORM storage, but “fresh” audit trail should probably not be “archived” so that it’s searchable and some actionable insight can be gained from it.
  • All-in-one – applying all of the above “just in case” may be unnecessary for every project out there, but that’s what I decided to do at LogSentinel. Business-event granularity with timestamping, hash chaining, anchoring, and eventually putting to WORM storage – I think that provides both security guarantees and flexibility.

I hope the overview is useful and the results from the survey shed some light on how this aspect of information security is underestimated.

The post Audit Trail Overview appeared first on Bozho's tech blog.

Pirate Party Urges Swedish Govt to Stop ‘Copyright Troll’ Invasion

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-urges-swedish-govt-to-stop-copyright-troll-invasion-180418/

In recent years, millions of file-sharers around the world have been ordered to pay significant settlement fees, or face legal repercussions.

These so-called “copyright trolling” efforts have been a common occurrence in several countries, with Sweden one of the latest hunting grounds.

Over the past months, tens of thousands of Swedes have been targeted in this manner.

The copyright holders go to court, armed with a list of IP-addresses, and when permission is granted they ask the associated ISPs for the account details of individual subscribers.

These suspected pirates then get a settlement demand in their mailbox, urging them to pay the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, or have their day in court.

As in many other countries, these practices are not without controversy. Several experts have spoken out against them, and ISPs have raised objections too. However, according to Swedish law, the rightsholders have the right to pursue these cases.

Despite its name, the Swedish Pirate Party has been relatively silent on the issue. However, that changed this week, as the party now calls on Justice Minister Morgan Johansson to take action.

The Pirate Party describes the copyright trolling efforts as extortion. It stresses that the evidence copyright holders rely on is far from solid, something they believe the courts should take into account.

“It is a scandal that the Swedish judicial system facilitates the mafia-like methods of copyright trolls,” says Pirate Party leader Magnus Andersson.

“To condone the sending of extortion letters without reasonable ground for suspicion of criminal activity is not acceptable. We demand the Justice Minister to do something about the situation with these copyright trolls!”

The Pirate Party sees plenty of opportunities to intervene. The Government could, for example, change how the IPRED directive is interpreted and demand higher scrutiny of the provided evidence.

Another option would be to work at the EU level to repeal the IPRED-directive in its entirety.

Besides calling on the Justice Minister to take action, the Pirate Party is also backing the anti-copyright troll initiative of Internet provider Bahnhof. Through this campaign, members of the public can voice their concerns to the Swedish Government.

Through these and other efforts, the Pirate Party hopes that something will be done to protect the public from the ‘trolling’ practices.

“We cannot accept a situation where private companies use the judicial system as a weapon of fear to extort innocent people,” Andersson tells TorrentFreak.

“This creates contempt for the judiciary and supports the view that the courts only exist to serve the state’s and the big companies’ interests,” he adds.

Thus far the copyright holders have shown no sign of backing down. They refute the “trolling” characterizations and counter that they are merely enforcing their rights. And with the courts on their side, they have little to worry about for now.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Microsoft Denies Piracy Extortion Claims, Returns Fire

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-denies-piracy-extortion-claims-returns-fire-180416/

For many years, Microsoft and the Software Alliance (BSA) have carried out piracy investigations into organizations large and small.

Companies accused of using Microsoft software without permission usually get a letter asking them to pay up, or face legal consequences.

This also happened to Hanna Instruments, a Rhode Island-based company that sells analytical instruments. Last year, the company was accused of using Microsoft Office products without a proper license.

In a letter, BSA’s lawyers informed Hanna that it would face up to $4,950,000 in damages if the case went to court. Instead, however, they offered to settle the matter for $72,074.

Adding some extra pressure, BSA also warned that Microsoft could get a court order that would allow U.S. marshals to raid the company’s premises.

Where most of these cases are resolved behind closed doors, this one escalated. After being repeatedly contacted by BSA’s lawyers, Hanna decided to take the matter to court, claiming that Microsoft and BSA were trying to ‘extort’ money on ‘baseless’ accusations.

“BSA, Microsoft, and their counsel have, without supplying one scintilla of evidence, issued a series of letters for the sole purpose of extorting inflated monetary damages,” the company informed the court.

Late last week Microsoft and BSA replied to the complaint. While the two companies admit that they reached out to Hanna and offered a settlement, they deny several other allegations, including the extortion claims.

Instead, the companies submit a counterclaim, backing up their copyright infringement accusations and demanding damages.

“Hanna has engaged and continues to engage in the unauthorized installation, reproduction, and distribution and other unlawful use of Microsoft Software on computers on its premises and has used unlicensed copies of Microsoft Software to conduct its business,” they write.

According to Microsoft and BSA, the Rhode Island company still uses unauthorized product keys to activate and install unlicensed Microsoft software.

Turning Hanna’s own evidence against itself, they argue that two product keys were part of a batch of an educational program in China — not for commercial use in the United States.

Microsoft / BSA counterclaim

Another key could be traced back to what appears to be a counterfeit store which Microsoft has since shut down.

“The materials provided by Hanna also indicate that it purchased at least one copy of Microsoft Software from BuyCheapSoftware.com, a now-defunct website that was sued by Microsoft for selling stolen, abused, and otherwise unauthorized decoupled product keys,” Microsoft and BSA write.

According to Hanna, BSA previously failed to provide evidence to prove that the company was using unlicensed keys. However, the counterclaim suggests that the initial accusations had merit.

Whether BSA’s tactic of bringing up millions of dollars in damages and a possible raid by the U.S. Marshalls is the best strategy to resolve such a matter is up for debate of course.

It could very well be that Hanna was duped into buying counterfeit software, without knowing it. Perhaps this will come out as the case progresses. That said, it could also help if both sides simply have a good conversation to see if they can make peace, without threats.

—

Microsoft and BSA’s reply and counterclaim is available here (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

TV Broadcaster Wants App Stores Blocked to Prevent Piracy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tv-broadcaster-wants-app-stores-blocked-to-prevent-piracy-180416/

After first targeting torrent and regular streaming platforms with blocking injunctions, last year Village Roadshow and studios including Disney, Universal, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, and Paramount began looking at a new threat.

The action targeted HDSubs+, a reasonably popular IPTV service that provides hundreds of otherwise premium live channels, movies, and sports for a relatively small monthly fee. The application was filed during October 2017 and targeted Australia’s largest ISPs.

In parallel, Hong Kong-based broadcaster Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) launched a similar action, demanding that the same ISPs (including Telstra, Optus, TPG, and Vocus, plus subsidiaries) block several ‘pirate’ IPTV services, named in court as A1, BlueTV, EVPAD, FunTV, MoonBox, Unblock, and hTV5.

Due to the similarity of the cases, both applications were heard in Federal Court in Sydney on Friday. Neither case is as straightforward as blocking a torrent or basic streaming portal, so both applicants are having to deal with additional complexities.

The TVB case is of particular interest. Up to a couple of dozen URLs maintain the services, which are used to provide the content, an EPG (electronic program guide), updates and sundry other features. While most of these appear to fit the description of an “online location” designed to assist copyright infringement, where the Android-based software for the IPTV services is hosted provides an interesting dilemma.

ComputerWorld reports that the apps – which offer live broadcasts, video-on-demand, and catch-up TV – are hosted on as-yet-unnamed sites which are functionally similar to Google Play or Apple’s App Store. They’re repositories of applications that also carry non-infringing apps, such as those for Netflix and YouTube.

Nevertheless, despite clear knowledge of this dual use, TVB wants to have these app marketplaces blocked by Australian ISPs, which would not only render the illicit apps inaccessible to the public but all of the non-infringing ones too. Part of its argument that this action would be reasonable appears to be that legal apps – such as Netflix’s for example – can also be freely accessed elsewhere.

It will be up to Justice Nicholas to decide whether the “primary purpose” of these marketplaces is to infringe or facilitate the infringement of TVB’s copyrights. However, TVB also appears to have another problem which is directly connected to the copyright status in Australia of its China-focused live programming.

Justice Nicholas questioned whether watching a stream in Australia of TVB’s live Chinese broadcasts would amount to copyright infringement because no copy of that content is being made.

“If most of what is occurring here is a reproduction of broadcasts that are not protected by copyright, then the primary purpose is not to facilitate copyright infringement,” Justice Nicholas said.

One of the problems appears to be that China is not a party to the 1961 Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations. However, TVB is arguing that it should still receive protection because it airs pre-recorded content and the live broadcasts are also archived for re-transmission via catch-up services.

The question over whether unchoreographed live broadcasts receive protection has been raised in other regions but in most cases, a workaround has been found. The presence of broadcaster logos on screen (which receive copyright protection) is a factor and it’s been reported that broadcasters are able to record the ‘live’ action and transmit a copy just a couple of seconds later, thereby broadcasting an already-copyrighted work.

While TVB attempts to overcome its issues, Village Roadshow is facing some of its own in its efforts to take down HDSubs+.

It appears that at least partly in response to the Roadshow legal action, the service has undergone some modifications, including a change of brand to ‘Press Play Extra’. As reported by ZDNet, there have been structural changes too, which means that Roadshow can no longer “see under the hood”.

According to Justice Nicholas, there is no evidence that the latest version of the app infringes copyright but according to counsel for Village Roadshow, the new app is merely transitional and preparing for a possible future change.

“We submit the difference to be drawn is reactive to my clients serving on the operators a notice,” counsel for Roadshow argued, with an expert describing the new app as “almost like a placeholder.”

In short, Roadshow still wants all of the target domains in its original application blocked because the company believes there’s a good chance they’ll be reactivated in the future.

None of the ISPs involved in either case turned up to the hearings on Friday, which removes one layer of complexity in what appears thus far to be less than straightforward cases.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

MPAA and RIAA Still Can’t Go After Megaupload

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-and-riaa-still-cant-go-after-megaupload-180414/

Well over six years have passed since Megaupload was shutdown, but there is still little progress in the criminal proceedings against its founders.

The United States wants New Zealand to extradite the men but have thus far failed to achieve that goal. Dotcom and his former colleagues are using all legal means to prevent this eventuality and a final conclusion has yet to be reached.

While all parties await the outcome, the criminal case in the United States remains pending. The same goes for the lawsuits filed by the MPAA and RIAA in 2014.

Since the civil cases may influence the criminal proceedings, Megaupload’s legal team previously managed to put these cases on hold, and last week another extension was granted.

Previous extensions didn’t always go this easy. Last year there were concerns that the long delays could result in the destruction of evidence, as some of Megaupload’s hard drives were starting to fail.

However, after the parties agreed on a solution to back-up and restore the files, this is no longer an issue.

“With the preservation order in place, and there being no other objection, Defendant Megaupload hereby moves the Court to enter the attached proposed order, continuing the stay in this case for an additional six months,” Megaupload’s legal team recently informed the court.

Without any objections from the MPAA and RIAA, U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady swiftly granted Megaupload’s request to stay both lawsuits until October this year.

While the US Government hopes to have Dotcom in custody by that time, the entrepreneur has different plans. Following a win at the Human Rights Tribunal in New Zealand, he hopes to put the criminal case behind him soon.

If that indeed happens, the MPAA and RIAA might have their turn.

The latest stay order

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‘Pirate’ Android App Store Operator Avoids Prison

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-android-app-store-operator-avoids-prison-180413/

Assisted by police in France and the Netherlands, the FBI took down the “pirate” Android stores Appbucket, Applanet and SnappzMarket in the summer of 2012.

During the years that followed several people connected to the Android app sites were arrested and indicted, and slowly but surely these cases are reaching their conclusions.

This week the Northern District Court of Georgia announced the sentencing of one of the youngest defendants. Aaron Buckley was fifteen when he started working on Applanet, and still a teenager when armed agents raided his house.

Years passed and a lot has changed since then, Buckley’s attorney informed the court before sentencing. The former pirate, who pleaded guilty to Conspiracy to Commit Copyright Infringement and Criminal Copyright Infringement, is a completely different person today.

Similar to many people who have a run-in with the law, life wasn’t always easy on him. Computers offered a welcome escape but also dragged Buckley into trouble, something he deeply regrets now.

Following the indictment, things started to change. The Applanet operator picked up his life, away from the computer, and also got involved in community work. Among other things, he plays a leading role in a popular support community for LGBT teenagers.

Given the tough circumstances of his personal life, which we won’t elaborate on, his attorney requested a downward departure from the regular sentencing guidelines, to allow for lesser punishment.

After considering all the options, District Court Judge Timothy C. Batten agreed to a lower sentence. Unlike some other pirate app stores operators, who must spend years in prison, Buckley will not be incarcerated.

Instead, the Applanet operator, who is now in his mid-twenties, will be put on probation for three years, including a year of home confinement.

The sentence (pdf)

In addition, he has to perform 20 hours of community service and work towards passing a General Educational Development (GED) exam.

It’s tough to live with the prospect of possibly spending years in jail, especially for more than a decade. Given the circumstances, this sentence must be a huge relief.

TorrentFreak contacted Buckley, who informed us that he is happy with the outcome and ready to work on a bright future.

“I really respect the government and the judge in their sentencing and am extremely grateful that they took into account all concerns of my health and life situation in regards to possible sentences,” he tells us.

“I am just glad to have another chance to use my time and skills to hopefully contribute to society in a more positive way as much as I am capable thanks to the outcome of the case.”

Time to move on.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

The answers to your questions for Eben Upton

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/eben-q-a-1/

Before Easter, we asked you to tell us your questions for a live Q & A with Raspberry Pi Trading CEO and Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton. The variety of questions and comments you sent was wonderful, and while we couldn’t get to them all, we picked a handful of the most common to grill him on.

You can watch the video below — though due to this being the first pancake of our live Q&A videos, the sound is a bit iffy — or read Eben’s answers to the first five questions today. We’ll follow up with the rest in the next few weeks!

Live Q&A with Eben Upton, creator of the Raspberry Pi

Get your questions to us now using #AskRaspberryPi on Twitter

Any plans for 64-bit Raspbian?

Raspbian is effectively 32-bit Debian built for the ARMv6 instruction-set architecture supported by the ARM11 processor in the first-generation Raspberry Pi. So maybe the question should be: “Would we release a version of our operating environment that was built on top of 64-bit ARM Debian?”

And the answer is: “Not yet.”

When we released the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, we released an operating system image on the same day; the wonderful thing about that image is that it runs on every Raspberry Pi ever made. It even runs on the alpha boards from way back in 2011.

That deep backwards compatibility is really important for us, in large part because we don’t want to orphan our customers. If someone spent $35 on an older-model Raspberry Pi five or six years ago, they still spent $35, so it would be wrong for us to throw them under the bus.

So, if we were going to do a 64-bit version, we’d want to keep doing the 32-bit version, and then that would mean our efforts would be split across the two versions; and remember, we’re still a very small engineering team. Never say never, but it would be a big step for us.

For people wanting a 64-bit operating system, there are plenty of good third-party images out there, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Given that the 3B+ includes 5GHz wireless and Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, why would manufacturers continue to use the Compute Module?

It’s a form-factor thing.

Very large numbers of people are using the bigger product in an industrial context, and it’s well engineered for that: it has module certification, wireless on board, and now PoE support. But there are use cases that can’t accommodate this form factor. For example, NEC displays: we’ve had this great relationship with NEC for a couple of years now where a lot of their displays have a socket in the back that you can put a Compute Module into. That wouldn’t work with the 3B+ form factor.

Back of an NEC display with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module slotted in.

An NEC display with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module

What are some industrial uses/products Raspberry is used with?

The NEC displays are a good example of the broader trend of using Raspberry Pi in digital signage.

A Raspberry Pi running the wait time signage at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal Studios.
Image c/o thelonelyredditor1

If you see a monitor at a station, or an airport, or a recording studio, and you look behind it, it’s amazing how often you’ll find a Raspberry Pi sitting there. The original Raspberry Pi was particularly strong for multimedia use cases, so we saw uptake in signage very early on.

An array of many Raspberry Pis

Los Alamos Raspberry Pi supercomputer

Another great example is the Los Alamos National Laboratory building supercomputers out of Raspberry Pis. Many high-end supercomputers now are built using white-box hardware — just regular PCs connected together using some networking fabric — and a collection of Raspberry Pi units can serve as a scale model of that. The Raspberry Pi has less processing power, less memory, and less networking bandwidth than the PC, but it has a balanced amount of each. So if you don’t want to let your apprentice supercomputer engineers loose on your expensive supercomputer, a cluster of Raspberry Pis is a good alternative.

Why is there no power button on the Raspberry Pi?

“Once you start, where do you stop?” is a question we ask ourselves a lot.

There are a whole bunch of useful things that we haven’t included in the Raspberry Pi by default. We don’t have a power button, we don’t have a real-time clock, and we don’t have an analogue-to-digital converter — those are probably the three most common requests. And the issue with them is that they each cost a bit of money, they’re each only useful to a minority of users, and even that minority often can’t agree on exactly what they want. Some people would like a power button that is literally a physical analogue switch between the 5V input and the rest of the board, while others would like something a bit more like a PC power button, which is partway between a physical switch and a ‘shutdown’ button. There’s no consensus about what sort of power button we should add.

So the answer is: accessories. By leaving a feature off the board, we’re not taxing the majority of people who don’t want the feature. And of course, we create an opportunity for other companies in the ecosystem to create and sell accessories to those people who do want them.

Adafruit Push-button Power Switch Breakout Raspberry Pi

The Adafruit Push-button Power Switch Breakout is one of many accessories that fill in the gaps for makers.

We have this neat way of figuring out what features to include by default: we divide through the fraction of people who want it. If you have a 20 cent component that’s going to be used by a fifth of people, we treat that as if it’s a $1 component. And it has to fight its way against the $1 components that will be used by almost everybody.

Do you think that Raspberry Pi is the future of the Internet of Things?

Absolutely, Raspberry Pi is the future of the Internet of Things!

In practice, most of the viable early IoT use cases are in the commercial and industrial spaces rather than the consumer space. Maybe in ten years’ time, IoT will be about putting 10-cent chips into light switches, but right now there’s so much money to be saved by putting automation into factories that you don’t need 10-cent components to address the market. Last year, roughly 2 million $35 Raspberry Pi units went into commercial and industrial applications, and many of those are what you’d call IoT applications.

So I think we’re the future of a particular slice of IoT. And we have ten years to get our price point down to 10 cents 🙂

The post The answers to your questions for Eben Upton appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

WHOIS Limits Under GDPR Will Make Pirates Harder to Catch, Groups Fear

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/whois-limits-under-gdpr-will-make-pirates-harder-to-catch-groups-fear-180413/

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law covering data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union.

As more and more personal data is gathered, stored and (ab)used online, the aim of the GDPR is to protect EU citizens from breaches of privacy. The regulation applies to all companies processing the personal data of subjects residing in the Union, no matter where in the world the company is located.

Penalties for non-compliance can be severe. While there is a tiered approach according to severity, organizations can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million, whichever is greater. Needless to say, the regulations will need to be taken seriously.

Among those affected are domain name registries and registrars who publish the personal details of domain name owners in the public WHOIS database. In a full entry, a person or organization’s name, address, telephone numbers and email addresses can often be found.

This raises a serious issue. While registries and registrars are instructed and contractually obliged to publish data in the WHOIS database by global domain name authority ICANN, in millions of cases this conflicts with the requirements of the GDPR, which prevents the details of private individuals being made freely available on the Internet.

As explained in detail by the EFF, ICANN has been trying to resolve this clash. Its proposed interim model for GDPR compliance (pdf) envisions registrars continuing to collect full WHOIS data but not necessarily publishing it, to “allow the existing data
to be preserved while the community discussions continue on the next generation of WHOIS.”

But the proposed changes that will inevitably restrict free access to WHOIS information has plenty of people spooked, including thousands of companies belonging to entertainment industry groups such as the MPAA, IFPI, RIAA and the Copyright Alliance.

In a letter sent to Vice President Andrus Ansip of the European Commission, these groups and dozens of others warn that restricted access to WHOIS will have a serious effect on their ability to protect their intellectual property rights from “cybercriminals” which pose a threat to their businesses.

Signed by 50 organizations involved in IP protection and other areas of online security, the letter expresses concern that in attempting to comply with the GDPR, ICANN is on a course to “over-correct” while disregarding proportionality, accountability and transparency.

A small sample of the groups calling on ICANN

“We strongly assert that this model does not properly account for the critical public and legitimate interests served by maintaining a sufficient amount of data publicly available while respecting privacy interests of registrants by instituting a tiered or layered access system for the vast majority of personal data as defined by the GDPR,” the groups write.

The letter focuses on two aspects of “over-correction”, the first being ICANN’s proposal that no personal data whatsoever of a domain name registrant will be made available “without appropriate consideration or balancing of the countervailing interests in public disclosure of a limited amount of such data.”

In response to ICANN’s proposal that only the province/state and country of a domain name registrant be made publicly available, the groups advise the organization that publishing “a natural person registrant’s e-mail address” in a publicly accessible WHOIS directory will not constitute a breach of the GDPR.

“[W]e strongly believe that the continued public availability of the registrant’s e-mail address – specifically the e-mail address that the registrant supplies to the registrar at the time the domain name is purchased and which e-mail address the registrar is required to validate – is critical for several reasons,” the groups write.

“First, it is the data element that is typically the most important to have readily available for law enforcement, consumer protection, particularly child protection, intellectual property enforcement and cybersecurity/anti-malware purposes.

“Second, the public accessibility of the registrant’s e-mail address permits a broad array of threats and illegal activities to be addressed quickly and the damage from such threats mitigated and contained in a timely manner, particularly where the abusive/illegal activity may be spawned from a variety of different domain names on different generic Top Level Domains,” they add.

The groups also argue that since making email addresses is effectively required in light of Article 5.1(c) ECD, “there is no legitimate justification to discontinue public availability of the registrant’s e-mail address in the WHOIS directory and especially not in light of other legitimate purposes.”

The EFF, on the other hand, says that being able to contact a domain owner wouldn’t necessarily require an email address to be made public.

“There are other cases in which it makes sense to allow members of the public to contact the owner of a domain, without having to obtain a court order,” EFF writes.

“But this could be achieved very simply if ICANN were simply to provide something like a CAPTCHA-protected contact form, which would deliver email to the appropriate contact point with no need to reveal the registrant’s actual email address.”

The groups’ second main concern is that ICANN reportedly makes no distinction between name registrants that are “natural persons versus those that are legal entities” and intends to treat them all as if they are subject to the GDPR, despite the fact that the regulation only applies to data associated with an “identified or identifiable natural person”.

They say it is imperative that EU Data Protection Authorities are made to understand that when registrants obtain a domain for illegal purposes, they often only register it as a “natural person” when registering as a legal person (legal entity) would be more appropriate, despite that granting them less privacy.

“Consequently, the test for differentiating between a legal and natural person should not merely be the legal status of the registrant, but also whether the registrant is, in fact, acting as a legal or natural person vis a vis the use of the domain name,” the groups note.

“We therefore urge that ICANN be given appropriate guidance as to the importance of maintaining a distinction between natural person and legal person registrants and keeping as much data about legal person domain name registrants as publicly accessible as possible,” they conclude.

What will happen with WHOIS on May 25 still isn’t clear. It wasn’t until October 2017 that ICANN finally determined that it would be affected by the GDPR, meaning that it’s been scrambling ever since to meet the compliance date. And it still is, according to the latest available documentation (pdf).

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

How to retain system tables’ data spanning multiple Amazon Redshift clusters and run cross-cluster diagnostic queries

Post Syndicated from Karthik Sonti original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-to-retain-system-tables-data-spanning-multiple-amazon-redshift-clusters-and-run-cross-cluster-diagnostic-queries/

Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse service that logs the history of the system in STL log tables. The STL log tables manage disk space by retaining only two to five days of log history, depending on log usage and available disk space.

To retain STL tables’ data for an extended period, you usually have to create a replica table for every system table. Then, for each you load the data from the system table into the replica at regular intervals. By maintaining replica tables for STL tables, you can run diagnostic queries on historical data from the STL tables. You then can derive insights from query execution times, query plans, and disk-spill patterns, and make better cluster-sizing decisions. However, refreshing replica tables with live data from STL tables at regular intervals requires schedulers such as Cron or AWS Data Pipeline. Also, these tables are specific to one cluster and they are not accessible after the cluster is terminated. This is especially true for transient Amazon Redshift clusters that last for only a finite period of ad hoc query execution.

In this blog post, I present a solution that exports system tables from multiple Amazon Redshift clusters into an Amazon S3 bucket. This solution is serverless, and you can schedule it as frequently as every five minutes. The AWS CloudFormation deployment template that I provide automates the solution setup in your environment. The system tables’ data in the Amazon S3 bucket is partitioned by cluster name and query execution date to enable efficient joins in cross-cluster diagnostic queries.

I also provide another CloudFormation template later in this post. This second template helps to automate the creation of tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog for the system tables’ data stored in Amazon S3. After the system tables are exported to Amazon S3, you can run cross-cluster diagnostic queries on the system tables’ data and derive insights about query executions in each Amazon Redshift cluster. You can do this using Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, or Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

You can find all the code examples in this post, including the CloudFormation templates, AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts, and the resolution steps for common errors you might encounter in this GitHub repository.

Solution overview

The solution in this post uses AWS Glue to export system tables’ log data from Amazon Redshift clusters into Amazon S3. The AWS Glue ETL jobs are invoked at a scheduled interval by AWS Lambda. AWS Systems Manager, which provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management, maintains the details of Amazon Redshift clusters for which the solution is enabled. The last-fetched time stamp values for the respective cluster-table combination are maintained in an Amazon DynamoDB table.

The following diagram covers the key steps involved in this solution.

The solution as illustrated in the preceding diagram flows like this:

  1. The Lambda function, invoke_rs_stl_export_etl, is triggered at regular intervals, as controlled by Amazon CloudWatch. It’s triggered to look up the AWS Systems Manager parameter store to get the details of the Amazon Redshift clusters for which the system table export is enabled.
  2. The same Lambda function, based on the Amazon Redshift cluster details obtained in step 1, invokes the AWS Glue ETL job designated for the Amazon Redshift cluster. If an ETL job for the cluster is not found, the Lambda function creates one.
  3. The ETL job invoked for the Amazon Redshift cluster gets the cluster credentials from the parameter store. It gets from the DynamoDB table the last exported time stamp of when each of the system tables was exported from the respective Amazon Redshift cluster.
  4. The ETL job unloads the system tables’ data from the Amazon Redshift cluster into an Amazon S3 bucket.
  5. The ETL job updates the DynamoDB table with the last exported time stamp value for each system table exported from the Amazon Redshift cluster.
  6. The Amazon Redshift cluster system tables’ data is available in Amazon S3 and is partitioned by cluster name and date for running cross-cluster diagnostic queries.

Understanding the configuration data

This solution uses AWS Systems Manager parameter store to store the Amazon Redshift cluster credentials securely. The parameter store also securely stores other configuration information that the AWS Glue ETL job needs for extracting and storing system tables’ data in Amazon S3. Systems Manager comes with a default AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that it uses to encrypt the password component of the Amazon Redshift cluster credentials.

The following table explains the global parameters and cluster-specific parameters required in this solution. The global parameters are defined once and applicable at the overall solution level. The cluster-specific parameters are specific to an Amazon Redshift cluster and repeat for each cluster for which you enable this post’s solution. The CloudFormation template explained later in this post creates these parameters as part of the deployment process.

Parameter name Type Description
Global parameters—defined once and applied to all jobs
redshift_query_logs.global.s3_prefix String The Amazon S3 path where the query logs are exported. Under this path, each exported table is partitioned by cluster name and date.
redshift_query_logs.global.tempdir String The Amazon S3 path that AWS Glue ETL jobs use for temporarily staging the data.
redshift_query_logs.global.role> String The name of the role that the AWS Glue ETL jobs assume. Just the role name is sufficient. The complete Amazon Resource Name (ARN) is not required.
redshift_query_logs.global.enabled_cluster_list StringList A comma-separated list of cluster names for which system tables’ data export is enabled. This gives flexibility for a user to exclude certain clusters.
Cluster-specific parameters—for each cluster specified in the enabled_cluster_list parameter
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.connection String The name of the AWS Glue Data Catalog connection to the Amazon Redshift cluster. For example, if the cluster name is product_warehouse, the entry is redshift_query_logs.product_warehouse.connection.
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.user String The user name that AWS Glue uses to connect to the Amazon Redshift cluster.
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.password Secure String The password that AWS Glue uses to connect the Amazon Redshift cluster’s encrypted-by key that is managed in AWS KMS.

For example, suppose that you have two Amazon Redshift clusters, product-warehouse and category-management, for which the solution described in this post is enabled. In this case, the parameters shown in the following screenshot are created by the solution deployment CloudFormation template in the AWS Systems Manager parameter store.

Solution deployment

To make it easier for you to get started, I created a CloudFormation template that automatically configures and deploys the solution—only one step is required after deployment.

Prerequisites

To deploy the solution, you must have one or more Amazon Redshift clusters in a private subnet. This subnet must have a network address translation (NAT) gateway or a NAT instance configured, and also a security group with a self-referencing inbound rule for all TCP ports. For more information about why AWS Glue ETL needs the configuration it does, described previously, see Connecting to a JDBC Data Store in a VPC in the AWS Glue documentation.

To start the deployment, launch the CloudFormation template:

CloudFormation stack parameters

The following table lists and describes the parameters for deploying the solution to export query logs from multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

Property Default Description
S3Bucket mybucket The bucket this solution uses to store the exported query logs, stage code artifacts, and perform unloads from Amazon Redshift. For example, the mybucket/extract_rs_logs/data bucket is used for storing all the exported query logs for each system table partitioned by the cluster. The mybucket/extract_rs_logs/temp/ bucket is used for temporarily staging the unloaded data from Amazon Redshift. The mybucket/extract_rs_logs/code bucket is used for storing all the code artifacts required for Lambda and the AWS Glue ETL jobs.
ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters Requires Input A comma-separated list of cluster names from which the system table logs need to be exported.
DataStoreSecurityGroups Requires Input A list of security groups with an inbound rule to the Amazon Redshift clusters provided in the parameter, ExportEnabledClusters. These security groups should also have a self-referencing inbound rule on all TCP ports, as explained on Connecting to a JDBC Data Store in a VPC.

After you launch the template and create the stack, you see that the following resources have been created:

  1. AWS Glue connections for each Amazon Redshift cluster you provided in the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters.
  2. All parameters required for this solution created in the parameter store.
  3. The Lambda function that invokes the AWS Glue ETL jobs for each configured Amazon Redshift cluster at a regular interval of five minutes.
  4. The DynamoDB table that captures the last exported time stamps for each exported cluster-table combination.
  5. The AWS Glue ETL jobs to export query logs from each Amazon Redshift cluster provided in the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters.
  6. The IAM roles and policies required for the Lambda function and AWS Glue ETL jobs.

After the deployment

For each Amazon Redshift cluster for which you enabled the solution through the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters, the automated deployment includes temporary credentials that you must update after the deployment:

  1. Go to the parameter store.
  2. Note the parameters <<cluster_name>>.user and redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.password that correspond to each Amazon Redshift cluster for which you enabled this solution. Edit these parameters to replace the placeholder values with the right credentials.

For example, if product-warehouse is one of the clusters for which you enabled system table export, you edit these two parameters with the right user name and password and choose Save parameter.

Querying the exported system tables

Within a few minutes after the solution deployment, you should see Amazon Redshift query logs being exported to the Amazon S3 location, <<S3Bucket_you_provided>>/extract_redshift_query_logs/data/. In that bucket, you should see the eight system tables partitioned by customer name and date: stl_alert_event_log, stl_dlltext, stl_explain, stl_query, stl_querytext, stl_scan, stl_utilitytext, and stl_wlm_query.

To run cross-cluster diagnostic queries on the exported system tables, create external tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. To make it easier for you to get started, I provide a CloudFormation template that creates an AWS Glue crawler, which crawls the exported system tables stored in Amazon S3 and builds the external tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Launch this CloudFormation template to create external tables that correspond to the Amazon Redshift system tables. S3Bucket is the only input parameter required for this stack deployment. Provide the same Amazon S3 bucket name where the system tables’ data is being exported. After you successfully create the stack, you can see the eight tables in the database, redshift_query_logs_db, as shown in the following screenshot.

Now, navigate to the Athena console to run cross-cluster diagnostic queries. The following screenshot shows a diagnostic query executed in Athena that retrieves query alerts logged across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

You can build the following example Amazon QuickSight dashboard by running cross-cluster diagnostic queries on Athena to identify the hourly query count and the key query alert events across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

How to extend the solution

You can extend this post’s solution in two ways:

  • Add any new Amazon Redshift clusters that you spin up after you deploy the solution.
  • Add other system tables or custom query results to the list of exports from an Amazon Redshift cluster.

Extend the solution to other Amazon Redshift clusters

To extend the solution to more Amazon Redshift clusters, add the three cluster-specific parameters in the AWS Systems Manager parameter store following the guidelines earlier in this post. Modify the redshift_query_logs.global.enabled_cluster_list parameter to append the new cluster to the comma-separated string.

Extend the solution to add other tables or custom queries to an Amazon Redshift cluster

The current solution ships with the export functionality for the following Amazon Redshift system tables:

  • stl_alert_event_log
  • stl_dlltext
  • stl_explain
  • stl_query
  • stl_querytext
  • stl_scan
  • stl_utilitytext
  • stl_wlm_query

You can easily add another system table or custom query by adding a few lines of code to the AWS Glue ETL job, <<cluster-name>_extract_rs_query_logs. For example, suppose that from the product-warehouse Amazon Redshift cluster you want to export orders greater than $2,000. To do so, add the following five lines of code to the AWS Glue ETL job product-warehouse_extract_rs_query_logs, where product-warehouse is your cluster name:

  1. Get the last-processed time-stamp value. The function creates a value if it doesn’t already exist.

salesLastProcessTSValue = functions.getLastProcessedTSValue(trackingEntry=”mydb.sales_2000",job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Run the custom query with the time stamp.

returnDF=functions.runQuery(query="select * from sales s join order o where o.order_amnt > 2000 and sale_timestamp > '{}'".format (salesLastProcessTSValue) ,tableName="mydb.sales_2000",job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Save the results to Amazon S3.

functions.saveToS3(dataframe=returnDF,s3Prefix=s3Prefix,tableName="mydb.sales_2000",partitionColumns=["sale_date"],job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Get the latest time-stamp value from the returned data frame in Step 2.

latestTimestampVal=functions.getMaxValue(returnDF,"sale_timestamp",job_configs)

  1. Update the last-processed time-stamp value in the DynamoDB table.

functions.updateLastProcessedTSValue(“mydb.sales_2000",latestTimestampVal[0],job_configs)

Conclusion

In this post, I demonstrate a serverless solution to retain the system tables’ log data across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters. By using this solution, you can incrementally export the data from system tables into Amazon S3. By performing this export, you can build cross-cluster diagnostic queries, build audit dashboards, and derive insights into capacity planning by using services such as Athena. I also demonstrate how you can extend this solution to other ad hoc query use cases or tables other than system tables by adding a few lines of code.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue with Node.js in Production and Amazon Redshift – 2017 Recap.

About the Author

Karthik Sonti is a senior big data architect at Amazon Web Services. He helps AWS customers build big data and analytical solutions and provides guidance on architecture and best practices.

 

 

 

 

Using AWS Lambda and Amazon Comprehend for sentiment analysis

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-aws-lambda-and-amazon-comprehend-for-sentiment-analysis/

This post courtesy of Giedrius Praspaliauskas, AWS Solutions Architect

Even with best IVR systems, customers get frustrated. What if you knew that 10 callers in your Amazon Connect contact flow were likely to say “Agent!” in frustration in the next 30 seconds? Would you like to get to them before that happens? What if your bot was smart enough to admit, “I’m sorry this isn’t helping. Let me find someone for you.”?

In this post, I show you how to use AWS Lambda and Amazon Comprehend for sentiment analysis to make your Amazon Lex bots in Amazon Connect more sympathetic.

Setting up a Lambda function for sentiment analysis

There are multiple natural language and text processing frameworks or services available to use with Lambda, including but not limited to Amazon Comprehend, TextBlob, Pattern, and NLTK. Pick one based on the nature of your system:  the type of interaction, languages supported, and so on. For this post, I picked Amazon Comprehend, which uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract insights and relationships in text.

The walkthrough in this post is just an example. In a full-scale implementation, you would likely implement a more nuanced approach. For example, you could keep the overall sentiment score through the conversation and act only when it reaches a certain threshold. It is worth noting that this Lambda function is not called for missed utterances, so there may be a gap between what is being analyzed and what was actually said.

The Lambda function is straightforward. It analyses the input transcript field of the Amazon Lex event. Based on the overall sentiment value, it generates a response message with next step instructions. When the sentiment is neutral, positive, or mixed, the response leaves it to Amazon Lex to decide what the next steps should be. It adds to the response overall sentiment value as an additional session attribute, along with slots’ values received as an input.

When the overall sentiment is negative, the function returns the dialog action, pointing to an escalation intent (specified in the environment variable ESCALATION_INTENT_NAME) or returns the fulfillment closure action with a failure state when the intent is not specified. In addition to actions or intents, the function returns a message, or prompt, to be provided to the customer before taking the next step. Based on the returned action, Amazon Connect can select the appropriate next step in a contact flow.

For this walkthrough, you create a Lambda function using the AWS Management Console:

  1. Open the Lambda console.
  2. Choose Create Function.
  3. Choose Author from scratch (no blueprint).
  4. For Runtime, choose Python 3.6.
  5. For Role, choose Create a custom role. The custom execution role allows the function to detect sentiments, create a log group, stream log events, and store the log events.
  6. Enter the following values:
    • For Role Description, enter Lambda execution role permissions.
    • For IAM Role, choose Create an IAM role.
    • For Role Name, enter LexSentimentAnalysisLambdaRole.
    • For Policy, use the following policy:
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "logs:CreateLogStream",
                "logs:PutLogEvents"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:*:*"
        },
        {
            "Action": [
                "comprehend:DetectDominantLanguage",
                "comprehend:DetectSentiment"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}
    1. Choose Create function.
    2. Copy/paste the following code to the editor window
import os, boto3

ESCALATION_INTENT_MESSAGE="Seems that you are having troubles with our service. Would you like to be transferred to the associate?"
FULFILMENT_CLOSURE_MESSAGE="Seems that you are having troubles with our service. Let me transfer you to the associate."

escalation_intent_name = os.getenv('ESACALATION_INTENT_NAME', None)

client = boto3.client('comprehend')

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    sentiment=client.detect_sentiment(Text=event['inputTranscript'],LanguageCode='en')['Sentiment']
    if sentiment=='NEGATIVE':
        if escalation_intent_name:
            result = {
                "sessionAttributes": {
                    "sentiment": sentiment
                    },
                    "dialogAction": {
                        "type": "ConfirmIntent", 
                        "message": {
                            "contentType": "PlainText", 
                            "content": ESCALATION_INTENT_MESSAGE
                        }, 
                    "intentName": escalation_intent_name
                    }
            }
        else:
            result = {
                "sessionAttributes": {
                    "sentiment": sentiment
                },
                "dialogAction": {
                    "type": "Close",
                    "fulfillmentState": "Failed",
                    "message": {
                            "contentType": "PlainText",
                            "content": FULFILMENT_CLOSURE_MESSAGE
                    }
                }
            }

    else:
        result ={
            "sessionAttributes": {
                "sentiment": sentiment
            },
            "dialogAction": {
                "type": "Delegate",
                "slots" : event["currentIntent"]["slots"]
            }
        }
    return result
  1. Below the code editor specify the environment variable ESCALATION_INTENT_NAME with a value of Escalate.

  1. Click on Save in the top right of the console.

Now you can test your function.

  1. Click Test at the top of the console.
  2. Configure a new test event using the following test event JSON:
{
  "messageVersion": "1.0",
  "invocationSource": "DialogCodeHook",
  "userId": "1234567890",
  "sessionAttributes": {},
  "bot": {
    "name": "BookSomething",
    "alias": "None",
    "version": "$LATEST"
  },
  "outputDialogMode": "Text",
  "currentIntent": {
    "name": "BookSomething",
    "slots": {
      "slot1": "None",
      "slot2": "None"
    },
    "confirmationStatus": "None"
  },
  "inputTranscript": "I want something"
}
  1. Click Create
  2. Click Test on the console

This message should return a response from Lambda with a sentiment session attribute of NEUTRAL.

However, if you change the input to “This is garbage!”, Lambda changes the dialog action to the escalation intent specified in the environment variable ESCALATION_INTENT_NAME.

Setting up Amazon Lex

Now that you have your Lambda function running, it is time to create the Amazon Lex bot. Use the BookTrip sample bot and call it BookSomething. The IAM role is automatically created on your behalf. Indicate that this bot is not subject to the COPPA, and choose Create. A few minutes later, the bot is ready.

Make the following changes to the default configuration of the bot:

  1. Add an intent with no associated slots. Name it Escalate.
  2. Specify the Lambda function for initialization and validation in the existing two intents (“BookCar” and “BookHotel”), at the same time giving Amazon Lex permission to invoke it.
  3. Leave the other configuration settings as they are and save the intents.

You are ready to build and publish this bot. Set a new alias, BookSomethingWithSentimentAnalysis. When the build finishes, test it.

As you see, sentiment analysis works!

Setting up Amazon Connect

Next, provision an Amazon Connect instance.

After the instance is created, you need to integrate the Amazon Lex bot created in the previous step. For more information, see the Amazon Lex section in the Configuring Your Amazon Connect Instance topic.  You may also want to look at the excellent post by Randall Hunt, New – Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex Integration.

Create a new contact flow, “Sentiment analysis walkthrough”:

  1. Log in into the Amazon Connect instance.
  2. Choose Create contact flow, Create transfer to agent flow.
  3. Add a Get customer input block, open the icon in the top left corner, and specify your Amazon Lex bot and its intents.
  4. Select the Text to speech audio prompt type and enter text for Amazon Connect to play at the beginning of the dialog.
  5. Choose Amazon Lex, enter your Amazon Lex bot name and the alias.
  6. Specify the intents to be used as dialog branches that a customer can choose: BookHotel, BookTrip, or Escalate.
  7. Add two Play prompt blocks and connect them to the customer input block.
    • If booking hotel or car intent is returned from the bot flow, play the corresponding prompt (“OK, will book it for you”) and initiate booking (in this walkthrough, just hang up after the prompt).
    • However, if escalation intent is returned (caused by the sentiment analysis results in the bot), play the prompt (“OK, transferring to an agent”) and initiate the transfer.
  8. Save and publish the contact flow.

As a result, you have a contact flow with a single customer input step and a text-to-speech prompt that uses the Amazon Lex bot. You expect one of the three intents returned:

Edit the phone number to associate the contact flow that you just created. It is now ready for testing. Call the phone number and check how your contact flow works.

Cleanup

Don’t forget to delete all the resources created during this walkthrough to avoid incurring any more costs:

  • Amazon Connect instance
  • Amazon Lex bot
  • Lambda function
  • IAM role LexSentimentAnalysisLambdaRole

Summary

In this walkthrough, you implemented sentiment analysis with a Lambda function. The function can be integrated into Amazon Lex and, as a result, into Amazon Connect. This approach gives you the flexibility to analyze user input and then act. You may find the following potential use cases of this approach to be of interest:

  • Extend the Lambda function to identify “hot” topics in the user input even if the sentiment is not negative and take action proactively. For example, switch to an escalation intent if a user mentioned “where is my order,” which may signal potential frustration.
  • Use Amazon Connect Streams to provide agent sentiment analysis results along with call transfer. Enable service tailored towards particular customer needs and sentiments.
  • Route calls to agents based on both skill set and sentiment.
  • Prioritize calls based on sentiment using multiple Amazon Connect queues instead of transferring directly to an agent.
  • Monitor quality and flag for review contact flows that result in high overall negative sentiment.
  • Implement sentiment and AI/ML based call analysis, such as a real-time recommendation engine. For more details, see Machine Learning on AWS.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

More power to your Pi

Post Syndicated from James Adams original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pi-power-supply-chip/

It’s been just over three weeks since we launched the new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Although the product is branded Raspberry Pi 3B+ and not Raspberry Pi 4, a serious amount of engineering was involved in creating it. The wireless networking, USB/Ethernet hub, on-board power supplies, and BCM2837 chip were all upgraded: together these represent almost all the circuitry on the board! Today, I’d like to tell you about the work that has gone into creating a custom power supply chip for our newest computer.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, with custome power supply chip

The new Raspberry Pi 3B+, sporting a new, custom power supply chip (bottom left-hand corner)

Successful launch

The Raspberry Pi 3B+ has been well received, and we’ve enjoyed hearing feedback from the community as well as reading the various reviews and articles highlighting the solid improvements in wireless networking, Ethernet, CPU, and thermal performance of the new board. Gareth Halfacree’s post here has some particularly nice graphs showing the increased performance as well as how the Pi 3B+ keeps cool under load due to the new CPU package that incorporates a metal heat spreader. The Raspberry Pi production lines at the Sony UK Technology Centre are running at full speed, and it seems most people who want to get hold of the new board are able to find one in stock.

Powering your Pi

One of the most critical but often under-appreciated elements of any electronic product, particularly one such as Raspberry Pi with lots of complex on-board silicon (processor, networking, high-speed memory), is the power supply. In fact, the Raspberry Pi 3B+ has no fewer than six different voltage rails: two at 3.3V — one special ‘quiet’ one for audio, and one for everything else; 1.8V; 1.2V for the LPDDR2 memory; and 1.2V nominal for the CPU core. Note that the CPU voltage is actually raised and lowered on the fly as the speed of the CPU is increased and decreased depending on how hard the it is working. The sixth rail is 5V, which is the master supply that all the others are created from, and the output voltage for the four downstream USB ports; this is what the mains power adaptor is supplying through the micro USB power connector.

Power supply primer

There are two common classes of power supply circuits: linear regulators and switching regulators. Linear regulators work by creating a lower, regulated voltage from a higher one. In simple terms, they monitor the output voltage against an internally generated reference and continually change their own resistance to keep the output voltage constant. Switching regulators work in a different way: they ‘pump’ energy by first storing the energy coming from the source supply in a reactive component (usually an inductor, sometimes a capacitor) and then releasing it to the regulated output supply. The switches in switching regulators effect this energy transfer by first connecting the inductor (or capacitor) to store the source energy, and then switching the circuit so the energy is released to its destination.

Linear regulators produce smoother, less noisy output voltages, but they can only convert to a lower voltage, and have to dissipate energy to do so. The higher the output current and the voltage difference across them is, the more energy is lost as heat. On the other hand, switching supplies can, depending on their design, convert any voltage to any other voltage and can be much more efficient (efficiencies of 90% and above are not uncommon). However, they are more complex and generate noisier output voltages.

Designers use both types of regulators depending on the needs of the downstream circuit: for low-voltage drops, low current, or low noise, linear regulators are usually the right choice, while switching regulators are used for higher power or when efficiency of conversion is required. One of the simplest switching-mode power supply circuits is the buck converter, used to create a lower voltage from a higher one, and this is what we use on the Pi.

A history lesson

The BCM2835 processor chip (found on the original Raspberry Pi Model B and B+, as well as on the Zero products) has on-chip power supplies: one switch-mode regulator for the core voltage, as well as a linear one for the LPDDR2 memory supply. This meant that in addition to 5V, we only had to provide 3.3V and 1.8V on the board, which was relatively simple to do using cheap, off-the-shelf parts.

Pi Zero sporting a BCM2835 processor which only needs 2 external switchers (the components clustered behind the camera port)

When we moved to the BCM2836 for Raspberry Pi Model 2 (and subsequently to the BCM2837A1 and B0 for Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+), the core supply and the on-chip LPDDR2 memory supply were not up to the job of supplying the extra processor cores and larger memory, so we removed them. (We also used the recovered chip area to help fit in the new quad-core ARM processors.) The upshot of this was that we had to supply these power rails externally for the Raspberry Pi 2 and models thereafter. Moreover, we also had to provide circuitry to sequence them correctly in order to control exactly when they power up compared to the other supplies on the board.

Power supply design is tricky (but critical)

Raspberry Pi boards take in 5V from the micro USB socket and have to generate the other required supplies from this. When 5V is first connected, each of these other supplies must ‘start up’, meaning go from ‘off’, or 0V, to their correct voltage in some short period of time. The order of the supplies starting up is often important: commonly, there are structures inside a chip that form diodes between supply rails, and bringing supplies up in the wrong order can sometimes ‘turn on’ these diodes, causing them to conduct, with undesirable consequences. Silicon chips come with a data sheet specifying what supplies (voltages and currents) are needed and whether they need to be low-noise, in what order they must power up (and in some cases down), and sometimes even the rate at which the voltages must power up and down.

A Pi3. Power supply components are clustered bottom left next to the micro USB, middle (above LPDDR2 chip which is on the bottom of the PCB) and above the A/V jack.

In designing the power chain for the Pi 2 and 3, the sequencing was fairly straightforward: power rails power up in order of voltage (5V, 3.3V, 1.8V, 1.2V). However, the supplies were all generated with individual, discrete devices. Therefore, I spent quite a lot of time designing circuitry to control the sequencing — even with some design tricks to reduce component count, quite a few sequencing components are required. More complex systems generally use a Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) with multiple supplies on a single chip, and many different PMIC variants are made by various manufacturers. Since Raspberry Pi 2 days, I was looking for a suitable PMIC to simplify the Pi design, but invariably (and somewhat counter-intuitively) these were always too expensive compared to my discrete solution, usually because they came with more features than needed.

One device to rule them all

It was way back in May 2015 when I first chatted to Peter Coyle of Exar (Exar were bought by MaxLinear in 2017) about power supply products for Raspberry Pi. We didn’t find a product match then, but in June 2016 Peter, along with Tuomas Hollman and Trevor Latham, visited to pitch the possibility of building a custom power management solution for us.

I was initially sceptical that it could be made cheap enough. However, our discussion indicated that if we could tailor the solution to just what we needed, it could be cost-effective. Over the coming weeks and months, we honed a specification we agreed on from the initial sketches we’d made, and Exar thought they could build it for us at the target price.

The chip we designed would contain all the key supplies required for the Pi on one small device in a cheap QFN package, and it would also perform the required sequencing and voltage monitoring. Moreover, the chip would be flexible to allow adjustment of supply voltages from their default values via I2C; the largest supply would be capable of being adjusted quickly to perform the dynamic core voltage changes needed in order to reduce voltage to the processor when it is idling (to save power), and to boost voltage to the processor when running at maximum speed (1.4 GHz). The supplies on the chip would all be generously specified and could deliver significantly more power than those used on the Raspberry Pi 3. All in all, the chip would contain four switching-mode converters and one low-current linear regulator, this last one being low-noise for the audio circuitry.

The MXL7704 chip

The project was a great success: MaxLinear delivered working samples of first silicon at the end of May 2017 (almost exactly a year after we had kicked off the project), and followed through with production quantities in December 2017 in time for the Raspberry Pi 3B+ production ramp.

The team behind the power supply chip on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (group of six men, two of whom are holding Raspberry Pi boards)

Front row: Roger with the very first Pi 3B+ prototypes and James with a MXL7704 development board hacked to power a Pi 3. Back row left to right: Will Torgerson, Trevor Latham, Peter Coyle, Tuomas Hollman.

The MXL7704 device has been key to reducing Pi board complexity and therefore overall bill of materials cost. Furthermore, by being able to deliver more power when needed, it has also been essential to increasing the speed of the (newly packaged) BCM2837B0 processor on the 3B+ to 1.4GHz. The result is improvements to both the continuous output current to the CPU (from 3A to 4A) and to the transient performance (i.e. the chip has helped to reduce the ‘transient response’, which is the change in supply voltage due to a sudden current spike that occurs when the processor suddenly demands a large current in a few nanoseconds, as modern CPUs tend to do).

With the MXL7704, the power supply circuitry on the 3B+ is now a lot simpler than the Pi 3B design. This new supply also provides the LPDDR2 memory voltage directly from a switching regulator rather than using linear regulators like the Pi 3, thereby improving energy efficiency. This helps to somewhat offset the extra power that the faster Ethernet, wireless networking, and processor consume. A pleasing side effect of using the new chip is the symmetric board layout of the regulators — it’s easy to see the four switching-mode supplies, given away by four similar-looking blobs (three grey and one brownish), which are the inductors.

Close-up of the power supply chip on the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+

The Pi 3B+ PMIC MXL7704 — pleasingly symmetric

Kudos

It takes a lot of effort to design a new chip from scratch and get it all the way through to production — we are very grateful to the team at MaxLinear for their hard work, dedication, and enthusiasm. We’re also proud to have created something that will not only power Raspberry Pis, but will also be useful for other product designs: it turns out when you have a low-cost and flexible device, it can be used for many things — something we’re fairly familiar with here at Raspberry Pi! For the curious, the product page (including the data sheet) for the MXL7704 chip is here. Particular thanks go to Peter Coyle, Tuomas Hollman, and Trevor Latham, and also to Jon Cronk, who has been our contact in the US and has had to get up early to attend all our conference calls!

The MXL7704 design team celebrating on Pi Day — it takes a lot of people to design a chip!

I hope you liked reading about some of the effort that has gone into creating the new Pi. It’s nice to finally have a chance to tell people about some of the (increasingly complex) technical work that makes building a $35 computer possible — we’re very pleased with the Raspberry Pi 3B+, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it!

The post More power to your Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Reddit Copyright Complaints Jump 138% But Almost Half Get Rejected

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/reddit-copyright-complaints-jump-138-but-almost-half-get-rejected-180411/

So-called ‘transparency reports’ are becoming increasingly popular with Internet-based platforms and their users. Among other things, they provide much-needed insight into how outsiders attempt to censor content published online and what actions are taken in response.

Google first started publishing its report in 2010, Twitter followed in 2012, and they’ve now been joined by a multitude of major companies including Microsoft, Facebook and Cloudflare.

As one of the world’s most recognized sites, Reddit joined the transparency party fairly late, publishing its first report in early 2015. While light on detail, it revealed that in the previous year the site received just 218 requests to remove content, 81% of which were DMCA-style copyright notices. A significant 62% of those copyright-related requests were rejected.

Over time, Reddit’s reporting has become a little more detailed. Last April it revealed that in 2016, the platform received ‘just’ 3,294 copyright removal requests for the entire year. However, what really caught the eye is how many notices were rejected. In just 610 instances, Reddit was required to remove content from the site, a rejection rate of 81%.

Having been a year since Reddit’s last report, the company has just published its latest edition, covering the period January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017.

“Reddit publishes this transparency report every year as part of our ongoing commitment to keep you aware of the trends on the various requests regarding private Reddit user account information or removal of content posted to Reddit,” the company said in a statement.

“Reddit believes that maintaining this transparency is extremely important. We want you to be aware of this information, consider it carefully, and ask questions to keep us accountable.”

The detailed report covers a wide range of topics, including government requests for the preservation or production of user information (there were 310) and even an instruction to monitor one Reddit user’s activities in real time via a so-called ‘Trap and Trace’ order.

In copyright terms, there has been significant movement. In 2017, Reddit received 7,825 notifications of alleged copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that’s up roughly 138% over the 3,294 notifications received in 2016.

For a platform of Reddit’s unquestionable size, these volumes are not big. While the massive percentage increase is notable, the site still receives less than 10 complaints each day. For comparison, Google receives millions every week.

But perhaps most telling is that despite receiving more than 7,800 DMCA-style takedown notices, these resulted in Reddit carrying out just 4,352 removals. This means that for whatever reasons (Reddit doesn’t specify), 3,473 requests were denied, a rejection rate of 44.38%. Google, on the other hand, removes around 90% of content reported.

DMCA notices can be declared invalid for a number of reasons, from incorrect formatting through to flat-out abuse. In many cases, copyright law is incorrectly applied and it’s not unknown for complainants to attempt a DMCA takedown to stifle speech or perceived competition.

Reddit says it tries to take all things into consideration before removing content.

“Reddit reviews each DMCA takedown notice carefully, and removes content where a valid report is received, as required by the law,” the company says.

“Reddit considers whether the reported content may fall under an exception listed in the DMCA, such as ‘fair use,’ and may ask for clarification that will assist in the review of the removal request.”

Considering the numbers of community-focused “subreddits” dedicated to piracy (not just general discussion, but actual links to content), the low numbers of copyright notices received by Reddit continues to baffle.

There are sections in existence right now offering many links to movies and TV shows hosted on various file-hosting sites. They’re the type of links that are targeted all the time whenever they appear in Google search but copyright owners don’t appear to notice or care about them on Reddit.

Finally, it would be nice if Reddit could provide more information in next year’s report, including detail on why so many requests are rejected. Perhaps regular submission of notices to the Lumen Database would be something Reddit would consider for the future.

Reddit’s Transparency Report for 2017 can be found here.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Securing messages published to Amazon SNS with AWS PrivateLink

Post Syndicated from Otavio Ferreira original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/securing-messages-published-to-amazon-sns-with-aws-privatelink/

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now supports VPC Endpoints (VPCE) via AWS PrivateLink. You can use VPC Endpoints to privately publish messages to SNS topics, from an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), without traversing the public internet. When you use AWS PrivateLink, you don’t need to set up an Internet Gateway (IGW), Network Address Translation (NAT) device, or Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. You don’t need to use public IP addresses, either.

VPC Endpoints doesn’t require code changes and can bring additional security to Pub/Sub Messaging use cases that rely on SNS. VPC Endpoints helps promote data privacy and is aligned with assurance programs, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), FedRAMP, and others discussed below.

VPC Endpoints for SNS in action

Here’s how VPC Endpoints for SNS works. The following example is based on a banking system that processes mortgage applications. This banking system, which has been deployed to a VPC, publishes each mortgage application to an SNS topic. The SNS topic then fans out the mortgage application message to two subscribing AWS Lambda functions:

  • Save-Mortgage-Application stores the application in an Amazon DynamoDB table. As the mortgage application contains personally identifiable information (PII), the message must not traverse the public internet.
  • Save-Credit-Report checks the applicant’s credit history against an external Credit Reporting Agency (CRA), then stores the final credit report in an Amazon S3 bucket.

The following diagram depicts the underlying architecture for this banking system:
 
Diagram depicting the architecture for the example banking system
 
To protect applicants’ data, the financial institution responsible for developing this banking system needed a mechanism to prevent PII data from traversing the internet when publishing mortgage applications from their VPC to the SNS topic. Therefore, they created a VPC endpoint to enable their publisher Amazon EC2 instance to privately connect to the SNS API. As shown in the diagram, when the VPC endpoint is created, an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) is automatically placed in the same VPC subnet as the publisher EC2 instance. This ENI exposes a private IP address that is used as the entry point for traffic destined to SNS. This ensures that traffic between the VPC and SNS doesn’t leave the Amazon network.

Set up VPC Endpoints for SNS

The process for creating a VPC endpoint to privately connect to SNS doesn’t require code changes: access the VPC Management Console, navigate to the Endpoints section, and create a new Endpoint. Three attributes are required:

  • The SNS service name.
  • The VPC and Availability Zones (AZs) from which you’ll publish your messages.
  • The Security Group (SG) to be associated with the endpoint network interface. The Security Group controls the traffic to the endpoint network interface from resources in your VPC. If you don’t specify a Security Group, the default Security Group for your VPC will be associated.

Help ensure your security and compliance

SNS can support messaging use cases in regulated market segments, such as healthcare provider systems subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and financial systems subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and is also in-scope with the following Assurance Programs:

The SNS API is served through HTTP Secure (HTTPS), and encrypts all messages in transit with Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates issued by Amazon Trust Services (ATS). The certificates verify the identity of the SNS API server when encrypted connections are established. The certificates help establish proof that your SNS API client (SDK, CLI) is communicating securely with the SNS API server. A Certificate Authority (CA) issues the certificate to a specific domain. Hence, when a domain presents a certificate that’s issued by a trusted CA, the SNS API client knows it’s safe to make the connection.

Summary

VPC Endpoints can increase the security of your pub/sub messaging use cases by allowing you to publish messages to SNS topics, from instances in your VPC, without traversing the internet. Setting up VPC Endpoints for SNS doesn’t require any code changes because the SNS API address remains the same.

VPC Endpoints for SNS is now available in all AWS Regions where AWS PrivateLink is available. For information on pricing and regional availability, visit the VPC pricing page.
For more information and on-boarding, see Publishing to Amazon SNS Topics from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud in the SNS documentation.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about anything in this post, start a new thread on the Amazon SNS forum or contact AWS Support.

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MPA Reveals Scale of Worldwide Pirate Site Blocking

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-reveals-scale-of-worldwide-pirate-site-blocking-180410/

Few people following the controversial topic of Internet piracy will be unaware of the site-blocking phenomenon. It’s now one of the main weapons in the entertainment industries’ arsenal and it’s affecting dozens of countries.

While general figures can be culled from the hundreds of news reports covering the issue, the manner in which blocking is handled in several regions means that updates aren’t always provided. New sites are regularly added to blocklists without fanfare, meaning that the public is kept largely in the dark.

Now, however, a submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) by Motion Picture Association Canada provides a more detailed overview. It was presented in support of the proposed blocking regime in Canada, so while the key figures are no doubt accurate, some of the supporting rhetoric should be viewed in context.

“Over the last decade, at least 42 countries have either adopted and implemented, or are legally obligated to adopt and implement, measures to ensure that ISPs take steps to disable access to copyright infringing websites, including throughout the European Union, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Korea,” the submission reads.

The 42 blocking-capable countries referenced by the Hollywood group include the members of the European Union plus the following: Argentina, Australia, Iceland, India, Israel, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand.

While all countries have their own unique sets of legislation, countries within the EU are covered by the requirements of Article 8.3 of the INFOSEC Directive which provides that; “Member States shall ensure that rightholders are in a position to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe a copyright or related right.”

That doesn’t mean that all countries are actively blocking, however. While Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia have the legal basis to block infringing sites, none have yet done so.

In a significant number of other EU countries, however, blocking activity is prolific.

“To date, in at least 17 European countries, over 1,800 infringing sites and over 5,300 domains utilized by such sites have been blocked, including in the following four countries where the positive impact of site-blocking over time has been demonstrated,” MPA Canada notes.

Major blocking nations in the EU

At this point, it’s worth pointing out that authority to block sites is currently being obtained in two key ways, either through the courts or via an administrative process.

In the examples above, the UK and Denmark are dealt with via the former, with Italy and Portugal handled via the latter. At least as far as the volume of sites is concerned, court processes – which can be expensive – tend to yield lower site blocking levels than those carried out through an administrative process. Indeed, the MPAA has praised Portugal’s super-streamlined efforts as something to aspire to.

Outside Europe, the same two processes are also in use. For example, Australia, Argentina, and Singapore utilize the judicial route while South Korea, Mexico, Malaysia and Indonesia have opted for administrative remedies.

“Across 10 of these countries, over 1,100 infringing sites and over 1,500 domains utilized by such sites have been blocked,” MPA Canada reveals.

To date, South Korea has blocked 460 sites and 547 domains, while Australia has blocked 91 sites and 355 domains. In the case of the latter, “research has confirmed the increasingly positive impact that site-blocking has, as a greater number of sites are blocked over time,” the Hollywood group notes.

Although by no means comprehensive, MPA Canada lists the following “Notorious Sites” as subject to blocking in multiple countries via both judicial and administrative means. Most will be familiar, with the truly notorious The Pirate Bay heading the pile. Several no longer exist in their original form but in many cases, clones are blocked as if they still represent the original target.


The methods used to block the sites vary from country to country, dependent on what courts deem fit and in consideration of ISPs’ technical capabilities. Three main tools are in use including DNS blocking, IP address blocking, and URL blocking, which can also include Deep Packet Inspection.

The MPA submission (pdf) is strongly in favor of adding Canada to the list of site-blocking countries detailed above. The Hollywood group believes that the measures are both effective and proportionate, citing reduced usage of blocked sites, reduced traffic to pirate sites in general, and increased visits to legitimate platforms.

“There is every reason to believe that the website blocking measures [presented to the CRTC] will lead to the same beneficial results in Canada,” MPA Canada states.

While plenty of content creators and distributors are in favor of proposals, all signs suggest they will have a battle on their hands, with even some ISPs coming out in opposition.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Japan Seeks to Outmaneuver Constitution With Piracy Blocking Proposals

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/japan-seeks-to-outmaneuver-constitution-with-piracy-blocking-proposals-180406/

Speaking at a news conference last month, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that the Japanese government is considering measures to prohibit access to pirate sites, initially to protect the country’s manga and anime industries.

“The damage is getting worse. We are considering the possibilities of all measures including site blocking,” he said.

But Japan has a problem.

The country has no specific legislation that allows for site-blocking of any kind, let alone on copyright infringement grounds. In fact, the constitution expressly supports freedom of speech and expressly forbids censorship.

“Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed,” Article 21 reads.

“No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated,” the constitution adds.

Nevertheless, the government appears determined to do something about the piracy threat. As detailed last month, that looks like manifesting itself in a site-blocking regime. But how will this be achieved?

Mainichi reports that the government will argue there are grounds for “averting present danger”, a phrase that’s detailed in Article 37 of Japan’s Penal Code.

“An act unavoidably performed to avert a present danger to the life, body, liberty
or property of oneself or any other person is not punishable only when the harm
produced by such act does not exceed the harm to be averted,” the Article (pdf) begins.

It’s fairly clear that this branch of Japanese law was never designed for use against pirate sites. Furthermore, there is also a clause noting that where an act (in this case blocking) causes excessive harm it may lead “to the punishment being reduced or may exculpate the offender in light of the circumstances.”

How, when, or if that ever comes into play will remain to be seen but in common with most legal processes against pirate site operators elsewhere, few turn up to argue in their defense. A contested process is therefore unlikely.

It appears that rather than forcing Internet providers into compliance, the government will ask for their “understanding” on the basis that damage is being done to the anime and manga industries. ISPs reportedly already cooperate to censor child abuse sites so it’s hoped a similar agreement can be reached on piracy.

Initially, the blocking requests will relate to just three as-yet-unnamed platforms, one local and two based outside the country. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg and if ISPs agree to block this trio, more demands are sure to follow.

Meanwhile, the government is also working towards tightening up the law to deal with an estimated 200 local sites that link, but do not host pirated content. Under current legislation, linking isn’t considered illegal, which is a major problem given the manner in which most file-sharing and streaming is carried out these days.

However, there are also concerns that any amendments to tackle linking could fall foul of the constitutional right to freedom of expression. It’s a problem that has been tackled elsewhere, notably in Europe, but in most cases the latter has been trumped by the former. In any event, the government will need to tread carefully.

The proposals are expected to be formally approved at a Cabinet meeting on crime prevention policy later this month, Mainichi reports.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Police Assisted By MPAA Shut Down Pirate TV Box Sellers

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/police-assisted-by-mpaa-shut-down-pirate-tv-box-sellers-180404/

Piracy configured set-top boxes are the next big thing, today. Millions have been sold around the world and anti-piracy groups are scrambling to rein them in.

Many strategies are being tested, from pressurizing developers of allegedly infringing addons to filing aggressive lawsuits against sites such as TVAddons, a Kodi addon repository now facing civil action in both the United States and Canada.

Also under fire are companies that sell set-top boxes that come ready configured for piracy. Both Tickbox TV and Dragon Media Inc are being sued by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) in the US. At this stage, neither case looks promising for the defendants.

However, civil action isn’t the only way to deal with defendants in the United States, as a man and woman team from Tampa, Florida, have just discovered after being arrested by local police.

Mickael Cantrell and Nancy Major were allegedly the brains behind NBEETV, a company promising to supply set-top boxes that deliver “every movie, every tv show that’s ever been made, plus live sports with no blackouts” with “no monthly fees ever.”

As similar cases have shown, this kind of marketing spiel rarely ends well for defendants but the people behind NBEE TV (also known as FreeTVForLife Inc.) were either oblivious or simply didn’t care about the consequences.

A company press release dated April 2017 advertising the company’s NBPro 3+ box and tracked down by TF this week reveals the extent of the boasts.

“NBPRO 3+ is a TV box that offers instant access to watch every episode of any TV show without paying any monthly bill. One just must attach the loaded box to his TV and stream whatever they want, with no commercials,” the company wrote.

But while “Free TV for Life” was the slogan, that wasn’t the reality at the outset.

NBEETV’s Kodi-powered Android boxes were hellishly expensive with the NBPRO 1, NBPRO 3, NBPRO 5 costing $199.00, $279.00 and $359.00 respectively. This, however, was presented as a bargain alongside a claim that the “average [monthly] cable bill across the country is approximately $198.00” per month.

On top of the base product, NBEETV offered an 800 number for customer support and from their physical premises, they ran “training classes every Tuesday and Thursdays at 11:00” for people to better understand their products.

The location of that building isn’t mentioned in local media but a WHOIS on the company’s FreeTVForLife domain yields a confirmed address. It’s one that’s also been complained about in the past by an unhappy customer.

“Free TV for LIFE [redacted]..(next to K-Mart) Hudson, Fl.. 34667. We bought the Little black box costing $277.00. The pictures were not clear,” Rita S. wrote.

“The screen froze up on us all the time, even after hooking straight into the router. When we took the unit back they kept $80 of our money….were very rude, using the ************* word and we will not get the remainder of our money for 14-28 days according to the employee at the store. Buyers beware and I am telling everyone!!!”

While this customer was clearly unhappy, NBEETV claimed to be a “movement which is spreading across the country.” Unfortunately, that movement reached the eyes of the police, who didn’t think that the content being offered on the devices should have been presented for free.

“We saw [the boxes] had Black Panther, The Shape Of Water, Jumanji was on there as well,” said Detective Darren Hill.

“This is someone blatantly on the side of the road just selling them, with signage, a store front; advertising on the internet with a website.”

Detective Hill worked on the case with the MPAA but even from TorrentFreak’s limited investigations this week, the couple were incredibly easy to identify.

Aside from providing accurate and non-hidden address data in WHOIS records, Mickael Cantrell (also known as Michael Cantrell) put in his real name too. The listed email address is also easily traced back to a company called Nanny Bees Corporation which was operated by Cantrell and partner Nancy Major, who was also arrested in the NBEETV case.

Unfortunately for the couple, the blundering didn’t stop there. Their company YouTube channel, which is packed with tutorials, is also in Cantrell’s real name. Indeed, the photograph supplied to YouTube even matches the mugshot published by ABC Action News.

The publication reports that the Sheriff’s Office found the couple with around 50 ‘pirate’ boxes. The store operated by the couple has also been shutdown.

Finally, another curious aspect of NBEETV’s self-promotion comes via a blog post/press release dated August 2017 in which Cantrell suddenly ups the ante by becoming Michael W. Cantrell, Ph. D alongside some bold and unusual claims.

“Dr. Cantrell unleashes his latest innovation, a Smart TV Box that literally updates every ten minutes. Not only does the content (what you can view) but the whole platform updates automatically. If the Company changes an icon you receive the change in real time,” the release reads.

“Thanks to the Overlay Processor that Dr. Cantrell created, this processor named B-D.A.D (Binary Data Acceleration Dump) which enhances an Android unit’s operating power 5 times than the original bench test, has set a new industry standard around the world.”

Sounds epic….perhaps it powered the following video clip.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.