Tag Archives: Challenge

Protecting coral reefs with Nemo-Pi, the underwater monitor

Post Syndicated from Janina Ander original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/coral-reefs-nemo-pi/

The German charity Save Nemo works to protect coral reefs, and they are developing Nemo-Pi, an underwater “weather station” that monitors ocean conditions. Right now, you can vote for Save Nemo in the Google.org Impact Challenge.

Nemo-Pi — Save Nemo

Save Nemo

The organisation says there are two major threats to coral reefs: divers, and climate change. To make diving saver for reefs, Save Nemo installs buoy anchor points where diving tour boats can anchor without damaging corals in the process.

reef damaged by anchor
boat anchored at buoy

In addition, they provide dos and don’ts for how to behave on a reef dive.

The Nemo-Pi

To monitor the effects of climate change, and to help divers decide whether conditions are right at a reef while they’re still on shore, Save Nemo is also in the process of perfecting Nemo-Pi.

Nemo-Pi schematic — Nemo-Pi — Save Nemo

This Raspberry Pi-powered device is made up of a buoy, a solar panel, a GPS device, a Pi, and an array of sensors. Nemo-Pi measures water conditions such as current, visibility, temperature, carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide concentrations, and pH. It also uploads its readings live to a public webserver.

Inside the Nemo-Pi device — Save Nemo
Inside the Nemo-Pi device — Save Nemo
Inside the Nemo-Pi device — Save Nemo

The Save Nemo team is currently doing long-term tests of Nemo-Pi off the coast of Thailand and Indonesia. They are also working on improving the device’s power consumption and durability, and testing prototypes with the Raspberry Pi Zero W.

web dashboard — Nemo-Pi — Save Nemo

The web dashboard showing live Nemo-Pi data

Long-term goals

Save Nemo aims to install a network of Nemo-Pis at shallow reefs (up to 60 metres deep) in South East Asia. Then diving tour companies can check the live data online and decide day-to-day whether tours are feasible. This will lower the impact of humans on reefs and help the local flora and fauna survive.

Coral reefs with fishes

A healthy coral reef

Nemo-Pi data may also be useful for groups lobbying for reef conservation, and for scientists and activists who want to shine a spotlight on the awful effects of climate change on sea life, such as coral bleaching caused by rising water temperatures.

Bleached coral

A bleached coral reef

Vote now for Save Nemo

If you want to help Save Nemo in their mission today, vote for them to win the Google.org Impact Challenge:

  1. Head to the voting web page
  2. Click “Abstimmen” in the footer of the page to vote
  3. Click “JA” in the footer to confirm

Voting is open until 6 June. You can also follow Save Nemo on Facebook or Twitter. We think this organisation is doing valuable work, and that their projects could be expanded to reefs across the globe. It’s fantastic to see the Raspberry Pi being used to help protect ocean life.

The post Protecting coral reefs with Nemo-Pi, the underwater monitor appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Jam Cameroon #PiParty

Post Syndicated from Ben Nuttall original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-jam-cameroon-piparty/

Earlier this year on 3 and 4 March, communities around the world held Raspberry Jam events to celebrate Raspberry Pi’s sixth birthday. We sent out special birthday kits to participating Jams — it was amazing to know the kits would end up in the hands of people in parts of the world very far from Raspberry Pi HQ in Cambridge, UK.

The Raspberry Jam Camer team: Damien Doumer, Eyong Etta, Loïc Dessap and Lionel Sichom, aka Lionel Tellem

Preparing for the #PiParty

One birthday kit went to Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. There, a team of four students in their twenties — Lionel Sichom (aka Lionel Tellem), Eyong Etta, Loïc Dessap, and Damien Doumer — were organising Yaoundé’s first Jam, called Raspberry Jam Camer, as part of the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend. The team knew one another through their shared interests and skills in electronics, robotics, and programming. Damien explains in his blog post about the Jam that they planned ahead for several activities for the Jam based on their own projects, so they could be confident of having a few things that would definitely be successful for attendees to do and see.

Show-and-tell at Raspberry Jam Cameroon

Loïc presented a Raspberry Pi–based, Android app–controlled robot arm that he had built, and Lionel coded a small video game using Scratch on Raspberry Pi while the audience watched. Damien demonstrated the possibilities of Windows 10 IoT Core on Raspberry Pi, showing how to install it, how to use it remotely, and what you can do with it, including building a simple application.

Loïc Dessap, wearing a Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend T-shirt, sits at a table with a robot arm, a laptop with a Pi sticker and other components. He is making an adjustment to his set-up.

Loïc showcases the prototype robot arm he built

There was lots more too, with others discussing their own Pi projects and talking about the possibilities Raspberry Pi offers, including a Pi-controlled drone and car. Cake was a prevailing theme of the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend around the world, and Raspberry Jam Camer made sure they didn’t miss out.

A round pink-iced cake decorated with the words "Happy Birthday RBP" and six candles, on a table beside Raspberry Pi stickers, Raspberry Jam stickers and Raspberry Jam fliers

Yay, birthday cake!!

A big success

Most visitors to the Jam were secondary school students, while others were university students and graduates. The majority were unfamiliar with Raspberry Pi, but all wanted to learn about Raspberry Pi and what they could do with it. Damien comments that the fact most people were new to Raspberry Pi made the event more interactive rather than creating any challenges, because the visitors were all interested in finding out about the little computer. The Jam was an all-round success, and the team was pleased with how it went:

What I liked the most was that we sensitized several people about the Raspberry Pi and what one can be capable of with such a small but powerful device. — Damien Doumer

The Jam team rounded off the event by announcing that this was the start of a Raspberry Pi community in Yaoundé. They hope that they and others will be able to organise more Jams and similar events in the area to spread the word about what people can do with Raspberry Pi, and to help them realise their ideas.

The Raspberry Jam Camer team, wearing Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend T-shirts, pose with young Jam attendees outside their venue

Raspberry Jam Camer gets the thumbs-up

The Raspberry Pi community in Cameroon

In a French-language interview about their Jam, the team behind Raspberry Jam Camer said they’d like programming to become the third official language of Cameroon, after French and English; their aim is to to popularise programming and digital making across Cameroonian society. Neither of these fields is very familiar to most people in Cameroon, but both are very well aligned with the country’s ambitions for development. The team is conscious of the difficulties around the emergence of information and communication technologies in the Cameroonian context; in response, they are seizing the opportunities Raspberry Pi offers to give children and young people access to modern and constantly evolving technology at low cost.

Thanks to Lionel, Eyong, Damien, and Loïc, and to everyone who helped put on a Jam for the Big Birthday Weekend! Remember, anyone can start a Jam at any time — and we provide plenty of resources to get you started. Check out the Guidebook, the Jam branding pack, our specially-made Jam activities online (in multiple languages), printable worksheets, and more.

The post Raspberry Jam Cameroon #PiParty appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Connect Veeam to the B2 Cloud: Episode 3 — Using OpenDedup

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/opendedup-for-cloud-storage/

Veeam backup to Backblaze B2 logo

In this, the third post in our series on connecting Veeam with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, we discuss how to back up your VMs to B2 using Veeam and OpenDedup. In our previous posts, we covered how to connect Veeam to the B2 cloud using Synology, and how to connect Veeam with B2 using StarWind VTL.

Deduplication and OpenDedup

Deduplication is simply the process of eliminating redundant data on disk. Deduplication reduces storage space requirements, improves backup speed, and lowers backup storage costs. The dedup field used to be dominated by a few big-name vendors who sold dedup systems that were too expensive for most of the SMB market. Then an open-source challenger came along in OpenDedup, a project that produced the Space Deduplication File System (SDFS). SDFS provides many of the features of commercial dedup products without their cost.

OpenDedup provides inline deduplication that can be used with applications such as Veeam, Veritas Backup Exec, and Veritas NetBackup.

Features Supported by OpenDedup:

  • Variable Block Deduplication to cloud storage
  • Local Data Caching
  • Encryption
  • Bandwidth Throttling
  • Fast Cloud Recovery
  • Windows and Linux Support

Why use Veeam with OpenDedup to Backblaze B2?

With your VMs backed up to B2, you have a number of options to recover from a disaster. If the unexpected occurs, you can quickly restore your VMs from B2 to the location of your choosing. You also have the option to bring up cloud compute through B2’s compute partners, thereby minimizing any loss of service and ensuring business continuity.

Veeam logo  +  OpenDedup logo  +  Backblaze B2 logo

Backblaze’s B2 is an ideal solution for backing up Veeam’s backup repository due to B2’s combination of low-cost and high availability. Users of B2 save up to 75% compared to other cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud Storage. When combined with OpenDedup’s no-cost deduplication, you’re got an efficient and economical solution for backing up VMs to the cloud.

How to Use OpenDedup with B2

For step-by-step instructions for how to set up OpenDedup for use with B2 on Windows or Linux, see Backblaze B2 Enabled on the OpenDedup website.

Are you backing up Veeam to B2 using one of the solutions we’ve written about in this series? If you have, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

View all posts in the Veeam series.

The post Connect Veeam to the B2 Cloud: Episode 3 — Using OpenDedup appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Canonical on trust and security in the Snap Store

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754502/rss

Here’s a
posting from Canonical concerning the cryptocurrency-mining app that
was discovered in its Snap Store. “Several years ago when we started
the work on snap packages, we understood that we could not instantly
implement an alternative that was completely safe from all perspectives. In
addition to being safe, it had to be useful. So the challenge we gave
ourselves was to significantly improve the situation immediately, and then
pave the road for incremental improvements that could be rolled out
gradually.”

Solving Complex Ordering Challenges with Amazon SQS FIFO Queues

Post Syndicated from Christie Gifrin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/solving-complex-ordering-challenges-with-amazon-sqs-fifo-queues/

Contributed by Shea Lutton, AWS Cloud Infrastructure Architect

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a fully managed queuing service that helps decouple applications, distributed systems, and microservices to increase fault tolerance. SQS queues come in two distinct types:

  • Standard SQS queues are able to scale to enormous throughput with at-least-once delivery.
  • FIFO queues are designed to guarantee that messages are processed exactly once in the exact order that they are received and have a default rate of 300 transactions per second.

As customers explore SQS FIFO queues, they often have questions about how the behavior works when messages arrive and are consumed. This post walks through some common situations to identify the exact behavior that you can expect. It also covers the behavior of message groups in depth and explains why message groups are key to understanding how FIFO queues work.

The simple case

Suppose that you run a major auction platform where people buy and sell a wide range of products. Your platform requires that transactions from buyers and sellers get processed in exactly the order received. Here’s how a FIFO queue helps you keep all your transactions in one straight flow.

A seller currently is holding an auction for a laptop, and three different bids are received for the same price. Ties are awarded to the first bidder at that price so it is important to track which arrived first. Your auction platform receives the three bids and sends them to a FIFO queue before they are processed.

Now observe how messages leave the queue. When your consumer asks for a batch of up to 10 messages, SQS starts filling the batch with the oldest message (bid A1). It keeps filling until either the batch is full or the queue is empty. In this case, the batch contains the three messages and the queue is now empty. After a batch has left the queue, SQS considers that batch of messages to be “in-flight” until the consumer either deletes them or the batch’s visibility timer expires.

 

When you have a single consumer, this is easy to envision. The consumer gets a batch of messages (now in-flight), does its processing, and deletes the messages. That consumer is then ready to ask for the next batch of messages.

The critical thing to keep in mind is that SQS won’t release the next batch of messages until the first batch has been deleted. By adding more messages to the queue, you can see more interesting behaviors. Imagine that a burst of 11 bids is sent to your FIFO queue, with two bids for Auction A arriving last.

The FIFO queue now has at least two batches of messages in it. When your single consumer requests the first batch of 10 messages, it receives a batch starting with B1 and ending with A1. Later, after the first batch has been deleted, the consumer can get the second batch of messages containing the final A2 message from the queue.

Adding complexity with multiple message groups

A new challenge arises. Your auction platform is getting busier and your dev team added a number of new features. The combination of increased messages and extra processing time for the new features means that a single consumer is too slow. The solution is to scale to have more consumers and process messages in parallel.

To work in parallel, your team realized that only the messages related to a single auction must be kept in order. All transactions for Auction A need to be kept in order and so do all transactions for Auction B. But the two auctions are independent and it does not matter which auctions transactions are processed first.

FIFO can handle that case with a feature called message groups. Each transaction related to Auction A is placed by your producer into message group A, and so on. In the diagram below, Auction A and Auction B each received three bid transactions, with bid B1 arriving first. The FIFO queue always keeps transactions within a message group in the order in which they arrived.

How is this any different than earlier examples? The consumer now gets the messages ordered by message groups, all the B group messages followed by all the A group messages. Multiple message groups create the possibility of using multiple consumers, which I explain in a moment. If FIFO can’t fill up a batch of messages with a single message group, FIFO can place more than one message group in a batch of messages. But whenever possible, the queue gives you a full batch of messages from the same group.

The order of messages leaving a FIFO queue is governed by three rules:

  1. Return the oldest message where no other message in the same message group is currently in-flight.
  2. Return as many messages from the same message group as possible.
  3. If a message batch is still not full, go back to rule 1.

To see this behavior, add a second consumer and insert many more messages into the queue. For simplicity, the delete message action has been omitted in these diagrams but it is assumed that all messages in a batch are processed successfully by the consumer and the batch is properly deleted immediately after.

In this example, there are 11 Group A and 11 Group B transactions arriving in interleaved order and a second consumer has been added. Consumer 1 asks for a group of 10 messages and receives 10 Group A messages. Consumer 2 then asks for 10 messages but SQS knows that Group A is in flight, so it releases 10 Group B messages. The two consumers are now processing two batches of messages in parallel, speeding up throughput and then deleting their batches. When Consumer 1 requests the next batch of messages, it receives the remaining two messages, one from Group A and one from Group B.

Consider this nuanced detail from the example above. What would happen if Consumer 1 was on a faster server and processed its first batch of messages before Consumer 2 could mark its messages for deletion? See if you can predict the behavior before looking at the answer.

If Consumer 2 has not deleted its Group B messages yet when Consumer 1 asks for the next batch, then the FIFO queue considers Group B to still be in flight. It does not release any more Group B messages. Consumer 1 gets only the remaining Group A message. Later, after Consumer 2 has deleted its first batch, the remaining Group B message is released.

Conclusion

I hope this post answered your questions about how Amazon SQS FIFO queues work and why message groups are helpful. If you’re interested in exploring SQS FIFO queues further, here are a few ideas to get you started:

Puerto Rico’s First Raspberry Pi Educator Workshop

Post Syndicated from Dana Augustin original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/puerto-rico-raspberry-pi-workshop/

Earlier this spring, an excited group of STEM educators came together to participate in the first ever Raspberry Pi and Arduino workshop in Puerto Rico.

Their three-day digital making adventure was led by MakerTechPR’s José Rullán and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Alex Martínez. They ran the event as part of the Robot Makers challenge organized by Yees! and sponsored by Puerto Rico’s Department of Economic Development and Trade to promote entrepreneurial skills within Puerto Rico’s education system.

Over 30 educators attended the workshop, which covered the use of the Raspberry Pi 3 as a computer and digital making resource. The educators received a kit consisting of a Raspberry Pi 3 with an Explorer HAT Pro and an Arduino Uno. At the end of the workshop, the educators were able to keep the kit as a demonstration unit for their classrooms. They were enthusiastic to learn new concepts and immerse themselves in the world of physical computing.

In their first session, the educators were introduced to the Raspberry Pi as an affordable technology for robotic clubs. In their second session, they explored physical computing and the coding languages needed to control the Explorer HAT Pro. They started off coding with Scratch, with which some educators had experience, and ended with controlling the GPIO pins with Python. In the final session, they learned how to develop applications using the powerful combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi for robotics projects. This gave them a better understanding of how they could engage their students in physical computing.

“The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is the perfect solution in the classroom because to us it is very resourceful and accessible.” – Alex Martínez

Computer science and robotics courses are important for many schools and teachers in Puerto Rico. The simple idea of programming a microcontroller from a $35 computer increases the chances of more students having access to more technology to create things.

Puerto Rico’s education system has faced enormous challenges after Hurricane Maria, including economic collapse and the government’s closure of many schools due to the exodus of families from the island. By attending training like this workshop, educators in Puerto Rico are becoming more experienced in fields like robotics in particular, which are key for 21st-century skills and learning. This, in turn, can lead to more educational opportunities, and hopefully the reopening of more schools on the island.

“We find it imperative that our children be taught STEM disciplines and skills. Our goal is to continue this work of spreading digital making and computer science using the Raspberry Pi around Puerto Rico. We want our children to have the best education possible.” – Alex Martínez

After attending Picademy in 2016, Alex has integrated the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s online resources into his classroom. He has also taught small workshops around the island and in the local Puerto Rican makerspace community. José is an electrical engineer, entrepreneur, educator and hobbyist who enjoys learning to use technology and sharing his knowledge through projects and challenges.

The post Puerto Rico’s First Raspberry Pi Educator Workshop appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

[$] Autoscaling for Kubernetes workloads

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754153/rss

Technologies like containers, clusters, and Kubernetes offer the prospect
of rapidly scaling the available computing resources to match variable demands
placed on the system. Actually implementing that scaling can be a
challenge, though.
During KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2018,
Frederic Branczyk from CoreOS (now
part of Red Hat) held a packed session
to introduce a standard and officially recommended way to scale workloads
automatically in Kubernetes
clusters.

Analyze Apache Parquet optimized data using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift

Post Syndicated from Roy Hasson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/analyzing-apache-parquet-optimized-data-using-amazon-kinesis-data-firehose-amazon-athena-and-amazon-redshift/

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest way to capture and stream data into a data lake built on Amazon S3. This data can be anything—from AWS service logs like AWS CloudTrail log files, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, Application Load Balancer logs, and others. It can also be IoT events, game events, and much more. To efficiently query this data, a time-consuming ETL (extract, transform, and load) process is required to massage and convert the data to an optimal file format, which increases the time to insight. This situation is less than ideal, especially for real-time data that loses its value over time.

To solve this common challenge, Kinesis Data Firehose can now save data to Amazon S3 in Apache Parquet or Apache ORC format. These are optimized columnar formats that are highly recommended for best performance and cost-savings when querying data in S3. This feature directly benefits you if you use Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, or any other big data tools that are available from the AWS Partner Network and through the open-source community.

Amazon Connect is a simple-to-use, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to provide a great customer experience at a lower cost than common alternatives. Its open platform design enables easy integration with other systems. One of those systems is Amazon Kinesis—in particular, Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose.

What’s really exciting is that you can now save events from Amazon Connect to S3 in Apache Parquet format. You can then perform analytics using Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum in real time, taking advantage of this key performance and cost optimization. Of course, Amazon Connect is only one example. This new capability opens the door for a great deal of opportunity, especially as organizations continue to build their data lakes.

Amazon Connect includes an array of analytics views in the Administrator dashboard. But you might want to run other types of analysis. In this post, I describe how to set up a data stream from Amazon Connect through Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose and out to S3, and then perform analytics using Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum. I focus primarily on the Kinesis Data Firehose support for Parquet and its integration with the AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift.

Solution overview

Here is how the solution is laid out:

 

 

The following sections walk you through each of these steps to set up the pipeline.

1. Define the schema

When Kinesis Data Firehose processes incoming events and converts the data to Parquet, it needs to know which schema to apply. The reason is that many times, incoming events contain all or some of the expected fields based on which values the producers are advertising. A typical process is to normalize the schema during a batch ETL job so that you end up with a consistent schema that can easily be understood and queried. Doing this introduces latency due to the nature of the batch process. To overcome this issue, Kinesis Data Firehose requires the schema to be defined in advance.

To see the available columns and structures, see Amazon Connect Agent Event Streams. For the purpose of simplicity, I opted to make all the columns of type String rather than create the nested structures. But you can definitely do that if you want.

The simplest way to define the schema is to create a table in the Amazon Athena console. Open the Athena console, and paste the following create table statement, substituting your own S3 bucket and prefix for where your event data will be stored. A Data Catalog database is a logical container that holds the different tables that you can create. The default database name shown here should already exist. If it doesn’t, you can create it or use another database that you’ve already created.

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE default.kfhconnectblog (
  awsaccountid string,
  agentarn string,
  currentagentsnapshot string,
  eventid string,
  eventtimestamp string,
  eventtype string,
  instancearn string,
  previousagentsnapshot string,
  version string
)
STORED AS parquet
LOCATION 's3://your_bucket/kfhconnectblog/'
TBLPROPERTIES ("parquet.compression"="SNAPPY")

That’s all you have to do to prepare the schema for Kinesis Data Firehose.

2. Define the data streams

Next, you need to define the Kinesis data streams that will be used to stream the Amazon Connect events.  Open the Kinesis Data Streams console and create two streams.  You can configure them with only one shard each because you don’t have a lot of data right now.

3. Define the Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream for Parquet

Let’s configure the Data Firehose delivery stream using the data stream as the source and Amazon S3 as the output. Start by opening the Kinesis Data Firehose console and creating a new data delivery stream. Give it a name, and associate it with the Kinesis data stream that you created in Step 2.

As shown in the following screenshot, enable Record format conversion (1) and choose Apache Parquet (2). As you can see, Apache ORC is also supported. Scroll down and provide the AWS Glue Data Catalog database name (3) and table names (4) that you created in Step 1. Choose Next.

To make things easier, the output S3 bucket and prefix fields are automatically populated using the values that you defined in the LOCATION parameter of the create table statement from Step 1. Pretty cool. Additionally, you have the option to save the raw events into another location as defined in the Source record S3 backup section. Don’t forget to add a trailing forward slash “ / “ so that Data Firehose creates the date partitions inside that prefix.

On the next page, in the S3 buffer conditions section, there is a note about configuring a large buffer size. The Parquet file format is highly efficient in how it stores and compresses data. Increasing the buffer size allows you to pack more rows into each output file, which is preferred and gives you the most benefit from Parquet.

Compression using Snappy is automatically enabled for both Parquet and ORC. You can modify the compression algorithm by using the Kinesis Data Firehose API and update the OutputFormatConfiguration.

Be sure to also enable Amazon CloudWatch Logs so that you can debug any issues that you might run into.

Lastly, finalize the creation of the Firehose delivery stream, and continue on to the next section.

4. Set up the Amazon Connect contact center

After setting up the Kinesis pipeline, you now need to set up a simple contact center in Amazon Connect. The Getting Started page provides clear instructions on how to set up your environment, acquire a phone number, and create an agent to accept calls.

After setting up the contact center, in the Amazon Connect console, choose your Instance Alias, and then choose Data Streaming. Under Agent Event, choose the Kinesis data stream that you created in Step 2, and then choose Save.

At this point, your pipeline is complete.  Agent events from Amazon Connect are generated as agents go about their day. Events are sent via Kinesis Data Streams to Kinesis Data Firehose, which converts the event data from JSON to Parquet and stores it in S3. Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum can simply query the data without any additional work.

So let’s generate some data. Go back into the Administrator console for your Amazon Connect contact center, and create an agent to handle incoming calls. In this example, I creatively named mine Agent One. After it is created, Agent One can get to work and log into their console and set their availability to Available so that they are ready to receive calls.

To make the data a bit more interesting, I also created a second agent, Agent Two. I then made some incoming and outgoing calls and caused some failures to occur, so I now have enough data available to analyze.

5. Analyze the data with Athena

Let’s open the Athena console and run some queries. One thing you’ll notice is that when we created the schema for the dataset, we defined some of the fields as Strings even though in the documentation they were complex structures.  The reason for doing that was simply to show some of the flexibility of Athena to be able to parse JSON data. However, you can define nested structures in your table schema so that Kinesis Data Firehose applies the appropriate schema to the Parquet file.

Let’s run the first query to see which agents have logged into the system.

The query might look complex, but it’s fairly straightforward:

WITH dataset AS (
  SELECT 
    from_iso8601_timestamp(eventtimestamp) AS event_ts,
    eventtype,
    -- CURRENT STATE
    json_extract_scalar(
      currentagentsnapshot,
      '$.agentstatus.name') AS current_status,
    from_iso8601_timestamp(
      json_extract_scalar(
        currentagentsnapshot,
        '$.agentstatus.starttimestamp')) AS current_starttimestamp,
    json_extract_scalar(
      currentagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.firstname') AS current_firstname,
    json_extract_scalar(
      currentagentsnapshot,
      '$.configuration.lastname') AS current_lastname,
    json_extract_scalar(
      currentagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.username') AS current_username,
    json_extract_scalar(
      currentagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.defaultoutboundqueue.name') AS               current_outboundqueue,
    json_extract_scalar(
      currentagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.inboundqueues[0].name') as current_inboundqueue,
    -- PREVIOUS STATE
    json_extract_scalar(
      previousagentsnapshot, 
      '$.agentstatus.name') as prev_status,
    from_iso8601_timestamp(
      json_extract_scalar(
        previousagentsnapshot, 
       '$.agentstatus.starttimestamp')) as prev_starttimestamp,
    json_extract_scalar(
      previousagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.firstname') as prev_firstname,
    json_extract_scalar(
      previousagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.lastname') as prev_lastname,
    json_extract_scalar(
      previousagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.username') as prev_username,
    json_extract_scalar(
      previousagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.defaultoutboundqueue.name') as current_outboundqueue,
    json_extract_scalar(
      previousagentsnapshot, 
      '$.configuration.routingprofile.inboundqueues[0].name') as prev_inboundqueue
  from kfhconnectblog
  where eventtype <> 'HEART_BEAT'
)
SELECT
  current_status as status,
  current_username as username,
  event_ts
FROM dataset
WHERE eventtype = 'LOGIN' AND current_username <> ''
ORDER BY event_ts DESC

The query output looks something like this:

Here is another query that shows the sessions each of the agents engaged with. It tells us where they were incoming or outgoing, if they were completed, and where there were missed or failed calls.

WITH src AS (
  SELECT
     eventid,
     json_extract_scalar(currentagentsnapshot, '$.configuration.username') as username,
     cast(json_extract(currentagentsnapshot, '$.contacts') AS ARRAY(JSON)) as c,
     cast(json_extract(previousagentsnapshot, '$.contacts') AS ARRAY(JSON)) as p
  from kfhconnectblog
),
src2 AS (
  SELECT *
  FROM src CROSS JOIN UNNEST (c, p) AS contacts(c_item, p_item)
),
dataset AS (
SELECT 
  eventid,
  username,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.contactid') as c_contactid,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.channel') as c_channel,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.initiationmethod') as c_direction,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.queue.name') as c_queue,
  json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.state') as c_state,
  from_iso8601_timestamp(json_extract_scalar(c_item, '$.statestarttimestamp')) as c_ts,
  
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.contactid') as p_contactid,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.channel') as p_channel,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.initiationmethod') as p_direction,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.queue.name') as p_queue,
  json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.state') as p_state,
  from_iso8601_timestamp(json_extract_scalar(p_item, '$.statestarttimestamp')) as p_ts
FROM src2
)
SELECT 
  username,
  c_channel as channel,
  c_direction as direction,
  p_state as prev_state,
  c_state as current_state,
  c_ts as current_ts,
  c_contactid as id
FROM dataset
WHERE c_contactid = p_contactid
ORDER BY id DESC, current_ts ASC

The query output looks similar to the following:

6. Analyze the data with Amazon Redshift Spectrum

With Amazon Redshift Spectrum, you can query data directly in S3 using your existing Amazon Redshift data warehouse cluster. Because the data is already in Parquet format, Redshift Spectrum gets the same great benefits that Athena does.

Here is a simple query to show querying the same data from Amazon Redshift. Note that to do this, you need to first create an external schema in Amazon Redshift that points to the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

SELECT 
  eventtype,
  json_extract_path_text(currentagentsnapshot,'agentstatus','name') AS current_status,
  json_extract_path_text(currentagentsnapshot, 'configuration','firstname') AS current_firstname,
  json_extract_path_text(currentagentsnapshot, 'configuration','lastname') AS current_lastname,
  json_extract_path_text(
    currentagentsnapshot,
    'configuration','routingprofile','defaultoutboundqueue','name') AS current_outboundqueue,
FROM default_schema.kfhconnectblog

The following shows the query output:

Summary

In this post, I showed you how to use Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest and convert data to columnar file format, enabling real-time analysis using Athena and Amazon Redshift. This great feature enables a level of optimization in both cost and performance that you need when storing and analyzing large amounts of data. This feature is equally important if you are investing in building data lakes on AWS.

 

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Analyzing VPC Flow Logs with Amazon Kinesis Firehose, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight and Work with partitioned data in AWS Glue.

About the Author

Roy Hasson is a Global Business Development Manager for AWS Analytics. He works with customers around the globe to design solutions to meet their data processing, analytics and business intelligence needs. Roy is big Manchester United fan cheering his team on and hanging out with his family.

 

 

 

Securing Your Cryptocurrency

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backing-up-your-cryptocurrency/

Securing Your Cryptocurrency

In our blog post on Tuesday, Cryptocurrency Security Challenges, we wrote about the two primary challenges faced by anyone interested in safely and profitably participating in the cryptocurrency economy: 1) make sure you’re dealing with reputable and ethical companies and services, and, 2) keep your cryptocurrency holdings safe and secure.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how to make sure you don’t lose any of your cryptocurrency holdings through accident, theft, or carelessness. You do that by backing up the keys needed to sell or trade your currencies.

$34 Billion in Lost Value

Of the 16.4 million bitcoins said to be in circulation in the middle of 2017, close to 3.8 million may have been lost because their owners no longer are able to claim their holdings. Based on today’s valuation, that could total as much as $34 billion dollars in lost value. And that’s just bitcoins. There are now over 1,500 different cryptocurrencies, and we don’t know how many of those have been misplaced or lost.



Now that some cryptocurrencies have reached (at least for now) staggering heights in value, it’s likely that owners will be more careful in keeping track of the keys needed to use their cryptocurrencies. For the ones already lost, however, the owners have been separated from their currencies just as surely as if they had thrown Benjamin Franklins and Grover Clevelands over the railing of a ship.

The Basics of Securing Your Cryptocurrencies

In our previous post, we reviewed how cryptocurrency keys work, and the common ways owners can keep track of them. A cryptocurrency owner needs two keys to use their currencies: a public key that can be shared with others is used to receive currency, and a private key that must be kept secure is used to spend or trade currency.

Many wallets and applications allow the user to require extra security to access them, such as a password, or iris, face, or thumb print scan. If one of these options is available in your wallets, take advantage of it. Beyond that, it’s essential to back up your wallet, either using the backup feature built into some applications and wallets, or manually backing up the data used by the wallet. When backing up, it’s a good idea to back up the entire wallet, as some wallets require additional private data to operate that might not be apparent.

No matter which backup method you use, it is important to back up often and have multiple backups, preferable in different locations. As with any valuable data, a 3-2-1 backup strategy is good to follow, which ensures that you’ll have a good backup copy if anything goes wrong with one or more copies of your data.

One more caveat, don’t reuse passwords. This applies to all of your accounts, but is especially important for something as critical as your finances. Don’t ever use the same password for more than one account. If security is breached on one of your accounts, someone could connect your name or ID with other accounts, and will attempt to use the password there, as well. Consider using a password manager such as LastPass or 1Password, which make creating and using complex and unique passwords easy no matter where you’re trying to sign in.

Approaches to Backing Up Your Cryptocurrency Keys

There are numerous ways to be sure your keys are backed up. Let’s take them one by one.

1. Automatic backups using a backup program

If you’re using a wallet program on your computer, for example, Bitcoin Core, it will store your keys, along with other information, in a file. For Bitcoin Core, that file is wallet.dat. Other currencies will use the same or a different file name and some give you the option to select a name for the wallet file.

To back up the wallet.dat or other wallet file, you might need to tell your backup program to explicitly back up that file. Users of Backblaze Backup don’t have to worry about configuring this, since by default, Backblaze Backup will back up all data files. You should determine where your particular cryptocurrency, wallet, or application stores your keys, and make sure the necessary file(s) are backed up if your backup program requires you to select which files are included in the backup.

Backblaze B2 is an option for those interested in low-cost and high security cloud storage of their cryptocurrency keys. Backblaze B2 supports 2-factor verification for account access, works with a number of apps that support automatic backups with encryption, error-recovery, and versioning, and offers an API and command-line interface (CLI), as well. The first 10GB of storage is free, which could be all one needs to store encrypted cryptocurrency keys.

2. Backing up by exporting keys to a file

Apps and wallets will let you export your keys from your app or wallet to a file. Once exported, your keys can be stored on a local drive, USB thumb drive, DAS, NAS, or in the cloud with any cloud storage or sync service you wish. Encrypting the file is strongly encouraged — more on that later. If you use 1Password or LastPass, or other secure notes program, you also could store your keys there.

3. Backing up by saving a mnemonic recovery seed

A mnemonic phrase, mnemonic recovery phrase, or mnemonic seed is a list of words that stores all the information needed to recover a cryptocurrency wallet. Many wallets will have the option to generate a mnemonic backup phrase, which can be written down on paper. If the user’s computer no longer works or their hard drive becomes corrupted, they can download the same wallet software again and use the mnemonic recovery phrase to restore their keys.

The phrase can be used by anyone to recover the keys, so it must be kept safe. Mnemonic phrases are an excellent way of backing up and storing cryptocurrency and so they are used by almost all wallets.

A mnemonic recovery seed is represented by a group of easy to remember words. For example:

eye female unfair moon genius pipe nuclear width dizzy forum cricket know expire purse laptop scale identify cube pause crucial day cigar noise receive

The above words represent the following seed:

0a5b25e1dab6039d22cd57469744499863962daba9d2844243fec 9c0313c1448d1a0b2cd9e230a78775556f9b514a8be45802c2808e fd449a20234e9262dfa69

These words have certain properties:

  • The first four letters are enough to unambiguously identify the word.
  • Similar words are avoided (such as: build and built).

Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Ethereum, and others use mnemonic seeds that are 12 to 24 words long. Other currencies might use different length seeds.

4. Physical backups — Paper, Metal

Some cryptocurrency holders believe that their backup, or even all their cryptocurrency account information, should be stored entirely separately from the internet to avoid any risk of their information being compromised through hacks, exploits, or leaks. This type of storage is called “cold storage.” One method of cold storage involves printing out the keys to a piece of paper and then erasing any record of the keys from all computer systems. The keys can be entered into a program from the paper when needed, or scanned from a QR code printed on the paper.

Printed public and private keys

Printed public and private keys

Some who go to extremes suggest separating the mnemonic needed to access an account into individual pieces of paper and storing those pieces in different locations in the home or office, or even different geographical locations. Some say this is a bad idea since it could be possible to reconstruct the mnemonic from one or more pieces. How diligent you wish to be in protecting these codes is up to you.

Mnemonic recovery phrase booklet

Mnemonic recovery phrase booklet

There’s another option that could make you the envy of your friends. That’s the CryptoSteel wallet, which is a stainless steel metal case that comes with more than 250 stainless steel letter tiles engraved on each side. Codes and passwords are assembled manually from the supplied part-randomized set of tiles. Users are able to store up to 96 characters worth of confidential information. Cryptosteel claims to be fireproof, waterproof, and shock-proof.

image of a Cryptosteel cold storage device

Cryptosteel cold wallet

Of course, if you leave your Cryptosteel wallet in the pocket of a pair of ripped jeans that gets thrown out by the housekeeper, as happened to the character Russ Hanneman on the TV show Silicon Valley in last Sunday’s episode, then you’re out of luck. That fictional billionaire investor lost a USB drive with $300 million in cryptocoins. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to you.

Encryption & Security

Whether you store your keys on your computer, an external disk, a USB drive, DAS, NAS, or in the cloud, you want to make sure that no one else can use those keys. The best way to handle that is to encrypt the backup.

With Backblaze Backup for Windows and Macintosh, your backups are encrypted in transmission to the cloud and on the backup server. Users have the option to add an additional level of security by adding a Personal Encryption Key (PEK), which secures their private key. Your cryptocurrency backup files are secure in the cloud. Using our web or mobile interface, previous versions of files can be accessed, as well.

Our object storage cloud offering, Backblaze B2, can be used with a variety of applications for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. With B2, cryptocurrency users can choose whichever method of encryption they wish to use on their local computers and then upload their encrypted currency keys to the cloud. Depending on the client used, versioning and life-cycle rules can be applied to the stored files.

Other backup programs and systems provide some or all of these capabilities, as well. If you are backing up to a local drive, it is a good idea to encrypt the local backup, which is an option in some backup programs.

Address Security

Some experts recommend using a different address for each cryptocurrency transaction. Since the address is not the same as your wallet, this means that you are not creating a new wallet, but simply using a new identifier for people sending you cryptocurrency. Creating a new address is usually as easy as clicking a button in the wallet.

One of the chief advantages of using a different address for each transaction is anonymity. Each time you use an address, you put more information into the public ledger (blockchain) about where the currency came from or where it went. That means that over time, using the same address repeatedly could mean that someone could map your relationships, transactions, and incoming funds. The more you use that address, the more information someone can learn about you. For more on this topic, refer to Address reuse.

Note that a downside of using a paper wallet with a single key pair (type-0 non-deterministic wallet) is that it has the vulnerabilities listed above. Each transaction using that paper wallet will add to the public record of transactions associated with that address. Newer wallets, i.e. “deterministic” or those using mnemonic code words support multiple addresses and are now recommended.

There are other approaches to keeping your cryptocurrency transaction secure. Here are a couple of them.

Multi-signature

Multi-signature refers to requiring more than one key to authorize a transaction, much like requiring more than one key to open a safe. It is generally used to divide up responsibility for possession of cryptocurrency. Standard transactions could be called “single-signature transactions” because transfers require only one signature — from the owner of the private key associated with the currency address (public key). Some wallets and apps can be configured to require more than one signature, which means that a group of people, businesses, or other entities all must agree to trade in the cryptocurrencies.

Deep Cold Storage

Deep cold storage ensures the entire transaction process happens in an offline environment. There are typically three elements to deep cold storage.

First, the wallet and private key are generated offline, and the signing of transactions happens on a system not connected to the internet in any manner. This ensures it’s never exposed to a potentially compromised system or connection.

Second, details are secured with encryption to ensure that even if the wallet file ends up in the wrong hands, the information is protected.

Third, storage of the encrypted wallet file or paper wallet is generally at a location or facility that has restricted access, such as a safety deposit box at a bank.

Deep cold storage is used to safeguard a large individual cryptocurrency portfolio held for the long term, or for trustees holding cryptocurrency on behalf of others, and is possibly the safest method to ensure a crypto investment remains secure.

Keep Your Software Up to Date

You should always make sure that you are using the latest version of your app or wallet software, which includes important stability and security fixes. Installing updates for all other software on your computer or mobile device is also important to keep your wallet environment safer.

One Last Thing: Think About Your Testament

Your cryptocurrency funds can be lost forever if you don’t have a backup plan for your peers and family. If the location of your wallets or your passwords is not known by anyone when you are gone, there is no hope that your funds will ever be recovered. Taking a bit of time on these matters can make a huge difference.

To the Moon*

Are you comfortable with how you’re managing and backing up your cryptocurrency wallets and keys? Do you have a suggestion for keeping your cryptocurrencies safe that we missed above? Please let us know in the comments.

*To the Moon — Crypto slang for a currency that reaches an optimistic price projection.

The post Securing Your Cryptocurrency appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Introducing the AWS Machine Learning Competency for Consulting Partners

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-aws-machine-learning-competency-for-consulting-partners/

Today I’m excited to announce a new Machine Learning Competency for Consulting Partners in the Amazon Partner Network (APN). This AWS Competency program allows APN Consulting Partners to demonstrate a deep expertise in machine learning on AWS by providing solutions that enable machine learning and data science workflows for their customers. This new AWS Competency is in addition to the Machine Learning comptency for our APN Technology Partners, that we launched at the re:Invent 2017 partner summit.

These APN Consulting Partners help organizations solve their machine learning and data challenges through:

  • Providing data services that help data scientists and machine learning practitioners prepare their enterprise data for training.
  • Platform solutions that provide data scientists and machine learning practitioners with tools to take their data, train models, and make predictions on new data.
  • SaaS and API solutions to enable predictive capabilities within customer applications.

Why work with an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner?

The AWS Competency Program helps customers find the most qualified partners with deep expertise. AWS Machine Learning Competency Partners undergo a strict validation of their capabilities to demonstrate technical proficiency and proven customer success with AWS machine learning tools.

If you’re an AWS customer interested in machine learning workloads on AWS, check out our AWS Machine Learning launch partners below:

 

Interested in becoming an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner?

APN Partners with experience in Machine Learning can learn more about becoming an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner here. To learn more about the benefits of joining the AWS Partner Network, see our APN Partner website.

Thanks to the AWS Partner Team for their help with this post!
– Randall

Cryptocurrency Security Challenges

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cryptocurrency-security-challenges/

Physical coins representing cyrptocurrencies

Most likely you’ve read the tantalizing stories of big gains from investing in cryptocurrencies. Someone who invested $1,000 into bitcoins five years ago would have over $85,000 in value now. Alternatively, someone who invested in bitcoins three months ago would have seen their investment lose 20% in value. Beyond the big price fluctuations, currency holders are possibly exposed to fraud, bad business practices, and even risk losing their holdings altogether if they are careless in keeping track of the all-important currency keys.

It’s certain that beyond the rewards and risks, cryptocurrencies are here to stay. We can’t ignore how they are changing the game for how money is handled between people and businesses.

Some Advantages of Cryptocurrency

  • Cryptocurrency is accessible to anyone.
  • Decentralization means the network operates on a user-to-user (or peer-to-peer) basis.
  • Transactions can completed for a fraction of the expense and time required to complete traditional asset transfers.
  • Transactions are digital and cannot be counterfeited or reversed arbitrarily by the sender, as with credit card charge-backs.
  • There aren’t usually transaction fees for cryptocurrency exchanges.
  • Cryptocurrency allows the cryptocurrency holder to send exactly what information is needed and no more to the merchant or recipient, even permitting anonymous transactions (for good or bad).
  • Cryptocurrency operates at the universal level and hence makes transactions easier internationally.
  • There is no other electronic cash system in which your account isn’t owned by someone else.

On top of all that, blockchain, the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies, is already being applied to a variety of business needs and itself becoming a hot sector of the tech economy. Blockchain is bringing traceability and cost-effectiveness to supply-chain management — which also improves quality assurance in areas such as food, reducing errors and improving accounting accuracy, smart contracts that can be automatically validated, signed and enforced through a blockchain construct, the possibility of secure, online voting, and many others.

Like any new, booming marketing there are risks involved in these new currencies. Anyone venturing into this domain needs to have their eyes wide open. While the opportunities for making money are real, there are even more ways to lose money.

We’re going to cover two primary approaches to staying safe and avoiding fraud and loss when dealing with cryptocurrencies. The first is to thoroughly vet any person or company you’re dealing with to judge whether they are ethical and likely to succeed in their business segment. The second is keeping your critical cryptocurrency keys safe, which we’ll deal with in this and a subsequent post.

Caveat Emptor — Buyer Beware

The short history of cryptocurrency has already seen the demise of a number of companies that claimed to manage, mine, trade, or otherwise help their customers profit from cryptocurrency. Mt. Gox, GAW Miners, and OneCoin are just three of the many companies that disappeared with their users’ money. This is the traditional equivalent of your bank going out of business and zeroing out your checking account in the process.

That doesn’t happen with banks because of regulatory oversight. But with cryptocurrency, you need to take the time to investigate any company you use to manage or trade your currencies. How long have they been around? Who are their investors? Are they affiliated with any reputable financial institutions? What is the record of their founders and executive management? These are all important questions to consider when evaluating a company in this new space.

Would you give the keys to your house to a service or person you didn’t thoroughly know and trust? Some companies that enable you to buy and sell currencies online will routinely hold your currency keys, which gives them the ability to do anything they want with your holdings, including selling them and pocketing the proceeds if they wish.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever allow a company to keep your currency keys in escrow. It simply means that you better know with whom you’re doing business and if they’re trustworthy enough to be given that responsibility.

Keys To the Cryptocurrency Kingdom — Public and Private

If you’re an owner of cryptocurrency, you know how this all works. If you’re not, bear with me for a minute while I bring everyone up to speed.

Cryptocurrency has no physical manifestation, such as bills or coins. It exists purely as a computer record. And unlike currencies maintained by governments, such as the U.S. dollar, there is no central authority regulating its distribution and value. Cryptocurrencies use a technology called blockchain, which is a decentralized way of keeping track of transactions. There are many copies of a given blockchain, so no single central authority is needed to validate its authenticity or accuracy.

The validity of each cryptocurrency is determined by a blockchain. A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called “blocks”, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Blockchains by design are inherently resistant to modification of the data. They perform as an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable, permanent way. A blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority. On a scaled network, this level of collusion is impossible — making blockchain networks effectively immutable and trustworthy.

Blockchain process

The other element common to all cryptocurrencies is their use of public and private keys, which are stored in the currency’s wallet. A cryptocurrency wallet stores the public and private “keys” or “addresses” that can be used to receive or spend the cryptocurrency. With the private key, it is possible to write in the public ledger (blockchain), effectively spending the associated cryptocurrency. With the public key, it is possible for others to send currency to the wallet.

What is a cryptocurrency address?

Cryptocurrency “coins” can be lost if the owner loses the private keys needed to spend the currency they own. It’s as if the owner had lost a bank account number and had no way to verify their identity to the bank, or if they lost the U.S. dollars they had in their wallet. The assets are gone and unusable.

The Cryptocurrency Wallet

Given the importance of these keys, and lack of recourse if they are lost, it’s obviously very important to keep track of your keys.

If you’re being careful in choosing reputable exchanges, app developers, and other services with whom to trust your cryptocurrency, you’ve made a good start in keeping your investment secure. But if you’re careless in managing the keys to your bitcoins, ether, Litecoin, or other cryptocurrency, you might as well leave your money on a cafe tabletop and walk away.

What Are the Differences Between Hot and Cold Wallets?

Just like other numbers you might wish to keep track of — credit cards, account numbers, phone numbers, passphrases — cryptocurrency keys can be stored in a variety of ways. Those who use their currencies for day-to-day purchases most likely will want them handy in a smartphone app, hardware key, or debit card that can be used for purchases. These are called “hot” wallets. Some experts advise keeping the balances in these devices and apps to a minimal amount to avoid hacking or data loss. We typically don’t walk around with thousands of dollars in U.S. currency in our old-style wallets, so this is really a continuation of the same approach to managing spending money.

Bread mobile app screenshot

A “hot” wallet, the Bread mobile app

Some investors with large balances keep their keys in “cold” wallets, or “cold storage,” i.e. a device or location that is not connected online. If funds are needed for purchases, they can be transferred to a more easily used payment medium. Cold wallets can be hardware devices, USB drives, or even paper copies of your keys.

Trezor hardware wallet

A “cold” wallet, the Trezor hardware wallet

Ledger Nano S hardware wallet

A “cold” wallet, the Ledger Nano S

Bitcoin paper wallet

A “cold” Bitcoin paper wallet

Wallets are suited to holding one or more specific cryptocurrencies, and some people have multiple wallets for different currencies and different purposes.

A paper wallet is nothing other than a printed record of your public and private keys. Some prefer their records to be completely disconnected from the internet, and a piece of paper serves that need. Just like writing down an account password on paper, however, it’s essential to keep the paper secure to avoid giving someone the ability to freely access your funds.

How to Keep your Keys, and Cryptocurrency Secure

In a post this coming Thursday, Securing Your Cryptocurrency, we’ll discuss the best strategies for backing up your cryptocurrency so that your currencies don’t become part of the millions that have been lost. We’ll cover the common (and uncommon) approaches to backing up hot wallets, cold wallets, and using paper and metal solutions to keeping your keys safe.

In the meantime, please tell us of your experiences with cryptocurrencies — good and bad — and how you’ve dealt with the issue of cryptocurrency security.

The post Cryptocurrency Security Challenges appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates

Post Syndicated from Andy Klein original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-failure-rates/

Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 Helium HDD

In November 2013, the first commercially available helium-filled hard drive was introduced by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The 6 TB drive was not only unique in being helium-filled, it was for the moment, the highest capacity hard drive available. Fast forward a little over 4 years later and 12 TB helium-filled drives are readily available, 14 TB drives can be found, and 16 TB helium-filled drives are arriving soon.

Backblaze has been purchasing and deploying helium-filled hard drives over the past year and we thought it was time to start looking at their failure rates compared to traditional air-filled drives. This post will provide an overview, then we’ll continue the comparison on a regular basis over the coming months.

The Promise and Challenge of Helium Filled Drives

We all know that helium is lighter than air — that’s why helium-filled balloons float. Inside of an air-filled hard drive there are rapidly spinning disk platters that rotate at a given speed, 7200 rpm for example. The air inside adds an appreciable amount of drag on the platters that in turn requires an appreciable amount of additional energy to spin the platters. Replacing the air inside of a hard drive with helium reduces the amount of drag, thereby reducing the amount of energy needed to spin the platters, typically by 20%.

We also know that after a few days, a helium-filled balloon sinks to the ground. This was one of the key challenges in using helium inside of a hard drive: helium escapes from most containers, even if they are well sealed. It took years for hard drive manufacturers to create containers that could contain helium while still functioning as a hard drive. This container innovation allows helium-filled drives to function at spec over the course of their lifetime.

Checking for Leaks

Three years ago, we identified SMART 22 as the attribute assigned to recording the status of helium inside of a hard drive. We have both HGST and Seagate helium-filled hard drives, but only the HGST drives currently report the SMART 22 attribute. It appears the normalized and raw values for SMART 22 currently report the same value, which starts at 100 and goes down.

To date only one HGST drive has reported a value of less than 100, with multiple readings between 94 and 99. That drive continues to perform fine, with no other errors or any correlating changes in temperature, so we are not sure whether the change in value is trying to tell us something or if it is just a wonky sensor.

Helium versus Air-Filled Hard Drives

There are several different ways to compare these two types of drives. Below we decided to use just our 8, 10, and 12 TB drives in the comparison. We did this since we have helium-filled drives in those sizes. We left out of the comparison all of the drives that are 6 TB and smaller as none of the drive models we use are helium-filled. We are open to trying different comparisons. This just seemed to be the best place to start.

Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Rates: Helium vs. Air-Filled Hard Drives table

The most obvious observation is that there seems to be little difference in the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) based on whether they contain helium or air. One conclusion, given this evidence, is that helium doesn’t affect the AFR of hard drives versus air-filled drives. My prediction is that the helium drives will eventually prove to have a lower AFR. Why? Drive Days.

Let’s go back in time to Q1 2017 when the air-filled drives listed in the table above had a similar number of Drive Days to the current number of Drive Days for the helium drives. We find that the failure rate for the air-filled drives at the time (Q1 2017) was 1.61%. In other words, when the drives were in use a similar number of hours, the helium drives had a failure rate of 1.06% while the failure rate of the air-filled drives was 1.61%.

Helium or Air?

My hypothesis is that after normalizing the data so that the helium and air-filled drives have the same (or similar) usage (Drive Days), the helium-filled drives we use will continue to have a lower Annualized Failure Rate versus the air-filled drives we use. I expect this trend to continue for the next year at least. What side do you come down on? Will the Annualized Failure Rate for helium-filled drives be better than air-filled drives or vice-versa? Or do you think the two technologies will be eventually produce the same AFR over time? Pick a side and we’ll document the results over the next year and see where the data takes us.

The post The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Danish Traffic to Pirate Sites Increases 67% in Just a Year

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/danish-traffic-to-pirate-sites-increases-67-in-just-a-year-180501/

For close to 20 years, rightsholders have tried to stem the tide of mainstream Internet piracy. Yet despite increasingly powerful enforcement tools, infringement continues on a grand scale.

While the problem is global, rightsholder groups often zoom in on their home turf, to see how the fight is progressing locally. Covering Denmark, the Rights Alliance Data Report 2017 paints a fairly pessimistic picture.

Published this week, the industry study – which uses SimilarWeb and MarkMonitor data – finds that Danes visited 2,000 leading pirate sites 596 million times in 2017. That represents a 67% increase over the 356 million visits to unlicensed platforms made by citizens during 2016.

The report notes that, at least in part, this explosive growth can be attributed to mobile-compatible sites and services, which make it easier than ever to consume illicit content on the move, as well as at home.

In a sea of unauthorized streaming sites, Rights Alliance highlights one platform above all the others as a particularly bad influence in 2017 – 123movies (also known as GoMovies and GoStream, among others).

“The popularity of this service rose sharply in 2017 from 40 million visits in 2016 to 175 million visits in 2017 – an increase of 337 percent, of which most of the traffic originates from mobile devices,” the report notes.

123movies recently announced its closure but before that the platform was subjected to web-blocking in several jurisdictions.

Rights Alliance says that Denmark has one of the most effective blocking systems in the world but that still doesn’t stop huge numbers of people from consuming pirate content from sites that aren’t yet blocked.

“Traffic to infringing sites is overwhelming, and therefore blocking a few sites merely takes the top of the illegal activities,” Rights Alliance chief Maria Fredenslund informs TorrentFreak.

“Blocking is effective by stopping 75% of traffic to blocked sites but certainly, an upscaled effort is necessary.”

Rights Alliance also views the promotion of legal services as crucial to its anti-piracy strategy so when people visit a blocked site, they’re also directed towards legitimate platforms.

“That is why we are working at the moment with Denmark’s Ministry of Culture and ISPs on a campaign ‘Share With Care 2′ which promotes legal services e.g. by offering a search function for legal services which will be placed in combination with the signs that are put on blocked websites,” the anti-piracy group notes.

But even with such measures in place, the thirst for unlicensed content is great. In 2017 alone, 500 of the most popular films and TV shows were downloaded from P2P networks like BitTorrent more than 15 million times from Danish IP addresses, that’s up from 11.9 million in 2016.

Given the dramatic rise in visits to pirate sites overall, the suggestion is that plenty of consumers are still getting through. Rights Alliance says that the number of people being restricted is also hampered by people who don’t use their ISP’s DNS service, which is the method used to block sites in Denmark.

Additionally, interest in VPNs and similar anonymization and bypass-capable technologies is on the increase. Between 3.5% and 5% of Danish Internet users currently use a VPN, a number that’s expected to go up. Furthermore, Rights Alliance reports greater interest in “closed” pirate communities.

“The data is based on closed [BitTorrent] networks. We also address the challenges with private communities on Facebook and other [social media] platforms,” Fredenslund explains.

“Due to the closed doors of these platforms it is not possible for us to say anything precisely about the amount of infringing activities there. However, we receive an increasing number of notices from our members who discover that their products are distributed illegally and also we do an increased monitoring of these platforms.”

But while more established technologies such as torrents and regular web-streaming continue in considerable volumes, newer IPTV-style services accessible via apps and dedicated platforms are also gaining traction.

“The volume of visitors to these services’ websites has been sharply rising in 2017 – an increase of 84 percent from January to December,” Rights Alliance notes.

“Even though the number of visitors does not say anything about actual consumption, as users usually only visit pages one time to download the program, the number gives an indication that the interest in IPTV is increasing.”

To combat this growth market, Rights Alliance says it wants to establish web-blockades against sites hosting the software applications.

Also on the up are visits to platforms offering live sports illegally. In 2017, Danish IP addresses made 2.96 million visits to these services, corresponding to almost 250,000 visits per month and representing an annual increase of 28%.

Rights Alliance informs TF that in future a ‘live’ blocking mechanism similar to the one used by the Premier League in the UK could be deployed in Denmark.

“We already have a dynamic blocking system, and we see an increasing demand for illegal TV products, so this could be a natural next step,” Fredenslund explains.

Another small but perhaps significant detail is how users are accessing pirate sites. According to the report, large volumes of people are now visiting platforms directly, with more than 50% doing so in preference to referrals from search engines such as Google.

In terms of deterrence, the Rights Alliance report sticks to the tried-and-tested approaches seen so often in the anti-piracy arena.

Firstly, the group notes that it’s increasingly encountering people who are paying for legal services such as Netflix and Spotify so believe that allows them to grab something extra from a pirate site. However, in common with similar organizations globally, the group counters that pirate sites can serve malware or have other nefarious business interests behind the scenes, so people should stay away.

Whether significant volumes will heed this advice will remain to be seen but if a 67% increase last year is any predictor of the future, piracy is here to stay – and then some. Rights Alliance says it is ready for the challenge but will need some assistance to achieve its goals.

“As it is evident from the traffic data, criminal activities are not something that we, private companies (right holders in cooperation with ISPs), can handle alone,” Fredenslund says.

“Therefore, we are very pleased that DK Government recently announced that the IP taskforce which was set down as a trial period has now been made permanent. In that regard it is important and necessary that the police will also obtain the authority to handle blocking of massively infringing websites. Police do not have the authority to carry out blocking as it is today.”

The full report is available here (Danish, pdf)

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

[$] The LRU lock and mmap_sem

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/753058/rss

The kernel’s memory-management subsystem has to manage a great deal of
concurrency; that leads to an ongoing series of locking challenges that
sometimes seem intractable. Two recurring locking issues — the LRU locks
and the mmap_sem lock — were the topic of sessions held during the
memory-management track of the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and
Memory-Management Summit. In both cases, it quickly became clear that,
while some interesting ideas are being pursued, easy
solutions are not on offer.

Former Judge Accuses IP Court of Using ‘Pirate’ Microsoft Software

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/former-judge-accuses-ip-court-of-using-pirate-microsoft-software-180429/

While piracy of movies, TV shows, and music grabs most of the headlines, software piracy is a huge issue, from both consumer and commercial perspectives.

For many years, software such as Photoshop has been pirated on a grand scale and around the world, millions of computers rely on cracked and unlicensed copies of Microsoft’s Windows software.

One of the key drivers of this kind of piracy is the relative expense of software. Open source variants are nearly always available but big brand names always seem more popular due to their market penetration and perceived ease of use.

While using pirated software very rarely gets individuals into trouble, the same cannot be said of unlicensed commercial operators. That appears to be the case in Russia where somewhat ironically the Court for Intellectual Property Rights stands accused of copyright infringement.

A complaint filed by the Paragon law firm at the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Court for Intellectual Property Rights (CIP) alleges that the Court is illegally using Microsoft software, something which has the potential to affect the outcome of court cases involving the US-based software giant.

Paragon is representing Alexander Shmuratov, who is a former Assistant Judge at the Court for Intellectual Property Rights. Shmuratov worked at the Court for several years and claims that the computers there were being operated with expired licenses.

Shmuratov himself told Kommersant that he “saw the notice of an activation failure every day when using MS Office products” in intellectual property court.

A representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed that a complaint had been received but said it had been forwarded to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

In respect of the counterfeit software claims, CIP categorically denies the allegations. CIP says that licenses for all Russian courts were purchased back in 2008 and remained in force until 2011. In 2013, Microsoft agreed to an extension.

Only adding more intrigue to the story, CIP Assistant chairman Catherine Ulyanova said that the initator of the complaint, former judge Alexander Shmuratov, was dismissed from the CIP because he provided false information about income. He later mounted a challenge against his dismissal but was unsuccessful.

Ulyanova said that Microsoft licensed all courts from 2006 for use of Windows and MS Office. The licenses were acquired through a third-party company and more licenses than necessary were purchased, with some licenses being redistributed for use by CIP in later years with the consent of Microsoft.

Kommersant was unable to confirm how licenses were paid for beyond December 2011 but apparently an “official confirmation letter from the Irish headquarters of Microsoft, which does not object to the transfer of CIP licenses” had been sent to the Court.

Responding to Shmuratov’s allegations that software he used hadn’t been activated, Ulyanova said that technical problems had no relationship with the existence of software licenses.

The question of whether the Court is properly licensed will be determined at a later date but observers are already raising questions concerning CIP’s historical dealings with Microsoft not only in terms of licensing, but in cases it handled.

In the period 2014-2017, the Court for Intellectual Property Rights handled around 80 cases involving Microsoft and claims of between 50 thousand ($800) and several million rubles.

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

Secure Build with AWS CodeBuild and LayeredInsight

Post Syndicated from Asif Khan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/secure-build-with-aws-codebuild-and-layeredinsight/

This post is written by Asif Awan, Chief Technology Officer of Layered Insight, Subin Mathew – Software Development Manager for AWS CodeBuild, and Asif Khan – Solutions Architect

Enterprises adopt containers because they recognize the benefits: speed, agility, portability, and high compute density. They understand how accelerating application delivery and deployment pipelines makes it possible to rapidly slipstream new features to customers. Although the benefits are indisputable, this acceleration raises concerns about security and corporate compliance with software governance. In this blog post, I provide a solution that shows how Layered Insight, the pioneer and global leader in container-native application protection, can be used with seamless application build and delivery pipelines like those available in AWS CodeBuild to address these concerns.

Layered Insight solutions

Layered Insight enables organizations to unify DevOps and SecOps by providing complete visibility and control of containerized applications. Using the industry’s first embedded security approach, Layered Insight solves the challenges of container performance and protection by providing accurate insight into container images, adaptive analysis of running containers, and automated enforcement of container behavior.

 

AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. CodeBuild scales continuously and processes multiple builds concurrently, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You can get started quickly by using prepackaged build environments, or you can create custom build environments that use your own build tools.

 

Problem Definition

Security and compliance concerns span the lifecycle of application containers. Common concerns include:

Visibility into the container images. You need to verify the software composition information of the container image to determine whether known vulnerabilities associated with any of the software packages and libraries are included in the container image.

Governance of container images is critical because only certain open source packages/libraries, of specific versions, should be included in the container images. You need support for mechanisms for blacklisting all container images that include a certain version of a software package/library, or only allowing open source software that come with a specific type of license (such as Apache, MIT, GPL, and so on). You need to be able to address challenges such as:

·       Defining the process for image compliance policies at the enterprise, department, and group levels.

·       Preventing the images that fail the compliance checks from being deployed in critical environments, such as staging, pre-prod, and production.

Visibility into running container instances is critical, including:

·       CPU and memory utilization.

·       Security of the build environment.

·       All activities (system, network, storage, and application layer) of the application code running in each container instance.

Protection of running container instances that is:

·       Zero-touch to the developers (not an SDK-based approach).

·       Zero touch to the DevOps team and doesn’t limit the portability of the containerized application.

·       This protection must retain the option to switch to a different container stack or orchestration layer, or even to a different Container as a Service (CaaS ).

·       And it must be a fully automated solution to SecOps, so that the SecOps team doesn’t have to manually analyze and define detailed blacklist and whitelist policies.

 

Solution Details

In AWS CodeCommit, we have three projects:
●     “Democode” is a simple Java application, with one buildspec to build the app into a Docker container (run by build-demo-image CodeBuild project), and another to instrument said container (instrument-image CodeBuild project). The resulting container is stored in ECR repo javatestasjavatest:20180415-layered. This instrumented container is running in AWS Fargate cluster demo-java-appand can be seen in the Layered Insight runtime console as the javatestapplication in us-east-1.
●     aws-codebuild-docker-imagesis a clone of the official aws-codebuild-docker-images repo on GitHub . This CodeCommit project is used by the build-python-builder CodeBuild project to build the python 3.3.6 codebuild image and is stored at the codebuild-python ECR repo. We then manually instructed the Layered Insight console to instrument the image.
●     scan-java-imagecontains just a buildspec.yml file. This file is used by the scan-java-image CodeBuild project to instruct Layered Assessment to perform a vulnerability scan of the javatest container image built previously, and then run the scan results through a compliance policy that states there should be no medium vulnerabilities. This build fails — but in this case that is a success: the scan completes successfully, but compliance fails as there are medium-level issues found in the scan.

This build is performed using the instrumented version of the Python 3.3.6 CodeBuild image, so the activity of the processes running within the build are recorded each time within the LI console.

Build container image

Create or use a CodeCommit project with your application. To build this image and store it in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), add a buildspec file to the project and build a container image and create a CodeBuild project.

Scan container image

Once the image is built, create a new buildspec in the same project or a new one that looks similar to below (update ECR URL as necessary):

version: 0.2
phases:
  pre_build:
    commands:
      - echo Pulling down LI Scan API client scripts
      - git clone https://github.com/LayeredInsight/scan-api-example-python.git
      - echo Setting up LI Scan API client
      - cd scan-api-example-python
      - pip install layint_scan_api
      - pip install -r requirements.txt
  build:
    commands:
      - echo Scanning container started on `date`
      - IMAGEID=$(./li_add_image --name <aws-region>.amazonaws.com/javatest:20180415)
      - ./li_wait_for_scan -v --imageid $IMAGEID
      - ./li_run_image_compliance -v --imageid $IMAGEID --policyid PB15260f1acb6b2aa5b597e9d22feffb538256a01fbb4e5a95

Add the buildspec file to the git repo, push it, and then build a CodeBuild project using with the instrumented Python 3.3.6 CodeBuild image at <aws-region>.amazonaws.com/codebuild-python:3.3.6-layered. Set the following environment variables in the CodeBuild project:
●     LI_APPLICATIONNAME – name of the build to display
●     LI_LOCATION – location of the build project to display
●     LI_API_KEY – ApiKey:<key-name>:<api-key>
●     LI_API_HOST – location of the Layered Insight API service

Instrument container image

Next, to instrument the new container image:

  1. In the Layered Insight runtime console, ensure that the ECR registry and credentials are defined (click the Setup icon and the ‘+’ sign on the top right of the screen to add a new container registry). Note the name given to the registry in the console, as this needs to be referenced in the li_add_imagecommand in the script, below.
  2. Next, add a new buildspec (with a new name) to the CodeCommit project, such as the one shown below. This code will download the Layered Insight runtime client, and use it to instruct the Layered Insight service to instrument the image that was just built: 
    version: 0.2
phases:
pre_build:
commands:
echo Pulling down LI API Runtime client scripts
git clone https://github.com/LayeredInsight/runtime-api-example-python
echo Setting up LI API client
cd runtime-api-example-python
pip install layint-runtime-api
pip install -r requirements.txt
build:
commands:
echo Instrumentation started on `date`
./li_add_image --registry "Javatest ECR" --name IMAGE_NAME:TAG --description "IMAGE DESCRIPTION" --policy "Default Policy" --instrument --wait --verbose
  3. Commit and push the new buildspec file.
  4. Going back to CodeBuild, create a new project, with the same CodeCommit repo, but this time select the new buildspec file. Use a Python 3.3.6 builder – either the AWS or LI Instrumented version.
  5. Click Continue
  6. Click Save
  7. Run the build, again on the master branch.
  8. If everything runs successfully, a new image should appear in the ECR registry with a -layered suffix. This is the instrumented image.

Run instrumented container image

When the instrumented container is now run — in ECS, Fargate, or elsewhere — it will log data back to the Layered Insight runtime console. It’s appearance in the console can be modified by setting the LI_APPLICATIONNAME and LI_LOCATION environment variables when running the container.

Conclusion

In the above blog we have provided you steps needed to embed governance and runtime security in your build pipelines running on AWS CodeBuild using Layered Insight.

 

 

 

[$] Supporting Intel/AMD memory encryption

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/752683/rss

Once a niche feature, memory encryption is becoming mainstream with support
in both Intel and AMD processors, Kirill Shutemov said at the beginning of
his session during the memory-management track of the 2018 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. Memory encryption can harden the
system against attack, but it also presents some interesting challenges for
the kernel.

Continued: the answers to your questions for Eben Upton

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/eben-q-a-2/

Last week, we shared the first half of our Q&A with Raspberry Pi Trading CEO and Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton. Today we follow up with all your other questions, including your expectations for a Raspberry Pi 4, Eben’s dream add-ons, and whether we really could go smaller than the Zero.

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

Get your questions to us now using #AskRaspberryPi on Twitter

With internet security becoming more necessary, will there be automated versions of VPN on an SD card?

There are already third-party tools which turn your Raspberry Pi into a VPN endpoint. Would we do it ourselves? Like the power button, it’s one of those cases where there are a million things we could do and so it’s more efficient to let the community get on with it.

Just to give a counterexample, while we don’t generally invest in optimising for particular use cases, we did invest a bunch of money into optimising Kodi to run well on Raspberry Pi, because we found that very large numbers of people were using it. So, if we find that we get half a million people a year using a Raspberry Pi as a VPN endpoint, then we’ll probably invest money into optimising it and feature it on the website as we’ve done with Kodi. But I don’t think we’re there today.

Have you ever seen any Pis running and doing important jobs in the wild, and if so, how does it feel?

It’s amazing how often you see them driving displays, for example in radio and TV studios. Of course, it feels great. There’s something wonderful about the geographic spread as well. The Raspberry Pi desktop is quite distinctive, both in its previous incarnation with the grey background and logo, and the current one where we have Greg Annandale’s road picture.

The PIXEL desktop on Raspberry Pi

And so it’s funny when you see it in places. Somebody sent me a video of them teaching in a classroom in rural Pakistan and in the background was Greg’s picture.

Raspberry Pi 4!?!

There will be a Raspberry Pi 4, obviously. We get asked about it a lot. I’m sticking to the guidance that I gave people that they shouldn’t expect to see a Raspberry Pi 4 this year. To some extent, the opportunity to do the 3B+ was a surprise: we were surprised that we’ve been able to get 200MHz more clock speed, triple the wireless and wired throughput, and better thermals, and still stick to the $35 price point.

We’re up against the wall from a silicon perspective; we’re at the end of what you can do with the 40nm process. It’s not that you couldn’t clock the processor faster, or put a larger processor which can execute more instructions per clock in there, it’s simply about the energy consumption and the fact that you can’t dissipate the heat. So we’ve got to go to a smaller process node and that’s an order of magnitude more challenging from an engineering perspective. There’s more effort, more risk, more cost, and all of those things are challenging.

With 3B+ out of the way, we’re going to start looking at this now. For the first six months or so we’re going to be figuring out exactly what people want from a Raspberry Pi 4. We’re listening to people’s comments about what they’d like to see in a new Raspberry Pi, and I’m hoping by early autumn we should have an idea of what we want to put in it and a strategy for how we might achieve that.

Could you go smaller than the Zero?

The challenge with Zero as that we’re periphery-limited. If you run your hand around the unit, there is no edge of that board that doesn’t have something there. So the question is: “If you want to go smaller than Zero, what feature are you willing to throw out?”

It’s a single-sided board, so you could certainly halve the PCB area if you fold the circuitry and use both sides, though you’d have to lose something. You could give up some GPIO and go back to 26 pins like the first Raspberry Pi. You could give up the camera connector, you could go to micro HDMI from mini HDMI. You could remove the SD card and just do USB boot. I’m inventing a product live on air! But really, you could get down to two thirds and lose a bunch of GPIO – it’s hard to imagine you could get to half the size.

What’s the one feature that you wish you could outfit on the Raspberry Pi that isn’t cost effective at this time? Your dream feature.

Well, more memory. There are obviously technical reasons why we don’t have more memory on there, but there are also market reasons. People ask “why doesn’t the Raspberry Pi have more memory?”, and my response is typically “go and Google ‘DRAM price’”. We’re used to the price of memory going down. And currently, we’re going through a phase where this has turned around and memory is getting more expensive again.

Machine learning would be interesting. There are machine learning accelerators which would be interesting to put on a piece of hardware. But again, they are not going to be used by everyone, so according to our method of pricing what we might add to a board, machine learning gets treated like a $50 chip. But that would be lovely to do.

Which citizen science projects using the Pi have most caught your attention?

I like the wildlife camera projects. We live out in the countryside in a little village, and we’re conscious of being surrounded by nature but we don’t see a lot of it on a day-to-day basis. So I like the nature cam projects, though, to my everlasting shame, I haven’t set one up yet. There’s a range of them, from very professional products to people taking a Raspberry Pi and a camera and putting them in a plastic box. So those are good fun.

Raspberry Shake seismometer

The Raspberry Shake seismometer

And there’s Meteor Pi from the Cambridge Science Centre, that’s a lot of fun. And the seismometer Raspberry Shake – that sort of thing is really nice. We missed the recent South Wales earthquake; perhaps we should set one up at our Californian office.

How does it feel to go to bed every day knowing you’ve changed the world for the better in such a massive way?

What feels really good is that when we started this in 2006 nobody else was talking about it, but now we’re part of a very broad movement.

We were in a really bad way: we’d seen a collapse in the number of applicants applying to study Computer Science at Cambridge and elsewhere. In our view, this reflected a move away from seeing technology as ‘a thing you do’ to seeing it as a ‘thing that you have done to you’. It is problematic from the point of view of the economy, industry, and academia, but most importantly it damages the life prospects of individual children, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The great thing about STEM subjects is that you can’t fake being good at them. There are a lot of industries where your Dad can get you a job based on who he knows and then you can kind of muddle along. But if your dad gets you a job building bridges and you suck at it, after the first or second bridge falls down, then you probably aren’t going to be building bridges anymore. So access to STEM education can be a great driver of social mobility.

By the time we were launching the Raspberry Pi in 2012, there was this wonderful movement going on. Code Club, for example, and CoderDojo came along. Lots of different ways of trying to solve the same problem. What feels really, really good is that we’ve been able to do this as part of an enormous community. And some parts of that community became part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation – we merged with Code Club, we merged with CoderDojo, and we continue to work alongside a lot of these other organisations. So in the two seconds it takes me to fall asleep after my face hits the pillow, that’s what I think about.

We’re currently advertising a Programme Manager role in New Delhi, India. Did you ever think that Raspberry Pi would be advertising a role like this when you were bringing together the Foundation?

No, I didn’t.

But if you told me we were going to be hiring somewhere, India probably would have been top of my list because there’s a massive IT industry in India. When we think about our interaction with emerging markets, India, in a lot of ways, is the poster child for how we would like it to work. There have already been some wonderful deployments of Raspberry Pi, for example in Kerala, without our direct involvement. And we think we’ve got something that’s useful for the Indian market. We have a product, we have clubs, we have teacher training. And we have a body of experience in how to teach people, so we have a physical commercial product as well as a charitable offering that we think are a good fit.

It’s going to be massive.

What is your favourite BBC type-in listing?

There was a game called Codename: Druid. There is a famous game called Codename: Droid which was the sequel to Stryker’s Run, which was an awesome, awesome game. And there was a type-in game called Codename: Druid, which was at the bottom end of what you would consider a commercial game.

codename druid

And I remember typing that in. And what was really cool about it was that the next month, the guy who wrote it did another article that talks about the memory map and which operating system functions used which bits of memory. So if you weren’t going to do disc access, which bits of memory could you trample on and know the operating system would survive.

babbage versus bugs Raspberry Pi annual

See the full listing for Babbage versus Bugs in the Raspberry Pi 2018 Annual

I still like type-in listings. The Raspberry Pi 2018 Annual has a type-in listing that I wrote for a Babbage versus Bugs game. I will say that’s not the last type-in listing you will see from me in the next twelve months. And if you download the PDF, you could probably copy and paste it into your favourite text editor to save yourself some time.

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