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Artists Protest RIAA for Trampling on Their Moral Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Showtime Seeks Injunction to Stop Mayweather v McGregor Piracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sample of the sites targeted by the lawsuit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

let's talk about Threads

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

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

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

Programs

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

Program

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

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

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

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

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

How Processes Work

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

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

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

diagram of how processes work

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

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

How Threads Work

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

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

Process vs. Thread

diagram of threads in a process over time

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

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

diagram of single and multi-treaded process

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

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

Threads vs. Processes

So to review:

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

Processes vs. Threads — Advantages and Disadvantages

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

What about Concurrency and Parallelism?

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

diagram of concurrency and parallelism

Why Choose Process over Thread, or Thread over Process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

activity monitor of Google Chrome

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

Windows Task Manager view

Made it This Far?

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

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

We love to hear from you

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

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

Community Profile: David Pride

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/community-profile-david-pride/

This column is from The MagPi issue 55. You can download a PDF of the full issue for free, or subscribe to receive the print edition in your mailbox or the digital edition on your tablet. All proceeds from the print and digital editions help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve its charitable goals.

David Pride’s experiences in computer education came slightly later in life. He admits to not being a grade-A student: he left school with few qualifications, unable to pursue further education at university. There was, however, a teacher who instilled in him a passion for computers and coding which would stick with him indefinitely.

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

David joined us at the St James’s Palace community celebration, mingling with the likes of the Duke of York, plus organisers of Jams and clubs, such as Grace and Femi

Welcome to the Community

Twenty years later, back in 2012, David heard of the Raspberry Pi – a soon-to-be-released “new little marvel” that he instantly fell for, head first. Despite a lack of knowledge in Linux and Python, he experimented and had fun. He found a Raspberry Jam and, with it, Pi enthusiasts like Mike Horne and Peter Onion. The projects on display at the Jam were enough to push David further into the Raspberry Pi rabbit hole and, after working his way through several Python books, he began to take steps into the world of formal higher education.

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

David’s determination to access and complete further education in computing has earned him a three-year PhD studentship. Not bad for a “lousy student”

Back to School

With a Mooc qualification from Rice University under his belt, he continued to improve upon his self-taught knowledge, and was fortunate enough to be accepted to study for a master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. With a distinction for his final dissertation, David completed the course with an overall distinction for his MSc, and was recently awarded a fully funded PhD studentship with The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute.

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

Self-playing xylophones, Wiimote air drums, Lego sorters, Pi Wars robots, and more. David is continually hacking toys, giving them new Pi-powered life

Maker of things

The portfolio of projects that helped him to achieve his many educational successes has provided regular retweet material for the Raspberry Pi Twitter account, and we’ve highlighted his fun, imaginative work on this blog before. His builds have travelled to a range of Jams and made their way to the Raspberry Pi and Code Club stands at the Bett Show, as well as to our birthday celebrations.

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

“Pi & Chips – with a little extra source”

His website, the pun-tastic Pi and Chips, is home to the majority of his work; David also links to YouTube videos and walk-throughs of his projects, and relates his experiences at various events. If you’ve followed any of the action across the Raspberry Pi social media channels – or indeed read any previous issues of The MagPi magazine – you’ll no doubt have seen a couple of David’s projects.

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile 4-Bot

Many readers will have come across the wonderful 4-Bot before, and it has even made an appearance alongside David in a recent Bloomberg interview. Considering the trillions of possible game positions, David made a compromise and, if you’re lucky, you may just be able to beat it

The 4-Bot, a robotic second player for the family game Connect Four, allows people to go head to head with a Pi-powered robotic arm. Using a Python imaging library, the 4-Bot splits the game grid into 42 squares, and recognises them as being red, yellow, or empty by reading the RGB value of the space. Using the minimax algorithm, 4-Bot is able to play each move within 25 seconds. Believe us when we say that it’s not as easy to beat as you’d hope. Then there’s his more recent air drum kit, which uses an old toy found at a car boot sale together with a Wiimote to make a functional air drum that showcases David’s toy-hacking abilities… and his complete lack of rhythm. He does fare much better on his homemade laser harp, though!

The post Community Profile: David Pride appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Launch – Hello Amazon Macie: Automatically Discover, Classify, and Secure Content at Scale

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launch-amazon-macie-securing-your-s3-buckets/

When Jeff and I heard about this service, we both were curious on the meaning of the name Macie. Of course, Jeff being a great researcher looked up the name Macie and found that the name Macie has two meanings. It has both French and English (UK) based origin, it is typically a girl name, has various meanings. The first meaning of Macie that was found, said that that name meant “weapon”.  The second meaning noted the name was representative of a person that is bold, sporty, and sweet. In a way, these definitions are appropriate, as today I am happy to announce that we are launching  Amazon Macie, a new security service that uses machine learning to help identify and protect sensitive data stored in AWS from breaches, data leaks, and unauthorized access with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) being the initial data store. Therefore, I can imagine that Amazon Macie could be described as a bold, weapon for AWS customers providing a sweet service with a sporty user interface that helps to protects against malicious access of your data at rest. Whew, that was a mouthful, but I unbelievably got all the Macie descriptions out in a single sentence! Nevertheless, I am a thrilled to share with you the power of the new Amazon Macie service.

Amazon Macie is a service powered by machine learning that can automatically discover and classify your data stored in Amazon S3. But Macie doesn’t stop there, once your data has been classified by Macie, it assigns each data item a business value, and then continuously monitors the data in order to detect any suspicious activity based upon access patterns. Key features of the Macie service include:

  • Data Security Automation: analyzes, classifies, and processes data to understand the historical patterns, user authentications to data, data access locations, and times of access.
  • Data Security & Monitoring: actively monitors usage log data for anomaly detected along with automatic resolution of reported issues through CloudWatch Events and Lambda
  • Data Visibility for Proactive Loss prevention: Provides management visibility into details of storage data while providing immediate protection without the need for manual customer input
  • Data Research and Reporting: allows administrative configuration for reporting and alert management requirements

How does Amazon Macie accomplish this you ask? 

Using machine learning algorithms for natural language processing (NLP), Macie can automate the classification of data in your S3 buckets. In addition, Amazon Macie takes advantage of predictive analytics algorithms enabling data access patterns to be dynamically analyzed. Learnings are then used to inform and to alert you on possible suspicious behavior. Macie also runs an engine specifically to detect common sources of personally identifiable information (PII), or sensitive personal information (SP).  Macie takes advantage of AWS CloudTrail and continuously checks Cloudtrail events for PUT requests in S3 buckets and automatically classify new objects in almost real time.

While Macie is a powerful tool to use for security and data protection in the AWS cloud, it also can aid you with governance, compliance requirements, and/or audit standards.  Many of you may already be aware of the EU’s most stringent privacy regulation to date – The General Protection Data Regulation (GDPR), which becomes enforceable on May 25, 2018. As Amazon Macie recognizes personally identifiable information (PII) and provides customers with dashboards and alerts, it will enable customers to comply with GDPR regulations around encryption and pseudonymization of data. When combined with Lambda queries, Macie becomes a powerful tool to help remediate GDPR concerns.

Tour of the Amazon Macie Service

Let’s look a tour of the service and look at Amazon Macie up close and personal.

First, I will log onto the Macie console and start the process of setting up Macie so that I can start to my data classification and protection by clicking the Get Started button.


As you can see, to enable the Amazon Macie service, I must have the appropriate IAM roles created for the service, and additionally I will need to have AWS CloudTrail enabled in my account.

I will create these roles and turn on the AWS CloudTrail service in my account. To make things easier for you to setup Macie, you can take advantage of sample template for CloudFormation provided in the Macie User Guide that will set up required IAM roles and policies for you, you then would only need to setup a trail as noted in the CloudTrail documentation.

If you have multiple AWS accounts, you should note that the account you use to enable the Macie service will be noted as the master account, you can integrate other accounts with the Macie service but they will have the member account designation. Users from member accounts will need to use an IAM role to federate access to the master account in order access the Macie console.

Now that my IAM roles are created and CloudTrail is enabled, I will click the Enable Macie button to start Macie’s data monitoring and protection.


Once Macie is finished starting the service in your account, you will be brought to the service main screen and any existing alerts in your account will be presented to you. Since I have just started the service, I currently have no existing alerts at this time.


Considering we are doing a tour of the Macie service, I will now integrate some of my S3 buckets with Macie. However, you do not have to specify any S3 buckets for Macie to start monitoring since the service already uses the AWS CloudTrail Management API analyze and process information. With this tour of Macie, I have decided to monitor some object level API events in from certain buckets in CloudTrail.

In order to integrate with S3, I will go to the Integrations tab of the Macie console.  Once on the Integrations tab, I will see two options: Accounts and Services. The Account option is used to integrate member accounts with Macie and to set your data retention policy. Since I want to integrate specific S3 buckets with Macie, I’ll click the Services option go to the Services tab.


When I integrate Macie with the S3 service, a trail and a S3 bucket will be created to store logs about S3 data events. To get started, I will use the Select an account drop down to choose an account.  Once my account is selected, the services available for integration are presented. I’ll select the Amazon S3 service by clicking the Add button.

Now I can select the buckets that I want Macie to analyze, selecting the Review and Save button takes me to a screen which I confirm that I desire object level logging by clicking Save button.

4
Next, on our Macie tour, let’s look at how we can customize data classification with Macie.

As we discussed, Macie will automatically monitor and classify your data. Once Macie identifies your data it will classify your data objects by file and content type. Macie will also use a support vector machine (SVM) classifier to classify the content within S3 objects in addition to the metadata of the file. In deep learning/machine learning fields of study, support vector machines are supervised learning models, which have learning algorithms used for classification and regression analysis of data. Macie trained the SVM classifier by using a data of varying content types optimized to support accurate detection of data content even including the source code you may write.

Macie will assign only one content type per data object or file, however, you have the ability to enable or disable content type and file extensions in order to include or exclude them from the Macie service classifying these objects. Once Macie classifies the data, it will assign risk level of the object between 1 and 10 with 10 being the highest risk and 1 being the lowest data risk level.

To customize the classification of our data with Macie, I’ll go to the Settings Tab. I am now presented with the choices available to enable or disable the Macie classifications settings.


For an example during our tour of Macie, I will choose File extension. When presented with the list of file extensions that Macie tracks and uses for classifications.

As a test, I’ll edit the apk file extension for Android application install file, and disable monitoring of this file by selecting No – disabled from the dropdown and clicking the Save button. Of course, later I will turn this back on since I want to keep my entire collection of data files safe including my Android development binaries.


One last thing I want to note about data classification using Macie is that the service provides visibility in how you data object are being classified and highlights data assets that you have stored regarding how critical or important the information for compliance, for your personal data and for your business.

Now that we have explored the data that Macie classifies and monitors, the last stop on our service tour is the Macie dashboard.

 

The Macie Dashboard provides us with a complete picture of all of the data and activity that has been gathered as Macie monitors and classifies our data. The dashboard displays Metrics and Views grouped by categories to provide different visual perspectives of your data. Within these dashboard screens, you also you can go from a metric perspective directly to the Research tab to build and run queries based on the metric. These queries can be used to set up customized alerts for notification of any possible security issues or problems. We won’t have an opportunity to tour the Research or Alerts tab, but you can find out more information about these features in the Macie user guide.

Turning back to the Dashboard, there are so many great resources in the Macie Dashboard that we will not be able to stop at each view, metric, and feature during our tour, so let me give you an overview of all the features of the dashboard that you can take advantage of using.

Dashboard Metrics – monitored data grouped by the following categories:

  • High-risk S3 objects: data objects with risk levels of 8 through 10.
  • Total event occurrences: – total count of all event occurrences since Macie was enabled
  • Total user sessions – 5-minute snapshot of CloudTrail data

Dashboard Views – views to display various points of the monitored data and activity:

  • S3 objects for a selected time range
  • S3 objects
  • S3 objects by personally identifiable information (PII)
  • S3 objects by ACL
  • CloudTrail events and associated users
  • CloudTrail errors and associated users
  • Activity location
  • AWS CLoudTrail events
  • Activity ISPs
  • AWS CloudTrail user identity types

Summary

Well, that concludes our tour of the new and exciting Amazon Macie service. Amazon Macie is a sensational new service that uses the power of machine learning and deep learning to aid you in securing, identifying, and protecting your data stored in Amazon S3. Using natural language processing (NLP) to automate data classification, Amazon Macie enables you to easily get started with high accuracy classification and immediate protection of your data by simply enabling the service.  The interactive dashboards give visibility to the where, what, who, and when of your information allowing you to proactively analyze massive streams of data, data accesses, and API calls in your environment. Learn more about Amazon Macie by visiting the product page or the documentation in the Amazon Macie user guide.

– Tara

AWS Migration Hub – Plan & Track Enterprise Application Migration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Jeff;

Piracy Narrative Isn’t About Ethics Anymore, It’s About “Danger”

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-narrative-isnt-about-ethics-anymore-its-about-danger-170812/

Over the years there have been almost endless attempts to stop people from accessing copyright-infringing content online. Campaigns have come and gone and almost two decades later the battle is still ongoing.

Early on, when panic enveloped the music industry, the campaigns centered around people getting sued. Grabbing music online for free could be costly, the industry warned, while parading the heads of a few victims on pikes for the world to see.

Periodically, however, the aim has been to appeal to the public’s better nature. The idea is that people essentially want to do the ‘right thing’, so once they understand that largely hard-working Americans are losing their livelihoods, people will stop downloading from The Pirate Bay. For some, this probably had the desired effect but millions of people are still getting their fixes for free, so the job isn’t finished yet.

In more recent years, notably since the MPAA and RIAA had their eyes blacked in the wake of SOPA, the tone has shifted. In addition to educating the public, torrent and streaming sites are increasingly being painted as enemies of the public they claim to serve.

Several studies, largely carried out on behalf of the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), have claimed that pirate sites are hotbeds of malware, baiting consumers in with tasty pirate booty only to offload trojans, viruses, and God-knows-what. These reports have been ostensibly published as independent public interest documents but this week an advisor to the DCA suggested a deeper interest for the industry.

Hemanshu Nigam is a former federal prosecutor, ex-Chief Security Officer for News Corp and Fox Interactive Media, and former VP Worldwide Internet Enforcement at the MPAA. In an interview with Deadline this week, he spoke about alleged links between pirate sites and malware distributors. He also indicated that warning people about the dangers of pirate sites has become Hollywood’s latest anti-piracy strategy.

“The industry narrative has changed. When I was at the MPAA, we would tell people that stealing content is wrong and young people would say, yeah, whatever, you guys make a lot of money, too bad,” he told the publication.

“It has gone from an ethical discussion to a dangerous one. Now, your parents’ bank account can be raided, your teenage daughter can be spied on in her bedroom and extorted with the footage, or your computer can be locked up along with everything in it and held for ransom.”

Nigam’s stance isn’t really a surprise since he’s currently working for the Digital Citizens Alliance as an advisor. In turn, the Alliance is at least partly financed by the MPAA. There’s no suggestion whatsoever that Nigam is involved in any propaganda effort, but recent signs suggest that the DCA’s work in malware awareness is more about directing people away from pirate sites than protecting them from the alleged dangers within.

That being said and despite the bias, it’s still worth giving experts like Nigam an opportunity to speak. Largely thanks to industry efforts with brands, pirate sites are increasingly being forced to display lower-tier ads, which can be problematic. On top, some sites’ policies mean they don’t deserve any visitors at all.

In the Deadline piece, however, Nigam alleges that hackers have previously reached out to pirate websites offering $200 to $5000 per day “depending on the size of the pirate website” to have the site infect users with malware. If true, that’s a serious situation and people who would ordinarily use ‘pirate’ sites would definitely appreciate the details.

For example, to which sites did hackers make this offer and, crucially, which sites turned down the offer and which ones accepted?

It’s important to remember that pirates are just another type of consumer and they would boycott sites in a heartbeat if they discovered they’d been paid to infect them with malware. But, as usual, the claims are extremely light in detail. Instead, there’s simply a blanket warning to stay away from all unauthorized sites, which isn’t particularly helpful.

In some cases, of course, operational security will prevent some details coming to light but without these, people who don’t get infected on a ‘pirate’ site (the vast majority) simply won’t believe the allegations. As the author of the Deadline piece pointed out, it’s a bit like Reefer Madness all over again.

The point here is that without hard independent evidence to back up these claims, with reports listing sites alongside the malware they’ve supposed to have spread and when, few people will respond to perceived scaremongering. Free content trumps a few distant worries almost every time, whether that involves malware or the threat of a lawsuit.

It’ll be up to the DCA and their MPAA paymasters to consider whether the approach is working but thus far, not even having government heavyweights on board has helped.

Earlier this year the DCA launched a video campaign, enrolling 15 attorney generals to publish their own anti-piracy PSAs on YouTube. Thus far, interest has been minimal, to say the least.

At the time of writing the 15 PSAs have 3,986 views in total, with 2,441 of those contributed by a single video contributed by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel. Despite the relative success, even that got slammed with 2 upvotes and 127 downvotes.

A few of the other videos have a couple of hundred views each but more than half have less than 70. Perhaps most worryingly for the DCA, apart from the Schimel PSA, none have any upvotes at all, only down. It’s unclear who the viewers were but it seems reasonable to conclude they weren’t entertained.

The bottom line is nobody likes malware or having their banking details stolen but yet again, people who claim to have the public interest at heart aren’t actually making a difference on the ground. It could be argued that groups advocating online safety should be publishing guides on how to stay protected on the Internet period, not merely advising people to stay away from certain sites.

But of course, that wouldn’t achieve the goals of the MPAA Digital Citizens Alliance.

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

DMCA Used to Remove Ad Server URL From Easylist Ad Blocklist

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-used-to-remove-ad-server-url-from-easylist-ad-blocklist-170811/

The default business model on the Internet is “free” for consumers. Users largely expect websites to load without paying a dime but of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. To this end, millions of websites are funded by advertising revenue.

Sensible sites ensure that any advertising displayed is unobtrusive to the visitor but lots seem to think that bombarding users with endless ads, popups, and other hindrances is the best way to do business. As a result, ad blockers are now deployed by millions of people online.

In order to function, ad-blocking tools – such as uBlock Origin or Adblock – utilize lists of advertising domains compiled by third parties. One of the most popular is Easylist, which is distributed by authors fanboy, MonztA, Famlam, and Khrinunder, under dual Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and GNU General Public Licenses.

With the freedom afforded by those licenses, copyright tends not to figure high on the agenda for Easylist. However, a legal problem that has just raised its head is causing serious concern among those in the ad-blocking community.

Two days ago a somewhat unusual commit appeared in the Easylist repo on Github. As shown in the image below, a domain URL previously added to Easylist had been removed following a DMCA takedown notice filed with Github.

Domain text taken down by DMCA?

The DMCA notice in question has not yet been published but it’s clear that it targets the domain ‘functionalclam.com’. A user called ‘ameshkov’ helpfully points out a post by a new Github user called ‘DMCAHelper’ which coincided with the start of the takedown process more than three weeks ago.

A domain in a list circumvents copyright controls?

Aside from the curious claims of a URL “circumventing copyright access controls” (domains themselves cannot be copyrighted), the big questions are (i) who filed the complaint and (ii) who operates Functionalclam.com? The domain WHOIS is hidden but according to a helpful sleuth on Github, it’s operated by anti ad-blocking company Admiral.

Ad-blocking means money down the drain….

If that is indeed the case, we have the intriguing prospect of a startup attempting to protect its business model by using a novel interpretation of copyright law to have a domain name removed from a list. How this will pan out is unclear but a notice recently published on Functionalclam.com suggests the route the company wishes to take.

“This domain is used by digital publishers to control access to copyrighted content in accordance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and understand how visitors are accessing their copyrighted content,” the notice begins.

Combined with the comments by DMCAHelper on Github, this statement suggests that the complainants believe that interference with the ad display process (ads themselves could be the “copyrighted content” in question) represents a breach of section 1201 of the DMCA.

If it does, that could have huge consequences for online advertising but we will need to see the original DMCA notice to have a clearer idea of what this is all about. Thus far, Github hasn’t published it but already interest is growing. A representative from the EFF has already contacted the Easylist team, so this battle could heat up pretty quickly.

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

Backblaze Cloud Backup 5.0: The Rapid Access Release

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-backup-5-0-rapid-access/

Announcing Backblaze Cloud Backup 5.0: the Rapid Access Release. We’ve been at the backup game for a long time now, and we continue to focus on providing the best unlimited backup service on the planet. A lot of the features in this release have come from listening to our customers about how they want to use their data. “Rapid Access” quickly became the theme because, well, we’re all acquiring more and more data and want to access it in a myriad of ways.

This release brings a lot of new functionality to Backblaze Computer Backup: faster backups, accelerated file browsing, image preview, individual file download (without creating a “restore”), and file sharing. To top it all off, we’ve refreshed the user interface on our client app. We hope you like it!

Speeding Things Up

New code + new hardware + elbow grease = things are going to move much faster.

Faster Backups

We’ve doubled the number of threads available for backup on both Mac and PC . This gives our service the ability to intelligently detect the right settings for you (based on your computer, capacity, and bandwidth). As always, you can manually set the number of threads — keep in mind that if you have a slow internet connection, adding threads might have the opposite effect and slow you down. On its default settings, our client app will now automatically evaluate what’s best given your environment. We’ve internally tested our service backing up at over 100 Mbps, which means if you have a fast-enough internet connection, you could back up 50 GB in just one hour.

Faster Browsing

We’ve introduced a number of enhancements that increase file browsing speed by 3x. Hidden files are no longer displayed by default, but you can still show them with one click on the restore page. This gives the restore interface a cleaner look, and helps you navigate backup history if you need to roll back time.

Faster Restore Preparation

We take pride in providing a variety of ways for consumers to get their data back. When something has happened to your computer, getting your files back quickly is critical. Both web download restores and Restore by Mail will now be much faster. In some cases up to 10x faster!

Preview — Access — Share

Our system has received a number of enhancements — all intended to give you more access to your data.

Image Preview

If you have a lot of photos, this one’s for you. When you go to the restore page you’ll now be able to click on each individual file that we have backed up, and if it’s an image you’ll see a preview of that file. We hope this helps people figure out which pictures they want to download (this especially helps people with a lot of photos named something along the lines of: 2017-04-20-9783-41241.jpg). Now you can just click on the picture to preview it.

Access

Once you’ve clicked on a file (30MB and smaller), you’ll be able to individually download that file directly in your browser. You’ll no longer need to wait for a single-file restore to be built and zipped up; you’ll be able to download it quickly and easily. This was a highly requested feature and we’re stoked to get it implemented.

Share

We’re leveraging Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and giving folks the ability to publicly share their files. In order to use this feature, you’ll need to enable Backblaze B2 on your account (if you haven’t already, there’s a simple wizard that will pop up the first time you try to share a file). Files can be shared anywhere in the world via URL. All B2 accounts have 10GB/month of storage and 1GB/day of downloads (equivalent to sharing an iPhone photo 1,000 times per month) for free. You can increase those limits in your B2 Settings. Keep in mind that any file you share will be accessible to anybody with the link. Learn more about File Sharing.

For now, we’ve limited the Preview/Access/Share functionality to files 30MB and smaller, but larger files will be supported in the coming weeks!

Other Goodies

In addition to adding 2FV via ToTP, we’ve also been hard at work on the client. In version 5.0 we’ve touched up the user interface to make it a bit more lively, and we’ve also made the client IPv6 compatible.

Backblaze 5.0 Available: August 10, 2017

We will slowly be auto-updating all users in the coming weeks. To update now:

This version is now the default download on www.backblaze.com.

We hope you enjoy Backblaze Cloud Backup v5.0!

The post Backblaze Cloud Backup 5.0: The Rapid Access Release appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Video playback on freely-arranged screens with info-beamer

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/info-beamer/

When the creator of the digital signage software info-beamer, Florian Wesch, shared this project on Reddit, I don’t think he was prepared for the excited reaction of the community. Florian’s post, which by now has thousands of upvotes, showcased the power of info-beamer. Not only can the software display a video via multiple Raspberry Pis, it also automatically rejigs the output to match the size and angle of the Pis’ monitors.

info-beamer raspberry pi

Wait…what?

I know, right? We’ve seen many video-based Raspberry Pi projects, but this is definitely one of the most impressive ones. While those of us with a creative streak were imagining cool visual arts installations using monitors and old televisions of various sizes, the more technically-minded puzzled over how Florian pulled this off.

It’s obvious that info-beamer has manifold potential uses. But we had absolutely zero understanding of how it works!

How does info-beamer do this?

Lucky for us, Florian returned to Reddit a few days later with a how-to video, explaining in layman’s terms how you too can get a video to play on a multi-screen, multi-Pi setup.

Automatic video wall configuration with info-beamer hosted

This is an exciting new feature I’ve made available for the info-beamer hosted digital signage system: You can create a video wall consisting of freely arranged screens in seconds. The screens don’t even have to be planar. Just rotate and place them as you like.

First you’ll need to set up info-beamer, which will allow you to introduce multiple Raspberry Pis, and their attached monitors, into a joint network. To make the software work, there’s some Python code you have to write yourself, but hands-on tutorials and example code exist to make this fairly easy, even if you have little experience in Python.

info-beamer raspberry pi

As you can see in Florian’s video, info-beamer assigns each monitor its own, unique section of video. Taking a photo of the monitors and uploading it to a site provides enough information for the software to play a movie trailer split across multiple screens.

info-beamer raspberry pi

A step that’s missing in the video, but that Florian described on Reddit, is how to configure the screens via a drag-and-drop interface so that the software recognizes them. Once this is done, your video display is good to go.

For more information about info-beamer check out the website, and follow the official Twitter account for updates.

Using Raspberry Pi in video-based projects

Since it has an HDMI port, connecting your Raspberry Pi to any compatible monitor, including your television, is an easy task. And with a little tweaking and soldering you can even connect your Pi to that ageing SCART TV/Video combo you might have in the loft.

As I said earlier, there’s an abundance of Pi-powered video-based projects. Many digital art installations, and even commercial media devices, rely on the Raspberry Pi because of its low cost, small size, and high-quality multimedia capabilities.

Have you used a Raspberry Pi in a video-playback project? Share it with us below – we’d love to see it!

The post Video playback on freely-arranged screens with info-beamer appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Hotspot Shield VPN Reported to FTC For Alleged Privacy Breaches

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/hotspot-shield-vpn-reported-to-ftc-for-alleged-privacy-breaches-170807/

With online privacy becoming an increasingly hot topic, large numbers of companies are offering products which claim to stop third-parties from snooping on users’ Internet activities.

At the forefront are Virtual Private Networks (VPN), which push consumer traffic through encrypted tunnels and remote servers to hide activity from ISPs while offering varying levels of anonymity.

Claims made by VPN companies are often scrutinized by privacy advocates but if a complaint filed this morning by the Center for Democracy and Technology
(CDT) gains momentum, there could be a government investigation into one of the most popular.

Developed by AnchorFree, Inc. and initially released more than nine years ago, the Hotspot Shield application allows users to connect to a VPN service. According to its makers, it’s been downloaded 75 million times and provides “anonymous web surfing with complete privacy.” That claim, however, is now under the spotlight.

In a complaint filed this morning with the Federal Trade Commission, CDT notes that Hotspot Shield makes “strong claims” about the privacy and security of its data collection and sharing practices, including that it “never logs or stores user data.” Crucially, the company also claims never to track or sell its customers’ information, adding that security and privacy are “guaranteed.”

Countering, CDT says that Hotspot Shield engages in logging practices that contradict its claims, noting that it collects information to “identify [a user’s] general location, improve the Service, or optimize advertisements displayed through the Service.”

The complaint says that IP addresses and unique device identifiers are regularly
collected by Hotspot Shield but the service gets around this issue by classing neither sets of data as personal information.

CDT says it used Carnegie Mellon University’s Mobile App Compliance System to gain insight into Hotspot Shield’s functionality and found problems with privacy.

“CMU’s analysis of Hotspot Shield’s Android application permissions found undisclosed data sharing practices with third party advertising networks,” the group notes.

“While an ad-supported VPN may be beneficial in certain instances, it should not be paired with a product or service that tells users that it ensures anonymity, privacy, and security.”

CDT also says that Hotspot Shield tries to cover its back with a disclaimer that the company “may not provide a virtual IP Address for every web site you may visit and third-party web sites may receive your original IP Address when you are visiting those web sites.” But this runs counter to the stated aim of the service, CDT writes.

Accusing Hotspot Shield of unfair and deceptive trade practices, CDT calls on the Commission to conduct an investigation into its data collection and sharing practices.

Hotspot Shield is yet to respond to the complaint or accusations but in a 2014 blog post, welcomed the FTC’s involvement in online security issues.

Full complaint here, courtesy Ars

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

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 7

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2017/08/04/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-7/

Hard to believe it’s already August! This week there were a ton of articles to highlight. It’s really exciting to see how many data aficionados there are out there coming up with new ways to connect Grafana to their data, wherever it may live. In this issue we cover crypto currency visualization, home automation setups and breakdown the installation in a number of environments. Enjoy!

Grafana 4.4.2 Released

Grafana v4.4.2 is now Available for download

This week’s release includes a few updates and some bug fixes.

To see the full changelog, head over to our community site.

From the Blogosphere

Plugins and Dashboards

Last week’s timeShift was packed full of plugin updates, as well as a couple of new ones. This week was a little quieter on the plugin front, but we still have a new data source plugin to announce. It’s easy to install this new plugin via the grafana-cli for an on-prem Grafana instance, or a 1-click install on Hosted Grafana.

NEW PLUGIN

PRTG Data Source – This data source visualizes data from the Paessler PRTG monitoring system. The easy to use query editor included with this plugin gives access to an array of PRTG metadata properties including Status, Message, Active, Tags, Priority, and more. Annotation support to show sensor status messages on graphs.

Install Now

This week’s MVC (Most Valuable Contributor)

This week we highlight a contributor who is going to make everyone waiting for Elasticsearch alerting in Grafana jump for joy!

lvheyang (Cui Wenzheng)
lvheyang submitted a PR for Elasticsearch Alerting that must have been a huge amount of work and is of impressive quality. Thank you very much for your hard work and we look forward to releasing Alerting for Elasticsearch in Grafana 5.0.0.

Tweet of the Week

We scour Twitter each week to find an interesting/beautiful dashboard and show it off! #monitoringLove

Nice @jorgedlcruz! – Making data more beautiful, one boring number at a time 🙂 – Also, I spy one of my favorite panels in there, the Worldmap Panel!

Upcoming Events

We love when people talk about Grafana at meetups and conferences.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017 – 7:30pm | Apprenda HQ


433 River Street, 4th Floor, Troy, NY

Kubernetes focused event! demo from Apprenda and how Kubernetes is used @ GitHub:
Steve Wade, is a Principal Kubernetes Consultant from London and will be providing some fundamental information about the Kubernetes ecosystem as well as overview of its core components. He’ll also talk about some monitoring and alerting best practices learned from working with Kubernetes customers and demo how Prometheus, Grafana and Slack can be used to monitor, visualize and alert on both the Kubernetes platform as well as application workloads.

Aaron Brown, a Site Reliability Engineer at Github, will dive into the ways in which Kubernetes is used within Github to make software development and deployment more efficient.

RSVP

What do you think?

Please tell us how we’re doing. We want to make sure this continues to be a valuable resource for the Grafana community. Submit a comment on this article below, or post something at our community forum. Help us make this better!

Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and join the Grafana Labs community.

How to Monitor and Visualize Failed SSH Access Attempts to Amazon EC2 Linux Instances

Post Syndicated from Assaf Namer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-monitor-and-visualize-failed-ssh-access-attempts-to-amazon-ec2-linux-instances/

As part of the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, you are responsible for monitoring and managing your resources at the operating system and application level. When you monitor your application servers, for example, you can measure, visualize, react to, and improve the security of those servers. You probably already do this on premises or in other environments, and you can adapt your existing processes, tools, and methodologies for use in the AWS Cloud. For more details about best practices for monitoring your AWS resources, see the “Manage Security Monitoring, Alerting, Audit Trail, and Incident Response” section in the AWS Security Best Practices whitepaper.

This blog post focuses on how to log and create alarms on invalid Secure Shell (SSH) access attempts. Implementing live monitoring and session recording facilitates the identification of unauthorized activity and can help confirm that remote users access only those systems they are authorized to use. With SSH log information in hand (such as invalid access type, bad private keys, and remote IP addresses), you can take proactive actions to protect your servers. For example, you can use an AWS Lambda function to adjust your server’s security rules when an alarm is triggered that indicates an invalid SSH access attempt.

In this post, I demonstrate how to use Amazon CloudWatch Logs to monitor SSH access to your application servers (Amazon EC2 Linux instances) so that you can monitor rejected SSH connection requests and take action. I also show how to configure CloudWatch Logs to send SSH access logs from application servers that reside in a public subnet. Last, I demonstrate how to visualize how many attempts are made to SSH into your application servers with bad private keys and invalid user names. Using these techniques and tools can help you improve the security of your application servers.

AWS services and terminology I use in this post

In this post, I use the following AWS services and terminology:

  • Amazon CloudWatch – A monitoring service for the resources and applications you run on the AWS Cloud. You can use CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources.
  • CloudWatch namespaces – Containers for metrics. Metrics in different namespaces are isolated from each other so that metrics from different applications are not mistakenly aggregated into the same statistics. You also can create custom metrics for which you must specify namespaces as containers.
  • CloudWatch Logs – A feature of CloudWatch that allows you to monitor, store, and access your log files from EC2 instances, AWS CloudTrail, and other sources. Additionally, you can use CloudWatch Logs to monitor applications and systems by using log data and create alarms. For example, you can choose to search for a phrase in logs and then create an alarm if the phrase you are looking for is found in the log more than 5 times in the last 10 minutes. You can then take action on these alarms, if necessary.
  • Log stream – A log stream represents the sequence of events coming from an application instance or resource that you are monitoring. In this post, I use the EC2 instance ID as the log stream identifier so that I can easily map log entries to the instances that produced the log entries
  • Log group – In CloudWatch Logs, a group of log streams that share the same retention time, monitoring, and access control settings. Each log stream must belong to one log
  • Metric – A specific term or value that you can monitor and extract from log events.
  • Metric filter – A metric filter describes how Amazon CloudWatch Logs extracts information from logs and transforms it into CloudWatch metrics. It defines the terms and patterns to look for in log data as the data is sent to CloudWatch Logs. Metric filters are assigned to log groups, and all metric filters assigned to a given log group are applied to their log stream—see the following diagram for more details.
  • SSH logs – Reside on EC2 instances and capture all SSH activities. The logs include successful attempts as well as unsuccessful attempts. Debian Linux SSH logs reside in /var/log/auth.log, and stock CentOS SSH logs are written to /var/log/secure. This blog post uses an Amazon Linux AMI, which also logs SSH sessions to /var/log/secure.
  • AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) – IAM enables you to securely control access to AWS services and resources for your users. In the solution in this post, you create an IAM policy and configure an EC2 instance that assumes a role. The IAM policy allows the EC2 instance to create log events and save them in an Amazon S3 bucket (in other words, CloudWatch Logs log files are saved in the S3 bucket).
  • CloudWatch dashboards – Amazon CloudWatch dashboards are customizable home pages in the CloudWatch console that you can use to monitor your resources in a single view, even those resources that are spread across different regions. You can use CloudWatch dashboards to create customized views of the metrics and alarms for your AWS resources.

Architectural overview

The following diagram depicts the services and flow of information between the different AWS services used in this post’s solution.

Here is how the process works, as illustrated and numbered in the preceding diagram:

  1. A CloudWatch Logs agent runs on each EC2 instance. The agents are configured to send SSH logs from the EC2 instance to a log stream identified by an instance ID.
  2. Log streams are aggregated into a log group. As a result, one log group contains all the logs you want to analyze from one or more instances.
  3. You apply metric filters to a log group in order to search for specific keywords. When the metric filter finds specific keywords, the filter counts the occurrences of the keywords in a time-based sliding window. If the occurrence of a keyword exceeds the CloudWatch alarm threshold, an alarm is triggered.
  4. An IAM policy defines a role that gives the EC2 servers permission to create logs in a log group and send log events (new log entries) from EC2 to log groups. This role is then assumed by the application servers.
  5. CloudWatch alarms notify users when a specified threshold has been crossed. For example, you can set an alarm to trigger when more than 2 failed SSH connections happen in a 5-minute period.
  6. The CloudWatch dashboard is used to visualize data and alarms from the monitoring process.

Deploy and test the solution

1.  Deploy the solution by using CloudFormation

Now that I have explained how the solution works, I will show how to use AWS CloudFormation to create a stack with the desired solution configuration. CloudFormation allows you to create a stack of resources in your AWS account.

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console, choose CloudFormation, choose Create Stack, choose Specify an Amazon S3 template URL and paste the following link in the box: https://s3.amazonaws.com/awsiammedia/public/sample/MonitorSSHActivities/CloudWatchLogs_ssh.yaml
    Screenshot of creating the stack
  2. Choose Launch to deploy the stack.
  3. On the Specify Details page, enter the Stack name. Then enter the KeyName, which is the SSH key pair for the region you use. I use this key-pair later in this post; if you don’t have a key pair for your current region, follow these instructions to create one. The OperatorEmail is the CloudWatch alarm recipient email address (this field is mandatory to launch the stack), which is the email address to which SSH activity alarms will be sent. You can use the SSHLocation box to limit the IP address range that can access your instances; the default is 0.0.0/0, which means that any IP can access the instance. After specifying these variables, click Next.
    Screenshot of the "Specify Details" page
  4. On the Options page, tag your instance, and click Next. Tags allow you to assign metadata to AWS resources. For example, you can tag a project’s resources and then use the tag to manage, search for, and filter resources. For more information about tagging, see Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources.
    Screenshot of the "Options" page
  5. Wait until the CloudFormation template shows CREATE_COMPLETE, as shown in the following screenshot. This means your stack was created successfully.
    Screenshot showing the stack was created successfully

After the stack is created successfully, you have two distinct application servers running, each with a CloudWatch agent. These servers represent a fleet of servers in your infrastructure. Choose the Outputs tab to see more details about the resources, such as the public IP addresses of the servers. You will need to use these IP addresses later in this post in order to trigger log events and alarms.

Screenshot showing the public IP addresses of the servers

The CloudWatch log agent on each server is installed at startup and configured to stream SSH log entries from /var/log/secure to CloudWatch via a log stream. CloudWatch aggregates the log streams (ssh.log) from the application servers and saves them in a CloudWatch Logs log group. Each log stream is identified by an instance-ID, as shown in the following screenshot.

Screenshot of two log streams' instance-IDs

The application servers assume a role that gives them permissions to create CloudWatch Logs log files and events. CloudFormation also configures two metrics: ssh/InvalidUser and ssh/Disconnect. The ssh/InvalidUser metric sends an alarm when there are more than 2 SSH attempts into any server that include an invalid user name. Similarly, the ssh/Disconnect metric creates an alarm when more than 10 SSH disconnect requests come from users within 5 minutes.

To review the metrics created by CloudFormation, choose Metrics in the CloudWatch console. A new SSH custom namespace has been created, which contains the two metrics described in the previous paragraph.

You should now have two application servers running and two custom CloudWatch metrics and alarms configured. Now, it’s time to generate log events, trigger alarms, and test the configurations.

2.  Test SSH metrics and alarms

Now, let’s try to trigger an alarm by trying to SSH with an invalid user name into one of the servers. Use the key pair you specified when launching the stack and connect to one of the Linux instances from a terminal window (replace the placeholder values in the following command).

ssh -i <the-key-pair-you-specified-in-the-CloudFormation-template> ec2-user@<ec2 DNS or IP address>

Now, exit the session and try to sign in as bad-user, as shown in the following command.

ssh -i <the-key-pair-you-specified-in-the-CloudFormation-template> bad-user@<ec2 DNS or IP address>

The following command is the same as the previous command, but with the placeholder values replaced by actual values.

ssh -i "my-keycap" bad-user@ec2-XX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Because the alarm triggers after two or more unsuccessful SSH login attempts with an invalid user name in 1 minute, run the preceding command a few times. The server’s log captures the bad SSH login attempts, and after a minute, you should see InvalidUserAlarm in the CloudWatch console, as shown in the following screenshot. Choose Alarms to see more details. The alarm should disappear after another minute if there are no more SSH login attempts.

Screenshot showing InvalidUserAlarm in the CloudWatch console

You can also view the history of your alarms by choosing the History tab. CloudWatch metrics are saved for 15 months.

When the CloudFormation stack launches, a topic-registration email is sent to the email address you specified in the template. After you accept the topic registration, you will receive an alarm email with details about the alarm. The email looks like what is shown in the following screenshot.

Screenshot of the alarm email

3.  Understanding CloudWatch metric filters and their transformation

The CloudFormation template includes two alarms, InvalidUserAlarm and SSHReceiveddisconnectAlarm, and two metric filters. As I mentioned previously, the metric filters define the pattern you want to match in a CloudWatch Logs log group. When a pattern is found, it transforms into an Amazon metric as defined in the MetricTransformations section of the metric filter.

The following is a snippet of the InvalidUser metric filter. Each pattern match—denoted by FilterPattern—is counted as one metric value as specified in the MetricValue parameter in the MetricTranformations section. The CloudWatch alarm associated with this metric filter will be triggered when the metric value crosses a specified threshold.

  InvalidUser:
    Type: AWS::Logs::MetricFilter
    Properties:
      LogGroupName:
        Ref: WebServerLogGroup
      FilterPattern: "[Mon, day, timestamp, ip, id, status = Invalid, ...]"
      MetricTransformations:
      - MetricValue: '1'
        MetricNamespace: SSH
        MetricName: sshInvalidUser

When a CloudWatch alarm is triggered, the service sends an email to an Amazon SNS topic with more details about the alarm type, trigger parameters, and status.

4.  Create a CloudWatch metric filter to identify attempts to SSH into your servers with bad private keys

You can create additional metric filters in CloudWatch Logs to provide better visibility into the SSH activity on your servers. Let’s assume you want to know if there are too many attempts to SSH into your servers with bad private keys. If an attempt is made with a bad private key, a line like the following is logged in the SSH log file.

Apr 27 21:44:49 ip-172-31-38-5 sash[28515]: Connection closed by <ip address> [preauth]

You can produce this log line by modifying the pem file you are using (a pem file holds your private key). In a terminal window, modify your private key by copying and pasting the following lines in the same directory where your key resides.

$ cat <valid-pem-file> | sed s/./A/25 > bad-keys.pem

$ cat bad-keys.pem | sed s/./A/26 > bad-keys.pem

These lines simply change the characters at positions 25 and 26 from their current value to the character A, keeping the original pem file intact. Alternatively, you can use nano <valid-keys>.pem from the command line or any other editor, change a character, save the file as bad-keys.pem, and exit the file.

Now, try to use bad-keys.pem to access one of the application servers.

ssh  -i "bad-keys.pem" [email protected]

The SSH attempt should fail because you are using a bad private key.

Permission denied (public key).

Now, let’s look at the server’s ssh.log file from the CloudWatch Logs console and analyze the error log messages. I need to understand the log format in order to configure a new filter. To review the logs, choose Logs in the navigation pane, and select the log group that was created by CloudFormation (it starts with the name you specified when launching the CloudFormation template).

Screenshot of the ssh.log file

In particular, notice the following line when you try to SSH with a bad private key.

Screenshot of one line of the ssh.log file

Let’s add a metric filter to capture this line so that we can use this metric later when we build an SSH Dashboard. Copy the following line to the Filter events search box at the top of the console screen and press Enter.

[Mon, day, timestamp, ip, id, msg1= Connection, msg2 = closed, ...]

Screenshot of pasting the line from the ssh.log file into the "Filter events" search box

You can now see only the lines that match the pattern you specified. These are the lines you want to count and transform into metrics. Each string in the message is represented by a word in the filter. In our example, we are looking for a pattern where the sixth word is Connection and the seventh word is closed. Other words in the log line are not important in this context. The following image depicts the mapping between a string in a log file and a metric filter.

To create the metric filter, choose Logs in the navigation pane of the CloudWatch console. Choose the log groups to which you want to apply the new metric filter and then choose Create Metric Filter. Choose Next.

Screenshot of creating a metric filter

Paste the filter pattern we used previously (the sixth word equals Connection and the seventh word equals closed) in the Filter Pattern box. Select the server you tried to sign in to with the bad private key to Select Log Data to Test and click Test Pattern. You should see the results that are shown in the following screenshot. When completed, click Assign Metric.

Screenshot of applying the filter pattern

Type SSH for the Metric Namespace and sshClosedConnection-InvalidKeysFilter for Filter Name. Choose Create Filter to see your new metric filter listed. You can use the newly created metric filter to graph the metrics and set alarms. The alarms can be used to inform your administrator via email of any event you specify. In addition, metrics can be used to generate SNS notification to trigger an AWS Lambda function in order to take proactive actions, such as blocking suspicious IP addresses in a security group.

Screenshot of creating a filter

Choose Create Alarm next to Filter Name and follow the instructions to create a CloudWatch alarm.

Screenshot of the "Create Alarm" option

Back at the Metrics view, you should now have three SSH metric filters under Custom Namespaces. Note that it can take a few minutes for the number of SSH metrics to update from two to three.

Screenshot showing you now have three SSH metric filters

5.  Create a graph by using a CloudWatch dashboard

After you have configured the metrics, you can display SSH metrics in a graph. CloudWatch dashboards allow you to create reusable graphs of AWS resources and custom metrics so that you can quickly monitor your operational status and identify issues at a glance. Metrics data is kept for a period of two weeks.

In the CloudWatch console, choose Dashboards in the navigation pane, and then choose Create dashboard to create a new graph in a dashboard. Name your dashboard SSH-Dashboard and choose Create dashboard. Choose Line Graph from the graph options and choose Configure.

Screenshot of creating a CloudWatch dashboard

In the Add metric graph window under Custom Namespace, choose SSH > Metrics with no dimensions. Select all three metrics you have configured (the CloudFormation template configured two metrics and you manually added one more metric).

By default, the metrics are displayed on the graph as an average. However, you configured metrics that are based on summary metrics (for example, the total number of alarms in two minutes). To change the default, choose the Graphed metrics tab, and change the statistic from Average to Sum, as shown in the following screenshot. Also, change the time period from 5 minutes to 1 minute.

Screenshot of changing the statistic from "Average" to "Sum"

Your graphed metrics should look like the following screenshot. When you have provided all the necessary information, choose Create Widget.

Screenshot of thet graphed metrics

You can rename the graph and add static text to give the console more context. To add a text widget, choose Widget and select text. Then edit the widget with markdown language. Your dashboard may then look like the following screenshot.

The consolidated metrics graph displays the number of SSH attempts with bad private keys, invalid user names, and too many disconnects.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I demonstrated how to automate the deployment of the CloudWatch Logs agent, create filters and alarms, and write, test, and apply metrics on the fly from the AWS Management Console. You can then visualize the metrics with the AWS Management Console. The solution described in this post gives you monitoring and alarming capabilities that can help you understand the status of and potential risks to your instances and applications. You can easily aggregate logs from many servers and different applications, create alarms, and display logs’ metrics on a graph.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about the solution in this post, start a new thread on the CloudWatch forum.

– Assaf

Now Kodi ‘Navi-X’ Domains Get Signed Over to Law Firm

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/now-kodi-navi-x-domains-get-signed-over-to-law-firm-170730/

In the wake of the Dish Network lawsuit filed against TVAddons in Texas, the booming Kodi third-party addon scene received its first real taste of corporate power.

With lawyers breathing down their necks, several high-profile Kodi addons took the decision to shut down and even TVAddons itself went offline without explanation.

With very little news surfacing, last week we revealed how three key domains previously operated by TVAddons had ended up in new hands. TVAddons.ag, the site’s main domain, plus Offshoregit.com and XBMCHUB.com, were transferred to Canadian law firm, DrapeauLex.

With no explanations forthcoming from company owner Daniel Drapeau or staff at TVAddons, no solid conclusions could be reached. Was this part of a settlement with Dish Networks or was something unrelated underway?

With everyone involved remaining tight-lipped since, further investigations by TorrentFreak this week have revealed more developments on the domain shifting front, with one in particular catching the eye.

Back in May, one of the oldest and most popular Kodi addons was shut down by its operators. Navi-X, which was used by hundreds of thousands of people, was discontinued after spam, pollution of its indexes, and mislabeled adult content piled on top of general legal fears.

Navi-X was a particularly iconic piece of software. Launched in 2007 by Netherlands-based coder ‘Rodejo,’ it debuted on XBMC (Kodi’s previous name) on the original XBoX. Subsequent success aside, that longevity put the addon into the history books.

So why then is Navi-X’s former main domain now in the hands of the same law firm that’s taken control of TVAddons’ domains?

Now Navi-X’s domain is in the hands of lawyers

Navixtreme.com was first registered in November 2007 and was the key domain associated with Navi-X. For years it was prominently displayed on the addons’ Twitter feed, for example. Another domain – navi-x.org – was registered more recently in February 2017. Both are now under the control of lawyer Daniel Drapeau.

What is unusual about this situation is that Navi-X shut down long before the Dish lawsuit was filed against TVAddons. If TVAddons did indeed shut down because of that lawsuit, why then have the domains of Navi-X been transferred in the same manner as TVAddons’ domains? They certainly weren’t mentioned in the lawsuit so one has to conclude that something else is at play here.

Again, no one wants to talk, but the situation appears to be fluid. In addition to the TVAddons .ag domain that was transferred last week, the law firm has now acquired other TVAddons domains that were registered around the same time, including TVAddons.com, .org, and .TV.

Something unusual is undoubtedly going on in the addon scene but quite where this will all end up is currently anyone’s guess. All the signs point to legal action of some kind but the nature of that is still unclear. That being said, it’s unlikely to remain a secret forever.

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

Top Ten Ways to Protect Yourself Against Phishing Attacks

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/top-ten-ways-protect-phishing-attacks/

It’s hard to miss the increasing frequency of phishing attacks in the news. Earlier this year, a major phishing attack targeted Google Docs users, and attempted to compromise at least one million Google Docs accounts. Experts say the “phish” was convincing and sophisticated, and even people who thought they would never be fooled by a phishing attack were caught in its net.

What is phishing?

Phishing attacks use seemingly trustworthy but malicious emails and websites to obtain your personal account or banking information. The attacks are cunning and highly effective because they often appear to come from an organization or business you actually use. The scam comes into play by tricking you into visiting a website you believe belongs to the trustworthy organization, but in fact is under the control of the phisher attempting to extract your private information.

Phishing attacks are once again in the news due to a handful of high profile ransomware incidents. Ransomware invades a user’s computer, encrypts their data files, and demands payment to decrypt the files. Ransomware most often makes its way onto a user’s computer through a phishing exploit, which gives the ransomware access to the user’s computer.

The best strategy against phishing is to scrutinize every email and message you receive and never to get caught. Easier said than done—even smart people sometimes fall victim to a phishing attack. To minimize the damage in an event of a phishing attack, backing up your data is the best ultimate defense and should be part of your anti-phishing and overall anti-malware strategy.

How do you recognize a phishing attack?

A phishing attacker may send an email seemingly from a reputable credit card company or financial institution that requests account information, often suggesting that there is a problem with your account. When users respond with the requested information, attackers can use it to gain access to the accounts.

The image below is a mockup of how a phishing attempt might appear. In this example, courtesy of Wikipedia, the bank is fictional, but in a real attempt the sender would use an actual bank, perhaps even the bank where the targeted victim does business. The sender is attempting to trick the recipient into revealing confidential information by getting the victim to visit the phisher’s website. Note the misspelling of the words “received” and “discrepancy” as recieved and discrepency. Misspellings sometimes are indications of a phishing attack. Also note that although the URL of the bank’s webpage appears to be legitimate, the hyperlink would actually take you to the phisher’s webpage, which would be altogether different from the URL displayed in the message.

By Andrew Levine – en:Image:PhishingTrustedBank.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=549747

Top ten ways to protect yourself against phishing attacks

  1. Always think twice when presented with a link in any kind of email or message before you click on it. Ask yourself whether the sender would ask you to do what it is requesting. Most banks and reputable service providers won’t ask you to reveal your account information or password via email. If in doubt, don’t use the link in the message and instead open a new webpage and go directly to the known website of the organization. Sign in to the site in the normal manner to verify that the request is legitimate.
  2. A good precaution is to always hover over a link before clicking on it and observe the status line in your browser to verify that the link in the text and the destination link are in fact the same.
  3. Phishers are clever, and they’re getting better all the time, and you might be fooled by a simple ruse to make you think the link is one you recognize. Links can have hard-to-detect misspellings that would result in visiting a site very different than what you expected.
  4. Be wary even of emails and message from people you know. It’s very easy to spoof an email so it appears to come from someone you know, or to create a URL that appears to be legitimate, but isn’t.

For example, let’s say that you work for roughmedia.com and you get an email from Chuck in accounting ([email protected]) that has an attachment for you, perhaps a company form you need to fill out. You likely wouldn’t notice in the sender address that the phisher has replaced the “m” in media with an “r” and an “n” that look very much like an “m.” You think it’s good old Chuck in finance and it’s actually someone “phishing” for you to open the attachment and infect your computer. This type of attack is known as “spear phishing” because it’s targeted at a specific individual and is using social engineering—specifically familiarity with the sender—as part of the scheme to fool you into trusting the attachment. This technique is by far the most successful on the internet today. (This example is based on Gimlet Media’s Reply All Podcast Episode, “What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished?“)

  1. Use anti-malware software, but don’t rely on it to catch all attacks. Phishers change their approach often to keep ahead of the software attack detectors.
  2. If you are asked to enter any valuable information, only do so if you’re on a secure connection. Look for the “https” prefix before the site URL, indicating the site is employing SSL (Secure Socket Layer). If there is no “s” after “http,” it’s best not to enter any confidential information.
By Fabio Lanari – Internet1.jpg by Rock1997 modified., GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20995390
  1. Avoid logging in to online banks and similar services via public Wi-Fi networks. Criminals can compromise open networks with man-in-the-middle attacks that capture your information or spoof website addresses over the connection and redirect you to a fake page they control.
  2. Email, instant messaging, and gaming social channels are all possible vehicles to deliver phishing attacks, so be vigilant!
  3. Lay the foundation for a good defense by choosing reputable tech vendors and service providers that respect your privacy and take steps to protect your data. At Backblaze, we have full-time security teams constantly looking for ways to improve our security.
  4. When it is available, always take advantage of multi-factor verification to protect your accounts. The standard categories used for authentication are 1) something you know (e.g. your username and password), 2) something you are (e.g. your fingerprint or retina pattern), and 3) something you have (e.g. an authenticator app on your smartphone). An account that allows only a single factor for authentication is more susceptible to hacking than one that supports multiple factors. Backblaze supports multi-factor authentication to protect customer accounts.

Be a good internet citizen, and help reduce phishing and other malware attacks by notifying the organization being impersonated in the phishing attempt, or by forwarding suspicious messages to the Federal Trade Commission at [email protected]. Some email clients and services, such as Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail, give you the ability to easily report suspicious emails. Phishing emails misrepresenting Apple can be reported to [email protected].

Backing up your data is an important part of a strong defense against phishing and other malware

The best way to avoid becoming a victim is to be vigilant against suspicious messages and emails, but also to assume that no matter what you do, it is very possible that your system will be compromised. Even the most sophisticated and tech-savvy of us can be ensnared if we are tired, in a rush, or just unfamiliar with the latest methods hackers are using. Remember that hackers are working full-time on ways to fool us, so it’s very difficult to keep ahead of them.

The best defense is to make sure that any data that could compromised by hackers—basically all of the data that is reachable via your computer—is not your only copy. You do that by maintaining an active and reliable backup strategy.

Files that are backed up to cloud storage, such as with Backblaze, are not vulnerable to attacks on your local computer in the way that local files, attached drives, network drives, or sync services like Dropbox that have local directories on your computer are.

In the event that your computer is compromised and your files are lost or encrypted, you can recover your files if you have a cloud backup that is beyond the reach of attacks on your computer.

The post Top Ten Ways to Protect Yourself Against Phishing Attacks appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Google Removes Torrent Sites From ‘Results Carousel’

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/google-removes-torrent-sites-from-results-carousel-100722/

Two weeks ago we noticed a ‘handy’ feature where Google highlighted various torrent sites in its search results.

People who typed “best torrent sites” into the search box would see a reel of popular sites such as The Pirate Bay and RARBG in the results, featured with their official logos and all.

Google employees obviously didn’t curate the list themselves. They are a Google feature called the “results carousel,” which is generated based on an algorithm. Still, considering the constant criticism the search engine faces from rightsholders, it’s a sensitive topic.

The torrent site carousel

It appears that the search engine itself wasn’t very happy with the featured search results either. This week, the torrent sites were quietly banned from the search carousel feature. According to the company, it wasn’t working as intended.

“We have investigated this particular issue and determined that this results carousel wasn’t working in the intended manner, and we have now fixed the issue,” a Google spokesperson informed TorrentFreak.

Although Google carefully avoids the words copyright and piracy in its comments, it’s quite obvious what motivated this decision. The company doesn’t want to highlight any pirate sites, to avoid yet another copyright controversy.

That the intervention was triggered by “piracy” concerns is backed up by another change. While various “streaming sites” are still prominently listed in a search carousel, the pirate sites were carefully stripped from there as well.

A few days ago it still listed sites including Putlocker, Alluc, and Movie4k.to, but only legitimate streaming portals remain on the list today. That change definitely required some human intervention.

Only ‘legitimate’ streaming postals now

This isn’t the first time that Google’s “rich” search results have featured pirate sites. The same thing happened in the past when the search engine displayed pirate site ratings of movies, next to ratings from regular review sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

Apparently, Google’s search engine algorithms need some anti-piracy fine-tuning, every now and then.

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

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 5

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2017/07/21/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-5/

We cover a lot of ground in this week’s timeShift. From diving into building your own plugin, finding the right dashboard, configuration options in the alerting feature, to monitoring your local weather, there’s something for everyone. Are you writing an article about Grafana, or have you come across an article you found interesting? Please get in touch, we’ll add it to our roundup.

From the Blogosphere

  • Going open-source in monitoring, part III: 10 most useful Grafana dashboards to monitor Kubernetes and services: We have hundreds of pre-made dashboards ready for you to install into your on-prem or hosted Grafana, but not every one will fit your specific monitoring needs. In part three of the series, Sergey discusses is experiences with finding useful dashboards and shows off ten of the best dashboards you can install for monitoring Kubernetes clusters and the services deployed on them.

  • Using AWS Lambda and API gateway for server-less Grafana adapters: Sometimes you’ll want to visualize metrics from a data source that may not yet be supported in Grafana natively. With the plugin functionality introduced in Grafana 3.0, anyone can create their own data sources. Using the SimpleJson data source, Jonas describes how he used AWS Lambda and AWS API gateway to write data source adapters for Grafana.

  • How to Use Grafana to Monitor JMeter Non-GUI Results – Part 2: A few issues ago we listed an article for using Grafana to monitor JMeter Non-GUI results, which required a number of non-trivial steps to complete. This article shows of an easier way to accomplish this that doesn’t require any additional configuration of InfluxDB.

  • Programming your Personal Weather Chart: It’s always great to see Grafana used outside of the typical dev-ops usecase. This article runs you through the steps to create your own weather chart and show off your local weather stats in Grafana. BONUS: Rob shows off a magic mirror he created, which can display this data.

  • vSphere Performance data – Part 6 – The Dashboard(s): This 6-part series goes into a ton of detail and walks you through the various methods of retrieving vSphere performance data, storing the data in a TSDB, and creating dashboards for the metrics. Part 6 deals specifically with Grafana, but I highly recommend reading all of the articles, as it chronicles the journey of metrics exploration, storage, and visualization from someone who had no prior experience with time series data.

  • Alerting in Grafana: Alerting in Grafana is a fairly new feature and one that we’re continuing to iterate on. We’re soon adding additional data source support, new notification channels, clustering, silencing rules, and more. This article steps you through all the configuration options to get you to your first alert.

Plugins and Dashboards

It can seem like work slows during July and August, but we’re still seeing a lot of activity in the community. This week we have a new graph panel to show off that gives you some unique looking dashboards, and an update to the Zabbix data source, which adds some really great features. You can install both of the plugins now on your on-prem Grafana via our cli, or with one-click on GrafanaCloud.

NEW PLUGIN

Bubble Chart Panel This super-cool looking panel groups your tag values into clusters of circles. The size of the circle represents the aggregated value of the time series data. There are also multiple color schemes to make those bubbles POP (pun intended)! Currently it works against OpenTSDB and Bosun, so give it a try!

Install Now

UPDATED PLUGIN

Zabbix Alex has been hard at work, making improvements on the Zabbix App for Grafana. This update adds annotations, template variables, alerting and more. Thanks Alex! If you’d like to try out the app, head over to http://play.grafana-zabbix.org/dashboard/db/zabbix-db-mysql?orgId=2

Install 3.5.1 Now

This week’s MVC (Most Valuable Contributor)

Open source software can’t thrive without the contributions from the community. Each week we’ll recognize a Grafana contributor and thank them for all of their PRs, bug reports and feedback.

mk-dhia (Dhia)
Thank you so much for your improvements to the Elasticsearch data source!

Tweet of the Week

We scour Twitter each week to find an interesting/beautiful dashboard and show it off! #monitoringLove

This week’s tweet comes from @geek_dave

Great looking dashboard Dave! And thank you for adding new features and keeping it updated. It’s creators like you who make the dashboard repository so awesome!

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Iot & HOME AUTOMATION #3 openHAB, InfluxDB, Grafana:
If you are interested in topics of the internet of things and home automation, this might be a good occasion to meet people similar to you. If you are into it, we will also show you how we can all work together on our common projects.

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New – S3 Sync capability for EC2 Systems Manager: Query & Visualize Instance Software Inventory

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-s3-sync-capability-for-ec2-systems-manager-query-visualize-instance-software-inventory/

It is now essential, with the fast paced lives we all seem to lead, to find tools to make it easier to manage our time, our home, and our work. With the pace of technology, the need for technologists to find management tools to easily manage their systems is just as important. With the introduction of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager service during re:Invent 2016, we hoped to provide assistance with the management of your systems and software.

If are not yet familiar with the Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, let me introduce this capability to you. EC2 Systems Manager it is a management service that helps to create system images, collect software inventory, configure both Windows and Linux operating systems, as well as, apply Operating Systems patches. This collection of capabilities allows remote and secure administration for managed EC2 instances or hybrid environments with on-premise machines configured for Systems Manager. With this EC2 service capability, you can additionally record and regulate the software configuration of these instances using AWS Config.

Recently we have added another feature to the inventory capability of EC2 Systems Manager to aid you in the capture of metadata about your application deployments, OS and system configurations, Resource Data Sync aka S3 Sync. S3 Sync for EC2 Systems Manager allows you to aggregate captured inventory data automatically from instances in different regions and multiple accounts and store this information in Amazon S3. With the data in S3, you can run queries against the instance inventory using Amazon Athena, and if you choose, use Amazon QuickSight to visualize the software inventory of your instances.

Let’s look at how we can utilize this Resource Data Sync aka S3 Sync feature with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to query and visualize the software inventory of instances. First things first, I will make sure that I have the Amazon EC2 Systems Manager prerequisites completed; configuration of the roles and permissions in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), as well as, the installation of the SSM Agent on my managed instances. I’ll quickly launch a new EC2 instance for this Systems Manager example.


Now that my instance has launched, I will need to install the SSM Agent onto my aws-blog-demo-instance. One thing I should mention is that it is essential that your IAM user account has administrator access in the VPC in which your instance was launched. You can create a separate IAM user account for instances with EC2 Systems Manager, by following the instructions noted here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/sysman-configuring-access-policies.html#sysman-access-user. Since I am using an account with administrative access, I won’t need to create an IAM user to continue installing the SSM Agent on my instance.

To install the SSM Agent, I will SSH into my instance, create a temporary directory, and pull down and install the necessary SSM Agent software for my Amazon Linux EC2 instance. An EC2 instance based upon a Windows AMI already includes the SSM Agent so I would not need to install the agent for Windows instances.

To complete the aforementioned tasks, I will issue the following commands:

mkdir /tmp/ssm

cd /tmp/ssm

sudo yum install -y https://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads-windows/SSMAgent/latest/linux_amd64/amazon-ssm-agent.rpm

You can find the instructions to install the SSM Agent based upon the type of operating system of your EC2 instance in the Installing SSM Agent section of the EC2 Systems Manager user guide.


Now that I have the Systems Manager agent running on my instance, I’ll need to use a S3 bucket to capture the inventory data. I’ll create a S3 bucket, aws-blog-tew-posts-ec2, to capture the inventory data from my instance. I will also need to add a bucket policy to ensure that EC2 Systems Manager has permissions to write to my bucket. Adding the bucket policy is simple, I select the Permissions tab in the S3 Console and then click the Bucket Policy button. Then I specify a bucket policy which gives the Systems Manager the ability to check bucket permissions and add objects to the bucket. With the policy in place, my S3 bucket is now ready to receive the instance inventory data.


To configure the inventory collection using this bucket, I will head back over to the EC2 console and select Managed Resources under Systems Manager Shared Resources section, then click the Setup Inventory button.

In the Targets section, I’ll manually select the EC2 instance I created earlier from which I want to capture the inventory data. You should note that you can select multiple instances for which to capture inventory data if desired.

Scrolling down to the Schedule section, I will choose 30 minutes for the time interval of how often I wish for inventory metadata to be gathered from my instance. Since I’m keeping the default Enabled value for all of the options in the Parameters section, and I am not going to write the association logs to S3 at this time, I only need to click the Setup Inventory button. When the confirmation dialog comes up noting that the Inventory has been set up successfully, I will click the Close button to go back to the main EC2 console.


Back in the EC2 console, I will set up my Resource Data Sync using my aws-blog-tew-posts-ec3 S3 bucket for my Managed Instance by selecting the Resource Data Syncs button.


To set up my Resource data, I will enter my information for the Sync Name, Bucket Name, Bucket Prefix, and the Bucket Region that my bucket is located. You should also be aware that the Resource Data Sync and the sync S3 target bucket can be located in different regions. Another thing to note is that the CLI command for completing this step is displayed, in case I opt to utilize the AWS CLI for creating the Resource Data Sync. I click the Create button and my Resource Data Sync setup is complete.


After a few minutes, I can go to my S3 bucket and see that my instance inventory data is syncing to my S3 bucket successfully.

With this data syncing directly into S3, I can take advantage of the querying capabilities of the Amazon Athena service to view and query my instance inventory data. I create a folder, athenaresults, within my aws-blog-tew-posts-ec2 S3 bucket, and now off to the Athena console I go!

In the Athena console, I will change the Settings option to point to my athenaresults folder in my bucket by entering: s3://aws-blog-tew-posts-ec2/athenaresults. Now I can create a database named tewec2ssminventorydata for capturing and querying the data sent from SSM to my bucket, by entering in a CREATE DATABASE SQL statement in the Athena editor and clicking the Run Query button.


With my database created, I’ll switch to my tewec2ssminventorydata database and create a table to grab the inventory application data from the S3 bucket synced from the Systems Manager Resource Data Sync.

As the query success message notes, I’ll run the MSCK REPAIR TABLE tew_awsapplication command to partition the newly created table. Now I can run queries against the inventory data being synced from the EC2 Systems Manager to my Amazon S3 buckets. You can learn more about querying data with Amazon Athena on the product page and you can review my blog post on querying and encrypting data with Amazon Athena.

 

 
Now that I have query capability of this data it also means I can use Amazon QuickSight to visualize my data.

If you haven’t created an Amazon QuickSight account, you can quickly follow the getting started instructions to setup your QuickSight account. Since I already have a QuickSight account, I’ll go to the QuickSight dashboard and select the Manage Data button. On my Your Data Sets screen, I’ll select the New data set button.
Now I can create a dataset from my Athena table holding the Systems Manager Inventory Data by selecting Athena as my data source.


This takes me through a series of steps to create my data source from the Athena tewec2ssminventorydata database and the tew_awsapplication table.


After choosing Visualize to create my data set and analyze the data in the Athena table, I am now taken to the QuickSight dashboard where I can build graphs and visualizations for my EC2 System Manager inventory data.

Adding the applicationtype field to my graph, allows me to build a visualization using this data.

 

Summary

With the new Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Resource Data Sync capability to send inventory data to Amazon S3 buckets, you can now create robust data queries using Amazon Athena and build visualizations of this data with Amazon QuickSight.  No longer do you have to create custom scripts to aggregate your instance inventory data to an Amazon S3 bucket, now this data can be automatically synced and stored in Amazon S3 allowing you to keep your data even after your instance has been terminated. This new EC2 Systems Manager capability also allows you to send inventory data to S3 from multiple accounts and different regions.

To learn more about Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and EC2 Systems Manager Inventory, take a look at the product pages for the service. You can also build your own query and visualization solution for the EC2 instance inventory data captured in S3 by checking out the EC2 Systems Manager user guide on Using Resource Data Sync to Aggregate Inventory Data.

In the words of my favorite Vulcan, “Live long, query and visualize and prosper” with EC2 Systems Manager.

– Tara

 

 

Running an elastic HiveMQ cluster with auto discovery on AWS

Post Syndicated from The HiveMQ Team original http://www.hivemq.com/blog/running-hivemq-cluster-aws-auto-discovery

hivemq-aws

HiveMQ is a cloud-first MQTT broker with elastic clustering capabilities and a resilient software design which is a perfect fit for common cloud infrastructures. This blogpost discussed what benefits a MQTT broker cluster offers. Today’s post aims to be more practical and talk about how to set up a HiveMQ on one of the most popular cloud computing platform: Amazon Webservices.

Running HiveMQ on cloud infrastructure

Running a HiveMQ cluster on cloud infrastructure like AWS not only offers the advantage the possibility of elastically scaling the infrastructure, it also assures that state of the art security standards are in place on the infrastructure side. These platforms are typically highly available and new virtual machines can be spawned in a snap if they are needed. HiveMQ’s unique ability to add (and remove) cluster nodes at runtime without any manual reconfiguration of the cluster allow to scale linearly on IaaS providers. New cluster nodes can be started (manually or automatically) and the cluster sizes adapts automatically. For more detailed information about HiveMQ clustering and how to achieve true high availability and linear scalability with HiveMQ, we recommend reading the HiveMQ Clustering Paper.

As Amazon Webservice is amongst the best known and most used cloud platforms, we want to illustrate the setup of a HiveMQ cluster on AWS in this post. Note that similar concepts as displayed in this step by step guide for Running an elastic HiveMQ cluster on AWS apply to other cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform.

Setup and Configuration

Amazon Webservices prohibits the use of UDP multicast, which is the default HiveMQ cluster discovery mode. The use of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets for auto-discovery is a perfect alternative if the brokers are running on AWS EC2 instances anyway. HiveMQ has a free off-the-shelf plugin available for AWS S3 Cluster Discovery.

The following provides a step-by-step guide how to setup the brokers on AWS EC2 with automatic cluster member discovery via S3.

Setup Security Group

The first step is creating a security group that allows inbound traffic to the listeners we are going to configure for MQTT communication. It is also vital to have SSH access on the instances. After you created the security group you need to edit the group and add an additional rule for internal communication between the cluster nodes (meaning the source is the security group itself) on all TCP ports.

To create and edit security groups go to the EC2 console – NETWORK & SECURITY – Security Groups

Inbound traffic

Inbound traffic

Outbound traffic

Outbound traffic

The next step is to create an s3-bucket in the s3 console. Make sure to choose a region, close to the region you want to run your HiveMQ instances on.

Option A: Create IAM role and assign to EC2 instance

Our recommendation is to configure your EC2 instances in a way, allowing them to have access to the s3 bucket. This way you don’t need to create a specific user and don’t need to use the user’s credentials in the 

s3discovery.properties

file.

Create IAM Role

Create IAM Role

EC2 Instance Role Type

EC2 Instance Role Type

Select S3 Full Access

Select S3 Full Access

Assign new Role to Instance

Assign new Role to Instance

Option B: Create user and assign IAM policy

The next step is creating a user in the IAM console.

Choose name and set programmatic access

Choose name and set programmatic access

Assign s3 full access role

Assign s3 full access role

Review and create

Review and create

Download credentials

Download credentials

It is important you store these credentials, as they will be needed later for configuring the S3 Cluster Discovery Plugin.

Start EC2 instances with HiveMQ

The next step is spawning 2 or more EC-2 instances with HiveMQ. Follow the steps in the HiveMQ User Guide.

Install s3 discovery plugin

The final step is downloading, installing and configuring the S3 Cluster Discovery Plugin.
After you downloaded the plugin you need to configure the s3 access in the 

s3discovery.properties

file according to which s3 access option you chose.

Option A:

# AWS Credentials                                          #
############################################################

#
# Use environment variables to specify your AWS credentials
# the following variables need to be set:
# AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
# AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
#
#credentials-type:environment_variables

#
# Use Java system properties to specify your AWS credentials
# the following variables need to be set:
# aws.accessKeyId
# aws.secretKey
#
#credentials-type:java_system_properties

#
# Uses the credentials file wich ############################################################
# can be created by calling 'aws configure' (AWS CLI)
# usually this file is located at ~/.aws/credentials (platform dependent)
# The location of the file can be configured by setting the environment variable
# AWS_CREDENTIAL_PROFILE_FILE to the location of your file
#
#credentials-type:user_credentials_file

#
# Uses the IAM Profile assigned to the EC2 instance running HiveMQ to access S3
# Notice: This only works if HiveMQ is running on an EC2 instance !
#
credentials-type:instance_profile_credentials

#
# Tries to access S3 via the default mechanisms in the following order
# 1) Environment variables
# 2) Java system properties
# 3) User credentials file
# 4) IAM profiles assigned to EC2 instance
#
#credentials-type:default

#
# Uses the credentials specified in this file.
# The variables you must provide are:
# credentials-access-key-id
# credentials-secret-access-key
#
#credentials-type:access_key
#credentials-access-key-id:
#credentials-secret-access-key:

#
# Uses the credentials specified in this file to authenticate with a temporary session
# The variables you must provide are:
# credentials-access-key-id
# credentials-secret-access-key
# credentials-session-token
#
#credentials-type:temporary_session
#credentials-access-key-id:{access_key_id}
#credentials-secret-access-key:{secret_access_key}
#credentials-session-token:{session_token}


############################################################
# S3 Bucket                                                #
############################################################

#
# Region for the S3 bucket used by hivemq
# see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region for a list of regions for S3
# example: us-west-2
#
s3-bucket-region:<your region here>

#
# Name of the bucket used by HiveMQ
#
s3-bucket-name:<your s3 bucket name here>

#
# Prefix for the filename of every node's file (optional)
#
file-prefix:hivemq/cluster/nodes/

#
# Expiration timeout (in minutes).
# Files with a timestamp older than (timestamp + expiration) will be automatically deleted
# Set to 0 if you do not want the plugin to handle expiration.
#
file-expiration:360

#
# Interval (in minutes) in which the own information in S3 is updated.
# Set to 0 if you do not want the plugin to update its own information.
# If you disable this you also might want to disable expiration.
#
update-interval:180

Option B:

# AWS Credentials                                          #
############################################################

#
# Use environment variables to specify your AWS credentials
# the following variables need to be set:
# AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
# AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
#
#credentials-type:environment_variables

#
# Use Java system properties to specify your AWS credentials
# the following variables need to be set:
# aws.accessKeyId
# aws.secretKey
#
#credentials-type:java_system_properties

#
# Uses the credentials file wich ############################################################
# can be created by calling 'aws configure' (AWS CLI)
# usually this file is located at ~/.aws/credentials (platform dependent)
# The location of the file can be configured by setting the environment variable
# AWS_CREDENTIAL_PROFILE_FILE to the location of your file
#
#credentials-type:user_credentials_file

#
# Uses the IAM Profile assigned to the EC2 instance running HiveMQ to access S3
# Notice: This only works if HiveMQ is running on an EC2 instance !
#
#credentials-type:instance_profile_credentials

#
# Tries to access S3 via the default mechanisms in the following order
# 1) Environment variables
# 2) Java system properties
# 3) User credentials file
# 4) IAM profiles assigned to EC2 instance
#
#credentials-type:default

#
# Uses the credentials specified in this file.
# The variables you must provide are:
# credentials-access-key-id
# credentials-secret-access-key
#
credentials-type:access_key
credentials-access-key-id:<your access key id here>
credentials-secret-access-key:<your secret access key here>

#
# Uses the credentials specified in this file to authenticate with a temporary session
# The variables you must provide are:
# credentials-access-key-id
# credentials-secret-access-key
# credentials-session-token
#
#credentials-type:temporary_session
#credentials-access-key-id:{access_key_id}
#credentials-secret-access-key:{secret_access_key}
#credentials-session-token:{session_token}


############################################################
# S3 Bucket                                                #
############################################################

#
# Region for the S3 bucket used by hivemq
# see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_region for a list of regions for S3
# example: us-west-2
#
s3-bucket-region:<your region here>

#
# Name of the bucket used by HiveMQ
#
s3-bucket-name:<your s3 bucket name here>

#
# Prefix for the filename of every node's file (optional)
#
file-prefix:hivemq/cluster/nodes/

#
# Expiration timeout (in minutes).
# Files with a timestamp older than (timestamp + expiration) will be automatically deleted
# Set to 0 if you do not want the plugin to handle expiration.
#
file-expiration:360

#
# Interval (in minutes) in which the own information in S3 is updated.
# Set to 0 if you do not want the plugin to update its own information.
# If you disable this you also might want to disable expiration.
#
update-interval:180

This file has to be identical on all your cluster nodes.

That’s it. Starting HiveMQ on multiple EC2 instances will now result in them forming a cluster, taking advantage of the S3 bucket for discovery.
You know that your setup was successful when HiveMQ logs something similar to this.

Cluster size = 2, members : [0QMpE, jw8wu].

Enjoy an elastic MQTT broker cluster

We are now able to take advantage of rapid elasticity. Scaling the HiveMQ cluster up or down by adding or removing EC2 instances without the need of administrative intervention is now possible.

For production environments it’s recommended to use automatic provisioning of the EC2 instances (e.g. by using Chef, Puppet, Ansible or similar tools) so you don’t need to configure each EC2 instance manually. Of course HiveMQ can also be used with Docker, which can also ease the provisioning of HiveMQ nodes.

Several TVAddons Domains Transferred to Canadian Lawfirm

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/several-tvaddons-domains-transferred-to-canadian-lawfirm-170718/

The last couple of months have been the most chaotic on record for the booming Kodi third-party addon scene. After years of largely interrupted service, a single lawsuit changed the entire landscape.

Last month, TF broke the news that third-party Kodi add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were being sued in a federal court in Texas. The fallout was something to behold.

Within days the ‘pirate’ Kodi community found itself in turmoil. Several high-profile Kodi addons took the decision to shut down and even TVAddons itself went dark without explanation.

At the time, unsubstantiated rumors suggested that TVAddons’ disappearance could be attributed to some coincidental site maintenance. However, with around 40 million regular users built up over a number of years, a disappearing Facebook page, and complete radio silence during alleged “routine maintenance,” something was clearly wrong.

It would’ve taken just a couple of minutes to put a ‘maintenance’ notice on the site but one didn’t appear back in June, and one hasn’t appeared since. Behind the scenes,
however, things have been shifting.

In addition to wiping the DNS entries of TVAddons.ag, on at least another couple of occasions the domain has been quietly updated. The image below shows how it used to look.

TVAddons historical domain WHOIS

PrivacyDotLink refers to a service offered by Cayman Islands-based registry Uniregistry. Instead of displaying the real name and address of the domain owner (in this case the person behind TVAddons.ag), the registry replaces the information with details of its own.

The privacy service is used for many reasons, but it’s not hard to see why it’s of particular use to sites in the ‘pirate’ sector.

While some of the changes to the TVAddons domain during the past five weeks or so haven’t been obvious, this morning we observed the biggest change yet. As seen in the image below, its ownership details are no longer obscured by the privacy service.

TVAddons new domain WHOIS

What stands out here is the name Daniel Drapeau. On closer inspection, this gentleman turns out to be a Canada-based lawyer who was admitted to the Quebec Bar in 1991.

“A passion for IP and a 20 year track record, servicing corporations and individuals alike in a wide variety of industries, including industrial equipment, consumer products, publishing, food & beverage, fashion and arts,” Drapeau’s Linkedin page reads.

“His forte is the strategic use of IP rights and litigation to achieve his clients’ goals, whether they be protective, aggressive or defensive. Specialties: Expeditive remedies, including injunctions and seizure orders.”

The other fresh detail in the WHOIS is an address – 600, de Maisonneuve West, Montreal (Quebec) H3A 3J2. It’s a perfect match for the premises of DrapeauLex, a law firm launched by Drapeau in 2012.

Only adding to the intrigue is the fact that other domains operated by TVAddons both recently and historically have also been transferred to the lawfirm.

XMBCHUB.com, which was the domain used by TVAddons before making the switch several years ago, was transferred yesterday. The same can be said about Offshoregit.com, the domain used by TVAddons to distribute Kodi addons.

While there are a few explanations for a lawyer’s name appearing on the TVAddons domains, none of them are yet supported by legal documentation filed in the United States. As of this morning, the Dish Network case docket had received no additional updates. No notice of action in Canada has been made public.

Nevertheless, as a past president of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada’s anti-counterfeiting committee, Drapeau is certainly an interesting character in the IP space. As noted in a 2009 article by Professor of Law Michael Geist, Drapeau “urged the government to adopt a system of notice-and-takedown.”

Interestingly, Drapeau also worked at law firm Smart & Biggar, where former colleague Jean-Sébastien Dupont recently went on to represent Canadian broadcasters in Wesley (Mtlfreetv.com) v. Bell Canada, the big Kodi-addon piracy case currently underway in Canada.

At this stage, it’s unclear who Drapeau is working for in the TVAddons case. It’s possible that he’s working for Dish and this is a step towards the domains being handed over to the broadcaster as part of a settlement deal with TVAddons. That being said, the XBMChub and Offshoregit domains weren’t mentioned in the Dish lawsuit so something else might be underway.

TorrentFreak reached out to Drapeau for comment and clarification, but at the time of publication, we had received no response.

Dan Drapeau talks Intellectual Property from DrapeauLex on Vimeo.

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