Tag Archives: dna

Friday Squid Blogging: Do Cephalopods Contain Alien DNA?

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/friday_squid_bl_627.html

Maybe not DNA, but biological somethings.

“Cause of Cambrian explosion — Terrestrial or Cosmic?“:

Abstract: We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ~500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence contained within meteorites as well as the detection in the upper atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion — life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.

Two commentaries.

This is almost certainly not true.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Kidnapping Fraud

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/kidnapping_frau.html

Fake kidnapping fraud:

“Most commonly we have unsolicited calls to potential victims in Australia, purporting to represent the people in authority in China and suggesting to intending victims here they have been involved in some sort of offence in China or elsewhere, for which they’re being held responsible,” Commander McLean said.

The scammers threaten the students with deportation from Australia or some kind of criminal punishment.

The victims are then coerced into providing their identification details or money to get out of the supposed trouble they’re in.

Commander McLean said there are also cases where the student is told they have to hide in a hotel room, provide compromising photos of themselves and cut off all contact.

This simulates a kidnapping.

“So having tricked the victims in Australia into providing the photographs, and money and documents and other things, they then present the information back to the unknowing families in China to suggest that their children who are abroad are in trouble,” Commander McLean said.

“So quite circular in a sense…very skilled, very cunning.”

[$] Easier container security with entitlements

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/755238/rss

During KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, Justin Cormack and Nassim Eddequiouaq presented
a proposal to simplify the setting of security parameters for containerized
applications.
Containers depend on a large set of intricate security primitives that can
have weird interactions. Because they are so hard to use, people often just
turn the whole thing off. The goal of the proposal is to make those
controls easier to understand and use; it is partly inspired by mobile apps
on iOS and Android platforms, an idea that trickled back into Microsoft and
Apple desktops. The time seems ripe to improve the field of
container security, which is in desperate need of simpler controls.

[$] Securing the container image supply chain

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754443/rss

“Security is hard” is a tautology, especially in the fast-moving world
of container orchestration. We have previously covered various aspects of
Linux container
security through, for example, the Clear Containers implementation
or the broader question of Kubernetes and
security, but those are mostly concerned with container isolation; they do not address the
question of trusting a container’s contents. What is a container running?
Who built it and when? Even assuming we have good programmers and solid
isolation layers, propagating that good code around a Kubernetes cluster
and making strong assertions on the integrity of that supply chain is far
from trivial. The 2018 KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe event featured some projects that could
eventually solve that problem.

[$] Updates in container isolation

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754433/rss

At KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, several talks explored the topic of
container isolation and security. The last year saw the release of Kata Containers which, combined with
the CRI-O project, provided strong isolation
guarantees for containers using a hypervisor. During the conference, Google
released its own hypervisor called gVisor, adding yet another
possible solution for this problem. Those new developments prompted the
community to work on integrating the concept of “secure containers”
(or “sandboxed containers”) deeper
into Kubernetes. This work is now coming to fruition; it prompts us to look
again at how Kubernetes tries to keep the bad guys from wreaking havoc once
they break into a container.

[$] Autoscaling for Kubernetes workloads

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

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

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 44

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2018/05/11/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-44/

Welcome to TimeShift Grafana v5.1.2 is available and includes an important bug fix for MySQL, plus an update for GDPR compliance. See below for more details and the full release notes.
Also, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 videos are now available including talks from members of the Grafana Labs team! Check out these talks below.
If you would like your article highlighted in our weekly roundup, feel free to send me an email at [email protected]

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 43

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2018/05/04/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-43/

Welcome to TimeShift This week, Grafana Labs was happy to speak at and sponsor KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Copenhagen, Denmark. We got to chat with a ton of Grafana users, attended amazing talks, and generally had a blast! From Grafana Labs, Goutham Veeramanchaneni gave two talks focusing on TSDB – the engine behind Prometheus, and Tom Wilkie discussed a technique for using Jsonnet for packaging and deploying “Monitoring Mixins” – extensible and customizable combinations of dashboards, alert definitions and exporters.

EC2 Fleet – Manage Thousands of On-Demand and Spot Instances with One Request

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-fleet-manage-thousands-of-on-demand-and-spot-instances-with-one-request/

EC2 Spot Fleets are really cool. You can launch a fleet of Spot Instances that spans EC2 instance types and Availability Zones without having to write custom code to discover capacity or monitor prices. You can set the target capacity (the size of the fleet) in units that are meaningful to your application and have Spot Fleet create and then maintain the fleet on your behalf. Our customers are creating Spot Fleets of all sizes. For example, one financial service customer runs Monte Carlo simulations across 10 different EC2 instance types. They routinely make requests for hundreds of thousands of vCPUs and count on Spot Fleet to give them access to massive amounts of capacity at the best possible price.

EC2 Fleet
Today we are extending and generalizing the set-it-and-forget-it model that we pioneered in Spot Fleet with EC2 Fleet, a new building block that gives you the ability to create fleets that are composed of a combination of EC2 On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances with a single API call. You tell us what you need, capacity and instance-wise, and we’ll handle all the heavy lifting. We will launch, manage, monitor and scale instances as needed, without the need for scaffolding code.

You can specify the capacity of your fleet in terms of instances, vCPUs, or application-oriented units, and also indicate how much of the capacity should be fulfilled by Spot Instances. The application-oriented units allow you to specify the relative power of each EC2 instance type in a way that directly maps to the needs of your application. All three capacity specification options (instances, vCPUs, and application-oriented units) are known as weights.

I think you’ll find a number ways this feature makes managing a fleet of instances easier, and believe that you will also appreciate the team’s near-term feature roadmap of interest (more on that in a bit).

Using EC2 Fleet
There are a number of ways that you can use this feature, whether you’re running a stateless web service, a big data cluster or a continuous integration pipeline. Today I’m going to describe how you can use EC2 Fleet for genomic processing, but this is similar to workloads like risk analysis, log processing or image rendering. Modern DNA sequencers can produce multiple terabytes of raw data each day, to process that data into meaningful information in a timely fashion you need lots of processing power. I’ll be showing you how to deploy a “grid” of worker nodes that can quickly crunch through secondary analysis tasks in parallel.

Projects in genomics can use the elasticity EC2 provides to experiment and try out new pipelines on hundreds or even thousands of servers. With EC2 you can access as many cores as you need and only pay for what you use. Prior to today, you would need to use the RunInstances API or an Auto Scaling group for the On-Demand & Reserved Instance portion of your grid. To get the best price performance you’d also create and manage a Spot Fleet or multiple Spot Auto Scaling groups with different instance types if you wanted to add Spot Instances to turbo-boost your secondary analysis. Finally, to automate scaling decisions across multiple APIs and Auto Scaling groups you would need to write Lambda functions that periodically assess your grid’s progress & backlog, as well as current Spot prices – modifying your Auto Scaling Groups and Spot Fleets accordingly.

You can now replace all of this with a single EC2 Fleet, analyzing genomes at scale for as little as $1 per analysis. In my grid, each step in in the pipeline requires 1 vCPU and 4 GiB of memory, a perfect match for M4 and M5 instances with 4 GiB of memory per vCPU. I will create a fleet using M4 and M5 instances with weights that correspond to the number of vCPUs on each instance:

  • m4.16xlarge – 64 vCPUs, weight = 64
  • m5.24xlarge – 96 vCPUs, weight = 96

This is expressed in a template that looks like this:

"Overrides": [
{
  "InstanceType": "m4.16xlarge",
  "WeightedCapacity": 64,
},
{
  "InstanceType": "m5.24xlarge",
  "WeightedCapacity": 96,
},
]

By default, EC2 Fleet will select the most cost effective combination of instance types and Availability Zones (both specified in the template) using the current prices for the Spot Instances and public prices for the On-Demand Instances (if you specify instances for which you have matching RIs, your discounts will apply). The default mode takes weights into account to get the instances that have the lowest price per unit. So for my grid, fleet will find the instance that offers the lowest price per vCPU.

Now I can request capacity in terms of vCPUs, knowing EC2 Fleet will select the lowest cost option using only the instance types I’ve defined as acceptable. Also, I can specify how many vCPUs I want to launch using On-Demand or Reserved Instance capacity and how many vCPUs should be launched using Spot Instance capacity:

"TargetCapacitySpecification": {
	"TotalTargetCapacity": 2880,
	"OnDemandTargetCapacity": 960,
	"SpotTargetCapacity": 1920,
	"DefaultTargetCapacityType": "Spot"
}

The above means that I want a total of 2880 vCPUs, with 960 vCPUs fulfilled using On-Demand and 1920 using Spot. The On-Demand price per vCPU is lower for m5.24xlarge than the On-Demand price per vCPU for m4.16xlarge, so EC2 Fleet will launch 10 m5.24xlarge instances to fulfill 960 vCPUs. Based on current Spot pricing (again, on a per-vCPU basis), EC2 Fleet will choose to launch 30 m4.16xlarge instances or 20 m5.24xlarges, delivering 1920 vCPUs either way.

Putting it all together, I have a single file (fl1.json) that describes my fleet:

    "LaunchTemplateConfigs": [
        {
            "LaunchTemplateSpecification": {
                "LaunchTemplateId": "lt-0e8c754449b27161c",
                "Version": "1"
            }
        "Overrides": [
        {
          "InstanceType": "m4.16xlarge",
          "WeightedCapacity": 64,
        },
        {
          "InstanceType": "m5.24xlarge",
          "WeightedCapacity": 96,
        },
      ]
        }
    ],
    "TargetCapacitySpecification": {
        "TotalTargetCapacity": 2880,
        "OnDemandTargetCapacity": 960,
        "SpotTargetCapacity": 1920,
        "DefaultTargetCapacityType": "Spot"
    }
}

I can launch my fleet with a single command:

$ aws ec2 create-fleet --cli-input-json file://home/ec2-user/fl1.json
{
    "FleetId":"fleet-838cf4e5-fded-4f68-acb5-8c47ee1b248a"
}

My entire fleet is created within seconds and was built using 10 m5.24xlarge On-Demand Instances and 30 m4.16xlarge Spot Instances, since the current Spot price was 1.5¢ per vCPU for m4.16xlarge and 1.6¢ per vCPU for m5.24xlarge.

Now lets imagine my grid has crunched through its backlog and no longer needs the additional Spot Instances. I can then modify the size of my fleet by changing the target capacity in my fleet specification, like this:

{         
    "TotalTargetCapacity": 960,
}

Since 960 was equal to the amount of On-Demand vCPUs I had requested, when I describe my fleet I will see all of my capacity being delivered using On-Demand capacity:

"TargetCapacitySpecification": {
	"TotalTargetCapacity": 960,
	"OnDemandTargetCapacity": 960,
	"SpotTargetCapacity": 0,
	"DefaultTargetCapacityType": "Spot"
}

When I no longer need my fleet I can delete it and terminate the instances in it like this:

$ aws ec2 delete-fleets --fleet-id fleet-838cf4e5-fded-4f68-acb5-8c47ee1b248a \
  --terminate-instances   
{
    "UnsuccessfulFleetDletetions": [],
    "SuccessfulFleetDeletions": [
        {
            "CurrentFleetState": "deleted_terminating",
            "PreviousFleetState": "active",
            "FleetId": "fleet-838cf4e5-fded-4f68-acb5-8c47ee1b248a"
        }
    ]
}

Earlier I described how RI discounts apply when EC2 Fleet launches instances for which you have matching RIs, so you might be wondering how else RI customers benefit from EC2 Fleet. Let’s say that I own regional RIs for M4 instances. In my EC2 Fleet I would remove m5.24xlarge and specify m4.10xlarge and m4.16xlarge. Then when EC2 Fleet creates the grid, it will quickly find M4 capacity across the sizes and AZs I’ve specified, and my RI discounts apply automatically to this usage.

In the Works
We plan to connect EC2 Fleet and EC2 Auto Scaling groups. This will let you create a single fleet that mixed instance types and Spot, Reserved and On-Demand, while also taking advantage of EC2 Auto Scaling features such as health checks and lifecycle hooks. This integration will also bring EC2 Fleet functionality to services such as Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Batch that build on and make use of EC2 Auto Scaling for fleet management.

Available Now
You can create and make use of EC2 Fleets today in all public AWS Regions!

— Jeff;

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 42

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2018/04/27/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-42/

Welcome to TimeShift Grafana v5.1 Stable is available! Two of the biggest new features include a native data source for MSSQL Server and heatmap support for Prometheus. Download the latest release and checkout other new features and fixes below.
Heading to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2-4? Come by our booth and say hi! Also don’t miss Tom Wilkie’s talk on Prometheus Monitoring Mixins: Using Jsonnet to Package Together Dashboards, Alerts and Exporters, and Goutham Veeramanchaneni’s talks: TSDB: The Engine behind Prometheus and TSDB: The Past, Present and the Future Latest Release We received a lot of great suggestions, bug reports and pull requests from our amazing community – Thank you all!

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 41

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2018/04/20/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-41/

Welcome to TimeShift The big news this week is the release of Grafana v5.1.0-beta1. This beta release adds a number of features and enhancements including MSSQL support, additional alerting notification channels, improved dashboard provisioning functionality and some important UX fixes – most notably, the recently reported page scrolling issue.
The Grafana Labs team will also hit the road for a few weeks starting with Percona Live in Santa Clara, CA, April 23-25 which we are speaking at and sponsoring, followed by KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2-4, which we are also speaking at and sponsoring.

Oblivious DNS

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/oblivious_dns.html

Interesting idea:

…we present Oblivious DNS (ODNS), which is a new design of the DNS ecosystem that allows current DNS servers to remain unchanged and increases privacy for data in motion and at rest. In the ODNS system, both the client is modified with a local resolver, and there is a new authoritative name server for .odns. To prevent an eavesdropper from learning information, the DNS query must be encrypted; the client generates a request for www.foo.com, generates a session key k, encrypts the requested domain, and appends the TLD domain .odns, resulting in {www.foo.com}k.odns. The client forwards this, with the session key encrypted under the .odns authoritative server’s public key ({k}PK) in the “Additional Information” record of the DNS query to the recursive resolver, which then forwards it to the authoritative name server for .odns. The authoritative server decrypts the session key with his private key, and then subsequently decrypts the requested domain with the session key. The authoritative server then forwards the DNS request to the appropriate name server, acting as a recursive resolver. While the name servers see incoming DNS requests, they do not know which clients they are coming from; additionally, an eavesdropper cannot connect a client with her corresponding DNS queries.

News article.

Backblaze Cuts B2 Download Price In Half

Post Syndicated from Ahin Thomas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-drops-download-price-in-half/

Backblaze B2 downloads now cost 50% less
Backblaze is pleased to announce that, effective immediately, we are reducing the price of Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage downloads by 50%. This means that B2 download pricing drops from $0.02 to $0.01 per GB. As always, the first gigabyte of data downloaded each day remains free.

If some of this sounds familiar, that’s because a little under a year ago, we dropped our download price from $0.05 to $0.02. While that move solidified our position as the affordability leader in the high performance cloud storage space, we continue to innovate on our platform and are excited to provide this additional value to our customers.

This price reduction applies immediately to all existing and new customers. In keeping with Backblaze’s overall approach to providing services, there are no tiers or minimums. It’s automatic and it starts today.

Why Is Backblaze Lowering What Is Already The Industry’s Lowest Price?

Because it makes cloud storage more useful for more people.

When we decided to use Backblaze B2 as our cloud storage service, their download pricing at the time enabled us to offer our broadcasters unlimited audio uploads so they can upload past decades of preaching to our extensive library for streaming and downloading. With Backblaze cutting the bandwidth prices 50% to just one penny a gigabyte, we are excited about offering much higher quality video. — Ian Wagner, Senior Developer, Sermon Audio

Since our founding in 2007, Backblaze’s mission has been to make storing data astonishingly easy and affordable. We have a well documented, relentless pursuit of lowering storage costs — it starts with our storage pods and runs through everything we do. Today, we have over 500 petabytes of customer data stored. B2’s storage pricing already being 1⁄4 that of Amazon’s S3 has certainly helped us get there. Today’s pricing reduction puts our download pricing 1⁄5 that of S3. The “affordable” part of our story is well established.

I’d like to take a moment to discuss the “easy” part. Our industry has historically done a poor job of putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes. When customers are faced with the decision of where to put their data, price is certainly a factor. But it’s not just the price of storage that customers must consider. There’s a cost to download your data. The business need for providers to charge for this is reasonable — downloading data requires bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money. We discussed that in a prior post on the Cost of Cloud Storage.

But there’s a difference between the costs of bandwidth and what the industry is charging today. There’s a joke that some of the storage clouds are competing to become “Hotel California” — you can check out anytime you want, but your data can never leave.1 Services that make it expensive to restore data or place time lag impediments to data access are reducing the usefulness of your data. Customers should not have to wonder if they can afford to access their own data.

When replacing LTO with StarWind VTL and cloud storage, our customers had only one concern left: the possible cost of data retrieval. Backblaze just wiped this concern out of the way by lowering that cost to just one penny per gig. — Max Kolomyeytsev, Director of Product Management, StarWind

Many businesses have not yet been able to back up their data to the cloud because of the costs. Many of those companies are forced to continue backing up to tape. That tape is an inefficient means for data storage is clear. Solution providers like StarWind VTL specialize in helping businesses move off of antiquated tape libraries. However, as Max Kolomyeytsev, Director of Product Management at StarWind points out, “When replacing LTO with StarWind VTL and cloud storage our customers had only one concern left: the possible cost of data retrieval. Backblaze just wiped this concern out of the way by lowering that cost to just one penny per gig.”

Customers that have already adopted the cloud often are forced to make difficult tradeoffs between data they want to access and the cost associated with that access. Surrendering the use of your own data defeats many of the benefits that “the cloud” brings in the first place. Because of B2’s download price, Ian Wagner, a Senior Developer at Sermon Audio, is able to lower his costs and expand his product offering. “When we decided to use Backblaze B2 as our cloud storage service, their download pricing at the time enabled us to offer our broadcasters unlimited audio uploads so they can upload past decades of preaching to our extensive library for streaming and downloading. With Backblaze cutting the bandwidth prices 50% to just one penny a gigabyte, we are excited about offering much higher quality video.”

Better Download Pricing Also Helps Third Party Applications Deliver Customer Solutions

Many organizations use third party applications or devices to help manage their workflows. Those applications are the hub for customers getting their data to where it needs to go. Leaders in verticals like Media Asset Management, Server & NAS Backup, and Enterprise Storage have already chosen to integrate with B2.

With Backblaze lowering their download price to an amazing one penny a gigabyte, our CloudNAS is even a better fit for photographers, videographers and business owners who need to have their files at their fingertips, with an easy, reliable, low cost way to use Backblaze for unlimited primary storage and active archive. — Paul Tian, CEO, Morro Data

For Paul Tian, founder of Ready NAS and CEO of Morro Data, reasonable download pricing also helps his company better serve its customers. “With Backblaze lowering their download price to an amazing one penny a gigabyte, our CloudNAS is even a better fit for photographers, videographers and business owners who need to have their files at their fingertips, with an easy, reliable, low cost way to use Backblaze for unlimited primary storage and active archive.”

If you use an application that hasn’t yet integrated with B2, please ask your provider to add B2 Cloud Storage and mention the application in the comments below.

 

How Do the Major Cloud Storage Providers Compare on Pricing?

Not only is Backblaze B2 storage 1⁄4 the price of Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or Azure, but our download pricing is now 1⁄5 their price as well.

Pricing Tier Backblaze B2 Amazon S3 Microsoft Azure Google Cloud
First 1 TB $0.01 $0.09 $0.09 $0.12
Next 9 TB $0.01 $0.09 $0.09 $0.11
Next 40 TB $0.01 $0.085 $0.09 $0.08
Next 100 TB $0.01 $0.07 $0.07 $0.08
Next 350 TB+ $0.01 $0.05 $0.05 $0.08

Using the chart above, let’s compute a few examples of download costs…

Data Backblaze B2 Amazon S3 Microsoft Azure Google Cloud
1 terabyte $10 $90 $90 $120
10 terabytes $100 $900 $900 $1,200
50 terabytes $500 $4,300 $4,500 $4,310
500 terabytes $5,000 $28,800 $29,000 $40,310
Not only is Backblaze B2 pricing dramatically lower cost, it’s also simple — one price for any amount of data downloaded to anywhere. In comparison, to compute the cost of downloading 500 TB of data with S3 you start with the following formula:
(($0.09 * 10) + ($0.085 * 40) + ($0.07 * 100) + ($0.05 * 350)) * 1,000
Want to see this comparison for the amount of data you manage?
Use our cloud storage calculator.

Customers Want to Avoid Vendor Lock In

Halving the price of downloads is a crazy move — the kind of crazy our customers will be excited about. When using our Transmit 5 app on the Mac to upload their data to B2 Cloud Storage, our users can sleep soundly knowing they’ll be getting a truly affordable price when they need to restore that data. Cool beans, Backblaze. — Cabel Sasser, Co-Founder, Panic

As the cloud storage industry grows, customers are increasingly concerned with getting locked in to one vendor. No business wants to be fully dependent on one vendor for anything. In addition, customers want multiple copies of their data to mitigate against a vendor outage or other issues.

Many vendors offer the ability for customers to replicate data across “regions.” This enables customers to store data in two physical locations of the customer’s choosing. Of course, customers pay for storing both copies of the data and for the data transfer between regions.

At 1¢ per GB, transferring data out of Backblaze is more affordable than transferring data between most other vendor regions. For example, if a customer is storing data in Amazon S3’s Northern California region (US West) and wants to replicate data to S3 in Northern Virginia (US East), she will pay 2¢ per GB to simply move the data.

However, if that same customer wanted to replicate data from Backblaze B2 to S3 in Northern Virginia, she would pay 1¢ per GB to move the data. She can achieve her replication strategy while also mitigating against vendor risk — all while cutting the bandwidth bill by 50%. Of course, this is also before factoring the savings on her storage bill as B2 storage is 1⁄4 of the price of S3.

How Is Backblaze Doing This?

Simple. We just changed our pricing table and updated our website.

The longer answer is that the cost of bandwidth is a function of a few factors, including how it’s being used and the volume of usage. With another year of data for B2, over a decade of experience in the cloud storage industry, and data growth exceeding 100 PB per quarter, we know we can sustainably offer this pricing to our customers; we also know how better download pricing can make our customers and partners more effective in their work. So it is an easy call to make.

Our pricing is simple. Storage is $0.005/GB/Month, Download costs are $0.01/GB. There are no tiers or minimums and you can get started any time you wish.

Our desire is to provide a great service at a fair price. We’re proud to be the affordability leader in the Cloud Storage space and hope you’ll give us the opportunity to show you what B2 Cloud Storage can enable for you.

Enjoy the service and I’d love to hear what this price reduction does for you in the comments below…or, if you are attending NAB this year, come by to visit and tell us in person!

1 For those readers who don’t get the Eagles reference there, please click here…I promise you won’t regret the next 7 minutes of your life.

The post Backblaze Cuts B2 Download Price In Half appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

[$] The true costs of hosting in the cloud

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/748106/rss

Should we host in the cloud or on our own servers? This question was
at the center of Dmytro Dyachuk’s talk, given
during KubeCon +
CloudNativeCon last November. While many services
simply launch in the cloud without the organizations behind them
considering other options, large
content-hosting services have actually
moved back to their own data centers: Dropbox
migrated in 2016
and Instagram
in 2014. Because such transitions can be expensive
and risky, understanding the economics of hosting is a critical part
of launching a new service. Actual hosting costs are often
misunderstood, or secret, so it is sometimes difficult to get the
numbers right. In this article, we’ll use Dyachuk’s talk to try to
answer the “million dollar question”: “buy or rent?”

Jailed Streaming Site Operator Hit With Fresh $3m Damages Lawsuit

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/jailed-streaming-site-operator-hit-with-fresh-3m-damages-lawsuit-180207/

After being founded more than half a decade ago, Swefilmer grew to become Sweden’s most popular movie and TV show streaming site. It was only a question of time before authorities stepped in to bring the show to an end.

In 2015, a Swedish operator of the site in his early twenties was raided by local police. A second man, Turkish and in his late twenties, was later arrested in Germany.

The pair, who hadn’t met in person, appeared before the Varberg District Court in January 2017, accused of making more than $1.5m from their activities between November 2013 and June 2015.

The prosecutor described Swefilmer as “organized crime”, painting the then 26-year-old as the main brains behind the site and the 23-year-old as playing a much smaller role. The former was said to have led a luxury lifestyle after benefiting from $1.5m in advertising revenue.

The sentences eventually handed down matched the defendants’ alleged level of participation. While the younger man received probation and community service, the Turk was sentenced to serve three years in prison and ordered to forfeit $1.59m.

Very quickly it became clear there would be an appeal, with plaintiffs represented by anti-piracy outfit RightsAlliance complaining that their 10m krona ($1.25m) claim for damages over the unlawful distribution of local movie Johan Falk: Kodnamn: Lisa had been ruled out by the Court.

With the appeal hearing now just a couple of weeks away, Swedish outlet Breakit is reporting that media giant Bonnier Broadcasting has launched an action of its own against the now 27-year-old former operator of Swefilmer.

According to the publication, Bonnier’s pay-TV company C More, which distributes for Fox, MGM, Paramount, Universal, Sony and Warner, is set to demand around 24m krona ($3.01m) via anti-piracy outfit RightsAlliance.

“This is about organized crime and grossly criminal individuals who earned huge sums on our and others’ content. We want to take every opportunity to take advantage of our rights,” says Johan Gustafsson, Head of Corporate Communications at Bonnier Broadcasting.

C More reportedly filed its lawsuit at the Stockholm District Court on January 30, 2018. At its core are four local movies said to have been uploaded and made available via Swefilmer.

“C More would probably never even have granted a license to [the operator] to make or allow others to make the films available to the public in a similar way as [the operator] did, but if that had happened, the fee would not be less than 5,000,000 krona ($628,350) per film or a total of 20,000,000 krona ($2,513,400),” C More’s claim reads.

Speaking with Breakit, lawyer Ansgar Firsching said he couldn’t say much about C More’s claims against his client.

“I am very surprised that two weeks before the main hearing [C More] comes in with this requirement. If you open another front, we have two trials that are partly about the same thing,” he said.

Firsching said he couldn’t elaborate at this stage but expects his client to deny the claim for damages. C More sees things differently.

“Many people live under the illusion that sites like Swefilmer are driven by idealistic teens in their parents’ basements, which is completely wrong. This is about organized crime where our content is used to generate millions and millions in revenue,” the company notes.

The appeal in the main case is set to go ahead February 20th.

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

Our Readers Respond on the Best Solution for Managing Digital Photos and Videos

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/digital-media-management/

tripod photo setup at the beach

This post summarizes the responses we received to our November 28 post asking our readers how they handle the challenge of digital asset management (DAM). You can read the previous posts in this series below:

  1. What’s the Best Solution for Managing Digital Photos and Videos?
  2. An Introduction to Managing Digital Photos and Videos

Use the Join button above to receive notification of future posts on this topic.

This past November, we published a blog post entitled What’s the Best Solution for Managing Digital Photos and Videos? We asked our readers to tell us how they’re currently backing up their digital media assets and what their ideal system might be. We posed these questions:

  1. How are you currently backing up your digital photos, video files, and/or file libraries/catalogs? Do you have a backup system that uses attached drives, a local network, the cloud, or offline storage media? Does it work well for you?
  2. Imagine your ideal digital asset backup setup. What would it look like? Don’t be constrained by current products, technologies, brands, or solutions. Invent a technology or product if you wish. Describe an ideal system that would work the way you want it to.

We were thrilled to receive a large number of responses from readers. What was clear from the responses is that there is no consensus on solutions for either amateur or professional, and that users had many ideas for how digital media management could be improved to meet their needs.

We asked our readers to contribute to this dialog for a number of reasons. As a cloud backup and cloud storage service provider, we want to understand how our users are working with digital media so we know how to improve our services. Also, we want to participate in the digital media community, and hope that sharing the challenges our readers are facing and the solutions they are using will make a contribution to that community.

The State of Managing Digital Media

While a few readers told us they had settled on a system that worked for them, most said that they were still looking for a better solution. Many expressed frustration with dealing with the growing amount of data for digital photos and videos that is only getting larger with the increasing resolution of still and video cameras. Amateurs are making do with a number of consumer services, while professionals employ a wide range of commercial, open source, or jury rigged solutions for managing data and maintaining its integrity.

I’ve summarized the responses we received in three sections on, 1) what readers are doing today, 2) common wishes they have for improvements, and 3) concerns that were expressed by a number of respondents.

The Digital Media Workflow

Protecting Media From Camera to Cloud

We heard from a wide range of smartphone users, DSLR and other format photographers, and digital video creators. Speed of operation, the ability to share files with collaborators and clients, and product feature sets were frequently cited as reasons for selecting their particular solution. Also of great importance was protecting the integrity of media through the entire capture, transfer, editing, and backup workflow.

Avid Media Composer screenshot

Avid Media Composer

  • Many readers said they backed up their camera memory cards as soon as possible to a computer or external drive and erased cards only when they had more than one backup of the media. Some said that they used dual memory cards that are written to simultaneously by the camera for peace-of-mind.
  • While some cameras now come equipped with Wi-Fi, no one other than smartphone users said they were using Wi-Fi as part of their workflow. Also, we didn’t receive feedback from any photographers who regularly shoot tethered.
  • Some readers said they still use CDs and DVDs for storing media. One user admitted to previously using VHS tape.
  • NAS (Network Attached Storage) is in wide use. Synology, Drobo, FreeNAS, and other RAID and non-RAID storage devices were frequently mentioned.
  • A number were backing up their NAS to the cloud for archiving. Others said they had duplicate external drives that were stored onsite or offsite, including in a physical safe, other business locations, a bank lock box, and even “mom’s house.”
  • Many said they had regular backup practices, including nightly backups, weekly and other regularly scheduled backups, often in non-work hours.
  • One reader said that a monthly data scrub was performed on the NAS to ensure data integrity.
  • Hardware used for backups included Synology, QNAP, Drobo, and FreeNAS systems.
  • Services used by our readers for backing up included Backblaze Backup, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, CrashPlan, SmugMug, Amazon Glacier, Google Photos, Amazon Prime Photos, Adobe Creative Cloud, Apple Photos, Lima, DropBox, and Tarsnap. Some readers made a distinction between how they used sync (such as DropBox), backup (such as Backblaze Backup), and storage (such as Backblaze B2), but others did not. (See Sync vs. Backup vs. Storage on our blog for an explanation of the differences.)
  • Software used for backups and maintaining file integrity included Arq, Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync, SoftRAID, FreeNAS, corz checksum, rclone, rsync, Apple Time Machine, Capture One, Btrfs, BorgBackup, SuperDuper, restic, Acronis True Image, custom Python scripts, and smartphone apps PhotoTransfer and PhotoSync.
  • Cloud torrent services mentioned were Offcloud, Bitport, and Seedr.
  • A common practice mentioned is to use SSD (Solid State Drives) in the working computer or attached drives (or both) to improve speed and reliability. Protection from magnetic fields was another reason given to use SSDs.
  • Many users copy their media to multiple attached or network drives for redundancy.
  • Users of Lightroom reported keeping their Lightroom catalog on a local drive and their photo files on an attached drive. They frequently had different backup schemes for the catalog and the media. Many readers are careful to have multiple backups of their Lightroom catalog. Some expressed the desire to back up both their original raw files and their edited (working) raw files, but limitations in bandwidth and backup media caused some to give priority to good backups of their raw files, since the edited files could be recreated if necessary.
  • A number of smartphone users reported using Apple or Google Photos to store their photos and share them.

Digital Editing and Enhancement

Adobe still rules for many users for photo editing. Some expressed interest in alternatives from Phase One, Skylum (formerly Macphun), ON1, and DxO.

Adobe Lightroom screenshot

Adobe Lightroom

  • While Adobe Lightroom (and Adobe Photoshop for some) are the foundation of many users’ photo media workflow, others are still looking for something that might better suit their needs. A number of comments were made regarding Adobe’s switch to a subscription model.
  • Software used for image and video editing and enhancement included Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Luminar, Affinity Photo, Phase One, DxO, ON1, GoPro Quik, Apple Aperture (discontinued), Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere, and Apple Final Cut Studio (discontinued) or Final Cut Pro.
Luminar 2018 DAM screenshot

Luminar 2018 DAM preview

Managing, Archiving, Adding Metadata, Searching for Media Files

While some of our respondents are casual or serious amateur digital media users, others make a living from digital photography and videography. A number of our readers report having hundreds of thousands of files and many terabytes of data — even approaching one petabyte of data for one professional who responded. Whether amateur or professional, all shared the desire to preserve their digital media assets for the future. Consequently, they want to be able to attach metadata quickly and easily, and search for and retrieve files from wherever they are stored when necessary.

  • It’s not surprising that metadata was of great interest to our readers. Tagging, categorizing, and maintaining searchable records is important to anyone dealing with digital media.
  • While Lightroom was frequently used to manage catalogs, metadata, and files, others used spreadsheets to record archive location and grep for searching records.
  • Some liked the idea of Adobe’s Creative Cloud but weren’t excited about its cost and lack of choice in cloud providers.
  • Others reported using Photo Mechanic, DxO, digiKam, Google Photos, Daminion, Photo Supreme, Phraseanet, Phase One Media Pro, Google Picasa (discontinued), Adobe Bridge, Synology Photo Station, FotoStation, PhotoShelter, Flickr, and SmugMug.
Photo Mechanic screenshot

Photo Mechanic 5

Common Wishes For Managing Digital Media in the Future

Our readers came through with numerous suggestions for how digital media management could be improved. There were a number of common themes centered around bigger and better storage, faster broadband or other ways to get data into the cloud, managing metadata, and ensuring integrity of their data.

  • Many wished for faster internet speeds that would make transferring and backing up files more efficient. This desire was expressed multiple times. Many said that the sheer volume of digital data they worked with made cloud services and storage impractical.
  • A number of readers would like the option to be able to ship files on a physical device to a cloud provider so that the initial large transfer would not take as long. Some wished to be able to send monthly physical transfers with incremental transfers send over the internet. (Note that Backblaze supports adding data via a hardware drive to B2 Cloud Storage with our Fireball service.)
  • Reasonable service cost, not surprisingly, was a desire expressed by just about everyone.
  • Many wished for not just backup, but long-term archiving of data. One suggestion was to be able to specify the length-of-term for archiving and pay by that metric for specific sets of files.
  • An easy-to-use Windows, Macintosh, or Linux client was a feature that many appreciated. Some were comfortable with using third-party apps for cloud storage and others wanted a vendor-supplied client.
  • A number of users like the combination of NAS and cloud. Many backed up their NAS devices to the cloud. Some suggested that the NAS should be the local gateway to unlimited virtual storage in the cloud. (They should read our recent blog post on Morro Data’s CloudNAS solution.)
  • Some just wanted the storage problem solved. They would like the computer system to manage storage intelligently so they don’t have to. One reader said that storage should be managed and optimized by the system, as RAM is, and not by the user.

Common Concerns Expressed by our Readers

Over and over again our readers expressed similar concerns about the state of digital asset management.

  • Dealing with large volumes of data was a common challenge. As digital media files increase in size, readers struggle to manage the amount of data they have to deal with. As one reader wrote, “Why don’t I have an online backup of my entire library? Because it’s too much damn data!”
  • Many said they would back up more often, or back up even more files if they had the bandwidth or storage media to do so.
  • The cloud is attractive to many, but some said that they didn’t have the bandwidth to get their data into the cloud in an efficient manner, the cloud is too expensive, or they have other concerns about trusting the cloud with their data.
  • Most of our respondents are using Apple computer systems, some Windows, and a few Linux. A lot of the Mac users are using Time Machine. Some liked the concept of Time Machine but said they had experienced corrupted data when using it.
  • Visibility into the backup process was mentioned many times. Users want to know what’s happening to their data. A number said they wanted automatic integrity checks of their data and reports sent to them if anything changes.
  • A number of readers said they didn’t want to be locked into one vendor’s proprietary solution. They prefer open standards to prevent loss if a vendor leaves the market, changes the product, or makes a turn in strategy that they don’t wish to follow.
  • A number of users talked about how their practices differed depending on whether they were working in the field or working in a studio or at home. Access to the internet and data transfer speed was an issue for many.
  • It’s clear that people working in high resolution photography and videography are pushing the envelope for moving data between storage devices and the cloud.
  • Some readers expressed concern about the integrity of their stored data. They were concerned that over time, files would degrade. Some asked for tools to verify data integrity manually, or that data integrity should be monitored and reported by the storage vendor on a regular basis. The OpenZFS and Btrfs file systems were mentioned by some.
  • A few readers mentioned that they preferred redundant data centers for cloud storage.
  • Metadata is an important element for many, and making sure that metadata is easily and permanently associated with their files is essential.
  • The ability to share working files with collaborators or finished media with clients, friends, and family also is a common requirement.

Thank You for Your Comments and Suggestions

As a cloud backup and storage provider, your contributions were of great interest to us. A number of readers made suggestions for how we can improve or augment our services to increase the options for digital media management. We listened and are considering your comments. They will be included in our discussions and planning for possible future services and offerings from Backblaze. We thank everyone for your contributions.

digtal media management screenshot

Digital media management

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going!

Were you surprised by any of the responses? Do you have something further to contribute? This is by no means the end of our exploration of how to better serve media professionals, so let’s keep the lines of communication open.

Bring it on in the comments!

The post Our Readers Respond on the Best Solution for Managing Digital Photos and Videos appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

[$] Changes in Prometheus 2.0

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/744721/rss

2017 was a big year for the Prometheus project, as it published
its 2.0 release in November. The new release ships numerous
bug fixes, new features, and, notably, a new storage engine that brings major
performance improvements. This comes at the cost of incompatible changes to
the storage and configuration-file formats. An overview of
Prometheus and its new release was presented to the Kubernetes community in a talk
held during KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon. This article covers what changed in this new release
and what is brewing next in the Prometheus community; it is a companion to
this article, which provided a general
introduction to monitoring with Prometheus.

Copyright Trolls Obtained Details of 200,000 Finnish Internet Users

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-trolls-obtained-details-of-200000-finnish-internet-users-180118/

Fifteen years ago, the RIAA was contacting alleged file-sharers in the United States, demanding cash payments to make supposed lawsuits go away. In the years that followed, dozens of companies followed in their footsteps – not as a deterrent – but as a way to turn piracy into profit.

The practice is now widespread, not just in the United States, but also in Europe where few major countries have avoided the clutches of trolls. Germany has been hit particularly hard, with millions of cases. The UK has also seen tens of thousands of individuals targeted since 2006 although more recently the trolls there have been in retreat. The same cannot be said about Finland, however.

From a relatively late start in 2013, trolls have been stepping up their game in leaps and bounds but the true scale of developments in this Scandinavian country will probably come as a surprise to even the most seasoned of troll-watchers.

According to data compiled by NGO activist Ritva Puolakka, the business in Finland has grown to epidemic proportions. In fact, between 2013 and 2017 the Market Court (which deals with Intellectual Property matters, among other things) has ordered local Internet service providers to hand over the details of almost 200,000 Finnish Internet subscribers.

Published on the Ministry of Education and Culture website (via mikrobitti.fi) the data (pdf) reveals hundreds of processes against major Finnish ISPs.

Notably, every single case has been directed at a core group of three providers – Elisa, TeliaSonera and DNA – while customers of other ISPs seem to have been completely overlooked. Exactly why isn’t clear but in other jurisdictions it’s proven more cost-effective to hone a process with a small number of ISPs, rather than spread out to those with fewer customers.

Only one legal process is listed for 2013 but that demanded the identities of people behind 50 IP addresses. In 2014 there was a 14-fold increase in processes and the number of IP addresses targeted grew to 1,387.

For 2015, a total of 117 processes are listed, demanding the identities of people behind 37,468 IP addresses. In 2016 the trolls really upped their game. A total of 131 processes demanded the details of individuals behind 98,966 IP addresses. For last year, 79 processes are on the books, which in total amounted to 60,681 potential defendants in settlement cases.

In total, between 2013 and 2017 the Market Court ordered the ISPs to hand over the personal details of people behind a staggering 198,552 IP addresses. While it should be noted that each might not lead to a unique individual, the number is huge when one considers the potential returns if everyone pays up hundreds of euros to make supposed court cases go away.

But despite the significant scale, it will probably come as no surprise that very few companies are involved. Troll operations tend to be fairly centralized, often using the same base services to track and collect evidence against alleged pirates.

In the order they entered the settlement business in Finland the companies involved are: LFP Video Group LLC, International Content Holding B.V., Dallas Buyers Club LLC, Crystalis Entertainment UG, Scanbox Entertainment A/S, Fairway Film Alliance LLC, Copyright Collections Ltd, Mircom International Content Management, Interallip LLP, and Oy Atlantic Film Finland Ab.

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

[$] Containers without Docker at Red Hat

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/741841/rss

The Docker (now Moby) project has
done a lot to popularize containers in recent years. Along the way,
though, it has generated concerns about its concentration of functionality
into a single, monolithic system under the control of a single daemon
running with root privileges: dockerd. Those concerns were
reflected in a talk
by Dan Walsh, head of the container team at Red Hat, at KubeCon +
CloudNativeCon. Walsh spoke about the work the container team is doing
to replace Docker with a set of smaller, interoperable components. His rallying cry is “no big fat
daemons” as he finds them to be contrary to the venerated Unix philosophy.

[$] Demystifying container runtimes

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/741897/rss

As we briefly mentioned in our overview article about
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, there are multiple container “runtimes”, which are
programs that can create and execute containers that are typically fetched
from online
images. That space is slowly reaching maturity both in terms
of standards and implementation: Docker’s containerd 1.0 was released
during KubeCon, CRI-O 1.0 was released a few months ago, and rkt is
also still in the game. With all of those runtimes, it may be a confusing
time for those looking at deploying their own container-based system
or Kubernetes cluster from
scratch. This article will try to explain
what container runtimes are, what they do, how they compare with each other, and
how to choose the right one. It also provides a primer on container
specifications and standards.