Tag Archives: ECR

Block The Pirate Bay Within 10 Days, Dutch Court Tells ISPs

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/block-the-pirate-bay-within-10-days-dutch-court-tells-isps-170922/

Three years ago in 2014, The Court of The Hague handed down its decision in a long-running case which had previously forced two Dutch ISPs, Ziggo and XS4ALL, to block The Pirate Bay.

Ruling against local anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which brought the case, the Court decided that a blockade would be ineffective and also restrict the ISPs’ entrepreneurial freedoms.

The Pirate Bay was unblocked while BREIN took its case to the Supreme Court, which in turn referred the matter to the EU Court of Justice for clarification. This June, the ECJ ruled that as a platform effectively communicating copyright works to the public, The Pirate Bay can indeed be blocked.

The ruling meant there were no major obstacles preventing the Dutch Supreme Court from ordering a future ISP blockade. Clearly, however, BREIN wanted a blocking decision more quickly. A decision handed down today means the anti-piracy group will achieve that in just a few days’ time.

The Hague Court of Appeal today ruled (Dutch) that the 2014 decision, which lifted the blockade against The Pirate Bay, is now largely obsolete.

“According to the Court of Appeal, the Hague Court did not give sufficient weight to the interests of the beneficiaries represented by BREIN,” BREIN said in a statement.

“The Court also wrongly looked at whether torrent traffic had been reduced by the blockade. It should have also considered whether visits to the website of The Pirate Bay itself decreased with a blockade, which speaks for itself.”

As a result, an IP address and DNS blockade of The Pirate Bay, similar to those already in place in the UK and other EU countries, will soon be put in place. BREIN says that four IP addresses will be affected along with hundreds of domain names through which the torrent platform can be reached.

The ISPs have been given just 10 days to put the blocks in place and if they fail there are fines of 2,000 euros per day, up to a maximum of one million euros.

“It is nice that obviously harmful and illegal sites like The Pirate Bay will be blocked again in the Netherlands,” says BREIN chief Tim Kuik.

“A very bad time for our culture, which was free to access via these sites, is now happily behind us.”

Today’s interim decision by the Court of Appeal will stand until the Supreme Court hands down its decision in the main case between BREIN and Ziggo / XS4ALL.

Looking forward, it seems extremely unlikely that the Supreme Court will hand down a conflicting decision, so we’re probably already looking at the beginning of the end for direct accessibility of The Pirate Bay in the Netherlands.

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

EU Piracy Report Suppression Raises Questions Over Transparency

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/eu-piracy-report-suppression-raises-questions-transparency-170922/

Over the years, copyright holders have made hundreds of statements against piracy, mainly that it risks bringing industries to their knees through widespread and uncontrolled downloading from the Internet.

But while TV shows like Game of Thrones have been downloaded millions of times, the big question (one could argue the only really important question) is whether this activity actually affects sales. After all, if piracy has a massive negative effect on industry, something needs to be done. If it does not, why all the panic?

Quite clearly, the EU Commission wanted to find out the answer to this potential multi-billion dollar question when it made the decision to invest a staggering 360,000 euros in a dedicated study back in January 2014.

With a final title of ‘Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU’, the completed study is an intimidating 307 pages deep. Shockingly, until this week, few people even knew it existed because, for reasons unknown, the EU Commission decided not to release it.

However, thanks to the sheer persistence of Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda, the public now has a copy and it contains quite a few interesting conclusions. But first, some background.

The study uses data from 2014 and covers four broad types of content: music,
audio-visual material, books and videogames. Unlike other reports, the study also considered live attendances of music and cinema visits in the key regions of Germany, UK, Spain, France, Poland and Sweden.

On average, 51% of adults and 72% of minors in the EU were found to have illegally downloaded or streamed any form of creative content, with Poland and Spain coming out as the worst offenders. However, here’s the kicker.

“In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements,” the study notes.

“That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”

For a study commissioned by the EU with huge sums of public money, this is a potentially damaging conclusion, not least for the countless industry bodies that lobby day in, day out, for tougher copyright law based on the “fact” that piracy is damaging to sales.

That being said, the study did find that certain sectors can be affected by piracy, notably recent top movies.

“The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally,” the study notes.

“People do not watch many recent top films a second time but if it happens, displacement is lower: two legal consumptions are displaced by every ten illegal second views. This suggests that the displacement rate for older films is lower than the 40 per cent for recent top films. All in all, the estimated loss for recent top films is 5 per cent of current sales volumes.”

But while there is some negative effect on the movie industry, others can benefit. The study found that piracy had a slightly positive effect on the videogames industry, suggesting that those who play pirate games eventually become buyers of official content.

On top of displacement rates, the study also looked at the public’s willingness to pay for content, to assess whether price influences pirate consumption. Interestingly, the industry that had the most displaced sales – the movie industry – had the greatest number of people unhappy with its pricing model.

“Overall, the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay,” the study notes.

For other industries, where sales were not found to have been displaced or were positively affected by piracy, consumer satisfaction with pricing was greatest.

“For books, music and games, prices are at a level broadly corresponding to the
willingness to pay of illegal downloaders and streamers. This suggests that a
decrease in the price level would not change piracy rates for books, music and
games but that prices can have an effect on displacement rates for films and
TV-series,” the study concludes.

So, it appears that products that are priced fairly do not suffer significant displacement from piracy. Those that are priced too high, on the other hand, can expect to lose some sales.

Now that it’s been released, the findings of the study should help to paint a more comprehensive picture of the infringement climate in the EU, while laying to rest some of the wild claims of the copyright lobby. That being said, it shouldn’t have taken the toils of Julia Reda to bring them to light.

“This study may have remained buried in a drawer for several more years to come if it weren’t for an access to documents request I filed under the European Union’s Freedom of Information law on July 27, 2017, after having become aware of the public tender for this study dating back to 2013,” Reda explains.

“I would like to invite the Commission to become a provider of more solid and timely evidence to the copyright debate. Such data that is valuable both financially and in terms of its applicability should be available to everyone when it is financed by the European Union – it should not be gathering dust on a shelf until someone actively requests it.”

The full study can be downloaded here (pdf)

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

Are Cryptocurrency Miners The Future for Pirate Sites?

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/are-cryptocurrency-miners-the-future-for-pirate-sites-170921/

Last weekend The Pirate Bay surprised friend and foe by adding a Javascript-based cryptocurrency miner to its website.

The miner utilizes CPU power from visitors to generate Monero coins for the site, providing an extra revenue source.

Initially, this caused the CPUs of visitors to max out due to a configuration error, but it was later adjusted to be less demanding. Still, there was plenty of discussion on the move, with greatly varying opinions.

Some criticized the site for “hijacking” their computer resources for personal profit, without prior warning. However, there are also people who are happy to give something back to TPB, especially if it can help the site to remain online.

Aside from the configuration error, there was another major mistake everyone agreed on. The Pirate Bay team should have alerted its visitors to this change beforehand, and not after the fact, as they did last weekend.

Despite the sensitivities, The Pirate Bay’s move has inspired others to follow suit. Pirate linking site Alluc.ee is one of the first. While they use the same mining service, their implementation is more elegant.

Alluc shows how many hashes are mined and the site allows users to increase or decrease the CPU load, or turn the miner off completely.

Alluc.ee miner

Putting all the controversy aside for a minute, the idea to let visitors mine coins is a pretty ingenious idea. The Pirate Bay said it was testing the feature to see if it’s possible as a replacement for ads, which might be much needed in the future.

In recent years many pirate sites have struggled to make a decent income. Not only are more people using ad-blockers now, the ad-quality is also dropping as copyright holders actively go after this revenue source, trying to dry up the funds of pirate sites. And with Chrome planning to add a default ad-blocker to its browser, the outlook is grim.

A cryptocurrency miner might alleviate this problem. That is, as long as ad-blockers don’t start to interfere with this revenue source as well.

Interestingly, this would also counter one of the main anti-piracy talking points. Increasingly, industry groups are using the “public safety” argument as a reason to go after pirate sites. They point to malicious advertisements as a great danger, hoping that this will further their calls for tougher legislation and enforcement.

If The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites can ditch the ads, they would be less susceptible to these and other anti-piracy pushes. Of course, copyright holders could still go after the miner revenues, but this might not be easy.

TorrentFreak spoke to Coinhive, the company that provides the mining service to The Pirate Bay, and they don’t seem eager to take action without a court order.

“We don’t track where users come from. We are just providing servers and a script to submit hashes for the Monero blockchain. We don’t see it as our responsibility to determine if a website is ‘valid’ and we don’t have the technical capabilities to do so,” a Coinhive representative says.

We also contacted several site owners and thus far the response has been mixed. Some like the idea and would consider adding a miner, if it doesn’t affect visitors too much. Others are more skeptical and don’t believe that the extra revenue is worth the trouble.

The Pirate Bay itself, meanwhile, has completed its test run and has removed the miner from the site. They will now analyze the results before deciding whether or not it’s “the future” for them.

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

Surviving Your First Year

Post Syndicated from Gleb Budman original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/startup-stages-surviving-your-first-year/

Surviving Your First Year

This post by Backblaze’s CEO and co-founder Gleb Budman is the fifth in a series about entrepreneurship. You can choose posts in the series from the list below:

  1. How Backblaze got Started: The Problem, The Solution, and the Stuff In-Between
  2. Building a Competitive Moat: Turning Challenges Into Advantages
  3. From Idea to Launch: Getting Your First Customers
  4. How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers
  5. Surviving Your First Year

Use the Join button above to receive notification of new posts in this series.

In my previous posts, I talked about coming up with an idea, determining the solution, and getting your first customers. But you’re building a company, not a product. Let’s talk about what the first year should look like.

The primary goals for that first year are to: 1) set up the company; 2) build, launch, and learn; and 3) survive.

Setting Up the Company

The company you’re building is more than the product itself, and you’re not going to do it alone. You don’t want to spend too much time on this since getting customers is key, but if you don’t set up the basics, there are all sorts of issues down the line.

startup idea board

Find Your Co-Founders & Determine Roles

You may already have the idea, but who do you need to execute it? At Backblaze, we needed people to build the web experience, the client backup application, and the server/storage side. We also needed someone to handle the business/marketing aspects, and we felt that the design and user experience were critical. As a result, we started with five co-founders: three engineers, a designer, and me for the business and marketing.

Of course not every role needs to be filled by a co-founder. You can hire employees for positions as well. But think through the strategic skills you’ll need to launch and consider co-founders with those skill sets.

Too many people think they can just “work together” on everything. Don’t. Determine roles as quickly as possible so that it’s clear who is responsible for what work and which decisions. We were lucky in that we had worked together and thus knew what each person would do, but even so we assigned titles early on to clarify roles.

Takeaway:   Fill critical roles and explicitly split roles and responsibilities.

Get Your Legal Basics In Place

When we’re excited about building a product, legal basics are often the last thing we want to deal with. You don’t need to go overboard, but it’s critical to get certain things done.

  1. Determine ownership split. What is the percentage breakdown of the company that each of the founders will own? It can be a tough discussion, but it only becomes more difficult later when there is more value and people have put more time into it. At Backblaze we split the equity equally five ways. This is uncommon. The benefit of this is that all the founders feel valued and “in it together.” The benefit of the more common split where someone has a dominant share is that person is typically empowered to be the ultimate decision-maker. Slicing Pie provides some guidance on how to think about splitting equity. Regardless of which way you want you go, don’t put it off.
  2. Incorporate. Hard to be a company if you’re not. There are various formats, but if you plan to raise angel/venture funding, a Delaware-based C-corp is standard.
  3. Deal With Stock. At a minimum, issue stock to the founders, have each one buy their shares, and file an 83(b). Buying your shares at this stage might be $100. Filing the 83(b) election marks the date at which you purchased your shares, and shows that you bought them for what they were worth. This one piece of paper paper can make the difference between paying long-term capital gains rates (~20%) or income tax rates (~40%).
  4. Assign Intellectual Property. Ask everyone to sign a Proprietary Information and Inventions Assignment (“PIIA”). This document says that what they do at the company is owned by the company. Early on we had a friend who came by and brainstormed ideas. We thought of it as interesting banter. He later said he owned part of our storage design. While we worked it out together, a PIIA makes ownership clear.

The ownership split can be worked out by the founders directly. For the other items, I would involve lawyers. Some law firms will set up the basics and defer payment until you raise money or the business can pay for services out of operations. Gunderson Dettmer did that for us (ask for Bennett Yee). Cooley will do this on a casey-by-case basis as well.

Takeaway:  Don’t let the excitement of building a company distract you from filing the basic legal documents required to protect and grow your company.

Get Health Insurance

This item may seem out of place, but not having health insurance can easily bankrupt you personally, and that certainly won’t bode well for your company. While you can buy individual health insurance, it will often be less expensive to buy it as a company. Also, it will make recruiting employees more difficult if you do not offer healthcare. When we contacted brokers they asked us to send the W-2 of each employee that wanted coverage, but the founders weren’t taking a salary at first. To work around this, make the founders ‘officers’ of the company, and the healthcare brokers can then insure them. (Of course, you need to be ok with your co-founders being officers, but hopefully, that is logical anyway.)

Takeaway:  Don’t take your co-founders’ physical and financial health for granted. Health insurance can serve as both individual protection and a recruiting tool for future employees.

Building, Launching & Learning

Getting the company set up gives you the foundation, but ultimately a company with no product and no customers isn’t very interesting.

Build

Ideally, you have one person on the team focusing on all of the items above and everyone else can be heads-down building product. There is a lot to say about building product, but for this post, I’ll just say that your goal is to get something out the door that is good enough to start collecting feedback. It doesn’t have to have every feature you dream of and doesn’t have to support 1 billion users on day one.

Launch

If you’re building a car or rocket, that may take some time. But with the availability of open-source software and cloud services, most startups should launch inside of a year.

Launching forces a scoping of the feature set to what’s critical, rallies the company around a goal, starts building awareness of your company and solution, and pushes forward the learning process. Backblaze launched in public beta on June 2, 2008, eight months after the founders all started working on it full-time.

Takeaway:  Focus on the most important features and launch.

Learn & Iterate

As much as we think we know about the customers and their needs, the launch process and beyond opens up all sorts of insights. This early period is critical to collect feedback and iterate, especially while both the product and company are still quite malleable. We initially planned on building peer-to-peer and local backup immediately on the heels of our online offering, but after launching found minimal demand for those features. On the other hand, there was tremendous demand from companies and resellers.

Takeaway:  Use the critical post-launch period to collect feedback and iterate.

Surviving

“Live to fight another day.” If the company doesn’t survive, it’s hard to change the world. Let’s talk about some of the survival components.

Consider What You As A Founding Team Want & How You Work

Are you doing this because you hope to get rich? See yourself on the cover of Fortune? Make your own decisions? Work from home all the time? Founder fighting is the number one reason companies fail; the founders need to be on the same page as much as possible.

At Backblaze we agreed very early on that we wanted three things:

  1. Build products we were proud of
  2. Have fun
  3. Make money

This has driven various decisions over the years and has evolved into being part of the culture. For example, while Backblaze is absolutely a company with a profit motive, we do not compromise the product to make more money. Other directions are not bad; they’re just different.

Do you want a lifestyle business? Or want to build a billion dollar business? Want to run it forever or build it for a couple years and do something else?

Pretend you’re getting married to each other. Do some introspection and talk about your vision of the future a lot. Do you expect everyone to work 20 or 100 hours every week? In the office or remote? How do you like to work? What pet peeves do you have?

When getting married each person brings the “life they’ve known,” often influenced by the life their parents lived. Together they need to decide which aspects of their previous lives they want to keep, toss, or change. As founders coming together, you have the same opportunity for your new company.

Takeaway:  In order for a company to survive, the founders must agree on what they want the company to be. Have the discussions early.

Determine How You Will Fund Your Business

Raising venture capital is often seen as the only path, and considered the most important thing to start doing on day one. However, there are a variety of options for funding your business, including using money from savings, part-time work, friends & family money, loans, angels, and customers. Consider the right option for you, your founding team, and your business.

Conserve Cash

Whichever option you choose for funding your business, chances are high that you will not be flush with cash on day one. In certain situations, you actually don’t want to conserve cash because you’ve raised $100m and now you want to run as fast as you can to capture a market — cash is plentiful and time is not. However, with the exception of founder struggles, running out of cash is the most common way companies go under. There are many ways to conserve cash — limit hiring of employees and consultants, use lawyers and accountants sparingly, don’t spend on advertising, work from a home office, etc. The most important way is to simply ensure that you and your team are cash conscious, challenging decisions that commit you to spending cash.

Backblaze spent a total of $94,122 to get to public beta launch. That included building the backup application, our own server infrastructure, the website with account/billing/restore functionality, the marketing involved in getting to launch, and all the steps above in setting up the company, paying for healthcare, etc. The five founders took no salary during this time (which, of course, would have cost dramatically more), so most of this money went to computers, servers, hard drives, and other infrastructure.

Takeaway:  Minimize cash burn — it extends your runway and gives you options.

Slowly Flesh Out Your Team

We started with five co-founders, and thus a fairly fleshed-out team. A year in, we only added one person, a Mac architect. Three months later we shipped a beta of our Mac version, which has resulted in more than 50% of our revenue.

Minimizing hiring is key to cash conservation, and hiring ahead of getting market feedback is risky since you may realize that the talent you need will change. However, once you start getting feedback, think about the key people that you need to move your company forward. But be rigorous in determining whether they’re critical. We didn’t hire our first customer support person until all five founders were spending 20% of their time on it.

Takeaway:  Don’t hire in anticipation of market growth; hire to fuel the growth.

Keep Your Spirits Up

Startups are roller coasters of emotion. There have been some serious articles about founders suffering from depression and worse. The idea phase is exhilarating, then there is the slog of building. The launch is a blast, but the week after there are crickets.

On June 2, 2008, we launched in public beta with great press and hordes of customers. But a few months later we were signing up only about 10 new customers per month. That’s $50 new monthly recurring revenue (MRR) after a year of work and no salary.

On August 25, 2008, we brought on our Mac architect. Two months later, on October 26, 2008, Apple launched Time Machine — completely free and built-in backup for all Macs.

There were plenty of times when our prospects looked bleak. In the rearview mirror it’s easy to say, “well sure, but now you have lots of customers,” or “yes, but Time Machine doesn’t do cloud backup.” But at the time neither of these were a given.

Takeaway:  Getting up each day and believing that as a team you’ll figure it out will let you get to the point where you can look in the rearview mirror and say, “It looked bleak back then.”

Succeeding in Your First Year

I titled the post “Surviving Your First Year,” but if you manage to, 1) set up the company; 2) build, launch, and learn; and 3) survive, you will have done more than survive: you’ll have truly succeeded in your first year.

The post Surviving Your First Year appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Automating Amazon EBS Snapshot Management with AWS Step Functions and Amazon CloudWatch Events

Post Syndicated from Andy Katz original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/automating-amazon-ebs-snapshot-management-with-aws-step-functions-and-amazon-cloudwatch-events/

Brittany Doncaster, Solutions Architect

Business continuity is important for building mission-critical workloads on AWS. As an AWS customer, you might define recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) for different tier applications in your business. After the RPO and RTO requirements are defined, it is up to your architects to determine how to meet those requirements.

You probably store persistent data in Amazon EBS volumes, which live within a single Availability Zone. And, following best practices, you take snapshots of your EBS volumes to back up the data on Amazon S3, which provides 11 9’s of durability. If you are following these best practices, then you’ve probably recognized the need to manage the number of snapshots you keep for a particular EBS volume and delete older, unneeded snapshots. Doing this cleanup helps save on storage costs.

Some customers also have policies stating that backups need to be stored a certain number of miles away as part of a disaster recovery (DR) plan. To meet these requirements, customers copy their EBS snapshots to the DR region. Then, the same snapshot management and cleanup has to also be done in the DR region.

All of this snapshot management logic consists of different components. You would first tag your snapshots so you could manage them. Then, determine how many snapshots you currently have for a particular EBS volume and assess that value against a retention rule. If the number of snapshots was greater than your retention value, then you would clean up old snapshots. And finally, you might copy the latest snapshot to your DR region. All these steps are just an example of a simple snapshot management workflow. But how do you automate something like this in AWS? How do you do it without servers?

One of the most powerful AWS services released in 2016 was Amazon CloudWatch Events. It enables you to build event-driven IT automation, based on events happening within your AWS infrastructure. CloudWatch Events integrates with AWS Lambda to let you execute your custom code when one of those events occurs. However, the actions to take based on those events aren’t always composed of a single Lambda function. Instead, your business logic may consist of multiple steps (like in the case of the example snapshot management flow described earlier). And you may want to run those steps in sequence or in parallel. You may also want to have retry logic or exception handling for each step.

AWS Step Functions serves just this purpose―to help you coordinate your functions and microservices. Step Functions enables you to simplify your effort and pull the error handling, retry logic, and workflow logic out of your Lambda code. Step Functions integrates with Lambda to provide a mechanism for building complex serverless applications. Now, you can kick off a Step Functions state machine based on a CloudWatch event.

In this post, I discuss how you can target Step Functions in a CloudWatch Events rule. This allows you to have event-driven snapshot management based on snapshot completion events firing in CloudWatch Event rules.

As an example of what you could do with Step Functions and CloudWatch Events, we’ve developed a reference architecture that performs management of your EBS snapshots.

Automating EBS Snapshot Management with Step Functions

This architecture assumes that you have already set up CloudWatch Events to create the snapshots on a schedule or that you are using some other means of creating snapshots according to your needs.

This architecture covers the pieces of the workflow that need to happen after a snapshot has been created.

  • It creates a CloudWatch Events rule to invoke a Step Functions state machine execution when an EBS snapshot is created.
  • The state machine then tags the snapshot, cleans up the oldest snapshots if the number of snapshots is greater than the defined number to retain, and copies the snapshot to a DR region.
  • When the DR region snapshot copy is completed, another state machine kicks off in the DR region. The new state machine has a similar flow and uses some of the same Lambda code to clean up the oldest snapshots that are greater than the defined number to retain.
  • Also, both state machines demonstrate how you can use Step Functions to handle errors within your workflow. Any errors that are caught during execution result in the execution of a Lambda function that writes a message to an SNS topic. Therefore, if any errors occur, you can subscribe to the SNS topic and get notified.

The following is an architecture diagram of the reference architecture:

Creating the Lambda functions and Step Functions state machines

First, pull the code from GitHub and use the AWS CLI to create S3 buckets for the Lambda code in the primary and DR regions. For this example, assume that the primary region is us-west-2 and the DR region is us-east-2. Run the following commands, replacing the italicized text in <> with your own unique bucket names.

git clone https://github.com/awslabs/aws-step-functions-ebs-snapshot-mgmt.git

cd aws-step-functions-ebs-snapshot-mgmt/

aws s3 mb s3://<primary region bucket name> --region us-west-2

aws s3 mb s3://<DR region bucket name> --region us-east-2

Next, use the Serverless Application Model (SAM), which uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy the Lambda functions and Step Functions state machines in the primary and DR regions. Replace the italicized text in <> with the S3 bucket names that you created earlier.

aws cloudformation package --template-file PrimaryRegionTemplate.yaml --s3-bucket <primary region bucket name>  --output-template-file tempPrimary.yaml --region us-west-2

aws cloudformation deploy --template-file tempPrimary.yaml --stack-name ebsSnapshotMgmtPrimary --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM --region us-west-2

aws cloudformation package --template-file DR_RegionTemplate.yaml --s3-bucket <DR region bucket name> --output-template-file tempDR.yaml  --region us-east-2

aws cloudformation deploy --template-file tempDR.yaml --stack-name ebsSnapshotMgmtDR --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM --region us-east-2

CloudWatch event rule verification

The CloudFormation templates deploy the following resources:

  • The Lambda functions that are coordinated by Step Functions
  • The Step Functions state machine
  • The SNS topic
  • The CloudWatch Events rules that trigger the state machine execution

So, all of the CloudWatch event rules have been created for you by performing the preceding commands. The next section demonstrates how you could create the CloudWatch event rule manually. To jump straight to testing the workflow, see the “Testing in your Account” section. Otherwise, you begin by setting up the CloudWatch event rule in the primary region for the createSnapshot event and also the CloudWatch event rule in the DR region for the copySnapshot command.

First, open the CloudWatch console in the primary region.

Choose Create Rule and create a rule for the createSnapshot command, with your newly created Step Function state machine as the target.

For Event Source, choose Event Pattern and specify the following values:

  • Service Name: EC2
  • Event Type: EBS Snapshot Notification
  • Specific Event: createSnapshot

For Target, choose Step Functions state machine, then choose the state machine created by the CloudFormation commands. Choose Create a new role for this specific resource. Your completed rule should look like the following:

Choose Configure Details and give the rule a name and description.

Choose Create Rule. You now have a CloudWatch Events rule that triggers a Step Functions state machine execution when the EBS snapshot creation is complete.

Now, set up the CloudWatch Events rule in the DR region as well. This looks almost same, but is based off the copySnapshot event instead of createSnapshot.

In the upper right corner in the console, switch to your DR region. Choose CloudWatch, Create Rule.

For Event Source, choose Event Pattern and specify the following values:

  • Service Name: EC2
  • Event Type: EBS Snapshot Notification
  • Specific Event: copySnapshot

For Target, choose Step Functions state machine, then select the state machine created by the CloudFormation commands. Choose Create a new role for this specific resource. Your completed rule should look like in the following:

As in the primary region, choose Configure Details and then give this rule a name and description. Complete the creation of the rule.

Testing in your account

To test this setup, open the EC2 console and choose Volumes. Select a volume to snapshot. Choose Actions, Create Snapshot, and then create a snapshot.

This results in a new execution of your state machine in the primary and DR regions. You can view these executions by going to the Step Functions console and selecting your state machine.

From there, you can see the execution of the state machine.

Primary region state machine:

DR region state machine:

I’ve also provided CloudFormation templates that perform all the earlier setup without using git clone and running the CloudFormation commands. Choose the Launch Stack buttons below to launch the primary and DR region stacks in Dublin and Ohio, respectively. From there, you can pick up at the Testing in Your Account section above to finish the example. All of the code for this example architecture is located in the aws-step-functions-ebs-snapshot-mgmt AWSLabs repo.

Launch EBS Snapshot Management into Ireland with CloudFormation
Primary Region eu-west-1 (Ireland)

Launch EBS Snapshot Management into Ohio with CloudFormation
DR Region us-east-2 (Ohio)

Summary

This reference architecture is just an example of how you can use Step Functions and CloudWatch Events to build event-driven IT automation. The possibilities are endless:

  • Use this pattern to perform other common cleanup type jobs such as managing Amazon RDS snapshots, old versions of Lambda functions, or old Amazon ECR images—all triggered by scheduled events.
  • Use Trusted Advisor events to identify unused EC2 instances or EBS volumes, then coordinate actions on them, such as alerting owners, stopping, or snapshotting.

Happy coding and please let me know what useful state machines you build!

Pioneers: only you can save us

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pioneers-third-challenge/

Pioneers, we just received this message through our network — have you seen it?

Can you see me? Only YOU can save us!

Uploaded by Raspberry Pi on 2017-09-14.

Only you can save us

We have no choice – we must help her! If things are as bad as she says they are, our only hope of survival is to work together.

We know you have the skills and imagination required to make something. We’ve seen that in previous Pioneers challenges. That’s why we’re coming directly to you with this: we know you won’t let her down.

What you need to do

We’ve watched back through the recording and pulled out as much information as we can:

  • To save us, you have ten weeks to create something using tech. This means you need to be done on 1 December, or it will be too late!
  • The build you will create needs to help her in the treacherous situation she’s in. What you decide to make is completely up to you.
  • Her call is for those of you aged between 11 and 16 who are based in the UK or Republic of Ireland. You need to work in groups of up to five, and you need to find someone aged 18 or over to act as a mentor and support your project.
  • Any tech will do. We work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but this doesn’t mean you need to use a Raspberry Pi. Use anything at all — from microcontrollers to repurposed devices such as laptops and cameras.

To keep in contact with you, it looks like she’s created a form for you to fill in and share your team name and details with her. In return she will trade some items with you — things that will help inspire you in your mission. We’ve managed to find the link to the form: you can fill it in here.

Only you can save us - Raspberry Pi Pioneers

In order to help her (and any others who might still be out there!) to recreate your project, you need to make sure you record your working process. Take photos and footage to document how you build your make, and put together a video to send to her when you’re done making.

If you manage to access social media, you could also share your progress as you go along! Make sure to use #MakeYourIdeas, so that other survivors can see your work.

We’ve assembled some more information on the Pioneers website to create a port of call for you. Check it out, and let us know if you have any questions. We will do whatever we can to help you protect the world.

Good luck, everybody! It’s up to you now.

Only you can save us.

The post Pioneers: only you can save us appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Kodi ‘Trademark Troll’ Has Interesting Views on Co-Opting Other People’s Work

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/kodi-trademark-troll-has-interesting-views-on-co-opting-other-peoples-work-170917/

The Kodi team, operating under the XBMC Foundation, announced last week that a third-party had registered the Kodi trademark in Canada and was using it for their own purposes.

That person was Geoff Gavora, who had previously been in communication with the Kodi team, expressing how important the software was to his sales.

“We had hoped, given the positive nature of his past emails, that perhaps he was doing this for the benefit of the Foundation. We learned, unfortunately, that this was not the case,” XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen said.

According to the Kodi team, Gavora began delisting Amazon ads placed by companies selling Kodi-enabled products, based on infringement of Gavora’s trademark rights.

“[O]nly Gavora’s hardware can be sold, unless those companies pay him a fee to stay on the store,” Betzen explained.

Predictably, Gavora’s move is being viewed as highly controversial, not least since he’s effectively claiming licensing rights in Canada over what should be a free and open source piece of software. TF obtained one of the notices Amazon sent to a seller of a Kodi-enabled device in Canada, following a complaint from Gavora.

Take down Kodi from Amazon, or pay Gavora

So who is Geoff Gavora and what makes him tick? Thanks to a 2016 interview with Ali Salman of the Rapid Growth Podcast, we have a lot of information from the horse’s mouth.

It all began in 2011, when Gavora began jailbreaking Apple TVs, loading them with XBMC, and selling them to friends.

“I did it as a joke, for beer money from my friends,” Gavora told Salman.

“I’d do it for $25 to $50 and word of mouth spread that I was doing this so we could load on this media center to watch content and online streams from it.”

Intro to the interview with Ali Salman

Soon, however, word of mouth caused the business to grow wings, Gavora claims.

“So they started telling people and I start telling people it’s $50, and then I got so busy so I start telling people it’s $75. I’m getting too busy with my work and with this. And it got to the point where I was making more jailbreaking these Apple TVs than I was at my career, and I wasn’t very happy at my career at that time.”

Jailbreaking was supposed to be a side thing to tide Gavora over until another job came along, but he had a problem – he didn’t come from a technical background. Nevertheless, what Gavora did have was a background in marketing and with a decent knowledge of how to succeed in customer service, he majored on that front.

Gavora had come to learn that while people wanted his devices, they weren’t very good at operating XBMC (Kodi’s former name) which he’d loaded onto them. With this in mind, he began offering web support and phone support via a toll-free line.

“I started receiving calls from New York, Dallas, and then Australia, Hong Kong. Everyone around the world was calling me and saying ‘we hear there’s some kid in Calgary, some young child, who’s offering tech support for the Apple TV’,” Gavora said.

But with things apparently going well, a wrench was soon thrown into the works when Apple released the third variant of its Apple TV and Gavorra was unable to jailbreak it. This prompted him to market his own Linux-based set-top device and his business, Raw-Media, grew from there.

While it seems likely that so-called ‘Raw Boxes’ were doing reasonably well with consumers, what was the secret of their success? Podcast host Salman asked Gavora for his ‘networking party 10-second pitch’, and the Canadian was happy to oblige.

“I get this all the time actually. I basically tell people that I sell a box that gives them free TV and movies,” he said.

This was met with laughter from the host, to which Gavora added, “That’s sort of the three-second pitch and everyone’s like ‘Oh, tell me more’.”

“Who doesn’t like free TV, come on?” Salman responded. “Yeah exactly,” Gavora said.

The image below, taken from a January 2016 YouTube unboxing video, shows one of the products sold by Gavora’s company.

Raw-Media Kodi Box packaging (note Kodi logo)

Bearing in mind the offer of free movies and TV, the tagline on the box, “Stop paying for things you don’t want to watch, watch more free tv!” initially looks quite provocative. That being said, both the device and Kodi are perfectly capable of playing plenty of legal content from free sources, so there’s no problem there.

What is surprising, however, is that the unboxing video shows the device being booted up, apparently already loaded with infamous third-party Kodi addons including PrimeWire, Genesis, Icefilms, and Navi-X.

The unboxing video showing the Kodi setup

Given that Gavora has registered the Kodi trademark in Canada and prints the official logo on his packaging, this runs counter to the official Kodi team’s aggressive stance towards boxes ready-configured with what they categorize as banned addons. Matters are compounded when one visits the product support site.

As seen in the image below, Raw-Media devices are delivered with a printed card in the packaging informing people where to get the after-sales services Gavora says he built his business upon. The cards advise people to visit No-Issue.ca, a site setup to offer text and video-based support to set-top box buyers.

No-Issue.ca (which is hosted on the same server as raw-media.ca and claimed officially as a sister site here) now redirects to No-Issue.is, as per a 2016 announcement. It has a fairly bland forum but the connected tutorial videos, found on No Issue’s YouTube channel, offer a lot more spice.

Registered under Gavora’s online nickname Gombeek (which is also used on the official Kodi forums), the channel is full of videos detailing how to install and use a wide range of addons.

The No-issue YouTube Channel tutorials

But while supplying tutorial videos is one thing, providing the actual software addons is another. Surprisingly, No-Issue does that too. Filed away under the URL http://solved.no-issue.is/ is a Kodi repository which distributes a wide range of addons, including many that specialize in infringing content, according to the Kodi team.

The No-Issue repository

A source familiar with Raw-Media’s devices informs TF that they’re no longer delivered with addons installed. However, tools hosted on No-Issue.is automate the installation process for the customer, with unlisted YouTube Videos (1,2) providing the instructions.

XBMC Foundation President Nathan Betzen says that situation isn’t ideal.

“If that really is his repo it is disappointing to see that Gavora is charging a fee or outright preventing the sale of boxes with Kodi installed that do not include infringing add-ons, while at the same time he is distributing boxes himself that do include the infringing add-ons like this,” Betzen told TF.

While the legality of this type of service is yet to be properly tested in Canada and may yet emerge as entirely permissible under local law, Gavora himself previously described his business as operating in a gray area.

“If I could go back in time four years, I would’ve been more aggressive in the beginning because there was a lot of uncertainty being in a gray market business about how far I could push it,” he said.

“I really shouldn’t say it’s a gray market because everything I do is completely above board, I just felt it was more gray market so I was a bit scared,” he added.

But, legality aside (which will be determined in due course through various cases 1,2), the situation is still problematic when it comes to the Kodi trademark.

The official Kodi team indicate they don’t want to be associated with any kind of questionable addon or even tutorials for the same. Nevertheless, several of the addons installed by No-Issue (including PrimeWire, cCloud TV, Genesis, Icefilms, MoviesHD, MuchMovies and Navi-X, to name a few), are present on the Kodi team’s official ban list.

The fact remains, however, that Gavora successfully registered the trademark in Canada (one month later it was transferred to a brand new company at the same address), and Kodi now have no control over the situation in the country, short of a settlement or some kind of legal action.

Kodi matters aside, though, we get more insight into Gavora’s attitudes towards intellectual property after learning that he studied gemology and jewelry at school. He’s a long-standing member of jewelry discussion forum Ganoskin.com (his profile links to Gavora.com, a domain Gavora owns, as per information supplied by Amazon).

Things get particularly topical in a 2006 thread titled “When your work gets ripped“. The original poster asked how people feel when their jewelry work gets copied and Gavora made his opinions known.

“I think that what most people forget to remember is that when a piece from Tiffany’s or Cartier is ripped off or copied they don’t usually just copy the work, they will stamp it with their name as well,” Gavora said.

“This is, in fact, fraud and they are deceiving clients into believing they are purchasing genuine Tiffany’s or Cartier pieces. The client is in fact more interested in purchasing from an artist than they are the piece. Laying claim to designs (unless a symbol or name is involved) is outrageous.”

Unless that ‘design’ is called Kodi, of course, then it’s possible to claim it as your own through an administrative process and begin demanding licensing fees from the public. That being said, Gavora does seem to flip back and forth a little, later suggesting that being copied is sometimes ok.

“If someone copies your design and produces it under their own name, I think one should be honored and revel in the fact that your design is successful and has caused others to imitate it and grow from it,” he wrote.

“I look forward to the day I see one of my original designs copied, that is the day I will know my design is a success.”

From their public statements, this opinion isn’t shared by the Kodi team in respect of their product. Despite the Kodi name, software and logo being all their own work, they now find themselves having to claw back rights in Canada, in order to keep the product free in the region. For now, however, that seems like a difficult task.

TorrentFreak wrote to Gavora and asked him why he felt the need to register the Kodi trademark, but we received no response. That means we didn’t get the chance to ask him why he’s taking down Amazon listings for other people’s devices, or about something else that came up in the podcast.

“My biggest weakness, I guess, is that I’m too ethical about how I do my business,” he said, referring to how he deals with customers.

Only time will tell how that philosophy will affect Gavora’s attitudes to trademarks and people’s desire not to be charged for using free, open source software.

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

BREIN Tracks Down and Settles With “Libra Release Team”

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/brein-tracks-down-and-settles-with-libra-release-team-170916/

Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has been very active in recent years, targeting uploaders on various sharing sites and services.

This week the anti-piracy group announced yet another victory against a group of frequent copyright infringers in the Netherlands.

BREIN successfully tracked down and settled with two key members of the “Libra Release Team” (LRT), which is estimated to consist of eight to ten people in total.

LRT is best known in the Netherlands for repackaging English movie and TV releases with Dutch subtitles. These were then shared on torrent sites and Usenet forums.

According to court papers, the files in question were uploaded to place2home.org and place2home.net. However, they often spread out over other sites as well. In total, the release team has published nearly 800 titles.

BREIN tracked down the founder of LRT, who had already stopped uploading, and obtained an ex-parte court order against a more recent uploader. Both have settled with the anti-piracy group for a total of 8,000 euros, an amount that takes their financial situations into account.

The uploader was further summoned to and stop his activities effective immediately. If not, an ex-parte court order requires him to pay an additional penalty of €2,000 per day, up to a maximum of €50,000.

The court papers don’t mention how the members were uncovered, but it is likely that they left traces to their real identities online, which is often the case. The group also recruited new members publicly, using Skype and Gmail as contact addresses.

It’s unclear whether the settlements means the end of the Libra Release Team. While the targeted persons are unlikely to pick up their old habit, some of the others may still continue, perhaps under a new name.

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

Simplify Your Jenkins Builds with AWS CodeBuild

Post Syndicated from Paul Roberts original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/simplify-your-jenkins-builds-with-aws-codebuild/

Jeff Bezos famously said, “There’s a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting that stands between your idea and that success.” He went on to say, “…70% of your time, energy, and dollars go into the undifferentiated heavy lifting and only 30% of your energy, time, and dollars gets to go into the core kernel of your idea.”

If you subscribe to this maxim, you should not be spending valuable time focusing on operational issues related to maintaining the Jenkins build infrastructure. Companies such as Riot Games have over 1.25 million builds per year and have written several lengthy blog posts about their experiences designing a complex, custom Docker-powered Jenkins build farm. Dealing with Jenkins slaves at scale is a job in itself and Riot has engineers focused on managing the build infrastructure.

Typical Jenkins Build Farm

 

As with all technology, the Jenkins build farm architectures have evolved. Today, instead of manually building your own container infrastructure, there are Jenkins Docker plugins available to help reduce the operational burden of maintaining these environments. There is also a community-contributed Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) plugin that helps remove some of the overhead, but you still need to configure and manage the overall Amazon ECS environment.

There are various ways to create and manage your Jenkins build farm, but there has to be a way that significantly reduces your operational overhead.

Introducing AWS CodeBuild

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of provisioning, managing, and scaling your own build servers. With CodeBuild, there is no software to install, patch, or update. CodeBuild scales up automatically to meet the needs of your development teams. In addition, CodeBuild is an on-demand service where you pay as you go. You are charged based only on the number of minutes it takes to complete your build.

One AWS customer, Recruiterbox, helps companies hire simply and predictably through their software platform. Two years ago, they began feeling the operational pain of maintaining their own Jenkins build farms. They briefly considered moving to Amazon ECS, but chose an even easier path forward instead. Recuiterbox transitioned to using Jenkins with CodeBuild and are very happy with the results. You can read more about their journey here.

Solution Overview: Jenkins and CodeBuild

To remove the heavy lifting from managing your Jenkins build farm, AWS has developed a Jenkins AWS CodeBuild plugin. After the plugin has been enabled, a developer can configure a Jenkins project to pick up new commits from their chosen source code repository and automatically run the associated builds. After the build is successful, it will create an artifact that is stored inside an S3 bucket that you have configured. If an error is detected somewhere, CodeBuild will capture the output and send it to Amazon CloudWatch logs. In addition to storing the logs on CloudWatch, Jenkins also captures the error so you do not have to go hunting for log files for your build.

 

AWS CodeBuild with Jenkins Plugin

 

The following example uses AWS CodeCommit (Git) as the source control management (SCM) and Amazon S3 for build artifact storage. Logs are stored in CloudWatch. A development pipeline that uses Jenkins with CodeBuild plugin architecture looks something like this:

 

AWS CodeBuild Diagram

Initial Solution Setup

To keep this blog post succinct, I assume that you are using the following components on AWS already and have applied the appropriate IAM policies:

·         AWS CodeCommit repo.

·         Amazon S3 bucket for CodeBuild artifacts.

·         SNS notification for text messaging of the Jenkins admin password.

·         IAM user’s key and secret.

·         A role that has a policy with these permissions. Be sure to edit the ARNs with your region, account, and resource name. Use this role in the AWS CloudFormation template referred to later in this post.

 

Jenkins Installation with CodeBuild Plugin Enabled

To make the integration with Jenkins as frictionless as possible, I have created an AWS CloudFormation template here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/proberts-public/jenkins.yaml. Download the template, sign in the AWS CloudFormation console, and then use the template to create a stack.

 

CloudFormation Inputs

Jenkins Project Configuration

After the stack is complete, log in to the Jenkins EC2 instance using the user name “admin” and the password sent to your mobile device. Now that you have logged in to Jenkins, you need to create your first project. Start with a Freestyle project and configure the parameters based on your CodeBuild and CodeCommit settings.

 

AWS CodeBuild Plugin Configuration in Jenkins

 

Additional Jenkins AWS CodeBuild Plugin Configuration

 

After you have configured the Jenkins project appropriately you should be able to check your build status on the Jenkins polling log under your project settings:

 

Jenkins Polling Log

 

Now that Jenkins is polling CodeCommit, you can check the CodeBuild dashboard under your Jenkins project to confirm your build was successful:

Jenkins AWS CodeBuild Dashboard

Wrapping Up

In a matter of minutes, you have been able to provision Jenkins with the AWS CodeBuild plugin. This will greatly simplify your build infrastructure management. Now kick back and relax while CodeBuild does all the heavy lifting!

About the Author

Paul Roberts is a Strategic Solutions Architect for Amazon Web Services. When he is not working on Serverless, DevOps, or Artificial Intelligence, he is often found in Lake Tahoe exploring the various mountain ranges with his family.

Self-Driving Cars Should Be Open Source

Post Syndicated from Bozho original https://techblog.bozho.net/self-driving-cars-open-source/

Self-driving cars are (will be) the pinnacle of consumer products automation – robot vacuum cleaners, smart fridges and TVs are just toys compared to self-driving cars. Both in terms of technology and in terms of impact. We aren’t yet on level 5 self driving cars , but they are behind the corner.

But as software engineers we know how fragile software is. And self-driving cars are basically software, so we can see all the risks involved with putting our lives in the hands anonymous (from our point of view) developers and unknown (to us) processes and quality standards. One may argue that this has been the case for every consumer product ever, but with software is different – software is way more complex than anything else.

So I have an outrageous proposal – self-driving cars should be open source. We have to be able to verify and trust the code that’s navigating our helpless bodies around the highways. Not only that, but we have to be able to verify if it is indeed that code that is currently running in our car, and not something else.

In fact, let me extend that – all cars should be open source. Before you say “but that will ruin the competitive advantage of manufacturers and will be deadly for business”, I don’t actually care how they trained their neural networks, or what their datasets are. That’s actually the secret sauce of the self-driving car and in my view it can remain proprietary and closed. What I’d like to see open-sourced is everything else. (Under what license – I’d be fine to even have it copyrighted and so not “real” open source, but that’s a separate discussion).

Why? This story about remote carjacking using the entertainment system of a Jeep is a scary example. Attackers that reverse engineer the car software can remotely control everything in the car. Why did that happen? Well, I guess it’s complicated and we have to watch the DEFCON talk.

And also read the paper, but a paragraph in wikipedia about the CAN bus used in most cars gives us a hint:

CAN is a low-level protocol and does not support any security features intrinsically. There is also no encryption in standard CAN implementations, which leaves these networks open to man-in-the-middle packet interception. In most implementations, applications are expected to deploy their own security mechanisms; e.g., to authenticate incoming commands or the presence of certain devices on the network. Failure to implement adequate security measures may result in various sorts of attacks if the opponent manages to insert messages on the bus. While passwords exist for some safety-critical functions, such as modifying firmware, programming keys, or controlling antilock brake actuators, these systems are not implemented universally and have a limited number of seed/key pair

I don’t know in what world it makes sense to even have a link between the entertainment system and the low-level network that operates the physical controls. As apparent from the talk, the two systems are supposed to be air-gapped, but in reality they aren’t.

Rookie mistakes were abound – unauthenticated “execute” method, running as root, firmware is not signed, hard-coded passwords, etc. How do we know that there aren’t tons of those in all cars out there right now, and in the self-driving cars of the future (which will likely use the same legacy technologies of the current cars)? Recently I heard a negative comment about the source code of one of the self-driving cars “players”, and I’m pretty sure there are many of those rookie mistakes.

Why this is this even more risky for self-driving cars? I’m not an expert in car programming, but it seems like the attack surface is bigger. I might be completely off target here, but on a typical car you’d have to “just” properly isolate the CAN bus. With self-driving cars the autonomous system that watches the surrounding and makes decisions on what to do next has to be connected to the CAN bus. With Tesla being able to send updates over the wire, the attack surface is even bigger (although that’s actually a good feature – to be able to patch all cars immediately once a vulnerability is discovered).

Of course, one approach would be to introduce legislation that regulates car software. It might work, but it would rely on governments to to proper testing, which won’t always be the case.

The alternative is to open-source it and let all the white-hats find your issues, so that you can close them before the car hits the road. Not only that, but consumers like me will feel safer, and geeks would be able to verify whether the car is really running the software it claims to run by verifying the fingerprints.

Richard Stallman might be seen as a fanatic when he advocates against closed source software, but in cases like … cars, his concerns seem less extreme.

“But the Jeep vulnerability was fixed”, you may say. And that might be seen as being the way things are – vulnerabilities appear, they get fixed, life goes on. No person was injured because of the bug, right? Well, not yet. And “gaining control” is the extreme scenario – there are still pretty bad scenarios, like being able to track a car through its GPS, or cause panic by controlling the entertainment system. It might be over wifi, or over GPRS, or even by physically messing with the car by inserting a flash drive. Is open source immune to those issues? No, but it has proven to be more resilient.

One industry where the problem of proprietary software on a product that the customer bought is … tractors. It turns out farmers are hacking their tractors, because of multiple issues and the inability of the vendor to resolve them in a timely manner. This is likely to happen to cars soon, when only authorized repair shops are allowed to touch anything on the car. And with unauthorized repair shops the attack surface becomes even bigger.

In fact, I’d prefer open source not just for cars, but for all consumer products. The source code of a smart fridge or a security camera is trivial, it would rarely mean sacrificing competitive advantage. But refrigerators get hacked, security cameras are active part of botnets, the “internet of shit” is getting ubiquitous. A huge amount of these issues are dumb, beginner mistakes. We have the right to know what shit we are running – in our frdges, DVRs and ultimatey – cars.

Your fridge may soon by spying on you, your vacuum cleaner may threaten your pet in demand of “ransom”. The terrorists of the future may crash planes without being armed, can crash vans into crowds without being in the van, and can “explode” home equipment without being in the particular home. And that’s not just a hypothetical.

Will open source magically solve the issue? No. But it will definitely make things better and safer, as it has done with operating systems and web servers.

The post Self-Driving Cars Should Be Open Source appeared first on Bozho's tech blog.

Turtle, the earthbound crowdfunded rover

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/turtle-rover/

With ten days to go until the end of their crowdfunding campaign, the team behind the Turtle Rover are waiting eagerly for their project to become a reality for earthbound explorers across the globe.

Turtle Rover

Turtle is the product of the Mars Rover prototype engineers at Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland. Their waterproof land rover can be controlled via your tablet or smartphone, and allows you to explore hidden worlds too small or dangerous for humans. The team says this about their project:

NASA and ESA plan to send another rover to Mars in 2020. SpaceX wants to send one million people to Mars in the next 100 years. However, before anyone sends a rover to another planet, we designed Turtle — a robot to remind you about how beautiful the Earth is.

With a Raspberry Pi at its core, Turtle is an open-source, modular device to which you can attach new, interesting features such as extra cameras, lights, and a DSLR adapter. Depending on the level at which you back the Kickstarter, you might also receive a robotic arm as a reward for your support.

Turtle Rover Kickstarter Raspberry Pi

The Turtle can capture photos and video, and even live-stream video to your device. Moreover, its emergency stop button offers peace of mind whenever your explorations takes your Turtle to cliff edges or other unsafe locations.

Constructed of aerospace-grade aluminium, plastics, and stainless steel, its robust form, watertight and dust-proof body, and 4-hour battery life make the Turtle a great tool for education and development, as well as a wonderful addition to recreational activities such as Airsoft.

Back the Turtle

If you want to join in the Turtle Rover revolution, you have ten days left to back the team on Kickstarter. Pledge €1497 for an unassembled kit (you’ll need your own Raspberry Pi, battery, and servos), or €1549 for a complete rover. The team plan to send your Turtle to you by June 2018 — so get ready to explore!

Turtle Rover Kickstarter Raspberry Pi

For more information on the build, including all crowdfunding rewards, check out their Kickstarter page. And if you’d like to follow their journey, be sure to follow them on Twitter.

Your Projects

Are you running a Raspberry Pi-based crowdfunding campaign? Or maybe you’ve got your idea, and you’re soon going to unleash it on the world? Whatever your plans, we’d love to see what you’re up to, so make sure to let us know via our social media channels or an email to [email protected]

 

The post Turtle, the earthbound crowdfunded rover appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

NSA Spied on Early File-Sharing Networks, Including BitTorrent

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/nsa-spied-on-early-file-sharing-networks-including-bittorrent-170914/

In the early 2000s, when peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing was in its infancy, the majority of users had no idea that their activities could be monitored by outsiders. The reality was very different, however.

As few as they were, all of the major networks were completely open, with most operating a ‘shared folder’ type system that allowed any network participant to see exactly what another user was sharing. Nevertheless, with little to no oversight, file-sharing at least felt like a somewhat private affair.

As user volumes began to swell, software such as KaZaA (which utilized the FastTrack network) and eDonkey2000 (eD2k network) attracted attention from record labels, who were desperate to stop the unlicensed sharing of copyrighted content. The same held true for the BitTorrent networks that arrived on the scene a couple of years later.

Through the rise of lawsuits against consumers, the general public began to learn that their activities on P2P networks were not secret and they were being watched for some, if not all, of the time by copyright holders. Little did they know, however, that a much bigger player was also keeping a watchful eye.

According to a fascinating document just released by The Intercept as part of the Edward Snowden leaks, the National Security Agency (NSA) showed a keen interest in trying to penetrate early P2P networks.

Initially published by internal NSA news site SIDToday in June 2005, the document lays out the aims of a program called FAVA – File-Sharing Analysis and Vulnerability Assessment.

“One question that naturally arises after identifying file-sharing traffic is whether or not there is anything of intelligence value in this traffic,” the NSA document begins.

“By searching our collection databases, it is clear that many targets are using popular file sharing applications; but if they are merely sharing the latest release of their favorite pop star, this traffic is of dubious value (no offense to Britney Spears intended).”

Indeed, the vast majority of users of these early networks were only been interested in sharing relatively small music files, which were somewhat easy to manage given the bandwidth limitations of the day. However, the NSA still wanted to know what was happening on a broader scale, so that meant decoding their somewhat limited encryption.

“As many of the applications, such as KaZaA for example, encrypt their traffic, we first had to decrypt the traffic before we could begin to parse the messages. We have developed the capability to decrypt and decode both KaZaA and eDonkey traffic to determine which files are being shared, and what queries are being performed,” the NSA document reveals.

Most progress appears to have been made against KaZaA, with the NSA revealing the use of tools to parse out registry entries on users’ hard drives. This information gave up users’ email addresses, country codes, user names, the location of their stored files, plus a list of recent searches.

This gave the NSA the ability to look deeper into user behavior, which revealed some P2P users going beyond searches for basic run-of-the-mill multimedia content.

“[We] have discovered that our targets are using P2P systems to search for and share files which are at the very least somewhat surprising — not simply harmless music and movie files. With more widespread adoption, these tools will allow us to regularly assimilate data which previously had been passed over; giving us a more complete picture of our targets and their activities,” the document adds.

Today, more than 12 years later, with KaZaA long dead and eDonkey barely alive, scanning early pirate activities might seem a distant act. However, there’s little doubt that similar programs remain active today. Even in 2005, the FAVA program had lofty ambitions, targeting other networks and protocols including DirectConnect, Freenet, Gnutella, Gnutella2, JoltID, MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger and……BitTorrent.

“If you have a target using any of these applications or using some other application which might fall into the P2P category, please contact us,” the NSA document urges staff. “We would be more than happy to help.”

Confirming the continued interest in BitTorrent, The Intercept has published a couple of further documents which deal with the protocol directly.

The first details an NSA program called GRIMPLATE, which aimed to study how Department of Defense employees were using BitTorrent and whether that constituted a risk.

The second relates to P2P research carried out by Britain’s GCHQ spy agency. It details DIRTY RAT, a web application which gave the government to “the capability to identify users sharing/downloading files of interest on the eMule (Kademlia) and BitTorrent networks.”

The SIDToday document detailing the FAVA program can be viewed here

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

Manage Kubernetes Clusters on AWS Using CoreOS Tectonic

Post Syndicated from Arun Gupta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/kubernetes-clusters-aws-coreos-tectonic/

There are multiple ways to run a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The first post in this series explained how to manage a Kubernetes cluster on AWS using kops. This second post explains how to manage a Kubernetes cluster on AWS using CoreOS Tectonic.

Tectonic overview

Tectonic delivers the most current upstream version of Kubernetes with additional features. It is a commercial offering from CoreOS and adds the following features over the upstream:

  • Installer
    Comes with a graphical installer that installs a highly available Kubernetes cluster. Alternatively, the cluster can be installed using AWS CloudFormation templates or Terraform scripts.
  • Operators
    An operator is an application-specific controller that extends the Kubernetes API to create, configure, and manage instances of complex stateful applications on behalf of a Kubernetes user. This release includes an etcd operator for rolling upgrades and a Prometheus operator for monitoring capabilities.
  • Console
    A web console provides a full view of applications running in the cluster. It also allows you to deploy applications to the cluster and start the rolling upgrade of the cluster.
  • Monitoring
    Node CPU and memory metrics are powered by the Prometheus operator. The graphs are available in the console. A large set of preconfigured Prometheus alerts are also available.
  • Security
    Tectonic ensures that cluster is always up to date with the most recent patches/fixes. Tectonic clusters also enable role-based access control (RBAC). Different roles can be mapped to an LDAP service.
  • Support
    CoreOS provides commercial support for clusters created using Tectonic.

Tectonic can be installed on AWS using a GUI installer or Terraform scripts. The installer prompts you for the information needed to boot the Kubernetes cluster, such as AWS access and secret key, number of master and worker nodes, and instance size for the master and worker nodes. The cluster can be created after all the options are specified. Alternatively, Terraform assets can be downloaded and the cluster can be created later. This post shows using the installer.

CoreOS License and Pull Secret

Even though Tectonic is a commercial offering, a cluster for up to 10 nodes can be created by creating a free account at Get Tectonic for Kubernetes. After signup, a CoreOS License and Pull Secret files are provided on your CoreOS account page. Download these files as they are needed by the installer to boot the cluster.

IAM user permission

The IAM user to create the Kubernetes cluster must have access to the following services and features:

  • Amazon Route 53
  • Amazon EC2
  • Elastic Load Balancing
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon VPC
  • Security groups

Use the aws-policy policy to grant the required permissions for the IAM user.

DNS configuration

A subdomain is required to create the cluster, and it must be registered as a public Route 53 hosted zone. The zone is used to host and expose the console web application. It is also used as the static namespace for the Kubernetes API server. This allows kubectl to be able to talk directly with the master.

The domain may be registered using Route 53. Alternatively, a domain may be registered at a third-party registrar. This post uses a kubernetes-aws.io domain registered at a third-party registrar and a tectonic subdomain within it.

Generate a Route 53 hosted zone using the AWS CLI. Download jq to run this command:

ID=$(uuidgen) && \
aws route53 create-hosted-zone \
--name tectonic.kubernetes-aws.io \
--caller-reference $ID \
| jq .DelegationSet.NameServers

The command shows an output such as the following:

[
  "ns-1924.awsdns-48.co.uk",
  "ns-501.awsdns-62.com",
  "ns-1259.awsdns-29.org",
  "ns-749.awsdns-29.net"
]

Create NS records for the domain with your registrar. Make sure that the NS records can be resolved using a utility like dig web interface. A sample output would look like the following:

The bottom of the screenshot shows NS records configured for the subdomain.

Download and run the Tectonic installer

Download the Tectonic installer (version 1.7.1) and extract it. The latest installer can always be found at coreos.com/tectonic. Start the installer:

./tectonic/tectonic-installer/$PLATFORM/installer

Replace $PLATFORM with either darwin or linux. The installer opens your default browser and prompts you to select the cloud provider. Choose Amazon Web Services as the platform. Choose Next Step.

Specify the Access Key ID and Secret Access Key for the IAM role that you created earlier. This allows the installer to create resources required for the Kubernetes cluster. This also gives the installer full access to your AWS account. Alternatively, to protect the integrity of your main AWS credentials, use a temporary session token to generate temporary credentials.

You also need to choose a region in which to install the cluster. For the purpose of this post, I chose a region close to where I live, Northern California. Choose Next Step.

Give your cluster a name. This name is part of the static namespace for the master and the address of the console.

To enable in-place update to the Kubernetes cluster, select the checkbox next to Automated Updates. It also enables update to the etcd and Prometheus operators. This feature may become a default in future releases.

Choose Upload “tectonic-license.txt” and upload the previously downloaded license file.

Choose Upload “config.json” and upload the previously downloaded pull secret file. Choose Next Step.

Let the installer generate a CA certificate and key. In this case, the browser may not recognize this certificate, which I discuss later in the post. Alternatively, you can provide a CA certificate and a key in PEM format issued by an authorized certificate authority. Choose Next Step.

Use the SSH key for the region specified earlier. You also have an option to generate a new key. This allows you to later connect using SSH into the Amazon EC2 instances provisioned by the cluster. Here is the command that can be used to log in:

ssh –i <key> [email protected]<ec2-instance-ip>

Choose Next Step.

Define the number and instance type of master and worker nodes. In this case, create a 6 nodes cluster. Make sure that the worker nodes have enough processing power and memory to run the containers.

An etcd cluster is used as persistent storage for all of Kubernetes API objects. This cluster is required for the Kubernetes cluster to operate. There are three ways to use the etcd cluster as part of the Tectonic installer:

  • (Default) Provision the cluster using EC2 instances. Additional EC2 instances are used in this case.
  • Use an alpha support for cluster provisioning using the etcd operator. The etcd operator is used for automated operations of the etcd master nodes for the cluster itself, in addition to for etcd instances that are created for application usage. The etcd cluster is provisioned within the Tectonic installer.
  • Bring your own pre-provisioned etcd cluster.

Use the first option in this case.

For more information about choosing the appropriate instance type, see the etcd hardware recommendation. Choose Next Step.

Specify the networking options. The installer can create a new public VPC or use a pre-existing public or private VPC. Make sure that the VPC requirements are met for an existing VPC.

Give a DNS name for the cluster. Choose the domain for which the Route 53 hosted zone was configured earlier, such as tectonic.kubernetes-aws.io. Multiple clusters may be created under a single domain. The cluster name and the DNS name would typically match each other.

To select the CIDR range, choose Show Advanced Settings. You can also choose the Availability Zones for the master and worker nodes. By default, the master and worker nodes are spread across multiple Availability Zones in the chosen region. This makes the cluster highly available.

Leave the other values as default. Choose Next Step.

Specify an email address and password to be used as credentials to log in to the console. Choose Next Step.

At any point during the installation, you can choose Save progress. This allows you to save configurations specified in the installer. This configuration file can then be used to restore progress in the installer at a later point.

To start the cluster installation, choose Submit. At another time, you can download the Terraform assets by choosing Manually boot. This allows you to boot the cluster later.

The logs from the Terraform scripts are shown in the installer. When the installation is complete, the console shows that the Terraform scripts were successfully applied, the domain name was resolved successfully, and that the console has started. The domain works successfully if the DNS resolution worked earlier, and it’s the address where the console is accessible.

Choose Download assets to download assets related to your cluster. It contains your generated CA, kubectl configuration file, and the Terraform state. This download is an important step as it allows you to delete the cluster later.

Choose Next Step for the final installation screen. It allows you to access the Tectonic console, gives you instructions about how to configure kubectl to manage this cluster, and finally deploys an application using kubectl.

Choose Go to my Tectonic Console. In our case, it is also accessible at http://cluster.tectonic.kubernetes-aws.io/.

As I mentioned earlier, the browser does not recognize the self-generated CA certificate. Choose Advanced and connect to the console. Enter the login credentials specified earlier in the installer and choose Login.

The Kubernetes upstream and console version are shown under Software Details. Cluster health shows All systems go and it means that the API server and the backend API can be reached.

To view different Kubernetes resources in the cluster choose, the resource in the left navigation bar. For example, all deployments can be seen by choosing Deployments.

By default, resources in the all namespace are shown. Other namespaces may be chosen by clicking on a menu item on the top of the screen. Different administration tasks such as managing the namespaces, getting list of the nodes and RBAC can be configured as well.

Download and run Kubectl

Kubectl is required to manage the Kubernetes cluster. The latest version of kubectl can be downloaded using the following command:

curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/$(curl -s https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt)/bin/darwin/amd64/kubectl

It can also be conveniently installed using the Homebrew package manager. To find and access a cluster, Kubectl needs a kubeconfig file. By default, this configuration file is at ~/.kube/config. This file is created when a Kubernetes cluster is created from your machine. However, in this case, download this file from the console.

In the console, choose admin, My Account, Download Configuration and follow the steps to download the kubectl configuration file. Move this file to ~/.kube/config. If kubectl has already been used on your machine before, then this file already exists. Make sure to take a backup of that file first.

Now you can run the commands to view the list of deployments:

~ $ kubectl get deployments --all-namespaces
NAMESPACE         NAME                                    DESIRED   CURRENT   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
kube-system       etcd-operator                           1         1         1            1           43m
kube-system       heapster                                1         1         1            1           40m
kube-system       kube-controller-manager                 3         3         3            3           43m
kube-system       kube-dns                                1         1         1            1           43m
kube-system       kube-scheduler                          3         3         3            3           43m
tectonic-system   container-linux-update-operator         1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   default-http-backend                    1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   kube-state-metrics                      1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   kube-version-operator                   1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   prometheus-operator                     1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-channel-operator               1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-console                        2         2         2            2           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-identity                       2         2         2            2           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-ingress-controller             1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-monitoring-auth-alertmanager   1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-monitoring-auth-prometheus     1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-prometheus-operator            1         1         1            1           40m
tectonic-system   tectonic-stats-emitter                  1         1         1            1           40m

This output is similar to the one shown in the console earlier. Now, this kubectl can be used to manage your resources.

Upgrade the Kubernetes cluster

Tectonic allows the in-place upgrade of the cluster. This is an experimental feature as of this release. The clusters can be updated either automatically, or with manual approval.

To perform the update, choose Administration, Cluster Settings. If an earlier Tectonic installer, version 1.6.2 in this case, is used to install the cluster, then this screen would look like the following:

Choose Check for Updates. If any updates are available, choose Start Upgrade. After the upgrade is completed, the screen is refreshed.

This is an experimental feature in this release and so should only be used on clusters that can be easily replaced. This feature may become a fully supported in a future release. For more information about the upgrade process, see Upgrading Tectonic & Kubernetes.

Delete the Kubernetes cluster

Typically, the Kubernetes cluster is a long-running cluster to serve your applications. After its purpose is served, you may delete it. It is important to delete the cluster as this ensures that all resources created by the cluster are appropriately cleaned up.

The easiest way to delete the cluster is using the assets downloaded in the last step of the installer. Extract the downloaded zip file. This creates a directory like <cluster-name>_TIMESTAMP. In that directory, give the following command to delete the cluster:

TERRAFORM_CONFIG=$(pwd)/.terraformrc terraform destroy --force

This destroys the cluster and all associated resources.

You may have forgotten to download the assets. There is a copy of the assets in the directory tectonic/tectonic-installer/darwin/clusters. In this directory, another directory with the name <cluster-name>_TIMESTAMP contains your assets.

Conclusion

This post explained how to manage Kubernetes clusters using the CoreOS Tectonic graphical installer.  For more details, see Graphical Installer with AWS. If the installation does not succeed, see the helpful Troubleshooting tips. After the cluster is created, see the Tectonic tutorials to learn how to deploy, scale, version, and delete an application.

Future posts in this series will explain other ways of creating and running a Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

—Arun

On the Equifax Data Breach

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/on_the_equifax_.html

Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the population. It’s an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver’s license numbers — exactly the sort of information criminals can use to impersonate victims to banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, and other businesses vulnerable to fraud.

Many sites posted guides to protecting yourself now that it’s happened. But if you want to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, your only solution is government regulation (as unlikely as that may be at the moment).

The market can’t fix this. Markets work because buyers choose between sellers, and sellers compete for buyers. In case you didn’t notice, you’re not Equifax’s customer. You’re its product.

This happened because your personal information is valuable, and Equifax is in the business of selling it. The company is much more than a credit reporting agency. It’s a data broker. It collects information about all of us, analyzes it all, and then sells those insights.

Its customers are people and organizations who want to buy information: banks looking to lend you money, landlords deciding whether to rent you an apartment, employers deciding whether to hire you, companies trying to figure out whether you’d be a profitable customer — everyone who wants to sell you something, even governments.

It’s not just Equifax. It might be one of the biggest, but there are 2,500 to 4,000 other data brokers that are collecting, storing, and selling information about you — almost all of them companies you’ve never heard of and have no business relationship with.

Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You’re secretly tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit. Facebook is the largest surveillance organization mankind has created; collecting data on you is its business model. I don’t have a Facebook account, but Facebook still keeps a surprisingly complete dossier on me and my associations — just in case I ever decide to join.

I also don’t have a Gmail account, because I don’t want Google storing my e-mail. But my guess is that it has about half of my e-mail anyway, because so many people I correspond with have accounts. I can’t even avoid it by choosing not to write to gmail.com addresses, because I have no way of knowing if [email protected] is hosted at Gmail.

And again, many companies that track us do so in secret, without our knowledge and consent. And most of the time we can’t opt out. Sometimes it’s a company like Equifax that doesn’t answer to us in any way. Sometimes it’s a company like Facebook, which is effectively a monopoly because of its sheer size. And sometimes it’s our cell phone provider. All of them have decided to track us and not compete by offering consumers privacy. Sure, you can tell people not to have an e-mail account or cell phone, but that’s not a realistic option for most people living in 21st-century America.

The companies that collect and sell our data don’t need to keep it secure in order to maintain their market share. They don’t have to answer to us, their products. They know it’s more profitable to save money on security and weather the occasional bout of bad press after a data loss. Yes, we are the ones who suffer when criminals get our data, or when our private information is exposed to the public, but ultimately why should Equifax care?

Yes, it’s a huge black eye for the company — this week. Soon, another company will have suffered a massive data breach and few will remember Equifax’s problem. Does anyone remember last year when Yahoo admitted that it exposed personal information of a billion users in 2013 and another half billion in 2014?

This market failure isn’t unique to data security. There is little improvement in safety and security in any industry until government steps in. Think of food, pharmaceuticals, cars, airplanes, restaurants, workplace conditions, and flame-retardant pajamas.

Market failures like this can only be solved through government intervention. By regulating the security practices of companies that store our data, and fining companies that fail to comply, governments can raise the cost of insecurity high enough that security becomes a cheaper alternative. They can do the same thing by giving individuals affected by these breaches the ability to sue successfully, citing the exposure of personal data itself as a harm.

By all means, take the recommended steps to protect yourself from identity theft in the wake of Equifax’s data breach, but recognize that these steps are only effective on the margins, and that most data security is out of your hands. Perhaps the Federal Trade Commission will get involved, but without evidence of “unfair and deceptive trade practices,” there’s nothing it can do. Perhaps there will be a class-action lawsuit, but because it’s hard to draw a line between any of the many data breaches you’re subjected to and a specific harm, courts are not likely to side with you.

If you don’t like how careless Equifax was with your data, don’t waste your breath complaining to Equifax. Complain to your government.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

EDITED TO ADD: In the early hours of this breach, I did a radio interview where I minimized the ramifications of this. I didn’t know the full extent of the breach, and thought it was just another in an endless string of breaches. I wondered why the press was covering this one and not many of the others. I don’t remember which radio show interviewed me. I kind of hope it didn’t air.

Strategies for Backing Up Windows Computers

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/strategies-for-backing-up-windows-computers/

Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 logos

There’s a little company called Apple making big announcements this week, but about 45% of you are on Windows machines, so we thought it would be a good idea to devote a blog post today to Windows users and the options they have for backing up Windows computers.

We’ll be talking about the various options for backing up Windows desktop OS’s 7, 8, and 10, and Windows servers. We’ve written previously about this topic in How to Back Up Windows, and Computer Backup Options, but we’ll be covering some new topics and ways to combine strategies in this post. So, if you’re a Windows user looking for shelter from all the Apple hoopla, welcome to our Apple Announcement Day Windows Backup Day post.

Windows laptop

First, Let’s Talk About What We Mean by Backup

This might seem to our readers like an unneeded appetizer on the way to the main course of our post, but we at Backblaze know that people often mean very different things when they use backup and related terms. Let’s start by defining what we mean when we say backup, cloud storage, sync, and archive.

Backup
A backup is an active copy of the system or files that you are using. It is distinguished from an archive, which is the storing of data that is no longer in active use. Backups fall into two main categories: file and image. File backup software will back up whichever files you designate by either letting you include files you wish backed up or by excluding files you don’t want backed up, or both. An image backup, sometimes called a disaster recovery backup or a system clone, is useful if you need to recreate your system on a new drive or computer.
The first backup generally will be a full backup of all files. After that, the backup will be incremental, meaning that only files that have been changed since the full backup will be added. Often, the software will keep changed versions of the files for some period of time, so you can maintain a number of previous revisions of your files in case you wish to return to something in an earlier version of your file.
The destination for your backup could be another drive on your computer, an attached drive, a network-attached drive (NAS), or the cloud.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage vendors supply data storage just as a utility company supplies power, gas, or water. Cloud storage can be used for data backups, but it can also be used for data archives, application data, records, or libraries of photos, videos, and other media.
You contract with the service for storing any type of data, and the storage location is available to you via the internet. Cloud storage providers generally charge by some combination of data ingress, egress, and the amount of data stored.
Sync
File sync is useful for files that you wish to have access to from different places or computers, or for files that you wish to share with others. While sync has its uses, it has limitations for keeping files safe and how much it could cost you to store large amounts of data. As opposed to backup, which keeps revision of files, sync is designed to keep two or more locations exactly the same. Sync costs are based on how much data you sync and can get expensive for large amounts of data.
Archive
A data archive is for data that is no longer in active use but needs to be saved, and may or may not ever be retrieved again. In old-style storage parlance, it is called cold storage. An archive could be stored with a cloud storage provider, or put on a hard drive or flash drive that you disconnect and put in the closet, or mail to your brother in Idaho.

What’s the Best Strategy for Backing Up?

Now that we’ve got our terminology clear, let’s talk backup strategies for Windows.

At Backblaze, we advocate the 3-2-1 strategy for safeguarding your data, which means that you should maintain three copies of any valuable data — two copies stored locally and one stored remotely. I follow this strategy at home by working on the active data on my Windows 10 desktop computer (copy one), which is backed up to a Drobo RAID device attached via USB (copy two), and backing up the desktop to Backblaze’s Personal Backup in the cloud (copy three). I also keep an image of my primary disk on a separate drive and frequently update it using Windows 10’s image tool.

I use Dropbox for sharing specific files I am working on that I might wish to have access to when I am traveling or on another computer. Once my subscription with Dropbox expires, I’ll use the latest release of Backblaze that has individual file preview with sharing built-in.

Before you decide which backup strategy will work best for your situation, you’ll need to ask yourself a number of questions. These questions include where you wish to store your backups, whether you wish to supply your own storage media, whether the backups will be manual or automatic, and whether limited or unlimited data storage will work best for you.

Strategy 1 — Back Up to a Local or Attached Drive

The first copy of the data you are working on is often on your desktop or laptop. You can create a second copy of your data on another drive or directory on your computer, or copy the data to a drive directly attached to your computer, such as via USB.

external hard drive and RAID NAS devices

Windows has built-in tools for both file and image level backup. Depending on which version of Windows you use, these tools are called Backup and Restore, File History, or Image. These tools enable you to set a schedule for automatic backups, which ensures that it is done regularly. You also have the choice to use Windows Explorer (aka File Explorer) to manually copy files to another location. Some external disk drives and USB Flash Drives come with their own backup software, and other backup utilities are available for free or for purchase.

Windows Explorer File History screenshot

This is a supply-your-own media solution, meaning that you need to have a hard disk or other medium available of sufficient size to hold all your backup data. When a disk becomes full, you’ll need to add a disk or swap out the full disk to continue your backups.

We’ve written previously on this strategy at Should I use an external drive for backup?

Strategy 2 — Back Up to a Local Area Network (LAN)

Computers, servers, and network-attached-storage (NAS) on your local network all can be used for backing up data. Microsoft’s built-in backup tools can be used for this job, as can any utility that supports network protocols such as NFS or SMB/CIFS, which are common protocols that allow shared access to files on a network for Windows and other operatings systems. There are many third-party applications available as well that provide extensive options for managing and scheduling backups and restoring data when needed.

NAS cloud

Multiple computers can be backed up to a single network-shared computer, server, or NAS, which also could then be backed up to the cloud, which rounds out a nice backup strategy, because it covers both local and remote copies of your data. System images of multiple computers on the LAN can be included in these backups if desired.

Again, you are managing the backup media on the local network, so you’ll need to be sure you have sufficient room on the destination drives to store all your backup data.

Strategy 3 — Back Up to Detached Drive at Another Location

You may have have read our recent blog post, Getting Data Archives Out of Your Closet, in which we discuss the practice of filling hard drives and storing them in a closet. Of course, to satisfy the off-site backup guideline, these drives would need to be stored in a closet that’s in a different geographical location than your main computer. If you’re willing to do all the work of copying the data to drives and transporting them to another location, this is a viable option.

stack of hard drives

The only limitation to the amount of backup data is the number of hard drives you are willing to purchase — and maybe the size of your closet.

Strategy 4 — Back Up to the Cloud

Backing up to the cloud has become a popular option for a number of reasons. Internet speeds have made moving large amounts of data possible, and not having to worry about supplying the storage media simplifies choices for users. Additionally, cloud vendors implement features such as data protection, deduplication, and encryption as part of their services that make cloud storage reliable, secure, and efficient. Unlimited cloud storage for data from a single computer is a popular option.

A backup vendor likely will provide a software client that runs on your computer and backs up your data to the cloud in the background while you’re doing other things, such as Backblaze Personal Backup, which has clients for Windows computers, Macintosh computers, and mobile apps for both iOS and Android. For restores, Backblaze users can download one or all of their files for free from anywhere in the world. Optionally, a 128 GB flash drive or 4 TB drive can be overnighted to the customer, with a refund available if the drive is returned.

Storage Pod in the cloud

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is an option for those who need capabilities beyond Backblaze’s Personal Backup. B2 provides cloud storage that is priced based on the amount of data the customer uses, and is suitable for long-term data storage. B2 supports integrations with NAS devices, as well as Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers and servers.

Services such as BackBlaze B2 are often called Cloud Object Storage or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), because they provide a complete solution for storing all types of data in partnership with vendors who integrate various solutions for working with B2. B2 has its own API (Application Programming Interface) and CLI (Command-line Interface) to work with B2, but B2 becomes even more powerful when paired with any one of a number of other solutions for data storage and management provided by third parties who offer both hardware and software solutions.

Backing Up Windows Servers

Windows Servers are popular workstations for some users, and provide needed network services for others. They also can be used to store backups from other computers on the network. They, in turn, can be backed up to attached drives or the cloud. While our Personal Backup client doesn’t support Windows servers, our B2 Cloud Storage has a number of integrations with vendors who supply software or hardware for storing data both locally and on B2. We’ve written a number of blog posts and articles that address these solutions, including How to Back Up your Windows Server with B2 and CloudBerry.

Sometimes the Best Strategy is to Mix and Match

The great thing about computers, software, and networks is that there is an endless number of ways to combine them. Our users and hardware and software partners are ingenious in configuring solutions that save data locally, copy it to an attached or network drive, and then store it to the cloud.

image of cloud backup

Among our B2 partners, Synology, CloudBerry Archiware, QNAP, Morro Data, and GoodSync have integrations that allow their NAS devices to store and retrieve data to and from B2 Cloud Storage. For a drag-and-drop experience on the desktop, take a look at CyberDuck, MountainDuck, and Dropshare, which provide users with an easy and interactive way to store and use data in B2.

If you’d like to explore more options for combining software, hardware, and cloud solutions, we invite you to browse the integrations for our many B2 partners.

Have Questions?

Windows versions, tools, and backup terminology all can be confusing, and we know how hard it can be to make sense of all of it. If there’s something we haven’t addressed here, or if you have a question or contribution, please let us know in the comments.

And happy Windows Backup Day! (Just don’t tell Apple.)

The post Strategies for Backing Up Windows Computers appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

How to Provision Complex, On-Demand Infrastructures by Using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda

Post Syndicated from Ben Eichorst original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/how-to-provision-complex-on-demand-infrastructures-by-using-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-lambda/

Many AWS customers are using the power of AWS CloudFormation to customize complex infrastructures. At the same time, they are moving towards self-service for their expanding customer bases. How can complex infrastructure be provisioned on-demand while minimizing customer use of the AWS Management Console?

Let’s say AnyCompany uses AWS services to process sensitive datasets owned by its customers. These customers need to be able to provision their own processing infrastructure on demand. However, AnyCompany doesn’t want the customers to access AWS CloudFormation directly, or see how customer data is processed. How can AnyCompany create resources with CloudFormation templates without exposing proprietary processing methods?

You can use Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda to provide complex, on-demand, data-processing infrastructure to users who have no need to access the AWS Management Console. In this post, we walk through the setup and configuration of working code examples that you (and your customers) can use to provision on-demand infrastructure. This post’s solution combines principles of immutable computing with a method to provide granular access to powerful capabilities available in the AWS Cloud. In this post, you create immutability for an Amazon EC2 instance by provisioning it without an SSH key or any other access mechanism. The instance can’t be altered after it’s launched.

Solution architecture

API Gateway simplifies the creation, management, and deployment of APIs. Integration of API Gateway with Lambda, the AWS serverless compute service, allows for further interaction with the larger family of AWS services. In this post, the Lambda function provisions on-demand CloudFormation infrastructure stacks for our example service’s primary business function:  the calculation of pi.

Two CloudFormation templates are used to provision infrastructure stacks:

  • The primary template
  • The business-function template

The primary CloudFormation template creates the base infrastructure that is shown in the following diagram.

Architecture Diagram

The primary template creates a stack of resources:

  • API Gateway resources
  • The associated AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) security roles
  • An Amazon S3 bucket for the results of the data processed by the business-function template
  • A Lambda function specifically for the purpose of creating multiple iterations of a second repeatable infrastructure. This repeatable infrastructure, contained within the second CloudFormation template, is referred to as the business-function template.

The API created by the primary template allows system users to pass selected parameters to the business-function template, such as cost-center tags, a unique name, and data-processing parameters. The ability to pass parameters allows the business-function infrastructure to adapt to the specific needs of each request. In this post’s example—calculating the first 15,000 digits of pi—the number of digits calculated can be specified in the request initiated by the customer. For your own business function templates, this could be the location of input data or an email address to which results are sent.

In the example business-function template, the template provisions an immutable EC2 instance that calculates a specified number of digits of pi and uploads the results to the S3 bucket. The business-function stack then self-terminates, reducing any potential extra costs.

This architecture allows you, at multiple points, to control access, processing parameters, and workflow.

In the earlier diagram, (1) all access to the AWS Management Console and API for your account’s infrastructure is segregated through the use of API Gateway. Then, (2) IAM role–based restrictions are in place for API Gateway to call the Lambda function. The Lambda function serves to selectively add, subtract, or alter input parameters from external users. The code for this function is embedded in the primary CloudFormation template. You can modify the code to add specific tags for billing information or call other AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB or Amazon RDS to keep a record of which infrastructure is instantiated by which API users.

In our example template, the Lambda function is populated to pass only the required parameters for the business-function template’s calculation of pi. The use of the function restricts the ability of customers to inject unexpected or undesirable parameters. The solution then (3) uses a Lambda execution role to control the Lambda function’s access. Finally, (4) the Lambda function initiates the CloudFormation business-function template by using another IAM role that is restricted to instantiating only the resources required.

The use of an intermediate Lambda function here allows for heavy customization and filtering of the input requests from the customer-facing API Gateway.

Solution Features

By using this API Gateway–based solution, you can benefit in a number of ways:

  • User requests are decoupled from the infrastructure that fulfills those requests.

    This post’s solution removes the need for users to have access to the AWS Management Console. Users can accomplish their infrastructure-backed requests on demand without having any direct access to the console. Additionally, processing methods and infrastructure can be switched in and out without any change to the external appearance of your service. For example, in this post, I could have a containerized solution such as Amazon EC2 Container Services (Amazon ECS) process my pi-calculation service without any visibility to users.

  • Proprietary processing methods and infrastructure are obscured from users.

    The solution in this post can protect the proprietary secrets of your company’s data processing service by obscuring which processing methods you are using and which infrastructure performs the processing. The solution also isolates users from viewing each other’s operations. Without having console access, users cannot determine which running processing stacks are initiated by other users.

  • On-demand infrastructure in specific configurations is created without allowing users to provision arbitrary infrastructure.

    The solution in this post complements the functionality of the AWS Service Catalog. Beyond allowing only preapproved infrastructure and preventing unapproved resources from executing outside your company’s policies, this API Gateway–driven method delivers a specific, processed result. For ease of troubleshooting and integration with DevOps workflows, you can standardize, version, and deploy complicated CloudFormation stacks for networking, compute, storage, and big data processing.

  • Simplification of the user experience.

    This solution also simplifies the user experience. Commands that request a specific result are limited to a single, familiar REST API interface call that delivers only that result.

  • Cost savings through self-terminating infrastructure.

    The architecture of this solution is augmented through the use of self-terminating CloudFormation stacks. Stacks can spin up expensive infrastructure to perform data processing on demand, and self-terminate as soon as the task has completed. This can save you infrastructure costs associated with idle resources.

Walkthrough: Deploy the solution

This post’s example templates create the base infrastructure and a business-function process. The business-function process can instantiate a single EC2 instance to calculate a specified number of digits of pi and deposit the results in an S3 bucket. As noted previously, this example includes built-in logic to automatically self-terminate the business-function template’s CloudFormation stacks after instantiation.

The following steps walk through how to provision this solution for creating on-demand business-function CloudFormation stacks through API Gateway. You can modify the business-function template code for your specialized infrastructure needs. However, you must upload the modified template to your own S3 bucket before completing Step 1 because the business-function template location is required for the primary template’s parameters.

Both templates are designed for use in the us-west-2 region and may require minor modifications to function properly in other regions.

Costs

API Gateway costs are based on the number of API calls requested, and the single call here leads to a near-zero cost. For current pricing, see Amazon API Gateway Pricing. The associated S3 costs and Lambda costs for this post also are negligible because you are not transferring much data or spending a significant amount of time processing serverless code. The most expensive part of this post’s solution is the on-demand EC2 instance cost invoked in each business-function template instantiation. This cost is approximately $0.012 per hour for each run with the default t2.micro EC2 instance. In total, running the solution as presented in this post should cost you less than $0.10 in order to test multiple calculations of pi.

 

1. Deploy the CloudFormation template

First, deploy the primary CloudFormation template for API Gateway and other resources. This template creates IAM policies, IAM roles, API Gateway resources, a new S3 bucket, and a Lambda function.

The primary template requires you to have enabled API Gateway Usage Plans.

You can deploy the primary template and launch the primary stack in the us-west-2 region by selecting the following button. Aside from Stack name, the only required parameters are the exact location of the business-function template in S3 and a unique S3 bucket name as a location for template results.

  1. In the CloudFormation console, on the Specify Details page, type a stack name.
  2. For NewS3BucketName, type a unique name.
  3. For S3CFTLocation, leave the default value. If you adapt the primary template for your own customized business-function template, be sure to include the entire URI of the S3 location (for example, https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/mys3bucket/businessFunctionTemplate.yaml).

Create Stack Screen

  1. On the Options page, no changes are required, but you can specify additional tags if desired.
  2. On the Capabilities page, acknowledge that CloudFormation might create IAM resources, as shown in the following screenshot. To finish creating the stack, choose Create.

 

2. Create an API key for the API Gateway

Though you could modify the example primary template for public use, this example restricts access to execute API calls through the use of API keys. After you create the API key, you must associate the new API key with the usage plan created by the primary template.

  1. In the API Gateway console, choose API Keys.
  2. Choose Actions, Create API key.
  3. For Name, type a name for the key. For API Key, leave the default Auto Generate
  4. (Optional) For Description, type a value.
  5. Choose Save.
  6. Choose Add to Usage Plan and type WrappingApiUsagePlan. This usage plan defaults your Stage to PROD because it is the only configured stage.
  7. To add the key to the usage plan, choose the green check icon. Your key should resemble the following screenshot.
  8. Choose Show and note the API key value for the next step.

3. Initiate a REST API query

Now, initiate a REST API query against the API that you created. in the example curl command below, replace the placeholder API key specified in the x-api-key HTTP header with your API key.

You also need to replace the example URI path with your API’s specific URI. Create the full URI by concatenating the base URI listed in the CloudFormation output for the primary template stack with the primary template’s API call path, which is /PROD/PerRunExecute. This full URI for your specific API call should closely resemble the URI path (e.g. https://abcdefghi.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/PROD/PerRunExecute) in the following example curl command.

curl -v -X POST -i -H "x-api-key: 012345ABCDefGHIjkLMS20tGRJ7othuyag" https://abcdefghi.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/PROD/PerRunExecute -d '{
  "StackName":"MyCalculatePiStack",
  "CostCenter":"12345",
  "DigitsToCalculate": "15000"
}'

When you run the curl command, it executes a POST query to the REST API to instantiate the business-function template and calculate the first 15,000 digits of pi. A successful API query returns information on the curl request as well as CloudFormation API output similar to the following, indicating an “HTTPStatusCode” of 200.

{"StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-west-2:123456789012:stack/MyCalculatePiStack/1234debf-9423-11e7-9a08-50399b8d8a8c", "ResponseMetadata": {"RetryAttempts": 0, "HTTPStatusCode": 200, "RequestId": "0cbabc97-9423-11e7-97b3-395d92028ea7", "HTTPHeaders": {"x-amzn-requestid": "0cbabc97-9423-11e7-97b3-395d92028ea7", "date": "Thu, 07 Sep 2017 23:19:52 GMT", "content-length": "388", "content-type": "text/xml"}}}


4. Examine the output


After the EC2 instance completes its processing and uploads the results to the S3 bucket created by the primary template, you can examine the output. Using the configured t2.micro EC2 instance, instantiation and calculation for the first 15,000 digits of pi takes approximately 5–10 minutes. You can monitor progress in the EC2 console (where you see a new EC2 instance running) or the CloudFormation console (where you see the provisioned stack in a “created” state).


After the first 15,000 digits of pi have been uploaded to the S3 bucket, the EC2 instance self-terminates the stack. You can then download the results file from the S3 bucket, as shown below. The naming convention for pi calculating runs is “PiCalculation” concatenated with an epoch timestamp from the time of execution.




This file contains the instance ID that performed the processing, a time stamp, and the first 15,000 digits of pi. The output should look similar to the following screenshot.




 


5. Clean up


To help minimize your costs, clean up any infrastructure that resulted from following the solution in this post. Remember that you first have to detach the API key that you created from the usage plan in order to delete the primary CloudFormation stack. You can do this by clicking the X for associated usage plans for your API key, as shown in the following screenshot.




You also must empty the S3 results bucket of all files for the bucket to be deleted when the CloudFormation stack self-terminates.


This solution can be adapted to any CloudFormation template encompassing a business function for your service.


Adapt to Your Services


To adapt this example to your own business-function:


    

  1. Write a CloudFormation template that implements your new business function.
    2. 

  2. In the primary template, customize the Lambda resource object code for “PerRunCloudFormationExecutionLambda” to accept and pass on the specific parameters needed by your business function template. Save it with a new name.
    3. 

  3. Upload your custom business-function CloudFormation template developed in step 1 to an S3 bucket with permissions that allow the CloudFormation service to access the template objects. For more information about S3 access control, see Managing Access Permissions to Your Amazon S3 Resource.
    4. 

  4. Start your new stack with the modified primary CloudFormation template. Pass it, as a parameter, the name of your new business function template as a parameter. You can reuse the same API Gateway usage plan created previously, if desired.
    5. 

  5. Test, using your new stack name in place of the bolded content above, and posting an API Gateway query with parameters needed by your new business function.
    6. 



Conclusion


By using API Gateway, you can control complex, on-demand CloudFormation stacks that create AWS infrastructure. When you combine this functionality with self-terminating templates, you can realize significant cost savings. API Gateway also allows for standardization of infrastructure. It can enable your users to instantiate complex and costly architectures on demand and only for as long as your users need them.


Though the solution in this post assumes that the business function is to calculate the first 15,000 digits of pi (a less than profitable venture these days), you can adopt the solution to deliver significant cost savings. For example, instead of a single EC2 instance, the business-function template could instantiate Amazon Redshift (a petabyte-scale data warehouse), Amazon EMR, or any complex processing infrastructure. As with all on-demand AWS services, you pay for the infrastructure only when it is running.


If you have comments about any of this content, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about implementing this solution, start a new thread on the API Gateway forum.

	

	
	




	

		
New UK IP Crime Report Reveals Continued Focus on ‘Pirate’ Kodi Boxes

		

			 		

	


		

		
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/new-uk-ip-crime-report-reveals-continued-focus-on-pirate-kodi-boxes-170908/


The UK’s Intellectual Property Office has published its annual IP Crime Report, spanning the period 2016 to 2017.


It covers key events in the copyright and trademark arenas and is presented with input from the police and trading standards, plus private entities such as the BPI, Premier League, and Federation Against Copyright Theft, to name a few.


The report begins with an interesting statistic. Despite claims that many millions of UK citizens regularly engage in some kind of infringement, figures from the Ministry of Justice indicate that just 47 people were found guilty of offenses under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act during 2016. That’s down on the 69 found guilty in the previous year.


Despite this low conviction rate, 15% of all internet users aged 12+ are reported to have consumed at least one item of illegal content between March and May 2017. Figures supplied by the Industry Trust for IP indicate that 19% of adults watch content via various IPTV devices –  often referred to as set-top, streaming, Android, or Kodi boxes. 


“At its cutting edge IP crime is innovative. It exploits technological loopholes before they become apparent. IP crime involves sophisticated hackers, criminal financial experts, international gangs and service delivery networks. Keeping pace with criminal innovation places a burden on IP crime prevention resources,” the report notes.


The report covers a broad range of IP crime, from counterfeit sportswear to foodstuffs, but our focus is obviously on Internet-based infringement. Various contributors cover various aspects of online activity as it affects them, including music industry group BPI.


“The main online piracy threats to the UK recorded music industry at present are from BitTorrent networks, linking/aggregator sites, stream-ripping sites, unauthorized streaming sites and cyberlockers,” the BPI notes.


The BPI’s website blocking efforts have been closely reported, with 63 infringing sites blocked to date via various court orders. However, the BPI reports that more than 700 related URLs, IP addresses, and proxy sites/ proxy aggregators have also been rendered inaccessible as part of the same action.


“Site blocking has proven to be a successful strategy as the longer the blocks are in place, the more effective they are. We have seen traffic to these sites reduce by an average of 70% or more,” the BPI reports.


While prosecutions against music pirates are a fairly rare event in the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Specialist Fraud Division highlights that their most significant prosecution of the past 12 months involved a prolific music uploader.


As first revealed here on TF, Wayne Evans was an uploader not only on KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay, but also some of his own sites. Known online as OldSkoolScouse, Evans reportedly cost the UK’s Performing Rights Society more than £1m in a single year. He was sentenced in December 2016 to 12 months in prison.


While Evans has been free for some time already, the CPS places particular emphasis on the importance of the case, “since it provided sentencing guidance for the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, where before there was no definitive guideline.”


The CPS says the case was useful on a number of fronts. Despite illegal distribution of content being difficult to investigate and piracy losses proving tricky to quantify, the court found that deterrent sentences are appropriate for the kinds of offenses Evans was accused of.


The CPS notes that various factors affect the severity of such sentences, not least the length of time the unlawful activity has persisted and particularly if it has done so after the service of a cease and desist notice. Other factors include the profit made by defendants and/or the loss caused to copyright holders “so far as it can accurately be calculated.”


Importantly, however, the CPS says that beyond issues of personal mitigation and timely guilty pleas, a jail sentence is probably going to be the outcome for others engaging in this kind of activity in future. That’s something for torrent and streaming site operators and their content uploaders to consider. 


“[U]nless the unlawful activity of this kind is very amateur, minor or short-lived, or in the absence of particularly compelling mitigation or other exceptional circumstances, an immediate custodial sentence is likely to be appropriate in cases of illegal distribution of copyright infringing articles,” the CPS concludes.


But while a music-related trial provided the highlight of the year for the CPS, the online infringement world is still dominated by the rise of streaming sites and the now omnipresent “fully-loaded Kodi Box” – set-top devices configured to receive copyright-infringing live TV and VOD.


In the IP Crime Report, the Intellectual Property Office references a former US Secretary of Defense to describe the emergence of the threat.  


“The echoes of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous aphorism concerning ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ reverberate across our landscape perhaps more than any other. The certainty we all share is that we must be ready to confront both ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’,” the IPO writes.


“Not long ago illegal streaming through Kodi Boxes was an ‘unknown’. Now, this technology updates copyright infringement by empowering TV viewers with the technology they need to subvert copyright law at the flick of a remote control.”


While the set-top box threat has grown in recent times, the report highlights the important legal clarifications that emerged from the BREIN v Filmspeler case, which found itself before the European Court of Justice.


As widely reported, the ECJ determined that the selling of piracy-configured devices amounts to a communication to the public, something which renders their sale illegal. However, in a submission by PIPCU, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, box sellers are said to cast a keen eye on the legal situation.


“Organised criminals, especially those in the UK who distribute set-top boxes, are aware of recent developments in the law and routinely exploit loopholes in it,” PIPCU reports.


“Given recent judgments on the sale of pre-programmed set-top boxes, it is now unlikely criminals would advertise the devices in a way which is clearly infringing by offering them pre-loaded or ‘fully loaded’ with apps and addons specifically designed to access subscription services for free.”


With sellers beginning to clean up their advertising, it seems likely that detection will become more difficult than when selling was considered a gray area. While that will present its own issues, PIPCU still sees problems on two fronts – a lack of clear legislation and a perception of support for ‘pirate’ devices among the public.


“There is no specific legislation currently in place for the prosecution of end users or sellers of set-top boxes. Indeed, the general public do not see the usage of these devices as potentially breaking the law,” the unit reports.


“PIPCU are currently having to try and ‘shoehorn’ existing legislation to fit the type of criminality being observed, such as conspiracy to defraud (common law) to tackle this problem. Cases are yet to be charged and results will be known by late 2017.”


Whether these prosecutions will be effective remains to be seen, but PIPCU’s comments suggest an air of caution set to a backdrop of box-sellers’ tendency to adapt to legal challenges.


“Due to the complexity of these cases it is difficult to substantiate charges under the Fraud Act (2006). PIPCU have convicted one person under the Serious Crime Act (2015) (encouraging or assisting s11 of the Fraud Act). However, this would not be applicable unless the suspect had made obvious attempts to encourage users to use the boxes to watch subscription only content,” PIPCU notes, adding;


“The selling community is close knit and adapts constantly to allow itself to operate in the gray area where current legislation is unclear and where they feel they can continue to sell ‘under the radar’.”


More generally, pirate sites as a whole are still seen as a threat. As reported last month, the current anti-piracy narrative is that pirate sites represent a danger to their users. As a result, efforts are underway to paint torrent and streaming sites as risky places to visit, with users allegedly exposed to malware and other malicious content. The scare strategy is supported by PIPCU.


“Unlike the purchase of counterfeit physical goods, consumers who buy unlicensed content online are not taking a risk. Faulty copyright doesn’t explode, burn or break. For this reason the message as to why the public should avoid copyright fraud needs to be re-focused.


“A more concerted attempt to push out a message relating to malware on pirate websites, the clear criminality and the links to organized crime of those behind the sites are crucial if public opinion is to be changed,” the unit advises.


But while the changing of attitudes is desirable for pro-copyright entities, PIPCU says that winning over the public may not prove to be an easy battle. It was given a small taste of backlash itself, after taking action against the operator of a pirate site.


“The scale of the problem regarding public opinion of online copyright crime is evidenced by our own experience. After PIPCU executed a warrant against the owner of a streaming website, a tweet about the event (read by 200,000 people) produced a reaction heavily weighted against PIPCU’s legitimate enforcement action,” PIPCU concludes.


In summary, it seems likely that more effort will be expended during the next 12 months to target the set-top box threat, but there doesn’t appear to be an abundance of confidence in existing legislation to tackle all but the most egregious offenders. That being said, a line has now been drawn in the sand – if the public is prepared to respect it. 


The full IP Crime Report 2016-2017 is available here (pdf)


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

	

	
	




	

		
Perfect 10 Takes Giganews to Supreme Court, Says It’s Worse Than Megaupload

		

			 		

	


		

		
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/perfect-10-takes-giganews-supreme-court-says-worse-megaupload-170906/


Adult publisher Perfect 10 has developed a reputation for being a serial copyright litigant.


Over the years the company targeted a number of high-profile defendants, including Google, Amazon, Mastercard, and Visa. Around two dozen of Perfect 10’s lawsuits ended in cash settlements and defaults, in the publisher’s favor.


Perhaps buoyed by this success, the company went after Usenet provider Giganews but instead of a company willing to roll over, Perfect 10 found a highly defensive and indeed aggressive opponent. The initial copyright case filed by Perfect 10 alleged that Giganews effectively sold access to Perfect 10 content but things went badly for the publisher.


In November 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. Perfect 10 was ordered to pay Giganews $5.6m in attorney’s fees and costs. Perfect 10 lost again at the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.


As a result of these failed actions, Giganews is owned millions by Perfect 10 but the publisher has thus far refused to pay up. That resulted in Giganews filing a $20m lawsuit, accusing Perfect 10 and President Dr. Norman Zada of fraud.


With all this litigation boiling around in the background and Perfect 10 already bankrupt as a result, one might think the story would be near to a conclusion. That doesn’t seem to be the case. In a fresh announcement, Perfect 10 says it has now appealed its case to the US Supreme Court.


“This is an extraordinarily important case, because for the first time, an appellate court has allowed defendants to copy and sell movies, songs, images, and other copyrighted works, without permission or payment to copyright holders,” says Zada.


“In this particular case, evidence was presented that defendants were copying and selling access to approximately 25,000 terabytes of unlicensed movies, songs, images, software, and magazines.”


Referencing an Amicus brief previously filed by the RIAA which described Giganews as “blatant copyright pirates,” Perfect 10 accuses the Ninth Circuit of allowing Giganews to copy and sell trillions of dollars of other people’s intellectual property “because their copying and selling was done in an automated fashion using a computer.”


Noting that “everything is done via computer” these days and with an undertone that the ruling encouraged others to infringe, Perfect 10 says there are now 88 companies similar to Giganews which rely on the automation defense to commit infringement – even involving content owned by people in the US Government.


“These exploiters of other people’s property are fearless. They are copying and selling access to pirated versions of pretty much every movie ever made, including films co-produced by treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin,” Nada says.


“You would think the justice department would do something to protect the viability of this nation’s movie and recording studios, as unfettered piracy harms jobs and tax revenues, but they have done nothing.”


But Zada doesn’t stop at blaming Usenet services, the California District Court, the Ninth Circuit, and the United States Department of Justice for his problems – Congress is to blame too.


“Copyright holders have nowhere to turn other than the Federal courts, whose judges are ridiculously overworked. For years, Congress has failed to provide the Federal courts with adequate funding.  As a result, judges can make mistakes,” he adds.


For Zada, those mistakes are particularly notable, particularly since at least one other super high-profile company was shut down in the most aggressive manner possible for allegedly being involved in less piracy than Giganews.


Pointing to the now-infamous Megaupload case, Perfect 10 notes that the Department of Justice completely shut that operation down, filing charges of criminal copyright infringement against Kim Dotcom and seizing $175 million “for selling access to movies and songs which they did not own.”


“Perfect 10 provided evidence that [Giganews] offered more than 200 times as many full length movies as did megaupload.com. But our evidence fell on deaf ears,” Zada complains.


In contrast, Perfect 10 adds, a California District Court found that Giganews had done nothing wrong, allowed it to continue copying and selling access to Perfect 10’s content, and awarded the Usenet provider $5.63m in attorneys fees.


“Prior to this case, no court had ever awarded fees to an alleged infringer, unless they were found to either own the copyrights at issue, or established a fair use defense. Neither was the case here,” Zada adds.


While Perfect 10 has filed a petition with the Supreme Court, the odds of being granted a review are particularly small. Only time will tell how this case will end, but it seems unlikely that the adult publisher will enjoy a happy ending, one in which it doesn’t have to pay Giganews millions of dollars in attorney’s fees.


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