Tag Archives: internet

Court Cracks Down on ‘Future’ Pirate Mayweather-McGregor Streams

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-cracks-down-on-future-pirate-mayweather-mcgregor-streams-170821/

This weekend, the undefeated Floyd Mayweather Jr. will go head-to-head with UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

The fight is not just about prestige, but also about money. Some predict that the unusual matchup could pull in a staggering one billion dollars.

A significant portion of this will go to each of the fighters, but rightsholders such as Showtime benefit as well.

People who want to stream the event live over the Internet will have to cough up between $89.95 and $99.99. This will generate millions of dollars in revenue but the numbers would be even higher if it wasn’t so easy to stream the fight through pirate sites.

This is why Showtime took some of the most brazen pirate sites to court last week, demanding an injunction to stop the pirated streams before they even start. In its complaint, the cable TV provider listed 44 domain names which advertise the fight, urging the court to shut them down pre-emptively.

A few of the 44 targeted (sub)domains.

After reviewing the application, United States District Judge André Birotte Jr. approved the preliminary injunction, which forbids the site’s operators from offering infringing streams. The injunction stays in place until August 28, two days after the event.

While the order is a clear win for Showtime, it’s unclear how effective it will be. The sites in question are all believed to be connected to LiveStreamHDQ and its alleged operator “Kopa Mayweather,” who Showtime have battled before.

At the time of writing, the sites are all still online, although the language appears to have changed. Many now have articles explaining how the fight can be watched legally. Whether it remains that way has to be seen.

Updated ‘pirate’ site

Interestingly, the injunction doesn’t mention any domain name registrars or registries. When Showtime applied for similar measures in the past, the company specifically asked to take control of domain names, so these couldn’t be used for any infringing activity.

That said, the current order applies to the defendants and any others who are “in active concert or participation” with them, so this might be enough for domain registrars and other parties to take appropriate action.

Showtime also has the possibility to request updates to the injunction, if needed, but with only a few days to go this has to happen swiftly.

As mentioned earlier, this is not the first time that Showtime has gone after alleged pirates before they get a chance to commit an offense. The company launched similar cases for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao and Mayweather vs. Berto matchups in 2015.

While these efforts were successful in taking a few pirate sites down, there were plenty of unauthorized streams available when the events started. This time it’s not likely to be any different. With hundreds of live streaming sites and tools out there, piracy will remain undefeated.

—

A copy of the preliminary injunction is available here (pdf).

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

Healthy Aussie Pirates Set To Face Cash ‘Fines’, Poor & Sick Should Be OK

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/healthy-aussie-pirates-set-to-face-cash-fines-poor-sick-should-be-ok-170821/

One of the oldest methods of trying to get people to stop downloading and sharing pirated material is by hitting them with ‘fines’.

The RIAA began the practice in September 2003, tracking people sharing music on early peer-to-peer networks, finding out their identities via ISPs, and sending them cease-and-desist orders with a request to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Many thousands of people were fined and the campaign raised awareness, but it did nothing to stop millions of file-sharers who continue to this day.

That’s something that Village Roadshow co-chief Graham Burke now wants to do something about. He says his company will effectively mimic the RIAA’s campaign of 14 years ago and begin suing Internet pirates Down Under. He told AFR that his company is already setting things up, ready to begin suing later in the year.

Few details have been made available at this stage but it’s almost certain that Village Roadshow’s targets will be BitTorrent users. It’s possible that users of other peer-to-peer networks could be affected but due to their inefficiency and relative obscurity, it’s very unlikely.

That leaves users of The Pirate Bay and any other torrent site vulnerable to the company, which will jump into torrent swarms masquerading as regular users, track IP addresses, and trace them back to Internet service providers. What happens next will depend on the responses of those ISPs.

If the ISPs refuse to cooperate, they will have to be taken to court to force them to hand over the personal details of their subscribers to Village Roadshow. It’s extremely unlikely they’ll hand them over voluntarily, so it could be some time before any ISP customer hears anything from the film distributor.

The bottom line is that Village Roadshow will want money to go away and Burke is already being open over the kind of sums his company will ask for.

“We will be looking for damages commensurate with what they’ve done. We’ll be saying ‘You’ve downloaded our Mad Max: Fury Road, our Red Dog, and we want $40 for the four movies plus $200 in costs’,” he says.

While no one will relish any kind of ‘bill’ dropping through a mail box, in the scheme of things a AUS$240 settlement demand isn’t huge, especially when compared to the sums demanded by companies such as Voltage Pictures, who tried and failed to start piracy litigation in Australia two years ago.

However, there’s even better news for some, who have already been given a heads-up that they won’t have to pay anything.

“We will identify people who are stealing our product, we will ask them do they have ill health or dire circumstances, and if they do and undertake to stop, we’ll drop the case,” Burke says.

While being upfront about such a policy has its pros and cons, Burke is also reducing his range of targets, particularly if likes to be seen as a man of his word, whenever those words were delivered. In March 2016, when he restated his intention to begin suing pirates, he also excluded some other groups from legal action.

“We don’t want to sue 16-year-olds or mums and dads,” Burke said. “It takes 18 months to go through the courts and all that does is make lawyers rich and clog the court system. It’s not effective.”

It will remain to be seen what criteria Village Roadshow ultimately employs but it’s likely the company will be asked to explain its intentions to the court, when it embarks on the process to discover alleged pirates’ identities. When it’s decided who is eligible, Burke says the gloves will come off, with pirates being “pursued vigorously” and “sued for damages.”

While Village Roadshow’s list of films is considerable, any with a specifically Australian slant seem the most likely to feature in any legal action. Burke tends to push the narrative that he’s looking after local industry so something like Mad Max: Fury Road would be perfect. It would also provide easy pickings for any anti-piracy company seeking to harvest Aussie IP addresses since it’s still very popular.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Australians who use pirate streaming services will be completely immune to the company’s planned lawsuit campaign. However, Burke appears to be tackling that threat using a couple of popular tactics currently being deployed elsewhere by the movie industry.

“Google are not doing enough and could do a lot more,” he told The Australian (subscription)

Burke said that he was “shocked” at how easy it was to find streaming content using Google’s search so decided to carry out some research of his own at home. He said he found Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk with no difficulty but that came with a sting in the tail.

According to the movie boss, his computer was immediately infected with malware and began asking for his credit card details. He doesn’t say whether he put them in.

As clearly the world’s most unlucky would-be movie pirate, Burke deserves much sympathy. It’s also completely coincidental that Hollywood is now pushing a “danger” narrative to keep people away from pirate sites.

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

The Windows App Store is Full of Pirate Streaming Apps

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/the-windows-app-store-is-full-of-pirate-streaming-apps-170820/

Over the past few years it has become much easier to stream movies and TV-shows over the Internet.

Legal streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon are booming. At the same time, however, there’s also a dark market of thousands of pirate streaming tools.

In recent months, Hollywood has directed many its anti-piracy efforts towards unauthorized Kodi-addons and several popular pirate streaming sites, which offer movies and TV-shows without permission. What seems to be largely ignored, however, is a “store” that hundreds of millions of people have access to; the Windows App Store.

When we were browsing through the “top free” apps in the Windows Store, our attention was drawn to several applications that promoted “free movies” including various Hollywood blockbusters such as “Wonder Woman,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” and “The Mummy.”

Initially, we assumed that a pirate app may have slipped passed Microsoft’s screening process. However, the ‘problem’ doesn’t appear to be isolated. There are dozens of similar apps in the official store that promise potential users free movies, most with rave reviews.

Some of the many pirate apps in the “trusted” store

Most of the applications work on multiple platforms including PC, mobile, and the Xbox. They are pretty easy to use and rely on the familiar grid-based streaming interface most sites and services use. Pick a movie or TV-show, click the play button, and off you go.

The sheer number of piracy apps in the Windows Store, using names such as “Free Movies HD,” “Free Movies Online 2020,” and “FreeFlix HQ,” came as a surprise to us. In particular, because the developers make no attempt to hide their activities, quite the opposite.

The app descriptions are littered with colorful language offering the latest Hollywood movies, and thousands of others, without charge. In addition, the apps display their capabilities in various screenshots, including those showing movies that are not yet available on legal streaming platforms.

Screenshot provided by the Windows app store

Making matters worse, the applications show advertising as well, including high-quality pre-roll ads. Some of these appear to be facilitated through Microsoft’s own Ad Monetization platform. Other apps offer paid versions or in-app purchases to monetize their service.

After hours of going through the pirate app offerings, it’s clear that Microsoft’s “trusted” Windows Store is ridden with unauthorized content. Thus far we have only mentioned video, but the issue also applies to pirated music in the form of dedicated streaming and download apps.

Earlier this year, Microsoft signed a landmark anti-piracy agreement with several major copyright holders, to address pirate search results in the Bing search engine. The above makes clear that search results in the Microsoft Store store may require some attention too.

TorrentFreak reached out to Microsoft, asking for a comment on our findings, but at the time of publication we haven’t yet heard back.

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

TVAddons Decimated Without Trial, Here’s a View of the Damage

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tvaddons-decimated-without-trial-heres-a-view-of-the-damage-170820/

On June 2, a collection of Canadian telecoms giants including Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Videotron, Groupe TVA, Rogers Communications and Rogers Media, filed a complaint in Federal Court against Montreal resident Adam Lackman, the man behind TVAddons.

They claimed that by developing, hosting, distributing or promoting Kodi add-ons, Lackman infringed their copyrights.

On June 9 the Federal Court handed down an interim injunction against Lackman which restrained him from various activities in respect of TVAddons. The process took place ex parte, meaning in secret, without Lackman being able to mount a defense.

The plaintiffs were also granted an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that granted access to Lackman’s premises and allowed him to be interrogated.

As previously reported, the plaintiffs abused the process and only later did a court recognize that the search was designed as both a fishing exercise and a means to take down TVAddons, in advance of any trial on the merits of the case.

In the meantime, with the process grinding through an early appeal, the plaintiffs’ aim of destroying TVAddons has been at least partially achieved. After prolonged downtime, Lackman recently brought the site back under a new URL, TVAddons.co. However, he informs TF that serious damage has been done to a project that previously enjoyed great momentum.

“Google is the most popular site on the internet. If Google was down for a day, you’d check back tomorrow. If it was down for a week, you’d check back a week later. If it was down for a month, maybe you’d try once in a while,” Lackman says.

“However, if Google was down for more than six months, would you return in a year from now? Probably not. And that’s Google, not a small community site like TVAddons.”

Some people are coming back to the site now, but in nowhere near the volumes it previously enjoyed. Here’s a traffic analysis for a typical day at TVAddons.ag before the takedown.

TVAddons.ag daily traffic, before the takedown

And here is how the traffic for TVAddons.co looked a few days ago, a little two weeks after its revival and ten weeks after the initial takedown.

Part of the problem is not being able to get in touch with former users. In addition to taking control of TVAddons’ domains, the legal process also deprived the site of its social media accounts.

For example, TVAddons’ original Twitter account is now dormant. It still has 141K followers but with its passwords in the hands of lawyers, Lackman has been forced to open a new account, TVAddonsco. However, he’s only been able to attract just over 8,000 followers.

Facebook tells a similar story. With no access to the old account (which had 174,229 likes), the new account facebook.com/tvaddonsco is stalling at around 1,600. The situations on YouTube and Instagram are just as bleak.

“They’ve completely muzzled us, there was never anything questionable on our social media, seizing it without actually winning a lawsuit against us is nothing less than censorship,” Lackman says.

“Since we never required user registration, we don’t have the ability to reach the majority of our users without having access to our old social media accounts and notification system, which doesn’t work without our domain name being active.”

Also seized were TVaddons’ Feedburner account, which was used to manage the site’s 100,000 RSS feed subscribers.

“It was in the same account as Google+ and YouTube so we lost that too. We could have easily used it to forward our RSS feed and keep all the subscribers otherwise,” Lackman adds.

This has left TVAddons having to do its best to spread the details of its new locations via social media and a contest that has thus far gained more than 87,000 entries and may be helping things along.

While it’s now common knowledge that many TVAddons-related domains and accounts were seized following the search, Lackman now reveals that other non-connected projects were affected too. Included were the social media pages of several unrelated businesses, the domain name of a hosting website that was around seven years old, and an entirely legal “cord-cutting” information resource.

“Since the cord-cutting phenomenon conflicts with their business interests, seizing that specific social media page effectively destroyed their direct competition,” Lackman says.

“The plaintiffs are trying to destroy their competition rather than innovating. TVAddons provided a lot of legitimate competition for them in terms of content for cordcutters, they’re trying to keep a grasp on the market at any cost.

“Their failure at innovating can be immediately demonstrated by the fact that the NFL recently canceled all broadcast contracts with Canadian TV operators, in favor of DAZN, a new legal sports streaming service that charges half the price they did, with way more content than their sports packages ever offered.”

But despite the setbacks, Lackman appears determined to continue not only with the resurrected TVAddons, but also the legal fight against the Canadian broadcasting giants intent on his destruction.

At the time of writing the site’s fundraiser has generated more than $27,000 in 15 days but TF understands that this might only be 5 to 10 percent of the final sum required when all bills are counted. It’s hoped that new methods of donating and assistance from friendly website operators might give the campaign an additional boost but in the meantime, Lackman is expressing gratitude for the efforts so far.

It’s hard to say whether TVAddons will once again reach the heights achieved at its peak but after taking years to build up a following, the odds are certainly stacked against it.

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

On ISO standardization of blockchains

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/08/on-iso-standardization-of-blockchains.html

So ISO, the primary international standards organization, is seeking to standardize blockchain technologies. On the surface, this seems a reasonable idea, creating a common standard that everyone can interoperate with.

But it can be silly idea in practice. I mean, it should not be assumed that this is a good thing to do.

The value of official standards

You don’t need the official imprimatur of a government committee for something to be a “standard”. The Internet itself is a prime example of that.

In the 1980s, the ISO and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) pursued competing standards for creating a world-wide “internet”. The IETF was an informal group of technologist that had essentially no official standing.

The ISO version of the Internet failed. Their process was to bring multiple stakeholders from business, government, and universities together in committees to debate competing interests. The result was something so horrible that it could never work in practice.

The IETF succeeded. It consisted of engineers just building things. Rather than officially “standardized”, these things were “described”, so that others knew enough to build their own version that interoperated. Once lots of different people built interoperating versions of something, then it became a “standard”.

In other words, the way the Internet came to be, standardization followed interoperability — it didn’t create interoperability.

In the end, the ISO gave up on their standards and adopted the IETF standards. The ISO brought no value to the development of Internet standards. Whether they ratified the Internet’s “TCP/IP” standard, ignored it, or condemned it, the Internet would exist today anyway, and a competing ISO-blessed internetwork would not.

The same question exists for blockchain technologies. Groups are off busy innovating quickly, creating their own standards. If the ISO blesses one, or creates its own, it’s unlikely to have any impact on interoperability.

Blockchain vs. chaining blocks

The excitement over blockchains is largely driven by people who don’t know the details, who don’t understand the difference between a blockchain like Bitcoin and the problem they are trying to solve.

Consider a record keeping system, especially public records. Storing them in a blockchain seems like a natural idea.

But in fact, it’s a terrible idea. A Bitcoin-style blockchain has a lot of features you don’t want, like “proof-of-work” signing. It is also missing necessary features, like bulk storage with redundancy (backups). Sure, Bitcoin has redundancy, but by brute force, storing the blockchain in thousands of places around the Internet. This is far from what a public records system would need, which would store a lot more data with far fewer backup copies (fewer than 10).

The only real overlap between Bitcoin and a public records system is a “signing chain”. But this is something that already existed before Bitcoin. It’s what Bitcoin blockchain was built on top of — it’s not the blockchain itself.

It’s like people discovering “cryptography” for the first time when they looked at Bitcoin, ignoring the thousand year history of crypto, and now every time they see a need for “crypto” they think “Bitcoin blockchain”.

Consensus and forking

The entire point of Bitcoin, the reason it was created, was as the antithesis to centralized standardization like ISO. Standardizing blockchains misses the entire point of their existence. The Bitcoin manifesto is that standardization comes from acclamation not proclamation, and that many different standards are preferable to a single one.

This is not just a theoretical idea but one built into Bitcoin’s blockchain technology. “Consensus” is achieved by the proof-of-work mechanism, so that those who do the most work are the ones that drive the consensus. When irreconcilable differences arise, the blockchain “forks”, with each side continuing on with their now non-interoperable blockchains. Such forks are not a sin, but part of the natural evolution.

We saw this with the recent fork of Bitcoin. There are now so many transactions that they exceed the size of blocks. One group chose a change to make transactions smaller. Another group chose a change to make block sizes larger.

It is this problem, of consensus, that is the innovation that Bitcoin created with blockchains, not the chain signing of public transaction records.

Ethereum

What “blockchain standardization” is going to mean in practice is not the blockchain itself, but trying to standardize the Ethereum version. What makes Ethereum different is the “smart contracts” programming language, which has financial institutions excited.

This is a bad idea because from a cybersecurity perspective, Ethereum’s programming language is flawed. Different bugs in “smart contracts” have led to multiple $100-million hacks, such as the infamous “DAO collapse”.

While it has interesting possibilities, we should be scared of standardizing Ethereum’s language before it works.

Conclusion

People who matter are too busy innovating, creating their own blockchain standards. There is little that the ISO can do to improve this. Their official imprimatur is not needed to foster innovation and interoperability — if they are consequential at anything, it’ll just be interfering.

Streaming Service iflix Buys Shows Based on Piracy Data

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/streaming-service-iflix-buys-shows-based-on-piracy-data-170819/

When major movie and TV companies discuss piracy they often mention the massive losses incurred as a result of unauthorized downloads and streams.

However, this unofficial market also offers a valuable pool of often publicly available data on the media consumption habits of a relatively young generation.

Many believe that piracy is in part a market signal showing copyright holders what consumers want. This makes piracy statistics key business intelligence, which some companies have started to realize.

Netflix, for example, previously said that their offering is partly based on what shows do well on BitTorrent networks and other pirate sites. In addition, the streaming service also uses piracy to figure out how much they can charge in a country. They are not alone.

Other major entertainment companies also keep a close eye on piracy, using this data to their advantage. This includes the Asia-based streaming portal iFlix, which recently secured $133 million in funding and boasts to have over five million users.

Iflix co-founder Patrick Grove says that his company actively uses piracy numbers to determine what content they acquire. The data reveal what is popular locally, and help to give viewers the TV-shows and movies they’re most interested in.

“We looked at piracy data in every market,” Grove informed CNBC’s Managing Asia, which doesn’t stop at looking at a few torrent download numbers.

Representatives from the Asian company actually went out on the streets to buy pirated DVDs from street vendors. In addition, iflix also received help from local Internet providers which shared a variety of streaming data.

TorrentFreak reached out to the streaming service to get more details about their data gathering techniques. One of the main partners to measure online piracy is the German company TECXIPIO, which is known to actively monitor BitTorrent traffic.

The company also maintains a close relationship with Internet providers that offer further insight, including streaming data, to determine which titles work best in each market.

While analyzing the different sets of data, the streaming service was surprised to see the diversity in different regions as well as the ever-changing consumer demand.

“Through looking at the Top 20 pirated DVDs in every market we are live in, we were surprised to find the amount of pirated K-drama content. In Ghana for example, the number one pirated title is K-drama series called ‘Legend of the Blue Sea’,” an iflix spokesperson told us.

Iflix believes that piracy data is superior to other market intelligence. Before rolling out its service in Saudi Arabia the company made a list of the 1,000 most popular shows and used that to its advantage.

While there is a lot of piracy in emerging markets, iflix doesn’t think that people are not willing to pay for entertainment. It just has to be available for a decent price, and that’s where they come in.

“We believe that people in emerging markets do not actively want to steal content, they do so because there is no better alternative,” the company informs us.

“As consumers become more connected, gaining access to information and cultural influences on a global scale, they want to be entertained at a world-class standard. We set out with the aim of offering an alternative that is better than piracy; by providing unlimited access to high-quality, world-class entertainment, all at the price of pirated DVD.”

There is no doubt that iflix is ambitious, and that it’s willing to employ some unusual tactics to grow its userbase. The company is quite optimistic about the future as well, judging from its co-founder’s prediction that it will welcome its billionth viewer in a few years.

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

Rightscorp Bleeds Another Million, Borrows $200K From Customer BMG

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/rightscorp-bleeds-another-million-borrows-200k-from-customer-bmg-170819/

Anti-piracy outfit Rightscorp is one of the many companies trying to turn Internet piracy into profit. The company has a somewhat novel approach but has difficulty balancing the books.

Essentially, Rightscorp operates like other so-called copyright-trolling operations, in that it monitors alleged offenders on BitTorrent networks, tracks them to their ISPs, then attempts to extract a cash settlement. Rightscorp does this by sending DMCA notices with settlement agreements attached, in the hope that at-this-point-anonymous Internet users break cover in panic. This can lead to a $20 or $30 ‘fine’ or in some cases dozens of multiples of that.

But despite settling hundreds of thousands of these cases, profit has thus far proven elusive, with the company hemorrhaging millions in losses. The company has just filed its results for the first half of 2017 and they contain more bad news.

In the six months ended June 2017, revenues obtained from copyright settlements reached just $138,514, that’s 35% down on the $214,326 generated in the same period last year. However, the company did manage to book $148,332 in “consulting revenue” in the first half of this year, a business area that generated no revenue in 2016.

Overall then, total revenue for the six month period was $286,846 – up from $214,326 last year. While that’s a better picture in its own right, Rightscorp has a lot of costs attached to its business.

After paying out $69,257 to copyright holders and absorbing $1,190,696 in general and administrative costs, among other things, the company’s total operating expenses topped out at $1,296,127 for the first six months of the year.

To make a long story short, the company made a net loss of $1,068,422, which was more than the $995,265 loss it made last year and despite improved revenues. The company ended June with just $1,725 in cash.

“These factors raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern within one year after the date that the financial statements are issued,” the company’s latest statement reads.

This hanging-by-a-thread narrative has followed Rightscorp for the past few years but there’s information in the latest accounts which indicates how bad things were at the start of the year.

In January 2016, Rightscorp and several copyright holders, including Hollywood studio Warner Bros, agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over intimidating robo-calls that were made to alleged infringers. The defendants agreed to set aside $450,000 to cover the costs, and it appears that Rightscorp was liable for at least $200,000 of that.

Rightscorp hasn’t exactly been flush with cash, so it was interesting to read that its main consumer piracy settlement client, music publisher BMG, actually stepped in to pay off the class-action settlement.

“At December 31, 2016, the Company had accrued $200,000 related to the settlement of a class action complaint. On January 7, 2017, BMG Rights Management (US) LLC (“BMG”) advanced the Company $200,000, which was used to pay off the settlement. The advance from BMG is to be applied to future billings from the Company to BMG for consulting services,” Rightscorp’s filing reads.

With Rightscorp’s future BMG revenue now being gobbled up by what appears to be loan repayments, it becomes difficult to see how the anti-piracy outfit can make enough money to pay off the $200,000 debt. However, its filing notes that on July 21, 2017, the company issued “an aggregate of 10,000,000 shares of common stock to an investor for a purchase price of $200,000.” While that amount matches the BMG debt, the filing doesn’t reveal who the investor is.

The filing also reveals that on July 31, Rightscorp entered into two agreements to provide services “to a holder of multiple copyrights.” The copyright holder isn’t named, but the deal reveals that it’s in Rightscorp’s best interests to get immediate payment from people to whom it sends cash settlement demands.

“[Rightscorp] will receive 50% of all gross proceeds of any settlement revenue received by the Client from pre-lawsuit ‘advisory notices,’ and 37.5% of all gross proceeds received by the Client from ‘final warning’ notices sent immediately prior to a lawsuit,” the filing notes.

Also of interest is that Rightscorp has offered not to work with any of the copyright holders’ direct competitors, providing certain thresholds are met – $10,000 revenue in the first month to $100,000 after 12 months. But there’s more to the deal.

Rightscorp will also provide a number of services to this client including detecting and verifying copyright works on P2P networks, providing information about infringers, plus reporting, litigation support, and copyright protection advisory services.

For this, Rightscorp will earn $10,000 for the first three months, rising to $85,000 per month after 16 months, valuable revenue for a company fighting for its life.

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

Court Orders Aussie ISPs to Block Dozens of Pirate Sites

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-aussie-isps-to-block-dozens-of-pirate-sites-170818/

Rather than taking site operators to court, copyright holders increasingly demand that Internet providers should block access to ‘pirate’ domains.

As a result, courts all around the world have ordered ISPs to block subscriber access to various pirate sites.

This is also happening in Australia where the first blockades were issued late last year. In December, the Federal Court ordered ISPs to block The Pirate Bay and several other sites, which happened soon after.

However, as is often the case with website blocking, one order is not enough as there are still plenty of pirate sites and proxies readily available. So, several rightsholders including movie studio Village Roadshow and local broadcaster Foxtel went back to court.

Today the Federal Court ruled on two applications that cover 59 pirate sites in total, including many popular torrent and streaming portals.

The first order was issued by Justice John Nicholas, who directed several Internet providers including IINet, Telstra, and TPG to block access to several pirate sites. The request came from Village Roadshow, which was backed by several major Hollywood studios.

The order directs the ISPs to stop passing on traffic to 41 torrent and streaming platforms including Demonoid, RARBG, EZTV, YTS, Gomovies, and Fmovies. The full list of blocked domains is even longer, as it also covers several proxies.

“The infringement or facilitation of infringement by the Online Locations is flagrant and reflect a blatant disregard for the rights of copyright owners,” the order reads.

“By way of illustration, one of the Online Locations is accessible via the domain name ‘istole.it’ and it and many others include notices encouraging users to implement technology to frustrate any legal action that might be taken by copyright owners.”

In a separate order handed down by Federal Court Judge Stephen Burley, another 17 sites are ordered blocked following a request from Foxtel. This includes popular pirate sites such as 1337x, Torlock, Putlocker, YesMovies, Vumoo, and LosMovies.

The second order also includes a wide variety of alternative locations, including proxies, which brings the total number of targeted domain names to more than 160.

As highlighted by SHM, the orders coincide with the launch of a new anti-piracy campaign dubbed “The Price of Piracy,” which is organized by Creative Content Australia. Lori Flekser, Executive director of the non-profit organization, believes that the blockades will help to significantly deter piracy.

“Not only is there decreasing traffic to pirate sites but there is a subsequent increase in traffic to legal sites,” she said.

At the same time, she warns people not to visit proxy and mirror sites, as these could be dangerous. This message is also repeated by her organization’s campaign, which warns that pirate sites can be filled with ransomware, spyware, trojans, viruses, bots, rootkits and worms.

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

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 9

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2017/08/18/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-9/

Matt from Grafana NYC spent the week visiting Stockholm to focus on v5.0 with Torkel. Despite warnings otherwise, the weather has been beautiful, making a nice backdrop for many UX discussions. Very, very excited to soon show what we’ve been working on.

Latest Release

Grafana v4.4.3 is Available for download

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

Grafana <3 Prometheus

Our very own Carl Bergquist spoke at PromCon 2017 yesterday in Munich, highlighting recent Grafana features and enhancements.

We also used the opportunity to debut our coming Prometheus query editor with a load of new functionality; seems the community approves,
in fact this is our most popular tweet ever!

From the Blogosphere

  • Wikimedia Metrics: A tweet this week reminded us of the public metrics Wikimedia exposes using Grafana. Exploring the performance stats in real time for the 5th mot popular site on the internet is pretty fun.

  • Creating Grafana Annotations with InfluxDB: Nice short article by Max Chadwick showing how to quickly add InfluxDB as a source for Grafana annotations.

This week’s MVC (Most Valuable Contributor)

This week’s MVC highlights what is great about Open Source software.

ericslaw
ericslaw submitted his first PR to a public project this past week. Speaking from personal experience, submitting a PR can feel daunting and and we were lucky that he chose Grafana. Even the smallest contributions, like Eric fixing a bogus link within our templating has big impact.

Tweet of the Week

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

Seems the excitement about Prometheus and Grafana has also caught the attention of a certain superhero.

What do you think?

That wraps up another issue. Hope you’re finding these roundups valuable. Let us know how we’re doing! Submit a comment on this article below, or post something at our community forum. Help us make this better!

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

Analyzing AWS Cost and Usage Reports with Looker and Amazon Athena

Post Syndicated from Dillon Morrison original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/analyzing-aws-cost-and-usage-reports-with-looker-and-amazon-athena/

This is a guest post by Dillon Morrison at Looker. Looker is, in their own words, “a new kind of analytics platform–letting everyone in your business make better decisions by getting reliable answers from a tool they can use.” 

As the breadth of AWS products and services continues to grow, customers are able to more easily move their technology stack and core infrastructure to AWS. One of the attractive benefits of AWS is the cost savings. Rather than paying upfront capital expenses for large on-premises systems, customers can instead pay variables expenses for on-demand services. To further reduce expenses AWS users can reserve resources for specific periods of time, and automatically scale resources as needed.

The AWS Cost Explorer is great for aggregated reporting. However, conducting analysis on the raw data using the flexibility and power of SQL allows for much richer detail and insight, and can be the better choice for the long term. Thankfully, with the introduction of Amazon Athena, monitoring and managing these costs is now easier than ever.

In the post, I walk through setting up the data pipeline for cost and usage reports, Amazon S3, and Athena, and discuss some of the most common levers for cost savings. I surface tables through Looker, which comes with a host of pre-built data models and dashboards to make analysis of your cost and usage data simple and intuitive.

Analysis with Athena

With Athena, there’s no need to create hundreds of Excel reports, move data around, or deploy clusters to house and process data. Athena uses Apache Hive’s DDL to create tables, and the Presto querying engine to process queries. Analysis can be performed directly on raw data in S3. Conveniently, AWS exports raw cost and usage data directly into a user-specified S3 bucket, making it simple to start querying with Athena quickly. This makes continuous monitoring of costs virtually seamless, since there is no infrastructure to manage. Instead, users can leverage the power of the Athena SQL engine to easily perform ad-hoc analysis and data discovery without needing to set up a data warehouse.

After the data pipeline is established, cost and usage data (the recommended billing data, per AWS documentation) provides a plethora of comprehensive information around usage of AWS services and the associated costs. Whether you need the report segmented by product type, user identity, or region, this report can be cut-and-sliced any number of ways to properly allocate costs for any of your business needs. You can then drill into any specific line item to see even further detail, such as the selected operating system, tenancy, purchase option (on-demand, spot, or reserved), and so on.

Walkthrough

By default, the Cost and Usage report exports CSV files, which you can compress using gzip (recommended for performance). There are some additional configuration options for tuning performance further, which are discussed below.

Prerequisites

If you want to follow along, you need the following resources:

Enable the cost and usage reports

First, enable the Cost and Usage report. For Time unit, select Hourly. For Include, select Resource IDs. All options are prompted in the report-creation window.

The Cost and Usage report dumps CSV files into the specified S3 bucket. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours for the first file to be delivered after enabling the report.

Configure the S3 bucket and files for Athena querying

In addition to the CSV file, AWS also creates a JSON manifest file for each cost and usage report. Athena requires that all of the files in the S3 bucket are in the same format, so we need to get rid of all these manifest files. If you’re looking to get started with Athena quickly, you can simply go into your S3 bucket and delete the manifest file manually, skip the automation described below, and move on to the next section.

To automate the process of removing the manifest file each time a new report is dumped into S3, which I recommend as you scale, there are a few additional steps. The folks at Concurrency labs wrote a great overview and set of scripts for this, which you can find in their GitHub repo.

These scripts take the data from an input bucket, remove anything unnecessary, and dump it into a new output bucket. We can utilize AWS Lambda to trigger this process whenever new data is dropped into S3, or on a nightly basis, or whatever makes most sense for your use-case, depending on how often you’re querying the data. Please note that enabling the “hourly” report means that data is reported at the hour-level of granularity, not that a new file is generated every hour.

Following these scripts, you’ll notice that we’re adding a date partition field, which isn’t necessary but improves query performance. In addition, converting data from CSV to a columnar format like ORC or Parquet also improves performance. We can automate this process using Lambda whenever new data is dropped in our S3 bucket. Amazon Web Services discusses columnar conversion at length, and provides walkthrough examples, in their documentation.

As a long-term solution, best practice is to use compression, partitioning, and conversion. However, for purposes of this walkthrough, we’re not going to worry about them so we can get up-and-running quicker.

Set up the Athena query engine

In your AWS console, navigate to the Athena service, and click “Get Started”. Follow the tutorial and set up a new database (we’ve called ours “AWS Optimizer” in this example). Don’t worry about configuring your initial table, per the tutorial instructions. We’ll be creating a new table for cost and usage analysis. Once you walked through the tutorial steps, you’ll be able to access the Athena interface, and can begin running Hive DDL statements to create new tables.

One thing that’s important to note, is that the Cost and Usage CSVs also contain the column headers in their first row, meaning that the column headers would be included in the dataset and any queries. For testing and quick set-up, you can remove this line manually from your first few CSV files. Long-term, you’ll want to use a script to programmatically remove this row each time a new file is dropped in S3 (every few hours typically). We’ve drafted up a sample script for ease of reference, which we run on Lambda. We utilize Lambda’s native ability to invoke the script whenever a new object is dropped in S3.

For cost and usage, we recommend using the DDL statement below. Since our data is in CSV format, we don’t need to use a SerDe, we can simply specify the “separatorChar, quoteChar, and escapeChar”, and the structure of the files (“TEXTFILE”). Note that AWS does have an OpenCSV SerDe as well, if you prefer to use that.

 

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE IF NOT EXISTS cost_and_usage	 (
identity_LineItemId String,
identity_TimeInterval String,
bill_InvoiceId String,
bill_BillingEntity String,
bill_BillType String,
bill_PayerAccountId String,
bill_BillingPeriodStartDate String,
bill_BillingPeriodEndDate String,
lineItem_UsageAccountId String,
lineItem_LineItemType String,
lineItem_UsageStartDate String,
lineItem_UsageEndDate String,
lineItem_ProductCode String,
lineItem_UsageType String,
lineItem_Operation String,
lineItem_AvailabilityZone String,
lineItem_ResourceId String,
lineItem_UsageAmount String,
lineItem_NormalizationFactor String,
lineItem_NormalizedUsageAmount String,
lineItem_CurrencyCode String,
lineItem_UnblendedRate String,
lineItem_UnblendedCost String,
lineItem_BlendedRate String,
lineItem_BlendedCost String,
lineItem_LineItemDescription String,
lineItem_TaxType String,
product_ProductName String,
product_accountAssistance String,
product_architecturalReview String,
product_architectureSupport String,
product_availability String,
product_bestPractices String,
product_cacheEngine String,
product_caseSeverityresponseTimes String,
product_clockSpeed String,
product_currentGeneration String,
product_customerServiceAndCommunities String,
product_databaseEdition String,
product_databaseEngine String,
product_dedicatedEbsThroughput String,
product_deploymentOption String,
product_description String,
product_durability String,
product_ebsOptimized String,
product_ecu String,
product_endpointType String,
product_engineCode String,
product_enhancedNetworkingSupported String,
product_executionFrequency String,
product_executionLocation String,
product_feeCode String,
product_feeDescription String,
product_freeQueryTypes String,
product_freeTrial String,
product_frequencyMode String,
product_fromLocation String,
product_fromLocationType String,
product_group String,
product_groupDescription String,
product_includedServices String,
product_instanceFamily String,
product_instanceType String,
product_io String,
product_launchSupport String,
product_licenseModel String,
product_location String,
product_locationType String,
product_maxIopsBurstPerformance String,
product_maxIopsvolume String,
product_maxThroughputvolume String,
product_maxVolumeSize String,
product_maximumStorageVolume String,
product_memory String,
product_messageDeliveryFrequency String,
product_messageDeliveryOrder String,
product_minVolumeSize String,
product_minimumStorageVolume String,
product_networkPerformance String,
product_operatingSystem String,
product_operation String,
product_operationsSupport String,
product_physicalProcessor String,
product_preInstalledSw String,
product_proactiveGuidance String,
product_processorArchitecture String,
product_processorFeatures String,
product_productFamily String,
product_programmaticCaseManagement String,
product_provisioned String,
product_queueType String,
product_requestDescription String,
product_requestType String,
product_routingTarget String,
product_routingType String,
product_servicecode String,
product_sku String,
product_softwareType String,
product_storage String,
product_storageClass String,
product_storageMedia String,
product_technicalSupport String,
product_tenancy String,
product_thirdpartySoftwareSupport String,
product_toLocation String,
product_toLocationType String,
product_training String,
product_transferType String,
product_usageFamily String,
product_usagetype String,
product_vcpu String,
product_version String,
product_volumeType String,
product_whoCanOpenCases String,
pricing_LeaseContractLength String,
pricing_OfferingClass String,
pricing_PurchaseOption String,
pricing_publicOnDemandCost String,
pricing_publicOnDemandRate String,
pricing_term String,
pricing_unit String,
reservation_AvailabilityZone String,
reservation_NormalizedUnitsPerReservation String,
reservation_NumberOfReservations String,
reservation_ReservationARN String,
reservation_TotalReservedNormalizedUnits String,
reservation_TotalReservedUnits String,
reservation_UnitsPerReservation String,
resourceTags_userName String,
resourceTags_usercostcategory String  


)
    ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
      FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
      ESCAPED BY '\\'
      LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'

STORED AS TEXTFILE
    LOCATION 's3://<<your bucket name>>';

Once you’ve successfully executed the command, you should see a new table named “cost_and_usage” with the below properties. Now we’re ready to start executing queries and running analysis!

Start with Looker and connect to Athena

Setting up Looker is a quick process, and you can try it out for free here (or download from Amazon Marketplace). It takes just a few seconds to connect Looker to your Athena database, and Looker comes with a host of pre-built data models and dashboards to make analysis of your cost and usage data simple and intuitive. After you’re connected, you can use the Looker UI to run whatever analysis you’d like. Looker translates this UI to optimized SQL, so any user can execute and visualize queries for true self-service analytics.

Major cost saving levers

Now that the data pipeline is configured, you can dive into the most popular use cases for cost savings. In this post, I focus on:

  • Purchasing Reserved Instances vs. On-Demand Instances
  • Data transfer costs
  • Allocating costs over users or other Attributes (denoted with resource tags)

On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances

Purchasing Reserved Instances vs On-Demand Instances is arguably going to be the biggest cost lever for heavy AWS users (Reserved Instances run up to 75% cheaper!). AWS offers three options for purchasing instances:

  • On-Demand—Pay as you use.
  • Spot (variable cost)—Bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity.
  • Reserved Instances—Pay for an instance for a specific, allotted period of time.

When purchasing a Reserved Instance, you can also choose to pay all-upfront, partial-upfront, or monthly. The more you pay upfront, the greater the discount.

If your company has been using AWS for some time now, you should have a good sense of your overall instance usage on a per-month or per-day basis. Rather than paying for these instances On-Demand, you should try to forecast the number of instances you’ll need, and reserve them with upfront payments.

The total amount of usage with Reserved Instances versus overall usage with all instances is called your coverage ratio. It’s important not to confuse your coverage ratio with your Reserved Instance utilization. Utilization represents the amount of reserved hours that were actually used. Don’t worry about exceeding capacity, you can still set up Auto Scaling preferences so that more instances get added whenever your coverage or utilization crosses a certain threshold (we often see a target of 80% for both coverage and utilization among savvy customers).

Calculating the reserved costs and coverage can be a bit tricky with the level of granularity provided by the cost and usage report. The following query shows your total cost over the last 6 months, broken out by Reserved Instance vs other instance usage. You can substitute the cost field for usage if you’d prefer. Please note that you should only have data for the time period after the cost and usage report has been enabled (though you can opt for up to 3 months of historical data by contacting your AWS Account Executive). If you’re just getting started, this query will only show a few days.

 

SELECT 
	DATE_FORMAT(from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate),'%Y-%m') AS "cost_and_usage.usage_start_month",
	COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost ), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_unblended_cost",
	COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN (CASE
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'DiscountedUsage' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'RIFee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'Fee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         ELSE 'Non RI Line Item'
        END = 'RI Line Item') THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_reserved_unblended_cost",
	1.0 * (COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN (CASE
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'DiscountedUsage' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'RIFee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'Fee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         ELSE 'Non RI Line Item'
        END = 'RI Line Item') THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0)) / NULLIF((COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost ), 0)),0)  AS "cost_and_usage.percent_spend_on_ris",
	COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN (CASE
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'DiscountedUsage' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'RIFee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'Fee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         ELSE 'Non RI Line Item'
        END = 'Non RI Line Item') THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_non_reserved_unblended_cost",
	1.0 * (COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN (CASE
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'DiscountedUsage' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'RIFee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'Fee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         ELSE 'Non RI Line Item'
        END = 'Non RI Line Item') THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0)) / NULLIF((COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost ), 0)),0)  AS "cost_and_usage.percent_spend_on_non_ris"
FROM aws_optimizer.cost_and_usage  AS cost_and_usage

WHERE 
	(((from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate)) >= ((DATE_ADD('month', -5, DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CAST(NOW() AS DATE))))) AND (from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate)) < ((DATE_ADD('month', 6, DATE_ADD('month', -5, DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CAST(NOW() AS DATE))))))))
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
LIMIT 500

The resulting table should look something like the image below (I’m surfacing tables through Looker, though the same table would result from querying via command line or any other interface).

With a BI tool, you can create dashboards for easy reference and monitoring. New data is dumped into S3 every few hours, so your dashboards can update several times per day.

It’s an iterative process to understand the appropriate number of Reserved Instances needed to meet your business needs. After you’ve properly integrated Reserved Instances into your purchasing patterns, the savings can be significant. If your coverage is consistently below 70%, you should seriously consider adjusting your purchase types and opting for more Reserved instances.

Data transfer costs

One of the great things about AWS data storage is that it’s incredibly cheap. Most charges often come from moving and processing that data. There are several different prices for transferring data, broken out largely by transfers between regions and availability zones. Transfers between regions are the most costly, followed by transfers between Availability Zones. Transfers within the same region and same availability zone are free unless using elastic or public IP addresses, in which case there is a cost. You can find more detailed information in the AWS Pricing Docs. With this in mind, there are several simple strategies for helping reduce costs.

First, since costs increase when transferring data between regions, it’s wise to ensure that as many services as possible reside within the same region. The more you can localize services to one specific region, the lower your costs will be.

Second, you should maximize the data you’re routing directly within AWS services and IP addresses. Transfers out to the open internet are the most costly and least performant mechanisms of data transfers, so it’s best to keep transfers within AWS services.

Lastly, data transfers between private IP addresses are cheaper than between elastic or public IP addresses, so utilizing private IP addresses as much as possible is the most cost-effective strategy.

The following query provides a table depicting the total costs for each AWS product, broken out transfer cost type. Substitute the “lineitem_productcode” field in the query to segment the costs by any other attribute. If you notice any unusually high spikes in cost, you’ll need to dig deeper to understand what’s driving that spike: location, volume, and so on. Drill down into specific costs by including “product_usagetype” and “product_transfertype” in your query to identify the types of transfer costs that are driving up your bill.

SELECT 
	cost_and_usage.lineitem_productcode  AS "cost_and_usage.product_code",
	COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_unblended_cost",
	COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN REGEXP_LIKE(cost_and_usage.product_usagetype, 'DataTransfer')    THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_data_transfer_cost",
	COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN REGEXP_LIKE(cost_and_usage.product_usagetype, 'DataTransfer-In')    THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_inbound_data_transfer_cost",
	COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN REGEXP_LIKE(cost_and_usage.product_usagetype, 'DataTransfer-Out')    THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_outbound_data_transfer_cost"
FROM aws_optimizer.cost_and_usage  AS cost_and_usage

WHERE 
	(((from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate)) >= ((DATE_ADD('month', -5, DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CAST(NOW() AS DATE))))) AND (from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate)) < ((DATE_ADD('month', 6, DATE_ADD('month', -5, DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CAST(NOW() AS DATE))))))))
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY 2 DESC
LIMIT 500

When moving between regions or over the open web, many data transfer costs also include the origin and destination location of the data movement. Using a BI tool with mapping capabilities, you can get a nice visual of data flows. The point at the center of the map is used to represent external data flows over the open internet.

Analysis by tags

AWS provides the option to apply custom tags to individual resources, so you can allocate costs over whatever customized segment makes the most sense for your business. For a SaaS company that hosts software for customers on AWS, maybe you’d want to tag the size of each customer. The following query uses custom tags to display the reserved, data transfer, and total cost for each AWS service, broken out by tag categories, over the last 6 months. You’ll want to substitute the cost_and_usage.resourcetags_customersegment and cost_and_usage.customer_segment with the name of your customer field.

 

SELECT * FROM (
SELECT *, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY z___min_rank) as z___pivot_row_rank, RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY z__pivot_col_rank ORDER BY z___min_rank) as z__pivot_col_ordering FROM (
SELECT *, MIN(z___rank) OVER (PARTITION BY "cost_and_usage.product_code") as z___min_rank FROM (
SELECT *, RANK() OVER (ORDER BY CASE WHEN z__pivot_col_rank=1 THEN (CASE WHEN "cost_and_usage.total_unblended_cost" IS NOT NULL THEN 0 ELSE 1 END) ELSE 2 END, CASE WHEN z__pivot_col_rank=1 THEN "cost_and_usage.total_unblended_cost" ELSE NULL END DESC, "cost_and_usage.total_unblended_cost" DESC, z__pivot_col_rank, "cost_and_usage.product_code") AS z___rank FROM (
SELECT *, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY CASE WHEN "cost_and_usage.customer_segment" IS NULL THEN 1 ELSE 0 END, "cost_and_usage.customer_segment") AS z__pivot_col_rank FROM (
SELECT 
	cost_and_usage.lineitem_productcode  AS "cost_and_usage.product_code",
	cost_and_usage.resourcetags_customersegment  AS "cost_and_usage.customer_segment",
	COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost ), 0) AS "cost_and_usage.total_unblended_cost",
	1.0 * (COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN REGEXP_LIKE(cost_and_usage.product_usagetype, 'DataTransfer')    THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0)) / NULLIF((COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost ), 0)),0)  AS "cost_and_usage.percent_spend_data_transfers_unblended",
	1.0 * (COALESCE(SUM(CASE WHEN (CASE
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'DiscountedUsage' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'RIFee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         WHEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_lineitemtype = 'Fee' THEN 'RI Line Item'
         ELSE 'Non RI Line Item'
        END = 'Non RI Line Item') THEN cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost  ELSE NULL END), 0)) / NULLIF((COALESCE(SUM(cost_and_usage.lineitem_unblendedcost ), 0)),0)  AS "cost_and_usage.unblended_percent_spend_on_ris"
FROM aws_optimizer.cost_and_usage_raw  AS cost_and_usage

WHERE 
	(((from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate)) >= ((DATE_ADD('month', -5, DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CAST(NOW() AS DATE))))) AND (from_iso8601_timestamp(cost_and_usage.lineitem_usagestartdate)) < ((DATE_ADD('month', 6, DATE_ADD('month', -5, DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CAST(NOW() AS DATE))))))))
GROUP BY 1,2) ww
) bb WHERE z__pivot_col_rank <= 16384
) aa
) xx
) zz
 WHERE z___pivot_row_rank <= 500 OR z__pivot_col_ordering = 1 ORDER BY z___pivot_row_rank

The resulting table in this example looks like the results below. In this example, you can tell that we’re making poor use of Reserved Instances because they represent such a small portion of our overall costs.

Again, using a BI tool to visualize these costs and trends over time makes the analysis much easier to consume and take action on.

Summary

Saving costs on your AWS spend is always an iterative, ongoing process. Hopefully with these queries alone, you can start to understand your spending patterns and identify opportunities for savings. However, this is just a peek into the many opportunities available through analysis of the Cost and Usage report. Each company is different, with unique needs and usage patterns. To achieve maximum cost savings, we encourage you to set up an analytics environment that enables your team to explore all potential cuts and slices of your usage data, whenever it’s necessary. Exploring different trends and spikes across regions, services, user types, etc. helps you gain comprehensive understanding of your major cost levers and consistently implement new cost reduction strategies.

Note that all of the queries and analysis provided in this post were generated using the Looker data platform. If you’re already a Looker customer, you can get all of this analysis, additional pre-configured dashboards, and much more using Looker Blocks for AWS.

About the Author

Dillon Morrison leads the Platform Ecosystem at Looker. He enjoys exploring new technologies and architecting the most efficient data solutions for the business needs of his company and their customers. In his spare time, you’ll find Dillon rock climbing in the Bay Area or nose deep in the docs of the latest AWS product release at his favorite cafe (“Arlequin in SF is unbeatable!”).

 

 

 

Cloudflare Kicking ‘Daily Stormer’ is Bad News For Pirate Sites

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is-bad-news-for-pirate-sites-170817/

“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet.”

Those are the words of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who decided to terminate the account of controversial Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer.

Bam. Gone. At least for a while.

Although many people are happy to see the site go offline, the decision is not without consequence. It goes directly against what many saw as the core values of the company.

For years on end, Cloudflare has been asked to remove terrorist propaganda, pirate sites, and other possibly unacceptable content. Each time, Cloudflare replied that it doesn’t take action without a court order. No exceptions.

“Even if it were able to, Cloudfare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website,” the company wrote just a few weeks ago, in its whitepaper on intermediary liability.

“We’re the plumbers of the internet. We make the pipes work but it’s not right for us to inspect what is or isn’t going through the pipes,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince himself said not too long ago.

“If companies like ours or ISPs start censoring there would be an uproar. It would lead us down a path of internet censors and controls akin to a country like China,” he added.

The same arguments were repeated in different contexts, over and over.

This strong position was also one of the reasons why Cloudflare was dragged into various copyright infringement court cases. In these cases, the company repeatedly stressed that removing a site from Cloudflare’s service would not make infringing content disappear.

Pirate sites would just require a simple DNS reconfiguration to continue their operation, after all.

“[T]here are no measures of any kind that CloudFlare could take to prevent this alleged infringement, because the termination of CloudFlare’s CDN services would have no impact on the existence and ability of these allegedly infringing websites to continue to operate,” it said.

That comment looks rather misplaced now that the CEO of the same company has decided to “kick” a website “off the Internet” after an emotional, but deliberate, decision.

Taking a page from Cloudflare’s (old) playbook we’re not going to make any judgments here. Just search Twitter or any social media site and you’ll see plenty of opinions, both for and against the company’s actions.

We do have a prediction though. During the months and years to come, Cloudflare is likely to be dragged into many more copyright lawsuits, and when they are, their counterparts are going to bring up Cloudflare’s voluntary decision to kick a website off the Internet.

Unless Cloudflare suddenly decides to pull all pirate sites from its service tomorrow, of course.

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

“Public Figure” Threatened With Exposure Over Gay Piracy ‘Fine’

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/public-figure-threatened-with-exposure-over-gay-piracy-fine-170817/

Flava Works is an Illinois-based company specializing in adult material featuring black and Latino men. It operates an aggressive anti-piracy strategy which has resulted in some large damages claims in the past.

Now, however, the company has found itself targeted by a lawsuit filed by one of its alleged victims. Filed in a California district court by an unnamed individual, it accuses Flava Works of shocking behavior relating to a claim of alleged piracy.

According to the lawsuit, ‘John Doe’ received a letter in early June from Flava Works CEO Phillip Bleicher, accusing him of Internet piracy. Titled “Settlement Demand and Cease and Desist”, the letter got straight to the point.

“Flava Works is aware that you have been ‘pirating’ the content from its website(s) for your own personal financial benefit,” the letter read.

[Update: ‘John Doe’ has now been identified as Marc Juris, President & General Manager of AMC-owned WE tv. All references to John Doe below refer to Juris. See note at footer]

As is often the case with such claims, Flava Works offered to settle with John Doe for a cash fee. However, instead of the few hundred or thousand dollars usually seen in such cases, the initial settlement amount was an astronomical $97,000. But that wasn’t all.

According to John Doe, Bleicher warned that unless the money was paid in ten days, Flava Works “would initiate litigation against [John Doe], publically accusing him of being a consumer and pirate of copyrighted gay adult entertainment.”

Amping up the pressure, Bleicher then warned that after the ten-day deadline had passed, the settlement amount of $97,000 would be withdrawn and replaced with a new amount – $525,000.

The lawsuit alleges that Bleicher followed up with more emails in which he indicated that there was still time to settle the matter “one on one” since the case hadn’t been assigned to an attorney. However, he warned John Doe that time was running out and that public exposure via a lawsuit would be the next step.

While these kinds of tactics are nothing new in copyright infringement cases, the amounts of money involved are huge, indicating something special at play. Indeed, it transpires that John Doe is a public figure in the entertainment industry and the suggestion is that Flava Works’ assessment of his “wealth and profile” means he can pay these large sums.

According to the suit, on July 6, 2017, Bleicher sent another email to John Doe which “alluded to [his] high-profile status and to the potential publicity that a lawsuit would bring.” The email went as far as threatening an imminent Flava Works press release, announcing that a public figure, who would be named, was being sued for pirating gay adult content.

Flava Works alleges that John Doe uploaded its videos to various BitTorrent sites and forums, but John Doe vigorously denies the accusations, noting that the ‘evidence’ presented by Flava Works fails to back up its claims.

“The materials do not reveal or expose infringement of any sort. [Flava Works’] real purpose in sending this ‘proof’ was to demonstrate just how humiliating it would be to defend against Flava Works’ scurrilous charges,” John Doe’s lawsuit notes.

“[Flava Works’] materials consist largely of screen shots of extremely graphic images of pornography, which [Flava Works] implies that [John Doe] has viewed — but which are completely irrelevant given that they are not Flava Works content. Nevertheless, Bleicher assured [John Doe] that these materials would all be included in a publicly filed lawsuit if he refused to accede to [Flava Works’] payment demands.”

From his lawsuit (pdf) it’s clear that John Doe is in no mood to pay Flava Works large sums of cash and he’s aggressively on the attack, describing the company’s demands as “criminal extortion.”

He concludes with a request for a declaration that he has not infringed Flava Works’ copyrights, while demanding attorneys’ fees and further relief to be determined by the court.

The big question now is whether Flava Works will follow through with its threats to exposure the entertainer, or whether it will drift back into the shadows to fight another day. Definitely one to watch.

Update: Flava Works has now followed through on its threat to sue Juris. A complaint filed iat an Illinois court accuses the TV executive of uploading Flava Works titles to several gay-focused torrent sites in breach of copyright. It demands $1.2m in damages.

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

New – VPC Endpoints for DynamoDB

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-vpc-endpoints-for-dynamodb/

Starting today Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Endpoints for Amazon DynamoDB are available in all public AWS regions. You can provision an endpoint right away using the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). There are no additional costs for a VPC Endpoint for DynamoDB.

Many AWS customers run their applications within a Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for security or isolation reasons. Previously, if you wanted your EC2 instances in your VPC to be able to access DynamoDB, you had two options. You could use an Internet Gateway (with a NAT Gateway or assigning your instances public IPs) or you could route all of your traffic to your local infrastructure via VPN or AWS Direct Connect and then back to DynamoDB. Both of these solutions had security and throughput implications and it could be difficult to configure NACLs or security groups to restrict access to just DynamoDB. Here is a picture of the old infrastructure.

Creating an Endpoint

Let’s create a VPC Endpoint for DynamoDB. We can make sure our region supports the endpoint with the DescribeVpcEndpointServices API call.


aws ec2 describe-vpc-endpoint-services --region us-east-1
{
    "ServiceNames": [
        "com.amazonaws.us-east-1.dynamodb",
        "com.amazonaws.us-east-1.s3"
    ]
}

Great, so I know my region supports these endpoints and I know what my regional endpoint is. I can grab one of my VPCs and provision an endpoint with a quick call to the CLI or through the console. Let me show you how to use the console.

First I’ll navigate to the VPC console and select “Endpoints” in the sidebar. From there I’ll click “Create Endpoint” which brings me to this handy console.

You’ll notice the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy section for the endpoint. This supports all of the fine grained access control that DynamoDB supports in regular IAM policies and you can restrict access based on IAM policy conditions.

For now I’ll give full access to my instances within this VPC and click “Next Step”.

This brings me to a list of route tables in my VPC and asks me which of these route tables I want to assign my endpoint to. I’ll select one of them and click “Create Endpoint”.

Keep in mind the note of warning in the console: if you have source restrictions to DynamoDB based on public IP addresses the source IP of your instances accessing DynamoDB will now be their private IP addresses.

After adding the VPC Endpoint for DynamoDB to our VPC our infrastructure looks like this.

That’s it folks! It’s that easy. It’s provided at no cost. Go ahead and start using it today. If you need more details you can read the docs here.

Showtime Seeks Injunction to Stop Mayweather v McGregor Piracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sample of the sites targeted by the lawsuit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

let's talk about Threads

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

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

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

Programs

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

Program

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

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

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

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

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

How Processes Work

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

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

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

diagram of how processes work

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

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

How Threads Work

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

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

Process vs. Thread

diagram of threads in a process over time

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

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

diagram of single and multi-treaded process

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

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

Threads vs. Processes

So to review:

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

Processes vs. Threads — Advantages and Disadvantages

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

What about Concurrency and Parallelism?

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

diagram of concurrency and parallelism

Why Choose Process over Thread, or Thread over Process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

activity monitor of Google Chrome

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

Windows Task Manager view

Made it This Far?

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

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

We love to hear from you

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

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

Roku Gets Tough on Pirate Channels, Warns Users

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/roku-gets-tough-on-pirate-channels-warns-users-170815/

In recent years it has become much easier to stream movies and TV-shows over the Internet.

Legal services such as Netflix and HBO are flourishing, but there’s also a darker side to this streaming epidemic. Millions of people are streaming from unauthorized sources, often paired with perfectly legal streaming platforms and devices.

Hollywood insiders have dubbed this trend “Piracy 3.0” are actively working with stakeholders to address the threat. One of the companies rightsholders are working with is Roku, known for its easy-to-use media players.

Earlier this year Roku was harshly confronted with this new piracy crackdown when a Mexican court ordered local retailers to take its media player off the shelves. While this legal battle isn’t over yet, it was clear to Roku that misuse of its platform wasn’t without consequences.

While Roku never permitted any infringing content, it appears that the company has recently made some adjustments to better deal with the problem, or at least clarify its stance.

Pirate content generally doesn’t show up in the official Roku Channel Store but is directly loaded onto the device through third-party “private” channels. A few weeks ago, Roku renamed these “private” channels to “non-certified” channels, while making it very clear that copyright infringement is not allowed.

A “WARNING!” message that pops up during the installation of these third-party channels stresses that Roku has no control over the content. In addition, the company notes that these channels may be removed if it links to copyright infringing content.

Roku Warning

“By continuing, you acknowledge you are accessing a non-certified channel that may include content that is offensive or inappropriate for some audiences,” Roku’s warning reads.

“Moreover, if Roku determines that this channel violates copyright, contains illegal content, or otherwise violates Roku’s terms and conditions, then ROKU MAY REMOVE THIS CHANNEL WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE.”

TorrentFreak reached out to Roku to find out how they plan to enforce this policy, but we have yet to hear back. According to Cord Cutters News, several piracy channels have already been removed recently, with other developers opting to leave the platform.

Roku’s General Counsel Steve Kay previously informed us that the company is taking the piracy problem seriously. Together with various stakeholders, they are working hard to address the problem.

“We actively work to prevent third-parties from using our platform to distribute copyright infringing content. Moreover, we have been actively working with other industry stakeholders on a wide range of anti-piracy initiatives,” Kay said.

Roku is not the only platform dealing with the piracy epidemic, the popular media player software Kodi is in the same boat. Kodi has also taken an active anti-piracy stance but they’re not banning any add-ons. They believe it would be pointless due to the open source nature of their software.

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

OK Google, be aesthetically pleasing

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/aesthetically-pleasing-ok-google/

Maker Andrew Jones took a Raspberry Pi and the Google Assistant SDK and created a gorgeous-looking, and highly functional, alternative to store-bought smart speakers.

Raspberry Pi Google AI Assistant

In this video I get an “Ok Google” voice activated AI assistant running on a raspberry pi. I also hand make a nice wooden box for it to live in.

OK Google, what are you?

Google Assistant is software of the same ilk as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. It’s a virtual assistant that allows you to request information, play audio, and control smart home devices via voice commands.

Infinite Looping Siri, Alexa and Google Home

One can barely see the iPhone’s screen. That’s because I have a privacy protection screen. Sorry, did not check the camera angle. Learn how to create your own loop, why we put Cortana out of the loop, and how to train Siri to an artificial voice: https://www.danrl.com/2016/12/01/looping-ais-siri-alexa-google-home.html

You probably have a digital assistant on your mobile phone, and if you go to the home of someone even mildly tech-savvy, you may see a device awaiting commands via a wake word such the device’s name or, for the Google Assistant, the phrase “OK, Google”.

Homebrew versions

Understanding the maker need to ‘put tech into stuff’ and upgrade everyday objects into everyday objects 2.0, the creators of these virtual assistants have allowed access for developers to run their software on devices such as the Raspberry Pi. This means that your common-or-garden homemade robot can now be controlled via voice, and your shed-built home automation system can have easy-to-use internet connectivity via a reliable, multi-device platform.

Andrew’s Google Assistant build

Andrew gives a peerless explanation of how the Google Assistant works:

There’s Google’s Cloud. You log into Google’s Cloud and you do a bunch of cloud configuration cloud stuff. And then on the Raspberry Pi you install some Python software and you do a bunch of configuration. And then the cloud and the Pi talk the clouds kitten rainbow protocol and then you get a Google AI assistant.

It all makes perfect sense. Though for more extra detail, you could always head directly to Google.

Andrew Jones Raspberry Pi OK Google Assistant

I couldn’t have explained it better myself

Andrew decided to take his Google Assistant-enabled Raspberry Pi and create a new body for it. One that was more aesthetically pleasing than the standard Pi-inna-box. After wiring his build and cannibalising some speakers and a microphone, he created a sleek, wooden body that would sit quite comfortably in any Bang & Olufsen shop window.

Find the entire build tutorial on Instructables.

Make your own

It’s more straightforward than Andrew’s explanation suggests, we promise! And with an array of useful resources online, you should be able to incorporate your choice of virtual assistants into your build.

There’s The Raspberry Pi Guy’s tutorial on setting up Amazon Alexa on the Raspberry Pi. If you’re looking to use Siri on your Pi, YouTube has a plethora of tutorials waiting for you. And lastly, check out Microsoft’s site for using Cortana on the Pi!

If you’re looking for more information on Google Assistant, check out issue 57 of The MagPi Magazine, free to download as a PDF. The print edition of this issue came with a free AIY Projects Voice Kit, and you can sign up for The MagPi newsletter to be the first to know about the kit’s availability for purchase.

The post OK Google, be aesthetically pleasing appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Why that "file-copy" forensics of DNC hack is wrong

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/08/why-that-file-copy-forensics-of-dnc.html

People keep asking me about this story about how forensics “experts” have found proof the DNC hack was an inside job, because files were copied at 22-megabytes-per-second, faster than is reasonable for Internet connections.

This story is bogus.
Yes, the forensics is correct that at some point, files were copied at 22-mBps. But there’s no evidence this was the point at Internet transfer out of the DNC.
One point might from one computer to another within the DNC. Indeed, as someone experienced doing this sort of hack, it’s almost certain that at some point, such a copy happened. The computers you are able to hack into are rarely the computers that have the data you want. Instead, you have to copy the data from other computers to the hacked computer, and then exfiltrate the data out of the hacked computer.
Another point might have been from one computer to another within the hacker’s own network, after the data was stolen. As a hacker, I can tell you that I frequently do this. Indeed, as this story points out, the timestamps of the file shows that the 22-mBps copy happened months after the hack was detected.
If the 22-mBps was the copy exfiltrating data, it might not have been from inside the DNC building, but from some cloud service, as this tweet points out. Hackers usually have “staging” servers in the cloud that can talk to other cloud serves at easily 10 times the 22-mBps, even around the world. I have staging servers that will do this, and indeed, have copied files at this data rate. If the DNC had that data or backups in the cloud, this would explain it. 
My point is that while the forensic data-point is good, there’s just a zillion ways of explaining it. It’s silly to insist on only the one explanation that fits your pet theory.
As a side note, you can tell this already from the way the story is told. For example, rather than explain the evidence and let it stand on its own, the stories hype the credentials of those who believe the story, using the “appeal to authority” fallacy.

Game of Thrones Pirates Arrested For Leaking Episode Early

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/game-of-thrones-pirates-arrested-for-leaking-episode-early-170814/

Over the past several years, Game of Thrones has become synonymous with fantastic drama and story telling on the one hand, and Internet piracy on the other. It’s the most pirated TV show in history, hands down.

With the new season well underway, another GoT drama began to unfold early August when the then-unaired episode “The Spoils of War” began to circulate on various file-sharing and streaming sites. The leak only trumped the official release by a few days, but that didn’t stop people downloading in droves.

As previously reported, the leaked episode stated that it was “For Internal Viewing Only” at the top of the screen and on the bottom right sported a “Star India Pvt Ltd” watermark. The company commented shortly after.

“We take this breach very seriously and have immediately initiated forensic investigations at our and the technology partner’s end to swiftly determine the cause. This is a grave issue and we are taking appropriate legal remedial action,” a spokesperson said.

Now, just ten days later, that investigation has already netted its first victims. Four people have reportedly been arrested in India for leaking the episode before it aired.

“We investigated the case and have arrested four individuals for unauthorized publication of the fourth episode from season seven,” Deputy Commissioner of Police Akbar Pathan told AFP.

The report indicates that a complaint was filed by a Mumbai-based company that was responsible for storing and processing the TV episodes for an app. It has been named locally as Prime Focus Technologies, which markets itself as a Netflix “Preferred Vendor”.

It’s claimed that at least some of the men had access to login credentials for Game of Thrones episodes which were then abused for the purposes of leaking.

Local media identified the men as Bhaskar Joshi, Alok Sharma and Abhishek Ghadiyal, who were employed by Prime Focus, and Mohamad Suhail, a former employee, who was responsible for leaking the episode onto the Internet.

All of the men were based in Bangalore and were interrogated “throughout the night” at their workplace on August 11. Star India welcomed the arrests and thanked the authorities for their swift action.

“We are deeply grateful to the police for their swift and prompt action. We believe that valuable intellectual property is a critical part of the development of the creative industry and strict enforcement of the law is essential to protecting it,” the company said in a statement.

“We at Star India and Novi Digital Entertainment Private Limited stand committed and ready to help the law enforcement agencies with any technical assistance and help they may require in taking the investigation to its logical conclusion.”

The men will be held in custody until August 21 while investigations continue.

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

Thomas and Ed become a RealLifeDoodle on the ISS

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/astro-pi-reallifedoodle/

Thanks to the very talented sooperdavid, creator of some of the wonderful animations known as RealLifeDoodles, Thomas Pesquet and Astro Pi Ed have been turned into one of the cutest videos on the internet.

space pi – Create, Discover and Share Awesome GIFs on Gfycat

Watch space pi GIF by sooperdave on Gfycat. Discover more GIFS online on Gfycat

And RealLifeDoodles aaaaare?

Thanks to the power of viral video, many will be aware of the ongoing Real Life Doodle phenomenon. Wait, you’re not aware?

Oh. Well, let me explain it to you.

Taking often comical video clips, those with a know-how and skill level that outweighs my own in spades add faces and emotions to inanimate objects, creating what the social media world refers to as a Real Life Doodle. From disappointed exercise balls to cannibalistic piles of leaves, these video clips are both cute and sometimes, though thankfully not always, a little heartbreaking.

letmegofree – Create, Discover and Share Awesome GIFs on Gfycat

Watch letmegofree GIF by sooperdave on Gfycat. Discover more reallifedoodles GIFs on Gfycat

Our own RealLifeDoodle

A few months back, when Programme Manager Dave Honess, better known to many as SpaceDave, sent me these Astro Pi videos for me to upload to YouTube, a small plan hatched in my brain. For in the midst of the video, and pointed out to me by SpaceDave – “I kind of love the way he just lets the unit drop out of shot” – was the most adorable sight as poor Ed drifted off into the great unknown of the ISS. Finding that I have this odd ability to consider many inanimate objects as ‘cute’, I wanted to see whether we could turn poor Ed into a RealLifeDoodle.

Heading to the Reddit RealLifeDoodle subreddit, I sent moderator sooperdavid a private message, asking if he’d be so kind as to bring our beloved Ed to life.

Yesterday, our dream came true!

Astro Pi

Unless you’re new to the world of the Raspberry Pi blog (in which case, welcome!), you’ll probably know about the Astro Pi Challenge. But for those who are unaware, let me break it down for you.

Raspberry Pi RealLifeDoodle

In 2015, two weeks before British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake journeyed to the International Space Station, two Raspberry Pis were sent up to await his arrival. Clad in 6063-grade aluminium flight cases and fitted with their own Sense HATs and camera modules, the Astro Pis Ed and Izzy were ready to receive the winning codes from school children in the UK. The following year, this time maintained by French ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet, children from every ESA member country got involved to send even more code to the ISS.

Get involved

Will there be another Astro Pi Challenge? Well, I just asked SpaceDave and he didn’t say no! So why not get yourself into training now and try out some of our space-themed free resources, including our 3D-print your own Astro Pi case tutorial? You can also follow the adventures of Ed and Izzy in our brilliant Story of Astro Pi cartoons.

Raspberry Pi RealLifeDoodle

And if you’re quick, there’s still time to take part in tomorrow’s Moonhack! Check out their website for more information and help the team at Code Club Australia beat their own world record!

The post Thomas and Ed become a RealLifeDoodle on the ISS appeared first on Raspberry Pi.