Tag Archives: making

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.

ВАС, тричленен състав: Отнемането на лицензията на БиБиТи незаконно

Post Syndicated from nellyo original https://nellyo.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/cem_bbt-2/

Както вече е известно, през септември 2016 г. Съветът за електронни медии отне лицензиите за телевизионна дейност  на две търговски дружества  – ТВ Седем и Балкан Българска Телевизия.

На 7 август 2017 г.  петчленен състав на ВАС потвърди отнемането на лицензиите на ТВ Седем за две програми. Решението е окончателно.

На 14 август 2017 г. тричленен състав на ВАС с Решение 10470 се произнася и по решението на СЕМ за лицензията на БиБиТи  ЕАД  –  търговски доставчик на медийни услуги, притежаващ Индивидуална лицензия № ЛРР-01-3-016-01 за доставяне на аудио-визуална услуга с наименование  News 7.

За правното основание, възприето от СЕМ –  неверни декларации  – съдът пише следното:

В конкретния случай повече от очевидно е, че процесният казус не третира отказ за издаване на лицензия,а за прекратяването на вече издадена такава.Прекратяване и отнемането на лицензията, като отделни регулаторни правомощия на СЕМ са обект на регламентация в разпоредбите на чл. 121 и 122 ЗРТ, и в този смисъл е налице ясна и конкретна нормативна регулация на двете хипотези и те не следва да се извличат по тълкувателен път. Нито една от двете разпоредби не предвижда откриване на производство по несъстоятелност като основание за отнемане или прекратяване на вече издадена лицензия за доставяне на аудио-визуална услуга.

 
Съвсем логично

Настъпилите в последствие обстоятелства в правната сфера на лицензианта,не могат да бъдат приравнени на невярно деклариране към момента на кандидатстването за лицензията. Декларацията представлява документ с официален характер, който удостоверява факти и обстоятелства за предходен или настоящият момент. Чл.111, ал. 1, т.6 ЗРТ изрично предвижда кандидатите да декларират, ”че не са налице” а не, че няма да настъпят определени обстоятелства. Декларацията за наличие на конкретни обстоятелства няма характер на обещание занапред.

Съдът

ОТМЕНЯ Решение № РД-05-143 от 13.09.2016г. на Съвета за електронни медии с което се отнема и прекратява индивидуална лицензия № ЛЛР-01-3-016-01 за доставяне на аудио-визуална услуга с наименование News 7, издадена на Балкан Българска Телевизия ЕАД.

РЕШЕНИЕТО подлежи на обжалване пред петчленен състав на Върховния административен съд в 14-дневен срок от деня на съобщаването му на страните по делото, че е изготвено.

В някои медии неточно са приели, че решението за ТВ Седем, което наистина е окончателно, се отнася и до БиБиТи.

Filed under: BG Law Making, BG Media, BG Regulator, Media Law

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.

AWS Summit New York – Summary of Announcements

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-summit-new-york-summary-of-announcements/

Whew – what a week! Tara, Randall, Ana, and I have been working around the clock to create blog posts for the announcements that we made at the AWS Summit in New York. Here’s a summary to help you to get started:

Amazon Macie – This new service helps you to discover, classify, and secure content at scale. Powered by machine learning and making use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Macie looks for patterns and alerts you to suspicious behavior, and can help you with governance, compliance, and auditing. You can read Tara’s post to see how to put Macie to work; you select the buckets of interest, customize the classification settings, and review the results in the Macie Dashboard.

AWS Glue – Randall’s post (with deluxe animated GIFs) introduces you to this new extract, transform, and load (ETL) service. Glue is serverless and fully managed, As you can see from the post, Glue crawls your data, infers schemas, and generates ETL scripts in Python. You define jobs that move data from place to place, with a wide selection of transforms, each expressed as code and stored in human-readable form. Glue uses Development Endpoints and notebooks to provide you with a testing environment for the scripts you build. We also announced that Amazon Athena now integrates with Amazon Glue, as does Apache Spark and Hive on Amazon EMR.

AWS Migration Hub – This new service will help you to migrate your application portfolio to AWS. My post outlines the major steps and shows you how the Migration Hub accelerates, tracks,and simplifies your migration effort. You can begin with a discovery step, or you can jump right in and migrate directly. Migration Hub integrates with tools from our migration partners and builds upon the Server Migration Service and the Database Migration Service.

CloudHSM Update – We made a major upgrade to AWS CloudHSM, making the benefits of hardware-based key management available to a wider audience. The service is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis, and is fully managed. It is open and standards compliant, with support for multiple APIs, programming languages, and cryptography extensions. CloudHSM is an integral part of AWS and can be accessed from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and through API calls. Read my post to learn more and to see how to set up a CloudHSM cluster.

Managed Rules to Secure S3 Buckets – We added two new rules to AWS Config that will help you to secure your S3 buckets. The s3-bucket-public-write-prohibited rule identifies buckets that have public write access and the s3-bucket-public-read-prohibited rule identifies buckets that have global read access. As I noted in my post, you can run these rules in response to configuration changes or on a schedule. The rules make use of some leading-edge constraint solving techniques, as part of a larger effort to use automated formal reasoning about AWS.

CloudTrail for All Customers – Tara’s post revealed that AWS CloudTrail is now available and enabled by default for all AWS customers. As a bonus, Tara reviewed the principal benefits of CloudTrail and showed you how to review your event history and to deep-dive on a single event. She also showed you how to create a second trail, for use with CloudWatch CloudWatch Events.

Encryption of Data at Rest for EFS – When you create a new file system, you now have the option to select a key that will be used to encrypt the contents of the files on the file system. The encryption is done using an industry-standard AES-256 algorithm. My post shows you how to select a key and to verify that it is being used.

Watch the Keynote
My colleagues Adrian Cockcroft and Matt Wood talked about these services and others on the stage, and also invited some AWS customers to share their stories. Here’s the video:

— Jeff;

 

AWS CloudHSM Update – Cost Effective Hardware Key Management at Cloud Scale for Sensitive & Regulated Workloads

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-cloudhsm-update-cost-effective-hardware-key-management/

Our customers run an incredible variety of mission-critical workloads on AWS, many of which process and store sensitive data. As detailed in our Overview of Security Processes document, AWS customers have access to an ever-growing set of options for encrypting and protecting this data. For example, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) supports encryption of data at rest and in transit, with options tailored for each supported database engine (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Aurora).

Many customers use AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to centralize their key management, with others taking advantage of the hardware-based key management, encryption, and decryption provided by AWS CloudHSM to meet stringent security and compliance requirements for their most sensitive data and regulated workloads (you can read my post, AWS CloudHSM – Secure Key Storage and Cryptographic Operations, to learn more about Hardware Security Modules, also known as HSMs).

Major CloudHSM Update
Today, building on what we have learned from our first-generation product, we are making a major update to CloudHSM, with a set of improvements designed to make the benefits of hardware-based key management available to a much wider audience while reducing the need for specialized operating expertise. Here’s a summary of the improvements:

Pay As You Go – CloudHSM is now offered under a pay-as-you-go model that is simpler and more cost-effective, with no up-front fees.

Fully Managed – CloudHSM is now a scalable managed service; provisioning, patching, high availability, and backups are all built-in and taken care of for you. Scheduled backups extract an encrypted image of your HSM from the hardware (using keys that only the HSM hardware itself knows) that can be restored only to identical HSM hardware owned by AWS. For durability, those backups are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and for an additional layer of security, encrypted again with server-side S3 encryption using an AWS KMS master key.

Open & Compatible  – CloudHSM is open and standards-compliant, with support for multiple APIs, programming languages, and cryptography extensions such as PKCS #11, Java Cryptography Extension (JCE), and Microsoft CryptoNG (CNG). The open nature of CloudHSM gives you more control and simplifies the process of moving keys (in encrypted form) from one CloudHSM to another, and also allows migration to and from other commercially available HSMs.

More Secure – CloudHSM Classic (the original model) supports the generation and use of keys that comply with FIPS 140-2 Level 2. We’re stepping that up a notch today with support for FIPS 140-2 Level 3, with security mechanisms that are designed to detect and respond to physical attempts to access or modify the HSM. Your keys are protected with exclusive, single-tenant access to tamper-resistant HSMs that appear within your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). CloudHSM supports quorum authentication for critical administrative and key management functions. This feature allows you to define a list of N possible identities that can access the functions, and then require at least M of them to authorize the action. It also supports multi-factor authentication using tokens that you provide.

AWS-Native – The updated CloudHSM is an integral part of AWS and plays well with other tools and services. You can create and manage a cluster of HSMs using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or API calls.

Diving In
You can create CloudHSM clusters that contain 1 to 32 HSMs, each in a separate Availability Zone in a particular AWS Region. Spreading HSMs across AZs gives you high availability (including built-in load balancing); adding more HSMs gives you additional throughput. The HSMs within a cluster are kept in sync: performing a task or operation on one HSM in a cluster automatically updates the others. Each HSM in a cluster has its own Elastic Network Interface (ENI).

All interaction with an HSM takes place via the AWS CloudHSM client. It runs on an EC2 instance and uses certificate-based mutual authentication to create secure (TLS) connections to the HSMs.

At the hardware level, each HSM includes hardware-enforced isolation of crypto operations and key storage. Each customer HSM runs on dedicated processor cores.

Setting Up a Cluster
Let’s set up a cluster using the CloudHSM Console:

I click on Create cluster to get started, select my desired VPC and the subnets within it (I can also create a new VPC and/or subnets if needed):

Then I review my settings and click on Create:

After a few minutes, my cluster exists, but is uninitialized:

Initialization simply means retrieving a certificate signing request (the Cluster CSR):

And then creating a private key and using it to sign the request (these commands were copied from the Initialize Cluster docs and I have omitted the output. Note that ID identifies the cluster):

$ openssl genrsa -out CustomerRoot.key 2048
$ openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -key CustomerRoot.key -out CustomerRoot.crt
$ openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in ID_ClusterCsr.csr   \
                              -CA CustomerRoot.crt    \
                              -CAkey CustomerRoot.key \
                              -CAcreateserial         \
                              -out ID_CustomerHsmCertificate.crt

The next step is to apply the signed certificate to the cluster using the console or the CLI. After this has been done, the cluster can be activated by changing the password for the HSM’s administrative user, otherwise known as the Crypto Officer (CO).

Once the cluster has been created, initialized and activated, it can be used to protect data. Applications can use the APIs in AWS CloudHSM SDKs to manage keys, encrypt & decrypt objects, and more. The SDKs provide access to the CloudHSM client (running on the same instance as the application). The client, in turn, connects to the cluster across an encrypted connection.

Available Today
The new HSM is available today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), and EU (Ireland) Regions, with more in the works. Pricing starts at $1.45 per HSM per hour.

— Jeff;

ВАС: отнемането на лицензиите на ТВ Седем незаконно

Post Syndicated from nellyo original https://nellyo.wordpress.com/2017/08/14/cem-tv7/

Преди почти година СЕМ с две решения отне лицензиите за телевизионна дейност на две телевизии – ТВ Седем и Балкан Българска Телевизия ЕАД.

Тези телевизии имат славна история, в частност – в последните години – според обвинителния акт на Прокуратурата на Република България   от юли 2017 те имат общо с модела КТБ.

Но в правовата държава отнемането на лицензия става на базата на закон.

Лицензиите са отнети на основание  “установяване на неверни данни в декларациите по чл. 111.” Това са декларации  за  отсъствие на правни пречки, включително че кандидатите за лицензия не са лица, които “през последните пет години, предхождащи кандидатстването за лицензия, са обявени в несъстоятелност или са в производство за обявяване в несъстоятелност или в ликвидация” (чл.105, ал.4, т.5).

Според СЕМ тъй като  през 2016 г. са открити производства за несъстоятелност на двете търговски дружества, се отнемат лицензиите за неверни декларации – нищо че  данните са били верни към момента на подаване на декларацията.  СЕМ намира, че възникването на правните пречки за доставчик, който вече притежава лицензия,

е нарушение на критериите за допустимост за издаването й, което като последица налага принудителното й отнемане.

 ВАС (тричл. състав)    отменя решението на СЕМ за ТВ Седем ЕАД:

СЕМ, в противоречие с лимитативните посочени в закона предпоставки, е отнел индивидуалните лицензии на [фирма] за доставяне на аудио-визуални медийни услуги с наименование „ТV7” и „СУПЕР7” и е заличил от Публичния регистър на СЕМ програми „ТV7” и „СУПЕР7”. Предвид изложеното настоящият състав приема, че обжалваният акт е издаден в противоречие с приложимия материален закон и следва да бъде отменен.

Решението на петчленния състав на ВАС от 7 август 2017 оставя в сила решението на тричленния състав:

[…] проблемът, който очертава параметрите на правния спор, е свързан с въпроса дали лицензията може да бъде отнета на припознатото от органа основание и без ЗРТ да го е уредил нарочно. Отговорът му е отрицателен.

  • а. Отнемането на лицензия по същността си е мярка от категорията на принудителните административни. За да бъде правомерно приложена, основанието на ПАМ, видът и съдържанието й трябва да са изрично уредени със закон – арг. чл. 23 ЗАНН. Подобно разрешение намира разумното си оправдание в интензитета на засягане на правната сфера на адресата на мярката, в частност – прекратяването на породените от лицензионния акт права, и е проявление на общия принцип в публичното право, че на административните органи е разрешено само това, което е изрично предвидено в закона.
  • б. Основанията за отнемане на лицензия са лимитативно установени в чл. 122 ЗРТ. Разпоредените с отмененото решение правни последици не могат да настъпят от други юридически факти извън уредените от закона, а в техния обсег откриването на производство по несъстоятелност на доставчика на медийни услуги не попада. В противен случай би се накърнил принципа за законоустановеност на ПАМ. Само на това основание решението на колективния орган е подлежало на отмяна.
  • в. Дори да се приеме, че в ЗРТ съществува празнота, немислимо е нейното преодоляване и чрез аналогия на закона (с основанията по чл. 125д ЗРТ за заличаване на регистрацията на радио- и телевизионните оператори) или на правото, вкл. посредством правоприлагане по аргумент за по-силното основание в една от четирите му проявни форми, на която се позовава касатора. Аналогията е изключена на самостоятелно основание от изчерпателността на изброяването на предпоставките за отнемане на лицензия, а тя определя и характера на правните норми в текста на чл. 122 ЗРТ, ограничаващ обема на правомощията на СЕМ с упражнения предмет.


ВАС посочва още, че

Отнемането на лицензията е само един от способите по чл. 121, ал. 1 ЗРТ за прекратяването й – вж. т. 2 на текста. Отделно основание с идентични правни последици е прекратяването на юридическото лице, титуляр на лицензията – чл. 121, ал. 1, т. 3 ЗРТ. В случая на производство по несъстоятелност, приключващо с решение на съда по чл. 735, ал. 3 вр. ал. 1 ТЗ, прекратяването на лицензията би било резултат от евентуално постановеното заличаване на търговеца. Т.е. според обективното право разрешаването на колизията между критерия към кандидатите за лицензия и действието на вече издадена при последващо несъответствие с него е поставено в зависимост от изхода на производството по несъстоятелност, който би могъл да рефлектира върху съществуването на правния субект – носител на лицензията, респ. способността му да осъществява дейността, предмет на лицензионния режим.

Filed under: BG Content, BG Law Making, BG Media, BG Regulator, Media Law

New Premier League Blocking Disrupts Pirate IPTV Providers

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/new-premier-league-blocking-disrupts-pirate-iptv-providers-170814/

Top tier football in the UK is handled by the English Premier League (EPL) and broadcasting partners Sky and BT Sport. All face considerable problems with Internet piracy, through free web or Kodi-based streaming and premium IPTV feeds.

To mitigate the threat, earlier this year the Premier League obtained a unique High Court injunction which required ISPs such as Sky, BT, and Virgin to block ‘pirate’ football streams in real-time.

Although the success of the program was initially up for debate, the EPL reported it was able to block 5,000 server IP addresses that were streaming its content. When that temporary injunction ran out, the EPL went back to court for a new one, valid for the season that began this past weekend. There are signs the EPL may have upped its game.

As soon as the matches began on Saturday, issues were reported at several of the more prominent IPTV providers. Within minutes of the match streams going live, subscribers to affected services were met with black screens, causing anger and frustration. While some clearly knew that action was on the cards, relatively few had an effective plan in place.

One provider, which targets subscribers in the UK, scrambled to obtain new domain names, thinking that the existing domains had been placed on some kind of Premier League blacklist. While that may have indeed been the case, making a service more obscure in that sense was never going to outwit the systems deployed by the anti-piracy outfits involved.

Indeed, the provider in question was subjected to much chaos over both Saturday and Sunday, since it’s clear that large numbers of subscribers had absolutely no idea what was going on. Even if they understood that the EPL was blocking, the change of domain flat-footed the rest. The subsequent customer service chaos was not a pretty sight but would’ve been a pleasure for the EPL to behold.

An interesting side effect of this EPL action is that even if IPTV subscribers don’t care about football, many were affected this past weekend anyway.

TF is aware of at least three services (there are probably many more) that couldn’t service their UK customers with any other channels whatsoever while the Premier League games were being aired. This suggests that the IP addresses hit by the EPL and blocked by local ISPs belonged to the same servers carrying the rest of the content offered by the IPTV providers.

When the High Court handed down its original injunction it accepted that some non-Premier League content could be blocked at the same time but since that “consists almost exclusively of [infringing] commercial broadcast content such as other sports, films, and television programs,” there was little concern over collateral damage.

So the big question now is what can IPTV providers and/or subscribers do to tackle the threat?

The first interesting thing to note is not all of the big providers were affected this past weekend, so for many customers the matches passed by as normal. It isn’t clear whether EPL simply didn’t have all of the providers on the list or whether steps were taken to mitigate the threat, but that was certainly the case in a handful of cases.

Information passed to TF shows that at least a small number of providers were not only waiting for the EPL action but actually had a backup plan in place. This appears to have resulted in a minimum of disruption for their customers, something that will prove of interest to the many frustrated subscribers looking for a new service this morning.

While the past few days have been somewhat chaotic, other issues have been muddying the waters somewhat.

TF has learned that at least two, maybe three suppliers, were subjected to DDoS attacks around the time the matches were due to air. It seems unlikely that the EPL has been given permission to carry out such an attack but since the High Court injunction is secret in every way that describes its anti-piracy methods, that will remain a suspicion. In the meantime, rival IPTV services remain possible suspects.

Also, a major IPTV stream ‘wholesaler’ is reported to have had technical issues on Saturday, which affected its ability to serve lower-tier providers. Whether that was also linked to the Premier League action is unknown and TF couldn’t find any source willing to talk about the provider in any detail.

So, sports fans who rely on IPTV for their fix are wondering how things will pan out later this week. If this last weekend is anything to go by, disruption is guaranteed, but it will be less of a surprise given the problems of the last few days. While some don’t foresee huge problems, several providers are already advising customers that VPNs will be necessary.

An IPTV provider suggesting the use of VPNs

While a VPN will indeed solve the problem in most cases, for many subscribers that will amount to an additional expense, not to mention more time spent learning about VPNs, what they can do, and how they can be setup on the hardware they’re using for IPTV.

For users on Android devices running IPTV apps or Kodi-type setups, VPNs are both easy to install and use. However, Mag Box STB users cannot run a VPN directly on the device, meaning that they’ll need either a home router that can run a VPN or a smaller ‘travel’ type router with OpenVPN capabilities to use as a go-between.

Either way, costs are beginning to creep up, if IPTV providers can’t deal with the EPL’s blocking efforts. That makes the new cheaper football packages offered by various providers that little bit more attractive. But that was probably the plan all along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Haughs’ tote-ally awesome Raspberry Pi bag

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

While planning her trips to upcoming educational events, Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Amanda Haughs decided to incorporate the Pi Zero W into a rather nifty accessory.

Final Pi Tote bag

Uploaded by Amanda Haughs on 2017-07-08.

The idea

Commenting on the convenient size of the Raspberry Pi Zero W, Amanda explains on her blog “I decided that I wanted to make something that would fully take advantage of the compact size of the Pi Zero, that was somewhat useful, and that I could take with me and share with my maker friends during my summer tech travels.”

Amanda Haughs Raspberry Pi Tote Bag

Awesome grandmothers and wearable tech are an instant recipe for success!

With access to her grandmother’s “high-tech embroidery machine”, Amanda was able to incorporate various maker skills into her project.

The Tech

Amanda used five clear white LEDs and the Raspberry Pi Zero for the project. Taking inspiration from the LED-adorned Babbage Bear her team created at Picademy, she decided to connect the LEDs using female-to-female jumper wires

Amanda Haughs Pi Tote Bag

Poor Babbage really does suffer at Picademy events

It’s worth noting that she could also have used conductive thread, though we wonder how this slightly less flexible thread would work in a sewing machine, so don’t try this at home. Or do, but don’t blame me if it goes wonky.

Having set the LEDs in place, Amanda worked on the code. Unsure about how she wanted the LEDs to blink, she finally settled on a random pulsing of the lights, and used the GPIO Zero library to achieve the effect.

Raspberry Pi Tote Bag

Check out the GPIO Zero library for some great LED effects

The GPIO Zero pulse effect allows users to easily fade an LED in and out without the need for long strings of code. Very handy.

The Bag

Inspiration for the bag’s final design came thanks to a YouTube video, and Amanda and her grandmother were able to recreate the make using their fabric of choice.

DIY Tote Bag – Beginner’s Sewing Tutorial

Learn how to make this cute tote bag. A great project for beginning seamstresses!

A small pocket was added on the outside of the bag to allow for the Raspberry Pi Zero to be snugly secured, and the pattern was stitched into the front, allowing spaces for the LEDs to pop through.

Raspberry Pi Tote Bag

Amanda shows off her bag to Philip at ISTE 2017

You can find more information on the project, including Amanda’s initial experimentation with the Sense HAT, on her blog. If you’re a maker, an educator or, (and here’s a word I’m pretty sure I’ve made up) an edumaker, be sure to keep her blog bookmarked!

Make your own wearable tech

Whether you use jumper leads, or conductive thread or paint, we’d love to see your wearable tech projects.

Getting started with wearables

To help you get started, we’ve created this Getting started with wearables free resource that allows you to get making with the Adafruit FLORA and and NeoPixel. Check it out!

The post Ms. Haughs’ tote-ally awesome Raspberry Pi bag appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Growing up alongside tech

Post Syndicated from Eevee original https://eev.ee/blog/2017/08/09/growing-up-alongside-tech/

IndustrialRobot asks… or, uh, asked last month:

industrialrobot: How has your views on tech changed as you’ve got older?

This is so open-ended that it’s actually stumped me for a solid month. I’ve had a surprisingly hard time figuring out where to even start.

It’s not that my views of tech have changed too much — it’s that they’ve changed very gradually. Teasing out and explaining any one particular change is tricky when it happened invisibly over the course of 10+ years.

I think a better framework for this is to consider how my relationship to tech has changed. It’s gone through three pretty distinct phases, each of which has strongly colored how I feel and talk about technology.

Act I

In which I start from nothing.

Nothing is an interesting starting point. You only really get to start there once.

Learning something on my own as a kid was something of a magical experience, in a way that I don’t think I could replicate as an adult. I liked computers; I liked toying with computers; so I did that.

I don’t know how universal this is, but when I was a kid, I couldn’t even conceive of how incredible things were made. Buildings? Cars? Paintings? Operating systems? Where does any of that come from? Obviously someone made them, but it’s not the sort of philosophical point I lingered on when I was 10, so in the back of my head they basically just appeared fully-formed from the æther.

That meant that when I started trying out programming, I had no aspirations. I couldn’t imagine how far I would go, because all the examples of how far I would go were completely disconnected from any idea of human achievement. I started out with BASIC on a toy computer; how could I possibly envision a connection between that and something like a mainstream video game? Every new thing felt like a new form of magic, so I couldn’t conceive that I was even in the same ballpark as whatever process produced real software. (Even seeing the source code for GORILLAS.BAS, it didn’t quite click. I didn’t think to try reading any of it until years after I’d first encountered the game.)

This isn’t to say I didn’t have goals. I invented goals constantly, as I’ve always done; as soon as I learned about a new thing, I’d imagine some ways to use it, then try to build them. I produced a lot of little weird goofy toys, some of which entertained my tiny friend group for a couple days, some of which never saw the light of day. But none of it felt like steps along the way to some mountain peak of mastery, because I didn’t realize the mountain peak was even a place that could be gone to. It was pure, unadulterated (!) playing.

I contrast this to my art career, which started only a couple years ago. I was already in my late 20s, so I’d already spend decades seeing a very broad spectrum of art: everything from quick sketches up to painted masterpieces. And I’d seen the people who create that art, sometimes seen them create it in real-time. I’m even in a relationship with one of them! And of course I’d already had the experience of advancing through tech stuff and discovering first-hand that even the most amazing software is still just code someone wrote.

So from the very beginning, from the moment I touched pencil to paper, I knew the possibilities. I knew that the goddamn Sistine Chapel was something I could learn to do, if I were willing to put enough time in — and I knew that I’m not, so I’d have to settle somewhere a ways before that. I knew that I’d have to put an awful lot of work in before I’d be producing anything very impressive.

I did it anyway (though perhaps waited longer than necessary to start), but those aren’t things I can un-know, and so I can never truly explore art from a place of pure ignorance. On the other hand, I’ve probably learned to draw much more quickly and efficiently than if I’d done it as a kid, precisely because I know those things. Now I can decide I want to do something far beyond my current abilities, then go figure out how to do it. When I was just playing, that kind of ambition was impossible.

So, I played.

How did this affect my views on tech? Well, I didn’t… have any. Learning by playing tends to teach you things in an outward sprawl without many abrupt jumps to new areas, so you don’t tend to run up against conflicting information. The whole point of opinions is that they’re your own resolution to a conflict; without conflict, I can’t meaningfully say I had any opinions. I just accepted whatever I encountered at face value, because I didn’t even know enough to suspect there could be alternatives yet.

Act II

That started to seriously change around, I suppose, the end of high school and beginning of college. I was becoming aware of this whole “open source” concept. I took classes that used languages I wouldn’t otherwise have given a second thought. (One of them was Python!) I started to contribute to other people’s projects. Eventually I even got a job, where I had to work with other people. It probably also helped that I’d had to maintain my own old code a few times.

Now I was faced with conflicting subjective ideas, and I had to form opinions about them! And so I did. With gusto. Over time, I developed an idea of what was Right based on experience I’d accrued. And then I set out to always do things Right.

That’s served me decently well with some individual problems, but it also led me to inflict a lot of unnecessary pain on myself. Several endeavors languished for no other reason than my dissatisfaction with the architecture, long before the basic functionality was done. I started a number of “pure” projects around this time, generic tools like imaging libraries that I had no direct need for. I built them for the sake of them, I guess because I felt like I was improving some niche… but of course I never finished any. It was always in areas I didn’t know that well in the first place, which is a fine way to learn if you have a specific concrete goal in mind — but it turns out that building a generic library for editing images means you have to know everything about images. Perhaps that ambition went a little haywire.

I’ve said before that this sort of (self-inflicted!) work was unfulfilling, in part because the best outcome would be that a few distant programmers’ lives are slightly easier. I do still think that, but I think there’s a deeper point here too.

In forgetting how to play, I’d stopped putting any of myself in most of the work I was doing. Yes, building an imaging library is kind of a slog that someone has to do, but… I assume the people who work on software like PIL and ImageMagick are actually interested in it. The few domains I tried to enter and revolutionize weren’t passions of mine; I just happened to walk through the neighborhood one day and decided I could obviously do it better.

Not coincidentally, this was the same era of my life that led me to write stuff like that PHP post, which you may notice I am conspicuously not even linking to. I don’t think I would write anything like it nowadays. I could see myself approaching the same subject, but purely from the point of view of language design, with more contrasts and tradeoffs and less going for volume. I certainly wouldn’t lead off with inflammatory puffery like “PHP is a community of amateurs”.

Act III

I think I’ve mellowed out a good bit in the last few years.

It turns out that being Right is much less important than being Not Wrong — i.e., rather than trying to make something perfect that can be adapted to any future case, just avoid as many pitfalls as possible. Code that does something useful has much more practical value than unfinished code with some pristine architecture.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in game development, where all code is doomed to be crap and the best you can hope for is to stem the tide. But there’s also a fixed goal that’s completely unrelated to how the code looks: does the game work, and is it fun to play? Yes? Ship the damn thing and forget about it.

Games are also nice because it’s very easy to pour my own feelings into them and evoke feelings in the people who play them. They’re mine, something with my fingerprints on them — even the games I’ve built with glip have plenty of my own hallmarks, little touches I added on a whim or attention to specific details that I care about.

Maybe a better example is the Doom map parser I started writing. It sounds like a “pure” problem again, except that I actually know an awful lot about the subject already! I also cleverly (accidentally) released some useful results of the work I’ve done thusfar — like statistics about Doom II maps and a few screenshots of flipped stock maps — even though I don’t think the parser itself is far enough along to release yet. The tool has served a purpose, one with my fingerprints on it, even without being released publicly. That keeps it fresh in my mind as something interesting I’d like to keep working on, eventually. (When I run into an architecture question, I step back for a while, or I do other work in the hopes that the solution will reveal itself.)

I also made two simple Pokémon ROM hacks this year, despite knowing nothing about Game Boy internals or assembly when I started. I just decided I wanted to do an open-ended thing beyond my reach, and I went to do it, not worrying about cleanliness and willing to accept a bumpy ride to get there. I played, but in a more experienced way, invoking the stuff I know (and the people I’ve met!) to help me get a running start in completely unfamiliar territory.

This feels like a really fine distinction that I’m not sure I’m doing justice. I don’t know if I could’ve appreciated it three or four years ago. But I missed making toys, and I’m glad I’m doing it again.

In short, I forgot how to have fun with programming for a little while, and I’ve finally started to figure it out again. And that’s far more important than whether you use PHP or not.

Firefox 55 released

Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/730198/rss

Firefox 55.0 has been released. From the release
notes: “Today’s release brings innovative functionality, improvements to core browser performance, and more proof that we’re committed to making Firefox better than ever. New features include support for WebVR, making Firefox the first Windows desktop browser to support VR experiences. Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure – https – version of sites when possible.”

Uber Drivers Hacking the System to Cause Surge Pricing

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/uber_drivers_ha.html

Interesting story about Uber drivers who have figured out how to game the company’s algorithms to cause surge pricing:

According to the study. drivers manipulate Uber’s algorithm by logging out of the app at the same time, making it think that there is a shortage of cars.

[…]

The study said drivers have been coordinating forced surge pricing, after interviews with drivers in London and New York, and research on online forums such as Uberpeople.net. In a post on the website for drivers, seen by the researchers, one person said: “Guys, stay logged off until surge. Less supply high demand = surge.”

.

Passengers, of course, have long had tricks to avoid surge pricing.

I expect to see more of this sort of thing as algorithms become more prominent in our lives.

[$] Escape from QuickBooks (with data in hand)

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/729087/rss

When a small business contemplates getting away from a proprietary
accounting tool like QuickBooks in favor of free software like GnuCash, the
first order of business is usually finding a way to liberate that
business’s accounting data for input into a new system. Strangely enough,
Intuit, the creator of QuickBooks, never quite got around to making that
easy to do. But it turns out
that, with a bit of effort, this move can be made. Getting there involves
wandering through an undocumented wilderness; this article is at attempt to
make things easier for the next people to come along.

Darth Beats: Star Wars LEGO gets a musical upgrade

Post Syndicated from Janina Ander original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/darth-beats/

Dan Aldred, Raspberry Pi Certified Educator and creator of the website TeCoEd, has built Darth Beats by managing to fit a Pi Zero W and a Pimoroni Speaker pHAT into a LEGO Darth Vader alarm clock! The Pi force is strong with this one.

Darth Beats MP3 Player

Pimoroni Speaker pHAT and Raspberry Pi Zero W embedded into a Lego Darth Vader Alarm clock to create – “Darth Beats MP3 Player”. Video demonstrating all the features and functions of the project. Alarm Clock – https://goo.gl/VSMhG4 Speaker pHAT – https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/speaker-phat

Darth Beats inspiration: I have a very good feeling about this!

As we all know, anything you love gets better when you add something else you love: chocolate ice cream + caramel sauce, apple tart + caramel sauce, pizza + caramel sau— okay, maybe not anything, but you get what I’m saying.

The formula, in the form of “LEGO + Star Wars”, applies to Dan’s LEGO Darth Vader alarm clock. His Darth Vader, however, was sitting around on a shelf, just waiting to be hacked into something even cooler. Then one day, inspiration struck: Dan decided to aim for exponential awesomeness by integrating Raspberry Pi and Pimoroni technology to turn Vader into an MP3 player.

Darth Beats assembly: always tell me the mods!

The space inside the LEGO device measures a puny 6×3×3 cm, so cramming in the Zero W and the pHAT was going to be a struggle. But Dan grabbed his dremel and set to work, telling himself to “do or do not. There is no try.”

Darth Beats dremel

I find your lack of space disturbing.

He removed the battery compartment, and added two additional buttons in its place. Including the head, his Darth Beats has seven buttons, which means it is fully autonomous as a music player.

Darth Beats back buttons

Almost ready to play a silly remix of Yoda quotes…

Darth Beats can draw its power from a wall socket, or from a portable battery pack, as shown in Dan’s video. Dan used the GPIO Zero Python library to set up ‘on’ and ‘off’ switches, and buttons for skipping tracks and controlling volume.

For more details on the build process, read his blog, and check out his video log:

Making Darth Beats

Short video showing you how I created the “Darth Beats MP3 Player”.

Accessing Darth Beats: these are the songs you’re looking for

When you press the ‘on’ switch, the Imperial March sounds before Darth Beats asks “What is thy bidding, my master?”. Then the device is ready to play music. Dan accomplished this by using Cron to run his scripts as soon as the Zero W boots up. MP3 files are played with the help of the Pygame library.

Of course, over time it would become boring to only be able to listen to songs that are stored on the Zero W. However, Dan got around this issue by accessing the Zero W remotely. He set up an online file upload system to add and remove MP3 files from the player. To do this, he used Droopy, an file sharing server software package written by Pierre Duquesne.

IT’S A TRAP!

There’s no reason to use this quote, but since it’s the Star Wars line I use most frequently, I’m adding it here anyway. It’s my post, and I can do what I want!

As you can imagine, there’s little that gets us more excited at Pi Towers than a Pi-powered Star Wars build. Except maybe a Harry Potter-themed project? What are your favourite geeky builds? Are you maybe even working on one yourself? Be sure to send us nerdy joy by sharing your links in the comments!

The post Darth Beats: Star Wars LEGO gets a musical upgrade appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Steal This Show S03E06: ‘The Crypto-Financier Of The Underground’

Post Syndicated from J.J. King original https://torrentfreak.com/steal-show-s03e06-crypto-financier-underground/

stslogo180If you enjoy this episode, consider becoming a patron and getting involved with the show. Check out Steal This Show’s Patreon campaign: support us and get all kinds of fantastic benefits!

In this episode, we meet Dan Hassan, a very early Bitcoin enthusiast who’s taking a different approach to making use of his cryptocurrency wealth. Instead of moving to Silicon Valley, buying a Tesla and funding dubious startups, Dan’s helping activists and progressives find their feet in crypto.

His aim is to create an extended gang of independently wealthy individuals who can dedicate themselves to disruption and the building of radical, new social alternatives. What could be more STEAL THIS SHOW?

*Please note, although we did manage to screw some crypto tips out of Dan, nothing in this show is to intended as financial advice. These are weird times. Literally no one can predict what’s going to happen!
—

Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary, and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary, and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guest: Robert Barat and Rob Vincent

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Riley Byrne
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

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

Court Won’t Drop Case Against Alleged KickassTorrents Owner

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-wont-drop-case-against-alleged-kickasstorrents-owner-170804/

kickasstorrents_500x500Last summer, Polish law enforcement officers arrested Artem Vaulin, the alleged founder of KickassTorrents.

Polish authorities acted on a criminal complaint from the US Government, which accused Vaulin of criminal copyright infringement and money laundering.

While Vaulin is still awaiting the final decision in his extradition process in Poland, his US counsel tried to have the entire case thrown out with a motion to dismiss submitted to the Illinois District Court late last year.

One of the fundamental flaws of the case, according to the defense, is that torrent files themselves are not copyrighted content. In addition, they argued that any secondary copyright infringement claims would fail as these are non-existent under criminal law.

After a series of hearings and a long wait afterwards, US District Judge John Z. Lee has now issued his verdict (pdf).

In a 28-page memorandum and order, the motion to dismiss was denied on various grounds.

The court doesn’t contest that torrent files themselves are not protected content under copyright law. However, this argument ignores the fact that the files are used to download copyrighted material, the order reads.

“This argument, however, misunderstands the indictment. The indictment is not concerned with the mere downloading or distribution of torrent files,” Judge Lee writes.

“Granted, the indictment describes these files and charges Vaulin with operating a website dedicated to hosting and distributing them. But the protected content alleged to have been infringed in the indictment is a number of movies and other copyright protected media that users of Vaulin’s network purportedly downloaded and distributed..,” he adds.

In addition, the defense’s argument that secondary copyright infringement claims are non-existent under criminal law doesn’t hold either, according to the Judge’s decision.

Vaulin’s defense noted that the Government’s theory could expose other search engines, such as Google, to criminal liability. While this is theoretically possible, the court sees distinct differences and doesn’t aim to rule on all search engines in general.

“For present purposes, though, the Court need not decide whether and when a search engine operator might engage in conduct sufficient to constitute aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement. The issue here is whether 18 U.S.C. § 2 applies to 17 U.S.C. § 506. The Court is persuaded that it does,” Judge Lee writes.

Based on these and other conclusions, the motion to dismiss was denied. This means that the case will move forward. The next step will be to see how the Polish court rules on the extradition request.

Vaulin’s lead counsel Ira Rothken is disappointed with the outcome. He stresses that while courts commonly construe indictments in a light most favorable to the government, it went too far in this case.

“Currently a person merely ‘making available’ a file on a network in California wouldn’t even be committing a civil copyright infringement under the ruling in Napster but under today’s ruling that same person doing it in Illinois could be criminally prosecuted by the United States,” Rothken informs TorrentFreak.

“If federal judges disagree on the state of the federal copyright law then people shouldn’t be criminally prosecuted absent clarification by Congress,” he adds.

The defense team is still considering the best options for appeal, and whether they want to go down that road. However, Rothken hopes that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will address the issue in the future.

“We hope one day that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will undo this ruling and the chilling effect it will have on internet search engines, user generated content sites, and millions of netizens globally,” Rothken notes.

For now, however, Vaulin’s legal team will likely shift its focus to preventing his extradition to the United States.

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

TV Box Seller Emails Sky TV Bosses With ‘Pirate’ Offer, Gets Sued for $1m

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tv-box-seller-emails-sky-tv-bosses-with-pirate-offer-gets-sued-for-1m-170804/

After relatively quiet treatment in the media, last year press in New Zealand began reporting on the booming ‘pirate’ set-top box business sweeping the world.

Often based around legal Kodi software boosted with third-party addons, the devices are known for providing free movies, TV shows, and sports.

Last November, ‘My Box NZ’ owner Krish Reddy, who said he would take on Sky in its own backyard with his custom streaming boxes, hit the headlines. The 27-year-old told NZHerald that “it seemed like a great idea so we decided to do it ourselves.”

The boxes offered some local free-to-air channels but also the all-important premium offerings from Sky, including Sky Movies and Sky Sports, an expensive proposition for an official subscriber.

“Why pay $80 minimum per month for Sky when for one payment you can have it free for good?” Reddy’s advertising said.

Reddy was confident in the abilities of his product but was also confident he wasn’t breaking the law.

“I don’t see why [Sky] would contact me but if they do contact me and … if there’s something of theirs that they feel I’ve unlawfully taken then yeah … but as it stands I don’t [have any concerns],” he told the Herald.

As things moved on, Reddy’s business really took off. He admitted to having sold 8,000 of the devices and then April this year, Sky appeared to ruh out of patience. In a letter from its lawyers, the pay TV company said Reddy’s devices breached copyright law and the Fair Trading Act. Reddy responded by calling the TV giant “a playground bully” and denied again that he was breaking the law.

“From a legal perspective, what we do is completely within the law. We advertise Sky television channels being available through our website and social media platforms as these are available via streams which you can find through My Box,” he said.

“The content is already available, I’m not going out there and bringing the content so how am I infringing the copyright… the content is already there, if someone uses the box to search for the content, that’s what it is.”

Stuff reports that the initial compensation demand from Sky against Reddy’s company My Box runs to NZD$1.4m (US$1m), an amount that could “rise by millions” by the time a judgment is reached.

“They have given us until September 24 to respond. We are not going to sit and take it,” Reddy told the publication. “How many people can say they went up against a multimillion dollar giant like Sky?”

And it seems that Reddy is absolutely determined to fight back. Earlier this year he said that his father always encouraged him as a child to seek out the big guy for a fight, something that is now playing out with one of the world’s biggest broadcasters.

“[Sky’s] point of view is they own copyright and I’m destroying the market by giving people content for free. To me it is business; I have got something that is new … that’s competition,” he said.

In Europe, where these kinds of cases have already been tested at the highest level, comments like these would be extremely ill-advised and enough to give any defending lawyer a high temperature, but Reddy really doesn’t seem to care.

In fact, a bulk email he sent out to 50,000 people advertising his product as “being better than Sky”, actually found the inboxes of 50 Sky TV staff and directors. He believes this triggered the legal action from the company.

While Reddy was on Sky’s radar long before the mailshot, the blatancy of his advertising and its targets won’t have helped his case one bit. Sky, for its part, is determined to get a ruling against a large player and Reddy seems the perfect catch.

“Anyone selling these boxes are within our sights. You have got to go after the big fish first,” said Sky spokeswoman Kirsty Way.

No case like this has ever gone to court in New Zealand so it could be important for setting the ground rules on several aspects of copyright law, including the making available right.

In addition to prosecutions, Way told Stuff that it could also be possible to introduce site-blocking laws such as those already in place in Australia and the UK. These would aim to render Kodi-powered devices less effective at providing copyrighted content from unauthorized sources.

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

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 7

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

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

Grafana 4.4.2 Released

Grafana v4.4.2 is now Available for download

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

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

From the Blogosphere

Plugins and Dashboards

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

NEW PLUGIN

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

Install Now

This week’s MVC (Most Valuable Contributor)

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

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

Tweet of the Week

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

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

Upcoming Events

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

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


433 River Street, 4th Floor, Troy, NY

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

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

RSVP

What do you think?

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

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

Deploying an NGINX Reverse Proxy Sidecar Container on Amazon ECS

Post Syndicated from Nathan Peck original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/nginx-reverse-proxy-sidecar-container-on-amazon-ecs/

Reverse proxies are a powerful software architecture primitive for fetching resources from a server on behalf of a client. They serve a number of purposes, from protecting servers from unwanted traffic to offloading some of the heavy lifting of HTTP traffic processing.

This post explains the benefits of a reverse proxy, and explains how to use NGINX and Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) to easily implement and deploy a reverse proxy for your containerized application.

Components

NGINX is a high performance HTTP server that has achieved significant adoption because of its asynchronous event driven architecture. It can serve thousands of concurrent requests with a low memory footprint. This efficiency also makes it ideal as a reverse proxy.

Amazon ECS is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers. It allows you to run applications easily on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS helps you get your application components running on instances according to a specified configuration. It also helps scale out these components across an entire fleet of instances.

Sidecar containers are a common software pattern that has been embraced by engineering organizations. It’s a way to keep server side architecture easier to understand by building with smaller, modular containers that each serve a simple purpose. Just like an application can be powered by multiple microservices, each microservice can also be powered by multiple containers that work together. A sidecar container is simply a way to move part of the core responsibility of a service out into a containerized module that is deployed alongside a core application container.

The following diagram shows how an NGINX reverse proxy sidecar container operates alongside an application server container:

In this architecture, Amazon ECS has deployed two copies of an application stack that is made up of an NGINX reverse proxy side container and an application container. Web traffic from the public goes to an Application Load Balancer, which then distributes the traffic to one of the NGINX reverse proxy sidecars. The NGINX reverse proxy then forwards the request to the application server and returns its response to the client via the load balancer.

Reverse proxy for security

Security is one reason for using a reverse proxy in front of an application container. Any web server that serves resources to the public can expect to receive lots of unwanted traffic every day. Some of this traffic is relatively benign scans by researchers and tools, such as Shodan or nmap:

[18/May/2017:15:10:10 +0000] "GET /YesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScanningForResearchPurposePleaseHaveALookAtTheUserAgentTHXYesThisIsAReallyLongRequestURLbutWeAreDoingItOnPurposeWeAreScann HTTP/1.1" 404 1389 - Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86 Safari/537.36
[18/May/2017:18:19:51 +0000] "GET /clientaccesspolicy.xml HTTP/1.1" 404 322 - Cloud mapping experiment. Contact [email protected]

But other traffic is much more malicious. For example, here is what a web server sees while being scanned by the hacking tool ZmEu, which scans web servers trying to find PHPMyAdmin installations to exploit:

[18/May/2017:16:27:39 +0000] "GET /mysqladmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 391 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:39 +0000] "GET /web/phpMyAdmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 394 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:39 +0000] "GET /xampp/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 396 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:40 +0000] "GET /apache-default/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 405 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:40 +0000] "GET /phpMyAdmin-2.10.0.0/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 397 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:40 +0000] "GET /mysql/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 386 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:41 +0000] "GET /admin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 386 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:41 +0000] "GET /forum/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 396 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:41 +0000] "GET /typo3/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 396 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:42 +0000] "GET /phpMyAdmin-2.10.0.1/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 399 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:44 +0000] "GET /administrator/components/com_joommyadmin/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 418 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:18:34:45 +0000] "GET /phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php HTTP/1.1" 404 390 - ZmEu
[18/May/2017:16:27:45 +0000] "GET /w00tw00t.at.blackhats.romanian.anti-sec:) HTTP/1.1" 404 401 - ZmEu

In addition, servers can also end up receiving unwanted web traffic that is intended for another server. In a cloud environment, an application may end up reusing an IP address that was formerly connected to another service. It’s common for misconfigured or misbehaving DNS servers to send traffic intended for a different host to an IP address now connected to your server.

It’s the responsibility of anyone running a web server to handle and reject potentially malicious traffic or unwanted traffic. Ideally, the web server can reject this traffic as early as possible, before it actually reaches the core application code. A reverse proxy is one way to provide this layer of protection for an application server. It can be configured to reject these requests before they reach the application server.

Reverse proxy for performance

Another advantage of using a reverse proxy such as NGINX is that it can be configured to offload some heavy lifting from your application container. For example, every HTTP server should support gzip. Whenever a client requests gzip encoding, the server compresses the response before sending it back to the client. This compression saves network bandwidth, which also improves speed for clients who now don’t have to wait as long for a response to fully download.

NGINX can be configured to accept a plaintext response from your application container and gzip encode it before sending it down to the client. This allows your application container to focus 100% of its CPU allotment on running business logic, while NGINX handles the encoding with its efficient gzip implementation.

An application may have security concerns that require SSL termination at the instance level instead of at the load balancer. NGINX can also be configured to terminate SSL before proxying the request to a local application container. Again, this also removes some CPU load from the application container, allowing it to focus on running business logic. It also gives you a cleaner way to patch any SSL vulnerabilities or update SSL certificates by updating the NGINX container without needing to change the application container.

NGINX configuration

Configuring NGINX for both traffic filtering and gzip encoding is shown below:

http {
  # NGINX will handle gzip compression of responses from the app server
  gzip on;
  gzip_proxied any;
  gzip_types text/plain application/json;
  gzip_min_length 1000;
 
  server {
    listen 80;
 
    # NGINX will reject anything not matching /api
    location /api {
      # Reject requests with unsupported HTTP method
      if ($request_method !~ ^(GET|POST|HEAD|OPTIONS|PUT|DELETE)$) {
        return 405;
      }
 
      # Only requests matching the whitelist expectations will
      # get sent to the application server
      proxy_pass http://app:3000;
      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }
  }
}

The above configuration only accepts traffic that matches the expression /api and has a recognized HTTP method. If the traffic matches, it is forwarded to a local application container accessible at the local hostname app. If the client requested gzip encoding, the plaintext response from that application container is gzip-encoded.

Amazon ECS configuration

Configuring ECS to run this NGINX container as a sidecar is also simple. ECS uses a core primitive called the task definition. Each task definition can include one or more containers, which can be linked to each other:

 {
  "containerDefinitions": [
     {
       "name": "nginx",
       "image": "<NGINX reverse proxy image URL here>",
       "memory": "256",
       "cpu": "256",
       "essential": true,
       "portMappings": [
         {
           "containerPort": "80",
           "protocol": "tcp"
         }
       ],
       "links": [
         "app"
       ]
     },
     {
       "name": "app",
       "image": "<app image URL here>",
       "memory": "256",
       "cpu": "256",
       "essential": true
     }
   ],
   "networkMode": "bridge",
   "family": "application-stack"
}

This task definition causes ECS to start both an NGINX container and an application container on the same instance. Then, the NGINX container is linked to the application container. This allows the NGINX container to send traffic to the application container using the hostname app.

The NGINX container has a port mapping that exposes port 80 on a publically accessible port but the application container does not. This means that the application container is not directly addressable. The only way to send it traffic is to send traffic to the NGINX container, which filters that traffic down. It only forwards to the application container if the traffic passes the whitelisted rules.

Conclusion

Running a sidecar container such as NGINX can bring significant benefits by making it easier to provide protection for application containers. Sidecar containers also improve performance by freeing your application container from various CPU intensive tasks. Amazon ECS makes it easy to run sidecar containers, and automate their deployment across your cluster.

To see the full code for this NGINX sidecar reference, or to try it out yourself, you can check out the open source NGINX reverse proxy reference architecture on GitHub.

– Nathan
 @nathankpeck