Tag Archives: Play

Announcement: IPS code

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/08/announcement-ips-code.html

So after 20 years, IBM is killing off my BlackICE code created in April 1998. So it’s time that I rewrite it.

BlackICE was the first “inline” intrusion-detection system, aka. an “intrusion prevention system” or IPS. ISS purchased my company in 2001 and replaced their RealSecure engine with it, and later renamed it Proventia. Then IBM purchased ISS in 2006. Now, they are formally canceling the project and moving customers onto Cisco’s products, which are based on Snort.

So now is a good time to write a replacement. The reason is that BlackICE worked fundamentally differently than Snort, using protocol analysis rather than pattern-matching. In this way, it worked more like Bro than Snort. The biggest benefit of protocol-analysis is speed, making it many times faster than Snort. The second benefit is better detection ability, as I describe in this post on Heartbleed.

So my plan is to create a new project. I’ll be checking in the starter bits into GitHub starting a couple weeks from now. I need to figure out a new name for the project, so I don’t have to rip off a name from William Gibson like I did last time :).

Some notes:

  • Yes, it’ll be GNU open source. I’m a capitalist, so I’ll earn money like snort/nmap dual-licensing it, charging companies who don’t want to open-source their addons. All capitalists GNU license their code.
  • C, not Rust. Sorry, I’m going for extreme scalability. We’ll re-visit this decision later when looking at building protocol parsers.
  • It’ll be 95% compatible with Snort signatures. Their language definition leaves so much ambiguous it’ll be hard to be 100% compatible.
  • It’ll support Snort output as well, though really, Snort’s events suck.
  • Protocol parsers in Lua, so you can use it as a replacement for Bro, writing parsers to extract data you are interested in.
  • Protocol state machine parsers in C, like you see in my Masscan project for X.509.
  • First version IDS only. These days, “inline” means also being able to MitM the SSL stack, so I’m gong to have to think harder on that.
  • Mutli-core worker threads off PF_RING/DPDK/netmap receive queues. Should handle 10gbps, tracking 10 million concurrent connections, with quad-core CPU.
So if you want to contribute to the project, here’s what I need:
  • Requirements from people who work daily with IDS/IPS today. I need you to write up what your products do well that you really like. I need to you write up what they suck at that needs to be fixed. These need to be in some detail.
  • Testing environment to play with. This means having a small server plugged into a real-world link running at a minimum of several gigabits-per-second available for the next year. I’ll sign NDAs related to the data I might see on the network.
  • Coders. I’ll be doing the basic architecture, but protocol parsers, output plugins, etc. will need work. Code will be in C and Lua for the near term. Unfortunately, since I’m going to dual-license, I’ll need waivers before accepting pull requests.
Anyway, follow me on Twitter @erratarob if you want to contribute.

Porn Producer Says He’ll Prove That AMC TV Exec is a BitTorrent Pirate

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/porn-producer-says-hell-prove-that-amc-tv-exec-is-a-bittorrent-pirate-170818/

When people are found sharing copyrighted pornographic content online in the United States, there’s always a chance that an angry studio will attempt to track down the perpertrator in pursuit of a cash settlement.

That’s what adult studio Flava Works did recently, after finding its content being shared without permission on a number of gay-focused torrent sites. It’s now clear that their target was Marc Juris, President & General Manager of AMC-owned WE tv. Until this week, however, that information was secret.

As detailed in our report yesterday, Flava Works contacted Juris with an offer of around $97,000 to settle the case before trial. And, crucially, before Juris was publicly named in a lawsuit. If Juris decided not to pay, that amount would increase significantly, Flava Works CEO Phillip Bleicher told him at the time.

Not only did Juris not pay, he actually went on the offensive, filing a ‘John Doe’ complaint in a California district court which accused Flava Works of extortion and blackmail. It’s possible that Juris felt that this would cause Flava Works to back off but in fact, it had quite the opposite effect.

In a complaint filed this week in an Illinois district court, Flava Works named Juris and accused him of a broad range of copyright infringement offenses.

The complaint alleges that Juris was a signed-up member of Flava Works’ network of websites, from where he downloaded pornographic content as his subscription allowed. However, it’s claimed that Juris then uploaded this material elsewhere, in breach of copyright law.

“Defendant downloaded copyrighted videos of Flava Works as part of his paid memberships and, in violation of the terms and conditions of the paid sites, posted and distributed the aforesaid videos on other websites, including websites with peer to peer sharing and torrents technology,” the complaint reads.

“As a result of Defendant’ conduct, third parties were able to download the copyrighted videos, without permission of Flava Works.”

In addition to demanding injunctions against Juris, Flava Works asks the court for a judgment in its favor amounting to a cool $1.2m, more than twelve times the amount it was initially prepared to settle for. It’s a huge amount, but according to CEO Phillip Bleicher, it’s what his company is owed, despite Juris being a former customer.

“Juris was a member of various Flava Works websites at various times dating back to 2006. He is no longer a member and his login info has been blocked by us to prevent him from re-joining,” Bleicher informs TF.

“We allow full downloads, although each download a person performs, it tags the video with a hidden code that identifies who the user was that downloaded it and their IP info and date / time.”

We asked Bleicher how he can be sure that the content downloaded from Flava Works and re-uploaded elsewhere was actually uploaded by Juris. Fine details weren’t provided but he’s insistent that the company’s evidence holds up.

“We identified him directly, this was done by cross referencing all his IP logins with Flava Works, his email addresses he used and his usernames. We can confirm that he is/was a member of Gay-Torrents.org and Gayheaven.org. We also believe (we will find out in discovery) that he is a member of a Russian file sharing site called GayTorrent.Ru,” he says.

While the technicalities of who downloaded and shared what will be something for the court to decide, there’s still Juris’ allegations that Bleicher used extortion-like practices to get him to settle and used his relative fame against him. Bleicher says that’s not how things played out.

“[Juris] hired an attorney and they agreed to settle out of court. But then we saw him still accessing the file sharing sites (one site shows a user’s last login) and we were waiting on the settlement agreement to be drafted up by his attorney,” he explains.

“When he kept pushing the date of when we would see an agreement back we gave him a final deadline and said that after this date we would sue [him] and with all lawsuits – we make a press release.”

Bleicher says at this point Juris replaced his legal team and hired lawyer Mark Geragos, who Bleicher says tried to “bully” him, warning him of potential criminal offenses.

“Your threats in the last couple months to ‘expose’ Mr. Juris knowing he is a high profile individual, i.e., today you threatened to issue a press release, to induce him into wiring you close to $100,000 is outright extortion and subject to criminal prosecution,” Geragos wrote.

“I suggest you direct your attention to various statutes which specifically criminalize your conduct in the various jurisdictions where you have threatened suit.”

Interestingly, Geragos then went on to suggest that the lawsuit may ultimately backfire, since going public might affect Flava Works’ reputation in the gay market.

“With respect to Mr. Juris, your actions have been nothing but extortion and we reject your attempts and will vigorously pursue all available remedies against you,” Geragos’ email reads.

“We intend to use the platform you have provided to raise awareness in the LGBTQ community of this new form of digital extortion that you promote.”

But Bleicher, it seems, is up for a fight.

“Marc knows what he did and enjoyed downloading our videos and sharing them and those of videos of other studios, but now he has been caught,” he told the lawyer.

“This is the kind of case I would like to take all the way to trial, win or lose. It shows
people that want to steal our copyrighted videos that we aggressively protect our intellectual property.”

But to the tune of $1.2m? Apparently so.

“We could get up to $150,000 per infringement – we have solid proof of eight full videos – not to mention we have caught [Juris] downloading many other studios’ videos too – I think – but not sure – the number was over 75,” Bleicher told TF.

It’s quite rare for this kind of dispute to play out in public, especially considering Juris’ profile and occupation. Only time will tell if this will ultimately end in a settlement, but Bleicher and Juris seemed determined at this stage to stand by their ground and fight this out in court.

Complaint (pdf)

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

Artists Protest RIAA for Trampling on Their Moral Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bam. Gone. At least for a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

[$] Reducing Python’s startup time

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/730915/rss

The startup time for the Python interpreter has been discussed by the core
developers and others numerous times over the years; optimization efforts
are made periodically as well.
Startup time can dominate the execution time of command-line programs
written in Python,
especially if they import a lot of other modules. Python startup time is
worse than some other scripting languages and more recent versions of the
language are taking more than twice as long to start up when compared to
earlier versions (e.g. 3.7 versus 2.7).
The most recent iteration of the startup time
discussion has played out in the python-dev and python-ideas mailing lists
since mid-July. This time, the focus has been on the collections.namedtuple()
data structure that is used in multiple places throughout the standard
library and in other Python modules, but the discussion has been more
wide-ranging than simply that.

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

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

let's talk about Threads

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

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

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

Programs

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

Program

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

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

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

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

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

How Processes Work

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

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

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

diagram of how processes work

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

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

How Threads Work

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

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

Process vs. Thread

diagram of threads in a process over time

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

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

diagram of single and multi-treaded process

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

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

Threads vs. Processes

So to review:

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

Processes vs. Threads — Advantages and Disadvantages

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

What about Concurrency and Parallelism?

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

diagram of concurrency and parallelism

Why Choose Process over Thread, or Thread over Process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

activity monitor of Google Chrome

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

Windows Task Manager view

Made it This Far?

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

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

We love to hear from you

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

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

Community Profile: David Pride

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

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

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

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

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

Welcome to the Community

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

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

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

Back to School

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

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

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

Maker of things

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

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile

“Pi & Chips – with a little extra source”

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

David Pride The MagPi Raspberry Pi Community Profile 4-Bot

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

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

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Roku Gets Tough on Pirate Channels, Warns Users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roku Warning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK Google, be aesthetically pleasing

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

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

Raspberry Pi Google AI Assistant

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

OK Google, what are you?

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

Infinite Looping Siri, Alexa and Google Home

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

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

Homebrew versions

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

Andrew’s Google Assistant build

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

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

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

Andrew Jones Raspberry Pi OK Google Assistant

I couldn’t have explained it better myself

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

Find the entire build tutorial on Instructables.

Make your own

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does Amazon Macie accomplish this you ask? 

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

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

Tour of the Amazon Macie Service

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

 

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

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

Dashboard Metrics – monitored data grouped by the following categories:

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

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

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

Summary

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

– Tara

Launch – AWS Glue Now Generally Available

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launch-aws-glue-now-generally-available/

Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of AWS Glue. Glue is a fully managed, serverless, and cloud-optimized extract, transform and load (ETL) service. Glue is different from other ETL services and platforms in a few very important ways.

First, Glue is “serverless” – you don’t need to provision or manage any resources and you only pay for resources when Glue is actively running. Second, Glue provides crawlers that can automatically detect and infer schemas from many data sources, data types, and across various types of partitions. It stores these generated schemas in a centralized Data Catalog for editing, versioning, querying, and analysis. Third, Glue can automatically generate ETL scripts (in Python!) to translate your data from your source formats to your target formats. Finally, Glue allows you to create development endpoints that allow your developers to use their favorite toolchains to construct their ETL scripts. Ok, let’s dive deep with an example.

In my job as a Developer Evangelist I spend a lot of time traveling and I thought it would be cool to play with some flight data. The Bureau of Transportations Statistics is kind enough to share all of this data for anyone to use here. We can easily download this data and put it in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket. This data will be the basis of our work today.

Crawlers

First, we need to create a Crawler for our flights data from S3. We’ll select Crawlers in the Glue console and follow the on screen prompts from there. I’ll specify s3://crawler-public-us-east-1/flight/2016/csv/ as my first datasource (we can add more later if needed). Next, we’ll create a database called flights and give our tables a prefix of flights as well.

The Crawler will go over our dataset, detect partitions through various folders – in this case months of the year, detect the schema, and build a table. We could add additonal data sources and jobs into our crawler or create separate crawlers that push data into the same database but for now let’s look at the autogenerated schema.

I’m going to make a quick schema change to year, moving it from BIGINT to INT. Then I can compare the two versions of the schema if needed.

Now that we know how to correctly parse this data let’s go ahead and do some transforms.

ETL Jobs

Now we’ll navigate to the Jobs subconsole and click Add Job. Will follow the prompts from there giving our job a name, selecting a datasource, and an S3 location for temporary files. Next we add our target by specifying “Create tables in your data target” and we’ll specify an S3 location in Parquet format as our target.

After clicking next, we’re at screen showing our various mappings proposed by Glue. Now we can make manual column adjustments as needed – in this case we’re just going to use the X button to remove a few columns that we don’t need.

This brings us to my favorite part. This is what I absolutely love about Glue.

Glue generated a PySpark script to transform our data based on the information we’ve given it so far. On the left hand side we can see a diagram documenting the flow of the ETL job. On the top right we see a series of buttons that we can use to add annotated data sources and targets, transforms, spigots, and other features. This is the interface I get if I click on transform.

If we add any of these transforms or additional data sources, Glue will update the diagram on the left giving us a useful visualization of the flow of our data. We can also just write our own code into the console and have it run. We can add triggers to this job that fire on completion of another job, a schedule, or on demand. That way if we add more flight data we can reload this same data back into S3 in the format we need.

I could spend all day writing about the power and versatility of the jobs console but Glue still has more features I want to cover. So, while I might love the script editing console, I know many people prefer their own development environments, tools, and IDEs. Let’s figure out how we can use those with Glue.

Development Endpoints and Notebooks

A Development Endpoint is an environment used to develop and test our Glue scripts. If we navigate to “Dev endpoints” in the Glue console we can click “Add endpoint” in the top right to get started. Next we’ll select a VPC, a security group that references itself and then we wait for it to provision.


Once it’s provisioned we can create an Apache Zeppelin notebook server by going to actions and clicking create notebook server. We give our instance an IAM role and make sure it has permissions to talk to our data sources. Then we can either SSH into the server or connect to the notebook to interactively develop our script.

Pricing and Documentation

You can see detailed pricing information here. Glue crawlers, ETL jobs, and development endpoints are all billed in Data Processing Unit Hours (DPU) (billed by minute). Each DPU-Hour costs $0.44 in us-east-1. A single DPU provides 4vCPU and 16GB of memory.

We’ve only covered about half of the features that Glue has so I want to encourage everyone who made it this far into the post to go read the documentation and service FAQs. Glue also has a rich and powerful API that allows you to do anything console can do and more.

We’re also releasing two new projects today. The aws-glue-libs provide a set of utilities for connecting, and talking with Glue. The aws-glue-samples repo contains a set of example jobs.

I hope you find that using Glue reduces the time it takes to start doing things with your data. Look for another post from me on AWS Glue soon because I can’t stop playing with this new service.
– Randall

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;

AWS Migration Hub – Plan & Track Enterprise Application Migration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Jeff;

Popcorn Time Devs Help Streaming Aggregator Reelgood to ‘Fix Piracy’

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-devs-help-streaming-aggregator-reelgood-to-fix-piracy-170812/

During the fall of 2015, the MPAA shut down one of the most prominent pirate streaming services, Popcorn Time fork PopcornTime.io.

While the service was found to be clearly infringing, many of the developers didn’t set out to break the law. Most of all, they wanted to provide the public with easy access to their favorite movies and TV-shows.

Fast forward nearly two years and several of these Popcorn Time developers are still on the same quest. The main difference is that they now operate on the safe side of the law.

The startup they’re working with is called Reelgood, which can be best described as a streaming service aggregator. The San-Francisco based company, founded by ex-Facebook employee David Sanderson, recently raised $3.5 million and has opened its doors to the public.

The goal of Reelgood is similar to Popcorn Time in the way that it aims to be the go-to tool for people to access their entertainment. Instead of using pirate sources, however, Reelgood stitches together content from various legal platforms, both paid and free.

Reelgood

TorrentFreak spoke to former Popcorn Time developer Luigi Poole, who’s leading the charge on the development of Reelgood’s web app. He stresses that the increasing fragmentation of streaming services, which drives some people to pirate sites, is one of the problems Reelgood hopes to fix.

“There’s a misconception that torrenting is done by bad people who don’t want to pay for content. I’d say, in the vast majority of cases, torrenting is a symptom of the massive fragmentation that’s been given as the only legal option to the consumer,” Poole says.

While people have many reasons to pirate, some stick to unauthorized services because it’s simply too cumbersome to dig through all the legal options. Pirate sites have a single interface to all popular movies and TV-shows and legal platforms don’t.

“The modern TV/movie ecosystem is made up of an increasing number of different services. This makes finding content like changing channels, only more complicated. Is that movie you’re about to buy or rent on a service you already pay for? Right now there’s no way to do this other than a cumbersome search using each service’s individual search. Time to go digging,” Poole says.

“We believe this is the main reason people torrent — it’s just easier, given that the legal options presented to us are essentially a ‘go fetch’ treasure hunt,” he adds.

Flipping that channel on an old school television often beats the online streaming experience. That is, for those who want more than Netflix alone.

And the problem isn’t going away anytime soon. As we reported earlier this week, there’s a trend towards more fragmentation, instead of less. Disney is pulling some of its most popular content from the US Netflix in 2019, keeping piracy relevant.

“The untold story is that consumers are throwing up their hands with all this fragmentation, and turning to torrenting not because it’s free, but because it’s intuitive and easy,” Poole says.

“Reelgood fixes this problem by acting as a pirate site interface for every legal option, sort of like a TV guide to anything streaming, also giving you notifications anytime something is new, letting you track when certain content becomes available, and not only telling you where it’s available but taking you straight there with one click to play.”

Reelgood can be seen as a defragmentation tool, creating a uniform interface for all the legal platforms people have access to. In addition to paid services such as Netflix and HBO, it also lists free content from Fox, CBS, Crackle, and many other providers.

TorrentFreak took it for a spin and it indeed works as advertised. Simply add your streaming service accounts and all will be bundled into an elegant and uniform interface that allows you to watch and track everything with a single click.

The service is still limited to US libraries but there are already plans to expand it to other countries, which is promising. While it may not eradicate piracy anytime soon, it does a good job of trying to organize the increasingly complex streaming landscape.

Unfortunately, it’s still not cheap to use more than a handful of paid services, but that’s a problem even Reelgood can’t fix. Not even with help from seven former Popcorn Time developers.

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.

Messaging Fanout Pattern for Serverless Architectures Using Amazon SNS

Post Syndicated from Christie Gifrin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/messaging-fanout-pattern-for-serverless-architectures-using-amazon-sns/

Sam Dengler, Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect

Serverless architectures allow solution builders to focus on solving challenges particular to their business, without assuming the overhead of managing infrastructure in AWS. AWS Lambda is a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers.

When using Lambda in a serverless architecture, the goal should be to design tightly focused functions that do one thing and do it well. When these functions are composed to accomplish larger goals in microservice architectures, the complexity shifts from the internal components to the external communication between components. It’s all too easy to accidentally back into an architecture that is rigid to change because components are too knowledgeable of each other via the communication paths between them.

Solution builders can address this architectural challenge by using messaging patterns, resulting in loosely coupled communication between highly cohesive components to manage complexity in serverless architectures. As introduced in the recent Building Scalable Applications and Microservices: Adding Messaging to Your Toolbox post, a common approach when one component wishes to deliver the same message to multiple receivers is to use the fanout publish/subscribe messaging pattern.

The fanout pattern for message communication can be implemented in code. However, depending on your requirements, alternative solutions exist to offload this undifferentiated responsibility from the application. Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub messaging service that lets you fan out messages to large numbers of recipients.

In this post, I review a serverless architecture from PlayOn! Sports as a case study for migration of fanout functionality from application code to SNS.

PlayOn! Sports serverless video processing platform

PlayOn! Sports is one of the nation’s leading high school sports media companies. They operate a comprehensive technology platform, enabling high-quality, low-cost productions of live sports events for the NFHS High School Sports Network.

At the 2014 AWS re:Invent conference, Lambda was announced. The PlayOn! Sports technology team recognized the parallels between serverless demos featuring image processing using ImageMagick to video processing using ffmpeg.

At the time, PlayOn! Sports was broadcasting live video with adaptive bit rates, requiring a transcoding of the video stream to multiple quality levels for consumption on desktop, mobile, and connected devices. This is not unusual for an internet media company. However, with over 50,000 live broadcasts produced in 2014, the traditional media and entertainment technological approaches and pricing models would not work.

After some consultation with the Lambda team to validate support for custom binary execution, PlayOn! Sports moved forward with the development of a new serverless video processing platform according to the architecture diagram below.

In the architecture, a laptop in the field captures the video from a camera source and divides it into small fragments, according to the HLS protocol. The fragments are published to Amazon S3, through an Amazon CloudFront distribution for accelerated upload. When the file has been written to S3, it triggers a Lambda function to initiate the video segment processing.

Video transcoding fanout implementation in Lambda

Given Lambda’s integration growth across AWS, it’s easy to forget that it did not include managed integration with SNS when it was announced in November 2014.

PlayOn! Sports was actively experimenting with approaches to video processing to address quality control, audience growth, and cost constraints. Lambda was a great tool for rapid innovation. A goal of the architecture design was the ability to add and remove video processing alternatives to the workflow, using the fanout pattern to identify optimal solutions. Below is example code from the initial implementation:

import json
import logging
import boto3

logger = logging.getLogger('boto3')
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

client = boto3.client('lambda')
fanout_functions = ['media_info', 'transcode_audio']

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    logger.info(json.dumps(event))
    logger.info('fanout_functions: %s', fanout_functions)

    for fanout_function in fanout_functions:
        logger.info('invoke: %s', fanout_function)
        response = client.invoke(
            FunctionName=fanout_function,
            InvocationType='Event',
            Payload=json.dumps(event)
        )
        logger.info('response: %s', response)

    return 'done'

Each Lambda function is invoked asynchronously, injecting the same S3 event that triggered the original Lambda function. For example, the media_info Lambda function could be scaffolded similar to the following code snippet:

import json
import logging
import boto3

logger = logging.getLogger('boto3')
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    logger.info(json.dumps(event))

    # MediaInfo Processing
    # see: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/extracting-video-metadata-using-lambda-and-mediainfo/

    return 'done'

Refactoring fanout implementation using SNS

The PlayOn! Sports development team was familiar with SNS, but had not used it previously to support system-to-system messaging patterns. After the announcement of SNS triggering of Lambda functions, the PlayOn! Sports team planned to migrate to the new feature to offload the overhead of managing the fanout Lambda function.

When invoking a Lambda function, SNS wraps the original event with SNSEvent. The Lambda function can be refactored by adding a function to parse the S3 event from SNSEvent, as seen in the following code:

import json
import logging
import boto3

logger = logging.getLogger('boto3')
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    s3_event = parse_event(event)
    logger.info(json.dumps(s3_event))

    # MediaInfo Processing
    # see: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/extracting-video-metadata-using-lambda-and-mediainfo/

    return 'done'


def parse_event(event):
    record = event['Records'][0]
    if 'EventSource' in record and record['EventSource'] == 'aws:sns':
        return json.loads(record['Sns']['Message'])

    return event

This Lambda function modification can be authored, tested, and deployed before enabling the SNS integration to verify that the existing Lambda fanout execution path continues to operate as before. The Lambda function invocation can now be transferred from the fanout Lambda function to SNS without disruption to S3 processing.

As the diagram below shows, the resulting architecture is similar to the original. The exception is that objects written to S3 now trigger a message to be published to an SNS topic. This sends the S3 event to multiple Lambda functions to be processed independently.

Sample architecture deployment using AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and system administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources. CloudFormation provisions and updates resources in an orderly and predictable fashion. To launch the CloudFormation stack for the sample fanout architecture, choose the following button:

 

 

Follow these steps to complete the architecture deployment:

  1. If necessary, sign into the console for your account when prompted.
  2. On the Select Template page, choose Next.
  3. Under Parameters, for S3BucketName, enter a globally unique name.
  4. For SnsTopicName, enter a region-unique name.
  5. Choose Next, Next.
  6. Select the checkbox for I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources, and choose Create.

After the stack has completed creation, you can test both paths of execution by uploading files to the S3 bucket that you created. Uploading a file to the “/uploads/lambda/” directory in S3 triggers the Lambda fanout function. Uploading a file to the “/uploads/sns/” directory in S3 triggers the SNS fanout execution path. You can verify execution by monitoring the Lambda function outputs in CloudWatch Logs.

Conclusion

In this post, I reviewed the fanout messaging pattern and options for its inclusion in a serverless architectures using Lambda application code and SNS. Using the PlayOn! Sports serverless video processing pipeline use case, I demonstrated how easy it is to refactor an existing application to use the SNS fanout approach.

I also provided a sample architecture in CloudFormation that you can run in your own account. Try it out and expand the sample architecture by adding other Lambda functions to the SNS topic, to demonstrate the flexibility of the fanout messaging pattern!

You can get started with SNS using the AWS Management Console, or the SDK of your choice. For more information about how to use SNS fanout messaging, see the following resources:

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

DMCA Used to Remove Ad Server URL From Easylist Ad Blocklist

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domain text taken down by DMCA?

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

A domain in a list circumvents copyright controls?

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

Ad-blocking means money down the drain….

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

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

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

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

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

Deploy a Data Warehouse Quickly with Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Tableau Server

Post Syndicated from Jorge A. Lopez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/deploy-a-data-warehouse-quickly-with-amazon-redshift-amazon-rds-for-postgresql-and-tableau-server/

One of the benefits of a data warehouse environment using both Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is that you can leverage the advantages of each service. Amazon Redshift is a high performance, petabyte-scale data warehouse service optimized for the online analytical processing (OLAP) queries typical of analytic reporting and business intelligence applications. On the other hand, a service like RDS excels at transactional OLTP workloads such as inserting, deleting, or updating rows.

In the recent JOIN Amazon Redshift AND Amazon RDS PostgreSQL WITH dblink post, we showed how you can deploy such an environment. Now, you can deploy a similar architecture using the Modern Data Warehouse on AWS Quick Start. The Quick Start is an automated deployment that uses AWS CloudFormation templates to launch, configure, and run the services required to deploy a data warehousing environment on AWS, based on Amazon Redshift and RDS for PostgreSQL.

The Quick Start also includes an instance of Tableau Server, running on Amazon EC2. This gives you the ability to host and serve analytic dashboards, workbooks and visualizations, supported by a trial license. You can play with the sample data source and dashboard, or create your own analyses by uploading your own data sets.

For more information about the Modern Data Warehouse on AWS Quick Start, download the full deployment guide. If you’re ready to get started, use one of the buttons below:

Option 1: Deploy Quick Start into a new VPC on AWS

Option 2: Deploy Quick Start into an existing VPC

If you have questions, please leave a comment below.

Next Steps

You can also join us for the webinar Unlock Insights and Reduce Costs by Modernizing Your Data Warehouse on AWS on Tuesday, August 22, 2017. Pearson, the education and publishing company, will present best practices and lessons learned during their journey to Amazon Redshift and Tableau.