Tag Archives: USTR

French Minister of Culture Calls For Pirate Streaming Blacklist

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/french-minister-of-culture-calls-for-pirate-streaming-blacklist-180423/

Nearly a decade ago, France was on the anti-piracy enforcement frontline.

The country was the first to introduce a graduated response system, Hadopi, where Internet subscribers risked losing their Internet connections if they were caught sharing torrents repeatedly.

Today this approach is no longer as effective as it once was. The bulk of all online piracy has moved from P2P downloading to streaming, and the latter isn’t traceable by anti-piracy watchdogs.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the French Government, Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen in particular, who highlighted the issue to reporters a few days ago.

“The Hadopi response is no longer suitable because piracy is now 80% by streaming,” she said, quoted by local media.

While Hadopi may have outgrown its usefulness, France is not giving up the piracy fight. On the contrary, the country is now pondering new measures to target the current epidemic of pirate streaming sites.

Nyssen hopes that local authorities will implement a national pirate site blocklist to address the problem. Ideally, this should be constantly updated to ensure that pirate streaming sites remain inaccessible.

The Minister told reporters that France must “act on the sites,” by implementing “a blacklist which is constantly updated to keep them offline”.

This list would be maintained by the Hadopi agency which can then circulate it among several online intermediaries. This can include Internet providers, but also search engines and advertising networks.

The tough language will be music to the ears of the film industry and the timing doesn’t appear to be a total coincidence either.

The comments from the French Minister of Culture come shortly after several film industry groups boycotted a reception at the ministry. According to the groups, France dropped the ball on enforcement against piracy, which is blamed for more than a billion euros in losses.

The renewed promise may calm the waters for a while, but for now, it’s little more than that. It will likely take time before an effective pirate site blacklist is established, if it gets that far.

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

Registrars Suspend 11 Pirate Site Domains, 89 More in the Crosshairs

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/registrars-suspend-11-pirate-site-domains-89-more-in-the-crosshairs-180423/

In addition to website blocking which is running rampant across dozens of countries right now, targeting the domains of pirate sites is considered to be a somewhat effective anti-piracy tool.

The vast majority of websites are found using a recognizable name so when they become inaccessible, site operators have to work quickly to get the message out to fans. That can mean losing visitors, at least in the short term, and also contributes to the rise of copy-cat sites that may not have users’ best interests at heart.

Nevertheless, crime-fighting has always been about disrupting the ability of the enemy to do business so with this in mind, authorities in India began taking advice from the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) a couple of years ago.

After studying the model developed by PIPCU, India formed its Digital Crime Unit (DCU), which follows a multi-stage plan.

Initially, pirate sites and their partners are told to cease-and-desist. Next, complaints are filed with advertisers, who are asked to stop funding site activities. Service providers and domain registrars also receive a written complaint from the DCU, asking them to suspend services to the sites in question.

Last July, the DCU earmarked around 9,000 sites where pirated content was being made available. From there, 1,300 were placed on a shortlist for targeted action. Precisely how many have been contacted thus far is unclear but authorities are now reporting success.

According to local reports, the Maharashtra government’s Digital Crime Unit has managed to have 11 pirate site domains suspended following complaints from players in the entertainment industry.

As is often the case (and to avoid them receiving even more attention) the sites in question aren’t being named but according to Brijesh Singh, special Inspector General of Police in Maharashtra, the sites had a significant number of visitors.

Their domain registrars were sent a notice under Section 149 of the Code Of Criminal Procedure, which grants police the power to take preventative action when a crime is suspected. It’s yet to be confirmed officially but it seems likely that pirate sites utilizing local registrars were targeted by the authorities.

“Responding to our notice, the domain names of all these websites, that had a collective viewership of over 80 million, were suspended,” Singh said.

Laxman Kamble, a police inspector attached to the state government’s Cyber Cell, said the pilot project was launched after the government received complaints from Viacom and Star but back in January there were reports that the MPAA had also become involved.

Using the model pioneered by London’s PIPCU, 19 parameters were applied to list of pirate sites in order to place them on the shortlist. They are reported to include the type of content being uploaded, downloaded, and the number of downloads overall.

Kamble reports that a further 89 websites, that have domains registered abroad but are very popular in India, are now being targeted. Whether overseas registrars will prove as compliant will remain to be seen. After booking initial success, even PIPCU itself experienced problems keeping up the momentum with registrars.

In 2014, information obtained by TorrentFreak following a Freedom of Information request revealed that only five out of 70 domain registrars had complied with police requests to suspend domains.

A year later, PIPCU confirmed that suspending pirate domain names was no longer a priority for them after ICANN ruled that registrars don’t have to suspend domain names without a valid court order.

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

OMG The Stupid It Burns

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/04/omg-stupid-it-burns.html

This article, pointed out by @TheGrugq, is stupid enough that it’s worth rebutting.

The article starts with the question “Why did the lessons of Stuxnet, Wannacry, Heartbleed and Shamoon go unheeded?“. It then proceeds to ignore the lessons of those things.
Some of the actual lessons should be things like how Stuxnet crossed air gaps, how Wannacry spread through flat Windows networking, how Heartbleed comes from technical debt, and how Shamoon furthers state aims by causing damage.
But this article doesn’t cover the technical lessons. Instead, it thinks the lesson should be the moral lesson, that we should take these things more seriously. But that’s stupid. It’s the sort of lesson people teach you that know nothing about the topic. When you have nothing of value to contribute to a topic you can always take the moral high road and criticize everyone for being morally weak for not taking it more seriously. Obviously, since doctors haven’t cured cancer yet, it’s because they don’t take the problem seriously.
The article continues to ignore the lesson of these cyber attacks and instead regales us with a list of military lessons from WW I and WW II. This makes the same flaw that many in the military make, trying to understand cyber through analogies with the real world. It’s not that such lessons could have no value, it’s that this article contains a poor list of them. It seems to consist of a random list of events that appeal to the author rather than events that have bearing on cybersecurity.
Then, in case we don’t get the point, the article bullies us with hyperbole, cliches, buzzwords, bombastic language, famous quotes, and citations. It’s hard to see how most of them actually apply to the text. Rather, it seems like they are included simply because he really really likes them.
The article invests much effort in discussing the buzzword “OODA loop”. Most attacks in cyberspace don’t have one. Instead, attackers flail around, trying lots of random things, overcoming defense with brute-force rather than an understanding of what’s going on. That’s obviously the case with Wannacry: it was an accident, with the perpetrator experimenting with what would happen if they added the ETERNALBLUE exploit to their existing ransomware code. The consequence was beyond anybody’s ability to predict.
You might claim that this is just the first stage, that they’ll loop around, observe Wannacry’s effects, orient themselves, decide, then act upon what they learned. Nope. Wannacry burned the exploit. It’s essentially removed any vulnerable systems from the public Internet, thereby making it impossible to use what they learned. It’s still active a year later, with infected systems behind firewalls busily scanning the Internet so that if you put a new system online that’s vulnerable, it’ll be taken offline within a few hours, before any other evildoer can take advantage of it.
See what I’m doing here? Learning the actual lessons of things like Wannacry? The thing the above article fails to do??
The article has a humorous paragraph on “defense in depth”, misunderstanding the term. To be fair, it’s the cybersecurity industry’s fault: they adopted then redefined the term. That’s why there’s two separate articles on Wikipedia: one for the old military term (as used in this article) and one for the new cybersecurity term.
As used in the cybersecurity industry, “defense in depth” means having multiple layers of security. Many organizations put all their defensive efforts on the perimeter, and none inside a network. The idea of “defense in depth” is to put more defenses inside the network. For example, instead of just one firewall at the edge of the network, put firewalls inside the network to segment different subnetworks from each other, so that a ransomware infection in the customer support computers doesn’t spread to sales and marketing computers.
The article talks about exploiting WiFi chips to bypass the defense in depth measures like browser sandboxes. This is conflating different types of attacks. A WiFi attack is usually considered a local attack, from somebody next to you in bar, rather than a remote attack from a server in Russia. Moreover, far from disproving “defense in depth” such WiFi attacks highlight the need for it. Namely, phones need to be designed so that successful exploitation of other microprocessors (namely, the WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular baseband chips) can’t directly compromise the host system. In other words, once exploited with “Broadpwn”, a hacker would need to extend the exploit chain with another vulnerability in the hosts Broadcom WiFi driver rather than immediately exploiting a DMA attack across PCIe. This suggests that if PCIe is used to interface to peripherals in the phone that an IOMMU be used, for “defense in depth”.
Cybersecurity is a young field. There are lots of useful things that outsider non-techies can teach us. Lessons from military history would be well-received.
But that’s not this story. Instead, this story is by an outsider telling us we don’t know what we are doing, that they do, and then proceeds to prove they don’t know what they are doing. Their argument is based on a moral suasion and bullying us with what appears on the surface to be intellectual rigor, but which is in fact devoid of anything smart.
My fear, here, is that I’m going to be in a meeting where somebody has read this pretentious garbage, explaining to me why “defense in depth” is wrong and how we need to OODA faster. I’d rather nip this in the bud, pointing out if you found anything interesting from that article, you are wrong.

Steam Censors MEGA.nz Links in Chats and Forum Posts

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/steam-censors-mega-nz-links-in-chats-and-forum-posts-180421/

With more than 150 million registered accounts, Steam is much more than just a game distribution platform.

For many people, it’s also a social hangout and a communication channel.

Steam’s instant messaging tool, for example, is widely used for chats with friends. About games of course, but also to discuss lots of other stuff.

While Valve doesn’t mind people socializing on its platform, there are certain things the company doesn’t want Steam users to share. This includes links to the cloud hosting service Mega.

Users who’d like to show off some gaming footage, or even a collection of cat pictures they stored on Mega, are unable to do so. As it turns out, Steam actively censors these type of links from forum posts and chats.

In forum posts, these offending links are replaced by the text {LINK REMOVED} and private chats get the same treatment. Instead of the Mega link, people on the other end only get a mention that a link was removed.

Mega link removed from chat

While Mega operates as a regular company that offers cloud hosting services, Steam notes on their website that the website is “potentially malicious.”

“The site could contain malicious content or be known for stealing user credentials,” Steam’s link checker warns.

Potentially malicious…

It’s unclear what malicious means in this context. Mega has never been flagged by Google’s Safe Browsing program, which is regarded as one of the industry standards for malware and other unwanted software.

What’s more likely is that Mega’s piracy stigma has something to do with the censoring. As it turns out, Steam also censors 4shared.com, as well as Pirate Bay’s former .se domain name.

Other “malicious sites” which get the same treatment are more game oriented, such as cheathappens.com and the CSGO Skin Screenshot site metjm.net. While it’s understandable some game developers don’t like these, malicious is a rather broad term in this regard.

Mega clearly refutes that they are doing anything wrong. Mega Chairman Stephen Hall tells TorrentFreak that the company swiftly removes any malicious content, once it receives an abuse notice.

“It is crazy for sites to block Mega links as we respond very quickly to disable any links that are reported as malware, generally much quicker than our competitors,” Hall says.

Valve did not immediately reply to our request for clarification so the precise reason for the link censoring remains unknown.

That said, when something’s censored the public tends to work around any restrictions. Mega links are still being shared on Steam, with a slightly altered URL. In addition, Mega’s backup domain Mega.co.nz still works fine too.

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

Facebook Privacy Fiasco Sees Congress Urged on Anti-Piracy Action

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/facebook-privacy-fiasco-sees-congress-urged-on-anti-piracy-action-180420/

It has been a tumultuous few weeks for Facebook, and some would say quite rightly so. The company is a notorious harvester of personal information but last month’s Cambridge Analytica scandal really brought things to a head.

With Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in the midst of a PR nightmare, last Tuesday the entrepreneur appeared before the Senate. A day later he faced a grilling from lawmakers, answering questions concerning the social networking giant’s problems with user privacy and how it responds to breaches.

What practical measures Zuckerberg and his team will take to calm the storm are yet to unfold but the opportunity to broaden the attack on both Facebook and others in the user-generated content field is now being seized upon. Yes, privacy is the number one controversy at the moment but Facebook and others of its ilk need to step up and take responsibility for everything posted on their platforms.

That’s the argument presented by the American Federation of Musicians, the Content Creators Coalition, CreativeFuture, and the Independent Film & Television Alliance, who together represent more than 650 entertainment industry companies and 240,000 members. CreativeFuture alone represents more than 500 companies, including all the big Hollywood studios and major players in the music industry.

In letters sent to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary; the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the coalitions urge Congress to not only ensure that Facebook gets its house in order, but that Google, Twitter, and similar platforms do so too.

The letters begin with calls to protect user data and tackle the menace of fake news but given the nature of the coalitions and their entertainment industry members, it’s no surprise to see where this is heading.

“In last week’s hearing, Mr. Zuckerberg stressed several times that Facebook must ‘take a broader view of our responsibility,’ acknowledging that it is ‘responsible for the content’ that appears on its service and must ‘take a more active view in policing the ecosystem’ it created,” the letter reads.

“While most content on Facebook is not produced by Facebook, they are the publisher and distributor of immense amounts of content to billions around the world. It is worth noting that a lot of that content is posted without the consent of the people who created it, including those in the creative industries we represent.”

The letter recalls Zuckerberg as characterizing Facebook’s failure to take a broader view of its responsibilities as a “big mistake” while noting he’s also promised change.

However, the entertainment groups contend that the way the company has conducted itself – and the manner in which many Silicon Valley companies conduct themselves – is supported and encouraged by safe harbors and legal immunities that absolve internet platforms of accountability.

“We agree that change needs to happen – but we must ask ourselves whether we can expect to see real change as long as these companies are allowed to continue to operate in a policy framework that prioritizes the growth of the internet over accountability and protects those that fail to act responsibly. We believe this question must be at the center of any action Congress takes in response to the recent failures,” the groups write.

But while the Facebook fiasco has provided the opportunity for criticism, CreativeFuture and its colleagues see the problem from a much broader perspective. They suck in companies like Google, which is also criticized for shirking its responsibilities, largely because the law doesn’t compel it to act any differently.

“Google, another major global platform that has long resisted meaningful accountability, also needs to step forward and endorse the broader view of responsibility expressed by Mr. Zuckerberg – as do many others,” they continue.

“The real problem is not Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, regardless of how sincerely he seeks to own the ‘mistakes’ that led to the hearing last week. The problem is endemic in a system that applies a different set of rules to the internet and fails to impose ordinary norms of accountability on businesses that are built around monetizing other people’s personal information and content.”

Noting that Congress has encouraged technology companies to prosper by using a “light hand” for the past several decades, the groups say their level of success now calls for a fresh approach and a heavier touch.

“Facebook and Google are grown-ups – and it is time they behaved that way. If they will not act, then it is up to you and your colleagues in the House to take action and not let these platforms’ abuses continue to pile up,” they conclude.

But with all that said, there is an interesting conflict that develops when presenting the solution to piracy in the context of a user privacy fiasco.

In the EU, many of the companies involved in the coalitions above are calling for pre-emptive filters to prevent allegedly infringing content being uploaded to Facebook and YouTube. That means that all user uploads to such platforms will have to be opened and scanned to see what they contain before they’re allowed online.

So, user privacy or pro-active anti-piracy filters? It might not be easy or even legal to achieve both.

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

Securing Elections

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html

Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems are failing, and we need to fix them.

Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper.

Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is. In 2007, the states of California and Ohio conducted audits of their electronic voting machines. Expert review teams found exploitable vulnerabilities in almost every component they examined. The researchers were able to undetectably alter vote tallies, erase audit logs, and load malware on to the systems. Some of their attacks could be implemented by a single individual with no greater access than a normal poll worker; others could be done remotely.

Last year, the Defcon hackers’ conference sponsored a Voting Village. Organizers collected 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines and electronic poll books. By the end of the weekend, conference attendees had found ways to compromise every piece of test equipment: to load malicious software, compromise vote tallies and audit logs, or cause equipment to fail.

It’s important to understand that these were not well-funded nation-state attackers. These were not even academics who had been studying the problem for weeks. These were bored hackers, with no experience with voting machines, playing around between parties one weekend.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that voting equipment, including voting machines, voter registration databases, and vote tabulation systems, are that hackable. They’re computers — often ancient computers running operating systems no longer supported by the manufacturers — and they don’t have any magical security technology that the rest of the industry isn’t privy to. If anything, they’re less secure than the computers we generally use, because their manufacturers hide any flaws behind the proprietary nature of their equipment.

We’re not just worried about altering the vote. Sometimes causing widespread failures, or even just sowing mistrust in the system, is enough. And an election whose results are not trusted or believed is a failed election.

Voting systems have another requirement that makes security even harder to achieve: the requirement for a secret ballot. Because we have to securely separate the election-roll system that determines who can vote from the system that collects and tabulates the votes, we can’t use the security systems available to banking and other high-value applications.

We can securely bank online, but can’t securely vote online. If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread.

We can’t, so we need to accept that our voting systems are insecure. We need an election system that is resilient to the threats. And for many parts of the system, that means paper.

Let’s start with the voter rolls. We know they’ve already been targeted. In 2016, someone changed the party affiliation of hundreds of voters before the Republican primary. That’s just one possibility. A well-executed attack that deletes, for example, one in five voters at random — or changes their addresses — would cause chaos on election day.

Yes, we need to shore up the security of these systems. We need better computer, network, and database security for the various state voter organizations. We also need to better secure the voter registration websites, with better design and better internet security. We need better security for the companies that build and sell all this equipment.

Multiple, unchangeable backups are essential. A record of every addition, deletion, and change needs to be stored on a separate system, on write-only media like a DVD. Copies of that DVD, or — even better — a paper printout of the voter rolls, should be available at every polling place on election day. We need to be ready for anything.

Next, the voting machines themselves. Security researchers agree that the gold standard is a voter-verified paper ballot. The easiest (and cheapest) way to achieve this is through optical-scan voting. Voters mark paper ballots by hand; they are fed into a machine and counted automatically. That paper ballot is saved, and serves as a final true record in a recount in case of problems. Touch-screen machines that print a paper ballot to drop in a ballot box can also work for voters with disabilities, as long as the ballot can be easily read and verified by the voter.

Finally, the tabulation and reporting systems. Here again we need more security in the process, but we must always use those paper ballots as checks on the computers. A manual, post-election, risk-limiting audit varies the number of ballots examined according to the margin of victory. Conducting this audit after every election, before the results are certified, gives us confidence that the election outcome is correct, even if the voting machines and tabulation computers have been tampered with. Additionally, we need better coordination and communications when incidents occur.

It’s vital to agree on these procedures and policies before an election. Before the fact, when anyone can win and no one knows whose votes might be changed, it’s easy to agree on strong security. But after the vote, someone is the presumptive winner — and then everything changes. Half of the country wants the result to stand, and half wants it reversed. At that point, it’s too late to agree on anything.

The politicians running in the election shouldn’t have to argue their challenges in court. Getting elections right is in the interest of all citizens. Many countries have independent election commissions that are charged with conducting elections and ensuring their security. We don’t do that in the US.

Instead, we have representatives from each of our two parties in the room, keeping an eye on each other. That provided acceptable security against 20th-century threats, but is totally inadequate to secure our elections in the 21st century. And the belief that the diversity of voting systems in the US provides a measure of security is a dangerous myth, because few districts can be decisive and there are so few voting-machine vendors.

We can do better. In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security declared elections to be critical infrastructure, allowing the department to focus on securing them. On 23 March, Congress allocated $380m to states to upgrade election security.

These are good starts, but don’t go nearly far enough. The constitution delegates elections to the states but allows Congress to “make or alter such Regulations”. In 1845, Congress set a nationwide election day. Today, we need it to set uniform and strict election standards.

This essay originally appeared in the Guardian.

Hackspace magazine 6: Paper Engineering

Post Syndicated from Andrew Gregory original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hackspace-magazine-6/

HackSpace magazine is back with our brand-new issue 6, available for you on shop shelves, in your inbox, and on our website right now.

Inside Hackspace magazine 6

Paper is probably the first thing you ever used for making, and for good reason: in no other medium can you iterate through 20 designs at the cost of only a few pennies. We’ve roped in Rob Ives to show us how to make a barking paper dog with moveable parts and a cam mechanism. Even better, the magazine includes this free paper automaton for you to make yourself. That’s right: free!

At the other end of the scale, there’s the forge, where heat, light, and noise combine to create immutable steel. We speak to Alec Steele, YouTuber, blacksmith, and philosopher, about his amazingly beautiful Damascus steel creations, and about why there’s no difference between grinding a knife and blowing holes in a mountain to build a road through it.

HackSpace magazine 6 Alec Steele

Do it yourself

You’ve heard of reading glasses — how about glasses that read for you? Using a camera, optical character recognition software, and a text-to-speech engine (and of course a Raspberry Pi to hold it all together), reader Andrew Lewis has hacked together his own system to help deal with age-related macular degeneration.

It’s the definition of hacking: here’s a problem, there’s no solution in the shops, so you go and build it yourself!

Radio

60 years ago, the cutting edge of home hacking was the transistor radio. Before the internet was dreamt of, the transistor radio made the world smaller and brought people together. Nowadays, the components you need to build a radio are cheap and easily available, so if you’re in any way electronically inclined, building a radio is an ideal excuse to dust off your soldering iron.

Tutorials

If you’re a 12-month subscriber (if you’re not, you really should be), you’ve no doubt been thinking of all sorts of things to do with the Adafruit Circuit Playground Express we gave you for free. How about a sewable circuit for a canvas bag? Use the accelerometer to detect patterns of movement — walking, for example — and flash a series of lights in response. It’s clever, fun, and an easy way to add some programmable fun to your shopping trips.


We’re also making gin, hacking a children’s toy car to unlock more features, and getting started with robot sumo to fill the void left by the cancellation of Robot Wars.

HackSpace magazine 6

All this, plus an 11-metre tall mechanical miner, in HackSpace magazine issue 6 — subscribe here from just £4 an issue or get the PDF version for free. You can also find HackSpace magazine in WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and independent newsagents in the UK. If you live in the US, check out your local Barnes & Noble, Fry’s, or Micro Center next week. We’re also shipping to stores in Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore, Belgium, and Brazil, so be sure to ask your local newsagent whether they’ll be getting HackSpace magazine.

The post Hackspace magazine 6: Paper Engineering appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Confused About the Hybrid Cloud? You’re Not Alone

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/confused-about-the-hybrid-cloud-youre-not-alone/

Hybrid Cloud. What is it?

Do you have a clear understanding of the hybrid cloud? If you don’t, it’s not surprising.

Hybrid cloud has been applied to a greater and more varied number of IT solutions than almost any other recent data management term. About the only thing that’s clear about the hybrid cloud is that the term hybrid cloud wasn’t invented by customers, but by vendors who wanted to hawk whatever solution du jour they happened to be pushing.

Let’s be honest. We’re in an industry that loves hype. We can’t resist grafting hyper, multi, ultra, and super and other prefixes onto the beginnings of words to entice customers with something new and shiny. The alphabet soup of cloud-related terms can include various options for where the cloud is located (on-premises, off-premises), whether the resources are private or shared in some degree (private, community, public), what type of services are offered (storage, computing), and what type of orchestrating software is used to manage the workflow and the resources. With so many moving parts, it’s no wonder potential users are confused.

Let’s take a step back, try to clear up the misconceptions, and come up with a basic understanding of what the hybrid cloud is. To be clear, this is our viewpoint. Others are free to do what they like, so bear that in mind.

So, What is the Hybrid Cloud?

The hybrid cloud refers to a cloud environment made up of a mixture of on-premises private cloud resources combined with third-party public cloud resources that use some kind of orchestration between them.

To get beyond the hype, let’s start with Forrester Research‘s idea of the hybrid cloud: “One or more public clouds connected to something in my data center. That thing could be a private cloud; that thing could just be traditional data center infrastructure.”

To put it simply, a hybrid cloud is a mash-up of on-premises and off-premises IT resources.

To expand on that a bit, we can say that the hybrid cloud refers to a cloud environment made up of a mixture of on-premises private cloud[1] resources combined with third-party public cloud resources that use some kind of orchestration[2] between them. The advantage of the hybrid cloud model is that it allows workloads and data to move between private and public clouds in a flexible way as demands, needs, and costs change, giving businesses greater flexibility and more options for data deployment and use.

In other words, if you have some IT resources in-house that you are replicating or augmenting with an external vendor, congrats, you have a hybrid cloud!

Private Cloud vs. Public Cloud

The cloud is really just a collection of purpose built servers. In a private cloud, the servers are dedicated to a single tenant or a group of related tenants. In a public cloud, the servers are shared between multiple unrelated tenants (customers). A public cloud is off-site, while a private cloud can be on-site or off-site — or on-prem or off-prem.

As an example, let’s look at a hybrid cloud meant for data storage, a hybrid data cloud. A company might set up a rule that says all accounting files that have not been touched in the last year are automatically moved off-prem to cloud storage to save cost and reduce the amount of storage needed on-site. The files are still available; they are just no longer stored on your local systems. The rules can be defined to fit an organization’s workflow and data retention policies.

The hybrid cloud concept also contains cloud computing. For example, at the end of the quarter, order processing application instances can be spun up off-premises in a hybrid computing cloud as needed to add to on-premises capacity.

Hybrid Cloud Benefits

If we accept that the hybrid cloud combines the best elements of private and public clouds, then the benefits of hybrid cloud solutions are clear, and we can identify the primary two benefits that result from the blending of private and public clouds.

Diagram of the Components of the Hybrid Cloud

Benefit 1: Flexibility and Scalability

Undoubtedly, the primary advantage of the hybrid cloud is its flexibility. It takes time and money to manage in-house IT infrastructure and adding capacity requires advance planning.

The cloud is ready and able to provide IT resources whenever needed on short notice. The term cloud bursting refers to the on-demand and temporary use of the public cloud when demand exceeds resources available in the private cloud. For example, some businesses experience seasonal spikes that can put an extra burden on private clouds. These spikes can be taken up by a public cloud. Demand also can vary with geographic location, events, or other variables. The public cloud provides the elasticity to deal with these and other anticipated and unanticipated IT loads. The alternative would be fixed cost investments in on-premises IT resources that might not be efficiently utilized.

For a data storage user, the on-premises private cloud storage provides, among other benefits, the highest speed access. For data that is not frequently accessed, or needed with the absolute lowest levels of latency, it makes sense for the organization to move it to a location that is secure, but less expensive. The data is still readily available, and the public cloud provides a better platform for sharing the data with specific clients, users, or with the general public.

Benefit 2: Cost Savings

The public cloud component of the hybrid cloud provides cost-effective IT resources without incurring capital expenses and labor costs. IT professionals can determine the best configuration, service provider, and location for each service, thereby cutting costs by matching the resource with the task best suited to it. Services can be easily scaled, redeployed, or reduced when necessary, saving costs through increased efficiency and avoiding unnecessary expenses.

Comparing Private vs Hybrid Cloud Storage Costs

To get an idea of the difference in storage costs between a purely on-premises solutions and one that uses a hybrid of private and public storage, we’ll present two scenarios. For each scenario we’ll use data storage amounts of 100 terabytes, 1 petabyte, and 2 petabytes. Each table is the same format, all we’ve done is change how the data is distributed: private (on-premises) cloud or public (off-premises) cloud. We are using the costs for our own B2 Cloud Storage in this example. The math can be adapted for any set of numbers you wish to use.

Scenario 1    100% of data on-premises storage

Data Stored
Data stored On-Premises: 100% 100 TB 1,000 TB 2,000 TB
On-premises cost range Monthly Cost
Low — $12/TB/Month $1,200 $12,000 $24,000
High — $20/TB/Month $2,000 $20,000 $40,000

Scenario 2    20% of data on-premises with 80% public cloud storage (B2)

Data Stored
Data stored On-Premises: 20% 20 TB 200 TB 400 TB
Data stored in Cloud: 80% 80 TB 800 TB 1,600 TB
On-premises cost range Monthly Cost
Low — $12/TB/Month $240 $2,400 $4,800
High — $20/TB/Month $400 $4,000 $8,000
Public cloud cost range Monthly Cost
Low — $5/TB/Month (B2) $400 $4,000 $8,000
High — $20/TB/Month $1,600 $16,000 $32,000
On-premises + public cloud cost range Monthly Cost
Low $640 $6,400 $12,800
High $2,000 $20,000 $40,000

As can be seen in the numbers above, using a hybrid cloud solution and storing 80% of the data in the cloud with a provider such as Backblaze B2 can result in significant savings over storing only on-premises. For other cost scenarios, see the B2 Cost Calculator.

When Hybrid Might Not Always Be the Right Fit

There are circumstances where the hybrid cloud might not be the best solution. Smaller organizations operating on a tight IT budget might best be served by a purely public cloud solution. The cost of setting up and running private servers is substantial.

An application that requires the highest possible speed might not be suitable for hybrid, depending on the specific cloud implementation. While latency does play a factor in data storage for some users, it is less of a factor for uploading and downloading data than it is for organizations using the hybrid cloud for computing. Because Backblaze recognized the importance of speed and low-latency for customers wishing to use computing on data stored in B2, we directly connected our data centers with those of our computing partners, ensuring that latency would not be an issue even for a hybrid cloud computing solution.

It is essential to have a good understanding of workloads and their essential characteristics in order to make the hybrid cloud work well for you. Each application needs to be examined for the right mix of private cloud, public cloud, and traditional IT resources that fit the particular workload in order to benefit most from a hybrid cloud architecture.

The Hybrid Cloud Can Be a Win-Win Solution

From the high altitude perspective, any solution that enables an organization to respond in a flexible manner to IT demands is a win. Avoiding big upfront capital expenses for in-house IT infrastructure will appeal to the CFO. Being able to quickly spin up IT resources as they’re needed will appeal to the CTO and VP of Operations.

Should You Go Hybrid?

We’ve arrived at the bottom line and the question is, should you or your organization embrace hybrid cloud infrastructures?

According to 451 Research, by 2019, 69% of companies will operate in hybrid cloud environments, and 60% of workloads will be running in some form of hosted cloud service (up from 45% in 2017). That indicates that the benefits of the hybrid cloud appeal to a broad range of companies.

In Two Years, More Than Half of Workloads Will Run in Cloud

Clearly, depending on an organization’s needs, there are advantages to a hybrid solution. While it might have been possible to dismiss the hybrid cloud in the early days of the cloud as nothing more than a buzzword, that’s no longer true. The hybrid cloud has evolved beyond the marketing hype to offer real solutions for an increasingly complex and challenging IT environment.

If an organization approaches the hybrid cloud with sufficient planning and a structured approach, a hybrid cloud can deliver on-demand flexibility, empower legacy systems and applications with new capabilities, and become a catalyst for digital transformation. The result can be an elastic and responsive infrastructure that has the ability to quickly respond to changing demands of the business.

As data management professionals increasingly recognize the advantages of the hybrid cloud, we can expect more and more of them to embrace it as an essential part of their IT strategy.

Tell Us What You’re Doing with the Hybrid Cloud

Are you currently embracing the hybrid cloud, or are you still uncertain or hanging back because you’re satisfied with how things are currently? Maybe you’ve gone totally hybrid. We’d love to hear your comments below on how you’re dealing with the hybrid cloud.

[1] Private cloud can be on-premises or a dedicated off-premises facility.

[2] Hybrid cloud orchestration solutions are often proprietary, vertical, and task dependent.

The post Confused About the Hybrid Cloud? You’re Not Alone appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Pirates Taunt Amazon Over New “Turd Sandwich” Prime Video Quality

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-taunt-amazon-over-new-turd-sandwich-prime-video-quality-180419/

Even though they generally aren’t paying for the content they consume, don’t fall into the trap of believing that all pirates are eternally grateful for even poor quality media.

Without a doubt, some of the most quality-sensitive individuals are to be found in pirate communities and they aren’t scared to make their voices known when release groups fail to come up with the best possible goods.

This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.

Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10.

Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.

Indeed, one legitimate customer reported that he’d raised the quality issue with Amazon and they’d said that the problem was “probably on his end”.

“I have Amazon Prime Video and I noticed the quality was always great for their exclusive shows, so I decided to try buying the shows on Amazon instead of iTunes this year. I paid for season pass subscriptions for Legion, Billions and Homeland this year,” he wrote.

“Just this past weekend, I have noticed a significant drop in details compared to weeks before! So naturally I assumed it was an issue on my end. I started trying different devices, calling support, etc, but nothing really helped.

“Billions continued to look like a blurry mess, almost like I was watching a standard definition DVD instead of the crystal clear HD I paid for and have experienced in the past! And when I check the previous episodes, sure enough, they look fantastic again. What the heck??”

With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.

“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday.

“Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”

Arrr! The quality be fallin’

So what’s happening exactly?

A TorrentFreak source (who tells us he’s been working in the BluRay/DCP authoring business for the last 10 years) was kind enough to give us two opinions, one aimed at the techies and another at us mere mortals.

“In technical terms, it appears [Amazon has] increased the CRF [Constant Rate Factor] value they use when encoding for both the HEVC [H265] and H264 streams. Previously, their H264 streams were using CRF 18 and a max bitrate of 15Mbit/s, which usually resulted in file sizes of roughly 3GB, or around 10Mbit/s. Similarly with their HEVC streams, they were using CRF 20 and resulting in streams which were around the same size,” he explained.

“In the past week, the H264 streams have decreased by up to 50% for some streams. While there are no longer any x264 headers embedded in the H264 streams, the HEVC streams still retain those headers and the CRF value used has been increased, so it does appear this change has been done on purpose.”

In layman’s terms, our source believes that Amazon had previously been using an encoding profile that was “right on the edge of relatively good quality” which kept bitrates relatively low but high enough to ensure no perceivable loss of quality.

“H264 streams encoded with CRF 18 could provide an acceptable compromise between quality and file size, where the loss of detail is often negligible when watched at regular viewing distances, at a desk, or in a lounge room on a larger TV,” he explained.

“Recently, it appears these values have been intentionally changed in order to lower the bitrate and file sizes for reasons unknown. As a result, the quality of some streams has been reduced by up to 50% of their previous values. This has introduced a visual loss of quality, comparable to that of viewing something in standard definition versus high definition.”

With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.

“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.

With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.

You wouldn’t download stream….

TorrentFreak contacted Amazon Prime for comment on both the recent changes and growing customer complaints but at the time of publication we were yet to receive a response.

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

IsoHunt Founder Returns With New Search Tool

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-founder-returns-with-new-search-tool-180419/

Of all the major torrent sites that dominated the Internet at the beginning of this decade, only a few remain.

One of the sites that fell prey to ever-increasing pressure from the entertainment industry was isoHunt.

Founded by the Canadian entrepreneur Gary Fung, the site was one of the early pioneers in the world of torrents, paving the way for many others. However, this spotlight also caught the attention of the major movie studios.

After a lengthy legal battle isoHunt’s founder eventually shut down the site late 2013. This happened after Fung signed a settlement agreement with Hollywood for no less than $110 million, on paper at least.

Launching a new torrent search engine was never really an option, but Fung decided not to let his expertise go to waste. He focused his time and efforts on a new search project instead, which was unveiled to the public this week.

The new app called “WonderSwipe” has just been added to Apple’s iOS store. It’s a mobile search app that ties into Google’s backend, but with a different user interface. While it has nothing to do with file-sharing, we decided to reach out to isoHunt’s founder to find out more.

Fung tells us that he got the idea for the app because he was frustrated with Google’s default search options on the mobile platform.

“I find myself barely do any search on the smartphone, most of the time waiting until I get to my desktop. I ask why?” Fung tells us.

One of the main issues he identified is the fact that swiping is not an option. Instead, people end up browsing through dozens of mobile browser tabs. So, Fung took Google’s infrastructure and search power, making it swipeable.

“From a UI design perspective, I find swiping through photos on the first iPhone one of the most extraordinary advances in computing. It’s so easy that babies would be doing it before they even learn how to flip open a book!

“Bringing that ease of use to the central way of conducting mobile search and research is the initial eureka I had in starting work on WonderSwipe,” Fung adds.

That was roughly three years ago, and a few hours ago WonderSwipe finally made its way into the App store. Android users will have to wait for now, but the application will eventually be available on that platform as well.

In addition to swiping through search results, the app also promises faster article loading and browsing, a reader mode with condensed search results, and a hands-free mode with automated browsing where summaries are read out loud.

WonderwSwipe


Of course, WonderSwipe is nothing like isoHunt ever was, apart from the fact that Google is a search engine that also links to torrents, indirectly.

This similarity was also brought up during the lawsuit with the MPAA, when Fung’s legal team likened isoHunt to Google in court. However, the Canadian entrepreneur doesn’t expect that Hollywood will have an issue with WonderSwipe in particular.

“isoHunt was similar to Google in how it worked as a search engine, but not in scope. Torrents are a small subset of all the webpages Google indexes,” Fung says.

“WonderSwipe’s aim is to find answers in all webpages, powered by Google search results. It presents results in extracted text and summaries with no connection to BitTorrent clients. As such, WonderSwipe can be bigger than isoHunt has ever been.”

Ironically, in recent years Hollywood has often criticized Google for linking to pirated content in its search results. These results will also be available through WonderSwipe.

However, Fung says that any copyright issues with WonderSwipe will have to be dealt with on the search engine level, by Google.

“If there are links to pirated content, tell search engines so they can take them down!” he says.

WonderSwipe is totally free and Fung tells us that he plans to monetize it with in-app purchases for pro features, and non-intrusive advertising that won’t slow down swiping or search results. More details on the future plans for the app are available here.

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

Hollywood Studios Get ISP Blocking Order Against Rarbg in India

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-studios-score-blocking-order-against-rarbg-in-india-180417/

While the major Hollywood studios are very reluctant to bring a pirate site blocking case to their home turf, they are very active abroad.

The companies are the driving force behind lawsuits in Europe, Australia, and are also active in India, where they booked a new success last week.

Website blocking is by no means a new phenomenon in India. The country is known for so-called John Doe orders, where a flurry of websites are temporarily blocked to protect the release of a specific title.

The major Hollywood studios are taking a different approach. Disney Enterprises, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Universal, and Warner Bros. are requesting blockades, accusing sites of being structural copyright infringers.

One of the most recent targets is the popular torrent site Rarbg. The Hollywood studios describe Rarbg as a ‘habitual’ copyright infringer and demand that several Internet providers block access to the site.

“It is submitted that the Defendant Website aids and facilitates the accessibility and availability of infringing material, and induce third parties, intentionally and/or knowingly, to infringe through their websites by various means,’ the movie studios allege.

The complaint filed at the High Court of Delhi lists more than 20 Internet providers as co-defendants, and also includes India’s Department of Telecommunications and Department of Electronics and Information Technology in the mix.

The two Government departments are added because they have the power to enforce blocking orders. Specifically, the Hollywood studios note that the Department of Technology’s license agreement with ISPs requires these companies to ensure that copyright infringing content is not carried on their networks.

“It is submitted that the DoT itself acknowledges the fact that service providers have an obligation to ensure that no violation of third party intellectual property rights takes place through their networks and that effective protection is provided to right holders of such intellectual property,” the studios write.

Last week the court granted an injunction that requires local Internet providers including Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Telenor, You Broadband, and Vodafone to block Rarbg.

Blocking order

As requested, the Department of Telecommunications and Department of Electronics and Information Technology are directed to notify all local internet and telecom service providers that they must block the torrent site as well.

The order is preliminary and can still be contested in court. However, given the history of similar blocking efforts around the world, it is likely that it will be upheld.

While there’s not much coverage on the matter, this isn’t the first blocking request the companies have filed in India. Last October, a similar case was filed against another popular torrent site, 1337x.to, with success.

TorrentFreak reached out to the law firm representing the Hollywood studios to get a broader overview of the blocking plans in India. At the time of writing, we have yet to hear back.

—

A copy of the order obtained by Disney Enterprises, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Universal, Warner Bros and the local Disney owned media conglomerate UTV Software, is available here (pdf).

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

TV Broadcaster Wants App Stores Blocked to Prevent Piracy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tv-broadcaster-wants-app-stores-blocked-to-prevent-piracy-180416/

After first targeting torrent and regular streaming platforms with blocking injunctions, last year Village Roadshow and studios including Disney, Universal, Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox, and Paramount began looking at a new threat.

The action targeted HDSubs+, a reasonably popular IPTV service that provides hundreds of otherwise premium live channels, movies, and sports for a relatively small monthly fee. The application was filed during October 2017 and targeted Australia’s largest ISPs.

In parallel, Hong Kong-based broadcaster Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) launched a similar action, demanding that the same ISPs (including Telstra, Optus, TPG, and Vocus, plus subsidiaries) block several ‘pirate’ IPTV services, named in court as A1, BlueTV, EVPAD, FunTV, MoonBox, Unblock, and hTV5.

Due to the similarity of the cases, both applications were heard in Federal Court in Sydney on Friday. Neither case is as straightforward as blocking a torrent or basic streaming portal, so both applicants are having to deal with additional complexities.

The TVB case is of particular interest. Up to a couple of dozen URLs maintain the services, which are used to provide the content, an EPG (electronic program guide), updates and sundry other features. While most of these appear to fit the description of an “online location” designed to assist copyright infringement, where the Android-based software for the IPTV services is hosted provides an interesting dilemma.

ComputerWorld reports that the apps – which offer live broadcasts, video-on-demand, and catch-up TV – are hosted on as-yet-unnamed sites which are functionally similar to Google Play or Apple’s App Store. They’re repositories of applications that also carry non-infringing apps, such as those for Netflix and YouTube.

Nevertheless, despite clear knowledge of this dual use, TVB wants to have these app marketplaces blocked by Australian ISPs, which would not only render the illicit apps inaccessible to the public but all of the non-infringing ones too. Part of its argument that this action would be reasonable appears to be that legal apps – such as Netflix’s for example – can also be freely accessed elsewhere.

It will be up to Justice Nicholas to decide whether the “primary purpose” of these marketplaces is to infringe or facilitate the infringement of TVB’s copyrights. However, TVB also appears to have another problem which is directly connected to the copyright status in Australia of its China-focused live programming.

Justice Nicholas questioned whether watching a stream in Australia of TVB’s live Chinese broadcasts would amount to copyright infringement because no copy of that content is being made.

“If most of what is occurring here is a reproduction of broadcasts that are not protected by copyright, then the primary purpose is not to facilitate copyright infringement,” Justice Nicholas said.

One of the problems appears to be that China is not a party to the 1961 Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations. However, TVB is arguing that it should still receive protection because it airs pre-recorded content and the live broadcasts are also archived for re-transmission via catch-up services.

The question over whether unchoreographed live broadcasts receive protection has been raised in other regions but in most cases, a workaround has been found. The presence of broadcaster logos on screen (which receive copyright protection) is a factor and it’s been reported that broadcasters are able to record the ‘live’ action and transmit a copy just a couple of seconds later, thereby broadcasting an already-copyrighted work.

While TVB attempts to overcome its issues, Village Roadshow is facing some of its own in its efforts to take down HDSubs+.

It appears that at least partly in response to the Roadshow legal action, the service has undergone some modifications, including a change of brand to ‘Press Play Extra’. As reported by ZDNet, there have been structural changes too, which means that Roadshow can no longer “see under the hood”.

According to Justice Nicholas, there is no evidence that the latest version of the app infringes copyright but according to counsel for Village Roadshow, the new app is merely transitional and preparing for a possible future change.

“We submit the difference to be drawn is reactive to my clients serving on the operators a notice,” counsel for Roadshow argued, with an expert describing the new app as “almost like a placeholder.”

In short, Roadshow still wants all of the target domains in its original application blocked because the company believes there’s a good chance they’ll be reactivated in the future.

None of the ISPs involved in either case turned up to the hearings on Friday, which removes one layer of complexity in what appears thus far to be less than straightforward cases.

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

Pirate Site-Blocking? Music Biz Wants App Blocking Too

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-site-blocking-music-biz-wants-app-blocking-too-180415/

In some way, shape or form, Internet piracy has always been carried out through some kind of application. Whether that’s a peer-to-peer client utilizing BitTorrent or eD2K, or a Usenet or FTP tool taking things back to their roots, software has always played a crucial role.

Of course, the nature of the Internet beast means that software usage is unavoidable but in recent years piracy has swung more towards the regular web browser, meaning that sites and services offering pirated content are largely easy to locate, identify and block, if authorities so choose.

As revealed this week by the MPA, thousands of platforms around the world are now targeted for blocking, with 1,800 sites and 5,300 domains blocked in Europe alone.

However, as the Kodi phenomenon has shown, web-based content doesn’t always have to be accessed via a standard web browser. Clever but potentially illegal addons and third-party apps are able to scrape web-based resources and present links to content on a wide range of devices, from mobile phones and tablets to set-top boxes.

While it’s still possible to block the resources upon which these addons rely, the scattered nature of the content makes the process much more difficult. One can’t simply block a whole platform because a few movies are illegally hosted there and even Google has found itself hosting thousands of infringing titles, a situation that’s ruthlessly exploited by addon and app developers alike.

Needless to say, the situation hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has spent the last year (1,2,3) targeting many people involved in the addon and app scene, hoping they’ll take their tools and run, rather than further develop a rapidly evolving piracy ecosystem.

Over in Russia, a country that will happily block hundreds or millions of IP addresses if it suits them, the topic of infringing apps was raised this week. It happened during the International Strategic Forum on Intellectual Property, a gathering of 500 experts from more than 30 countries. There were strong calls for yet more tools and measures to deal with films and music being made available via ‘pirate’ apps.

The forum heard that in response to widespread website blocking, people behind pirate sites have begun creating applications for mobile devices to achieve the same ends – the provision of illegal content. This, key players in the music industry say, means that the law needs to be further tightened to tackle the rising threat.

“Consumption of content is now going into the mobile sector and due to this we plan to prevent mass migration of ‘pirates’ to the mobile sector,” said Leonid Agronov, general director of the National Federation of the Music Industry.

The same concerns were echoed by Alexander Blinov, CEO of Warner Music Russia. According to TASS, the powerful industry player said that while recent revenues had been positively affected by site-blocking, it’s now time to start taking more action against apps.

“I agree with all speakers that we can not stop at what has been achieved so far. The music industry has a fight against illegal content in mobile applications on the agenda,” Blinov said.

And if Blinov is to be believed, music in Russia is doing particularly well at the moment. Attributing successes to efforts by parliament, the Ministry of Communications, and copyright holders, Blinov said the local music market has doubled in the past two years.

“We are now in the top three fastest growing markets in the world, behind only China and South Korea,” Blinov said.

While some apps can work in the same manner as a basic web interface, others rely on more complex mechanisms, ‘scraping’ content from diverse sources that can be easily and readily changed if mitigation measures kick in. It will be very interesting to see how Russia deals with this threat and whether it will opt for highly technical solutions or the nuclear options demonstrated recently.

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

[$] The rhashtable documentation I wanted to read

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/751374/rss

The rhashtable data structure is a generic resizable hash-table
implementation in the Linux kernel, which LWN first introduced as “relativistic
hash tables” back in 2014. I thought at the time that it might be fun to make
use of rhashtables, but didn’t, until an opportunity arose through my work on
the Lustre filesystem. Lustre is a cluster filesystem that is currently in
drivers/staging while the code is revised to meet upstream
requirements. One of those requirements is to avoid duplicating
similar functionality where possible. As Lustre contains a resizable
hash table, it really needs to be converted to use rhashtables instead — at
last I have my opportunity.

Subscribers can read on for a look at the rhashtable API by guest author
Neil Brown.

The answers to your questions for Eben Upton

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/eben-q-a-1/

Before Easter, we asked you to tell us your questions for a live Q & A with Raspberry Pi Trading CEO and Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton. The variety of questions and comments you sent was wonderful, and while we couldn’t get to them all, we picked a handful of the most common to grill him on.

You can watch the video below — though due to this being the first pancake of our live Q&A videos, the sound is a bit iffy — or read Eben’s answers to the first five questions today. We’ll follow up with the rest in the next few weeks!

Live Q&A with Eben Upton, creator of the Raspberry Pi

Get your questions to us now using #AskRaspberryPi on Twitter

Any plans for 64-bit Raspbian?

Raspbian is effectively 32-bit Debian built for the ARMv6 instruction-set architecture supported by the ARM11 processor in the first-generation Raspberry Pi. So maybe the question should be: “Would we release a version of our operating environment that was built on top of 64-bit ARM Debian?”

And the answer is: “Not yet.”

When we released the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, we released an operating system image on the same day; the wonderful thing about that image is that it runs on every Raspberry Pi ever made. It even runs on the alpha boards from way back in 2011.

That deep backwards compatibility is really important for us, in large part because we don’t want to orphan our customers. If someone spent $35 on an older-model Raspberry Pi five or six years ago, they still spent $35, so it would be wrong for us to throw them under the bus.

So, if we were going to do a 64-bit version, we’d want to keep doing the 32-bit version, and then that would mean our efforts would be split across the two versions; and remember, we’re still a very small engineering team. Never say never, but it would be a big step for us.

For people wanting a 64-bit operating system, there are plenty of good third-party images out there, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Given that the 3B+ includes 5GHz wireless and Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, why would manufacturers continue to use the Compute Module?

It’s a form-factor thing.

Very large numbers of people are using the bigger product in an industrial context, and it’s well engineered for that: it has module certification, wireless on board, and now PoE support. But there are use cases that can’t accommodate this form factor. For example, NEC displays: we’ve had this great relationship with NEC for a couple of years now where a lot of their displays have a socket in the back that you can put a Compute Module into. That wouldn’t work with the 3B+ form factor.

Back of an NEC display with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module slotted in.

An NEC display with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module

What are some industrial uses/products Raspberry is used with?

The NEC displays are a good example of the broader trend of using Raspberry Pi in digital signage.

A Raspberry Pi running the wait time signage at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal Studios.
Image c/o thelonelyredditor1

If you see a monitor at a station, or an airport, or a recording studio, and you look behind it, it’s amazing how often you’ll find a Raspberry Pi sitting there. The original Raspberry Pi was particularly strong for multimedia use cases, so we saw uptake in signage very early on.

An array of many Raspberry Pis

Los Alamos Raspberry Pi supercomputer

Another great example is the Los Alamos National Laboratory building supercomputers out of Raspberry Pis. Many high-end supercomputers now are built using white-box hardware — just regular PCs connected together using some networking fabric — and a collection of Raspberry Pi units can serve as a scale model of that. The Raspberry Pi has less processing power, less memory, and less networking bandwidth than the PC, but it has a balanced amount of each. So if you don’t want to let your apprentice supercomputer engineers loose on your expensive supercomputer, a cluster of Raspberry Pis is a good alternative.

Why is there no power button on the Raspberry Pi?

“Once you start, where do you stop?” is a question we ask ourselves a lot.

There are a whole bunch of useful things that we haven’t included in the Raspberry Pi by default. We don’t have a power button, we don’t have a real-time clock, and we don’t have an analogue-to-digital converter — those are probably the three most common requests. And the issue with them is that they each cost a bit of money, they’re each only useful to a minority of users, and even that minority often can’t agree on exactly what they want. Some people would like a power button that is literally a physical analogue switch between the 5V input and the rest of the board, while others would like something a bit more like a PC power button, which is partway between a physical switch and a ‘shutdown’ button. There’s no consensus about what sort of power button we should add.

So the answer is: accessories. By leaving a feature off the board, we’re not taxing the majority of people who don’t want the feature. And of course, we create an opportunity for other companies in the ecosystem to create and sell accessories to those people who do want them.

Adafruit Push-button Power Switch Breakout Raspberry Pi

The Adafruit Push-button Power Switch Breakout is one of many accessories that fill in the gaps for makers.

We have this neat way of figuring out what features to include by default: we divide through the fraction of people who want it. If you have a 20 cent component that’s going to be used by a fifth of people, we treat that as if it’s a $1 component. And it has to fight its way against the $1 components that will be used by almost everybody.

Do you think that Raspberry Pi is the future of the Internet of Things?

Absolutely, Raspberry Pi is the future of the Internet of Things!

In practice, most of the viable early IoT use cases are in the commercial and industrial spaces rather than the consumer space. Maybe in ten years’ time, IoT will be about putting 10-cent chips into light switches, but right now there’s so much money to be saved by putting automation into factories that you don’t need 10-cent components to address the market. Last year, roughly 2 million $35 Raspberry Pi units went into commercial and industrial applications, and many of those are what you’d call IoT applications.

So I think we’re the future of a particular slice of IoT. And we have ten years to get our price point down to 10 cents 🙂

The post The answers to your questions for Eben Upton appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

WHOIS Limits Under GDPR Will Make Pirates Harder to Catch, Groups Fear

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/whois-limits-under-gdpr-will-make-pirates-harder-to-catch-groups-fear-180413/

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law covering data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union.

As more and more personal data is gathered, stored and (ab)used online, the aim of the GDPR is to protect EU citizens from breaches of privacy. The regulation applies to all companies processing the personal data of subjects residing in the Union, no matter where in the world the company is located.

Penalties for non-compliance can be severe. While there is a tiered approach according to severity, organizations can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million, whichever is greater. Needless to say, the regulations will need to be taken seriously.

Among those affected are domain name registries and registrars who publish the personal details of domain name owners in the public WHOIS database. In a full entry, a person or organization’s name, address, telephone numbers and email addresses can often be found.

This raises a serious issue. While registries and registrars are instructed and contractually obliged to publish data in the WHOIS database by global domain name authority ICANN, in millions of cases this conflicts with the requirements of the GDPR, which prevents the details of private individuals being made freely available on the Internet.

As explained in detail by the EFF, ICANN has been trying to resolve this clash. Its proposed interim model for GDPR compliance (pdf) envisions registrars continuing to collect full WHOIS data but not necessarily publishing it, to “allow the existing data
to be preserved while the community discussions continue on the next generation of WHOIS.”

But the proposed changes that will inevitably restrict free access to WHOIS information has plenty of people spooked, including thousands of companies belonging to entertainment industry groups such as the MPAA, IFPI, RIAA and the Copyright Alliance.

In a letter sent to Vice President Andrus Ansip of the European Commission, these groups and dozens of others warn that restricted access to WHOIS will have a serious effect on their ability to protect their intellectual property rights from “cybercriminals” which pose a threat to their businesses.

Signed by 50 organizations involved in IP protection and other areas of online security, the letter expresses concern that in attempting to comply with the GDPR, ICANN is on a course to “over-correct” while disregarding proportionality, accountability and transparency.

A small sample of the groups calling on ICANN

“We strongly assert that this model does not properly account for the critical public and legitimate interests served by maintaining a sufficient amount of data publicly available while respecting privacy interests of registrants by instituting a tiered or layered access system for the vast majority of personal data as defined by the GDPR,” the groups write.

The letter focuses on two aspects of “over-correction”, the first being ICANN’s proposal that no personal data whatsoever of a domain name registrant will be made available “without appropriate consideration or balancing of the countervailing interests in public disclosure of a limited amount of such data.”

In response to ICANN’s proposal that only the province/state and country of a domain name registrant be made publicly available, the groups advise the organization that publishing “a natural person registrant’s e-mail address” in a publicly accessible WHOIS directory will not constitute a breach of the GDPR.

“[W]e strongly believe that the continued public availability of the registrant’s e-mail address – specifically the e-mail address that the registrant supplies to the registrar at the time the domain name is purchased and which e-mail address the registrar is required to validate – is critical for several reasons,” the groups write.

“First, it is the data element that is typically the most important to have readily available for law enforcement, consumer protection, particularly child protection, intellectual property enforcement and cybersecurity/anti-malware purposes.

“Second, the public accessibility of the registrant’s e-mail address permits a broad array of threats and illegal activities to be addressed quickly and the damage from such threats mitigated and contained in a timely manner, particularly where the abusive/illegal activity may be spawned from a variety of different domain names on different generic Top Level Domains,” they add.

The groups also argue that since making email addresses is effectively required in light of Article 5.1(c) ECD, “there is no legitimate justification to discontinue public availability of the registrant’s e-mail address in the WHOIS directory and especially not in light of other legitimate purposes.”

The EFF, on the other hand, says that being able to contact a domain owner wouldn’t necessarily require an email address to be made public.

“There are other cases in which it makes sense to allow members of the public to contact the owner of a domain, without having to obtain a court order,” EFF writes.

“But this could be achieved very simply if ICANN were simply to provide something like a CAPTCHA-protected contact form, which would deliver email to the appropriate contact point with no need to reveal the registrant’s actual email address.”

The groups’ second main concern is that ICANN reportedly makes no distinction between name registrants that are “natural persons versus those that are legal entities” and intends to treat them all as if they are subject to the GDPR, despite the fact that the regulation only applies to data associated with an “identified or identifiable natural person”.

They say it is imperative that EU Data Protection Authorities are made to understand that when registrants obtain a domain for illegal purposes, they often only register it as a “natural person” when registering as a legal person (legal entity) would be more appropriate, despite that granting them less privacy.

“Consequently, the test for differentiating between a legal and natural person should not merely be the legal status of the registrant, but also whether the registrant is, in fact, acting as a legal or natural person vis a vis the use of the domain name,” the groups note.

“We therefore urge that ICANN be given appropriate guidance as to the importance of maintaining a distinction between natural person and legal person registrants and keeping as much data about legal person domain name registrants as publicly accessible as possible,” they conclude.

What will happen with WHOIS on May 25 still isn’t clear. It wasn’t until October 2017 that ICANN finally determined that it would be affected by the GDPR, meaning that it’s been scrambling ever since to meet the compliance date. And it still is, according to the latest available documentation (pdf).

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

How to retain system tables’ data spanning multiple Amazon Redshift clusters and run cross-cluster diagnostic queries

Post Syndicated from Karthik Sonti original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-to-retain-system-tables-data-spanning-multiple-amazon-redshift-clusters-and-run-cross-cluster-diagnostic-queries/

Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse service that logs the history of the system in STL log tables. The STL log tables manage disk space by retaining only two to five days of log history, depending on log usage and available disk space.

To retain STL tables’ data for an extended period, you usually have to create a replica table for every system table. Then, for each you load the data from the system table into the replica at regular intervals. By maintaining replica tables for STL tables, you can run diagnostic queries on historical data from the STL tables. You then can derive insights from query execution times, query plans, and disk-spill patterns, and make better cluster-sizing decisions. However, refreshing replica tables with live data from STL tables at regular intervals requires schedulers such as Cron or AWS Data Pipeline. Also, these tables are specific to one cluster and they are not accessible after the cluster is terminated. This is especially true for transient Amazon Redshift clusters that last for only a finite period of ad hoc query execution.

In this blog post, I present a solution that exports system tables from multiple Amazon Redshift clusters into an Amazon S3 bucket. This solution is serverless, and you can schedule it as frequently as every five minutes. The AWS CloudFormation deployment template that I provide automates the solution setup in your environment. The system tables’ data in the Amazon S3 bucket is partitioned by cluster name and query execution date to enable efficient joins in cross-cluster diagnostic queries.

I also provide another CloudFormation template later in this post. This second template helps to automate the creation of tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog for the system tables’ data stored in Amazon S3. After the system tables are exported to Amazon S3, you can run cross-cluster diagnostic queries on the system tables’ data and derive insights about query executions in each Amazon Redshift cluster. You can do this using Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, or Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

You can find all the code examples in this post, including the CloudFormation templates, AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts, and the resolution steps for common errors you might encounter in this GitHub repository.

Solution overview

The solution in this post uses AWS Glue to export system tables’ log data from Amazon Redshift clusters into Amazon S3. The AWS Glue ETL jobs are invoked at a scheduled interval by AWS Lambda. AWS Systems Manager, which provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management, maintains the details of Amazon Redshift clusters for which the solution is enabled. The last-fetched time stamp values for the respective cluster-table combination are maintained in an Amazon DynamoDB table.

The following diagram covers the key steps involved in this solution.

The solution as illustrated in the preceding diagram flows like this:

  1. The Lambda function, invoke_rs_stl_export_etl, is triggered at regular intervals, as controlled by Amazon CloudWatch. It’s triggered to look up the AWS Systems Manager parameter store to get the details of the Amazon Redshift clusters for which the system table export is enabled.
  2. The same Lambda function, based on the Amazon Redshift cluster details obtained in step 1, invokes the AWS Glue ETL job designated for the Amazon Redshift cluster. If an ETL job for the cluster is not found, the Lambda function creates one.
  3. The ETL job invoked for the Amazon Redshift cluster gets the cluster credentials from the parameter store. It gets from the DynamoDB table the last exported time stamp of when each of the system tables was exported from the respective Amazon Redshift cluster.
  4. The ETL job unloads the system tables’ data from the Amazon Redshift cluster into an Amazon S3 bucket.
  5. The ETL job updates the DynamoDB table with the last exported time stamp value for each system table exported from the Amazon Redshift cluster.
  6. The Amazon Redshift cluster system tables’ data is available in Amazon S3 and is partitioned by cluster name and date for running cross-cluster diagnostic queries.

Understanding the configuration data

This solution uses AWS Systems Manager parameter store to store the Amazon Redshift cluster credentials securely. The parameter store also securely stores other configuration information that the AWS Glue ETL job needs for extracting and storing system tables’ data in Amazon S3. Systems Manager comes with a default AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that it uses to encrypt the password component of the Amazon Redshift cluster credentials.

The following table explains the global parameters and cluster-specific parameters required in this solution. The global parameters are defined once and applicable at the overall solution level. The cluster-specific parameters are specific to an Amazon Redshift cluster and repeat for each cluster for which you enable this post’s solution. The CloudFormation template explained later in this post creates these parameters as part of the deployment process.

Parameter name Type Description
Global parameters—defined once and applied to all jobs
redshift_query_logs.global.s3_prefix String The Amazon S3 path where the query logs are exported. Under this path, each exported table is partitioned by cluster name and date.
redshift_query_logs.global.tempdir String The Amazon S3 path that AWS Glue ETL jobs use for temporarily staging the data.
redshift_query_logs.global.role> String The name of the role that the AWS Glue ETL jobs assume. Just the role name is sufficient. The complete Amazon Resource Name (ARN) is not required.
redshift_query_logs.global.enabled_cluster_list StringList A comma-separated list of cluster names for which system tables’ data export is enabled. This gives flexibility for a user to exclude certain clusters.
Cluster-specific parameters—for each cluster specified in the enabled_cluster_list parameter
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.connection String The name of the AWS Glue Data Catalog connection to the Amazon Redshift cluster. For example, if the cluster name is product_warehouse, the entry is redshift_query_logs.product_warehouse.connection.
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.user String The user name that AWS Glue uses to connect to the Amazon Redshift cluster.
redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.password Secure String The password that AWS Glue uses to connect the Amazon Redshift cluster’s encrypted-by key that is managed in AWS KMS.

For example, suppose that you have two Amazon Redshift clusters, product-warehouse and category-management, for which the solution described in this post is enabled. In this case, the parameters shown in the following screenshot are created by the solution deployment CloudFormation template in the AWS Systems Manager parameter store.

Solution deployment

To make it easier for you to get started, I created a CloudFormation template that automatically configures and deploys the solution—only one step is required after deployment.

Prerequisites

To deploy the solution, you must have one or more Amazon Redshift clusters in a private subnet. This subnet must have a network address translation (NAT) gateway or a NAT instance configured, and also a security group with a self-referencing inbound rule for all TCP ports. For more information about why AWS Glue ETL needs the configuration it does, described previously, see Connecting to a JDBC Data Store in a VPC in the AWS Glue documentation.

To start the deployment, launch the CloudFormation template:

CloudFormation stack parameters

The following table lists and describes the parameters for deploying the solution to export query logs from multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

Property Default Description
S3Bucket mybucket The bucket this solution uses to store the exported query logs, stage code artifacts, and perform unloads from Amazon Redshift. For example, the mybucket/extract_rs_logs/data bucket is used for storing all the exported query logs for each system table partitioned by the cluster. The mybucket/extract_rs_logs/temp/ bucket is used for temporarily staging the unloaded data from Amazon Redshift. The mybucket/extract_rs_logs/code bucket is used for storing all the code artifacts required for Lambda and the AWS Glue ETL jobs.
ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters Requires Input A comma-separated list of cluster names from which the system table logs need to be exported.
DataStoreSecurityGroups Requires Input A list of security groups with an inbound rule to the Amazon Redshift clusters provided in the parameter, ExportEnabledClusters. These security groups should also have a self-referencing inbound rule on all TCP ports, as explained on Connecting to a JDBC Data Store in a VPC.

After you launch the template and create the stack, you see that the following resources have been created:

  1. AWS Glue connections for each Amazon Redshift cluster you provided in the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters.
  2. All parameters required for this solution created in the parameter store.
  3. The Lambda function that invokes the AWS Glue ETL jobs for each configured Amazon Redshift cluster at a regular interval of five minutes.
  4. The DynamoDB table that captures the last exported time stamps for each exported cluster-table combination.
  5. The AWS Glue ETL jobs to export query logs from each Amazon Redshift cluster provided in the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters.
  6. The IAM roles and policies required for the Lambda function and AWS Glue ETL jobs.

After the deployment

For each Amazon Redshift cluster for which you enabled the solution through the CloudFormation stack parameter, ExportEnabledRedshiftClusters, the automated deployment includes temporary credentials that you must update after the deployment:

  1. Go to the parameter store.
  2. Note the parameters <<cluster_name>>.user and redshift_query_logs.<<cluster_name>>.password that correspond to each Amazon Redshift cluster for which you enabled this solution. Edit these parameters to replace the placeholder values with the right credentials.

For example, if product-warehouse is one of the clusters for which you enabled system table export, you edit these two parameters with the right user name and password and choose Save parameter.

Querying the exported system tables

Within a few minutes after the solution deployment, you should see Amazon Redshift query logs being exported to the Amazon S3 location, <<S3Bucket_you_provided>>/extract_redshift_query_logs/data/. In that bucket, you should see the eight system tables partitioned by customer name and date: stl_alert_event_log, stl_dlltext, stl_explain, stl_query, stl_querytext, stl_scan, stl_utilitytext, and stl_wlm_query.

To run cross-cluster diagnostic queries on the exported system tables, create external tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. To make it easier for you to get started, I provide a CloudFormation template that creates an AWS Glue crawler, which crawls the exported system tables stored in Amazon S3 and builds the external tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Launch this CloudFormation template to create external tables that correspond to the Amazon Redshift system tables. S3Bucket is the only input parameter required for this stack deployment. Provide the same Amazon S3 bucket name where the system tables’ data is being exported. After you successfully create the stack, you can see the eight tables in the database, redshift_query_logs_db, as shown in the following screenshot.

Now, navigate to the Athena console to run cross-cluster diagnostic queries. The following screenshot shows a diagnostic query executed in Athena that retrieves query alerts logged across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

You can build the following example Amazon QuickSight dashboard by running cross-cluster diagnostic queries on Athena to identify the hourly query count and the key query alert events across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters.

How to extend the solution

You can extend this post’s solution in two ways:

  • Add any new Amazon Redshift clusters that you spin up after you deploy the solution.
  • Add other system tables or custom query results to the list of exports from an Amazon Redshift cluster.

Extend the solution to other Amazon Redshift clusters

To extend the solution to more Amazon Redshift clusters, add the three cluster-specific parameters in the AWS Systems Manager parameter store following the guidelines earlier in this post. Modify the redshift_query_logs.global.enabled_cluster_list parameter to append the new cluster to the comma-separated string.

Extend the solution to add other tables or custom queries to an Amazon Redshift cluster

The current solution ships with the export functionality for the following Amazon Redshift system tables:

  • stl_alert_event_log
  • stl_dlltext
  • stl_explain
  • stl_query
  • stl_querytext
  • stl_scan
  • stl_utilitytext
  • stl_wlm_query

You can easily add another system table or custom query by adding a few lines of code to the AWS Glue ETL job, <<cluster-name>_extract_rs_query_logs. For example, suppose that from the product-warehouse Amazon Redshift cluster you want to export orders greater than $2,000. To do so, add the following five lines of code to the AWS Glue ETL job product-warehouse_extract_rs_query_logs, where product-warehouse is your cluster name:

  1. Get the last-processed time-stamp value. The function creates a value if it doesn’t already exist.

salesLastProcessTSValue = functions.getLastProcessedTSValue(trackingEntry=”mydb.sales_2000",job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Run the custom query with the time stamp.

returnDF=functions.runQuery(query="select * from sales s join order o where o.order_amnt > 2000 and sale_timestamp > '{}'".format (salesLastProcessTSValue) ,tableName="mydb.sales_2000",job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Save the results to Amazon S3.

functions.saveToS3(dataframe=returnDF,s3Prefix=s3Prefix,tableName="mydb.sales_2000",partitionColumns=["sale_date"],job_configs=job_configs)

  1. Get the latest time-stamp value from the returned data frame in Step 2.

latestTimestampVal=functions.getMaxValue(returnDF,"sale_timestamp",job_configs)

  1. Update the last-processed time-stamp value in the DynamoDB table.

functions.updateLastProcessedTSValue(“mydb.sales_2000",latestTimestampVal[0],job_configs)

Conclusion

In this post, I demonstrate a serverless solution to retain the system tables’ log data across multiple Amazon Redshift clusters. By using this solution, you can incrementally export the data from system tables into Amazon S3. By performing this export, you can build cross-cluster diagnostic queries, build audit dashboards, and derive insights into capacity planning by using services such as Athena. I also demonstrate how you can extend this solution to other ad hoc query use cases or tables other than system tables by adding a few lines of code.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue with Node.js in Production and Amazon Redshift – 2017 Recap.

About the Author

Karthik Sonti is a senior big data architect at Amazon Web Services. He helps AWS customers build big data and analytical solutions and provides guidance on architecture and best practices.

 

 

 

 

Cybersecurity Insurance

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/cybersecurity_i_1.html

Good article about how difficult it is to insure an organization against Internet attacks, and how expensive the insurance is.

Companies like retailers, banks, and healthcare providers began seeking out cyberinsurance in the early 2000s, when states first passed data breach notification laws. But even with 20 years’ worth of experience and claims data in cyberinsurance, underwriters still struggle with how to model and quantify a unique type of risk.

“Typically in insurance we use the past as prediction for the future, and in cyber that’s very difficult to do because no two incidents are alike,” said Lori Bailey, global head of cyberrisk for the Zurich Insurance Group. Twenty years ago, policies dealt primarily with data breaches and third-party liability coverage, like the costs associated with breach class-action lawsuits or settlements. But more recent policies tend to accommodate first-party liability coverage, including costs like online extortion payments, renting temporary facilities during an attack, and lost business due to systems failures, cloud or web hosting provider outages, or even IT configuration errors.

In my new book — out in September — I write:

There are challenges to creating these new insurance products. There are two basic models for insurance. There’s the fire model, where individual houses catch on fire at a fairly steady rate, and the insurance industry can calculate premiums based on that rate. And there’s the flood model, where an infrequent large-scale event affects large numbers of people — but again at a fairly steady rate. Internet+ insurance is complicated because it follows neither of those models but instead has aspects of both: individuals are hacked at a steady (albeit increasing) rate, while class breaks and massive data breaches affect lots of people at once. Also, the constantly changing technology landscape makes it difficult to gather and analyze the historical data necessary to calculate premiums.

BoingBoing article.

MPAA Quietly Shut Down Its ‘Legal’ Movie Search Engine

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-quietly-shut-down-its-legal-movie-search-engine-180411/

During the fall of 2014, Hollywood launched WhereToWatch, its very own search engine for movies and TV-shows.

The site enabled people to check if and where the latest entertainment was available, hoping to steer U.S. visitors away from pirate sites.

Aside from the usual critics, the launch received a ton of favorable press. This was soon followed up by another release highlighting some of the positive responses and praise from the press.

“The initiative marks a further attempt by the MPAA to combat rampant online piracy by reminding consumers of legal means to watch movies and TV shows,” the LA Times wrote, for example.

Over the past several years, the site hasn’t appeared in the news much, but it did help thousands of people find legal sources for the latest entertainment. However, those who try to access it today will notice that WhereToWatch has been abandoned, quietly.

The MPAA pulled the plug on the service a few months ago. And where the mainstream media covered its launch in detail, the shutdown received zero mentions. So why did the site fold?

According to MPAA Vice President of Corporate Communications, Chris Ortman, it was no longer needed as there are many similar search engines out there.

“Given the many search options commercially available today, which can be found on the MPAA website, WheretoWatch.com was discontinued at the conclusion of 2017,” Ortman informs TF.

“There are more than 140 lawful online platforms in the United States for accessing film and television content, and more than 460 around the world,” he adds.

The MPAA lists several of these alternative search engines on its new website. The old WhereToWatch domain now forwards to the MPAA’s online magazine ‘The Credits,’ which features behind-the-scenes stories and industry profiles.

While the MPAA is right that there are alternative search engines, many of these were already available when WhereToWatch launched. In fact, the site used the services of the competing service GoWatchIt for its search results.

Perhaps the lack of interest from the U.S. public played a role as well. The site never really took off and according to traffic estimates from SimilarWeb and Alexa, most of the visitors came from Iran, where the site was unusable due to a geo-block.

After searching long and hard we were able to track down a former WhereToWatch user on Reddit. This person just started to get into the service and was disappointed to see it go.

“So, does anyone know of better places or simply other places where this information lives in an easily accessible place?” he or she asked.

One person responded by recommending Icefilms.info, a pirate site. This is a response the MPAA would cringe at, but luckily, most people mentioned justwatch.com as the best alternative.

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

Using AWS Lambda and Amazon Comprehend for sentiment analysis

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-aws-lambda-and-amazon-comprehend-for-sentiment-analysis/

This post courtesy of Giedrius Praspaliauskas, AWS Solutions Architect

Even with best IVR systems, customers get frustrated. What if you knew that 10 callers in your Amazon Connect contact flow were likely to say “Agent!” in frustration in the next 30 seconds? Would you like to get to them before that happens? What if your bot was smart enough to admit, “I’m sorry this isn’t helping. Let me find someone for you.”?

In this post, I show you how to use AWS Lambda and Amazon Comprehend for sentiment analysis to make your Amazon Lex bots in Amazon Connect more sympathetic.

Setting up a Lambda function for sentiment analysis

There are multiple natural language and text processing frameworks or services available to use with Lambda, including but not limited to Amazon Comprehend, TextBlob, Pattern, and NLTK. Pick one based on the nature of your system:  the type of interaction, languages supported, and so on. For this post, I picked Amazon Comprehend, which uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract insights and relationships in text.

The walkthrough in this post is just an example. In a full-scale implementation, you would likely implement a more nuanced approach. For example, you could keep the overall sentiment score through the conversation and act only when it reaches a certain threshold. It is worth noting that this Lambda function is not called for missed utterances, so there may be a gap between what is being analyzed and what was actually said.

The Lambda function is straightforward. It analyses the input transcript field of the Amazon Lex event. Based on the overall sentiment value, it generates a response message with next step instructions. When the sentiment is neutral, positive, or mixed, the response leaves it to Amazon Lex to decide what the next steps should be. It adds to the response overall sentiment value as an additional session attribute, along with slots’ values received as an input.

When the overall sentiment is negative, the function returns the dialog action, pointing to an escalation intent (specified in the environment variable ESCALATION_INTENT_NAME) or returns the fulfillment closure action with a failure state when the intent is not specified. In addition to actions or intents, the function returns a message, or prompt, to be provided to the customer before taking the next step. Based on the returned action, Amazon Connect can select the appropriate next step in a contact flow.

For this walkthrough, you create a Lambda function using the AWS Management Console:

  1. Open the Lambda console.
  2. Choose Create Function.
  3. Choose Author from scratch (no blueprint).
  4. For Runtime, choose Python 3.6.
  5. For Role, choose Create a custom role. The custom execution role allows the function to detect sentiments, create a log group, stream log events, and store the log events.
  6. Enter the following values:
    • For Role Description, enter Lambda execution role permissions.
    • For IAM Role, choose Create an IAM role.
    • For Role Name, enter LexSentimentAnalysisLambdaRole.
    • For Policy, use the following policy:
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "logs:CreateLogGroup",
                "logs:CreateLogStream",
                "logs:PutLogEvents"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:*:*"
        },
        {
            "Action": [
                "comprehend:DetectDominantLanguage",
                "comprehend:DetectSentiment"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}
    1. Choose Create function.
    2. Copy/paste the following code to the editor window
import os, boto3

ESCALATION_INTENT_MESSAGE="Seems that you are having troubles with our service. Would you like to be transferred to the associate?"
FULFILMENT_CLOSURE_MESSAGE="Seems that you are having troubles with our service. Let me transfer you to the associate."

escalation_intent_name = os.getenv('ESACALATION_INTENT_NAME', None)

client = boto3.client('comprehend')

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    sentiment=client.detect_sentiment(Text=event['inputTranscript'],LanguageCode='en')['Sentiment']
    if sentiment=='NEGATIVE':
        if escalation_intent_name:
            result = {
                "sessionAttributes": {
                    "sentiment": sentiment
                    },
                    "dialogAction": {
                        "type": "ConfirmIntent", 
                        "message": {
                            "contentType": "PlainText", 
                            "content": ESCALATION_INTENT_MESSAGE
                        }, 
                    "intentName": escalation_intent_name
                    }
            }
        else:
            result = {
                "sessionAttributes": {
                    "sentiment": sentiment
                },
                "dialogAction": {
                    "type": "Close",
                    "fulfillmentState": "Failed",
                    "message": {
                            "contentType": "PlainText",
                            "content": FULFILMENT_CLOSURE_MESSAGE
                    }
                }
            }

    else:
        result ={
            "sessionAttributes": {
                "sentiment": sentiment
            },
            "dialogAction": {
                "type": "Delegate",
                "slots" : event["currentIntent"]["slots"]
            }
        }
    return result
  1. Below the code editor specify the environment variable ESCALATION_INTENT_NAME with a value of Escalate.

  1. Click on Save in the top right of the console.

Now you can test your function.

  1. Click Test at the top of the console.
  2. Configure a new test event using the following test event JSON:
{
  "messageVersion": "1.0",
  "invocationSource": "DialogCodeHook",
  "userId": "1234567890",
  "sessionAttributes": {},
  "bot": {
    "name": "BookSomething",
    "alias": "None",
    "version": "$LATEST"
  },
  "outputDialogMode": "Text",
  "currentIntent": {
    "name": "BookSomething",
    "slots": {
      "slot1": "None",
      "slot2": "None"
    },
    "confirmationStatus": "None"
  },
  "inputTranscript": "I want something"
}
  1. Click Create
  2. Click Test on the console

This message should return a response from Lambda with a sentiment session attribute of NEUTRAL.

However, if you change the input to “This is garbage!”, Lambda changes the dialog action to the escalation intent specified in the environment variable ESCALATION_INTENT_NAME.

Setting up Amazon Lex

Now that you have your Lambda function running, it is time to create the Amazon Lex bot. Use the BookTrip sample bot and call it BookSomething. The IAM role is automatically created on your behalf. Indicate that this bot is not subject to the COPPA, and choose Create. A few minutes later, the bot is ready.

Make the following changes to the default configuration of the bot:

  1. Add an intent with no associated slots. Name it Escalate.
  2. Specify the Lambda function for initialization and validation in the existing two intents (“BookCar” and “BookHotel”), at the same time giving Amazon Lex permission to invoke it.
  3. Leave the other configuration settings as they are and save the intents.

You are ready to build and publish this bot. Set a new alias, BookSomethingWithSentimentAnalysis. When the build finishes, test it.

As you see, sentiment analysis works!

Setting up Amazon Connect

Next, provision an Amazon Connect instance.

After the instance is created, you need to integrate the Amazon Lex bot created in the previous step. For more information, see the Amazon Lex section in the Configuring Your Amazon Connect Instance topic.  You may also want to look at the excellent post by Randall Hunt, New – Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex Integration.

Create a new contact flow, “Sentiment analysis walkthrough”:

  1. Log in into the Amazon Connect instance.
  2. Choose Create contact flow, Create transfer to agent flow.
  3. Add a Get customer input block, open the icon in the top left corner, and specify your Amazon Lex bot and its intents.
  4. Select the Text to speech audio prompt type and enter text for Amazon Connect to play at the beginning of the dialog.
  5. Choose Amazon Lex, enter your Amazon Lex bot name and the alias.
  6. Specify the intents to be used as dialog branches that a customer can choose: BookHotel, BookTrip, or Escalate.
  7. Add two Play prompt blocks and connect them to the customer input block.
    • If booking hotel or car intent is returned from the bot flow, play the corresponding prompt (“OK, will book it for you”) and initiate booking (in this walkthrough, just hang up after the prompt).
    • However, if escalation intent is returned (caused by the sentiment analysis results in the bot), play the prompt (“OK, transferring to an agent”) and initiate the transfer.
  8. Save and publish the contact flow.

As a result, you have a contact flow with a single customer input step and a text-to-speech prompt that uses the Amazon Lex bot. You expect one of the three intents returned:

Edit the phone number to associate the contact flow that you just created. It is now ready for testing. Call the phone number and check how your contact flow works.

Cleanup

Don’t forget to delete all the resources created during this walkthrough to avoid incurring any more costs:

  • Amazon Connect instance
  • Amazon Lex bot
  • Lambda function
  • IAM role LexSentimentAnalysisLambdaRole

Summary

In this walkthrough, you implemented sentiment analysis with a Lambda function. The function can be integrated into Amazon Lex and, as a result, into Amazon Connect. This approach gives you the flexibility to analyze user input and then act. You may find the following potential use cases of this approach to be of interest:

  • Extend the Lambda function to identify “hot” topics in the user input even if the sentiment is not negative and take action proactively. For example, switch to an escalation intent if a user mentioned “where is my order,” which may signal potential frustration.
  • Use Amazon Connect Streams to provide agent sentiment analysis results along with call transfer. Enable service tailored towards particular customer needs and sentiments.
  • Route calls to agents based on both skill set and sentiment.
  • Prioritize calls based on sentiment using multiple Amazon Connect queues instead of transferring directly to an agent.
  • Monitor quality and flag for review contact flows that result in high overall negative sentiment.
  • Implement sentiment and AI/ML based call analysis, such as a real-time recommendation engine. For more details, see Machine Learning on AWS.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.