Tag Archives: USTR

Microsoft acquires GitHub

2018-06-04 corbet

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/756443/rss

Here’s the
press release announcing Microsoft’s agreement to acquire GitHub for a
mere $7.5 billion. “GitHub will retain its developer-first
ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all
developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use
the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for
their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any
operating system, any cloud and any device.”

ISP Questions Impartiality of Judges in Copyright Troll Cases

2018-06-02 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/isp-questions-impartiality-of-judges-in-copyright-troll-cases-180602/

Following in the footsteps of similar operations around the world, two years ago the copyright trolling movement landed on Swedish shores.

The pattern was a familiar one, with trolls harvesting IP addresses from BitTorrent swarms and tracing them back to Internet service providers. Then, after presenting evidence to a judge, the trolls obtained orders that compelled ISPs to hand over their customers’ details. From there, the trolls demanded cash payments to make supposed lawsuits disappear.

It’s a controversial business model that rarely receives outside praise. Many ISPs have tried to slow down the flood but most eventually grow tired of battling to protect their customers. The same cannot be said of Swedish ISP Bahnhof.

The ISP, which is also a strong defender of privacy, has become known for fighting back against copyright trolls. Indeed, to thwart them at the very first step, the company deletes IP address logs after just 24 hours, which prevents its customers from being targeted.

Bahnhof says that the copyright business appeared “dirty and corrupt” right from the get go, so it now operates Utpressningskollen.se, a web portal where the ISP publishes data on Swedish legal cases in which copyright owners demand customer data from ISPs through the Patent and Market Courts.

Over the past two years, Bahnhof says it has documented 76 cases of which six are still ongoing, 11 have been waived and a majority 59 have been decided in favor of mainly movie companies. Bahnhof says that when it discovered that 59 out of the 76 cases benefited one party, it felt a need to investigate.

In a detailed report compiled by Bahnhof Communicator Carolina Lindahl and sent to TF, the ISP reveals that it examined the individual decision-makers in the cases before the Courts and found five judges with “questionable impartiality.”

“One of the judges, we can call them Judge 1, has closed 12 of the cases, of which two have been waived and the other 10 have benefitted the copyright owner, mostly movie companies,” Lindahl notes.

“Judge 1 apparently has written several articles in the magazine NIR – Nordiskt Immateriellt Rättsskydd (Nordic Intellectual Property Protection) – which is mainly supported by Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt, the Swedish Association for Copyright (SFU).

“SFU is a member-financed group centered around copyright that publishes articles, hands out scholarships, arranges symposiums, etc. On their website they have a public calendar where Judge 1 appears regularly.”

Bahnhof says that the financiers of the SFU are Sveriges Television AB (Sweden’s national public TV broadcaster), Filmproducenternas Rättsförening (a legally-oriented association for filmproducers), BMG Chrysalis Scandinavia (a media giant) and Fackförbundet för Film och Mediabranschen (a union for the movie and media industry).

“This means that Judge 1 is involved in a copyright association sponsored by the film and media industry, while also judging in copyright cases with the film industry as one of the parties,” the ISP says.

Bahnhof’s also has criticism for Judge 2, who participated as an event speaker for the Swedish Association for Copyright, and Judge 3 who has written for the SFU-supported magazine NIR. According to Lindahl, Judge 4 worked for a bureau that is partly owned by a board member of SFU, who also defended media companies in a “high-profile” Swedish piracy case.

That leaves Judge 5, who handled 10 of the copyright troll cases documented by Bahnhof, waiving one and deciding the remaining nine in favor of a movie company plaintiff.

“Judge 5 has been questioned before and even been accused of bias while judging a high-profile piracy case almost ten years ago. The accusations of bias were motivated by the judge’s membership of SFU and the Swedish Association for Intellectual Property Rights (SFIR), an association with several important individuals of the Swedish copyright community as members, who all defend, represent, or sympathize with the media industry,” Lindahl says.

Bahnhof hasn’t named any of the judges nor has it provided additional details on the “high-profile” case. However, anyone who remembers the infamous trial of ‘The Pirate Bay Four’ a decade ago might recall complaints from the defense (1,2,3) that several judges involved in the case were members of pro-copyright groups.

While there were plenty of calls to consider them biased, in May 2010 the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, a fact Bahnhof recognizes.

“Judge 5 was never sentenced for bias by the court, but regardless of the court’s decision this is still a judge who shares values and has personal connections with [the media industry], and as if that weren’t enough, the judge has induced an additional financial aspect by participating in events paid for by said party,” Lindahl writes.

“The judge has parties and interest holders in their personal network, a private engagement in the subject and a financial connection to one party – textbook characteristics of bias which would make anyone suspicious.”

The decision-makers of the Patent and Market Court and their relations.

The ISP notes that all five judges have connections to the media industry in the cases they judge, which isn’t a great starting point for returning “objective and impartial” results. In its summary, however, the ISP is scathing of the overall system, one in which court cases “almost looked rigged” and appear to be decided in favor of the movie company even before reaching court.

In general, however, Bahnhof says that the processes show a lack of individual attention, such as the court blindly accepting questionable IP address evidence supplied by infamous anti-piracy outfit MaverickEye.

“The court never bothers to control the media company’s only evidence (lists generated by MaverickMonitor, which has proven to be an unreliable software), the court documents contain several typos of varying severity, and the same standard texts are reused in several different cases,” the ISP says.

“The court documents show a lack of care and control, something that can easily be taken advantage of by individuals with shady motives. The findings and discoveries of this investigation are strengthened by the pure numbers mentioned in the beginning which clearly show how one party almost always wins.

“If this is caused by bias, cheating, partiality, bribes, political agenda, conspiracy or pure coincidence we can’t say for sure, but the fact that this process has mainly generated money for the film industry, while citizens have been robbed of their personal integrity and legal certainty, indicates what forces lie behind this machinery,” Bahnhof’s Lindahl concludes.

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

Analyzing Amazon Connect records with Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, and Amazon QuickSight

2018-06-02 Luis Caro Perez

Post Syndicated from Luis Caro Perez original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/analyzing-amazon-connect-records-with-amazon-athena-aws-glue-and-amazon-quicksight/

Last year, we released Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center service that enables any business to deliver better customer service at low cost. This service is built based on the same technology that empowers Amazon customer service associates. Using this system, associates have millions of conversations with customers when they inquire about their shipping or order information. Because we made it available as an AWS service, you can now enable your contact center agents to make or receive calls in a matter of minutes. You can do this without having to provision any kind of hardware. 2

There are several advantages of building your contact center in the AWS Cloud, as described in our documentation. In addition, customers can extend Amazon Connect capabilities by using AWS products and the breadth of AWS services. In this blog post, we focus on how to get analytics out of the rich set of data published by Amazon Connect. We make use of an Amazon Connect data stream and create an end-to-end workflow to offer an analytical solution that can be customized based on need.

Solution overview

The following diagram illustrates the solution.

In this solution, Amazon Connect exports its contact trace records (CTRs) using Amazon Kinesis. CTRs are data streams in JSON format, and each has information about individual contacts. For example, this information might include the start and end time of a call, which agent handled the call, which queue the user chose, queue wait times, number of holds, and so on. You can enable this feature by reviewing our documentation.

In this architecture, we use Kinesis Firehose to capture Amazon Connect CTRs as raw data in an Amazon S3 bucket. We don’t use the recent feature added by Kinesis Firehose to save the data in S3 as Apache Parquet format. We use AWS Glue functionality to automatically detect the schema on the fly from an Amazon Connect data stream.

The primary reason for this approach is that it allows us to use attributes and enables an Amazon Connect administrator to dynamically add more fields as needed. Also by converting data to parquet in batch (every couple of hours) compression can be higher. However, if your requirement is to ingest the data in Parquet format on realtime, we recoment using Kinesis Firehose recently launched feature. You can review this blog post for further information.

By default, Firehose puts these records in time-series format. To make it easy for AWS Glue crawlers to capture information from new records, we use AWS Lambda to move all new records to a single S3 prefix called flatfiles. Our Lambda function is configured using S3 event notification. To comply with AWS Glue and Athena best practices, the Lambda function also converts all column names to lowercase. Finally, we also use the Lambda function to start AWS Glue crawlers. AWS Glue crawlers identify the data schema and update the AWS Glue Data Catalog, which is used by extract, transform, load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue in the latter half of the workflow.

You can see our approach in the Lambda code following.

from __future__ import print_function
import json
import urllib
import boto3
import os
import re
s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
client = boto3.client('s3')
def convertColumntoLowwerCaps(obj):
    for key in obj.keys():
        new_key = re.sub(r'[\W]+', '', key.lower())
        v = obj[key]
        if isinstance(v, dict):
            if len(v) > 0:
                convertColumntoLowwerCaps(v)
        if new_key != key:
            obj[new_key] = obj[key]
            del obj[key]
    return obj

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    bucket = event['Records'][0]['s3']['bucket']['name']
    key = urllib.unquote_plus(event['Records'][0]['s3']['object']['key'].encode('utf8'))
    try:
        client.download_file(bucket, key, '/tmp/file.json')        
        with open('/tmp/out.json', 'w') as output, open('/tmp/file.json', 'rb') as file:
            i = 0
            for line in file: 
                for object in line.replace("}{","}\n{").split("\n"):
                    record = json.loads(object,object_hook=convertColumntoLowwerCaps)
                    if i != 0:
                        output.write("\n")
                    output.write(json.dumps(record))
                    i += 1
        newkey = 'flatfiles/' + key.replace("/", "")                
        client.upload_file('/tmp/out.json', bucket,newkey)
        s3.Object(bucket,key).delete()
        return "success"
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)
        print('Error coping object {} from bucket {}'.format(key, bucket))
        raise e

We trigger AWS Glue crawlers based on events because this approach lets us capture any new data frame that we want to be dynamic in nature. CTR attributes are designed to offer multiple custom options based on a particular call flow. Attributes are essentially key-value pairs in nested JSON format. With the help of event-based AWS Glue crawlers, you can easily identify newer attributes automatically.

We recommend setting up an S3 lifecycle policy on the flatfiles folder that keeps records only for 24 hours. Doing this optimizes AWS Glue ETL jobs to process a subset of files rather than the entire set of records.

After we have data in the flatfiles folder, we use AWS Glue to catalog the data and transform it into Parquet format inside a folder called parquet/ctr/. The AWS Glue job performs the ETL that transforms the data from JSON to Parquet format. We use AWS Glue crawlers to capture any new data frame inside the JSON code that we want to be dynamic in nature. What this means is that when you add new attributes to an Amazon Connect instance, the solution automatically recognizes them and incorporates them in the schema of the results.

After AWS Glue stores the results in Parquet format, you can perform analytics using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon Athena, or any third-party data warehouse platform. To keep this solution simple, we have used Amazon Athena for analytics. Amazon Athena allows us to query data without having to set up and manage any servers or data warehouse platforms. Additionally, we only pay for the queries that are executed.

Try it out!

You can get started with our sample AWS CloudFormation template. This template creates the components starting from the Kinesis stream and finishes up with S3 buckets, the AWS Glue job, and crawlers. To deploy the template, open the AWS Management Console by clicking the following link.

In the console, specify the following parameters:

BucketName: The name for the bucket to store all the solution files. This name must be unique; if it’s not, template creation fails.
etlJobSchedule: The schedule in cron format indicating how often the AWS Glue job runs. The default value is every hour.
KinesisStreamName: The name of the Kinesis stream to receive data from Amazon Connect. This name must be different from any other Kinesis stream created in your AWS account.
s3interval: The interval in seconds for Kinesis Firehose to save data inside the flatfiles folder on S3. The value must between 60 and 900 seconds.
sampledata: When this parameter is set to true, sample CTR records are used. Doing this lets you try this solution without setting up an Amazon Connect instance. All examples in this walkthrough use this sample data.

Select the “I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources.” check box, and then choose Create. After the template finishes creating resources, you can see the stream name on the stack Outputs tab.

If you haven’t created your Amazon Connect instance, you can do so by following the Getting Started Guide. When you are done creating, choose your Amazon Connect instance in the console, which takes you to instance settings. Choose Data streaming to enable streaming for CTR records. Here, you can choose the Kinesis stream (defined in the KinesisStreamName parameter) that was created by the CloudFormation template.

Now it’s time to generate the data by making or receiving calls by using Amazon Connect. You can go to Amazon Connect Cloud Control Panel (CCP) to make or receive calls using a software phone or desktop phone. After a few minutes, we should see data inside the flatfiles folder. To make it easier to try this solution, we provide sample data that you can enable by setting the sampledata parameter to true in your CloudFormation template.

You can navigate to the AWS Glue console by choosing Jobs on the left navigation pane of the console. We can select our job here. In my case, the job created by CloudFormation is called glueJob-i3TULzVtP1W0; yours should be similar. You run the job by choosing Run job for Action.

After that, we wait for the AWS Glue job to run and to finish successfully. We can track the status of the job by checking the History tab.

When the job finishes running, we can check the Database section. There should be a new table created called ctr in Parquet format.

To query the data with Athena, we can select the ctr table, and for Action choose View data.

Doing this takes us to the Athena console. If you run a query, Athena shows a preview of the data.

When we can query the data using Athena, we can visualize it using Amazon QuickSight. Before connecting Amazon QuickSight to Athena, we must make sure to grant Amazon QuickSight access to Athena and the associated S3 buckets in the account. For more information on doing this, see Managing Amazon QuickSight Permissions to AWS Resources in the Amazon QuickSight User Guide. We can then create a new data set in Amazon QuickSight based on the Athena table that was created.

After setting up permissions, we can create a new analysis in Amazon QuickSight by choosing New analysis.

Then we add a new data set.

We choose Athena as the source and give the data source a name (in this case, I named it connectctr).

Choose the name of the database and the table referencing the Parquet results.

Then choose Visualize.

After that, we should see the following screen.

Now we can create some visualizations. First, search for the agent.username column, and drag it to the AutoGraph section.

We can see the agents and the number of calls for each, so we can easily see which agents have taken the largest amount of calls. If we want to see from what queues the calls came for each agent, we can add the queue.arn column to the visual.

After following all these steps, you can use Amazon QuickSight to add different columns from the call records and perform different types of visualizations. You can build dashboards that continuously monitor your connect instance. You can share those dashboards with others in your organization who might need to see this data.

Conclusion

In this post, you see how you can use services like AWS Lambda, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena to process Amazon Connect call records. The post also demonstrates how to use AWS Lambda to preprocess files in Amazon S3 and transform them into a format that recognized by AWS Glue crawlers. Finally, the post shows how to used Amazon QuickSight to perform visualizations.

You can use the provided template to analyze your own contact center instance. Or you can take the CloudFormation template and modify it to process other data streams that can be ingested using Amazon Kinesis or stored on Amazon S3.

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Analyze Apache Parquet optimized data using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift and Visualize AWS Cloudtrail Logs Using AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight.

About the Authors

Luis Caro is a Big Data Consultant for AWS Professional Services. He works with our customers to provide guidance and technical assistance on big data projects, helping them improving the value of their solutions when using AWS.

Peter Dalbhanjan is a Solutions Architect for AWS based in Herndon, VA. Peter has a keen interest in evangelizing AWS solutions and has written multiple blog posts that focus on simplifying complex use cases. At AWS, Peter helps with designing and architecting variety of customer workloads.

GoDaddy to Suspend ‘Pirate’ Domain Following Music Industry Complaints

2018-06-01 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/godaddy-to-suspend-pirate-domain-following-music-industry-complaints-180601/

Most piracy-focused sites online conduct their business with minimal interference from outside parties. In many cases, a heap of DMCA notices filed with Google represents the most visible irritant.

Others, particularly those with large audiences, can find themselves on the end of a web blockade. Mostly court-ordered, blocking measures restrict the ability of Internet users to visit a site due to ISPs restricting traffic.

In some regions, where copyright holders have the means to do so, they choose to tackle a site’s infrastructure instead, which could mean complaints to webhosts or other service providers. At times, this has included domain registries, who are asked to disable domains on copyright grounds.

This is exactly what has happened to Fox-MusicaGratis.com, a Spanish-language music piracy site that incurred the wrath of IFPI member UNIMPRO – the Peruvian Union of Phonographic Producers.

Pirate music, suspended domain

In a process that’s becoming more common in the region, UNIMPRO initially filed a complaint with the Copyright Commission (Comisión de Derecho de Autor (CDA)) which conducted an investigation into the platform’s activities.

“The CDA considered, among other things, the irreparable damage that would have been caused to the legitimate rights owners, taking into account the large number of users who could potentially have visited said website, which was making available endless musical recordings for commercial purposes, without authorization of the holders of rights,” a statement from CDA reads.

The administrative process was carried out locally with the involvement of the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi), an autonomous public body tasked with handling anti-competitive behavior, unfair competition, and intellectual property matters.

Indecopi HQ

The matter was decided in favor of the rightsholders and a subsequent ruling included an instruction for US-based domain name registry GoDaddy to suspend Fox-MusicaGratis.com. According to the copyright protection entity, GoDaddy agreed to comply, to prevent further infringement.

This latest action involving a music piracy site registered with GoDaddy follows on the heels of a similar enforcement process back in March.

Mp3Juices-Download-Free.com, Melodiavip.net, Foxmusica.site and Fulltono.me were all music sites offering MP3 content without copyright holders’ permission. They too were the subject of an UNIMPRO complaint which resulted in orders for GoDaddy to suspend their domains.

In the cases of all five websites, GoDaddy was given the chance to appeal but there is no indication that the company has done so. GoDaddy did not respond to a request for comment.

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

Majority of Canadians Consume Online Content Legally, Survey Finds

2018-05-31 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/majority-of-canadians-consume-online-content-legally-survey-finds-180531/

Back in January, a coalition of companies and organizations with ties to the entertainment industries called on local telecoms regulator CRTC to implement a national website blocking regime.

Under the banner of Fairplay Canada, members including Bell, Cineplex, Directors Guild of Canada, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Movie Theatre Association of Canada, and Rogers Media, spoke of an industry under threat from marauding pirates. But just how serious is this threat?

The results of a new survey commissioned by Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) in collaboration with the Department of Canadian Heritage (PCH) aims to shine light on the problem by revealing the online content consumption habits of citizens in the Great White North.

While there are interesting findings for those on both sides of the site-blocking debate, the situation seems somewhat removed from the Armageddon scenario predicted by the entertainment industries.

Carried out among 3,301 Canadians aged 12 years and over, the Kantar TNS study aims to cover copyright infringement in six key content areas – music, movies, TV shows, video games, computer software, and eBooks. Attitudes and behaviors are also touched upon while measuring the effectiveness of Canada’s copyright measures.

General Digital Content Consumption

In its introduction, the report notes that 28 million Canadians used the Internet in the three-month study period to November 27, 2017. Of those, 22 million (80%) consumed digital content. Around 20 million (73%) streamed or accessed content, 16 million (59%) downloaded content, while 8 million (28%) shared content.

Music, TV shows and movies all battled for first place in the consumption ranks, with 48%, 48%, and 46% respectively.

Copyright Infringement

According to the study, the majority of Canadians do things completely by the book. An impressive 74% of media-consuming respondents said that they’d only accessed material from legal sources in the preceding three months.

The remaining 26% admitted to accessing at least one illegal file in the same period. Of those, just 5% said that all of their consumption was from illegal sources, with movies (36%), software (36%), TV shows (34%) and video games (33%) the most likely content to be consumed illegally.

Interestingly, the study found that few demographic factors – such as gender, region, rural and urban, income, employment status and language – play a role in illegal content consumption.

“We found that only age and income varied significantly between consumers who infringed by downloading or streaming/accessing content online illegally and consumers who did not consume infringing content online,” the report reads.

“More specifically, the profile of consumers who downloaded or streamed/accessed infringing content skewed slightly younger and towards individuals with household incomes of $100K+.”

Licensed services much more popular than pirate haunts

It will come as no surprise that Netflix was the most popular service with consumers, with 64% having used it in the past three months. Sites like YouTube and Facebook were a big hit too, visited by 36% and 28% of content consumers respectively.

Overall, 74% of online content consumers use licensed services for content while 42% use social networks. Under a third (31%) use a combination of peer-to-peer (BitTorrent), cyberlocker platforms, or linking sites. Stream-ripping services are used by 9% of content consumers.

“Consumers who reported downloading or streaming/accessing infringing content only are less likely to use licensed services and more likely to use peer-to-peer/cyberlocker/linking sites than other consumers of online content,” the report notes.

Attitudes towards legal consumption & infringing content

In common with similar surveys over the years, the Kantar research looked at the reasons why people consume content from various sources, both legal and otherwise.

Convenience (48%), speed (36%) and quality (34%) were the most-cited reasons for using legal sources. An interesting 33% of respondents said they use legal sites to avoid using illegal sources.

On the illicit front, 54% of those who obtained unauthorized content in the previous three months said they did so due to it being free, with 40% citing convenience and 34% mentioning speed.

Almost six out of ten (58%) said lower costs would encourage them to switch to official sources, with 47% saying they’d move if legal availability was improved.

Canada’s ‘Notice-and-Notice’ warning system

People in Canada who share content on peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent without permission run the risk of receiving an infringement notice warning them to stop. These are sent by copyright holders via users’ ISPs and the hope is that the shock of receiving a warning will turn consumers back to the straight and narrow.

The study reveals that 10% of online content consumers over the age of 12 have received one of these notices but what kind of effect have they had?

“Respondents reported that receiving such a notice resulted in the following: increased awareness of copyright infringement (38%), taking steps to ensure password protected home networks (27%), a household discussion about copyright infringement (27%), and discontinuing illegal downloading or streaming (24%),” the report notes.

While these are all positives for the entertainment industries, Kantar reports that almost a quarter (24%) of people who receive a notice simply ignore them.

Stream-ripping

Once upon a time, people obtaining music via P2P networks was cited as the music industry’s greatest threat but, with the advent of sites like YouTube, so-called stream-ripping is the latest bogeyman.

According to the study, 11% of Internet users say they’ve used a stream-ripping service. They are most likely to be male (62%) and predominantly 18 to 34 (52%) years of age.

“Among Canadians who have used a service to stream-rip music or entertainment, nearly half (48%) have used stream-ripping sites, one-third have used downloader apps (38%), one-in-seven (14%) have used a stream-ripping plug-in, and one-in-ten (10%) have used stream-ripping software,” the report adds.

Set-Top Boxes and VPNs

Few general piracy studies would be complete in 2018 without touching on set-top devices and Virtual Private Networks and this report doesn’t disappoint.

More than one in five (21%) respondents aged 12+ reported using a VPN, with the main purpose of securing communications and Internet browsing (57%).

A relatively modest 36% said they use a VPN to access free content while 32% said the aim was to access geo-blocked content unavailable in Canada. Just over a quarter (27%) said that accessing content from overseas at a reasonable price was the main motivator.

One in ten (10%) of respondents reported using a set-top box, with 78% stating they use them to access paid-for content. Interestingly, only a small number say they use the devices to infringe.

“A minority use set-top boxes to access other content that is not legal or they are unsure if it is legal (16%), or to access live sports that are not legal or they are unsure if it is legal (11%),” the report notes.

“Individuals who consumed a mix of legal and illegal content online are more likely to use VPN services (42%) or TV set-top boxes (21%) than consumers who only downloaded or streamed/accessed legal content.”

Kantar says that the findings of the report will be used to help policymakers evaluate how Canada’s Copyright Act is coping with a changing market and technological developments.

“This research will provide the necessary information required to further develop copyright policy in Canada, as well as to provide a foundation to assess the effectiveness of the measures to address copyright infringement, should future analysis be undertaken,” it concludes.

The full report can be found 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.

Hiring a Director of Sales

2018-05-31 Yev

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hiring-a-director-of-sales/

Backblaze is hiring a Director of Sales. This is a critical role for Backblaze as we continue to grow the team. We need a strong leader who has experience in scaling a sales team and who has an excellent track record for exceeding goals by selling Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, this leader will need to be highly motivated, as well as able to create and develop a highly-motivated, success oriented sales team that has fun and enjoys what they do.

The History of Backblaze from our CEO
In 2007, after a friend’s computer crash caused her some suffering, we realized that with every photo, video, song, and document going digital, everyone would eventually lose all of their information. Five of us quit our jobs to start a company with the goal of making it easy for people to back up their data.

Like many startups, for a while we worked out of a co-founder’s one-bedroom apartment. Unlike most startups, we made an explicit agreement not to raise funding during the first year. We would then touch base every six months and decide whether to raise or not. We wanted to focus on building the company and the product, not on pitching and slide decks. And critically, we wanted to build a culture that understood money comes from customers, not the magical VC giving tree. Over the course of 5 years we built a profitable, multi-million dollar revenue business — and only then did we raise a VC round.

Fast forward 10 years later and our world looks quite different. You’ll have some fantastic assets to work with:

A brand millions recognize for openness, ease-of-use, and affordability.
A computer backup service that stores over 500 petabytes of data, has recovered over 30 billion files for hundreds of thousands of paying customers — most of whom self-identify as being the people that find and recommend technology products to their friends.
Our B2 service that provides the lowest cost cloud storage on the planet at 1/4th the price Amazon, Google or Microsoft charges. While being a newer product on the market, it already has over 100,000 IT and developers signed up as well as an ecosystem building up around it.
A growing, profitable and cash-flow positive company.
And last, but most definitely not least: a great sales team.

You might be saying, “sounds like you’ve got this under control — why do you need me?” Don’t be misled. We need you. Here’s why:

We have a great team, but we are in the process of expanding and we need to develop a structure that will easily scale and provide the most success to drive revenue.
We just launched our outbound sales efforts and we need someone to help develop that into a fully successful program that’s building a strong pipeline and closing business.
We need someone to work with the marketing department and figure out how to generate more inbound opportunities that the sales team can follow up on and close.
We need someone who will work closely in developing the skills of our current sales team and build a path for career growth and advancement.
We want someone to manage our Customer Success program.

So that’s a bit about us. What are we looking for in you?

Experience: As a sales leader, you will strategically build and drive the territory’s sales pipeline by assembling and leading a skilled team of sales professionals. This leader should be familiar with generating, developing and closing software subscription (SaaS) opportunities. We are looking for a self-starter who can manage a team and make an immediate impact of selling our Backup and Cloud Storage solutions. In this role, the sales leader will work closely with the VP of Sales, marketing staff, and service staff to develop and implement specific strategic plans to achieve and exceed revenue targets, including new business acquisition as well as build out our customer success program.

Leadership: We have an experienced team who’s brought us to where we are today. You need to have the people and management skills to get them excited about working with you. You need to be a strong leader and compassionate about developing and supporting your team.

Data driven and creative: The data has to show something makes sense before we scale it up. However, without creativity, it’s easy to say “the data shows it’s impossible” or to find a local maximum. Whether it’s deciding how to scale the team, figuring out what our outbound sales efforts should look like or putting a plan in place to develop the team for career growth, we’ve seen a bit of creativity get us places a few extra dollars couldn’t.

Jive with our culture: Strong leaders affect culture and the person we hire for this role may well shape, not only fit into, ours. But to shape the culture you have to be accepted by the organism, which means a certain set of shared values. We default to openness with our team, our customers, and everyone if possible. We love initiative — without arrogance or dictatorship. We work to create a place people enjoy showing up to work. That doesn’t mean ping pong tables and foosball (though we do try to have perks & fun), but it means people are friendly, non-political, working to build a good service but also a good place to work.

Do the work: Ideas and strategy are critical, but good execution makes them happen. We’re looking for someone who can help the team execute both from the perspective of being capable of guiding and organizing, but also someone who is hands-on themselves.

Additional Responsibilities needed for this role:

Recruit, coach, mentor, manage and lead a team of sales professionals to achieve yearly sales targets. This includes closing new business and expanding upon existing clientele.
Expand the customer success program to provide the best customer experience possible resulting in upsell opportunities and a high retention rate.
Develop effective sales strategies and deliver compelling product demonstrations and sales pitches.
Acquire and develop the appropriate sales tools to make the team efficient in their daily work flow.
Apply a thorough understanding of the marketplace, industry trends, funding developments, and products to all management activities and strategic sales decisions.
Ensure that sales department operations function smoothly, with the goal of facilitating sales and/or closings; operational responsibilities include accurate pipeline reporting and sales forecasts.
This position will report directly to the VP of Sales and will be staffed in our headquarters in San Mateo, CA.

Requirements:

7 – 10+ years of successful sales leadership experience as measured by sales performance against goals.
Experience in developing skill sets and providing career growth and opportunities through advancement of team members.
Background in selling SaaS technologies with a strong track record of success.
Strong presentation and communication skills.
Must be able to travel occasionally nationwide.
BA/BS degree required

Think you want to join us on this adventure?
Send an email to jobscontact@backblaze.com with the subject “Director of Sales.” (Recruiters and agencies, please don’t email us.) Include a resume and answer these two questions:

How would you approach evaluating the current sales team and what is your process for developing a growth strategy to scale the team?
What are the goals you would set for yourself in the 3 month and 1-year timeframes?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that this sounds like the opportunity for which you’ve been waiting.

Backblaze is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The post Hiring a Director of Sales appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Amazon Neptune Generally Available

2018-05-30 Randall Hunt

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

Amazon Neptune is now Generally Available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully-managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. At the core of Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with millisecond latencies. Neptune supports two popular graph models, Property Graph and RDF, through Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL, allowing you to easily build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets. Neptune can be used to power everything from recommendation engines and knowledge graphs to drug discovery and network security. Neptune is fully-managed with automatic minor version upgrades, backups, encryption, and fail-over. I wrote about Neptune in detail for AWS re:Invent last year and customers have been using the preview and providing great feedback that the team has used to prepare the service for GA.

Now that Amazon Neptune is generally available there are a few changes from the preview:

A large number of performance enhancements and updates
AWS CloudFormation support
AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)/SDK support
Updated to Apache TinkerPop 3.3.2
Support for IAM roles with bulk loading from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Launching an Amazon Neptune Cluster

Launching a Neptune cluster is as easy as navigating to the AWS Management Console and clicking create cluster. Of course you can also launch with CloudFormation, the CLI, or the SDKs.

You can monitor your cluster health and the health of individual instances through Amazon CloudWatch and the console.

Additional Resources

We’ve created two repos with some additional tools and examples here. You can expect continuous development on these repos as we add additional tools and examples.

Amazon Neptune Tools Repo
This repo has a useful tool for converting GraphML files into Neptune compatible CSVs for bulk loading from S3.
Amazon Neptune Samples Repo
This repo has a really cool example of building a collaborative filtering recommendation engine for video game preferences.

Purpose Built Databases

There’s an industry trend where we’re moving more and more onto purpose-built databases. Developers and businesses want to access their data in the format that makes the most sense for their applications. As cloud resources make transforming large datasets easier with tools like AWS Glue, we have a lot more options than we used to for accessing our data. With tools like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, and more we get to choose the best database for the job or even enable entirely new use-cases. Amazon Neptune is perfect for workloads where the data is highly connected across data rich edges.

I’m really excited about graph databases and I see a huge number of applications. Looking for ideas of cool things to build? I’d love to build a web crawler in AWS Lambda that uses Neptune as the backing store. You could further enrich it by running Amazon Comprehend or Amazon Rekognition on the text and images found and creating a search engine on top of Neptune.

As always, feel free to reach out in the comments or on twitter to provide any feedback!

– Randall

FCC Asks Amazon & eBay to Help Eliminate Pirate Media Box Sales

2018-05-30 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/fcc-asks-amazon-ebay-to-help-eliminate-pirate-media-box-sales-180530/

Over the past several years, anyone looking for a piracy-configured set-top box could do worse than search for one on Amazon or eBay.

Historically, people deploying search terms including “Kodi” or “fully-loaded” were greeted by page after page of Android-type boxes, each ready for illicit plug-and-play entertainment consumption following delivery.

Although the problem persists on both platforms, people are now much less likely to find infringing devices than they were 12 to 24 months ago. Under pressure from entertainment industry groups, both Amazon and eBay have tightened the screws on sellers of such devices. Now, however, both companies have received requests to stem sales from a completetey different direction.

In a letter to eBay CEO Devin Wenig and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos first spotted by Ars, FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly calls on the platforms to take action against piracy-configured boxes that fail to comply with FCC equipment authorization requirements or falsely display FCC logos, contrary to United States law.

“Disturbingly, some rogue set-top box manufacturers and distributors are exploiting the FCC’s trusted logo by fraudulently placing it on devices that have not been approved via the Commission’s equipment authorization process,” O’Rielly’s letter reads.

“Specifically, nine set-top box distributors were referred to the FCC in October for enabling the unlawful streaming of copyrighted material, seven of which displayed the FCC logo, although there was no record of such compliance.”

While O’Rielly admits that the copyright infringement aspects fall outside the jurisdiction of the FCC, he says it’s troubling that many of these devices are used to stream infringing content, “exacerbating the theft of billions of dollars in American innovation and creativity.”

As noted above, both Amazon and eBay have taken steps to reduce sales of pirate boxes on their respective platforms on copyright infringement grounds, something which is duly noted by O’Rielly. However, he points out that devices continue to be sold to members of the public who may believe that the devices are legal since they’re available for sale from legitimate companies.

“For these reasons, I am seeking your further cooperation in assisting the FCC in taking steps to eliminate the non-FCC compliant devices or devices that fraudulently bear the FCC logo,” the Commissioner writes (pdf).

“Moreover, if your company is made aware by the Commission, with supporting evidence, that a particular device is using a fraudulent FCC label or has not been appropriately certified and labeled with a valid FCC logo, I respectfully request that you commit to swiftly removing these products from your sites.”

In the event that Amazon and eBay take action under this request, O’Rielly asks both platforms to hand over information they hold on offending manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers.

Amazon was quick to respond to the FCC. In a letter published by Ars, Amazon’s Public Policy Vice President Brian Huseman assured O’Rielly that the company is not only dedicated to tackling rogue devices on copyright-infringement grounds but also when there is fraudulent use of the FCC’s logos.

Noting that Amazon is a key member of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) – a group that has been taking legal action against sellers of infringing streaming devices (ISDs) and those who make infringing addons for Kodi-type systems – Huseman says that dealing with the problem is a top priority.

“Our goal is to prevent the sale of ISDs anywhere, as we seek to protect our customers from the risks posed by these devices, in addition to our interest in protecting Amazon Studios content,” Huseman writes.

“In 2017, Amazon became the first online marketplace to prohibit the sale of streaming media players that promote or facilitate piracy. To prevent the sale of these devices, we proactively scan product listings for signs of potentially infringing products, and we also invest heavily in sophisticated, automated real-time tools to review a variety of data sources and signals to identify inauthentic goods.

“These automated tools are supplemented by human reviewers that conduct manual investigations. When we suspect infringement, we take immediate action to remove suspected listings, and we also take enforcement action against sellers’ entire accounts when appropriate.”

Huseman also reveals that since implementing a proactive policy against such devices, “tens of thousands” of listings have been blocked from Amazon. In addition, the platform has been making criminal referrals to law enforcement as well as taking civil action (1,2,3) as part of ACE.

“As noted in your letter, we would also appreciate the opportunity to collaborate further with the FCC to remove non-compliant devices that improperly use the FCC logo or falsely claim FCC certification. If any FCC non-compliant devices are identified, we seek to work with you to ensure they are not offered for sale,” Huseman concludes.

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

Hong Kong Customs Arrest Pirate Streaming Device Vendors

2018-05-29 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/hong-kong-customs-arrest-pirate-streaming-device-vendors-180529/

As Internet-capable set-top boxes pour into homes across all populated continents, authorities seem almost powerless to come up with a significant response to the growing threat.

In standard form these devices, which are often Android-based, are entirely legal. However, when configured with specialist software they become piracy powerhouses providing access to all content imaginable, often at copyright holders’ expense.

A large proportion of these devices come from Asia, China in particular, but it’s relatively rare to hear of enforcement action in that part of the world. That changed this week with an announcement from Hong Kong customs detailing a series of raids in the areas of Sham Shui Po and Wan Chai.

After conducting an in-depth investigation with the assistance of copyright holders, on May 25 and 26 Customs and Excise officers launched Operation Trojan Horse, carrying out a series of raids on four premises selling suspected piracy-configured set-top boxes.

During the operation, officers arrested seven men and one woman aged between 18 and 45. Four of them were shop owners and the other four were salespeople. Around 354 suspected ‘pirate’ boxes were seized with an estimated market value of HK$320,000 (US$40,700).

“In the past few months, the department has stepped up inspections of hotspots for TV set-top boxes,” a statement from authorities reads.

“We have discovered that some shops have sold suspected illegal set-top boxes that bypass the copyright protection measures imposed by copyright holders of pay television programs allowing people to watch pay television programs for free.”

Some of the devices seized by Hong Kong Customs

During a press conference yesterday, a representative from the Customs Copyright and Trademark Investigations (Action) Division said that in the run up to the World Cup in 2018, measures against copyright infringement will be strengthened both on and online.

The announcement was welcomed by the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia’s (CASBAA) Coalition Against Piracy, which is back by industry heavyweights including Disney, Fox, HBO Asia, NBCUniversal, Premier League, Turner Asia-Pacific, A&E Networks, Astro, BBC Worldwide, National Basketball Association, TV5MONDE, Viacom International, and others.

“We commend the great work of Hong Kong Customs in clamping down on syndicates who profit from the sale of Illicit Streaming Devices,” said General Manager Neil Gane.

“The prevalence of ISDs in Hong Kong and across South East Asia is staggering. The criminals who sell ISDs, as well as those who operate the ISD networks and pirate websites, are profiting from the hard work of talented creators, seriously damaging the legitimate content ecosystem as well as exposing consumers to dangerous malware.”

Malware warnings are very prevalent these days but it’s not something the majority of set-top box owners have a problem with. Indeed, a study carried by Sycamore Research found that pirates aren’t easily deterred by such warnings.

Nevertheless, there are definite risks for individuals selling devices when they’re configured for piracy.

Recent cases, particularly in the UK, have shown that hefty jail sentences can hit offenders while over in the United States (1,2,3), lawsuits filed by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) have the potential to end in unfavorable rulings for multiple defendants.

Although rarely reported, offenders in Hong Kong also face stiff sentences for this kind of infringement including large fines and custodial sentences of up to four years.

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

Kidnapping Fraud

2018-05-29 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/kidnapping_frau.html

Fake kidnapping fraud:

“Most commonly we have unsolicited calls to potential victims in Australia, purporting to represent the people in authority in China and suggesting to intending victims here they have been involved in some sort of offence in China or elsewhere, for which they’re being held responsible,” Commander McLean said.
The scammers threaten the students with deportation from Australia or some kind of criminal punishment.
The victims are then coerced into providing their identification details or money to get out of the supposed trouble they’re in.
Commander McLean said there are also cases where the student is told they have to hide in a hotel room, provide compromising photos of themselves and cut off all contact.
This simulates a kidnapping.
“So having tricked the victims in Australia into providing the photographs, and money and documents and other things, they then present the information back to the unknowing families in China to suggest that their children who are abroad are in trouble,” Commander McLean said.
“So quite circular in a sense…very skilled, very cunning.”

Protecting your API using Amazon API Gateway and AWS WAF — Part I

2018-05-25 Chris Munns

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/protecting-your-api-using-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-waf-part-i/

This post courtesy of Thiago Morais, AWS Solutions Architect

When you build web applications or expose any data externally, you probably look for a platform where you can build highly scalable, secure, and robust REST APIs. As APIs are publicly exposed, there are a number of best practices for providing a secure mechanism to consumers using your API.

Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.

In this post, I show you how to take advantage of the regional API endpoint feature in API Gateway, so that you can create your own Amazon CloudFront distribution and secure your API using AWS WAF.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

As you make your APIs publicly available, you are exposed to attackers trying to exploit your services in several ways. The AWS security team published a whitepaper solution using AWS WAF, How to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities.

Regional API endpoints

Edge-optimized APIs are endpoints that are accessed through a CloudFront distribution created and managed by API Gateway. Before the launch of regional API endpoints, this was the default option when creating APIs using API Gateway. It primarily helped to reduce latency for API consumers that were located in different geographical locations than your API.

When API requests predominantly originate from an Amazon EC2 instance or other services within the same AWS Region as the API is deployed, a regional API endpoint typically lowers the latency of connections. It is recommended for such scenarios.

For better control around caching strategies, customers can use their own CloudFront distribution for regional APIs. They also have the ability to use AWS WAF protection, as I describe in this post.

Edge-optimized API endpoint

The following diagram is an illustrated example of the edge-optimized API endpoint where your API clients access your API through a CloudFront distribution created and managed by API Gateway.

Regional API endpoint

For the regional API endpoint, your customers access your API from the same Region in which your REST API is deployed. This helps you to reduce request latency and particularly allows you to add your own content delivery network, as needed.

Walkthrough

In this section, you implement the following steps:

Create a regional API using the PetStore sample API.
Create a CloudFront distribution for the API.
Test the CloudFront distribution.
Set up AWS WAF and create a web ACL.
Attach the web ACL to the CloudFront distribution.
Test AWS WAF protection.

Create the regional API

For this walkthrough, use an existing PetStore API. All new APIs launch by default as the regional endpoint type. To change the endpoint type for your existing API, choose the cog icon on the top right corner:

After you have created the PetStore API on your account, deploy a stage called “prod” for the PetStore API.

On the API Gateway console, select the PetStore API and choose Actions, Deploy API.

For Stage name, type prod and add a stage description.

Choose Deploy and the new API stage is created.

Use the following AWS CLI command to update your API from edge-optimized to regional:

aws apigateway update-rest-api \
--rest-api-id {rest-api-id} \
--patch-operations op=replace,path=/endpointConfiguration/types/EDGE,value=REGIONAL

A successful response looks like the following:

{
    "description": "Your first API with Amazon API Gateway. This is a sample API that integrates via HTTP with your demo Pet Store endpoints", 
    "createdDate": 1511525626, 
    "endpointConfiguration": {
        "types": [
            "REGIONAL"
        ]
    }, 
    "id": "{api-id}", 
    "name": "PetStore"
}

After you change your API endpoint to regional, you can now assign your own CloudFront distribution to this API.

Create a CloudFront distribution

To make things easier, I have provided an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy a CloudFront distribution pointing to the API that you just created. Click the button to deploy the template in the us-east-1 Region.

For Stack name, enter RegionalAPI. For APIGWEndpoint, enter your API FQDN in the following format:

{api-id}.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

After you fill out the parameters, choose Next to continue the stack deployment. It takes a couple of minutes to finish the deployment. After it finishes, the Output tab lists the following items:

A CloudFront domain URL
An S3 bucket for CloudFront access logs

Output from CloudFormation

Test the CloudFront distribution

To see if the CloudFront distribution was configured correctly, use a web browser and enter the URL from your distribution, with the following parameters:

https://{your-distribution-url}.cloudfront.net/{api-stage}/pets

You should get the following output:

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "type": "dog",
    "price": 249.99
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "type": "cat",
    "price": 124.99
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "type": "fish",
    "price": 0.99
  }
]

Set up AWS WAF and create a web ACL

With the new CloudFront distribution in place, you can now start setting up AWS WAF to protect your API.

For this demo, you deploy the AWS WAF Security Automations solution, which provides fine-grained control over the requests attempting to access your API.

For more information about deployment, see Automated Deployment. If you prefer, you can launch the solution directly into your account using the following button.

For CloudFront Access Log Bucket Name, add the name of the bucket created during the deployment of the CloudFormation stack for your CloudFront distribution.

The solution allows you to adjust thresholds and also choose which automations to enable to protect your API. After you finish configuring these settings, choose Next.

To start the deployment process in your account, follow the creation wizard and choose Create. It takes a few minutes do finish the deployment. You can follow the creation process through the CloudFormation console.

After the deployment finishes, you can see the new web ACL deployed on the AWS WAF console, AWSWAFSecurityAutomations.

Attach the AWS WAF web ACL to the CloudFront distribution

With the solution deployed, you can now attach the AWS WAF web ACL to the CloudFront distribution that you created earlier.

To assign the newly created AWS WAF web ACL, go back to your CloudFront distribution. After you open your distribution for editing, choose General, Edit.

Select the new AWS WAF web ACL that you created earlier, AWSWAFSecurityAutomations.

Save the changes to your CloudFront distribution and wait for the deployment to finish.

Test AWS WAF protection

To validate the AWS WAF Web ACL setup, use Artillery to load test your API and see AWS WAF in action.

To install Artillery on your machine, run the following command:

$ npm install -g artillery

After the installation completes, you can check if Artillery installed successfully by running the following command:

$ artillery -V
$ 1.6.0-12

As the time of publication, Artillery is on version 1.6.0-12.

One of the WAF web ACL rules that you have set up is a rate-based rule. By default, it is set up to block any requesters that exceed 2000 requests under 5 minutes. Try this out.

First, use cURL to query your distribution and see the API output:

$ curl -s https://{distribution-name}.cloudfront.net/prod/pets
[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "type": "dog",
    "price": 249.99
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "type": "cat",
    "price": 124.99
  },
  {
    "id": 3,
    "type": "fish",
    "price": 0.99
  }
]

Based on the test above, the result looks good. But what if you max out the 2000 requests in under 5 minutes?

Run the following Artillery command:

artillery quick -n 2000 --count 10  https://{distribution-name}.cloudfront.net/prod/pets

What you are doing is firing 2000 requests to your API from 10 concurrent users. For brevity, I am not posting the Artillery output here.

After Artillery finishes its execution, try to run the cURL request again and see what happens:

$ curl -s https://{distribution-name}.cloudfront.net/prod/pets

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>ERROR: The request could not be satisfied</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>ERROR</H1>
<H2>The request could not be satisfied.</H2>
<HR noshade size="1px">
Request blocked.
<BR clear="all">
<HR noshade size="1px">
<PRE>
Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: [removed]
</PRE>
<ADDRESS>
</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>

As you can see from the output above, the request was blocked by AWS WAF. Your IP address is removed from the blocked list after it falls below the request limit rate.

Conclusion

In this first part, you saw how to use the new API Gateway regional API endpoint together with Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF to secure your API from a series of attacks.

In the second part, I will demonstrate some other techniques to protect your API using API keys and Amazon CloudFront custom headers.

HackSpace magazine 7: Internet of Everything

2018-05-24 Andrew Gregory

Post Syndicated from Andrew Gregory original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hackspace-magazine-7-internet-of-everything/

We’re usually averse to buzzwords at HackSpace magazine, but not this month: in issue 7, we’re taking a deep dive into the Internet of Things.

Internet of Things (IoT)

To many people, IoT is a shady term used by companies to sell you something you already own, but this time with WiFi; to us, it’s a way to make our builds smarter, more useful, and more connected. In HackSpace magazine #7, you can join us on a tour of the boards that power IoT projects, marvel at the ways in which other makers are using IoT, and get started with your first IoT project!

Awesome projects

DIY retro computing: this issue, we’re taking our collective hat off to Spencer Owen. He stuck his home-brew computer on Tindie thinking he might make a bit of beer money — now he’s paying the mortgage with his making skills and inviting others to build modules for his machine. And if that tickles your fancy, why not take a crack at our Z80 tutorial? Get out your breadboard, assemble your jumper wires, and prepare to build a real-life computer!

Shameless patriotism: combine Lego, Arduino, and the car of choice for 1960 gold bullion thieves, and you’ve got yourself a groovy weekend project. We proudly present to you one man’s epic quest to add LED lights (controllable via a smartphone!) to his daughter’s LEGO Mini Cooper.

Makerspaces

Patriotism intensifies: for the last 200-odd years, the Black Country has been a hotbed of making. Urban Hax, based in Walsall, is the latest makerspace to show off its riches in the coveted Space of the Month pages. Every space has its own way of doing things, but not every space has a portrait of Rob Halford on the wall. All hail!

Diversity: advice on diversity often boils down to ‘Be nice to people’, which might feel more vague than actionable. This is where we come in to help: it is truly worth making the effort to give people of all backgrounds access to your makerspace, so we take a look at why it’s nice to be nice, and at the ways in which one makerspace has put niceness into practice — with great results.

And there’s more!

We also show you how to easily calculate the size and radius of laser-cut gears, use a bank of LEDs to etch PCBs in your own mini factory, and use chemistry to mess with your lunch menu.

All this plus much, much more waits for you in HackSpace magazine issue 7!

Get your copy of HackSpace magazine

If you like the sound of that, you can 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.

And if you can’t get to the shops, fear not: you can subscribe from £4 an issue from our online shop. And if you’d rather try before you buy, you can always download the free PDF. Happy reading, and happy making!

The post HackSpace magazine 7: Internet of Everything appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Fully-Loaded Kodi Box Sellers Receive Hefty Jail Sentences

2018-05-24 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/fully-loaded-kodi-box-sellers-receive-hefty-jail-sentences-180524/

While users of older peer-to-peer based file-sharing systems have to work relatively hard to obtain content, users of the Kodi media player have things an awful lot easier.

As standard, Kodi is perfectly legal. However, when augmented with third-party add-ons it becomes a media discovery powerhouse, providing most of the content anyone could desire. A system like this can be set up by the user but for many, buying a so-called “fully-loaded” box from a seller is the easier option.

As a result, hundreds – probably thousands – of cottage industries have sprung up to service this hungry market in the UK, with regular people making a business out of setting up and selling such devices. Until three years ago, that’s what Michael Jarman and Natalie Forber of Colwyn Bay, Wales, found themselves doing.

According to reports in local media, Jarman was arrested in January 2015 when police were called to a disturbance at Jarman and Forber’s home. A large number of devices were spotted and an investigation was launched by Trading Standards officers. The pair were later arrested and charged with fraud offenses.

While 37-year-old Jarman pleaded guilty, 36-year-old Forber initially denied the charges and was due to stand trial. However, she later changed her mind and like Jarman, pleaded guilty to participating in a fraudulent business. Forber also pleaded guilty to transferring criminal property by shifting cash from the scheme through various bank accounts.

The pair attended a sentencing hearing before Judge Niclas Parry at Caernarfon Crown Court yesterday. According to local reporter Eryl Crump, the Court heard that the couple had run their business for about two years, selling around 1,000 fully-loaded Kodi-enabled devices for £100 each via social media.

According to David Birrell for the prosecution, the operation wasn’t particularly sophisticated but it involved Forber programming the devices as well as handling customer service. Forber claimed she was forced into the scheme by Jarman but that claim was rejected by the prosecution.

Between February 2013 and January 2015 the pair banked £105,000 from the business, money that was transferred between bank accounts in an effort to launder the takings.

Reporting from Court via Twitter, Crump said that Jarman’s defense lawyer accepted that a prison sentence was inevitable for his client but asked for the most lenient sentence possible.

Forber’s lawyer pointed out she had no previous convictions. The mother-of-two broke up with Jarman following her arrest and is now back in work and studying at college.

Sentencing the pair, Judge Niclas Parry described the offenses as a “relatively sophisticated fraud” carried out over a significant period. He jailed Jarman for 21 months and Forber for 16 months, suspended for two years. She must also carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.

The pair will also face a Proceeds of Crime investigation which could see them paying large sums to the state, should any assets be recoverable.

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

The devil wears Pravda

2018-05-24 Robert Graham

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/the-devil-wears-pravda.html

Classic Bond villain, Elon Musk, has a new plan to create a website dedicated to measuring the credibility and adherence to “core truth” of journalists. He is, without any sense of irony, going to call this “Pravda”. This is not simply wrong but evil.

Musk has a point. Journalists do suck, and many suck consistently. I see this in my own industry, cybersecurity, and I frequently criticize them for their suckage.

But what he’s doing here is not correcting them when they make mistakes (or what Musk sees as mistakes), but questioning their legitimacy. This legitimacy isn’t measured by whether they follow established journalism ethics, but whether their “core truths” agree with Musk’s “core truths”.

An example of the problem is how the press fixates on Tesla car crashes due to its “autopilot” feature. Pretty much every autopilot crash makes national headlines, while the press ignores the other 40,000 car crashes that happen in the United States each year. Musk spies on Tesla drivers (hello, classic Bond villain everyone) so he can see the dip in autopilot usage every time such a news story breaks. He’s got good reason to be concerned about this.

He argues that autopilot is safer than humans driving, and he’s got the statistics and government studies to back this up. Therefore, the press’s fixation on Tesla crashes is illegitimate “fake news”, titillating the audience with distorted truth.

But here’s the thing: that’s still only Musk’s version of the truth. Yes, on a mile-per-mile basis, autopilot is safer, but there’s nuance here. Autopilot is used primarily on freeways, which already have a low mile-per-mile accident rate. People choose autopilot only when conditions are incredibly safe and drivers are unlikely to have an accident anyway. Musk is therefore being intentionally deceptive comparing apples to oranges. Autopilot may still be safer, it’s just that the numbers Musk uses don’t demonstrate this.

And then there is the truth calling it “autopilot” to begin with, because it isn’t. The public is overrating the capabilities of the feature. It’s little different than “lane keeping” and “adaptive cruise control” you can now find in other cars. In many ways, the technology is behind — my Tesla doesn’t beep at me when a pedestrian walks behind my car while backing up, but virtually every new car on the market does.

Yes, the press unduly covers Tesla autopilot crashes, but Musk has only himself to blame by unduly exaggerating his car’s capabilities by calling it “autopilot”.

What’s “core truth” is thus rather difficult to obtain. What the press satisfies itself with instead is smaller truths, what they can document. The facts are in such cases that the accident happened, and they try to get Tesla or Musk to comment on it.

What you can criticize a journalist for is therefore not “core truth” but whether they did journalism correctly. When such stories criticize “autopilot”, but don’t do their diligence in getting Tesla’s side of the story, then that’s a violation of journalistic practice. When I criticize journalists for their poor handling of stories in my industry, I try to focus on which journalistic principles they get wrong. For example, the NYTimes reporters do a lot of stories quoting anonymous government sources in clear violation of journalistic principles.

If “credibility” is the concern, then it’s the classic Bond villain here that’s the problem: Musk himself. His track record on business statements is abysmal. For example, when he announced the Model 3 he claimed production targets that every Wall Street analyst claimed were absurd. He didn’t make those targets, he didn’t come close. Model 3 production is still lagging behind Musk’s twice adjusted targets.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

So who has a credibility gap here, the press, or Musk himself?

Not only is Musk’s credibility problem ironic, so is the name he chose, “Pravada”, the Russian word for truth that was the name of the Soviet Union Communist Party’s official newspaper. This is so absurd this has to be a joke, yet Musk claims to be serious about all this.

Yes, the press has a lot of problems, and if Musk were some journalism professor concerned about journalists meeting the objective standards of their industry (e.g. abusing anonymous sources), then this would be a fine thing. But it’s not. It’s Musk who is upset the press’s version of “core truth” does not agree with his version — a version that he’s proven time and time again differs from “real truth”.

Just in case Musk is serious, I’ve already registered “www.antipravda.com” to start measuring the credibility of statements by billionaire playboy CEOs. Let’s see who blinks first.

I stole the title, with permission, from this tweet:

The devil wears Pravda
— Guillaume (@gepeto42) May 23, 2018

BPI Wants Piracy Dealt With Under New UK Internet ‘Clean-Up’ Laws

2018-05-23 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/bpi-wants-music-piracy-dealt-with-under-uk-internet-clean-up-laws-180523/

For the past several years, the UK Government has expressed a strong desire to “clean up” the Internet.

Strong emphasis has been placed on making the Internet safer for children but that’s just the tip of a much larger iceberg.

This week, the Government published its response to the Internet Safety Strategy green paper, stating unequivocally that more needs to be done to tackle “online harm”.

Noting that six out of ten people report seeing inappropriate or harmful content online, the Government said that work already underway with social media companies to protect users had borne fruit but overall industry response has been less satisfactory.

As a result, the Government will now carry through with its threat to introduce new legislation, albeit with the assistance of technology companies, children’s charities and other stakeholders.

“Digital technology is overwhelmingly a force for good across the world and we must always champion innovation and change for the better,” said Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

“At the same time I have been clear that we have to address the Wild West elements of the Internet through legislation, in a way that supports innovation. We strongly support technology companies to start up and grow, and we want to work with them to keep our citizens safe.”

While emphasis is being placed on hot-button topics such as cyberbullying and online child exploitation, the Government is clear that it wishes to tackle “the full range” of online harms. That has been greeted by UK music group BPI with a request that the Government introduces new measures to tackle Internet piracy.

In a statement issued this week, BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor welcomed the move towards legislative change and urged the Government to encompass the music industry and beyond.

“This is a vital opportunity to protect consumers and boost the UK’s music and creative industries. The BPI has long pressed for internet intermediaries and online platforms to take responsibility for the content that they promote to users,” Taylor said.

“Government should now take the power in legislation to require online giants to take effective, proactive measures to clean illegal content from their sites and services. This will keep fans away from dodgy sites full of harmful content and prevent criminals from undermining creative businesses that create UK jobs.”

The BPI has published four initial requests, each of which provides food for thought.

The demand to “establish a new fast-track process for blocking illegal sites” is not entirely unexpected, particularly given the expense of launching applications for blocking injunctions at the High Court.

“The BPI has taken a large number of actions against individual websites – 63 injunctions are in place against sites that are wholly or mainly infringing and whose business is simply to profit from criminal activity,” the BPI says.

Those injunctions can be expanded fairly easily to include new sites operating under similar banners or facilitating access to those already covered, but it’s clear the BPI would like something more streamlined. Voluntary schemes, such as the one in place in Portugal, could be an option but it’s unclear how troublesome that could be for ISPs. New legislation could solve that dilemma, however.

Another big thorn in the side for groups like the BPI are people and entities that post infringing content. The BPI is very good at taking these listings down from sites and search engines in particular (more than 600 million requests to date) but it’s a game of whac-a-mole the group would rather not engage in.

With that in mind, the BPI would like the Government to impose new rules that would compel online platforms to stop content from being re-posted after it’s been taken down while removing the accounts of repeat infringers.

Thirdly, the BPI would like the Government to introduce penalties for “online operators” who do not provide “transparent contact and ownership information.” The music group isn’t any more specific than that, but the suggestion is that operators of some sites have a tendency to hide in the shadows, something which frustrates enforcement activity.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, the BPI is calling on the Government to legislate for a new “duty of care” for online intermediaries and platforms. Specifically, the BPI wants “effective action” taken against businesses that use the Internet to “encourage” consumers to access content illegally.

While this could easily encompass pirate sites and services themselves, this proposal has the breadth to include a wide range of offenders, from people posting piracy-focused tutorials on monetized YouTube channels to those selling fully-loaded Kodi devices on eBay or social media.

Overall, the BPI clearly wants to place pressure on intermediaries to take action against piracy when they’re in a position to do so, and particularly those who may not have shown much enthusiasm towards industry collaboration in the past.

“Legislation in this Bill, to take powers to intervene with respect to operators that do not co-operate, would bring focus to the roundtable process and ensure that intermediaries take their responsibilities seriously,” the BPI says.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and the Home Office will now work on a White Paper, to be published later this year, to set out legislation to tackle “online harms”. The BPI and similar entities will hope that the Government takes their concerns on board.

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

Acunetix v12 – More Comprehensive More Accurate & 2x Faster

2018-05-23 Darknet

Post Syndicated from Darknet original https://www.darknet.org.uk/2018/05/acunetix-v12-more-comprehensive-more-accurate-2x-faster/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=darknetfeed

Acunetix, the pioneer in automated web application security software, has announced the release of Acunetix v12. This new version provides support for JavaScript ES7 to better analyse sites which rely heavily on JavaScript such as SPAs. This coupled with a new AcuSensor for Java web applications, sets Acunetix ahead of the curve in its ability to comprehensively and accurately scan all types of websites.

With v12 also comes a brand new scanning engine, re-engineered and re-written from the ground up, making Acunetix the fastest scanning engine in the industry.

Read the rest of Acunetix v12 – More Comprehensive More Accurate & 2x Faster now! Only available at Darknet.

Singapore ISPs Block 53 Pirate Sites Following MPAA Legal Action

2018-05-21 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/singapore-isps-block-53-pirate-sites-following-mpaa-legal-action-180521/

Under increasing pressure from copyright holders, in 2014 Singapore passed amendments to copyright law that allow ISPs to block ‘pirate’ sites.

“The prevalence of online piracy in Singapore turns customers away from legitimate content and adversely affects Singapore’s creative sector,” said then Senior Minister of State for Law Indranee Rajah.

“It can also undermine our reputation as a society that respects the protection of intellectual property.”

After the amendments took effect in December 2014, there was a considerable pause before any websites were targeted. However, in September 2016, at the request of the MPA(A), Solarmovie.ph became the first website ordered to be blocked under Singapore’s amended Copyright Act. The High Court subsequently ordering several major ISPs to disable access to the site.

A new wave of blocks announced this morning are the country’s most significant so far, with dozens of ‘pirate’ sites targeted following a successful application by the MPAA earlier this year.

In total, 53 sites across 154 domains – including those operated by The Pirate Bay plus KickassTorrents and Solarmovie variants – have been rendered inaccessible by ISPs including Singtel, StarHub, M1, MyRepublic and ViewQwest.

“In Singapore, these sites are responsible for a major portion of copyright infringement of films and television shows,” an MPAA spokesman told The Straits Times (paywall).

“This action by rights owners is necessary to protect the creative industry, enabling creators to create and keep their jobs, protect their works, and ensure the continued provision of high-quality content to audiences.”

Before granting a blocking injunction, the High Court must satisfy itself that the proposed online locations meet the threshold of being “flagrantly infringing”. This means that a site like YouTube, which carries a lot of infringing content but is not dedicated to infringement, would not ordinarily get caught up in the dragnet.

Sites considered for blocking must have a primary purpose to infringe, a threshold that is tipped in copyright holders’ favor when the sites’ operators display a lack of respect for copyright law and have already had their domains blocked in other jurisdictions.

The Court also weighs a number of additional factors including whether blocking would place an unacceptable burden on the shoulders of ISPs, whether the blocking demand is technically possible, and whether it will be effective.

In common with other regions such as the UK and Australia, for example, sites targeted for blocking must be informed of the applications made against them, to ensure they’re given a chance to defend themselves in court. No fully-fledged ‘pirate’ site has ever defended a blocking application in Singapore or indeed any jurisdiction in the world.

Finally, should any measures be taken by ‘pirate’ sites to evade an ISP blockade, copyright holders can apply to the Singapore High Court to amend the blocking order. This is similar to the Australian model where each application must be heard on its merits, rather than the UK model where a more streamlined approach is taken.

According to a recent report by Motion Picture Association Canada, at least 42 countries are now obligated to block infringing sites. In Europe alone, 1,800 sites and 5,300 domains have been rendered inaccessible, with Portugal, Italy, the UK, and Denmark leading the way.

In Canada, where copyright holders are lobbying hard for a site-blocking regime of their own, there’s pressure to avoid the “uncertain, slow and expensive” route of going through the courts.

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

ISP Telenor Will Block The Pirate Bay in Sweden Without a Shot Fired

2018-05-20 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/isp-telenor-will-block-the-pirate-bay-in-sweden-without-a-shot-fired-180520/

Back in 2014, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry filed a lawsuit against Bredbandsbolaget, one of Sweden’s largest ISPs.

The copyright holders asked the Stockholm District Court to order the ISP to block The Pirate Bay and streaming site Swefilmer, claiming that the provider knowingly facilitated access to the pirate platforms and assisted their pirating users.

Soon after the ISP fought back, refusing to block the sites in a determined response to the Court.

“Bredbandsbolaget’s role is to provide its subscribers with access to the Internet, thereby contributing to the free flow of information and the ability for people to reach each other and communicate,” the company said in a statement.

“Bredbandsbolaget does not block content or services based on individual organizations’ requests. There is no legal obligation for operators to block either The Pirate Bay or Swefilmer.”

In February 2015 the parties met in court, with Bredbandsbolaget arguing in favor of the “important principle” that ISPs should not be held responsible for content exchanged over the Internet, in the same way the postal service isn’t responsible for the contents of an envelope.

But with TV companies SVT, TV4 Group, MTG TV, SBS Discovery and C More teaming up with the IFPI alongside Paramount, Disney, Warner and Sony in the case, Bredbandsbolaget would need to pull out all the stops to obtain victory. The company worked hard and initially the news was good.

In November 2015, the Stockholm District Court decided that the copyright holders could not force Bredbandsbolaget to block the pirate sites, ruling that the ISP’s operations did not amount to participation in the copyright infringement offenses carried out by some of its ‘pirate’ subscribers.

However, the case subsequently went to appeal, with the brand new Patent and Market Court of Appeal hearing arguments. In February 2017 it handed down its decision, which overruled the earlier ruling of the District Court and ordered Bredbandsbolaget to implement “technical measures” to prevent its customers accessing the ‘pirate’ sites through a number of domain names and URLs.

With nowhere left to go, Bredbandsbolaget and owner Telenor were left hanging onto their original statement which vehemently opposed site-blocking.

“It is a dangerous path to go down, which forces Internet providers to monitor and evaluate content on the Internet and block websites with illegal content in order to avoid becoming accomplices,” they said.

In March 2017, Bredbandsbolaget blocked The Pirate Bay but said it would not give up the fight.

“We are now forced to contest any future blocking demands. It is the only way for us and other Internet operators to ensure that private players should not have the last word regarding the content that should be accessible on the Internet,” Bredbandsbolaget said.

While it’s not clear whether any additional blocking demands have been filed with the ISP, this week an announcement by Bredbandsbolaget parent company Telenor revealed an unexpected knock-on effect. Seemingly without a single shot being fired, The Pirate Bay will now be blocked by Telenor too.

The background lies in Telenor’s acquisition of Bredbandsbolaget back in 2005. Until this week the companies operated under separate brands but will now merge into one entity.

“Telenor Sweden and Bredbandsbolaget today take the final step on their joint trip and become the same company with the same name. As a result, Telenor becomes a comprehensive provider of broadband, TV and mobile communications,” the company said in a statement this week.

“Telenor Sweden and Bredbandsbolaget have shared both logo and organization for the last 13 years. Today, we take the last step in the relationship and consolidate the companies under the same name.”

Up until this final merger, 600,000 Bredbandsbolaget broadband customers were denied access to The Pirate Bay. Now it appears that Telenor’s 700,000 fiber and broadband customers will be affected too. The new single-brand company says it has decided to block the notorious torrent site across its entire network.

“We have not discontinued Bredbandsbolaget, but we have merged Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget and become one,” the company said.

“When we share the same network, The Pirate Bay is blocked by both Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget and there is nothing we plan to change in the future.”

TorrentFreak contacted the PR departments of both Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget requesting information on why a court order aimed at only the latter’s customers would now affect those of the former too, more than doubling the blockade’s reach. Neither company responded which leaves only speculation as to its motives.

On the one hand, the decision to voluntarily implement an expanded blockade could perhaps be viewed as a little unusual given how much time, effort and money has been invested in fighting web-blockades in Sweden.

On the other, the merger of the companies may present legal difficulties as far as the court order goes and it could certainly cause friction among the customer base of Telenor if some customers could access TPB, and others could not.

In any event, the legal basis for web-blocking on copyright infringement grounds was firmly established last year at the EU level, which means that Telenor would lose any future legal battle, should it decide to dig in its heels. On that basis alone, the decision to block all customers probably makes perfect commercial sense.

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

Connect, collaborate, and learn at AWS Global Summits in 2018

2018-05-18 Tina Kelleher

Post Syndicated from Tina Kelleher original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/connect-collaborate-and-learn-at-aws-global-summits-in-2018/

Regardless of your career path, there’s no denying that attending industry events can provide helpful career development opportunities — not only for improving and expanding your skill sets, but for networking as well. According to this article from PayScale.com, experts estimate that somewhere between 70-85% of new positions are landed through networking.

Narrowing our focus to networking opportunities with cloud computing professionals who’re working on tackling some of today’s most innovative and exciting big data solutions, attending big data-focused sessions at an AWS Global Summit is a great place to start.

AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. As the name suggests, these summits are held in major cities around the world, and attract technologists from all industries and skill levels who’re interested in hearing from AWS leaders, experts, partners, and customers.

In addition to networking opportunities with top cloud technology providers, consultants and your peers in our Partner and Solutions Expo, you’ll also hone your AWS skills by attending and participating in a multitude of education and training opportunities.

Here’s a brief sampling of some of the upcoming sessions relevant to big data professionals:

May 31^st : Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices on AWS | AWS Summit – Mexico City
June 6^th-7^th: Various (click on the “Big Data & Analytics” header) | AWS Summit – Berlin
June 20-21^st : [email protected] | Public Sector Summit – Washington DC
June 21^st: Enabling Self Service for Data Scientists with AWS Service Catalog | AWS Summit – Sao Paulo

Be sure to check out the main page for AWS Global Summits, where you can see which cities have AWS Summits planned for 2018, register to attend an upcoming event, or provide your information to be notified when registration opens for a future event.

AWS IoT 1-Click – Use Simple Devices to Trigger Lambda Functions

2018-05-16 Jeff Barr

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-1-click-use-simple-devices-to-trigger-lambda-functions/

We announced a preview of AWS IoT 1-Click at AWS re:Invent 2017 and have been refining it ever since, focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Designed to make IoT available and accessible to a broad audience, AWS IoT 1-Click is now generally available, along with new IoT buttons from AWS and AT&T.

I sat down with the dev team a month or two ago to learn about the service so that I could start thinking about my blog post. During the meeting they gave me a pair of IoT buttons and I started to think about some creative ways to put them to use. Here are a few that I came up with:

Help Request – Earlier this month I spent a very pleasant weekend at the HackTillDawn hackathon in Los Angeles. As the participants were hacking away, they occasionally had questions about AWS, machine learning, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS DeepLens. While we had plenty of AWS Solution Architects on hand (decked out in fashionable & distinctive AWS shirts for easy identification), I imagined an IoT button for each team. Pressing the button would alert the SA crew via SMS and direct them to the proper table.

Camera Control – Tim Bray and I were in the AWS video studio, prepping for the first episode of Tim’s series on AWS Messaging. Minutes before we opened the Twitch stream I realized that we did not have a clean, unobtrusive way to ask the camera operator to switch to a closeup view. Again, I imagined that a couple of IoT buttons would allow us to make the request.

Remote Dog Treat Dispenser – My dog barks every time a stranger opens the gate in front of our house. While it is great to have confirmation that my Ring doorbell is working, I would like to be able to press a button and dispense a treat so that Luna stops barking!

Homes, offices, factories, schools, vehicles, and health care facilities can all benefit from IoT buttons and other simple IoT devices, all managed using AWS IoT 1-Click.

All About AWS IoT 1-Click
As I said earlier, we have been focusing on simplicity and a clean out-of-box experience. Here’s what that means:

Architects can dream up applications for inexpensive, low-powered devices.

Developers don’t need to write any device-level code. They can make use of pre-built actions, which send email or SMS messages, or write their own custom actions using AWS Lambda functions.

Installers don’t have to install certificates or configure cloud endpoints on newly acquired devices, and don’t have to worry about firmware updates.

Administrators can monitor the overall status and health of each device, and can arrange to receive alerts when a device nears the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced, using a single interface that spans device types and manufacturers.

I’ll show you how easy this is in just a moment. But first, let’s talk about the current set of devices that are supported by AWS IoT 1-Click.

Who’s Got the Button?
We’re launching with support for two types of buttons (both pictured above). Both types of buttons are pre-configured with X.509 certificates, communicate to the cloud over secure connections, and are ready to use.

The AWS IoT Enterprise Button communicates via Wi-Fi. It has a 2000-click lifetime, encrypts outbound data using TLS, and can be configured using BLE and our mobile app. It retails for $19.99 (shipping and handling not included) and can be used in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

The AT&T LTE-M Button communicates via the LTE-M cellular network. It has a 1500-click lifetime, and also encrypts outbound data using TLS. The device and the bundled data plan is available an an introductory price of $29.99 (shipping and handling not included), and can be used in the United States.

We are very interested in working with device manufacturers in order to make even more shapes, sizes, and types of devices (badge readers, asset trackers, motion detectors, and industrial sensors, to name a few) available to our customers. Our team will be happy to tell you about our provisioning tools and our facility for pushing OTA (over the air) updates to large fleets of devices; you can contact them at [email protected].

AWS IoT 1-Click Concepts
I’m eager to show you how to use AWS IoT 1-Click and the buttons, but need to introduce a few concepts first.

Device – A button or other item that can send messages. Each device is uniquely identified by a serial number.

Placement Template – Describes a like-minded collection of devices to be deployed. Specifies the action to be performed and lists the names of custom attributes for each device.

Placement – A device that has been deployed. Referring to placements instead of devices gives you the freedom to replace and upgrade devices with minimal disruption. Each placement can include values for custom attributes such as a location (“Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 1337”) or a purpose (“Coffee Request Button”).

Action – The AWS Lambda function to invoke when the button is pressed. You can write a function from scratch, or you can make use of a pair of predefined functions that send an email or an SMS message. The actions have access to the attributes; you can, for example, send an SMS message with the text “Urgent need for coffee in Building 8, 3rd Floor, Room 1337.”

Getting Started with AWS IoT 1-Click
Let’s set up an IoT button using the AWS IoT 1-Click Console:

If I didn’t have any buttons I could click Buy devices to get some. But, I do have some, so I click Claim devices to move ahead. I enter the device ID or claim code for my AT&T button and click Claim (I can enter multiple claim codes or device IDs if I want):

The AWS buttons can be claimed using the console or the mobile app; the first step is to use the mobile app to configure the button to use my Wi-Fi:

Then I scan the barcode on the box and click the button to complete the process of claiming the device. Both of my buttons are now visible in the console:

I am now ready to put them to use. I click on Projects, and then Create a project:

I name and describe my project, and click Next to proceed:

Now I define a device template, along with names and default values for the placement attributes. Here’s how I set up a device template (projects can contain several, but I just need one):

The action has two mandatory parameters (phone number and SMS message) built in; I add three more (Building, Room, and Floor) and click Create project:

I’m almost ready to ask for some coffee! The next step is to associate my buttons with this project by creating a placement for each one. I click Create placements to proceed. I name each placement, select the device to associate with it, and then enter values for the attributes that I established for the project. I can also add additional attributes that are peculiar to this placement:

I can inspect my project and see that everything looks good:

I click on the buttons and the SMS messages appear:

I can monitor device activity in the AWS IoT 1-Click Console:

And also in the Lambda Console:

The Lambda function itself is also accessible, and can be used as-is or customized:

As you can see, this is the code that lets me use {{*}}include all of the placement attributes in the message and {{Building}} (for example) to include a specific placement attribute.

Now Available
I’ve barely scratched the surface of this cool new service and I encourage you to give it a try (or a click) yourself. Buy a button or two, build something cool, and let me know all about it!

Pricing is based on the number of enabled devices in your account, measured monthly and pro-rated for partial months. Devices can be enabled or disabled at any time. See the AWS IoT 1-Click Pricing page for more info.

To learn more, visit the AWS IoT 1-Click home page or read the AWS IoT 1-Click documentation.

— Jeff;

Noise

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