Tag Archives: VR

Russia Blocks 500+ Google IPs & Domains, Fails to Shutdown Encrypted Chat App

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/russia-blocks-100s-of-google-domains-to-shutdown-encrypted-chat-app-180412/

Zello is an encrypted app which acts as a kind of ‘walkie-talkie’, assisting communication between close friends or in groups of up to a thousand people.

Zello gained a lot of publicity in 2017 when it was used as an unofficial rescue co-ordination tool while Hurricane Harvey was battering the United States. It soon shot to the top of the download charts after being downloaded a million times in a day.

While Zello is a great tool, it is not popular with the Russian government. Under the so-called ‘Yarovaya law‘, services like Zello, plus ISPs and other telecoms companies, are required to pre-register with Russian telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor. They are also required to share encryption keys so that law enforcement can decrypt messages.

Zello has reportedly done neither and as a result is being targeted by the Russian government, which has tried to block it more than 70 times since April 2017.

As reported last month, local telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor told ISPs to carry out “a new experiment” to block 15 million IP addresses – most of them owned by Amazon – to take the app down.

Zello co-founder Zello Alexei Gavrilov later revealed that Amazon had effectively told his company not to use its services anymore.

“The latest in this story: let’s block half the Internet for Zello’s sake,” he said.

“Half the Internet was not blocked, but nevertheless, it had some effect, and as a result, Amazon came to us, whose service we used, and Amazon asked us not to do what we did to circumvent the blocks using the Amazon platform.”

But despite the Amazon ban, Zello still managed to keep operating by using the services of another hosting company. It now transpires that at least in part, Zello is being kept on the air by Google, whose services the comms app now uses. That hasn’t gone unnoticed by Russian authorities who are now taking steps to hit Zello in its new home.

Vedomosti reports that telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor has already taken sweeping action by blocking 286 IP addresses and 285 domains belonging to Google, which have now been added to Russia’s national blacklist.

“Technical domains and Google addresses have been entered in the register of prohibited resources on the basis of the request of the General Prosecutor’s Office – in connection with the restriction of access to the Zello service,” the publication reports.

News site Roskomvoboda reports that the blocking of Google IP addresses and domains was scheduled to go ahead last week, including many under googleusercontent.com, the domain used for loading content from the Google CDN.

Telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor insists that blocking the Google addresses won’t affect the operation of other Internet services but a representative from Roskomvoboda said that is impossible to predict or guarantee, given the fluid nature of IP address allocation.

In any event, Zello continues to operate so that’s one service that remains unaffected by the drastic action.

It seems unlikely that Russia will give up trying to block Zello. While the software has been used for humanitarian causes, it has reportedly been used by workers coordinating strikes and even terrorist groups. The same can be said of any communications system, of course, but since Zello is end-to-end encrypted, the authorities want the ability to listen in.

Founded in Russia but now based in the US, Zello doesn’t want to share its keys with Russia, nor does it want to store the telecoms data of 400,000 Russian users as local law now dictates.

Amendments to come into force this year requires services like Zello to store the actual content of user communications for six months and metadata (such as who communicated with who, when, and for how long) for three years. At least for now, Zello doesn’t intend being spied upon.

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

Using AWS Lambda and Amazon Comprehend for sentiment analysis

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

This post courtesy of Giedrius Praspaliauskas, AWS Solutions Architect

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

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

Setting up a Lambda function for sentiment analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

client = boto3.client('comprehend')

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

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

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

Now you can test your function.

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

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

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

Setting up Amazon Lex

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

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

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

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

As you see, sentiment analysis works!

Setting up Amazon Connect

Next, provision an Amazon Connect instance.

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

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

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

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

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

Cleanup

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

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

Summary

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

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

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Russia Asked ISPs to Block 13.5 Million Amazon IP Addresses to Silence One App

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/russia-asked-isps-to-block-13-5-million-amazon-ip-addresses-to-silence-one-app-180331/

Russia is developing a track record of being one of the most aggressive countries on the site-blocking front. Already many thousands of sites are rendered inaccessible to the general public but just how far will the government go to achieve its aims?

If reports coming out this week hold true, extremely far indeed.

The controversy centers around an app called Zello, which acts as a kind of ‘walkie-talkie’, assisting communication between close friends or in groups of up to a thousand people.

The app gained a lot of press in 2017 when it was revealed it was being used as an unofficial rescue co-ordination tool while Hurricane Harvey was battering the United States. It quickly shot to the top of the download charts after being downloaded a million times in a day.

But while the app clearly has some fantastic uses, Zello seems to represent a challenge to the authority of the Russian government.

Under the so-called ‘Yarovaya law‘, services like Zello, ISPs, and other telecoms companies, are required to register with Russian telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor. Amendments to come into force this year also require them to store the actual content of user communications for six months and metadata (such as who communicated with who, when, and for how long) for three years.

Encrypted services are also required to share keys which allow law enforcement bodies so that they can decrypt messages sent and received by users, something which has communications and VPN companies extremely concerned.

Until now, Zello has reportedly failed to register itself so as a result, the service has become a blocking target for Russian authorities. Zello uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) and last summer it was reported that dozens of Amazon’s IP addresses ended up on Russia’s official blacklist. This week, however, a much more worrying proposition raised its head.

Operators of at least four Internet service providers confirmed to Russia’s Vedomosti that Rozcomnadzor had issued recommendations that they block access to Zello. Copies of letters to the ISPs were published on Telegram and according to reports, most if not all of the country’s ISPs were targeted.

While blocking Zello would be bad enough, the suggestion of how that should take place is nothing short of astounding. The letter speaks of “an experiment” in which ISPs take action to block 36 Internet subnets – representing a staggering 15 million IP addresses – in order to take Zello down.

A total of 26 of those subnets have been identified as belonging to Amazon, accounting for 13.5 million IP addresses in total. Some are reportedly operated by Comcast, others by Softlayer, with the remainder connected to companies in China.

“The subnets selected by Roskomnadzor are not all Amazon’s IP addresses, but they account for a significant portion of the addresses from two large regions of the United States where the company’s data centers are located,” Vedomosti said, quoting a source familiar with Amazon’s infrastructure.

Zello founder and technical director Alexei Gavrilov said that he wasn’t surprised by the news and noted that he’d learned about the list of addresses from Telegram channels. However, it’s claimed that Zello doesn’t completely depend on the listed subnets, meaning that hundreds or thousands of other services unrelated to the app would end up as collateral damage, should they be blocked.

Neither Rozkomnadzor nor Amazon have commented publicly on the news and Russia’s Ministry of Communications has refused to comment. Fortunately, at the time of writing there have been no reports of ISPs mass-blocking IP addresses connected to Zello.

Whether Russia would really flex its muscles so broadly and aggressively just to prove a point is unknown but with the growing war on privacy the way it is, almost anything seems possible.

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

Announcing Rust 1.25

Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/750458/rss

The Rust team has announced
the release of Rust 1.25.0. “The last few releases have been
relatively minor, but Rust 1.25 contains a bunch of stuff! The first one is
straightforward: we’ve upgraded to LLVM 6
from LLVM 4. This has a number of effects, a major one being a step closer
to AVR support.” See the release
notes for details.

Founder of Fan-Made Subtitle Site Lose Copyright Infringement Appeal

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/founder-of-fan-made-subtitle-site-lose-copyright-infringement-appeal-180318/

For millions of people around the world, subtitles are the only way to enjoy media in languages other than that in the original production. For the deaf and hard of hearing, they are absolutely essential.

Movie and TV show companies tend to be quiet good at providing subtitles eventually but in line with other restrictive practices associated with their industry, it can often mean a long wait for the consumer, particularly in overseas territories.

For this reason, fan-made subtitles have become somewhat of a cottage industry in recent years. Where companies fail to provide subtitles quickly enough, fans step in and create them by hand. This has led to the rise of a number of subtitling platforms, including the now widely recognized Undertexter.se in Sweden.

The platform had its roots back in 2003 but first hit the headlines in 2013 when Swedish police caused an uproar by raiding the site and seizing its servers.

“The people who work on the site don’t consider their own interpretation of dialog to be something illegal, especially when we’re handing out these interpretations for free,” site founder Eugen Archy said at the time.

Vowing to never give up in the face of pressure from the authorities, anti-piracy outfit Rättighetsalliansen (Rights Alliance), and companies including Nordisk Film, Paramount, Universal, Sony and Warner, Archy said that the battle over what began as a high school project would continue.

“No Hollywood, you played the wrong card here. We will never give up, we live in a free country and Swedish people have every right to publish their own interpretations of a movie or TV show,” he said.

It took four more years but in 2017 the Undertexter founder was prosecuted for distributing copyright-infringing subtitles while facing a potential prison sentence.

Things didn’t go well and last September the Attunda District Court found him guilty and sentenced the then 32-year-old operator to probation. In addition, he was told to pay 217,000 Swedish krona ($26,400) to be taken from advertising and donation revenues collected through the site.

Eugen Archy took the case to appeal, arguing that the Svea Hovrätt (Svea Court of Appeal) should acquit him of all the charges and dismiss or at least reduce the amount he was ordered to pay by the lower court. Needless to say, this was challenged by the prosecution.

On appeal, Archy agreed that he was the person behind Undertexter but disputed that the subtitle files uploaded to his site infringed on the plaintiffs’ copyrights, arguing they were creative works in their own right.

While to an extent that may have been the case, the Court found that the translations themselves depended on the rights connected to the original work, which were entirely held by the relevant copyright holders. While paraphrasing and parody might be allowed, pure translations are completely covered by the rights in the original and cannot be seen as new and independent works, the Court found.

The Svea Hovrätt also found that Archy acted intentionally, noting that in addition to administering the site and doing some translating work himself, it was “inconceivable” that he did not know that the subtitles made available related to copyrighted dialog found in movies.

In conclusion, the Court of Appeal upheld Archy’s copyright infringement conviction (pdf, Swedish) and sentenced him to probation, as previously determined by the Attunda District Court.

Last year, the legal status of user-created subtitles was also tested in the Netherlands. In response to local anti-piracy outfit BREIN forcing several subtitling groups into retreat, a group of fansubbers decided to fight back.

After raising their own funds, in 2016 the “Free Subtitles Foundation” (Stichting Laat Ondertitels Vrij – SLOV) took the decision to sue BREIN with the hope of obtaining a favorable legal ruling.

In 2017 it all fell apart when the Amsterdam District Court handed down its decision and sided with BREIN on each count.

The Court found that subtitles can only be created and distributed after permission has been obtained from copyright holders. Doing so outside these parameters amounts to copyright infringement.

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

Pirate Site Admins Receive Suspended Sentences, Still Face €60m Damages Claim

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-site-admins-receive-suspended-sentences-still-face-e60m-damages-claim-180313/

After being founded in 2009, French site Liberty Land (LL) made its home in Canada. At the time listed among France’s top 200 sites, Liberty Land carried an estimated 30,000 links to a broad range of unlicensed content.

Like many other indexes of its type, LL carried no content itself but hosted links to content hosted elsewhere, on sites like Megaupload and Rapidshare, for example. This didn’t save the operation from an investigation carried out by rightsholder groups SACEM and ALPA, which filed a complaint against Liberty Land with the French authorities in 2010.

Liberty Land

In May 2011 and alongside complaints from police that the people behind Liberty Land had taken extreme measures to hide themselves away, authorities arrested several men linked to the site in Marseille, near Le Havre, and in the Paris suburb of Montreuil.

Despite the men facing a possible five years in jail and fines of up to $700,000, the inquiry dragged on for nearly seven years. The trial of its alleged operators, now aged between 29 and 36-years-old, finally went ahead January 30 in Rennes.

The men faced charges that they unlawfully helped to distribute movies, TV series, games, software, music albums and e-books without permission from rightsholders. In court, one defended the site as being just like Google.

“For me, we had the same role as Google,” he said. “We were an SEO site. There is a difference between what we were doing and the distribution of pirated copies on the street.”

According to the prosecution, the site made considerable revenues from advertising, estimated at more than 300,000 euros between January 2009 and May 2011. The site’s two main administrators reportedly established an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands and a bank account in Latvia where they deposited between 100,000 and 150,000 euros each.

The prosecutor demanded fines for the former site admins and sentences of between six and 12 months in prison. Last week the Rennes Criminal Court rendered its decision, sentencing the four men to suspended sentences of between two and three months. More than 176,000 euros generated by the site was also confiscated by the Court.

While the men will no doubt be relieved that this extremely long case has reached a conclusion of sorts, it’s not over yet. 20minutes reports that the claims for damages filed by copyright groups including SACEM won’t be decided until September and they are significant, totaling 60 million euros.

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

Dotcom: Obama Admitted “Mistakes Were Made” in Megaupload Case

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/dotcom-obama-admitted-mistakes-were-made-in-megaupload-case-180301/

When Megaupload was forcefully shut down in 2012, it initially appeared like ‘just’ another wave of copyright enforcement action by US authorities.

When additional details began to filter through, the reality of what had happened was nothing short of extraordinary.

Not only were large numbers of Megaupload servers and millions of dollars seized, but Kim Dotcom’s home in New Zealand was subjected to a military-style raid comprised of helicopters and dozens of heavily armed special tactics police. The whole thing was monitored live by the FBI.

Few people who watched the events of that now-infamous January day unfold came to the conclusion this was a routine copyright-infringement case. According to Kim Dotcom, whose life had just been turned upside down, something of this scale must’ve filtered down from the very top of the US government. It was hard to disagree.

At the time, Dotcom told TorrentFreak that then-Vice President Joe Biden directed attorney Neil MacBride to target the cloud storage site and ever since the Megaupload founder has leveled increasingly serious allegations at officials of the former government of Barack Obama.

For example, Dotcom says that since the US would have difficulty gaining access to him in his former home of Hong Kong, the government of New Zealand was persuaded to welcome him in, knowing they would eventually turn him over to the United States. More recently he’s been turning up the pressure again, such as a tweet on February 20th which cast more light on that process.

“Joe Biden had a White House meeting with an ‘extradition expert’ who worked for Hong Kong police and a handful of Hollywood executives to discuss my case. A week prior to this meeting Neil MacBride hand-delivered his action plan to Biden’s chief of staff, also at the White House,” Dotcom wrote.

But this claim is just the tip of an extremely large iceberg that’s involved illegal spying on Dotcom in New Zealand and a dizzying array of legal battles that are set to go on for years to come. But perhaps of most interest now is that rather than wilting away under the pressure, Dotcom appears to be just warming up.

A few hours ago Dotcom commented on an article published in The Hill which revealed that Barack Obama will visit New Zealand in March, possibly to celebrate the opening of Air New Zealand’s new route to the U.S.

Rather than expressing disappointment, the Megaupload founder seemed pleased that the former president would be touching down next month.

“Great. I’ll have a Court subpoena waiting for him in New Zealand,” Dotcom wrote.

But that was just a mere hors d’oeuvre, with the main course was yet to come. But come it did.

“A wealthy Asian Megaupload shareholder hired a friend of the Obamas to enquire about our case. This person was recommended by a member of the Chinese politburo ‘if you want to get to Obama directly’. We did,” Dotcom revealed.

Dotcom says he’ll release a transcript detailing what Obama told his friend on March 21 when Obama arrives in town but in the meantime, he offered another little taster.

“Mistakes were made. It hasn’t gone well,” Obama reportedly told the person reporting back to Megaupload. “It’s a problem. I’ll see to it after the election.”

Of course, Obama’s position after the election was much different to what had gone before, but that didn’t stop Dotcom’s associates infiltrating the process aimed at keeping the Democrats in power.

“Our friendly Obama contact smuggled an @EFF lawyer into a re-election fundraiser hosted by former Vice President Joe Biden,” he revealed.

“When Biden was asked about the Megaupload case he bragged that it was his case and that he ‘took care of it’,” which is what Dotcom has been claiming all along.

On March 21, when Obama lands in New Zealand, Dotcom says he’ll be waiting.

“I’m looking forward to @BarackObama providing some insight into the political dimension of the Megaupload case when he arrives in the New Zealand jurisdiction,” he teased.

Better get the popcorn ready….

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

Pirate Site Operators’ Jail Sentences Overturned By Court of Appeal

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-site-operators-jail-sentences-overturned-by-court-of-appeal-180226/

With The Pirate Bay proving to be somewhat of an elusive and irritating target, in 2014 police took on a site capturing an increasing portion of the Swedish pirate market.

Unlike The Pirate Bay which uses torrents, Dreamfilm was a portal for streaming content and it quickly grew alongside the now-defunct Swefilmer to dominate the local illicit in-browser viewing sector. But after impressive growth, things came to a sudden halt.

In January 2015, Dreamfilm announced that the site would be shut down after one of its administrators was detained by the authorities and interrogated. A month later, several more Sweden-based sites went down including the country’s second largest torrent site Tankefetast, torrent site PirateHub, and streaming portal Tankefetast Play (TFPlay).

Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance described the four-site networks as one of “Europe’s leading players for illegal file sharing and streaming.”

Image published by Dreamfilm after the raiddreamfilm

After admitting they’d been involved in the sites but insisting they’d committed no crimes, last year four men aged between 21 and 31-years-old appeared in court charged with copyright infringement. It didn’t go well.

The Linköping District Court found them guilty and decided they should all go to prison, with the then 23-year-old founder receiving the harshest sentence of 10 months, a member of the Pirate Party who reportedly handled advertising receiving 8 months, and two others getting six months each. On top, they were ordered to pay damages of SEK 1,000,000 ($122,330) to film industry plaintiffs.

Like many similar cases in Sweden, the case went to appeal and late last week the court handed down its decision which amends the earlier decision in several ways.

Firstly, the Hovrätten (Court of Appeals) agreed that with the District Court’s ruling that the defendants had used dreamfilm.se, tfplay.org, tankafetast.com and piratehub.net as platforms to deliver movies stored on Russian servers to the public.

One defendant owned the domains, another worked as a site supervisor, while the other pair worked as a programmer and in server acquisition, the Court said.

Dagens Juridik reports that the defendants argued that the websites were not a prerequisite for people to access the films, and therefore they had not been made available to a new market.

However, the Court of Appeal agreed with the District Court’s assessment that the links meant that the movies had been made available to a “new audience”, which under EU law means that a copyright infringement had been committed. As far as the samples presented in the case would allow, the men were found to have committed between 45 and 118 breaches of copyright law.

The Court also found that the website operation had a clear financial motive, delivering movies to the public for free while earning money from advertising.

While agreeing with the District Court on most points, the Court of Appeals decided to boost the damages award from SEK 1,000,000 ($122,330) to SEK 4,250,000 ($519,902). However, there was much better news in respect of the prison sentences.

Taking into consideration the young age of the men (who before this case had no criminal records) and the unlikely event that they would offend again, the Court decided that none would have to go to prison as previously determined.

Instead, all of the men were handed conditional sentences with two ordered to pay daily fines, which are penalties based on the offender’s daily personal income.

Last week it was reported that Sweden is preparing to take a tougher line with large-scale online copyright infringers. Proposals currently with the government foresee a new crime of “gross infringement” under both copyright and trademark law, which could lead to sentences of up to six years in prison.

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

Amazon Redshift – 2017 Recap

Post Syndicated from Larry Heathcote original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-redshift-2017-recap/

We have been busy adding new features and capabilities to Amazon Redshift, and we wanted to give you a glimpse of what we’ve been doing over the past year. In this article, we recap a few of our enhancements and provide a set of resources that you can use to learn more and get the most out of your Amazon Redshift implementation.

In 2017, we made more than 30 announcements about Amazon Redshift. We listened to you, our customers, and delivered Redshift Spectrum, a feature of Amazon Redshift, that gives you the ability to extend analytics to your data lake—without moving data. We launched new DC2 nodes, doubling performance at the same price. We also announced many new features that provide greater scalability, better performance, more automation, and easier ways to manage your analytics workloads.

To see a full list of our launches, visit our what’s new page—and be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.

Major launches in 2017

Amazon Redshift Spectrum—extend analytics to your data lake, without moving data

We launched Amazon Redshift Spectrum to give you the freedom to store data in Amazon S3, in open file formats, and have it available for analytics without the need to load it into your Amazon Redshift cluster. It enables you to easily join datasets across Redshift clusters and S3 to provide unique insights that you would not be able to obtain by querying independent data silos.

With Redshift Spectrum, you can run SQL queries against data in an Amazon S3 data lake as easily as you analyze data stored in Amazon Redshift. And you can do it without loading data or resizing the Amazon Redshift cluster based on growing data volumes. Redshift Spectrum separates compute and storage to meet workload demands for data size, concurrency, and performance. Redshift Spectrum scales processing across thousands of nodes, so results are fast, even with massive datasets and complex queries. You can query open file formats that you already use—such as Apache Avro, CSV, Grok, ORC, Apache Parquet, RCFile, RegexSerDe, SequenceFile, TextFile, and TSV—directly in Amazon S3, without any data movement.

“For complex queries, Redshift Spectrum provided a 67 percent performance gain,” said Rafi Ton, CEO, NUVIAD. “Using the Parquet data format, Redshift Spectrum delivered an 80 percent performance improvement. For us, this was substantial.”

To learn more about Redshift Spectrum, watch our AWS Summit session Intro to Amazon Redshift Spectrum: Now Query Exabytes of Data in S3, and read our announcement blog post Amazon Redshift Spectrum – Exabyte-Scale In-Place Queries of S3 Data.

DC2 nodes—twice the performance of DC1 at the same price

We launched second-generation Dense Compute (DC2) nodes to provide low latency and high throughput for demanding data warehousing workloads. DC2 nodes feature powerful Intel E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) CPUs, fast DDR4 memory, and NVMe-based solid state disks (SSDs). We’ve tuned Amazon Redshift to take advantage of the better CPU, network, and disk on DC2 nodes, providing up to twice the performance of DC1 at the same price. Our DC2.8xlarge instances now provide twice the memory per slice of data and an optimized storage layout with 30 percent better storage utilization.

“Redshift allows us to quickly spin up clusters and provide our data scientists with a fast and easy method to access data and generate insights,” said Bradley Todd, technology architect at Liberty Mutual. “We saw a 9x reduction in month-end reporting time with Redshift DC2 nodes as compared to DC1.”

Read our customer testimonials to see the performance gains our customers are experiencing with DC2 nodes. To learn more, read our blog post Amazon Redshift Dense Compute (DC2) Nodes Deliver Twice the Performance as DC1 at the Same Price.

Performance enhancements— 3x-5x faster queries

On average, our customers are seeing 3x to 5x performance gains for most of their critical workloads.

We introduced short query acceleration to speed up execution of queries such as reports, dashboards, and interactive analysis. Short query acceleration uses machine learning to predict the execution time of a query, and to move short running queries to an express short query queue for faster processing.

We launched results caching to deliver sub-second response times for queries that are repeated, such as dashboards, visualizations, and those from BI tools. Results caching has an added benefit of freeing up resources to improve the performance of all other queries.

We also introduced late materialization to reduce the amount of data scanned for queries with predicate filters by batching and factoring in the filtering of predicates before fetching data blocks in the next column. For example, if only 10 percent of the table rows satisfy the predicate filters, Amazon Redshift can potentially save 90 percent of the I/O for the remaining columns to improve query performance.

We launched query monitoring rules and pre-defined rule templates. These features make it easier for you to set metrics-based performance boundaries for workload management (WLM) queries, and specify what action to take when a query goes beyond those boundaries. For example, for a queue that’s dedicated to short-running queries, you might create a rule that aborts queries that run for more than 60 seconds. To track poorly designed queries, you might have another rule that logs queries that contain nested loops.

Customer insights

Amazon Redshift and Redshift Spectrum serve customers across a variety of industries and sizes, from startups to large enterprises. Visit our customer page to see the success that customers are having with our recent enhancements. Learn how companies like Liberty Mutual Insurance saw a 9x reduction in month-end reporting time using DC2 nodes. On this page, you can find case studies, videos, and other content that show how our customers are using Amazon Redshift to drive innovation and business results.

In addition, check out these resources to learn about the success our customers are having building out a data warehouse and data lake integration solution with Amazon Redshift:

Partner solutions

You can enhance your Amazon Redshift data warehouse by working with industry-leading experts. Our AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners have certified their solutions to work with Amazon Redshift. They offer software, tools, integration, and consulting services to help you at every step. Visit our Amazon Redshift Partner page and choose an APN Partner. Or, use AWS Marketplace to find and immediately start using third-party software.

To see what our Partners are saying about Amazon Redshift Spectrum and our DC2 nodes mentioned earlier, read these blog posts:

Resources

Blog posts

Visit the AWS Big Data Blog for a list of all Amazon Redshift articles.

YouTube videos

GitHub

Our community of experts contribute on GitHub to provide tips and hints that can help you get the most out of your deployment. Visit GitHub frequently to get the latest technical guidance, code samples, administrative task automation utilities, the analyze & vacuum schema utility, and more.

Customer support

If you are evaluating or considering a proof of concept with Amazon Redshift, or you need assistance migrating your on-premises or other cloud-based data warehouse to Amazon Redshift, our team of product experts and solutions architects can help you with architecting, sizing, and optimizing your data warehouse. Contact us using this support request form, and let us know how we can assist you.

If you are an Amazon Redshift customer, we offer a no-cost health check program. Our team of database engineers and solutions architects give you recommendations for optimizing Amazon Redshift and Amazon Redshift Spectrum for your specific workloads. To learn more, email us at [email protected].

If you have any questions, email us at [email protected].

 

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Amazon Redshift Spectrum – Exabyte-Scale In-Place Queries of S3 Data, Using Amazon Redshift for Fast Analytical Reports and How to Migrate Your Oracle Data Warehouse to Amazon Redshift Using AWS SCT and AWS DMS.

About the Author

Larry Heathcote is a Principle Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Web Services for data warehousing and analytics. Larry is passionate about seeing the results of data-driven insights on business outcomes. He enjoys family time, home projects, grilling out and the taste of classic barbeque.

 

 

 

Four days of STEAM at Bett 2018

Post Syndicated from Dan Fisher original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/bett-2018/

If you’re an educator from the UK, chances are you’ve heard of Bett. For everyone else: Bett stands for British Education Technology Tradeshow. It’s the El Dorado of edtech, where every street is adorned with interactive whiteboards, VR headsets, and new technologies for the classroom. Every year since 2014, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been going to the event hosted in the ExCeL London to chat to thousands of lovely educators about our free programmes and resources.

Raspberry Pi Bett 2018

On a mission

Our setup this year consisted of four pods (imagine tables on steroids) in the STEAM village, and the mission of our highly trained team of education agents was to establish a new world record for Highest number of teachers talked to in a four-day period. I’m only half-joking.

Bett 2018 Raspberry Pi

Educators with a mission

Meeting educators

The best thing about being at Bett is meeting the educators who use our free content and training materials. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the everyday tasks of the office without stopping to ask: “Hey, have we asked our users what they want recently?” Events like Bett help us to connect with our audience, creating some lovely moments for both sides. We had plenty of Hello World authors visit us, including Gary Stager, co-author of Invent to Learn, a must-read for any computing educator. More than 700 people signed up for a digital subscription, we had numerous lovely conversations about our content and about ideas for new articles, and we met many new authors expressing an interest in writing for us in the future.

BETT 2018 Hello World Raspberry Pi
BETT 2018 Hello World Raspberry Pi
BETT 2018 Hello World Raspberry Pi

We also talked to lots of Raspberry Pi Certified Educators who we’d trained in our free Picademy programme — new dates in Belfast and Dublin now! — and who are now doing exciting and innovative things in their local areas. For example, Chris Snowden came to tell us about the great digital making outreach work he has been doing with the Eureka! museum in Yorkshire.

Bett 2018 Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Chris Snowden

Digital making for kids

The other best thing about being at Bett is running workshops for young learners and seeing the delight on their faces when they accomplish something they believed to be impossible only five minutes ago. On the Saturday, we ran a massive Raspberry Jam/Code Club where over 250 children, parents, and curious onlookers got stuck into some of our computing activities. We were super happy to find out that we’d won the Bett Kids’ Choice Award for Best Hands-on Experience — a fantastic end to a busy four days. With Bett over for another year, our tired and happy ‘rebel alliance’ from across the Foundation still had the energy to pose for a group photo.

Bett 2018 Raspberry Pi

Celebrating our ‘Best Hands-on Experience’ award

More events

You can find out more about starting a Code Club here, and if you’re running a Jam, why not get involved with our global Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend celebrations in March?

Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend 2018. GIF with confetti and bopping JAM balloons

We’ll be at quite a few events in 2018, including the Big Bang Fair in March — do come and say hi.

The post Four days of STEAM at Bett 2018 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

The Effects of the Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/01/the_effects_of_3.html

On January 3, the world learned about a series of major security vulnerabilities in modern microprocessors. Called Spectre and Meltdown, these vulnerabilities were discovered by several different researchers last summer, disclosed to the microprocessors’ manufacturers, and patched­ — at least to the extent possible.

This news isn’t really any different from the usual endless stream of security vulnerabilities and patches, but it’s also a harbinger of the sorts of security problems we’re going to be seeing in the coming years. These are vulnerabilities in computer hardware, not software. They affect virtually all high-end microprocessors produced in the last 20 years. Patching them requires large-scale coordination across the industry, and in some cases drastically affects the performance of the computers. And sometimes patching isn’t possible; the vulnerability will remain until the computer is discarded.

Spectre and Meltdown aren’t anomalies. They represent a new area to look for vulnerabilities and a new avenue of attack. They’re the future of security­ — and it doesn’t look good for the defenders.

Modern computers do lots of things at the same time. Your computer and your phone simultaneously run several applications — ­or apps. Your browser has several windows open. A cloud computer runs applications for many different computers. All of those applications need to be isolated from each other. For security, one application isn’t supposed to be able to peek at what another one is doing, except in very controlled circumstances. Otherwise, a malicious advertisement on a website you’re visiting could eavesdrop on your banking details, or the cloud service purchased by some foreign intelligence organization could eavesdrop on every other cloud customer, and so on. The companies that write browsers, operating systems, and cloud infrastructure spend a lot of time making sure this isolation works.

Both Spectre and Meltdown break that isolation, deep down at the microprocessor level, by exploiting performance optimizations that have been implemented for the past decade or so. Basically, microprocessors have become so fast that they spend a lot of time waiting for data to move in and out of memory. To increase performance, these processors guess what data they’re going to receive and execute instructions based on that. If the guess turns out to be correct, it’s a performance win. If it’s wrong, the microprocessors throw away what they’ve done without losing any time. This feature is called speculative execution.

Spectre and Meltdown attack speculative execution in different ways. Meltdown is more of a conventional vulnerability; the designers of the speculative-execution process made a mistake, so they just needed to fix it. Spectre is worse; it’s a flaw in the very concept of speculative execution. There’s no way to patch that vulnerability; the chips need to be redesigned in such a way as to eliminate it.

Since the announcement, manufacturers have been rolling out patches to these vulnerabilities to the extent possible. Operating systems have been patched so that attackers can’t make use of the vulnerabilities. Web browsers have been patched. Chips have been patched. From the user’s perspective, these are routine fixes. But several aspects of these vulnerabilities illustrate the sorts of security problems we’re only going to be seeing more of.

First, attacks against hardware, as opposed to software, will become more common. Last fall, vulnerabilities were discovered in Intel’s Management Engine, a remote-administration feature on its microprocessors. Like Spectre and Meltdown, they affected how the chips operate. Looking for vulnerabilities on computer chips is new. Now that researchers know this is a fruitful area to explore, security researchers, foreign intelligence agencies, and criminals will be on the hunt.

Second, because microprocessors are fundamental parts of computers, patching requires coordination between many companies. Even when manufacturers like Intel and AMD can write a patch for a vulnerability, computer makers and application vendors still have to customize and push the patch out to the users. This makes it much harder to keep vulnerabilities secret while patches are being written. Spectre and Meltdown were announced prematurely because details were leaking and rumors were swirling. Situations like this give malicious actors more opportunity to attack systems before they’re guarded.

Third, these vulnerabilities will affect computers’ functionality. In some cases, the patches for Spectre and Meltdown result in significant reductions in speed. The press initially reported 30%, but that only seems true for certain servers running in the cloud. For your personal computer or phone, the performance hit from the patch is minimal. But as more vulnerabilities are discovered in hardware, patches will affect performance in noticeable ways.

And then there are the unpatchable vulnerabilities. For decades, the computer industry has kept things secure by finding vulnerabilities in fielded products and quickly patching them. Now there are cases where that doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s because computers are in cheap products that don’t have a patch mechanism, like many of the DVRs and webcams that are vulnerable to the Mirai (and other) botnets — ­groups of Internet-connected devices sabotaged for coordinated digital attacks. Sometimes it’s because a computer chip’s functionality is so core to a computer’s design that patching it effectively means turning the computer off. This, too, is becoming more common.

Increasingly, everything is a computer: not just your laptop and phone, but your car, your appliances, your medical devices, and global infrastructure. These computers are and always will be vulnerable, but Spectre and Meltdown represent a new class of vulnerability. Unpatchable vulnerabilities in the deepest recesses of the world’s computer hardware is the new normal. It’s going to leave us all much more vulnerable in the future.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

Denuvo Has Been Sold to Global Anti-Piracy Outfit Irdeto

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-has-been-sold-to-global-anti-piracy-outfit-irdeto-180123/

It’s fair to say that of all video games anti-piracy technologies, Denuvo is perhaps the most hated of recent times. That hatred unsurprisingly stems from both its success and complexity.

Those with knowledge of the system say it’s fiendishly difficult to defeat but in recent times, cracks have been showing. In 2017, various iterations of the anti-tamper system were defeated by several cracking groups, much to the delight of the pirate masses.

Now, however, a new development has the potential to herald a new lease of life for the Austria-based anti-piracy company. A few moments ago it was revealed that the company has been bought by Irdeto, a global anti-piracy company with considerable heritage and resources.

“Irdeto has acquired Denuvo, the world leader in gaming security, to provide anti-piracy and anti-cheat solutions for games on desktop, mobile, console and VR devices,” Irdeto said in a statement.

“Denuvo provides technology and services for game publishers and platforms, independent software vendors, e-publishers and video publishers across the globe. Current Denuvo customers include Electronic Arts, UbiSoft, Warner Bros and Lionsgate Entertainment, with protection provided for games such as Star Wars Battlefront II, Football Manager, Injustice 2 and others.”

Irdeto says that Denuvo will “continue to operate as usual” with all of its staff retained – a total of 45 across Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the US. Denuvo headquarters in Salzburg, Austria, will also remain intact along with its sales operations.

“The success of any game title is dependent upon the ability of the title to operate as the publisher intended,” says Irdeto CEO Doug Lowther.

“As a result, protection of both the game itself and the gaming experience for end users is critical. Our partnership brings together decades of security expertise under one roof to better address new and evolving security threats. We are looking forward to collaborating as a team on a number of initiatives to improve our core technology and services to better serve our customers.”

Denuvo was founded relatively recently in 2013 and employs less than 50 people. In contrast, Irdeto’s roots go all the way back to 1969 and currently has almost 1,000 staff. It’s a subsidiary of South Africa-based Internet and media group Naspers, a corporate giant with dozens of notable companies under its control.

While Denuvo is perhaps best known for its anti-piracy technology, Irdeto is also placing emphasis on the company’s ability to hinder cheating in online multi-player gaming environments. This has become a hot topic recently, with several lawsuits filed in the US by companies including Blizzard and Epic.

Denuvo CEO Reinhard Blaukovitsch

“Hackers and cybercriminals in the gaming space are savvy, and always have been. It is critical to implement robust security strategies to combat the latest gaming threats and protect the investment in games. Much like the movie industry, it’s the only way to ensure that great games continue to get made,” says Denuvo CEO Reinhard Blaukovitsch.

“In joining with Irdeto, we are bringing together a unique combination of security expertise, technology and enhanced piracy services to aggressively address security challenges that customers and gamers face from hackers.”

While it seems likely that the companies have been in negotiations for some, the timing of this announcement also coincides with negative news for Denuvo.

Yesterday it was revealed that the latest variant of its anti-tamper technology – Denuvo v4.8 – had been defeated by online cracking group CPY (Conspiracy). Version 4.8 had been protecting Sonic Forces since its release early November 2017 but the game was leaked out onto the Internet late Sunday with all protection neutralized.

Sonic Forces cracked by CPY

Irdeto has a long history of acquiring anti-piracy companies and technologies. They include Lockstream (DRM for content on mobile phones), Philips Cryptoworks (DVB conditional access system), Cloakware (various security), Entriq (media protection), BD+ (Blu-ray protection), and BayTSP (anti-piracy monitoring).

It’s also noteworthy that Irdeto supplied behind-the-scenes support in two of the largest IPTV provider raids of recent times, one focused on Spain in 2017 and more recently in Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece and the Netherlands (1,2,3).

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

Epic Games Sues Cheater Over ‘Stealing’ Fortnite V-Bucks

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/epic-games-sues-cheater-over-stealing-fortnite-v-bucks-180112/

Last fall, Epic Games released Fortnite’s free-to-play “Battle Royale” game mode for the PC and other platforms, generating massive interest among gamers.

This also included thousands of cheaters, many of whom were subsequently banned. Epic Games then went a step further by taking several cheaters to court for copyright infringement.

While the initial targets were people who coded, used or promoted cheats to gain a clear competitive advantage, this week Epic sued a different type of cheater. In a complaint filed at a California Federal court, the game publisher accuses a New Zealander of creating an exploit that allows users to get free V-bucks.

V-bucks are the game’s currency and can be bought through an online store, starting at $9.99. The virtual coins allow players to purchase skins for their characteras well as other game tools.

According to Epic, people who create and use these kinds of free-money exploits are stealing from the game publisher.

“Players who search for and promote exploits ruin the game experience for others and undermine the integrity of Fortnite. Players who use exploits to avoid paying for items in Fortnite are stealing from Epic,” the complaint reads.

V-bucks

The alleged perpetrator is identified as Yash Gosai, who’s a resident of Auckland, New Zealand. Epic believes that Gosai developed the exploit which was then promoted through YouTube.

“On information and belief, Gosai developed an exploit for Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode that enables players to obtain V-bucks without paying for them. Gosai created and posted a video on YouTube to advertise, promote and demonstrate the exploit,” the complaint reads.

While the game company managed to get the video taken down, they’re not done with the New Zealander. They accuse Gosai of copyright infringement, breach of contract, as well as conversion.

“Defendant’s videos demonstrating the exploit infringe Epic’s copyrights in Fortnite by copying, reproducing, preparing derivative works from, and/or displaying Fortnite
publicly without Epic’s permission, the company writes.

Epic asks the court for damages and wants the defendant to destroy all Fortnite copies and any related works.

As mentioned before, this is not the first lawsuit Epic has filed against a cheater. Thus far, it has reached at least three settlements behind closed doors. Minnesota resident Charles Vraspir signed an agreement early December. Philip Josefsson from Sweden and Artem Yakovenko from Russia followed soon after.

—

A copy of the complaint against Gosai is available here (pdf).

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

AWS IoT, Greengrass, and Machine Learning for Connected Vehicles at CES

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-greengrass-and-machine-learning-for-connected-vehicles-at-ces/

Last week I attended a talk given by Bryan Mistele, president of Seattle-based INRIX. Bryan’s talk provided a glimpse into the future of transportation, centering around four principle attributes, often abbreviated as ACES:

Autonomous – Cars and trucks are gaining the ability to scan and to make sense of their environments and to navigate without human input.

Connected – Vehicles of all types have the ability to take advantage of bidirectional connections (either full-time or intermittent) to other cars and to cloud-based resources. They can upload road and performance data, communicate with each other to run in packs, and take advantage of traffic and weather data.

Electric – Continued development of battery and motor technology, will make electrics vehicles more convenient, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly.

Shared – Ride-sharing services will change usage from an ownership model to an as-a-service model (sound familiar?).

Individually and in combination, these emerging attributes mean that the cars and trucks we will see and use in the decade to come will be markedly different than those of the past.

On the Road with AWS
AWS customers are already using our AWS IoT, edge computing, Amazon Machine Learning, and Alexa products to bring this future to life – vehicle manufacturers, their tier 1 suppliers, and AutoTech startups all use AWS for their ACES initiatives. AWS Greengrass is playing an important role here, attracting design wins and helping our customers to add processing power and machine learning inferencing at the edge.

AWS customer Aptiv (formerly Delphi) talked about their Automated Mobility on Demand (AMoD) smart vehicle architecture in a AWS re:Invent session. Aptiv’s AMoD platform will use Greengrass and microservices to drive the onboard user experience, along with edge processing, monitoring, and control. Here’s an overview:

Another customer, Denso of Japan (one of the world’s largest suppliers of auto components and software) is using Greengrass and AWS IoT to support their vision of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Here’s a video:

AWS at CES
The AWS team will be out in force at CES in Las Vegas and would love to talk to you. They’ll be running demos that show how AWS can help to bring innovation and personalization to connected and autonomous vehicles.

Personalized In-Vehicle Experience – This demo shows how AWS AI and Machine Learning can be used to create a highly personalized and branded in-vehicle experience. It makes use of Amazon Lex, Polly, and Amazon Rekognition, but the design is flexible and can be used with other services as well. The demo encompasses driver registration, login and startup (including facial recognition), voice assistance for contextual guidance, personalized e-commerce, and vehicle control. Here’s the architecture for the voice assistance:

Connected Vehicle Solution – This demo shows how a connected vehicle can combine local and cloud intelligence, using edge computing and machine learning at the edge. It handles intermittent connections and uses AWS DeepLens to train a model that responds to distracted drivers. Here’s the overall architecture, as described in our Connected Vehicle Solution:

Digital Content Delivery – This demo will show how a customer uses a web-based 3D configurator to build and personalize their vehicle. It will also show high resolution (4K) 3D image and an optional immersive AR/VR experience, both designed for use within a dealership.

Autonomous Driving – This demo will showcase the AWS services that can be used to build autonomous vehicles. There’s a 1/16th scale model vehicle powered and driven by Greengrass and an overview of a new AWS Autonomous Toolkit. As part of the demo, attendees drive the car, training a model via Amazon SageMaker for subsequent on-board inferencing, powered by Greengrass ML Inferencing.

To speak to one of my colleagues or to set up a time to see the demos, check out the Visit AWS at CES 2018 page.

Some Resources
If you are interested in this topic and want to learn more, the AWS for Automotive page is a great starting point, with discussions on connected vehicles & mobility, autonomous vehicle development, and digital customer engagement.

When you are ready to start building a connected vehicle, the AWS Connected Vehicle Solution contains a reference architecture that combines local computing, sophisticated event rules, and cloud-based data processing and storage. You can use this solution to accelerate your own connected vehicle projects.

— Jeff;

Media Giant Can Keep Seized Ad Revenue From Pirate Sites

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/media-giant-can-keep-seized-ad-revenue-from-pirate-sites-180109/

For several decades the MPAA and RIAA have been the prime anti-piracy groups in the United States.

While that may be true, there’s another player making a massive impact, while getting barely any press.

ABS-CBN, the largest media and entertainment company in the Philippines, has filed a series of lawsuits against pirate sites in the US, with the popular streaming portal Fmovies as the biggest target.

The company has already won several cases with damages ranging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars. However, the associated injunctions in these cases are perhaps even more significant.

We previously covered how ABS-CBN managed to get court orders to seize domain names, without the defendants getting actively involved. This is also the case in a recent lawsuit where a Florida federal court signed a broad injunction targeting more than two dozen sites that offered the company’s content.

The websites, including abscbn-teleserye.com, dramascools.com, tvnijuan.org, pinoydailyshows.com and weeklywarning.org, may not be known to a broad audience but their domain names have all been suspended, linking to a takedown message instead.

What’s most interesting, however, is that the advertising revenues of these sites were previously frozen. This was done to ensure that ABS-CBN would at least get some money if the defendants failed to respond, a strategy that seems to have paid off.

After the targeted site owners failed to respond, ABS-CBN requested a default judgment with damages for trademark and copyright infringement.

U.S. District Court Judge Cecilia Altonaga has now signed the order, awarding the media company over a million dollars in statutory trademark infringement damages. In addition, several of the sites must also pay copyright infringement damages.

Damages

The default judgment also orders associated registrars and registries to hand over the domain names to ABS-CBN. Thus far several domains have been seized already, but some foreign companies have not complied, most likely because they fall outside the US jurisdiction.

The most interesting part of the order, however, is that Judge Altonaga grants ABS-CBN the previously seized advertising revenues.

“All funds currently restrained by the advertising services, networks, and/or platforms […], pursuant to the temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in this action are to be immediately (within five business days) transferred to Plaintiffs in partial satisfaction of the monetary judgment entered herein against each Defendant,” the Judge writes.

List of sites and their ad-networks

The sites in question used advertising services from a variety of well-known networks, including Google Adsense, MGID, Popads, AdsKeeper, and Bidvertiser. None of these companies responded in court after the initial seizure order, suggesting that they did not object.

This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a copyright holder has been granted advertising revenue from pirate sites in this manner. While it’s not known how much revenue the sites were making, there is bound to be some.

This could be a common legal tactic going forward because, generally speaking, it is very hard to get money from defaulting defendants who are relatively anonymous, or living in a foreign jurisdiction. By going after the advertisers, copyright holders have a good chance of securing some money, at least.

—

A copy of the default judgment is available here (pdf) and all affected websites are listed below.

– abscbn-teleserye.com
– astigvideos.com
– cinepinoy.lol
– cinepinoy.ag
– pinoyflix.ag
– pinoyflix.lol
– cinezen.me
– dramascools.com
– dramasget.com
– frugalpinoytv.org
– lambingan.cn
– pinoylambingan.ph
– lambingan.io
– lambingans.net
– latestpinoymovies.com
– pinasnews.net
– pinastvreplay.com
– pinoybay.ch
– pinoychannel.me
– pinoydailyshows.com
– pinoyplayback.net
– pinoytvshows.net
– pinoytv-shows.net
– rondownload.net
– sarapmanood.com
– tambayanshow.net
– thelambingan.com
– tvnijuan.org
– tvtambayan.org
– vianowpe.com
– weeklywarning.org
– weeklywarning.com

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

Tech Companies Meet EC to Discuss Removal of Pirate & Illegal Content

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tech-companies-meet-ec-to-discuss-removal-of-pirate-illegal-content-180109/

Thousands perhaps millions of pieces of illegal content flood onto the Internet every single day, a problem that’s only increasing with each passing year.

In the early days of the Internet very little was done to combat the problem but with the rise of social media and millions of citizens using it to publish whatever they like – not least terrorist propaganda and racist speech – governments around the world are beginning to take notice.

Of course, running parallel is the multi-billion dollar issue of intellectual property infringement. Eighteen years on from the first wave of mass online piracy and the majority of popular movies, TV shows, games, software and books are still available to download.

Over the past couple of years and increasingly in recent months, there have been clear signs that the EU in particular wishes to collectively mitigate the spread of all illegal content – from ISIS videos to pirated Hollywood movies – with assistance from major tech companies.

Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are all expected to do their part, with the looming stick of legislation behind the collaborative carrots, should they fail to come up with a solution.

To that end, five EU Commissioners – Dimitris Avramopoulos, Elżbieta Bieńkowska, Věra Jourová, Julian King and Mariya Gabriel – will meet today in Brussels with representatives of several online platforms to discuss progress made in dealing with the spread of the aforementioned material.

In a joint statement together with EC Vice-President Andrus Ansip, the Commissioners describe all illegal content as a threat to security, safety, and fundamental rights, demanding a “collective response – from all actors, including the internet industry.”

They note that online platforms have committed significant resources towards removing violent and extremist content, including via automated removal, but more needs to be done to tackle the issue.

“This is starting to achieve results. However, even if tens of thousands of pieces of illegal content have been taken down, there are still hundreds of thousands more out there,” the Commissioners writes.

“And removal needs to be speedy: the longer illegal material stays online, the greater its reach, the more it can spread and grow. Building on the current voluntary approach, more efforts and progress have to be made.”

The Commission says it is relying on online platforms such as Google and Facebook to “step up and speed up their efforts to tackle these threats quickly and comprehensively.” This should include closer cooperation with law enforcement, sharing of information with other online players, plus action to ensure that once taken down, illegal content does not simply reappear.

While it’s clear that that the EC would prefer to work collaboratively with the platforms to find a solution to the illegal content problem, as expected there’s the veiled threat of them being compelled by law to do so, should they fall short of their responsibilities.

“We will continue to promote cooperation with social media companies to detect and remove terrorist and other illegal content online, and if necessary, propose legislation to complement the existing regulatory framework,” the EC warns.

Today’s discussions run both in parallel and in tandem with others specifically targeted at intellectual property abuses. Late November the EC presented a set of new measures to ensure that copyright holders are well protected both online and in the physical realm.

A key aim is to focus on large-scale facilitators, such as pirate site operators, while cutting their revenue streams.

“The Commission seeks to deprive commercial-scale IP infringers of the revenue flows that make their criminal activity lucrative – this is the so-called ‘follow the money’ approach which focuses on the ‘big fish’ rather than individuals,” the Commission explained.

This presentation followed on the heels of a proposal last September which had the EC advocating the take-down-stay-down principle, with pirate content being taken down, automated filters ensuring infringement can be tackled proactively, with measures being taken against repeat infringers.

Again, the EC warned that should cooperation with Internet platforms fail to come up with results, future legislation cannot be ruled out.

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

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 26

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2017/12/15/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-26/

Welcome to TimeShift

Big news this week: Grafana v5.0 has been merged into master and is available in the nightly builds! We are really excited to share this with the community, and look forward to receiving community feedback (good or bad) on the new features and enhancements. As you see in the video below, there are some big changes that aim to improve workflow, team organization, permissions, and overall user experience. Check out the video below to see it in action, and give it a spin yourself.

  • New Grid Layout Engine: Make it easier to build dashboards and enable more complex layouts
  • Dashboard Folders & Permissions
  • User Teams
  • Improved Dashboard Settings UX
  • Improved Page Design and Navigation

NOTE: That’s actually Torkel Odegaard, creator of Grafana shredding on the soundtrack!

Latest Stable Release

Grafana 4.6.3 is available and includes some bug fixes:

  • Gzip: Fixes bug Gravatar images when gzip was enabled #5952
  • Alert list: Now shows alert state changes even after adding manual annotations on dashboard #99513
  • Alerting: Fixes bug where rules evaluated as firing when all conditions was false and using OR operator. #93183
  • Cloudwatch: CloudWatch no longer display metrics’ default alias #101514, thx @mtanda

Download Grafana 4.6.3 Now

From the Blogosphere

Monitoring MySQL with Prometheus and Grafana: Julien Pivotto (who will be speaking at GrafanaCon EU), gave a great presentation last month on Monitoring MySQL with Prometheus and Grafana. You can also check out his slides.

Monitor your Docker Containers: docker stats doesn’t often give you the level of insight you need to effectively manage your containers. This article discuses how to use cAdvisor, Prometheus and Grafana to get a handle on your Docker performance.

Magento Performance Monitoring with Grafana Dashboards and Alerts: This Christmas-themed post walks you through how to monitor the performance of Magento, start building dashboards, and setup Slack alerts, all while sitting in your rocking chair, sipping eggnog.

Icinga Web2 and Grafana Working Together: This is a follow-up post about displaying service performance data from Icinga2 in Grafana. Now that we know how to list the services on a dashboard, it would be helpful to filter this list so that specific teams can know the status of services they specifically manage.

Setup of sitespeed in AWS with Peter Hedenskog: In this video, Peter Hedenskop from Wikimedia and Stefan Judis set up a video call to go over setting up sitespeed in AWS. They create a fully functional Grafana dashboard, including web performance metrics from Stefan’s personal website running in the cloud.

Deploying Grafana to Access Zabbix in Alibaba Cloud ECS: This article walks you through how to deploy Grafana on Alibaba Cloud ECS to access Zabbix to visualize performance data for your website or application.

Let’s Summarize the Test Results with Grafana Annotations + Prometheus: The engineers of NTT Communications Corporation have created something of an Advent Calendar, with new posts each day. December 14th’s post focused on Grafana’s new annotation functionality via the UI and the API.

New Speakers Added!

We have added new speakers, and talk titles to the lineup at grafanacon.org. Only a few left to include, which should be added in the next few days.

Join us March 1-2, 2018 in Amsterdam for 2 days of talks centered around Grafana and the surrounding monitoring ecosystem including Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxData, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, and many other topics.

This year we have speakers from Bloomberg, CERN, Tinder, Red Hat, Prometheus, InfluxData, Fastly, Automattic, Percona, and more!

Get Your Ticket Now

Grafana Plugins

This week we have a new plugin for the popular IoT platform DeviceHive, and an update to our own Kubernetes App. To install or update any plugin in an on-prem Grafana instance, use the Grafana-cli tool, or install and update with 1 click on Hosted Grafana.

NEW PLUGIN

DeviceHive is an IOT Platform and now has a data source plugin, which means you can visualize the live commands and notifications from a device.


Install Now

UPDATED PLUGIN

Kubernetes App – The Grafana Kubernetes App allows you to monitor your Kubernetes cluster’s performance. It includes 4 dashboards, Cluster, Node, Pod/Container and Deployment, and also comes with Intel Snap collectors that are deployed to your cluster to collect health metrics.


Update

Upcoming Events:

In between code pushes we like to speak at, sponsor and attend all kinds of conferences and meetups. We also like to make sure we mention other Grafana-related events happening all over the world. If you’re putting on just such an event, let us know and we’ll list it here.

FOSDEM | Brussels, Belgium – Feb 3-4, 2018: FOSDEM is a free developer conference where thousands of developers of free and open source software gather to share ideas and technology. Carl Bergquist is managing the Cloud and Monitoring Devroom, and we’ve heard there were some great talks submitted. There is no need to register; all are welcome.

Tweet of the Week

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


Ok, ok – This tweet isn’t showing a off a dashboard, but we can’t help but be thrilled when someone post about our poster series. We’ll be working on the fourth poster to be unveiled at GrafanaCon EU!

Grafana Labs is Hiring!

We are passionate about open source software and thrive on tackling complex challenges to build the future. We ship code from every corner of the globe and love working with the community. If this sounds exciting, you’re in luck – WE’RE HIRING!

Check out our Open Positions

How are we doing?

Let us know what you think about timeShift. Submit a comment on this article below, or post something at our community forum. Find an article I haven’t included? Send it my way. Help us make timeShift better!

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

Не, Испания не отсъства от каталунските учебници

Post Syndicated from Йовко Ламбрев original https://yovko.net/catalonia-textbooks/

Тази статия бе написана за Дневник и публикувана там на 8 ноември 2017 под заглавие „Желанието за независимост на Каталуня не идва от учебниците“. Не съм търсил и получавал хонорар за този текст – написах го по свое желание и настоях да бъде публикуван заради предходен материал, към който имах сериозни критики и за който става дума в текста. Препубликувам го и тук, в блога си, за да остане за личния ми архив.

Не съм изоставил темата Каталуния – макар да съзнавам напълно, че това се превръща в моя лична и самотна битка. Напоследък не смогвам с всичко, което е важно за мен, а и ситуацията в собствената ни превзета държава не е по-различна от театралната демокрация в кралство Испания. Тъжно е, че Каталуния извади на яве симптом на много тежка болест, свързана с егоизма на европейците и липсата на обикновена човешка солидарност в Европа. Симптом, който не предвещава нищо добро за бъдещето ни. Но ще го осъзнаем късно.

Важността да се направи езика един и същ винаги е била признавана за нещо велико и е признак на доминация или превъзходство на принцове или нации… но тъй като всяка нация чувства собствения си език като дар от Природата, това прави трудно завладяването им и ще ви е нужно известно време да го направите, особено когато хората, както в случая – каталунците, са упорити, арогантни и влюбени в своята страна, затова е добре внимателно да се помисли и да се дават скрити инструкции и съвети, така че целта да се постигне незабелязано…

Хосе Родриго Вилялпандо, старши служител в Съвета на Кастилия, 1716 г., извадка от “Тайни инструкции” до магистратите в Каталуния

В наш интерес е да “испанизираме” каталунските деца.

Хосе Игнасио Верт, испански министър на образованието, 2012 г.

Натиснете тук за да видите презентацията.

“Нивото на университетското образование е високо, студентите имат много богат избор от дисциплини и относително малък брой „задължителни“ лекции. В университета всички предмети се преподават най-малко на два езика (каталунски и испански). Много често има възможност и за обучение на английски.” Това ми казва мой приятел, който от три години живее в едно от по-малките градчета на север от Барселона и завършва докторантура.

Поводът да говорим по темата е статия, публикувана в Дневник и озаглавена Испания отсъства, монархията е зло, Европа се проваля – какво пише в каталунските учебници, която преразказва прочита на испанската медия ABC на едно изследване. Самото изследване е валидно и съдържа анализ на учебен материал за V и VI клас, заедно със забележки и препоръки, но преразказът на ABC е далеч от обективен и преднамерено внушава напълно недостоверни неща: като например, че в каталунските училища всичко се учи на каталунски, учебният материал е манипулиран и манипулативен, испаноговорящите деца са в неравностойно положение, учениците дори не знаели кой е Дон Кихот и биват облъчвани с антиевропейски послания.

За жалост, това е част от активна кампания, обслужваща пряко тезата на испанското централно правителство на Народната партия, че каталунското движение за независимост е подхранвано от манипулирани исторически факти и систематично промиване на съзнания. В конфликта между Барселона и Мадрид медиите играят активна, но невинаги достатъчно чистоплътна роля.

Затова помолих няколко събеседници, които имат преки наблюдения върху образователната система в Каталуния, да споделят своята гледна точка.

Валентина е българка, която живее от 17 години в каталунската област Тарагона. Майка е на две деца (на 9 и 11 години), нейни са снимките от учебниците за IV, V и VI клас от обикновено държавно училище, които илюстрират тази статия.

Румен също е българин и е баща на две деца. Живее от две години и половина с цялото си семейство много близо до Барселона, а по-големият му син учи в частно международно училище.

Роса е каталунка, живее вече 48 години в град от област Барселона. Има две деца (на 8 и на 11 години) и е преподавател в системата на държавното образование на Каталуния. Комуникацията ни с Роса е на испански.

Споделям им, че в България се прокрадва тезата, че каталунският стремеж за независимост е подклаждан от манипулации в образователната система и моля за техните гледни точки.

“Мисля, че статията е едностранчива, защото учениците имат по два комплекта учебници (испански и каталунски), като първите се спускат от Мадрид. Освен това има сериозен контрол от централното правителство.”, споделя Румен.

“Тази информация е невярна и не отговаря на действителността.”, още по-категорична е Роса. “Учебниците не индоктринират. Те обясняват съвременната история с исторически факти, съвсем коректно и без да вменяват какви намерения е имала една или друга страна. Учителите също не индоктринират, най-малкото нямат никакво време за това. Всяко ново правителство променя образователния закон и учебните програми дори без съобразяване с децата със специални нужди, например. Има паралелки с повече от 30 деца (в тази на дъщеря ми са 31), но ако дете зададе въпрос на испански, ще му бъде отговорено на испански, дори и в час по каталунски.”

А Валентина допълва, че проблемът е всъщност обратен и “борбата винаги е била и е на основата да се запази езикът, културата и традициите. „Залитането“ на Каталуния към независимост няма нищо общо с това, което се изучава в училищата, по-скоро с политиката на испанските власти, която подтиска всякаква възможност за развитие и подобряване условията на живот в Каталуния.”

Питам Румен как се обучават децата в частно международно училище и на колко езика се преподава и общува. “Там основно ги обучават на английски език, но все пак имат минимум 30% от учебния материал на испански и каталунски, предимно по география, история и социални науки. Предметите се преподават на три основни езика и един чужд, приблизително 60% английски, 20% испански, 10% каталунски и 10% френски (чуждия език). Единственият сериозен недостатък, който съм забелязал в образователната им система, е много ниското ниво на владеене (когато въобще го има) на английски сред местното население и най-вече младежите под 25 г. Живял съм в три европейски държави освен в България и мога да кажа с чисто сърце, че Испания е най-назад във владеенето на чужди езици.”

В едно свое есе Пере Маянс Балселс, който е професор по каталунски език и литература, разказва как още през 1979 г. Каталунският автономен статут (регионалния основен закон) установява каталунския език като официален (поделяйки, разбира се, този статус с испанския), а Законът за езиково нормиране в Каталуния от 1983 г, има за цел да изравни положението на каталунския език, който дотогава на всички нива е бил поставен неоспоримо по-ниско от испанския. С този закон каталунският език става главният език, използван в основното и средното образование. “Той също признаваше правото на децата да получават начално образование на своя първи език, дали каталунски или испански, и изискваше двата езика да бъдат преподавани на всички нива на неуниверситетското образование, държеше заедно учениците с различен езиков произход и осигуряваше на всички деца в Каталуния на училищна възраст, независимо какъв език са ползвали при започване на училище, в края на своето основно обучение да могат да си служат и с каталунския, и с испанския език правилно и свободно.”, пише проф. Балселс. “Общо диагностично оценяване от 2010 г., публикувано от испанското министерство на образованието, показва, че езиковата компетенция на каталунските ученици по испански език е еднаква със средната за испанската държава, и в действителност е по-голяма от тази в някои едноезични общности като Канарските острови, Екстремадура или Андалусия, или тази в двуезични общности, където испанският има много по-силно присъствие като език на преподаване (като в Балеарските острови, Галисия и област Валенсия).”

Между другото, каталунският езиков модел е признат за добра практика в областта на преподаването в многоезични общности и отличен от групата на високо равнище по въпросите на многоезичието, създадена от Европейската комисия през 2005 г.

Реалната борба е да се опази каталунския език, който е застрашен. “Реалният проблем тук в Каталуния не е дали се изучава испански език и дали децата могат да общуват на него свободно.”, уточнява Валентина. “Реалният проблем е, че децата се връщат вкъщи с речник, пълен с испанизирани думи (espanyolismes) по вина на самите учители, които нямат добър каталунски, и, разбира се, на съученици, с които не могат да говорят на каталунски, защото те не искат да го говорят. Свидетели сме на това всеки ден от много време насам. Реалната борба е да се опази каталунския език, който е застрашен. Истината е, че малко хора говорят правилен каталунски, използват се много испански фрази и се забравят традиционните каталунски фрази и изрази. Нужно е учителите да имат по високо ниво за да се даде по-добра основа за бъдещото образование. Определено е много странно, когато получиш съобщение от преподавател в бележника на детето ти с правописни грешки, видни дори за мен, която съм българка с ниво С по каталунски.”

Съгласно данни на официалната анкета за употреба на езиците EULP (Enquesta d’usos lingüístics de la població), проведена през 2013 г., 94,3% от жителите над 14-годишна възраст заявяват, че разбират каталунски, 80,4% го говорят, 82,4% могат да четат и 60,4% могат да пишат на него. Но трябва да се има предвид, че Каталуния е общност на имигранти и едва малко повече от половината от анкетираните са родени в Каталуния, а около четвърт от тях на друго място в Испания – главно в региони, в които се говори кастилски, 18% са от чужбина.

Ф. Чавие Вила (доцент в Барселонския университет по каталунска филология и доктор по лингвистика от Vrije Universiteit в Брюксел) пише: “През 2010 г. Конституционният съд постанови, че кастилският език ще е задължителен в Каталуния, но не и самият каталунски. И на базата на това решение, две години по-късно испанският министър на образованието подпали Каталуния, когато се похвали, че неговата цел е да се “испанизират” (españolizar) каталунските ученици. Той представи законопроект, който не само посегна на каталунската юрисдикция, но позволи каталунските деца да бъдат обучавани едноезично на кастилски – позиция, която беше възприета като колониална и напълно неприемлива от повечето каталунци.”

Жузеп Мария Ганиет, компютърен инженер от Барселонския автономен университет, специализирал Изкуствен интелект, твърди, че “испанската държава, съзнавайки силното чувство за идентичност, което езикът поражда у хората, винаги е гледала на некастилските езици и култури като на историческа аномалия, вместо да ги приеме като общо културно наследство, което следва да бъде запазено и защитено.”

В заключение питам събеседниците си, дали считат, че учебниците провокират анти-европейски нагласи сред учениците или внушават, че Европа е провален проект?

Валентина споделя: “Определено не вярвам в това, тук хората са с точно противното мнение. Макар че след последните събития и позицията си относно 1 октомври, смятам, че ЕС загуби много почитатели, както и част от желанието за членство на Република Каталуния в ЕС.”

Румен допълва: “Според мен каталунците са абсолютно проевропейски настроени и това е една от причините сепаратизмът да не е толкова разпространен, защото ЕС е по-важен за каталунците от независимостта им. Твърдя това въз основа на многобройни разговори и с про-, и с антинастроените към отцепването. Историята на Испания, както и на България, има много гледни точки, така че дали е преподавана манипулативно е страшно трудно да се установи обективно, вероятно има такива елементи, но не вярвам спорните моменти да са много.”

Роса обобщава: “Убедена съм, че образованието в Каталуния защитава демокрацията, свободата и мира, и разказва за Европа на многообразието и плурализма и в никакъв случай за Европа като за провален проект.” Питам я накрая и за гледната ѝ точка за политическата криза между централното и автономното правителство и тя споделя: “Каталунското правителство действа съгласно демократичния мандат, който получи след изборите през септември 2015 г. и действията им бяха отговорни. Има неща, които бих искала да бяха направили по-добре, но и Мадрид не остана по-назад, особено провокирайки ситуации, които можеха да бъдат избегнати. Аз твърдо вярвам, че независимостта ще се случи. Ще отнеме повече или по-малко усилия, но ще се случи. Когато едно гражданско общество с постоянство и мир направи крачка към по-добро общество за себе си и децата си… няма връщане назад. Достатъчно е да си спомним, че всичките многолюдни демонстрации бяха като празненства, по лицата на хората грееха усмивки, завладяни от мечтата за по-добър проект. Това не може да бъде спряно. Гневът и конфронтацията, или отрицанието в името на самото отрицание, не могат да спрат това.”

В този материал са използвани извадки от есета, включени в книгата “Какво става с Каталуния?”, преведена и издадена на български език от Сдружение “Диалози” като свободна за разпространение електронна книга. Снимките са от учебници за IV, V и VI клас и опровергават твърденията, че всички учебни материали са само на каталунски език, избягват споменаването на Испания и Европейския съюз, а децата не учат кой е Сервантес и Дон Кихот. Направени са от Валентина Григорова. Благодаря за съдействието на Юлияна Кръстева при подготвянето на този материал.

timeShift(GrafanaBuzz, 1w) Issue 25

Post Syndicated from Blogs on Grafana Labs Blog original https://grafana.com/blog/2017/12/08/timeshiftgrafanabuzz-1w-issue-25/

Welcome to TimeShift

This week, a few of us from Grafana Labs, along with 4,000 of our closest friends, headed down to chilly Austin, TX for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017. We got to see a number of great talks and were thrilled to see Grafana make appearances in some of the presentations. We were also a sponsor of the conference and handed out a ton of swag (we overnighted some of our custom Grafana scarves, which came in handy for Thursday’s snow).

We also announced Grafana Labs has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a Silver member! We’re excited to share our expertise in time series data visualization and open source software with the CNCF community.

Latest Release

Grafana 4.6.2 is available and includes some bug fixes:

  • Prometheus: Fixes bug with new Prometheus alerts in Grafana. Make sure to download this version if you’re using Prometheus for alerting. More details in the issue. #9777
  • Color picker: Bug after using textbox input field to change/paste color string #9769
  • Cloudwatch: build using golang 1.9.2 #9667, thanks @mtanda
  • Heatmap: Fixed tooltip for “time series buckets” mode #9332
  • InfluxDB: Fixed query editor issue when using > or < operators in WHERE clause #9871

Download Grafana 4.6.2 Now

From the Blogosphere

Grafana Labs Joins the CNCF: Grafana Labs has officially joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). We look forward to working with the CNCF community to democratize metrics and help unify traditionally disparate information.

Automating Web Performance Regression Alerts: Peter and his team needed a faster and easier way to find web performance regressions at the Wikimedia Foundation. Grafana 4’s alerting features were exactly what they needed. This post covers their journey on setting up alerts for both RUM and synthetic testing and shares the alerts they’ve set up on their dashboards.

How To Install Grafana on Ubuntu 17.10: As you probably guessed from the title, this article walks you through installing and configuring Grafana in the latest version of Ubuntu (or earlier releases). It also covers installing plugins using the Grafana CLI tool.

Prometheus: Starting the Server with Alertmanager, cAdvisor and Grafana: Learn how to monitor Docker from scratch using cAdvisor, Prometheus and Grafana in this detailed, step-by-step walkthrough.

Monitoring Java EE Servers with Prometheus and Payara: In this screencast, Adam uses firehose; a Java EE 7+ metrics gateway for Prometheus, to convert the JSON output into Prometheus statistics and visualizes the data in Grafana.

Monitoring Spark Streaming with InfluxDB and Grafana: This article focuses on how to monitor Apache Spark Streaming applications with InfluxDB and Grafana at scale.

GrafanaCon EU, March 1-2, 2018

We are currently reaching out to everyone who submitted a talk to GrafanaCon and will soon publish the final schedule at grafanacon.org.

Join us March 1-2, 2018 in Amsterdam for 2 days of talks centered around Grafana and the surrounding monitoring ecosystem including Graphite, Prometheus, InfluxData, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, and more.

Get Your Ticket Now

Grafana Plugins

Lots of plugin updates and a new OpenNMS Helm App plugin to announce! To install or update any plugin in an on-prem Grafana instance, use the Grafana-cli tool, or install and update with 1 click on Hosted Grafana.

NEW PLUGIN

OpenNMS Helm App – The new OpenNMS Helm App plugin replaces the old OpenNMS data source. Helm allows users to create flexible dashboards using both fault management (FM) and performance management (PM) data from OpenNMS® Horizon™ and/or OpenNMS® Meridian™. The old data source is now deprecated.


Install Now

UPDATED PLUGIN

PNP Data Source – This data source plugin (that uses PNP4Nagios to access RRD files) received a small, but important update that fixes template query parsing.


Update

UPDATED PLUGIN

Vonage Status Panel – The latest version of the Status Panel comes with a number of small fixes and changes. Below are a few of the enhancements:

  • Threshold settings – removed Show Always option, and replaced it with 2 options:
    • Display Alias – Select when to show the metric alias.
    • Display Value – Select when to show the metric value.
  • Text format configuration (bold / italic) for warning / critical / disabled states.
  • Option to change the corner radius of the panel. Now you can change the panel’s shape to have rounded corners.

Update

UPDATED PLUGIN

Google Calendar Plugin – This plugin received a small update, so be sure to install version 1.0.4.


Update

UPDATED PLUGIN

Carpet Plot Panel – The Carpet Plot Panel received a fix for IE 11, and also added the ability to choose custom colors.


Update

Upcoming Events:

In between code pushes we like to speak at, sponsor and attend all kinds of conferences and meetups. We also like to make sure we mention other Grafana-related events happening all over the world. If you’re putting on just such an event, let us know and we’ll list it here.

Docker Meetup @ Tuenti | Madrid, Spain – Dec 12, 2017: Javier Provecho: Intro to Metrics with Swarm, Prometheus and Grafana

Learn how to gain visibility in real time for your micro services. We’ll cover how to deploy a Prometheus server with persistence and Grafana, how to enable metrics endpoints for various service types (docker daemon, traefik proxy and postgres) and how to scrape, visualize and set up alarms based on those metrics.

RSVP

Grafana Lyon Meetup n ° 2 | Lyon, France – Dec 14, 2017: This meetup will cover some of the latest innovations in Grafana and discussion about automation. Also, free beer and chips, so – of course you’re going!

RSVP

FOSDEM | Brussels, Belgium – Feb 3-4, 2018: FOSDEM is a free developer conference where thousands of developers of free and open source software gather to share ideas and technology. Carl Bergquist is managing the Cloud and Monitoring Devroom, and we’ve heard there were some great talks submitted. There is no need to register; all are welcome.

Tweet of the Week

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

We were thrilled to see our dashboards bigger than life at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this week. Thanks for snapping a photo and sharing!

Grafana Labs is Hiring!

We are passionate about open source software and thrive on tackling complex challenges to build the future. We ship code from every corner of the globe and love working with the community. If this sounds exciting, you’re in luck – WE’RE HIRING!

Check out our Open Positions

How are we doing?

Hard to believe this is the 25th issue of Timeshift! I have a blast writing these roundups, but Let me know what you think. Submit a comment on this article below, or post something at our community forum. Find an article I haven’t included? Send it my way. Help us make timeShift better!

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