Key events H2 2018:

• APT attack by the Leafminer group
• New GreyEnergy malware
• The Sharpshooter campaign
• MuddyWater
• Cloud Hopper
• Shamoon v.3
• Ransomware and Phishing attacks

If you’re not facing some kind of problem, you don’t need a new tool. Full stop. Don’t look for solutions and then back into problems. If you’re not facing a problem that a new technology doesn’t solve significantly better than your existing technology, then your decision is over. If you’re considering using this technology because you’ve seen others using it, it might be useful to think about what problems they are facing, and ask yourself if you’re facing the same problems. It is often easy to reach for a technology because you see another company using it, the difficulty is in determining whether or not you’re facing the same challenges.

This is the result of the community road mapping effort which took place in the fall 2018 and winter of 2019. Information about the AI road mapping effort can be found here: https://cra.org/ccc/visioning/visioning-activities/2018-activities/artificial-intelligence-roadmap/

On March 19 2019 Norsk Hydro, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers revealed that ransomware had been used in an attack against them. The Norwegian firm was attacked on March 18 and production processes at a number of facilities in Norway, Qatar, Brazil and other countries were affected.

It's this portability—the fact that microprocessors can perform their calculations almost anywhere—that gives edge networking, computing, monitoring, automation and control its true value.

To understand the future of Silicon Valley, cross the Atlantic.

Unternehmen können anhand des Leitfadens ihre Schwachstellen erkennen und mit Unterstützung des BVT Maßnahmen ergreifen, um ihren Schutz zu verbessern.

Sharding, also known as horizontal partitioning, is a popular scale-out approach for relational databases. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a managed relational database service that provides great features to make sharding easy to use in the cloud. In this post, I describe how to use Amazon RDS to implement a sharded database architecture to achieve high scalability, high availability, and fault tolerance for data storage. I discuss considerations for schema design and monitoring metrics when deploying Amazon RDS as a database shard. I also outline the challenges for resharding and highlight the push-button scale-up and scale-out solutions in Amazon RDS.

Mirai, the virulent Internet of Things malware that delivered record-setting denial-of-service attacks in 2016, has been updated to target a new crop of devices, including two found inside enterprise networks, where bandwidth is often plentiful, researchers said on Monday.

This website is a solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-tech Magazine. It has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

drist aims at being simple to understand and pluggable with standard tools. There is no special syntax to learn, no daemon to run, no agent, and it relies on base tools like awk, sed, ssh and rsync.

I’m a person who’s only satisfied if I feel I’m being productive. I like figuring things out. I like making things. And I want to do as much of that as I can. And part of being able to do that is to have the best personal infrastructure I can. Over the years I’ve been steadily accumulating and implementing “personal infrastructure hacks” for myself. Some of them are, yes, quite nerdy. But they certainly help me be productive. And maybe in time more and more of them will become mainstream, as a few already have.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to welcome the new shiny RFC8482, which effectively deprecates the DNS ANY query type. DNS ANY was a "meta-query" - think of it as a similar thing to the common A, AAAA, MX or SRV query types, but unlike these it wasn't a real query type - it was special. Unlike the standard query types, ANY didn't age well. It was hard to implement on modern DNS servers, the semantics were poorly understood by the community and it unnecessarily exposed the DNS protocol to abuse. RFC8482 allows us to clean it up - it's a good thing.

Sometimes the IT industry is pretty silly.

The web is for everyone and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won’t be easy. But if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the web we want.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
   3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Today Rancher Labs is announcing a new open source project, k3s, which is a lightweight, easy to install Kubernetes distribution geared towards resource-constrained environments and low touch operations.

In Human + Machine, Accenture leaders Paul R. Daugherty and H. James (Jim) Wilson show that the essence of the AI paradigm shift is the transformation of all business processes within an organization.

(echo red; echo green 1>&2) | echo blue can output any of blue green (with a newline between them), green blue, or blue; the usual case is blue green. Fully explaining this requires surprisingly arcane Unix knowledge.

Data from 6,313 mobile data plans in 230 countries were gathered and analysed by Cable.co.uk between 23 October and 28 November 2018. The average cost of one gigabyte (1GB) was then calculated and compared to form a worldwide mobile data pricing league table.

Version 3.0.0: New and updated features, bug fixes, new protocol support...

An effort to create an open standard for transmitting metrics at scale, with support for both text representation and Protocol Buffers.

The Red Hat Product Security risk report reviews the state of security for our products in 2018.

Common Voice is Mozilla's initiative to help teach machines how real people speak.

SecBSD is an UNIX-like operating system focused on computer security based on OpenBSD.

Simple, reliable messaging. It takes a lot to support this statement. For 10 years WhatsApp demonstrated unprecedented reliability and availability, serving over 1.5B users. There is absolutely no way to reproduce interactions between all of them, within the cluster spanning over 10,000 nodes and multiple data centers. Investigations must be done on a live system without disturbing connected users. If there are repairs needed, it has to be done on the fly.

Hyperconvergence of hardware resources is expected to be a fundamental architecture for multiple mini data center i.e. edge nodes. Red Hat team came with an innovative hyperconvergence of OpenStack projects along with Ceph software-defined storage. A solution shows, it is possible to gain better control all edge nodes by reducing control planes and maintain the continuity and sustainability of 5G network along with the performance required by new age applications.

Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.

Key Takeaways:

• Complexity is the greatest impediment to a software company’s growth and profitability.
• Development costs increase exponentially with respect to the complexity of your code base.
• The choice between speed and simplicity is a false dichotomy. Investment in simplicity is investment in speed.
• Few executives recognize the cost of complexity because they don’t understand the nature of the products they’re selling.
• Software is a product like no other — a hybrid product-service with a very unique warranty.

Relativ zu den Spitzenreitern liegt Österreich bei vielen Kennzahlen der Digitalisierung zurück.

Season of Docs brings technical writers and open source projects together for a few months to work on open source documentation. 2019 is the first time we’re running this exciting new program.

When you think about how “traditional” enterprise-focused firms – think Microsoft, Oracle and IBM – sell software, it usually follows a well trodden formula: negotiations, long sales cycles and a “checklist” of features demanded by decision makers who seldom use the products they buy.

We introduce SMoTherSpectre, a speculative code-reuse attack that leverages port-contention in simultaneously multi-threaded processors (SMoTher) as a side channel to leak information from a victim process. SMoTher is a fine-grained side channel that detects contention based on a single victim instruction.

This article builds upon Vivek Rau’s chapter “Eliminating Toil” in Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems [1]. We begin by recapping Vivek’s definition of toil and Google’s approach to balancing operational work with engineering project work. [1] B. Beyer, C. Jones, J. Petoff, and N. Murphy, eds., Site Reli- ability Engineering (O’Reilly Media, 2016).

When you are working with a database, or any other kind of software, your experience is enhanced or hindered by the tools you use to interact with it. PostgreSQL has a command line tool, psql, and it’s pretty powerful, but some people much prefer a graphical editor.

SUSE adds C-level executives to ensure continued success, momentum and growth as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions to enable hybrid and multi-cloud workload management

We have grown from a handful of regions to 15 locations around the world. Even as the demands increase, we are bound by hard physical constraints of power and optics supply availability. Because of these dual pressures of increasing demand and physical constraints, we decided to rethink and transform our data center network from top to bottom, from topologies to the fundamental building blocks used within them. In this post, we’ll share the story of this transformation over the last two years.

For more than a century we’ve counted on calories to tell us what will make us fat. Peter Wilson says it’s time to bury the world’s most misleading measure.

As artificially intelligent systems grow in intelli- gence and capability, some of their available options may allow them to resist intervention by their programmers. We call an AI system “corrigible” if it cooperates with what its creators regard as a corrective intervention, despite de- fault incentives for rational agents to resist at- tempts to shut them down or modify their preferences.

Combined, F5 and NGINX provide a new, end-to-end set of application offerings that bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps.

Create amazing Internet of Things designs without soldering or dropping down to C. The GRiSP project makes building internet-connected hardware devices easier with Erlang!

• Real bare-metal Erlang virtual machine
• Hard real-time event handling, using open source code
• Digilent Pmod™ compatible connectors for sensors and actuators

This tool intends to provide an aggregated view of the ENISA Good Practices for IoT and Smart Infrastructure that have been published the last years.

Today we are going to talk about logs, quantitative metrics, and how to observe them in order to increase the team reaction rate and reduce the system waiting time in case of an incident.

This is a textbook in preparation for an introductory undergraduate course on theoretical computer science.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.

Because of an ever-increasing demand for capacity, submarine cable system design is evolving and the wet plant equipment design and technology are facing new challenges.

At a time of soaring corporate profits and plenty of HR lip service about "wellness," millions of workers--in virtually every industry--are deeply unhappy. Why did work become so miserable? Who is responsible? And does any company have a model for doing it right?

The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation is a new non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the state of the art for Erlang, Elixir, LFE, and other technologies based on the BEAM.

Try to avoid “technological aging”. Unlike biological aging, it is reversible.

Across the Internet ecosystem, people are busy doing things with IPv6. Mobile carriers have it, broadband carriers do it, content providers offer it, operating systems use it, the Cloud wants it, and IoT needs it. But all too often, and especially when we look at enterprises, what’s keeping the people pushing for IPv6 busiest, is convincing key stakeholders that they should invest in their own deployment.

• Meinungen darüber was Industrial Analytics (IA) genau ist, gehen auseinander
• unterschiedliche Gründe, warum IA noch nicht in der Industrie angekommen ist

The software update will change an automated system, and still has to go through flight testing.

The bottom line is that technology advances have been moving very fast, while public policy has lagged behind. It is time for public policy to catch up with technology. If technology is driving the future, society should do the steering.

PostgreSQL can scale rather well vertically. The more resources (CPU, memory, disk) that you can make available to your PostgreSQL server, the better it can perform. However, while some parts of Postgres can automatically make use of the increased resources, other parts need configuration changes before improvements can be noticed.

The takeaway is: don't use Kubernetes just because everybody else does. Carefully evaluate your requirements and check which tool fits the bill.

More than 1.55 million room nights are reserved on the Booking.com platform every day. It’s a staggering amount of traffic, and not surprisingly, the Amsterdam-based travel e-commerce company has a lot of knowledge to share about handling metrics at scale.

To support microservice-based development, Alibaba has now launched Fescar, an open source version of its Global Transaction Service solution to the problem of distributed transactions.

Killed by Google is a Free and Open Source list of dead Google products, services, and devices.
It serves to be a tribute and memorial of beloved products and services killed by Google.

This International Docking System Standard (IDSS) Interface Definition Document (IDD) establishes a standard docking interface to enable on-orbit crew rescue operations and joint collaborative endeavors utilizing different spacecraft.

The rogue code can disable safety systems designed to prevent catastrophic industrial accidents. It was discovered in the Middle East, but the hackers behind it are now targeting companies in North America and other parts of the world, too.

VMware Cloud on AWS Quick Reference Poster.

Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX pathnames and filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes. A pathname lets you select a particular file, and may include zero or more “/” characters. Each pathname component (separated by “/”) is a filename; filenames cannot contain “/”. Neither filenames nor pathnames can contain the ASCII NUL character (\0), because that is the terminator. This lack of limitations is flexible, but it also creates a legion of unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws). It also makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users.

Exciting times are ahead for us. We expect that our Zion, Kings Canyon, and Mount Shasta designs will address our growing workloads in AI training, AI inference, and video transcoding respectively.

Easy flamegraphs for Rust projects and everything else, without Perl or pipes.

Reinforcement learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are un- likely to behave optimally all the time. If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions — harmful either for the agent or for the environment — and lead the agent into a safer situation. However, if the learning agent expects to receive rewards from this sequence, it may learn in the long run to avoid such interrup- tions, for example by disabling the red button — which is an undesirable outcome.

PostgreSQL and ZFS were made for each other. This talk dives downstack into the internals and way that PostgreSQL consumes disk resources and tricks that are available if you run PostgreSQL on ZFS (ZFS on Linux, ZFS on FreeBSD, or ZFS on
Illumos).

People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean

Blue Oak Council’s model license demonstrates all the techniques that licenses can use to make software free and simple for everyone to use and build on, in everyday language that everyone can understand.

1. Applying the correct troubleshooting steps to your problems is crucial:
   a) Understand what resources have been saturated.
   b) Understand what if anything is causing an error.
   c) From there you can divert into the areas that are related to that resource and start to narrow down the issue.
   d) Tackle the problems bit by bit.
2. Having the right tools for the job key for success. PMM is a great example of a tool that can help you quickly identify, drill in, and fix bottlenecks.
3. Have realistic load tests. In this case, they had tested the new release on a concurrency level that was not like their production
4. By identifying the culprit query we were able to:
   a.) Drop average query time from 20s to 661ms
   b.) Increase QPS by 2x
   c.) Reduce the usage of CPU to 1/4 of its level prior to our intervention

Some 40% of firms across Europe classified as being “AI startups” showed no evidence that they used AI, according to new research from venture firm MMC.

Leverage the power of Kubernetes to build an efficient software delivery pipeline.

Gerade im Bereich der IT halten externe Berater (und auch Mitarbeiter) sich oft mehr oder weniger an den Vorgaben der Aufsicht fest. So manch einer hat keine Ahnung, ob das eigentlich zielführend ist - und von was redet der Techniker am anderen Ende des Tisches da eigentlich?!?!!!??? Garniert mit eigenen Anekdoten, kleinen fiktiven Beispielen und absolut tauglich für Anfänger: Informationssicherheit & IT-Risikomanagement am Beispiel der Bank B!