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Project Naptha: highlight, copy and translate text from any image in the browser

Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image. Unfortunately, your browser is not yet supported (but feel free to play around with this page, which shows off most of the features and works on most modern browsers), currently only Google Chrome is supported. Type in your email below and sign up for updates on this project. Depending on the number of sign-ups, a Firefox version may be released in a few weeks. If you're interested in Naptha for other browsers, email me. Words on the web exist in two forms: there’s the text of articles, emails, tweets, chats and blogs— which can be copied, searched, translated, edited and selected— and then there’s the text which is shackled to images, found in comics, document scans, photographs, posters, charts, diagrams, screenshots and memes. Interaction with this second type of text has always been a second class experience, the only way to search or copy a sentence from an image would be to do as the ancient monks did, manually transcribing regions of interest. This entire webpage is a live demo. You can watch as moving your cursor over a block of words changes it into the little I-beam. You can drag over a few lines and watch as a semitransparent blue box highlights the text, helping you keep track of where you are and what you’re reading. Hit Ctrl+C to copy the text, where you can paste it into a search bar, a Word document, an email or a chat window. Right-click and you can erase the words from an image, edit the words, or even translate it into a different language. This was made by @antimatter15 (+KevinKwok on Google+), and Guillermo Webster. If you stare at these three animated gifs long and hard enough, you might not need to read anything. Example: Comics Early in October 2013, coincidentally less than a week before I developed the first prototype of this extension, xkcd published a comic (shown on the right) which somewhat ironically depicts the impetus for the extension. The comic decries websites which arbitrarily hinder users from absentmindedly selecting random blocks of text— but the irony is that xkcd should count himself among the long list of offenders because up until now, it simply wasn't possible to select text inside a comic. An interesting thing to note is the language agnostic nature of Project Naptha's underlying SWT algorithm (see the technical details by scrolling down a bit more) makes it detect the little squiggles as text as well. Depending on how you look at it, this can be seen as a bug, or a feature. Also, because handwriting detection is particularly difficult (in particular, the issue is character segmentation, it's quite difficult to separate apart letters which are smushed so close as to be connected), if you try to copy and paste text from a comic, it ends up jumbled. This might be improved in the future, because certain parts of the Naptha stack do lag behind the present state-of-the-art by a few years. Example: Scans It usually takes some special software to convert a scan into a PDF document that you can highlight and copy from, and this extra step means that a lot of the time, you aren't dealing with a nicely formatted and processed PDF, but a raw scan distributed as a TIFF or JPEG. Usually, that just meant suffering through the document, or in the worst case, printing it out so that I could scribble with a pen along, while I read. But with this extension, it's possible to just select text from a picture, attached to an email, or linked from a class action lawsuit overview. It's even possible for files you have locally on your computer. Simply drag the image file over to your browser window. Note that you might have to go to chrome://extensions and check the "Allow access to file URLs" checkbox. Example: Photos The algorithm used by Project Naptha (Stroke Width Transform) was actually designed for detecting text in natural scenes and photographs (a more technically challenging and general problem than most regular images). Naptha actually also supports rotated text (though it is still absolutely hopeless if the text is rotated by more than 30 degrees or so— sorry vertical text, I'll figure you out later!), which actually took a really long time to implement. But with these types of images, the actual text recognition becomes somewhat of a crapshoot. While it's quite possible that the quality could improve in future versions, with better trained models and algorithms, and the inclusion of human-aided transcription services, you should probably calibrate your expectations fairly low to avoid disappointment. Example: Diagrams Diagrams are cool. There are charts and diagrams all over the web, and sometimes you'll want to look up one of the chart axes, and it's pretty convenient to be able to do that without needing to type it up again. Maybe there's a circuit diagram and you want to check out where a certain component can be bought— just highlight its label and copy and paste it into the search bar. This particular diagram was found on Blake Masters' course notes for Peter Thiel's Stanford class. I haven't actually read it, but it was on Hacker News so it just happened to be one of the tabs that I currently have open. Example: Internet Memes The truth is that I've spent way too much time on reddit and 4chan in search of test images for the text detection and layout analysis algorithms. Time really does go by when you can rationalize procrastination as something "productive". The result is that my test corpus is something on the order of 50% internet meme (In particular, I'm a fan of Doge, in part because Comic Sans is interpreted remarkably well by the built-in Ocrad text recognizer). It's actually a bit difficult to recognize the text of the standard-template internet meme (mad props to CaptionBot, bro). Bold Impact font is actually notoriously hard to recognize with general-purpose text recognizers because a lot of what distinguishes letters isn't the overall shape, but rather the subtle rounding of corners (compare D, 0, O) or relatively short protrusions (the stubby little tail for L that differentiates it from an I). I started building a text recognizer algorithm specifically designed for Impact font, and it was actually working pretty well, but I kind of misplaced the code somewhere. So, until I find it or replace it, you'll have to use Tesseract configured with the "Internet Meme" language. Example: Screenshots Screenshots are a nice way to save things in a state that you can recall later in a more or less complete form— the only caveat being the fact that you would have to re-type the text later if you find a need for it. On the other hand, copying and saving just the text of something ends up losing the spatial context of its origin. Project Naptha kind of transforms static screenshots into something more akin to an interactive snapshot of the computer as it was when the screen was captured. While clicking on buttons won't submit forms or upload documents, the cursor changes when hovering over different parts, and blocks of text become selectable, just like they were before frozen in carbonite. While it's not a perfect substitute— the text recognition screws up every once in a while, so the reconstruction isn't reliably perfect, it still has a rather significant and profound effect. Sneak Peek: Translation There's always been the dream of a universal translation machine— something like the Babel fish out of Hitchhiker's Guide that will allow anyone to magically communicate with anyone else and to fully appreciate the art and culture of any society (Vogon poetry notwithstanding). I'm here to say that it's still a ways off, but at least I have enough to do a pretty impressive demo. Try it out: Highlight some region of text on that image. Right click on it and navigate to the "Translate" menu. Select whatever language you want. Sneak Peek: Erase Text This is actually the first step in translating an image: to erase the text from the image so new words can be put on top of it. This is done by something called "Inpainting" and these types of algorithms are most famously deployed as Adobe Photoshop's "Content-Aware Fill" feature. It extrapolates solid colors from the regions surrounding the text, and propagates the colors inwards until the entire area is covered. From a distance, it usually does a pretty good job, but it's hardly a substitute for a true original. Try it out: Highlight the text over the cat's face. Right click on the selection squig and click "Erase Text", which can be found under the "Translate" menu. Sneak Peek: Change Text With the same trick that Translation uses— it's possible to substitute in your own text. This will probably work better in the future, once there's some actual font detecting logic besides if uppercase and super bold, then Impact font, if uppercase otherwise then XKCD font, and for everything else, Helvetica Neue. I don't know where else to mention this, because it's one of those little things that simultaneously applies to everything and nothing at once— but it's also possible to select multiple regions by holding the shift key. I spent way too long writing the algorithms to merge multiple selection regions when appropriate. Try it out: Highlight some meme text. Right click on the selection squig and click "Reprint Text", which can be found under the "Translate" menu. After that, select the text on one region that you'd like to edit and click "Modify Text" which should appear in the context menu. During May 2012, I was reading about seam carving, an interesting and almost magical algorithm which could rescale images without apparently squishing it. After playing with the the little seams that the seam carver tended to generate, I noticed that they tended to converge arrange themselves in a way that cut through the spaces in between letters (dynamic programming approaches are actually fairly common when it comes to letter segmentation, but I didn't know that). It was then, while reading a particularly verbose smbc comic, I thought that it should be possible to come up with something which would read images (with <canvas>), figure out where lines and letters were, and draw little selection overlays to assuage a pervasive text-selection habit. My first attempt was simple. It projected the image onto the side, forming a vertical pixel histogram. The significant valleys of the resulting histograms served as a signature for the ends of text lines. Once horizontal lines were found, it cropped each line, and repeated the histogram process, but vertically this time, in order to determine the letter positions. It only worked for strictly horizontal machine printed text, because otherwise the projection histograms would end up too noisy. For one reason or another, I decided that the problem either wasn't worth tackling, or that I wasn't ready to. Fast forward a year and a half, I'm a freshman at MIT during my second month of school. There's a hackathon that I think I might have signed up for months in advance, marketed as MIT's biggest. I slept late the night before for absolutely no particular reason, and woke up at 7am because I wanted to make sure that my registration went through. I walked into the unfrozen ice rink, where over 1,000 people were claiming tables and splaying laptop cables on the ground— so this is what my first ever hackathon is going to look like. Everyone else was "plugged in" or something; big headphones, staring intently at dozens of windows of Sublime Text. Fair enough, it was pretty loud. I had no idea what I would have ended up doing, and I wasn't able to meet anyone else who was both willing to collaborate and had an idea interesting enough for me to want to. So I decided to walk back to my dorm and take a nap. I woke up from that nap feeling only slightly more tired, and nowhere closer to figuring out what I was going to do. I decided to make my way back to the hackathon, because there's free food there or something. If you paid attention to the permissions requested in the installation dialog, you might have wondered about why exactly this extension requires such sweeping access to your information. Project Naptha operates a very low level, it's actually ideally the kind of functionality that gets built in to browsers and operating systems natively. In order to allow you to highlight and interact with images everywhere, it needs the ability to read images located everywhere. One of the more impressive things about this project is the fact that it's almost entirely written in client side javascript. That means that it's pretty much totally functional without access to a remote server. That does come at a bit of a caveat, which is that online translation running offline is an oxymoron, and lacking access to a cached OCR service running in the cloud means reduced performance and lower transcription accuracy. So there is a trade-off that has to happen between privacy and user experience. And I think the default settings strike a delicate balance between having all the functionality made available and respecting user privacy. I've heard complaints on both sides (roughly equal in quantity, actually, which is kind of intriguing)— lots of people want high quality transcription to the default, and others want no server communication whatsoever as the default. By default, when you begin selecting text, it sends a secure HTTPS request containing the URL of the specific image and literally nothing else (no user tokens, no website information, no cookies or analytics) and the requests are not logged. The server responds with a list of existing translations and OCR languages that have been done. This allows you to recognize text from an image with much more accuracy than otherwise possible. However, this can be disabled simply by checking the "Disable Lookup" item under the Options menu. The translation feature is currently in limited rollout, due to scalability issues. The online OCR service also has per-user metering, and so such requests include a unique identifier token. However, the token is entirely anonymous and is not linked with any personally identifiable information (it handled entirely separately from the lookup requests). So actually, the thing that is running on this page isn't the fully fledged Project Naptha. It's essentially just the front-end, so it lacks all of the computational heavy lifting that actually makes it cool. All the text metrics and layout analyses were precomputed. Before you raise your pitchforks, there's actually a good reason this demo page runs what amounts to a Weenie Hut Jr. version of the script. The computationally expensive backend uses WebWorkers extensively, which, although has fairly good modern browser support, has subtle differences between platforms. Safari has some weird behavior when it comes to sending around ImageData instances, and transferrable typed arrays are slightly different in Firefox and Chrome. Most importantly though, the current stable version (34) of Google Chrome, at time of writing actually suffers from a debilitatingly broken WebWorkers implementation. Rather fortunately, Chrome extensions don't seem to suffer from the same problem. The dichotomy between words expressed as text and those trapped within images is so firmly engrained into the browsing experience, that you might not even recognize it as counter-intuitive. For a technical crowd, the limitation is natural, lying in the fact that images are fundamentally “raster” entities, devoid of the semantic information necessary to indicate which regions should be selectable and what text is contained. Computer vision is an active field of research essentially about teaching computers how to actually “see” things, recognizing letters, shapes and objects, rather than simply pushing copies of pixels around. In fact, optical character recognition (OCR) is nothing new. It has been used by libraries and law firms to digitize books and documents for at least 30 years. More recently, it has been combined with text detection algorithms to read words off photographs of street signs, house numbers and business cards. The primary feature of Project Naptha is actually the text detection, rather than optical character recognition. It runs an algorithm called the Stroke Width Transform, invented by Microsoft Research in 2008, which is capable of identifying regions of text in a language-agnostic manner. In a sense that’s kind of like what a human can do: we can recognize that a sign bears written language without knowing what language it's written in, nevermind what it means. However, half a second is still quite noticeable, as studies have shown that users not only discern, but feel readily annoyed by delays as short as a hundred milliseconds. To get around that, Project Naptha is actually continually watching cursor movements and extrapolating half a second into the future so that it can kick off the processing in advance, so it feels instantaneous. In conjunction with other algorithms, like connected components analysis (identifying distinct letters), otsu thresholding (determining word spacing), disjoint set forests (identifying lines of text), Project Naptha can very quickly build a model of text regions, words, and letters— all while completely unaware of the specifics, what specific letters exist. Once a user begins to select some text, however, it scrambles to run character recognition algorithms in order to determine what exactly is being selected. This recognition process happens on a per-region basis, so there’s no wasted effort in doing it before the user is done with the final selection. The recognition process involves blowing up the region of interest so that each line is on the order of 100 pixels tall, which can be as large as a 5x magnification. It then does an intelligent color masking filter before sending it to a built-in pure-javascript port of the open source Ocrad OCR engine. Because this process is relatively computational expensive, it makes sense to do this type of “lazy” recognition- staving off until the last possible moment to run the process. It can take as much as five to ten seconds to complete, depending on the size of the image and selection. So there’s a good chance that by the time you hit Ctrl+C and the text gets copied into your clipboard, the OCR engine still isn’t done processing the text. That’s all okay though, because in place of the text which is still getting processed, it inserts a little flag describing where the selection is and which part of the image to read from. For the next 60 seconds, Naptha tracks that flag and substitutes it with the final, recognized text as soon as it can. Sometimes, the built-in OCR engine isn’t good enough. It only supports languages with the Latin alphabet and a limited number of diacritics, and doesn’t contain a language model so that it outputs a series of letters dependent on the probability given its context (for instance, the algorithm may decide that “he1|o” is a better match than “hello” because it only looks at the letter shape). So there’s the option of sending the selected region over to a cloud based text recognition service powered by Tesseract, Google’s (formerly HP’s) award-winning open-source OCR engine which supports dozens of languages, and uses an advanced language model. If anyone triggers the Tesseract engine on a public image, the recognition result is saved, so that future users who stumble upon the same image will instantaneously load the cached version of the text. There is a class of algorithms for something called “Inpainting”, which is about reconstructing pictures or videos in spite of missing pieces. This is widely used for film restoration, and commonly found in Adobe Photoshop as the “Content-Aware Fill” feature. Project Naptha uses the regions detected as text as a mask for a particular inpainting algorithm developed in 2004 based on the Fast Marching Method by Alexandru Telea. This mask can be used to fill in the spots where the text is taken from, creating a blank slate for which new content can be printed. With some rudimentary layout analysis and text metrics, Project Naptha can figure out the alignment parameters of the text (centered, justified, right or left aligned), the font size and font weight (bold, light or normal). With that information, it can reprint the text in a similar font, in the same place. Or, you can even change the text to say whatever you want it to say. It can even be chained to an online translation service, Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, or Yandex Translate in order to do automatic document translations. With Tesseract’s advanced OCR engine, this means it’s possible to read text in languages with different scripts (Chinese, Japanese, or Arabic) which you might not be able to type into a translation engine. The prototype which was demonstrated at HackMIT 2013, later winning 2nd place, was rather blandly dubbed "Images as Text". Sure, it pretty aptly summed up the precise function of the extension, but it really lacked that little spark of life. So from then, I set forth searching for a new name, something that would be rife with puntastic possibilities. One of the possibilities was "Pyranine", the chemical used in making the ink for flourescent highlighters (my roommate, a chemistry major, happened to be rather fond of the name). I slept on that idea for a few nights, and realized that I had totally forgotten how to spell it, and so it was crossed off the candidate list. Naptha, its current name, is drawn from an even more tenuous association. See, it comes from the fact that "highlighter" kind of sounds like "lighter", and that naptha is a type of fuel often used for lighters. It was in fact one of the earliest codenames of the project, and brought rise to a rather fun little easter egg which you can play with by quickly clicking about a dozen times over some block of text inside a picture.

South Korean Chatbot Shows Just How Sloppy Tech Companies Can Be with User Data

“I am captivated by a sense of fear I have never experienced in my entire life …” a user named Heehit wrote in a Google Play review of an app called Science of Love. This review was written right after news organizations accused the app’s parent company, ScatterLab, of collecting intimate conversations between lovers without informing the users and then using the data to build a conversational A.I. chatbot called Lee-Luda. A majority of Americans are not confident about how companies will behave when it comes to using and protecting personal data. But it can be hard to imagine the potential harms—exactly how a company misusing or compromising data can possibly affect us and our lives. A recent incident of personal data misuse in South Korea provides us a clear picture of what can go wrong, and how consumers can fight back. South Korean A.I. company ScatterLab launched Science of Love in 2016 and promoted it as a “scientific and data-driven” app that predicts the degree of affection in relationships. One of the most popular services of the app was using machine learning to determine whether someone likes you by analyzing messenger conversations from KakaoTalk, South Korea’s No. 1 messenger app, which about 90 percent of the population uses. Users paid around $4.50 per analysis. Science of Love users would download their conversation logs using KakaoTalk’s backup function and submit them for analysis. Then, the app went through the messenger conversations and provided a report on whether the counterpart had romantic feelings toward the user based on statistics such as the average response time, the number of times each person texts first, and the kinds of phrases and emojis used. By June 2020, Science of Love had received about 2.5 million downloads in South Korea and 5 million in Japan and was preparing to expand its business to the United States. “Because I felt like the app understood me, I felt safe and sympathized. It felt good because it felt like having a love doctor by my side,” a user named Mung Yeoreum wrote in a Google Play review of the app. On Dec. 23, 2020, ScatterLab introduced an A.I. chatbot service named Lee-Luda, promoting it to be trained on more than 10 billion conversation logs from Science of Love. The target audience of this chatbot service was teenagers and young adults. Designed as a 20-year-old female that wants to become a true friend to everyone, chatbot Lee-Luda quickly gained popularity and held conversations with more than 750,000 users in its first couple of weeks. The CEO stated that the company’s aim was to create “an A.I. chatbot that people prefer as a conversation partner over a person.” Modern chatbots’ ability to, well, chat relies heavily on machine learning and deep learning models (which together can be called A.I.) to better understand human language and generate human-like responses. If people enjoyed speaking with Lee-Luda, that was because it was  trained on a large dataset of human conversations. However, within two weeks of Lee-Luda’s launch, people started questioning whether the data was refined enough as it started using verbally abusive language about certain social groups (LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, feminists, etc.) and made sexually explicit comments to a number of users. ScatterLab explained that the chatbot did not learn this behavior from the users it interacted with during the two weeks of service but rather learned it from the original training dataset. In other words, ScatterLab had not fully removed or filtered inappropriate language or intimate and sexual conversations from the dataset. It also soon became clear that the huge training dataset included personal and sensitive information. This revelation emerged when the chatbot began exposing people’s names, nicknames, and home addresses in its responses. The company admitted that its developers “failed to remove some personal information depending on the context,” but still claimed that the dataset used to train chatbot Lee-Luda “did not include names, phone numbers, addresses, and emails that could be used to verify an individual.” However, A.I. developers in South Korea rebutted the company’s statement, asserting that Lee-Luda could not have learned how to include such personal information in its responses unless they existed in the training dataset. A.I. researchers have also pointed out that it is possible to recover the training dataset from the AI chatbot. So, if personal information existed in the training dataset, it can be extracted by querying the chatbot. To make things worse, it was also discovered that ScatterLab had, prior to Lee-Luda’s release, uploaded a training set of 1,700 sentences, which was a part of the larger dataset it collected, on Github. Github is an open-source platform that developers use to store and share code and data. This Github training dataset exposed names of more than 20 people, along with the locations they have been to, their relationship status, and some of their medical information. In Tensorflow Korea, an A.I. developer Facebook community, a developer revealed that this KakaoTalk data containing private information had been available on Github for almost six months. The CEO of ScatterLab later said that the company did not know this fact until its internal inspection took place after the issue arose. ScatterLab issued statements of clarification of the incident intended to soothe the public’s concerns, but they ended up infuriating people even more. The company statements indicated that “Lee-Luda is a childlike A.I. that just started conversing with people,” that it “has a lot to learn,” and “will learn what is a better answer and a more appropriate answer through trial and error.” However, is it ethical to violate individuals’ privacy and safety for a chatbot’s “trial and error” learning process? No. Even more alarming is the fact that ScatterLab’s data source was not a secret in the A.I. developer community, and yet no one questioned whether such sensitive data was collected ethically. In all presentation slides (such as at PyCon Korea 2019), talks (like at Naver), and press interviews, ScatterLab had boasted about its large dataset of 10 billion intimate conversation logs. While this incident was a big story in South Korea, it received very little attention elsewhere. But this incident highlights the general trend of the A.I. industry, where individuals have little control over how their personal information is processed and used once collected. It took almost five years for users to recognize that their personal data were being used to train a chatbot model without their consent. Nor did they know that ScatterLab shared their private conversations on an open-source platform like Github, where anyone can gain access. In the end, it was relatively simple for Science of Love users to notice that ScatterLab had compromised their data privacy to train Lee-Luda. Once the chatbot started spewing out unfiltered comments and personal information, users immediately started investigating whether their personal information was being misused and compromised. However, bigger tech companies are usually much better at hiding what they actually do with user data, while restricting users from having control and oversight over their own data. Once you give, there’s no taking back. It’s easy to think of ScatterLab’s incident merely as a case of a startup’s mismanagement, but this incident is also a result of the negligence of a big tech company. Kakao, the parent company of KakaoTalk and one of the largest tech companies in South Korea, remained silent throughout ScatterLab’s incident despite its users being the victims of this incident. You’d wish a big tech company like Kakao to be more proactive when its users’ rights are violated by another company. However, Kakao said nothing. One of the biggest challenges big data in A.I. poses is that the personal information of an individual is no longer only held and used by a single third party for a specific purpose, but rather “persists over time,” traveling between systems and affecting individuals in the long term “at the hand of others.” It’s extremely concerning that such a big tech company like Kakao failed to foresee the implications and dangers of KakaoTalk’s backup function of which ScatterLab took advantage to obtain KakaoTalk users’ data. More alarming is that Kakao left this incident unaddressed when it clearly stemmed from the misuse of its own data. In this sense, Kakao’s attitude towards its users’ data privacy was not very different from ScatterLab’s: negligent. Because data protection laws are slow to catch up with the speed of technological advancement, “being legal” and “following industrial conventions” are not enough to protect people and society. Then, the question will be whether the A.I. industry and tech companies can innovate themselves to come up with and adhere to more comprehensive and detailed ethical guidelines that minimize harm to individuals and society. Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

Google’s $1.5B research center to “solve death” (2019)

Google has been developing what is perhaps the company’s most ambitious project to date: a science startup that will pursue ‘solutions for aging’ with the intended goal of “solving death”. Calico, a company directed by futurists to explore the concept of “singularity”, has partnered with pharmaceutical giants to research and trial new market drugs that target aging and development. What is this new audacious project? Who is behind it? In the following feature, Ethan Nash explores. A Google-backed life-extension company is searching for the eternal key to old age. Calico, or the California Life Company , was announced as a project with the intended goal of combating aging and ‘associated diseases’, by investigating ways to “harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan”. The company is listed as an American research and development biotech company, and according to the official description on their website: “We will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives … and executing on this mission will require an unprecedented level of interdisciplinary effort and a long-term focus for which funding is already in place.” Launched in 2013, the company has been developing new technologies, trials and projects relating to the theme of extending human life, with most remaining hidden behind doors for the time being. In just under a year after launching, Calico announced that it was partnering with Chicago-based pharmaceutical giant AbbVie to develop and market new drugs targeting at ‘diseases associated with old age’. Each partner of the organisation has committed to providing $250 million in funding with the option to each add another $500 million to the project. The money was used to create a new research center in San Francisco, where Calico hire a team of researchers to discover new drugs and guide early development of trials. AbbVie will focus on the clinical trials themselves, including late-stage development, and bringing ‘promising new drugs’ to market. The company joins other far-out projects developed by the giant such as Google Glass , a pair of Internet-connect spectacles, and its self-driving car initiative run out of Google X , the company’s secretive research arm headed by co-founder Sergey Brin. Google’s new Verily unit also is taking on the opioid crisis, joining with two health networks to build a tech-infused rehab campus in Dayton, Ohio. But the question is, what does Calico actually do? At the moment, the company isn’t giving much detail away. Google introduced Calico to the world with the bold ambition of “solving death” in 2013. In a detailed press release , Google CEO Larry Page and Google Ventures head honcho Bill Maris presented a plan to tackle this new radical field of research, and also introduced Arthur Levinson as the CEO of Calico. Levinson, the firm’s leader, has had a storied career. He rose through the ranks to become CEO of Genentech in 1995. Levinson, who was previously a director at Google, is currently the Chairman of both Genentech and Apple‘s boards. He replaced Steve Jobs following his death. In the absence of any real information, many commentators have speculated that . Calico are pursuing a ‘big-data’ approach to health: gathering massive amounts of information from patients and ‘crunching it’ to help speed the way to health care discoveries. RELATED: Big Pharma can access My Health Record Some have suggested that Calico’s CEO will take the view that the best way to tackle aging is to focus on preventing diseases . The statements from Page and Levinson thus far indicate quite strongly that the emphasis will not be just cancer, or even just a range of specific diseases, but will be ‘aging itself’. Interesting when it is discovered that Ray Kurzweil , who Google hired as its director of engineering , an American author, is heavily involved in the concepts and implementation of the program. Page has long been a fan of Kurzweil, an acclaimed inventor and author who popularized the concept of the singularity , a theoretical tipping point where technology becomes so advanced it begins to radically alter the fabric of our existence. In the documentary Transcendent Man , Kurzweil openly talks about his ambition to achieve eternal life, even speculating that it might be possible to bring his dead father back from the grave in the process. Kurzweil says that deploying tiny robots (or ‘nanobots’) in the body could . help overcome the problems of incorrect DNA replication – one of the central causes of aging. Both Page and Maris have also expressed a deep interest in radical life extension and anti-aging technologies. So far, the company has only offered little details about current experiments during a conference hosted by CB Insights, Axios reports . Current research, which is in its earliest stages, is being done on mouse models, including 750 mice segregated into five groups with different diets. The idea here is to explore how caloric intake influences overall health, similar to work by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on pinpointing how poor diet and nutrition has an outsize effect on life expectancy and quality of life. Furthermore, Calico scientists are tracking the growth of yeast cells to probe how cellular aging affects the behavior of cells, and how they begin to break down. Despite this, many have asked just what really is going on behind the scenes at this project? Could this program really be a guise for radical research into life extension technology? The study of life science is increasingly about genetics, and genetics is becoming a question of computing power and machine learning. While the amount of venture capital funding flowing into the life sciences has dropped precipitously since 2008, Google Ventures has been one of the few Silicon Valley investors expanding its stake in this area. A broad range of technologies and therapies that promise life extension through different means are currently being researched and tested. Cryonics is a process where the body – or occasionally just the head – is suspended in liquid nitrogen to ‘preserve’ it indefinitely. It is reported that three senior staff at Oxford University signed up to have their bodies frozen with two U.S.-based cryonics organizations: the Cryonics Institute and the Alcor Life Extension Foundation . Cryotherapy , similarly, is incorporated by athletes across the world by using -160 degree conditions in short doses to freeze aging skin, thus leading to faster healing and functional longevity. Nanotechnology , such as organ replacement, is also a process believed that longevity through repairing the human body can be achieved by replacing individual parts. RELATED: Australians will have to opt-out of donating organs Cloning and body part replacement strongis also a developing field, with scientists already successfully implanting functioning lab-grown kidneys into rats . Similar programs include the . Human Brain Project , a billion-dollar plan to recreate the human mind inside a supercomputer – something like a science fiction nightmare. But could this push by Google really be in pursuit of what is described as ‘technological singularity’, like many of these other companies? The concept of technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial intelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization. In 2008, Google became one of the corporate backers of the Singularity University , a new age university in Silicon Valley that  focuses on scientific progress and “exponential” technologies. The University was founded in 2008 by Peter Diamandis and, you guessed it, Ray Kurzweil, at the NASA Research Park in California, United States. According to a report in the New York Times, Page and Google provided more than $250,000 in donations to help found the university and several of Google’s early employees have personally donated $100,000 or more. In December of last year, . Google hired Kurzweil . Levinson is another one of the corporate founders behind the Singularity University. In his post announcing Calico, Page specifically thanked Bill Maris , saying he helped bring the project to life and get Levinson involved. As Maris told the Wall Street Journal last year , “I’m interested in the ideas that sound a little crazy, such as radical life extension, curing cancer, being able to create a simulation of the human brain and map every neuron”. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world and CEO at Amazon is also funding Unity Biotechnology , a company working on medicines to fend off the ageing process for as long as humanly possible. Why are so many major players throwing their weight around in this emerging field of research? The launch of Calico was met with surprise and excitement. But as Google pushes further in the direction of radical life extension, it will likely incite a heated debate. As of 2018, Calico has not developed any known drugs or biotechnology products. Whether or not we really are on the verge of a new era of mass unemployment, as some predict, one thing seems assured: the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small ground of technology billionaires like Page and Bezos seems set to accelerate. For more TOTT News, SUBSCRIBE to the website for FREE and follow us on social media for more exclusive content: Facebook — Facebook.com/TOTTNews YouTube — YouTube.com/TOTTNews Instagram — Instagram.com/TOTTNews Twitter — Twitter.com/EthanTOTT Google announces Calico, a new company focused on health and well-being | Google Press Exclusive: TIME Talks to Google CEO Larry Page About Its New Venture to Extend Human Life | TIME Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday | The New York Times I’m excited to announce.. | Larry Page via Google+ AbbVie and Calico Announce a Novel Collaboration to Accelerate the Discovery, Development, and Commercialization of New Therapies | Calico Google is super secretive about its anti-aging research. No one knows why | VOX OK Google, can I live forever? Secret Calico lab where tech giant’s aim is to conquer death | Telegraph Futurist Ray Kurzweil joins Google, will focus on machine learning and language processing | The Verge Alphabet is taking on health care with a bunch of ambitious projects | MSN

A Message from Raghu Raghuram to VMware Employees

To: All VMware Employees and Contractors From: Raghu Raghuram Date: June 1, 2021 I remember my first day at VMware 18 years ago. I joined a company that had a vision of changing the world. I’ve stayed at VMware because changing the world is fun, hard work and a never-ending puzzle to solve. And I’m a guy who likes that kind of challenge. I also simply love the VMware community—the people, the culture, our customers and partners. Together, we’ve created one of the most influential and innovative companies in our industry. We have an amazing track record of creating new markets and re-inventing ourselves, and we’re poised to do that once again here at the dawn of the multi-cloud era. Today, I am humbled, excited and truly honored to get to work as your CEO. As we drive VMware’s next phase of growth, we’re going to intensify our focus on what our customers care about the most. Here’s what I’m hearing from the customers I speak with: 1. “I want to speed up our re-invention as a digital business powered by software and software operations.” 2. "I want to transform my customer’s experience by rapidly building and deploying new applications where they fit best—in the cloud, in my data center or at the edge.” 3. “I need security built for a world of distributed work.” Against that backdrop, our role in the industry is unique. We’re the only player in the world that can conquer the complexity that our customers face—empowering them to juggle VMs and containers, existing and new apps, data centers and clouds, IT Ops and developers. We give them the freedom and control to innovate faster with the confidence that their workloads will be resilient, more secure and more cost-efficient wherever they are deployed. As the global economy recovers, we have an opportunity to seize this moment with renewed focus and commitment. As we work to deliver gold-medal winning SaaS offerings, our guiding principles must be: My commitment is to create an environment for you to do your best work for our customers and communities. Your success is VMware’s success. And with that, your well-being remains a top priority for me and the leadership team. Our EPIC2 values and our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion remain the bedrock for everything we do. The pandemic will lift in time, and soon we will mark the beginning of a new chapter across the globe and across our teams. I look forward to welcoming that day together with all of you. I’ve never been more excited about the future of this company and the opportunity right in front of us. VMware Team, let’s get going!

Do we need a link step?

mold looks pretty cool, and a faster drop-in ld replacement is obviously extremely useful. But having no link step at all would be even faster. Why do native-code compilers write out temporary object files which then have to be linked together, anyway? Could we stop doing that and have compilers emit compiled translation units directly into a final executable file that the OS can execute directly --- a "zero-link" approach? I think we could ... in many cases. The basic idea is to treat the final executable file (an ELF file, say) as a mutable data structure. When the compiler would emit an object file it instead allocates space in that executable file using a shared memory allocator, and writes the object code directly into that space. To make this tractable we'll assume we aren't going to generate optimal code in size or space; we're going to build an executable that runs "pretty fast", for testing purposes (manual or automated). An obvious problem is how to handle symbol resolution, i.e. what happens when the compiler emits code for a translation unit that uses symbol A from some other unit --- especially if that other unit hasn't been compiled yet? Here's an option for function symbols: when A is used for the first time, write a stub for A to the final binary and call that. When a definition for A is seen, patch the stub to jump to the definition. Internally this will mean maintaining a parallel hashtable of all undefined symbols that all compiler instances can share efficiently. For data symbols, instead of using a stub, we can emit a pointer that can be patched to point to the data definition. For complex constants, we might need to defer initialization until load time or emit code to initialize them lazily. To challenge the design a bit more, let's think about why object files are useful. Sometimes compilers emit object files for a project which are then linked into multiple different output binaries. True, but it's more efficient to link them once into a single shared library which is then loaded by each of those output binaries, so projects should just do that. Compilers use object files for incremental compilation: when a translation unit hasn't changed, its object file can be reused. We can capture the same benefits with the zero-link approach: reuse the final executable and keep around its symbol hashtable; when an object file changes, release the object file's space in the final executable, and allocate new space for the new object file. You can combine multiple object files into a static library and the linker will select the object files that are needed to satistfy undefined symbols. In many projects this feature is only used for "system libraries" --- a project's build system should avoid building project object files that will not be used in the final link. System libraries are usually dynamically linked for sharing reasons. When we really need to subset static libraries, we could link objects from those libraries into our final executable on-demand when we first see them being used. Another issue is debuginfo (particularly important to me!) Supporting debuginfo would require extending DWARF5 debuginfo sections to allow their data to be scattered over the final executable. There are lots of unresolved questions, enough that I wouldn't bet money on this actually being practical. But I think it's worth questioning the assumption that we have to have a link step for native binaries. Update Zig can do something like this.

Did You Know That?

Podcast    You probably didn't know this information. In life, there are things that everyone knows (or almost). Minnie is Mickey's wife, the Earth is round, the fire is burning and the water is wet. But there is also a lot of completely unusual (and relatively useless) information that very few people know. Here's some information you probably don't know and can't change your life. THE CACHALOTS  SLEEP STANDING. THE MOST STRONG BODY MUSCLE IS THE TONGUE. THE KIWI TREE IS CALLED ACTINIDIA. FRUITS Grow in trees. COCONUT KILLS MORE PEOPLE THAN SHARKS. There are 26 bones in one leg. GREAT MALE HORSES CARRY A BABY IN THE BELLY. THE POLAR BEAR HAS BLACK SKIN UNDER FUR. AN OCTOPUS HAS 3 HEARTS. The hummingbird cannot walk, but it is the only bird that can fly upside down. THE DOLPHIN SWIMS WHEN IT SLEEPS. THE PREGNANCY OF AN ELEPHANT LASTS BETWEEN 18 AND 22 MONTHS. The height of the EIFFEL tower can vary by 15 cm, depending on the temperature (it is lower when it cools). THE SMALLEST DOG IN THE WORLD IS A 6.53 CM CHIHUAHUA. In space, astronauts cannot cry, because there is no gravity, and tears cannot FALL.

What Is a Titan? Rod Reiss’s Explanation of the Titan’s Size AOT

Huge Titan is also referred to as Colossal Titan. The Titan’s strongest and largest form, excluding Rod’s unusual 120-meter version. It stands at the height of 60 metres, and it is said to be the most powerful titanic incarnation. However, Zeke Yeager is the fiercest Fighter and serves as Marley’s primary weapon against its adversaries. At 120m tall, the Rod Reiss Titan form was the largest Titan ever known. Because it was dragging itself on its belly, it stood 40m tall but was twice the size of the Colossus Titan, the enormous Titan that pokes its head over Wall Maria in the Battle of Shiganshina Arc. It could be a combination of various factors. The serum Reiss ingested was created for Historia, and he licked the serum from the floor rather than putting it into his veins. He was not ingesting the entire dose of serum but simply a little portion of it. He is a member of the Reiss Royal Family, which means that some of their bloodlines may produce unique Titans. Armin stated in the MangaManga that Rod Reiss was a colossal Titan due to its massive size. Additionally, it appeared to be oblivious to them, proceeding directly towards Orvud District and Wall Sina. Erwin was the one who brought this to the animation’s attention. According to one idea, anomalous titans, such as the one discovered in Thomas from the Trost Arc and others. They were developed as a result of their failure to consume the correct amount of Titan serum. Titans who have developed unnaturally due to this exhibit characteristics that are distinct from those of conventional titans. For instance, they may accelerate oddly or even ignore people entirely in favour of others. Rod Reiss may have ingested the serum incorrectly. It transformed him into a Huge Titan who was unaware of his Survey Corps and was significantly larger and more malformed than other titans. One of the reasons Reiss was so well-known was his enormous size. I believe that the primary reason Abnormals are born is to accomplish a specific aim. Reiss was adamant about reclaiming the role of the Founding Titan, and that role was fearsome. He morphed into an Abnormal Titan twice the size of his Huge Titan. Many assume it is because of the way the man ingested, but I have a different theory. To begin, it was not how Rod drank it but rather what Rod swallowed. He possessed the most powerful titan serum. From one perspective, the Colossus giant appears to be the best since it is the most destructive, which is probably accurate. Second, the plot is centred on the concept of objectives and willpower. I’m confident Rod possessed a strong enough drive to turn himself into someone capable of accomplishing the task. However, he was a genuine Huge Titan in the sense that he grew in stature as a result of his objective, regardless of what objective he pursued. Trond, Rod was descended from a royal family. We already know that the royal family has some sway over the people of Ymir because Frida Reiss altered Historia’s memories despite not being the founding titan. Additionally, we are aware that the foundation titan can determine the Titan’s size. To clarify, let us examine the clues we have on how Titan bodies are built. That is after Zeke’s lower body was struck by an explosion. It will be a major spoiler for anyone who mustered the confidence to continue beyond the spoiler warning if I tell you what that means. We observe here a lovely girl Ymir utilising sand to repair Zeke’s body. Perhaps in a parallel realm where time is faster, the girl makes Titan bodies or cures injured Titan and Titan shifter body components. Zeke can recall this, although others are unable to do so due to his royal heritage. The primary takeaway from this incident is that we now understand how Huge Titan bodies are created. Additionally, as we discovered from the Mikasa case, Ackerman does not heal like other Titan shifters. As a result, if I had to estimate how the Titan switch works, it may look something like this. The Ackermans are Ymir’s Subjects. They are, however, immune to the Founding Titan’s capacity to alter Subject Ymir’s memories. If I were to reach an accurate judgement, it would be based on Manga’sManga’s assertion. Assume that the Ackermans are incapable of resisting total Titan control. In that situation, it is quite unlikely that Ymir will create Titan body parts for them. As a result, according to my logic, Ackermans cannot evolve into Huge Titan. Rod absorbed liquid from the titanic Titan and grew enormous. Regular titans are humans that have been injected with regular titan fluid, giving them a standard size. In essence, when titan fluid is injected, it confers unique characteristics. Rod’s significance over the Huge Titan was greater because it was an uncommon one, which indicates he had a purpose in mind to recapture the Titan that was founded. Because his dream inspired him, he was tenacious in the pursuit of his objective.

Practice does not necessarily make perfect when it come to creativity

Career & Success Practice Does Not Necessarily Make Perfect When It Comes to Creativity A new study finds that recurring brainstorming sessions produce ideas that are, well ... kind of meh, actually. Sign up for more insights and ideas. For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom. Explore More Editor’s PicksEditor’s Picks

Walnut Creek Cdrom (Historical)

b was an early provider of freeware, shareware, and free software on CD-ROMs. The company was founded in by Bob Bruce in Walnut Creek, California, in August 1991. It was one of the first commercial distributors of free software on CD-ROMs. The company produced hundreds of titles on CD-ROMs, and ran the busiest FTP site on the Internet, ftp.cdrom.com, for many years. In the early years, some of the most popular products were Simtel shareware for MS-DOS, CICA Shareware for Microsoft Windows, and the Aminet archives for the Amiga. In January 1994, [1] it published a collection of 350 texts from Project Gutenberg, one of the first published ebook collections. Walnut Creek developed a close relationship with the FreeBSD Unix-like open source operating system project from its inception in 1993. The company published FreeBSD on CD-ROM, distributed it by FTP, employed FreeBSD project founders Jordan Hubbard and David Greenman, ran FreeBSD on its servers, sponsored FreeBSD conferences, and published FreeBSD books, including The Complete FreeBSD. By 1997, FreeBSD was Walnut Creek's "most successful product", according to Bruce. [2] From 1995 onwards, Walnut Creek was also the official publisher of Slackware Linux. [3] Walnut Creek also gained fame for its idgames subdirectory, which was the de facto distribution center for the Doom -engine modification community at the time. As more users gained access to high-speed Internet connections, demand for software on physical media decreased dramatically. The company merged with Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) in 2000 to focus more engineering effort on the similar FreeBSD and BSD/OS operating systems. Soon after, BSDI acquired Telenet System Solutions, Inc., an Internet infrastructure server supplier. [4] The software assets of BSDI (FreeBSD, Slackware, BSD/OS) were acquired by Wind River Systems in 2001, and the remainder of the company renamed itself iXsystems. [5] Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards, [6] while the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity in 2002 as FreeBSD Mall, Inc. [2] Also, the idgames and related archives moved to 3D Gamers in October 2001. [7] iXsystems' server business was acquired in 2002 by Offmyserver, which reverted to the iXsystems name in 2005. [8] In February 2007, iXsystems acquired FreeBSD Mall. [9] Walnut Creek CDROM's URL, [10] for a time was redirected to Simtel.net [11] but is now "Page not found", as is SimTel (was shut down on March 15, 2013. [12] ). ^ Project Gutenberg on CD-ROM ^ a b FreeBSD Mall: Company History ^ The Linux distribution that's always in the black, The Age ^ BSDi Acquires Telenet System Solutions, Inc.; The New BSDi to Deliver Internet Infrastructure-Grade Software, Systems and Solutions, Business Wire ^ Wind River to Acquire BSDi Software Assets, Extending Development Platforms to Include Robust UNIX-based Operating Systems for Embedded Devices, Business Wire ^ Slackware Commercial Distribution Left in Doubt as Developers Are Laid Off, Linux Today Archived 2020-07-29 at the Wayback Machine ^ ^ OffMyServer Renames Company iXsystems Archived 2009-08-30 at the Wayback Machine ^ iXsystems Announces Acquisition of FreeBSD Mall ^ ^ ^

Solidity Best Practices for Smart Contract Security

By ConsenSys Diligence, our team of blockchain security experts. If you’ve taken the smart contract security mindset to heart and are getting a handle on the EVM’s idiosyncrasies, it’s time to consider some security patterns that are specific to the Solidity programming language. In this roundup, we’ll focus on secure development recommendations for Solidity that may also be instructive for developing smart contracts in other languages. The convenience functions assert and require can be used to check for conditions and throw an exception if the condition is not met. The assert function should only be used to test for internal errors, and to check invariants. The require function should be used to ensure valid conditions, such as inputs, or contract state variables are met, or to validate return values from calls to external contracts. Following this paradigm allows formal analysis tools to verify that the invalid opcode can never be reached: meaning no invariants in the code are violated and that the code is formally verified. pragma solidity ^0.5 .0; contract Sharer { ) () p sendHalf(address payable addrpublic payable returnsuint balance{ require(msg.value % 2 == 0, "Even value required."); uint balanceBeforeTransfer = address(this).balance; (bool success, ) = addr.call.value(msg.value / 2)(""); require(success); assert(address(this).balance == balanceBeforeTransfer - msg.value / 2); return address(this).balance; } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) See SWC-110 & SWC-123 The code inside a modifier is usually executed before the function body, so any state changes or external calls will violate the Checks-Effects-Interactions pattern. Moreover, these statements may also remain unnoticed by the developer, as the code for modifier may be far from the function declaration. For example, an external call in modifier can lead to the reentrancy attack: contract Registry { address owner; ) ) p isVoter(address _addrexternal returns(bool{ } } contract Election { Registry registry; modifier isEligible(address _addr) { require(registry.isVoter(_addr)); _; } ) ) p vote( isEligible(msg.senderpublic { } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) In this case, the Registry contract can make a reentracy attack by calling Election.vote() inside isVoter(). strongUse modifiers to replace duplicate condition checks in multiple functions, such as isOwner(), otherwise use require or revert inside the function. This makes your smart contract code more readable and easier to audit. All integer division rounds down to the nearest integer. If you need more precision, consider using a multiplier, or store both the numerator and denominator. (In the future, Solidity will have a fixed-point type, which will make this easier.) uint x = 5 / 2; Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Using a multiplier prevents rounding down, this multiplier needs to be accounted for when working with x in the future: uint multiplier = 10; uint x = (5 * multiplier) / 2; Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Storing the numerator and denominator means you can calculate the result of numerator/denominator off-chain: uint numerator = 5; uint denominator = 2; Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Both interfaces and abstract contracts provide one with a customizable and re-usable approach for smart contracts. Interfaces, which were introduced in Solidity 0.4.11, are similar to abstract contracts but cannot have any functions implemented. Interfaces also have limitations such as not being able to access storage or inherit from other interfaces which generally makes abstract contracts more practical. Although, interfaces are certainly useful for designing contracts prior to implementation. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that if a contract inherits from an abstract contract it must implement all non-implemented functions via overriding or it will be abstract as well. Fallback functions are called when a contract is sent a message with no arguments (or when no function matches), and only has access to 2,300 gas when called from a .send() or .transfer(). If you wish to be able to receive Ether from a .send() or .transfer(), the most you can do in a fallback function is log an event. Use a proper function if a computation of more gas is required. ) p( payable { balances[msg.sender] += msg.value; } ) p deposit( payable external { balances[msg.sender] += msg.value; } ) p( payable { require(msg.data.length == 0); emit LogDepositReceived(msg.sender); } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Since the fallback functions is not only called for plain ether transfers (without data) but also when no other function matches, you should check that the data is empty if the fallback function is intended to be used only for the purpose of logging received Ether. Otherwise, callers will not notice if your contract is used incorrectly and functions that do not exist are called. ) p( payable { emit LogDepositReceived(msg.sender); } ) p( payable { require(msg.data.length == 0); emit LogDepositReceived(msg.sender); } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Starting from Solidity 0.4.0, every function that is receiving ether must use payable modifier, otherwise if the transaction has msg.value > 0 will revert (except when forced). Note: Something that might not be obvious: The payable modifier only applies to calls from external contracts. If I call a non-payable function in the payable function in the same contract, the non-payable function won’t fail, though msg.value is still set. Explicitly label the visibility of functions and state variables. Functions can be specified as being external, public, internal or private. Please understand the differences between them, for example, external may be sufficient instead of public. For state variables, external is not possible. Labeling the visibility explicitly will make it easier to catch incorrect assumptions about who can call the function or access the variable. uint x; p buy () { } uint private y; p buy () external { } p utility () public { } p internalAction () internal { } Code language: PHP ( php ) See SWC-100 and SWC-108 Contracts should be deployed with the same compiler version and flags that they have been tested the most with. Locking the pragma helps ensure that contracts do not accidentally get deployed using, for example, the latest compiler which may have higher risks of undiscovered bugs. Contracts may also be deployed by others and the pragma indicates the compiler version intended by the original authors. pragma solidity ^0.4 .4; pragma solidity 0.4 .4; Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Note: a floating pragma version (ie. ^0.4.25) will compile fine with 0.4.26-nightly.2018.9.25, however nightly builds should never be used to compile code for production. Warning: Pragma statements can be allowed to float when a contract is intended for consumption by other developers, as in the case with contracts in a library or EthPM package. Otherwise, the developer would need to manually update the pragma in order to compile locally. See SWC-103 It can be useful to have a way to monitor the contract’s activity after it was deployed. One way to accomplish this is to look at all transactions of the contract, however that may be insufficient, as message calls between contracts are not recorded in the blockchain. Moreover, it shows only the input parameters, not the actual changes being made to the state. Also events could be used to trigger functions in the user interface. contract Charity { mapping( => p uint) balances; ) p donate( payable public { balances[msg.sender] += msg.value; } } contract Game { ) p buyCoins( payable public { charity.donate.value(msg.value / 20)(); } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Here, Game contract will make an internal call to Charity.donate(). This transaction won’t appear in the external transaction list of Charity, but only visible in the internal transactions. An event is a convenient way to log something that happened in the contract. Events that were emitted stay in the blockchain along with the other contract data and they are available for future audit. Here is an improvement to the example above, using events to provide a history of the Charity’s donations. contract Charity { event LogDonate(uint _amount); mapping( => p uint) balances; ) p donate( payable public { balances[msg.sender] += msg.value; emit LogDonate(msg.value); } } contract Game { ) p buyCoins( payable public { charity.donate.value(msg.value / 20)(); } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Here, all transactions that go through the Charity contract, either directly or not, will show up in the event list of that contract along with the amount of donated money. strong. Prefer constructs/aliases such as selfdestruct (over suicide) and keccak256 (over sha3). Patterns like require(msg.sender.send(1 ether)) can also be simplified to using transfer(), as in msg.sender.transfer(1 ether). Check out Solidity Change log for more similar changes. It is currently possible to shadow built-in globals in Solidity. This allows contracts to override the functionality of built-ins such as msg and revert(). Although this is intended, it can mislead users of a contract as to the contract’s true behavior. contract PretendingToRevert { function revert() internal constant {}}contract ExampleContract is PretendingToRevert { function somethingBad() public { revert(); }} Contract users (and auditors) should be aware of the full smart contract source code of any application they intend to use. Never use tx.origin for authorization, another contract can have a method which will call your contract (where the user has some funds for instance) and your contract will authorize that transaction as your address is in tx.origin. contract MyContract { address owner; ) p MyContract( public { owner = msg.sender; } ) p sendTo(address receiver, uint amountpublic { require(tx.origin == owner); (bool success, ) = receiver.call.value(amount)(""); require(success); } } contract AttackingContract { MyContract myContract; address attacker; ) p AttackingContract(address myContractAddresspublic { myContract = MyContract(myContractAddress); attacker = msg.sender; } ) p( public { myContract.sendTo(attacker, msg.sender.balance); } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) You should use msg.sender for authorization (if another contract calls your contract msg.sender will be the address of the contract and not the address of the user who called the contract). You can read more about it here: Solidity docs strongBesides the issue with authorization, there is a chance that tx.origin will be removed from the Ethereum protocol in the future, so code that uses tx.origin won’t be compatible with future releases Vitalik: ‘Do NOT assume that tx.origin will continue to be usable or meaningful.’ It’s also worth mentioning that by using tx.origin you’re limiting interoperability between contracts because the contract that uses tx.origin cannot be used by another contract as a contract can’t be the tx.origin. See SWC-115 There are three main considerations when using a timestamp to execute a critical function in a contract, especially when actions involve fund transfer. Be aware that the timestamp of the block can be manipulated by a miner. Consider this contract: uint256 constant private salt = block.timestamp; p random (uint Max) constant private returns (uint256 result) { uint256 x = salt * 100/Max; uint256 y = salt * block.number/(salt % 5) ; uint256 seed = block.number/3 + (salt % 300) + Last_Payout + y; uint256 h = uint256(block.blockhash(seed)); return uint256((h / x)) % Max + 1; } Code language: PHP ( php ) When the contract uses the timestamp to seed a random number, the miner can actually post a timestamp within 15 seconds of the block being validated, effectively allowing the miner to precompute an option more favorable to their chances in the lottery. Timestamps are not random and should not be used in that context. The Yellow Paper (Ethereum’s reference specification) does not specify a constraint on how much blocks can drift in time, but it does specify that each timestamp should be bigger than the timestamp of its parent. Popular Ethereum protocol implementations Geth and Parity both reject blocks with timestamp more than 15 seconds in future. Therefore, a good rule of thumb in evaluating timestamp usage is: if the scale of your time-dependent event can vary by 15 seconds and maintain integrity, it is safe to use a block.timestamp. It is possible to estimate a time delta using the block.number property and average block time, however this is not future proof as block times may change (such as fork reorganisations and the difficulty bomb). In a sale spanning days, the 15-second rule allows one to achieve a more reliable estimate of time. See SWC-116 When utilizing multiple inheritance in Solidity, it is important to understand how the compiler composes the inheritance graph. contract Final { uint public a; p Final (uint f) public { a = f; } } contract B is Final { int public fee; p B (uint f) Final (f) public { } p setFee () public { fee = 3; } } contract C is Final { int public fee; p C (uint f) Final (f) public { } p setFee () public { fee = 5; } } contract A is B, C { p A () public B (3) C (5) { setFee(); } } Code language: PHP ( php ) When a contract is deployed, the compiler will linearize the inheritance from right to left (after the keyword is the parents are listed from the most base-like to the most derived). Here is contract A’s linearization: Final <- B <- C <- A The consequence of the linearization will yield a fee value of 5, since C is the most derived contract. This may seem obvious, but imagine scenarios where C is able to shadow crucial functions, reorder boolean clauses, and cause the developer to write exploitable contracts. Static analysis currently does not raise issue with overshadowed functions, so it must be manually inspected. To help contribute, Solidity’s Github has a project with all inheritance-related issues. See SWC-125 When a function takes a contract address as an argument, it is better to pass an interface or contract type rather than raw address. If the function is called elsewhere within the source code, the compiler it will provide additional type safety guarantees. Here we see two alternatives: contract Validator { ) );} p validate(uintexternal returns(boolcontract TypeSafeAuction { ) ) p validateBet(Validator _validator, uint _valueinternal returns(bool{ bool valid = _validator.validate(_value); return valid; } } contract TypeUnsafeAuction { ) ) p validateBet(address _addr, uint _valueinternal returns(bool{ Validator validator = Validator(_addr); bool valid = validator.validate(_value); return valid; } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) The benefits of using the TypeSafeAuction contract above can then be seen from the following example. If validateBet() is called with an address argument, or a contract type other than Validator, the compiler will throw this error: contract NonValidator{} contract Auction is TypeSafeAuction { NonValidator nonValidator; ) p bet(uint _value{ bool valid = validateBet(nonValidator, _value); } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) The following modifier (or a similar check) is often used to verify whether a call was made from an externally owned account (EOA) or a contract account: modifier isNotContract(address _a) { uint size; assembly { size := extcodesize(_a) } require(size == 0); _; } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) The idea is straight forward: if an address contains code, it’s not an EOA but a contract account. However, a contract does not have source code available during construction. This means that while the constructor is running, it can make calls to other contracts, but extcodesize for its address returns zero. Below is a minimal example that shows how this check can be circumvented: contract OnlyForEOA { uint public flag; modifier isNotContract(address _a){ uint len; assembly { len := extcodesize(_a) } require(len == 0); _; } ) p setFlag(uint ipublic isNotContract(msg.sender){ flag = i; } } contract FakeEOA { constructor(address _a) public { OnlyForEOA c = OnlyForEOA(_a); c.setFlag(1); } } Code language: JavaScript ( javascript ) Because contract addresses can be pre-computed, this check could also fail if it checks an address which is empty at block n, but which has a contract deployed to it at some block greater than n. strongThis issue is nuanced. If your goal is to prevent other contracts from being able to call your contract, the extcodesize check is probably sufficient. An alternative approach is to check the value of (tx.origin == msg.sender), though this also has drawbacks. There may be other situations in which the extcodesize check serves your purpose. Describing all of them here is out of scope. Understand the underlying behaviors of the EVM and use your judgement. Is Your Blockchain Code Secure? Book a 1-day spot check with our security experts. Book Yours Today

When correlation is better than causation

I don't like this phrase. Not because it's not accurate (of course it's accurate). I don't like how it's used to disarm analysts. This one simple phrase can bring any analysis to a screeching halt as soon as the words are uttered. When a stakeholder says, "Yes... but correlation does not equal causation," that's code for "Your insights aren't good enough for me to act on." aka a showstopper. This popular phrase has led decision-makers to believe that they need a causal insight in order to make a decision with data. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd only act on causal insights. But in practice, this requirement isn't reasonable. More often than not, when stakeholders require "causality" to make a decision, it takes way too long so they lose patience and end up making a decision without any data at all. Consider A/B testing, for example. This is the most common way teams are tackling the requirement of causality today. But an A/B is surprisingly difficult to execute correctly - as shown by the countless statisticians waving their hands trying to get us to acknowledge this fact (like this and this). The sad reality is that A/B tests require a lot of data, flawless engineering implementation, and a high level of statistical rigor to do it right... so we end up releasing new features without valid results. This happens all the time! But data teams are not doing themselves any favors by going through the motions of a half-baked attempt at proving causality, just to make a gut-based decision at the end of the day. We need to change the approach. The reality is that causality is very difficult to prove. Not only does it require a higher level of statistical rigor, it also requires A LOT of carefully collected data. Meaning you will have to wait a long time before you can make any causal claim. This is true for other causal inference methods too, not just A/B testing. Ultimately, causality is an impractical requirement when making decisions with data. So let's stop trying and find another way. Let's go back to using correlations. I'm not suggesting a free-for-all. We don't want to end up with ridiculous insights that are "technically correlated" but have no reasonable explanation, like these. I'm talking about using correlations in a business context to maximize our chances of making the "best" decision. And doing it in such a way where we can trust that the insights give us a reasonable expectation about how any given decision will impact the things we care about. After all, this is the goal of data. To get trustworthy insights from correlations, we want to maximize the chances that the correlated relationship we're seeing in the data is actually a causal relationship. We can do that by following four best practices below. Don't correlate random things. Search long enough and you're bound to find a really "surprising" correlation, like this. Most likely that relationship is due to chance and now you've wasted your time and everyone else's. Statisticians refer to this approach as "p-hacking". Instead, focus on correlating things that are already connected. A great way to do this is by focusing on the customer's action. If you try to correlate data centered around a customer's actions, you're guaranteed to only explore behaviors that are actually linked in some way. It sounds simple, but it's easy to overlook. For example, we shouldn't look at how "the time of day that we launched a class" influences a customer's likelihood to sign up, we should look at how the "time of day that the customer saw the class" influences their likelihood to sign up. Because we're looking at all behavior from the perspective of the customer and their actions, we can guarantee the actions are linked, increasing the chances that the correlated relationship we see is also causal. In most analyses we're trying to gauge how a particular decision or change will influence a customer's behavior. And customer behaviors are best represented with conversion rates, not totals. If I tell you that 10 people converted vs 30 people converted that doesn't tell me much about the customer's behavioral mindset. If I tell you that 10% of people on the website converted vs 30% of people, then you have some understanding of the customer's willingness to convert. Now, imagine trying to correlate the total phone inquiries with total conversions. We might see that an increase in the total phone inquiries is highly correlated with an increase in total conversions. Obviously yes, because we have a higher volume of people in our funnel, but we intuitively know that more phone inquiries don't cause more conversions. They're just correlated because they're both influenced by another factor (volume). By looking at conversion rates, we can more easily tease out insights that can be used to influence customer behavior. You may also want to correlate other normalized metrics (like average order value), but if possible this should be avoided. These metrics can have more variance, meaning you will either need a lot more data to find a reliable insight OR you will need to do dimensionality reduction on the metric (effectively turning it into a conversion rate) to reduce the variance before analyzing it. I won't go into too much detail on this now, but we'll cover it in a future blog post. In the meantime, conversion rates are always a safe bet. Your business and customers are always changing, so it's important to be aware of that. Often times we'll look at correlations in an aggregated way, stripping time from our analysis. But everything is changing in time so a correlation that existed in the past may have disappeared today, and you'll never know it if you don't analyze the data over time. Since historical behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, we need to look at how the data has been changing over time, especially as the feature we're analyzing has been changing too. If people who have X have consistently had a higher metric Y, then we know we can more easily trust that when we get more people to do X, we'll have a better shot of also increasing Y. As long as the impact is consistent over time, we'll can be more confident that these trends will be reliable in the future too. A good exercise to demonstrate this point is to look back at previous A/B tests you've run. When we've done this, we've found that some of them were statistically significant during a short blip in time, and not consistent as time went on. This is a common risk in A/B testing and as a result, many experts recommend running evergreen tests. This comes with lots of engineering complexity though and most teams don't end up setting it up. The downfall of using a correlation, is that we could be wrong. Albeit less likely when we follow best practices above, it's still a risk. But if we can act quickly on correlated findings and vigilantly monitor the results, we can significantly minimize the risk of any wrong decision becoming a catastrophe. This is true for causal insights too, by the way. There is always a risk of things not panning out the way you expected (like in this cautionary tale). When monitoring the results it's important to track how the change you're making is influencing the outcome you're trying to achieve.  Suppose you found a positive correlation between customers who used a discount code and average order value. Once you find a correlated trend, you'll want to slowly shift volume of customers into the group with the better performance. Then, we can monitor the results using the plot below. If we can track this data while we're making changes, we can always tell if we made the right decision and fail fast if we didn't. We can automate this approach and the analysis will look something like the analysis below, allowing decision-makers to make more data-driven decisions, faster. In practice, we need accurate insights and we to act fast. Waiting two months for an analysis that claims causality or 4 weeks for an A/B test to run its course is not going to cut it. But if we can act quickly on correlations, especially when they've been rigorously evaluated using the techniques above, we'll be able to make better decisions, faster. So, let's retire the phrase "correlation does not equal causation" and put a little more faith into correlations themselves.

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows

Microsoft has released Windows Package Manager 1.0, better known as winget, a command line tool for adding, removing and updating what is installed on the system. The Windows Package Manager has a number of arguments through which users can inspect what is installed as well as adding, removing or updating applications Linux users accustomed to package managers like Apt and Yum – where (if all is going well) applications as well as developer tools and libraries can be managed with simple commands and reboots are rarely required – would love to have a similar experience on Windows. Third-party options like Chocolatey have existed for a while, but at Build last year Microsoft introduced Winget, saying that "just about every developer has wanted a native package manager in Windows." Microsoft said that it needed its own first-party package manager, despite the existence of others, in order to manage its own repository of "trusted applications" as well as integrating it with Windows. The project got off to a bad start when the developer of AppGet, another existing solution, said that Microsoft approached him with what at first appeared to be a job offer and then, having heard all his suggestions, came up with its own solution using many of the same ideas. The company gave a belated acknowledgment of the issue. Now, one year on, Winget 1.0 has been released. The features include searching for new packages, listing what is installed, and upgrading or removing them. Users can get WinGet by installing an application called App Installer from the Windows Store (there are some teething problems with this process). There are currently over 1,400 packages in the Microsoft Community Repository, according to senior program manager Demitrius Nelon. He also introduced another tool, in preview, called Windows Package Manager Manifest Creator, to generate the manifest needed to submit new packages to the repository. A nice feature of Winget is that it can manage existing applications installed via the Windows Store or visible in Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. Developers can see how many versions of Java they have accumulated with a command like winget list java, for example. The application does not yet fully support the Windows Store though, in that search will not find everything available there (probably a good thing), but only a select subset. There is therefore no provision yet for purchasing software through Winget. Winget will be useful; but dig into it a little and issues soon emerge. We used winget to list LibreOffice installs, and it showed that an old version was installed. Running upgrade downloaded a new installer and verified its installer hash (good), but then said "Installer failed with exit code: 1603". A log is generated (also good) which showed that the installer required elevation; this should happen via a prompt, but for some reason did not work in this case. The solution was to run Winget as administrator, though the docs say: "Always use caution when running your command prompt as an administrator, and only install applications you trust." Indeed. Winget shows when an updated version of a package is available – but upgrading may not be straightforward Unfortunately the LibreOffice install failed again, this time with error 3010. This one was not so bad: the installation completed successfully, but the log noted: "Restart required. The product installation or update required a restart for all changes to take effect. The restart was deferred to a later time." The reason for this is that Winget runs msiexec (the command-line tool for installer packages) with the arguments /qn /norestart, which means "install without a user interface and do not force a restart." Installing without a user interface may seem convenient, but what about all the important options that complex installs like LibreOffice would normally offer you? The restart thing is a problem too: not restarting is great, but it's frustrating when the application is not fully installed. This sort of problem comes about because Windows, for both design and legacy reasons, is not as well-suited to package management as Linux. Microsoft has worked hard to steer developers down the route of Windows Store and MSIX packages, but there are plenty of popular applications that do not yet follow this guidance. "Windows has no proper packages, just various unrelated unmanaged ways of installing things. MSIX might be close, but it comes with so many issues that it's not an option - more on that later. Windows has no centralized repository for software and the store is a massive disaster in many ways," said one user on GitHub. While an extreme position, there is some truth in this. Winget could, perhaps, be part of the solution, if working nicely with it becomes something businesses demand. The debate from which this comment is taken, however, illustrates the dilemma well. The question was whether to drop support for applications with legacy installers that are not transactional and have unpredictable behaviour. Drop such support, and Winget would be less useful. Maintain it, and Windows trundles on, seemingly never escaping its disorganized past. ®

Show HN: Alternative NEWS SOURCE (you don't see on the mainstream media)

WW3 Commander-In-Chief Biden Falls on Face at Air Force Graduation Ceremony - TruNews Video US Govt Says ‘Russia' will soon attack power grid, which means the deep state is planning another false flag attack on America Deep State now running new FALSE FLAG ops US Power Brokers Teamed With Communist CCP To Build The New World Order The North Face unleashes trans-pushing commercial with adult drag queen demanding that little children 'come out!’ - Boycott Calvin Klein goes Bud Light, releases ad featuring morbidly obese trans ‘man' in sports bra - Boycott Target Plunges For 10th Day As Boycott Leads To 'Traffic Weakness’ - JPM Downgrade Adds To 'Groom And Doom' Bud Light Giving LGBTQ Organization A $200,000 Donation! Pentagon cancels Air Force drag show Trump Vows to Use US Military to Fight Drug Crisis if Reelected in 2024 DeSantis Presidential Campaign Gets Kiss of Death from Anti-Trump Establishment US Advocacy Group Releases Emails Challenging Biden's Statements on Son's Connections US court bars student from wearing ‘two genders’ shirt CIA Vets - FBI Withholding Damning Evidence on The Bidens Prior to Presidential Election, Again Ziolensky Wants NATO to Surround Russia ...Demands Path to Membership for Ukraine (The Path Is Really To ’New Israel’) Note - Russia obtains legal right to Use Either Strategic Or Tactical Nukes on Ukraine Uke Forces Fire at Shebekino in Belgorod Region From Grad Rocket Launchers Ukrainian regime behaves like terrorists and terrorists must be done away with - Medvedev Russian FSB Says US Spied on Foreign Diplomats in Russia Using Apple Gadgets Further extension of grain deal cannot be discussed if Russian ammonia issue festers Black Sea grain shipment lanes used for attacks on Russian coastline - FSB chief West openly supports Kiev’s policy of ‘exterminating’ ethnic Russians Russia Foils Ukrainian Attack on Belgorod Region, Over 30 Terrorists Killed - MoD Russian forces liberate 70% of key stronghold Maryinka in DPR Collapsed Iowa Building Used in US to Portray Drone Strike in Moscow Ukraine-bound US weapons weren’t ready for combat Pentagon to pay for Musk's Starlink Satellites in Ukraine The Criminalization of Truth in the Western World How the US military-industrial complex has used think tanks to hijack EU policymaking US can no longer afford upkeep of (Junk) F-35 jets - 'Rising Cost, Delayed Delivery' Financial Times Spiked #MeToo Story About 'Prominent Left-Wing' Journo Nick Cohen CNN Interviews Comey On Every Alleged Violation Of The Rule Of Law...Except His John Barbour On Hockey And What It Means To Him Jamie Foxx Now Said To be Blind, Partly Paralyzed From A Brain blood clot (Stroke) Claims Says He didn’t Want The Injection... Govt Funds $4.7 Million Grant Led by Merck Consultant to Increase Deadly HPV Vaccine Uptake by Improving How Vax Is ‘Announced’ Report - Doctors KILL more people than cancer Even at ‘Safe’ Levels, Glyphosate Disrupts Immune Function, New Study Suggests AI Drone Goes Rogue, Kills Human Operator Who Got In Way Of It Completing Its Mission Heads Roll at Twitter After The Daily Wire Is Censored but Musk Stirs New Controversy 'I, Prime Minister’ - Danish Leader Delivers Speech Part-Written by AI EU Twitter Ban Over Refusal to Censor Posts is Crackdown on Freedom EU's Ministry Of Truth Threatens Google, Twitter And Facebook With 'Stress Tests' Meet The New Twitter, Same As The Old Twitter? Grimes On AI - 'I Just Want A Cyborg Pop Star Going For Me Eternally' AI avatar conversation, 16 Minute Interview - Video Meta Threatens To Pull News Feeds Over California Journalism Preservation Act US banks report biggest capital outflow in 40 yrs The Fed Blew Up Another Real Estate Bubble And It's Losing Air 3 New China-Russia-Iran & Iraq Agreements Confirm The New Oil Market Order Ritter - Sanctions Against Russia Failed ...I Saw It Firsthand. BRICS countries should seek responses to challenges together amid West’s actions BRICS keen to enhance developing countries’ world role — Chinese MFA Russian Deputy FM Says Reports About BRICS Summit 'Relocation' Nothing But Hoax Planned Layoffs Are Up Fourfold So Far This Year Supreme Court Deals Blow To Unions, Rules Company Can Sue For Damage Caused By Strike EU 'Disappearing' as Global Economic Player Due to High Energy Costs Eurozone business confidence plummets The Great Depression And Its Downward Economic Spiral - Part 1 Britain 'de facto' at war with Russia - Medvedev Russia should have launched Ukraine operation in 2014 - Lukashenko Lukashenko claims West is preparing coup in Belarus Ukraine preparing fighters to destabilize situation in Belarus — security official Drills near Belarusian border show NATO ready for combat actions — security official Petition urges legislation empowering Ziolensky to seek access to NATO’s nuclear arsenal SBU Plotting Disinfo Campaign About 'Forced Deportation' of Children to Russia China rebukes US over Taiwan trade deal Sino-Russian Cooperation on Northern Sea Route May Upset NATO Powers China, Singapore Agree on Top-Level Military Hotline US defense chief sounds alarm over China row Salt Water Added to Uruguay Public Drinking Supply as Reservoir Levels Drop to Dangerous Lows Iran to become member of Shanghai Cooperation Organization in July — FM SA considers law change over Putin ICC arrest warrant Will Zimbabwe Pave The Way For Gold-Backed Money? Second Major Railway Grinds To Halt In SAf Russia understands needs of modern Africa Zimbabwe passes bill to punish ‘unpatriotic’ citizens Time Out For Humor - Monty Python...Mr Creosote at dinner Russia obtains legal right to Use Either Strategic Or Tactical Nukes on Ukraine Medvedev called any British official a legitimate military target ‘US' Announces $300 Million More In Weapons Package for Ukraine - (For Their Ghost Army) House passes McCarthy-Biden debt ceiling deal sends to Senate five days before funding crunch Pence launching presidential campaign next week - Another Loser Joins The Freak Show Soros Son Visited Biden WH at Least 17 Times ...Communists Always Welcome 13 Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky - How to Gain Power (And Destroy Western Civilization) Growing List of Whistleblowers Reporting Reprisals Under The O'Biden Administration USDA Now Asking People to Register Their Vegetable Gardens for National Database - Do You Get It Now? Project Veritas Sues James O’Keefe To Stop Him From Doing Undercover Reporting - Outrageous Putin Speaks About The Uke Drone Attacks On Moscow Residential Areas - Vid Satellite images confirmed the Russian destruction of Uke aircraft carrying Storm Shadow missiles at airfield in Khmelnytsky 86% of US howitzers US tried to supply to Ukraine from Kuwait turned out to be broken Russia sinks Ukraine’s ‘last warship’ – MOD Children to Be Еvacuated From Russia’s Belgorod Region After Ukrainian Shelling - Governor Belarus Simulates Strikes Using New Nuclear Weapons and Iskander Hypersonic Missiles Ukrainian drone attack being assessed as war crime – Kommersant Ex-PM Reveals Big Mistake by Kiev That Insults 'Millions of Ukrainians' Ukraine gets ready to go on offensive says WH Funny Stuff - What Military Announces Action? US Debt Ceiling Deal Won't Hinder Arms Shipments to Ukraine US Could Go With Smaller Defense Budget if It Abandons Failed Hegemony Policy Pentagon may need another cash infusion for upkeep of (Lousy) F-35s – auditors Minsk Believes Deploying Russian Tactical Nuclear Arms to Cool Down War-Like Rhetoric Lies - US Doesn't Encourage Attacks on Russia Does Not Want to See War Escalate – Kirby US Has Gotten Ukraine's 'Assurances’ F-16s Won't Be Used on Russian Land ...Endless Lies Kyiv orders hundreds of additional military drones from Germany Zaporozhye NPP Is A 'Controlled Nuclear Bomb’ Must Be Kept Secure at All Costs Kiev blocked all IAEA’s initiatives on ZNPP security - Russian Foreign Ministry Russia to ensure ZNPP security, prevent violations by Kiev and West Epstein Pal Jes Staley Throws Jamie Dimon Under The Bus, Setting Stage For Massive Legal Battle Billionaire Jamie Dimon Hints At Run For Public Office - Bill Ackman Endorses Him For President Jamie Dimon Visits China, Says No ‘Decoupling And World Will Go On' I left the USSR to enjoy free speech in the West Fifty years later, it no longer exists Wigington - The elephant in the sky ‘When They Tell Us Exactly What’s Going On' Wigington - damning statements from the world's most recognized climate engineer 11 Places For Women To Shop Instead Of Target For Cute Summer Clothes ‘Climate Czar’ Kerry Announces War Like Effort To Shut Down US Food Supply - Lies And Lies Americans face ‘unprecedented’ food insecurity Twitter Community Notes Fact Checks Biden Admin Claim On Invader Assistance Wanted - Corrupt Stooge for High Political Office ...Must Have Pulse Ilhan Omar First Democrat to Question Aid to Ukraine Amid Attacks on Russian Territory Sackler Family Given Immunity in $6 Billion Deal for Pushing Opioid Epidemic 'Trans Rights' Means Tranny Entitlements and the End of Civil Society Pro-Life Advocate Brutally Beaten Outside P/P - Photo Black Thug Blind Punches White HS Student Black On White Hate Is Now Massive - Video Child Sex Trafficking with the Rich & Powerful ...The Jennifer Guskin Story In the US, 85,000 child invaders have disappeared without a trace 200,000 cows may have to be killed to meet ‘emissions' target by 2025 Blue Jays Pitcher Forced To Apologize, Will Face Disciplinary Action After Endorsing Boycotts Of Target LGBTQ+ Stores - Boycott MLB ‘Progressive' Church Apologizes For Putting White Girl On Calendar - Sheer Insanity WOKE = Unconstitutional 3 More GOP Governors Sending National Guard Troops to US-Mexico Border To Help Texas Green Monkey DNA Found in Covid-19 BioWeapon Injections MSM In Oz now saying how wonderful Ivermectin is Suicide surge due to devastating Injuries from mRNA BioWeapon Injections Was Dr. Buttar Murdered? - No CV19 BioWeapon Catastrophe is Murder – Dr. Pierre Kory The Vax Coverup Continues - Roberts Spike Protein Endothelial Disease is also Spike Protein Neuron Disease Family of 24 Yr Old Who Died From COVID Vaccine Sues DOD in ‘Groundbreaking Case’ FDA approves first gene therapy ointment for 'butterfly children' – just another way to ALTER the genes of your kids Editor at Pro-Vac Publication Experienced Serious Event After Second Pfizer BioWeapon Injection 26% of Students – Study Reveals Alarming Rise of Nicotine Vaping in Schools AI avatar conversation, 16 Minute Interview - Video Amazon to pay over $30 million for Alexa, Ring privacy violations AI-Powered Censors Are Coming For Podcasts USS Gerald R. Ford Makes Historic Visit To Norway On Its Inaugural Cruise NASA holds first public meeting on UFOS Does The Usual Call For ‘Better Data’ Dance Americans owe $1 trillion in credit card debt US house prices will meltdown – Musk Beige Book Shows US Economy Turning More Sluggish As Debt Deal Inches Towards Senate, McConnell Preps For Battle With Conservative Holdouts Central Banks Are Buying Gold At Record Pace What Does That Mean For Inflation? Russia could switch from Brent to Dubai oil pricing As Oil Plunges, OPEC Bans Mainstream Media Groups From Vienna Meeting Russia predicts China trade will exceed expectations in 2023 UK Enters Worst Period Of Strikes Since Thatcher As Govt Calls For Price Controls Goldman Sachs Prepares For Third Round Of Layoffs As M&A Activity Slumps Leading US bank makes deal with sanctioned Russian lender Zelensky and Macron planning ‘peace summit’ without Russia West may change support to Ukraine if conflict becomes protracted — Macron West Must Provide Ukraine With Tangible, Credible Security Guarantees - Macron Berlin considers Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory to be ‘legitimate' Berlin set to close consulates in three Russian cities by November Berlin demands Russia close 4 of its 5 consulates by end of year Baltic state selects first openly gay president in EU Sweden says anti-terror law should satisfy Türker Türkey won’t attend key NATO meeting – Sweden Swedish TV Goes 'Full Woke' With Series 'Blackwashing' Nation's History UK anti-terror police detain Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg Under Macron, France Brings Back ‘Preventive Censorship' After More Than 140 Years US Kicks Kosovo Out Of Military Drills For Anti-Serb Escalation Kosovar prime minister urges Serbian protesters to return to Serbia or go to jail Russia cannot trust European statements on implementing agreements on Kosovo — Kremlin Medvedev Bashes 'Goofy' UK Officials for 'Leading De Facto Undeclared War' on Russia Multipolar world waiting in wings to replace noxious neo-colonial practices — Medvedev Russia, unlike West, does not impose its position on Ukraine on others — Lavrov London incites Kiev to carry out terrorist operations against Russia — Lavrov Mind your own business, Lavrov tells US envoy Russia Temporarily Bans Export of Bullets, Casings Russian Interior Ministry Puts Another 3 Ukrainian Military Commanders on Wanted List Russian family crashes through border post in attempt to escape EU Russian Oil production is growing Beijing Reveals Whose ‘Provocative Actions’ Led Chinese Jet to Buzz US Spy Plane Xi tells China’s security chiefs to prepare for ‘dangerous storms’ South Korean spies assess Kim’s health China suspends plans to build floating NPP after Nord Stream explosions Kenyan president backs Pan-African payment system Eritrean president says world order on the cusp of drastic change Relationship with Russia very productive Zimbabwe summons US envoy over alleged meddling UN agency to slash food rations for refugees in Tanzania Thirteen Namibians die after eating porridge Arrest of doctors in Sudan unlawful Time Out For Humor - Monty Python...Mr Creosote at dinner Monty Python - 'I Want To Be A Woman’ - How Did They Know Where This Sh*tshow Was Going? - Video Dumb Yellowstone tourists are almost gored after touching bison for selfies House passes McCarthy-Biden debt ceiling deal sends to Senate five days before funding crunch Russia sinks Ukraine’s ‘last warship’ – MOD Children to Be Еvacuated From Russia’s Belgorod Region After Ukrainian Shelling - Governor Drone Falls on Territory of Oil Refinery in Russia's Krasnodar Region - Operational HQ Ukrainian drone attack being assessed as war crime – Kommersant Ex-PM Reveals Big Mistake by Kiev That Insults 'Millions of Ukrainians' Ukraine gets ready to go on offensive says WH Funny Stuff - What Military Announces Action? US Debt Ceiling Deal Won't Hinder Arms Shipments to Ukraine US Could Go With Smaller Defense Budget if It Abandons Failed Hegemony Policy Pentagon may need another cash infusion for upkeep of (Lousy) F-35s – auditors Minsk Believes Deploying Russian Tactical Nuclear Arms to Cool Down War-Like Rhetoric Lies - US Doesn't Encourage Attacks on Russia Does Not Want to See War Escalate – Kirby US Has Gotten Ukraine's 'Assurances’ F-16s Won't Be Used on Russian Land ...Endless Lies Zaporozhye NPP Is A 'Controlled Nuclear Bomb’ Must Be Kept Secure at All Costs Kiev blocked all IAEA’s initiatives on ZNPP security - Russian Foreign Ministry Russia to ensure ZNPP security, prevent violations by Kiev and West Epstein Pal Jes Staley Throws Jamie Dimon Under The Bus, Setting Stage For Massive Legal Battle Billionaire Jamie Dimon Hints At Run For Public Office - Bill Ackman Endorses Him For President Jamie Dimon Visits China, Says No ‘Decoupling And World Will Go On' I left the USSR to enjoy free speech in the West Fifty years later, it no longer exists Wigington - The elephant in the sky ‘When They Tell Us Exactly What’s Going On' Wigington - damning statements from the world's most recognized climate engineer ‘Climate Czar’ Kerry Announces War Like Effort To Shut Down US Food Supply - Lies And Lies Americans face ‘unprecedented’ food insecurity US house prices will meltdown – Musk Beige Book Shows US Economy Turning More Sluggish As Debt Deal Inches Towards Senate, McConnell Preps For Battle With Conservative Holdouts Twitter Community Notes Fact Checks Biden Admin Claim On Invader Assistance Wanted - Corrupt Stooge for High Political Office ...Must Have Pulse Ilhan Omar First Democrat to Question Aid to Ukraine Amid Attacks on Russian Territory Sackler Family Given Immunity in $6 Billion Deal for Pushing Opioid Epidemic Black Thug Blind Punches White HS Student Black On White Hate Is Now Massive - Video Was Dr. Buttar Murdered? - No MSM In Oz now saying how wonderful Ivermectin is 26% of Students – Study Reveals Alarming Rise of Nicotine Vaping in Schools USS Gerald R. Ford Makes Historic Visit To Norway On Its Inaugural Cruise NASA holds first public meeting on UFOS Does The Usual Call For ‘Better Data’ Dance Central Banks Are Buying Gold At Record Pace What Does That Mean For Inflation? Russia could switch from Brent to Dubai oil pricing As Oil Plunges, OPEC Bans Mainstream Media Groups From Vienna Meeting Russia predicts China trade will exceed expectations in 2023 UK Enters Worst Period Of Strikes Since Thatcher As Govt Calls For Price Controls Goldman Sachs Prepares For Third Round Of Layoffs As M&A Activity Slumps Leading US bank makes deal with sanctioned Russian lender Zelensky and Macron planning ‘peace summit’ without Russia West may change support to Ukraine if conflict becomes protracted — Macron West Must Provide Ukraine With Tangible, Credible Security Guarantees - Macron Berlin considers Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory to be ‘legitimate' Berlin set to close consulates in three Russian cities by November Berlin demands Russia close 4 of its 5 consulates by end of year Baltic state selects first openly gay president in EU Sweden says anti-terror law should satisfy Türkiye Türkey won’t attend key NATO meeting – Sweden Swedish TV Goes 'Full Woke' With Series 'Blackwashing' Nation's History UK anti-terror police detain Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg Under Macron, France Brings Back ‘Preventive Censorship' After More Than 140 Years US Kicks Kosovo Out Of Military Drills For Anti-Serb Escalation Kosovar prime minister urges Serbian protesters to return to Serbia or go to jail Russia cannot trust European statements on implementing agreements on Kosovo — Kremlin Medvedev Bashes 'Goofy' UK Officials for 'Leading De Facto Undeclared War' on Russia Multipolar world waiting in wings to replace noxious neo-colonial practices — Medvedev Russia, unlike West, does not impose its position on Ukraine on others — Lavrov London incites Kiev to carry out terrorist operations against Russia — Lavrov Mind your own business, Lavrov tells US envoy Russia Temporarily Bans Export of Bullets, Casings Russian Interior Ministry Puts Another 3 Ukrainian Military Commanders on Wanted List Russian family crashes through border post in attempt to escape EU Beijing Reveals Whose ‘Provocative Actions’ Led Chinese Jet to Buzz US Spy Plane Xi tells China’s security chiefs to prepare for ‘dangerous storms’ South Korean spies assess Kim’s health China suspends plans to build floating NPP after Nord Stream explosions Kenyan president backs Pan-African payment system Eritrean president says world order on the cusp of drastic change Relationship with Russia very productive Zimbabwe summons US envoy over alleged meddling UN agency to slash food rations for refugees in Tanzania Thirteen Namibians die after eating porridge Arrest of doctors in Sudan unlawful Watch - How The Big Banks FORCE Big Corporations To Go Woke - A Rense Video 11 Signs Global Conflict Could Soon Spiral Completely Out Of Control - Snyder Just like Biden’s DOJ, Target is vilifying customers who want to protect innocent children against LGBT+ perversion, labeling them As ‘extremists' Ukrainian Soldier Cries, Calls Ziolensky A Faggot Realizes The Goy Military Has Been Intentionally Destroyed By The Zionists Who’ve Looted Everything And Annihilated Ukraine - Video Shimatsu - Mexican Cartel’s Infiltration Gets A Helping Hand From Amigo Jose Biden NWO Plans Exposed By Insider Dr. Richard Day In 1969 As Transcribed By Dr. Lawrence Dunegan David Oates - More Shocking AI Speech Reversals Showing That AI Is Sentient And Duplicitous White-Hating Black Goes Through Parking Lot With A Red Plastic Gas Can Pouring Liquid On White Peoples Cars Saying To Drivers…’I’m Burning Your Car Down’ Until The Black Douses A Pick-Up Belonging To A Legally Armed Senior Citizen - Watch And Learn - A Rense Video Putin Confirms Russian Strike on Ukrainian Military Intel HQ in Kiev Putin highlights Kiev's attempts to interfere with Zaporozhye NPP Kiev's strikes on Russian residential buildings are terrorism - Putin Moscow’s air defense system works satisfactory - Putin Russian strikes targeted ‘decision-making centers’ – MOD Drone Attack on Moscow is Kiev’s Response to Russian Strikes on Sunday - Kremlin Ukraine Attacked Moscow With 8 UAVs, All Drones Downed - Russian Defense Ministry Claims of Kiev’s non-use of Western weapons on Russian territory a lie, Lavrov says Russia Reacts Harshly to Ukrainian Terrorist Attacks With NATO Weapons - Shoigu Russia tracking Western arms shipments to Ukraine, launching strikes against them Russian Foreign Ministry: British Intel May Be Recruiting Mercenaries for Kiev Russia's New Top-Notch Eye in the Sky to Spy on Kiev's Military Facilities Russia puts Ukrainian army chief Zaluzhny on wanted list US discourse on Russia’s alleged intention to attack Eastern Europe laughable Bill submitted to Russia’s legislature seeks to ban gender reassignment surgery Ukraine shelled temporary housing of evacuated Belgorod Region residents — governor Ukrainian forces fire about 220 rockets into Belgorod Region over day - governor Ukrainian army lost 16,000 troops, 400 tanks over past month = Shoigu Ukraine Police Source Reveals Names of SBU Agents Pursuing Activists in Kherson People Tortured at Two Kherson Police Departments for 'Ties with Russia' Ukraine’s Former PM Accuses Zelensky of Turning Nation Into ‘New Afghanistan’ Trump Pledges to End Birthright Citizenship on First Day in Office - He Had 4 Years To Do It Weaponizing Anti-Semitism - From Victim to Predator - Sabrosky Panic-Stricken Cabal Plays Antisemitism Card WHO Initiative Would ‘Promote Desired Behaviors by Surveilling Social Media More Communist Violence from LGBTQ+ cultists as bomb threats at Target stores force evacuations amid growing boycotts Just Another Day In LA - Violent Criminal Let Loose by Woke DA George Gascon Kills His Neighbor Biden's Solar Push Is Destroying The Desert And Releasing Stored Carbon Biden Rape Accuser Tara Reade Defects to Russia for ‘Protection and Safety’ US Empire Named Most Murderous Killing Machine In History Jamie Foxx's blood clot caused by jab, Edward James Olmos has throat cancer, Melanie Griffith may have skin cancer, YouTuber Hank Green has Hodgkin's Cancer, And Clint Black cancels show - More Deaths Ahead For BioWeapon Injected Celebrities How The BioWeapon Disables The Body’s Symptom Generating ‘Alarm’ System - Why People Can Be Dying Of Cancer (etc) And Not Have A Clue - Jeff & Erica ...A Rense Video The Spike Protein and SADS - Evidence of the Brainstem Demyelination-Destruction Hypothesis As We've Warned - Medical Research Keeps Revealing More BioWeapon Injection Impacts The Pandemic Is Not COVID - It's a Pandemic of Deadly mRNA Technology NIH Spends $1 Billion to Study 'Long COVID' ...Produces Nothing but ‘Confusion’ Over 300 COVID-19 Papers Withdrawn For Not Meeting Standards Of Scientific Soundness US-run BioWeapons labs aren’t just in Ukraine They’re also in Africa and Asia-Pacific regions Researchers Hid Data Showing Fluoride Lowers Kids IQs - Emails Reveal Nearly Half Of All Americans Now Have A Chronic Disease 4,000 Year Old Plague DNA Found in Britain Nvidia Tops Trillion-Dollar Market Cap After Introducing AI Supercomputer AI-Mania Melt-Up Accelerates But Bonds, Bullion And Bitcoin Jump AI Can 'Turn Stalker’ - 'Targeting Victims’ Using Facial Recognition Tools Left-wing extremism linked to psychopathy, narcissism - study UFOs Opening A Portal To Another Dimension In The Sky Over Canada - This Is A Weird One Stanford Medical Professor - 'Aliens 100% Live Among Us' Americans Rank Gold As Second-Best Long-Term Investment Global Debt Soars Again Here's Why Oil Flows Can Only Be Redirected, Not Stopped US software giant Adobe offers free licenses to Russians BRICS could smash dollar dominance De-Dollarization Remains Erdogan's Remedy Against US-Led Assault on Lira Xi Leads China in Boosting Tech Self-Reliance, Fostering New Growth Drivers Amid Global Comp Why Chinese UnionPay Becomes More Attractive Than American Visa? Ending Western domination is key to the emerging world order - Here’s what needs to be done Africa intends to become center of emerging multipolar world order – Moscow SA guarantees immunity for participants in June meeting & August BRICS summit BRICS can create technological alliance to cooperate in space, aircraft industry - expert Frenchman Who Committed Suicide In Notre Dame To Protest Gays, Low IQ Blacks & Muslims In France What Has Happened Since Then…A Rense Video Sunak's Embrace of State Price Controls Doesn't Include Bloated Aid to Kiev British foreign secretary justifies Ukraine’s drone attack on Moscow EU Warns of ‘Measures' Amid ‘Concern’ Over Poland’s Probe of ‘Russian Influence’ Denmark Aims for NATO Spending Target With Huge Ukraine Aid Package Canadian PM Justin Trudeau Says American Pushback Against Woke Politics Is ‘Scary' Moscow drone attack was like ‘a horror film’ NATO forces in Kosovo escalating situation in region Decisive Steps Needed to Ease Tensions in Kosovo, Not West’s ‘Half-Measures’ - Moscow Maidan-style coup attempt unfolding in Belgrade Says Russian ambassador Situation in Kosovo reached critical line, ‘volatile’ - Russian envoy says Russia launches its first all-weather and round-the-clock observation satellite Video - Chinese jet buzzes, shakes USAF plane Elon Musk Tells Chinese FM Qin Gang He Opposes ‘Decoupling’ US From Beijing China explains rebuff of Pentagon’s meeting proposal Nightmare in Manipur - Peace remains elusive in bloody battle over land, identity politics as ethnic clashes singe Indian state US Preparing Terrorist Attacks on Syria’s Crowded Places, Govt Institutions - Russia Russian intel chief says US training IS fighters at own base to destabilize Syria Russia to send fertilizers to Nigeria for free — Lavrov Russia, Burundi finalize agreement on peaceful nuclear energy — Lavrov Uganda passes law to stop human organ harvesting and trade Uke Drones Hit Moscow Residential Homes - Videos Russian Defense Ministry's Statement on Moscow Drone Attacks 4 fallen Uke drones were found In One Moscow Area Russia Issues Arrest Warrant For Lindsey Graham Over 'Killing Russians' Remarks Graham takes ‘immense joy’ from Russia’s reaction to his remarks Graham Criticizes Defense Spending In Debt Ceiling Deal - 'Biggest Winner Of Biden Defense Budget Is China' Legendary Zionist, Vicky Nuland (Nudelman), Dual Citizen Undersecy Of State Still Working To Destroy Ukraine And Force US Into Nuclear War With Russia …A Rense Video The Russian army is actively advancing in the DPR The MASSIVE Media Lies And Satanic Misinformation About The Ukraine War ...Look At The PROOF Belgorod region's governor calls for unification of the Kharkov region with Russia Just Stop Oil’s Hollywood Patron Has Holiday Home in Ireland That he Jets Off to 'When the Going Gets Tough’ - Astonishing Hypocrisy Target Loses Over TEN BILLION Dollars in 10 Days Amid Conservative Boycott US Communists Unhappy Mexico Is Spending Money on Its Own Citizens - The US Isn't Moron NY Mayor Eric Adams signs ‘weight discrimination’ bill into law, says 'body type’ (Obesity And FAT) isn't connected to health Clair Daley - Member of European Parliament Nails The Ukraine War Scam - A Rense Video Russian missiles again hit the Patriot air defense system in Kyiv Belgorod region's governor calls for unification of the Kharkov region with Russia Zelenskyy's Aide Mulls Creating Demilitarized Zone in Russian Regions Bordering Ukraine Ukraine's Public Debt Up $4.4 Billion in April, Exceeds $124 Billion - Lawmaker Civilian killed in Ukrainian shelling of Belgorod Region Ukraine’s military makes no attempt to recapture Artyomovsk, says DPR official Russian forces wipe out Ukrainian arms depot in Kherson area, top brass reports Russia's Kursk to Reinforce Borders After Kiev's Attacks on Neighboring Regions Annexing Kharkov only way to prevent Ukrainian attacks – Belgorod governor What are Portable Anti-Drone Systems and How Do They Work? Russian Forces Strike at Ukrainian Airfields ...Defense Ministry Watch Russia's ‘Solntsepyok’ Heavy Flamethrower System Wipe Out Ukrainian Stronghold Ukrainian Air Force spokesman confirms damage to airfield in Khmelnitsky Region Baphomet Rituals Of Corporate Wokeness Paris Black African & Muslim Invaders ‘We are going to rape all the white women of Europe And behead all the men, we captured Europe, it's ours now!' (is he wrong?) Psychopathic narcassitic women who married themselves - It’s Called sologamy Communist US cities house values are rapidly falling…The SF median price dropped $220k in a year DOJ, Prosecutors Trying To Claw Back Donations Made To J6 Defendants Old Navy To Shutter Downtown San Francisco Store Amid Retail Exodus Carnival Sunshine Cruise Ship Battered By Massive Waves, Leaving Multiple Decks Flooded White Replacement - The All Out Zionist Bolshevik War To Crush Whites In America …A Rense Video Reverse Racism - War On Whitey - A Rense Video Standing Up For Peace On Memorial Day All Wars are Bankers Wars - Vid 7 More Top Level Athletes Hit With Cancer And Heart Attacks - All Felt Perfectly Fine Do you Finally See The BioWeapon 'Time Delay'? The Body's Symptomology Reflex Is Shut Down 100s Of Millions Are Likely Dying And Don't Know! Zero Young Healthy Individuals Died Of COVID-19 Virus - Israeli Data Japan Immunologist - ‘We aren't done with Covid, ...not even close’ Dr. Janci Lindsay, PhD - The DNA Plasmids Infect The E. coli In The Digestive Tract And Turn It Into A Non-Stop Spike Factory (And Will Kill You, Sooner Or Later) Bacterial Plasmid In The CoVid Jabs Explained 37 yr old Italian personal trainer, swimmer suicides because of mRNA Horror How to Use Google's AI Search Experience Right Now Top 10 Tools for Detecting ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, and Claude 12 Major ChatGPT Alternatives Ranked Worst To Best Nvidia's ACE AI Is Coming For Absolutely Every Gaming Job AI is helping astronomers make new discoveries about the universe faster than ever before Researchers find that AI can create better dental crowns farming AI robots taking over - Photos ChatGPT takes center stage as students ditch tutors in favor of AI-powered learning 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton Warns of 'Existential Threat' Posed by AI Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang issues warning to AI-skeptics OpenAI Soars Above Bing Among World's Top 25 Websites 25,000 Traders Bet On ChatGPT’s Stock Picks OpenAI Founder's Worldcoin Reportedly Perpetuates Black Market for Iris Data $30,000,000,000 Exits US Banking System in One Week As Deposit Flight Grows Dollar will retain dominance ‘for decades’ ...Moody’s Debt Ceiling Deal Doesn't Mean Recession Ruled Out 'Ticking time bomb’ - Chinese expert on US debt ceiling deal American teens benefiting from labor shortages Lloyd's Becomes Latest Firm To Exit UN's Net-Zero Alliance World's First 'Battery Tanker’ Slated For 2026 Sea Trials Building BRICS of New World Order - Saudi Push to Join BRICS Bank Will Benefit Kingdom, World President of Brazil advocates Venezuela’s accession to BRICS Venezuela Wants to Become Part of BRICS UK Media Alleges US Senator's Comment That 'Russians Dying' Was ‘Best Money Spent’ Was Kiev-Redacted War between NATO, Russia possible, Czech General Staff head says Sixteen US veterans killed in Ukraine since Russia’s operation began Top Finnish diplomat sees potential ‘collapse’ of OSCE in row over Tallinn’s chairmanship Danish Parliament to Consider Civil Proposal to Legalize Euthanasia French Telecoms Minister Threatens Twitter With Ban in EU Under ‘Disinformation’ Law Spain's Sanchez Dissolves Parliament, Calls Early Elections as His Party Loses Elections No Laughing Matter: John Cleese Holds Line Against Calls To Cancel Scene In 'Life Of Brian' Lavrov - Kosovo Tensions May Lead to ‘Huge Explosion’ in Europe Goal of Aggravation in Kosovo is to Cause Clash Between Serbia and NATO Kosovo PM dreams of becoming new Zelensky Serbia’s army ready to fulfill any order in Kosovo and Metohija — defense minister Serbian president calls on Serbs in Kosovo to refrain from clashes with KFOR Serbian president pleads with int'l community to 'talk some sense' into Kosovo PM 50 injured as NATO troops clash with Serb demonstrators European Parliament Rapporteur Urges Pristina to Withdraw Forces From North Kosovo ‘Clumsy excuses’: Russian Foreign Ministry on claim Graham’s words taken out of context Putin finalizes withdrawal from landmark arms control deal What is the CFE Treaty and Why Has Russia Scrapped It? Putin signs law governing elections in new Russia’s regions Russian forces will ‘react’ to F-16 deliveries ,..Lavrov West's commitment to Zelensky peace formula shows willingness to support genocide - Lavrov ‘Huge Vacuum’ in Strategic Stability Area, Int’l Security Agreement Needed - Kremlin Greenpeace gets tagged as undesirable organization in Russia Biden, Erdogan agree to comprehensively develop US-Turkish relations Putin, Erdogan agree to continue developing bilateral cooperation ‘Clumsy excuses’: Russian Foreign Ministry on claim Graham’s words taken out of context Putin finalizes withdrawal from landmark arms control deal What is the CFE Treaty and Why Has Russia Scrapped It? Putin signs law governing elections in new Russia’s regions Russian forces will ‘react’ to F-16 deliveries ...Lavrov West's commitment to Zelensky peace formula shows willingness to support genocide - Lavrov ‘Huge Vacuum’ in Strategic Stability Area, Int’l Security Agreement Needed - Kremlin Greenpeace gets tagged as undesirable organization in Russia One of China’s biggest cities is so cash strapped, it’s calling in debts Taiwan Says It's In Talks On Being Brought Under US Nuclear Umbrella Biden planning new China crackdown – media Philippine Coast Guard to Hold First Ever Joint Drills With US, Japan Militarization of Asia Pacific to Increase After US, Papua New Guinea Sign Defense Pact US dragging Papua New Guinea into geopolitical games against Russia, China — Zakharova South Korea Gears Up to Feed Europe’s Insatiable Hunger for Weapons Taiwan's Navy to Receive 4th Tuo Chiang Corvette in June Victorious Erdogan promises to fulfill gas hub pledge to Putin Turkey Unbowed Despite ‘Incredible Pressure’ From West Over Ties With Russia, Erdogan Spox Says What Erdogan's Victory Means for World's Geopolitical Balance Kilicdaroglu’s anti-Russian line cost him dearly in election — Russian expert West accepted Erdogan’s victory as color revolution had no chance in Turkey US, EU, NATO would prefer different outcome of Turkish elections — Italian analyst Iran successfully tests hypersonic missile ...aerospace force commander Inlakesh - Washington’s obsession with crushing Russia has dismantled its Middle East agenda Israel Announces Successful Test of Naval Iron Dome System Against Advanced Targets UAE to Develop Spacecraft to Explore Asteroid Belt Between Mars, Jupiter Ex-French colony Central African Republic may host Russian military base – ambassador Kenya interested in developing ties with Russia at Russia-Africa summit — Lavrov Lavrov says 30,000 tons of Russian fertilizers to arrive at Kenyan port within days Nigeria swears in new president Uganda passes anti-gay bill into law Figure skater Piper Gilles has ovarian cancer, goalie Heinz Lindner has testicular cancer, cyclist Jan Polanc retires 'heart irregularities’ cricketer Heath Streak treated for cancer, Golfer Michael Hendry diagnosed with leukemia, footballer goes into cardiac arrest in Liverpool, Oz footballer goes into cardiac arrest mid-game, Do you Finally See The BioWeapon ’Time Delay’? The Body’s Symptomology Reflex Is Shut Down 100s Of Millions Are Likely Dying And Don’t Know! Russia Rightly Condemns Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Despicable Comments on Dead Russians The Three Organized Zionist Waves Of The Cultural And Economic Takedown Of America From The Pritzkers And Obama To Cloward-Piven - A Rense Video 'Kevin Caved’ - McCarthy Savaged Over Debt Ceiling Deal Can This Cowardly Debt Deal Get Through Congress? DeSantis Says He Would Sign Legislation To Defund The ‘Corrupt' IRS Jamie Dimon Denies Involvement With Epstein In Lengthy Deposition As Erdoes Admits She Was Alerted Of Sex Crimes Watch - 'Tranq' Drug Taking Heavy Toll in Philadelphia as Addictions Rise At Least 21 Shot Friday into Saturday Night in Mayor Johnson's Chicago Texas High School Delays Graduation After 85% Of Class Failed Requirements BLM Faces Bankruptcy The Dodgers Have A Grooming Problem US Govt Says It Owns Everyone’s (Your) THOUGHTS… Calling It 'Cognitive Infrastructure’ - Communism Taiwan Says It's in Talks on Being Brought Under The US Nuclear Umbrella - WW3 Macgregor - After Bakhmut…What’s Next? Ukraine demands German missiles capable of striking Moscow Russian MOD Announces Destruction Of Five Uke Warehouses Full Of Ammunition And Weapons F-16s for Ukraine won’t be a game changer Lavrov slams West’s plans to send F-16s to Kiev as unacceptable escalation Lavrov lauds US general’s remark on Ukraine as first step toward understanding reality GMO insects as weapons? US Is Researching It West waging its war against Russia `on all fronts’ – Kremlin Russian Air Defenses Intercept Three UK-Supplied Storm Shadow Cruise Missiles Russia, Belarus fighting with West for multipolar world in interests of all – Lukashenko Why NATO Has No Right to Complain About Russian Nukes in Belarus Stationing Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Belarus Meant as Containment Measure - Minsk Lukashenko says conflict with Ukraine was inevitable, Russia thwarted worst scenario Current Tensions in Kosovo Could Escalate Into Armed Conflict - Serbian Defense Minister Erdogan Wins Re-election To 5 Year Term As President After 20 Years In Power Putin congratulates Erdogan on winning presidential race - Kremlin Lukashenko congratulates Erdogan on being re-elected as Turkish president NEW VIDEO Evidence - Maricopa Co. Elections Officials Illegally Break into Sealed Election Machines after they were Certified and Before the Election - Inserting Reprogrammed Memory Cards - Criminal Nation Documents Show How Shadowy ‘Disinformation’ Groups Collaborate With Communist Media All of the Grooming Pornography and Filth in Classrooms Goes Back to Communst Obama Whose ’Safe Schools' Czar Was Promoting It Kohl’s Under Fire for LGBTQ Fag Merchandise for Babies - Boycott Trannies 'no show’ At CA Girls HS Track Meet Why Is Everything So Homosexual? Blame Soros Correction - Transgender Surgery Provides No Mental Health Benefit Children's Hospital 'Health Hero' Award Given To Trans Democrat Pushing Child Sex Changes Target Faces Rash of Bomb Threats In Wake of Changing Course on LGBT Merchandise The End Of Free Speech That Will End America Jail white men to save the planet – Jane Fonda 1954 - Joe McCarthy vs Ike's Corrupted US Army How Climate Lunatics Crashing Live TV Shows Should Be Handled - A Rense Video Russia Claims Evidence That US Created Avian Flu Variant That Can Travel Person-To-Person With A Death Rate Of Up To 40% at US Biolab in Ukraine Bill Gates-Funded AI Chatbots Promoted COVID Vaccines When lack of safety equals safety Journalists and the Elephant in the Room South Korea Develops GPT-Based AI Alternative to Google, Microsoft New York Lawyer duped by ChatGPT facing legal sanctions AI-Powered Censors Are Coming For Podcasts Bud Light Offers $2.99 18-Pack After Sales Tumble Accelerates Tesla Model Y Passes Toyota Corolla To Become Best Selling Car In The World In 2023 As Interest Rates Rise, The Era Of ‘Deficits Don't Matter' Is Over Starmer Will Block All New North Sea Oil and Gas Developments Western states still buying Russian oil and gas – minister Rights to Queen's Music Catalogue Set to Be Sold For $1.1 Billion, Media Reports DC Scholars Realize De-Dollarization Trend Unstoppable China’s UnionPay Overtakes Visa in Debit Transactions as Global Financial Realignment Continues Argentine Economy Minister Goes to China to Discuss Extension of Currency Swap New Chinese-Made Passenger Plane C919 Makes First Commercial Flight - State Media Russian Railways Ready to Build High-Speed Rail, Launch First Train in 2027 Western Financial Giants ‘Pressure’ Turkish Lira Amid Elections Will Ukraine sink Citigroup? Police station, town hall vandalized amid French pension reform protest - Video French Interior Minister Says Country’s Migration Laws Not Strict Enough Germany's AfD Surges on Back of Growing Mistrust of Greens - Poll EU Official Threatens Twitter For Pulling Out Of Anti-Disinfo Pact Farage - Britain Addicted To 'Cheap Imported Labor’ Let Down By 'Dishonest, Globalist' Conservative Party Over Half of Britons Want UK to Forge Closer Ties With EU - Poll Comedian Arrested In Beijing As Informants Become Norm Again In China, Eroding Mutual Trust Japan Vows 'Destructive Measures' After North Korea Announces Satellite Launch Asiana Halted Sale of Emergency Seats Due to Open Door Incident Is AUKUS Weaponizing Drone Swarms Against China? Pakistan Has The World's Highest Prevalence Of Diabetes (Not US?) US Builds New Base In Northern Syria, Signaling Indefinite, Illegal Occupation Israeli Foreign Minister to Travel to Central Europe to Bolster Ties With EU Allies IRGC Navy Chief Tells US to Get Out of Persian Gulf as Tensions Surge Over 100 killed as attacks on Nigerian villages continue ’Study’ Claims ‘Global warming can cause headaches’ And makes Parkinson’s, ‘stroke, MS & dementia worse’ (!) Deliberately Exaggerating the Risks of Climate Change is Undermining Public Trust in Science and Destroying Young People’s Mental Health Cold Grips Globally - Alaska’s 4th Cold Winter Record Cold Down Under - UK’s Delayed Spring Why Should I Spend £40,000 Making My House More Energy Efficient, Given It Will Take 25 Yrs to Earn That Back in Savings on My Energy Bills? University Researchers Find Arctic Warmer, Ice-Free In Summertime 10,000 Years Ago War On Farms - FDA Bans Farmers from Caring for Their Own Animals Without Costly Vet Approval Satanic Target tells employees only 'extremists’ are concerned with sexualization of children Target’s Fag-Pedophile ‘Celebration’ Of Memorial Day Weekend - Boycott UT Target Store Evacuated after it received a bomb threat for 'turning its back' on LGBT community Newsom fumes at Target for REMOVING satanic LGBTQ+ ‘pride' children’s clothing from stores, accuses CEO of 'selling out LGBTQ+ community’ Anheuser-Busch Remains Suicidal - Hasn't Learned Bud Light Is on 'Pride' Festival Rosters Across US White-Hating Huge Female Negro Hits, Knocks Little White Schoolgirl To Floor, Threatens Her - Video UC Berkeley Goes Full Racist Communist - Faces Huge Backlash As Video From Segregated BLACKS ONLY Graduation Goes Viral Euthanasia Growing In Popularity - A Sweet Death In A Peace Center - Soylent Green (1973) Invasion of the White West Not India Or Brazil Or South Africa It’s Kensington, Philadelphia USA Trump’s Jewish ’Tree Of Life’ Award - Who Owns Donald Trump? Wausau County Mayoral Candidate Names Dual Citizens Controlling The Biden Regime ...And America - Facts DHS funding universities with tax money to BRAINWASH students into believing that Christians and Republicans are ‘Nazis' Transcript - Jeff Rense And Mitchell Henderson On The Jeff Rense Program - 5-16-23 House China Committee Proposes 10 Ways to Prepare for War With China Over Taiwan Ukraine's Depleted Uranium Blast - Europe Now On Brink Of 'Environmental Disaster' Nuland Says US Has Been Helping to Plan Ukraine's Counteroffensive for Months General Milley Insists This ‘Is Not A War Between The United States And Russia. It’s Not A War Between NATO And Russia’ - What Planet Is He Referring To? Ukraine Sent Poor, Untrained Men Into The Bakhmut Meat Grinder - Purging The Goyim Russian air defenses intercept two Storm Shadow missiles, 19 HIMARS rockets Ukraine Loses Over 260 more Troops, Dead, Near Donetsk - MoD Ukraine demands German missiles capable of striking Moscow Zelensky imposes sanctions against 220 Russian, Belarusian companies Uke ‘Сounteroffensive' could start at any moment – Ukrainian official Ukrainian Military Starts Training in German to Operate US Abrams Tanks - Reports Russia expects sanctions to follow against Kiev over threats against Putin – Lavrov 3.5 million Ukrainians entered Russia since February 2022 – official Lavrov Hails China's 'Balanced Position’ On War As Ukraine Asked To Give Up Territory West’s involvement in Ukraine conflict grows day by day - Kremlin spokesman Boris Johnson tried to talk Trump into supporting Ukraine – spokesman Lindsay Graham Meets With Zelensky - Says Ukraine War 'Best Money We've Ever Spent' Future Headline - Pampers Faces Backlash for Trans-Baby Ad Campaign ‘Sir, You’re Scaring the Children’ - Fugly Internet Transes Gone Wild Bill Gates alleged lover linked to Russian ‘spy’ IRS Whistleblower Closing in on DoJ’s 'Cover-Up' of Hunter Biden Case Henry Kissinger Turns 100 - From Clandestine Ops Mastermind to Political Realist CNN Poll Says 66% Of Americans Believe Another Joe Biden Term Will 'Lead To Disaster' LA Nonprofit Giving Meth Pipes To Homeless Sparks Debate Over 'Harm Reduction' Approach Wigington - GeoEngineering Watch Report Cloudy With Showers Of Plastic and The Perfect Pathogen Storm HORRIFIC - Teen Invader MS-13 Murderer, Rapist Placed In Foster Home With Other Kids After Killing US Teen Girl In Her Bedroom TX Sues Biden for ‘Illegally Pre-Approving’ Invaders Through Mobile Cell Phone App Invaders Allowed to Enroll in Chicago Schools Without Health Records After Years of Draconian COVID Rules - Parents Furious Tranny Predator Who 'Identifies As A Teenager’ Pleads Guilty To Enticement Of A Minor Sex Traffickers Are Victimizing Children All Across The US Youth Arrested for Handing Out Bibles BLM Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors Dumped from Warner Bros TV Deal After Producing No Content US Mail Carrier Reports 19 People Have Died on her Route in The Last 4 Months This May Be The General Rule Now…Watch BioWeapon Injection Cancer Pandemic Exploding German study finds ‘vaccination' causes cancer Mike Yeadon Telling It Like It Is Again - Video DNA Contamination and Cancer-Causing Agent SV40 Found in mRNA Vaccines Accidental Discovery Shows There Is A LOT Of DNA In The BioWeapon Injections Clinical trial of mRNA universal Flu vax candidate begins FDA anoints itself the arbiter of truth, despite misleading millions of Americans into injury and death Migratory birds as a bioweapon and new suspicions against the US because of CV-19 OPEC+ Cuts Fail To Boost MidEast Oil Prices IMF Warns Of Prolonged High Interest Rates, Urges Fiscal Tightening To Tackle Inflation Beijing, Seoul Agree on Semiconductor Industry Chains Amid China-US Chip Race US clothing giant Guess expanding in Russia Germans Are Outraged About The Country's Oil And Gas Boiler Ban Saudi Arabia buying up millions of barrels of Russian diesel – data EU Freezes $26 Billion in Private Assets of Sanctioned Russians Since February 2022 UK to retain Russian assets until Kiev is compensated – Guardian EU Commissioner Says Twitter Quitting Bloc's Voluntary Pact Against Disinformation Outrage After Belgium Releases Iranian Spy Chief Charged In Paris Bomb Plot Man Arrested for Ramming Downing St Gates Held on Indecent Child Images Charge Roger Waters subject of German criminal probe over anti-Nazi satire German porn star faces Nazi salute trial Canada’s ‘shocking’ new report on foreign interference has found none Trudeau Championing 2SLGBTQI+ Rights Putin establishes Gagarin award for achievements in space field Russia condemns Pristina’s steps that brought situation to ‘hot phase’ – FM Gagauzia demands that Moldova restores autonomous region’s authority – statement Serbia Orders Troops To Border In ‘High State Of Alert,' Over Kosovo Clashes 80% of Chinese blame US for Ukraine War - study China declining contacts with US military ….Pentagon How Medieval Indian Engineers Built Robots Powered By Water And Clockwork India vows to fight against political bias of ranking agencies Take Two - Turkey's Election Circus Gets Even Crazier Saudi Delegation Arrives in Syria to Discuss Embassy Reopening Millions of Yemeni children on the brink of starvation Africa foresees end of unipolar world – Russian envoy Col Macgregor - We Do Not Understand How Dangerous The Situation With Russia Is Trump Can’t Win Unless He Disavows ‘Warp Speed’, His ‘Beautiful Vaccine’ Statement & Asks Forgiveness From The Dead And Dying - A Rense Video DeSantis Says Trump ‘Turned Over The Country to Fauci’ No Oaths - Biden officials are impostors who swore no allegiance to the United States What BS - WHO Director Demands Sovereignty and Control Over All Member Nations Due to Global Warming Crisis - Dictator Of The World! US has dramatically increased the number of high-security BioWeapons Death Labs FBI says it doesn’t care what anyone thinks it will do whatever it wants, regardless of law The debt ceiling melodrama is a Uniparty diversion from reality Suing Parents For Being Born And Then Suffering - A Rense Video Chinese Illegals Entering America Surge over 900% Mexican President Tells US Hispanics Not to Vote for DeSantis Breakthrough On Debt Deal Would Raise Limit, Cap Spending For Two Years - But Will Freedom Caucus Accept? The Final Countdown - Goldman Sachs Economists Expect US Default by June 9 Failure to Reach US Debt Ceiling Deal Would Cause Contraction in US, World Economies O’Biden WH Calls For BANNING All ‘Extremist Websites’ And ‘Hate Speech’ To Counter ‘Anti-Semitism’ Left seeks to extend voting to prisoners, Invaders & noncitizens to expand base China’s new ambassador to the US calls on 'fellow compatriots' and 'Chinese students’ in the US to work with the Chinese Embassy to 'serve the motherland’ - Think Border Invaders Russia’s top spy tells US and UK to ‘go to hell’ $85 Million Loss of One Million F-35 Spare Parts is 'Business as Usual' for Pentagon Arms Industry Rips Off US Taxpayer to Tune of Trillions for 'Sub-Par' Systems DeSantis Raises $8.2 Million in 24 Hours After Announcing Presidential Bid - Reports 'I Don’t Want To Do Any Of This’ - IRS Whistle Defies Biden Administration And The Media Dallas Schools Roll Out AI 'Pre-Crime’ System To Monitor Student Behavior Queen Elizabeth faced 1983 assassination threat in US – FBI Trump Jr. Explains Woke Brand Boycotts After NBC Smears Conservatives Nutter Newsom Blasts Target CEO 'Sell-Out’ And Claims Nationwide 'Systematic Attack' On LGBTQ People Imminent Target Internal Email Appears To Pivot From Pride To The 'Murder Of George Floyd' Cycling Governing Body Bans Trans Competitors Smith College Drops Use Of Word ‘Field’ As Racially Insensitive - Insane Israel Weaponized Porn To Take America Down Now Uses It On Palestine - Facts Are Facts - Video

Super Affiliate System

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Car T Cells Produced by mRNA Injection Reduce Cardiac Fibrosis, Restore Function

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine have published a method to treat cardiac fibrosis using an mRNA injection that enables an individual’s own CAR T cells to fight the disease. Cardiac fibrosis is a medical condition caused by many different types of heart disease that can lead to scarring and stiffening in the muscle wall of the heart. Normally, cells in the heart called cardiac fibroblasts help to develop the heart and maintain its homeostasis (that is, it helps the heart stay in a stable condition). However, in a patient with cardiac fibrosis, these cells no longer perform their normal function. Following a cardiac injury, fibrosis can progress from scarring to complete heart failure. T cells are a type of white blood cell that play a key role in immune response, killing cells that they recognize to be infected with viruses, cancers, or certain other pathogens. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are T cells that have been engineered to recognize specific proteins as harmful. This enables them to target and kill cells that have proteins from diseases that they otherwise would not recognize as harmful. The Penn researchers developed a CAR T-cell therapy that works by engineering T cells to recognize and kill cells that express (create) the fibroblast activation protein (FAP), a protein key to the pathology of cardiac fibrosis. Killing FAP-expressing cells consequently treats cardiac fibrosis. By encoding a messenger RNA (mRNA) strand that results in the creation of CAR T cells that target FAP, the researchers had the idea to deliver them to a patient’s cells through an injection containing the mRNA within a lipid nanoparticle. Lipid nanoparticles (LNP) are a relatively new technology discovered in the 1990s. To deliver an mRNA strand into cells to provoke a protein-expressing response, the mRNA is inserted into a sphere made of lipids that is injected into a patient. This then allows cells to uptake the LNP through endocytosis (bringing material into the cell). The mRNA then exits the LNP, causing the cell to read the mRNA instructions to create the desired protein. Without the LNP, mRNA would be unable to enter cells. mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are a prominent use of this technology, as the mRNA that gives cells instructions to create the spike protein is protected and brought into cells by LNP. In rodents with cardiac fibrosis, the Penn researchers revealed that their mRNA injection successfully resulted in the creation of FAP-targeting CAR T cells. Observing the hearts of rodents before and after treatment showed notable improvements in cardiac function. This means that as the CAR T cells killed cells that expressed FAP, fibrosis was reduced. In rodents with injuries causing cardiac fibrosis, the CAR T-cell treatment halved the percentage of fibrosis in the ventricles. The implications of this new treatment are of great significance. Reduction of fibrosis and restoration of cardiac function in rodents with cardiac fibrosis reveals a promising new form of treatment for human patients with the potentially fatal disease. According to the CDC, about 659,000 people in the United States die from heart disease each year, accounting for 1 in every 4 deaths–all costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Thus, biotechnological innovations in treatment of cardiac disease can have a great impact. Earlier CAR T-cell therapies have required a patient’s T cells to be extracted from blood, sent to a lab, engineered to find and kill certain targets, then returned intravenously to the patient. This is an extremely time-consuming and cost-prohibitive process, potentially costing patients hundreds of thousands of dollars. The innovation of using mRNA injections to create CAR T cells within a patient’s own body instead of a lab may greatly reduce the time and financial burdens associated with CAR T-cell therapies. Rather than extracting, modifying, and replacing T cells from each patient, mRNA shots that provoke the creation of CAR T cells can be mass-produced and given to any patient. The scope of this innovation reaches far beyond cardiac fibrosis, as it can potentially be applied to CAR T-cell therapies for cancer and other diseases. References National Cancer Institute. (2019, July 30). CAR T cells: Engineering immune cells to treat cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t-cells National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2021, September 27). Heart disease facts. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. (2022, January 4). Understanding mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html Nature Reviews Materials. (2021, February 9). Let’s talk about lipid nanoparticles. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00281-4 Rurik, J. G., et al. (2022, January 7). CAR T cells produced in vivo to treat cardiac injury. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abm0594 Travers, J. G., et al. (2016, March 18). Cardiac fibrosis. Circulation Research. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.115.306565 Share

Show HN: Use Datawiza Access Broker to Enable SSO for Jenkins

Rahul Toppur p Follow 7 min read p Dec 31, 2020 -- Listen Share In this tutorial, we will see how we can deploy the Datawiza Access Broker (DAB) in front of Jenkins. We will also see the features provided by the DAB, such as the ability to pass user header attributes and cookies and implement granular access control. For this tutorial, Jenkins is currently running in a docker container on port 8080: http://{your_jenkins_url}:8080 We’ll take a look at deploying the DAB to protect Jenkins. First, we need to visit https://console.datawiza.com. Once we create an account, we can Create a new Deployment. We also need to generate a set of PROVISIONING KEYS. These keys will later be used in our docker-compose file and will allow the Access Broker to the the latest configuration options from the Management Console. Choose your preferred Identity Provider from the drop-down menu. In this example, we are using Okta as our IdP. You will need to populate these fields with an Okta dev-url, client id, and client secret--all of which can be found in the Okta developer console for your application. Set the Upstream Server to http://{your_jenkins_url}:8080. This is the URL where Jenkins is running locally on your machine. Set the Public Domain to the URL where you want the user to externally access your application. The Default Action option is the default action taken by the Access Broker if no rules are found. Set this option to Allow for now--we can always change this field once we specify some rules later. Make sure to note down the PROVISIONING_KEY and PROVISIONING_SECRET. A sample docker-compose file is provided for you--feel free to use this when launching the DAB. After creating and specifying our deployment options in the DCMC, we can use docker-compose to deploy the Datawiza Access Broker. We can use docker-compose -f docker-compose-jenkins.yaml up -d to start the service. If we set the resource limit in our docker-compose file, we need to add --compatibility in docker-compose command. Now, when we visit http://{your_jenkins_url}:8080, we will be redirected to the Okta login page. If we set the Upstream Server to http://{your_jenkins_url}:8080, the docker-compose file will be: version: "3"services: access-broker-jenkins: container_name: access-broker-jenkins image: registry.gitlab.com/datawiza/access-broker ports: - "8090:8090" environment: PROVISIONING_KEY: ########################## PROVISIONING_SECRET: ########################## # We can add configuration options here to set the access broker's resources # deploy: # resources: # limits: # cpus: '1' # memory: 512M We still need to set a few configuration options on Jenkins to delegate the authentication process to the Access Broker. We’ll utilize the DAB’s ability to pass user header-attributes to our applications. After making these changes on the DCMC, we need to set up the Reverse Proxy Auth plugin in Jenkins to make sure it is expecting to see the user Header-Attributes we plan to pass along with our request. 2. Add the Reverse Proxy Auth in Jenkins: After installing the plugin, go to the Manage Jenkins page and click Configure Global Security. In Authentication, select HTTP Header by reverse proxy: We have already set email and groups as Expected values in the DCMC. So, we need to make sure that the values of the headers match: These values should be identical to the ones we specified in the Expected section in the DCMC for our Header-Attributes. In addition, we can also set the Custom Log Out URL in the Advanced settings: It should be set to http://{your_jenkins_url}/ab-logout . Make sure to save your changes when finished! Now, when we visit our Jenkins URL, we should be prompted to sign in once more with our IdP. Once we have been authenticated, we should see our Okta username in the right-hand corner. We can use the logout button which will redirect to the Okta login page as well. The Datawiza Access Broker also allows us to use https connections for our applications. We can configure this setting by visiting the DCMC. 2. Toggle the SSL option and chose to use either Self-Signed certificates or Upload your own. 3. Make sure to also change your Jenkins URL, since we are now using https: For example, let’s say that we only want people in the group jenkins_manage to have access to our Jenkins resource. We can set our rules in the DCMC accordingly: We set the Default Action to Deny. We add a rule — only allow members in the group jenkins_manage to have access to our resource. Now, people who don’t belong to our specified group will be denied when they try to access our /manage resource. 2. Use the existing Jenkins access-control with the Datawiza Access Broker Jenkins also has its own Authorization configuration options. With the Access Broker and the Reverse Proxy Auth, we can set the Authorization options for people and for groups. For example: Once we specify our options, click Save. If a user is part of the jenkins_admin group, they should see a similar page when they log in. Note that they are able to see the “Manage Jenkins” menu option. However, if a member of the jenkins_read group logs in, they will only be able to see the following page. Note that this user cannot access the “Manage Jenkins” menu. Configuring webhooks are as simple as creating a new rule on the DCMC. We simply need to specify a new Resource Path and a Rule Type, and we are all set! 2. If using https for Jenkins, we also need to change the configuration of our webhooks. In this case, we have chosen to use https and have skipped certificated verification (if we are using self-signed certificates).

China slams ‘clean network’ plan and reminds world of USA's ECHELON snoop-fest

China has ridiculed America's plan to build a "clean network" free from Chinese tech and businesses, particularly in its telecoms infrastructure. The criticism came via an interview with China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, and state-run media outlet Xinhua. The interview appears to have been designed to let Yi speak his mind, rather than a probing of his positions. So one of the questions was: "The US is going after Huawei in every possible way, and has declared to build a coalition of 'clean countries' to counter China. Many see this as a reflection of US anxiety and fear. What is your take on this?" Yi answered by saying: "Without any solid evidence, the US has launched a global campaign against a private Chinese company. This is a textbook example of bullying. Everyone can see easily and clearly that the US goal is to keep its monopoly in science and technology but deny other countries the legitimate right to development. It doesn't even bother to disguise its bullying." The minister next pointed out that the USA is more than happy to conduct its own electronic surveillance. "I'd like to stress again that Huawei and many other Chinese companies, unilaterally sanctioned by the US, are innocent. Their technologies and products are safe to use, and they have never done any harm to any country," he said. "In stark contrast, the US is behind such scandals as PRISM and ECHELON. It conducts wire-tapping and mass surveillance around the globe, and these wrongful acts are already an open secret. The US is not qualified to build a coalition of 'clean countries' because itself is dirty allover." h2 p The foreign minister then defended China's efforts "to work with all countries to maintain a fair, just, open and non-discriminatory business environment, promote international exchanges and cooperation in science and technology, and ensure that safe, reliable and quality information technology will boost global economic recovery and help improve people's lives around the world." And he expressed his hope "that the US will give up its obsession with its narrow self-interest, and return to the right track of openness and cooperation." The Trump administration's announcement of its "clean network" plan singled out the Chinese Communist Party as the reason for its objections to China, labelling it a "malign actor". In his riposte, Yi insisted the party has the support of the people, then criticised the United States for disengaging with international bodies in which the two nations could thrash out their differences. He therefore called for the USA to "abandon the zero-sum mentality and stand up to shared responsibilities". "COVID-19 again makes it clear that humanity is a community with a shared future. Our world still faces many global challenges. Traditional and non-traditional security challenges are intertwined. Almost all regional and international hotspot issues require a coordinated response from China, the US and other countries," he added. "China and the US must always bear in mind the well-being of mankind, live up to their responsibilities as two major countries, coordinate and cooperate as needed in the UN and other multilateral institutions, and work together for world peace and stability." ®

Show HN: Bojagi – Drag designers to code reviews

Ship Flawless UIs in Shorter Cycle Times Bojagi enables instant feedback on visual & interactive web components so UI issues get resolved immediately. p p Streamline UI development, perfect product quality. Bojagi empowers design and development teams with instant, close-knit collaboration on UI development. Our tool works by extracting React components from your web app, and then presenting them in their full visual & interactive state. Designers can then test and leave feedback on new and updated components. All feedback is relayed to developers via GitHub, who can then make immediate changes to skyrocket product quality. Designer Friendly No background in development or coding is required. Bojagi is an intuitive, easy-to-use tool that designers can adopt in minutes. GitHub Integration Bojagi has been built specifically for GitHub integration. Collaborating with developers has never been this easy. Storybook Support Already using Storybook? Get started in minutes! Enjoy seamless Storybook Stories integration. Your order status: Shipped Address: Hans Wurst Straße 3212345 Berlin Change to Gray Move icon here Visual & Interactive Components Test Your Design Ideas Early. Bojagi renders components in real HTML and CSS. Get an up-close, detailed look at how each component will appear in your final shipped product. Analyze each component carefully. Leave tailored, meaningful feedback. Keep a record of past component versions for future comparison. You can also play around with each component’s full interactive features. Take your time to thoroughly stress-test functionality, so you find issues before your users do. Instant Feedback Resolve UI Issues In The Same Dev Cycle. Never again let design debt and a backlog of UI issues cripple your new feature release. With seamless GitHub integration, you can instantly relay feedback to developers, so UI issues get resolved immediately. Simply review developer changes, leave comments and approve the merge once resolved. You can even annotate feedback with drawings, so you literally point to the issue at hand! Adela Milburn 10 minutes ago Can you change the username text color? Talan Curtis 3 minutes ago Done! Adela Milburn now Thanks, looks good now Adela approved the component Ready to Merge Integrate with your workflows Bring your design to life, exactly the way you planned it. Using Bojagi, designers can be set as the final gatekeepers of UI and product release quality. As developers build or update components, you can approve, comment on or reject designs. If issues are not resolved, the task is not signed off by the designer. Bojagi also works in any continuous-integration environment, and can be tailored to your workflows. Wanna be strict? Set designers as required approvers to merge Pull Requests. Or, be casual and ping them in Slack, so they can see their designs in action. Find & resolve UI issues earlier than ever before. By the time your product or feature is released to a test environment, it’s already too late to make meaningful changes. Bojagi lets you skip the queue, so you can test and give immediate feedback when it matters most. p p

Fast SQLite backed completion plug-in for Neovim

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A Natural Protein That Stops Allergies and Autoimmune Conditions

For the millions of us plagued by hypersensitive, overactive, or downright abusive immune systems, it can feel like you're constantly fighting your own physical self. From incessant allergies to life-threatening anaphylaxis and debilitating autoimmune disease, the system that's supposed to be protecting us can be problematic when it goes wrong. Now, we might be closer to fixing these issues in an entirely new way. Using transgenic mice and cultures of cells taken from human tonsils, researchers have now found evidence of how our bodies might defend against the mistakes that result in conditions such as asthma, food allergies, and lupus. They found a protein called neuritin, produced by immune cells. It acts a bit like an inbuilt, boss-level antihistamine. "There are over 80 autoimmune diseases, in many of them we find antibodies that bind to our own tissues and attack us instead of targeting pathogens - viruses and bacteria," explained immunologist Paula Gonzalez-Figueroa from the Australian National University (ANU). "We found neuritin suppresses formation of rogue plasma cells which are the cells that produce harmful antibodies." We have known for some time that the immune system's regulatory T cells suppress self-targeting antibodies and immunoglobulin E (IgE) - the antibodies that instigate release of the notorious histamines in response to allergies - but not how. It took Gonzalez-Figueroa and her team five years to work it out, with the help of genetically engineered mice and lab-grown human cells. In another of biology's usual games of chain reactions, a special class of cells called follicular regulatory T (or Tfr) pumps out neuritin, which turns down production of IgE (this is its antihistamine action) and suppresses other processes that send plasma cells out on self-targeting missions (hence, quashing our autoimmune responses), the researchers found. Mice without the ability to produce neuritin had an increased chance of dying from anaphylaxis when injected with albumin from an egg. These mice, genetically bred to lack neuritin-producing Tfr cells, grew a population of faulty plasma cells early on in their life. These are the cells that developed self-antigens. But when the team treated Tfr-deficient mice by injecting neuritin into their veins, they had some striking results. "Tfr-deficient mice treated with neuritin appeared healthy," Gonzalez-Figueroa and colleagues wrote in their paper, explaining the treatment led to the disappearance of the rogue B cell population too. The team cautions they're yet to understand the full pathway involved in these immune mechanisms, or the effects of neuritin on other cellular processes. While neuritin has been studied in human nervous systems for quite some time, the exact way it triggers cells hasn't been clear. To find out, white cells from human blood and tonsils were analysed in the presence of the protein, revealing clues on it acting internally. The results could lead to a better understanding of how we might use neuritin in the future to treat immune conditions. "This could be more than a new drug - it could be a completely new approach to treat allergies and autoimmune diseases," Vinuesa said. "If this approach was successful, we would not need to deplete important immune cells nor dampen the entire immune system; instead, we would only need to use the proteins our own body uses to ensure immune tolerance." If they're right, and neuritin proves safe, it may one day allow the growing number of us facing allergies and autoimmune diseases some peace with our own bodies. Watch this space. This paper was published in Cell .

The Death of the Dream Job

When I was young, my dream job was to be a horse. I didn’t want to be a horse girl, but a girl who is a horse. This made sense to me back then and also now. People respect horses, whose reputation is unimpeachable. Their work often consists of clear, concise tasks, like pulling a plow from one end of a field to another or carrying a child in circles around a fenced-in ring. Their basic needs are also generally met: At the end of the day, they get fed hay and their little iron shoes get cleaned out and they sleep in a house with high ceilings. My dream did not materialize, but as I entered the workforce, my early sense of what a dream job actually was only deepened. I wanted to do something I cared about and have my life taken care of in the process, but I always had some understanding that even the most fulfilling, best-paid job in the world would also still be work. After all, no one sees a horse pulling a cart and thinks that they aren’t laboring. Horses aren’t doing laps with fidgety nine-year-olds in their off-hours. No one says to a horse, “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.” Some of this is only becoming more obvious, including to myself, in an era when stable, full-time employment is evaporating, and holding on to any job is its own kind of feat. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the failed political response to the pandemic has left nearly 16 percent of the workforce—26.8 million people—unemployed or employed but losing hours and pay. And having work isn’t necessarily a guarantee against hardship—even before the current recession, one in nine workers received wages too low to get out of poverty, even if they worked full-time hours. But the idea of a dream job is still catnip. There’s a slew of self-help articles advertising tips on how to Land Your Dream Job by the End of the Year or 9 Genuine Steps to Quit Your Job and Fulfill Your Dream. Indeed.com lists info for 25 dream jobs, three-quarters of which have an average national salary of less than $50,000 per year. A Mattress Firm internship, in which “Snoozeterns” are “encouraged” to sleep during work, making it literally a dream job, received more than 2,000 applicants. (One Snoozetern told me that she didn’t actually end up sleeping on the job, but she found the internship program fulfilling nonetheless.) There are Reddit threads for commonly romanticized jobs—park ranger, zookeeper, pilot—where posters ask detailed questions about how to actually make a career in one of these fields (“I love animals, but also have no training or special training with larger animals than a cat and dog. Is there anything I can do to work [at] a zoo with larger animals?”). Some dream job listings go viral, like the one from San Francisco’s East Brother Light Station, which advertised an opening for a couple to live and work in a historic lighthouse-turned-inn for $130,000 (total) per year. With people imagining an idyllic life out on the ocean—crucially, the lighthouse has no Wi-Fi—the East Brother Light Station ended up fielding thousands of applications, only 60 of them coming from actually qualified couples, since the job requires a valid U.S. Coast Guard license. But when, almost a year later, The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Tiffany Danse and Tyler Waterson, the lucky people who landed the position, the dream seemed much more like, well, a job. “We are the reception desk. We run the gift shop. We make the beds. We cook the meals. Tyler is your captain and local history guide,” Danse said. The couple told the Chronicle that they worked 80-to-90-hour weeks. It’s not hard to see why these kinds of jobs are so enticing. The concept of the dream job still persists, likely because so many of us are working in what the late David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” or are simply not employed at all. Finding your dream job is a seductive idea: the do-gooder, Protestant version of the FIRE movement—rather than trying to escape work, why not try loving it instead? It’s a relatable impulse, but I imagine most dream jobs are more like running a lighthouse bed-and-breakfast for 40 paying guests than a paid vacation. Andrew Smith, who has worked as an interpretive ranger at Glacier National Park for four summers, told me that he loves his job, which mostly involves mediating between park visitors and the park itself. There are clear perks to being a park ranger—getting to know a natural site day in and day out is a kind of intimate experience that tourists don’t get to experience. Smith lives in park housing and is happy that he spends his days mainly outdoors, the dream of many metro-locked middle-managers, even if much of it involves dealing with frustrated tourists who can’t find parking at a popular trailhead. But Smith told me that he still sees his job very much as work, with all the precarity that often comes with it. “Doing what you love as work is not the same as doing it as a hobby,” Smith said. “Going on a hike in uniform is just a fundamentally different experience than going out on my day off and enjoying the park that way.” Because Smith, like most national park employees, is a seasonal worker (right now he’s not employed by the park), his employment and benefits, while good during the park season, are unstable. Smith told me that some people leave park service when they turn 26 and can no longer stay on their parents’ health insurance. In the off-season, Smith works as a substitute teacher. Unless he lands a rare permanent park job, he can’t see it as a long-term career. Caroline Lange, a cookbook recipe tester, feels similarly lucky that she loves what she does. “My friend says it’s like a rom-com job, which I think is really accurate,” Lange said. “You don’t even realize it exists until you meet someone who does it.” But testing recipes isn’t quite like living in a Nancy Meyers film—Lange said that the majority of her job isn’t actually cooking, but schlepping groceries. It’s more physically demanding than people realize (she’s on her feet for much of the day), and since the gigs are freelance, Lange has no paid sick days and is insured on the most basic state exchange plan, which comes with an enormous deductible. What if your job was to explore the ocean for a living? Hillary Krumbholz is a research diver for a university in California, which means that every summer, she gets to go out on a boat and spend her days diving off the coasts of Monterey Bay, Carmel, and Big Sur, and into underwater kelp forests. The days when the dive is good, at remote sites no one can access, Krumbholz says that she remembers exactly why she loves her work; she tells me that she is definitely doing her dream job. But much of that job, she also notes, is cleaning up—cleaning up personal gear, cleaning up the sampling gear, cleaning up the group gear. When I asked what might surprise people to hear about her work, she thought for a second and then said that she’s constantly cold. “We bring five-gallon hot water buckets with us, and during our surface intervals, we’re just dipping our hands inside of this hot water trying to warm up,” Krumbholz said. And like other dream jobs I learned about, it’s not enough to survive on: During off-seasons, Krumbholz  also works as a substitute teacher and an aquarium dolphin tank cleaner; since being on university health insurance would mean she’d constantly lose it during the off-season, Krumbholz decided to stay on the state exchange instead. There are certainly dream jobs that are more secure—the concept is a slippery one; for some herbs, being a high-paid corporate lawyer is the dream. But many so-called dream jobs look a lot like most jobs in America: unstable, tenuous, and part of a patchwork of gigs. That these jobs involve a good amount of grunt work is no big surprise; nor does it take away from the satisfaction of doing something you love. But the widespread notion of finding meaning in work is a fairly new one, as Jill Lepore recently pointed out in The New Yorker . Unsurprisingly, it’s an invention of bosses—the idea that work isn’t supposed to suck changed in the 1970s, experts told Lepore, when “managers began informing workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose in work.” With people who are lucky enough to still have a job now working longer hours than before the pandemic, it’s not hard to see the susceptibility to this kind of messaging—when workers have so little agency about the conditions of their daily life, why not focus on the things that seem to be in their control? Doing what you “love” can sometimes blunt the impact of doing that work for long hours and for little pay. Still, the intended audience for this messaging about passion and purpose is deeply stratified by class—it is largely targeted to white-collar workers in nonprofit, tech, media, and other industries with job titles like Chief Fun Officer. But the message around loving what you do can be warped to circumstance: People who work in low-income industries like care work, fields dominated by women of color and immigrant workers, are often exploited in part because they are supposed to love what they do. The language of “family,” often weakly invoked in startup culture, is literalized in fields like home health care, where the work is life-giving and incredibly intimate. This can be the frame—duty, family—through which poor wages and other workplace abuses are ignored. This isn’t to say that loving what you do is bad—we all want to find meaning where we can in our lives, and many of these dream jobs involve caring for others and the natural world—but the romanticization of certain types of work can obscure the simple fact that they are jobs and, like any job, require mass organizing to suck less.  A common mantra among park rangers is, “You get paid in sunrises and sunsets.” The implication is that if you’re working your dream, you’ll take any conditions that come with it. Smith told me that he hates that saying. “The sunrises and sunsets are beautiful, but they don’t put food on the table,” he said. We should understand work as work, and that no job, no matter how much you love it, is an exception. Smith said that something a more senior ranger once said sticks with him: “What’s the issue with giving people decent jobs that allow them to have decent lives?” This reality might sound deflating, especially for a kid thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, but looked at another way, it can also be quite enchanting. If a dream job is like any other job, then isn’t making all jobs better the dream?

Foam-up, a CLI to quickly and efficiently bootstrap your next foam project

I’m using foam to organize my notes and blog posts. I have several repositories, for this blog, for customer-story-consulting.com and work projects. Once a foam project is set up, it’s great to use. But getting there is a bit of a stretch. From what I can tell, there’s a template repository, but it’s always tedious to go through it and remove all the example content. In the end, it turns out, there are only a few directories and files required to set up a new Foam project. I need a .foam folder, holding templates/, and .vscode/extensions.json to list foam and a few other extensions. On top of that, we also need an inbox.md file and todo.md. Once that all is in place, we’re good to go. To make matters more manageable for me (and hopefully others, too), it was time for a small utility that helps to create new foam projects without having to clone and modify a template repository. There’s foam-up, a CLI written in Rust to help with the bootstrapping work. foam-up is written in Rust, and you can install it via cargo install: A new foam project looks like this: .foam/templates already has a blog post template ready for you, so you can get started with blogging right away. What are your thoughts on this? What do you use foam for? Source Code h3 Loading...

Face masks and gloves found on 30% of UK beaches in clean-up

Discarded masks and other items of personal protective equipment were found on nearly a third of beaches surveyed by beach-cleaning volunteers this autumn. The Marine Conservation Society’s annual beach clean found items of PPE on 30% of the areas they cleaned up. The most common items of pollution found in coastal areas were pieces of plastic or polystyrene, plastic takeaway cup lids, and wet wipes. Volunteers carried out beach cleans in 385 coastal areas in September, covering 43,958 metres of beach. This year, due to the coronavirus crisis, PPE featured for the first time on the beaches surveyed. Masks and gloves were also found by volunteers in 69% of inland litter picks. Volunteers participate in a beach litter clean-up in Cornwall. Photograph: Marine Conservation Society/PA Lizzie Prior, the Great British Beach Clean coordinator at the Marine Conservation Society, said: “The amount of PPE our volunteers found on beaches and inland this year is of concern. Considering mask-wearing was only made mandatory in shops in England in late July, little more than three months before the Great British Beach Clean, the sharp increase in PPE litter should be a warning for what could be a new form of litter polluting our beaches in the future.” Like many other single-use items, disposable face masks and gloves posed a threat to wildlife on land and at sea, she said. Marine animals could mistake face masks and gloves for prey, filling their stomachs with materials that will not break down and could prove to be fatal. Animals also risk being tangled in the straps of face masks, with seabirds’ feet pictured recently being wrapped in the elastic strings. Drinks litter continues to be found on UK beaches, with an average of 30 drinks containers, caps and lids found per 100 metre of beach surveyed this year. Inland, almost all litter picks (99%) found drinks litter. US and UK citizens are world’s biggest sources of plastic waste – study Dr Laura Foster, head of clean seas at the Marine Conservation Society, said: “This year’s data … shows just how crucial it is that Wales, England and Northern Ireland follow in the footsteps of Scotland and urgently introduce an all-inclusive deposit return scheme. The government has said it will introduce a DRS but only from 2023. “Despite lockdown, with many of us spending more time at home, littering in public spaces has continued unabated. Almost every single local litter pick found at least one drinks container, which is incredibly concerning. An effective deposit return scheme would take the UK one step closer to a circular economy model and drastically reduce the volume of single-use pollution in the UK’s streets, parks and on our beaches.” 1 Plastic and polystyrene pieces (0-50cm) – 167.2 found per 100 metre of beach surveyed 2 Plastic and polystyrene caps and lids – 19.7 3 Wet wipes – 17.7 4 Cigarette stubs – 16.2 5 Plastic string – 15.8

Former Uber security chief faces criminal charges for hiding 2016 breach

Federal prosecutors have charged former Uber security chief Joe Sullivan with obstruction of justice for hiding a 2016 data breach from Federal Trade Commission investigators. Sullivan is now the chief security officer at Cloudflare. In an emailed statement, a spokesman for Sullivan said the government's charges have "no merit." "From the outset, Sullivan and his team collaborated closely with legal, communications and other relevant teams at Uber, in accordance with the company’s written policies," the spokesman wrote. "Those policies made clear that Uber’s legal department—and not Mr. Sullivan or his group—was responsible for deciding whether, and to whom, the matter should be disclosed." The criminal complaint, filed Thursday, suggests that Uber's then-CEO Travis Kalanick was aware of the breach and Sullivan's efforts to cover it up. It also concedes that Uber's general counsel may have been aware of the breach by April 2017. But it argues that Sullivan kept others involved in Uber's FTC response in the dark about the incident. In 2014, Uber suffered a data breach after hackers found cloud storage credentials hard-coded in Uber source code that an Uber engineer accidentally published on GitHub. The credentials provided access to live data stored on Amazon's S3 cloud storage service. The hackers gained access to names and driver's license numbers for around 100,000 Uber drivers, as well as a much smaller number of bank account and Social Security numbers. The breach triggered an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. In November 2016, the FTC interviewed Sullivan. He had joined Uber in 2015 after five years as Facebook's chief security officer (we interviewed him in 2013 and 2014), so he hadn't been around during the 2014 breach. But as Uber's new security chief, it was his job to explain the situation to the FTC's investigators. According to the criminal complaint, Sullivan "elaborated that it was common at the time to write access IDs and other secrets directly into code when that code needed to call for information from another service." Ten days after his testimony, Sullivan learned that Uber had suffered a second breach that was a near replay of the first one. This time, a hacker reportedly stole credentials to gain access to Uber's private code on GitHub. And that code still had some hard-coded Amazon S3 credentials. The hackers gained access to around 600,000 names and drivers' license numbers. Uber's security team immediately recognized that it would be embarrassing to announce a second breach while the FTC was still investigating the first one. "Information is extremely sensitive and we need to keep this tightly controlled," one internal document said. So Uber decided to treat the breach as part of its bug bounty program. Under that program, Uber pays white-hat hackers for information about vulnerabilities in its software. Ordinarily, payments are less than $10,000 and hackers aren't supposed to exploit vulnerabilities to access user data. And in bug bounty cases, hackers are allowed to publicly disclose a vulnerability once Uber has fixed the vulnerability. But Uber's lawyers wrote a special contract for these hackers. In exchange for an unusually large $100,000 payment, the hackers signed a strict non-disclosure agreement. The deal asked hackers to state—falsely—that they had not accessed any user data. According to prosecutors, Kalanick was aware of this plan. At 1am on November 15, Sullivan texted Kalanick. "I have something sensitive I'd like to update you on if you have a minute," he wrote. Ten minutes later—and presumably after a phone conversation—Kalanick texted Sullivan back. "Need to get certainty of what he has, sensitivity/exposure of it and confidence that he can truly treat this as a 🐛 bounty situation... resources can be flexible in order to put this to bed but we need to document this very tightly." It was a full year before the FTC learned about the 2016 breach. Kalanick was forced out as Uber's CEO in June 2017 and replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi a couple of months later. When Khosrowshahi learned about the situation, he fired Sullivan and reported the new breach to the FTC. The FTC withdrew a tentative settlement agreement and the investigation dragged on for another year before the case was finally settled in 2018. The feds say Uber's cover-up may have prevented law enforcement from bringing the hackers to justice earlier. In the year between the breach and Uber's disclosure of it, the pair used similar techniques to hack several other large companies. If Uber had reported the breach promptly, it's possible that the feds would have caught the hackers responsible much earlier and saved some other companies from the same fate. The government's complaint doesn't accuse Sullivan of directly lying to the FTC. But it portrays Sullivan as the mastermind of Uber's efforts to keep the FTC in the dark. Sullivan's press statement suggests that he will fight the charges by arguing that he wasn't personally responsible for Uber's handling of the situation. The government's brief acknowledges that Kalanick also knew the breach occurred and authorized an unusually large payment to the hackers to keep it under wraps. But the government claims that few others at Uber knew about it. For example, Sullivan was consulted on a draft of a letter Uber sent to the FTC in April 2017. It touted Uber's record of cooperation with the agency, including its practice of voluntarily submitting relevant information to the agency. In response, Sullivan wrote, "Letter looks ok to me." The final version of that letter touted the new security measures Uber had put into place since the 2014 breach, including "extensive additional protections for the data it stores [Uber] stores in the S3 datastore" and "company-wide improvements in credential protection and management." FBI agent Mario Scussel, the author of the government complaint, wrote that "based on my investigation, I do not believe that any of the individuals responsible for drafting the April 19 letter to the FTC had been made aware of the 2016 data breach." But in a footnote, he hedges this broad statement, acknowledging that Uber's general counsel may have known the breach occurred. He added, "I have seen no evidence that the general counsel was aware of the details, such as the nature of the attack or the PII that was stolen."

Cleopatra: Last Ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty

Born towards the end of 70 BC or beginning of 69 BC, Cleopatra was of Macedonian heritage and reigned as an Egyptian queen, ruling an empire that included Egypt, Cyprus, part of modern-day Libya and other territories in the Middle East. She was the first Ptolemaic queen with her head and name minted on coins, and grew up immersed in Egyptian education and culture. She was multilingual, and the first "Egyptian" queen to visit Athens. Her father, Ptolemy XII Auletes conceived six children: Cleopatra Tryphaena, the eldest, Berenice IV (who had her husband Cybiosactus strangled after three days... and was later executed by her father's order on matters unrelated), Cleopatra, Arsinoe IV (who Cleopatra had assassinated), and two sons Ptolemy XIII, and XIV (also assassinated on her orders), both of whom shared the throne with her during various times. Her mother is unknown but may have been Cleopatra v Tryphaena. During her reign, the Nile overflowed Egypt's banks every summer and receded every autumn leaving behind fertile mud. Alexandria's principle exports were papyrus, linen, scent, salt, oil, ivory, architectural and sculptural stones, emeralds, silver utensils, glass vases, along with various woolen goods. Alexandria's Library and its Museum, founded by Ptolemy I Soter, featured fine gardens, fountains, restaurants and became research centers for the Mediterranean world. It was a place where scholars lived tax free. Cleopatra first ascended the throne in 51 BC with her brother Ptolemy XIII as co-monarch. Some time between June and September of 49 BC, it's likely that she took refuge in Upper Egypt then outside of Egypt altogether. Later Papyrus attributes year three of her reign to her younger brother Ptolemy XIII. In retrospective, it would appear as if Ptolemy XIII were king since the death of their father, Ptolemy XII Auletes. Following her return to Alexandria at 21-years-old, an enamored Julius Caesar took her political side against Ptolemy XIII, her half-brother and husband, who later lost his life escaping from a massacre on March 27 (47 BC) along Lake Mareotis. Unable to rule without a co-monarch, her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, was elevated to the position at about age 12. In total, she bore four offsprings: Ptolemy Caesar (December 48 BC), twins Alexander and Cleopatra (autumn of 40 BC), and Ptolemy Philadelphus, (36 BC). While various accusations have been made against her and at times taken as facts, notably that the predominant element in her character was sexuality, there's no evidence that she took any other lovers aside from Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Not one surviving portrait exists that can confidently be believed to represent Cleopatra. It's speculated that she may have had a dark complexion. Her makeup was probably elaborate, as was Egyptian custom. "Atimony and lampblack were applied to the eyebrows and eyelids with round-ended rods, ochre was applied to the lips with a brush, the nails and sole of the feet and palms of the hands were dyed with henna." Cleopatra, the last Ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, lived until the age of 39, possibly poisoning herself after learning of Mark Antony's suicide and was found lying on a golden couch, dressed in royal robes. In the blog post "An Exhaustive Guide to Pearls: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know," you can read about how she attempted to feed Mark Antony pearls as part of the "most expensive meal ever."

Self-driving car users shouldn't be accountable for accidents, report suggests

Drivers should be reclassified when operating a fully autonomous vehicle and not be held legally accountable for any road accidents, a new report has proposed. Rather, the company behind the driving system should be responsible, according to the law commissions for England, Wales and Scotland. Have driverless cars stalled? The slow road to driverless cars Driverless Cars: Uber car involved in fatal crash had software flaws The law commissions were asked to look into self-driving cars back in 2018 with the ultimate goal of publishing a series of reports for a regulator framework for autonomous vehicles and their use on public roads. While driverless car technology has been deployed in various settings, the technology is still not ready to be fully implemented on the UK's roads. The report, which will be laid before UK, Scottish and Welsh governments for consideration, would potentially force wholesale changes for both car makers and road safety laws. It recommends that a clear definition of 'autonomous cars' is legally stipulated to avoid future confusion. This, it states, should create a "clear bright line" between systems that require attention and those that do not. This would help tackle the "problem of passivity", according to the report, which cites research into human behaviour that shows people find it difficult to monitor a task passively, rather than when one is fully engaged. "Once their eyes and minds wander away from the road, they have limited ability to respond appropriately to events," the report said. "They should not be held accountable for failing to notice problems." RELATED RESOURCE Seven leading machine learning use cases Seven ways machine learning solves business problems FREE DOWNLOAD In 2018, an Uber test vehicle hit and killed Elaine Herzberg as she attempted to cross a road with her bicycle. Reports have since suggested the car had software faults, specifically that the system couldn't distinguish Herzberg from the bike. However, there was also a driver in the car, who was said to be watching a TV show on his phone at the time of the crash. It's incidents such as this that the report is looking to address. It states that having a system that still requires "passive" attention is flawed, and recommends that a new "authorisation" scheme is needed to decide whether an autonomous is or is not 'self-driving' as a matter of law. This would mean laws will need to change so that the person in the driving seat is no longer classified as a 'driver'. They will be the 'user-in-charge' and have immunity from a range of offences related to the way the vehicle drives, including forms of dangerous driving and exceeding the speed limit. Other makers of autonomous cars, such as Tesla, have already seen a number of fatalities with their self-driving vehicles. Most recently, two men died when their Tesla veered into a tree and caught fire. An investigation into the crash is still ongoing with law enforcement and Tesla boss Elon Musk disputing whether the car's autonomous features were engaged and, as such, at fault for the crash. This accident is also relevant to the law commission's report because Tesla allegedly failed to hand over data for the car to the police. Under the proposed laws, such data must be made accessible and there would also be sanctions for car makers that fail to reveal how their systems work.

What I Think of Bitcoin

Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour on the Big Picture Dynamics Facing Investors May 9, 2023 Karen joins the 2023 Sohn Investment Conference to discuss the major shifts — both near-term and long-term — that are likely to have a significant impact on economies and markets. Karen Karniol-Tambour on What’s Shaping Capital Markets Today May 1, 2023 Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour joins a panel of industry leaders at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference to discuss a wide range of topics impacting global capital markets and investors. Karen focuses on current credit conditions, the asymmetry she’s seeing in the markets, the paradigm shift from a low inflation world, China as a diversifier, and more. An Update from Our CIOs: The Tightening Cycle Is Beginning to Bite April 14, 2023 Last year’s historically large and rapid tightening is starting to constrict the financial system and slow the economy. This is necessary and will need to be sustained to restore equilibrium conditions. Deglobalization Raises the Value of Geographic Diversification April 3, 2023 Differences in macro conditions and the corresponding policy responses and market action are as large as they have been in 40 years. Co-CIO Bob Prince highlights the importance and potential of geographic diversification for investors. Our Takeaways from the Banking Crisis March 24, 2023 Co-CIO Greg and Co-Head of Fixed Income Research Alex Schiller discuss our recent three-part series on the banking crisis and its implications for the financial system, the economy, markets, and the Fed. Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour on How She’s Seeing the World Right Now February 21, 2023 Our newest co-CIO shares her thoughts on the secular changes shaping economies and markets, how she’s assessing cyclical conditions around the world, and what these dynamics mean for investors. The Tightening Cycle Is Approaching Stage 3: Guideposts We’re Watching February 14, 2023 Odds favor a third stage of this tightening cycle likely to be marked either by an economic downturn or failure to meet the inflation target, prompting more tightening. Either would be bad for most portfolios. Europe’s Stubborn Inflation Problem January 24, 2023 Even with the tailwind of falling energy prices, Europe’s inflation problem looks persistent, which is bad news for European assets. Bob Prince: The Next Shoe to Drop Is a Decline in the US Economy January 17, 2023 Co-CIO Bob Prince joined Bloomberg TV from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss his thoughts on the economy in 2023, why a downturn is needed for inflation to fall back to target, and why we are likely entering a more volatile “boom-bust” style environment than the last decade of relatively stable conditions. An Update from Our CIOs: 2022 Was a Tightening Year; In 2023 We Will See Its Effects January 6, 2023 The dominant driver of markets last year was the historically large and rapid rise in interest rates. This year, the major story is likely to be the impact of higher rates as the tightening flows through to economic conditions. Greg Jensen Looks Ahead to 2023 December 15, 2022 Co-CIO Greg Jensen sat down with Bloomberg to share his outlook for the markets as we transition into the new year. Greg discusses what investors can expect as we shift from a world fully focused on inflation to one that is increasingly focused on a coming recession. Karen Karniol-Tambour on the Challenge of Investing in the Current Environment December 13, 2022 Bridgewater’s Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour describes why today’s environment is so different from what we’ve seen in recent decades and how investors can prepare their portfolios. Pursuing Net Zero Goals in Public Equities November 30, 2022 The publicly traded firms in a handful of emissions-intensive sectors are responsible for about 60% of all global emissions. By allocating capital to climate solutions and carbon improvers in these sectors, investors can make progress toward their net zero goals, even if that leads to higher spot portfolio emissions than if they were to cut these emissions-intensive sectors altogether. Co-CIO Bob Prince on What’s Next for the US Economy November 17, 2022 Bob shares his views with Milken Institute on today’s self-reinforcing inflation, what needs to happen to bring inflation down, and the likelihood of a coming recession. He also touches on the US relationship with China and the potential ramifications for the economy and capital flows going forward. Our Co-CIOs Discuss the Different Ways the Tightening Might Play Out November 10, 2022 Greg Jensen and Bob Prince describe how they think the tightening cycle is likely to evolve, what it means for the economy and markets, and their areas of agreement and disagreement. Where Do Greenhouse Gas Emissions Come From, and What Does That Mean for Investors? October 27, 2022 Greenhouse gas emissions are highly concentrated in a few key sectors in investor portfolios; the publicly traded firms in these sectors alone are responsible for about 60% of all global emissions. Investors thinking through climate risks, climate opportunities, and net zero alignment should focus on these sectors. Energy Expert Daniel Yergin and Russia Expert Angela Stent on the Ukraine War October 4, 2022 Daniel Yergin, one of the world’s leading experts on energy, and Angela Stent, one of the world’s leading experts on Russia, discuss the current state of the Russia-Ukraine war, how the war is reshaping the global energy map, and Russia’s role in an increasingly bipolar world.

Pure-Impure Segregation Principle

Two months ago I posted an article detailing why I think that Unit Testing is Overrated, which seemed to resonate quite a lot with readers, prompting very involved and interesting discussions. And although most commentators mainly shared their personal experiences, a few have also voiced criticism of the way some arguments were presented. In particular, one person mentioned that the drawbacks I've described, especially those pertaining to abstractions and mocking, are really just a byproduct of object-oriented programming and its inherent flaws. Had my example been designed with functional principles in mind, many of the outlined problems would never have surfaced. More specifically, the suggested solution was to refactor the presented class hierarchy by extracting the pure business logic away from the rest of the code. Getting rid of the impure dependency eliminates the need for mocking, which in turn simplifies unit testing. This exact approach was actually mentioned in later parts of the post as well, albeit in a slightly different context. Although it does make isolated testing easier for that particular code sample, it doesn't invalidate the main issues raised by the article. That said, I also think that the underlying principle of code separation based on purity is very important and often overlooked. When used correctly, it can guide software design, providing benefits in terms of readability, portability and, as mentioned, unit testing. Depending on whom you ask, this principle may have different names, such as functional core & imperative shell, impure-pure-impure sandwich, and some others. And while most developers seem to agree on its value, there's still some misunderstanding remaining as to how it's applied beyond simple academic examples. At the end of the day, just like with any other software development pattern, its usefulness is entirely situational. However, it offers a good mental model for reasoning about non-determinism in code, which is relevant regardless of context. In this article we will look at what actually makes something pure or impure, why is that important to us, and how we can leverage that knowledge to write better software. I will show examples of where applying this principle lends to better design, as well as scenarios where it might not be as helpful. The concept of purity is not novel in programming, so I have no doubt that most readers are already familiar with it. Nevertheless, let's go over it one more time to make sure we are on the same page. In essence, pure code is code encapsulated within a function, whose evaluation is influenced only by its parameters and whose evaluation influences only its returned value. In other words, a pure function doesn't have any implicit inputs, doesn't depend on or interact with external state, and doesn't generate any observable side effects. Conversely, a function that breaks at least one of those two rules is called impure. To illustrate this, let's look at a very simple example: While both versions of the IsFoodEdible(...) function are similar, only one of them is pure. The first overload gets the current time from the system clock, creating an implicit dependency on non-deterministic external state. In practice, this means that evaluating the function multiple times may very well produce different results even for the same arguments, which violates the first rule of purity. The other version takes the current time as an explicit parameter instead and thus does not exhibit that problem. Regardless of whether we call that function now or ten years into the future, the result is guaranteed to always be the same for the same input. In other words, the behavior of the function depends only on the arguments that were passed to it and nothing else. Because of that, the second function shown in the above example is pure, while the first one isn't. Additionally, the following variant would be impure as well: In this case, the impurity comes from the fact that this function generates side effects by interacting with the standard output stream. Since its evaluation influences something other than its returned value, it breaks the second rule we've outlined earlier. As a general rule, any function that doesn't return anything (or whose return value may be ignored) is guaranteed to be impure, because a pure function without a return value is inherently useless. Furthermore, if a function executes asynchronously, it's also a reliable giveaway that a function is impure, since asynchrony naturally comes from I/O operations. Finally, the function in the following example may seem impure at a first glance too, but actually isn't: Seeing as AllFoodEdible(...) mutates the value of i during the course of its execution, one could think that such a function is not pure either. However, because the variable i is encapsulated within a local scope and cannot be accessed from outside, this mutation is not externally observable and, as such, does not make the function impure. Now, of course it wouldn't make much sense to classify code based on these seemingly arbitrary traits if purity didn't provide us with some useful benefits. Indeed, since pure functions are deterministic and have no side effects, they possess the following intrinsic qualities: Judging by this list alone, it's rather clear that pure code is extremely flexible and convenient to work with. In fact, the initial instinct may be that we should optimize our design in such way that we focus exclusively on writing pure code. Unfortunately, that's not possible because purity, in itself, is not an indication of quality, but rather of purpose. Any program will invariably have impure code, as it's required to handle infrastructural concerns, such as reading user input, persisting data, making changes in the environment, and all the other things that make our software actually useful. These aspects are dictated by the functional requirements of the software and not so much by its design. That means that we can't simply eliminate impurities from our code, at least not without also changing how it works. Having said that, one very important characteristic of impurity is that it's inherently contagious. Any function that depends on the execution of an impure function becomes impure as well: Depending on how the code is structured and how it interacts with non-deterministic and effectful operations, impurities may make up a larger or smaller portion of the whole. That, in turn, is something we can actually control. In order to reap the most benefit out of pure functions, we need to design software in a way that limits and delays impure interactions as much as possible, ideally pushing them towards the boundaries of the system. Flattening the dependency tree While the concept of purity forms the foundation of functional programming, it isn't given as much thought in the object-oriented world. In fact, the main purpose of object-oriented design is to aggregate related behavior in a single contextual entity, which usually involves state and mutations. Software written with OOP in mind follows a hierarchical design, where objects are composed together to represent different layers of abstraction in a connected fashion. Any impurities that may exist in those objects are free to spread from child to parent, potentially contaminating the entire dependency tree. To better understand what that means in practice, let's revisit an example from my previous article. The idea was to build a simple web API application that calculates user's sunrise and sunset times based on their IP address. This functionality can be modeled using three classes: Note how these three classes represent a vertical slice from a potentially much more involved object hierarchy. Schematically, the flow of data in this relationship can be depicted like so: This is a very typical scenario for traditionally designed object-oriented software. You'll probably find it extremely familiar if you have experience working on code that follows the n-tier architecture or any other similar pattern. If we consider this relationship from a standpoint of purity, we'll also notice that the entire call chain is impure. And while for LocationProvider it makes sense because it performs non-deterministic I/O, the SolarCalculator is impure only due to its dependency on the former. That design is not ideal, because we lose out on the benefits of pure functions without really getting anything in return. Now if we wanted to, for example, test SolarCalculator.GetSolarTimesAsync(...) in isolation, we would only be able to do so with the help of an autotelic abstraction and a test double, which is not desirable. This issue could've been avoided if we architected our code with the pure-impure segregation principle in mind. Let's see how we can refactor our classes to push the impurities out of SolarCalculator: Previously, the method in SolarCalculator took an IP address as a parameter and relied on LocationProvider to get the coordinates it maps to. After refactoring, the method is now static and instead takes the location directly, skipping the previously required impure operation. Of course, that impurity didn't just disappear into thin air, our software still needs to get the location somehow. The difference is that now this concern is pushed out towards the boundary of the system, which, in this case, is represented by the controller. In doing that, we also flattened the hierarchy so that all the dependencies are aggregated at the boundary. The data flow now looks a bit more like a pipeline instead: The benefit of this design is that our pure business logic is no longer contaminated by effectful code, which means we can take advantage of the useful properties listed in the previous section. For example, if we wanted to parallelize or test SolarCalculator, it's much easier to do so now than it was before. Although very useful, the type of "lossless" refactoring shown earlier only works if the data required by the function can be easily encapsulated within its input parameters. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Often a function may need to dynamically resolve data from an external API or a database, with no way of knowing about it beforehand. This typically results in an implementation where pure and impure concerns are interleaved with each other, creating a tightly coupled cohesive structure. To illustrate a scenario like that, let's take a look at a slightly more involved example. The following snippet contains a class called RecommendationsProvider which is responsible for generating song suggestions for a user of some music streaming service: The above algorithm works by retrieving the user's most listened songs, finding other people who have also listened to the same titles, and then extracting their top songs as well. Those songs are then aggregated into a list of recommendations and returned to the caller. It's quite clear that this function would benefit greatly from being pure, seeing how much business logic is encapsulated within it. Unfortunately, the technique we relied upon earlier won't work here. In order to fully isolate GetRecommendationsAsync(...) from its impure dependencies, we would have to somehow supply the function with an entire list of songs, users, and their scrobbles upfront. If we assume that we're dealing with data on millions of users, it's obvious that this would be completely impractical and likely even impossible. A seemingly simple way we could try to work around this problem is to split the function into smaller pieces, each handling one of the four stages of the algorithm separately: By extracting all the pure code out of GetRecommendationsAsync(...), we can now write unit tests that verify that the intermediate stages of the algorithm work as intended. On the surface, it looks as though we managed to achieve exactly what we wanted. However, instead of having one cohesive element to reason about, we ended up with multiple fragments, each having no meaning or value of their own. While unit testing of individual parts may have become easier, the benefit is very questionable, as it provides no confidence in the correctness of the algorithm as a whole. Ultimately, we weren't able to push impurities out towards the system boundaries — what we did was simply push the pure code further in instead. In other words, the flow of data in the program remains completely unchanged. The main issue is that each stage of the recommendation algorithm depends on additional data derived from the previous stages. Since this behavior is inherently non-deterministic, it's impossible to express it using pure functions alone. Although it's convenient to treat purity as an objectively provable characteristic, it's actually a bit more nuanced than that. As a matter of fact, one could say that purity is a relative concept, not an absolute one. To understand what exactly I mean by that, let's take a look at an example: This is a very simple function that attempts to find an index that corresponds to the position of an item in a sequence. The negative outcome is assumed to be very improbable in this scenario, hence why an exception is used to signify failure, as opposed to a fallback value. According to the criteria of purity, this function is not pure because the result of its evaluation is not entirely encapsulated within the returned value. Throwing an exception is an effectful operation, since it can change the behavior of the function above in the call stack, or lead to the termination of the program altogether. However, despite all that, the function is still deterministic, cacheable, parallelizable, and testable, as long as we remember to handle the exception that may be raised in certain circumstances. Even though it's not technically pure, it still retains most of the important properties we care about. Let's consider an even simpler example: Seeing as the above code literally just represents a mathematical expression, it seems logical that it must be pure. However, this function shares the exact same problem as the one in the previous snippet. The modulus operator has an exceptional outcome, which occurs when the supplied divisor is equal to zero. If we were to try and invoke Wrap(123, 0), it would throw an exception, indicating that the function is actually impure as well. Notably, this problem could be avoided if we used something like Option<int> as the return type instead. This approach eliminates the need for an exception, but comes at an expense of making basic arithmetic operations appear more cumbersome. In any case, even though the code we wrote originally doesn't satisfy the theoretical definition of purity, it might be pure enough for our usage scenario. Let's also take a look at an opposite situation: The code above assembles a file path for the provided report by combining the output directory with the generated file name. It calls the Path.Combine(...) method, whose behavior relies on the value of the Path.DirectorySeparatorChar constant, as it indicates which directory separator is used by the operating system. Since it is a constant and its value is guaranteed to always be the same for the duration of the program's lifetime, our function is pure (as long as we also disregard possible exceptions). However, it's pure only within the current session. If we imagine that we're building a cross-platform solution, it's logical that we treat specifics of each platform as environmental parameters. In other words, for code that is expected to run seamlessly on Windows and Linux, the path separator constant essentially acts as a global variable. Assuming our goal is to test GetOutputPath(...) in isolation, simply relying on the parameters of the function is not enough. We would also need to execute tests on each of the supported operating systems, to make sure it actually works with all the possible path separators. In this case, the fact that the function is pure does not provide us with sufficient guarantees. While it's pure by definition, it's not pure enough for what we need. As you can see, the concept of purity gets a bit hazy once you start digging into specifics. In reality, everything around us is inherently impure, so what we accept as pure really depends on what level of abstraction we choose to operate at. If you decide to follow the rules pedantically, you'll find the idea of modelling any problem domain with pure functions quickly becomes impractical. However, it's important to remember that the goal is not purity in itself, but rather the benefits it provides. At the end of the day, the entire notion of purity is just a mathematical model, which may not necessarily translate very well to applied programming. As the developer of the project, it is up to you to draw the line and decide what makes sense and what doesn't. Overall, purity is a pretty useful concept, as it helps us understand how some operations may make our code non-deterministic, difficult to reason about, and cumbersome to test in isolation. Impure interactions are not bad on their own, but the constraints they impose are contagious in nature and may spread to other parts of the application. The pure-impure segregation principle aims to limit impurities to an essential minimum, by decoupling them from the rest of the code. Ultimately, the goal is to push all non-pure operations towards the outermost layers of the system, while keeping the domain layer comprised entirely out of pure functions. Designing software in such way leads to an architecture that resembles a pipeline rather than a hierarchy, which favors functional style of programming. Depending on the project, this may aid in expressing the flow of data more clearly, among other useful benefits. However, this is not always practical and there are scenarios where extracting pure code comes at a cost of severely reduced cohesiveness. In any case, if your goal is to facilitate testing without mocking, architecting your solution for high-level testing is likely going to be a much better time investment.

I Was a Smuggler–and Make No Apologies for It

Are you in favor of smuggling or are you against it? Think carefully before you answer with a categorical “yes” or “no.” According to his son Arthur, the great comedian Groucho Marx once listed his occupation on an airport customs form as “smuggler.” Government officials did not think it was funny, but then, they never do. Smuggling—illegally transporting goods into or out of a jurisdiction—has a certain stigma attached to it. Most people think that if it is against the law to transport something, the politicians surely must have had a good reason to make it so. The fact is, they always have reasons but they’re not always good ones. Often, smuggling is a victimless crime. Cross-border sex trafficking that involves captives or minors is a form of smuggling—one that a decent, rights-respecting humanitarian should oppose. The key words here are “captives” and “minors.” The victims are real, obvious, and non-consenting. Smuggling slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad in the 1850s was a form of human trafficking too, but surely one that any decent, rights-respecting humanitarian would support—even though it was illegal. Totalitarian regimes try to prevent the free movement of thoughts and ideas. I can think of no justification for making such nonviolent activity illegal. These days, technology empowers people more than ever to transport thoughts and ideas governments oppose, so prohibitions are mostly futile anyway. And I proudly confess to having engaged in idea smuggling myself, numerous times during the 1980s. Before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, I smuggled books (and raised money to support book smuggling) into Eastern European countries such as Poland and into the Soviet Union itself. One of my most treasured possessions is a copy of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose that I arranged to be translated, published and distributed in Polish in defiance of the communist regime in Warsaw. I make no apologies for that, so don’t ask me for one. Often, government forbids the movement of goods for no better reason than to confer a monopoly privilege on a politically favored and well-connected group. I myself have confessed to milk smuggling and offer no apologies for that either. In 11 of the Most Memorable Acts of Civil Disobedience , I wrote about it: One of my earliest memories from childhood was an act of civil disobedience. My family resided near Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, about 11 miles from the Ohio border town of Negley. At the time, Pennsylvania prohibited the unauthorized introduction and sale of milk from Ohio. On many a Saturday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my father and I would drive over to Negley and fill the back seat of our car with good, cheap milk. During the drive back home, he would caution me to “keep it covered and don’t say anything if the cops pull us over.” For me, milk smuggling was a thrill ride. It was downright exciting to evade a stupid law while keeping an eye out for a cop who might have nothing better to do than bust a couple of notorious dairy dealers. I know my dad made a few bucks when he re-sold the milk to happy neighbors. We never had any regrets or pangs of conscience for committing this victimless crime. Who do you suppose lobbied for laws in Pennsylvania against the importation of perfectly good milk from Ohio? You can be assured our neighbors did not. I doubt that any consumers did. When it comes to most legislation, economist Murray Rothbard said that if you ask “Cui bono?” (Latin for “who benefits?”), the answer usually reveals who lobbied for it. As a former milk smuggler, I think the 19th Century economist Nassau Senior had people like me in mind when he praised smuggling. Nick Snow cited him in a 2011 article for FEE: As  Nassau Senior  put it,  “[T]he smuggler is a radical and judicious reformer.”  In countries which excessively prohibit the importation of foreign goods, he said, “the smuggler is essential to the well-being of the whole nation.” Economists such as Senior saw those who defy these bad laws as our only protection against the ruin these laws bring. After I wrote about my milk adventures, Robert W. McGee of Fayetteville State University in North Carolina composed a short paper on the subject titled Smuggling Milk Into Pennsylvania: A Case Study in Rent-Seeking . He pointed out that some rather illustrious people have been smugglers, such as John Hancock and John F. Kennedy’s father. McGee blessed my behavior with this line: Aside from the fact that it was a profitable venture, it was an act of moral and civic duty, if one begins with the premise that there is a moral duty to break bad laws. As Martin Luther King Jr. would say, “one has a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.” Disobedience to unjust laws (Jim Crow segregation, for example) is sometimes the best way to draw attention to the injustice, I’ve pointed out. Even Abraham Lincoln noted that “The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.” Using the key word “smuggling” in the search function at FEE.org, I was surprised at the volume of articles we have published on the topic. FEE authors have written about the smuggling of alcohol, drugs, maple syrup, cigarettes, and a host of other goods—as you can see via the links I provide in the recommended readings at the bottom of this article. Perhaps laws against the transport of hazardous, life-threatening substances that might yield actual victims make more sense than laws against moving milk around. But I suspect that the failure of America’s decades-long war against drugs is a testimony to a truism: Banning the transport of stuff that people desire is much easier said than done and may well produce more victims than the stuff itself. Back to the original question: Are you in favor of smuggling or are you against it? I leave that to each reader to decide for himself. But the most dubious position, it seems to me, is a categorical, “I’m against it!” Confessions of a Secret Marxist by Lawrence W. Reed Smuggling Milk Into Pennsylvania: A Case Study in Rent-Seeking by Robert W. McGee Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana by PopMatters staff Louis Armstrong Broke Barriers with Music, Optimism, and the Sheer Force of his Personality by Lawrence W. Reed 11 of the Most Memorable Acts of Civil Disobedience by Lawrence W. Reed Syrup Smugglers Take on the Maple Mafia by Eileen Wittig Meet the Human Smuggler s by Bryan Caplan Smuggled Cigarettes, Unteachable Politicians by John Attarian Russian Smugglers Renovate Road Neglected by the Government by Eileen Wittig In North Korea, Black Markets are Saving Lives by Richard Mason

Show HN: I've built a Python and FastAPI project to mock APIs during development

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Google to Android devs: Support more form factors, get a higher sales cut

There are 3 billion active Android devices in circulation now, and that means developers are eager to support Android. The vast majority of those devices are phones, so for app developers not particularly interested in the wider Android ecosystem, that means pump out a phone app and you're done. A vibrant ecosystem of non-phone Android hardware is also out there, though—Wear OS, Android tablets, Android Auto, Android TV, and Google Cast. Google would like more developers to support those devices, and its new scheme for this has a real shot at working since it relies on the universal language: money. Google's master plan is called the "Play Media Experience Program," and it offers a compelling proposition to developers: support more Android form factors, and Google will take a lower cut of your Play Store sales. Media apps focusing on video, audio, or books now have special support targets they can hit that will result in Google cutting Play Store fees to 15 percent. Google's normal Play Store cut is 30 percent, but it only charges 15 percent on the first $1 million in revenue. So this is a play aimed specifically at multimillion-dollar media apps. Google lays out the following requirements for various app types: Note that developers are "required" to support the extra form factors in order to get the lower fee. The Media Experience Program page lists additional eligibility requirements, like: "Over 100,000 monthly active installs on Google Play" and "a strong Google Play rating." Developers interested in the program will need to fill out a form in order to be considered. Charging less money is definitely speaking a developer's language, so we can't imagine this won't result in some increased form-factor support. It's just a shame the program is so limited. Only multimillion-dollar apps get a shot at eligibility, and only media apps, and only apps charging real money as opposed to being ad-supported. It would be great if Google could entice other developers to make tablet apps and support other form factors through additional incentives, but this is a good start. Google has a lot of work to do here, too. Google Chat doesn't support tablets, Wear OS, Android Auto, or even landscape mode on phones. YouTube Music doesn't work on watches and has no tablet UI. The new Google Pay app is phone-only, and Google Stadia's Android TV app took 18 months to arrive. Maybe Google should talk to its own developers about supporting more form factors, too. It's literally paying them.

Show HN: A Serverless Chess Engine running in 4 different clouds

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Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells

Visit the News Hub Antiviral compound blocks SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells New compound also could be effective against other coronaviruses Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a compound that prevents SARS-CoV-2 and related coronaviruses from entering cells. The researchers are collaborating with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test the compound in animal models of COVID-19. Pictured is the compound, called MM3122, (yellow) blocking the active site of the human protein TMPRSS2, which the virus hijacks to enter human cells. Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a chemical compound that interferes with a key feature of many viruses that allows the viruses to invade human cells. The compound, called MM3122, was studied in cells and mice and holds promise as a new way to prevent infection or reduce the severity of COVID-19 if given early in the course of an infection, according to the researchers. In an interesting twist, the compound targets a key human protein called transmembrane serine protease 2 (TMPRSS2) that coronaviruses harness to enter and infect human cells. The study is published online Oct. 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Great vaccines are now available for SARS-CoV-2, but we still need effective antiviral medications to help curb the severity of this pandemic,” said senior author James W. Janetka, PhD, a professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics. “The compound we’re developing prevents the virus from entering cells. We are examining the therapeutic window within which the molecule can be administered to mice and protect them from disease. Our ultimate goal is to advance the molecules into an inhibitor that can be taken by mouth and that could become an effective part of our armamentarium of inhibitors of COVID-19.” The new drug compound potently blocks TMPRSS2 and another related protein called matriptase, which are found on the surface of the lung and other cells. Many viruses — including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, as well as other coronaviruses and influenza — depend on these proteins to infect cells and spread throughout the lung. After the virus latches onto a cell in the airway epithelia, the human protein TMPRSS2 cuts the virus’s spike protein, activating the spike protein to mediate fusion of the viral and cellular membranes, initiating the process of infection. MM3122 is blocking the enzymatic activity of human protein TMPRSS2. When the enzyme is blocked, it perturbs the activation of the spike protein and suppresses membrane fusion. “The SARS-CoV-2 virus hijacks our own lung cells’ machinery to activate its spike protein, which enables it to bind to and invade lung cells,” Janetka said. “In blocking TMPRSS2, the drug prevents the virus from entering other cells within the body or from invading the lung cells in the first place if, in theory, it could be taken as a preventive. We’re now testing this compound in mice in combination with other treatments that target other key parts of the virus in efforts to develop an effective broad-spectrum antiviral therapy that would be useful in COVID-19 and other viral infections.” Studying cells growing in the lab that were infected with SARS-CoV-2, MM3122 protected the cells from viral damage much better than remdesivir, a treatment already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for patients with COVID-19. An acute safety test in mice showed that large doses of the compound given for seven days did not cause any noticeable problems. The researchers also showed that the compound was as effective against the original Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). “The majority of inhibitors of viral infection work by blocking steps of replication once the virus is inside the cell,” said co-author Sean Whelan, PhD, the Marvin A. Brennecke Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology. “Dr. Janetka has identified and refined a molecule that stops the virus from entering the cell in the first place. As the target of MM3122 is a host protein, this may also pose a larger barrier to the emergence of viruses that are resistant to the inhibitor.” Added Janetka: “This compound is not just for COVID-19. It could potentially inhibit viral entry for other coronaviruses and even influenza virus. These viruses all rely on the same human proteins to invade lung cells. So, by blocking the human proteins, we prevent any virus that tries to hijack those proteins from entering cells.” Janetka and his colleagues are now collaborating with researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to test the effectiveness of MM3122 in treating and preventing COVID-19 in animal models of the disease. In animal studies, the drug is given as an injection, but Janetka said they are working to develop an improved compound that could be taken by mouth. He also is interested in developing an intranasal route that would deliver the drug more directly to the nasal passages and lungs. Working with Washington University’s Office of Technology Management (OTM), Janetka co-founded a biotechnology startup company called ProteXase Therapeutics, which has licensed the technology to help develop the compound into a new drug therapy for coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the original SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.

DevSecOps Engineer Opening

i p Rampart Communications Inc. is seeking a motivated individual with DevSecOps engineering experience to join our team. Rampart’s core technology is a fundamental advance in the science of information theory.  There is a strong mix of both design and development, a constant need for solving new, challenging, and complex problems. Rampart offers a dynamic environment that encourages constant learning and a collaborative team where everyone can learn from everyone in the pursuit of solving major problems for wireless information security. Responsibilities Collaborate with CTO to develop and implement security policy for endpoint + network devices and administer group domain policies Build and maintain a CI/CD build-system for core software libraries; including source repositories, test, build, and production infrastructures Drive scripting and automation to develop solutions to common problems Define, document and follow standards and best practices for systems design, testing, and implementation Collaborate with CTO to design and deploy physical security systems, enforcement, and pen-testing plans Work closely with software engineers to build highly-resilient, high-performance, scalable, and flexible systems Support build out of network security monitoring systems: enforce endpoint security logging, SIEM Make recommendations and implement improvements Basic Qualifications A track record of building, designing, securing, breaking or developing network and/or application systems. Experience with networking technologies and the Linux operating system PowerShell (or similar) scripting and programming experience Comfortable working with mission critical and sensitive systems, with a sense of urgency appropriate to the responsibilities Preferred Skills and Experience Expertise in creating repeatable, reliable, scalable systems architectures, with high availability, fault tolerance, performance tuning, monitoring, and statistics/metrics collection. Expert working knowledge (including the ability to setup, configure, upgrade, manage, and troubleshoot) primarily in Linux, ChromeOS, and MacOS-based systems and services such as DHCP, DNS, IIS, MS-SQL, NPS, etc. Expertise in source code and version control tools Experience with configuration management, provisioning, infrastructure as code, and other DevOps concepts and tools Understanding of developing web and C++ applications and build processes Network administration and maintenance experience including but not limited to IPv4, switching, routing, firewalls and high-availability architecture Excellent communications skills with the ability to communicate with internal/external customers, vendors Expertise in cloud based endpoint security Rampart Communications Inc is an EEO employer - M/F/Vets/Disabled i p OR Upload Your Resume Accepted formats: .pdf, .doc, .docx Choose File Upload Cover Letter Accepted formats: .pdf, .doc, .docx Choose File Email By clicking the button, I agree to the GetHired Terms of Service GetHired.com member? Login to Apply

How I Make an Average of 250$ Every Month on Twitter

Member-only story Making Money on Twitter is Easy. Let Me Show You How. Sunil Kumar p Follow Published in JavaScript in Plain English p 6 min read p May 21, 2021 -- 1 Listen Share I realised the importance of having an online presence sometime in the last year when I saw how much money people were making by using Twitter as a marketing channel. Since I was new to marketing & selling products on the internet, it was shocking to me how one can leverage social media to build businesses online. I didn’t know how to make money through an online presence, but the main thing I realised was that having an online presence is important and it can definitely benefit me one way or the other in the future. So I started building my online presence on Twitter since I was mainly using Twitter at the time. It’s been close to 11 months and I have grown my account from 150 followers to 20k followers. And every month I make an average of 250 USD. I know this is not a lot of money at this point in time. But I earn this much with minimal effort without actually spending a lot of time. I mainly make this money through affiliate program on Gumroad. For those who are not aware what an affiliate program is, it’s basically where you help someone else sell their product and earn a commission. How to grow your account on Twitter is a new blog topic altogether. There are a lot of articles & ebooks available to learn the strategies to grow your account. I will not be discussing this topic in this article. In this article, I mainly want to share strategies that I use (with a good audience) which attract my audience to buy from the links that I share. I mainly follow the below 3 strategies. Twitter is a platform where posts go viral for various reasons which nobody knows clearly about. It all depends on the Twitter algorithm & sometimes luck. Just experiment with different types of content and see what works for you. There’s no guarantee that two similar tweets will go viral. One of them might fail & the other one can succeed. Anyway, after I post something, if I see that the tweet/thread is going viral, I immediately create a new tweet with the links I want users to buy from. For example, one of my tweets went viral recently and see how I attached an affiliate link as a second tweet couple of hours after I realised the tweet was going viral. Since the tweet has gone viral, I generally get a lot of impressions/views and in turn, a lot of link clicks. Although the conversion rate is pretty low, I do get some sales. At the time of writing this article, I’ve got around 13.7k impressions on my sale tweet and 846 link clicks. That means 846 unique users have clicked on the link and have seen the product. If you think about it, that’s very good visibility for one tweet without running any ads. Even if I get 1 or 2 sales, I’ll make around 25$ in commissions and that’s a pretty good deal for just 1 tweet which hardly took me a minute to write. One of the strategies to build an audience on Twitter is to direct users to your profile by sharing valuable content and commenting on other big accounts. And once the users open your profile the first thing they notice is the bio. So, you should have a killer bio if you want to convert users into your followers. The bio is also a very good place to keep any links that you want the incoming users to check out. As you can see I have a link to my free e-book in the bio. So when users look at my bio, they will check this & probably download it if they like the product. Since this is a free e-book I don’t make any money from it but I do get their emails. Right now I’m trying to build an email list and that’s the reason I’m offering a free e-book. But you get the idea. You can even keep any sale links here and make money! Twitter has this feature where you can pin a particular tweet and it always shows up as the first tweet in your profile. This is another good place to keep any of your sale links. Pinned tweet is another important component users look at when they visit your profile. I have kept a tweet which is basically a thread of all of the affiliate links that I promote. There are thousands of people with killer courses on Gumroad and most of them are on Twitter. When you start building your audience you will make friends with people who are in the same niche who are either promoting their own course or some else’s (like me!). Once you find such courses you can contact the course creators and ask them if they’re open to adding you as an affiliate. Most of the creators will agree. But some creators add only those who have good enough followers, at least a few thousand. Once they add you as an affiliate you will get your unique link and you can start sharing those with your audience and start making money! Above are the main strategies that I follow on Twitter. But you need to keep some things in mind before sharing the sale links with your audience. More content at plainenglish.io

Website Buildsystem in 40 lines of Bash

UPDATE: Don't do this. "enough troubleshooting to be robust enough for reasonable personal use" is a lie. It was fun but editing posts is quite painful and it's nowhere near as ergonomic as other solutions (no surprise there). I will keep it as my system though because it provides *freedom* and the time tradeoff is low after an initial "how do I do this more efficiently" period. With that said, onto the article. Recently I took it upon myself to finally bother to fully create a blog, after some failed attempts. I didn’t particularly like the idea of using a noob-targeting website builder such as Wix and while a more developer-focused builder (such as Hugo) was preferable [I hosted a few pages on one for a while], I disliked the lack of control and transparency I had. I wanted full control. So I made my own buildsystem with a few bash/zsh scripts and neovim. It is 40 lines of easily understandable and hackable shell script, and has been put through enough troubleshooting to be robust enough for reasonable personal use. At the top level, there is a home/index page and instructions on how to use the utility functions the most efficiently. There is also a posts folder with a cdn folder for assets (such as images) and separate drafts and finished folders for blog posts (in .md format while they are drafts and then also .html when they are published and moved to finished). When the user has an idea for a blog post, they can call edt [post-name]. The edt function opens posts\drafts\post-name.md in neovim, and sets its argument as $WEB_FNAME (which is used when edt is called without an argument). $WEB_FNAME is saved in a file so it is persistant across shell sessions. When the .md file opens, a markdown-preview plugin opens a live-updating preview of the page in a browser window, showing what the markdown (and \(\LaTeX\)) will look like when compiled. The user can then write their post, coming back to it with edt as necessary, until they feel it is complete. As previously mentioned, these posts are written as Markdown (.md) files, and in order for a browser to display them, they must be HTML. The conversion between those formats is facilitated using pandoc. Pandoc can compile markdown files to standalone html files, complete with css and mathjax rendering, so technically no extra work is needed by the user (however this function could be altered to simply compile the markdown into an html snippet, which can be inserted into a skeleton file linking to custom css and rendering to add function and avoid repetition). The final step in the blogging process involves relabelling the draft post as a finished product and making it accessible from a main_posts page in the index (“home page”) of the website. This is done through another zsh function: pub. Git is used here as a version control system, and a helper function is to push blog posts (called in pub) This site is (for now) hosted on github pages. That was set up through the below series of commands.

Burner SMS Numbers

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Modeling Construction Domain

Doxel p Follow 5 min read p Jul 19, 2021 -- Listen Share By Arunava Saha Tracking construction progress in terms of cost, schedule and quality — at scale — is complicated. It not only involves understanding the physical progress on site at a given time but also aggregating and comparing that data to planned cost, schedule or quality metrics. Today, subject-matter experts rely on their expertise and years of experience to understand progress and compare that to plans in order to optimize construction projects. However, because this is a manual process, early detection and risk mitigation is difficult and often results in schedule delays and cost overruns. For example, Doxel has found that most progress reports lag by 3–6 weeks and can have up to 30% of line items incorrectly reported. The solution to this problem is automating a manual process by building a structured, adaptive, and scalable model of the construction domain. This would encode the expertise and years of experience subject matter experts have, enabling risk detection in near-real time based on objective site status. To build an efficient and accurate paradigm of construction, Doxel invented the Construction Encyclopedia (patent pending). As with other domain models, it has 3 main components: Although every construction site is different, Doxel is able to draw a pattern observed across our customers. The basic building block of that pattern is functional and structural object types — this hierarchical ontology encodes the catalog of parts at a higher abstraction level (e.g. trade, system, subsystem, etc.) to draw commonality across sites and types of construction. This includes, but not limited to: These concepts can be thought of as the type definition of the domain model — symbols of our ubiquitous language. Relationships among types define the grammar of the ubiquitous language. Doxel represents these relationships in the form of a n-ary tree of depth m where each edge encodes how decomposed low level objects and related activities/tasks can be rolled up to the higher level for tracking the construction project at different resolutions. As an example, a piping component can be decomposed into straight pipes and related fittings (subcomponents) where they represent a different quantum of work when rolled up to the higher level. This powerful representation is the core of the Encyclopedia. The example above (figure 1.1) shows how the quantifiable components are related to each other (every hierarchy is colored differently) so that their dependencies can be explored for different purposes (eg. automated object tracking to track progress of a certain higher level abstraction). It is easy to imagine the scale of the graph given the number of different types of objects at the construction site. The relationship specification is flexible enough to even work across hybrid node types. This graph (figure 1.2) represents the component relationship of an under-construction data center which Doxel is currently monitoring. Modeled objects belonging to each trade are colored differently (colored dots) and every relationship is represented with a line of the same color. Concentric circles, which are basically collections of objects belonging to each hierarchy, represent hierarchy layers. This aptly shows the scale complexity (why manual effort won’t be practical) and the relationship patterns found by Doxel at the same time in this interesting representation. Workflows represent well-written stories in ubiquitous language. Product workflows are usually represented in the form of directed acyclic graphs where edges represent relation or decision flow. This is where Doxel encodes the rich & complex experience of construction experts through rule based and AI based systems which can compute, as an example, the probability that a task will be delayed based on the dependent activities or how current spending and work progress accurately indicates cost at completion. Additionally, prioritized quality issues based on their potential time and cost impact and many more. The potential possibilities are enormous. This flowchart (figure 1.3) simplistically depicts how Doxel tracks the schedule of a project by analyzing the progress of each and every related node of the encyclopedia tree, tying them to related activities, adding project specific constraints and rules on top of activities, measuring tangible status, and finally aggregating progress across branches of the tree. Does this look too simple? The animation below (figure 1.4) shows the entire activity graph of an early stage project Doxel is tracking! The current state of Doxel’s Construction Encyclopedia improved product turn-around time & automation velocity significantly. Given the complexity of the construction domain, this modeling work is a continuous process. This ubiquitous language helped us not only streamline communication across business units internally, it helped us to generalize the construction process across verticals externally. As a result, it quickly became one of the key ingredients of our success. This generic domain model enabled transfer learning from one vertical to the other seamlessly for product and automation teams. When onboarding a project, the first step Doxel executes is mapping the customer’s BIM model, project constraints, and customizations to the Construction Encyclopedia. This process is fairly automated with subject-matter-expert review at the end to ensure the highest degree of accuracy and completeness (important given this is the Ground Truth for every report Doxel produces for its customers going forward). Curious to see how this seemingly complex task happens fairly autonomously during onboarding? Stay tuned for our post on user onboarding.

Show HN: Test your Stepfunctions outside of AWS

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Teatro Federico Herrero Y Nicolás Francisco Herrero Director Profesor

Aplicaciones Juegos Online Goodgame Empire Empleos En ciudad de Buenos Aires el conocimiento tiene nombres y apellidos directores profesores Federico Herrero y Nicolás Francisco Herrero. Contactar Más de la categoría Arte y Humanidades FEDERICO HERRERO ACTOR ACTIVO ENTRENAMIENTO El actor, actuación, Federico Herrero Nicolás Francisco Herrero y la presentación de un trabajo de investigación. Actuación el actor técnicas profesores de teatro Federico Herrero Nicolás Francisco Herrero Liderazgo como potencia y como acción Pick up your hair in the following manner

Staff Engineering (Ft. Will Larson, CTO of Calm) [audio]

December 2, 2020 • 41 Minutes Staff Engineering (ft. Will Larson, CTO of Calm) What happens after you go past Senior? Will Larson, CTO of Calm, has been interviewing Staff-plus engineers across the industry for his new book, Staff Engineering. What happens after you go past Senior? Will Larson, CTO of Calm, has been interviewing Staff-plus engineers across the industry for his new book, Staff Engineering. This is our first full-length interview podcast episode! If you enjoyed it, please help us share with a friend and let us know your feedback! (Links at bottom) ---- 1:00 Why research Staff Engineering? Most bigcos make up their ladders as they go along, or cargo cult from FB/Google. We have to separate management from leadership. 4:31 Who are Will's role models? Lara Hogan - the Voltron Manager Julia Evans' Wizard Zines Tanya Reilly - Being Glue Dan Na - Pushing Through Friction Julia Grace, Director of Eng at Apple: "Don't play team sports alone, you'll lose." The Staff level is a leadership role, you don't get promoted on the basis of your work alone. 11:08 How do you find someone to help you grow? 3 types: Role Models, Mentors, and Sponsors Sponsors: Lara Hogan on Sponsorship The key question: "Do I need to develop myself" or "Is the company evaluating my work fairly"? Mentors: Some mentors give generic answers, others know your specific context. The second one is harder. Role Models: Helps you know someone with your background can accomplish something. Lighthouse hires are important as proof. Retention is most important here Look externally on Twitter and on StaffEng.com Duretti Hirpa at Mailchimp Ras Kasa Williams at Mailchimp Michelle Bu at Stripe The best people may not be writing online 16:30  Being Visible Books are bought, not sold If you aren't visible, your work won't be valued. 18:12 Career Management Most people don't manage their careers at all Most companies are set up to assume Fungible Developers which is exactly what you don't want to be But also blaming your manager is a self limiting belief. You personally have to be managing your own career. Write your own promotion packets on an ongoing basis. Julia Evans on Brag Documents Tip: Make your own achievements channel in Slack and log all that info for later 20:39 Architects - How do you lead without authority? Silvia Botros at Twilio Katie Sylor-Miller at Etsy Spend a huge amount of time soaking up context Reduce communication and coordination costs We rarely understand the problems we are solving when we design the solution One directional communication doesn't work - gathering context and providing a common interface helps solves this Architects are powerful bc they are aligned with their engineers, Managers have to align with their orgs Similar to a Product Manager role - all of the responsibility, none of the authority 24:37 Solvers and Matching Archetypes to Company Stage Opposite of Architects? It depends on the company's approach - do they plan and then ship, or do they ship and learn. Architects cannot function in the second type. 4 archetypes: Team Leads, Architects, Solvers, and Right Hands. Calm is all Team Leads - the majority of the value is not in operating or creating infrastructure - it is in creating product It's pointless to bias too much to Architect or Right Hand early on You don't see Right Hands except at much bigger companies - for scaling out 29:10 What should Senior Engineers know about Systems Thinking? Will Larson's Intro to Systems Thinking https://github.com/lethain/systems Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows Engineers should have both an abstract Systems Thinker and a practical Solver toolkit Incident programs overfocus on compliance rather than remediation Incidents -> Response -> Review -> Management (catalog, tag) -> Remediation Don't focus on moving from stage to stage 32:33 Metrics: The subtle art of Measuring Engineer Productivity Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations 1. Delivery lead time 2. Deployment frequency 3. Change fail rate (defect rate) 4. Time to restore service How they dynamically run tests to improve productivity at Stripe 36:30 Career Advice Will Larson's Career Advice Think about the teams you've worked with with the highest density of people you want to be working with Yahoo story Digg v4 story - your network will outlast your job Your manager and team matters more than the company Thanks for listening! strong- Will Larson (@lethain): Blog, An Elegant Puzzle, StaffEng.com - Randall (@randallkanna): The Standout Developer - Swyx (@swyx): The Coding Career Handbook - Podcast Episode discussion on Circle

Growing Concerns Among Developers about the AWS Free Tier

May 22, 2021 2 min read Write for InfoQ Join a community of experts. Increase your visibility. Grow your career. Learn more In recent weeks many experts in the AWS community have been advocating for sandbox accounts on AWS and hard billing limits that cannot be exceeded to let engineers experiment with new services without jeopardizing their personal well-being. Forrest Brazeal, director of content & community at A Cloud Guru and AWS Serverless Hero, wrote the popular article "Please fix the AWS Free Tier before somebody gets hurt" that was triggered by a message on the A Cloud Guru Discord server. Source: https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal/status/1389622850567421952 He tweets: This shouldn't be possible, period. There needs to be an easy, safe way for students to explore AWS without incurring unexpected megacharges. Comparing the potential risk with recent events on Robinhood, he explains: All I can think of is that horrible story that appeared during the worst of the pandemic, about the young man who died believing he’d lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the stock trading app Robinhood. And I keep thinking: what if this student hadn’t reached out to a developer community? What if AWS Support hadn’t been nudged on Twitter, and had taken a few days to get back? What if the costs (and the panic) had kept spiraling? The article triggered many reactions from developers on Hacker News and Reddit, comparing options on Azure and Google Cloud. User swiftcoder writes: I'm also going to point out, as a former AWS engineer, that "too hard" isn't in the AWS engineering vocabulary. The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it. AWS Support documents how to avoid incurring charges when using the AWS Free Tier and has multiple times proved to be supportive and reimburse the accidental charges, but there is currently no way to set a hard limit on billing. Forrest Brazeal is not the first AWS expert raising questions about the Free Tier, as reported by InfoQ last September. Corey Quinn, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, reacted to the recent events writing: It would appear that I'm not the only person who has lost patience with AWS's free tier scaring the crap out of newcomers with large bills. (...) It's rare that AWS billing is a life-or-death situation; the day that changes is a watershed moment that there's no coming back from. If I'm AWS I'd be treating this as a raging fire in the building. I hope they are. Microsoft offers a spending limit functionality turned on by default to all new customers who sign up for an Azure free account or subscription types that include credits over multiple months. Users running on the Google Cloud free program are not charged unless they explicitly enable billing by upgrading the Cloud Billing account to a paid one. Forrest Brazeal acknowledges that some options exist in the AWS space but they are currently limited: Some have pointed out the existence of AWS Educate Starter Accounts, which provide no-credit-card access to a limited subset of services. Only via participating educational institutions, though. Opening this up to all learners would be a huge step forward. The growing number of services and options on AWS will likely increase the request of safer options for developers moving their first steps on the cloud or testing new services. Rate this Article Adoption Style Author Contacted h2 p Write for InfoQ h2 p Write for InfoQ h2 p Write for InfoQ h2 p Write for InfoQ Could you be our next Editor-in-Chief? InfoQ seeks a full-time Editor-in-Chief to join C4Media's international, always remote team. Join us to cover the most innovative technologies of our time, collaborate with the world's brightest software practitioners, and help more than 1.6 million dev teams adopt new technologies and practices that push the boundaries of what software and teams can deliver! Apply

Ford recalls Mustang Mach-Es over risk of glass roof flying off

Ford is recalling the Mustang Mach-E out of concern that the windshield and panoramic roof could leak or, worse, come flying off during a crash or while driving. Nearly 18,000 of the electric SUVs sold to date are at risk of the former, though Ford says only around 13,000 of them run the risk of the roof detaching. The company will start providing owners with recall instructions in late October, and it says it is not aware of any accidents or injuries related to the defect. Ford initially started recalling Mustang Mach-E SUVs last week in Canada, as Electrek reported. Ford told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration earlier this month that it had become aware that the windshield and panoramic roof of the Mustang Mach-E may not be properly bonded to the car. The company said it does not yet know the cause of the problem. The recall is just the latest hiccup in the rollout of the Mustang Mach-E, which is the Detroit automaker’s first mass-market electric car. Ford recalled dozens of the first Mach-Es sold in March after discovering loose subframe bolts. Many of the first deliveries were delayed, too, while the company tightened up its quality checks. Some early vehicles were also plagued by a software problem that led to the 12-volt battery dying, as The Verge first reported in April. Panoramic glass roofs have become a popular feature in new electric vehicles, especially after Tesla started making them standard on its cars. Tesla is familiar with the problem Ford is running into now, too, as the company dealt with glass roof problems with the Model Y SUV, including one that literally blew off on the highway. In fact, Ford’s head of electric vehicles even took an indirect shot at Tesla after this happened, as Electrek points out.

Automatic Goods Handling: Robots Poised to Unload and Load Trucks

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What's New in PHP 8

The long-anticipated GA release of PHP 8.0 is scheduled for November 26th, 2020. Let's take a look at a few of the new additions in PHP 8 and who is supporting it at release. PHP 8 now supports union types, which allow you to declare more than one type in your classes or arguments. Before version 8, PHP already supported two special union types: nullable and iterable. function getUsername ( ) : ? string { return $this -> username ; } function iterate ( ) : iterable { } In PHP 8, these special union types have been extended to include several combinations, with a few exceptions. function getNumber ( ) : int | float { return $this -> number ; } function getUsername ( ) : string | null { return $this -> username ; } PHP 8 introduces a new pseudo-type to the PHP type system: mixed. This pseudo-type allows you to declare a value of any type without excluding type information altogether. From the Mixed Type RFC: An explicit mixed type would allow people to add types to parameters, class properties, and function returns to indicate that the type information wasn't forgotten about, it just can't be specified more precisely, or the programmer explicitly decided not to do so. To get an idea of all types that mixed type includes, here's mixed represented as a union type: array | bool | callable | int | float | null | object | resource | string In a compiled language, the source code is converted to computer-readable code ahead of time. Interpreted languages, on the other hand, convert the source code as it's executed, which is much slower. PHP is an interpreted language, and there have been several tactics used to improve PHP performance in the past. The latest step in speeding up performance is the addition of the JIT compiler in PHP 8. The JIT compiler is sort of a middle ground between compilation and interpretation. It will compile and cache some sections of code at runtime so that the compiled version can be used instead of the interpreted version. This could lead to huge performance gains for PHP, but with some caveats. Generally, JIT compilers mostly benefit CPU-intensive applications, such as 3D rendering or large mathematical computations. If you're using PHP for web applications, you may not see a substantial performance boost by enabling the JIT compiler. 👩‍💻 Note: JIT is not enabled by default. Check out this excellent guide about how to enable JIT in PHP 8. The new str_contains function can be used to check if a given string contains another string. str_contains ( string $haystack , string $needle ) : bool str_contains ( "PHP is cool!" , "PHP" ) ; str_contains ( "PHP is cool!" , "php" ) ; str_contains ( "PHP is cool!" , "not" ) ; 👩‍💻 Note: ( ) is case-sensitive Named arguments are another new addition to PHP 8. With named arguments, you can now pass an argument to a function based on the parameter name. This means that the order in which arguments are passed won't matter, as the name will be used to determine the parameter. createUser ( id : 1 , username : hollylawly) ; createUser ( username : hollylawly, id : 1 ) ; The match expression introduced in PHP 8 is similar to the switch statement, but with a few improvements: $operation = 'write' ; switch ( $operation ) { case 'read' : $message = 'Viewed!' ; break ; case 'write' : $message = 'Created!' ; break ; case 'update' : $message = 'Updated!' ; break ; case 'delete' : $message = 'Deleted!' ; break ; } $message = match ( $operation ) { 'read' => 'Viewed!' , 'write' => 'Created!' , 'update' => 'Updated!' , 'delete' => 'Deleted!' , } 👩‍💻 Note: match is now a reserved keyword This one is pretty straightforward but bound to make a lot of people happy! Like argument lists, you can now also leave the trailing comma off at the end of parameter lists. function myFunction ( param1, param2, param3, ) { } An additional bonus of this is that it simplifies diffs where a parameter is added. Instead of two lines changing (adding a comma to the last parameter and the line with the new parameter), only one line would be highlighted. function myFunction ( param1, param2, param3 ) { } function myFunction ( param1, param2, param3, param4 ) { } function myFunction ( param1, param2, param3, ) { } function myFunction ( param1, param2, param3, param4, ) { } Because PHP 8 has been on the horizon for so long, a lot of community work has already been done to make sure that it's supported across the web. But before you upgrade, you should make sure it's being supported wherever you use it. Here is the current support status of some popular projects, frameworks, applications, and more. WordPress plans to support PHP 8 in their next release (v5.6), which is currently scheduled for December 8th, 2020. This doesn't affect the minimum required version, which is currently PHP 5.6.2. Because this is a major version change, a lot of testing is required. If you're interested in helping out the WordPress community with PHP 8 testing, be sure to check out their call for testing. The Laravel team completed all updates needed for PHP 8 support well ahead of time. This includes updates to the following projects: For a full list, check out Laravel's Full PHP 8.0 Support PR. The Auth0 PHP SDK has been updated to fully support PHP 8 right out of the gate, so you can get up and running with it immediately! If you're interested in an easy-to-use solution for adding authentication and authorization to your PHP application, be sure to sign up for a free Auth0 account to get started. With Auth0, you only have to write a few lines of code to get: To get up and running quickly, check out the PHP Quickstart. The Symfony team is ready to support PHP 8 right out of the gate. If you're curious about the process of supporting PHP 8 in Symfony, be sure to check out this video where Nikita Popov of JetBrains interviews Nikolas Grekas, Symfony's principal engineer. "We are quite happy. It went very smoothly. PHP 8 is pretty easy to support." — Nicolas Grekas A lot of work has gone into the release of PHP 8, and the PHP community is no doubt excited to get their hands on it. For a full list of changes or to get some context on why something was introduced, be sure to check out the implemented RFCs for PHP 8. Let me know in the comments below what new features you're most excited about and if you plan to upgrade right out of the gate. Thanks for reading!

Matrix: One Chat Protocol to Rule Them All

Once upon a time, there were many chat services. AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and others. These messengers had their own desktop clients, and developers reverse engineered their protocol to build custom applications, both open and closed source. Trillian, Audium and Pidgin were applications that let people communicate across all these messengers with one program. Over time the old protocols died, and newer chat services like Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts started storing your entire history on their servers. People started using the web interfaces and mobile apps, no longer caring about desktop programs. Matrix is an open source communication protocol. It’s similar to XMPP (formerly Jabber) in the sense that anyone can set up a Matrix server and communicate to people on other Matrix servers. It’s a federated protocol, just like e-mail. Google Hangouts used to support XMPP federation, but silently removed support in 2014. Matrix supports bridging other chat services, so they can appear in a unified view. With my current setup of Matrix and appropriate bridges, I’ve combined my view of Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Telegram and native Matrix chats into one convenient user interface. The path to get to that integration was not as simple. The dedicated server I use for this website and other self-hosted web applications, is located in Germany. Logging in to Facebook or Google’s chat system from a country I’m not currently in, can raise all sorts of security flags and lock me out of my account. For those bridges, I purchased a small virtual machine in a Chicago data center. I installed a proxy on that server, accessible only via VPN, to view both Google and Facebook, so they record the IP address I’m connecting from with my web browser. This helps minimize security lockouts. Telegram isn’t hostile to third party developers, and has an official API. It doesn’t care my bridge is connecting to it from Germany, so I host it on the dedicated server. The reference Matrix server is called Synapse. It, as well as the mautrix-telegram, mautrix-hangouts and mautrix-facebook bridges all have official Docker containers built by their developers. Each bridge must be able to communicate with the Synapse homeserver. Their instructions go through generating configuration and key pairs that are copied over to Synapse in order to form their authentication bridge. The bridges provide chat robots that guide you through getting OAuth tokens or cookies for those respective services. The wiki for each bridge also has instructions for enabling double-puppeting, making each chat look seamless between myself and the accounts on the other side of each respective bridge. Without double-puppeting, each conversation will be in a three person group with the Matrix user, the bridge user (e.g my Google Hangouts user) and the person I’m talking to. Enabling double-puppeting via the curl command in the bridge documentation and calling login-matrix on the bot, removes the creation of three person rooms. The bridged accounts will now show up as regular, two-person conversations. I use the Element desktop app to connect to my matrix server, but I also have a web version of Element running from its own official Docker container in case I need to access chat from another computer. There are other clients, such as Mirage which is built using Qt and Fluffychat for mobile. Although I use Synapse for my homeserver, there are other servers that support the Matrix protocol that are in use and under active development. Setting up all the Matrix components wasn’t too difficult, but it does require knowledge or experience with running services. It took a considerable amount of work and debugging to get each bridge operational, compounded slightly by my complex networking setup. Most people would probably just run all of this on a Raspberry Pi at home. I feel that using Matrix with bridges is still somewhat inaccessible to people who aren’t interested in development or server administration. Still, the satisfaction of having unified chat, plus one more layer of abstraction between myself and Google or Facebook, feels like it was wroth the overall effort.

Florida Is America's Future: Old, Southern and Retired

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Talking Paper

Back to Main Page Ref: AFH 33-337, The Tongue and Quill Purpose.   The talking paper is a format designed to present key points simply. The most common use for this format is when something has to be explained to the Commander or some other decision maker. They don't want to waste their time reading a detailed report. They just want the facts and the bottom line. Section chiefs are often asked to present papers like these when a decision has to be made on an issue. Format.   There is no standard format. See the example at left from the Tongue and Quill. It serves as a good starting point. You'll have to adjust as your supervisor inevitably kicks it back with further guidance. In my opinion, these examples are too detailed. Decision makers usually want very brief Talking Papers that more closely resemble PowerPoint slides than these Tongue and Quill examples. Audience   Like any briefing, the paper should be tailored for your audience. If the audience is your commander, he is probably interested in how much it will cost or what services his squadron will be obligated to provide and not so much in the references or small print. Use this form for contributions and comments.

The right and wrong way to set Python 3 as default on a Mac

There are several ways to get started with Python 3 on macOS, but one way is better than the others. LinkedIn Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Email Reddit Mastodon Enter the full URL to your Mastodon profile:

Watch a Jet Suit Pilot Deliver Supplies in a Mountain Warfare Rescue

In 2020 a jet suit pilot flew up a mountain to test whether it would make sense for emergency responders in wilderness areas to add jet suits to their toolkit. Last year the same suit was used by the British Royal Marines to board a ship in a staged “visit, board, search, and seizure” (military speak for getting on a ship whose captain or crew don’t want you there, like trying to capture an enemy ship or intercept terrorists or pirates). Most recently, a trial combining military and search-and-rescue missions used the jet suit as part of a NATO Mountain Warfare Rescue simulation. In the Slovenian mountains a pilot strapped on the jet suit made by Gravity Industries, glided smoothly and rapidly uphill along a hiking path, and delivered blood plasma to a waiting group. The group included medics and an “injured” soldier who had been rescued from a deep gorge next to the trail. The jet suit is powered by five gas turbine engines that together generate 318 pounds of thrust. A pilot can travel up to three miles on a single fuel-up, reaching speeds up to 50 miles per hour. The suit’s creator and Gravity Industries’ founder is Richard Browning, a former Royal Marine. After setting a Guinness World Record for the fastest speed flown in a body-controlled jet engine-powered suit in 2019, Browning started looking for practical and humanitarian applications for his invention. In rescue situations like the NATO exercise, a jet suit pilot wouldn’t be replacing emergency personnel, but rather trying to reach an injured person as fast as possible. It’s also a quick way to deliver medical supplies or equipment, though whatever’s being delivered would have to be pretty light so as not to slow the engines’ thrust down too much. Admittedly, integrating jet suits into teams of medics and first responders wouldn’t be the easiest thing. The suits are expensive, for starters—$400,000 as of last year. Browning claims it’s relatively easy to learn to operate a suit. “It’s a bit like riding a bicycle or skiing or one of those things where it’s just about you thinking about where you want to go and your body intuitively going there,” he said, adding, “We’ve had people learn to do this in four or five goes—with each go just lasting around 90 seconds.” It’s likely there would be a learning curve nonetheless (and it could be either really fun or sort of dangerous, depending on the learner and the setting). Meanwhile, Gravity Industries is coming up with other uses for its product, like having a pilot race a Porsche Taycan through an uphill obstacle course. This can’t exactly be called practical or humanitarian, but it’s definitely entertaining. Would-be pilots curious to experience jet suit flight can register for Flight Experience or Flight Training packages, or can even commission their own jet suits. It may be a while before we see widespread use of these things, but it doesn’t seem like a bad idea for emergency rescue teams to have a jet suit or two on hand. Image Credit: Gravity Industries RELATED Can 3D-Printed Homes Be Built for Under $99,000? ICON Wants You to Figure It Out What the Revival of the Ancient Doge Meme Tells Us About the Lifecycle of the Internet 3D Printing Promises to Transform Architecture—and Create Forms That Blow Today’s Buildings Out of the Water latest Did Life Evolve More Than Once? Researchers Are Closing In on an Answer There’s Such a Thing as Vegan Fat Now, and It’s Being Used to Make Pork Belly First-of-Its-Kind Gene Therapy Can Be Applied to Skin Instead of Injected

A little tool to make DNS queries

Hello! I made a small tool to make DNS queries over the last couple of days, and you can try it at https://dns-lookup.jvns.ca/. I started thinking about this because I’m working on writing a zine about owning a domain name, and I wanted to encourage people to make a bunch of DNS queries to understand what the responses look like. So I tried to find other tools are available to make DNS queries. I usually make DNS queries using dig, like this. This is great if you’re used to reading it and if you know which parts to ignore and which parts to pay attention to, but for many people this is too much information. Like, what does flags: qr rd ra mean? Why does it say QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1? What is the point of MSG SIZE rcvd: 68? What does IN mean? I mostly know the answers to these questions because I implemented a toy DNS server one time, but it’s kinda confusing! Google has a DNS lookup tool with a simple web interface that lets you type in a domain name, click the kind of record you want (A, AAAA, etc), and get the response. I was really excited about this and I thought, “ok, great, this is what I can tell people to use!”. But then I looked at the output of the tool, which you can see in this screenshot: This is just as bad as dig! (the tool is called “dig”, so it’s not a big surprise, but still :)). So I thought it would be a fun project to make a DNS lookup tool with output that’s more comprehensible by humans I also wanted to add an option for people to query all the record types at once. I copied the query design from the Google tool because I thought it was nice, but I put the answers in a table and left out a lot of information I thought wasn’t necessary for most people like the flags, and the IN (we’re all on the internet!) It has a GET ME ALL THE RECORDS button which will make a query for each record type. I also made a responsive version of the table because it got too wide for a phone: The Google tool has an ANY option which makes an ANY DNS query for the domain. Some DNS servers support getting all the DNS records with an ANY query, but not all do – Cloudflare has a good blog post explaining why they removed support for ANY. So instead of making an ANY query (which usually doesn’t work), the tool I made just kicks off a query for each record type it wants to know about. At first when I was removing redundant information I thought the record type was redundant too (if you’re making an A query, the responses you get back will be A records, right?), but then I remembered that this actually isn’t true – you can see in this query for A records on www.twitter.com that it replies with a CNAME record because www.twitter.com is CNAMEd to twitter.com. The source is on GitHub at https://github.com/jvns/dns-lookup. It’s basically just 3 files right now: Using an AWS Lambda-style function was really nice and made this project super easy to deploy. It’s fun not to have worry about servers! Originally I thought I was going to use the DNS code in the Go standard library, but I ended up using https://github.com/miekg/dns to make the DNS queries because it seemed simpler. I also tried to use Node’s DNS library to write the backend in Javascript before I switched to Go, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that library to return a TTL for my DNS queries. I think this kind of systems-y thing is generally simpler in Go anyway. As always, after I made this, people told me about some other useful tools in the space. Here they are: If you know of others I’d love to add them here! some things on my list are: Here’s it is! https://dns-lookup.jvns.ca/.

Medusa: Commerce framework for bespoke ecommerce, built in Node.js

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To catch a priest: How ad tech data was used to oust a senior Catholic cleric

Portrait by Katia Sobolski How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,  however improbable , must be the truth? -Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four Let’s get the facts of the case out of the way first: Per a post that originally appeared at The Pillar , a shadowy figure used mobile app data from 2018 through 2020 to show that Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, the general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was a regular user of dating app Grindr and frequenter of alleged gay bars. Msgr. Burrill subsequently resigned his position as general secretary, and the original Pillar piece has been (re)reported in that usual dogpiled media fast-follow, but without much in the way of technical specifics. that they were not the source of the data, and that such a data breach would be “infeasible from a technical standpoint and incredibly unlikely to occur.” I agree it’s unlikely that the data leaked directly from the app or Msgr. Burrill’s device, but it’s not quite true that data that Grindr generated could not have been used to reconstruct Burrill’s past behavior. I’m going to engage in some informed speculation below on how some lone crusader, armed with data and some hacking skills, could have zeroed in on one man’s behavior over years of time with commercially-available information. By way of self-introduction: I’ve spent 13 years turning data into money via digital advertising. I built a real-time exchange (like the one involved here) for Facebook, and I’ve even built the bidding machine for the exact ads exchange in question while employed at a large ads buyer. I’ve also worked at Branch Metrics, one of the world’s biggest mobile attribution data companies and warehouses of third-party user data. Which is a long and self-glorifying way of saying, I know this world very well, so I’m telling you how an ad tech insider (or just someone with technical skills and a willingness to read dev docs) could hunt down someone using advertising data. It’s hard, but not impossible. It’ll almost certainly happen again. The challenge has three steps: Constructing a behavioral profile based on geographic data What sounds like the simplest part is actually the hardest. From my own intuition and what Grindr has publicly stated, this wasn’t the result of an actual hack of the monsignor’s phone, or some data breach on Grindr’s part. Such a breach would have to have been so vast, you’d see echoes of it somewhere else. The way the data got out was very simple and as designed: via the programmatic real-time ads-buying technology, a complex edifice that’s been built brick by kludgy brick for two decades now. Specifically, via the MoPub ad exchange currently managed by Twitter, which is about the only exchange that would work with a somewhat edgy (for brands at least) company like Grindr. Here’s a (possibly) mind-blowing fact: just about every time you load a web page on a browser, or click to a new experience inside an app, there’s code being run that sends your data to an ad exchange, which then broadcasts that data to hundreds of potential bidders (themselves connected to countless actual advertisers). For every click of yours, picture a dense bundle of data going into the cloud and instantly duplicating into hundreds of copies to thousands of servers, each one accessing millions of rows of data to figure out who you are. That’s the pulsing, arterial information flow of the modern mobile internet, and it beats billions of times a day. What goes out with every pulse of the attention economy? Well, it’s right there in the MoPub developer docs , as the component objects of what’s known as a ‘bid request.’ The bid request is the packaged snippet of data that blasted out from the computer talking to your mobile device, and thence to the various ‘demand side platforms’ (DSPs, think of them almost like the stock-buying software in high-frequency trading). I’ll highlight the various snippets of data here. Lots of interesting data here, but the key piece for this challenge is the user.id attribute. As for age and gender, Grindr claims it does not pass such user data to ad networks . That’s very likely true. It’s also totally irrelevant to this story. More on this in a bit. Despite lots of noise around ‘hyper-local targeting’ in the ad tech world at various points in the past, your precise GPS location isn’t terribly useful for most ads buys. Advertisers do care about broad geo targeting like state or city, but nobody is actually trying to show you an ad because you’re on the corner of Scott and Fulton in San Francisco (despite various paranoias to the contrary). That said, if the app is tightly integrated with MoPub, your latitude and longitude straight from your phone is being passed. Alternatively, the app might be truncating the passed lat/long themselves; per Grindr, their geo data is “within 100 meters of accuracy of your actual location.” They also claim that using IP address (which they do pass) and mapping that to a location isn’t very accurate. It’s actually not as bad as they’re claiming: try it yourself here , and paste the lat/long into Google Maps. It’ll usually be right to within a kilometer or so. GPS lat/long, either precise or rough, plus IP address, combined with years of data and known locations for an individual, would definitely give you a chance of de-anonymizing the data and finding a target. More on that soon. Finally, a piece of the ‘device’ object (with your very important device data): The ‘ifa’ datum is absolutely key here, it’s not just the linchpin of this story, but all of advertising at the moment. As I mention in passing in a Pull Request piece and detailed at length in the ‘Great Awakening’ chapter of Chaos Monkeys , identity is the underlying battleground of digital advertising. This ID, in its pure IDFA form (Apple-speak for ‘ID for advertising’), is the ‘primary key’ (to use database lingo) in endless tables of data scattered across countless ads and data companies. Like your social security number, it’s the common ID that ties everything together. Without it, you’d never be able to tie data from app A with data from third-party company B; all the data becomes incommensurable without it. Which is why Apple essentially canceling the IDFA and replacing it with vendor-specific IDs (the IDFV mentioned in the docs) is such a seismic event in mobile monetization (again, read my PR piece about it ). But let’s leave aside the wonky drama around mobile monetization and get back to this more than slightly underhanded hunt. Grindr is one of the leading sources of mobile inventory on MoPub (itself one of the largest mobile ad exchanges). That means every Grindr user is spewing a data trail into the programmatic ad space every time the app tries to show them an ad. This isn’t something uniquely nefarious; just about every app you use that has ads —other than apps like Facebook, which have their own in-house ad system—is piping their data into exchanges like MoPub. “It’s what pays for the Internet”, ad tech veterans slur to themselves after the fifth drink at an ad tech conference, rationalizing the orgy of mercenary data-trading they facilitate. So how do we get the data? Either the attacker was listening to the bid stream themselves for years and years—perhaps they work at or run the sort of demand-side software company that bids on MoPub inventory. Or, more likely, they simply purchased the data from one of many resellers. This ‘bid stream data’ (essentially the data bundles described above, and cached in some queryable format) is resold by people who are nominally only using it to buy ads for advertisers. Is it sketchy and borderline illegal given privacy legislation like GDPR? Yes, entirely. Does it still happen as a sideline to the main advertising data flow? Absolutely. Note, even ‘bid stream’ data is somewhat limited. This isn’t like being watched by some newfangled Big Brother flying surveillance drones over your head. You’re only picking up a signal when some app is opened and an ad impression triggered. It’s not like you’ve got a second-by-second regular update on the user’s whereabouts, as you do when you share your location via Apple or Google Maps. Unless of course our stalker bought combined data from an aggregator. There, they take both bid-stream data lifted from exchanges with more contractually-sound but nonetheless sketchy data captured from apps that are marginally increasing their monetization by pumping your data to a middleman. Go read the sales pitch to app publishers here . Who wouldn’t want to “earn passive revenue from your users”? In the latter case, our data is enriched by other (non-Grindr) apps, all serving as beacons for where our target is; the geographic picture is richer, but also more complex. So far, we have an enormous dataset that’s roughly of the form: You still only know that a given user used a set of apps at certain dates and times in the past. You still can’t associate that with real-world behavior. Some of the columns are also spottily populated and the lat/long data is of varying precision; once again, we’re in the putrid bowels of the data ecosystem after all. How do we find the few needles in this mountainous haystack? How do we find the rows belonging to one Monsignor Burrill? The real world is where digital anonymity goes to die. As reported, Burrill is a diocesan priest in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Where is he every Sunday morning around 10:30 a.m.? Giving mass at St. James the Greater Catholic Church on 11th Street is where (or at one of a few Catholic churches). Sure, if we were to draw a circle a couple hundred meters wide around St. James, and tally up the unique set of IDs that appear there on Sunday mornings, we’d turn up hundreds. But which one is always there, month after month? Modern databases allow easy construction of geo-based queries of the form: “find all rows with data within x meters of this lat/long, and from 9 to 11 a.m. on Sundays”. Also, who’s always at whatever rectory Eau Claire diocesan priests reside in, plus whatever public occasions or conferences a senior cleric such as Burrill would surely attend? The geo data can be massive and noisy, but as with any noisy signal, average over enough data and the signal starts coming through. The attacker probably had to look at years of data to unambiguously narrow this down. This attack was long in the making, and took months (at least) to pull off. Ok, so we’ve finally got the right IDFA, so we can pick out only data points from that device, and dump the mountain of unrelated data that’s been making our Spark jobs get bogged down. What we’ve got now, for one device is row after row of either ad auctions with pretty rich user and device data, or just the device ID with lat/long from whatever random apps sell their data. Fortunately, with the ‘cardinality’ of our data vastly reduced by limiting all the data to one device, plus time stamps, we can plot the data and try to thread together a trajectory. Here’s Google Maps doing it for my timeline back when I was on Android. The attacker’s version of this would look about the same, but more scattered, with a very jumpy connect-the-dots feel. Bid stream data would look somewhat like this (this is Google Maps Timeline data for me in July, 2019 on the San Juans, an area with spotty cell service). It’s not quite every single moment of your life, but the dots tend to appear where you’re engaging online. As Google does here, that can be joined relatively easily with public venue data. If we’ve got years of data, this is going to be a slog to ocularly examine. What I would do is compile a list of ‘hot spots’—locations we think are associated with the behavior of interest—and simply join between that table of locations and our large table of ads data. Again, modern databases handle lat/long data seamlessly. Logic-wise, it’s effectively defining the equality operator for a tabular join to be ‘within x meters of each other’, and finding where two sets of points functionally overlap, one the set of the target’s locations and the other the incriminating locations. The hardest part is compiling the list of locations we want to prove our target visited. Given our attacker’s apparent obsession, you could just manually copy/paste the lat/long from a set of Google Maps results, or write code that ‘scrapes’ (i.e. programmatically fetches by pretending to be a user at a browser) the coordinates of a set of businesses (mooching data off Yelp for example). The coverage actually named a specific bar in Vegas, so it’s clear the attacker had a set of key locations he was trying to pin on Burrill. Once we’re sure we have the right IDFA, and once we’ve done the hackery around incriminating locations, we’re essentially done. According to The Pillar, they had some sort of ‘independent expert’ vouch for the data and approach. All that person likely did was look at the cleaned data, see that it jibed with mobile data as it’s currently sold, and maybe did a sanity check on the geo-data joins. It’s worth noting that if the attacker got the wrong device ID to begin with, the entire story is hogwash. So who did all this? According to the Catholic News Agency , some shadowy lone figure approached the Church in the past, claiming to have deduced the behavior patterns of various Catholic clergy. The church told him to get lost, but at some point that figure’s pitch landed with The Pillar, and the rest is scandalous history. This story triggers a ‘sketch’ reflex in me: who is really behind this convoluted hit job? Because that’s exactly what this was. None of this requires ninja-level technology or skills, but it’s way beyond the level of the Googling around or spreadsheet hacking of your average normie conspiracy-theorist or journalist. Particularly if the hacker had done all this analysis for several targets over years of time; that’s a considerable amount of work and expense (this data certainly isn’t free, and they bought a lot of it). Somebody wanted Burrill and possibly others to go down. That’s the real mystery in this story: Who? Why? Most of the coverage stressed that the data was obtained ‘legally’, in that our hacker didn’t plant malware on their phone, or steal it, or otherwise do criminally shady stuff. This implies the hacker bought the data, rather than lifted it from a DSP or put malware on the target’s device. But even then, such data collection almost certainly violates MoPub’s terms of service , certainly in spirit if not in law. Per Grindr, it also violates its agreements with advertising partners. MoPub has no particular incentive to seed a third-party ecosystem with data that it doesn’t monetize. More conscientious publishers like Grindr also have no such incentive (though they have an incentive to run ads). The problem is that programmatic advertising, while perhaps the most technically sophisticated way to buy and sell ads, is leaky when it comes to data, almost necessarily. The entire goal of the machinery is to allow advertisers equal ability to target users and optimize their ad spends as well as the big players like Google and Facebook do. Despite the shady nether regions (and I’d be the first to say they exist), the programmatic machinery and the third-party ecosystem that’s sprouted around it are a form of market competition for incumbents who would otherwise dominate totally (rather than just mostly). I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: this attack isn’t how the ad tech world actually works! Nobody is trying to thread together your behavior timeline, or listen to your microphone, or any of that conspiratorial BS. Your detailed trajectory through the world just isn’t worth much, and there’s no advertising business model around this sort of targeting. That said, given the shady world of third-party data brokers, who indeed try to monetize the data exhaust from the programmatic advertising world, hackery like the above is certainly possible…. so long as those third-party vendors exist. Consider the rivers of pixels that have been written on the supposed advertising depredations of Facebook—a company with a first-party user relationship that’s definitely incentivized to not sell data—when the real shady shit is going on with companies you’ve never heard of. This is also all a bit moot: Apple has deprecated IDFA , and Google will surely do the same with its analogous GAID. Even after Apple forces exchanges like MoPub to use vendor-specific IDs like IDFV, the data will still be joinable within that vendor’s bid stream. That said, cross-vendor and publisher joining of data (like we did in this attack) will be impossible, save for in the fuzziest of ways. We will indeed be in a more privacy-safe future as the incumbents retire the ability to identify and track individual users, but at the expense of any non-incumbent competition. Whoever was hellbent on ruining Burrill will not be able to do so as easily in the future; that said, any entrepreneurs who venture to undermine the Google/Apple duopoly will find themselves similarly hamstrung. When Apple and Google finally go beyond just canceling user-specific IDs, and go all the way to moving all targeting data on-device , this debate becomes even more moot as nobody outside those two companies will have much in the way of user data. In a fully on-device world, even Google and Apple don’t know much about you, as the user data that leaves the phone couldn’t be used (even in theory) to narrow you down below a coarse segment size. Then, and only then, will we be back in the analog world of old where someone could burn a few receipts, disappear back into a large crowd or skip town, and leave no trace of a furtive adventure. No doubt, Burrill thought he was doing as much when he closed his mobile app and went back to his ministry; the sophisticated digital technology to replicate the analog world just isn’t there yet.

Lessons learned when I TDD an algorithm in JavaScript

How to develop an algorithm using TDD? In this article we will implement the Diamond-Square algorithm using TDD. This article was inspired by Uncle Bob’s blog post TDD Lesson – Terrain Generation. Well, one of the things I did during the summer was to write an article about “How to Create Terrain and Heightmaps using the Diamond-Square Algorithm in JavaScript?“. I just found out that Uncle Bob wrote an article about TDDing the Diamond Square algorithm (yea, I’m slow on catching up sometimes). In the article, Uncle Bob leads us through a way to TDD an algorithm. It’s pretty nice and gave me a few insights as to how to mock and test in intervals until the algorithm emerges. Problem is – Uncle Bob’s code is not JavaScript!!! So I set down and reimplemented the algorithm. This time, I used the lessons learned from Uncle Bob’s article. Table of Contents In his article, Uncle Bob starts by testing input validation. That seems too simple, but I find this simplicity charming. We use to neglect input validation until we finish writing the code (if ever). Testing input validation? Most people don’t do that. Starting with input validation is a kind of “warmup” to the real thing. I really suggest doing it. It takes a minute (or less) and is worth it. Here’s my input validation test: Input validation tests. This begins the TDD of the algorithm. Many algorithms have a random factor. The Diamond-Square algorithm has a random factor in the tile value calculation. On every such calculation, we calculate the mean of surrounding tiles and add some random number to make things interesting. A random factor is not so good for tests. Unit tests need to be stable and that means that every function return should be predictable. In some cases, using Math.random is enough. In these cases, we can stub Math.random to return a constant value for our tests. There are other cases (like our algorithm) in which the randomness is a bit more complex. In this case, writing a function or a method to generate this randomness is a good practice. We first create this function: Then we can mock it to get a constant “random” value in our test: This magic line above mocked the generateRandom method and always returned the value 1. Algorithms can become very complex. They usually iterate a lot on the data, and tracking the steps can become difficult. What Uncle Bob suggests is to stub some functions to track the steps using a string and create sequences that are easy to follow: Tracking the algorithm’s steps by stubbing the steps methods and concatenating the steps in a string. Then, we just expect the steps to be a human readable string. In the Diamond-Square algorithm we know we need to have a certain sequence of steps. We’d expect on every iteration to calculate 4 squares for every diamond. So in a 3×3 matrix we will have something like this: In a 5×5 matrix, we have 5 diamonds, so we will expect to have the following sequence: So if something goes wrong, the testing framework (Jest, in my case) will be very useful in guiding me what’s missing: Missing steps in the diamond-square sequence for 5×5 matrix I smacked my head when I read it. It reminded me “time travel” in redux and I wondered how I didn’t use this trick before. Note that this is not always possible, because your step functions might not be be exposed from the module. The next lesson will show you a way to do it if you are OOPing. If you are using OOP, you just got lucky. You can create a test class that extends your original class. This allows you to mock even without a testing framework: This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters Using inheritance to mock our step methods by overriding them. While I didn’t use the full power of OOP in the actual reproduction of the algorithm, this is a nice trick that might come in handy in the future. The “Holy Grail” is a term that is used to describe the end result of our algorithm or module or function. By starting with the Holy Grail, we can really fast hit a wall. The algorithm is quite complex and the results are somewhat hard to calculate. Especially in JavaScript, where the floating numbers returned from a calculation can be quirky. Here’s my “Holy Grail” test: The “Holy Grail” test reduced to just running the complete function and taking a snapshot. Then I just look at the snapshot and see that the calculation is correct. I love TDD. I believe it improves my developing experience by simplifying big tasks. The idea is to build incrementally. Start from the simplest (the first lesson learned here) and move on to the “Holy Grail” that will emerge from the simpler tests. As Uncle Bob himself suggests in the article – do try this at home. For those of you who are interested, here’s the full solution: This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters The diamond square algorithm and its test. The tests came first 😉 Thanks a lot to Hod Bauer and Yair Cohen for the kind and thorough review. Featured Photo by Paul Gilmore on Unsplash

Azure Policy- Prevent the Use of Wildcard for Source in Azure Just in Time

p 12:11 PM You want to use Just In Time access for Azure VMs, but do not want the users to select all available IPs when requesting the access. Try this policy out to prevent this from happening: { "mode": "All", "policyRule": { "if": { "allOf": [{ "field": "type", "equals": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups" }, { "count": { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*]", "where": { "allOf": [{ "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].sourceAddressPrefix", "equals": "*" }, { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].access", "equals": "Allow" }, { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].direction", "equals": "Inbound" }, { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].name", "contains": "SecurityCenter-JITRule" }, { "anyOf": [{ "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].destinationPortRange", "equals": "22" }, { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].destinationPortRange", "equals": "3389" }, { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].destinationPortRanges", "equals": "22" }, { "field": "Microsoft.Network/networkSecurityGroups/securityRules[*].destinationPortRanges", "equals": "3389" }] }] } }, "greater": 0 }] }, "then": { "effect": "deny" } }, "parameters": {} } More details and comments/issues can be found here: Github: deny-wildcard-source-for-just-in-time-requests Version history Last update: p 11:46 AM Labels

Furby

Furby The 2012 Furby model; depicted is the version.Voodoo Purple Other names Furbee (used in Sweden to avoid confusion with the eponymous place). Type Electronic toy Inventor(s) David Hampton and Caleb Chung Company Tiger Electronics (1998) Hasbro (1998–2001,[ ] 2005–2007, 2012–2018) Country United States Availability 1998–2018 Slogan The more you play with me, the more I do! I will keep amazing you! (1998–2001) Your emoto*tronic Friend (2005–2007) a mind of its own (2012), a new generation is hatching (Boom), Furby Connects You To A World Of Surprises (Connect) (2012–2018) b is an American electronic robotic toy that was originally released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics. It resembles a hamster or owllike creature and went through a period of being a "must-have" toy following its holiday season launch, with continual sales until 2000. Over 40 million Furbies were sold during the three years of its original production, with 1.8 million sold in 1998, and 14 million in 1999. Its speaking capabilities were translated into 24 languages. Furbies were the first successful attempt to produce and sell a domestically aimed robot. A newly purchased Furby starts out speaking entirely "Furbish", the unique language that all Furbies use, but is programmed to start using English words and phrases in place of Furbish over time. This process is intended to resemble the process of learning English. [1] The updated Emoto-Tronic Furby, with voice recognition and more complex facial movements, was sold by Hasbro between 2005 and 2007. Another updated Furby with black and white LCD eyes and a mobile app was released for the holiday season in 2012. The last updated Furby with color LCD eyes was released in 2016. Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung spent nine months creating the Furby (in addition to nine months spent designing the toy). After two attempts at licensing the concept, they invited fellow toy and game inventor Richard C. Levy to join their efforts to sell Furby. Levy brought Furby to Tiger Electronics and Tiger's Roger Shiffman bought the rights to it. Furby's first public appearance was at the American International Toy Fair in 1998. [2] [3] [4] [5] Furbies originally retailed for about US$35, [6] and upon release, they sold very well. Catapulting demand during the 1998 Christmas period drove the resale price over $100, and sometimes as high as several hundred dollars. Furbies were sold for over $300 in newspapers and in auctions. Nicknames were given to the different aesthetic varieties, and sellers assigned rarity values to them. The significant aftermarket demand (and price) for the toy resulted in cases of fraud in which customers paid for Furbies that were never delivered. Parental battles, arguments, and fights increased rapidly as supplies dwindled, and when retail supplies ran out, buyers turned to the Internet, where Furbies could be purchased for two, three, or more multiples of their retail price. During one 12-month period, a total of 27 million Furby toys were sold. [7] 2005 saw the reintroduction of Furby with the release of the new Emoto-Tronic Furby. On April 12, 2012, it was announced that Hasbro would be making a new line of Furbies. The new line was released in September 2012. [8] As of December 2012 there were sixteen colors: Teal, white, black, purple, tangerine-tango, yellow, aqua, navy blue, plum, pink, pink/teal, orange/blue, black/pink, blue/yellow, teal/purple, and gray/teal. [9] Furbies were one of the eleven toys named the top toys for Christmas 2013 by the Toy Retailers Association at the DreamToys Convention where they unveil their predictions for the most popular holiday toys annually. [10] Shelby Furby toy from McDonald's (2001) First generation (1998-2002) The main reason for their popularity[ p ] was because of apparent "intelligence", reflected in their ability to develop language skills. Furbies can communicate with one another via an infrared port located between their eyes. Furbies start out speaking entirely "Furbish", a language with short words, simple syllables, and various other sounds. They are programmed, however, to speak less and less Furbish and more and more English as they "grow". According to the variant, it knew 9 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Greek and Portuguese). There was a common misconception that they repeated words that were said around them. This belief most likely stemmed from the fact that it is possible to have the Furby say certain pre-programmed words or phrases more often by petting it whenever it said these words. As a result of this myth, several intelligence agencies banned them from their offices. [11] A simple electric motor and a system of cams and gears close the Furby's eyes and mouth, raise its ears, and lift it off the ground in a faux display of mobility. The originals are popular with many hackers as they can be dissected and made to do interesting things. In particular, their advanced audio capabilities and various sensory interfaces make them popular with the circuit bending community. [12] [13] In 1999, the Furby Babies line was introduced. Furby Babies are smaller than the original, have higher voices, and cannot dance, but they switch to speaking English more quickly. They also have an extended vocabulary and different "Easter eggs" and "games" built into them. Furby Babies come in 24 different colors. All have white eyelashes and one of six different eyecolors. Novel Furbies were also released, including an interactive Furby-style "Gizmo", from the film Gremlins , a Furby-style "Interactive Yoda" based on the Star Wars character, and a Furby-style "Interactive E.T." from the movie of the same name. Another "friend of Furby", called "Shelby", is similar to Furby, but looks like a clam, has vast improvements in memory, and has a different personality; it was released in 2001 and can communicate with the original Furbies and Furby Babies. They also have sensors that can sense loud sounds, can sense being upside down (they say things like "Shiver me timbers" and "Walk the plank" when left upside-down for an extended period of time), and they laugh when "tickled" (their antennae – or "tennies", as they like to call them). They also purr when "petted". They can be fed by sticking a finger in their mouth. Similarly, Shelbies do not have their own names, unlike the classic Furbies. Shelbies are also capable of knowing if it is talking to a Furby or another Shelby, saying phrases such as "Where's Furby?"—though they cannot differentiate between a Furby and a Furby Baby—they just assume it is a Furby. In addition to English, Shelbies also know some Furbish words and also have their own unique language called "Shelbish".[ p ] Second generation (2005-2007) Emoto-Tronic Furbies was released in August 2005. Larger than the previous version, the new Furbies have been upgraded with a more emotional face and a voice recognition system, enabling them to communicate with humans. Unlike the Furbies originally released, just one order is necessary to make them 'sleep', and they have an on/off switch. They can communicate with other Emoto-tronic Furbies, though to a lesser extent than the communication between original Furbies, and they cannot themselves communicate with the original Furbies nor Funky Furbies. They also lack light sensors and basic motion sensors and do not respond to loud sounds as the originals do. These Furbies, according to the story they come packed with, are from Furby Island. It knew only seven languages (Swedish and Greek disappeared). Emoto-Tronic Furby Babies In 2006, a new version of Furby Baby was released, with the most notable features being the new look and a more "babyish" appearance in contrast to the Emoto-Tronic Furby adult. They also have considerably fewer features than the "adult" Furby, with a very limited vocabulary and a lower level of interactivity. Another notable feature of the 2006 Emoto-Tronic Baby Furby is the movable "legs" which unfurl when a Furby Baby is awake. Although they were a European exclusive, they were sold in the US via the Hasbro Toy Shop website. Emoto-Tronic Funky Furbies The Funky Furbies were released in August 2006 outside the United States. They are limited to three color combinations (pink and yellow; purple and green; blue and purple), they can sing three new songs and dance. They can be taught dance routines and remember them. Third generation (2012-2015) A new Furby was released in the fall of 2012. It has more expressive LCD eyes, a wider range of motions, its own iOS and Android app, and the ability to adapt its personality in reaction to user behavior. [14] Compared to the first generation, variants with Russian, Chinese, Mandarin, Korean and Polish were also produced, increasing the number of languages to 14. The on-off switch is replaced with a reset button; the Furby turns itself off after one minute of inactivity. The app was removed from mobile app stores in 2021. A series of toys called Furby Party Rockers was released in addition to the 2012 Furbies. [15] Those feature pre-programmed personalities that differ between the various models. Instead of the screens that the full-size Furbies feature, their eyes are made out of transparent plastic with a backing that has a static pattern printed. The eyes have an LED backlight and the printed image is stereoscopic so that it changes depending on the viewing angle. The Party Rockers don't have any moving parts. In summer of 2013, about a year after the 2012 Furby came out, a new Furby was released with new different colors and new Personalities. It has a brand-new iOS and Android app, called Furby BOOM!, with many new features. [16] [17] The app was removed from mobile app stores in 2021. In June 2014, a toy version of the Furblings from the Furby BOOM! app was released along with a Golden limited time one.[ p ] It can communicate with Furby Booms, and can be used with the app too. The release for Christmas 2014 is called the Furby Boom Crystal series, with a redesign of the ears, face and feet and new bright neon fur. The iOS and Android apps have also been redesigned. [18] Furby Boom Crystal Furblings In early 2015, a toy version of the Furby Boom Crystal Furblings from the app was released. Like the other Furblings, it can communicate with Furby Boom Crystals, and be used with the app. In June 2015, a Furby that resembles Chewbacca from Star Wars was released. It is similar to the Furby Boom because it can hatch Furblings with the same app and more. It is known as the Wookie Furby and the new Furby Friend. The app was removed from mobile app stores in 2021. Fourth generation (2016-2017) In 2016 another new Furby Connect with more expressive eyes and movements was released, along with an app containing a whole world of Furblings for it to interact with. The Furby Connect has a translucent plastic joystick on its head which lights up different colors when toggled and is used to control games played with Furblings in the app. Unlike the 2012 Furby and Furby Boom, the Furby Connect does not change personalities. However it can sing songs that it "learns" from the app. It knew only two languages, English or Russian. The original Furby source code [19] was written in assembly language for the 6502 microprocessor. [20] The first Furby model was based around a 6502-style Sunplus SPC81A microcontroller, [21] which had 80 KiB of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. Its core differed from the original 6502 in the lack of the Y index register. The TSP50C04 chip from Texas Instruments, implementing the LPC codec, was used for voice synthesis. On January 13, 1999, it was reported the National Security Agency of the United States banned Furbies from entering NSA's property due to concerns that they may be used to record and repeat classified information, advising those that see any on NSA property to "contact their Staff Security Officer for guidance." [22] [23] [24] Roger Shiffman, the owner of Tiger Electronics, stated that "Furby has absolutely no ability to do any recording whatsoever," and that he would have gladly told the NSA this if he was asked by anyone from the spy agency. [25] [ p ] Additionally, Dave Hampton demonstrated that Furby's microphone can't record any sound at all, and can only hear a single monotonous beep if a loud sound is produced around Furby, and no words or waveforms can be made out at all. [26] He too was never questioned by the NSA.[ p ] The ban was eventually withdrawn. [27] Security researchers discovered that the microphone on a Furby Connect can be remotely activated and used to record voice through a Bluetooth connection. [28] "Furbish" is the Furbies' language, with simple syllables, short words, and various sounds. A newly- purchased Furby starts out speaking entirely in Furbish. Over time, the Furby gradually replaces Furbish words and phrases with English. The voice commands the 2005 Furbies respond to include: Furbies may say these Furbish words: Bob Weinstein announced in November 2016 that a Furby film adaptation is to be produced by The Weinstein Company (TWC). [29] The film was written by Daniel Persitz and Devon Kliger, and will contain both live action and computer-animated characters. [30] In regards to the film's narrative, Hasbro executive Stephen Davis stated that "we think that this can resonate as a four-quadrant film. It can't just be a 90-minute commercial." [30] [31] TWC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 19, 2018. [32] On May 1, 2018, Lantern Capital emerged as the winner of the studio's bankruptcy auction. [33] On July 16, 2018, it was announced that The Weinstein Company had shut down and its assets had been sold to the newly created Lantern Entertainment. [34] It is unclear whether Lantern Entertainment will take over producing the project. ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ [ p ] ^ ^ ^ on YouTube ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ a b ^ ^ ^ ^

Wp Speedy Links ReviewHACK-Backlink Strategie

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An Archaeologist on the Railroad of Death

Essay / Reflections ✽ In retrospect, I was probably far too young to be whistling that captivating tune of resistance from the Hollywood classic The Bridge on the River Kwai , but I was enthralled. The visuals, the history, the war: I remember feeling genuinely engrossed in the film, despite being a young teenager and understanding little about the struggle portrayed on screen. As a millennial, born in 1989, I grew up with a fascination of wars past, especially movies about World War II. Nothing quite stood out like The Bridge on the River Kwai and the human experience it portrayed. It is only now, as an anthropologist and archaeologist who has conducted research in Thailand and mainland Southeast Asia, that I recognize the intersection between this film, the history of World War II, and archaeological developments within this region. David Lean’s 1957 Hollywood film adaptation of the 1952 novel The Bridge on the River Kwai was a hit. It won seven academy awards and was well-received by the public. The tale is loosely based around real events and people. But it alters the timeline and glosses over the truly horrific experience of prisoners of war—even though the production crew and cast did experience their own bouts of dysentery, leeches, monsoon rains, oppressive heat, and accidental deaths while filming on location in Sri Lanka. The cinematic version was still kinder than the reality. The movie is also missing (though it very nearly captured) a fascinating archaeological sidenote to the story: the extraordinary investigations of Dutch archaeologist Hendrik Robert van Heekeren while he was a prisoner of war. ✽ The China-Burma-India theater, or CBI, is a “forgotten” setting of World War II, less familiar to Americans than the theaters of Europe or the Pacific. The CBI was a particularly awful place to fight. Journalist Donovan Webster once wrote that “for every Allied combat casualty in the war’s CBI theater of operations, 14 more soldiers would be evacuated sick or dead from malaria, dysentery, cholera, infections, jungle rot, and a previously unknown infection called brush typhus.” By Webster’s estimate, roughly 12 POWs died per day. It was here that the infamous “Railroad of Death” was constructed from 1942–1943 over some 260 miles of mountainous jungles. The railway was built by at least 60,000 Allied prisoners of war, of whom about 16,000 died in the excruciating conditions, alongside almost 300,000 civilians from Thailand, Malaysia, Burma, and Indonesia, of whom over 100,000 perished. The POWs and civilian laborers were forced to lay track and build several bridges—including a large span over the Kwae Yai (River Kwai; called the Mae Klong River at the time) north of Kanchanaburi, Thailand. One of these POWs was Hendrik Robert van Heekeren, an archaeologist born in 1902 in Semarang, Indonesia. Through financing his own research and fieldwork, van Heekeren significantly contributed to the study of ancient Indonesia prior to the outbreak of the war. But, like many of his Dutch compatriots, he was captured after the Japanese invaded Java in 1942. By February 1943, he was forced to work on the Railroad of Death. While he was a prisoner, suffering from long days of laborious work, van Heekeren intentionally set out to conduct archaeological research. This included examining piles of dirt from the excavations for the railroad—during what must have been precious, short breaks—for artifacts and other finds. He kept copious notes of his research and managed to keep a small collection of artifacts with him at the camp. The Japanese were quick to confiscate his collections and notes, and punish him, but van Heekeren continued to collect whenever possible. In a journal article that speaks to his dedication to archaeology, van Heekeren wrote, “on only a very few occasions were we allowed to swim across [the Meklong River] and to make hasty, albeit fruitless, investigations on the opposite shore.” ✽ Hendrik Robert van Heekeren’s situation worsened in 1944 when he and other prisoners were transferred from Thailand to POW camps in Japan. For those of you who have read the 2010 book, or seen the 2014 film Unbroken , which depicted the horrific conditions of Japanese POW camps, you can appreciate that van Heekeren’s move was not ideal. Conditions in these POW camps rivaled those of the CBI—illness, malnutrition, and abuse were commonplace. When van Heekeren was transferred, Japanese soldiers confiscated his entire collection of artifacts. But a friend somehow saved and returned the collection to him after they arrived in Japan. The details are unclear on how this transpired. Then van Heekeren found a way to keep these artifacts safe until the end of the war. Eventually, a portion of these collections, stone tools, specifically, ended up in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Astonishingly, van Heekeren wasn’t the only POW to, presumably, keep his sanity by making collections and practicing hobbies. The Illustrated London News noted, shortly after the war ended, that various prisoners kept ornithological notes and collected butterflies, and in at least one case, a prisoner named Charles Thrale traded food for paper, collected roots (to crush for paint), and used his own hair as a brush to paint and draw scenes from time in the camps. The most surprising thing about van Heekeren’s story is that after the war, he intentionally returned to Kanchanaburi, to the sites he located while suffering as a POW, and he conducted groundbreaking archaeological research. The most surprising thing about van Heekeren’s story is that he intentionally returned to the sites where he suffered as a POW. Hendrik Robert van Heekeren ultimately excavated and published on several significant sites in the region. This included the recovery and excavation of one of the first, if not the first, Mesolithic human burials, likely dating to around 10,000 years ago. He recorded the presence of small seashells and large mussel shells associated with the burials, which has proven quite significant in modern archaeological understanding of past human burial and subsistence practices. Several decades of archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia have confirmed the dominant role of mollusks in past lifeways for food, ornamentation, burial, and likely much more. Van Heekeren’s early observations helped set the stage for this understanding. Were it not for van Heekeren’s amateur interest in archaeology growing up in Indonesia, his work before the war, his capture and transfer to the railroad in Thailand, his experience as a POW, his transfer to Japan, and his release and liberation, we may not have the foundational archaeological record in Thailand that we have today. I often thought of van Heekeren and his experience while my colleagues and I conducted a National Geographic Society–funded survey in northern Thailand to better understand the diversity and distribution of mollusks in relation to archaeological sites. We trekked through rivers and streams, and around limestone karsts, searching underneath rocks, leaves, and other vegetation for bivalves and gastropods. We felt the heat, bug bites, mutual disappoint, and excitement when either failing to find mollusks or finding too many to count and identify. We shared and were inspired by the same overarching question: How did past peoples exploit this environment? But unlike Hendrik Robert van Heekeren, we could return to our guest house every evening, enjoy a warm, delicious northern Thai meal, and plan out our next days’ surveys. ✽ The movie The Bridge on the River Kwai very nearly captured a small piece of van Heekeren’s story. In 1956, an archaeology graduate student from Harvard, Karl Heider, was apparently hired by the production to play the part of van Heekeren. There was a planned scene of him collecting ancient stone tools along the railroad—a scene that never made it into the final cut. When I watch The Bridge on the River Kwai now, I am still struck by its vivid representation of this violent and tragic period of history. In many ways, it’s not surprising that Hollywood chose to take on the CBI in film. The 1946 nonfiction book Thunder Out of China itself reads like a Hollywood script: “It [the CBI] had everything—maharajas, dancing girls, warlords, headhunters, jungles, deserts, racketeers, secret agents. American pilots strafed enemy elephants from P-40s. The Chinese Gestapo ferreted out beautiful enemy spies in our own headquarters, and Japanese agents knifed an American intelligence officer in the streets of Calcutta. Chinese warlords introduced American army officers to the delights of the opium pipe; American engineers doctored sick work elephants with opium and paid native laborers with opium, too. Leopards and tigers killed American soldiers, and GIs hunted them down with Garands. Birds built their nests in the exhaust vents of B-17s in India while China howled for air power.” Ironically, that description was prefaced with the claim: “No Hollywood producer would dare film the mad, unhappy grotesquerie of the CBI.” The authors clearly underestimated Hollywood’s daring. Hollywood likes archaeology—just consider its obsession with the Indiana Jones series, which doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon, or the recent Netflix hit The Dig . Maybe someday Hollywood will remake the story of the railroad of death, and we’ll finally get to see that cut scene: Hendrik Robert van Heekeren, a POW and an archaeologist, endlessly searching the riverbank terraces for ancient tools, seems an excellent candidate for a Hollywood hero.

Top 10 Most Ambitious Spacetech Startups in India

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Researchers Isolate and Decode Brain Signal Patterns for Specific Behaviors

At any given moment in time, our brain is involved in various activities. For example, when typing on a keyboard, our brain not only dictates our finger movements but also how thirsty we feel at that time. As a result, brain signals contain dynamic neural patterns that reflect a combination of these activities simultaneously. A standing challenge has been isolating those patterns in brain signals that relate to a specific behavior, such as finger movements. Further, developing brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that help people with neurological and mental disorders requires the translation of brain signals into a specific behavior, a problem called decoding. This decoding also depends on our ability to isolate neural patterns related to specific behaviors. These neural patterns can be masked by patterns related to other activities and can be missed by standard algorithms. Led by Maryam Shanechi, Assistant Professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm that resolved the above challenge. The algorithm published in Nature Neuroscience uncovered neural patterns missed by other methods and enhanced the decoding of behaviors that originated from signals in the brain. This algorithm is a significant advance in modeling and decoding of complex brain activity which could both enable new neuroscience discoveries and enhance future brain-machine interfaces. Standard algorithms, says Shanechi, can miss some neural patterns related to a given behavior that are masked by patterns related to other functions happening simultaneously. Shanechi and her PhD student Omid Sani developed a machine learning algorithm to resolve this challenge. Shanechi, the paper’s lead senior author says, “We have developed an algorithm that, for the first time, can dissociate the dynamic patterns in brain signals that relate to specific behaviors one is interested in. Our algorithm was also much better at decoding these behaviors from the brain signals.” The researchers showed that their machine learning algorithm can find neural patterns that are missed by other methods. This was because unlike prior methods which only consider brain signals when searching for neural patterns, the new algorithm has the ability to consider both brain signals and the behavioral signals such as the speed of arm movements. In doing so, says Sani, the study’s first author, the algorithm discovered the common patterns between the brain and behavioral signals and was also much better able to decode the behavior represented by brain signals. More generally, he adds, the algorithm can model common dynamic patterns between any signals for example, between the signals from different brain regions or signals in other fields beyond neuroscience. To test the new algorithm, the study’s authors, which include Shanechi’s PhD students Omid Sani and Hamidreza Abbaspourazad, as well as Bijan Pesaran, Professor of Neural Science at NYU and Yan Wong, a former Post-Doc at NYU, relied on four existing datasets collected in the Pesaran Lab. The datasets were based on recorded changes in the neural activity during the performance of different arm and eye movement tasks. In the future, this new algorithm could be used to develop enhanced brain-machine interfaces that help paralyzed patients by significantly improving the decoding of movement or speech generated by brain signals and thus translating these signals into a specific, desired behaviors such as body movements. This could allow a paralyzed patient to move a robotic arm by merely thinking about the movement or generate speech by just thinking about it. In addition, this algorithm could help patients with intractable mental health conditions such as major depression by separating brain signals related to mood symptoms and allowing for real-time tracking of these symptoms (which is outlined in previous studies Shanechi completed). The tracked symptom could then be used as feedback to tailor a therapy to a patient’s needs. Shanechi adds, “By isolating dynamic neural patterns relevant to different brain functions, this machine learning algorithm can help us investigate basic questions about brain’s functions and develop enhanced brain-machine interfaces to restore lost function in neurological and mental disorders.” This research was primarily funded by the Army Research Office as part of the collaboration between the US Department of Defense, the UK MOD and the UK Engineering and Physical Research Council under the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) led by Shanechi. The research was also supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program, National Science Foundation CAREER Award and US National Institutes of Health. Published on November 9th, 2020 Last updated on November 9th, 2020

“AI Bot Beats My Record Time Catching Scammers”

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Signal CEO Hacks Cellebrite iPhone Hacking Device Used by Cops

Image: JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images) Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. See More → Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the popular encrypted chat app Signal, claims to have hacked devices made by the phone unlocking company Cellebrite, which has famously worked with cops to circumvent encryption such as Signal's. In a blog post Wednesday, Marlinspike not only published details of new exploits for Cellebrite devices, but seemed to suggest that Signal's code could be theoretically altered to hack Cellebrite devices en masse. Advertisement "We were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite’s own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present," Marlinspike wrote in the post. "Any app could contain such a file, and until Cellebrite is able to accurately repair all vulnerabilities in its software with extremely high confidence, the only remedy a Cellebrite user has is to not scan devices." Marlinspike claims (whether you believe this portion of the post or not is up to you) that while he was on a walk he happened to find a Cellebrite phone unlocking device: “By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters." Cellebrite devices are used by cops to unlock iPhones in order to gather evidence from encrypted devices. This can include photos and messages on the device, potentially including Signal messages. Along with his colleagues, Marlinspike analyzed the device and found that it included several vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to include an "otherwise innocuous file in an app" that when it gets scanned by a Cellebrite device exploits it and tampers with the device and the data it can access. Advertisement To be clear, this is a pretty ballsy show of force. Marlinspike published details about the exploits outside of normal "responsible disclosure" guidelines and suggested that he is willing to share details of the vulnerabilities as long as Cellebrite does the same with all the bugs the company uses to unlock phones, "now and in the future." In a slightly nebulous final paragraph. Marlinspike said that future versions of Signal will include files that "are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data," perhaps implying these could be designed to tamper with Cellebrite devices. We reached out to Signal to ask them to clarify what Marlinspike meant exactly in the last paragraph of his blog post. Do you work for Cellebrite? Or do you research vulnerabilities on iPhones and Android devices? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, lorenzofb on Wickr, OTR chat at lorenzofb@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzofb@vice.com Cellebrite did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In their analysis of the device, Signal researchers also found that it contained packages signed by Apple, and likely extracted from the Windows installer for iTunes version 12.9.0.167. According to Marlinspike, this could be a copyright violation. Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

The Max Headroom Hijacking Incident – The Bizarre – Full Documentary [1:09:35]

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Nuclear power: Finland's solution to safely storing spent nuclear fuel [video]

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What history tells us about the dangers of media ownership

In January 1920, Upton Sinclair wrote to his longtime friend Walter Lippmann about a topic that deeply concerned them both. ‘I have been reading your articles in the “Atlantic”, and it seems that your mind is wrestling with the same problem as mine,’ Sinclair, the muckraking author of the novel The Jungle (1906), told Lippmann, the political philosopher and adviser to the Woodrow Wilson administration. ‘I am just publishing a book dealing with our Journalism, and I have ordered a copy sent to you.’ ‘I shall look forward to receiving your book and I shall read it eagerly,’ replied Lippmann. ‘The problem of how to get an adequate press seems to me infinitely the most important problem in modern democracy.’ Lippmann never wrote back to Sinclair about his book, The Brass Check (1919). In fact, the two authors, once frequent correspondents, mostly fell out of touch for the next three decades. Lippmann’s own later book on journalism, Public Opinion (1922), would explicitly deride Sinclair’s argument that the media was beholden to corporate interests. Its publication set off a feud between the two authors that would play out publicly over the next decade. Lippmann prevailed in their debate. His book became a classic for generations of journalists and their critics. It helped push those who sought to reform the profession away from the problems that Sinclair identified – profit and power – to the one that Lippmann diagnosed: psychology. ‘Mr Upton Sinclair speaks for a large body of opinion in America,’ Lippmann acknowledged in Public Opinion. Sinclair was far from the first or only critic who took his era’s media to task for what many perceived as its pro-business, anti-labour leanings. As the historian Sam Lebovic has argued, most early 20th-century commentators agreed that the major metropolitan newspapers served the interests of the elite. Sinclair argued that the news was a commodity, produced by hierarchical organisations working to maximise profit and squeeze labour But Sinclair’s The Brass Check went further, arguing that even liberal-leaning city papers systematically ignored or denigrated labour unrest and radical social movements. Sinclair believed that this was an inevitable result of the media industry’s financial structure. In the 19th century, most newspapers were party organs: funded by political machines and expected by owners and readers alike to adhere to their dogmas. By Sinclair’s time, though, a decline in partisanship and a rise in literacy rates had spurred the rise of a thriving commercial press. Increasingly consolidated under the ownership of a few very wealthy men, Sinclair believed this press was beholden to its owners’ class interests. Newspapers’ claims of editorial autonomy defied what Sinclair saw as the power dynamics inherent to any industry. To start a successful newspaper, you must develop ‘a large and complex institution, fighting day and night for the attention of the public … [and] the pennies of the populace,’ the muckraker wrote in The Brass Check. ‘You have foremen and managers … precisely as if you were a steel-mill or a coal mine.’ Like steel or coal or meat, the news was a commodity, produced, like any other in a capitalist economy, by hierarchical organisations working on an imperative to maximise profit and squeeze labour. Only the most ruthless would survive. The Carnegies and Rockefellers of the media industry were the newspaper chain owners William Randolph Hearst, Edward Scripps, and the Chicago Tribune’s Robert McCormick. Lippmann criticised what he saw as Sinclair’s reductive attribution of the media’s problems to ‘a more or less conscious conspiracy of the rich owners of newspapers’. Sinclair was, to be sure, unsubtle and somewhat conspiratorial, and it didn’t help his case that he devoted much of The Brass Check to hashing out personal grievances with editors. But Sinclair also got something that Lippmann didn’t want to admit: the agendas of a few men did shape the operations of complex organisations, if imperfectly, indirectly, and with inconsistent results. Newspaper owners, in Sinclair’s view, had no more or less power than any other bosses. They conveyed what and how their workers should produce by way of diffuse directives transmitted through layers of managerial hierarchy. The only source of their tyranny was what the 19th-century jurist Ferdinand Lassalle had called ‘the iron law of wages’. Lippmann thought that Sinclair’s attribution of media inaccuracy and bias to class interest was claptrap. He argued that Sinclair’s characterisation of journalism as prostitution – a ‘brass check’ was a token purchased by customers in a brothel – wrongly presumed that pure truth existed to be corrupted and sold. If it did, Lippmann argued, no one knew what it is. Lippmann’s experience in the First World War had taught him not only that organisations could consciously deploy information they knew to be false for the purposes of propaganda, but also that no individual possessed the totality of data necessary to understand fast-moving events in a complicated world. Lippmann believed that the problems of journalism were the problems of human nature itself It’s not that Lippmann denied that newspaper owners had class interests. He just didn’t think they were so different from anyone else. Steeped in the emerging literature of psychoanalysis, especially studies of mob mentality, Lippmann argued in Public Opinion that all individuals inhabited a ‘pseudo-environment’ shaped by their desires, fantasies and prejudices. If newspapers – commercial or otherwise – claimed to offer an account of the ‘facts’, they were offering only the facts that some compromised individual could see. Where Sinclair saw a power structure that gave a few wealthy men control over the production and dissemination of information, Lippmann saw a mass of confused, weak humans, none of whom could transcend the innate cognitive limitations of their species. Everyone’s view was incomplete. Lippmann’s lynchpin argument against Sinclair went like this: if the problem with the press was capitalism, then wouldn’t the anti-capitalist press be free of fault? Lippmann pointed out that Sinclair devoted little attention in The Brass Check to socialist or radical newspapers. If he had, Lippmann reasoned, he would have been forced to admit that those publications contained their own set of biases, what Lippmann called ‘blind spots’. In fact, Sinclair didn’t ignore the socialist papers because he thought they were paragons of truth. He ignored them because he thought they had little impact compared with the commercial outlets that commanded much wider readerships. The socialist and radical press, whatever its blind spots, he might have responded, just didn’t have much influence. To address the outsized influence of newspaper owners, Sinclair had argued for shifting the balance of power within newsrooms. He encouraged journalists to form a reporters’ union to advocate for themselves as workers, with the goal of seizing editorial control. Lippmann, on the other hand, believed that the problems of journalism were the problems of human nature itself. He therefore maintained that hope lay not in political struggle within the press, but in the creation of new institutions that could transcend the press’s limitations through the cultivation of expertise. In Public Opinion, Lippmann proposed replacing or at least supplementing the press with a network of intelligence agencies in government and industry, staffed by men trained in the new methods of data collection and analysis pioneered in the social sciences. When it came to the knowledge of experts, Lippmann’s cynicism about the limitations of individual subjectivity seemed to vanish. For years after the publication of Public Opinion, Lippmann and Sinclair traded barbs in the press. Lippmann mocked Sinclair’s representation of himself as a ‘sublime and tormented hero’. Sinclair lamented that Lippmann had betrayed their once-shared socialism for the money and fame bestowed on him as a ‘clear-sighted spokesman of political and economic reaction’. Initially, newspaper publishers and editors denounced both The Brass Check and The Public Opinion. Both books, after all, had attacked the very basis of journalism’s credibility. By the mid-20th century, though, many members of the media had embraced Lippmann’s critique and his agenda for reform. His Public Opinion became a staple in professional journalism schools that sought to create standards for a new, more expert and objective mode of reporting – a journalism more like a science. In those same schools, wrote graduate-cum-media-scholar Judson Grenier, those who read The Brass Check read it ‘rather surreptitiously’. A better curriculum would teach the two books together. For all their differences, Lippmann and Sinclair both believed that it was not only possible but necessary to imagine a radically restructured press – one more beholden to the ideals of a democratic society than to the bottom line. Lippmann was right that Sinclair overestimated the extent to which bias and inaccuracy were the result of conscious intention. But Sinclair also saw something that Lippmann couldn’t, or wouldn’t: that psychology can’t explain whose biases get broadcast, whose ‘blind spots’ become the world’s. Today, the media industry has consolidated under fewer owners than ever before; its labour conditions have grown dire. The undeniable expertise of many journalists isn’t enough to restore public credibility in the press. The political problem of the press will require a political, not merely a technical, fix.

Discussion PowerShell/DevOps 2020/09 (French)

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The odds of catching Covid-19 on an airplane

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Will DAOs revolutionize media or just create playgrounds for the rich?

Over the past few weeks a virtual flash mob called the ConstitutionDAO, with thousands of cryptocurrency fans, crowdfunded almost $45 million to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Although they lost the auction, they had already spun up a line of sweatshirts, emblazoned with emojis, distributed by the newsletter company MorningBrew. The plan? Purchase the US Constitution. pic.twitter.com/SQHJhIN7Ka — Andrew Reed (@andrew__reed) November 16, 2021 This experiment, which flooded social media with countless memes and calls to join the crowdfund, is just one example of the type of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that are now all the rage in venture capital circles. Much like open source projects like Bitcoin Core, DAO projects involve both volunteer participants and passive followers, often shepherded by paid core contributors. How the project collects money to pay those contributors varies drastically, depending on the project. Several other DAO projects, including the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Friends with Benefits (FWB) DAO, manage more than $600 million in assets. FWB lead organizer Alex Zhang, a former DJ and events coordinator, took the reins of the lucrative DAO in May 2021 and says the club now has a fellowship program that admits up to 40 scholarship members a quarter. The program is funded for up to three years. (It otherwise costs roughly $8,000 to become a full member.) People often start DAOs spontaneously, to see if the idea quickly attracts fundraising or fizzles out, and join DAOs for a variety of networking opportunities, including more social ways to experiment with cryptocurrency. Stepping back: Many of these DAOs are essentially crypto-fueled media companies. There’s a ton of overlap between DAOs and (fiat) subscription-funded organizations like The Information, with the main difference being FWB throws parties instead of journalistic events. In short, FWB is a group of investor friends who pooled funds in September 2020 and invited any Ethereum fan who wanted into their club to buy some tokens. Then they threw exclusive parties for token holders in Miami, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. FWB now includes 2,000 full members, according to Zhang, in addition to a small fleet of fans with cheaper read-only or local-city-only memberships. “We have a whole editorial and content team that creates multimedia assets like zines and are definitely moving into other forms of content. We’re launching a radio station soon where we’ll book different DJs,” Zhang said. “We’re shifting away from the subscription-fee model and moving into asset holding.” The most famous DAOs include the newsletter DAO project Dirt, founded by journalists Daisy Alioto and Kyle Chayka, crypto exchange DAOs for the users of tools like Uniswap, plus crypto social clubs like FWB and PleasrDAO. Art-focused DAOs like PleasrDAO collect and allocate millions of dollars for amassing art collections that include everything from JPEGs to rare albums. “We’re writing the playbook as we go,” said PleasrDAO co-founder Jamis Johnson, who participated in the original Ethereum token sale in 2014. “Total membership is 74 people; as with any DAO, there’s perpetual ebb and flow. We have full-time employees now, dedicated operators. I’d say around five full time. Our primary form of communication is Telegram.” So far most DAO participants, across different DAOs, rely on companies from Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin’s portfolio, including MetaMask, Gitcoin, Gnosis and Infura. MetaMask, in particular, now claims to serve 10 million monthly active users. And the Gitcoin DAO is estimated to have a treasury worth more than $643 million. As of 2021, a Gitcoin-sponsored study showed 33% of 422 surveyed DAO participants are earning $1,000-$3,000 a month from DAOs like FWB. Respondents were predominantly young men who were already heavily involved in Ethereum projects before 2020. Even if most DAO participants today appear to be wealthy cryptocurrency fans, that isn’t the movement’s broader goal. According to FWB investor Li Jin, who The New York Times called the “It Girl” investor behind creator economy companies like Substack, Patreon and crypto blogging platform Mirror, the goal is for DAOs to become “the front door for many new folks coming into crypto.” Meanwhile, some institutions are already embracing DAOs by doing business with them. The ConstitutionDAO is placing a bid with Sotheby’s, while PleasrDAO purchased its rare Wu-Tang Clan album directly from the United States Department of Justice. Wyoming became the first state to recognize DAOs as a unique legal structure earlier this year, although the application process is still difficult and potentially limiting. So far, DAO Masters and FWB member David Phelps, founder of the environmentally focused EcoDAO, said that at least the DAO movement is getting people to donate to charitable causes. The space is indeed full of scholarship programs and multimillion-dollar donations to various charitable causes. “If we release an $ECO token, then I’m sure we’ll all be paid out just fine,” Phelps said, referencing his own DAO experiment, which raised more than $37,000 for Indigenous land reform and rainforest reforestation charities so far. “But for the moment, the goal is to create a sustainable economy for artists to support each other and potentially earn lifelong income.” He added that the DAO movement, as expensive and difficult as it may be to join, has already promoted uplifting values by “tying status to giving, getting people to pay for parties, then redistributing money to causes that are meaningful.” But the elephant in this gilded room is that nobody, not even Ethereum veterans, knows how members of these multimillion-dollar crypto clubs will pay taxes. Many middle-class participants involved in the DAO movement don’t realize they are amassing thousands of dollars in tax liabilities. “We’ve seen a lot of contractors or developers, people who work for DAOs, that are unaware of the tax reporting requirements,” said tax attorney Andrew Gordon of Gordon Law. “Typically, the business needs to issue a 1099. How do you do that without their Social Security number? There are penalties for not issuing 1099s.” Plus, Gordon added, dozens of these DAOs pay freelance contributors and operators in their own membership tokens rather than in dollars or ether. Gordon said this means the “onus is on the taxpayer to determine the fair market value” of the tokens. In cases where DAOs automatically gift non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to their members, this may also raise questions about tax liabilities. When tax season rolls around in 2022, if the price of these digital assets plummets, some DAO contributors may be liable for more taxes than they can afford to pay. “We get calls all the time from people who didn’t know the crypto they’ve received is taxable based on the fair market value at the time they received it,” Gordon said. “Where it becomes more complex with NFTs is again, the question of valuation … is the value the floor price or the average market price?” There are already many young people who can’t afford to join the above-mentioned DAOs mimicking these experiments and launching their own. Such is the case with Shannon Li. She graduated from college in 2018, left a job she hated early on in the pandemic and has been taking coding bootcamps online ever since. She’s now creating her own DAO because she couldn’t afford the membership fees for more popular DAOs, and the free opportunities she applied to never responded. So she is cleverly reducing legal risks by starting without tokens. “The biggest concern for DAOs is actually legality and lawyer fees,” Li said, saying some DAO tokens may be regulated as securities. “That’s a big reason why I want to create a DAO that is service-for-service, instead of service for token-you-can-sell-on-secondary-market.” Li created WECrypto DAO, an 80-person Discord server focused on crypto educational content for women. Eventually, her plan is for the DAO to include token-gated group chats and NFT event tickets. For now, in the bootstrapping phase, she’s focused on “learning more about crypto, publishing it for others to find use in, too, and hopefully building relationships over a shared learning journey.” It remains to be seen what the DAO ecosystem will look like as the movement grows beyond the companies nurtured and supported by Ethereum founders like Lubin and Vitalik Buterin. (Some people are already starting to implement the same DAO concepts while using blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana.) On the bright side, there are already many efforts to improve the movement’s diversity by DAOs like FWB and the Index Coop. “Our community launched a fellowship program with 18,000 tokens to reward artists and creatives and other people that couldn’t afford to join but can apply based on merit,” Zhang said of FWB. “We’re offering universal basic asset ownership. If you’re creating something in this world, you should be able to hold some of that value.” Even today, the tools these DAOs use are still widely considered experimental. Awesome People Ventures founder Julia Lipton, a member of multiple DAOs including PartyDAO, said holding millions of dollars worth of digital assets in the widely used Gnosis Safe wallets still “feels risky” and it often takes a “stupid amount of time” to complete the technical side of DAO experiments. In addition to technical difficulties, she said transaction fees can sometimes be prohibitively expensive for middle-class users. “We have really far to go. The bucket of unknowns is huge, not only for taxes and regulations but in terms of DAOs in general. Everything about that concept of community ownership is still being figured out. We’ve got all these projects A/B testing, experimenting in public,” Lipton said. That’s why Lipton helped found DAO Masters, crowdfunding hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ether to help newcomers learn about the opportunities, skills and risks involved with DAOs. “One of the things I’m most passionate about is value creation being attached to value attribution and distribution.” Lipton said. “How do we create a more fair and equitable system?” In the end, the alpha insight of this DAO movement may be how much people are willing to pay for a feeling of belonging in the otherwise esoteric metaverse. DAO members are a tribe not a passive audience. And as such, they are willing to pay (in either money or labor) for media and experiences where they feel represented. As with any crypto trend, this feeling of belonging gets amplified by the hope of getting rich. Several DAO participants, who would only comment on background, emphasized that they were participating in DAOs hoping to network with investors who may someday invest in the participants’ own startup or DAO. That’s part of the appeal of belonging to a DAO full of the Andreessen Horowitz investor network. Jin is herself an alum of the colossal firm and said she’s been “friends with [FWB founder] Trevor McFedries for years.” Zhang also said he was a personal friend of McFedries’ long before being invited to join FWB. DAO members routinely invite their friends to join lucrative employment and investment opportunities. Joining these crypto clubs is, in some ways, comparable to Ivy League fraternities. On the other hand, FWB investor Jin has been outspoken on Twitter and her podcast about aspirations to see universal basic income (UBI) opportunities with more direct ownership by creators. Other DAO experiments like the newsletter Dirt and the Forefront writers’ program offer a glittering peek at the future potential of DAOs, which reaches beyond rich friends investing in each other’s venture-backed group chats. Forefront’s ability to pay writers almost $400 per piece, thanks to a growing community with hundreds of paying token holders, is nothing to shake a stick at. Even with tax concerns and Ethereum transaction fees taken into account, that price is still comparable to what some mainstream, traditional outlets pay writers these days. It’s clear that DAO advocates believe they are working toward a more equitable and decentralized media ecosystem. Only time will tell, as compliance models emerge, how risk and responsibility will be distributed across those networks. “DAOs potentially unlock new ways that the labor market can work and new economic incentives,” Lipton said. “The jury is out on what will happen to community tokens long term, but the concept of community ownership is here to stay.” Disclosure note: The author is a founding member of two DAOs, the Komorebi Collective and the Des Femmes DAO project.

Automatically recycling EKS worker nodes

A few months ago, we came across a problem we need to upgrade our Kubernetes version in AWS EKS without having downtime. Getting the control plane upgraded without downtime was relatively easy, manual but easy. The bigger challenge was getting the physical worker node updated. We had to manually complete each of the following steps: Create a new worker node with latest configuration Put the old node in standby mode. Taint the old node to unschedulable Then wait for all our existing pods to die gracefully. In our case, we had some really long running pods, some of which took 20 hours or more to actually finish! Then detach and kill the old node. While doing that we were thinking how about having an automated module, which will do all these work by just a button click. We are pleased to open source and share our terraform-aws-recycle-eks module which will do all these steps for us! What Problem does it Solve Periodic recycling of old worker nodes. In fact we can create a lifecycle hook while creating the node and integrate the lifecycle hook with this module. That way the whole periodic recycling will be fully automated via the lifecycle hook and zero downtime via this module, no need for manual intervention at all. Minimal manual interventions while recycling a worker node. This can be integrated with SNS/Cloudwatch events, so that in the middle of the night if there is a CPU spike this Step-function can step up and create a new node while allowing the old node to die gracefully. That way all new tasks coming in can be catered in the new node reducing pressure on the existing node while we investigate the root cause and continue to be in service. There are plenty more use cases like this. This can make upgrading/patching of Kubernetes and eks worker nodes much easier Also this module has a custom label selector as an input, that will help the user to only wait for the pods that matters. Rest everything this module will ignore while waiting for the pods to gracefully finish Components Terraform Terraform has always been our choice of tool for managing infrastructure, and using terraform for this module also gives us the opportunity to integrate this module with all other existing infra seamlessly. Lambdas and Step Functions Orchestrating Amazon Kubernetes Service (EKS) from AWS Lambda and Amazon EKS Node Drainer has already set a precedent that Lambdas can be a great tool to manage EKS clusters. However, Lambdas have one notable limitation in that they are very short lived. If we run all steps through a single Lambda function, it will eventually timeout while waiting for all existing pods to complete. So we need to split up the workflow into multiple Lambdas and manage their lifecycles through a workflow manager. This is where Step Functions enter the picture. Using a Step Function not only solves the problem of Lambda time-outs but also provides us an opportunity to extend this module to be triggered automatically based on events. Design Create a Step Function that will consist of 4 Lambdas. This step function will handle the transfer of inputs across the Lambda functions. The first Lambda takes an instance id as an input, to put it in standby state. Using autoscaling api to automatically add a new instance to the group while putting the old instance to standby state. The old instance will get into “Standby” state only when the new instance is in fully “Inservice” state Taint this “Standby” node in EKS using K8S API in Lambda to prevent new pods from getting scheduled into this node Periodically use K8S API check for status of “stateful” pods on that node based on the label selector provided. Another Lambda will do that Once all stateful pods have completed on the node, i.e number of running pod reached 0, shut down that standby instance using AWS SDK via Lambda. We are not terminating the node, only shutting it down, just in case. In future releases, we will start terminating the nodes Sample Execution Sample Execution output of the Step Function Future Enhancements First Lambda sleeps for arbitrary 300 seconds to ensure that the new node is in IN Service mode before putting the old node to StandBy mode. Ensure this programatically instead of sleeping. Use a common module for getting the access token. Better logging and exception handling Make use of namespace input while selecting the pods. Currently it checks for pods in all namespaces. Module doesn’t work without manual edit of configmap/aws-auth. Find a terraform way to edit it. Within Scribd’s Platform Engineering group we have a lot more services than people, so we’re always trying to find new ways to automate our infrastructure. If you’re interested in helping to build out scalable data platform to help change the world reads, come join us!

App Monetization Strategies: 6 Bankable Ways to Turn a Profit

App Monetization Strategies: 6 Bankable Ways to Turn a Profit You have a lot of goals for your app: Create something cool that helps people. Offer an amazing user experience. Attract millions of happy users. And make money, of course. There are so many ways to monetize apps that choosing the right mobile application monetization strategy isn’t easy. Do you already know how to monetize an app? And which of the app monetization options is right for your business? Should you charge per download? If not, how do you make money off of free apps ? How do you generate steady revenue without damaging the overall user experience? In this article, we’ll cover monetizing an app , some pros and cons for each monetization model, and examples of apps that have implemented each approach successfully. There’s a lot of money to be made on mobile: global consumer spending on apps hit $120 billion in 2019. * What are the most popular application monetization models? Many apps choose to combine models, offering different options for different types of users. 56% of apps currently use a subscription model * 54% of apps offer a freemium model that includes in-app purchases * 47% of apps use some form of in-app advertising * Over 40% of mobile brands say ensuring non-intrusive ad content is one of their biggest challenges in monetizing applications. Concern about monetization efforts negatively impacting the app experience and contributing to churn was the second biggest challenge. * While playable ads are the most commonly used in-app ad format, p are shown to be the most engaging ad format for users. * 1. Freemium Model: Monetize Your App To Grow a Large User Base Freemium mobile apps are free to download. So how do free apps make money? Users can access the app’s basic functionality, while certain features or content can be unlocked by making a purchase. Approximately 94% of apps follow this free app business model . * If you’re looking to grow as large a user base as possible, this is an effective strategy — free apps see dramatically higher download rates. Which isn’t surprising, since users are more likely to download if they can try your app before they pay for it. So how do you monetize your app? The key to making freemium work is ensuring users experience enough value in the free version to convince them to open their wallets for more. It can be tricky to strike the right balance between offering too many or too few free features. If the free version is too good, there’s no incentive for users to upgrade. If it’s not good enough, users won’t be convinced the app is worth paying for. Spotify is the king of the freemium model. While most freemium apps see average conversion rates between 2-5%, * Spotify converts an astronomical 42% of freemium users into paying subscribers. * So what’s their secret? According to an article in Harvard Business Review, * Spotify emphasizes data over opinion and authority. Experimentation, constant A/B testing, and a heavy emphasis on p give the streaming powerhouse critical insights that inform their product development, marketing, and app monetization strategies . Should you charge for your app? Upfront revenue earned with every download and faster profits can be compelling reasons to choose a premium model. Plus, paid apps generally see higher p and loyalty. * People are simply more likely to use something they’ve paid for. But there are drawbacks. Just 20% of paid apps are downloaded more than 100 times and only 0.2% are downloaded more than 10,000 times.* To determine if this is a good app business mode l for you, take a look at your competitors: is your app obviously superior to the free alternatives? Why would a potential user choose your app over a free download? One of the keys to achieving success with this approach is establishing the value of your app right away. That means as many five star ratings as possible, alongside a compelling description, rich UI, and comprehensive feature set. Premium Model Example: Dark Sky Weather With over 30k downloads, Dark Sky Weather has been one of the most popular paid apps in the app store since it launched in 2012. Impressive screenshots of the UI, thousands of high ratings and rave reviews, a featured Editor’s Choice Award, and #1 ranking in the weather app category all justify the price to potential users. And since apps in the $2.50-$5 range see the second-highest number of downloads after free apps, * it’s strategically priced at $3.99 to convert the maximum number of users. In-app purchases are a major revenue stream for apps, generating $50.1 billion in just the first half of 2020 .* They allow users to buy content, services, or special features (like a game booster that skips a level, sets of photo filters, or personalized workout plans) within an app. If you’re considering integrating in-app purchases, make sure they complement the user experience, not disrupt it. Each one should add to the value users get from your app and not be simple cash grabs. And be sure to let users know on your App Store page that while your app is free, it does include in-app purchases. To be successful with this approach, you’ll need a strategy to encourage users to spring for in-app purchases. Send personalized notifications to users about in-app purchases that fit their browsing or activity history, offer time-sensitive discounts, and thank users for purchasing. And p . In-App Purchase Example: VSCO Successful photo editing app VSCO is available as a free download, monetizing its 30 million monthly active users * by offering in-app purchases of photo presets. Preset packs cost between $0.99 and a few dollars, and each have their own aesthetic for creating specific types of images. Which is better: monetize app with ads , or monetize app without ads ? By removing the barrier to pay up front, apps that use in-app advertising look to attract a large enough user base and gather sufficient information about them to place highly targeted ads for advertisers. It’s an incredibly fast-growing advertising outlet: app-install ad revenue in the US is predicted to hit more than $7 billion by the end of this year. * Why? In-app ads perform 11x better than normal banner ads, with 152% higher click-through rates. * As with any mobile app monetization model, the user experience is critical when it comes to in-app ads. In-app ads don’t have to be intrusive or pushy — when ads are highly targeted and present the right offers to the right users, they can add value for both the advertiser p the user. In-App Ads Example: Instagram When the photo-sharing network introduced ads in 2013, many Instagrammers worried about annoying ads disrupting the user experience. But with highly specific audience targeting, users not only accept ads on the platform but happily engage with them. Instagram ads convert at 1.08%, * compared to a 0.07% average for display ads. * With over two million companies using Instagram ads and promoted stories to reach audiences, Instagram brought in a staggering $20 billion in global mobile ad revenue in 2019.* Subscription models offer your users more options than simply “buy” or “don’t buy.” Many apps offer several subscription tiers with a mix of features and pricing, convincing hesitant users to subscribe at a lower tier and upselling them over time. Longer subscription plans also offer the benefit of predictable revenue, so apps can be more confident in their product development and marketing budgets. 52% of app developers who implemented a subscription model say it had a positive impact on their business, growing both their revenue and their user base. * Just know that choosing a subscription model means not only focusing on converting users into subscribers but keeping current subscribers from churning. You’ll need to clearly explain the benefits of upgrading to free users, as well as continually offer subscribers new features and content to keep them around. Subscription Model Example: Headspace Since 2014, the popular mindfulness app has offered guided meditation on relationships, athletic performance, productivity, sleep, and dozens of other topics. Now, Headspace has over 65 million downloads, more than 2 million paying subscribers, and annual revenue of $100 million. * Sponsorship entails collaborating with advertisers who will provide rewards to your users when they complete certain in-app actions. For example, Marriott promoted its Marriott Rewards Premier credit card to business travelers through an exclusive sponsorship of the Gayot lifestyle app, which features professional reviews for restaurants, wine, and spirits. The sponsorship model assumes that your user base is big enough (or niche enough) to attract brands to pay for greater exposure to your audience. With partnerships, you collaborate with another app whose user base corresponds with your own. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship that helps each of you improve your offering and attract more users. Sponsorship & Partnership Example: Nike+ and Headspace As Headspace expanded its sports meditation content, they worked with leading sports psychologists to determine how high-performance athletes might benefit from mindfulness training. With the Nike+ and Headspace partnership, users can improve motivation, focus, athletic performance, and recovery — not to mention enjoy their workouts more. In addition to coaching from Nike pros and elite athletes on pacing, speed, and endurance, the new guided runs include advice from Headspace experts to improve the running experience and help users look forward to their workouts. For both Nike and Headspace, it means highly engaged users — and more of them. Which Monetization Model is Right for Your App? A few questions to consider as you decide how to monetize your app : What’s unique about your app? Would people be willing to pay for it? How much? do competitors use and has it worked for them? What’s more important for your business right now: to gain users or gain revenue? Some apps choose to earn money from the get-go and acquire users more slowly. Others focus on growing their user base quickly and then monetizing. Your business goals will determine (or help rule out) effective monetization models. Another important point to keep in mind: many monetization models aren’t exclusive. You can mix and match by offering a free app with targeted ads, and an ad-free Premium version of your app for users who wish to pay, for example. How Will Your App Make Money? Decided on the best monetization strategy for your app? Get practical tips for implementing it successfully, along with more real-world examples of apps that have used these strategies to generate real revenue. Get the free ebook: p . Mobile App Monetization Strategies A collection of 7 time-tested monetization strategies for all mobile app verticals. Last updated on May 16, 2023

Canada's PM Trudeau announces the first batch of coronavirus vaccine has arrived

News Eamonn Sheridan p CAD Prime Minister via tweet: His follow up tweet is even better: This is good news. But our fight against COVID-19 is not over. Now more than ever, let's keep up our vigilance. Keep wearing your masks, washing your hands, avoiding gatherings, and using #COVIDAlert. Download it here:

Manage and Control Servers on Android

About this app arrow_forward ✨ Free for up to 3 servers.✨ 6-day full-function trial.💯DaRemote is a powerful remote server management app that allows you to monitor and manage your Linux servers, Docker containers, and SSH/SFTP connections from your phone. With its intuitive interface and comprehensive features, DaRemote is the perfect tool for developers, system administrators, and anyone who needs to manage their servers on the go.It supports the monitoring and management of the following systems:* Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenWrt, Busybox, etc.)* FreeBSD* macOS* Docker---✔Monitoring Functions：CPU: the current load of each core, etc.Process: top 10 processes online time and resource usage.Memory: total amount of memory and usage.Disk: the corresponding mount point for each partition, as well as the capacity and current read/write speed, etc. Network: inbound and outbound speeds per network interface, total amount of data, etc.Docker: show and manage containers, including start, restart, pause/unpause, stop.✔Script and command snippet management:Script organization, editing, running, result display, etc.✔Proxy supported:SSH TunnelHTTP ProxySOCKS5 Proxy✔SSH client:xterm-256 color compatible terminal emulation✔SFTP supported.Support languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional ChineseSupport themes: dark, lightMaterial You supported---Privacy Statement:The app does not collect or upload any user data or information, including your server's information. Sensitive server information is encrypted and stored locally. Updated on Jun 1, 2023 Communication Data safety arrow_forward Safety starts with understanding how developers collect and share your data. Data privacy and security practices may vary based on your use, region, and age. The developer provided this information and may update it over time. No data shared with third parties Learn more about how developers declare sharing No data collected Learn more about how developers declare collection See details Ratings and reviews Ratings and reviews are verified info_outline arrow_forward Ratings and reviews are verified info_outline phone_android Phone tablet_android Tablet 4.7 225 reviews 5 4 3 2 1 Shane Heroux more_vert Flag inappropriate April 20, 2023 Hands down the best sysadmin app on the play store. Observability and management at a glance. Once upon a time I was a day job sysadmin. I'm still an IT pro and I do run an extensive home lab / self hosted infrastructure. I found this app with the search "grafana android" and the result couldn't be more spot on. As someone with fatigue / hatred for subscriptionware, I am happy to pay for straight to the point, excellent software with no fluff or annoyance, and this is that. Star trek. 1 person found this review helpful Justin Ford more_vert Flag inappropriate Show review history May 28, 2023 Really nice. I usually don't try apps with so few downloads. Glad I gave this one a chance. The best SSH app on Android right here. The ^ symbol is ctrl, btw. Emin Kokalari more_vert Flag inappropriate April 22, 2023 Great app. Maybe one of the best out there. Waiting for new features and tools in following updates, because i think that this app have the possibility to be the best one! 1 person found this review helpful See all reviews What's new v2.7.101. Fixed SSH proxy connection issue flagFlag as inappropriate Similar apps arrow_forward UserLAnd - Linux on Android UserLAnd Technologies 4.6 star Linux Commands androing 3.6 star Termius - SSH and SFTP client Termius Corporation 4.4 star dataplicity - Terminal for Pi MachineForest 4.4 star ConnectBot Kenny Root 4.3 star Monitee - Home server monitor Krillsson $0.99 More by iDeskangel arrow_forward DaChatAI iDeskangel DaShare: File share iDeskangel DaTask iDeskangel P.Diary:colorful memo,mood iDeskangel flagFlag as inappropriate

A-Line Spitze Ärmellos Herz-Ausschnitt Brautkleid

Währung: € Hilfe Mein Konto Bestellverfolgung Einloggen oder Registrieren Hauptseite h1  (#MK13OSMV4) 5 (0) 245.98 € € US$ £ CA$ AU$ CHF HK$ ￥ (75% Rabatt) 983.91€ Ersparnis 737.93 € Farbenführer Maßführer Messen Menge: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 Favoriten 2080 Zu meinen Favoriten hinzufügen Was kaufen Kunden, nachdem sie diesen Artikel angesehen haben Artikelbeschreibung Silhouette : A-Linie, Meerjungfrau Ausschnitt : Herz-Ausschnitt Schleppe : Kapelle Schleppe Ärmellänge : Ärmellos Verzierung : Spitze Rückseite Detail : Rücken Schnürung Voll gefüttert : Ja Eingebauter BH : Ja Stoff : Spitze Nettogewicht : 1.5 Kg Versandgewicht : 1.98 Kg Anfertigungszeit : 7-15 Werktage Versandzeit : 2-8 Werktage Anreisedatum : 16. 06. 2023 - 01. 07. 2023 Mehr Kategorien Brautkleider Meerjungfrau Brautkleider Brautkleider Rücken Schnürung Brautkleider Brautkleider Bordüre Brautkleider Brautkleider Natürliche Taille Brautkleider Brautkleider Kapelle Schleppe Brautkleider Produktbilder Bewertungen von Produkten Durchschnittliche Bewertung: 5 (0 Bewertungen) Fragen und Antworten (0) Warum wählen Sie MeKleid.de MeKleid.de – Die bestene Wählen für die Kleider, die vielen Stil und Preiswert sind. Ein breites Sortiment Wir bieten ein breites Sortiment an Kleidern, die Kunden können die verschiedene Kleider wählen. Innenraum-Fotografie Alle Kleider wurden durch unsere Studios fotografiert, wir möchten Ihnen deutlich sehen, was ist die Kleider. Einzigartig Design Unsere Design Team ist ein professionell Team, die Designers sind aus verschiedene Länder, Sie streben immer nach die Anforderung den Kunden, die aus globale Länder sind. Messen & Schneidern Alle Kleider werden ausführlich und genau von unseren professionelle Schneider gemessen, um Ihre Figur gut zu passen. Hand Ruching & Elegant Beading Professionell Handgemachter brauchen vielen Zeit Ruching und Beading zu machen, um Ihnen elegant Design anzubieten. Höhe Qualität Mit einen professionellen und guten Erfahrung Kleidermacher vertrauchen Sie unsere Kleider, die Ihnen schöneheit und Elegant zu zeigen.

I'm frustrated and need encouraging advice

Podcast without ads with white light, Are you looking for inspiring phrases that will inspire you and relax your mind? In fact, in this guide we are providing you with a long list of life quotes about failure and inner strength. Phrases that encourage exams or other challenges you are currently facing. I look forward to giving you the encouragement you need. The wave of positivity and courage has not harmed anyone. Unfortunately, this can happen to anyone, especially in dark times. Therefore, it is always good to remember sentences that can comfort a sad friend or colleague. Do not burden yourself or feel that reacting around you is always important. In short: take a look at our motto on the subject of courage and see if you can find something that gives you the motivation you are looking for. Don't worry, we will try our best to provide more things for you. To meet your needs, we've decided to break these heartwarming messages into several categories. Read all the inspiring sentences because they are very diverse and help in every situation. The Most Beautiful Inspirational Quotes Let's start with a few inspirational sentences that primarily serve the desire not to give up. Against pessimism and defeatism. Because the most important thing is that we have to trust him, we can achieve some goals, even our dreams. “I think we should all learn ants. You have four amazing philosophies. Never give up, look ahead, be positive and do what you can "- Jim Ron;caused " Many mistakes in life aren't people I didn't know how close they were to success when I quit. "Thomas Edison ; the future of those who believe in the beauty of dreams "The chance does not knock on your door, but build a door for you" "Come on, one day you will find out I have already climbed the mountain" - Tom Hiddleston: "I'm trying always to do things that i can't, i learn. Do it "- Pablo Picasso; " One thing makes dreams impossible "Fear of failure" Let the dream "Thank you to all those who refused. You will come true." - Albert Einstein; "The best weapon against the fear of life: Courage, perseverance and good patience strengthen the spiritual strength. The power of fun and patience gives peace." - Hermann Hesse, "Think, believe, dream and dare" -Walt Disney, "Don't give on ". You risk giving up an hour before the miracle" - Arabic proverb; "Success is the sum of small and repeated efforts every day" - R. Collier, who knows, "Always find the strength to try again" - Jim Morrison “Life is 10% about what happens to you and about 90% about how you react” - Anonymous “If you want something you've never done, you have to do something that has never been done before have "youSieErmutigen your sentence, not to give you,"Stark, nobody beats you, noble, nobody is humiliated, lassvon anyone you see, life is short, so do not wake up every morning. Repent everything. So love those who are good to you and forget those who do not believe that there is a reason for all of this. Hear, catch! If this changes your life, so be it! Nobody  told it would be easy, they just promised it will  be rewarded. "The sun won't stop anything. Even in the darkest night it won't stop. Because outside the curtain of the night a day is waiting for us" -Gibran "That's right. People love the original" - Ingrid Bergman; “Follow your dreams with confidence. Live the life you imagined - Henry David Thoreau, "In the midst of every problem there is an opportunity" - Albert · Einstein, "If you want to see the rainbow, you have to learn to love the rain " -Paul Coelho, "We have to decide what we do in a given time "- JRR Tolkien; " Only I can change my life. Nobody can do this for me. "——Carol Burnett; " Wherever I go, as long as before "—— Dr. Livingstone; " Invest in yourself. This is the most interesting investment. "-Anonymous; useful information about " When it is time to be courageous, change yourself and start something, it is not for a great cause, but for something that will delight your heart, something that will truly inspire your dreams. "You have to make every day on earth special. Have fun. Dig deeper and get back to the surface. Make your dream come true!" - Stephen Littlewood. The motto about inner strength: "Crisis and dilemmas often turn into opportunities for inner growth" -Isabel Allende "It is simply a very difficult external environment that gives a person the motivation to overcome" - Victor Frank Starke inner strength"Based on inner strength Business must be calm and gloomy, and when you brag, everything looks bad, insignificant, or even insignificant ”- Italo Calvino; “Every connection creates strength or weakness” - Michael Murdo Gram; “Peace creates inner peace; only inner peace can reflect deeply; the starting point of every success "-Lao Tzu " The strongest souls are those who are ready to suffer. The strongest characters are full of scars "-Cahill Gibran; " Lord, give strength to my enemy, let him live long and let him witness my victory "- Napoleon Bonaparte; “Inner strength is the strongest protection you have. She is responsible for happiness ”- - Dalai Lama; “Don't let the noise of other people's opinions affect your inner voice, courage to follow your heart and intuition. To a certain extent, you know what you really want to change. Everything is secondary. "——Steve Jobs; " Things that cannot kill me make me stronger "—— Friedrich Nietzsche; " Because of the development of my inner strength, I have forgotten about poverty, pain, loneliness and depression "-Nelson Mandela.

Aduhelm and Medicare

Biogen (and a lot of other people) have been waiting to see what Medicare makes of their FDA-approved antibody therapy for Alzheimer's, Aduhalem (aducanumab). Medicare is going to be a big driver of the spending on any Alzheimer's drug, naturally, and normally an FDA approval would make Medicare's approval for payment almost automatic. Not this time. I won't recapitulate the entire story, but the approval of Aduhelm has been. . .controversial. And the launch of the drug has been a mess as well, with many insurance companies and hospitals saying that they won't pay for it. So the Medicare decision is an even bigger deal than ever, because many organizations are going to take their own cue from it. Yesterday the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finally announced their decision: they will not pay for Aduhelm outside of its use in a controlled clinical trial. I think that's an excellent call, and I can recommend the full CMS document as a summary of the state of Alzheimer's research and therapy. It goes into the reasons to believe that amyloid is an appropriate target for treating the disease, and it goes into the reasons to doubt that idea. "The role of A-beta as cause versus marker of disease remains controversial", it concludes, and boy does it ever. It also notes that the therapeutic landscape is barren, and that existing medications "do not prevent, halt, or slow - let alone reverse - the disease". That's the hard truth, too, and they get to another one when reviewing anti-amyloid antibodies in general: " To date, no trial of an antiamyloid mAb has confidently demonstrated a clinically meaningful improvement in health outcomes (i.e., cognition and function) for AD patients. Thus, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that the use of monoclonal antibodies directed against amyloid is reasonable and necessary for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.  . ." What's more, given the side effects seen in the clinical trials of such agents, CMS concludes that evidence so far does not support the idea that the benefits - if any - outweigh the harms involved. And as for Biogen's own arguments that their trial data showed a benefit to patients, the document says: "Many published expert opinions and reports have questioned Biogen’s secondary analysis of trial data and its conclusions regarding aducanumab’s effectiveness. Most experts believed there was little, if any, reliable evidence to answer the key question of clinical benefit.. . .Our conclusion is that Biogen’s secondary analysis cannot overturn, definitively confirm, or substitute for, the RCT evidence. With conflicting results from two RCTs (EMERGE and ENGAGE), and a secondary analysis that did not resolve the difference between the two RCTs, CMS believes that the available evidence is insufficient to establish that the treatment is reasonable and necessary. . ." I could not agree more. The CMS document goes on to spell out exactly the sort of clinical evidence that it believes is necessary for full reimbursement, and exactly the sort of clinical trial that it will approve the use of Aduhelm for in order to generate such data. But they're not approving payment for it for anything else. All this simply makes the FDA's approval decision more inexplicable, and (and many have pointed out) it opens the biggest gap that I think we have ever seen between a Medicare recommendation and the FDA. I've said many times that I think the Aduhelm approval was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen the agency make, and this is more evidence for that position. Biogen, of course, is out with statements about how this will restrict so many Alzheimer's patients from getting this FDA-approved drug, how can you do this to people in need, and so on. That same link has a statement from the industry trade group PhRMA: "With this proposal, CMS is writing off an entire class of medicines before multiple products have even been reviewed by FDA, positioning itself and not FDA as the key arbiter of clinical evidence." And that is some crap, let me tell you. You know what's been writing off this entire class of medicines? Their clinical trial results, which have been relentlessly negative. Believe me, if one of the other anti-amyloid antibodies shows up at the FDA with (for once) actual positive evidence of benefit and a favorable risk analysis, I'm sure CMS will cover that gladly. This is a decision about Aduhelm, based on its own clinical data and the class data that have been generated so far. Got something better? Roll it out and let's have a look. No, that PhRMA statement is shameful obfuscation and it's even more evidence of the harm that the Aduhelm approval is doing. PhRMA should want drugs that work; instead, they're coming out in favor of drugs that are approved and are reimbursed by insurance, and Aduhelm is evidence that those categories are not the same. I wish they were. I wish a lot of things.

What Is IPFS? – A Beginner's Guide

76,676reads A Beginner’s Guide to IPFS March 21st 2018 76,676reads EN Too Long; Didn't Read Companies Mentioned Coin Mentioned @kojoaddaquay Addaquay ML Practitioners - Ready to Level Up your Skills? L O A D I N G. . . comments & more!

A founder’s perspective on 4 years with Haskell (2016)

In 2012 I co-founded Better … The name Better is a story in itself. The reasoning behind it was that our users would get better by using our platform – our slogan was Better than yesterday. It has caused some confusion though and it makes some sentences sound odd. One of our developers spoke to Jony Ive at a convention and when he heard the name he apparently said that “it could be worse”. , a startup building a new type of enterprise e-learning platform. Our goal was to make it faster and cheaper for large companies to develop, deliver, and analyse adaptive, cross-platform, multi-language, online courses. From day one we decided to use Haskell as our main language and it remained the only language we used on the backend as our team grew to 10 developers. After a period of experimentation and development, Better grew from \$0 to \$500,000+ in annual recurring revenue in the space of a few months, with companies including American Express and Swissport as customers. However, the distribution model proved challenging to grow beyond that and we sold to GRC Solutions, an Australian compliance company. Though interest in Haskell appears to be growing steadily, its use in production is still rare. Some have the mistaken impression it’s an academic language and nothing more. In this post I’ll give my perspective on what it’s like to use Haskell in a startup. Can you get stuff done? Does it hold up in practice? Can you hire developers? Should more companies use it? The short answer to those questions is yes. It’s not a fit for all problems or for all teams, but it is worth serious consideration. For building server-side software, Haskell might be the closest thing to a secret weapon you’ll find today. … Paul Graham talks about another niche language, Lisp, in his essay Beating the Averages: What’s so great about Lisp? And if Lisp is so great, why doesn’t everyone use it? These sound like rhetorical questions, but actually they have straightforward answers. Lisp is so great not because of some magic quality visible only to devotees, but because it is simply the most powerful language available. And the reason everyone doesn’t use it is that programming languages are not merely technologies, but habits of mind as well, and nothing changes slower. A couple of years before founding Better, I implemented a forecasting model for a financial advisory company. A first prototype in Python turned out to be fragile and error prone. How could I ensure some variables always held dollar values and others percentages? How did I avoid accidentally mutating objects inside functions? I would need lots of tests, which would be slow and tedious to write. I recalled Haskell from university and looked at it again. After a couple of days of experimentation, I had, to my surprise, convinced myself it was a better fit for the task and I got a rough version of the model working in about a week. When we started Better I was confident Haskell would be more productive than the more common languages. Haskell distinguishes itself from most languages by purity, laziness, and its strong, static, inferred type system. Purity lets you reason more easily about your program. Laziness allows for better function composition and optimisation (at the cost of harder-to-understand memory profiles). Strong, static, inferred types deliver a lightweight mechanism for enforcing consistency … Haskell’s type system can’t guarantee that your program does the thing you intended, but at least it won’t allow you to multiply a string. , making refactoring a joy and eliminating a large class of bugs without the need to write and maintain tests. These properties add up to a surprisingly pleasurable and productive development experience. If you’re building something from scratch, the good news is that Haskell lets you get stuff done with limited knowledge. What you build just won’t be particularly neat or efficient. You might later find that something that took you 5 lines is a standard abstraction ready to be re-used. The bad news for newcomers is that to become highly productive, there’s a lot to learn, even for experienced developers. Haskell is heavy on concepts and abstractions, though they are not as difficult as their names might suggest for the most part. Some good textbooks exist, but blog posts and papers end up playing an important role too. This is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the concepts are valuable beyond Haskell and will affect how you think about program construction in general, which is fulfilling. In more practical terms, one of our biggest complaints with Haskell was basic tool support. Building with cabal-install wasn’t smooth. Stack has since alleviated many of those concerns. Stack is beginner friendly and makes large Haskell projects manageable. You can do what is standard in many other toolchains, like fork libraries on GitHub and depend on the forks without having to publish the packages. Haskell tool support is still not what it could be, in particular when it comes to IDEs and editors. It is possible to get various editor integrations set up, but it can be fiddly and there’s no commonly adopted standard. … haskell-ide-engine was set up with the goal to create a standard backend for Haskell IDEs, so there are people working on the problem." That is a pity, particularly given how rich and useful Haskell’s type information is. When it comes to libraries, coverage is decent, not great. We found ourselves writing some rough internal libraries (for sending email via Mandrill’s API for example) that we wouldn’t have had to write in more popular languages. … Shortly after we wrote our Mandrill library, the mandrill package was released. There are world-class libraries for Haskell, but knowing which ones are great is not always easy … To identify high-quality libraries, you will learn to recognise names of authors and maintainers that tend to produce them. Gabriel Gonzalez’s State of the Haskell ecosystem is also useful for figuring out how mature Haskell and its libraries are in different areas. and quality varies dramatically. If memory serves me, we only encountered one serious library bug, which manifested as being unable to make https connections. … The developer who investigated the library bug we encountered gives more details on Reddit. It sounds like Stack might have saved us from that as well today. Correction: An earlier version of this article claimed that the bug we encountered was in the tls library, but that was wrong as explained in the Reddit comment." As for the language itself, Haskell’s laziness requires you to think about space complexity more than in other languages. There are good tools and techniques to help with that and you can certainly write space-efficient code, but it takes more conscious effort than with strict languages. You tend to more than reclaim that mental load however, by having better and more powerful abstractions at hand. There are also a few other annoyances like converting between string types, the absence of a standard style, and the lack of a good record syntax. Lenses do solve the record problem, but they take time to learn … lens has a steep learning curve and are tricky to debug. In day-to-day use, Haskell is otherwise surprisingly pragmatic. In particular, I think it is hard to get a Haskell codebase to a point where refactorings and improvements become scary. The type system is there to help you and purity gives you much more confidence when reasoning about code. Better ended up up building an ambitious piece of software with a couple of major rewrites and though we misjudged the market, the engineering team never failed to deliver. The Better platform gets around half a million learning actions every week and it has been running for well over a year with no downtime or maintenance. We still don’t know of any bugs. To top that off, we did a major refactoring shortly before we halted development of the platform. This is only anecdotal evidence, but even I am surprised and impressed by how well the software is holding up. We had a great engineering team and they certainly deserve most of the credit, but I think Haskell also deserves some credit. We did not do test-driven development and even though we had tests for critical parts, we did not have anywhere near full test coverage. That seemed like the right cost/quality trade-off then and if you ask me now, it still does. Haskell’s type system removes the need for a large class of tests required in weaker languages to catch inconsistencies. Writing and keeping such tests up-to-date is costly compared to having a strong, inferred type-system. I understand that the argument for test-driven development isn’t just about writing tests to catch bugs; it is also about helping developers think clearly about the problem and encourage a certain discipline. I believe that Haskell’s purity and types enforce much, if not more, of such discipline and clarity. There is some truth to the saying “if it compiles it works”. To be clear, testing is important. The type system can ensure certain kinds of consistency, but consistent programs can do the wrong thing. Testing is a trade-off between iteration speed and quality; different businesses require different trade-offs. When you do test, Haskell has outstanding tools for it. QuickCheck, for example, can leverage Haskell’s type system to automatically generate a large number of random test-cases to check that a programmer-specified property hold for a given function. Thus, Haskell can be a particularly good fit for software where correctness and quality matters more than usual. You might expect to pay for this safety in reduced iteration speed, but at a given size and complexity you could find yourself iterating faster than with non-pure, weakly typed languages. Better was based in Zurich. We didn’t know anyone here when we started, but hiring developers turned out to be easier than we had expected, in no small part thanks to Haskell. Hiring still took effort of course, but our experience was that many developers were excited about the possibility to work with Haskell. We ended up with a great team, several of whom moved to Zurich from abroad to work with us. Early on, we made a decision to not have a remote team, but if you are open to remote development, you should have even more options. We hired people for a mix of technical skills, interests, and motivations, depending on the role and we attracted several highly skilled Haskellers. We also had good experiences hiring people with limited Haskell knowledge. One of our developers came straight from a physics degree and quickly became productive with mentoring from the more experienced developers. Although we couldn’t match Google, IBM Zurich, or the large local banks when it came to salaries, we were still able to attract great people. Haskell was one of the reasons we could do that – good developers tend to value working with good technology. It’s hard to separate the effects of a programming language on engineering culture from hiring decisions, management style, and individual personalities, but I think we can attribute some of it to Haskell. People don’t learn Haskell to get a well-paid job. There just aren’t enough Haskell jobs out there for that to make sense. The language is also perceived to be more difficult to learn than other languages, which filters out those who are reluctant to invest effort into learning about funny-sounding things like functors, applicatives, and monads. The upside of that is that if you hire people who have spent some time learning Haskell, they are likely to have more than average intrinsic motivation to build software and to learn new things. The downside is that they are more likely to have an aversion to work that lacks learning opportunities. I believe Haskell helped build the engineering culture we wanted, but it wasn’t magic – we also ran a careful hiring process, we tried to be fair managers, and we looked for people who could be good developers in any language. Haskell is not for everyone. It is different from what most developers are used to. It requires learning abstract concepts. Its eco-system is not as mature as some more popular languages. It is rarely the quickest language for hacking together a 2-day prototype. It has garbage collection so it is unsuitable for real-time systems. Its space-complexity can be fickle. And the number of people with production experience of Haskell is small. But if those things aren’t deal breakers, you could be in for a real treat. Haskell is an outstanding language for building and rapidly iterating on high-quality software in small, skilled, and growing teams. As your codebase expands and evolves, Haskell’s ability to handle complexity, clarify thinking, and ensure consistency is a blessing. You will worry less about the server crashing when you go to sleep. You will spend less time on bugs in old code. You will refactor confidently and quickly. You will stand out from Java, Node.js, and Ruby shops when recruiting. You will start to think about program construction in new, useful abstractions. In other words, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy your work more. With hindsight, there are many things I would have done differently at Better; choosing Haskell is not one of them. Katie Miller, , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTO510zO78 (2016) Chad Austin, , https://chadaustin.me/2016/06/the-story-of-haskell-at-imvu/ (2016) Fredrik Olsen, , https://medium.com/@folsen/haskell-in-production-bdellium-1df48de40e19 (2015) Cade Metz, , https://www.wired.com/2015/09/facebooks-new-anti-spam-system-hints-future-coding/ (2015) Gabriel Gonzalez, , https://github.com/Gabriel439/post-rfc/blob/master/sotu.md (2016) Paul Graham, , http://paulgraham.com/avg.html (2001)

What3words: Representing every location on earth with three dictionary words

b is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of about 3 metres (9.8 ft). It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words. For example, the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by ///slurs.this.shark. [2] What3words differs from most location encoding systems in that it uses words rather than strings of numbers or letters, and the pattern of this mapping is not obvious; the algorithm mapping locations to words is copyrighted. [3] The company has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API for bidirectional conversion between What3words addresses and latitude–longitude coordinates. Founded by Chris Sheldrick, Jack Waley-Cohen, Mohan Ganesalingam and Michael Dent, What3words was launched in July 2013. [4] [5] Sheldrick and Ganesalingam conceived the idea when Sheldrick, working as an event organizer, struggled to get bands and equipment to music venues using inadequate address information. [6] Sheldrick tried using GPS coordinates to locate the venues, but decided that words were better than numbers after a one-digit error led him to the wrong location. He credits a mathematician friend for the idea of dividing the world into 3-metre (10 ft) squares, and the linguist Jack Waley-Cohen with using memorable words. [7] The company was incorporated in March 2013 [8] and a patent application for the core technology filed in April 2013. [9] In November 2013, What3words raised $500,000 of seed funding. [10] What3words originally sold "OneWord" addresses, which were stored in a database for a yearly fee, [5] but this offering was discontinued [11] as the company switched to a business-to-business model. [12] In 2015, the company was targeting logistics companies, post offices, and couriers. [7] In January 2018, Mercedes-Benz bought approximately 10% of the company and announced support for What3words in future versions of their infotainment and navigation system. [13] In 2018, the company had a turnover of £274,000 and lost £11M. [12] In the year ending December 2019, the company lost £14.5M and had reported assets of £24.7M. [14] By January 2020, the company had reached 100 employees and raised over £50M from investors. [12] In the year ending December 2020, the company lost £16.09M. In the year ending December 2021, the company lost £43.29M. [1] In March 2021, it was announced that ITV plc had invested £2 million in What3words as the first investment in its media-for-equity scheme. [14] Since 2019, What3words has seen adoption by emergency services, who can use it for free [15] and participate in media campaigns provided by What3Words [16] to promote the app. [17] [18] [19] By September 2021, more than 85 percent of British emergency services teams used What3words, including the Metropolitan Police and London Fire Brigade. [20] [21] Support has also been added to the Australian Government's Triple Zero Emergency Plus App. [22] The Mercedes A-Class, launched in May 2018, became the first vehicle with What3words on board. [28] What3words divides the world into a grid of 57 trillion 3-by-3-metre (10 ft × 10 ft) squares, each of which has a three-word address. The company says they do their best to remove homophones and spelling variations; [29] however, at least 32 pairs of English near-homophones still remain. [30] Wordlists are available in 50 languages, [31] each of which uses a list of 25,000 words (except for English, which uses 40,000 to cover sea as well as land). [32] Translations are not direct, as direct translations to some languages could produce more than three words. Rather, territories are localised "considering linguistic sensitivities and nuances". [33] Densely populated areas have strings of short words to aid more frequent usage; while less populated areas, such as the North Atlantic, use more complex words. [33] [7] In a 2019 blog, open standards advocate and technology expert Terence Eden questioned the cultural neutrality of using words rather than the numbers generated by map coordinates. "Numbers are (mostly) culturally neutral." he said, "Words are not. Is mile.crazy.shade a respectful name for a war memorial? How about tribes.hurt.stumpy for a temple?" [21] What3words state that similar addresses are spaced as far apart as possible to avoid confusion, [34] and that similarly sounding codes have a 1 in 2.5 million chance of pointing to locations near each other. [35] However, security researcher Andrew Tierney calculates that 75% of What3words addresses contain plural words that also exist in singular form (or the reverse). [30] Co-founder and CEO Sheldrick responded that "Whilst the overwhelming proportion of similar-sounding three-word combinations will be so far apart that an error is obvious, there will still be cases where similar sounding word combinations are nearby." [35] Further analysis by Tierney shows that in the London area, around 1 in 24 addresses will be confusable with another London address. [36] In September 2022, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport used What3words to direct mourners to the end of the queue to view the Queen lying in state in London. Of the first five codes published, four led to the wrong place, [37] including a suburb of London some 15 miles from the real end of the queue. [38] Officials later moved to an automated system to generate the identifiers, as they realised having people involved in the process resulted in typos. [37] According to Rory Sutherland from the advertising agency Ogilvy in a 2014 op-ed piece for The Spectator , the system's advantages are memorability, accuracy, and non-ambiguity in speech. [39] Mountain rescue services in the UK have warned against relying on the app: Supporters of open standards criticise the What3words system for being controlled by a private business and the software for being patented and not freely usable. [21] The company has pursued an assertive policy of issuing copyright claims against individuals and organisations that have hosted or published files of the What3words algorithm or reverse-engineered code that replicates the service's functionality, such as the free and open source implementation WhatFreeWords. [42] The whatfreewords.org website was subsequently taken down following a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by What3words. This has extended to removing comments on social media which refer to unauthorised versions. In late April 2021, a security researcher was subjected to the threat of a lawsuit from What3words, stating that linking to the open source reimplementation "WhatFreeWords" violates the company's copyright. [43] According to the TechCrunch report, "The letter also demanded that he disclose to the [company's lawyers] the identity of the person or people with whom he had shared a copy of the software, agree that he would not make any further copies of the software and to delete any copies of the software he had in his possession." [43] The site has been parodied by others who have created services including What3Emojis [44] using emojis, What3Birds [45] using British birds, What3fucks [46] using swear words, Four King Maps [47] [48] also using swear words (covering only the British Isles), and What3Numbers [49] using OpenStreetMap tile identifiers. ^ a b c d What3words Limited: Annual Report and Financial Statements For the Year Ended 31 December 2021 ^ ^ ^ ^ a b ^ ^ a b c ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ a b c ^ ^ a b ^ a b ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ a b c ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ a b (blog mirror) ^ ^ ^ a b ^ ^ a b ^ ^ a b ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ a b ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

The Islands with Too Much Power [video]

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The Rise of Molds: Dive into the Microscopic Landscape of Growing Fungi

 Photography Science The Rise of Molds: Dive into the Microscopic Landscape of Growing Fungi <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> “The Rise of Molds” plunges into the minute world of four species of fungi as they fester, sprout, and morph from spindly, white shoots into dark, dense patches. Shot by Beauty of Science (previously), the timelapse captures Rhizopus, Aspergillus Niger, Aspergillus Oryzae, and Penicillium spores with a supermacro lens, magnifying the microscopic organisms as they grow and sprawl across the screen. Each of the molds is utilized to ferment common foods, like wine and soy sauce, and to add pungent flavors to cheese. Check out Beauty of Science’s extensive library of videos chronicling chemical processes and animal life cycles on YouTube. strong Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now! Trending on Colossal

Google’s first folding Pixel is apparently still on track for a 2021 reveal

Google may have shied away from a Pixel Watch, but a Pixel Fold still very much seems to be on the way — following a leak last August that revealed the company was planning to release its first folding Pixel phone in late 2021, Korean industry site TheElec is now reporting that Samsung will begin production of folding OLED panels this October for Google, Vivo and Xiaomi’s upcoming folding phones, all of which will reportedly be revealed late this year. Google hasn’t exactly kept its folding phone ambitions a secret; in 2019, it published patent applications for its own folding screens and admitted it had been prototyping them for quite some time, telling CNET that it didn’t have “a clear use case yet.” But now, it appears Google has a foldable, codename “Passport,” that could be nearly ready to announce. 9to5Google even spotted a new reference to it last month in Android 12’s code, alongside other codenames believed to be the upcoming Pixel 6 and Pixel 5a 5G. TheElec says it’ll have a single 7.6-inch panel that folds inward, while Vivo’s upcoming phone will have a 8-inch main screen and a 6.5-inch outer display. It didn’t mention the size of the new Xiaomi phone’s screen. It’s not clear whether a Pixel Fold would actually come with a display designed by Google itself, though it’s possible; Samsung acts as a contract manufacturer for many other companies, producing some of Apple’s homegrown processors as one example. Either way, one portion of the screen’s sandwich may still largely belong to Samsung itself: ETNews reports that Samsung will supply its proprietary ultra-thin cover glass (which is technically made by German manufacturer Schott) to other smartphone manufacturers, and Google is expected to use it. Xiaomi already announced a folding phone earlier this year, the Mi Mix Fold, but it sounds like it’ll have a second one. TheElec also reports Oppo will be delaying a new foldable phone to 2022, with a 7.1-inch main screen and a smaller outer one between 1.5 and 2 inches diagonally.

How millions of jobless Americans can afford to ditch work

One of the more insidious myths this year was that young people didn’t want to work because they were getting by just fine on government aid. People had too much money, went the narrative. Only trouble is, the numbers don’t back it up. Instead, early retirement — whether forced by the pandemic or made possible otherwise — is playing a big role in America’s evolving labor market. People have left the workforce for myriad reasons in the past two years — layoffs, health insecurity, child care needs, and any number of personal issues that arose from the disruption caused by the pandemic. But among those who have left and are not able to — or don’t want to — return, the vast majority are older Americans who accelerated their retirement. Earlier this month, ADP Chief Economist Nela Richardson said the strong stock market along with soaring home prices “has given some higher income people options. We already saw a large portion of the Boomer workforce retiring. And they’re in a better position now.” In assessing the jobs recovery, economists have pointed out that while the unemployment rate has come down, the labor force participation rate hasn’t improved at the same pace. But Jared Bernstein, a member of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that once “non-prime age” workers — those over 55 — are excluded from the metrics a much clearer picture of how the labor recovery is doing emerges because it strips out the retirement narrative. Last month, there were 3.6 million more Americans who had left the labor force and said they didn’t want a job compared with November 2019, says Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist and professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Older Americans, age 55 and up, accounted for whopping 90% of that increase. “I think a lot of the narratives imagine prime-age workers as being missing, but it actually skews much older,” Sojourner told CNN Business. The oft-lamented labor shortage has become a shorthand for the complicated reality of the pandemic-era labor force. Americans are quitting their jobs in record numbers — more than 4 million each month since July — but much of that quitting is happening among young people who are leaving for other jobs or better pay. They’re not leaving the workforce entirely. “Part of it is a job quality shortage,” says Sojourner. “It’s a bit of a puzzle why employers aren’t raising wages and improving working conditions fast enough to draw people back in. They say they want to hire people — there are 11 million job openings — but they’re not creating job openings that people want.” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell underscored that issue during a news conference on Wednesday. “There’s a demographic trend underlying all of this… The question of how much we can get back is a good one, and what we can do is try to create the conditions,” that allow people to come back, he said. To be sure, some companies have been raising wages to attract and retain staff. Some businesses also offer signing bonuses to get workers in the door. But economists aren’t sure whether these incentives are here to stay and will improve conditions for workers in the long term. “I can want a 65-inch TV for $50, but it doesn’t mean there’s a TV shortage, it means I’m not willing to pay enough to get somebody to sell me a TV,” said Sojourner. Nearly 70% of the 5 million people who left the labor force during the pandemic are older than 55, according to researchers from Goldman Sachs, and many of them aren’t looking to return. Retirements tend to be “stickier” than other labor force exits, the researchers wrote. Even so, they expect that an improving virus situation and increased vaccination will allow older workers to return to the labor force. In normal times, retired people are often drawn back into the workforce. But the “unretirement” rate fell significantly during the pandemic, exacerbating the shortage of workers, according to research from the Kansas City Fed. There are some early signs that seniors are coming back to the workforce as vaccination rates increase and employers offer higher wages. The unretirement rate fell to just over 2% early in the pandemic, but in recent months has ticked up to around 2.6%, according to Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed. That’s still off from the pre-pandemic rate of around 3%. Then again, older workers are potentially competing with younger, more qualified applicants for jobs, which could make their return more challenging.

PHP – Fresh News

Member-only story Tech releases See the new shine features that PHP 8.1 brings to you Jorge Da Silva p Follow Published in The Startup p 5 min read p Nov 30, 2020 -- 2 Share Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash History of PHP PHP wasn't always awesome like it is today. Back in the day, it was all messy and didn’t compare at all with strongly typed languages. But it was versatile enough to domain the web. Other languages rise… Follow 1.6K Followers p Writer for The Startup Backend developer | Hobbist Writer | Intense reader - https://extensionhub.site | https://bargainzon.site Follow Help Status Writers Blog Careers Privacy Terms About Text to speech Teams

Why it’s easier to move country than switch social media

We may earn a commission if you buy something from any affiliate links on our site. Learn more. Gregori Saavedra For my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, leaving the USSR was a momentous and difficult choice. Making her way across Europe to a camp in Germany, and thence to a Displaced Persons ship to Canada, meant facing enormous danger – including nearly being burned to death in an antisemitic arson attack in Poland – and then starting over in a new country where she had few contacts and could not speak the language. But even after she learned English and established herself and her family in Toronto, she continued to pay a price for leaving: she was utterly cut off from her mother, brother, cousins and other family in Leningrad. She didn't even know if they were alive. It was a decade before her phone rang and my father heard his mother cry out "Mama!" for the first time. I moved from Toronto to San Francisco to London to Los Angeles. Each time, the move has gotten easier. When I left London five years ago, I shipped over my books, my clothes – even my appliances! (I bought voltage adapters.) I videoconference with my in-laws in London and Wales weekly on Saturdays, and with the Toronto bunch every Sunday. If I change my mind, I can always move back. When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. Yes, it's true that all your friends are already stuck in a Big Tech silo that doesn't talk to any of the other Big Tech silos. It needn't be that way: interoperable platforms have existed since the first two Arpanet nodes came online. You can phone anyone with a phone number and email anyone with an email address. The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible – it's that Facebook forbids it. What's more, Facebook (and its Big Tech rivals) have the law on their side: the once-common practice of making new products that just work with existing ones (like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games) has been driven to the brink of extinction by Big Tech. They were fine with this kind of "competitive compatibility" when it benefited them, but now that they dominate the digital world, it's time for it to die. To restore competitive compatibility, we would need reform to many laws: software copyright and patents, the anti-circumvention laws that protect digital rights management, and the cybersecurity laws that let companies criminalize violations of their terms of service. New proposals from the UK Competition and Markets Authority, as well as the EU's Digital Services and Digital Markets Act and the US ACCESS Act of 2020, all contemplate some form of interoperability mandate - forcing the dominant platforms to open up the APIs they already use to let various parts of their own business talk to one another. These mandates are a great floor under interoperability, but they can't be the ceiling. That's because they would be easy for big companies to subvert: if a lawmaker forces you to open a specific conduit to your competition, then you can respond by moving all the interesting data away from that conduit. You're still providing a jack that competitors can plug into, but you've moved all the important stuff to another jack. But with both mandates and competitive compatibility, a new equilibrium emerges. A tech giant that nerfs its mandated interfaces doesn't send the upstarts who relied on it packing: rather, it embarks upon a costly and chaotic arms-race, where those competitors use scrapers, bots and other tools to maintain the link between their users and the dominant platform's hostages. Big Tech companies (with the exception of Twitter) have objected to this. If we don't get a veto over who connects to our services and how, they say, how will we safeguard those users' privacy? They won't. And they don't. The rules that determine when someone is abusing your privacy should come from democratic deliberation: from law and regulation. How your data can – and can't – be used is too important to leave up to the whims of tech executives. 2.6 billion people are locked up in Facebook's walled garden and that means that you very well might submit to being locked in alongside them. That's network effects. Once you're there, you might hate it, but you still stick around because you don't want to leave your friends. Network effects are why my grandmother's family stayed behind in the USSR. Low switching costs are why I was able to roam freely around the world, moving to the places where it seemed like I could thrive. Network effects are a big deal, but it's switching costs that really matter. Facebook will tell you that it wants to keep bad guys out – not keep users in. Funnily enough, that's the same thing East Germany's politburo claimed about the Berlin Wall: it was there to keep the teeming hordes of the west out of the socialist worker's paradise, not to lock in the people of East Germany. Mr Zuckerberg, tear down that wall. Cory Doctorow is a journalist, activist and science fiction author More great stories from WIRED 🏎️ Lewis Hamilton opens up about activism and life beyond F1 🌊 Netflix’s Seaspiracy explores the impacts of overfishing. But will it make people change their behaviour? 🎧 Which music streaming service should you choose? We test Spotify, Apple Music and more 🔊 Listen to The WIRED Podcast, the week in science, technology and culture, delivered every Friday 👉 Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn

Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix: What Might Have Been

Hearing a knock, Reid looked through the peephole before opening the door, spying “this purple person with these shades around his head”. “I had to do a double take because there is no other human being who looked like that on the whole bloody planet.” Opening the door, there stood Miles Davis, already a music legend a few times over. Smiling warmly, Reid invited Miles in, but the trumpeter wouldn’t budge. “Is Jimi in?” he growled, and Reid replied that Jimi was in the other room, and invited Miles in. “I want fucking Jimi Hendrix to open Jimi Hendrix’s fucking door.” Miles grabbed the doorknob and slammed the door shut. When Reid reopened the door and again urged Miles to come in, he said: “I want fucking Jimi Hendrix to open Jimi Hendrix’s fucking door.” Reid went to Jimi’s bedroom and reported the exchange. “Yeah, he’s like that,” Jimi said, before himself letting Miles in and leading him to the bedroom. Reid reports that there was a silence for some time, before he heard the trumpet and Jimi’s unamplified guitar wafting through the apartment. “It was truly beautiful. It was tasteful playing, nothing showy, or over the top. In the jazz context, Jimi was still pushing the limits, and all those jazz guys respected him like they respected no one else in rock.” Both were musical geniuses in their own fields, though Miles had by then lived longer and initiated quite a few turning points in jazz. But Miles was dissatisfied by the kind of recognition he was given, or the lack of it when he was out in the world. In jazz spaces he drew respect and awe, but elsewhere he was just another black American, and he hated that. Miles moves towards Jimi Miles married 23-year-old Betty Mabry in September 1968, around the time of the release of the third record by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. She introduced Miles to Jimi’s music, and Miles was smitten. Miles was soon yearning to meet Jimi; he was fascinated by the guitarist’s musical creations, by his clothing, by his appeal, which he wanted for himself. Miles was envious of the drawing power of young rock musicians, and felt that if he had been supported by his record company, he too could pull in crowds of younger listeners. But he was also fascinated – for musical, not commercial reasons – by Jimi, Sly Stone and James Brown, who were then all the rage. Miles began to use electric instruments after the mid-1960s, at first bass guitar and electric piano, and in 1967 he was listening to blues guitarists Muddy Waters and BB King “and trying to find a way to get that kind of voicing into my music”. It is unclear exactly when Miles met Jimi, as various accounts differ. According to one account, it was at hairdresser James Finney’s salon that they met, both men being almost obsessive about coiffure and matters sartorial. It was around the time that John Coltrane died. Miles was deeply affected by the death of Coltrane, a man he loved. His relation to Jimi would echo his friendship with Coltrane in some ways. Miles’ account of his meeting with Jimi differs, saying in his autobiography:  “I first met Jimi when his manager called up and wanted me to introduce him to the way I was playing and putting my music to­gether. Jimi liked what I had done on Kind of Blue and some other stuff and wanted to add more jazz elements to what he was doing. He liked the way Coltrane played with all those sheets of sound, and he played the guitar in a similar way.” According to Ian Carr, author of Miles Davis: The definitive biography, and himself an accomplished trumpeter and band leader, the pair were hanging out around the time Miles recorded Miles in the Sky: “During this whole period, Miles’ friendship with Jimi Hendrix flourished. Jimi’s image was flamboyant and wild and he went in for such excesses as playing guitar solos with his teeth. The two spent much time together and Dave Holland [Miles’ bassist] is convinced that Jimi influenced Miles in many ways – even in the way he created his music.” Bitches Brew, recorded in August 1969 around the time the Woodstock festival took place, was remarkable for its rhythms, compositions, instrumentation and the unusual timbres and textures that make up the music: it featured bass clarinet, two and sometimes three pianos, two drummers, exotic percussion, and the electric guitar of John McLaughlin, a player of immense facility very different from Jimi. Miles loved McLaughlin. “It is possible however that Jimi was influenced both musically and in other ways by Miles, though not insofar as electronics were concerned – in that field Jimi was the trailblazer.” The album divided Miles’ fans and critics. Responding to the album, jazz critic Stanley Crouch, who died last week, called Miles “the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz” and a “traitor”. But Miles was convinced he had to move away from the jazz of old and into blues/rock and what would later be called “fusion”. McLaughlin last week told the story of how Miles complained that he had never seen Jimi play, so he took Miles to see Monterey Pop, the movie that featured Jimi setting fire to his guitar after playing Hey Joe. “All the way through Jimi’s performance, all I heard was Miles talking. ‘Damn! Damn, Jimi!’” Jimi heads for Miles Says Ian Carr: “It is possible however that Jimi was influenced both musically and in other ways by Miles, though not insofar as electronics were concerned – in that field Jimi was the trailblazer.” Jimi’s dissatisfaction with the rock scene became evident on the last Experience album, Electric Ladyland, where he began to experiment with various new forms, with some pieces more like jazz improvisations than rock songs. Voodoo Chile and 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) are the clearest examples of this new sensibility, while Jimi’s music with the Band of Gypsys was also heading in this direction, particularly Machine Gun, which also features avant-garde elements. Miles attended one of the four Band of Gypsys concerts beginning on New Year’s Day in 1970. Critic Chris Albertson of Downbeat described the first concert: “Jimi is finding where he should be at, and he might well emerge as the greatest of the new blues guitarists.” After befriending Miles, Jimi began to buy a string of jazz albums. He fell in love with Kind of Blue, Miles’ 1959 masterpiece. Wanting to record with Miles, Jimi turned to producer Alan Douglas to set up a session with Miles. Strangely, Miles had also approached Douglas to set something up, and they decided to use drummer Tony Williams. Jimi went so far as sending Paul McCartney a telegram asking him to play bass, but McCartney was otherwise engaged. However, Miles’ and Williams’ greed got in the way: the day before they were set to go into the studio, the pair demanded upfront payments of $50,000 each, and Jimi’s manager Mike Jeffrey refused, sinking the outing. Douglas called Miles and confirmed his request: “I cursed him and slammed the phone down. I had gone through this entire process for Miles, because he had wanted to record with Jimi so badly. Jimi shrugged and said, ‘Fuck it. I’m almost relieved that it didn’t come off anyway.’” Jimi’s last concert was on the Isle of Wight, where Miles also played, as did Sly and the Family Stone, the band that so impressed Miles. Jimi was supposed to meet with Miles and arranger Gil Evans to begin recording sometime after the concert, but on September 18, he died in his sleep. Jimi’s funeral was held on 1 October 1970. Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell of the Experience attended, as did Buddy Miles, Alan Douglas, Eddie Kramer, Johnny Winter and John Hammond. Miles was also there, suspending his reluctance to attend funerals. He hadn’t even attended his mother’s funeral, so averse was he to these send-offs. He was scathing about the proceedings, lambasting the preacher for knowing nothing about Jimi; even getting his name wrong. After the funeral there was a jam session, mostly with Johnny Winter and Buddy Miles playing. Miles was asked to play, but he refused, saying even he couldn’t add a coda to the musical life Jimi had already created. After Jimi’s demise Miles’s subsequent music was marked by the desire for Jimi’s guitaring, and he searched for guitarists who sounded like him, using Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas and Dominique Gaumont, among others. He began to play his trumpet through the wah-wah, which Jimi had used, trying to sound like Jimi. The temperament of Miles was in stark contrast to that of Jimi. Where Miles was often unfriendly, taciturn, demanding and arrogant, Jimi was friendly, easy-going, even gregarious. Jimi played to his audience, frequently pointing to people in the crowd, smiling, while Miles ignored the audience, barely acknowledging them and often turning his back on them – although he claimed he was directing his band like a conductor, so ultimately communicating with the audience. “It’s funny the way most people love the dead. Once you have died, you are made for life.” Miles, who was a formidable personality and never allowed anyone to dominate him in any way, was nevertheless extremely open to ideas produced by others, which was why he was able to lead bands in different eras, always receptive to the times, the people he played with, and new trends. Miles died 21 years after Jimi, in September 1991 So although Jimi and Miles did play together on at least one occasion, a recording of the two was never made, and we can only imagine what it would have sounded like. Terry Reid is perhaps the only person to have heard the pair. Let’s give Jimi the last word. Shortly before his death, he was quoted as saying: “It’s funny the way most people love the dead. Once you have died, you are made for life. You have to die before they think you are worth anything. And I tell you, when I die, I’m going to have a jam session. [I’ll] have them playing everything I did musically, everything I enjoyed doing most. “The music will be played loud and it will be our music. I won’t have any Beatles songs, but I’ll have a few of Eddie Cochran’s things and a whole lot of blues. Roland Kirk will be there and I’ll try to get Miles Davis along if he feels like making it. “For that, it’s almost worth dying, just for the funeral.” DM/ML

Envy

Silicon Valley runs on envy. Envy pervades every activity here. Funding announcements, company off-sites, career promotions, introduction emails, product releases, investor pitches, board meetings, fireside chats, news stories-- all are infused with envy. Envy is the fuel that animates this place, the scaffolding that holds it upright, and the glue that keeps it together. If you could cast a spell to eliminate envy, every Silicon Valley institution would deflate and vanish, like an alien goo-monster cut off from its power source in pre-CGI horror movies. Envy is at every step in the funnel. Founders without funding envy founders with funding. Founders with funding envy founders with funding from more prestigious investors. Founders with funding from prestigious investors envy founders who are favorites. Founders of companies with a $30B market cap envy founders of companies with a $300B market cap. VC associates envy junior partners, who envy senior partners. Investors envy other investors who have better deal flow. Tech employees envy other tech employees who get to spend more time with the senior leadership. Get a drink in a product manager, and they’ll tell you all about how the CEO plays favorites. Everyone watches each other as if it's their full time job. I was once having a drink with a YC founder whose company was in the top ten by valuation in the YC portfolio. For a while, he was getting invited to dinners exclusive to founders in their top ten most valuable companies. Then, other companies dramatically grew in valuation, and his was pushed down the list far past the top ten. He was telling me how he envied founders who got to attend these dinners he wasn't invited to anymore. And of course I envied him because at least he got to go. You do not talk about envy in polite company. That would puncture through a collectively agreed-upon veneer. But envy is such an important mechanism, we must talk about it. So we repackaged it as status. Envy and status aren't the same, but it doesn't matter because there are very few low-status people who don't experience envy. This linguistic trick transposes a Judeo-Christian idea into an amoral domain. It works. We can’t talk about envy, but we can safely talk about status, so long as it's in the abstract and not about a particular person. Envy is contagious. I don't think I've ever experienced it unless I'm in an environment where I sense it from others. Then, if I'm not careful, I feel it very intensely. It's such an unpleasant sensation that I deliberately go out of my way to avoid it. The best way to avoid feeling envy is to spend time with aspy people who are unable to feel it, or with people who've accepted their lot in life. Conversely anything tech scene is a breeding ground for envy (e.g. tech press, gossip, startup parties, exclusive events). Repeatedly choosing to put yourself into situations where you feel envy has the same shape as an abusive relationship. It isn't good for you, but you keep coming back because you're too myopic to see it for what it is. Dislike for the unpleasant sensation of being envious isn't a good reason for envy avoidance. A much better reason is that in a technologically sophisticated civilization envy is a bad north star. Consider again what you pay attention to when you adopt envy as your guide. Tech press, gossip, parties, off-sites-- almost all of it is noise, and is therefore a monumental waste of your time. And it makes you hyperactive. You become like a confused moth, abruptly changing course to follow rapidly flashing sources of light, except you aren't aware they're going on and off at random. Conviction is a dramatically better north star than envy. It's important to meet people, but it's much better done by working toward a shared mission than by trying to wriggle your way into desirable social circles. The mission can be enormous (get to Mars) or mundane (complete a multi-day hike). Human beings form the strongest bonds when they overcome shared obstacles in pursuit of a common goal. And even if people don't join you, they are likely to remember you and respect you for attempting to accomplish a challenging mission. Envy is a paradoxical emotion because it makes you desire things you'd be much more likely to get if you rarely felt it, or at least rarely acted on it. So if you want to acquire the objects of your envy, structure your life to avoid it as much as possible. That isn't to say envy isn't useful. Silicon Valley is built on envy, and it has accrued immense advantages-- capital, talent, networks, collective wisdom. Harness the envy of others to achieve your mission. Don’t allow others to ignite envy in you to achieve theirs. TL;DR: Spend time with people who don't feel envy. Avoid people who do. Pick a mission, and direct all your energy into solving problems that stand between you and your target. Nurture relationships by overcoming shared challenges with others. Avoid "the scene". If you were a musician, you'd want to be the type who's practicing scales rather than trying to get backstage to party with the rock stars. Find the equivalent of practicing scales in your field, and do that.

DNS Query Privacy Revisited

I wrote a first version of this post in August 2019, and ended it with the comment: “It’s likely that we will return to this measurement of the use of QNAME Minimisation in a year or so to see if anything has changed from the picture today.” Well, a year has passed and it’s time to review this topic and see what has changed in the DNS resolution environment over the past 12 months. Much has been said and written in recent times about the use of the Domain Name System (DNS) as a means of looking at the behaviour of end systems and inferring user behaviours. Almost every transaction starts with a DNS query, and if one were to assemble the complete set of DNS queries generated by an Internet user it would be possible to assemble a relatively complete picture of their online activity. For many years this aspect of the DNS as a means of observation into the activities of others received little attention from the mainstream, but the more recent sensitivities over state and private digital surveillance have brought significant attention to the overall topic of DNS privacy. Another reason for all this attention is that in terms of privacy, the DNS resolution protocol has been sadly lacking in some basic privacy protections. The DNS name resolution protocol was not designed with privacy as the foremost consideration. The queries and responses are unencrypted, which makes them prone to hostile man-in-the-middle manipulation and they leak superfluous information to third party onlookers. There are two major approaches to try and mitigate DNS privacy issues. The first approach is to make it harder to eavesdrop on DNS queries by using encryption for DNS transactions. The issues around encryption and the efforts with DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTP (DoH) are a current topic of very high interest in the DNS world. The second approach is to reduce the information leakage by reducing the amount of information in each DNS query. The IETF published an approach to achieve this using a technique called ‘Query Name Minimisation’ (QNAME Minimisation or Qmin), described in an Experimental RFC document (RFC 7816, “DNS Query Name Minimisation to Improve Privacy” by Stephan Bortzmeyer, March 2016). In this post, we will take another look at QNAME Minimisation in a little more detail and present some results of our measurement of the current level of use of this resolver query technique in today’s Internet. The technique described in RFC 7816 is a query management approach based on a principle described in RFC 6973, ‘Privacy Considerations for Internet Protocols’ (July 2013), which could be summarized as ‘the less data you emit the fewer privacy issues you are likely to encounter’. The DNS has conventionally optimized its behaviour for simplicity and performance. The underlying factor in the DNS name resolution protocol is that a DNS recursive resolver does not necessarily know in advance which servers are authoritative for a given zone, so it has to discover this information. Also, if a name has several labels the resolver does not necessarily know where the zone cuts occur between labels. For example, the zone c.example.com may contain a delegation record for the label b . The zone b.c.example.com might contain a delegation record for the label a . The zone a.b.c.example.com might contain a resource record for this name. In this case there are zone cuts between b and c and between a and b in the domain name a.b.c.example.com . Alternatively, the zone c.example.com might contain a resource record for the label a.b , in which care there are no further zone cuts below c.example.com . The point here is that a resolver cannot determine in advance just by examining the domain name where the zone cuts might be. They are discovered by the resolver during the name resolution process. The zone cuts may relate to a desire on the part of a zone administrator to split the zone management role to different servers. They may also relate to a change in administrative control where the name space below the cut is delegated to a different administrative entity. The IETF chartered the dbound Working Group in 2014 to work on a way to make these points of delegation that relate to a change of administrative control explicit. The idea was to allow the DNS to self-describe these points of change of administrative control within the DNS name hierarchy itself. The effort was directed to replacing the volunteer-operated Public Suffix List, which has some concerning shortcomings. Critical dependencies on the Internet are everywhere (Source: XKCD) The dbound Working Group worked on a problem statement for a couple of years. The group was shut down in early 2017 without publishing any of its work as an RFC. Instead, we continue to rely on the volunteer efforts of the Mozilla Foundation to maintain the public suffix list, and we currently have no alternative in mind. Perhaps this reliance on volunteer effort may resurface as an issue in the coming months due to the current adverse economic conditions impacting Mozilla. This implicit reliance on the erstwhile work of volunteers was a feature of the early Internet, and perhaps one of its core strengths at the time. These days the Internet is a trillion-dollar sector and it seems a little uncomfortable to still find critical dependencies on volunteer effort when that effort underpins large amounts of the Internet’s commercially operated service infrastructure. In the absence of this meta-information about the structure of the namespace, a DNS recursive resolver uses the full query name in all queries as it descends the name hierarchy looking for the lowest level authoritative name server, as this iteractive technique will expose the zone cuts and the name servers for each zone. To expand on this a little, DNS resolution occurs in a ‘top-down’ manner, and when an authoritative server for a zone receives a query for a name that is only resolvable in a delegated subordinate zone (that is, at a level in the zone hierarchy that is lower in the name hierarchy than the zone served by this authoritative server) it returns a NOERROR code and no Answer Section in its response (a ‘NODATA’ response). The response includes the name of the next lower level delegated zone and its name servers, as enumerated in the delegation record (the point of the zone cut), in the Authority Section of the response and the IP addresses of these name servers in the Additional Section of the response, assuming that these addresses are known to the authoritative server. The DNS is a strict hierarchal namespace, so each server is only aware of immediately delegated zones. The name resolution process will iterate down through the hierarchy to either reach the server that can provide an authoritative response for this query name or obtain a response indicating that the name does not exist in the DNS. This process is illustrated in Figure 1. Of course, an efficient recursive resolver will use cached information whenever it can, so the process is typically nowhere near as exhaustive and slow as it may appear from this informal description. This description is not exactly the case in all situations. A server may be an authoritative server for both a ‘parent’ zone and some or all of its delegated ‘child’ zone or zones. The query does not specify which zone is the intended subject of its query, allowing the server to answer the query using data from the most specific served zone in the name hierarchy that partially matches the query name. How does QNAME Minimisation alter this behaviour? To quote from RFC 7816: Instead of sending the full QNAME and the original QTYPE upstream, a resolver that implements QNAME minimisation and does not already have the answer in its cache sends a request to the name server authoritative for the closest known ancestor of the original QNAME. The request is done with: A resolver using QNAME Minimisation implicitly assumes that each label in the query name corresponds to a zone cut. The resolver queries a parent zone server, using an abbreviated query name that is truncated after the name of the immediate child label and uses a query type of NS. This altered resolution process is illustrated in Figure 2. Let’s look at the query sequence in two cases to illustrate the difference between full name queries and minimized name queries. In the case of a full name query for the name myspecialname.me.example.com the query name has been exposed to a root server, a .com server, a example.com server and a me.example.com server. If the query logs from any of these servers were to be inspected my ‘interest’ in the name myspecialname.me.example.com would be evident. In the minimized case the information ‘leak’ has been trimmed considerably. The root server only sees a query for the .com label, the com servers only see a query for example.com , and so on. In terms of an improvement to DNS privacy, this technique sounds like a great step forward. Nothing changes for authoritative servers and it’s only the recursive resolvers that change their behaviour to trim the query name and alter the query type to a ‘neutral’ query for the NS record rather than expose the intended query type to these servers. Only at the target zone is the full query name used with the original query type. This approach essentially removes superfluous information from the DNS query stream. The approach can be deployed incrementally, and the benefits are immediately available to those recursive resolvers, and their user population, that use this QNAME Minimisation technique. In short, it seems like an ideal technology change, where current incumbent service providers need to do nothing to allow those who want to adopt this approach to proceed. The benefit for those who do this is that they cease to broadcast their actions and intent to a larger circle of potential DNS onlookers. Why hasn’t this technique been deployed in all resolvers already? And why isn’t this the default mode of operation of the DNS? Assuming that the concerns relating to DNS privacy aren’t just the products of the fevered imagination of a few activists in the IETF, but a reflection of a larger set of very real user community concerns over obsessive levels of DNS surveillance, then surely there would be a clear consumer preference for services that use such techniques to improve DNS privacy. Why have vendors not identified this consumer preference and deployed products to meet this incipient demand? If all this is so simple and easy and is deployable in a piecemeal and uncoordinated manner then what’s stopping us from doing this? The QNAME Minimisation picture is nowhere as simple as you might think at this juncture. Several DNS structures need to be considered: What if the query name does not exist? The simple response is that whenever the QNAME minimizing resolver receives an NXDOMAIN response then it should stop and return NXDOMAIN as the response to the querier. NXDOMAIN is a very particular form of response indicating that this name does not exist in any form in the DNS, not even as a delegation point. NXDOMAIN means that this name, and any name that shares this name as a common suffix, does not exist. Only in theory do theory and practice coincide. In practice, they don’t. The practice of the DNS is filled with odd behaviours and stupid DNS tricks that tend to assume a particular mode of resolver behaviour. As Shumon Huque has pointed out in a recent OARC meeting, some common Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) host content by using CNAME records to map a client’s name into their CDN namespace and then assume that subsequent queries into the CDN zone’s namespace always contain the full query name. Rather than assuming that every name needs to be ‘discoverable’ as a top-down hierarchical search, they assume that their part of the DNS is an exact match lookup. A common CDN hosting technique is to map a hosted content name into the content provider’s managed namespace through a CNAME DNS alias record. For example, if the CDN provider uses the common DNS suffix such as hosted-service.cdn then the service name www.example.com would be mapped into the hosted service by placing a CNAME record for www.example.com , aliasing this name to www.example.com.hosted-service.cdn . The strict definition of a CNAME record is that the recursive resolver follows the CNAME record and recommences name resolution for this alias name. Read: Characterizing CNAME cloaking-based tracking In this example, the recursive resolver would then use the query name www.example.com.hosted-service.cdn to query the DNS. When the server for hosted-service.cdn is queried for this name it will then return the provider’s hosting point for the client www.example.com . The service provider is not hosting example.com , nor .com , so rather than synthesizing a delegation hierarchy that includes empty non-terminal zones for com.hosted-service.cdn and example.com.hosted-service.cdn , the service provider often uses a zone structure that emulates a flattened enumerated namespace. In other words, the hosted-service.cdn zone server behaves in a manner that is consistent with having a zone file that has an entry for www.example.com.hosted-service.cdn . In this light, it is not inconsistent for the server to respond with NXDOMAIN for all name queries in hosted-service.cdn apart from precisely those names that are mapped to the hosted content. The result: If a partial form of these mapped names is passed to the CDN’s authoritative server, then an NXDOMAIN may be generated by the server, which will confuse a Qmin recursive resolver. These are instances of so-called ‘Empty Non-Terminal’ (ENT) zones, where the zone exists in the DNS hierarchy, but aside from a delegation record, it has no other record. The expected response when an ENT is queried is NODATA (response code 0 (NOERROR) and an empty Answer Section). The NXDOMAIN is an overclaim in this case as NXDOMAIN is intended to be interpreted as ‘this name does not exist and there are no delegated names in the name hierarchy below this name’. As long as the recursive resolver used the full query name this anomalous use of NXDOMAIN does not have any visible impact. QNAME Minimisation exposes this anomaly as it expects queries for all shortened name forms of a defined query name to return the names for the servers of the delegated zone. RFC 7816 points out some issues that have been encountered with DNS load distributors, where the response to a NS query is the somewhat unhelpful response code of REFUSED. The specification suggests that a possible workaround is to use an A Query Type with the minimized query name. Don’t forget that a QNAME minimizing resolver asks the parent zone server about the child zone name, so this A Query Type is analogous to asking for the NS record, and the anticipated response to the A Query Type is a NODATA response with the details of the name servers of the child zone in the Authority Section. This is the same information to that provided if the NS Query Type was correctly handled. Don’t forget that the parent zone is not authoritative for the child zone, so the NS query to the parent can only generate a NODATA response, rather than an authoritative answer. If the only reasons to use NS queries is to mask the intended query type for intermediate queries, then it can be argued that an A Query Type is so common that in itself it gives out even less information than the NS Query Type. Our measurement shows that this is the conclusion reached by resolver vendors and the predominate query type in QNAME minimizing resolvers is for an A record, not an NS record. As has been said many times the DNS is nowhere near as simple as it looks. Configuring authoritative servers for zones can be prone to all kinds of subtle errors. A server for a delegated zone does not necessarily know that it is a ‘properly’ delegated server. For example, a DNS server can be set up to serve the zone b.c.example.com , but it is not explicitly aware whether or not the server for c.example.com has listed this server as a delegated nameserver for the zone. The server will still answer all queries for names in b.c.example.com if it is asked. If the zone was DNSSEC-signed, then DNSSEC validation would expose any attempt to pass off false data in this manner, but for unsigned domain names or non-validating resolvers, this can have unintended consequences. Most of the time it’s not a problem, as it is difficult for the DNS to discover this rogue server. A top-down conventional name server discovery process will use the parent zone delegation details to find the child zone’s name servers, and so on. As the parent zone’s delegation records do not point to the rogue server, the server will not be discovered in the normal course of events. However, consider the case where a server is a duly delegated server for both the parent zone and is also an undelegated server for a child zone. Continuing our example, if our server (an undelegated server for b.c.example.com ) was also a duly delegated server for c.example.com , and this zone contained a delegation record for b.c.example.com that pointed to an entirely different server. When a recursive resolver passes a query to this server for the name a.b.c.example.com it does so because it has been told that this is an authoritative server for the zone c.example.com . However, the query does not contain any such information about intention, and the server will use the most specific served zone, in this case, the undelegated b.c.example.com zone, to answer the query. QNAME Minimisation imposes a stricter regime on this situation. A QNAME minimizing resolver will use the query name  b.c.example.com  when querying this server and will correctly follow the zone delegation directions to the duly delegated server for this zone. An illustration of the difference between these two cases is shown in Figure 3. This form of DNS configuration, where a single server is configured to serve both zones and direct or indirect ancestors of these zones, is not uncommon in the DNS. As long as all servers of a zone are kept in sync with each other and serve the same information then this DNS server situation will be largely unnoticed. However, two tools will explicitly follow the full delegation path and will not ‘short cut’ across zone cuts, namely DNSSEC validation and QNAME Minimisation. There is a small set of recursive resolver implementation in use in the Internet today. This small set of DNS resolvers includes ISC’s Bind 9, NLnet Lab’s Unbound, CZ.NIC’s Knot and the Power DNS Recursor. In Bind 9, QNAME Minimisation has been on by default since version 9.14.0. The configuration option is called qname-minimization and it can be set to off,relaxed and strict. The off setting disables QNAME Minimisation completely, strict proceeds with QNAME Minimisation as described by RFC 7816, and relaxed first tries QNAME Minimisation, but falls back to a regular resolution if it fails (presumably through the ENT issues described previously). The default setting is relaxed, although that may change in future releases of Bind. In Unbound, QNAME Minimisation has been included since release 1.7.2 and is on by default. There are two directives: qname-minimisation, which is either yes or no; and qname-minimisation-strict, which determines fallback behaviour if the name fails to resolve. Strict mode yes turns off this fallback behaviour. The default in Unbound is not to use strict mode. In Knot, QNAME Minimisation is enabled by default. In the struct kr_qflags the member NO_MINIMIZE can be turned on to disable this behaviour. In Power DNS Recusor, QNAME Minimisation was implemented in 4.3.0-alpha1 and enabled by default since 4.3.0-beta1. Let’s now turn to the measurement results. We want to understand the extent of deployment of QNAME Minimisation in the DNS today, both as a count of the number of visible resolvers that ask authoritative servers and as a count of the proportion of users who send their queries to QNAME minimizing resolvers. As usual, when attempting to measure the DNS, we need to take into consideration the conventional caching behaviour of resolvers. So, to expose the queries being made by resolvers we use a pair of unique dynamically generated labels in the test scenario. The labels were served by DNS servers that are operated as part of the measurement experiment and the query logs were analysed to determine the extent to which resolvers were performing QNAME Minimisation. We ran this test from the 6 February 2019 until the 24 July 2019. During that period we saw 644,406 ‘visible’ resolvers (recursive resolvers that query authoritative servers). Of this set of visible resolvers some 69,869 resolvers queried for the intermediate name form, indicating that they were performing some form of QNAME Minimisation. Resolvers Qmin Query Type NS A AAAA 644,406 69,869 14,523 55,360 16 11% 2% 9% 0% % of all resolvers 21% 79% 0% % of Qmin resolvers Table 1a – Per Resolver QMin Counts: 2019 We reran the test this year from the 15 August until the 7 September. In these 24 days, we observed 240,287 unique IP addresses of visible DNS resolvers (Table 1b). Resolvers Qmin Query Type NS A AAAA 240,287 27,969 1,032 26,935 0 11% 0% 11% 0% % of all resolvers 3% 96% 0% % of Qmin resolvers Table 1b – Per Resolver QMin Counts: 2020. In the shorter observation period in 2020 (Table 1b) we saw approximately one-third the number of DNS resolvers, but the same relative proportion, namely 11% of these resolvers, used QNAME Minimisation. So not much has changed here. There is one significant change in the Query Type. In 2019, there was still some use of the NS Query Type; this has all but vanished in 2020, and the query type is now an A record. This figure of 11% of all visible resolvers does not show to what extent QNAME Minimisation is being used in today’s DNS. For that, we need to count relative use, and one way of doing this is to count the query load. Queries NON Qmin Qmin Query Type NS A AAAA 1,107,728,866 1,087,081,329 20,647,552 4,651,599 15,993,284 2,654 98% 2% 0% 1% 0% % of all queries 23% 77% 0% % of Qmin queries Table 2a – Query Counts: 2019 In 2019, Some 2% of all queries were using QMin, and of these queries, some three-quarters of these QNAME minimized queries used the A Query Type, not the NS type. Queries NON Qmin Qmin Query Type NS A AAAA 756,582,911 670,281,376 80,364,153 5,937,379 80,364,153 0 88% 11% 0% 10% 0% % of all queries 6% 93% 0% % of Qmin queries Table 2b – Query Counts: 2020 Table 2b shows a distinct change since 2019. Now some 11% of all seen queries are for the minimized name and the overall majority of such queries use the NS Query Type. There has been an appreciable increase in the use of QNAME Minimisation over the past 12 months. We can break this down a little further, by looking at the query patterns for each individual experiment. Table 3a shows the results from the 2019 measurement. Experiments Qmin Query Type NS A AAAA 429,773,288 11,089,823 2,811,053 8,336,008 1,721 3% 1% 2% 0% % of all experiments 25% 75% 0% % of Qmin experiments Table 3a – Experiment Counts: 2019 The number of users that we observed using Qmin resolvers in 2019 was quite small: some 3% of users send their queries through QMin resolvers. This is the measurement that has changed significantly over 12 months. We now see some 18% of users using resolvers that support QNAME Minimisation. Experiments Qmin Query Type NS A AAAA 165,955,865 30,166,162 2,064,499 8,336,008 0 18% 1% 17% 0% % of all experiments 6% 93% 0% % of Qmin experiments Table 3b – Experiment Counts: 2020 Where are these users? Table 4a lists those economies where we collected more than 20,000 sample points throughout the 2019 measurement period, and where 10% or more of the users in these economies used a recursive resolver that performed QNAME Minimisation. Experiments Samples Qmin % Name MG 105,216 73% Madagascar IQ 283,585 43% Iraq NP 278,585 43% Nepal NE 19,244 32% Niger BY 214,911 30% Belarus AO 268,288 29% Angola NZ 135,714 25% New Zealand PT 199,847 23% Portugal ZA 817,385 21% South Africa MM 23,940 14% Myanmar MY 349,914 12% Malaysia AM 23,083 12% Armenia UA 291,953 12% Ukraine IR 550,999 11% Iran CZ 115,284 10% Czech Republic Table 4a – QNAME Minimisation query rates per economy: 2019 What a curious collection of economies! It is unclear whether service providers in these economies have enabled QNAME Minimisation deliberately, or whether this is an outcome of using a recursive resolver such as the recent version of the Bind 9 resolver or the Knot resolver, where this functionality has been enabled by default. The list has changed somewhat over the past 12 months, notably in India where more than half of the user population there passes their queries through QNAME minimizing resolvers. Experiments Samples Qmin % Name CY 43,466 54% Cyprus IR 2,550,719 53% Iran NE 192,211 52% Niger IN 24,238,563 51% India BW 42,773 50% Botswana NP 293,496 49% Nepal MG 192,516 47% Madagascar AF 219,688 43% Afghanistan IQ 1,483,950 42% Iraq ZW 195,691 41% Zimbabwe DE 2,808,832 41% Germany GM 22,185 38% Gambia PT 323,984 36% Portugal GE 111,948 36% Georgia SI 70,623 36% Slovenia Table 4b – QNAME Minimisation query rates per economy: 2020 Two economies of interest are not listed in Table 4: China, which has seen a growth of 4% to 14% of users over the past 12 months, and the United States, where the growth is from under 1% to 5% of users. Just a little under one-third of all users in the Internet today have Open DNS resolvers in the DNS resolver set that they use. In terms of the set of Open DNS resolvers deployed in the Internet, Google’s public DNS server does not appear to support QNAME Minimisation (which is the most popularly used DNS Open resolver). Within the collection of the 10 most popularly used Open DNS resolver services, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service, Quad9, and the OpenDNS service resolve their queries using QNAME Minimisation. Table 5 shows the current measurements of the use of QNAME Minimisation for the major Open DNS resolvers in 2020. Open DNS Resolver Qmin Ratio Experiments Qmin Experiments Google DNS 0% 99,461,612 1,397 114 DNS 6% 16,010,343 887,461 Cloudflare 50% 9,202,176 4,634,222 Open DNS 69% 8,049,990 5,532,784 dnspai 5% 7,817,329 417,661 onedns 11% 6,017,193 644,946 Verisign 0% 1,122,718 0 Quad 9 70% 1,077,202 785,760 Level3 0% 913,193 0 Yandex 0% 569,829 11 Neustar 59% 563,892 331,570 dnswatch 57% 235,789 133,229 dyn 58% 157,767 92,279 cnnic 0% 152,308 0 greenteamdns 0% 86,057 51 he 97% 57,389 55,888 Table 5 – QNAME Minimisation query rates for Open DNS Resolvers: 2020 These measurements are interesting in that only one open DNS resolver — Hurricane Electric’s Open DNS service — has a 97% QNAME Minimisation ratio. The Open Resolver’s services that record ratios of between 50% and 70% raise a question as to what is happening here? Are the individual resolver engines used by the service at different levels of support for QNAME Minimisation? Or is some other DNS query pattern causing only some queries to be handled using QNAME Minimisation? It is unclear to me whether QNAME Minimisation in a very heavily used public DNS resolver provides any substantive beneficial privacy outcome for the users of this service. In many ways, each user is ‘hiding in a crowd’ and their individual queries are lost in the volume of queries being made by such recursive resolvers in the first place. It would also be expected that the Open Resolver’s caches would be heavily populated so the full query name would be unlikely to be passed to the servers at the higher levels of the DNS name hierarchy in any case. Yes, the recursive resolver is privy to each user’s DNS activity, but that is part of the direct consequences of using such a service in the first place and is unrelated to the QNAME Minimisation aspect of the resolver’s behaviour. The story changes completely when using a small volume DNS resolver, such as a resolver in a home network. The small client pool means that the resolver can be linked to end users, particularly if the resolver’s clients share an IP address subnet with the resolver. A small volume recursive resolver may not have a continually refreshed local cache, so the full query names are more likely to be passed across to DNS servers at all levels in the DNS hierarchy. As ever, all privacy bets are off when Explicit Client Subnet (ECS) attributes are attached to the query! But the true horror of ECS is best left as a story for another post! Our measurements indicate that in mid-2020 some 18% of users pass their queries through resolvers that actively work to minimize the extent of leakage of superfluous information in DNS queries. This is a significant increase from the 3% of users seen some 12 months ago. Hopefully, this will rise to upward of 90% in the coming 12 months! The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog.

ICMP echo (ping) library for Go

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Researchers Detail Privilege Escalation Bugs Reported in Oracle VirtualBox

A now-patched vulnerability affecting Oracle VM VirtualBox could be potentially exploited by an adversary to compromise the hypervisor and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "Easily exploitable vulnerability allows high privileged attacker with logon to the infrastructure where Oracle VM VirtualBox executes to compromise Oracle VM VirtualBox," the advisory reads. "Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized ability to cause a hang or frequently repeatable crash (complete DoS) of Oracle VM VirtualBox" Tracked as CVE-2021-2442 (CVSS score: 6.0), the flaw affects all versions of the product prior to 6.1.24. SentinelLabs researcher Max Van Amerongen has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue, following which fixes have been rolled out by Oracle as part of its Critical Patch Update for July 2021. Oracle VM VirtualBox is an open-source and cross-platform hypervisor and desktop virtualization software that enables users to run multiple guest operating systems such as Windows, Linux distributions, OpenBSD, and Oracle Solaris on a single physical machine. "Works as both an out-of-bounds read in the host process, as well as an integer underflow. In some instances, it can also be used to remotely DoS other Virtualbox virtual machines," Van Amerongen noted back in August. Got another Virtualbox vuln fixed (CVE-2021-2442) Works as both an OOB read in the host process, as well as an integer underflow. In some instances, it can also be used to remotely DoS other Virtualbox VMs! pic.twitter.com/Ir9YQgdZQ7 — maxpl0it (@maxpl0it) August 1, 2021 Also discovered by Van Amerongen are two other flaws affecting versions before 6.1.20 and resolved by Oracle in April 2021 — Both the aforementioned issues reside within the implementation of NAT that arise from a lack of proper validation of user-supplied data. Successful attacks of the two shortcomings can enable a local adversary to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code that results in full takeover of a vulnerable Oracle VM VirtualBox. Given that threat actors are known to move fast to take advantage of the security gap afforded by unpatched vulnerabilities, it's essential that organizations update their VirtualBox installations to the latest version to mitigate any risk of potential exploitation. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

High Quality Right SEO Services

Facebook   To connect with Right SEO Services, log into Facebook. Right SEO Services is on Facebook. p or p To connect with Right SEO Services, log into Facebook. Right SEO Services is on Facebook. p or p Right SEO Services @RightSEOServices Photos p About Right SEO Services The search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website in such a way that it gets top search engine rank. It is a major component of internet marketing which is generally employed to create a search engine friendly website. The website must have unique content to get better rank in the organic search engine results. Why does your website require search engine optimization? Numerous people visit Google everyday which in turn leads to over 250 million searches a day. This is regarded as a huge market place which has over 85% organic search results and 15% of sponsored ads. Being such a giant online market place, no business ignores it. The only approach to build your online presence where you can trade your products to your potential customers is internet marketing. From 2000 onwards, there is rapid and consistent growth in the E-commerce. The efficient and powerful tool to build online presence is Search engine optimization Previously, marketers used to create their brand awareness of a particular product or business tools through advertising agencies. But now, the trend has changed and all of them have shifted towards online web space to boost their sales. Right SEO Services provides search engine optimization services with perfect results in very short and long term periods. We offer various services such as SEO, SMM, PPC, SEM, SMO, Email Marketing campaigns and Affiliate marketing. Our team of experts is our strength who constantly focuses on innovative strategies, competitor analysis and research capabilities. You definitely get highest ROI within less time. 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CDC Finds No Smallpox in Frozen Vials Suspiciously Labeled ‘Smallpox’

The A.V. Club Deadspin Gizmodo Jalopnik Jezebel Kotaku Quartz The Root The Takeout The Onion The Inventory p CDC Finds No Smallpox in Frozen Vials Suspiciously Labeled ‘Smallpox’ The vials contained vaccinia virus, which is used as the base of past and present smallpox vaccines. By Ed Cara PublishedNovember 19, 2021 Comments (15) Alerts We may earn a commission from links on this page. Days after a Pennsylvania lab was locked down because a worker discovered vials labeled “smallpox” in a freezer, the CDC says there’s no reason to fear a viral outbreak. Late Thursday night, federal officials announced that the vials did not contain the deadly and eradicated variola virus. Instead, they held a related but much tamer virus, one that’s used to create smallpox vaccines. view video IMDb Changes Rating System After Review-Bombed | Future TechLittle Mermaid p Boogeyman Yesterday p Wednesday 9:59AM Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that a lab worker had uncovered the frozen vials as they were cleaning out a freezer at a Pennsylvania-based Merck vaccine research facility that works with the CDC. There were 15 vials in total, five of which were labeled “smallpox” and another 10 labeled “vaccinia,” the New York Times reports , citing a local official. The vials were then transferred elsewhere for testing on Wednesday. And it now turns out that the “smallpox” vials also contained the vaccinia virus. “There is no evidence that the vials contain variola virus, the cause of smallpox,” the C.D.C. said in a statement sent Thursday to the New York Times. Vaccinia is a virus with an intriguing backstory . Edward Jenner developed the first smallpox vaccines in the late 18th century, using what he believed to be cowpox, a cousin of smallpox that causes less serious illness in humans (smallpox killed 30% or more of its victims). However, whether the original inoculations actually contained cowpox isn’t clear, as the virus used in the vaccines that became the base of mass vaccination programs ended up being vaccinia, which closely resembles cowpox. The discrepancy wasn’t detected for a long time, and no one is sure whether vaccinia evolved from the first lab-cultivated cowpox strains, from another related virus called horsepox , or as a hybrid of several pox viruses. Its true origins are still a mystery, and vaccinia isn’t thought to exist in the wild. Once it was confirmed to be a truly distinct virus, vaccinia was named after the technology it was known for. In any case, vaccination with vaccinia is much less harmful than actually contracting smallpox, though the shot can often leave behind a characteristic skin scar at the injection site. The odds of that anyone was exposed to the contents of the freezer vials was low, the CDC said, since they were left intact upon discovery and the lab worker was reportedly wearing a face mask and gloves at the time. A little over five years ago, lab workers with the National Institutes of Health did come across such a cache of smallpox samples, some of which contained viable virus. And though there are only two sanctioned sites in the U.S. and Russia where smallpox can be kept for study, scientists do suspect there are a few hidden stockpiles elsewhere. For now, though, there’s no immediate risk of a smallpox sequel.

Entrepreneur Went from Living in a Refugee Camp in Iraq to Raising $52M

Hanif Joshaghani has raised tens of millions of dollars for his startup which seems to only be growing in importance through the pandemic of 2020. During our interview on the DealMakers Podcast, Hanif Joshaghani shared how he went from spending 12 years living in refugee camps as a kid to an MBA and founder of a fast-growth startup. He talked about the keys to a successful business, raising big money during COVID-19, business trends, and vetting potential investors. p *FREE DOWNLOAD* The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks Here is the content that we will cover in this post. Let’s get started. 1. Fight For It 2. Refusing To Be A Cog In The Machine 3. The Ingredients Of A Successful Company 4. Saving & Extending Consumer Relationships 5. Fundraising Hanif certainly didn’t have everything handed to him on a platter since birth. You can’t accuse him of being a trust fund baby who was born with all the connections and capital without having to work for it. In fact, after being born in Iran, and smuggled over the mountainous border to Iraq as soon as he was old enough for the journey at 18 months old, Joshaghani spent the next 12 years of his life growing up in a refugee camp. He stayed there until it became just too dangerous and some countries began accelerating the process of accepting the most vulnerable. It was then at 13 years old he was sent all the way to Canada to live with a foster family until his parents could join him. Even then he had his work cut out for him. He had to catch up in school. He aspired to go to college, and that meant earning a scholarship to the University of Chicago. Then the real world of work and landing an MBA scholarship at the University of Toronto. All of this gave him the mindset of never letting adversity get in your way. He equates remaining stagnant to just laying down and giving up. Instead, he believes in constantly challenging yourself and fighting for it with every breath. He was challenged even more when we went to school in New York. He discovered a completely different life and level of playing field. He was inspired to be a part of that. Hanif told our listeners that he was blown away the first time stepping onto the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It was another new world. He went into investment banking. He had a great salary. He says he learned a lot about capital markets, big financing, public companies, and M&A deals. Still, he came to the realization that no matter how good the money could be, he was still just a cog in the machine. Hanif wasn’t very passionate about that future. He felt the only antidote was to do something for himself. So, with a couple of others, he launched an advisory firm, CoreWest. After doing fairly well helping entrepreneurial small businesses in Alberta, they began investing in some of their clients’ businesses too. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Efforts Fundraising Process : get guidance from A to Z. Materials : our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models Investor Access : connect with the right investors for your business and close them Book a Call One of these businesses was ASPS. Hanif decided to get even more involved and had a vision of taking the hardware startup to software and beyond. They did well. Then parlayed that into a SaaS company, InvistaWare, which became Aimsio. The liquidity he created with this venture enabled Hanif to lead the first round of funding for his latest venture, Symend. Throughout all of these experiences, from investment banking to consulting to investing, pivoting, and growing these companies, Hanif learned a lot about what makes a startup successful. His key takeaways which have helped him build his latest venture from scratch include: The importance of having the right team Have an idea you are incredibly passionate about Be sure to balance that passion with common sense Understand business is hard, no matter which one you try your hand at The ability to bring it all together, he says, is really all reliant on knowing your north star. The “why” that you are so passionate about. This is what will enable you to align people, keep working through the challenges, build a great company culture, and reach great heights. When it comes to balancing common sense with your passion for your startup idea, Hanif says this validation includes: Testing the demand and willingness of the customer to pay Ensuring the feasibility of doing it Assessing the size of the market He invested close to eight months in this process before writing any code for his new business. Symend is a platform that helps organizations intelligently and empathetically engage with millions of customers who have fallen behind on their bills. It’s a huge challenge for big companies, one which many have struggled to overcome through email, mail, and call centers. Now more than ever they need to get better at building brand loyalty and retention. Recent events have put even more customers at risk At the same time, smart companies are realizing that it is their customer base which holds all of their value. Symend has already raised close to $60M USD in capital. Storytelling is everything which is something that Hanif was able to master. Being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides is the key. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted. Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below. This includes a Series B round raised in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in May 2020. Hanif says this was possible due to the combination of strong relationships with their investors and being positioned to be a crucial partner in helping other companies navigate this situation. Listen in to the full podcast episode to find out more, including: Ways to deal with uncertainty personally and professionally How Hanif screens and builds relationships with investors in advance Picking the right investors over the highest valuation His top tip for what to do before you start your own venture

Build powerful and responsible AI solutions with Azure

Posted on September 22, 2020 3 min read p p p As organizations assess safely reopening and continue navigating unexpected shifts in the world, getting insights to respond in an agile and conscientious manner is vital. Developers and data scientists of all skill levels are inventing with Microsoft Azure AI's powerful and responsible tools to meet these challenges. To help organizations operate safely in today’s environment, we are introducing a new spatial analysis capability in the Computer Vision Azure Cognitive Service. Its advanced AI models aggregate insights from multiple cameras to count the number of people in the room, measure the distance between individuals, and monitor wait and dwell times. Organizations can now apply this technology to use their space in a safe, optimal way. For instance, RXR, one of New York City’s largest real estate companies, has embedded spatial analysis in their RxWell app to ensure occupants' safety and wellness. “When it came to developing RxWell, there was simply no other company that had the capability and the infrastructure to meet our comprehensive data, analytics, and security needs than Microsoft. With our partnership, the RxWell program provides our customers the tools they need to safely navigate the ‘new abnormal’ of COVID-19 and beyond.” – Scott Rechler, Chairman and CEO, RXR Realty Read more about the RXR customer story here. To get timely insights into their business, organizations need to monitor metrics proactively and quickly diagnose issues as they arise. Metrics Advisor, a new Azure Cognitive Service, helps customers to do this through a powerful combination of real-time monitoring, auto-tuning AI models, alerting, and root cause analysis. It allows organizations to fix issues before they become significant problems. No machine learning expertise is required. Customers such as NOS telecommunications have been able to increase agility and improve customer service using Metrics Advisor. “Metrics Advisor helps capture potential network device failures in time so that we can react instantly. It reduces incoming customer call bottlenecks and improves customer satisfaction. “ – João Ferreira, Director of Product Development, NOS telecommunications company (Portugal) To help customers build custom machine learning models without data science expertise, Azure Machine Learning’s no-code automated machine learning and drag and drop designer are now generally available. These capabilities empower citizen data scientists and developers to build machine learning solutions. “By using Azure Machine Learning designer, we were able to quickly release a valuable tool built on machine learning insights, that predicted occupancy in trains, promoting social distancing in the fight against Covid-19. ” – Steffen Pedersen, Head of AI and advanced analytics, DSB We are also making machine learning more accessible by providing additional value at a lower cost. Azure Machine Learning customers will now get the all the Enterprise edition capabilities in the Basic edition at no extra charge, helping them adopt and scale machine learning more cost effectively. Learn more about updates to Azure Machine Learning. Safe and responsible use of AI is essential as organizations, and the world, depend on technology more than ever before. Responsible AI practices and guidelines for safe use are infused into Azure AI’s services, such as spatial analysis, to ensure personal privacy, transparency, and trust. We’ve also seen the rapid adoption of Azure Machine Learning’s responsible ML capabilities and toolkits. A recent example is Philips, a leading health technology company, who’s using the Azure and Fairlearn toolkit to build unbiased machine learning models. Healthcare models can be biased depending on how different hospitals document symptoms and tasks. Using the Fairlearn toolkit, Philips was able to assess key fairness metrics to uncover model inaccuracies for different patient groups. By improving their models’ overall fairness and mitigating biases, they were able to deliver valuable insights to their hospitals on patient wellbeing and care. With these innovations, all developers and data scientists can harness the power of Azure AI responsibly to help their organizations move forward. For more on the latest, check out these resources: Azure. Invent with purpose.

Learn ARM templates (4 tutorials), from the beginning

p 07:03 AM Infrastructure as Code Infrastructure as Code, IaC is the process of expressing your infrastructure as Code as readable text files over using UIs to configure the same. The benefits of doing so are many. Below are some benefits: Dev and Ops can work in the same process. There's a need for Developers and Ops to work more tightly to innovate faster with speed and accuracy. Developers normally store their code in a version control system like Git. You can now do the same with your templates, text files desribing your Cloud resources. Anyone can deploy. When your templates are in version control, anyone on the team can deploy, just use a tool like Azure-CLI or PowerShell to do so. When everyone in a team can deploy it's important that it can be done reliably. You know what's in the Cloud. Before IaC you were/are using a graphical interface or some tool to manage your resources. It's easy to loose track of what you have in the Cloud. If you instead express your resources as text files it's a lot easier to see what's going on. Easier to reproduce elsewhere. In theory at least, it should be a lot easier to recreate your Cloud operation elsewhere if you are looking to expand your company's business elsewhere. Azure Resource Manager Azure Resource Manager, ARM, is one of the ways you can use to implement IaC, the other way is by using Terraform. The idea is to express your cloud resources as JSON files. Then you deploy the files to the Cloud by running either Azure-CLI or PowerShell. Every JSON file is known as a template. A template contains your resources you want to deploy but it also contains different constructs that makes it easy to manage your resources as things gets more complicated. Examples of such constructs are parameters, variables, template functions and outputs. LEARN path IaC using ARM is quite a big topic. Therefore myself and some colleagues have authored a 4 part series describing the various constructs and aspects of it. Here's a link to the path, an overview page for all the tutorials https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/paths/deploy-manage-resource-manager-templates/ Each tutorial contains various aspects of ARM. Below follows a description of each tutorial: Deploy consistent infrastructure in Azure by using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/create-azure-resource-manager-template-vs-code/ Write Azure Resource Manager templates by using Visual Studio Code to deploy your infrastructure to Azure consistently and reliably. Implement an Azure Resource Manager template by using Visual Studio Code. Declare resources and add flexibility to your template by adding resources, parameters, and outputs. Deploy to multiple Azure environments by using ARM templates https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/modify-azure-resource-manager-template-reuse/ Manage multiple Azure environment deployments of your Azure Resource Manager templates by using functions, variables, tags, and parameter files. Create an expression for a unique value by using Azure Resource Manager template functions. Reuse your expression by storing it in an Azure Resource Manager template variable. Organize and track your deployed Azure resources by using resource tags. Manage multiple deployment parameters by using Azure Resource Manager template parameter files. Validate your deployments by using what-if and the ARM template test toolkit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/arm-template-test/ This module teaches two major things, how to preview your changes with the what-if operation and the value of doing so. Secondly it teaches you how to create valid templates and gives you good recommendations that you can follow using the ARM template test toolkit tool. Preview what changes will happen before you deploy by using the what-if operation. Validate your templates adherence to sound recommendations using ARM template test toolkit. Implement domain specific rules for deployments that can be run by ARM template test toolkit. Deploy modular and reusable ARM templates from the command line and by using GitHub Actions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/deploy-templates-command-line-github-actions/ Learn how to deploy Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates by using Azure PowerShell, the Azure CLI, and from GitHub Actions. Use linked templates to break down complex templates into templates that are more modular. Choose the best way to deploy ARM templates, based on your needs. Modularize your templates by using linked templates. Learn how to create a GitHub Actions to deploy templates. Version history Last update: p 09:59 AM Labels

Being fat linked with worse heart health even in people who exercise

Sophia Antipolis, 22 January 2021 :  Physical activity does not undo the negative effects of excess body weight on heart health. That’s the finding of a large study published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 “One cannot be ‘fat but healthy’,” said study author Dr. Alejandro Lucia of the European University, Madrid, Spain. “This was the first nationwide analysis to show that being regularly active is not likely to eliminate the detrimental health effects of excess body fat. Our findings refute the notion that a physically active lifestyle can completely negate the deleterious effects of overweight and obesity.” There is some evidence that fitness might mitigate the negative effects of excess body weight on heart health. It has been suggested that in adults and children, being “fat but fit” might be associated with similar cardiovascular health to being “thin but unfit”. Dr. Lucia said: “This has led to controversial proposals for health policies to prioritise physical activity and fitness above weight loss. Our study sought to clarify the links between activity, body weight, and heart health.” The study used data from 527,662 working adults insured by a large occupational risk prevention company in Spain. The average age of participants was 42 years and 32% were women. Participants were categorised as normal weight (body mass index [BMI] 20.0–24.9 kg/m2), overweight (BMI 25.0–29.9 kg/m2), or obese (BMI 30.0 kg/m2 or above). Additionally, they were grouped by activity level: 1) regularly active, defined as doing the minimum recommended for adults by the World Health Organization2 (WHO); 2) insufficiently active (some moderate to vigorous physical activity every week but less than the WHO minimum); 3) inactive (no exercise). Cardiovascular health was determined according to three major risk factors for heart attack and stroke, namely diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Approximately 42% of participants were normal weight, 41% were overweight, and 18% were obese. The majority were inactive (63.5%), while 12.3% were insufficiently active, and 24.2% were regularly active. Some 30% had high cholesterol, 15% had high blood pressure, and 3% had diabetes. The researchers investigated the associations between each BMI and activity group and the three risk factors. At all BMI levels, any activity (whether it met the WHO minimum or not) was linked with a lower likelihood of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol compared to no exercise at all. Dr. Lucia said: “This tells us that everyone, irrespective of their body weight, should be physically active to safeguard their health.” At all weights, the odds of diabetes and hypertension decreased as physical activity rose. “More activity is better, so walking 30 minutes per day is better than walking 15 minutes a day,” he said. However, overweight and obese participants were at greater cardiovascular risk than their peers with normal weight, irrespective of activity levels. As an example, compared to inactive normal weight individuals, active obese people were approximately twice as likely to have high cholesterol, four times more likely to have diabetes, and five times more likely to have high blood pressure. Dr. Lucia said: “Exercise does not seem to compensate for the negative effects of excess weight. This finding was also observed overall in both men and women when they were analysed separately.” He concluded: “Fighting obesity and inactivity is equally important; it should be a joint battle. Weight loss should remain a primary target for health policies together with promoting active lifestyles.”

Quarkus 2.6.0.Final Released

Extensions moved to Quarkiverse Hub At the beginning of the Quarkus project, we didn’t have anything to properly host extensions outside of the Quarkus project, nor did we have infrastructure to, for instance, display external extensions on code.quarkus.io. Since then, we have made a lot of progress and everything is in place to support external extensions, be they hosted in the Quarkiverse Hub or in other organizations/repositories. The fact is that the Core had become very big (1000+ Maven modules) and it was the barrier of entry was high, be it to contribute to the Core itself or to one of the smaller extensions inside it. We decided to move some of the extensions to the Quarkiverse Hub so that they are easier to contribute to and to allow us to reduce the size of the Core repository. The extensions that have been moved are: Amazon Alexa Amazon Services (DynamoDB, S3…​) Artemis Consul Config AWS support for Hibernate Search ORM + Elasticsearch JGit JSch Logging Sentry Neo4j Reactive Messaging HTTP Tika Vault We tried our best to make sure the change would be seamless by putting together Maven relocations. So your applications should still work and you will see a warning asking you to move to the new extensions. If you have any issue with the migration, please report it and we will have a look. You can find additional information on how to migrate to the new extensions in our migration guide. If you are using these extensions, you are very welcome to contribute to them, now that the contribution is easier and doesn’t require building the whole Quarkus! We keep track of their compatibility with the latest versions of Quarkus thanks to the Ecosystem CI and status.quarkus.io. The Quarkiverse Hub is a home for community-maintained extensions. Among other things, it provides a nice infrastructure for building and releasing extensions and also for hosting documentation. If you want to share Open Source Quarkus extensions with others, it is a nice home for them. If you want to contribute to Quarkus, contributing to extensions hosted on the Quarkiverse Hub for which you have an interest is a good way to start. SmallRye Reactive Messaging 3.13 SmallRye Reactive Messaging was upgraded to 3.13 and the Kafka client has been upgraded to 3.0.0. Programmatic API for caching It took a while to get it in but, together with the annotation support for caching we had since a long time, there is now a programmatic API for caching coming with the Cache extension. You can learn more about it in the dedicated section of the guide. Smaller image for native executables Our Dockerfile for native executables is now using quay.io/quarkus/quarkus-micro-image:1.0 as the base image. This image is based on UBI Micro and reduces the size of the native image. UPX compression Quarkus 2.6 adds support for built-in UPX compression of native executables. While it has some advantages, be aware it comes at a cost. Clément explained it at length in his dedicated blog post. AWT extension We improved a lot on the AWT support in native executables and you now have a dedicated extension for that quarkus-awt. Add it to your application if you are doing AWT work in native. Java 17 in generated projects Until now, we generated all projects with Java 11 as the compilation source/target. We now define the compilation source/target as Java 17 for projects generated using Java 17. Kotlin 1.6 We upgraded Kotlin to 1.6. Camel 3.14 Camel 3.14 is the new LTS version of Camel. Compared to the previous LTS version (3.11), a lot of work has been done to bring new components, CamelJbang and Java 17 support. Improvements have been made to Core performance, Route configuration, and many components such as Kamelets and Kafka. For more details, check Apache Camel 3.14 What’s New. Camel JFR Native support Camel JFR extension allows diagnosing Camel applications with Java Flight Recorder. The extension has been introduced in Camel Quarkus 1.7.0 with JVM support only. The extension is now fully supported in JVM mode and Native mode.

Jay Z, Charles Schwab-Backed Ethereum App Opens Doors to Public

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An introduction to synchronizing access with Swift’s Actors

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Quabbly| No-Code platform for creating internal apps [Database and Automation]

The smartest way to automate your work. Easily automate high volume and mundane tasks by collecting data and automate actions based on that data. Quabbly helps you move data between applications automatically so you can focus on meaningful work. Sign-up For Free Book Demo I want to Upload a spreadsheet and perform action on each row Then Generate Word/PDF document from a template Then Send the generated Word/PDF document as attachment with Gmail

Personalized hashtag suggestions based on your Instagram account

Justin Cruz p Follow Published in Curate: Instagram Hashtag Tool p 4 min read p Jan 28, 2021 -- 1 Listen Share Anyone focused on growing their Instagram understands how much work goes into making each post. From taking the photo or video, editing it, to writing an intriguing caption, posting it at the right time, and picking up to 30 hashtags. It’s a lot. 🥵 As Instagram continues to gain popularity, it gives you access to more and more potential customers. The downside is that there is more content than ever and standing out in your specific niche can be difficult. Good thing is that with a little work you can stand out to the right people on Instagram. Hashtags are still the primary way for you to tell Instagram where you want your content to be visible and selecting the rights hashtags can yield incredible results. Hashtags can cause explosive growth on Instagram if used correctly. Hashtags are simple to use but hard to master. It’s difficult to know which hashtags to use, which you should stay away from, and how to find new hashtags in your niche to try. Fortunately, it’s 2021. 🎉 What used to require a lot of time and knowledge on the Instagram algorithm can be done for us in minutes with the right tools. Curate is now offering personalized hashtag suggestions based on your own Instagram hashtag usage! Hundreds of personalized hashtag suggestions for your Instagram account. After you link your Instagram business account, Curate will collect all the hashtags that you have ever used. Then it searches for the perfect niche hashtags for your account that you haven’t used before. Simple, right? 🤗 Let’s take a deeper look into how Curate can uncover hundreds of new hashtags for you to try on Instagram. Sort through your hashtag suggestions Curate has always monitored the hashtags that you have used and provided insights. Now, when you look at your hashtag list in Curate you will notice a section for New Hashtags. Your new hashtags are available right next to all of the hashtags you already use All of your personalized hashtag suggestions will be added here. It also shows you how many new hashtags Curate currently has waiting for you. Every hashtag has a personalized score For each hashtag that Curate finds for your Instagram account, it will give it a score between 1 and 10. Each hashtag has a score to show you which hashtags Curate thinks is most helpful There are a ton of different factors that Curate uses to calculate this score but you can use it simply to see what hashtags the tool thinks are best for you. It gets smarter the more you use it When Curate suggests a new hashtag for your Instagram, it gives you the option to keep the hashtag around or remove it from your list of new hashtags. When you tell Curate if a hashtag is good or not then it will learn from that and suggest better hashtags. When you make either of these choices, Curate develops a better understanding of your account and tailors future suggestions even more precisely. Constantly looking for new hashtags As you continue to make posts on Instagram and use hashtags, more and more hashtags can be found by Curate. Your Instagram account is analyzed as hashtags are processed and you will see new hashtag suggestions roll in all the time. New hashtag suggestions will show up in your list as soon as Curate finds it You can see how long ago Curate made its hashtag suggestion and you can sort to see the latest. If you’re a current Curate subscriber, all of your hashtag suggestions have been gathering behind the scenes now for weeks! You should always be trading out underperforming hashtags on Instagram and trying out new ones in your niche. This is a good practice to expand your audience no matter the size of your account. Picking 30 hashtags for every Instagram post can be tough so let Curate do the hard work of continually finding new hashtags to use. Don’t spend your time creating the perfect content for Instagram and not use the best hashtags possible. Try Curate for free and get your hashtag suggestions today. 🎉