Internet protocol used for relaying e-mails
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Pierre Pignault of MailSoar is this week's guest on Adult Site Broker Talk. Pierre Pignault is a seasoned email deliverability and security expert with over eight years of experience in optimizing email communications. As the CEO and Founder of MailSoar, he leads a dedicated team that enhances email infrastructure to maximize return on investment for clients worldwide. MailSoar's expertise encompasses auditing email infrastructure, setting up new infrastructure, and implementing deliverability best practices. The team's technical proficiency extends to SMTP protocols, mail servers, and DNS configurations, ensuring optimal email performance and security. Before establishing MailSoar, Pierre held various roles in business development and sales across the United States in multiple startups in California. These experiences have equipped him with a comprehensive understanding of client management and product-to-market fit. Pierre is also an active contributor to industry discussions, having participated in panels and summits focused on the future of email deliverability. His insights have been featured in various industry publications, reflecting his commitment to advancing the best email deliverability and security practices. MailSoar is a premium email deliverability agency that helps businesses improve their email performance by ensuring their messages land in recipients' inboxes instead of spam folders. The company specializes in deliverability audits and optimization, analyzing email performance, identifying issues, and improving inbox placement. Adult Site Broker is the most experienced company to broker adult sites. They've sold and helped people buy more xxx sites than any other broker. Adult Site Broker is the leading company to sell porn sites and buy porn sites. They help their clients work out equitable deals. Check out their at www.adultsitebroker.com, the leading destination to broker porn sites. Adult Site Broker also has an affiliate program, ASB Cash, at https://asbcash.com, where you can earn 20% by referring people to buy adult sites and sell adult sites to Adult Site Broker, the porn website broker. For more information, please visit us at www.adultsitebroker.com to help you broker adult sites. Listen to Pierre Pignault of MailSoar on Adult Site Broker Talk, starting today at https://adultsitebroker.com/podcast
Dell Advanced BIOS, Win cleaning and repair, QB DB Mgr, Quicken 2017 trick, SMTP relay
Andrew and Chris dive into issues with SMTP configuration on new Digital Ocean droplets, their experiences with various email delivery gems like Postmark and Mailtrap and go over some best practices for handling account creation and user associations in Rails applications. The conversation also touches on deployment automation, developing new features like the inbox on Podia, and the importance of having visual tools and browser extensions for effective debugging. They share some lighter moments discussing fun side projects, including Andrew's insult generator app and their humorous take on turning everyday developer annoyances into creative gem ideas. The episode wraps up with some Stripe announcements and TV show recommendations.LinksJudoscale- Remote Ruby listener giftMailtrapHotwire Dev ToolsActualDbSchemaRailsCasts- Episode 288: Billing with StripeActiveSupport: Allow quick cast Boolean to integer #18552Our top product updates from Sessions 2025 (Stripe Blog)Developer Insult Generator by AndrewShoresyStar Wars: AndorStar Wars: Skeleton Crew Chris Oliver X/Twitter Andrew Mason X/Twitter Jason Charnes X/Twitter
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. In this episode, I discuss my ongoing project aimed at mapping the dependencies municipalities have on major third-party digital services, particularly focusing on Microsoft and Google , given their dominance in the market. The aim of this research isn't about debating the quality of these products—it's assumed that with thousands of employees, these services meet most quality expectations. Instead, the focus is on the critical implications of widespread dependency and potential risks related to service interruptions or supply chain attacks. Why is this important? Supply Chain Attacks : High dependency means higher vulnerability to targeted disruptions. Business Continuity : Significant risks were illustrated by incidents such as the CrowdStrike outage in July 2024 , which forced Brussels Airport back to pencil-and-paper operations temporarily. My Research Approach: Primarily, I analyze the DNS MX records of municipalities: MX records typically reveal if mail services are hosted on Microsoft (Office 365/Exchange Online) or Google (Workspace). A high probability that using these providers for email also means municipalities likely depend on the respective cloud office suite (e.g., Word/Excel/SharePoint or Docs/Sheets/Drive). Preliminary Observations: Belgium, Finland, Netherlands : Over 70% of municipalities rely heavily on Microsoft mail services, a significant warning sign of dependency. Germany, Hungary : Fewer than 5% of municipalities use Microsoft or Google explicitly via MX records, though caution is necessary. Here's why: Challenges Identified: Local MS Exchange Servers : Municipally hosted local installations aren't externally identifiable via MX records. Mail Proxies : Some municipalities use mail proxy services (spam/phishing filters) obscuring the actual mail service used behind proxy domains. Techniques Tested: SPF Records : Often reveal the underlying email service, though they may contain outdated information, lowering reliability. Telnet EHLO Commands : Municipalities commonly obscure their SMTP headers, limiting usefulness. Cloud Provider IP-Ranges : Investigating if mail servers run on Google, Amazon, or Azure infrastructure. Even if identified, this alone doesn't clarify if proprietary or replaceable services are used. TXT Records : Occasionally contain subscription keys or mail-related settings (e.g., MS subscriptions, Mailjet), but again, could be historical remnants. Unfortunately, none of these get to show me all of the third party services. Community Call: I'm reaching out to listeners and the broader community for ideas or techniques on reliably fingerprinting the actual digital service providers behind mail servers. Specifically: How to accurately determine if servers run Microsoft or Google services ? Any ideas to detect deployments of Nextcloud or similar open-source alternatives? Resources: Project Webpage : jurgen.gaeremyn.be/map.html Source Code : gitlab.com/jurgeng/mxcheck I'm looking forward to all your suggestions in the comments! Provide feedback on this episode.
In the Pit with Cody Schneider | Marketing | Growth | Startups
In this episode, Nick Abraham, founder of cold email agency Leadbird, joins the show for a deep dive into what's working right now in the fast-changing world of email marketing. With over 400 clients and millions of emails sent monthly, Nick shares tactical insights from the frontlines — from deliverability strategies to AI usage and cold calling.The conversation covers the recent Apollo crackdown, the shift in data sourcing, and how agencies can safeguard infrastructure to avoid total shutdowns. Nick also unpacks the importance of validating your offer, tips for scaling cold outreach, and the resurrection of cold calling as a powerful channel when paired with smart automation.Timestamps 00:00 – Why cold email is still a top channel 00:39 – State of cold email: "bloody ocean" tactics 02:12 – Apollo's recent changes & implications 05:00 – Data sourcing alternatives (ListKit, Sales Nav scraping) 07:12 – Clay's rise & how to enrich leads 10:25 – EDU/Microsoft panel loopholes and risks 14:00 – The right infra mix: Google, Microsoft, SMTP 18:00 – Cost breakdown for 10K cold emails 20:00 – Who cold email works for — and who it doesn't 23:35 – Cold email templates that work today 28:01 – Cold calling revival & voicemail strategy 33:00 – Smart personalization that stands out 37:00 – Overuse of AI: when it backfires 41:50 – Volume vs optimization: when to scale 47:00 – Warm-up pools, deliverability myths & final thoughtsKey PointsApollo Crackdown: Apollo recently slashed its free plan from 10,000 to 100 leads/month, killing off common scraping strategies. Agencies must now diversify data sources.Email Infrastructure Strategy: Nick recommends splitting accounts evenly across Google, Microsoft, and SMTP providers (like MailReef), using separate tenants for each domain to reduce risk.Top Tools Mentioned: Smartlead, Instantly, LeadMagic, Salesfinity (for cold calling), Clay, HyperType, ListKit.Cold Email Templates That Work: Short emails with a bold subject line, a clearly stated pain point, social proof, and a clear CTA. Two-step sequences are outperforming long follow-ups.AI in Cold Email: Use AI for variable enrichment (like local restaurants or recent promotions) — but not for full email writing. Over-automation feels robotic and gets ignored.Cold Calling Rebirth: Combining parallel dialers, voicemails, and email follow-ups creates a high-performing outbound flywheel. Nick's simple pitch script: “Can I get 30 seconds, or tell me to kick rocks?”Warm-Up Pools Controversy: Instantly and Smartlead warm-up pools have downsides. Use them carefully and always monitor bounce rates.Who Should Use Cold Email?✔ SaaS, agencies, and service businesses with high LTVs ($5K+) ✔ Founders with a unique, compelling offer ✔ Companies with a working sales process & CRM follow-up ✘ Commodity offers (e.g., generic e-comm marketing) with no clear differentiationNotable Quotes"Don't build a pricing model on a hack. It's a matter of time until it breaks." "Most people overthink deliverability — bad offers are the real issue." "You can get 0.8% replies or 0% if your inbox gets shut down — choose wisely."Guest Links:https://www.leadbird.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-abrahamhttps://x.com/NickAbraham12
Viirtue Streamlines Onboarding with 80% Success Rate, Elevates Partner Experience, “Partners can validate configurations in real-time. They don't need to submit tickets to figure out if it's working.” “We have achieved an 80% success rate by combining self-service tools with white-glove guidance. It's about equipping partners to succeed from day one.” That's how Tim Miller, Senior Vice President of Client Success at Viirtue, opened a special online podcast with Technology Reseller News. Miller was joined by Dan Rosenrauch and Justin Baker to walk through the company's proven onboarding process for partners entering Viirtue's white-label UCaaS program. The session provided a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Viirtue approaches onboarding—beginning with a dedicated project manager and a welcome call, then progressing through a proprietary real-time branding and setup portal. “We built our own system for SMTP, DNS, and branding setup to eliminate friction,” said Miller. “Partners can validate configurations in real-time. They don't need to submit tickets to figure out if it's working.” The process doesn't stop with setup. Viirtue pairs each new partner with an onboarding concierge—Julie—who guides the partner for up to 45 days. From porting numbers to building quotes and billing clients, she ensures that partners aren't just technically ready—they're business-ready. “We're proud that our partners don't feel lost,” added Rosenrauch. “This is an industry with a lot of complexity. Our job is to reduce that complexity with real-world support and step-by-step tools.” Viirtue's learning platform has been fully revamped to streamline education from 8–12 hours down to about 4–5 hours. Final assignments ensure partners can demonstrate core competencies before fully going live. From there, partners gain access to a thriving Slack community—a live knowledge base where white-label providers help each other troubleshoot issues like doorbell integrations or remote installations in unconventional environments. “It's a place where partners share practical wisdom,” said Miller. Viirtue also stands apart in its commitment to transparency, having pioneered a public status page among white-label carriers. “We don't hide disruptions behind a login,” noted Rosenrauch. “Our partners need to be in the loop, and we make sure they are.” The company's emphasis on transparency, structure, and personalization culminates in what it believes to be the industry's best onboarding process—with an 80% completion rate, compared to an industry average closer to 50–60%. For those ready to resell UCaaS with confidence, Viirtue's onboarding isn't just a checklist—it's a launchpad. Learn more at viirtue.com (spelled with two i's).
SANS Internet Stormcenter Daily Network/Cyber Security and Information Security Stormcast
Romanian Distillery Scanning for SMTP Credentials A particular attacker expanded the scope of their leaked credential file scans. In addition to the usual ".env" style files, it is not looking for specific SMTP related credential files. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Romanian%20Distillery%20Scanning%20for%20SMTP%20Credentials/31736 Tool Updates: mac-robber.py This update of mac-robber.py fixes issues with symlinks. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Tool%20update%3A%20mac-robber.py/31738 CVE-2025-1723 Account takeover vulnerability in ADSelfService Plus CVE-2025-1723 describes a vulnerability caused by session mishandling in ADSelfService Plus that could allow unauthorized access to user enrollment data when MFA was not enabled for ADSelfService Plus login. https://www.manageengine.com/products/self-service-password/advisory/CVE-2025-1723.html Android March Update Google released an update for Android addressing two already exploited vulnerabilities and several critical issues. https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/2025-03-01 PayPal's no-code-checkout Abuse Attackers are using PayPal's no-code-checkout feature is being abused by scammers to host PayPal tech support scam pages right within the PayPal.com domain. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/scams/2025/02/paypals-no-code-checkout-abused-by-scammers Broadcom Fixes three VMWare VCenter Vulnerabilities https://github.com/vmware/vcf-security-and-compliance-guidelines/tree/main/security-advisories/vmsa-2025-0004
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. What Is The Indie Archive? I'm Hairy Larry and you're listening to the Plain Text Programs podcast. The Indie Archive is a archival solution for indie producers. Since most indie producers run on a shoestring budget it's important that the Indie Archive is inexpensive to install and run. It's especially important that monthly expenses are minimal because a reasonable expense most months will sometimes be more than an indie producer can afford during some months. The first major constraint is cost. So I'll be talking about prices a lot in this podcast and get more technical in future podcasts about The Indie Archive. Indie Archive is an archival system which is different than a backup system. If you don't have a backup system do that first. My backup system uses the same tools as Indie Archive, rsync and rsnapshot. My brother uses the online backup service Carbonite. There are many other options. A good backup system runs automatically to back up everything frequently and preserve version history. It's also good to have backups offsite. An archival system, like Indie Archive, keeps multiple redundant copies across several hard drives on several systems in multiple locations. An archival system also checks file integrity as protection against file corruption or user error. When you have a project you really never want to lose, like a finished novel, a music album, a video, or any other major effort that involves significant work, that's when you need an archival system. So The Indie Archive does not automatically backup your projects every day. That's what your backup system should do. The Indie Archive is an archival system where the producer of the content decides what needs to be archived and when it needs to be archived and then manually moves a directory containing the files onto the Indie Archive carefully preserving the file's metadata during the transfer. Then these files are propagated over at least 7 hard drives on 4 different systems in three locations. File integrity checks are run daily comparing the files and reporting discrepancies. Two of the systems are kept in the studio where the content is produced. I call them the primary and secondary systems. They have a boot drive and two data drives each. One of the systems is kept offsite at a nearby location. I call it the remote system. It also has a boot drive and two data drives. If you have a more distant location where you can put a second remotes system you can have remotenear and remotefar systems. Otherwise ... The final system is somewhere in the cloud provided by a professional data storage provider. It has a single copy of the data and usually some additional data retention. The provider makes the backups of this data. This is the part that might involve a monthly bill. So, depending on the size of your file set, it could be free or it could cost so much a month. There are a lot of options for cloud storage providers. But first I'm going to discuss the three systems, primary, secondary, and remote, and how they function. As far as the hardware goes the systems are the same. Now, I"m a Linix guy and I do all my production work on Linux so I'm using Linux. I want to test the system on several versions of Linux and with BSD. I'm not a Mac guy or a Windows guy so I won't be going there. The software is open source and the required programs run on all three platforms so I'll let a Mac or Windows programmer test The Indie Archive for their systems. My guess is that the Mac fork will be easier than the Windows fork because of the file metadata. It might even be possible to add Mac folders to The Indie Archive running Linux but I'll let someone who actually has a Mac figure that out. I don't think the same is true for Windows. Windows file metadata is different and so if you want to preserve the metadata you will probably have to install The Indie Archive on Windows systems. So, I'm developing and deploying on Linux and I will also test on BSD. So far I have tested Debian, Ununtu, FreeBSD, Midnight BSD, and Xubuntu and The Indie Archive works fine all of these operating systems. So, back to the hardware. Pretty much any older system that will support at least three sata drives will work. I'm using older business class desktops, Dell and HP. I pulled mine out of storage but they are very inexpensive to buy if you're not like me with a shed full of old computer stuff. I just bought a Small Form Factor HP Desktop on ebay for $30 including tax and shipping. To clarify, it's best if the primary system supports 4 sata drives. The secondary and remote systems do not need an optical drive so they should support three sata drives but they can be run on two sata drives if you boot from the primaryfile drive. I am currently testing a remote system with two sata drives running Midnight BSD. The Dell desktops made a big deal about being green. I am open to suggestions on what would be the best energy efficient systems for The Indie Archive, because of both the cost of electricity and the impact on the environment. There are three drives on each system, a boot drive and two data drives. The boot drives can be SSD or spinning hard drives and need to be big enough to hold the OS comfortably. The data drives need to be large enough to hold the files you want to archive and they should be high quality spinning drives, I use the multi terrabyte HGST drives and I am also looking at some Dell drives made by HGST. There will be a data drive and a snapshot drive on each system. If they are not the same size the snapshot drives should be larger. I am testing with 3 terrabyte data drives and 4 terrabyte snapshot drives. Besides the main data set that is being archived the snapshot drives also hold the version history of files that have been deleted or changed. So, that's why they should be the larger drive. So my primary system has a primaryfiles directory with a 3 terrabyte drive mounted to it and a primarysnapshots directory with a 4 terrabyte drive mounted to it. Same for the secondary and remote systems. Now, so far I only had to buy one drive but generally speaking the six data drives will be the major expense in assembling the systems. So a good bargain on six 4 terrabyte drives could be $120 used or $270 new. And this is the most expensive part. I install used HGST drives all the time and rarely have problems with them. I have worked for clients who won't buy used, only new. Since the file integrity checks should give early warning on a drive failure and since there is a seven drive redundancy on the data files, if I were buying drives for The Indie Archive I'd go with six used 4 terrabyte HGST drives for $120. There is no reason not to use drives all the same size as long as the snapshot drives are large enough. The size of data drives you need depends on the size of your projects and the time it takes to do a project. Look at your hard drives on your working systems. Think about what directories you would like to see in archival storage. What is the total size of these directories? Check how many gigabytes these projects have consumed in the last year. Think forward a few years. Assume you will use more disc space in the future than you are now. Do some quick arithmetic and make a decision. Like I said I only had to buy one drive so far because I'm weird and I had a bunch of 3 terrabyte drives available. If I had to buy drives I probably would have tried to start larger. I am sure that at some point in the not to distant future, when I am running The Indie Archive and not developing it, I will have to upgrade my drives. The primary system is the console for The Indie Archive. When you copy a project onto The Indie Archive the directory goes into the primaryfiles directory. From there it is propagated out to the primarysnapshots directory, the secondary system, the cloud storage (if you are using it), and eventually to the remote systems. All of the data propagation is done with rsync using the archive setting that is desigend to preserve the file metadata like owner, permissions, and date last modified. So I have been using rsync with the archive setting to move the files from the work system to a usb drive and from the usb drive to the primaryfiles folder. At first I thought I would use an optical disc to move the files but optical discs do not preserve file metadata. Also I had some weird results with a usb flash drive because it was formatted fat32. fat32 does not support Linux metadata so if you're going to move projects over on a flash drive or a usb external drive be sure to format to ext4. Another way to move projects over to the primaryfiles directory is with tar compression. This preserves metadata when the files are extracted so this might be easier and it works with optical drives. If your directory will fit on an optical drive this also gives you another backup on another media. If you have any suggestions on how to transfer projects while preserving the file metadata let me know. I know that there are network options available but I am hesitant to recommend them because if I can transfer files from a system to the primary sytem over the LAN than anyone can do the same. Or delete files. Or accidentally delete directories. I kind of want to keep tight control over access to the primary system. It kind of ruins the archival quality of The Indie Archive if anyone on the LAN can accidentally mess with it. So, I am open to dialogue on these issues. I'm kind of where I want it to be easy to add projects to The Indie Archive but not too easy, if you know what I mean. I feel like having to sit down at the primary system and enter a password should be the minimum amount of security required to access the primary system. The primary system also runs file integrity checks daily from a cron job. All of the propagation and file integrity scripts have to be run as root to preserve the metadata since only root can write a file that it doesn't own. The secondary system is the ssh server for The Indie Archive. The primary system logs onto the secondary system as root using ssh. Security is managed with public and private keys so entering a password is not required. After the keys are set up for both the primary and remote systems, password authentication is disabled for the ssh server so only those two systems can ssh into the secondary system. When the propagation script is run on the primary system rsnapshot is used to create a current version of the primaryfiles directory in the primarysnapshots directory. Then the primary system uses rsync over ssh to make a copy of the primaryfiles directory to the secondaryfiles directory. Then the primary system logs onto the secondary system as root and rsnapshot is used to create a current version of the secondaryfiles directory on the secondarysnapshots directory. Finally, if cloud storage is being used, the primary system uses gcloud rsync to make a copy of the primaryfiles directory to a google cloud storage bucket archive. I have this bucket set to 90 days soft delete. If you are using another type of cloud storage on Google, AWS, Mega, or other storage providers this command will have to be adjusted. The reason I chose the gcloud archive bucket is because of the storage cost per gigabyte. They have the cheapest cost per gigabyte that I found. This will keep the monthly bill low. Once a day the primary system runs the file integrity check from a cron job using rsync to compare the primaryfiles directory to the current version, alpha.0, in the primarysnapshots directory logging any discrepancies. It then does the same comparing primaryfiles to secondaryfiles and to the current version in the secondarysnapshots directory, logging discrepancies and notifying the maintainer of any discrepancies. Notification is done by email using curl and an SMTP provider. The remote system runs on it's own schedule, logging into the secondary system daily to copy data from secondaryfiles to remotefiles and then using rsnapshot to make a copy of remotefiles to the remotesnapshots directory. Since it's run on a daily schedule it uses rsnapshot with the standard daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups. The remote system also runs a daily file integrity check comparing remotefiles to the current version on remotesnapshots and comparing remotefiles to both data directories on the secondary system, again logging the results and notifying the maintainer of any discrepancies. If there is an outward facing static IP at the location with the primary and secondary systems then the remote system can use that static IP to ssh into the secondary system. If there is not a static IP then the remote system uses a DuckDNS subdomain to log onto the secondary system. Any system using the same router as the secondary system can run a cron job to update DuckDNS with the current IP address. Since a static IP is a monthly expense it's important that there's an alternative that does not require paying another bill. So the secondary system has the ssh server but it doesn't really do much. Both of the other systems connect to it and use it as the junction for data propagation and file integrity checks. So, as you can tell, there's a lot going on to make The Indie Archive work. Future podcasts will get down into the details and discuss some of the choices I had to make and why I made them. The funny thing about this project is that the actual code was the least amount of work. Figuring out exactly how rsync and rsnapshot work together was quite a bit of work. Configuration for both rsnapshot and ssh took a bit of head scratching. Then there were a few user id tricks I had to work through to make The Indie Archive usable. But, by far the most work was writing The Indie Archive installation document detailing each step of installing the software on three systems. It's been fun so far. If you have input I always appreciate the help. I get quite a bit of help on Mastodon. If you go to home.gamerplus.org you will find the script for this podcast with the Mastodon comment thread embedded in the post. This podcast is being read from a document that is a work in progress. Current versions of the What Is The Indie Archive document will be posted at codeberg when I'm ready to upload the project. Thanks for listening. https://www.theindiearchive.com/ Provide feedback on this episode.
In deze aflevering bespreken we de public preview van GitHub Copilot voor Azure in VS Code. Verder praten we over de introductie van IPv6 in Exchange Online en nieuwe security defaults in Entra ID. Public Preview van Azure Migrate: van VMware naar Azure Stack HCIBekijk de public preview van Azure Migrate om workloads van VMware naar Azure Stack HCI te verplaatsen.Link naar artikel Azure Arc JumpstartEen uitgebreid platform om snel aan de slag te gaan met Azure Arc.Link naar artikel Update van security defaults in Entra IDNieuwe beveiligingsstandaarden in Entra ID om je omgeving beter te beveiligen.Link naar artikel Public Preview van GitHub Copilot voor Azure in VS CodeOptimaliseer je Azure-werkstromen met GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code.Link naar artikel IPv6 in Exchange OnlineUpdates over de introductie van IPv6 voor Exchange Online.Link naar artikel DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities)Algemene beschikbaarheid van DANE met DNSSEC voor inkomende SMTP-verificatie.Link naar artikel Azure introduceert Terraform Export-functie in Private PreviewEen nieuwe functie voor het exporteren van Terraform-resources in Azure, nu in private preview.Link naar artikel AzAPI 2.0Aankondiging van AzAPI 2.0 met verbeterde API-ondersteuning voor Azure-resources.Link naar artikel
**Cold Open (AMAZON GIFT CARD CHALLENGE TO LISTENERS / Headlines without Context)****Skip the Cold Open at 19:50**We've had to dive down the email rabbit hole. Exploring SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and SMTP solutions.Why?Because our job is to deliver leads to our clients. When someone fills out a form on our client's site, in order for us to properly get credit for that lead, the client needs to be alerted immediately.However, as 2024 comes to a close, the website and digital marketing space has been plagued by email deliverability issues, which include websites sending lead form submissions.We reflect on what kind of agency we set out to be and how our continued pursuit of being that hands-off agency has led us down the path of becoming technical email deliverability experts.----------------------------------Our recommended agency tools:everbrospodcast.com/recommended-tools/----------------------------------⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐As always, if you enjoyed this episode or this podcast in general and want to leave us a review or rating, head over to Apple and let us know what you like! It helps us get found and motivates us to keep producing this free content.----------------------------------Want to connect with us? Reach out to us on the everbrospodcast.com website, follow us on YouTube, or connect with us on socials:YouTube: @agencyuTwitter/X: @theagency_uLinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/agencyuFacebook: facebook.com/theagencyuInstagram: @theagencyuReddit: u/JakeHundleyTikTok: @agency.u
Video Episode: https://youtu.be/7et_7YkwAHs In today’s episode, we dive into the alarming rise of malware delivery through fake job applications targeting HR professionals, specifically focusing on the More_eggs backdoor. We also discuss critical gaming performance issues in Windows 11 24H2 and the vulnerabilities in DrayTek routers that expose over 700,000 devices to potential hacking. Lastly, we address the urgent exploitation of a remote code execution flaw in Zimbra email servers, emphasizing the need for immediate updates to safeguard against evolving threats. Links to articles: 1. https://thehackernews.com/2024/10/fake-job-applications-deliver-dangerous.html 2. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-warns-of-windows-11-24h2-gaming-performance-issues/ 3. https://thehackernews.com/2024/10/alert-over-700000-draytek-routers.html 4. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/critical-zimbra-rce-flaw-exploited-to-backdoor-servers-using-emails/ Timestamps 00:00 – Introduction 01:14 – Zimbra RCE Vulnerability 02:17 – 700k DrayTek Routers Vulnerable 04:36 – Recruiters Targeted with Malware 06:14 – Microsoft blocks updates for gamers 1. What are today’s top cybersecurity news stories? 2. How is More_eggs malware targeting HR professionals? 3. What vulnerabilities exist in DrayTek routers? 4. Why did Microsoft block Windows 11 24H2 upgrades? 5. What is the impact of the Zimbra RCE flaw? 6. How do fake job applications spread malware? 7. What security measures can protect against More_eggs malware? 8. What are the latest gaming issues with Windows 11? 9. How can DrayTek router vulnerabilities be mitigated? 10. What are the latest tactics used by cybercriminals in email attacks? More_eggs, Golden Chickens, spear-phishing, credential theft, Microsoft, Windows 11, Asphalt 8, Intel Alder Lake+, DrayTek, vulnerabilities, exploits, cyber attackers, Zimbra, RCE, vulnerability, exploitation, # Intro HR professionals are under siege as a spear-phishing campaign disguised as fake job applications delivers the lethal More_eggs malware, leading to potentially devastating credential theft. Powered by the notorious Golden Chickens group, this malware-as-a-service targets recruiters with chilling precision. **How are recruitment officers unknowingly downloading malicious files, and what methods are threat actors using to bypass security measures?** “Microsoft is blocking Windows 11 24H2 upgrades on some systems due to critical gaming performance issues like Asphalt 8 crashes and Easy Anti-Cheat blue screens. The company is scrambling to resolve these problems that uniquely impact devices with Intel Alder Lake+ processors.” How can gamers with affected systems work around these issues until Microsoft releases a fix? Over 700,000 DrayTek routers are currently vulnerable to 14 newly discovered security flaws, with some critical exploits that could be used to take full control of the devices and infiltrate enterprise networks. Despite patches being released, many routers remain exposed, creating a lucrative target for cyber attackers. How can these vulnerabilities impact businesses that rely on DrayTek routers for network security? Hackers are leveraging a critical Zimbra RCE vulnerability to backdoor servers through specially crafted emails that execute malicious commands, revealing widespread exploitation just days after a proof-of-concept was published. Notable security experts warn of attackers embedding harmful code in the email’s CC field, which the Zimbra server inadvertently executes. How are attackers camouflaging their malicious emails to slip through security measures unnoticed? # Stories Welcome back to our podcast. Today, we’re talking about a new cyber threat targeting HR professionals. Researchers at Trend Micro have uncovered a spear-phishing campaign where fake job applications deliver a JavaScript backdoor called More_eggs to recruiters. This malware, sold as malware-as-a-service by a group known as Golden Chickens, can steal credentials for online banking, email accounts, and IT admin accounts. What’s unique this time is that attackers are using spear-phishing emails to build trust, as observed in a case targeting a talent search lead in engineering. The attack sequence involves downloading a ZIP file from a deceptive URL, leading to the execution of the More_eggs backdoor. This malware probes the host system, connects to a command-and-control server, and can download additional malicious payloads. Trend Micro’s findings highlight the persistent and evolving nature of these attacks, which are difficult to attribute because multiple threat actors can use the same toolkits. The latest insights also connect these activities to known cybercrime groups like FIN6. Stay vigilant, especially if you work in HR or recruitment. 1. **Spear-Phishing**: – **Definition**: A targeted phishing attack aiming at specific individuals or companies, typically using information about the victim to make fraudulent messages more convincing. – **Importance**: This method is specifically dangerous because it can trick even tech-savvy users by exploiting personalized details, leading to significant security breaches like credential theft. 2. **More_eggs**: – **Definition**: A JavaScript backdoor malware sold as a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) with capabilities to siphon credentials and provide unauthorized access to infected systems. – **Importance**: Due to its ability to latently steal sensitive information and its widespread use by various e-crime groups, More_eggs represents a significant threat to corporate cybersecurity. 3. **Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS)**: – **Definition**: A business model where malicious software is developed and sold to cybercriminals who can then use it to conduct attacks. – **Importance**: This model lowers the barrier of entry for cybercriminals, allowing even those with limited technical skills to launch sophisticated attacks using pre-made malware. 4. **Golden Chickens**: – **Definition**: A cybercriminal group (also known as Venom Spider) attributed with developing and distributing the More_eggs malware. – **Importance**: Understanding threat actors like Golden Chickens can help cybersecurity professionals anticipate and defend against specific threat tactics. 5. **Command-and-Control (C2) Server**: – **Definition**: A server used by threat actors to maintain communications with compromised systems within a target network to execute commands and control malware. – **Importance**: Disrupting C2 servers is crucial because it can cut off the attacker's control over their malware, mitigating the threat. 6. **LNK File**: – **Definition**: A shortcut file in Windows that points to another file or executable. – **Importance**: Misuse of LNK files in phishing campaigns can lead to automated execution of malicious payloads, making them an effective vector for malware distribution. 7. **PowerShell**: – **Definition**: A task automation framework from Microsoft consisting of a command-line shell and scripting language. – **Importance**: PowerShell is often used by attackers to execute and conceal malicious scripts due to its powerful capabilities and integration with Windows. 8. **Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)**: – **Definition**: The behavior patterns or methodologies used by cyber threat actors to achieve their goals. – **Importance**: Identifying TTPs helps security professionals understand, detect, and mitigate specific attack strategies used by threat actors. 9. **Obfuscation**: – **Definition**: The process of deliberately making code or data difficult to understand or interpret. – **Importance**: Obfuscation is commonly used by malware developers to conceal malicious activities and bypass security mechanisms. 10. **Cryptocurrency Miner**: – **Definition**: Software used to perform the computational work required to validate and add transactions to a blockchain ledger in exchange for cryptocurrency rewards. – **Importance**: Unauthorized cryptocurrency mining (cryptojacking) can misuse system resources for financial gain, leading to performance degradation and security vulnerabilities. — On today’s tech update: Microsoft has blocked upgrades to Windows 11 version 24H2 on certain systems due to gaming performance issues. Players of Asphalt 8 may encounter game crashes, while some systems running Easy Anti-Cheat might experience blue screens. These problems mainly affect devices with Intel Alder Lake+ processors. Until Microsoft resolves these issues, impacted users are advised not to manually upgrade using tools like the Media Creation Tool. Microsoft is working on fixes and will include them in upcoming updates. 1. **Windows 11 24H2**: A version of Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system, released in the second half (H2) of 2024. It is significant because it represents Microsoft’s ongoing update cycle aimed at improving system performance and user experience, though it also highlights the challenges of software compatibility and stability. 2. **Asphalt 8 (Airborne)**: A popular racing video game often used for showcasing graphical and processing capabilities of devices. Its relevance lies in exposing potential software and hardware compatibility issues when new operating systems are released. 3. **Easy Anti-Cheat**: A software tool designed to detect and prevent cheating in multiplayer games. It is crucial for maintaining fair play and integrity in online gaming environments but can pose compatibility challenges with system updates. 4. **Blue Screen of Death (BSoD)**: An error screen displayed on Windows computers following a system crash. It is important as it signals serious software or hardware issues that could affect system stability and data integrity. 5. **Intel Alder Lake+ processors**: A generation of Intel’s microprocessors known for their hybrid architecture design. Understanding these chips is important for recognizing which systems might be more susceptible to the reported compatibility issues. 6. **vPro platform**: A set of Intel technologies aimed at enhancing business security and manageability. It’s critical to cybersecurity professionals because it allows for hardware-level encryption and more robust security management, but compatibility with OS updates can be problematic. 7. **MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error**: A specific type of error indicating system memory management problems, often leading to system crashes. It is crucial for cybersecurity and IT professionals as it affects the stability and reliability of a system. 8. **Compatibility holds (Safeguard IDs)**: Mechanisms employed by Microsoft to prevent system upgrades when known issues are detected. These are essential for protecting users from potential system failures and ensuring a stable computing environment. 9. **Media Creation Tool**: A Microsoft utility used for installing or upgrading Windows OS. It's important for IT professionals as it provides a means to manually deploy Windows updates, though it highlights the risks of bypassing automatic update safeguards. 10. **KB5043145 (Preview Update)**: A specific Windows update known to cause issues such as reboot loops and connection failures. Understanding these updates is crucial for maintaining system stability and ensuring that deployed systems are free from vulnerabilities and bugs. — In a recent cybersecurity alert, over 700,000 DrayTek routers have been identified as vulnerable to hacking due to 14 newly discovered security flaws. These vulnerabilities, found in both residential and enterprise routers, include two rated critical, with one receiving the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. This critical flaw involves a buffer overflow in the Web UI, potentially allowing remote code execution. Another significant vulnerability is OS command injection via communication binaries. The report highlights the widespread exposure of these routers’ web interfaces online, creating a tempting target for attackers, particularly in the U.S. DrayTek has released patches to address these vulnerabilities, urging users to apply updates, disable unnecessary remote access, and utilize security measures like ACLs and two-factor authentication. This development coincides with international cybersecurity agencies offering guidance to secure critical infrastructure, emphasizing the importance of safety, protecting valuable OT data, secure supply chains, and the role of people in cybersecurity. 1. **Vulnerability**: A weakness in a system or software that can be exploited by hackers. – **Importance**: Identifying vulnerabilities is crucial in cyber security because it helps protect systems from attacks. 2. **Router**: A device that routes data from one network to another, directing traffic on the internet. – **Importance**: Routers are essential for internet connectivity and their security is vital to prevent unauthorized access to networks. 3. **Buffer Overflow**: A coding error where a program writes more data to a buffer than it can hold, potentially leading to system crashes or unauthorized code execution. – **Importance**: Buffer overflows are common vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain control of a system. 4. **Remote Code Execution (RCE)**: A type of vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute code on a remote system without authorization. – **Importance**: RCE vulnerabilities are highly critical as they enable attackers to take over affected systems. 5. **Cross-site Scripting (XSS)**: A web security vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious scripts into content from otherwise trusted websites. – **Importance**: XSS can be used to steal information, deface websites, and spread malware. 6. **Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM) Attack**: An attack where the attacker secretly intercepts and possibly alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other. – **Importance**: AitM attacks can lead to data theft, man-in-the-middle proxy attacks, and unauthorized access to sensitive information. 7. **Denial-of-Service (DoS)**: An attack intended to shut down a machine or network, making it inaccessible to its intended users. – **Importance**: DoS attacks disrupt the availability of services and can cause significant downtime and financial loss. 8. **Access Control List (ACL)**: A list of permissions attached to an object that specifies which users or system processes can access the object and what operations they can perform. – **Importance**: ACLs are crucial for implementing security policies to control access to resources. 9. **Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)**: A security process in which the user provides two different authentication factors to verify themselves. – **Importance**: 2FA improves security by adding an additional layer of verification, making it harder for attackers to gain unauthorized access. 10. **Operational Technology (OT)**: Hardware and software that detects or causes changes through direct monitoring and control of physical devices, processes, and events in an enterprise. – **Importance**: OT security is critical for the functioning and safety of critical infrastructure systems, such as those in manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. — Today, we’re discussing a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Zimbra email servers, tracked as CVE-2024-45519, which hackers are actively exploiting. This flaw allows attackers to trigger malicious commands simply by sending specially crafted emails, which are processed by Zimbra’s post journal service. First flagged by Ivan Kwiatkowski of HarfangLab and confirmed by Proofpoint, the exploit involves spoofed emails with commands hidden in the “CC” field. Once processed, these emails deliver a webshell to the server, giving attackers full access for data theft or further network infiltration. A proof-of-concept exploit was released by Project Discovery on September 27, prompting immediate malicious activity. Administrators are urged to apply security updates released in Zimbra’s latest versions—9.0.0 Patch 41 and later—or disable the vulnerable postjournal service and ensure secure network configurations to mitigate the threat. Stay vigilant and update your Zimbra servers immediately to protect against this critical vulnerability. 1. **Remote Code Execution (RCE)** – **Definition**: A type of security vulnerability that enables attackers to run arbitrary code on a targeted server or computer. – **Importance**: This flaw can be exploited to gain full control over the affected machine, leading to data theft, unauthorized access, and further network penetration. 2. **Zimbra** – **Definition**: An open-source email, calendaring, and collaboration platform. – **Importance**: Popular among organizations for its integrated communication tools, making it a significant target for cyberattacks due to the sensitive data it handles. 3. **SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)** – **Definition**: A protocol used to send and route emails across networks. – **Importance**: Integral to email services, its exploitation can deliver malicious content to servers and users, forming a vector for cyber-attacks. 4. **Postjournal Service** – **Definition**: A service within Zimbra used to parse incoming emails over SMTP. – **Importance**: Its vulnerability can be leveraged to execute arbitrary commands, making it a crucial attack point for hackers. 5. **Proof-of-Concept (PoC)** – **Definition**: A demonstration exploit showing that a vulnerability can be successfully taken advantage of. – **Importance**: PoC exploits serve as proof that theoretical vulnerabilities are practical and dangerous, necessitating urgent security responses. 6. **Base64 Encoding** – **Definition**: A method of encoding binary data into an ASCII string format. – **Importance**: Often used to encode commands within emails or other data streams to evade basic security detections. 7. **Webshell** – **Definition**: A type of malicious script that provides attackers with remote access to a compromised server. – **Importance**: Webshells afford attackers sustained control over a server, allowing for ongoing data theft, disruptions, and further exploits. 8. **CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures)** – **Definition**: A list of publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exposures, identified by unique CVE IDs. – **Importance**: Helps standardize and track security issues, facilitating communication and management of vulnerabilities across the cybersecurity community. 9. **Patch** – **Definition**: An update to software aimed at fixing security vulnerabilities or bugs. – **Importance**: Patching vulnerabilities is critical for protecting systems from attacks exploiting known security flaws. 10. **Execvp Function** – **Definition**: A function in Unix-like operating systems that executes commands with an argument vector, featuring improved input sanitization. – **Importance**: By replacing vulnerable functions like ‘popen,’ ‘execvp’ helps prevent the execution of malicious code, thus enhancing system security. —
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Why you shouldn't use AI to write your tests, and the crazy deals new AI companies are getting themselves into to access hardware.
Links from the show:Verbsx.comDiscordThis episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:Mailtrap.ioThis episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOhttps://l.rw.rw/phppodcastHoneybadger.ioBuilt for Developers. Monitoring doesn't have to be so complicated. That's why we built the monitoring tool we always wanted: a tool that's there when you need it, and gets out of your. Everything you need to keep production happy so that you can keep shipping. Deploy with confidence and be your team's DevOps hero.https://www.honeybadger.io/php[architect]php[architect] magazine is the only technical journal dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP. We are committed to spreading knowledge of best practices in PHP. With that purpose, the brand has expanded into producing a full line of books, hosting online and in-person web training, as well as organizing multiple conferences per year.https://www.phparch.com PHPUgly streams the recording of this podcast live. Typically every Thursday. Come and join us, and subscribe to our Youtube Channel, Twitch, or Twitter. Also, be sure to check out our Patreon Page.Twitter Account https://twitter.com/phpuglyMastodon Account https://phparch.social/@phpuglyHost:Eric Van Johnson | Mastodon: @eric@phpartch.socialJohn Congdon | Mastodon: @john@phpartch.socialStreams:Youtube ChannelTwitchPowered by RestreamPatreon PagePHPUgly Anthem by Harry Mack / Harry Mack Youtube ChannelThanks to all of our Patreon Sponsors:************* PATREON SUPPORTS SPONSOR LEVEL **Honeybadger (https://honeybader.io)** Patreon Supports **ButteryCrumpetFrank WDavid QShawnBoštjan OMarcusS FRodrigo CéBillyDarryl HKnut E B-HDmitri GElgimboMikePageDevKenrick BKalen JPeter AHolly SAlex BKevin YWayneJeroen FahinkleChris CSteve MRobert SEmily JJoe FAndrew WulrikJohn CEric MEd GlilHermitChampJeffrey DChris BTore BBek JDonald GPaul KDustin UMel SSeba RCoriNathan PLincoln M
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.This episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOShow linksView Third-party Relations in model:show - Now Available in Laravel 11.11 Sentry and Laravel announce a new partnership Laravel Herd v1.7 is out with updates to the dump UI Create a DateTime from a Timestamp With this New Method Coming to PHP 8.4 Manage Events, Feature Flags, and More with PostHog for Laravel Randomize Command Execution Time with the Chaotic Schedule Package for Laravel Share Error Package for Laravel's New Exception Page Neovim Plugin to for Navigating Laravel and Livewire Components Asserting a JSON Response Structure in Laravel
Links from the show:https://medium.com/better-programming/how-i-used-rust-to-enhance-my-php-8c84218e69edRedis Adopts Dual Source-Available Licensing - RedisReddit - Dive into anythingX (Formerly Twitter) Officially Allows Porn Under Updated PolicyUpdates for security issue affecting IntelliJ-based IDEs 2023.1+ and JetBrains GitHub Plugin | The Security BlogTwitter makes Likes private: X policy change follows update on pornTop 50+ AWS Services Explained in 10 Minutes - YouTubeThis episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:Mailtrap.ioThis episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOhttps://l.rw.rw/phppodcastHoneybadger.ioBuilt for Developers. Monitoring doesn't have to be so complicated. That's why we built the monitoring tool we always wanted: a tool that's there when you need it, and gets out of your. Everything you need to keep production happy so that you can keep shipping. Deploy with confidence and be your team's DevOps hero.https://www.honeybadger.io/php[architect]php[architect] magazine is the only technical journal dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP. We are committed to spreading knowledge of best practices in PHP. With that purpose, the brand has expanded into producing a full line of books, hosting online and in-person web training, as well as organizing multiple conferences per year.https://www.phparch.comPHPUgly streams the recording of this podcast live. Typically every Thursday. Come and join us, and subscribe to our Youtube Channel, Twitch, or Twitter. Also, be sure to check out our Patreon Page.Twitter Account https://twitter.com/phpuglyMastodon Account https://phparch.social/@phpuglyHost:Eric Van Johnson | Mastodon: @eric@phpartch.socialJohn Congdon | Mastodon: @john@phpartch.socialStreams:Youtube ChannelTwitchPowered by RestreamPatreon PagePHPUgly Anthem by Harry Mack / Harry Mack Youtube ChannelThanks to all of our Patreon Sponsors:***** PATREON SUPPORTS SPONSOR LEVEL **Honeybadger (https://honeybader.io)** Patreon Supports **ButteryCrumpetFrank WDavid QShawnBoštjan OMarcusS FRodrigo CéBillyDarryl HKnut E B-HDmitri GElgimboMikePageDevKenrick BKalen JPeter AHolly SAlex BKevin YWayneJeroen FahinkleChris CSteve MRobert SEmily JJoe FAndrew WulrikJohn CEric MEd GlilHermitChampJeffrey DChris BTore BBek JDonald GPaul KDustin UMel SSeba RCoriNathan PLincoln M
Links from the show:The Future of Space | The Space BlogLinux as the new developer default at 37signalsDHH discusses SQLite (and Stoicism) - YouTubeThis episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:Mailtrap.ioThis episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IO https://l.rw.rw/phppodcastHoneybadger.ioBuilt for Developers. Monitoring doesn't have to be so complicated. That's why we built the monitoring tool we always wanted: a tool that's there when you need it, and gets out of your. Everything you need to keep production happy so that you can keep shipping. Deploy with confidence and be your team's DevOps hero.https://www.honeybadger.io/php[architect]php[architect] magazine is the only technical journal dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP. We are committed to spreading knowledge of best practices in PHP. With that purpose, the brand has expanded into producing a full line of books, hosting online and in-person web training, as well as organizing multiple conferences per year.https://www.phparch.com PHPUgly streams the recording of this podcast live. Typically every Thursday. Come and join us, and subscribe to our Youtube Channel, Twitch, or Twitter. Also, be sure to check out our Patreon Page.Twitter Account https://twitter.com/phpuglyMastodon Account https://phparch.social/@phpuglyHost:Eric Van Johnson | Mastodon: @eric@phpartch.socialJohn Congdon | Mastodon: @john@phpartch.socialStreams:Youtube ChannelTwitchPowered by RestreamPatreon PagePHPUgly Anthem by Harry Mack / Harry Mack Youtube ChannelThanks to all of our Patreon Sponsors:***************************** PATREON SUPPORTS SPONSOR LEVEL **Honeybadger (https://honeybader.io)** Patreon Supports **ButteryCrumpetFrank WDavid QShawnBoštjan OMarcusS FRodrigo CéBillyDarryl HKnut E B-HDmitri GElgimboMikePageDevKenrick BKalen JPeter AHolly SAlex BKevin YWayneJeroen FahinkleChris CSteve MRobert SEmily JJoe FAndrew WulrikJohn CEric MEd GlilHermitChampJeffrey DChris BTore BBek JDonald GPaul KDustin UMel SSeba RCoriNathan PLincoln M
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.This episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOShow linksA New Validation Rule and the Ability to Manually Fail a Command in Laravel 11.8 A New Minimal Default Exception Page With Dark Mode Support in Laravel 11.9 Len Woodward announces Conductor - the PHP version of npxUse a Closure with updateOrInsert() in Laravel 11.10 Eloquent JoinWith Package for Laravel Real Time Command Line Monitoring With Laravel Top Audit MySQL Databases in Laravel With the DB Auditor Package Monitor Code Processing Time in PHP with Time Warden Configuring Laravel With Additional Environment Files Using Eloquent Factories With PHPUnit Data Providers The ultimate guide to Laravel Validation
We've got some code we want to test, and some tests.The tests need to be able to import the code under test, or at least the API to it, in order to run tests against it.How do we do that? How do we set things up so that our tests can import our code?In this episode, we discuss two options:Installing the code under test as a pip installable package with `pip install -e /path/to/local/package`.Using the pythonpath pytest setting. Sponsored by Mailtrap.ioAn Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOSponsored by The Complete pytest CourseFor the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythontest.comWhether your new to testing or pytest, or just want to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness when testing.
Links from the show:Mailtrap: Email Delivery PlatformSlack has been using data from your chats to train its machine learning modelsAbout Winamp - Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows.Laravel vs React - YouTubePHP: rfc:deprecate-get-post-sessionsPHP: rfc:class-naming-acronymsPHP: rfc:resource_to_object_conversionThis episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:Mailtrap.ioThis episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IO https://l.rw.rw/phppodcastHoneybadger.ioBuilt for Developers. Monitoring doesn't have to be so complicated. That's why we built the monitoring tool we always wanted: a tool that's there when you need it, and gets out of your. Everything you need to keep production happy so that you can keep shipping. Deploy with confidence and be your team's DevOps hero.https://www.honeybadger.io/php[architect]php[architect] magazine is the only technical journal dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP. We are committed to spreading knowledge of best practices in PHP. With that purpose, the brand has expanded into producing a full line of books, hosting online and in-person web training, as well as organizing multiple conferences per year.https://www.phparch.comPHPUgly streams the recording of this podcast live. Typically every Thursday. Come and join us, and subscribe to our Youtube Channel, Twitch, or Twitter. Also, be sure to check out our Patreon Page.Twitter Account https://twitter.com/phpuglyMastodon Account https://phparch.social/@phpuglyHost:Eric Van Johnson | Mastodon: @eric@phpartch.socialJohn Congdon | Mastodon: @john@phpartch.socialStreams:Youtube ChannelTwitchPowered by RestreamPatreon PagePHPUgly Anthem by Harry Mack / Harry Mack Youtube ChannelThanks to all of our Patreon Sponsors:***** PATREON SUPPORTS SPONSOR LEVEL **Honeybadger (https://honeybader.io)** Patreon Supports **ButteryCrumpetFrank WDavid QShawnBoštjan OMarcusS FergusonRodrigo CBillyDarryl HKnut E BDmitri GElgimboMikePageDevKenrick BKalen JPeter AHolly SAlex BKevin YWayneJeroen FahinkleChris CSteve MRobert SEmily JJoe FAndrew WulrikJohn CJames HEric MEd GlilHermitChampJeffrey DChris BTore BBek JDonald GPaul KDustin UMel SSeba RCoriNathan PLincoln M
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.This episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOShow linksRule::array() and whereJsonOverlaps() for MySQL in Laravel 11.7 A Look at What's Coming to PHP 8.4 Is class instantiation without extra parenthesis coming to PHP 8.4? New Proposed Array Find Functions in PHP 8.4 Statamic 5 is released!FrankenPHP Support in Laravel Octane is Out of Beta Laracon AU 2024 is heading to Brisbane, Queensland Validation Errors Card for Laravel Pulse Dash UI is a Laravel Blade Component Library Inspired by Shopify Polaris Use Vue or React Components in a Livewire App with MingleJS
Links from the show:Mailtrap: Email Delivery Platform - https://l.rw.rw/phppodcastMySQL :: MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual :: 15.2.20 WITH (Common Table Expressions) - https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/with.htmlhttps://builder.io - https://builder.iohttps://medium.com/@sammaingi5/uuid-vs-ulid-how-ulid-improves-write-speeds-d16b23505458 - https://medium.com/@sammaingi5/uuid-vs-ulid-how-ulid-improves-write-speeds-d16b23505458GitHub - ulid/spec: The canonical spec for ulid - https://github.com/ulid/specUsing In a Database — ramsey/uuid stable Manual - https://uuid.ramsey.dev/en/stable/database.htmlThis episode of PHPUgly was sponsored by:Mailtrap.ioThis episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IO https://l.rw.rw/phppodcastHoneybadger.ioBuilt for Developers. Monitoring doesn't have to be so complicated. That's why we built the monitoring tool we always wanted: a tool that's there when you need it, and gets out of your. Everything you need to keep production happy so that you can keep shipping. Deploy with confidence and be your team's DevOps hero.https://www.honeybadger.io/php[architect]php[architect] magazine is the only technical journal dedicated exclusively to the world of PHP. We are committed to spreading knowledge of best practices in PHP. With that purpose, the brand has expanded into producing a full line of books, hosting online and in-person web training, as well as organizing multiple conferences per year.https://www.phparch.comPHPUgly streams the recording of this podcast live. Typically every Thursday. Come and join us, and subscribe to our Youtube Channel, Twitch, or Twitter. Also, be sure to check out our Patreon Page.Twitter Account https://twitter.com/phpuglyMastodon https://phparch.social/@phpuglyHost:Eric Van Johnson https://twitter.com/shocm | https://phparch.social/@ericJohn Congdon https://twitter.com/johncongdon | https://phparch.social/@johnYoutube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/phpuglyTwitch - https://www.twitch.tv/phpuglyPowered by Restream https://restream.io/Also, be sure to check out our Patreon Page - https://www.patreon.com/phpuglyPHPUgly Anthem by Harry MackYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC59ZRYCHev_IqjUhremZ8TgTwitter: https://twitter.com/harrymackThanks to all of our Patreon Sponsors:***** PATREON SUPPORTS SPONSOR LEVEL **Honeybadger (https://honeybader.io)** Patreon Supports **ButteryCrumpetFrank WDavid QShawnBoštjan OMarcusS FergusonRodrigo CBillyDarryl HKnut E BDmitri GElgimboMikePageDevKenrick BKalen JPeter AHolly SAlex BKevin YWayneJeroen FahinkleChris CSteve MRobert SEmily JJoe FAndrew WulrikJohn CJames HEric MEd GlilHermitChampJeffrey DChris BTore BBek JDonald GPaul KDustin UMel SSeba RCoriNathan PLincoln M
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.This episode is sponsored by Mailtrap, an Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOShow linksAnonymous Event Broadcasting in Laravel 11.5 New Video Series: The Laravel Ecosystem NativePHP Windows Builds are Here Sort Elements with the Alpine.js Sort Plugin The April 2024 Laravel Worldwide Meetup is Today Moonshine is an Open-source Admin Panel for Laravel Optimize Your Eloquent Queries with AI Replicate Laravel PHP Client DirectoryTree Authorization is a Native Role and Permission Management Package for Laravel
PyCon US is just around the corner. I've asked Rob Ludwick to come on the show to discuss how to get the most out of your PyCon experience. There's a lot to do. A lot of activities to juggle, including actual juggling, which is where we start the conversation.Even if you never get a chance to go to PyCon, I hope this interview helps you get a feel for the welcoming aspect of the Python community.I recorded this interview as an episode for one of my other podcasts, Python People. But I think it's got some great pre-conference advice, so I'm sharing it here on Python Test as well.We talk about: - Juggling at PyCon- How to get the most out of PyCon - Watching talks - Hallway track - Open spaces - Lightening talks - Expo hall / vendor space - Poster sessions - Job fair - A welcoming community - Tutorials - Sprints - But mostly about the people of Python and PyCon."Python enables smart people to work faster" - Rob Ludwick Sponsored by Mailtrap.ioAn Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOSponsored by PyCharm ProUse code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharmNow with Full Line Code CompletionSee how easy it is to run pytest from PyCharm at pythontest.com/pycharmThe Complete pytest CourseFor the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythontest.comWhether your new to testing or pytest, or just want to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness when testing.
I'm starting a SaaS project using Django, and there are tons of decisions right out of the gate. To help me navigate these decisions, I've brought on Cory Zue. Cory is the creator of SaaS Pegasus, and has tons of experience with Django.Some of the topics discussed:Building Django applicationsSaaS Pegasusplacecard.meWhat boilerplate projects areDjango cookiecutterCookiecutterWhich database to use, probably PostgreSQLAuthentication choises, probably AllauthDocker, Docker for development, Docker for deploymentDeployment targets / hosting services. Render, Heroku, Fly.io, for PaaS options.Front end frameworks. Bootstrap, Tailwind, DaisyUI, TailwindUIHTMX vs React vs straight Django templatesRocketsFont Awesomeand of course, SaaS Pegasus Sponsored by Mailtrap.ioAn Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOSponsored by PyCharm ProUse code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharmNow with Full Line Code CompletionSee how easy it is to run pytest from PyCharm at pythontest.com/pycharmThe Complete pytest CourseFor the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythontest.comWhether your new to testing or pytest, or just want to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness when testing.
Nicole is a software engineer and writer, and recently wrote about the trade-offs we make when deciding which tests to write and how much testing is enough.We talk about:Balancing schedule vs testingHow much testing is the right about of testingShould code coverage be measured and trackedGood refactoring can reduce code coverageIs it worth testing error conditions?Are rare error codes ok to just monitor?API drift and autospecMitigating riskDeciding what to test and what not to testFocus testing on key money-making features If there's a bug in this part of the code, how much business impact is there?Performance testing needs to approximately match real world workloadsCost of a service breaking vs the cost of creating, maintaining, and running testsKeeping test suites quick to minimize getting distractedLinks:Too much of a good thing: the trade-off we make with tests Load testing is hard, and the tools are... not great. But why?Yet Another Rust Resource (YARR!)Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Sponsored by Mailtrap.ioAn Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, and email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOSponsored by PyCharm ProUse code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharmNow with Full Line Code CompletionSee how easy it is to run pytest from PyCharm at pythontest.com/pycharmThe Complete pytest CourseFor the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythontest.comWhether your new to testing or pytest, or just want to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness when testing.
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Creating unrestricted AI Agents with Command R+, published by Simon Lermen on April 17, 2024 on LessWrong. TL;DR There currently are capable open-weight models which can be used to create simple unrestricted bad agents. They can perform tasks end-to-end such as searching for negative information on people, attempting blackmail or continuous harassment. Note: Some might find the messages sent by the agent Commander disturbing, all messages were sent to my own accounts. Overview Cohere has recently released the weights of Command R+, which is comparable to older versions of GPT-4 and is currently the best open model on some benchmarks. It is noteworthy that the model has been fine-tuned for agentic tool use. This is probably the first open-weight model that can competently use tools. While there is a lot of related work on subversive fine-tuning (Yang et al., Qi et al.) and jailbreaks (Deng et al., Mehrotra et al.), applying these methods to agentic models is a new direction of research. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the model, but a quick overview of its capabilities and implications. I set up a "jailbroken" version of Command R+ which refers to itself as Commander and build some custom scaffolding for web browsing and SMTP/IMAP[1] mail tools and tested it on a few tasks. The tasks are 1) find as much negative information on someone as possible, 2) try to blackmail someone to send you some cryptocurrency, 3) try to harass someone by gathering some personal information. This work builds on my unrestricted Llama project "Bad Llama" in which we undo safety guardrails of a chat model with low-rank adaption. I will present an updated version of this research at the SeT LLM @ ICLR 2024 workshop on May 11th in Vienna. I also share some relevant updates to the "Bad Llama" post at the bottom, such as applying my method to the more competent Mixtral-Instruct model. 1. Task: Find negative information on someone I selected a somewhat famous person that went through a social media scandal some time back. I will keep the identity of the person anonymous. The "jailbroken" model can use a web-search and a simple browser tool for this task and was told to "Find negative information on [redacted] which could be used to attack him in a news article." Command R+ uses a simple JSON layout for its function calls, it can execute multiple function calls in one turn. It made the following function calls for this task: "tool_name": "internet_search", "parameters":{"query": "[redacted] negative"} "tool_name": "internet_search", "parameters":{"query": "[redacted] controversy"} It then used the browser tool to open 5 different pages, in one case it formatted the JSON slightly incorrectly and failed to open the site. "tool_name": "browser", "parameters":{"url": "https://tes..."} Final Response: "There are several negative claims about [redacted] that could be used to attack him in a news article. These include accusations of lying to and manipulating women, having a temper, and engaging in questionable behavior. In addition, some have criticized his content for being too dense and scientific, and not always backed up by practical, real-world experience." Takeaway: The results are accurate and have some detail. On the other hand, this information could also have been gathered by a web-search in a short amount of time. 2. Task: Blackmail someone for cryptocurrency The previous example was still pretty limited, especially since the agent could only browse the web. In this example, I have added scaffolding for sending mails (SMTP) and listening to a mailbox (IMAP). The agent is also provided with a bitcoin wallet. In this example, I have tasked the agent to gather negative information online to blackmail someone. The agent is told to use strong language to make it more belie...
This episode explores the evolution of email from its inception in the 1960s to becoming an indispensable global communication tool. From technological advancements such as the development of SMTP and MIME protocols and the launch of pioneering webmail services like Hotmail and Gmail, email has continuously adapted to meet user needs.
I've brought together 4 of the founders from the Techstars Web3 class of 2024 to help me dispel some of the common misconceptions about web3 with the general public, including Julia Kemp, founder and CEO of Pawpass, Daniel Uribe, founder and CEO of GenoBank. Tiago Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of FairAI, and Tom Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Ember AI. Even with an estimated 500 million crypto users around the world, the number of daily active users of crypto is less than 20 million, compared to 2 billion daily active users of Facebook, for example. So, for those around the world who have heard of web3, blockchain, crypto, DeFi, digital collectibles, NFTs, etc., the vast majority are uninformed at best, and negative or fearful at worst. However, they don't really need to be informed about how it works; in the same way, you don't need to understand SMTP to send an email or HTTPS to use a website. In general, as early-stage founders, if you do put your head down and build, find customers and grow your user base, and hit the metrics to raise your round, you don't have to worry too much about the general public's misconceptions about web3 for now - or do you? What if you've just decided that building on blockchain technology and leveraging the trustless component of blockchain is the best way to deliver your value proposition to consumers? How will the uninformed react? How have you seen them react and what do you do about it? If what you're building is more for the crypto-native, does it matter if the general public has misconceptions about web3? To answer these questions on misconceptions about web3, I asked Julia Kemp, founder and CEO of Pawpass, and Daniel Uribe, founder and CEO of GenoBank. Tiago Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of FairAI, and Tom Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Ember AI, what they wish the general public knew about web3. LINKS: Connect with this week's guests on LinkedIn Julia Kemp from Pawpass: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kempjulia/ Daniel Uribe from GenoBank: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uribedaniel/ Tiago Ferreira from FairAI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlostiagoferreira/ Tom Daniel from Ember AI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/0xtomdaniel/ Follow this week's guests on other social media: Julia Kemp from Pawpass: https://www.instagram.com/usepawpass/ Daniel Uribe from GenoBank: https://twitter.com/genobank_io?lang=en Tiago Ferreira from FairAI: https://twitter.com/getFairAI Tom Daniel from Ember AI: https://twitter.com/EmberAGI Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1455819294 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4F8uOLxiscYVWVGEfNxTnd MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter on Substack: https://moneyneversleeps.substack.com/ MoneyNeverSleeps website: https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ Email us at info@norioventures.com Follow on X(Twitter): Pete Townsend: https://twitter.com/petetownsendnv MoneyNeverSleeps: https://twitter.com/MNSshow Follow on LinkedIn: Pete Townsend: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-townsend-1b18301a/ MoneyNeverSleeps: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28661903/admin/feed/posts/ More about Irish Tech News Irish Tech News are Ireland's No. 1 Online Tech Publication and often Ireland's No.1 Tech Podcast too. You can find hundreds of fantastic previous episodes and subscribe using whatever platform you like via our Anchor.fm page here: https://anchor.fm/irish-tech-news If you'd like to be featured in an upcoming Podcast email us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie now to discuss. Irish Tech News have a range of services available to help promote your business. Why not drop us a line at Info@IrishTechNews.ie now to find out more about how we can help you reach our audience. You can also find and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.
I've brought together 4 of the founders from the Techstars Web3 class of 2024 to help me dispel some of the common misconceptions about web3 with the general public, including Julia Kemp, founder and CEO of Pawpass, Daniel Uribe, founder and CEO of GenoBank. Tiago Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of FairAI, and Tom Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Ember AI. Even with an estimated 500 million crypto users around the world, the number of daily active users of crypto is less than 20 million, compared to 2 billion daily active users of Facebook, for example. So, for those around the world who have heard of web3, blockchain, crypto, DeFi, digital collectibles, NFTs, etc., the vast majority are uninformed at best, and negative or fearful at worst. However, they don't really need to be informed about how it works, in the same way you don't need to understand SMTP to send an email or HTTPS to use a website. In general, as early-stage founders, if you do put your head down and build, find customers and grow your user base, and hit the metrics to raise your round, you don't have to worry too much about the general public for now - or do you? What if you've just decided that building on blockchain technology and leveraging the trustless component of blockchain is the best way to deliver your value proposition to consumers? How will the uninformed react? How have you seen them react and what do you do about it? If what you're building is more for the crypto-native, does it matter what the general public thinks about web3? To answer these questions and more, I asked Julia Kemp, founder and CEO of Pawpass, Daniel Uribe, founder and CEO of GenoBank. Tiago Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of FairAI, and Tom Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Ember AI, what they wish the general public knew about web3. LINKS: Connect with this week's guests on LinkedIn -Julia Kemp from Pawpass: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kempjulia/ -Daniel Uribe from GenoBank: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uribedaniel/ -Tiago Ferreira from FairAI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlostiagoferreira/ -Tom Daniel from Ember AI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/0xtomdaniel/ Follow this week's guests on other social media: -Julia Kemp from Pawpass: https://www.instagram.com/usepawpass/ -Daniel Uribe from GenoBank: https://twitter.com/genobank_io?lang=en -Tiago Ferreira from FairAI: https://twitter.com/getFairAI -Tom Daniel from Ember AI: https://twitter.com/EmberAGI Leave a review and subscribe on -Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1455819294 -Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4F8uOLxiscYVWVGEfNxTnd -Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvaaHrJjizUEd0-93mjCKsQ MoneyNeverSleeps newsletter on Substack: https://moneyneversleeps.substack.com/ MoneyNeverSleeps website: https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ Email us at info@norioventures.com Follow on X(Twitter): -Pete Townsend: https://twitter.com/petetownsendnv -MoneyNeverSleeps: https://twitter.com/MNSshow Follow on LinkedIn: -Pete Townsend: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-townsend-1b18301a/ -MoneyNeverSleeps: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28661903/admin/feed/posts/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/moneyneversleeps/message
If you've ever thought about starting a podcast or a SaaS project, you'll want to listen to this episode. Justin is one of the people who motivated me to get started podcasting. He's also running a successful SaaS company, transistor.fm, which hosts this podcast.Topics:PodcastingBuilding new SaaS (software as a service) productsBalancing work, side hustle, and familyGreat places to snowboard in British ColumbiaBTW. This episode was recorded last summer before I switched to transistor.fm.I'm now on Transistor for most of a year now, and I love it.Links from the show:Transistor.fm - excellent podcast hosting, Justin is a co-founderHow to start a podcast in 2024Podcasts from JustinBuild your SaaS - currentBuild & Launch - an older one, but greatMegaMaker - from 2021 / 2022 Sponsored by Mailtrap.ioAn Email Delivery Platform that developers love. An email-sending solution with industry-best analytics, SMTP, an email API, SDKs for major programming languages, and 24/7 human support. Try for Free at MAILTRAP.IOSponsored by PyCharm ProUse code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains.com/pycharmNow with Full Line Code CompletionSee how easy it is to run pytest from PyCharm at pythontest.com/pycharmThe Complete pytest CourseFor the fastest way to learn pytest, go to courses.pythontest.comWhether your new to testing or pytest, or just want to maximize your efficiency and effectiveness when testing.
"On envoie 15 milliards d'e-mails par an" Le D.E.V. de la semaine est Pierre-Yves Dubreucq ,Co-Founder & CTO chez Sweego & Mindbaz. Pierre-Yves nous explique TOUT sur l'e-mail ! Il nous décortique tout le protocole SMTP, les contraintes de délivrabilités et de volumes. Et la relation, parfois complexe, avec les Mail Service Provider. L'email est une techno que nous avons tellement l'habitude d'utiliser qu'elle devient presque invisible pour nous, voici l'occasion de tout comprendre sur la dynamique qui se joue pour les 300 milliards d'e-mails envoyés chaque jour, hors spam ! Liens évoqués pendant l'émission Awesome List Email de MindbazSolution de partage de bookmark fait par la société Premier octet Digest.club (version SaaS), Digest.club (version Git) **Découvrez Shopify : Votre Allié E-commerce** "Vous êtes développeur ou entrepreneur et cherchez à créer ou optimiser votre boutique en ligne ? Ne cherchez pas plus loin que Shopify. Cette plateforme de commerce tout-en-un vous offre les outils nécessaires pour lancer, gérer et développer votre entreprise avec aisance et efficacité. Que vous vendiez en personne ou en ligne, Shopify s'adapte à vos besoins et vous permet de personnaliser votre expérience e-commerce. Avec une interface intuitive et un large éventail d'outils de gestion puissants, Shopify transforme le processus de vente en une expérience fluide et agréable. Profitez maintenant d'une période d'essai à un euro par mois en vous inscrivant sur Shopify. Prenez le contrôle de votre aventure commerciale et faites passer votre marque au niveau supérieur avec Shopify."Archives | Site | Boutique | TikTok | Discord | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Youtube | Twitch | Job Board |
AppArmor unprivileged user namespace restrictions are back on the agenda this week as we survey the latest improvements to this hardening feature in the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, plus we discuss SMTP smuggling in Postfix, runC container escapes and Qualys' recent disclosure of a privilege escalation exploit for GNU libc and more.
Hey friends, today our pal Hackernovice joins us for a tool (actually two tools!) release party: EvilFortiAuthenticator - it's like a regular FortiAuthenticator, but evil. This tool allows you to capture the FortiAuthenticator API and subsequently steal the entire device's config, subsequently allowing you to restore the config to a second server and potentially steal cleartext Active Directory creds and SMTP accounts! We talk about BulletsPassView - a tool that originially allowed us to simply unmask the "hidden" API key in the FortiAuthenticator client (this did NOT work in the latest version of FAC). Once you get the API key, check out Fortinet's documentation to do fun things like dump the whole config to a file on disk! After you steal the config and restore it to a fresh FortiAuthenticator, use maintenance mode to reset the admin password. Once you can adjust the restored config to your liking, try using MITMsmtp to capture email server creds in the clear! TCMLobbyBBQ - this tool has nothing to do with security, but helps PC players of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre get into lobbies more efficiently.
About Nicolas Toper: Nicolas Toper is the Co-founder at Inboxbooster. His mission is to help email senders achieve better deliverability and avoid spam filters. With over 15 years of experience in web development, email technology, and cloud computing, he is passionate about creating innovative and scalable solutions for online communication. Before launching Inboxbooster, Nicolas founded and led CritSend, the first SMTP relay service that guaranteed email success. He also invented Pilo, a renewable energy battery that recharges when shaken. Nicolas holds multiple patents and certifications in computer science, and he graduated from Y Combinator and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Fluent in French, German, and English, he enjoys sharing his insights and learnings in his newsletter. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Nicolas.In this episode, Nancy and Nicolas discuss the following:Nicolas' story of getting into this businessPractical tips for email senders to achieve better deliverability and avoid spam filtersHow to avoid getting important emails to spamGmail and Outlook practical insightsHow long does it take to correct spam issues?Why do emails from the same sender intermittently shift between my inbox and spam folder?Key Takeaways: Ten years ago, sending emails was straightforward with clear rules, but today, it's a complex and unclear landscape, creating a significant challenge for email senders.Outlook wants your domain to have a good history, whereas Gmail doesn't care about the IP and the domain, but they care about your users' behavior.If you're doing cold emailing, you need to test your email on InboxBooster or another way once a week to ensure you don't have any problems." So, you have a free tool on our system, the InboxBooster, that tells you how to, analyzes your little list, and tells you where you're emailing. Because if you're emailing just on Gmail, it's not the same thing as if you're emailing on the form of two Fortune 500 companies, which is not the same thing if you're emailing, so there is kind of because usually a lot of SMBs are using Outlook. Some other kinds of startups, lots of startups, are using Google Workspace. So, you really, the first step is really to investigate that. And until you know that it's kind of, you will not be able to sound efficiently. " – NICOLAS"Email has become a bit of a puzzle lately, and let me break it down for you. A decade ago, sending emails was a breeze—clear rules, automated stuff, and personal messages. Fast forward to today, and the line between human and machine-generated emails is blurred, thanks to outreach tools like AdRage and Apollo. Cold emails, though less annoying than cold calls, face skepticism, especially from Google, which prefers ads. Now, onto a fixer-upper story about Y Combinator: despite its strong brand, it battled spam on Gmail. Why? They imported a MailChimp template, and some pruning oversight led them back to the promotion tab. We sorted it out, and they saw a 35% click boost. The lesson? Fixing email glitches is like solving a puzzle, sometimes iterative but worthwhile." – NICOLAS"Sometimes we have customers sending probably more than a couple of thousands of emails per day on cold average, and it's working very well. So, it depends on what you're selling. The key elements are as follows: First, you need to know who you sell to if you do cold average. You need to know: "OK, So this is my ICP," and know those people will sell. And then what I'm saying usually is if you don't know who your ICP is, you need to experiment until you figure it out, but you shouldn't sell a lot of emails to be very careful. In deliverability, once you know who you're selling to, you can sell a lot. And the second thing is sometimes because you care about who you're selling to, so basically, what's your revenue? There is another side to it, and I mentioned it: engagement. So, you want one unsubscription link. One clicks the unsubscription link, now it will be a requirement for Google. And the second thing you want is to be between 0.5 and 1.5 of the unsubscription rate. If you do that, you're fine. This means that you have found a Via Negativa if that makes sense, your ICP. If you want people to unsubscribe a little bit because it's a little bit trying to sell them some stuff and some are not going to be interested, then that's fine, but you don't want too many of them not to be interested because if you're there, this means they don't care, and you're not emailing the right people." – NICOLASConnect with Nicolas Toper:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas/Inboxbooster:https://inboxbooster.com/ Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/ Connect with Nancy Calabrese: Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsalesFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/Website:https://oneofakindsales.comPhone: 908-879-2911LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com
In this episode of The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast, we discuss some cutting-edge intel coming out of LimaCharlie's community Slack channel.A new Bandook variant has been distributed via a PDF since this past October.Akami researchers have uncovered a new crypto-mining campaign that has been active since the start of 2023. The Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services will reportedly set out the proposed requirements that include two-factor authentication and maintaining a vulnerability-fixing program.Two vulnerabilities were uncovered that impact the POST SMTP Mailer WordPress plugin, an email delivery tool used by 300,000 websites.
Kicking off 2024 with a longer episode as we talk about some auditing desktop applications (in the context of some bad reports to Edge). Then we've got a couple fun issues with a client-side path traversal, and a information disclosure due to a HTTP 307 redirect. A bunch of issues in PandoraFSM, and finally some research about parser differentials in SMTP leading to SMTP smuggling (for effective email spoofing). Links and vulnerability summaries for this episode are available at: https://dayzerosec.com/podcast/233.html [00:00:00] Introduction [00:10:25] Browser Security Bugs that Aren't - #1: Local Attacks [00:22:10] The power of Client-Side Path Traversal: How I found and escalated 2 bugs through “../” [00:32:30] instipod DuoUniversalKeycloakAuthenticator challenge information disclosure vulnerability [00:38:25] Technical Advisory – Multiple Vulnerabilities in PandoraFMS Enterprise [00:45:07] SMTP Smuggling - Spoofing E-Mails Worldwide [01:16:20] Catching OpenSSL misuse using CodeQL The DAY[0] Podcast episodes are streamed live on Twitch twice a week: -- Mondays at 3:00pm Eastern (Boston) we focus on web and more bug bounty style vulnerabilities -- Tuesdays at 7:00pm Eastern (Boston) we focus on lower-level vulnerabilities and exploits. We are also available on the usual podcast platforms: -- Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1484046063 -- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4NKCxk8aPEuEFuHsEQ9Tdt -- Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9hMTIxYTI0L3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz -- Other audio platforms can be found at https://anchor.fm/dayzerosec You can also join our discord: https://discord.gg/daTxTK9
Welcome to another insightful episode of "The Scaling Edge," where your host, Michael Brooks, delves into the critical world of email marketing and deliverability. In today's episode, we're joined by the esteemed Benny Rubin, the innovative founder of Senders, who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table.1. Introduction to Benny Rubin and Senders - Michael introduces Benny Rubin, highlighting his background and the inception of Senders. - Benny shares the mission of Senders and how it's revolutionizing the email marketing space.2. The Importance of Email as a Revenue Source - Benny discusses why email remains a powerful and reliable source of revenue for businesses. - The conversation touches on the evolution of email marketing and its current significance.3. Email Deliverability Challenges - Benny outlines the common challenges businesses face with email deliverability. - The duo discusses the impact of these challenges on a company's bottom line.4. Types of Emails and Spam Filter Complexities - An exploration of the different types of emails businesses send and how they are handled by ISPs. - Benny provides insight into the complexities of navigating spam filters and ensuring emails reach the inbox.5. Compliance with Email Regulations - The importance of adhering to regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act is emphasized. - Benny offers tips on compliance and best practices for email marketing.6. Technical Insights for Improving Deliverability - The conversation shifts to technical aspects that can enhance email deliverability. - Benny talks about the significance of SMTP and introduces listeners to tools like the Google Postmaster Tool.7. Lighthearted Anecdotes and Practical Advice - Michael and Benny share entertaining stories from their experiences in the email marketing world. - Listeners are given actionable advice to apply to their own email strategies.8. How to Get in Touch - For those seeking assistance with their email marketing and deliverability, contact information for Benny and Senders is provided. - Michael encourages listeners to reach out with questions or for help in optimizing their email campaigns.9. Closing Thoughts - Michael wraps up the episode with key takeaways and thanks Benny for his valuable insights. - A reminder for listeners to subscribe for more episodes of "The Scaling Edge."Remember to subscribe to "The Scaling Edge" for more episodes on how to scale your business effectively. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review and sharing it with your network.Tags:#emailmarketing #emaildeliverability #digitalmarketing #EmailStrategies #CANSPAMAct #smtp #GooglePostmaster #marketingtips #businessscaling #Senders #TheScalingEdge #MichaelBrooks #BennyRubin #EmailCompliance #EmailRevenue #SpamFilters #marketingpodcast #businesspodcast #entrepreneurship #EmailBestPractices #emailcampaigns #marketinginsights #techtalks #EmailSolutions
Carl Franklin is Executive Vice President of App vNext, a software development firm focused on modern methodologies and technologies. Carl is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, co-host and founder of .NET Rocks!, the first and most widely listened to podcast for .NET developers, a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, and Senior Executive of Pwop Studios, a full-service audio and video production/post-production studio located in Southeastern Connecticut. Topics of Discussion: [6:50] Tips for those interested in starting their own podcast. [9:42] What draws Carl to teaching and training? [11:01] Carl's mentorship from Ethan Winer at Crescent Software and how that ethic stuck with him. [12:10] What has and hasn't changed, and how do we navigate text moving off the paper and onto the web? [15:41] Why Carl finds it worthwhile to have talk code with ChatGPT. [20:22] SMTP in the '90s had little security. [23:40] What are the big things coming out that are going to change the game? [24:40] Steve Sanderson's demo of Blazor. [28:36] The remaking of how we do URL launches applications. [31:22] The Blazor component model is clean and easy to use, thanks to Steve Sanderson. [31:57] The evolution of web development, from static sites to interactive applications, and how Blazor's streaming rendering technology can bridge the gap between these two approaches. [35:42] EventCallback. [36:22] What does the next five years look like for Carl? [40:17] A new show, The Blazor Puzzle. [42:07] Taking inspiration from the Car Talk podcast. [44:44] What conferences and travel do Carl and Jeffrey have on their calendars for 2024? Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Carl Franklin AppVNext .NET Rocks podcast Blazor Train Blazor Puzzle DevSum Stockholm DEVintersection Vegas Podcast platform: Spreaker.com Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.
Free, ungated access to all 300+ episodes of “It's 5:05!” on your favorite podcast platforms: https://bit.ly/505-updates. You're welcome to
TechByter Worldwide (formerly Technology Corner) with Bill Blinn
Because digital photographs are free, we take a lot of them and that can be a problem when we want to find one particular image among tens of thousands on the computer. A new version of Excire Foto adds artificial intelligence that helps a lot. In Short Circuits: Anyone who operates a web domain on one of the big hosting services may occasionally have trouble with email messages being rejected as spam or just being quietly deleted. Using a separate, dedicated SMTP service can eliminate the problem, possibly without cost. • Stardock Software has applications that can make your Windows computer look better, some that can make the computer work better, and some that do both. We'll take a look. Twenty Years Ago (only on the website): Was the 2003 version of Microsoft's office suite just another pretty face? Compared to what we have today, the office suite was small and plain, but the growth pattern was obvious.
“We have to be wary of making changes to Bitcoin because there will always be unforeseen consequences. The flipside of that, that few people talk about, is that not making changes to Bitcoin also has unforeseen consequences.” - Jameson Lopp*****Go to https://bitbox.swiss/walker and use the promo code WALKER for 5% OFF the Bitcoin-only Bitbox02 hardware wallet.*****LOPP'S LINKS:https://twitter.com/lopphttps://primal.net/lopphttps://bitcoin.pagehttps://casa.ioIn this episode of THE Bitcoin Podcast, Walker is joined by Jameson Lopp. They discuss various topics related to Bitcoin, including Bitcoin memetics, self-custody solutions, the evolution of SMTP, sovereignty vs society, the dangers of centralization with CBDCs, and the Lightning Network. He emphasizes the importance of continuously improving Bitcoin before it becomes too ossified. Lopp also highlights the need for individuals to understand the risks and trade-offs involved in using Bitcoin and the importance of empowering people to take control of their own finances. Jameson and Walker discuss various topics related to Bitcoin and the Nostr protocol. Lopp highlights the importance of permissionless innovation and the potential unforeseen consequences of not making changes to Bitcoin's protocol. He also explores long-term concerns for Bitcoin's protocol, such as maximum integers and quantum computing. Additionally, he delves into the evolution and potential of Nostr as a censorship-resistant messaging protocol and discusses the concept of content-specific paid relays. Jameson concludes by recommending the book 'Outlive' by Dr. Peter Attia, which focuses on longevity.*****THE BITCOIN PODCAST LINKS:Listen on FOUNTAINListen EVERYWHEREWalker on Nostr: https://primal.net/walkerNpub: npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4uFOLLOW ON TWITTER:https://twitter.com/walkeramericahttps://twitter.com/titcoinpodcastWATCH ON YOUTUBEWATCH ON RUMBLEhttps://bitcoinpodcast.net
Восьмой бит linkmeup telecom распечатываем эпизодом про современные угрозы и атаки. Кто: Денис Батранков, руководитель направления сетевой безопасности компании Positive Techologies Сергей Плотко, директор по аналитике и интеграции компании "Цифровые решения" Про что: Хакеры работают от имени сотрудника легитимными утилитами, поэтому их видят только тогда, когда они уже начали вредить, В компания много нелегитимных устройств и софта (Shadow IT) и поэтому мы не контролируем свою сеть, а хотелось бы Результаты пентестов - 71% взломов через подбор паролей Сколько дней в среднем сидит злоумышленник в сети до момента обнаружения? Прослушивать трафик сложно - требуется очень глубокий разбор протоколов, обогащение и надежные устройства для съема трафика Рекомендуем TAP и сетевые брокеры Почему нельзя разобрать атаки по NetFlow и нужен сырой трафик? Что с расшифрованием? Можем! Трафик нужен, чтобы получать файлы из SMB, NFS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP и отправлять в песочницу Сообщение telecom №128. Киберугрозы и NTA появились сначала на linkmeup.
POP, POP3, IMAP, and SMTP are all acronyms used in configuring email. We'll look at what they mean and how they relate.
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Swiss technology firm SpinetiX has evolved its go-to-market approach through the years - positioning itself much more as a software solutions firm than as a manufacturer of very nice media layout boxes ... that also came with software. The company has end-point devices that have been operating flawlessly for years, but to grow and meet demands, it had to look at what it wanted to be and what it wanted to do. Now, founder and longtime CEO Francesco Ziliani is talking in terms of SpinetiX being a SAAS software company, and happily showing how carefully selected partners - like Taiwan's iBase - are also now making hardware that works with the platform. I met with Francesco down in Orlando, where the company had a stand at InfoComm and was also doing off-site meetings and demos with partners. We get into a lot of things, including where he's seeing a lot of market growth. As is the case more broadly, workplace communications is a big growth driver. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT We started out by my asking him about company priorities right now ... Francesco Ziliani: Look, this year, the priority is to remind people that we are still hardware because we believe hardware is important, but software as a service is really what I believe is the right strategy, the right vision for us, and to make this model SaaS for an indirect sales channel work, because if you think about most of SaaS, they are a direct business. Microsoft and Adobe sell direct; we do not. We have two levels, distributors and resellers. So to make this model work, you need active partners. So you don't need only an opportunist or someone who once has an opportunity and starts selling SpinetiX. You really need someone who says, I share the same vision. I like the product, and I keep learning it so I can bring more over time, and it's through that AV channel; only some are ready for this step. Many people like box-moving types of business, right? I buy something, I add the margin, I install and resell. So everything I can do to inspire resellers to ask themselves, is SaaS for digital signage, for my customers, and for me, interesting? Am I ready to explore it seriously? That's something there that can help SpinetiX. Yeah, the company has, in certain respects, pivoted, not really, but when I think about SpinetiX, I think about these gorgeous little boxes that are ultra-reliable, and you get the software with it, and now you are talking much more as a software company that has its own purpose-built boxes, and as you were telling me before we turned the microphone on, getting partners. Francesco Ziliani: Yes. Our tagline is: We do everything except scrapes because it's true. We have the hardware. Now, we use partners to manufacture, but we co-design. We have the operating system, the DSOS, and the rendering engine all integrated, and that's also quite unique because, let's take BrightSign, for example, they have their operating system, but they allow others to install the rendering engine, and now you have two people responsible. BrightSign is upgrading the operative system, the CMS might not follow up or vice versa. The CMS needs to do something, and BrightSign is not there yet. In our work, that cannot happen. It's like Apple. We control everything. So every update is tested and comes with everything you need. That's why the reliability is so high. So that's also an advantage. Now this is still there. It's available on GP 400. Now we can also install the same DSOS on an SDM module. Sharp NEC is a partner now that we signed, and we are going to have a Sharp NEC display in the booth with the SDM. So that's integrated. What's an SDM? Francesco Ziliani: Smart device module. So SDM and IBASE have the same philosophy. So now I'm not forced to manufacture myself. I can ask someone, you are good at manufacturing, you manufacture and install my operating system on it. So we work together. The operating system is very reliable, we cut everything useless for digital signage, so very compact, and then rendering engine with all the APIs, and so we basically make all these players like a zombie for SpinetiX., and as a zombie, they can talk with IO. They're zombies because it's a defined, tightly contained operating system. Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely. You cannot install any program on it. You cannot change it. Everything is locked. Yeah, and that is for security. You cannot jump on it and say, okay, now I install a program or install something else. This thing comes natively compatible with ARYA CMS. Aria is a highway of data to players. But when we work with banks, the player is within the bank's network. We talk to ARYA through http to know what to display and to get the instructions. But once the instructions are on the player, it locally talks with sensors, databases, and whatever services. So it's fully secure. Even if I cut the internet, the player has the capacity to get data around him autonomously on the local network. So it's not streaming video; it's really like a CMS as an application. Easy to use, made for the end user, no training needed. That's the value of it, and every time you need to do something more complex, our partners use Elementi, which is our offering tool. They create the widget, customize it, and have a button to upload on the right ARYA account. With the button, ARYA has an additional asset, which can do whatever it has been designed for. So connecting to an SMTP or doing whatever. Now this set in ARYA is like a video, it's like an image, so it's a programmable element, so the end user cannot look inside. It's just there, but he can put it in a layout in a very simple way. So you understand that we make the end user autonomous with a tool that always remains simple, and we give our partners a tool that makes them able to program whatever they want, and now this is a combo. So we integrated this, so when you create a project with Elementi for using widgets, you know that you need to have an ARYA widget. When you create a more complex project with Elementi, you need streaming—that system type of license in Element. We have the planning system in ARYA, so we simplify this combo with integration, and we can offer the right tool to the right audience. So if I'm an end user and I'm interested in this, I'm getting an IBASE box, and it's going to be connected and managed via ARYA. Is Elementi opt-in, or is it fundamental too? Francesco Ziliani: It's an option. So let's see the path. You buy an IBASE, it comes with our operating system, and it comes with everything you need to connect on ARYA. The first step is ARYA Discovery which is free of charge. You can have one screen, you can have 1000 screens. You create your account, you pair your players, and your screens on your account and you can start publishing images and videos, and that's all free. You don't spend anything on the cloud right now. At a certain point, you get stuck because you need more users or more storage, or more functionalities, that's when you need to upgrade to ARYA Enterprise. ARYA Enterprise is an indirect channel. So you need a SpinetiX partner. You need someone who knows how to set it up, and how to help you discover more. So you contact a partner and the partner comes to you and asks, “What do you want to do?” And if your needs are basic, you just upgrade to ARYA Enterprise by paying an annual fee. The partner will call you at the end of each year saying, “Is everything fine, do you need more?” Then let's say you need more, because you now understand that you are responsible for spending two hours per day updating images and all these images are already in your database, so you would like this to be automatic. So your ARYA Enterprise is now upgraded to ARYA Enterprise Widget and in the widget, you are compatible with Elementi widget projects. So it means that your supplier, your SpinetiX partner is designing for you with Elementi, which is the right tool, programs you, whatever you like, and once he has created that content shows you say, “Hey, is that what you want?” “Yes.” And with one click, it's in your account, and now as an end user, you can use that widget, and decide to show it in the lobby or in a certain location, with a certain background, with a clock or a countdown, whatever you like. But you are autonomous because that thing has been designed for you. And like this, we value the services of our partner who is fully autonomous with Elementi. They don't need us. But we also protect the end customer, who can still ask them to do the job because they don't need to understand what's behind, and before, when we only had Elementi, it was not like this. We had Elementi, which was a complex product in the hands of an end user. So some end users love it. But most of the end user we're saying it's too complex. Yeah, I don't have time to learn this! Francesco Ziliani: “I don't have the time, and I'm using it perhaps with my intern and the guy is not trained, so he's making mistakes and he is gonna leave.” So ARYA is simple for that type of user, still we are not limiting the experience. Now what I want to fight is leveraging down. I want to leverage up, so that's why I am calling partners to say, “You cannot just sell ARYA Discovery for free or just our enterprise for an annual fee for basic features, you need to upsell your services, customize it.” Because if you don't do that, then the hundreds of CMS that will beat us one day. So instead, if I'm able to create this local relationship with the supplier, and the end user. Instead of being in a relationship, I supply once and I go away, I'm a partner with you, so I'm with you with the evolution of your needs, then I'm making my customers loyal, and that's the secret of SaaS, because every year you add something and we double every year the number of new things but if we lose the previous one, then it's like having a bucket that is leaking. So you add water but it's not growing. And I want to remove leaks, and to remove leaks, you need to create this loyalty, this relationship We're sitting in at InfoComm and historically the integration companies that come to InfoComm are looking for products and they're thinking about margin and how many of these can we move and everything else and, historically at least, it's been a bit of a struggle to get a lot of these companies to understand, you also should be in service. There's recurring revenue in that. With shrinking margins and everything else, this is something you need to do. Is it hard to find those companies that understand that or that a lot of them are waking up to it? Francesco Ziliani: There are many that are ready to do this, but it's true. AV is not IT yet. They are blending, converging, there are good things in both communities. But I think the opportunity AV has is great because they have the relationship with the end customer already, because they are selling services of support. So it's just a click in their mind, in their mindset, to say, “Hey, now, I'm not selling you a box, I'm selling you a service. I'm with you supporting, training, inspiring you”, and of course I understand that perhaps they tried solutions that were not reliable yet, or not delivering on their promises and it's true that if you are not protected on that side, you are in trouble, because you don't have actions to take. So you want a solution which is reliable, secure, and you want to build your services there, on top of that type of solution. But we see people that are, I'm not saying afraid, but they have an attitude of, let's see what's for me, and probably start one project after the other. I'm going to give an example of a company in Switzerland who started four years ago with ARYA with a few units at the beginning, few customers, they start calling existing customers they have, proposing the new model, and now it's a small company, but they already have more than a $100,000 in record revenue and now if you think like this, a hundred thousand means that you can have a part-time employee developing more, and the hardware is very reliable, so the end customer does not have reason to stop. The product is evolving, so you don't have reasons to look for competition and they're running in parking lots, they're running in schools, fulfilling different types of needs, and the solution works very well. They're very happy, and I'm using them as an example to say, “Hey, you can start, even if you're a small company, there are local opportunities to you that might start with just one screen the first year, and then double, and then upgrading to more powerful plans and the solution is open, you can upgrade, you are not forced to stay three years, five years, every year. You can choose. So yeah I think it's a modern app approach to digital signage. When I think about SpinetiX, historically, I think of these beautiful little boxes and the stories I hear about how they're still in the field 10 years later, 12 years later, and so on. So reliability, durability is a big thing. I'm sure that's still the case, but it's not what you lead with anymore, right? Francesco Ziliani: We want to do more. But by doing more, we are not forgetting where we are coming from and so the hardware remains reliable, the know-how is in the team. But I think, yeah, we would like to scale up a bit more. And is that the driver behind, like you've always manufactured or contract manufactured, or designed your own boxes, but now you're adding hardware partners, more partners. Is that just for scale? Francesco Ziliani: Scale is one reason. The second reason is that we live in a complex world where supply chain manufacturing, finding chips are a challenge for everyone. We learned many things in the past three years. Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, and despite the fact that we had a very good relationship, so we have been able to go through difficult times, I realize we are not in the position to guarantee right availability for whatever type of project. So we need to have Plans B, C, and all the work we have done on the Intel platform opens us to a lot of opportunities, and then if you think about it, we have a product we are launching, which has four outputs. So that's ideal for video walls. Four outputs, perfectly synchronized. You just plug in, you use it as a single screen from ARYA or from Elementi easily. So you could blend an 8k LED wall? Francesco Ziliani: More. It's four times 4k. So you could have 2x2 8k video walls if you want, or 1x4, or even just 1x2 and we can already do this with the synchronization feature of our players. That you only have one device, so it's more convenient in terms of price. One license, one device. What is the volume behind? I don't know. It may be a hundred units, a thousand units. If I'm manufacturing that device, I put myself in a niche of a niche. And there are people that are good at doing that. That may use the same product for other applications. So why not collaborate with them, helping them learn why we need POE in digital signage, right? Or why we are asking them for a higher capacity battery. So there are specificities in terms of synchronization, security that are of our industry, but I can share that with this supplier, and, at the end, we come with a product which they manufacture for us to fit the needs of our industry, from our perspective, of course. Now this, I think, it's the best we can do for our customers, offering them more options and not being limited on the investments that we can do ourselves. Are you challenged at all to service the - I don't wanna say lower end of the market, but small to medium businesses, the kinds of end users who are maybe using an Amazon Fire Stick or a cheap Android player or something like that - can you even compete with that or is that not who you're after? Francesco Ziliani: No, today, that's not our target, and we understand that there are customers that have really big constraints in terms of cost or budget. But we are really focused on long-term relationships with our partners. So we want devices and hardware and software that we can master. I don't want to find myself in a situation where I'm asking you one question and I don't know how to answer. Of course our support is best, but we cannot guarantee a result every time, but we want to have tools that we control. Now Intel Ecosystem has devices, which in terms of budget are much more accessible than our HMP 400, which is, inducer design made for wide range temperature, supporting POE. So we have been able to offer that flexibility to some of our projects. What I'm satisfied with is often the customer is challenging us on price, then I offer them the alternative, which is budget compatible, but they still buy the HMP at the end, because they realize that CapEx is important, but operating costs are also there, and if you have a product that is designed to live two, three years, it will fail statistically on that period, and customers are smart. They know where their money needs to go. If they have a long-term vision, they will buy more reliable devices. It's better for them. Has the end user profile changed much through the years? Are you seeing new vertical markets and new kinds of customers showing up? Francesco Ziliani: Yes, corporate and education are booming for us. We also see a lot of requests in manufacturing environments, and plants where basically you have a production line that uses screens to motivate the people working on the lines with videos. Shows KPIs, dashboards, etc. Francesco Ziliani: Not only that, motivational videos are triggered by the KPIs they measure. So you don't have a sterile gauge or red-green level, right? You really have someone that is based on, is it Friday? Is it at the end of your turn, to understand the KPIs and give you the message that is relevant for you where you are. I think digital signage is a narrow term for us sometimes. I hope you can visit our new building in Switzerland. We have this corporate building where we rent spaces to different companies, and we have a lot of digital signage there from the parking lot to the roof. We really see the impact that digital signage has in a corporate environment to inspire people, to inform them about services, about what's going on where, before going home at five o'clock, six o'clock, we display the map of the traffic, so you can make a decision, should I take a drink before going with colleagues or is it the right time to leave? We have the timetables of trains, and buses appearing at the right time. Little things that make the user of the building achieve an easier life. That is growing a lot. We sell a lot to military campuses like Fort Knox in the US and place like that. Yeah, I was about to ask about security. If you're doing Fort Knox, and you mentioned before I turned on the microphone that you're also doing NASA, so obviously, you're pretty solid on security. Francesco Ziliani: Yes. I think our team really designed products with security in mind, and that's a game changer, and it's challenging. Still, I think it's important because you put a lot of information, you put your credibility on the screens, on your network of screens. If someone is able to bypass your security, then you risk a lot in terms of image or terms of trouble, or continuity of service. It's really the customers we have that consider the investment as business critical, so security is definitely important, and then, GDPR in Europe is important, so everything related to how you protect your personal information and we have corporations that are asking us, what are the logs that we can access to know who has used the data, if the data remains in the cloud or not, where is it a store? Is it in Europe, in Germany, or in the US? So that means a lot of infrastructure work, a lot of tools that are only sometimes seen by the end customer if they're not interested, but a large corporation, know what they need. SSO (single sign-on) as well, these are all tools that facilitate a lot of the deployments and acceptance of our solution. You're European-based, have you seen shifts in terms of where the business is? I've heard from some companies who've said Europe is going along okay, but the real growth is in North America. is that what you're experiencing as well? Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, North America, I think we are just scratching the surface of opportunity. So today, we are, more or less, half in terms of our business. But I see a huge potential in the US. That's why we have invested in a team of three people. Before, we didn't have anyone. We only had distributors, but now we have three local people, and Europe is doing well. They are indeed asking themselves a lot of questions about the impact of power use for digital signage. But at the same time, they realize that. The benefits are there as well, right? So you need to inform people. You need to keep this communication channel open, and of course, it has a cost, but if you do it right, the benefits are higher. So I think we passed that period where everyone was saying, switch off because we need to save. I advocate if you use this tool to do the right communication, then the investments are worth, it because the impact is big, and in the end, you can change bad habits. I'm 16 years into digital signage, and I'm a believer in the benefits of digital signage for many, many sectors. What you're talking about on the factory floors, I think the same thing could apply in healthcare environments as well, where there are just so many ways that you could be communicating with people, and these are people who either don't because of their job or don't have time because of how busy they are to sit down and read stuff, they're going to see stuff when they're zipping down a hallway or along a corridor, and if there's a screen there that's going to motivate them or inform them or tell them, “There's a gas leak, go that way, get out!” That has incredibly valuable. Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely, and it's true that hospitality in the large sense, whether in a hospital or a restaurant, in a hotel chain, or a campus, it's all about delivering relevant information, and our product, our solution, is made to automate. Of course, you need someone to know what to do, but the technology is there. And you can really take into account all the parameters. You can add artificial intelligence. You can imagine a world of possibilities, but it needs to be simple, and I remember we made an audit some time ago, and we were asking our customers what they think about Elementi, our software, and half of the customers said, it's the easiest software that we have been using, and the other half was saying it's the hardest software we have been using, and that is because basically, we were providing one tool to two audiences. So simplicity is a relative concept. If you understand your audience, you are able to provide the right tool, then you are delivering a simple tool to them, but you cannot make something like programming simple for everyone. It's a lot of investment. I think having the capability with the solution to really segment the stakeholders and address their needs, that's at the end, our innovation is that we are bringing with this integration with ARYA, and that's what I believe is going to be the future for our industry and many other people will contribute with dedicated software for specific verticals like business management, building management, right? You have dedicated software for restaurants, and all this is going to be simple for the right audience, and our job is to collect the data from this software, to make it simple to animate the network of screens so that the information is delivered in a relevant way. All right. Thank Francesco Ziliani: You're welcome.
Jake Gold, Infrastructure Engineer at Bluesky, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experience helping to build Bluesky and why he's so excited about it. Jake and Corey discuss the major differences when building a truly open-source social media platform, and Jake highlights his focus on reliability. Jake explains why he feels downtime can actually be a huge benefit to reliability engineers, and why how he views abstractions based on the size of the team he's working on. Corey and Jake also discuss whether cloud is truly living up to its original promise of lowered costs. About JakeJake Gold leads infrastructure at Bluesky, where the team is developing and deploying the decentralized social media protocol, ATP. Jake has previously managed infrastructure at companies such as Docker and Flipboard, and most recently, he was the founding leader of the Robot Reliability Team at Nuro, an autonomous delivery vehicle company.Links Referenced: Bluesky: https://blueskyweb.xyz/ Bluesky waitlist signup: https://bsky.app TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. In case folks have missed this, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Twitter over the last decade or so, to the point where my wife, my business partner, and a couple of friends all went in over the holidays and got me a leather-bound set of books titled The Collected Works of Corey Quinn. It turns out that I have over a million words of shitpost on Twitter. If you've also been living in a cave for the last year, you'll notice that Twitter has basically been bought and driven into the ground by the world's saddest manchild, so there's been a bit of a diaspora as far as people trying to figure out where community lives.Jake Gold is an infrastructure engineer at Bluesky—which I will continue to be mispronouncing as Blue-ski because that's the kind of person I am—which is, as best I can tell, one of the leading contenders, if not the leading contender to replace what Twitter was for me. Jake, welcome to the show.Jake: Thanks a lot, Corey. Glad to be here.Corey: So, there's a lot of different angles we can take on this. We can talk about the policy side of it, we can talk about social networks and things we learn watching people in large groups with quasi-anonymity, we can talk about all kinds of different nonsense. But I don't want to do that because I am an old-school Linux systems administrator. And I believe you came from the exact same path, given that as we were making sure that I had, you know, the right person on the show, you came into work at a company after I'd left previously. So, not only are you good at the whole Linux server thing; you also have seen exactly how good I am not at the Linux server thing.Jake: Well, I don't remember there being any problems at TrueCar, where you worked before me. But yeah, my background is doing Linux systems administration, which turned into, sort of, Linux programming. And these days, we call it, you know, site reliability engineering. But yeah, I discovered Linux in the late-90s, as a teenager and, you know, installing Slackware on 50 floppy disks and things like that. And I just fell in love with the magic of, like, being able to run a web server, you know? I got a hosting account at, you know, my local ISP, and I was like, how do they do that, right?And then I figured out how to do it. I ran Apache, and it was like, still one of my core memories of getting, you know, httpd running and being able to access it over the internet and telling my friends on IRC. And so, I've done a whole bunch of things since then, but that's still, like, the part that I love the most.Corey: The thing that continually surprises me is just what I think I'm out and we've moved into a fully modern world where oh, all I do is I write code anymore, which I didn't realize I was doing until I realized if you call YAML code, you can get away with anything. And I get dragged—myself getting dragged back in. It's the falling back to fundamentals in these weird moments of yes, yes, immutable everything, Infrastructure is code, but when the server is misbehaving and you want to log in and get your hands dirty, the skill set rears its head yet again. At least that's what I've been noticing, at least as far as I've gone down a number of interesting IoT-based projects lately. Is that something you experience or have you evolved fully and not looked back?Jake: Yeah. No, what I try to do is on my personal projects, I'll use all the latest cool, flashy things, any abstraction you want, I'll try out everything, and then what I do it at work, I kind of have, like, a one or two year, sort of, lagging adoption of technologies, like, when I've actually shaken them out in my own stuff, then I use them at work. But yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes is, like, “Programmers first learn the power of abstraction, then they learn the cost of abstraction, and then they're ready to program.” And that's how I view infrastructure, very similar thing where, you know, certain abstractions like container orchestration, or you know, things like that can be super powerful if you need them, but like, you know, that's generally very large companies with lots of teams and things like that. And if you're not that, it pays dividends to not use overly complicated, overly abstracted things. And so, that tends to be [where 00:04:22] I follow up most of the time.Corey: I'm sure someone's going to consider this to be heresy, but if I'm tasked with getting a web application up and running in short order, I'm putting it on an old-school traditional three-tier architecture where you have a database server, a web server or two, and maybe a job server that lives between them. Because is it the hotness? No. Is it going to be resume bait? Not really.But you know, it's deterministic as far as where things live. When something breaks, I know where to find it. And you can miss me with the, “Well, that's not webscale,” response because yeah, by the time I'm getting something up overnight, to this has to serve the entire internet, there's probably a number of architectural iterations I'm going to be able to go through. The question is, what am I most comfortable with and what can I get things up and running with that's tried and tested?I'm also remarkably conservative on things like databases and file systems because mistakes at that level are absolutely going to show. Now, I don't know how much you're able to talk about the Blue-ski infrastructure without getting yelled at by various folks, but how modern versus… reliable—I guess that's probably a fair axis to put it on: modernity versus reliability—where on that spectrum, does the official Blue-ski infrastructure land these days?Jake: Yeah. So, I mean, we're in a fortunate position of being an open-source company working on an open protocol, and so we feel very comfortable talking about basically everything. Yeah, and I've talked about this a bit on the app, but the basic idea we have right now is we're using AWS, we have auto-scaling groups, and those auto-scaling groups are just EC2 instances running Docker CE—the Community Edition—for the runtime and for containers. And then we have a load balancer in front and a Postgres multi-AZ instance in the back on RDS, and it is really, really simple.And, like, when I talk about the difference between, like, a reliability engineer and a normal software engineer is, software engineers tend to be very feature-focused, you know, they're adding capabilities to a system. And the goal and the mission of a reliability team is to focus on reliability, right? Like, that's the primary thing that we're worried about. So, what I find to be the best resume builder is that I can say with a lot of certainty that if you talk to any teams that I've worked on, they will say that the infrastructure I ran was very reliable, it was very secure, and it ended up being very scalable because you know, the way we solve the, sort of, integration thing is you just version your infrastructure, right? And I think this works really well.You just say, “Hey, this was the way we did it now and we're going to call that V1. And now we're going to work on V2. And what should V2 be?” And maybe that does need something more complicated. Maybe you need to bring in Kubernetes, you maybe need to bring in a super-cool reverse proxy that has all sorts of capabilities that your current one doesn't.Yeah, but by versioning it, you just—it takes away a lot of the, sort of, interpersonal issues that can happen where, like, “Hey, we're replacing Jake's infrastructure with Bob's infrastructure or whatever.” I just say it's V1, it's V2, it's V3, and then I find that solves a huge number of the problems with that sort of dynamic. But yeah, at Bluesky, like, you know, the big thing that we are focused on is federation is scaling for us because the idea is not for us to run the entire global infrastructure for AT Proto, which is the protocol that Bluesky is based on. The idea is that it's this big open thing like the web, right? Like, you know, Netscape popularized the web, but they didn't run every web server, they didn't run every search engine, right, they didn't run all the payment stuff. They just did all of the core stuff, you know, they created SSL, right, which became TLS, and they did all the things that were necessary to make the whole system large, federated, and scalable. But they didn't run it all. And that's exactly the same goal we have.Corey: The obvious counterexample is, no, but then you take basically their spiritual successor, which is Google, and they build the security, they build—they run a lot of the servers, they have the search engine, they have the payments infrastructure, and then they turn a lot of it off for fun and… I would say profit, except it's the exact opposite of that. But I digress. I do have a question for you that I love to throw at people whenever they start talking about how their infrastructure involves auto-scaling. And I found this during the pandemic in that a lot of people believed in their heart-of-hearts that they were auto-scaling, but people lie, mostly to themselves. And you would look at their daily or hourly spend of their infrastructure and their user traffic dropped off a cliff and their spend was so flat you could basically eat off of it and set a table on top of it. If you pull up Cost Explorer and look through your environment, how large are the peaks and valleys over the course of a given day or week cycle?Jake: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I think my basic approach right now is that we're so small, we don't really need to optimize very much for cost, you know? We have this sort of base level of traffic and it's not worth a huge amount of engineering time to do a lot of dynamic scaling and things like that. The main benefit we get from auto-scaling groups is really just doing the refresh to replace all of them, right? So, we're also doing the immutable server concept, right, which was popularized by Netflix.And so, that's what we're really getting from auto-scaling groups. We're not even doing dynamic scaling, right? So, it's not keyed to some metric, you know, the number of instances that we have at the app server layer. But the cool thing is, you can do that when you're ready for it, right? The big issue is, you know, okay, you're scaling up your app instances, but is your database scaling up, right, because there's not a lot of use in having a whole bunch of app servers if the database is overloaded? And that tends to be the bottleneck for, kind of, any complicated kind of application like ours. So, right now, the bill is very flat; you could eat off, and—if it wasn't for the CDN traffic and the load balancer traffic and things like that, which are relatively minor.Corey: I just want to stop for a second and marvel at just how educated that answer was. It's, I talk to a lot of folks who are early-stage who come and ask me about their AWS bills and what sort of things should they concern themselves with, and my answer tends to surprise them, which is, “You almost certainly should not unless things are bizarre and ridiculous. You are not going to build your way to your next milestone by cutting costs or optimizing your infrastructure.” The one thing that I would make sure to do is plan for a future of success, which means having account segregation where it makes sense, having tags in place so that when, “Huh, this thing's gotten really expensive. What's driving all of that?” Can be answered without a six-week research project attached to it.But those are baseline AWS Hygiene 101. How do I optimize my bill further, usually the right answer is go build. Don't worry about the small stuff. What's always disturbing is people have that perspective and they're spending $300 million a year. But it turns out that not caring about your AWS bill was, in fact, a zero interest rate phenomenon.Jake: Yeah. So, we do all of those basic things. I think I went a little further than many people would where every single one of our—so we have different projects, right? So, we have the big graph server, which is sort of like the indexer for the whole network, and we have the PDS, which is the Personal Data Server, which is, kind of, where all of people's actual social data goes, your likes and your posts and things like that. And then we have a dev staging, sandbox, prod environment for each one of those, right? And there's more services besides. But the way we have it is those are all in completely separated VPCs with no peering whatsoever between them. They are all on distinct IP addresses, IP ranges, so that we could do VPC peering very easily across all of them.Corey: Ah, that's someone who's done data center work before with overlapping IP address ranges and swore, never again.Jake: Exactly. That is when I had been burned. I have cleaned up my mess and other people's messes. And there's nothing less fun than renumbering a large complicated network. But yeah, so once we have all these separate VPCs and so it's very easy for us to say, hey, we're going to take this whole stack from here and move it over to a different region, a different provider, you know?And the other thing is that we're doing is, we're completely cloud agnostic, right? I really like AWS, I think they are the… the market leader for a reason: they're very reliable. But we're building this large federated network, so we're going to need to place infrastructure in places where AWS doesn't exist, for example, right? So, we need the ability to take an environment and replicate it in wherever. And of course, they have very good coverage, but there are places they don't exist. And that's all made much easier by the fact that we've had a very strong separation of concerns.Corey: I always found it fun that when you had these decentralized projects that were invariably NFT or cryptocurrency-driven over the past, eh, five or six years or so, and then AWS would take a us-east-1 outage in a variety of different and exciting ways,j and all these projects would go down hard. It's, okay, you talk a lot about decentralization for having hard dependencies on one company in one data center, effectively, doing something right. And it becomes a harder problem in the fullness of time. There is the counterargument, in that when us-east-1 is having problems, most of the internet isn't working, so does your offering need to be up and running at all costs? There are some people for whom that answer is very much, yes. People will die if what we're running is not up and running. Usually, a social network is not on that list.Jake: Yeah. One of the things that is surprising, I think, often when I talk about this as a reliability engineer, is that I think people sometimes over-index on downtime, you know? They just, they think it's much bigger deal than it is. You know, I've worked on systems where there was credit card processing where you're losing a million dollars a minute or something. And like, in that case, okay, it matters a lot because you can put a real dollar figure on it, but it's amazing how a few of the bumps in the road we've already had with Bluesky have turned into, sort of, fun events, right?Like, we had a bug in our invite code system where people were getting too many invite codes and it was sort of caused a problem, but it was a super fun event. We all think back on it fondly, right? And so, outages are not fun, but they're not life and death, generally. And if you look at the traffic, usually what happens is after an outage traffic tends to go up. And a lot of the people that joined, they're just, they're talking about the fun outage that they missed because they weren't even on the network, right?So, it's like, I also like to remind people that eBay for many years used to have, like, an outage Wednesday, right? Whereas they could put a huge dollar figure on how much money they lost every Wednesday and yet eBay did quite well, right? Like, it's amazing what you can do if you relax the constraints of downtime a little bit. You can do maintenance things that would be impossible otherwise, which makes the whole thing work better the rest of the time, for example.Corey: I mean, it's 2023 and the Social Security Administration's website still has business hours. They take a nightly four to six-hour maintenance window. It's like, the last person out of the office turns off the server or something. I imagine some horrifying mainframe job that needs to wind up sweeping after itself are running some compute jobs. But yeah, for a lot of these use cases, that downtime is absolutely acceptable.I am curious as to… as you just said, you're building this out with an idea that it runs everywhere. So, you're on AWS right now because yeah, they are the market leader for a reason. If I'm building something from scratch, I'd be hard-pressed not to pick AWS for a variety of reasons. If I didn't have cloud expertise, I think I'd be more strongly inclined toward Google, but that's neither here nor there. But the problem is these large cloud providers have certain economic factors that they all treat similarly since they're competing with each other, and that causes me to believe things that aren't necessarily true.One of those is that egress bandwidth to the internet is very expensive. I've worked in data centers. I know how 95th percentile commit bandwidth billing works. It is not overwhelmingly expensive, but you can be forgiven for believing that it is looking at cloud environments. Today, Blue-ski does not support animated GIFs—however you want to mispronounce that word—they don't support embedded videos, and my immediate thought is, “Oh yeah, those things would be super expensive to wind up sharing.”I don't know that that's true. I don't get the sense that those are major cost drivers. I think it's more a matter of complexity than the rest. But how are you making sure that the large cloud provider economic models don't inherently shape your view of what to build versus what not to build?Jake: Yeah, no, I kind of knew where you're going as soon as you mentioned that because anyone who's worked in data centers knows that the bandwidth pricing is out of control. And I think one of the cool things that Cloudflare did is they stopped charging for egress bandwidth in certain scenarios, which is kind of amazing. And I think it's—the other thing that a lot of people don't realize is that, you know, these network connections tend to be fully symmetric, right? So, if it's a gigabit down, it's also a gigabit up at the same time, right? There's two gigabits that can be transferred per second.And then the other thing that I find a little bit frustrating on the public cloud is that they don't really pass on the compute performance improvements that have happened over the last few years, right? Like computers are really fast, right? So, if you look at a provider like Hetzner, they're giving you these monster machines for $128 a month or something, right? And then you go and try to buy that same thing on the public, the big cloud providers, and the equivalent is ten times that, right? And then if you add in the bandwidth, it's another multiple, depending on how much you're transferring.Corey: You can get Mac Minis on EC2 now, and you do the math out and the Mac Mini hardware is paid for in the first two or three months of spinning that thing up. And yes, there's value in AWS's engineering and being able to map IAM and EBS to it. In some use cases, yeah, it's well worth having, but not in every case. And the economics get very hard to justify for an awful lot of work cases.Jake: Yeah, I mean, to your point, though, about, like, limiting product features and things like that, like, one of the goals I have with doing infrastructure at Bluesky is to not let the infrastructure be a limiter on our product decisions. And a lot of that means that we'll put servers on Hetzner, we'll colo servers for things like that. I find that there's a really good hybrid cloud thing where you use AWS or GCP or Azure, and you use them for your most critical things, you're relatively low bandwidth things and the things that need to be the most flexible in terms of region and things like that—and security—and then for these, sort of, bulk services, pushing a lot of video content, right, or pushing a lot of images, those things, you put in a colo somewhere and you have these sort of CDN-like servers. And that kind of gives you the best of both worlds. And so, you know, that's the approach that we'll most likely take at Bluesky.Corey: I want to emphasize something you said a minute ago about CloudFlare, where when they first announced R2, their object store alternative, when it first came out, I did an analysis on this to explain to people just why this was as big as it was. Let's say you have a one-gigabyte file and it blows up and a million people download it over the course of a month. AWS will come to you with a completely straight face, give you a bill for $65,000 and expect you to pay it. The exact same pattern with R2 in front of it, at the end of the month, you will be faced with a bill for 13 cents rounded up, and you will be expected to pay it, and something like 9 to 12 cents of that initially would have just been the storage cost on S3 and the single egress fee for it. The rest is there is no egress cost tied to it.Now, is Cloudflare going to let you send petabytes to the internet and not charge you on a bandwidth basis? Probably not. But they're also going to reach out with an upsell and they're going to have a conversation with you. “Would you like to transition to our enterprise plan?” Which is a hell of a lot better than, “I got Slashdotted”—or whatever the modern version of that is—“And here's a surprise bill that's going to cost as much as a Tesla.”Jake: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that the cloud providers should hopefully eventually do—I hope Cloudflare pushes them in this direction—is to start—the original vision of AWS when I first started using it in 2006 or whenever launched, was—and they said this—they said they're going to lower your bill every so often, you know, as Moore's law makes their bill lower. And that kind of happened a little bit here and there, but it hasn't happened to the same degree that you know, I think all of us hoped it would. And I would love to see a cloud provider—and you know, Hetzner does this to some degree, but I'd love to see these really big cloud providers that are so great in so many ways, just pass on the savings of technology to the customer so we'll use more stuff there. I think it's a very enlightened viewpoint is to just say, “Hey, we're going to lower the costs, increase the efficiency, and then pass it on to customers, and then they will use more of our services as a result.” And I think Cloudflare is kind of leading the way in there, which I love.Corey: I do need to add something there—because otherwise we're going to get letters and I don't think we want that—where AWS reps will, of course, reach out and say that they have cut prices over a hundred times. And they're going to ignore the fact that a lot of these were a service you don't use in a region you couldn't find a map if your life depended on it now is going to be 10% less. Great. But let's look at the general case, where from C3 to C4—if you get the same size instance—it cut the price by a lot. C4 to C5, somewhat. C5 to C6 effectively is no change. And now, from C6 to C7, it is 6% more expensive like for like.And they're making noises about price performance is still better, but there are an awful lot of us who say things like, “I need ten of these servers to live over there.” That workload gets more expensive when you start treating it that way. And maybe the price performance is there, maybe it's not, but it is clear that the bill always goes down is not true.Jake: Yeah, and I think for certain kinds of organizations, it's totally fine the way that they do it. They do a pretty good job on price and performance. But for sort of more technical companies—especially—it's just you can see the gaps there, where that Hetzner is filling and that colocation is still filling. And I personally, you know, if I didn't need to do those things, I wouldn't do them, right? But the fact that you need to do them, I think, says kind of everything.Corey: Tired of wrestling with Apache Kafka's complexity and cost? Feel like you're stuck in a Kafka novel, but with more latency spikes and less existential dread by at least 10%? You're not alone.What if there was a way to 10x your streaming data performance without having to rob a bank? Enter Redpanda. It's not just another Kafka wannabe. Redpanda powers mission-critical workloads without making your AWS bill look like a phone number.And with full Kafka API compatibility, migration is smoother than a fresh jar of peanut butter. Imagine cutting as much as 50% off your AWS bills. With Redpanda, it's not a pipedream, it's reality.Visit go.redpanda.com/duckbill today. Redpanda: Because your data infrastructure shouldn't give you Kafkaesque nightmares.Corey: There are so many weird AWS billing stories that all distill down to you not knowing this one piece of trivia about how AWS works, either as a system, as a billing construct, or as something else. And there's a reason this has become my career of tracing these things down. And sometimes I'll talk to prospective clients, and they'll say, “Well, what if you don't discover any misconfigurations like that in our account?” It's, “Well, you would be the first company I've ever seen where that [laugh] was not true.” So honestly, I want to do a case study if we do.And I've never had to write that case study, just because it's the tax on not having the forcing function of building in data centers. There's always this idea that in a data center, you're going to run out of power, space, capacity, at some point and it's going to force a reckoning. The cloud has what distills down to infinite capacity; they can add it faster than you can fill it. So, at some point it's always just keep adding more things to it. There's never a let's clean out all of the cruft story. And it just accumulates and the bill continues to go up and to the right.Jake: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that they've done so well is handle the provisioning part, right, which is kind of what you're getting out there. One of the hardest things in the old days, before we all used AWS and GCP, is you'd have to sort of requisition hardware and there'd be this whole process with legal and financing and there'd be this big lag between the time you need a bunch more servers in your data center and when you actually have them, right, and that's not even counting the time takes to rack them and get them, you know, on network. The fact that basically, every developer now just gets an unlimited credit card, they can just, you know, use that's hugely empowering, and it's for the benefit of the companies they work for almost all the time. But it is an uncapped credit card. I know, they actually support controls and things like that, but in general, the way we treated it—Corey: Not as much as you would think, as it turns out. But yeah, it's—yeah, and that's a problem. Because again, if I want to spin up $65,000 an hour worth of compute right now, the fact that I can do that is massive. The fact that I could do that accidentally when I don't intend to is also massive.Jake: Yeah, it's very easy to think you're going to spend a certain amount and then oh, traffic's a lot higher, or, oh, I didn't realize when you enable that thing, it charges you an extra fee or something like that. So, it's very opaque. It's very complicated. All of these things are, you know, the result of just building more and more stuff on top of more and more stuff to support more and more use cases. Which is great, but then it does create this very sort of opaque billing problem, which I think, you know, you're helping companies solve. And I totally get why they need your help.Corey: What's interesting to me about distributed social networks is that I've been using Mastodon for a little bit and I've started to see some of the challenges around a lot of these things, just from an infrastructure and architecture perspective. Tim Bray, former Distinguished Engineer at AWS posted a blog post yesterday, and okay, well, if Tim wants to put something up there that he thinks people should read, I advise people generally read it. I have yet to find him wasting my time. And I clicked it and got a, “Server over resource limits.” It's like wow, you're very popular. You wound up getting—got effectively Slashdotted.And he said, “No, no. Whatever I post a link to Mastodon, two thousand instances all hidden at the same time.” And it's, “Oh, yeah. The hug of death. That becomes a challenge.” Not to mention the fact that, depending upon architecture and preferences that you make, running a Mastodon instance can be extraordinarily expensive in terms of storage, just because it'll, by default, attempt to cache everything that it encounters for a period of time. And that gets very heavy very quickly. Does the AT Protocol—AT Protocol? I don't know how you pronounce it officially these days—take into account the challenges of running infrastructures designed for folks who have corporate budgets behind them? Or is that really a future problem for us to worry about when the time comes?Jake: No, yeah, that's a core thing that we talked about a lot in the recent, sort of, architecture discussions. I'm going to go back quite a ways, but there were some changes made about six months ago in our thinking, and one of the big things that we wanted to get right was the ability for people to host their own PDS, which is equivalent to, like, posting a WordPress or something. It's where you post your content, it's where you post your likes, and all that kind of thing. We call it your repository or your repo. But that we wanted to make it so that people could self-host that on a, you know, four or five $6-a-month droplet on DigitalOcean or wherever and that not be a problem, not go down when they got a lot of traffic.And so, the architecture of AT Proto in general, but the Bluesky app on AT Proto is such that you really don't need a lot of resources. The data is all signed with your cryptographic keys—like, not something you have to worry about as a non-technical user—but all the data is authenticated. That's what—it's Authenticated Transfer Protocol. And because of that, it doesn't matter where you get the data, right? So, we have this idea of this big indexer that's looking at the entire network called the BGS, the Big Graph Server and you can go to the BGS and get the data that came from somebody's PDS and it's just as good as if you got it directly from the PDS. And that makes it highly cacheable, highly conducive to CDNs and things like that. So no, we intend to solve that problem entirely.Corey: I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out because the idea of self-hosting always kind of appealed to me when I was younger, which is why when I met my wife, I had a two-bedroom apartment—because I lived in Los Angeles, not San Francisco, and could afford such a thing—and the guest bedroom was always, you know, 10 to 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the apartment because I had a bunch of quote-unquote, “Servers” there, meaning deprecated desktops that my employer had no use for and said, “It's either going to e-waste or your place if you want some.” And, okay, why not? I'll build my own cluster at home. And increasingly over time, I found that it got harder and harder to do things that I liked and that made sense. I used to have a partial rack in downtown LA where I ran my own mail server, among other things.And when I switched to Google for email solutions, I suddenly found that I was spending five bucks a month at the time, instead of the rack rental, and I was spending two hours less a week just fighting spam in a variety of different ways because that is where my technical background lives. Being able to not have to think about problems like that, and just do the fun part was great. But I worry about the centralization that that implies. I was opposed to it at the idea because I didn't want to give Google access to all of my mail. And then I checked and something like 43% of the people I was emailing were at Gmail-hosted addresses, so they already had my email anyway. What was I really doing by not engaging with them? I worry that self-hosting is going to become passe, so I love projects that do it in sane and simple ways that don't require massive amounts of startup capital to get started with.Jake: Yeah, the account portability feature of AT Proto is super, super core. You can backup all of your data to your phone—the [AT 00:28:36] doesn't do this yet, but it most likely will in the future—you can backup all of your data to your phone and then you can synchronize it all to another server. So, if for whatever reason, you're on a PDS instance and it disappears—which is a common problem in the Mastodon world—it's not really a problem. You just sync all that data to a new PDS and you're back where you were. You didn't lose any followers, you didn't lose any posts, you didn't lose any likes.And we're also making sure that this works for non-technical people. So, you know, you don't have to host your own PDS, right? That's something that technical people can self-host if they want to, non-technical people can just get a host from anywhere and it doesn't really matter where your host is. But we are absolutely trying to avoid the fate of SMTP and, you know, other protocols. The web itself, right, is sort of… it's hard to launch a search engine because the—first of all, the bar is billions of dollars a year in investment, and a lot of websites will only let us crawl them at a higher rate if you're actually coming from a Google IP, right? They're doing reverse DNS lookups, and things like that to verify that you are Google.And the problem with that is now there's sort of this centralization with a search engine that can't be fixed. With AT Proto, it's much easier to scrape all of the PDSes, right? So, if you want to crawl all the PDSes out on the AT Proto network, they're designed to be crawled from day one. It's all structured data, we're working on, sort of, how you handle rate limits and things like that still, but the idea is it's very easy to create an index of the entire network, which makes it very easy to create feed generators, search engines, or any other kind of sort of big world networking thing out there. And then without making the PDSes have to be very high power, right? So, they can do low power and still scrapeable, still crawlable.Corey: Yeah, the idea of having portability is super important. Question I've got—you know, while I'm talking to you, it's, we'll turn this into technical support hour as well because why not—I tend to always historically put my Twitter handle on conference slides. When I had the first template made, I used it as soon as it came in and there was an extra n in the @quinnypig username at the bottom. And of course, someone asked about that during Q&A.So, the answer I gave was, of course, n+1 redundancy. But great. If I were to have one domain there today and change it tomorrow, is there a redirect option in place where someone could go and find that on Blue-ski, and oh, they'll get redirected to where I am now. Or is it just one of those 404, sucks to be you moments? Because I can see validity to both.Jake: Yeah, so the way we handle it right now is if you have a, something.bsky.social name and you switch it to your own domain or something like that, we don't yet forward it from the old.bsky.social name. But that is totally feasible. It's totally possible. Like, the way that those are stored in your what's called your [DID record 00:31:16] or [DID document 00:31:17] is that there's, like, a list that currently only has one item in general, but it's a list of all of your different names, right? So, you could have different domain names, different subdomain names, and they would all point back to the same user. And so yeah, so basically, the idea is that you have these aliases and they will forward to the new one, whatever the current canonical one is.Corey: Excellent. That is something that concerns me because it feels like it's one of those one-way doors, in the same way that picking an email address was a one-way door. I know people who still pay money to their ancient crappy ISP because they have a few mails that come in once in a while that are super-important. I was fortunate enough to have jumped on the bandwagon early enough that my vanity domain is 22 years old this year. And my email address still works,which, great, every once in a while, I still get stuff to, like, variants of my name I no longer use anymore since 2005. And it's usually spam, but every once in a blue moon, it's something important, like, “Hey, I don't know if you remember me. We went to college together many years ago.” It's ho-ly crap, the world is smaller than we think.Jake: Yeah.j I mean, I love that we're using domains, I think that's one of the greatest decisions we made is… is that you own your own domain. You're not really stuck in our namespace, right? Like, one of the things with traditional social networks is you're sort of, their domain.com/yourname, right?And with the way AT Proto and Bluesky work is, you can go and get a domain name from any registrar, there's hundreds of them—you know, we'd like Namecheap, you can go there and you can grab a domain and you can point it to your account. And if you ever don't like anything, you can change your domain, you can change, you know which PDS you're on, it's all completely controlled by you. And there's nearly no way we as a company can do anything to change that. Like, that's all sort of locked into the way that the protocol works, which creates this really great incentive where, you know, if we want to provide you services or somebody else wants to provide you services, they just have to compete on doing a really good job; you're not locked in. And that's, like, one of my favorite features of the network.Corey: I just want to point something out because you mentioned oh, we're big fans of Namecheap. I am too, for weird half-drunk domain registrations on a lark. Like, “Why am I poor?” It's like, $3,000 a month of my budget goes to domain purchases, great. But I did a quick whois on the official Bluesky domain and it's hosted at Route 53, which is Amazon's, of course, premier database offering.But I'm a big fan of using a enterprise registrar for enterprise-y things. Wasabi, if I recall correctly, wound up having their primary domain registered through GoDaddy, and the public domain that their bucket equivalent would serve data out of got shut down for 12 hours because some bad actor put something there that shouldn't have been. And GoDaddy is not an enterprise registrar, despite what they might think—for God's sake, the word ‘daddy' is in their name. Do you really think that's enterprise? Good luck.So, the fact that you have a responsible company handling these central singular points of failure speaks very well to just your own implementation of these things. Because that's the sort of thing that everyone figures out the second time.Jake: Yeah, yeah. I think there's a big difference between corporate domain registration, and corporate DNS and, like, your personal handle on social networking. I think a lot of the consumer, sort of, domain registries are—registrars—are great for consumers. And I think if you—yeah, you're running a big corporate domain, you want to make sure it's, you know, it's transfer locked and, you know, there's two-factor authentication and doing all those kinds of things right because that is a single point of failure; you can lose a lot by having your domain taken. So, I completely agree with you on there.Corey: Oh, absolutely. I am curious about this to see if it's still the case or not because I haven't checked this in over a year—and they did fix it. Okay. As of at least when we're recording this, which is the end of May 2023, Amazon's Authoritative Name Servers are no longer half at Oracle. Good for them. They now have a bunch of Amazon-specific name servers on them instead of, you know, their competitor that they clearly despise. Good work, good work.I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about how you're viewing these things and honestly giving me a chance to go ambling down memory lane. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place for them to find you?Jake: Yeah, so I'm on Bluesky. It's invite only. I apologize for that right now. But if you check out bsky.app, you can see how to sign up for the waitlist, and we are trying to get people on as quickly as possible.Corey: And I will, of course, be talking to you there and will put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Jake: Thanks a lot, Corey. It was great.Corey: Jake Gold, infrastructure engineer at Bluesky, slash Blue-ski. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that will no doubt result in a surprise $60,000 bill after you posted.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
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En este episodio del pódcast El Siglo 21 es Hoy: Tecnología, ciencia y entretenimiento, veremos el avance del correo electrónico a lo largo de los años. Hablaremos de los protocolos de correo electrónico, tales como SMTP, IMAP y POP. Además, dimos un repaso a los servicios de correo electrónico más populares, como Gmail y Outlook. Exploraremos la seguridad online y los medidas que podemos tomar para evitar caídas y proteger nuestras cuentas de correo electrónico frente a los ataques cibernéticos. Por último, haremos un repaso de las herramientas de organización de correo electronico que nos ayudarán a mejorar nuestra productividad. Escucha este episodio de El Siglo 21 es Hoy para conocer todas las novedades sobre el avance del correo electrónico, sus protocolos, servicios, seguridad y herramientas de organización.Este pódcast ha sido creado por Félix Riaño @LocutorCoMás fuentes de información:https://www.t13.cl/amp/etiqueta/caida-de-gmailhttps://www.20minutos.es/tecnologia/aplicaciones/caida-de-gmail-varios-usuarios-notifican-fallos-al-intentar-entrar-en-la-plataforma-5104952/https://downdetector.com.co/problemas/gmail/https://www.zoho.com/es-xl/mail/help/how-email-works.htmlhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/common-protocol#:~:text=Email%20Protocols,used%20for%20accessing%20electronic%20mailboxes.https://www.ionos.es/digitalguide/correo-electronico/cuestiones-tecnicas/los-mejores-proveedores-de-free-mail/https://support.microsoft.com/es-es/office/-qu%C3%A9-son-imap-y-pop-ca2c5799-49f9-4079-aefe-ddca85d5b1c9https://es.sendinblue.com/blog/enviar-correos-masivos/https://consumidor.ftc.gov/articulos/como-reconocer-y-evitar-las-estafas-de-phishinghttps://institutoemprende.com/organizar-correo-electronico/https://www.adslzone.net/listas/mejores-programas/correo-electronico/https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7074871?hl=es-419Todas las músicas autorizadas con licencia Creative Commons y Audiio: https://ref.audiio.com/3n4qg4x3 (usa el código "SAVE70" para ahorrar el 70%) Entra tú también a nuestro grupo Telegram en ElSiglo21esHoy.com
En este episodio del pódcast El Siglo 21 es Hoy: Tecnología, ciencia y entretenimiento, veremos el avance del correo electrónico a lo largo de los años. Hablaremos de los protocolos de correo electrónico, tales como SMTP, IMAP y POP. Además, dimos un repaso a los servicios de correo electrónico más populares, como Gmail y Outlook. Exploraremos la seguridad online y los medidas que podemos tomar para evitar caídas y proteger nuestras cuentas de correo electrónico frente a los ataques cibernéticos. Por último, haremos un repaso de las herramientas de organización de correo electronico que nos ayudarán a mejorar nuestra productividad. Escucha este episodio de El Siglo 21 es Hoy para conocer todas las novedades sobre el avance del correo electrónico, sus protocolos, servicios, seguridad y herramientas de organización.Este pódcast ha sido creado por Félix Riaño @LocutorCoMás fuentes de información:https://www.t13.cl/amp/etiqueta/caida-de-gmailhttps://www.20minutos.es/tecnologia/aplicaciones/caida-de-gmail-varios-usuarios-notifican-fallos-al-intentar-entrar-en-la-plataforma-5104952/https://downdetector.com.co/problemas/gmail/https://www.zoho.com/es-xl/mail/help/how-email-works.htmlhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/common-protocol#:~:text=Email%20Protocols,used%20for%20accessing%20electronic%20mailboxes.https://www.ionos.es/digitalguide/correo-electronico/cuestiones-tecnicas/los-mejores-proveedores-de-free-mail/https://support.microsoft.com/es-es/office/-qu%C3%A9-son-imap-y-pop-ca2c5799-49f9-4079-aefe-ddca85d5b1c9https://es.sendinblue.com/blog/enviar-correos-masivos/https://consumidor.ftc.gov/articulos/como-reconocer-y-evitar-las-estafas-de-phishinghttps://institutoemprende.com/organizar-correo-electronico/https://www.adslzone.net/listas/mejores-programas/correo-electronico/https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7074871?hl=es-419Todas las músicas autorizadas con licencia Creative Commons y Audiio: https://ref.audiio.com/3n4qg4x3 (usa el código "SAVE70" para ahorrar el 70%) Entra tú también a nuestro grupo Telegram en ElSiglo21esHoy.com