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Showing posts from October, 2019

The Best Fiber Network in America is Owned by The People

I'm a huge fan of municipal broadband and the ordinary people owning public utilities (within reason...Do you trust your neighbor to own your power grid?). Ammon, Idaho beats out large, cumbersome, clunky cities that I will live in one day to have America's most sophisticated fiber network . You may have great fiber, yeah, but do you have diversity of thought, people, jobs, and industries? Seriously, I don't know. It's a choice to opt into the network, and new residential houses are being built with the fiber infrastructure in mind. But lets check those stats: 1 Gbps connection to 10$/mo with no contract - and you need not even do that - you could get 15 Mbps free. This is even better than water or power being utilities. Members can also easily establish their own private networks with friends and family (or coworkers for businesses) without incurring any additional infrastructure costs. You, the people, can make VPNs! I wonder how that looks. Wha

AWS servers hit by sustained DDoS attack, Making us All Say "It's Always DNS"

Article  If you aren't familiar with Route 53 on AWS, it's a Domain Management module.  So, the DDoS attack battered the records that tie IP addresses to FQDNs. From 6:30pm BST on Tuesday, a handful of customers suffered an outage to services while the attack persisted, lasting until approximately 2:30am on Wednesday morning, when services to the Route 53 DNS were restored. This was the equivalent of a full working day in some parts of the US. Amazon also encouraged users to specify the region their bucket was in when trying to update the configuration of clients. What have we learned? Anything can be attacked. Hopefully, you didn't have to learn that, as that is the mantra of anyone working in IT (Right after "It's always DNS").  After all, there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer: You still need backups , though I admit I'm not sure how you'd store DNS records (Though I can configure them in Cisco Command Line

Ammo for the Streaming Wars: Verizon Customers Get a Year of Disney+ For Free

  Article That's an even better deal than one offered to us D23 Members  Well, $140 for 3 years, A year's subscription for D+ is 69$, which is 138$, more or less the cost of one person's service per month when I sold Verizon plans back in 2013. Is this an effort to bolster numbers in the face of T-Mobile and Sprint's approved merger? Perhaps not, as the deal is also given to existing customers of Verizon with 4G LTE and 5G Unlimited Service. Maybe 5G will be capable enough before the deal is over for us to stream from anywhere. Apple also has a deal ; Buy one of their expensive pieces of hardware that costs far more than a year's worth of their service, and get a year for free. No word on if HBO+, or DC Universe, or Quibi, or whatever else I'm missing will break out such deals.

Severless Application with Node.js, & AWS CodeStar and Cloud9

Instructions: Here Technologies; Node.js AWS CodeStar AWS Cloud9 Node.js is running Javascript on Chrome's V8 engine that is event-driven. I used it quite a bit in the past year without actually understanding what it truly does - Run Javascript without a browser. Including applications that use JS. According to the instructions above, Cloud9 is an IDE (Integraded Development Enviroment) where you write, run, and debug code of popular programming languages. CodeStar builds and deploys the applications: "Create service role?" "Why yes, I believe I will." The above image is from the instructions linked above. On the project template page, I pick Node.js: Then I name it 'nodejs-serverless-project' 'serverless-brooklyn' It's not as if the name prevents the tutorial from working, right? And I select AWS CodeCommit. CodeStar will set up a complete integration pipeline (While monitoring with CloudWatch), Co

Yes, There Are Competent IT and Cyberprofessionals Out There, If You're Not Cheap.

The updated (and frankly, better written and edited) version will be on my Medium blog December 7th, 2020 with the title " The Myth of the Tech Talent Shortage and The Cost To Your Business ." My Medium profile is here . This post is getting attention again: Hi. I like to think I've gotten less angry than when this was posted (Though I still think it's true, the times have changed with COVID-19, and I could have worded this more constructively). I'm pivoting to different areas of IT; Check the services and projects tag.   It's still BS that there aren't more part time positions in IT and tech. It's not like the talent isn't plentiful.  From Pexels.com Atlanta, Georgia Baltimore, Maryland Newark, New Jersey Savannah, Georgia What do they have in common? They have been the victim of serious cyberattacks on their infrastructure. Said attacks cost the affected city governments and companies more than 30$million dollars .

Return of the Toy 2: Walmart and Mattel Ensure That The Empire Strikes Back

Article Not content to let Target and Toys R Us have all the fun this holiday season , a new toy titanship has emerged: Walmart and Mattel have teamed up for KidHQ, a giant, digital catalog. I appreciate that the website is unlike other things in the marketing sphere, openly pointing out that this is advertising. We are here to sell to you. All for brand engagement , of course. When you make people think a brand is their friend, they're likely to buy. After all: Marketers receive aggregated, anonymized data on purchases through KidHQ and how visitors interact with different toys, [Ivy] Sheibar said And data is worth more than gold. Time to talk about Mattel's past few years.  In 2015, they lost a very lucrative contract - The right to make Disney Princess dolls. Why? “We took Disney for granted. We weren’t focusing on them,” [Chris] Sinclair says. “Shame on us.” [ source ] Also, Mattel had made its own fairy tale heroine line with "Ever After High&q

AWS: Connecting to an EC2 Linux Instance

Haven't practiced this in a few months. Back to establish the basics. Before, I just jumped into the available white papers on Amazon's site. While informative, a lot of it went over my head. Learning the simpler things such as using EC2, Linux, and puTTY works to make the information stick. I'm using the yearly free tier of AWS for practice. Many things are run on Amazon's infrastructure - like Netflix. Have to keep up with that! But how do you use puTTY to connect to your Instance? You change the key Amazon gives you (.pem) to one with a .ppk extension using puTTYGen. Key blocked. Then you use said adjusted key, your given login name, and your public DNS IPv4 chain-code thing on your EC2 Management page (the blanked out square under 'Host Name (or IP Address)'). DNS IPv4 Chain-Code blocked. We have connectivity! What happened? I spun up a Virtual Machine on EC2 / AWS, installed an Amazon-variant of Linux, and SSH'd into it with pu

Return of the Toy; Toys R US is now back Online Only, Essentially as a Front for Target

Article I was a pretty big Toys R US shopper from 2012 - 2017 or so. Not shopping for children (I have none), but because I was, and still am, a big fan of Funko Pops (Nerd pundits, go on, roll your eyes!), video games, and Mattel's various toylines of fantasy creatures in high school. Indeed, the new site looks far more modern and useable than the old one. There is also a little accessibility marker that leads to this page. Essentially, the TRU site is a front that leads you to purchase the object on Target's website - and even then, you may be buying from a third party often at far more inflated prices. Such is the cost of the blind-bag craze. Besides banking on Nostalgia, I'm not sure what Target's ultimate goal is here. Instead of jumping through all of those hoops, why not go to Target directly - or even Amazon? But I suppose nostalgia might just be enough.

Grace Hopper Celebration 2019 (GHC19)

From Aicha Evans' speech at the Keynote. September 6th - I receive an email from Anita B Organization, saying "We read your application, we like your website, and here's a free ticket to GHC 2019 in Orlando, Florida!" After a few more questions, it seemed everything was on the up and up, and so I accepted - and that's what this post is about! For those who don't know, Grace Hopper Celebration is the largest gathering of Women in Technology in the world. On a personal note, This is the first trip I've taken without my parents. Sure, they've left me behind to go on vacations, but I've never left them. I was totally worried! But you know what happened? I met a lot of cool people in Orlando, learned a lot of neat things, and had a blast just walking around airports for upwards of 8 hours. New Delta Sky Club on Wikimedia I really, really love airports! And I survived. I know in the past, I've wormed my way out of jobs