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It's been a while since re:Invent happened, but in my defense it has been a very busy three months. Other than Christmas, New Years, taking some time off and working with clients I had the opportunity to attend the recent re:Invent held in Las Vegas. Going to re:Invent in Vegas was an excellent way to catch what's been happening in cloud technologies and what to keep an eye out from the eponymous service provider. In this post I'll start with the fun stuff like the swag, welcome reception and 5k run and finish with the breakout sessions I really enjoyed and got the most out of.
Swag
To start with here's what you're all interested in, the sweet sweet conference swag. re:Invent was brilliant. Here's a summary of my favourite things picked up while there.
Joyent Trition shirt: Fancy shirt, big thankyou to the folks at Joyent.
re:Invent thermos: For doing a short survey of two breakout sessions you got to take your pick from a selection of AWS merch. I picked the AWS water bottle/thermos. I've been using this regularly as my day-to-day water bottle, big thanks to AWS!
Amazon Snowball USB drive: Although only 1/16000th the data capacity of a standard AWS Snowball (80TB Snowball, 5GB drive) I very much like this diminutive storage device. It is currently being used as a Linux Mint 18.1 "Serena" boot stick for repairing an old laptop of mine.
Amazon Echo dot (not pictured): On registering for the conference everyone got an AWS hoodie and their own Amazon Echo Dot. The day after I registered I immediately spent a few hours working it out, playing with it and planning a backlog of skill projects which I hope to implement and talk about here in the next year. Great little tool.
A ridiculous mountain of laptop stickers: Over the three days between scheduled talks I made sure I spent plenty of time jumping from booth to booth talking to vendors about the services and/or software they provide. This was a great way to know what's out there and say thanks to the companies who's tools already make your life easier. In the process I collected so many stickers. So many. My highlight was chatting to an AWS maker space developer working on a disaster sign-in system that could be deployed to key places in the event of some major event like an earthquake and based on tagging could let loved ones know you were ok if you were in range of the device.
This was all of my favourites, the one thing I regret not getting was one of the re:Play Las Vegas 2016 grid t-shirts with the compute cube in the middle, if anyone knows where I can get one let me know.
Welcome Reception
Of course all of this event swag was collected from the conference hall, much of it on the welcome reception night. There were 30,000 attendees and from the queues to enter the hall a good percentage of that number were present. There was a great vibe and you can tell that AWS really fosters fun in their community, it was also great to hear about new services vendors are promoting and see the projects AWS work on that aren't generally at the forefront.
I've done some running in the past so I took the opportunity to do the conference 5k run, how often do you get the opportunity to sprint through the streets in a country you've never been to before right? Something that added some extra dimension was the forecasted freeze warning of below zero celsius the night before. Luckily the day was alright temperature wise, staying just above the positive degrees and was good fun, I ended up with a time of 25 minutes, 19 seconds. 189th out of 985, not too shabby!
re:Invent Sessions
re:Invent is one of the rare opportunities where you can have a chance to see presentations by architects and developers who are on the forefront of technology and ask questions to improve your understanding of services and take home some new techniques you can use in the field. I chose a set of sessions which were a mix of the work I'm doing at the moment (AWS account compliance and security) and my personal interests (Formal reasoning, AI and the frontier of software development). Here are a summary of my favourites, I highly recommend checking out the re:Invent breakout session YouTube channel, so much win.
Another Day, Another Billion Packets (NET401)
A great 400 level talk about the networking issues AWS face with their under the hood infrastructure and the solution outcomes. As a day-to-day user of AWS you will generally not see any of this, this talk gave insight into the service history and why some of the networking services are the way they are. If you're new to networking there is a lot to digest in this talk but it's hugely worth watching, especially in retrospective after re:Invent.
Compliance Architecture: How Capital One Automates the Guard Rails (ARC312)
This talk by Peter M. O'Donnell and Kapil Thangavelu was my introduction to Cloud Custodian which I have now been using for the past two months for a compliance project, a great tool I will hopefully have time to write about as an extension on AWS account compliance work I've written about in the past. Keep an eye on this project as it takes away the necessity of building your own automated account clean up and management tool. CloudCustodian can be found here.
Amazon s2n: Cryptography and Open Source at AWS (NET405)
A great talk about the S2N project about analysing the code behind the heartbleed SSL bug of 2014, how to improve software development practices that can let bugs like this slip by and the development of vulnerability detection solutions. Also a good eye into how AWS gets involved in open source software.
Bringing Deep Learning to the Cloud with Amazon EC2 (CMP314)
This was a talk by Tom Jones and Diego Oppenheimer, Deep Learning is not specifically my field but it's great to see how AWS and Algorithmia are harnessing the graphical hardware side to perform some amazing graphical processing tasks, super interesting stuff if you have the time to watch.
The Effective AWS CLI User (DEV402)
This was another great talk, by Kyle Knapp. I walked into this one thinking I was a pretty advanced user of the AWS CLI and came out surprised, I discovered some of the newer features added into the CLI can really speed up the time to automate infrastructure tasks and help you build your own set of command primitives.
Take-aways:
--generate-cli-skeleton output --query text lets you query what fields you should be asking for if you're just trying to access specific attributes of a JSON object being returned from the CLI.
The power of the ---debug argument, it will show you what the CLI tool as taken in, substituting any variables you have possibly passed in through Bash.
<command> --debug 2>&1 | less -S to cleanly check out these logs irrespective of the size of your terminal.
~/.aws/cli/alias: CLI now has it's own alias file so you can build your own CLI commands that you would generally do by scripting these in bash, think your gitconfig file. Some great examples of aliases can be found on Github
Summary
In summary re:Invent was excellent, I'd highly recommend it if you're a heavy user of AWS, being surrounded by the people who build the worlds most prevalent cloud platform really made for a great week. I originally hoped for this post to be a longer one, seeing as how much happened over the week, what I took away in terms of AWS compliance checking and my extra week touring around California but it the post was already getting too long, next up I will have another compliance post.
Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. MARK GRAHAM/AFP/Getty Images.
Milo Yiannopoulos has started issuing reporters threatening messages when asked to comment for stories.
"I can't wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight," the right-wing nationalist told Observer over text message, in response to a longer feature in development about an Upper East Side restaurant he is said to frequent.
When asked to elaborate on who specifically had upset him, Yiannopoulos explained that the statement was his "standard response to a request for comment."
Yiannopoulos also sent the message to The Daily Beast's Will Sommer in an article examining the struggling U.K. Independence Party, which the conservative commentator is reportedly seeking to join as part of, what an Info Wars host describes as, a "soft coup" lead by nationalist figures.
Yiannopoulos posted a picture on Instagram of the veiled threat issued to Sommer, captioning it "where is the lie."
Over the past 18 months, the provocative nationalist has seen his career implode following a Buzzfeed report linking his tenure at Breitbart to known white supremacists and neo-Nazis. After the piece's publication, Yiannopoulos lost funding from the Mercer family, known in the political world as prominent pro-Trump megadonors, and subsequently elevated his racist rhetoric.
This past weekend, the nationalist bragged on Facebook and Instagram that he'd sent $14.88 to The New Yorker's former fact checker Talia Lavin. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "The number 1488 is a combination of digits popularly used by white supremacists and neo-Nazis—14 to represent the infamous "14 Words" (a mantra about securing "a future for white children") and 88 to represent "Heil Hitler."
Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is designed to provide a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment for customers to develop and run a wide variety of cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2, customers get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux community. Amazon Linux 2 is provided at no additional charge.
Amazon Linux 2 LTS Candidate is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). It is also available as a Docker container image and as virtual machine images for use on VMware, Oracle VM VirtualBox, and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization solutions. The virtual machine images can be used for on-premises development and testing. Amazon Linux 2 supports the latest Amazon EC2 features and includes packages that enable easy integration with AWS. AWS provides ongoing security and maintenance updates for Amazon Linux 2.
IN MID-NOVEMBER 1979, Sigrid Cerf, an Annandale housewife, saw a picture of a starving Cambodian child on the cover of Time magazine. Reading that 2 1/4 million Cambodians faced starvation, she resolved to do something to express her sympathy for their plight.
Her options were limited; she was homebound with two sons, one only 10 months old, and further isolated by deafness. But drawing from childhood memories of her mother and grandmother baking in a warm kitchen on cold days, she was determined to raise money for Cambodian relief by selling homemade bread.
Cerf began to work in her tiny U-shaped kitchen, which, while convenient for preparing family meals, is hardly the space needed to turn out 70 to 80 loaves of bread a day. Yet the kitchen opens to the dining area and the family room beyond, making it possible for her to work while the baby slept or played nearby. And accommodations were possible: While Cerf mixed dough, dinner could simmer in a crockery cooker in the bathroom.
Soon television publicity brought so many orders she couldn't keep up and, even more than space, she wanted extra hands to knead dough. When word went out that she needed help, "the whole community of Camelot the Annandale subdivision where the Cerfs live was at my door," she says.
Neighbors kneaded dough, chopped apples, grated cheese, bagged, labeled and delivered bread. A woman confined to a wheelchair took telephone orders. The man next door took care of the Cerfs' yard to allow her computer-scientist husband, Vint, more time to help. The proprietor of Health Way, a neighborhood health food store, helped them to buy ingredients wholesale. "After people meet Sigrid they are transformed by the experience," Vint Cerf says.
Two weeks later, that possibility became a reality when Amazon officially picked up the show, and it happened in the wildest manner possible. Instead of receiving a phone call from a producer, studio executive, or Amazon underling informing them of the news, the cast and Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar were actually informed in person by Amazon founder, chairman, and chief executive officer Jeff Bezos from the stage during an interview taking place at a space awards banquet.
A federal district court judge on Wednesday ruled that President Trump can't block people from viewing his Twitter feed over their political views.
Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said President Trump's Twitter account is a public forum and blocking people who reply to his tweets with differing opinions constitutes viewpoint discrimination, which violates the First Amendment.
The court's ruling is a major win for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of seven people who were blocked from the @realDonaldTrump account because of opinions they expressed in reply tweets.
Buchwald, who was appointed by former President Clinton, rejected Trump's argument that the First Amendment does not apply in this case and that the president's personal First Amendment interests supersede those of the plaintiffs.
She suggested in her 75-page opinion that Trump could have ignored his opponents' reply tweets.
"No First Amendment harm arises when a government's 'challenged conduct' is simply to ignore the [speaker], as the Supreme Court has affirmed 'that it is free to do,' " she wrote. "Stated otherwise, 'a person's right to speak is not infringed when government simply ignores that person while listening to others,' or when the government 'amplifies' the voice of one speaker over those of others."
Buchwald explained that blocking someone on Twitter goes further than just muting them.
"Muting preserves the muted account's ability to reply to a tweet sent by the muting account, blocking precludes the blocked user from 'seeing or replying to the blocking user's tweets' entirely," she said.
In addition to Trump, the lawsuit named White House social media director and assistant to the president Daniel Scavino.
But Buchwald did not order Trump or Scavino to unblock the individual plaintiffs in the case or prohibit them from blocking others from the account based on their views as the plaintiffs' had asked.
She said a declaratory judgment should be sufficient.
"Because no government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the President and Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional," Buchwald wrote.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which the Knight Foundation helped found, tweeted a screen shot of that line from Buchwald's opinion.
"Clock's ticking @realDonaldTrump & @DanScavino," he wrote.
Josh Geltzer, executive director of Georgetown Law's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said the court's ruling is a critical victory in preserving free speech in the digital age.
"The court's thorough decision recognizes that the President's use of @realDonaldTrump on Twitter makes it the type of public forum in which the government may not, under the First Amendment, silence its critics," he said in a statement.
A Department of Justice spokesperson said the agency respectfully disagrees with the court's decision and is considering its next steps.
Amazon Studios is in talks to revive one of CEO Jeff Bezos' favorite properties.
The retailer and streaming outlet is near a deal to revive the space drama The Expanse for a fourth season just 10 days after Syfy canceled the series. Amazon Studios declined comment as sources note the deal is not closed.
Syfy had only first-run linear rights in the U.S. to The Expanse, which was based on James S. A. Corey's best-selling book series of the same name and starred Steven Strait. Amazon Studios had streaming rights to the first three seasons of the show. Sources say Bezos is a big fan of the book and was livid that the TV series went to NBCUniversal-owned Syfy. The move is said to have ignited Bezos' demand that Amazon Studios brass find the company's version of Game of Thrones.
The Expanse was a pricey swing for Syfy and the nature of the deal put additional pressure for the show to perform on its linear network as the cabler did not have either SVOD or international rights to profit from. (Netflix had international rights to the series.) The dramawas Syfy's first major push back into the traditional science fiction genre.
Following the cancellation, producers Alcon Television Group — which fully financed and produced the series — planned to shop the space drama to other networks.
Opening to promising reviews and a strong collection of loyal viewers in 2015, The Expanse's first season averaged 581,000 viewers in the advertiser-coveted adults 18-49 demographic and 1.4 million total viewers with three days of DVR. Season two, which returned more than a year later with a significant marketing push and a solid lead-in, was down 24 percent among total viewers and averaged 457,000 total viewers. That compares more readily to similar returns for Syfy's inexpensive co-productions like Dark Matter and Killjoys than to the cabler's original scripted series like The Magicians and Happy.
The Expanse's third season, which bowed in April, tumbled another 5 percent among total viewers and 12 percent in the demo from season two.
"The Expanse transported us across the solar system for three brilliant seasons of television. Everyone at Syfy is a massive fan of the series, and this was an incredibly difficult decision," said Chris McCumber, president of entertainment networks at NBCU Cable Entertainment. "We want to sincerely thank The Expanse's amazing cast, crew and all the dedicated creatives who helped bring James S. A. Corey's story to life. And to the series' loyal fans, we thank you most of all."
The decision to bring The Expanse to its end comes as Syfy has a packed scripted roster that also includes the upcoming George R.R. Martin drama Nightflyers, The Purge, Deadly Class, Krypton, The Magicians, anthology Channel Zero, Van Helsing,Wynonna Earp and Killjoys, with the latter set to wrap in 2019. The Expanse will be Syfy's second series to conclude this year, joining 12 Monkeys.
Starring Strait, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Dominique Tipper, The Expanse is set in a future where humanity has colonized the solar system. Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Children of Men) served as showrunners and executive produced the Alcon TV Group project alongside Naren Shankar.
At Amazon, The Expanse will join a growing roster of genre programming including its upcoming Lord of the Rings TV franchise; Jordan Peele's Nazi hunting drama series; Gillian Flynn's Utopiaremake; futuristic drama The Peripheralfrom Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan; Consider Phlebas; and a reboot of Hanna, among others.
The Expanse move follows a busy week of news on the broadcast side that saw Brooklyn Nine-Nine move to NBC after the comedy's cancellation by Fox, while the latter network revived Last Man Standing. In both cases, the networks' studio counterparts owned the shows, making the jump to their respective home networks considerably easier. In TheExpanse's case, Amazon had SVOD rights, making a move to a different outlet more challenging.
In June 2016 we announced 86 that we would be making it much easier for developers to create embedded timelines on their sites, by no longer requiring the timelines to be registered under widget settings 616. We launched publish.twitter.com 4.8k to make it much easier to create timeline widgets without requiring you to make changes to your account settings, and to make the embedded timelines more flexible.
Today, we are announcing the conclusion of that process and discontinuation of support for older timeline widgets that rely on widget settings 616.
On May 25, 2018, the widget settings page will no longer allow embedded timeline widgets to be created or edited. From that date, the only (and best) way to create timeline widgets will be to head to publish.twitter.com 4.8k. All existing timeline widgets that rely on these settings (e.g. the ones that have data-widget-id in the markup) will continue to function until July 27.
On July 27, 2018, timeline widgets that rely on account-specific widget settings will no longer be rendered. From that time, all settings will be in the embed code itself as 'data-*' attributes in the markup. We expect timelines to work as expected for the majority of users. Settings previously customised (for example link color and height), will not be applied. The content of the timelines - the Tweets - will be rendered in the same way. The one notable exception will be search timelines 221, which will no longer be rendered in the same way, and will fall back to a simple link that points to the corresponding search results on twitter.com 14. We hope that your search timeline can be replaced with a user timeline 180, list timeline 162, collection timeline 195, or likes timeline which will offer more fine-grained control over what Tweets show up on your webpage. We also continue to offer three tiers of the RESTful Search API 168 which can help you transition from the search timeline if you are open to writing your own display code.
To ensure timeline widgets look the way you want, we recommend clicking on the "Embed" link at the bottom of your timeline, which will direct you to publish.twitter.com 4.8k. Here, you can grab the equivalent embed code with all the settings in the embed code itself. This is the recommended way to create timeline widgets going forward. This approach will work for all kinds of timelines except search timelines (these are being retired). We understand that change causes burden to some developers, and we apologize for this. The web-based widget settings are part of an old internal technology stack, and we want to adjust our priorities to give developers the best overall experience. We're continuing to improve the experience for embedded Tweets and timelines, so keep watching for further announcements about new features in the future!
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) will hold its 5th annual Federal Summit on May 15, 2018 at the Marriott Metro Center, 775 12th street, NW, Washington DC.
This informative, one-day symposium is expected to draw over 250 information security professionals from civilian and defense agencies and from innovators in cloud security to share case studies, lessons learned and new technologies that support secure implementation of cloud computing to support agency missions.
A world-class program of speakers and panelists will provide perspectives on the Federal cloud computing strategy, civilian and defense agency cloud security standards, and real-world implementation experience with state-of-the-art cloud security architectures.
EVENT THEME
Agencies Can Shift to a Secure Cloud for Mission Critical Systems
What are the Technologies – new and proven – that are critical to making cloud the dominant IT system?
What Government Programs are leading the pack in deploying Mission Critical Systems to the Cloud?
What are lessons learned in deploying a secure cloud to support mission critical systems?
This one-day summit will focus on two components of cloud security – deploying mission critical systems to the cloud, and new technologies that support deployment including managing security certifications and compliance.
Topics include:
Getting to mission critical with cloud
How do technologies including Blockchain, IoT, and Fog Computing support mission critical systems on the cloud?
Management of requirements for multiple security certifications What is the status of Continuous Monitoring?
EVENT DETAILS
What:
CSA Federal Summit 2018
Where:
Washington Marriott Metro Center – Washington D.C.
When:
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Hotel Information:
Marriott Metro Center – No rooms held
Registration Costs:
Standard Registration for Non-Government Employees Fee: $150 USD
– Starts February 16, 2018 to April 2, 2018
Late Registration for Non-Government Employees Fee: $175 USD
– Starts April 3, 2018
Government Employee Registration is Free $0– Please bring government ID with you to the event to verify when checking in.
Student Registration: $50 USD – Please bring your student ID to the event to verify when checking in.
CCSK Foundation Training: $795 – This does not include registration to the conference.
CCM Foundation Training Course: $695 – This does not include registration to the conference.
Location Details:
Washington Marriott Metro Center, 775 12th Street NW, Washington, DC 20005
Offering a 180-degree bird's-eye view of Bethlehem, the fabulous Conservatory is the most unique room in the mansion (perhaps in the entire town!). Spanning the full depth of the house, this roof-top refuge fills with morning light and offers breathtaking tree-lined views. More modern in design than the rest of the inn, this special suite features a sleekly styled king bed with matching end tables and a sitting area with a vintage loveseat and a lush garden setting breakfast nook. Trickling fountains, cable TV, and lush green plants add to the room's appeal. The private bath has a pedestal sink and a Jacuzzi style bathtub.
All Room Rates are subject to 10% tax (6% PA state tax and 4% Bethlehem Hotel tax).
I'm often asked by friends and family what they should charge for "side work". This tools makes the calculation easy and quick. It also allows you to adjust their assumptions to better fit your situation.
A web based terminal for EC2 instances that does not require SSH or any other inbound connections to the instaces. Instead it uses the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) API to run commands (bash or powershell).
