Bluetooth-Finder fürs Portemonnaie oder den Schlüsselbund, versprechen ein Ende mit der Suche nach verlorenen Dingen. Dank Cloud-Ortung sollen sie sich praktisch überall finden lassen. Ein Versprechen, das von c't getestete Geräte nicht halten konnten.
Quelle: Heise Tech News
Eric Risberg / AP
On her first day at Uber after training, site reliability engineer Susan Fowler Rigetti said her new manager told her about his open marriage and tried to get her to have sex with him.
It was the first instance of what she described as “one very, very strange year at Uber” in a blog post on Sunday. Now an engineer with payment startup Stripe, Fowler reflected on what she described as a pattern of sexism as well as organizational chaos that prompted her and other women to leave.
“On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org,” she wrote. “Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women.” She said when she joined this Uber team the number had been over 25%.
As the blog post prompted some people on Twitter to revive #deleteuber, CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News that he had not known about the incidents that Fowler described — although Fowler says she spoke to upper management about it. He also said he had called for an urgent investigation.
“What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace FOR EVERYONE and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber — and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.”
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, a member of Uber&039;s board, tweeted on Sunday that she would be working with the HR team on the investigation. Kalanick said she had his “full support.”
Initially, Fowler wrote that she believed obviously inappropriate behavior would be handled by HR if she reported it. Instead, she said she was told her manager was a “high performer” with no previous infractions; she said she was told to move to another team or face a poor performance review.
“Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company.”
She also wrote about a culture of management chaos, where managers fought with peers and undermined their supervisors. When she sought a transfer, she was told she had “performance problems” — which had never been documented in her reviews until a score was quietly changed after the fact.
As women around her left the company, Fowler said she kept reporting sexism, documented with emails, to HR. Her manager then told her she could lose her job if she kept making reports to HR, she said — something that is illegal under employment law. She left the company shortly after.
“When I look back at the time I spent at Uber, I&039;m overcome with thankfulness that I had the opportunity to work with some of the best engineers around. I&039;m proud of the work I did, I&039;m proud of the impact that I was able to make on the entire organization, and I&039;m proud that the work I did and wrote a book about has been adopted by other tech companies all over the world. And when I think about the things I&039;ve recounted in the paragraphs above, I feel a lot of sadness, but I can&039;t help but laugh at how ridiculous everything was.”
Quelle: <a href="Uber CEO Opens "Urgent Investigation" Into Workplace Sexism Described By Former Employee“>BuzzFeed
Diese Woche schützen wir in c't uplink unsere Privatsphäre angesichts immer neugierigerer Software, warnen vor einer alten Gefahr in E-Mails und suchen kleine Bluetooth-Helfer.
Quelle: Heise Tech News
A guide to sexting best practices for you and your favorite taker-of-nudes.
If you've ever sent or received a sext, you&039;re not alone. In a 2013 study, about 27% of all smartphone users said they receive sexts on a regular basis, and 12% admitted to sending nudes (though the people polled may have been being coy). That number may even be higher now, as the study came out just as Snapchat, then an ephemeral multimedia messaging platform built around disappearing photos and video, was taking off.
This is a judgment-free zone. If you want to send a nude (and have a willing participant), then send a nude. There’s nothing wrong with nudity! Human bodies are beautiful&033; But it&039;s also totally normal to want to maintain control of the way your nudes are seen and distributed.
The only way to truly control your nude distribution is to do it yourself. Just follow these simple steps: Take a pic of your goods, download the pic to an encrypted hard drive, drop in a password-protected folder, confiscate your partner’s phone, show them the image, close the file, return their phone, and proceed.
But that’s deeply unsexy&033; And also not how sexting works.
If you decide to send nudes, you assume the risk of those nudes ending up in a public forum, and should prepare yourself for the worst case scenario — but you can significantly lower that risk by following this guide to best practices for ~sensual~ electronic communication. These tips don’t offer a complete guarantee that your nudes won’t be leaked, but they are a good First Line of Defense Against the Dark Interwebs.
One note: If you’re under 18, never, ever, under any circumstances, share a photo of yourself naked. You can be prosecuted as a sex offender, even for sending a picture of yourself consensually.
Reclining Nude by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve / The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Here is the most important sexting advice of all: Only send NSFW content to people you trust. Does the recipient seem like someone who would publish your nudes as revenge or use them as blackmail? Do they seem like they take basic security precautions with their devices (see: tip #2)? Are they generally …trustworthy?
You can use apps that employ the most secure end-to-end encryption available, but it won’t matter if the person on the other end takes a screenshot, and “accidentally” posts it to Twitter. So make sure that the person you’re sending your Anthony Weiner to is someone who understands the value of the safekeeping of your selfie.
Because, duh&033; If their (or your) phone is ever stolen and left unlocked, your nudes might end up in the wrong hands.
Snapchat will display a particular icon (an arrow with spikes) when a screenshot of your Snap has been taken. Instagram will also notify you if the recipient of a “disappearing” Instagram direct message takes a screenshot.
However, neither of these notification features prevent someone from taking the screenshot in the first place, and they could easily take advantage of the app’s biggest loophole: taking a photo of the screen with another device.
Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News
Quelle: <a href="How To Safely Send Your Nudes“>BuzzFeed
Welcome to “Is This an #Ad?,” a column in which we take a celebrity social media post about a brand or product and find out if they’re getting paid to post about it or what. Because even though the FTC recently came out with rules on this, it’s not always clear. Send a tip for ambiguous tweets or ‘grams to katie@buzzfeed.com.
DeRay McKesson
Dave Kotinsky / Getty Images
DeRay McKesson, activist and organizer, tweeted about how happy he was with his new Verizon phone plan.
There’s three pieces of evidence here. Two indicate it’s an ad, and one suggests it isn’t.
1. No one in the history of forever has been excited about their cell phone plan, right? Everyone hates their phone company and their cable company; it’s not something that delights you like a candy bar or good quality black tights. It’s the lesser of several evils. So if you’re actually saying something nice about a phone company, you must be getting paid, right?
2. Notice the hashtag. It has the Verizon red checkmark logo in it – custom emoji for hashtags are one of Twitter’s advertising offerings. Using a branded hashtag is an incredibly high indicator for something being an ad, right?
3. Then we have the final piece of evidence, which should be weighed most heavily: the person who tweeted it. McKesson is not the kind of person who does #sponsored tweets. His reputation is built on his integrity, and as a prominent activist, he occupies a space closer to something more like a politician – people who could not accept sponsored tweets without serious professional repercussions – than, say, a Kardashian or even a Jonas brother.
Shortly after the initial tweet, McKesson tweeted that it was NOT an ad. He also confirmed to BuzzFeed News that it was not an ad, and he has never done any sort of sponsored tweets.
Even though it wasn’t an ad, quite a few of his followers thought it was, and tweeted back at him. Some even angrily chastised him for violating the FTC rules about disclosing when a social media post is an ad.
This was clearly frustrating for McKesson, who just wanted to earnestly share a good deal with people. “I had an incredibly expensive cell phone plan given how much I'm on my phone and the internet,” he told BuzzFeed News over text. “I&039;m legit excited about this new plan –- it literally cut my phone bill in half.” What kind of cake-eating plutocrat wouldn’t be excited about saving money like that?
Apparently, this isn’t even the first time that McKesson’s followers have accused him of doing deceptive sponsored tweets. “It happened when I tweeted about Dove Soap, Doritos, Spotify, and Patagonia, too,” he said (he often wears a signature blue Patagonia vest). “I&039;d just hoped that the immediate attacks on my integrity because of these types of tweets would have ended.”
The bad news is that celeb social media posts are so notoriously deceptive and done by flouting the rules that people are still confused. The FTC’s rules state that social media #ads should be labeled clearly, or use a hashtag like ad or sponsored. But we’re so used to seeing people skip out on those clear labels that we’re ready to assume the worst.
The good news here is that people have gotten wiser and more skeptical about celebrities or people with large social media followings doing ads. That’s a positive thing — the ability to identify ads masquerading as not-ads is an incredibly important tool to have, and it represents a new savviness on the part of consumers. Being able to tell when something on social media isn’t what it seems flexes the same muscle that identifying fake news does. For McKesson’s followers – people interested in politics and hard news – being able to identify fake news (the real kind of fake news from bogus sites, not just “news I don’t like”) is critical. The fake-news-detector skill is so necessary that it’s now being taught to young people in high schools.
Whether or not an instagram is sponsored or not might seem fairly silly. But in this light, the ability to tell when a Kardashian is being paid to promote a product is absolutely vital to the health of our democracy.
The moral here? Deceptive ads are eroding our country, and Verizon apparently has a great new deal on phone plans.
Quelle: <a href="Is This An Ad: DeRay McKesson And Verizon“>BuzzFeed
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer snaps a photo on inauguration day.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO — A number of senior White House officials, including Press Secretary Sean Spicer, have at one point downloaded the Confide messaging app that touts “military grade encryption,” allowing users to secretly and securely message one another. But it may be a great deal less secure than they think.
Cybersecurity experts warn that the Confide app, which boasts a feature that deletes messages as soon as they are read, is rife with security concerns. It also raises questions about whether senior members of the White House should be using an app which purposefully deletes their conversations, potentially flouting rules requiring that they keep an accurate record of communications within the White House. The use of the app by government officials was first reported by Axios.
BuzzFeed News found the phone numbers of Spicer, along with Hope Hicks, the director of strategic communications, via a feature which allows users to see friends who have already joined.
In a phone call with BuzzFeed News, Spicer confirmed that he used the app, but said that he had done so only once, when asked to do so by a reporter “months ago.” He offered to show a BuzzFeed News reporter his phone as proof.
“I downloaded it, but I'm glad to show anyone my phone and that I&039;ve literally sent one message on Confide,” said Spicer. “These are personal phones… I also have iTunes on my personal phone, Solitaire, and other apps. Frankly I think the idea that you guys are writing a story, the idea of what apps I use on my phone, is an invasion of my privacy.”
Spicer added that he kept a separate device for White House business, and that he used his personal phone for personal matters.
Hick’s cell number, which at first appeared on the Confide app, was no longer there when a BuzzFeed News reporter checked several hours later. A company insider said that it was possible she had deleted the app months ago, but that the company policy was to keep users listed even once the account was deleted.
The insider, who spoke to BuzzFeed News on condition of anonymity due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement, said that the primary purpose of the app was built to be a social messaging platform, and that the security features were secondary. As such, it kept the numbers of any person who had downloaded it, even if they immediately deleted the app or never used it.
The expert said it was concerning that senior White House staff would use the app, and that it should not be trusted. While messages are deleted immediately from the phone, the company stores them for upwards of a week before manually deleting them. The expert also said that the company stores the metadata of all its users, meaning that while the content of the messages would not be available, it would be possible to see how often a user was sending messages, and to whom.
Confide did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News asking that they confirm the details of the app, or answer questions about the type of encryption they currently use to ensure the security of their users.
Confide is one of dozens of messaging apps gaining in popularity in recent years, as users turn to apps touting end-to-end encryption as a way of protecting messages and calls. Cybersecurity experts, however, say that many of these apps make false or overly-confident claims. Confide, they added, does not make its code public, or offer details on the type of encryption it uses, making it difficult for independent researchers to fact-check their claims. Other apps, including the Signal app, which is widely supported by privacy experts, is open-source, meaning that it makes its code widely public so that researchers can see for themselves the type of encryption and protective measures it is taking.
In an interview with CyberScoop earlier this week. Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey, called the Confide app “a triumph of marketing over substance.” The app relies on the software library Open SSL, according to a review by Jean-Philippe Aumasson, a researcher at the cybersecurity company, Kudelski Security. Certain versions of OpenSSL have been shown to vulnerable to bugs and malware, though it is unclear which version Confide uses.
“It always worries me when someone starts by saying they use ‘military grade encryption.’ That immediately makes me start to look for the snake oil,” Woodward told CyberScoop. “It sounds like sales puff over substance.”
An independent cybersecurity researcher, who spoke to BuzzFeed News Wednesday, said he was part of a team of researchers who was currently investigating the app and had found “a number of problems… we would not recommend this app to someone looking for secure messaging.”
He refused, however, to detail those problems, as he said his team was still in the midst of researching the app.
The problems, he added, are not just limited to Confide. Cybersecurity researchers have recently found gaping vulnerabilities in the Telegram app, widely used by US government workers, as well as supporters of the ISIS militant group.
During a meeting in Washington D.C. earlier this year, two US intelligence officers shared that they had recently seens a spike in government officials, including members of congress, national security staff, and White House staff, using encrypted messaging apps. The officers expressed concern over the apps government officials were using to share potentially sensitive information.
“On the one hand, it’s better than sending something sensitive over an open platform. I’m glad they are not Facebook messaging each other sensitive information. But the apps give a false sense of security and, depending on what they have downloaded, they may be putting themselves, and their communications, at greater risk,” said one officer.
Quelle: <a href="White House Staff Are Using A ‘Secure’ App That’s Really Not So Secure“>BuzzFeed
This essay is a guest post from the Deputy Editor at Screener, a site for critical writing on television and streaming and the new home of Television Without Pity.
PewDiePie at Barnes & Noble Union Square on Oct. 29, 2015, in New York City.
John Lamparski / Getty Images
This week, Disney dropped Swedish YouTube star Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg after the Wall Street Journal raised questions about anti-Semitic messages in several of his videos. YouTube followed suit shortly afterward, canceling the upcoming second season of his web series, Scare PewDiePie. Some of his more line-crossing content has been deleted, and he’s no longer a “Google Preferred” producer at YouTube — although, as Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku explained, Kjellberg still makes advertising profit from his work.
For those who don’t enjoy them, Kjellberg’s videos, in which he performs running commentary while playing video games, are nails on a chalkboard even when they don’t include Nazi references. And so it’s not surprising that, outside the video game/vlogger community, the online reaction to his fall from grace has been almost uniformly a smug satisfaction.
The fact that this was framed as a full-scale investigation and major story for the Journal should be a reminder of both the outsize paychecks digital video personalities draw (Forbes estimated Kjellberg’s earnings at $15 million in 2016, making him the highest-paid star on YouTube) and the vast, devoted fan bases that enable them. As of December 2016, Kjellberg had an astonishing 50 million YouTube subscribers.
So that’s one story we could tell, about how the tech, money, and celebrity spheres we’re familiar with all converged on the most hot-button issue of 2017: the rise of white nationalism and fascism in America. It’s a slam dunk. But it’s not the real story.
The real story with PewDiePie is not that somebody you’re preconditioned to hate — whether out of personal distaste for his combination of Euro-DJ obliviousness and shrieking energy, or because you dismiss his industry at large, or because you’re incredulous that anybody could make this much money doing basically nothing — got his just deserts. That’s missing the point, because PewDiePie himself is beside the point. He is one of 50 million-and-one drops in an ocean, caught in a tide toward a nasty shore.
PewDiePie is one of 50 million-and-one drops in an ocean, caught in a tide toward a nasty shore.
The online alt-right is built on lulz, and on an insulated privilege enjoyed by people without any personal context for or historical understanding of the things their privilege lets them say. Rewriting Felix Kjellberg’s history to make him a monster — pulled along by the gravity of recent high-impact cautionary tales like those of Milo Yiannopolous and Richard Spencer — is investigative laziness that obscures a much more important fact: that “edgelords,” the boys and men who group together online for the explicit proliferation of hate speech and misogyny, will almost inevitably keep pushing the line until they end up in a truly dark place.
Because PewDiePie’s relationship to his following, like that of Milo to his own fans, is both a reciprocal system of validation and a male personality cult, we don't diagnose it as anything out of the ordinary: We take it at face value, because “men are men.” We can demonize “them” (the ones who go too far) as an idea, continue to ignore them in reality, and then act shocked when their need for attention finally intersects with their ability to make themselves heard.
This isn’t about being right. Of course joke-racists, trolls, and budding fascists are wrong; of course they’re out of control, abetted by corporations who provide them with platforms to organize and speak. This is about understanding what lies beneath this dark side of the internet, and how to stop it.
Kjellberg is not the first or only video creator of his type, but his fingerprints are everywhere. The glut of “Let’s Play” videos and other game-tangential content that makes up the majority of high-subscriber YouTube content bears his marks, his idioms, his pressured speech. By luck and serendipity, his effect on a predominant emerging media format of the 21st century is permanent, generating tropes and formats and standards for expression as far-reaching as his fame. If YouTubing is an art, he’s an accidental Picasso.
But most of the people talking about Kjellberg right now aren’t actually that familiar with him. Humans tend to overestimate how common our own positions and interests actually are, a phenomenon called false-consensus bias. It explains why your relatives are constantly shocked by things on Facebook; it explains in large part why both the left and right are shocked by the reactions to Presidents Trump and Obama. It also explains why Felix Kjellberg is such an easy blank canvas for our essays and thinkpieces: because he matters most to young people whose ideas and obsessions still aren&039;t taken seriously by mainstream discourse.
Among 13-to-18-year-olds, Variety reported in 2014, PewDiePie is more recognizable than Jennifer Lawrence. If you find that impossible to believe, you are coming upon an understanding of false-consensus bias. Kids on screens — who largely ignore the entertainment and news and culture that you deem important, the world as the rest of us understand it — are building their own world: building the future. Fifty million of them. And PewDiePie’s fans, like it or not, are getting something real from him.
“Many people see me as a friend they can chill with for 15 minutes a day,” Kjellberg explained in 2014. “The loneliness in front of the computer screens brings us together. But I never set out to be a role model; I just want to invite them to come over to my place.”
Given that attachment, that not-quite-even-simulated intimacy, there’s nothing quite so disappointing as a YouTube personality letting slip an unconscious prejudice or unattractive attitude. In the earliest weeks of 2017, Kjellberg’s unreconstructed understanding of social and political dynamics led, as it often does, to disaster.
First, The Sun isolated audio from a video in which Kjellberg uses a racial slur during a particularly celebratory moment. A few days later, a steadily increasing propensity for referencing Nazis, Hitler, and anti-Semitic topics – the Wall Street Journal counts nine – exploded, in a sketch in which Kjellberg hired a pair of men in India to hoist a banner calling for the death of all Jews (a request that Kjellberg maintains he never thought they would carry out).
Kjellberg has never been a particularly enlightened individual. His distracted, screeching patter has always contained a few too many “bitches”; his insistence on addressing his followers as “bros” is part and parcel of the unrealistically male-focused view that gaming culture has of its own demographics (that false-consensus bias again). And as an influencer, that means Kjellberg adds to it by abetting it: He is both a creature of, and unavoidably a thought leader in, a nominally masculine industry and culture undergoing extreme identity crisis.
PewDiePie / WSJ
Reddit “ironists,” imageboard Pepe posters, and all the other uncreative online shock jocks are born of a culture that is insulated from real life. Hitler jokes and rape jokes alike come originally from naivete, and eventually harden into belief: Witness so many standup comics caught with their pants down, who then get so hurt by the backlash that they double down, becoming vicious. Projecting our cultural shadow onto their Other — we, the good people, searching out and stomping out those who are secretly not good — keeps us from seeing how these communities start, grow, and feed on our dismissal.
This isn’t an argument against political correctness, which is a vile concept created by conservatism, and it’s not a call to sympathy for the internet trolls of the world. But sunlight is the best disinfectant, and what you can’t see — or what you refuse to see — you can’t fix. Hiding from the ugliest parts of our own culture is putting them in a position to do the most damage.
We’re conditioned to distance ourselves from Reddit dorks, anime-avatar trolls, and suddenly Nazi-identifying furries, and so they stay invisible — until they aren’t. They become collectives, at which point it feels like they came from nothing. But they came from somewhere: boredom, loneliness, and the universal feeling (which most of us are lucky enough to overcome in childhood) of being the protagonist of the universe, who is mistreated despite doing one’s best.
To these boys, rape and Anne Frank are equally ghost stories, equally a path to extremity. The thing is that this breed of deeply aggrieved male nerd will always talk louder, talk over each other, talk over women. Nerds scream because they don’t feel heard. That’s the only reason anyone ever does.
The joke hate eventually evolves into real hate.
It&039;s just a short step from like-minded victim-heroes linking up to edgelords radicalizing each other, just like Men’s Rights Activists, or creepy Pick-Up Artists: Nobody else gets their embattled perspective, their need for validation, their need for help. In fact, they’re vilified for it. And so they urge one another on, and because all humor is based on seeds of discomfort, and seeds can eventually bloom, the joke hate eventually evolves into real hate.
Imagine the acceptable level of hatred in humor, even just a couple of decades ago, from blackface to spousal abuse and “Spanish Fly” — and how it might have evolved, without pushback from society at large to stop it. Imagine that the people making these so-called jokes today exist in a world, as far as they understand or emotionally value it, that is full of people urging them on.
Because we overlook these folks as they travel from A to B, we assume that A equals B; they never “changed,” they just got their covers pulled. We looked away, in reality, just long enough for the change to occur outside our peripheral vision. The reality is that they were begging for limits, and we didn&039;t offer them, because they&039;re too gross to look at. Drawing a self-comforting line between “Reddit dorks” over here and “monsters” over there does nothing to stop them, much less help them. It only serves the rest of us.
Suhaimi Abdullah / Getty Images
We got so used to invoking Godwin’s Law (the idea that every internet discussion will eventually reach the point of comparing something to Hitler or Nazis) that we internalized it, and can’t hear certain terms anymore because they’re too big to let in the door. When you are saying something that big, taking it that far, and still don’t feel heard, you get louder and louder, doubling down every time — and then to still feel invisible?
Then, too, people like Felix Kjellberg and Milo Yiannopoulos are not American, which adds an extra layer of noise between them and their understanding the visceral reality of what they’re saying. The poisonous aspect of that is that it covers their American followers like a blanket of safety: They make their “jokes” from one more hurdle down the line, normalizing it, and dragging their fans along.
Imagine how easy it would be to idolize someone who so regularly can be counted upon to reframe your personal Overton Window — the category of what you think is unthinkable — to include things you wouldn’t have said six months ago, every six months. It’s a wonderful feeling, of liberation and transgression, and it never ends: What gave you a thrill now sounds commonplace, everyone is saying it, everyone has normalized it, and we need to move on to something else. Something worse, or else nobody will pay attention. This reciprocating discourse provides incredible validation, teaching that the worst thing a guy can think doesn’t make him a terrible person, but a hero.
This group-therapy strategy also means granting one another a form of permission: We overlook the degree to which men are constantly checking in with each other, or the “alpha” in any given situation, to see where the line is — c.f. Trump telling Billy Bush “they” let you do anything — and when neither side of that conversation has a sense of authority, it becomes a self-reinforcing system of okays and consensus.
The wobble-and-fall, then, is a predictable arc: It’s the hyperactive child at dinner who gets a laugh, then repeats the joke enough times that he’s banned from the table. Only in Kjellberg’s case, the attention he was getting wasn’t from adults, hiding smiles behind their hands, but from the base he’d spent five years cultivating, pleasing, and urging ever onward in turn.
Questioning this basic framework — of collaborative ideology, of the complex cues boys and men use to inform and police their own and others’ behavior — is breaking the rules of Boy Club. It&039;s impossible to ask the question without coming up against male fragility, against the #NotAllMen defense of masculinity: “How dare you say I’m following the leader?”
With a celebrity like Kjellberg, it also invokes the idea that, if being a “fan” is part of your identity, any questioning of him is an indictment of you on at least two levels: both as a heroic independent thinker, and as a man with refined enough tastes to like the thing that you like. An exploration of your culture, whether that’s video games or YouTubers or white supremacy, is absolutely an attack on you, from an angle you’re no more likely to see than you are the back of your own head. Because, like any question of privilege, its effect is existential, practically Lovecraftian: You think the world is like this, but really it’s like that, and our brains are not capable of processing that way.
Every edgelord and burgeoning fascist fancies himself a Neo, opening his eyes to the secret truth.
Quelle: <a href="PewDiePie Isn’t A Monster; He’s Someone You Know“>BuzzFeed
First and foremost, security is our priority
Microsoft makes security a priority at every step, from code development to incident response. Azure code development adheres to Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) – a software development process that helps developers build more secure software and address security compliance requirements while reducing development cost. Azure Security Center makes Azure the only public cloud platform to offer continuous security-health monitoring. Azure is ubiquitous, with a global footprint approaching nearly 40 geographical regions and continuously expanding. With its worldwide presence, one of the differentiated capabilities Azure offers is the ability to easily build, deploy, and manage globally distributed data-driven applications that are secure.
Azure DocumentDB is Microsoft's multi-tenant, globally distributed database system designed to enable developers to build planet scale applications. DocumentDB allows you to elastically scale both throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions. The service offers guaranteed low latency at P99 – 99.99% high availability, predictable throughput, and multiple well-defined consistency models – all backed by comprehensive enterprise-level SLAs. By virtue of its schema-agnostic and write optimized database engine, by default DocumentDB is capable of automatically indexing all the data it ingests and serve SQL, MongoDB, and JavaScript language-integrated queries in a scale-independent manner.
DocumentDB has a number of powerful security features built-in. To secure data stored in an Azure DocumentDB database account, DocumentDB provides support for a secret-based authorization model that utilizes a strong hash-based message authentication code (HMAC). In addition to the secret based authorization model, DocumentDB also supports policy driven IP-based access controls for inbound firewall support. This model is very similar to the firewall rules of a traditional database system and provides an additional level of security to the DocumentDB database account. With this model, you can now configure a DocumentDB database account to be accessible only from an approved set of machines and/or cloud services. Once this configuration is applied, all requests originating from machines outside this allowed list will be blocked by the server. Access to DocumentDB resources from these approved sets of machines and services still require the caller to present a valid authorization token. All communication inside the cluster in DocumentDB (e.g., replication traffic) is using SSL. All communication from Mongo (or any other clients) to DocumentDB service is always using SSL.To learn more about securing access to your data in DocumentDB, see Securing Access to DocumentDB Data.
The table below maps current DocumentDB features to the security checklist that MongoDB recommends.
Checklist Item
Status
Enable Access Control and Enforce Authentication
Enabled by default
Only discovery/authentication commands like IsMaster/GetLastError/WhatsMyUri are supported before authentication
Configure Role-Based Access Control
Each DatabaseAccount has its own key.
Support for ReadOnly keys to limit access.
No default user/account present.
Encrypt Communication
We do not allow non-SSL communication – all communication to service is always over SSL.
DocumentDB requires TLS1.2 which is more secure than TLS1, SSL3
Encrypt and Protect Data
Encryption at rest
Limit Network Exposure
IP Filtering
Audit System Activity
We audit all APIs and all system activities, and plan to expose it to customers using Portal shortly (today we already expose it to customers when they ask for it).
Run MongoDB with a Dedicated User
DocumentDB is a multi-tenant service so no account has direct access to the core operating system resources.
Run MongoDB with Secure Configuration Options
DocumentDB only support MongoDB wire protocol and does not enable HTTP/JSONP endpoints
The capabilities offered by DocumentDB span beyond that of traditional geographical disaster recovery (Geo-DR) offered by "single-site" databases. Single site databases offering Geo-DR capability are a strict subset of globally distributed databases. With DocumentDB&039;s turnkey global distribution, developers do not have to build their own replication scaffolding by employing either the Lambda pattern (for example, AWS DynamoDB replication) over the database log or by doing "double writes" across multiple regions. We do not recommend these approaches since it is impossible to ensure correctness of such approaches and provide sound SLAs.
DocumentDB enables you to have policy-based geo-fencing capabilities. Geo-fencing is an important capability that ensures data governance and compliance restrictions and may prevent associating a specific region with your account. Examples of geo-fencing include (but are not restricted to), scoping global distribution to the regions within a sovereign cloud (for example, China and Germany), or within a government taxation boundary (for example, Australia). The policies are controlled using the metadata of your Azure subscription.
For failover, you can specify an exact sequence of regional failovers if there is a multi-regional outage and you can associate the priority to various regions associated with the database account. DocumentDB will ensure that the automatic failover sequence occurs in the priority order you specified.
We are also working on encryption-at-rest and in-motion. Customers will be able to encrypt data in DocumentDB to align with best practices for protecting confidentiality and data integrity. Stay tuned for that.
Second, you don’t have to rewrite your Apps
Moving to DocumentDB doesn’t require you to rewrite your apps or throw away your existing tools. DocumentDB supports protocol for MongoDB, which means DocumentDB databases can now be used as the data store for apps written for MongoDB. This also means that by using existing drivers for MongoDB databases, your applications written for MongoDB can now communicate with DocumentDB and use DocumentDB databases instead of MongoDB databases. In many cases, you can switch from using MongoDB to DocumentDB by simply changing a connection string. Using this functionality, you can easily build and run MongoDB database applications in the Azure cloud – leveraging DocumentDB&039;s fully managed and scalable NoSQL databases, while continuing to use familiar skills and tools for MongoDB. Furthermore, we only support SSL for Mongo (not http) for the benefit of all users. Other benefits that you can get right away (that you can’t get anywhere else) include:
No Server Management – DocumentDB is a fully managed service, which means you do not have to manage any infrastructure or Virtual Machines yourself. And DocumentDB is available in all Azure Regions, so your data will be available globally instantly.
Limitless Scale – You can scale throughput and storage independently and elastically. You can add capacity to serve millions of requests per second with ease.
Enterprise grade – DocumentDB supports multiple local replicas to deliver 99.99% availability and data protection in the face of both local and regional failures. You automatically get enterprise grade compliance certifications and security features.
MongoDB Compatibility – DocumentDB protocol support for MongoDB is designed for compability with MongoDB. You can use your existing code, applications, drivers, and tools to work with DocumentDB.
Third, we do it with love…
Modern developers rely on dozens of different technologies to build apps, and that number is constantly expanding. These apps are often mission-critical and demand the best tools and technologies, regardless of vendor. That’s why we work so hard to find elegant, creative and simple ways to enable our customers build any app, using any model, with any language (e.g., Node.js, Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET, .NET core, SQL) against DocumentDB. And that’s why there are thousands of apps built on top of DocumentDB for everything from IoT, advertising, marketing, e-commerce, customer support, games, to power grid surveillance. We are deeply committed to making your experience on DocumentDB simply stellar! We offer a platform that brings everything together into one to simplify the process of building distributed apps at planet scale . We agonize over the best way to give developers the best experience, making sure our service works together seamlessly with all other services in Azure like Azure Search, Azure Stream Analytics, Power BI, Azure HDInsight and more. We strive for nearly instantaneous, yet thoughtful, human responses to each inquiry about DocumentDB that you post online. For us, this is not going above and beyond, it’s how we do it. This is who we are.
Welcome to real planet-scale NoSQL revolution!
We’re thrilled you’re going to be helping us define our NoSQL product (which capabilities to add, which APIs to support, and how to integrate with other products and services) to make our service even better. DocumentDB powers the businesses of banking and capital markets, professional services and discrete manufacturers, startups and health solutions. It is used everywhere in the world, and we’re just getting started. We’ve created something that both customers and developers really love and something we are really proud of! The revolution that is leading thousands of developers to flock to Azure DocumentDB has just started, and it is driven by something much deeper than just our product features. Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how developers build modern applications requires a degree of thoughtfulness, craftsmanship and empathy towards developers and what they are going through. We understand that, because we ourselves are developers.
We want to enable developers to truly transform the world we are living in through the apps they are building, which is even more important than the individual features we are putting into DocumentDB. Developing applications is hard, developing distributed applications at planet scale that are fast, scalable, elastic, always available and yet simple – is even harder. Yet it is a fundamental pre-requisite in reaching people globally in our modern world. We spend limitless hours talking to customers every day and adapting DocumentDB to make the experience truly stellar and fluid. The agility, performance and cost-effectiveness of apps built on top of DocumentDB is not an accident. Even tiny details make big differences.
So what are the next steps you should take? Here are a few that come to mind:
First, go to the Create a DocumentDB account with protocol support for MongoDB tutorial to create a DocumentDB account.
Then, follow the Connect to a DocumentDB account with protocol support for MongoDB tutorial to learn how to get your account connection string information.
Afterwards, take a look at the Use MongoChef with a DocumentDB account with protocol support for MongoDB tutorial to learn how to create a connection between your DocumentDB database and MongoDB app in MongoChef.
When you feel inspired (and you will be!), explore DocumentDB with protocol support for MongoDB samples.
Sincerely,
@rimmanehme + your friends @DocumentDB
Quelle: Azure
A traffic jam in New Delhi.
Prakash Singh / AFP / Getty Images
Uber has quietly assembled a team of engineers in India to work on the ride-hail giant’s mapping and autonomous vehicle efforts. The size of the team and how its efforts dovetail with Uber's broader autonomous vehicle R&D could not be learned, but Amit Jain, president of Uber India, confirmed its existence to BuzzFeed News.
“All I can say about the team in Hyderabad is it is helping out with autonomous,” Jain said. “It is focused on improving maps. Maps for us is one of the key critical aspects of our operations. How accurate are etas? How up-to-date are your maps? That’s a team that’s focused on maps and autonomous [tech] across the world.”
In the last year, Uber has doubled down on its self-driving car efforts and launched pilot programs to put passengers in test vehicles. India, the ride-hail giant’s second-largest market, accounts for 12% of Uber’s trips worldwide and has become an increasing priority after Uber sold its China business over the summer. In July 2015, Uber said it would invest $1 billion in India. It has since grown into a team of about 1,000 employees in the country, with two engineering centers in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, where engineers work on localizing Uber’s services to the Indian market – and some on supporting the company’s global autonomous vehicle efforts.
But don’t expect Uber to bring its autonomous vehicle pilot program to India — a country notorious for its traffic and rule-less roads — anytime soon.
“Autonomous in India is probably one of the most difficult challenges,” Jain said. “It’s not something I see in India in the next 10 years.”
In the last year, Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick and all of his direct reports have made at least one trip to India, and several have visited twice, Jain said. During a panel discussion in New Delhi last December, Kalanick noted that “some of our autonomous work is actually happening in India,” in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Asked about the prospect of autonomous vehicles in India, he too said it’s a ways off. “If there are major unexpected advances in artificial intelligence, it will happen sooner in India than you might expect.”
“If there are major unexpected advances in artificial intelligence, they will happen sooner in India than you might expect.”
“India will be one of the last places to get autonomy,” Kalanick said. “The main reason is, have you seen how crazy people drive on the roads? It’s going to be a long time before my scientists are going to build any kind of software that can drive on Indian roads.”
In the last two years, Uber has invested heavily in its self-driving program and mapping efforts, embarking on a $500 million global mapping project, according to the Financial Times. In 2015, Uber opened an Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, which later became home to its first self-driving car pilot program. Last summer, Uber acquired automated trucking startup Otto and tapped co-founder Anthony Levandowski, who helped build Google’s first self-driving car, to helm its self-driving efforts. In October, Uber announced that one of its self-driving trucks had completed its first delivery, hauling 2,000 cases of Budweiser across Colorado for Anheuser-Busch.
To staff its Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, Uber poached dozens of engineers from Carnegie Mellon University. The company’s self-driving truck team works in a San Francisco warehouse about 1.5 miles from Uber’s Market Street headquarters, and also has a space in Palo Alto. Uber further expanded its self-driving R&D efforts in December with the acquisition of Geometric Intelligence, an artificial intelligence startup the company said would work in part on self-driving car efforts.
Uber declined to answer questions about the size of the Hyderabad team and the nature of its autonomous vehicle work. Still, the Hyderabad team’s existence alone shows that Uber’s mapping and autonomous vehicle efforts are broader than the company’s engineering hubs in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. “We have a global mapping team, including some folks in India working on maps-related projects, to improve pickups and drop-offs and the Uber core experience for riders and drivers,” a company spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “All our mapping efforts feed into our self-driving efforts.”
Quelle: <a href="Uber’s Engineers In India Are Working On Mapping For Self-Driving Cars“>BuzzFeed
Former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski
Afp / AFP / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The former campaign manager for President Donald Trump's White House bid has told prospective lobbying clients that he has access to Trump&039;s Twitter account, four sources told BuzzFeed News.
In discussions with representatives from at least two different potential clients — Facebook and financial company Blackstone Group — Lewandowski mentioned having access to Trump&039;s Twitter account as a selling point, according to different sources who were briefed on each meeting by participants. Sources also said Lewandowski brought up the same thing in additional meetings as well, but it&039;s unclear which other companies he was courting when he made the same claim.
In emails, Lewandowski repeatedly denied he mentioned access to Trump&039;s Twitter account or that he met with anyone at either of those companies. “I know facts don&039;t matter to buzz feed but it&039;s not true,” he wrote. On questions about his meeting with Facebook, he simply said: “Never.” And regarding any talks with Blackstone, he said: “I never met Blackstone. Please make sure you accurately report that! I doubt you will.”
It was unclear to one of the sources briefed by the meeting participants whether Lewandowski was saying he actually has access to the account, or just that he has the ear of Trump and his digital staff.
A White House official told BuzzFeed News that Lewandowski “does not have access” to Trump&039;s Twitter account.
Those in the room who were expecting a detailed government relations pitch were taken aback by the claim, two sources familiar with the meetings said.
“It wasn&039;t a question of whether they believed him or not,” one of the sources said. “It was as weird as him walking into the office and saying, &039;I like chocolate.&039;”
Ed Brookover, who recently joined Lewandowski&039;s firm, said he had never heard the claim. “And we don&039;t discuss what we say in pitch meetings,” he said.
The companies too did not want to comment on the meetings, despite sources who were briefed confirming that meetings with individuals from those companies occurred.
Facebook declined to comment on whether they met with Lewandowski, but confirmed that he is not working for them.
And a Blackstone Group spokesperson said the firm did not engage in discussions about services from his new firm. Asked a follow-up, broader question about any meetings with Lewandowski at all, the spokesperson repeated the same previous response.
Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman is the chairman of Trump&039;s strategic and policy forum.
Trump&039;s Twitter account has been central to his campaign and his presidency so far. The president makes policy announcements and responds to world events and criticism all through Twitter.
Trump has also gone after specific companies using his Twitter account, making corporate America nervous about their stock prices potentially crashing with a single tweet.
Lewandowski recently joined with another former Trump staffer, Barry Bennett, to open Avenue Strategies. Bennett was also Ben Carson&039;s campaign manager last year.
Lewandowski, a hard-charging New Hampshire operative, has been touting his access to Trump — along with his firm&039;s physical proximity to the White House — for weeks.
The pair told Bloomberg Businessweek they&039;ve already signed several clients since opening up their shop in December and disputed that their new roles conflict with Trump&039;s “drain the swamp” campaign message.
“I think what Donald Trump said was, Washington lobbyists have used their special access to the detriment of the American people,” Lewandowski said in the interview. “Our goal here is to help companies grow and expand, which falls directly in line with the goals of this administration.”
Quelle: <a href="Corey Lewandowski’s Potential Clients Say He’s Bragging About Access To Trump&039;s Twitter Account“>BuzzFeed
