7 reasons to love the Rust language—and 7 reasons not to
Much of programming language design today focuses on creating functional
languages that guide the coder into writing software that’s easier to analyze.
Rust is part of this trend. Many developers love Rust’s logical, functional
syntax that encourages structuring their code as a sequence of nested function
calls. At the same time, Rust’s creators wanted to build something that could
handle the bit-banging, low-level programming required to keep IoT (Internet of
Things) functioning. Rust offers the right combination for programmers looking
to tackle these very real challenges with modern style. ... In some regards,
learning Rust is a process of unlearning concepts and techniques you've likely
followed from the beginning of your programming career. As an example, Rust
requires abandoning the ideas of scope and ownership, which are required by
older languages like JavaScript and Java. If you want to leverage Rust's
benefits, you have to be willing to relinquish some familiar features that can
lead to bugs.
Board members should make CISOs their strategic partners
Awareness and funding do not translate into preparedness: although 75% of those
surveyed feel their board understands their organization’s systemic risk, 76%
think they have invested adequately in cybersecurity, 75% believe their data is
adequately protected, and 76% discuss cybersecurity at least monthly, these
efforts appear insufficient—47% still view their organization as unprepared to
cope with a cyber attack in the next 12 months. Board members disagree with
CISOs about the most important consequences of a cyber incident: internal data
becoming public is at the top of the list of concerns for boards (37%), followed
closely by reputational damage (34%) and revenue loss (33%). These concerns are
in sharp contrast with those of CISOs, who are more worried about significant
downtime, disruption of operations, and impact on business valuations. High
employee awareness doesn’t protect against human error: although 76% of those
surveyed believe their employees understand their role in protecting the
organization against threats, 67% of board members believe human error is their
biggest cyber vulnerability.
Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Cognitive Load: a Summary of Community Discussions
Reducing the cognitive pressure on development teams enables them to focus
more readily on the core business code. Majors feels that "the more swiftly
and easily developers can move, the better your platform team". In a recent
Twitter thread, Majors elaborated on the relationship platform teams have with
infrastructure and business code: Platform teams uniquely sit between these
two tectonic plates -- infra code and business code, each moving at different
speeds -- allowing other engineers to completely abstract infrastructure away.
Majors draws a clear line between DevOps and platform engineering in stating
"DevOps is about automation and managing infrastructure. Platform is about not
having infra to run." This definition aligns to another statement made by
Majors in that platform teams should focus on paying other people to run
infrastructure, and conserve their development cycles for the development
platform. Majors states that the goal of the platform team is to "run less
software".
Hackers can guess your password using thermal imagery
Thermal attacks can occur after users type their passcode on a computer
keyboard, smartphone screen or ATM keypad before leaving the device unguarded.
A passer-by equipped with a thermal camera can take a picture that reveals
where their fingers have touched the device. The brighter an area appears in
the thermal image, the more recently it was touched and therefore the order
sequence can be estimated. Previous research by Dr Mohamed Khamis, who led the
development of the system, found that ThermoSecure could reveal 86 per cent of
passwords when thermal images are taken within 20 seconds, dropping to 62 per
cent after 60 seconds. They also found that within 20 seconds, ThermoSecure
was capable of successfully guessing 67 per cent of long 16-character
passwords. As passwords grew shorter, success rates increased – 93 per cent of
eight-symbol passwords were cracked and all six-symbol passwords were
successfully guessed. Another aspect which made it easier for ThermoSecure to
guess passwords was the typing style of the keyboard users.
EU rolling out measures for online safety and AI liability
“The Digital Services Act is one of the EU’s most ground-breaking
horizontal regulations and I am convinced it has the potential to become
the ‘gold standard’ for other regulators in the world,” said Jozef SÃkela,
minister for industry and trade. “By setting new standards for a safer and
more accountable online environment, the DSA marks the beginning of a new
relationship between online platforms and users and regulators in the
European Union and beyond.” Under the DSA, providers of intermediary
services – including social media, online marketplaces, very large online
platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs) – will be
forced into greater transparency, and will also be held accountable for
their role in disseminating illegal and harmful content online. For
example, the DSA will prohibit platforms from using targeted advertising
based on the use of minors’ personal data; impose limits on the use of
sensitive personal data for targeted advertising, including gender, race
and religion; and introduce obligations on firms to react quickly to
illegal content.
How to Prevent Turnover in DevOps Teams
Even though software engineers like to have a sense of ownership, we
shouldn’t discourage flexibility—people easily become bored working on the
same thing for years and years. There’s also the fallacy of sunk cost to
keep in mind, which states that we tend to value things more because we’ve
put more time and effort into them. Thus, providing flexibility to pivot
when it makes sense can increase overall satisfaction and output.
Accordingly, flexible management is also crucial to embrace pivots when
they are necessary. For example, if a project is well underway but an
engineer identifies a new solution that is more elegant, team leads should
be open to recognizing and acting on changes. But to realize this sort of
relationship, trust and openness must be bidirectional, said Sutter. If
engineers can’t express their ideas or are afraid to tell their boss
they’re wrong, these important conversations can’t happen. A flexible
structure is also necessary to attract talent that prefers more modern
work-life balance.
Why Traditional Logging and Observability Waste Developer Time
To handle the many mechanisms and services newer applications used or
offered, they were broken down into their own microlevel apps:
microservices. Pulling all the components out of a monolith so each one
could run more efficiently on its own obviously required a complex
architecture to make them work together. Cloud native DevOps truncated the
development cycle rather organically. Past monolith environments made
replicating things in testing pretty simple. But with the cloud, there are
too many moving parts. Each cog and gear — an instance, a container, the
second deployment of some app — has its own configuration. Add in the
exact conditions affecting some individual user experience or availability
of some cloud resource, and you have rather irreplicable sets of
conditions. Hence, devs need to anticipate more and more issues before
full deployment, especially if they’re spinning out the process to another
“as a service” provider (serverless in particular). If they don’t do this,
late-stage troubleshooting will become overwhelming.
How to Budget Effectively for Multi-Cloud
The most effective approach to effective multi-cloud budgeting is to
partner across your organization to understand workload plans,
specifically regarding the cloud provider of choice, says A.J. Wasserman,
product owner, Cloud FinOps, with Liberty Mutual Insurance. “This will
provide a solid baseline for forecasting, which can then be used to drive
budgeting,” she explains. “As you go through this process, it's important
to attempt to segment the budget by cloud provider to understand how your
actuals are tracking compared to the original budget.” The best approach
to multi-cloud budgeting is to focus on a multi-year plan versus an annual
budget to allow for both tactical and strategic considerations, Hoecker
advises. Looking beyond budgeting and into financial operations, it's
important to define a common tagging approach that can be applied
consistently across clouds. This will enable common views, as well as the
ability to compare cloud consumption and costs between cloud service
providers, Potter says. “Cloud FinOps solutions can help provide real-time
insight into cloud spend versus budgets, and alert relevant stakeholders
early if costs are exceeding expectations,” he notes.
Email Defenses Under Siege: Phishing Attacks Dramatically Improve
Attackers are improving too because of the effort that cyberattackers make
in collecting intel for targeting victims with social engineering. For
one, they're utilizing the vast amounts of information that can be
harvested online, says Jon Clay, vice president of threat intelligence for
cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. "The actors investigate their victims
using open source intelligence to obtain lots of information about their
victim [and] craft very realistic phishing emails to get them to click a
URL, open an attachment, or simply do what the email tells them to do,
like in the case of business e-mail compromise (BEC) attacks," he says.
The data suggests that attackers are also getting better at analyzing
defensive technologies and determining their limitations. To get around
systems that detect malicious URLs, for example, cybercriminals are
increasingly using dynamic websites that may appear legitimate when an
email is sent at 2 a.m., for example, but will present a different site at
8 a.m., when the worker opens the message.
A Guide to Process Mapping for Seamless Software Testing
Process mapping helps businesses and companies to be more efficient by
providing insight into the processes of that business or company. Process
mapping helps to identify bottlenecks, repetitions, and delays in the flow
of a process, as well as helping to identify boundaries, responsibilities,
effectiveness metrics, and set a schedule baseline. When mapping a
process, you identify each step, draw each step using the appropriate
shape or symbol, and show the flow by drawing arrows to connect the steps.
This can be done by hand or using process mapping software. ... There are
two ways process mapping can help software testers in coding and
debugging: process mapping for debugging and process mapping for control
flow and statistical analysis. Every software developer can tell you about
the drudgery of debugging a piece of software. Developers can spend hours
combing through code trying to find the piece that is generating an error
or incorrect output.
Quote for the day:
"A throne is only a bench covered
with velvet." -- Napoleon Bonaparte
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