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Career Opportunities in Cyber Security
What are the endless opportunities in cyber security for 2021? This is the question answered at last 14th May 2021 Advanced Diploma in Cyber Security Open House. The Open House features Breyvan Tan, Managing Director for Wissen, and EC-Council distributor. Breyvan shared the outlook for the cyber security job sphere in the future and why there is an urgent need for cybersecurity professionals. How do you get yourself ready for the job? Breyvan started the presentation strongly with data from Ciodive that says that there’s a 0% unemployment rate in cyber security. The various data breaches in Singapore and other countries show that the need to protect data is essential. He also mentioned that multiple industries are also hiring cyber security professionals from hospitals to even schools. Of course, these employers won’t hire just anyone who expressed interest in cyber security. To get employed, one must get certified. Breyvan compared the hiring process to driving. Everyone can drive, but can the driver steer the vehicle in the right direction? Entering the cyber security world is just like this. Skills and training are what employees are looking for. This is why professionals who have cyber security certification enjoy up to USD 16,000 higher pay rate than those who don’t have any certificate. How do you get ready for the job? Get proper training and certification. Those who attended the event both onsite and online learned more about Advanced Diploma in Cyber Security through the Open House. Programme Consultant and lifelong learning advocate Thaddeaus Villaruel shared information about the programme in the Open House. Those who signed up during the event...
Ruby on Rails application monitoring with the Elastic Stack
Ruby on Rails application monitoring with the Elastic Stack Recently, at the Tochigi Ruby Conference, I gave a presentation on monitoring Ruby on Rails applications. Here’s a quick overview. The slides (in Japanese) are here. The application used in the demo is published on GitHub. Points to keep in mind for application monitoring I introduced the following monitoring areas: Uptime monitoring Host and application metrics Monitoring logs Application performance monitoring (APM) The app created for this demo posts questions from participants. During a session, participants post any questions they have, and at the end of the session there is a Q&A session based on the posted questions. Some details about the application: It is composed of a frontend (NGINX + Rails) and backend (PostgreSQL). On each server, Metricbeat, Filebeat, Auditbeat, and Packetbeat were installed, along with Heartbeat on the backend and the Elastic APM Ruby Agent on the frontend. Then, logs and metrics for each type of monitoring explained below were collected. Also, setup was minimized by using Elasticsearch Service for data storage and visualization. Elasticsearch Service allows you to set up Elastic APM Server, Elasticsearch, and Kibana in a cloud environment. There’s also a 14-day trial, so if you’re interested in monitoring you can get started right away. Monitoring the various areas Uptime monitoring The most important thing in monitoring is whether or not the application status as seen from outside the application is normal. The Elastic Stack enables easy monitoring of HTTP, TCP, and ICMP using Heartbeat. For this demo, I used the following monitoring settings: ICMP: each server HTTP: Rails application page, NGINX server status page...
Matt Stauffer: “Is Laravel Enterprise-Ready?”
Matt Stauffer: “Is Laravel Enterprise-Ready?” By: Povilas Korop With Laravel Live UK 2018 being over (awesome event, thanks Jonty!), I want to share my recap of one particular talk. Matt Stauffer has expressed his thoughts about Laravel in enterprise world. Is Laravel good enough? Let’s find out and discuss. Let’s start with the fact that I had already written about Laravel in enterprise, after Taylor shared his thoughts that Laravel is suitable for any project, as long as developers know what they’re doing. In his talk at Laravel live UK, Matt has dug much deeper. With valid concerns answered, with success stories examples, with strong overall message. Let’s dive in. Slides are available here, embedded below, but if you want to follow my summary and opinion, please read further. Wait, so what is enterprise? That was the first (big) part of the talk. Apparently, no one can answer that precisely, the only common word is BIG. Large customer base, big amount of data, huge consequences of any downtime etc. But what struck me more, was the definition by John Corry on Twitter: You know it’s enterprise if we spend more time in meetings than we do building things. That led to the main point of Laravel in enterprise. It’s not about quality of code, or framework structure, it’s about convincing people in the big companies, responsible for important decisions and large budgets, to trust the future of the company to the previously unknown tech-stack. They need proof. They need less uncertainty. They want to sleep well at night, feeling safe about their job. That’s what enterprise means – much...
Top 15 React Native libraries that I use in my apps – Coding is Love
This list of React native libraries is not curated randomly from the Internet. These are the libraries that I use personally in my apps. There may be alternatives for these libraries but I chose these after a good amount of research and trying them out in my apps. I’m also giving some live practical examples of how I use these libraries. So here’s the list of top React Native libraries This library is really good for quickly adding simple animations and transitions to your React Native app. This library can be used in 2 ways – Declarative and Imperative. Declarative usage – Simply mention the name of one of the pre-built animations and that animation will be applied as soon as that element loads. Ex: Heading should slide in from left when a page is opened. Imperative usage – If you want to play animation manually then this method works great. Ex: wobble a heart icon when someone likes a post. You can also define your own animations! For complex animations, I prefer to use React Native’s Animated API from scratch. Practical example Check the gif below. Profile page with simple transitions – Profile Image has a zoom in animation, Profile details slide-in left with a delay. Finally, like icon has a small wobble animation when someone likes a post. This library has very good support for Local push notifications. It has features like schedule notification, repeat notification based on day, week, time etc which are not available in other libraries. If your app has an offline-first approach and needs push notifications then this library is the way to...
8 Reasons Why Mobile App Development Projects Fail
Working on any software product is a complex process requiring expertise, a budget, competent management, and taking into account many various factors. Indeed, starting a project is one thing, and bringing it to successful release is quite another. The industry is rapidly developing, the competition in the App Store and Google Play is enormous, and only a few manage to at least bring the product to a successful release, leave alone consolidating their position in the market. To make the success likelier, it is important to know the main reasons why mobile app development projects fail and how to avoid failure. I will tell you about this in this article from the perspective of our perennial development experience. No Market Research It may seem you have found a bright idea that will earn you millions. You may also decide to take the easy route and create a clone of an existing popular app, for example, Tik Tok or Instagram. In all these cases, you risk spending time simply developing an unnecessary product unwanted on the market. That is why you cannot skip such an important stage as market research and competitive environment analysis. If the analysis results show at once that the project has no prospects in its current form, you will be able to save plenty of money and time. Moreover, you will manage to see what you have to change to make your app highly-demanded in the future. There are 5 simple ways to validate your mobile app idea: Want to start a project? Our team is ready to implement your ideas. Contact us now to discuss...
Cyber Security Today, May 19, 2021 – Data breach at an international student insurer, avoid stalkerware and the latest business email scam | IT World Canada News
Data breach at an international student insurer, avoid stalkerware and the latest business email scam. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday May 19th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. A Canadian-based insurance firm called guard.me has begun notifying policyholders of a data breach. The Markham, Ont., company specializes in covering international students not protected by government insurance. According to the Bleeping Computer news site, policyholders are being told the company spotted suspicious activity on its website on May 12th. Data accessed includes dates of birth and genders. The email and physical mail addresses, as well as phone numbers of some policyholders, were also copied. The data breach notification also says the company is now adding two-factor authentication to protect logins. Does your organization allow employees to use the Internet Explorer browser? Do you as an individual use it? If so, better make sure the browser is patched. Bitdefender says an exploit kit used by a number of cyber attackers now includes ways of getting at two unpatched vulnerabilities in Explorer to deposit malware. Victims get hit just by going to an unsuspecting but infected website. By the way, one of those patches dates back to 2018, the other to 2019. Why they haven’t been installed yet by some people is baffling. Stalkerware is a category of mobile apps that allow someone to monitor other people. Another word for it is spyware. Jealous lovers might secretly install stalkerware on a partner’s smartphone. They might tell the victim it’s an app for their own protection. Some spyware is marketed as a child or employee monitor. They come...Building ASP.NET Core Web APIs with Clean Architecture
Published Sep 30, 2018 • Updated Mar 7, 2020 Last year I wrote a post introducing clean architecture and attempted to explain how its layered approach and separation of concerns can help overcome some common software design pitfalls enabling us to create testable, loosely-coupled code that is easier to maintain and extend. In this post, we’ll revisit Clean Architecture in the context of a somewhat more real-world example by using its principles to design and build an ASP.NET Core based Web API. Understanding these principles is critical for this guide and I won’t be covering the basics from scratch so if you’re new to Clean Architecture I recommend you check out my previous post or Uncle Bob’s to get up to speed. This guide also assumes knowledge of other topics like MVC, dependency injection and testing so if you run into something you’re not familiar with please take a moment to familiarize yourself with any new concepts. Get notified on new posts Straight from me, no spam, no bullshit. Frequent, helpful, email-only content. A Story of Layers and Dependencies At its absolute core, Clean Architecture is really about organizing our code into layers with a very explicit rule governing how those layers may interact. The overriding rule that makes this architecture work is The Dependency Rule. This rule says that source code dependencies can only point inwards. Nothing in an inner circle can know anything at all about something in an outer circle. With that in mind, to get started; I’ve fleshed out a project structure that should represent each of the logical layers in the diagram. Let’s break...
How to Use AJAX With Ruby on Rails 5 – RubyGuides
The normal flow of visiting a website is that you load a page & if you want to see new information you have to either reload the page to update it, or click a link to visit a different page. This a synchronous flow. New data is only presented when a new page is requested from the server. But… What if you don’t want this page reload? What if you want to fetch data from the backend, at any time you want, so that you can update any part of the current page? This is where AJAX comes in. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript & XML. It’s a technique that’s independent of your web framework, but Rails specifically has good support for it as you’ll learn in this article. Keep in mind that adding AJAX into your app makes it more complex. Direct AJAX Request AJAX has two parts, the request, which you make from the browser using Javascript, and the response, which you handle from your Ruby app. You can make an AJAX request with plain Javascript. But because that requires a lot of boilerplate code we usually do this through a Javascript library like jQuery. Here’s what a jQuery request looks like: However, since Rails 5.1 jQuery is not available by default (but you can add it back). Note: You’ll get an InvalidAuthenticityToken error when you do a jQuery POST request, this means that you need to submit the csrf-token from the current page as a security measure. Using Rails.ajax does this for you automatically. There is a solution! Rails includes its own AJAX function: Remember, this...
Big Data To Good Data: Andrew Ng Urges ML Community To Be More Data-Centric And Less Model-Centric
“If 80 percent of our work is data preparation, then ensuring data quality is the important work of a machine learning team.” Andrew Ng The progress in machine learning progress owes a lot to teams downloading models and trying to do better on standard benchmark data sets. The bulk of the time is spent on improving the code, the model or the algorithms. “What I’m finding is that for a lot of problems, it’d be useful to shift our mindset toward not just improving the code but in a more systematic way of improving the data,” said Andrew Ng Last week, Andrew Ng drew the ML community’s attention towards MLOps, a field dealing with building and deploying machine learning models more systematically. Andrew Ng explained how machine learning development could accelerate if more emphasis is on being data-centric than model-centric. Traditional software is powered by code, whereas AI systems are built using both code (models + algorithms) and data. “When a system isn’t performing well, many teams instinctually try to improve the code. But for many practical applications, it’s more effective instead to focus on improving the data,” he said. Progress in machine learning, says Andrew Ng, has been driven by efforts to improve performance on benchmark datasets. The common practice amongst researchers is to hold the data fixed while trying to improve the code. But, when the dataset size is modest (<10,000 examples), Andrew Ng suggests ML teams will make faster progress, given the dataset is good. Improving code vs improving data quality (Source: Deeplearning.AI) It is commonly assumed that 80 percent of machine learning is data cleaning....
Top 9 Cross-Platform Mobile App Development Tools in 2020
You must have seen how beautifully your day to day life is bound with lots of mobile apps.You start your day with various types of transport apps, continue it by entertaining yourself with various social media, eCommerce apps and end it with various gaming and informative apps. Whatever the activity you perform is based on various kinds of mobile apps whether it is related to personal life or professional life. It means apps are playing a crucial role in your day to day life. Do you know that developers have to face a lot of challenges so that they could make applications that work well on multiple platforms? This issue could be resolved with different types of cross-platform mobile app development tools. This piece of article is going to make you aware of the top cross-platform mobile app development tools with the help of which you can develop cutting edge cross-platform mobile apps. Let’s have a deep look: Xamarin Xamarin is known as the best choice for native applications. This is helpful for these types of functions such as large amounts of local data, offline mode, and image recognition required to be implemented. According to Datanyze, The market share of Xamarin to date in 2020 is 31% in the US. This tool runs on the .Net common language as it is built on the C# programming language. This tool is used to build apps for multiple platforms such as iOS, Windows, and Android. With the help of the Xamarin tool, mobile application developers can create scalable and robust applications by taking the help of its QA and testing features. This tool is really amazing...
Cyber Security Today, May 17, 2021 – The latest on ransomware gangs and their strategies
The latest on ransomware gangs and their strategies. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Monday May 17th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. Is the Darkside ransomware gang dead or temporarily going quiet? Has ransomware suddenly got a bad name among crooks? This is what many cybersecurity experts are wondering after Darkside said it had lost access to the public part of its blog, payment server and content delivery server. Not only that, Darkside is releasing its decryption keys so anyone hit by its ransomware could get their scrambled data back for free. In addition cryptocurrency funds were also taken by someone from the gang’s payment sever, which is where victims made ransomware payments. This came after U.S. President Joe Biden urged Moscow to take action against the reportedly Russia-based group for its attack on the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S., and Biden promised the U.S. would disrupt the gang. On top of this, one Russian cybercrime forum suddenly banned all discussion threads about ransomware, saying the topic is now toxic. And the REvil gang has been quoted as saying it will keep a closer eye on affiliate crooks who want to use its ransomware platform to make sure they stay away from attacking what it calls the social sector and governments. Are ransomware gangs disbanding, afraid of aggressive law enforcement? Or is this smoke and mirrors? First of all, note that REvil is merely saying it’s going to be more selective in targets. Apparently it thinks that will cool things off. As for Darkside, perhaps some of its money is gone but the gang still...
Understanding the benefits of AngularJS to build modern web apps
If you’re a seasoned web developer, you would have probably heard of AngularJS, an advanced JavaScript framework built to enhance HTML for web applications. Developed by extremely talented Google engineers Adam Abrons and Miško Heverym in 2009, AngularJS has gained tremendous popularity due to outstanding features it ships with. This blog post is written to give you a clear picture of benefits that you can take by using AngularJS in your projects. Firstly, I’ll tell you what actually AngularJS is, and then give you some solid reasons that will definitely compel you to think “why it’s crucial to adopt AngularJS today”. Let’s begin! What is AngularJS? AngularJS, often referred to as Angular, is an open-source JavaScript framework, designed to simplify both front-end development and testing tasks for web developers. Written in pure JavaScript, Angular is most suitable for developing single-page web applications that only require client-side programming languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It’s a fully extensible, next generation MVC (Model–view–controller) framework that doesn’t only run without all possible library dependencies, but also works perfectly with other libraries. AngularJS – the self-proclaimed “superheroic JavaScript MVW (Model-View-Whatever) framework” – allows you to use HTML as template language and enables you extend HTML vocabulary, so you could express each and every component of your application in a clear and concise manner. By helping developers write and test JavaScript code better, Angular makes the browser flawlessly work with any server technology. In a nutshell, this fabulous framework is built to bring MVC capability to modern web applications. Why to Choose AngularJS for Your Next Web App? Below are some good reasons...
The Practical Guide to Becoming a Professional Web Developer
This article is meant to serve as a practical guide to becoming a professional web developer. I’ve spent over 20 years writing code for the web. I work with and help developers daily. In this article, I will tell you what you should learn, when you should learn it, and where you can learn it from (usually for free ). I’ll then give you advice on how to get real world experience and, most importantly, how to get paid for writing code. Author’s Note: Due to popular demand, this article is now available as an expanded eBook that includes a special appendix that puts all the links from this article in one easy to follow list. You can get the eBook version here. I get no direct compensation for mentioning any of the sites listed here. I just want to provide you with the best resources possible to help you get where you’re going.Two things to keep in mind… 1. It’s okay to skip ahead. This guide will help you no matter where you are on your journey toward becoming a professional developer. After reading this introduction, just scroll to the heading that best describes your situation and begin reading from there. If you’re just getting started, or just thinking about getting started, then follow the King’s advice from Alice in Wonderland… “Begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end; then stop.” 2. Quickly get a taste of everything first and then specialize. Money is not the most important thing. You need to ❤ LOVE ❤ what you do! But you won’t know what...
.NET Core Container Images now Published to Microsoft Container Registry
We are now publishing .NET Core container images to Microsoft Container Registry (MCR). We have also made other changes to the images we publish, described in this post. Important: You will need to change FROM statements in Dockerfile files and docker pull commands as a result of these changes. 3.0 references need to be changed now. Most 1.x and 2.x usages can be changed over time. The new tag scheme is decribed in this post and are provided at the microsoft-dotnet-core repo, our new home on Docker Hub. Summary of changes: .NET Core images are now published to Microsoft Container Registry. Updates will continue to be published to Docker Hub, for .NET Core 1.x and 2.x. .NET Core 3.0 will only be published to MCR. Nano Server 2016 images are no longer supported or published. Microsoft Container Registry (MCR) Microsoft teams are now publishing container images to MCR. There are two key reasons for this change: We can establish MCR as the official source of Microsoft-provided container images, and then more easily promote and syndicate those images to multiple container services, like Docker Hub and Red Hat OpenShift. We can use Microsoft Azure as a global content distribution network (CDN) for delivering Microsoft-provided container images from locations closer to you. This means your container images pulls will be faster and have improved reliability in many cases. From an architectural perspective, MCR is a globally replicated service that handles image manifest requests. It uses the Azure CDN service for image layer requests. This separation isn’t observable with docker pull, but it is easy to see when you inspect .NET Core...
Mobile App Development Company India | Android, iOS & Tizen App Development Company | Best SEO Company
Wincer Song – Shanghai, China We are attached with WeeTech Solution for very long time as our Application Development Partner and they have developed many applications for our various products. In all these years, they have always kept their words and their App Development Team has delivered us the product on or before the deadline. They have gained our confidence of vote for their sheer efficiency in work and time management. After all Time is Money for us!! The best thing about WeeTech Solution is that they will constantly keep you informed and involved about their working style and structure and if you don’t like anything then without any hesitance they will provide you an instant alternative to it. They don’t act as suppliers, but as business partners instead. We have always been able to count with them, the quality of the deliverables were wonderful and their attitude is always positive. This is what separates them from other App Development Companies. Laura Coolidge – London, UK Seeing the current trend of Application Development and their ROI, I was looking to get into this business and in WeeTech I got the most perfect Advisory and Development Partner. They managed the whole stuff by themselves which included Planning + Design +Development + Testing and kept me well informed about the progress. They duly kept their words and allotted me the most compact Application for Android and iPhone platforms which increased my audience base too. Clive Rice – California, USA I already had an Android App developed for my business but I was not happy with it. Then one day I came...
Cyber Security Today, May 12, 2021 – Hate on messaging apps, Zix used in scams and QR code warning
Fight hate on private messaging apps, how Zix is used for scams, a warning on QR codes and more. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday, May 12th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. The government of Canada should do more to stop disinformation on private internet messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. That’s the recommendation of the cybersecurity policy exchange at Toronto’s Ryerson University. There’s a lot of discussion about disinformation on public social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But in a report issued Tuesday the exchange says private messaging apps are also being abused by fake news, hate speech, sexual comments and materials that incite violence. In a survey of 2,500 Canadians, a quarter of respondents said they get messages with hate speech at least once a month. Rates are higher among people of colour. Almost half said they get private messages at least once a month that they suspect are false. Some platforms label suspect messages and limit the number of targets that suspect messages can go to. But the report says the federal government should do more, including improving digital literacy so people can spot falsehoods, and demanding transparency from private messaging platforms on how many accounts host and distribute bad material. There’s a link to the full report here. Recently I told you a ransomware gang had threatened to release confidential files of the Washington, D.C. police department unless it was paid. According to news reports the gang says it has started putting that data online. If true the files could damage police operations. Meanwhile the...Open Source Roadmap · React Native
This year, the React Native team has focused on a large scale re-architecture of React Native. As Sophie mentioned in her State of React Native post, we’ve sketched out a plan to better support the thriving population of React Native users and collaborators outside of Facebook. It’s now time to share more details about what we’ve been working on. Before I do so, I’d like to lay out our long-term vision for React Native in open source. Our vision for React Native is… We have identified the following focus areas to help us achieve this vision. ✂️ Lean Core Our goal is to reduce the surface area of React Native by removing non-core and unused components. We’ll transfer non-core components to the community to allow it to move faster. The reduced surface area will make it easier to manage contributions to React Native. is an example of a component that we transferred to the community. We are working on a workflow that will allow internal teams to continue using these components after we remove them from the repository. We have identified dozens more components that we’ll give ownership of to the community. 🎁 Open Sourcing Internals and 🛠Updated Tooling The React Native development experience for product teams at Facebook can be quite different from open source. Tools that may be popular in the open source community are not used at Facebook. There may be an internal tool that achieves the same purpose. In some cases, Facebook teams have become used to tools that do not exist outside of Facebook. These disparities can pose challenges when we open source our...
