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Aussie govts urged to adopt global cyber security standards for cloud – Strategy – Security – Cloud – Telco/ISP – iTnews
A NSW government-sponsored taskforce of industry leaders has called on federal, state and local governments across Australia to adopt internationally recognised cyber security standards for cloud services. It has also urged governments to more favourably evaluate proposals or tender bids from companies that adopt cyber security and other risk standards for telecommunications and the Internet of Things (IoT). The NSW cyber security standards harmonisation taskforce made the recommendations alongside 22 others in a 16-page report [pdf] released on Thursday. It follows six-months of work by the taskforce – which consists of representatives from across the defence, energy health and financial services sectors – to drive the adoption of standards. The report separates recommendations for standards development and implementation into seven key areas: cloud, defence, education, energy, financial services, health and telco and IoT. The taskforce found that there was generally a myriad of cyber security standards to select from, with some embedded into policy and others not. In the cloud arena, the report urges governments to “adopt and leverage recognised ISO and/or IEC standards as baseline requirements for information security (i.e. ISO/IEC 27000 series)”. Governments looking to introduce new cloud services at a protected level or below should also consider “ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 and potentially FedRAMP as part of a uniform security baseline”. ISO/IEC 27000 is a widely-known family of standards used to ensure information assets are secure, whereas FedRamp is a US program providing a standardised approach to cloud security assessments. The report said that standards could be embedded within “any regulatory frameworks or procurement models proposed in relation to cyber security”. Governments have similarly been urged to adopt...
List of useful gems to build Ruby on Rails app
Here’s the list of useful gems to build Ruby on Rails app. This list may help you to start with a new Rails app. I used most of the gems listed below and I only listed the gems that are still maintained. The list I built here is assuming you’re using the latest Ruby on Rails stable version: Ruby 2.6.x Rails 5.2.x or at least Rails 3.2.x version Latest update on September 23, 2018 Usage: To help you quickly build an admin dashboard for your Rails application. Though it’s not as rich as the WordPress admin dashboard, it really saves your time a lot. You can have a complete admin dashboard for your Rails application after installing this gem. Latest update on March 26, 2019 Usage: To help you build registration and sign in feature of your Rails app. Almost all of the Rails projects I am working on always use this gem. It even works nicely with Oauth like allowing the user to sign in or register using their Facebook or Twitter account. Latest update on March 19, 2019 Usage: One of the most of Rails app server I used besides Thin and Unicorn. It supports multiple workers which improve Rails ability to handle more concurrent requests. There is also the gem named puma_worker_killer which will help you to automatically restart one or more Puma clusters based on available max RAM. That gem really helped a lot to handle the increased memory usage after your app run on Puma on several hours. Latest update on January 09, 2019 Usage: Give you an interface between your Ruby on Rails...
Understanding React Native Architecture
React Native is an excellent entering point to app development for a web developer, especially with React experiences. However, it does not mean that React Native is simple. You can write apps with your familiar language, JavaScript, but it certainly requires an overall understanding of iOS and Android platforms. This article is a summary of my learning process on the React Native architecture and the ecosystem from the web developer point of view. The Execution Environments React runs on the JavaScript runtime environment. For the web, it is a web browser. There is a single JavaScript thread, and it uses web APIs implemented natively in the browser. It is important to understand how the callbacks work between the main JS thread and Web APIs, especially when using asynchronous functions. This interaction between JavaScript engine and native APIs are also vital to understand how React Native behaves in its environment. Threads in React Native There are three key threads in React Native execution environment, JavaScript thread, Native main thread and the background thread to handle Shadow Node. In the current architecture, the communication between these threads happens over the library called “bridge”. The React Native team is actively working on the major architecture upgrade and this article gives a great overview of why and how the change is needed. I don’t get into the details, but the basic understanding of the current and future architecture helps to model your application, especially to separate the concerns. React and React Native As you can see above, React Native covers a significantly broader area than React itself. React for the web looks rather...
Introducing Laravel Nova
I’m thrilled to announce the newest member of the Laravel ecosystem: Laravel Nova . Nova is a beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel. We’ve sweat the small details and carefully crafted Nova to not only look great, but to be a joy to work with.In this post, I’ll go over the key features of Nova; however, be sure to watch the recording of my Laracon talk for an in-depth demo of Nova’s features . Preface Nova is installed via Composer as a Laravel package. It doesn’t interfere with your existing application in any way. In fact, you can install Nova into existing Laravel 5.6 applications that you have already built.On the front-end, Nova is powered by Vue.js, Vue Router, and Tailwind.css. This makes for a powerful, flexible combination, especially in regards to customization — it’s a breeze to build custom tools, cards, and fields.Each Eloquent model in your application has a corresponding Nova “resource” class which defines its fields, actions, filters, lenses, and cards. Nova is configured entirely using simple PHP classes. No configuration is stored in the database. Resource Management Of course, a primary feature of Nova is the ability to create, read, update, and delete resources in your database. We have worked hard to cover all of the edge-cases in this regard. Need to update the data on the “intermediate / pivot” table of a polymorphic many-to-many relationship? We have you covered. Nova has wonderful support for all of the various Eloquent relationship types.Resource detail views give you instant access to a resource’s information, as well as its related resources — all with lightning fast search, pagination,...
The Role of Big Data in Mobile App Development
The radical increase in mobile users has entailed the improvement of the mobile app industry. Mobile application development agencies help businesses in planning and designing exclusive and robust mobile apps that can fulfill the requirements of clients. People are depending more on mobile apps for performing daily jobs. And these applications consume lots of data. To assess and handle this data effectively, you need a unique data management tool. This is where big data analytics plays a role. It helps organizations get data-driven understanding from apps. What is Big Data? These days, tools, devices, and people create a diverse and dynamic volume of data. And this amount of data requires scalable, creative, enhanced, and new technology for analytics, hosting, and collection. The big data technology processes data gathered for deriving rich and real-time business information associated with productivity management, performance, profit, users, augmented shareholder value, and risk. Speed is the main factor in the world of Big Data. Generally, conventional analytics concentrates on the assessment of historical data, while, you can encompass the real-time data, using Big Data Analytics. Some top international brands that have used Big Data for boosting the operations of their organizations are: Netflix Capital One American Express Starbucks Amazon What is The Requirement Of Big Data In Mobile App Development? As per a Statista survey report, the global number of mobile application downloads is predicted to increase to 258.2 billion by 2022 and was 205 billion in 2018. This wide mobile app user base creates large volumes of raw data. Raw or unstructured type of data requires high-level analytics for testing the numbers and creating...
A Neglected Frontier: Challenges to Japan’s Cyber Security
2020’s SolarWinds cyberattack, which affected numerous US government agencies, underscores the growing relevance of IT security and cyber-crime to national governments. Not solely the work of individual criminals, crimes perpetrated by state-sponsored or entirely state-operated hacker groups have increasingly been alleged. With cyberspace growing in importance as a frontier of political contestation, states must act; what steps has Japan been taking, and what barriers are there to enhancing Japan’s cybersecurity? The SolarWinds hack involved a group of hackers, , sneaking malicious code into the update system of the SolarWinds IT management software. Compromised updates were then downloaded by the software’s users, which range from . As a result, the hackers likely gained access to data critical to economic competitiveness and national security. This incident underlines the risk posed by cyberattacks that use non-state vectors to their advantage. Though Japan does not seem to have become a significant victim of the SolarWinds hack, its current state cybersecurity strategy is vulnerable to a similar attack due to weaknesses in areas such as its funding and focus. Japan’s Cyber Security Forces Today At the time of writing, the Japan Self-Defence Force (JSDF) operates a Cyber Defence Group of 290 personnel under the control of the SDF’s Command Control Communication Computers Systems Command (C4SC). Combined with cyber defence personnel already under the umbrella of the C4SC, Japan has approximately dedicated to cyber security for the JSDF as a whole. It is worth noting that each branch of the JSDF (ground, air and maritime) has its own dedicated cyber defence unit; these units combined total around 370 personnel. There also exists a small of...
NodeJS vs. Rails: How to Learn Web Development
You may have come across Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, AngularJS, JavaScript, and perhaps the “MEAN” stack — MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS — in your research of the different programming technologies. Newcomers will often gravitate towards learning only JavaScript — a single programming language — but it’s often mistaken as a shortcut to becoming a full-stack web developer. Yet, the “MEAN” stack can provide simpler solutions to a wider variety of problems. I frequently get asked questions like this: If I learn JavaScript and not the “MEAN” stack — MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS — will web development be 4x easier for me? If I focus my time on JavaScript, will I be 4x better than any developer who uses those four technologies? It seems intuitive that we would be 4x better off as a full-stack JavaScript developer, but this is a common misconception. That’s okay, let’s explore why. Domain Specific Knowledge Learning JavaScript alone is not a fast track to full-stack web development. Learning only a programming language’s syntax — domain specific knowledge — doesn’t mean we’ll become a better full-stack web developer. Domain specific knowledge alone will make our skill progression a negligible amount easier in the grand scheme of any developer’s career. There is a better approach. Procedural Knowledge The smart way to becoming a full-stack web developer is by first learning how to figure out the things that we don’t know — procedural knowledge — and how to teach ourselves foreign concepts. If we want to make the long-term decision that will benefit the growth of our developer careers, we need to think of programming languages differently....The Front-End Web Developer Roadmap for 2021 | by Mehdi Aoussiad | JavaScript In Plain English | Dec, 2020 | Medium
The Front-End Web Developer Roadmap for 2021 Step by step guide to becoming a modern front-end web developer. A front-end web developer is someone who takes care of building the user interface of a website or a web application. He/She basically works on creating the visual part and making it dynamic in order to allow the user to interact with it. Nowadays, front-end web development has become more complex than it was. It’s more than just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are a lot of technologies you need to learn, the tasks are many as well. However, if you have the passion and discipline, you can definitely become a successful front-end web developer. In this article, we will give a front-end web developer roadmap of how you should learn front-end web development in 2021. Let’s get right into it. 1. How does the web work? Before starting to learn any technologies, it’s way better if you first learn the fundamentals of the web in general. Here we are learning how the web works and how it started, this is a must for every type of developer. You will need to learn about things like HTTP, domain names, hosting, browsers, and how they work. Here is a list of some topics that you need to consider: 2. Learn the basics: HTML and CSS HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It is used to build the skeleton or the markup for your website. Here you need to learn the basics of HTML, but you might want to pay more attention to HTML forms as they will be fundamental in the future....
Scientists ‘program’ living bacteria to store data | Science | AAAS
Escherichia coli bacteria can convert electrical pulses into bits of DNA stored in their genome. Scientists ‘program’ living bacteria to store data By Robert F. ServiceJan. 11, 2021 , 1:35 PM Hard disks and optical drives store gigabits of digital data at the press of a button. But those technologies—like the magnetic tapes and floppy drives before them—are apt to become antiquated and unreadable when they are overtaken by new technology. Now, researchers have come up with a way to electronically write data into the DNA of living bacteria, a storage option unlikely to go obsolete any time soon. “This is a really nice step” that might one day spur commercial development, says Seth Shipman, a bioengineer at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new work. He notes, however, that real-world applications are a long way off. DNA is attractive for data storage for several reasons. First, it is more than 1000 times as dense as the most compact hard drives, enabling it to store the equivalent of 10 full-length digital movies within the volume of a grain of salt. And because DNA is central to biology, the technologies to read and write it are expected to become cheaper and more powerful with time. Storing data in DNA is not a new idea. To do so, researchers typically convert a data file’s string of digital ones and zeros into combinations of the molecule’s four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. They then use a DNA synthesizer to write that code into DNA. But the accuracy of DNA synthesis decreases the...
New milestone: 20 million downloads for Laravel Excel | by Patrick Brouwers | Maatwebsite | Medium
We are happy to have reached this milestone and thank you all for using our package over the last 6,5 years! Cheers to many more imports and exports! Laravel Excel 3.1.20 In other news, we have released Laravel Excel 3.1.20 with some improvements for running imports on Vapor and working with row numbers, along with some fixes and changes. You can find a write up about this new release here. New features Re-sycing remote temporary file When dealing with a multi server setup (and thus using a remote temporary file), it’s possible for the clean up that occurs after entire queue has been run to only cleanup the server that the last AfterImportJob runs on. The rest of the server would still have the local temporary file stored on it. In this case your local storage limits can be exceeded and future imports won’t be processed (This is especially an issue with Vapor). To mitigate this you can set the new config settings (force_resync_remote) to true. After every queued chunk the local temporary file will be deleted on the server that processed it. Without this setting it will only happen at the end of the process. Remember row number A new trait was added that helps keeping track of the current row number. This can be especially useful when dealing with the ToModel concern. You can get the current row number by using the `$this->rowNumber` property. Remember chunk offset In additional to the row number trait also a chunk offset trait was added. It keeps track of the start row of the current chunk. This can be especially helpful...
How AR brings Radical Changes in Mobile App Development
We live in a mobile-driven world. Tasks which earlier took several minutes or hours can now be fulfilled in the blink of an eye thanks to advanced app development services. The thriving mobility platform is evolved by leaps and bounds by implementing several features of emerging technologies like AR, VR, AI, IoT, and Blockchain. These technologies have made our life easier than before and brought revolutionary changes in the way we do business. In this article, we will discuss the role of Augmented Reality in mobile-app development. But before that, let’s highlight the basic concept of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality is a simulation of the real world, which is made enhanced and more informative with the help of computer-generated incessant data, targeting multiple sensory systems like that of sight, hearing, olfactory (smell), haptic (grabbing), etc. The overall information can be both constructive (adding more data into the real-world) or can be destructive (masking data from the real world). Augmented Reality finds its application in varieties of sectors like the gaming industry, military for enhanced combat facilities, commercial sectors like education, travel & tourism, organizing meetings, etc. Let us now analyze the growing importance of Augmented Reality in mobile-app development. One of the most widely used implementations of AR concept is the development of Facial Recognition-based mobile applications. Users can readily access such apps as their face can act as a password. Another example is providing services based on facial recognition, like Lenskart, where the users can try any frame using the AR face recognition feature. Here, the frames are shown to the users after scanning their face. In this...
Cyber Security Today – More ransomware gangs now using DDoS attacks, more data thefts and an ADT technician admits spying on women | IT World Canada News
More ransomware gangs now using DDoS attacks, more data thefts and an ADT technician admits spying on women Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Monday January 25th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. To hear the podcast click on the arrow below: There’s a new ransomware tactic going around: Launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites, then demanding organizations pay up to get decryption keys for scrambled data or the attack will continue. Denial of service attacks are like someone knocking on a door for hours. The door is a website. Too many knocks and the website crashes, and the organization has trouble doing business. Last fall the Bleeping Computer news service said two ransomware gangs started using this strategy. Now, it says, a third gang is doing it. Organizations used to ignore ransomware attacks by restoring data from backups. Then gangs began stealing data in addition to encrypting it, as extra leverage: Pay for decryption keys to unscramble the data or you’ll be embarrassed by the release of the stolen data. The distributed denial of service attack is a variation of this threat. Organizations should consider adding denial of service defences to their cybersecurity strategies. Typically these services blunt denial of service attacks by spreading the huge wave of knocks across the Internet. Separately a security firm called Radware warned last week that other gangs continue to launch denial of service extortion attacks against websites and demand bitcoin to stop. These gangs don’t use ransomware. Their weapon is the denial of service attack alone. Where do denial of service attacks come from? They...Remote debugging with VS Code on Windows to a Raspberry Pi using .NET Core on ARM
I’ve been playing with my new “CrowPi” from Elecrow. It’s a great Raspberrry Pi STEM kit that is entirely self-contained in a small case. It includes a touch screen and a TON of sensors, LCDs, matrix display, sensors, buzzers, breadboard, etc. NOTE: I talked to the #CrowPi people and they gave me an Amazon COUPON that’s ~$70 off! The coupon is 8EMCVI56 and will work until Jan 31, add it during checkout. The Advanced Kit is at https://amzn.to/2SVtXl2 #ref and includes everything, touchscreen, keyboard, mouse, power, SNES controllers, motors, etc. I will be doing a full review soon. Short review is, it’s amazing. I was checking out daily builds of the new open source .NET Core System.Device.Gpio that lets me use C# to talk to the General Purpose Input/Output pins (GPIO) on the Raspberry Pi. However, my “developer’s inner loop” was somewhat manual. The developer’s inner loop is that “write code, run code, change code” loop that we all do. If you find yourself typing repetitive commands that deploy or test your code but don’t write new code, you’ll want to try to optimize that inner loop and get it down to one keystroke (or zero in the case of automatic test). In my example, I was writing my code in Visual Studio Code on my Windows machine, building the code locally, then running a “publish.bat” that would scp (secure copy) the resulting binaries over to the Raspberry Pi. Then in another command prompt that was ssh’ed into the Pi, I would chmod the resulting binary and run it. This was tedious and annoying, however as programmers sometimes we...
Comparison Between Flutter Vs Angular for Web App Development
Aug 28, 2019 One of the most annoying dilemmas that web app developers face during web development is to choose the best framework for the project. There are various types of frameworks available for web application development, and sometimes, it becomes a tough choice for developers to choose the right. First of all, let’s understand why developers need a framework. When it comes to native web development, it becomes a costly affair for businesses, especially for startups. They have budget constraints, and they look for cost-effective deals for mobile and web app development, and that’s where these app development frameworks come into the picture. These frameworks have different Development tools and other resources such as plugins and libraries that make the a smooth-sailing affair for developers. And help developers to obtain native-like app experience at low-cost. For a decade, Angular was a preferred choice for developers to develop web apps. However, Flutter is a recent development that has taken the digital space by storm. On every prestigious blog and online forums for web and mobile app development, we hear about Flutter and why developers should prefer it. We have thought of comparing these two amazing frameworks to kill the dilemma that developers face. Why have we decided to compare these two frameworks? The reason is Google develops both the frameworks. Angular is a hybrid app development framework that used to build web applications and mobile apps. It uses typescript language and HTML structure to control and develop web applications. It is good to create an app either for iOS or Microsoft OS. However, it gets complicated when it requires...
Be Careful: Laravel 5.8 Added bigIncrements As Defaults – Laravel Daily
There is one change in Laravel 5.8 that is not mentioned in the official Upgrade Guide but caused me problems – I couldn’t create a foreign key migration, and spent half-hour until found out the reasons. So I want to share, maybe you will encounter the same thing. My Situation Example and Error While working on one project, I’ve created a simple table transaction_types: And added just one new string() field: And then tried to create a migration for transactions table with a foreign key, with same syntax I used to do all the time: Migration file content: And here’s what happened when running php artisan migrate: As usual, the error “cannot add foreign key constraint” doesn’t give much details so I was just guessing, what could go wrong: Look closer at what Laravel is generating when doing php artisan make:migration command: bigIncrements. BIG increments. And then, of course, if you’re doing a foreign key from just “unsigned integer” type (as I always did my whole life), it fails. Type mismatch. Obviously. How to Fix Well, it’s easy. There are two ways to make it work: The choice is yours. Why Am I so Angry About It Simple – this change wasn’t mentioned anywhere in 5.8 changes. So, it makes me think that probably it’s only me with this problem, and everyone else will actually notice that migrations are being generated with bigIncrements(). After some googling, I’ve found one Reddit thread and one Stackoverflow post about it. That’s it. Oh, and, of course, it was mentioned and discussed in the official Github repository of Laravel, back in November 2018: Don’t get me wrong,...
Programming Language for Mobile App Development|how to make an mobile app
In this digital era, smartphones are the fastest developing digital platform, which are providing various business solutions to leverage. Mobiles are the most popular device for internet browsing, approx. 79% of the internet is used only through smartphones. This rapid growing mobile market is getting advanced through mobile applications only. Software companies are looking into every possible app scenario to reach on every tablet, smartphone, and smartwatches. But how to make a mobile app? Which one of the many mobile app development languages is perfect in developing a cutting-edge mobile app is coming up as the biggest challenge for the companies. Here, we have listed some of the dynamically used programming languages in mobile application development:- 1. HTML5: Latest version of HTML including audio-video-specifications HTML5 is one of the most common languages used in programming for mobile apps. Also, an ideal option to create various data types like level browser playing field, to rationalize input parameters, and it accounts for varied resolution and screen size. You don’t need to create a new application for different mobile platform. Moreover, being an SEO-friendly language, it doesn’t ask for that much of maintenance that the other languages demand for, especially those mobile programming languages which support one-code base. HTML5 can easily scale to work on every browser, device or operating system. Moreover, It is cost-effective in nature. 2.Objective-C: A Smalltalk with ‘C’ Objective-C is commonly used for building mobile apps and Mac OS operating system. As far as an objective oriented programming language is concerned, the code is written with a unique object which includes their own data and logic. Also, the...
