It’s been about 3 months now since I switched over to Medium from Wordpress. Now that I have had a chance to experience it a bit I think I can provide a comparison between Medium and Wordpress.

Pros

• Simple, easy to use interface, almost never have to drill down menus looking for options
• Super easy to use editor, its basically blank and you only see what you write until you want to insert something, save or publish your post
• “Reads” statistics, this lets you see how many people that visit a specific post actually bother to scroll down or read it. It’s a useful way to determine if you are doing a good job of capturing the readers interest

• Medium doesn’t do the stupid “” replacement with html character codes that Wordpress performs in code tags. This was one of the reasons I decided to leave Wordpress, the ability to disable the “feature” required paying
• Publications allow you to easily setup a system where members can submit posts that are displayed on a shared page
• Draft comments can be left by members of your publication and those you share the draft link with, allowing you to get feedback on stories before making them public
• Comments can leave tags on your article, allowing readers to easily reference sections that they are addressing

• Great embedding support, I found it very easy to embed and format things into posts. Pictures, Twitter, Videos, its all pretty nice and easy
• Lack of plugins, strangely a good thing. One of the biggest detractors of Wordpress is the terrible nature of plugin developers (and users) to never address security issues. It’s extremely common for Wordpress sites to get breached due to insecure/not updated plugins

Cons

• Lack of syntax highlighting is super annoying on Medium. I have not looked for alternatives to the default code boxes but they are not that useful. Wordpress provided some great features in its code tags.
• Cannot really mess around with the blog theme, while the default looks fine it leaves something to be desired. I actually really liked the theme from my Wordpress blog as it was simple to navigate and just showed you the content you wanted to see.
• Medium definitely does not give you as much control of the blog as Wordpress did, however this wasn't as big as a con as it may seem. Most of the time I never used any of the fancy admin features Wordpress provided (mainly because you need to pay to use them)
• Does not seem to have as much help available online as Wordpress does, makes it tricky at times when I want to do something fancy and cannot determine if Medium actually supports the feature
• Medium does not allow you to leave notes for readers which can be frustrating when you don’t want to sidetrack the main content of the blog post

Overall I think I am happy with using Medium over Wordpress. It feels more slick to me and the editor is really easy to use. While some of the issues above do leave me wanting for the functionality I had in Wordpress, I think that Medium provides an overall better experience for writing.

My Experience With Medium was originally published in Information & Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Brian Krebs is a well-known and respected reporter who covers many different topics in the security industry, often involving data breaches and ATM skimmers. However, Krebs has always been unpopular among the financial and cyber criminals of the world given his uncanny ability to uncover the dirt on how they perform their criminal operations. He is also the author of the NYT Best Seller Spam Nation, a book detailing the operations of cyber criminals who use spam emails to make money as well as their wars with competing spammers. Check out this video below for a great talk by Krebs regarding his book.

Over the past week, Kreb’s website, KrebsOnSecurity was under a remarkably severe DDoS attack. Attacks at this scale have never really been seen before (read further below for details). As a result it’s important that the security industry develop some method to provide protection to journalists like Krebs against attacks that in the past would have been classified as a nation state capability.

What Is A DDoS Attack?

If you are not familiar with the term, DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack. The idea behind the attack is simple, but to understand it you need to have a basic understanding of computer networks. This is a simplified explanation but it should get the following point across.

When two computers want to communicate on the internet, they send each other messages called “packets”. These packets contain all the information needed to allow communication between the two systems. When a computer receives a packet, it must allocate some CPU and network processing time to determine the contents of the packet. Normally the computer performs these tasks so fast that they are not noticed by the user.

When a website is hosted on a server, it needs to be able to respond to multiple visitors quickly and efficiently. As such, servers are given a very high ceiling in bandwidth so they can scale to a very large amount of requests. Think of bandwidth as a pipeline, the bigger it is the more data can flow from one end to the other, but ultimately there is a finite limit (the size of the pipe).

A DDoS attack preys on this property and attempts to fill, or use up, the server’s available bandwidth. When this happens, the server is unable to respond to legitimate visitors and the website ends up appearing as offline. These attacks can be devastating for websites because they are difficult to stop and can be launched simultaneously from all over the world. Often times, the senders of these DDoS attacks are compromised computers or smart devices which are being controlled from some centralized Command & Control infrastructure operated by the actual attacker.

The Internet Of Shit

This is one of the reasons why IoT (Internet of Things) is such a stupid idea. These devices are basically never updated and even when they are shipped to users, they are buggy and have lots of security issues. IoT is basically a free distributed infrastructure being built for DDoS attackers.

Katie Moussouris on Twitter

This is #IoT in a nutshell https://t.co/F9oU4og3yc

Kevin Beaumont on Twitter

The Internet of Things

Back To Krebs

The attacks against Krebs started after he revealed the operations of vDOS a botnet for hire company run by two Israeli teenagers. It is alleged that they made over $600, 000 in two years by offering their DDoS service to take down websites.

Two weeks after the article was published, a DDoS attack at an unprecedented scale was launched against KrebsOnSecurity. It is reported by ArsTechnica that the site was sent over 620 Gigabits of data per second. It should be noted that this is one of, if not the, largest attacks to ever take place on the internet! Initially Akamai, a popular CDN (content delivery network), was able to shield Krebs from the attacks but after a few hours, around 4PM that day they notified Krebs that they would not be able to continue supporting his site and he had two hours before they stopped shielding his website. Krebs opted to shut down the site while attempting to work out a solution for this attack. For the sake of brevity I don’t want to go over the rest of the details of the attack as it is already covered in the ArsTechnica article. If you are interested in more details about the attack, I suggest you read it as well as these two posts by Krebs.

What Does This Attack Mean For Journalists?

The dystopian cyberpunk future is here.

In the Future, Hackers Will Build Zombie Armies from Internet-Connected Toasters

The scary thing about this attack is that a journalist had his website shut down by someone who didn’t like the content. What is even more concerning is it means there are single actors out there that can carry out attacks which a few years ago would have been considered the realm of powerful governments. This all means that journalists will need to take even more precautions when determining how they want to share their content. It’s clear that not even a powerful CDN like Akamai can protect them from determined attackers.

Now, more than ever, journalists need to be given protection from the growing threats of internet warfare. If we want to continue to be able to exercise our rights of free speech then we need to develop products and practices that can be used to mitigate these targeted attacks.

What are these specific products or practices? I am not sure of any silver bullet solution, as DDoS attacks are difficult to deal with. The only way (I know of) to determine if a packet was sent by an adversary is to perform some analysis on it, which means having to spend time checking its contents. If an attack is large enough, this becomes difficult to perform at scale and causes a huge increase in costs. Krebs solved this issue by registering for Google’s Project Shield, which is Google’s attempt to protect journalists from DDoS attacks. It remains to be seen if the site will stay up for the coming weeks but projects like this are definitely a good thing.

Ultimately, one thing is clear to me: while attacks at this scale are rare right now, they will likely become much more common in the coming years. As a result it is imperative that we find some definite way to protect websites and journalists from these attacks.

Attack On Krebs was originally published in Information & Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update: this solution does no longer work on later versions of Fedora that switched to Wayland instead of X.org by default. If you don’t want to switch back to X.org and you’re using the GNOME desktop environment, you can enable scroll wheel emulation as outlined here.

I’ve been struggling with this for quite some time now, but I finally figured out how to enable scroll wheel emulation for the Logitech Trackman Marble on Fedora Linux 24.

Previously (when I was using Ubuntu Linux), I had a small shell script that defined the required xinput properties. However, this did not work on Fedora, as they use the new libinput framework.

With the change to the libinput subsystem, you can now enable this behavior by creating a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-libinput.conf with the following content:

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Marble Mouse"
 MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball"
 Driver "libinput"
 Option "ScrollMethod" "button"
 Option "ScrollButton" "8"
 EndSection

Magically, this function got enabled as soon as I saved the file, without even having to restart X! I’m impressed.

openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 tinggal menghitung hari lagi lho!. Acara tersebut akan dilaksanakan di UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta dan akan dilaksanakan selama 3 hari. Acara akan dimulai dengan workshop yang diadakan pada tanggal 30 September 2016 dan dilanjutkan dengan seminar tanggal 1-2 Oktober 2016. Buat kalian yang belum tahu apa itu openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 silahkan baca disini.

Jadwal sudah diumumkan secara resmi pada halaman events.opensuse.org. Pada acara ini akan ada beberapa materi-materi keren yang akan dibawakan oleh speaker-speaker yang tentunya keren juga tentunya. Materi yang dibawakan yaitu seputar openSUSE dan teknologi open source dan speaker-nya juga tidak hanya berasal dari Indonesia saja tetapi juga kontributor se-Asia.

Materi yang dibahas yaitu bermacam-macam, dimulai dari materi teknis seperti pemanfaatan openSUSE pada perangkat Raspberry Pi maupun penggunaan openSUSE untuk High Availability Server.

Selain hal teknis ada juga materi yang membahas hal penting terkait kontribusi, seperti peran dan kontribusi untuk openSUSE dan FOSS Project, peran wanita pada era teknologi hingga pemanfaatan teknologi open source di dunia pendidikan. Bahkan beberapa engineer dari SUSE dan openSUSE juga ikut memberikan materi terkait proses pengembangan openSUSE Leap 42.2 dan cara berkontribusi di kernel openSUSE.

Acara akan dilaksanakan di ruangan berbeda yaitu pada Convention Hall, Ruang Fakultas Sains dan Teknologi (101, 102, 103), serta laboratorium untuk workshop.

Berikut merupakan beberapa materi yang akan dibawakan pada openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 :

Jumat, 30 September 2016

1. Integrating Ceph Jewel and OpenStack Mitaka on openSUSE Leap 42 Nodes oleh Utian Ayuba
2. openQA hands-on with openSUSE Leap 42.1 oleh Ben Chou
3. Centralized Logs using ELK(Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) Stack using openSUSE oleh Estu Fardani

Sabtu, 1 Oktober 2016

1. High Availability Cluster with openSUSE Leap oleh Edwin Zakaria
2. Clustering Docker with Docker Swarm on openSUSE oleh Saputro Aryulianto
3. Women Contributions in Today’s Technology Era oleh Umul Sidikoh
4. openSUSE Leap 42.2 development process oleh Max Lin
5. OpenSCAP and related contents for openSUSE oleh Kazuki Omo

Info lengkap : https://events.opensuse.org/conference/summitasia16/schedule#2016-10-01

Minggu, 2 Oktober 2016

1. Open Source Stack of Big Data Technology oleh Muhammad Rifqi Maarif
2. GUI Prototyping/Wireframing with Pencil on openSUSE Leap oleh Kukuh Syafaat
3. How to contribute to FOSS Project oleh Ahmad Haris
4. Building kernel package in Open Build Services oleh Jeffrey Cheung.
5. Building Game on Raspberry Pi with OpenSUSE  oleh Levay

Info lengkap : https://events.opensuse.org/conference/summitasia16/schedule#2016-10-02

Jadi, buat kalian yang belum mendaftar silakan registrasi pada link berikut untuk workshop tanggal 30 September (Tapi kayaknya kuota udah full) dan link berikut untuk seminar tanggal 1-2 Oktober 2016, kemudian ikuti petunjuknya. Jangan sampai ketinggalan, kuota terbatas!

Sampai bertemu di Jogjakarta!

The post H-10 openSUSE Asia Summit 2016, Sudahkah Kamu Daftar ? appeared first on dhenandi.com.

ownCloud is even more hiring. In my last post I wrote that we need PHP developers, a security engineer and a system administrator. For all positions we got interesting inquiries already. That’s great, but should not hinder you from sending your CV in case you are still interested. We have multiple positions!

But there is even more opportunity: Additionally we are looking for an ownCloud Desktop Client developer. That would be somebody fluid in C++ and Qt who likes to pick up responsibility for our desktop client together with the other guys on the team. Shifted responsibilities have created this space, and it is your chance to jump into the desktop sync topic which makes ownCloud really unique.

The role includes working with the team to plan and roll out releases, coordinate with the server- and mobile client colleagues, nail out future developments, engage with community hackers and help with difficult support cases. And last but not least there is hacking fun on remarkable nice Qt based C++ code of our desktop client, together with high profile C++ hackers to learn from.

It is an ideal opportunity for a carer type of personality, to whom it is not enough to sit in the basement and only hack, but also to talk to people, organize, and become visible. Having a Qt- and/or KDE background is a great benefit. You would work from where you feel comfortable with as ownCloud is a distributed company.

The ownCloud Client is a very successful part of the ownCloud platform, it has millions of installations out there, and is released under GPL.

If you want to do something that matters, here you are! Send your CV today and do not forget to mention your github account :-)

I just released the long awaited PostfixAdmin 3.0.

Right. there isn't a beta label anymore :-) It's more than two years since we released the first beta for 3.0 (and even more years of working towards 3.0 - I started working on the PFAHandler class in 2011) so I think we can safely drop the beta label.

PostfixAdmin 3.0 is now officially the stable version of PostfixAdmin. I'll keep the 2.3 branch maintained for a while if someone finds critical or security bugs, but nevertheless it's probably a good idea to upgrade to 3.0 whenever you have some time.

See the official announcement for details and the changelog, and my PostfixAdmin 3.0 slides (which still wear the beta label) for a quick overview of PostfixAdmin and what's new in 3.0.

BTW: I already submitted PostfixAdmin 3.0 to openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap 42.2. It will arrive there as soon as the submit requests get accepted.