You can now use blue/green deployments with AWS CodeDeploy. Now, you can choose from two deployment types when using CodeDeploy. The existing deployment type supported by CodeDeploy is now known as an in-place deployment.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com
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As President Donald Trump took the oath of office on Friday, federal surveillance helicopters were buzzing the event’s perimeter.
But the Feds’ eyes in the skies apparently had little interest in Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington. Protests in several other major cities also seemed to pass off without intensive aerial surveillance — although those in Oakland and San Francisco were watched closely by state and local police.
Surveillance and security for public events and protests are hard for outsiders to monitor. But the helicopters and other aircraft operated by law enforcement send transponder signals that are tracked by flight-monitoring websites.
Over a weekend that saw hundreds of thousands of Americans take to the streets, BuzzFeed News used two of these sites, Flightradar24 and ADS-B Exchange, to watch the skies over Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area. On Saturday, these cities hosted some of the largest protest marches across the nation.
Flightradar24 uses both crowdsourced data and a feed provided by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but may hide certain planes if requested by their operators. ADS-B Exchange is completely crowdsourced, and does not censor its data. We looked for aircraft operated by federal, state, and local law enforcement — including those registered to companies previously identified as fronts for federal aerial surveillance.
Both sites have good coverage for the cities we monitored, and revealed essentially the same picture — federal, state, and local law enforcement aircraft were apparently not trying to hide from view.
In the maps below, drawn from Flightradar24 data, the tracks of federal aircraft are shown in green, state police in purple, and local law enforcement in orange. Slide to the right to see flights on Friday Jan. 20, the day of the inauguration, and to the left to see flights on Saturday Jan. 21, when women’s marches and other protests took place across the nation. (Days are from midnight to midnight, local time.)
Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News / Via flightradar24.com
As a designated National Special Security Event, the inauguration was under close scrutiny — federal helicopters were in the air for most of the day. They included Department of Homeland Security (DHS) choppers, plus two registered to Midwest Aerial Imaging and TAFY Consulting. Documents submitted to the FAA that reveal the the former’s choppers are part of the DHS fleet; the latter registers its aircraft to a PO Box used by the FBI.
These helicopters patrolled a perimeter around the Mall and the US Capitol, where crowds gathered for the inauguration. The most intense surveillance was above a corridor to the north of the Mall that includes Washington’s bohemian restaurant district and the historically black Howard University. A DHS chopper also circled around the campus of the University of Maryland, to the northwest.
But we detected no law enforcement aircraft on Saturday, when hundreds of thousands of women and other protesters marched in Washington DC.
Federal officials would not comment on these patterns of aerial surveillance — although the FBI has previously told BuzzFeed News that its aircraft do not monitor activities protected by the First Amendment, which would include Saturday’s peaceful protests.
“As a matter of policy, we do not discuss law enforcement techniques or practices,” acting DHS press secretary Gillian Christensen told BuzzFeed News by email. The Secret Service, which coordinated security for the inauguration, also declined to comment.
According to a DHS statement issued on Tuesday, security for the inauguration involved more than 50 agencies, including the military.
Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News / Via flightradar24.com
The NYPD has an extensive fleet of helicopters, but they were not especially busy over the inauguration weekend. On Friday, they monitored bridges over the East River, which is a common pattern. On Saturday, a lone NYPD chopper meandered over Manhattan.
We detected no law enforcement flights over the city on either day.
Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News / Via flightradar24.com
Both the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department were in the air over downtown Los Angeles on Friday and especially on Saturday. But they did not seem to have a tight focus on the women’s march, which ended at City Hall.
Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News / Via flightradar24.com
The San Francisco Bay Area was a notable exception to the pattern of sparse aerial surveillance of the weekend’s protests. Both on Friday and Saturday, the Oakland Police and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) circled downtown Oakland, where protesters gathered over the weekend. The CHP also circled protest locations in San Francisco, including City Hall.
The CHP, which dispatched a small plane and a helicopter to the Bay Area, did not immediately respond to queries from BuzzFeed News about its interest in the weekend’s protests. However, in July 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters closed the I-880 freeway for several hours, after marching from Oakland City Hall.
With additional reporting by Charles Seife.
LINK: Spies In The Skies
LINK: Government Spy Planes Circled Over The Democratic Convention More Intensely Than GOP Event
LINK: The Republican Convention Was Secretly Watched From Above
Quelle: <a href="Here’s How The Feds And Cops Watched Trump’s Inauguration And Protests From The Air“>BuzzFeed
Ethan Miller / Getty Images
Google removed 1.7 billion ads — largely sponsored search results and banner ads that appear on other sites — in 2016, according to a blog post published by the company. That's more than double the number of ads it took down in 2015.
According to Google, two key factors led to the uptick in deleted ads. First, it expanded the scope of the policy for removing ads. For example, the company declared war on high-interest, predatory payday loans in May. It cut 5 million ads for those services in the ensuing months and has “taken action” against 8,000 sites that offer such services. The company would not specify what that action was.
Not all of these 1.7 billion ads made it onto the internet. Google said that many of them were filtered out during its approval process, which uses a mixture of human and computer reviewers, though it declined to specify percentages. The process of submitting ads varies by advertiser, product, and country. The company emphasized that it reviews all ads in some capacity.
Google also said that a combination of human and technological reviewers make the large-scale takedowns of millions of ads possible. For ads that require nuance or whose scam type is newer, human reviewers are involved. “Tabloid cloakers,” which are essentially ads for fake news that lead to product pages, are a newer type of scam in the online ad world, so identifying and taking them down requires human reviewers. The company also said that sophisticated bad actors have learned how to change the appearance of their ads after they&039;re reviewed and accepted by Google, which presents a new challenge that for now necessitates human involvement.
Cloakers were on the rise in 2016. The company gave an example: “When people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.” It suspended 1,300 tabloid cloaker accounts in 2016, but it advises people to be on the lookout; these types of ads garner lots of clicks, and they&039;re likely to grow in 2017.
There&039;s another category of fake news, however, that Google says it took action against. The company said that in November and December of 2016 — US election time — it reviewed 550 sites that “were suspected of misrepresenting content to users, including impersonating news organizations,” and banned nearly 200 of them from its advertising network. Around the same time, social media sites — Facebook especially — were embroiled in a debate over fake political news that spread throughout their platforms and likely influenced the outcome of the election.
These are the other categories of flagrant ads Google targeted in 2016, according to the blog post:
Quelle: <a href="Google Pulled 1.7 Billion Ads In 2016, Including Ones For Fake News“>BuzzFeed
EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now offer native support for the IPv6 protocol worldwide. Last month, IPv6 in VPC was launched in the US East (Ohio) region. We now support IPv6 in all AWS regions, except regions in China.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com
Facebook is testing a Snapchat Stories clone in its main app after a similar clone on Instagram helped spark a sharing increase on the platform.
The test, officially called Facebook Stories, could help invigorate original sharing (posts that are personal in nature) on Facebook at a time when the company is reportedly experiencing a decline in such activity. Since Facebook's News Feed is, to some extent, powered by original sharing, a dwindling of personal posts could hurt its quality. Facebook has embraced a number of new content formats to thwart the problem, including Stories and live video.
Snapchat Stories — photos and videos users string together that disappear after 24 hours — could prove to be a perfect solution to the problem. The format has been a rousing success inside the Facebook-owned Instagram, used by 150 million people each month, and credited for helping increase Instagram’s sharing level significantly. When Instagram executives discussed Stories’ results in an interview with Recode this week, they could hardly contain themselves. “In the last couple months, with ranked feed and Stories, people are sharing more now than ever on a per-person basis, and more people are sharing [in] total,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said. “We have more people sharing every single day than ever before.”
Now that Stories have proven themselves on Instagram, Facebook is bringing them into its main app as well. They’ll debut in Ireland with an eye toward extending them to other markets in the months ahead. “The way people share today is different to five or even two years ago — it&039;s much more visual, with more photos and videos than ever before,” a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News via email. “We want to make it fast and fun for people to share creative and expressive photos and videos with whoever they want, whenever they want.”
As Snap barrels towards a public offering anticipated to hit the markets in the first half of 2017, it will have to convince investors that it can hold its own against Facebook, a company that&039;s copied its products and made them available to a larger user base, while wooing advertisers with better data.
For Facebook, cloning Snap’s Stories feature is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: undercut a rival with its own creation, and temper a potentially troubling decline in original sharing.
Quelle: <a href="Facebook’s Snapchat Stories Clone Could Solve One Of Its Biggest Problems“>BuzzFeed
We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a new edge location in Munich, Germany for Amazon CloudFront. The Munich location is our third location in Germany (joining Frankfurt and Berlin), and our 7th edge location in Germany bringing the total number of worldwide edge locations to 69. To see a list of Amazon CloudFront global edge locations, please see our edge location list here.
To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, register and attend a monthly office hour session that includes Q&A with Amazon CloudFront Engineers and Product Managers.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com
Tensorflow is an open-source software library created by Google for Machine Intelligence. And Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text with others. Throughout this series, we’ll be using these two applications primarily, but we’ll also venture into other popular frameworks as well. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to run a linear regression (the “hello world” of ML) inside a container you built running in a cloud.
Quelle: OpenShift
In this briefing, Alban Crequy of Kinvolk.io gives a quick introduction to the Weave Scope open source tool for monitoring for containers running on Kubernetes, then dives into using the Traffic Control plugin to test applications and detect degraded networks.
Quelle: OpenShift
The street protests following last Friday's inauguration saw two headline-grabbing acts of public violence. In one, a masked protestor in Washington, DC punched white nationalist leader Richard Spencer in the head, before running away. In the other, a Trump supporter in Seattle shot an anti-fascist protester outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech at the University of Washington. (The protester survived.) The shooter later turned himself into police, who released him without charging him with a crime, and without naming him.
Two acts of violence, committed by two men unknown to the public, separated by one key difference: The identity of Spencer&039;s assailant is the subject of a $5,000 bounty on an eight-month-old crowd-sourced investigations site called WeSearchr that has become a hub for the often conspiratorial energies of the alt-right.
The model behind WeSearchr is simple: Staff or users post a bounty for “questions people want answered,” users fund the bounties through the site, and successful bounties get paid. “Questions people want answered” so far include what is in Megyn Kelly&039;s divorce records, “Are there satanic pedo tunnels under your walnut pizza kid&039;s hangout spot?” and “Has [former Gawker media owner] Nick Denton committed financial crimes?” Just as often, the site crowd funds projects that don&039;t reveal any new information, such as putting up a Pepe billboard in the Midwest or inviting Kathy Shelton — a rape victim whose attacker Hillary Clinton defended in court in Arkansas in the 1970s — to a presidential debate in October.
Internet citizen investigations aren&039;t new, and it&039;s well established that they can be parlous for their subjects. (Just last month, a man armed with an assault rifle entered a pizza parlor in Washington DC to look into the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that it was the site of a child sex ring.) And now — in the context of a new administration that has already offered the media “alternative facts” and catered to news outlets that have published demonstrably false news — there&039;s quite an opportunity for an explicitly pro-Trump, crowd-sourced information bounty service. The market for such information includes but is hardly limited to a new universe of Trump-loyal outlets that are in the process of creating a new reality.
Above: A cartoon posted on the blog of WeSearchr co-founder Pax Dickinson, depicting he and co-founder Charles Johnson hunting “Political Correctness” and “Mainstream Media.”
Ben Garrison
Especially so since WeSearchr may have the ear of the Trump administration. One of the site&039;s cofounders is Charles Johnson, the troll and conservative activist who according to a Forbes story worked with members of the Trump transition staff to select cabinet choices. In an email to BuzzFeed News, Johnson called the Forbes story a “libelous hit piece,” but did not deny having access to the members of the new administration. Earlier this week, Twitter suspended WeSearchr&039;s account in response to its promotion of the bounty for identifying the man who punched Spencer.
In a separate email to BuzzFeed News, Johnson wrote that “I have discussed the matter with the Trump administration,” and that he plans to sue Twitter with money crowdfunded on WeSearchr. (Johnson would not say who he talked to in the White House.)
Asked whether he was concerned that the site condoned vigilantism, Johnson responded, “we have a very productive relationship with law enforcement and those relationships continue to grow thanks to the regime change in Washington. We will likely have the LEO community as a client this year. Our terms of service are pretty clear. We are crime stoppers for the 21st century.”
An update to the bounty yesterday stated “Information on the suspect who is the subject of this bounty will be immediately forwarded to the appropriate law enforcement departments. As our terms of service and disclaimers state, this is not a call for any vigilante justice, libel, or other illegal action.”
According to Johnson, WeSearchr has so far paid out “ten or so” bounties. Those include the surfacing of the divorce records of the David Mikkelson, the creator of Snopes (a $500 bounty); and video of a young Barack Obama speaking in Kenya that was subsequently broadcast on Infowars (a $10,000 bounty).
Still, the site has not yet succeeded in identifying the man who punched Richard Spencer. And another update to the bounty makes it clear that the submissions have not all been rigorously fact-checked: “Many are saying he has already been identified as a poop-eating degenerate called &039;Ray.&039; We are also told that this &039;Ray&039; character is deceased. Either way, we need more CONCLUSIVE PROOF as to who the ANTIFA attacker is, proof that would satisfy a police department, not just an MS paint meme.”
Quelle: <a href="This Alt-Right Investigations Site May Have Ties To The Trump Administration“>BuzzFeed
We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.7, which includes 403 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com
