DevSecOps Pune Meetup 4

This I had attended almost a month back. I just didn’t have the time or the energy to blog about it. Thankfully, one of the organizers Rohan Nageskar took the time to blog about it so I don’t have to do much other than share a few of the links I had shared and some which I had forgotten to do on that date. The first one was about usage of A.I. for vulnerability assessment using twitter mentions as a source. While the idea certainly has merit and would go a long way in getting nods to fix vulnerabilities in the code during the whole cycle of development, production, deployment, scaling, maintainance till the time the code or app. or whatever needs to be retired. At the same time however, it is not known how accurate the system would be because at the end, it still relies on human input and humans per-se are bad at threat perception and evaluation as per millions of examples. All the wars that have been fought and are still being fought in whatever name is a strong example of that.

One of the other things that I shared was the Intel Spoiler attack which was just shared just a few hours ago or something so it was pretty fresh at the time. I also shared a bit about where the hardware industry seemed to be heading and it seems at least for the near future that AMD would have the leg up. There’s the whole RISC bit for which chips are already out there and lot more being promised in the coming months and year but that’s a different topic altogether.

Incidentally, while Rohan was sharing about using Ansible for scaling a webapp and how you would have different servers for scaling the webapp. depending on needs, I was wondering that definitely the BJP IT Team would have profited from Rohan’s presentation. While Rohan didn’t go much into specifics of things, it was more or a high-level overview of the process, it did establish some groundwork for any individual or team as to how they could go about it. For newbies they could well read up on the differences on webapp. and website . To my mind, they are one and the same as most sites nowadays are dyanmic in nature due to nature of things.

I also shared about the BJP site hack (unofficially of course) and everybody was nonplussed to learn about it because we all have been told again and again the skills the BJP IT cell has. This is when it was almost 2 weeks when the site was down. Few days later, they did put a sort of site back and stole a bootstrapable theme . There were quite a few hate comments, which can be easily be termed victim-shaming and they had no choice but to respond back . It seems that the people in BJP do not understand either understand or don’t want to understand Intellectual Property Rights or to be more specific, Copyright in this particular case. This specific example is clearly a case of copyright infringment rather than anything else. In fact all of the FOSS environment revolves around credit-sharing apart from monetary compensation.

Anyways, some pictures from the meetup to round off the day 🙂

Me sharing some point probably
All the attendees of the Devops meetup.

In the last picture you can see Rohan at the end right in an orange t-shirt with glasses while Rahul you can see in dead center in white shirt at the center. They were the organizers of the event. Many thanx to Qualys for being the host for the meetup.

Scarcity and Copyright

Hi all,

Saw the recent news on Openright and this leaves quite a bit frustrated, infuriated and angry. While my understanding may be flawed but this is the way I see it.

From what I understand from the news link given is that the labels and the big guys will profit from this new arrangement and not the little guys 😦 Also the consumers would not be able to have and remix that music (hence becoming an artist) for an additional 45 years.

From what I understand as we stand its right now (borrowed from Copyright law in England) is right now 50 years from the date of Original recording .

Copyright in a sound recording expires either (a) 50 years after the recording is made, or (b) if the recording is published during that period then 50 years from the publication, or (c) if during the initial 50 years the recording is played in public or communicated to the public then 50 years from that communication or playing to the public, provided the author of the broadcast is an EEA citizen. Otherwise the duration under the laws of the country of which the author is a national applies, unless such a duration would be longer than offered in UK law, or would be contrary to treaty obligations of the UK in force on 29 October 1993.

(Taken from wikipedia) . Now if one adds the proposed extension to the copyright term it would become 95 years. Who stands to gain, not the commons, nor so much the musician on the street, its the big labels and the rock singers.

Now while its in UK, if such a revision were to take place there is possibility of peer-pressure effects in other developed countries as well.

At some point of time its sure to reflect in newer and more stricter agreements then the TRIPS Agreement (TRIPS PLUS) which as far as India was concerned I felt we were just unprepared to know the nuances of what we were signing (or perhaps we wanted to fall in step with the rest of the world) .

Wouldn’t this extension also reflect at some point in time to additional extensions for literature, for additional patent life-term in medicine ?

Few Interesting links :-

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000388.html

http://www.bilaterals.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=33

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080908-80-of-artists-would-get-30year-from-copyright-extension.html

While I don’t think creation would stop, much of the remixing culture would surely go underground and that would be a sadder state of the world 😦 .

Also I’m sure that I dream of a nightmare but we have seen nightmares coming true if nobody speaks out against them.

Hoping for some more light on the matter, let’s fight the good fight 🙂

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