Im running a very small podcast hosting company, and spotify is NOT a good player in this space. They are not respecting the standard in any way. As an example, instead of linking to the source url, they make their own copy and serve that instead in the app, so the hoster does not see any downloads, cannot do statistics, etc. It also add copy protection... They also do not refresh the original URL regularly or the content, so if a change was made to the file , description or image it will not show up on spotify unless you do some custom stuff (breaking other players).
So the break is already happening in this world...
They really do need to do that in order for Podcasts to be supported on very old devices (that only support Spotify's APIs and DRM-ed Vorbis files), which I appreciate as a user of such an old device myself.
That said, they allow distributors to opt into "Passthrough" MP3 delivery to all modern devices (including browsers – just check the network tab in developer tools!), although it's not the default.
If they just served podcasts directly from third parties, third parties would be able at least in theory to push potentially malicious data to the Spotify app (and Spotify users' devices).
As for performance, if the third party has an outage, then it would make Spotify look broken. And who knows if the third party site can serve the traffic well enough for a good experience.
You can apparently opt into something called "Passthrough" that makes (most) Spotify clients download MP3s directly from your CDN, but it's not the default and has certain requirements on your format and uptime.
In a nutshell (I have been in Cybersecurity for 18 years...) one key aspect of cybersecurity is to centralize all logs of security (and a few other tools) in a central repository and use that data to identify threats through rules, correlation, ML, analytics or any other means (SIEM space). Also compliance requirements...
Basically every vendor has its own formats, fields and the way to centralize this data (syslog still rules...) and parse it in a common way (a source IP is a source IP in all tech) has been a pain point since forever. There is basically a whole industry around it, and a whole bunch of logstash parsers have been scarificed. Even better is that vendors have a tendency to change format once in a while, so even some you have will break way more often then they should. Many vendors dont see that as an issue as it locks their clients in.
This is another attempt at solving this. It does seem to have traction for once, and nobody wants to piss off Amazon, if they make this a prerequesite to be on their marketplace then it will actually work.
Back in 1999 I worked at a company as IT manager, and the CIO had me parsing logs every morning. On paper. On a line-type printer. We fed the logs directly to the printer in real-time because he was concerned if a system had been hacked that they would fuss with the logs and he wanted a physical print out in real time to thwart any efforts to munge the logs post hack. Highlight any potential threats with an actual highlighter.
This sucked.
However, it really taught me how to skim logs for threats in the physical form super fast...
I can confirm that we have no brown-outs. Also
- We have a mix of very cold and warm weather, so are consuming lots of energy for heating in winter.
- Hydro-Quebec, state-owned utility has a stellar record for maintenance, coverage and capacity management. It also send money back to the gov to support social programs.
- Even with all that our electriciyy cost for consumers,,entre rpsies, and industrial is one of the lowest in the world.
> "We have a mix of very cold and warm weather, so are consuming lots of energy for heating in winter"
Are heat pumps / electric heating widely used in Quebec yet? When I lived in Ontario, despite having a very clean grid (nuclear, hydro, wind) and relatively low electricity prices, pretty much every house/building had oil or gas heating. Seems like Scandinavia and Northern Europe are a bit further along in electrification of heating.
There is a lot of room for greening at the point of service through geothermal and the like, lots of room for efficiency improvements too. The economic incentives are aligned as well, every ounce of savings in-province means export dollars in on green energy exports.
Power footprint also confirms that the compute density is pretty low.
We built a few racks of Supermicro AMD servers (4 X computes in 2U), and we load tested it to 23kva peak usage (about 1/2 full with nthat type of nodes only, our DC would let us go further)
Were also over 1 PB of disks (unclear how much of this is redundancy), also in NVMe (15.36 TB x 24 in 2U is a lot of storage...)
Other then that not a bad concept, not sure of a premium they will charge or what will be comparable on price.
I'm working on many projects with RedHat, and have heavily dealt with IBM in the past.
I can definitely confirm that the IBM statement is true. Execs signed on many projects, and we were always stuck with a blue pile of unusable garbage at the end. For twice the price orginally agreed to...
Working with RedHat as of today is still, well, working with RedHat. Highly competent people building things that will run well for a long time, and (so far) still at a reasonable cost. I do start to see some changes on pricing (high increases are on the horizon...), and more red tape around things that don't fit in the standard boxes. So i'm trying to decouple some areas from being fully dependant to more standardized/vendor agnostic models to keep options opened (mainly in container space).
This is probably part of the reason why it's OEM-only. That way AMD can control where it's used, avoiding it competing with it's own EPYC server chips.
Happened here in Canada with Teleglobe. All their assets (mainly buried fiber links) were purchased for cheap by Tata Communication, which has been growing since.
Anyone in the security field has used any of these sites and can give feedback? I am looking for short/remote gigs to supplement my work now, could be interesting.
I was a full-time consultant for a while but decided to go back being a full time employee due to a new baby in the house.
So the break is already happening in this world...