#ftp cloud service

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[meret118]

The Department of Homeland Security plans to use four-legged robot dogs, similar to those developed by Boston Dynamics, in raids on suspects. The robots will be used to jam networks, disable devices, communicate with humans and otherwise act as walking "denial of service attacks."

. . .

Everyday villains don't have robot dogs, but savvy homeowners surely already know that wireless cameras are easily disabled with cheap WiFi-jamming gadgets. Disabling a Ring-type camera is even easier. Home security calls for wired gear, not running the wires outside, and having the footage copied to the cloud automatically—even cheapo Chinese camera sets can dump over FTP.

[livseses]

Idk if I'm onto something at all, but I think I connected two dots of frustration just now.

Okay so, I'm fucking around in my phone. Still hype that FTP is built into the file explorer. Genuinely, that's a solidly good thing and it's a damn shame that doesn't exist for literally every file browser. But when I go to look for photos, I realize it doesn't match up with the filesystem. All of our pictures in the "bonibel" album in our gallery are just scattered haphazardly throughout DCIM and Downloads. And when we use another app (Element in this case) to pull up a picture, it's using yet another method of fetching files, unless we go through 2-3 extra screens to get to the file explorer.

And when I was explaining this annoyance to my gf, I recalled a Tom Scott video where he talked about how gmail's labels work and took the place of folders there. Recall ofc is hazy and needs plenty of salt, but what we remember was that the way emails are organized in gmail is that they're all just in one spot and labels are attached to just filter them out.

And I'm just like, really annoyed by these two instances of taking our directories away. Directories/folders are, if not the best way of organizing stuff, the way that all modern operating systems are built upon already. Organizing stuff into folders (for us at least) is incredibly intuitive since that's how it's done in every other computer that's not an appliance. (And it's done in these appliances too, they just don't let you get into them)

Idk, this is a bit of a late night ramble, but I'm frustrated, annoyed, and downright worried about the way tech is going. Corpos don't want us owning anything. They don't want us fucking with our devices. They want you to replace your computer/phone/console/tablet with a new one instead of any ability to extend its life yourself. Everything is locked away and obfuscated so they can keep you on the thing the way they want it. Cloud services. Subscriptions. Forced automatic updates that install adware. App store monopolies. It's all this shitty capitalist takeover of quite possibly the greatest invention in human history.

[vnetindiawebhost]

Unlimited Shared Hosting - Is it Really Reliable?

Shared web hosting, VPS and Cloud offers consist of hosting several websites on the same server. This type of hosting meets a need for flexibility for administrators of private web platforms.

But, unlimited shared hosting offers are becoming more and more frequent. What are the benefits of this web hosting solution? Is it really reliable? Here is the point of this article.

Web hosting with a high level of performance Contrary to popular belief, hosting a website on a shared server is not synonymous with minimal performance. On the contrary, it can even guarantee a high level of performance (in the same way as a dedicated server).

Significant progress has been made in this direction in recent years, which makes it possible to partition resources between the hosts.

Today, with unlimited shared hosting, you benefit from storage space and substantial RAM to run your website optimally. Some web hosts even offer accounts that can operate up to 12 CPU threads and 48G of RAM.

This is way beyond what some dedicated servers can offer. The absence of limits also concerns traffic, the number of websites and email boxes.

Optimized web hosting Another important aspect is that most shared web servers are optimized for CMS. They, therefore, offer more flexibility and fluidity in the management and administration of platforms created with content management software.

Thus, if you are the administrator of an e-commerce site or the showcase site of an SME, shared hosting, with a quality host, is perfectly suited to meet your performance needs.

But to make the most of the many advantages offered by subscribing to a shared web hosting offer, you have to choose your service provider carefully. On the o2switch platform , for example, you can benefit from an unlimited high-performance hosting service that incorporates the latest technological innovations in the field.

This web host provides its customers with high-end servers with an intuitive and fully secure technical interface. The proposed offer is unique, complete and suitable for various uses.

Such web hosting services offer good value for money and generally have a human-sized team that is really responsive in the event of a problem.

Unlike a dedicated server, subscribing to an unlimited hosting offer does not incur hardware maintenance and administration costs. It is the host himself who takes care of all the expenses of maintenance and repairs.

This also allows the owners of the hosted websites to devote themselves entirely to their core business. It is a very practical solution for SMEs and modest e-commerce shops.

Easy to manage server space The choice of such a solution to host a website makes it possible to obtain server space that is easy to administer. Most hosts offering this service provide their customers with configuration tools that allow them to easily manage web spaces.

With the technical interface of your shared server space, you can manage your FTP accounts, your databases, your emails and your SSL certificates.

Depending on the web host, you may also have access to many open-source applications that will help you with various tasks. All this in a few clicks and in an intuitive way. This is very convenient for beginners who want to take over the administration of their site themselves.

An important security guarantee When you subscribe to a shared web hosting offer, the service provider takes care of the administration of the server. It takes care of installing security updates and correcting any vulnerabilities.

This security watch provided by the web host is a very important guarantee for website owners.

And besides, with most serious hosts, the security offered by shared servers is as effective as that offered by dedicated servers. In both cases, the protection of customer data is taken very seriously.

In addition, choosing shared web hosting also allows you to panic less in the event of malicious attacks. You will only have to contact the server administrator, that is to say, your web host, so that the appropriate corrective measures can be taken. Shared hosting service providers are usually very responsive.

[livseses]

Here's a fun thing that might help if you're savvy enough to figure out how to install:

https://chibisafe.moe/

It's a cloud file uploader but the cloud is whatever computer you set it up on.

You can also find free DNS servers out there so you can use a URL for yourself instead of an IP address.

Or you could also look into FTP server!

Like, it's been so nice to not be reliant on cloud hosting services, and just save stuff to our HDD in our home computer.

I am begging people to use LibreOffice and personal storage devices like hard drives or USB sticks instead of relying 100% on Google Docs. LibreOffice is free and open-source, it saves files to your own computer, and it lets you save as many different file types. You can write in it, format ebooks in it, and do everything you might possibly need to do as a writer.

"Oh, but I'll lose my USB stick--" Fine, back things up in whatever cloud you use as a form of extra protection, but you should also try your absolute damnedest to also put them on some form of storage that isn't a cloud.

I know it's not accessible to everyone, but if you at all have the ability, don't rely on shit that lives on other people's computers. Especially with everything going on with AI theft and aggressive censorship of adult media. If you don't store your files on your own personal computer that you have control over, your files aren't fully yours, and they're at the whims of whoever owns the cloud.

Learn where your files are stored and how to access them. Get into the habit of backing up your files to your own personal storage. Even if you're not up for intense tech research and you don't care about how the computer actually works, please stop letting your art live in corporate clouds.

[atplblog]

Price: [price_with_discount] (as of [price_update_date] - Details) [ad_1] From the manufacturer Powerful, scalable, and versatile Synology DS1621+ is a powerful and compact 6-bay network attached storage solution designed to store and protect critical data assets. Today’s growing amount of unstructured data requires smarter and increasingly higher performance methods of storing, accessing, and collaborating. Designed for scalability, DS1621+ enables you to start small, then expand as your data grows. Turbocharge and expand it DS1621+'s dual M.2 2280 slots allow NVMe SSD caching to boost performance by 20x or more for commonly accessed data. It also supports an optional 10GbE NIC for faster network environments and more concurrent users. AMD Ryzen quad-core 2.2 GHz CPU 4 GB DDR4, expandable up to 32GB Up to 110,000 4K random read IOPS and 2300 MB/s sequential write speeds Dual M.2 2280 slots for NVMe Cache Supports 10GbE SFP+ / RJ-45 NIC for turbocharging existing workflows File sharing and syncing With comprehensive support for all major file sharing protocols — like CIFS, AFP, NFS, FTP and more — DiskStation lets you centralize files in one place and access them using any device. Take files on the road or easily share them with other people, thanks to Synology's easy file sharing and syncing software. Bulletproof data backup Ensure data remains safe by backing up your computers, servers, and virtual machines to DiskStation, and defend yourself from human-error or ransomware with the multi-version backup. Finally, avoid disaster with the ability to easily back up DiskStation to an offsite location or to any major cloud service. Virtualization ready With support for VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft Hyper-V, DiskStation serves as a seamless storage solution for virtualization environments. Additionally, Synology’s Virtual Machine Manager also lets you set up and run various virtual machines directly on DiskStation, including Windows, Linux, and Virtual DSM. Smart video surveillance Make your own video surveillance hub. Surveillance Station helps you protect your home or business by offering the ability to manage multiple network cameras, check live camera feeds from anywhere with the mobile app, catch suspicious incidents quickly with intelligent alerts, and easily find relevant recordings. 174% performance boost with over 110,000 4K random read IOPS2

Built-in M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots permit cache acceleration without occupying storage drive bays Flexibly scale up to 16 drives to increase storage capacity as demand grows Back up critical data and reduce your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) with Snapshot Replication Build an on-premises, multi-user collaboration environment with fine-grained control [ad_2]

[howzitsa]

TP-Link Archer AX20 AX1800 Dual Band Wifi 6 Router FEATURES: Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6: Equipped with the latest wireless technology, Wi-Fi 6, for faster speeds, greater capacity, and reduced network congestion Next-Gen 1.8Gbps Speeds: Enjoy smooth streaming, downloading, and gaming all without buffering with Wi-Fi speeds of 1.8Gbps Connect More Devices: Wi-Fi 6 technology communicates more data to more devices using revolutionary OFDMA technology while simultaneously reducing lag Quad-Core Processing: The 1.5GHz quad-core CPU ensures communications between your router and all connected devices are smooth Extensive Coverage: Beamforming, independent FEM, and four antennas combine to deliver focused reception to devices far away Increased Battery Life: Target Wake Time technology reduces your devices�� power consumption to extend their battery life USB Easy Sharing: A USB 2.0 Port enables easy file sharing within your network or building private Cloud Storage Easy Setup: Set up your router in minutes with the powerful TP-Link Tether App Backward Compatible: Supports all previous 802.11 standards and all Wi-Fi devices WIRELESS Standards Wi-Fi 6 IEEE 802.11ax/ac/n/a 5 GHz IEEE 802.11ax/n/b/g 2.4 GHz WiFi Speeds AX1800 5 GHz: 1201 Mbps (802.11ax) 2.4 GHz: 574 Mbps (802.11ax) WiFi Range 3 Bedroom Houses 4× Fixed High-Performance Antennas Multiple antennas form a signal-boosting array to cover more directions and large areas Beamforming Concentrates wireless signal strength towards clients to expand WiFi range High-Power FEM Improves transmission power to strengthen signal coverage WiFi Capacity High Dual-Band Allocate devices to different bands for optimal performance OFDMA Simultaneously communicates with multiple Wi-Fi 6 clients Airtime Fairness Improves network efficiency by limiting excessive occupation 4 Streams Connect your devices to more bandwidth Working Modes Router Mode Access Point Mode HARDWARE Processor 1.5 GHz Quad-Core CPU Ethernet Ports 1× Gigabit WAN Port 4× Gigabit LAN Ports USB Support 1× USB 2.0 Port Supported Partition Formats: NTFS, exFAT, HFS+, FAT32 Supported Functions: Apple Time Machine FTP Server Media Server Samba Server Buttons WPS/Wi-Fi Button Power On/Off Button LED On/Off Button Reset Button Power 12 V ⎓ 1.5 A SECURITY WiFi Encryption WPA WPA2 WPA3 WPA/WPA2-Enterprise (802.1x) Network Security SPI Firewall Access Control IP & MAC Binding Application Layer Gateway Guest Network 1× 5 GHz Guest Network 1× 2.4 GHz Guest Network VPN Server OpenVPN PPTP SOFTWARE Protocols IPv4 IPv6 Parental Controls URL Filtering Time Controls WAN Types Dynamic IP Static IP PPPoE PPTP L2TP Quality of Service QoS by Device Cloud Service Auto Firmware Upgrade OTA Firmware Upgrade TP-Link ID DDNS NAT Forwarding Port Forwarding Port Triggering DMZ UPnP IPTV IGMP Proxy IGMP Snooping Bridge Tag VLAN DHCP Address Reservation DHCP Client List Server DDNS TP-Link NO-IP DynDNS Management Tether App Webpage PHYSICAL Dimensions (W×D×H) 10.2 × 5.3 ×1.5 in (260.2 × 135.0 × 38.6 mm) Package Contents Wi-Fi Router Archer AX20 Power Adapter RJ45 Ethernet Cable Quick Installation Guide OTHER System Requirements Internet Explorer 11+, Firefox 12.0+, Chrome 20.0+, Safari 4.0+, or other JavaScript-enabled browser Cable or DSL Modem (if needed) Subscription with an internet service provider (for internet access) Certifications FCC, CE, RoHS Environment Operating Temperature: 0℃~40℃ (32℉ ~104℉) Storage Temperature: -40℃~70℃ (-40℉ ~158℉) Operating Humidity: 10%~90% non-condensing Storage Humidity: 5%~90% non-condensing TEST DATA WiFi Transmission Power CE:

[aitoolswhitehattoolbox]

Manager Cloud Engineering

and services (DNS, HTTP(S), SSH, FTP, SMTP, DHCP, TCP,IP etc) Understanding in any Languages Python, Power shell, Bash, Node.JS�� Apply Now

[centizen]

Serverless Computing – Is Serverless the New Future?

Technology often introduces a jargon of words and before we can truly understand what that means, more new technology has come and gone. This is getting changed around in this Internet era. So, lemme help you understand what’s the new buzzword “Serverless” is all about.

You spend a good deal of time building and deploying apps, but 3/4th of your time is spent managing them.

What exactly is Serverless? When I first heard the term, here is what popped into my head, “Is it less Server or no server?!”. Ironically, Serverless involves servers but you don’t have to manage them, somebody else (cloud-providers) will do that for you. Also it is a cloud-based execution model (It defines how a work takes place). The code runs in containers that are event-triggered and managed by your cloud provider. How could this be cost-effective? You are only metered for the execution and not for the capacity. i.e., You are only charged when your code is instantiated unto it ends execution.

Applications that significantly depend on third-party services (BaaS) or on custom code that runs in ephemeral containers (FaaS) are the ones that fall under Serverless.

What Serverless proposes for developers?

As a developer, you can focus on your product rather than worrying about managing operating servers or runtimes both on and off cloud (a win-win situation). And tbh, the modern infrastructure could be overwhelming and if you look at it closely, organizations are spending a rather lot of time debugging and managing the infrastructure. So to clearly define this, we can say that Serverless is a combination of BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) and FaaS (Function-as-a-Service).

Serverless lets you build applications with more flexibility and agility in a budget you don’t have to fret about. Serverless promises possibilities for carrying out business needs in a much more ideal manner.

A Serverless reality

It is not that servers are troublesome except they are time-consuming. Servers act as computers that accept requests from client machines and delivers data. Web servers, FTP servers, email servers are all examples of server computing. Consider a web server. When a user needs to access a page on the internet. She/He does this by sending requests to the webserver through a browser. The web server sends data based on the request.

With its ideal business nature, some might mistaken Serverless to be a conceptual fantasy whereas, enterprises are implementing them, NOW. Here are some Serverless Service Providers AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk, Alibaba Function Compute, Auth0��Webtask, Kubeless. Who uses these? Only popular sites like Netflix, Telenor etc., use this. Native cloud providers allow to insert, update and deploy code so that the company’s need not worry about the infrastructures & security.

Should you choose Serverless? And, why?

No physical server is involved. Since you are not going to maintain these physically, you need not worry about management and scalability. You will be allocated resources based on your demands & requirements. You don’t have to pay for idle time only for the time you run & deploy your code. Eliminating the need for pre/over — provision, and storage capacity cost.

Conclusion

Serverless could benefit almost every organization. However, if you are still having thoughts about that you can try out by little before investing your energy. You may think that Serverless is just another hype, it may or may not be however the concepts behind this has a much higher possibility when combined with what other technologies both evolving & evolved are about to offer.

[config-nilesh]

Deploying Laravel Applications to the Cloud

Deploying a Laravel application to the cloud offers several advantages, including scalability, ease of management, and the ability to leverage various cloud-based tools and services. In this guide, we will explore the steps to deploy a Laravel application to the cloud using platforms like AWS, DigitalOcean, and Heroku. We'll also touch on best practices for server configuration, environment variables, and deployment automation.

1. Preparing Your Laravel Application

Before deploying, it’s essential to ensure that your Laravel application is production-ready. Here are some preparatory steps:

Update Dependencies: Run composer install --optimize-autoloader --no-dev to ensure that only production dependencies are installed.

Environment Configuration: Make sure your .env file is configured correctly for the production environment. You’ll need to set up database connections, cache, queue configurations, and any other service keys.

Caching and Optimization: Laravel provides several optimization commands to boost the performance of your application. Run the following commands to optimize your app for production:bashCopy codephp artisan config:cache php artisan route:cache php artisan view:cache

Assets and Front-End Build: If your application uses frontend assets like JavaScript and CSS, run npm run production to compile them and ensure that assets are optimized.

Database Migration: Make sure your database schema is up to date by running:bashCopy codephp artisan migrate --force

2. Choosing a Cloud Platform

There are several cloud platforms that support Laravel applications, including AWS, DigitalOcean, and Heroku. Let's look at how to deploy on each.

A. Deploying Laravel to AWS EC2

AWS (Amazon Web Services) offers a robust infrastructure for hosting Laravel applications. Here's a high-level overview of the steps:

Launch an EC2 Instance: First, you need to create an EC2 instance running a Linux distribution (e.g., Ubuntu). You can choose the instance size based on your traffic and performance needs.

Install PHP and Required Software: Once the instance is up, SSH into it and install PHP, Composer, Nginx (or Apache), and other necessary services:bashCopy codesudo apt update sudo apt install php php-fpm php-mbstring php-xml php-bcmath php-mysql unzip curl sudo apt install nginx

Configure Nginx: Set up Nginx to serve your Laravel app. Create a new Nginx configuration file under /etc/nginx/sites-available/your-app and link it to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/.Example configuration:nginxCopy codeserver { listen 80; server_name your-domain.com; root /var/www/your-app/public; index index.php index.html index.htm; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; } error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; }

Database Configuration: Set up a MySQL or PostgreSQL database (you can use Amazon RDS for a managed database) and configure your .env file with the correct credentials.

SSL and Security: Secure your application with SSL (using Let's Encrypt or AWS Certificate Manager) and ensure your firewall and security groups are configured correctly.

Deploy Code: You can deploy your Laravel application to EC2 using Git, FTP, or tools like Envoyer or Laravel Forge. For Git deployment, clone your repository and configure your environment variables.

B. Deploying Laravel to DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean provides a simple and cost-effective way to host Laravel applications. Here’s how to deploy:

Create a Droplet: Log into your DigitalOcean account and create a new Droplet with a suitable operating system (typically Ubuntu).

Install PHP, Nginx, and Composer: SSH into your droplet and install the necessary dependencies for your Laravel app:bashCopy codesudo apt update sudo apt install php php-fpm php-mbstring php-xml php-bcmath php-mysql unzip curl sudo apt install nginx

Configure Nginx and Laravel Application: Configure Nginx to point to your Laravel application’s public folder and set up SSL.

Database Configuration: Set up MySQL or PostgreSQL on your droplet, then configure the .env file for your database credentials.

Deploying the Code: You can either deploy your code via Git or use an automation tool like Envoyer to streamline deployments. You’ll also need to configure file permissions for storage and cache directories.

C. Deploying Laravel to Heroku

Heroku is an excellent choice for quick and easy Laravel application deployment with minimal configuration. Here’s how you can deploy a Laravel app on Heroku:

Create a Heroku App: Sign up or log into your Heroku account and create a new app. This will automatically provision a server for you.

Install Heroku CLI: Install the Heroku CLI on your local machine if you haven't already:bashCopy codecurl https://cli-assets.heroku.com/install.sh | sh

Configure the .env File for Heroku: Heroku uses environment variables, so make sure you configure your .env file correctly or set them directly in the Heroku dashboard.

Deploy the Code: Push your code to Heroku using Git:bashCopy codegit push heroku master

Database Configuration: Heroku offers a managed PostgreSQL database that you can provision with the command:bashCopy codeheroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev

Run Migrations: Run database migrations on Heroku with:bashCopy codeheroku run php artisan migrate

3. Automating Deployment with Laravel Forge or Envoyer

For smoother deployment management, you can use tools like Laravel Forge or Envoyer.

Laravel Forge: Laravel Forge is a server management and deployment service designed for PHP applications. It automates tasks like server provisioning, security updates, and Laravel deployments to platforms like AWS, DigitalOcean, and others.

Envoyer: Envoyer is a zero-downtime deployment tool that ensures your Laravel app is deployed with no interruption to your users. It handles the deployment process seamlessly, ensuring the application is running smoothly at all times.

4. Conclusion

Deploying a Laravel application to the cloud can seem daunting, but it becomes easier with tools and services that automate much of the process. Whether you choose AWS, DigitalOcean, or Heroku, each platform offers unique benefits for hosting your Laravel application. Using automation tools like Forge and Envoyer, you can further streamline the deployment process, ensuring your app runs smoothly and efficiently in the cloud.

[internetunboxed1234]

2.3 Transfer Information on the Internet

Cloud storage enables productivity, collaboration, real-time file sharing, and email communications, allowing users to send attachments or share files through services like Google Drive. For simple file transfers, smaller-scale services such as Filemail, WeTransfer, and Send Anywhere allow you to send files without signing up for an account, though they often have limitations on file size and availability. Paid options are available for larger transfers.

Additionally, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is commonly used for transferring files over the Internet, especially by web developers. FTP works via an Internet protocol, allowing users to log in using an FTP client (like WinSCP or FileZilla), navigate directories, and transfer files between a client and server.

[fromdevcom]

Web hosting is the initial, basic, and most important step that your business will need for you to have an online presence. Most people fail to understand how web hosting works or even what it is. This is a guide for all non-techies and business owners wishing to gain basic information about web hosting.What Is Web Hosting?Learn the basics of web hosting from this YouTube tutorial playlist. It is exclusively compiled by fromdev for beginners. A Web HostA web host is a company that has servers dedicated to housing your business. This is basically where your online shop or website will reside online. At a small monthly or annual fee, web hosts provide servers to store all your business information necessary for you to run your website, online shop, or blog. So, basically, your web host will give you disk space for your website and the disk space will determine the number of files you will have access to.Domain NameThis is your online brand. This is the name you will be identified by. You can use your business name or the product’s name in a city. Once you have a domain name and a host, you will use a file transfer protocol; FTP to send files from your computer to your web hosts. The domain name will be recognized by the host to complete the FTP file transfers.MySQLYour website’s or online store’s information must run through databases. The databases allow you to store your data in tables and rows. This is made possible by MySQL databases. Essentially, MySQL reads data inputted from a script on the web server then creates, adds, updates, or deletes data as commanded. This is a very important feature that you should look for. Fortunately, even the cheapest web hosting companies will offer this in their packages.BandwidthThough not a big techie jargon, bandwidth is a word used to imply the amount of space that a signal transmits through. You cannot send big files through small bandwidths. If you do, the transmission will be slow and if running an online store, you will lose customers because people hate slow ‘internet’. Only chose a web host with unlimited and scalable bandwidth for efficient operation and high traffic flow to your website, blog, or online store.UptimeTo attract more visitors to your site, you should have a web host that offers reliable and continuous usage time of your website. Downtimes discourage customers and will lower traffic to your business. Inexpensive web hosts strive to give you services with approximately 100% uptime, which means that you or your client can access your site from any place at any time.Types Of HostingYou could be wondering about the suitable web hosting for your business. There are diverse types of hosting but the most common and the cheapest hosting is shared hosting. It has its disadvantage but sharing servers with many other websites will lower the costs of server maintenance per person translating to lower monthly fees.Dedicated hosting is also offered by inexpensive web hosts but you will pay a lot more because all the server maintenance costs fall on you. The other types of hosting include Colocation hosting, Windows, Cloud, E-mail hosting, UNIX hosting, VPS hosting, E-commerce, green, reseller hosting, and managed to host. All of these will be suitable for specific business and personal needs.In conclusion, knowing these basics will help you get the best web host for your business. You should, therefore, look out for these features in your web host. They should also have systems that support website building and marketing of your information and products.Lewis Brown is a web host offering the cheapest web hosting services in packages that will boost your business presence and growth online. He is a blogger and a travel writer as well. You can learn more about web hosting from his blog.

[adeholagangbo]

ITNW1337 MODULE 1 TO 3 GANGBO'S PORTFOLIO

Bio

30 years old, originally from the Benin Republic. Currently stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, serving as a combat engineer in the US Army. Immigrated to the US in 2016 to improve English and pursue personal development. Now pursuing an associate degree in Information Technology (IT), aiming for a successful transition from military to civilian life. Enthusiastic about online education and eager to connect with fellow students.

 INTRODUCTION

The Internet is a vast network of interconnected computers that enables users to communicate, access, and share information. It serves as a platform for various online activities, such as research, communication, and entertainment. My ITNW 1337 class, covering modules 1 to 3, explores a wide range of topics, starting with the methods and tools required to connect to the Internet, including various types of connections like broadband and mobile, as well as network setup.

The course introduces web browsers—software applications that facilitate Internet navigation—discussing features like tabs, bookmarks, and history. It also focuses on effective searching techniques using search engines, providing tips for refining search queries to quickly find relevant information.

Additionally, the modules cover the basics of email, including how to create an account, send and receive messages, and manage attachments. There's an exploration of cloud storage solutions that allow users to store and access files online, along with productivity tools that enhance collaboration and efficiency.

The course discusses different methods for transferring files, such as email attachments, cloud services, and FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It examines various online platforms for sharing information and engaging with communities, highlighting their functionalities and purposes.

Furthermore, the modules introduce technologies that enable quick access to information through mobile devices, discussing their applications in marketing and communication. Finally, the course module 3 summarizes eight essential skills or tools necessary for effectively navigating the digital landscape, emphasizing their importance in everyday online interactions.

Overall, these modules aim to equip users with the essential skills needed to navigate the Internet successfully and utilize its vast resources for both personal and professional growth.

Module 1

Key Concepts

What is the Internet?

The Internet is the largest global network of interconnected computers, known as a "network of networks," enabling communication and data transfer between billions of devices.

Originating from ARPANET, it transitioned from a government project to a public network by 1995.

How the Internet Works

The Internet relies on physical infrastructure like fiber optics, cable, and telephone lines.

Devices communicate using an addressing system based on the Internet Protocol (IP), with IPv4 being the original structure, now transitioning to IPv6 to accommodate more devices.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) translate human-friendly URLs into IP addresses, simplifying web navigation.

Accessing the Internet

Access requires a device and an Internet connection, typically through ISPs. Major connection types include Fiber Optic, Cable, DSL, Fixed Wireless, Satellite, and Cellular.

Web Browser Basics

Web browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari) are applications used to access the World Wide Web. They retrieve web pages based on URLs.

Internet Search Tools

Search engines help users find information online by indexing web pages using algorithms (e.g., PageRank) to determine relevance.

Effective searching requires understanding how to use search engines, including query operators and advanced search techniques.

Documents and Links

Links or documents that support my learning.

content.ctcd.edu/courses/itnw1337oer/m21/docs/cheat_sheet_search.pdf 

www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=54eebb917e039ffee2bdc5f50a891bd748bcdd37c467dfda4f890a8fc71c52c5JmltdHM9MTcyNjk2MzIwMCZpbnNpZD01MjEx&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=2f1955d3-0e7c-615d-1d19-41000f2b6077&psq=Visual+representation+of+IPv4+vs.+IPv6&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20vd2F0Y2g_dj12bzVnbEs5Y3pJRQ&ntb=1

Overall understanding the fundamental concepts of the Internet, how it works, and the tools available for accessing and navigating it is crucial for both personal and professional growth. This knowledge empowers me to use the Internet more effectively, enabling efficient research, communication, and collaboration. I can apply these skills to improve my online learning experience and help others in navigating digital spaces, fostering a more connected and informed community. By mastering search techniques and browser functionalities, I’ll be better equipped to find reliable information

 Module 2

This module explores essential communication and productivity tools that enhance both personal and professional life, such as email services, cloud storage, and file transfer protocols. These technologies enable instant communication, data storage, and easy file sharing across devices, improving efficiency in today’s digital world. 

Key Concepts Learned 

Email Services: 

Definition: Email is an electronic communication tool allowing users to send and receive messages via the Internet. 

Key Elements: Emails include a username and domain name separated by the “@” symbol. Hosted email addresses (e.g.gov, Edu, .mil) are organization-specific, while webmail services (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook) are free and widely used for personal and business purposes. 

Common Features: Address book, calendar, and instant messaging options are often included. 

Cloud Storage and Productivity: 

Definition: Cloud storage allows users to save data on remote servers (not their local computers) and access it from any device with an Internet connection. 

Common Cloud Services: Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and Apple iCloud. 

Benefits: File sharing, collaboration, data backup, and the ability to work from anywhere. 

Productivity Tools: Web-based applications like Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365 allow users to create and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. 

Transfer of Information on the Internet: 

Email Attachments: Files can be attached to emails for easy sharing. 

Cloud Storage File Sharing: Users can upload files to cloud services and invite others to view or download them. 

File Transfer Protocol (FTP): A method for transferring large files over the Internet, often used by web developers. FTP requires an FTP client like FileZilla or WinSCP to manage file transfers. 

Links to Resources

Reflection Section 

This module helped me understand how communication technologies like email and cloud storage simplify both personal and professional tasks. I can now effectively use cloud storage services to backup and share files. Additionally, learning about FTP has broadened my understanding of how web developers manage large file transfers. In my future career, especially in IT, I see myself applying these skills to enhance collaboration and streamline workflows, particularly in remote work environments.

Module 3

This module covers the evolution of communication platforms and digital interactions through social media, blogs, wikis, and forums, along with innovations like QR codes, NFC technology, and emerging technologies. These tools revolutionize how we connect, share information, and engage with digital content, while advanced technologies like AI, blockchain, and IoT are shaping the future. 

Key Concepts Learned and Definitions

Social Media Platforms:

Definition: Social media includes a wide variety of platforms that allow users to share content, connect, and collaborate. These platforms range from blogs and forums to content communities and wikis.

Examples:

Content Communities: YouTube, Pinterest

Blogs: WordPress, Blogger

Forums: Quora, StackExchange

Wikis: Wikipedia, WikiHow

Social Networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter)

Podcasts: BuzzSprout, Spreaker

Usage: 

Social media allows for different types of interaction:

Blogs: Author-centric platforms for sharing opinions and information with readers.

Wikis: Collaborative platforms where content is created and modified by multiple users.

Forums: Discussion-based platforms where users can share their thoughts on specific topics.

QR Codes, SnapTags, and NFC Technology:

QR Codes: Two-dimensional barcodes that can be scanned with mobile devices to access digital content or websites.

SnapTags: An advanced version of QR codes, offering additional features and interactivity without needing special apps or high-end phones.

NFC (Near Field Communication): A short-range wireless technology that allows devices to exchange information when they are in close proximity (less than 4 inches), widely used in contactless payments and data sharing.

The Essential Eight Technologies:

Internet of Things (IoT): A network of physical devices connected via the Internet, capable of collecting and sharing data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Machines simulating human intelligence to perform tasks like decision-making and problem-solving.

Blockchain: A decentralized digital ledger that records transactions across multiple computers securely.

Augmented Reality (AR): Technology that overlays digital content onto the real world through devices like smartphones.

Virtual Reality (VR): A simulated experience using a headset that immerses users in a digital environment.

Advanced Robotics: Robots with enhanced capabilities used in fields like manufacturing, healthcare, and defense.

Quantum Computing: A new computing paradigm that leverages quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than classical computers.

Neuromorphic Computing: Computing systems designed to mimic the human brain's neural structure for improved AI processing.

Links to Resources 

Reflection Section

This module introduced me to the various tools we use for digital communication and collaboration, such as social media platforms, QR codes, and NFC technology. I was particularly interested in learning how platforms like blogs and forums differ in terms of interactivity and content ownership. Additionally, exploring technologies like NFC, SnapTags, and the Essential Eight provided valuable insights into the future of digital communication, payments, and AI-driven innovations.

In my IT career, I can apply this knowledge by leveraging NFC for secure data exchange or contactless payments, and by staying informed about how emerging technologies like AI and blockchain will impact industries. Understanding these tools will help me adapt to new tech trends and possibly integrate these advancements into business solutions.

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Certainly! Here’s a comprehensive article focusing on the phrase "Upload Files" in the context of modern digital practices:

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**The Evolution and Impact of File Uploading in the Digital Era**

**Introduction**

In today’s digital age, the process of uploading files has become a fundamental aspect of how we store, share, and manage information. From personal photos to critical business documents, uploading files is integral to numerous activities. This article explores the evolution of file uploading, its significance in various contexts, the tools available for this task, and best practices to ensure efficiency and security.

**The Evolution of File Uploading**

The concept of file uploading has undergone significant transformation since the early days of computing. Here’s a brief overview of its evolution:

1. **Early Days of Computing**: In the early days of computing, file uploads were largely confined to local networks and required physical media like floppy disks or CDs. The process was manual, labor-intensive, and limited by the physical constraints of storage devices.

2. **Advent of the Internet**: The rise of the internet in the 1990s revolutionized file uploading. With the introduction of FTP (File Transfer Protocol), users could upload files to remote servers over the internet, making file sharing and storage more accessible.

3. **Cloud Computing Era**: The early 2000s saw the emergence of cloud computing, which significantly transformed file uploading. Services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive allowed users to upload files to cloud storage, providing access from any device with an internet connection and facilitating real-time collaboration.

4. **Mobile and App Integration**: With the proliferation of smartphones and apps, uploading files has become more streamlined. Mobile apps from cloud storage providers and file-sharing services have made it easier to upload files directly from mobile devices.

**Significance of Uploading Files**

Uploading files serves a range of essential functions in both personal and professional contexts:

1. **Data Backup**: Regularly uploading files to cloud storage ensures that important data is backed up and protected from local hardware failures, accidental deletions, or other unforeseen issues.

2. **Collaboration**: In a professional setting, the ability to upload files to shared platforms enables team members to collaborate efficiently. Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be accessed and edited by multiple users, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity.

3. **Accessibility**: Uploading files to cloud services provides users with access to their documents from any device with an internet connection. This convenience supports remote work and allows for greater flexibility in managing and accessing information.

4. **File Sharing**: Whether for personal or professional reasons, uploading files to shareable links or platforms allows users to easily distribute large files or collections of documents to others without relying on physical media or email attachments.

**Tools and Platforms for Uploading Files**

There are numerous tools and platforms available to facilitate file uploading. Each offers unique features suited to different needs:

1. **Cloud Storage Services**: Platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive provide robust solutions for uploading and managing files. These services offer features such as file synchronization, sharing capabilities, and integration with other productivity tools.

2. **File Transfer Services**: For sending large files quickly, services like WeTransfer and Hightail provide straightforward options. These services generate links for file downloads, making it easy to share large files without requiring an account.

3. **FTP Clients**: FTP (File Transfer Protocol) clients like FileZilla and Cyberduck allow for more advanced file uploading, particularly for users managing web servers or large-scale data transfers. FTP clients offer features such as batch uploading and secure file transfers.

4. **Social Media and Collaboration Tools**: Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams integrate file uploading into broader communication and collaboration tools, facilitating seamless file sharing within team environments.

**Best Practices for Efficient and Secure File Uploading**

To ensure that file uploading is both efficient and secure, consider the following best practices:

1. **Organize Files**: Before uploading, organize your files into clearly labeled folders. This helps maintain order and makes it easier to locate files later.

2. **Check File Formats**: Ensure that the files you are uploading are in compatible formats for the platform you are using. Some platforms may have restrictions or specific requirements for file formats.

3. **Monitor Storage Limits**: Be aware of storage limits on your chosen platform. Regularly review and manage your stored files to avoid exceeding these limits and ensure efficient use of storage space.

4. **Use Secure Connections**: When uploading sensitive or confidential files, ensure that the connection is secure. Look for platforms that offer encryption and secure transfer protocols.

5. **Verify Uploads**: After uploading, verify that the files have been correctly uploaded and are accessible. This helps avoid issues with incomplete or corrupted uploads.

6. **Keep Software Updated**: Ensure that any software or applications you use for uploading files are up to date. Updates often include security patches and improvements that enhance functionality and safety.

**Conclusion**

The ability to upload files has become an essential component of modern digital life, impacting everything from personal data management to professional collaboration. As technology continues to advance, the tools and methods for uploading files will likely evolve, offering even greater convenience and capabilities. By understanding the significance of file uploading, utilizing the right tools, and following best practices, users can effectively manage their files and ensure secure, efficient, and productive workflows.

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If you have any more questions or need further details, feel free to ask!

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