neurotixz

Likely reason: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl...

In a nutshell:

Since June 9, 2025, Internet users located in Russia and connecting to web services protected by Cloudflare have been throttled by Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Wiz has tons of competitors, and Microsoft is one of them, so are Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Crowstrike, SentinelOne, etc... Wiz is definately a leader but are in no way a monopoly, so I do not see this as an FTC play to stop the deal.

I had a very similar experience, I was leading the selection process for our new endpoint security vendor, Crowdstrike people: - verbally attacked/abused a selection team member - were ranting constantly about golf with our execs - were dismissive and just annoying throughout - raised hell with our execs when they learned they were not going to POC, basically went through everyone of them simultaneously - I had to get a rep kicked out of the rfp as he was constantly disrespectful

We did not pick them, and cancelled any other relashionship we had with them, in IR space by example.

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...

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.

OKTA SLAs and support terms specifically exclude AWS outages, so why would they?

Based on this page, Quebec is 99.8% renewable.

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.

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-commoditie...

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.

Downtown Montreal here, speed right now: 83 mbit/s down 13 mbit/s up

Quite good, almost as fast as my home connection.

Wow, this is extremely useful and really addresses a major pain point.

I love it!

Incredible Billing Machine

I am in Canada, but I think it can also apply in the US:

I am working in security , which is a small world where I am. I usually take a look at a LinkedIn profile to know who an applicant knows that I know as well, that way I can get more insight from people I know and trust if I feel the need. I had a few people call me as well to confirm a suspicion or get a bit of insight into someone's personality. Lots of people can sail an interview but are lacking in person. It saved me a few bad experiences i<m sure, and I know a few other people that hired anyway and regretted it later.

Hope that helps a little. Obviously it does not apply for international candidates or people new to the country/region, which is a profile we see often at the moment.

Also, I decided to change job a few years ago, getting LinkedIn alerts on jobs helped me target decent recruiters that really know the specific field, and it landed me 3 interviews and job offers.

They are using Arbor in their core network, and auto mitigate attacks on customers now. I am working with Arbor systems as well as others for DDoS protections where I am working now, and I can confirm that it works quite well.

Takes about 5 mins to kick in once an attack has started, which is very good.

Seems to be the index and abstracts only, the actual documents needs to be paid for. Not too expensive at 15$ each, probably worthed if you need such information.

If your company has a PCI environment, i'm not that worried (you probably have a pretty good idea of what you are doing, at least in theory), but most startups do not have this, as far as I know. Most just want to get a product/service out of the door. This is where I get worried :-)

It is very easy to setup a system in a corner (here, we'll install this piece of software, that will save us the 99$/month recurly subscription...) then forget about it until it is too late...

Some guidance would be very important, as well as mentioning ways to make it more secure, including tokenization, logging of CC numbers in server logs, knowing if the data transits through your server or not depending on provider, maybe even keep the software behind a a firewall without internet access, these can make a big difference in managing the risk.

As an open source project, you cannot be held responsible on what the people using the software is doing, but I think making sure that they understand that even if the software is free and easy to install and use, that additional work is required to make sure that the data is safe.

Very interesting, and I would definitely see a use. Just a few comments:

- How does this fit into the PCI picture, only thing I have seen on the site is a 2 line faq entry. Not enough to help on scoping or identifying requirements that would apply.

- How secure is it, and how are security notifications done? Keeping the software secure and up to date should be considered as critical. I would add a section on the site pertaining to security and addressing vulnerabilities. I did not see on the site information about security updates/patches. They might be on GitHub but it is way to deep to be useful to most people.

This kind of software is a perfect example of a high-value target for intrusion, I am a bit worried for the security of the information it contains, especially for smaller startups with limited resources, as well as zombie installations that can be forgotten in a corner with personal information or cards information inside.

Not saying it's a bad idea BTW, just a few concerns as a security analyst.

I would be extremely surprised that you would need 30 x86 boxes to reach the performance of a P8 box, on any type workload. By my experience with P5-P7 they can be faster for certain workloads then x86, but not that much.

While the performance seen here is nice, i'm curious to see the price/performance ratio. Running against a 8-core XEON would not make sense if the closer Intel system price-wise is a quad 12-core xeon... Obviously we are talking cloud here so it might not even apply.

By my experience with Power7, the price/performance ratio is much lower on Power then Intel systems. Maybe it changed but i'm not holding my breath, even if IBM seems much more aggressive on pricing with P8 then they were with P5-P7. The

Quick calculation, absolutely unscientific:

Seeing that the price is 0.14$/hour for the 6-core xeon and 1.08$/hour on the 176 core P8, it would have to be roughly 8-10x faster to justify the cost difference, not sure it will be the case.

The main thing preventing me from using stripe directly in my applications is that it does not calculate sales taxes. The added complexity to do so makes it complex to integrate.

That aside, thanks for the book, I am buying it as I am sure that the advice will be relevant for the payment platform I will use (hesitating betweek Chargify and Recurly right now).

Thanks for the reply, which business fields is this experience coming from?

I could be biased by the industries I worked in (telecom, engineering, banking), there was a constant push to bring down opex spending, by squeezing suppliers on maintenance fees, reducing headcount and improving efficiency (especially in IT). The target is recurring costs.

In those businesses capex looks good in annual reports as they tend to show investment in infrastructure, security and business support tools and software (we invested X$ to improve our telecom infrastructure, call center or any other field of the business). It shows a willingness to stay current, ahead of competitors.

It just shows that knowing how your potential customer are structured is important. Especially for large enterprise customers. Your business model needs to follow those trends.

I do not know who your customers are, but for lots of corporations, spending a fortune on hardware (capex) is easier then spending anything on services (opex). It is linked to accounting rules for those 2 different categories of spending (I am not an accountant, I just happen to be dealing with one on a regular basis, as well as with a feew large entreprises).

So for your product to be competitive, it needs to be very compelling to get over that hurdle, and be much superior to anything else. Being in `magic quadrant` in Gartner or other is also useful (yes I know, it does not mean much, but it looks good for management).

One common way of getting over that hurdle is to find a creative way for your service to move to the capex side of things. One example is selling an appliance which does not do much, and relies entirely on your service, sell it for a very high price, bundle a 3 year support contract that covers the cost of your service, and suddenly it's capex :-)

Almost all the independant colo centers in Montreal have been bought out by big players with the corporate world in sight, not the small 1-2 servers market. So the prices skyrocketed.

The opposite is true for dedicated, since they have to compete with us-based players, and OVH got in the East Coast market big time. Prices are lowering.

Yes, always compare with rented dedicated, and only go with colo if it makes sense. I did this analysis last year and rented won big time. Never looked back since. Main points in favor of rented dedicated servers: - Much cheaper in my business case (5-10 TB/month by server, only a few high CPU requirements) most dedicated come with bandwidth included - No need to take care of the hardware in case of failure (opening a ticket versus managing the whole process) - Easier to switch machine if needs changes - Scales faster (as quickly then 2-3 hours with decent automation tools, and virtualization) - No switch, firewall, etc (IPMI should always be behind a firewall, never opened on the Internet) - The upfront cost to buy a server was high, and monthly cost of dedicated was actually lower, due to the lack of competition in the colo sector in my area (Montreal, Canada), prices were (and still are) rising quickly, it was hard to predict the long-term costs

The web part is just a tiy part of a major project. Extracting informations from 55 databases/unrelated systems in a coherent manner is a nightmare by definition.

The number of different 3rd party libraries that are required, the type incompatibilities, matching fields, accounting for changes in the schema, and talking to legacy systems (I am sure there are many of them in there...), all in 5 months? Good luck.

Add to this the overhead of talking to IT and management of insurance companies, the IRS and others, and just the fact that it does answer some queries is fairly impressive in my book.

Also I am sure that most of those systems are failry deep inside the corporate networks of these insurers, just getting access to them probably was not an easy task.

That said the authentication layers failures and lack of testing are far from impressive.

For the first time in my life, I disagree that Godwin Law's could be applied in this case.

It is truly a sad day and and it really shows the incredibly wrong state of affairs in Russia when comparisons to Hitler are actually justified. In this case the parallels with the situation an the state of affairs in pre-war Germany cannot be denied. It shows the same willingness to create two classes of citizen, and the withdrawal of the rights of that second-class.