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Updated Google Cloud suffered a brief outage, seemingly bringing down or disrupting a whole bunch of websites relying on its systems.

If you've had trouble accessing Snapchat, Discord, Spotify, Etsy, retailers like Home Depot, and others today, this is likely why: a fault developed in Google Cloud's networking infrastructure, resulting in websites throwing up 404 errors. Netizens found themselves unable to log into or use certain services properly.

The good news is that, by now, the IT breakdown has been resolved in that sites using Google's cloud-based load balancers should work again.

The bad news is that Google's customers can't update their load balancing configurations until the web giant gives the word, and when that will be isn't known.

The outage was acknowledged by Google at 1010 PST (1810 UTC), about 35 minutes minutes after websites apparently started going wrong, and a fix was deployed within a few minutes to stop the "page not found" errors. Since that update, though, changes by customers to their external proxy load balancers are being ignored.

According to the tech titan's status page:

The load-balancing blunder had a knock-on effect of temporarily disrupting Google Cloud's App Engine, Cloud Functions, Apigee, and Cloud Run services.

We'll let you know when Google considers this situation fully restored.

"The issue with Cloud Networking has been resolved for all affected projects as of Tuesday, 2021-11-16 11:28 US/Pacific," Google said on its status page, noting the issue has been fully fixed.

"Customer impact from 10:10 to 11:28 US/Pacific was configuration changes to External Proxy Load Balancers not taking effect. As of 11:28 US/Pacific configuration pushes resumed."

Read more:
Google Cloud partially fixes load balancer SNAFU that hit Discord, Spotify, others today - The Register

Canonical may be working on introducing systemd to Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), according to a post by Ubuntu Desktop Team Technical Leader Didier Roche.

Roche's remarks were posted on the Ubuntu Desktop Team Updates two days ago. "PoC of systemd on WSL at startup of an instance," he said, raising hopes (or fears) that the component will be introduced in a future WSL 2 update. The remark was first spotted by Phoronix.

Systemd manages services and other system software on Linux, and is widely used by the most popular distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, and the Red Hat family. The original WSL did not support systemd for technical reasons, starting with the fact it had its own init process.

When WSL 2 was introduced, with a new container-based model for running Linux on Windows, supporting systemd seemed feasible (Linux distros running on Micrsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor have no problem with it) but Microsoft continued with its own init presumably for reasons related to the integration between WSL and the rest of Windows.

WSL 2 users though have frequently requested systemd support. The reasons are many and varied, but the lack of systemd does introduce friction for users familiar with other distros that include it. Canonical's Snap packaging system depends on systemd, and since Canonical regards Snap as the future of application deployment one can understand why the company is keen to have it supported in WSL, particularly now that GUI Linux applications are supported in Windows 11.

Another problem is that users do not always realise that commands they use like systemctl for managing services are actually part of systemd. As far as some are concerned, this is a bug in WSL 2, in this case because an attempt to start the SSH daemon gave the error, "System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate. Failed to connect to bus: Host is down."

There are a number of workarounds to enable systemd on WSL 2 but an official solution would still be welcome.

It is important that systemd does not only run, but runs as PID 1, the first process in the operating system. A developer has come up with a project called genie to ensure this happens.

Then there's Distrod, which is described as "a systemd-based meta-distro for WSL2 that allows you to install Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Gentoo and many other distros with systemd in a minute, or make your current distro run systemd." We note such solutions are unofficial.

Here's Distrod, one of several unofficial solutions for systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Both projects work by introducing another container. Distrod, for example, "is a binary that creates a simple container that runs systemd as an init process, and starts your WSL sessions within that container." According to its author, even WSLg, for GUI desktop application support, works with Distrod. Genie, so called because it creates a systemd "bottle," also works with WSLg but the docs state that "Linux GUI apps started from the Windows Start Menu items created by WSLg will run outside the bottle."

Canonical is not Microsoft, of course, but has worked closely with the WSL team. There is little doubt that systemd in WSL 2 is a desirable feature for various users, at least as an option, so we will be watching progress with interest.

Read the rest here:
Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux - The Register

Interview Netlify has acquired OneGraph, which provides a GraphQL API that wraps the APIs of third-party services, as well as launching a new Jamstack innovation fund for startups.

Jamstack is an architectural approach for web applications where static web pages retrieve dynamic content by calling APIs, hence "JavaScript, APIs and Markup." A web server is not required and Jamstack sites are amenable to acceleration via a content delivery network (CDN), but server-side logic still exists, in the APIs that are called, and these become the potential bottleneck.

"The Jamstack and the architectural approach behind that has really changed the direction of the modern web, and this move towards decoupling the web UI layer from the back end infrastructure layer and splitting up all these different APIs and services is an architectural tendency that's only getting stronger," Matt Biilmann, Netlify CEO and co-founder, tells The Register.

Chris Bach, also a Netlify co-founder and now its chief strategy & creative officer, says Jamstack is "a much better way to build the web. It's scalable, it's more performant, it's faster to iterate on, it's more compatible, the workflow is way safer."

Netlify is a hosting company for Jamstack applications built with React, Next.js, Angular, Vue.js, Gatsby, and other frameworks. The company packages build services, serverless functions (which run on AWS Lambda), and a CDN for deployment.

The company has now acquired OneGraph, whose goal is "to put all of the internet's APIs under a single GraphQL endpoint."

The service will not be integrated immediately, but there is an initial beta launch of API authentication with Stripe, Spotify, GitHub, and Salesforce, creating an authentication token that can be used with Netlify serverless functions. However, this only does authentication and does not wrap the third-party API. A limitation of the beta is that "you can only log in with your own credentials and can't proxy site visitor credentials," making it of limited use in many scenarios.

Netlify API authentication, the first piece of OneGraph integration

Future plans are more comprehensive. "What if we could put all the world's APIs and services behind one GraphQL endpoint," Biilmann says, to give teams "one framework for how to talk to them, how to authenticate with them, and how to build with them."

The reality is that it is early days, and much will depend on third-party support for OneGraph. "It will be important that we can allow external providers to plug into our platform and extend it," Biilmann adds, "to live up to its full potential."

The big cloud providers are also offering Jamstack platforms, such as AWS Amplify and Azure Static Apps, so the space is getting more competition.

What if we could put all the world's APIs and services behind one GraphQL endpoint?

The company says it's also rolled out a new $10m Jamstack Innovation Fund, which offers startups up to $100,000. What are the missing pieces in the Jamstack ecosystem that this may help address? "We're seeing the API-ification of everything," Biilmann says. "Content has moved to headless solutions, and now we're seeing the same thing happening for commerce across a lot of different sectors so we want to see a very broad ecosystem emerging."

The company has scored one major win recently: Twilio has migrated its developer console to Jamstack and Netlify, claiming faster deployment cycles, from once a week to 10 to 15 times per day, and much faster render times.

What about enterprise development? Front-end developers find a GraphQL API easy to work with, Biilmann says, but "for back-end teams building APIs and services, we're seeing that exposing them as GraphQL services tends to be harder." This challenge is one of the things new startups may help address, he adds.

Jamstack, according to Biilmann, is the web fighting back against proprietary platforms. "The web is an unique platform in not being owned by a single company. We're investing in this to see the web become a better platform, to make sure that as new devices and new delivery landscapes like metaverse arrive, that the web is still the best way to build and operate your applications."

That said, the curious thing is that Netlify sees itself as a kind of platform of platforms, which is in part proprietary. Bach tells The Reg that "Netlify has become this aggregator of all these big interesting projects." Is that in itself a proprietary layer?

Answering a question about open source, Biilmann says that "the layer of the stack we are building, the full infrastructure automation and workflow layer, that's inherently a layer where to build that as a proprietary platform makes sense, because it's a globally distributed platform requiring a lot of operations and maintenance and vigilance.

"All the tooling around that, even stuff like our build plugins, framework and so on, we make that available to everyone as open source I don't think developers want to work with proprietary frameworks and libraries."

More here:
Netlify acquires OneGraph: One API to rule them all? - The Register

Recent model smartphones can be smarter still about finding hidden cameras in their vicinity, if they take advantage of time-of-flight (ToF) sensors.

ToF is a measurement technique that relies on reflected light to quickly determine the distance of objects. ToF sensors are used in LIDAR (light detection and ranging) systems and in other applications that utilize SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) algorithms, all of which involve the analysis of the visible and near-visible spectrum.

These sensors have started showing up in smartphones recently Apple's iPhone 12 and 13, and Samsung's Galaxy S20+, among others, include a laser-based Sony ToF sensor for augmented reality applications and adding depth information to 2D imagery.

Now, four researchers based in Singapore and South Korea have another application in mind: They see ToF sensors as a way to spot concealed cameras.

Sriram Sami, Bangjie Sun, and Sean Rui Xiang Tan, from National University of Singapore, and Jun Han from Yonsei University, describe how this might be done in a paper [PDF] titled "LAPD: Hidden Spy Camera Detection using Smartphone Time-of-Flight Sensors".

Their research was presented at the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems earlier this week. You can see the pitch below.

Youtube Video

LAPD in this context has nothing to do with the Los Angeles Police Department, a likely association at least for US readers reared on Hollywood police procedurals. Rather, it stands for Laser-Assisted Photography Detection a technique for ferreting out tiny concealed lenses by checking for unusually intense reflections in the scanned area.

Surreptitious spying with hidden cameras has become a global concern, according to the boffins.

"Tiny hidden spy cameras placed in sensitive locations such as hotel rooms and lavatories are increasingly a threat to individual privacy globally," the research paper explains. "For example, in South Korea alone, there were over 6,800 such reported cases in a single year."

Salacious snooping has become a particular issue for users of services like AirBnB, where the platform operator doesn't control room providers or guarantee trustworthiness.

There are dedicated signal detection devices for finding hidden cameras and other electronics like the CC308+ and the K18, to say nothing of what can be done with open source Wi-Fi analysis software.

But the researchers contend these can be difficult to use correctly. What's more, smartphones are commonplace these days, so adding an app like LAPD is likely to be more convenient than carrying a dedicated bug or signal detector at all times. LAPD's goal is to be accessible, usable, and accurate, and to judge by the results reported in the paper, it hits those marks.

"From our comprehensive experiments, LAPD achieves an 88.9 per cent hidden camera detection rate, compared to just using the naked eye which yields only a 46.0 per cent hidden camera detection rate," the paper reads.

The dedicated K18 signal detector managed detection rates of 62.3 per cent and 57.7 per cent using its continuous and blinking methods respectively.

And boffins' LAPD method produced the lowest overall false positive rate (16.67 per cent), compared to the two K18 modes (26.9 per cent and 35.2 per cent) and to the naked eye (54.9 per cent). The technique's strong results follow from its use of a deep learning filter that's been trained to remove false positives.

Sriram Sami, one of the researchers, told The Register in an email that he feels this project is a way to address what he described as asymmetric warfare.

"The 'attackers' have all the power to place hidden cameras anywhere, and the public is, in contrast, generally defenseless," he explained. "That's why we're doing this work, and why we hope hidden camera detection can become more commonplace."

Sami said he intends to release the source code for LAPD but has to coordinate that with his colleagues.

The rest is here:
Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams - The Register

Rounding out a successful launch this morning, Rocket Lab has made good on CEO Peter Beck's promise to do pretty much everything bar catching the returning Electron booster in the company's recovery efforts.

An awful lot was riding on the mission, which placed a pair of BlackSky satellites into orbit and was dubbed "Love at first Insight." It was the second launch since a BlackSky payload was lost on May's "Running Out Of Toes" mission after a second-stage failure. In total, Rocket Lab has launched 22 Electrons and lost three (including the first, a test mission named "It's a Test").

Rocket Lab has been iterating its recovery plans; despite the failure of "Running Out Of Toes", the first stage managed a soft ocean landing by parachute. It is also almost a year since the first ocean landing as part of the "Return To Sender" mission.

The eventual goal is to snag an Electron booster by helicopter as it descends, something ebullient Rocket Lab boss Beck told us was "not that hard" ahead of the launch.

The success of this morning's efforts means that a recovery attempt is not far off.

As for the launch itself, which was from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 01:38 UTC this morning, the Electron delivered the two Earth-Imaging satellites to a 430km orbit. The first stage then returned to Earth, descending to the ocean by parachute while being tracked by the recovery helicopter.

Unlike the propulsive antics of SpaceX's Falcon 9, the comparatively diminutive Electron will require aerial capture. The plan is then to refurbish the booster and refly it, further bringing down costs for the small-satellite launcher.

The next Electron launch (another BlackSky mission) is set for December, however, that recovery attempt will have to wait until 2022. As Beck observed: "We are all excited to move onto the next phase of reusability next year: catching Electron in the air with a helicopter."

Go here to read the rest:
Everything but the catch: '90s pop act or a successful mission for Rocket Lab? - The Register