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Argo CD vs Flux CD

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 7 min
Views 3K

За последнее время я вижу всё больше споров на тему двух популярных GitOps инструментов: Argo CD и Flux CD.

На самом деле я считаю такие споры необоснованными, потому что глубоко убеждён что внимания заслуживают оба инструмента и каждый из них хорош для решения своего круга задач.

В своей профессиональной деятельности я активно использую и тот и другой. Я хочу поделиться с вами своим мнением и кейсами использования. Надеюсь эта статья поможет вам выбрать наиболее подходящий инструмент под ваши нужды.

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Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0 +12
Comments 14

Harnessing the Power of Machine Learning in Fraud Prevention

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 6 min
Views 7.4K

Picture this: A thriving e-commerce platform faces a constant battle against fake reviews that skew product ratings and mislead customers. In response, the company employs cutting-edge algorithms to detect and prevent fraudulent activities. Solutions like these are crucial in the modern digital landscape, safeguarding businesses from financial losses and ensuring a seamless consumer experience.

The industry has relied on rules-based systems to detect fraud for decades. They remain a vital tool in scenarios where continuous collecting of a training sample is challenging, as retraining methods and metrics can be difficult. However, machine learning outperforms rules-based systems in detecting and identifying attacks when an ongoing training sample is available.

With advancements in machine learning, fraud detection systems have become more efficient, accurate, and adaptable. In this article, I will review several ML methods for preventing fraudulent activities and discuss their weaknesses and advantages.

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Total votes 11: ↑11 and ↓0 +11
Comments 1

PostgreSQL 16: Part 5 or CommitFest 2023-03

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 28 min
Views 1K

The end of the March Commitfest concludes the acceptance of patches for PostgreSQL 16. Let’s take a look at some exciting new updates it introduced.

I hope that this review together with the previous articles in the series (2022-072022-092022-112023-01) will give you a coherent idea of the new features of PostgreSQL 16.

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Total votes 10: ↑10 and ↓0 +10
Comments 0

Building a GPT-like Model from Scratch with Detailed Theory and Code Implementation

Reading time 14 min
Views 33K

Unlock the power of Transformer Neural Networks and learn how to build your own GPT-like model from scratch. In this in-depth guide, we will delve into the theory and provide a step-by-step code implementation to help you create your own miniGPT model. The final code is only 400 lines and works on both CPUs as well as on the GPUs. If you want to jump straight to the implementation here is the GitHub repo.

Transformers are revolutionizing the world of artificial intelligence. This simple, but very powerful neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, has quickly become the go-to choice for natural language processing, generative AI, and more. With the help of transformers, we've seen the creation of cutting-edge AI products like BERT, GPT-x, DALL-E, and AlphaFold, which are changing the way we interact with language and solve complex problems like protein folding. And the exciting possibilities don't stop there - transformers are also making waves in the field of computer vision with the advent of Vision Transformers.

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Total votes 25: ↑25 and ↓0 +25
Comments 1

Turning a typewriter into a Linux terminal

Reading time 3 min
Views 9.3K

Hi everyone, a few months ago I got a Brother AX-25, and since then, I've been working on turning it into a computer. It uses an Arduino to scan the custom mechanical keyboard and control the typewriter, and a Raspberry Pi is connected to the Arduino over serial so I can log into it in headless mode.

See how it works
Total votes 10: ↑10 and ↓0 +10
Comments 5

Backup & Recovery Solutions from China

Reading time 9 min
Views 4.1K

There are new challenges that force IT companies to look for non-trivial approaches to solve the problems of their customers every year.  And as you know LANIT-Integration is not an exception. Our team has already managed to work with many products, but we never stop discovering new ones.

In this article I would like to provide an overview of backup and recovery software from Chinese vendors and to compare these solutions with domestic ones.

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Total votes 15: ↑15 and ↓0 +15
Comments 1

Our new public speech synthesis in super-high quality, 10x faster and more stable

Reading time 3 min
Views 4.1K

hero_image


In our last article we made a bunch of promises about our speech synthesis.


After a lot of hard work we finally have delivered upon these promises:


  • Model size reduced 2x;
  • New models are 10x faster;
  • We added flags to control stress;
  • Now the models can make proper pauses;
  • High quality voice added (and unlimited "random" voices);
  • All speakers squeezed into the same model;
  • Input length limitations lifted, now models can work with paragraphs of text;
  • Pauses, speed and pitch can be controlled via SSML;
  • Sampling rates of 8, 24 or 48 kHz are supported;
  • Models are much more stable — they do not omit words anymore;

This is a truly break-through achievement for us and we are not planning to stop anytime soon. We will be adding as many languages as possible shortly (the CIS languages, English, European languages, Hindic languages). Also we are still planning to make our models additional 2-5x faster.


We are also planning to add phonemes and a new model for stress, as well as to reduce the minimum amount of audio required to train a high-quality voice to 5 — 15 minutes.


As usual you can try our model in our repo or in colab.

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Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0 +13
Comments 0

Q4 2021 DDoS attacks and BGP incidents

Reading time 6 min
Views 990

2021 was an action-packed year for Qrator Labs.

It started with the official celebration of our tenth year anniversary, continued with massive routing incidents, and ended with the infamous Meris botnet we reported back in September.

Now it is time to look at the events of the last quarter of 2021. There are interesting details in the BGP section, like the new records in route leaks and hijacking ASes, but first things first, as we start with the DDoS attacks statistics.

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Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0 +13
Comments 0

New botnet with lots of cameras and some routers

Reading time 3 min
Views 1.8K

DDoS attacks send ripples on the ocean of the Internet, produced by creations of various sizes - botnets. Some of them feed at the top of the ocean, but there also exists a category of huge, deep water monstrosities that are rare and dangerous enough they could be seen only once in a very long time.

November 2021 we encountered, and mitigated, several attacks from a botnet, that seems to be unrelated to one described and/or well-known, like variants of Mirai, Bashlite, Hajime or Brickerbot.

Although our findings are reminiscent of Mirai, we suppose this botnet is not based purely on propagating Linux malware, but a combination of brute forcing and exploiting already patched CVEs in unpatched devices to grow the size of it. Either way, to confirm how exactly this botnet operates, we need to have a sample device to analyze, which isn’t our area of expertise.

This time, we won’t give it a name. It is not 100% clear what we are looking at, what are the exact characteristics of it, and how big this thing actually is. But there are some numbers, and where possible, we have made additional reconnaissance in order to better understand what we’re dealing with.

But let us first show you the data we’ve gathered, and leave conclusions closer to the end of this post.

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Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0 +12
Comments 0

Q3 2021 DDoS attacks and BGP incidents

Reading time 7 min
Views 3.5K

The third quarter of 2021 brought a massive upheaval in the scale and intensity of DDoS attacks worldwide.

It all led to September when together with Yandex, we uncovered one of the most devastating botnets since the Mirai and named it Meris, as it was held accountable for a series of attacks with a very high RPS rate. And as those attacks were aimed all over the world, our quarterly statistics also changed.

This quarter, we've also prepared for your consideration a slice of statistics on the application layer (L7) DDoS attacks. Without further ado, let us elaborate on the details of DDoS attacks statistics and BGP incidents for Q3, 2021.

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Total votes 17: ↑17 and ↓0 +17
Comments 0

Who controls App Store: Martians or AI? Closed session of Russia's Federation Council and Apple leaked online

Reading time 2 min
Views 3.2K


Video recording of a closed session of the upper house of Russia's parliament was leaked online by Telegram channel A000MP97. In the video, Andrei Klimov, head of the Ad Hoc Sovereignty and Preventing Interference in the Domestic Affairs Commission, demands Apple to disclose who controls the App Store: people from Mars or artificial intelligence?

On September 16th, a closed session of the Commission took place, and representatives of Apple and Google were among those who were invited. The session discussed ways to protect sovereignty of the country, in particular, the fact that the Navalny app was still available in Apple App Store and Google Play. The services were accused of being complicit with organisations deemed extremist and banned in Russia as well as interference with Russian elections.
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Total votes 17: ↑17 and ↓0 +17
Comments 0

Mēris botnet, climbing to the record

Reading time 7 min
Views 16K

Introduction

For the last five years, there have virtually been almost no global-scale application-layer attacks.

During this period, the industry has learned how to cope with the high bandwidth network layer attacks, including amplification-based ones. It does not mean that botnets are now harmless.

End of June 2021, Qrator Labs started to see signs of a new assaulting force on the Internet – a botnet of a new kind. That is a joint research we conducted together with Yandex to elaborate on the specifics of the DDoS attacks enabler emerging in almost real-time.

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Total votes 28: ↑28 and ↓0 +28
Comments 0

In-Memory Showdown: Redis vs. Tarantool

Reading time 13 min
Views 5.2K
image

In this article, I am going to look at Redis versus Tarantool. At a first glance, they are quite alike — in-memory, NoSQL, key value. But we are going to look deeper. My goal is to find meaningful similarities and differences, I am not going to claim that one is better than the other.

There are three main parts to my story:

  • We’ll find out what is an in-memory database, or IMDB. When and how are they better than disk solutions?
  • Then, we’ll consider their architecture. What about their efficiency, reliability, and scaling?
  • Then, we’ll delve into technical details. Data types, iterators, indexes, transactions, programming languages, replication, and connectors.

Feel free to scroll down to the most interesting part or even the summary comparison table at the very bottom and the article.
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Total votes 18: ↑17 and ↓1 +16
Comments 3

System-on-Chip bus: AXI4 simplified and explained

Reading time 20 min
Views 26K

Protocol AXI4 was developed for High-bandwidth and low latency applications. It is designed to allow communication between master and slave devices. Master is typically a DMA or CPU and slaves are DRAM controllers, or other specific protocol controllers: UART, SPI, and others. Sometimes one component can implement multiple instances of this protocol. Usually, a prefix is used to differentiate between multiple AXI4 interfaces.

For example, Ethernet MAC can integrate DMA and slave interface used to command MAC. MAC can accept commands on the slave interface that contain data about the location of the next ethernet packet and MAC can start fetching this packet using the separate master interface instance.

This article was motivated by common design mistakes AXI4 designers make when they are designing their Digital IP. (Looking at you Xilinx)

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Total votes 10: ↑10 and ↓0 +10
Comments 1

Building an Arduino based RFID Emulator

Reading time 7 min
Views 13K

This project is aimed at creating an experimental device for emulating RFID labels of three widely available components. I simplified the explanation of the process so that it could be easily replicated. I also developed some helpful ideas along the way, including writing a special program for converting a serial number into the transmitted data, which will definitely prove useful.
Total votes 21: ↑20 and ↓1 +19
Comments 0

Mode on: Comparing the two best colorization AI's

Reading time 11 min
Views 3.2K

This article continues a series of notes about colorization. During today's experiment, we’ll be comparing a recent neural network with the good old Deoldify to gauge the rate at which the future is approaching.

This is a practical project, so we won’t pay extra attention to the underlying philosophy of the Transformer architecture. Besides, any attempt to explain the principles of its operation to a wide public in hand waving terms would become misguiding.

A lecturer: Mr. Petrov! How does a transformer work?
Petrov with a bass voice: Hum-m-m-m.


Google Colorizing Transformer vs Deoldify

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Total votes 17: ↑17 and ↓0 +17
Comments 0

An Unexpected Article About Our Unicorn: Who Is the PVS-Studio Mascot?

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.9K

PVS-Studio has a mascot that became inseparable from the brand - a unicorn. Lately we've been getting many questions about our magic steed: why the unicorn, why has he changed so much, does he have hooves, how come he doesn't wear pants, and how do we draw him. The answers are finally here, in this very article.

Attention: there will be a lot of pictures. And I mean A LOT.

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Total votes 11: ↑11 and ↓0 +11
Comments 0

Overview of Morris's counters

Reading time 7 min
Views 1.2K

On implementing streaming algorithms, counting of events often occurs, where an event means something like a packet arrival or a connection establishment. Since the number of events is large, the available memory can become a bottleneck: an ordinary n-bit counter allows to take into account no more than 2^n - 1events.
One way to handle a larger range of values using the same amount of memory would be approximate counting. This article provides an overview of the well-known Morris algorithm and some generalizations of it.

Another way to reduce the number of bits required for counting mass events is to use decay. We discuss such an approach here [3], and we are going to publish another blog post on this particular topic shortly.

In the beginning of this article, we analyse one straightforward probabilistic calculation algorithm and highlight its shortcomings (Section 2). Then (Section 3), we describe the algorithm proposed by Robert Morris in 1978 and indicate its most essential properties and advantages. For most non-trivial formulas and statements, the text contains our proofs, the demanding reader can find them in the inserts. In the following three sections, we outline valuable extensions of the classic algorithm: you can learn what Morris's counters and exponential decay have in common, how to improve the accuracy by sacrificing the maximum value, and how to handle weighted events efficiently.

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Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0 +12
Comments 0