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This is the second post in our series of articles about the results of checking open-source software working with the RDP protocol. Today we are going to take a look at the rdesktop client and xrdp server.

On March 13, a proposal for the RIPE anti-abuse working group was submitted, stating that a BGP hijacking event should be treated as a policy violation. In case of acceptance, if you are an ISP attacked with the hijack, you could submit a special request where you might expose such an autonomous system. If there is enough confirming evidence for an expert group, then such a LIR would be considered an adverse party and further punished. There were some arguments against this proposal.

With this article, we want to show an example of the attack where not only the true attacker was under the question, but the whole list of affected prefixes. Moreover, it again raises concerns about the possible motives for the future attack of this type.

At my agency we work a lot with international candidates and German companies. So, I wanted to write a small essay about the visa issues because often they will influence your chances of landing a job heavily. Since I work mostly with German market, I will talk about the processes in Germany, the processes may and probably are different in other EU countries. Hopefully the information will be helpful and will give you some clarity.

As all of you know, nowadays there is a big demand for experienced IT professionals in almost all EU countries. When I say experienced I mean 3+ years of experience. Companies are adjusting their teams to accept English speaking colleagues from around the globe, coming up with different perks to smooth up the relocation process and in general the IT world is becoming predominantly English speaking. Germany government understanding the demand by the industry has made the process quite fast and straightforward. I expect even easier process to be implemented in the upcoming year or two.

Visa sponsorship

Companies in Germany do not sponsor visas like in other countries, there is no such a term here. Companies either hire non-EU candidates or not. The decision is strictly an internal decision and is not influenced by any quotas, permissions etc. If you get a job contract from a German company (be it a big conglomerate or a small startup) you have a right to apply for the work visa.

Do I need a university degree?

Dmitry learned the language of business but I think about the world as an engineer. He works with tech brands to create content and promote corporate culture at scale. Apart from it, he is one of the veterans at Techstars Startup Digest, and he is acting as an advisor for the SXSW tech festival.

Here is his interview with the LAMA app platform.

Our team provides quick and effective customer support. User requests are handled solely by programmers since our clients are programmers themselves and they often ask tricky questions. Today I'm going to tell you about a recent request concerning one false positive that even forced me to carry out a small investigation to solve the problem.

Tech journalist Igor Oskolkov of 3DNews.ru has recently tested publicly available version of the evaluation board or, as the vendor calls it, the developer software-hardware complex, under the code name BFK 3.1 with the Russian SoC Baikal-T1 based on the MIPS P5600 Warrior architecture. Here goes the English translation of his text, that was first published in Russian by servernews.ru.

Ability to write good unit tests is an important feature of any developer. But how to understand that your unit tests are correct? Good unit test is like a good chess game. In our case chessmen are the approaches which we are going to discuss in this post. There is no best chessman in a chess game because everything depends on the positions (and a player). Likewise, in unit testing you don't have to distinguish only one approach. In other words, you should use all approaches together to get the best result. So, if you want to win this game, then welcome under the cut.

Entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new tools and possibilities to develop their businesses and enrich their knowledge. One of the ways of doing this is visiting themed events — meeting colleagues in real life, exchanging experiences, and communicating with potential investors.

In fact, there are thousands of tech-focused events taking place annually. The important thing is to pick the best, most useful and easily accessible ones to optimize your time and expenses.

Techstars Startup Digest solves this problem by sending its subscribers an email newsletter with a curated list of relevant and reasonably priced events for entrepreneurs. Currently, Startup Digest consists of more than 700 curators, is approaching 700K subscriptions, and is available in more than 300 cities all around the world. Today, I’d like to share its history, how the founders came up with the idea, what it looked like in the initial stages, and what it’s going through right now.

Leadership is not a service, it’s a skill. Professionals working as a software developer for a couple of years are given the chance to be a tech lead. However, remember that ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’

There are several things that you need to take care of while being a tech lead. Obviously, you don’t need to code as much as you need to do while being a software developer. However, there are several other non-coding related things that now are your responsibility to deal with.

10 Tips for Being a Good Tech Lead

Maintaining a tech lead position while not gaining any criticism from the team isn’t possible. This is not due to your incapacity albeit due to human nature. However, the effort can be made to minimize it and becoming better in what you do eventually. After all, you are the leader now.

Just about the fastest portable 64-bit hash function with decent quality.

This is a translation of the original article by Leonid Yuriev.

Long time ago, when a mobile phone costed about 2000$ and one minute of voice call was 50 cents, pagers were really popular. Later cellular phones became cheaper, calls and SMS prices became lower, and finally pagers mostly disappeared.


For people, who owned a pager before, and want to know how it works, this article will be useful.

One of the many botched faxes

This is a (rather freely) translated version of this article.

When most people hear «fax», they remember those clumsy hybrids of a telephone and a printer straight outta 80s (unless you're in Japan, of course — they're still common there). But did you know that a similar technology is used to provide ship crews with weather data when there's no Internet connection? And Kyodo, a Japanese news agency (they sure like faxes, huh), still broadcasts news like that. And we can decode all this stuff, too — given a receiver, an audio cable and some software.

Иногда молодые команды разработки охватывает неразбериха.

Это случается в тот момент, когда они ещё не до конца разобрались, что такое эджайл; проджект и продакт спорят, кто из них кто, а задачи каждый ведёт сам по себе. Или все уже всё знают, но планировать спринты не получается — задачи не прорабатываются, демо и ретро проходят нерегулярно.

У нас тоже была похожая история, но мы нашли свой путь.

Это рассказ от команды личного кабинета Яндекс.Кассы, и подробнейшая инструкция для тех, кто хочет улучшить своё планирование.

Как всё было

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.

I manage a team that designs and introduces in-house Kubernetes aaS at Mail.ru Cloud Solutions. And we often see a lack of understanding as to this technology, so I’d like to talk about common strategic mistakes at Kubernetes implementation in major projects.

Most of the problems arise because the technology is quite sophisticated. There are unobvious implementation and operation challenges, as well as poorly used advantages, all of those resulting in money loss. Another issue is the global lack of knowledge and experience with Kubernetes. Learning its use by the book can be tricky, and hiring qualified staff can be challenging. All the hype complicates Kubernetes-related decision making. Curiously enough, Kubernetes is often implemented rather formally – just for it to be there and make their lives better in some way.

Hopefully, this post will help you to make a decision you will feel proud of later (and won’t regret or feel like building a time machine to undo it).

I came to Mail.ru Group in 2013, and I required a queue for one task. First of all, I decided to check what the company had already got. They told me they had this Tarantool product, and I checked how it worked and decided that adding a queue broker to it could work perfectly well.

I contacted Kostja Osipov, the senior expert in Tarantool, and the next day he gave me a 250-string script that was capable of managing almost everything I needed. Since that moment, I have been in love with Tarantool. It turned out that a small amount of code written with a quite simple script language was capable of ensuring some totally new performance for this DBMS.

Today, I’m going to tell you how to instantiate your own queue in Tarantool 2.2.

This is a transcription of a talk that was presented at CSNOG 2020 — video is at the end of the page

Greetings! My name is Alexander Zubkov. I work at Qrator Labs, where we protect our customers against DDoS attacks and provide BGP analytics.

We started using Mellanox switches around 2 or 3 years ago. At the time we got acquainted with Switchdev in Linux and today I want to share with you our experience.

Last October, I made the first demoscene production after an almost two-decades-long break — a demo for PICO-8 fantasy console “PICOCHAK: Attack of Donuts.” This article is “behind the scenes” or PICOCHAK.

A few days ago 0xd34df00d has published the translation of the article, describing the possible information about some function if we use it as a "black box", not trying to read its implementation. Of course, this information is quite different from language to language; in the original article, four cases were considered:

• Python — dynamic typing, almost no information from signature, some hints are gained by the tests;
• C — weak static typing, a little more information;
• Haskell — strong static typing, with pure functions by default, a lot more information;
• Idris — dependent typing, compiler can prove the function correctness.

"Here's C and there's Haskell, and what about Rust?" — this was the first question in the following discussion. The reply is here.

PVS-Studio is a tool for detecting software bugs and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of software written in C, C++, C#, and Java. The analyzer runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.