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Understanding the Differences Between Kafka and RabbitMQ: in Simple Terms

Reading time7 min
Views5.1K

Software message brokers became the standard for creating complex systems. However not all IT specialists understand how these instruments work. Pavel Malygin, Lead System Analyst at Innotech, dives into the topic of message brokers and explains how they are used.

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Methodology for calculating results of a task set: taking into account its level of difficulty

Reading time3 min
Views2.4K

In the world of academic knowledge evaluation, objective calculation of large data presents a serious problem. Can a student studying in an Advanced Maths class and getting B-marks be evaluated equally with another student, getting B-marks in a General Maths class? Can we create a system that would take into account the level of difficulty those students face?

This article will describe a system of independent evaluation we have been using for school olympics in five subjects (Mathematics, English Language, Russian Language, Tatar Language, Social Science) for students grades 1 to 11. In each academic year we organise six qualification tournaments, with about 15,000 students from different regions of Russia. Then we select the top ten participants in each subject and each grade for their future participation in the final (seventh) tournament, where only the best of the best are chosen. It means that 550 participants compete in the final tournament, which is about 5.5% of all participants in the academic year. 

It is obvious that those multiple tournaments cannot be absolutely homogenous, and inevitably the levels of difficulty for each set of tasks vary. Therefore, it is critical for us to take into consideration those variations of difficulty and calculate the results in the most objective manner.

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How Yandex Made Their Biggest Improvement in the Search Engine with the Help of Toloka

Reading time5 min
Views2.3K

Toloka is a crowdsourcing platform and microtasking project launched by Yandex to quickly markup large amounts of data. But how can such a simple concept play a crucial role in improving the work of neural networks?

Learn how

Modern Micro-Service Architecture: Key Challenges for System Analysts

Reading time9 min
Views1.8K

We're continuing to explore micro service architecture. In today's blog Alexander Solyar, Lead system architect at Innotech, describes the main challenges analysts are facing while working with micro services. He also shares a number of effective solutions and recommendations.

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The 2022 National Internet Segment Reliability Research

Reading time8 min
Views1.1K

The National Internet Segment Reliability Research explains how the outage of a single Autonomous System might affect the connectivity of the impacted region with the rest of the world. Generally, the most critical AS in the region is the dominant ISP on the market, but not always.

As the number of alternate routes between ASes increases (the "Internet" stands for "interconnected networks" - and each network is an AS), so does the fault-tolerance and stability of the Internet across the globe. Although some paths are more important than others from the beginning, establishing as many alternate routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure an adequately robust network.

The global connectivity of any given AS, whether an international giant or a regional player, depends on the quantity and quality of its path to Tier-1 ISPs.

Usually, Tier-1 implies an international company offering global IP transit service over connections with other Tier-1 providers. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that such connectivity will always be maintained. For many ISPs at all "tiers", losing connection to even one Tier-1 peer would likely render them unreachable from some parts of the world.

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Top 10 incident response mistakes

Reading time9 min
Views1.2K

Imagine someone withdrew money from a company's account at night. The next morning panic breaks out, leading to yet more problems. The IT department can reinstall a compromised system from scratch or restore it from backup. Reinstalling from scratch will wipe out all traces left by the attackers, and external investigators will have to search for clues in other systems. Restoring from backup carries the risk of accidentally reinstating a compromised image. In this paper, we will describe common mistakes that experts make when responding to security incidents.

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Modern Microservice Architecture: Design Principles

Reading time7 min
Views4K

First mentions of micro service architecture application go back to the previous decade. Today this approach became the industry standard. Alexander Solyar, Lead software architect at Innotech, dives into details, shares professional insights and practical rules for working with micro services .

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How I gave my old laptop second life

Reading time16 min
Views3K

17-19 min read

Hi y'all, my name is Labertte and I use Arch btw.
Probably like every other Linux user, I'd like to buy a ThinkPad, put some lightweight distribution like Arch or Gentoo on it, and then go to Starbucks, get a soy latte and tell everyone that I use "linux". But I decided to go a little different route and give a chance to my old laptop that I was using about five or seven years ago.

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Backup & Recovery Solutions from China

Reading time9 min
Views4.5K

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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The Systems Engineering Methodology for Startups

Reading time6 min
Views2K

Creating a product startup can be an exciting experience, but it can be a daunting one as well. On average, only 1 out of 10 startups is successful, according to the Global Startup Ecosystem Report. Therefore, to raise your prospects, there are quite a number of important considerations to make in advance. 

Bearing in mind everything you need when launching a startup is a challenging task, so it’d be a sound idea to rely on some well-established methodology. That's why we were inspired by the Systems Engineering methodology, presented in such industry standards as ISO 15288 and CFR21. In this article, we’ll make a brief overview of this methodology and highlight how it can help entrepreneurs to encompass and structure the process of creating and developing a startup.

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Metaverses: hype or the future to come?

Reading time5 min
Views1.5K

Alexander Volchek, IT entrepreneur, CEO educational platform GeekBrains

Pretty much everyone in the IT community is talking metaverses, NFTs, blockchain and cryptocurrency. This time we will discuss metaverses, and come back to everything else in the letters to follow. Entrepreneurs and founders of tech giants are passionate about this idea, and investors are allocating millions of dollars for projects dealing with metaverses. Let's start with the basics.

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What are neural networks and what do we need them for?

Reading time4 min
Views4.7K

Explaining through simple examples

For a long time, people have been thinking on how to create a computer that could think like a person. The advent of artificial neural networks is a significant step in this direction. Our brain consists of neurons that receive information from sensory organs and process it: we recognize people we know by their faces, and we feel hungry when we see delicious food. All of this is the result of brain neurons working and interacting with each other. This is also the principle that artificial neural networks are based on, simulating the processes occurring in the human brain.

What are neural networks

Artificial neural networks are a software code that imitates the work of a brain and is capable of self-learning. Like a biological network, an artificial network also consists of neurons, but they have a simpler structure.

If you connect neurons into a sufficiently large network with controlled interaction, they will be able to perform quite complex tasks. For example, determining what is shown in a picture, or independently creating a photorealistic image based on a text description.

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IDS Bypass at Positive Hack Days 11: writeup and solutions

Reading time10 min
Views2K

The IDS Bypass contest was held at the Positive Hack Days conference for the third time (for retrospective, here's . This year we created six game hosts, each with a flag. To get the flag, participants had either to exploit a vulnerability on the server or to fulfill another condition, for example, to enumerate lists of domain users.

The tasks and vulnerabilities themselves were quite straightforward. The difficulty laid in bypassing the IDS: the system inspected network traffic from participants using special rules that look for attacks. If such a rule was triggered, the participant's network request was blocked, and the bot sent them the text of the triggered rule in Telegram.

And yes, this year we tried to move away from the usual CTFd and IDS logs towards a more convenient Telegram bot. All that was needed to take part was to message the bot and pick a username. The bot then sent an OVPN file to connect to the game network, after which all interaction (viewing tasks and the game dashboard, delivering flags) took place solely through the bot. This approach paid off 100%!

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An Antidote to Absent-Mindedness, or How I Gained Access to an OpenShift Node without an SSH Key

Reading time6 min
Views5.4K

Typically when a Node falls out of the OpenShift cluster, this is resolved by simply restarting the offending element. What should you do, however, if you’ve forgotten the SSH key or left it in the office? You can attempt to restore access by using your wit and knowledge of Linux commands. Renat Garaev, lead developer at Innotech, described how he found the solution for this riddle and what was the outcome.

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Utilitarian blockchain. 1. Assets

Reading time8 min
Views1.5K
image

In the modern world, the term " **blockchain** " is steadily associated with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, mining, trading and financial pyramids. However, even among programmers and IT people there is not always a clear understanding of what it is and what it is for.

This article attempts to look at this still relatively new element of the information and human space in practical and slightly philosophical aspects.

> **Disclaimer**: The article will use simple language to explain non-trivial concepts, so non-critical distortion of technical details is possible.
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Information is changed by entropy

Reading time2 min
Views1.2K

According to the no-cloning theorem it is impossible to create an independent and identical copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. We cannot delete any quantum information as well. All changes in time of the state vector in quantum mechanics are described by the action of unitary operators. Accordingly, there must be an operator performing a deleting operation. The operator must be a zero matrix in order to nullify quantum information totally in all cases. But a zero matrix is not a uninaty or hermitian matrix. Therefore there is no such unitary operator that can delete information.

   This might be proven in another way. Let us imagine the double-slit thought experiment where interference exists when we do not know about the system and interference does not when we know about the system. Assume we have a storage where the data is stored and the experiment is being conducted with knowing about the system. Suppose we destroy the storage. What does the screen in the experiment show us? Quantum mechanics tells us that there must not be interference. Should it appear after the data is destroyed? Since the wave function has collapsed it cannot be restored. If there is a chance to delete the information in the experiment, it means that the wave function must go back to the initial state and show us interference, which is a contradiction.

   Based on the foregoing, we will consider the quantum eraser experiment. In that experiment information is neither erased nor disappeared. It is being changed. That is the key point. We increase entropy. If there is a 50 per cent chance to get interference then the entropy = 1 (max value). The same with a spin. If we change spins of elementary particles, for example in the Stern–Gerlach experiment with different axes measurements, we do not delete the information about the states of particles, we increase the entropy. Changing does not equal deleting. 

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PHDays 11: bootkit infection, sanitizers for the Linux kernel, the new face of OSINT, and phishing on official websites

Reading time3 min
Views1.6K

Positive Hack Days 11 will begin in a matter of weeks. This international forum on practical security will be held on May 18–19 in Moscow.

As per tradition, PHDays will have three big tracks dedicated to countering attacks (defensive), protection through attack (offensive), and the impact of cybersecurity on business. It is our pleasure to present the first talks.

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