Pull to refresh
23.76

IT Standards *

Standards in Information Technology

Show first
Rating limit
Level of difficulty

How to conduct UX brainstorming sessions effectively: tips and methods that work

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 6 min
Views 338
Retrospective

Brainstorming is a popular working method which is commonly used by UX design teams. It involves a group of designers meeting (whether offline or via video call) and generating as many ideas as possible to find the best solution to a specific problem or come up with creative design ideas. Brainstorming sessions are usually held at the start of a UX project so that designers could use the ideas they think are the best later in the process of product creation. These sessions can vary in duration and form depending on which problems need to be solved, how many people participate and how many ideas need to be generated. 

Read more
Rating 0
Comments 3

It's alive

Reading time 2 min
Views 1.1K

I wonder why IT developer interviews are so strange most of the time. It feels as if the people are looking for computer science teachers, not engineers. All those theoretical questions that have no relation to the working reality. It is strange to be looking for eloquent teachers, who can perfectly explain any term or pattern, and then ask them to do the actual work. Maybe it is the imprint from the years spent in university when the teachers looked like all-knowing gods and seemed to solve any issue in your life. May be, may not. Anyway, these teachers stay in unis and don't do the work.

You know, what would be my universal answer to all interview questions? “I have no idea how and why it works, but I can use it, and I can use it for good”. This is the reality. Actually, no one knows exactly these hows and whys. What is a computer? What is electricity? What is an electron? No one knows for sure. But it works and we use it.

Imagine a famous author, like Stephen King, asked a question about the difference between deus ex machina and Mary Sue. Would his answer change the quality of his books? He may or he may not know all those scientific literature terms, but he can use the language and use it for good.

Every time I turn on my computer it is a wonder. I have no idea what is going on, but it awakes, it becomes alive, and I can communicate with it in its own sublime and subtle language.

Have you ever realised that all these electronic devices are monsters, Frankenstein's monsters? Some pieces of dead matter were put together, and then, with some electricity involved, it suddenly awoke. “It's alive!”. Had Frankenstein any idea why it turned alive? Of course not, or why he was so surprised? Every developer experiences this feeling almost every day. “It's working!”

Read more
Total votes 7: ↑4 and ↓3 +1
Comments 1

MISRA C: struggle for code quality and security

Reading time 11 min
Views 1.1K

A couple of years ago the PVS-Studio analyzer got its first diagnostic rules to check program code compliance with the MISRA C and MISRA C++ standards. We collected feedback and saw that our clients were interested in using the analyzer to check their projects for MISRA compliance. So, we decided to further develop the analyzer in this direction. The article covers the MISRA C/C++ standard and the MISRA Compliance report. It also shows what we already managed to do and what we plan to achieve by the end of the year.


0866_MISRA_C/image1.png

Read more →
Rating 0
Comments 0

Blockchain is the perfect solution to online privacy problem

Reading time 3 min
Views 1.1K

We are increasingly aware of the importance of our personal data. Primarily due to numerous data leaks and the fact of numerous sales of personal information on the black market. Yes, huge corporations like Apple or Samsung prioritize the preservation of sensitive user data. However, they find it difficult to store and use them at the same time. That is why blockchain technology is the perfect tool for solving the online privacy problem.

There are constant news in the media about the problem of personal privacy, which is represented by constant data leaks and the general technological illiteracy of the world population. In the Pew study, nearly 80% of respondents said they are very concerned about how companies are using the data they collect. In MState's study, 24% of respondents stopped using certain apps due to privacy concerns.

Today, an increasing number of people are actively protecting their data by refusing the services of companies and applications that use personal data. This is why Apple, Lyft, Dropbox, and Adobe have started taking a consumer-centric approach to data privacy. Consumers' understanding that their personal data is a commodity is increasing.

Free TON is a prime example of a secure blockchain. This blockchain has some of the best features compared to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Stellar. Data security directly depends on the use of blockchain. Each of the above blockchains provides a different level of data protection. Ethereum is the most popular blockchain, but Free TON may soon overtake it. This blockchain is just over a year old, and its capabilities exceed those of all other blockchains.

Читать далее
Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1 -1
Comments 0

Telegram bot provides time-based currency

Reading time 2 min
Views 7.5K

Many of us spend time in specialized telegram groups. The power over communication here belongs to random people with their own shortcomings. Conflict and abuse occurs regularly. Is there another way to keep order so that scam spam doesn't flourish and no one has total control over group members?

In my case, these thoughts led to the development and testing of a system that can be connected to your Telegram today.

How it works?
Total votes 6: ↑5 and ↓1 +4
Comments 5

Quintet instead of Byte — data storage and retrieval approach

Reading time 13 min
Views 1.6K
Quintet is a way to present atomic pieces of data indicating their role in the business area. Quintets can describe any item, while each of them contains complete information about itself and its relations to other quintets. Such description does not depend on the platform used. Its objective is to simplify the storage of data and to improve the visibility of their presentation.



We will discuss an approach to storing and processing information and share some thoughts on creating a development platform in this new paradigm. What for? To develop faster and in shorter iterations: sketch your project, make sure it is what you thought of, refine it, and then keep refining the result.

The quintet has properties: type, value, parent, and order among the peers. Thus, there are 5 components including the identifier. This is the simplest universal form to record information, a new standard that could potentially fit any programming demands. Quintets are stored in the file system of the unified structure, in a continuous homogeneous indexed bulk of data. The quintet data model — a data model that describes any data structure as a single interconnected list of basic types and terms based on them (metadata), as well as instances of objects stored according to this metadata (data).
Read more →
Total votes 8: ↑8 and ↓0 +8
Comments 2

Flightradar24 — how does it work? Part 2, ADS-B protocol

Reading time 9 min
Views 6.8K
I’m going to have a guess and say that everyone whose friends or family have ever flown on a plane, have used Flightradar24 — a free and convenient service for tracking flights in real time.

image

In the first part the basic ideas of operation were described. Now let's go further and figure out, what data is exactly transmitting and receiving between the aircraft and a ground station. We'll also decode this data using Python.
Read more →
Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0 +12
Comments 0

Physical unclonable functions: protection for electronics against illegal copying

Reading time 7 min
Views 4.9K
Translation

Source: The online counterfeit economy: consumer electronics, a report made by CSC in 2017

Over the past 10 years, the number of fake goods in the world has doubled. This data has been published in the latest Year-End Intellectual Property Rights Review by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2016 (the most current year tracked). A lot of the counterfeiting comes from China (56%), Hong Kong (36%) and Singapore (2%). The manufacturers of original goods suffer serious losses, some of which occur on the electronics market.

Many modern products contain electronic components: clothes, shoes, watches, jewellery, cars.
Last year, direct losses from the illegal copying of consumer electronics and electronic components in the composition of other goods were about $0.5 trillion.

How to solve this problem?
Read more →
Total votes 14: ↑14 and ↓0 +14
Comments 0

Eliminating opportunities for traffic hijacking

Reading time 8 min
Views 4.1K

Beautiful scheme for BGP connection to Qrator filtering network

A little historical overview


  • BGP hijacks — when an ISP originates an advertisement of address space that does not belong to it;
  • BGP route leaks — when an ISP advertises prefixes received from one provider or peer to another provider or peer.

This week it has been 11 years since the memorable YouTube BGP incident, provoked by the global propagation of a more specific prefix announce, originated by the Pakistan Telecom, leading to an almost 2 hour in duration traffic disruption in the form of redirecting traffic from legitimate path to the bogus one. We could guess if that event was intentional, and even a correct answer wouldn’t help us completely prevent such incidents from happening today. While you read this, a route leak or a hijack is spreading over the networks. Why? Because BGP is not easy, and configuring a correct and secure setup is even harder (yet).

In these eleven years, BGP hijacking became quite damaging attack vector due to the BGP emplacement in the architecture of modern internet. Thanks to BGP, routers not only acquire peer information, and therefore all the Internet routes — they are able of calculating the best path for traffic to its destination through many intermediate (transit) networks, each representing an individual AS. A single AS is just a group of IPv4 and/or IPv6 networks operating under a single external routing policy.
Read more →
Total votes 18: ↑18 and ↓0 +18
Comments 0

Authors' contribution