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RUSHVILLE - The Open Resource and The Rush County Community Foundation are working together to promote digital inclusion.

Thanks to a grant from the Rush County Community Foundation (RCCF), The Open Resource now has 10 new Samsung Chromebooks, a Chromecast media streaming device, eight new work station tables, and a large screen TV cart at the 103 North Main Street training and conference area.

Carole Yeend, President of The Open Resource, indicated this new equipment was acquired thanks to the grant from the RCCF. The new equipment will help The Open Resource expand their Digital Navigator program they recently initiated.

Yeend explained, Thanks to the foundation with these new state of the art digital devices and other equipment we will be able to expand our digital inclusion options by adding new free computer related classes and expanded presentation options to the community.

We really appreciated how the foundation and our other donors are helping us grow the organization and its community services specifically in the area of digital inclusion," Yeend added.

Ron Shields (digital navigator project champion) went on to detail how the new free Digital Navigator service program is available to any resident needing help surviving in todays digital world by providing one on one technical support, technology themed classes, refurbished devices (computers and tablets), and more.

Shields said, Any resident can find more information about the digital program at our website theopenresource.org, by checking out our Facebook page, or stopping by the 103 location.

RCCF Program Officer Kristie Amos said, The RCCF grants committee is excited to support the spread of technology in Rush County. They recognize the importance of the Open Resource in their endeavor to make our community more digitally inclusive and are pleased with progress of the project so far.

With remaining funds from the grant, The Open Resource hopes to acquire and make available to the community additional refurbished laptop computers, resources (both people and hardware) to support a Raspberry Pi computer science type workshop camp for school age children, additional training materials to support classes focused on topics such as digital video production, and more.

If you would like to volunteer to become a digital navigator, have an idea for a class, or would like to lead a class in a topic of interest contact either Yeend or Shield at The Open Resource.

-Information provided.

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See the original post:

The Open Resource and RCCF promote digital inclusion - Greensburg Daily News

The Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grants over one million dollars per year to Armenian and Armenian Studies university students around the world, including renewals. In 2021, 231 scholarship applications were received for its two principal scholarship categories: Armenian Studies and Higher Education for Armenian Students in Developing Countries. As always, each application was rigorously evaluated. Seventy scholarships of varying amounts were granted: 13 in Armenian Studies (graduate level) and 57 to Armenian students in higher education (mostly undergraduate level).

A total of457,000 USD was granted in new scholarships within theArmenian Studies scholarship category. Fifty-one applications were received and 13 selected. Scholarships run from one to three years. Eight are for PhDs, one is a Post-Doc, and four are for MAs. Of the 13 scholarships, 10 went to women and three to men. The scholarship awardees are pursuing their studies in the UK, the US, France, Ireland, Spain and Netherlands. In terms of broad research topics, five are on contemporary Armenia, include two on gender-related issues, three are on language and education, three are on art, literature and heritage studies, and two are on the contemporary ramifications of the Genocide. Armenian Studies is defined in its broad sense and not confined to area studies.

A total of288,000USD was granted within theHigher Education Scholarships for Armenian Students in Developing Countries category.180 applications were received from which 57 were selected 32 women and 25 men. The topics studied include biology, law, social sciences, psychology, nursing, communications, translation, social work, robotics, engineering, business and finance, computer science, architecture, graphic design and English literature, among many others. The aim of this scholarship category is to encourage university students of Armenian origin from less developed countries, particularly undergraduates in the Middle East, to obtain higher education in any field in a recognized university in their own country of residence or in Armenia.

The Armenian Communities Department congratulates all the awardees!

These two scholarship categories are currently closed. They will reopen in January 2022 for the subsequent academic year. The Short-Term grants (for travel and for Armenian studies) remain open.

Guest contributions to the Armenian Weekly are informative articles or press releases written and submitted by members of the community.

Link:

2021 University Scholarships awarded by the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - Armenian Weekly

The websites we visit are scattered across a vast, messy web of underground cables, racks of metallic boxes, and a myriad of routers that weve come to call the internet. So when you punch in an address and hit enter, how does your browser know where to look?

The answer is a system thats been around since the days that the internet was so small and so compact, it could all be mapped in a single text file.Its called the Domain Name System (or DNS for short), and although it has kept up with the internets evolving role for decades, it has also crumbled more frequently than ever in recent years and taken down some of the webs biggest sites along with it.

That increasing frequency has led many to call for a better system but replacing the very foundations of the worldwide web is no easy undertaking.

The DNS is one of the internets most vital cogs. It acts as the internets phonebook. Not the thick, physical kind but more akin to the digital one on your phone.

The DNSs job is to translate a website name into its computer-friendly address.

You see, electronic devices like your computer or your modem router dont understand the language we speak. They talk in numbers. So when you type in a domain name like digitaltrends.com, the browser doesnt quite know what it means. It needs that websites unique identification number its physical address (192.0.66.16 for Digital Trends) to navigate through the maze of servers and routers, then trace the websites location and bring it up on your screen.

In other words, the DNSs job is to translate a website name into its computer-friendly address similar to how your phones contacts app lets you access a mobile number or an address by simply entering a persons name. Except unlike your phones contacts app, the internets phonebook has nearly 2 billion entries of websites (and counting).

So every time you enter a URL in the address bar, your browser first calls the DNS and requests it to fetch the websites number. Once the DNS returns that information, the browser can find and connect to the websites server.

This all happens in the blink of an eye, and browsers are able to cut back further on how long the DNS process takes by caching the IDs of the websites you visit often.

Without the DNS, your browser would be lost in the dark without a flashlight. Its essential for pretty much anything that involves a web address, which covers most of your internet activities, from sending someone a text to processing a digital payment. In the span of a single a day, hundreds of billions of DNS pings are exchanged a trillion in the case of Comcast.

The DNS has been around since the 1970s, when the internet was restricted to the walls of a few universities. Unlike todays global, decentralized system, it was just a text file with a list of all the connected computers numerical addresses and it was maintained by a single woman named Elizabeth Feinler.

But DNS has unquestionably evolved far beyond what its original makers envisioned. And as a result of this forced evolution, cracks have begun to appear in its architecture.

The bigger concern is the consolidation in the DNS market.

In July 2021, several banking pages and services like Airbnb, Amazon, and others went offline for over an hour due to a DNS bug. A similar issue disrupted a large chunk of the internet in 2020. In fact, such outages are so common that the phrase its always DNS, which pokes fun at how the DNS is usually responsible for a network snag, has become a popular joke among technologists.

The reason DNS is involved with so many internet outages, according to Dan York, the director of online content at the Internet Society, is simply because it operates at a huge scale beyond that of any other service. There are dozens of moving parts, and since it all works like some high-speed relay race, even when one of them malfunctions, it breaks the entire DNS chain.

In the grand scheme of things, though, DNSs error rate is fairly low (remember: trillions of queries pass through it every day). According to data supplied by Pingdom, a global network-monitoring platform, DNS has been only responsible for 4% of daily outages this year so far.

The bigger concern is the consolidation in the DNS market. One of the original objectives behind moving on from the original text file to the modern DNS was to engineer a distributed database that avoids the problems caused by a centralized database.

But what has happened is that as more people came online and network demands grew, large companies delegated their DNS duties to third-party hosting services like Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services. Most of the top thousand domains have coalesced around just four infrastructure providers. So any time theres a bug in one of these providers, a massive chunk of the mainstream web goes offline.

ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit regulatory body that oversees DNS standards, has no control over which hosting services companies pick. Because of this, Raj Jain, a computer science professor at Washington University, believes theres a dire need for a law against all internet monopolies, including DNS providers and search engines.

A few startups have more ambitious solutions in mind, however. Handshake, a blockchain-powered platform, argues the centralization of the DNS into the hands of a couple of hosting companies and gatekeepers like ICANN has made it vulnerable to cyberattacks and censorship. It wants to decentralize the Domain Name System for good by distributing its root onto a blockchain network, where everyone can truly own their domains instead of trusting a third party.

Handshake lets us create a whole new phone book, Handshakes head of marketing, Jake Schaeffer, told Digital Trends, owned by no one and everyone at the same time.

In reality, though, its close to impossible to replicate DNS ability to scale. Previous attempts similar to Handshakes have come and failed.

DNS processes hundreds of thousands of queries per second, and any new technologies such as blockchain cant keep up with this rapid rate of change, says Eric Osterweil, an assistant computer science professor at George Mason University and former vice-chair of the team responsible for analyzing the DNS security, stability, and reliability.

My view is that the collision-free namespace of DNS is something we would likely never be able to create again, added Osterweil.

An ICANN spokesperson said the coalition doesnt believe there are significant issues with DNS administration or scaling, and that it closely follows the development of new identifier technologies, such as those based on blockchain and peer-to-peer networks.

A blockchain-based alternative to the DNS doesnt have any takers yet. But its a familiar story and one weve seen before in the case of Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin has been in development for over a decade, and its still far from replacing traditional currencies. Its partial success paints a promising picture, though. Whether companies like Handshake can replicate this success to build a reliable DNS alternative remains to be seen.

ICANN, in its strategic plan for the next few years, has identified many of the DNS common issues and allocated more budget to pare down its risks. But if history is any indication, even once updates to resolve these issues are executed, theyll take years to roll out.

Until then, DNS will keep knocking the internets most visited destinations offline once in a while, and the its always DNS chants will continue.

See the original post:

The internets phonebook is flawed and outdated. Its time for an upgrade - Digital Trends

In a recent article on the Ably Blog, Alex Diaconu reviewed the thirty-year-old "eight fallacies of distributed computing" and provided a number of hints at how to handle them. InfoQ has taken the chance to talk with Diaconu to learn more about how Ably engineers deal with the fallacies.

The eight fallacies are a set of conjectures about distributed computing which can lead to failures in software development. The assumptions are: the network is reliable; latency is zero; bandwidth is infinite; the network is secure; topology doesn't change; there is one administrator; transport cost is zero; the network is homogeneous.

The fallacies can be seen as architectural requirements you have to account for when designing distributed systems. InfoQ has taken the chance to talk with Diaconu to learn more about how Ably engineers deal with the fallacies.

InfoQ: Almost thirty years since the fallacies of distributed computing were initially suggested, they are still highly relevant. What's their role at Ably?

Diaconu: All of the fallacies are pointers to distributed system design pitfalls, and they are all still relevant today. They don't all have the same impact some are more easily accommodated than others. The fallacies that have the most pervasive effect on how we structure our systems at Ably are:

InfoQ: Do you think the evolution of distributed systems in the last thirty years has revealed any additional fallacies that should be taken into account?

Diaconu: I believe the most significant transformation over the last 30 years is the maturity of our understanding of how to deal with them. Thats not to say that the answers are any easier, but they are better understood. We know what approaches are good, what approaches are bad, and the limits of any given approach. There is now well-established scientific theory and engineering practice around these problem spaces. Computer science students are taught the problems and what the state of the art is.

Of course, its important to acknowledge that the fallacies are manifestations of enduring technical challenges; they shouldnt be thought of as easily avoided pitfalls. I suppose you could say that there is, in fact, a new fallacy "avoiding the fallacies of distributed computing is easy."

InfoQ: Some of the fallacies have become meanwhile commonplace, for example the idea that the Cloud is not secure is widely accepted. Still there may be some subtlety to them that makes the process of dealing with them not so trivial.

Diaconu: As previously mentioned, the challenges of distributed systems, and the broad science around the techniques and mechanisms used to build them, are now well researched. The thing you learn when addressing these challenges in the real world, however, is that academic understanding only gets you so far.

Building distributed systems involves engineering pragmatism and trade-offs, and the best solutions are the ones you discover by experience and experiment.

As an example, the "network is reliable" fallacy is the most basic thing you have to address. The known solutions involve protocols with retries; or consensus formation protocols; or redundancy for fault tolerance, depending on the particular failure mode of concern.

However, the engineering reality is that multiple kinds of failures can, and will, occur at the same time. The ideal solution now depends on the statistical distribution of failures; or on analysis of error budgets, and the specific service impact of certain errors.

The recovery mechanisms can themselves fail due to system unreliability, and the probability of those failures might impact the solution. And of course, you have the dangers of complexity: solutions that are theoretically sound, but complex, might be far more complicated to manage or understand whenever an incident takes place than simpler mechanisms that are theoretically not as complete.

InfoQ: If we look at microservices, which have become quite popular in the last few years, they seem to be at odds with the "transport cost is zero" fallacy. In fact, the smaller each microservice, the larger their overall count and the ensuing transport cost. How do you explain this?

Diaconu: Maybe another fallacy is "microservices make it easier to reason about your system". Sometimes breaking things down into components with a smaller surface area makes them easier to reason about. However, sometimes creating those boundaries adds complexity; it can certainly add failure modes, and it can create new things whose behavior also needs to be reasoned about.

Much like the previous answer, the actual design choices, and when and where you deploy the known theoretical solutions, come down to engineering judgment and experience. At Ably, we operate a system with multiple roles that scale, interoperate and discover one another independently. However, splitting functionality out into a distinct role is something we rarely do, and only when there is a particular driver for that to happen. For example, if we want some specific functionality to scale independently of other functionality, that justifies the creation of an independent role, even if it brings additional complexity.

Diaconu's article not only helps you understand where the fallacies originate from, but it also attempts to provide useful hints at current techniques and approaches to address the fallacies, so do not miss it if you are interested in the subject.

Read the rest here:

Reviewing the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing - InfoQ.com