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Bad bots have long been a major illness plaguing the internet. As internet traffic reached new heights throughout the global pandemic, unfortunately so did bot traffic. By Erez Hasson.

In 2020, 40.8 percent of internet traffic wasn’t human, and 25.6 percent originated from bad bots. What have these bad bots been doing throughout the year?

The article content:

• Scalpers changed their targets
• Bots are looking for vaccine appointments
• Did bad bots target the elections?
• Account Takeover attacks are more prevalent than ever
• The travel industry remains a favorite target of sophisticated bots

Also known as Credential Stuffing and Credential Cracking brute force attacks, these are one of the most sinister automated threats infecting the internet today. Data from Imperva Research Labs reveals a third of all login attempts in recent months have been malicious. Good read!

When cookies aren’t available, Google Analytics will soon be able to gather data using machine learning. By Matt Southern.

Google announces several updates that will help provide site owners and advertisers with relevant data when cookies aren’t available.

The new privacy-safe tracking methods, which don’t involve Google’s controversial FLoC technology, rely on consented first-party data and machine learning.

With these updates for site owners and advertisers, Google will:

• Extend its advanced machine learning models to behavioral reporting in Google Analytics.
• Allow seamless access to Consent Mode, which adjusts how Google tags operate based on user cookie consent choices.
• Implement enhanced conversions that allow tags to use consented, first-party data to track how users convert after engaging with ads.

Google Analytics will soon utilize machine learning to enhance marketers’ understanding of the customer journey with or without cookies. Interesting read.

A JavaScript API for dynamic image creation coupled with CSS. Images add color to an application. However, as we all know, having a lot of high-resolution images affects the page load time. By Viduni Wickramarachchi.

Source: https://blog.bitsrc.io/programmatically-generate-images-with-css-painting-api-3b1a860dae3b

If you need a geometric image in your application, you don’t have to include it as an asset anymore. You can programmatically generate geometric images on the fly using the CSS Painting API.

The article will walk you through:

• Introduction to the CSS Painting API
• Using the CSS Painting API in practice
• Generated image
• What else can we do with this CSS Painting API?
  • You can create dynamic images
  • You can generate random images using Math.random() in the paint() method
• Browser support

The CSS Paint API is extremely useful to reduce the response time of network requests. This is achieved by generating some images programmatically rather than retrieving them via network requests. Good read!

Like any other programming language or framework, Node.js is susceptible to every type of web app exposure. Although the basis of Node.js is secure, third-party packages may need more security standards to safeguard your web app. The study says that 14% of the NPM (Node Package Manager) ecosystem is impacted and 54% of the NPM ecosystem is about to be impacted indirectly. By Kiran Malvi.

NPM or the Node.js Package Manager is globally one of the largest open-source package ecosystems. This rich ecosystem has caused a boost in the app’s functionality and developer productivity.

The article then mentions these practices:

• Restrict XSS attacks by validating user inputs
• Abstain from data leaks
• Utilize security linters
• Implement access control on each request
• Secure deserialization
• Execute HTTP response headers

… and more. For the full list together with good solution suggestions for each of these follow the link to the full article.

Since Node.js libraries and frameworks allow app developers and engineers to create unique and complicated systems, they also expose those systems to lots of vulnerabilities. Staying ahead of modern Node.js security practices will help app developers create more secure systems for users. Nice one!

While it’s essential that everyone pays attention to their mental health no matter their age, job title, or gender, entrepreneurs have a unique lifestyle that may require them to pay even closer attention. By Tycoonstory.

There’s no other way to say it – being an entrepreneur is hard.They have to keep up with stressful financial matters, are constantly working their brains by coming up with novel ideas, and usually contribute more of their day to work than most other people do.

So, how can you practice good self-care as an entrepreneur?

• Adopt healthy habits
• Lean on others
• Set up strict boundaries
• Manage your time better
• Delegate work
• Get a good night’s sleep
• Do what makes you happy
• Take it easy
• See a professional sooner rather than later

It may be smart to consider hiring others to help out. You may feel like you are doing fine on your own but having even one other person to help makes a huge difference. No one’s path looks the same when you’re an entrepreneur. Sure, they may look similar, but every journey is different and new because the ideas being presented and sought after are new. Try to slow down and focus on the present-day instead of rushing through what needs to be done. Some good advice here!

Having been implementing WebRTC in production systems for almost a year now, we wanted to add this resource to the documentation available for the architecture of WebRTC videocalls. Partly to share our knowledge and common gotchas, and also to give back to the web standard that has supported us so well. By yown.it.

The introduction of WebRTC as a web standard is a process that has taken place across major browsers over many years. This means that it is intentionally “un-opinionated” when it comes to being used within frameworks.

This also means that most examples, while freely available, focus on vanilla javascript HTML implementations, the cleanest simplest way of streaming media streams between browsers.

The article deals with:

• The “problem” with WebRTC
• Discovery & data persistence
• Initiation, hang-ups and identification
• Perfect negotiation
• Code Samples

Overcoming Perfect negotiation issue in React relies on using the event driven architecture, and we’ve included our code as a bonus. It took us a long time to implement perfect negotiation using the React component lifecycle and we don’t see many online examples. This article is excellent source of information on WebRTC topic. You will also get links to further reading and code samples. Nice one!

Five years ago, we made history by launching the IBM Quantum Experience, putting the first quantum processor on the cloud for anyone to run experiments. By Ryan Mandelbaum @IBM.

Accessing quantum devices wasn’t easy prior to 2016. Theorists had to convince hardware researchers at institutions like IBM to help them realize experiments on custom quantum processors.

“It gave us the validation that we had something, and that we could get a lot of people behind it,” said Jerry Chow, now-Director of Quantum Hardware System Development at IBM. More importantly, it proved to IBM overall that this would be a project worth devoting resources to. After witnessing the ThinkQ 2015 audience response, IBM’s then-VP of Science and Technology Dario Gil asked the IBM Quantum team what it would take to deliver the project faster.

Five years ago today, the team made history by launching the IBM Quantum Experience, putting the first quantum processor on the IBM Cloud so that anyone could run their own quantum computing experiments.

At the end of his conference presentation, MIT professor Isaac Chuang asked the crowd: Would they use small-scale, cloud-based IBM quantum processors? Everyone raised their hands.

The biggest lessons learned were how to build stable devices, how to bring them online, and how to automate some of the most important experiments - especially device calibration.Putting a quantum computer on the cloud requires an entirely different mindset. Very interesting article, for details follow the link. Superb read!

Distributed applications are complex and bring in their own set of challenges for developers to debug and fix production issues. Though the microservices architecture helps maintain a smaller team that works autonomously and focuses on separate business domains, it introduces newer challenges due to its distributed nature. By Nish.

For example, in case of an issue during a business transaction, the request needs to be traced end-to-end, which may span across multiple services and infrastructure. This is where monitoring and observability come into the picture. While monitoring records the overall health of an application while observability helps you dig deeper with contextual data.

The article also covers:

• Health checks
• Logging
• Structured logging
• Centralized logging & correlation ID
• Distributed tracing

Distributed tracing is the equivalent of call stacks for modern cloud and microservices architectures, with the addition of a performance profiler tossed in. Distributed tracing or distributed request tracing helps look at the request end-to-end and enables you to identify a problem holistically. Open-source distributed tracing systems like the openzipkin/zipkin are prevalent in this space. You will get link to video link in which authors looked at observability and monitoring’s key pillars like logging, metrics, and tracing and deep-dived into the health checks.

The authors also have built a series of modules to help you learn to build .NET microservices and cloud-native technologies. Check out the links in the article that will help you understand monitoring and observability Excellent!

RPA is made up of three core technologies: workflow automation, screen scraping and AI. The unique combo of these technologies allows RPA to solve the productivity challenge of manual desktop tasks. By Allen Chan, DE & CTO, Digital Business Automation.

The content of the article:

• Practical definition of robotic process automation (RPA) and the three core technologies that power it
• The intended users of RPA and the best usages of the technology
• Practical limitations of RPA
• RPA and its role and use with other popular automation technologies, including AI
• What’s next for RPA

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a program (in this case, it is a software robot) to mimic human users’ interaction with their desktop to perform tasks - for example, copying information from an Excel spreadsheet to a form, inserting customer data and placing an order on a website, etc. While we assume many human tasks have been automated in today’s digital world, there is still a large portion of our daily work that requires manual labor, and much of that work is repetitive. You will also get plenty of charts explaining concepts and links to further reading. Nice one!

Webpack is one of the most popular bundlers around today. Tons of production apps and frameworks, such as Next.js, Create React App, and more, use it for bundling and building. Additionally, it has the largest library of plugins out of any bundler. However, times have changed since Webpack’s inception, and now it is not the best tool for lots of cases. By AsyncBanana.

The article main content:

• Why Webpack grew
• The ecosystem now
• Dev mode speeds
• Ease of configuration
• Bundle size
• Alternatives (Parcel, Rollup, Vite, Snowpack)

Nowadays, there are many other bundlers, like Rollup, Parcel, Vite, and Snowpack, as well as a new native module system, ESM, or ECMAScript Modules. The newer bundlers have simpler configuration, allowing people to add/create plugins and configure the setup more easily, and some utilize ESM to make ultra fast reload speeds and smaller bundles.

While Webpack has a vast number of plugins and community support, in lots of ways, it is not the best thing to use. Personally, author prefers Vite, as it solves all three problems in an effective way, making it as easy to configure as Parcel, but still using ESM and gaining the advantages of that. Nice one!