What are APIs..? How do they work..?

What is an API?

What exactly is an API? We hear about how valuable APIs are all the time; our founder, Ross Mason, often says that they will have a significant impact on business. However, what is the definition of an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other.  In other words, an API is the messenger that delivers your request to the provider that you’re requesting it from and then delivers the response back to you.

An API defines functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations, which allows those implementations and definitions to vary without compromising each other. Therefore, a good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing the building blocks.

How do APIs work?

Imagine a waiter in a restaurant.  You, the customer, are sitting at the table with a menu of choices to order from, and the kitchen is the provider who will fulfill your order.

You need a link to communicate your order to the kitchen and then to deliver your food back to your table. It can’t be the chef because she’s cooking in the kitchen. You need something to connect the customer who’s ordering food and the chef who prepares it.  That’s where the waiter — or the API —  enters the picture.

The waiter takes your order, delivers it to the kitchen, telling the kitchen what to do. It then delivers the response, in this case, the food, back to you. Moreover, if it’s designed correctly, hopefully, your order won’t crash!

A real example of an API

How are APIs used in the real world? Here’s a very common scenario – booking a flight.

When you search for lights online, you have a menu of options to choose from. You choose a departure city and date, a return city and date, cabin class, and other variables like your meal, your seat, or baggage requests.

To book your flight, you need to interact with the airline’s website to access the airline’s database to see if any seats are available on those dates, and what the cost might be based on the date, flight time, route popularity, etc.

You need access to that information from the airline’s database, whether you’re interacting with it from the website or an online travel service that aggregates information from multiple airlines. Alternatively, you might be accessing the information from a mobile phone. In any case, you need to get the information, and so the application must interact with the airline’s API, giving it access to the airline’s data.

The API is the interface that, like your helpful waiter, runs and delivers the data from the application you’re using to the airline’s systems over the Internet. It also then takes the airline’s response to your request and delivers right back to the travel application you’re using. Moreover, through each step of the process, it facilitates the interaction between the application and the airline’s systems – from seat selection to payment and booking.

APIs do the same for all interactions between applications, data, and devices. They allow the transmission of data from system to system, creating connectivity. APIs provide a standard way of accessing any application data, or device, whether it’s accessing cloud applications like Salesforce, or shopping from your mobile phone.

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Ping V/s Traceroute

In computer networks, data is sent in small blocks known as packets. Each packet is transmitted individually and may also follow different route to reach the destination. Once all these packets of the original message reach the destination, they are re-assembled to form the original message. But, sometimes, it may happen that the web server is down, network congestion or some other technical glitch is there, that may prevent the message from reaching the destination. To diagnose such congestions and network failures, we use two common programs namely Ping and Traceroute.

Ping – It is a utility that helps one to check if a particular IP address is accessible or not. Ping works by sending a packet to the specified address and waits for the reply. It also measures round trip time and reports errors.

Ping is also used in checking if the computers on a local network are active. For this, the user has to go in command prompt and type : ping 127.0.0.1, and if the address is active, the ping would return a message like this :

The IP address 127.0.0.1 is the address of the local host and would receive a ping reply even if the sender is not connected to internet.

Traceroute – It is utility  that traces a packet from your computer to the host, and will also show the number of steps (hops) required to reach there, along with the time by each step. Traceroute works by sending the packets of data with low survival time (Time to Live – TTL) which specifies how many steps (hops) can the packet survive before it is returned. When a packet can’t reach the final destination and expires at an intermediate step, that node returns the packet and identifies itself. So, by increasing the TTL gradually, Traceroute is able to identify the intermediate hosts. If any of the hops come back with  “Request timed out”, it denotes network congestion and a reason for slow loading Web pages and dropped connections.

The main difference between Ping and Traceroute is that Ping is a quick and easy utility to tell if the specified server is reachable and how long will it take to send and receive data from the server whereas Traceroute finds the exact route taken to reach the server and time taken by each step (hop).

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Tips to protect small companies from Cyber attack.

Are you the owner of a small company? If the answer is yes and you think no cyber attack will ever affect you, think again. In fact, there’s a higher risk of getting into trouble with hackers than if you were a big business, or even a medium-sized one. According to recent reports, more than 40% of cyber attacks are aimed at companies who employ under 500 people. A more worrisome study says that one in five small businesses are targeted by hackers. More often than not, these companies have to close down because their security plans are nonexistent or there’s too few of them to actually ensure complete protection.

Cybersecurity is the most important way to make sure your business isn’t put in danger by malware attacks. Especially when the people behind them show no signs of backing down. Thus, putting strong security measures in place is, like we said, essential if you don’t want to lose your life’s work and your clients’ trust. After all, the latter expect their sensitive data to be protected at all cost. When they see that that’s not the case, your clients will turn to other companies instead.

To prevent that from happening, we want to tell you how to protect your small company from cyber attacks.

Create as many backups as possible

A backup is incredibly important if you want to keep each sensitive data safe from cyber threats. People who create malicious software and send it to damage devices, particularly the ones used by employees from a small business, are relentless. By creating several backups, you can sleep well at night knowing that those important files, presentations, and whatnot won’t be ruined forever in case malware reaches them.

Use the most powerful antivirus software

In this day and age, relying on a strong security solution marks the difference between keeping your company o the course or shutting it down completely. Remember to choose the one made to protect a computer from every type of malware ever created. The antivirus software you end up with needs to locate and then get you rid of spam, spyware, Trojan horses, phishing attempts, and so much more. After you settle on the best option for your business, ensure that regular updates are performed.

Educate your employees

The people who work for you need to know that clicking on random links received via their work email is a no-no. It’s the same if they connect to networks that don’t use a strong password. These are only two of the most dangerous practices you must stop from happening. How can it be done? You could, for example, organize trainings or set up meetings where security professionals advise employees on safe practices at work.

Another idea would be to carry security policies and procedures through.

Payment terminals should use different networks

 

Using the same network for a payment terminal is a practice that should be stopped. Never ever tie it to your general store network. Instead, keep these two separate, because that way only a few authorized employees will have access to them. By doing that, the computers on your network will keep their sensitive content intact in the face of cyber attacks.

Use cybersecurity insurance

We insure our cars, houses, and so on, so why shouldn’t we do the same for our business? Cyber security insurance helps a lot in case of a cyber threat. How? If a malware attack happens, your company will be held responsible. A lawsuit will follow, so you’ll have to pay quite a lot of money as compensation. With a cyber security insurance at hand, you make sure every legal cost is fully covered.

Change passwords regularly

Many of us use the same password for more than a year on all our devices, social platforms, and so on. Employees in small companies do the same, hence a higher risk of cyber attacks. Change the passwords every three months and remember to create very strong ones each time you do that. The most secure passwords are made of 8-16 characters that contain special characters, numbers, and letters. If you know you don’t have a good memory, a password manager will make things easier for you.

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'Flick' New Unit Of time invented by Facebook

We don't have the time to dig into all the different ways someone could measure time. Generally, we structure our lives around years, months, days, hours ... you know, the big ones. The easy ones. But time measurements can get as nitty gritty as you need them to. In Facebook's case, the company needed a unit of time that just wasn't there. So they invented an entirely new one.
         

Allow us to introduce you to the "flick," the new unit of time developed by a Facebook engineer. Chances are, you won't be measuring how long you've been on the treadmill or how long to cook your turkey in flicks. But for a select group, the new unit could become quite helpful. Initially created by Christopher Horvath in late 2016 and launched by Facebook Open Source in January 2018, the flick is equal to precisely one 705,600,000th of a second. It's just a tad longer than a nanosecond, but still shorter than a microsecond. Finally, right?

Like we said, understanding the flick probably won't impact your daily life. But here's a hint as to how this little sliver of a second could be helpful for some. Here are some numbers into which 1/705,600,000 divides evenly: 1/8, 1/16, 1/22.05, 1/24, 1/25, 1/30, 1/32, 1/44.1, 1/48, 1/50, 1/60, 1/90, 1/100, 1/120.

Still confused? All of these numbers are also frame rates or frequencies involved in displaying movies, music, and other media. Working any of those figures out into decimals yields a nasty, often neverending line of digits. The flick is here to clean it up. For example, 1/24th of a second is 29,400,000 flicks. If we were to try to measure that fraction of a second as a decimal, it would be 0.0416666666666666... Ew.

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One Character message can even Crash an iPhone. Must Read.!

Only a single character can crash your iPhone and block access to the Messaging app in iOS as well as popular apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Outlook for iOS, and Gmail.

First spotted. by Italian Blog Mobile World, a potentially new severe bug affects not only iPhones but also a wide range of Apple devices, including iPads, Macs and even Watch OS devices running the latest versions of their operating software.

Like previous 'text bomb' bug, the new flaw can easily be exploited by anyone, requiring users to send only a single character from Telugu—a native Indian language spoken by about 70 million people in the country.

Once the recipient receives a simple message containing the symbol or typed that symbol into the text editor, the character immediately instigates crashes on iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and Apple TVs running Apple's iOS Springboard.

Apps that receive the text bomb tries to load the character, but fails and refuses to function properly until the character is removed—which usually can be done by deleting the entire conversation.

The easiest way to delete the offending message is by asking someone else to send a message to the app that is crashing due to the text bomb. This would allow you to jump directly into the notification and delete the entire thread containing the character.

The character can disable third-party apps like iMessage, Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Outlook for iOS, as well as Safari and Messages for the macOS versions.

Telegram and Skype users appear to be unaffected by the text bomb bug.

Apple was made aware of the text bomb bug at least three days ago, and the company plans to address the issue in an iOS update soon before the release of iOS 11.3 this spring.

The public beta version of iOS 11.3 is unaffected.

Since so many apps are affected by the new text bomb, bad people can use the bug to target Apple users via email or messaging or to create mass chaos by spamming the character across an open social platform.

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Zero Day Vulnerability in Telegram

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the desktop version for end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app that was being exploited in the wild in order to spread malware that mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero and ZCash.

The Telegram vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Alexey Firsh from Kaspersky Lab last October and affects only the Windows client of Telegram messaging software.

The flaw has actively been exploited in the wild since at least March 2017 by attackers who tricked victims into downloading malicious software onto their PCs that used their CPU power to mine cryptocurrencies or serve as a backdoor for attackers to remotely control the affected machine, according to a blogpost on Securelist.

Here's How Telegram Vulnerability Works

The vulnerability resides in the way Telegram Windows client handles the RLO (right-to-left override) Unicode character (U+202E), which is used for coding languages that are written from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the malware creators used a hidden RLO Unicode character in the file name that reversed the order of the characters, thus renaming the file itself, and send it to Telegram users.
For example, when an attacker sends a file named "photo_high_re*U+202E*gnp.js" in a message to a Telegram user, the file's name rendered on the users' screen flipping the last part.

Therefore, the Telegram user will see an incoming PNG image file (as shown in the below image) instead of a JavaScript file, misleading into downloading malicious files disguised as the image.

During the analysis, Kaspersky researchers found several scenarios of zero-day exploitation in the wild by threat actors. Primarily, the flaw was actively exploited to deliver cryptocurrency mining malware, which uses the victim's PC computing power to mine different types of cryptocurrency including Monero, Zcash, Fantomcoin, and others.

While analyzing the servers of malicious actors, the researchers also found archives containing a Telegram's local cache that had been stolen from victims.

In another case, cybercriminals successfully exploited the vulnerability to install a backdoor trojan that used the Telegram API as a command and control protocol, allowing hackers to gain remote access to the victim’s computer.

"After installation, it started to operate in a silent mode, which allowed the threat actor to remain unnoticed in the network and execute different commands including the further installation of spyware tools," the firm added.

Firsh believes the zero-day vulnerability was exploited only by Russian cybercriminals, as "all the exploitation cases that [the researchers] detected occurring in Russia," and a lot of artifacts pointed towards Russian cybercriminals.

The best way to protect yourself from such attacks is not to download or open files from unknown or untrusted sources.

The security firm also recommended users to avoid sharing any sensitive personal information in messaging apps and make sure to have a good antivirus software from reliable company installed on your system

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9 Unknown Facts About SpaceX Rocket Launched

Before Tuesday's test launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, not even the company's CEO Elon Musk knew what to expect.
"It's either going to be an exciting success or an exciting failure," he said. "One big boom! I'd say tune in, it's going to be worth your time."
Musk was right: There was a big boom when the Falcon Heavy's 27 engines fired and lifted SpaceX's largest rocket into space. The booster rockets returned to Earth, landing at the same time like a pair of synchronized divers at the Olympics. The payload, a Tesla Roadster, made it to Mars orbit and beyond.
The launch felt part scientific breakthrough, part Silicon Valley product launch. It was filled with wonder, disbelief and humor -- there's a car traveling through space with a sign saying "Don't Panic!"

The Falcon Heavy launch had a number of significant moments that were easy to miss. So I gathered all the notable instances and SpaceX Easter eggs here together.

This rocket is kind of a big deal

SpaceX has launched rockets before, but the Falcon Heavy is the company's largest one to date. Tuesday's launch was the first attempt at sending it with a payload into space.
In a press conference post-launch, Elon Musk said, "Crazy things can come true. I didn't really think this would work. When I see the rocket liftoff, I see a thousand things that could not work. And it's amazing when they do."
SpaceX has embraced the ups and downs that come with pushing rocket technology forward. Last year, the company posted this video, titled "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster," on its YouTube channel. It's basically a highlight reel of rocket booster failures -- aka lots of explosions.

The Falcon's name

 

SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are named after Han Solo's ride in Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon.

It's big

At 230 feet (70 meters) tall, the Falcon Heavy is without a doubt impressive, but it's not the largest rocket ever. That distinction goes to NASA's Saturn V rocket, which stood 330 feet (111 meters) tall.

 

Designed to be reusable

An early goal for SpaceX was the development of a system of reusable rockets. For decades one of the largest cost factors behind rockets was that they had to be built anew for each launch. Musk compared it to if airplanes had to be discarded after one flight.
SpaceX focused on how to return its rockets to Earth and make a controlled landing. Last year, SpaceX did just that when the company landed a Falcon 9 booster onto a drone ship floating in the Atlantic. The drone ship's name is "Of Course I Still Love You," in tribute to the late sci-fi author Iain M. Banks.
Including that first landing, SpaceX has landed 21 Falcon 9 boosters back on Earth.

 

Three rockets

Last year's Falcon 9 had one booster rocket, while the Falcon Heavy has three: two first-stage boosters (aka Falcon 9 rockets) and one core booster. These three rockets give the Falcon Heavy 5 million pounds (2.3 million kg) of thrust, which allows it to carry 70 tons (63.5 metric tonnes) of cargo into space.

Both of the Falcon Heavy's first stage boosters returned and landed safely in the SpaceX landing zone. SpaceX

One of the best moments from the Falcon Heavy launch was when the two first-stage boosters landed in sync back to Earth at a landing zone. It seemed unreal. The third booster, the core booster, did not land successfully and crashed at 300 mph (480 kph) into the landing drone ship in the ocean.

 

It can carry whales

The Falcon Heavy can carry a 140,700-pound (63,800-kg) payload into lower Earth orbit -- that's the equivalent of two humpback whales. For a trip to Mars, it can carry 37,000 lbs (16,800 kg) -- about the weight of 31 grand pianos.

 

The rocket car

When a new rocket is tested, the payload is usually a concrete block. Typically, Musk thought that was boring and opted for a cherry-red Tesla Roadster with a dummy astronaut named Starman (after the David Bowie song) in the driver's seat.
"It looks so ridiculous and impossible. You can tell it's real because it looks so fake. We'd have way better CGI if it was fake," said Musk. "The imagery of it is something that's going to get people excited about it around the world."

 

A brand new spacesuit

The spacesuit Starman wears is actually one Space X revealed last summer. It looks sleek and futuristic with its gray and white color scheme and was tested to double vacuum pressure.

 

Tesla Roadster Easter eggs

The car itself had a handful of Easter eggs:

• On the dashboard sits a tiny Roadster and spaceman
• The dashboard's screen displays "Don't Panic!" a reference to the cover of the guide in the novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
• "Made on Earth by humans" is printed on the car's circuit board
• In the car is a disk with a digital copy of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of sci-fi books
• There's a plaque in the car engraved with the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees

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