That's an apology every crappy security add-on has always made. We shouldn't be happy about applying layer after layer of faulty controls, let alone applauding that as some kind of defense-in-depth best practice.
When I set up new fileshares at work I used Filescreen templates to stop those being created on network shares (Example [1]).
Gnome creates it's own too, and I wish it would stop - the only solution seems to be to recompile libgio with the trash method redirected to delete[2].
Interesting. My initial instinct is to compare them to MongoDB which IPO'd about a year ago. They seem to be doing quite well since, but then again, who hasn't in the tech sector?
I will say I very much enjoy Elastic's suite of products, I can't say the same for MonogoDB.
There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic.
MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB Inc's revenue, which is why investors are bullish on the company.
Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0].
Say what you will about MongoDB (the database), but MongoDB Inc. is the most successful open source software-based company since Red Hat. You can see it in the outperformance of $MDB compared to similarly timed open-source IPOs such as Hortonworks ($HDP) and Cloudera ($CLDR).
I can't speak for others, but I was looking to set up a quick elastic search cluster and Elastic's hosted offering beat the pants off of AWS ElasticSearch in terms of usability, polish, ease of getting started and security-by-default.
Now, I don't have a lot of data in the cluster, so we'll see how performance is when that happens, but would definitely recommend Elastic's offering.
Elastic Cloud runs in either AWS or GCP. You get to choose but it's just between those. Unless you mean you were using AWS's ElasticSearch service... which is known to not be all that great.
You could build ES clusters on AWS directly on EC2 and it would be cheaper than Cloud, unless what you're really looking for is that support contract.
I spent a few months of my life learning ES inside and out and would choose this option every time. One of the best tech investments I've ever made.
> You could build ES clusters on AWS directly on EC2 and it would be cheaper than Cloud, unless what you're really looking for is that support contract.
Or you are willing to trade money for dev time. Setting up and running the ES cluster on EC2 will take time and energy (source, I did it ). Whereas setting up the ES cluster on either the Elastic Search hosted service or AWS ElasticSearch is really just clicking some buttons.
However, I'm sure the right solution also depends on the amount of data you are using and the problem you are trying to solve.
I can largely agree with the last statement. The problem I find with the hosted services is that people just tend to throw data at it without really knowing anything about cluster/node/shard performance. This typically blows up in their face at some point and even though Elastic Cloud has nice sliders in place for spend-more-money, they still have to go through the rebalancing pains (if they didn't write-lock the cluster outright). That should never happen.
If you have strictly time-series data and are willing to make compromises around retention window, hosted elasticsearch is an easy conclusion. Invariably though, I find that where performance is a real concern, you have to carefully plan what data you're indexing and that requires operations knowledge around elasticsearch. At that point you almost might as well host it yourself anyway.
Also if X-Pack was something I _had_ to have, and tbh there are free alternatives for all of its good features, I would consider Elastic Cloud.
I'm even a customer of theirs on some clusters, but lackluster support and pushy upselling experiences have made me want to move out of it.
An issue I had with AWS was that even after they launched VPC ES clusters, they still hid the node IPs in the API output(I guess they patched ES?!). Our use case as a data lake meant that we had severely degraded performance with the hadoop/spark drivers than one would expect form it.
> Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0].
Also the reason Redis Labs made the controversial decision to change their licensing (and they reference Elastic in it) [1].
> Cloud providers have been taking advantage of the open source community for years by selling (for hundreds of millions of dollars) cloud services based on open source code they didn’t develop (e.g. Docker, Spark, Hadoop, Redis, Elasticsearch and others). This discourages the community from investing in developing open source code, because any potential benefit goes to cloud providers rather than the code developer or their sponsor.
It's a big deal for a lot of companies to be able to pay the cloud bill in one place. Elastic used to provide the availability to pay for the Elastic cloud subscription through AWS' Marketplace. Elastic stopped this when they changed their pricing at the beginning of 2017 and we (my last employer) were negotiating a contract with them at the time. AWS billing was a hard requirement for us because it made it a lot easier on us from the finance side. We walked and I know a lot of others who did too.
It’s a business decision of course. Forge your own path or be beholden to your revenue model dictated by AWS.
Big Enterprise will not require billing through AWS (disclaimer: employed at a large enterprise, buying ~$900k software license currently). They’ll have an accounts payable department, a procurement process, and someone to cut a check or ACH to Elastic monthly/annually.
I totally get that. I don't dispute that. But if you must choose between "please sir, can I have some more?" and controlling your own revenue destiny, it is clear why some would choose the later.
Would you want to be beholden to AWS' whims? You might as well be a Walmart supplier at that point, constantly dragged out to Bentonville having to make your case for every penny of your costs. Amazon has proven its model (all about scale), how it operates (your margin = our opportunity), and you partner with them at your own peril.
I'm suggesting the thought process to shift from, "Ahhh, those Elastic guys and their bad decisions!" to "Hmm, well, tough decision to make [forgoing revenue through AWS] but I understand why they made it".
Can someone explain why a company would pay a cloud provider extra to manage an open source API for them when they could just run it in the cloud themselves?
Another thing to note, along with sibling comments: AWS Elasticsearch is limited in its capabilities. For example, you are blocked from relying on custom ranking models to rank your documents.
There are a lot of limitations with Amazon's hosted offering. Mostly you will find out about them when your cluster needs maintenance (upgrades, outages, etc.). Elastic cloud is a much better product in terms of features, support, performance, documentation, price, etc. I've used both and ran my own clusters as well. Elastic Cloud is my default option these days.
Can you say more about these limitations? Right now I'm using a pretty big custom ranking function to rank my documents in Elasticsearch (using a function_score query), but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I setup a 3 billion plus document ES cluster using AWS Elasticsearch Service. As a whole it works really well, and it's nice not to have to manage individual EC2 instances. With that said, there are some very annoying things. Previously if you modified the access policy of the ES cluster, it would completely rebuild the entire cluster (create all new nodes and copy all data), which can take many hours.
Recently I turned off some slow query and slow index advanced logging options, again AWS completely rebuilt the entire ES cluster when these options surely should be able to be applied without copying all data.
With that said, there are some very annoying things. Previously if you modified the access policy of the ES cluster, it would completely rebuild the entire cluster (create all new nodes and copy all data), which can take many hours.
From what I can tell, it still does. I can’t comment on the length of time though. I did it before I had many documents and it was a very small Dev instance.
Really great reply - thank you for sharing. I was just researching the company more for investment. I agree also with regards to Horton/Cloudera. They had so much promise - but felt out of favor.
The results for ElasticSearch are from 2015, curious to see how relevant they are now especially given that the team has been working on addressing these issues in the interim.
Also elastic back then was used as a place where you copy your data, not your main data store. (Their positioning changed later) MongoDB was supposed to be used for your primary data store.
There is no security benefit to Google's scare tactics of calling other companies "untrusted sources". Both because Google scans apps installed from untrusted sources on your phone anyways, and because Google's malware scanning is literally industry-worst: https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/mobile-devices/
Imagine if Microsoft made you enable "untrusted sources" to install Steam on a PC.
I see posts on Reddit fairly often where someone says that Chrome is warning them about going to Google.com. And then I see people "helpfully" telling them to just ignore the warning.
They're being man-in-the-middle attacked. And people are telling them how to mess with security, in a way that's completely harmful to them.
Messing with security so you can install a game is teaching you dangerous lessons. Shotgun aimed at face.
Do you know if the restrictions apply to the electronically assisted "e-bikes". They pretty much operate like a normal bike, but require minimal effort to go up hills.
There is a quiet war brewing between city councils and dockless bike companies. It's tough to say whether cities will embrace a dockless bike/scooter future, or if they will ultimately ban the companies from operation, leaving a market for docked bikes to remain.
There aren't many dockless hire bikes in Copenhagen, but they cause no problem. That's because there's existing places for people to leave bicycles.
Maybe these startup should work with the city councils to install similar bike parking in some locations, either by removing 1-2 car parking spaces (10-20 bikes?) or using otherwise wasted space.
A car parked on the street doesn't inconvenience me but a bike/scooter on the sidewalk does - every single day. I'm a cyclist myself. I do like the convenience of dockless bikes for drop offs.
Parked cars are always in the way, the ones double parked blocking the official bike lane are hugely disruptive and dangerous and the nearly permanently parked cars along the side block what could be actually effective biking and pedestrian infrastructure. Just because cars are parked on the "street" and this is the status quo doesn't mean its no longer an inconvenience.
Cars parked on the street are a huge inconvenience. They've just managed to formalize that inconvenience, and we forget about the fact that cars stole 85% of the street while people using their own feet are stuck sharing the other 15% with trash cans, telephone poles, and basically anything else in our public sphere.
How does the popularity of bikes compare to electric scooters? Anecdotally, I see a lot more Bird and Lime S scooters flying around than I do bicycles these days - and we do have docked bicycle and Lime bikes and Ofo options available in my city.
Having tried many of these services, I find the electric scooters to be the most enjoyable, although the electric bikes are quite fun too and can be a better experience if you're carrying something which can be put in the basket.
Bird just opened in SLC and they are suddenly everywhere. Park City, just a few miles away, launched the country's first ebike share system and it's wildly popular. They are also everywhere.
I have no hard data to prove this, though I'm sure it's out there- I don't think it's bike vs scooter, it's electric vs human powered that's driving bird's popularity over bike shares.
I think you're exactly right. I'm a pretty hardcore cyclist and I commute 20 miles total every day but the number of people willing to exert massive effort for their commute is super small. My company is working on self-delivering shared ebikes and we recently made the decision to include a throttle because most folks won't ever be capital-B Bikers.
The scooters have been a good lesson for us as they've highlighted the importance of fun and friendliness in a shared vehicle. I don't think any of the shared ebikes are coming close to the right combination of factors that make people want to ride them. Scooters have nailed it, but their big problem is how easy it is to copy the model.
Thats interesting. Are you in the US? How are you thinking about the legislative landscape that seems to be eager to classify anything non-pedal assist as an e-motorcycle?
Yeah, Seattle. Legislators and city govs have been super friendly and eager to help us, and we're still keeping really good pedal assist. The worst case scenario is in some areas we can disable throttles and make our pedal assist boost factor absurdly high. Making the case to govs for throttles on our bikes is easier than with a company who wants to sell ebikes to the public because we're not trying to get bicyclists to purchase our bikes. We're trying to get people to skip car trips and make connecting to public transit actually doable for them. So far this resonates with city planners.
No room for buses, trains, or regular bicycles? The nice thing about a regular bicycle is the unlimited range. Whereas the nice thing about an electric bike is the speed.
My personal hierarchy is more like this:
0-1 miles: walk
1-10 miles: e-bike or bus or lyft
10-100 miles: regular bike or train
> 100 miles: car
No buses for me. I've given it a try many times but in SF, unless you're on a popular commuting line, it's filled with crazy, aggressive homeless people.
I've given up traveling via bike after losing my wheels to theft. My friend got his u-lock + loop locked bike's seat stolen while grabbing food to go at the Westfield food court around lunchtime.
> 10-100 miles: regular bike or train
SF to San Jose is 55 miles. To think you'd consider biking twice that is... crazy to me. More power to you I suppose.
I used to work with someone who cycled about 40km (25 miles) to work.
I admired his general health and determination. His alternative was a reasonably fast train; including walking at each end it was at most ⅓ of the time.
I think the most I ever cycled is about 80km/day, for a five-day cycling "holiday" in the low countries. It was a great trip, but I was completely exhausted at the end of each day.
The people I know who bike to work probably operate on different calculus than just viewing it as a commute choice. On days where I drive in or WFH, I still end up on my bike for X hours/day - so bike commuting is basically doubling up commuting and exercise for me, meaning
Am normal person, can confirm. Normal people don't use public transit because normal people don't use public transit, therefore normal people shouldn't use public transit.
They are great too, but if you live in a high bike crime area, you don't want to deal with super locking your bike at your destination. Dealing with stolen tires , seats and handlebars is aggravating as hell after the 3rd time.
Also bring your bike on the train, and then going the last 2 miles to your actual destination is pretty annoying too. It's much nicer to just grab a bike at the station and then leave it at work.
That's my situation -- bike to the train on my own bike, leave it in a locker so I don't have to deal carrying it around, then grab a shared bike at the end of my trip and leave it near the office. If I had bikeshare near my home, I'd skip using my own bike for commuting entirely. Not having to worry about whether or not my bike will have all of its pieces is wonderful.
Buses being at the whim of traffic while costing only 15-20% less than Uber Express for 5-10miles while offering none of the live-information means its a no-go for me.
I've spent far too long waiting in various weather conditions, hoping the bus arrives on time. So even up to a 30-40% premium to just hop into a car makes sense to me.
> Buses being at the whim of traffic while costing only 15-20% less than Uber Express for 5-10miles while offering none of the live-information means its a no-go for me.
In Seattle, buses have had GPS trackers for years. A lot of stops use that data for "time of arrival" displays. There is also a publicly available feed of that data, lots of apps out there that remind people when to leave their office to go out and catch their bus.
Most of the busses are GPS tracked, but some less frequent lines still have no GPS, while others mix fixed data with busses that have GPS data. Its a patchwork, better than many other cities bus tracking systems, but still we have a ways to go.
At this point, I think signal prioritization and finishing the planned bus/streetcar jumps should yield significant reliability improvements in Seattle. If the #8 could just be timely, it would be a boon for anyone going from Queen Anne to downtown, Cap Hill, South Seattle or vice versa. Its sad that the I-5 commuters essentially wreck its schedule by parking in the road on Denny.
I also haven't seen any here yet. I ride Citibike daily (Brooklyn and Manhattan) and would be wary of using the scooters because the roads are so badly maintained. It's already pretty bad even on a bike.
They haven't launched here. We barely even have dockless bikeshares (and even then they're not allowed in the exclusive Citibike coverage area). We're a rough regulatory environment.
It sucks to be in the largest city and yet could not try the scooters or electric bikes. I think it makes more sense for NYC to have them and would be a great way to avoid subway for like 2 miles.
NYC is also the most densely packed city in the US. There are places in the city where the sidewalks get so dense during commute/tourist hours that people cannot fit, pushing pedestrians out into the streets and bike lanes. 8th Ave north of Penn Station at 5:30pm is a prime example of this.
There's simply no room to have lots of discarded dockless bikes/scooters in such an environment where there isn't even enough room to walk, and they would be treated poorly. Docks/exclusion zones for the most congested foot traffic areas are necessary.
Worth noting that those Bird and Lime scooters are illegal in some countries, like the UK. Bird cannot expand to the UK without laws changing (which I'm sure there's plenty of lobbying going on to ensure).
They're illegal in the same way that if you sticking four wheels on a fridge and driving it down the street is also illegal. They're not road worthy, and you can't use them on footpaths in the same way you can't cycle on footpaths.
I'm seeing more and more on my commute, but it's the difference between a few people buying their own from Alibaba and a company installing them across the city. The former's unlikely to draw attention from the police, the latter much more so.
Basically, the laws say that your vehicle must be licensed to be used on a road unless it’s a bicycle/pedal assist bike/a few other categories, and there’s no mechanism for licensing some of the newer transport options. The laws also say that a vehicle can’t be used on the pavement at all, so there’s no way they can be used on a public road at all.
And have you ever seen a picture of most British cities - there’s barely enough room for cars and pedestrians sometimes, never mind a whole separate lane for cyclists/etc.
A few months after bird first launched in Santa Monica I decided to start scraping the app to see how many rides they were doing and estimate their revenue.
I was surprised at how much, so started to do the same thing with the local bike share which had been around for a couple years and covered exactly the same area (with more bikes than bird had scooters at the time).
Bird was already doing 7x the daily rides that the bike share was!
The stat I heard was that a bike is likely to be used 1-2 times per day by a user, whereas the same user will use a scooter 3-4 times per day.
So in this scenario you might see someone ride the bike from their apartment downtown, but during the day use a scoot to get between meetings, to a lunch venue, to the bar after work again and then maybe ride a bicycle home at the end of the day if not catch a car.
The bikes are super heavy; they require docking, which somewhat removes the purposes of using them to get from point to point in the first place. I don't know many people who aren't already cyclists who use it.
Off hand I'd say scooters are much more filling a vacant market, whereas the bike sharing competes more with uber or lyft in the first place.
Just to clear that up. If it was between those two I'd take the latter given that hitting a pothole on that Lime thing is liable to stop all forward momentum suddenly and precariously. But really I'd want the electric bike.
Though I think the unstated single most important selling point for the Lime scooter over the electric bike is that you don't need to deal with the homicidal, low awareness, little education American driver and the abhorrent infrastructure (and policies) that enable them.
Nationalistic swipes are intellectually boring and perturbative—a bad combination. Please resist the temptation and stick with just the substantive content instead.
> Though I think the unstated single most important selling point for the Lime scooter over the electric bike is that you don't need to deal with the homicidal, low awareness, little education American driver and the abhorrent infrastructure (and policies) that enable them.
Except you do some places. In San Francisco it is illegal to ride an e-scooter on the sidewalk. You are supposed to ride in the bicycle lanes.
In San Diego, it is legal to ride on the sidewalk, but pedestrians have the right away. I believe this stems from the city's desire to be bike friendly with their inability/unwillingness to fund proper and adequate bike lanes.
> Though I think the unstated single most important selling point for the Lime scooter over the electric bike is that you don't need to deal with the homicidal, low awareness, little education American driver and the abhorrent infrastructure (and policies) that enable them.
How so? Both Lime scooters and electric bikes are supposed to be ridden in bike lanes on the road, although enforcement can be hit-or-miss.
I live near Downtown Oakland and have yet to see one of these Scooters on the road -- so far the primary use case in Oakland seems to be teenagers blasting around Lake Merritt on the weekends.
According to the Lime app, there are at least 50 Lime-S scooters within 1km of the corner of Broadway and Telegraph right now. There are 9 outside 12th St BART alone.
Ok, I know we like to dump on Americans with impunity, and I'm not even going to get into whether it's deserved or not, but have you driven in much of the rest of the world?
I'm from the US, but I noticed that a lot of train stations in Europe had full drug stores inside - with normal drug store prices as well. Super convenient.
"When you consider that much of WeWork’s revenue is likey just VC dollars paying the expenses of their tenants"
Is that a known fact or just a guess? The prices are low enough that it seems like it could easily appeal to bootstrapped companies or small businesses.
