EDGE COMPUTING

Those tricksy tickets

It was Nov. 15, 2022, and Swifties everywhere were poised in front of laptops waiting to buy tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour on Ticketmaster. The ticket seller had previously promised Swift’s team that it could handle the capacity, but its technology failed to keep up with demand, and many fans were left disappointed.

The company issued an apology, claiming that it is “working to shore up our tech for the new bar that has been set by demand for the…Eras Tour,” and said the traffic was quadruple what they expected, reaching 3.5 billion total system requests at its peak. Joe Berchtold, president and CFO of Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation, said in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee that the unprecedented influx came in part from bots and “industrial-scale ticket scalping.”

Technologists have been trying to solve the Taylor Swift problem since long before last fall. StackPath CEO Kip Turco told Protocol in 2021 that edge computing, where data is processed faster and more efficiently on servers physically closer to users, was the answer. Other methods of stemming the tide of scalpers and ticket timeouts include Ticketmaster’s Verified Fans program, but 3.5 million people preregistered, the largest in the company’s history.

Spencer Kimball, former Google engineer and current co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, doesn’t work with Ticketmaster, but he understands how tricky it is to deal with that kind of increase in demand. It’s typically pretty hard to accommodate, Kimball explained to IT Brew. To always be able to react to four times your peak “feels like a waste of money,” Kimball said.

Read more here.—MM

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PHISHING

Phishers of men

Want to avoid making a rookie mistake on your first day at a new job? For one, don’t microwave fish in the office. Secondly, avoid clicking that link from your new CEO offering a $500 Amazon gift card as a hiring bonus.

Email is the “most exploited business function” and the “primary initial attack vector for cybersecurity incidents,” according to Cloudflare’s Phishing Threats report, released Tuesday Aug. 15.

Deceptive links, such as dangerous attachments and messages impersonating a brand you might expect to interact with, far outpaced other methods of entrapment in email phishing scams, the report found. Such links represented more than one-third of all threat indicators Cloudflare analyzed across 13 billion messages in the last year.

Phishing “continues to be the No. 1 IT security problem,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told IT Brew. “And it’s not because the phishers are standing still. They’re doing more and more to create smarter versions of the threats.”

New employees are particularly vulnerable to clicking links or otherwise engaging with phishing attempts because their devices may not be properly configured yet and they’re likely to be distracted, Prince said.

“Starting a new job sucks. It’s incredibly stressful. You feel like you have to learn a ton of things,” Prince said. “When people are anxious, it’s one of the most effective times when attackers can take advantage of people.”

Read more here.—KG

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

WORKFLOW

Snake in the sheets

A new feature will soon be slithering into Excel spreadsheets near you: the ability to run the Python programming language directly in the ubiquitous data processing program.

Microsoft previewed the update in a Tuesday blog post, saying it plans to “integrate Python and Excel analytics within the same Excel grid for uninterrupted workflow.”

“Python in Excel combines Python’s powerful data analysis and visualization libraries with Excel’s features you know and love,” the company said. “You can manipulate and explore data in Excel using Python plots and libraries, and then use Excel’s formulas, charts, and PivotTables to further refine your insights.”

The forthcoming capabilities will first be rolled out to members of the Microsoft 365 Insider beta program with a family or personal subscription or a business/education subscription. Users with a perpetual license are not automatically eligible and must buy an additional license. While the Python integration will be free to use during the testing phase, “some functionality will be restricted without a paid license” down the road, Microsoft indicated, and not all Insiders program users are promised access.

Keep reading here.—KG

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

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