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As 2020 comes to a close, we can only look back and marvel at how we managed to keep it all together. And not just keep it all together, but to move forward and to grow. The challenges of this year on a new startup were unlike anything we could have planned for. But we took it in stride and allowed ourselves to learn from it. We asked the Ermetic co-founders to reflect on the year and share the lessons they learned.

How did the Covid19 crisis affect development and business plans for Ermetic and for you, personally?

Shai Morag, Ermetic Co-Founder and CEO:

At the beginning of the year, we also saw the beginning of the COVID crisis. Honestly, there were several weeks that we were very concerned, not just for the health and safety of our families and colleagues, but also for the health and safety of our new company. As things progressed, we found that actually, there was almost no negative effect on our business. As the world shifted to embrace working from home, companies looked to strengthen and secure their cloud environment to enable that.

In terms of development, we let our employees choose where they wanted to work (i.e. home or office). Most of our developers decided to work from the office and the ones that chose to work from home were still effective and contributed equally to the team.

In terms of our business plans, being forced to work remotely accelerated the digital transformation and drove more migration to the cloud. Because of this, we saw more demand for public cloud security solutions and for governing identities and managing entitlements in the cloudwhich is exactly what Ermetic does.

Michael Dolinsky, Ermetic Co-Founder and CTO:

Surprisingly, Corona had a minimal effect on our development team. We were able to keep working full throttle straight through 2020. At this stage in the company, we have a clear development path and we were able to execute whether we were in the office or working from home. As a team, we tried to work in the office as much as it was safe and possible to do so. Personally, I realize how lucky I am to feel good about the year and to know that I was ok giving up the usual distractions to focus on the work.

What are your predictions for Cloud and cyber security over the next year? The next five years?

Sivan Krigsman, Ermetic Co-Founder and CPO:

At the beginning, cloud security solutions were developed by essentially copying data center solutions and adapting them to the cloud. There are separate solutions for network security, workload security, infrastructure configuration, data protection, identity and access management But in cloud infrastructure, those silos dont make sense. It is impossible to evaluate the efficacy of one layer without looking at all of the others in parallel. I think that over the next few years, were going to see new cloud security solutions that solve problems across all of the old silos.

Arick Goomanovsky, Ermetic Co-Founder and CBO:

Well, I definitely think cloud security solutions will start to play a major role in corporate security stacks as public cloud environments become an integral part of the infrastructure. In the longer term, I expect security tools will evolve into more hybrid platforms, capable of addressing both public and private cloud scenarios.

What is the coolest new technology that youve seen introduced in the last year?

Michael Dolinsky, Ermetic Co-Founder and CTO:

GPT3 the advancement of AI, especially GPT3, which shows incredible promise.

Arick Goomanovsky, Ermetic Co-Founder and CBO:

Obviously, the Ermetic access graph, and specifically the combination of the identity and network access pieces. But, hey, I am biased.

Shai Morag, Ermetic Co-Founder and CEO:

Its not a really new technology, but in my mind Zoom is a very cool product that I grew to admire over the last year. Allowing the world to work remotely, and doing it pretty smoothly, is mind blowing.

If you could have dinner with two people one living and one historical who would you choose and why?

Shai Morag, Ermetic Co-Founder and CEO:

I would love to have dinner with Andy Jassy (CEO of Amazon Web Services) as I think AWS is an amazing company. Im mostly intrigued by how you continue to maintain such a great culture while continuing to grow at scale.

A person from history Id like to have dinner with is Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician. I have always been very curious about his creativity. How do he get to be creative? How can I help my kids be more creative? Whats the process to be more creative? Im very interested to learn what his process was. I would love to hear if he has any tips for me.

Arick Goomanovsky, Ermetic Co-Founder and CBO:

(Current) Jordan Peterson, the psychologist, and (historical) Richard Feynamn (Nobel Prize winner in Physics), as I am sure the conversations with both could be highly interesting and inspiring, and simultaneously very amusing.

Sivan Krigsman, Ermetic Co-Founder and CPO:

If I could choose two people to have dinner with, Id choose Elon Musk (founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX) and Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize winner in Physics). Both of them have made huge contributions to the world and it would be fascinating to get to know them and hear what they have to say to each other! The conversation would definitely be interesting.

Michael Dolinsky, Ermetic Co-Founder and CTO:

Definitely Bill Gates (co-founder of Microsoft Corporation) because the company he started and the technologies they developed have been a big part of my professional life since an early stage. Its really hard to pick one historical figure, but right now Id say Alexander Hamilton (founding father of the United States), because his talents were so multi-disciplinary.

The post The Wild Ride of 2020 and its Impact on Cloud Security appeared first on Ermetic.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Ermetic authored by Ermetic Team. Read the original post at: https://ermetic.com/whats-new/blog/the-wild-ride-of-2020-and-its-impact-on-cloud-security/

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The Wild Ride of 2020 and its Impact on Cloud Security - Security Boulevard

Jordan Graham's supernatural horror film interweaves home video footage and occult testimonials from his own grandmother.

Don't ever let anyone tell you there's no original ideas in horror anymore. Sator, a new indie chill-festwritten, directed, produced, edited, scored, andshot by Jordan Graham, blends the foggy deep-woods supernatural horror of The Witch with his family's real-life accounts of the occultincluding actual testimonials from his grandmother,June Petersonto create a singularly unique horror hybrid.Below, we're hyped to exclusively bring you the Sator trailer in all its tension-building glory.

The film follows a man named Adam, recently rocked by a mysterious death in the family, who delves into the history of an insidious presence known as Sator that he believes has been stalking his bloodline for centuries. The script, based on Graham's actual family and their claims of making contact with Sator over the years, blends its narrative fiction with haunting home video footage and Peterson's real recollections.

Sator is quite personal to me, Graham said. It delves into my familys dark history with mental illness surrounding a supernatural entity, and uses home video footage to create an interwoven piece between documentary and fiction.

Check out the trailer below, followed by the film's official poster. Sator will debut on VOD on February 9, 2021. The film also starsMichael Daniel, Aurora Lowe, Gabriel Nicholson, and Rachel Johnson.

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Here is the official synopsis for Sator:

Secluded in a desolate forest home to little more than the decaying remnants of the past, a broken family is further torn apart by a mysterious death. Adam, guided by a pervasive sense of dread, hunts for answers only to learn that they are not alone; an insidious presence by the name of Sator has been observing his family, subtly influencing all of them for years in an attempt to claim them.

This is as close as we get to a new 'Turok.'

Vinnie Mancuso is a Senior Editor at Collider, where he is in charge of all things related to the 2018 film 'Aquaman,' among other things. You can also find his pop culture opinions on Twitter (@VinnieMancuso1) or being shouted out a Jersey City window between 4 and 6 a.m.

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Sator Trailer Reveals a Deeply Horrifying Hybrid of Fiction and Fact - Collider

By Jackson Elliott, Contributor Follow | Wednesday, October 21, 2020 Jordan Peterson speaks in a video to his supporters that was posted to YouTube on Oct. 19, 2020. | Jordan Peterson/YouTube

Jordan Peterson spoke of God's grace and mercy in his first public communication with his fans on Monday after a year spent largely out of public view as he sought treatment for an addiction to a prescribed medication.

Peterson posted theeight-minute video on his YouTube channel and in it, his cheeks appear more hollow than in his last video. He also spoke more slowly than usual but remained clear and coherent. His voice filled with emotion when he spoke about his friends and family supporting him.

My extended family and friends went above and beyond the call of duty in my estimation, he said in the video. Im certainly not convinced that I would have the character to provide to any one of them what they provided to me. That was a humbling lesson.

In his online lectures, Peterson has shown many people that the Bible contains relevant truths on living a meaningful life. With over 3 million YouTube subscribers from around the world, the soft-spoken psychology professor from Toronto, Canada, is one of the most influential intellectuals in public life today. Commenters on his videos often thank him for pointing them toward God.

Peterson said he plans to write a series of lectures on the book of Exodus and a video series devoted to the book of Proverbs.

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Youve all heard, no doubt, that wisdom is proverbial or theres such a thing as proverbial wisdom. That phrase stems from the book of Proverbs, he said. I think the analysis of those will prove of benefit to me and perhaps to those of you who are inclined to watch or listen to my analysis.

Petersons approach to the Bible doesnt concern itself as much with whether Bible stories are literally true as it does with whether they are metaphorically true. Although he has refused to say whether he believes Jesus rose bodily from the dead, Peterson often tells listeners that goodness overcoming death is an important concept that gives people meaning to live by. The facts dont matter to him so much as the story.

Peterson himself is famously reticent to answer whether he believes in a personal God or is a Christian. When asked by interviewers whether hes a Christian, he said that as a Westerner he was conditioned and influenced by Christian moral teaching. On other occasions, he said he cannot say he believes in God because, he contends, anyone who truly believed in God would live a morally perfect life, and he doesnt.

I try to act as if God exists, because God only knows what youd be if you truly believed, he said in an interview with Prager University in May 2019.

Despite Petersons past statements about his belief in God, he declared that With Gods grace and mercy, Ill be starting to create original material once again.

Peterson visited hospitals around the world searching for a cure after he developed a physical addiction to the medicine he was taking to fix a severe autoimmune reaction to food. The dosage he was prescribed was reportedly increased to help his anxiety after his wife was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2019. The medicine also had the unusual effect of doing the opposite of what it normally does, he said.

While fighting the addiction and autoimmune disorders in the hospital, Peterson experienced terrible withdrawal symptoms, including a restlessness so severe that he wanted to kill himself.

Ive been suffering from impaired health, he said in the video. Severely impaired health, as a consequence of benzodiazepine use for anxiety, or more accurately from a combination of using that medication and then ceasing its use once I realized it was dangerous.

Peterson ended his video by thanking his fans and YouTube subscribers for their continued support.

Thank you very much, and thank you very much is probably sufficient, he said.

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Jordan Peterson tells fans he's thankful for 'Gods grace ...

Jordan Peterson is often called a rock star. It is a title he flatly rejects.

I am not a performance artist, states the celebrated clinical psychologist, I dont have fans, I have people who are listening carefully to what I am saying.

Petersons universal appeal is undeniable. His worldwide lecture tours routinely sell out and his bestseller 12 Rules for Life has been translated into more than 30 languages. Nearly three million followers subscribe to his YouTube channel, his lectures count a staggering 145 million views, and his podcast has been downloaded over 55,000,000 times.

The Toronto professor skyrocketed to fame in 2016, when he fiercely objected to Canadas C-16 bill, which mandated the use of transgender pronouns. Peterson became the traditionalists hero and his name soon became synonymous with the anti-PC movement.

But Petersons narrative does not concern politics or current events. His search is for eternal values virtues and themes that are common across all human experience, across all time.

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Moses was wandering around with the Israelites forever in the desert, Peterson tells the attentive audience. Theyre going left and going right and worshiping idols and having a hell of a time... getting rebellious, and Moses goes up on the mountain and he has this tremendous revelation, sort of, in the sight of God, and it illuminates him and he comes down with the law. Through mediating and trying to keep the peace, Moses considered what principles of peace would satisfy the people. Through Gods intervention he presented the Ten Commandments to the people to say, Look, this is already basically what were doing but now its codified. Thats all a historical process thats condensed into a single story, says Peterson. But obviously that happened, because we have written law that emerged from the bottom up.

LAW IS also touched on through the first chapters of Genesis, along with the idea that both male and female were made in the image of God.

The notion that every single human being regardless of their peculiarities, strangenesses, sins, crimes and all of that has something Divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect, plays an integral role... in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. Its an idea that Peterson believes sits at the base of our legal system. We see how the archetypal Adam and Eve story represents a situation we are always in. Just like Adam and Eve, we humans live in a walled garden, explains Peterson, but there is always a snake. The garden is a place of paradise, warmth, love and sustenance, but its also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it. Through Abraham, the father of nations who was ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, we consider what sacrifice is. We realize how without sacrifice, modern civilization would not have come into being. It is our ability to envision ourselves in the future and the need to make a sacrifice in the present that allowed us to progress and thrive.

We follow Cain and Abels dramatic tale as they lead two different life paths. Abel pleases God while Cain becomes resentful and murderous. Through Peterson we see how Cains torment grows. Gods rejection of his sacrifices means that his attempts to give up something valuable in the present to ensure prosperity in the future are insufficient, and in consequence, he fails to prosper.

Every line is a passage to our past, loaded with illuminating insight into human psyche, behavior, evolution and even the origin of the text itself. The story of the Mesopotamian deity Marduk, for example, sheds light on what the Hebrew words tohu vavohu typically translated as unformed and void actually mean. Marduk, who had eyes all the way around his head, fought a deity called Tiamat. We need to know that, explains Peterson, because the word Tiamat is associated with the word tehom. Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis. Petersons exploration of biblical stories is a journey filled with enlightenment and wonder.

More than 21 million people have tuned in and listened to Petersons gripping journey into the mysterious tales. We see the values and virtues upon which our entire civilization is founded, and the repercussions of neglecting them. We realize that values such as responsibility, humility, sacrifice, striving and courage have lasted for a reason, how they enabled the construction of our magnificent civilization, and the danger posed to our very existence if we lose them.

The idea is to see if theres something at the bottom of this amazing civilization that weve managed to structure, and that I think is in peril, says Peterson. Maybe if we understand it a little bit better we wont be so prone just to throw the damn thing away.

Originally posted here:
Jordan Peterson turns to Genesis for lessons on civilization in peril - The Jerusalem Post

Ernest Clines Ready Player One was a jukebox musical for trash culture of the 80s, a vision of a near-future dystopia where things were so bad, Zaxxon and Twisted Sister were classic works of art meriting serious scholarly attention. Life is certainly imitating art, at least as far as the dystopian nature of 2020 is concerned. So who wouldnt want to read a sequel?

Ready Player Two picks up in medias res after the events of the first book. Our hero, teen gamer Wade Watts, and his motley group of Internet friends have solved the mysterious riddles of one James Halliday, inventor of the OASIS, which is some sort of futuristic extra-cool Second Life for our environmentally-ravaged future. By virtue of finding the many Easter Eggs Halliday has hidden around the Internet and learning the minutiae of the movies and video games he loved, Wade has inherited his company and become the richest and most famous man in the world. Everything is swell! Except that Halliday has left Wade one more thing: an advanced neural interface which allows the user full sensory overload instead of the crummy old immersive VR experiences of yore.

I was awestruck by the perfect replication of all that interlinked sensory input, Wade enthuses, munching on a virtual apple, his olfactory system in kinetic overdrive. These were subtle, nuanced sensations that could never be re-created or simulated by a pair of haptic gloves.

Okay, so Proust this is not. In the hands of a more agile writer, there might be ripe potential for satire here; Halliday is, quite literally, a deus ex machina figure, constantly one step ahead of his billions of devoted OASIS minions. If it werent for Clines obvious affection for the sheer hubris of creating a virtual world in ones image, Halliday would seem like a mustache-twirling digital archvillain, a Bezos writ large.

Thats the overwhelming issue with the Ready Player Whatever universe: at no point does Cline question the wisdom of an all-encompassing monoculture that screeches to a halt around 1988, while technology evolves at hyperspeed around it. Ah, the good old days, he sighs, and writes another chapter about fucking Donkey Kong or whatever. Hes the Gamemaster Anthony of genre fiction, a clunky stylist content to wallop the reader over the head with a never-ending barrage of Remember when?s.

In Ready Player One, the main antagonists were the corporate suits of Innovative Online Industries, which was sort of a combination of a for-profit online university and an internment camp. By the end of the first chapter of Ready Player Two, our heroes have managed a hostile takeover of IOI and transformed themselves into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the worlds most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform, as well as releasing all of IOIs indentured servants and, presumably, creating a massive labor crisis. But they finally manage to pay off the national debt and donate hundreds of billions of dollars to solve world poverty, or something. So thats nice!

Their efforts to ditch this crappy planet and terraform the nearest habitable rock eventually fall by the wayside when an evil sentient AI springs the murderous CEO of IOI out of prison and forces our heroes to go on a lengthy fetch quest through VR time and space to retrieve the seven pieces ofoh, who cares. At this point you already know whether or not Ready Player Two is the book for you. It is not the book for me.

Cline had some legitimately good ideas the first time around. Theres potential in interrogating the nature of escapism in times of social upheaval. This time, though, instead of character development, hes chosen to double down on lengthy, dull descriptions of battle scenes and minutely-detailed virtual worlds. A complicated boss fight against Princeyes, Princeis crassly opportunistic even by the standards of posthumous tributes to Prince. A climactic showdown in Middle-Earth is as monotonous and impenetrable as The Silmarillion itself.

Add to that some of the most excruciating sex scenes in recent fiction and youve got the stuff of nightmares. We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss, Wade reminisces. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldnt get enough. Oh, brother. Luckily hours of futuristic VR porn have cured him of that pesky bout of transphobia, and his own dalliance with omnipotence has provided him with valuable insight as to the human condition.

Cline muses, in full Jordan Peterson gets an Oculus Quest mode: Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised [sic] of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribea tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Like so much of Clines writing, this is cheap introspection disguised as trenchant insight.

Maybe the freshman seminar-level Big Ideas of this book will make more sense when Steven Spielberg or whoever inevitably turns it into another expensive action-movie pastiche. The Ready Player One movie grossed nearly $600 million, and an adaptation of Ready Player Two cant be far behind. This book is criticism-proof; the people who ate it up the first time are just going to gorge on it again. They didnt even bother to send out advance copies for review.

When I finished reading it, I felt physically drained, exhausted after living in Ernest Clines head for nearly 400 pages of Animotion and Van Hagar, John Hughes movies and bad video games. I needed a break from the constant clanging drone of coin-op nostalgia. I stumbled outside to get some fresh air. Like Depeche Mode, I enjoyed the silence.

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Ready Player Two Book Review - Book and Film Globe