Build an Air Quality Reporting Service With Messages API

Have you ever thought about extending your existing application to interact with multiple communication channels? What if we could use this idea to draw attention to issues like air pollution and climate change?

The World Air Quality Index project is a non-profit project started in 2007. Their mission is to promote air pollution awareness and ensure access to world-wide air quality information. They provide REST APIs to get access to data from weather and air quality monitoring stations around the globe. You can use other data sources to build a service that focuses on social issues as well!

In this example, we will build a service, powered by Node.js — a JavaScript Runtime and the Vonage Messages API, that will send information about the current air quality at a given location over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The source code for the example we will build can also be found on GitHub.

#node #air-pollution #nodejs #javascript

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Procedure To Become An Air Hostess/Cabin Crew

Minimum educational required – 10+2 passed in any stream from a recognized board.

The age limit is 18 to 25 years. It may differ from one airline to another!

 

Physical and Medical standards –

• Females must be 157 cm in height and males must be 170 cm in height (for males). This parameter may vary from one airline toward the next.
• The candidate's body weight should be proportional to his or her height.
• Candidates with blemish-free skin will have an advantage.
• Physical fitness is required of the candidate.
• Eyesight requirements: a minimum of 6/9 vision is required. Many airlines allow applicants to fix their vision to 20/20!
• There should be no history of mental disease in the candidate's past.
• The candidate should not have a significant cardiovascular condition.

You can become an air hostess if you meet certain criteria, such as a minimum educational level, an age limit, language ability, and physical characteristics.

As can be seen from the preceding information, a 10+2 pass is the minimal educational need for becoming an air hostess in India. So, if you have a 10+2 certificate from a recognized board, you are qualified to apply for an interview for air hostess positions!

You can still apply for this job if you have a higher qualification (such as a Bachelor's or Master's Degree).

So That I may recommend, joining Special Personality development courses, a learning gallery that offers aviation industry courses by AEROFLY INTERNATIONAL AVIATION ACADEMY in CHANDIGARH. They provide extra sessions included in the course and conduct the entire course in 6 months covering all topics at an affordable pricing structure. They pay particular attention to each and every aspirant and prepare them according to airline criteria. So be a part of it and give your aspirations So be a part of it and give your aspirations wings.

Read More:   Safety and Emergency Procedures of Aviation || Operations of Travel and Hospitality Management || Intellectual Language and Interview Training || Premiere Coaching For Retail and Mass Communication || Introductory Cosmetology and Tress Styling  ||  Aircraft Ground Personnel Competent Course

For more information:

Visit us at:     https://aerofly.co.in

Phone         :     wa.me//+919988887551 

Address:     Aerofly International Aviation Academy, SCO 68, 4th Floor, Sector 17-D,                            Chandigarh, Pin 160017 

Email:     info@aerofly.co.in

 

#air hostess institute in Delhi, 

#air hostess institute in Chandigarh, 

#air hostess institute near me,

#best air hostess institute in India,
#air hostess institute,

#best air hostess institute in Delhi, 

#air hostess institute in India, 

#best air hostess institute in India,

#air hostess training institute fees, 

#top 10 air hostess training institute in India, 

#government air hostess training institute in India, 

#best air hostess training institute in the world,

#air hostess training institute fees, 

#cabin crew course fees, 

#cabin crew course duration and fees, 

#best cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#cabin crew courses after 12th,

#best cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#cabin crew training institute in India,

#cabin crew training institute near me,

#best cabin crew training institute in India,

#best cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#best cabin crew training institute in the world, 

#government cabin crew training institute

6 Best Weather APIs for Measuring Air Quality Worldwide

Weather APIs, powered by technology, provide weather data (some real-time, some at specific times). These data can influence personal decisions and business decisions. There are also numerous APIs that offer Air Quality information. Each with their own features which makes one better than the other.

Air Quality APIs are used to measure carbon monoxide, air pollution, and air quality index. They help retrieve currently forecasted, and historical data. Individuals and enterprises can then use this data for all sorts of decisions, including travel arrangements or health-related choices.

In this article, we’ll be exploring the best 6 Weather APIs that provide services for measuring Air Quality.

ClimaCell

The ClimaCell Weather API gives real-time and historical information about the weather. The API exposes air quality data, pollen data, and fire index data from all around the world.

With ClimaCell’s Air Quality API, developers can get a good number of useful data which includes health recommendations, percentage of Carbon Monoxide(CO), Nitrogen Dioxide(NO2), and Sulfur Dioxide(S02) in the air, global AQ index, and others.

ClimaCell works by comparing historical air data and real-time data to forecast predictions of the future air condition. This helps in providing the right information and helping businesses make better decisions.

ClimaCell has a free plan which allows developers to make 1,000 calls per day, 100 calls per hour and provides a free sample of the air quality and pollen layer. Other plans support multiple API calls and more features that influence business decisions.

Breezometer

Breezometer is an API service that provides weather data such as wind speed, humidity, precipitation, and air quality with coverage of 95 countries worldwide.

Breezometer has the following features:

1. The data is updated hourly, so you’re sure not to be provided vague or expired data.
2. It provides a 4-day forecast.
3. It provides APIs which range from air pollution to wildfires to pollen reports.

Breezometer offers free and paid plans. While the free plan is limited to 1,000 calls per day, applications using the paid plans can make millions of calls per day and they also get other features like health recommendation, Pollen Counts and Pollen Heatmap.

#api #rest-api #weather-api-for-web-dev #weather-api #air-quality-api #coding #weather #apis

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

1. Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
2. Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

• Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
• Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
• The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

54% of Developers Cite Lack of Documentation as the Top Obstacle to Consuming APIs

Recently, I worked with my team at Postman to field the 2020 State of the API survey and report. We’re insanely grateful to the folks who participated—more than 13,500 developers and other professionals took the survey, helping make this the largest and most comprehensive survey in the industry. (Seriously folks, thank you!) Curious what we learned? Here are a few insights in areas that you might find interesting:

API Reliability

Whether internal, external, or partner, APIs are perceived as reliable—more than half of respondents stated that APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter. Respondents choosing the “not often enough to matter” option here came in at 55.8% for internal APIs, 60.4% for external APIs, and 61.2% for partner APIs.

Obstacles to Producing APIs

When asked about the biggest obstacles to producing APIs, lack of time is by far the leading obstacle, with 52.3% of respondents listing it. Lack of knowledge (36.4%) and people (35.1%) were the next highest.

#api #rest-api #apis #api-first-development #api-report #api-documentation #api-reliability #hackernoon-top-story