As a long-time freelancer, when the pandemic began to adversely affect my income, I started looking for remote work opportunities that would allow me to comfortably continue my digital nomad lifestyle.
I was hoping to find a nicely organized, up-to-date and relatively comprehensive online directory for remote work job boards/aggregator sites. The best I could find was something at Github, which was a good start but was somewhat out of date and not so easy to use.
So I compiled my own directory and put it online, to share with anyone who wanted to use it (no email/registration required and free of any affiliate links or advertising). This is more than just a list: every site is concisely summarized and the directory is broken down into two parts, general and technical.
In case anyone reading this might benefit from the directory, here’s the link.
Suggestions for additions and modifications are welcome. This is a work in progress that I hope will become increasingly valuable to the digital nomad community over time.
AWS today launchedAmazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times or on-demand.
Unlike some of its competitors, though, AWS is positioning this service more as a data transfer service than a way to automate workflows, and, workflows and while the data flow can be bi-directional, AWS’s announcement focuses mostly on moving data from SaaS applications to other AWS services for further analysis. For this, AppFlow also includes a number of tools for transforming the data as it moves through the service.
“Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete,” said AWS principal advocate Martin Beeby in today’s announcement. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error.”
Every flow (which AWS defines as a call to a source application to transfer data to a destination) costs $0.001 per run, though, in typical AWS fashion, there’s also cost associated with data processing (starting at 0.02 per GB).
“Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third-party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” said Kurt Kufeld, vice president, Vice President, AWS. “Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public internet. Internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications — – all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”
At this point, the number of supported services remains comparatively low, with only 14 possible sources and four destinations (Amazon Redshift and S3, as well as Salesforce and Snowflake). Sometimes, depending on the source you select, the only possible destination is Amazon’s S3 storage service.
Over time, the number of integrations will surely increase, but for now, it feels like there’s still quite a bit more work to do for the AppFlow team to expand the list of supported services.
AWS has long left this market to competitors, even though it has tools like AWS Step Functions for building serverless workflows across AWS services and EventBridge for connections applications. Interestingly, EventBridge currently supports a far wider range of third-party sources, but as the name implies, its focus is more on triggering events in AWS than moving data between applications.
If you have a toddler and a mini-tramp you know the rallying cry of “Mama, Count!”. If you don’t don’t have either of these things, become the hero uncle or aunt by building one for your family members who have been social distancing with a three-year-old monster bundle of joy for the last five weeks. This trampoline bounce counter uses a Raspberry Pi and a distance sensor to stream the bounce count to a nice little web GUI.
The hardware couldn’t be more simple, and there’s a good chance you already have everything on hand. The HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor is a staple in beginner microcontroller kits. It simply lays on the floor pointed up at the bottom of the trampoline, connected to a Raspberry Pi via a resistor divider.
The software is where [Eric Escobar’s] project makes your life easy. He’s included a simple calibration routine that marks the low point of a bounce as you stand still on the tramp. There’s even a systemd service file included to ensure the software is always running, even after reboot. Cumulative bounce count can be seen on a webpage served from the Pi via an AJAX script.
Having a running count is a great first step, and surely a magical new feature of the trampoline that will be loved by the little ones. If that sense of wonder runs out, you could always gamify the system by adding in daily or hourly totals and a high-scores board.
For most of human history, the way to get custom shapes and colors onto one’s retinas was to draw it on a cave wall, or a piece of parchment, or on paper. Later on, we invented electronic displays and used them for everything from televisions to computers, even toying with displays that gave the illusion of a 3D shape existing in front of us. Yet what if one could just skip this surface and draw directly onto our retinas?
Admittedly, the thought of aiming lasers directly at the layer of cells at the back of our eyeballs — the delicate organs which allow us to see — likely does not give one the same response as you’d have when thinking of sitting in front of a 4K, 27″ gaming display to look at the same content. Yet effectively we’d have the same photons painting the same image on our retinas. And what if it could be an 8K display, cinema-sized. Or maybe have a HUD overlay instead, like in video games?
In many ways, this concept of virtual retinal displays as they are called is almost too much like science-fiction, and yet it’s been the subject of decades of research, with increasingly more sophisticated technologies making it closer to an every day reality. Will we be ditching our displays and TVs for this technology any time soon?
A Complex Solution to a Simple Question
The Mark I human eye is a marvel produced through evolutionary processes over millions of years. Although missing a few bug fixes that were included in the cephalopod eye, it nevertheless packs a lot of advanced optics, a high-density array of photoreceptors, and super-efficient signal processing hardware. Before a single signal travels from the optic nerve to the brain’s visual cortex, the neural network inside the eye will have processed the incoming visual data to leave just the important bits that the visual cortex needs.
The basic function of the eye is to use its optics to keep the image of what is being looked at in focus. For this it uses a ring of smooth muscle called the ciliary muscle to change the shape of the lens, allowing the eye to change its focal distance, with the iris controlling the amount of light that enters the eye. This enables the eye to focus the incoming image onto the retina so that the area with the most photorecepters (the fovea centralis) is used for the most important thing in the scene (the focus), with the rest of the retina used for our peripheral vision.
Layers of the human retina (from Gray’s ‘Anatomy of the Human Body’)
The simple question when it comes to projecting an image onto the retina thus becomes: how to do this in a way that plays nicely with the existing optics and focusing algorithms of the eye?
Giving the Virtual a Real Place
In the naive and simplified model of virtual retinal display technology, three lasers (red, green and blue, for a full-color image) scan across the retina to allow the subject to perceive an image as if its photons came from a real life object. As we have however noted in the previous section, this is not what we’re working with in reality. We cannot directly scan across the retina, as the eye’s lens will diffract the light, a diffraction that changes as the eye adjusts its focal length.
The only part of the retina that we’re interested in is also the fovea, as it is the only section of the retina where there is a dense cluster of cones (the photoreceptors capable of sensing the frequency of light, i.e. color). The rest of the retina is only used for peripheral vision, with mostly (black and white sensing) rods and very few cones. To get clearly identifiable images projected onto a retina, we have a 1.5 mm wide fovea, with the 0.35 mm in diameter foveola providing the best visual acuity.
Hitting this part of the retina requires that the subject either consciously focuses on the projected image in order to perceive it clearly, or adjust for the focal distance of the eye at any given time. After all, to the eye all photons are assumed to come from a real-life object, with a specific location and distance. Any issues with this process can result in eyestrain, headaches and worse, as we have seen with tangentially related technologies such as 3D movies in cinemas as well as virtual reality systems.
Smart Glasses: Keeping Things Traditional
Schematic overview of a Google Glass LCoS-based projection unit.
Most people are probably aware of head-mounted displays, also called ‘smart glasses’. What these do is create a similar effect to what can be accomplished with virtual retinal display technology, in that they display images in front of the subject’s eyes. This is used for applications like augmented (mixed) reality, where information and imagery can be super-imposed on a scene.
Google made a bit of a splash a few years back with their Google Glass smart glasses, which use special, half-silvered mirrors to guide the projected image into the subject’s eyes. Like the later Enterprise versions of Google Glass, Microsoft is targeting their HoloLens technology at the professional and education markets, using combiner lenses to project the image on the tinted visor, similarly to how head-up displays (HUDs) in airplanes work.
The Magic Leap One AR smart glasses (Credit: iFixit)
Magic Leap’s Magic Leap One uses waveguides that allow an image to be displayed in front of the eye, on different focal planes, akin to the technology used in third generation HUDs. Compared to the more futuristic looking HoloLens, these look more like welding goggles. Both the HoloLens and Magic Leap One are capable of full AR, whereas the Google Glass lends itself more as a basic HUD.
Although smart glasses have their uses, they’re definitely not very stealthy, nor are most of them suitable for outdoor use, especially during sunny weather and hot summer weather. It would be great if one could skip the cumbersome head strap and goggles or visor. This is where virtual retinal displays (VDRs) come into play.
Painting with Lasers and Tiny Mirrors
Naturally, the very first question that may come to one’s mind when hearing about VDRs is why it’s suddenly okay to shine not one but three lasers into your eyes? After all, we have been told to never, not even once, point even the equivalent of a low-powered laser pointer at a person, let alone straight at their eyes. Some may remember the 2014 incident at the Burning Man festival where festival goers practically destroyed the sight of a staff member with handheld lasers.
The BML500P prototype. (Credit: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum)
The answer to these concerns is that very low-powered lasers are used. Enough to draw the images, not enough to do more than cause the usual wear and tear from using one’s eyes to perceive the world around us. As the light is projected straight onto the retina, there is no image that can become washed out in bright sunlight. Companies like Bosch have prototypes of VRD glasses, with the latter recently showing off their BML500P Bosch Smartglasses Light Drive solution. They claim an optical output power of <15 µW.
Bosch’s solution uses RGB lasers with a MEMS mirror to direct the light into the subject’s pupil, and onto the retina. However, one big disadvantage of such a VRD solution is that it cannot just be picked up and used like one can with the previously mentioned smart glasses. As discussed earlier, VRDs need to precisely target the fovea, meaning that a VRD has to be adjusted to each individual user to work or else one will simply see nothing as the laser misses the target.
Much like the Google Glass solution, Bosch’s BML500P is mostly useful for HUD purposes, but over time this solution could be scaled up, with a higher resolution than the BML500P’s 150 line pairs and in a stereo version.
The Future is Bright
The cost of entry in the AR and smart glasses market at this point is still very steep. While Google Glass Enterprise 2 will set you back a measly $999 or so, HoloLens 2 costs $3,500 (and up), leading some to improvise their own solution using beam splitters dug out of a bargain bin at a local optics shop. Here too the warning of potentially damaging one’s eyes cannot be underestimated. Sending the full brightness of a small (pico)projector essentially straight into one’s eye can cause permanent damage and blindness.
There are also AR approaches that focus on specific applications, such as tabletop gaming with Tilt Five’s solution. Taken together, it appears that AR — whether using the beam splitter, projection or VRD approach — still is in a nascent phase. Much like virtual reality (VR) a few years ago, it will take more research and development to come up with something that checks all the boxes for being affordable, robust and reliable.
That said, there definitely is a lot of potential here and I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what comes out of this over the coming years.
Are you a ham radio operator? Have you ever felt the need to send IP over Morse? If you answered yes (or no) and don’t mind a few manual steps between converting network packets to and from and Morse code, [Folkert van Heusden]’s IP Over Morse project has you covered.
To send data, a network packet is first split into 5-bit words. Then those 32 different values are mapped to Morse characters (A-Z, 0-5, and a ‘/’ for termination), and the result is turned into an audio file ready to be sent over the airwaves, because no one is insane enough to want to do it by hand. To receive, the process is reversed. The GitHub repository for the project hosts the custom bits that [Folkert] created, should anyone wish to give it a shot.
The process of turning binary data into a completely different format sounds a bit like UUencoding, and is certainly an unconventional use of Morse code. Luckily, learning Morse code is easier than it’s ever been and it’s just waiting to be worked into novel projects, because why not?
Security recommendations for identity and access on the Azure Security Center free tier are now generally available. This is part of the effort to make the cloud security posture management (CSPM) features completely free. Until now, these recommendations were only available on the standard pricing tier.
COVID-19 is disrupting the lives of nearly everyone around the world in profound ways. From the tragic loss of lives and livelihoods to the less serious challenges of working from home and homeschooling, all are trying to navigate uncharted waters. This has led to widespread fear and uncertainty, but also a coming together of people and communities looking for ways to help.
As a mission-driven company with employees and customers in dozens of countries around the world, Ripple for Good is donating to funds and campaigns to help communities affected by this pandemic.
To start, we are giving back in the Bay Area–food scarcity is dramatically increasing for tens of thousands in the wake of job losses, business closures and overdue rent payments. In response, Ripple and its cofounder Chris Larsen are donating $5M; $1M each to five food banks and meal service providers that are supporting families and individuals in the area:
Loaves & Fishes Family Kitchen: Since its inception, Loaves & Fishes have provided over 6.5M meals to low-income, disadvantaged individuals and families.
Samaritan House: Samaritan House is leading the fight against poverty in San Mateo County by delivering essential services and personalized support.
San Francisco-Marin Food Bank: The Food Bank serves 32K families per week in San Francisco and Marin and this number has already grown by one-third in the last weeks.
Second Harvest of Silicon Valley: Second Harvest provides food to more than a quarter of a million people in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties every month.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) quickly created a series of rapid response funds to help individuals and families, nonprofits and small businesses in need across all nine Bay Area counties. Ripple has also contributed to this fund.
Despite the Bay Area’s vibrant economy and abundance of wealth, one in five people have less than $400 in their bank accounts. For them, and for our regional economy and the civic and social fabric of the Bay Area, COVID-19 presents not only a dire immediate threat, but also a pernicious long-term danger.
The scale and immediacy of the situation demand extreme generosity.
And, many industry leaders are stepping up. Google announced it will donate $1M to Bay Area families with another $1M directly from CEO Sundar Pichai. Apple committed $15M and will match employee contributions at a two-to-one ratio to help lessen the impact of the pandemic.
Grassroots efforts are sprouting up too. Tech leaders are engaging with local funders, nonprofits and government agencies to move beyond recovery to resilience and sustainability in areas like homelessness, affordable housing and public transportation. Together, we are working to lessen the economic and social impact of COVID-19 once the economy reopens.
Tech has earned a reputation for reckless disruption; for “moving fast and breaking things,” but not building or, in this case, rebuilding them. If we can maintain this kind of momentum and work in partnership with each other, the industry has an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives—not only in times of crisis, but when we find our equilibrium in the new normal.
As if fighting the coronavirus pandemic weren’t challenging enough, cybercriminals are making things more difficult for healthcare providers and humanitarian groups. Attacks have already delayed COVID-19 testing and limited access to related healthca…
GitHub may have made life a little easier for programmers. The Microsoft-owned service is making its core features available to everyone for free, including teams. Your company won’t have to pay for a subscription just to manage all its code in one p…
The content below is taken from the original ( in /r/ BOINC), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Hello guys,
I would like to make a guide for getting the Rosetta to run on Raspberry Pi 3B+, or probably any other board with 1GB and more RAM. It seems like many people are struggling with it.
My set up:
– HW:
– Raspberry Pi 3B+
– No name USB charger 5V 1A with a very short cable
– SD Card 16GB
– The newest version of Raspbian
Beginning state:
I assume that you have Raspbian installed and BOINC running. I set up my BOINC client to use 100 percent RAM available and 90 percent swap.
In case you have less than 500MB of RAM per core (definitely applies to RPI 3B+), set up ZRAM (follow the guide in the readme):
Increase swap size – I set it to 2048MB. I am not sure how much is needed and how exactly it works in combination with ZRAM, I simply went with the biggest value, since I have enough free space on the SD card.
(Optional) In case you are fine using only SSH, decrease the amount of RAM available to the GPU to 16MB. This will give you a few more MB of RAM. 32MB seems to be enough for 720p.
sudo raspi-config
– Advanced Options – Memory split – 16MB
(Optional) Decrease the consumption of the chip and reduce temperatures:
– Disable USB hub and Ethernet:
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/soc/3f980000.usb/buspower >/dev/null
– Disable HDMI:
sudo tvservice –off
These commands need to be reapplied after each reboot.
In the beginning, only 3 tasks were able to run at the same time. However, after a few hours of run time, my Raspberry pi managed to turn on all 4 tasks. While doing so, 1,3GB of data was stored in the swap. It seems like sometimes the WU can get initialized/deinitialized multiple times in a row. I guess that the RAM space is simply quite on the limit.
The speed of calculations seems to be OK compared to my Android Huawei Honor 8 (I am using only the efficient A53 cores on it). RPI 3B+ might even turn out a bit faster? Maybe there are fewer background processes…
The world is locked down for an indefinite period and people are working from home. All the meetings, interviews, seminars are being taken online on […]
As most in the technology community know, nation states have a suite of powerful tools that can be used to trace and monitor mobile phones. By and large, this comes up in discussions of privacy and legislation now and then, before fading out of the public eye once more. In the face of a global pandemic, however, governments are now using these tools in the way many have long feared – for social control. Here’s what’s happening on the ground.
The Current Situation
With COVID-19 sweeping the globe, its high level of contagiousness and rate of hospitalizations has left authorities scrambling to contain the spread. Unprecedented lockdowns have been put in place in an attempt to flatten the curve of new cases to give medical systems the capacity to respond. A key part of this effort is making sure that confirmed cases respect quarantine rules, and isolate themselves to avoid spreading the disease. Rules have also been put in place in several countries where all overseas arrivals must quarantine, regardless of symptoms or status.
“According to an epidemiological investigation you were near a corona patient on 06/03/20. You must immediately enter a home isolation by 20/03/20 to protect your relatives and the public. If you have fever, cough, etc. call A-101. Learn more at the link gov.il/corona” – An Israeli government text message. Source: @kann_news
In order to achieve this, Israel has begun to use the cellular devices to track suspected coronavirus cases. Using technology initially developed for counterterrorism purposes, it allows Israeli authorities to monitor the movements of individual citizens. If a citizen is detected as having spent 10 minutes or more within 2 meters of an infected person, they are sent a text message instructing them to self-isolate until a particular date. While a very effective method of tracing possible infection contacts, it also shows the incredible granularity of the data available to Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. With this capability, it would also be trivial to track phone users for enforcement purposes, too.
South Korea has also been actively tracing citizen’s mobile phones. Public health organisations have sent out texts detailing the recent movements of infected people, revealing intimate details of their citizens private lives. In one ridiculous case, a woman who had supposedly sustained serious injuries in a recent car accident was noted to be travelling to weddings and restaurants, leading to a grilling by TV reporters after she was identified by internet users.
Iran tried a more obvious method, asking users to install an app that promised to help diagnose coronavirus symptoms. It secretly leaked user’s live location data, and once this was public knowledge, it was promptly removed from the Play Store for breaking Google’s Terms of Service. This method is quite transparent to even a moderately technical user, and stands out for this reason. Of course, this does not mean that Iran doesn’t have more serious capabilities behind the scenes for cellular tracking, but it does raise questions as to why such a blatantly obvious approach would be attempted.
A screenshot of a Chinese website used to determine whether individuals have travelled to disease hotspots.
China has dealt with COVID-19 longer than anyone, and is heavily experienced with domestic surveillance technologies. An independent source has confirmed this technology is being used for access control to buildings. At entry points, individuals scan a QR code which takes them to a phone provider’s website. Entering their details, the user is shown a record of their location in the last 14 days. If they have avoided disease hot zones, they’re granted admittance to the facility.
Justification?
The ideal democracy governs with the consent of the people. While people might object to the invasion of their privacy like this in normal circumstances, they may be willing to make this tradeoff in times of peril. It’s not clear that any of the above-mentioned countries attempted to obtain their citizens’ consent.
What stops governments from using these same domestic spying powers after the health crisis ends? Oftentimes, even if it’s not used in the mainstream, intelligence organisations that operate in the dark can get away with using such tools with impunity, even in violation of the country’s own laws. We know that many have been doing so for years. If anything, it serves as a useful reminder to the public that no mobile device can be considered secure from nosy government actors.
Looking Ahead
It’s important to remember that cellphone-based tracking systems come with a major caveat. Those who don’t wish to be tracked always have the option of simply not carrying a cellular device. There are currently no nation states that enforce the carrying of a mobile phone, and so the best way to dodge such tracking is to simply opt-out of the technology altogether. In this modern era, anyone making such a decision is giving up a lot, and it’s not one that can be made lightly. For some though, it’s no option at all – where phones are used for access control to buildings, it’s hard to avoid. In China, for instance, a corona-tracking function has been tied into Alipay, the most popular pay-by-phone app, and some cities require a green light on a cellphone to use public transportation.
World governments have shown their hand, making it clear to the public that they have an immensely powerful and threatening technology at their disposal, and that they’re willing to use it without consent. While it is currently being employed in service of public health, the potential ramifications are plain to see. It may prove difficult for citizens to win back civil liberties that have been suspended in the current quarantine. Time will tell.
D-Wave, the Canadian quantum computing company, today announced that it is giving anyone who is working on responses to the COVID-19 free access to its Leap 2 quantum computing cloud service. The offer isn’t only valid to those focusing on new drugs but open to any research or team working on any aspect of how to solve the current crisis, be that logistics, modeling the spread of the virus or working on novel diagnostics.
One thing that makes the D-Wave program unique is that the company also managed to pull in a number of partners that are already working with it on other projects. These include Volkswagen, DENSO, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, MDR, Menten AI, Sigma-i Tohoku University, Ludwig Maximilian University and OTI Lumionics. These partners will provide engineering expertise to teams that are using Leap 2 for developing solutions to the Covid-19 crisis.
As D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told me, this project started taking shape about a week and a half ago. In our conversation, he stressed that teams working with Leap 2 will get a commercial license, so there is no need to open source their solutions and won’t have a one-minute per month limit, which are typically the standard restrictions for using D-Wave’s cloud service.
“When we launched leap 2 on February 26th with our hybrid solver service, we launched a quantum computing capability that is now able to solve fairly large problems — large scale problems — problems at the scale of solving real-world production problems,” Baratz told me. “And so we said: look, if nothing else, this could be another tool that could be useful to those working on trying to come up with solutions to the pandemic. And so we should make it available.”
He acknowledged that there is no guarantee that the teams that will get access to its systems will come up with any workable solutions. “But what we do know is that we would be remiss if we didn’t make this tool available,” he said.
Leap is currently available in the U.S., Canada, Japan and 32 countries in Europe. That’s also where D-Wave’s partners are active and where researchers will be able to make free use of its systems.
The UK's National Videogame Museum (NVM) is under threat. The site in Sheffield — the only permanent museum dedicated to video game culture in the UK — is one of many brick-and-mortar businesses that have been forced to close their doors during t…
Google and Microsoft have redesigned native form controls — buttons and various input elements you see on web forms — to look more harmonious and be more touch-friendly. They spent the past year working together to design a new theme and make built…
Azure Kinect DK, a developer kit with advanced AI sensors for building sophisticated computer vision and speech models, is now available in Japan, Germany, and the UK.
Direct upload of Azure Managed Disks provides a simplified workflow for uploading an on-premises VHD directly into an empty managed disk or copy a managed disk to another Azure region for regional migration or expansion.
For a short time only, RISC OS users can benefit from a cloud service that nobody expected or requested and, quite frankly, most people probably won’t actually use. Well, it’s aimed at developers really, not the average user, so there’s that. Everybody who’s anybody in the world of computing these days knows that ‘the cloud’ […]
The content below is taken from the original ( Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Two years ago today we announced 1.1.1.1, a secure, fast, privacy-first DNS resolver free for anyone to use. In those two years, 1.1.1.1 has grown beyond our wildest imagination. Today, we process more than 200 billion DNS requests per day making us the second largest public DNS resolver in the world behind only Google.
Yesterday, we announced the results of the 1.1.1.1 privacy examination. Cloudflare’s business has never involved selling user data or targeted advertising, so it was easy for us to commit to strong privacy protections for 1.1.1.1. We’ve also led the way supporting encrypted DNS technologies including DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS. It is long past time to stop transmitting DNS in plaintext and we’re excited that we see more and more encrypted DNS traffic every day.
1.1.1.1 for Families
Since launching 1.1.1.1, the number one request we have received is to provide a version of the product that automatically filters out bad sites. While 1.1.1.1 can safeguard user privacy and optimize efficiency, it is designed for direct, fast DNS resolution, not for blocking or filtering content. The requests we’ve received largely come from home users who want to ensure that they have a measure of protection from security threats and can keep adult content from being accessed by their kids. Today, we’re happy to answer those requests.
Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. 1.1.1.1 for Families leverages Cloudflare’s global network to ensure that it is fast and secure around the world. And it includes the same strong privacy guarantees that we committed to when we launched 1.1.1.1 two years ago. And, just like 1.1.1.1, we’re providing it for free and it’s for any home anywhere in the world.
Two Flavors: 1.1.1.2 (No Malware) & 1.1.1.3 (No Malware or Adult Content)
1.1.1.1 for Families is easy to set up and install, requiring just changing two numbers in the settings of your home devices or network router: your primary DNS and your secondary DNS. Setting up 1.1.1.1 for Families usually takes less than a minute and we’ve provided instructions for common devices and routers through the installation guide.
1.1.1.1 for Families has two default options: one that blocks malware and the other that blocks malware and adult content. You choose which setting you want depending on which IP address you configure.
Malware Blocking Only Primary DNS: 1.1.1.2 Secondary DNS: 1.0.0.2
Malware and Adult Content Primary DNS: 1.1.1.3 Secondary DNS: 1.0.0.3
Additional Configuration
In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household’s Internet usage.
1.1.1.1 for Families is built on top of the same site categorization and filtering technology that powers Cloudflare’s Gateway product. With the success of Gateway, we wanted to provide an easy-to-use service that can help any home network be fast, reliable, secure, and protected from potentially harmful content.
Not A Joke
Most of Cloudflare’s business involves selling services to businesses. However, we’ve made it a tradition every April 1 to launch a new consumer product that leverages our network to bring more speed, reliability, and security to every Internet user. While we make money selling to businesses, the products we launch at this time of the year are close to our hearts because of the broad impact they have for every Internet user.
This year, while many of us are confined to our homes, protecting our communities from COVID-19, and relying on our home networks more than ever it seemed especially important to launch 1.1.1.1 for Families. We hope during these troubled times it will help provide a bit of peace of mind for households everywhere.
PowerToys is a powerful open-source tool for Windows 10, which brings in useful features such as multi-zone for monitors, file renamer, and so on. This […]
IPv6 for Azure Virtual Network is now generally available worldwide. IPv6 support within the Azure Virtual Network and to the internet enables you to expand into the growing mobile and IoT markets with Azure-based applications and to address IPv4 depletion in your own corporate networks.
If you’ve ever tried to buy the Harry Potter audiobooks, you probably noticed something kind of tricky: there are there’s two very different versions. The version most widely available in the U.S. US is narrated by Jim Dale. The U.K. UK version is read by Stephen Fry.
Which is better? I won’t get into that — that’s something the internet Internet has been arguing about for a decade+ now. I will say, however, that getting the Stephen Fry versions in the U.S. US (legally) is usually a pretty big pain in the butt. Different countries, different distribution rights, different licensing — yada yada yada.
It got a bit easier today, albeit for just the first book: Audible has put the Stephen Fry version of “Harry Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” Stone up online, for free, until further notice.
Audible says it’s doing this as part of J.K. Rowling’s #HarryPotterAtHome program, in which the author is “relaxing the usual copyright permissions” to make the story available to more children who are likely stuck at home during the ongoing COVID-19 Covid-19 outbreak. The same program is allowing teachers to post videos of themselves reading the series aloud to their students (as long as it’s on a “closed educational platform”… so not like, YouTube) without worrying about getting into a copyright battle.
A few small catches:
If you’re in North America and get hooked on Fry’s take on the narration, finding/importing the Fry version of the other books is going to be up to you. Even if you sign up for an Audible account, the rest of the series on Audible is read by Jim Dale. To be clear, Dale’s version is very good! Just know that it’s different.
It’ll work across laptops, phones, tablets, etc. with the caveat that it’s streaming only, so plan on listening somewhere with an internet Internet connection.
You can find the Harry Potter stream — plus a bunch of other family-friendly family friendly audiobooks as part of Audible’s free Stories program — right here.
There’s crowdsourcing a problem, and then there’s crowdsourcing a problem within NASA, where some of the smartest, most creative and resourceful problem-solvers in the world solve real-world challenges daily as part of their job. That’s why it’s uplifting to hear that NASA has issued a call to its entire workforce to come up with potential ways the agency and its resources can contribute to the ongoing effort to fight with the current coronavirus pandemic.
NASA is using its crowdsourcing platform NASA @ WORK, which it uses to internally source creative solutions to persistent problems, in order to collect creative ideas about new ways to address the COVID-19 crisis and the various problems it presents. Already, NASA is engaged in a few different ways, including offering supercomputing resources recourses for treatment research, and working on developing AI solutions that can help provide insight into key scientific investigations that are ongoing around the virus.
There is a degree of specificity in the open call NASA put to its workforce: It identified key areas where solutions are most urgently needed, working together with the White House and other government agencies involved in the response, and determined that NASA staff efforts should focus on addressing shortfalls and gaps in the availability of personal protective equipment, ventilation hardware hardware, and ways to monitor and track the coronavirus spread and transmission. That’s not to say NASA doesn’t want to hear solutions about other COVID-19 issues, just that these are the areas where they’ve identified the most current need.
To add some productive time-pressure to this endeavor, NASA is looking for submissions from staff on all the areas above to be made via NASA @ WORK by April 15. Then there’ll be a process of assessing what’s most viable, and allocating resources to make those a reality. Any products or designs that result will be made “open source for any business or country to use,” the agency says — – with the caveat that this might not be strictly possible in all cases depending on the specific technologies involved.
The world is locked down for an indefinite period and people are working from home. All the meetings, interviews, seminars are being taken online on […]
The UK's National Videogame Museum (NVM) is under threat. The site in Sheffield — the only permanent museum dedicated to video game culture in the UK — is one of many brick-and-mortar businesses that have been forced to close their doors during t…
Google and Microsoft have redesigned native form controls — buttons and various input elements you see on web forms — to look more harmonious and be more touch-friendly. They spent the past year working together to design a new theme and make built…
PowerToys is a powerful open-source tool for Windows 10, which brings in useful features such as multi-zone for monitors, file renamer, and so on. This […]
