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Chromium OS for All SBC Crams Chromium Onto a Raspberry Pi

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You can already install Chromium onto just about any computer out there, but that doesn’t include single board computers, like the Raspberry Pi or C.H.I.P. While it’s still early in development, Chromium OS for All SBC seeks to fix that oversight.

Read more…



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OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest March 12-18

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SuccessBot Says

Current PTL Election Status

Quotas – Service vs. Library

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Create a VNet-to-VNet VPN in the Azure Management Portal

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cloud-computing-hands-hero

Learn how to create two virtual networks (VNets) and link them together using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in the new Azure Management Portal.

The post Create a VNet-to-VNet VPN in the Azure Management Portal appeared first on Petri.

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What Lies Beneath: The First Transatlantic Communications Cables

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For some reason, communications and power infrastructure fascinates me, especially the long-haul lines that move power and data over huge distances. There’s something about the scale of these projects that really gets to me, whether it’s a high-tension line marching across the countryside or a cell tower on some remote mountain peak. I recently wrote about infrastructure with a field guide that outlines some of the equipment you can spot on utility poles. But the poles and wires all have to end at the shore. Naturally we have to wonder about the history of the utilities you can’t see – …read more

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Understanding ARM Chips for Servers, the Cloud and IoT

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Docker Container Orchestration: What You Need to Know

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IEEE delivers Ethernet-for-cars standard

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802.3bw, aka 100BASE-T1, is optimised for wire weight

The march of Ethernet into motor vehicles continues, with the IEEE launching the first automotive standard for 100 Mbps Ethernet over single twisted pair cables.…

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Whatever happened to Green IT?

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When low energy levels are a good thing

Call it green computing or sustainable IT, ten years ago it was all the rage. The IT press was filled with articles about it. Today, it’s hard to find a headline that mentions it. What happened?…

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Amazon Web Services Turns Ten Years Old

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Mechanic computers used to pwn cars in new model-agnostic attack

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Proof-of-concept gets shiny sharp new teeth.

Nullcon Hacker Craig Smith has designed an attack whereby a car bearing malicious code could infect computers used in mechanics’ workshops. The workshop computers emerge capable of infecting nearly any other vehicle that arrives for service.…

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Oops! Microsoft says its ‘Bitcoin ban’ was a bug, not a feature

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Some twit put the wrong thing on the web and – silly us! – we took it at face value

Yesterday, we reported that Microsoft had stopped accepting Bitcoin in its digital tat bazaars.…

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Skyhook Wireless brings location services to wearables in a petite package

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Table with glass of water, fitness wearable and smartphone on it. Skyhook Wireless has been working on location technology for longer than many of the biggest names in smartphones have been around. Today it launched a new SDK aimed at bringing location to wearables in an extremely small code footprint. The challenge with wearables when it comes to location is that there isn’t a lot of real estate inside them and thus they tend to have underpowered… Read More

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LG builds a DAB+ digital radio radio into a smartmobe

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Not everyone has Spotify, or the download allowance to use it

Here’s an oddity: LG has launched a smartphone with a built-in DAB+ broadcast digital radio.…

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A simple typo stopped a $1 billion bank heist

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typo
Typos happen, and it’s not usually the end of the world. Worst case: you just go back and fix them. A typo has probably never cost you money, and even if it has, […]

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Phonvert has a plan to convert old smartphones into IoT nodes

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pic While many retired smartphones still work and have usable sensors like cameras, accelerometers, touch screens and bluetooth radios, large swaths of them remain unused or, worse yet, end up in landfills. The team at Phonvert created an open source software platform that can convert old smartphones into usable IoT (Internet of Things) nodes. Read More

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WD’s PiDrive gives your Raspberry Pi 314GB of storage

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Sure, you can already add storage to your Raspberry Pi, but it’s usually an exercise in trade-offs: SD cards don’t hold much data, and USB drives (even the portable ones) tend to be too big and power-hungry for a mini PC. WD doesn’t think you should have to compromise, though. It’s shipping a new PiDrive that stuffs 314GB into a slim design that won’t overwhelm the Pi’s power system, but is fast enough to make full use of the USB connection. It even has a special version of BerryBoot (a multi-operating system tool) to help you load your platform of choice and fill that abundant space with apps.

The PiDrive is relatively expensive. Its normal $45.81 (£39.50) price is higher than that of the Raspberry Pi itself, and even a "limited-time" cut to $31.42 (£27.09) may have you thinking carefully before pulling the trigger. If you have a media server or another Raspberry Pi project that simply can’t get by on a few dozen gigs, though, it might be worth shelling out a little extra.

Via: Western Digital (PR Newswire)

Source: WD PiDrive (US), (UK)

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Google adds support for Microsoft Office, Facebook at Work, Slack and others to its single sign-on solution

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unnamed Google doesn’t just offer its own web-based productivity apps, but it also offers a service for business users who want to use Google as an identity provider for accessing other online services using the widely used SAML standard. Today, Google is adding a few new options to this program, which now includes a number of Google competitors. Among the 14 new pre-configured options are the… Read More

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Zubie makes your car part of the Internet of Things

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Zubie connected car device It seems like I talk about connected cars and V2X and autonomous vehicles like it’s my job. Probably because it is. But like a lot of people, I do not yet own a car that’s connected in any way. There are a lot of new companies that want to rectify this situation for us by using the OBD-II port to bring Wi-Fi and connected apps to the cars we already drive. If you’re wondering… Read More

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Google joins Facebook’s effort to reinvent the data center

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Facebook and Google aren’t the best of friends, but they’re willing to make exceptions for the right causes: Google has joined Facebook’s Open Compute Project in a bid to improve data centers everywhere. It’s starting off by contributing a new server rack spec that both improves power handling and lets project members’ racks slip into Google computing farms. The move isn’t entirely surprising, even though it involves an arch-rival. Google is no stranger to building its own hardware — it’s just offering some of that know-how to the tech industry in hopes of getting some upgrades in return.

It’s not the only company making moves, either. Microsoft is contributing SONiC, or Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. The code should help companies build switches and other networking gear using open source, widely compatible technology. While you probably won’t see a lot of these collaborations first-hand, you might just notice the difference if your favorite cloud services run that much faster or supply you with more storage.

Source: Google Cloud Platform Blog, Microsoft Azure Blog

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OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest March 5-11

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Cross-Project

Election Season, PTL and TC

The stable:follows-policy Tag Is Official, Projects Need To Start Applying For It

 

Release Countdown For Week R-3, March 14-18

Reminder: WSME Is Not Being Actively Maintained

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Build your cloud skills at Next ‘20 OnAir: No-cost training opportunities

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Every week throughout Google Cloud Next ‘20 OnAir, we’re focusing on a different theme to help you grow your cloud skills through a series of guided hands-on labs, talks by Google Cloud’s technical experts, and competitions. 

Guided hands-on labs

If you’re new to Google Cloud, or brushing up on the basics, join us for Cloud Study Jam every Wednesday during which Google Cloud experts will review relevant cloud training and certification resources, lead you through hands-on labs, and answer your questions live. The sessions will be hosted in Americas and Asia Pacific-friendly times. 

By participating in the labs featured in our Cloud Study Jam sessions, you’ll also be working towards earning your firstskill badge on Qwiklabs. Digital skill badges allow you to demonstrate your growing Google Cloud-recognized skillset and share your progress with your network. You can earn the badges by completing a series of hands-on labs, leading up to a final assessment challenge lab, to test your skills.

Here’s a taste of what to expect from the Cloud Study Jam sessions:

Infrastructure sessions
On July 29, our Cloud Study Jam events will be all about infrastructure. Hands-on labs will focus on cloud environment provisioning, introducing cloud monitoring best practices, configuring networking, and more. In these value-packed sessions, you’ll also learn how to best prepare for Google Cloud certifications such as the Associate Cloud Engineer and the highest-paying IT certification for the past two years, Professional Cloud Architect

Application modernization sessions
Explore how to modernize your applications using Kubernetes on August 26. Participate in hands-on labs that demonstrate how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) can be used to perform workload orchestration and effortlessly run continuous delivery pipelines. You’ll also have a chance to learn about the Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification. 

AI sessions
Dive into Google Cloud AI on September 2 and learn how to address real-world challenges at scale. See how AI can enable businesses to continue interacting with their customer base through the use of virtual agents in hands-on labs. Understand why certification matters and how you can take the next steps on this path. You’ll also have the opportunity to get your machine learning questions answered by Lak Lakshmanan, Head of Data Analytics and AI Solutions at Google Cloud. 

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Your Next ‘20 OnAir journey starts here: Resources and session guides available now

Google Cloud Next ‘20 OnAir, running from Jul 14 to Sep 8, offers nine full weeks of programming to help you solve your toughest business…

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Talks with Google Cloud’s technical experts

Every Friday starting on July 24, you can participate in Google Cloud Talks by DevRel. Ask Google Cloud Developer Relations team members your questions on Google Cloud solutions including machine learning, AI, serverless, app modernization, and more. The team will also provide a summary of each week’s topic and deliver technical talks to supplement the week’s programming. Talks by DevRel will be hosted in Americas and Asia Pacific-friendly times. We’ll also have details soon on the sessions running in Japan. 

Competitions

Join our weekly Cloud Herogame to take your skills to the next level. Each game will have a collection of labs relevant to that week’s theme. You can pick and choose which hands-on labs to do, or try them all. Play with other attendees and compete to see yourself on the leaderboard. The weekly game link and its access code will be released on Tuesdays at 9 am PDT here

Ready to get started? Registerfor our Cloud Study Jam sessions. You can also find our full schedule of training opportunities on the Learning Hub.

Your gcloud command-line questions answered in printable cheat sheet

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If you have a Google Cloud environment, you’ve probably spent some time with the gcloud command-line tool, the primary command-line tool for creating and managing Google Cloud resources. But with over 2,000 commands, it can be a little overwhelming to get started with its multitude of flags, filters, and formats. 

Fear not for the gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet is now here to help guide the way! It’s a handy tool to stow in your proverbial knapsack or actual back pocket as you start out with the Cloud SDK, helping you recognize command patterns and find useful gcloud commands, to get you on your way. The gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet is available as a one-page sheet, an online resource, and quite fittingly, a command itself, gcloud cheat-sheet.

We’ve organized the gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet around common command invocations (like creating a Compute Engine virtual machine instance), essential workflows (such as authorization and setting properties for your configuration), and core tool capabilities (like filtering and sorting output). This list of useful commands, all neatly packed into a single double-sided page, is ready to be downloaded and printed. As a bonus, the cheat sheet also includes a quick rundown of how gcloud commands are structured, enabling you to easily discover commands beyond the confines of this pithy list.

Whether you’re new to the gcloud command-line tool and need a good starting point, or are a seasoned user and need a map to situate yourself, the gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet is a nifty companion as you traverse the expansive landscape of Google Cloud. You can access the cheat sheet online, or download the printable PDF. Or if you’ve already got the latest version of Cloud SDK installed, give the cheat sheet a whirl right now with gcloud cheat-sheet. We hope you find it to be a useful resource!

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Private endpoints for Azure File Sync are now generally available

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Starting with Azure File Sync agent 10.1, Azure File Sync supports private endpoints in all public and Azure US Government cloud regions where Azure File Sync is available.

Asia’s internet registry APNIC finds about 50 million unused IPv4 addresses behind the sofa

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About three /8’s worth is a decent chunk of the total pool and locals unready to go all-in on IPv6 are hungry

APNIC, the regional Internet address registry for India, China, and 54 other Asia-Pacific nations, has found about fifty million IPv4 addresses behind the sofa.…

Azure Virtual WAN: Multiple capabilities and new partners now generally available

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Today we are announcing the General Availability of multiple enhancements in Azure Virtual WAN, including hub-to-hub, custom routing and transit capabilities.

Alphabet’s Loon launches its balloon-powered Kenyan internet service

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Alphabet’s Loon has officially begun operating its commercial internet service in Kenya . This is the first large-scale commercial offering that makes use of Loon’s high-altitude balloons, which essentially work as cell service towers that drift on currents in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Loon’s Kenyan service is offered in partnership with local telecom provider Telkom Kenya, and provides cellular service through their network to an area covering roughly 50,000 square kilometres (31,000 square miles) that normally hasn’t had reliable service due to the difficulty of setting up ground infrastructure in the mountainous terrain.

Loon has been working towards deploying its first commercial service deployment in Kenya since it announced the signed deal in 2019, but the company says that the mission has taken on even greater significance and importance since the onset of COVID-19, which has meant that reliable connectivity, especially in light of the restrictions upon travel that the epidemic has placed, making the ability to remotely contact doctors, family members and others all the more important.

Some of the technical details of how Loon’s stratospheric balloons will offer this continuous service, and what kind of network quality people can expect include that the fleet includes around 35 balloons acting together which are moving constantly to maintain the target area coverage. Average speeds look to be around 18.9Mbps down, and 4.74 Mbps up, with 19 millisecond second latency, and real-world testing has shown that this has served well for use across voice and video calls, as well as YouTube streaming, WhatsApp use and more, according to Loon.

The path followed by Alphabet’s balloons as they provide service to the target area in Kenya.

The company actually began testing its service earlier this year, with many customers connecting to the network without even realizing it during those tests, and Loon says it has served over 35,000 customers and provided the services listed during those tests.

Prior to today’s commercial service launch, Loon has also employed its balloons to provide emergency service to areas affected by disaster, including Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. It’s now working with a number of commercial telecom partners to deploy non-emergency service in a number of underserved regions globally.

BOINC Radio 26 – New BOINC Projects!

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Recorded on July 3rd.

We have some cool news to share!

Length: 35 minutes

Listen on the web: https://boinc.network

Listen on LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@BOINCNetwork:c

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/30EtN42RCSUPPC3OvUO2lM

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/boinc-radio/id1492837872

RSS: https://feeds.captivate.fm/boincradio/

Learn, Chat, Science

BOINC Radio is a participatory podcast hosted on the BOINC Network Discord server. This means you, listener, help guide the direction of each episode!

Every Friday at 4pm EST your friendly hosts bring topics for everyone to discuss. Topics can range from BOINC, science, and distributed computing news to network theory to interesting anecdotes.

submitted by /u/jring_o to r/BOINC
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DJing Without The Truckload Of Equipment; Secret Ingredient is Raspberry Pi

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There is a romance to notions of a byegone age of DJing — driving a pair of Technics 1200s dwarfed on either side by the stacks, pumping techno bass through the laser-tinged darkness into a hungry crowd. Even if the reality of early evening Saturday wedding parties playing inoffensive crooners for the 50-somethings didn’t really live up to it.

The trouble with DJing old-style was that it required extensive logistics to shift all that equipment not to mention a record collection, so the modern DJ for whom everything has gone digital is truly lucky in the scale of their operation. For some people even that is too much to carry, and [Dennisdebel] has minimised a DJ rig to the next level, by running the popular Mixxx DJing software on a Raspberry Pi hooked up to his DJ controller. You can see the result in the video below the break.

This is more of a HOWTO for installing a set of software packages on the Pi to achieve an aim rather than a special hardware hack, but as he points out the interest lies in regaining control of the process. The DJ space is dominated by commercial offerings increasingly laden with DRM and proprietary cloud offerings, so this represents a means of taking back control of the process. If it’s not hacky enough, you can always add a home-made DJ mixing station.

Could this new hub be the end of the 1x gearing debate?

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Wireless shifting, hub gears and a cassette – is this the future?

AWS attempts to woo devs with new tool aimed at porting .NET applications to Linux

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Bezos’ bunch beats Microsoft to the punch, though it has limited use for now

Amazon Web Services is trying to lure more to developers to its cloud by creating a tool built for porting .NET applications to Linux, though in its current form we found it to be less useful than hoped.…

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

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Great problem of our time solved: Classic FM won’t have to rebrand as Classic DAB

Analogue radio station licences will be extended for another 10 years, the UK government has said – entirely reversing plans to shut off FM and AM radio stations in favour of DAB digital radio.…

Decided to go with the Sleeper Aesthetic

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Decided to go with the Sleeper Aesthetic submitted by /u/SWIMMlNG to r/battlestations
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Meet BukuWarung, the bookkeeping app built for Indonesia’s 60 million “micro-merchants”

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In Indonesia, there are about 60 million “micro-merchants,” typically small store owners who sell food and other staple items, and have close relationships with their customers. Many often extend informal lines of credit to shoppers, but much of their financial tracking is still done with pen and paper ledgers. Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, the co-founders of BukuWarung, want to digitize the process with a financial platform designed especially for small Indonesian businesses. Their goal is to start with bookkeeping tools, before expanding into services, services including access to working capital.

The startup is currently taking part in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. BukuWarung has also raised seed funding from East Ventures, AC Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Tanglin Ventures, Samporna, as well as strategic angel investors from Grab, Gojek, Flipkart, PayPal, Xendit, Rapyd, Alterra, ZEN Rooms and other companies.

Chauhan and Peddisetty met while working together at Singapore-based, Singapore-based peer-to-peer marketplace Carousell, where they focused on developing monetization products for sellers. Chauhan also worked on products for merchants at Grab, the largest ride-sharing and on-demand delivery company in Southeast Asia. But the inspiration behind BukuWarung is also personal, because both Chauhan and Peddisetty’s families run small neighborhood stores.

“We can look at this more deeply given the experience we have monetizing merchants at Grab and Carousell,” Chauhan said. “We also know good potential exists in Indonesia, where we can help 60 million micro-merchants come online and digitize. From a macro-level, we felt this would be a huge opportunity, and there is also the personal element of being potentially being able to impact millions of merchants.”

Paper records not only make tracking finances a labor-intensive process, but also means it is harder for merchants to gain access to lines of credit. Chauhan and Peddisetty told TechCrunch that their goal is to expand the company to financial services as well, doing for Indonesian merchants what KhataBook and OKCredit have done in India.

Since launching last year, BukuWarung has signed up 600,000 merchants across 750 cities and towns in Indonesia and currently has about 200,000 monthly average users. The founders say their goal is to reach all 60 million micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses in Indonesia. It has already made its first acquisition: Lunasbos, one of the first Indonesian credit-tracking credit tracking apps.

BukuWarung founders Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty

While preparing to launch BukuWarung, the founders traveled through Indonesia, speaking to almost 400 merchants about their challenges with bookkeeping, credit tracing and accounting. Based on those conversations, the two decided to start by focusing on a bookkeeping app, which launched 10 months ago.

Despite a partial lockdown in Indonesia from April to June, BukuWarung continued to grow because most of its users sell daily necessities, like groceries. In smaller cities and villages, merchants often offer credit lines because their customers’ cash flow is very tight, and many do not have a regular monthly paycheck, Chauhan said. “Everyone is buying and selling on credit, that is something we validated in our research.”

Then there is the community aspect, where many merchants are close to their customers.

“This changes depending on the location of the business, but business owners have often known a lot of people in their neighborhoods for a long time, and when it comes to credit, they typically offer 500 Indonesian rupiah all the way up to about one million rupiah [about USD $70.56],” Chauhan said. But when it’s time to settle bills, which often means going to customers’ homes and asking for payment, many merchants feel hesitant, he added.

“They will never chase or call the person. The app we built sends automatic reminders to customers, and this ‘soft message’ really helps merchants not feel shy while at the same time professionally giving customer reminders.”

While talking to merchants, BukuWarung’s founders also realized that many were using pay-as-you-go data plans and lower-end smartphones. Therefore, their app needed to be as lightweight as possible, and work offline so users could access and update their records anytime. This focus on making their app take up as little data and space as possible differentiates them from other bookkeeping apps, the founders said, and helps them sign up and retain users in Indonesia.

Chauhan and Peddisetty said the company will partner with financial tech companies as it grows  to give users access to online payment systems, including digital wallets, and financing.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer said, “Building digital infrastructure for emerging economies is a huge opportunity, especially in the post-COVID world. And we believe BukuWarung is a team that can take on this challenge. We have seen this journey before with Khatabook and OkCredit in India and see that BukuWarung is on a similar growth trajectory to empower micro-businesses in Indonesia.”

Plan your migration to Azure VMware solution using Azure Migrate

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Azure Migrate now supports assessments for Azure VMware Solution (AVS), providing even more options for you to plan your migration to Azure. AVS enables you to run VMware natively on Azure. AVS provides a dedicated Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) for your VMware environment on Azure, ensuring you can leverage familiar VMware tools and investments, while modernizing applications overtime with integration to Azure native services. Delivered and operated as a service, your private cloud environment provides all compute, networking, storage, and software required to extend and migrate your on-premises VMware environments to Azure.

As organizations now more than ever look for cost efficiencies, business stability, and consistency, choosing the most efficient migration path is imperative. This means considering a number of different workload scenarios and destinations, such as migrating your servers to Azure Virtual Machines or running your existing VMware workloads natively on Azure with AVS.

Previously, Azure Migrate tooling provided support for migrating Windows and Linux servers to Azure Virtual Machines, as well as support for database, web application, and virtual desktop scenarios. Now, you can use the migration hub to assess machines for migrating to AVS as well.

With the Azure Migrate: Server Assessment tool, you can analyze readiness, Azure suitability, cost planning, performance-based rightsizing, and application dependencies for migrating to AVS. The AVS assessment feature is currently available in preview.

This expanded support allows you to get an even more comprehensive assessment of your datacenter. Compare cloud costs between Azure native virtual machines (VMs) and AVS to make the best migration decisions for your business. Azure Migrate acts as an intelligent hub, gathering insights throughout the assessment to make suggestions, including tooling recommendations for migrating VM or VMware workloads.

How to perform an AVS assessment

You can use all the existing assessment features that Azure Migrate offers for Azure Virtual Machines to perform an AVS assessment. Plan your migration to AVS with up to 35,000 VMware servers in one Azure Migrate project.

  • Discovery: Use the Azure Migrate: Server Assessment tool to perform a datacenter discovery, either by downloading the Azure Migrate appliance or by importing inventory data through a CSV upload. Read Assess your servers with a CSV import into Azure Migrate to learn more about the import feature.
  • Group servers: Create groups of servers from the list of machines discovered. Here, you can select whether you’re creating a group for an Azure Virtual Machine assessment or AVS assessment. Application dependency analysis features allow you to refine groups based on connections between applications.
  • Assessment properties: You can customize the AVS assessments by changing the properties and recomputing the assessment. Select a target location, node type, and Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) level—there are currently three locations available—including East US, West Europe, and West US, and more will continue to be added as additional nodes are released.
  • Suitability analysis: The assessment gives you a few options for sizing nodes in Azure, between performance-based or as on-premises. It checks AVS support for each of the discovered servers and determines if the server can be migrated “as is” to AVS. If there are any issues found, the assessment automatically provides remediation guidance.
  • Assessment and cost planning report: Run the assessment to get a look into how many machines are in use and what estimated monthly and per-machine costs will be in AVS. The assessment also recommends a tool for migrating the machines to AVS. With this, you have all the information you need to plan and execute your AVS migration as efficiently as possible.
     

Plan your migration to Azure VMware Solution using Azure Migrate 1

AVS Assessment and cost planning report.

Plan your migration to Azure VMware Solution using Azure Migrate 2 
AVS Readiness report with suggested migration tool.

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Supreme Court rules generic website names can be trademarked

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The Supreme Court has ruled that website names are trademarkable even if they consist of a generic term followed by ".com." The ruling means that Booking.com is eligible for a trademark on the generic name that's associated with its domain. Booking.c…

Microsoft is offering low-cost certifications to job seekers

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Microsoft believes that one of the best ways to help the economy rebound and reduce the staggering rate of unemployment is to help workers learn new digital skills. Today, it announced an initiative designed to train 25 million people worldwide by th…

Resources from Google Cloud partners to support businesses during COVID-19

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Our Google Cloud partners play a huge role in supporting our customers, and at no time has that been more true than now. From the beginning of the pandemic, the Google Cloud partner community has been at the forefront of building new solutions to address the short-term and long-term needs of our customers around the world.

Last month I shared just a few of the examples of how partners, customers, and Googlers are working together to enable business continuity in so many key areas of our communities today. 

In parallel, we’ve seen many partners that have worked quickly to combine their decades of technical expertise with the learnings of the past several months in order to provide customers with new offers, solutions, and services to best support them.

To make it easier for a broader range of customers to benefit from these resources, today we’re launching a newpartner offers and solutionsresource. This is a simple way for customers to connect directly with partners who can provide solutions and support to help their businesses move forward during this time. Below are just a few of the highlighted offers from this new resource.

Partners supporting healthcare & life sciences organizations

Deloitte has created Deloitte’s Health360 Solution, Coronavirus Response Management Platform (CRMP), to help states identify patient subpopulations that are at highest risk in order to provide tailored testing, care, and services to these populations. This solution can support operational and policy leaders in every state as a standalone platform using only Deloitte data, but can also integrate with states’ data sources.

Maven Wave, an Atos company, has rolled out Rapid Response offeringsthat can be implemented in as little as a week. These include healthcare solutions for managing patient inquiries, enabling work from home, telehealth, and data visualization to keep businesses running, while adapting to the changing needs of their customers.  

TEKsystems Global Services is supporting healthcare clients during the pandemic by using their conversational AI solution, TEKsystems.sAIge, to create a chatbot for COVID-19 screening. This is helping healthcare workers save time and resources where it’s needed most. 

Supporting business continuity efforts & IT cost optimization

To support organizations across industries reeling from the influx of requests for information and support, Google Cloud collaborated with contact center partners such as Avaya, Cisco, Five9, Genesys, and Twilio to quickly create the Rapid Response Virtual Agentprogram. The program, powered by Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, enables customers to quickly build and implement a customized Contact Center AI virtual agent over chat, voice, and social channels. Our Systems Integrators help customers develop and implement their virtual agent through the program, including Kin + Carta, Maven Wave, mediaagility, Quantiphi, SADA, SpringML, and others.

As a response to COVID-19 challenges, Devoteam is helping businesses, governments, and schools optimize Google Cloud workloads to find cost savings with best practice and solution guidance for resource planning, cost estimation, cost budgeting, cost control and optimization. Devoteam’s experts have already helped around 400 schools transition to G Suite, offering their services free of charge. Their new Remote Productivity Hub offers articles and advice on switching to remote work and remote team management, using Google tools. Devoteam also prepared an offering portfolio focused on workforce training, rapid deployment of Google products as well as a series of EMEA-wide webinars to support business continuity and boost work effectiveness in the new situation.

Pandera Systems has developed specialized COVID-19 business support servicesto address organizations’ critical business needs during this time. Their free Transformation Accelerator Program provides digital coaching, implementation support, and accelerated transformation lessons to equip businesses with the tools they need to minimize disruption, fast. 

Helping customers transition to remote work 

The G Suite Rapid Standup package by Cloudbakers offers a quick, secure, and cost effective remote solution to help keep employees healthy and safe, while staying productive and energized.  Cloudbakers’ quick-stand up G Suite special offer comes with custom configurations, unlimited access to their “Continuous Learning as a Service” portal and 5 additional admin support hours to help customers in this transformation.

#CloudQuarters, a new work from home resource hub by SADA, shares information, guidance, curated content, and tips & tricks for G Suite and Google Meet. Customers can explore how-to videos and collateral, product updates, and un-gated resources for download.

Cloudypedia is helping small & medium businesses run from home during this time by helping to get their employees enabled to work remotely. Cloudypedia has waived all service fees for SMBs and is offering consultancy and assessment workshops, end-user support, 24/7 admin support, and online training. 

Partners supporting government and higher education organizations

Pluto7 is sharing their expertise on the top use cases to improve customer experiences with AI and ML. One of the solutions that stands out is their Education ML solution, helping to build immersive learning experiences for deeper student exploration and engagement while redefining how students learn, interact, and research in a remote learning environment.

MTX is offering comprehensive solutions for Emergency Response Management (ERM)to address COVID-19’s impact on Health, Administrative, Education, and other State Agencies. The ERM Solutions are agile and flexible, and can rapidly innovate to ensure citizens receive the assistance and services they need during emergency situations. Each ERM solution can be customized and deployed in less than 48 hours.

K-12 Distance Learning

Our education partners across Latin America are helping teachers and students by offering their expertise, resources, and solutions on distance learning. Brazilian partner, Foreducation Edtech, has created a live talk video serieson remote teaching best practices, including successful case studies on remote lessons from their partner schools available in Portuguese.

Edvolution launched a fully online digital adoption program that enables educational organizations to start using G Suite for Education immediately. Schools have been able to start teaching remotely within just one week with this across Latin America. Edvolution also provides technical onboarding and support, teacher training and support, as well as metrics dashboards. 

Our Google Cloud partner ecosystem is working tirelessly to help our customers, users, and communities, and we’re proud to support their work. To learn more, please visit our Partner Offers & Solutionshub.

Album art for your current Sonos music on a tiny, beautiful Raspberry-Pi powered full colour screen

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Wyze launches its $50 wire-free outdoor camera

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In recent years, Seattle-based Wyze made a name for itself thanks to making a lot of smart home gadgets affordable. These days, the company sells everything from smart plugs and locks to scales and fitness bands, but what started it all was the $20 Wyze indoor security camera. Today, the company is following that up with its newest camera, the Wyze Cam Outdoor, which is launching in early access today.

It’ll cost $50 for the starter bundle with a base station and once the camera is out of early access, you’ll be able to add additional cameras for $40 each. As usual, Wyze is undercutting many of its direct competitors in this space for basic outdoor security cameras on price.

For the most part, the that name tells you everything you need. It’s a 20 fps 1080p camera for live streaming and recording and features IP65 water resistance that keeps the overall blocky aesthetics of the original Wyze camera. It also offers a night vision mode and two-way audio through the Wyze app, which also offers a rolling 14 days of free cloud storage, in addition to on-device storage. And, of course, it also uses some onboard smarts to do motion detection, using a standard PIR sensor.

Image Credits: Wyze /

Like similar products, it runs purely on battery power, so you don’t have to string any cables across your yard. The company says the battery should last three to six months.

It mounts to its base with magnets, but you still need to do a bit of DIY to screw that base into your walls, ceilings or garden fences.

The base station itself is obviously cabled (and that includes the option to plug in an Ethernet ethernet cable, in addition to Wi-Fi WiFi support). One nice feature here is that the base station also includes an SD card slot, so you can store videos on there, too.

Given that it’s pretty small, at 2.3×2.3×2.8 inches, Wyze also built another nifty feature into the software: offline travel mode. With this, the company says, you can watch your hotel room or campsite while you’re away from home.

Image Credits: Wyze

Based on the samples, this looks to be a pretty capable outdoor camera, but hardware is only one piece of the puzzle here. A lot depends on how well the app and on-camera motion detection work, too. We’ll take a closer look at those once we get a review sample in the next couple of weeks.

If you don’t want to wait until then, the starter pack is now available in Wyze’s shop and in the Wyze app.

How Azure.com operates on Azure part 2: Technology and architecture

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When you’re the company that builds the cloud platforms used by millions of people, your own cloud content needs be served up fast. Azure.com—a complex, cloud-based application that serves millions of people every day—is built entirely from Azure components and runs on Azure.

Microsoft culture has always been about using our own tools to run our business. Azure.com serves as an example of the convenient platform-as-a-service (PaaS) option that Azure provides for agile web development. We trust Azure to run Azure.com with 99.99-percent availability across a global network capable of a round-trip time (RTT) of less than 100 milliseconds per request.

In part two of our two-part series we share our blueprint, so you can learn from our experience building a website on planetary scale and move forward with your own website transformation.

This post will help you get a technical perspective on the infrastructure and resources that make up Azure.com. For details about our design principles, read Azure.com operates on Azure part 1: Design principles and best practices.

The architecture of a global footprint

With Azure.com, our goal is to run a world-class website in a cost-effective manner at planetary scale. To do this, we currently run more than 25 Azure services. (See Services in Azure.com below.)

This blog examines the role of the main services, such as Azure Front Door, which routes HTTP requests to the web front end, and Azure App Service, a fully managed platform for creating and deploying cloud applications.

The following diagram shows you a high-level view of the global Azure.com architecture.

  • On the left, networking services provide the secure endpoints and connectivity that give users instant access, no matter where they are in the world.
  • On the right, developers use Azure DevOps services to run a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline that delivers updates and features with zero downtime.
  • In between, a variety of PaaS options that provide compute,  storage, security, monitoring, and more.

Diagram of a high-level view of the global Azure.com architecture.

Azure.com global architecture: A high-level look at the Azure services and dataflow.

Host globally, deliver regionally

The Azure.com architecture is hosted globally but runs locally in multiple regions for high availability. Azure App Service hosts Azure.com from the nearest global datacenter infrastructure, and its automatic scaling features ensure that Azure.com meets changing demands.

The diagram below shows a close-up of the regional architecture hosted in App Service. We use deployment slots to deploy to development, staging, and production environments. Deployment slots are live apps with their own host names. We can swap content and configurations between the slots while maintaining application availability.

Diagram of the regional architecture hosted in App Service.

Azure.com regional architecture: App Service hosts regional instances in slots.

A look at the key PaaS components behind Azure.com

Azure.com is a complex, multi-tier web application. We use PaaS options as much as possible because managed services save us time. Less time spent on infrastructure and operations means more time to create a world-class customer experience. The platform performs OS patching, capacity provisioning, and load balancing, so we’re free to focus elsewhere.

Azure DNS

Azure DNS enables self-service quick edits to DNS records, global nameservers with 100-percent availability, and blazing fast DNS response times via Anycast addressing. We use Azure DNS aliases for both CNAME and ANAME record types.

Azure Front Door Service

Azure Front Door Service enables low-latency TCP-splitting, HTTP/2 multiplexing and concurrency, and performance based global routing. We saw a reduction in RTT to less than 100 milliseconds per request, as clients only need to connect to edge nodes, not directly to the origin.

For business continuity, Azure Front Door Service supports backend health probes, a resiliency pattern, that in effect removes unhealthy regions when they are misbehaving. In addition, to enable a backup site, Azure.com uses priority-based traffic routing. In the event our primary service backend goes offline, this method enables Azure Front Door Service to support ringed failovers.

Azure Front Door Service also acts as a reverse proxy, enabling pattern-based URL rewriting or request forwarding to handle dynamic traffic changes.

Web Application Firewall

Web Application Firewall (WAF) helps improve the platform’s security posture by providing load shedding bad bots and protection against OWASP top 10 attacks at the application layer. WAF forces developers to pay more attention to their data payloads, such as cookies, request URLs, form post parameters, and request headers.

We use WAF custom rules to block traffic to certain geographies, IPs, URLs, and other request properties. Rules offload traffic at the network edge from reaching your origin.

Content Delivery Network

To reduce load times, Azure.com uses Content Delivery Network (CDN) for load shedding to origin. CDN helps us lower the consumed bandwidth and keep costs down. CDN also improves performance by caching static assets at the Point of Presence (POP) edge nodes and reducing RTT latency. Without CDN, our origin nodes would have to handle every request for static assets.

CDN also supports DDoS protection, improving app security. We enable CDN compression and HTTP/2 to optimize delivery for static payloads. Using CDN is also a sustainable approach to optimizing network traffic because it reduces the data movement across a network.

Azure App Service

We use App Service horizontal autoscaling to handle burst traffic. The Autoscale feature is simple to use and is based on Azure Monitor metrics for requests per second (RPS) per node. We also reduced our Azure expenses by 50 percent by using elastic compute—a benefit that directly reduces our carbon consumption.

Azure.com uses several other handy App Service features:

App Service is also a PaaS service, which means we don’t have to worry about the virtual machine (VM) infrastructure, OS updates, app frameworks, and the downtime associated with managing these. We follow the paired region concept when choosing our datacenters to mitigate against any rolling infrastructure updates and ensure improved isolation and resiliency.

As a final note, it’s important to choose the right App Service plan tier so that you can right-size your vertical scaling. The plan you choose also affects sustainable energy proportionality, which means running instances at a higher utilization rate to maximize carbon efficiency.

DaaS - .NET Profiler: identifying code bottlenecks and measuring improvements.

DaaS – .NET Profiler: identifying code bottlenecks and measuring improvements. In this case we found our HTML whitespace “minifier” was saturating our compute nodes. After disabling it, we verified response times, and CPU usage improved significantly.

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor enables passive health monitoring over Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Azure Data Explorer data sources. We rely on these query monitor alerts to build configuration-based health models based on our telemetry logs so we know when our app is misbehaving before our customers tell us.

For example, we monitor CPU consumption by datacenter as the following screenshot shows. If we see sustained, high CPU usage for our app metrics, Monitor can trigger a notification to our response team, who can quickly respond, triage the problem, and help improve MTTR. We also receive proactive notifications if a client-browser is misbehaving or throwing console errors, such as when Safari changes a specific push and replace state pattern.

CPU consumption by datacenter.

Performance counters: We are alerted if CPU spikes are sustained for more than five minutes.

Application Insights

Application Insights, a feature of Monitor, is used for client– and server-side Application Performance Management (APM) telemetry logging. It monitors page performance, exceptions, slow dependencies, and offers cross-platform profiling. Customers typically use Application Insights in break-fix scenarios to improve MTTR and to quickly triage failed requests and application exceptions.

We recommend enabling telemetry sampling so you don’t exhaust your data volume storage quota. We set up daily storage quota alerts to capture any telemetry saturation before it shuts off our logging pipeline.

Application Insights also provides OpenTelemetry support for distributed tracing across app domain boundaries and dependencies. This feature enables traceability from the client side all the way to the backend data or service tier.

Data volume capacity alert showing that the data storage threshold is exceeded.

Data volume capacity alert: Example showing that the data storage threshold is exceeded, which is useful for tracking runaway telemetry logs.

Developing with Azure DevOps

A big team works on Azure.com, and we use Azure DevOps Services to coordinate our efforts. We create internal technical docs with Azure Wikis, track work items using Azure Boards, build CI/CD workflows using Azure Pipelines, and manage application packages using Azure Artifacts. For software configuration management and quality gates, we use GitHub, which works well with Azure Boards.

We submit hundreds of daily pull requests as part of our build process, and the CI/CD pipeline deploys multiple updates every day to the production site. Having a single tool to manage the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) simplifies the learning curve for the engineering team and our internal customers.

To stay on top of what’s coming, we do a lot of planning in Delivery Plans. It’s a great tool for viewing incremental tasks and creating forecasts for the major events that affect Azure.com traffic, such as Microsoft Build, Microsoft Ignite, and Microsoft Ready.

What’s next

As the Azure platform evolves, so does Azure.com. But some things stay the same—the need for a reliable, scalable, sustainable, and cost-effective platform. That’s why we trust Azure.

Microsoft offers many resources and best practices for cloud developers, please see our additional resources below. To get started, create your Azure free account today.

Services in Azure.com

For more information about the services that make up Azure.com, check out the following resources.

Compute

Networking

Storage

Access provisioning

Application life cycle

Azure.com operates on Azure part 1: Design principles and best practices

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Azure puts powerful cloud computing tools into the hands of creative people around the world. So, when your website is the face of that brand, you better use what you build, and it better be good. As in, 99.99-percent composite SLA good.

That’s our job at Azure.com, the platform where Microsoft hopes to inspire people to invent the next great thing. Azure.com serves up content to millions of people every day. It reaches people in nearly every country and is localized in 27 languages. It does all this while running on the very tools it promotes.

In developing Azure.com, we practice what we preach. We follow the guiding principles that we advise our customers to adopt and the principles of sustainable software engineering (SSE). Even this blog post is hosted on the very infrastructure that it describes.

In part one of our two-part series, we will peek behind the Azure.com web page to show you how we think about running a major brand website on a global scale. We will share our design approach and best practices for security, resiliency, scalability, availability, environmental sustainability, and cost-effective operations—on a global scale.

Products, features, and demos supported on Azure.com

As a content platform, Azure.com serves an audience of business and technical people—from S&P 500 enterprises to independent software vendors, and from government agencies to small businesses. To make sure our content reaches everyone, we follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We also adopted sustainable software engineering principles to help us responsibly achieve global scale and reduce our carbon footprint.

Azure.com supports static content, such as product and feature descriptions. But the fun is in the interactive components that let readers customize the details, like the products available by region page where we show service availability across 61 regions (and growing), the Azure updates page that keeps people informed about Azure changes, and the search box.

The Azure pricing page provides up-to-date pricing information for more than 200 services across multiple markets, and it factors in any discounts for which a signed-in user is eligible. We also built a comprehensive pricing calculator for all services. Prospective customers can calculate and share complex cost estimates in 24 currencies.

As a marketing channel, Azure.com also hosts demos. For example, we created in-browser interactive demos to display the benefits of Azure Cognitive Services, and we support streaming media for storytelling. We also provided a total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator for estimating cloud migration savings in 27 languages and 12 regions.

And did we mention the 99.99-percent composite SLA that Azure.com meets?

Azure Pricing calulator.

Pricing calculator: Interactive cost estimation tool for all Azure products and services.

History of Azure.com

As the number of Azure services has grown, so has our website, and it has always run on Azure. Azure.com is always a work in progress, but here are a few milestones in our development history:

  • 2013: Azure.com begins life on the popular open-source Umbraco CMS. It markets seven Azure services divided into four categories: compute, data services, app services, and network.
  • 2015: Azure.com moves to a custom ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) application hosted on Azure. It now supports 16 Azure services across four categories.
  • 2020: Azure.com continues to expand its support of more categories of content. Today, the website describes more than 200 Azure offerings, including Azure services, capabilities, and features.

 

Azure.com timeline of supported products and services.

Azure.com timeline: Every year we support more great Azure products and services.

Design principles behind Azure.com

To create a solid architectural foundation for Azure.com, we follow the core pillars of great Azure architecture. These pillars are the design principles behind the security, performance, availability, and efficiency that make Azure.com run smoothly and meet our business goals.

The core pillars of great Azure architecture.

Design principles: Azure.com follows the tenets of Azure architectural best practices.

You can take a class on how to Build great solutions with the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework.

A pillar of security and resiliency

Like any cloud application, Azure.com requires security at all layers. That means everything covered by the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, from the network to the application, web page, and backend dependencies. This is our defense-in-depth approach to security.

Resiliency is the ability to defend against malicious attacks, bad actors, or bots saturating your compute resources and possibly causing unnecessary scale-out and cost overruns. Resiliency isn’t about avoiding failure, but rather responding to failure in a way that avoids downtime and data loss.

One metric for resiliency is the recovery time objective (RTO), which says how long an application can be offline after suffering an outage. For us, it’s less than 30 minutes. Failure mode analysis (FMA) is another assessment of resiliency and includes planning for failures and running live fire drills. We use both these methods to assess the resiliency of Azure.com.

Super scalable and highly available

Any cloud application needs enough scalability to handle peak loads. For Azure.com, peaks occur during major events and marketing campaigns. Regardless of the load, Azure.com requires high availability to support around-the-clock operations. We trust the platform to support business continuity and guard against unexpected outages, overloaded resources, or failures caused by upstream dependencies.

As a case in point, we rely on Azure scalability to handle the big spikes in demand during Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite, the largest annual events handled by Azure.com. The number of requests per second (RPS) jumps 20 to 30 percent as tens of thousands of event attendees flock to Azure.com to learn about newly announced Azure products and services.

Whatever the scale, the Azure platform provides reliable, sustainable operations that enable Microsoft and other companies to deliver premium content to our customers.

Cost-effective high performance is a core design principle

Our customers often tell us that they want to move to a cloud-based system to save money. It’s no different at Azure.com, where cost-efficient provisioning is a core design principle. Azure.com has a handy cost calculator to compare the cost of running on-premises to running on Azure.

Efficiency means having a way to track and optimize underutilized resources and use dynamic scaling to support seasonal traffic demands. This principle applies to all layers of the software development life cycle (SDLC), starting with managing all the work items, using a source code repository, and implementing continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). Cost-efficiency extends to the way we provision and host resources in multiple environments, and maintain an inventory of our digital estate.

But being cost-conscious doesn’t mean giving up on speed. Top-notch performance takes minimal network latency, fast server response times, and consistent page load and render times. Azure.com performance always focuses on the user experience, so we make sure to optimize network routing and minimize round-trip time (RTT).

Operating with zero downtime

Uptime is important for any large web application. We aim for zero downtime. That means no service downtime—ever. It’s a lofty goal, but it’s possible when you use CI/CD practices that spare users from the effects of the build and deployment cycles.

For example, if we push a code update, we aim for no site downtime, no failed requests, and no adverse impact on Azure.com users. Our CI/CD pipeline is based on Azure DevOps and pumps out hundreds of builds and multiple deployments to the live production servers every day without a hitch.

Another service level indicator (SLI) that we use is mean time to repair (MTTR). With this metric, lower is better. To minimize MTTR SLI, you need DevOps tools for identifying and repairing bottlenecks or crashing processes.

Next steps

From our experience working on Azure.com, we can say that following these design principles and best practices improves application resiliency, lowers costs, boosts security, and ensures scalability.

To review the workings of your Azure architecture, consider taking the architecture assessment.

For more information about the Azure services that make up Azure.com, see the next article in this blog series, How Azure.com operates on Azure part 2: Technology and architecture.

Netbooks: The Next Generation — Chromebooks

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Netbooks are dead, long live the Chromebook. Lewin Day wrote up a proper trip down Netbook Nostalgia Lane earlier this month. That’s required reading, go check it out and come back. You’re back? Good. Today I’m making the case that the Chromebook is the rightful heir to the netbook crown, and to realize its potential I’ll show you how to wring every bit of Linuxy goodness out of your Chromebook.

I too was a netbook connoisseur, starting with an Asus Eee 901 way back in 2009. Since then, I’ve also been the proud owner of an Eee PC 1215B, which still sees occasional use. Only recently did I finally bite the bullet and replace it with an AMD based Dell laptop for work.

For the longest time, I’ve been intrigued by a good friend who went the Chromebook route. He uses a Samsung Chromebook Plus, and is constantly using it to SSH into his development machines. After reading Lewin’s article, I got the netbook bug again, and decided to see if a Chromebook would fill the niche. I ended up with the Acer Chromebook Tab 10, codename Scarlet. The price was right, and the tablet form factor is perfect for referencing PDFs.

Two Asus Netbooks and a ChromeOS tablet.
Behold, my netbook credentials.

The default ChromeOS experience isn’t terrible. You have the functionality of desktop Chrome, as well as the ability to run virtually any Android app. It’s a good start, but hardly the hacker’s playground that a Linux netbook once was. But we can still get our Linux on with this hardware. There are three separate approaches to making a Chromebook your own virtual hackspace: Crostini, Crouton, and full OS replacement.

The Official Solution: Crostini

Crostini is the officially supported way to run Linux applications on a Chromebook. It’s a refined process, if your device supports it. Crostini uses virtualization to sandbox the Linux install, so there are some older devices that will never receive support for it. If you want to use Crostini, make sure you purchase a supported device.

Crostini is particularly simple to set up. Go into the ChromeOS settings, to the Linux section, and press the button to enable it. ChromeOS will download a Debian image and do all the install. It asks you for a username to use, and that’s it. Once it’s set up, you have a Debian system ready to go.

Apt works as expected, and the whole Debian collection of software is available. Any graphical programs are forwarded to the ChromeOS graphical layer, so you can interact with them as expected. Even audio is forwarded.

Crostini is quite flexible, all things considered. You can swap the default Debian system for Fedora, Kali, Arch, or another Distro. On an x86 Chromebook, it’s possible to install Steam and run OGL accelerated games. If you’re looking for a full desktop experience, there are even guides to install a desktop environment like KDE.

There’s even an Unsupported USB flag that can be enabled to forward virtually any device into the Linux VM. Want to program an Arduino? Yeah, it’s possible. Another experimental flag adds the ability to forward ports into the Linux VM. This opens up the ability to do web programming and all sorts of other tasks. The best part about Crostini is that it’s still being actively developed, and features are being added. For example, an experimental audio capture flag was recently added. One of the best resources I’ve found for learning more about Crostini developments is the aptly named r/Crostini subreddit, and particularly their wiki.

As neat as Crostini is, it does depend on your device getting whitelisted by Google. If you’re stuck with hardware that isn’t on the Crostini supported list, there is another option: Crouton.

Crouton

I won’t wade into the debate on which is tastier, but Crouton does have some distinct advantages. The biggest advantage is that it runs on just about any ChromeOS device that has devmode. Instead of running a VM, Crouton is based on chroot, so direct access to the hardware is possible. On the other hand, Crouton requires putting your device in developer mode, AKA the official rooting process. If you’re willing to commit to dev mode, and the powerwash it requires, then the steps required to install crouton are simple.

Crouton running Gnome and Gimp on a Chromebook

Download the crouton binary, install it to the proper location, and run sudo crouton -t xfce to download and set up the image. Once it’s installed, sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 starts up the chroot and launches the XFCE desktop. From there, install the Crouton extension and xiwi, and you can run linux application GUIs right on your ChromeOS desktop. It’s a little less refined than Crostini, but does the trick.

Since we have root from dev mode, it’s easy enough to pull a few tricks, like adding a udev rule to redirect devices into the chroot. Want direct access to a built-in camera? Crouton can do it.

Full OS Replacement

For absolute full control over your device, the only option is to ditch ChromeOS altogether and install a Linux distro. On x86 devices, chrx is a popular option for dual-booting a full-fat Linux distro with ChromeOS. Even some Arm models can be convinced to boot a Linux distro that supports their chipset, but beware that you’re way outside the realm of what’s officially supported by Google. Not that that ever stopped us before.

There’s a distro that’s designed specifically for Chromebooks, GalliumOS. It’s a stripped down Xubuntu, designed to run well on the lightweight Chromebook hardware. There is, of course, a catch. GalliumOS can only run on certain devices. Arm devices are totally unsupported, and some older machines have other various incompatibilities.

Google did add support for a legacy boot mode that makes the installation of a full Linux OS much easier. Even if your device has a firmware write-protect switch, it’s probably possible to put the device in dev mode and boot via the venerable BIOS process.

Final Thoughts

I’ve written most of this article from the Acer tablet I mentioned earlier. The experience reminds me a lot of working from a netbook. I have Crostini installed, and have been working my way though testing out a multitude of programs. Not everything works perfectly, but each update brings fixes and features.

Is a Chromebook the next netbook for you? Maybe. A modern Chromebook is an impressive piece of hardware, and it brings a lot of hackability.

If you go the Chromebook route, be sure to let us know in the comments how it’s worked for you, and send in some other Chromebook related hacks!

Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In

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Passwords are a pain and they are also a security risk. Microsoft has been trying to persuade IT, professionals and consumers, to do away with passwords in recent years. Social engineering techniques, like phishing and malware, make passwords vulnerable. Around 80 percent of successful attacks originate from compromised passwords.

Users also make passwords less secure by choosing passwords that are easy to guess and that can be hacked in dictionary attacks. Moreover, it’s common that people use the same password across multiple devices and services, increasing the damage if a password compromised. Multifactor authentication (MFA) helps protect passwords but it has a low adoption rate.

What is passwordless sign-in?

Microsoft’s answer to these security problems is passwordless authentication. With passwordless sign-in, passwords are replaced by something you have, like a security key, plus something you are or know. Something you are might be a biometric gesture like a fingerprint. Something you know might be a PIN.

If you read through Microsoft’s documentation on passwordless sign-in, it refers mainly to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Azure AD is the identity management platform used by Microsoft 365, Office 365, and of course Azure. To add to the complexity, Microsoft supports three different passwordless technologies in Azure AD and Windows 10:

  • Windows Hello for Business
  • Microsoft Authenticator app
  • FIDO2 security keys

Windows Hello

Designed for users that have a designated Windows 10 device, Windows Hello uses the PC itself as the ‘something you have’. Windows Hello can be used to sign in to Windows 10 and it also provides single sign-on (SSO) to services like Microsoft 365.

For devices that don’t have a built-in biometric device, like a fingerprint scanner, a PIN can be used. While PINs might not seem to offer an advantage over passwords, unlike passwords, Windows Hello PINs can only be used on the device where they are registered.

Microsoft Accounts

If you log in to Windows 10 using a Microsoft account and have Windows Hello set up, you can access Microsoft services, like Outlook.com, in supported browsers using Windows Hello.

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Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

 

You will be required to enter a PIN or use a biometric gesture to complete the sign-in.

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Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

Work or school accounts (Microsoft 365)

To use Windows Hello for Business with Microsoft 365, you must first sign in to Windows 10 using Windows Hello with your work or school account. To log in to Windows 10 from the lock screen using a work or school account, the device must be Azure AD joined. Once logged in, single sign-on works with Microsoft 365, so there’s no need to enter a password or confirm your identity again using a PIN or biometric gesture.

For more information on joining Windows 10 to an Azure Active Directory domain, see Join Windows 10 to Azure Active Directory During OOBE on Petri. It is also possible to join, or connect in Microsoft’s terminology, a Windows 10 device to Azure AD in the Settings app.

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Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In (Image Credit: Russell Smith)

Microsoft Authenticator app

Users with accounts registered for MFA will likely be familiar with the Microsoft Authenticator app or similar solutions like Google Authenticator. But the Microsoft Authenticator app can also be used for passwordless authentication in Microsoft 365.

Unlike Windows Hello, the Microsoft Authenticator app is a good solution for passwordless sign-in where users share PCs. The app runs on iOS 8.0 or later, and Android 6.0 or later. Microsoft Authenticator app passwordless authentication isn’t enabled in Azure AD by default.

If Microsoft Authenticator app passwordless is setup, after entering a username to log in to Microsoft 365, the user gets a message displaying a number that they must tap in the Authenticator app on their mobile device. To complete sign-in, the user must click Approve and provide a PIN or biometric gesture.

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Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In (Image Credit: Microsoft)

 

Before evaluating the Microsoft Authenticator app as a passwordless sign-in solution, your Azure AD tenant must have Azure MFA with push notifications enabled as a verification method. Azure AD MFA requires a premium Azure AD subscription.

FIDO2 security keys

If users that share PCs don’t want to or can’t use their mobile phones with the Microsoft Authenticator app, security keys are a hardware alternative. Security keys usually come in the form of small USB devices and they provide stronger security than software passwordless solutions like the Microsoft Authenticator app. Keys from manufacturers such as Yubico and Feitian are FIDO2 compatible and work with Azure AD, so allow passwordless sign-in to Microsoft 365.

Some security keys also support NFC so that they can be used with mobile devices. And a few can be used with Windows Hello. But using a security key with Windows Hello usually requires extra software to be installed on the Windows 10 device.

To sign in to a service like Microsoft 365 using a security key, the key must be plugged into a USB port on the Windows 10 device. Alternatively, if the key supports NFC, an NFC reader can be used. There is usually a touchpad or sensor on the device that the user must tap to complete a passwordless sign-in. Some keys replace the sensor with a fingerprint reader to further improve security.

Before you can use a FIDO2 security key to sign in to Microsoft 365, FIDO2 security key sign-in must be enabled in Azure AD. FIDO2 Microsoft-compliant security keys are supported for passwordless login in the Windows 10 May 2019 Update and later. A supported browser is required, like Microsoft Edge. Users can register compatible security keys without any help from IT.

Support for hybrid Azure AD-joined devices

The Windows 10 May 2020 Update (version 2004) supports signing in using FIDO2 security keys to devices that are hybrid joined to Azure AD. Hybrid-joined devices are joined to a Windows Server Active Directory (AD) domain and registered, not joined, to Azure AD. Using security keys with AD requires making some changes to extend AD’s Kerberos realm to Azure Active Directory.

In the rest of this series, I will look at each of the three passwordless sign-in options in more detail, starting with Windows Hello.

The post Understanding Windows 10 and Microsoft 365 Passwordless Sign-In appeared first on Petri.

Microsoft’s Free New Tool to Recover Files in Windows

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If you have never had to recover a file in Windows, you are in the minority. At some point in time, many of us have accidentally deleted a file on either a drive or removable storage like an SD card or USB stick.

While there are tons of third-party tools that Google will surface, you never quite know if these tools will work or worse, if they are installing malware or crypto mining software in the background. That’s where professional services come into play but those options can be expensive and depending on the task, completely overkill.

Microsoft has a new application that makes it easy to recover files and below you will find a tutorial about how to use the application. If you need additional documentation, you can find that here.

Application:

The first thing you will need to do is download the recovery tool. You can download the application from the link below:

Download: Microsoft Windows File Recovery Tool

Recovery Modes:

It’s important to understand which file system your device is using as this will help to determine which mode you should use. The file recovery tool supports FAT/exFAT/ReFS/and NTFS. Us the table below to determine which mode you should be using.

Command Line Syntax:

When entering your commands, here is a breakdown of the parameters that you will need to know:

  • /r – Uses segment mode, which examines File Record Segments (FRS).
  • /n – <filter> – Scans for a specific file by using a file name, file path, or wildcards. For example:
    • File name: /n myfile.docx
    • File path: /n /users/<username>/Documents/
    • Wildcard: /n myfile.*
      /n *.docx
      /n *<string>*
  • /x -Uses signature mode, which examines file types and works on all file systems.
  • /y:<type(s)> – Scans for files with specific file types. Separate multiple entries by using commas. For a list of extension groups and corresponding file types, see the table, “Signature mode extension groups and file types” in the section, “About modes and file systems”.
  • /# – Shows signature mode extension groups and corresponding file types in each group.
  • /? – Shows a quick summary of syntax and switches for general users.
  • /! – Shows a quick summary of syntax and switches for advanced users.

How to Recover lost files on Windows 10

If you need to recover files in Windows 10, the first thing you will need to do is to download the app from the store.

  • After installing the app, press the Windows key, enter Windows File Recovery in the search box, and then select Windows File Recovery.
  • In the Command Prompt window, enter the command in the following format: winfr source-drive: destination-drive: [/switches]
    • Note: The source and destination files must be different to recover the object
  • The tool will automatically create a recovery folder for you called, Recovery_<date and time> on the destination drive.
  • To change ‘modes’ you use either /n for default /r for segment and /x for signature
  • Default Mode Example: To recover a file from you C: drive to your E: drive, you would enter the following command:
    • winfr C: E: /n \Users\<username>\Documents\Importantinfo.docx
  • If you want to recover an entire folder, use the following command:
    • winfr C: E: /n \Users\<username>\Documents\
  • Segment Mode Example: Recover PDF and Word files from your C: drive to the recovery folder on an E: drive.
    • winfr C: E: /r /n *.pdf /n *.docx
  • Signature mode example:
    • winfr C: E: /x /y:JPEG,PNG

Important to Remember:

If you are trying to recover a file from your device, you need to stop writing content to the disk immediately. For best results, once the file is deleted, you need to try and recover the contents at that time, the longer you wait, the harder it will be to retrieve the file

As a default, you should always create full backups of your devices and not depend on a tool such as this one to retrieve files. This type of application works best for immediately recovering contents, not trying to recover a file from three weeks ago.

 

The post Microsoft’s Free New Tool to Recover Files in Windows appeared first on Petri.

Stop Windows 10 from upgrading to next version and Set the target Feature Update version

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Stop Windows 10 from upgrading to next versionYou can Enable the Select the target Feature Update version Group Policy setting or use the TargetReleaseVersionInfo Registry key to stop Windows 10 from installing […]

This article Stop Windows 10 from upgrading to next version and Set the target Feature Update version first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.