Skype gets shareable conversation links for easy invites

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Need to invite someone to join a Skype session? Well, that task just got a lot easier. The video-chatting app added a new feature that lets you invite folks to join a conversation with a shareable link. All you have to do is nab the URL, send it to the person and they can click it to join. What’s more, the invitee doesn’t need a Skype account to do so. Clicking on a shared link can employ Skype on the web as a guest, but it’ll still offer access to messaging and both video and voice calls. If you’re familiar with sharing links to Dropbox or OneDrive files, you have an idea of how this works. It sounds like a simple addition, but it’s sure to save time, and allow people who aren’t using the app to easily participate as needed.

Source: Skype

Anti-drone rifle shoots down UAVs with radio waves

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While the US military continues to develop new and awesome ways of blowing aerial drones to smithereens, not many of these systems can easily be adapted to use in the civilian realm. That’s why Battelle has developed the DroneDefender, a shoulder-mounted rifle that knocks UAVs offline with a barrage of radio waves.

"It can help us in numerous settings, from the White House lawn to bases and embassies overseas; from prisons and schools to historic sites,"Alex Morrow, technical director on the project, said in a statement. "It easily and reliably neutralizes the threat." The weapon weighs roughly 10 pounds and can target drones up to 400 meters away. When the trigger is pulled, the gun emits a blast of electromagnetic energy tuned to the most common GPS and ISM frequencies, safely disabling the drone and preventing it from accepting any additional commands from its operator. This is especially helpful if the drone is equipped with an improvised explosive device.

Source: Battelle

No thanks: JPEG images may soon have copy protection

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No dupes allowed

So much for hopes that the tech industry would back away from copyright protection any time soon. The Joint Photographic Experts Group recently launched a Privacy & Security initiative that potentially brings digital rights management (DRM) to regular JPEG images, not just the specialized JPEG 2000 format. The proposal could protect your privacy by encrypting metadata (such as where you took a photo), but it could also prevent you from copying or opening some pictures. Needless to say, that opens up a can of worms when it comes to fair use rights. If someone slapped DRM on a photo, you couldn’t use it for news, research or remixed art — many of the internet memes you know wouldn’t be possible.

There’s no certainty that JPEG files will be locked down soon, so this isn’t an immediate crisis. We’d add that there’s also hope for a compromise: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued for a middle road approach in a presentation to the JPEG Committee. It sees value in encrypted data as a filter (say, making sure that only your Facebook friends see a photo), but doesn’t want any data to be non-removable or used to prevent copying. It’d rather have services give you more control over that data, and make sure that any security measures are based on open standards that won’t break functionality. While the JPEG team might not take this advice to heart, it at least knows that it has some options.

[Image credit: Randy Kruzan via Getty Images]

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation, JPEG

Better hot-patches, more virty in Big Blue’s next AIX

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And you thought big Unix was dead! Well it ain’t. And it wants upgrading inside a year

As well as the range of Linux servers it released last week, Big Blue also announced version 7.2 of its venerable AIX operating system.…

Next Month, You’ll Be Able to Activate Windows 10 with Windows 7 and 8 Product Keys

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Upgrading to Windows 10 is easy if you’re already on Windows 7 or 8 . However, if you want a clean install , you have to install an older version first. Next month, the first big update to Windows 10 will fix this.

Read more…



Devs ask Microsoft for real .NET universal apps: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

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Windows 10 only is not a universal solution

Microsoft introduced the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) this year: applications that run across many device types, provided that they all run Windows 10.…

Microsoft offers sneak peak of Hyper-V containers with Win 10 nested virtualisation

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If you find Leonardo Di Caprio down there in a nested VM, please let us know

Microsoft has added nested virtualisation to Windows 10 as a prelude to revealing its Hyper-V Containers technology.…

Senior Pi

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We made the Raspberry Pi to teach kids about computing. Of the 7 million Pis we’ve sold so far, about a third have ended up with kids – the way the maker community took to the Pi was a real surprise to us, as was the enthusiastic response from industrial users. One of the best […]

The post Senior Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Next-Gen Enterprise Network Doesn’t Stop at Corporate Firewall

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Engineering team staffing up

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I’m very pleased to welcome Mike Perez (a.k.a. thingee) to the Engineering team at the OpenStack Foundation.

Within the Foundation, the Engineering team is tasked with ensuring the long-term health of the OpenStack open source development project. That includes helping in keeping the project infrastructure up and running, organizing the design summits and identifying issues within our open community early and engage to fix them proactively. Mike brings a lot of development experience and community engagement to the table, and I expect we’ll be able to address more issues more quickly as a result of him joining the team.

The team is now composed of two infrastructure engineers, with Jeremy Stanley (current Infrastructure PTL) and Clark Boylan, and two development coordinators (Mike and myself). We are hiring new people (an upstream developer advocate and another development coordinator) to cope with our project continued growth and the increased complexity of the challenges our community encounters.

You can find those job descriptions (and the openings in other teams at the Foundation right now) on the OpenStack job board. If you like the idea of working for a non-profit, have a keen sense of community, cherish having a lot of autonomy and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, you should definitely consider joining us!

Adobe and Dropbox make it easier to edit PDFs from the cloud

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Dropbox got cozy with Microsoft Office back in the spring, offering a way to easily edit files stored in its cloud-based repository. Now, Dropbox is getting friendly with Adobe Document Cloud, too. More specifically, the company is playing nice with Adobe Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader to serve up quick and easy access to edit PDF documents. Once you connect your Dropbox account with the Adobe apps, you’ll be able to pull in files without leaving the app. What’s more, when you’re browsing files in Dropbox, you’ll have the option to open a PDF in the appropriate Adobe app to edit, e-sign, comment and markup the file as needed. And as you might expect, no matter how you open the document or which device you’re using, everything automatically syncs in Dropbox across desktop and mobile. PDFs are by far the most common file format stored with the could-driven storage service,and now its improving the workflow for power users. The new functionality goes live on the desktop today with iOS integration arriving "in the coming months." Android users can expect to employ the PDF-editing workflow next year. Slideshow-328120

Snickerdoodle Dev Board Boasts ARM Processor with Onboard FPGA

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snickerdoodleThe team at krtkl is crowdfunding Snickerdoodle, a hybrid development board that has an ARM application processor with an onboard FPGA.

Read more on MAKE

The post Snickerdoodle Dev Board Boasts ARM Processor with Onboard FPGA appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

RAID 5 was great, until high-capacity HDDs came into play, but SSDs restored its former glory.

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Technology often becomes obsolete these days, but sometimes a single change in it revives the principle and makes it relevant again. As HDD capacity… Read more at VMblog.com.

Introducing Microsoft Azure Backup Server

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cloud-computing-hand-heroimg

Microsoft has started Project Venus by launching Microsoft Azure Backup Server, which offers more backup functionality and a local disk repository.

The post Introducing Microsoft Azure Backup Server appeared first on Petri.

Virtualisation blog ‘of interest to Interpol’

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VMware man William Lam detained in France en route to VMworld Europe

VMware employee William Lam appears to have been denied entry to Europe.…

AWS Launches Internet of Things Cloud Platform

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New utility that runs a program with different settings you choose.

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AdvancedRun is a new tool for Windows that allows you to run a program with different settings that you choose, including – low or high priority, start directory, main window state (Minimized/Maximized), run the program with different user or permissions, Operating system compatibility settings, and environment variables. You can also save the desired settings into […]

OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter (Oct. 3 – Oct. 9)

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What you need to know about Astara

Henrik Rosendahl, CEO of Akanda, introduces OpenStack’s newest project, an open-source network orchestration platform built by OpenStack operators for OpenStack clouds.

An OpenStack security primer

Meet the troubleshooters and firefighters of the OpenStack Security project and how you can get involved.

The Road to Tokyo

Community feedback

OpenStack is always interested in feedback and community contributions, if you would like to see a new section in the OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter or have ideas on how to present content please get in touch: [email protected].

Reports from Previous Events 

  • None this week

Deadlines and Contributors Notifications

Superuser Awards: your vote counts

(voting closes on 10/12 at 11:59 pm PT)

Security Advisories and Notices 

Tips ‘n Tricks 

Upcoming Events

What you need to know from the developer’s list (WIP)

Success Bot Says

  • harlowja: The OpenStack Universe [1]
  • krotscheck: OpenStack CI posted first package to NPM [2]
  • markvan: OpenStack Chef Cookbook team recently put in place all the pieces to allow for a running a full (devstack like) CI test against all the cookbook projects commits.
  • proton driver running with Kerberos for encryption and authentication
  • Tell us yours via IRC with a message “#success [insert success]

Proposed Design Summit allocation

  • Track layout is on the official schedule [3].
  • PTLs or liaisons can start pushing up schedule details. The wiki [4] explains how.
  • Reach out to ttx or thingee on IRC if there are any issues.

Devstack extras.d support going away M-1

  • Sean Dague mentions extras.d is devstack plugins, and has existed for 10 months.
  • Projects should prioritize getting to the real plugin architecture.
  • Sean compiled a list of the top 25 jobs (by volume) that giving warnings of breaking [5].

Naming N and O Release Now

  • Sean Dague suggests since we already have the locations for N and O summits, we should start the name polls now.
  • Carol Barrett mentions that the current release naming process only allows the release to be named is announced and no sooner than the opening of development of the previous release [6].
    • Consensus is made to have this changed.
    • Monty mentions this option was discussed in the past, but it was changed because we wanted to keep a sense of ownership by the people who actually worked on the release.
  • Sean will propose this to the next group of TC members.

Requests + urllib3 + distro packages

  • Problems:
    • Requests python library has very very specific versions of urllib3 it works with. So specific that they aren’t always released.
    • Linux vendors often unbundle urllib3 from requests and then apply what patches were needed to their urllib3 while not updating their requests package dependencies.
    • We use urllib3 and requests in some places, but don’t mix them up.
    • If we have a distro-alterted requests + pip installed urllib3, request usually breaks.
  • Lots of places the last problem can happen; they all depend on us having a dependency on requests that is compatible with the version installed by the distro, but a urllib3 dependency that triggers an upgrade of just urllib3. When constraints are in use, the requests version has to match the distro requests version exactly, but that will happen from time to time. Examples include:
    • DVSM test jobs where the base image already has python-requests installed.
    • Virtualenvs where the system-site-packages are enabled.
  • Solutions:
    • Make sure none of our testing environments include distro requests packages.
      • Monty notes we’re working hard to make this happen.
    • Make our requirements be tightly matched to what requests needed to deal with unbundling.
      • In progress by Matt Riedemann [7].
    • Teach pip how to identify and avoid this situation by always upgrading requests.
    • Get the distros to stop un-vendoring urllib3.

[1] – http://bit.ly/1OpNcOu

[2] – http://bit.ly/1VJsrMM

[3] – http://bit.ly/1VJsubb

[4] – http://bit.ly/1VJsrMN

[5] – http://bit.ly/1OpNepG

[6] – http://bit.ly/1Se8FXO

[7] – http://bit.ly/1VJsubc

Technical Committee Highlights October 7, 2015

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It’s a busy week pre-summit and pre-release so let’s jump into it.

Technical Committee Elections this week

There are 19 candidates for 6 positions in this six-month cycle of TC elections. Active Technical Contributors (ATCs) should have an email in their inbox to use to vote in this election. Sign into review.openstack.org and then go to Settings > Contact Information to find your Preferred Email, which is where the ballot was sent. Vote by 23:59 UTC October 9th 2015.

Cross-project sessions at the Summit

By Friday October 9, please add your suggestions for cross-project sessions to this site: http://bit.ly/1PBxFIt by clicking Suggest session. On Monday October 12, the technical committee will review all the submissions and fit them into the cross-project time slots at the Summit. There are about 26 proposals now for about twenty 40-minute time slots on the schedule.

Applying for OpenStack governance

One team’s application prompted a discussion on whether or not a project should apply to the TC right away or if it should have some amount of history of operating as an OpenStack project first. The consensus on that application was that we should wait and let the project get going first. The team was Kosmos, a new project, formed initially from members of Designate (DNS as a Service) and Neutron Load Balancing as a Service teams, so they thought they’d go ahead and apply for governance to get started. We had enough discussion about the thinking around “people we know” versus “showing your work” that we decided to ask them to wait and show more evidence that their work is going forward. We recognize that teams do need to be governed to get access to some services like docs hosting and integrated testing.

The last week of September we discussed both CloudKitty and Juju Charms for Ubuntu’s applications. We decided to delay a decision on the Juju charms application until there is something substantial in the repositories since they can be set up without being “official” now. That also gives time for understanding any licensing complexity. CloudKitty, a billing solution for OpenStack, was accepted for governance.

Astara a.k.a Akanda

Another interesting application discussion came this week when a Neutron driver, Astara, from the company Akanda, asked for governance in the “big tent” rather than adding their driver as a repo to the neutron team. The TC worked with both the outgoing and incoming PTLs on this one as it was a new concept for everyone. We approved their application to governance and now are reviewing the second patch in the series, adding the Astara driver to the Neutron repository collection.

Removing projects from the big tent

When the PTL elections rolled around we discovered that MagnetoDB had no contributors for the last release and decided to retire the project. We had a discussion about formalizing the policy and ensuring the communications about the removal are clear. With the easier inclusion policies in place, it also makes sense that rotating out could happen smoothly as well.

Download 15 Free Programming Books for Coders of All Levels

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You can never have too many free ebooks—especially ones that help you learn something new or improve your skills. So here you go: 15 programming books for beginners and current coders alike.

Read more…

HP Launches Open Source OS for Data Center Networking

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OpenStack Training Sessions available in Tokyo

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The OpenStack Summit in Tokyo is just around the corner and we wanted to update you on some upcoming OpenStack Training and Certification classes that will take place in Tokyo around the Summit dates (October 27-30). For those of you traveling, you might want to take advantage of these offers and make the most of your visit.

Training Offerings:

OpenStack Networking Fundamentals Express by PLUMgrid
  • Date: October 26, 2015
  • Duration: 1 day
  • Time: 9am-5pm
  • Location: Iidabashi First Tower 2-6-1 Koraku, Bunkyo-ku Tokyo, 112-8560 Japan
  • Register here
OpenStack Networking Bootcamp Express by PLUMgrid
  • Date: October 30, 2015
  • Duration: 1 day
  • Time: 9am-5pm
  • Location: Iidabashi First Tower 2-6-1 Koraku, Bunkyo-ku Tokyo, 112-8560 Japan
  • Register here
MidoDay Tokyo by Midokura
  • Date: October 26, 2015
  • Duration: 1 day
  • Time: 9am-7pm
  • Location: ARK Mori Buidling at ARK Hills 1-12-32 Akasaka, Minato-ku Tokyo 107-6001 Japan
  • Register here
OpenStack Integration with Big Cloud Fabric by Big Switch Networks
  • Date: October 27-30, 2015
  • Duration: 30 minutes
  • Time: on-demand
  • Location: online
  • Register here
Mirantis OpenStack Bootcamp (OS100)
  • Dates: October 24- October 26
  • Duration: 3 Days
  • Time: 9 am – 5 pm
  • Location: Tokyo, Japan, TBD
  • Register here
If you have any questions regarding the above Training and Certifications, please contact the Member companies directly for more information.

 

See you in Tokyo!

 

The Blockchain Might Be The Next Disruptive Technology

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blockchain-2048 To process a transaction, you need first to make sure the sender owns the asset he wants to transfer, and make sure he will not trade it twice. In the blockchain, information is stored in blocks that record all transactions ever done through the network. Hence, it allows validating both the existence of assets to be traded and ownership. Read More

OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter (Sept., 26 – Oct., 2)

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53 things that are new in OpenStack Liberty

Another autumn, another OpenStack release.  OpenStack’s 12th release, Liberty, is due on October 15, and release candidates are already being made available.  But what can we expect from the last six months of development?

App Developers: First App on OpenStack Tutorial Needs You

The tutorial that guides new developers to deploy their first application on OpenStack is complete for Apache Libcloud and needs help for new languages and SDKs.

The Road to Tokyo 

Community feedback

OpenStack is always interested in feedback and community contributions, if you would like to see a new section in the OpenStack Weekly Community Newsletter or have ideas on how to present content please get in touch: [email protected].

Reports from Previous Events 

  • None this week

Deadlines and Contributors Notifications 

Security Advisories and Notices 

Tips ‘n Tricks 

Upcoming Events 

What you need to know from the developer’s list

PTL election results are in!

Proposed Design Summit track/room/time allocation

Brain implant may allow Alzheimer’s patients to keep their memories

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Brain scan
Researchers at DARPA have developed an implant to assist a diseased brain make new memories. One day Alzheimer’s patients or those suffering from brain damage won’t have to worry about losing their sense […]