The content below is taken from the original ( Underwater Crawling Soft Robot Stays in Shape), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

When you think of robots that were modeled after animals, a brittle star is probably not the first species that comes to mind. Still, this is the animal that inspired [Zach J. Patterson] and his research colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University for their underwater crawling robot PATRICK.

PATRICK is a soft robot made from molded silicone. Each of his five limbs contains several shape memory alloy (SMA) springs which can be contracted through Joule heating thereby causing the limbs to bend. The robot’s control board is sending and receiving commands via Bluetooth Low Energy from a nearby computer. To control PATRICK’s motion the researchers constructed a closed-loop system where an offboard OpenCV based camera system is constantly tracking the robot. As shown in the video below with an average velocity of 1 cm/s, PATRICK’s movement is a bit sluggish but the system is supposedly very robust against uncertainties in the environment.

In the future [Zach J. Patterson et al.] would like to improve their design by giving the robot the ability to grasp objects. Ultimately, also the offboard camera should be replaced with onboard sensors so that PATRICK can navigate autonomously.

Soft robots like artificial jellyfish are especially useful underwater and sometimes almost cross the boundary to organic life.

The content below is taken from the original ( CSIC launches a BOINC project to search for drugs against coronavirus[SPA]), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

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The content below is taken from the original ( New compilation of remote work job boards), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

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The content below is taken from the original ( AWS launches Amazon AppFlow, its new SaaS integration service), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times or on-demand.

Unlike some of its competitors, though, AWS is positioning this service more as a data transfer service than a way to automate workflows, and, workflows and while the data flow can be bi-directional, AWS’s announcement focuses mostly on moving data from SaaS applications to other AWS services for further analysis. For this, AppFlow also includes a number of tools for transforming the data as it moves through the service.

“Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete,” said AWS principal advocate Martin Beeby in today’s announcement. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error.”

Every flow (which AWS defines as a call to a source application to transfer data to a destination) costs $0.001 per run, though, in typical AWS fashion, there’s also cost associated with data processing (starting at 0.02 per GB).

“Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third-party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” said Kurt Kufeld, vice president, Vice President, AWS. “Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public internet. Internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications — – all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”

At this point, the number of supported services remains comparatively low, with only 14 possible sources and four destinations (Amazon Redshift and S3, as well as Salesforce and Snowflake). Sometimes, depending on the source you select, the only possible destination is Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Over time, the number of integrations will surely increase, but for now, it feels like there’s still quite a bit more work to do for the AppFlow team to expand the list of supported services.

AWS has long left this market to competitors, even though it has tools like AWS Step Functions for building serverless workflows across AWS services and EventBridge for connections applications. Interestingly, EventBridge currently supports a far wider range of third-party sources, but as the name implies, its focus is more on triggering events in AWS than moving data between applications.

The content below is taken from the original ( Trampoline Bounce Counter Has Raspberry Pi Automate Away Your Parental Duties), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you have a toddler and a mini-tramp you know the rallying cry of “Mama, Count!”. If you don’t don’t have either of these things, become the hero uncle or aunt by building one for your family members who have been social distancing with a three-year-old monster bundle of joy for the last five weeks. This trampoline bounce counter uses a Raspberry Pi and a distance sensor to stream the bounce count to a nice little web GUI.

The hardware couldn’t be more simple, and there’s a good chance you already have everything on hand. The HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor is a staple in beginner microcontroller kits. It simply lays on the floor pointed up at the bottom of the trampoline, connected to a Raspberry Pi via a resistor divider.

The software is where [Eric Escobar’s] project makes your life easy. He’s included a simple calibration routine that marks the low point of a bounce as you stand still on the tramp. There’s even a systemd service file included to ensure the software is always running, even after reboot. Cumulative bounce count can be seen on a webpage served from the Pi via an AJAX script.

Having a running count is a great first step, and surely a magical new feature of the trampoline that will be loved by the little ones. If that sense of wonder runs out, you could always gamify the system by adding in daily or hourly totals and a high-scores board.

It seems [Eric] is well practiced at automating his responsibilities away. We previously saw him use a Raspberry Pi to control the door of his chicken coop.

The content below is taken from the original ( The Smallest Large Display Is Projected Straight Onto Your Retina), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

For most of human history, the way to get custom shapes and colors onto one’s retinas was to draw it on a cave wall, or a piece of parchment, or on paper. Later on, we invented electronic displays and used them for everything from televisions to computers, even toying with displays that gave the illusion of a 3D shape existing in front of us. Yet what if one could just skip this surface and draw directly onto our retinas?

Admittedly, the thought of aiming lasers directly at the layer of cells at the back of our eyeballs — the delicate organs which allow us to see — likely does not give one the same response as you’d have when thinking of sitting in front of a 4K, 27″ gaming display to look at the same content. Yet effectively we’d have the same photons painting the same image on our retinas. And what if it could be an 8K display, cinema-sized. Or maybe have a HUD overlay instead, like in video games?

In many ways, this concept of virtual retinal displays as they are called is almost too much like science-fiction, and yet it’s been the subject of decades of research, with increasingly more sophisticated technologies making it closer to an every day reality. Will we be ditching our displays and TVs for this technology any time soon?

A Complex Solution to a Simple Question

The Mark I human eye is a marvel produced through evolutionary processes over millions of years. Although missing a few bug fixes that were included in the cephalopod eye, it nevertheless packs a lot of advanced optics, a high-density array of photoreceptors, and super-efficient signal processing hardware. Before a single signal travels from the optic nerve to the brain’s visual cortex, the neural network inside the eye will have processed the incoming visual data to leave just the important bits that the visual cortex needs.

The basic function of the eye is to use its optics to keep the image of what is being looked at in focus. For this it uses a ring of smooth muscle called the ciliary muscle to change the shape of the lens, allowing the eye to change its focal distance, with the iris controlling the amount of light that enters the eye. This enables the eye to focus the incoming image onto the retina so that the area with the most photorecepters (the fovea centralis) is used for the most important thing in the scene (the focus), with the rest of the retina used for our peripheral vision.

The simple question when it comes to projecting an image onto the retina thus becomes: how to do this in a way that plays nicely with the existing optics and focusing algorithms of the eye?

Giving the Virtual a Real Place

In the naive and simplified model of virtual retinal display technology, three lasers (red, green and blue, for a full-color image) scan across the retina to allow the subject to perceive an image as if its photons came from a real life object. As we have however noted in the previous section, this is not what we’re working with in reality. We cannot directly scan across the retina, as the eye’s lens will diffract the light, a diffraction that changes as the eye adjusts its focal length.

The only part of the retina that we’re interested in is also the fovea, as it is the only section of the retina where there is a dense cluster of cones (the photoreceptors capable of sensing the frequency of light, i.e. color). The rest of the retina is only used for peripheral vision, with mostly (black and white sensing) rods and very few cones. To get clearly identifiable images projected onto a retina, we have a 1.5 mm wide fovea, with the 0.35 mm in diameter foveola providing the best visual acuity.

Hitting this part of the retina requires that the subject either consciously focuses on the projected image in order to perceive it clearly, or adjust for the focal distance of the eye at any given time. After all, to the eye all photons are assumed to come from a real-life object, with a specific location and distance. Any issues with this process can result in eyestrain, headaches and worse, as we have seen with tangentially related technologies such as 3D movies in cinemas as well as virtual reality systems.

Smart Glasses: Keeping Things Traditional

Most people are probably aware of head-mounted displays, also called ‘smart glasses’. What these do is create a similar effect to what can be accomplished with virtual retinal display technology, in that they display images in front of the subject’s eyes. This is used for applications like augmented (mixed) reality, where information and imagery can be super-imposed on a scene.

Google made a bit of a splash a few years back with their Google Glass smart glasses, which use special, half-silvered mirrors to guide the projected image into the subject’s eyes. Like the later Enterprise versions of Google Glass, Microsoft is targeting their HoloLens technology at the professional and education markets, using combiner lenses to project the image on the tinted visor, similarly to how head-up displays (HUDs) in airplanes work.

Magic Leap’s Magic Leap One uses waveguides that allow an image to be displayed in front of the eye, on different focal planes, akin to the technology used in third generation HUDs. Compared to the more futuristic looking HoloLens, these look more like welding goggles. Both the HoloLens and Magic Leap One are capable of full AR, whereas the Google Glass lends itself more as a basic HUD.

Although smart glasses have their uses, they’re definitely not very stealthy, nor are most of them suitable for outdoor use, especially during sunny weather and hot summer weather. It would be great if one could skip the cumbersome head strap and goggles or visor. This is where virtual retinal displays (VDRs) come into play.

Painting with Lasers and Tiny Mirrors

Naturally, the very first question that may come to one’s mind when hearing about VDRs is why it’s suddenly okay to shine not one but three lasers into your eyes? After all, we have been told to never, not even once, point even the equivalent of a low-powered laser pointer at a person, let alone straight at their eyes. Some may remember the 2014 incident at the Burning Man festival where festival goers practically destroyed the sight of a staff member with handheld lasers.

The answer to these concerns is that very low-powered lasers are used. Enough to draw the images, not enough to do more than cause the usual wear and tear from using one’s eyes to perceive the world around us. As the light is projected straight onto the retina, there is no image that can become washed out in bright sunlight. Companies like Bosch have prototypes of VRD glasses, with the latter recently showing off their BML500P Bosch Smartglasses Light Drive solution. They claim an optical output power of <15 µW.

Bosch’s solution uses RGB lasers with a MEMS mirror to direct the light into the subject’s pupil, and onto the retina. However, one big disadvantage of such a VRD solution is that it cannot just be picked up and used like one can with the previously mentioned smart glasses. As discussed earlier, VRDs need to precisely target the fovea, meaning that a VRD has to be adjusted to each individual user to work or else one will simply see nothing as the laser misses the target.

Much like the Google Glass solution, Bosch’s BML500P is mostly useful for HUD purposes, but over time this solution could be scaled up, with a higher resolution than the BML500P’s 150 line pairs and in a stereo version.

The Future is Bright

The cost of entry in the AR and smart glasses market at this point is still very steep. While Google Glass Enterprise 2 will set you back a measly $999 or so, HoloLens 2 costs $3,500 (and up), leading some to improvise their own solution using beam splitters dug out of a bargain bin at a local optics shop. Here too the warning of potentially damaging one’s eyes cannot be underestimated. Sending the full brightness of a small (pico)projector essentially straight into one’s eye can cause permanent damage and blindness.

There are also AR approaches that focus on specific applications, such as tabletop gaming with Tilt Five’s solution. Taken together, it appears that AR — whether using the beam splitter, projection or VRD approach — still is in a nascent phase. Much like virtual reality (VR) a few years ago, it will take more research and development to come up with something that checks all the boxes for being affordable, robust and reliable.

That said, there definitely is a lot of potential here and I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what comes out of this over the coming years.

The content below is taken from the original ( Sending IP Over Morse, Because Why Not?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Are you a ham radio operator? Have you ever felt the need to send IP over Morse? If you answered yes (or no) and don’t mind a few manual steps between converting network packets to and from and Morse code, [Folkert van Heusden]’s IP Over Morse project has you covered.

To send data, a network packet is first split into 5-bit words. Then those 32 different values are mapped to Morse characters (A-Z, 0-5, and a ‘/’ for termination), and the result is turned into an audio file ready to be sent over the airwaves, because no one is insane enough to want to do it by hand. To receive, the process is reversed. The GitHub repository for the project hosts the custom bits that [Folkert] created, should anyone wish to give it a shot.

The process of turning binary data into a completely different format sounds a bit like UUencoding, and is certainly an unconventional use of Morse code. Luckily, learning Morse code is easier than it’s ever been and it’s just waiting to be worked into novel projects, because why not?

The content below is taken from the original ( Identity recommendations now included in Azure Security Center free tier), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Security recommendations for identity and access on the Azure Security Center free tier are now generally available. This is part of the effort to make the cloud security posture management (CSPM) features completely free. Until now, these recommendations were only available on the standard pricing tier.

The content below is taken from the original ( Giving in Place: Ripple Is Proud to Be Part of the Tech Community’s Response to COVID-19), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

COVID-19 is disrupting the lives of nearly everyone around the world in profound ways. From the tragic loss of lives and livelihoods to the less serious challenges of working from home and homeschooling, all are trying to navigate uncharted waters. This has led to widespread fear and uncertainty, but also a coming together of people and communities looking for ways to help.

As a mission-driven company with employees and customers in dozens of countries around the world, Ripple for Good is donating to funds and campaigns to help communities affected by this pandemic. 

To start, we are giving back in the Bay Area–food scarcity is dramatically increasing for tens of thousands in the wake of job losses, business closures and overdue rent payments. In response, Ripple and its cofounder Chris Larsen are donating $5M; $1M each to five food banks and meal service providers that are supporting families and individuals in the area:

• Alameda County Community Food Bank: Every dollar donated provides two meals to vulnerable families and individuals in Alameda County. 
• Loaves & Fishes Family Kitchen: Since its inception, Loaves & Fishes have provided over 6.5M meals to low-income, disadvantaged individuals and families.
• Samaritan House: Samaritan House is leading the fight against poverty in San Mateo County by delivering essential services and personalized support.
• San Francisco-Marin Food Bank: The Food Bank serves 32K families per week in San Francisco and Marin and this number has already grown by one-third in the last weeks. 
• Second Harvest of Silicon Valley: Second Harvest provides food to more than a quarter of a million people in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties every month.

Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) quickly created a series of rapid response funds to help individuals and families, nonprofits and small businesses in need across all nine Bay Area counties. Ripple has also contributed to this fund. 

Despite the Bay Area’s vibrant economy and abundance of wealth, one in five people have less than $400 in their bank accounts. For them, and for our regional economy and the civic and social fabric of the Bay Area, COVID-19 presents not only a dire immediate threat, but also a pernicious long-term danger.

The scale and immediacy of the situation demand extreme generosity. 

And, many industry leaders are stepping up. Google announced it will donate $1M to Bay Area families with another $1M directly from CEO Sundar Pichai. Apple committed $15M and will match employee contributions at a two-to-one ratio to help lessen the impact of the pandemic. 

Grassroots efforts are sprouting up too. Tech leaders are engaging with local funders, nonprofits and government agencies to move beyond recovery to resilience and sustainability in areas like homelessness, affordable housing and public transportation. Together, we are working to lessen the economic and social impact of COVID-19 once the economy reopens.

Tech has earned a reputation for reckless disruption; for “moving fast and breaking things,” but not building or, in this case, rebuilding them. If we can maintain this kind of momentum and work in partnership with each other, the industry has an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives—not only in times of crisis, but when we find our equilibrium in the new normal.

The post Giving in Place: Ripple Is Proud to Be Part of the Tech Community’s Response to COVID-19 appeared first on Ripple.

The content below is taken from the original ( Cloudflare goes retro with COBOL delivery service – Older coders: Who’s laughing now? Turns out we’re still vital), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Dust off your COBOL code and give it new life in WebAssembly

Network infrastructure biz Cloudflare has implemented a way to run COBOL code on its serverless platform Cloudflare Workers.…

The content below is taken from the original ( Microsoft makes its advanced account protection free for healthcare workers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

As if fighting the coronavirus pandemic weren’t challenging enough, cybercriminals are making things more difficult for healthcare providers and humanitarian groups. Attacks have already delayed COVID-19 testing and limited access to related healthca…

The content below is taken from the original ( GitHub’s core code tools are now free for everyone), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

GitHub may have made life a little easier for programmers. The Microsoft-owned service is making its core features available to everyone for free, including teams. Your company won’t have to pay for a subscription just to manage all its code in one p…

The content below is taken from the original ( Skype Meet lets you host free Video Conference Calls; No Download or Sign-Up required), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The world is locked down for an indefinite period and people are working from home. All the meetings, interviews, seminars are being taken online on […]

This article Skype Meet lets you host free Video Conference Calls; No Download or Sign-Up required first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.

The content below is taken from the original ( Cellular Tracking Used During COVID-19 Pandemic), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

As most in the technology community know, nation states have a suite of powerful tools that can be used to trace and monitor mobile phones. By and large, this comes up in discussions of privacy and legislation now and then, before fading out of the public eye once more. In the face of a global pandemic, however, governments are now using these tools in the way many have long feared – for social control. Here’s what’s happening on the ground.

The Current Situation

With COVID-19 sweeping the globe, its high level of contagiousness and rate of hospitalizations has left authorities scrambling to contain the spread. Unprecedented lockdowns have been put in place in an attempt to flatten the curve of new cases to give medical systems the capacity to respond. A key part of this effort is making sure that confirmed cases respect quarantine rules, and isolate themselves to avoid spreading the disease. Rules have also been put in place in several countries where all overseas arrivals must quarantine, regardless of symptoms or status.

In order to achieve this, Israel has begun to use the cellular devices to track suspected coronavirus cases. Using technology initially developed for counterterrorism purposes, it allows Israeli authorities to monitor the movements of individual citizens. If a citizen is detected as having spent 10 minutes or more within 2 meters of an infected person, they are sent a text message instructing them to self-isolate until a particular date. While a very effective method of tracing possible infection contacts, it also shows the incredible granularity of the data available to Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. With this capability, it would also be trivial to track phone users for enforcement purposes, too.

South Korea has also been actively tracing citizen’s mobile phones. Public health organisations have sent out texts detailing the recent movements of infected people, revealing intimate details of their citizens private lives. In one ridiculous case, a woman who had supposedly sustained serious injuries in a recent car accident was noted to be travelling to weddings and restaurants, leading to a grilling by TV reporters after she was identified by internet users.

Iran tried a more obvious method, asking users to install an app that promised to help diagnose coronavirus symptoms. It secretly leaked user’s live location data, and once this was public knowledge, it was promptly removed from the Play Store for breaking Google’s Terms of Service. This method is quite transparent to even a moderately technical user, and stands out for this reason. Of course, this does not mean that Iran doesn’t have more serious capabilities behind the scenes for cellular tracking, but it does raise questions as to why such a blatantly obvious approach would be attempted.

China has dealt with COVID-19 longer than anyone, and is heavily experienced with domestic surveillance technologies. An independent source has confirmed this technology is being used for access control to buildings. At entry points, individuals scan a QR code which takes them to a phone provider’s website. Entering their details, the user is shown a record of their location in the last 14 days. If they have avoided disease hot zones, they’re granted admittance to the facility.

Justification?

The ideal democracy governs with the consent of the people. While people might object to the invasion of their privacy like this in normal circumstances, they may be willing to make this tradeoff in times of peril. It’s not clear that any of the above-mentioned countries attempted to obtain their citizens’ consent.

What stops governments from using these same domestic spying powers after the health crisis ends? Oftentimes, even if it’s not used in the mainstream, intelligence organisations that operate in the dark can get away with using such tools with impunity, even in violation of the country’s own laws. We know that many have been doing so for years. If anything, it serves as a useful reminder to the public that no mobile device can be considered secure from nosy government actors.

Looking Ahead

It’s important to remember that cellphone-based tracking systems come with a major caveat. Those who don’t wish to be tracked always have the option of simply not carrying a cellular device. There are currently no nation states that enforce the carrying of a mobile phone, and so the best way to dodge such tracking is to simply opt-out of the technology altogether. In this modern era, anyone making such a decision is giving up a lot, and it’s not one that can be made lightly. For some though, it’s no option at all – where phones are used for access control to buildings, it’s hard to avoid. In China, for instance, a corona-tracking function has been tied into Alipay, the most popular pay-by-phone app, and some cities require a green light on a cellphone to use public transportation.

World governments have shown their hand, making it clear to the public that they have an immensely powerful and threatening technology at their disposal, and that they’re willing to use it without consent. While it is currently being employed in service of public health, the potential ramifications are plain to see. It may prove difficult for citizens to win back civil liberties that have been suspended in the current quarantine. Time will tell.

The content below is taken from the original ( D-Wave gives anyone working on responses to the COVID-19 free cloud access to its quantum computers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

D-Wave, the Canadian quantum computing company, today announced that it is giving anyone who is working on responses to the COVID-19 free access to its Leap 2 quantum computing cloud service. The offer isn’t only valid to those focusing on new drugs but open to any research or team working on any aspect of how to solve the current crisis, be that logistics, modeling the spread of the virus or working on novel diagnostics.

One thing that makes the D-Wave program unique is that the company also managed to pull in a number of partners that are already working with it on other projects. These include Volkswagen, DENSO, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, MDR, Menten AI, Sigma-i Tohoku University, Ludwig Maximilian University and OTI Lumionics. These partners will provide engineering expertise to teams that are using Leap 2 for developing solutions to the Covid-19 crisis.

As D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told me, this project started taking shape about a week and a half ago. In our conversation, he stressed that teams working with Leap 2 will get a commercial license, so there is no need to open source their solutions and won’t have a one-minute per month limit, which are typically the standard restrictions for using D-Wave’s cloud service.

“When we launched leap 2 on February 26th with our hybrid solver service, we launched a quantum computing capability that is now able to solve fairly large problems — large scale problems — problems at the scale of solving real-world production problems,” Baratz told me. “And so we said: look, if nothing else, this could be another tool that could be useful to those working on trying to come up with solutions to the pandemic. And so we should make it available.”

He acknowledged that there is no guarantee that the teams that will get access to its systems will come up with any workable solutions. “But what we do know is that we would be remiss if we didn’t make this tool available,” he said.

Leap is currently available in the U.S., Canada, Japan and 32 countries in Europe. That’s also where D-Wave’s partners are active and where researchers will be able to make free use of its systems.

The content below is taken from the original ( The fight to save the UK’s only permanent video game museum), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The UK&#39;s National Videogame Museum (NVM) is under threat. The site in Sheffield — the only permanent museum dedicated to video game culture in the UK — is one of many brick-and-mortar businesses that have been forced to close their doors during t…

The content below is taken from the original ( Google and Microsoft are working to make web forms more touch-friendly), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Google and Microsoft have redesigned native form controls — buttons and various input elements you see on web forms — to look more harmonious and be more touch-friendly. They spent the past year working together to design a new theme and make built…

The content below is taken from the original ( Azure Kinect DK is now available in Japan, Germany, and the UK), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Azure Kinect DK, a developer kit with advanced AI sensors for building sophisticated computer vision and speech models, is now available in Japan, Germany, and the UK.

The content below is taken from the original ( Direct Upload of Azure Managed Disks is Generally Available), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Direct upload of Azure Managed Disks provides a simplified workflow for uploading an on-premises VHD directly into an empty managed disk or copy a managed disk to another Azure region for regional migration or expansion.

The content below is taken from the original ( First there was JFPatch – now there’s JFPatch-as-a-service), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

For a short time only, RISC OS users can benefit from a cloud service that nobody expected or requested and, quite frankly, most people probably won’t actually use. Well, it’s aimed at developers really, not the average user, so there’s that. Everybody who’s anybody in the world of computing these days knows that ‘the cloud’ […]

The content below is taken from the original ( Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Two years ago today we announced 1.1.1.1, a secure, fast, privacy-first DNS resolver free for anyone to use. In those two years, 1.1.1.1 has grown beyond our wildest imagination. Today, we process more than 200 billion DNS requests per day making us the second largest public DNS resolver in the world behind only Google.

Yesterday, we announced the results of the 1.1.1.1 privacy examination. Cloudflare’s business has never involved selling user data or targeted advertising, so it was easy for us to commit to strong privacy protections for 1.1.1.1. We’ve also led the way supporting encrypted DNS technologies including DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS. It is long past time to stop transmitting DNS in plaintext and we’re excited that we see more and more encrypted DNS traffic every day.

1.1.1.1 for Families

Since launching 1.1.1.1, the number one request we have received is to provide a version of the product that automatically filters out bad sites. While 1.1.1.1 can safeguard user privacy and optimize efficiency, it is designed for direct, fast DNS resolution, not for blocking or filtering content. The requests we’ve received largely come from home users who want to ensure that they have a measure of protection from security threats and can keep adult content from being accessed by their kids. Today, we’re happy to answer those requests.

Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content. 1.1.1.1 for Families leverages Cloudflare’s global network to ensure that it is fast and secure around the world. And it includes the same strong privacy guarantees that we committed to when we launched 1.1.1.1 two years ago. And, just like 1.1.1.1, we’re providing it for free and it’s for any home anywhere in the world.

Two Flavors: 1.1.1.2 (No Malware) & 1.1.1.3 (No Malware or Adult Content)

1.1.1.1 for Families is easy to set up and install, requiring just changing two numbers in the settings of your home devices or network router: your primary DNS and your secondary DNS. Setting up 1.1.1.1 for Families usually takes less than a minute and we’ve provided instructions for common devices and routers through the installation guide.

1.1.1.1 for Families has two default options: one that blocks malware and the other that blocks malware and adult content. You choose which setting you want depending on which IP address you configure.

Malware Blocking Only
Primary DNS: 1.1.1.2
Secondary DNS: 1.0.0.2

Malware and Adult Content
Primary DNS: 1.1.1.3
Secondary DNS: 1.0.0.3

Additional Configuration

In the coming months, we will provide the ability to define additional configuration settings for 1.1.1.1 for Families. This will include options to create specific whitelists and blacklists of certain sites. You will be able to set the times of the day when categories, such as social media, are blocked and get reports on your household’s Internet usage.

1.1.1.1 for Families is built on top of the same site categorization and filtering technology that powers Cloudflare’s Gateway product. With the success of Gateway, we wanted to provide an easy-to-use service that can help any home network be fast, reliable, secure, and protected from potentially harmful content.

Not A Joke

Most of Cloudflare’s business involves selling services to businesses. However, we’ve made it a tradition every April 1 to launch a new consumer product that leverages our network to bring more speed, reliability, and security to every Internet user. While we make money selling to businesses, the products we launch at this time of the year are close to our hearts because of the broad impact they have for every Internet user.

This year, while many of us are confined to our homes, protecting our communities from COVID-19, and relying on our home networks more than ever it seemed especially important to launch 1.1.1.1 for Families. We hope during these troubled times it will help provide a bit of peace of mind for households everywhere.

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PowerToys is a powerful open-source tool for Windows 10, which brings in useful features such as multi-zone for monitors, file renamer, and so on. This […]

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Access the Windows Virtual Desktop service within your Azure DevTest subscription