The content below is taken from the original ( IPv6 for Azure Virtual Network is now generally available), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
IPv6 for Azure Virtual Network is now generally available worldwide. IPv6 support within the Azure Virtual Network and to the internet enables you to expand into the growing mobile and IoT markets with Azure-based applications and to address IPv4 depletion in your own corporate networks.
The content below is taken from the original ( Audible has the first Harry Potter audiobook (as read by Stephen Fry!) streaming for free right now), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
If you’ve ever tried to buy the Harry Potter audiobooks, you probably noticed something kind of tricky: there are there’s two very different versions. The version most widely available in the U.S. US is narrated by Jim Dale. The U.K. UK version is read by Stephen Fry.
Which is better? I won’t get into that — that’s something the internet Internet has been arguing about for a decade+ now. I will say, however, that getting the Stephen Fry versions in the U.S. US (legally) is usually a pretty big pain in the butt. Different countries, different distribution rights, different licensing — yada yada yada.
It got a bit easier today, albeit for just the first book: Audible has put the Stephen Fry version of “Harry Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” Stone up online, for free, until further notice.
Audible says it’s doing this as part of J.K. Rowling’s #HarryPotterAtHome program, in which the author is “relaxing the usual copyright permissions” to make the story available to more children who are likely stuck at home during the ongoing COVID-19 Covid-19 outbreak. The same program is allowing teachers to post videos of themselves reading the series aloud to their students (as long as it’s on a “closed educational platform”… so not like, YouTube) without worrying about getting into a copyright battle.
A few small catches:
You can find the Harry Potter stream — plus a bunch of other family-friendly family friendly audiobooks as part of Audible’s free Stories program — right here.
The content below is taken from the original ( NASA issues agency-wide crowdsourcing call for ideas around COVID-19 response), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
There’s crowdsourcing a problem, and then there’s crowdsourcing a problem within NASA, where some of the smartest, most creative and resourceful problem-solvers in the world solve real-world challenges daily as part of their job. That’s why it’s uplifting to hear that NASA has issued a call to its entire workforce to come up with potential ways the agency and its resources can contribute to the ongoing effort to fight with the current coronavirus pandemic.
NASA is using its crowdsourcing platform NASA @ WORK, which it uses to internally source creative solutions to persistent problems, in order to collect creative ideas about new ways to address the COVID-19 crisis and the various problems it presents. Already, NASA is engaged in a few different ways, including offering supercomputing resources recourses for treatment research, and working on developing AI solutions that can help provide insight into key scientific investigations that are ongoing around the virus.
There is a degree of specificity in the open call NASA put to its workforce: It identified key areas where solutions are most urgently needed, working together with the White House and other government agencies involved in the response, and determined that NASA staff efforts should focus on addressing shortfalls and gaps in the availability of personal protective equipment, ventilation hardware hardware, and ways to monitor and track the coronavirus spread and transmission. That’s not to say NASA doesn’t want to hear solutions about other COVID-19 issues, just that these are the areas where they’ve identified the most current need.
To add some productive time-pressure to this endeavor, NASA is looking for submissions from staff on all the areas above to be made via NASA @ WORK by April 15. Then there’ll be a process of assessing what’s most viable, and allocating resources to make those a reality. Any products or designs that result will be made “open source for any business or country to use,” the agency says — – with the caveat that this might not be strictly possible in all cases depending on the specific technologies involved.
The content below is taken from the original ( Mobile payments firms in India are now scrambling to make money), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of India’s most valuable startup, Paytm, posed an existential question in a recent press conference.
“What do you think of the commercial model for digital mobile payments. How do we make money?” Sharma asked Nandan Nilekani, one of the key architects of the Universal Payments Infrastructure that created a digital payments revolution in the country.
It’s the multi-billion-dollar question that scores of local startups and international giants have been scrambling to answer as many of them aggressively shift their focus to serving merchants and building lending products and other financial services .
New Delhi’s abrupt move to invalidate much of the paper bills in the cash-dominated nation in late 2016 sent hundreds of millions of people to cash machines for months to follow.
For a handful of startups such as Paytm and MobiKwik, this cash crunch meant netting tens of millions of new users in a span of a few months.
India then moved to work with a coalition of banks to develop the payments infrastructure that, unlike Paytm and MobiKwik’s earlier system, did not act as an intermediary “mobile wallet” to serve as an intermediary between users and their banks, but facilitated direct transaction between two users’ bank accounts.
Silicon Valley companies quickly took notice. For years, Google and the likes have attempted to change the purchasing behavior of people in many Asian and African markets, where they have amassed hundreds of millions of users.
In Pakistan, for instance, most people still run errands to neighborhood stores when they want to top up credit to make phone calls and access the internet.
With China keeping its doors largely closed for foreign firms, India, where many American giants have already poured billions of dollars to find their next billion users, it was a no-brainer call.
“Unlike China, we have given equal opportunities to both small and large domestic and foreign companies,” said Dilip Asbe, chief executive of NPCI, the payments body behind UPI.
And thus began the race to participate in the grand Indian experiment. Investors have followed suit as well. Indian fintech startups raised $2.74 billion last year, compared to 3.66 billion that their counterparts in China secured, according to research firm CBInsights.
And that bet in a market with more than half a billion internet users has already started to pay off.
“If you look at UPI as a platform, we have never seen growth of this kind before,” Nikhil Kumar, who volunteered at a nonprofit organization to help develop the payments infrastructure, said in an interview.
In October, just three years after its inception, UPI had amassed 100 million users and processed over a billion transactions. It has sustained its growth since, clocking 1.25 billion transactions in March — despite one of the nation’s largest banks going through a meltdown last month.
“It all comes down to the problem it is solving. If you look at the western markets, digital payments have largely been focused on a person sending money to a merchant. UPI does that, but it also enables peer-to-peer payments and across a wide-range of apps. It’s interoperable,” said Kumar, who is now working at a startup called Setu to develop APIs to help small businesses easily accept digital payments.
Vice-president of Google’s Next Billion Users Caesar Sengupta speaks during the launch of the Google “Tez” mobile app for digital payments in New Delhi on September 18, 2017 (Photo: Getty Images via AFP PHOTO / SAJJAD HUSSAIN)
The Google Pay app has amassed over 67 million monthly active users. And the company has found the UPI pipeline so fascinating that it has recommended similar infrastructure to be built in the U.S.
In August, the Federal Reserve proposed to develop a new inter-bank 24×7 real-time gross settlement service that would support faster payments in the country. In November, Google recommended (PDF) that the U.S. Federal Reserve implement a real-time payments platform such as UPI.
“After just three years, the annual run rate of transactions flowing through UPI is about 19% of India’s Gross Domestic Product, including 800 million monthly transactions valued at approximately $19 billion,” wrote Mark Isakowitz, Google’s vice president of Government Affairs and Public Policy.
Paytm itself has amassed more than 150 million users who use it every year to make transactions. Overall, the platform has 300 million mobile wallet accounts and 55 million bank accounts, said Sharma.
But despite on-boarding more than a hundred million users on their platform, payment firms are struggling to cut their losses — let alone turn a profit.
At an event in Bangalore late last year, Sajith Sivanandan, managing director and business head of Google Pay and Next Billion User Initiatives, said current local rules have forced Google Pay to operate in India without a clear business model.
Mobile payment firms never levied any fee to users as a strategy to expand their reach in the country. A recent directive from the government has now put an end to the cut they were receiving to facilitate UPI transactions between users and merchants.
Google’s Sivanandan urged the local payment bodies to “find ways for payment players to make money” to ensure every stakeholder had incentives to operate.
Paytm, which has raised more than $3 billion to date, reported a loss of $549 million in the financial year ending in March 2019.
The firm, backed by SoftBank and Alibaba, has expanded to several new businesses in recent years, including Paytm Mall, an e-commerce venture, social commerce, financial services arm Paytm Money and a movies and ticketing category.
This year, Paytm has expanded to serve merchants, launching new gadgets such as a stand that displays QR check-out codes that comes with a calculator and a battery pack, a portable speaker that provides voice confirmations of transactions and a point-of-sale machine with built-in scanner and printer.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Sharma said these devices are already garnering impressive demand from merchants. The company is offering these gadgets to them as part of a subscription service that helps it establish a steady flow of revenue.
The firm’s Money arm, which offers lending, insurance and investing services, has amassed over 3 million users. The head of Paytm Money, Pravin Jadhav, resigned from the company this week, a person familiar with the matter said. A Paytm spokeswoman declined to comment. (Indian news outlet Entrackr first reported the development.)
Flipkart’s PhonePe, another major player in India’s payments market, today serves more than 175 million users, and over 8 million merchants. Its app serves as a platform for other businesses to reach users, explained Rahul Chari, co-founder and CTO of the firm, in an interview with TechCrunch. The company is currently not taking a cut for the real estate on its app, he added.
But these startups’ expansion into new categories means that they now have to face off even more rivals, and spend more money to gain a foothold. In the social commerce category, for instance, Paytm is competing with Naspers-backed Meesho and a handful of new entrants; and heavily-backed OkCredit and KhataBook today lead the bookkeeping market.
BharatPe, which raised $75 million two months ago, is digitizing mom and pop stores and granting them working capital. And PineLabs, which has already become a unicorn, and MSwipe have flooded the market with their point-of-sale machines.
A vendor holds an Mswipe terminal, operated by M-Swipe Technologies Pvt Ltd., in an arranged photograph at a roadside stall in Bengaluru, India, on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“They have no choice. Payment is the gateway to businesses such as e-commerce and lending that you can monetize. In Paytm’s case, their earlier bet was Paytm Mall,” said Jayanth Kolla, founder and chief analyst at research firm Convergence Catalyst.
But Paytm Mall has struggled to compete with giants Amazon India and Walmart’s Flipkart. Last year, Mall pivoted to offline-to-online and online-to-offline models, wherein orders placed by customers are serviced from local stores. The company also secured about $160 million from eBay last year.
An executive who previously worked at Paytm Mall said the venture has struggled to grow because its goal-post has constantly shifted over the years. It has recently started to focus on selling fastags, a system that allows vehicle owners to swiftly pay toll fees. At least two more executives at the firm are on their way out, a person familiar with the matter said.
Kolla said the current dynamics of India’s mobile payments market, where more than 100 firms are chasing the same set of audience, is reminiscent of the telecom market in the country from more than a decade ago.
“When there were just four to five players in the telecom market, the prospect of them becoming profitable was much higher. They were scaling like crazy. They grew with the lowest ARPU in the world (at about $2) and were still profitable.
“But the moment that number grew to more than a dozen overnight, and the new players started offering more affordable plans to subscribers, that’s when profitability started to become elusive,” he said.
To top that off, the arrival of Reliance Jio, a telecom operator run by India’s richest man, in 2016 in the country with the cheapest tariff plans in the world, upended the market once again, forcing several players to leave the market, or declare bankruptcies, or consolidate.
India’s mobile payments market is now heading to a similar path, said Kolla.
If there were not enough players fighting for a slice of India’s mobile payments market that Credit Suisse estimate could reach $1 trillion by 2023, WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country with more that 400 million users, is set to roll out its mobile payments service in the country in a couple of months.
At the aforementioned press conference, Nilekani advised Sharma and other players to focus on financial services such as lending.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus outbreak that promoted New Delhi to order a three-week lockdown last month is likely going to impact the ability of millions of people to use such services.
“India has more than 100 million microfinance accounts, serviced in cash every week by gig-economy workers, who hawk vegetables on street corners or embroider saris sold in malls, among other things. Three out of four workers make a living by working casually for others or at their family firms and farms. Prolonged shutdowns will impair their ability to repay loans of 2.1 trillion rupees ($28.5 billion), putting the world’s largest microfinance industry at risk,” wrote Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee.
The content below is taken from the original ( Extending the power of Azure AI to Microsoft 365 users), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Today, Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President of Modern Life and Devices, announced the availability of new Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions. In his blog, he shared a few examples of how Microsoft 365 is innovating to deliver experiences powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to billions of users every day. Whether through familiar products like Outlook and PowerPoint, or through new offerings such as Presenter Coach and Microsoft Editor across Word, Outlook, and the web, Microsoft 365 relies on Azure AI to offer new capabilities that make their users even more productive.
Azure AI is a set of AI services built on Microsoft’s breakthrough innovation from decades of world-class research in vision, speech, language processing, and custom machine learning. What is particularly exciting is that Azure AI provides our customers with access to the same proven AI capabilities that power Microsoft 365, Xbox, HoloLens, and Bing. In fact, there are more than 20,000 active paying customers—and more than 85 percent of the Fortune 100 companies have used Azure AI in the last 12 months.
Azure AI helps organizations:
The announcement of Microsoft Editor is one example of innovation. Editor, your personal intelligent writing assistant is available across Word, Outlook.com, and browser extensions for Edge and Chrome. Editor is an AI-powered service available in more than 20 languages that has traditionally helped writers with spell check and grammar recommendations. Powered by AI models built with Azure Machine Learning, Editor can now recommend clear and concise phrasing, suggest more formal language, and provide citation recommendations.
Additionally, Microsoft PowerPoint utilizes Azure AI in multiple ways. PowerPoint Designer uses Azure Machine Learning to recommend design layouts to users based on the content on the slide. In the example image below, Designer made the design recommendation based on the context in the slide. It can also can intelligently crop objects and people in images and place them in optimal layout on a slide. Since its launch, PowerPoint Designer users have kept nearly two billion Designer slides in their presentation.
You can take a closer look at how the PowerPoint team built this feature with Azure Machine Learning in this blog.
PowerPoint also uses Azure Cognitive Services such as the Speech service to power live captions and subtitles for presentations in real-time, making it easier for all audience members to follow along. Additionally, PowerPoint also uses Translator Text to provide live translations into over 60 languages to reach an even wider audience. These AI-powered capabilities in PowerPoint are providing new experiences for users, allowing them to connect with diverse audiences they were unable to reach before.
These same innovations can also be found in Microsoft Teams. As we look to stay connected with co-workers, Teams has some helpful capabilities intended to make it easier to collaborate and communicate while working remotely. For example, Teams offers the ability of live captioning meetings, which leverages the Speech API for speech transcription. But it doesn’t stop there. As you saw with PowerPoint, Teams also uses Azure AI for live translations when you set up Live Events. This functionality is particularly useful for company town hall meetings or even for any virtual event with up to ten thousand attendees, allowing presenters to reach audiences worldwide
These are just a few of the ways Microsoft 365 applications utilize Azure AI to deliver industry-leading experiences to billions of users. When you consider the fact that other Microsoft products such as Microsoft 365, Xbox, HoloLens 2, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform all rely on Azure AI, you begin to see the massive scale and the breadth of scenarios that only Azure can offer. Best of all, these same capabilities are available to anyone in Azure AI.
The content below is taken from the original ( Microsoft sees Nearly 800% Increase for Cloud Services), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Seemingly overnight, a sizeable portion of the global workforce moved to being a remote operation. While everyone is looking for new options about how to try and keep operations running as smooth as possible, cloud vendors are seeing a significant spike in usage.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that they would be throttling some Office 365 features to help alleviate bandwidth constraints. And this weekend, the company provided some insight into the surge of growth that they have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Microsoft states that in regions that are practicing social distancing or sheltering in place, usage is up 775% in those regions. Further, the company is seeing 3x increase of Windows Virtual Desktop usage as well.
The strain that a remote workforce is putting on networks will be used as a case-study to help prepare for future events that force this type of working model. The reason why networks are struggling in certain regions is that the onset of the increased load was seemingly overnight, there was no ramp-up period for the added traffic. After this pandemic passes, we can only hope that networks will find ways to increase the capacity to help offset a future surge in required bandwidth.
For several years, Microsoft had been pushing for a utilization increase among its customers for its cloud services. The company provides credits to many of its customers as part of sales bundles or other activities but having customers fully utilize their benefits has frequently been a challenge. I suspect that with COVID-19, there are not many cloud credits going unused this fiscal year.
While Microsoft is on the front lines of the remote workforce operations, there are many other companies that are benefiting from this scenario. Slack has announced strong growth for its services and it’s likely that Google’s G-Suite is seeing growth as well as nearly every other remote collaboration tool.
The post Microsoft sees Nearly 800% Increase for Cloud Services appeared first on Petri.
The content below is taken from the original ( Want to see through walls? Electroboffins build tiny chip in the lab that vibrates at just the right frequency to do it), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Scientists have crafted a tiny flexible electrical device capable of generating terahertz waves that can penetrate walls and microscopic cells, potentially paving the way for new imaging techniques – and fast switching in chips.…
The content below is taken from the original ( Apple makes its pro video and audio editing software free to use for 90 days), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( Raleigh launches cycle to work scheme specifically for electric bikes), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Raleigh has launched a new website designed to make it easier for people to access electric bikes on the cycle to work scheme. A 2019 refresh to the cycle to work guidelines confirmed that electric bikes can be bought via the scheme, and that those buying machines costing over £1000 are eligible for the savings […]
The content below is taken from the original ( UK turns to WhatsApp to share coronavirus information), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Three years ago, the U.K. government chastised WhatsApp for using enabling end-to-end encryption by default. Today, it’s relying on the encrypted messaging app as a vital service for sharing information about the coronavirus pandemic.
The new chatbot, supplied by the U.K. government, will let anyone subscribe to official advice about the pandemic, known as COVID-19, in the hope of reducing the burden on its national health system.
Send “hi” to 07860 064422 (or +44 7860 064422 for international users) over WhatsApp to start receiving updates.
The U.K. government’s official WhatsApp account, which it’s using to share information about the coronavirus pandemic (Image: TechCrunch)
The U.K. government said the service will also allow the government to send messages to all opted-in users if required.
Currently the U.K. does not have a national emergency alert system, unlike the U.S., to notify citizens en masse on mass about incidents or emergencies. South Korea was praised for its use of sending up-to-date emergency alerts to citizens, which experts say has helped to “flatten the curve” of infections, a reference to slowing the rate of infection to help ease the burdens on hospitals.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared a national lockdown on Tuesday, ordering all non-essential citizens and residents to stay at home in an effort to fight the spread of the pandemic.
U.K. authorities had faced criticism for failing to issue the stay-at-home order sooner. Several other countries and cities with spiking infection rates, including Italy and New York, had ordered their citizens to remain at home.
As of Wednesday, there were more than 438,000 confirmed global cases of COVID-19, with 19,000 deaths recorded.
The content below is taken from the original ( GSM Module Does More Than Advertised), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
For many projects, a WiFi connection is overkill, too complicated, or too far away to work properly. Even though it’s relatively ubiquitous, sometimes the best choice for getting data to or from the real world is a connection to the cellular network, which can be done with the M590 module for about a dollar each. For that price, lots of people have had the opportunity to explore the module itself, and [marcrbarker] shows some of the extra, unadvertised, features it has.
Acting as a GSM module that can send and receive SMS messages is just the tip of the iceberg for this tiny device which we saw once before for a DIY GPS tracker. With a USB TTL serial data module, a lot more is on the table including answering voice calls and responding with DTMF tones, operate as a dial-up modem, connect with TCP, and even has some FTP capabilities. [marcrbarker] also suggests that it could do “call pranking” where it can send signals without being charged for a call.
There are a lot of details on the project site about all of this newfound functionality, and it reminds us of a time when it was discovered that not only was the ESP8266 a cheap WiFi module, but it could also run custom programs on its own. While the M590 probably can’t do all of that, it does seem to have a lot more locked away than most of us had thought before.
The content below is taken from the original ( in /r/ sysadmin), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Hi folks. For one reason or another, it looks like we may get some stay at home time.
I was thinking this is a great time to be doing some study, and love them or hate them, maybe even an exam. So I was trying to find out which exam vendors offer remotely proctored exams, where the remote staff member watches you take your test in the (government-enforced) comfort of your home, via your webcam.
I found, or already know of:
Do you know of any other vendors that support this format? For which exams? Have I missed one you can link to?
Cheers
mildly related: I saw Cisco Learning have said the deadline for Cisco certifications is going to be extended by six months to help people with a deadline that they cant address due to shutdowns. [4]
[1] https://www.offensive-security.com/offsec/proctoring/
[2] https://pecb.com/en/pecb-certification-process
[3] https://home.pearsonvue.com/Test-Owner/Deliver/Online-proctored.aspx
[5] https://www.cncf.io/certification/cka/faq/
edited: to add kubernetes related as suggested below
The content below is taken from the original ( How Azure Machine Learning service powers suggested replies in Outlook), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Microsoft 365 applications are so commonplace that it’s easy to overlook some of the amazing capabilities that are enabled with breakthrough technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft Outlook is an email client that helps you work efficiently with email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and more in a single place.
To help users be more productive and deliberate in their actions while emailing, the web version of Outlook and the Outlook for iOS and Android app have introduced suggested replies, a new feature powered by Azure Machine Learning service. Now when you receive an email message that can be answered with a quick response, Outlook on the web and the Outlook mobile suggest three response options that you can use to reply with only a couple of clicks or taps, helping people communicate in both their workplace and personal life, by reducing the time and effort involved in replying to an email.
The developer team behind suggested replies is comprised of data scientists, designers, and machine learning engineers with diverse backgrounds who are working to improve the lives of Microsoft Outlook users by expediting and simplifying communications. They are at the forefront of applying cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technologies and leverage these technologies to understand how users communicate through email and improve those interactions from a productivity standpoint to create a better experience for users.
To process the massive amount of raw data that these interactions provide, the team uses Azure Machine Learning pipelines to build their training models. Azure Machine Learning pipelines allow the team to divide training steps into discrete steps such as data cleanup, transforms, feature extraction, training, and evaluation. The output of the Azure Machine Learning pipeline converts raw data into a model. This Machine Learning pipeline allows the data scientists to build a training pipeline in a compliant manner that enforces privacy and compliance checks.
In order to train this model, the team needed a way to build and prepare a large data set comprised of over 100 million messages. To do this, the team leveraged a distributed processing framework to sample and retrieve data from a broad user base.
Azure Data Lake Storage is used to store the training data used for training the suggested replies models. We then clean and curate the data into message reply pairs (including potential responses to an email) that are stored in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS). The training pipelines also consume the reply pairs stored in ADLS in order to train models. To conduct the Machine Learning training itself, the team uses GPU pools available in Azure. The training pipelines leverage these curated Message Reply pairs to learn how to suggest appropriate replies based on a given message. Once the model is created, data scientists can compare the model performance with previous models and evaluate which approaches perform better at recommending relevant suggested replies.
The Outlook team helps protect your data by using the Azure platform to prepare large-scale data sets that are required to build a feature like suggested replies in accordance with Office 365 compliance standards. The data scientists use Azure compute and workflow solutions that enforce privacy policies to create experiments and train multiple models on GPUs. This helps with the overall developer experience and provides agility in the inner development loop cycle.
This is just one of many examples of how Microsoft products are powered by the breakthrough capabilities of Azure AI to create better user experiences. The team is learning from feedback every day and improving the feature for users while also expanding the types of suggested replies offered. Keep following the Azure blog to stay up-to-date with the team and be among the first to know when this feature is released.
Learn more about the Azure Machine Learning service.
Get started with a free trial of Azure Machine Learning service.
The content below is taken from the original ( 400,000 new people have joined Folding@Home’s fight against COVID-19), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( Marvell announces 96-core ThunderX3 Arm server processor), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Marvell got into the Arm server business with the 2018 acquisition of Cavium, maker of the ThunderX Arm server processor. Now the company is introducing the first major revision to the product line since the acquisition, and it’s a doozy.
The ThunderX3 line tops out at a stunning 96 cores with four threads per core, for a total of 384 threads per processor. Intel and AMD have only two threads per core, and the top-end Intel Xeon maxes out at 56 cores while the AMD Epyc is at 64 cores.
Marvell also bests Ampere, the startup run by former Intel exec Renee James that’s also working on an Arm-based server chip. Ampere recently announced the Altra Q80-30 processor a few weeks back sporting 80 cores, but no hyperthreading. Ampere’s strategy is cores over threads.
The content below is taken from the original ( Bee Counter Will Have You Up to Your Nectar In Hive Data), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
While we admit that free honey sounds pretty good, beekeeping is not some set-it-and-forget-it hobby where you can just put bees in a box and come back in a month to collect the goods. With the world’s bee population in decline, it’s more important than ever to monitor the health of hives.
One way to do that is to count the bees as they leave and reenter the hive. You can use the data to determine how many workers are working, or to compare activity between multiple hives. If you notice the bees are gone for longer and longer periods, it’s probably because their nearby nectar sources are dwindling and they have to travel farther to find flowers.
This open-source bee counter built by [hydronics2] is designed to fit the opening of a standard hive. The bees can only buzz themselves back in by flying through one of 24 little IR break-beam gates. Our favorite thing about this build is the way [hydronics2] created the individual gates by sandwiching two boards together with headers as spacers. It’s such a simple and perfect solution.
It’s also pretty cool that the board is designed to be compatible with any Feather or ItsyBitsy board, so there are a lot of options for data handling. Check out the brief demo we planted after the break, and stick around for the build video. If you’d prefer a more hands-off approach, try computer vision.
[via Instructables]
The content below is taken from the original ( Can you really get work done on a tiny laptop?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( Can you really get work done on a tiny laptop?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( Beyond JAMstack: Next.js creator on hybrid rendering, TypeScript and Visual Studio Code), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Interview Guillermo Rauch, creator of the Next.js framework for building React applications, spoke to The Register about the just-released Next.js 9.3 and its hybrid approach to web application development.…
The content below is taken from the original ( InstalledAppView lets you get a list of all installed apps on Windows 10), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
If you want to get a list of all installed apps on Windows 10, you can use this software called InstalledAppView. It is a free […]
This article InstalledAppView lets you get a list of all installed apps on Windows 10 first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Choosing between Virtual Private Network and Zero Trust Remote Access Solutions), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
As we enter a time of crisis that will see a significant number of employees asked to work from home, organizations need to provide effective but secure remote access to corporate resources. The tried and tested virtual private network (VPN) might seem like the obvious choice. But so-called ‘zero trust’ is gaining popularity and could surpass traditional VPN access. Gartner says that 60% of enterprises could replace VPNs with zero trust by 2023.
VPNs are a common way of allowing remote users to securely access resources behind a perimeter network. Firewalls are used to create a perimeter behind which sits all a company’s valuable IT assets. You can think of it as like building a moat around a castle. But just like the castle analogy, perimeter networks fail to protect on several levels.
Perimeter networks don’t protect resources against insider attacks. And if a hacker steals a user’s credentials, they have the key to the castle, and they can act freely in the context of the stolen user’s account. VPNs can also lead to compromise when third-party contractors use unmanaged devices to connect to corporate resources.
Most seasoned Windows IT system administrators will be familiar with the basics of configuring VPNs. And while VPNs can sometimes provide a quick remote access solution, they can be difficult to manage and work with. Not to mention that users might have issues connecting to VPN servers and maintaining reliable connections.
Windows 10 and Windows Server support several different remote access technologies. Windows Server has a built-in VPN server role. And Windows 10 has a built-in VPN client that can be used to connect to a Windows Server VPN server.
Microsoft DirectAccess uses technology similar to VPNs but works seamlessly for end users. When DirectAccess is configured, users don’t need to establish a remote connection to a server using a VPN client. DirectAccess makes sure that client computers are always connected to the corporate network.
DirectAccess is still supported but Microsoft hasn’t committed to extending support beyond the lifecycle of Windows Server 2019. Microsoft says that Windows 10 ‘Always On VPN’ should be used as a replacement for DirectAccess.
Always On VPN goes beyond the features of DirectAccess to provide conditional access and system health checks using Network Policy Server (NPS), integration with Windows Hello for Business and Azure Multifactor Authentication, and more. You can see a complete list of the advanced features on Microsoft’s website here.
Zero trust is not a new security concept. But partly because it isn’t as straightforward to understand as VPNs since it isn’t a security product, there hasn’t been large adoption. But that is starting to change as the technology to implement zero trust is readily available. And the current coronavirus crisis could see zero trust projects rise as more employees are expected to work from home.
Zero trust is a security framework that dates from 2009. In short, the idea is that you shouldn’t trust anyone. Not even your own employees. Every person accessing your network must be verified. And access control policies limit the access employees have to corporate IT resources. Policies should provide just enough access to complete work-related tasks and nothing more.
If zero trust is a security concept rather than a product, what is needed to implement the technology? There are of course many vendors providing zero trust network access solutions, like Microsoft, Palo Alto, and ScaleFT. But as Petri is a site mainly dedicated to Microsoft technologies, I want to look in more detail at the Microsoft solutions needed to implement zero trust.
Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is the primary product around which zero trust is based at Microsoft. Azure AD is an identity management service for cloud-born applications. Azure AD has a feature called Application Proxy that lets users access corporate web applications, and apps hosted behind a Remote Desktop Gateway, using a remote client.
Choosing between Virtual Private Network and Zero Trust Remote Access Solutions (Image Credit: Microsoft)Application Proxy uses an on-premises connector to manage communication between the cloud service and the on-premises application. The connector only uses outbound connections, so you don’t need to open inbound ports or place a server in a demilitarized zone (DMZ). Application Proxy replaces the need for a VPN or reverse proxy.
Application Proxy works alongside Azure AD Conditional Access policies. Conditional Access is used to permit or deny users and devices access to corporate resources. For example, access might be granted only if certain conditions are met. Like whether the user and device are verified by the organization, the user’s IP location information, the user’s group membership, and real-time and calculated risk detection.
Choosing between Virtual Private Network and Zero Trust Remote Access Solutions (Image Credit: Microsoft)Conditional Access policies can be created to require multifactor authentication, access from managed devices for specific apps, to block access from specific IP locations, and much more.
Windows Server has a feature called Web Application Proxy that works like a reverse proxy and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) proxy. Web Application Proxy provides similar functionality to Azure AD Application Proxy, but it is a purely on-premises solution.
As organizations scramble to give more users remote access, the question about which technology to deploy is largely mute due to the speed of changes required and the technology that is already in place. But going forwards, as remote working becomes the new ‘normal’, even if only temporarily, zero trust provides the most secure and flexible solution. And it is something organizations might investigate if other pieces, like Azure Active Directory, are already in place.
For businesses that have already migrated to Windows 10, Always On VPN is the next best alternative. Although it still requires more investment than a traditional VPN server, with requirements for a Network Policy Server and Active Directory Certificate Services. But if you can get funding and mount the technical challenges, Always On VPN is the most secure way to establish VPN connections from Windows 10 to your corporate network using native technologies. Alternatively, there are plenty of third-party products for Windows, from the likes Cisco and Check Point, that are also worth looking at.
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Formula 1 had to postpone and cancel several races on its calendar due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. With races in Australia, Bahrain, Monaco, Monaco and Vietnam and China already called off, and the Dutch and Spanish Grands Prix now postponed, the organization today announced that it would now host an esports series, the F1 Esports Virtual Grand Prix series, with a number of current F1 drivers drivers, alongside a number of other stars.
The virtual Formula 1 races will use Codemaster’s official Formula 1 2019 PC game and fans can follow along on YouTube, Twitch and Facebook, as well as on F1.com. The races will be about half as long as regular races, with 28 laps. The first race will take place this Sunday.
“We are very pleased to be able to bring some light relief in the form of the F1 Esports Virtual GP, in these unpredictable times, as we hope to entertain fans missing the regular sporting action,” said Julian Tan, Formula 1’s head of digital business initiatives and sports. “With every major sports league in the world unable to compete, it is a great time to highlight the benefits of esports and the incredible skill that’s on show.”
While some F1 drivers are already avid gamers, many are not. To make up for this difference in skill levels, “game settings will be configured in such a way to encourage competitive and entertaining racing,” the organization says. That means all cars will be set to the same performance characteristics, vehicle damage will be reduced and anti-lock brakes and traction control will be optional.
As the organization notes, “The series is strictly for entertainment purposes, to bring racing action to fans in this unprecedented scenario the world has been affected by, with no official World Championship points up for grabs for the drivers.”
Formula 1 is not the only motorsports organization to take these steps to keep their events top of mind for fans even as the real races have been postponed. NASCAR is launching its eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series this weekend, for example, which will also feature current drivers.
“Until we have cars back on track, the entire NASCAR community has aligned to provide our passionate fans with a unique, fun and competitive experience on race day,” said Ben Kennedy, VP of racing development at NASCAR. “Our long-time partners at iRacing offer an incredible product and we are excited to see how many of our best drivers will stack up in the virtual domain of competitive racing.”
Across the Atlantic, the first-ever virtual round of the Nürburgring Endurance Series will kick off on Saturday.
