It's a good time to be a Windows power user. Microsoft has released a preview version of Windows 10's redesigned Terminal (known as just Windows Terminal) through its app store, giving you a considerably more powerful command line tool. You can run…
One rite of passage back in the good old days of owning a TRS-80, Commodore 64, or similar vintage computer was writing your own game. It probably wouldn’t be very good, but it wouldn’t be much worse than most of the stuff that was out there, either. Today, trying to get a kid interested in “hunt the wumpus” is probably not going to fly and having them create a modern-looking is out of the question. Or is it? Disguised as a game itself, Game Builder offers an interactive way to create interesting games without having to get too detailed into programming. On the other hand, it supports JavaScript, so you can get to programming if you need to or want to. We could easily see a kid — or even an adult — easing into programming using this game which is free, from Google.
In the old days, hardware was a limiting factor and Basic made it pretty easy to whip out some text or crude graphics. Our favorite was a high low game that guesses your number. But everyone had some little game they’d create so they said they could. Today’s games, though, have good graphics and music and 3D shapes and a host of other things you didn’t have to contend with back then. Game Builder, though, makes it pretty simple. You can work on a game by yourself, or with friends, or with the general public. Everyone involved can play the game, but they can also edit the game. The tool runs under Steam so even though it is marked for PC or Mac, it will also run on Linux if you have Steam installed properly.
Playing at Editing
There is very little difference between playing and editing. You can start with a template or a blank canvas. At any time during game play, you can switch to edit mode with a mouse click or the tab key. If you start with the blank template, you get four player characters on a big green field. But you can change anything you want. You can hide players, change their representations, or even their physics.
When you enter build mode you get a menu down at the bottom that lets you pick: create, move, rotate, scale, terrain, text, logic, or edit. Most of these are exactly what they sound like. You can create from a wide number of models that tie into Google poly. The terrain mode is like Minecraft where floors are built from blocks. The logic menu is what’s really interesting though.
In the Cards
Each actor can have a number of cards arranged in panels. For example, a player might have a panel for health. A card within would set how many life points the player has and what to do when there are no more. Another card might register a collision with an object that has a weapon tag and use it to deduct points from the player’s life. Other cards control motion, display attributes, and so on. There are cards that have if/then/else logic and cards that react to events like collisions, time, or the start of the game.
In the figure, you can see a card on the left making a platform on the right move back and forth. Each card has settings that vary depending on its function. In this case, you can control the speed, for example.
The cards actually have JavaScript behind them, which you can convert into if you want finer control. The edit menu command lets you set an actor’s appearance and also their physics. You can, for example, make objects heavy or immovable. You can determine how they bounce and if you can push them. There are handy presets for common items like characters and walls.
Just Try It
It sounds a little complicated, but if you do the tutorial it is really quite simple. The nice thing too is if you are in a game and you see something you want to know how to build yourself, you can just slip into build mode and look at the logic behind it. In fact, one of the demos is nothing more than things to look at in that way. There is a rocket to launch and a tree you can cut down with an ax. You can even paint rocks.
You might enjoy the video from [Shojib] below to see how it works, but it is more fun to just go load it and try it. There’s also an official tutorial video below the first one. It isn’t hard to pick up, especially if you work the tutorial and the card fair demo.
Often when we are talking video games around here, we mean something old fashioned. We’d like to see someone do some classic games with this, such as Space Invaders or PacMan. We think you could do it.
There are a lot—some might say “too many”—recipes floating around in the world. Books and magazines are full of them but, thanks to the internet, you could cook a new recipe a day and never open a cookbook. There are many apps for keeping track of your online favorites, but the truly special recipes deserve a hard…
Chrome: As one who spends quite a bit of time browsing the news from various sites around the web, it’s frustrating to encounter paywall after paywall after paywall—especially when a site or author’s own social media feed was the one cajoling you to click and read an article in the first place.
Sarah Shewey is the Founder & CEO of Happily, a platform that rapidly assembles experiences for the fastest growing brands in the world with the largest network of freelance event producers. She is also the co-founder of TEDActive, the founder of EXP, a co-founder of The Margin, and the board president of dublab.
Events have increasingly become an important channel in the marketing mix, despite how notoriously “impossible” it is to measure the ROI, or return on investment. When people show up to your event, they are willingly giving you their attention for hours on end – not trying to avoid attention-grabbing ads.
A well produced experience provides a great way to reach outside of your existing networks, build a pipeline of new customers, transform existing customers into superfans, and position your brand as a thought leader. In 2017, only 7% of marketers said that events were their most important marketing channel. Last year, that number rose to 41% according to a survey done by Bizzabo.
As the founder of Happily, the largest network of event producers in the United States, I’ve had backstage access to thousands of events – some wildly successful like TED and others that didn’t ever get traction in building an engaged community.
What has defined the successful ones?
The experiential marketing industry has long struggled to measure success in a meaningful way. They propose all the same KPIs (key performance indicators), but rarely do those KPIs provide a benchmark to determine if an event is successful or give marketers the ability to tell what worked and what didn’t. They especially fall down when customers aren’t won until months after an event.
The good news is, there’s a lot of data coming into support organizations today through the many technologies and channels available. The bad news is all of this data can lead to metric overload. In the ever-changing customer support ecosystem, it can be difficult for managers to know which metrics really matter and where to focus for the best return.
Deep breaths.
It’s a good idea to periodically take a step back, look at the support metrics you’re tracking, and consider some newer metrics that may more accurately reflect today’s support center.
Measuring the Customer Experience (CX)
Typically, customer satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Score and CSAT are used as a proxy for measuring CX. After all, it stands to reason that if customers are happy, they’re having a good experience. While it’s absolutely important to measure customer satisfaction, it’s equally as important to dig deeper into metrics that more accurately measure CX, especially as organizations increasingly focus on CX as a competitive differentiator.
I must admit of being suspicious when I first heard about the https://www.whatismytenantid.com site. The site does one thing, and that’s to return the tenant identifier of an Azure or Office 365 tenant. The tenant identifier is a GUID (like 72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47) to mark the data belonging to a company within Microsoft’s cloud platforms. On the surface, it seems like a tenant identifier is a private piece of information that shouldn’t be easily accessible within the internet, but it is.
In the case of WhatIsMyTenantId.com, simply input the domain name for a company and the site will spit out the tenant identifier if one exists. You’re not limited to your own company. The site is quite happy to tell you the identifier for any company it can find, like Microsoft.com as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Finding the tenant identifier for Microsoft.com (image credit: Tony Redmond)
First Impressions Were Bad
The first time I thought about this, I thought that it was bad that a site could reveal the identifier for any Office 365 or Azure tenant. The reaction is understandable because you’d imagine this data to be private and only accessible to those who need to know. But when you look under the covers, a different situation emerges.
An interesting discussion in the Microsoft technical community reveals that OAuth 2.0 is the reason why Microsoft publishes tenant identifiers. We learn that “OpenID Connect is a simple identity layer that sits on top of OAuth 2.0. For Office 365 there is an OpenID Connect metadata document for each tenant which contains more of the information required for apps to perform sign-ins (including the tenant id).”
Finding Tenant Identifiers
All Office 365 and Azure tenants make information available through a connect point. For instance, you can find the information for Microsoft’s tenant at https://login.microsoftonline.com/microsoft.com/.well-known/openid-configuration. A bunch of JSON-formatted data is returned to guide apps through the authentication process. Replace microsoft.com with your domain in the URL to see what’s returned for your tenant.
In a nutshell, if Microsoft didn’t publish tenant identifiers online, applications using OAuth 2.0 couldn’t authenticate. Administrators might not have been aware of this information, but programmers do, probably because they need to figure this stuff out.
How Administrators Find Tenant Identifiers
If administrators were to be asked how to find the tenant identifier, they’d probably follow the advice given by Microsoft and use the Azure AD PowerShell module to run a command like:
(Get-AzureADTenantDetail).ObjectId
Another way to find the tenant identifier is to open the Azure portal. Your tenant identifier is in the URL. The problem with this approach is that you must connect a PowerShell session to a tenant to retrieve the information. Consultants and Service Providers who manage tenants on behalf of companies might not be easily able to run PowerShell using an account belong to the tenant, meaning that they need another method to get the tenant identifier.
Tenant Identifiers in the Open
Whether you like it or not, your tenant identifier is publicly available to all and sundry. All WhatIsMyTenantId.com does is to check if the information is available online and then strip the tenant identifier out from the JSON payload returned. The site is owned by ShareGate, a well-known ISV specializing in SharePoint migrations, who get the chance to advertise their wares. That’s probably fair compensation for providing a service that some find very valuable.
I found that there’s a management web service available in the official Microsoft RDS GitHub for managing WVD. I wrote up a blog post about it at https://www.concurrency.com/blog/june-2019/windows-virtual-desktop-management-web-app. You deploy it as an app service in your own subscription and can use it to manage your own WVD tenants. It doesn’t have 100% of features, but it’s a good alternative to PowerShell’ing your way through everything.
Old, unused email accounts put your security and privacy at risk. With a compromised account, someone can impersonate you, search for personal information, or try the same password on your other accounts. The more unmonitored (and forgotten) accounts you have out there, the more doors into your personal information…
Since Google acquired Waze back in 2013, the company has been slowly adding Waze features into Google Maps, including Waze’s traffic reporting functions and real-time speed limits.
Walking in the woods has measurable health benefits, and professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki is studying how to spread those benefits to as many people as possible. According to his research, spending time in nature can lower your blood pressure and decrease stress hormones, with the effects of a hike lasting for days. You…
STH started on June 8, 2009 making today the site’s 10th anniversary. As a special for the day, we have the story on where “home” came from in the name
If you want to get serious about growing your business, it’s finally time to admit that you can’t do everything yourself. Once you start to expand,… Read more at VMblog.com.
HyperGrid , a market leader in hybrid Cloud Management Platforms (CMP), today announced a milestone HyperCloud software release that delivers… Read more at VMblog.com.
MIT researchers have created a new autonomous robot boat prototype — – which they have named “roboats” ‘roboats’ to my everlasting glee — – that can target and combine with one another Voltron-style to create new structures. Said structures could be bigger boats, but MIT is thinking a bit more creatively — – it envisions a fleet of these being able to join up to form on-demand urban infrastructure, including stages for concerts, walking bridges or even entire outdoor markets.
The roboats would of course be able to act as autonomous water taxis and ferries, which could be particularly particular useful in a setting like Amsterdam, which is why MIT teamed up with Amsterdam’s Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions on this. this joint. Equipped with sensors, sub-aquatic thrusters, GPS, cameras and tiny computer brains, the roboats can currently follow a pre-determined path, but testing on newer 3D-printed prototypes introduced a level of autonomy that can accomplish a lot more.
New tests focused on a a custom latching system, with which a very high degree of precision, that can connect to specific points with millimetre accuracy, using a trial and error algorithm-based autonomous programming to make sure they connect to their target correctly. The initial use case in Amsterdam that MIT identified is overnight garbage collection, where these could act as mini barges working the canal to quickly and easily clear refuse left out by residents and store owners.
Longer-term, the vision is to see what kind of additional configurations might be possible, including larger platforms that can support people on board, and “tentacle-like rubber grippers that tighten around the pin — like a squid grasping its prey” to improve the latching mechanism in a way inspired by a somewhat terrifying visual.
The era where the majority of employees work solely from a gleaming corporate headquarters is giving way to the era of the cloud-based mobile worker. Enabling your workforce to get work done from anywhere increases productivity, improves collaboration, and strengthens employee engagement. But it also can create security and compliance challenges.
At Google Cloud Next ‘19 in April, we delivered a presentation on how Google Cloud securely enables modern end-user computing. It’s a timely, essential topic given the reality we now operate in.
Our ecosystem of end-user computing products is built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP delivers a foundation that prioritizes security by default, leverages purpose-built infrastructure, and offers powerful proprietary security controls. GCP allows users to integrate an extensive ecosystem of partner tools, and provides validation against some of the most rigorous global security standards such as the ISO 27000 series.
In addition to this infrastructure foundation, our multilayered approach to end-user computing embeds security at the application, user, and device layers. Let’s take a look at the Google Cloud end-user computing stack:
Application security End users increasingly access apps through browsers, and Chrome Browser provides secure, trusted access to these cloud apps across platforms. We’re continuously working to improve the security of Chrome Browser, helping you safeguard customer and business data across your enterprise. For example, features such as Google Safe Browsing, regular security updates, sandboxing, and site isolation keep your enterprise and users one step ahead of potential threats.
In addition, we take a proactive and intelligent approach to security with all of our G Suite apps, including Gmail, Docs, Drive, and more, automatically blocking many threats that confront your users and automating protection. G Suite gives admins a simple, streamlined way to protect users, manage devices, ensure compliance, and keep your data secure. Transparency is core to Google’s DNA, and we want to be clear that you—not Google—own your own data. We do not sell your data to third parties, there is no advertising in G Suite, and we never collect or use data from G Suite services for any advertising purposes.
User security In the mobile enterprise, users expect to be able to work from anywhere, on any device, on any network. This new reality requires a new approach to user security.
We developed BeyondCorp, a “zero trust” enterprise security model to help ensure security in this mobile, cloud-based, perimeterless new world. BeyondCorp shifts controls from the network perimeter to individual users and devices, granting access based on identity, device state, and context. This gives IT more granular control and lets users work securely from any location, on any device.
Implementing Cloud Identity, our unified identity, access, and device management solution, is a great step towards enabling BeyondCorp in your organization. Cloud Identity provides enhanced account security with multi-factor authentication and works seamlessly with FIDO security keys, including Google’s Titan Security Key, to provide an extra layer of protection. Additionally, now your Android phone is also a FIDO security key, providing a strong and convenient defense against phishing and account takeovers.
Device security Google offers a variety of Android and Chrome enterprise devices in multiple form factors and price points. Both Android and Chrome devices are secure by design and employ a defense-in-depth security model. Features like verified boot, application sandboxing, on-device encryption, and regular background security updates, help ensure rock-solid, always-on device security. For more details on our approach to Android and Chrome security, check out our recent blog post where we cover the findings from Gartner’s Mobile OSs and Device Security: A Comparison of Platforms report.
Devices are only as secure as the software tools that users run on them. Google Play Protect is the world’s most widely used anti-malware solution, with 50B apps verified daily and over 2 billion devices protected. With Managed Google Play, you can push, update, and remotely configure apps protected by Google Play Protect for your users on both Chrome and Android devices, protecting them from side-loading risks in third-party app stores.
Security from the data center to the device With interlocking defenses—from infrastructure, to application, to user, to device—our goal is to deliver a multilayered security solution that works up and down the enterprise end user computing tech stack, so your organization can be more mobile and more productive, without sacrificing security. If you’re interested in learning more, please watch our Next session and reach out to us to keep the conversation going.
At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come. That's what This Week in Tech History does. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, annive…
At first glance, Tibbits look like building blocks, but each one is a module or a connector that makes it easier to build connected devices and systems. Tibbits were created by Tibbo Technology, a Taipei-based startup that exhibited at Computex this week (it showed off a humanoid robot built from various Tibbits).
Pre-programmed Tibbit modules from Tibbo
The heart of the Red Dot Award-winning Award winning Tibbo Project System (the company used bright colors to make its modules stand out from other hardware) is the Tibbo Project PCB, which includes a CPU, memory and Ethernet port. Then you pick Tibbits, with pre-programmed functionality (such as RS232/422/485 modules, DAC and ADC devices, power regulators, temperature, humidity or pressure sensors or PWM generators), to plug into your PCB. Once done, you can place your project in one of Tibbo’s three enclosure kits (custom enclosures are also available).
Tibbo also offers anonline configurator that lets you preview your device to see if it will work the way you want before you begin building, and its own programming languages (Tibbo BASIC and Tibbo C) and app development platform.
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Don’t Sleep is a small portable Windows program to prevent system shutdown, Standby, Hibernate, Turn Off and Restart.
Today, Emtek pulls the plug on BlackBerry Messenger. The company announced last month that it would shut down the consumer service, which has been steadily losing users and failing to attract new ones. As a consolation for diehard fans, BlackBerry op…
Figure 1: Finding the tenant identifier for Microsoft.com (image credit: Tony Redmond)
At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come. That's what This Week in Tech History does. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, annive…
Today, Emtek pulls the plug on BlackBerry Messenger. The company announced last month that it would shut down the consumer service, which has been steadily losing users and failing to attract new ones. As a consolation for diehard fans, BlackBerry op…