The content below is taken from the original (PNG vs JPG vs GIF vs BMP vs TIF: Image file formats explained), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Mercedes-Benz aims to take hydrogen fuel-cells mainstream), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

General Motors’ confidence in hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) vehicles seems to be sparking something of a renaissance among other automakers. In April, Toyota announced it was testing a HFC semi truck, and now Mercedes has announced a hybrid crossover utility vehicle that combines the pricey alternative-fuel tech with something a little less exotic: a battery-powered electric vehicle. The GLC F-Cell will carry 4.4 kilograms of hydrogen onboard, in addition to its 147 kilowatt lithium-ion battery. The automaker says that the the F-Cell’s range can hit 437 kilometers (roughly 271 miles) with a governed top speed of 99 MPH, and that it’ll charge in about 1.5 hours.

In terms of horsepower, Mercedes says the crossover has an output of 197 ponies and 258 foot-pounds of torque. You’ll be able to pick from a few different driving modes including true hybrid (both power plants are working interchangeably) and fuel-cell only ("the ideal mode if the intention is to keep the electric range in reserve").

There’s also battery-only ("the ideal mode for short distances") and a mode where battery charging takes top priority. That’s planned for recharging for "maximum overall range prior to refueling with hydrogen," and also "creates power reserves for uphill or very dynamic driving."

From the sounds of it, that lithium-ion power plant could be the key to overcoming HFC’s biggest drawback: a dearth of refueling infrastructure. Mercedes’ hydrogen station plan still doesn’t sound very promising though. Its "concrete plan" includes 100 stations built by the end of next year, with "up to 400" in place by 2023. The vehicle is expected to go on sale in the US by the end of next year.

Via: The Verge

Source: Mercedes Benz

The content below is taken from the original (IDG Contributor Network: MPLS or IPsec VPN: which is the best?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (UK Data Protection Bill lands: Oh dear, security researchers – where’s your exemption?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The UK’s Data Protection bill has landed with a hefty thud, offering up 200-plus pages of legislation for the geeks and wonks to sink their teeth into.

The bill, launched into the House of Lords yesterday and published in full today (PDF), aims to overhaul the UK’s data protection laws and update them for the digital age.

Much of the text aims to implement the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into force in May 2018; confirming for the Nth time that businesses can’t rely on the idea that Brexit will get them out of complying.

As Neil Brown, tech lawyer at decoded:Legal, put it: “The message seems clear: irrespective of Brexit, the GDPR is here to stay, so you may as well get on and implement it, and do it well.”

On top of this, there are some added extras in the UK’s bill – such as new criminal offences related to dodgy data dealings – as well as some exemptions and derogations, which are to be expected when a member state implements an EU regulation.

However, any hopes that the UK’s legislation would ease the confusion – or perhaps high drama – around the GDPR have been dashed.

The document runs to 218 pages, with 194 clauses, 18 schedules and 112 pages of explanatory notes, and – as has been pointed out by many observers, parts of the text – like this eye-crossing sentence: “Terms used in Chapter 2 and in the GDPR have the same meaning in Chapter 2 as they have in the GDPR” – are fairly Kafka-esque.

Fuck off http://pic.twitter.com/2HLFrMLayu

— Tim Turner (@tim2040) September 14, 2017

Certainly, the complexity of the document – which is part and parcel of a bill that seeks to implement EU law and replace existing UK laws on data processing by both corporate and law enforcement bodies – will keep the lawyers in business for the foreseeable.

Nine months and a lot more b*llocks to go before new EU data protection rules kick in

READ MORE

Describing the bill as “a bit of a mess”, Jon Baines, chairman of the National Association of Data Protection and Freedom of Information Officers, said it was “indicative of how difficult it is, and will be, for the UK to make legislation which enables us to trade and cooperate with the EU when we leave it”.

He added that there was a “real risk” of confusion, in part because of the escalating hype around GDPR.

“Already we have organisations utterly confused about their obligations, and any number of ill- or under-informed advisers and consultants muddying the waters. This is only going to get worse, I fear,” said Baines.

A glimmer of hope for those frustrated by the prevalence of GDPR snake-oil salesmen comes in the section of the bill that will make accreditation of certification providers valid only if they are carried out by the information commissioner or the national accreditation body.

But Baines noted that the ICO has been working on something similar for years, and added: “I really hope the accreditation and certification provisions ultimately lead to a raising of standards but I’m not optimistic for the near and mid-term future.”

What’s in the bill?

The purported aim of the new legislation is to offer people more control over their data and how people use it.

It tightens up rules on consent – for instance, the much-trailed end of the dreaded pre-ticked box – allows people to withdraw consent, and gives them the right to access information on how organisations use their data, as well as to request that posts or photos about them are deleted.

Groups that are given exemptions from some of the data processing rules in the Data Protection Bill include journalists – who are allowed to process data on people if it will ”expose wrongdoing” – and bodies investigating financial fraud and doping in sport.

Fines for organisations in breach of the rules are to be paid in Sterling, and have been set at a maximum of £17m or 4 per cent of global turnover. This is (at the moment) a straight conversion of the GDPR’s max fine of €20m – if Brexit does much more damage to the exchange rate, UK firms might have something to be thankful for.

Elsewhere, the UK government sets out new recordable offences – meaning the police will record them in the national police computer – including unlawfully obtaining personal data and altering personal data in a way to prevent it being disclosed.

Re-identification of de-identified personal data will also be an offence, which comes with an unlimited fine.

However, Brown noted that the legislation does not make a specific reference to exemptions for security researchers – so they will have “to take care to ensure what they do is ‘justified in the public interest’.”

Alan Woodward, a security researcher at the University of Surrey, said that there was a real chance researchers could be caught out by this, adding that it was reminiscent of laws that make reverse-engineering of software products illegal.

“At the moment I think researchers are ‘assuming’ that if they prove that an anonymised data set can be subject to re-identification, then it would be in the public interest for that fact to be known,” he said. “Personally I would see it as equivalent to responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities.”

But Baines argued that, although it might be preferable to have something more specific, “in practical terms, the [defences set out in the legislation] should prevent anyone being unfairly prosecuted for public interest security research”.

Observers told The Reg that they had spotted few other controversies or surprises in the document, but stressed that it was still early days, especially when the bill has yet to be debated in Parliament.

The legislation is due for its second reading in the House of Lords – the first chance for peers to discuss the legislation – on 10 October. ®

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

Microsoft spends one billion dollars per year on cybersecurity and much of that goes to making Microsoft Azure the most trusted cloud platform. From strict physical datacenter security, ensuring data privacy, encrypting data at rest and in transit, novel uses of machine learning for threat detection, and the use of stringent operational software development lifecycle controls, Azure represents the cutting edge of cloud security and privacy.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Microsoft Azure is the first cloud to offer new data security capabilities with a collection of features and services called Azure confidential computing. Put simply, confidential computing offers a protection that to date has been missing from public clouds, encryption of data while in use. This means that data can be processed in the cloud with the assurance that it is always under customer control. The Azure team, along with Microsoft Research, Intel, Windows, and our Developer Tools group, have been working on confidential computing software and hardware technologies for over four years. The bottom of this post includes a list of Microsoft Research papers related to confidential computing. Today we take that cutting edge one step further by now making it available to customers via an Early Access program.

Data breaches are virtually daily news events, with attackers gaining access to personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and corporate intellectual property. While many breaches are the result of poorly configured access control, most can be traced to data that is accessed while in use, either through administrative accounts, or by leveraging compromised keys to access encrypted data. Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in-use. With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from the following threats:

• Malicious insiders with administrative privilege or direct access to hardware on which it is being processed
• Hackers and malware that exploit bugs in the operating system, application, or hypervisor
• Third parties accessing it without their consent

Confidential computing ensures that when data is “in the clear,” which is required for efficient processing, the data is protected inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE – also known as an enclave), an example of which is shown in the figure below. TEEs ensure there is no way to view data or the operations inside from the outside, even with a debugger. They even ensure that only authorized code is permitted to access data. If the code is altered or tampered, the operations are denied and the environment disabled. The TEE enforces these protections throughout the execution of code within it.

With Azure confidential computing, we’re developing a platform that enable developers to take advantage of different TEEs without having to change their code. Initially we support two TEEs, Virtual Secure Mode and Intel SGX. Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) is a software-based TEE that’s implemented by Hyper-V in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. Hyper-V prevents administrator code running on the computer or server, as well as local administrators and cloud service administrators from viewing the contents of the VSM enclave or modifying its execution. We’re also offering hardware-based Intel SGX TEE with the first SGX-capable servers in the public cloud. Customers that want their trust model to not include Azure or Microsoft at all can leverage SGX TEEs. We’re working with Intel and other hardware and software partners to develop additional TEEs and will support them as they become available.

Microsoft already uses enclaves to protect everything from blockchain financial operations, to data stored in SQL Server, and our own infrastructure within Azure. While we’ve previously spoken about our confidential computing blockchain efforts, known as the Coco Framework, today we are announcing the use of the same technology to implement encryption-in-use for Azure SQL Database and SQL Server. This is an enhancement of our Always Encrypted capability, which ensures that sensitive data within a SQL database can be encrypted at all times without compromising the functionality of SQL queries. Always Encrypted achieves that this by delegating computations on sensitive data to an enclave, where the data is safely decrypted and processed. We continue to use enclaves inside Microsoft products and services to ensure that wherever sensitive information needs to be processed, it can be secured while in use.

In addition to SQL Server, we see broad application of Azure confidential computing across many industries including finance, healthcare, AI, and beyond. In finance, for example, personal portfolio data and wealth management strategies would no longer be visible outside of a TEE. Healthcare organizations can collaborate by sharing their private patient data, like genomic sequences, to gain deeper insights from machine learning across multiple data sets without risk of data being leaked to other organizations. In oil and gas, and IoT scenarios, sensitive seismic data that represents the core intellectual property of a corporation can be moved to the cloud for processing, but with the protections of encrypted-in-use technology. 

Customers can try out Azure confidential computing through our Early Access program, which includes access to Azure VSM and SGX-enabled virtual machines, as well as tools, SDKs, and Windows and Linux support to enable any application in the cloud to protect its data while in use.

Sign up for the Azure confidential computing Early Access program.

I look forward to seeing you at Ignite, where I’ll demonstrate enclaves in Azure. There’s so many opportunities and use cases we can secure together using the Azure cloud, Intel hardware, along with Microsoft technologies, services, and products. 

Today is the exciting beginning of a new era of secure computing. Join us in Azure as we create this future.

– Mark

Microsoft Research papers related to confidential computing:

• Shielding applications from an untrusted cloud with Haven 
• VC3: Trustworthy Data Analytics in the Cloud using SGX
• Oblivious Multi-Party Machine Learning on Trusted Processors 
• A Design and Verification Methodology for Secure Isolated Regions

See how confidential computing fits within Microsoft’s broader cloud security strategy in the Microsoft Story Labs feature: Securing the Cloud.

The content below is taken from the original (‘Don’t Google Google, Googling Google is wrong’, says Google), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you want to write developer documentation like a Google hotshot, you’d better kill “kill”, junk “jank” and unlearn “learnings”.

Those are just a few rules from the company’s newly open-sourced (oops, two sins there, verbing and hyphenation) developer documentation guide.

Even though any Linux user knows “kill” is a command, Google would rather you not use it as a verb – “stop,” “exit,” “cancel,” or “end” are preferred. “Jank” (Wiktionary says “blocking of a software application’s user interface due to slow operations or poor interface design”) should be used with care; and thankfully, “learnings” get a simple “don’t use”.

And yes, what we said in the headline is correct. Google’s style gurus have ridden out in a crusade against verbing the corporate noun: “Don’t use as a verb or gerund. Instead, use ‘search with Google’” (we consider it admirable that Mountain View expects “gerund” to get by without a developer Googling it – sorry, “searching it with Google”).

The guide carries plenty of evidence of a long debate about what words can be both noun and verb: “login” is a noun, with “sign in” given as the preferred verb; “backoff (noun), back off (verb), back-off (adjective)” are noted; “clickthrough/click through” are similarly stipulated; and “display” is troublesome because it’s intransitive (Google it. Damn, we broke the rule again, we meant “search ‘intransitive’ with Google”).

“Interface” gets similar treatment: if you’re reaching for a verb, the preferred list is: interact, talk, speak, or communicate.

As anyone who’s tried to draft a style guide will tell you, contradictions are inevitable. So it is that “the Internet” has turned into “the internet” because other style guides (thank you very much, The Guardian) do so. However, just a couple of lines down, we find that the “internet of things” is rendered “Internet of Things” to explain why IoT is an acceptable abbreviation.

And that’s just a sampling the word list. Punctuation, grammar and syntax would make pedants everywhere proud, we guess.

The Oxford Comma, controversial almost anywhere, is given Google’s blessing (although not named):

Not recommended: I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Recommended: I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God

… and we learn that Google follows the usage of all civilised persons: it instructs devs not to capitalise the first word after the colon.

As an American company, Google can’t risk a howl of outrage by enforcing ISO date formats over the locally-preferred Month:Day:Year. Instead, it asks me to state that this article was written on September 13, 2017.

We’re sure that our readers will find many more amusements, outrages, and debates in the guide. Let us know what you find in the comments. ®

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The content below is taken from the original (Introducing B-Series, our new burstable VM size), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Today I am excited to announce the preview of the B-Series, a new Azure VM family that provides the lowest cost of any existing size with flexible CPU usage. For many workloads that run in Azure, like web servers, small databases, and development and test environments, the CPU performance is very bursty. These workloads will run for a long time using a small fraction of the CPU performance possible and then spike to needing the full power of the CPU due to incoming traffic or required work. With our current sizes, while running in these low points, you are still paying for the full CPU, so that you can handle the high and bursty points.

The B-Series offers a cost effective way to deploy these workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously and burst in their performance. While B-Series VMs are running in the low-points and not fully utilizing the baseline performance of the CPU, your VM instance builds up credits. When the VM has accumulated enough credit, you can burst your usage, up to 100% of the vCPU for the period of time when your application requires the higher CPU performance.

These VM sizes allow you to pay and burst as needed, using only a fraction of the CPU when you don’t need it and burst up to 100% of the CPU when you do need it (using Intel® Haswell 2.4 GHz E5-2673 v3 processors or better). This level control gives you extreme cost flexibility and flexible value.

The B-Series comes in the following 6 VM sizes during preview:

Size	vCPU’s	Memory: GiB	Local SSD: GiB	Baseline CPU Performance of VM	Max CPU Performance of VM	US East Linux Price / Hour (Price during preview)	US East Windows Price / Hour (Price during preview)
Standard_B1s	1	1	4	10%	100%	$ 0.012 ($ 0.006)	$ 0.017 ($ 0.009)
Standard_B1ms	1	2	4	20%	100%	$ 0.023 ($ 0.012)	$ 0.032 ($ 0.016)
Standard_B2s	2	4	8	40%	200%	$ 0.047 ($ 0.024)	$ 0.065 ($ 0.033)
Standard_B2ms	2	8	16	60%	200%	$ 0.094 ($ 0.047)	$ 0.0122 ($ 0.061)
Standard_B4ms	4	16	32	90%	400%	$ 0.188 ($ 0.094)	$ 0.229 ($ 0.115)
Standard_B8ms	8	32	64	135%	800%	$ 0.376 ($ 0.188)	$ 0.439 ($ 0.219)

Get more information on the Burstable VM sizes. To participate in this preview, request quota in the supported region that you would like. After your quota has been approved, you can use the portal or the API’s to do your deployment as you normally would.

We are launching the preview with the following regions, but expect more later this year:

• US – West 2
• US – East
• Europe – West
• Asia Pacific – Southeast

See ya around, 

Corey

The content below is taken from the original (This tiny sensor could sleep for years between detection events), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

It’s easy enough to put an always-on camera somewhere it can live off solar power or the grid, but deep in nature, underground, or in other unusual circumstances every drop of power is precious. Luckily, a new type of sensor developed for DARPA uses none at all until the thing it’s built to detect happens to show up. That means it can sit for years without so much as a battery top-up.

The idea is that you could put a few of these things in, say, the miles of tunnels underneath a decommissioned nuclear power plant or a mining complex, but not have to wire them all for electricity. But as soon as something appears, it’s seen and transmitted immediately. The power requirements would have to be almost nil, of course, which is why DARPA called the program Near Zero Power RF and Sensor Operation.

A difficult proposition, but engineers at Northeastern University were up to the task. They call their work a “plasmonically-enhanced micromechanical photoswitch,” which pretty much sums it up. I could end the article right here. But for those of you who slept in class the day we covered that topic, I guess I can explain.

The sensor is built to detect infrared light waves, invisible to our eyes but still abundant from heat sources like people, cars, fires, and so on. But as long as none are present, it is completely powered off.

But when a ray does appear, it strikes a surface is covered in tiny patches that magnify its effect. Plasmons are a sort of special behavior of conducting material, which in this case respond to the IR waves by heating up.

Here you can see the actual gap that gets closed by the heating of the element (lower left).

“The energy from the IR source heats the sensing elements which, in turn, causes physical movement of key sensor components,” wrote DARPA’s program manager, Troy Olsson, in a blog post. “These motions result in the mechanical closing of otherwise open circuit elements, thereby leading to signals that the target IR signature has been detected.”

Think of it like a paddle in a well. It can sit there for years without doing a thing, but as soon as someone drops a pebble into the well, it hits the paddle, which spins and turns a crank, which pulls a string, which raises a flag at the well-owner’s house. Except, as Olsson further explains, it’s a little more sophisticated.

“The technology features multiple sensing elements—each tuned to absorb a specific IR wavelength,” he wrote. “Together, these combine into complex logic circuits capable of analyzing IR spectrums, which opens the way for these sensors to not only detect IR energy in the environment but to specify if that energy derives from a fire, vehicle, person or some other IR source.”

The “unlimited duration of operation for unattended sensors deployed to detect infrequent but time-critical events,” as the researchers describe it, could have plenty of applications beyond security, of course: imagine popping a few of these all over the forests to monitor the movements of herds, or in space to catch rare cosmic events.

The tech is described in a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Featured Image: DARPA / Northeastern University

The content below is taken from the original (Starling Bank launches Marketplace, integrates with itemised receipt and rewards startup Flux), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Marketplace banking — the idea that your bank will provide you with access to various third-party money-related apps and services within its own app — has long been championed by fintech startups, whilst upcoming Open Banking/PSD2 legislation in the U.K. and EU, respectively, will make third-party app integration an inevitable reality. That’s seeing a number of challenger banks skating to where the puck is going, including London-based Starling Bank, which today is launching the Starling Marketplace.

Billed by the digital-only challenger bank as a new concept in banking, the Starling Marketplace puts products from other fintech providers (and in the future “lifestyle products,” because nearly every business is going to be tempted to jump onboard the Open Banking train) within “an easily browsed ecosystem” accessible within the Starling app.

Partnering companies integrate with Starling Bank via the challenger bank’s Open Banking-compliant APIs, although, as I’ll explain below, are integrating more deeply than simply making use of those APIs, which any third-party developer, once vetted, can potentially do.

The first fintech company to be added to the Starling Marketplace, and an example of the deepest kind of integration we are likely to see, is Flux, the itemised receipt and rewards startup based in London. Founded by Tom Reay, Matty Cusden-Ross, and Veronique Barbosa, all former early employees at Revolut, the company has built a software platform that bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app.

The Starling integration sees Flux send real-time itemised receipts to the Starling app when a customer pays with their Starling card at any of Flux’s retail partners, which so far includes all 111 EAT stores in the U.K. and Bel-Air. As early as next week, Flux will also enable Starling users to get automated loyalty points with cash-back for Flux-supported purchases, without the need for paper coupons. Starling Bank users will need to activate Flux from the Marketplace section of the Starling app to instantly link their card.

“This is our first native integration, where you can switch on Flux from in app, and our first full bank partnership,” Flux’s Cusden-Ross tells TechCrunch. “Starling customers should switch on Flux because we’ll help them finally rid their wallets of paper receipts and paper loyalty cards without asking them to download or setup anything extra. We also think Starling customers are particularly interested in tracking their financial life in real-time and would agree it’s insane that today the only way to keep track of exactly what we buy is via little bits of paper”.

The framing of Starling’s Flux integration as a “first full bank partnership” refers to the fact that Flux originally launched with rival challenger bank Monzo, but only in a very limited pilot that restricts the number of users that can be activated as Monzo readies its own API and marketplace banking offer.

“The users we do have have been really positive on the experience and have been driving our word of mouth sign-ups to sky-rocket, they’re all patiently on a waitlist and we’re working with Monzo to understand timelines for next steps. The on-boarding experience for Monzo is also a pilot version where the user is currently on-boarding through our website and not natively in Monzo,” explains Cusden-Ross.

In a call with Megan Caywood, Chief Platform Officer at Starling Bank, she explained that the Flux partnership, when/if Starling users choose to activate the functionality, enables a greater detail of spending data to be displayed within the Starling app for purchases made at merchants that support Flux. By default, Starling users can see the retailer’s name, amount spent, date and location (complete with a map), but Flux goes further by displaying the item bought, VAT and any available loyalty stamps.

Zooming out a bit further, Caywood says that Starling third-party integrations fall into three categories. Flux and the bank’s upcoming partnership with TransferWise are examples of the deepest type of Starling app integration but isn’t typical.

Instead, whilst they’ll be discoverable and can be authorised via something akin to an app store within the Starling app, most Marketplace apps will only send back and display a limited amount of data in the form of a dashboard or ‘widget’ (my words, not Caywood’s). If I understand correctly, in certain instances this trade-off reduces the regulatory burden on Starling and, crucially, is a good compromise to stop the Starling app from becoming bloated.

A third category of integration are apps that simply make use of Starling’s API. Right now, these include Tail, the local offers startup I recently covered, or roundups app Moneybox, which use the API to authenticate, access and build on top of various levels of your Starling bank account data and functionality, with your permission, of course.

“TransferWise will be one end of the spectrum, being deeply integrated, whereas Moneybox is at the other end of the spectrum where they just integrate our API but don’t appear in Starling,” Caywood tells me. “The Marketplace portion of the app is a hybrid – where an app has integrated our API and we have integrated theirs, so users can find them and connect to them via the Starling app, and have a dashboard in Starling that gives an overview”.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing that Flux has closed $1.5 million in seed funding led by PROfounders. I also understand that Anthemis, which has invested in other fintech companies such as Currency Cloud and Azimo, participated in the round.

The content below is taken from the original (How External Access for Microsoft Teams Works), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Teams Gets Guests

Long anticipated and much promised, Microsoft launched external access for Teams on September 11 (here’s a link to Brad’s news story). Well, they posted a blog describing the principles used for the design (motherhood and apple pie – teamwork, security and compliance, and manageability). Releasing code that worked and satisfied those principles took a little longer and tenants reported some frustration that Teams and web clients had not received the updated code. It takes time to distribute new bits across Office 365 and tenants gradually received updates with the necessary code (version 1.0.00.25151 of the desktop client works).

External access for Teams is now available to all Office 365 commercial and education customers. The new feature allows Teams to compete with the likes of Slack and Hipchat. Office 365 Groups has supported external access since August 2016. However, the groups developers chose to build their external access around the existing model used for SharePoint. On the one hand, this was a good decision because it delivered external access faster. On the downside, external members of groups can access the files in the SharePoint team sites belonging to groups, but they cannot browse conversations or the group calendar.

Given that Teams brings together resources from many Office 365 applications, Microsoft needed to make sure that their selected access mechanism delivered secure, robust, and reliable access to anything in a team. Doing so created some engineering difficulties that took more time to resolve than originally predicted.

But Only for Azure AD Accounts

For now, the external access for Teams is only for users with Azure AD accounts. As Microsoft notes in their announcement:

“Later, we’ll add the ability for anyone with a Microsoft Account (MSA) to be added as a guest in Teams. If the guest doesn’t have an existing MSA, they will be directed to create a free account using their current corporate or consumer email address, such as Outlook.com or Gmail.com.”

Azure AD, Guests, and Invitations

External guests are represented by guest objects in Azure Active Directory and leverage the B2B collaboration infrastructure built for the directory. You can create guest user objects through the Azure portal with the Invite a Guest option (or with PowerShell). In either case, you enter the email address of the external user.

Azure AD supports the creation of guest accounts for email addresses from another Office 365 tenant, an on-premises organization, or a consumer email service like Outlook.com or Gmail. When created, you see and can manage guest users in the Office 365 Admin or the Azure portal. You know guest users in Azure AD because their UserType property is “Guest” and their UserPrincipalName is based on their email address in the form:

Tony.Redmond_OtherDomain.com#EXT#MyDomain.onmicrosoft.com

To list all the guest user accounts for your domain, you can run the Get-AzureADUser cmdlet:

[PS] C:\> Get-AzureADUser -Filter "UserType eq 'Guest'" | Sort DisplayName | Format-Table DisplayName, UserPrincipalName

When Azure AD adds a new guest user object, it calls the Invitation API to create and send an invitation via email to the user’s address to tell them that they have been invited to start using an application in your domain. The Invitation API allows the application generating the invitation to include a link for the user to enter the application, like the access information for an Office 365 Group or Team.

If the guest already has a Microsoft account (belonging to another Office 365 tenant or an MSA account), they can go ahead and use that account. If not, Azure AD goes through a redemption process to make sure that the guest can sign in.

All Azure B2B applications work in the same manner (including Groups and Teams). The difference is the link contained in the invitation – it can point to an individual team, group, or other application and the application referenced must be ready to allow access to that guest user. Making sure that Teams is ready to handle guest user access is the core of the new feature.

Controlling Licenses

The Teams settings in the Office 365 Admin Center control whether external users have access to Teams in the tenant. Go to Settings by user/license type and select Guest in the drop-down. Then move the slider for Turn Microsoft Teams on or off for users of this type to “On” (Figure 1) and save the settings. External access is now available for all teams in the tenant.

Figure 1: Allowing external users to access Teams (image credit: Tony Redmond)

In addition, check the settings for Office 365 Groups in the Office 365 Admin Center to make sure that the slider to Let group members outside the organization access group content is On. This ensures that access to the SharePoint site owned by groups and used by Teams is available.

Adding External Members to Teams

To add a new external team member, a team owner or Office 365 Admin uses the web or desktop client to select the team and then Add members (right-click menu). Input the email address for the new member and click Add Member (Figure 2). You can input the email addresses of people who do not have Azure AD accounts connected to an Office 365 tenant (like Outlook.com) and Teams will add these as external members. However, until Microsoft supports non-Azure AD accounts, they will not be able to access Teams.

Figure 2: Adding a new guest to a team (image credit: Tony Redmond)

To make everyone in the team aware that someone external is joining, Teams posts a notification in the General channel to tell them that the owner has added a new guest.

An Invitation Arrives

Teams generates and sends the invitation, which holds all the information necessary for the recipient to know about the team they are joining, including a GUID to find the right Office 365 tenant and another GUID for the team. The recipient must redeem the invitation by clicking the Open Microsoft Teams link in the message (Figure 3).

Figure 3: An invitation to join a team (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Switching Between Tenants

If the Teams desktop app is available, Teams launches it to access the target team. This means that Teams needs to sign-out from your home tenant and sign-into the target tenant (Figure 4). Switching is quick and painless. That is, if your client software is at the right version and the target tenant allows external access to Teams. If not, you might go into a whirl of unhappiness and will never be able to connect to the remote tenant.

Figure 4: The choice to switch tenants (image credit: Tony Redmond)

The need to switch to a different context for the client within the target tenant is understandable and is like the approach used by Yammer when a user switches networks. Later, you can return to your home tenant by clicking on your photo in the lower left-hand corner and selecting your home tenant from the list of accounts (Figure 5).

Figure 5: How to switch tenants (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Microsoft has not yet updated the Teams mobile client but have said that messages posted by external members appear in the mobile clients and that an update is on the way to support switching between tenants.

Identifying Guests

Teams gives some visual hints to users that the discussions and other content shared in the team is available to external members. First, a banner with “This team has guests” appears under the team name in the client. Second, external members have a “(Guest)” suffix in member lists (Figure 6). The suffix also shows up when guest users contribute to chats within the team. You can also see the warning that “This team contains users from outside your organization,” just in case the guest suffix is overlooked.

Figure 6: Guest members listed for a team (image credit: Tony Redmond)

By default, Azure AD guest accounts do not include information like a properly-formatted display name or contact information. It is easy to add this information by editing the account using the Azure Portal or the Office 365 Admin Center. For instance, some tenants like to add the name of the company a guest belongs to in their display name.

You can remove external members from a team in the same way as you remove a tenant user. Select View team from the menu and then Remove for the user in the member list. You cannot remove a user who is a team owner until you demote them to member first. If you want to remove an external user from all teams in a tenant, you can remove their guest user object from Azure AD. Removing an external member from a team does not remove the Azure AD guest user account. If you want to remove a guest account, you can do this from the Azure portal, the Office 365 Admin Center, or by running the Remove-AzureADUser cmdlet, which then removes the guest from all teams and groups that it had joined.

What External Team Members Can Do

Table 1 lists the functionality available to external team members and compares it with the functions available to users belonging to the host tenant. All the functionality you expect is there, like being able to join in private and public chats using IM, video, and audio (and as Håvard Øverås pointed out to me, even chat with Skype for Business users). You can work with the shared OneNote notebook and the files in the SharePoint team site. However, when I tried to access Planner, the sign-in took me to my own tenant and the plans stored there. This is what I expected because Planner does not yet support external access and underlines the point that just because one app supports access, you cannot assume that everything that tenant users can get through via the app enjoy the same access.

Table 1: Functionality available to tenant and guest users (source: originally Microsoft – with some updates)

Some control over the features available to guests is available to team owners. Right-click a team name and select View team from the menu. Go to the Settings tab and select Guest permissions. You can then select whether guests can create, update, or remove channels. You cannot upgrade a guest to become an owner of a team,

The standard Teams features that external users cannot access are logical and in line with how external access works for Office 365 Groups. No one wants external people to be able to browse your corporate directory, create their own team, or look for other teams to join.

Teams and Groups

Teams uses Office 365 Groups for its membership service and Groups also supports external members. It therefore follows that if you have a group with external members, those members should have access to the team belonging to the group.

What confused me is that if you open the General channel for a team belonging to a group that has external members, you see a series of notifications saying that the team owner removed people from the team (Figure 7). These are the external members in the group and removing them from the team seemed to show that Teams and Groups keep separate membership lists.

Figure 7: Guests belonging to the group leave the team (image credit: Tony Redmond)

Teams and Groups share common membership and what happened here is that when Microsoft first enabled external access a process ran to remove external users from Teams. Once the tenant enabled external access for Teams, you can add new external members. However, you must add the members from the group to the team to force Teams to send invitations so that the guests go through the redemption process to gain access to Teams. If you add a new external member to the team who was never a member of the group, they show up in the group membership.

A Domain Blocking Policy

In August 2017, Microsoft released an external block policy for Groups, Teams, and Planner. The policy allows Office 365 tenants to define a block or an allow list for domains for external access (but not both). For instance, you can define a block list to stop team owners adding people from competitor domains as external members of teams.

Moving Forward

Adding the ability to add people with Azure AD accounts as external members of Teams is a good step forward. The true power of this capability comes when you can add anyone (policy permitting) with any email address as an external member. But for now, if you need to share Teams between Office 365 tenants, all the necessary tools are in place.

Follow Tony on Twitter @12Knocksinna.

Want to know more about how to manage Office 365? Find what you need to know in “Office 365 for IT Pros”, the most comprehensive eBook covering all aspects of Office 365. Available in PDF and EPUB formats (suitable for iBooks) or for Amazon Kindle

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The content below is taken from the original (Purple, Brown, Yellow, Red, Green Screen of Death explained), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (How to convert BAT to EXE file on Windows), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Shropshire farm completes harvest with nothing but robots), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Researchers in Shropshire, England have managed to sow and harvest a field of barley using nothing but robots. Many aspects of farming have now been automated, but rarely is the entire process — planting, tending, monitoring and harvesting — completed without someone stepping foot inside the field. The ‘Hands-Free Hectare‘ project was set up last October by a team from Harper Adams University. With £200,000 in government funding, they modified a tractor and combine harvester with cameras, lasers and GPS systems. Drones and a robot "scout," which could scoop up and carry soil samples, helped the group monitor the field from afar.

Kit Franklin, the project’s leader and an agricultural engineer, freely admits that it was "the most expensive hectare of barley ever." So why bother? Well, commercial farms and agriculture businesses tend to use large, heavy machinery. These vehicles are efficient, but have a damaging effect on the soil and subsequent crops. "Automation is the future of farming, but we’re at a stage where farm machinery has got to unsustainable sizes," Franklin told The Times. He believes smaller, smarter vehicles are the future, as they can work with greater precision and reduce harmful soil compaction.

The Hands-Free Hectare project, while successful, was not without its challenges. The tractor failed to keep a straight line in the field, which meant some of the crops were sown in crooked strips. After drilling and rolling the crop, the team also struggled to quickly repurpose their tractor for spraying. "Sadly, we missed that target but we have since managed to get on our T1 and T2 fungicides, including a herbicide to help tackle some grass weeds we were seeing and micro-nutrients to aid the crop growth," Kieran Walsh, the team’s agronomist explains. Monitoring a field from a video feed, she adds, is harder than being out there and looking yourself.

It seems inevitable that automation’s role in farming will grow in the future. Large-scale machinery is efficient and convenient in rural locations where labourers are hard to come by. That’s not to say there won’t be a place for human farmers — someone needs to monitor the robots and make sure they’re working properly. As Walsh hints, there’s also a certain something, an ability to "read" the land that’s unique to farmers. Until a machine can replicate these observational skills, there will be a need for humans to pull on their boots and get down in the dirt every so often.

Via: Gizmodo UK

Source: The Times

The content below is taken from the original (Announcing Dedicated Interconnect: your fast, private on-ramp to Google Cloud), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

By John Veizades, Product Manager, Dedicated Interconnect

Easy to manage, high bandwidth, private, network connectivity is essential for large enterprises. That’s why today we’re announcing Dedicated Interconnect, a new way to connect to Google Cloud and access the world’s largest cloud network.

Dedicated Interconnect lets you establish a private network connection directly to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through one of our Dedicated Interconnect locations. Dedicated Interconnect also offers increased throughput and even a potential reduction in network costs.

Companies with data and latency-sensitive services, such as Metamarkets, a real-time analytics firm, benefit from Dedicated Interconnect.

"Accessing GCP with high bandwidth, low latency, and consistent network connectivity is critical for our business objectives. Google’s Dedicated Interconnect allows us to successfully achieve higher reliability, higher throughput and lower latency while reducing the total cost of ownership by more than 60%, compared to solutions over the public internet.” 

– Nhan Phan, VP of Engineering at Metamarkets 

Dedicated Interconnect enables you to extend the corporate datacenter network and RFC 1918 IP space into Google Cloud as part of a hybrid cloud deployment. If you work with large or real-time data sets, Dedicated Interconnect can also help you control how that data is routed.

Dedicated Interconnect features 

With Dedicated Interconnect you get a direct connection to GCP VPC networks with connectivity to internal IP addresses in RFC 1918 address space. It’s available in 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s) increments, and you can select from 1 to 8 circuits from the Cloud Console.

Dedicated Interconnect can be configured to offer a 99.9% or a 99.99% uptime SLA. Please see the Dedicated Interconnect documentation for details on how to achieve these SLAs.

Because it combines point and click deployment with ongoing monitoring, Dedicated Interconnect is easy to provision and to manage. Once you have it up and running, you can add an additional VLAN with a point and click configuration — no physical plumbing necessary.

Locations 

Dedicated Interconnect is available today in many locations — with more coming soon. This means you can connect to Google’s network from almost anywhere in the world. For a full list of locations, visit the Dedicated Interconnect locations page. Note that many locations offer service from more than one facility.

Once connected, the Google network provides access to all GCP regions using a private fiber network that connects more than 100 points of presence around the globe. The Google network is the largest cloud network in the world, by several measures, including by the number of points of presence.

Is Dedicated Interconnect right for you? 

Here’s a simple decision tree that can help you determine whether Dedicated Interconnect is right for your organization

Get started with Dedicated Interconnect 

Use Cloud Console to place an order for Dedicated Interconnect.

Dedicated Interconnect will make it easier for more businesses to connect to Google Cloud. We can’t wait to see the next generation of enterprise workloads that Dedicated Interconnect makes possible.

The content below is taken from the original (Inside the store that only accepts personal data as currency), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

On the internet, technology companies try to track your every move. The news story you liked on Facebook last week. Your Google searches. The videos you watch on YouTube. They’re all monitored by algorithms that want to serve you highly targeted ads. We don’t realise it, but the breadcrumb trail we leave online has value. Real, monetary value. To emphasise that point, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab is running a pop-up shop in London called The Data Dollar Store this week. Inside, you’ll find exclusive t-shirts, mugs and screen prints by street artist Ben Eine. The catch? You can only buy them by giving up some personal data.

Of course, I had to take a look.

Opposite Old Street station, a smattering of Eine fans and curious, spontaneous shoppers waited in line. One by one they filed in and heard the store’s unusual rules: to acquire the mug, you had to hand over three photos, or screenshots of your WhatsApp, SMS and email conversations, to Kaspersky. To buy the t-shirt, it had to be the last three photos on your Camera Roll — so you couldn’t be selective — or the last three messages on your phone. The original print, finally, forced you to hand over your phone. A member of staff would then poke around and select five photos or three screenshots. You could barter with them, but ultimately it was their choice.

There was a mixture of excitement and nervousness in the store. Some people were caught off guard and immediately started rummaging through their phones, checking photos and messages for anything that might cause embarrassment. Others looked smug — clearly, they had been told the rules beforehand and prepared their devices accordingly. "This is stuff we give away freely all the time," Eine told me. "But when you’re actually asked to exchange this private information and walk away with something that does have monetary value, people are like, ‘Whoa! What is actually on my telephone? What are the messages that I’ve sent?’ It’s a little bit scary."

I went through the process myself. Originally, I had planned to go for the screen print and fully expose my phone to the people outside the store. But I’m a scaredy-cat and quickly changed my mind, opting for the mug instead. I picked out some photos of a field hockey pitch, a classic car and a longboard my older brother owns. Naturally, I went for shots that didn’t show my face or anyone I knew. The momentary panic surprised me, because I don’t consider myself a man with many secrets. But in that store, I realised just how much data I consider private or sensitive on my phone.

The Data Dollar Store is, of course, a marketing stunt. An interesting thought experiment, but little more. Neither Eine nor Kaspersky are implying that this is the future of commerce. It’s just designed to make people think. "I want people to be worried about the information they’re giving away," Eine says, "and then realise that they’re giving this information away all day, every day." Information has value, he argues, and we should know what that value is. "People should be rewarded for allowing people to have that information," he adds. "At the moment, nobody gets rewarded for giving away all of their personal information."

Source: The Data Dollar Store

The content below is taken from the original (Goodbye Skype for Business, Hello….Teams), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft appears to be on the cusp of rebranding its business communications platform once again. What was formerly called Lync and currently known as Skype for Business is set to be rebranded once again.

As users were trying to login today to Office 365, some were being prompted with the image you see in this post. Considering that this is coming directly from Microsoft, it would seem that Skype for Business is going to be rebranded under the Teams umbrella.

This move isn’t all that surprising, the Skype for Business branding never made much sense as it was often confused with the Skype consumer platform which is fundamentally different than the business offering.

The message that showed this branding change was quickly pulled but not before it made its way to Twitter. Seeing as Ignite is coming up at the end of the month, I would expect this change to occur at that conference.

Teams has been a bright spot for Microsoft with it quickly attracting a loyal fan base. While Slack still has the brand recognition Microsoft desires, for those using Office 365, Teams is proving to be a worthy competitor.

With this announcement, it would appear that Microsoft is going to fold all of the capabilities of Skype for Business into this new tool and once again leave the Skype branding for only the consumer. Seeing as Ignite is only about three weeks away, we shouldn’t have to wait too much longer for the official statement.

[Update] Microsoft has posted a message to its admin portal that says the company is upgrading Skype for Business to Teams; you can read the announcement below. The company says that for now, this is an opt-in experience but that would suggest that everyone will be forced to upgrade at some point.

Thanks for the image Hoyot

The post Goodbye Skype for Business, Hello….Teams appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Record your band’s demo with this tiny cylindrical recording studio), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you’ve ever attempted to record a little music demo of your own, you know that these days, the wealth of technological options can be a little overwhelming. Audio company iZotope, known for its pro-level recording gear and software, might just solve this problem with a pared-down little gadget called Spire Studio. The cute, cylindrical hardware has inputs for microphones and instruments and connects to the Spire mixing and editing app on your smart phone. It even has a rechargeable lithium ion battery that the company claims will last for four hours so you can record pretty much anywhere.

Spire Studio has a built-in mic, two pre-amped inputs and even audio effects like reverb or delay to make your recording sound more professional. You can control the whole back end with the Spire app, which connects wirelessly to the Spire hardware. The recording pod is small enough to drop into your backpack and take with you anywhere. It’s even got an automatic level system which will make sure you don’t record your band at too high a level. Spire Studio has eight tracks that you can use to overdub and record on your own, or you can send your songs to bandmates who can then record their own parts (assuming they have their own Spire). And, according to FastCompany, you can export the tracks to an audio program like Pro Tools or Logic to have even more control over the multiple audio tracks.

Ultimately, having a quick way to record a basic song with actual instruments and vocal performances could benefit a wide range of customers. Professional musicians can make a demo really fast when inspiration strikes, and hobbyists can have an easy intro to multitrack recording, something that’s harder and harder to come by in the increasingly complex world of software recording. We’ve reached out to Spire for more details on price and release timeline and will update this post when we hear back.

Via: FastCompany

Source: Spire Studio

The content below is taken from the original (RED reveals more about its holographic smartphone display), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

When RED Camera first announced its crazy $1,200 Hydrogen smartphone with a "holographic display," a lot of folks wondered how that would actually work. Now, CEO Jim Jannard has revealed that RED is creating the screen in partnership with a company called Leia Inc. (yes, like that Leia). A spin-off from Hewlett-Packard labs, it calls itself "the leading provider of light field holographic display solutions for mobile," and the key words "light field" gives us a pretty good idea as to how it works

Light field displays use multiple layers of LCDs with a "directional backlight," letting you see two different views of the same object with each eye, producing a 3D effect. In practice, when you rotate a display, objects like buildings would appear to project from the screen, as shown in the video below. The effect shows a lot of promise for virtual and augmented reality headsets, but for external displays, viewing angles have been limited so far.

Leia says it "leverages recent breakthroughs in nano-photonic design and manufacturing to provide a complete lightfield ‘holographic’ display solution for mobile devices." It says the tech can create a holograph-like effect, "while preserving the normal operation of the display." In other words, if you turn off the 4D part, it’ll work like a regular smartphone screen. RED hasn’t showed the tech to many folks yet, but MKBHD’s Marcus Brownlee did see it, and said he was "pretty impressed," adding that it wasn’t perfect because of issues like light bleeding and stuttering for 4D gaming.

To produce content for the screen in the form of .h4v files, Jannard has told Redusers that "you can generate .h4v (holographic 4-View) by shooting 4 cameras (we are building solutions from consumer to professional), or by converting 3D to .h4v (very easy), or converting 2D to 3D (very hard) and then to .h4v."

RED has formed a "strategic partnership" with Leia and made an unnamed investment in the company, and Jannard will join its board of directors. It says the smartphone will arrive in the first half of 2018, and functional prototypes are supposed to be ready in the coming months.

Source: Reduser.net