As William Gibson once noted, the future is already here, it just isn’t equally distributed. That’s especially true for those of us with disabilities. [Abishek Singh] wanted to do something about that, so he created a way for the hearing-impaired to use Amazon’s Alexa voice service. He did this using a TensorFlow deep learning network to convert American Sign Language (ASL) to speech and a speech-to-text converter to interpret the response. This all runs on a laptop, so it should work with any voice interface with a bit of tweaking. In particular, [Abishek] seems to have created a custom bit of ASL to trigger Alexa. Perhaps the next step would be to use a robotic arm to create the output directly in ASL and cut out the Echo device completely? [Abishek] has not released the code for this project yet, but he has released the code for other projects, such as Peeqo, the robot that responds with GIFs.
The UK government could ban kids from owning drones weighing over 250g (0.55 lbs), under rules drawn up by the Department for Transport. The proposals suggest children could fly a heavier drone under adult supervision if someone older owns and has re…
Microsoft has announced this week Remote Desktop Web Client general availability for Windows Server 2016 and 2019 Preview.
At last year’s Ignite, Microsoft announced that it was working on an HTML5 web client for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) that would allow users to connect to Windows Server remote desktops and apps from any browser without additional software. At the end of March, a preview was made available. Last week, Microsoft announced that the Remote Desktop Web Client had reached general availability for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 Preview.
It has been possible to connect to a remote desktop via a browser for some time using Remote Desktop Web Connection. But it requires Internet Explorer and an ActiveX control, both of which are legacy technologies that Microsoft has deprecated in Windows 10. And because of the reliance on IE, users of non-Windows platforms couldn’t use it. ActiveX Controls also come with their own security issues and management headaches.
Remote Desktop Web Client is released for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 Preview (Image Credit: Microsoft)
That’s where the new HTML5 web client comes in. It works cross platform because it doesn’t rely on proprietary Microsoft technologies. There is official support for Edge, IE11+, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari but mobile devices are not currently supported. The client can be added to existing Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services (RDS) deployments and it is built-in to the preview version of Windows Server 2019, which is due for release later this year. Microsoft says that the current release supports the following features:
Access desktops and apps published through a feed
Single sign-on
Print to PDF file
Audio out
Full screen and dynamic resolution
Copy/paste text using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V
Keyboard and mouse input support
Localized in 18 languages
Before you can use the web client, your RDS deployment will need to have an RD Gateway, an RD Connection Broker, and the RD Web Access role installed. RDS must be configured for per-user CAL licensing. If you are running Windows Server 2016, the July 18th 2017 cumulative update (KB4025334) should be installed on the RD Gateway. The OS build must be 14393.1532 or higher. Finally, public trusted certificates need to be configured for the RD Gateway and RD Web Access roles. You can find instructions on how to add the web client to Windows Server 2016 using PowerShell here.
The RDS Web Client is ‘Lightweight’
The release of an HTML5 client for RDS is long overdue. Citrix XenDesktop includes similar functionality, but it also supports mobile devices and offers a more flexible solution than Microsoft RDS. Microsoft’s web client doesn’t support all the features available in the native Remote Desktop Connection software that is built-in to Windows. For instance, Remote Desktop Connection has full printing support and the ability to connect to remote server drives. The new web client is a good start but for companies that rely heavily on terminal services, it won’t be up to the job of replacing a Citrix.
Azure Advisor is a free service that analyzes your Azure usage and provides recommendations on how you can optimize your Azure resources to reduce costs, boost performance, strengthen security, and improve reliability.
We are excited to announce that we have added several new Azure Advisor recommendations to help you get the most out of your Azure subscriptions.
Buy Reserved Instances to save over pay-as-you-go costs
Azure Reserved Instances (RIs) allow you to reserve virtual machines (VMs) in advance on a one or three-year term and save up to 80 percent versus pay-as-you go rates. RIs are ideal for workloads with predictable, consistent traffic.
Azure Advisor will analyze your last 30 days of VM usage and recommend purchasing RIs when it may provide cost savings. Advisor will show you the regions and VM sizes where you could save money and give you an estimate of your potential savings from purchasing RIs if your usage remains consistent with the previous 30 days.
Create Azure Service Health alerts
Azure Service Health is a free service that provides personalized guidance and support when Azure service issues might affect you. You can create Service Health alerts for any region or service so that you and your teams stay informed via the Azure portal, email, text message, or webhook notification when business-critical resources could be impacted.
Azure Advisor will identify your subscriptions that do not have Service Health alerts configured and recommend that you set up alerts on those subscriptions.
Upgrade to a support plan that includes technical support
Azure technical support plans give you access to Azure experts when you need assistance. Azure offers a range of support options to best fit your needs, whether you’re a developer just starting your cloud journey or a large organization deploying business-critical applications.
Azure Advisor will identify subscriptions with a high amount of monthly Azure spend that are likely running strategic workloads and recommend upgrading your support plan to include technical support.
Configure your Traffic Manager profiles for optimal performance and availability
Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic for service endpoints in different datacenters and optimize for performance and availability. Azure Advisor has added new recommendations to solve common configuration issues with Traffic Manager profiles.
Reduce DNS Time to Live
Time to Live (TTL) settings on your Traffic Manager profile allow you to specify how quickly to switch endpoints if a given endpoint stops responding to queries. Reducing the TTL value means that clients will be routed to functioning endpoints faster.
Azure Advisor will identify Traffic Manager profiles with a longer TTL configured and will recommend configuring the TTL to either 20 seconds or 60 seconds depending on whether the profile is configured for Fast Failover.
Add or move one endpoint to another Azure region
If all endpoints in a Traffic Manager profile configured for proximity routing are in the same region, users from other regions may experience connection delays. Adding or moving an endpoint to another region will improve overall performance and provide better availability if all endpoints in one region fail.
Azure Advisor will identify Traffic Manager profiles configured for proximity routing where all the endpoints are in the same region and recommend that you either add or move an endpoint to another Azure region.
Add an endpoint configured to “All (World)”
If a Traffic Manager profile is configured for geographic routing, then traffic is routed to endpoints based on defined regions. If a region fails, there is no pre-defined failover. Having an endpoint where the Regional Grouping is configured to “All (World)” will avoid traffic being dropped and improve service availability.
Azure Advisor will identify Traffic Manager profiles configured for geographic routing where there is no endpoint configured to have the Regional Grouping as “All (World)” and recommend making that configuration change.
Add at least one more endpoint, preferably in another region
Traffic Manager profiles with more than one endpoint experience higher availability if any given endpoint fails. Placing these endpoints in different regions further improves service reliability.
Azure Advisor will identify Traffic Manager profiles where there is only one endpoint and recommend adding at least one more endpoint in another region.
If you are a business and want to use Google Drive, then your only option until now was to buy a full G Suite subscription, even if you don’t want or need access to the rest of the company’s productivity tools. Starting today, though, these businesses businesses, will be able to buy a subscription to a standalone stand-alone version of Google Drive, too.
Google says that a standalone version of Drive stand-along version of drive has been at the top of the list of requests from prospective customers, so it’s now giving this option to them in the form of this new service (though to be honest, I’m not sure how much demand there really is for this product). Standalone Stand-along Google Drive will come with all the usual online storage and sharing features as the G Suite version.
Pricing will be based on usage. Google will charge $8 per month per active user and $0.04 per GB stored in a company’s Drive.
Google’s idea here is surely to convert those standalone stand-alone Drive users to full G Suite users over time, but it’s also an acknowledgement on Google’s part that not every business is ready to move away from legacy email tools and desktop-based productivity applications like Word and Excel just yet (and that its online productivity suite may not be right for all of those businesses, too).
Drive, by the way, is going to hit a billion users this week, Google keeps saying. I guess I appreciate that they don’t want to jump the gun and are actually waiting for that to happen instead of just announcing it now when it’s convenient. Once it does, though, it’ll become the company’s eighth product with more than a billion users.
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Data sovereignty is a major issue for many major companies, especially in Europe. So far, Google’s G Suite, which includes products like Gmail, Google Docs and Sheets, didn’t give users any control over where their data was stored at rest, but that’s changing today. As the company announced at its Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, G Suite users can now choose where to store whether their primary data for select G Suite apps: in the U.S. or in Europe.
These new data regions are now available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers at no additional cost.
“What this means is that for organizations with data- or geo-control requirements, G Suite will now let them choose where to store the primary a copy of their data for G Suite apps like Gmail should be stored at rest,” said G Suite VP of product management David Thacker.
Google is also adding a tool that makes it easy to move data to another region as employees move between jobs and organizations.
“Given PwC is a global network with operations in 158 countries, I am very happy to see Google investing in data regions for G Suite and thrilled by how easy and intuitive it will be to set up and manage multi-region policies for our domain,” said Rob Tollerton, director of IT at PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, in a canned statement about this new feature.
Azure File Sync replicates files from your on-premises Windows Server to an Azure file share. With Azure File Sync, you don’t have to choose between the benefits of cloud and the benefits of your on-premises file server – you can have both! Azure File Sync enables you to centralize your file services in Azure while maintaining local access to your data.
We created Microsoft Azure Files with the goal of making it easy for you to reap the benefits of cloud storage. We know from decades of experience building Windows file server that file shares are useful for more than just application development; file shares are used for everything under the sun. With Azure Files, we are focused on building general purpose file shares that can replace all the file servers and NAS devices your organization has, and today, we are happy to share an important milestone on that journey: the general availability of Azure File Sync!
Azure File Sync grew out of our conversations with thousands of customers about the challenge of balancing the need for local and fast access to their frequently accessed data with the maintenance and time cost of managing on-premises storage. Azure File Sync replicates files from your on-premises Windows Server to an Azure file share, just like how you might have used DFS-R to replicate data between Windows Servers. Once you have a copy of your data in Azure, you can enable cloud tiering—the real magic of Azure File Sync—to store only the hottest and most recently accessed data on-premises. And since the cloud has a full copy of your data, you can connect as many servers to your Azure file share as you want, allowing you to establish quick caches of your data wherever your users happen to be. As mentioned above, in simple terms, Azure File Sync enables you to centralize your file services in Azure while maintaining local access to your data.
Having a copy of the data in the cloud enables you to do more. For example, you can nearly instantly recover from the loss of server with our fast disaster recovery feature. No matter what happens to your local server – a bad update, damaged physical disks, or something worse, you can rest easy knowing the cloud has a fully resilient copy of your data. Simply connect your new Windows Server to your existing sync group, and your namespace will be pulled down right away for use.
When we announced Azure File Sync last year at Ignite, we thought it would help a lot of organizations on their cloud journeys but nothing could have prepared us for the groundswell of interest in Azure Files and Azure File Sync. For the general availability of Azure File Sync, we focused on addressing your feedback from using Azure File Sync in preview. Here are a few of our top innovations and enhancements in Azure File Sync since our initial preview:
Sync and cloud tiering performance, scale, and reliability improvements. For general availability, we have increased the performance of Azure File Sync upload by 2X and fast disaster recovery by 4X to 18X (depending on hardware). We have also rearchitected the cloud tiering backend to support faster and more reliable tiering, enabling us to support tiering as soon as we detect that the used volume space exceeds your volume free space percentage threshold.
Enhanced Azure File Sync portal experience. One of the top concerns we heard from customers during preview is that it was hard to understand the state of the system. We believe that you shouldn’t have to understand how our system is built or have a Ph.D. in computer science to understand the state of an Azure File Sync server endpoint. To this end, we are excited to introduce a revamped portal experience that more clearly displays the progress of sync uploads and surfaces only actionable error messages to you – keeping you focused on your day to day job!
Holistic disaster recovery through integration with geo-redundant storage (GRS). Fast disaster recovery enables you to quick recover in the event of a disaster on-premises, but what about a disaster affecting one of the datacenters serving an Azure region? For GA, we now integrate end-to-end with the geo-redundant storage (GRS) resiliency setting. This enables you to fearlessly adopt Azure File Sync to protect against disasters for your organization’s most valuable data!
We’re just getting started!
For us, the general availability of Azure File Sync is just the start of the innovations we plan to bring to Azure Files and Azure File Sync. We have a whole series of new features and incremental improvements to deliver throughout the summer and fall, including support for and tighter integration with Windows Server 2019! Stay tuned – we think you’ll like what we have for you! See you at Ignite!
Visit our product page to learn more about Azure File Sync.
The content below is taken from the original ( Picard 2.0 released), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
This time we are announcing the release of a new Picard!
Official MusicBrainz cross-platform music tagger Picard 2.0 is now out, containing many fixes and new features and much needed upgrades!
The last time we put out a major release was more than 6 years ago (Picard 1.0 in June of 2012), so this release comes with a major back-end update. If you’re in a hurry and just want to try it out, the downloads are available from the Picard website.
If you have been following our Picard related blogs, you will know that we switched up our dependenciesa bit. Python should now be at least version 3.5, PyQt 5.7 or newer and Mutagen should be 1.37 or newer. A side effect of this dependency bump is that Picard should look betterand in general feel more responsive.
A couple of things to note – with Picard 2.0, Picard Windows builds will be portable standalone binaries. Also, we will only be supporting 64-bit Windows officially because of lack of resources to build a 32-bit image. The macOS requirements were also bumped up for the same reasons, with macOS 10.10 being the lowest version that is supported.
As such, Picard 1.4.2 will be the last version that is supported for both Windows 32 and macOS 10.7-10.10. You can find it in the Picard downloads section as well.
We would like to thank all contributors, from all around the world, who helped for this release: Laurent Monin, Sophist, Wieland Hoffmann, Vishal Choudhary, Philipp Wolfer, Calvin Walton, David Mandelberg, Paul Roub, Yagyansh Bhatia, Shen-Ta Hsieh, Ville Skyttä, Yvan Rivierre and also all of our translators!
Be aware that downgrading from 2.0 to 1.4 may lead to configuration compatibility issues – ensure that you have saved your Picard configuration before using 2.0 if you intend to go back to 1.4.
Note:If you are facing errors while tagging releases on Windows, do take a look at this FAQ about SSL errors.
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Got an odd screw, nut, bolt, washer or fastener you need to buy more of, but have no idea to how to find the right one? Amazon’s AR “Part Finder” can help. The company has rolled out a new feature on mobile that lets you point your camera at the item in question, so Amazon can scan it, measure it, then direct you to matching items from its product catalog.
The company didn’t announce the feature’s launch, but confirmed to us it was rolled out to all users a couple of weeks ago.
The feature takes advantage of the iPhone’s camera and its augmented reality capabilities to measure the object in question – a process it walks you through when you first launch “Part Finder” by tapping the Camera button next to the search box in the Amazon app.
To use Part Finder, you first tap the icon to launch the feature, then place the object on a white surface next to a penny, as instructed. (A piece of white paper worked well.)
The instructions explain how to correctly tilt the phone in order to measure the part. This involves an augmented reality display of a crosshairs and circle that appear on the white surface in the camera’s viewfinder. You tilt the phone until the circle is lined up in the center of the crosshairs.
Amazon’s app then scans the item and delivers results, assuming the product is in focus and you’ve followed the instructions properly.
On the following screen, you add more information to help narrow down the results. For example, we scanned a screw and it asked for other details like whether it was a flat head and the drive type. (Some of this information could have been derived from the scan, one would think, so it’s not clear how much Amazon is relying on the scan itself versus user input here.)
Of course, a screw is an easier thing to find on Amazon. The feature will be a lot more handy when you’re stuck with an odd part that you don’t know how to identify. Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a bunch of unintended parts lying around to test.
Amazon’s Part Finder is one of the more practical examples of AR technology, which can be used to determine the size of real-world objects using a smartphone’s camera. Apple, for example, is introducing a new app in iOS 12 called “Measure” which will let you point your iPhone at things like picture frames, posters and signs, tables, and other objects, to get automatic measurements.
Amazon is not the only retailer using AR to improve the shopping experience. Many other retailers are also taking advantage of the technology – like Wayfair, Houzz and Targetare for visualizing furniture in your own room. Topology is using AR to let you virtually try on custom-fit glasses. Target is letting shoppers try on makeup at home in its mobile AR Studio. Ebay’s AR tool helps sellers find the right box for their items. And so on.
The Part Finder feature is currently showing up in Amazon’s app on iOS. No word yet on its Android release.
The Part Finder uses computer vision technology, not augmented reality, we’ve learned. An earlier version of this post said otherwise. We’ve updated the article to reflect this.
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Last month, Singapore hosted a summit between the leaders of North Korea and the United States. Accredited journalists invited to the event were given a press kit containing a bottle of water, various paper goods, and a fan that plugs into a USB port.
Understandably, the computer security crowd on Twitter had a great laugh. You shouldn’t plug random USB devices into a computer, especially if you’re a journalist, especially if you’re in a foreign country, and especially if you’re reporting on the highest profile international summit in recent memory. Doing so is just foolhardy.
This is not a story about a USB fan, the teardown thereof, or of spy agencies around the world hacking journalists’ computers. This a story of the need for higher awareness on what we plug into our computers. In this case nothing came of it — the majority of USB devices are merely that and nothing more. One of the fans was recently torn down (PDF) and the data lines are not even connected. (I’ll dive into that later on in this article). But the anecdote provides an opportunity to talk about USB security and how the compulsion to plug every USB device into a computer should be interrupted by a few seconds of thoughtfulness first.
What Can Go Wrong By Plugging Random Devices Into Your Computer
The best example of why you shouldn’t plug a random USB device into your computer is Stuxnet. This worm, discovered in 2010, was specifically designed to compromise Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and had the effect of destroying one-fifth of Iran’s Uranium enrichment capability, and infected hundreds of thousands of computers.
Although it’s been about ten years since the Stuxnet worm was deployed, it remains the most impressive cyber weapon of all time. Stuxnet used four 0-day exploits to specifically target the programmable logic controllers of nuclear centrifuges, gradually increasing and decreasing the operating speed, until one thousand of these machines were destroyed. Whoever wrote Stuxnet — the current best guess is a collaboration between US and Israeli intelligence agencies — had deep knowledge of Windows exploits and the Siemens programmable logic controller software found on these centrifuges. While Stuxnet was quite sophisticated, it was initially deployed using decidedly low-tech means.
Stuxnet first found its way into Iranian nuclear facilities through a USB thumb drive. The exact details are not known, but all signs point to someone plugging an untrusted device into a computer without considering the ramifications.
USB Exploits: The Usual Suspects
So just what does an attack with a random USB device look like? Several different approaches have popped up over the years and they’re all rather fascinating.
The best, and easiest, way to get into a computer with a USB device is with a keystroke injection attack. This is best accomplished with a USB Rubber Ducky, a small device that looks like a USB thumb drive. Instead of storage, the USB Rubber Ducky contains a microcontroller that emulates a normal USB keyboard and will send keystroke payloads to a computer automatically. For example, if you’re on a Windows computer, typing Alt+F4 will close your current window. If you program a USB Rubber Ducky to emit the ‘Alt-F4’ keyboard combination when it’s plugged in, the USB Rubber Ducky will close the currently focused window.
These exploits can be expanded. Programming the USB Rubber Ducky with a more sophisticated script could change a computer’s hosts file. Whenever a user types in google.com into their browser’s address bar, the computer would pull up goggle.com. Software payloads could be downloaded through the command line, installing keyloggers. Passwords can be stolen in a matter of seconds with a keystroke injection attack.
This class of attacks falls under the banner of BadUSB attacks, something first discussed in 2014. It’s not just a USB Rubber Ducky, either: normal thumb drives can be reprogrammed to perform keystroke injection attacks, and a one dollar microcontroller can be programmed to perform the same attack.
Concerning implementation, the only necessary components for this attack would be a small microcontroller and a handful of passive components. This microcontroller would connect to the computer over the D+ and D- lines found in every USB port. Given a (physically) small enough microcontroller, a USB spy device could look identical to a USB-powered fan. The only way to tell the difference is to take it apart and look at the circuit board.
TURNIPSCHOOL, a device that becomes a wireless USB keyboard. Source: Michael Ossmann
In addition to a USB ducky, an attack via USB device could take the form of COTTONMOUTH, a device created by the NSA and leaked to the world through the NSA ANT Catalog in 2013. TURNIPSCHOOL is a ‘clone’ of COTTONMOUTH developed by Great Scott Gadgets and demonstrated at Shmoocon 2015. This small circuit board that fits inside the plastic plug of a USB device. This small circuit board can become a custom USB device under remote control. Think of it as a wireless USB keyboard.
But USB attacks aren’t limited to turning a USB fan into a USB keyboard. The USBee attack turns the data bus on a USB connector into an antenna, allowing for data exfiltration over radio. If you’re a state-level actor handing out USB devices to journalists and you want some lulz, the USB Killer is a great choice; this will simply fry the USB port (and possibly more) in any computer.
In short, there are dozens of ways a USB device can be harmful. They all have one thing in common, though: they all use microcontrollers, or obviously complex electronics. All of them will have a connection to the D+ and D- or TX and RX lines in a USB port. Knowing this, we can define a threat model of what an attack via a random USB device will look like. We also know how to test that threat: if there’s some measurable resistance between the D+ and D- lines in the USB port (somewhere between a few hundred kiloohms to a few megaohms), there might be something there.
The Results Of The USB Fan’s Analysis
Thanks to a reporter from The Economist, [Sergei Skorobogatov] of Cambridge University analyzed one of the USB fans distributed at the Singapore summit. The first step of the analysis was to probe the D+ and D- lines of the USB port. These connections are how every USB device transmits data to and from a computer. If these lines are disconnected, no data can be transferred to a computer. The first step of the analysis found a resistance above 1 Gigaohm, suggesting they were disconnected from everything else. Since this is a USB-C connector, the TX1 and TX2 data lines were also probed, finding they too were disconnected from everything else.
The USB-C connector and components of the Singapore fan
[Skorobogatov]’s visual inspection of the circuit board revealed VCONN connected to VBUS through a resistor. Two diodes are on the board, probably to reduce the voltage to the electric motor. There was no complex electronic device inside this particular USB fan distributed at the Singapore conference. This device was clean, but that could only be established after careful inspection.
It should be noted that resistance between the D- and D+ lines in a USB port is not evidence of any spyware, malware, or other spy device. Resistors tied to the data lines of a USB port are used for device negotiation of USB chargers. If the designers of this USB fan wanted to draw more than 500 mA from a USB port (unlikely, but let’s just roll with it), they would have to install resistors on the data lines. Therefore, a complete analysis of any USB must include a visual inspection of the circuit board.
Why This Matters
The journalist who started this whole mess by posting the image of the USB fan drive on Twitter is extremely capable and competent. As a war correspondent he faced great peril in Egypt in 2011 and during the Libyan civil war to name just two of his reporting assignments. Simply by virtue of living through those experiences, this journalist knows something about physical security. But computer security is more abstract and the same instincts are harder to apply.
The real story here is that accomplished journalists would be grateful for a random USB device given to them by a foreign government. There is every indication this journalist actually plugged this USB fan into his computer. But even if he went the safe route and opted to use a USB battery or a cable with data lines disconnected to protect against malware, I’m sure others didn’t take precautions. Out of 2500 journalists at the Singapore summit, some unquestionably plugged this threat into their computer.
There is a massive, massive gulf of understanding between otherwise competent professionals and the most basic tenets of computer security. So spread the word when you have the chance: Don’t give your passwords to people. Don’t reuse passwords. And don’t plug random USB devices into your computer.
Casper is opening a storefront designed specifically for sleepy New Yorkers in need of a nap.
In The Dreamery, you can reserve nooks for 45 minutes at a time, at a cost of $25 per session. These nooks are basically giant wooden “O”s with curtains and soundproofed backing, and of course they’re stocked with Casper beds.
It’s easy to dismiss or giggle about a nap store, but it seems a lot less funny when it’s a warm afternoon and you’re having trouble keeping your eyes open at work. In fact, I will happily confess to taking advantage of the TechCrunch New York couch after a big lunch, or after a morning that started stupidly early thanks to deadlines and embargoes.
The Dreamery, of course, is a lot fancier than the office couch, as I discovered when I dropped by for a quick tour. Beyond the nooks themselves, there are also lockers to drop off your stuff, private washrooms to get cleaned up, a lounge for hanging out and drinking coffee before or after, plus additional amenities like pajamas and Headspace Heaspace “sleepcasts.” (And yes, a Casper spokesperson assured me that the sheets are changed between each session.)
“The Dreamery is about making sleep and rest a part of our regular wellness routines — similar to how many people prioritize a workout class,” said COO Neil Parikh in a statement. “The concept enables us to pilot new ways of bringing better sleep to more people and to more places — whether that’s here, the workplace, airports, or beyond.”
Oh, and this new storefront is located on the same New York City block as a Casper sleep store, so it should be a pretty quick walk if you love the experience so much that you want to take a mattress home.
Last year at Ignite, I talked to you about the preview of Azure Data Box, a ruggedized, portable, and simple way to move large datasets into Azure. So far, the response has been phenomenal. Customers have used Data Box to move petabytes of data into Azure.
While our customers and partners love Data Box, they told us that they also wanted a lower capacity, even easier-to-use option. They cited examples such as moving data from Remote/Office Branch Offices (ROBOs), which have smaller data sets and minimal on-site tech support. They said they needed an option for recurring, incremental transfers for ongoing backups and archives. And they said it needed to have the same traits as Data Box – namely fast, simple, and secure.
Got it. We hear the message loud and clear. So, I’m here today with our partners at Inspire 2018 to announce a new addition to the Data Box family: Azure Data Box Disk.
How it works
Data Box Disk leverages the same infrastructure and management experience as Azure Data Box. You can receive up to five 8TB disks, totaling 40TB per order. Data Box Disk is fast, utilizing SSD technology, and is shipped overnight, so you can complete a data transfer job in as little as one week.
The disks connect via USB or SATA, and simple commands such as robocopy or drag-and-drop can be used to move data. Quick and easy. Once returned to the Azure DC, your data is securely uploaded, and the disks are cryptographically erased. Data Box Disk uses AES 128-bit encryption, so your data is safe at every point in the process — just like Data Box.
A cool success story
Our customers and partners constantly amaze me with the creative ways they use our products, and Data Box Disk is no exception. For example, it turns out that disks are a great form-factor for autonomous vehicle research: the small form factor of disks provide the right balance between capacity and portability to collect and transport test vehicle data into Azure.
One such customer is LG, which is using Data Box Disk at an autonomous vehicle test center in South Korea.
“We needed a way to transfer massive amounts of data for our autonomous vehicle projects, which are based all around the world. The solution needed to be portable, simple to use, cost-effective and, of course, very secure. The Azure Data Box Disk met all of those criteria. Overall it was a very good experience, beginning with Microsoft’s fast response to our business requirement and including its continuing engineering support along the way’”. – Hyoyuel (Andy) Kim, Senior Manager, Vehicle Component Company, LG Electronics
Sign up today for previews
Data Box Disk Preview is available in the EU and US, and we’re continuing to expand to other Azure regions in the coming months. The Preview is currently free; look for more information on pricing later this year. Customers and CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) Partners are invited to sign up for the Data Box Preview on the same portal as Data Box Preview, which is still available half price – now also in the EU and UK! ISV Partners, please sign up on our Partner Portal.
Stop by and say hello!
If you’re at Inspire, please stop by our booth, we’d love to show you the Data Box family. If you can’t make it this year, please do check out the Azure site or contact your Microsoft rep for more info. Stay tuned, as we’ve got even more cool stuff coming out in the coming months!
Your feedback is important to us. Leave your comments below and let us know what you think about today’s update to the Azure Data Box Family and what we can do to keep improving our service!
Beginning later this month, Microsoft will change the provisioning process for Exchange Online shared mailboxes to ensure that these mailboxes receive a 50 GB quota. Microsoft’s documentation has always said that shared mailboxes get 50 GB, but errors in the provisioning process led to the allocation of 100 GB quotas, just like regular user mailboxes.
The Need for Licenses
Shared mailboxes can have a 100 GB quota, but only if they have an Exchange Online Plan 2 license. However, unlicensed mailboxes that received a 100 GB quota keep it unless the mailbox’s “state” changes. In other words, if you convert a shared mailbox to be a user mailbox. If an unlicensed shared mailbox grows past 50 GB, Exchange will stop delivering email to the mailbox until the size is reduced under the quota or it is licensed.
Despite the availability of more modern collaboration methods within Office 365, shared mailboxes continue to be popular with customers. Common use cases include:
Converting mailboxes belonging to ex-employees to shared mailboxes to free up Office 365 licenses. If the converted mailboxes are bigger than 50 GB, they’ll need licenses if you want to keep them receiving email. If you don’t want to have ongoing access to the mailbox and just want to have the content available receiving email. If you don’t want to have ongoing access to the mailbox and just want to have the content available for compliance purposes, it might be better to convert ex-employee mailboxes into inactive mailboxes.
Having a common point to receive inbound customer communications (help desks). This article explains the use case. Microsoft would prefer people to use Office 365 Groups for this purpose, but although Groups support the ability of members to send as or send on behalf of the group, lack of access to all the folders in the mailbox and the inability to categorize or mark items for follow-up make Groups a less than perfect solution in this scenario.
Basic collaboration within a small group. This might be true on-premises, but Office 365 Groups or Microsoft Teams are better cloud solutions.
Migration Targets
I do not think that a high percentage of shared mailboxes active within Exchange Online exceed 50 GB, but it is true that more of these mailboxes exist in Exchange Online than do on-premises. The reason is that shared mailboxes are also used to move data into Office 365 from legacy archiving systems or other email systems. Shared mailboxes are convenient migration targets and once the data is in the mailboxes, it is indexed and available to the full breadth of Office 365 compliance functionality.
In these cases, if you want to move more than 50 GB into a shared mailbox, you must license the target mailboxes first.
Understanding Shared Mailboxes in a Tenant
You can get a list of shared mailboxes in a tenant by looking in the Groups section of the Office 365 Admin Center. However, this doesn’t tell you what the current quota is for the mailboxes or what’s used. To get this information, we must use PowerShell.
Here’s a simple script to fetch a list of shared mailboxes and then report the current quota used, the allocated quota, and the license state. Get-MailboxStatistics is a “heavy” cmdlet, meaning that it takes more resources to run than most other cmdlets, so the script will be slow to process a large set of mailboxes.
Given their popularity, shared mailboxes are not going to disappear anytime soon. The change in provisioning behavior and the clampdown on email delivery when unlicensed shared mailboxes exceed 50 GB are reminders that shared mailboxes need management from time to time. Just like the rest of Office 365.
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.
Trade secret theft allegations are serious enough in the corporate world, but they're particularly grave when they involve military projects. And one contractor is learning that the hard way. A Connecticut federal court has found electrical enginee…
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A big trend in web services right now is the so-called serverless computing, such as Amazon’s Lambda service. The idea is you don’t have a dedicated server waiting for requests for a specific purpose. Instead, you have one server (such as Amazon’s) listening for lots of requests and on demand, you spin up an environment to process that request. Conceptually, it lets you run a bit of Javascript or some other language “in the cloud” with no dedicated server. A new concept — https://itty.bitty.site — takes this one step farther. The site creates self-contained websites where the content is encoded in the URL itself.
Probably the best example is to simply go to the site and click on “About itty bitty.” That page is itself encoded in its own URL. If you then click on the App link, you’ll see a calculator, showing that this isn’t just for snippets of text. While this does depend on the itty.bitty.site web host to provide the decoding framework, the decoding is done totally in your browser and the code is open source. What that means is you could host it on your own server, if you wanted to.
At first, this seems like a novelty until you start thinking about it. A small computer with an Internet connection could easily formulate these URLs to create web pages. A bigger computer could even host the itty.bitty server. Then there’s the privacy issue. At first, we were thinking that a page like this would be hard to censor since there is no centralized server with the content. But you still need the decoding framework. However, that wouldn’t stop a sophisticated user from “redirecting” to another — maybe private — decoding website and reading the page regardless of anyone’s disapproval of the content.
That might be the most compelling case of all. You can encode something in a URL and then anyone with that URL could read your content even if someone shuts down your servers (or the itty bitty servers). The itty bitty server just hands out some generic JavaScript. The website data is stored as a fragment which — interestingly enough — doesn’t get sent to the server.
That means the server doesn’t even get a look at what you are trying to decode. It just provides the decoding framework and your browser does all the rest of the work locally. We’d love to see someone fork the project and add simple encryption, too. Currently, the text is compressed and base 64 encoded, but anyone with the URL can decode what it says. An encryption key would allow you to send URLs in the clear that only some people could decode and would be very hard to suppress.
The itty bitty code itself is an app since you can edit most pages with an edit link at the top right corner. If you don’t like editing in place, the site explains how you can use a generic HTML file or use an online HTML editor, if you prefer.
There are limitations. You probably can’t host graphics internally — you’d need an external place to point to pictures. You also can make really long URLs — which means some services like Twitter will cut them off. We figure you could use a URL shortener if you needed to. There’s also a way to make a QR code baked right in.
If you want to make a backup person apoplectic, call an old backup an archive.
It’s just shy of saying that data on a RAID array doesn’t need to be backed up. The good news is that the differences between backup and archive are quite stark and easy to understand.
What is backup?
Backup is a copy of data created to restore said data in case of damage or loss. The original data is not deleted after a backup is made.
By Phillip Coletti, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform
With every new feature we introduce to Google Cloud Billing, we strive to provide your business with greater flexibility, control, and clarity so that you can better align your strategic priorities with your cloud usage. In order to do so, it’s important to be able to answer key questions about your cloud costs, such as:
“How much am I forecasted to spend this month based on historical trends?”
“Which GCP product or project is forecasted to cost me the most this month?”
Today, we are excited to announce the availability of a new cost forecast feature for Google Cloud Billing. This feature makes it easier to see at a glance how your costs are trending and how much you are projected to spend. You can now forecast your end-of-month costs for whatever bucket of spend is important to you, from your entire billing account down to a single SKU in a single project.
View your current and forecasted costs
Get started
Cost forecast for Google Cloud Billing is now available to all accounts. Get started by navigating to your account’s billing page in the GCP console and opening the reports tab in the left-hand navigation bar.
To help clarify how Ripple, the technology company, and XRP, the independent digital asset, are distinctly different, we’ve outlined in a simple infographic the most frequently asked questions related to the two:
What is it?
How is one related to each other?
Who controls whether it succeeds or fails?
Who uses it?
Who owns it?
For more information about Ripple, visit our website.
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DJs make up a huge part of the SoundCloud user base, uploading long mixes and gathering original electronic music to include in live performances. Pioneer is taking advantage of this fact with an update to its iOS mix recording app, DJM-REC. The comp…
Thanks to a reporter from The Economist, [Sergei Skorobogatov] of Cambridge University 
Trade secret theft allegations are serious enough in the corporate world, but they're particularly grave when they involve military projects. And one contractor is learning that the hard way. A Connecticut federal court has found electrical enginee…
