A minute to remember!

This year more than any, time to take a moment and remember all those who braved, fought and struggled to help us live the life we have today!

Time passes but memories never fade… A minute to remember!

Manage Control Tower life cycle actions intelligently using AWS Service Catalog, AWS Config, Amazon DynamoDB and AWS CloudFormation

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As customers create and manage multi-account AWS environments, cloud administrators need to process where each account can apply configuration autonomously from a centralize configuration repository. Some of the customers I work with use AWS Control Tower to manage a multi account environment. Administrators use AWS Control Tower to create organization units for account grouping and then create multiple accounts in those organization units. These administrators would like a process to ensure consistency. For example, the administrator would like accounts across all regions to deploy a security configuration or apply an account base tagging strategy for resources that will be deployed. A mechanism to do this will be for the administrator to add an AWS CloudFormation template that contains the steps for applying the security configuration to a configuration repository, then each account will then retrieve the configuration and deploy it in its own environment.

In this blog post, I will show you how to enable administrators to configure an AWS Control Tower environment to automatically deploy configurations when needed using AWS Service Catalog, AWS Cloud Watch events and other AWS services.

This solution uses the following AWS services. Most of the resources are set up for you with an AWS CloudFormation stack:

Background

Here are some of AWS Service Catalog concepts referenced in this post. For more information, see Overview of AWS Service Catalog.

  • A product is a blueprint for building the AWS resources to make available for deployment on AWS, along with the configuration information. Create a product by importing an AWS CloudFormation template, or, in case of AWS Marketplace-based products, by copying the product to AWS Service Catalog. A product can belong to multiple portfolios.
  • A portfolio is a collection of products, together with the configuration information. Use portfolios to manage user access to specific products. You can grant portfolio access for an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, IAM group, or IAM role level.
  • A provisioned product is an AWS CloudFormation stack; that is, the AWS resources that are created. When an end-user launches a product, AWS Service Catalog provisions the product from an AWS CloudFormation stack.
  • Constraints control the way users can deploy a product. With launch constraints, you can specify a role that the AWS Service Catalog can assume to launch a product.

Solution overview­

The following diagram maps out the solution architecture.

Here’s the process for the administrator:

  1. The administrator deploys an AWS CloudFormation template that creates base components in the Control Tower management environment like API Gateway, DynamoDB, Lambda, Step Function and others. These components will be used by the add configuration and managed account configuration deployment process.
  2. The administrator uses the Add Configuration process to add a CloudFormation configuration item to the configuration database which will be used by the managed account deployment process.

Here’s the process when the managed account deploys a CloudFormation configuration item:

  1. Behind the scene, invisible to the end-user, a scheduled Cloud Watch rule triggers a Lambda in the managed account which communicates to the master account through an API Gateway. The process queries the configuration database for new CloudFormation configuration items.
  2. If there are new CloudFormation configuration item the managed account deploys the CloudFormation template and updates the configuration database.

Step 1: Configuring an environment

Prerequisites:

You will need the following information to deploy the base components:
A user with an administrator role
The name of a user, group or role who will launch AWS Service Catalog products. You will enter the user as follows:

  • User  :user/<username>
  • Role  :role/<rolename>
  • Group: group/<groupname>

Deploy the base components:

Deployment Methods:

Download content and use your own bucket.

  1. Download this content zip file
  2. Extract the zip file, it will create a folder called postaction
  3. Create an AWS S3 bucket, note the bucket name
  4. Upload the postaction folder to the bucket
  5. Drill down into the postaction folder
  6. Click the checkbox next to setup_ctpostaction_base.json
  7. Right click and copy the Object URL

Use content from existing location.

  1. Login to the AWS Control Tower console using the Control Tower master account with an administrator role.
  2. Verify that AWS Control Tower has been deployed successfully.
  3. Right click and copy this CloudFormation setup link.
  4. Open the AWS CloudFormation console in a new browser tab.
  5. In the AWS CloudFormation console, choose Create Stack, Amazon S3 URL, paste the URL you just copied, and then choose Next.
  6. On the Specify stack details page, specify the following:
    • Stack name: ctpostactionbase
    • SourceBucket: use default or enter your bucket name
  7. Leave the default values except as noted.
  8. On the Review page, check the box next to I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names, and choose Create.
  9. After the status of the stack changes to CREATE COMPLETE, select the stack and choose Outputs to see the output.

  • In the parameter screen the user  selects the parameters for the stack location and the target organization unit.
  • When the parameters have all been selected, the user  launches the AWS Service Catalog product.

Deploy a CloudFormation configuration item:

  1. Login to the AWS Service Catalog console
  2. Select Product list from the top left
  3. Select the SCproductCTAddConfigItem AWS Service Catalog product
  4. Select the LAUNCH PRODUCT button
  5. Enter a Name myfirstconfig select Next
  6. Parameters:
    1.  AutomationDescription: default
    2. AutonomousLevel:
      1. Autonomous – configuration will be deployed by the service.
    3. ActionMethod
      1. SpokePull – The manage accounts will download and install this configuration
      2. MasterPush – The Control Tower master account will push this configuration to manage accounts.
    4. S3StackLocation – The CloudFormation stack to be deployed
    5. OrgUnits – The OrgUnit to deploy the configuration to accounts in this OU will get the configuration
    6. Regions – The region to apply the configuration  select 1 or ALL
    7. AdministrationRoleARN – use default
    8. ExecutionRoleName – use default
  7. Select Next
  8. On the TagOptions page select Next
  9. On the Notifications page select Next
  10. On the Review page select Launch
  11. Monitor until the Status changes to Succeeded
  12. Optional – you can switch to a mange account to verify the configuration has been deployed.

Cleanup process

To avoid incurring cost, please delete resources that are not needed.  You can terminate the Service Catalog product deployed from the AWS Service Catalog console, select Provisioned products then select Action then Terminate.

Conclusion

In this post, you learned an easy way to for administrators to configure an AWS Control Tower environment to automatically deploy configurations when needed. You also saw how there’s an extra layer of governance and control when you use Control Tower and AWS Service Catalog to deploy resources to support business objectives.

About the Author

Kenneth Walsh is a solutions architect focusing on AWS Marketplace. Kenneth is passionate about cloud computing and loves being a trusted advisor for his customers.

 

MIT tests autonomous ‘Roboat’ that can carry two passengers

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We’ve heard plenty about the potential of autonomous vehicles in recent years, but MIT is thinking about different forms of self-driving transportation. For the last five years, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) an…

EasyBCD lets you easily edit Windows Boot Settings and configure the Bootloader

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How to modify Boot settings & configure BootloaderEasyBCD is a robust tool for modifying the Windows bootloader. It is incredibly useful […]

This article EasyBCD lets you easily edit Windows Boot Settings and configure the Bootloader first appeared on TheWindowsClub.com.

RISC OS 5.28 now available

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Slightly delayed from our original target in Spring, we’re pleased to announce RISC OS 5.28 is now available for all platforms that met or exceeded our stable release criteria.

Adobe tries using AI to fix blurry video footage

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Between things like camera shake and poor lighting, the videos you take with your phone, DSLR or mirrorless camera can end up blurry for any numbers of reasons. Worse yet, it’s difficult to sharpen a photo or video after the fact, and more often than…

Update: NetRouteView v1.35

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When you add a new route, the new dialog-box is filled with the values you used in the previous time.
When you add a new route, NetRouteView now automatically fills the lowest metric value on your system.

Introducing the Microsoft Azure Modular Datacenter

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We designed the Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) for customers who need cloud computing capabilities in hybrid or challenging environments, including remote areas. This announcement is complemented by our Azure Space offerings and partnerships that can extend satellite connectivity anywhere in the world. Scenarios range from mobile command centers, humanitarian assistance, military mission needs, mineral exploration, and other use cases requiring high intensity, secure computing on Azure.

The MDC can give customers a path to migrate apps to Azure while still running these workloads on-premises with low-latency connections to their own datacenter. This provides a stepping stone for transforming workloads to the Azure API with the option of continuing to run these apps on-premises, or in public or sovereign clouds.

Azure where you need it

Modular Datacenter in remote location.

Around the world, there are significant cloud computing and storage needs in areas with adverse conditions, where low communication, disrupted network availability and limited access to specialized infrastructure would have previously prevented taking advantage of cloud computing. The MDC solves this by bringing Azure to these environments, providing datacenter scale compute resources closest to where they’re needed.

With MDC you can deploy a self-contained datacenter unit with a field transportable solution that provides near-immediate value. The unit can operate in a wide range of climates and harsh conditions in a ruggedized, radio frequency (RF) shielded unit. Once deployed it can act as critical infrastructure where temperature, humidity, and even level surfaces can pose a challenge.

MDC can provide onsite augmentation of compute and storage capabilities, managing and operating high-performance applications in the field, IoT and real-time analytics workloads that require ultra-low latency, and standing up cloud applications to support critical infrastructure recovery.

Connectivity

A major differentiator for MDC is that customers can run the unit with full network connectivity, occasionally connected or fully disconnected. This is a unique, powerful capability that allows customers to access the power of the Azure cloud on their terms.

Satellite communications option

Modular Datacenter deployed to airfield.

Microsoft is partnering with satellite operators to provide an option for secure and reliable connectivity to field deployed MDC units.

This connectivity is achieved through a network high availability module which continuously evaluates network performance. In the event of a network disruption, the network high availability module will move traffic from the impacted network to a backup satellite connection. This resiliency ensures continued delivery of essential hyperscale services through Azure. Alternatively, MDC can use satellite communications as the primary connection where no other network is available.

Ready to go

Modular Datacenter next to building.

MDC units are in early use with defense and private sector organizations, for more information contact your Microsoft representative.

Free P2P VPN

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People use a VPN — virtual private network — for a lot of reasons. However, for many people it is synonymous with hiding your network traffic, one thing that VPN can do. FreePN is a relatively new open source project that aims to build a free peer-to-peer VPN network. Like TOR, it is decentralized.

Right now, you can download for Ubuntu and Gentoo. There is a way to ask for early access for Debian, Fedora, and Arch. Windows, iOS, MacOS, and Android versions are promised for the future.

The code is on GitHub, so all questions are in theory answerable. Digging into the fpnd README told us most of the features we hoped to find on the main page (but didn’t):

The FreePN network daemon (fpnd) is a P2P implementation of a distributed virtual private network (dVPN) that creates an anonymous “cloud” of peers where each peer is both a client node and an exit node. Peers are randomly connected on startup and reconnected to new (random) peers as needed.

The FreePN network daemon (fpnd) is a P2P implementation of a distributed virtual private network (dVPN) that creates an anonymous “cloud” of peers where each peer is both a client node and an exit node. Peers are randomly connected on startup and reconnected to new (random) peers as needed.

In addition, the page notes that they only route http(s) traffic and, optionally, DNS traffic. IPv6 packets are dropped, unless you configure it to pass without VPN.

Is this a better answer than TOR? We don’t know. We weren’t clear on how you could set this up for some possible use cases, but there appears to be a fledgling support group on Reddit. If this works well and can support more platforms, it could be a good thing for online privacy and protection.

We’ve noted before that truly secure networking can be hard to accomplish. For many of us, a VPN is just an extra layer of security, or a way to watch TV that is only available in another country. But for some people, a VPN is a political necessity.

Ocean Solutions Accelerator’s third wave tackles a new set of aquatic challenges

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The Sustainable Ocean Alliance and its Ocean Solutions Accelerator take on the problems facing our planet’s waters, and the latest cohort of companies in the latter show a fresh slate of issues to address and resources to utilize. From reef rehabilitation to a “Fitbit for fishing boats,” they’re trying to fix things up in the oceans or at least mitigate the damage we’re doing down there.

The accelerator’s four week, all-virtual (like all of them these days) program focuses on the unique challenges faced by social good companies in this space.

“Startups in the sector are still struggling to find adequate funding during the early phases of operations,” the accelerator’s co-founder Craig Dudenhoffer told TechCrunch in an email. “Many of the solutions (especially hardware) are costly to produce and take a heavy upfront cash investment. We found that out of the hundreds of applicants, only a fraction had received substantial investments. We believe more investors need to educate themselves on opportunities in the ocean sector.”

The SOA team selected nine companies for this wave, only three of which are U.S.-based. “This year, in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw our largest and most diverse applicant pool to date,” said Dudenhoffer in the release announcing the companies. “I was particularly encouraged by this year’s applicant pool to see the varying types of solutions, as well as an increase in the number of entrepreneurs that are actively building technologies to address the critical challenges that face the ocean.”

SOA founder Daniela Fernandez recently noted that their area of operation is especially international, so keeping things virtual actually opens up a lot of possibilities, especially for smaller companies that can’t afford to temporarily relocate. “It gives you so many options and makes it far more inclusive,” she told me. “Everybody just has more flexibility and tranquility. So I believe we were headed in that direction anyway.”

'Reefcubes' to help rebuild reefs.

Image Credits: ARC Marine

Here are the nine lucky companies:

  • AquaAI (Norway): Developed a fishlike autonomous underwater vehicle for unobtrusive observation and inspection. inspection
  • AKUA (U.S.): Makes super-healthy kelp-based foods, starting with jerky and soon burgers. burgers
  • ARC Marine (U.K.): Helps protect and rehabilitate reefs with sustainable “Reef Cube” habitat and nursery. ‘Reef Cube’ habitat and nursery
  • Desolenator (The Netherlands): Solar-powered desalination for communities facing fresh water shortages. shortages
  • FlyWire (U.S.): Digital catch monitoring for compliance with regulations and connected commerce. commerce
  • microTERRA (Mexico): Sustainable, aquafarm-grown protein for animal feed. feed
  • Oceanworks (U.S.): Marketplace for recycled ocean-sourced plastic. plastic
  • PlanetCare (Slovenia): Filter for catching microfibers in washing machine drains before they enter the water system. system
  • Trademodo (Canada): New, comprehensive platform for ethical seafood businesses and supply chains. chains

The companies will get the tender loving care lavished on all the new accelerator’s participants, but possibly also a bit of harsh reality as they learn the difficulties of being an ethics-focused company with long-term goals in a capitalist system that demands almost immediate returns. One of the most important steps in building one of these companies seems to be getting over this demoralizing hump and seeing the possibilities in spite of the difficulties.

A demo day is scheduled for November 5, which is good timing because probably nothing else will be happening around then.

Pitching tech to optimize building design for sustainability, Atlanta-based Cove.tool raises $5.7 million

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Patrick Chopson and Sandeep Ahuja started cove.tool, an Atlanta-based company developing software to optimize building design for sustainability and cost, because of problems they’d faced in their careers as architects.

Along with Patrick’s brother, Daniel Chopson, the two Georgia Institute of Technology graduates have developed a suite of software products that are now used by thousands of architects, engineers, contractors and developers like EYP, P2S, Skanska, and JLL in 22 countries around the world. The company’s software is also taught in universities including California Polytechnic State University, the University of Illinois, and UNC Charlotte, along with their alma matter, Georgia Tech.

Now the company is $5.7 million richer following the close of its series A funding led by the Los Angeles-based investment firm Mucker Capital and including previous investors Urban.us, Knoll Ventures, and Atlanta’s own Techsquare Labs.

The company’s first product is software that helps model the energy consumption of a building and provides insights on how to improve energy efficiency. The product turns what used to be a manual process that involved outside consultants and roughly 150 hours of work into a job that can be done in 30 minutes, according to the cove.tool.

The software can account for factors such as energy consumption, light exposure, glare, radiation, water and embodied carbon targets for new and existing buildings and offers the ability to compare different options, allowing architects and developers to determine the most cost-efficient way to meet energy targets. In its most recent update, the company added an occupancy tool to help developers understand the safest designs for reducing the potential spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19.

Buildings and building construction are a huge contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, accounting for roughly 39 percent of carbon emissions annually, according to data released by the Global Alliance for Building and Construction and the International Energy Agency. And the continuing global migration to cities means that demand for new buildings and construction won’t slow down anytime soon. As demand for buildings increases, technologies like cove.tool’s software could save the equivalent of 40,000 trees on a typical construction project, the company said.

Example of cove.tool software for optimizing building design. Image Credit: cove.tool

We only have about 10 years to lower buildings to actually be net zero before the action would be useless in terms of stopping climate change,” said Ahuja, the company’s chief executive. 

With the new funds in hand cove.tool intends to expand global sales and marketing efforts and develop some new projects, according to Ahuja. Both founders said that the software is already designed to meet the building standards for Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. And the company has a plan to see if it can design energy efficient structures for a martian environment.

“For fun, we’re going to do Mars,” Ahuja said. “We want to see what the model looks like.”

The big selling point for the software is that environmental sustainability is baked into the product so even if developers only care about cost-cutting, they’ll be improving their carbon footprint anyway.

“Every developer that uses our platform may or may not care about sustainability, but they definitely save on cost,” said Ahuja.

Next on the product roadmap is a marketplace that can provide energy efficient materials that construction managers and developers would need to turn the cove.tool designs into actual buildings.

“Everybody is using a completely different bad workflow,” Chopson, the company’s co-founder and product development lead, said. “This brings it together in terms of cost and the offset carbon targets that every building and every city actually need to meet.”

The roadmap is to create easier workflows from the architect to the contractor so everyone involved can coordinate more closely. As it moves into this side of the construction market, cove.tool will find itself facing some very well-funded competitors, but that’s because the construction management and procurement side of the market is massive.

Companies like Procore have become billion dollar businesses on the back of. their pitch to simplify the construction management process.

The cove.tool marketplace product will be arriving sometime in the middle of 2021 and the company has already amassed a database of over 1,000 products from hundreds of vendors that it intends to list, according to Ahuja.

“There’s a lot of product databases, but no one can analyze it,” said Chopson. “We’re the only ones who can analyze that glass is better than any other glass.. It’s highly disorganized and you can’t compare one thing versus another.. The key is to be able to analyze things and put the analysis you do in the context of a building.”

Ultimately, the focus will still be on efficiency and sustainability, the founders said. And in a rapidly warming world, there are few things that are important.

As Omar Hamoui, a partner at Mucker Capital and the new director on the cove.tool board, said in a statement, “Sustainable design is rapidly becoming a necessity in the built world.”

A reminder about RISCOSitory’s mailing lists

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Apparently, Yahoogroups mailing lists will be brought to a close in December and, if no further action is taken, that will mean the end of a number of mailing lists… Read more »

Robot Travels the World

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Around the World in 80 Days may have been an impressive feat of international travel in a world before widespread air transit. In modern times though, it’s not even necessary to leave your home in order to travel around the world. To that end, [Norbert] is attempting to accomplish this journey using a robot that will do the traveling for him as part of this year’s Virtual Maker Faire.

The robot is called the World Tour Robot, and the idea for it is to be small enough to ship to each new location around the world and be simple enough to be repaired easily. It is driven by two servo motors and controlled by a Raspberry Pi which also handles a small camera. Once at its location, it can connect to the internet and then be able to be controlled through a web interface. Locations are selected by application, and the robot is either handed off to the next person in the chain or put back in a box to be shipped.

The robot hasn’t left for its maiden voyage just yet but [Norbert] plans to get it started soon. Hopefully there are enough interesting places for this robot to explore on its trip around the world, although it’s probably best to avoid Philadelphia as it is known to be unfriendly to robots.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

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How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Earlier this week, we announced Cloudflare One™, our comprehensive, cloud-based network-as-a-service solution. Cloudflare One improves network performance and security while reducing cost and complexity for companies of all sizes.

Cloudflare One is built to handle the scale and complexity of the largest corporate networks. But when it comes to network security and performance, the industry has focused all too often on the largest of customers with significant budgets and technology teams. At Cloudflare, we think it’s our opportunity and responsibility to serve everyone, and help companies of all sizes benefit from a better Internet.

This is Zero Trust Week at Cloudflare, and we’ve already talked about our mantra of Zero Trust for Everyone. As a quick refresher, Zero Trust is a security framework that assumes all networks, devices, and Internet destinations are inherently compromised and therefore should not be trusted. Cloudflare One facilitates Zero Trust security by securing how your users connect to corporate applications and the Internet at large.

As a small business network administrator, there are fundamentally three things you need to protect: devices, applications, and the network itself. Below, I’ll outline how you can secure devices whether they are in your office (DNS Filtering) or remote (WARP+ and Gateway), as well as applications and your network by moving to a Zero Trust model of security (Access).

By design, Cloudflare One is accessible to teams of any size. You shouldn’t need a massive IT department or a Fortune 500 budget to connect to your tools safely.  On Tuesday, we announced a new free plan which provides many of the features of Cloudflare One, including DNS filtering, Zero Trust access, and a management dashboard – for up to 50 users at no cost.

Starting now, your team can begin deploying Cloudflare One in your organization in just a few simple steps.

Step 1: Protect offices from threats on the Internet with DNS Filtering (10 minutes)
Step 2: Secure remote workers connecting to the Internet with Cloudflare WARP+ (30 minutes)
Step 3: Connect users to applications without a VPN with Cloudflare Access (1 hour)
Step 4: Block threats and data loss on devices with a Secure Web Gateway (1 hour)
Step 5: Add Zero Trust to your SaaS applications (2 hours)

1. Start blocking malicious sites and phishing attempts in 10 minutes

The Internet can be a dangerous place with malware and threats lurking everywhere. Protecting employees from threats on the Internet requires a way to inspect and filter their traffic. That starts with DNS-level filtering that can quickly and easily eliminate known malicious sites as well as restrict access to potentially dangerous neighborhoods on the Internet.

When your devices connect to a website, they start by sending a DNS query to a DNS resolver to find the IP address of the hostname for that site. The resolver responds and the device initiates the connection. That initial query creates two challenges for your team’s security:

  • Most DNS queries are unencrypted. ISPs can spy on DNS queries made by your employees and corporate devices while they work from home. Even worse, a malicious actor could modify responses to launch an attack.
  • DNS queries can resolve to malicious hostnames. Team members can click on links that lead to phishing attacks or malware downloads.

Cloudflare One can help keep that first query private and stop devices from inadvertently requesting a known malicious hostname.

Start by signing up for a Cloudflare account and navigating to the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard.

Next, set up a location.  You’ll be prompted to create a location which you can do if you want to protect the DNS queries of an office network. Simply deploy Gateway’s DNS filtering for your office by changing your network’s router to point to the assigned Gateway IP address.

Cloudflare operates 1.1.1.1, the world’s fastest DNS resolver. We’ve built Cloudflare Gateway’s DNS filtering tools on top of that same architecture so that your team has faster and safer DNS.

Now you can easily create a Gateway DNS policy to filter security threats or specific content categories.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Then use the Gateway dashboard to monitor queries that are allowed or blocked.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Then navigate to the dashboard on the “Overview” tab and see your traffic including what you are blocking and allowing.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

2.Next, protect all of your remote employees and send all traffic through Cloudflare over an encrypted connection

Employees who used to connect to the Internet through your office network now connect from hundreds or thousands of different home networks or mobile hotspots to do their jobs. That traffic relies on connections that might not be private.

You can use Cloudflare One to route all team member traffic over an encrypted, accelerated path to the Internet with Cloudflare WARP. Cloudflare WARP is available as an application that your team members can install on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. The client will route all of their device’s traffic to a nearby Cloudflare data center over Cloudflare’s implementation of a technology called WireGuard.

When they connect, Cloudflare One uses WARP+, our implementation of WARP that uses the Argo Smart Routing service to find the shortest path through our global network of data centers to reach the user’s destination.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Your team can begin using Cloudflare WARP today. Navigate to the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard and purchase the Cloudflare Gateway or Cloudflare for Teams Standard plan. Once purchased, you can create a rule to determine who in your organization can use Cloudflare WARP.

Your end users can launch the client, input your team’s organization name, and login to begin using WARP+.  Alternatively, you can deploy the application with settings preconfigured using an device management solution like JAMF or InTune.

Cloudflare WARP seamlessly integrates with Gateway’s DNS filtering to bring secure, encrypted, DNS resolution to roaming devices. Users can input the DoH subdomain of a location in your Cloudflare for Teams account to begin using your organization’s DNS filtering settings wherever they work.

3. Replace your VPN with Cloudflare Access

When we were a smaller team and relied on a VPN, our IT help desk received hundreds of tickets complaining about our VPN. Some of these descriptions might look familiar.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

We built Cloudflare Access as a way to replace using a VPN as the gatekeeper to applications. Cloudflare Access follows a model known as Zero Trust security where Cloudflare’s network, by default, does not trust any connection. Every user attempting to reach an application has to prove they should be allowed to access that application based on rules that administrators configure. With our new Teams free plan, up to 50 seats of Access are available at no cost.

That sounds like adding a burden, but Cloudflare Access integrates with your team’s identity provider and single sign-on (SSO) options to make any application feel as seamless as a SaaS application with SSO. Even if your team does not have a corporate identity provider, you can integrate Access with free services like GitHub and LinkedIn, so your employees and partners can authenticate without adding cost.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

For hosted applications, you can connect your origin to Cloudflare’s network without opening holes in your firewall using Argo Tunnel. Cloudflare’s network will accelerate the traffic from that origin to your users along fast lanes using our global private backbone.

When your team members need to connect to an application, they can visit it directly or start from a custom app launcher for your team. When they arrive, they’ll be prompted to login with your identity provider and Access will check their identity, and other characteristics like country of login, against rules that you create in the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Cloudflare’s free plan includes up to 50 seats of Cloudflare Access at no cost so that your team can begin

4. Add a Secure Web Gateway to block threats and file loss

With Cloudflare WARP, all of the traffic leaving your devices now routes through Cloudflare’s network. However, threats and data loss can hide inside of that traffic. You can add Cloudflare Gateway’s HTTP filtering to your team’s Cloudflare WARP usage to block threats and file loss. For example, if your team uses Box you can restrict all file uploads to other cloud based storage services to ensure everything stays in one, approved place.

To get started, navigate to the Policies section of the Cloudflare for Teams dashboard. Select the HTTP tab to begin building rules that inspect traffic for potential issues like known malicious URLs or files being uploaded to unapproved destinations.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

To inspect traffic, you’ll need to download and install a certificate on the enrolled devices. Once installed, you can enable HTTP filtering from the Policies tab to begin enforcing the policies that you created and capturing event logs.

5. Bring Zero Trust rules to your SaaS applications

If you don’t have self-hosted applications, or also use SaaS applications, you can still bring the same Zero Trust rules to the SaaS applications that your team uses with Cloudflare Access for SaaS – wherever they live. With Access for SaaS, companies can now centrally manage user access and security monitoring for all applications.

You can integrate Cloudflare Access as an identity provider to any SaaS application that supports SAML SSO. That integration will send all login attempts through Cloudflare’s network to your configured identity providers and enforce rules that you control.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Access for SaaS still includes the ability to run multiple identity providers simultaneously. When users login to the SaaS application, they’ll be prompted to pick the identity provider they need, or we’ll send them directly to the only provider you want to use for that application.

How small businesses can start using Cloudflare One today

Once deployed, Access for SaaS gives your team high visibility, with low effort, into every login to both internal and SaaS applications. You can use the new Access for SaaS feature as part of the Cloudflare for Teams free plan for up to 50 users.

6. Soon: Protect small business office networks

Cloudflare’s Magic Transit™ product takes everything we learned protecting our own network from IP-layer attacks and extends that security to our customers who operate their own IP address space. By protecting that network, customers also benefit from performant and reliable IP connectivity to the Internet.

Today, some of the largest enterprises in the world rely on Magic Transit to keep their business safe from attack. We plan to extend that same protection and connectivity to teams who operate smaller networks in upcoming releases.

What’s next?

Cloudflare One represents our vision for the future of the corporate network, and we’re just getting started adding products and features that help teams move to that model. That said, your team shouldn’t have to wait to begin connecting through Cloudflare and securing your data and applications with our network.

To get started, sign up for a Cloudflare account and follow the steps above.  If you have any questions on setting up Cloudflare One as a small business, or large enterprise, please let us know in this community forum post.

BBC Micro:bit with boosted specs and onboard mic to go on sale from next month

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16KB RAM becomes 128KB as the Beeb gets down with the kids again

As the nights draw in, Auntie Beeb has given schoolkids and hobbyists a much-needed something to look forward to in the next few weeks an updated BBC Micro:bit.…

DroneDeploy teams with Boston Dynamics to deliver inside-outside view of job site

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DroneDeploy, a cloud software company that uses drone footage to help industries like agriculture, oil and gas and construction get a birds-eye view of a site to build a 3D picture, announced a new initiative today that combines drone photos with cameras on the ground or even ground robots from a company like Boston Dynamics for what it is calling a 360 Walkthrough.

Up until today’s announcement, DroneDeploy could use drone footage from any drone to get a picture of what a site looked like outside, uploading those photos and stitching them together into a 3D model that is accurate within an inch, according to DroneDeploy CEO Mike Winn.

Winn says that while there is great value in getting this type of view of the outside of a job site, customers were hungry for a total picture that included inside and out, and the platform which is simply processing photos transmitted from drones could be adapted fairly easily to accommodate photos coming from cameras on other devices.

“Our customers are also looking to get data from the interiors, and they’re looking for one digital twin, one digital reconstruction of their entire site to understand what’s going on to share across their company with the safety team and with executives that this is the status of the job site today,” Winn explained.

He adds that this is even more important during COVID when access to job sites has been limited, making it even more important to understand the state of the site on a regular basis.

“They want fewer people on those job sites, only the essential workers doing the work. So for anyone who needs information about the site, if they can get that information from a desktop or the 3D model or a kind of street view of the job site, it can really help in this COVID environment, but it also makes it much more efficient,” Winn said.

He said that while companies could combine this capability with fixed cameras on the inside of a site, they don’t give the kind of coverage a ground robot could, and the Boston Dynamics robot is capable of moving around a rough job site with debris scattered around.

DroneDeploy bird's eye view of job site showing path taken through the site.

Image Credits: DroneDeploy

While Winn sees the use of the Boston Dynamics robot as more of an end goal, he says that more likely for the immediate future, you will have a human walking through the job site with a camera to capture the footage to complete the inside-outside picture for the DroneDeploy software.

“All customers already want to adopt robots to collect this data, and you can imagine a Boston Dynamics robot [doing this], but that’s the end state of course. Today we’re supporting the human walk-through as well, a person with a 360 camera walking through the job site, probably doing it once a week to documents the status of the job sites,” he said.

DroneDeploy launched in 2013 and has raised over $100 million, according to Winn. He reports his company has over 5000 customers with drone flight time increasing by 2.5x YoY this year as more companies adopt drones as a way to cope with COVID.

Azure IoT Edge 1.0.10 release is now available

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The Azure IoT Edge 1.0.10 release is available with support for diagnostic metrics, message priorities, module startup order, and arrays in twins.

Scania is testing a solar truck trailer to see how much fuel it could save

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Solar panels have been installed on EVs like Hyundai’s Sonata Hybrid, but they can’t boost mileage much because of the small surface area. A typical semi-truck trailer, on the other hand, has the same surface as a medium-sized house. With that in min…

Visualize your GCP landscape

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Hey all,

I work for Google’s (Professional Services Organisation) and I wanted to get your input on a new tool I released: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/tree/master/tools/gcpviz

If you’re not familiar, our PSO org makes most of the things we build freely available in the above repo. (You’ll find my other tool, gcs2bq, there as well)

submitted by /u/rosmo to r/googlecloud
[link] [comments]

Time for a virtual love affair: ESXi-Arm Fling flung onto the web for peeps to test drive with Raspberry Pi 4, other kit

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Totally not-safe-for-production 64-bit Arm hypervisor port released for evaluation, sell the SmartNIC this smartNIC idea, etc

VMware on Monday released the first public spin of its ESXi bare-metal hypervisor for selected 64-bit Arm systems.…

Azure Communication Services SMS and Telephony now available in Public Preview

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Build engaging communication experiences with the same secure platform used by Microsoft Teams. Add video, voice, SMS, chat, and telephony capabilities into almost any web, mobile, or desktop application.

Chocolatey Central Management v0.3.1 is now available (C4B)

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Howdy, We've just released Chocolatey Central Management (CCM) v0.3.1. This is a bug fix release.

Also see our guide on upgrades at https://chocolatey.org/docs/central-management-setup-upgrade. Installation guide is at https://chocolatey.org/docs/central-management-setup

Noted Changes * Service Install – Allow skipping certificate binding with package parameter /SkipCertificateBinding * Fix – Web – Invalid LDAP credentials/URL should not prevent login for ccmadmin user * Fix – Service Install – Netsh Entries Incorrectly Parsed ("Cannot index into a null array") when installing in different locales [#74]

The full release notes can be found at https://chocolatey.org/docs/release-notes-central-management.

NVIDIA RTX A6000 48GB GPU NVIDIA Drops Quadro Designation

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The NVIDIA RTX A6000 is an actively cooled 48GB GDDR6 GPU that slots Ampere into what we would previously be considered a “Quadro” segment for the company

The post NVIDIA RTX A6000 48GB GPU NVIDIA Drops Quadro Designation appeared first on ServeTheHome.

NVIDIA BlueField-2 and BlueField-2X DPU Offerings Launched

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NVIDIA BlueField-2 and BlueField-2X DPU offerings are launched as the next step in the NVIDIA data center vision alongside its new DOCA software stack

The post NVIDIA BlueField-2 and BlueField-2X DPU Offerings Launched appeared first on ServeTheHome.

Obsidian, a SFF pc built on a picture frame

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https://ift.tt/34svJRC