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Microsoft Azure now lets you have a server all to yourself
Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Dedicated Host, a new cloud service that will allow you to run your virtual machines on single-tenant physical services. That means you’re not sharing any resources on that server with anybody else and you’ll get full control over everything that’s running on that machine.
Previously, Azure already offered isolated Virtual Machine sizes for two very large virtual machine types. Those are still available, but their use cases are comparably limited to these new hosts, which offer far more flexibility.
With this move, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS, which also offers Dedicated Hosts with very similar capabilities. Google Cloud, too, offers what it calls “sole-tenant nodes.”
Azure Dedicated Host will support Windows, Linux and SQL Server virtual machines and pricing is per host, independent of the number of virtual machines you end up running on them. You can currently opt for machines with up to 48 physical cores and prices start at $4.039 per hour.
To do this, Microsoft is offering two different processors to power these machines. Type 1 is based on the 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 with up to 3.5 gigahertz of clock speed, while Type 2 features the Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 with single-core clock speeds of up to 3.7 gigahertz. The available memory ranges from 144GiB to 448GiB. You can find more details here.
As Microsoft notes, these new dedicated hosts can help companies reach their compliance requirements for physical security, data integrity and monitoring. The dedicated hosts still share the same underlying infrastructure as any other host in the Azure data centers, but users have full control over any maintenance window that could impact their servers.
These dedicated hosts can also be grouped into larger host groups in a given Azure region, allowing you to build clusters of your own physical servers inside the Azure data center. Because you’re actually renting a physical machine, any hardware issue on that machine will impact the virtual machines you are running on them, so chances are you’ll want to have multiple dedicated hosts for your failover strategy anyway.
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Microsoft brings Plug and Play to IoT
Microsoft today announced that it wants to bring the ease of use of Plug and Play, which today allows you to plug virtually any peripheral into a Windows PC without having to worry about drivers, to IoT devices. Typically, getting an IoT device connected and up and running takes some work, even with modern deployment tools. The promise of IoT Plug and Play is that it will greatly simplify this process and do away with the hardware and software configuration steps that are still needed today.
As Azure corporate vice president Julia White writes in today’s announcement, “one of the biggest challenges in building IoT solutions is to connect millions of IoT devices to the cloud due to heterogeneous nature of devices today – such as different form factors, processing capabilities, operational system, memory and capabilities.” This, Microsoft argues, is holding back IoT adoption.
IoT Plug and Play, on the other hand, offers developers an open modeling language that will allow them to connect these devices to the cloud without having to write any code.
Microsoft can’t do this alone, though, since it needs the support of the hardware and software manufacturers in its IoT ecosystem, too. The company has already signed up a number of partners, including Askey, Brainium, Compal, Kyocera, STMicroelectronics, Thundercomm and VIA Technologies . The company says that dozens of devices are already Plug and Play-ready and potential users can find them in the Azure IoT Device Catalog.
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The consumer version of BBM is shutting down on May 31
It might be time to move on from BBM. The consumer version of the BlackBerry Messenger will shut down on May 31. Emtek, the Indonesia-based company that partnered with BlackBerry in 2016, just announced the closure. It’s important to note, BBM will still exist and BlackBerry today revealed a plan to open its enterprise-version of BBM to general consumers.
Starting today, BBM Enterprise will be available through the Google Play Store and eventually from the Apple App Store. The service will be free for one year and after that, $2.49 for six months of service. This version of the software, like the consumer version, still features group chats, voice and video calls and the ability to edit and retract messages.
As explained by BlackBerry, BBMe features end-to-end encryption:
BBMe can be downloaded on any device that uses Android, iOS, Windows or MAC operating systems. The sender and recipient each have unique public/private encryption and signing keys. These keys are generated on the device by a FIPS 140-2 certified cryptographic library and are not controlled by BlackBerry. Each message uses a new symmetric key for message encryption. Additionally, TLS encryption between the device and BlackBerry’s infrastructure protects BBMe messages from eavesdropping or manipulation.
BBM is one of the oldest smartphone messaging services. Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s original name, released the messenger in 2005. It quickly became a selling point for BlackBerry devices. BBM wasn’t perfect and occasionally crashed, but it was a robust, feature-filled messaging app when most of the world was still using SMS. Eventually, with the downfall of RIM and eventually BlackBerry, BBM fell behind iMessage, WhatsApp and other independent messaging platforms. Emtek’s partnership with BlackBerry was supposed to bring the service into the current age, but some say the consumer version ended up bloated with games, channels and ads. BlackBerry’s BBMe lacks a lot of those extra features, so consumers might find it a better platform for communicating.
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Homeland Security warns of security flaws in enterprise VPN apps
Several enterprise virtual private networking apps are vulnerable to a security bug that can allow an attacker to remotely break into a company’s internal network, according to a warning issued by Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division.
An alert was published Friday by the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency following a public disclosure by CERT/CC, the vulnerability disclosure center at Carnegie Mellon University.
The VPN apps built by four vendors — Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Pulse Secure and F5 Networks — improperly store authentication tokens and session cookies on a user’s computer. These aren’t your traditional consumer VPN apps used to protect your privacy, but enterprise VPN apps that are typically rolled out by a company’s IT staff to allow remote workers to access resources on a company’s network.
The apps generate tokens from a user’s password and are stored on their computer to keep the user logged in without having to reenter their password every time. But if stolen, these tokens can allow access to that user’s account without needing their password.
But with access to a user’s computer — such as through malware — an attacker could steal those tokens and use them to gain access to a company’s network with the same level of access as the user. That includes company apps, systems and data.
So far, only Palo Alto Networks has confirmed its GlobalProtect app was vulnerable. The company issued a patch for both its Windows and Mac clients.
Neither Cisco nor Pulse Secure have patched their apps. F5 Networks is said to have known about storing since at least 2013 but advised users to roll out two-factor authentication instead of releasing a patch.
CERT warned that hundreds of other apps could be affected — but more testing was required.
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Cloud Foundry ❤ Kubernetes
Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service project that more than half of the Fortune 500 companies use to help them build, test and deploy their applications, launched well before Kubernetes existed. Because of this, the team ended up building Diego, its own container management service. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of Kubernetes, which has become somewhat of the de facto standard for container orchestration, a number of companies in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem starting looking into how they could use Kubernetes to replace Diego.
The result of this is Project Eirini, which was first proposed by IBM. As the Cloud Foundry Foundation announced today, Project Eirini now passes the core functional tests the team runs to validate the software releases of its application runtime, the core Cloud Foundry service that deploys and manages applications (if that’s a bit confusing, don’t even think about the fact that there’s also a Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, which already uses Kubernetes, but which is mostly meant to give enterprise a single platform for running their own applications and pre-built containers from third-party vendors).
“That’s a pretty big milestone,” Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me. “The project team now gets to shift to a mode where they’re focused on hardening the solution and making it a bit more production-ready. But at this point, early adopters are also starting to deploy that [new] architecture.”
Childers stressed that while the project was incubated by IBM, which has been a long-time backer of the overall Cloud Foundry project, Google, Pivotal and others are now also contributing and have dedicated full-time engineers working on the project. In addition, SUSE, SAP and IBM are also active in developing Eirini.
Eirini started as an incubation project, and while few doubted that this would be a successful project, there was a bit of confusion around how Cloud Foundry would move forward now that it essentially had two container engines for running its core service. At the time, there was even some concern that the project could fork. “I pushed back at the time and said: no, this is the natural exploration process that open-source communities need to go through,” Childers said. “What we’re seeing now is that with Pivotal and Google stepping in, that’s a very clear sign that this is going to be the go-forward architecture for the future of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.”
A few months ago, by the way, Kubernetes was still missing a few crucial pieces the Cloud Foundry ecosystem needed to make this move. Childers specifically noted that Windows support — something the project’s enterprise users really need — was still problematic and lacked some important features. In recent releases, though, the Kubernetes team fixed most of these issues and improved its Windows support, rendering those issues moot.
What does all of this mean for Diego? Childers noted that the community isn’t at a point where it’ll hold developing that tool. At some point, though, it seems likely that the community will decide that it’s time to start the transition period and make the move to Kubernetes official.
It’s worth noting that IBM today announced its own preview of Eirini in its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment and that the latest version of SUSE’s Cloud Foundry-based Application Platform includes a similar preview as well.
In addition, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which is hosting its semi-annual developer conference in Philadelphia this week, also announced that it has certified it first to systems integrators, Accenture and HCL as part of its recently launched certification program for companies that work in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and have at least 10 certified developers on their teams.
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Windows Virtual Desktop is now in public preview
Last year, Microsoft announced the launch of its Windows Virtual Desktop service. At the time, this was a private preview, but starting today, any enterprise user who wants to try out what using a virtual Windows 10 desktop that’s hosted in the Azure cloud looks like will be able to give it a try.
It’s worth noting that this is very much a product for businesses. You’re not going to use this to play Apex Legends on a virtual machine somewhere in the cloud. The idea here is that a service like this, which also includes access to Office 365 ProPlus, makes managing machines and the software that runs on them easier for enterprises. It also allows employers in regulated industries to provide their mobile workers with a virtual desktop that ensures that all of their precious data remains secure.
One stand-out feature here is that businesses can run multiple Windows 10 sessions on a single virtual machine.
It’s also worth noting that many of the features of this service are powered by technology from FSLogix, which Microsoft acquired last year. Specifically, these technologies allow Microsoft to give the non-persistent users relatively fast access to applications like their Outlook and OneDrive applications, for example.
For most Microsoft 365 enterprise customers, access to this service is simply part of the subscription cost they already pay — though they will need an Azure subscription and to pay for the virtual machines that run in the cloud.
Right now, the service is only available in the US East 2 and US Central Azure regions. Over time, and once the preview is over, Microsoft will expand it to all of its cloud regions.
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Microsoft Defender comes to the Mac
Microsoft today announced that it is bringing its Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to the Mac. Previously, this was a Windows solution for protecting the machines of Microsoft 365 subscribers and assets of the IT admins that try to keep them safe. It was also previously called Windows Defender ATP, but given that it is now on the Mac, too, Microsoft decided to drop the “Windows Defender” moniker in favor or “Microsoft Defender.”
“For us, it’s all about experiences that follow the person and help the individual be more productive,” Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Office and Windows, told me. “Just like we did with Office back in the day — that was a big move for us to move it off of Windows-only — but it was absolutely the right thing. So that’s where we’re headed.”
He stressed that this means that Microsoft is moving off its “Windows-centric approach to life.” He likened it to bringing the Office apps to the iPad and Android. “We’re just headed in that same direction of saying that it’s our intent that we can secure every endpoint so that this Microsoft 365 experience is not just Windows-centric,” Spataro said. Indeed, he argued that the news here isn’t even so much the launch of this service for the Mac but that Microsoft is reorienting the way it thinks about how it can deliver value for Microsoft 365 clients.
Given that Microsoft Defender is part of the Microsoft 365 package, you may wonder why those users would even care about the Mac, but there are plenty of enterprises that use a mix of Windows machines and Mac, and which provide all of their employees with Office already. Having a security solution that spans both systems can greatly reduce complexity for IT departments — and keeping up with security vulnerabilities on one system is hard enough to begin with.
In addition to the launch of the Mac version of Microsoft Defender ATP, the company also today announced the launch of new threat and vulnerability management capabilities for the service. Over the last few months, Microsoft had already launched a number of new features that help businesses proactively monitor and identify security threats.
“What we’re hearing from customers now is that the landscape is getting increasingly sophisticated, the volume of alerts that we’re starting to get is pretty overwhelming,” Spataro said. “We really don’t have the budget to hire the thousands of people required to sort through all this and figure out what to do.”
So with this new tool, Microsoft uses its machine learning smarts to prioritize threads and present them to its customers for remediation.
To Spataro, these announcements come down to the fact that Microsoft is slowly morphing into more of a security company than ever before. “I think we’ve made a lot more progress than people realize,” he said. “And it’s been driven by the market.” He noted that its customers have long asked Microsoft to help them protect their endpoints. Now, he argues, customers have realized that Microsoft is moving to this person-centric approach (instead of a Windows-centric one) and that the company may now be able to help them protect large parts of their systems. At the same time, Microsoft realized that it could use all of the billions of signals it gets from its users to better help its customers proactively.
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Microsoft Edge on mobile now includes a built-in fake news detector
In 2019, we still don’t really know what to do about fake news. With nothing to disincentivize viral hyperpartisan headlines and other exercises in confirmation bias, online misinformation seems to run as rampant as ever. It’s a tricky problem, particularly because it’s one that requires the readers most drawn to too outrageous to be true news to challenge their beliefs. In other words, without some kind of technical solution or massive cultural shift, the fake news dilemma won’t be solving itself any time soon.
That being said, Microsoft’s mobile Edge browser is taking a modest swing at it. On Android and iOS, the Microsoft Edge app now installs with a built-in fake news detector called NewsGuard. The partnership is an extension of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program, and NewsGuard for Edge was first announced earlier this month.
While NewsGuard isn’t on by default, anyone using Edge can enable it with a simple toggle in the settings menu. When I downloaded the app to test it, Edge actually nudged me to the Settings menu and then to an option called News Rating (this enables NewsGuard) with a small blue dot. The dot wasn’t an alarm-red notification but would probably be notable enough to pique my interest and point me to the setting, even if I wasn’t writing this story.
For now, NewsGuard’s ratings concentrate on U.S.-based websites, but major sites abroad are included too. TechCrunch received a healthy green check on NewsGuard, indicating that we maintain “basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” Clicking the green badge next to the address bar presented an option to review TechCrunch’s full “nutrition label” — a rundown of pertinent information like our ownership and financing, content and credibility. The information was pretty nuanced, right down to the insight that “opinion pieces are not always clearly labeled,” which is fair enough. It even included an example of a corrected story and how we handled it. As The Guardian noted, the Daily Mail didn’t fare quite so well.
The editorial deep-dives that influence NewsGuard’s ratings are impressive, though they do exemplify another issue that makes fighting fake news particularly tricky. Even if news sources are evaluated across a matrix of factors, there’s still some degree of subjective assessment necessary to make these decisions. While there are plenty of entities that could be making these calls, how do we reach a consensus on who should be doing it?
NewsGuard is co-led by Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill. Like other editorially minded news experiments, NewsGuard relies on a human team instead of algorithms. The company counts former CIA director General Michael Hayden and The Information founder Jessica Lessin among its advisors.
Edge isn’t a very popular browser, but it still makes an interesting case study in the intractable war against low-quality information online. It also illustrates the central Catch 22 of the fake news era: The users who need a fake news detector the most are the least likely to use one. Microsoft’s Edge experiment with NewsGuard isn’t a solution to that issue, but baking some kind of news verification tool right into the browser does feel like a step in a compelling direction.
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The annual PornHub year in review tells us what we’re really looking at online
PornHub, a popular site that features people in various stages of undress, saw 33.5 billion visits in 2018. There are currently 7.53 billion people on Earth.
Y’all have been busy.
The company, which owns most of the major porn sites online, produces a yearly report that aggregates user behavior on the site. Of particular interest, aside from the fact that all of us are horndogs, is that the U.S., Germany and India are in the top spots for porn browsing and that the company transferred 4,000 petabytes of data, or about 500 MB, per person on the planet.
We ignore this data at our peril. While it doesn’t seem important at first glance, the fact that these porn sites are doing more traffic than most major news organizations is deeply telling. Further, like the meme worlds of Twitter and Facebook, Stormy Daniels and Fortnite made the top searches, which points to the spread of politics and culture into the heart of our desires. TV manufacturers should note that 4K searchers are rising in popularity, which suggests that consumer electronics manufacturers should start getting read for a shift (although it should be noted that there is sadly little free 4K content on these sites, a discovery I just made while researching this brief.)
Need more frightening/enlightening data? Here you go.
Just as ‘1080p’ searches had been a defining term in 2017, now ‘4k’ ultra-hd has seen a significant increase in popularity through-out 2018. The popularity of ‘Romantic’ videos more than doubled, and remained twice as popular with female visitors when compared to men.
Searches referring to the dating app ‘Tinder’ grew by 161% among women, 113% among men and 131% by visitors aged 35 to 44. It was also a top trending term in many countries including the United Kingdom and Australia. The number of Tinder themed fantasy date videos on the site is now more than 3500.
Life imitates art, and eventually porn imitates everything, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see that ‘Bowsette’ also made our list of searches that defined 2018. After the original Nintendo fan-art went viral, searches for Bowsette exceeded 3 million in just one week and resulted in the release of a live-action Bowsette themed porn parody (NSFW) with more than 720,000 views.
Bowsette. Good. Moving on.
The Bible Belt represented well in the showings, with Mississippi, South Carolina and Arkansas spending the most time looking at porn. Kansas spent the least. Phones got the most use as porn distribution devices and iOS and Android nearly tied in terms of platform popularity.
Windows traffic fell considerably this year, while Chrome OS became decidedly more popular in 2018. Chrome was popular when it came to browsers used, while the PlayStation was the biggest deliverer of flicks to the console user.
Porn is a the canary in the tech coal mine, and where it goes the rest of tech follows. All of these data points, taken together, paint a fascinating picture of a world on the cusp of a fairly unique shift from desktop to mobile and from HD to 4K video. Further, given that these sites are delivering so much data on a daily basis, it’s clear that all of us are sneaking a peek now and again… even if we refuse to admit it.
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Microsoft will soon automatically transcribe video files in OneDrive for Office 365 subscribers
Microsoft today announced a couple of AI-centric updates for OneDrive and SharePoint users with an Office 365 subscription that bring more of the company’s machine learning smarts to its file storage services.
All of these features will launch at some point later this year. With the company’s Ignite conference in Orlando coming up next month, it’s probably a fair guess that we’ll see some of these updates make a reappearance there.
The highlight of these announcements is that starting later this year, both services will get automated transcription services for video and audio files. While video is great, it’s virtually impossible to find any information in these files without spending a lot of time. And once you’ve found it, you still have to transcribe it. Microsoft says this new service will handle the transcription automatically and then display the transcript as you’re watching the video. The service can handle over 320 file types, so chances are it’ll work with your files, too.
Other updates the company today announced include a new file view for OneDrive and Office.com that will recommend files to you by looking at what you’ve been working on lately across the Microsoft 365 and making an educated guess as to what you’ll likely want to work on now. Microsoft will also soon use a similar set of algorithms to prompt you to share files with your colleagues after you’ve just presented them in a meeting with PowerPoint, for example.
Power users will also soon see access statistics for any file in OneDrive and SharePoint.
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