fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
A Late-night, Late Semester Reflection on Christmas Eve
Tags: College, Students, Goals, Christmas

It’s quite late so apologies if this makes no sense. The results of my semester surprised me, which hasn’t happened since my first semester of college (that went so badly I was motivated to start this Medium in the first place).

I am writing this because I was disappointed in one of my grades. Even though it was just one A-, I felt like I could have done better. I was 0.5% away from an A, which is a horrible feeling.

Here’s what I think happened:

Job applications and internships: work (and by work, I mean career work not school work) drained me in the beginning. This is different from last year fall because instead of focusing on applications and abandoning school in the beginning, I was actually trying really hard on school and doing less on applications (or basically trying to balance both and putting tons of effort into both).

This leads to burn out.

This semester, I learned burn out is real. You can overwork yourself in the beginning too much if you don’t have balance (which is already hard enough with online school because I basically never had fun).

Then, by the end of the semester, I was dying. I was really, really over it. I think the main reason I even made it through was dedication to finish, not giving up, and the foundation I had laid for myself in the beginning of the semester.

Moral of the story? Focus on one thing at a time and do it good. Know your limits and don’t push past them because you will suffer later.

I am learning more and more about balance in life and work, which is something I want to enforce for the rest of my life. I really suffered from a lack of motivation this semester because I questioned why grades and maintaining a 4.0 was even important. As you saw from my posts of each semester, I had a clearcut goal that I was motivated by (getting a 4.0 to prove to myself that I could do better than in high school, keeping it up so I could show I wasn’t just a one-hit wonder, getting on the Dean’s List).

When I had a specific goal, I met it. I didn’t have any goal this semester other than do well, get all A’s. When you have a goal like that with no motivation behind it, there’s really no driving force when things get hard. That’s what happened to me during finals.

So on the plus side, me getting this A- will push me during my next semester where I’m focused on school as my main priority, so that I have an incentive to not mess up again (with 0.5% away) because frankly, it sucks. This feeling of getting so close, yet missing it because of a mistake you could’ve fixed in the last 2 weeks of school sucks. It feels like I’ve wasted all the work I did in the first 10 weeks to make sure I would have a nice cushion for an A.

That’s motivation for next time.

You got this,

Qi
YouthInU
By: Monisha Kannamangalam Gowrisankar
Tags: Part Time Jobs, Jobs Near Me, College, Jobs, Scholarship

I am Monisha K Gowrisankar, hail from a small village town in southern Indian state TamilNadu. I am currently a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley. And stepping into my entrepreneurial journey with YouthInU. I had tried to give shape to many crazy ideas during my college days right from building a software to help the friendly mom-and-pop retail stores to aiding blind students with an online repository of all books being made available in audio format. Mind you, these were days when I had to go to a café or college maintained facility for access to the internet. Then life happened with work (and more work) and marriage and then kids.

It has been 12 years since college. Now that this is the right time for me to bootstrap and start, I want to do something that will enable other Monishas’ of the world to chase their ambitions without the wait of 12 years. So, YouthInU is all about to providing that right opportunity to the college students, and create a pathway to their passion. Our mission is to connect the youth to the right employers across globe.
How to be productive
By: Kaitlyn Dickinson
Tags: Reflections, College, Planning, Burnout, Productivity

If you are reading this, it means you have somehow stumbled upon the story of a 21-year-old college student with 2 followers on Medium, good job! I am making the assumption that this was either a mistake or you are very desperate. Regardless, I encourage you to read for a minute or two and you might get a new sliver of information you can apply in your life.

I’ve read many productivity articles, watched YouTube videos telling me how I can organize to change my life, and self-reflected a bunch to see how I can improve. But I always seem to end back in the same spot, thinking more about how to be productive than well, actually being productive.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from productivity guides, it’s that they are not tailored for you, and what works for someone else can very likely not work for you.

My advice on how to be productive is to honestly throw all of the productivity articles and videos out the window and focus on things that work for you. I’m not saying you should never read or watch one again (well, kinda), but if you stop and actually think about your jobs, school, lifestyle; when have you been the most productive, when have you been the laziest, you will soon realize that you have full control over what you want to achieve, rather than waste time thinking about how to achieve it.

I do admit that I feel like a fraud writing this, because what do I know? I’m a young adult in college still trying to find out myself and what works best for me. But as an engineering student, when I reflect I find that the most productive I’ve been is where I don’t take time to look at what works for others, I hit the ground running and do what works best for me.

I do use planners still, but more as a guideline than a strict schedule because that had me feeling burnt out. I use Trello, a project management software, to plan tasks I want to get done each week with due-dates. This way I can pick and choose which task I feel the most passionate about working on and get it done the fastest, rather than dreading the strict schedule I set for myself.

I try to use the Pomodoro technique a lot now because I noticed it helps me from feeling overwhelmed, being able to take breaks. However, I don’t always use it like some people say you should do because there are times where I need to sit down with a piece of code for a few hours and grind it out to get the project done. Everything is situational.

I hope this article wasn’t a huge waste of time, cheers on being productive!
Hi:)
By: H
Tags: First Post, College, New Writers, Journal

Hi:)

This is the disclaimer that this will not be a very serious dispensary of writing. The grammar will be poor and the rhetoric just alright. I am giving this warning because if anyone reads this…well good luck.

Now, since that has been established let me introduce myself. My name is H. I’m a 19 year old average American college student. A sorority girl even. I know you’re probably picturing the stereotype blonde bombshell but trust me that is farthest from the truth.

Recently, I have ruined my life in multiple ways which I will eventually explain.

It involves boys, best friends, a worldwide pandemic and crippling depression. The perfect combination for a fuck up storm to blow up you’re whole life. Or my whole life.

The reason I’m writing is to use this as an outlet to make sense of my life, or more so how it got fucked up. I figured this may be the only way to fix it.

There is a beautiful Charles Dickens quote that goes “suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.”

This quote determines me to turn things around. That because I have I hope, my past has not won.

Whoever you are, I hope you enjoy the shit show that was my life.

Welcome ;)

H
最暖年度CEO》加護病房陪腦麻兒子，納德拉轉念改造微軟
Tags: Microsoft, Satya Nadella

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
Run a Hackathon or Classroom Labs in Azure
By: Kumar Allamraju
Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Teams, Azure, Microsoft Azure

Getting Started

Setting up Azure Lab Services is a multi-step process. You first create a Lab Account in your Azure subscription.

You can also attach a Shared Image Gallery to version your custom images as well as peer a virtual network to access resources in your VNet. For this demo, I’m going to skip these two options.

Once the lab account is created, go to https://labs.azure.com The Lab VMs are running in Microsoft’s managed tenant so you’ll not see any VMs in your subscription.

Create a new Lab, provide VM credentials and set the Lab policies. The lab creation will take at least 20 minutes.

Make sure to pick the right VM size that supports your lab.

Once the lab is provisioned, you should see something like below

Click on the lab that you just created.

You will see the Lab’s Dashboard. From here you can work on the Template, add VM pool, add Users and the Lab schedule.

Click on Template. Initially the template will be in Stopped State. Go ahead and start the template. RDP in to the template VM. This is like a base image VM in which you’ll install all your custom software. Now you’ll see an option to Publish the VM. This is the image that you’ll use to create Lab VMs or create new Labs in the future.

You can set the max VMs now or you can set the max VMs after the template is published.

Invite Students/Users to the Lab

You’ll see options to manually add users or upload a CSV.

Click on Invite all to send an invite to your students. Once the user completes the registration, they’ll get access to https://labs.azure.com and RDP into their Lab VM.

Set a Lab Schedule

As an example I created a lab schedule for a week from 8 am to 5 pm.

This is a just quick overview of Azure Lab Services. There’s an excellent documentation on Azure Lab Services. I highly recommend you to go through the docs and consider using Azure Lab Services to conduct any hackathon or classroom labs in the Cloud.
五小時攻略微軟雲端證照 // AZ-900 準備秘笈
By: 楊智堯, Kevin Yang
Tags: Microsoft, Az 900 考古題, Certification, Azure Fundamentals, Azure

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
Peekaboo we see GRU (part 1)
By: Peekaboo We See Gru
Tags: Microsoft, Infosec, Phishing, Sysmon, Windows 10

This image shows the route a postal worker (mailman) takes each day to deliver mail to several hundred homes. If this delivery person was an “attacker”, this information would be essential to help catch them and identify homes that might have evidence that can be used to stop the criminal gang in the future.

For Microsoft Windows computers, Sysmon is free and one of the best tools an administrator can use to detect malicious events on host computers and throughout the company network.

When an email arrives in a users inbox, administrators hope that malicious emails have been filtered out. If a malicious (phishing) email is able to bypass those first layers of protection, we hope the user doesn’t do something that allows the attacker to control the user’s computer. Today it is common for attackers to gain code execution on user’s systems. Once we have accepted this reality we need to think about how to detect these events.

In part one of this series, we won’t repeat information about Sysmon setup and config that has already been explained well by others. If you don’t have Sysmon installed, please check out these guides. One of the core data sources for this series is Sysmon. Without Sysmon, we won’t know what parts of our network are under the attackers control.

How to install and use Sysmon for malware investigation (sophos.com)

Getting Started With Sysmon — Black Hills Information Security (blackhillsinfosec.com)

Splunking with Sysmon Series Part 1: The Setup | Hurricane Labs
Boost your productivity skills with this awesome Windows 10 feature!
By: Dler Ari
Tags: Microsoft, Windows 10, Programming, Development, Productivity

How to enable the Clipboard history

The only two prerequisites required to get started is to run the latest version of Windows 10 and activate it which takes seconds to do because it is already installed on your computer. Additionally, it takes seconds to learn and utilize the tool. It is also important to note that it does not change anything except make you more productive.

There are two ways of activating the clipboard history; the first one is to open the start menu and search “clipboard”, open “Clipboard settings”, and then enable it.

The other way is to type windows key + v which opens a minimized window as shown below.

Once you activate it, the following sections will now explain how to use it. If you cannot find it make sure you are running the latest version of Windows 10.

Paste copied item

It is worth knowing that clipboard history does not change how you copy and paste things, but adds a graphical interface to make the process more intuitive. Everything you need to know to access it can found by typing windows key + v .

This opens up a graphical toolbar on the page that shows the list or history of copied items. To paste something you simply click on one of the items you want to paste, it can be an image, a text, or whatever the copy feature supports.

Delete copied item

Say you work as a software developer and when you share your screen and use the clipboard history, you probably do not want everyone in the team to see it, perhaps, it is sensitive information.

If you copy something and want to remove it, you can either remove a single item or clear the whole list. These two options can be found when you hover over the item you want to handle.

Note: the Clear all button is only visible once you hover over an item, this should have been on top somewhere because it applies to all items.

Save copied item

What if you copy a password that you need shortly? With the clipboard history, you can easily achieve this.

To save a copied item, click on the Pin button. Later on, if you want to clear everything, the items that are pinned will not be removed. This is useful when you do not want to keep track of sensitive information or other things that have been copied.

Summary

The clipboard history is not a replacement for the conventional way of doing copy and paste, but an improvement that has always been needed but never thought about, or maybe, but never implemented! The first thing that came to my mind when hearing about this tool is that I did not feel comfortable putting copied items somewhere that is visible and accessible; one for security reasons, and the other for personal reasons.

However, after using clipboard history the reasons are not that critical in terms of the productivity and flexibility it offers.

One personal tip to the Microsoft team behind this awesome tool is to find a way to blur it when used in screen-sharing sessions. Apart from that, I highly recommend anyone to give it a try.
Manage Azure Resources using Automation tasks — new way
By: Kumar Allamraju
Tags: Microsoft, Automation, Virtual Machine, Azure

During the Christmas break (CY2020), I was catching up on Azure updates and came across this feature in Azure Portal. I felt it’s worth sharing.

To help you manage Azure resources more easily, we can create automated management tasks for a specific resource or resource group by using automation task templates. Today you can schedule a shutdown time for an Azure VM. You’ll find this under your VM’s >> Operations >> Auto-shutdown section

We can also use Azure Automation runbooks to schedule VM startup/shutdown at scale.

Azure now provides a new way to schedule start/stop Azure VMs. For an Azure virtual machine, you can create an automation task that starts/stops an Azure virtual machine on a predefined schedule. Behind the scenes, an automation task is actually a workflow that runs on the Azure Logic Apps service and is billed using the same pricing rates and pricing model.

Important: This capability is in public preview, is provided without a service level agreement, and is not recommended for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities.

Let’s get started

Prerequisites

An Azure account and subscription. If you don’t have a subscription, sign up for a free Azure account.

The Azure resource that you want to manage. This article uses an Azure Virtual Machine as the example.

An Office 365 account if you want to follow along with the example, which sends you email by using Office 365 Outlook.

Create Automation Tasks

Login to the Azure Portal: https://portal.azure.com Go to your VM >> Automation >> Tasks

3. Click on +Add and add 2 tasks: one for Start and the other task to Power off the Virtual Machine

You can repeat the same process to Power off the VMs. You’ll see 2 Logic Apps and the corresponding API connections in your resource group or Logic Apps view

That’s it. Your VMs will start/stop at the scheduled times. Now a question arises. How are Automation tasks differ from the Azure Automation?

Automation tasks are more basic and lightweight than Azure Automation and can only be created at the resource level. By comparison, Azure Automation is a cloud-based automation and configuration service that supports consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. The service comprises process automation for orchestrating processes by using runbooks, configuration management with change tracking and inventory, update management, shared capabilities, and heterogeneous features. Automation gives you complete control (at scale) during deployment, operations, and decommissioning of workloads and resources.

This is a nice feature to keep in mind if you are flexible to manage at the resource level. IMHO, this new (preview) method is lot better than the original method. I’m hopeful Azure will continue to add more automation tasks in the near future. Pls give it a try.

References

Managed Azure Resource using Logic Apps

Start/Stop VMs using Azure Automation Accounts
2020 was a lot of things, but don’t forget it was also the 25th anniversary of Windows 95.
By: Kaushik Viswanath
Tags: Microsoft, Windows 95, Christmas, Nostalgia, Tech

2020 was a lot of things, but don’t forget it was also the 25th anniversary of Windows 95. If you’re feeling nostalgic for the halcyon days of Windows’ pixelated yet iconic flag ‘Start’ button but don’t have a CD-ROM drive to help you install the OS that gave us Minesweeper, maybe settle for an ugly Windows-themed Christmas sweater instead. On The Bold Italic, Marker contributor Zara Stone takes readers on a brief but enthralling tour through the wonderland of Windows winter-wear.
Aralık 2020 — Power BI Yenilikler
By: Ömer Kaymaz
Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Power Platform, Business Intelligence, Power Bi, Dynamics 365

Power BI December 2020 Feature Summary

The last update of 2020 is here! We know you are excited for this update, like a kid excited to open their presents…
Microsoft is also criticized for its people control tools
By: Amador Palacios
Tags: Microsoft

For many months (before Covid-19), people had been talking and writing about the “control” that companies exercise through computer media over the work carried out by their hired personnel.

And after Covid-19 and with the increase in remote work, these comments appear day in and day out in a multitude of media. I recently read one complaining about the control tools that Microsoft offers with Office 365 to analyze employee activity.

When someone works for a company and receives a salary for their work, it is quite logical that the company tries to know what their workers are doing, and to make sure that they work as efficiently as possible.

The time that the person works for the company is part of their working life and therefore is not private and personal. I have worked for more than 40 years and I did not feel harassed by my boss knowing what I was doing. That is logical and normal.

I have seen comments from people saying that controlling what people do in the workplace is psychological abuse. Which is just ridiculous to me.

I think things are being taken out of their proper context.

It is clear that remote work is a reality that will increase, and both people and companies need tools that help them be more efficient, and part of that efficiency is that those responsible know what their employees are doing.

This has always been called management, and management needs a certain level of control to know what is happening in the workplace.

Maintaining the privacy of people (their intimate and personal lives), companies must manage their work teams in the most efficient way possible.

Microsoft, and the companies that use its management tools, have tens of thousands of employees and they need to “know” what their workers are doing in order to manage them properly and efficiently.

Every day I see more people with “very thin” skin who are shocked by almost anything. They are the ones who complain a lot and solve nothing. And those have always existed, what happens is that now they go further with their complaints through social networks.
Microsoft Flight Simulator Can Now Be Played in Virtual Reality
Tags: Microsoft, VR, Gaming, Technology

Image: Microsoft

Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus, Valve, and HTC virtual reality headsets are all supported.

By Matthew Humphries

Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the highlights of 2020, and the game just got even better for anyone who owns a virtual reality headset.

Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, announced yesterday that Flight Simulator can now be played using VR headsets on PC. You may remember Microsoft put out a call for virtual reality beta testers back in October, and clearly found some. Neumann singles out the flight sim community as being “a very active and insightful partner in shaping how the team approached VR.”

VR comes as a free update for the game and Microsoft is trying to support as many headsets as it possibly can. So far, the game will work with most Windows Mixed Reality headsets, including the HP Reverb G2, as well as all Oculus, Valve, and HTC headsets. If you already have one of those headsets, all you need is the latest update for Flight Simulator in order to start playing with a whole new level of immersion.

Xbox gamers will look on jealously, knowing they have to wait until next summer to play the game (without VR). Meanwhile, PC gamers may still be waiting for their flight sticks to ship due to both demand and the pandemic limiting supplies of most peripherals this year. Virtual reality headsets are a little easier to find, although Valve’s Index headset currently has a shipment time of “8 or more weeks.”
New malware is affecting Chrome, Firefox, other browsers: How to protect yourself
Tags: Microsoft, Googlechrome, Adrozek

Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Yandex have become the latest targets of an ongoing malware campaign, dubbed Adrozek, as revealed by Microsoft. The malware injects ads into search results and adds malicious browser extensions. The company claims that this virus has been at scale since at least May, with the attacks peaking in August, with the threat being noticed on more than 30,000 devices every day.



The main goal for Adrozek is to lead people to affiliate pages. It is doing so by silently adding malicious browser extensions and changing the browser settings to insert ads into webpages. It is also modifying the Dynamic Link Library (DLL) files per target browser, for example, it is turning of MsEdge.dll on Microsoft Edge, which is basically turning off the security controls of the browser.



Microsoft 365 Defender Research team in a blog post stated that this is a unique campaign as it affects multiple browsers and also exfiltrates website credentials that may bring additional risks to users.



Adrozek installs into a device via a “though drive-by download,” which basically carries a generic file name and a standard format of setup_.exe. When a user runs the program, the installer puts a random .exe file into a temporary folder, which, in turn, drops the main payload in the Program Files folder. The payload holds names like Audiolava.exe, QuickAudio.exe, or converter.exe, thus making people believe that it’s legitimate audio-related software. The malware then inst
Monitor and optimize on-premises data gateway performance
Tags: Microsoft, Performance, Monitoring, Microsoft Power Bi, Power Bi

Enable performance logging

Make the following changes to the Microsoft.PowerBI.DataMovement.Pipeline.GatewayCore.dll.config file in the \Program Files\On-premises data gateway folder.

Note — Currently, queries from premium capacity to the gateway are sometimes missed in this logging. Microsoft is actively working on fixing this issue.

The DisableQueryExecutionReport property is by default set to False to enable additional logging for queries executed using the gateway. This creates both the Query Execution Report and the Query Execution Aggregation Report files. To turn this feature off, switch the flag to True.

<setting name="DisableQueryExecutionReport" serializeAs="String">

<value>True</value>

</setting>

2. The DisableSystemCounterReport is by default set to False to enable additional logging for memory and CPU system counters. This creates the System Counter Aggregation Report file. To turn this feature off, switch the flag to True.

<setting name=" DisableSystemCounterReport" serializeAs="String"> <value>True</value> </setting>

3. There are other values in the config file that you can update as needed:

ReportFilePath : Determines the path where the three log files are stored. By default, this path is either \Users\PBIEgwService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\On-premises data gateway\Report or \Windows\ServiceProfiles\PBIEgwService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\On-premises data gateway\Report. The path depends on the OS version. If you use a service account for the gateway other than PBIEgwService, replace this part of the path with the service account name.

: Determines the path where the three log files are stored. By default, this path is either \Users\PBIEgwService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\On-premises data gateway\Report or \Windows\ServiceProfiles\PBIEgwService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\On-premises data gateway\Report. The path depends on the OS version. If you use a service account for the gateway other than PBIEgwService, replace this part of the path with the service account name. ReportFileCount : Determines the number of log files of each kind to retain. The default value is 10.

: Determines the number of log files of each kind to retain. The default value is 10. ReportFileSizeInBytes : Determines the size of the file to maintain. The default value is 104,857,600.

: Determines the size of the file to maintain. The default value is 104,857,600. QueryExecutionAggregationTimeInMinutes : Determines the number of minutes for which the query execution information is aggregated. The default value is 5.

: Determines the number of minutes for which the query execution information is aggregated. The default value is 5. SystemCounterAggregationTimeInMinutes: Determines the number of minutes for which the system counter is aggregated. The default value is 5.

4. After you make the changes to the config file, restart the gateway for these config values to take effect. You now see the report files being generated in the location that you specified for ReportFilePath.
Happy Holiday Greetings From Project M To You!
By: Project M
Tags: Microsoft, Happy New Year, Emotional Ai, Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology Patents

Check out the video on how to crop an image of a person before testing Project M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_D-YRhHjQo&t=2s.

Try M at https://projectm.ipmdinc.com.
Cisco ISE — Integração com AD. Configuração do Microsoft Active…
By: Fernando Mantovani Pierobon
Tags: Microsoft, Authentication, Security, Cisco, Ise

Learn more. Medium is an open platform where 170 million readers come to find insightful and dynamic thinking. Here, expert and undiscovered voices alike dive into the heart of any topic and bring new ideas to the surface. Learn more

Make Medium yours. Follow the writers, publications, and topics that matter to you, and you’ll see them on your homepage and in your inbox. Explore
Free Tier in Azure
By: Kumar Allamraju
Tags: Microsoft, Free Tier, Azure

The Azure free account includes access to a number of Azure products that are free for 12 months, $200 credit to spend for the first 30 days of sign up, and access to more than 25 products that are always free.

Check it out here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/free-account-faq/
Microsoft and Facebook, SharePoint and Social Networking
By: Mike Gilronan
Tags: Microsoft, Facebook, Social Media

This article was originally posted on October 25, 2007.

Microsoft’s announcement of their buying a stake in Facebook is not a surprise (kind of a yawner, actually), given the rumors that have been swirling about such a relationship for a few months now. It’s been interesting to see many of the MSFT bloggers and other contacts with whom I interact creating Facebook sites.

Also interesting to watch will be how MSFT leverages this relationship to build better tools for fostering social networking within business organizations. Hopefully, the deeper Facebook relationship produces not just eyeballs, traffic, advertising revenues, etc., but also an infusion of new ideas into MSFT to enhance the teams and the tools already present. The SharePoint team is in the process of writing an excellent whitepaper about social networks for business use, which gives me some comfort that these issues are being thought and talked about, and acted on, by Microsoft. (Where have you gone, Knowledge Network?)

As we tell customers all the time: the next generation of people entering the workforce is not going to know a world without tools like these. Even if you work in a highly structured, highly regulated, or traditionally conservative enironment and giving your employees a platform for self-expression is not a priority for you, there are many compelling business cases for business use of social networking tools, both internally within your organization, and externally in customer-facing applications that you should explore and be aware of. Paul Gillin’s book does a fairly exhaustive job of describing these business cases, and there is an enormous amount of information about this on the Net as well. As Lee Iacocca said in simpler times: “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
Top-secret Cloud Platform for Classified Data from Microsoft
By: Rajitha Jayawardena
Tags: Microsoft, Azure

Microsoft revealed the launch of its newest cloud offering, Azure Government Top Secret, at the beginning of the month (April, 2020). For its US government clients who deal with classified information, Microsoft has customized Azure Government Top Secret.

The new cloud service extends Microsoft’s tactical edge portfolio for the US government, including Azure (public cloud), Azure Government, and Azure Government Hidden.

Azure Government Top Secret is claimed to have the same functionality as the commercial edition of Azure, Azure Government and Azure Government Secret to enable a continuum of project cloud computing to the tactical edge.

“The consistency between Azure (commercial), Azure Government, and Azure Government Secret is also starting to change the game as software development may happen from anywhere, while the code itself can be promoted to enclaves with higher classification levels. There it can interact with data of higher classification levels. At the end of the day, this means doing more for the mission at a lower overall cost,” said Carroll Moon, CTO of CloudFit Software.

In the classified space, the wide range of services can meet the demand for higher performance, particularly the need to gain deeper insights from data sourced from any location, as well as the need to allow remote work to grow rapidly.

Microsoft is collaborating with the US government, according to sources, to obtain accreditation for its new cloud. In the meantime, the building of the Top Secret regions of the Azure Government has already been completed.

Microsoft has also announced upgrades to its Azure Government Secret service, which the US Department of Defense, law enforcement, and other agencies have approved and actively used.

Azure Government Secret will now add Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Container Instances, according to Microsoft. The enhancements aim to allow developers of software to more effectively deploy and manage containerized applications.

Azure Sentinel and Azure Security Center are now now available in Azure Government Secret for intelligent security analytics services, allowing unified security across digital properties and promoting proactive threat management.
Ms Office Course In Rawalpindi
By: Icp Institute
Tags: Microsoft, Ms Office, Best Institute, Computer Course, Institute

Course special Design for Professionals and Students. In this course give training about computer how to use computer which have you make Application salary slip letters and other actives in office work this is not just a course we also train you how to work in professional field. We will training of MS office which have MS Excel , MS Word and MS power point with Urdu in page and basic knowledge of computer which have internet email or typing .
I will do excel data entry internet research copy paste data entry
By: Sathi Akter
Tags: Microsoft, Excel, Data Entry Services, Google Sheets, Words

I will do excel data entry internet research copy paste data entry Sathi Akter ·Dec 23, 2020

excel data entry internet research copy paste data entry

Good Day

I am having valuable experience in the fields like any type of microsoft excel or google spreadsheet data entry tasks. Having good cognitive skills and a quick learner, I will provide you a 100% accurate service and solutions to your complex problems.

My Service:

Specialty:
Flame Graphs for Q#
By: Aman Bansal
Tags: Microsoft, Q Sharp, Software Development, Quantum Computing

Flame Graphs for Q#

Profiling is an important technique in software engineering as it allows you to evaluate the performance of your software along with its constituent parts.

Turns out, this is also true for quantum software! Any quantum program or circuit consists of a sequence of quantum gates like CNOT or T. Profiling such programs is very useful in determining the resource-intensive parts and better targeting our optimization efforts.

Flame graphs are a visualization of profiled software, allowing the most frequent code-paths to be identified quickly and accurately. — Brendan Gregg

The idea behind this mini-project, however, was to examine the resource consumption of each function rather than the frequency of different code-paths.

We used the Q# Resources Estimator which provides statistics on the number of gates and qubits used by a function across all its calls during the execution of a program.

Our goal was to modify the resources estimator such that, given some Q# code, it generates a profile that can be used as an input to the open-source flame graph library. To achieve this, we keep track of the stack trace as a string. When we encounter an unseen stack trace, we create a new entry with its resource consumption and for a previously seen one, we simply update the entry.

We tested our implementation to measure the number of CNOT gates used in the Q# implementation of Shor’s algorithm, a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for integer factorization. Here is the result!
Attacking MFA Enabled Accounts
Tags: MFA, Microsoft, Infosec, Social Engineering, Cybersecurity

With no doubt MFA reduce the attack on the accounts password to almost zero, because simply your password is not enough to get the access to the service you want, you have to provide another factor that prove that you are really the person you claim to be.

Microsoft, Google and other giants on the web push the users to secure their accounts using MFA, for example all new provisioned Microsoft 365 tenants will have MFA enabled by default for all users, so the attackers (bad guys) are adapting their attacks as well to go on with the new security measures in place.

But unfortunately not all the users get the whole sense of the MFA behavior, if you get a notification and you did not perform a sign-in to the service, you have to deny or report this activity so it will be blocked and the attack will fail.

Social engineering is one of the oldest and still persistent attacks, here I’ll list ana example of how an attacker can leverage social engineering technics to attack a user account that have MFA enabled.

The attacker are using all the resources to get access to the users accounts, for example, a Gmail user that have MFA enabled in his account and each time he perform a sign-in he receive an SMS with a six digits code to enter it in the Gmail sign-in web page so the access will be granted to his Gmail account.

This user have listed some item for sale on Facebook Marketplace, the attacker get in touch with the Gmail user and show interest in buying the item on sale, but using the social engineering technics he told to the Gmail user that he got screwed many times on internet and to prove the reality of that seller and the item on sale he will send the seller a six digits code that he must return t to the attacker through Facebook so he can ensure that the operation is legit, the attacker perform the sigh-in on the Gmail platform and wait for the MFA 6 digits code to be received on Facebook, if the user for some reason is not paying attention or not getting the full meaning and behavior of the MFA he might transfer the code to the attacker and allow to the attack to happen.

This happen in a short amount of time, it can involve many technics like fear urgency, trust…

Conclusion

Using MFA will reduce drastically the attacks on the accounts, avoid using SMS for many reasons, it can be intercepted, it is not encrypted, instead use the MFA Apps like Microsoft authenticator and Google authenticator for example, those are fully encrypted, take advantage of phone security as well (Biometric, PIN Lock…) and their only use is to complete the sign-in. to the requested services.
Final nail in the coffin for ‘Cuberpunk2077’As Sony and Microsoft takes it down from their digital marketplaces.
By: Ibtesam Ghani
Tags: Microsoft, Latest Tech Stories, Cyberpunk, Sony, Cd Projekt Red

With the release of Cyberpunk 2077 ‘Cd Projekt Red’ has been walking on a tight rope. The company released a game that was in the oven for about eight years and when it finally came out it still felt under-cooked and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Cyberpunk 2077 was not a rush job, by all means, The developers spent countless hours trying to perfect the game but the expectations were so high from Cd Projekt Red that they were not able to deliver and the game fell flat on its face.

Some people might be enjoying it for the time being but most of the folks were upset over its flawed game design, from glitches and bugs to the overall game-play experience. By no means it is a bad game but it’s not a great one either.

So the company gave in under the massive pressure by the fans for not making it clear how the experience would be on their current-gen gaming hardware, and made a public apology offering refunds and promising to make the game better for its players in the coming year.

But that was not enough and in the aftermath of the apology made by Cd Projekt Red, on Dec 18th, 2020 Sony took the game down from its ‘PSN’ store and offered refunds to its loyal customers. Microsoft without any hesitation did the same and took down the game from its official store for Xbox and started refunding the money.

Well, it’s a big blow for the company as cyberpunk 2077 was the highest-selling game of the year and Cd Projekt Red is a huge game development company with investors and shareholders and a setback like this could shake their confidence in the company’s future.

As for Sony and Microsoft, it was a good strategic decision to honor its customers and give them their hard-earned money back so they can spend it on something worth better; but this decision was made for the digital marketplaces only by both companies, what would happen to the physical copies of the game will they ever get refunded? No one knows yet.

Being a fan of Cd Projekt Red’s previous work like the ‘Witcher’ series, I wanted this game to succeed like their other projects, I know they can still do a lot with this game and make it much better in the coming future but as of now the backslash over this blunder just makes it hard to believe.
MS Ignite The Tour | Mumbai
By: Anushka Raj
Tags: Microsoft, Msignite

MS Ignite The Tour | Mumbai

Last year I attended MS Ignite The Tour |Mumbai.

I heard about this event from Prince Sir (CEO of Khabai Tech) where I worked as a Front End Developer. I registered for the event. My registration was confirmed.🎉😊

I was excited to go to Mumbai(my dream city). I was very happy for the first time I got a chance to participate in such a big event.

What is MS Ignite The Tour?

MS Ignite is for IT pros, decision-makers, implementors, architects, developers, and data professionals to explore the latest tools, receive deep technical training, and get questions answered by Microsoft experts.

Event Day: 22nd May 2019

Finally, I was there. The event area was surrounded by tech enthusiasts.

After the check-in process, I and my co-workers entered the hall. The hall was all set with the technical people. I was very excited.

Why Ignite the tour?

I go to these events for a mixture of reasons.

The primary reason is to meet the community and meet new peoples to hear about them and their challenges. I got a lot of that on this trip.

Secondary, for me, is the actual learning sessions.

As always a wide variety of topics to choose from from the event.

These events are so like music festivals with people/subjects you want to see. It was hard for me to choose the topics. I know people are excellent presenters.

This time I started and ended with some Azure sessions. (My interests in Azure certainly made it easier for me to understand, I think.)

“Learn, Connect, and Explore.”

Session information

There was so much more at Ignite the Tour in Mumbai that I could attend myself.

You can access many of the sessions (particularly those from learning paths) on the Microsoft Tech Community: Web and Cloud.

One day, 1000 attendees, speakers from 16 countries, lots of fun with experiments, sponsors booth, games, relaxing areas, interviews, and countless hours of networking.

Sessions that I attended:

Session BRK1235- “What if AI was your daughter?” was fabulous.

Learned lots of things from Sapna Grover Mam❤
Four Quick Tips For Using A Microsoft SQL Server Database As A Common Datastore
By: Resolute Software
Tags: Microsoft, Business Intelligence, Data Management, Sql Server, Data Transfer

Data’s been the new big thing for years. Businesses have started working smarter rather than harder, and are looking for potential new ways to grow their footprint. Building large datastores across different business areas is undoubtedly no longer an extra, but rather a need. The real challenge hides behind aggregating the data, and building insightful information sources.

Imagine that you’ve been assigned the task to gather information from several external databases and to store that information on a SQL Server database. While it might seem quite straightforward at first glance, you’ll quickly realize there’s a lot to be careful with. Have a look at the topics below to make sure that you are aware of some of the possible pitfalls to avoid.

Using Linked Servers (Database Engine)

Linked Servers will let you connect and execute commands to external (remote) data sources. For example, if any of your services makes use of a MySQL database, creating the link between them will ease the transfer of data.

Don’t forget to check out the official Microsoft docs for Linked Servers: Linked Servers (Database Engine)

Using OPENQUERY (Transact-SQL)

OPENQUERY fullfills the role of executing pass-through queries on the specified linked server. OPENQUERY can be referenced in the FROM clause of a query as if it were a table name.

OPENQUERY(linked_server, 'query')

Official documentation from Microsoft can be found here: OPENQUERY (Transact-SQL)

Parameterized OPENQUERY

You will have a great time struggling with SQL Server if you want to attach parameters to your OPENQUERY requests. Reading through the official docs, it’s stated:
Durable Functions for Python: Stateful Entities Released
By: Amine Kaabachi
Tags: Microsoft, Serverless, Development, Azure, Azure Functions

Azure Function

Azure Functions is a serverless solution that allows you to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs. Instead of worrying about deploying and maintaining servers, the cloud infrastructure provides all the up-to-date servers needed to keep your applications running.

Durable Function

Durable Functions is an extension of Azure Functions that lets you write stateful functions in a serverless compute environment. The extension lets you define stateful workflows by writing orchestrator functions and stateful entities by writing entity functions using the Azure Functions programming model. Behind the scenes, the extension manages state, checkpoints, and restarts for you, allowing you to focus on your business logic.

Stateful entities

Entity functions define operations for reading and updating small pieces of state, known as durable entities. Like orchestrator functions, entity functions are functions with a special trigger type, the entity trigger. Unlike orchestrator functions, entity functions manage the state of an entity explicitly, rather than implicitly representing state via control flow. Entities provide a means for scaling out applications by distributing the work across many entities, each with a modestly sized state.

I was trying to do something useful with It in October but been stack with the limited support for Durable entities. The good news is that it is now supported.

Durable Functions for Python v1.0.0b12 is an exciting new release that exposes the durable entities API, drops support for extension bundles V1, and fixes a handful of minor bugs. https://pypi.org/project/azure-functions-durable/1.0.0b12/

Example Usage

Tigger Function

Orchestrator Function

Counter Function

You can check out the complete example here: