Four of the biggest social networks, Twitter, Microsoft, YouTube and Facebook are going to be working together to build a database of photos and videos used to recruit people into terrorist organizations.
This shared database will identify images via a unique digital footprint, making it easier for them to identify and remove any imagery related to terrorism. Shared hashes will be used to help identify potential terrorist content on the mentioned social networks.
They said that hopefully this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency of helping to curb the global issue of terrorist content online.
A joint blog post by the 4 companies states:
“There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services. When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies”.
Not the First Collaboration of Its Kind:
Exactly an year earlier, these big names had collaborated before as well to identify and remove child pornography from the internet using a similar technique. This technique was developed by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation.
The companies said that the content flagged by the database will not be automatically removed from the platform, but instead it will be reviewed by each company, and by reviewing its policies it will be decided whether if it violates the company’s terms of service.
The companies also said that throughout this collaboration they will do their best to protect the users’ privacy and their ability to express themselves freely and safely on each of the mentioned platforms.
“We also seek to engage with the wider community of interested stakeholders in a transparent, thoughtful and responsible way as we further our shared objective to prevent the spread of terrorist content online while respecting human rights”
The next version of SQL Server is now in public preview and available on Windows and Linux both. Linux has received SQL support for the first time ever.
According to Microsoft’s announcement on their official blog post,
SQL Server enables developers and organizations to build intelligent applications with industry-leading performance and security technologies using their preferred language and environment. With the next release of SQL Server, you can develop applications with SQL Server on Linux, Windows, Docker, or macOS (via Docker) and then deploy to Linux, Windows, or Docker, on-premises or in the cloud.
All of the native features of SQL Server available on Windows, in-memory online-transaction processing (OLTP), in-memory columnstores, Transparent Data Encryption, Always Encrypted, and Row-Level Security to name some.
Microsoft Joins Linux Foundation
Microsoft just joined the Linux Foundation as a high-paying Platinum member.Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation said,
"Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people."
Google Joins .Net Foundation
The Redmond based company is becoming an advocate of open sourcing and will be committed to accepting community feedback and community contributions. Visual Studio for example went open source a year ago with .Net.
Google is also keen to have a portion of that pie and is officially becoming a member of the .Net foundation. There seems to be a pattern here with Microsoft going all in with Linux and sharing (almost) everything with it. Google had not been interested in .Net from the start and was in fact invested in Java, its competitor, with Android. With Oracle sueing Google over the use of Java in Android is is not strange to see the company is looking elsewhere. .Net is a major part of corporate development so Google joining hands with Microsoft on this front does not seem a crazy move.
The SQL server support for Linux is mostly to sway the audience from Oracle (Java again). SQL server is cheaper as well, and better support means that majority of corporate Linux users would go for SQL server instead.
Using Skype for a quick chat or video call just got a whole lot easier. Microsoft has announced that anyone can now use Skype as a guest user without the need of registering a new account. Guest users don’t even need to download the Skype application. The real purpose of the move is to increase new users and stay step ahead of other competitors.
Microsoft says “Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve made it easier than ever for you to connect with anyone on Skype, without needing to register or even download it. By joining Skype as a Guest, you can quickly chat, voice or video call without any hassle. Perfect if you’re new to Skype and want to quickly chat with someone, anywhere in the world, for free.”
From now on, web-based guest interface that lets you make and receive calls. To make a call, all you need to do is go to skype.com and mention a temporary username (handle) for yourself. Once done, you get a link which can be shared with anyone and the guest user can start a voice call, video call, group chat or share files. In other words, guest users can allowed all actions a normal user with a desktop application can and all they need is a web browser.
The idea is actually not to different from what Google implemented with Hangouts. While Hangouts may be going through an existential crisis and might be phased out, Skype has taken a cue from its book. Hangouts users could be a part of the call by accessing a link. Skype upgrades it so that users can make calls with mere links. Conversations last for 24 hours, after that, these are wiped.
Microsoft might be a bit too late here as WhatsApp and others are already killing it and have nearly forced it out of the race. While Skype was the same old bulky and slow application, others made a move and gathered enough users to overtake Skype. Today, WhatsApp announced support for video calls, nearly matching Skype in basic features as far as smartphone apps go. The only route out for Skype and Microsoft is to somehow maintain its importance in the desktop realm once the competitors take on Skype in that battle.
Microsoft unveiled the Surface Studio Yesterday, an all-in-one PC with a 28-inch PixelSense display, with the thinnest display ever built according to Microsoft and a 3:2 display ratio. It also has an Intel Core processor, with a 2TB hybrid hard drive and an NVIDIA GPU, as well as integrated 2.1 speakers and a haptic feedback controller puck device.
The computer has a unique hinge on the back designed to make it more flexible for creative pursuits, and Microsoft’s Panay Panos said onstage it’s designed to “fundamentally change” the way people create.
The Studio has a touchscreen, 32GB RAM, a 2TB hybrid drive that combines HD and SD storage, four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, Audio, SD and Mini DisplayPort (no Thunderbolt) and the new radial input Surface Dial with haptic feedback. The speakers, ports and drive are contained in the base, which is a short, square box that lies between the chrome supports under the display.
Surface Studio’s display is designed to immerse the user as much as possible, according to Panay, which includes using 13.5 million pixels to make for a 192 PPI density that doesn’t reveal individual pixels no matter where you’re viewing from, according to Microsoft. The display also includes a feature Microsoft is calling TrueColor, which Panay says allows creators to “render the world… as he or she believes it needs to be rendered.”
What this means is that you can change your color space on the fly, meaning a filmmaker working in DCI-P3 can easily switch to sRGB to see how their content will look on TVs that don’t support the wider P3 color specification.
The display also features something called “True Scale,” which allows it to display print products at actual scale on the screen. “One inch on the screen is one inch in real life,” Panay said onstage at Microsoft’s product reveal on Wednesday.
Surface Studio’s hinge, which consists of two chrome arms attached to the base, is also designed to be reflective on purpose to further help it “fade to background,” according to Panay. It’s an interesting tactic for trying to reduce the user’s awareness of the actual hardware itself, and one that sounds a bit more like marketing hype than effective measure.
The Studio’s display includes a “linear mic array” that’s able to pic up a user’s voice from across the room, making it essentially an integrated Echo-like speaker thanks to the inclusion of Cortana in Windows 10.
Surface Studio also supports Surface Pen, making it an amazing option for graphics professionals. The Surface Dial works with the screen intelligently, giving you software tools like color sliders in various apps.
The hinge is designed to easily let you go from upright to flat working device without resistance, and the Surface Pen support really helps make that True Scale feature very appealing. It basically means you can write in full speed (the latency looks incredibly low) on a 1:1 8.5×11 piece of virtual paper on the screen.
Onstage, Panay also introduced and demonstrated the Surface Dial. It’s designed a new input device, in line with but different from things like mice and keyboards. Dial has global controls built-in, meaning they work throughout Windows at the system level. The Dial can work either laid out on the desk like a keyboard, or placed directly on the display, as in the image above. It’ll have different functions depending on which way you’re using it. Surface Dial also works with Surface Book, Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 4 for off-screen functions.
demo of the Surface Studio’s creative prowess included a demo from Madefire founder Ben Wolstenholme, who used it to create a thumbnail for an animated comic for his app. Wolstenholme explained how he used to do the same workflow on paper and in multiple steps, but he can now do it entirely digitally right on the Surface Studio, complete with assigning handy shortcuts like zooming for detailed inking to the Dial.
“It’s amazing to me that Surface Studio makes it possible for me to have my entire creative workflow in one place,” Wolstenholme said.
Surface Dial is open to developers, letting them create on-screen use cases that make it possible to use it to do things like change color while you’re actually in the act of digital painting, or adjusting scale and switching between tools on the fly.
The Surface Studio is available for pre-order now, and will arrive in Microsoft Stores for hands-on demos starting October 27. It’s going to ship in limited numbers by this holiday season, and is priced starting at $2,999.
A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft’s data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the "The slow but eventual end of Moore’s Law."
"Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man," notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. "What’s more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter."
The team created this system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that will significantly improve the speed of Bing and Azure queries. "This was a moonshot project that succeeded," said Lanka.
What they did was insert an FPGA directly between the network and the servers, which in bypassing the traditional software approach speeds up computation. “What we’ve done now is we’ve made the FPGA the front door,” said Derek Chiou, one of the Microsoft engineers who created the system. "“I think a lot of people don’t know what FPGAs are capable of."
Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability). In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications. This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.
We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high speeds).
This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication. By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network. Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger. The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively. The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft’s production datacenters worldwide.
LinkedIn, the business-focused social network which Microsoft recently bought for an astounding $26 Billion, is now trying to turn over a new leaf. They have now introduced a new online-learning section with over 9,000 courses covering everything from coding and programming to writing and accounting.
Called “LinkedIn Learning”, it is built on content taken from the popular e-learning portal, Lynda. LinkedIn acquired the portal back in 2015 for $1.5 billion and is now finally making full use of their plethora of courses.
What is LinkedIn Learning?
LinkedIn Learning is an ambitious e-learning portal tailored to individuals. The subjects available include business, technology, and creative topics. The social network has also added some extra features to make the online learning system work better with their business-minded goal. Consequently, businesses looking to keep training their employees and even educational institutions exploring e-learning courses can make use of the portal.
Currently, individuals looking to start learning through LinkedIn will have to sign-up for LinkedIn’s Premium service. Once signed up, LinkedIn Premium users will get 25 new courses every week. You can also try out LinkedIn Learning for free for a whole month.
LinkedIn Learning for Business
Employers and HR managers can recommend courses for their employees and then track their performance through LinkedIn’s analytics products. The analytics tools can not only monitor employees’ progress but also look at the wider range of what is being studied as a point of reference.
The company has also said that they will soon be releasing an enterprise tier so that large companies can take subscriptions for their entire employee base.
Apart from its e-learning initiative, LinkedIn has introduced a handful of other changes. They announced an updated design for their desktop website which will come with a revamped newsfeed as well as new messaging features.
Now, the French data protection authority has ordered Microsoft to stop it.
France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) issued a formal notice on Wednesday, asking Microsoft to "stop collecting excessive data" as well as "tracking browsing by users without their consent."
Moreover, the CNIL notified Microsoft that the company must also take "satisfactory measures to ensure the security and confidentiality" of its users' personal data.
The notice comes after a series of investigations between April and June 2016 by French authorities, revealing that Microsoft was still transferring data to the United States under the "Safe Harbor" agreement that a European Court court invalidated in October last year.
Allegations on Windows 10
The CNIL's list of complaints about Windows 10 does not end there, as it goes on to read:
Microsoft is collecting data on "Windows app and Windows Store usage data," along with monitoring apps its user's download and time spent on each app, which according to the CNIL, is irrelevant and "excessive" data collection.
Microsoft is also criticized for its lack of security, since there is no limit set on the number of guesses for entering the four-digit PIN used to protect your Microsoft account.
After Windows 10 installation, Microsoft also activates a user's advertising ID by default, which enables Windows apps as well as other third-party apps to monitor user browsing history and to offer targeted ads "without obtaining users' consent."
Windows 10 does not give you any option to block cookies.
And as I mentioned above, Microsoft is transferring its users' personal data to the United States under the "Safe Harbor" agreement.
In a statement, the CNIL said: "It has been decided to make the formal notice public due to, among other reasons, the seriousness of the breaches and the number of individuals concerned (more than ten million Windows users on French territory)."
Microsoft Response on the CNIL Notice
Microsoft has responded to the notice, saying the company is happy to work with the CNIL to"understand the agency's concerns fully and to work toward solutions that it will find acceptable."
What's more interesting is that Microsoft does not deny the allegations set against it and does nothing to defend Windows 10 excessive data collection, as well as fails to address the privacy concerns the CNIL raises.
However, the tech giant does address concerns about the transfer of its users' personal data to the U.S. under the "Safe Harbor" agreement, saying that "the Safe Harbor framework is no longer valid for transferring data from European Union to the United States."
The company says it still complies with the Safe Harbor agreement up until the adoption of Privacy Shield.
"Microsoft has in fact continued to live up to all of its commitments under the Safe Harbor Framework, even as the European and US representatives worked toward the new Privacy Shield," says Microsoft. "We're working now toward meeting the requirements of the Privacy Shield."
Windows 10 Privacy concerns seem to be a never ending topic. Over the last year, Microsoft has annoyed users with a number of weird practices around Windows 10, including aggressive upgrades and transferring too much information about users back to Redmond.
Since there is the promise of a statement about privacy next week, let's see what happens next. You can read Microsoft's full statement, courtesy of David Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel, on VentureBeat.
Microsoft Corp. launched an alpha version of a new Linux client for its Skype chat and calling service, very tellingly named Skype for Linux Alpha. In a blog post Wednesday that announced the launch, the company said the client “is not a fully functioning Skype client yet” but had been launched anyway because it wants “to get it [the client] in your hands as soon as possible.”
Pointing out some of the differences between the new app and the version it replaces, the blog says users will “be using the latest, fast and responsive Skype UI, you can share files, photos and videos and send a whole new range of new emoticons.” The company is also asking for users to test the app and provide feedback so it can prioritize which features it should work on adding, improving or fixing.
Skype also seems keen on phasing out its older Linux client. Using the new alpha version, “you will be able to call your friends and family on the latest versions of Skype on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, but you won’t be able to make or receive calls to and from the previous versions of Skype for Linux (4.3.0.37).”
Another feature announced Wednesday was the alpha version of Skype based on WebRTC (an interface that supports browser-to-browser communication without additional plugins). Using the same features as the new Linux client, it is targeted at users of Chromebook and Chrome on Linux. The offering for the Chrome browser will expand over the next few months to include landlines and cellphones as well, the company said.
If you have an existing Skype account, the WebRTC version can be accessed using this link.
Skype was first released in 2003 and Microsoft bought the company in 2011 for $8.5 billion.
Microsoft is taking away storage from users this month, bringing free users down to five gigabytes. The previous free offering was 15GB. The changes are rolling out to users over time, but should be complete by July 27
This isn’t a surprise: Microsoft has been sending out emails about the change all year, and even gave users the option to keep their extra storage back in January. If you did that, there’s nothing to worry about. Everyone else, however, will see their storage drop to 5GB
And now they’re rolling the free offering down to 5GB. It’s more than Dropbox’s free 2GB, sure, but far less than Google’s 15GB. Microsoft is no longer competing with Google on free storage space.
Microsoft has fidgeted with the amount of free storage offered by OneDrive for years now. At launch, OneDrive offered 7GB of free storage with an additional 3GB for students. Later Microsoft increase their free offering to 15GB, which not (probably not coincidentally) is the exact amount of free storage Google Drive offers
This might be, at least in part, because Microsoft has an advantage for growing their platform that Google and Dropbox can only dream of — owning the Windows platform. OneDrive is included by default on fresh Windows installations, and a stream of pop ups ensure that new users see it and possibly use it. Office saves all new files to OneDrive by default, and OneDrive constantly offers users to upload photos and screenshots to the cloud.
All of this synergy gives Microsoft plenty of built-in ways to turn Windows users into paid OneDrive users, meaning they don’t necessarily need to offer a bunch of free storage in order to attract new users.
But if you’ve been using OneDrive for a while now, it’s understandable if this decision leaves you disappointed. To which we respond — Google Drive gives you 15GB of free storage when you sign up.
Microsoft has announced that it is planning to acquire LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, for $26.2 Billion in cash.
Yes, Microsoft announced today that it would buy LinkedIn for $196 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at $26.2 BILLION.
It is so far the biggest acquisition made by Microsoft, which has made 8 takeovers, including Skype in 2011 and Nokia in 2013, worth more than $1 Billion.
According to the tech giant, LinkedIn will retain its own brand and product, and also LinkedIn's existing CEO Jeff Weiner will remain as the company's chief executive.
LinkedIn will now become a part of Microsoft's productivity, and business processes segment and Weiner will report directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Here's what Nadella said about the deal:
"The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centered on connecting the world's professionals. Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet."
The offer of $196 per share on LinkedIn represents a premium of 49.5 per cent to LinkedIn's Friday closing price.
LinkedIn is the world’s most popular as well as largest professional social network and continues to grow. With the launch of new version of its mobile app last year, the company has increased its member engagement and enhanced its news feed to deliver better business insights.
Both Mr. Weiner and LinkedIn’s chairperson, co-founder and controlling shareholder Mr. Reid Hoffman back the deal.
"Just as we have changed the way the world connects to opportunity, this relationship with Microsoft, and the combination of their cloud and LinkedIn's network, now gives us a chance also to change the way the world works," Weiner said in the statement.
"For the last 13 years, we have been uniquely positioned to connect professionals to make them more productive and successful, and I’m looking forward to leading our team through the next chapter of our story."
This year, Microsoft impressed the world with 'Microsoft loves Linux' announcements, like developing a custom Linux-based OS for running Azure Cloud Switch, selecting Ubuntu as the operating system for its Cloud-based Big Data services and bringing the popular Bash shell to Windows 10.
Now, the next big news for open-source community:
Microsoft has released its own custom distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 as a "ready-made" Virtual Machine image in order to make the operating system available directly from the Azure Marketplace.
FreeBSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is an open source Unix-like advanced computer operating system used to power modern servers, desktops as well as embedded systems.
Until now, the only way for Azure customers to run FreeBSD was to make use of a custom image from outside of Azure (from the FreeBSD Foundation).
However, the new release makes it easier for Azure users to launch FreeBSD directly from the Azure Marketplace and get official support from Microsoft whenever necessary.
Why is it so important for FreeBSD to run on Azure?
According to the company, it’s important for FreeBSD to run in Azure because many top-tier virtual appliance vendors develop their products on the operating system.
However, the key reason for building, testing, releasing and maintaining its own FreeBSD 10.3 image is to ensure its users have an enterprise service level agreement (SLA) for their
"FreeBSD VMs running in Azure," says Jason Anderson, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center.
As shown in the image, just click on the +New on the Azure Marketplace tile on your dashboard, Type "FreeBSD 10.3" in the text search box, and here you are.
He also added that Microsoft did so to remove "burden" from the FreeBSD Foundation that fully relies on community contributions.
"We will continue to partner closely with the [FreeBSD] Foundation as we make further investments in FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure," Anderson said, as well as add "new Hyper-V features – stay tuned for more information on this!"
The company has previously worked on supporting FreeBSD on Hyper-V as a virtual machine that was aimed at ensuring software appliance partners' kit functioned smoothly in Azure that makes use of Hyper-V.
Like everyoneelsethesedays, Microsoft sure loves its bots. Now, the company has rolled out its own news-finding bot called “Rowe,” which lives inside the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing-powered personalized news reading app, News Pro. Rowe is an experiment with helping you keep up with the news that matches your current interests. You can ask the bot to show you news by typing in a topic, view today’s headlines, ask for other personalized suggestions or read the stories the bot has surfaced for you already.
Rowe, however, seems more like an assistive search engine, rather than a true AI-like bot, as its “personalized” suggestions are not as good as its ability to return articles on a given subject. And even then, its results are a bit limited. For example, if you type in a popular, but broad, subject like “U.S. Elections,” the bot returns just three top stories, one of which currently appears to be more of an op-ed/thought piece rather than hard news. That’s not a great experience.
Below its recommended stories, buttons appear that let you pull up more news articles on the subject, like those focused on “election predictions” or “polls,” in this case.
Meanwhile, if you type a news topic that’s a bit more specific, the selection of stories may improve. For instance, asking Rowe about “Twitter 140” — a reference to Twitter’s plans to distance itself from its strict 140-character count rule — the bot returns popular stories from well-known sites like Yahoo, CNET and PCMag.
Rowe has one other weird and not entirely practical trick, too — if you upload a picture of yourself, it will surface news articles where the person in the story looks like you. Why? Uh, because it can? (Oh, and prepare to be either very flattered or very insulted by its results.)
The bot — initially spotted by the blogMSPoweruser.com following Microsoft’sannouncement — is the latest development from Microsoft’s News Pro app, which first debuted this January. A sort of standard news-gathering app, News Pro is Microsoft’s own take on something like Apple News, or the third-party app Smart News, perhaps.
The app offers users a customized experience by connecting to your Facebook and LinkedIn in order to better understand your interests.
In practice, News Pro doesn’t do a great job at personalization yet, I’ve found. While it accurately suggests stories from areas like “computer hardware” and the “Internet” for me, it misses a number of possible suggestions that could be easily pulled from my ever-growing set of Facebook likes.
Similarly, the bot feels rough around the edges, too. But this is not an “official” Microsoft product, we should point out — it’s an app from the company’s internal R&D incubator, Microsoft Garage.
Microsoft is hardly the only company experimenting with new ways to deliver the news via bots, however. Other efforts in the space include those running on Facebook Messenger’s bot platform, like bots from CNN, The WSJ, Business Insider or even yours truly; Telegram’snews bots; or independent efforts like Quartz’s app, and many more.
The updated app also introduces other features, including groups for discussing the news with others, for example.
Rowe is available in the updated News Pro app on iTunes here.
