This Week I Learned - Week #216

This Week I Learned -

Azure Pack will continue to evolve until 2022 (6 years from now) and will be supported until 2027 (11 years from now).

* Azure in Germany is an isolated instance of Azure. It isn’t connected to other Azure regions. Azure Portal URL is different.

AWS market share = 3X Azure

* The recent WannaCrypt malware exploits a Service Message Block (SMB) vulnerability (CVE-2017-0145). Utilize Windows Update to keep your machines up-to-date with the latest security updates. If you are running Azure Cloud Services (Platform as a Service Web Roles and Worker Roles or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)) automatic updates (including MS17-010 update to resolve this vulnerability) are enabled by default, so there is no further action required. Confirm that anti-malware is deployed and updated. If you are using Microsoft anti-malware for Azure or Windows Defender, Microsoft released an update last week which detects this threat as Ransom:Win32/WannaCrypt. You can also use Azure Security Center to verify that anti-malware, and other critical security controls, are configured for all of your Azure virtual machines - Azure Blog

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), is an enterprise content management platform for managing web content, digital experiences, digital assets, online communities, mobile applications, and forms. AEM helps digital marketers to manage and optimize online content to build their brand, drive demand, and expand their markets.

* fast.ai has a free 7 week course, Practical Deep Learning For Coders. Udacity's Intro to Machine Learning is free too

* The $16-billion giant Airbnb, which started in August 2008, has a market capitalisation of $31 billion, and is in more than 65,000 cities in close to 200 countries. The market capitalisation of Hilton and Marriott is around $20 billion and $34 billion, respectively - Hindu BusinessLine

* Mozilla Corporation has completed the acquisition of Read It Later, Inc. the developers of Pocket, a human-powered content recommendation system with 10 million unique monthly active users on iOS, Android and the Web, and with more than 3 billion pieces of content saved to date.

* Apple is building a physical office at a cost of $5 billion

* Online food aggregator Zomato recently surfaced in a major security breach where over 17 millions user records were compromised. As per Zomato, which has nearly 120 million users, Zomato said that they were fortunate enough to resolve this with 'minimal damage'. Their blog says a developer was using the same email and password combination on Github that was leaked when the hosting site 000webhost credential database was hacked. They "were not using 2 factor authentication on Github (we have been using two-factor authentication on Github since the last few months). With the login credentials for the developer, the hacker was able to use the developer's password to get into his Github account and review one of our code repositories to which the developer had access (this happened some time last year, but for some reason the hacker only exploited the code very recently)" - NDTV

* Pulling a tooth can lead to a cascade of other problems: the teeth start shifting, the bone diminishes, the skin sags and the risk of gum disease increases - NY Times

* In November 2016, Larsen & Toubro, India’s biggest engineering firm, shed 14,000 employees, or 11.2 per cent of its workforce, in one of the biggest corporate retrenchment exercises in recent times.


* In UP, the BJP won 325 seats with roughly 40 per cent of the votes. It means almost 60 per cent of the people did not vote for the BJP in UP. Likewise, in 2014, the BJP won an absolute majority with 31 per cent of the votes. The Opposition has the requisite vote to put up a challenge if they are united. Fragmentation and division of the Opposition has been an important factor aiding the BJP's electoral triumph in state after state - Zoya Hasan on Rediff News

If your application do not require large amount of OS disk space, you would observe savings of $2.18 per VM if you choose to deploy with 32GB Standard Managed OS disk vs. 127GB. For large scale deployments, the benefit would accumulate and may represent significant cost savings.

* In 2015, the RBI had awarded in-principle approval to founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma to set up a payments bank along with 10 others. So far, apart from Paytm, only Airtel has gotten its payments bank running. Paytm Payments Bank imposes no minimum balance requirement for the bank account. Also, online transactions (such as IMPS, NEFT, RTGS) will not have any charges. The payment bank accounts have a balance limit of Rs. 1 lakh - the same as a mobile wallet after KYC. One big difference from wallets is that the payments bank can pay interest, and can choose to offer ATM and debit cards. The Paytm bank will issue a Rupay debit card, which will be free, but it will charge Rs. 100 + delivery as an annual fee. Airtel is paying an interest of 7.25 percent per year on accounts. Payments banks are not allowed to offer loans, or offer credit cards. The payments banks can also only invest the money people deposit in government securities.

* Wonder what made National Voter Service Portal to place this notice on its home page - "The information from this website should not be used for any other purpose than intended."

* NPS is India’s answer to the US’ retirement scheme-401(K)

Tax benefits on NPS are available through 3 sections – 80CCD(1), 80CCD(2) and 80CCD(1B).

* Yet another IRCTC website annoyance - Print Ticket can not be taken as Journey Date has already passed

* Many media houses are owned by politicians or affiliated to political parties

* "Failure is data for future work" - Kamal Hasan

Comments