This Week I Learned - Week #5 2019

This Week I Learned -

* Windows 7, Windows Server 2008/R2, and SQL Server 2008/R2 all have end-of-support dates in the next 12 months. That means no more security fixes unless you pony up some large piles of money for extended security fix support. Microsoft has promised that customers that move Windows Server 2008/R2 or SQL Server 2008/R2 to Azure (or Azure Stack) will continue to get free security fixes for up to 3 years.

* Back up of virtual machines is done at the fabric level. These backup jobs that protect the entire machine are unaffected by what we do with firewalls, such as Azure Firewall - Petri

* DevOps is a loose set of practices, guidelines, and culture designed to break down silos in IT development, operations, networking, and security.  CA(L)MS—which stands for Culture, Automation, Lean (as in Lean management; also see continuous delivery), Measurement, and Sharing—is a useful acronym for remembering the key points of DevOps philosophy - How SRE Relates to DevOps, The Site Reliability Workbook

* A self-identified “capitalist,” Roger McNamee, author of “Zucked - Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe” currently advocates breaking up Facebook’s data monopoly by force, and heavily regulating its appalling business practices.  In 2006, McNamee writes, he counseled the 22-year-old C.E.O. against selling Facebook to Yahoo for a billion dollars. McNamee also profited from this mentorship. Facebook’s “core platform,” as McNamee puts it, is relatively simple: It “consists of a product and a monetization scheme”....users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. It is a company whose product is used by one-third of the planet has only 30,000 employees. Without the advents of the iPhone, cloud data storage and the industry’s “lean start-up” model, Facebook may well have wandered down the bleak path of the short-lived early-2000s social media entities Myspace and Friendster. McNamee makes the angry but measured argument that “social media has enabled personal views that had previously been kept in check by social pressure.” Our time and lives are the company’s only currency. Without our continued attention, Facebook quite literally has nothing - NY Times

* Apple knew of FaceTime bug for over a week before it acted on it. A 14-year-old in Arizona discovered the flaw that exposed millions of iPhone users to eavesdropping. His mother exhausted every avenue she could to alert Apple. But it wasn’t until 28th Jan that the company raced to disable Group FaceTime and said it was working on a fix - NY Times

* ...the creators of Java backed the release of Android, saying that it had “strapped another set of rockets to the [Java] community’s momentum”. But after it acquired Java in 2010, Oracle sued us for using these software interfaces, trying to profit by changing the rules of software development after the fact. Oracle’s lawsuit claims the right to control software interfaces—the building blocks of software development—and as a result, the ability to lock in a community of developers who have invested in learning the free and open Java language. A court initially ruled that the software interfaces in this case are not copyrightable, but that decision was overruled. A unanimous jury then held that our use of the interfaces was a legal fair use, but that decision was likewise overruled. Unless the Supreme Court corrects these twin reversals, this case will end developers’ traditional ability to freely use existing software interfaces to build new generations of computer programs for consumers. The U.S. Constitution authorized copyrights to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” not to impede creativity or promote lock-in of software platforms - Google Blog

* Aadhaar (Hindi for “foundation”), is the world’s largest biometric identification system

* "Google grew at a time when the traditional role of the system administrator was being transformed. It questioned system administration, as if to say: we can't afford to hold tradition as an authority, we have to think anew, and we don't have time to wait for everyone else to catch up" - Mark Burgess

Comments