Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - *  On 22 April 2015, Microsoft announced an extension to the Online Services Bug Bounty program to include various Microsoft Azure properties.The Online Services Bug Bounty program gives individuals across the globe the opportunity to submit vulnerability reports on eligible Online Services (O365 and Microsoft Azure) provided by Microsoft. Qualified submissions are eligible for payment from a minimum of $500 USD up to $15,000 USD. *  The website Plain Text Offenders publicly shames sites which store plain text passwords. *  You've heard of the hamburger menu. This is how the Kebab menu looks - *  Navinder Singh Sarao trading from his home caused the flash crash of 2010 after asking someone to help him build a spoofing robot *  A pox party (also measles party, flu party etc.) is a social activity where children are deliberately exposed to an infectious disease, supposedly to promote immunity. Such parties are typically organize...

With the proliferation of smartphones, there has been a huge growth of native mobile apps as well. One of the biggest advantages of a native app is that it can leverage internal features of the native mobile device's OS ("a closed ecosystem") that are not available to a mobile web app.   But are all native mobile apps as helpful as they look? Troy Hunt makes some great points on security & privacy issues with native mobile apps . Highlights: * In the browser world, there are tools to opt out of invasive tracking by websites. But in the mobile world, there is no equivalent, certainly not within a platform like iOS where third party apps can’t be used to intercept your traffic. gender, birth date and mobile number. mobile apps provide access to classes of data that are simply unobtainable in the browser and you can't block access to it like you can with anti-tracking tools in the browser *  There are third party tracking services (like Gomeeki which calls it...

This Week I Learned - *  There are numerous learning videos on PowerShell on Microsoft Virtual Academy featuring the inventor of PowerShell, Jeffrey Snover * In the US, 7 out of every 8 minutes on mobile devices is spent within apps *  Google Handwriting Input allows you to handwrite text on your phone or tablet in 82 languages.  By building on large-scale language modeling, robust multi-language OCR, and incorporating large-scale neural-networks and approximate nearest neighbor search for character classification, Google Handwriting Input supports languages that can be challenging to type on a virtual keyboard. *  Jan Koum and Brian Acton's messaging app, Whatsapp is 50% bigger than global SMS with 800 million monthly active users * Trivia - It is strange that the menu options in Word Online show up randomly on the right or left * Flipkart generates about 75% of its traffic from the mobile app, while that number is 90% for Myntra. Myntr...

This Week I Learned - *  SLA for a single instance VM on Basic / Standard tier of Azure Website is 99.95% * Microsoft's Office Lens native mobile app trims, enhances and makes pictures of whiteboards and documents readable. Office Lens can convert images to editable Word and PowerPoint files too. * Microsoft’s own IT department, is taking measured steps in deploying the more than 1,300 line-of-business applications to the Cloud * Google Store uses 32 digit order numbers. * I read about PopChartLab  twice in a single day from different sources . Their visualization work reminds me of GapMinder & Gramener * Google Maps can help you find all petrol filling outlets in a city * Private banks in India like ICICI & HDFC do a better job than public sector banks. The competition between the private banks is helping customers avail more features online. HDFC now makes it possible to file form 15G/H online to avail TDS waiver. * Some banks i...

This Week I Learned - *  Azure Resource Explorer is a new web site where you can discover the Azure Resource Management APIs * The majority of all functionality of the SQL Server is now available within Azure SQL Database v12 . The list of unsupported functions and functionality are almost all directly related to stuff that is primarily about server and OS management, not things you worry about with PaaS (Platform as a Service). *  The Heartbleed SSL vulnerability was a turning point for Linus's Law (Eric Raymond, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, famously wrote "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.". The idea is that open source software, by virtue of allowing anyone and everyone to view the source code, is inherently less buggy than closed source software. He dubbed this "Linus's Law"), a catastrophic exploit based on a severe bug in open source software affected about 18% of all the HTTPS websites in the world, and allowed attackers to view ...