This Week I Learned - Week #39 2020

 This Week I Learned - 

* Using Azure Resource Mover service, you can currently move the following resources across regions:

  1. Azure VMs and associated disks
  2. NICs
  3. Availability sets
  4. Azure virtual networks
  5. Public IP addresses
  6. Network security groups (NSGs)
  7. Internal and public load balancers
  8. Azure SQL databases and elastic pools

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure enterprise-scale landing zones provides guidance on landing zone critical design areas to build and operationalize your Azure environment.



From Google Developer Advocate Priyanka Vergadia's GCP sketch notes

The Chaos Monkey Guide for Engineers is a full how-to of Chaos Monkey, including what it is, its origin story, its pros and cons, its relation to the broader topic of Chaos Engineering

* Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. Terraform is not mutually exclusive with other systems. It can be used to manage a single application, or the entire datacenter.

Block by Block is a joint venture by UN-Habitat, Microsoft, and Mojang, that aims to improve marginalized areas by actively engaging community members in public projects imagined first in Minecraft.

* "the best public schools were in the wealthiest Zip Codes"

* Eight of the top 10 most surveilled cities in the world are in China

China Central Television (CCTV) is a Chinese public service broadcaster. CCTV has a network of 50 channels broadcasting different programmes and is accessible to more than one billion viewers in six different languages.

* Hyderabad with over three lakh surveillance cameras has been ranked 16th among the top 20 most surveilled cities in the world  with 29.9 public CCTV cameras per 1,000 people.

* A recent report by Top10VPN has identified 2 million surveillance-camera networks outside China, which use the hardware from controversial Chinese firms such as Hikvision and Dahua. The People’s Republic of China is the controlling stakeholder in Hikvision with a 42% ownership. Dahua, on the other hand, has backdoors, allowing unauthorised access to their surveillance systems.

Finland is the first country in Europe to put dogs to work sniffing out the coronavirus. A similar trial
started at Dubai international airport last month. After collecting their luggage, arriving international passengers are asked to dab their skin with a wipe. In a separate booth, the beaker containing the wipe is then placed next to others containing different control scents - and the dog starts sniffing. If it indicates it has detected the virus - usually by yelping, pawing or lying down - the passenger is advised to take a free standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, using a nasal swab, to verify the dog's verdict. In the University of Helsinki's preliminary tests, dogs - which have been successfully used to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes - were able to identify the virus with nearly 100% accuracy, even days before before a patient developed symptoms. Although Covid-19 is known to infect mink and cats, dogs do not have the 
receptors necessary for the virus to readily gain a foothold and do not appear to be easily infected, according to Hielm-Bjorkman. There is no evidence that they can transmit the virus to people or other animals.- The Guardian

India, as part of its counter-space capabilities, demonstrated Anti-Satellite (A-Sat) missile technology on March 27, 2019, which equipped India with a ‘kinetic kill’ option to destroy enemy satellites. But the CASI report points to how China has multiple other counter-space technologies that are intended to threaten adversary space systems from ground to geosynchronous orbit (GEO). These include direct-ascent kinetic-kill vehicles (anti-satellite missiles), co-orbital satellites, directed-energy weapons, jammers, and cyber capabilities - ToI

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