Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

CAPTCHA , an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart," refers to various authentication methods that validate users as humans, and not bots, by testing users with a challenge that is simple for humans but difficult for machines.  CAPTCHAs prevent scammers and spammers from using bots to fill out web forms for malicious purposes. The term CAPTCHA was coined in 2003 by a group of computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon University led by Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum. Launched by von Ahn in 2007, reCAPTCHA v1 had a dual aim: To make the text-based CAPTCHA challenge more difficult for bots to crack, and to improve the accuracy of optical character recognition (OCR) being used at the time to digitize printed texts.  In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA and began using it to digitize texts for Google Books while offering it as a service to other organizations. According to Google , every time its CAPTCHAs are solved, that human e

This Week I Learned -  *  Helidon is a Java microservice framework that is open sourced by Oracle.  *  Microsoft Azure AI  provides more than 449 prebuilt neural voices across 147 languages. Custom Neural Voice (CNV) is a feature offered by Azure AI that enables users to create a unique, customized, synthetic voice for their applications. This feature uses human speech samples as training data to generate a highly natural-sounding voice for a brand or characters. CNV which is based on neural text-to-speech technology allows creation of synthetic, realistic and natural-sounding voiced for representing brands and personifying machines for conversational interactions with users. Duolingo, the language learning company is using Custom Neural Voice to personalize language learning by introducing a cast of characters within the platform. * Azure Speech to text supports real-time language identification for multilingual language learning scenarios, and helps human-human interaction with bett

This Week I Learned -  *  Migrate application workloads written in full .NET Framework, which requires running in Windows containers to .NET Standard . Migrated workloads will run in Linux containers with a smaller footprint in terms of a container image and hence provide better density. This decreases the number of agent nodes required to host and run applications. *  Azure shared disks is a feature for Azure managed disks that allow you to attach a managed disk to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously .  * You can attach an SSD persistent disk in multi-writer mode to up to two N2 virtual machine (VM) instances simultaneously so that both VMs can read and write to the disk. Persistent disks in multi-writer mode support a subset of SCSI-3 Persistent Reservations (SCSI PR) commands.  You can attach a non-boot persistent disk to more than one VM in read-only mode , which lets you share static data between multiple VMs. Sharing static data between multiple VMs from one persiste

This Week I Learned -  *  Much like code, IT architecture design is also prone to technical debt . Technical debt includes the cost of additional work required later as a consequence of choosing easy solutions instead of better approaches. The primary objective of creating technical debt is to prioritize delivery over proper design principles. * Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. * Google's Bard has an advantage over ChatGPT and other chatbots by accessing the web for updated information. * Now anyone using Immersive Reader, with any content they choose, can go to the Reading Preferences pane, enable Reading Coach to practice reading out loud and receive focused practice exercises. When the Reading Coach switch is enabled, the Play button in the Immersive Reader changes to a Microphone button. Students can select the Edit button near the Reading Coach toggle to customize parts of the coach inluding the voice, fe

A landscape diagram visually represents various organizations, companies, or elements within a specific industry or sector. 2022 API Platform Landscape For high resolution image & notes, visit Postman CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape  For high resolution image & guide, visit  landscape.cncf.io The 2024 MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) Landscape For  PDF  &  interactive  version, check the 2024 “state of the union” report

I cleared the SC-900:Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals exam . In the preparation process I brushed up on Microsoft cybersecurity services and learned about all the new changes that have been introduced since Microsoft Ignite November 2021. I was very impressed with the preparation material that is available on this topic (& for other Fundamentals certification exams) - MS Learn exam targeted Learning Path - ~6 hours, 16 modules Exam Cram video sessions : 214 minutes Free practice assessment   Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals Exam Ref SC-900 by Dwayne Natwick, Packt (2022) I found a lot of useful illustrations along the learning path - Microsoft security services map Source:  Cybersecurity Reference Architecture  (Dec 2021) Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a unified infrastructure security management system & a cloud workload protection solution. Microsoft Sentinel is a mix of security information event management (SIEM) and sec

This Week I Learned -  * Microsoft Defender for Cloud protects workloads in Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), GitHub and Azure DevOps (ADO). Microsoft recommends using the native cloud connector. *  Reference list of all the recommendations Defender for Cloud can provide for AWS resources   * Data in the Archive tier of Azure Storage can take up to 15 hours to rehydrate, depending on the priority specified for the rehydration operation. * Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now a supported operating system on OCI. * Azure NetApp Files [ PDF ] is built in the Azure data center with direct access to compute nodes, it delivers agility, sub-millisecond latency, and high performance on par or better than on-premises storage. * The Server Message Block protocol (SMB protocol) is a client-server communication protocol used for sharing access to files, printers, serial ports and other resources on a network. A group at IBM developed the SMB protocol in the 1980s. The proto