Wipro wins five-year contract from Fortum

The announcement was made before market hours today, 20 October 2020. Shares of Wipro rose 1.09% to settle at Rs 343.25 yesterday. Wipro announced that it has won an Application Management (AMS) and Services Integration & Management (SIAM) contract from Fortum, one of the leading clean-energy companies headquartered in Espoo, Finland.The announcement was made before market hours today, 20 October 2020. Shares of Wipro rose 1.09% to settle at Rs 343.25 yesterday. As a part of the five-year agreement, Wipro will manage Fortum's application portfolio across hundreds of applications for more than 11,500 users across 18 countries and provide 24/7 support for business-critical applications. Wipro will leverage its Artificial Intelligence and automation platform, Wipro HOLMES to enable process automation for enhanced end-user experience. In addition, Wipro's Service Integration & Management (SIAM) transformation solution will help Fortum consolidate and govern its multi-supplier eco-system. Fortum is a European energy company with activities in more than 40 countries. The company provide customers with electricity, gas, heating and cooling as well as smart solutions to improve resource efficiency. Wipro is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services…

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AWS and their Billions in IPv4

I was doing some work on AWS and wanted to know what IP addresses were being used. Luckily for me, AWS publishes this all here https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json. When you go through this list, you’ll quickly see that AWS has a massive asset of IPv4 allocations. Just counting quickly I noticed a lot of big prefixes. However, the IPv4 ranges on that list are just the ranges that are in use and allocated today by AWS. Time to dig a bit deeper. IPv4 address acquisitions by AWS Over the years, AWS has acquired a lot of IPv4 address space. Most of this happens without gaining too much attention, but there were a few notable acquisitions that I’ll quickly summarize below. 2017: MIT selling 8 million IPv4 addresses to AWS In 2017 MIT sold half of its 18.0.0.0/8 allocation to AWS. This 18.128.0.0/9 range holds about 8 million IPv4 addresses. 2018: GE sells 3.0.0.0/8 to AWS In 2018 the IPv4 prefix 3.0.0.0/8 was transferred from GE to AWS. With this, AWS became the proud owner of its first /8! That’s sixteen million new IPv4 addresses to feed us hungry AWS…

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Catalyst 8000 Edge Family

Networking Introducing the Catalyst 8000 Edge Family, Cisco’s New SD-WAN Platform We have been asking more of our networks lately. The cloud has become the operating platform for the new enterprise, while SASE, multicloud architectures, and edge applications add new levels of complexity. It’s time for us to revamp the WAN edge devices that handle the network traffic, to address these needs. At the same time we need to keep IT teams agile, so they can support resilient businesses. I am thus very proud to announce availability of an entire new line of edge devices, the Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms and Catalyst Cellular Gateway. An upgrade path from several of Cisco’s ISR and ASR routers, the Catalyst 8000 line is built for SD-WAN, multicloud, security, and analytics — for managing traffic that is increasingly distributed across the cloud. The Catalyst 8000 family provides the security, performance, and agility our customers need. It will serve enterprises with seamless connectivity and consistent policy-based automation for all users, customers, and applications. On top of that, our new Catalyst Cellular Gateways will allow networks to add cellular connectivity – including…

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Windows apps now run on Chromebooks

Windows apps now run on Chromebooks with Parallels Desktop Google is bringing Windows app support to Chromebooks today through a partnership with Parallels. First announced earlier this year, Chrome OS will now boot a full version of Windows inside a virtual machine to gain access to existing desktop apps. It’s designed for businesses, which means only enterprise customers will be able to purchase the app for $69.99 per user. Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise will launch a full copy of Windows, allowing Microsoft’s operating system to sit side by side with Chrome OS and Android apps. Chrome OS even redirects certain Windows file types directly to the Parallels instance to make it easier to launch files that you’d typically use a desktop app for. The integration isn’t as seamless as the Coherence mode that’s typically found in Parallels Desktop, which lets you pin Windows apps to the macOS dock and run them without seeing the full Windows desktop and taskbar. This is an initial 1.0 release, and some of that deeper Chrome OS and Windows app integration will come over time. You will be…

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ITSM: Skills and Certifications You Need to Know

IT service management (ITSM) is one of the most vital jobs in tech, especially in the context of the enterprise. ITSM specialists focus on improving customers’ interactions with software products and services; it’s a big job, especially when you consider the complex needs of many clients and companies. For most ITSM specialists, guiding principles of the job include: Listening to feedback from clients and customers.Iterative adjustments to products and workflows.A holistic view of the entire organization’s needs.Optimization and automation.Concentrating on maximum value.  Depending on the company, the execution of those principles can look radically different. And if that wasn’t difficult enough on its own, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many companies to rapidly shift their tech stacks toward the cloud. Workflows have gone remote, with new tools and procedures. ITSM specialists must be smart and proactive to ensure that clients have their needs met.  At their highest level, ITSM specialists must handle the delivery and maintenance of IT services for an entire company, with an emphasis on holistic experience. Because it’s more of a discipline or philosophy than a distinct job, ITSM is incorporated into…

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MS is installing Office web apps on Windows 10

Microsoft is installing Office web apps on Windows 10 without your permission Microsoft recently pushed an update for Windows 10 that covertly installs progressive web apps (PWA) for Microsoft Office apps without asking for permission. The ‘forced update’ installs Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook web-based apps. These are basically shortcuts to the web version of Office that can be accessed through any browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, although the installed apps open through Microsoft Edge only even if your default browser is set to something else. There are also some reports that suggest Windows 10 devices were restarted without asking for any sort of permissions. This was done to install these apps through a forced software update. It was initially assumed that the update was pushed for Windows Insider members only. However, it seems to have reached non-Insider members as well. We can confirm the same, as a recent update has installed these apps on our system as well, with the installation date as October 14. Do note that these apps are not the full version of Microsoft Office. They will only open a web-version of…

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New High-End Exynos Chipsets

Samsung developing two new high-end Exynos chipsets, one features AMD GPU It is rumored that Samsung will soon introduce the Exynos 2100 chipset and that it won’t be plagued by performance and power efficiency issues that plagued the Exynos 990. However, that isn’t the only processor that the South Korean smartphone giant is working on. The company reportedly has two more Exynos processors in the pipeline. The Exynos 2100, which is expected to be a part of the Galaxy S21, goes by the internal model number Exynos 9840. According to Ice Universe (@UniverseIce on Twitter), Samsung is working on the Exynos 9855 and the Exynos 9925. So, we can expect the Exynos 9855 to debut with the Galaxy S22 in 2022. The Exynos 9925 will reportedly feature AMD’s Radeon graphics, and we can expect it to be released only in 2023. However, some previous rumors had claimed that we could see an Exynos chipset with AMD graphics as soon as 2021, so we can only be certain after an official announcement from Samsung. Samsung had recently unveiled the Exynos 1080 processor with 5nm process, Cortex-A78 CPU cores, Cortex-A55 CPU cores, and the ARM Mali-G78 GPU. The Exynos 1080 is expected…

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Windows Emotet malware

Watch out for Emotet malware's new 'Windows Update' attachment The Emotet botnet has begun to use a new malicious attachment that pretends to be a message from Windows Update telling you to upgrade Microsoft Word. Emotet is a malware infection that spreads through spam emails containing malicious Word or Excel documents. These documents utilize macros to download and install the Emotet Trojan on a victim's computer, which uses the computer to send spam email and ultimately leads to a ransomware attack on a victim's network. After a short vacation, the Emotet malware returned to operation on October 14th and began blasting out malicious spam worldwide. These spam campaigns pretend to be invoices, shipping information, COVID-19 information, information about President Trump's health, resumes, or purchase orders, as shown below. Attached to these spam emails are malicious Word (.doc) attachments or links to download one. When opened, these attachments will prompt a user to 'Enable Content' so that malicious macros will run to install the Emotet malware on a victim's computer. To trick users into enabling the macros, Emotet uses various document templates, including pretending to be created on iOS…

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E-Textiles

Emerging Technologies in Electronics That Will Change Our Future Electronic textiles (or smart clothing) are fabrics embedded with digital components and electronics to provide added value to the wearer. There are many other applications that rely on integrating electronics into fabrics, such as interior design technologies. This type of technology is considered revolutionary because it has the ability to do several things that conventional fabrics cannot, including conduct energy, communicate, transform, and grow. Future applications for smart clothing may be developed for health monitoring, tracking soldiers, and monitoring pilot. Personal and portable physiological monitoring,  communications, heating, and lighting can all benefit from this technology.

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AI-Based Technology

How Microsoft Is Enabling Its AI-Based Technology To Be Disability-Inclusive The lack of machine learning datasets that include people with disabilities has proved to be a major roadblock for developing technological solutions customised to their needs. This is often referred to as ‘data desert’. It is a common practice for organisations building technology products and services to use data at an aggregate level, which leads to stereotyping and being exclusionary in the process. Earlier this week, Microsoft, in a lengthy blog, revealed its roadmap to deal with this data desert which has become a major hindrance in making artificial intelligence accessible to people with disability. The tech giant Microsoft has revealed its various collaborations to ‘shrink this data desert’ as discussed below. Seeing AI Just recently, Microsoft introduced the Seeing AI app for iOS. This app, designed specifically for visually impaired persons, uses the device camera to identify people and objects and then describes them audibly. The company believes that its use can be further enhanced to recognise objects that are specific to that particular user. If this is truly realised, then such an innovation would…

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