Information Technology

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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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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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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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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Azure to AWS map

Over the years you might have worked with either AWS or Azure as cloud providers, both offer fairly similar services, so the experience in one of them mildly translates into the other one, as long as you know the basics. So here is a map of the services and their brother from another mother. This is a shallow comparison for the main services, with the service purpose and key differences I could think of, so once you know the service name you can do a full investigation. Compute Azure Virtual Machines / EC2 (Elastic compute cloud) When you want to manage your own virtual machines, IaaS, this is the services you are looking at. Azure function / Lambda Sometimes you just need to execute a bit of code, but you don’t need a dedicated virtual machine for that. You can go server-less and use Azure functions or Lambda. Azure App Services / Elastic Beanstalk For running applications in the cloud, without having to worry too much about the servers they are running. They will have dedicated virtual machines under the hood. A key difference…

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Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams new AI-based feature will remove background noise Microsoft Teams is getting another excellent feature that will use the company’s artificial intelligence technology to reduce background noise in meetings. Windows 10, 7, and 8.1 users will begin receiving this feature in November 2020. Microsoft Teams noise suppression feature is being improved to seamlessly remove the background noise. For example, this AI-based feature might reduce the sound of clicking pens, mic issues, and other unwelcome background noises. Microsoft has been working on the feature for quite a few months now and the company has been training its AI model using its own internal meetings. The noise suppression feature will analyze your audio feed and use the company’s homegrown deep neural networks to reduce the sound of the background, such as the clicking of the keyboard, noise generated from fans, etc. Microsoft said that this is an update to the existing noise suppression feature and users will now have control over how much noise suppression they want. “The “High” setting is new and will suppress more background noise,” the tech giant noted in a roadmap update. The…

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Windows 10’s God Mode

Windows 10 comes with both the Control Panel and modern Settings, but the modern Settings app provides an unpolished experience with key features missing. Fortunately, Windows 10 still comes with the Control Panel-based advanced configuration page called "God Mode" that allows you to easily access all advanced tools, features, and tasks. God Mode lets you access all management features in one location and it's still better than the modern Windows 10 Settings. God Modes UI is based on Control Panel layout and it's designed to help you quickly configure Windows settings from one screen. Enable God Mode in Windows 10 To access God Mode in Windows 10, you need to create a special shortcut folder on your desktop, as highlighted in the steps below: Login to your account with administrator privileges.On the desktop, right-click anywhere.Select “Create a new folder” option.Right-click the new folder.Rename the folder to the following command:GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}Press enter. As you can see, You can double-click on this folder to open God Mode. When you're in the God Mode folder, you will be presented with a page similar to the screenshot below: Windows 10's…

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