Daily Archives: May 14, 2020

In March, we announced Microsoft Family Safetya new app to help you protect what matters most with digital and physical safety. Today, we are excited to start rolling out the launch of limited preview of the app on iOS and Android.

With families working and learning from home, many of us are spending more time on our computers and phones and are looking for ways to ensure our loved ones are safe. Microsoft Family Safety helps you to facilitate a dialogue with your kids about the time they are spending on their devices and type of content they are viewing. The app provides transparency on where everyone is spending time online and allows you to create flexible schedules to carve out more time for things like online learning. Additionally, it helps you stay connected even when youre apart with location sharing. Our team is committed to bringing you additional physical safety features in the coming months, like safe driving, so as we go back to a new normal you can help protect your family across your whole life.

Find the balance that is right for your family. Give your kids independence to learn and explore, while setting boundaries that help them make good choices. Kids can see the same activity reports their parents see, so everyone can be part of the conversation. Additionally, with Microsoft Family Safety, family members can manage their data and information and who it is shared with. We work around the clock to help protect your information and will not sell your data.

Lets take a closer look as some of the features you can try in the preview of Family Safety:

Getinformationaboutyour familys activitysoyou canhave a conversation aboutwhat your kids are doing online and on their devices.View screen time, top websites visited, and terms kids are searching for online.2,3Receive an email summary each week to help facilitate a dialogue on healthy digital choices and begin developing good habits from a young age.

Set screen time limits across Windows and Xbox devices. Or ifyour kids will be on devices longer forthings likeonline learning, you can set limits on specific apps or games instead.2 Now when you say only one hour of a certain game, that really means one hour of that gamewhether thats being played on a Windows PC, Xbox, or Android phone. And if they run out of screen time, they can ask for more. You have the choice to add more time or not based on what is right for your family.

Create a safe space for yourkidsto explore online. Set healthy boundaries with web and search filters to block mature content and set browsing to kid-friendly websites on Microsoft Edge.3 Get notified when your kids want to download a more mature app or game from the Microsoft Stores with age limits, keeping you in the know and helping to avoid surprises.5 Family Safety provides you with the tools to begin talking about the type of content that is right for your kids.

Stay connected even when youre apart. See loved ones on a map with location sharing.4 Plus, save places they visit the most, like home, work, or school, to know where family members are at glance. With stay-at-home orders and restrictions on mobility currently in place, it is important to know where your loved ones are when they are not at homefor example if your teenager got side-tracked while running to the grocery store and ended up at a friends house. And as we get back to a new normal, keeping in touch with your loved ones will be even more important.

We invite you to join the preview today so that we can gather your feedback and continue enhancing the experience before launching in the coming months. Once launched, the app will be available to download for free in the app stores.

For users, who have already expressed interest, we will be reaching out with instructions to download the preview.

We have limited availability for additional users on Android and iOS and invite you to sign up. As a participant in the preview, you gain early access to the app and get to help shape the product by sharing feedback about your experience.

Microsoft Family Safety is best when used together. We are looking for families with children of all ages to join the preview. We ask that users participating in the preview actively provide feedback to help us learn from your experience. You can send feedback in the app by shaking your device or tapping on the menu > Help and feedback.

Get the preview.

From our family to yours, we couldnt be more excited to help you protect what matters most.

1 Currently in preview, available to a limited number of users on iOS and Android.2 Windows, Xbox, and Android apps and games only.3 Enables SafeSearch with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 and Xbox One devices only.4 Location permissions must be active.5 Applies to apps downloaded from the Xbox and Microsoft stores.

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The new Microsoft Family Safety app now available in preview for iOS and Android - Microsoft

The world of malware protection has come a long way since the wild west of the early 2000s, when Trojans lurked behind every download. The malware threats that loom now are more advanced and more evasive. Now, researchers from the Microsoft Threat Protection Intelligence Team are teaming up with Intel Labs to spearhead new, deep learning-based approaches for detecting and classifying malware.

Specifically, the researchers examined the use of deep transfer learning from computer vision for static malware classification. Intel had already done work on that application of deep learning, so the researchers used that prior research and a real-world dataset from Microsoft to poke at an interesting idea: approaching malware classification as a computer vision problem.

The researchers were interested in the idea that the binary code of pieces of malware, if represented as grayscale plots, might exhibit patterns that could be automatically recognized as benign or malicious. To test this, they used static malware-as-image network analysis, or STAMINA. They broke the dataset comprising 2.2 million portable executable file hashes into three sections, with 60% used for training, 20% for validation, and 20% for testing.

The workflow for STAMINA. Image courtesy of Microsoft.

While static analysis is typically associated with traditional detection methods, it remains to be an important building block for AI-driven detection of malware, wrote Jugal Parikh and Marc Marino for Microsofts Threat Protection Intelligence Team. It is especially useful for pre-execution detection engines: static analysis disassembles code without having to run applications or monitor runtime behavior.

The team found that STAMINA achieved high accuracy in malware detection with only a handful of false positives: at a 0.1% false positive rate, it attained 87.05% recall; at a 2.58% false positive rate, it attained 99.07% recall.

The results certainly encourage the use of deep transfer learning for the purpose of malware classification, Parikh and Marino wrote. It helps accelerate training by bypassing the search for optimal hyperparameters and architecture searches, saving time and compute resources in the process.

The researchers do acknowledge that there are cons to go along with the pros, however. While STAMINA is better at in-depth examinations of files, larger applications of the tool would likely begin to buckle under the computational weight inherent in converting billions of pixels into image files, lending an advantage to more traditional metadata-based methods.

Now, the researchers are working to advance another facet of deep learning for malware protection: optimizing deep learning models to be deployed on client machines for on-premises malware detection with low performance overhead.

To read more about STAMINA, click here.

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Microsoft and Intel Test Malware Protection Through Computer Vision - Datanami

The Universal Windows Platform, UWP for short, was supposed to be the future of Windows. Back when Microsoft still had aspirations for Windows to be a major mobile OS, UWP apps were supposed to be able to function on desktops, tablets, and phones alike. Yet over the years, developers largely stuck to the tried and trusted Win32 platform.

Now it seems Microsoft is getting rid of UWP altogether. As spotted by Paul Thurrott, a session for the companys upcoming online-only Build conference will explain how theWindows app platform is evolving and unifying Win32 and UWP under the WinUI framework. Another session describes how:

WinUI is Microsofts UI framework of the future for every app on Windows, designed to work in both Universal (UWP) and Desktop (Win32) apps. Come learn how WinUI provides a path forward for every Windows Developer, whether youre using WinForms, WPF, MFC, native or .NET, and more!

The longstanding fragmentation within Windows has left some developers frustrated compared to the more streamlined vision behind Apple and Google software. Unfortunately the information we have now doesnt tell us much about the specifics of Microsofts plans, but hopefully Build will provide a clearer picture when it begins May 19.

on Thurrott

Read our daily coverage on how the tech industry is responding to the coronavirus and subscribe to our weekly newsletter Coronavirus in Context.

For tips and tricks on working remotely, check out our Growth Quarters articles here or follow us on Twitter.

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Microsoft will detail how it plans to unify UWP and Win32 apps at Build 2020 - The Next Web

Centrical, a provider of holistic employee engagement and real-time performance management platform for Fortune 500 companies, announced an integration with Microsoft Teams, Microsofts unified communications and collaboration hub. Organizations on Teams will now be able to use Centrical to motivate, train, and help employees set and pursue performance goals directly from the Microsoft platform.

Coronavirus and WFH Reveals Gaps in Cybersecurity Safety Net

A major operational challenge the COVID-19 pandemic has created for large businesses is being able to manage the experience and performance of the great number of employees now working from home. The integration of Centrical with Microsoft Teams helps solves that, easily and effectively, said Gal Rimon, Centricals Founder and CEO. Centrical for Teams helps to create a new normal for connecting employees with their managers, to each other, aligning on goals as well as having the drive to perform.

The Centrical for Teams integration provides companies with a proven-effective way to create a routine for employees new workstyle but with familiar elements, they will find reassuring. Leaderboards, challenges, and missions are all there as is the ability to recognize and reward stellar performance. In addition, Centricals structured and closed-loop communications capability makes conversations between managers and employees highly productive, even if theyre miles apart. Along with that, it lets organizations rapidly reskill or upskill employees to handle shifting roles and responsibilities by way of quickly deployed remote learning programs.

Performance Management on TeamsThe Centrical integration adds a layer of employee performance management capabilities that makes Microsoft Teams even more beneficial for organizations, said MikeAmmerlaan, director, Microsoft 365 Ecosystem at Microsoft Corp. Centrical on Teams keeps remote employees focused on their goals, maintain their skills, or develop new ones and allows for peer recognition, a valuable way to keep employees connected to each other.

A compelling aspect of the Centrical for Teams integration is the Centrical Bot. It allows for automated push notifications with user interactivity for things like daily updates on scores or KPI results, and reminders to complete learning activities. It also lets polling be conducted so businesses can quickly grasp the mindset of employees either company-wide, at the unit level, or individually. In addition, users can share badges theyve earned in their Teams channels to earn recognition for their efforts from peers and managers.

The Centrical Bot can also act as a focal point for gamified performance challenges and microlearning. The data from those and other activities using game mechanics can be pushed to the Centrical platform where it can be used to assign points for achieving KPIs, completing learning activities, or correctly answering quizzes creating a helpful, fun competition that encourages participation.

IoT is Blooming Connections to Hit 83 Billion by 2024

An Improved Employee ExperienceThis integration brings to Teams the powerful blend of real-time performance management and personalized microlearning with advanced gamification, uniquely offered by the Centrical platform. It enhances the employee experience on Teams in terms of engagement, learning, and performance through these features and functions that are part of the integration.

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Centrical Announces Integration with Microsoft Teams - EnterpriseTalk

Chief executives and other representatives from more than 330 businesses, including Capital One COF, +9.61% , General Mills GIS, -2.12% , Microsoft MSFT, +0.43% , Nike NKE, +0.61% , Salesforce CRM, -1.55% , Visa V, +2.15% and more are calling on bipartisan federal lawmakers to build back a better economy from COVID-19 by infusing resilient climate solutions.

The businesses, in lobbying Congress Wednesday through an effort they call LEAD on Climate 2020, represent combined annual revenues of more than $1 trillion and a shared market valuation of nearly $11.5 trillion. They employee more than 3 million people. The group, supported by sustainable investing advocates Ceres, claims they are the largest ever to advance a call to action from the business community to Congress on climate change.

Read:Microsoft aims to be carbon negative by 2030

House Democrats unveiled their opening bid Tuesday in the next debate on Capitol Hill over how to fight the coronavirus and revive the economy. The sweeping bill, projected to cost a little over $3 trillion, was set to be voted on at the end of the week. The proposal includes bolstering the direct payments program put in place in the $1.8 trillion coronavirus bill passed in late March, additional monies for state and local governments, and extending the expiration date for some unemployment benefits related to the pandemic.

The businesses behind the pledge want Congress to work toward putting Americans into clean-energy jobs, as well as foster an accelerated transition to a net-zero emissions economy by 2050 or sooner and provide more investment in sustainable infrastructure. The business leaders also urge Congress to consider a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and setting a carbon price. Setting a market-based carbon price remains a policy sticking point in a divided quest for a solution to man-made accelerating climate change, although has been increasingly, if slowly, adopted.

Some economists believe that raising the cost of burning coal, oil and gas can be a cost-effective way to curb emissions. But countries using the practice have found it politically difficult to set prices that are high enough to spur truly deep reductions in emissions. Many carbon pricing programs today are fairly modest.

Several participants LEAD on Climate call for plans that put the U.S. on a 1.5 Celsius warming target, the more aggressive end of a range of temperatures deemed a manageable level of average warming in coming decades by the Paris Climate accord and other initiatives. The Paris pact, for instance, has called for slowing to at least 2C by 2050.

Read:5 ways to slow global warming that share the burden with the oil patch: McKinsey

The LEAD on Climate businesses include more than a dozen Fortune 500 firms as well as trade associations, including the skiing-tourism sector, medium and small businesses from all 50 states. The companies and investors calling for climate action as part of economic recovery efforts span across the American economy, including retailers, manufacturers, health-care services, food and beverage companies, outdoors industries, technology companies and energy providers.

The high level of participation is notable given the disruption most of the companies and investors are experiencing due to the economic collapse, as well as the current social distancing constraints on in-person advocacy.

This increased corporate and investor policy engagement comes at a time when the consequences of the climate crisis have never been clearer or more dire. Last year, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were at their highest levels in at least the last 800,000 years, and the World Meteorological Organization recently found that the last decade was the hottest on record.

As U.S. and global emissions have steadily grown over the years, so has corporate and investor ambition to reduce emissions even amidst the current pandemic. In April, General Mills committed to source 100% renewable electricity by 2030 after joining the RE100 global corporate initiative, while both the clothing brand Eileen Fisher and the commercial real estate company JLL had their ambitious science-based targets approved by the Science Based Target initiative to limit their greenhouse gas emissions in line with the 1.5 degrees Celsius ambition of the Paris Agreement. All three belong to LEAD on Climate.

Also announced Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat, will co-head the climate policy group that presidential contender Joe Biden has set up in collaboration with his one-time rival Bernie Sanders, his campaign confirmed on Wednesday. The panels other co-chair will be former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a Biden ally who helped craft the Paris climate accord when he was President Barack Obamas Secretary of State. Ocasio-Cortez and co-writers of a proposed New Green Deal share some of the objectives of the LEAD on Climate effort, including green-job promotion.

Below, select quotes from the participants:

Today we have a health crisis, an economic crisis and a climate crisis all happening at once. The best solutions will tackle all three together. We have a distinct opportunity at this unique moment in history to define what we want our future to look like, said Patrick Flynn, vice president for sustainability at Salesforce.

At Nestl, our ambition to achieve zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is at the heart of our strategy to build a resilient business, said Meg Villarreal, government affairs manager at the food giant.

We urge Congress to enact policies that leverage private sector investment and innovation, such as a carbon dividend, said Hannon Armstrong HASI, -0.45% Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Eckel. This is how we turn the tide on the climate crisis and propel our country toward a thriving economy that is good for people and the planet. Hannon Armstrong is the first U.S. public company that provides capital to companies in energy efficiency, renewable energy and other sustainable infrastructure markets.

Policymakers must ensure that the decisions that are being taken today to rebuild our economy also factor in the dire climate consequences that are not too far behind, said Mindy Lubber, CEO and president at Ceres. They have the potential to reshape a new resilient economy in fundamental ways that prevent the next climate-fueled crisis.

Through smart investments in infrastructure and clean energy, we can create and build on industries and pave the way for family-sustaining careers, all while keeping our families healthy and making our communities more resilient for decades to come, said Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat of Florida, and chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.

Cement and ultimately, concrete, is a fundamental part of society, literally creating the foundation and structure of every city and community in the United States, said Jamie Gentoso, CEO, U.S. Cement at LafargeHolcim. As the leader in cement manufacturing in the U.S., LafargeHolcim actively seeks ways to decrease our carbon footprint. In participating with such a diverse, accomplished group of companies, I believe our combined experience, expertise and advocacy efforts will prompt Congress to take action on the climate crisis.

In the face of a global pandemic, Americas farmers have displayed tremendous resolve to ensure we remain fed and fueledbut grower profitability is at even greater risk due to the economic impact of the virus, said David Perry, CEO of Indigo Ag. By paying farmers for storing carbon in their soil we can create a new income stream for farmers during this challenging time, while leveraging one of the most scalable, affordable and immediate opportunities to address climate change: agriculture. Indigo is proud to stand by industry-leading companies to encourage Congress to build back better with climate positive stimulus funding, including incentives for agricultural carbon sequestration.

Tiffany & Co. TIF, -0.31% has long been committed to operating in a manner that respects both people and the planet, said Anisa Kamadoli Costa, chief sustainability officer at Tiffany & Co. Businesses must continue to lead in this way but cannot tackle climate change alone. We need smart public policies to advance our economy while protecting societys most vulnerable citizens and facilitating a net-zero emissions future.

The ski industry has been increasingly vocal about the need for climate action at the federal level. Now, the opportunity exists to rebuild our economy and future focused on renewable, clean energy, said Kelly Pawlak, president and CEO, National Ski Areas Association. Ski areas have paved the way for other small and rural businesses by installing and investing in wind and solar energy, and making broad-scale change to their operations to reduce their carbon emissions. This pandemic has given us a preview of the havoc climate change can wreak on our industry, and our way of life. Its time to raise our collective voice and advocate for the policies that ensure a sustainable future.

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Microsoft, Visa and others worth combined $11.5 trillion want Congress to include climate in COVID-19 recovery plan - MarketWatch

Innovaccer, a healthcare technology company, is focused on helping doctors, hospitals, and other players in healthcare talk to one another.

That's a tougher task than it might seem. The electronic medical records systems in use across the US often don't make it easy to transfer information, leaving physicians notoriously reliant on fax machines.

Innovaccer was started in 2014 to help solve this problem. The company provides platforms that help healthcare providers exchange information about their patients in real time. Its latest offering is called InAPI, and works by giving healthcare companies a common language to use for digital health information, which tends to vary across health records systems, hospitals, and doctors groups.

The technology is timely. The way hospitals handle data has proved inefficient for many, as the novel coronavirus flooded their emergency departments, labs, and critical care wings with patients, and they were asked to quickly report more data to regulators.

The US Department of Health and Human Services has also passed rules requiring providers to share health information with patients and health insurers, using a standard known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR, pronounced like fire).

It dictates how patient data should be coded in computers. Companies like Innovaccer, Change Healthcare, and Orion Health are helping with the transition.

"Left on its own, the industry will move at a slower pace," said Mark Hetz, a senior research director at the Advisory Board. "But when these things start to become a requirement, or it's clear that this is the standard that everyone should be adopting, that takes the risk out of it and people move more quickly."

Innovaccer's CTO Mike Sutten Innovaccer

Innovaccer's new platform uses FHIR give doctors and consensual third parties, including payers, app makers, and researchers, access to data that's all in the same place,according to Mike Sutten, the chief technology officer.

"We spent a decade digitizing the records," said Sutten.

The next challenge is "getting all those functions and people that are involved in caring for a person to operate as one," he said.

Read more: The US teamed up with Palantir on a secretive project to analyze coronavirus data. Now, they want to gather personal health information, too.

The San Francisco-based startup works with more than 25,000 providers typically mid-sized health systems like Connecticut's Hartford Healthcare and collaborates with cloud businesses like Microsoft Azure, according to the company.

To date, Innovaccer has raised $120 million from the likes of Microsoft's M12, Tiger Global, and Westbridge, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

The company deals with application programming interfaces, or APIs, which are common ways for applications to talk to one another. They're commonly used across the internet, for instance to let online shoppers buy merchandise through PayPal or view the weather on Google instead of a weather site.

But APIs can be messy in the world of healthcare, and Innovaccer's role is to make them more uniform.

Innovaccer's platform reaches into health systems' computers and pulls their patient data onto a cloud-based environment like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, where its APIs are wrestled into submission.

Once there, everything from simple details, like patients' birthdays, to more complex ones, like how blood sugar is recorded, is standardized and sent back to the providers' servers.

Through the platform, Innovaccer can make patients' comprehensive medical history available to providers, no matter what kind of electronic health records, claims systems, or insurance companies are used, Sutten said.

The data it collects on the cloud can be shared by patients with other doctors and hospitals, health insurers, or apps, as long as they give permission, Sutten said. Innovaccer is hoping that aggregation leads to public health benefits.

"After that is when the users get to take advantage of it. Whether they use some of the applications we have built for care management, or whether they could build their own applications," Sutten said.

Health insurers could use the platform to more efficiently determine what services a patient received and how sick they are, Sutten said. And Innovaccer has created tools that show doctors things like what a patients' insurance covers, according to Sutten.

But the implications extend beyond traditional stakeholders. Innovaccer is thinking of ways the data could help people lead healthier lifestyles through partnerships with apps or health systems.

"We make it very personal," Sutten said. "We find out, do they have care at home? Do they have transportation? Do they have access to healthy food? All those things go into caring for a population," he said.

While regulatory changes were also at play, the pandemic has underscored the need for greater interoperability, according to the Advisory Board's Hetz.

That's the ability for computer systems, in this case healthcare computer systems, to talk to each other and to external servers, broadly speaking.

"I think there are a lot of organizations out there that wish they had invested more in skills development and such around FHIR so they could respond more quickly," Hetz said in the interview.

Hospitals have been struggling to meet the coronavirus reporting requirements to health officials due to various technical challenges, including limited interoperability, as Business Insider reported.

Meanwhile, those that can help make sense of the data have been busier than ever.

Orion Health, a healthcare software company, has been implementing FHIR-compliant telehealth, triage, and patient portals for hospitals across Europe as providers looked for ways to better handle so many coronavirus patients, according to Chris Lucas, vice president of Orion's clinical portals.

"Being able to enable an outcome where you can aggregate all this information is pretty powerful," Lucas said. "I do feel that the situation is changing people's perceptions as to how important it is to have that joined record," he said.

Change Healthcare offers similar services and recently shared its APIs free of charge to health plans, according to CEO Neil de Crescenzo and vice president of healthcare platforms, Gautam Shah.

Shah said the pandemic probably hasn't accelerated healthcare groups' transition to FHIR as much as it's increased their appreciation for data management in the long-term.

"They're still thinking about how to care for the patients that are coming through their doors," he said in an interview.

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A health startup backed by Microsoft has raised $120 million for a new approach to patient data, and the technology is poised to upend the way doctors...

Kissing and making up?

Fisticuffs can be far more energizing than everyone just getting along.

In recent times, therefore, it's been uplifting to see Google and Microsoft spitefully sniping at each other over the latter's new Edge browser.

Should you have been unaccountably detained by the nefarious authorities lately, you may not know that the minute Edge received praise, Google sniffed that it wasn't secure.

To which Microsoft offered this notice to Edge users who drifted to the Chrome Web Stor: "Extensions installed from sources other than the Microsoft Store are unverified, and may affect browser performance."

There was potential here for a few episodes of Real Browsers of Silicon Valley.

Suddenly, though, there appears to have been a disturbing rapprochement. Techdows spotted that Edge users are now being encouraged to go to the Chrome Web Store. Yes, the same place that apparently harbors extensions that are unverified and may give your browser indigestion.

I confess I'm especially disturbed by the wording that's now being tossed at Edge users: "You can also find great extensions at the Chrome Web Store."

Not merely extensions, but great extensions. I'm tempted to suspect a lawyer may have written that. Or at least someone in the Google marketing department.

Naturally, I asked Microsoft why it had suddenly lurched from prickly to cuddly. Could it be that Google and Microsoft had a kiss-and-make-up Zoom call -- I mean, a Microsoft Teams call? Or a Google Meet encounter? Microsoft declined to comment.

Perhaps, you might think, Microsoft has stopped to play nice merely because that's its brand image these days. Or perhaps some Redmonder stopped to think that, indeed, Edge doesn't currently enjoy enough of its own extensions.

My delvings into Redmond's innards suggest the latter may have driven the decision even more than the former. You really don't want to annoy your customers, do you? Especially when you can't currently offer them what they need.

Of course, Edge is based on Google's Chromium platform. In my own experimentations, I've found it to be a more pleasant experience than Chrome. Just that little bit more responsive and generally brighter -- though I can't quite cope with Bing as my default search engine.

Then again, I just looked at my Outlook email inbox and Microsoft is getting prickly again.

"The new browser recommended by Microsoft is here. Let's go," sniffs an oddly prominent banner above my emails.

Oh, let's stop.

I've already downloaded Edge. I still mostly use Firefox, though. Microsoft, if you can be nice to Google, can't you be nice to me and leave me alone?

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Microsoft is suddenly recommending Google products and I'm worried - ZDNet

Microsoft is rolling out a new reply-all protection feature for Office 365 and Exchange Online. Its designed to prevent email storms (reply allpocalypse), when hundreds or thousands of people start replying to an email thread after someone forgot to BCC everyone or a distribution list was misconfigured.

The new block feature will mostly benefit large organizations, and is initially being rolled out to detect 10 reply-all emails to over 5,000 recipients within 60 minutes. Over time, as we gather usage telemetry and customer feedback, we expect to tweak, fine-tune, and enhance the Reply All Storm Protection feature to make it even more valuable to a broader range of Office 365 customers, explains Microsofts Exchange transport team.

Reply-all email storms are a problem that affect businesses large and small, and have been occurring for decades. Microsoft had its own infamous incident back in 1997, which employees fondly refer to as Bedlam DL3. Around 25,000 people were on a distribution list and kept replying to the thread, generating 15,000,000 email messages and 195 gigabytes of data. The incident overwhelmed Microsofts own Exchange mail servers, and the company rolled out a message recipient limit in Exchange to try and tackle future problems.

Microsoft still suffers from reply-all email storms, though. Last year a GitHub notification triggered an email storm for thousands of Microsoft employees. Back in March, thousands of Microsoft employees were also caught in a reply-all email thread that was quickly shut down within 30 minutes.

Microsofts new reply-all email block feature will stay in place for four hours after its automatically triggered, enough time to stop people from asking why am I on this email thread? hundreds of times. The new feature appears to be working for Microsofts own employees. Humans still behave like humans no matter which company they work for, says the Exchange team. Were already seeing the first version of the feature successfully reduce the impact of reply-all storms within Microsoft.

See the article here:

Microsoft now blocks reply-all email storms to end our inbox nightmares - The Verge

As the pandemic began to spread across the globe, it has changed the way millions of us consume content and work. Cloud-based working platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack have seen a massive surge in users, and gaming platforms like Xbox Live and PlayStation Network have also seen record growth.

One other area that has seen record numbers is video game streaming platforms. A recent report from StreamElements detailed how various platforms such as Facebook Gaming, YouTube Gaming, Twitch, and others, have reported triple-figure year-over-year growth, owing in part to pandemic. One very notable elephant in the room is Microsoft's Mixer platform, which remains utterly, tragically flat.

While the industry as a whole effectively doubled year-over-year, Mixer's own growth remained flat, at a measly 0.2 percent year-over-year. Without the pandemic, it's not hard to envision that Mixer would have shrunk during this period instead, suggesting to me that the platform has a serious issue retaining users.

Microsoft may need a miracle here.

Mixer was always the underdog going into this battle. Facebook and YouTube have utterly massive established audiences they can leverage to soak up users, and Twitch remains the dominant force in the space, with the lion's share of the industry's "celebrities." Mixer also has a fair amount of systemic problems, with platform instability anecdotally often cited to me as a reason people don't stick around.

Pulling in big names like Ninja and Shroud doesn't seem to have helped the platform grow as a whole, particularly when you consider the fact other platforms are also splashing the cash around. YouTube brought up exclusive rights to the entire Activision-Blizzard streaming esports operation, alongside etching a deal with YouTube heavyweight Pewdiepie for streaming shows.

The future of Mixer truly remains uncertain. As anyone following Microsoft for any length of time will know, the company generally doesn't stick it out with a failing product for very long. Microsoft may be able to turn the tide, particularly if future games like Halo Infinite manage to rack up a healthy exclusive esports presence. That said, typically Xbox has been putting its shows across all platforms, rather than on Mixer exclusively.

Will Mixer survive? Right now, it's not looking great, but who knows? As a fan of the service, I hope it does, but Microsoft may need a miracle here.

Related: Best Webcams for Streaming in 2020

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As the streaming industry booms, Microsoft's Mixer remains dead in the water - Windows Central

There are many things that are ironic in the IT business. Too many to count, some days. And maybe it is just because many of us are attending the virtual Open Compute Summit driven in large part by Facebook and Microsoft (still). But it looks like momentum is building for the SONiC network operating system, launched four years ago at the Open Compute Summit by Microsoft and open sourced under the auspices of what had been, until that moment, an organization largely devoted to open source hardware. Not software.

The world is a funny place, indeed. Incumbent switch makers created the most recent iterations of their network operating systems from Unix kernels and, later, Linux kernels. IOS from Cisco Systems dates back more than three decades and is its own beast, but its follow-on, NX-OS for the Nexus line of switches, is based on Linux, just like Arista Networks EOS network operating system is. JunOS from Juniper Networks is based on FreeBSD, but has its own hooks to Linux. And of course, Cumulus Networks, which was just acquired by Nvidia in the wake of its $6.9 billion acquisition of switch, NIC, and chip maker Mellanox Technologies at the end of April, is based on Linux and so are the Mellanox MLNX-OS and Onyx switch operating systems. The hyperscalers and large cloud builders have created their own NOSes as well, as far as we know all based on Linux, and finally there is Arrcus, which has created a homegrown routing and switch operating system called ArcOS from scratch with its own kernel.

Microsoft created SONiC not because it wanted to embrace Linux on its switches, but because it had no choice. There was no real benefit to trimming down a Windows Server kernel to be the heart of a switch operating system and there was every reason to use the substantial Linux expertise in the world to make a NOS that could run all of its Azure cloud infrastructure connectivity. And that, according to Dave Maltz, distinguished engineer at Microsofts Azure Networking division, is what has finally happened. At the virtual Open Compute Summit today, Maltz said that the Azure Networking service is now running SONiC top to bottom, and significantly it can run not just top of rack switches, but modular rack switches that are used to create a giant logical switch out of line cards that are essentially the same as a top of racker but with a backplane lashing them all together.

According to Maltz, more than ten of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and a number of large enterprises have all adopted SONiC as their switch operating system, with Microsoft and Alibaba being the two biggies that are on the record.

When Microsoft launched SONiC and its companion Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) back in 2016, it started out with modest Layer 2 and Layer 3 switching functions running in containers atop a Linux kernel with a Redis database for telemetry. The software ran on several ASICs, including Broadcoms Trident 2, Mellanoxs Spectrum, Caviums XPliant (now part of Marvell), and Centec Networks GoldenGate; these were used predominantly for 40 Gb/sec switches, and there were a handful of options. In the following year, Broadcoms Tomahawk and Tomahawk 2 ASICs were added as well as Marvells Prestera and Barefoot Networks Tofino, and these additions were for 100 Gb/sec switches and there were around 16 different platforms available. RDMA and QoS features were added to the SONiC stack as was management via Swarm (the old Docker tool). In 2018, there was another big jump with SONiC as virtualization was added to container support and warm reboot (in under 1 second) was added along with streaming telemetry and a new config database. Arm compute support was added, and the platform list grew to 31 unique machines, including those based on the Taurus chip from Nephos, the Helix 4, Trident 2, and Tomahawk 3 chips from Broadcom, and the Lacrosse chip from Cisco (used in the high-end Nexus 9000 switches). Last year, support for SONiC on the Broadcom Jericho and Jericho 2 deep buffer switch ASICs was added, as was support for Innoviums Teralynx 7, Marvells Falcon, and Mellanoxs Spectrum 2 ASICs. The base of platforms grew to 69 different machines, and significantly, Microsoft worked with the SONiC community to add in support for modular switches, which Maltz calls chassis switches. Cisco has added its Silicon One merchant router chip to this list earlier this year, and there are no doubt others we have not heard about as yet.

This is an incredible ramp when you consider that Cumulus Networks only supported Broadcom and Mellanox ASICs and Arrcus is focusing on the Broadcom families at this point. Granted, the Broadcom ASICs get you something on the order of 65 percent of the datacenter switch market share at this point, so you have to be making money or be a highly motivated open source collective to add all of these other ASICs to the hardware abstraction list.

Of course, that was precisely the point when Microsoft created SONiC and SAI and then turned around and open sourced it and donated it to the Open Compute Project community. And today, according to Maltz, there are 3.84 million ports in the worldwide base of Ethernet ports that are being driven by SONiC. Thats many billions of dollars worth of switches, any way you want to cut it.

And now the telcos, service providers, and enterprises are probably going to follow suit. Maltz says that eBay is evaluating the use of SONiC in its networks, and Comcast is looking at using SONiC-based gear at the datacenter core. French Internet advertising broker Criteo is going to be using SONiC switches exclusively in 2020 and beyond, and retailer Target (which has had famous network security issues in the past that hammered its stock) is going to adapt SONiC network gear as well.

It is not surprising, then, that someone is stepping up to offer a supported SONiC distribution. And in fact, Dell Technologies and Apstra both announced formal SONiC distributions and enterprise support engagements today at the virtual Open Compute event.

In January 2016, only months before Microsoft dropped the SONiC bomb, Dell open sourced its own FTOS OS10 network operating system, which it got by virtue of its acquisition of switch maker Force10 Networks in the summer of 2011. Dell kept its hand in the OpenSwitch (OPX) project it spawned; it also participated in the SONiC community started by Microsoft and was an early adopter of Cumulus Linux on its switch gear.

We had our feet in two different puddles, Drew Schulke, vice president of networking at Dell Technologies, tells The Next Platform. What it really comes down to, as is the case with a great many open source projects, is that you look and see who has the gravitational pull, who gets the customer adoption, who gets the ecosystem support. And our call about a year ago was that SONiC was winning that battle and was going to be declared the victor. We didnt drop OpenSwitch like a bad habit, but spun it into the Linux Foundation and made it part of the broader Open Networking Linux project. But our focus going forward is very much going to be on the SONiC side.

One of the selling points of SONiC, says Schulke, is that it is container friendly from the get-go, which means that companies can add their own secret sauce to it without mucking about in the base NOS kernel and having to upstream code into the Linux kernel. (Imagine that.) And based on its Azure heritage, it is very good at Layer 3 underlays and Layer 3 fabrics using an EVPN overlay. But Dell will be working on adding more Layer 2 functionality in the coming months as well as Multicast, IGMP snooping, Uplink Failure Detection, and eventually the Open Shortest Path First routing protocol. These additions to SONiC will be open sourced by Dell, incidentally. The Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies is the formal name of the Dell rollup of SONiC that is sanctioned by Microsoft, and it will be generally available in the third quarter with those additional Layer 2 features with support contracts of one, three, or five years. Pricing will scale by the bandwidth of the switch, with it costing in the range of a couple of thousand dollars per switch per year.

The rest of the SONiC community has its own ideas about what to do in the future.

We are working on deploying SONiC at the edge for 5G deployments to places where we need to put computing right up next to the wireless edge so it can be close to the consumers and producers of that information, Maltz explained in his keynote address. SONiC will be there offering a trusted base platform that can be used to bootstrap securely all the other infrastructure necessary at the edge. Were doing SONiC-based load balancers rather than having a proprietary load balancer that has to be a specialized box in your network architecture. Running SONiC on top of existing network ASICs you probably already have can to offer Layer 4 load balancing, again bringing load balancers into the same network management framework you already have for the rest of your network devices. We have ideas about managing SONiC via Kubernetes, which is a great platform for deploying cloud services, and managing SONiC through Kubernetes means you can leverage the abilities already present in your software team, enabling you to deploy new containers to those switches so you can innovate faster and more safely and using the frameworks that your engineers are already used to. Were looking at how we can take machine learning and apply that to Sonic into the management of networks. One of the hardest problems every network operator has to deal with determining whether their network is healthy or not. And if its not, whats the problem? Leveraging the ability of SONiC to expose new telemetry from the switches to do flexible computation on those switches themselves and send that data back to larger networks and systems which can then do machine learning and analysis. Other communities working to build better network management solutions that will make it easier to have a healthy and reliable network. Were also taking Sonic, the other team, and running it open to some of the biggest switches in the network. Were taking it down onto the individual servers using Sonic as a management platform for SmartNICs, providing flexible ways of offloading network transformation from the server to the SmartNIC, but yet still managing that SmartNIC as if it was a network switch something that many of us are. Companies already have software automation systems that can handle. And of course, one of the challenges weve talked about in the past was making good on now is taking Sonic out to the very largest switches is in the network those that run the wide area network so SONiC can truly be the one network operating system from backbone switches down through our datacenters to the 5G edge and all the way onto our servers as part of that SmartNIC solution.

That sounds like a pretty comprehensive strategy to us. The wonder is that Microsoft doesnt roll up support for its own SONiC distribution, or IBMs Red Hat division doesnt. Or both, for that matter.

See more here:

Is Microsofts SONiC Winning The War Of The NOSes? - The Next Platform