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Showing posts from May, 2019

Google sibling Jigsaw brings anti-troll AI to France ahead of EU elections

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  French news publisher Le Monde is launching a new comments section using Jigsaw's Perspective API. The EU elections  get underway tomorrow, and as debate heats up it's likely the comments sections of major news sites will be ablaze with fiery opinions, harassment, and general internet nastiness.    To help counter abusive online comments in France, Alphabet think tank Jigsaw has launched French-language versions of Perspective and Tune, its AI-powered, troll-fighting technologies. The Perspective API is first rolling out to the comments section of French news publisher Le Monde and will also be available to other publishers. The new version of  Le Monde's  comment system going live today will use Jigsaw's Perspective API to encourage readers to share views on news ahead of this week's 2019 European Union parliamentary elections. Perspective's machine-learning model is designed to determine whether a comment could be seen as toxic to a discussion. The model was

The future of SAP HANA

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  The message that came out of SAPPHIRE last week is that SAP remains all in on HANA, and that the future is making it cloud-native. While the recently closed  acquisition of Qualtrics  provided many of the headlines at SAPPHIRE last week, the fact that SAP remains fully committed to HANA had the most immediate significance. The future of SAP HANA was very much the spotlight of SAP chairman Hasso Plattner's  day two keynote . Normally, a speech about HANA would not make headlines. But in the wake of  major staff restructuring last winter  that lead to considerable  sturm und drang  about the future of HANA, it was important for SAP to reaffirm that it was staying the course. As Larry Dignan reported last week, HANA is the underpinning of the bevy of new services that SAP is releasing on its cloud platform. And SAP, like most of its enterprise technology brethren, is now adopting a cloud-first game plan for HANA development -- where new features get introduced first to the cloud ver

A hacker is wiping Git repositories and asking for a ransom

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  Hacker threatens to release the code if victims don't pay in 10 days. Hundreds of developers have had had Git source code repositories wiped and replaced with a ransom demand. The attacks started earlier today, appear to be coordinated across Git hosting services (GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab), and it is still unclear how they are happening. What it is known is that the hacker removes all source code and recent commits from vitcims' Git repositories, and leaves a ransom note behind that asks for a payment of 0.1 Bitcoin (~$570). The hacker claims all source code has been downloaded and stored on one of their servers, and gives the victim ten days to pay the ransom; otherwise, they'll make the code public. To recover your lost code and avoid leaking it: Send us 0.1 Bitcoin (BTC) to our Bitcoin address ES14c7qLb5CYhLMUekctxLgc1FV2Ti9DA and contact us by Email at admin@gitsbackup.com with your Git login and a Proof of Payment. If you are unsure if we have your data, contact us

Azure global outage: Our DNS update mangled domain records, says Microsoft

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  Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, Power BI, DevOps, all down for nearly two hours. Microsoft says a mishap during a DNS migration was behind a nearly two-hour Azure outage on May 2, between 19:43 and 22:35 UTC.  The global incident impacted a whole range of Microsoft cloud services, causing connection problems for core services like Azure, multiple services under the Microsoft 365 umbrella, Dynamics, and DevOps.  The incident had a knock-on effect for Azure compute, storage, App Service, Azure AD identity services, and SQL Database.  Microsoft was mid-way through migrating its legacy domain name system (DNS) to its own hosted Azure DNS, when "some domains for Microsoft services were incorrectly updated", it explains on the  Azure status history page .   Microsoft updated the page several times during the incident and as services were gradually restored.  The company assures customers that none of their DNS records were impacted during the event and that Azure DNS itself remai