Weekly News: Tracking Down the Untrackable

Tracking down the untrackable; News Windows virtual desktop features,; How old is an old dev; Confronting the new data reality… Discover the weekly Tech & IT news.

Tracking Down the Untrackable

What can be worse than
crushing your personal record and not being able to brag about it to your
friends online? 

Well, how about, for example, a ransomware attack.

If you are a fitness lover or know someone who fits into this
category, chances are you have already heard about the Garmin hack. 

The American GPS and smartwatch maker was down for almost three days, its data and services held hostage for a ransom of $10m. As a result, users were unable to sync their devices with Garmin’s ecosystem of apps. 

Evil Corp, a Russian hacking group behind a recent string of attacks on U.S. companies, is thought to be responsible for the incident.

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New Windows Virtual Desktop features

With the current pandemic, being able to
deliver a secure Windows 10 desktop experience to remote workers has become a
must for many companies. 

First
introduced under public preview, the Virtual Desktop updates are now
generally available. 

The new,
now-polished features include:

• Azure portal integration and role-based access control (RBAC)
• Scalable user management via the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
• Monitoring logs now stored in Azure, for quicker troubleshooting and analysis
• A/V redirect for Microsoft Teams

How old is an old dev?

Unfortunately, age discrimination remains an
issue in most industries and professions. 

Whereas
experience was once unanimously revered and treasured, our fast-paced society
often tends to see older professionals as necessarily outdated. Rather than
being the exception, IT is one of those areas in which the gap is even
wider. 

In a short paper published earlier this year, software engineering students went through popular online articles and related discussions on Hacker News to analyze how the media portrays the employability of older developers. 

“Too old to be a developer” seems to be a common theme.

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Confronting the new data reality

European data
watchdogs aren’t wasting any time. 

Shortly after the European Court of Justice stroke down the Private Shield dataflow agreement between the U.S. and the E.U., the European Data Protection Board warned there will be no regulatory grace period.  

Companies relying on the cross-Atlantic flow of data to conduct operations and sell products and services will have to adapt; and fast.

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