The result is irrevocable and reflects the impatience of the Old Continent. On Thursday 30 January the European Parliament overwhelmingly supported (582 votes in favor, 40 against and 37 abstentions) a resolution calling on the new Commission chaired by Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen to take urgent regulatory measures – thus binding on the industry – to finally achieve a universal charger for all portable devices.

Parliamentarians believe that time has come for the legislator to overcome the inability of the industry to agree on a standard device that could be used for all small and medium-sized devices (from smartphones, tablets, cameras, readers, and mobile phones, to mention only the most common product categories).

Elected officials note that the population “always has to deal with different types of chargers on the market,” which, given the relatively high rate of equipment renewal among the general public, unnecessarily leads to the production of additional e-waste, which could be reduced if a frequent basis were adopted.

Beyond convenience, therefore, there is an environmental issue: in Europe in 2016, total e-waste production will amount to 12.3 million tonnes or an average of 16.6 kg per person. This share could be reduced if chargers could feed more products: not only would they be thrown away less, but it would also be possible to produce less of them.

Challenges for Europe and the environment

Moreover, this is one of Parliament’s requests: to make the charger optional when purchasing any electronic device. “Strategies to decouple the purchase of chargers from the purchase of new devices should be introduced with a universal charging solution,” argue the MEPs. But beware: all this must be done without any price increase for customers.

The resolution adopted has no binding legal force but calls on the European Commission to look where its interest lies: “it is essential for the credibility of the European Union on the international stage and to its citizens that legislative acts adopted by the Union are transposed in good time through concrete legislative measures,” observes the Parliament.

In 2018, Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has since been reappointed, said that “given the unsatisfactory progress of this voluntary approach, the Commission will soon launch an impact study to assess the costs and benefits of various other options.” Things have slipped since then.

Finally, on the periphery of this issue, Parliament wants the Commission to promote the interoperability of wireless chargers with different portable devices and to look into legislative initiatives that will improve the collection and recycling of chargers on the continent. Brussels is invited to formulate its proposals by July 2020 at the latest. That is six months from now. But the subject has been dragging on for ten years.

AdaptiveMobile Security, one of the world’s leading providers of mobile network security, has just released details of a new vulnerability. The said vulnerability can potentially affect more than a billion phones. A simple SMS is enough to take control of a device and track victims. The researchers named it SIM Jacker, and say they have already seen several practical cases. According to the researchers, the flaw was exploited by a company that works with governments to monitor individuals.

By sending an SMS message containing a specific code to a mobile phone, the SIM card receives instructions to take control of the device and execute particular commands or recover data. The attack uses the software contained in the SIM card called “S@T Browser,” which can interact with the mobile to retrieve information.

A system that could be exploited by many criminal groups

The researchers were able to confirm that vulnerability is currently being utilized in a very effective way. “In one country, we see about 100-150 specific mobile numbers targeted per day by Simjacker attacks, with peaks of 300 numbers in one day. “Besides, this system could send messages to victims containing false information, call overcharged numbers, serve as a spy system via the microphone by calling a specific number, install malware via the browser, retrieve other information about the device or disable the SIM card entirely to block the mobile.”

The researchers shared their results with the GSM Association and SIM alliance organizations to alert operators and improve the security of the new SIM cards. In the meantime, operators will have to analyze the messages to block suspicious SMS messages. They could also change the security settings of the SIM cards and uninstall the “S@T Browser” remotely, but this may be quite difficult and time-consuming.

An utterly invisible SMS attack for the victim

In the main attack discovered by the researchers, the victim’s mobile phone receives an SMS designed not to trigger a notification. The system retrieves the IMEI number of the device, as well as information about the base station to which it is connected, and sends the data back in another SMS. SMS messages are not visible at any time to the victim, leaving no trace in the mobile phone’s inboxes or send boxes. By identifying the base station, the SMS author can locate an individual with an accuracy that increases, the denser the mesh size of the relay antennas. Location data are therefore much more accurate in cities than in the countryside.

The “S@T Browser” is quite old, not updated since 2009, and is found in most SIM cards, including eSIMs. It is intended in particular to add functions such as consulting your bank balance via your SIM card. It is used by operators in more than 30 countries, representing a potential market of nearly a billion people. The functions that can be operated remotely are not limited to the location of the device since the attacker can use a complete list of STK commands. The researchers were able to open the browser, make calls, send messages.

No revolution in Forbes magazine’s ranking of the world’s wealthiest people: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos remains number one ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

But the 2019 edition still brings its lot of surprises : the fall of Zuckerberg, the rise of Donald Trump (despite an unchanged fortune).

An American Top 3

The top three in Forbes’ 2019 ranking of the richest people on the planet is the same as in 2018, with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, maintaining his first place by raising nearly $20 billion more for an estimated $131 billion in wealth. He thus widened the gap with the number two, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, now a philanthropist. At 63, his wealth increased more modestly to $96.5 billion, from $90 billion last year.

The third in the ranking is investor Warren Buffett, 88, the oldest of the podium, although his reputation for having a nose for good deals took a hit with the plunge in profits and the action of food giant Kraft Heinz at the end of February, on which he had relied. As a result, his assets fell by $1.5 billion to $82.5 billion.

With 14 persons among the top 20, Americans still dominate this world ranking, which includes some 2,100 billionaires, whose combined assets amount to $8,700 billion.

Zuckerberg falls to 8th place, undermined by Facebook’s setbacks

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg dropped from 5th to 8th place after “losing” nearly $9 billion.

While he remains the youngest among the top ten, Mark Zuckerberg, heavily criticized in recent months for his social network, is behind Mexican telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim, Spanish Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex and Zara, and Oracle’s American co-founder Larry Ellison.

Trump gains a few places (715th)

The estimate of the fortune of American President Donald Trump is unchanged at $3.1 billion.  Its nine New York skyscrapers – including the famous Trump Tower on 5th Avenue – account for nearly half of the total, while its clubs and golf courses are worth $550 million.

While 994 people in last year’s ranking saw their wealth ratings fall – a record, according to Forbes – the stability of the American president’s wealth allows him to move up to 715th place (he was 766th last year). However, there were different developments in its assets. One of its Florida golf clubs, the National Doral Miami, was depreciated by $26 million, after suffering from lower bookings due to its policy, according to Forbes.

In January, Donald Trump was dethroned by Illinois’ new Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotels, whose fortune is estimated at $3.2 billion, as one of the wealthiest American elected officials.

With serverless cloud offers, the developer no longer has to worry about configuring and managing servers or virtual machines. These offers are also called “Function as a Service”, or FaaS, because the application code is executed when a “function” called by an event (such as an HTTP request) is triggered. The service is billed based on code execution time and resources consumed, to the nearest millisecond.

In view of these specifications, not all developments are eligible. Natively designed for microservices architectures, the serverless is more suitable for web, backend or IoT applications that have an event component. Monolithic systems, on the other hand, go beyond the framework, as do those that constantly require cloud resources that generate prohibitive additional costs.  Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google (via Google Cloud Platform) and Microsoft (with its Azure cloud) now all market serverless cloud services.  

Amazon Web Services opened the serverless cloud market with Lambda in late 2014. By relying on the basic brick that is the Lambda calculation function, the service provider has since considerably enriched its offer. AWS has affixed the serverless label to a large number of services going as far as offering 100% serverless infrastructures.

AWS, the pioneer consolidates its lead

With API Gateway, AWS first offered a managed API proxy service, which allows APIs (giving access to data, applications or AWS services such as EC2) to be created, managed and monitored. In terms of databases, the provider has started to switch its NoSQL solution, DynamoDB, to serverless mode. Last November, he broadened the spectrum to relational databases by unveiling Aurora Serverless, a “serverless” version of his MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible solution.

In parallel, AWS launched Fargate. Designed for Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) and EKS (Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes), this service offers to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. To launch an application via Fargate, simply package it into a container layer, specify its CPU and memory requirements, and define the network and identification policy. Finally, Amazon markets Greengrass, a service designed to perform Lambda functions as close as possible to connected objects.

To accelerate serverless adoption, AWS unveiled a Serverless Application Repository (SAM) on GitHub last February, through which its customers can share their serverless applications. AWS has also expanded the number of languages supported by its Lambda offer. After Java, Python, JavaScript, Node.js and C#, it is now the turn of Go and .Net Core 2.0 to be supported by the environment. In addition, there is a series of development tools. For example, Cloud9 provides an environment for testing and debugging Lambda functions. CodeDeploy allows, via an alias system, to compare the performance of different versions of a Lambda function. And X-Ray manages the debugging of distributed applications, based on a micro-service architecture. In the end, for Steve Houël, an architectural solution within the consulting firm Ippon, the conclusion is without appeal: “AWS is two to three years ahead of its competitors”.

Microsoft focuses on simplicity

In stable version since November 2016, Azure Functions offers an approach comparable to that of Amazon Lambda, including pricing. The Microsoft FaaS service allows to trigger functions related to Azure services (Cosmos DB, Storage, Event Grid, Mobile Apps, Notification Hubs…) or third party services (GitHub webhooks, Twilio SMS messages). It provides a wide range of models to implement different scenarios. HTTPTrigger triggers, for example, code execution following an HTTP request. QueueTrigger responds to messages that arrive in Azure’s storage queue while EventHubTrigger reacts to events sent by Azure Event Hub from a connected website, application or object.

Azure Functions supports C#, F# and JavaScript but also Python, PHP, Bash, Batch and PowerShell. Microsoft announced in September support for Net Core 2.0 and, the following month, Java. Through a Maven plugin, a developer can code and debug Azure functions locally from Eclipse, IntelliJ or Visual Studio Code development environments (IDEs). In its latest version (15.6), released in early March, Visual Studio 2017 also supports Azure Functions.

Access rights management is supported by Azure Active Directory or OAuth Managed Identification Service. Azure Application Insights provides analysis and supervision of the functions. Finally, Azure Stack offers the possibility of mixed public, private or hybrid cloud hosting. “A differentiating point”, for Luc Germain, director of cloud, devops and digital workplace offers at ESN Devoteam.

Google, Firebase’s mobile asset

Launched discreetly by Google in alpha version in February 2016, Cloud Functions went a year later in beta version… and still is. A habit, almost a tradition at the web giant. Remember that his webmail service, Gmail, has been in beta for ten years. Based on the FaaS principle, Google’s serverless offer can trigger functions in response to events recorded on its cloud (Google Cloud Platform), such as importing files on Cloud Storage, an incoming message, data sent by an object connected to Cloud Pub/Sub, or a change made to a log in Stackdriver Logging.

Via an HTTP request, Cloud Functions can respond to events from third-party systems such as GitHub, Slack or Stripe. Mobile application developers can also use Cloud Functions directly from Firebase, the mobile platform of Google Cloud Platform. Cloud Functions reacts in particular to events derived from Firebase Analytics data.

Cloud Functions are encoded in JavaScript. The execution of the latter is supported by a standard Node.js environment. Since the acquisition of Apigee by Google in September 2016, Google Cloud Functions is equipped with a service similar to the Amazon API Gateway to declare REST resources and associated functions. The large number of job offers published around Apigee illustrates Google’s interest in this technology. Finally, the Mountain View giant offers a tool (called Cloud Functions Emulator) to test serverless functions locally before they are deployed.

Health professionals, parents, teachers, and parents would benefit from promoting a realistic, proactive and inventive discourse on new technologies to overcome the fear of fear of the anguish of modernity.

The Internet and video games are now part of our daily lives, which does not prevent them from being regularly the focus of controversy. They are readily credited with having a negative influence on the new generations.

For example, in recent years, the concept of “cyberaddiction” has been used to evoke the abusive use that can be made of these technologies. Many psychologists remind us that addiction and virtual addiction is still not listed as a pathology in the international classification of mental disorders.

But the notion of addiction has expanded its perimeter and no conduct seems to be able to escape it.

Addiction to virtual addiction in adolescence would be more of a stigmatization than a true diagnosis, a judgment that runs the risk of freezing a child and his or her family in a misunderstanding of their difficulties.

Fear of A New Social Data

Almost all technical and cultural developments have generated their share of hopes, apprehensions, and worries. Writing, printing, the press, cinema, radio, television and now information and communication technologies, including the Internet and video games, are no exception to the rule.

The 35-year-olds have always been wary of the influence of technological innovations on their children’s future, education or psyche. Concerns that revolve around recurrent themes: New media could replace the “real life” and legacy of previous generations in the learning of moral principles while maintaining an excessive and unhealthy imagination.

Cyber-addiction: Definition

The term “cyberdépendances” has enjoyed some success since the 1990s, following on from the concepts of “drug-free addiction,” mentioned by Otto Fenichel in 1949.

Among the pitfalls to avoid, the assimilation of the Internet as a toxic substance that, in addition to demonizing a tool that is widely used today and used daily by millions of people, makes it possible to identify a comfortable scapegoat.

The perimeters of concepts are even more complex when one considers cyber dependency from adolescence: the quest for identity, psychological fragility, imposes an absolute caution regarding diagnosis.

Issues

The Internet offers opportunities and accessibility to a wide variety of content. Combined with the ability to remain anonymous behind the screen, these new uses are changing our online media and behaviors.

Beyond the dangers of dependency, there are other issues that arouse public interest. The increasingly violent content, increasingly shocking images, overdose and pornographic scriptwriting contribute to the formatting of adolescents’ emotional and sexual education.

For older people, this immoderate flow also contributes to a radical reconsideration of the notions of privacy, social ties and a series of cognitive problems specific to the “Google generation” (attention disorders, dysorthography, etc.).

In the same way, our relationship with time and space is shaken up “confusing real and virtual would be, in this case, wanting to decode our existences in the light of the exceptional, the” photogenic .” The debate on violence in video games is an example of this.

Read more on this topic here www.addictionrecov.org/internet.aspx

Many small appliances are used to save time in everyday tasks.

To get the best performance out of your tech devices, it is best to clean them regularly, especially those that are used daily like cleaning appliances!

It can only be beneficial to them. After losing our dear coffee machine and steam cleaners here in the office, we want to share this article with our readers.

Here are some easy cleaning tips to follow.

A rule that you should never neglect is to always follow safety rules. For cleaning, the appliance must be disconnected first before doing anything else! No handling of appliances if your hands are not dry and finally, never allow soaking in the dishwater or water. To wash the blades, do it with a brush, not with your fingers…

For bread toasters: If a slice is stuck, use a wooden pliers or chopsticks to make them up, never with a knife or fork, especially if the appliance is turned on. If there is no drawer to collect crumbs and other debris, compressed air as a sprayer will eventually dislodge them.

An electric kettle is easy to wash: a mixture of malt vinegar and water, which is brought to the boil and with which the resistance is involved, is used. Alternatively, put a coke-based soda in the kettle and run the kettle. It will be like new!

To reduce the wear and tear of household appliances, always avoid heating the engine;

Use the speeds recommended in the operating instructions of the user manual. If you feel that the robot is struggling, either you go to the top speed, or you divide your preparation to mix them

The steam cleaners will scald over time . Especially if your water is very hard. So here is a natural trick to maintain them and thus prolong their life.

Every year you will add a little white vinegar or alcohol vinegar in your water.
You will use your steam cleaner with all the accessories so that the mixture will pass through all the part of your cleaner.

The action of the vinegar will remove the limestone from your pipes and your nozzles; you will find a device without deposition of scale and prolong its life.

Be careful not to do this cleaning too often. The action of white vinegar, if used too frequently, could damage the joints.

More on steam cleaning on this WordPress Blog!

Used in both phytotherapy and aromatherapy over the centuries, the vaporizer is gradually integrated into the universe of cannabis, with a huge success in 2017.

If most users have been conquered by this device with offering features, it is probably because of its legendary effectiveness and its ability to prepare cannabis in a more tasty way compared to traditional smoking methods. The cannabis vaporizer is therefore used by quite a lot of green addicts.

It is a device which proceeds by heating the cannabinoid to a boiling point, so that the cannabis is purified, more efficient, while preserving its flavors delivering a clean smoke.

According to the ranges, brands and prices, we will try to help you making the best choice. Portable or desktop cannabis vaporizers? We will help you to judge the advantages of each model so that your choice can fully satisfy you.

What is a cannabis vaporizer?

A cannabis vaporizer. also called “vaporisateur pour herbe” is a device that heats grass, oil or resin at a given temperature to release the flavours or active ingredients without the slightest form of combustion. It is a process that turns cannabis into vapour by the effect of sublimation. The vapor delivered by the vaporisation action is very pure compared to traditional smoking methods and consists solely of the aroma of the plants as well as the active ingredients.

The cannabis vaporizer transforms cannabis while retaining its aroma and 99% of its active substances. In short, it heats it by bubbling, reduces the smoke while preserving intact the active substances contained in your substance. The vaporizer heats the grass until the cannabinoid crystals evaporate without allowing the plant material to burn. It is a process that increases consumer satisfaction, because of the ability of grass to pass through the body more easily.

This is undoubtedly what contributed to the success of this device until now.

Portable vaporizers

These models are intended to be used anywhere thanks to their rather discreet operating modes. With a portable cannabis spray, you can enjoy the benefits of cannabis wherever you are, alone or accompanied depending on the occasion. This model is available in several others with different characteristics among which you will find:

• Arizer Air
• Pax 2 and 3
• Crafty and Mighty
• Gpen
• and many more…

Desktop or electric vaporizers

These types of vaporizers are better for sharing and group sessions.. They can easily withstand daily or intensive use when maintained according to the instructions provided. There are several types of which you will often encounter:

• Volcano
• Plenty
• Arizer Extreme Q
• and many more

Find more on cannabis vaporizers by visiting https://sites.google.com/site/vaporisateurcannabis/

Technology has the potential to make a significant difference in the manufacturing sector. It can increase productivity, make the production process more efficient and change the way products are distributed. Some companies are already making significant changes in the way that they use technology, and this may point to the way things will be in the future.

Analysing Big Data

It is estimated that over half of manufacturing companies are now analysing big data to assess their performance in certain areas. This helps to make them more competitive as they use this data to find ways to operate more efficiently.

Upgrading Security

When IT is used on a regular basis, it may be necessary to ensure that all of your systems are as well protected as they can be. Up to ten percent of companies have not made any attempts to upgrade their security recently and this could pose a real threat to their business.

IT Investment

Significant investments have already been made in IT systems by many companies. Investment needs to be made as soon as possible so that companies do not find that they have too much to catch up on. If competitors are already making investments, then it will give them the edge.

Internet Of Things

The Internet of things refers to the ability of objects to send information to other objects without the need for any human intervention. Although this is technology that is still very much in the early stages, the potential has certainly been seen by many manufacturing companies.

Assertiveness From Non-US Companies

Companies that are based in the US are not leveraging technology in the same ways that overseas companies are. It could mean that US companies are in danger of being left behind if they do not start to adapt some of these methods soon.