Tag Archive for: change

Microsoft and Manaaki Whenua to map NZ’s forest cover change

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Microsoft and New Zealand Crown Research Institute, Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, are teaming up to develop improved detection of land use and forest cover change in New Zealand.

Microsoft says its AI for Good team will work with Manaaki Whenua’s Remote Sensing team to develop models and methods to assess and monitor changes in land use and land cover at scale. The two organisations will use high-resolution satellite imagery, including datasets from the Planetary Computer. 

It says those are important elements in assessing carbon stored in New Zealand forests, and improved mapping will help inform decisions and policies for a more sustainable Aotearoa.

“The data from this initiative will have practical applications related to understanding changes in carbon sequestration – the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says Microsoft’s AI for Good programme’s chief data scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres.

Microsoft says these new mapping approaches can be combined with other carbon models to monitor changes in carbon, helping policymakers, urban planners, and the general community consider how their land use affects New Zealand’s climate change goals.

Manaaki Whenua chief scientist Fiona Carswell says Aotearoa New Zealand has ambitious goals to address climate change, and meeting those goals will require many partnerships and collaborations.

“This project with Microsoft is a strong example of working together to enrich our understanding of te taiao (our environment) today and for our future,” she says.

Additional collaboration with Manaaki Whenua and Microsoft, along with other partners, enterprises, and local communities, will develop research that supports government decision-making and policies related to the care of the land and climate change.

Microsoft says as data becomes ever more available at increasing resolution and frequency, techniques like AI and deep learning open new possibilities for monitoring our environment by mapping and measuring the natural world more frequently and with greater accuracy and confidence. 

It says this project is an important step toward realising this aim.

This follows Microsoft’s recent…

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Hacker language preferences change with the times • The Register

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Never mind what enterprise programmers are trained to do, a self-defined set of hackers has its own programming language zeitgeist, one that apparently changes with the wind, at least according to the relatively small set surveyed.

Members of Europe’s Chaos Computer Club, which calls itself “Europe’s largest association of hackers” were part of a pool for German researchers to poll. The goal of the study was to discover what tools and languages hackers prefer, a mission that sparked some unexpected results.

The researchers were interested in understanding what languages self-described hackers use, and also asked about OS and IDE choice, whether or not an individual considered their choice important for hacking and how much experience they had as a programmer and hacker.

How are CCC hackers hacking?

To be fair, the survey only had 43 respondents, so it’s too small to allow for representative conclusions, but even with a tiny sample, they note the results “add to the extremely scarce literature on the subject. The approach could serve as a model for future surveys, possibly at international level,” the paper said. 

The experience of respondents gives the survey more weight, though. Nearly three-quarters said they had five or more years of experience as a hacker, and 93 percent have five or more years of programming experience. 

As for which programming languages the hackers from CCC prefer (respondents could choose more than one answer), it appears that Bash/Shell/PowerShell are the most popular, with 72.5 percent saying they’ve used it to hack in the past year. The next most popular is Python, with 70 percent saying they used it for hacking in the past year. 

For those arguing that Bash isn’t a programming language, the researchers understand. However, “we have included them in the list anyway to avoid possible gaps in the study,” the paper said.

Beyond Python, language use drops off dramatically: C, the…

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Driving the business value of cyber security in an era of accelerated change

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Over the past couple of years, as organisations have had to rapidly deploy cloud and digital technologies in order to stay open, the need to protect their distributed workforces and infrastructure has become more important than ever.

The practically overnight mass exodus to remote working saw the attack surface widen dramatically, leading to a slew of new threats, attacks and breaches.

So, as governments and security practitioners battle to keep up with the pace of change, what is next for the cyber security industry in 2022?

To find out, ITWeb’s 17th annual Security Summit will be held from 31 May to 2 June at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.

This year’s Security Summit, themed: “Driving the business value of cyber security in an era of accelerated change”, will once again bring together leading international and local industry experts, analysts and end-users to unpack the latest threats facing African CISOs, CIOs, security specialists and risk officers.

Topics will include cyber diplomacy, security as a business enabler, vulnerability management, cloud security, DevSecOps, OT/IOT security, SASE, securing the remote workforce, the role of the CISO, supply chain security, user awareness and training, data privacy, mobile security and much, much more. Plus, meet with leading security technology providers to learn about the latest solutions to mitigate the ever-changing security and risk landscape.

Security practitioners must be up to speed with the latest tools and technologies that are being used to protect, fight and mitigate today’s potentially catastrophic threats, as well as the methods that attackers are employing to carry them out. And they have to do this in a regulatory environment that is more stringent than ever before.

This is why Security Summit 2022 will provide delegates with the information and expert advice needed to get their information and cyber security strategy to the next level.

Whether on the technical or business side, those just embarking on their security journeys, or some who want advice on how to get a better return on security investment, attendees will learn about the most important skills, insights and best practices for combating…

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How to hack the Registry File to change the size of the Windows 11 taskbar

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Normally, Microsoft does not allow users to modify the relative size of the Windows 11 taskbar. But with a hack of the Registry File, we can make that possible.

windows-11.jpg
Image: Microsoft

While Microsoft Windows 11 is full of ways to customize and personalize your overall user experience, there are still more than a few obvious exceptions that cannot be readily modified. One of these is the size of the Windows 11 taskbar. Whether your screen resolution is 4K or VGA, the relative size of the taskbar is constant.

However, with a tweak of the Windows 11 Registry File, users can adjust the size of the taskbar to be relatively smaller or larger based on their current display needs. This how-to tutorial shows you how to add the Registry File key necessary to make this possible.

SEE: Maximize your work-from-home productivity with these tools (TechRepublic Premium)

Change the size of the Windows 11 taskbar

Disclaimer: Editing the Windows Registry file is a serious undertaking. A corrupted Windows Registry file could render your computer inoperable, requiring a reinstallation of the Windows operating system and potential loss of data. Back up the Windows Registry file and create a valid restore point before you proceed.

To make our edits in the Windows 11 Registry File, we will type “regedit” into the Windows 11 search tool. From the results, choose the Regedit app and then use the left-hand window to navigate to this key, as shown in Figure A.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\

Figure A

Right-click the “Advanced” key and select New | DWORD (32-bit) Value and give the new key the name “TaskbarSI”, as shown in Figure B.

Figure B

Now, double-click the TaskbarSI key you just created and change the Value data to either a “0” (zero) to make the taskbar smaller or a “2” to make the taskbar larger, as shown in Figure C.

Figure C

Click the OK button when you are finished, close the Regedit app, and then restart your Windows 11 PC. When the computer restarts, the taskbar should be larger or smaller than normal.

To restore the Windows 11 taskbar to its original size, you have two options. You can either…

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