Microsoft

A late one for this release of ‘from around the web’ after being on holiday for the last week – as the case always seems to be I’ve come out of the sun quite red. This week we have another step in the right direction to getting rid of passwords, some helpful templates for building a first config for a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall and an interesting (short) review of the Hubitat home automation hub.

New Azure Active Directory capabilities help you eliminate passwords at work
It’s been promised by Microsoft (and some others) for quite some time and it looks like another leap in the right direction has been made. With FIDO2 and devices like the YubiKey password less login on Windows 10 Azure AD domain joined devices is happening. Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the page!

iron-skillet
All the options within a PAN NGFW can seem quite daunting and while the out of the box settings for security policies will help they are far from best practice. That’s where the IronSkillet comes in handy to take some of that pain away and give you a serious starting point.

Smart Home Hub – Hubitat Review
For the people who don’t have the time (or know how) to invest in something like Home Assistant but aren’t up for relying on a connection to the ‘cloud’ for home automation then Hubitat may well be for you. I’ve been exploring home automation for quite some time (at the moment using LIFX and HomeSeer) and may well consider looking into Hubitat some more if/when I decide to expand on it.

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series What I take from the Vision 2011 video

Every now and again Microsoft gives us a glimpse into what they see as the future of computing/productivity. The latest one is out (replacing the 2009 video) and over this series of posts I am going to take a look at different parts of the videos and try to make sense of what Microsoft is telling us about the future.

The latest video can be seen below on YouTube and the Microsoft micro site about the video can be seen at this link.

So keep an eye out for my first real post in this series which will be about how we use mobile devices to interact with each other.