December 16, 2015 – Palm Tree Tech Center

Cocoa neighborhood uses new surveillance cameras to fight crime

COCOA, Fla. — Surveillance video could be the best clue police have to solve a shooting in a Cocoa neighborhood.

And cameras like those are part of a community push by residents who want to work with officers to clean up their streets.

Last month, Broadmoor neighborhood residents joined forces with police with a plan to install surveillance cameras.

On Sunday night, the cameras captured what appears to be a dispute that led to a shooting.

It’s the kind of criminal activity Lawrence Sinclair had in mind when he and 70 of his neighbors met with city leaders to propose a public-private partnership to fill the community with cameras.

Some of the cameras were installed last month.

Homeowners are offering police 24-hour live access to the video via smartphones and tablets.

Police support the effort, but the city is still looking at legal issues involved before officers view the live feed.

In the meantime, Cocoa police Chief Mike Cantaloupe told residents to install the rest of the cameras on their properties, which have been donated by the company Night Owl.

“Chances are, if there is something that happens, especially at one of those residences or in the nearby surrounding area, we may at least get some video of a car going through the neighborhood,” said Cantaloupe.

Police are investing the shooting.

Sinclair said while he realizes identifying people in the video may not be possible, he wishes the rest of the cameras had been installed earlier.

Homeowners hope to have 48 cameras up and running in the neighborhood by Christmas and 176 cameras by March.

source: wftv

http://www.wftv.com/news/news/local/cocoa-neighborhood-uses-new-surveillance-cameras-f/npkTD/

Beware the Death Star flaw in Office 365

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a moisture farmer from Tatooine was able to blow up a planet-destroying Death Star with a single shot down a narrow pipe (well, and with the Force). You would have thought that the Empire would have bolstered protection for the reactor in its replacement Death Star, but no — entire ships were able to fly right to the core to blow it up too (once the shield generator was taken out).

The mega-clouds that are increasingly replacing data centers may also have such fatal flaws that could blow them up.

Take Office 365. Time has proven that it’s not infallible. There have been several major outages in the past two years, as well as many minor outages. The causes have varied, so there’s been no common fatal flaw discovered thus far.

For example, a December 3 outage in Europe had nothing to do with Office 365 itself but caused five hours of turmoil of customers, affecting, according to news reports, 1 percent of Outlook users on the desktop and 35 percent of Outlook users on the Web. And users were also unable to get into SharePoint, Power BI, Intune, and Yammer.

The issue occurred in Azure Active Directory: A configuration error caused authentication failures for Web protocols. We now know that Office 365’s dependency on Azure is one of the weak spots in the service.

IT admins can easily see and understand the connection between server applications and Active Directory. For example, on-premises Exchange requires Active Directory to authenticate users and protocols. So if you’re having issues with DNS, connectivity, or any number of other things, your messaging environment will not work if it cannot communicate with Active Directory.

As Exchange MVP Tony Redmond has detailed, Exchange Online has a similar dependency on Azure Active Directory for authentication — and thus the same weakness.

Microsoft, while not apologetic about the outages, said it plans to make a variety of improvements to the service — mainly improved testing and fallback options — as well as better communication to users of service status.

While you wait for Microsoft — or any mega-cloud provider — to make the perfect, indestructible cloud with amazingly transparent communication to its users, you can adopt third-party continuity offerings (like Mimecast) and monitoring offerings (like ENow’s Mailscape).

Do your research and find the ones that are right for you. And may the Force be with you.

Source: InfoWorld

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3015246/cloud-computing/beware-the-death-star-flaw-in-office-365.html

Daily Archives2015 December 16