Dynatrace’s enhancements deliver analytics capabilities to more open-source services

Dynatrace announced customers can extend Smartscape, the Dynatrace platform’s real-time and continuously updated topology, to bring Dynatrace’s powerful AIOps and analytics capabilities to more open-source services, including OpenTelemetry, FluentD, and Prometheus.

This expands Dynatrace’s unique ability to unify observability data and detail dependencies across all entities in dynamic, cloud-native environments. As a result, DevOps and SRE teams can easily curate and analyze data streams from any source, at scale.

According to Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President, Management Software and DevOps, at IDC, “To power digital transformation, organizations often rely on heterogeneous and highly dynamic architectures. These reflect large-scale systems performing trillions of operations for vastly different purposes across the enterprise. The complexity is enhanced by an accelerated adoption of emerging, open-source technologies, which in turn generate telemetry data that is exploding in volume, speed, and cardinality. Organizations are challenged to translate unstructured data from these environments into actionable business insights. Traditional machine learning correlation falls short because the IT landscape is not properly represented in the data models, and the cause-and-effect chain remains unclear.”

The Dynatrace platform creates and continuously updates Smartscape topology in real time to support constantly changing, modern cloud environments, which can consist of millions of entities with trillions of dependencies. The combination of this and the platform’s powerful AIOps and analytics capabilities puts all data from these environments – including metrics, logs, traces, as well as data from user experiences and the latest open-source standards – into actionable context. This enables teams to analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize their clouds quickly and with precision.

“As a leading insurance provider in the health, life, invest, and car space, much of our business operates digitally and at scale,” said Michael Akers, Group Monitoring Services Manager at Vitality. “To provide an exceptional service to our advisers, members, and partners, we rely on an open, multicloud architecture with interconnected applications and microservices across Kubernetes and other cloud-native platforms. Despite the complexity of our environment and the immense amount of data produced, the Dynatrace platform’s extensive observability and AIOps capabilities help ensure everything in our cloud stack works seamlessly, and all steps in our supply chain deliver the services our members need, more efficiently than ever before.”

“Driving digital transformation at enterprise-scale requires highly dynamic architectures with interconnected apps and microservices across cloud-native platforms. Custom entities and open-source data streams, which may be connected medical devices for a healthcare provider, smart containers for shipping companies, or any other business-specific and mission-critical variables, make managing these environments even more difficult,” said Steve Tack, SVP of Product Management at Dynatrace. “With this announcement, we are increasing visibility across clouds, which helps DevOps and SRE teams tame complexity, accelerate innovation, and drive better business outcomes.”

These enhancements will be generally available within 60 days.

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Red Hat partners with Nutanix to deliver open hybrid multicloud solutions

Red Hat and Nutanix announced a strategic partnership to enable a solution for building, scaling and managing cloud-native applications on-premises and in hybrid clouds. The collaboration brings together technologies, enabling installation, interoperability and management of Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Nutanix Cloud Platform, including Nutanix AOS and AHV.

Key elements of the partnership include:

• Red Hat OpenShift as the preferred choice for enterprise full stack Kubernetes on Nutanix Cloud Platform. Customers looking to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will be able to use a cloud platform from Nutanix, which includes both Nutanix AOS and AHV.
• Nutanix Cloud Platform is now a preferred choice for HCI for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift. This will enable customers to deploy virtualized and containerized workloads on a hyperconverged infrastructure, building on the combined benefits of Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies and Nutanix’s hyperconverged offerings.
• Nutanix AHV is now a Red Hat certified hypervisor enabling full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift on Nutanix Cloud Platform. The certification of the Nutanix built-in hypervisor, AHV, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift offers enterprise customers a simplified full stack solution for their containerized and virtualized cloud-native applications. This certification delivers Red Hat customers additional choice in hypervisor deployments, especially as many organizations explore innovative, modern virtualization technologies.
• Joint engineering roadmap providing robust interoperability. Red Hat and Nutanix will focus on delivering continuous testing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift with Nutanix AHV to provide robust interoperability. The companies will also collaborate to deliver more timely support by aligning product roadmaps.
• More seamless support experience providing faster resolution times for joint customers. Customers will be able to contact either company with support issues. The two companies are collaborating to deliver a best-in-class support experience for the interoperability of the certified products.

Because of its distributed architecture, Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers an IT environment that is highly scalable and resilient, and well-suited for enterprise deployments of Red Hat OpenShift at scale. The platform also includes fully integrated unified storage, addressing many tough challenges operators routinely face in configuring and managing storage for stateful containers.

“This partnership brings together Red Hat’s industry-leading cloud native solutions with the simplicity, flexibility and resilience of the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Together, our solutions provide customers with a full stack platform to build, scale, and manage containerized and virtualized cloud native applications in a hybrid multicloud environment,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, president and CEO, Nutanix.

“We have a vision to enable open hybrid clouds, where customers have choice and flexibility. Our partnership with Nutanix brings a leading hyperconverged offering to the open hybrid cloud, driving greater choice for our joint customers in how they deploy their containerized workloads and backed by a joint support experience,” said Paul Cormier, president and CEO, Red Hat.

“Organizations around the world are deploying an increasingly diverse mix of modern and cloud-native workloads. This Red Hat and Nutanix partnership, and in particular the collaborative support agreement between the two companies, helps to bring virtualized applications and Red Hat OpenShift-based containerized workloads running on Nutanix’s Cloud Platform together in a way that will benefit exactly these types of organizations and help to drive increased simplicity, agility, scalability within today’s complex hybrid-cloud world,” said Eric Sheppard, research vice president, IDC.

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Query.AI appoints Dan Burns to board of directors

Query.AI announced the appointment of Optiv co-founder and former CEO Dan Burns to its board of directors. Burns, a business, technology, and cybersecurity industry veteran with nearly three decades of experience, joins Query.AI’s lead Seed investor, Jay Leek, managing partner at ClearSky Security and ​​the former CISO of Blackstone, as an independent board member.

“The average enterprise today is using somewhere between 50 and 75 discrete cybersecurity solutions and technologies—some are in the cloud, some are on-prem, and some are hybrid. As a result, crucial data is everywhere, making it very difficult for organizations to access, investigate, and respond in a timely fashion,” said Burns. “The cybersecurity industry has gone through a long period of trying to centralize data to gain visibility. But, over the past several years through my work at Optiv and beyond, I’ve had many CISOs tell me that the current approach is just too expensive and resource intensive.”

Burns continued, “Query.AI offers a really innovative, browser-based product that overlays and serves as connective tissue for the full security estate so that organizations can see and act on their cybersecurity data, regardless of where it lives. I’m beyond excited to join the Query.AI board, and really looking forward to working closely with the team to accelerate the adoption of a platform that solves a huge cybersecurity industry problem.”

Burns co-founded Accuvant in 2002 to successfully execute his initial vision to build a company with the breadth, depth, and capabilities to address the information security needs of organizations worldwide. He launched the sales force and grew it to a national powerhouse organization within a 10-year period, conducting business with nearly half of the Fortune 500, and driving $740M in revenue.

In 2015, as CEO, Burns and Blackstone created Optiv with the merger of Accuvant and Fishnet Security with more than $2 billion in total revenues. Burns now serves on a select number of boards to help entrepreneurs and investors execute on their plans to create disruptive cybersecurity companies.

“Dan brings to Query.AI an extremely deep knowledge of the cybersecurity industry and landscape, decades of insights from solving complex customer problems, and valuable perspective from scaling a business from inception to enterprise,” said Dhiraj Sharan, CEO of Query.AI. “We are looking forward to working closely with Dan to enable organizations to accelerate cybersecurity investigations, save money, and amplify human potential.”

This strategic board appointment builds off of a strong first half for Query.AI, which included the company’s official launch, its $4.6 million Seed funding announcement, and being recognized as a 2021 Cool Vendor in Security Operations by Gartner.

The Query.AI approach to security operations is unique because it analyzes data in real-time from across systems, directly where it lives, eliminating the time-consuming need to pivot investigations from one security tool to the next.

The browser-based, patented platform automatically normalizes and enriches data, delivering meaningful insights to security analysts and SOC professionals in a single aggregated view that empowers companies to efficiently manage investigations and gain accelerated, high-confidence outcomes.

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Ash Parikh joins Druva as CMO

Druva announced the appointment of Ash Parikh as Chief Marketing Officer. With extensive marketing leadership, proven experience building cloud-first businesses, and background in data management, Parikh is set to play a critical role as the company continues to fuel its growth and global expansion.

The appointment follows a string of company milestones, including increasing demand for its SaaS platform as cloud migration surges, surpassing $2 billion in valuation and its recent recognition as a Visionary on debut in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.

Parikh joins Druva from Informatica, where he held a number of marketing leadership positions over the last 14 years. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President and Global Head of Marketing, where he focused on marketing strategy, digital-first demand generation, connected campaigns, growth marketing, brand awareness, and operational excellence.

In his role, Parikh was pivotal in helping the company secure and maintain a leadership position in major industry analyst evaluations spanning a number of years, while building its position in the industry as a leading cloud data management vendor. He also led the marketing effort in Informatica’s transformation to a subscription and cloud-first business model.

“The last 12 months have been a time of tremendous growth and opportunity as businesses increasingly recognize the incredible potential of cloud data protection and management,” said Jaspreet Singh, CEO and Founder, Druva. “With over two decades of experience scaling marketing organizations, building deep alignment between sales and marketing, and driving industry leadership, Ash will be instrumental in helping Druva continue its strong momentum, and propelling our business to even greater heights.”

“As the industry’s largest at-scale SaaS solution with a metadata-rich end-to-end platform, Druva’s ability to deliver enterprise-class data protection is unwavering and unmatched,” said Parikh. “As more businesses prepare to harness the power of SaaS, Druva’s deep expertise means customers can not only strengthen data protection, but improve cyber resiliency and unlock the value of data. Druva is at an inflection point in its growth trajectory, and I’m incredibly excited to join this outstanding team and accelerate Druva’s growth even further.”

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Privitar expands executive leadership team with new appointments

Privitar announced the expansion of its executive leadership team with the appointments of Victoria Normark as Chief Technology Officer, Pat Walsh as Chief Marketing Officer, and Bill Ziske as Senior Vice President of Sales, North America. The additions of these software and security industry veterans align Privitar for its next stage of innovation and growth, as the company continues to expand its data privacy capabilities and builds out its modern data provisioning platform.

“The additions of Victoria Normark, Pat Walsh, and Bill Ziske, all seasoned and highly respected leaders, reflect our commitment to the Privitar team and to our customers,” said Jason du Preez, Privitar CEO and co-founder. “We are committed to helping organizations use their data to maximize business benefits in a safe and ethical manner. Digital transformation is accelerating and we are investing in the people and teams that will build on existing success and deliver our rapidly expanding capabilities over the next year.”

Victoria Normark joins Privitar from Snow Software, the global leader in technology intelligence. As Privitar’s Chief Technology Officer, Normark will oversee the company’s global engineering and technology strategy and will play a vital role in leading the company’s development of the Privitar Data Provisioning Platform. Prior to leading engineering at Snow Software, she was a management consultant who helped large bureaucratic businesses transform into modern agile organizations. Based in Stockholm, Normark will spend significant time on-location with Privitar’s global engineering teams.

Chief Marketing Officer Pat Walsh will lead Privitar’s global Go-to-Market strategy and initiatives including branding, demand generation, product marketing, and strategic communications. Based in Boston, Walsh joins Privitar from security management company Tufin, where he oversaw all marketing activities and helped bring the company public in 2019. Prior to Tufin, Walsh served as head of marketing at Core Security (acquired by Courion), and was the CMO of Talend, a leading big data and enterprise integration vendor.

Rounding out Privitar’s Go-to-Market leadership team is Bill Ziske, SVP of Sales, North America. Based in Dallas, Texas, Ziske will partner with David Gray, SVP of Sales for EMEA & APAC, to oversee the company’s global sales, customer success, sales enablement, and partner ecosystem initiatives. He previously served as VP of Sales for software monitoring and testing company Eggplant, and Regional VP of Sales for Jive Software, a business communication and collaboration company.

“Victoria’s extensive experience building and managing distributed teams, moving large scale enterprise applications into SaaS, and managing agile software development will be of tremendous benefit to Privitar as we build out the next evolution of our world-class technology,” added du Preez. “Pat and Bill will play an instrumental role expanding Privitar’s presence in the United States, and building out core teams in Boston and Texas. I look forward to partnering with Victoria, Pat, Bill and the rest of our leadership team as we deepen Privitar’s impact and reach, and achieve our full potential as the global leader in modern data provisioning.”

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AMTS appoints Alexander Ivanyuk and David Ellis as new board members

AMTS announced that their members have elected a new board, appointing Alexander Ivanyuk, Senior Director of Product and Technology, at global technology company Acronis, and David Ellis, Vice President of Sales and Corporate Relations at cloud security validation provider SecureIQLab, as new board members.

Simon Edwards, CEO at SE Labs, a private and independently-owned security testing company, and longtime AMTSO board member, is stepping up as a new co-chairman of the board. He shares the position with Luis Corrons, Security Evangelist at Avast, a global leader in digital security and privacy.

AMTSO’s board has a 50:50 share of tester and vendor members, to assure balanced contributions from both sides, to develop objective standards and best practices for anti-malware testing and assessment of other cybersecurity products.

Incoming Alexander Ivanyuk represents the vendor side, having worked in the IT industry for 20 years, both in the software and hardware space. He brings strategic product management and PR and marketing experience to AMTSO, which he gathered at his current position at Acronis and in past roles at Kaspersky Lab and in the IT media field.

Testing representative, David Ellis, brings extensive experience in developing testing and validation metrics, documenting testing methodologies from his current role at SecureIQLab, as well as business development and sales experience from his previous positions at Forcepoint, NSS Labs, and HighSide.

“We are happy to welcome two great, new board members with Alexander Ivanyuk and David Ellis, to contribute their vendor and tester perspectives and guidance to the AMTSO organization,” said Dennis Batchelder, President and CEO at AMTSO. “We also are grateful for the valuable insights and direction we have received from outgoing board members Onur Komili at Sophos and Chris Pickard at MRG Effitas. Thank you both for your service all these years.”

SE Lab’s Simon Edwards has previously been chairman of the AMTSO board, from 2012 until 2015, and again from 2016 until 2018. Avast’s Luis Corrons has been chairman of the AMTSO board since 2018. Additional board members are Maik Morgenstern, CEO and Technical Director of AV-Test, Jesse Song, CEO of SKD Labs, Alexander Vukcevic, Director of Avira Protection Labs at NortonLifeLock Inc., and Glaucia Young, Engineering Director at Microsoft.

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How to Research the History of Your Home

Photo: Sundry Photography (Shutterstock)

Whether you live in an older home, or just appreciate them (and can lose hours scrolling through the Cheap Old Houses Instagram account), you may have looked at a house and wondered about its history: How old it is, who lived and died there, and what other events took place there over the years.

Fortunately, there are a few relatively simple ways to get the backstory on your house, or that one in your neighborhood you’ve always been curious about. Here’s what to know and where to start.

Google the house’s address

Like any other type of research, the easiest place to start is with a Google search of the home’s address. This may or may not be useful, but you might as well start with the lowest-hanging fruit.

If the house is or was on the market over the past few years, you’ll probably come across a Zillow or Realtor.com listing, which, if nothing else, should tell you the year the house was built. Plus, if you don’t live in the house, it may contain interior shots that would be interesting to see. Anything else a quick Google search unearths is a bonus.

Look for clues

If you do live in the house you’re researching and don’t know the year it was built, try looking around for clues. According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, closets are a good place to start, because you may find old wallpaper or paint with patterns and/or color schemes specific to a certain era. Or, examine any exposed rafters or brick in the house for dates or stamps left by the builder.

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Research using public records

Here’s where things may get a little more time consuming. There are plenty of public records out there, but not everything is fully digitized, so you may need to page through (digitized) hand-written census records, for example, to find out who lived in the house previously.

Typically, the most accessible public records are titles, deeds, property tax records, plat maps, and other local history documents, which may be available through your county auditor’s website, the local library, or a local historical society. Also, Sandborn Fire Insurance Maps are widely available, and contain information on the house’s construction.

Talk to your neighbors

Depending on where you live, your house may look a lot like your neighbor’s, so if you have questions about your home’s history—like when it was built, or what a particular feature was originally for—they may know the answer. If you live in a small town, chances are there are some lifelong residents who’ll be able to fill you in on the home’s history, including the previous owners and what they did for a living.

Learn about the history of your town or neighborhood

Were the cottages on your street originally built to house railroad employees? Was the area considered rural farmland at one point, where the farms were subdivided into multiple lots? Was there a major influx of immigrants from a certain part of the world during the period when your house was built? Even if you don’t find anything specifically about your home, getting some general historical background may be useful.

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How to Get Better at Promoting Your Small Business on Social Media

Photo: Natee Meepian (Shutterstock)

Whether you’re content with keeping your side hustle on the side or want to turn it into your full-time job, you need customers and a strategy. And you know where the customers are: Scrolling Instagram and sending TikToks to their friends TikToks. But how do you get their attention on social media?

Think about how you use social media as a customer

You’re not just an entrepreneur or a hustler; you’re also a social media user and a customer yourself! What do you look for in brands’ and companies’ social media posts? Think about how you already use social media and how you experience your time scrolling the apps.

Katherine Young, who owns breakfast restaurant Mister Bagel Westbrook with her husband, as well as the Modern Chandler Candle Co., shared her social media strategy with Lifehacker: “We didn’t establish Mister Bagel. We bought it. So though it had all of the standard social media accounts, the previous owner did basically nothing with them. So really, one of the first things I did was spread the word about new ownership online, and that is sort of where our social media following came from.”

Young looked at the existing social media accounts for her new business from the viewpoint of a customer and social media user and realized instantly that they needed an overhaul. So she invested time and energy into promoting the business online in a way that would appeal to her if she were looking for a new place to get a bagel.

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Focus on authenticity and simplicity on social media

You may have the urge to put on a little front for social media and present yourself and your business in a buttoned-up way, but remember that customers like to see you be genuine. That’s why some companies hire influencers to promote their business across the influencers’ social media channels: Seeing real people use a product is really helpful—and fun—for a potential customer. Focus more on sincerity than you do on getting the most beautiful, well-composed shot.

“My social strategy is authenticity and simplicity,” Young said. “I don’t have any time to curate a fake persona and I’m pretty ‘What you see is what you get.’ Every time I try to have a grid aesthetic, I find something I really want to post that doesn’t vibe with it, and I end up posting it anyway. I actually think my customers respect that and like that about me. I’m exactly what you see, and I don’t pretend to be anything different.”

You have interests and a personality, so show them off and give people a reason to want to support you, not just your product. Similarly, your potential buyers and clients have interests and personalities, so work on getting to know them.

Joseph Heller, CEO and founder of Supplied, said, “As a solopreneur, your key advantage is your passion, your personality, and your understanding of your customer. Unfortunately, a website is a very static approach to selling online, which doesn’t allow you to accentuate these key advantages. In fact, you are at a disadvantage because your larger competitors can do a much better job of getting traffic to a website or having a website with a better experience. However, on social media, especially with Facebook Live, you have the advantage of talking directly to your customers and interacting with them in a way that a larger competitor can’t compete with.”

He added that in his opinion, the biggest mistake small business owners make is not knowing who their customers “truly” are: “We encourage our customers to lean into who their target customer is and have seen nearly all of our customers successfully generate revenue through selling to their specific niche,” he said of Supplied, which is a wholesale marketplace that lets solopreneurs choose from products with no minimum order requirement.

He recommends using Facebook Live to communicate with existing and would-be customers in the most authentic way, but play around with various platforms to see where your target audience spends most of their time.

Don’t forget about the social part of social media

Social media is just that: social. You can’t just post a picture of your product to your Story and call it a day. Leaving the “social” out of social media also leaves the “hustle” out of your side hustle.

“Don’t be afraid to slip into direct messages of people you want to collaborate with, or don’t be afraid to talk to the people who message or post,” Young said. “If someone tags one of our bagels in their Story, I don’t just repost it. I thank them for their business or comment on the pic. And I can’t tell you how many business connections I’ve made just from being chatty or friendly or just myself. I’m never afraid to let people see the person behind the profile and that has always worked in my favor.”

While she owns the brick-and-mortar bagel store, her candle company has no physical HQ. All of her advertising and sales take place online, but Young points out that social media is how all of her wholesale accounts found Modern Chandler Candle Co. Thanks to social media, Young’s candles are available in other business owners’ storefronts.

“Social media is my main way of communicating to candle customers, so I certainly see upticks when I post specific things,” she said. “For example, I made custom candles for a bachelorette party and when I posted them, two brides reached out, and I booked two more bachelorette parties for this summer and a wedding.”

Stick with it

You might not see amazing engagement right away or get an influx of orders, but having a strong social media presence will help you in the long run by giving potential customers something to look at when they’re making their buying decisions. You know the old saying: You have to spend money to make money, so promote an Instagram or Facebook post here or there. Consider paying an influencer to pose with your products. Run a discount special for anyone who references your social media at checkout or gives your account a follow.

But whatever you do, never stop posting.

“My biggest tip is don’t give up,” Heller said. “All of our customers that stick with online selling and actively seek out knowledge and support end up being able to at least supplement their income, with many able to turn it into their full-time job.”

  

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How to Look for a New Job Without Tipping Off Your Boss

Photo: Franck Boston (Shutterstock)

If you’re looking for a new job, there’s a chance you’re feeling unfulfilled in your current position and you’re so over your boss that instead of bringing this up to them and hoping for a change, you’re ready to jump ship entirely.

Especially if you and your boss aren’t on good terms as it is—and you don’t feel like they’re a support system for you—how terrible would it be if they realized you were actively searching for an escape route? If, heaven forbid, you lost out on a job you were interviewing for and had to continue working for a boss who now knew how unhappy you were, the idea of continuing to show up to work under them every day would be absolutely mortifying.

That’s why you need to know how to job hunt on the down-low.

Be careful when job-hunting on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a feature called #OpenToWork that lets you demonstrate to recruiters that you’re actively hunting for new roles. As LinkedIn explains:

If you’re looking for a job, you can let recruiters and your network on LinkedIn know you’re open to new job opportunities. If you specify the types of job opportunities that you’re interested in and your preferred location, we’ll help your profile show up in search results when recruiters look for suitable job candidates.

There’s a balance here, though. Advertising yourself as willing and able to interview for and take a new job makes it easier to, well, interview for and take a new job. But it also makes it pretty obvious what you’re up to. Your job might have recruiters trawling LinkedIn, too, and they might rat you out if they see you’ve enabled that feature.

This could work in your favor, of course. Maybe your HR department or boss would come to you with solutions to your complaints or an offer of a raise if they knew you were searching. This is why it’s important to consider approaching your boss with your grievances and requests before looking to bail.

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But you know your workplace culture and all of its unique quirks. If that were an option, you probably wouldn’t be actively looking. So bear in mind that if you advertise yourself as available, your boss might just find out. Prepare yourself for that conversation and any awkwardness that follows.

You can also head it off by double-checking your settings. Make sure your “Notify Your Network” setting is turned off. The #OpenToWork feature only advertises you to people outside your network, too, so connect with the entire HR team at your company to avoid moles seeing when you have it turned on.

How to interview when you already have a job

Job interviews are tough to schedule if you already have a job. To get to the potential employer during work hours, you might have to leave your own job during those same work hours. We don’t recommend lying and saying you have a doctor’s appointment, but work out your phrasing in advance. Just saying you have “an appointment” could work, if your managers aren’t super strict about knowing where you are when you’re not at your desk.

When coordinating an interview with another company’s recruiter, don’t sound too desperate, no matter how bad your situation is. It’s a job-hunting no-no to diss your current employer, but you can delicately explain that there might be scheduling conflicts and you’d appreciate the recruiter’s help finding a suitable interview time that works for you and the hiring manager. It’s their job to get good candidates into the interview chair, so work with them and try not to spin a web of lies as you go.

We live in a work-obsessed, capitalist society and at plenty of companies, lunch breaks and appointments are rigidly scheduled. If you have vacation days, consider redeeming one for the day of your interview so you’re not on a time crunch. If all else fails, you might have to dash to the interview on your lunch break, but make sure you tell the hiring team in advance if that’s the case so that this can run smoothly and on-time.

If you’re actively looking for a new job, start dressing up every day at your current one. That will not only put you in a very business-forward mindset, but will make it much less suspicious if you show up one day in a fancy interview outfit. If your current workplace is really casual, change into the interview garb somewhere besides your office bathroom. Nothing is quite as suspicious as emerging from the restroom in a dress and heels before “lunch” or “an appointment.”

Communicate clearly with the hiring manager

Once you get into a talking stage of sorts with a recruiter or hiring manager, be totally honest with them. As mentioned above, work with them to schedule interviews that won’t raise suspicion in your current office setting.

Beyond that, make it clear from the jump that you’d prefer your activities be confidential. You have a right to ask them not to contact your employer and to tell them, professionally, that you are keeping this hush-hush. If they give you pushback, it could be a sign that the work culture there is no good, either, so consider sticking it out with the devil you know while you apply elsewhere.

Avoid using your work computer for job-hunting tasks

If your company has given you a computer or phone for business use, try to use it only for business. That’s an all-the-time piece of guidance, but it’s a hard one to follow. Corporations have big bucks and the little guys have much less, so it’s probable that your work phone and computer are faster and better than the ones you bought for yourself.

But remember that anything you do on a work-issued device—yes, anything (yikes)—is something your boss has a legal right to look at. The people on the IT team are probably too busy to dig through all your communications, but play it safe anyway. They could easily run a search after you put in your two-weeks’ notice and find all the resumes you saved to the desktop or emails you sent from your work phone. It’s not a good look, and it burns a few bridges, so it’s best to avoid that altogether.

Take advantage of remote work

During the pandemic lockdowns, most of us became well acquainted with Zoom and Slack. Use this to your advantage by using work-from-home days when you have hiring calls or interviews. Some interviews can even be done via video call and your boss never has to know.

Don’t let the job hunt—or your overall dissatisfaction with your current gig—affect your output or productivity, though, as hard as it might be. This can raise suspicions or even get you fired before you’ve secured a landing place at another company. At some point in the hiring process, you might also be required to prove that you work at your current job, though hiring managers should ask you before reaching out to your HR department. Don’t do anything in what you hope will be your final weeks to give them a reason to bad-mouth you to your potential saviors.

Don’t tell your current colleagues you’re job-hunting

If you hate your job, your co-workers probably do, too. Kvetching at an after-work happy hour is common and can build camaraderie, but a mutual interest in shit-talking doesn’t mean you need to fill your colleagues in on your job hunting activities. In a toxic workplace, you have no guarantee they won’t use your desperation to get out as a way to throw you under the bus to make themselves look good in front of a boss.

Plus, it’s straight-up embarrassing if you hype up an interview and then don’t get the job. Move in silence, as they say, and never let anyone know what you’re up to until the day you put in your notice.

 

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The Best and Worst Foods for Composting

Photo: lomiso (Shutterstock)

As proponents of composting (or at least using kitchen scraps as plant food) we’re always on the lookout for tips and tricks that could improve the process, or (better yet) make it easier. This includes knowing what should—and, just as importantly, what shouldn’t—end up in the compost pile or bin.

Fortunately, Maki Yazawa at Well+Good wrote an article outlining the best and worst foods to compost. Here’s what to know.

The best foods to compost

According to Yazawa’s research—including expert interviews—there are some of the best foods to compost:

Coffee and tea

This one’s well-known, but a classic for a reason: Coffee grounds contain nitrogen, which helps with the composting process. Plus, if you use unbleached coffee filters, those can be composted too. Same goes for tea: As long as the teabag is biodegradable and made from compostable materials, go ahead and throw the whole thing in.

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Fruits

Fruits, in general, are popular additions to compost piles, thanks to all the nutrients they provide. However, some parts take longer to break down, like pits from avocados or stone fruits (like peaches and nectarines), or tough rinds (like some types of melon). It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on the amount of acidic fruits—like tomatoes and citrus fruits—you add to the compost pile, as they can throw off its pH.

Vegetables

Meanwhile, vegetables are much easier to compost, primarily because they can go in whole, as scraps, rotten, cooked, or raw.

Leftovers

Leftovers, including “undressed vegetables, grains, and pasta, as well as boneless pieces of lean meat and protein” can all be composted, Yazawa writes.

The worst foods to compost

While technically, most foods can be added to a compost pile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advises against including the following items—primarily because they can cause foul odors, or attract pests:

• Dairy products, like butter, milk, sour cream, yogurt
• Eggs (although eggshells are fine)
• Fats, grease, lard, or oils
• Meat or fish bones

Lastly, the EPA says to avoid composting black walnut tree leaves or twigs, because they release substances that might be harmful to plants.

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Zerto 9 brings immutability and automation for ransomware resilience

Zerto announced the general availability of Zerto 9, significantly advancing its capabilities in the fight against ransomware. Offering new immutability and automation features, Zerto 9 also provides enhanced cloud data management and protection capabilities for end users and managed service providers, new backup capabilities including support for additional cloud platforms, and cloud tiering to deliver secure and cost-effective archive storage and simplified management.

Ransomware attacks continue to grow in severity and volume, bringing increasing costs and growing financial, legal, and even political ramifications. Organizations must invest in technology that allows them to recover and resume operations quickly following a ransomware attack, not just protect against it. Based on a foundation of 12 years of expertise with continuous data protection (CDP), Zerto enables organizations to move on from a ransomware attack with minimal data loss and downtime by allowing users to rewind and recover data with granularity from any point in time—and do so within seconds of a disruptive event.

Zerto 9 enables immutability settings for long-term data retention to be easily managed from within the Zerto user interface. As a result, users can set how long backups can remain unaltered, safeguarding them to the cloud to prevent malicious deletion or modification of data, including ransomware. In this release, immutability support is available for Amazon S3.

“Zerto 9 enables organizations to defend their business from the consequences of ransomware, and with fully orchestrated failover and failback, organizations can recover infected applications and data from just seconds back,” said Deepak Verma, vice president, product management for Zerto. “With just a few clicks, our journal-based recovery is flexible enough to recover only what is needed, whether that’s files, virtual machines, or an entire application stack from a point-in-time. As ransomware attacks continue to escalate, these are game-changing capabilities that we have had built into our platform for many years now, and they just keep getting better with every release.”

“It’s vital to keep our infrastructure and data safe from the risks associated with ransomware,” said Alan Barrett, head of IT, TWM Solicitors LLP. “By adopting Zerto, we are maximising the protection of our systems, and in the event of a malware attack, we can rewind and recover data with granularity from any point in time and do so within seconds of a disruptive event with minimal data loss and downtime.”

Zerto 9 adds new automated VM protection to ensure complete, flexible data protection across each environment even when new VMs are added. Using native vSphere tags, servers can now be instantly added to Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) without any manual configuration to quickly protect workloads with new or existing protection groups and apply existing SLA rules, including pre-validation and alerts.

New instant restore has been added so that Zerto users can restore VMs straight into production easily and quickly without having to worry about failing over to a DR site first or running out of resources on overtaxed backup appliances. Preserving journal checkpoints allows users to revert to other points in time quickly for the same VM if the selected restore point does not meet requirements. This has been coupled with restore of files or directories by downloading them or by restoring them directly into its original location from any long-term retention (LTR) repository such as public cloud.

New capabilities for end users and managed service providers

Zerto 9 continues to advance its backup and disaster recovery capabilities to include new support for additional cloud platforms and new cloud tiering to deliver secure and cost-effective archive storage and simplified management for both end users and managed service providers.

For instance, long-term retention repositories can now be stored on S3-compatible on-premises or cloud storage such as Cloudian. In addition, users can also tier LTR data to Amazon S3-IA and S3 Glacier as well as Azure Blob Cool and Archive storage classes by defining retention policies within Zerto 9. Native cloud APIs to tier backups are leveraged to eliminate compute costs associated with tiering data in public cloud.

Backup is now managed within its own separate context within the Zerto user interface. A new type of virtual protection group (VPG) called local continuous backup VPG enables easy configuration and management of CDP-based backups and long-term retention of VMs. This new VPG provides users with the ability to segregate less critical VMs which require only backup and restore from the critical VMs that need full Zerto disaster recovery features.

“As a bank, it’s critical that our services are available to our customers 24/7/365 and free from disruptions, and Zerto makes us confident we can deliver on that,” said Steve Walcott, senior server specialist, FirstCaribbean International Bank. “Zerto gives us the continuous data protection we need, and we’re very excited about the enhanced cloud services in Zerto 9. Being able to securely and cost-effectively manage more data in the cloud will help keep the business nimble and our customers satisfied.”

Users can find training on the advanced Zerto 9 capabilities in several updated hands-on labs, including recovering from ransomware in a safe lab environment. New and updated Zerto 9 labs can be found in myZerto or by getting started at zerto.com/labs.

Zerto is also proud to announce that it’s been named as a new entrant into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Solutions. Zerto is thrilled to be included in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant as it demonstrates a milestone in Zerto’s journey as a valid player in the backup market. Zerto 9 continues to advance the company as a formidable, converged backup and disaster recovery vendor.

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BehavioSec extends its behavioral biometrics platform into a SOC/ISO compliant SaaS version

BehavioSec announced that it has extended its patented technology and BehavioSense platform into a SOC/ISO compliant, hosted-version and a cloud-native, SaaS version. These new versions will help more organizations meet compliance and cloud mandates, support frictionless multi-factor authentication (MFA), and gain access to the advanced behavioral biometrics technology – which until now – has only been employed within the world’s largest banks, e-Identity providers, and online retailers.

According to the recent July release of the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Online Fraud Detection, “The convergence between online fraud detection (OFD), identity proofing and authentication continues with many organizations applying OFD capabilities to mitigate risk in identity proofing and authentication events.” The report further adds, “Banks are becoming increasingly comfortable with using vendor-hosted or SaaS solutions from vendors for transaction monitoring, which is a OFD capability that has traditionally been deployed on-premises in banking environments.”

As biometrics technology adoption increases and more companies look to hosted and SaaS-based solutions, the new SaaS-version of the company’s BehavioSense platform is the market’s first to offer comprehensive behavioral biometrics for MFA in this lightweight, self-service form factor. Unlike other SaaS-based solutions that may specialize in just web interfaces or typing, this new platform brings the company’s deep insights across device types and human interaction to identify unique humans during the authentication process.

“As more organizations move through digital transformation projects, adopting solutions that can offer accuracy, protect privacy, reduce friction – and be agile – is critical,” said Ed Amoroso, Founder and CEO of analyst firm TAG CYBER and former Chief Security Officer at AT&T. “This is especially important for organizations with continuous delivery models for their online services or those concerned with insider threat in our current remote/hybrid work environments.”

The new SaaS packaging is more than a port – it is purpose-built to streamline the BehavioSec API and feature set to offer transparent and passwordless MFA, reduction of step-ups, and replacement of legacy technologies like knowledge-based challenges. In particular, while the new service may seamlessly work in conjunction with one-time passwords (OTP), it can also serve as the means to retire OTP – as OTPs and SMS codes are notorious for their added costs to both business and consumer, friction-full experiences, and recently – vulnerability to a rising trend of SMS fraud.

To ensure rapid time-to-value, the new SaaS solution offers an especially lightweight SDK for easy deployment and integration with Identity & Access Management (IAM) platforms already implemented within customer environments for business, consumer, or workforce protection.

“The vision at the outset of this project was to bring this powerful technology used by the largest financial institutions to a broader audience needing a solution for digital identity protection that supports both compliance and privacy protection,” said BehavioSec VP of Products, Jordan Blake. “And it is not enough to make it available. It has to be highly deployable and user friendly, too – offering high value.”

In addition to the new SaaS version, the commercial release of the vendor-hosted BehavioSense service offers sophisticated fraud organizations the full breadth and depth of BehavioSec fraud prevention technology in a Type 2 SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant environment. While the company’s software-based BehavioSense platform has always been fully cloud-compatible for deployment within customer environments (including public cloud), this release comes after the company’s April announcement of Type 1 SOC 2 certification and the subsequent completion of the full Type 2 and ISO requirements.

This announcement follows the company’s 2020 performance that saw a successful 300% growth and a series of developments during the first half of 2021, including significant platform updates and recently, key patent grants. As the company continues to invest in technology innovation and expansion of its go-to-market capabilities, the tripling of its platform footprint into a portfolio play provides a foundation to offer customers greater flexibility with multiple packaging and licensing options tightly aligned to customer requirements and phased implementations.

The new BehavioSense SaaS platform is available now in controlled release with general availability slated for later this year.

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Securitas acquires Protection One to enhance its protective services capabilities in Germany

Securitas has agreed to acquire Protection One, a German company specializing in remote technology-driven security solutions and electronic security.

The acquisition will enhance Securitas’ protective services capabilities in Germany and is in line with the Group’s strategy of doubling its security solutions and electronic security sales by 2023. The purchase price is approximately MEUR 72 (MSEK 735) on a debt-free basis.

In 2020, Protection One’s annual sales were more than MEUR 33 (MSEK 337), of which over 90 percent were on a recurring monthly revenue basis. The company has 230 employees in Germany and is present at 12 locations with the operation center based in Meerbusch, offering remote monitoring services with 24/7 real-time intervention. Combining its high-performance and tailor-made installation offering, the company provides full scope of electronic security services across 10 300 objects for approximately 7 000 clients, mainly small and medium-sized businesses.

Peter Karlströmer, Divisional President Security Services Europe: “We are very happy to welcome the Protection One team to the Securitas family. As the leading German player selling remote monitoring services and installations Protection One fits perfectly with Securitas’ security solutions and electronic security strategy. We are excited about the new opportunities that Protection One’s strong experience in customized client solutions will enable, given their high client satisfaction and Securitas’ increased focus on the SME segment. With this acquisition, we will further strengthen our leading offerings in the growing German security market. We believe this acquisition will help us serve our clients in an even better way today and in the future.”

The acquisition-related costs are expected to be MSEK 45, to be recognized in the period 2021 to 2023. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to EPS as of 2022. The acquisition is subject to approval from competition authorities and is expected to be finalized during the third quarter of 2021.

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Infosys implements its IaaS solution for SPS in collaboration with Hitachi Vantara

Infosys announced the renewal of its strategic collaboration with Select Portfolio Servicing (SPS) to implement its Cobalt-powered infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution in collaboration with Hitachi Vantara. Through this engagement, Infosys will offer SPS next-generation hybrid cloud, infrastructure services, and application services for the next five years.

As SPS’ strategic partner, Infosys will leverage its Cobalt portfolio to design, build, operate, and automate a robust and resilient private cloud infrastructure as a service with on-demand flexibility and scalability. Furthermore, Infosys intends to implement hybrid cloud to maximize data centre flexibility underpinned by enhanced disaster recovery and security posture.

Murali S. Palanganatham, Chief Information Officer at Select Portfolio Servicing, Inc. stated, “We have forged a strong collaboration with Infosys over the years, which has enabled us to leverage a repertoire of services & capabilities encompassing Application development, IT operations, IaaS, SaaS and Security.

By resorting to Infosys’ Cobalt solutions and leveraging their expertise in integrated infrastructure, applications, IT operations and services, we intend to continuously scale, increase performance, enhance flexibility of our technology ecosystem, and streamline IT operations, augmented by automation.”

Narsimha Rao Mannepalli, Executive Vice-President, Head of Cloud & Infrastructure Solutions, Infosys, said, “Being future-ready is key to survive and compete in the current business environment. We are excited to extend our collaboration with SPS and explore new avenues for leveraging our Cobalt portfolio to address a range of technology needs on-demand in an efficient, timely, and agile manner.”

Mark Ablett, Chief Revenue Officer, Hitachi Vantara, said, “We are thrilled to utilize our EverFlex infrastructure as-a-service offering in partnership with Infosys to design and operate a modern and resilient hybrid cloud transformation for SPS’s regulated financial workloads. The ability to deliver a flexible consumption model for new storage and data services will enable SPS to innovate at scale and quickly address the needs of their growing customer base.”

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LogicGate raises $113M to fuel innovation and accelerate growth

LogicGate announces a $113 million Series C funding round led by PSG, a leading growth equity firm partnering with middle-market software and technology-enabled services companies. Greenspring Associates also meaningfully increased its commitment since their original investment in 2019.

“Today, the market for risk and compliance tools is experiencing significant growth and innovation, which we believe is similar to the CRM market 10-15 years ago,” said Matt Kunkel, CEO of LogicGate. “We’re thrilled to partner with PSG and continue our relationship with Greenspring as we aim to address the market demand for a holistic no-code platform equipped with the tools and agility required to meet the evolving risk management needs of modern organizations.”

According to Gartner, the integrated risk management (IRM) market is projected to experience growth of 12.6% in 2021, with the total addressable market expected to grow to $9.3 billion by 2023. In a Gartner survey of risk managers, the top three risk management priorities for their companies — a greater focus on building operational resilience, building business model resilience, and risk interdependencies and cross-functional response — all require an IRM approach.

Since its inception in 2015, LogicGate has embraced its mission to create flexible, easy-to-use enterprise technology for accurately assessing, monitoring, actioning, and rapidly pivoting GRC programs to changing maturity levels.

Today, LogicGate serves hundreds of customers, including SoFi, Zurich Insurance, Memorial Hermann Health, and Cimpress, who are using the robust Risk Cloud platform in an effort to build and scale a myriad of entry-level to sophisticated risk, compliance, regulatory and security programs that go beyond asset protection to revenue creation. The company continues to grow its client roster and out-of-the-box applications, which can be found on the Risk Cloud Exchange marketplace, as well as its technology partnerships and channel sales.

“LogicGate has a leading platform that leverages their no-code solution for a broad array of customers spanning a variety of industries globally,” said Adam Marcus, LogicGate board member and Managing Director at PSG. “We are excited to work alongside the LogicGate team as they continue to expand their product footprint and deliver a comprehensive risk management solution to the marketplace.”

The new capital brings LogicGate’s total funding to date to $156 million. The funds aim to fuel all elements of LogicGate’s business, including significant product advancements — notably, a risk quantification solution set to be released later this year — and the expansion of its partner ecosystem, international presence and security posture.

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OpenSSF adds new members from around the globe to improve OSS security

OpenSSF announced new membership commitments to advance open source security education and best practices. New members include Accurics, Anchore, Bloomberg Finance, Cisco Systems, Codethink, Cybertrust Japan, OpenUK, ShiftLeft, Sonatype and Tidelift.

Open source software (OSS) has become pervasive in data centers, consumer devices and services, representing its value among technologists and businesses alike. Because of its development process, open source has a chain of contributors and dependencies before it ultimately reaches its end users. It is important that those responsible for their user or organization’s security are able to understand and verify the security of this dependency supply chain.

“The massive support we’re seeing for the OpenSSF and its initiatives is a reflection of the industry-wide commitment to secure open source software,” said Kay Williams, Governing Board Chair, OpenSSF, and Supply Chain Security Lead, Azure Office of the CTO, Microsoft. “We welcome the latest OpenSSF new members and look forward to their contributions.“

The new Scorecard 2.0 is also available now and includes new security checks, scaled up the number of projects being scored, and made this data easily accessible for analysis. The Scorecard is gaining adoption for automating analysis and trust decisions on the security posture of open source projects.

The OpenSSF is a cross-industry collaboration that brings together technology leaders to improve the security of OSS. Its vision is to create a future where participants in the open source ecosystem use and share high quality software, with security handled proactively, by default, and as a matter of course.

Its working groups include Securing Critical Projects, Security Tooling, Identifying Security Threats, Vulnerability Disclosures, Digital Identity Attestation, and Best Practices.

OpenSSF has more than 45 members and associate members contributing to working groups, technical initiatives and governing board and helping to advance open source security best practices.

“As maintainers of multiple open source projects and a vendor working to help organizations secure their software supply chains, the current security challenges are ever present for us. Joining the OpenSSF enables us to work across the wider community to develop best practices and ensure that everyone benefits from this coordinated industry effort,” said Neil Levine, Vice President of Product at Anchore.

“As a global technology leader, Cisco has a responsibility to ensure the software that the world builds, deploys, and interacts with is secure to use, without compromising the user experience,” said Stephen Augustus, head of open source at Cisco. “Cisco is delighted to openly collaborate with the OpenSSF member organizations to define policy and deliver tooling that helps organizations build and run secure applications.”

“As a software consultancy trusted by our clients to provide impartial advice when choosing software to depend on, and processes to adopt, Codethink is pleased to join the OpenSSF to help to promote Open Source solutions to our clients and secure the future of those solutions openly and collaboratively. Codethink has long been a proponent of the use of Open Source software in industry, and in promoting participation as a way to mitigate risk. With the OpenSSF, we see many possible avenues to furthering these goals to the benefit of all,” said Javier Jardón, Head of Automotive Strategy at Codethink.

“Cybertrust Japan, a developer of embedded Linux for industrial use, is pleased to join the OpenSSF based on the agreement with the activities which continuously promote the security of OSS gathering community-centric and cross-industry participants. We are looking forward to contributing to open source community through our involvement with OpenSSF and their working groups utilizing our secure technology regarding our Linux OS for IoT devices and our trust services that protect the IoT lifecycle with a trust chain.” said Yasutoshi Magara, President & CEO, Cybertrust Japan.

“Open Technology plays a vital role in the global economy, powering services like cloud computing. It has a good reputation for software quality, stability and security, but inevitably there are issues discovered over time. Where open source has an advantage is how organisations collaborate, improve code and work together to manage notifications and updates to all the community members and users involved around a project‘s ecosystem. OpenUK is pleased to join the OpenSSF and help the development and adoption of best practices for companies, communities and users within the software supply chain,” said Amanda Brock, CEO and Chief Policy Officer, OpenUK

“We are honored to have been accepted into the Open Source Security Foundation, and support their vision to create a future where participants in the open source ecosystem use and share high quality software, with security handled proactively, by default, and as a matter of course,” said Chetan Conikee, CTO, ShiftLeft. “Like many of our customers, ShiftLeft has benefited greatly from leveraging open source software to build our differentiated products and features. This new juncture further strengthens our commitment of giving back to the community by empowering organizations with code, enabling them with the ability to build and run secure applications.”

“As the maintainers of the largest repository of open source components in Maven Central, we have a unique view into how great the demand for open source has become in recent years. However, as that demand has grown, bad actors have recognized the power of open source and are seeking to use that against the industry. As these software supply chain attacks become more commonplace, open source developers have become the frontline of this new battle,” said Brian Fox, CTO of Sonatype.

”One of our key missions at Sonatype is to help organizations continuously harness all of the good that open source has to offer, without any of the risk, and OpenSSF and its members share a similar vision. We’re thrilled to officially join OpenSSF and collectively work with other members to keep open source ecosystems safe and secure, as we all figure out how to battle both new and old attacks on the community.”

“Open source has become the de facto development platform, providing the building blocks for the majority of modern applications. Yet most organizations struggle to effectively manage the health and security of their open source software supply chain. We look forward to collaborating with the members of the OSSF and our open source maintainer partners to proactively make open source software more secure for everyone.,” said Donald Fischer, CEO and co-founder, Tidelift.

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7 of the Best VR Games That Will Actually Give You a Great Workout

Boxing experience Thrill of the Fight is the toughest game I played, it got my heart rate the highest, and even though the graphics were a bit cheesy I ended up totally immersed. Between rounds of one fight, I nearly sat down on the virtual stool in my corner of the ring.

The hands-on experience begins when you start the app and see the menus explaining how the game works. Instead of pointing your controllers at buttons on the menus (most games have you aim them like laser guns), you walk directly up to the menu screens and touch them with your virtual hands, which are already wearing boxing gloves.

You’re in a small gym with a garage-like feel. A coach stands off to the side, watching you but not speaking. There’s a locker room area, a dummy you can practice punches on, and an elevated boxing ring. Choose an opponent to fight, and suddenly you’re in one corner of the ring with a small crowd gathered around. You throw punches, and try not to get punched. If you do take a hit, the world fades a bit, goes black and white, and you (if you are like me) back away from your opponent for a minute while you try to get your bearings.

I won three rounds against my opponent, but it was exhausting. I hit him when I could, and kept moving toward him, trying to keep the pressure on. I found myself constantly pushing into the far corner of my Guardian, which the game helpfully draws as a red rectangle on the virtual ring’s floor. I needed to punch and punch again and not get punched myself. The audience was watching, my coach judging silently. I didn’t want to fuck this up. I didn’t want to get punched. If you want to get your heart rate up, or just be a little bit terrified for a short interval workout, play Thrill of the Fight.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Skin Is Naturally Anti-microbial

Often it feels like squid just evolved better than us mammals.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.

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How to Aerate Your Lawn (and Why You Should)

Photo: Paul Maguire (Shutterstock)

Depending on where you live—and your mentality about yard appearance—lawns can be hard work. If you don’t want to go the artificial route (which has its own environmental and physical challenges), there are other ways to make lighter work of lawn care. There are lots of little steps you can take to keep your lawn lush and green or to conserve water—and one way to help encourage lawn growth and lighten your landscaping load is to aerate the grass.

Here’s what aeration is, and why you should be poking holes in your yard.

What is aeration?

Grass can grow deep, healthy roots, but sometimes it needs a little help. Aeration is the process of punching holes in the lawn for water and nutrients to penetrate deeper into the soil and fortify the roots. When you have well-fed and hydrated roots, they grow deeper, letting the grass stay green longer—not to mention thicker and more sustainable. You won’t need to water or fertilize nearly as much as you normally would if a lawn is sufficiently aerated.

When to aerate your lawn

Landscaping company Briggs & Stratton explains that aeration helps with stunted grass growth, which is compacted soil: “Compacted soils have too many solid particles in a certain volume or space, which prevents proper circulation of air, water, and nutrients within the soil.” Heavy amounts of thatch (tightly intermingled layer of organic debris, such as living and dead stems, leaves, and roots, that accumulates where the grass stems meet the soil) can add to a compacted lawn.

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According to lawn care site Trees.com, once you have half an inch or more of thatch, it’s probably time remove it and aerate your yard. Aeration might also be beneficial when your lawn is quick to dry out, because water may not be penetrating deep enough. If you just bought a new construction home, the soil may be compacted due to construction, or if your lawn sustains heavy traffic, that can compress the soil and keep it from growing.

How to aerate your lawn

First, you need to prep the lawn. Remove the layer of thatch so the aeration tools can puncture through the soil properly. After removing thatch, True Green suggests watering your lawn a few days ahead of aeration. Watering one inch into the soil allows for easier penetration. Then choose the type of aeration you would like, be it spike or plug. Spike aeration is the act of poking holes in the yard, which can be done with aeration shoes, manual push or hand aerators, and electric aerators.

Plug aeration involves hollow spikes punching the soil and removing a chunk of the earth. This process creates a broader hole for optimal aeration. Whichever version you choose, make sure you cover the entire lawn in one direction. Home Depot suggests going over the yard again in a perpendicular motion. After this process is done, you should probably fertilize or add a layer of compost (but it’s not required). Be sure to water your lawn two or three times a week for the next few weeks to strengthen the roots.

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How to Finally Block Someone in Google Drive

Google Drive is finally rolling out its long-awaited “block user” option. While it was previously possible to remove users from a shared document or prevent them from downloading and sharing files they collaborate on, you can now block all interactions directly in Drive.

According to Google’s announcement post, blocking someone in Drive will:

• Block another user from sharing any content with you in the future. This can be a useful control if, for example, another user has a history of sending spam or abusive content.
• Remove all existing files and folders shared by another user. This is an easy way to get rid of all spam or abusive content shared by a specific user at one time.
• Remove another person’s access to your content, even if you’ve previously shared it with them.

Later in the post, Google confirms that blocking users in Drive also blocks them on other Google services and apps you use, like Gmail.

Google Drive’s new block option might seem like a small addition, but it’s a crucial feature that will help cut down on the app’s use as a cyberbullying tool and could help prevent the spread of malware and phishing scams through malicious Drive files.

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How to block someone in Google Drive

You can only block other Google Drive users from your desktop, but it works on any browser and the Progressive Web App. It’s not available in the new standalone desktop client nor the Android or iOS apps yet, but it’s easy to hop on your computer and stop someone from sharing files with you forever.

1. Open Google Drive in your browser or the Google Drive PWA.
2. Go to the “Shared with me” tab.
3. Right-click a shared file from the user you want to block, then select “Block [username].”
4. You can also add or remove users to your Google account’s blocked list. Blocked users can’t contact you on Drive, Gmail, or any other Google apps.

[GSMArena]

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How to Fake Like You Know What's Going on In the Olympics

Photo: Gorodenkoff (Shutterstock)

Did you know the summer Olympics include competitions in canoeing, BMX racing, handball, trampoline, and judo? Maybe you didn’t, but fans of those sports definitely do, and you might encounter those big brains and need to play along.

It’s hard to keep track of all the events and key players in a major event that happens once every four years—or, in this case, five years after the last one—but still, it’s the hot topic for the next few days, so you have to at least try to fake it. Here’s how to pretend like you know what’s going on in the Olympics—or any major sporting event you haven’t been following.

Become a morning television person

Millennials and Gen Z-ers are cable-cutters, which we already know, but there’s a benefit to being someone who watches morning television while the Olympics are going on: NBC’s Today is all over the coverage, since NBC has the American rights to it.

Because the Olympics are taking place in Japan and there’s a considerable time difference, the morning show has a duty to reveal all overnight happenings. Use this to your advantage. Morning TV is all about feel-good content, so you’ll get updates on medals and interviews with American athletes’ parents even if you only devote a few of your precious morning moments to this mission. Parental interviews are especially useful if you’re trying to acquire a bunch of biographical facts about an athlete you just heard of. By watching just a sliver of this coverage, you can figure out where they’re from, how they got into their sport, and what they like to do besides train and generally be a beast in the ring or on the court or… whatever.

Use Twitter to your advantage

During any big event, look to Twitter trends—that includes when a movie trailer drops, when the Video Music Awards are on, and, yes, when the Olympics are happening, where the trending list will tell you the basics of what you need to know to keep up with the conversation.

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When an American athlete does well or poorly, they trend. It’s really that easy. In most cases, some kind soul over at Twitter will write a little blurb about the trend, so you don’t even need to click on someone’s name to figure out what sport they play or why they’re generating so much buzz.

Sometimes, the athletes trend for reasons other than their performances. Zero in on these instances—like when Sha’Carri Richardson was prevented from competing this year because she tested positive for THC or when Simone Biles bowed out this week and cited mental health concerns—because you don’t need to know any gritty sports details to participate in cultural discourse. If you have opinions on weed or mental health, you can talk about this stuff with ease, even if you don’t know how fast Richardson runs or what gymnastics maneuvers Biles is best known for.

Educate yourself on the Olympics the old-fashioned way

If you’re on your way to a sports bar to meet your Olympics-obsessed friends right now and need immediate guidance, stick to Twitter trends. If you have some time to devote to learning about the event, though...read up.

There’s a reason people go nuts for this every four years: The Olympics are interesting and fun. The athletes can be lovable or intimidating, the stats can blow your mind, and it’s cool to learn about subjects you usually go almost half a decade without thinking about. In the four years you weren’t thinking about some obscure sport, a handful of athletes were thinking about it nonstop. They worked really hard for this, so you can learn a thing or two from all their effort.

Because the Olympics are such a big deal, media outlets prep coverage for months in advance and they call in their brightest minds to do it. Go to the homepage of any outlet you like and dig in.

“My advice would be to read the tweets or work of smart folks,” said Dakota Schmidt, a basketball writer from Wisconsin. Schmidt admits that he doesn’t know much about the Olympics himself, “minus the situation regarding Simone Biles and Team USA men’s basketball and women’s soccer struggling a bit.”

We’ll help you catch up to Schmidt and get started on your educational journey. Read analysis of Biles’ decision here, the men’s basketball team here, and the women’s soccer team here.

Stick to what you know

“Follow the old-fashioned method of saying that a particular team or athlete is overrated or the GOAT,” joked Schmidt. “If you do that enough, you might be featured on TV.”

He has a point, though you probably won’t make it onto the small screen: While there are plenty of experts on TV and in the media offering up well-crafted analysis, there are also quite a few people spouting off some pretty basic opinions. Punditry, whether delivered on air or on a bar stool, is essentially a time-filler in between the action. You don’t have to know every detail of every sport to kick back, watch some fast-moving balls, and take note when your country gets a new medal. You can just relax and enjoy the show, offering up standard critiques and insights like, “Wow, she’s fast.”

 

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Make This Cocktail in Memoriam of the Perfect Peach

Peaches are a great source of consternation for me. I am convinced that the last good peach I ate was consumed during my childhood, in 2001 or 2002, somewhere in the neighborhood of Kisela Voda in Skopje, Macedonia. Most likely, it was one I had picked from a neighbor’s tree on my way from one grandmother’s house to the other—it was sun-kissed, warm, and fuzzy. I’d have wiped the fuzz off on my shirt, having learned the hard way that the down would prickle if I didn’t. (So taken with the softness of my very first Peach-Off-the-Branch, I nuzzled it against my face only to be met with the burn of trichomes stinging my cheek.) I doubt I gave a second thought to the fruit’s looming endangered status as I bit into lush velvet skin, enjoying the symphony on my taste buds as I ambled on, juice running down my chin and hands.

The perfect peach was hardly a rare commodity in those days. Even though my family lived in the city capital, our neighborhood was more orchard than metropolitan, and in the summer, the dirt roads that passed for streets were often littered with stone fruits in various states of decay. It seemed to me the only people who actually bought peaches from the market were usually friends who lived in the tower blocks, or those tasked with bringing produce to the old pensioner Baba who was too crippled with arthritis to make the journey to Zelen Pazar herself.

I don’t know what happened to peaches. I don’t know if it was the arrival of the Western-Style Supermarket, catering to a newly capitalized (and capitalist) workforce in need of convenience. Maybe it was the succession of neighbors who took to chopping down their fruit trees, favoring grass plots in place of groves, flower bushes instead of food. My father spent years trying to make his own manicured emerald Gatsby Lawn happen, all at the cost of the sour cherries, apricots and wild roses that had survived decades in the front yard with little enterprise. Just like that, the beloved peaches of my childhood were nowhere to be found. Still, I kept hope alive.

Hope held until the summer of 2018, when I finally made it back to Skopje. I booked a room in the center of town, mere footsteps from the market. In a jet lag fugue, I went and bought peaches—from a few different vendors, just to be safe—and brought them to my grandmother’s barrack. Slivers of each batch were laid out to try, but these peaches weren’t it. They were pale, watery, and lackluster. “It rained too much this year,” my grandmother said with a shake of the head and a tsk, redirecting her attention to the Turkish soap opera on TV. Easier for her to move on—she’d had decades of good peaches.

From the orchards of Ontario, to the Obor market in Bucharest, to the organic aisle at Whole Foods, and back to Skopje once more. Nothing comes close to my memory in full saturation. The perfect peach, with its halo of fragrance, its lanugo coat, its just-blushed hue, is now an elusive and illusory sphere.

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The longing for those bygone peaches is often accentuated not so much by their absence, but by the facsimiles that arrive every season to take their place. At this point, I have given up on finding the perfect peach. I can’t handle another anemic and mealy letdown. Instead, when the urge comes, I create my own holograms. I know it’s not the real thing, but it still feels closer somehow.

This week’s cocktail is an ode to my memory of peaches. Seasonal peaches provide the base of this conjuring, and mezcal evokes the salinity of my tears (lol). The dashes of heat are optional, but necessary if you want that trichome-inspired sting. To make this homage, you will need:

• 3-5 peach slices (I use donut peaches, but use whatever is ripe and around)
• 3/4 ounce lemon juice (fresh)
• ¾ ounce honey syrup*
• 2 ounces mezcal (of the less smoky variety) or blanco tequila
• Optional: A couple of dashes of habanero bitters, or just plain tabasco works fine.

*To make honey syrup, simply add 1 part hot water to 3 parts honey and stir thoroughly.

Place peach slices and a couple dashes of hot sauce in a shaker and muddle to a near puree. Add the lemon, honey syrup, and mezcal. Fill the shaker with ice, and give it a good quick shake; a count to eight should suffice. Strain into a chilled glass over ice, the fresher and dryer the better. A single large ice cube is ideal but work with what you have.

(Please feel free to treat this as a template for you to riff on. Play around with different modifiers, and different spirits. Gin, for instance, almost always plays nice.)

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Why Back-to-School Shopping Is More Expensive This Year (and How to Spend Less)

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Welp, parents, it looks like you’ll need to leave even more room in your budget for school supplies this year: According to the National Retail Federation, families will spend an average of $849 on supplies in 2021, $59 more than last year, due to pandemic-related supply chain issues. Here’s a look at what you can expect and ways to save money on supplies.

Supply chain issues are inflating school supply costs

As Money.com reports, retailers like Walmart and Amazon are fighting for space on shipping containers, and in some cases, paying for air freight, which is much more expensive. For that reason, basic supplies like pencils and paper will likely be marked up, for a projected average cost of $849. (For college students, it’s $1,050.) There’s also a microchip shortage that is affecting laptops and other electronics, so you might see a bump in prices there, too—or at least fewer deals.

How to save money on school supplies

• Start shopping now: Beat the late August rush and look for deals now, while you have more time to shop. Most big retailers have newsletters or alerts you can sign up for, which will give you a heads-up on any discounts or coupons.
• Shop based on need only: A lot of supplies, like binders, rulers, or pens can be recycled year over year, so look around the home and take stock of what you already have, and then go shopping.
• Find supplies on reseller sites like Craigslist: People on these sites sell stuff like backpacks or pencil crayons for next to nothing. Just make sure that you meet these sellers somewhere semi-public, like in the lobby of their building, and that you only pay them once you’ve seen the items in-person.
• Check whether your school district offers free supplies: As Verywell Family points out, some states require school districts to provide free supplies to children, as needed. Reach out to your local school district to see if they can provide assistance.
• Contact local charities and other non-profits: If you simply don’t have the cash, contact the Salvation Army, local churches, or non-profit agencies near you, as they will be able to provide donated supplies. Here’s a list by state to help you get started.

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6 of the Weirdest Dog Behaviors (and Why They Do It)

Photo: By Gladskikh Tatiana (Shutterstock)

Many dogs have instinctual hangovers from past centuries, when they weren’t nearly as domesticated as they are today. One of those behaviors is the circling of sleeping areas, which is something that might baffle you or make you laugh.

According to Live Science, however, it’s an instinct left over from ancient dogs who lived in the wild and who had to make their own beds, as well as ward off predators like snakes and other animals that may have been lurking in unseen areas. Circling around an area would also to convey to other dogs that a territory had been claimed, Leslie Irvine, a sociologist at the University of Colorado explained. “Even though our dogs now sleep on cushions, the behavior endures,” she told the publication.

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