1Password, a leader in enterprise password management, recently launched Secrets Automation, an easy-to-use way to secure, manage and orchestrate the rapidly expanding infrastructure secrets required in a modern enterprise. Secrets such as corporate credentials, API tokens, keys and certificates can number in the hundreds for midsize businesses and many thousands for enterprises. This scale and complexity lead to huge security risks. Besides the new product launch, 1Password also completed the acquisition of SecretHub, a secrets management company that protects nearly 5 million enterprise secrets a month. The SecretHub team and CEO Marc Mackenbach will join 1Password immediately, adding expertise and engineers to speed up the 1Password Secrets Automation roadmap. 1Password Secrets Automation launches with a host of partnerships and integrations that will make it easy for developers and DevOps teams to integrate with the mission-critical tools and libraries they already use.  

1Password is the first line of defense for over 80,000 businesses worldwide protecting their employees, customers and intellectual property by securing passwords, financial details and other sensitive information. Today's launch and SecretHub acquisition signal a major expansion of 1Password, helping enterprises secure their infrastructure and machine-to-machine secrets alongside their human passwords. 

"Companies need to protect their infrastructure secrets as much as their employees' passwords," said Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password. "With 1Password and Secrets Automation, there is a single source of truth to secure, manage, and orchestrate all of your business secrets. We are the first company to bring both human and machine secrets together in a significant and easy-to-use way." 

Secrets Security Not Keeping Pace. With the massive expansion of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, infrastructure secrets are multiplying as never before, scattered across multiple services and cloud providers. Companies often try to protect these secrets through a combination of home-grown solutions and awkward hacks. Human error within IT and developer organizations happens all the time and is compounded by risky shortcuts taken in the name of speed and productivity. 

Leaked secrets can have widespread ramifications; when an engineer accidentally placed a secret key into source code at Uber, the names, driver's licenses, and other private information of 57 million users were stolen. A recent GitGuardian report detected over 2 million infrastructure secrets exposed on code sharing platforms, growing 20% over the previous year. This underscores the massive and growing issue of properly managing secrets and protecting sensitive customer data. 

1Password Secrets Automation was developed to address directly these challenges. Key features include:

• The security of 1Password--store credentials, tokens and other secrets fully encrypted, using the same security that made 1Password the No. 1 enterprise password manager. 
• A single source of truth for all your secrets--gain complete visibility and auditability in a way that you can't when secrets are spread across multiple services. 
• Granular access control--define which people and services have access and what level of access they are granted. 
• Ease of use--built on 1Password's intuitive user interface, Secrets Automation delivers administrative simplicity, providing for good secrets hygiene. 
• Integration with your existing tools--Secrets Automation integrates with HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, Kubernetes and Ansible, with more integrations on the way. You'll also find ready-to-use client libraries in Go, Node and Python.

1Password and GitHub are also announcing a partnership: "We're partnering with 1Password because their cross-platform solution will make life easier for developers and security teams alike," said Dana Lawson, VP of partner engineering and development at GitHub, the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. "With the upcoming GitHub and 1Password Secrets Automation integration, teams can automate fully all of their infrastructure secrets, with full peace of mind that they are safe and secure."

A Roadmap Driven by Customer Demand. Kira Systems, an AI-based contract review and analysis software company, was one of many customers that requested 1Password expand its offering to solve their secrets management problems. 
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"We've been a 1Password customer for six years and have long wanted to centralize our secrets management," said Joey Coleman, Kira Fellow and director, systems with Kira Systems. "We store terabytes of sensitive data across many deployments, so it is critical for us to have a secure and efficient way of managing the credentials that give access to that data. Secrets Automation delivers an extra level of security while also removing the manual labor required to manage the volume of passwords and credentials."

Engineers from Yale University have developed a wearable device that can help individuals assess whether they have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The cheap device can clip onto a person’s clothes and capture aerosolized viral particles in the surrounding environment.

From rapid tests to vaccines, many extraordinary innovations have helped us navigate this global pandemic. While we have several ways to determine whether a person has been infected with SARS-CoV-2, we still can only guess when and how someone has been exposed to the virus.

This innovation from a team of Yale University researchers is hoping to fill that surveillance gap. Called the Fresh Air Clip, the device is cheap, designed to attach to a person’s collar and capture aerosolized viral particles around a person’s mouth and nose.

The clip captures viral particles on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surface. At the end of a day, or several days, a wearer removes the clip and sends it to a lab, which uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis to determine the presence of SARS-CoV-2.

A new study is reporting on several tests of the Fresh Air Clip establishing it can effectively capture airborne viral particles. One experiment involved supplying the clips to several volunteers who wore the monitors for up to five days. Of the 62 monitors deployed, five returned positive results, showing exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

“Of the positive Fresh Air Clips, four were worn by restaurant servers and one was worn by a homeless shelter staff person,” the study shows. “Notably, two positive samples collected in restaurants with indoor dining were found to have high viral load when compared to the other samples (>100 copies per clip), suggestive of close contact with one or more infected individuals.”

As well as establishing the wearable monitor as being able to capture detectable levels of viral particles, the researchers note the device is sensitive enough to catch exposure events at sub infectious doses. This suggests the volume of viral particles picked up by the monitor allows for the quantification of environmental exposure to the virus. This is important, as it means the device does not simply offer an indication of viral exposure but a measure of the level of exposure.

Krystal Pollitt, a researcher working on the device, says one interesting potential use for the device could be to test the effectiveness of ventilation settings in COVID positive patient hospital rooms. Speaking to Yale News recently, Pollitt said her team found airborne traces of SARS-CoV-2 in hospital rooms that were thought to be well ventilated.

“We found this to be really interesting because we know that one of the infection control measures that is being highly recommended is enhanced ventilation,” said Pollitt. “Within the hospital network we had very high air change rates. Despite having those high air change rates, we could still detect airborne levels across the room.”

In its current form, the Fresh Air Clip can screen indoor environments and establish whether they are high-risk areas for exposure. Pollitt also said the wearable can also be used to identify indoor exposure events days before positive cases appear.

“The Fresh Air Clip can be useful for early identification of exposure events and allow for rapid action to be taken,” Pollitt said. “Exposed individuals can get tested or quarantine to prevent potential community transmission.”

The next big step for the device will be to develop ways for the monitor to offer real-time notification of viral exposure, in much the same way a radiation strip can immediately notify a wearer they are exposed to gamma or x-rays. Pollitt says she is interested in further developing the device with real-time exposure notifications.
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“It’s key to report back results quick,” Pollitt says. “We are keen to incorporate techniques for real-time SARS-CoV-2 detection.”
The new study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

A ruling at the end of December by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has backed up an April 2020 decision by the FCC to open up 1,200MHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use. Unlicensed means anyone can use it, if they do so responsibly, covering uses like your future Wi-Fi 6E home network.

While Wi-Fi 6 connections make more reliable and efficient use of the same spectrum, that’s been in use for the last couple of decades, especially when multiple devices are connected, Wi-Fi 6E routers will work at 2.4GHz and 5GHz plus the new 6GHz band. That has enough room for up to seven maximum capacity Wi-Fi streams to broadcast in the same area at once without interfering with each other or using any existing spectrum. 

Beyond that, there’s already work on a future standard, known as IEEE 802.11be or Wi-Fi 7. That could further optimize the use of the new band with even larger 320MHz channels, 46 Gbps maximum transfer rates, and more, but it’s not scheduled to be complete until 2024 (pdf).

In the immediate future, while 6GHz Wi-Fi has the same theoretical top speed as 5GHz Wi-Fi, the extra space means that instead of getting so much interference from other devices and nearby networks, you’ll have a faster, more consistent connection. Last year a representative for the Wi-Fi Alliance said that this should enable 1–2 Gbps connections over Wi-Fi, similar to what you see now with mmWave 5G.
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AT&T argued against the FCC’s plan, saying the commission failed to identify and address possible interference with “tens of thousands of microwave links critical to maintaining network infrastructure,” talking about the wireless tech that keeps many cell sites connected to the wider internet. In one filing, AT&T said, “The 6GHz FS [fixed service] band is the only band suitable for long distance transmission, routinely supporting paths between 10-50 miles and, in cases, even longer distances.” Mobile carriers preferred a plan where the FCC would auction off a chunk of the 6GHz bandwidth for use solely by their 5G networks. The FCC said that low-power indoor use protects licensed 6GHz tech like AT&T’s microwave links and TV broadcasts from interference, while “standard power” devices used indoors and outdoors could include automated frequency control to prevent interference.

Besides being one of the most powerful computers in the world and currently ranked 105 on the Top500 list, France's Jean Zay supercomputer is now the first HPC to have a photonic coprocessor.

Unlike traditional processors which use electric current, LightOn’s photonic coprocessor transmits and processes information using light. The company's photonics coprocessor was added to the Jean Zay supercomputer under a pilot program and represents not only a technological breakthrough but also a first for the industry.

So far, LightOn’s technology has successfully been used by a community of researchers since 2018. 

Now though, its photonic coprocessor will be available to select users of the Jean Zay research community over the next few months who will use the device to conduct research on machine learning foundations, differential privacy, satellite imaging analysis and natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

LightOn Photonic Co-processor. LightOn's Optical Processing Unit (OPU) uses photonics to speed up randomized algorithms at a very large scale. However, it also works in tandem with standard silicon CPUs and Nvidia's A100 GPU technology.

The company's Aurora 2 OPU powers its Appliance integrated computing unit which is built i so that it can be quickly and easily integrated in data centers or in this case, a supercomputer. According to LightOn, its Appliance can reach a peak performance of 1.5 PetaOPS or 1.5 X 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second and can deliver performance that is 8 to 40 times higher than GPU-only acceleration, like normal mainframes.

CEO and co-founder of LightOn, Igor Carror provided further insight into the pilot program that saw its Appliance integrated into the Jean Zay supercomputer in a press release, saying:

“This pilot program integrating a new computing technology within one of the world’s Supercomputer would not have been possible without the particular commitment of visionary agencies such as GENCI and IDRIS/CNRS. Together with the emergence of Quantum Computing, this world premiere strengthens our view that the next step after exascale super-computing will be about hybrid computing.”

Several industry pundits saw the tall-screen trend coming—but they didn't know things would get this tall. PC monitors that are taller than they are wide have enjoyed a resurgence last year, as they provide more vertical space for taking in long documents, articles, spreadsheets, and social media and news feeds. But this 420×1920 monitor takes the tall-screen thing to new heights.

As spotted by Gizmodo, the screen comes from Elsonic, a sub-brand of Japanese company Nojima, which started off with LED bulbs but now makes TVs and other tech products. The product page for the tall monitor specifically highlights web browsing, Twitter, and browser games as use cases. 

The display is only 8.8 inches, so it would best serve as a portable, secondary or tertiary monitor. It charges via USB-C but can't output video through the port. The monitor relies on mini HDMI for its video signal. That gives it a little versatility in the sense that it can connect to things lacking USB-C. But with more PCs ditching HDMI, and the monitor already having a USB-C port right there, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Built like a New York City skyscraper, the EK-MD088 takes up minimal surface space. Its base is approximately 3.07×0.83 inches (78×21 mm), and it towers 9.76 inches (248 mm) into the sky. The display should make an easy portable monitor (assuming you can find a case to accommodate its dimensions), as it only weighs about 0.43 pounds (198 g). 

A 420×1920 resolution gives the TFT panel an aspect ratio of 7:32. A picture wasn't provided, but the stand is supposed to allow for landscape mode, too.

Elsonic's listing doesn't get into color capabilities but says the screen has a standard refresh rate of 60 Hz and a typical brightness of 300 nits. The screen has two buttons on the side that let you pick between six brightness settings.
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Currently, the monitor is only available in Japan. So if you’re really craving this type of unit, you may have to act as an importer to get it. It's expected to release in "early February," the product page says, for 14,800 yen, which is about $128.21.