Pin to Quick Access

By default, File Explorer opens to Quick Access. This contains a whole bunch of stuff (folders) as well as stuff that has been "pinned" to Quick Access.  Any folder of interest can be "pinned to quick access" using a simple right click. A pinned folder can be easily "unpinned" using the self-same right click action.

ai.exe - what is it?

ai.exe is part of Microsoft Office (now known as Microsoft 365 apps) and handles local AI requirements for Office applications like Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. An example would be auto suggestions and predictive text in Word. It is not specifically tied to the operating system version.

Basic Microsoft Edge Shortcuts

Control-Tab    Enables you to scroll through open tabs

Control-Shift-Tab    Reverse scroll but is quite an unnatural set of keys to press

Control-J    View your downloads

Control-H    View your browsing history

OOXML versus OpenDocument

When configuring Microsoft Word on a new machine, you will be prompted if you wish to have Office Open XML (informally OOXML) or OpenDocument (extension .odt for text) as the default format.

Choose the former if you want to be more Microsoft-centric and use all features of Microsoft's ecosystem, choose the latter if you need interoperability with applications like LibreOffice.

OOXML started out as an XML format for Excel and later extended to other applications such as Word.

Dawn of the NPU

Stand down GPUs, this is the dawn of the NPUs. NPUs are neural processing units, which simulate the neural networks in nature. It is characterized by parallel processing, performing trillions of operations per second. It is more efficient (uses less power) for AI tasks than a CPU or GPU.

ipconfig's DNS features

ipconfig /displaydns

displays the contents of the DNS Resolver Cache (also known as the DNS cache). 

The DNS cache is a temporary DNS storage on your device holding already visited domain names.

Stuff you might see in there include some complicated microsoft.com related addresses under Record Name. Record type of 1 signifies an IP address (IPv4). Record type 2 (also known as a AAAA record) is an IPv6 address.  Record type 5 is an MX record (mail exchange). MX records show where mail for a domain should be routed to. Multiple MX records may exist for a single domain. Time to live is the time in seconds for the cache entry to expire.

These records represent the content of a DNS reply.

Black Point

What does "black point" mean in photo editing? This is a setting which controls the darkest parts of an image. Adjusting this can improve contrast and make colours stand out.

Microsoft malware protection Update Stub

mpsigstub.exe is a Microsoft executable related to Windows Security updates in Windows 10 or 11. It is visible in Task Manager and can often be seen sucking up resources.

Fluent Assertions

BDD

So-called "Safe" Kernel Programming with eBPF

eBPF technology has roots in the Linux kernel. It is software designed to run programs in a privileged context within an operating system kernel in a sandboxed environment.  This is done without touching kernel source code or loading kernel modules.  A more complete description can be found on ebpf.io.

The use of the acronym eBPF is historic. BPF stood for Berkeley Packet Filter and eBPF was the extended version. eBPF now does lots more than packet filtering so the appropriateness of this meaning is defunct. The original BPF, mostly obsolete, is sometimes now called cBPF (classic BPF) to distinguish it from the eBPF concept.

A more technical guide to the technology can be found here on the Cilium website. Cilium is a tool built on eBPF used in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and in EKS Anywhere on AWS (for on premise container management).

GitHub Desktop

GitHub Desktop enables you to work with projects hosted on GitHub. It is an open source application based on Electron (software framework to create desktop applications with web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript with a Chromium browser engine front end and a Node.js backend, used in Visual Studio Code). Roughly speaking it is a visual version of the CLI. 

Collaborative Email Authentication with DMARC

DMARC is an email authentication policy covered by RFC7489.

It stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance" and builds on SPF and DKIM protocols.  SPF and DKIM were invented for email authentication - the problem of validating whether this email that claims to come Jack really came from Jack. More details on why DKIM was needed and the threats it is intended to protect from are detailed in RFC4686. DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail.

DMARC improves on DKIM and other protocols in the way described emphasising collaboration between senders and receivers.

Some documents may describe DMARC as a replacement for ADSP. ADSP is an optional extension of DKIM and stands for Author Domain Signing Practices where a domain can publish the signing practices it utilizes when relaying mail on behalf of authors. It did not have much adoption.

SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol)

You may have encountered SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol) in the context of the Services tab in Task Manager in the form of SSDPSRV (SSDP Discovery Service). 

It is a HTTPU (HTTP UDP) text based protocol i.e. relies on UDP underneath.

The SSDP protocol can discover Plug and Play devices, with uPnP (Universal Plug and Play).

The SSDP protocol has been found to be used in DDoS attacks also known as SSDP Reflection Attack with Amplification.

Vulnerabilities also arise from widespread proliferation of certain open source libraries e.g. pupnp.

The Helm Package Manager for Kubernetes

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. It was developed at Deis in 2015 and later acquired by Microsoft.