Davemichels

Leading developer and integrator of cloud contact centre solutions, Foehn, recently received the award for “EMEA Cloud Partner of the Year” from Genesys, a global leader in omni-channel contact centre environments. The award was presented at the Genesys G-Summit Europe on the 10^th of September 2019.

The accolade from Genesys is the third that Foehn has received in consecutive years, following PureCloud Partner of the Year in 2018 and 2017. The new award highlights Foehn’s skills in PureCloud implementations via the Genesys Cloud and acknowledges customer wins with multi-national deployments.

The sales director for Foehn, Julian Barrow, spoke as part of the panel discussion for the Partner Day conference for Genesys, showcasing the achievements of the Foehn brand, and explaining how the company’s approach to marketing, sales and customer experience in a self-sufficient manner has helped to drive the business forward.

A Fantastic Achievement for Foehn

Julian Barrow

When receiving the award from Genesys, Julian Barrow thanked the Foehn team and the company’s clients for their commitment to the PureCloud offering and noted that Foehn had had a fantastic three years building their proposition with PureCloud through Genesys Cloud.

The latest Genesys award follows a year of fantastic growth and success within Foehn’s two decades in the communications space, including the ITSPA Best VoIP software award for 2018 for the Voxivo cloud collaboration and phone system. Additionally, this year, Foehn launched its Voxivo CX cloud contact centre. Other exciting updates over the last year have included the award of ISO/IEC 27001, Cyber Essentials accreditation, and G-Cloud listing on the Government’s digital marketplace for six years in a row.

CTO of Foehn, James Passingham, said that the company is exceptionally proud to be recognised as Genesys’ EMEA partner of the year, building on the wins that the company has had over the past two years as PureCloud partner of the year. The award this year recognises the skills that Foehn has built and the challenges that the company has overcome as it continues to grow on an international scale.

Growth in partnership

John Bell

In the meantime, Genesys continues to dominate the contact centre market with solutions offered to more than 11,000 businesses across 100 countries. Commenting on Foehn’s latest success, the Channel and Alliance Director for Genesys, John Bell, said that over the three-year partnership, Foehn has consistently delivered excellent outcomes.

Bell emphasised that that Foehn has achieved fantastic results in deploying the PureCloud solution via Genesys Cloud, and the company’s investment into resources across professional services, tech support, marketing and sales has helped them to win new customers in EMEA and the UK.

Is there a backlash toward the technology industry in the culture? I tend to think so, having written about its various twists and turns most weekdays for the past couple years now. But sometimes an obsession with a beat can lead to myopia, and so it can be useful to check in with your assumptions from time to time to see whether they still hold up.

Such an occasion presented itself over the weekend, when the New York Times published an op-ed by Rob Walker with the provocative title “There is no tech backlash.” Walker argues that whatever jaded media types and politicians might be saying about the big tech platforms, consumers remain enamored of them, and the companies’ financial performance has been superb. He writes:

According to its...

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• WeWork's tumultuous path towards IPO has been casting a shadow on other flexible office providers.
• The chief executive officer of Knotel, which recently raised $400 million, spoke to Business Insider about the differences between WeWork's business model and managing offices for bigger companies. 
• For more stories about WeWork, click here.

The flexible office space was fueled by dollars chasing WeWork's success. But not every company in the space wants to emulate WeWork now, particularly as its plans to go public have soured. 

WeWork's troubles could hurt rivals, including Knotel, the company's co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Amol Sarva told Business Insider in an interview last week. 

"It's hard when you have to walk over a fallen giant," he said. 

Read more: Now WeWork wants to be a manufacturer. The coworking company is opening a 200,000-square-foot New Jersey plant to make its signature aluminum and glass walls.

Money-losing WeWork had been weighing a valuation of as little as $10 billion in a potential public offering, according to reports, significantly lower than the $47 billion it had commanded in its last round of fundraising. And even after all that, it decided this week to delay its IPO because of weak investor demand. 

That being said, Knotel considers itself to be very different than its larger rival because it only works with big companies like Microsoft and Starbucks. WeWork is trying to court Fortune 500 clients which provide a more reliable revenue stream, but a majority (60%) of its customers are small companies, startups, and individuals looking for communal office space and amenities like networking and coffee. 

The idea of coworking — meaning the term that WeWork helped popularize — is "over," Sarva said. "We're almost at the point where people say 'flex."

In contrast to coworking's communal space model, flexible office providers manage office space for companies that can be outfitted more quickly and cheaply than a traditional lease. It's also less of a commitment for customers: traditional leases run 10-15 years, whereas flexible office providers set agreements in months or a few years. Workers only share the space with their colleagues, and companies can save on long-term costs by outsourcing office management – managing office audiovisual equipment and restocking supplies, for example – to their flexible office provider. 

"Knotel's business isn't about the cool couch and keg - those are commodities, " he added, as another knock to WeWork's culture. 

Like Sarva, CEOs of other flexible space providers are distancing themselves from WeWork's model. Ryan Simonetti, the CEO of event and flex-space startup Convene, talked to Business Insider recently about the difficulty of comparing flex-office companies. 

"The reality is that if you go under the hood of each of the companies, I think all of us have a different strategy," Simonetti said.

Read more: WeWork lays out its path to profitability — and most of its options involve slowing its breakneck growth

Both Convene and Knotel have brought in significant funding. The former raised $152 million last July at a $500 million valuation. 

In August, Knotel completed a $400 million round of fundraising led by Wafra, the investment arm of Kuwait, as well as Japan's Mori Trust, Itochu Corp. and Mercuria Investment Co. It's now valued at more than $1 billion, according to the company. 

Founded in 2016, Knotel has more than 4 million feet across 200 locations in cities, including New York San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Paris, and Berlin. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How Area 51 became the center of alien conspiracy theories

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is a giant place of memory.

For one, there’s the gravestones, mausoleums, statues, and stone structures. It’s hard to describe the scale of it. They rise up, respectfully spaced out, on nearly every patch of ground for miles, up and down hills, under trees, unfurling everywhere for 478 acres.

Then there’s the archives. Not every grave at Green-Wood gets an intentional visitor, like a descendent, or a history-lover seeking out a specific name and story. But every grave, every lot, and every person is meticulously documented, and thereby remembered by dozens of paid archivists and volunteers. Everyone buried in Green-Wood has the privilege of being considered a part of capital-H History. If Green-Wood is a city, then the archives are a census for everyone lucky enough to be a resident.

On a rainy day in early September, Green-Wood archivist Tony Cucchiara gave me a tour of the massive Green-Wood archival system, accounting for all 570,000 burials. Green-Wood has millions of pages of burial orders, lot information, and family information spread across three buildings.

Cucchiara explained the information in these files is useful to historians studying disease, to genealogists, and to New York history generally. These records are also useful to descendants of the deceased, to people who want to learn about their families and look for connection.

However, climate change poses long-term and short-term threats to archives around the country. In a worst case scenario, climate change could mean that irreplaceable records documenting the course of human history are lost forever.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Most of the island lost power, and people off the island were unable to get in touch with their families and friends. People on the island struggled to get access to food and water. About 3,000 people died both in the immediate violence of the storm and in the aftermath.

The hurricane’s destruction didn’t stop with its assault on human life and livelihood. It also assaulted Puerto Rican culture. Several archives and cultural institutions on the island—including The Archivo General, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña main offices, the National Gallery, University of Puerto Rico (UPR), the Museum of the Americas, the National Guard Museum, La Casa del Libro, and the Castillo San Cristóbal—were damaged from the storm. Irreplaceable materials were lost.

Art museums, housing delicate paper artifacts, faced a plague of mold and mildew as generators were appropriately allocated to the island's most vulnerable people. As reported by the New York Times, the museum curator had a maintenance crew drill massive holes into the museum walls in order to get some degree of ventilation. The Museum of Puerto Rican Art's sculpture garden lost 90 percent of its collection. Roofs were blown off buildings. Windows were shattered.

Natural disasters have destroyed cultural artifacts before. Earthquakes, for instance, have damaged or destroyed temples and buildings in China, Greece, Puerto Rico, and Japan. However, climate change-driven disasters has made the safety of cultural artifacts into an urgent issue. In the past few years, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Harvey, and Hurricane Irma have damaged dozens of museums and cultural centers in New York City, Houston, Florida, and the Caribbean. This isn’t just bad luck. Because of climate change, hurricanes are happening more frequently. And since human culture is disportionately centered on coastlines, cultural repositories are at risk.

We’re not just in the midst of a climate crisis. We’re in the midst of a cultural reckoning. Politicians are debating how or if we should adapt for the future, with responses ranging from calls for a sweeping Green New Deal, to calls for “realistic,” lightweight regulation on polluting titans, to outright climate denial. Meanwhile, something else is going on. Archivists and conservators are taking stock of human culture. They’re asking, what do we have, and what could we lose in the next 100 years? Is there any way to save what’s at risk?

This problem prompted archivists Eira Tansey, Ben Goldman, and Whitney Ray to complete the Repository Data Project, a growing database that currently catalogs more than 25,000 archives in the United States, including major university libraries, small museums, corporate archives, and art facilities.

The reason for making this database, Tansey told Motherboard, is to figure out which facilities are at risk of sea level rise and worsened storm surges over the next 100 years. If we know what’s at risk, theoretically, we can plan and prepare for the worst. Or alternatively, we can at least know which facilities need help when the next disaster strikes.

The study brought up an uncomfortable question. What happens if we abandon culturally rich areas? What will happen to the archives in these areas, to the history stored in them?

“As there will be inevitable migration and abandonment of certain areas, the only traces that will be left of some places is in the archives,” Tansey said. “And so, we have a large amount of responsibility for what it looks like to do our work in the context of climate change.”

But of course, the Repository Data Project isn’t just about archivists taking cultural stock. The project, at its core, forces us to ask difficult questions. In a changing world, one where climate change will change the way coastlines look and likely the way governments function in upcoming decades, who and what will we choose to remember?

Some archivists are organizing teach-ins for people to learn about how to protect their histories. Archivists are taking millions of records, and one by one, putting them in folders and vaults designed to withstand the worst conditions a warming world will bring. Archivists are starting to realize that we need to adapt to a changing world, because our cultural memory is at stake.

Why Do We Archive?

The creation of records is a fundamentally political act.

We archive music recordings and films. We archive flyers, pamphlets, books, newspapers, and images from social movements like the civil rights movement, feminist activism, LGBTQ+ organizing, and the labor movement. Records have the opportunity to represent the lives, stories, and histories of historically marginalized communities not protected by their governments or society at large.

“Even if you never step foot in an archive, you benefit from archives,” Tansey said. “Because places like the National Archives hold tons of records that document people's rights and their own histories.”

We also produce birth records, photographs, newspapers, books, letters, advertisements, registrations, lists, memorandums, and death records. But we don’t do this just for the hell of it. The U.S. has a long history of slavery and colonialism, and these organizations rely upon bureaucracy and paper-pushing.

Slave logs were used to dehumanize enslaved people and convert them from people to cargo. Census records, among other things, were used to help the U.S. government track down Japanese-Americans and place them in internment camps.

So what do we communicate when we preserve records? Sometimes, the knowledge in records is useful because the governments and corporations will need those records in the future. Other times, we say that the knowledge in those records could be useful in the future. We say that the communities represented in those records matter and have a place in our collective memory.

Image: Green-Wood Cemetery archives. Taken by Caroline Haskins.

The world isn't going to blow to smithereens in 11 years. (This viral conclusion from a recent climate change report is just factually wrong.) But the UN’s committee of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in October that we will need to fundamentally and restructure our governments and global economic system if we want to avoid an absolute worst-case warming scenario.

As climate change warms the Earth, it also warms our oceans. Since warm oceans power storm systems like hurricanes and typhoons, climate change has brought more frequent hurricanes, and hurricanes that are more severe on average. Now consider the fact that storms have been getting slower, on average, for the past 70 years. The longer that a storm is centered on an area, the more time the storm has to incur wind and flooding damage. Basically, worse storms are happening more often.

Human culture is often stored in at-risk areas. According to the UN, 40 percent of the world's population lives within 60 miles of a coastline, and about 10 percent of the world's population lives in coastal areas that are less than 10 meters above sea level. Additionally, out of all cities with populations over five million, two thirds of them in coastal areas are at risk of inundation due to sea level rise.

When climate change-fueled storms damage archive buildings, wind, water, and abrupt humidity can quickly damage invaluable records beyond repair. Even the most well-funded facilities are at risk of storm-driven damage, especially if they’re in coastal areas.

Regional and local facilities, which tend to have less robust funding than federally funded facilities or major research institutions, are at an even higher risk. Hurricane Katrina, damaged countless local records for people living along the Gulf Coast. “Property deeds, birth certificates, and personal papers, as well as records documenting rights and entitlements, such as Social Security and veterans' benefits" were damaged on a massive scale. Cultural artifacts, botanic gardens, museums, and historic locations throughout the Gulf Coast were also damaged.

Archives and cultural centers face long-term risks because of climate change, completely independent of extreme events like hurricanes. Climate change is making the world hotter and more humid, on average, and heat and humidity are precisely the conditions that put delicate paper documents and art at risk.

Responding and adapting to climate change forces us to ask what we owe to each other. We have to confront which communities we are willing to protect, whether we are willing to make reparations for past injustices, and whether we have the potential to build a better world than the one that got us into this mess. How can we build a better world if we don’t have the history of the world we come from?

The Repository Data Project

The “US Archival Repository Location Data” project—“Repo data” project, for short—lives on the website of the Open Science Foundation, where academics and researchers can easily share their findings publicly. According to a state summary sheet, the Repo data project has documented the existence of 25,771 archives at 18,614 addresses. The data is also posted on GitHub.

Eira Tansey, one of the two principal investigators of the Repo Data project alongside Ben Goldman, said the project began with a grant from the Society of American Archivists, and their goal was simple: document the existence of as many archives in the U.S. as possible. Ironically, although the job of professional archivists is to catalog and store data, there was no comprehensive list or data set of all U.S. archives until this project.

“It’s not like hospitals—we know every hospital in the United States because they’re highly regulated,” Tansey said. “No such thing exists for archives.”

Tansey and Goldman hired then-graduate student Whitney Ray in 2017 to help with the project. The team reached out to about 150 regional archive associations and asked them to send any records they had listing archives in their field. Tansey said that this work collectively took from mid-2017 through the early months of 2019.

A large part of the Repo Data project was determining what exactly counts as an archive.

“There are a lot of people where when they think of archives, they think, ‘OK, it’s a very protective space where you go and you put on white gloves, and you have to be a historian that has a good reason to go through these things,’” Tansey told Motherboard. “But if we think of archival records as being things that document people’s daily lives, then maybe they exist in places like public libraries, or small town halls, or places that we don’t necessarily think of as archives.”

Tansey and Goldman also collaborated with Penn State University geographer Tara Mazurczyk and PSU librarian Nathan Piekielek to assess how these archives would be impacted by climate change. Their paper, which was published in the journal Climate Risk Management in 2018, found that climate change posts a severe risk to archives.

According to the study, 98.8 percent of archives are likely to be affected by at least one climate risk factor, such as sea level rise, storm surge, flooding, increased rain, warmer temperatures, or humidity. The researchers assessed conditions in a “business as usual” scenario, assuming that we collectively do little to nothing to mitigate climate change. The finer details of the findings were grim:

• 18 coastal locations would be completely flooded with a 1.8-meter rise in sea level.
• 84 coastal locations would go underwater with a direct hit from a category 4 storm.
• 92 coastal locations could warm 10 degrees Fahrenheit or more by 2100
• 93 coastal locations could get an additional 10 inches of rain each year by 2100, compared to today.

Image: Slide from presentation made by Tansey and Goldman showing six feet of sea level rise, a possible level of change in about a century that assumes a “business as usual” nonresponse to climate change, overlain with known archive locations in Louisiana.

“There are going to be some places where it won’t be possible to live anymore—or, if people do live in them, then we will have a very different relationship with what it looks like,” Tansey said. “In some places, the only documentary traces left will be in archives.”

This isn’t a far-off concern. As the Repo Data Project team was cataloging U.S. archives, Hurricane Irma struck Florida and the Caribbean. Fletcher Durant, head of conservation and preservation at the University of Florida, asked the team for its list of archives in Florida. Durant was volunteering for the American Institute for Conservation’s National Heritage Responders, which gives archives resources in the wake of disasters like hurricanes.

“We actually called over 500 organizations in the state of Florida,” Durant said. “If they had collections that were damaged and needed conservation assistance, of if they wanted assistance working through the FEMA paperwork, we could put them in touch with FEMA folks that might help them.”

Durant said that of the 500 archives they contacted, thankfully, only 18 of them reported any damage to their collection. They reported leaking roofs, broken windows, and fallen trees, which compromised the climatic conditions inside the facilities and put paper materials at risk of water damage.

Since Irma, Florida has been hit by three tropical storms and two hurricanes, Michael and Dorian. This is going to keep happening. Archives in Florida, and coastal regions generally, will get wetter, more battered, and more humid. It’s not a matter of whether records are going to get lost. It’s a matter of which records will get lost, and whether we know they’ve been lost.

Image: Slide from presentation made by Tansey and Goldman showing six feet of sea level rise, a possible level of change in about a century that assumes a “business as usual” nonresponse to climate change, overlain with known archive locations in Florida.

Intuitively, one might think that a solution to mitigating the risks that climate change poses to archives is simple: just digitize the archives. But digital archives face a host of threats. Accidental server crashes have temporarily wiped data stored in digital archives, authoritarian regimes have wiped digital archives on a whim. And theoretically, water damage could damage sensitive servers that store digital records.

Archivists also have to maintain the digital archive in addition to maintaining the physical archive. Digital archives aren’t a replacement for physical documents, photos, or paintings. They’re just an additional way of storing them.

Tansey argues that digitization is one strategy, but it’s not a complete solution. Plainly, she said, it’s expensive to scan, upload, and describe records so that they’re searchable in catalogs. Digital archives also have to be maintained, just like physical archives. What happens if the community relevant to an archive is forced to relocate?

“Let’s say you have a city that effectively, over the next 100 years, becomes abandoned, Tansey said. “There’s no more tax base. Who is now responsible for maintaining the records of that city that no longer exists? Even if you can digitize them, someone still has to pay for domain registration. Someone still has to pay the storage costs of keeping those records as accessible files. And PDFs are great now, but what’s the file format going to be 100 years from now?”

A Day at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery Archives

Green-Wood Cemetery buried its first person in 1840. About 47,000 people lived in Brooklyn at the time. Now, Green-Wood is populated by about half-a-million, all dead. The people who work there eagerly refer to the dead as the cemetery’s “permanent residents.”

Image: Tony Cucchiara opens a chronology book at the Green-Wood Cemetery archives. Taken by Caroline Haskins.

The job of Green-Wood Cemetery archivist Cucchiara is to work with on-staff archivists and volunteers to accomplish three things: minimize the speed at which materials deteriorate, make those materials accessible to researchers, and eventually, at some point in the future, digitize those records and make them all public.

He also oversees a group of volunteers who, for the past 10 years, has been working on “rehousing” documents from regular paper folders to alkaline, acid-free folders.

“We have a very intrepid group of volunteers that come in on Sundays about every six weeks, and they work for five to six hours straight,” Cucchiara said. “20 to 25 people, opening folding and unfolding and flattening these materials. It takes a lot of effort to do this. This is all hand work, that’s the only way we can do it.”

Cucchiara said the volunteers are generally graduate students and retirees. “They’re actuaries, they’re attorneys, they’re chemists, they’re teachers, who in their retirement, have a great interest in and love of history,” he said.

The work of these volunteers is dramatically extending the lifetime of these documents. Common materials can often destroy sensitive documents. For instance, regular folders and rubber bands are often acidic. When acid migrates from paper to paper, the documents deteriorate quickly. Metal paper clips can also rust on paper sheets, and scotch tape is impossible to remove without damaging the document.

So lot by lot, cabinet by cabinet, floor to ceiling, these workers have rehoused millions of documents from acidic danger to alkaline safety. There’s two main “groups” of archival records at Green-Wood: the lot burial orders, and the chronology books.

Image: Chronology book at the Green-Wood Cemetery archives. This shows the very first burials at the site.

Burial orders pertain to what’s in a “lot,” or a patch of grass that could house dozens to thousands of graves. These lots are either private (and expensive) or public (and more densely packed). The lot burial orders contain highly specific information about each person in a burial spot, like cause of death, when they died, age, whether they were married or single, and even the addresses of family members, businesses with which they were associated. If it’s a private lot, which were expensive even at the turn of the century, there might even be even drawings and diagrams of the lot in question.

The chronology books, meanwhile, consist of 60 volumes of extra large pizza box-sized books documenting the burial of every single person from 1840 to 1937. These books also include individual information like place of birth and cause of death.

This information is valuable, but maintaining it all is incredibly expensive. Sets of acid-free document cases can cost hundreds of dollars. 100-packs of alkaline folders cost about $30. Plastic paper clips cost more than metal paper clips. Green-Wood also uses 13 mobile storage “carriages.” These costs add up quickly when you’re dealing with millions of pages of records. Eventually digitizing the records and making them searchable online, Cucchiara said, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He emphasized that digitization won’t occur until far into the future.

Probably the least expensive way that Green-Wood protects its documents is through constant monitoring the temperature and humidity in the places the archives are stored. Once a week, Cucchiara said, he retrieves the monitors and uploads the information to a database, which tracks changes in the facilities over time. Cucchiara said that both the database and the monitors are inexpensive.

The charts are remarkably consistent. The only blips in temperature were in the middle of the winter. Cucchiara explained that the archivers would turn up the temperature a few degrees so they could work with the documents comfortably.

Image: Climate monitoring device at the Green-Wood Cemetery archives.

Image: Climate monitoring database used by Green-Wood Cemetery archivers.

Green-Wood Cemetery in a Changing Climate

There’s a divide within Green-Wood. On one hand, there’s the heavy stones above ground and the metal caskets below ground. They’re built to withstand rain, wind, heat, snow, flooding, and ice. These are supposed to be durable monuments to memory. And on the other hand, there’s the paper archives. Millions of volumes of incredibly delicate paper records, stored in expensive alkaline folders in climate-controlled faults, and handled delicately. These are the fragile monuments to memory.

But it was the outdoor structures, the durable monuments to memory, that were damaged during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Cucchiara said that the archives, which would have become moldy and unreadable if they touched floodwater, were unharmed. There were no broken windows, no damaged roofs, nothing. The facilities didn’t even lose power.

Cemeteries were conceived as a way of separating and containing the dead. But they’ve never aimed to forget the dead. That’s why cemeteries have stone monuments and metal caskets designed to last multiple generations. One day, maybe when humans are dead and gone, we’ll have a layer of the Earth’s crust that’s embedded with cemetery stone and metal. Maybe, in this human-layer of the Earth, we’ll have gravestones torn apart by climate change-fueled superstorms, alongside AirPods, plastic, and everything else that capitalism has managed to make but not destroy.

But even a broken cemetery monument is a privilege for the few, the likes of turn-of-the-century New York elites and their descendants. Being in a paper archive, likewise, is a privilege. It’s a ticket into cultural memory. But not everyone is afforded that privilege.

Consider the loss of records that occurred after Hurricane Katrina: Thousands of living people experienced “identity loss” when their personal documents were destroyed. Photographs, films, paintings, and historical documents in homes and museums, testaments to the history of the people who have lived on the Gulf Coast, were destroyed. People living in the Gulf region have just as much of a right to be remembered as the people of Green-Wood. But there’s a social and economic barrier of entry to visibility that not everyone can pass.

The Future of Archives

At the time of writing, Hurricane Dorian is winding down after ravaging the Bahamas and barreling up the east coast of the United States. The Bahamas, from what we know now, have been devastated. An estimated 15,000 people don’t have food or shelter. Many lives have clearly been lost, but we don’t know how many. Entire cities have been flooded and leveled, but we don’t have a precise sense of what’s been lost and what’s left.

Climate change is not a distant threat, or an abstract. It’s killing people right now. It’s devastating communities and destroying human culture right now.

Tansey said that going forward, the goal of the Repo Data Project is to make it as robust as possible, as inclusive as possible, and as up-to-date as possible. The team already used the grant provided by the Society of American Archivists, so right now, a priority is finding a financial pathway to maintaining stewardship over the data.

In August, Tansey and co-principal investigator Ben Goldman were honored by the Society of American Archivists for their work on the project.

Around the same time the Repo Data Project got started, in early 2017, Tansey became involved with a decentralized collective called Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change). The group hasn’t been consistently active since it was created. But on September 20, the same day as the Global Climate Strike, the group is co-hosting two teach-ins in—one in Austin, Texas and one in Vancouver, British Columbia—with Archivists Against History Repeating Itself, a collective whose mission is to use archives to “address” and “repair” injustice perpetrated by “white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, and capitalism.”

“These Teach Ins will provide insights and serve as a launching point for future actions against climate change,” the event description says. “By joining international efforts to raise awareness of climate change, archivists can join the global community to tell leaders across the world that we demand climate action.”

As for Green-Wood, it’s unclear what a changing climate will mean for its yellow and purple wildflowers, cooing crickets, and grass cut down to a height of exactly three inches by a landscaping staff. Green-Wood will certainly continue to receive money to maintain its living plants and the papers of the dead. Maybe the cemetery vegetation will wither in climate change-driven heat, or be blown apart by future superstorms. The papers, meanwhile, will probably last as long as the community that it represents continues to exist. Maybe in a couple centuries or millennia, Brooklyners will retreat or die off, and Brooklyn as we know it ceases to exist. Maybe then, the papers will drop into the earth and feed a city of worms.

• A few years back, a startup called Docker popularized so-called containers, a different way of thinking about running software in the cloud.
• VMware COO Sanjay Poonen says that when Docker first started taking off, the world saw it as a threat to its core virtualization products. 
• Now, Poonen says, Docker has "disappeared," while VMware is making a major play into containers of its own — specifically, with Kubernetes, an open source cloud computing project started by Google engineers.
• VMware plans to "create the largest force working on Kubernetes," Poonen says, which is why it plans to acquire Pivotal, and why it has already acquired Heptio. 
• VMware is already the second-largest contributor to Kubernetes.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

A few years back, a startup called Docker popularized so-called containers, a different way of thinking about running software in the cloud. At the time, the world saw the rise of Docker as an existential threat to VMware, as VMware COO Sanjay Poonen tells Business Insider at the SAP-TechCrunch Conference on Sept. 5.

VMware pioneered the market for virtual machines (VMs) — basically, software that tricks one server into acting like several servers, increasing efficiency. But Docker's containers presented an alternative to virtual machines that allow users to package up their code so that their applications can run on any computing environment, without the headaches of maintaining a whole army of VMs. 

Fast forward to today, though, and Docker's star has fallen somewhat, as increased competition puts pressure on its business. Meanwhile, VMware has chosen to embrace, rather than fight, the container revolution that Docker has started — specifically by making what Poonen calls a "huge bet" on Kubernetes, an open source cloud computing project started by Google engineers that makes it easy to manage these containers and run large-scale applications.

"People were saying Docker would be a significant threat to VMware, but they disappeared," Poonen told Business Insider. "There was a massive parade that showed up called Kubernetes. We decided to join that parade and become a leader of that parade."

Today, VMware has become the second biggest contributor to the Kubernetes project – second only to Google itself.

Just August, VMware announced it will acquire Pivotal, which is betting on Kubernetes as a major part of its strategy. Last year, it acquired Heptio, which was co-founded by Craig McLuckie and Joseph Beda, two former Google engineers who helped create Kubernetes.

Poonen says the goal is to "create the largest force working on Kubernetes," which he sees as critical to the company's future. 

"The mystery of this whole thing is we were nowhere in this parade, and people thought of this parade as a threat to us, and people didn't think of VMware as an open source player as well," Poonen says. "Now we see this as our future. We have gotten a religion in Kubernetes."

'We felt we had to ride this wave'

"We felt we had to ride this wave and become a leader in the containers," Poonen said. 

Read more: Here's how VMware is putting its $550 million acquisition of Heptio to work as it builds a new future around Kubernetes, the red-hot cloud software created by Google

At VMware's conference in August, VMware announced a host of new Kubernetes announcements. For example, it announced Project Pacific, which would embed Kubernetes into vSphere, one of VMware's flagship products that helps users manage virtual machines. 

"People left with a very clear sense that VMware aspires to be the leader in the parade of Kubernetes with the moves they made in Heptio and Pivotal," Poonen said.

The company is also uniting its Kubernetes products under the Tanzu branding — with "Tanzu" being the Japanese word for "containers." Poonen says he hopes that Tanzu becomes as big of a name as VMware flagship products like ESX and vSphere.

Poonen also says he gives the Heptio team "a tremendous amount of credit" for influencing VMware into giving more code back to the open source community, whether through code or through support. 

"This will be closely connected with developer mindset," Poonen said. "We hope that creates positive mindshare with developer community."

All told, Poonen says, he believes that VMware can succeed with Kubernetes as it has with virtualization.

"Why can't the company that created VMs also be the company that creates the best container and container management platform of the future?" Poonen said. "Our view is, it's not a threat. It's an opportunity. That's what I meant by joining the parade and becoming the leader of the community. We can do that effectively. I believe we're at a good start to that strategy."

SEE ALSO: $20 billion Stripe is making a new global push with the product that's helping open source developers on GitHub get paid for the code they write

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows how cats spread across the world

Google is announcing a new plan for its MVNO Fi cell service: Unlimited. Like the big four carriers in the US, Google apparently feels the need to use the word “Unlimited” next to its service, whether or not it means what you think it means.

For Google, it means that a single line costs $70 for everything, two are $60 apiece, three are $50 apiece, and you can have four to six at $45 per line. The caveats — and there are always caveats with unlimited plans — is that Google “may optimize” video streaming down to 480p and will also throttle data for any single user that goes over 22GB per month. (You can pay $10 per GB if you want un-throttled data over 22GB.)

Google is also tying its new Unlimited plan to Google One, another service that...

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• Successful online dating can feel impossible when the competition seems infinite. 
• Business Insider spoke to a few relationship experts on how to best stand out on dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, or Bumble.
• Being honest and realistic — both in your profile content and photos — is crucial, they said. 
• Striking a balance between sharing enough but not sharing too much is necessary to attract comparable matches.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When it comes to online dating, everyone has an opinion — and a seemingly very strong one at that. One thing is for sure: it's not easy to stand out when you're competing for attention against millions of people on an app. 

Not to mention that it doesn't take more than a quick glance at Tinder Nightmares to realize that it's slim pickings as far as quality goes — especially if you don't set yourself up for success. 

But what does setting yourself up for success look like when you have mere seconds to make an impression? We turned to leading relationship experts to find out. 

Here are some of their best profile-writing tweaks and photography choices you should consider to improve your odds of getting more quality dates.

SEE ALSO: We asked teachers to name one thing parents should never do

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Take more realistic pictures.

Experts recommend to stop lying about age, weight, height, or any other points of insecurity. 

"If you're unhappy with your current circumstances, deal with it, don't ignore it or lie about it," Wendy O'Connor, a psychologist and life coach, told Business Insider. "You will be surprised at how many people there are who really will like you for you, so be authentic and honest and it will get you further."

Keep your profile short and sweet.

Nobody wants to read a dissertation about your life, so experts recommend being intentional with your word choice. 

"It's important to be short and to the point," O'Connor said. "It's also important to remember that there's a fine line between too boring and too playful where your whole profile is a bunch of jokes." 

A good rule of thumb is to follow an outline created by Brian Howie, the host and creator of The Great Love Debate. 

"Every profile should have three things you want people to find out about you, two things you wish to find in them, and one thing you hope to find together: 'I am A, B, C, looking for X, Y, let's run around the world and find or do Z,'" Howie said.

Offer key details about your interests and passions.

Though you might not want to reveal too much, experts say you should be specific when it comes to certain details like your interests and passions. 

"For example, I was unequivocal in my Tinder profile about two things: loving the book 'Sapiens' and an interest in finding a relationship of equals," Keren Eldad, a business coach, speaker, and creator of the Date with Enthusiasm program, told Business Insider.

Eldad ended up meeting her fiancé on Tinder.

"In turn, I found a man whose profile said that he 'reads probably more than is good for me,' and who is thoughtful, egalitarian, and progressive."

Add a picture of an interest you have or would like to have.

This could be anything, according to O'Connor — from tennis, cooking, or gardening to Disneyland, art, wine, or animals. Aligning photos with interests will also make it easier for others to start a conversation with you. 

Project confidence and be positive.

"If you're showing pictures that display negative doom and gloom, that's what you will get," O'Connor said. 

Nobody wants to be with someone who leads with negativity, so instead of focusing on things you don't want or don't like, focus on the positive, she said.

For your photos, colors matter just as much as style.

"When it comes to photos, I suggest dressing in simple, but popping colors, smiling genuinely, looking into the lens, having at least one full-body shot, and having at least one interesting thing in the shot that represents you," Destin Pfaff, founder of Love And Matchmaking, told Business Insider. 

Don't forget about your social media.

"Connecting your Instagram or Facebook to your bio allows a person to give you bonus time over the three to 30 seconds they spent on your profile," Pfaff said. 

That said, he cautioned never to link to other dating sites. 

"You'll be viewed as a serial dater," he said.

Consider a professional photo.

An increasing number of dating app users are shelling out for professional photos for their profiles. 

Note that a great professional photograph looks natural and realistic, not like it was a staged photo shoot or Photoshopped to make you look like another person. 

"If you're not going to go the professional route, keep in mind that you're competing against others who are," Jenn Mann, host of VH1's "Couples Therapy with Dr. Jenn," told Business Insider.

Include at least one summer shot.

In 2013, a Match.com survey found that 60% of men and 82% of women were viewed as more attractive in photos taken in the summer months versus the winter. 

Meanwhile, just 2% of people were viewed as more attractive in winter photos.

"Typically, both sexes look better when outdoors and relaxed rather than huddled up in hats and scarves," Kate Taylor, a Match.com dating expert, told The Telegraph. "Plus, you're more likely to be outside enjoying the sunshine and having a good time, and this comes across as much in a photo as it does in person."

Mercedes-Benz is known for being a pioneer in the world of automobiles, but until now, it hadn’t ventured into the world of two-wheeled electric scooters. That will change, though, as the company very quietly announced a two-wheeler at the 2019 Frankfurt Motor Show last week.

Stuffed inside a press release between news of Mercedes-Benz-branded over-the-ear headphones and a toy version of the company’s EQC electric SUV is a brief mention of the forthcoming e-scooter. Seriously, here’s every word Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler wrote about the new scooter:

E-scooters have only been allowed on German roads since June, and it is already hard to conceive of a traffic scene without them. These agile, electrically powered scooters are...

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Blue’s latest USB microphone, the Yeti X, is aimed directly at streamers, podcast hosts, and other content creators. The most visible upgrade: real-time LED metering on the microphone itself, letting you know when the gain is too quiet (or in the red) during your recording.

The big knob on the face of the new mic is its command center, and you’ll probably use it a lot to adjust levels and switch between its three modes. In addition to displaying the metering, the knob can turn up the gain on the microphone, and as you might expect, it’ll mute if you click it inwards.

You can also cycle between two other modes by holding the knob in for two seconds. One controls the volume, and the other is blend mode, which...

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Leading meeting platform and collaboration solution provider, Highfive recently announced numerous updates to its services for today’s modern companies. The brand has introduced both its new Meeting Connector solution for multi-platform conferences, and a new pricing strategy designed to make the technology more affordable too.

The Highfive Meeting Connector is the latest tool in the Highfive portfolio, allowing any Highfive user to directly connect with third-party platforms for video conferencing like Zoom, Cisco Webex, and BlueJeans. This connection tool will remove the barriers to easier meetings in today’s agile environments. The interoperability feature is the first of its kind to appear in the industry and was designed using proprietary technology from the Highfive team.

The Meeting Connector solution leverages WebRTC, SIP interoperability and APIs to enable teams to use the software and hardware that they already rely on for their everyday communications. The Highfive Meeting Connector requires no specialist configurations and can serve as a bridge between various SIP-enabled solutions.

The Next Step in Interoperability

Joe Manuele

According to the CEO of Highfive, Joe Manuele, while the video collaboration space has transformed drastically in the last decade, companies still tend to cling to legacy technology and proprietary services. The new Meeting Connector from Highfive aims to let businesses continue using the tools that they like most to communicate and collaborate in an evolving environment.

As businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, and the availability of SIP and WebRTC technologies becomes more widespread, Highfive’s Meeting Connector will give companies a seamless experience for connecting with coworkers, clients, and contractors with a single tap. The Meeting Connector experience was specifically designed for mid-level businesses and enterprises that may need to leverage multiple video platforms across internal and external teams.

Today, corporate meeting rooms are still a critical linchpin in driving the adoption of video meeting facilities in the enterprise, according to Wainhouse Research. WR’s report on the Diverging Paths to the Meeting Rooms highlights that more than four in five respondents to their survey say that their organisation is very interested in cloud-based video, or they’ve integrated it into their system already.

The arrival of the new Meeting Connector solution comes at the same time as Highfive is also announcing an update to their pricing model, to make the technology more available to SMBs and SMEs in the modern landscape. Highfive’s meeting room offers now include access to unlimited user licenses and free mobile apps and desktop software too.

More Affordable Pricing with Highfive

The new and improved Highfive pricing model provides businesses of all sizes with a predictive pricing strategy by removing the costs and complexities associated with managing various user licenses at once. In contrast to other user-based plans on the market, which whitelist individual email addresses and charge for add-ons, Highfive will whitelist all company emails instantly. This ensures that every worker in the business can participate in and host their own video meetings.

The new Highfive pricing model means that everyone benefits from unlimited meetings and minutes, as well as features like screen sharing, virtual whiteboards, and recording with no additional cost. There’s also built-in PSTN functionality so that the system can fulfill a complete range of conferencing need.

CEO, Joe Manuele said that most incumbent cloud and desktop conferencing solutions with user-based licensing models don’t translate into the modern conferencing environment. To remove the barrier to entry, Highfive is using its new pricing model to change the status quo for companies of all sizes. The reimagined approach will eliminate the excessive complexity and costs of launching a new meeting room environment in the modern communication landscape.

Highfive was the first brand in the collaboration space to bring the per-room pricing model to life, bundling video, and audio hardware with software to simplify the cost strategy for businesses. Highfive also stood out as the first video conferencing provider to build its stack on WebRTC technology. The company is continuing to set itself apart as a pioneer among collaboration brands with innovative new approaches to pricing and technology today.

According to Manuele, the new pricing plans are aligned to solve the problems that he sees businesses facing every day. Highfive wants to give modern consumers a complexity-free approach to digital transformation.

The new pricing plans from Highfive, and it’s unique approach to cross-platform meetings ensure that more businesses, both large and small will be able to start taking advantage of the benefits that video conferencing on the cloud can offer.

Days before Huawei is due to reveal its new flagship Mate 30 lineup, launching without Google apps or services on September 19th, promotional images of four of the upcoming devices appear to have leaked online. The images were shared by leaker Evan Blass, and show off what he claims is the new Mate 30, Mate 30 Pro, Mate 30 Lite, and what appears to be a Porsche Design edition of one of the new handsets.

At the top of the lineup is the Mate 30 Pro. The images suggest the phone will be equipped with a wide notch at the top of the device and a display that curves around the left and right sides of the phone like Oppo’s “waterfall screen” seen on Vivo’s new Nex 3. On the back we can see the familiar Leica branding along with four sensors...

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The next generation of Wi-Fi has been trickling out over the past year, but this week, its launch is going to accelerate. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that oversees implementation of the Wi-Fi standard, is launching its official Wi-Fi 6 certification program. That might sound boring, but it means the Wi-Fi 6 standard is truly ready to go, and tech companies will soon be able to advertise their products — mostly brand new ones — as certified to properly support Wi-Fi 6.

Wi-Fi 6 includes a bunch of new technologies that combine together to make Wi-Fi more efficient. This is particularly important because of just how many devices we all have these days — it’s not unusual for a family to have a dozen or more gadgets all connected to...

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Immature, fragmented standards will prevent blockchain from fully entering the financial services realm in the near term.

• Netflix has acquired the worldwide streaming rights to "Seinfeld," the company announced on Monday.
• The five-year global deal is a big win for Netflix, which is losing two of its most popular TV shows, "Friends" and "The Office."
• The Netflix/"Seinfield" deal is worth more than what what NBCUniversal paid for "The Office" and what WarnerMedia paid for "Friends," according to The Los Angeles Times.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In a major victory for Netflix, the streaming giant has acquired the global streaming rights to the hit 1990s sitcom, "Seinfeld."

All 180 episodes of the series will be available to stream on Netflix in the US and around the world starting in 2021. The Los Angeles Times first reported the acquisition Monday, which was followed by a Twitter announcement by Netflix.

Anonymous sources told The LA Times that the deal was worth more than what NBCUniversal paid for "The Office" rights ($500 million for five years) and what WarnerMedia paid for "Friends" ($425 million for five years), both of which were US-only deals. The deal Netflix struck with Sony Pictures Television for "Seinfeld" is also for five years, but is worldwide.

"'Seinfeld' is a one-of-a-kind, iconic, culture-defining show," Sony Pictures Television chairman Mike Hopkins said in a statement to The LA Times. "Now, 30 years after its premiere, 'Seinfeld' remains center stage. We're thrilled to be partnering with Netflix to bring this beloved series to current fans and new audiences around the globe."

The deal is a big win for Netflix after it lost both "Friends" and "The Office," which were its two most popular shows last year, according to data from analytics company Jumpshot. The former will be leaving the service at the end of this year for WarnerMedia's upcoming streaming platform, HBO Max, and the latter will leave Netflix in 2021 for NBCUniversal's yet-to-be-named service.

"Seinfeld" is currently streaming on Hulu in the US as part of a five-year deal that expires in 2021 and in some international territories on Amazon Prime Video. 

SEE ALSO: A Netflix cofounder describes the company's 'unbelievably ridiculous' early pitches and why they worked

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• As Apple is offering consumers more options to choose from than ever before with iPhone and iOS, Google is embracing simplicity, both with Android and the latest Pixel.
• Google's approach harkens back to Apple's initial strategy with the first generation iPhone released 12 years ago.
• So far, the strategy is paying off, with Google reporting that it doubled Pixel sales year-over-year.
• More broadly, both smartphone manufacturers continue to borrow inspiration from one another, rolling out features that resemble their competition.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

This month, Google and Apple are rolling out their newest operating systems, Android 10 and iOS 13. One boasts of an unprecedented level of customization and is dense with new features, while the other touts a simple, newly-streamlined interface that's meant to be easier to use. 

You might be surprised to learn which software is which.

Originally known as a more customizable and versatile alternative to Apple, Google is re-prioritizing simplicity, both with its Android operating system and its Pixel phones. 

In doing so, the company is adopting a strategy that made Apple's computers and phones so successful early on: betting that users are less interested in variety of choice and more interested in simple, straightforward technology that "just works."

SEE ALSO: Apple is including a faster charger with its more expensive iPhone 11 Pro that will charge your phone halfway in 30 minutes

Android 10 is a departure from past versions.

Unveiled at the start of September, Android 10 is the first version since Android 1.0 that isn't named after a candy or dessert food (Nougat, Oreo, and Pie were the three versions leading up to Android 10).

The name isn't the only step Android is taking towards simplicity. Google has described Android 10 as "simpler, smarter, and more helpful" than past versions, pointing to a new gesture navigation feature that allows users to switch between tasks, go backwards, and return to the home screen by swiping, without using visible buttons.

Similarly, Google says it prioritized making the software "easy to navigate" and light on preloaded apps, providing users with essentials rather than frills.

Google’s Pixel phone prioritizes simplicity more than most Android devices.

On its own Pixel phones, Google provides one of the most pared-down, minimal Android experiences available. Rather than having a "skin," or the app-heavy software layer than sits atop Android preferred by most third-party Android device-makers, Pixel phones prioritize Google's suite of apps, like Google Photos, Gmail, Maps, and more.  

This has become a selling point among Android users — even among those running Android on third-party devices, many have opted to ditch third-party apps and simplify their home screens to more closely resemble the Pixel's interface.

This approach harkens back to Apple’s original iPhone strategy.

As it moves to simplify Android and provide a streamlined experience on the Pixel, Google is taking pages from the playbook Apple used during the iPhone's early days.

More fundamentally, Apple distinguished itself from other cell phone makers early on by presenting users with a single product that "just works." By contrast, Nokia offered users over 100 different phones to choose from at the time that the first iPhone was unveiled.

While Android can be run on third-party devices, Google has followed Apple's lead with its own hardware — each generation of Pixel smartphone has offered just two models, one being an XL version. (Google also recently unveiled a cheaper version of the Pixel 3 labeled the Pixel 3a, which has a slightly slower processor but similar functionality.)

Both companies provide affordable models, but Apple is giving consumers more and more options to choose from.

In recent years, Apple has widened the number of iPhone models per generation that are available to buy.

This trend started back in 2013, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 5S as well as the iPhone 5C. Fast-forward four years, and Apple launched three phones at once: the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X.

At the same time, Apple continued selling older devices on its site, a trend that continues today: Apple unveiled the new iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max on Tuesday, and altogether, it's now selling five iPhone models on it's website.

But the broad range of available models allows Apple to reach users with different needs and income levels, much like Nokia's strategy at the time the first iPhone was unveiled. Doing so also allows the tech giant to better compete in growing markets like India and China.

More broadly, iOS and Android keep borrowing heavily from each other.

Across the board, Apple and Google are rolling out features on their mobile operating systems that strongly resemble one another. 

When iOS 13 launches on September 19, it will include a new swipeable typing feature, similar to Google's swipeable keyboard known as Gboard. Apple is also rolling out an AI-powered reminders feature in iOS 13, similar to the Google Assistant app. Both Android 10 and iOS 13 will include a new dark mode feature, and the new lineup of iPhones' Night Sight feature resembles camera software on the Pixel 3.

But now that the smartphone market has contracted, there's no telling which strategy will pay off. Apple's wide range of offerings, including less expensive iPhones, seems to working: CEO Tim Cook announced during Tuesday's keynote that the iPhone XR, Apple's $750 offering from 2018, had become the most popular iPhone and the most popular smartphone in the world. 

But Google's Pixel strategy has worked, too: The company reported in July that it doubled Pixel sales year over year. 

• Over the summer, Microsoft said that its Teams workplace chat app was growing faster than Slack, the one-time unicorn startup that went public this year in a much-watched direct listing.
• Microsoft's Office 365 security boss Girish Chander tells Business Insider that a big part of this is because companies are less willing to cherry-pick their favorite apps from different vendors like Slack, and more excited about suites of pre-integrated products. 
• Chander says this is a shift away from the so-called "best of breed" approach, and towards a trend he calls "best of suite." 
• Security plays a major role in this transition, he says: Having multiple apps is great on paper, he says, but makes it hard for the IT department to manage and ensure that all data is staying safe. 
• That's a benefit for Teams in particular and Office 365 in general, Chander says, because the former is deeply integrated with the latter.
• That said, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield recently told analysts that while plenty of its largest customers are using Office 365, they're still using the Slack app internally because it better suits their needs. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

The spotlight for workplace chat software this year has been focused on Slack, the buzzy startup that went public in June in an unusual direct listing and has had a bumpy ride on the public markets ever since.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has been quickly and steadily growing Microsoft Teams, its own chat app, built in to the Office 365 suite. In July, Microsoft said that Teams had 13 million daily active users, compared to the 10 million that Slack disclosed in January, and that Teams is growing faster overall. (Importantly, neither company has given more current numbers since those dates.) 

Girish Chander, group program manager of Office 365 security, says that Teams is benefiting from the fact that it's both included in and integrated with the rest of the suite, which includes cloud versions of Microsoft mainstays like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. 

More specifically, Chander says, Microsoft Teams — and Office 365 as a whole — have benefitted from a larger shift in the market.

As the software market first began moving to the cloud in earnest a decade or so ago, there emerged a trend towards what Chander calls "best of breed."

Where before, customers would get the lion's share of their software from a few major vendors, the cloud meant that it was suddenly easy to cherry-pick whatever software they thought was best for a particular job— whether it came from titans like Microsoft, Google, or Salesforce, or smaller players like Slack, Zoom, or Atlassian. 

Now, though, Chander says that as IT departments and CIO offices are faced with an incredible proliferation of options in the cloud software market, that best-of-all-worlds approach actually becomes a series of headaches.

"What I hear these days is, you know, that's a nightmare to manage," says Chander.

'Best of suite'

That "nightmare" has led customers back towards pre-integrated software suites, like Microsoft Office 365, says Chander, as those same IT pros and CIOs look to simplify the task of securing and managing their cloud software. Chander calls this approach "best of suite," and says that Microsoft is benefiting greatly from it. 

This approach has become especially appealing amid a broader awareness amongst customers of the very real risk of cyberattack, Chander says. That goes double for businesses in regulated industries like healthcare, which have to comply with the HIPAA standard — not to mention that companies in the EU have to comply with GDPR.  

"The importance customers give to security and compliance is through the roof," says Chander.

This is something that leads customers away from services like Slack, and towards Microsoft Teams, in Chander's view. While both apps offer integrations with outside services, Teams naturally boasts deeper integrations with the rest of the Office 365 suite.

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That's good for users, considering many workers already use Office 365 in their daily lives, but Chander makes the case that it's good for the IT department, too, since Microsoft itself can vouch for the security and integrity of business data as it flows into and out of Teams.

"The suite-wide view is a clear advantage for us," says Chander. 

The Microsoft graph

Chander also cites the sheer amount of data Microsoft has access to as another important boon. Called the Microsoft Graph, it's the aggregated data on how Microsoft's cloud products get used — useful, in a security context, to know when a corporate Office 365 user isn't quite acting like themselves.

If a user based in Montana is suddenly logging in from Berlin, for instance, and accessing files that they've never, ever touched before, it might be a signal that something is wrong.

Slack might take issue with Microsoft's view of the market. When the company announced its first-ever quarterly earnings earlier this month, CEO Stewart Butterfield said that while most of its business customers use Office 365, they were still going out of their way to use Slack.

"Of course, like most of our large enterprise customers, they run on Office 365," Butterfield told analysts on the earnings call, speaking of a "Fortune 100 financial services firm" which is also apparently a major Slack customer.

"They still chose Slack because only Slack was capable of meeting their needs. Increasingly, in regulated industries, we are seeing significant traction because Slack want security and compliance with scalability, an open platform and a great user experience," Butterfield said.

SEE ALSO: Safra Catz has long been Oracle's secret weapon, and analysts say that it's her time to shine as sole CEO: 'This will test her, but she will prevail'

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NOW WATCH: Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, says 2 beliefs have brought him the greatest success in life

Around the world, countries and corporations are rethinking their relationship with encryption. In the wake of terrorist attacks, legislation in India and Australia has sought to give law enforcement access to encrypted communications, in moves that could threaten the security of encryption around the world. In the United States, Apple has staked its reputation on protecting encrypted communications even when they belong to terrorists — while Facebook pledged this year to shift the company to private messaging.

The moves have exposed obvious tensions between free speech and safety. In an effort to move the discussion forward, the Stanford Internet Observatory today held a conference in which tech platforms, government agencies,...

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• Huawei is offering to sell its 5G technology patents to a Western company in a bid to quell fears about security.
• The US has urged allied nations to reject Huawei's 5G kit on national security grounds, arguing that Huawei could be used as a conduit for Chinese state spying. Huawei denies this.
• CEO Ren Zhengfei told The Economist that a one-off sale of its 5G patents could create a viable competitor for Huawei.
• Ren said he had "no idea" of who might want to take the offer.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Huawei is trying an unusual tactic to try to break its deadlock with the US government. It's offering to sell the rights to all its 5G patents in a one-time-only offer.

Huawei's CEO, Ren Zhengfei, told The Economist's Hal Hodson that the company was offering to bundle up its 5G patents, licenses, code, and technical blueprints in a one-off transaction.

The idea would be to create a rival for the Chinese tech giant. "A balanced distribution of interests is conducive to Huawei's survival," Ren told Hodson.

Ren said he had "no idea" who might be interested in buying, and he did not put a figure on how much Huawei's 5G "stack" might be worth. Hodson said it could run to tens of billions of dollars given the amount of money Huawei has poured into research.

The move is designed to placate concerns in the West about Huawei's 5G dominance, coupled with the national security concerns from the Trump administration, which argues that Huawei could act as a proxy for the Chinese government to spy. Huawei denies this.

Huawei's rollout of 5G has been actively targeted by the Trump administration, which has been advising allies to reject Huawei's kit or risk damaging their relationship with the US.

Read more: The Trump administration is warning allies to stay away from Huawei — but not everyone's listening

At the same time the US has hamstrung Huawei by placing it on a trade blacklist, though Huawei has now received two 90-day licenses to give American firms time to disentangle themselves from the company.

The major threat from the blacklisting is cutting Huawei off from Google. Huawei phones all run Google's Android operating system and come with Google's bundle of apps including the Google Play Store, which allows users to download other popular apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

Though Huawei has developed its own operating system as a plan B, being cut off from the world's most popular apps would put Huawei phones at a major disadvantage.

It is unclear whether the strategy floated by Ren would do anything to appease the US, whether China would approve the sale, or even whether Huawei would find a buyer.

SEE ALSO: Here's why the US is terrified of one Chinese company controlling the world's 5G networks

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NOW WATCH: If you want an emoji that isn't available, you can create it. Here's how everyday people send their submissions.

Indigenous people and people of color are disproportionately affected by our global climate crisis. But in the mainstream green movement and in the media, they are often forgotten or excluded. This is Tipping Point, a new VICE series that covers environmental justice stories about and, where possible, written by people in the communities experiencing the stark reality of our changing planet.

Gilberto Ysaias started thinking about leaving Honduras when he couldn't produce enough crops to provide for his family. As an Indigenous farmer, the hotter summers were wreaking havoc on his yearly harvest.

The criminal gang MS-13 then tried to extort Ysaias (his name has been changed here to protect his identity). When he couldn’t cough up the cash, they tried to recruit his 11-year-old son.

Enough was enough. He heard that people could get asylum in the United States, so he and his son packed their bags and walked nearly 2,000 miles to get to the Texas border.

In March, they were detained upon entry to the United States and were scheduled for deportation. Now they are with their sponsor, waiting for a judge to rule on whether they will be granted asylum under the claim of gang violence.

Because climate change is not yet seen as a valid legal reason for asylum in any country, it is not included as a claim for their case. Yet the climate crisis played a central role in their decision to leave.

“Last summer, in my region, there was tremendous heat for a month, and half of all the plants dried,” Ysaias said in a case declaration. “Because of the heat, farmers are planting fewer crops and planting more grass for cattle. Because landowners are planting more grass, there are fewer jobs maintaining crops.”

Climate change—which the U.S. Department of Defense called a “threat multiplier”—can exacerbate poverty, conflict, and instability, which already plague impoverished nations like Honduras. According to new research from Stanford University, the economic gap between the richest and poorest countries is 25 percent larger today than it would have been without climate change.

The International Organization for Migration projects that between 25 million and 1.5 billion people will have to leave their homes by 2050. The poorest and smallest nations are the ones who are least likely to contribute to climate change, but they will be the first to be forced to migrate.

“Ultimately, they're coming here for reasons that may fall under protected ground for asylum, but the root cause is climate change,” said Gianvito Grieco, an attorney for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), who worked on Ysaias's case.

Yet “climate change refugee” does not formally exist under international law. The United Nations (UN) 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defines “refugee” as someone who crosses an international border for “a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” That is usually interpreted as political oppression, not fear of sinking homes, scorched harvests, or devastated jungles.

“Just because it's become too hot in your country, or that yields are lower, or whatever result of climate change doesn't fall into that definition the way it's written now,” Greico said.

Because of that, many lawyers take issue with the term “climate refugee,” since the designation of refugee doesn’t cover environmental migration. Also, “climate refugee” assumes that there are only cross-border migrants, but most migrants will, in fact, move within their own borders.

“Legally, using the term ‘refugee’ implies rights and privileges under international law that simply do not exist—nearly all climate migrants will not qualify for traditional refugee status,” wrote Phillip Dane Warren, a lawyer at Columbia University, in Columbia Law Review in 2016.

This has forced individuals to litigate the term’s nuances. In 2014, Kiribati resident Ioane Teitiota sought asylum in New Zealand “on the basis of changes to his environment in Kiribati caused by sea level rise associated with climate change.” New Zealand’s supreme court dismissed his case, citing the Refugee Convention, and Teitiota was deported back to Kiribati which, even under zero emissions scenarios, will ultimately witness its communities consumed by the sea.

“It's like a double-edged sword,” Grieco said. “Do we want to change the law and try to include climate refugees and then risk that some kind of bipartisan compromise would actually scale back the protections that we have today? Or do we just try to find a way to get climate refugees in the framework that we currently have in place?”

Few migrants call themselves climate migrants

George Benson, an urban planner from Vancouver, said “his eyes were open” to climate change migration when he worked on a climate adaptation plan for the Philippines. There, he met with a group of farmers who struggled to adjust to extreme drought.

“People were saying, ‘I don't understand the community that I live in. I don't understand why the seasons change the way they do now,’” Benson said. “These are people that live this life for generations—with all of that embodied knowledge and practice—which is, in many cases, no longer relevant.”

Benson founded the Climate Migrants and Refugees Project with three colleagues to help develop resources for Canadian cities to respond to what could be millions of climate migrants. One challenge is that few migrants self-identify as climate migrants. It’s hard to advocate for a group that doesn’t even know it exists, Benson said.

“There's not necessarily a clear sense of identity that many people have as climate migrants and refugees,” Benson said. “It tends to be something that's a bit further in their background as far as why they migrate.”

'We want to be climate leaders instead of climate victims'

It’s difficult to navigate through a form of immigration that technically doesn’t exist without the assistance of law firms that are willing to take on the challenge.

“Climate migration is the human face of climate change,” said Ama Francis, a climate law fellow at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Having a passion for thinking about how to make migrants’ lives easier and to provide legal solutions for them is just one avenue for coming into this issue.”

Francis hails from Dominica, a small Caribbean island, which like the rest of the region, is increasingly facing unusually strong hurricanes. She thought that studying both immigration and climate change would help her and her island have the legal tools to fight climate change.

Ninety percent of homes were destroyed after Hurricane Maria swept through Dominica in 2017. Photo: Michael Lees

“We’re called the ‘nature island of the Caribbean’ and I think that's a well-earned title,” Francis said. “More than half of the island is protected legally, but climate change is a new challenge for us.”

Like Puerto Rico, Dominica was devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit called the country a “war zone.” Ninety percent of homes were destroyed and 20 percent of the population left the island after the storm.

“My own mom was displaced and lived in St. Kitts, the neighboring island,” Francis said. “My granny lived without her roof. It was devastating to the island and to me personally.”

Afterwards, her mom moved to the U.S. and then Barbados, where she is now. She says many others moved between multiple places after the storm.

Dominica then swore to become the world’s first "climate-resilient nation." Currently, it’s working with the World Bank to figure out a financing sector (Dominica's damages from Maria are estimated at $1.3 billion) and plans to use geothermal energy from renewable sources, even though its emissions are minimal.

“We want to be climate leaders instead of climate victims,” Francis said.

Francis now is working on disaster displacement and local and regional climate migration solutions at Columbia University’s Sabin Center, with a focus on small island developing states like Dominica. It’s a first step to getting legal protection locally, while the international community scrambles to figure out what to do.

More than 150 countries are trying to solve the issue of climate change migration. In 2015, the monumental Paris Agreement called for a task force to “address displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change.” And New Zealand indicated in 2017 that it may create a new visa category for displaced peoples of the Pacific.

The United States, however, is not one of those countries. It abstained from voting on the 2018 Global Compact of Migration, which aims to reduce the risks and vulnerabilities migrants face, and also plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

The responsibility for raising awareness about climate change migration should fall on the governments that are creating the crisis and making immigration difficult, said Abril Gallardo, an immigration activist for Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA).

“The reality is that there are so many influences of the U.S. or other countries that have gone into countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and even Mexico to exploit their resources,” Gallardo said. “They go into their homes. They take everything from there and they're expecting them to just stay there and die.”

But they don’t stay. Despite the dangers and risks of migrating, especially as the Trump administration continues to make it more difficult, people still try to move to the U.S. in hopes of finding work and safety.

“The people coming over, they know what the narrative is in this country,” Grieco said. “During the child separation crisis, the fact that people were still coming—that tells you exactly how bad the situation is in their country.”

It’s not just Trump’s anti-environment and anti-immigration policies that are hurting the prospects of climate migrants; it’s that those two positions are often united, said Benson.

“There are a number of people who are in opposition to any meaningful climate policy. They are also significantly vocal, in often quite frightening ways, about the need to curtail immigration to resist the movement of people into the country,” Benson said.

Gallardo, an immigrant herself, emphasized the importance of not assuming that migrants only care about immigration issues.

“We care about climate change. We care about education. We care about wages and we care about health care and we care about immigration,” she said. “And a powerful thing that I see is that the more Trump's administration is trying to create a dividing rhetoric, the more we are coming together.”

Izzie Ramirez is a culture and activism reporter and photographer, specializing in climate migration and protests. Follow her on Twitter.

With addition reporting from Sarah Emerson.

Have a story for Tipping Point? Email TippingPoint@vice.com

Slack is introducing a new dark mode for desktop versions of its workplace chat app. The new dark mode for desktop option will be available across all platforms today, allowing Windows, macOS, and Linux users to switch away from the traditional light theme that’s always been available on Slack.

Slack is enabling dark mode variants of all existing sidebar themes and adding its own “Nocturne” dark mode theme that can be set on both desktop and mobile. The desktop dark mode comes months after the same feature appeared on iOS and Android versions of Slack earlier this year.

“Dark Mode is an important feature for lots of people,” explains George Zamfir, an accessibility product manager at Slack. “It’s helpful for working at night or in...

Continue reading…

Fall tech announcement season is here, and Amazon is the next up to bat: the company just announced its next big hardware event for September 25th.

Details are slim, with the company only promising that it’ll “share some new things from the Amazon Devices and Services team,” but if past years are any indication, expect a whole pile of Amazon Echo and Amazon Fire TV-related hardware announcements — along with a possible surprise or two.

Amazon recently announced a new Fire TV Cube and a new lineup of Fire TVs at IFA 2019 earlier in September, but there are plenty of other Amazon products that could use a refresh before the holiday season, including the popular Echo line of speakers and the company’s...

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• McDonald's announced the acquisition of AI startup Apprente for an undisclosed sum on Tuesday.
• Apprente builds AI designed to understand and respond to human speech, which McDonald's said it plans to implement at its drive-thrus.
• Earlier in 2019 the fast food giant bought a separate AI company for $300 million to help tailor its touchscreen menu offerings to customers.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

McDonald's just bought an AI startup that could take human interaction out of the equation for its drive-thrus.

The fast food behemoth on Tuesday announced it was acquiring Silicon Valley AI startup Apprente. Apprente specialises in using AI to build a "voice-based conversational system," effectively AI that is capable of understanding and responding to human speech.

In a press release McDonald's said the idea was to use Apprente's voice tech to provide "faster, simpler and more accurate order taking" at drive-thrus.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that McDonald's had started testing voice-activated drive-thrus, in tandem with robotic fryers.

Read more: McDonald's just launched its first new type of restaurant since the drive-thru — here's what it's like to eat there

The company has already been trialling Apprente's technology in selected drive-thrus, and not only is it acquiring the company, but also establishing a new tech unit called "McD Tech Labs" to house it.

"McDonald's expects to grow its presence in Silicon Valley with the hiring of additional engineers, data scientists and other advanced technology experts to join McD Tech Labs," the company said. McDonald's did not publicly disclose how much it paid for Apprente.

McDonald's acquisition of Apprente is its second foray into AI this year. In March it bought AI personalization company Dynamic Yield for $300 million, and is using its technology to tailor menus to customers in attempt to sell them more food.

Other restaurant chains are also investing in tech that could cut out human workers. Starbucks announced its acquisition of Brightloom, a company that had previously operated a chain of restaurants without waiters, in July.

SEE ALSO: Robots make burgers at this San Francisco start-up backed by Alphabet Inc.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's why phone companies like Verizon and AT&T charge more for extra data

The chain will also form a global technology team, McD Tech Labs, to further support its future innovations.

The members of the Business Roundtable issued a framework designed to avoid overlapping standards by calling on comprehensive rules that apply across industries.

Apple’s extended warranty, AppleCare+, has always covered iOS and Apple Watch devices for a total of two years. But after its iPhone 11 event, the company quietly introduced a new option that basically turns AppleCare+ into a full-on monthly subscription, allowing consumers to continue paying beyond the regular coverage period and keep going for as long as Apple is able to service their product. The change was spotted by 9to5Mac.

Apple had already offered monthly installments for AppleCare+, but that was only an alternative to paying a lump sum for the same two-year coverage total. And it seems Apple has now eliminated this payment option.

With the new approach, Apple uses the pretty clear wording of “pay monthly until canceled.” As 9...

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• Apple held an event at Apple Park's Steve Jobs Theater on Tuesday to unveil new iPhones, an Apple Watch, a new iPad, and more.
• Apple's tagline for this event was "By Innovation Only."
• Based on what we actually saw at the event, though, it should have been called "By Iteration Only."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple's annual iPhone event for 2019 is in the books.

Apple's "By Innovation Only" event gave us three brand-new iPhone models — the 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max — a new Apple Watch, a new iPad, and release dates for a handful of Apple services that were announced earlier this year.

Read more: Here's everything Apple announced at its big iPhone 11 event

But that's about it.

There were no major surprises on Tuesday — no "One More Thing" — and some of Apple's greatest innovations teased in news reports ahead of the event just weren't ready.

Here's why Apple's iPhone 11 event should have been called "By Iteration Only" instead of "By Innovation Only."

SEE ALSO: Here's everything Apple announced at its big iPhone 11 event

SEE ALSO: Apple will release its next major iPhone software on September 19. Here are 10 new features worth getting excited about.

First, let's talk hardware. All of the major products are new and exciting, but they're not reinventing the wheel necessarily.

The new iPad? Its most "innovative" new feature is a slightly bigger screen, and its low $329 price tag.

The most "innovative" aspect of the new Apple Watch Series 5 is its always-on display, a feature people have been begging for since the days of Pebble watches. Other than that, the Apple Watch Series 5 is a minor update from last year's redesigned Series 4.

The iPhone 11 has some gorgeous new colors, and a cool new ultrawide camera, but otherwise it will look and feel almost identical to anyone who tried last year's iPhone XR.

The iPhone 11 Pro, similarly, has an excellent new camera system that should help it catch up with superior Android shooters, but the phone itself is not all that different from last year's iPhone XS.

The most innovative features in these new phones? Slow-motion selfies, and the ability to hold the shutter button in the Camera app to take a video — things that apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat already do.

The most innovative tech Apple talked about on stage was a new feature for the iPhone 11 Pro called "Deep Fusion," where the phone's neural engine selects the best pixels in each shot to optimize your photo for details and low noise — but that feature won't be ready until "later this year."

One feature Apple didn't talk about on stage was the new U1 chip in the new iPhone 11 Pro, which lets you precisely locate other Apple devices with the U1 chip. For now, it will help with sharing files, but it's not the Tile-like service people were expecting for finding random objects around your home. (That service may be announced soon, though.)

To me, it felt like the most innovative announcement of the day wasn't hardware, but pricing for Apple's new services. Apple Arcade and TV Plus, its subscriptions for original games and TV shows, will be $5 per month for the whole family — and free for a year if you buy a new Apple product. Now that's innovation!

Overall, though, it felt like there was not much actual innovation on display — but a whole lot of iteration. The iPad got a bigger screen, the Apple Watch got a minor update, and the iPhone 11 feels like the third consecutive year of the iPhone X design.

Yes, you're in for a treat if you're upgrading from much older devices — like anything made prior to 2017. But if you've bought anything from Apple over the past couple of years, then these new products will probably feel familiar.

Apple is rumored to be working on some futuristic new products, like a redesigned 5G-enabled iPhone and a pair of augmented-reality (AR) glasses. Apple also usually holds one final event of the year, typically around October. Here's hoping we get more innovation, and less iteration, at the next big event.

• A slew of data breaches, exploits, and backdoor hacks have compromised the private data of hundreds of millions of users in 2019 so far.
• Growing trends include supply-chain attacks, where hackers break into a company's software that's in turn distributed to clients, and ransomware, which can take your computer virtually hostage until you pay a ransom.
• Most high-profile hacks this year seem motivated by money, but a few have been traced to governments across the globe aiming to surveil individuals.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Nearly nine months in, 2019 has been a banner year for cybersecurity crises, with hackers targeting government agencies and private corporations alike.

Data breaches are not a new phenomenon, and federal agencies have acknowledged the constant threat of exploits. But 2019 has seen unprecedented attacks, including on systems that were previously seen as impenetrable, like Apple's iOS.

Most high-profile hacks this year were done with clear monetary aims, rather than carried out by spies or hacktivists. On a few occasions, however, hacks have been traced to governments across the globe attempting to surveil individuals.  

Last week, the US Department of Defense released a highly-anticipated new draft of cybersecurity standards, which tightens the norms that government contractors need to abide by for fending off hacks. The DOD is expected to issue its final framework for cybersecurity standards in January, according to FedScoop. 

Here's a look at the biggest hacks — representing the most users affected or the most impressive feats of hacking — from 2019 so far.

SEE ALSO: This one chart explains why cybersecurity is so important

WhatsApp was hacked and spyware was installed on users’ phones

In May, Hackers were able to install surveillance technology on the phones of WhatsApp users who answered their phone calls through the app, the Financial Times first reported.

It's unclear how many users fell victim to the attack. WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion users worldwide.

The FT reported that the spyware was designed by Israel's NSO group, and WhatsApp said in a statement that the hack bore the hallmarks of a private organization accustomed to working with government agencies. The Israeli firm denied any involvement.

An unprecedented iPhone hack targeted Uighur Muslims in China

For two years leading up to last month, "hacked websites" were used to attack iPhones, with every iPhone potentially vulnerable, according to Forbes.

The sophisticated hacks were discovered by cybersecurity researchers with Google's Project Zero, who announced last month that iPhone users who visited certain malicious websites could be vulnerable to surveillance across the phone's entire software, including passwords, messages, and location data.

The attack bore the signs of a state-backed effort, and was likely an attempt by the Chinese government to monitor Uighur Muslims, TechCrunch reported. 

Apple downplayed the scope of the attack in the days following Google's announcement, stating that the problem was patched within 10 days of the discovery and that the malicious websites comprised "a few dozen" sites specifically targeting Uighur users.

Hackers stole US Customs and Border Protection data, including travelers’ faces and license plates

In June, hackers breached a database of images kept by US Customs and Border Protection, including photos of travelers' faces and license plates, the agency announced at the time. 

The breach could have affected data of up to 100,000 travelers, according to the Washington Post. CBP stated that the images were obtained through a subcontractor's network but declined to name the subcontractor. 

But in the title of the Word Document containing CBP's announcement of the breach, the agency named a subcontractor that offers license plate reading technology — Perceptics — suggesting that the company may have been involved in the breach. Business Insider has reached out to Perceptics for comment.

A federal defense contractor was hit by Emotet malware

Just this week, a government tech contractor based in Virginia was hacked and several of its systems were put up for sale on the dark web, cybersecurity watchdog Brian Krebs reported.

The extent of the damage from the breach wasn't immediately clear. The contractor had ties to the US Department of Transportation, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of Homeland Security. 

The contractor, Miracle Systems, was hit by a malware strain known as Emotet that is typically distributed through email attachments. Miracle Systems CEO Sandesh Sarda told Krebs that the compromised systems were part of the firm's test environment and "no longer valid," but the Secret Service was investigating the hacks as of Monday.

A Quest Diagnostics breach exposed 11.9 million patients’ medical and financial data

Quest Diagnostics, a clinical laboratory, announced in June that an unauthorized user had accessed data on nearly 11.9 million patients, including credit card information and social security numbers.

The company did not immediately release details of how the breach occurred, but said that the unauthorized user had access to the information for months between Aug. 1, 2018 and March 30, 2019, Reuters reported.  

The company blamed for the breach was American Medical Collection Agency, a debt collector that handled the data. AMCA lost its four largest clients including Quest following the breach and filed for Chapter 11 protection, aiming to liquidate, according to Bloomberg.

Hackers broke into Microsoft’s Visual Studio and seeded backdoors into at least three video games

Microsoft found in April that hackers hijacked its development tool Visual Studio, seeding backdoors into three video game companies that use the tool. As many as 92,000 computers were running malicious versions of the affected video games, according to WIRED.

WIRED reports that the group responsible is likely a mysterious Chinese hacker collective known as Barium, which has been on a hacking spree for years.

The attack is an example of a supply chain hack, where hackers seed malicious code into a company's software that is in turn distributed to clients. In this case, the supply chain hack was especially difficult to detect because the video game companies digitally signed their software before distributing them, marking them as legitimate even though they contained malware.

Ransomware attacks continued to sweep local governments throughout the U.S.

Continuing a trend from years past, hackers used ransomware to extort state and local governments across the nation for money throughout 2019.

Targets this year included the city of Baltimore, a Georgia court agency, a group of cities in Florida, and several local agencies in Texas. 

While the Florida cities agreed to pay over $1 million in ransom, the other municipalities refused to pay hackers, instead shelling out millions of dollars to rebuild their IT infrastructure from scratch and protect against future attacks.

Fortnite warned 250 million players of a hack after some were hit with ransomware

Fortnite users were warned of a hack in August after some players were hit with ransomware that encrypted files on their computer and demanded payment for them to be unlocked.

The online video game warned its massive user base against downloading a supposed aimbot cheat tool, which claimed to give players an edge over competitors but actually loaded their computers with ransomware, according to Forbes.

To avoid the hack, users were given simple instructions: Don't download third-party software to cheat.

Hackers installed backdoors on thousands of ASUS computers using its own software

In an attack that began last year but wasn't discovered until 2019, hackers installed a malicious backdoor in thousands of computers made by Taiwan-based hardware giant ASUS.

The operation, first reported by Motherboard, placed malicious files in an ASUS software update, which the company unwittingly distributed to users through its Live Update Utility feature. 

The group responsible for the hack is likely the China-based Barium, according to WIRED. Barium is also believed to be behind the supply-chain hack of Microsoft's Visual Studio this year.

Manufacturing firms across the globe were struck by LockerGoga ransomware attacks

Since the start of the year, at least five manufacturing firms have fallen victim to ransomware known as LockerGoga. 

Like other aggressive forms of ransomware, LockerGoga can shut down computers and lock out users until they pay hackers a ransom. The malware can also shut down physical equipment, temporarily crippling manufacturing companies.

According to WIRED, firms hacked by LockerGoga found that their files had been encrypted within minutes. The only accessible file was a "ReadMe" file that said, "Greetings! There was a significant flaw in the security system of your company. You should be thankful the flaw was exploited by serious people and not by some rookies. They would have damaged all your data by mistake or for fun."

Tens of millions of peoples’ banking information was stolen in a Capital One data breach

In one of the largest hacks of a financial institution in history, Capital One announced in July that it had suffered a data breach, impacting tens of millions of credit card applicants.

Users' banking information, including transaction history, balances, credit scores, and addresses, were stolen. Some peoples' social security numbers were taken, but credit card information was not compromised, Capital One said at the time. 

Paige Thompson, a software engineer who previously worked for Amazon, was arrested and charged with computer fraud and abuse in connection with the hack. She could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.