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• Huawei just caught a break in the UK after the government postponed a decision on whether to exclude the Chinese firm from the country's 5G networks.
• Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright was expected to announce the government's position on Huawei during his telecoms supply chain review on Monday, but instead said the UK government is "not yet in a position" to make a decision.
• Wright said this was because of a lack of clarity on the part of the US government as to the implications of its trade ban on Huawei.
• Huawei Vice President Victor Zhang said Wright's announcement gave the company "confidence" that it can continue to work in the UK.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Huawei has just massively benefited from President Trump's fudging on a US trade ban.

The UK government was due to announce its official position on allowing Huawei's equipment into the country's 5G networks on Monday, but instead it decided to postpone the judgement.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright told the House of Commons during his telecoms supply chain review that the government is "not yet in a position" to make a decision on Huawei.

Wright implied that the postponement was due to a lack of clarity from the US government, which blacklisted Huawei in May after deeming it a national security risk.

"Since the US government's announcement, we have sought clarity on the extent and implications, but the position is not yet entirely clear. Until it is, we have concluded it would be wrong to make specific decisions in relation to Huawei."

The UK has been looking closely at whether Huawei poses a security risk if permitted to provide communications equipment to the country's telecoms operators.

UK officials have downplayed the idea that Huawei spies on behalf of the Chinese government, but did warn in March that the company's kit was riddled with software flaws. As a major ally of the US, the UK is also under pressure to follow the American view of Huawei as a national security threat.

These concerns became more complicated after former defence secretary Gavin Williamson was fired in May after an inquiry found him guilty of leaking Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to allow Huawei limited access to build the UK 5G network. Williamson denied being the source of the leak.

Meanwhile, the US position on Huawei since the ban is now unclear.

The US Commerce Department originally placed Huawei on an entity list in May, meaning US firms required a special license to trade with the company.

But President Trump announced at the G8 summit in June that he was relaxing the ban, and would allow American companies to sell to Huawei. A few days later however a Department of Commerce email obtained by Reuters told staff to still treat Huawei as blacklisted. There is also conflict between the President and Congress as to whether the ban on Huawei should be softened. Last week a group of senators filed a piece of legislation which, if passed, would block Trump from easing the pressure on the Chinese tech giant.

Read more: Trump meets with top US tech leaders to discuss sales to Huawei as he moves to soften restrictions against the Chinese tech giant

Huawei said it was emboldened by the UK's decision to delay its judgement. "The UK Government's Supply Chain Review gives us confidence that we can continue to work with network operators to rollout 5G across the UK," Huawei's Vice President Victor Zhang said in a statement sent to Business Insider.

Wright also stressed the need for a diverse set of equipment suppliers for 5G, something Zhang seized upon in his statement. "We welcome the Government's commitment to 'a diverse telecoms supply chain,'" said Zhang. Huawei, Nokia, and Ericsson dominate the market.

"The evidence shows excluding Huawei would cost the UK economy £7 billion and result in more expensive 5G networks, raising prices for anyone with a mobile device," Zhang added.

SEE ALSO: The Trump administration is warning allies to stay away from a powerful Chinese company — but not everyone's listening

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NOW WATCH: 5 things wrong with Apple's lightning cable

Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has announced its first phones to feature pop-up selfie cameras. When combined with their side-mounted fingerprint sensors, this means the Honor 9X and 9X Max have almost entirely bezel-less displays, with no display notches or hole-punches in sight. Android Authority reports that the Honor 9X will release in China on July 30th with prices starting at 1,399 yuan (around $203), while the 9X Max will come later on August 9th starting at 2,199 yuan (around $320).

Internally, both phones are using Huawei’s new Kirin 810 chipset, which made its debut on the Nova 5 Pro last month and is the company’s second 7nm chipset. The 9X starts with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, while the 9X Pro starts with 8GB of RAM...

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KaiOS, the phone operating system used on feature phones like last year’s Nokia 8110 remake, finally has an official version of WhatsApp. The app can be downloaded from the KaiStore for KaiOS devices with 256MB or 512MB of RAM, and it will come preinstalled on select phones starting in the third quarter of this year. The KaiOS version of the app supports both calling and messaging, and it includes end-to-end encryption just like it does on Android and iOS.

WhatsApp has been gradually released for select KaiOS devices over the past year. Last September, the app came to JioPhone handsets, which run the OS, and Android Authority reported that it came to the Nokia 8110 back in April, but only in India. Today marks the first time it is...

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You may be shocked to learn this, but nearly all of the promises AT&T made in the lead up to its $86 billion merger with Time Warner wound up not being true.

The company's promise that the deal wouldn't result in price hikes for consumers? False. The company's promise the deal wouldn't result in higher prices for competitors needing access to essential AT&T content like HBO? False. AT&T's promise they wouldn't hide Time Warner content behind exclusivity paywalls? False. The idea that the merger would somehow create more jobs at the company? False.

Of course the press and public aren't the only folks AT&T misled. To glean the support of the telecom sector's biggest union, the Communications Workers of America, AT&T apparently promised that newly acquired Time Warner (and subsidiary) workers would be able to join the union. But when the time came to actually allow those employees in, guess what? AT&T suddenly declared that wouldn't be happening for the vast majority of them:

"Of about 22,000 U.S. employees who previously worked at Time Warner, AT&T claimed the agreement applies to at most 82, a union official wrote in a letter attached to a June court filing. CWA, which already represents about 90,000 AT&T employees, has asked a judge to order arbitration. In May, the company asked that the case be dismissed, saying the company has “the right to determine” which employees are covered by unionization provisions."

Granted if you spend five seconds looking at the history of major mergers in the telecom and media space, none of this should be surprising.

Merger after merger, a universe of amazing promises are revealed that post deal, never actually materialize. Any conditions that are affixed are usually theatrically hollow, and adherence to them is rarely enforced. In AT&T's case, not a single merger condition was affixed to the deal, thanks in large part to a comically-myopic ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who was oblivious to AT&T's plan to use the death of net neutrality, regulatory capture at the FCC, and ownership of essential content as a competitive bludgeon in the streaming wars to come.

At some point, you'd think that major telecom unions would stop supporting megadeals that almost uniformly result in higher prices, less competition, and fewer jobs (given redundant positions are pretty uniformly eliminated a year or two after the ink is dry). But the CWA pretty routinely can't help itself; it also breathlessly supported AT&T's 2011 merger with T-Mobile, which was ultimately blocked for being exceptionally terrible. Fortunately the CWA seems to recognize the latest megamerger proposal, T-Mobile's planned $26 billion merger with Sprint, is going to be bad for the sector as well.

At some point you'd think that everybody in the chain, from unions and consumers to the press and antitrust enforcers, would realize these industry megadeals are almost always uniformly harmful. Pre-merger promises never materialize, prices routinely go up, and job losses abound; yet each and every time there's a new megadeal proposed we appear to have learned nothing, just like some purgatorial version of Charlie Brown and Lucy football.

• Starbucks announced a new deal with tech startup Brightloom on Monday. 
• The coffee giant granted Brightloom a license for elements of the coffee giant's software in exchange for an equity stake in the startup and a seat on its board of directors. 
• Brightloom — called Eatsa prior to its rebranding on Monday — is a restaurant tech company that previously operated a chain of restaurants where customers ordered via kiosk and did not need to interact with any employees. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Starbucks has a new deal with a tech startup that previously operated restaurants with zero human interaction. 

On Monday, Starbucks announced it is taking an equity stake in restaurant tech company Brightloom. Starbucks has granted Brightloom a license for elements of the coffee giant's software in exchange for an equity stake in the startup — which was called Eatsa until it announced its rebranding on Monday — and a seat on its board of directors. 

"It really is about the opportunity to change an entire industry. ... Any restaurant brand now realizes that for them to be in the game, it's no longer a 'nice to have it' — they have to have a robust digital platform," Brightloom CEO Adam Brotman told Business Insider. 

Brightloom's initial work with Starbucks will focus on providing software for the company's license partners around the world.

Digital has been a major sales driver and focus at Starbucks over the last decade. However, international locations still lack the capabilities of company-owned stores in the US. Currently, fewer than half of the more than 80 countries that Starbucks operates in have access to the chain's mobile app. Only eight countries allow customers to order and pay via app. 

Two international franchisees, Alsea and Alshaya, are part of Brightloom's most recent $30 million Series B funding round. The round, also announced on Monday, was led by Tao Capital Partners and Valor Equity Partners.

In March, Starbucks announced a $100 million investment in Valor Siren Ventures (VSV), a new fund managed by Valor Equity Partners and focused on food and retail startups. At the time, Starbucks said that it would also explore "direct commercial arrangements" with startups that VSV invests in. 

Brightloom, then Eatsa, was founded in 2015. At the time, the company operated a chain of restaurants where customers did not have to interact with any employees. Eatsa functioned essentially like a vending machine or a high-tech automat, with customers ordering via kiosk and meals appearing in cubbies without the need for employee interaction. 

At its peak, there were Eatsa locations in San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, DC. In 2018, the company closed the final two Eatsa locations to focus on restaurant technology and software.

Read more: We visited a restaurant that's powered by machines instead of people — here's what it's like

Brotman, who previously served as a Starbucks executive from 2009 to 2018, joined the company in April after being approached by Jon Shulkin, the executive chairman of Brightloom, and Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. 

"They confided to me that they were exploring a relationship to do something really interesting and historic around taking the Starbucks digital flywheel technology and combining it with what Brightloom has, creating the world's first end-to-end digital flywheel platform. ... It was an opportunity I couldn't pass up," Brotman said. 

While Brightloom's immediate focus will be on Starbucks franchise partners, the company plans to offer services to all types of restaurants. 

SEE ALSO: Inside the infamous dead mall that Amazon is turning into a 700,000-square foot fulfillment center

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NOW WATCH: How lobster went from the 'poor man's protein' to the delicacy we eat today

Slack is unveiling a new version of its desktop app for Windows and macOS today that promises big performance improvements. Slack has rebuilt its desktop app to focus on speed, and the company claims Slack will now launch 33 percent faster than before. The Slack app will even use 50 percent less RAM than before, according to the company.

Both of these performance improvements will be noticeable for many of Slack’s customers, but they’re particularly key if you use multiple workspaces in the existing Slack desktop app. Slack has totally rebuilt the desktop app so that all of the underlying code is multi-workspace aware. The result is that Slack will no longer create a standalone copy for each workspace and take up RAM for each instance....

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Microsoft posted the fourth quarter of its 2019 financial results today, reporting revenue of $33.7 billion and net income of $13.2 billion. Both are big increases year-over-year, setting a new record fiscal year for Microsoft. The results also come as Microsoft continues to be valued as a $1 trillion company thanks to the company’s market cap. Microsoft first passed the $1 trillion milestone in this quarter, thanks to its continued growth in cloud and diverse businesses.

Surface revenue was up in the same quarter last year, and it’s up once again by 14 percent. Microsoft attributes this to “strong growth in our commercial segment.” This growth shows that Surface hardware is selling well, despite no new refreshed models during this...

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A new set of leaked images of Google’s forthcoming Pixel 4 smartphone have surfaced on the web, showing off something that we’ve been expecting: it’ll have a large bezel on the top of the phone.

The leaked images comes from Ice universe (via 9to5Google) on Twitter, and show off the phone’s front panel. The images seem to confirm what we’ve suspected thus far, based on renders and dimensions of the phones: it’ll have some larger forehead and chin bezels that are bigger than competing phones like the S10 Plus or the OnePlus 7 Pro. Those bezels will cover up the variety of sensors and front-facing cameras that might otherwise have been hidden with a notch or popup camera.

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The Superhuman controversy from earlier this month, in which a former Silicon Valley exec blew the lid off a series of controversial email surveillance tools offered by the up-and-coming startup, has prompted a bit of soul searching among those in the tech industry. But in twisted fashion, the public blasting of a company like Superhuman has been the tech equivalent of opening Pandora’s Box, unearthing all sorts of free and easily available tools that have done this for years and can be employed by anyone with just the tiniest shred of tech savvy.

For instance, an open source, Python-based web tool called Supertracker has popped up on Github, courtesy of Delian Asparouhov, an investor with the venture capital firm Founder’s Fund. It...

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• Passwords, PIN numbers, and fingerprints play a relatively small and insecure role in keeping your online accounts and data safe. 
• Companies use security measures called behavioral biometrics that you likely don't know about, like tracking your mouse movements and the typical behavior in your accounts, measuring the angle you typically use your device, and measuring how fast you swipe around an app.
• Behavioral biometrics are more secure and convenient than more typical security measures.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Once you enter your password to access your accounts, you might imagine the website dusting off its hands in satisfaction that its verification process is complete and that, yes, it now knows it was you who just logged in and not an imposter.

But it doesn't stop there — websites and the companies behind them often monitor your behavior as a security measure, too.

"We look into behavioral biometrics," Etay Maor, a security advisor at IBM Security, told Business Insider. "We've been doing this for years ... most of the industries I talk to look into these things."

Behavioral biometrics are similar to regular biometrics, like fingerprints. But instead of recognizing a fingerprint, your actions and behavior within a website or app where you have an account with sensitive information are monitored to authenticate you.

You've probably encountered some examples of behavioral biometrics. For example, if you've ever seen an alert that says "You're logging in from a device you don't usually use," where a website recognizes that you're logging in from a new device.

There's also location-based security alerts, where your account is being accessed from a location that you don't typically frequent. Someone recently tried to access one of my accounts from Kuala Lumpur, but I was in bed in Connecticut when this attempt happened. I got an alert, and took the appropriate actions to better secure that account.

But there are other forms of behavioral biometrics that occur while you're using an app or when you're in your online accounts, and you likely have no idea it's happening.

The way you move your mouse once you log in, how fast you swipe around an app, what you typically do within an app or website, and even the angle at which you hold your phone are being monitored, and they're examples of behavioral biometrics.

Even when you're not using your devices, behavioral biometrics are in play. In fact, not using your devices is a biometric in itself. If your bank account was hacked while you're asleep and fraudulent transactions are being made, for example, banks can tell that the devices you usually use are offline. Your phone might be laying still and flat (because it's on your bedside table) and your laptop is in sleep mode. From that information, and considering the activity going on, a bank might suspect that something is awry, and it can push out an alert of suspicious activity. 

Indeed, your behavior is unique to you, like a fingerprint. And it's more secure than passwords, PINs, and even your actual fingerprint, according to Maor.

"Passwords are not secure today because there are so many ways for hackers to guess and generate passwords. We're in weird stage where passwords are becoming harder for a human to remember and yet still extremely easy for a machine or algorithm to guess," Maor said.

That's why Microsoft is ditching the common password and is encouraging users to log into Windows 10 using PINs and its Windows Hello facial recognition, where that data is stored in your devices. The company argues that on-device storage for security data is more secure than passwords stored in a company's servers.  

Still, even PINs and standard biometrics aren't the ultimate in security. "If it's something that a human knows or remembers, an attacker can extract that," Maor said, whether it's by hacking or social engineering, where an attacker can convince you to give them your password by, say, pretending to be tech support for a website.

Even regular biometrics like fingerprints and irises can be socially engineered out of you. At the end of the day, passwords, PINs, and standard biometrics won't stop a "determined attack."

With behavioral biometrics, your typical behavior isn't something that can be easily replicated. "An attacker can't extract your mouse movement, or your behavior from you. Maybe to a certain extent, but that's a totally different level of attack," Maor said.

It seems spooky, and it raises privacy concerns. And Maor recognizes that. "It sounds a bit Orwellian because it sounds like you're being followed all the time. But yeah, as soon as you go into the website, we try to protect you by making sure it really is you without you knowing that we're doing this." 

Behavioral biometrics also have a practical use, as they're simply less annoying than traditional authentication methods, like remembering passwords or multi-factor authentication. Behavioral metrics that take place under the radar offer a better experience while also keeping you more secure. Maor argues that if a company tries to authenticate you by making it too difficult or time consuming to enter your account, you'll go to another company or service. 

Still, passwords, PINs, and fingerprints are still necessary first lines of defence, but they're only used to identify you. The real security that's used to authenticate you happens in the background, without you even knowing.

SEE ALSO: Some Logitech wireless mice and keyboards are vulnerable to a significant security flaw that the company first fixed three years ago

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NOW WATCH: A hacker reveals the most secure thing you can do to your passwords

• US congressman Brad Sherman on Wednesday compared Facebook's proposed Libra cryptocurrency to 9/11, claiming it will result in more American deaths over time than the 3,000+ lives that were lost during the September 11th terrorist attacks.
• Sherman claims Libra will enable "tax evaders, terrorists, sanctions evaders, and drug dealers," and will make it difficult for the federal government to fund cancer research or prevent Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons.
• In a Bloomberg interview on Thursday night, Sherman stood by his remarks and explained further why the toll from Facebook's Libra "will exceed what was lost on 9/11."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

At a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman from California compared Facebook's proposed Libra cryptocurrency to the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

"Now, we're told by some that innovation is always good. The most innovative thing that happened this century is when Osama Bin Laden came up with the innovative idea of flying two airplanes into towers," he said on Wednesday. "That's the most consequential innovation, although this may do more to endanger innovation than even that."

On Thursday, when asked about his controversial remarks during an interview with Bloomberg, Sherman double down on his comparison, saying "the number of deaths that will occur in America, if this is successful in playing the role it's intended, will exceed what was lost on 9/11."

Here's what Sherman said on Bloomberg:

"Look, Zuckerberg is not as evil as Osama bin Laden, because the harm that Zuckerberg will do is a mere unintended by-product of his effort to make hundreds of millions of dollars more. But the fact is, in creating a tool for drug dealers, that's going to result in deaths on the streets of America every day. By creating a tool for tax evaders, that's going to mean the federal government can't fund cancer research, or can't fund the defense of the United States to the degree that we'd like to. And by providing a method for sanctions evaders, we're going to make it much more difficult for the federal government to prevent Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons."

Sherman said the key to the United States economy is the government's ability to control the banking system, but since all Libra transactions would be private, it would offer "financial privacy" to "tax evaders, terrorists, sanctions evaders, and drug dealers."

At the House hearing on Wednesday, Sherman didn't ask Facebook's cryptocurrency chief David Marcus any questions about Libra; instead, he spent five straight minutes describing the dangers of Libra, and how it could be used to finance "the next horrific terrorist attack against Americans."

Bloomberg anchor Emily Chang asked Sherman if he went too far with his comparison to 9/11, but the 64-year-old congressman stood by his statement.

"The number of deaths that will occur in America, if this is successful in playing the role it's intended, will exceed what was lost on 9/11. The additional heroin deaths, the inability to fund cancer research, the lack of success of our sanctions, will be very important. But it won't be all of a sudden. It won't be one big day. I had to be asked by a reporter, 'does that make Zuckerberg as evil as Osama bin Laden?' Clearly not. Bin Laden was trying to cause American deaths, Zuckerberg is just disinterested in whether they occur."

You can watch Sherman's entire interview on Bloomberg TV below.

For what it's worth, Sherman isn't the only politician coming down on Libra.

On Tuesday, during a Senate hearing on Libra, Sen. Chris Van Hollen from Maryland compared the Libra Association, the non-profit that will oversee Libra, to "Spectre," the evil organization from the James Bond films. And on Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that the financial assets that would set the value for the Libra currency would be "controlled by an undemocratically selected coalition of largely massive corporations" like Facebook, Uber, eBay, Spotify, Visa, and others.

SEE ALSO: Facebook must overcome a severe lack of trust if it hopes to bring Libra, its new cryptocurrency, to the masses

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NOW WATCH: All the ways Amazon is taking over your house

Microsoft has warned nearly 10,000 people that nation-state hackers have targeted or breached their accounts in the past year. The software giant revealed that around 84 percent of these attacks are aimed at businesses, while the remaining 16 percent are targeted at personal email accounts. The statistics reveal the extent of nation-state attacks, and that as many as 1,600 personal Microsoft Accounts have been affected by these hackers recently.

Most of these attacks originate from hackers in Iran, North Korea, and Russia according to Microsoft. “We have seen extensive activity from the actors we call Holmium and Mercury operating from Iran, Thallium operating from North Korea, and two actors operating from Russia we call Yttrium and...

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Slack says it is resetting the passwords of some of its users after new information has come to light about a security breach from March 2015. Any users who created their account before this date, who have not changed their passwords since, and who do not use single-sign-on can expect to have their passwords reset by the company if it hasn’t happened already. Slack says that around one percent of its users fall into all three of these categories, which ZDNet reports amounts to around 65,000 users.

The company chose to reset the passwords after it learned that a collection of user email addresses and password combinations had been compromised. After an investigation, the company linked the credentials to a hack it suffered in 2015 when...

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Last week, the California Senate's Labor, Public Employment and Retirement Committee held a hearing and passed Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which promises to make it harder for companies to claim workers are independent contractors and increase the operating expenses of Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand companies that already find themselves unable to turn a profit.

Written by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzelez (D-San Diego), AB5 codifies the California Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles where an “ABC test” was introduced to determine whether a worker was an employee or an independent contractor. Individuals with sufficient control over how and when they did their work are independent contractors, while workers without much control are employees.

While AB5 easily passed in the Assembly this May, 53-11, it has a long and ugly fight ahead of as it must pass multiple votes in the Senate then be signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. Each step of the way is an opportunity for companies like Uber and Lyft to intervene and extract concessions. Newsom has been evasive about whether he’ll side with his long-time political supporters in the Bay Area or his deep bench of union endorsements, which filled his gubernatorial campaign war chest with millions.

Shortly after AB5 passed the Assembly vote, Uber's CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle with Lyft's co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer titled, "Uber, Lyft ready to do our part for drivers." In their op-ed, they declare that "our companies are no longer upstarts,” but are now “public companies that tens of millions of people rely on for mobility and for work." In response to the waves of protests, strikes, and regulatory backlash targeting their exploitative business model, the trio argues that the real problem lies with "century-old employment laws."

Over the past few months, Uber and Lyft, along with other companies like DoorDash and Postmates, have tried to negotiate with unions and propose alternatives to AB5. The major alternative proposed is a third category for worker classification. This third category would be a chimera where workers could remain independent contractors but gain some of the benefits and protections expected for employees.

While these companies are united in supporting the third category in the name of a flexible work schedule, workers and unions are not. The California Labor Federation (CFL), a group that represents most of California's unions and over 2.1 million workers, is firmly opposed to anything other than AB5. In New York, attempts by the State Federation of Labor to craft a bill that worked similar to the proposed third category were lambasted by Hector Figueroa, then-president of New York's Service Employees International Union chapter.

Undeterred, Uber and Lyft have managed to patch together a coalition of driver support, thanks in part to a manipulative campaign where they sent out a vague petition using their apps prompting drivers to "fight for driver flexibility and independence." Drivers later revealed they did not know what the petition was for and did not think they were able to opt-out of signing it. The companies sponsored a counter-protest outside the Capitol Building in Sacramento as the hearing went on. Drivers organized by the California Chamber of Commerce and a coalition of groups that worked closely with Uber and Lyft against AB5 not only were helped in putting together a rally on the day before but paid $25 to $100 to attend.

Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Postmates derive a huge share of their sales from California: 41 percent of all Postmates' US sales are in California, 27 percent with DoorDash, 24 percent of Lyft's rides, 17 percent of Uber's rides, and 13 percent of UberEats' sales. When Tony West, Uber's general counsel and chief legal officer, was asked whether AB5 was an existential threat to Uber, he literally laughed then listed some (but not all) of Uber’s past scandals like its numerous lawsuits, toxic workplace culture, and massive data breach in 2016, the implication being that the company could survive if it became law.

The real threat is that AB5 could become a model everywhere. Let’s take Uber, for example. Before Uber went public, it filed and released an S-1 form, a document laying out all the information necessary for investors to clearly understand a company’s operations. Uber’s section dedicated to potential risks was particularly interesting. In it, Uber said its business would "be adversely affected if drivers were classified as employees instead of independent contractors" because it "generate[s] a significant percentage" of its gross revenue from five metro areas: Los Angeles, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, and São Paulo.

Uber has never made a profit and has actually lost over $14 billion in the last four years alone. In the prospectus, Uber insists that these five major metropolitan markets are essential to its path to profitability. In reality, what Uber actually relies on is the $20 billion in funding raised over the past decade and the $8 billion in new investments after going public in May. This investor welfare covers the cost of low prices that render each rideshare trip unprofitable, of driver incentives to combat the high turnover rate of drivers, and of promotions used to drive up demand.

The investors have continued piling that money onto Uber because they believe Khosrowshahi when he talks about becoming the “Amazon of transportation” or the platform on which all transportation happens. In other words, a monopoly. After achieving a monopoly, some commentators warn that Uber will then charge whatever price it wants and use its dominant position to both pay back investors and kill potential competitors. As an added bonus, Uber promises it will turn its labor costs to zero by deploying a fleet to autonomous vehicles (which may prove to be difficult to widely adopt). That is Uber’s path to profitability.

Equity research analysts at Barclays project Uber is on track to lose $3.9 billion in 2019 and if AB5 were passed, it would cost the company upwards of an additional $500 million. A drop in the bucket. But if AB5 were to become law and other states follow California's example and pass similar laws, it could constrict these companies' already narrow paths to profitability. Investors saw no clear path to profitability in Lyft’s S-1. Postmates hopes to use the money generated from going public to expand geographically and achieve profitability. DoorDash says it’s profitable (if you don't include overhead expenses like salaries and rent). If nationally adopted, the investors behind each of these companies could cash out and bankrupt them. AB5 isn’t an existential threat, but it will cause one.

To celebrate World Emoji Day (which, yes, is apparently a thing now), Apple and Google have released a preview of the new emoji which will be arriving on their mobile operating systems later this year. The actual subjects of the emoji were announced by Unicode back in February, now we’re seeing how they’ll actually look in practice.

There are a couple of interesting designs in there. For example, I can’t help but think that Apple’s design for a plate of falafel kinda looks like a big pile of shit? Not human shit, and not a fun cartoony soft-serve ice cream poop like the classic Pile of Poo, but like a pile of dung from a farmyard animal. Especially when viewed at the proper emoji scale of an Instagram comment or iMessage response....

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• Being a YouTube star is a more sought-after profession than being an astronaut among kids in the US and United Kingdom, a recent survey of 3,000 kids shows.
• Children ages eight to 12 in the US, UK, and China were recently polled in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, resulting in the first person to ever walk on the moon.
• Kids in the US and UK are three times more likely to want to be YouTubers or vloggers rather than astronauts, while kids in China were more likely to want to be astronauts.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Neil Armstrong became a role model in the eyes of kids everywhere 50 years ago when he became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969.

But today, kids are much more likely to aspire to be the next YouTube star rather than the next person in space. A recent survey conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Leggo shows that children in the US and United Kingdom are three times more likely to want to be YouTubers or vloggers, rather than astronauts, when they grow up.

The survey asked 3,000 kids, aged eight to 12, to choose from five professions to answer what they wanted to be when they grow up: astronaut, musician, professional athlete, teacher or vlogger/YouTuber. Although the top choice among kids in the US and UK was vlogger/YouTuber, 56% of kids in China said they wanted to be an astronaut.

The survey was conducted in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. The poll surveyed 3,000 kids, ages eight to 12, from the US, the UK, and China.

The results of this survey reflect a trend seen among Generation Z. As evident at this year's VidCon, a three-day conference about online video, an estimated 75,000 teens and their parents showed up to hear from their favorite YouTubers.

"Every time I go to schools, the most said thing from 90% of kids is, 'I want to be a YouTuber,'" YouTuber DeStorm Power told Business Insider. "They want to be social media stars."

SEE ALSO: I spent 3 days with teens' favorite social media stars and now I'm convinced that you don't need YouTube to be internet famous

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NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos is worth over $160 billion — here's how the world's richest man makes and spends his money

• A glowing wooden box Mark Zuckerberg invented to help his wife sleep has been developed into an actual product by an entrepreneur.
• In his original Facebook post about the box, the Facebook CEO encouraged entrepreneurs to take his idea and run with it.
• The "Zucklight" has secured more than $100,000 in backing on crowdfunding site Kickstarter since it went live in June.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A product inspired by a DIY invention of Mark Zuckerberg's has raked in more than $100,000 in funding from Kickstarter.

Zuckerberg revealed in April that he had invented a glowing wooden box to help his wife, Priscilla Chan, with insomnia. The Facebook CEO called it the "sleep box."

"It sits on her nightstand, and between the hours of 6-7 a.m. it emits a very faint light — visible enough that if she sees it she'll know it's an okay time for one of us to get the kids, but faint enough that the light won't wake her up if she's still sleeping. And since it doesn't show the time, if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she knows to just go back to sleep without having to worry about what time it is," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post.

Read more: Mark Zuckerberg built a glowing wooden box to help his wife sleep. Here are 3 similar gadgets you can actually buy.

In the same post, Zuckerberg urged others to take up the torch. "I'm putting this out there in case another entrepreneur wants to run with this and build sleep boxes for more people," he wrote.

Someone has done exactly that. A Kickstarter campaign launched in June for a product called the "Zucklight" has now garnered over $112,000 in funding, well over its original goal of $5,000 — which a spokesperson told CNBC was achieved within two hours of the page going live.

According to the Zucklight's page, the box can be controlled in conjunction with an app, that lets users control timings, brightness, and the colour of the light. Some versions of the box (it comes in "lite," "plus," and "pro") contain a wireless charger for smartphones. Early bird pricing for the Zucklight starts at $29, just under half the expected retail price of $60.

The entrepreneur behind the Zucklight is called Greg Hovannisyan, who told CNBC that he's had no contact with Zuckerberg himself. "Mark [Zuckerberg] is not affiliated with Zucklight in any way. We loved his idea, developed it even more and brought it to life," said Hovannisyan.

Here is the product trailer for the Zucklight:

Facebook was not immediately available to comment on the Zucklight.

SEE ALSO: These are the eccentric eating, sleeping, wellness, and workout regimes of the world's top tech billionaires

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NOW WATCH: The incredible story behind Slack, the app that's taken over offices everywhere

Oakland, California just became the third U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition in public spaces.

A city ordinance passed Tuesday night which prohibits the city of Oakland from "acquiring, obtaining, retaining, requesting, or accessing" facial recognition technology, which it defines as “an automated or semi-automated process that assists in identifying or verifying an individual based on an individual's face.”

The ordinance amends a 2018 law which requires any city staff member to get approval from the chair of Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission before “seeking or soliciting funds" for surveillance technology. State and federal funding for surveillance technology must also be approved by the chair, per the ordinance.

San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition by police and city government agencies a month ago, making it the first U.S. city to do so. Somerville, Mass., similarly banned the use of facial recognition last month. The success of a similar ordinance from Oakland shows that there’s momentum in major U.S. cities behind the idea that we shouldn’t just regulate the use of facial recognition, but ban it entirely.

According to a public memo by Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland City Council President, the ban was instituted on the basis that facial recognition is often inaccurate, lacks established ethical standards, is invasive in nature, and has a high potential for government abuse.

"Face recognition technology runs the risk of making Oakland residents less safe as the misidentification of individuals could lead to the misuse of force, false incarceration, and minority-based persecution," Kaplan said.

In a report to Oakland's Public Safety Committee, Chief of Police Anne Kirkpatrick said that the Oakland Police department doesn't currently have any technology that could be described as "facial recognition" and doesn’t have any plans to acquire the technology. However, Kirkpatrick argued that facial recognition could help law enforcement, and advised against a total ban.

“Staff does believe that Oakland’s current surveillance technology provides adequate thresholds for reviewing any possible future requests to test or purchase [facial recognition technology],” Kirkpatrick said.

Kirkpatrick said that the nearby San Mateo Sheriff’s Office has a shared “in-house facial recognition system” through the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), a regional law enforcement agency. Kirkpatrick recommended that the Oakland Police Department use information from this intelligence center. The NCRIC also uses Palantir.

So per Kirkpatrick’s suggestion, there wouldn’t be a total ban on facial recognition—just a restriction on where Oakland police can use it.

Tracey Rosenberg—a spokesperson for Oakland Privacy, a grassroots coalition of citizens dedicated to increasing "public transparency and oversight" over the use of surveillance—said in a phone call that the Oakland Police Department’s proposed compromise didn’t go far enough.

“The problem with that is it essentially becomes an outsourcing of a problematic technology,” Rosenberg said. “By investing in it, by using it, by normalizing it, we set up a situation where Oakland may not be engaging in real-time facial recognition, but they’re sort of funding the landscape of the development of the technology and its ubiquitous use in law enforcement.”

Last year, Oakland Privacy campaigned in favor of a Surveillance Equipment Transparency Ordinance, which now requires any city surveillance to have public use and privacy policies, data sharing information, and yearly use reports. Similar ordinances have passed in nine other cities, and Santa Clara County.

“When you have a police force that has a history of racial profiling, and then you give them software that we know is racially biased and unable to clearly distinguish the face of darker skinned people, and will potentially be informing police in real time that darker skinned people are criminals when in fact they are not by false matches,” Rosenberg said, “there’s potential there for horror and tragedy.”

• On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission launch, NASA made a simulation of what Neil Armstrong saw through his window as he piloted the lunar lander.
• Armstrong was the only one who could see the boulders covering the intended landing spot at the edge of the moon's West Crater. So he took control and flew past it to safer, less rocky ground. 
• NASA's simulation uses images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter along with trajectory information and Apollo 11 audio to reconstruct the view from Armstrong's window during those fateful three minutes.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Before Neil Armstrong took his small step onto the moon, an unexpected turn of events sent the mission off-course.

Armstrong was the Apollo 11 mission commander and pilot of the lunar module, called Eagle, the tiny spacecraft that launched from the main spaceship to carry the first humans to the surface of the moon.

The lunar module had overshot its intended landing point on a smooth part of the moon's surface by 4 miles, and the new target — on the West Crater's northeast flank — was covered in large boulders. Seeing the rocky landscape, Armstrong took manual control and flew the Eagle past the crater.

He was too focused on steering to talk with Mission Control.

Meanwhile, as Armstrong hunted for an impromptu landing site, the Eagle's computer was blaring an error code that neither Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin recognized. In the last four minutes, five alarms had gone off in the module. They didn't know it yet, but the guidance computer had crashed. Everything was in Armstrong's hands.

He soon spotted a safer landing spot 500 meters away, beside a smaller crater that would come to be known as the Little West Crater. The astronauts landed with only 45 seconds' worth of fuel left in the tank. A separate engine and fuel tank would secure their lift-off 21 hours later, when they would ascend to rejoin the main spaceship and Michael Collins, the astronaut who stayed in orbit. But they had just barely stuck the landing.

Relieved, Armstrong finally said: "The Eagle has landed."

Although the world watched live as the two Apollo 11 astronauts became the first people to stand on the moon, the only existing visuals of their hectic landing came from a camera mounted in Aldrin's tiny window.

But the size of the window and angle of the camera meant nobody had ever seen the danger that Armstrong saw — until now.

On the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, NASA has created a new simulation of Armstrong's view.

The space agency used footage from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft that's been orbiting the moon since 2009, observing, collecting data, and looking for scientifically valuable sites to investigate later. 

A team simulated the last 3 minutes and 7 seconds of the Apollo 11 moon landing using high-resolution images from LRO cameras, topography data, and the known Apollo 11 landing trajectory (based on callouts from the recorded audio). 

Take a look:

At the beginning of the video, you can see the moon's West Crater, which is over 620 feet (190 meters) in diameter, appear at the top. Then Armstrong directs the module right past it as mission control reads out altitudes and directions, regularly saying "looking good."

When they finally get a landing confirmation from Armstrong, mission control admits that they've all been holding their breath: "You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again." 

The field of view in the simulation is limited for accuracy, since the lunar module's windows were so small.

In the side-by-side comparison video below, you can see a similar shape in the actual footage from the camera in Aldrin's window. The new simulation is on the left, while the real footage is on the right.

The simulation is not 100% accurate, however, since it uses images captured many years after 1969.

Armstrong, of course, saw only the untouched dust and rock of the lunar surface. As Aldrin described it: "magnificent desolation." 

SEE ALSO: Something profound happens when astronauts see Earth from space for the first time

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NOW WATCH: Newly-released NASA footage shows what it's like to drive on the Moon first-hand

• David Marcus, head of Facebook's cryptocurrency efforts, testified at a Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing about Libra, the social network's new cryptocurrency push. 
• Marcus stated that the Libra Association, which will oversee Libra and be headquartered in Switzerland, will be regulated by the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC).
• But the FDPIC says — and Facebook confirms — that it hasn't been in touch. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

At a US Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Facebook said that Swiss authorities will regulate the Libra Association — a consortium of companies including Uber, Mastercard, and Facebook itself, which will itself oversee the new Libra cryptocurrency. 

The issue, it seems, is that this was news to those Swiss authorities. 

David Marcus, head of Facebook's cryptocurrency-focused Calibra subsidiary, testified in front of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on Tuesday. The hearing was called to examine Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency ambitions and address related data privacy concerns. 

Marcus stated in his prepared remarks that the Libra Association, which will be headquartered in Switzerland, will be regulated by the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC). The association will amass 100 members before Libra launches, Marcus said. 

"For the purposes of data and privacy protections, the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) will be the Libra Association's privacy regulator," said Marcus' testimony.

However, the FDPIC reportedly says that neither Facebook nor anybody else from the Libra Association ever actually got in touch.

"Until today we have not been contacted by the promoters of Libra," Hugo Wyler, the FDPIC head of communication, said in a statement to CNBC on Tuesday. "We expect Facebook or its promoters to provide us with concrete information when the time comes. Only then will we be able to examine the extent to which our legal advisory and supervisory competence is given. In any case, we are following the development of the project in the public debate."

"We've yet to meet with the FDPIC but look forward to meeting with them soon as part of our ongoing conversations with regulators and policymakers," a Calibra spokesperson told Business Insider.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The incredible story behind Slack, the app that's taken over offices everywhere

• NASA's Apollo Mission Control Center, which oversaw the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, has been restored and opened to visitors in Houston, Texas.
• The restoration effort took six years and $5 million. The room is now filled with original or historically accurate consoles, paint, and buttons.
• The screens show data and images from the Apollo 11 moon landing. 
• Here's what the room looks like.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Exactly 50 years ago, on July 16, 1969, NASA staff in the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center celebrated as Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins successfully blasted off of Earth, headed for the moon.

Armstrong and Aldrin stepped foot onto the lunar surface four days later, again with help from Mission Control. 

The fateful control room in Houston, Texas (that's who astronauts are talking to when they communicate with "Houston") was used to direct 42 space missions in total, starting with Gemini IV in 1965. Flight controllers in Mission Control monitored all the Apollo moon missions, including the first moonwalk. After the last space shuttle launch in 1992, NASA moved to a different control room and, later, a new building. 

Over time, consoles were unplugged, paint chipped, wallpaper peeled, and equipment fell into disrepair. People with building access even occasionally popped in to eat lunch there or take buttons as souvenirs, as the New York Times reported. 

But after six years and $5 million in investment, a team has restored Mission Control to its former glory. The space opened to the public on July 1, 2019 and now lives on today as it looked during Apollo 11. 

Here's what the room was like then, and what it's like to visit now.

SEE ALSO: NASA's next Mars rover will launch in 2020, and it's being built before our eyes — here's what the robot's birth has looked like

The restored Apollo Mission Control Center has been reupholstered and decorated with historically accurate details — including rotary phones, coffee mugs, and cigarettes — to look just as it did in July 1969.

In total, 400,000 people worked on the Apollo programs, and Mission Control was at the center of it all (on Earth, at least).

The room was cold and smelled of coffee and tobacco, according to Time.

The flight controllers in that room waved American flags as the Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down safely on Earth on July 24, 1969.

In total, the room was used during all 14 Apollo missions, nine Gemini missions, and 21 space shuttle missions.

Just one year ago, Mission Control looked like this. The empty room's carpet was worn and stained. Monitors' had been scratched. Metal appeared rusted, and the screens at the front of the room were broken.

Anyone with access to the building could come and go as they pleased, the Times reported, but that meant people occasionally left behind garbage.

Many buttons and dials had gone missing, since visitors sought out souvenirs.

Gene Kranz, an Apollo-era flight director who later became the director of NASA flight operations, told the Times that he had to clean up trash before giving any tours.

"This place was not representative of historic mission control," Kranz told the Times. "The configuration of the consoles in no way represented where we were and what we did."

Because the room was used throughout the space-shuttle program in the 1990s, much of the original equipment from the Apollo era had been replaced.

"Alumni who worked in flight control during the Apollo era had been advocating for years to do something about the state of the room," William Harris, president and CEO of Space Center Houston, told Houstonia Magazine. In 2013, Kranz and others decided to pursue a restoration project.

"The priority at Johnson Space Center is the current missions, the future missions, not preserving the past," Harris added.

Restoring the Mission Control Center was not easy — funding was the hardest part. The group needed $5 million to get the room back in shape.

The nearby city of Webster, Texas, where many Apollo-era staff lived during the program's heyday, put $3.5 million toward the restoration.

Space Center Houston — the museum associated with Johnson Space Center — raised over $500,000 on Kickstarter, and the city of Webster matched $400,000 of that fundraised total.

Restoration work started in July 2017. Photos from the 1960s helped the restoration team recreate the aesthetic of the Apollo era. They tracked down the consoles' original green paint and found extra viewing-room wallpaper hidden behind a fire extinguisher.

The group even pulled ceiling tiles that matched the originals from a phone booth in the Johnson Space Center lobby, according to the Times.

The restorers hunted down old equipment and other vintage items. The group placed a box in the Space Center lobby with a note asking NASA employees to return anything they had from the Apollo era.

"We got a lot of items back this way," Harris told Houstonia. "More than you would have expected."

Installing LED lights helped make the lighting more look like it did in 1969 while also protecting the room's contents from UV exposure.

"People came out of the woodwork from all over the place to give us items from that time that they thought would help," Harris said.

The team sought out historically accurate trash cans, chairs, and other items by scavenging around the Johnson Space Center, bidding on eBay, and requesting donations.

One curator got a phone call from a person whose father had worked at the factory that made the original console buttons. They offered a bag full of them, Houstonia reported. 

"It was great, because we really did need them," Harris said.

Today, the restored Mission Control Center boasts historically accurate coat racks, ash trays, flight-control manuals, and a coffee station to make the room feel like a time capsule.

The consoles are littered with pens, pencils, maps, stopwatches, binders, glasses, cigar boxes, and Winston or Marlboro cigarettes.

When the restoration team couldn't find original items from the '60s, they recreated objects with the most historically accurate materials available.

Recreating the information displayed on monitors and screens was especially challenging. According to a Space Center Houston blog post, "photographs and films provided some clues, but many focused on the flight controllers and not the screens."

"Due to the low light level of the room, many of the screens in the photos and films were overexposed when adjusted to capture the flight controllers," Paul Spana, the blog post's author, wrote.

The team wound up shipping the consoles to the Cosmophere space museum in Kansas, where experts restored and reanimated them.

Today, the five large screens at the front of the room display recreations of the images seen during during the Apollo 11 moon landing. The smaller consoles display data used that day.

"After 50 years, the flight controllers didn't recall a lot of the details about what was on the screens — they had been focused on getting the astronauts to the moon and back safely," Spana wrote. "Between their memory, books, photos, and the digitization of films that haven't been seen in a long time, the forgotten details began to fall in place."

Mission Control opened to visitors on July 1. Jennifer Keys, the restoration team's project manager, described the project as a "herculean effort," according to the Times.

Visitors can buy tickets on Space Center Houston's website.

"It was dazzling," Kranz told Times of his first visit to the restored room. "You couldn't believe this. All of a sudden you were 50 years younger and you wanted to work in there. I wanted back in that room to work."

Apple informed us that it has sent out a silent security update to Macs to remove software that was automatically installed by RingCentral and Zhumu. These video conferencing apps both used technology from Zoom — they’re essentially white labels — and thus they also had Zoom’s security flaws. Specifically, they installed secondary pieces of software that could take commands from websites to open up your webcam in a video conference without your intervention.

Even uninstalling those apps wouldn’t remove that secondary web server, which would mean that many users wouldn’t get the software vendors’ updates fixing the issue. That means Apple is best positioned to remove the offending software, and it is. Apple intends to fix the issue for...

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple informed us that it has sent out a silent security update to Macs to remove software that was automatically installed by RingCentral and Zhumu. These video conferencing apps both used technology from Zoom — they’re essentially white labels — and thus they also had Zoom’s security flaws. Specifically, they installed secondary pieces of software that could take commands from websites to open up your webcam in a video conference without your intervention.

Even uninstalling those apps wouldn’t remove that secondary web server, which would mean that many users wouldn’t get the software vendors’ updates fixing the issue. That means Apple is best positioned to remove the offending software, and it is. Apple intends to fix the issue for...

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Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon are remembered as arguably the greatest achievement of humanity. Saturday the 20th of July will mark 50 years to the day when a combination of immense investment and technological innovation allowed humans to walk on another planet for the first time. So later today Cisco will be making its most cutting edge Webex Meetings technology available to connect the globe to unite the teams who made this possible. NASA are an existing Cisco Webex customer and organisers of an anniversary gala that will be taking place in Florida tonight will be leveraging the Cisco technology to connect Apollo team members around the world.

Primarily the team of three astronauts; Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, come to mind when we think back to Apollo 11 but in reality the achievement was only made possible by a mammoth effort and the involvement of around 400,000 people back down on Earth. Three global locations were key to the mission’s success; the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center, Image and Mission Trackers in Australia, and the recovery team aboard the USS Hornet in San Francisco Bay.

Cisco and Buzz Aldrin Family Foundation will use Webex to connect the three critical locations so that personnel from each team can reconnect, reminisce and reflect on the teamwork that got man on the moon. UC Today spoke to Aruna Ravichandran, Cisco’s Vice President of Marketing for Collaboration, to find out more.

“We decided to partner with the Buzz Aldrin Family Foundation to bring together all of the people who were a part of this huge moment in history.”

The Kennedy Space Center will host The Apollo 50th Gala later on tonight to pay homage to the incredible feat that Apollo 11 represented. The launch took place from the site 50 years ago at 13:32 UTC. More than 500 guests will be in attendance including Apollo 11’s Command Module Pilot, Mike Collins, who orbited the moon in the command module Colombia, while Aldrin and Armstrong took the giant leap for mankind onto the moon’s surface.

An Astronaut panel will take place during the evening so that members of each team can discuss and recall the different phases of the mission. This may well be the first time that members from each team have all been connected at any one time.

“”We feel very humble that we could partner with the Foundation and help them make this type of reunion possible. It’s a great example of how with teamwork you can achieve anything.”

Apollo 11 relied on the historic event being broadcast and then relayed to Earth and this required radio telescopes across the globe. One of these telescopes near Canberra in Australia was the first to receive and then relay the historic TV images of astronaut Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon. Some of the Australian crew responsible for tracking the mission’s progress and ensuring the footage was seen globally were; John Saxon, Mike Dinn and Hamish Lindsay. The three will appear virtually at the gala using Webex Meetings technology.

Finally the vital team who ensured the astronauts were safely recovered after their return to Earth will also be using Webex to join the evenings celebrations at the gala. The USS Hornet was stationed in San Francisco Bay to facilitate the recovery operation and Larry Silva, Sergeant Joe Holt and John McLachlan, from the Underwater Demolition Team, will all appear at the gala via Webex.

“At Webex we are extremely passionate about teamwork and this is clearly an amazing example of teamwork, against all odds, making the impossible possible.”

The Lunar landing represented the culmination of huge technological innovation and many of the tech developments we have witnessed since then draw some inspiration from systems used during the Apollo missions. Cisco, who always aims to be at the cutting edge of technology, appreciate this and recognize the significance of this huge landmark.

“Think about the technological advancements we have made since Apollo 11 and now think about what we can do in the future.”

“Collaboration tools like Webex can empower and connect anyone whether they are on Earth now, or maybe in the future on the moon!”

Cisco will also be using Webex to ensure that you can join the fun too. You can watch the reunion live here starting tomorrow at 02:00am UK time.

Three years into its life with 2 million paying users signed up, Workplace — Facebook’s platform for businesses and other organizations to build internal communities and communications — is about to make a significant business shift of its own. Come September 2, Workplace is changing its pricing tiers, how it charges its users and the services that it provides customers.

Up to now, Facebook has taken a very simple approach to how it charges for Workplace, unique not just because of it being a paid service (unlike Facebook itself, which is free), but for how it modeled its pricing on the basic building block of Facebook-the-consumer product: a basic version was free, with an enhanced premium edition costing a flat $3 per active user, per month.

In September, that will change. The standard (basic) tier is getting rebranded as Workplace Essential, and will still be free to use. Meanwhile, the premium tier is being renamed Workplace Advanced and getting charged $4 per person, per month. And Facebook is introducing a new tier, Workplace Enterprise, which will be charged at $8 per person, per month, and will come with a new set of services specifically around guaranteed, quicker support and first-look access at new features. (Those who are already customers have the option of being grandfathered for a year, the company said, before switching to a new plan.)

Those are not the only changes. Two other notable shifts are getting introduced with these new tiers. First, these prices will be for all users, regardless of whether they are active in the month.

And second, they are specifically prices for people who access Workplace as general “knowledge workers” — marked by having email addresses and specific job functions. Frontline workers — for example, cashiers or baristas or others mostly on their feet all day helping customers — will be an add-on at $1.50 per person per month, also regardless of whether they are active or not.

For now, the rest of the features in the different tiers are remaining the same.

The changes at Workplace come amid a number of other developments among workforce collaboration and communication platforms.

First and foremost, Slack has gone public, subjecting it and its ups and downs to a lot more public scrutiny, but also putting it on the map as a business of some standing, helping it make a bigger move into brokering more deals with the larger enterprises that Workplace has been winning over. The latter’s customers include the likes of Walmart, the world’s biggest employer; as well as Nestlé, Vodafone, GSK, Telefonica, AstraZeneca and Delta Airlines, and Facebook says there are more than 150 companies signed up with more than 10,000 employees each.

Teams, meanwhile, has now passed Slack in user numbers, and in a way is a more direct competitor: it has positioned itself (like Workplace) as a tool for both knowledge and frontline workers, helping with actual back-office collaboration, as well as a way to broadcast communications to a wider group of employees.

Julien Codorniou, the VP of Workplace, said the changes in pricing tiers was not a reaction to competition, but rather a reaction to customers. Although the pricing for Workplace was an interesting twist on how enterprises tend to procure IT, it turned out to be too novel by half: it turned out that most actually like the predictability of paying the same amount for a service upfront, rather than having the pricing change each month depending on usage.

“Today, customers’ bills change every month, for example when a co-worker goes on vacation or whatever,” he said. “It’s a nightmare for the accounting department, who needs to know how much to pay two years out.”

He added that this doesn’t mean you can’t change how much you pay: you could change the pricing each month if necessary.

So far, no one has made the shift to the new tiers, so it will be interesting to see how and if they have much of an impact. I do know that from retail theory, customers in stores are more likely to select a middle-priced product if they are given an option of something cheap and something expensive at either end, and so this could be an interesting way to drive more users to Workplace’s paid tier.

What is more clear is that this is also a way for Facebook to raise its prices for the first time since the service launched, and lays the groundwork for more differentiation between different kinds of offerings.

Microsoft revealed last week that it now has more than 13 million people using its Microsoft Teams chat software, a milestone that means the app has overtaken Slack. While the news is significant, active user numbers don’t tell the whole story. Microsoft has been leveraging its popular Office 365 service to bundle Microsoft Teams into its offering to businesses, and the strategy is paying off.

Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield took out a full page ad in the New York Times more than two years ago, welcoming the Microsoft competition and showing that Slack was more than a little nervous about the software giant. Now that Microsoft has caught up and overtaken Slack in terms of raw user numbers, Butterfield says he’s not worried...

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As Buzzfeed reports, security researcher Karan Lyons published evidence of yet more video conferencing apps that could be maliciously opened with their cameras turned on due to a security flaw. The apps this time are RingCentral and a Chinese app called Zhumu. If you are a Mac user that has ever installed either app and then visited a malicious website, it would be possible for code embedded in an iframe to automatically open up a video conference that turns your webcam on. Both actually use Zoom’s technology behind the scenes — they’re essentially white labels — and so the same issues that afflicted Zoom also affect them.

If you are a user of RingCentral, you should update your app ASAP, as the latest patch includes a fix for this...

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