Davemichels

After Samsung delayed the launch of the Galaxy Fold, there are a few hanging questions. What caused the screens the break, and what will Samsung do to change the Fold’s design? But for those who preordered the device and are not put off by all the drama about the screens breaking, the biggest question of all might actually be this: when it will finally ship?

AT&T has been emailing customers one potential answer — June 13th. That’s according to a bunch of screenshots we’ve been seeing on Twitter and Reddit. The screenshots themselves are certainly legit, but that doesn’t mean that the date is. Samsung tells us that it has not announced any updates on the timing. We’ve reached out to AT&T and were told the company did not have any comment.

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Crisantos is a guest author for The UC Buyer.  This article was originally published on LinkedIn

I had the opportunity to attend Google Cloud Next 2019, Google's annual cloud conference held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on April 9-11. As you might expect, there were many attendees, announcements, and activities for the Google cloud community. By the end of the event, three critical themes emerged that were quite significant, that you might have missed – either because you couldn’t attend, or you were overwhelmed with the volume of announcements that were being made.

Wing, the Alphabet-owned startup, has become the first drone delivery company to gain the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval to make commercial deliveries in the US. Bloomberg reports that the company was granted the regulator’s blessing after fulfilling many of the safety requirements of a traditional airline.

Gaining the FAA’s approval as an airline was necessary for the way Wing wants to operate its drone deliveries. Current FAA regulations prevent a drone from being flown outside of an operator’s line of sight, while licenses for automated deliveries have previously only been granted for demonstrations where drone companies haven’t been allowed to accept payment for their services. Gaining the FAA’s approval as an airline...

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Google Voice is one of those services of which people tend to say, “Is that still around? Does anyone still use it?” But don’t be fooled by its longevity: people do still use it — and it’s possible that you may want to as well.

Originally called GrandCentral before it was bought by Google in 2009 and only intermittently updated since, Voice is a telecommunications service that works in conjunction with your existing phone service and offers a free secondary phone number with voicemail, SMS capabilities, and other services. Once your number is assigned (you are given a variety to choose from), you can associate it with one or several cellular or landline phone numbers.

When I first signed up for Google Voice in 2009, phone carriers were...

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You can’t fix something by ignoring it

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Amazon is now making its delivery drivers take selfies, it confirmed to The Verge, in a bid to reduce fraud. Using facial recognition, the company will verify drivers’ identities to make sure they are who they say they are. The new requirements appeared on the Amazon Flex app to drivers, notifying them that they needed to take a selfie before continuing work. Of course, Amazon warns drivers to “not take a selfie while driving.”

By asking drivers to take selfies, Amazon could be preventing multiple people from sharing the same account. These efforts could screen out anyone who is technically unauthorized from delivering packages, such as criminals who are attempting to use Amazon Flex as an excuse to lurk in front of people’s homes. In...

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The Department of Homeland Security says it expects to use facial recognition technology on 97 percent of departing passengers within the next four years. The system, which involves photographing passengers before they board their flight, first started rolling out in 2017, and was operational in 15 US airports as of the end of 2018.

The facial recognition system works by photographing passengers at their departure gate. It then cross-references this photograph against a library populated with facesimages from visa and passport applications, as well as those taken by border agents when foreigners enter the country.

The aim of the system is to offer...

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• Facebook harvested 1.5 million users' email contact data without their consent, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.
• In doing so, Facebook might have violated US and EU laws, experts say.
• The social network said it unintentionally collected the contacts and is now deleting them.
• The company is already under investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission for potentially violating a consent decree.

Facebook harvested 1.5 million users' email contact data without their consent, and experts say that in doing so the company may have violated American and European Union laws.

On Wednesday, Business Insider revealed that the social network had since May 2016 been scraping some new users' email contact books after asking for their email passwords to "verify" their accounts. About 1.5 million users ultimately had their data taken without permission; Facebook said this was done "unintentionally" and it is now deleting the data.

Experts who spoke with Business Insider on Thursday said that they believed Facebook's actions had potentially violated multiple laws including a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consent decree; the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union's data-privacy regulation; and while there would likely be a strong defense for Facebook, perhaps even the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a US criminal statute involving computer fraud and abuse.

If their theories are accurate, and regulators ultimately decide to take action against Facebook over the issue, then it could further exacerbate the legal headaches plaguing the company, which has been battling scandals on multiple fronts for the past two years — from Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of tens of millions of users' data to the social network's role spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Facebook is already under investigation by the FTC

Since 2011, Facebook has been subject to a consent decree by the FTC after it settled charges that alleged it had misled users on privacy issues. The FTC is now investigating Facebook over its subsequent privacy practices, namely the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The FTC is inquiring whether the incident violated the 2011 consent decree and is reportedly close to negotiating a settlement with Facebook that may be in the billions of dollars.

Ashkan Soltani, the former chief technologist for the FTC, said he believed Facebook's actions with users' email contacts may itself have broken the terms of the consent decree if it was using the data. "In my opinion, Facebook's collection and use of users' address books would be another clear violation of the Consent decree and merit an investigation," he said.

"The FTC enforces unfair and deceptive trade practices. On its own, downloading and using users' address books under a deceptive pretext of 'security' would constitute a deceptive practice, even IF the company wasn't under order," he said, speaking in the abstract.

Dina Srinivasan, a Yale Law graduate who recently wrote a paper called "The Antitrust Case Against Facebook," said that the company's behavior was potentially illegal "on the grounds that Facebook was deceiving consumers when it came to their data and privacy. This can be a violation of 3 things. (1) Federal antitrust laws. (2) Unfair competition laws which every state has a version of. (3) The FTC consent decree."

That said, it's not yet clear whether the FTC will ultimately attempt to take any action against Facebook on this issue, and a spokesperson for the organization didn't respond to a request for comment.

"There are so many different potential violations at this point that I don't know that FTC will investigate this latest ... particularly because it's under a lot of pressure to act on the Cambridge Analytica [incident]," said Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group that focuses on issues around corporate power.

She said that even if this did constitute a violation, it would be difficult to investigate. "Once there's a revised consent decree in place, it will be hard for the FTC to go back and investigate any misconduct that came before it (depending on the terms of the negotiated agreement settling the claims — it likely will resolve all liability for violations up to the date it's agreed to)."

The Silicon Valley firm could face trouble in Europe too

In May 2018, the European Union started enforcing GDPR, its tough new data-protection legislation. Facebook hasn't yet said if any of the affected users signed up in Europe after that date, but it seems extremely likely — in which case some believe Facebook may have fallen afoul of GDPR. 

"It is especially problematic because it was not just data of the user being verified that was ... processed, but the personal data of their contacts too," Michael Veale, a London-based data-protection researcher and Alan Turing institute fellow, said in an email.

"It might just have been 1.5m users that were directly affected, but considering the number of unique emails that were harvested and the network information linking them, the total number of individuals affected is likely in the hundreds of millions," he added.

He suggested there may have been multiple breaches of the law, including not informing users and processing people's data for advertising purposes without informing them. "This could be construed as a general security breach, as Facebook were not aware their system was effectively compromised," he said.

The Irish Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for regulating Facebook's data practices in the EU under GDPR, said it's now in contact with Facebook over the issue and is considering its next move.

"We are currently engaging with Facebook on this issue and once we receive further information we will decide what steps to take," Graham Doyle, the head of communications at the Irish Data Protection Commission, said.

The question of intent

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discussed the possibility that Facebook had potentially violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — which would veer into criminal territory. 

"It's an offense under 18 USC 1030 to, among other things, intentionally exceed authorized access to a protected computer. A 'protected computer' is, for practical purposes, any computer connected to the Internet," he said. "So with respect to Facebook's access to users' e-mail contacts, the relevant questions are whether there's any viable argument that it was 'authorized,' which seems like a very hard sell when it's represented as being specifically for the purpose of authentication, and if not, whether the access in excess of authorization was intentional."

He added: "If we were talking about a rapidly-corrected coding mistake that had removed language about scraping the user's contacts, you'd have a plausible case for saying this was access in excess of authorization, but not intentional. But that becomes more difficult to buy the longer they were doing it."

Facebook said that the action was purely unintentional — that it previously notified users it would be accessing their contacts, but a change inadvertently stripped that warning out. Such an argument would be a defense under the CFAA.

"Can they plead incompetence? In principle, though boy is that embarrassing," Sanchez said. "You'd need to look through internal correspondence to see whether anyone noticed the issue and Facebook decided not to fix it."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Read more:

• Car-bomb fears and stolen prototypes: Inside Facebook's efforts to protect its 80,000 workers around the globe
• Facebook quietly killed its Building 8 skunkworks unit as it reshuffles its cutting-edge experiments and hardware
• Leaked Andreessen Horowitz data reveals how much Silicon Valley startup execs really get paid, from CEOs to Sales VPs

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Watch Google's Stadia video-game-platform event in 5 minutes

The desktop version of Google Chrome’s browser is getting a reader mode, which can be used to strip out a page’s unnecessary background clutter to make an article easier to read. ZDNet notes that the feature launched today in Chrome’s experimental Canary release, and it should make its way to more stable versions of the browser in the future.

Reader modes have become a standard browser feature. Microsoft’s Edge browser has had one since at least 2015, and Firefox and Safari both added them in 2017. Firefox’s implementation is the most advanced out of the three, with support for different color-schemes (including a dark mode), text-to-speech, and a host of text-resizing options.

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• Zoom went public on Thursday, and shares soared 81% on its first day of trading.
• Zoom now has three goals: obtaining more enterprise customers, expanding to international markets, and promoting its new Zoom Phone product.
• Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Kelly Steckelberg, the company's chief financial officer, talked with Business Insider about how Zoom's viral nature and a frugal company philosophy helped the $9.2 billion company become profitable.

When the video-conferencing company Zoom went public on Thursday, shares skyrocketed 81%. But for Zoom, this is just day one of this milestone, and tomorrow, employees are back to work.

"We've got to go back to work," Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan told Business Insider. "I'm going to fly back to California. We have to double down on our execution and do what we were doing before. We've got to keep doing that to make sure we keep our customers happy."

Before going public, Zoom raised $517.5 million from investors, pricing its shares at $36 to achieve a $9.2 billion valuation. Zoom is entering the public markets with profitability on its side — making Zoom stand out in a landscape where tech companies often have redline-filled balance sheets as they go public.

"It's been something we've been striving for for a long time," Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom's chief financial officer, told Business Insider. "It's an amazing milestone ... Given the market conditions and our readiness, we felt now was the right time to do that."

3 post-IPO goals

Now that Zoom has reached its initial-public-offering (IPO) milestone, it has three key goals: sell to more enterprises, expand international sales, and push its new product Zoom Phone, a cloud-based phone system. In January, Zoom hired a head of international sales, and it's been hiring new enterprise sales representatives as well.

As it aggressively hires more engineers and sales reps, Yuan said a company can't succeed or grow without a healthy culture. This is reflected on the employee ratings site Glassdoor, where Zoom has 4.8 stars out of 5 and is ranked the No. 2 place to work in 2019.

When hiring, Yuan said the company cares more about whether candidates can build on the company culture and if they are willing to learn than the universities or companies the they come from. After all, if a company culture is broken, it can quickly cause a company to rot.

Read more: Video conferencing company Zoom prices IPO at $36 per share, giving it a $9.2 billion valuation — 9 times its last private valuation

Meanwhile, Zoom faces its share of competitors: Google Hangouts, Microsoft's Skype, and even Yuan's former company Cisco WebEx. But Yuan said Zoom doesn't focus on competitors.

"We really spend the time talking with our customers," Yuan said. "We try to be the first vendor to address customers' problems and try to be the vendor to come up with a better solution. If we focus on competitors, it's not sustainable."

Zoom's secret to profitability

Throughout the IPO roadshow, Yuan joined all of his meetings via Zoom. Steckelberg traveled for the meetings, while Yuan called in from his office in San Jose, California. As a joke, Yuan would change his video background to different scenes, such as a beach in Hawaii. He said shareholders were impressed.

"For the first two minutes, they were surprised," Yuan said.  "They said, 'Wow I did not realize you can do that.' It's an awesome experience."

This also showed shareholders how Zoom grew so fast. Steckelberg said it's because it's viral in nature. If a host calls someone else via Zoom, the person on the other side has the potential to become a Zoom customer. Zoom does invest in sales and marketing, but it does it with "discipline."

"It has the opportunity to be shared by millions of people without having a sales team to do that," Steckelberg said.

What's more, Zoom has this philosophy: Employees should take a minute to think about how they're spending their own money and take two minutes to think about how they're spending the company's money. This frugal philosophy, Yuan and Steckelberg said, also helped make Zoom profitable.

"We're striving for how it helps people think about how people can be as efficient as possible," Steckelberg said. "We want them to be thoughtful about how they bring value to our customers."

That's because Yuan doesn't see venture-capital money as money. And every time managers or department heads want to spend money, they ask themselves if there's a workaround, why they're spending that money, and what they'll get as a result.

"I remind myself, the money from the investors is not money from our perspective," Yuan said. "That's trust. Every dollar is trust. Those investors trust us ... That's one reason that contributed to the profitability."

This, Yuan said, is an important aspect of Zoom's top company value: care.

"We care for our community, customer, company, teammates, and our ourselves," Yuan said. "Today, we added one more: shareholders."

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NOW WATCH: Here's how North Korea's Kim Jong Un became one of the world's scariest dictators

• The accuracy rate of facial recognition depends on the data its fed. With enough good data, the accuracy rate could be almost perfect.
• Facial recognition is already being implemented in US airports for security and efficiency. But there are concerns that the US government is creating a digital ID library of millions of Americans without consent. 
• The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement are also using facial recognition for security reasons. But without clear protections, it could be used as a tool to violate human rights. 
• China is also implementing facial recognition on a bigger scale by giving citizens "social scores" in hopes of helping society become better. 
• Facial recognition can be used to make tasks automated, convenient, and efficient. But there needs to be regulation and protections in place.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Michelle Yan: How does my iPhone know that's me? And how does Facebook know that's me? And why is Facebook always asking if I want to tag myself in these photos? Well, both are using facial recognition technology. So what's going on?

Facial recognition is not a new thing. It was pretty simple. People would use a ruler to take measurements of your facial features, like how long your eyebrows are, the position of your eyes, the curve of your lips, and so forth. Today, the process is much faster.

WonSook Lee: Now, we use more like deep learning-based method, which raised the recognition even higher than humans can do. So almost perfect.

Michelle Yan: That's WonSook Lee, a professor in the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. She has 15 years of expertise in facial recognition, facial modeling, and computer animation. Wait, did she just say the accuracy rate of facial recognition is almost perfect?

WonSook Lee: So almost perfect.

Michelle Yan: Almost perfect? There are all these headlines about facial recognition being racist or having preprogrammed biases. Why was Amazon's "Rekognition" misidentifying dark-skinned women but identifying white men?

WonSook Lee: That's basically because they don't have a lot of database for African people. If we recognize the gender, or if we recognize the age, and then also if we recognize ethnic groups with their skin tone, we can raise the recognition system better.

Michelle Yan: Gotcha. So if Amazon's "Rekognition" was having trouble identifying dark-skinned women, programmers need to feed it more images of dark-skinned women and show them in various scenarios. Different lighting, various angles, in different outfits, wearing hats and sunglasses, all things that would increase the accuracy rate.

So theoretically, if the facial recognition software has enough variety of images of me, it should be able to recognize me a hundred percent of the time, even if I fed it an image of me in a darker scenario with glasses on and short blue hair. Now I don't care if Facebook misidentifies me as someone else, but what about when facial recognition misidentifies people at the airport? Or when law enforcement uses it to make an arrest?

WonSook Lee: Caucasian people recognize Caucasian very well, but they don't recognize Asian people very well. They don't recognize African people very well either. People are depending on familiarity, that kind of thing. Machines can do more objective work if they are trained enough with various people with enough data.

Michelle Yan: Luckily, it's not left up to just the machines. And if facial recognition gets it wrong, there are other methods in place like fingerprint, iris, ear, and palm recognition. But this still doesn't address the security and privacy concerns that come with this new technology.

Let's start with facial recognition in airports.

According to a recent report from BuzzFeed News, the US Customs and Border Protection stated that they're using this technology to, one: identify non-US citizens who use fraudulent travel documents, and two: provide a quicker check-in process. But there are concerns that the US government is using this technology to create a digital identification library of millions of Americans without their consent.

CBP says they're not storing the photos, but it's hard to prove if that's true or not. The US Customs and Border Protection claims they do delete photos after 12 hours and that they also give US citizens the option to opt out of checking-in with facial recognition and check-in manually. The reality is not many travelers know that they can opt out of the technology.

Another concern is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement using facial recognition.

ICE says it's using the technology to protect the US from cross-border crimes and undocumented migrants they say threaten national security and public safety. But there are concerns that this could be used as a tool that violates human rights if there aren't clear protections and restrictions in place.

It's unclear how this will shake out in the US. But in China, we're already seeing how the overuse of facial recognition can get out of hand. The country is using facial recognition for mass surveillance and to give their citizens social scores.

A citizen's social score is based on their economic and social reputation and can be affected by bad driving, jaywalking, posting fake news online, or just buying too many video games.

WonSook Lee: So when people pass and your face is shown, and if they have a database of the person, we can recognize the person. And if there are CCTVs everywhere in the city, let's say there is a targeted person, government want to know or whatever, and actually they can follow the track and then find out everything about a person.

Michelle Yan: Their face is linked to their government records, social networks, and tracked behavior through CCTV cameras. Good and honest behaviors can lead to discounted airline tickets. Committing wrong deeds can cause problems like banning you from flights and trains or taking away your dog. The Chinese government believes this social credit system can help society be better by rewarding good behavior and denouncing bad behavior. But it does feel like Orwell's "1984." And citizens have reported concerns about their privacy and the lack of checks and balances on this system.

Facial recognition is a powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility, right? It could wind up being great for automation, finding missing people, or just checking you in at the airport. But should companies and governments even have access to all this data? What sorts of guidelines should they follow? Will the government use it in limited ways like just for law enforcement? Or will they use it publicly to embarrass citizens like China's social credit system? How can they guarantee that the data they collect will be deleted? What are they going to do in case of a data breach? Or how will they prevent one? These are questions that are still in discussion, and it doesn't sound like there are going to be any simple answers anytime soon.

Facial recognition is here to stay. But there needs to be more terms and services and guidelines and regulations that will help protect the rights, security, safety, and privacy of the people who are affected by the technology. Otherwise, its use might become widespread faster than it can be regulated. And if the US adopts the same social credit system as China, I don't wanna be banned from taking flights just because I jaywalk all the time. Come on, it's New York.

Michelle Yan: How does my iPhone know that's me? And how does Facebook know that's me? And why is Facebook always asking if I want to tag myself in these photos? Well, both are using facial recognition technology. So what's going on?

Facial recognition is not a new thing. It was pretty simple. People would use a ruler to take measurements of your facial features, like how long your eyebrows are, the position of your eyes, the curve of your lips, and so forth. Today, the process is much faster.

WonSook Lee: Now, we use more like deep learning-based method, which raised the recognition even higher than humans can do. So almost perfect.

Michelle Yan: That's WonSook Lee, a professor in the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. She has 15 years of expertise in facial recognition, facial modeling, and computer animation. Wait, did she just say the accuracy rate of facial recognition is almost perfect?

WonSook Lee: So almost perfect.

Michelle Yan: Almost perfect? There are all these headlines about facial recognition being racist or having preprogrammed biases. Why was Amazon's "Rekognition" misidentifying dark-skinned women but identifying white men?

WonSook Lee: That's basically because they don't have a lot of database for African people. If we recognize the gender, or if we recognize the age, and then also if we recognize ethnic groups with their skin tone, we can raise the recognition system better.

Michelle Yan: Gotcha. So if Amazon's "Rekognition" was having trouble identifying dark-skinned women, programmers need to feed it more images of dark-skinned women and show them in various scenarios. Different lighting, various angles, in different outfits, wearing hats and sunglasses, all things that would increase the accuracy rate.

So theoretically, if the facial recognition software has enough variety of images of me, it should be able to recognize me a hundred percent of the time, even if I fed it an image of me in a darker scenario with glasses on and short blue hair. Now I don't care if Facebook misidentifies me as someone else, but what about when facial recognition misidentifies people at the airport? Or when law enforcement uses it to make an arrest?

WonSook Lee: Caucasian people recognize Caucasian very well, but they don't recognize Asian people very well. They don't recognize African people very well either. People are depending on familiarity, that kind of thing. Machines can do more objective work if they are trained enough with various people with enough data.

Michelle Yan: Luckily, it's not left up to just the machines. And if facial recognition gets it wrong, there are other methods in place like fingerprint, iris, ear, and palm recognition. But this still doesn't address the security and privacy concerns that come with this new technology.

Let's start with facial recognition in airports.

According to a recent report from BuzzFeed News, the US Customs and Border Protection stated that they're using this technology to, one: identify non-US citizens who use fraudulent travel documents, and two: provide a quicker check-in process. But there are concerns that the US government is using this technology to create a digital identification library of millions of Americans without their consent.

CBP says they're not storing the photos, but it's hard to prove if that's true or not. The US Customs and Border Protection claims they do delete photos after 12 hours and that they also give US citizens the option to opt out of checking-in with facial recognition and check-in manually. The reality is not many travelers know that they can opt out of the technology.

Another concern is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement using facial recognition.

ICE says it's using the technology to protect the US from cross-border crimes and undocumented migrants they say threaten national security and public safety. But there are concerns that this could be used as a tool that violates human rights if there aren't clear protections and restrictions in place.

It's unclear how this will shake out in the US. But in China, we're already seeing how the overuse of facial recognition can get out of hand. The country is using facial recognition for mass surveillance and to give their citizens social scores.

A citizen's social score is based on their economic and social reputation and can be affected by bad driving, jaywalking, posting fake news online, or just buying too many video games.

WonSook Lee: So when people pass and your face is shown, and if they have a database of the person, we can recognize the person. And if there are CCTVs everywhere in the city, let's say there is a targeted person, government want to know or whatever, and actually they can follow the track and then find out everything about a person.

Michelle Yan: Their face is linked to their government records, social networks, and tracked behavior through CCTV cameras. Good and honest behaviors can lead to discounted airline tickets. Committing wrong deeds can cause problems like banning you from flights and trains or taking away your dog. The Chinese government believes this social credit system can help society be better by rewarding good behavior and denouncing bad behavior. But it does feel like Orwell's "1984." And citizens have reported concerns about their privacy and the lack of checks and balances on this system.

Facial recognition is a powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility, right? It could wind up being great for automation, finding missing people, or just checking you in at the airport. But should companies and governments even have access to all this data? What sorts of guidelines should they follow? Will the government use it in limited ways like just for law enforcement? Or will they use it publicly to embarrass citizens like China's social credit system? How can they guarantee that the data they collect will be deleted? What are they going to do in case of a data breach? Or how will they prevent one? These are questions that are still in discussion, and it doesn't sound like there are going to be any simple answers anytime soon.

Facial recognition is here to stay. But there needs to be more terms and services and guidelines and regulations that will help protect the rights, security, safety, and privacy of the people who are affected by the technology. Otherwise, its use might become widespread faster than it can be regulated. And if the US adopts the same social credit system as China, I don't wanna be banned from taking flights just because I jaywalk all the time. Come on, it's New York.

Join the conversation about this story »

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Gates—all are visionaries that have shaped modern computing technology. With that in mind, YouTuber Laplanet Arts decided to take computing somewhere that it’s never been before—inside of a lasagna.

Micah Laplante, whose YouTube channel Laplanet Arts has 315 subscribers, mostly uploads product reviews and image-retouching tutorials. But after his wife made an off-handed joke about a PC made of pasta, he decided that he could actually make that ridiculous idea a reality.

“Never joke with me on such things because I may just do it,” Laplante wrote in the video’s caption. “And do it I have.” This was his first attempt at building a computer on his channel.

The basis of the Pasta PC was a broken Asus Transformer tablet that Laplante already owned. After removing the essential components he got to work building a new computer case out of pasta. Other than the motherboard, batteries, buttons and ports, Laplante built the new casing out of pasta—lasagna and rigatoni, to be precise (as well as some hot glue, electric tape, and paint).

The result was a fully functional computer. Due to the age of the original tablet, it lagged on certain functions, such as when Laplante tried to stream video on Hulu and run games on Steam and the Game Boy emulator that he downloaded, but otherwise the system worked normally.

“This has been a very long project that I’m mildly proud of,” said Laplante.

We’ll have to wait and see how his ingenuity will ripple out to the rest of the technology industry.

Listen to CYBER, Motherboard’s new weekly podcast about hacking and cybersecurity.

While Sprint and T-Mobile have been telling federal regulators that their $26.5 billion mega-merger will be great for consumers and competition, it’s becoming increasingly clear that some federal regulators just aren’t buying it.

The deal would combine the nation’s third and fourth-biggest wireless carriers, reducing overall competition in a US wireless industry already featuring some of the highest data prices in the developed world. Consumer groups, unions, and Wall Street analysts also warn the deal could result in anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people losing their jobs.

Granted, Sprint and T-Mobile executives have been telling the press, public, and regulators the exact opposite over the last year, claiming that reducing overall competitors will somehow increase competition and lower rates, all while somehow creating more jobs than ever before.

But it’s not clear regulators are buying it. Reports in both the Wall Street Journal and Reuters indicate that the deal is “meeting some resistance” from Department of Justice antitrust enforcers worried about the deal’s impact on overall wireless competition. The reports claim the deal is unlikely to be approved by the DOJ as currently structured.

T-Mobile CEO John Legere quickly took to Twitter to claim that the “premise” of the story was “simply untrue.”

But this isn’t the first example of regulators doubting the companies’ merger promises. A growing roster of state regulators and attorneys general have also expressed skepticism that the deal is in the public interest, noting that historically, such telecom sector consolidation harms both competition and consumer welfare.

“There’s no good way to spin this,” Wall Street telecom analyst Craig Moffett told Motherboard. “The deal is in real trouble.”

After initially giving the merger a 50 percent chance of approval, Moffett’s research firm MoffettNathanson recently lowered the chances to around 30 percent in a research note to investors, citing growing calls for tougher antitrust enforcement, opposition from state regulators, and the repeated blocking of similar deals in the not so distant past.

For example regulators blocked AT&T’s 2011 attempted merger with T-Mobile, stating it would harm consumers. T-Mobile went on to not only survive but thrive—injecting the sector with additional competition. A 2014 attempted merger between Sprint and T-Mobile was also blocked by regulators—again driven by worries of reduced competition and higher rates.

Hoping the third time’s the charm, T-Mobile has hired everyone from former Trump ally Corey Lewandowski to former FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn to sell the deal to regulators. T-Mobile executives have also come under fire for ramping up their patronage of Trump’s hotel in DC, in what’s widely seen as a ham-fisted attempt to curry favor.

While it remains possible the deal could still be approved with conditions, consumer groups were pleased with the reports of regulatory hesitation. A coalition of such groups this week filed a petition with the FCC featuring the signatures of 60,000 Americans opposed to the deal.

Consumer groups have argued that the one-two punch of greater consolidation and less oversight in the wake of the death of net neutrality could easily open the door to higher rates, worse customer service, and little recourse for American consumers.

“We are encouraged by news of the potential demise of this bad deal,” Free Press Senior Policy Counsel Carmen Scurato told Motherboard in a statement. “T-Mobile and Sprint executives can’t make the case for this deal’s public benefits because there aren’t any. Regulators digging in on the details are rightfully skeptical of the bogus claims made by these companies. No conditions will improve the merger, and it must be rejected.”

• Lincoln revealed its 2020 Corsair SUV at the New York auto show.
• The new crossover completes Lincoln's update of its SUV lineup.
• The Corsair will be Lincoln's compact, entry-level offering and will compete with SUVs from Audi, BMW, Lexus, Acura, and other luxury brands.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Lincoln has pulled the cover off its all-new 2020 Corsair, a compact crossover SUV that adds a critical fourth vehicle to the brand's lineup of luxury utes.

Corsair joins the highly successful new Navigator, Nautilus, and Aviator, giving Ford's premium marque a range of offerings to go head-to-head with the likes of Cadillac, Audi, BMW, Lexus, and Acura.

With consumers shifting away from sedans, crossovers are the hottest segment in the auto industry at the moment. The market for compact luxury SUVs is especially hot, and with the new Corsair, Lincoln now has a fresh entry-level product. Corsair replaces the MKC, which started at about $34,000.

Read more: Lincoln just added another new SUV to its luxury lineup

"Entering the fastest-growing luxury segment, the all-new Corsair is artistically crafted, expertly designed and infused with our unwavering attention and commitment to detail — it's unapologetically Lincoln," Joy Falotico, Lincoln's president, said in a statement. 

A new kind of name for Lincoln

The choice of the Corsair name continues Lincoln's move away from the "MK" nameplates in favor of embracing the kind of throwback names Detroit used to adore — those that avoided defining cars as engineering exercises. Lincoln has been on this path since rolling out its revamped Continental full-size sedan at the New York auto show in 2015, as a concept car.

Lincoln noted that "Corsair" is derived from the Latin word for "journey," but of course a corsair is also a small, fast ship (sometimes associated with pirates!) and the name has been often used in aviation. The choice shows that Lincoln wants customers to associate the brand with artful, high-end experiences, consistent with the company's "Quiet Flight" messaging. Lincoln doesn't intend to lure owners with performance, but rather is presenting its vehicles as calming, stylish environments.

A pair of turbocharged engine choices

The Corsair is indeed an elegant machine, as Business Insider learned during a preview prior to the vehicle's New York auto show debut. On the tech front, Corsair will get a suite of driver-assist features, and it has Ford's SYNC 3 infotainment system, wireless charging, the opportunity to go keyless with a smartphone app, and a 14-speaker Revel audio system is optional.

Engines will carry over from the outgoing MKC, but have been updated for fuel economy: there's a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder powerplant, making 250 horsepower with 275 pound-feet of torque; and a 2.3-liter turbo four, with 280 horsepower and 310 pound-feet of torque. An eight-speed automatic is the only transmission choice, and buyers will have the option of front-wheel or all-wheel drive.

Lincoln didn't detail pricing or a date its new vehicle will go on sale, but the Corsair is likely to arrive later this year and carry a sticker that's about the same as the MKC.

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NOW WATCH: Elon Musk's biggest challenge won't be Tesla or SpaceX — here's why

Businesses will have to pay $8,999 to be part of the future

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• Microsoft unveiled its new Surface Hub 2S "interactive whiteboard" on Wednesday. 
• It's essentially a Windows 10 PC built into a 50-inch TV with a touchscreen. 
• It costs $9,000 and will be available in June, but other accessories like a battery pack and mobile cart that lets you cart the Surface Hub 2S around an office don't currently have a price tag or release date. 
• Microsoft also announced an 85-inch model of the Surface Hub 2, which doesn't have a price tag yet, but Microsoft expects its release in 2020. 

Microsoft unveiled on Wednesday the Surface Hub 2S, a $9,000 50-inch touchscreen TV with a computer inside that runs on Windows 10.

Running on Windows 10, the Surface Hub 2S can run the wide variety of Microsoft's suite of software and services, including Microsoft Office 365. It's essentially a Windows computer inside a TV format with a touchscreen that can be used with Microsoft's Surface Pen stylus. 

It's designed for "collaboration" and an office work style where everyone gathers around it to be creative. Because it can be battery powered with an additional accessory, teams can roll it around anywhere around their office space. 

The Surface Hub 2S is designed to be wheeled around an office space on a separately-sold cart designed by Steelcase called the "Roam," which so far doesn't have a price tag or release date. A battery designed to power the Surface Hub 2S made by APC can also fit into the Steelcase Roam cart, but there's no pricing or availability to speak of yet. 

The Surface Hub 2S will be available in June. 

The company also unveiled an 85-inch model of its existing Surface Hub 2, larger than the original model. There's no price tag yet for the 85-inch Surface Hub 2, but the company says it'll be available in 2020. 

SEE ALSO: Microsoft is reportedly working on its own AirPods-style earbuds, codenamed 'Morrison'

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NOW WATCH: 14 problems that can make touch screen laptops infuriating

Google Pay can now automatically import loyalty cards, tickets, and offers from your Gmail account. The feature, first spotted by 9to5Google, advertises that by using it “You won’t get more offers, it will just be easier to use them.”

When I tried out the feature for myself, Google Pay was able to pull through a single entry for me — a Member ID for my United Airlines frequent flier account. 9to5Google reports that the service was able to pull through multiple vouchers and reward points when they tried it.

You can enable it yourself in Google Pay’s settings menu under “General,” and then tap the “Gmail imports” toggle.

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Zoho is intent on creating a one-stop shop for all business technology applications. The company’s impressive portfolio got a little bigger last week with the release of Commerce Plus, a fully integrated e-commerce platform. The first out-of-the box vertical solution built on top of the Zoho One platform, Commerce Plus is a customizable online store optimized for content management and dynamic personalization.

Zoho also announced the release of MarketingHub, an all-in-one marketing automation suite, as well as a business process workflow system, Orchestly. These applications, including CRM and self-service customer care, all tie into backend data using automated analytics and intelligence via the company’s AI brand, Zia.

Also at last week’s Zoholics 2019 event, the company announced plans to move its headquarters to a 100,000 square foot campus on recently purchased 375-acre plot of land in Austin, Texas. Founded in 1997, Zoho has more than 7,000 employees worldwide across 12 offices spanning five continents, with a user base of 45 million users in more than 180 countries.

Zoho has been rolling out Zia’s Conversational AI features as an intelligent assistant for both customer interactions and sales support. This includes the ability for Zoho customers to build and deploy their own chatbots across a suite of available products including CRM, Notebook and SalesIQ, with additional packages on the way.

“Zobots” for Conversational Self-Service
These do-it-yourself “Zobots” are configured in the Zia Skills Console. This console provides a sort of “NLU-as-a-Service” assortment of developer tools to understand intents, makes inputs actionable, and execute fulfillments. The chatbot platform is a conversational front-end to encourage self-service interactions (“what can I do here”) as well as enable more personalized questions (including checking account balance, what’s in my cart, status of order, etc.).

In a session at Zoholics ’19, the company demo’d a chatbot to help users understand how to build systems by declaring data types and including parameters to offer up multi-turn conversations. While it was impressive to see such a low barrier for any Zoho customer to build and deploy chatbots, there remained a substantial amount of programming (at least for beginners) as well as improvements needed in semantic understanding and multi-channel support.

Still, given the company’s dedication and track record with a comprehensive technology suite, it shouldn’t be too long before Zoho integrates via APIs to enable what’s next for intelligent assistants and Conversational Commerce.

The post Zoho Sets Its Sights on Conversational AI and the Future of Commerce appeared first on .

• Analysts say that Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's plan to emphasize sales and partnerships could lead to a "culture clash" with the search giant's more engineering-focused culture. 
• However, Google Cloud might come out of it stronger than ever:Although Google Cloud may have advanced technology, it needs a stronger enterprise sales program to catch up to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, say experts.
• Diane Greene, Kurian's predecessor, helped set the tone for Google Cloud to become more enterprise-focused, but analysts say Kurian needs to follow-up on these changes to gain a larger share of the cloud market.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

New Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian was hired for his enterprise sales chops — something that the search giant's growing cloud division needs, say experts. 

But for a company like Google Cloud that has long been engineering focused, a "culture clash" could be brewing, says Forrester vice president and principal analyst Dave Bartoletti, even as Kurian pursues a playbook that borrows from Oracle, his previous employer. 

"I think Thomas Kurian is a good choice, and we'll see if there's a culture clash," Bartoletti told Business Insider. "He definitely brings a very strong experience selling to enterprise. It's a much different sales motion than Google is used to ... Google is making real headway into the enterprise market with its cloud services."

Bartoletti says Google is learning that there's no "one-size-fits-all" for cloud. A technological edge is important, but to really gain traction with the largest customers, it needs a sales team that knows exactly how to solve its customers' problems. 

"In the enterprise market, it's not enough to build a better mousetrap," Bartoletti said. "I think Google has learned that. It's very different from the consumer market where you build something shiny and sexy or spend loads of money marketing it. Product management and especially technical account management matter so much more to the enterprise."

Kurian's partnership strategy, which so far involves tie-ups with enterprise mainstays like SAP and VMware, also points to a "very practical Google," says Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst of Lopez Research. She says the transition to an enterprise culture may make some employees unhappy, but it's a transition "that has to happen."

"The thing about engineering culture, and the thing about Google, is, I think, they were very much all about innovation," Lopez told Business Insider. "When you get to the scale of this size company and people are used to doing whatever project they want, people are going to have to work on boring projects...Kurian's job isn't to make friends, his job is to make sure they build the best enterprise cloud services."

"If you don't do this right, your innovation almost doesn't matter"

Not all hope is lost for Google. Bartoletti points to Amazon Web Services as an example. Like Google, Amazon is a developer-focused company known for catering to consumers. But as the first major player in what we now know as cloud computing, Amazon eventually learned how to sell to those large customers. 

"That's something AWS learned for the last few years," Bartoletti said. "They were a brand new vendor for the enterprise as well. Cloud was seen as very disruptive."

One important shift, Bartoletti says, is that Kurian recognizes that Google Cloud only has a fraction of the salespeople its competitors do. Kurian told the Wall Street Journal that he estimated that Google Cloud's sales team was one-tenth to one-fifteenth the size of those at AWS and Microsoft Azure. He plans to get that up to about half the size in the not-so-distant future.

"Just over the past two years, Google has realized there's something different about selling to large enterprises," Bartoletti said. "It's a lot more complex. There's a lot of history, and there's a lot of investment in both people and technology that enterprises are not willing to throw away."

Lopez said that when she met with Kurian, he spoke about streamlining the sales and contracting process, which is important, as customers can spend six to eight weeks negotiating a contract with a cloud vendor, she says.

For example, she says, Kurian told her that Google will give customers one sales contact for all of their cloud needs, rather than make them talk to different salespeople for different products. This is the kind of basic thing that Google has so far lacked, but that it needs to embrace to build momentum in the enterprise. 

"When tech companies run so hard defining the next wave of innovation, sometimes you leave out the basics," Lopez said. "[Enterprises] want to buy something simply. They want to have the right partner and support structure...These are aren't sexy things, but if you don't do this right, your innovation almost doesn't matter."

Kurian also told her that Google Cloud will streamline its partner program, whereby it works with outside specialists who do the dirty work of actually helping customers move to and start using their new cloud infrastructure. 

Google confirmed to Business Insider that changes to its partner program are underway, including new certification and specialization programs, and ways to identify top partners and bring them closer into the fold.

The changing nature of cloud

The other big shift identified by analysts is Google's multi-cloud strategy, as exemplified by the launch last week of the Anthos cloud platform — which will enable users to manage not only their Google Cloud infrastructure, but also their own data centers, and the rival Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services clouds. 

Bloomberg previously reported that Kurian faced internal resistance from co-founder at CTO Larry Ellison when he tried to run a similar strategy at Oracle. 

"That shows how the nature of cloud is changing," Bartoletti said. "Cloud used to be a place to get cheaper servers and storage. It's not that anymore. Cloud is now shorthand for all the services I'm going to use to build the next generation of incredible applications...In order for Google to succeed, its core innovations have to be available on as many clouds as possible."

Read more: Google Cloud's new CEO is executing the playbook that Larry Ellison apparently wouldn't let him run with at Oracle

Now, at Google Cloud, this strategy could be crucial, says Gartner senior director and analyst Sanjeev Mohan.

"When you go to AWS and Azure, they try to block off other stuff," Mohan told Business Insider. "Google openly admits, because they are the last big player to come in, there are other cloud vendors and they have to live and happily coexist. That, to me, is very refreshing coming from them."

Daniel Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, also predicts that Google Cloud will "aggressively acquire" over the next six to nine months.

"Just given the experience in Oracle, he's an M&A specialist and I think he understands technology and next gen cloud as well as anyone else there," Ives told Business Insider. "He's the right guy for the job but now it comes down to him strategically doing the right things. They need more feet on the street and more market among CIOs."

'An Everest climb'

It's still too early to tell how Kurian will do leading Google Cloud, but the organization will need to make "incremental change over time," Bartoletti says.

Analysts say Google Cloud has already made headway into this direction, starting under the reign of previous Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene. Analysts say that within the last year, Google Cloud has become more enterprise- and solution-oriented.

"I think this is the first time Google was interested in reaching out to enterprises. They didn't have the mentality of speaking to enterprises," JB Su, vice president of Advanced Technologies and principal analyst at Atherton Research, told Business Insider. "I think Thomas is saying, 'I'm not going to change. You hired me to do enterprise.'"

Even though Google Cloud's technology is in a class of itself, it still has work to do when it comes to strategy, analysts say. If it wants to beat the commanding lead of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, Google will have to put the work in. 

"Right now, this is an Everest climb for Google to start to get to a [cloud] share somewhere in the high single digits and double digits," Ives said.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at rmchan@businessinsider.com, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. PR pitches by email only, please. Other types of secure messaging available upon request. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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NOW WATCH: Watch Google's Stadia video-game-platform event in 5 minutes

BlueJeans, the cloud meeting platform for mobile devices, desktops, and room systems, recently announced that it had successfully reached a milestone in its performance this year. The company revealed that they now have $100 million in annual recurring revenue, as of the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019.

For years, BlueJeans has been building a powerful reputation for enterprise video collaboration. Up to two-thirds of BlueJeans’ revenue comes from its enterprise customers, and in the last year, customer adoption increased by 62% for the company’s meeting room solutions.

BlueJeans’ commitment to delivering pioneering products for customer success has placed the company at the forefront of a growing SaaS market. As trends like workplace diversity, new generations, and increasing remote employees transform the workplace, video meetings and collaboration platforms are more popular than ever. Today, BlueJeans is championing its solution as the answer to familiar workforce issues.

Increasing R&D Investment

Quentin Gallivan

Part of BlueJeans’ strategy to stay ahead of the competition involves increasing R&D investment year-over-year with more than a fourth of revenue invested in product innovation and development. There’s a significant difference between sustained growth and market disruption in the BlueJeans market according to CEO, Quentin Gallivan. The continued growth of the organisation means that the company is trusted by leading companies around the world. This says that the solution needs to be more than “good enough.”

Gallivan believes that the scale and reliability of the BlueJeans service is one of the reasons why people rely so heavily on BlueJeans. The collaboration company even captures customer feedback via Medallia – a leader in experience management technology. The latest data gives BlueJeans an impressive NPS score of 62. Additionally, global brands like ADP, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Intuit all rely on BlueJeans for their collaborative technology.

World-renowned research platforms for technology also rate BlueJeans as one of the top video conferencing providers in the world.

What Sets BlueJeans Apart?

According to the Chief Customer Officer of BlueJeans, Walt Weisner, the organisation doesn’t believe in “shortcuts to the top”. Instead, BlueJeans relies on a continuous loop of feedback to provide a differentiated experience in the collaborative market. BlueJeans technology is designed according to three crucial principles. It is:

• Simple: The BlueJeans rooms, meetings, and event platform deliver immersive experiences that work from any location or device. Employees are kept engaged with a simple and accessible experience
• Smart: Countless factors can disrupt work. BlueJeans removes complications like technical limitations and ambient noise to ensure a stronger collaborative experience. Technology like active noise reduction from Dolby manages the meeting quality in any environment
• Trusted: A proactive and secure management console gives companies complete control over their collaborative solution. The BlueJeans experience is also compliant with SOC 2 and SOC 3 and comes with a Command Centre dashboard for meeting control

Going forward, BlueJeans looks forward to continued growth, building off the feedback and insights of their valued customers and partners.

Microsoft has admitted that its Outlook.com security breach was worse than the company initially revealed. The software maker started notifying some Outlook.com users late on Friday night that a hacker was able to access accounts for months earlier this year. Microsoft’s notification revealed that hackers could have viewed account email addresses, folder names, and subject lines of emails, but in a separate notification to other affected users the company also admitted email contents could have been viewed.

Vice’s Motherboard revealed on Sunday that Microsoft sent a different notification message to around six percent of the affected Outlook.com accounts, and that the company only admitted this when it was presented with screenshot...

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• Having an iPhone doesn't stop Google handing over your data to the police, according to a New York Times investigation.
• Apple has long touted itself as more privacy-conscious than competitors like Google, and even opposed the FBI over a case it said would set a "dangerous precedent" for user privacy.
• But the Times found that Google is giving law enforcement data from both Android devices and iPhones when requests are granted.
• Apple told the Times that it doesn't have the ability to furnish law enforcement with data in the same way as Google.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

A New York Times investigation into how Google furnishes law enforcement with phone data exposed one crucial detail — having an iPhone doesn't stop Google handing over your data.

The in-depth investigation by the Times revealed many details about how Google uses its in-house database — called Sensorvault — to cooperate with law enforcement.

Using the database, Google is able to provide police with the data of phones from a specific time and location. By submitting "geofence" warrants, police are able to look at which phones were in close proximity to a crime. According to a Google employee, the firm once received as many as 180 of such requests in one week.

The data attached to each phone is initially anonymous, then once police have whittled down the number of suspect devices, Google provides them with the names of the people each device is associated with.

The technology has been praised as a useful tool for law enforcement, but the Times piece calls into question whether its powers are too sweeping, especially in the case of innocent people's data.

Former Google employee Brian McClendon who oversaw Google Maps until 2015, told the Times the method seemed to him "like a fishing expedition."

iPhones are findable in Google's database

An intelligence analyst, who has himself examined the data from hundreds of phones, told the Times that it wasn't just Android users who had their information examined by law enforcement. He said "most Android devices" and "some iPhones" had their data made available by Google.

Investigators told the Times that they hadn't sent the warrants to any other companies apart from Google, and Apple said it didn't have the ability to perform the same kind of searches.

Read more: Apple News won't let advertisers track users or monitor what they read

It is not clear from the Times' piece exactly how Google was able to provide law enforcement with the data of iPhone users, although it seems possible that it was able to do so through installed Google services, such as Google Maps.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Apple has a history of locking horns with law enforcement

Apple famously refused to help the FBI break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, a perpetrator of the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, which left 14 people dead. Farook was shot dead by police.

Apple CEO Tim Cook published an open letter in 2016, saying that the FBI's request for Apple to build a new version of its iOS operating software to break into Farook's phone would not only create a weakness exploitable by hackers, but that it would set a "dangerous precedent."

"The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge," Cook wrote.

Privacy remains a major marketing point for Apple, which it flaunts at Google's expense. At CES this year, Apple mocked Google with a huge poster which read: "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." Last month, the company released a video ad with the tagline: "If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on."

Read more: Apple released a 45-second video on why you should care about your smartphone's privacy

Google's cooperation with law enforcement is not blind. It requires a warrant, and officials told the Times that Google has pushed back on searches it considers overly broad.

"We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement," Google's director of law enforcement and information security, Richard Salgado, said in a statement sent to Business Insider.

"We have created a new process for these specific requests designed to honor our legal obligations while narrowing the scope of data disclosed and only producing information that identifies specific users where legally required."

Equally, Apple does not always refuse requests from law enforcement for user data. "When the FBI has requested data that's in our possession, we have provided it," Cook wrote in his 2016 letter.

SEE ALSO: Artificial intelligence experts from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft called on Amazon not to sell its facial recognition software to police

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NOW WATCH: Watch Apple debut its own no-fee credit card

On Saturday, Microsoft confirmed to TechCrunch that some users of the company’s email service had been targeted by hackers. A hacker or group of hackers had first broken into a customer support account for Microsoft, and then used that to gain access to information related to customers’ email accounts such as the subject lines of their emails and who they’ve communicated with.

But the issue is much worse than previously reported, with the hackers able to access email content from a large number of Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail email accounts, according to a source who witnessed the attack in action and described it before Microsoft’s statement, as well as screenshots provided to Motherboard. Microsoft confirmed to Motherboard that hackers gained access to the content of some customers’ emails.

In March, before Microsoft publicly confirmed the hack, the source told Motherboard that this abuse of a customer support portal allowed the hackers to gain access to any email account as long as it wasn’t a corporate level account. This means that while paid, enterprise accounts that businesses pay for weren’t affected, normal consumer accounts were. The source described the attack, including how it relied on abuse of Microsoft’s customer support tool. On Sunday, the source reiterated those details, and provided further information and screenshots of what kind of access the hackers had to Motherboard.

“We have identified that a Microsoft support agent’s credentials were compromised, enabling individuals outside Microsoft to access information within your Microsoft email account,” an email from Microsoft to a victim, and posted to Reddit on Saturday, reads.

Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

The email adds that the hackers could have accessed email folder names, the subject lines of emails, and the names of other email addresses the user communicated with. Some of the screenshots provided to Motherboard related to the attack show a panel with a list of account information that the hacker could access, including the customer’s calendar and birth date. The top of the panel has different sections such as “Profile,” “Mailbox Folder Stats,” “Admin Center,” and “Logon History.”

In its notification email, Microsoft said the hackers couldn’t access email content or attachments, and then in another section, that the company’s “data indicates” email contents could not have been viewed.

Motherboard’s source, however, said that the technique allowed full access to email content. On Sunday the source provided another screenshot of another page of the panel, with the label “Email Body” and the body of an email redacted by the source. They said the Microsoft support account used belonged to a high privileged user, meaning they likely have more access to material than other employees.

When presented with this screenshot, Microsoft confirmed it had also sent breach notification emails to some users that did say the customer’s email content had been impacted. Microsoft said that applied to around 6 percent of a small number of impacted customers, although the company didn’t specify how many in total.

“We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators’ access,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement.

Microsoft, like many other tech giants, does have the ability to scan or read user’s messages. In 2014, Microsoft looked into the email account of a French blogger to identify a Windows 8 leaker.

In its breach notification email, Microsoft said it immediately disabled the compromised customer support account once the company discovered the issue. The source said Microsoft noticed the attack at the end of March, and that hackers had access for at least six months. Microsoft pushed back against this, and pointed to its notification email which gave a timeframe between January 1st and March 28th.

The source said this access had been used as part of so-called iCloud unlocks, where hackers will compromise a target’s email or iCloud account in order to remove Activation Lock from their iPhone. This is an Apple security feature that stops thieves from factory resetting stolen devices and selling them on.

Update: This piece has been updated to include additional comment from Microsoft with the company pushing back against the claim of the issue being abused for at least six months.

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Google added a new way to verify your logins this week: using your Android phone as a physical security key for two-factor authentication. You should be using two-factor authentication to log onto websites, so that even if someone has your password from a data breach, they won’t be able to get in. And now with the new feature, if you have an Android phone running 7 or higher, you also have a convenient security key.

It’s more secure than many existing 2FA options (such as using SMS) because your phone will check in with your computer via Bluetooth to make sure you’re on the correct website and not being phished. SMS can be hacked, and most other secondary methods of verifying your logins won’t be able to check you’re attempting to log...

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Most often, people think of call queues and call centers as something that does a very specific thing. Frequently, this very specific thing is “handle a lot of incoming calls and direct them to a lot of agents”. While many call centers fall into that definition, a cloud based PBX can offer other solutions for call queues that you might not have considered.

Essentially, a call queue operates like an advanced hunt group, taking an inbound call and keeping the call on-hold until one of the available agents listed is ready to take the call. Good ones do a great job of keeping the caller interested until an agent is ready.

How photo booths escaped the brink of extinction by becoming FOMO generators

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Global provider of innovative meeting productivity and video collaboration solutions, Lifesize, recently announced a new milestone in their performance. The company confirmed that it had surpassed the $100 million mark in bookings, with a compound annual growth rate of 80% in annual recurring revenue for the last 4 years. Demand for the market-leading video conferencing opportunities provided by the company, alongside the exponential growth of their partner system has driven fantastic success for Lifesize. Not to mention, the company’s consistently high rate of customer satisfaction has also spurred evolution both internationally and at home.

According to reports by MarketsandMarkets, the opportunities for companies in the global enterprise collaboration market are growing, with expectations to reach about $60 billion by 2023. As the demand for collaboration and video conferencing solutions continues to develop, Lifesize is beginning to stand out as a leader for the collaborative technology industry. The company already supports multiple large global brands like LinkedIn, Yelp and Netflix. They’re also popular among thousands of smaller and mid-sized businesses too.

Exceptional Growth for the Lifesize Brand

Lifesize delivers a range of best-in-class video conferencing solutions over the cloud, with integrated equipment capable of providing new opportunities for workplace collaboration and communication on global scales. According to the latest revenue report, the company is growing at a phenomenal rate. Since its introduction in 2014, Lifesize has seen amazing adoption of its cloud-based services for web conferencing, video, and audio collaboration. Growth drivers include:

• An industry leading NPS score of 84 in 2018
• Pioneering 4k cloud-based video conferencing launched in 2018
• Over 3,500 global resellers, distributors, and partners, and 400 new partners added since January 2018
• 62% growth in enterprise customers year over year
• 60% of revenue generated from locations outside of the Americas

Built with open standards and WebRTC at their core, Lifesize solutions make it easier for customers to collaborate in the environments that suit them. Users can access Lifesize via native apps for Android, Windows, iOS, and Mac operating systems. Or, you can connect directly through your browser with a simple and intuitive interface.

Supporting the Rise of Video Conferencing

The most recent growth milestone achieved by Lifesize comes just after a range of other impressive announcements from the company. For instance, Lifesize just announced a new line of Icon 4k meeting room solutions and integrations with Screencloud, Kaptivo, and Amazon Chime.

According to the CEO of Lifesize, Craig Malloy, companies of all sizes are beginning to invest more in digital collaboration and video conferencing technology. Lifesize is currently the only vendor that’s capable of providing 4k video conferencing end-to-end for Huddle Rooms, conference rooms, and more. The Lifesize team has the vision to create a fully-connected meeting room experience, with 4K-quality video built on a highly flexible cloud-based platform.

Lifesize can provide an intuitive and reliable experience that their customers need, and that’s what’s driving its continued growth.

Google today announced that Google+ in G Suite, the last remaining remnants of what was once Google’s attempt to rival Facebook and Twitter, will now be called Currents. We don’t need to belabor the fact that Google+ was a flop and that its death was probably long overdue. We’ve done that. Now it’s time to look ahead and talk about what’s next for Currents. To do that, I sat down with David Thacker, the VP of Product Management for G Suite, at Google’s Cloud Next conference.

As Thacker told me, Google has shifted its resources to have the former Google+ team focus on Currents instead. But before we get to what that teams plans to do, let’s talk about the name first. Currents, after all, was also the name of the predecessor of Google Play Newsstand, the app that was the predecessor of the Google News app.

The official line is that “Currents” is meant to evoke the flow of information. Thacker also noted that the team did a lot of research around the name and that it had “very low recognition.” I guess that’s fair. It also allows Google to reuse an old trademark without having to jump through too many hoops. Since the Google+ name obviously now carries some baggage, changing the name makes sense anyway. “The enterprise version is distinct and separate now and it was causing confusion among our customers,” said Thacker.

“This allows us to do new things and move much faster in the enterprise,” Thacker explained. “To run a consumer social network at the scale of consumer G+ requires a lot of resources and efforts, as you can imagine. And that’s partially the reason we decided to sunset that product, as we just didn’t feel it was worth that investment given the user base on that. But it basically frees up that team to focus on the enterprise vision.”

Now, however, with consumer G+ gone, the company is going to invest in Currents. “We’re moving consumer resources into the enterprise,” he said.

The plan here clearly isn’t to just let Currents linger but to improve it for business users. And while Google has never publicly shared user numbers, Thacker argues that those businesses that do use it tend to use it expensively. The hope, though, surely, is to increase that number — whatever it may be — significantly over time. “If you look at our top G Suite customers, most of them use the product actively as a way to connect really broad organizations,” Thacker said.

Thacker also noted that this move now removes a lot of constraints since the team doesn’t have to think about consumer features anymore. “When Google+ was first designed, it was never designed for that [enterprise] use case, but organizations had the same need to break down silos and help spread ideas and knowledge in their company,” Thacker explained. “So while Google+ didn’t succeed as a consumer product, it will certainly live on in the enterprise.”

What will that future look like? As Thacker told me, the team started with revamping the posting workflow, which was heavily focused on image sharing, for example, which isn’t exactly all that important in a business context.

But there are other features the team is planning to launch, too, including better analytics. “Analytics is a really important part of it,” said Thacker. “When people are posting on Currents, whether it’s executives trying to engage their employee base, they want to see how that’s resonating. And so we built in some pretty rich analytics.”

The team also built a new set of administrative controls that help manage how organizations can control and manage their usage of Currents.

Going forward then, we may actually see a bit of innovation in Currents — something that was sorely lacking from Google+ while it was lingering in limbo. Google Cloud’s CEO Thomas Kurian told me that he wants to make collaboration one of his focus areas. Currents is an obvious fit there, and there are plenty of ways to integrate it with the rest of G Suite still.