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For months, Jewish Community Centers have been targeted by near-daily bomb threats, with over 100 reports since the beginning of 2017. Last Friday seemed to offer some respite, with the arrest of an individual responsible for some of the threats, and a new order from the FCC stripping anonymity protections from anyone dialing into a JCC. But the days after the order was issued saw even more threats, which led to evacuations at a Florida day school, a Delaware community center, a Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Anti-Defamation League headquarters in Manhattan. This weekend, as many centers prepared for Purim, six more threats hit Jewish centers in Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and other cities.

“AntiSemitism of this nature should not, and...

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When Evernote's cofounder, Phil Libin, stepped down in 2015, there was lots of industry speculation about the note-taking company's future. 

Business Insider republished a popular opinion piece by Josh Dickson, which described the company as "the first dead unicorn," and compared it unfavourably to newer rival Slack.

In an interview with Business Insider, Libin's successor, former Google executive Chris O'Neill, said the company had more paying users than Slack, and suggested it would outlive competitors like Google Keep and Microsoft's OneNote.

"Keep is a hobby, and I know that because I was there for 10 years, and who knows what they're going to do with it. It was one of those products that never really seemed to have full dedication," said O'Neill, who was previously head of global business operations at Google X. "That's what happens at large companies, there are products that are not their main business."

A bigger worry might be Microsoft's OneNote, which offers some of Evernote's premium features for free. 

"Do people love Microsoft?" countered O'Neill. "We're a productivity application that people love." 

To prove his point, O'Neill produced a photo of a female Evernote colleague who had been approached by a stranger wearing an Evernote t-shirt. Companies like Microsoft, he implied, don't inspire that kind of love.

He reeled off a list of celebrity Evernote users: Jimmy Fallon, Steve Colbert, and "the most successful entrepreneurs" in Silicon Valley. Investment firms Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz also pay for Evernote access.

Evernote is working on more encryption options 

O'Neill also addressed a privacy policy change from December which caused major blowback from users.

At the time, the change appeared to suggest employees would be able to read people's private notes. 

One user wrote in response: "I find your coming update for a more 'personalized' Evernote very upsetting. You will change your privacy policy and have your staff  look into people's private sphere to help 'technology' make Evernote more 'personalized'? I hate Facebook because it gives me what it THINKS I like. There you are. Why leave a [good] concept for a bad one? Who asked for this? Count me out, I don't need you."

And a headline at the time from The Next Web read: "Evernote employees will be able to read your notes – here's how to stop them."

O'Neill said any reports of Evernote employees reading notes were "totally false."

"We communicated very poorly [and] said, 'Hey, there are situations where we will access your account.' And that's common to any internet company. If law enforcement comes to us with authorised court order, we will fight it, but ultimately we need to adhere to the law, we need to provide access to notes," he said.

The "vast majority" of complaining users, he added, were responding to "headlines that were factually incorrect."

The episode led some users to ask for "Zero Knowledge" encryption, where Evernote would know nothing about the data it stores. 

O'Neill said the company would expand its encryption — though he added that if the company "encrypted every aspect," people wouldn't be able to search their own notes. The way Evernote works is that people can write information into notes. Multiple notes can then be stored in categorised "notebooks."

"We already provide you with encryption at the entity level, so you can encrypt [text] in a note," he said. "We want to elevate that at one level higher to the note itself." 

That means Evernote won't be offering the ability to encrypt entire notebooks just yet.

Evernote doesn't need to raise more money

After a period of cost-cutting, Evernote is financially stable, O'Neill said. He rebuilt the executive team and shuttered the company's operations in Russia, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Restructuring the company, and focusing on turning hardcore users into subscribers, has turned Evernote into a "cash-flow positive" business, he added.

"We're not worried about raising more money," he said. "We're thinking about the next decade of existence and aggressively investing."

Evernote has 200 million registered users, though O'Neill won't give active user metrics. With the company on track for 2 million paying customers, that suggests less than 1% of the userbase are paying subscribers.

Unsurprisingly, Evernote is focusing on converting the people who are most addicted to its products. "The focus is on people who are deeply engaged in the product, who use us multiple times in a month, day or week. We're looking at establishing Evernote as a habit."

And is the company a dead unicorn, as per Josh Dickson's post?

"We couldn't be further from that," O’Neill said. "I say that sometimes I like to be underestimated, and the proof is in the pudding. We're attracting and hiring phenomenal people, the financial performance has never been stronger in the company's history. In pretty much every metric you look at, we're in the best shape in the company's history."

He added: "I wasn't pleased at that [post] at the time, I felt it was mostly unfair. We did have room for improvement."

It's possible Evernote may never recover its original buzz. Since Business Insider's interview with the company, a new competitor has emerged in note-taking app Bear, which has won praise from Evernote users.

O'Neill is philosophical about whether Evernote's in the public favour or not.

Quoting a 2015 post by Square's head of communications, Aaron Zamost, he said: "Tech journalists force a narrative on a company. It comes around, you go from irrelevance, to doing no wrong, to doing no right, then it comes back and you start all over again. I know how the game works, I just have to tune out the noise. We've tuned out the noise."

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NOW WATCH: Apple just released this beautiful drone video of its new 'spaceship' campus

Google announced the newest version of Hangouts simply called Meet during this week’s Google Next event in San Francisco. There are plenty of press articles on how great, so I won’t waste your time.

Indeed the Google team spent an incredible amount of time thinking and re-thinking the entire process of starting a meeting. They wanted it to be intuitive, fast and frictionless. The effort was mostly a lot of polishing. Making something look easy is always hard.

Folks always imagine that Google has hundreds of people working on {insert name of Google project}. The big surprise is how limited the resources often really are. Google Meet’s core team is a grand total of 5. As in 1-2-3-4-5. More is not always more. The punch line it may be better to have a handful of small & focused people on something than a mighty team.

So Google Meet is a great product offering executed by a small focused team. But wait, there’s more.

In the past months, I’ve attended meetings using Google Meet. My WebRTC hawk ears & eyes are tuned to detect problems. A random frame drop off. A periodic audio packet gone astray. I hear or see it.

Yet Google Meet operated flawlessly. In fact, I nearly had to focus on the content of the meeting versus being annoyed by strange audio or video artifacts that often are simply part of the norm of an Internet-based video call.

The answer is the Google network.

To support Google’s broad range of services, they’ve quietly gone about installing, buying, burying or sinking cables all over the world to create their own network capabilities. In 2013, Deepfield calculated that Google services represented 25% of all traffic in the US. So it’s no surprise, Google wants you to have a good experience, their core business depends on a reliable network.

To make this happen, Google decided to get as close to you as possible with cache servers connected to their managed and often owned backbone. Today, about 50% of all ISP’s are connected directly to Google. The other 50% probably don’t matter.

The way I figure it, you’re probably no more than 10 km away from a Google network point.

Not happy with this, Google also set themselves up to provide peer connectivity to pretty much anybody who met some basic criteria. You can connect directly to Google at ~ 90 Internet Exchanges around the world (basically rooms where ISP’s cross connect) and another 100 or so interconnection points in numerous data centers around the world.

In short, Google wants any of its’ traffic to get off the public Internet as fast as possible so they can manage the quality of the connection.

Video is highly dependent upon solid low latency low packet loss transmissions. No amount of patents, trickery or sleight of hand gets you around this axiom. Thus that Google Meet rides on Google’s private network is a hidden secret.

What’s wrong with the public internet? Internet providers constantly bicker with each other about who is carrying whose traffic from Point A to B. They play numerous dirty tricks like over subscribing the bandwidth, routing certain packets to cheaper networks and sometimes just not routing them at all if they’re in a bad mood. This is why trying to run a real-time voice/audio call long distances across the public internet is fraught with risk. Sometimes it works and works well but when it doesn’t work, you have no idea who to blame. The ISP’s like it that way. Hiding in the shadows.

Now Google isn’t alone in trying to circumvent the core Internet. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Facebook dig, bury and sink their own cables.

Only they’re collectively a fraction of what Google has.

AWS only has ~ 40 worldwide interconnect points, Azure about ~ 45. Facebook only ~ 20. This means Google has easily the 2x the network fire power of their nearest competitor. Netflix is the sleeper in this group with about 90% of US residential ISP’s are directly connected to them.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is also leveraging the Google Network, so if you’re running any media time sensitive SaaS (i.e. WebRTC) application, your performance on GCP will likely be significantly better than AWS.

AWS will struggle to match Google anytime soon in these network capabilities. Retail Amazon.com is not a media heavy application and the bulk of AWS services aren’t time sensitive. However, if Amazon (or anyone else) wants to sell you enterprise services where users are online all day long, they’ll clearly have to step up to the network challenge.

The post Meet Google – the new telephone company appeared first on Chris Kranky.

"Flippy" is the burger-flipping robot of the future, built by Miso Robots. CaliBurger will use them in 50 locations by the end of 2019.

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If you know anything about Google’s messaging strategy in the last few years, you know that it’s been a bit of a mess. Allo, the consumer app, launched without the cross-platform features users expect. Text messaging on mobile is mired in inter-carrier warfare. And Hangouts has become a punchline.

On two of those fronts, Google has been making progress. And today, in a bit of a surprise, Google has signaled that it finally decided Hangouts is supposed to be: a business communication tool to complement its consumer apps. We’re now getting a glimpse of what that means — and if the early demo I saw is any indication, it might be time to stop making fun of Hangouts.

That’s because Hangouts is turning into a group chat system that looks a...

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Google has finally given a price and release date for the Jamboard, the 55-inch touchscreen display it wants businesses to buy and use as a hybrid whiteboard / conferencing system. That price is pretty high at $4,999 plus a $600 annual fee, but still much cheaper than Microsoft’s similar Surface Hub system. It’s designed for whiteboarding and teleconferencing, and it’s as good a system for doing anything else that I’ve tried.

It also finally has units out in the wild for the unwashed masses to try out at its Google Cloud Next conference, so I went out and did just that. It’s a 55-inch 4K TV with a touchscreen that can accept up to 16 multitouch points. It’s also pretty reflective, so if you have a well-lit conference room you probably...

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Microsoft has made a bad habit of introducing ads here and there throughout Windows, and now people are starting to notice them showing up in another spot: inside File Explorer.

People have reported seeing notifications to sign up for OneDrive — Microsoft’s cloud storage service — at the top of the Quick Access screen that comes up when you open a new File Explorer window.

Someone on Reddit reported seeing a prompt to sign into OneDrive back in October, which was a little more ambiguous — it could have been meant to help, after all. But a newer prompt is clearly an ad, with Microsoft displaying the service’s price and letting people click a button to “learn more” about it.

In an email to The...

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In just six years, Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) has become a major phenom in the data center hardware industry that has attracted an almost cult-like following among engineers.

And on Wednesday, Facebook upped the bar yet again.

Facebook announced that it was giving away four new designs for brand-new types of computer servers invented at Facebook.

Anyone can take these designs, modify them and use them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them.

Those contract manufacturers include Chinese companies ike Quanta, as well as the world's largest maker of computer servers, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Better and cheaper

While Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has a chip in this Open Compute Project game, OCP's influence hasn't necessarily been a boon to the company. That's because OCP is to data center hardware what Linux is to software: open source. Engineers all collaborate freely on designs, with no intellectual property ownership barriers.

The idea is simple: to help Facebook and other large-scale Internet cloud companies build faster, better, push-the-envelope hardware that costs less money than buying traditional servers from companies like HPE, Dell or Cisco.

And other big cloud providers, like Google and especially Microsoft, have been involved in OCP, using designs themselves and sharing some of their own tech innovations.

Apple, too, is involved, as is AT&T, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and many others. Meanwhile, Amazon and LinkedIn are also building their own infrastructure from scratch, if not from OCP designs, then from their own.

As businesses choose to use cloud-computing services instead of buying their own servers, and the internet companies build their own faster, cheaper servers, the server industry has begun to hurt. In 2016, revenue for the worldwide server market declined about 4% to just under $53 billion, according to market researcher IDC, in large part because of cloud computing and "declining high-end server sales," said IDC research director Kuba Stolarski.

This includes double-digit declines in revenue in the last half of 2016 for HPE.

Raising the bar

In many ways, Facebook's designs have been putting the professional hardware industry to shame, doing things with hardware that's never been done before.

That's because people watch 100 million hours of video a day on Facebook; they post over 95 million photos and videos to Facebook and Instagram daily, and a good 400 million people now use voice and video chat every month on Messenger, Facebook tells us.

That kinds of usage puts incredible demands on the computer infrastructure. Facebook has been inventing new tech in response, and then giving away what it creates to OCP.

To that end, Facebook's technical program manager Arlene Gabriana Murillo announced these four new servers on Wednesday, which adds to and updates a handful of other servers it has already contributed to OCP. Take a look:

SEE ALSO: Facebook is once again putting the $41 billion computer network industry to shame

SEE ALSO: This founder left his $4 billion company before the IPO because he had an even better idea

"Bryce Canyon" is a storage server for things like photos and videos that can hold more (20% higher hard disk drive density) and run faster (4x increase in compute capability) over the predecessor Facebook invented (known as "Honey Badger").

"Yosemite v2" is a server that keeps chugging away even when someone yanks out bits and pieces of its insides to replace or repair them.

"Tioga Pass" is a computer server that processes big chunks of data in memory, making it faster than conventional servers as well as its predecessor "Leopard." (It uses dual-socket motherboards and more i/o bandwidth for things like memory and graphics processing).

Google has fixed many of the vulnerabilities in its Chrome and Android platforms identified in yesterday’s WikiLeaks dump of CIA documents, the company said today. In a statement provided to Recode by Heather Adkins —Google’s Director of Information Security and Privacy — Google said that it was “confident that security updates and protections in both Chrome and Android already shield users from many of these alleged vulnerabilities,” that its analysis of remaining security flaws was ongoing, and that it would “implement any further necessary protections.”

Adkins’ statement came a day after WikiLeaks released 8,761 documents and files it said that it obtained from the CIA’s Center for Cyber...

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In response to the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report released earlier this January, the Nordic think tank Sustainia has released its Global Opportunities Report.

The paper takes a sunnier approach to solving many of the problems detailed in the WEF report, such as poor sanitation and underemployment.

Three main innovations stand out for their ability to improve people's health, opportunities, and security.

Here are the technologies that could prove vital in the coming decades.

SEE ALSO: 6 disastrous 'black swan' events that could happen by 2030

Smart water technology

Cities contain roughly half the world's population and account for 80% of total GDP, which means their infrastructure matters a great deal.

Among 5,500 global business leaders polled for the report, Sustainia's research has found smart water technology ranked as the top priority three years in a row for ensuring people around the world can live safe, healthy lives. The technology could live in sensor-laden pipes  and include cloud storage for the data pipes receive.

Smart water tech would allow cities to more easily and accurately check toxicity levels, regulate water flow, and plug the occasional leak. Sustainia predicts the smart water tech industry will grow to $20 billion by 2020, up from $8.4 billion in 2016.

E-learning software

Roughly half the world has access to the internet, but many still lack a high-quality education. Sustainia has found education ranks near the top of leaders' proposed means to combat inequality worldwide.

Sites like Coursera and Khan Academy, and other massive online open courseware (MOOCs), enable people who can't afford traditional school to learn new skills.

"The ubiquity of the internet offers huge opportunities for businesses to reach potential students outside the classic classroom," the report states, "and instead bring education directly to those who need it through computers, tablets, and phones."

Blockchain and cybersecurity

Cybersecurity — and the organization system blockchain, in particular — is an increasingly vital way to keep business transactions logged and tracked, Sustainia finds. The technology also allows for a reduction in cybercrime and, as residents in sub-Saharan Africa attested, the exchange of energy and finance.

Blockchain technology appeared in several categories in Sustainia's top 15 opportunities, mostly because the internet now pervades many aspects of modern life. Without proper security, those systems could come undone.

"Intelligent cyber security offers a promising opportunity," the report states, "as it employs adaptive algorithms that can detect and respond to threats in real time, stopping breaches before serious damage can be done."

The leaks detail 14 different iOS exploits that the CIA could use to compromise Apple devices.

Apple says it’s working to fix any holes the CIA may have exploited in what appears to be a number of spying programs the agency employed.

Yesterday, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks released a cache of more than 8,000 documents that detail classified CIA cyberspying programs.

According to the leaks, the CIA has a trove of malware that can undermine security and encryption measures on Apple’s iPhones, Mac OS operating system and AirPort routers, as well as Google Android phones, machines running Windows operating systems, Samsung smart TVs and other connected devices.

Apple responded late yesterday and said it plans to fix any vulnerabilities:

Apple is deeply committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy and security. The technology built into today’s iPhone represents the best data security available to consumers, and we’re constantly working to keep it that way. Our products and software are designed to quickly get security updates into the hands of our customers, with nearly 80 percent of users running the latest version of our operating system. While our initial analysis indicates that many of the issues leaked today were already patched in the latest iOS, we will continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities. We always urge customers to download the latest iOS to make sure they have the most recent security updates.

Apple made headlines last year for its principled stance against helping the FBI break the encryption on an iPhone used by a suspect in the San Bernardino shooting. The FBI eventually dropped its case after it claimed to have purchased a solution for hacking into the suspect’s locked iPhone.

It appears the CIA had also amassed tools for undermining iPhone security features, according to the WikiLeaks documents.

The leaks actually reveal 14 different iOS exploits that the CIA could use to hack into Apple products, many of which were shared with the GCHQ, the U.K.’s spy agency. The exploits had all kinds of bizarre, secret spy code names like Elderpiggy, Wintersky, Persistence and Rhino.

The WikiLeaks files also detailed numerous exploits that target users of Microsoft Windows, with programs that describe ways the agency can infect a computer with malware or viruses by hiding the malicious programs in CDs, in image files and USB sticks. We reached out to Microsoft for comment, but did not immediately hear back.

The leaks also included CIA tactics for compromising the security on Android phones, but Google would not comment.

A bit of advice: Run all the updates available on your personal electronics when prompted to do so — just to make sure you can take advantage right away of any security vulnerabilities that are patched.

The shift demonstrates how mobile devices are surpassing desktop devices.

The internet of things (IoT) is exploding -- and as with most explosions there are consequences and collateral damage.

On the positive side, businesses are looking to IoT technologies to enable new business models and transform business processes. The result, predicts the McKinsey Global Institute, will be a direct $4 to $11 trillion global economic impact by 2025 as 80-100% of all manufacturers will deliver some sort of IoT application by that time. Moreover, McKinsey is expecting a 32.6% CAGR in IoT from 2015 through 2020.

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At ProgrammableWeb, the application programming interface is at the epicenter of our online lives. But what people might not realize is how much the API is at the center of the future and soon present technology of every connected person’s daily life. APIs will continue to play a central role in trends like chatbots and virtual assistants, the Internet of Things, microservices, pretty much all things mobile, and so much more.

BERLIN — Some Amazon Echo owners are complaining that Alexa — the voice-controlled virtual assistant that sits inside the smart-home device — isn't responding to them.

Owners vented their frustrations on Twitter early on Wednesday morning, with many of them complaining that they couldn't operate other connected devices, such as lights and music systems, in the way they usually would.

"With Alexa down, I had to open the Philips Hue app to turn off the lamp like some kind of fucking barbarian," wrote Amazon Echo owner Mark Hopkins on Twitter.

Dennis Jackson, another Echo owner, wrote: "Holy crap, Alexa is down. I can't live. I don't know what to do next. I'm just going to stand still and wait. #scared #alone"

Ashley Mayer, a partner at venture capital firm Social Capital, published a video on Twitter of her asking Alexa for today's news. The light on the top the Echo device lights up but Alexa fails to respond.

Here is a small selection of other tweets relating to the issue:

Monitoring service Downdetector shows that Alexa experienced a sharp increase in "problems" on Wednesday morning.

Business Insider ran its own test at 10:00am (CET) and found no issues with Alexa.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

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NOW WATCH: Apple just released this beautiful drone video of its new 'spaceship' campus

Microsoft is shutting down its Socl community on March 15th. The software maker originally launched its own social network more than four years ago, and the company has been experimenting with it ever since. Microsoft’s Socl network started off life as a mysterious social network project from its FUSE research group, with a number of creation tools to build GIFs and quick shareable images.

Microsoft even launched its own Windows Phone, Android, and iOS apps for Socl, but there never seemed to be a clear plan for its social network. It’s not clear whether any data from Socl will be made available to the users of the social network before its closure, but given the limited usage it’s likely Microsoft will just take the site offline.

In a b...

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Microsoft is planning to make its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, available to Office 365 customers next week. The software giant is planning a launch event for March 14th to make Microsoft Teams live around the world.

Microsoft Teams originally debuted in preview back in early November, built as an alternative to slack with tighter Office integration. Microsoft’s launch will include an online event at 8:30AM PT / 11:30AM ET on March 14th, and the company will likely detail all the final features for Microsoft Teams before its official debut worldwide.

Microsoft has demonstrated a number of integrations for Teams, including the ability to connect Twitter accounts to chat rooms and integrate Skype for audio and voice calls. This...

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For decades, Microsoft Windows users were locked in a seemingly eternal debate with fans of Apple's Macs over who had the superior platform — a conflict spurred by the very public rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Around the mid-aughts, things settled into kind of a stable duopoly, as Apple found its niche as the maker of premium hardware for the culture-conscious, and Windows PCs earned a rep as the computer of the mainstream, especially for gamers and office workers.

Apple opened the door for users to install Windows on Macs, and Microsoft made truckloads of cash selling Office and its associated services on iPhone and iPad. It was all quiet on the PC front as the battle moved to the smartphone.

But now, after years of stability, change is on the horizon in the PC market. Former Apple lovers, including myself, are starting to reconsider Windows. And hardware like the Microsoft Surface Studio PC, Eve V laptop/tablet hybrid, and Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 are getting people excited about computers again.

It's a huge renaissance for Windows, coming at a time when Apple fans feel like the company is treating the Mac like an afterthought. Don't just take my word for it: Over the weekend, my friend Owen Williams wrote a piece titled "Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up," which really says it all.

And on Monday morning, The Verge's Dan Seifert published a story called "The desktop PC is finally cool," in light of the great strides that companies like Dell and HP have made in building interesting, extremely cool, nonportable PCs. Recently, Microsoft hinted that it's winning over high-end Apple customers, too.

A window closes, a window opens

The changing perception speaks to the great strides that Microsoft has made under CEO Satya Nadella. Windows 10 is considered one of Microsoft's best operating-system updates in years, with a strong focus on versatility and ease of use in both touch-screen and traditional PC modes.

And Microsoft promises to keep updating Windows 10, constantly refining the operating system with cool new forthcoming features like the video-game-improving Game Mode. The OS was pretty good to start with, and it's just getting better.

Apple, by contrast, has yet to ship a Mac with a full touch screen and is instead positioning the iPad Pro tablet as a laptop replacement (which is ironic, since the iPad Pro was clearly inspired by Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet). For Mac users who want a touch screen, Apple gave a consolation prize of sorts with the Touch Bar, a strip of controls above the new MacBook Pro's keyboard that has received mixed reviews.

Some Apple fans are also getting annoyed because the new MacBooks are focused on slimness and battery life rather than the processing power or the device ports they need to get work done. Whether this change in focus will pay off for Apple is still up in the air, but it's definitely alienating die-hards.

Apple is far from doomed, but there is a sense that the tide is turning: Macs are no longer the unimpeachable gold standard in computing. And Microsoft and its partners are exploiting that vulnerability to great effect.

SEE ALSO: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

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NOW WATCH: 5 hidden features to get the most out of your Xbox One

Nearly two-thirds of consumers are worried about home IoT devices listening in on their conversations, according to a Gartner survey released Monday.

Those jitters aren’t too surprising after recent news items about TV announcers inadvertently activating viewers’ Amazon Echos, or about data from digital assistants being used as evidence in criminal trials. But privacy concerns are just one hurdle smart homes still have to overcome, according to the survey.

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If you haven’t been paying attention to the PC world lately, you might not have noticed that the lowly PC has seen a bit of a resurgence, with interesting designs and unique concepts. We saw this come to bear at CES just a couple of months ago, where PC makers such as Dell, Lenovo, and HP all trotted out interesting laptop designs.

But the laptop isn’t the only PC that’s seen a design-focused revival. The lowly desktop PC has transformed from a boring beige or black box into a centerpiece of a modern desk space. An all-in-one computer in 2017 is both functional as a computer and beautiful to appreciate as a piece of design.

Microsoft’s Surface Studio really invigorated this category late last year. A 28-inch all-in-one PC that converts...

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Microsoft is teaming up with Steelcase, designers of office furniture, to envision a Surface-powered office of the future. The collaboration involves ideas on how to best design workspaces and furniture at a time when devices are rapidly changing to fit the new ways of working. Microsoft is highlighting five “Creatives Spaces” that make the most of Surface hardware.

An accompanying video shows off these spaces in action, but the workspaces look like a perfect environment that isn’t going to be replicated any time soon in many corporate offices worldwide. Nevertheless, Steelcase plans to show off this combination of office furniture worldwide in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Munich, and London.

Microsoft has been...

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Google’s latest “fake news” oversight sounds even worse when spoken aloud.

During the initial dustup over “fake news,” Google and its parent company Alphabet got less flack for spreading hoaxes than social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit. This week, the search giant is taking its lumps.

First: BuzzFeed explained how Alphabet-owned YouTube became the “engine” of false conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. Strike one.

Second: SearchEngineLand editor Danny Sullivan noticed that Google was passing off right-wing paranoia as the promoted answer to questions like, “Is Obama planning a coup?” and, “Is Obama planning martial law?” Strike two.

(For those not in the loop, “FFS” isn’t a technical term. It stands for “for fuck’s sake.”)

Those bogus search results are also served up as fact on Google’s virtual assistant, Google Home. Unlike a normal page of search results, Google Home doesn’t tell you where its answer came from or give you the option to see other answers.

Here’s a video of BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones getting the same ludicrous answer out of his Google Home:

Steeerrrrrike three!

I asked my Amazon Echo Dot, “Alexa, is Obama planning a coup?”

“Hmm,” Alexa said. “I can’t find the answer to the question I heard.”

Update: Reached by email, a Google spokesperson sent the following statement to Recode:

Featured Snippets in Search provide an automatic and algorithmic match to a given search query, and the content comes from third-party sites. Unfortunately, there are instances when we feature a site with inappropriate or misleading content. When we are alerted to a Featured Snippet that violates our policies, we work quickly to remove them, which we have done in this instance. We apologize for any offense this may have caused.

Amazon raised a lot of eyebrows when it bought the massively popular Twitch game-streaming service for $970 million in August 2014.

Why it would spend so much cash for Twitch was a real head-scratcher — live game broadcasts on the internet aren't exactly what you would call core to Amazon's retail business.

Things got murkier in late 2016 when Amazon announced that it was getting into the game business directly with three new PC titles, starting with multiplayer brawler "Breakaway."

At the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco this week, Amazon Games VP Mike Frazzini tells Business Insider that it's all part of one big master plan — a plan that comes directly from the playbook of CEO Jeff Bezos, focused around the idea of being "customer centric," and a plan that's already underway.

The big question at Amazon, he says, is "Who are our customers and how do we help them?" In the case of game developers, "they want to spend as much time as possible on creative and as little as possible on everything else."

To that end, Amazon is exploring what Frazzini calls "two fascinating frontiers" with regards to games: "Crowd" and "cloud." Which is where Twitch and the $12 billion Amazon Web Services cloud computing behemoth come in, and where they play so well together.

The wisdom of the crowd

From Frazzini's perspective, Twitch's massive success — with over 100 million users every month and a reach that includes half the millennial males in America — taps into a current that's existed since there were video games.

"Games have always been about communities," says Frazzini.  

Gamers have long turned to each other for recommendations and advice on new games to buy, Frazzini says. Twitch's most popular streaming personalities gather those communities around them, making them a key part of how new games go from good idea to massive phenomenon. 

That means opportunity for Amazon, which has been giving game developers new ways to hook Twitch features into their games. For instance, games like "Ultimate Chicken Horse" let Twitch viewers vote on the hazards that will appear in a level, giving them a part to play in the outcome of a match.

Those features help developers turn their games into durable businesses. A vibrant community keeps a game alive, driving sales of the core experience and any other premium content that comes later. And those communities are increasingly born on Twitch. 

On the other side of the equation, Amazon is exploring new ways to bring Twitch into the core of its business, giving Amazon Prime subscribers access to a bevy of Twitch perks. And just this week, Twitch announced that it would start selling games directly, giving streamers a cut of the revenue for any sales they drive.

After all, Frazzini asks, if Twitch streamers are how gamers are now finding games, "why not make it easier to buy stuff?"

Lumber mill

Those Twitch integrations are also a big part of the "cloud" piece of the puzzle. Amazon Web Services is already Amazon's most profitable unit, offering access to fundamentally unlimited supercomputing power on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Game studios, Fortune 500 companies, and pretty much every other type of software-related business are at least looking at cloud services from AWS, or its rivals, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. In light of that competition, Frazzini says, it's Amazon's mission to "be the best listeners on the planet" and deliver what customers need.

That's why Frazzini says his team at Amazon is focused on trying to make it as easy as possible for game developers to get started with AWS. That's why Amazon launched Lumberyard — a free platform for building games, called an "engine" in industry parlance, that simplifies the process of development in the cloud. 

Better yet, Lumberyard offers all kinds of built-in integrations with Twitch, including a recent service called Metastream which presents Major League Baseball-style real-time statistics to the viewers of an online multiplayer match. 

So by choosing Amazon Web Services, Frazzini says, a game developer gets lots of technology, much of it for free, for building cutting-edge games. And better yet, he says, that same technology makes it way easier to connect with those all-important Twitch audiences, which in turn makes your game more marketable.

For Amazon, that makes these two businesses "self-reinforcing," he says. The more successful a game is on Twitch, the more capacity and services it'll need from Amazon Web Services, ideally for Amazon. And the more it takes advantage of AWS, including Lumberyard, the more fans a game can find on Twitch.

Breakaway and Bezos

This is where "Breakaway" and Amazon's other original PC games come in.

Built on Amazon Web Services, Lumberyard, and offering deep Twitch integration including that new Metastream feature, Frazzini says that "Breakaway" is meant to prove to developers that the company knows what it's talking about when it comes to games. 

While Frazzini definitely hopes that "Breakaway" finds its audience and turns into a viable game on its own, he also says that "it helps" when you go into a customer meeting with a game developer and can show them a real thing, built on the real technology.

From Frazzini's perspective, it's still very early on for Twitch, Lumberyard, and even Amazon Web Services itself. Ultimately, it all comes down to a very Bezos-driven philosophy, Frazzini says. Whatever it takes to connect with customers and provide what they want, you do it, and you "really pay attention to details." 

"You do that hard work," Frazzini says. "And you do it over, and over, and over, and over."  

SEE ALSO: Amazon's massive cloud business hit over $12 billion in revenue and $3 billion in profit in 2016

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One in five Americans has access to legal weed, which means they can drop in at their local dispensary, browse a menu of marijuana varieties, and buy without a doctor's note.

While the days of buying marijuana in a back alley from your college roommate's cousin's friend may be nearing an end, there's often still confusion on what kind potency various strains have and where it comes from. These specs aren't always clearly labeled.

Jessica Catalano, a chef and author of "The Ganja Kitchen Revolution," knows good weed. She is a pioneer of cannabis cuisine, which infuses or pairs food with specific marijuana strains based on their flavor profile. The "pot sommelier" has smoked ganja for roughly 20 years.

When Catalano, who uses cannabis to treat her migraines, is making edibles or preparing pairing dinners, she looks for several characteristics in her bud. A stalk of weed should be dense with flower — the fluffy, green stuff you smoke.

"You want it to look healthy and covered in crystals [as] if someone took really fine particles of diamonds or snow and sprinkled it all over the cannabis," Catalano said.

There are several signs of stress that users can look for: brown or orange spots might mean the plant grew in an environment that was too hot, while a sparse bud might indicate the plant was exposed to excessive wind.

After marijuana is harvested but before it ends up on shelves, the plant undergoes a process called curing, in order to remove moisture from the flower and preserve its flavor and quality. A stalk of weed should not be bone dry. Instead, it should be springy when you pinch the bud between your fingers. If it retains the shape it's been squeezed into, it probably wasn't cured properly, according to Catalano.

Usually, dispensaries leave samples of different strains in jars on the counter. You can ask a dispensary employee, called a "budtender," to examine the buds more closely and find out which (if any) strains were organically grown.  Most employees receive extensive training to understand the plant and learn the nuances between different strains.

When it comes to smell, it's buyer's choice. Different strains can smell like citrus, pepper, or even baking spices. Catalano warns that you might make some poor choices along the way.

"I thought it was a great idea to infuse a strain called Kong into chocolate chip cookies. Kong is a very robust strain that tastes like fuel when you vaporize it — fuel and skunk," Catalano said.

The result was "catastrophic." Eventually, she figured out the winning combination.

SEE ALSO: What it's like to attend a $125 marijuana pairing dinner where guests eat and get high

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