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The James Webb Space Telescope will be 100 times as powerful as the Hubble. It will change how we see the universe.

Exploring strange new worlds. Understanding the origins of the universe. Searching for life in the galaxy. These are not the plot of a new science fiction movie, but the mission objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

On Christmas, NASA launched the Webb from French Guiana in partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Now the telescope is on its way to a point nearly a million miles away from the Earth.

On its journey, the telescope has to complete a difficult mechanical maneuver: assembling itself. The telescope is so large it needed to launch folded up inside a rocket. Over the course of several weeks, it needs to unfurl its various components, from its sunshield to its mirrors. According to NASA, more than 300 potential technical problems, or “single point failures,” could potentially doom the mission.

But when it fully deploys in space, the Webb will usher in a new age of astronomy, scientists say, and show humanity things it has never seen before.

“The Webb represents the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of astronomy,” says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at MIT. “We’ve been waiting for this a very long time.”

Scientists started thinking about a follow-up even before the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. After more than three decades in space, it’s unclear how much longer this boundary-breaking satellite will be able to scan and photograph the universe.

The Webb was originally supposed to launch in 2010 and cost around $1 billion. Its price tag ballooned to $10 billion, and it’s way overdue. But the wait will be worth it, at least according to the scientists who expect new and revealing glimpses of our universe.

“We’re going right up to the edge of the observable universe with Webb,” says Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. “And yeah, we’re excited to see what’s there.”

The Webb will surpass the Hubble in several ways. It will allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe. It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than our sun — and even embark on a search for signs of life there.

The Webb is a machine for answering unanswered questions about the universe, for exploring what has been unexplorable until now. Here’s a guide to what the Webb is capable of.

The Webb’s golden mirror is a giant leap for telescopes of its kind

NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team

The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble, was itself a huge leap forward for astronomy. Here on Earth, astronomers seek out remote mountaintops and deserts to build major telescopes for the best chance of viewing a dark sky away from pollution and bright lights. But their view is still marred by the slight haze and luminescence of the Earth’s atmosphere. Space is “the ultimate mountaintop,” as NASA explains. There’s no better view of space than the one from, well, space.

Hubble has meant so much during its 30-year run. For one thing, it’s sent us unforgettable, jaw-droppingly beautiful images like those of the Lagoon Nebula and the Pillars of Creation.

NASA, ESA, and STScI

It’s also taught us about the age of the universe, about what happens when stars explode, about black holes. It helped establish many of the boundaries that the Webb hopes to push. Most powerfully, its observations have led scientists to believe the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, propelled by something so mysterious that scientists simply call it “dark energy.”

The Webb is, controversially, named for the man who led NASA in the decade leading up to the moon landing. James Webb, its namesake, was a government bureaucrat at a time when it was federal policy to fire gay staffers. While current NASA administrator Bill Nelson has said that the agency has “found no evidence at this time that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,” more than 1,700 people have signed a petition accusing Webb of complicity in a discriminatory policy.

Namesake aside, the technological achievement of NASA’s newest telescope is uncontroversial. It’s set to take the success of the Hubble a step further.

“What we’re going to get is a telescope that’s about 100 times more powerful than Hubble,” says Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA who works on the Webb.

Michael McClare/Aaron E. Lepsch/Krystofer Kim via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

How?

The Webb improves on Hubble in two key ways. The first is just its size: Hubble was about the size of a school bus, whereas Webb is more like the size of a tennis court. “This thing is enormous,” Straughn says. “Webb is by far the biggest telescope NASA’s ever attempted to send into space.”

But it’s not just the total size of the contraption that matters. When it comes to reflecting telescopes, the key component is the size of its curved mirror. “You could sort of think of a telescope mirror like a light bucket,” Straughn says. The more light you can collect in this bucket, the fainter and farther-away things you can see in the universe.

Hubble’s mirror was an impressive 7.8 feet in diameter. Webb’s beautiful, gold-hued mirrors combine for a diameter of 21.3 feet. Overall, that amounts to more than six times the light-collecting area.

NASA

What does that mean in practice? Well, consider one of Hubble’s most famous images, the Deep Field. In 1995, scientists set the Hubble to stare off into a teeny-tiny patch of sky (about the size of the head of a pinhead, held at arm's length from the viewer) and capture as much light as it could from that one spot.

The image that came back was astounding. Hubble uncovered thousands of galaxies in this teensy patch of sky, helping us refine the number of galaxies thought to exist in the universe.

NASA, ESA, R. Bouwens, and G. Illingworth

This photograph also revealed Hubble’s larger power — as a time machine. In astronomy, the farther away things are, the older they are (because light from faraway places takes a very long time to travel to Earth). That means this Hubble Deep Field is not only a snapshot of space: It also contains the history of our universe. Galaxies in this image appear to us as they were billions of years ago.

“What Webb will do is take that field and go even further,” UT Austin’s Casey explains. “So the tiny specks of light in the background of the Hubble Deep Field will brighten and become more detailed, we’ll be able to see spiral arms, we’ll be able to see structure, and then we’ll get more specks of light even further in the past. We’re seeing farther back in time with Webb.”

With Webb, astronomers like Casey will be able to see so far back that they’ll potentially spot the very first stars and galaxies. Hubble has seen light dating to about 400 million years after the Big Bang, which took about 13.3 billion years to reach us.

“That’s far! But Webb has the capability to take us to 250 million years after the Big Bang,” explains Casey, who has been approved to work with the Webb Space Telescope. “It might not sound like a big difference. What’s a few hundred million years between friends? Actually, it’s the difference between seeing the first stars that ever turned on [and] arriving a bit too late after the funeral.”

Astronomers call this period when the first starlight shone through the universe “cosmic dawn.” With the Webb, humanity will be able to glimpse at it for the very first time.

Beyond that are barriers through which even the Webb cannot see. Prior to the first starlight, the universe was shrouded by a “dense, obscuring fog of primordial gas,” as the National Science Foundation explains. There’s no light that reaches our telescopes from this time, which is called the cosmic dark ages.

(There is some background radiation from the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow that shines to us from before the dark ages. But for the most part, the dark ages is a blank spot in our timeline of the universe.)

Casey and other astronomers hope the Webb will help them understand the end of the dark ages and figure out what caused this fog to lift, ushering in cosmic dawn. Scientists suspect the starlight from the earliest galaxies did it.

“If you have a cloud of gas and it encounters energetic light, that energetic light will ionize that gas and disassociate that cloud,” Casey says. “And so if that light just has turned on, it then hits that gas and really transforms the entire universe from a dark place to a light place.”

The Webb telescope sees infrared light — which can be very, very old

NASA/Chris Gunn

The Webb’s other advantage is the type of light it collects.

Light comes in a lot of different varieties. The human eye can see only a narrow band known as visible light, but the universe contains lots and lots of light outside this range, including the higher-frequency, higher-energy forms: ultraviolet, gamma rays. Then there’s the lower-energy light with longer wavelengths: infrared, microwaves, radio.

NASA and J. Olmstead (STScI)

The Hubble Space Telescope collects visible light, ultraviolet, and a little bit of infrared. The Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, so it sees light that’s in a longer wavelength than what our eyes can see. This seems nerdy and technical, but it’s actually what allows Webb to look further back in time than the Hubble.

Infrared light is often very old light, due to a phenomenon call redshifting. When a light source is moving away from a viewer, it gets stretched out, morphing into a longer and longer wavelength, growing redder. (The opposite is true as well: As a light source grows closer, the wavelengths shorten, growing bluer.) It’s similar to what happens when a siren goes by: The pitch increases as the siren approaches, then decreases as it trails away.

Because space is constantly expanding, the farthest things away from us in the universe are moving away from us. “And as light travels through space from those distant galaxies, the light is literally stretched by the expansion of space,” Straughn says.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)

Imagine a star that’s really far away. The light from that star may start off in the visible spectrum, but it gets stretched on its journey to us. It grows redder and redder. “So when we see distant galaxies with Hubble, they’re sort of these little, tiny red nuggets,” Straughn says. Eventually, these very distant, old galaxies grow so red that they drop into the infrared spectrum. Webb can see this ancient light that has become invisible to the human eye.

Conveniently, infrared light has other uses as well. It’s a really good type of light to use to look at exoplanets. For instance, if you were on a planet that orbits another star and wanted to see Earth, visible light wouldn’t be your best bet.

“The Earth peaks in the infrared,” says Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory astronomer Kevin Stevenson, who plans to use the Webb in his research. So if we want to be able to study an Earth-like planet in another solar system, “What we really want to do is observe at infrared wavelengths, because that’s where the light from the Earth is being emitted.”

Exoplanet scientists like Stevenson are going to use the Webb to analyze the atmospheres of these worlds: The Webb is capable of determining some of the chemicals in their atmospheres. “We can detect water, CO, CO2, methane,” Stevenson says. While those aren’t definitive signs of life on their own, they could begin to ask fascinating questions: What created that methane and carbon dioxide? Could it have been life?

“We all want to find another Earth, don’t we?” Stevenson says. “The prospect of answering the question ‘are we alone?’ has been something that we’ve been asking ourselves for centuries. And I think with James Webb, this will provide us the first opportunity to really answer that question.”

This $10 billion gadget better not break

Scientists are clearly raring to go, but the Webb revolution has taken a while. One reason for all the launch delays had to do with contractor snafus. But a big source of all of them, NASA’s Straughn says, is the complexity of the Webb itself.

“Because it’s so big, there aren’t any rockets that are big enough to launch it fully deployed,” Straughn says. That’s why the telescope had to be folded up to fit inside a rocket. “So that whole process of building a deployable telescope in space is the source of a lot of the engineering challenges.”

Upping the stakes is the fact that while Hubble was launched to around 340 miles above the Earth, Webb will be almost a million miles away — four times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

It means Webb will be unserviceable by human hands if it breaks. That’s scary, considering the history of the Hubble. Shortly after the Hubble launched in 1990, engineers realized there was a problem with its mirror; the telescope’s initial images came back fuzzy, and astronauts had to launch a space shuttle to fix it. That won’t be possible with the Webb. It just has to work.

It will be far away for good reason. Because Webb is an infrared telescope, it needs to be kept cold. The Earth itself is warm and glows in infrared. “Anything warm glows in infrared light,” Straughn says. “If the telescope was warm, it would just glow and see itself.”

The Webb will orbit around what’s called a Lagrange point. This is a point in space where the telescope can keep cold and, critically, also stay in line with the Earth as both orbit around the sun.

Michael McClare/Aaron E. Lepsch/Josh Masters via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Remarkably, any scientist around the world can apply to use the Webb Space Telescope, provided they write up a project proposal that passes peer review. It’s pretty competitive. In 2020, the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates space telescopes from John Hopkins University in Maryland, put out a call for proposals for Webb’s first observing run. About a quarter of the proposals were accepted.

“It feels like part of me is still stunned,” says Lisa Dang, a physics PhD student at McGill University who was one of the lucky few to get approved to use the Webb. “And the other part is having this imposter syndrome — like, these data better be really amazing.”

Dang is set to study one of the most extreme planets ever discovered: K2-141 b, a planet 202 light-years from Earth and so close to its host star that its surface is believed to be covered by an ocean of lava. If it has clouds, they are likely made out of vaporized rock, which could then precipitate out “rock rain.” Not much is confirmed about this lava planet, but Dang will use the Webb to study its atmosphere and see what’s possible on this extreme world.

Winning the project proposal “made me feel like an astronomer for the first time,” Dang says. “But it also makes K2-141 b very real suddenly.”

This is the power of an unprecedented telescope such as the Webb. It will help astronomers like Dang fill in the blank spaces of the cosmos.

“It’s wild, when you think about it, that we’re able to piece together the history of what happened before the Earth or the sun even existed,” Casey says.

If all goes according to plan, these kinds of breakthroughs could come in a matter of months.

Update, January 4: This story has been updated with news on the James Webb Space Telescope’s launch and the controversy surrounding the naming of the telescope.

Amtrak's Surfliner line along the coast of Southern California will be severely disrupted over the next several weeks as emergency crews repair damage from erosion that destabilized the cliff that supports the tracks. The emergency work, which will take place near San Clemente, also disrupts service on the MetroLink commuter rail line which uses the same tracks.

In non-pandemic times, Surfliner, which runs from San Diego through Los Angeles up to San Luis Obispo, is Amtrak's second-busiest rail corridor, serving 2.7 million passengers in 2019. Between Amtrak and MetroLink, 43 trains a day use the tracks that have been shut down. It is also one of Amtrak's most picturesque routes, running right along the coast with incredible views.

But that proximity to the ocean, with tracks running atop a bed of sand and rock, is proving a liability as California's coast erodes, a problem that is only going to get worse in the coming years.

"Despite large uncertainty owing to both statistical fluctuations and scientific ignorance, I predict with confidence—a slow-rolling erosion shitstorm is coming to coastal SoCal,” Bob Guza, professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego told Motherboard via email. “In fact, it already started."

Guza said that humans have drastically altered the Southern California coastal balance in the last 100 years. Among other things, rivers have been dammed for flood control, trapping sand that used to replenish beaches. And while cliff-top houses and railroads make for nice views, they're often shielded or supported by seawalls of rocks and boulders, which don't protect the cliff from erosion as well as sand does. And Guza added that over-watering of lawns and golf courses can lead to cliff failures, too.

Like most other crises, climate change is exacerbating the problem for various reasons. On the most basic level, higher sea levels, more violent storms, and bigger waves erode sand and cliffs faster. But, as professor Timu Gallien at UCLA told Motherboard, the main problem is coastal sediment is not getting replenished thanks to urbanization, dams, and "coastal armoring" like the repairs being done for Amtrak right now. Gallien said this results in "a negative sediment budget."

But linking this specific cliff's erosion with climate change is premature. All three researchers Motherboard spoke to said linking specific cliff erosion to any one factor can be difficult and can only be known in approximation. Adam Young, another Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor, said he would need to examine the site to find out whether climate change is a factor.

Whether linked to climate change or not, the way humans have changed the natural world extends far beyond emissions. The overdevelopment of sensitive habitats and human intervention in natural processes by paving over the natural world has resulted in our air, land, and seas as less stable and more volatile than before.

That’s one way to put something on a pedestal

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Today Facebook announced the Portal Go, a battery-powered 10-inch portal smart screen as well as a new version of the Portal+, with a  14-inch tiltable display

However, most interesting for me, beginning in December, Facebook is adding support for Microsoft Teams for all Portal touch-based devices including Portal Go and Portal+. This will be alongside the existing support for Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Zoom.

Portal’s will not be “Teams certified devices” like all other Teams dedicated devices to date. This is a different model more analogous to the model of Microsoft producing an app for mobile/cell devices. I would guess Microsoft see the use case as more Teams consumer and/or business users working from home. It will be a full “sign-in” experience for Teams, where you sign in with your account, not just meeting join.

Will organisations, maybe more in the SMB/C space use Portals as Teams devices in offices, maybe as personal or huddle room devices?

Will we see Alexa, which supports Skype and Zoom and Google Nest which supports Webex, also support Microsoft Teams? I expect so in the future.

Teams support on consumer video devices (like Alexa, Next and Portal) is something I discussed with Randy Chapman (@randychapman), Mark Vale (@MarkVale83) & Shawn Harry (@shawnharry ) on their UC Status Podcast Microsoft Teams in the Consumer Space. Up until now, it has been an odd gap, Microsoft is pushing Teams hard in the consumer space, but unlike Skype, Zoom, Webex and Google Duo, Teams wasn’t available on consumer “smart screen” devices or TVs.

Separately, Facebook is also introducing Portal for Business, a new service for SMBs to leverage Portal’s video calling and collaboration tools with Facebook Work Accounts for their teams. This is a new account type on Portal and will be available for many Facebook work products over the coming year. So Facebook is certainly positioning Portals for SMBs for their service.

Reference: Blog from Facebook Introducing Two New Portals, Including the First Portable Version – About Facebook (fb.com)

If you live near a freshwater river or lake, odds are good that you have seen warning signs about harmful algal and bacterial blooms posted on its shores. Alarmingly, a new study reports that these blooms may be early indicators of an ongoing ecological disaster, caused by humans, that eerily parallels the worst extinction event in Earth’s history.

Some 251 million years ago, the end-Permian event (EPE), popularly known as the “Great Dying,” wiped out nearly 90 percent of species on Earth, making it the most severe loss of life in our planet’s history.

Ominous parallels of that upheaval are now showing up on Earth, according to a team led by Chris Mays, a postdoctoral researcher and palaeobotanist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. The researchers found that toxic algal and bacterial blooms during the Great Dying are similar to a recent microbial proliferation in modern lakes and rivers—a trend that has been linked to human activities such as greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dioxide), deforestation, and soil loss. 

“We are not there yet,” Mays said in an email, referring to the conditions of the EPE. “There was probably a six-fold increase in carbon dioxide during the EPE, but today carbon dioxide levels haven't yet doubled since pre-industrial times.” 

“But with the present steep increase in carbon dioxide, we're playing catch-up pretty well,” he cautioned. “And the chances of harmful microbial bloom events, along with many other deleterious facets of change (e.g., intense hurricanes, floods, wildfires), also rise…all the way up this steep carbon dioxide slope.” 

The repeated correlation of these blooms with mass extinction events is “a disconcerting signal for future environmental change,” report the researchers in a study published on Friday in the journal Nature Communications. Indeed, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest we are currently in the midst of yet another mass extinction event, caused by humans. 

Not only do microbial blooms transform freshwater habitats into “dead zones” that can both choke out other species, thereby increasing the severity of extinction events, they can also delay the recovery of ecosystems by millions of years, the team noted.

Mays and his colleagues reached this troubling conclusion by analyzing fossil records near Sydney, Australia, that were laid down before, during, and after the end-Permian extinction.

Though the exact mechanisms behind the Great Dying are a matter of debate, it was driven in part by an intense bout of volcanic eruptions that sparked a dramatic uptick in global temperatures and greenhouse gases emissions. Wildfires, droughts, and other disruptions swept across the woodlands, causing a collapse of plant life and widespread deforestation. 

The sudden loss of forests, which act as a sink for carbon, created a noticeable “coal gap” during the end-Permian that exposes this long-term interruption in carbon sequestration. Nutrients and soils that had once been metabolized by these botanical ecosystems instead seeped into nearby freshwater habitats, bolstering microbial blooms that were already thriving as a result of higher temperature and atmospheric carbon. 

These microbial communities are an integral part of freshwater ecosystems worldwide, but the effects of human-driven climate change—including wildfires, deforestation, soil loss, and drought—are driving a new bloom boom. 

“The three main ingredients for this kind of toxic soup are accelerated greenhouse gas emissions, high temperatures, and abundant nutrients,” Mays said. “During the EPE and other extreme warming events, volcanic eruptions provided the first two, while sudden deforestation caused the third. Specifically: when the trees were wiped out, the soils bled into the rivers and lakes, providing all the nutrients that the microbes would need.”

“Today, humans are providing all three of the ingredients in abundance,” he noted. “Carbon dioxide and warming are the inevitable byproducts of burning fossil fuels for hundreds of years, and we've provided copious nutrients into our waterways, mostly from agriculture and logging. Together, this mix has led to a sharp increase in freshwater toxic blooms.”

This pattern threatens to spread the reach of toxic sludge and create the kind of dangerous dead zones that contributed to the enormous ecological turmoil, and slow recovery, of the Great Dying. Indeed, Mays’ team drew comparisons between the End-Permian’s blooms and those that are flourishing today, including their texture, filamentous structure, strong fluorescence, and concentrations. 

“The concentrations of algae from the end-Permian event, the worst mass extinction in Earth's history, were as high as some bloom events we see today,” Mays said. “But the EPE blooms occurred without humans helping.”

The team notes that “the optimal growth temperature range” for these freshwater microbes is 20–32°C, which matches the estimated summer air temperatures during the early Triassic, the period that immediately followed the Permian, and is also within the range of projected temperatures at mid-latitudes for the year 2100, according to the study. 

“The beauty of looking at prehistoric extreme warming events, like the end-Permian, is that they provide, arguably, a cleaner signal of the consequences of climate change,” Mays noted. “This is because the fossils and rocks show us the results of warming without additional messy influences from humans” such as “nutrient influx from agriculture, deforestation via logging, extinctions by poaching/overfishing,” and more. 

“As it turns out, you can cause a large number of extinctions simply by releasing a lot of greenhouse gas in a short time frame,” he continued. “It doesn't matter where the gases come from―volcanoes, airplanes, coal-fired power plants―the results may end up the same.”

Clearly, it’s not encouraging to see the same ecological trends of the worst mass extinction event in Earth’s history popping up in freshwater systems all around us. Tracking the continued emergence of these blooms could help scientists predict the environmental costs of the climate crisis in the coming years and decades, which may also include an extremely delayed recovery of the ecosystems lost to the advance of microbial dead zones.

Mays and his colleagues also plan to study the role of wildfires in mass extinction, as well as the burning of crucial carbon sinks such as the wetlands of South America or the peatlands of Siberia.

“As we've seen in the fossil record, without these regions of carbon-dioxide-drawdown, the world can stay intolerably warm for hundreds of millennia,” Mays said. “While wildfires play an important role in some ecosystems, I think most scientists would agree that preventing the burning of carbon sinks should be a global priority if we want to help minimize the long-term impacts of warming.”

“Unlike the species that suffered the mass extinctions of the past,” he concluded, “we have the opportunity to prevent these toxic blooms by keeping our waterways clean and curbing our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Ikea got in relatively early on selling furniture embedded with wireless charging coils, but what if you don’t have one of its powered-up desks or shelving units? If you want seamless Wireless Qi charging without redecorating, then next month, there will be a solution. Meet the Sjömärke, a $39.99 wireless charging pad made to work with furniture you already own.

This device isn’t like most Qi charging pads, where you’d put your phone or earbuds directly on the mat. Instead, the seven-inch by three-inch aluminum and plastic charger works through plastic or wood, so you can use its double-sided tape (or screws, not included) to put it on the underside of a table or shelf.

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Critics say Apple is not keeping its promise to hold fast when faced with government pressure.

Apple and Google shut down a voting app meant to help opposition parties organize against the Kremlin in a parliamentary election in Russia that’s taking place over the weekend. The companies removed the app from their app stores on Friday after the Russian government accused them of interfering in the country’s internal affairs, a clear attempt by President Vladimir Putin to obstruct free elections and stay in power.

The Smart Voting app was designed to identify candidates most likely to beat members of the government-backed party, United Russia, as part of a broader strategy organized by supporters of the imprisoned Russian activist Alexei Navalny to bring together voters who oppose Putin. In a bid to clamp down on the opposition effort, the Russian government told Google and Apple that the app was illegal, and reportedly threatened to arrest employees of both companies in the country.

The move also comes amid a broader crackdown on Big Tech in Russia. Earlier this week, a Russian court fined Facebook and Twitter for not removing “illegal” content, and the country is reportedly blocking peoples’ access to Google Docs, which Navalny supporters had been using to share lists of preferred candidates.

Critics say the episode serves as an example of why Apple, specifically, can’t be trusted to protect people’s civil liberties and resist government pressure. The company strictly controls the software allowed on to millions of devices and has recently faced allegations of monopolistic behavior with regard to how it manages its App Store, which is the only way people can install apps on iPhones and iPads. While Google is also being accused of caving to censorship demands, Android users can still access the Russian voting app without relying on the Google Play store, though it’s more difficult.

“Android users in Russia can find other ways to install this app, whereas Apple is actively helping the Russian government make it impossible for iOS users to do so,” Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, told Recode. “Apple’s top-down monopolistic approach is at the root of their harm.”

Apple insisted just last month that it did, in fact, have the ability to defy this type of government influence. The company said so when it announced a new photo-scanning iPhone feature meant to identify images containing child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The tool, Apple explained, would involve downloading a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) photo database, in the form of numerical codes, onto every iPhone. The update would have run those codes against photos stored in users’ iCloud accounts, looking for matches that would be reported to human reviewers, and then to the NCMEC.

Though stopping the abuse of children is certainly worthwhile, the tool raised a lot of concerns for privacy advocates. Some said the update amounted to Apple building “a backdoor” into iPhones, one that could easily be exploited by bad actors or governments seeking data about their citizens. In the face of mounting criticism, Apple put the update on hold. But the company also insisted that it would never bow to government pressure.

“We have faced demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users before, and have steadfastly refused those demands,” the company said. “We will continue to refuse them in the future.”

Apple has long marketed privacy as a feature of its products. After the San Bernardino terrorist attack, Apple famously refused the FBI’s demand that the company build a back door into the iPhone. Earlier this year, Apple updated the iPhone’s operating system to allow users to opt out of the app-based trackers deployed by platforms like Facebook. Nevertheless, the company’s move on Friday to take down a voting app in Russia shows that Apple’s actual willingness to oppose government interference has its limits.

Neither Apple nor Google provided a comment for this story.

Apple’s ambiguous commitment to protect its users’ civil liberties is especially concerning because the company still insists that it should control large swaths of the software available on the iPhone. While developers like Epic Games have been pushing back against this “walled garden” approach, Apple still manages to maintain wide-ranging discretion over what programs and apps run on its devices. But as recent events in Russia make clear, Apple’s tight control over its App Store can be abused by authoritarian governments.

“Apple was trying to bake censorship into the operating system, adding technology that could search our own phones for banned files,” warned Albert Fox Cahn, the director of STOP, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “But if one government can search for CSAM, another can search for religious texts and political discourse.”

After the idiotic and dangerous events of January 6, you might recall how corporations like AT&T and Comcast proclaimed they'd paused donations to any politicians behind the clumsy, violent attempt to, you know, dismantle functioning democracy. But, of course, this was mostly a show; the companies continued to donate money to those same politicians via their lobbying and policy umbrella orgs. Then, once the public was adequately distracted by the next big scandal du jour, quickly got back to work funding those same politicians again with zero meaningful penalty.

Now AT&T's making headlines once again, this time for funding the politicians behind Texas' terrible anti-abortion law. In addition to the way the law will harm women (particularly low income women and women of color), we've noted the law is an inherent mess that encourages vigilantism, likely opening the door to all kinds of additional problems in numerous other policy sectors. That's before you get to the problems with the Supreme Court's chickenshit middle of the night ruling that appears to ignore the very foundations of the law itself.

AT&T being AT&T, the company has been busy pushing all kinds of marketing missives about its breathless support for women, while simultaneously throwing giant wads of cash at politicians for whom that hasn't been much of a priority. The press hasn't been too bothered by this, leaving it to independent newsletter writers like Judd Legum to call AT&T out:

Whenever this sort of thing happens, AT&T attempts to turtle its way through it, usually by refusing to comment and hoping the scandal passes overhead. But to his credit, HBO's John Oliver this week wasn't having it, and managed to squeeze at least a comment out of his parent company (technically his soon to be ex-parent company thanks to the looming Discovery spinoff). After being prodded by Oliver, this is what AT&T came up with after weeks of total radio silence:

"AT&T has never taken a stance on abortion. Employee PAC contributions to Texas legislators went to both supporters and opponents of the Texas legislation."

As Oliver was quick to point out, not taking a stance on this immeasurably shitty law is taking a stance (oh hey Elon didn't see you standing there), especially if you're still happily funding the politicians behind it:

"Not taking a stance on this issue right now is taking a stance,” Oliver said. “And both-siding abortion isn’t really the PR slam dunk that that they seem to think it is. Although it is certainly on brand for them. AT&T clearly likes their public statements the same way that they like their cell signal — hilariously f-cking weak."

You can find the full segment here:

On one hand it's a great thing that an independent newsletter and a satirist are holding a corporation to account for funding terrible people pushing terrible, harmful legislation. On the flip side it's a testament to the timidity of the mainstream press that this sort of stuff routinely has to fall to independent newsletters and a satirist in the first place. Corporations routinely get to talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to supporting terrible politicians and terrible policies, and the fact AT&T was able to remain totally quiet for a month without much media scrutiny makes it abundantly clear why.

Microsoft now lets you remove passwords from Microsoft accounts to embrace a passwordless future. Starting today, the software giant will let consumers sign into Microsoft accounts with its Microsoft Authenticator app, Windows Hello, a security key, or an SMS / email verification code instead of a password.

The new option arrives just months after Microsoft started rolling out passwordless authentication for commercial users in March to help people adjust to the realities of remote work. “When I think of security, I think you’ve got to protect your whole life,” says Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of Microsoft security, compliance & identity, in an interview with The Verge. “It’s no longer enough just to think about work or home...

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News Summary

• Telstra and Cisco sign new five-year SaaS agreement for IoT to continue enterprise growth
• Companies continue collaboration to bridge regions together with powerful IoT networks to support a variety of industries including financial, retail and government
• With Telstra Control Center powered by Cisco customers gain the visibility they need to turn IoT data into smart business decisions

SAN JOSE, CA and MELBOURNE – September 13, 2021 – Telstra and Cisco today announced plans for continued collaboration with a new five-year agreement to provide advanced connectivity management for Internet of Things (IoT) services with Telstra Control Center powered by Cisco.

Using Cisco’s IoT Control Center SaaS solution for more than 10 years has allowed Telstra to advance its business goals and grow new revenue streams. The company currently serves thousands of customers including Australia’s major financial institutions, retailers and government, offering more visibility and flexibility to better manage their businesses and turn IoT data into decisions.

Cisco IoT Control Center is a market leading mobile IoT SaaS platform serving the connected car industry. It is currently used in more than 50 service provider networks and 30,000 enterprises supporting more than 185 million connected devices. Cisco continues to work with its service provider customers like Telstra to explore 5G use cases that will drive value, including private 5G, as the platform supports both 5G standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA) networks.

“We’re proud to be an IoT global leader as we continue to scale up our IoT software and platform offerings across several industry verticals, while leveraging Australia’s largest IoT network with over four million IoT devices now connected,” said Mark Chapman, Group Owner of Industry Solutions and IoT, Telstra. “Working with Cisco, our management platform helps customers automate and manage large-scale IoT deployments easily and cost-effectively. This means customers can be faster to market, lower costs, increase reliability and take actions through the platform ’s insights.”

“Cisco and Telstra have a long history driving innovation in networking, 5G, collaboration solutions and more,” said Masum Mir, Vice President, Mobility, Automation and IoT Control, Cisco. “Together we continue to empower autonomous industries and connected communities in Australia with smart infrastructure designed to support the future of connectivity with 5G.”

Supporting Resources

• About Telstra IoT
• Cisco IoT Control Center
• Cisco 5G

About Cisco 

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. Cisco inspires new possibilities by reimagining your applications, securing your data, transforming your infrastructure, and empowering your teams for a global and inclusive future. Discover more on The Network.

The post Telstra and Cisco Renew Agreement to Offer Businesses Added Visibility and Insights to Monetize IoT appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Are free minutes and accounts in WebRTC video API worth the trouble? I think not. Don’t choose your CPaaS vendor based on their “free” tier.

I am finalizing my 10th edition of Choosing a WebRTC API report these days. In the past year I’ve heard from a few vendors and developers questions about the free tiers in this space. So I took the time as part of this edition, to sit down and analyze the price plans of the various vendors in the market and create another article as part of the report (one that is available through the membership site for those who purchase the report).

In this article, I want to shine a light on one aspect of price plans in WebRTC APIs which is the free tier.

Let’s dive into things, shall we?

Free tier is optional

14 out of 24 vendors I looked at practice per minute pricing. Sometimes, they have multiple price strategies, but per minute pricing is the most common – especially on the bigger more widely known vendors.

Out of the 14 vendors, 5 offer free tiers in one way or another. And 2 offer credits – Amazon Chime SDK and Microsoft Azure Communication Services – these two offer IaaS cloud credits to startups as general practice and their CPaaS/WebRTC offering wraps into these as well (I’ve written about cloud giant effect on the CPaaS market last year).

Not all WebRTC API vendors offer a free tier

Free tiers seem to be almost “random” in who offers them and who doesn’t

Free depends on the plan

Some vendors have free plans that depend on different things.

For Twilio, for example, free minutes come only with their Twilio Video WebRTC Go service, which… amounts to ~$10/month, and offers a limited peer-to-peer experience.

With some vendors, the free plan is actually a limited free evaluation for 1-4 months in timeframe.

That said, the most popular alternative seems to be free minutes on a paid plan. You give your credit card, and will only be charged if you pass a number of minutes on a given month. More on that – in the next section.

Free monthly minutes depend on the plan/feature set you choose/use

It might also be dependent on what you pay (did we say free plan?)

10,000 free WebRTC minutes

Most vendors that give free minutes, are giving 10,000 free minutes per month.

Some give less. A few give more. The highest is 30,000 minutes per month.

If your service offers group calls of 10 participants for 30 minutes each time on average, then a single group call will take 300 minutes. That means ~33 such calls a month are free. Or a bit over a call a day.

This isn’t much. Not even for a small vendor just starting out. To be clear – this isn’t to say that 10,000 free minutes isn’t nice. Just that it won’t get you far.

The number of free minutes offered may seem a lot, but calculated for a use case they aren’t that many

Many small vendors see upwards of a million video minutes a month, so this amount to 1% of less of their total monthly minutes. Negligible in the long run

WebRTC video free tier? Money Time

Minutes are nice, but how about money? How much money do you actually save with these free minutes?

I did the math. The numbers range between $30-$90 per month. Less than $1,000 per year.

If you are building a business and making your long term plans on the CPaaS vendor to use based on a potential discount of $1,000 a year then you’re doing it wrong.

Why aren’t CPaaS vendors offering higher free plans? Because they have costs they need to cover. Assuming a 10% cost over that price point, then 1,000 “free” accounts will cost them up to $100,000 a year to maintain. And that doesn’t include the support costs which are higher.

CPaaS vendors would like to have startups sample and use their service, but they also need to operate as a business and make money. Giving more minutes than they do today probably isn’t going to accomplish more paying customers – it will just bring in more free riders that will also leach on their soul and support resources.

Free WebRTC video CPaaS plans worth less than $100/month

When making your decision on choosing a vendor, ignore that plan in your own business plan

As a CPaaS vendor, decide if you want such a free tier and what type of customers it is going to attract

How do you choose a WebRTC CPaaS vendor?

The answer to this question is definitely NOT through their free tiers or minutes…

To some extent, the decision is made these days via pricing. It is why I’ve written in this round of my report to include a special article dedicated to pricing of WebRTC calls in CPaaS services. This includes the leading metrics these platforms use for their price plans as well as price ranges for each vendor. For this analysis, I’ve also added Zoom Video SDK as another reference point for pricing.

The report itself introduces a new CPaaS vendor and removes another vendor. It also sports a new features set structure, one that is geared towards the changes in requirements made due to the pandemic.

This report is used today by:

• CPaaS vendors themselves, who wish to understand their competitive landscape
• Enterprises and startups who need to pick and choose a CPaaS vendor to work with
• Companies who wish to start a CPaaS business or compete through an adjacency type solution
• Investment first looking to understand the market and… make an investment decision

This month, until the report gets officially published, there’s a $500 discount. You can use coupon code API2021LAUNCH when you purchase the report.

The post Free WebRTC Video API in CPaaS. Is it worth it? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Exploited by apps. Attacked by thieves. Unprotected by police. The city’s 65,000 bikers have only themselves to count on.

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Zoom plans to expand its support for automatic live transcriptions with the addition of live translation, and turn its whiteboard feature into a more of a fully-featured app, among several other changes the company announced at its Zoomtopia conference on Monday.

Automatic live transcriptions / closed captions in English were announced to be coming to free Zoom accounts in February 2021. Now Zoom says it “plans to provide real-time transcription for (as many as 30 additional languages) by the end of next year.” As part of that push, Zoom will also offer translation services for paid accounts, with the plan “to support real-time translation across as many as 12 languages by the end of next year.” Zoom wasn’t able to share details about...

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Encrypted phone firm Ciphr, which is popular among organized criminals, has made moves to stop operating in Australia, according to photos of a Ciphr device obtained by Motherboard and an encrypted phone industry source.

The news signals a potential shakeup in the encrypted phone industry, which has been rocked by a recent wave of law enforcement operations. In June, Motherboard reported that the FBI secretly ran its own secure phone company called Anom to intercept users' messages. Ciphr is one of the few remaining established players in the space.

Following the Anom operation, Ciphr's owner "got really scared that they would come to him," the source in the encrypted phone industry in Australia told Motherboard. Motherboard gave the source anonymity so they could speak more candidly about sensitive industry matters.

The source said Ciphr has banned the company's resellers in Australia. Encrypted phone companies often work by outsourcing the sale of phones to individual distributors and agents based in particular markets. "If the international resellers get caught sending phones to Australia they also get cut off," the source added.

Are you a Ciphr user or distributor? Did you used to sell or use any phones from similar companies? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

In early July, another person provided Motherboard with screenshots of a Ciphr device. One screenshot showed that the user still had multiple days left on their subscription plan, but the status bar at the top of the screen read "disconnected." The person said the screenshots came from an Australian Ciphr phone.

The encrypted phone industry source said that Ciphr has also stopped operating in America, but Motherboard has not seen screenshots from a U.S.-based device.

"We will not be providing a comment at this time," someone in control of Ciphr's media email address told Motherboard in July. The company provided an identical response when asked again last week.

Ciphr offers a series of privacy-focused apps that the company installs on Android-based hardware. These include Ciphr Text, which is an instant end-to-end encrypted messaging app; an email system called Ciphr Mail, and Ciphr Vault, which is designed to securely store files locally on the device. Encrypted phone distributors can sell devices with companies' software for thousands of dollars for a six month or annual subscription.

Ciphr is heavily used by criminal groups, including bulk drug traffickers in Australia. One particular organization ran by a mastermind known as Mr. Blonde seems to have escaped the Anom operation because his associates were instead using Ciphr, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

One former distributor for Phantom Secure, an encrypted phone company that the U.S. Department of Justice shut down in 2018, previously described to Motherboard a meeting they had with Ciphr representatives.

"I felt like I was in a mafia-esque situation during that meeting," the distributor said.

Ciphr recently introduced a free app called Ciphr Lite which has been downloaded over a thousand times, according to its listing on the Google Play Store. The app does not require a phone number or email address for users to register. At least some reviewers who appear to be Ciphr users seem annoyed by the prospect of potentially anyone being able to message anyone else on the Ciphr network if they have the setting enabled.

"Why the f would [you] release an app connected to paid subscribers. This isn't a game," one review reads. Other reviews say the app works well.

The list of countries that Ciphr plans to introduce Ciphr Lite to includes some 116 countries. It does not include the United States or Australia.

In 2017, someone published Ciphr customer information online, including email addresses and unique IMEI numbers.

Many users of the encrypted phone industry have been in turmoil following the revelation that Anom, a relatively popular firm, was secretly run by the FBI for years. The FBI and a confidential human source (CHS) worked to attach an extra encryption key to each message sent by Anom devices, letting authorities essentially look over the shoulder and read the communications of organized crime groups. Australian authorities were also heavily involved in the operation, first seeding around 50 devices into the criminal underground as part of a beta test, and then arresting a wave of Anom users earlier this year.

In July Motherboard published an analysis of one of the Anom devices after obtaining one from the secondary market. 

Both the FBI and the Australian Federal Police declined to comment on Ciphr's recent changes.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

Vonage Communications Platform serves as an equalizer, bridging the communications tech gap between SMBs and larger competitors

HOLMDEL, NJ – September 9, 2021 – For Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, the events of the last year have highlighted the importance of providing future-proof cloud communications solutions for its growing small and midsize (SMB) customer base.

In an increasingly digital and post-COVID world, the global transition to a virtual or hybrid work environment has leveled the playing field for small and medium sized businesses, empowering them with the tools and technologies to operate like their larger counterparts in the enterprise space. Built using Vonage Communications APIs, the Vonage Communications Platform (VCP) delivers a secure, scalable, flexible cloud communications platform that powers global engagement solutions across APIs, unified communications and contact center innovations for businesses large and small.

“We have witnessed a secular change in the way that business gets done, with success driven by digital experiences and the ability to serve employees and customers remotely,” said Jay Bellissimo, Chief Operating Officer, Vonage. “Small and midsize businesses, all over the world, must adapt to meet these customer expectations and provide the experience customers demand in order to not only survive but thrive.”

Business technology is at its best when it’s used as an equalizer, and the Vonage Communications Platform is uniquely positioned to offer SMB organizations a wide range of scalable and flexible communications services and solutions including APIs, unified communications, and contact center applications that enable remote work and remote delivery of services, while making doing business easier and more cost effective. Cloud communications powered by the VCP can support hybrid and remote work environments for SMBs across verticals – from education to telehealth and insurance, financial services to entertainment, and more.

“In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to re-think their approach to digital transformation and accelerated adoption of communications technologies including unified communications, intelligent contact center applications, and communications APIs,” said Jason Blackwell, Research Director, IDC. “SMBs, in particular, can realize significant benefits when they choose a cloud communications provider that can provide all of these capabilities and enable them to compete with larger competitors on customer and employee experience.”

As a Farmers Insurance agency owner, LaTasha Baucham is dedicated to providing a personalized, reliable, and memorable customer experience. In just two years, her Florida-based agency, Baucham Insurance Group, has more than doubled its number of employees, a testament not only to the power of a great brand like Farmers, but to the importance of superior customer connections. Leveraging Vonage Contact Center, deeply integrated with Salesforce, has allowed Ms. Baucham’s team to spend less time worrying about how they will connect with customers, and more time focusing on how they will best be able to serve them. “I need to be able to adapt as I learn more about my customers’ needs and preferences. And if it takes me six months to make a change, that’s not adapting. Vonage allows us to build and adjust customer touchpoints into our system based upon our unique needs, and takes a lot of the guesswork out of what happens next in terms of customer connections,” Baucham noted. “The Vonage platform is agile and flexible enough to allow us to do that, and fluid enough to allow us to change and grow as our business changes and grows.”

Singapore-based HeyHi is an interactive online educational platform, powered by the Vonage Video API, with a mission to provide outstanding online classroom learning experiences to schools, learning centers, tuition centers and private tutors around the world. The value that Vonage brings to HeyHi goes beyond technology, as Vonage product managers and engineers provide HeyHi with expert guidance and support whenever needed – no matter the issue. “HeyHi and Vonage engineering teams work in close collaboration to solve problems, innovate our solution and not only meet, but exceed our customers’ expectations,” explains Yueh Mei, Founder/CEO of HeyHi. “As a small company, it is an honor and a privilege to have a direct line of contact with the Vonage team of sales support and engineers and work directly with the source. That connection is a very unique, important element of this partnership and just one reason why we’re so confident that Vonage is the perfect fit for our needs.”

“There’s still a start-up vibe at Vonage. The team there really listens to customer feedback and develops Vonage’s solutions in response to their customers’ needs, even smaller companies like ours,” said Asbjørn Nørgaard Blakstad, CTO at More Music Group, an organization developing a double-sided platform connecting music tutors and students for all ages with each other. “It’s lovely to work with a big company that is not standing still but is constantly looking to evolve and innovate.”

Learn more about how the Vonage Communications Platform is revolutionizing the way SMBs around the world are connecting with their customers and employees.

About Vonage
Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global cloud communications leader, helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Vonage’s Communications Platform is fully programmable and allows for the integration of Video, Voice, Chat, Messaging and Verification into existing products, workflows and systems. Vonage’s fully programmable unified communications and contact center applications are built from the Vonage platform and enable companies to transform how they communicate and operate from the office or anywhere, providing enormous flexibility and ensuring business continuity.

The post Vonage Supports Expanding Small Business Market through the Pandemic with Future-Proof Cloud Communications Solutions appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

A future powered by fusion energy is closer than ever before. This week, scientists at MIT got a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to a strength of 20 tesla. That’s the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth.

“Fusion in a lot of ways is the ultimate clean energy source,” Mari Zuber, MIT’s vice president of research, said in a Wednesday press release on the experiment. “The amount of power that is available is really game-changing.”

Fusion is such a big deal because it’s powered by water and would, theoretically, create an enormous amount of carbon-free energy. “It’s a nearly unlimited resource. We just have to figure out how to utilize it,” Zuber said.

Fusion powers the sun and recreating the process on Earth is a complicated process involving high temperature magnets generating massive magnetic fields. The MIT scientists set a goal three years ago of creating a magnet that could generate 20 teslas. They achieved it on schedule, even during the pandemic.

The next step is to design a fusion device called SPARC that can generate more plasma energy than it consumes.  “I now am genuinely optimistic that SPARC can achieve net positive energy, based on the demonstrated performance of the magnets,’ Zuber said. “The next step is to scale up, to build an actual power plant. There are still many challenges ahead, not the least of which is developing a design that allows for reliable, sustained operation. And realizing that the goal here is commercialization, another major challenge will be economic. How do you design these power plants so it will be cost effective to build and deploy them?”

This isn’t the only recent breakthrough for fusion energy. On August 9, government scientists working at the National Ignition Facility in California shot 192 lasers at a BB-size capsule and generated 1.3 megajoules of energy, roughly five times the energy that was absorbed. Researchers working for General Atomics have constructed a six-story magnet with plans to use it to achieve nuclear fusion. Last year, scientists in Italy recreated nuclear fusion from the big bang under a mountain in Italy.

With climate change wreaking havoc on the planet, the need for alternative sources of energy is pressing and scientists across the planet are working around the clock to create it. “None of us are trying to win trophies at this point,” Zuber said. “We’re trying to keep the planet livable.”

Microsoft is shelving its plans to fully reopen its US offices next month. The software giant had planned to reopen its headquarters on October 4th, but the ongoing uncertainty of COVID-19 and the spike in cases has forced the company to delay its back to the office push. Microsoft isn’t providing a new date to employees, though.

“Given the uncertainty of COVID-19, we’ve decided against attempting to forecast a new date for a full reopening of our US work sites in favor of opening US work sites as soon as we’re able to do so safely based on public health guidance,” explains Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of modern work.

This latest delay follows a number of postponements this year to fully reopen Microsoft’s offices....

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AUSTIN, TX – September 9, 2021 – TPx, a leading nationwide managed services provider delivering cybersecurity, managed networks and cloud communications, today launched a free ransomware evaluation for businesses nationwide. With the FBI reporting a 300% increase in cybercrimes since the pandemic began, businesses need a plan to help mitigate risk against growing cyber threats.

The free ransomware evaluation launch coincides with the start of National Small Business Week, which will spotlight the resilience of America’s small businesses as they rebound from the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. Businesses of every size face significant threats from ransomware. According to recent research, 43% of online attacks target small businesses, and a mere 14% of those businesses are prepared to defend themselves.

For a limited time, TPx is offering a complimentary 30-minute ransomware evaluation to businesses nationwide. The consultative evaluation is designed to help businesses understand their vulnerabilities and learn how to mitigate risk related to ransomware. TPx’s expert security consultants will review the company’s security practices and infrastructure setup to evaluate their ransomware risk, identify weaknesses and provide recommendations to help protect the business.

“In the current environment of heightened cyber threats, many small businesses don’t have a dedicated internal IT team to handle the modern work environment’s security needs,” said Jonathan Goldberger, Senior Vice President Security Practice and Strategic Sales, TPx. “The result has left many small businesses vulnerable without knowing how or where to start when it comes to protecting their IT environment. Our evaluation is intended to help businesses identify their organizational weaknesses and manage risk, ultimately helping them save money and protect their reputation.”

The free ransomware evaluation is the latest addition to TPx’s Security Advisory Services portfolio introduced in April of this year. TPx’s ransomware evaluation gives businesses recommendations on areas of cybersecurity that may require attention and is delivered by TPx’s expert security consultants. The free consultation and evaluation are available to any business in the United States. Businesses can sign up here: https://www.tpx.com/lp/ransomware-evaluation/.

About TPx

TPx helps businesses navigate the complicated and evolving IT landscape. As a leading managed services provider, TPx simplifies business operations, optimizes networks, improves productivity, reduces costs and keeps IT environments secure for businesses nationwide. TPx offers a full suite of managed IT, secure network, unified communications and cybersecurity services to manage its customers’ complex IT needs and make IT easy. For more information, visit www.tpx.com.

The post TPx Offers Free Ransomware Evaluation to Small Businesses Nationwide appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Are these new blasters really the future of Nerf?

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Employee location has become a bit more complicated as some return to the office, while others work remotely. To embrace those hybrid working conditions, Google is making more changes to its Google Workspace offering by going live with spaces in Google Chat for all users.

Spaces integrates with Workspace tools, like the calendar, Drive and documents, to provide a more hybrid work experience where users can see the full history, content and context of conversations, regardless of their location.

Google’s senior director of product management, Sanaz Ahari, wrote in a blog post Wednesday that customers wanted spaces to be more like a “central hub for collaboration, both in real time and asynchronously. Instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a video meeting, teams can come together directly in a space to move projects and topics along.”

Here are some new features users can see in spaces:

• One interface for everything — inbox, chats, spaces and meetings.
• Spaces, and content therein, can be made discoverable for people to find and join in the conversation.
• Better search ability within a team’s knowledge base.
• Ability to reply to any message within a space.
• Enhanced security and admin tools to monitor communication.

Employees can now indicate if they will be virtual or in-person on certain days in Calendar for collaboration expectations. As a complement, users can call colleagues on both mobile and desktop devices in Google Meet.

Calendar work location. Image Credits: Google

In November, all customers will be able to use Google Meet’s Companion Mode to join a meeting from a personal device while tapping into in-room audio and video. Also later this year, live-translated captions will be available in English to French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, with more languages being added in the future.

In addition, Google is also expanding its Google Meet hardware portfolio to include two new all-in-one video conferencing devices, third-party devices — Logitech’s video bar and Appcessori’s mobile device speaker dock — and interoperability with Webex by Cisco.

Google is tying everything together with a handbook for navigating hybrid work, which includes best practice blueprints for five common hybrid meetings.

Google is announcing two new hardware devices designed specifically to work with Google Meet and to look like Google hardware. The Series One Desk 27 and Series One Board 65 are both made by Avocor but are part of the Series One program where Google specifically blesses devices that are custom-built for Meet. They even include a custom Google Edge TPU chip in addition to a more standard Intel Core i5.

As its name implies, the Series One Desk 27 is a 27-inch display that has custom speakers, mics, a camera, and a touchscreen. In addition to using it as a standalone videoconferencing device, the Desk 27 can also be used as a laptop monitor. It has a USB-C plug on the back and when you dock in, your laptop can use its AV array for video...

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News Summary:

• Webex by Cisco hosts record 8 billion calls monthly and supports more than 39 million cloud calling users worldwide – the most of any cloud calling provider
• New capabilities and partnerships for Webex Calling power enterprises’ move to the cloud
• Cisco adds the UK to its Calling Plans, expanding coverage to more than 65 countries – the most in the industry

SAN JOSE, CA – September 7, 2021 – Today, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced it is now hosting a record eight billion calls monthly across its cloud calling platforms, the most of any cloud calling provider. To meet enterprises growing global needs, Cisco has also extended its domestic calling coverage to include the UK, with more than 65 countries now covered with its Cisco Calling Plans and Cloud Connected PSTN services – the most in the industry. Enterprises such as T-Mobile, Office Depot, Cigna Health, and CDK Global are relying on Webex Calling to power their businesses.

Webex Calling is part of the Webex Suite – the industry’s first suite for hybrid work that provides Cloud Calling, Messaging, Meetings, Polling, Events and Socio in a unified, secure offering. Reliability of calling systems is essential, as they are embedded in businesses’ everyday workflows. With a hospital, for example, if a call is delayed by even a minute, it can be the difference between life and death when a patient arrives in critical condition.

“With the move to hybrid work and increasing pressure to delight customers, there’s never been a greater need to unify communications across the entire workforce,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager, Cisco Security and Collaboration. “As enterprises look to migrate calling solutions to the cloud, Webex Calling offers the leading end-to-end, secure calling experience that makes unified communications a reality.”

New Webex Calling innovations benefit customers with:

• Broader global footprint: Cisco Calling Plans are now available to UK business customers, and Cloud Connected PSTN supports domestic calling in more than 65 countries
• Increased flexibility: Customers can now customize PSTN solutions, mixing and matching options to best meet location and operational requirements
• Speed enhancements and ease of use: Integration of Cloud Connected PSTN in Control Hub enables customers to automate ordering and provision of new numbers quickly and easily. As a result, organizations can achieve in minutes what previously took days. This is made possible in partnership with Cisco integrated service provider IntelePeer via Webex Control Hub

“We are now more dispersed than ever, we need flexible, reliable and secure communications and applications across voice and messaging,” says Ben Rife, President, Bullfrog Group. “Cisco and IntelePeer have worked closely together to integrate and automate a process that enables us to order, provision and manage numbers all from the Cisco Webex Control Hub, which is the nerve center of our communication system, enabling our business to continue to thrive.”

Cisco offers the most complete and secure cloud collaboration solutions with more than 39 million cloud calling users across all cloud calling platforms hosted by Cisco and its service provider partners. Customers are supported by Webex’s extensive partner ecosystem for Cloud Calling with over 1,000 partners worldwide offering local delivery, integration and calling plans and support to meet specific customer needs. With over 20 years of experience, Webex Calling is comprehensive enough to address the collaboration needs of every type of business, yet adaptable enough to accommodate future needs.

Additional Resources

• Blog: How to take your phone system to the cloud for hybrid work
• Video: Insights and advantages of cloud calling | Webex Calling
• Blog: Webex’s latest milestones and innovations hit the sweet spot for hybrid work 
• Register for a webinar here to learn more about the Webex Suite
• Register now for WebexOne here  

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. Cisco inspires new possibilities by reimagining your applications, securing your data, transforming your infrastructure, and empowering your teams for a global and inclusive future. Discover more on The Network.

About Webex by Cisco  
Webex is a leading provider of cloud-based collaboration solutions which includes video meetings, calling, messaging, events, customer experience solutions like contact center and purpose-built collaboration devices. Webex’s focus on delivering inclusive collaboration experiences fuels our innovation, which leverages AI and Machine Learning, to remove the barriers of geography, language, personality and familiarity with technology. Its solutions are underpinned with security and privacy by design. Webex works with the world’s leading business and productivity apps – delivered through a single application and interface. Learn more at webex.com.

The post Webex by Cisco Hits Record 8 Billion Monthly Calls Milestone appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

While businesses are providing workers with upskilling resources, they remain underutilized.