“I think our new threshold, frankly, should be 100Mbps. I think anything short of that shortchanges our children, our future, and our new digital economy.” That’s what FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel argued nine years ago — now, it’s finally happening.
Today, the FCC has changed its definition of “broadband” to mean download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second. It had been stuck at 25Mbps/3Mbps since 2015. As recently as 2021, outgoing FCC chairman Ajit Pai claimed we still didn’t need more than that.
These definitions matter, because they let the FCC report whether it’s failing or succeeding to close the broadband gap — and how much to regulate (or throw money at) broadband providers to...
Tango Networks has announced Global Pass, a potentially game-changing enhancement of its Tango Extend mobile UCaaS solution.
The Tango Extend eSIM service currently allows any subscriber’s smartphone to seamlessly integrate with their company’s UC platform, facilitating smooth business communications for remote employees as well as frontline, deskless, and hybrid workers.
With the addition of Global Pass, Tango Extend subscribers benefit from a unified fixed-rate business mobile service across 14 Home countries, complemented by seamless roaming in an additional 25 Home Away countries spanning Europe and North America.
Lee Essex, Senior Vice President of Sales for Tango Networks, said:
Global Pass is a game-changer, enhancing the capabilities of Tango Extend to redefine how enterprises connect, communicate, and collaborate on a global basis. With Global Pass, we empower enterprises to break free from traditional connectivity and geography constraints, fostering a new era of productivity and collaboration for the extended workforce.”
A significant challenge facing fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) solutions today is disconnecting when users roam between networks. While this might be no worse than roaming between networks on a mobile number, it still has an inevitably negative impact on the user experience.
Global Pass aims to revolutionise mobile communication by removing borders and allowing employees to stay connected while travelling or working internationally smoothly.
Initially launching in 14 countries during the first half of 2024, Global Pass subscribers based in the USA, UK, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Luxembourg, Spain, Sweden, and Poland can freely reside or travel between these countries and roam into 25 more countries across Europe and North America without incurring additional roaming charges.
Later expansions planned for 2024 and 2025 will include countries across Asia, Australasia, North and South America.
Tango Extend’s Seamless Integration With Microsoft Teams Phone and Other UC Platforms
Integrating seamlessly with leading UC platforms like Microsoft’s Teams Phone, Tango Extend empowers workers to utilise their existing business numbers directly on their mobile phones, including Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) mobile phones. Tango Extend offers a business e-SIM for any multi-SIM personal mobile phone, with payment and control managed by the business. E-SIM effectively provides a business user with a Teams number.
This setup securely separates work and personal communications with dual personas, allowing business calls to be made using the phone’s native dialler rather than a mobile app.
Tango Networks is empowering service providers with Teams Mobile Phone while producing a slick deployment, making it effortless for service providers and businesses to introduce and leverage Tango Extend and Global Pass.
Tango Extend seamlessly extends Teams-enabled fixed-line phone numbers from certified operators to mobile phones, leveraging Teams’ SIP Gateway technology. This empowers remote or on-the-go employees to make and receive Teams calls using the native dialer on their mobile devices.
Designed to bridge the communication gap for frontline and deskless workers in industries such as retail, manufacturing, delivery, transportation, and in-home services, Tango Extend provides access to corporate communications, facilitating more effective collaboration.
The Teams-integrated persona utilises the work-controlled SIM along with the worker’s Teams identity and phone number for work communications. This setup enables centralised capture and recording of work communications to adhere to records retention laws or for quality assurance purposes in customer support. Meanwhile, employees’ personal communications remain private and separate, using their personal identity and phone number.
“Today’s work-from-anywhere world demands simple and easy-to-operate communications to boost productivity,” said Andrew Bale, President of Tango Networks. “Tango Extend brings business communications to any worker in any location. With Tango Extend, business customers can get more from their investment in Teams.”
By adopting Tango Extend, Tango Networks highlights that companies are phasing out landline desk phones and reducing expenses associated with company-issued mobile phones, all while diminishing their carbon footprint and enhancing worker productivity.
Microsoft is finally creating a single version of Microsoft Teams that will allow you to switch between personal and work accounts easily. The new unified app is currently in testing and will let Microsoft Teams users switch between multiple tenants and personal or work account types.
This new version of Teams will be rolled out to commercial users in April and will include an account switcher that’s accessible from the profile section. “We received consistent feedback from personal and work users: you prefer a single Teams app that allows you to easily access and switch between personal and work accounts,” says Microsoft in a blog post. “This update lets you use one app for all kinds of Teams accounts.”
Cattle at a JBS facility in Brazil. | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Meat giant JBS said it’ll reach net zero emissions by 2040. LOL.
As public concern about climate change grows, so does demand for lower-emissions consumer goods. And as major meat producers face the fact that their climate impacts may turn away conscientious consumers, they are increasingly claiming to offer low-carbon meat.
That includes the Brazilian multinational JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, which in 2021 began claiming that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040, promising in a full-page New York Times ad that it could serve up “bacon, chicken wings and steak with net-zero emissions.”
This claim is, on its face, dubious. Meat, especially beef, is by far the food sector’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, and no solution to these emissions exists that would offer significant reductions — except scaling down meat production.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has deemed JBS’s misleading promises serious enough to take the company to court. A lawsuit filed by her office last week alleges that JBS’s claim about emissions reductions is both unsubstantiated and unachievable — and that it may not only mislead consumers into buying its highly polluting products but could also “in effect, provide environmentally conscious consumers with a ‘license’ to eat beef.”
While some critics may read the suit as an anti-free market move, it is, in reality, the opposite. Functioning markets depend on giving consumers accurate information to be able to make free choices; corporate duplicity undermines the market’s capacity to provide goods they see as preferable.
If successful, the lawsuit would come with financial penalties for JBS and would send a message to other food companies that greenwashing comes with monetary and political costs. In a context where the link between livestock production and climate change is often ignored or underreported, it could also send an important message to the public and policymakers about the prevalence of deception in the stories they are told by the livestock industry.
Why JBS’s net zero promises make no sense
JBS, which was founded in 1953 and is based in São Paulo, Brazil, today sells products in about 180 countries and runs plants and sales offices on nearly every continent through subsidiaries like JBS USA. In 2022, its net income was close to $3 billion. It is one of the biggest beef processors in the US, and a major processor of pork and chicken.
JBS didn’t respond to Vox’s request for comment in time for publication, but told the Wall Street Journal that it disagreed with James’s lawsuit and that it “will continue to partner with farmers, ranchers and our food system partners around the world to help feed a growing population while using fewer resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.”
But being in the meat business situates JBS in the most environmentally harmful part of the food system. Livestock is responsible for 57 percent of food systems emissions, or about 14.5 percent of all global emissions. Much of this comes from cows, which produce methane when they digest food, but it also comes from factory farms where pigs and chickens are raised and from open air manure lagoons where waste from farmed animals is stored.
Grazing cattle and growing feed crops for animals, like soy, are also major drivers of deforestation, most notably in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Among its many harms, deforestation removes a major carbon sink — meaning that not only does livestock production emit greenhouse gases, but the lands cleared for that production also can no longer capture and store planet-warming emissions anywhere near as efficiently as forests.
Leo Freitas/Getty Images
An area of the Amazon rainforest deforested for cattle ranching.
Andre Penner/AP
A forest is illegally burnt in the Amazon to clear land for industry.
Unsurprisingly, JBS’s emissions are gargantuan. In 2021 it reported more than 71 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions — making JBS, as New York’s lawsuit mentions, a larger emitter than the entire country of Ireland. Outside audits have suggested that its emissions are growing at an unchecked pace, increasing by 51 percent between 2016 and 2021.
With global demand for meat rising, the meat industry is a major impediment to meeting climate targets. Without shifting diets in wealthy countries away from meat and dairy, it would be impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C, a target set by the Paris climate agreement.
JBS’s business model conflicts with that reality, and with any possibility of bringing emissions in line with planetary limits. As New York’s lawsuit bluntly states: “scientists point to the need to reduce production of and demand for ruminant meat, including beef … The JBS Group plans to do the opposite.”
The case alleges that JBS’s claims — which have appeared on its website and have been repeated in forums including a New York Times event last year — have no basis in fact, and that the company has neither the information nor the means to deliver on its promises because it lacks a complete picture of its own emissions.
Corporate emissions reporting is usually split into three tranches: Scope 1, which includes direct emissions from company-owned facilities; scope 2, which includes emissions from electricity purchased by the company; and scope 3, which are all other emissions throughout the value chain of the product the company is selling. For meat processors like JBS, scope 3 is highly complex, including things like crops grown to feed animals, deforestation, and methane — and it can make up upward of 90 percent of their emissions.
JBS has admitted, as noted in the lawsuit, that it lacks the capacity to accurately calculate its scope 3 emissions due to the complexity of its supply chain (which would also suggest its 2021 reported emissions mentioned above are at best an estimate). In short: the company doesn’t have a reliable baseline emissions number from which it could plan to achieve net zero.
Worse, James’s lawsuit alleges that JBS had no plan for achieving net zero when it announced its commitment. In 2023, two years into making the net zero promise, it was still claiming to be “working to develop a robust net zero roadmap.”
At a New York Times event last fall, JBS CEO Gilberto Tomazoni said, “The main strategy that we have [to reduce emissions] is to regenerate agriculture.” The company’s website has claimed that JBS will invest $100 million by 2030 in research into “regenerative farming practices.” But while “regenerative” has become something of a catch-all buzzword in agriculture sustainability discourse, the term is infamously slippery, with no clear definition, and therefore no clear ability to quantify its capacity to reduce emissions.
Given the scale of emissions from animal agriculture, especially beef, it is not clear the means exist to significantly reduce, much less completely offset, emissions using regenerative or any other techniques.
Can litigation hold Big Meat accountable for greenwashing?
The New York lawsuit reflects the emergence of agricultural greenwashing as not just corporate fluff — but as a key area where the law can be used to hold food businesses accountable and protect consumers from having their good intentions exploited.
Across industries more traditionally associated with pollution, like plastics and fossil fuels, greenwashing is so widely recognized as a problem that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishes so-called “Green Guides” to inform companies about how to avoid running afoul of consumer protection laws in their marketing claims. These guides are not legally binding, but they can and have been the basis for class-action lawsuits. While they’ve traditionally focused on issues like recyclability, the environmental law firm Earthjustice hassubmitted a comment to the FTC calling for the inclusion of agriculture sustainability claims, citing JBS’s net zero promise as an example.
In the meat industry, there’s a parallel history of so-called “humanewashing” — misrepresenting products as coming from happy, free-roaming animals when they actually come from factory farms. Companies are, in effect, shaping their advertising to meet consumer affect: When they see consumer concern about the treatment of animals, they will claim that their animals are raised humanely. As public attention shifts to the carbon emissions of animal agriculture, livestock producers are pivoting to climate-friendly messaging.
Agribusiness already benefits from a lax regulatory environment that may make it especially disposed to this type of greenwashing. Last year, for example, the USDA signed off on a “climate-friendly” beef product marketed by Tyson Foods that claimed to emit 10 percent less than other types of beef even though Tyson did not reveal from what baseline it was reducing emissions, making the reduction claim meaningless.
In that otherwise inadequate regulatory context, the New York case is serving notice to the livestock industry that government officials are “paying attention to the next and most concerning advertising trend on the part of animal agribusiness,” Amanda Howell, managing attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which has litigated humanewashing claims against companies like Hormel and Trader Joe’s, told me.
This case is much bigger than just JBS
The lawsuit’s outcome will hinge on whether the attorney general can prove that reasonable consumers could have been misled by JBS’s claims. This is not necessarily a given, as companies sued for greenwashing or humanewashing can argue that they were merely engaging in “puffery,” or slight exaggeration that is accepted in advertising.
JBS, however, will have to show that it can substantiate its very definite claims about achieving “net zero.” That seems unlikely. This was already the conclusion that the BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) made in March 2023, when, based on a complaint filed by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, it called on JBS to stop making such claims because it could not show they were verifiable. But since the NAD’s decision is not legally binding, JBS ignored it.
This case is only the latest in a series of lawsuits that have challenged JBS’s almost comical predilection for fraud. In 2017, JBS S.A., JBS USA’s parent company, was fined $3.2 billion for its role in running a massive bribery operation in Brazil. In 2020, J&F Investimentos, the parent company of JBS S.A., pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the US and was fined $128 million. That same year, Pilgrim’s Pride, a US company owned by JBS, was fined $110 million by the Justice Department for price-fixing in the chicken business. JBS was also sued last year for issuing over $3 billion in “green” bonds linked to its sustainability goals to investors.
The company’s “extensive international corruption record” and environmental impact led Sen. Cory Booker and a bipartisan group of 14 other senators to write to the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year to ask that JBS not be allowed to issue stock on the New York Stock Exchange. For now, the company’s US stock issue has been delayed.
The lawsuit against JBS is ultimately about much more than JBS alone. Given the lack of clear regulatory commitment on the part of entities like the USDA, litigation may be a valuable tool to signal to Big Meat that they are being watched and that there are consequences for lying about their climate commitments.
Meanwhile, the publicity from the case can also send a message to two distinct audiences. First, the general public, informing them to be wary of sustainability pleas from the livestock industry. And second, policymakers themselves.
“I think a big potential indirect impact is a bit of education of policymakers. Congress gives special exemptions to animal ag in part because they don’t know, or don’t want to believe, the real climate and pollution impact,” Peter Lehner, managing attorney at Earthjustice, told me. “So I hope this will get a few more policymakers to understand that industrial ag is just that — another highly polluting industry.”
HP reveals new business laptops and mobile workstations that fill out what it calls the ‘industry’s largest’ AI PC portfolio, which is getting boosted with a new Nvidia partnership.
We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and automate lazy and mindless ad engagement clickbait.
The folks rushing to implement half-cooked AI at places like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) aren’t competent managers to begin with. Now they’re integrating “AI” with zero interest in whether it actually works or if it undermines product quality. They’re also often doing it without telling staffers what’s happening, revealing a widespread disdain for their own employees.
After CNET repeatedly published automated dreck, Wikipedia has taken the step of no longer ranking the formerly widely respected news site as a “generally reliable” news source. As Futurism notes, the website’s crap automated content crafted by fake automated journalists increasingly doesn’t pass muster:
“Let’s take a step back and consider what we’ve witnessed here,” a Wikipedia editor who goes by the name “bloodofox” chimed in. “CNET generated a bunch of content with AI, listed some of it as written by people (!), claimed it was all edited and vetted by people, and then, after getting caught, issued some ‘corrections’ followed by attacks on the journalists that reported on it,” they added, alluding to the time that CNET’s then-Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo — who now serves as Red Ventures’ “Senior Vice President of AI Edit Strategy” — disparagingly referred to journalists who covered CNET’s AI debacle as “some writers… I won’t call them reporters.””
Of course CNET was already having credibility problems long before AI came on the scene. The website, like many “tech news” websites, increasingly acts more of an extension of gadget marketing departments than an adult news venture. CNET editorial standards have long been murky, as exemplified by that whole CES Dish Network award scandal roughly a decade ago.
Things got worse once CNET was purchased by Red Ventures, which has been happy to soften the outlet’s coverage to please advertisers, and, like most modern media companies, sees journalism not as a truth-telling exercise, but as a purely extractive path toward chasing engagement at impossible scale.
That sentiment is everywhere you currently look, as a rotating crop of trust fund failsons drive what’s left of U.S. journalism into the soil. These folks see journalism as an irrelevant venture, and they’re keen to turn it into a sort of automated journalism simulacrum; stuff that looks somewhat like useful reporting, but is predominantly an unholy fusion of facts-optional marketing and engagement bait.
It’s great to see the folks at Wikipedia take note and act accordingly.
Threads plans to release its API by the end of June after testing it with a limited set of partners, including Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Sprout Social, Social News Desk, and Techmeme. The API will let developers build third-party apps for Threads and allow sites to publish directly to the platform.
The API will let users “authenticate, publish threads, and fetch the content they posted through these tools,” according to Threads developer Jesse Chan in a post on the social platform, with more features coming later.
This rise in temperatures is not isolated to any one part of the world. It’s happening everywhere, like in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s summer, and in the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s winter. Even the oceans are at never-before-seen temperatures, which portends more danger for corals and could fuel more intense hurricanes and typhoons. As temperatures rise, ocean waters warm, providing fuel for storms. It’s a mix that makes hurricanes more intense and unpredictable.
The stories below reveal how our winters are changing — and fast. Follow here for the latest news, analysis, and explainers on how winter is losing its cool.
Zoom has reported that its AI Companion productivity assistant has had over 500,000 accounts enabled within five months of launching.
In its Q4 FY 24 earnings call, Zoom underlined the early successes of its AI investments as being key drivers of its total revenue growth, rising 2.6 percent year over year for Q4.
Zoom also highlighted that AI Companion has already generated 7.2 million meeting summaries and outlined how its AI-first capabilities powered an impressive quarter (and year) for its Contact Centre business.
Kelly Steckelberg, CFO at Zoom, commented in the earnings call:
Zoom AI Companion has grown tremendously in just five months with over 510,000 accounts enabled and 7.2 million meeting summaries created as of the close of FY ’24. We are excited about the strong growth across these new products and the benefits they drive for our customers.”
Eric Yuan, Zoom Founder and CEO, also stressed how AI Companion had been integrated across Zoom’s portfolio of products.
“Zoom AI Companion, our generative AI assistant, empowers customers and employees with enhanced productivity, team effectiveness, and skills,” said Yuan. “Since its launch only five months ago, we expanded the AI Companion to six Zoom products, all included at no additional cost to licensed users. But we are far from done. Our future roadmap to AI is 100 percent guided by driving customer value.”
Zoom reported an almost 300 percent increase in Zoom Contact Center licenses for Q4, which Steckelberg explained as illustrating not only a significant number of new customers but also an expanded average deal size.
Among other major operational successes was steady growth for Zoom Phone — Zoom Phone customers with 10,000 or more seats grew 27 percent year over year to 95. Another was the payoff for the Workvivo acquisition and its subsequent integration into the Zoom interface, with the vendor saying it upsold a Fortune 10 company and long-standing Zoom customer on Workvivo to make it the latter’s biggest customer to date, while a global bank and long-term Workvivo customer signed up for the broader Zoom platform.
A third key operational success was Zoom Team Chat usage, which grew 130 percent across its paid accounts. Its migration tool to streamline the transition recorded a 400 percent increase in downloads over the past six months.
“As Zoom becomes a full workplace solution, we are seeing customers migrate from other chat products onto Zoom Team Chat,” Yuan annotated. “Customers appreciate the improved user experiences and enhanced collaboration driven by our Zoom Team Chat product, as well as the cost efficiencies realized by consolidating their communications and collaboration solutions onto Zoom.”
Beyond the quarterly revenue increase, other key financial figures for Q4 included enterprise revenue reported at $667.3 million, up 4.9 percent year over year, while online revenue was $479.2 million, down 0.5 percent year over year.
Non-GAAP income from operations grew by 10 percent year over year to $444 million, exceeding the high end of Zoom’s guidance, while non-GAAP gross margin Q4 was 79.2 percent, lower than 79.8 percent in Q4 of 2022, which Zoom attributed to its investment in AI Companion.
Net cash generated from operating activities amounted to $351.2 million, marking a notable increase of 66 percent compared to the same period in the fiscal year 2023, at $211.6 million.
A Steady FY24 for Zoom
Given ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty, FY24 was a steady one for Zoom.
Total revenue for the fiscal year was $4,527.2 million, up 3.1 percent year over year. Enterprise revenue was $2,619.3 million, up 8.7 percent year over year, while Online revenue decreased to $1,907.9 million, down 3.8 percent year over year.
Non-GAAP net income for the year was $1,608 million, compared to $1,329.0 million for FY23.
Net cash from operating activities totalled $1,598.8 million for FY24, marking a 23.9 percent increase from $1,290.3 million from the previous year. Meanwhile, free cash flow amounted to $1,471.9 million, up by 24.1 percent from $1,186.4 million in the fiscal year 2023.
Zoom and AI
Zoom’s AI Companion launched last autumn to great fanfare, with Yuan also teasing that more news about updates for the solution will be revealed at next month’s Enterprise Connect.
Among the features of AI Companion, which hit the one million meeting summary milestone in October, are AI-powered meeting summaries to help users catch up on missed information, intelligent recording capabilities for meetings such as highlights, chapters and summaries, and in-meeting questions for the AI Companion based on the meeting transcript.
AI Companion can also draft messages, emails and notes and is available at no extra cost for paying subscribers.
FreePower for Countertop is a Qi wireless charger built into your countertops. This is a demo unit I tried out to get a feel for the experience. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
I recently remodeled my kitchen, and my first thought during the design process was, “Can I embed wireless charging in my new quartzite countertop?” But I couldn’t find a solution that didn’t involve sticking bulky black boxes under the counter and requiring precise placement of my phone on a vast counter landscape. I wish I’d waited a year or two.
FreePower for Countertop puts all the technology into a slimline device that fits inside stone or wood countertops. Once installed and powered (hardwired or plugged in), it can charge up to three devices simultaneously at Qi2 speeds...
RingCentral has boasted of several high-profile UCaaS wins as it reports its quarterly earnings.
The vendor reported a sales increase of nine percent year on year for the quarter ending 31 December 2023, above the midpoint of its guidance.
On an earnings call with investors, returning CEO Vlad Shmunis highlighted the growth RingCentral has seen in the enterprise space, which is outpacing the wider business. Figures released ahead of the call showed that annualised recurring revenue (ARR) among enterprise customers topped $1bn for the first time.
Shmunis added colour to these figures by revealing UCaaS contract wins, albeit without naming the customers.
“One is the Fortune 100 insurance provider that purchased 20,000 UCaaS seats to connect its distributed broker network made up of thousands of field offices,” he said.
“Another one is a global 500 retailer that purchased 18,000 UCaaS seats to power communications across its more than 2,000 stores.
“And finally, a Fortune 500 global healthcare solutions company, who have added millions of dollars to their existing contracts.”
RingCentral classifies enterprise customers as those spending $100,000 in ARR. Shmunis said that the majority of these customers utilise RingCentral’s services in conjunction with Microsoft Teams.
“This strong presence with large customers and within the Microsoft Teams environment is a testament to the trust our Enterprise customers have in our products and our ability to add value to the Teams environment,” Shmunis added.
“Our new, advanced integration with Microsoft Teams is a key reason enterprise customers select RingCentral.”
The vendor now claims to count 20 percent of Fortune 1000 companies among its customers. Among these are two Fortune 1000 firms paying for RingCentral’s RingCX CCaaS platform at more than 1,000 seats each. RingCX now has 100 paying customers in total.
RingCentral’s share price has risen as much as eight percent since yesterday.
A charging station outside of a Toyota Store in Blauvelt, New York, on February 5th, 2024. | Image: Kena Betancur / VIEWpress / Getty
President Biden’s administration plans to pull back on strict new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules that would have forced US automakers to turn EVs into their main business by 2032. That’s according to The New York Times, which wrote yesterday that industry players had moved the administration to give them more time to bring down EV costs, and for a nationwide charging infrastructure to be more fully built out.
The Times writes that labor leaders pressured Biden to give them more time to extend union membership to those working in new US EV plants. As the article notes, labor union support is crucial as Biden faces re-election where he’s straddling a dire climate situation and attacks from candidate and former President Donald...
Jon Stewart hosting The Daily Show last time around, on August 6, 2015. | Brad Barket/Getty Images for Comedy Central
The host’s return to The Daily Show is a coda to a golden age.
Jon Stewart’s return to TheDaily Show has been, on the metrics, a success. According to Comedy Central, his first episode back on February 12 was watched by 1.85 million total viewers across premiere simulcasts and encores, up 110 percent from Trevor Noah’s final episode in 2022. It’s also a major improvement on Stewart’s last show. The Problem with Jon Stewart, which ran on Apple TV+ from 2021 to 2023, was routinely drawing in audiences as low as 40,000 people.
“Jon Stewart” and “The Daily Show” on their own are flawed brands. “Jon Stewart on The Daily Show,” on the other hand? That’s a combination of such heady nostalgia that the viewers pour in.
Still, Stewart’s first episode proved that his appeal is not just pure nostalgia. There is some kind of alchemy that occurs when Jon Stewart gets behind that old Daily Show desk. He knows the format of the show so well; he plays it like a virtuoso.
He eases into his monologue with no rush, breaking out the same Borscht Belt voices and self-deprecating barbs he used to play with in 2015, talking in the same relaxed patter that builds to the same crescendo of righteousness. He is so delighted by the chance to play a gotcha reel (in this case, members of the Trump family repeating “I can’t recall” during depositions after a discussion of Biden’s allegedly failing memory) that he almost manages to make the old trick feel new again. He almost manages to make you think, “Wow, Jon Stewart could have done something with the Trump era.” Almost.
Jon Stewart’s great satirical gift is his ability to puncture hypocrisy, which is why he became one of the most trusted sources of news in America during the 2000s. George W. Bush was Stewart’s perfect foil: a president who talked of compassionate conservatism and grand existential battles of good versus evil while lying to the public and embroiling America in dirty, vicious wars that dragged on for decades. No one could puncture Bush’s pieties as well as Jon Stewart. Nothing was more satisfying to watch than Stewart’s mugging face, eyes wide with faux shock, next to a video montage that promised to expose, once and for all, that Bush administration doublespeak.
Stewart’s version of The Daily Show lost some of its urgency during the Obama administration, as the brand of liberal centrism he championed ascended to cultural primacy and he lost his ability to position himself as the scrappy outsider unmasking a lying president. Still, most presidents have their hypocrisies, and Stewart found plenty to puncture during the Obama years: his initially tepid support of gay marriage, the drone warfare, the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. He left The Daily Show in 2015, just before Trump became the Republican candidate and the liberal consensus worldview of Daily Show viewers shattered.
Stewart, by and large, sat out the Trump years, so we don’t know for sure what his comedy would have looked like in that troubled era. We did, however, watch all the comedians who came up on The Daily Show try and fail to grapple with Trump, a president who never bothered to veil his indiscretions, who was so straightforwardly villainous that he had no hypocrisy there to be exposed. Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah — the more they talked about Trump, the more they seemed to become less funny and more earnest. They could not make his actions more absurd by hyperbole. Sarcasm was no longer attractive to audiences, who craved clear demarcations between the comedians who were on their side and those on Trump’s side. Robbed of their most effective weapons, liberal comics ended up spending the Trump years like much of the left did: alternating between rage and tears.
“For the last 20 years we [the left] have owned the cultural terrain of comedy and irony, arguably to good effect,” Nick Marx, a media scholar who studies political humor, told me in 2022. “The Trump era made liberals forget that. It made our comedians want to act like paternal figures who would pat us on the head.”
As liberal comedy faltered, right-wing comedy rushed to fill the power vacuum. Conservative comedians now position themselves as the truly edgy and transgressive ones, the people speaking truth to the power of liberal elitists, the heirs apparent to the tradition begun by Jon Stewart.
“There’s a rebelliousness in the way people think of this right-wing comedy, right?” Matt Sienkiewicz said in 2022. Sienkiewicz co-authored That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them alongside Marx. “Even if it really is regressive and pointing back to old dominant ideas. But it can be branded as being the opposite of Stephen Colbert crying about January 6 during his monologue, which is very much not cool to the teens.”
Stewart’s return comes not during the Trump era but during the Biden presidency, just as the country begins to stare down the possibility of a second Trump term. Biden is the sort of traditional president Stewart excels at handling; it’s not surprising that the sharpest moment of his first episode came when he criticized Biden’s administration for trying to shame the press out of covering criticism of Biden’s age. But Stewart has yet to prove his ability to cover a man like Donald Trump, especially in a moment when the right has successfully positioned itself as the home of transgressive comedy.
As good as Jon Stewart’s ratings were on his first night, The Daily Show wasn’t the most-watched show on late-night. Over on Fox News, Gutfeld! got 2.2 million views. No matter how skillful Stewart’s performance has been, it’s hard to avoid the sense that he’s delivering a coda to a golden age that ended long ago.
“The godfather is returning,” Scout CEO Scott Keogh said. “If you think about it, Scout sort of invented the segment.” | Image: Scout
The VW-owned brand broke ground on its new factory in South Carolina, where it eventually will churn out hundreds of thousands of rugged, battery-powered off-roaders. And that includes “chunky buttons.”
Google Cloud said Google's new Gemini 1.0 models, Gemini 1.0 Pro and Gemini 1.0 Ultra are generally available to enterprises and an private preview is available for Gemini 1.5.
Vertex AI customers will have access to Gemini 1.0 Pro, which is optimized for content generation, editing, classification and summaries. Gemini 1.0 Ultra will give Vertex AI customers a model for coding, reasoning and multi-language use cases.
Google Cloud also said Gemini 1.5 Pro will be available in private preview for Vertex AI in Google AI Studio. This model is midsized and optimized for multiple use cases. It performs at a similar level to Gemini 1.0 Ultra.
According to Google Cloud, Gemini 1.5 Pro gives enterprises the ability to analyze an entire code library in one prompt, reason across long documents, compare and analyze hours of video content, enable chatbots to hold long conversations with memory and personalize experiences without fine-tuning.
Gemini models will be available to enterprises via the Gemini API in Vertex AI and available to Vertex AI Search and Vertex AI Conversation.
Slack is launching a suite of built-in AI features that serve up summaries of threads and channel recaps, while also allowing you to ask questions about what’s been going on at work. The workplace management platform first started testing Slack AI last year, but now it’s rolling out as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise users.
In case you’ve fallen behind on a particular thread someone has tagged you in, you can use Slack AI to get a full summary of the conversation, as well as who has said what. There’s also a way to get a recap of the chatter that has been going on in channels.
Image: Slack
You can receive summaries of unread messages or messages from within a particular timeframe.
Salesforce has announced the general availability of Slack AI, a generative AI experience to enhance worker productivity.
Slack AI, first revealed in September, is native to Slack’s collaboration platform, meaning users can leverage the wealth of collective company knowledge shared within Slack through guided experiences powered by AI. These experiences encompass AI-powered search functionalities, channel recaps, thread summaries, and an upcoming “digests” feature that Salesforce is teasing.
These capabilities intend to empower users to rapidly discover answers, distil knowledge, and cultivate ideas more efficiently.
Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack, said:
For the past decade, Slack has revolutionized the way we work, bringing people, apps and systems together in one place. With Slack AI, we’re excited to take this transformation to the next level. These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth.”
Slack suggests Slack AI was inspired by Gartner’s study that almost half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs effectively, while the rise in the number of apps and tools to leverage has complicated workflows even further. Slack cites the enormous “potential” of AI to address the challenges, with the company’s research finding that test users saved an average of 97 minutes a week by utilising Slack AI.
“In the era of generative AI, Slack is the trusted, conversational platform that connects every part of a business to supercharge team productivity,” Dresser added.
Slack AI is now available as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise plans and in US and UK English. Slack promises that additional Slack plans and language support are “coming soon”, while AI-powered partner apps are available now in the Slack App Directory.
Slack AI’s Features in Detail
Slack AI’s search and summarisation functionalities offer customers a convenient way to locate and digest substantial amounts of information. Slack underlines that these features are reliable, user-friendly, and intuitive, requiring no specialised training. Users can activate them through guided, context-sensitive interactions, eliminating the need to acquire new skills to enjoy the rewards. Each output is also secure, properly cited, and tailored to the individual user.
Slack AI’s new advanced search means users can pose questions in natural language and receive succinct answers from relevant Slack messages. This streamlined process enables users to swiftly access the information they require, with Slack citing understanding a new marketing campaign or familiarising themselves with company policies as example use cases.
With channel recaps, users can review unread messages, condense the past week’s activity, or specify a custom date range for summarisation. This functionality allows users to efficiently catch up after being away from work, familiarise themselves with a new project, or engage in resolving time-sensitive problems.
The new thread summaries capability allows users to obtain the essence of a lengthy conversation with just one click, with transparent sources provided in each summary for users to delve deeper into highlights. This enables users to extract critical decisions and next steps from threads characterised by lengthy back-and-forth exchanges, familiarise themselves with customer support tickets or catch up on team stand-ups for a thorough priorities overview.
Slack AI operates within Slack’s infrastructure, with Slack stating that it adheres to rigorous security and compliance standards. LLMs are hosted directly within Slack, and customer data remains isolated and is not utilised for serving other clients or LLM training.
Slack also teased future features, including “digests”, which condense key highlights from channels, keeping users informed on less urgent matters while prioritising their focus. Additionally, Slack is integrating with Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM, enabling direct access to answers within Slack based on trusted customer data.
What Has Been Slack’s AI Story So Far?
In September, as well as unveiling Slack AI, the collaboration vendor also outlined Slack lists — which empower users to track work tasks, manage requests, and oversee cross-functional projects with a visible communication flow — and new automation capabilities.
These automation features empower every user to automate tasks regardless of coding expertise. The Taskflow Builder enables users to connect tools and a hub for easier access. Developers can also build and deploy custom apps with Slack as the host.
The technology leverages CRM and conversational data and introduces AI features into Slack, generative AI app integrations, and the ability to utilise customer insights through the Customer 360 and Data Cloud. The arrival of Slack GPT followed the release of Salesforce’s Einstein GPT. However, Slack GPT offered more advanced agent-assist innovations within the Service Cloud application than Einstien GPT.
In August, Salesforce launched Slack Sales Elevate, a personalised sales home that integrates Slack’s collaboration platform with Sales Cloud and comprises AI-powered features.
My skeptic spouse is now obsessed with these smart glasses. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Face computers are the future, but the world as we know it isn’t quite ready. That’s the conclusion both Apple and Meta have arrived at. You can see it in the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and the Apple Vision Pro. Both fall short of what we imagine true augmented reality ought to be, but that’s not their ultimate purpose. They’re designed to prime the public for the future by giving them a taste of it now.
And Meta’s smart glasses do a better job of that so far.
I’m not saying the Vision Pro is a bad product. I haven’t spent enough time with it, but what time I did spend cemented that it is the most technologically impressive mixed reality headset I’ve ever tried. If we’re talking pure hardware innovation, the Vision Pro blasts Meta’s...
AI, once an ambiguous science fiction trope, has become an ambiguous business buzzword, as every technology product races to implement what Silicon Valley thinks is the greatest innovation since the internet. But lost in the conversation are stories about the people building it and using it. If large language models and automated systems will, indeed, upend labor and capital, what does it actually look like in practice? In this package, we’ll explore the ways AI functions today: how people are using it, where it fails and where it succeeds, and what it actually means when we say “artificial intelligence.”
An AI-generated Biden called voters in New Hampshire ahead of the primary and told them to stay home. X locked down the search term “Taylor Swift” after AI-generated nudes of the pop giant flooded the platform. In the wake of both scandals, Congress has struggled with how to fight back against the flood of fake bullshit. Keeping the world from drowning in fakes affects all of us, but some of the cures sound worse than the sickness.
This week on Cyber, Motherboard Senior Editor Janus Rose and Fight for the Future’s Lia Holland come on to talk about the limits of legislation around AI-generated scams and abuse.
The update will allow users to see less political content in their recommended feeds. | Illustration: The Verge
It’ll soon be easier to avoid seeing political content across Instagram and Threads unless users explicitly choose to have it recommended to them. In a blog post published on Friday, Meta announced that it’s expanding an existing Reels policy that limits political content from people you’re not following (including posts about social issues) from appearing in recommended feeds to more broadly cover the company’s Threads and Instagram platforms.
“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,“ said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, announcing on Threads that the changes will be applied over the next few weeks. Facebook is also expected to roll out...
Well, it only took 15 years, but better late than never.
For the first time in its history, Uber ended the year having made more money than it spent on its ridehailing and delivery operations. As noted by Business Insider, the company reported an operating profit of $1.1 billion in 2023, compared to a $1.8 billion loss in 2022. Moreover, Uber said it made a net income of $1.9 billion after losing a whopping $9.1 billion in 2022.
“Looking back, 2023 was an inflection point for Uber,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an earnings call this week, “proving that we can continue to generate strong profitable growth at scale.”
“Looking back, 2023 was an inflection point for Uber”
Under Khosrowshahi, Uber has made steady progress in the years...
So we’ve noted more than once that as the streaming sector is saturated and new user growth slows, streaming giants will follow on a fairly predictable path that got their predecessors (cable TV companies) in trouble. Namely, shifting away from innovation and disruption and consumer welfare, and toward nickel-and-diming customers in a bid to give Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost.
That means a lot of pointless and harmful “growth for growth sake” mergers (see: Discovery Time Warner), endless price hikes, weird attempts to nickel-and-dime users (see: Amazon suddenly charging extra to avoid new ads), a general skimping on staff pay and customer service, and a steady enshittification of overall product quality you’ve probably already noticed.
Part of that process involves eliminating popular things that previously helped bring in new customers, like password sharing. We’ve noted how when Netflix wanted to sign up more customers, it praised password sharing, acknowledging that it didn’t really hurt the company’s bottom line, and basically acted as free advertising. Besides, Netflix already charges users extra for additional simultaneous streams.
Now that global growth is slowing, Netflix has to effectively cannibalize its own product quality and brand to appease Wall Street. It’s not good enough to just have a high quality product that makes money and people like; the need for improved quarterly returns inevitably turns disruptors into turf protectors. It’s what kicked Comcast in the teeth, and streaming execs seem poised to ignore the lessons.
Now that Netflix has normalized the attack on password sharing, companies like Hulu and Disney are following suit, sending out warnings that they’ll soon crack down on the practice. Like Netflix’s foray they don’t really explain how it will all work, or even explain why it’s necessary. Only that being harassed if your cash-strapped college kid shares your password is the new normal that you should get used to:
“As was the case with the rollout of Hulu’s new TOS, Disney says that the streamer can “analyze the use of your account to determine compliance” with the new rules but doesn’t detail specifically how it will identify anyone trying to skirt them. And while the new terms say that more information about this policy can be found on Disney’s online help center, all there seems to be right now is a pretty cut-and-dried explanation of how the company defines a “household.”
Again, there’s no real evidence to suggest that users who password share will sign up for service. Nor is there any hard evidence that Netflix’s password sharing is actually making much money (earnings can’t and don’t actually measure which new users were previously subscribed to another account). Many users lift passwords because they can’t or won’t pay. And estimates of profits here are kind of nebulous.
But if there’s any potential to squeeze out a tiny bit of additional profits from existing customers, these executives will do it. Wall Street demands it. And when annoyed users increasingly head to free alternatives or piracy after being inundated with price hikes and sagging product quality, execs will inevitably blame everything and everyone but themselves for the failure. It’s how this all works.
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