Davemichels

It could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Vaccination has worked wonders to drive down deaths from infectious disease. A few hundred years ago, less than 60 percent of children saw their fifth birthday. Now, 95 percent do. Vaccines — against smallpox, measles, polio, diphtheria, and more — have driven that progress.

But one of childhood’s biggest killers — malaria — has eluded effective vaccination. That, at long last, looks to be changing.

In a recently concluded clinical trial conducted by researchers from Oxford and the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro, Burkina Faso, a new malaria vaccine called R21/MM demonstrated 77 percent efficacy in children in Burkina Faso. That’s a dramatic increase over the efficacy of the only currently available malaria vaccine, RTS,S, and might represent a huge breakthrough in the fight against the disease.

Malaria infects hundreds of millions of people every year and kills hundreds of thousands, mostly young children and pregnant women. It has been one of the top killers of children for thousands of years, and still is today. For most of history, it ravaged warm regions the world over. But in the 20th century, it was successfully eradicated from much of the world through insecticide spraying. In sub-Saharan Africa, though, it has remained a major threat — and climate change means that the geographic range the malaria-carrying mosquito can survive in has expanded.

Unsurprisingly, a malaria vaccine has been a major priority for researchers. But malaria has proven absurdly difficult to vaccinate against. It’s caused by a parasite, not a bacterium or virus, and the parasite’s functioning in the body includes suppressing the immune response. For many diseases, infection leaves you immune for life, but it’s possible to catch malaria over and over again. And for many diseases, a vaccine just involves exposing the body to a dead or attenuated version of the disease agent. But that doesn’t really get results with malaria.

Fortunately, vaccine science has been rapidly advancing, and these days we can do far more than simple exposure vaccines. While the R21/MM vaccine doesn’t use the specific technologies that led to an unprecedented vaccine against Covid-19, it’s part of the same overarching story: Scientists are getting better at designing highly effective vaccinations, and their triumphs will be a huge part of the fight against death and illness in the 21st century.

Why it’s hard to vaccinate against malaria

The Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria in humans needs both blood-sucking insects and humans for its life cycle. It grows inside a mosquito and is transferred to a human host when the mosquito bites them. Then the parasite migrates to the liver, replicates itself, and infects the blood — where it can be taken up by the bite of another mosquito.

When the parasite is in the blood, it causes fever, chills, and flu-like illness. Healthy adults usually recover, but those with a weaker immune system — especially young children and pregnant women — can easily die. (Older people who live in regions where malaria is endemic are, surprisingly, not especially vulnerable. The theory is that after sufficient exposure to malaria over a lifetime, the immune system develops a general anti-parasite response that might be more durable than malaria-specific immunity.)

Vaccinating against malaria is tricky. Parasites have much more going on than viruses, making targeting a vaccine harder. Multiple life stages have been explored as vaccine targets, mostly without success. “Malaria vaccine [development] has been a graveyard for really great ideas,” Derek Lowe, a researcher who writes about drug discovery, told me. “We’ve learned about a lot of stuff that doesn’t work.” Targeting the parasite once it’s in the blood, for example, has been tried repeatedly but never succeeded. Exposing the body to dead or neutralized Plasmodium? A dead end. Researchers have been working on this for decades, and progress has been rare.

The earliest success stories of vaccination involved vaccines against diseases that produce lifelong immunity, like smallpox and polio. Those are viruses, so they’re much simpler to target. And since you can’t be reinfected with those diseases, the vaccine only needs to provoke the same immune response as the disease did originally, and the patient is safe for life.

But in the case of malaria, naturally acquired immunity against malaria typically is only partial and fades out in a few years. Researchers have been working for decades to figure out how a vaccine can induce durable immunity, and most of that work has ended in frustrating failures. The only vaccine approved for malaria today, RTS,S, has been around since 2016. While it’s much better than nothing, it’s not great — it has an initial efficacy of around 55 percent, and annual booster shots are needed.

R21/MM, the new vaccine, represents a significant improvement. At 77 percent efficacy — meaning that a vaccinated person is 77 percent less likely to get malaria than an unvaccinated person — it could cut malaria deaths dramatically.

That said, the new vaccine still doesn’t quite stack up to the efficacy of vaccines for other childhood diseases. The measles vaccine is 97 percent effective, for instance, and one dose of the chickenpox vaccine prevents 85 percent of cases and nearly 100 percent of severe cases (a booster shot brings efficacy up to 98 percent).

But there’s no question that the new vaccine is a huge step forward. If the efficacy statistics from the phase 2 clinical trial (the first test of safety and efficacy in the target population) hold up in phase 3 (when the vaccine is distributed on a much larger scale, so that its efficacy and safety can be evaluated with more information, and compared against the existing best treatment), the vaccine will have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives every year once it’s distributed widely throughout malaria-affected areas, primarily sub-Saharan Africa.

How the new vaccine works

The R21/MM vaccine is what’s called a pre-erythrocytic vaccine, which means it targets the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite during the earliest stages of its life cycle in the body, before it multiplies in the liver and enters the bloodstream. During this stage, malaria doesn’t yet have any symptoms; the plasmodium sporozoites grow silently until they release their next life stage, merozoites, into the bloodstream.

Many candidate malaria vaccines try to help the body target and destroy the parasite at the pre-erythrocytic stage, including RTS,S, the existing malaria vaccine. If the body can learn to recognize and have an immune response to the parasite at this stage, it can prevent it from multiplying in the liver, entering the blood, and causing symptomatic malaria.

Exposing the body to the malarial parasite isn’t itself enough to create durable immunity. Fortunately, modern vaccine researchers have a lot more tricks up their sleeves. The R21/MM vaccine targets a specific protein present on the surface of the Plasmodium parasite in its sporozoite form. (RTS,S targets the same protein — earlier research has established that it’s a particularly good target — but exposes the body to less of the protein, due to differences in the structure of the vaccine.)

Targeting a single protein can produce better-targeted and more consistent immunity than exposing the body to the whole disease agent. When the body is exposed to the whole disease agent, it’s hard to predict exactly what it will “learn” to fight. Showing it a single target protein ensures it’ll develop the antibodies scientists have determined that it needs the most. And the protein that R21/MM and RTS,S target is one that researchers have determined is very unlikely to mutate or vary among strains of malaria.

The next step of a successful vaccination is what’s called an adjuvant, an additive to the vaccine that kicks the immune system into higher gear. Protein-based vaccines are generally understood to need an adjuvant, because the body will not necessarily react to unfamiliar proteins by mounting a full immune response.

“What those do,” Lowe told me, “is they’re a totally separate ingredient that has nothing to do with the pathogen. But they basically set off your innate immune system that’s always there, surveilling for foreign-looking crap.” What makes a great adjuvant? Something people have strong reactions to. As long as the body finds it irritating and mounts an immune response, it can function as an adjuvant.

The research team behind R21/MM tested many different adjuvants to figure out which one provoked the strongest immune response, and the winner was a formulation called Matrix-M (that’s the MM in the vaccine’s name), an extract from the bark of a Chilean soap tree. Matrix-M is a proprietary invention of Novavax, also used in its highly effective Covid-19 vaccine.

This research has been in the works for years. In 2016, a trial was conducted in healthy adults in the UK, looking at the R21 vaccine alone and with the Matrix-M adjuvant. After success in the UK, another trial in healthy adults followed — this time in Burkina Faso, where malaria is endemic.

Once that early research was established to be safe, the research team began conducting studies in steadily younger cohorts. The group at the most risk from malaria is infants, but it’s generally easier to see if vaccines have health risks or side effects by looking at older cohorts. Once the vaccine was determined safe, research began in 5- to 17-month-old babies in Nanoro, Burkina Faso.

The R21/MM vaccine is administered with three shots, plus a booster shot one year later. That means distribution of the vaccine will be a real challenge, especially in poor areas with limited health care infrastructure, but it’s an improvement over RTS,S, which requires four shots for a full course of vaccination and, again, is significantly less effective.

In the phase 2 study published this week, researchers found that the R21/MM’s single booster shot a year later returns immunity to the full level achieved after the initial course of three shots. The results are “very exciting,” Halidou Tinto, the principal investigator for the trial in Nanoro, said.

Phase 3 trials begin right away at five sites across Africa, in order to test how the vaccine works in areas with different malaria prevalence. “We look forward to the upcoming phase 3 trial to demonstrate large-scale safety and efficacy data for a vaccine that is greatly needed in this region,” Tinto told the BBC.

The phase 3 trials might also help clarify whether all three shots and the booster are necessary, or whether there’s a way to induce good protection with a less demanding dosing regimen. With any luck, within a few years we’ll have the efficacy, safety, and dosing data needed for a rollout across malaria-afflicted areas.

The big picture

Malaria isn’t just one of the world’s biggest killers of children. It’s also one of the biggest barriers to good childhood health and development in affected areas. Malaria infection causes long-term problems including cognitive impairment, and likely has long-term developmental impacts on children even when they survive it.

The world has done a lot over the past few decades to fight malaria. Interventions like insecticide-treated bed nets and seasonal preventive treatment in the form of medications have driven death rates down from around 1 million every year as recently as the 1990s to around 400,000 today. But without an effective vaccine that can be distributed everywhere, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to eradicate the disease.

Researchers know that, and malaria vaccine research is one of the most active areas of vaccine research, with human challenge trials in the UK (meaning clinical trials where volunteers are deliberately infected with the disease), phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials throughout areas with high malaria prevalence, and other promising ideas being pursued based on encouraging results in mice.

Now, all that effort is starting to pay off. In general, writing about malaria vaccines means emphasizing that everything is still early-stage, that there’s lots of reason to expect a new innovation or development to fall through, and that while every avenue is worth pursuing, the public should know that most of them won’t pay off.

That’s not true this time. This is a late-stage result, and there’s every reason to expect it to hold up. “This is excellent work,” Lowe told me. “This is the best news in the malaria vaccine world ever.”

This is the first vaccine to meet the World Health Organization’s threshold of 75 percent effectiveness for a malaria vaccine. With many other vaccine candidates making their way through trials, it almost definitely won’t be the last. The more we know about malaria — and about vaccination — the better we can design vaccines that are cheap, simple to store and administer, that don’t require too many booster doses, and that provoke a strong and enduring immune response.

For more than 100 years, vaccination has been one of humanity’s most powerful tools against disease. It’s a tool that gets more potent every day, as we learn more about what makes vaccines work and how best to point our immune system at the perfect target.

This latest development is worth celebrating. It’s an innovation that could mean saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of children. And if it fills you with optimism about the prospects of a world where vaccines inch us closer to eradicating diseases that have long plagued humanity, it should.

Cellebrite, a well-known provider of phone-unlocking and hacking technology for law enforcement agencies, pushed an update to its products less than a week after the CEO of Signal claimed to have hacked one of the company's products.

Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal, explained in a blog post last week that he had obtained a Cellebrite device and found that "industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present." According to him, that allowed an attacker to embed malicious files in their app or phone—once connected to a Cellebrite unlocking device—that would then exploit the Cellebrite devices and manipulate what kind of data the device could access, potentially compromising police investigations.

On Monday, Cellebrite pushed an update to its customers.

A source who works in the forensics industry provided Motherboard with a copy of the Cellebrite announcement. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to protect them from retaliation from Cellebrite. Motherboard obtained multiple copies of the announcement. 

Two new version updates "have been released to address a recently identified security vulnerability. The security patch strengthens the protections of the solutions," the announcement read.

Cellebrite has limited what products can perform a logical iOS extraction. Mobile forensics products typically perform logical and physical extractions; with the former being the simpler of the two.

"As part of the update, the Advanced Logical iOS extraction flow is now available in Cellebrite UFED only," the announcement added.

Do you work for Cellebrite? Are you a Cellebrite customer? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, Wire/Wickr @lorenzofb, or email lorenzofb@vice.com. You can contact Joseph Cox on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, or email joseph.cox@vice.com

The announcement did not specifically say whether the addressed vulnerability is one and the same as the one disclosed by Marlinspike. It does add that "Based on our reviews, we have not found any instance of this vulnerability being exploited in the real-life usage of our solutions."

"This update is precautionary, as per our security response procedures. As always, we recommend customers regularly apply the latest software version updates," the message reads.

A Cellebrite customer, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak to the press, said that they believed these updates were to address the vulnerabilities found by Marlinspike. 

"It appears to be an attempt to minimize the attack surface not a 'fix,'" the source said. 

Andrew Garrett, CEO of forensics firm Garrett Discovery, told Motherboard in an email that "Most law enforcement have IT administrators that monitor and work on computers within the forensic lab and based on these types of attacks they should reconsider their network architecture to avoid someone taking total control of their network. The entire ecosystem of digital forensic tools is built on egg shells."

On Sunday, an Israeli human rights lawyer sent a letter to the country's attorney general demanding that Israeli police stop using the forensic technology until it can be fully audited, Haaretz reported.

Marlinspike's blog post was the latest in escalating tensions between Signal and Cellebrite. Signal is one of the largest encrypted messaging services in the world; Cellebrite is designed to extract information off of devices including message content. Last year, Cellebrite published a blog post titled "Cellebrite's new solution for decrypting the Signal app." Marlinspike then published a blog titled "No, Cellebrite cannot 'break Signal encryption,'" and last week published the blog post describing Cellebrite vulnerabilities. 

Cellebrite did not respond to a request for comment.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast CYBER, here.

Tesla has drawn a lot of scrutiny lately, has run into delays with the refreshed Model S and Model X, and the auto industry is struggling through a global shortage of semiconductors. But none of those things seemed to have much effect on Tesla’s business.

On Monday, the Silicon Valley automaker announced its best-ever start to a year, despite not making a single Model S sedan or Model X SUV. That’s thanks in large part to the fact that Tesla continues to increase the number of Model 3s and Model Ys it makes and sells out of its year-old factory in Shanghai, China, validating CEO Elon Musk’s long-standing goal of localizing production in the world’s biggest markets for electric vehicles.

As a result, Tesla generated $10.4 billion in...

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Enhancements Include Addition of Voice, MMS and SMS to Teams Through Direct Routing, and integration with Leading CRM and productivity tools

HOLMDEL, NJ – April 22, 2021 – Vonage  (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, announced new capabilities for its Vonage Business Communications (VBC) for Microsoft Teams integration, providing 50+ enterprise-grade calling features, SMS and MMS capabilities and more through direct routing, enabling businesses to provide their employees with the tools to connect and work from anywhere.

“First launched in early 2020, Vonage Business Communications for Teams is powering collaboration capabilities for our customers by bringing everything together in a shared workspace for their employees – all from within the Microsoft Teams app,” said Savinay Berry, EVP of Product and Engineering for Vonage. “With these enhancements to an already robust product offering, our customers now have access to more than 50 premium calling features, SMS and MMS and rich customer data through contact center and CRM integrations to allow employees to continue working the way they’re accustomed to, and where they’re most productive, without disruption – from anywhere.”

VBC for Teams is designed for global businesses that have adopted Microsoft Teams as their collaboration solution, enabling them to unify their communications within Teams. They will now have access to 50+ enterprise grade calling features, SMS, MMS and integrations with contact centers and CRM. By leveraging existing IT investments and through Vonage Direct Routing, businesses can seamlessly embed VBC into their Microsoft Teams application, retain existing numbers, keep existing phones and other devices and take total control of their communications solution with an integrated calling and collaboration experience.

“ClearFreight has offices in countries across the globe, making it difficult to find a unified communications solution that has the capabilities to bring all our locations together. We recently made the shift to using Microsoft Teams and were looking for a provider with a strong integration within that application,” said Calvin Hung, Network & Tech Support Supervisor, for international logistics company, ClearFreight. “Vonage was the one solution that met all our needs, with a convenient, single application integration into Microsoft Teams, as well as the ability to support our international locations.” Read more about how ClearFreight is connecting teams around the world with Vonage.

Enhanced calling capabilities
VBC for Teams has all the benefits of the VBC unified communications solution, ensuring employees have the premium calling features and functionality, as well as enterprise-grade quality and reliability they need to be successful in today’s remote world. VBC for Teams also gives businesses the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with customers around the world, providing them with the option to use local numbers in more than 100 countries.

SMS and MMS collaboration
In response to customer demand for richer, omnichannel collaboration tools, VBC for Teams now includes the ability to send and receive SMS and MMS, both internally and externally in North America. Uniquely embedded into Microsoft Teams and supported across devices and operating systems, messaging with SMS and MMS provides employees with the ability to better connect with each other and with customers from one communication platform to send and receive text, images or video.

Integration options with contact centers and up to 10 leading CRMs
Microsoft Teams users will also benefit from VBC’s seamless integration with contact centers, as well as business applications including up to 10 of today’s leading CRMs, such as Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce. This seamless integration removes the need to toggle between applications and screens, and provides employees with quick access to customer data all from one place, increasing productivity and enhancing customer interactions – while protecting IT investments.

“This integration from Vonage offers customers of Microsoft Teams an interesting option. They can keep the Microsoft native experience, yet leverage Vonage features, such as programmability, global services, and five nines reliability,” said Dave Michels, Principal Analyst at TalkingPointz. “Vonage also brings to the table an extensive, global SMS and MMS network that can expand multi-channel interoperability, and a fully integrated CCaaS solution that’s integrated to Dynamics and other CRMs.”

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 Makes Microsoft Teams Smarter and a Central Hub for Communications appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

From ‘once in a lifetime’ 5G spectrum buys, to growth in business services, here’s what you need to know about Verizon’s Q1 2021 results.

The Federal Communications Commission has decided to look into letting people text the upcoming shortened National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number in a bid to increase accessibility and use of the service by those who need it most (via Politico reporter John Hendel). Last May, the FCC approved the creation of a new short code, 988, that will act as an easier-to-remember phone number for the lifeline.

Please note that calling 988 will not connect you to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline until July 16th, 2022.

It’s worth noting that today’s approval is just a first step and doesn’t mean that people will, for sure, be able to text the 988 number when it goes live in July 2022. However, it does mean that the FCC will be looking...

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Joe Biden’s plan to fix the digital divide is a lot tougher than it looks.

Okay, hear me out on this. I really would just like Apple’s next iPad Pro to be a laptop. Not a clamshell, but a Surface Pro type of deal: a tablet with laptop hardware and a laptop OS. I think there must be people at Apple who want this, too, so I’m now respectfully requesting that the company stop dilly-dallying and make it happen.

Here’s my reasoning: at Tuesday’s Spring Loaded event, Apple finally unveiled a long-rumored update to its iPad Pro. While the device doesn’t look too different from iPad Pro models of years past, it’s a huge leap forward on the inside because it’s powered by Apple’s eight-core M1 processor. That’s the same processor that powers its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro (as well as the Mac mini), and it’s...

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Google has announced some new features coming to Chromebooks, including the company’s Live Captions feature that will be added to Chrome on “most” Chrome OS devices in the coming weeks. Once Live Captions are available, users can flip them on in the accessibility settings to get captions for any media with audio right inside their browser. The feature rolled out to Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux in March.

Google is also beefing up the Chrome OS Launcher, which lets you search for files and apps, with some new capabilities, allowing you make simple calculations and check the weather, the definition of a word, and stock prices.

Image: Google

The search giant is also...

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Figma spent years in stealth before launching its web-based collaborative design tool. Since coming into the light, the company has been iterating quickly. Today, Figma launches its biggest product update to date.

Meet FigJam, Figma’s new whiteboarding tool.

The entire concept of Figma stemmed from the fact that designers were taking up much more space at the figurative table and needed a place to collaborate efficiently. That is only more true today, especially during the last year of working from home, which is why Figma is extending itself throughout the workflow of designers with whiteboarding.

Not only does FigJam give designers a place to come up with ideas together, but it also gives nondesigners a place to participate in the brainstorm.

FigJam functionality includes sticky notes, emojis and drawing tools, as well as shapes, pre-built lines and connectors, stamps and cursor chats. As expected, FigJam works with Figma so components or other design objects breathed into life on FigJam can easily be moved into Figma.

“Our point of view here was focusing on how to make FigJam work as the first step in the design process, before you go into actually doing design work,” said Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field. “We see people looking for a better, more fluid experience, but we also wanted to make it simple enough to bring other people into the tool.”

To take that a step further, Figma is also introducing voice chat into all of its products. That means users who are designing alongside one another in Figma or brainstorming in FigJam don’t need to hop into a separate Zoom call or Google Meet, but can just toggle on chat in Figma to use audio.

Figma didn’t build its voice chat from scratch, but rather worked with a partner to bring this to market. Figma did not specify which partner/tech it’s working with on voice chat.

Alongside the release of FigJam and voice chat, Figma is also releasing a more full-featured mobile app, which will be in beta through TestFlight at launch.

One final update that Figma is announcing today is branching and merging in Figma. This allows designers who are updating the design system, for example, to branch out and do their work and then merge that work with the existing design system, rather than updating a shared component or resource and affecting everyone else’s workflow.

Dear Discord: Please go public and stay independent instead of being acquired. Love, Brad.

I’ve become a huge Discord fan and user of the past year. I’ve got many daily reference points from products that I use for real-time communication channels: Slack, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Zoom, Voxer, Mighty, and of course, email.

An increasing number of my group communications is on Discord. There was a ramp-up on Slack several years ago across organizations, but I find it noisy, not terribly easy to navigate, and tiresome for various reasons.

In contrast, Discord is much easier and feels much more vibrant for dynamic communities. This then leads to lots of 1:1 comms across organizations, which until recently was really difficult with Slack, which is now sort of, but not completely, fixed since Slack rolled out Connect.

I stopped using Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn for any real-time comm stuff a while ago. While my iMessage is noisy, it’s calmed down a lot given wiring up some other stuff to the right channels.

I continue to believe that Zoom has a massive disruptive opportunity to obliterate Slack. Still, it’s clearly not a priority for them, and all that might now be irrelevant given Salesforce + Slack along with the Salesforce / Zoom relationship.

That brings me back to Discord. While it would be a smart move for Microsoft to acquire Discord, it would likely pin Discord into a particular segment of Microsoft given Teams along with Microsoft’s functional separation between their gaming business and their corporate business. I know nothing specific about the Microsoft / Discord discussions, but I expect it was primarily, if not entirely, on the gaming side of Microsoft. This would eliminate what I expect is Discord’s most interesting current vector, which is cross-organization collaboration within either affinity groups (communities) or for corporations with their customers.

I fantasize about having one app that deals with all the different sub-apps. Right now, that’s called “my computer” since I have to deal with many different apps. If the promise of APIs really came true, or if XMPP had worked out, or if Trillian had become a thing, this might have happened. But, as with most things in tech, the walled garden takes over when the revenue and profit imperative takes over in the context of monetizing users.

Real-time everything is broken right now. Yeah, it works at an application and network-level (quite brilliantly, and much better than 20 years ago), but it sucks at a user level.

There is so much to do here. Ironically, at least from my perspective, we need more companies (e.g., Discord – stay independent) rather than fewer companies working on this right now.

The post I’m Glad Discord Isn’t Being Acquired appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

In a press release for Apple’s new Tile-like AirTag tracker, the company has revealed that iOS 14.5 will officially arrive “starting next week” — as spotted by Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern. AirTags go on sale April 30th and will only work with devices running iOS 14.5 or higher. Likewise, watchOS 7.4 and macOS 11.3 will also launch next week, as they support new Apple Podcast feature updates.

Apple first launched the 14.5 beta to the public earlier this year in February alongside watchOS 7.4 beta (no word on whether that’s arriving soon, too). Along with AirTag support, it will implement Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency requirement, which mandates that developers ask for permission to track users for ad targeting. The feature...

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Apple just announced an M1-powered update to the iPad Pro, and Logitech has followed up with a new keyboard and trackpad accessory for every generation of the 11-inch and 12.9-inch models. The Combo Touch is a case with a Microsoft Surface-style kickstand and a detachable backlit keyboard with a trackpad. It connects over the iPad Pro’s Smart Connector.

Logitech already released a similar Combo Touch keyboard for 10.2-inch and 10.5-inch iPads, as well as a related Folio Touch for the 11-inch iPad Pro and 10.9-inch iPad Air. The Folio Touch’s keyboard isn’t detachable and its trackpad is a little smaller than the new Combo Touch, but otherwise it’s a comparable product.

This is the first time Logitech has offered a...

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This week’s Zoom update includes a couple of quality of life improvements for anyone using its annotation or emoji reaction features, the company has announced. Meeting participants can now use any emoji that was previously available in Zoom chat to react during a meeting, up from the six meager options that were available previously. These include emoji with different skin colors. Hosts can also restrict emoji reactions to the standard six, if they prefer, and for larger accounts the full emoji set must be manually enabled by admins or account owners.

The service’s annotation feature is also being enhanced. Anyone who’s used Zoom’s annotation feature to draw text on the presentation screen will know how annoying it quickly becomes when...

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Right on schedule, Apple has launched the next generation of its iPad Pro. As was the case with the recent MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, Apple’s improvements to the iPad Pro are largely on the inside.

The device has a new M1 processor, the same chip that powers the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini. Apple claims this will deliver “a big jump in performance” over the previous generation. The graphics performance is over 1,500 times faster, per the company. Apple also says you can expect all-day battery life from the device.

The iPad Pro now supports Thunderbolt, 5G connectivity, and an improved camera.

Apple says the ISP and LIDAR scanner will capture “incredible details” in low-light conditions. There’s a TrueDepth camera system on...

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Discord is ending talks to sell itself to Microsoft or other companies, the Wall Street Journal reports. The popular online chat app was reportedly in talks to sell to Microsoft in March, for a price that valued Discord at over $10 billion.

The Wall Street Journal writes that Discord was in talks with at least three other companies, but has decided to stay independent because it’s “doing well.” Discord has around 140 million monthly users and earned about $130 million in revenue in 2020, but still isn’t profitable, according to WSJ.

Microsoft’s interest in Discord had a lot to do with the latter’s role as a home for online communities. The app is a destination for creators cultivating their own forums, as well as home-grown groups...

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Apple hasn’t tried to make a business out of podcasting until now. Will you pay?

Apple more or less invented podcasting. Now it’s finally going to try to make money from it: The company plans to start selling subscriptions to podcasts and keeping a slice of each transaction for itself.

Apple CEO Tim Cook briefly mentioned plans to roll out a subscription feature during the company’s keynote event Tuesday, without offering more details. But a person familiar with Apple’s plans has spelled it out to Recode:

• Starting next month, Apple will let podcast publishers sell subscriptions to individual shows or groups of shows, and set their own pricing, starting at 49 cents a month in the US.
• Apple won’t require podcasters to create Apple-only exclusive shows, but it does want them to distinguish between stuff they’re already distributing via Apple and stuff going up on other platforms: That could mean ad-free shows or shows with extra content or brand-new shows that only exist on Apple.
• Apple will keep 30 percent of any subscription revenue creators generate in their first year on the platform. After that, Apple’s cut will drop to 15 percent. That’s the same pricing scheme Apple already uses for other subscription services, like TV streamers.

Apple’s announcement comes as big tech companies are showing renewed interest in podcasting and audio in general. On Monday, Facebook announced plans to create its own version of Clubhouse, the social chat app, as well as plans to distribute podcasts itself. Spotify has invested $1 billion in podcast shows and tech. Twitter already has its own Clubhouse clone, and, strangely, CEO Jack Dorsey has shelled out $300 million to buy the failed music streaming service Tidal for Square, the payments company he also runs.

We have yet to see much evidence that consumers want to pay for podcasting, though there are some exceptions — mostly via Patreon, the company that lets fans pay creators for exclusive podcasts or any other creative content they want to sell. And even if Apple sells a lot of podcasts, it’s unlikely to make an impact on the company’s bottom line: Apple’s services unit, which includes things like App Store sales and Apple Music, is already huge, and generated $15.8 billion in the last three months of 2020.

It’s still a meaningful strategic change for Apple, which more or less introduced podcasts — the name is a nod to Apple’s iconic iPod music players — to mainstream audiences in 2005, but until now has never tried to make money from them.

The logic, as Apple executives have told me for several years, was that they didn’t think podcasts could be a meaningful business for the company and were happy to let podcast creators distribute their stuff on Apple’s devices and software for free. Podcasters can still do that, by the way: Apple won’t require anyone to charge anything for podcasts.

In a sense, this may be one of the only ways Apple could make a splash in podcasting. Podcasting, for now, is overwhelmingly an ad-supported business (though still a relatively small one: The industry still hasn’t cracked $1 billion a year in US ad sales: Facebook, by contrast, reported $84 billion in ad sales in 2020). And though Apple tried out digital advertising years ago, it has since taken on a pro-privacy stance that pretty much means it can’t be in the ad business today — at least not using the data-centric tactics that marketers now expect in their digital ad buys.

We’ll get a better sense of how the podcast landscape will change in the near future. Facebook has promised to provide more information about its podcast plans later this week. And Spotify, which has already teased plans to offer subscription options, will be talking about that more later this month, according to someone familiar with the company’s plans.

In the meantime, you can listen to a conversation about the way big tech is reshaping audio, featuring myself and Vox Media podcast producer Zachary Mack here:

Big Tech poses an enormous challenge to free speech — but we aren’t having the right debate about it.

Editor’s note, May 5, 2021: On Wednesday, a Facebook oversight board ruled that the social media service could retain its ban on former President Donald Trump following the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6. The board also stated, however, that Facebook would need to either justify a permanent ban or eventually restore Trump’s account. The following conversation, which took place on April 20, addresses some of the deeper issues raised by Facebook’s ban.

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America’s commitment to free speech is uniquely radical.

The US Constitution treats freedom of expression as the master freedom that makes every other possible. And our legal system reflects this view, which is why it has always been incredibly difficult to suppress or punish speech in this country.

But there has never been a consensus on how to implement the First Amendment. Free speech law has evolved a ton over the years, especially in the aftermath of revolutions in media technology. The birth of radio and television, for example, altered the information landscape, creating new platforms for speech and new regulatory hurdles.

Today, the big challenge is the internet and the many ways it has transformed the public square. In fact, if a public square exists at all anymore, it’s virtual. And that’s problematic because our communication platforms are controlled by a handful of tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

So what happens when companies like Facebook and Twitter decide, as they did in the aftermath of the insurrection on January 6, to ban the president of the United States for “glorifying violence” and spreading dangerous misinformation about the election? Is that a violation of the First Amendment?

The conventional response is no: Facebook and Twitter are private companies, free to do whatever they want with their platforms. That’s not wrong, but it is oversimplified. If the public square is controlled by a few private companies and they have the power to collectively ban citizens whenever they want, then doesn’t that give them the ability to effectively deny constitutionally protected liberties?

There are no simple answers to these questions, so I reached out to Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an expert on the history of the First Amendment, to explore some of the tensions. Lakier believes our current debate about deplatforming — and free speech more generally — is too hollow.

We talk about why contemporary First Amendment law is poorly equipped to handle threats to speech in the internet era, why we don’t want tech CEOs arbitrarily policing speech, what it means to have private control of the mass public sphere, and what, if anything, we can do on the policy front to deal with all of these challenges.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

What does the law actually say about the right of private companies like Twitter or Facebook to censor or ban users at will? Is it legal?

Genevieve Lakier

It is definitely legal. The First Amendment imposes very strict non-discrimination duties on government actors. So the government isn’t allowed to ban speech just because it wants to ban speech. There’s only going to be a limited set of cases in which it’s allowed to do that.

But the First Amendment only limits government actors, and no matter how powerful they are under current rules, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are not going to be considered government actors. So constitutionally they have total freedom to do whatever they want with the speech on their platforms.

The only caveat here is that they can’t permit unlawful speech on their platforms, like child pornography or speech that violates copyright protections or speech that’s intended to communicate a serious threat or incite violence. Bun in those cases, it’s not the tech companies making the decision, it’s the courts.

Sean Illing

So why do you believe that our current legal framework is inadequate for dealing with free speech and tech platforms?

Genevieve Lakier

It’s inadequate because it rests on a false understanding of the speech marketplace. The best explanation for why we have a strict state action restriction on the scope of the First Amendment is the government is a regulator of the speech marketplace, so we want to limit its ability to kick anyone out of the marketplace of ideas.

Ideally, we want to give people who participate in the marketplace of ideas a lot of freedom to discriminate when it comes to speech because that’s how the marketplace of ideas separates good ideas from bad ideas. You couldn’t have an effective marketplace of ideas if people couldn’t decide which ideas they want to associate with and which ideas they don’t.

And that makes sense at a certain level of abstraction. But the world we live in is not the one where the government is the only governor of the marketplace of ideas. The whole public-private distinction doesn’t really map onto the world of today. If that was the world we lived in, the current rules would work fantastically. But as the platforms make clear, private actors very often are themselves governors of the marketplace of ideas. They’re dictating who can speak and how they may speak.

Facebook and Twitter are not government actors, they don’t have an army, you can leave them much more easily than you can leave the United States. But when it comes to the regulation of speech, all the concerns that we have about government censorship — that it’s going to limit diversity of expression, that it’s going to manipulate public opinion, that it’s going to target dissident or heterodox voices — also apply to these massive private actors, yet under the current First Amendment rules there is no mechanism to protect against those harms.

Sean Illing

I absolutely don’t want Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or John Roberts deciding what kind of speech is permissible, but the reality is that these tech platforms are guided by perverse incentives and they do promote harmful speech and dangerous misinformation and that does have real-world consequences.

But if we want a truly open and free society, are those just risks we have to live with?

Genevieve Lakier

To some degree, yes. People love to talk about free speech as an unadulterated good, but the truth is that the commitment to free speech has always meant a commitment to allowing harmful speech to circulate. Free speech means little if it only means protection for speech that we don’t think is objectionable or harmful. So yeah, a society organized on the principle of free speech is going to have to tolerate harmful speech.

But that doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate all harmful speech, or that we can’t do anything to protect ourselves against harassment or threats or violent speech. Right now we have what’s widely seen as a crisis of speech moderation on these platforms. The platforms themselves are responding through effective self-regulation. But those efforts are always going to be guided by the profit motive, so I’m skeptical about how far that’s going to get us when it comes to sustainable speech moderation policies.

Sean Illing

Do you want the government telling Zuckerberg or Dorsey how to moderate content?

Genevieve Lakier

We might, as democratic citizens, think that our democratic government should have something to say about the speech that flows through the platforms. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we want Congress telling Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg what speech they may or may not allow. There’s a tremendous amount of disagreement about what’s harmful speech, or where to draw the lines, and you might not think Congress is in a good position to make those kinds of decisions.

Perhaps we want a diversity of approaches to content moderation across the platforms, and the government establishing a uniform speech code would undermine that. But at the same time the platforms are governors of speech, they’re the regulators of incredibly important forums of mass communication. And so I, as a democratic citizen who thinks the free speech principle is intended to facilitate democratic ends, want there to be more democratic oversight of what happens on the speech platforms.

Sean Illing

That sounds perfectly reasonable in the abstract, but what would “democratic oversight” look like in practice?

Genevieve Lakier

One way is to mandate transparency. To require the platforms to give more information to the public, to researchers, to the government, about how they’re making content moderation decisions, so ordinary citizens can assess if it’s good or bad, or what the effects of the policies are. That’s tricky because you’d have to think about what kind of information the platforms should be required to give and whether or not it would offer us any real insight. But I do think there’s a role for transparency here.

Alternatively, if we recognize that these private actors are playing such a tremendously important role in our public life, we could think about ways to make their decision-making more democratic or more democratically legitimate. So there have been proposals to create a kind of regulatory agency that would potentially collaborate with some of the platforms on developing policies. That might create more democratic structures of governance inside these platforms.

Sean Illing

What do you make of Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent suggestion that we should consider treating tech platforms like “common carriers” and regulate them like public utilities? Is that a good idea?

Genevieve Lakier

This is an idea that people on both the left and the right have suggested in recent years, but that had always been viewed as very constitutionally problematic. So it’s interesting that Justice Thomas thinks a common carrier platform law would be constitutional.

Practically, it’s hard to see how a common carrier regime would work. Common carrier laws— which prevent private actors from excluding almost any speech — work well when applied to companies whose job primarily is moving speech from one place to another. But the social media companies do a lot more than that: one of the primary benefits they provide to their users is by moderating content, to facilitate conversation, to flag news or videos as relevant, etc.

Common carrier obligations would make it difficult for the companies to perform this service, so the common carrier analogy doesn’t really work. Justice Thomas also suggested the possibility of subjecting the platforms to public accommodations law. Now, that seems more viable, because public accommodations law doesn’t prevent private companies from denying service to customers altogether, it merely limits the bases on which they could do so.

Sean Illing

Going back to your point about transparency, even if a company like Twitter formulated what most people might consider transparent and responsible speech policies (which I doubt, but let’s just grant that possibility), I don’t see any way to enforce it consistently over time. There is just too much ambiguity and the boundaries between free and harmful speech are impossible to define, much less police.

Genevieve Lakier

Regulation of speech is always tricky, and the scale of the speech and the transnational scope of these platforms creates enormous challenges. The best we can do is to try and develop mechanisms, appeals, processes, reviews, and transparency obligations where the platform’s disclosing what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. I think that’s the best we can do. It won’t be perfect, but it would be good to get to a system where we have some reason to believe that the decision-making is not ad hoc and totally discretionary.

Sean Illing

Are there free speech models around the world that the US could follow or replicate? A country like Germany, for example, isn’t comfortable with private companies deplatforming citizens, so they passed a law in 2017 restricting online incitement and hate speech.

Is there any room for an approach like that in the US?

Genevieve Lakier

The First Amendment makes it extremely difficult for the government to require platforms to take down speech that doesn’t fall into some very narrow categories. Again, incitement is one of those categories, but it is defined very narrowly in the cases to mean only speech that is intended, and likely, to lead to violence or lawbreaking. Hate speech is not one of those categories. That means that Congress could make it a crime to engage in incitement on the platforms but that would apply only to a very limited range of speech.

Sean Illing

I know you believe the platforms were justified in banning Trump after the assault on the Capitol in January, but do you also believe that we should punish or censor public officials for lying or perpetrating frauds on the public?

Genevieve Lakier

I think politicians should be able to be punished for lies, but I also think it’s very dangerous because the distinction between truth and lies is often difficult or subjective, and obviously democratic politics involves a lot of exaggeration and hyperbole and things that skirt the line between truth and lying. So we wouldn’t want a rule that allows whoever’s in power to silence their enemies or critics.

But on the other hand, we already prosecute all kinds of lies. We prosecute fraud, for instance. When someone lies to you to get a material benefit, they can go to jail. When prosecuted, the fact that you used speech to effectuate that fraudulent end is not a defense. As a subspecies of this, we criminalize election fraud. So if someone lies to you about the location of a polling place or they give you intentionally incorrect information about how to vote, they can go to prison.

Political lies that constitute fraud or that contribute to confusion about an election are in a narrow category of their own. So for example, I think President Trump’s lies about the outcome of the election are a species of election fraud. When used to achieve material benefit or electoral benefit where he’s going to use those lies in order to justify staying in power, that feels like the kind of lie that perhaps we want to include in our election fraud category.

Sean Illing

I just can’t imagine political speech, which is very different from commercial speech, ever being controlled that way. A border case like Trump inciting violence might be as clear-cut as it gets, but what about propaganda? Sophistry? And the innumerable forms of bullshit that have always constituted democratic politics? Democracy is a contest of persuasion and politicians and parties are always going to deceive and manipulate in pursuit of power and money.

That’s just baked into the democratic cake, right?

Genevieve Lakier

So I agree that there’s a category we could call election fraud that maybe we feel okay prosecuting and then there’s ordinary political bullshit that maybe we don’t. But I’m going to throw a question back at you, because I think that there are cases on the border that are really difficult. For example, what about the lies that Trump told his supporters in order to keep contributing to his fund after the election?

To me, that looks like fraud. If it wasn’t a politician, we would just call it classic fraud. But in the political domain, we call it something else. I’m not entirely sure about to think about this, but it’s an interesting case.

Sean Illing

Oh, no doubt it’s fraudulent, but I guess my point is that a great deal of politics is fraudulent in the same way, though it’s usually less overt than Trump’s hucksterism. Parties and politicians and special interest groups lie and peddle half-truths all the time. There’s so much bullshit in our political system that Trump appealed to a lot of people precisely because he was so transparently full of shit, which says quite a bit about where we’re at. The idea that we could ever meaningfully punish lying strikes me as fantastical.

Genevieve Lakier

What’s so interesting is that when you look at commercial speech cases, it’s not even controversial to prosecute false advertising. There’s no debate that false advertising is outside the scope of First Amendment protection.

The justification for that is often that the person who’s selling you the commercial good has information about the good that the consumer doesn’t have and cannot get, so if they tell you it will cure bad breath or whatever, you have to trust them. When there’s a clear imbalance in knowledge and access between the speaker and the listener, the court says it’s okay to prosecute lying.

One approach I’ve thought about, though I’m not sure it would work, is when a politician is lying about something that the member of the public has no way of checking or verifying either on their own or through public sources.

One of the reasons that the lies about the election were so damaging is because the people who were listening to those lies, they didn’t have any way of knowing whether this was or was not happening. I suppose they did though, they could rely on other news sources. But it was very difficult for them to verify what was happening in the black box of the election machinery.

So yeah, I agree that lying is an intrinsic part of democratic politics, but I also think that there are certain kinds of lies that are very difficult to respond to just through the ordinary marketplace of ideas. A huge challenge moving forward will be navigating these kinds of questions in a rapidly changing landscape.

The chipmaker is making major expansions beyond its traditional GPU business with the reveal of a new data center CPU, a next-generation data processing unit and new DGX systems for AI computing at the company’s GTC 2021 event.

With AI and machine learning applied to cloud applications, IT teams can automate management and ensure availability

DALLAS, TX – April 13, 2021 – Masergy, the software-defined network and cloud platform for the digital enterprise, enhanced its Masergy AIOps feature by applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize Software as a Service (SaaS) applications on global networks. The advancements help companies of all sizes to more quickly and easily solve the problems of application management while also automating IT processes and preventing performance degradation.

Businesses need enterprise cloud applications to be readily available to their employees no matter where they are, and yet it remains difficult for IT teams to ensure a high-performance user experience. Complex IT infrastructures and multi-cloud environments obscure visibility, requiring AI analytics to effectively identify and solve the root causes of performance degradation.

“Unplanned downtime is still largely due to manual processes and human error. AIOps eliminates these challenges, revolutionizing IT operations,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research. “The value of Masergy’s AIOps stems from its ability to evaluate bandwidth usage patterns, identify anomalies, and predict outages all within a fully managed SD-WAN or SASE service. It’s unique because it’s native to the network and security platform, offering prediction and propensity features.”

“Masergy created the industry’s first AI-based network intelligence service that analyzes the network and makes recommendations to enhance reliability. And we remain the only SD-WAN and SASE provider with a fully integrated AI-based network, security, and application optimization solution,” said Terry Traina, CTO, Masergy.

“This is the next innovation and another step forward on Masergy’s path to offering a fully autonomous network,” said Chris MacFarland, CEO, Masergy. “While our clients benefit from the automated analysis and intelligent recommendations of AIOps, Masergy is delivering on the future faster than our competitors. Our AI-powered cloud networking platform is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.”

“Masergy is a visionary in the arena of SD-WAN and AIOps, and has a clear plan for delivering secure, highly available, self-managed IT and fully autonomous networks,” said Paul Constantine, Executive Vice President of Supplier Services – Digital Distribution at Intelisys. “As Masergy’s largest Master Agent, we are always pursuing opportunities to bring innovative technologies to our sales partner community, and combined with support from our best-in-class sales engineers, we can together provide industry-leading solutions that address the challenges that business leaders face in the evolving distributed work environment.”

AIOps Predictive Intelligence and Proactive Optimization

Masergy AIOps is deeply embedded into the network, security, and application layers and was developed using an unprecedented amount of historic data patterns, leveraging the company’s 20 years of network and security logs. As a result, Masergy is uniquely positioned to provide a more mature AIOps algorithm and therefore the deepest insights for its SD-WAN and SASE solutions.

Because Masergy embedded AIOps into the application layers of its software-defined network, the AI engine now has direct access to more of the data it needs to deliver advanced performance optimization. AI analytics enriched from traffic flows, applications, and log data offer proactive recommendations for application performance. Here are some of the added features and business benefits:

• Accelerate application troubleshooting and management: Masergy AIOps observes application service quality and provides insights that isolate and identify the cause of performance degradation.
• Make data-driven decisions around resource allocation: Masergy AIOps observes application propensity for bandwidth consumption, helping IT managers intelligently manage application policies as well as forecast bandwidth and network capacity needs.
• Prevent potential application outages and performance degradation: Masergy AIOps evaluates historic patterns of bandwidth consumption, providing predictions, proactive recommendations, and real-time alerts on application bandwidth utilization.

As a built-in feature, Masergy AIOps is included with all SD-WAN and SASE solutions and delivers insights inside the unified management portal, where clients have real-time visibility and control over bandwidth. Masergy AIOps was first released in November 2019 as the industry’s first integrated AI-based, digital assistant for network optimization.

Watch the Masergy AIOps video
See AIOps in action
Learn more about Masergy AIOps

About Masergy

Masergy is the software-defined network and cloud platform for the digital enterprise. Recognized as the pioneer in software-defined networking, Masergy enables unrivaled, secure application performance across the network and the cloud with Managed SD-WAN, UCaaS, CCaaS and Managed Security solutions. Industry-leading SLAs coupled with an unparalleled customer experience enable global enterprises to achieve business outcomes with certainty. Learn more https://www.masergy.com/.

The post Masergy Enhances AIOps to Help Companies Improve Cloud Application Performance appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

SolarWinds said Friday that it didn’t make any adjustments to its 2020 performance-based executive compensation after the hack despite already spending at least $21.5 million on cleanup and recovery.

Today, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s NFT sold for about $5.4 million, or 2,224 ETH. The NFT is of an artwork that shows an image of Snowden’s face made from pages of a US appeals court decision that ruled the mass surveillance program Snowden exposed had violated US law.

The image is called “Stay Free.”

The profits won’t go to America’s most famous exiled whistleblower, however. Instead, the sale is meant to benefit the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where Snowden is the president. Its board includes actor John Cusack, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and the writer Glenn Greenwald.

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From AWS and Cisco Webex to Everything as a Service, here is where Presidio CEO Bob Cagnazzi is placing his biggest IT bets in 2021.

Email is the communication medium that refuses to die.

“Eventually, every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?” wrote the venture capitalist Fred Wilson in 2007. Three years later, he updated readers that other forms of messaging had outgrown email. “It looks like email’s reign as the king of communication is ending and social networking is now supreme,” he said. (To be fair to Wilson, his view was nuanced enough to continue investing in email tech.)

Investors weren’t alone — marketers have also spent years anticipating the next big thing.

“It was SMS, it was YouTube, it was Instagram. Before that it was Facebook, then it was Snapchat and TikTok. I kinda feel like individually all those things are fleeting. I think people found: You know what? Everyone still opens their emails every day,” says Darin Hager, a former sneaker entrepreneur who is now an email marketing manager at Adjust Media.

Email has an estimated four billion users today and continues to grow steadily even as mature social networks plateau. Estimates of the number of nonspam messages sent each day range from 25 billion to over 300 billion.

Unsurprisingly for a marketing channel with so much volume, there’s voluminous competition to send and program those emails. Yet, despite the competition, Klaviyo didn’t just break into the market — it has also achieved an unusual level of excitement and loyalty among marketers despite its youthful history.

“If you’re not using Klaviyo and you’re in e-commerce, then it’s not very professional. If you see ‘Sent by Constant Contact or Mailchimp’ at the bottom of an email by a brand, it makes it look like they’re not really there yet,” Hager said.

How did Klaviyo become the standard solution among email marketers?

In Klaviyo’s origin story, we delved into part of the answer: The company began life as an e-commerce analytics service. Once it matured to compete as an email service provider, Klaviyo benefited from the edge given by its deeper, more comprehensive focus on data.

However, that leaves several questions unanswered. Why is email so important to e-commerce? What are the substantive differences between Klaviyo’s feature set and those of its competitors? And why did several large, well-funded incumbents fail to capitalize on building an advantage in data first?

In this section, we’ll answer those questions — as well as laying out the significance of COVID-19 on the e-commerce market, and how newsletters and AI figure into the company’s future.

A positive Outlook on email’s longevity

Email is one of the oldest tech verticals: Constant Contact, one of the most venerable email service providers (ESPs), was founded in 1995, went public in 2007 and was taken private in 2015 for $1 billion. By the time Klaviyo started in 2012, the space was well served by numerous incumbents.

As online identity management grows in importance, Mastercard swooped in this morning and bought identity verification company Ekata for $850 million.

Mastercard certainly sees the rapid digital transformation that is happening in online commerce, a move that was accelerated by COVID. It’s a transformation that once started isn’t likely to change back to the old ways of doing business, even when we get past the pandemic.

With Ekata, the company gets a solution that can verify the online identity of a person making the transaction in real time using various signals that can indicate if this is fraudulent or true as they open an account or transact business. The company provides a score and other data that predicts the likelihood this person is who they say they are. It’s not unlike a credit risk score, except for identity.

That was one of the primary reasons Mastercard decided to acquire Ekata, according to Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence solutions at the company. “With the addition of Ekata, we will advance our identity capabilities and create a safer, seamless way for consumers to prove who they say they are in the new digital economy,” Bhalla said in a statement.

The two companies believe that by combining Mastercard’s fraud detection solutions with Ekata’s scoring approach, they will help prevent bad actors from using online platforms to conduct business. “The acceleration of online transactions has thrust global digital identity verification to the forefront as one of the biggest opportunities to build digital trust and combat global fraud,” Rob Eleveld, CEO at Ekata said in a statement.

The company, which was previously known as Whitepages Pro, was spun out as Ekata in June 2019. It has not raised any additional money, according to both PitchBook and Crunchbase data. It would seem that $850 million represents a nice exit for a company that hasn’t raised a dollar, but it’s clearly more mature than your average startup with 2,000 customers, including Lyft, Stripe, Equifax, Checkout.com and Intuit.

It appears that Mastercard was willing to pay to get the company it wanted at a time when a solution like this is becoming more essential than ever. The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory approval, but remember, regulators quashed the Visa-Plaid deal last year. If it passes muster, it should close some time in the next six months, according to the company.

Facebook is going all in on audio. The company announced multiple products on Monday that emphasize voice content over text, images, or video. The products will be released over the next few months and, in some cases, will start with a limited set of people.

Most notably, Facebook is indeed launching a competitor to the buzzy social audio app Clubhouse with a feature called Live Audio Rooms, which will be available this summer. It’ll first roll out to groups and public figures as a test, but it will eventually make its way to Messenger, too, so people can hang out with friends. Users will be able to record their conversations and distribute them, and eventually, people can charge for access to these rooms through either a subscription or...

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There are now more people who have died from the coronavirus worldwide than there are residents in Chicago.

Imagine that everyone living in Chicago died of a deadly disease. The world passed this grim milestone on Saturday, according to the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 tracker, which has officially recorded 3 million Covid-19 deaths around the globe — roughly 300,000 more people than all the current residents of the Windy City.

The number comes as some governments have begun ramping up vaccinations while simultaneously racing against outbreaks of multiple variants of the virus. As some may be beginning to sense an end to the pandemic, the virus still continues to spread at an alarming rate globally.

Globally, new infections are up recently, according to the Associated Press, averaging more than 700,000 cases and 12,000 deaths a day.

“This is not the situation we want to be in 16 months into a pandemic, where we have proven control measures,” Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 leaders, told the AP.

The death toll is accelerating, as the world passed 2 million deaths just two months ago. Brazil is an outlier for its Covid-19 death rate, accounting for about 3,000 deaths daily, approximately a quarter of the global daily death count. The country’s alarming mortality rate can largely be attributed to President Jair Bolsonaro and his Health Ministry’s tepid response to the virus. The Brazilian president has consistently opposed lockdowns and only recently came around to accepting vaccines as a means of fighting the pandemic.

In the US, the vaccination rate continues to grow, with 206 million doses administered as of Saturday, according to a Bloomberg report. But while wealthier countries may be eyeing a vaccine-facilitated end to the pandemic, less economically fortunate areas have been left waiting.

Countries are vaccinating, but at different speeds

Vaccinations are being administered in about 190 countries worldwide, but some, like the US and the UK, are well ahead of less developed nations. Of the 700 million jabs administered worldwide, 87 percent have gone to high-income or upper middle-income countries, according to comments last Friday from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a Covid-19 vaccine,” he said at a press briefing. “In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500.”

While the US and some western European countries have vaccination programs well underway, American drug companies have been waging a battle to preserve intellectual property rights over their vaccine formulas for as long as possible. This means that cheaper, generic vaccines are not yet available for widespread manufacturing in less developed countries.

In February, India and South Africa appealed to the World Trade Organization to issue an intellectual property waiver on Covid-19 vaccines that would facilitate more widespread production of the shots. That move, however, was blocked by wealthier Western countries, who argued that it would stifle innovation.

Recently, 10 Democratic and progressive senators wrote a letter to President Joe Biden, asking him to lobby the WTO to relax Covid-19 vaccine IP rules. “Simply put, we must make vaccines, testing, and treatments accessible everywhere if we are going to crush the virus anywhere,” the letter read.

Though Biden hasn’t yet made a decision one way or the other, the White House said it was studying the issue.

In the meantime, variants continue to spread, and US health officials worry about a recent decline in testing, which is critical to detecting new variants, as more and more Americans turn their attention toward getting vaccinated.

“I think the testing pillar of the pandemic response is still as vital as it’s ever been,” Joseph Petrosino, chair of molecular virology and microbiology at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Vox’s Umair Irfan last month. “Not only do we need to test, we need to start identifying which variants of the virus are spreading in a given area.”

As Coinbase goes public, cryptocurrency is more mainstream than ever.

Coinbase, a platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, became the first major cryptocurrency company to go public in the United States on Wednesday. It’s a clear sign that crypto is firmly in the mainstream of the finance industry — and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Coinbase stock — which is trading under the ticker COIN — ended its first day at $328 per share, putting the newly public company at a more than $85 billion valuation on Wednesday evening. Throughout the day, Coinbase’s price stayed far above the $250 reference price that the Nasdaq set before trading began, and at one point swung as high as $429. Ahead of the listing, the value of several cryptocurrencies also surged, with bitcoin hitting an all-time high.

In other words, if you’ve been pressing snooze on the bitcoin and blockchain conversation for the past decade, now’s probably a good time to wake up. The company’s direct listing on the Nasdaq is a “coming-out party” for cryptocurrencies, according to Erin Griffith of the New York Times. The tech policy site Protocol similarly declared Wednesday as the “biggest day yet for the crypto world.” As Paul Vigna, a Wall Street Journal cryptocurrency reporter, recently said, “Not only does it make crypto and bitcoin a little more acceptable, it now gives investors another way to invest in bitcoin.”

Even if the average investor doesn’t want to buy or sell cryptocurrencies on their own, Coinbase’s direct listing means average investors can invest in the cryptocurrency economy by investing in one of its biggest players.

If you’re still catching up on the trend, cryptocurrencies are virtual currencies built using blockchain technology, a type of decentralized database that can record interactions, like purchases, across a network of devices. Instead of trusting one system to record all these interactions, a record is kept on every single node of the network.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, created in 2009 by an anonymous developer under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, and is still the most prominent example of a payment method that’s facilitated along the blockchain. Here’s how Vox’s Timothy Lee explained bitcoin back in 2015:

Like MasterCard or PayPal, it allows money to be transmitted electronically. But Bitcoin is different from these conventional payment networks in two important ways. First, the Bitcoin network is fully decentralized. The MasterCard network is owned and operated by MasterCard Inc. But there is no Bitcoin Inc. Instead, thousands of computers around the world process Bitcoin transactions in a peer-to-peer fashion. Second, MasterCard and PayPal payments are based on conventional currencies such as the US dollar. In contrast, the Bitcoin network has its own unit of value, which is called the bitcoin.

Since then, lots of cryptocurrencies have popped up, and they’ve become their own economic sector, potentially worth trillions of dollars. Cryptocurrencies have historically been very volatile, but in recent years, more traditional financial institutions, including banks, investors, and regulators, have increasingly taken notice.

Here’s where Coinbase comes in. While people can buy cryptocurrencies directly — one individual buyer selling it to another — Coinbase aims to make the process easier by becoming a platform for people to buy, trade, and sell several of these various currencies, including bitcoin. Following its founding in 2012, the company has become the largest of these cryptocurrency platforms by volume in the US, and the second-largest in the world, according to Marketwatch. In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company reported that it had about 43 million retail users and that it had raised $3.4 billion in revenue up until the end of 2020, with most of those funds coming from transaction fees.

“What Netscape did for the internet in 1995 is what Coinbase will do for crypto and blockchain in 2021,” Roger Lee, a general partner at the investment firm Battery Ventures, which has invested in Coinbase, told Protocol last week. “The internet was very opaque and a very abstract concept to most people in the mid-’90s. Netscape created a lens through which to interact with it.”

Starting on Wednesday, regular investors now have the opportunity to get their own stake in this marketplace. While the company has gone public, it’s doing so as a direct listing, not a public offering (you can read more on what that means here). Regardless, it’s a big step for cryptocurrencies as they become a more recognized part of the economy.

Cryptocurrency and the blockchain are increasingly commonplace

Coinbase’s public listing is just the latest milestone on cryptocurrency’s journey from nerdy curiosity to mainstream investing opportunity and payment method. Since 2018, Square, the payment processing service, has let most of its payment app Cash App users buy and sell bitcoin. And lately, more and more of them have been doing so. Square CFO Amrita Ahuja said in February that 3 million people did transactions in bitcoin on the app last year, while 1 million did so in January 2021 alone.

Similarly, PayPal began to allow users to buy cryptocurrencies through their accounts last year. The platform expanded its cryptocurrency capabilities this March and started allowing users to exchange their crypto holdings into US dollars in order to pay for things, which is just one step short of allowing users to make purchases with actual cryptocurrency. Paypal has also indicated that users of Venmo, which it owns, will soon be able to transact in cryptocurrencies, too.

More broadly, applications for blockchain technology are appearing in a growing number of domains. The blockchain is key to the digital art being sold as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, that have become more popular in recent weeks. Blockchain technology has also popped up in vaccine passport apps, voting technology, and even managing supply chains. At the same time, the use of blockchain technology has also raised a wide range of challenges, including the risk of hacking, lack of regulation, and concern that its intense computing requirements can come with a whopping environmental footprint.

So even if you think bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain are weird or confusing, you should expect to see them continue to creep into everyday life.

Update, April 14, 5:10 pm ET: This piece was updated to include the news that Coinbase went public and to include its end-of-day trading price.

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By Sheila McGee-Smith
Besides video chat, latest release includes AI updates and new native webchat feature.

Parallels is releasing an update to its Desktop virtual machine software that allows M1 Mac owners to install Windows 10 on Arm. Parallels Desktop 16.5 now includes the necessary native support to run the Arm version of Windows on M1 chips, following Apple’s decision not to support Boot Camp on M1 Macs.

The latest version of Parallels Desktop for Mac now allows M1 Mac owners to run Windows 10 on Arm apps or traditional x86 apps side by side with Mac or iOS apps on Big Sur. There will be some app limitations on the Windows 10 on Arm side, thanks to its own app emulation, but Windows 10 on Arm will soon support x64 app emulation, too.

Image: Corel

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