Learning to play an instrument is all about gaining muscle memory and teaching your hands to move in a way you didn't previously think they could. I took piano lessons for years, and eventually abandoned it as stubborn teens do, but I’d like to imagine that if put in the time eventually my hands would be able to move like the hands in this video:
But the hands in this video aren't real. They're a 3D rendering that’s programmed to move across the keys of a piano accurately to the tune of any song—except for ones that aren’t humanly possible to play.
Created by Canadian-based Massive Technologies, the AI pianist is trained to listen to musical compositions and recreate them with virtual hands—and the results are pretty good.
Fayez Salka, co-founder of Massive Technologies, told me that their initial goal was to develop an “AI-powered virtual piano teacher” that could help students learn to play.
The hand’s knuckles are a little too smooth and move with a bit less fluidity compared to the real thing, but it’s close, and weirdly mesmerizing. In one demonstration video, the AI pianist plays tunes based on audio input from clips including the Tom & Jerry “Cat Concerto” episode ("Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2"), as well as music from Pixar’s Soul.
It also tries to play a “black midi” piece—compositions that can include billions or trillions of notes that are supposedly unplayable by two human hands—but ends up twitching across the keys in a flurry of noise and glitches while trying to keep up.
To generate the AI pianist’s movements, Massive Technologies gave the algorithm an audio file as an input, and it outputs an animation file “complete with the correct playing technique and kinematically accurate hand and body animation,” Salka said. The engineers can then apply that file to a virtual avatar in a virtual environment—videos like what’s on their YouTube channel, augmented reality that lets the user place a pianist at a real-life piano, or virtual reality.
To train the AI, Salka said his team brought professionally trained pianists to their labs in Helsinki, where they were asked to simply play the piano for hours. The AI observed their playing “through special hardware and sensors,” he said, and throughout the process the pianist and machine learning engineers would check the AI’s work and give it feedback or corrections.
“We would then take that feedback and use it as the curriculum for the AI for our next session with the pianist,” he said. “We repeated that process until the AI results closely matched the human playing technique and style.”
Massive Technologies launched an AR pianist app in 2017 that puts a virtual piano player in the room with you, but that app only offered a selection of pre-set songs. The company is releasing a new app that incorporates the AI pianist’s listening skills—it’s in the Apple Store now, but still in beta. Salka said that soon users will be able to point their phone’s microphone at any audio source, and the app will show a virtual piano player performing that song. He said he also sees potential for piano teachers to create interactive virtual lessons for remote teaching—or for virtual piano concerts, and film or games creators who want to incorporate a super-realistic pianist in their scenes.
There’s a wide variety of deals happening in the tech space, including TVs, computer components, and more. Starting with a gadget that’ll give you some fast transfer speeds, SanDisk’s Ultra 1TB NVMe SSD is $100 at Best Buy. That’s a great price for this kind of capacity, given it’s much faster than your standard SATA SSD. SanDisk covers this model with a five-year warranty. In terms of how you can use it, make sure your PC’s motherboard has an open M.2 2280 slot, or get crafty and buy an M.2 enclosure to turn it into a fast, compact external drive like the one shown above.
Someday, Sony will enable the PS5’s M.2 slot for an SSD of this size and shape, but until it does I wouldn’t recommend buying one expressly for that reason. Just to...
The 400-year curse dragging Indonesia’s capital into the sea.
Like many coastal cities around the world, Jakarta is dealing with sea-level rise. But Indonesia’s biggest city also has a unique problem: Because of restricted water access in the city, the majority of its residents have to extract groundwater to survive. And it’s causing the city to sink. Today, Jakarta is the world’s fastest-sinking city.
The problem gets worse every year, but the root of it precedes modern Indonesia by centuries. In the 1600s, when the Dutch landed in Indonesia and built present-day Jakarta, they divided up the city to segregate the population. Eventually, that segregation led to an unequal water piping system that excluded most Indigenous Jakartans, forcing them to find other ways to get water.
To understand how all of this ties together, and what’s in store for Jakarta’s future, watch the video above. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.
Barack Obama is getting into the podcast game. Today, Spotify announced that the former president and rockstar Bruce Springsteen — yes, you read that right — will host a show called Renegades: Born in the USA exclusively for the audio platform. They’ll discuss “race, fatherhood, marriage, and the state of America,” per a press release, and the first two episodes premiere today for both free and premium Spotify users. The first season will contain eight episodes total.
Higher Ground, the production company owned by Michelle and Barack Obama, signed a deal with Spotify in 2019, committing themselves to creating exclusive podcasts for the platform. Renegades is the second of those shows. The Michelle Obama Podcast debuted this past summer...
A United Airlines flight experienced a dramatic-looking engine failure just after takeoff from Denver International Airport on Saturday afternoon. UA328, originally headed to Honolulu, quickly circled back to the airport and made a safe landing after the pilots calmly made a “mayday” call to air traffic control. There were no injuries among the 231 passengers and 10 airline staff on board, according to the FAA.
Since it’s 2021, the incident was thoroughly captured with both photos and video. Passengers shared video of what looks to be a significant right engine failure, with visible damage, flames, and trailing smoke:
Flight 328 @united engine caught fire. my parents are on this flight everyone’s okay though! p...
The US government has released updated figures on the number of companies and federal agencies it believes were impacted by the recent SolarWinds hack. “As of today, 9 federal agencies and about 100 private sector companies were compromised,” Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger said in a briefing, though she declined to name specific organizations. Although the hack was “likely of Russian origin,” Neuberger said the hackers launched their attack from inside the US.
The latest figures revealed are lower than the 250 federal agencies and businesses that were previously reported to have been infected, though Neuberger cautioned that the investigation is still in its “beginning stages” and that “additional compromises” may be...
Facebook is blocking Australians from sharing news links in response to a proposed law that would force the company to pay for news. | Robert Cianflone/Getty Images
A law that would require some tech companies to pay news publishers is making waves around the world.
If you’re an Australian Facebook user who loves to share the news on your timeline, you may have noticed something different recently: You can’t.
In the next few days, though, things should go back to normal. Less than a week after suddenly banning news links for Australian users and shutting down Australian news pages to protest an upcoming law, Facebook says it’s gotten reassurances from the Australian government that it won’t be forced to pay publishers but will instead be given the chance to negotiate agreements with them — which it’s already starting to do. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Facebook has agreed to pay the major Australian media company Seven West Media for news content and is in negotiations with another called Nine Entertainment.
Australia has now passed the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which could force Facebook and Google to pay publishers if they host their content. The law is a response to years-long complaints from news outlets around the world about the role that Google and Facebook — and their mammoth digital ad businesses — have played in the decline of journalism and the decimation of its business model in the internet age. The two companies responded to the then-potential law in very different ways: Google made deals with Australian news publishers; Facebook decided to cut them off entirely.
After a few days of Australians seeing what Facebook was like without the news, a sizable amount of worldwide backlash against the company, and talks with the Australian government that resulted in a few last-minute changes to the law, Facebook decided that the new terms were good enough for its ban to end. The law passed a few days later.
Previously, Facebook had banned all users from sharing links to Australian news sources, Australian publications’ pages from hosting any of their own content, and Australian users from sharing any news links, Australian or international. Here’s what the platform looked like during the great news blackout:
This is what happened when anyone in the world tried to share a link to an Australian news source.This is what Australia’s news pages looked like.
Facebook also blocked anything it thought was an Australian news source — which included several sites that were decidedly not news outlets. There were reports of government pages being restricted, for example. (Also, bike trails.)
Even non-Australian news pages, like Vox.com, were blocked for Australian users.
The overzealous ban, however, was apparently intentional and maybe even a little bit punitive.
“As the law does not provide a clear guidance on the definition of news content, we have taken a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” Facebook told Recode when it initially imposed the ban. “However, we will reverse any Pages that are inadvertently impacted.”
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Facebook’s move would only make his government more determined to pass the law — and might encourage a few other governments to do something similar.
“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing,” Morrison wrote in a Facebook post. “These actions will only confirm the concerns that an increasing number of countries are expressing about the behaviour of BigTech companies who think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them.”
He added: “We will not be intimidated by BigTech seeking to pressure our Parliament as it votes on our important News Media Bargaining Code.”
The law Facebook hated but Google is learning (and paying) to live with
The law, which passed on Thursday, says that digital platforms like Facebook and Google have to pay news organizations if their content is featured on those platforms, like in Google search results or Facebook shares, unless they make enough deals with those organizations outside of the law. If the platforms and the publishers can’t come to a payment agreement, they’ll go before an arbiter who will decide a fair price for them that they will have to pay, or else face significant penalties. The treasury minister decides which digital platforms are subject to the law.
Google and Facebook, who dominate a digital ad business that pays them billions of dollars while news organizations go bankrupt, have been vehemently opposed to the law. Over the past several months, both havethreatened to take their services away from Australians if it were to pass.
Google blinked first, and began working out payment deals with Australian publications. A week ago, it announced a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Murdoch, Australia’s exceedingly rich and powerful news magnate and native son, has been very vocal about wanting a law that forces digital platforms to pay his publications, and he may well have influenced the country’s decision to move forward with this law.
News Corp now has a multi-year deal with Google. Terms were not disclosed, but the New York Times reported it was worth tens of millions of dollars. Google also made a deal with Australia’s Seven West Media and has agreed to work out licensing deals with French publications as France considers a similar law.
Facebook, obviously, took a different tack. Its stated reasoning was that if Australians can’t share news links, and Australian news organizations can’t post their own content, then Australia’s law won’t apply to it — after all, there’s nothing to pay media companies for. But there’s also no law in place yet. Facebook cut off Australian news publications before it really had to, which gave them, their government, and their readers a taste of what was to come if the media law went through. Facebook might have been hoping that a preview of its platform without Australian news would make lawmakers more amenable to passing a version of the law that Facebook preferred. Now that Australian lawmakers have, in fact, added a few amendments, it seems that gamble was correct. Facebook will still have to pay for the news one way or the other if it wants its platform to host links, but it has a little bit more control than it did before.
Facebook might be in the right here. It depends on whom you believe.
While some have cheered Australia’s move, reasoning that anything that gets tech companies to pay news organizations back for the content (or ad dollars) they’ve used to build their own platforms, other media analysts believe the law is a case of the government forcing companies to pay other companies — specifically, those owned by one of that government’s richest and most influential (former) citizens. What was well-intentioned may end up only making rich people even richer, with little benefit to anyone else.
Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis called the law a case of “media blackmail” and said Google had “caved” to “the devil Murdoch.” Facebook, he said, either “stood on principle” or just decided news content for Australian users wasn’t worth enough to the company to have to pay for it.
But others pointed out that the way Facebook went about standing on that principle may have done more harm than good; that suddenly depriving users of a service on which they’ve come to rely (including pages that have nothing to do with the news that also got caught in the ban) will only make them angry at Facebook, not Murdoch or the Australian government. And the rest of the world wouldn’t look kindly on Facebook for the move, either.
“Facebook managed to turn attention away from a flawed piece of legislation and on to its own reckless, opaque power,” wrote Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. “Even for a company that specializes in public relations disasters, this was quite an achievement.”
Facebook said last week that it didn’t think the law “recognizes the realities of how our services work.” The social network believes that it’s actually the publishers that benefit from Facebook, not the other way around.
“Last year Facebook generated approximately 5.1 billion free referrals to Australian publishers worth an estimated AU$407 million,” Facebook said. (Take those figures, which have not been independently verified, with a very large grainof salt.) And Facebook apparently barely needs news articles, which the company says makes up “less than four percent of the content people see in their News Feed.” That might be because Facebook has, in recent years, intentionally deemphasized news links in News Feeds in favor of posts from friends and family, and removed the “Trending” box that featured links to news articles.
In fact, Facebook said, it lets news organizations use its services for free, posting links to their articles for Facebook users, who then click on those links and give those news organizations precious traffic. What Facebook didn’t say was that this traffic isn’t worth nearly as much to those publishers as it could be, because Facebook and Google control the majority of the digital ads market and make most of the money from it, rather than the outlets whose content those ads are posted on. This is why Australia wants to force them to pay those publishers fairly in the first place.
A few other places, including France and Canada — and even the much larger European Union — have suggested they might follow Australia’s lead, too.
Facebook claims that it’s not opposed to paying news organizations and had wanted to launch in Australia Facebook News, a platform on which the company would pay publishers to license their content, as it’s already doing in the United States and the United Kingdom. Those deals would, of course, be on Facebook’s terms.
Like a boomerang, Facebook comes back around
The standoff came to an end less than a week after it started, with both sides claiming victory.
“After further discussions with the Australian government, we have come to an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to, including small and local publishers,” Facebook VP of global news partnerships Campbell Brown said in a statement to Recode. “We’re restoring news on Facebook in Australia in the coming days.”
The Australian government said it was introducing “further amendments” to the law, which appear to give Facebook more time to work out deals with news organizations and make investments in journalism, helping it avoid the mandatory arbitration it’s been so against. It’s very possible that the law won’t actually apply to anyone in the end, because Facebook and Google will be voluntarily paying enough news organizations to avoid it.
Facebook’s Brown also said that Facebook could very well re-ban the news in Australia if it doesn’t like how things are going: “Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation.”
In Australia, the question now becomes which news organizations will truly benefit from the law, or if most of that money is going to the major players with very little left for the small, non-Murdoch publications the law was supposed to help. If Google and Facebook are able to work out enough deals that the law no longer applies to them, smaller publications may still be left to accept whatever they’re offered. They may be the ultimate losers here.
Globally, this has shown that Google and Facebook will pay for news, but that they’ll do as much as possible for it to be on their own terms. Facebook was willing to cut off Australia’s news pages and links to bully an entire country out of passing a law it didn’t like. It may have won a few concessions here, but the rest of the world — including the United States, which is currently considering if Big Tech companies have too much power — may not have taken the lesson from this that Facebook wants them to. Countries may be more motivated than ever to check Facebook’s power before it gets much greater.
Last November, California passed Proposition 22, which made it so that companies like Uber and Lyft could classify their workers as contractors instead of employees, avoiding the obligation to give them benefits. Bloomberg has written a great report about how this type of change — replacing regular employees with contractors — could be coming to many other industries across the nation, which could affect millions of workers.
While the law was pushed for by ride-share companies, the article talks about the effects already being seen in other industries, like how grocery delivery workers are being fired and replaced by on-demand DoorDash workers. It also details an op-ed by an Uber investor, talking about how Prop 22 could be used to...
WhatsApp has a new plan to explain its contentious privacy policy — the one that came under fire when users grew concerned the platform would share their messages with parent company Facebook. In an announcement on Thursday, the company explained how users can read through the new policy and learn how business and personal messages — which have different privacy standards — are handled.
The new privacy policy primarily concerns messaging businesses on WhatsApp and what parts of your data those businesses have access to. Most WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning they can only be accessed by the people actually talking. But WhatsApp also lets users message businesses, and those messages aren’t extended the same protections....
BELMONT, CA – February 16, 2021 – RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE:RNG), a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today appointed former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan to the company’s board of directors.
“Over the past year we have learned the importance of being able to communicate effectively from wherever we are,” said Secretary Duncan. “RingCentral’s vision of enabling people to learn and work from anywhere presents some intriguing opportunities for us all to rethink how this next generation of communications technologies will empower us as individuals, families, businesses and our communities. I look forward to working with my fellow board members on this exciting journey.”
Secretary Duncan was U.S. Secretary of Education from January 2009 through December 2015 as part of the Obama Administration. Prior to his federal government service, he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools for eight years, and he is currently a senior fellow at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is also the managing partner at Emerson Collective, an organization dedicated to removing barriers so people can live to their full potential. He currently leads Chicago CRED, a nonprofit trying to achieve a transformative reduction in gun violence in Chicago. Secretary Duncan graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1987, majoring in sociology.
“Secretary Duncan brings a broad understanding and experience of the challenges that our communities will have to address over the next decade,” said Vlad Shmunis, founder, chairman and CEO of RingCentral. “RingCentral appreciates the knowledge, experience and perspectives of trusted advisors. I am excited to have him join our Board on this journey. I know his contributions will have a great impact.”
About RingCentral
RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone (MVP) platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premise PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral offers three key products in its portfolio including RingCentral Office® , a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform including team messaging, video meetings, and a cloud phone system; Glip ® the company’s free video meetings solution with team messaging that enables Smart Video Meetings; and RingCentral cloud Contact Center solutions. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.
Google has announced that a built-in screen recorder is coming to Chrome OS in March. Google hopes the tool will make it easier for students and teachers to record virtual lessons. “Teachers have long recorded lessons to help students do homework and study for tests, but in the past year it’s become downright critical for virtual learning,” reads Google’s blog post.
It looks pretty simple. Once you’ve pressed the appropriate button on your Chromebook, you’ll see a countdown in the center of your screen. While your Chromebook is recording, a red circle will appear on the right side of the shelf.
A few other tools for Chromebook learners are in the works as well, and some have already arrived. Chrome OS’s screen reader,...
If you hadn't noticed, the United States isn't really prepared for climate change. In part because corporations and disinformation mills have convinced countless Americans a destabilizing climate isn't actually happening. But also because we were already perpetually underinvesting in our core infrastructure before the symptoms of an unstable climate began to manifest. It's a massive problem that, as John Oliver highlighted six years ago, doesn't get the same attention as other pressing issues of the day. You know, like the latest influencer drama or mortal threat posed by TikTok.
Infrastructure policy is treated as annoying and boring... until a crisis hits and suddenly everybody cares. As millions of Texans found out this week when the state's energy infrastructure crumbled like a rotten old house under the weight of heating energy demands, leaving millions without power during a major cold snap. While outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News quickly tried to weaponize the crisis by blaming the renewable energy sector for the problems, deeper, more technical dives seem to indicate a lack of wind power output wasn't the underlying problem:
"While some early reports indicated that frozen wind turbines were causing significant shortfalls, 30GW is roughly equal to the entire state's wind capacity if every turbine is producing all the power it's rated for. Since wind in Texas generally tends to produce less during winter, there's no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation; in fact, a chart at ERCOT indicates that wind is producing significantly more than forecast."
"Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.
“The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances."
Texas' issues are somewhat unique by nature of the way the Texas utility grid is structured. It's isolated in part because of the state's unwillingness to be regulated by the federal government. And while deregulation efforts in the late nineties and early aughts were supposed to fix the state's power monopoly problems, the policy wound up being a bit of a mixed bag:
"from 2002 to 2013, the average household in deregulated areas paid a total of about $4,800 more than residents of cities — like Austin and San Antonio — served by just one municipal utility, or those served by electric cooperatives, the analysis said."
Either way, these problems could have been avoided. In fact, a decade-old report pointed out precisely how to avoid them via weatherization, investment, and greater emergency natural gas reserves. Many Texas utilities talked about how they were doing these things, but didn't actually follow through, the 2011 report politely noted:
"Although generators and gas producers reported having winterization procedures and practices in place, responses were generally reactive in their approach to winterization and preparedness."
And of course because gutting state and federal regulatory oversight is treated as a panacea on many fronts, government didn't do enough to ensure these companies were disaster-proofing their network. Going this extra mile also requires spending money on preparing for climate change, something that's hard to do when you've got millions of folks running around -- especially in Ted Cruz' state of Texas -- who don't believe in climate change. In fact as the crisis has become more and more pronounced, many political leaders did the exact opposite of responsible leadership, by turning infrastructure investment and competent regulatory oversight into another idiotic political trolling opportunity:
Here are three Texas Republicans mocking California power outages last year and my Dallas bathtub this morning, a literal block of ice pic.twitter.com/ViGZuTZz40
In addition to the power outages, millions of Texans lost access to voice services. While old copper phone lines still work, cable voice or VOIP services quickly fell apart -- in part because we stopped mandating back up batteries in many internet-based phone services. Meanwhile, cell phones don't work if there's no power going to your local tower, and a lack of backup power options at those sites:
Texas and Oklahoma are finding out what Calif and NY found out. In major blackouts, traditional copper wire phones work, cable phones and VoIP phones do not, and cells work only as long as their sites have diesel fuel or other backup power. https://t.co/X8Mxu1PYfO
— Public Utility Law Project of New York (@UtilityProject) February 16, 2021
After Hurricane Katrina, in 2008, the FCC passed rules mandating that cellular towers be upgraded to include battery backups or generators capable of delivering at least 8 hours of backup power, if not 24 or more. But the US cellular industry, you know, the one whose rates are some of the highest in the developed world, cried like a petulant child about the requirement and sued to scuttle the rules.
Backed by the then Bush White House, cellular carriers told anybody who'd listen that the requirement would create "a huge economic and bureaucratic burden" for the industry. A better approach, the industry proclaimed, would be to let the industry self-regulate and adhere to entirely voluntary guidelines, leaving it with the "flexibility" to adapt to problems as the industry saw fit. It didn't work, and as a result outages were equally dire during Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and Irma. And now again in Texas.
Infrastructure policy is often dismissed as droll wonkery and largely ignored... until a crisis. But these problems are made all the more frustrating because experts know what to do to prevent disruption and save lives... we just refuse to do it. Regardless, it's increasingly clear that letting powerful regional companies (be they in energy or telecom) self-regulate, while underinvesting all the while, is going to prove increasingly fatal as the climate increasingly destabilizes. The real question is: how many people are going to die before we actually learn something from the experience?
Sennheiser announced on Tuesday it’s looking for a new partner to buy its consumer audio business, which consists of headphones and soundbars. It’s going to shift its focus entirely to professional audio, including its Neumann microphone division and what Sennheiser calls business communications.
In a press release, Sennheiser says it wants to increase visibility in the competitive headphone and soundbar markets, and it thinks its products can be popular amid “strong competitive pressure.” But it needs an investor to make that happen. It also says that talks with potential partners will start soon.
“To be best able to exploit the potential in each of these markets, we are concentrating our own resources on the three business areas in...
Much of Texas has been hit by a historic winter cold front, leaving many without power and affecting internet and cell phone services in the state.
Downdetector is showing spikes in user reports for T-Mobile and AT&T from Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and the surrounding areas.
“We’re experiencing network issues following severe weather in several areas of the country and especially across Texas,” T-Mobile president of technology Neville Ray said in a tweet. “Our teams are working hard to restore service.”
We’re experiencing network issues following severe weather in several areas of the country and especially across Texas. Our teams are working hard to restore service. Stay tuned, stay safe and thank you for your patience.
Cisco Webex User Experience is Backed by High-Performance Network Service that is Unrivaled in the Industry
DALLAS, TX – – Masergy, the software-defined network and cloud platform for the digital enterprise, has enhanced its Masergy Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution by adding industry-leading collaboration with Cisco Webex. The solution consolidates Masergy’s hosted UC calling platform and Cisco Webex into a single application experience and allows clients to add Masergy’s Managed SD-WAN Secure connectivity services. Now, enterprises wanting the high performance of Masergy’s hosted voice services alongside the advanced capabilities of Webex can get everything they need in one complete and secure solution.
Business continuity remains a top priority for 2021, and cloud collaboration applications are critical for enabling the remote workforce. Productivity correlates with a proactive approach to ensure the network can support jitter- and latency-sensitive applications. UCaaS solutions integrated with network services improve the end user experience by delivering uninterrupted voice and video conferencing. A Nemertes Research study shows that IT leaders are increasing spending in response to COVID-19 with 82% planning to direct that spending toward video collaboration solutions and 74.8% directing it to connectivity including wide area network services.
“Companies of all sizes are looking for a no-hassle migration path to cloud communications. Masergy enhances the Webex solution with networking and management features that give enterprises the advanced features and support often required,” explained Dave Michels, Enterprise Communications Analyst, TalkingPointz. “This offer combines multiple services, thus reducing the burden on the customer’s IT to deliver and secure communications. It also simplifies installation and troubleshooting time. Masergy is filling a gap in the market with an integrated and wide-reaching solution encompassing collaboration technologies, global network services, and security services too.”
Masergy UCaaS with Cisco Webex is a cloud-based service for calling, messaging, and meeting. Masergy delivers an unparalleled experience by integrating its globally available voice and video calling with the chat, file sharing, and conferencing capabilities of the Cisco Webex application. When clients pair this new offering with Masergy’s Managed SD-WAN Secure connectivity services, they can achieve a highly reliable communications experience all across the globe. One management portal provides a unified view of analytics for the network, UCaaS, WAN edge devices, and application performance. Masergy also offers public switched telephone network (PSTN) services in 25 countries today as well as contact center as a service solutions and managed security services.
“Masergy UCaaS with Cisco Webex is a fully integrated experience providing a redefined one-stop-shop for both collaboration and IT needs. Masergy directly manages and operates the network and security service, so our clients can get back to doing what they do best,” said Terry Traina, CTO, Masergy. “Since 2004, Masergy has offered UCaaS solutions based on Cisco’s technology, and our clients trust us because of our engineering expertise and our custom cloud migration support as they look to gain a more agile, intuitive environment for collaboration.”
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 at https://www.masergy.com/.
Formerly CenturyLink, Lumen Technologies is investing heavily on edge computing and next-generation networking services. The carrier is also eliminating its SMB reporting segment and breaking its enterprise segment out to include a midmarket enterprise and large enterprise segment.
A pedestrian wearing a protective mask walks down a near-empty street in the Chinatown area of San Francisco, California, on March 20, 2020. | Michael Short/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Anti-Asian violence has spiked during the pandemic. A deadly incident draws new attention to it.
In the past few weeks, a slew of violent incidents in the Bay Area — including multiple attacks targeting elderly individuals — have renewed attention on anti-Asian racism during the pandemic.
The motivation for several of these assaults is not yet clear — but the ultimate effects of these attacks are the same: They’re instilling fear in Asian American communities, particularly among older adults who are already some of the most vulnerable populations during the current public health crisis.
“We do know that the rise in anti-Asian racism ... has had devastating impacts,” said Cynthia Choi, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, in a recent press call. “Our community is fearful of being in public alone, simply going for a walk and living our daily lives.” These attacks have also coincided with the start of the Lunar New Year holiday, but it’s not certain if they’re linked.
Over the past year, anti-Asian incidents have surged across the country: There have been more than 2,800 since last spring, according to Stop AAPI Hate, which has been tracking people’s reports. Ranging from verbal abuse and workplace discrimination to storefront vandalism and physical violence, many of these assaults have been fueled by xenophobic sentiment that seeks to scapegoat Asian Americans for the spread of the coronavirus, given its origins in China. Such incidents have only been stoked further by former President Donald Trump’s use of racist terms to describe the virus.
Activists are working to draw attention to the violence that’s taken place in an effort to pressure local governments to provide more financial support for victims and funding for community-based efforts. Groups including the Oakland Chinatown Coalition, for example, are coordinating volunteers who can help accompany seniors as they run errands. Actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu have also sought to draw attention to this problem, by offering a $25,000 reward for information about the individuals involved in harming the 91-year-old man in Oakland (police have since apprehended a suspect).
As they respond to these attacks, activists emphasize that it’s important for communities of color to stand in solidarity, and to make sure that policing is not viewed as the main form of redress — given how policing has disproportionately harmed Black Americans. Instead, they note that communities need to focus on cross-racial education and healing, in order to raise awareness about the discrimination that different groups experience.
“It’s incumbent upon us in our communities to speak out,” says Manjusha Kulkarni, the head of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council. “Part of addressing this issue is coming to terms with ... the invisibility overall of Asian Americans, and the idea of being perpetual foreigners who people don’t see as Americans.”
Anti-Asian violence has surged during the pandemic
Incidents of anti-Asian violence began spiking last spring as the pandemic got underway, and hundreds more have been documented since then. According to an Ipsos survey, 60 percent of Asian Americans have observed people blaming members of their community for Covid-19.
Kulkarni emphasizes that Trump’s rhetoric had a clear effect in stoking xenophobia and fueling these attacks, many of which fed off longstanding tropes about Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who can never be fully American. “We would often see increased violence or hate and discrimination when the president would make remarks. We saw that was having direct impact on the perpetrators,” she said, regarding the Stop AAPI Hate tracker. Additionally, the association of Asian Americans with the coronavirus activated age-old stereotypes that have associated immigrants of Asian descent with “weird” foods, dirtiness, and illness.
Anti-Asian attacks in the past year have been wide-ranging.According to the Stop AAPI Hate tracker, they’ve included an Asian American child getting pushed off her bike by a bystander at a park, a family at a grocery store getting spat on and accused of being responsible for the coronavirus, and vandalism outside businesses. Then there is the death of Ratanapakdee in San Francisco this past month: Members of his family told KTVU that they believe the attack on him was racially motivated.
In a recent executive action, President Joe Biden condemned anti-Asian racism, marking a stark change from the Trump administration. He’s also instructed the Justice Department to begin gathering data on these attacks and to strip discriminatory language from federal documents. But it is going to take more than one message denouncing such acts to maintain this dialogue and ensure that members of these communities get the funding and legal backing they need.
Activists want to raise awareness of these attacks and get more support for victims
Many activists are dedicated to raising awareness about these attacks, and are pushing lawmakers to take actions that support victims.
For those interested in helping, a number of these efforts are localized. San Francisco, for example, has helped set aside funds for victims and survivors in order to address legal and medical costs, but regional groups hope to pressure lawmakers to make the effort a more sustainable one. In Oakland, the Chinatown Coalition is among the groups coordinating volunteers who can help seniors with their daily activities and provide more foot traffic to storefronts in the area. The Asian Pacific Fund is also raising money for community organizations trying to combat anti-Asian racism in the Bay Area. And crowdfunding efforts have been set up to help cover expenses faced by Ratanapakdee’s family.
This weekend, there are demonstrations planned both in Oakland’s Chinatown and in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza.
Kulkarni emphasizes that people can use social media to share information about the attacks and elevate these resources. She says, too, that individuals can join their local city council meetings to make sure elected officials are aware of the violence that’s happening and press for more funding for victims.
“You don’t have to go to the city council building, you join via Zoom — make those pleas and demands of our elected leaders,” she says.
Ultimately, activists intend to continue calling attention to the problem, and they urge lawmakers to do the same.
“It is vital for our elected officials to vehemently condemn racism and acts of hate against Asian Americans in any form, from xenophobic language to violent acts,” says John Yang, the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. “Leaders must use their platforms to share our stories as well as ensure that the government provides resources for the victims and collects data on the hate our community is experiencing.”
Facebook, a company known for ripping its ideas from competitors, has reportedly set its sights on social audio. The New York Timesreports today that the company is working on a copycat of Clubhouse, the buzzy invite-only social audio startup. The Times reports the product is in the “early stages of development,” so it’s unclear if and when it might launch.
The news comes only five days after CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined Clubhouse and participated in a room to talk about the future of augmented and virtual reality. His presence on the app was shocking, given it’s a new social network, so the fact that Facebook might now be cloning Clubhouse is no surprise. The company has already done so with multiple other apps, including, most...
David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border.
Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone. Most of the incidents date to 2017, when then-President Donald Trump pushed for tighter border...
LONDON – – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, announced today that Salesforce.org has named Vonage as winner of its 2020 Cross-Industry Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year EMEA Award.
Presented at the Salesforce.org Virtual Partner Summit, the award recognises firms who have demonstrated excellence in serving Salesforce not-for-profit customers, innovating and giving back.
Vonage’s contact centre solution integrates all communications channels without expensive, disruptive hardware changes and plugs straight into an organisation’s Salesforce platform. This enables Vonage customers using Salesforce, like not-for-profit businesses Homeless Link and National Citizen Service (NCS), to perform better, connect easier and enhance experiences to help them serve their customers better.
“We are delighted to have won this prestigious award from Salesforce.org,” said Kristan Fiandach, Vice President, Alliances at Vonage. “This is testament to our integration with Salesforce and commitment to providing flexible and innovative tools to help non-profit organisations build next generation communications solutions to create richer relationships with their stakeholders.”
Salesforce, Salesforce.org and others are trademarks of Salesforce.com, Inc.
The Department of Justice has backed away from a Trump administration lawsuit against California for passing net neutrality rules. It’s the opening salvo in what is expected to be a stark reversal from Trump era policies friendly to major US telecom monopolies.
The DOJ on Monday formally dismissed the lawsuit, first filed in 2018 under former Trump U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The law still faces a legal challenge from the broadband industry, the next hearing for which is scheduled for February 23. Should California prevail, the state will have its own net neutrality law that in some cases goes even further than the FCC rules the law was intended to replace.
The DOJ’s retreat was applauded by new Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel, who is widely expected to fully restore the federal rules.
“I am pleased that the Department of Justice has withdrawn this lawsuit,” Rosenworcel said.
“When the FCC, over my objection, rolled back its net neutrality policies, states like California sought to fill the void with their own laws,” she noted. “By taking this step, Washington is listening to the American people, who overwhelmingly support an open internet, and is charting a course to once again make net neutrality the law of the land.”
The FCC’s 2015 rules prevented ISPs from exploiting their regional monopolies to harm competitors and consumers. ISPs had spent years toying with blocking customers from being able to access internet voice services like Vonage, video apps like Skype, digital payment services like Google Wallet, or other services that compete with an ISP’s own offerings.
ISPs have also given themselves an unfair advantage in the streaming video wars by applying arbitrary and unnecessary broadband caps and overage fees when their broadband customers use competitors like Netflix, but not when a consumer uses an ISP’s own streaming service.
But net neutrality first gained widespread attention when Comcast was caught covertly throttling BitTorrent without informing users. As a result, the rules also required that ISPs be transparent about how they’re managing their networks, allowing consumers to better understand the kind of broadband connections they’re buying.
Surveys repeatedly found the rules enjoyed the bipartisan approval of a vast majority of Americans.
But the Trump FCC dismantled the rules anyway, falsely claiming they had stifled US network investment, and that restoring them would reverse the trend. Numerous studies, earnings reports, and executive statements have repeatedly proven both claims to be false.
While less talked about, the Trump FCC’s “restoring internet freedom” order went several steps beyond killing net neutrality.
The repeal dramatically curtailed the FCC’s authority over telecom monopolies, making it more difficult to police billing fraud. The repeal even attempted to ban states from protecting consumers, an effort later shot down by the courts, who noted the FCC couldn’t give up its consumer protection authority only to turn around and dictate state policy.
In response to federal apathy to its consumer protection responsibilities, numerous states like California, Maine, and Washington stepped in to pass their own state level protections, a major reason why ISP behavior wasn’t worse in the wake of the federal repeal.
When ISPs like Comcast and AT&T failed to derail California's proposed law using procedural gamesmanship, the Trump DOJ quickly stepped in to help, filing suit against California in 2018 for what it claimed at the time was an “extreme and illegal” effort to protect US consumers.
Last month, California Representative Anna Eshoo and twelve other lawmakers sent a letter to the Biden DOJ, asking it to reverse course and drop the lawsuit.
“In January, my California colleagues and I asked the DOJ to withdraw from the Trump Administration lawsuit against California'slaw,” Eshoo said on Twitter. “Today I'm glad to see the DOJ fulfilled that request and is standing by a free and open internet.”
Under the law, the party that controls the White House enjoys a 3-2 partisan majority at both the FCC and FTC. So while Rosenworcel is expected to fully restore net neutrality rules in time, that can’t happen until the Biden Administration selects—and Congress confirms—a third Democratic Commissioner.
Favicons are one of those things that basically every website uses but no one thinks about. When you’ve got 100 tabs open, the little icon at the start of every browser tab provides a logo for the window you’ve opened. Twitter uses the little blue bird, Gmail is a red mail icon, and Wikipedia is the bold W. It’s a convenient shorthand that lets us all navigate our impossible tab situation.
According to a researcher, though, these icons can also be a security vulnerability that could let websites track your movement and bypass VPNs, incognito browsing status, and other traditional methods of cloaking your movement online.
The tracking method is called a Supercookie, and it’s the work of German software designer Jonas Strehle.
“Supercookie uses favicons to assign a unique identifier to website visitors. Unlike traditional tracking methods, this ID can be stored almost persistently and cannot be easily cleared by the user,” Strehle said on his Github. “The tracking method works even in the browser's incognito mode and is not cleared by flushing the cache, closing the browser or restarting the system, using a VPN or installing AdBlockers.
Strehle’s Github explained that he became interested in the idea of using favicons to track users after reading a research paper on the topic from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“The complexity and feature-rich nature of modern browsers often lead to the deployment of seemingly innocuous functionality that can be readily abused by adversaries,” the paper explained. “In this paper we introduce a novel tracking mechanism that misuses a simple yet ubiquitous browser feature: favicons.”
To be clear, this is a proof-of-concept and not something that Strehle has found out in the wild. Strehle’s supercookie program (which uses a Cookie Monster favicon) is a proof of the concept described by the university researchers.
“The favicons must be made very easily accessible by the browser. Therefore, they are cached in a separate local database on the system, called the favicon cache (F-Cache),” Strehle’s site said.
The F-Cache entries include a wealth of data about where a user has been, all in service of delivering a quick little icon to your browsing window.
“When a user visits a website, the browser checks if a favicon is needed by looking up the source of the shortcut icon link reference of the requested webpage,” Strehle said. “The browser initially checks the local F-cache for an entry containing the URL of the active website. If a favicon entry exists, the icon will be loaded from the cache and then displayed. However, if there is no entry, for example because no favicon has ever been loaded under this particular domain, or the data in the cache is out of date, the browser makes a GET request to the server to load the site's favicon.”
This data allows a web server to figure out quite a bit about its visitor. “By combining the state of delivered and not delivered favicons for specific URL paths for a browser, a unique pattern (identification number) can be assigned to the client,” Strehle said. “When the website is reloaded, the web server can reconstruct the identification number with the network requests sent by the client for the missing favicons and thus identify the browser.”
Strehle has set up a website that demonstrates how easy it is to track a user online using a favicon. He said it’s for research purposes, has released his source code online, and detailed a lengthy explanation of how supercookies work on his website.
The scariest part of the favicon vulnerability is how easily it bypasses traditional methods people use to keep themselves private online. According to Strehle, the supercookie bypasses the “private” mode of Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox. Clearing your cache, surfing behind a VPN, or using an ad-blocker won’t stop a malicious favicon from tracking you.
The researchers at the University of Illinois came to similar conclusions. “We find that combining our favicon-based tracking technique with immutable browser-fingerprinting attributes that do not change over time allows a website to reconstruct a 32-bit tracking identifier in 2 seconds,” they said. “Due to the severity of our attack we propose changes to browsers’ favicon caching behavior that can prevent this form of tracking, and have disclosed our findings to browser vendors who are currently exploring appropriate mitigation strategies.”
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