Davemichels

Segment, the startup Twilio bought last fall for $3.2 billion, was just beginning to take off in 2015 when it ran into a scaling problem: It was growing so quickly, the tools it had built to process marketing data on its platform were starting to outgrow the original system design.

Inaction would cause the company to hit a technology wall, managers feared. Every early-stage startup craves growth and Segment was no exception, but it also needed to begin thinking about how to make its data platform more resilient or reach a point where it could no longer handle the data it was moving through the system. It was — in a real sense — an existential crisis for the young business.

Segment’s engineering team began thinking hard about what a more robust and scalable system would look like. As it turned out, their vision would evolve in a number of ways between the end of 2015 and today, and with each iteration, they would take a leap in terms of how efficiently they allocated resources and processed data moving through its systems.

The project that came out of their efforts was called Centrifuge, and its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost. This is the story of how that system came together.

Growing pains

The systemic issues became apparent the way they often do — when customers began complaining. When Tido Carriero, Segment’s chief product development officer, came on board at the end of 2015, he was charged with finding a solution. The issue involved the original system design, which like many early iterations from startups was designed to get the product to market with little thought given to future growth and the technical debt payment was coming due.

“We had [designed] our initial integrations architecture in a way that just wasn’t scalable in a number of different ways. We had been experiencing massive growth, and our CEO [Peter Reinhardt] came to me maybe three times within a month and reported various scaling challenges that either customers or partners of ours had alerted him to,” said Carriero.

The good news was that it was attracting customers and partners to the platform at a rapid clip, but it could all have come crashing down if the company didn’t improve the underlying system architecture to support the robust growth. As Carriero reports, that made it a stressful time, but having come from Dropbox, he was actually in a position to understand that it’s possible to completely rearchitect the business’s technology platform and live to tell about it.

“One of the things I learned from my past life [at Dropbox] is when you have a problem that’s just so core to your business, at a certain point you start to realize that you are the only company in the world kind of experiencing this problem at this kind of scale,” he said. For Dropbox that was related to storage, and for Segment it was processing large amounts of data concurrently.

In the build-versus-buy equation, Carriero knew that he had to build his way out of the problem. There was nothing out there that could solve Segment’s unique scaling issues. “Obviously that led us to believe that we really need to think about this a little bit differently, and that was when our Centrifuge V2 architecture was born,” he said.

Building the imperfect beast

The company began measuring system performance, at the time processing 8,442 events per second. When it began building V2 of its architecture, that number had grown to an average of 18,907 events per second.

• Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani left a rambling message for Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, in which he asked that Tuberville help slow down the joint session of Congress to accept Electoral College votes.
• Giuliani, unfortunately, dialed the wrong number, though, and the message was left with another senator who passed a recording of the voicemail to The Dispatch.
• In it, Giuliani admits that President Trump is trying to buy more time to convince legislators to "pull their vote" from the Electoral College acceptance.
• This is not the first time Giuliani has called the wrong number. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you were worried that Rudy Giuliani would leave all his butt dials, hair dye mishaps, and Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conferences in the past, rejoice. Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney, is still at it. 

His latest gaffe involved calling Sen. Tommy Tuberville, of Alabama, to strategize about successfully slowing down the Electoral College roll call currently happening at the Capitol. The only problem? Giuliani called the wrong guy.

Instead, he left the voicemail with another (unnamed) Senator, who then forwarded a recording of the call to The Dispatch.

The impressively bungled call is reminiscent of a Scooby-Doo villain revealing the details of his evil plan. In it, Giuliani outlines the GOP strategy to "slow down" the counting of electoral certification votes and appears to admit the Trump team has run out of legitimate challenges to Joe Biden's election win.

"The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow - ideally until the end of tomorrow," he said. "So if you could object to every state and, along with a congressman, get a hearing for every state, I know we would delay you a lot, but it would give us the opportunity to get the legislators who are very, very close to pulling their vote."

He then expressed frustration with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has in recent weeks splintered off from Trump's party line that the presidential election had been stolen from him. This claim has repeatedly been refuted and is based on conspiracy theories. 

"I know McConnell is doing everything he can to rush it, which is kind of a kick in the head because it's one thing to oppose us, it's another thing not to give us a fair opportunity to contest it," Giuliani said. 

Giuliani appeared at President Trump's White House rally on Wednesday, in which the president encouraged his supporters to walk down to the Capitol to protest.

The former New York City mayor appeared to be in lockstep with Trump, at one point suggesting the election be determined via "trial by combat."

Giuliani told the gathered crowd that slowing down the electoral vote count would allow for a more thorough look at "fraudulent" ballots and "crooked" machines, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter or electoral fraud.

"Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent and we're wrong, we will be made fools of," he said. "But if we're right, a lot of them will go to jail."

This is the second recording of a call that's made headlines for Trump and his allies this week. On Monday, The Washington Post released the audio and transcript of a call that President Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the president told Raffensperger he wanted him to find "11,780 votes" - one more than the number of votes Biden beat him by in the state. 

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Both Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have removed the one minute video uploaded by President Trump in the wake of a mob rioting throughout the Capitol building.

Facebook previously removed a post by Trump that spread coronavirus misinformation, but, in general, the company has sparingly taken action on his posts.

"This is an emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump's video. We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence," Guy Rosen, VP of Integrity at Facebook, said in a tweet.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A YouTube spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "We removed a video posted this afternoon to Donald Trump’s channel that violated our policies regarding content that alleges widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Election."

In the video, Trump repeated false claims that the election was stolen from him and his supporters. He told the rioters to "go home" and that they were "very special" while continuing to spread misinformation about the election, which he lost.

Initially, Twitter removed the ability to retweet or reply to Trump's video. Users could still quote the tweet and add their own comment, however.

"This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can't be replied to, Retweeted or liked due to a risk of violence," a disclaimer under Trump's tweet reads. (The claim of election fraud is not disputed; it is wrong).

Update: This piece has been updated to include a statement from YouTube and that Twitter has removed the video.

Facebook has taken its most significant action against Trump yet, two weeks before the end of his presidency.

Social media companies are grappling with the reactions to the insurrection that broke out on Wednesday at the US Capitol. Despite plenty of time and warning, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube still seemed to be scrambling in their response to President Trump’s calls for an uprising in the wake of his election loss. In the aftermath of the Capitol violence, Twitter and Facebook are now implementing some of the toughest measures yet to limit Trump’s reach.

Twitter took the unprecedented action of locking Trump’s account for 12 hours — a period that was set to begin after Trump went into his own account and took down the tweets that violate its policies — and said it would suspend his account if the president, who has nearly 90 million followers on the platform, violated its rules on civic integrity or violent threats again. Following Twitter’s decision, Facebook announced that it would also implement a temporary ban and prevent Trump’s page from posting on the platform for 24 hours.

On Thursday, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the violating tweets had been deleted from inside the president’s account, which could mean that Trump is on track to have his ability to tweet restored.

Just minutes later on Thursday, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be indefinitely suspending Trump’s ability to post on the platform. Zuckerberg said that Trump would be barred from posting on Facebook and Instagram for at least the next two weeks, the remainder of his presidency.

Facebook

“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”

The move marks the most significant action Facebook has ever taken against Trump. At the time of the update, a Twitter spokesperson could not comment on whether that platform still planned to restore Trump’s account.

Beyond that, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have also used the tools they’ve employed in the past to handle sensitive events more proactively: adding labels, taking down posts that violate their rules, and elevating content from authoritative sources. But with insurrection that happened at the Capitol, it seems that, in the final days of the Trump presidency, the platforms still aren’t effectively clamping down on his misinformation or his attacks on US democracy. Before Twitter and Facebook suspended Trump’s ability to post, many prominent figures in tech and politics called on the companies to suspend Trump’s social media accounts altogether because of his continued incitement of violence.

In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, Facebook condemned the protests at the Capitol and said that “incitement and calls for violence” are banned on the site. Notably, Facebook was criticized vociferously after the platform left up a post from Trump that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” amid the 2020 protests over the police killing of George Floyd.

Trump has an immense megaphone on Facebook, where he has more than 35 million followers. In the hours before the violence, one of the most-engaged posts on the platform, according to the Facebook-owned tool CrowdTangle, was one from Trump encouraging his supporters to come to Washington, DC, on Wednesday, stating that the city “is being inundated with people who don’t want to see an election stolen.” The post included a Facebook-supplied label directing people to a page about election integrity on the Bipartisan Policy Center website, which is similar to the labels that Facebook applied to several of Trump’s recent posts.

The election integrity label was also applied to a video uploaded to Trump’s Facebook page as the insurrection was still unfolding on Capitol Hill. In it, Trump urged calm, but he repeated his false claims of a stolen election. Facebook took the video down just a couple hours after it was uploaded, but not before it had been viewed more than 2.7 million times.

A Facebook spokesperson also told Recode that it took other actions to quell disruption, including limiting the circulation of content Facebook predicts could violate its community standards and blocking the hashtag #StormTheCapitol. The spokesperson added that the company is in contact with law enforcement.

After those enforcement decisions, Facebook changed course again and announced its temporary ban on posting to Trump’s page. “We’ve assessed two policy violations against President Trump’s Page which will result in a 24-hour feature block, meaning he will lose the ability to post on the platform during that time,” the company said in a statement posted to Twitter.

In a statement posted to its platform on Wednesday afternoon, Twitter said calls to violence are against its policies and that the company is reducing engagement on tweets that could increase the risk of violence. Twitter added that it is exploring other “enforcement actions” to respond to the ongoing events at the Capitol. Later on Wednesday afternoon, Twitter took the rare action of deleting two of Trump’s tweets, including one falsely claiming that the election was “viciously stripped away” from him and one encouraging the rioters.

“In regard to the ongoing situation in Washington, D.C., we are working proactively to protect the health of the public conversation occurring on the service and will take action on any content that violates the Twitter Rules,” a tweet from the Twitter Safety account stated. “Threats of and calls to violence are against the Twitter Rules, and we are enforcing our policies accordingly.”

Several recent tweets posted by President Donald Trump at one point carried labels, which varied in severity. One post, in which Trump disparaged Vice President Mike Pence — and continued to call the US presidential election fraudulent — had a Twitter label stating this “claim of election fraud is disputed.” Users could no longer like, retweet, or comment on the tweet, though it can be quote tweeted, which allows users to retweet if they add their own commentary.

While a quote tweet allows people to provide their thoughts on what a public figure says, many of the quote tweets of Trump’s posts echo the president or his talking points, or criticize Twitter.

Nevertheless, Twitter took down Trump’s tweet about Pence on Wednesday evening.

The video of Trump addressing rioters that Facebook removed was also posted to his Twitter account. On Wednesday evening, its engagement was restricted: users could not “Like,” comment, retweet, or quote tweet the post. Twitter deleted the post not long thereafter. Still, the video had already been viewed there nearly 13 million times.

YouTube also took down the video of Trump addressing rioters, as well as several other videos that either promoted violence or included people carrying firearms.

“Our teams are working to quickly remove livestreams and other content that violates our policies, including those against incitement to violence or regarding footage of graphic violence,” Farshad Shadloo, a spokesperson for YouTube, told Recode, adding that the company is also amplifying authoritative sources on its homepage, in search results, and in recommendation letters.

On Parler, a small and largely unmoderated social media platform with a heavily conservative user base, there is significant discussion of the situation at the Capitol. The platform did not respond to Recode’s request for comment before publication.

Calls for platforms to do more

So far, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have refrained from suspending Trump’s account or those of major groups that helped organize the protests, despite blocking his ability to post.

Many people — including prominent members of the tech and civil liberties communities — are criticizing these social media companies for not going further in limiting violent rhetoric.

Chris Sacca, an early Twitter investor, wrote that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have blood on their hands for allowing people to “incite violent treason” on their platforms, and called on the leaders and their employees to “shut it down.”

Stanford Internet Observatory director and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos called for Twitter and Facebook to cut off Trump’s account.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have long argued that they have a responsibility to defend open communication on their platforms, even when it can be politically contentious. And in the rare cases where these companies have taken more extreme measures — such as when Twitter blocked a New York Post article containing disputed claims about Hunter Biden or Facebook’s removal of a Trump post containing false claims about Covid-19 and children — those actions have been met with sharp criticism from conservative politicians and some free-speech advocates.

But Wednesday’s events represent a serious test of whether incremental restrictions like a warning label go far enough, particularly in the scenario of a sitting president using social media to encourage a violent assault on US democracy.

And somehow, despite the fact that social media companies have had years to prepare for this moment, and plenty of warnings that Wednesday in particular could be a violent one, they still appeared indecisive and unprepared to handle the situation.

Update, January 7, 11:07 am ET: This story was updated to note that Facebook has extended its ban on Trump’s accounts.

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Twitter is locking President Donald Trump’s account for 12 hours after removing three tweets that contained “repeated and severe violations” of its civic integrity policy. It says the account will be permanently suspended if violations continue, and it will not be unlocked unless Trump entirely deletes the three offending tweets. The decision comes after Trump tweeted a video that Twitter said posed a “risk of violence.”

“As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, DC, we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy,” the Twitter Safety account tweeted. “This means that the account of...

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Ten months after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, triggering a worldwide shift to a work-from-home model, employers across the globe are trying to plan when and how to safely bring employees back into physical office spaces. With employee anxiety, social distancing regulations, and technology investments to consider, reopening offices could prove to be even more complex than shutting them down.

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Dell is launching three new monitors next month, and all of them come with a dedicated Microsoft Teams button. Dell claims it has created the “world’s first video conferencing monitors certified for Microsoft Teams,” after Microsoft started certifying displays, webcams, and headsets last year. Three monitors will be available next month, all offering quick access to Microsoft Teams.

The button will let Microsoft Teams users quickly launch the app to make and receive video calls. Hands-free commands will also be supported through Cortana and the built-in microphone.

This is the first time we’ve seen a Microsoft Teams button on a monitor, but headset manufacturers...

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Near the end of last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis revealed a plan to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine statewide using partnerships between the state, the federal government, hospitals— and, apparently, Eventbrite.

Yes, a platform best known for selling and distributing concert, party, and meetup tickets is now being used to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to some of the most vulnerable people in society. It is not going particularly well. People who want to get a vaccine are sitting on Eventbrite’s pages waiting for vaccine slots to become available, refreshing the page, and trying to get a spot as though it were a Playstation 5 or a hot concert ticket.

Through Eventbrite, Florida’s state health department has partnered with health departments in the counties of Collier, Brevard, Manatee, Monroe, Volusia, Pasco, Sarasota, and Seminole to organize COVID-19 testing as well as priority vaccination of individuals 65 years or older. Healthcare providers such as Baycare, one of the largest healthcare systems in the state, have also used Eventbrite to organize vaccination programs and are now offering drive-thru programs in the state.

Take Brevard County, whose Department of Health set up its Eventbrite registration in late December after its phone line was quickly overwhelmed. All vaccine appointment slots were quickly filled up, leading the county to double its slots from 3 hours (8 to 11 AM) to 6 hours. The county also extended its appointment slots to January 29th, but to date all are spoken for. 

There are a few concerns with using this sort of method. One is whether households can actually access the internet and register for vaccination. According to U.S. census data, anywhere from 10-20 percent of households in these counties have no internet or broadband access—a significant amount of that falls on poor, Black, or brown households, all of which are already disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Similar to a concert ticket, people who can quickly navigate Eventbrite’s website before spots sell out are also in a better position to get the vaccine. While vaccination right now is limited to priority groups—specifically people 65 years old or above—the most vulnerable among them are also the least likely to be able to register through this method. 

Another concern involves the possibility of scalping, which has long been a problem for ticketed events but may not be properly addressed. There are currently Eventbrite “spinner” bots for sale on a popular ticket bot website, though there’s not any evidence at the moment that they are being used in Florida.

“Eventbrite is a pretty easy to bot site, there are public bots all over Github that are well maintained and Eventbrite themselves are aware that they are not well protected against bots (although they call these people auto-attendees),” a cybersecurity source who has tracked scalping bots told Motherboard. “In the case of the vaccine I can only see two ways of this going as well: vaccine spots being resold at markup, or vaccines being held in order to stop people from getting them as the covid vaccine is highly politicized.” Motherboard granted the source anonymity as they were not permitted by their employer to speak publicly on the issue.

Already, fake Eventbrite sites have popped up that have scammed seniors, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

To secure a vaccination, you'll need to bring your Eventbrite registration ticket, a valid form of identification, and a completed form from the Department of Health titled "COVID-19 Vaccine Screening and Consent Form." All of that seems insufficient to stop someone from reserving multiple slots for future appointments and ensuring those without internet access never get the chance (unless it’s being done on their behalf), or turning around and selling those slots. 

This would be a worst-case scenario, but it shows the obvious pitfalls of using such a platform for something so critical, especially when people are willing to go to great (and unethical) lengths to ensure their health in a pandemic. 

Florida's Department of Health and Eventbrite did not immediately respond to Motherboard's request for comment. When reached for comment, a spokesperson from Gov. DeSantis’ office directed Motherboard to their email but did not answer any questions about why Eventbrite was being used or whether steps were being taken to prevent scalping of appointment slots. 

"The Governor will be holding a press conference today at Orlando Health in Seminole County at 12:00PM," Press Secretary Cody McCloud told Motherboard in an email. "I highly recommend you tune in! It will be streamed on The Florida Channel website."

Vaccine rollout problems aren’t unique to Florida—the entire country has been doing a pretty poor job of getting shots into arms in a timely fashion. And Eventbrite obviously isn’t the only problem in Florida. There have also been reports of extremely long lines and insufficient supply. In Broward County, a bespoke digital vaccine slot distribution campaign website has been mobbed by users.

Joseph Cox contributed additional reporting.

By the end of 2021, Intelligent Assistants (IAs) of the automated variety will be everywhere. They will take the form of chatbots, voicebots, virtual assistants, conversational IVRs and personal virtual agents. They will be invoked over smartphones, smartspeakers, websites, voice consoles in cars and popular messaging platforms. They are finally emerging as “go-to” resources for frequently-invoked applications and services, often starting with a question to be answered and then progressing through search and, ultimately, successful resolution of an issues or completion of a purchase.

Triggered by the global pandemic, acceptance of Intelligent Assistants accelerated in mid-2020. It was a few short months in the making. Hundreds of millions of people were forced to “go digital” as they sought assistant from the banks, merchants, healthcare providers, airlines and government agencies that figured prominently in preparing for inevitable changes in plans. The leading firms employed “Conversational AI” to handle unprecedented volumes of calls or “chats”, each addressing novel, highly-personal issues. There was a spike of inbound voice communications because customers’ first instincts was to call a toll-free number to get real-time advice from a live agent.

The Moment of Truth

Entering 2020, only the largest companies were dabbling with proof-of-concept or pilot projects aimed at solving problems arising from incorporating “Conversational AI” into their customer care or employee productivity fabrics. Helpdesk here, FAQ there, everywhere a chatbot. When the rush of activity hit in mid-year, those businesses and government agencies moved many of these limited implementations to the critical path with customers and employees as a matter of expediency. That was the moment of truth.

Many brands and agencies were pleasantly surprised to find that higher levels of automation and “capture rates” coincided with increased customer satisfaction. That was a first! IAs provided an AI-infused conversational alternative to making multiple calls over a matter of days, only to be put on hold for hours at a time. Both contact center and digital service managers are adapting strategies that build on customer confidence in conversational IAs by training them to take on more tasks to benefit both customers and employees.

Made Possible through Commoditization of Cloud-based Resources

The new era is made possible by commoditization of core enabling technologies that include automated speech processing (ASP), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Collectively, they support such functions as intent recognition, translation and emotion detection. They live in the cloud and are accessed through application programming interfaces (APIs) from technology giants, especially Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft. But there are a growing list of others, and a slew of small, innovators that use commodities as raw material for solutions to known problems, including more accurate speech recognition/transcription, faster tagging of intents and greater security.

New capabilities are “exposed” and made available through APIs that are cleverly knit together by system integrators (SIs) or business process outsourcers (BPOs) that expect firms to spend tens of billions of dollars on what amounts to a “conversational layer” between customers, employees and IT resources. As a result, companies of all sizes are able to introduce new EIAs quickly and affordably.

Solutions For Non-Technical Developers

Departmental and non-technical executives are the subject matter experts (SMEs) responsible for bringing IAs to both customers and employees. Their efforts are bolstered by tools and platforms for IA creation, training, maintenance and measurement. All benefit from rapidly maturing technology from an expanded ecosystem of solution providers. Speech Processing, Natural Language Understanding, Machine Learning and even Cognition have become commodities accessed through APIs from Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, among others, according to “free-to-fee” formulae that make it easier to justify with reduction in operating expenses and potential increase in revenue.

“Low code/No Code” development platforms reside “in the cloud”, where they connect with desired resources based on drag-and-drop menus that create Visio-like conversation paths. Nuance Mix is an example, but Nuance is not alone. Inference, now owned by Five9, offers similar resources that also include a multiplicity of pre-trained agents to speed implementation in select verticals. IBM, with Watson Assistant, brings a 60-day promise. Verint has a “Blueprint” to move projects from ideation through implementation.

Fulfilling CSA’s Promise

The result of all these developments is the realization of Conversational Service Automation’s (CSA’s) manifest destiny. It will not be automation for automation’s sake. Instead, the specific objectives and benefits are:

• Callers define their preferred paths to task completion: It starts when an IVR offers new prompts or options. The option to arrange for a callback and hang-up “without losing your place in the queue” was just the beginning. Now companies offer a slew of “voice-to-digital” options that leverage investment in conversational AI across time and multiple channels.
• Companies support asynchronous conversations over any device: Smartphones will be the most common point of origination, but expect the use of branded wake-up words to initiate or revive ongoing conversations to embrace smartspeakers in homes and hotel rooms, intelligent infotainment systems in cars and kiosks in commercial shopping venues. Voice assistants will routinely shepherd customers to complete their selected tasks, fulfilling on the promise of asynchronous, optichannel conversations as the preferred engagement model.
• Consistently correct conversational answers, actions and recommendations at scale: We’re already observing accelerated acceptance of digital channels for healthcare, hospitality, banking and retail. Success will breed success and you can expect accelerated adoption in 2021.

In effect, the digital world will make its transition from “either/or” to “both/and”… or should we say “either/and”? Individuals take control of their commercial conversations routinely. They don’t have to choose a particular app or know precisely what they are asking for. As we review submissions for our “Decision Makers’ Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants”, perhaps the most impressive advancements have been in the area of dialog management. Several solutions recognize that customers may go “off-topic” or change intents in the course of a multi-turn conversation. It is no longer a parlor trick to be able to let a person say, “wait a minute. What about financing?” in the course of shopping for a new car.

The fact that such a query might cause a live agent to shut down one set of connections or forms to open a link to another system no longer baffles a finely tuned IA. It will be able to support multiple threads, turns and outcomes. In the process IAs transform us into better humans.

The post Welcome to 2021: The Year of Ubiquitous Intelligent Assistants appeared first on .

• Bitcoin set a new record Saturday when the price of the digital currency passed $30,000.
• The blockchain incumbent has been surging in recent weeks, passing the $20,000 price point a little over two weeks ago and edging toward $25,000 on Christmas day.
• Bitcoin has grown significantly over the last year as it's drawn in more interest from institutional and retail investors, some of whom view digital coins as a safe haven during the coronavirus pandemic. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The price of bitcoin crossed $30,000 for the first time on Saturday as the digital currency continued its rally into the new year. 

Bitcoin reached a high of $33,136.92, a spike of around 14% over the last 24 hours.

The cryptocurrency has been breaking record-after-record in recent days, passing the $20,000 price point a little over two weeks ago and edging toward $25,000 on Christmas day. Its current market cap is about $611 billion.

Bitcoin's value grew over 300% last year as more institutional investors decided to embrace digital currencies. Companies like PayPal added support for cryptocurrency transactions, and some retail investors turned to digital coins as a safe haven (like gold) during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Investors aren't sure yet whether bitcoin's recent rise will impact the price of gold going forward. 

JPMorgan strategists argued in December that the newcomer currency may eventually lower the value of gold because "adoption of bitcoin by institutional investors has only begun, while for gold its adoption by institutional investors is very advanced."

But a Goldman Sachs analyst later wrote that bitcoin was unlikely to negatively affect gold long-term. "We do not see evidence that bitcoin's rally is cannibalizing gold's bull market and believe the two can coexist," the analyst wrote in a note.

Bitcoin wasn't the only digital currency to rise Saturday. Smaller competitors like Ethereum, Litecoin, and Chainlink all saw price jumps during cryptocurrency trading while almost all other markets were closed.

Read more about bitcoin's recent rally: 

• Bitcoin surges to fresh record high and looks set to break the $25,000 level: 'Merry Bitmas'
• Bitcoin soars above $23,000 as mammoth 2020 rally drives record highs
• Bitcoin's intrinsic value will rise in the coming months while gold may struggle as institutional investors flock to crypto, JPMorgan says
• Bitcoin's surge poses no threat to gold's status as the currency of last resort, Goldman Sachs says

The Russia-linked SolarWinds hack which targeted US government agencies and private corporations may be even worse than officials first realized, with some 250 federal agencies and business now believed affected, the New York Times reported.

Microsoft has said the hackers compromised SolarWinds’ Orion monitoring and management software, allowing them to “impersonate any of the organization’s existing users and accounts, including highly privileged accounts.” The Times reports that Russia exploited layers of the supply chain to access the agencies’ systems.

The Times reports that early warning sensors that Cyber Command and the NSA placed inside foreign networks to detect potential attacks appear to have failed in this instance. In...

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As Microsoft continues to investigate the massive SolarWinds attack, the company says it has discovered that its systems were infiltrated “beyond just the presence of malicious SolarWinds code.” In an update from its Security Response Center, Microsoft says that hackers were able to “view source code in a number of source code repositories,” but that the hacked account granting such access didn’t have permission to modify any code or systems.

While Microsoft points to “a very sophisticated nation-state actor” as the culprit, the US government and cybersecurity officials have implicated Russia as the architects of the overall SolarWinds attack. The attack exposed an extensive list of sensitive organizations, and today’s disclosure from...

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Ticketmaster has agreed to pay $10 million for breaking into a competitors’ network. The company and its parent Live Nation admitted to hiring a former employee from rival ticket seller CrowdSurge, then using his knowledge — including old usernames and passwords — to learn CrowdSurge’s inner workings and “cut [the company] off at the knees.”

“Ticketmaster employees repeatedly — and illegally — accessed a competitor’s computers without authorization using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect business intelligence,” said acting US attorney Seth DuCharme. “Further, Ticketmaster’s employees brazenly held a division-wide ‘summit’ at which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company’s computers.”

The hacking allegations were r...

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A few weeks ago, Oracle announced that it was moving its headquarters out of Redwood Shores, in the middle of Silicon Valley, to Austin, Texas. The move is more symbolic than anything else. The company told employees they can continue working from wherever they want and founder Larry Ellison sent an email to all employees saying he'll be working from the island of Lanai, which he purchased a few years ago. But the symbolism of the move works in multiple ways. Despite being founded and headquartered in Silicon Valley for almost half a century, Oracle has long represented the anti-Silicon Valley approach to innovation.

Nearly a decade ago, cartoon artist Manu Cornet made this truly classic cartoon image of tech company org charts (which he thankfully put under a Creative Commons license):

I've heard people at all of those companies more or less confirm the accuracy of every one of those. The Oracle one is particularly on point:

For a while now, people in Silicon Valley have been well aware of Oracle's reputation as the anti-innovation behemoth, especially following its attack on APIs, interfaces, and how software is developed with the case against Google's reimplementation of the Java API. We're still waiting on how the Supreme Court rules on that one, to see whether or not Oracle has succeeded in undermining a key part of how software is developed -- including Oracle's own practices in reimplementing others' APIs.

Bloomberg now has a big report on how all of the recent antitrust cases against Google have Oracle's fingerprints all over them, and in the article, Oracle's top lobbyist gleefully takes credit for it.

What's less known is that Oracle Corp. spent years working behind the scenes to convince regulators and law enforcement agencies in Washington, more than 30 states, the European Union, Australia and at least three other countries to rein in Google's huge search-and-advertising business. Those efforts are paying off.

Officials in more than a dozen of the states that sued Google received what has been called Oracle’s “black box” presentation showing how Google tracks users’ personal information, said Ken Glueck, Oracle’s top Washington lobbyist and the architect of the company’s antitrust campaign against Google. Glueck outlined for Bloomberg the presentation, which often entails putting an Android phone inside a black briefcase to show how Google collects users’ location details — even when the phones aren’t in use — and confirmed the contours of the pressure campaign.

“I couldn’t be happier,” said Glueck about the barrage of lawsuits. “As far as I can tell, there are more states suing Google than there are states.”

The thing is, Oracle more or less admits that it's doing this purely out of spite and the fact that it has failed to innovate and keep up with more nimble and innovative competitors. Oracle and Larry Ellison made some big bets early on that flopped. And rather than correct course and innovate, it has focused on what we've referred to as political entrepreneurship: lobbying and using the powers of government to shut down competitors, rather than innovate.

As many of us suspected, but is now confirmed by the article, Oracle is also a key player in trying to dismantle Section 230:

Oracle was one of the first companies to push Congress to adopt an anti-sex-trafficking measure in Congress, not because it was critical to its business but because Oracle knew it could hurt Google, according to a person familiar with the matter. The legislation weakened legal liability protections for tech companies such as Google from lawsuits over user-generated content in sex-trafficking cases.

Again, as many of us long knew, but didn't have public confirmation of, Oracle plays dirty in trying to smear anyone defending the open internet:

It’s also a master at stealth lobbying tactics, such as digging up dirt on competitors, disseminating opposition research and supporting dark-money groups that publicize negative findings about rivals.

In the article, it also points out that Oracle hired a firm to pay cleaning staff at a research group that wrote reports Oracle didn't like to rifle through the organization's trash to dig up dirt.

The article also confirms our earlier reporting about how Oracle execs sucking up to Trump, and Oracle's ability to label other companies' execs as saying anti-Trump stuff, was the key to it landing the TikTok deal:

Oracle won some battles after fostering ties to President Donald Trump. Oracle Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz and Glueck were part of Trump’s transition team. Catz advised the president on trade policy and serves on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Those ties may have proven fruitful when Microsoft was in pole position to acquire the U.S. operations of TikTok, the popular video app that Trump ordered its Chinese owner to sell. When TikTok picked Oracle as its preferred partner, after a phone call with Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, the president backed Oracle’s last-minute bid for a minority stake in the app as part of a deal that’s pending approvals.

As the article highlights, Oracle's revenue has continued to remain steady while all the tech companies it attacks politically have continued to thrive. And the reason for that is that those companies have built better products, while Oracle... hasn't. Instead, it's taken the tried and trued losers' approach. If you can't innovate, litigate. Or, in this case, rig the political system for favors. It's shameful.

Of course, what the Bloomberg report mostly leaves out is how much of this actually harms innovation and competition in the long run. We've already pointed out just how insanely short-sighted Oracle's API copyright case is. If you want to actually undermine Google's market share, making sure that others can reimplement its APIs is key. And while Oracle's cloud business is way behind leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, one of these days, someone in Oracle's giant legal and lobbying team is going to wake up and remember that Section 230 protects its cloud business too.

But, of course, Oracle would rather set fire to the entire internet than realize it needs to innovate.

When we look back at 2020 in the business world, we’ll remember it as the year online shopping stopped being the future of retail and became the present.

On March 4, I commuted into Vox Media’s New York City headquarters for what would end up being the final time during the godforsaken year of 2020. On the way in, I made a pit stop for some coffee, spending $3.89 on a bottle of Chameleon Cold-Brew, but left without handing over a card or cash on the way out. That’s because I had made that final purchase at a cashierless convenience store owned by a certain e-commerce giant: Amazon. Nine months later, that last stop looks like an appropriate harbinger of the major changes that would sweep across a big part of American life this year: how and where we shop.

Over the next few weeks, my family, and millions of others in the US, began relying on Amazon and other shopping websites and apps in record numbers as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the US. Masks, toilet paper, soap, and hand sanitizer were in high demand. But so were groceries, restaurant meals, puzzles, printers, and even dumbbells.

At times, government-mandated store closures in some parts of the country meant that if you needed to purchase something deemed nonessential, the only places to get it were “essential” big-box stores — or online. As a result, Amazon and other retail giants like Target and Walmart reaped the rewards, while retail chains and small boutiques that sold apparel or other “nonessential” merchandise were forced to close their doors and turn customers away. Nearly 10,000 stores in the US have closed permanently this year alone.

When we look back at 2020 in the business world, we’ll remember it as the year online shopping stopped being the future of retail and catapulted firmly into the present. This was the year that local governments forced us to give up in-store shopping for weeks or months, and then when we had an opportunity to return when stores reopened, we mostly kept shopping online anyway.

There’s a reason people who previously shunned online shopping for stores are now sticking with it: It’s typically much more convenient than browsing through rows of aisles to track down what you need. But the acceleration in online shopping this year — which otherwise would have taken several years to happen — will have profound consequences on the way millions of Americans work; the way corporate power is concentrated; and the way local communities are reconstructed to account for the decline of retail store chains like department stores and the malls they’ve long anchored.

At the end of last year, only around 13 percent of retail purchases — excluding auto and gas sales — were made online, according to Mastercard. By the end of 2020, that figure stands at around 20 percent, or $1 out of every $5. During normal recent years, when e-commerce growth rates averaged between 12 percent and 16 percent, that kind of jump would have taken several years to happen. But US e-commerce sales will have grown more than 30 percent in 2020, and there’s no going back.

Amazon, unsurprisingly, has been a huge winner of this dramatic shift, growing its US retail business an estimated 39 percent this year and increasing its market share to 39 percent of all online retail in the US, according to eMarketer. The e-commerce giant has posted record sales and profits, even with early warehouse capacity issues and delivery delays, internal labor battles, and spending billions on Covid-19-related precautions.

And it showed off its unparalleled strengths right up until the end of the holiday season. While many other retailers stopped promising deliveries in time for Christmas a week or two in advance, Amazon was guaranteeing same-day and next-day delivery of some online orders made as late as December 23, thanks in part to its huge warehouse coverage across the US and the continued expansion of its own delivery network.

But Amazon isn’t alone. Walmart and Target have had huge years too, posting modest market share gains in online retail. Part of their success has come from selling groceries and other in-demand goods on the web during the early months of the pandemic, coupled with curbside and in-store pickup offerings that were already in existence for online orders.

Small businesses have also had to take their sales online. The scale of this shift is reflected in the success of tech platforms catering to small and mid-sized merchants that don’t want to rely on Amazon. Shopify, which sells e-commerce software tools to small and mid-sized merchants, has seen its revenue grow nearly 100 percent year over year in the first nine months of the year.

The Canada-based software giant has benefited from small brick-and-mortar merchants scrambling to set up online shops amid store closures and reduced foot traffic even when their doors are allowed to remain open during the pandemic. As a result, Shopify’s market cap has nearly tripled this year to around $140 billion as of December 28, or more than 50 percent more than that of Target, the 58-year-old discount retail chain.

Etsy, the online marketplace known for handmade goods sold by small merchants and artists, has also profited handsomely from the shift. Many online shoppers flocked to Etsy in the first half of the year to purchase masks that small merchants were producing at a rapid rate, but have since gone on to purchase other non-mask items too. By the third quarter of the year, mask sales accounted for 11 percent of Etsy’s gross sales, down from 14 percent in the spring quarter. In total, Etsy’s revenue increased more than 100 percent in the first nine months of 2020.

For individual small merchants themselves, however, success online isn’t close to a guarantee, as the recent rise of Shopify and Etsy might suggest. If you’re a small retailer and want to set up an online storefront with Shopify to avoid relying on Amazon or Walmart.com, you likely still need to buy ads from one of the other tech giants — namely, Google or Facebook — to attract customers to your digital door.

Shopify knows this, and has started to tiptoe its way toward creating its own online marketplace to help online shoppers discover Shopify merchants by transforming a package-tracking app it already owned, previously called Arrive, into an app with more of a shopping focus. It’s now called, naturally, Shop. As for Etsy, it is now home to more than 3.6 million merchants, meaning small sellers need to fight for sales, sometimes paying a hefty cut for advertisements in order to be discovered.

For many small brick-and-mortar retailers, the pandemic has vanquished the idea that ignoring e-commerce is a viable option. Sure, when the pandemic is finally “over,” some of the changes in our behavior — whether consumption-related or otherwise — will certainly revert to something like 2019. Popular restaurants and bars will once again attract crowds. Travel will rebound, as should live sporting events and concerts.

But many of the changes in how we buy things will stick. When it comes to the purchase of essential consumables — think toothpaste, soap, and toilet paper — there’s little to no advantage gained from buying those items in person versus online, unless you are saving considerable money by making bulk purchases at a warehouse club like Costco.

The main obstacle to purchasing some of these low-priced goods online is the order minimums some online retailers require to make it economically feasible for them to ship them out. But subscribing to shipping memberships like Amazon Prime or Walmart+ can eliminate shipping minimums, or you can do what my wife and I often do on Target.com and save items in our virtual shopping cart until we are in need of enough items to cross the threshold and place an order.

For people who tried out ordering groceries online for the first time during the pandemic, many will never return to consistent in-store grocery shopping or, at a minimum, will be more willing to place the occasional grocery order online. Case in point: For the first time, the giant grocery chain Kroger is expected to crack the top 10 list of largest online retailers in the US by the end of 2020, according to eMarketer estimates.

The retailer being replaced by Kroger in the top 10 is Macy’s, the one-time department store giant that was already floundering before this year’s global health crisis; the legacy retailer said in January that it was planning to close 125 of its 800-plus stores. The pandemic was the final nail in the coffin of several department store chains and made the uphill battle much steeper for ones like Macy’s that were not in dire straits but were already struggling. A long-deteriorating middle class, lack of merchandise differentiation, and indifferent customer service all played a role in ceding customer loyalty to discount chains as well as online retailers.

And things will get worse for the department store chain sector, which today employs more than a half-million Americans. More than half of all mall-based department stores are expected to close by the end of 2021, according to estimates by Green Street Advisors, a commercial property research firm. And with department stores accounting for one out of every three square feet in shopping malls, the mall industry is likely headed to a crisis too.

So where do we go from here? The shift in our shopping behavior that 2020 accelerated will certainly make our lives as consumers easier in many ways — and that counts for something. But we don’t exist solely as consumers, nor do our friends, family, and neighbors. We are members of communities that count on physical retailers as major employers, businesses that will be forced to reinvent themselves after surviving a pandemic and a recession. We, our friends, family members, and neighbors work retail jobs to make ends meet or maybe even as stable careers, a dwindling prospect in the industry. More and more of the hirings in retail are happening inside e-commerce warehouses, where the roles might pay better but where the work is often more grueling.

Despite the hope that Shopify’s success this year may bring to small and mid-sized merchants carving out independent e-commerce futures outside of Amazon’s walls, this truth about 2020 remains: Amazon, the retail wrecking ball, has gotten more powerful this year, not less. And as we push more of our purchases online, the tech giant’s power will only grow.

The first thing to do when you get a new phone is to log back into all your accounts — email, Facebook, Signal, and so on — to make sure you’re getting all the important notifications you need and messages from friends. But after that, you’ll want to install apps that replace the default tools (like the web browser or weather app) with something better, along with apps that’ll just make your day-to-day usage of the phone a lot more helpful.

Here are our suggestions for where to start when setting up an Android phone.

We’ve rounded up our favorite and most-used games, apps, and entertainment. Check out our app picks for iPhones, Android phones, Windows PCs, and M1-equipped Macs; our favorite mobile games from Apple Arcade and Google Play...

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• Adidas is developing a plant-based leather material that will be used to make shoes. 
• The material, which Adidas is working on with partners, will be made from mycelium, which is part of a fungus. 
• The new material is one of several sustainability initiatives Adidas has in the works. The company said it produced 15 million pairs of shoes in 2020 that were made from recycled plastic waste collected from beaches and coastal regions.
• Adidas will also use recycled polyester in 60% of its products starting in 2021 and has started developing a new recycled cotton material.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Adidas is going plant-based. 

The athletic-wear company announced on Monday that it's working on a new material, a plant-based leather that will be used to make shoes. The leather alternative is made from mycelium, which is part of a fungus. 

Adidas said it is working on the plant-based leather with partners, but did not announce when shoes made with the material would join its lineup.

The company began offering a vegan version of one of its most popular shoes, the Stan Smith, in 2020, and has committed to banning fur from its products.

The new material is one of several sustainability initiatives for Adidas, which has stated a goal to end plastic waste. Adidas revealed that in 2020, it produced 15 million pairs of shoes made from recycled plastic waste and said its goal is to produce 17 million pairs next year.

The plastic used in the shoes was collected from beaches and coastal regions, Adidas said. 

Read more: POWER LIST: Here are the 28 most outstanding people of color transforming the sneaker industry today, from designers to influencers

Adidas added sneakers made of recycled plastic to its lineup in 2017 when it unveiled "Parley" versions of its popular Ultraboost running shoes. The shoes contain thread made from ocean plastic waste, which is incorporated into the laces, heel webbing, heel lining, and sock liner covers.

Beyond upcycled plastic, Adidas has started developing a new recycled cotton material and is already using recycled polyester in its product lineup - the company announced Monday that more than 60% of its product range will contain the material beginning in 2021.

Sustainability has been an emerging trend in the footwear industry for several years, with Adidas and sneaker upstarts like Allbirds leading the charge (the two companies are even collaborating on a low-carbon-footprint shoe together). More recently, companies like Everlane and Nike have also begun manufacturing their own more sustainable footwear. 

The trend is driven by sneakers' popularity, particularly in the US, where they're often seen as a status symbol. As Business Insider's Dennis Green reported in 2019, greener footwear is likely to make a bigger impression with customers than other types of apparel. 

Plus, as Eric Liedtke, Adidas' executive board member and brand head, told Business Insider last year, making sneakers more sustainable is a logical place to start given the complex nature of the manufacturing process. 

"Footwear - it's the greatest challenge, if you will," Liedtke said. "You've got to take on the greatest challenge first and set the edge, or set the point on, bringing it to the rest of your product offering."

AT&T says its services have mostly recovered from a bombing that caused multi-state internet outages on Christmas. The explosion of an RV in Nashville injured three people and destroyed a section of the city’s downtown, including “significant damage” to a key AT&T transmission facility. This brought down wireless and wired networks across parts of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama — disrupting cell service, some 911 networks, and communications at the Nashville International Airport, which briefly grounded flights as a result.

The AT&T building, located blocks away from the company’s better-known office tower, provides a regional network connection point in addition to local service. The blast reportedly damaged the building’s structure...

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• In February 2020, Jeff Bezos bought the Warner estate in Beverly Hills for $165 million.
• The estate features a 13,600-square-foot mansion, two guesthouses, a pool, and a tennis court.
• Bezos also reportedly bought an adjacent house for $10 million last July.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Jeff Bezos appears to be compiling a massive Beverly Hills compound.

Back in February 2020, the Amazon CEO broke a California record with his purchase of the Warner estate, a piece of Hollywood history belonging to billionaire David Geffen. The $165 million sale was the most expensive home sale in state history.

Then, last July, Bezos appeared to make another purchase, this time right next door: a $10 million home that shares a hedge line with the Warner estate. According to property records viewed by both Variety and Daily Mail, Bezos became the new owner of the 1930s-era home on a side street in Beverly Hills' Benedict Canyon neighborhood.

A spokesperson for Amazon did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment on the sale.

While there are few photos of the estate and the adjacent home, Los Angeles County has plenty of aerial views of the property that give us our best look yet at the massive compound Bezos is amassing in the hills above LA.

The Warner estate was built by Jack Warner, the cofounder and onetime president of Warner Bros., in 1937. Warner began with three acres of what used to be farmland, and slowly but surely, added parcels of adjacent land. He also built out the grounds of the estate, adding a golf course and two ponds.

Source: Architectural Digest

Warner liked to throw extravagant parties that were attended by stars like Olivia de Havilland and Jimmy Stewart and moguls like Howard Hughes. An invitation to a party at the estate was apparently one of the most sought-after in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early '40s.

Source: Architectural Digest

Warner filled the estate with expensive art, including a portrait of his wife, Ann, painted by Salvador Dali.

Source: Architectural Digest

Warner died in 1978, and Ann Warner owned the house until she died in 1990. That year, the music and movie tycoon David Geffen bought the whole estate, including the art, for $47.5 million, according to Forbes. The sale set a record at the time.

Source: Forbes, The Wall Street Journal

Geffen, who is worth an estimated $9 billion, has a multimillion-dollar real-estate portfolio that includes homes in Malibu, California, and in New York's East Hampton, and Manhattan.

Source: Forbes, Forbes

Geffen is also the owner of a $590 million superyacht called the Rising Sun, where he frequently hosts fellow moguls and celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bradley Cooper, Barack and Michelle Obama - and Jeff Bezos.

Source: Business Insider

Bezos has vacationed aboard the yacht near the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. Last year, he was pictured on the deck of the yacht alongside former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, model Karlie Kloss, and investor Josh Kushner.

Having a great time in the Balearics

A post shared by David Geffen (@davidgeffen) on Aug 6, 2019 at 3:52am PDTAug 6, 2019 at 3:52am PDT

 

Source: Business Insider

In February 2020, Bezos became the new owner of the Warner estate, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported that Bezos purchased the property for $165 million, making it the most expensive home sale in California history. No brokers were involved in the sale, according to The Journal.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, had been house hunting in Los Angeles and touring mansions throughout the area in previous weeks, the New York Post reported.

Source: New York Post

The Warner estate spans eight acres and is situated in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Beverly Hills.

Source: Los Angeles County

The estate promises the utmost privacy. It's surrounded by tall hedges, blocked off by a large gate, and completely hidden from view from the street.

Source: Google Maps

The compound is home to multiple dwellings, including two guesthouses and a 13,600-square-foot mansion.

Source: Los Angeles County

The Georgian-style home has eight bedrooms and nine bathrooms. It includes a floor that was once owned by Napoleon, according to The Journal.

Source: Los Angeles County, Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal

Photos shot of the interior of the estate by Architectural Digest in the early '90s show a screening room, an expansive bar, and a dining room that could easily fit 14 guests.

Source: Architectural Digest

The grounds also include a tennis court and manicured gardens. Geffen spent $45 million renovating the property, including $20 million on landscaping alone, The Journal reported.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

There's a large pool and what appears to be an adjacent hot tub outside one of the large guesthouses.

Source: Los Angeles County

At one point, the property also included a nine-hole golf course and a "motor court" with a garage and gas pumps, according to Architectural Digest, though it's not clear if those amenities are still on the property.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest

Bezos reportedly bought an adjacent property in July for $10 million. That property is on Tropical Avenue, which is perpendicular to the Warner estate. It shares a hedge with the compound, though it is currently accessed from a different street.

Source: Variety

That adjacent property was built in 1930 and was last sold for $5.45 million, according to Variety. It features three bedrooms and five bathrooms, six fireplaces, a rear patio, and rose and vegetable gardens.

Source: Variety, Zillow

It's not clear what Bezos would want with an adjacent property, but he has a history of snapping up homes near his larger estates. In 2017, he bought the house next door to his previous Beverly Hills mansion for $12.9 million. His ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, was granted both homes in the couple's divorce.

Source: Business Insider, Variety

Creates more engaging meeting experience with emotion recognition, real-time closed captioning, and automatic speaker recognition

BELMONT, CA – December 21, 2020 – RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced that it has acquired DeepAffects, a leading conversational intelligence pioneer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze business conversations and extract meaningful insights. The acquisition is part of RingCentral’s rapid innovation to create smarter video meetings. DeepAffects brings powerful AI capabilities that will enable RingCentral to deliver enhanced pre-meeting, in-meeting and post-meeting experiences for customers.

“As businesses shift to a hybrid model with employees working both in-office and remotely, it has never been more important to equip them with tools and insights that make meetings more engaging and productive,” said Anand Eswaran, president and chief operating officer at RingCentral. “With DeepAffects, we will bring conversational speech analysis and emotional sentiment recognition to our platform to deliver a differentiated, best-in-class meetings experience for our customers. We’re thrilled to welcome the DeepAffects team to RingCentral!”

The DeepAffects platform includes some of the following key capabilities:

• Multi-modal emotion recognition: Recognizes core emotions and sentiments directly from voice. It categorizes the conversations on the emotion cues, such as intensity, pitch and more, to bring emotional awareness insights to participants.

• Multi-speaker recognition and voiceprints: Identifies an individual person based on the unique characteristics of their voice. It also identifies the speaker at precisely the time they spoke during the conversation.

• Speech recognition with accent detection:Converts audio to text by applying powerful neural network models. It recognizes multiple languages and variants to support a global user base with an accent-aware speech recognition that can transcribe a non-native English speaker’s audio with very high accuracy.

“With a rich set of AI models and high accuracy for diarization, emotion and speech recognition, DeepAffects is truly a market leader in providing conversational intelligence and analysis,” said Prashant Kukde, founder and CEO of DeepAffects. “We are excited to join forces with RingCentral and empower workforces globally with smarter video meetings.”

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition closed in Q4 2020 and is not estimated to have a material financial impact for the year ending December 31, 2020.

About RingCentral

RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of cloud Message Video Phone (MVP), customer engagement, and contact center solutions for businesses worldwide. 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’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.

The post RingCentral Acquires DeepAffects Conversational Intelligence Pioneer to Enable Smarter Video Meetings appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Samsung’s Galaxy Chromebook 2 seems like it will improve on the battery life and price of its predecessor, according to leaked Samsung slides (via 9to5Google). The previous Galaxy Chromebook was an attractively designed 2-in-1 that nonetheless faltered due to its battery life and high $999 price tag. If these slides are to be believed, then next year might hold some Chromebooks to be hopeful about.

The most important change is that battery life. The slides shared by leaker WalkingCat say Samsung is targeting 12-plus hours of battery life on this new model. That’s a lot more than the measly 4 hours and 20 minutes (and the 8 hours Samsung promised) we observed in our review of this year’s model.

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• President Donald Trump on Wednesday vetoed a $741 billion defense bill, setting up a showdown with Congress.
• The bill — the National Defense Authorization Act — passed with a veto-proof majority in both chambers. 
• Trump has taken issue with the bill because it does not address his assertion that social-media companies are biased against conservatives, which is unrelated to national defense.
• By vetoing the bill, Trump has pitted himself against top Republicans in the final days of his presidency. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday vetoed a $741 billion defense bill, setting up a fight with Congress that could lead to the first veto override of his presidency.

"My Administration recognizes the importance of the Act to our national security," Trump said in a statement on his veto. "Unfortunately, the Act fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military's history, and contradicts efforts by my Administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions. It is a 'gift' to China and Russia."

This was the ninth veto of Trump's tenure, and none of the prior eight vetoes were overridden by Congress. 

The National Defense Authorization Act has been passed in Congress and signed by presidents without much fanfare for six decades, but Trump has taken an unusual stance against the annual defense bill. The 2021 NDAA passed with a veto-proof majority in both chambers, enjoying overwhelming bipartisan support. The bill authorizes appropriations for the Defense Department and defense-related activities in other federal agencies.

The president has demanded the bill include language to repeal Section 230, an aspect of the Communications Decency Act that shields social-media companies from liability over content posted on their platforms. Trump's desire to see Section 230 repealed is linked to his assertion that social-media giants are biased against conservatives, but the issue is completely unrelated to national defense. 

Trump in his Wednesday statement said the bill failed to "make any meaningful changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act." The president, who has spent years brushing off Russian election interference and has recently downplayed Russia's suspected role in the SolarWinds hack, went on to say that Section 230 "facilitates the spread of foreign disinformation online, which is a serious threat to our national security and election integrity." 

The president also took issue with language in the bill permitting the renaming of military bases that commemorate Confederate leaders. 

"The Act includes language that would require the renaming of certain military installations. Over the course of United States history, these locations have taken on significance to the American story and those who have helped write it that far transcends their namesakes," Trump said. "My Administration respects the legacy of the millions of American servicemen and women who have served with honor at these military bases, and who, from these locations, have fought, bled, and died for their country."

Republicans have been pleading with Trump to not veto the NDAA

Top Republicans have urged Trump against vetoing the bill, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe.

Inhofe recently referred to the NDAA as "the most important bill" of 2020 and said Section 230 had "nothing to do with the military."

"You've got to have a defense-authorization bill. Our kids in the field demand it," Inhofe said.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has also touted the importance of the legislation. 

"This will unlock more than $740 billion for the training, tools, and cutting-edge equipment that our service members and civilian employees need to defend American lives and American interests," McConnell said during a Senate speech on December 10. "It will give our troops the 3% pay raise they deserve. It'll keep our forces ready to deter China and stand strong in the Indo-Pacific."

Despite strong GOP support for the legislation, Trump made good on his threat to veto it. As a result, Trump could face a significant embarrassment in Congress during the final days of his presidency, which he has largely been spent fighting a losing legal battle against the election results and baselessly claiming he lost because of mass voter fraud.

Both chambers have already set dates to hold a vote to return after Christmas and override Trump's veto of the NDAA. The House will vote on December 28, and the Senate the day after.

"My intention was and is to ensure the Senate continues fulfilling our obligation to the men and women of our armed forces. I hope the president will not veto this bill," McConnell said on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

Trump has united Republicans and Democrats against his veto

Republicans responded swiftly to Trump's veto on Wednesday. Inhofe essentially urged his colleagues to override Trump's veto.

"The NDAA has become law every year for 59 years straight because it's absolutely vital to our national security and our troops. This year must not be an exception. Our men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform shouldn't be denied what they need - ever," Inhofe said via Twitter.

"I hope all of my colleagues in Congress will join me in making sure our troops have the resources and equipment they need to defend this nation," Inhofe added.

Congressional Democrats were also critical of the move. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a statement on Wednesday decried Trump's veto as a "staggering recklessness that harms our troops, endangers our security and undermines the will of the bipartisan Congress."

"In a time when our country was just targeted with a massive cyberattack, it is particularly hard to understand the reasoning behind the President's irresponsibility," Pelosi added. "Disturbingly, Trump is using his final hours in office to sow chaos."

Pelosi said the House would "take up the veto override with bipartisan support" next week. 

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith in a statement said that by vetoing the 2021 NDAA, the president has made it clear he "does not care about the needs of our military personnel and their families."

Well, the government is closing out the year with quite a mess. As threatened, President Trump today vetoed the massive National Defense Authorization Act, living up to his promise to veto it if it didn't include the complete revocation of Section 230 of the Communications Act, which has nothing to do with funding our military. Trump, for no reason at all, says that repealing Section 230 is important for "national security", which makes no sense at all (nor does he provide any rationale for this statement). Senate Armed Service chair and Trump buddy Senator Jim Inhofe had already threatened to override the veto should Trump go this route -- and has (correctly!) said that 230 has nothing at all to do with the NDAA. Inhofe has already responded to Trump's veto by asking Congress to "join me in making sure our troops have the resources and equipment they need to defend this nation." In other words, he's asking Congress to override the veto.

As for 230, Inhofe (ridiculously) claims that he does support a repeal of the law, but it should be in a separate legislative vehicle, and not the NDAA:

Meanwhile, the other big bills -- the omnibus government funding bill and the COVID relief bill, which are now tied together at the hip -- have also somehow been dragged into the Section 230 mess. Pretty much everyone assumed that after Congress voted overwhelmingly for both bills on Monday (as stupid as they were), Trump would sign them. After all, the White House was a part of the negotiations with Congressional leadership to come to the "compromise" that made it through.

But, last night, Trump threw a wrench in the works by claiming he wouldn't sign either unless the amount going to qualified individuals was $2,000 rather than $600. This seriously messed with his Republican colleagues who had pushed repeatedly to keep that number as low as possible. But the Democrats rightly seized on Trump's demands for $2,000 to agree with him and say they'll offer a revised bill with that more generous number.

Somehow, Section 230 had remained outside of the discussion over the funding bill and the stimulus bill, but Senator (who else?) Lindsey Graham has brought the two together by saying that he'll support the $2,000 part of the stimulus bill... if it also revokes 230. He's been tweeting more and more about this all day, and is now claiming that a refusal to revoke Section 230 means that Congress "cares more about big tech than working Americans."

That is, of course, utterly ridiculous. Section 230 protects working Americans more than it protects "big tech." It protects us posting on social media. It protects us forwarding emails. It protects us when we retweet nonsense. It makes the open internet possible, and enables the next generation of competitors to "big tech" to exist. Lindsey Graham's weird grandstanding about this is nonsense. Taking away 230 wouldn't rein in big tech, it would lock in big tech. They have large legal teams and can handle the disruption. This is why Facebook already supports major 230 reform. Zuckerberg knows that it would harm upstart competitors way more than Facebook.

There can be legitimate debates about Section 230 and how the open internet should work. The fact that it's suddenly being held hostage as part of the negotiations on three massive -- and totally unrelated to the internet -- bills is simply a case study in how broken Congress is, and how cynical politicians like Lindsey Graham have become.

ISLANDIA, NY – Dec. 22, 2020 – Intrado Corporation (“Intrado” or the “Company”), a global leader in technology-enabled services, announced today that it has acquired Asparia, Inc., a leading provider of patient engagement solutions for health systems, hospitals, and medical practices.

Asparia offers an easy-to-implement platform for healthcare providers to deliver advanced patient engagement capabilities across the patient care journey, delivering clear value for healthcare providers while enhancing the experience for patients. It is natively integrated with Electronic Health Record (“EHR”) systems from most major vendors and it offers a true, bi-directional and interactive communications experience for the patient as well as embedded check-in and chatbot functionality. The experience is powered by data-driven, real-time intelligence that benefits both the provider and patient.

Asparia serves health and hospital systems, medical groups, and Federally Qualified Health Centers, and engages patients using SMS in over 100 languages as well as interactive voice calls in 20 languages. Its SaaS solution automates many patient communication workflows including providing actionable appointment reminders and enhancing preventative care by automatically identifying and reaching out to patients who need screenings, tests, vaccinations, or other follow-up for medical needs.

“Asparia’s innovative, state-of-the-art, highly scalable, cloud-native solution seamlessly connects healthcare organizations and their EHR systems to patients in real-time,” said Jeff Robertson, President of Intrado Life & Safety. “Our 17,000+ healthcare clients will benefit from the easy-to-deploy platform and increased efficiency Asparia provides. We are thrilled to welcome Asparia employees, customers, and partners to Intrado.”

About Intrado Corporation

Intrado Corporation is an innovative, cloud-based, global technology partner to clients around the world. Our solutions connect people and organizations at the right time and in the right ways, making those mission-critical connections more relevant, engaging, and actionable – turning Information to Insight.

Intrado has sales and/or operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and South America. Intrado is controlled by affiliates of certain funds managed by Apollo Global Management, Inc. (NYSE: APO). For more information, please call 1-800-841-9000 or visit www.intrado.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can be generally identified by the use of words such as “may,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “intends,” “continue” or similar terminology. These statements reflect only Intrado’s current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance or results. These statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks associated with the Covid-19 pandemic; competition in Intrado’s highly competitive markets; increases in the cost of voice and data services or significant interruptions in these services; Intrado’s ability to keep pace with its clients’ needs for rapid technological change and systems availability; the continued deployment and adoption of emerging technologies; the loss, financial difficulties or bankruptcy of any key clients; security and privacy breaches of the systems Intrado uses to protect personal data; the effects of global economic and health trends on our business, including as a result of disruption of the business of Intrado’s clients; the non-exclusive nature of Intrado’s client contracts and the absence of revenue commitments; the cost of pending and future litigation; the cost of defending against intellectual property infringement claims; the effects of extensive regulation affecting many of Intrado’s businesses; Intrado’s ability to protect its proprietary information or technology; service interruptions to Intrado’s data and operation centers; Intrado’s ability to retain key personnel and attract a sufficient number of qualified employees; increases in labor costs and turnover rates; the political, economic and other conditions in the countries where Intrado operates; changes in foreign exchange rates; Intrado’s ability to complete future acquisitions, integrate or achieve the objectives of its recent and future acquisitions; and future impairments of our substantial goodwill, intangible assets, or other long-lived assets. In addition, Intrado is subject to risks related to its level of indebtedness. Such risks include Intrado’s ability to generate sufficient cash to service its indebtedness and fund its other liquidity needs; Intrado’s ability to comply with covenants contained in its debt instruments; Intrado’s ability to obtain additional financing; the incurrence of significant additional indebtedness by Intrado and its subsidiaries; and the ability of Intrado’s lenders to fulfill their lending commitments. Intrado is also subject to other risk factors described in its annual report for the year ended December 31, 2019.

These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which the statements were made. Intrado undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law.

The post Intrado Acquires Asparia appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

• Tennessee recorded more new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents than any other US state in the week to November 23, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows.
• Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday urged people to wear masks and stay home for the holidays, saying that the state is in its "darkest part" of the pandemic.
• Tennessee was "ground zero for a surge in COVID-19," he said.
• Tennessee has recorded more than half a million cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, around 3% of all infections. Its population makes up around 2% of the US.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Tennessee has recorded the highest rate of new coronavirus infections of any US state over the past week, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data - prompting the state's governor to declare it "ground zero" for the nation's COVID-19 surge.

On average, 127.9 new cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 Tennessee residents were confirmed each day in the week to November 23. This put it above California, the second-highest state, with a 111.2 daily infections per 100,000 people.

Gov. Bill Lee issued an executive order Monday, urging residents to work from home whenever possible and to limit social gatherings.

"We are in the darkest part of this pandemic in Tennessee. Our cases are surging, it's a very serious situation," Lee said in a video Tuesday.

He urged residents to wear face masks and only spend the holidays with people from their own household, adding that the state is "ground zero for a surge in COVID-19."

In a previous tweet, he noted that holiday gatherings and extended time indoors "have been the principal driver in spreading COVID-19 like wildfire."

As of December 22, Tennessee has recorded more than half a million cases of COVID-19, around 3% of all infections in the US, including 6,269 fatalities, according to the Tennessee State Government. Its population makes up around 2% of the US.

The state began vaccinating frontline healthcare workers on December 17, six days after the US Food and Drugs Administration approved Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine.

In the first round of vaccine distribution, Tennessee is getting 56,000 doses.

Read more: Employers are frantically calling labor lawyers to ask whether they can make a coronavirus vaccine mandatory in the workplace. Here's the advice 6 lawyers are giving clients.

On Sunday, Lee's wife Maria tested positive for COVID-19. Lee himself is isolating but has no symptoms.

Early in the pandemic, Tennessee became one of the first states to reopen after a month-long shelter-in-place executive order.

In late April, the state allowed the return of indoor dining and non-essential retail.

Americans are struggling to pay for internet during the pandemic. The stimulus bill delivers much-needed help.

Tucked inside the $900 billion Covid-19 stimulus bill are some pretty big broadband provisions aimed at getting more Americans the internet, at a time when connection is so pivotal in so many parts of everyday life.

The pandemic relief bill, passed by both houses of Congress at the start of the week, sets aside $7 billion in funding for broadband connectivity and infrastructure. That amount includes $3.2 billion for a $50-a-month emergency broadband benefit for low-income households and those that have suffered a significant loss of income in 2020, and a $75-a-month rebate for those living on tribal lands. It also includes $1 billion in grants for tribal broadband programs, $300 million for rural broadband grants, and funds toward telehealth, broadband mapping, and broadband in communities surrounding historically Black colleges and universities.

Broadband connectivity — or, rather, the lack thereof — has long been a problem in the United States. The pandemic has demonstrated how essential a lifeline the internet is, and how costly it can be for those who don’t have it. Work, education, social services, and myriad other activities are increasingly taking place online.

While the focus of lawmakers and regulators is often on rural broadband, getting good internet to more people is really a two-pronged problem of both access and affordability. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimates that 21 million Americans don’t have access to quality broadband internet, though some estimates suggest the actual number is much higher.

Even so, just because a wire runs by your house doesn’t mean you can afford it. A $60-a-month internet option — about the national average — is only available if you have that $60. In 2019, Pew Research found that half of non-broadband users still say they don’t subscribe to the service because it’s too expensive, and nearly one in five households earning $30,000 or less aren’t online.

The stimulus bill takes a crack at both issues, by putting funding toward expanding broadband infrastructure and toward helping people pay for a connection. The former often gets a lot more airtime than the latter.

“Broadband connections are essential for Americans seeking to get new jobs, and to access school, health care and other government services,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in a statement on Sunday. “Ensuring working families can stay online will pay massive dividends for kids’ education, helping people find jobs and jump starting the economic recovery next year.”

Wyden’s Emergency Broadband Connections Act was the $3.2 billion included in the stimulus bill. His office worked with Reps. Marc Veasey (D-TX) and Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who introduced provisions in the House, on the matter.

“With an increased number of families and businesses working from home throughout this pandemic, we recognized how important it was for Congress to prioritize greater broadband access, resiliency, and adoption in this omnibus, and we are pleased to have achieved exactly that,” Pallone, chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) chair of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee, said in a statement. “We must continue to ensure our communication networks are within reach for all Americans, especially for public safety entities, regardless of their location.”

Matt Wood, the vice president for policy at the media reform advocacy group Free Press, told Tony Romm of the Washington Post that at least 33 million households will be eligible for the affordability benefit, which the FCC will be charged with standing up and managing.

Ars Tecnica has a complete explanation on how people can try to access the benefits.

Not everything on the broadband wishlist made it into the deal, though. The FCC has a program called E-Rate that provides funding for internet in schools and libraries. That internet is typically limited to the physical buildings — which isn’t super helpful during a pandemic, when people are teaching and learning from home. Romm points out that there was a proposal in the Senate to put $3 billion toward E-Rate to help schools and libraries with more internet hot spots and laptops, but it didn’t make it into the final bill.

The fate of the stimulus bill is also unclear — on Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump released a video criticizing the stimulus package. He said he wants the stimulus checks in it, currently set at $600, to be for $2,000. He could refuse to sign the bill.

Having the internet is super important during the pandemic. It will be after, too.

While the Covid-19 outbreak has highlighted the cost of not having access to decent internet in the US, it’s not like this is a new problem, nor will it go away once the pandemic ends.

In an email to Vox, Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology and Law Policy, said that the emergency broadband benefit is “historic” and represents a “bipartisan recognition that broadband is essential to full participation in society.” She also called the $1 billion for tribal deployment a “great step in the right direction.”

But she warned that efforts shouldn’t stop here. “The digital divide won’t go away when the pandemic does, so much more needs to be done,” she said.

She pointed to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s (D-CA) $100 billion Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act as a repository of “many of the best ideas” for going forward. It includes putting $80 billion toward deploying high-speed broadband infrastructure across the country and providing a $50 monthly internet subsidy for low-income households, among other measures, in an attempt to address both accessibility and affordability. Earlier this year, Sohn described the bill, which passed the House but has gone nowhere in the Senate, as the “candy store” of ideas for digital inclusion in an interview with Recode.

Getting everyone in America in the internet is an ambitious goal — Recode recently laid out what it would really take to do it. The stimulus bill makes some important strides in addressing the often-ignored affordability issue. But real progress is going to take a lot of work for a long time.

Nothing about the beloved Christmas rom-com comes off as romantic — at least, not in a way that doesn’t feel cheap. 

I will not stay silent on this, my hottest take, any longer: Love Actually, the “classic” holiday rom-com that is very dear to at least one person in your life, is actually a very bad movie.

Now, I know a lot of you are likely clutching your pearls in disbelief. Maybe you yourself have been fond of this film since its November 2003 release, more than 17 years ago. Even after all these years, Love Actually still prevails for some as the quintessential Christmas film. It has been lauded for its heartwarming clichés and general cutesy-ness, neatly wrapped up in a rom-com package.

Here’s the gist: The movie introduces us to several different couples, living out their ideas of “love” a few weeks before Christmas. They take big chances in the name of love, suffer heartbreaks, isolate themselves, surround themselves with friends and family, and pursue love, all in the name of the holidays. Each relationship is angled as a way to make a statement about the nature of love. The characters are imperfect, and maybe that’s what the movie attempts to say about love, but it also fails to articulate this clearly. Some of the relationships feel flimsy; others are so underdeveloped that they don’t give me a chance to feel anything at all. Nothing about the movie comes off as romantic at all — at least, not in a way that doesn’t feel cheap.

I know this is the kind of opinion that makes people salivate at the opportunity to send hate mail. But in the spirit of Christmastime, I ask that you be kind and allow me to make my case that Love Actually is bad actually.

This is where the scene is set: Christmastime, in England, with a star-studded cast that does very little to impress. There are nine — nine! — main storylines, and each one attempts to depict a tale of love. But English accents, the holiday season, and celebrities barely masquerading as normal people feel like a failed insurance policy of a movie. The combination of all these pieces is an insult to the viewer’s imagination. Surely, writer-director Richard Curtis seems to be thinking as the movie drags itself deeper and deeper into a tedious hole, this will be a success. I’ve slapped all of British Hollywood into a supposed “rom-com” that grasps for straws when it comes to romance and comedy, but hey, they’ll love it — it is Christmastime, after all.

Love Actually’s obsession with Christmas is one of its main problems. It has nothing to do with Christmas, beyond its backdrop, yet it also attempts to promote the juvenile-but-lasting idea that Christmas is inherently romantic. I don’t know why this sentiment is so popular. Does a budding relationship need snowy scenery, gingerbread cookies, and lurking relatives to spark intimacy? Do couples automatically yearn for each other just because Santa is on the way? In a movie where the characters and their relationships are so flimsy, perhaps the forthcoming of Kris Kringle is a potent-enough aphrodisiac on its own.

The celebrity cast only emphasizes the two-dimensionality of these characters. Liam Neeson plays a grieving father overinvested in his son’s love life. Cute, I guess, but Neeson’s character spends the film acting like his son’s crush is a life or death situation. (The Taken franchise, although clearly inspired by Neeson’s overprotective father role here, doesn’t kick off for five more years.) Keira Knightley stars as a newlywed who serves the plot only as a cardboard character for Andrew Lincoln’s character to project a creepy crush onto. A last-minute Denise Richards cameo? Sure, why not! Rowan Atkinson as an enthusiastic jewelry counter employee isn’t enjoyable, it’s disconcerting — what on earth is Mr. Bean doing here?

The endless onslaught of instantly recognizable actors is as head-spinning as the plot points, which wind and weave together without an ounce of dexterity. The moment a particular plot seems all but forgotten, the film yanks us back to it, and the viewer has to fight to recall the context. I confused characters constantly, too — there are just so many boring white people, all tangled up in each other’s lives, sometimes even without knowing. This could be cute and fun if it had managed to be coherent. Watching Love Actually is like running a marathon, and it’s impossible to keep up without proper training, which is why I assume the stans can recite its intricacies so easily. For the rest of us, the mental gymnastics leave us winded.

Messy plots, messier characters

Love Actually fails to make viewers have a personal stake in the success of any of its overwrought romantic pairings, of which there are almost too many to count. The movie is far more concerned with shoving as many stories together as possible instead of developing people or their plot lines.

Let’s briefly run through the major characters, for those who have not seen the film. Spoiler: Almost all of them are terrible.

There’s Daniel (Liam Neeson) and his son Sam (Thomas Sangster), who is “in love” with a classmate, and that’s why he’s been moping around. This is totally unrelated to his mother’s recent death, although somehow, the girl of his dreams shares his mother’s first name, Joanna. Uh, weird, but okay! Daniel helps his son go so far as to stalk his classmate to the airport and tells the attendant that the child needs to enter without a boarding pass to “say goodbye to the love of his life.” We’re just going to pretend that’s normal or healthy, even for the realm of make-believe that is romantic movies? And yet, Love Actually wants us to root for father and son, to embrace and encourage this nearly criminal behavior, regardless of how poor Joanna might feel about it.

Juliet (Keira Knightley) is at the center of a love triangle between herself, her husband Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his best man, Mark (Andrew Lincoln). That is, if you can even call it a love triangle because Peter is completely unaware that his best friend is “in love” with his new bride, despite him never saying more than a few words to her in his life. A proper love triangle usually involves some form of awareness from all parties involved, but oh well! In what is arguably the movie’s most iconic scene, Mark shows up at Juliet’s house out of the blue to hold up some weird signs that proclaim his love. Though he waits until after Juliet and Peter’s wedding to make his feelings known, we viewers are supposed to find the confession, and subsequent kiss, worthy of our adoration.

Let me remind you that this is Mark’s best friend’s wife that he’s trying to get with, a woman he knows nothing about. There is no build-up — we are just meant to agree that, yes, Mark has a very normal obsession with Juliet, and that obsession is a remarkable “love.” Peter never finds out about the beginnings of this emotional affair, leaving the future of his marriage in doubt.

The other couples vary in how loathsome they are. The good: Jamie (Colin Firth) and Aurélia (Lúcia Moniz) fall for each other in the typical-but-believable way of romantic comedies. Neither of them speaks the other’s language, yet the attraction is there, born from the intangibles of love. The same goes for the pair of pornographic stunt doubles, John and Judy, played by Martin Freeman and Joanna Page, respectively. But those couples deserve large storylines, real arcs that can’t be found within the confines of this film.

Then, the bad: coworkers Karl and Sarah (Rodrigo Santoro and Laura Linney), who basically just hook up and nothing more. Nothing comes of it due to Sarah’s responsibilities with her mentally ill brother, but this is a ridiculously surface-level plot that just leaves us with more questions, so much so that the couple may as well have been edited out of the movie. Maybe the budding romance between the prime minister, charmingly played by Hugh Grant, and his staffer, Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), could function better elsewhere, too, but it certainly doesn’t work here. What gives the prime minister the eventual courage to pursue Natalie is watching her be sexually harassed by the president of the United States, played by Billy Bob Thornton. For some reason, the occurrence provokes a strange jealousy in the prime minister, but the film angles this as heartbreak. Natalie and the prime minister are clearly attracted to each other, but it goes no further until the end of their arc, motivated by a desire to stick it to the POTUS and, of course, by the spirit of Christmas.

Their romance is also wildly inappropriate, as is the relationship between Harry (Alan Rickman) and Mia (Heike Makatsch), a boss and his assistant. To make matters worse, Harry is married. He and Mia make eyes at each other from the start of their interactions, but the movie never actually makes it clear if they’re sleeping together or not. Inexplicably, Mia wears bedazzled devil ears to the holiday party. We get it, Love Actually: She’s a temptress, and he’s an idiot who wants to “dance with the devil” in front of his wife at a work function. His wife Karen (Emma Thompson) discovers the emotional infidelity and breaks down in private but returns stoically to her family, one of the film’s only legitimately moving scenes. But the fate of their broken marriage is never really resolved. The movie is full of dangling storylines like this; instead of following through on the plot, Love Actually lives and dies by its characters, and hangs viewers out to dry.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter why these characters fall for each other — love is blind, random, whatever, yes, I wholeheartedly agree — but that sentiment alone doesn’t give a movie of this nature lasting allure. The chemistry between the two stunt doubles, for example, has palpable reasoning. These people see each other naked at work every day, where they imitate sex acts! They are both shy people, sharing an intimate part of themselves with each other. They spend real time together — something that can’t be said for many of the pairings in the film.

Familiarity makes a fool of us

I am not trying to suggest in that snide, media-academic way that “We need to talk about Love Actually” or that the film’s central problem is that it is problematic. Its central problem is that it is not good. The film is a structural mess, at turns cringe-y and painful, and it lacks adequate closure or any meaningful lessons or clues about its characters. Is the prime minister not fearful of the optics of dating a staffer? Do Harry and his wife have past issues that led to the cheating? We’ll never know, even though Love Actually is about the length of a Lord of the Rings film. I guess there, somehow, just wasn’t enough time.

I am not the first to condemn Love Actually. People have been pointing out its flaws for years. Love Actually received overall mixed reviews from critics upon its release. There’s one review of Love Actually in the Atlantic from 10 years after the movie’s release, in 2013, which absolutely drags the film with the fury it deserves. “Love Actually is a considerable outlier among romantic comedies in its rigorous conviction not only that people fall in love without really knowing one another,” writes Christopher Orr, “but that they don’t even need to learn anything about each other to confirm their initial attraction.”

But I’m not the type to get stuffy about critical reception, and I believe that some critics do like sitting on high horses to turn up their noses at things that people generally like. But when it comes to Love Actually, I am sorry to say that many of us have been duped.

Andrew Selepak, a media professor at the University of Florida, told Vox that the film might not resonate with some people because of how poorly its characters act. The male cast is mostly deplorable; they don’t need to have redeemable qualities for the film to be enjoyable, but it’s hard to even want them to succeed when they’re so annoying. “The love of [Liam Neeson’s] life has died, and pretty quickly he’s looking into dating other women, and does date a woman simply because she looks like a supermodel that he’s infatuated with,” said Selepak. “Alan Rickman buys a more expensive gift for his secretary because she’s young and attractive, and only gets his wife a CD.” And these are hardly the worst of the many terrible things the men of Love Actually do.

Selepak says that the film’s age also might be a reason for the disconnect I’m experiencing now, many years after the fact. “Because it’s 17 years old, and there’s a lot of aspects to the movie that seem a bit dated at this point, particularly after things like the Me Too movement, where you have the prime minister of England who essentially starts a romantic relationship with his employee. It’s obviously a huge problem with the power difference,” he said.

Yet Love Actually continues to have a strong fanbase. It’s the Christmas theme and the familiarity of those actors that help the film go down easy for its many advocates, suggests Selepak. “With Christmas movies, we don’t want the unexpected. Having actors in there that we know and we love makes the movie a little bit easier to connect with,” Selepak said. Hallmark, for example, does the same thing in their holiday movies. They often use the same actors and actresses, which creates a kind of intimacy between fans and the Hallmark movie catalog.

While the movie is highly unrealistic, some parts of it also provide escapism for the dreamiest of viewers. “Most of us would never take that kind of leap in terms of taking these actions,” said Selepak. “Whereas we could look at [Love Actually] now and see Andrew Lincoln going to his best friend’s apartment and professing his love. That’s kind of like John Cusack standing outside of a girl’s house holding up a boombox [in Say Anything],” Selepak said. “It’s just not the type of thing that we would do in real life, as much as we may want to.”

When it comes down to it, though, this film exploits the commercialized romance of the holidays to tell us we must support these haphazard romances. Because the central characters are lonely during Christmastime, fate has intervened to make sure they never have to spend another holiday alone or overwhelmingly horny. This is a clear implausibility, and the film will never win me onto its side — and I am not some bitter, soulless woman; I am simply a person who hates to see the world fooled.

I think of the film this way, in terms of its longest-lasting legacy: Love Actually begat the quick and dirty catalog of holiday rom-coms that roll their way onto streaming platforms every year. If Love Actually were released today, it would probably go straight to Netflix. It would be something we would collectively watch and publicly disdain, all of us in on the same joke. At best, we’d profess a fondness for it in spite of our better judgment, not out of sincere affection.

I’m telling you all this for your own benefit, reader. Ask yourself: If this movie took place in the middle of summer, would it be that romantic? Or would the heat expose the sweaty, hurried flaws in this film? Does it only draw us in because of its cozy winter siren call?

I vote yes: Love Actually is smoke and mirrors and snow, nothing more.

• KFC announced Tuesday the creation of a new gaming console, KFConsole, which has a built-in "chicken chamber" to keep food warm in while users play.
• The bucket-like console has a cooling system which transfers the heat from the components to the chicken chamber, keeping the hardware cool and the chicken warm.
• The chicken chain has partnered with Cooler Master, Intel, Asus, and Seagate to create the KFConsole.
• "If Sony or Microsoft want any tips on how to engineer a chicken chamber for their efforts next time, they'd be welcome to get in touch," said Mark Cheevers, PR & social media lead at KFC UK & Ireland.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Fast-food chain KFC has created a new high-end gaming console that comes with a built-in "chicken chamber" to keep your chicken warm while you play.

KFC has teamed up with CoolerMaster to create the "KFConsole," the chicken chain said in a statement on Tuesday. It is essentially a high-end gaming PC with components made by Intel, Asus, and Seagate.

It's a powerful machine: KFC claims it can run games at 4K resolution at 240 frames per second - more than  the PlayStation 5 or Xbox One can manage. It can also run virtual reality games, KFC said.

The bucket-like console has a cooling system that transfers the heat produced by the components to the chicken chamber, helping to keep the hardware cool and the finger lickin' chicken warm.

"The Bargain Bucket-shaped machine features the world's first built in chicken chamber, which is kitted out to keep its contents hot, ready for consumption during intense gaming sessions," KFC said.

Cooler Master didn't immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. An Intel spokesperson said they don't have anything additional to share at this stage beyond the details on the Cooler Master website.

The cost and release date of the KFConsole haven't yet been announced.

The console has smooth gameplay with 240 frames per second frame rate, 4K display compatibility, and can run virtual reality games, according to Cooler Master's website.

It also includes an Intel Nuc 9 Extreme Compute Element and two Seagate BarraCuda 1TB SSD drives for storage, Cooler Master said.

—KFC Gaming (@kfcgaming) December 22, 2020

"This machine is capable of running games at top-level specs, all on top of keeping your meal warm for you to enjoy during your gaming experience... what's not to like?" said Mark Cheevers, PR & social media lead at KFC UK & Ireland, in the statement.

"If Sony or Microsoft want any tips on how to engineer a chicken chamber for their efforts next time, they'd be welcome to get in touch," he said.

Stephen James, global PR & influencer manager at Cooler Master, said in the press release: "When we were approached by KFC Gaming to make the KFConsole, we jumped at the chance to get involved and enter the console war."

"The KFConsole has been custom built with the gamer at the front of mind. The last thing we want is anyone to go hungry while playing!" he added.

Read more: McDonald's president pledges to do a 'better job' on transparency with franchisees after operators take a stand against shifting costs

One Twitter used responded to KFC's tweet asking how Cyberpunk, which has now sold more than 13 million copies, will run on the console. KFC replied: "It runs better than any console."

This isn't the only mind-boggling invention KFC has come up with in recent years.

In February, the food chain collaborated with Crocs to create shoes with fried chicken painted on them, topped with a chicken-scented charm. The shoes sold out within half an hour after their launch in July.

KFC announced the release of its 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog in December 2018 - basically a log that smells like fried chicken.