Former CISA director Christopher Krebs. | Photo By Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call
On Sunday night, as news broke of one of the broadest state-sponsored cyberattacks in recent memory, former civilian cybersecurity chief Christopher Krebs was stuck tweeting. A state-sponsored attacker linked to Russia had compromised senior-level cabinet agencies, implicating huge portions of the government and private sector. Fired in November from his role leading the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after a political spat with President Trump, Krebs had to watch it all take place from the outside.
“I have the utmost confidence in the CISA team and other Federal partners,” Krebs said. “I’m sorry I’m not there with them, but they know how to do this.”
‘There are going to be outages and shutdowns for public cloud,’ says Bob Venero, CEO of Holbrook, N.Y.-based solution provider Future Tech, No. 96 on the CRN 2020 SP500. ‘Corporations that rely solely on public cloud to function and run are putting their businesses at risk for loss of revenue, security vulnerabilities and unexpected losses in productivity. Public cloud is not invincible.’
Every holiday season, the United States Postal Service gets inundated with packages and holiday cards. To help keep mail moving, USPS staffs up with temporary positions and no double-pay overtime in December. But this holiday season is proving downright crazy in some parts of the country.
People waiting on packages in Louisville said they have seen items scanned into the Louisville distribution facility only to disappear for weeks. E-commerce sellers are having similar difficulties getting packages out of the facility to be sent around the country.
The Greensboro, North Carolina processing facility—which happens to be in Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's hometown—is experiencing similar problems as Louisville, with packages inside for extended periods.
It's hardly a mystery why this is happening. Thanks to COVID prompting people to do much more of their shopping from home, package volumes are through the roof—the USPS Reddit has near-daily photos of stuffed distribution facilities with endless lines of packages—as COVID cases yet again soar throughout the country, inevitably resulting in some postal workers getting sick or quarantining.
The dynamic is similar to the one from the summer when packages were also significantly delayed around the country. Then, the problem was exacerbated by new policies instituted by DeJoy that later got rolled back in advance of the election. The current delays don't appear to be the result of those policies being re-instituted, but rather the extreme package load surpassing even that of July and August, although the USPS has not yet released data on December's late and extra truck trips as required in ongoing litigation.
"This has been an extraordinary year of unprecedented challenges given the Covid-19 pandemic and the Postal Service is expecting significant volume increases which are difficult to predict," said USPS spokesperson Kimberly Frum in a statement to Motherboard. "The Postal Service begins planning for peak holiday season every January. To help handle the expected volume increase, the Postal Service has the ability to flex our network to meet the significant volume increases expected this year." Frum added that Sunday delivery was expanded to most major cities on November 29 and for an extra fee mail carriers will deliver packages on Christmas Day in select locations."
The current delays are significantly impacting small businesses as customers demand refunds for disappearing packages. For example, eBay told sellers it is "updating estimated delivery dates" and is giving packages 10 calendar days after the buyer marks an item not received to see some movement in the package's tracking history before a refund is issued. But in some of the most backlogged facilities, 10 days isn't enough. Independent e-commerce sellers often get refund requests much sooner. Meanwhile, the USPS is still telling customers any package ordered by December 18 will arrive by Christmas.
Bryan Tintes runs an online key-cloning service and relies on USPS to get replacement keys to customers quickly. Tintes told Motherboard he has roughly five times as many delayed packages this year as previous holiday seasons. Because some packages are taking days just to get scanned into the system, customers think Tintes hadn't mailed them yet and demand refunds. "I was expecting with the current pandemic and holiday season that there would be an increase in delays," he told Motherboard. "Honestly, I could never imagine it being this bad."
If you plan on still doing your holiday shopping online, you should probably get to that after you finish reading this sentence.
Webex Desk Camera: perfect for both the home or the office with an industry-first AI feature.
Webex Desk Hub: introduces a brand new category that simplifies hotdesking.
Webex Desk: packed with intelligent features users want like noise cancellation and virtual backgrounds.
SAN JOSE, CA – December 8, 2020 – Cisco has expanded its line-up of collaboration devices designed to empower the remote worker and enable a safe return to the office. The three new devices joining our intelligent Webex device portfolio are Webex Desk Camera, Webex Desk Hub and Webex Desk.
It’s clear that the future of work will involve a combination of remote and on-site interactions, known as hybrid-work. As the hybrid workplace takes shape, it’s important that you have seamless, smart experiences whether you’re at home or in the office—or somewhere in between. Together with the rest of Cisco’s intelligent portfolio, the new devices announced today provide such experiences.
“Customers are telling us that they are rethinking their office spaces—many are moving towards hybrid work with more people working at home and more hotdesks in the office,” said Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM, Security & Applications, Cisco. “So we are excited to be introducing two new devices, Webex Desk Camera and Webex Desk, that can be used at home or in the office as well as a brand new device called the Webex Desk Hub—a first for the industry—that allows personalized working in a shared space.”
Details:
Webex Desk Camera. Packed with the intelligent features you already know from our video portfolio – like facial recognition and occupancy metrics – the Webex Desk Camera is perfect for both the home or the office. And in an industry first that no other USB camera can do, you can now mute and unmute your microphone with a simple gesture—without ever touching your computer. Powered by the Webex platform like the rest of our desk portfolio, IT can manage the Desk Camera at scale so you’ll never miss an update and never be without support. This means that even in an ever-evolving workplace, IT can meet the needs of the workforce – wherever they are.
Preview: Webex Desk Hub. With many organizations rethinking and reconfiguring their office space, getting back to the office may mean less desk space and more hotdesking for employees. With the new Webex Desk Hub, it’s super simple to make any available desk your personal space. This new category of device is powerful enough to provide amazing quality video meetings and phone calls but also allows you to pair, charge, and connect all the things you’ve come to rely on for productivity and collaboration such as your own camera, headset, display, laptop and mobile. It is wrapped with intelligence to provide a consistent experience that enables you to get stuff done. In addition, Webex Desk Hub lets you reserve a desk using your laptop, badge or cell phone to authenticate your identity. This is not a basic device for hotdesking as you know it; the Webex Desk Hub is truly built for a new way of working.
Of course, it’s not only easy to use but also to manage. The Webex Desk Hub gathers real-time environmental data, occupancy, and desk usage to help manage the new office space. Or use it to deploy digital signage with reminders to help enable a safe return.
Preview: Webex Desk. Just like it’s “big sister” the Webex Desk Pro, the Webex Desk allows you to engage your audience by using slides or videos as your backdrop while you present—a feature we call “immersive presenter”. It transforms your experience by enabling you to connect to meetings, co-create and stay productive whether you’re at home or in the office. It is competitively priced for an all-in-one device with intelligent features users want like noise cancellation, virtual backgrounds and facial recognition. Use it as your primary display and connect to any meetings service. With a high-quality camera, microphone and speakers, it is super simple to set up, with no IT or technical knowledge required. You can be up and running in minutes.
Additional Resources:
Also announced today: the all new Webex with more than 50 new features and the new Webex App Hub with integrations to simplify workflows.
Comes on the heels of Cisco announcing an agreement to acquire IMImobile and intent to acquire Slido.
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Google, Dell, Intel and a handful of other major tech companies in the IT and cloud computing industries have banded together to tackle joint problems around security, remote work, and other enterprise issues that have only become more important during the coronavirus pandemic. The consortium these companies have formed is called the Modern Computing Alliance, and its founding members also include Box, Cirtrix, Imprivata, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMWare, and Zoom.
The Modern Computing Alliance will initially be focused on four areas: performance; security and identity; remote work, productivity, and collaboration; and health care. The goal is to pool knowledge and resources toward solving shared problems around how companies perform...
Google is making it even easier to work with Microsoft Office files, with the company now allowing users to directly edit attached Office files in Gmail, much like it already allows with Google Docs or Sheets files.
Google Workplace (the recently rebranded G Suite, which encompasses Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Calendar) has offered compatibility with Office files from Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for some time. But previously, documents had to be imported into Google Drive in order to edit or modify them — while emailed attachments were only able to be viewed.
The new workflow, however, streamlines that process considerably. Now, you can directly open and edit an Office file using the Google Docs editor just by clicking on it...
Microsoft is finally releasing x64 emulation on Windows for ARM to testers today, after announcing that the feature was coming back in September. The feature, available to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel, will allow users to run 64-bit apps that haven’t yet been compiled for their ARM-powered devices. This means that if you just got one of the new Surface Pro Xs (and are willing to jump through some hoops and install a Windows update long before it’s ready for public release), Microsoft says you should be able to play games like Rocket League, or run productivity apps like AutoDesk’s Sketchbook.
Whether they’ll run well is a different question. Windows on ARM’s emulation has been pretty rough in the past, but even running an app...
Thirteen discoveries in particular offered new and sometimes perplexing insights into where we came from and who our ancestors were.
This year, researchers found the earliest known example of mating between different human populations, as well as evidence that the first Americans arrived from Asia by boat.
Even amid the pandemic, anthropologists and archaeologists around the world have continued to make mind-boggling discoveries about our human ancestors this year.
One analysis revealed that the earliest known example of interbreeding between different human populations was 700,000 years ago - more than 600,000 years before modern humans interbred with Neanderthals. Findings from a Mexican cave, meanwhile, offered evidence that the earliest humans came to the Americas via boat, not land bridge. And researchers also found new reason to believe climate change was responsible for the extinction of many of our ancestors.
Here are some of the most eye-raising anthropological findings of 2020.
Scientists already knew that our evolutionary history was full of sex between different human species. But a genetic analysis revealed the earliest known example of mating between different human populations.
An employee of the Natural History Museum in London looks at a model of a Neanderthal male in his twenties that was on display in September 2014.
But a February study showed that the ancestors of those Neanderthals and Denisovans once interbred with a mysterious population of ancient humans in Eurasia 700,000 years ago.
"This continues the story that we've been seeing in studies throughout the past decade: There's lots more interbreeding between lots of human populations than we were aware of ever before," Alan Rogers, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and the lead author of the study, previously told Business Insider. "This discovery has pushed the time depth of those interbreedings much further back."
Our interbreeding with Neanderthals may explain why humans have a low tolerance for pain.
A replica of a Neanderthal skull in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern Croatian town of Krapina, Croatia.
Nikola Solic/Reuters
Certain Neanderthal genes, researchers found, code for proteins that convey a heightened sense of pain to the spinal cord and brain. A July study showed that a sample of people from the UK who had inherited those Neanderthal genes experienced more pain than study participants who didn't have them.
Neanderthals also used their hands differently than we did - they were better suited to a squeezing a spear than delicately grasping something between the thumb and forefinger.
A Neanderthal replica holding a spear.
Neanderthal hands were bigger than ours, and their thumbs stuck out at a wider angle from their palms than ours do.
According to a November study, this meant that precision grips like the ones we use when writing would have been challenging for Neanderthals.
But these ancestors had powerful squeeze grips — the kind one might need to swing a hammer.
Denisovans are an early human species related to Neanderthals. Until this year, only a meager handful of Denisovan bones had ever been found, all in a single cave in Siberia.
The opening of Baishiya Karst Cave in Tibet.
Dongju Zhang, Lanzhou University
But in February, researchers returned to a cave in Tibet where anthropologists had previously discovered a mysterious 160,000-year-old jawbone. They hypothesized last year that the bone belonged to a Denisovan, but had no genetic proof.
This time, however, they were able to collect ancient DNA from sediment in the cave. That led them to determine that the jawbone indeed came from a Denisovan who once thrived in the cave's harsh high-altitude environment.
Kira Westaway, an anthropologist from Macquarie University in Australia, told Business Insider that the discovery put "a lot more meat on the bones of the Denisovan story — the nature and length of their occupation, their ability to adapt to high-altitude locations, and their behavior and survival capabilities in the hostile environments of the Tibetan plateau."
But not all our ancestors were so hardy. Some went extinct due to to changing climates, new research suggests.
Reuters/Nikola Solic
According to research released in November, plummeting temperatures and changing rainfall may have been the "primary factor" behind the extinction of three human ancestor species: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis.
By examining more than 2,750 archaeological records, a team from Italy found that the climate cooled by up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) on average per year ahead of the species' disappearances.
As the climate changed and their preferred food sources suffered in the cold, both species of Homo lost half of their ecological niche in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Neanderthals, meanwhile, lost 25%, according to the study.
"Even the brain powerhouse in the animal kingdom cannot survive climate change when it gets too extreme," study author Pasquale Raia, a paleontologist from the University of Naples, told ScienceAlert.
The earliest humans to cross from Asia to the Americas proved creative and skillful. They crossed the sea between present-day Siberia and Alaska by boat during the last Ice Age.
Mikkel Winther Pedersen takes sediment samples from Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico, looking for early human DNA.
Devlin A. Gandy
Archaeologists determined that stone tools and artifacts discovered in a remote cave in Zacatecas, Mexico, were about 32,000 years old. They described the finding in a July study.
The new evidence upended the idea that the first people arrived in North America after continent-hopping from modern-day Siberia via the Bering land bridge between 18,000 and 13,000 years ago.
During the last Ice Age 32,000 years ago, that land bridge was impassable. So the research suggests the first Americans arrived by sea. According to the study authors, these migrants were likely anatomically modern humans.
Another study of the earliest Americans showed that females played a role hunting big game.
Illustration of a female hunter in the Andes 9,000 years ago.
Matthew Verdolivo, UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services
Scientists discovered a 9,000-year-old burial site containing weapons and animal-skinning tools high in the Andes mountains of Peru. They assumed the human bones there came from a skilled male hunter.
But a closer look revealed that this hunter was female. Further analysis of 27 other burial sites across North and South America, which also contained hunting tools and date back to the same time period, revealed that 40% of the hunters were female.
"Female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial," the study authors concluded.
The finding "overturns the long-held 'man-the-hunter' hypothesis," Randy Haas, lead author of the study and an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, said in a press release. This outdated archaeological theory suggested men were the primary hunters, while women gathered.
Thousands of drawings hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest tell the story of an ancient tribe's hunting practices about 12,000 years ago.
Ancient drawings of animals, humans, and geometric shapes decorate three recently discovered rock shelters in Colombian Amazon.
Jeison Lenis Chaparro-Cárdenas
The drawings, which cover more than 2.5 miles of rock in Colombia, depict scenes of humans hunting mastodons. They also contain images of other extinct animals like giant sloths, ancient llamas, and Ice Age horses.
Other recently discovered rock art in the Americas likely shows a psychoactive plant called datura.
An enhanced image of a painting on the ceiling of the Pinwheel Cave in California.
Devlin Gandy
A red pinwheel-shaped drawing found on the ceiling of a California cave may have been part of a hallucinogenic ritual nearly 500 years ago.
In addition to the drawing, researchers found chewed wads of datura stuffed into cracks in the ceiling of the cave. Their analysis also showed that people occupied the cave from about 1530 to 1890 and likely chewed the datura during that period.
According to a November study, the drawing could be evidence that paintings in caves have served as visual aids for drug-induced hallucinations.
On the other side of the world, Egyptologists have unearthed batch after batch of sarcophagi in an ancient city of the dead beneath Saqqara.
Newly discovered colored coffins from Saqqara on display October 3, 2020. They have been perfectly sealed for thousands of years.
Ziad Ahmed/NurPhoto via Getty
More than 160 mummies have been found so far. They'd been buried for 2,500 years — until the first cache of 13 was found at the bottom of a 36-foot-deep shaft in September. Researchers have also found various artifacts in the tombs they've excavated, as well as a trove of animal mummies.
Further discoveries from the site are expected in the coming months.
In England, archaeologists revealed that they'd determined the origin of some of the boulders that make up Stonehenge.
Inside the sarsen circle at Stonehenge.
James Davies/English Heritage
Stonehenge, which is estimated to be about 5,000 years old, is made up of two distinct types of stone slabs set in half circles.
Researchers traced one type, the smaller bluestones, to a site in Wales 150 miles away. Research from July suggests the 30-foot (9-meter) sandstone boulders, called sarsens, that constitute the rest of the monument came from a nearby woodland area.
Still, Stonehenge's builders had to drag the 50,000-pound (22,700-kilogram) sarsens about 15 miles —"which is insane really if you think about it," archaeologist David Nash, the lead author of the study, previously told Business Insider.
Near Rome, archaeologists discovered an ancient city buried underground without ever digging it up. They mapped it using radar.
Antiquity Publications Ltd/L. Verdonck
Using radar to scans below the soil, a group of Belgian and British researchers mapped the entire ancient city of Falerii Novi, which was built around 241 BC and sits about 30 miles outside of Rome. They were able to identify new structures like an elaborate bath house and a large public monument.
The city's last human inhabitants left during the early medieval period in about 700 CE.
Not all ancient archaeological sites are on land. A team in Australia discovered 270 Aboriginal artifacts underwater off the country's northwest coast.
Diver Chelsea Wiseman investigates the bottom of a submerged freshwater spring off Australia's northwest coast.
Hiro Yoshida
According to a July study, the artifacts were underwater because sea levels rose and submerged 30% of Australia's coast line at the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The researchers found stone tools for cutting and chopping, as well as stones for grinding seeds. The tools were at least 7,000 years old, and they're conclusive evidence that Aboriginal people flocked to the coast for food and resources.
"People gravitate to coastlines," Jonathan Benjamin, an archaeologist at Flinders University and lead author of the study, previously told Business Insider. "But if you want to know what was happening on the coasts, you now have to go underwater."
As the Electoral College gets ready to cast its votes for President-elect Joe Biden, President Donald Trump continues insisting the race was rigged and stolen from him by nefarious forces.
"The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!" he tweeted on Saturday.
In addition to being on track to lose the Electoral College, Trump has lost the national popular vote; multiple state recounts; nearly 40 lawsuits from his campaign and key Republican officials and 86 lawsuits overall; and a Supreme Court case.
On Monday, the Electoral College will meet to formally cast its votes for President-elect Joe Biden following the November general election.
As the day inches closer, President Donald Trump continues insisting that the election was rigged by nefarious forces like the Democratic Party, "big media," "big tech," and in some cases, dead communist dictators, all of whom engaged in a broad conspiracy to steal the election while simultaneously facing devastating Democratic losses down the ballot.
"This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice," Trump tweeted on Saturday. "The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!"
In fact, Trump did have his day in court, multiple times, and in almost every instance, he and his allies were told to take a hike.
Here are all the losses Trump has faced since November 3:
The president is on track to lose the Electoral College, notching 232 votes compared with Biden's 306. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency, and Biden achieved that by flipping five critical battleground states that Trump won in the 2016 election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. The Electoral College will formalize its votes on Monday, December 14.
Trump lost the national popular vote. He earned a little over 74 million votes compared with President-elect Joe Biden's 81 million. Trump had the highest number of votes of any incumbent president, while Biden had the highest number of any presidential candidate.
Trump lost two recounts his campaign requested in Georgia, both of which cemented Biden's victory in the state. An initial risk-limiting audit consisting of a hand recount of all the votes cast in Georgia's general election also confirmed Biden's victory. "It's been 34 days since the election on November 3," Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said at a news conference last week. "We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged."
Trump lost a recount in Wisconsin after which Biden actually gained votes. The Trump campaign shelled out $3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Trump received an additional 45 votes following the Dane recount, while Biden snagged 132 votes after Milwaukee's recount, for a net gain of 87 votes for Biden.
The Trump campaign and Republican officials have filed nearly 40 lawsuits challenging the election results since November 3 and haven't won a single case. While the president and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have made sweeping allegations of nationwide voter fraud and election-rigging, their lawsuits have not made the same argument. Instead, the majority of their cases focused on small irregularities with voting procedures and election administration in different states, and asked judges to throw out millions of ballots as a result.
Overall, according to the Washington Post, at least 86 judges across the country, from the state level all the way to the Supreme Court, have rejected at least one legal challenge filed by the president or his supporters. Many of the judges who threw out GOP requests to nullify the election results in different states were appointed by Trump and previous Republican presidents, and they did not mince words when dismissing the lawsuits.
In Pennsylvania, US District Judge Matthew Brann, a former senior Republican official, denied the Trump campaign's request to invalidate millions of Pennsylvania mail ballots, issuing a blistering opinion comparing the lawsuit to "Frankenstein's monster."
Brann criticized the Trump legal team, led by Giuliani, for presenting the court with "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpaid in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence," and said he would not "disenfranchise" 7 million Pennsylvania voters as a result.
A Pennsylvania appeals court panel in a 3-0 vote rejected the campaign's request to reverse Brann's decision. "Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so," Judge Stephanos Bibas, another Trump appointee, wrote in a sharply-worded opinion that was joined by the panel's two other judges, both of whom are Republican appointees. "Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here. The Campaign's claims have no merit." Bibas added: "Voters, not lawyers, choose the President."
In Georgia, US District Judge Steven Grimberg, another Trump appointee, rejected the Republican lawyer Lin Wood's request to halt the certification of votes in the state, alleging that Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, hurt him as a voter by agreeing to a settlement over signature matching on ballots in March.
When dismissing Wood's suit, Grimberg wrote, "To halt the certification at literally the eleventh hour would breed confusion and disenfranchisement that I find have no basis in fact and law."
In Wisconsin, yet another Trump judicial appointee, US District Judge Brett Ludwig, threw out the president's lawsuit seeking to void Biden's victory in the state. "A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred," he wrote. "This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits."
On Friday, the Supreme Court handed Trump his biggest defeat yet when it issued a terse order declining to hear a case brought by Texas that sought to throw out the election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia over unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Trump repeatedly hyped the case as being "the big one."
Texas' Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed the lawsuit and was backed by 18 other GOP attorneys general as well as a majority of House Republicans. It was the most brazen and far-fetched attempt yet by the party to ignore the will of the voters, overturn the results of a free and fair election, and reinstall Trump as president.
In a one-page opinion, the Supreme Court said that "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections."
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas disagreed with the other seven justices on whether the Supreme Court should have allowed Texas to file its complaint, based on their long-held view that as a matter of judicial procedure, the Supreme Court should always hear cases in which states sue each other. But Alito noted that even if he had heard the case, he "would not grant other relief," meaning he would have denied Texas' request to invalidate Biden's victory in four other states.
Blackboard Collaborate is a web-conferencing tool that gives instructors and students more ways to learn virtually face-to-screen-to-face.
PhotoAlto/Frederic Cirou/Getty Images
Blackboard Collaborate offers Blackboard instructors and moderators private, dedicated course rooms for breakout sessions, one-on-one meetings, and office hours.
Available as part of the standard or Ultra Blackboard experience, Blackboard Collaborate is located in your Course Tools and is accessible through a desktop or mobile device.
Blackboard is an online learning tool that allows students and instructors to host or take online classes as part of a school, university, or corporate environment. The educational platform is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor their digital classroom experience to an institution's and learners' needs.
In Blackboard, students can view assignments, submit work, have discussions, and even meet for a video conference. Meanwhile, instructors can make announcements, post course materials, and grade assignments and classes. Blackboard's apps also help students stay connected on their phones, and other features include calendars, discussions, groups, and assessments.
Within Blackboard, several advanced features enhance or expand the interactive element of online learning. Blackboard Collaborate and Blackboard Collaborate Ultra are just one. The video-based conferencing tool within the Blackboard platform hosts private "rooms" for real-time educational collaboration.
Here's everything you should know about Blackboard Collaborate.
What you need to know about Blackboard Collaborate
Blackboard's video conferencing tool works with both the original and Ultra versions through different interfaces. Both allow users to meet in real-time, add files, and more. You'll need to install the Blackboard Collaborate utility before you launch video sessions but will be prompted to download it when you click on a video session link.
Blackboard Collaborate rooms are located in the "Tools" section of a course. In Blackboard Original, there is one video "room" associated with a given course if enabled. In Ultra, the instructor may create additional sessions for other uses, including breakout or group-study sessions that can operate regardless of whether the instructor is present. Instructors can also customize the rooms to allow private messaging, allow simultaneous speakers, share their desktop, or set recording options.
The dedicated "Course Room" lasts for the entirety of the course, and instructors and students can join at any time without scheduling or without the need for an instructor to hold bigger classwide sessions. Instructors have an additional "My Room" that can be used for office hours or other smaller meetings with students.
And much like Zoom, in Collaborate, instructors can create a unique session link. Instructors can use the link to direct students immediately from another course area (a folder, for example) to the Collaborate session.
Blackboard Collaborate interactive features and mobile access
Collaborate offers several features to help students and instructors get the most out of the "room" experience. Users can participate in polls, raise their hand (like the Google Meet and Zoom feature) to share a question or comment, and use the chat to message other students or the room moderator without disrupting the larger conversation.
Collaborate will test your audio and video before you join the session or room, but in the case where your audio is not up to par, you have the option to call in and join the sessions using your phone. Or, you could go completely mobile by joining a Collaborate session from your mobile browser. Android users should sign into their Blackboard account using Chrome, while iPhone users can use Safari to join live classes and meetings, view instructor-shared content, and use all the same whiteboard and communication tools as a desktop device.
Three little words strike more fear into investors' hearts than anything else: stock market crash.
It's not just that they mean losses (another word that scares investors). It's also that no one knows for sure when a stock market crash is going to happen - though the signs were often there in retrospect - or even exactly what it is. There's no one official definition.
Generally, though a stock market crash is seen as a single trading day in which a stock exchange/market drops by at least 10%. But it can also be "anytime there's suddenly a lot of volatility that makes you wonder whether the world is coming to an end tomorrow," says Terry Marsh, a finance professor emeritus at Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley.
Here's the scoop on eight of the most notable stock market crashes in recent financial history, their causes, and their fallout. Unless otherwise noted, they occurred on US exchanges, though the effect often spread to other countries.
1. The Panic of 1907
What happened: A group of investors borrowed money from banks to finance an effort to corner shares of United Copper Company. UCC went bust under the weight of speculation, and then other firms followed: Stocks lost 15% to 20% of their value. Public confidence in banks fell and depositors rushed to withdraw their money, causing ruinous runs.
The damage: Some banks and stock brokerages failed, and many top executives at surviving financial institutions either resigned or were fired. Businesses couldn't get bank loans, causing them to fail.
What resulted: "We learned that when more than one financial institution is in trouble,someone must inject liquidity" into the system, says Carola Frydman, a finance professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. At the time, private financier J.P. Morgan put together a rescue package that finally restored order on the exchanges. Realizing how economically significant the stock market had become, however, the US government created the Federal Reserve System to formulate monetary policy and provide emergency funds in crises.
2. Black Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 28-29, 1929
What happened: For nearly a decade, the stock market had kept rising in a speculative spiral. Overproduction in factories and a Roaring 20s giddiness led consumers to take on too much debt and believe financial instruments would climb perpetually higher. Finally, catching on to the overheated situation, seasoned investors began cashing out. Stock prices dropped first on the 24th, briefly rallied - and then went into free fall on Oct. 28-29. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 25% in those days. Ultimately, the market lost 85% of its value.
The damage: The Crash of 1929 didn't cause the ensuing Great Depression, but it served as a wake-up call to massive underlying economic problems and exacerbated them. A panicked rush to withdraw money caused overextended banks to fail, depriving depositors of their savings. Deprived of lenders, businesses began to collapse, leading to scarcities of goods. As many as 25% of Americans ended up jobless, spurring foreclosures, migration, and demoralizing poverty. Gross domestic production (GDP) dropped 30%. The economic woe spread overseas, hitting Europe particularly hard.
What resulted: A slew of reforms and new legislation. They included the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, which separated retail banking from investment banking - and led to the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to insure bank depositor funds. The National Industrial Recovery Act was passed to promote stable growth and fair competition, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established to oversee the stock market and protect investors from fraudulent practices.
3. Black Monday, October 19, 1987
What happened: Sinking oil prices and US-Iran tensions had turned the market pessimistic. But what led to the wipeout on Oct. 19 - eerily close to the 58th anniversary of the 1929 crash - was the relatively new prevalence of computerized trading programs that allowed brokers to place bigger and faster orders. Unfortunately, they also made it difficult to stop trades soon enough once prices started to plummet. Ultimately, The Dow and S&P 500 each dropped more than 20% and Nasdaq lost 11%. International stock exchanges also tumbled.
The damage: Fortunately, the crash didn't cause a recession or hardship. Trader Blair Hull helped set things right by putting in a large order for options at the Chicago Board Options Exchange on Black Monday. The main casualty of the crash was consumer confidence. It was essentially a computer-IT "plumbing problem" that "scared people," says Marsh.
What resulted: The financial community realized how stock exchanges around the world were interconnected. The SEC implemented circuit breakers, also known as trading curbs, to halt trading for the day once a stock exchange declines by a given amount. To ensure liquidity, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan ensured credit was available and made it clear that "the Fed has your back," says Marc Chandler, a chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex.
4. Japanese Asset Bubble Burst, 1992
What happened: Japan's real estate and stock markets had flown to unprecedented heights in the 1980s. At first backed by fundamental economic growth, the spiral had become speculative by the decade's end. In 1992, the bubble of inflated real estate and stock prices finally burst.
The damage: The Nikkei index fell by nearly half, setting in motion a minor, slow-moving Japanese recession. There were never mass business closures - though "high-end restaurants didn't do as much business," says Marsh - but not much growth either. US investors weren't hurt badly because they typically had only small amounts of Japanese stocks in their portfolios. Japanese investors, however, never fully regained their confidence in the stock market.
What resulted: The Japanese government placed subtle controls on its financial system. "Still, it took decades for the Japanese [stock] market to recover," says Tyler Muir, an associate professor of finance at UCLA Anderson School of Management. The economy too: In fact, the 1990s are dubbed "The Lost Decade" in Japan.
5. Asia Financial Crash of 1997 (aka Tom Yum Kung Crisis)
What happened: Under pressure because the country borrowed too many US dollars, Thailand saw its baht currency collapse on July 2, 1997, declining 20% in value, and spurring debt and defaults that sent a ripple effect throughout several Asian financial systems.
The damage: Currency in other Asian countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia, tumbled as well. "In South Korea, women were giving the government their gold rings to melt down" and make into ingots for international sale to help a suddenly bankrupt nation pay off its debt, says Chandler.
What resulted: "East Asia got the lesson to self-insure" after the International Monetary Fund imposed tough measures in exchange for financial relief, says Marsh. And the crash raised awareness of the interconnectedness of regional financial markets and economies.
6. Dot-Com Bubble Burst, 2000-02
What happened: In the 1990s, with the internet revolutionizing professional and personal life, stocks in companies with ".com" after their names surged. Twelve large-cap stocks rose more than 1,000%; one, chipmaker Qualcomm, saw its stock increase more than 2,500%. Investors gobbled up shares of tech IPOs but seemed unaware that not every company tied to the World Wide Web could sustain its growth - or even had a viable. "A new economy was being born and it was hard to place a value on it," Chandler says. But finally, people did - aided by some tighter money policies imposed by the Federal Reserve. They started to sell. By October 2002, the tech-heavy Nasdaq had fallen more than 75% from its March 2000 crescendo of 5,048.62.
The damage: Pets.com, Toys.com, and WebVan.com went out of business, along with numerous other internet companies large and small. Even larger, blue-chip tech companies suffered.
What resulted: Along with revealing that many tech startups had no clothes, "the overall downturn also exposed things that otherwise would have stayed hidden" in other firms, like accounting irregularities, says Muir. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was established to protect investors from corporate fraud. And "a lot of broker-dealers probably did more due diligence before they put more money into any internet funds," says Marsh.
7. Subprime Mortgage Crisis, 2007-08
What happened: At the turn of the 21st century, real estate was hot. Hungry for commissions, lenders practically gave money to under qualified homebuyers. Investors bought up mortgage-backed securities and other new investments based on these "subprime" loans. Eventually, though, the inevitable happened: Burdened by debt, borrowers began to default, property prices fell, the investments based on them dived in value. Wall Street noticed, and in 2008 the stock market started to decline. By early September, it was down almost 20%. On Sept. 15, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 500 points.
The damage: Financial giants that had invested heavily in real estate securities, including venerable firms Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, failed. Businesses couldn't get loans because banks "didn't know who to trust," says Muir. Unemployment approached 10%. The misery spread overseas, where the Nikkei dropped almost 10% on Oct. 8, 2008. The US entered the Great Recession, which officially lasted until 2009, though economic recovery remained sluggish for years.
What resulted: Through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, the federal government rescued hobbled financial institutions; it also assumed control of other agencies, like troubled mortgage-market-makers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 regulated swaps and other exotic investments for the first time and led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
8. COVID-19 crash, March 16, 2020
What happened: By the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 had spread widely in China and then to Europe - notably Italy - and to the US, where restaurants and nonessential stores closed to stem the tide of infection.
As investors realized the extent to which the coronavirus could spread and negatively affect the economy, the stock market began to quiver. On March 16, with mandatory lockdowns being announced,the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly 13% and the S&P 500 dropped 12%.
The damage: Struggling businesses furloughed or laid-off workers and some shuttered forever. Restaurants were limited to deliveries only and then partial-capacity table service. Travel restrictions kneecapped the airline and hotel industry. The human loss of the COVID pandemic has been devastating, with more than 300,000 deaths in the US and 1.5 million worldwide. As of September, more than 31 million people were either unemployed or lived with an unemployed family member, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
What resulted: The Cares Act of 2020 allowed extended unemployment payments, and government stimulus funds helped Americans stay afloat. The stock market bounced back as e-commerce companies like Amazon, makers of personal protection equipment, and pharmaceutical companies surged in value. Many businesses whose employees worked remotely during the COVID crisis said they would continue a similar arrangement once the pandemic passes, but "it remains to be seen whether it's a permanent shift," says Muir.
The Financial Takeaway
Many of the above examples demonstrate how disasters that strike stock exchanges can leave positive legacies in their wake - even though they cause plenty of immediate pain.
Some stock market crashes maul economies for years. Others merely shake up investor confidence, making people more cautious in their choices. They can cause human tragedies and result in game-changing government reforms.
While the triggering events for stock crashes vary - involving everything from copper-mania to condo prices - the ultimate outcome has always been the same: The market recovers.
The US Supreme Court on Friday rejected a brazen request from Texas and other Republican-led states to overturn the election results in four states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The high court said in its opinion that Texas lacked standing to bring the case and had not proven it had a right to interfere in how other states administer their elections.
In addition to 18 Republican attorneys general, a majority of House Republicans filed an amicus brief supporting Texas' longshot effort, and President Donald Trump hyped the case as being "the big one."
Friday's decision is the Supreme Court's second denial this week of Republican efforts to nullify the results of the election.
On Tuesday, the high court rejected Pennsylvania legislators' request to void Joe Biden's win in the state.
The US Supreme Court on Fridy struck down Republicans' latest longshot effort to nullify the results of the 2020 election.
In a brief order issued Friday evening, the high court denied a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton due to a lack of standing. The decision is the latest in a long string of defeats for the Trump campaign and Republican officials, who have filed nearly 40 lawsuits since Election Day and haven't won a single case.
"The Supreme Court has decisively and speedily rejected the latest of Donald Trump and his allies' attacks on the democratic process," a spokesperson for President-elect Joe Biden said in a statement after the high court issued its decision. "This is no surprise - dozens of judges, election officials from both parties, and Trump's own Attorney General have dismissed his baseless attempts to deny that he lost the election."
Texas' case was the most brazen attempt yet by the GOP to throw the election to Trump, despite the fact that Biden defeated him in both the popular vote and in the Electoral College.
Paxton's lawsuit argued that Biden's victories in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia should be thrown out over unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Texas said that as a result, the Republican-led legislatures in all four states should be allowed to select a pro-Trump slate of electors to hand Trump a victory. The case was supported by 18 Republican attorneys general, as well as a majority of House Republicans.
The president significantly hyped the Texas case in the run-up to Friday's ruling.
"We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!" he tweeted on Wednesday.
Texas' demand was immediately decried by constitutional scholars as legally dubious and an unprecedented request for judges to overrule a democratic outcome in a free and fair election. As Business Insider has reported, despite Trump and Republicans' cries of election malfeasance and voter fraud, the 2020 race was the safest and most secure in US history.
Even some GOP lawmakers spoke out against Paxton's case.
"That doesn't sound like a very Republican argument to me," Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said in an interview airing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," citing federalism and the right of states to administer their own elections.
One of Texas' Republican senators, John Cornyn, told CNN earlier this week that he didn't understand the legal theory of the case.
"You know, it's very unusual because when a state sues a state, the Supreme Court of the United States has original jurisdiction, so you don't have to go through the ordinary procedure," he said. "I read just the summary of it, and I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it."
"Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say so on how other states administer their elections?" Cornyn added. "We have a diffused and dispersed system and even though we might not like it, they may think it's unfair ... those are decided at the state and local level and not at the national level. So it's an interesting theory, but I'm not convinced."
That argument was echoed by the Supreme Court. "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections," the justices wrote.
Friday's decision was the Supreme Court's second denial this week of Republican' efforts to void the 2020 election results; on Tuesday, the high court issued a terse order rejecting Pennsylvania legislators' request to decertify Biden's win in the state.
"This was not my case as has been so incorrectly reported," the president tweeted after the Pennsylvania decision, adding, "the case that everyone has been waiting for is the State's case with Texas and numerous others joining. It is very strong, ALL CRITERIA MET. How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?"
Democrats, meanwhile, sounded the alarm about the precedent even filing such a case could set. Speaking to The Washington Post, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut warned that while Texas was unlikely to be successful in its crusade, the legitimization of efforts to subvert democracy bodes ill for the future.
"If this becomes at all normalized more broadly than it already is, they will steal an election two years from now or four years from now," Murphy said.
After Friday's ruling, the Texas Republican Party issued a statement that drew sharp criticism for appearing to suggest that pro-Trump states should secede from the US.
"Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution," the statement from the group's chairman Allen West said. "The Texas GOP will always stand for the Constitution and for the rule of law even while others don't."
When Salesforce bought Slack earlier this week for $27.7 billion, it was in some ways the end of a startup fairytale. Slack was the living embodiment of the Silicon Valley startup success fantasy. It started as a pivot from a game company, of all things. It raised $1.4 billion, went from zero to a $7 billion valuation to IPO, checking off every box on the startup founder’s wish list.
Then quite suddenly this week, Slack was part of Salesforce, plucked off the market for an enormous sum of money.
While we might not ever know the back (Slack) room maneuvering that went on to make the deal a reality, it is interesting to note that Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told me in an interview this week that he was not actually trying to sell the company when he approached Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor earlier this year. Instead, he wanted to buy something from them.
“I actually talked to Bret in the early days of the pandemic to see if they wanted to sell us Quip because I thought it would be good for us, and I didn’t really know what their plans were [for it]. He said he’d get back to me, and then got back to me six months later or so,” Butterfield said.
At that point, the conversation flipped and the companies began a series of discussions that eventually led to Salesforce acquiring Slack.
Big money, big expectations
From the Salesforce perspective, Taylor says that the Slack deal was worth the money because it really allows his company to bring together all the pieces of their platform, one that has expanded over the years from pure CRM to include marketing, customer service, data visualization, workflow and more. Taylor also said that having Slack gives Salesforce a missing communication layer on top of its other products, something especially important when interactions with customers, partners or fellow employees have become mostly digital.
“When we say we really want Slack to be this next generation interface for Customer 360, what we mean is we’re pulling together all these systems. How do you rally your teams around these systems in this digital work-anywhere world that we’re in right now where these teams are distributed and collaboration is more important than ever,” Taylor said.
Butterfield sees a natural connection between what people do in the course of their work, what machines do behind the scenes in these systems of record and engagement and how Slack can help bridge the gap between humans and machines.
He says that by putting Slack in the middle of business processes, you can begin to eliminate friction that occurs in complex enterprise software like Salesforce. Instead of moving stuff through email, clicking a link, opening a browser, signing in and then finally accessing the tool you want, the approval could be built into a single Slack message.
“If you have hundreds of those kinds of actions a day, there’s a real opportunity to increase the velocity, and that has an impact, and not just in the minutes saved by the person doing the approval, but the speed of how the whole business operates,” Butterfield said.
Competing with Microsoft
While neither executive said the deal was about competing with Microsoft, it was likely an underlying reason that the companies decided to join forces. They may prove better together than they are separately, and both have complicated histories with Microsoft.
Slack has had an ongoing battle with Microsoft and its Teams product for years. It filed suit against the company last summer in the EU over what it called unfairly bundling of Teams for free with Office 365. In an interview last year with The Wall Street Journal, Butterfield said that he believes Microsoft sees his company as an existential threat. Hyperbole aside, there is tension and competition between the two enterprise software companies.
Salesforce and Microsoft also have a long history, from lawsuits in the early days to making friends and working together when it makes sense after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, while still competing hard in the market. It’s hard not to see the deal in that context.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal said the deal was at least partially about catching Microsoft.
“To get to a market cap of $1 trillion, Salesforce now has to take MSFT head on. Until now, the company has mostly been able to stay in its own swim lane in terms of products,” Agrawal told TechCrunch.
As for Butterfield, while he saw the obvious competition, he denied the deal was about putting his company in a better position to compete with his rival.
“I don’t think that was really an important part of the rationale, at least for me,” he said, adding “the competition with Microsoft is overblown. The challenge for us was the narrative. They’re just good PR or something that I couldn’t figure out,” he said.
While Butterfield cited a list of large clients in enterprise tech, insurance and banking, the narrative has always been that Slack was favored by developer teams, which is where it initially gained traction. Whatever the reality, with Salesforce, Slack is definitely in a better position to compete with any and all comers in the enterprise communications space, and while it will be part of Salesforce, the two companies also have to figure out how to maintain some separation.
Keeping Slack independent
Taylor certainly recognizes that Slack’s current customers are watching closely to see how they handle the acquisition, and his company will have to walk a fine line between respecting the brand and product independence on one hand, while finding ways to create and build upon existing hooks into Salesforce to allow the CRM giant to take full advantage of its substantial investment.
It won’t be easy to do, but you can see a similar level of independence in some of Salesforce’s recent big-money purchases like MuleSoft, the company it bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion, and Tableau, the company it bought last year for more than $15 billion. As Butterfield points out, those two companies have clearly maintained their brand identity and independence, and he sees them as role models for Slack.
“So there’s a layer of independence that’s like that [for Mulesoft and Tableau] because it’s not going to help anyone call us Chat Cloud or something like that. They paid a lot of money for us, so they want us to do more of what we were already doing,” he said.
Taylor, whose opinion matters greatly here, certainly sees it in similar terms.
“We want to make sure we have a real integrated value proposition, a real integrated platform for developers, but also maintain Slack’s technology independence, technology agnostic platform and its brand,” he said.
Better together
As for the companies coming together, both men see a lot of potential here to merge Slack communications with Salesforce’s enterprise software prowess to make something better, and Taylor sees Slack helping link the two with workflows and automations.
“When you think about automation, it’s event driven, these long-running processes, automations. If you look at what people are doing with the Slack platform, it’s essentially incorporating workflows and bots and all these things. The combination of the Salesforce platform where I think we have the best automation intelligence capabilities with the Slack platform is incredible,” Taylor said.
The challenge these two men now face as they move forward with this acquisition, and all of the expectations inherent in a deal this large, is making it work. Salesforce has a lot of experience with large acquisitions, and they have handled some well, and some not so well. It’s going to be imperative for both companies that they get this right. It’s now up to Taylor and Butterfield to make sure that happens.
Last month, Microsoft said its next version of Internet Explorer (11), would stop supporting Microsoft Teams. It also said beginning on August 17, 2021, the rest of the collaboration giant’s apps on the Microsoft 365 platform are set to no longer support Internet Explorer 11. The move comes as Microsoft hopes to gain wider acceptance of ts Microsoft Edge browser, noting in a statement: “We’re committed to helping make this transition go as smoothly as possible.”
Microsoft said that its customers have relied on IE 11 since 2013, a browsing option that was much safer when the internet was much less sophisticated. “Today, we have open web standards and newer browsers – like the new Microsoft Edge – have enabled better more innovative online experiences.” According to the company, the shift will lead to more pleasant experiences for Microsoft 365 subscribers in both its consumer and commercial realms. Microsoft hopes to enable faster and more responsive web access to greater sets of features in tools like Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, etc., with the move.
What about those who have already made a significant investment in IE 11? Eventually, Microsoft customers will no longer access Microsoft 365 apps and services using IE 11, but Microsoft clarified in a statement:
“We want to be clear that IE 11 is not going away and that our customers’ own legacy IE 11 apps and investments will continue to work. Customers have made business-critical investments in IE 11 legacy apps, and we respect that those apps are still functioning”
What Microsoft will focus on is bridging the divide between modern and legacy apps, noting many customers might feel there is no choice but to rely on a two-browser workaround of using IE 11 alongside a modern browser.”With the new Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer mode, customers do not need a workaround of one browser for some apps and another for other apps.” The company said that users can standardize on one browser and experience the modern web in a single tab.
“This is all possible while accessing business-critical legacy IE 11 apps in another tab via Microsoft Edge”
The whole thing, a part of Microsoft’s push to bring its customers to the Edge. As such, the company has used its Bing search engine to redirect customers to the browser. The company’s even stepped up its marketing efforts, as a quick search for competitor Firefox from within Bing shows an ad for Microsoft Edge above the search results.
As much as the process of user adoption can be annoying, there are actually some benefits to making the switch to the Edge. The browser has some of the best privacy settings and stops advertisers from tracking you across the Internet. This happens by default. In addition to privacy, there is a feature called interservice reader, which extends a distraction-free way to read.
It cuts out extraneous content that appears on pages and lets users control formatting, font size, colors, and even highlight sections while scrolling. Like any new or emerging technology, Microsoft is hoping its Edge browser will catch on, and forcing customers to use the technology might be a faster way to increase user adoption for the sake of security and ease-of-use.
How Dialpad utilised the Dashbase value proposition to deliver something unique
The future of delivering high-quality RTC
“Dashbase takes a communications-centric approach to log management; allowing us to debug issues quickly and keep our communications services reliable for our end users.” – Corey Burke, Senior VP of Telephony Platform at Dialpad
In response to COVID-19, RingCentral and Atos have partnered to create Unify Office by RingCentral, a born-in-the-cloud, digital first solution that offers next-generation messaging, video, and phone services. The offering can be activated quickly and provides global enterprise-grade security and reliability. In addition to the companies’ previously announced system integrator relationship, the expanded partnership will now include Unify Office as the exclusive UCaaS offering for the 40 million user installed base of the Atos Unify product family.
The creation of Unify Office by RingCentral allows Atos to maximise the global market opportunity in digital transformation by adding a strong cloud communications solution to its portfolio. Unify Office by RingCentral, combined with the Atos Unify OpenScape product family and the Atos Unify Cloud Contact Center offering, gives Atos’ customers unique access to solutions across all the major unified communications categories. Atos will also become a customer of Unify Office and start to deploy Unify Office for Atos Unified Communications and Collaboration (Atos UCC) (formerly the company’s Unify Division) with a view to expand this across the 110,000 employees. Unify, formerly Siemens Enterprise Communications, was acquired by Atos in 2016.
Unify Office by RingCentral launched earlier in 2020 in Germany and France and will shortly be available in the UK, USA and Australia. Atos will bring added value to RingCentral’s UCaaS offering because of exclusive compatibility with the Atos Unify family of devices and services capabilities. In addition, Atos will provide fully integrated Digital Workplace offers with some of Atos’ biggest technology and alliance partners. Unify Office will be the exclusive UCaaS solution offered through the Atos Unify Channel Program, allowing its reseller community of more than 1,700 partners worldwide to add their own value.
“We’ve always been focused on enabling employees to be productive and collaborate from anywhere, using any device and through the modality of their choice to drive effective business outcomes,” said Vlad Shmunis, the Founder, Chairman and CEO of RingCentral.
“By bringing Unify Office to the 40 million users of Atos Unify’s family of products, we will provide organisations with the ability to accelerate digital transformation across their entire enterprise”
Mark Smith, the Chief Marketing Officer of Atos Unify, added: “With Unify Office by RingCentral we have combined our leadership in digital workplaces with RingCentral’s leadership in cloud communications and collaboration. We couldn’t be more excited for customers old and new to benefit from the flexibility, reliability and certainty Unify Office will bring. Our services and development capabilities are being deployed to take advantage of the fully open platform Unify Office provides.”
Unify Office by RingCentral offers customers several features, including data residency, language support, seamless migration from existing Atos Unify products, security and reliability underpinned by a five-nines uptime SLA, and a global footprint. Unify Office can be deployed across more than 40 countries without the need to deploy multiple on-premises systems. In addition, the solution is localised in more than ten languages.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and one of the wealthiest people in the world, shared his top five books to read over the holiday season, rounding out what he called "a lousy year."
"In tough times—and there's no doubt that 2020 qualifies as tough times—those of us who love to read turn to all kinds of different books," Gates wrote.
The list includes non-fiction historic accounts and a book on social injustice and race.
Bill Gates, an eternal optimist, concedes that 2020 has been an overall "lousy year." But books have offered him some comfort.
Today, the Microsoft co-founder released his annual list of his top five books to read over the holiday season. This year, the list includes non-fiction history, a social justice text, and a retelling of medical innovations to combat cystic fibrosis.
"I hope you find something that helps you - or the book lover in your life - finish the year on a good note," Gates wrote.
Check out Gates' diverse range of winter picks down below.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
"I've tried to deepen my understanding of systemic racism in recent months. Alexander's book offers an eye-opening look into how the criminal justice system unfairly targets communities of color, and especially Black communities," Gates wrote.
After finishing the book, Gates said he was convinced there needs to be a better approach to sentencing and support for communities of color.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein
Gates said he started following Epstein's work after his 2014 Ted Talk on performance in sports.
His book captures the importance of people who have a broad breadth of knowledge over various topics in the workplace. It's a quality, Gates said, that helped Microsoft reach its current status as a top tech company.
"I think his ideas even help explain some of Microsoft's success, because we hired people who had real breadth within their field and across domains. If you're a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you," Gates wrote.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz/Amazon
Gates says the relevance of a novel written about 1940s England during World World II is now stronger than ever to our current world.
Larson captures the panic of English citizens tucked away in bomb shelters in 1940 and 1941 as Nazis flew overhead.
"The fear and anxiety they felt—while much more severe than what we're experiencing with COVID-19—sounded familiar," Gates wrote. "Larson gives you a vivid sense of what life was like for average citizens during this awful period, and he does a great job profiling some of the British leaders who saw them through the crisis, including Winston Churchill and his close advisers."
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, by Ben Macintyre
Gates considers "The Spy and The Traitor," a non-fiction book, as good as some of his favorite fictional spy novels.
Macintyre interviewed sources in the US and Russia to put together "this nonfiction account [that] focuses on Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who became a double agent for the British, and Aldrich Ames, the American turncoat who likely betrayed him."
Breath From Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine, by Bijal P. Trivedi
Amazon
"Breath From Salt" details the medical fight against cystic fibrosis and how scientists were able to develop new technologies to help patients and their families.
"This story is especially meaningful to me because I know families who've benefited from the new medicines described in this book," Gates wrote.
Gates wrote he suspects there will be a wave of books on biomedical innovations in the coming years.
Police in Canada's most populous province are developing a shared platform that will allow cops to more easily intercept phone communications, official documents show.
A York Regional Police Services Board report from February 2020 shows police in York Region, Ontario, are participating in the Provincial Lawful Access Common Environment (PLACE) working group. According to the report, the working group have teamed up with provincial partners in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area to develop a "common intercept system" that will enhance police ability to intercept communications. The system is expected to be operational by 2022.
York Region is one of several municipalities in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area. Lawful access is a euphemism used by law enforcement when referring to "interception of communications and search and seizure of information," according to the government of Canada.
In response to questions from Motherboard a spokesperson for York Regional Police said in an email that Ontario Provincial Police, Toronto Police Service, Peel Regional Police, Ottawa Police Service and Durham Regional Police are collaborating with York police in the working group.
"The PLACE project was initiated to provide participating police services with common, core capabilities to facilitate their lawful interception of private communication," the spokesperson added.
Ontario’s Solicitor General said in an email that the PLACE working group is an Ontario Provincial Police-led initiative and deferred questions to the force. Police in Hamilton also referred all questions to OPP. The OPP and police in Toronto and Ottawa acknowledged inquiries but did not respond to questions.
Brenda McPhail, Director of the Privacy, Surveillance and Technology Project at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), told Motherboard that secrecy around police surveillance capabilities in Canada is an "ongoing crisis."
"There's a complete lack of any details (about PLACE) and with a program like this, the devil's always going to be in the details," McPhail said in a phone call. She noted the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that police generally need to obtain a warrant to access basic subscriber information from telecom companies, raising questions about how the new intercept system will operate.
"Is there anything in this initiative that will try to argue against or work around the requirement for warrants for covert access intercepts?" she said.
Motherboard is filing access to information requests about the PLACE program but has not received records yet. The few details about PLACE contained in the York Regional Police business plan are mentioned alongside descriptions of other interception and hacking workshops undertaken by York police in recent years.
"York Regional Police has enhanced (…) Lawful Access capabilities by increasing knowledge, training and capability in Covert Access Intercept techniques," reads the report. Officers working in data recovery and other specialized units also attended an "advanced wiretap workshop" and an "Offensive Security Certified Professional course to develop 'hacking' skills for investigative purposes."
McPhail noted that the last time there was a public discussion around law enforcement agencies engaging in hacking it was during consultations about Bill C-59—federal legislation introduced in 2017 that codified how Canada's spy agencies can operate.
"In that case, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was allowed to engage in hacking to interfere with information on the internet, including hacking accounts," McPhail said. Without more information from police, "It's not clear what powers police would have with respect to hacking workshops."
Police across Canada have in recent years beefed up their surveillance and interception capabilities. In 2018, Motherboard reported how police forces in Ontario clandestinely rolled out unspecified surveillance equipment around the province. In 2019, police in York and Peel regions invested in a shared facial recognition system and York police have admitted to using Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition software. Police in Toronto also purchased licences from Grayshift LLC, makers of GrayKey phone hacking devices, worth $26,056 in 2019.
Richard Socher, former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, is taking on a new challenge — and it’s a doozy. Socher wants to fix consumer search and today he announced you.com, a new search engine to take on the mighty Google.
“We are building you.com. You can already go to it today. And it’s a trusted search engine. We want to work on having more click trust and less clickbait on the internet,” he said. He added that in addition to trust, he wants it to be built on kindness and facts, three worthy but difficult goals to achieve.
He said that there were several major issues that led him and his co-founders to build a new search tool. For starters, he says that there is too much information and nobody can possibly process it all. What’s more, as you find this information, it’s impossible to know what you can trust as accurate, and he believes that issue is having a major impact on society at large. Finally, as we navigate the internet in 2020, the privacy question looms large as is how you balance the convenience-privacy trade-off.
He believes his background in AI can help in a consumer-focused search tool. For starters the search engine, while general in nature, will concentrate on complex consumer purchases where you have to open several tabs to compare information.
“The biggest impact thing we can do in our lives right now is to build a trusted search engine with AI and natural language processing superpowers to help everyone with the various complex decisions of their lives, starting with complex product purchases, but also being general from the get-go as well,” he said.
While Socher was light on details, preferring to wait until GA in a couple of months to share some more, he said he wants to differentiate from Google by not relying on advertising and what you know about the user. He said he learned from working with Marc Benioff at Salesforce that you can make money and still build trust with the people buying your product.
He certainly recognizes that it’s tough to take on an entrenched incumbent, but he and his team believe that by building something they believe is fundamentally different, they can undermine the incumbent with a classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” kind of play where they’re doing something that is hard for Google to reproduce without undermining their primary revenue model.
He also sees Google running into antitrust issues moving forward and that could help create an opening for a startup like this. “I think a lot of stuff that Google [has been doing] … with the looming antitrust will be somewhat harder for them to get away with on a continued basis,” he said.
He acknowledges that trust and accuracy elements could get tricky as social networks have found out. Socher hinted at some social sharing elements they plan to build into the search tool including allowing you to have your own custom you.com URL with your name to facilitate that sharing.
Socher said he has funding and a team together working actively on the product, but wouldn’t share how much or how many employees at this point. He did say that Benioff and venture capitalist Jim Breyer are primary backers and he would have more information to share in the coming months.
For now, if you’re interested, you can go to the website and sign up for early access.
The Senate today voted 49-47 along party lines to move forward with an unqualified Trump ally to the FCC for a five-year term. It’s an aggressive move by the GOP experts say will not only help Trump attack free speech online, but could mire the Biden FCC in partisan gridlock for years. A final vote is expected later Tuesday.
Trump pick Nathan Simington has no experience whatsoever when it comes to telecom or consumer protection.
What Simington does have is the willingness to pursue Trump’s heavily-criticized plan to use the FCC to undermine Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation say is essential to protecting free speech online.
While Trump claims attacking the law will thwart the nonexistent “censorship” of Conservatives on social media, the real goal appears to be to thwart the policing of disinformation by social media giants. But experts have spent months pointing out in elaborate detail how attacking the law will result in corporations being more likely to censor user content, not less.
It’s a dumb idea opposed by a broad, bipartisan coalition of experts. And while Simington’s effort to attack the law will be an uphill climb in the wake of Trump’s defeat, even Conservative telecom policy experts say Simington could make a mess of the court system as it tries to deal with lawsuits related to social media content moderation.
But there’s another reason the GOP is rushing to appoint a new Commissioner during the transition: the telecom industry wants to mire the agency in partisan dysfunction during the Biden administration, preventing the reversal of hugely-unpopular Trump FCC policies like the attack on net neutrality or the erosion of media consolidation rules.
By law, the party that wins the White House enjoys a partisan 3-2 Commissioner advantage and gets to choose the agency head. But last August, Trump fired Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly for mildly criticizing his plan to attack Section 230. With O’Rielly fired and Ajit Pai leaving January 20, that leaves the FCC with a 2-1 Democratic majority in the new year.
Consumer groups say the GOP plan is to rush to appoint Simington, then block the Biden appointment of any new Democratic FCC boss. Gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners, the agency will find its consumer protection authority crippled in the new year.
Worse, Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel’s term expires at the tail end of next year, meaning it’s possible the GOP could block her replacement as well, leaving the GOP with a 2-1 FCC majority in 2022—despite losing the 2020 Presidential election.
Given Biden’s first act on the campaign trail was to hold a fundraiser hosted by Comcast, there’s certainly no guarantee the new administration will be tough on big telecom. But there’s a wide consensus among experts and consumer groups that the administration aims to restore net neutrality and take a tougher stance on consumer protection during Covid.
That’s something it can’t do if it lacks its election-earned majority, the entire point of the telecom-backed gambit. Uninformed or misinformed consumers will then blame the Biden FCC for not doing more to protect the American consumer, a story that’s likely to play out across numerous regulatory agencies courtesy of the GOP.
“Confirming Nathan Simington to the FCC during this critical time would jeopardize the agency’s ability to function, resulting in painful consequences for consumers who rely on broadband -- and that means everyone,” Greg Guice, Government Affairs Director at Public Knowledge said in a statement. “An indefinite deadlock just can't be the right answer during a pandemic.”
The GOP plan doesn’t work if Republicans lose the Georgia runoff races and control of the Senate. Telecom policy expert Harold Feld also told Motherboard that even should the Biden FCC face GOP-induced gridlock, the agency won’t be entirely powerless to protect consumers.
For example, the FCC could withdraw its support of the DOJ’s lawsuit against California for passing net neutrality rules, undermining telecom’s quest to leave both federal and lawmakers powerless to protect consumers from telecom monopolies.
Feld also said the FCC’s Democrats could still launch an investigation into the cable industry’s sale of personal subscriber data in violation of federal law, opening the door to a potential broader inquiry into the widespread abuse of broadband user location data, though penalties would be restricted until a Democratic majority is restored.
But Feld said that if the GOP remains intent on playing dirty, the Democrats can and must be more creative and aggressive in thwarting the efforts.
“Stop even routine functions until a Democratic majority is restored to the Commission,” Feld suggested. “Suspend all streamlined application processes. Stop all spectrum auctions, even those already scheduled. Shut down even routine license transfers and license modifications. Nothing gets done that does not directly impact public safety.”
Unless Democrats are willing to engage in more creative and aggressive responses to GOP obstructionism, it’s a problem that will just keep repeating itself, Feld argued.
“Republicans will replicate these tactics at the FTC, FERC and every other agency for as long as they can get away with it,” he said. “Biden, Schumer and Pelosi must give an explicit greenlight to the next FCC Chair to use maximum pressure on industry and Republicans to break the stalemate, or expect to see this pattern played out across the Biden Administration.”
Update: This article has been updated to explain that the Senate voted to move forward with the appointment of Simmington but that it is not yet final.
I know everyone is focused on Trump's attempt to take away Section 230 in the NDAA, but an equally important issue is that members of Congress have been trying to do Hollywood's bidding and sneak massive copyright reform into a must-pass government appropriations bill. The CASE Act has many problems that we've discussed, including the fact that it would unleash a wave of copyright trolling for people accidentally or innocently sharing works they don't realize are covered by copyright. There are also significant Constitutional problems with it, in that it routes around the Title III courts by handing disputes about private rights to the executive branch. That's not allowed.
But rather than actually discussing and debating those issues, and fixing the bill to make sure it is constitutional and protects the public, we've heard from three different sources that Nancy Pelosi has given the go-ahead in the House to include the CASE Act in the spending bill. As we said earlier this week, if you're trying to ram through a bill by adding them to an appropriations bill, it's because you know it has problems and will cause major issues and you just don't care because the politics of pleasing donors is too important. Hollywood has been screaming for this bill, and Pelosi has agreed to put it in.
If you're a constituent of Pelosi, I would highly recommend reaching out to her office and making it clear that you absolutely oppose any effort to attach the CASE Act to any appropriations bill. To ignore the many concerns that have been raised about the bill and what it will do to people across the country (especially in the middle of a pandemic) is a travesty. There is no need to pass this bill now, and there is certainly no need to do it in this way. Even if you're not a Pelosi constituent, it's worth reaching out to your Congressional Representatives. The good folks over at EFF have a handy dandy form under the accurate headline: "Don't let a quasi-court bankrupt internet users."
Many people have raised thoughtful critiques of the CASE Act, and there are many suggestions out there for how the bill can be fixed. To date, Congress has ignored those fixes. This is a bill that is highly controversial and should not be put into law through a sneaky, underhanded move like this. Make sure that Congress understands this.
by jzeballos@businessinsider.com (Joseph Zeballos-Roig)
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden speaks to the media after receiving a briefing from the transition COVID-19 advisory board on November 09, 2020 at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware. Mr. Biden spoke about how his administration would respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
President-elect Joe Biden threw his support behind a compromise relief plan in a CNN interview.
"I think it should be passed, and I think that, in fact, we're going to need more," Biden said in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that aired Thursday evening.
The relief plan appeared to gather more momentum on Capitol Hill after months of inaction from lawmakers.
President-elect Joe Biden came out in favor of the $908 billion compromise relief package, though maintaining he would seek more federal aid after he is sworn in on January 20.
"I think it should be passed, and I think that, in fact, we're going to need more," Biden said in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that aired Thursday evening. "I'm going to have to ask for more help."
Biden's comments come as lawmakers debate the scope and components of another relief package. Congressional Democratic leaders said they supported the $908 billion rescue plan on Wednesday as a blueprint for negotiations in a major concession from their past spending demands. It was unveiled by a centrist of group of 16 senators from both parties the day before.
The federal assistance package appeared to gain further momentum on Thursday as more GOP senators signaled they could back it. It contains $300 federal weekly unemployment benefits, as well as some state aid and more Paycheck Protection Program funds for small businesses among other measures.
It also includes a temporary liability shield from virus-related lawsuits for businesses. But details around its structure are still being ironed out alongside other provisions. Democrats have long opposed it.
The package omits a second round of $1,200 relief payments for taxpayers.
Biden has largely been on the sidelines as lawmakers cobble together a fourth rescue package, which still lacks legislative text. But in recent weeks he has stepped up his calls for lawmakers to pass aid now - while making clear he would seek a fresh round of relief for individuals and businesses upon taking office.
The US is entering a treacherous stretch of the pandemic, marking a series of grim milestones: hospitalizations exceeded 100,000 for the first time on Wednesday, and the nation recorded 2,804 deaths on the same day - the highest one-day total. Concerns are rising about virus-related restrictions setting back the shaky recovery.
At a virtual event on the state of the economy on Wednesday, Biden said his transition team was already drafting more economic aid legislation. He said the compromise relief plan "at best, is only going to be a down payment for what's going to happen early next year."
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has largely withdrawn from relief negotiations and placed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as the main Republican negotiator. The Kentucky Republican favors a slimmer plan that includes no extra federal unemployment funding and prioritizes small business funding.
McConnell wouldn't comment about the bipartisan deal when asked about it by reporters on Thursday. But he urged Congress to reach a deal after months of gridlock. "Compromise is within reach. We know where we agree. We can do this," McConnell said on the Senate floor.
Trump appears ready to back a relief plan. "I think we are getting very close. I want it to happen," Trump said at the White House on Thursday. "And I believe we are getting very close to a deal."
