Zoom is preparing its employees for a return to the workplace on a hybrid basis blending in-person office-based work with remote working.

The company has rejected any notion of returning to the office on a full-time basis, with flexibility a key priority in the formulation of these plans. It’s pertinent given just 1% of staff want a full-time return, with a quarter warning to work from home permanently, and more than half requesting a blend of the two.

Zoom also suggests it won’t rush office reopenings, and won’t do so until any given office space is fitted with personal protective equipment (PPE) and social distancing policies. The company had reopened its office in Sydney this summer but closed it shortly after due to a re-emergence of COVID-19 in the local area.

“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to returning to the office, and we’re listening to our employees to understand their concerns and help guide our plans,” said Zoom CFO, Kelly Steckelberg.

“Any decision we make at Zoom ladders into one goal: maintaining a mutual sense of trust between leadership and employees, as higher trust leads to a happier, more productive workforce. We’re carefully listening and learning, but ultimately, our office reopenings will be one component of a flexible, hybrid approach.”

During COVID-19, Zoom became the poster child for remote working and mid-pandemic communication, with businesses and consumers in equal measure resorting to the video conferencing service to stay in touch.

As the company swelled in reputation and revenue, it began investing in developing its core platform, addressing major security concerns, and building alternative technologies. Recently, for example, the firm announced new hardware that promises more office-style experiences for remote workers, including hosting video conferencing services on a TV.

The company is promoting its own technology and features as allowing it to take this hybrid approach, including the Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery, that’s designed to create an inclusive experience for in-person and remote workers. 

Zoom is the latest tech company to outline its return to work plans, after Google, for example, approved the majority of requests from its staff to work remotely or relocate. LinkedIn, too, has allowed remote working after initially being hesitant. 

Apple, by contrast, has held a hard stance on hybrid working, requiring its employees to return to the office at least three days per week. Its plans to reopen offices, however, have been delayed due to a spike in COVID-19 cases, with October set as the next date by which the firm will return to the workplace. 

IBM has unveiled its long-awaited ‘Telum’ chip, built with AI inference acceleration that will allow for fraud detection while a transaction is occurring.

The new processor was showcased at the annual Hot Chips conference with the first Telum-based system planned for 2022. 

Telum is IBM’s first processor to contain «on-chip» acceleration for artificial intelligence (AI) inference. The tech giant spent three years developing the «breakthrough» hardware, which is designed to help customers across banking, finance, trading, insurance applications and customer interactions. 

The processor is designed to enable applications to run efficiently where the data resides, differentiating it from traditional enterprise AI approaches that tend to require significant memory and data movement capabilities to handle inferencing. With the accelerator in close proximity to mission-critical data and applications, however, IBM suggests that enterprises can conduct high volume inferencing for real time-sensitive transactions without invoking off-platform AI solutions, which could potentially impact performance. 

«Today, businesses typically apply detection techniques to catch fraud after it occurs, a process that can be time-consuming and compute-intensive due to the limitations of today’s technology, particularly when fraud analysis and detection is conducted far away from mission-critical transactions and data,» IBM said. 

«Due to latency requirements, complex fraud detection often cannot be completed in real-time – meaning a bad actor could have already successfully purchased goods with a stolen credit card before the retailer is aware fraud has taken place.»

The chip was built on 7nm extreme ultraviolet tech, created by Samsung, and features eight processor cores that have a «deep-scalar out-of-order instruction pipeline» running with more than 5GHz clock frequency. IBM said that these were optimised for the demands of heterogeneous enterprise-class workloads.

It features a completely redesigned cache and chip-interconnection infrastructure that provides 32MB cache per core that can scale to 32 Telum chips. The dual-chip module design contains 22 billion transistors and 19 miles of wire on 17 metal layers.

Zoom has announced new services that promise more office-style experiences for remote workers that includes hosting the video conferencing platform on a TV.  

The company has been working with its hardware partners, Amazon and Facebook’s Portal TV, to develop a suite of services that ensure workers have the best experience no matter where they are. The idea is aimed at those who might be tired of using their laptop for all elements of their work and want more options for where in the home they can work. 

«As companies around the world shift toward a hybrid work model, they’ll need to provide remote workers with the same capabilities as on-site workers so they can effectively communicate and collaborate,» Zoom’s head of hardware partner marketing, Gerard Bao, said in a blog post. 

«Last July, we launched our Zoom for Home offering to help organisations make the transition to hybrid work and empower workers. To continue this effort, we’ve worked with our partners to develop solutions that help our users create the ultimate home office setup.»

It starts with Amazon’s second-gen Fire TV Cube, which now has a Zoom app that allows users make calls with the biggest screen in their home (if they also have a compatible webcam). 

For a more immersive experience, Zoom can also be set up through DTEN’s portable console, the DTEN Go. This includes four cameras, 12 microphones and 160 degrees of coverage that can turn your living room into a ‘Zoom Room’. It can also be paired with a DTEN Mate 10-inch tablet that offers more collaborative features, such as a digital whiteboard. 

For those that need to get up and move while working from home, Zoom’s integration with Facebook’s Portal TV could be an ideal solution. The service uses smart camera technology that pans and zooms to keep the user in the frame and also offers the usual features available on normal Zoom services, such as breakout rooms and virtual backgrounds.

Facebook has launched a fully immersive virtual reality (VR) remote working experience, powered by the Oculus Quest 2 headset, that tries to mimic physically being in a workplace.

With Horizon Workrooms, workers can beam their own comic book-style avatar into a virtual office and perform office-based tasks alongside their colleagues, as they might in a real-world setting. Such activities include working at their terminal, brainstorming, socialising, and listening to presentations.

“Workrooms is our flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance,” Facebook said. 

“It works across both virtual reality and the web and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate, and connect remotely, through the power of VR – whether that’s getting together to brainstorm or whiteboard an idea, work on a document, hear updates from your team, hang out and socialize, or simply have better conversations that flow more naturally.”

This VR experience, which businesses can sign up for in its beta state, is a logical extension of how collaboration tools have attempted to mimic the in-office experience.

Tech firms, like Microsoft and Google, have made efforts to improve their workplace collaboration tools over the last 18 months after COVID-19 forced the majority of office-based workers into some form of remote working. 

While these efforts have improved the remote working experience, they’ve largely failed to live up to the real deal, whether it’s through advances in video conferencing or iterative improvements to platforms such as Microsoft Teams. This is because of the fundamental physical disconnect that remains with remote and virtual working. 

It’s resulted in a new type of fatigue among many remote workers, with crucial aspects such as the office culture also going amiss.

As such, many businesses have instead opted for hybrid models as we emerge from the pandemic, which delivers a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario for a majority of employees. 

Facebook argues that its horizon Workplace experience, which is currently being used by Facebook employees, “transforms your home office into your new favourite meeting room”, and your desk into a shared table where you can gather with teammates. 

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Remote workers can also synchronise their computers with the virtual environment, and work on a virtual terminal, take notes, and share their screens with colleagues. 

The technology is powered by spatial audio, expressive avatars and hand tracking, which lets you use your hands to point, type or give a thumbs-up. 

The innovation builds on Mark Zuckerberg’s longstanding vision to build a metaverse that users can readily tap into and out of. 

The Facebook co-founder recently ramped up the rhetoric behind this concept, suggesting in July 2021 that his company’s future, and that of the internet, lied in the “metaverse”, according to Bloomberg. 

It’s something that’s been on the executive’s mind for many years, however, with Oculus hiring the former Google Glass lead engineer Adrian Wong in 2014 for a job as a ‘professional daydreamer’, with the task of “building the Metaverse”.

Microsoft has announced price increases for both Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services that will come into effect in March next year.  

The changes will apply to its commercial and business services, with consumer and education subscriptions remaining the same. 

The increase will also apply globally, with local market adjustments for certain regions, however only US pricing is available at present: Microsoft 365 Business Basic is going up from $5 to $6 per user and Microsoft 365 Business Premium will increase from $20 to $22. Office 365 E1 will rise from $8 to $10, Office 365 E3 will jump up from $20 to $23, Office 365 E5 will move from $35 to $38 and Microsoft 365 E3 changes from $32 to $36. 

These are the first «substantive» price increases to Office 365 since it was launched a decade ago, according to Microsoft, with only minor changes to the suites coming in over the last ten years. The reasoning for hiking them up now is partly to do with the higher demand for cloud-based services brought about by the pandemic, according to Jared Spataro, the corporate vice president for Microsoft 365.

«As leaders around the world look to empower their people for a more flexible, hybrid world of work, it’s clear that every organisation will need a new operating model across people, places, and processes,» Spataro wrote in a blog post. «We’re committed to building on the value we’ve delivered over the past decade to continuously provide innovation that helps our customers succeed and thrive today and well into the future.»

The changes follow a period of immense growth for Microsoft and its cloud services; the firm recently surpassed the milestone valuation of $2 trillion and it has more than 300 million paid seats for Office 365. The tech giant has also added more than 20 apps to Office 365 since it originally launched, including Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint.

A German data protection commissioner has officially warned Hamburg’s Senate Chancellery to avoid using Zoom as it is no longer compatible with GDPR.

Hamburg’s acting Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Ulrich Kühn, said in a press release that the on-demand version of the video conferencing platform does not meet the legislation’s criteria when it comes to data transfers.

He cites the European Court of Justice’s (CJEU) Schrems II decision, announced in July 2020, which invalidated the EU-US data transfer mechanism known as Privacy Shield and required alternative mechanisms to be more rigorous.

«All employees have access to a tried and tested video conference tool that is unproblematic with regard to third-country transmission,» Kühn wrote. «As the central service provider, Dataport also provides additional video conference systems in its own data centres. These are used successfully in other countries such as Schleswig-Holstein. It is therefore incomprehensible why the Senate Chancellery insists on an additional and legally highly problematic system.»

The issue appears to relate to a dispute over the way Zoom has used standard contractual clauses (SCCs) to justify its data transfers. On it’s website, Zoom says its services feature «an explicit consent mechanism for EU users» on its platform and that the firm has implemented «zero-load» cookies for users whose IP address show they are visiting the site from an EU member state. Specifically, the firm states: «we ensure that the transfer is governed by the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses (SCC)».

However, following the Schrems II decision in July 2020, companies are now required to perform additional steps to justify their use of SCCs, including performing additional risk assessments – something that Zoom appears not to have done.

Neil Brown, the director of virtual English law firm decoded.legal, told The Register that the press release was «somewhat oblique» but suggested that the Hamburg Data Protection Authority considers that Zoom does not ensure a level of protection for personal data which is «essentially equivalent» to that afforded by the GDPR.

«Many businesses used to address the international transfers aspect of the GDPR by incorporating the model contract clauses/SCCs into their contracts with organisations in non-adequate jurisdictions,» Brown told The Register. «In Schrems II, the CJEU said that these were not, in themselves, sufficient, and that a transferring controller must do a comprehensive risk assessment, and put appropriate additional measures in place to ensure ‘essentially equivalent’ protection.

«And that came as a shock to a lot of people, since it rather suggested that the model clauses were not fit for purpose. And, lo and behold, there is a new European set, which is a heck of a lot more complicated.»

In a statement, Zoom said it was proud to work with the City of Hamburg and many other leading German organisations, businesses and education institutions.

«The privacy and security of our users are top priorities for Zoom, and we take seriously the trust our users place in us,»  the firm said. «Zoom is committed to complying with all applicable privacy laws, rules, and regulations in the jurisdictions within which it operates, including the GDPR.»

Microsoft has been accused of making it harder to switch default browsers in Windows 11, prompting complaints from browser competitors like Firefox and Opera.

The tech giant has changed the way users can set default apps on its new operating system, according to The Verge. Similar to Windows 10, a prompt appears when a user installs a new browser or opens a web link for the first time.

The problem lies with a change in the way default browser apps are handled in Windows 11. Where Windows 10 allowed users to change default apps based on a program, Windows 11 requires users to set defaults by file or link type instead, much in the same way that PDFs or image extensions are handled.

For example, in Chrome, this means individually changing the default behaviour for HTM, HTML, PDF, SHTML, SVG, WEBP, XHT, XHTML, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPs, with each having its own drop-down menu.

Rival browsers tend to prompt users to set them as default, forcing them to navigate the default apps part of settings to do this.

Critics have argued that this creates unnecessary complications in what otherwise should be a simple process, causing many users to simply stick with Edge.

“Being able to select your preferred web browser is essential to shaping the internet experience that everyone deserves,” Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox said to IT Pro. ”We have been increasingly worried about the trend on Windows. Since Windows 10, users have had to take additional and unnecessary steps to set and retain their default browser settings. These barriers are confusing at best and seem designed to undermine a user’s choice for a non-Microsoft browser.”

Krystian Kolondra, Opera’s EVP and head of desktop browsers, told IT Pro that it is “unfortunate” when a platform vendor is “obscurifying a common use case to improve the standing of their own product”.

“We would like to encourage all platform vendors to respect user choice and allow competition on their platforms. Taking away user choice is a step backwards,” added Kolondra.

IT Pro has contacted Google and Microsoft for comment.

GitHub Discussions is officially out of beta, meaning open source developers can access a comprehensive suite of forum discussion tools to stay on top of community management.

Discussions grants open source development teams access to tools and processes to make community engagement more collaborative, the firm said. This includes being able to mark the most helpful answers, upvote responses, customise categories and pin major announcements. 

“Creating open source software today is so much more than the source code,” said GitHub’s Evi Liu.

“It’s about managing the influx of great ideas, developing the next generation of maintainers, helping new developers learn and grow, and establishing the culture and personality of your community.

“Over the past year, thousands of communities of all shapes and sizes have been using the GitHub Discussions beta as the central space for their communities to gather on GitHub in a productive and collaborative manner.”

Labelling discussions, integrating apps and responding through mobile are among the newest features GitHub has introduced as it’s taken the platform out of beta, with the company planning on rolling out further updates in the coming months.

Maintainers can organise and triage discussions with labels to keep forums tidy and help members filter to areas of interest. Power users can also integrate with GitHub Actions or existing workflows using the DiscussionsGraphQL API as well as Webhooks Finally, GitHub Discussions on mobile allows administrators to check in while away from their desktop. 

These new features are part of efforts to improve the overall GitHub user experience (UX) and make the open source coding repository more accessible and intuitive for developers. 

GitHub Discussions was first announced as part of a broader product roadmap in July 2020 as a means for communities to collaborate within a repository alongside issues and pull requests. The platform was then launched in December in its first beta version and has since been iterated upon following testing and feedback.

Private repositories were able to access GitHub Discussions from March this year, with the latest announcement signalling the general availability of the anticipated social feature.

At least 83 million Internet of Things (IoT) devices around the world could be at risk of hacking, potentially enabling threat actors to listen in on private conversations and watch live video streams from baby monitors and smart cameras.

That’s according to new findings from Mandiant, a cyber security company and subsidiary of FireEye.

Mandiant security researchers Jake Valletta, Erik Barzdukas, and Dillon Franke discovered a vulnerability that affects IoT devices that use the Kalay network platform manufactured by Taiwanese IoT and M2M (machine-to-machine) solutions provider ThroughTek.

Tracked as CVE-2021-28372, the vulnerability affects a core component of the Kalay platform, allowing hackers to “listen to live audio, watch real-time video data, and compromise device credentials for further attacks based on exposed device functionality”, according to the researchers.

Although Mandiant was not able to pinpoint the affected devices, its researchers noted that ThroughTek has at least 83 million active devices as well as an estimated 1.1 billion monthly connections on its Kalay platform, with all of them potentially being exposed to hackers.

Mandiant disclosed the vulnerability to the US’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has published an advisory report on the issue that recommends that users disconnect their ThroughTek devices from the internet, isolate them from the business networks, and to only connect to devices through virtual private networks (VPN).

A spokesperson for the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) told IT Pro that it is “aware of this vulnerability”, adding that ThroughTek “has released an update to fix the issue”.

“Simply using the platform does not automatically make you vulnerable to real-world impact, as additional information that is hard to guess is needed to exploit the vulnerability in an individual device successfully. To maximise protection, the NCSC recommends individuals keep their software up to date by installing the latest vendor updates as soon as practicable,” said the NCSC spokesperson.

The discovery of CVE-2021-28372 by Mandiant comes two months after Nozomi Networks researchers discovered a similar flaw affecting ThroughTek’s P2P SDK, which is used to provide remote access to audio or video streams over the internet.

The UK government is working on a new law that will force IoT device manufacturers to meet minimum security requirements and banning them from setting easy-to-hack passwords such as ‘admin’ or ‘password’. In April, it was announced that the legislation would also include smartphones.

Cisco has acquired application monitoring firm Epsagon in a multi-million dollar deal that will see the firm’s technology integrated into Cisco’s products and services. 

Joining the company’s Strategy, Incubation and Applications division, the Epsagon acquisition will expand Cisco’s advanced full-stack observability strategy with its expertise and technology. 

The startup, which has offices in New York and Tel Aviv, distributes tracing systems for modern applications and services, including containers and server-free environments. 

The value of the acquisition hasn’t been publicly disclosed, although Globes reports the figure stands at $500 million. Epsagon itself has raised $30 million to date, according to Pitchbook, with Globes estimating its value at between $100 to $200 million.

As the app market’s competitive landscape expands, Cisco’s senior VP and chief strategy office Liz Centoni said, businesses must fast-track their innovation timelines or they’ll be overtaken by their rivals. 

Businesses are doing this by adopting cloud-native technologies, microservices and containerised components on a massive scale. This has led to a rise in the complexity of IT environments, with firms like Epsagon stepping in to track the performance of the components that make up a firm’s digital infrastructure. 

“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimise for cost, security and performance and maximise digital business revenue,” Centoni said.

“Epsagon’s technology and talent align well with Cisco’s vision to enable enterprises to deliver unmatched application experiences through industry-leading solutions with deep business context. By contextualizing and correlating visibility and insights across the full stack, teams can improve collaboration to better understand their systems, solve issues quickly, optimise and secure application experiences and delight their customers.”

Cisco’s core software as a service (SaaS) platforms includes AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and Intersight which all feed into the full-stack observability strategy. This provides observability across the entire stack of apps, network infrastructure and security with real-time insights correlated across domains, and integrated with business context powered by AI and machine learning.