Mozilla has announced that its Firefox Lockwise password manager will reach end-of-life on 13 December.

The final versions of the plug-in will be 1.8.1 for iOS and 4.0.3 for Android, after that it will no longer be available for download or reinstallment. 

Lockwise joins several defunct projects Mozilla has taken down to try and streamline its business and become more profitable. Over the last few years, the company has shut down the team building the operating system for the failed Firefox phone, as well as binning off a file transfer tool and the Thunderbird email platform. There is, however, an Android replacement for the password manager – Firefox 93 for Android – that was released last month. 

Firefox Lockwise was launched in 2018, originally as a small experimental mobile app (named Lockbox at that point) that ended up bringing a way to access saved passwords and perform autofills on iOS, Android, and even desktops. It was later adapted as a Firefox extension, but with only a four-year lifespan.  

In a support article posted by Mozilla, users are advised to continue accessing passwords via the native Firefox browser on desktop and mobile. There is also a note on the support site suggesting that the Firefox iOS app will gain the ability to manage Firefox passwords system-wide later in December. This might mean that Mozilla adopts the features of Lockwise and eventually integrates them into the Firefox browser apps for all platforms. 

Mozilla laid off around 250 people – roughly a quarter of its workforce – in 2020 to refocus its business on projects that make money. CEO Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post, at the time, that the company’s plans leading up to the outbreak of COVID have become “no longer workable” after it became a pandemic. 

As part of the layoffs, Baker laid out a series of new focuses for Mozilla to set a stronger course for the company, such as building new products that “mitigate harms” and “that people love and want” to use, and also to build out new revenue streams.

Google is facing an internal backlash over its plans to enforce employees to provide vaccination statuses by December. 

“Several hundred” Googlers have signed and circulated a manifesto opposing the plans, according to CNBC, potentially delaying the tech giant’s office return, again. 

Google is following the Biden administration’s orders that all US companies with 100 or more workers have to ensure that all employees are fully vaccinated or regularly tested for Covid-19 by 4 January. According to internal documents, seen by CNBC, the tech giant has asked its 150,000 plus workforce to upload vaccination status to its internal system by 3 December, whether they plan to come into the office or not. This also appears to be the case for employees that work directly or indirectly with US government contracts – also whether they work remotely or not.

“Vaccines are key to our ability to enable a safe return to the office for everyone and minimise the spread of Covid-19 in our communities,” wrote Chris Rackow, Google VP of security, in an email sent near the end of October, CNBC reports.

The manifesto spreading around Google has been signed by at least 600 employees, according to reports. It asks the company’s leaders to retract the vaccine mandate and create a new one that is “inclusive of all Googlers“. It also calls on employees to “oppose the mandate as a matter of principle”, informing staff to not let the policy alter their decision if they’ve already opted not to get a vaccine.

“As we’ve stated to all our employees and the author of this document, our vaccination requirements are one of the most important ways we can keep our workforce safe and keep our services running,” a spokesperson for Google said. “We firmly stand behind our vaccination policy.”

Slack has doubled down on its ‘digital HQ‘ plans with the launch of new features to help any user customise their workflow, no matter their technical prowess. 

At its Frontiers conference this week, Slack said it had “completely rebuilt and re-engineered” its communications platform from the ground up in a bid to empower users to make work life simpler and more productive. 

This includes automated and no code functions that enable organisations to tailor their Slack app to suit. The idea of a ‘virtual HQ’ is to place a common space (a digital one) at the heart of a dispersed workforce, but like a physical office, Slack is implementing ways to change its platform to suit an organisation. 

“Just like no two businesses run the same, no two digital HQs are alike,” the company said. “Teams need the ability to tailor solutions based on their unique business needs and we’re on a mission to make that happen.

“In fact, we’ve already seen thousands of organisations like Noom use Workflow Builder to automate routine onboarding tasks and offer essential resources to new hires, saving time while achieving 100% new-hire engagement.” 

The Workflow Builder is a core element of the new Slack platform, which allows users to automate work for themselves and other members of their team – all without the need to write code. The key here is that anyone within the organisation can create a workflow in Slack, simply by dragging and dropping existing apps and customising the way they work to suit. According to Slack, since Workflow Builder launched, more than 400,000 users have built workflows, with 80% of customers building workflows in their digital HQs being non-developers.

The communication platform also revealed ‘Sign in with Slack links’, which is set to be released next year. This allows users to seamlessly connect their tools using Slack account information. There’s also ‘Subscribe in Slack’, a tool to add notifications from other third-party apps that are integrated into a user’s Slack workspace. 

Slack-first app deployment will let developers host and store the data that powers their apps in Slack and be able to attach “invisible metadata’ to their messages. The benefit here is that other apps will be able to communicate with each other via Slack; for example, the different calendar apps of two people at two different companies can directly talk to each other and schedule a meeting through Slack when they’re linked through Slack Connect. 

“Everyday Slack users can now build and automate workflows for their teams without leaning on IT or writing any code. For developers, not only are they now free to focus on more interesting work, we’ve cut their deployment time down from days to minutes,” said Steve Wood, Slack’s VP of product, developer platform 

There are also new additions for Slack Connect, the platform’s external communication feature. Coming early next year, users will be able to collaborate with up to 250 organisations in one channel. And, later in the year, customers will have the ability to set up secure work environments for large, complex projects with thousands of partners right in Slack. 

“Whether you’re planning a large-scale event like Dreamforce with hundreds of vendors or managing a multi-year construction project spanning thousands of vendors, everyone has access to the channels, apps and people needed to get their jobs done,” Slack said. “This gives teams a monumental leap forward in collaboration, flexibility and control.” 

The UK’s booming technology sector is “under threat”, according to a new report that suggests the country’s skills shortage has reached an all-time high. 

Around 80% of digital leaders have stated that post-pandemic priorities among their employees have made retention even more difficult, according to the Harvey Nash Group’s Digital Leadership report.  

The report, developed in partnership with CIONET and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology CISR, revealed that the number of UK digital leaders planning to boost their technology investment and headcount reached record levels, rising by over a third (36% and 37%, respectively) since 2020.

It reveals that 40% of UK digital leaders admit they can’t keep key employees as long as they would like as they’re being lured away by the offer of more money. Only a third (38%) of organisations say they redesigned their employee offer to make it attractive to staff in the new hybrid working world.

Additionally, the UK is facing a major shortage of talent in cyber security, big data analytics and technical architects. According to a recent DCMS report, the recruitment pool for cyber security professionals has a shortfall of 10,000 people a year, despite being the most sought after tech skill in the UK. The shortage of developers, which has been identified amongst the three jobs with the worst skills shortages in the UK behind HGV drivers and nurses, saw the biggest increase compared with previous years. 

The shortages are set to impact business growth, according to Harvey Nash, with two-thirds (66%) of digital leaders in the UK now unable to keep pace with change because of the “dearth” of talent they need. 

“With businesses planning record levels of digital investment, we could be standing on the verge of a ‘second renaissance’ for technology,” said Bev White, CEO of Harvey Nash Group. “Organisations are looking to push their digital transformations further and faster than ever before, putting technology at the very heart of how they operate. 

“But these ambitions are coming under threat from the acute skills shortages that are now worse than ever before. In fact, businesses face a triple whammy. They lack the supply of skilled resources they need; they have not yet evolved a new and effective employee proposition for the hybrid working world; and the skills they need are themselves changing as technology develops at pace.

“Digital leaders need to rapidly assess their needs and find solutions if their plans are not to be derailed by this potent cocktail of challenges.”

Users of Zoom‘s free tier might start seeing advertisements on the platform as part of a new pilot programme.

The ads will only be used on the browser page displayed when users end a meeting, and will not appear during calls. This will also only be implemented on the basic tier of the service.

Banner ads will appear at the top of the browser screen and there will also be a link that lets users manage cookies.

It marks a significant change from Zoom, which became a household name during the pandemic largely because of its free tier. However, there have been questions about how it would monetise its free users as the world returned to some type of normalcy.

The basic service allows users to host group meetings for up to 40 minutes, but there will potentially be a new restriction on the basic tier, one which Zoom says is a necessary step.

“This change ensures that our free Basic users are able to continue connecting with friends, family, and colleagues with the same robust platform we have always offered,” Janine Pelosi, Zoom’s chief marketing officer, wrote in a blog post.

Zoom has spent much of 2021 trying to grow beyond a video conferencing platform, investing heavily into hybrid working capabilities, which included a $100 million fund for startups to build applications on the platform.

The company has also been busy with potential acquisitions; it recently announced plans to acquire German machine learning startup Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions. The firm also attempted to make a multi-billion dollar takeover of customer service software maker Five9. But the deal was called off, reportedly due to Five9 investor concerns, with US regulators also uneasy about the takeover.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has announced he will be stepping down from his role to pursue investment opportunities with developers elsewhere.

The company’s chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will replace Friedman as CEO, officially taking charge on 15 November.

Friedman will move to “chairman emeritus”, which is a title held by executives that retire. In this role, Friedman will act as an advisor to both GitHub and Microsoft, but he will have more time to get back to his “roots” working with startups and developers.

Before taking the top job at GitHub, Friedman co-founded Xamarin, a startup that built cross platform dev tools, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

“With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots,” Friedman said in a blog post. “What drives me is enabling builders to create the future.

“I’ve loved working with and learning from developers who are building new tools and new projects, solving thorny problems, and creating magic out of code. That’s why I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.”

Both Friedman and Dohmke joined GitHub’s executive team shortly after its acquisition by Microsoft closed in 2018. Friedman replaced the coding platform’s co-founder, Chris Wanstrath as CEO, who stepped down as part of the acquisition. Dohmke became the chief product officer, having also joined Microsoft via an acquisition.

Dohmke has been a registered GitHub user since 2009, not long after it was founded in 2008, and previously co-founded an app-testing software startup, HockeyApp, which was also acquired by Microsoft in 2014. He is also credited with leading Microsoft’s acquisition process for GitHub, as well as deals for code-distribution startup Npm, and Semmle, which analyses code.

Microsoft has made its pitch for the ‘metaverse’ at its annual Ignite conference with the launch of Mesh for Microsoft Teams. 

The new service builds on ‘Together mode’ and ‘Presenter view’ in Microsoft Teams to make remote and hybrid meetings more immersive, according to the company’s corporate vice president Jeff Teper. 

It was just one of a number of Teams announcements unveiled at the tech giant’s 2021 conference, which also saw the launch of a redesigned Teams store and hardware created specifically for the video conferencing service, such as the Yealink deskVision monitor.

Mesh for Microsoft Teams, which will begin rolling out in 2022, is a mixed reality service that allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic environments within Microsoft Teams. This space will allow for virtual meetings, chats, and the sharing of documents and more, according to Microsoft.

The tools used for Mesh are ways “to signal we’re in the same virtual space, we’re one team, we’re one group, and help take the formality down a peg and the engagement up a peg,” Teper said.

“We’ve seen that those tools have accomplished both goals of helping a team be more effective and also helping individuals be more engaged.”

The Mesh announcement follows on from a big shakeup at Facebook, which has rebranded to ‘Meta‘ as part of a new ‘metaverse’ business shift. The Teams’ version is accessible via laptops, smartphones and mixed reality headsets, but like Mark Zuckerberg’s proposal, it is also described as a ‘new version of the internet’.      

Microsoft, however, has been working on its version of the metaverse for 12 years, according to technical fellow Alex Kipman, with the product already used by accounting service Accenture.

“We started to call it the Nth Floor, this magical, mythical campus that could only be found in virtual reality,” said Jason Warnke, senior managing director and global digital experiences lead for Accenture. 

Warnke added that his favourite feature was the ability to bump into colleagues from around the world and have deep and meaningful conversations. 

Gaming giant Sega has announced a strategic alliance with Microsoft to develop big-budget titles on the Azure platform. 

The Tokyo-based game maker is looking to develop “super games” as part of a long-term strategy to build titles for a global online community.

Sega and Microsoft have enjoyed a long partnership on the hardware front, but the Japanese firm has had to abandon its own console business after a series of failed products. The latest agreement with Microsoft, however, isn’t about hardware, but rather about cloud technology and software. 

Microsoft’s involvement is essentially about future-proofing the development of these games by utilising its cloud technology. The aim is to “anticipate” accelerating industry trends and optimise the development process with high-quality experiences for Sega users.

The foundations of this alliance also include mutual agreements to develop new technologies, focusing on areas such as network infrastructure and communication tools. 

“Sega has played such an iconic role in the gaming industry and has been a tremendous partner over the years,” said Sarah Bond, Microsoft’s CVP.

“We look forward to working together as they explore new ways to create unique gaming experiences for the future using Microsoft cloud technologies. Together we will reimagine how games get built, hosted, and operated, with a goal of adding more value to players and Sega alike.”

Microsoft has been looking to add more to its gaming portfolio in recent years, with reports that it was initially interested in acquiring Sega fully. The tech giant also reportedly made a £10 billion move for communication platform Discord, though the deal was said to be rejected because Discord preferred its own expansion plans.

“By considering a strategic partnership with Microsoft, we seek to further advance our game development so that our titles can be enjoyed by fans all over the world; in this regard, we aim to build an alliance that utilises both Sega’s powerful game development capabilities and Microsoft’s cutting-edge technology and development environment,” said Yukio Sugino, the president and COO of Sega.
 

Researchers from the US Air Force have demonstrated ways that the UK can partner with America to develop and deploy ‘state of the art’ machine learning algorithms to support ground troops. 

The US Air Force Research laboratory (AFRL) has been working with the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) since December 2020 to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems for warfare.

The four-year partnership agreement is aimed at accelerating joint US-UK collaboration of AI technologies, which will largely focus on research and development for command and control capabilities for both nations.

The first project of the collaboration was demonstrated via dual virtual events in New York and Salisbury, UK. It featured an integrated system with the ability to share data and algorithms through a common development and deployment platform. The platform is said to enable the rapid selection, testing, and deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities. 

This was the first in a series of events that will be hosted by the joint and international signatories of the Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration (AAIC) Partnership Agreement, with more projects to improve combat technologies. 

“We are dedicated to getting robotics and autonomous systems capability into the hands of the warfighters,” ​​Dr Robert W Sadowski, US Army DEVCOM, said. “Advances in robotics and autonomy will make our formations more capable and mission-ready while providing protection to our warfighters through unprecedented stand-off while enabling enhanced lethality on the battlefield.”

The demonstration featured a simulated scenario focusing on how the UK and US can cooperate and share AI capabilities to support troops. Where both countries operate in adjacent areas, they will be able to share data, AI algorithms “tightly” during missions.

Some of the technology on show included the UK’s Model Cards, which are able to present to a commander the ability to quickly understand, explore, and select appropriate machine learning models to deploy in missions. 

Researchers have unearthed a series of vulnerabilities that could have compromised thousands of WordPress websites.

Potentially exploitable bugs were found in the Brizy Page Builder, a WordPress plugin that is installed across more than 90,000 websites, according to security firm Wordfence.

The company’s Threat Intelligence team reported the issues in August and a fix was released shortly afterwards, but it’s likely that a number of installations still remain unpatched. If exploited, it could allow attackers to execute “complete site takeover” and add malicious code to existing posts.

The vulnerabilities could also allow for any registered user, including subscribers, to pass as an administrator, where they could modify posts and pages, even if they had already been published on a site.

The Wordfence’s Threat Intelligence team said it stumbled upon the vulnerability while conducting a routine review of the Wordfence firewall in July. It said the plugin “did not appear” to be under active attack, but they were led to believe that there was something amiss following “unusual traffic”.

“The unusual traffic led us to discover two new vulnerabilities as well as a previously patched access control vulnerability in the plugin that had been reintroduced,” Wordfence wrote in a blog post. “Both new vulnerabilities could take advantage of the access control vulnerability to allow complete site takeover.”

A patched version of the Brizy Page Builder plugin, was released on 24 August, just a few days after Wordfence disclosed the vulnerability. Wordfence “strongly recommends” users update to the latest version of the Brizy Page Builder (2.3.17) as soon as possible.