Video conferencing platform Zoom has introduced a swathe of new features that aim to “liven up your meetings” including filters, reactions, improved lighting capabilities and better background noise suppression. 

Users can choose from a variety of virtual backgrounds, as before, as well as a set of fresh video filters and toggles to alter their appearance while in conversation with their friends, family or colleagues. 

Filters to change the colour or set it to black and white or sepia have been rolled out to add more of a “casual” tone to virtual meetings, which countless workers have had to engage in due to office closures and lockdowns. Zoom also added filters that add unicorn horns, pirate eye patches, or aerospace goggles to participants. The filters can be configured in the settings.

“We believe that people connect better on video, but feeling connected when working from home is still challenging,” Zoom said in a blog post. “The casual and fun elements that bring us together in the office seem to be missing from virtual meeting culture … until now.”

“Zoom wants to empower you to feel your best in virtual meetings, express your individuality, and build moments of fun into your day with some new features that uplevel your video game,” the company added. 

The move appears to address a serious issue with video conferencing fatigue that many remote workers have felt since lockdown began. Research shows that continuous video conferencing leads to weariness due to the way such technology has disrupted the way we naturally communicate with each other.

As part of Zoom’s changes, users can also exert more control over the lighting of their frame, which can make a difference to people who work in rooms that aren’t  well-lit. 

Another useful new addition is improved noise suppression, which can drown out background noise such as building works or children playing, for example. The low setting will allow for soft background music or audio, while high background noise suppression will apparently provide distraction-free audio for important meetings and presentations.

Users delivering presentations can also adjust their virtual background to overlay their frame over slideshows, allowing them to move the video feed to any part of the screen and even resize the window.

The drive to add more fun is significant given the platform’s origins as a business-to-business video conferencing service and could be a nod to the millions of consumers that have flocked to the system during COVID-19. 

Indeed, several other platforms, including Teams and Facebook, have instigated several major platform changes in order to keep up with the Zoom surge, with Zoom’s latest changes perhaps a means of trying to stay on top of the competition.

Image courtesy of Zoom

Facebook is allowing its employees to work from home until July 2021 due to the continuing spread of the coronavirus across the US.

The social media firm will also give its staff £1,000 to put towards any home office equipment they’ll need.

The decision follows a number of tech companies that have announced similar plans, such as Google, and those that have made remote working permanent for some of their workforces, such as Twitter and Fujitsu. 

“Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. “In addition, we are giving employees an additional $1,000 for home office needs.”

The company also said it will continue to reopen offices in a restricted capacity, but only where virus mitigation has been in place for at least two months. It is unlikely that many locations in the US will reopen before the end of the year, however, due to the high number of coronavirus cases in the country. 

There was more optimism from Facebook and Google in May, mid-way through the first wave of the pandemic, as both announced plans to reopen offices in July. That has come and gone, but the pandemic still has a strong foothold in America.

Twitter showed a bit more flexibility and forward-thinking with its COVID-19 strategy, offering employees the decision to work from home indefinitely. The social media company also announced it wouldn’t open offices before September, though that may also change due to the continued rise in cases.

Japanese manufacturing giant Fujitsu announced plans at the start of July to make 80,000 workers permanently remote. This also included reducing its office footprint by 50% as part of its post-pandemic future. The plans are only for its employees in Japan at the moment, but Fujitsu hopes to reduce office space by 2022. 

SAP has partnered with HPE to make its HANA Enterprise Cloud available on-premise for the first time through HPE’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) GreenLake platform.

The partnership will allow customers to keep their SAP software configuration and data on-premise while benefiting from the flexibility of the cloud experience, including the subscription-based model that GreenLake is distributed through.

HPE will supply, install and manage customers’ infrastructure, while SAP will contribute their software through the SAP HANA database, including the full SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud catalogue of apps. These will include both SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA.

The virtual hearing for the trial against a teenager accused of July’s mass Twitter hack was cut short on Wednesday after the meeting was hijacked by members of the public.

Prosecutors were in the midst of deliberations over the alleged involvement of a 17-year-old teenager from Florida when their conference call was hijacked by a series of interruptions, including 15 seconds of a porographic clip, according to Krebsonsecurity.

The teenager is thought to have orchestrated the 15 July hack on Twitter, which led to the compromise of a number of high profile accounts. His bond hearing with the Hillsborough County criminal court was held via videoconferencing service Zoom, which has been plagued by security issues throughout 2020.

A notice of the hearing was available via public records, which included joining details and the session’s identification number. In a practice known as ‘Zoom bombing‘, unauthorised users are able to make use of this information in order to repeatedly join a call and interrupt the meeting taking place.

“Less than a minute had passed before one attendee not party to the case interrupted a discussion between the attorney and the judge by streaming a live video of himself adjusting his face mask,” Brian Krebs wrote. “Just a few minutes later, someone began interjecting loud music.”

Jude Christopher Nash, who presided over the hearing, was also “clearly” in charge of administering the video stream, according to Krebs. When the prosecution was interrupted by 15 seconds of the random conversation of an unauthorised guest, Nash reportedly told the participants he was removing the troublemakers as quickly as possible.

What happened next was quite common at the beginning of the year, when the first reports of Zoom bombing first surfaced. One of the unauthorised guests streamed a graphic video clip from Pornhub for roughly 15 seconds. Judge Nash then abruptly terminated the meeting.

Zoom has taken steps to prevent participants from hijacking meetings with settings that hide its information and capabilities to eject unwanted participants, but those settings were not fully used in this case.

The teenager on trial is accused of illegally gaining access to some 130 Twitter accounts, targeting the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. It’s believed 36 inboxes were also accessed during the hack, which led to the theft of data from seven accounts, according to Twitter.

Despite the disruption, the Judge ruled not to change the defendant’s bail conditions.

​

A recently introduced change to the way the Firefox browser handles cookies is said to be breaking a number of websites, including the gov.uk platform, with web developers being urged to re-examine their web code.

Mozilla is changing the default value of the SameSite attribute in the Firefox browser from ‘none’ to ‘lax’, meaning the browser will withhold cookies on cross-site requests unless the user navigates to the URL from an external site.

According to reports on GitHub, services on the gov.uk platform are not usable following the SameSite changes, with users experiencing broken elements or pictures missing, for example, on affected sites.

​TikTok has announced plans to open its first European data centre in Ireland, an investment worth around €420 million (£380 million).

The news comes following the US government’s crackdown on the video-sharing social media platform. President Donald Trump had previously threatened to ban the app on the basis of Chinese-linked security threats and on Monday he demanded that the US Treasury receive a cut of the proceeds from the forced sale of TikTok. However, according to regulatory lawyers, this may be open to challenges.

TikTok’s decision to open a data centre in Ireland, the first in Europe, could signify a desire to shift its operations away from the US as well as secure its position in the European market.

The million-euro investment is expected to create hundreds of jobs, as well as facilitate faster loading time and safe storage of European users’ data, according to Roland Cloutier, TikTok’s global chief information security officer.

“This data centre signals our long-term commitment to Ireland and we expect the data centre to open and be operational by early 2022,” Cloutier wrote in a blog post.

Late last month, TikTok Ireland became the data controller for users in the EEA and Switzerland.

“Ireland already plays a key role in our rapidly expanding European operations,” said Cloutier. “Since establishing our EMEA Trust and Safety Hub in Dublin at the start of this year, we have rapidly expanded our team and appointed senior leaders who are continuously enhancing the strategies, policies and processes designed to keep people on TikTok safe.”

Commenting on the announcement, Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, the agency responsible for the attraction and retention of inward foreign direct investment into the country, said:

“TikTok’s decision to establish its first European data centre in Ireland, representing a substantial investment here by the company, is very welcome and, following on from the establishment of its EMEA Trust & Safety Hub in Dublin earlier in the year, positions Ireland as an important location in the company’s global operations.”

With the new investment, TikTok might be hoping to receive better treatment from regulators in the EU than those in the US.

In late June, the platform signed the EU’s Code of Practice on disinformation, agreeing to a set of voluntary steps aimed at combating the spread of false information and ‘fake news’. However, it is unclear whether this will be enough to appease the EU and ward off the sort of restrictions imposed on fellow Chinese tech companies.

Financial tech firm Global Payments has agreed a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to expand its global reach with the development of a cloud-based payment platform for card issuers.

As part of the deal, Global Payments will also tap into AWS services as its preferred cloud provider.

The cloud-based platform is described as a “processing service” for card issuers. It aims to give companies more access to technology-oriented services that could help them to deliver more modern consumer experiences and help accelerate feature improvements.

Global Payments CEO Jeff Sloan told MarketWatch that it could “level the playing field for large financial institutions” suggesting that innovations such as contactless payment options and digital banking services “can all be done better, faster and cheaper in the cloud“.

He added that the arrangement with AWS was about “letting large financial institutions globally access the same technology that startups did.”

“The new platform’s cloud-based architecture will give clients the ability to use the services they need with greater speed-to-market, flexibility and best-in-class experiences for our customers and their cardholders,” said Sloan.

“By strategically partnering with AWS, we can capitalise on the fintech and open banking movement, further expand our role in technology innovation, leapfrog existing distribution models and solidify our position as a leading provider of technology solutions for financial institutions, new market entrants, and retailers across the globe.”

Global Payments will use a range of AWS services, such as storage, compute, database, security, analytics and machine learning to fulfil compliance requirements, enable new cloud-based services, and enhance customer experiences.

The two organisations will also work together to explore additional opportunities for collaboration on innovative payments products and services across all of Global Payments.

The partnership is another big win for AWS in the financial world. The company already works with CapitalOne, CoinBase and the National Bank of Canada, to name a few.

Zoom will suspend direct sales of its video conferencing products in mainland China, opting to only offer its technology through third-party partners. 

The change to Zoom’s sales policy, which is scheduled to come into force on 23 August, comes after US lawmakers raised questions about the company’s ties to the Chinese government, following its decision to suspend the accounts of several Chinese activists in June. 

The company announced the decision on its Chinese website and issued the following statement: “Our go-to-market model in Mainland China has included direct sales, online subscription, and sales through partners. We are now shifting to a partner-only model with Zoom technology embedded in partner offerings, which will provide better local support to users in Mainland China.”

Zoom’s services will now be embedded in offerings from its Chinese partners such as Bizconf Communications, Suirui Zhumu Video Conference, and Systec Umeet. Despite the change, users in mainland China will reportedly still be able to join regular Zoom meetings as participants.

The decision is likely to be linked to Zoom’s efforts to avoid facing the same scrutiny as video-sharing social networking service TikTok, owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance. The US government has been exploring the option of banning the service and this could extend to other tech services in any way affiliated with China.

In May, Zoom decided to limit new registrations in China to enterprise users who sign up for the teleconferencing service through an authorised sales representative.

Zoom’s founder and CEO Eric Yuan moved to the US from China in 1997, becoming a US citizen in 2007. Zoom is headquartered and founded in San Jose, California, but a significant portion of its development team is based in China. 

Nevertheless, the company has recently shifted its focus from China to India. Last week, it announced that it is recruiting DevOps engineers and IT, Security, and Business Operations personnel for a new technology centre in Bangalore.

​Welcome to the seventh issue of IT Pro 20/20, our digital magazine that brings all of the previous month’s most important tech issues into clear view.

Each month, we will shine a spotlight on the content that we feel every IT professional should be aware of, only in a condensed version that can be read on the go, at a time that suits you.

This time we’re turning our attention to a part of the tech industry that has shown remarkable resilience during a time of upheaval. The small business and startups sectors have long been associated with innovation, agility, fresh talent, and, let’s face it, quirkiness. The smaller you are, the easier it is to shake things up, whether that’s in the way employees work or the markets that are targeted.

Yet, the coronavirus pandemic has forced many larger businesses to go back to basics. Restructuring is now common, and so too is mass remote work. Some business processes no longer work as well as they did, while others have ground to a halt entirely. In many ways, the larger firms have had to behave like startups in order to survive, taking cues about the prioritisation of agility above all else and abandoning longer-tail projects in favour of those that provide immediate value.

It’s this idea of smaller businesses driving the new normal that’s the theme for most of our articles this month, although it’s most prominent in our lead feature, which takes a look at the trends that are likely to define how we work over the next few years. Elsewhere, we’ve got some industry tips on how to begin building your SMB tech stack, a somewhat frank discussion on the hidden dangers of bringing staff back from furlough, and a look at whether it’s wise to launch a new business right now.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Friday 28 August. Previous issues can be found here.

We hope you enjoy reading this month’s issue. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.