​The first thing that strikes you about the SkyKey is its size. Weighing a mere 79g, it will fit easily in the palm of your hand, with a footprint of just 59 x 100mm. Yet this miniscule appliance can manage up to 100 EnGenius EWS access points (APs) and network switches via the free ezMaster software.

Indeed, it’s so tiny that you may not need to make use of the included mounting brackets: EnGenius has cleverly given the box a magnetic back, allowing it to clamp securely to the side of a rack cabinet. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports sit on the left-hand side, while on the other end there’s a microSD card slot for configuration backups, plus a socket for the optional power adapter. You may not need that, though, as the first Ethernet socket also supports PoE.

Deploying the SkyKey took just a few minutes. After connecting the appliance to the lab’s PoE switch, we created a free EnGenius Cloud account, then loaded up the iOS app on our iPad and added the SkyKey by scanning in the QR code on its base. 

The EnGenius Cloud portal has dual roles. As well as providing remote access to ezMaster hosts, it also directly manages EnGenius’ ECW series of wireless APs and ECS switches. The mobile app is geared up for the cloud service, however, so it can show details of registered SkyKey hosts but not the wireless networks they’re managing. What you can do, though, is visit the page that lists all ezMaster hosts, where you can connect to its local web interface for further configuration. 

Before adding APs, it’s worth defining your wireless settings. These are created as per-site “projects”, which can contain multiple AP groups for different types of wireless services. Each group supports up to eight SSIDs with its own encryption scheme, along with options for SSID masking, L2 isolation (so wireless clients can’t see each other) and VLAN isolation. 

There are also extensive captive portal features, which can be used to direct users to custom splash pages, present AUPs, apply ezMaster, RADIUS or external Cloud4Wi authentication, redirect visitors to a specific web page after login and keep them within walled gardens. A Wi-Fi scheduler function also lets you disable individual SSIDs and APs for specific periods during the day.

To put all of this to the test, we used a mixture of EnGenius EWS357AP Wi-Fi 6 and EWS330AP Wi-Fi 5 APs. Connecting them really couldn’t have been easier: once online, they popped up in the ezMaster console as pending approval, and we were able to claim them with a just few clicks. Helpfully, the SkyKey immediately checked each AP’s firmware on connection and offered to upgrade them all for us.

The next step is to assign your APs to a group. This takes about 30 seconds to complete, after which they’ll start broadcasting whatever wireless services you’ve defined. Local management is disabled on connected APs as they’re now controlled by the SkyKey: you can still connect to each one’s web portal, but the only operations available are viewing statistics and rebooting. 

The SkyKey’s web console, meanwhile, presents a status view of SkyKey resource usage, projects, APs and managed switches. Selecting a project opens up a new screen with a wide range of AP and client-monitoring features. The topology view only works if you have an EWS switch, but you can use the embedded map view to see the physical location of connected APs. We were also able to survey all connected clients and see a range of statistics, including real-time traffic graphs for selected APs. 

While the SkyKey offers a decent set of management and monitoring features, it’s not as capable or versatile as the Cloud Key Gen2 appliance we normally use in the lab to manage our UniFi NanoHD APs. However, the SkyKey is cheaper, not to mention more conveniently sized, making it an attractive plug-and-play solution for small businesses wanting to manage an EnGenius-branded wireless network.

​Since the world has gone into lockdown and we’ve all had to connect with friends, family and colleagues via videoconferencing, three services have come to the fore: Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Hangouts. 

Hangouts is a natural choice for most, as it comes free with a Gmail account and is almost foolproof, which is why it has proved so popular for both businesses and consumers. It also hasn’t been plagued by security issues like Zoom, which has seen a significant backlash in recent months. But with these services gaining importance, is Hangouts right for you?

Google Hangouts review: Pricing plans

Google’s collaborations tools can be a little confusing, especially as it has Hangouts and Meet, which are two separate services that almost do the same thing. The way to differentiate them is that Meets is the version that comes bundled in with paid G Suite plans, while Hangouts is available to free users. Meets boasts a few more enterprise-friendly features than Hangouts, including support for meeting-room infrastructure and meeting recording – so you can either have a free, but limited, version of the software or you can opt for a business account and have the version with more functionality. 

Basic G Suite accounts including Meet start from £4.14 per month with a rudimentary suite of features such as a limit of 100 participants on calls and 30GB of Drive cloud storage. A ‘Business’ option which costs £8.28 per month increases the participation limit to 150 and adds unlimited Drive storage. The final tier is a £20 enterprise champion that allows for up to 250 participants on calls, unlimited storage and, quite crucially, significantly greater security options. 

Google Hangouts review: Interface

G Suite had already seen quite significant growth before the coronavirus pandemic forced us all into lockdown, but services like Hangouts have been a key tool for many individuals and businesses since the outbreak. One reason for this is that it’s ever so simple to use via either the app or the web version. 

The interface, launched from a web browser, has giant buttons for call, video and chats right there in the middle so you can jump into any of the three straight away. To the left of that is the instant messenger feature which is again easy-peasy. There are also icons to open the menu and contacts pages in the top left corner, although a couple are somewhat redundant.

Such is the ease of its interface, the least tech-savvy person in your office – or even your nan – will have no trouble navigating it. This isn’t something to be totally thankful for though, as the main reason it’s so simple is because there isn’t a whole lot of things to do on it. Compared to features offered by other services like Zoom or Teams, such as customisable backgrounds and collaborative whiteboards,  Hangouts is relatively basic no matter which tier you pay for. 

Google Hangouts review: Call Quality

Call quality on Hangouts is decent enough; its basic function works, in that you can see and hear the other callers, but it could be better. Competitors like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are doing it better with clearer calls. Obviously, any participants on your call with poor Wi-Fi will cause a bit of fuzziness, but it’s an almost constant problem with Hangouts, regardless of broadband, where other callers are blurred behind extreme pixelation or their voice is subject to a slight delay. Inevitably, this results in people talking over each other, which can be frustrating and awkward during meetings. 

Google Hangouts review: Integrations

Integrating with other apps is arguably where Hangouts and G Suite is at its best. As the videoconferencing service within Google’s suite of apps, it’s one click away from Google Docs or Drive and can even be launched from Gmail. Setting up meetings from your shared work calendar is utterly foolproof. 

It’s arguably helped other comms platforms too, such as Slack, which integrates with G Suite seamlessly. Just typing ‘/Hangouts’ within a channel or private message is all you need to launch a call.

Google Hangouts review: Features

Security is a big concern with videoconferencing platforms right now – particularly Zoom – but Hangouts has a bit of an advantage in this area as it comes bundled in with G Suite. For example, anyone that doesn’t have access to the shared calendar will have to be verified before they join a call. There are also preventative functions to stop unwanted participants from hijacking your call. All of these elements are set as default, so most users will hardly notice them. 

As for other features, Hangouts has very little to offer. It is, after all, a free service and you are literally getting what you pay for: basic video calling, instant messaging and the ability to share your screen with other participants. This is probably a big factor in Google making Meet available for free until September.  

Google Hangouts review: Verdict

While the pandemic continues, so will the increased use of videoconferencing platforms. And, given the length of the lockdown, it’s worth investing in a service. Hangouts is free but it’s very limited. So choosing something paid for might be a better option. Currently, services like Zoom are free, so it may be worth trialling a few before a final decision is made. 

Meet being available for free until September does change things and it probably is worth choosing that over Hangouts while in lockdown. But, if you want a bog-standard service without the fuss, the latter is for you. Sure, you’ll have less functionality, like not being able to change your background into something funny, but this is the new normal for most businesses, and your boss probably isn’t going to care whether or not you can make it look like you’re calling from space.  

​We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling after accidentally sending an email to the wrong recipient. If it’s an internal message, you may still be able to recall it – but if it’s gone to someone outside of your company there may be nothing you can do. At best, it’s an embarrassment; at worst, if your message contained confidential or personal information, you could be looking at a hefty fine.

SafeSend Email Security is a small add-in for Outlook that’s designed to eliminate that risk. It achieves this partly by requiring users to review all external email recipients and confirm that they’re correct before the message can be released. 

There’s a lot more than this to the software, however. It also provides extensive data loss prevention (DLP) services, allowing you to scan email subjects, message contents and attachments for specific keywords and patterns. If a match is found, the software can request confirmation before sending or even block transmission altogether.

Deployment is a cinch. The add-in can either be installed manually or distributed and managed centrally using a group policy. It works with all versions of Outlook from 2007 upwards, and there’s also a web version for Outlook 365 and OWA. We had no problems using a GPO to distribute the MSI package to the Windows clients in our lab: once they had logged into the domain and been authenticated, the add-in was silently deployed without the need for any user interaction.

Training requirements are minimal. Users just need to be advised that the first time they load Outlook, SafeSend will pop up a message to confirm their internal email domain. Once this is done, any attempt to send a message outside of the organisation will bring up a confirmation prompt.

That might sound a little intrusive, but the dialog is clean and simple, showing all the email’s recipients (including those in the “Cc:” field) with a tickbox next to each one. If something’s not right, you can remove any unwanted recipients before sending, or reopen the message for further editing.

Central management is just as easy. SafeSend provides ADMX/ADML files for deployment on your domain controller; with these copied across to the PolicyDefinations folder on our Active Directory server, we were able to create a customised SafeSend GPO for all authenticated users.

This process can be a little time-consuming, but that’s only because the SafeSend GPO has over 150 options to configure. Some of these are simple controls, such as preventing users from removing SafeSend, adding extra safe domains and deciding whether to enable the “Select All” tickbox. More advanced options let you do things such as limiting the number of message recipients, detecting bulk emails and adding custom footer messages.

In addition, you can, of course, customise SafeSend’s DLP policies. These are extremely versatile as you can create multiple rules to detect specific strings, credit card numbers and even regular expressions. To ensure nothing slips through the net, SafeSend scans not only the text of outgoing emails but also attachments in various formats, including PDFs, Office attachments and ZIP archives.

If a user’s email triggers one of your DLP rules, they’ll be presented with details of the sensitive content and the detection rules that it triggered. You can set a custom action for each rule, so for some types of data you could require explicit confirmation from the sender, while other content might be completely blocked.

SafeSend also gives you the option of adding X-headers to emails. These can be used to trigger encryption using a separate security product such as Mimecast and Proofpoint – or you can use X-headers in conjunction with Exchange transport rules to verify that users have SafeSend installed. 

We found SafeSend simple to roll out and refreshingly easy to manage. In these days when an accidental data breach can expose you to steep fines, every SMB ought to be concerned about email security – and this add-in is a great solution.

​“I think we’re alone now,” sang Tiffany on her 1987 hit single; “there doesn’t seem to be anyone around”. It’s a feeling many self-isolating workers will be familiar with, and just like the track over three decades ago, remote video conferencing app Zoom is an absolute chart-topper. 

As of the first week of April, it ‘s the number one most downloaded app in 60 countries, with more than 200 million daily meeting participants. It’s not surprising that Zoom is used by schoolchildren, their remote-working parents, and self-isolating grandparents alike – the company’s service has been adopted by people across all generations. But is it still suitable for businesses?

Zoom review: Features

Zoom’s Basic Personal Meeting plan is free for anyone to use, allowing unlimited one-to-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings for up to 100 participants. It comes with many useful perks, such as the option to screen-share and collaboratively edit a document during meetings using desktop, tablet and mobile devices running Zoom. Another useful feature is the virtual Whiteboard, which will be appreciated by anyone working from home during the lockdown who misses the simplicity of collaboration from back in the office days. The unique Waiting Room feature gives the host the option to manage when a participant joins the meeting by admitting attendees one by one. You can also choose who to hold in the Waiting Room based on whether they’re not signed into Zoom. 

Apart from the basic free version, Zoom comes with three paid plans which you can choose from to suit your business needs. Ranging from £11.99 to £15.99 per month and host, you can choose between Pro, Business, and Enterprise. However, it should be kept in mind that the Business plan has a required minimum of 10 hosts, while Enterprise needs at least 100. All plans are business-oriented, allowing users to include 100, 300, or even 500 participants – and if that’s still not enough, Enterprise Plus lets the host include up to 1,000 participants. 

Although the Free version has a 40-minute cap on group meetings, any of the paid plans remove this limit and allow meetings lasting up to 24 hours (although we’d strongly discourage the idea of hosting 23-hour meetings). All of the paid plans also come with Skype for Business interoperability and 1GB of MP4 or M4A cloud recording, which can be expanded from £32 per month.

It comes as no surprise that Zoom is a favourite among employees forced into remote working due to the ongoing coronavirus lockdown. The app keeps you feeling organised by making it easy to plan meetings well in advance in its Schedule function, which can be linked to Google Calendar using the Zoom Chrome Extension and to Microsoft Outlook using web and desktop add-ons.

Zoom review: Interface

Zoom’s interface is minimalist and makes the app a pleasure to use. Its simple, modernist design is reminiscent of Skype, but Zoom has managed to add more colours and even a simple calendar which showcases meetings for the day (with a pleasant potted plant design, to boot).

Its home page allows the user to navigate between starting a new meeting, joining an existing one, checking the schedule, or sharing the screen – all in simple square grid fashion. The additional tabs at the top, which let the user maneuver between the Home page and Chat, Meetings, or Contacts, could be more prominent, but overall there’s not much to complain about.

When it comes to actual video conferences, users can view other attendees in rectangular grids which are laid out symmetrically across the screen. A helpful element is the name tags at the bottom of every grid, which can help you remember who’s who within the company. Usually you should know who you are speaking to, but it’s still a useful feature for employees of massive corporations or for those who are meeting people for the first time over video.

Zoom review: Usability

The app is easy to install and use (at least when it comes to its basic functions), but it’s also free and non-committal. This last feature in particular seems to be the secret to Zoom’s success. Users who are unable to install Zoom on their devices (or are just stingy on precious data storage) can join a meeting or webinar through their web browser. The option is so successful that even video conferencing veteran Skype has recently launched a similar feature called ‘Meet Now’.

However, the option sounds better in theory than in practise. Zoom promises that a “Join from your browser” link is supposed to appear after the user clicks on the link to join the meeting. However, when tested, the option did not appear and the Zoom app was automatically downloaded instead. Turns out, there is a catch: the user who set up the meeting has to log in to their Zoom Account Settings, select a “Join from your browser” Link option on the Meeting tab, which is under In Meeting (Advanced). Sounds easy? Try explaining that to your coworkers right before the first Monday morning meeting.

Zoom review: Security and deployment

Despite all of these pros, it’s impossible to ignore the elephant in the room: Zoom has earned itself a somewhat patchy reputation for security. From FBI warnings and plummeting stocks to being banned by SpaceX, Google, the US Senate, and even Germany’s Foreign Office, Zoom has faced the consequences of not making its security settings more comprehensible.

Most notably, ‘Zoom-bombing’ and the lack of end-to-end encryption have been PR nightmares for the company, but these factors do not automatically make it a bad video conferencing platform. In Zoom’s defense, the tool became a victim of its almost-overnight success – it was designed for use by tech-savvy startups rather than casual consumers. However, since its popularity exploded at the start of the lockdown, the company has revised its security tools and added extra features such as passwords for meetings or the previously-mentioned Waiting Room. Nevertheless, you want to make sure that “we’re alone now”, do not share your Personal Meeting ID to your 2.5 million Twitter followers, in Prime Ministerial fashion.

Zoom review: Verdict

Zoom is a very slick video conferencing app which can be tailored to your business’ needs. Its minimalist design makes the interface user-friendly and easy to navigate, at least when it comes to its basic features. Despite Zoom’s recent history of security mishaps, the tool is under more scrutiny than before, which will hopefully motivate the company to make its security settings easier to use. When it comes to the aesthetic side, there are ways that the interface could be made even better, with more visually-appealing fonts in the nametags and different borders between the callers. However, that isn’t much of a complaint, if truth be told, and there’s a lot to like. 

Zoom is having a moment, and this is reflected in its massive user base. Even if companies are banning the platform left, right, and centre, it’s still the most popular app at the moment and chances are, anyone who you wish to speak to already has it installed. At this point, it’s almost easier to jump on the Zoom bandwagon – and if you do, you’ll likely find that it’s popular for a very good reason.

Google has announced that it will cover working from home costs for 114,000 employees who will likely continue to do so for the rest of the year.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, confirmed in a message on the company’s blog that every Google employee will receive an allowance of $1,000 (around £811) to cover the costs of “necessary equipment and office furniture”.

A spokesperson for the company confirmed to IT Pro that the Pichai’s announcement also applies to UK employees.

Pichai also announced that Google will begin to reopen offices on 6 July, “assuming external conditions allow”.

Staff returning to these buildings will do so on a rotating basis, with employees set to go into the office “one day every couple of weeks” to ensure occupancy remains at around 10%. Pichai assured that offices will “have rigorous health and safety measures in place to ensure social distancing and sanitization guidelines are followed”.

Pichai also revealed that Google will increase the target office capacity to 30% in September if conditions permit. However, he added that “there are a limited number of Googlers whose roles are needed back in office this calendar year”.

“If this applies to you, your manager will let you know by June 10. For everyone else, returning to the office will be voluntary through the end of the year, and we encourage you to continue to work from home if you can,” he said, following through on the company’s promise to continue allowing employees to work from home for the rest of the year.

At the same time, Facebook also announced that it would encourage employees to continue working from home until the end of 2020.

Pichai’s announcement comes weeks after an internal document revealed that Google is struggling to provide laptops and other essential equipment for its remote workers and new employees. A memo from leadership at the tech giant informed employees that hardware such as laptops and phones were in “limited supply”.

On 23 March 2016, Microsoft released Tay to the world, a chatbot built through a collaboration between the company’s research and Bing divisions. Unlike other chatbots, this was designed as a proof of concept to show that artificial intelligence could interact with users effectively across very human communication media – in this case, Twitter.

Unfortunately, Microsoft hadn’t quite understood the dangers of releasing a tool that learns from user interaction into the Twittersphere, a place not exactly known for constructive criticism and polite political discourse. Exploiting its “repeat after me” function – it’s still unclear whether this was built in or a learned function – users were able to expose the @TayandYou account to inflammatory statements about some of the internet’s most popular talking points of the time, whether that was Gamergate, feminism, or simply entries from the Urban Dictionary.

Within days, this self-described “AI with zero chill” had been transformed into an accomplished purveyor of hate. The chatbot was supposed to demonstrate how AI can learn from environmental cues and communicate nuanced ideas in a language familiar to those on Twitter. What we got was a bot that echoed some of the more hateful sides of the internet, either through the parroting of genuine messages or users attempting to derail the project.

Microsoft said at the time that it was “deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay”, and that it would “look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values”.

Tay was meant to show just how far Microsoft’s research teams had outpaced those of its rivals in the AI arms race. Instead, it was a catastrophic failure, proving that technology capable of learning and making its own decisions based on its environment needed to have guardrails, not just in development but also in its application.

It’s clear the experiment served as a wake-up call for a company that, until that point, had little in the way of internal processes to govern how such technology was developed. Some three months after it pulled the plug on Tay, CEO Satya Nadella would go on to pen an article in Slate, that tackled the issue head on, arguing that AI and humans can exist in harmony if strict development safeguards exist – something that is now regarded as the genesis of Microsoft’s current internal policies.

Heading into the Aether

By 2017, Microsoft had started work on turning Nadella’s ideals into something a little more tangible, deciding that the answer was to involve as many voices as possible in development. To this end, Microsoft created the Aether Committee, an internal ethics board made up of representatives from all the various departments involved in the development and delivery of AI products. Today it includes people from its engineering teams, sales teams, and research departments, as well as a representative from Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Economist.

“One way of accounting for the broad use of the technology across a range of different sectors is to bring a range of perspectives to the actual work,” says Natasha Crampton, head of Microsoft’s Office of Responsible AI. “As much as possible, you want to try and have a diverse group of people actually building the technology. That then helps you try and avoid the situation where your training data is a miss-match for the real world conditions for which the technology is used.”

Aether, which stands for ‘AI, Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research’, was the first step in creating greater accountability and communicating what can and can’t be done at a development level among the many teams operating across the globe. The committee was tasked with ensuring that any work on AI being done at the company followed a set of new principles now being championed by Microsoft – fairness, reliability in its purpose, safety, privacy and security, and inclusivity of wider society, all of which are underpinned by the ideas of transparency and accountability.

While Aether proved useful for communicating these new ideas, the committee functioned solely as a non-binding advisory body, promoting fairly vague principles without the powers to create or enforce policy. Its limitations in affecting change soon became clear and in 2018, Microsoft created the Office for Responsible AI, a separate department responsible for enforcing new development policies and maintaining oversight of all AI development, with the help of the committee.

“You can think of the Office for Responsible AI as the governance complement to the advisory function of the Aether Committee work,” explains Cramption, who has headed up the unit since July 2019. “So together, we have this company wide approach where we use Aether as this thought leadership body to unravel some of these really thorny questions, and my office sort of defines the company wide approach and roles.”

Crampton and her team have been tasked with coming up with a set of internal policies to help govern the development of AI at Microsoft – in other words, safeguards to prevent a repeat of Tay. A large part of that is case management, which ensures that new and existing projects are able to effectively translate academic AI papers into something fit for the real world, as well as improving communication between development, sales and public-facing teams – something that was clearly ineffective during the rollout of Tay in 2016.

One way it does this is by assessing projects for ‘sensitive use cases’– anything that’s likely to infringe on the fundamental human rights of the end user or lead to the denial of services (such as a loan application), anything involving the public sector, or any service that could harm the end user, either physically, psychologically, or materially. Through this, the Aether committee and OFRA can triage use cases as Microsoft works with customers, and pass recommendations up to the senior leadership team.

At least, that’s the idea. Most of Microsoft’s AI policies are still in a pilot phase.

“We’ve been piloting the standard for coming up to five months now and we’re starting to get some interesting learnings,” explains Crampton.

“We’re imminently about to bring on more groups as part of our phase 2 – the rollout is accompanied by research and a learning process as we go, because the whole point of the pilot is to make sure that we are refining the standard and improving it as we learn more. Based on what we see now, my expectation is that by the end of the next financial year, so in 2021, we will have it rolled out across the company.”

Owning up to mistakes

Microsoft’s work in this area is as much about righting the wrongs of the past as it is about ensuring AI is built for everyone. Tay was certainly a blemish on Microsoft’s development history, but the incident also shattered any trust the public had placed in AI-based software and served as validation for those who feel the technology is overhyped, or perhaps even dangerous.

“We’ve tried to approach this in a humble way, recognising that we don’t have all the answers yet … these are really tough challenges that we’re confronting,” says Crampton.

“The near term role of it is to really be a champion for developing new practices … to uphold our principles. I really want to be forward leaning on that and really try and do what we did for privacy or security and embed responsible AI considerations into our thinking when we’re developing technologies.”

Crampton believes her soon-to-be company-wide AI policies are a reflection of a maturing Microsoft, a company trying to be more responsible with how it develops software, and how it speaks to its customer base.

“When customers come to us and ask us to help them with solutions, we think about how we can help the customer with a product in a way that upholds our principles,” says Crampton. “And … sometimes we are conscious of how a system may be expanded in the future.

“A number of our AI technologies are building blocks, especially when we think about some of our cognitive services. By design, we make available the building block and the customer adds various components. If we use facial recognition as an example, we provide the [facial] matching technology, but the customer adds their cameras, their database, their people and their processes. Recognising that there are all of these different actors, different people contributing different things to create an overall system and interaction between components is really important, and so is the accountability between different players.”

“We really try hard to communicate the limitations of our technology,” adds Crampton. “In the past, I think Microsoft has really just focused heavily on the capability. We think it’s important to talk about the limitations as well. And so we are trying to communicate those to our customers so that they are educated about the downstream issues that could arise.”

It used to be the porn industry that led the way in technical innovation – or so I’m told. Nowadays, the games industry is a better barometer. Right now, it’s starting to go through the licensing pains that will soon be felt across the computing spectrum, and you’ll doubtless be shocked to hear that it’s us consumers who will feel that pain most acutely.

I recently wrote a feature in IT Pro’s sister magazine, PC Pro, about the burgeoning games streaming services, one of which was Nvidia GeForce Now. This arguably launched with the most enticing business model – a bring-your-own games service that allows you to play titles you’ve previously purchased on Steam, Uplay or other online games stores. Nvidia provides the streaming infrastructure, for up to £5 per month, you bring the games. 

At least, that was the theory – a theory that upset some of the games publishers, who hadn’t agreed to have their games on GeForce Now and demanded that they were removed.

This brings us to a philosophical dilemma: what constitutes a “PC”? Steam and other stores allow users to install their games library on any PC they own, but it seems some games publishers don’t believe that what Nvidia is offering can reasonably be classed as a PC at all.

I see both sides of the argument. GeForce Now isn’t a PC in any conventional sense. Unlike rival Shadow, which hands users their own Windows instance and lets them install what they like, GeForce Now users never see a Windows desktop. Instead, they pick from a graphical menu of preinstalled games and can play them on demand using a variety of devices, as long as they’ve already purchased the game from a supported stores or direct from the publisher. 

Games publishers, used to being paid afresh every time a customer installs their game on a new platform, are narked that they aren’t getting a cut from Nvidia. And without their games, Nvidia doesn’t have a business. Nvidia, on the other hand, is doing all the heavy lifting. It’s providing the server infrastructure, the bandwidth, and clearly doing all the optimisation work itself, since publishers weren’t even aware their titles were on the service. Why should those publishers expect to be paid yet again when it’s Nvidia that’s bearing all the cost and hard graft?

If your response to that question is a Gallic shrug, a yawn of non-gamer’s ambivalence, don’t be nonchalant: these are the types of questions that will soon have to be dealt with right across the software industry.

Streamed desktops are the future. In ten years’ time, we won’t be buying laptops or desktops with bundles of local processing power and storage, we’ll be buying dumb terminals more akin to Chromebooks. Windows, macOS and even Linux instances will be streamed, and then we’ll have the interesting conundrum of how apps are licensed on such platforms. 

At the moment, for example, if you buy a Microsoft Office subscription or Adobe Creative Cloud, you get to install the client software on as many systems as the licence permits – not very many in Adobe’s case. 

However, what happens when we’re effectively renting our OS from Microsoft or Apple? Will they adopt an Nvidia-like approach where the OS becomes invisible to the end user and you take your pick from a selection of apps in their stores? If that’s the case, you can expect Microsoft and Apple to demand a cut of app subs revenue and the whole licensing model is up in the air. Or will they go for a Shadow-like route, where you stream a Windows/macOS instance and things carry on much like they do today, with you paying for an OS subscription and software subs on top of that?

Last decade saw the demise of the one-off licence – the idea that you buy a piece of software and have the right to use it indefinitely, as long as you can still find a PC to support it. Aside from Serif’s Affinity packages, I can’t think of a piece of software from a major publisher that’s still clinging to that old model. 

The difficult bit is predicting where we’re headed. The squabble between games publishers and Nvidia is just a warm up for what’s to come, with software publishers trying to retain their margins and the OS vendors determined to take a cut. We’re already seeing this with the Windows Store and Mac App Store. 

One thing’s for sure: it won’t be good news for us, the customer. Just as you have to pay twice if you want to play the same game on Windows, Mac or mobile devices, I can well see that happening with the streaming platforms that will emerge. It’s going to be an ugly, expensive fight.

Azure Bastion and Confidential Computing are among ten services Microsoft has launched for UK Azure customers to improve security and allow users to take advantage of technologies like IoT.

Bastion, a managed platform as a service (PaaS), first launched in public preview last June and is designed to protect exposed virtual machines (VMs) from outside threats. The service lets users securely connect to VMs without using public IP addresses, reducing exposure to the public internet and cyber threats such as malware.

Meanwhile, Confidential Computing will allow customers to secure information while it’s being used, as opposed to encrypting data while it’s sitting in a data centre or being moved across a network. This real-time encryption feature means multiple organisations can combine data sets and analyse them without being able to access each other’s data.

A prospective use case for the technology could be banks combining transaction data to detect fraud and money laundering, while hospitals could combine patient records for analysis to improve diagnostics.

Among the services being launched are App Configuration, Bot Service, Consumption Plan Linux, IoT Central, Premium Plan Linux, Time Series Insights, and Virtual Network NAT.

The final service being launched, Private Link, offers a secure connection to Microsoft’s cloud with no public internet access. This can also help users meet the demands of regulations in different markets across the world.

“Microsoft continues to invest in our UK Azure regions to meet the growing needs of our customers,” said Michael Wignall, Azure business lead at Microsoft UK.

“Azure is helping organisations, both large and small, adapt to a new way of working, and our cloud experts continue to help them at this challenging time.”

App Configuration allows customers to centrally manage application settings while the Bot Service gives them the capability to develop Q&A bots to improve the customer experience. Time Series Insights collects, processes, stores and analyses data, as well as giving customers the ability to launch queries.

IoT Central, meanwhile, is a secure app platform for IoT devices and software, which can also scale as businesses grow. The product’s main appeal is the offer of industry-specific app templates for sectors ranging from retail to healthcare.

​Nvidia has forecast its 2021 second-quarter revenue above analysts’ estimates, powered by a surge in demand for data centre components amid the mass shift to remote working.

The company expects its Q2 revenue to be $3.65bn (£3bn), “plus or minus 2 percent”. According to IBES from financial market data provider Refinitiv, analysts were estimating this to be around $3.29bn (£2.70bn), as reported by Reuters.

Nvidia’s Q2 outlook takes into account the company’s $6.9bn acquisition of high-performance networking firm Mellanox, which was finalised last month. Weeks later, it was reported that Nvidia is also set to acquire networking software firm and former Mellanox collaborator Cumulus Networks, in a bid to further enhance its data centre credentials.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that the company has “had an excellent quarter”.

“The acquisition of Mellanox expands our cloud and data centre opportunity. We raised the bar for AI computing with the launch and shipment of our Ampere GPU,” he said. “And our digital GTC conference attracted a record number of developers, highlighting the accelerating adoption of NVIDIA GPU computing.”

Huang also added that Nvidia’s data centre “achieved a record and its first $1 billion quarter”, an 80% increase from the year before.

“NVIDIA is well-positioned to advance the most powerful technology forces of our time – cloud computing and AI,” he said.

Last month, the company announced that it would join the digital fight against coronavirus by providing the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium with its expertise in AI and large-scale computing optimisations.

During the course of the coronavirus pandemic, the unprecedented demand for chips, especially the ones used in data centres, has proven to make or break a tech company’s revenues.

In March, HPE reported that its year-on-year revenues for the previous quarter have declined by 8% due to difficulties in its compute business, led primarily by the continued shortage of Intel processors.

​Facebook has announced the launch of a range of new features which aim to help businesses work more effectively from home during the coronavirus lockdown.

The new features include updates to Facebook’s enterprise connectivity platform Workplace as well as the new Oculus for Business unit, which was up until now in closed beta testing.

The tech giant also announced that their Facebook Work Groups, which help coworkers connect for more lightweight tasks, have reached 20 million active monthly users across 170,000 active Work Groups.

One of the newly-launched features is Workplace Rooms, which allows users to host both planned and spontaneous video calls from their desktop, mobile or the Workplace app on Facebook’s video calling device Portal. Just like the recently launched Messenger Rooms, Workplace Rooms allows users to hold video conferences with up to 50 people at a time, regardless of whether they have the Workplace app installed or not.

The launch might mark another attempt by the company to capitalise on the demand for video conferencing as well as take on video call giant Zoom.

Workplace VP Julien Codorniou emphasised that Workplace Rooms users will not face situations similar to ‘Zoom-bombing’. Speaking to IT Pro, he said that in order to share the screen with the rest of the video conference attendees, a user needs to “have the permission of the admin” of the call.

Codorniou also said that in the case of Zoom, “a B2C usage of the product was made with a B2B product”.

“Workplace has all the security and privacy certifications that you would expect from a system of SOC2, SOC3, ISO27, or 108, Privacy Shield, and all of that. Again, we are a B2B business even if Facebook is a B2C company,” he said.

Workplace has also experienced a surge in users during the lockdown: “Two years and a half after the launch of Workplace, we now have five million paid users (…) from three million six months ago,” said Codorniou.

Facebook also issued updates to Workplace’s Live Video feature, adding a live Q&A feature as well as live captions which will translate from six languages – English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German – in real-time.

The tech giant also announced the general availability of Oculus for Business, an enterprise platform solution which aims to support large scale virtual reality (VR) deployments in corporate workplace environments. Oculus is currently used for employee-training purposes by Johnson&Johnson and for collaboration by Nestlé Purina.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced the launch of Shops, which allows users to browse and purchase products directly from a business’ Facebook or Instagram profile.