Video conferencing service Zoom has added a set of security features to help users combat ‘Zoom-bombing’ attacks. 

The new controls will help account holders remove unwanted guests and also spot if their meeting’s ID number has been shared online.

Zoom-booming has been an issue for the company throughout the year with hackers exploiting its mass adoption. This has affected both personal and professional meetings, including legal proceedings, and many will see this fix as long overdue. 

Starting this week, hosts and co-hosts will be given an option to temporarily pause their meeting and remove unwanted guests. Users can click a new «Suspend Participant Activities» button, which stops all video, audio, chat functions, screen sharing and recording. 

Hosts and co-hosts will then be asked if they want to report a user from their meeting, with the option to share a screenshot of them. They will then be removed once ‘Submit’ is clicked. Zoom’s security team will be notified and hosts can continue with their meeting by individually restarting all the features. This service will be set as the default for all free and paid Zoom users. 

Hosts and co-hosts can already report users with the security icon in the top corner, but this can also be enabled for non-hosts by account owners and admins. The option is available via the web browser on Mac, PC, Linux and on Zoom’s mobile apps. 

Soon, users will also be able to see if their meeting has been compromised with an ‘At-Risk Meeting Notifier’ which scans public social media posts and other websites for publicly shared meeting links. When the tool spots a meeting that’s potentially at risk of disruption, it automatically alerts the account owner by email with advice. This will most likely be to delete the vulnerable meeting and create a new one with a different ID.

A new macOS update released last week is reportedly bricking older MacBook Pro laptops, according to a number of dissatisfied Apple customers.

Big Sur, which was first unveiled during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last June, is rendering some devices unresponsive, causing them to display a static black screen without any way of bypassing or resolving the issue.

The problem with Apple’s latest operating system update is said to be affecting mostly 13-inch MacBook Pros released between late 2013 and mid-2014, according to MacRumors. However, the models have been listed as compatible with the update.

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Apple’s engineering team is reportedly aware of the issue and Big Sur has become a popular topic of discussion on the Apple Support forum, with users describing how their MacBooks are stuck on a black screen with keyboards “completely disabled”.

Apple is reportedly telling users to bring their laptops in for repair, according to a discussion on forum site Reddit. However, this might not be possible for many living in regions under government-imposed lockdowns, such as England.

This is not the only issue facing Big Sur. On 14 November, when the macOS update was released, Apple users reported server outages that caused iMessage and Apple Pay to go down and performance issues for users running macOS Catalina and earlier, according to 9to5Mac. The issue also caused Big Sur downloads and installations to fail, as well as security and privacy concerns.

​Amazon Web Services (AWS) will ditch Nvidia chips responsible for the processing of Alexa queries and will instead use its own in-house silicon, the company confirmed on Friday.

The cloud giant will also be shifting data processing for its cloud-based facial recognition system, ‘Rekognition‘, over to these in-house chips, according to Reuters.

Alexa queries, issued through Amazon’s Echo line of smart speakers, are sent through the company’s data centres where they undergo several stages of processing before coming back to users with an answer, including translating the processed text into audible speech.

The company said that the «majority» of this processing will now be handled using Amazon’s own «Inferentia» computing chips. These were first launched in 2018 as Amazon’s first custom silicon-designed chips for accelerating deep learning workloads.

Amazon has said that the shift to Inferentia for Alexa processing had resulted in a 25% latency boost and 30% lower cost. The firm hopes the same will happen with its Rekognition system, which has also started to adopt the Inferentia chip.

The cloud giant didn’t specify which company previously handled Rekognition processing, but the service has come under some scrutiny from civil rights groups for its involvement with law enforcement. Police were temporarily banned from using it earlier in the year, following the Black Lives Matter protests.

Nvidia and Intel are two of the biggest providers of computing chips, often for data centres, with companies like Amazon and Microsoft included in their clientele. However, a number of firms have begun to move away from vendors and are bringing the technology in-house. For example, Apple has recently moved away from Intel chips in favour of the A14 Bionic processors, which will be used going forward.

Salesforce has said it aims to add over 100,000 new skilled jobs to the UK market over the next four years through a partnership with training provider QA.

Three apprenticeship programmes and a developer Bootcamp will be created to boost the country’s digital skills and produce a cohort of graduates trained in Salesforce certifications, the company announced on Thursday.

The initiatives could potentially add over 100,000 skilled jobs in the UK over the next four years, according to IDC, with Salesforce boosting its own ecosystem of customers and partners.

Demand for digital skills has been high for years but it has become particularly acute during the pandemic and the greater use of cloud platforms. QA, which is an established provider of Salesforce training, is aiming to bridge the gap by expanding its work with the company.

In the UK, there is a growing demand for Salesforce technology, according to QA, which is fuelling the need for businesses to quickly find and hire new skilled Salesforce talent.

The Developer Bootcamp is a 12-week intensive course that provides specialist skills required to design data models, user interfaces and security for custom applications as well as the ability to customise them for mobile use. The first boot camp is expected to start in March 2021.

The apprenticeship programmes will provide practical learning closely aligned to specific career paths, namely service desk engineering, marketing professional, and business analytics roles within the Salesforce ecosystem.

All three apprenticeships are available for immediate starts and both initiatives will be complemented by content from a Salesforce’s online learning platform Trailhead, which allows participants to continue to develop their Salesforce skills after they have completed their programmes.

«We care passionately about developing the next generation of skilled professionals for our industry,» said Adam Spearing, Salesforce’s EMEA CTO. «The Salesforce ecosystem represents a growing opportunity and urgent need for talent within our customers, marketplace, partners and developers, and we want to kick-start the careers and pathways for young adults. We are excited to be partnering with QA to launch the Developer Bootcamp and Apprenticeship programmes.»

Google will restrict the online cloud storage capacity for high-quality photos and videos to 15GB from next year as the firm looks to capitalise on the millions of users who have come to rely on the service.

From June 2021, new high-quality content uploaded to Google Photos will count towards a free 15GB storage capacity, with the company making several pricing tiers available to those who need to store more data. The limit will also apply to files that users keep on Drive, specifically Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, and Jamboard files.

Google is framing these plans as a way to be able to continue to provide everybody with a great storage experience while keeping pace with the growing demand for its free services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of its new visual data preparation tool that lets users clean and normalise data without having to write code.

Built as part of its AWS Glue service, the new DataBrew tool aims to make visual data preparation more accessible for a greater number of users.

According to AWS, DataBrew facilitates data exploration and experimentation directly from AWS data lakes, data warehouses, and databases. Its users will be able to choose from over 250 built-in functions to combine, pivot, and transpose the data, with the tool also providing transformations that use advanced machine learning techniques such as natural language processing.

DataBrew is serverless and fully-managed, the claim being that users will never need to configure, provision, or manage any compute resources directly.

“AWS customers are using data for analytics and machine learning at an unprecedented pace”, commented Raju Gulabani, AWS vice president of Database and Analytics. “However, these customers regularly tell us that their teams spend too much time on the undifferentiated, repetitive, and mundane tasks associated with data preparation. Customers love the scalability and flexibility of code-based data preparation services like AWS Glue, but they could also benefit from allowing business users, data analysts, and data scientists to visually explore and experiment with data independently, without writing code.

«AWS Glue DataBrew features an easy-to-use visual interface that helps data analysts and data scientists of all technical levels understand, combine, clean, and transform data,” he added.

AWS Glue DataBrew is generally available starting today in Ireland and Frankfurt, Germany, as well as select parts of the United States, including Ohio and Oregon, and the Asia Pacific Region. AWS said that it will announce the availability in additional regions “soon” but has yet to confirm when the tool will arrive in the UK.

When it comes to pricing, AWS said that the DataBrew users will not be faced with any “upfront commitments or costs” to use the tool, but will be expected to pay for the ability to create and run transformations on datasets. AWS did not immediately respond to IT Pro’s query regarding specific pricing.

By 2025 analyst firm Gartner predicts that three quarters of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at the edge – meaning outside of a traditional data centre or cloud and closer to end users.

The Linux Foundation defines edge computing as the delivery of computing capabilities to the logical extremes of a network in order to improve the performance, security, operating cost and reliability of applications and services. “By shortening the distance between devices and the cloud resources that serve them, edge computing mitigates the latency and bandwidth constraints of today’s internet, ushering in new classes of applications,” the foundation explains in its Open Glossary of Edge Computing.

Edge computing has been on a large hype cycle for several years now and many consider it “the Wild West”. This is because there’s a high volume of chaotic activity in this area, resulting in duplicated efforts, as technologists all vie to find the best solutions.

“It’s early doors,” says Brian Partridge, research director at 451 Research. “Vendors and service providers are throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Enterprises are experimenting, investors are making large bets. In short, the market is thrashing, crowded and there’s a lot of confusion.” 

A synergy between cloud native and the edge 

Edge computing opens up many possibilities for organisations looking to scale their infrastructure and support more latency-sensitive applications. As cloud native infrastructures were created to improve flexibility, scalability and reliability, many developers are looking to replicate these benefits close to the data’s source, at the edge. 

“Cloud native can help organisations fully leverage edge computing by providing the same operational consistency at the edge as it does in the cloud,” notes Priyanka Sharma, general manager of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). 

“It offers high levels of interoperability and compatibility through the use of open standards and serves as a launchpad for innovation based on the flexible nature of its container orchestration engine. It also enables remote devops teams to work faster and more efficiently,” she points out. 

Benefits of using cloud native at the edge

Benefits of using cloud native at the edge include the ability to complete faster rollbacks. Therefore, edge deployments that break or have bugs can be rapidly returned to a working state, says William Fellows, co-founder and research director of 451 Research. 

“We’re also seeing more granular, layered container support whereby updates are portioned into smaller chunks or targeted at limited environments and thus don’t require an entire container image update. Cloud native microservices provide an immensely flexible way of developing and delivering fine-grain service and control,” he adds.

There are also financial benefits to taking the cloud native path. The reduction in bandwidth and streamlined data that cloud native provides can reduce costs, making it an incredibly efficient tool for businesses. 

“It can also allow consumption-based pricing approach to edge computing without a large upfront CapEx spend,” notes Andrew Buss, IDC research director for European enterprise infrastructure.

However, it wouldn’t be the “Wild West” out there right now if cloud native was the perfect solution. There are still several challenges still to work on, including security concerns. 

“Containers are very appealing due to them being lightweight but they’re actually very bad at ‘containing’,” points out Ildikó Vanska, ecosystem technical lead at the Open Infrastructure Foundation (formerly the OpenStack Foundation).

“This means they don’t provide the same level of isolation as virtual machines, which can lead to every container running on the same kernel being compromised. That’s unacceptable from a security perspective. We should see this as a challenge that we still need to work on, not a downside to applying cloud native principles to edge computing,” she explains. 

There’s also the complexity of dealing with highly modular systems, so for those interested in moving towards cloud native edge computing, you need to prepare by investing the time and resources necessary to effectively implement it. 

What should businesses be thinking about when embarking on cloud native edge computing? 

Cloud native edge solutions are still relatively rare; IDC’s European Enterprise Infrastructure and Multicloud survey from May 2020 showed that the biggest edge investments are still on-premise. 

“However, we expect this to shift in the coming years as cloud native edge solutions become more widely available and mature and we have more use cases that take advantage of cloud as part of their design,” says Gabriele Roberti, Research Manager for IDC’s European Vertical Markets, Customer Insights and Analysis team, and Lead for IDC’s European Edge Computing Launchpad.

For those businesses eager to take the leap, Partridge recommends starting with the application vision, requirements and expected outcomes. After targeting edge use cases that can support a desired business objective – such as lowering operations costs – you can then turn your attention to the system required. 

Laura Foster, programme manager for tech and innovation at techUK, reiterates that it’s important to build a use case that works for your business needs. 

“There’s an exciting ecosystem of service providers, innovators and collaboration networks that can help build the right path for you, but the journey towards cloud native edge computing also needs to go hand in hand with cultural change,” she points out. 

“Emerging technologies, including edge computing, will pioneer innovation, but only if businesses push for change. Retraining and reskilling workforces is a fundamental part of an innovation journey and can often be the key to getting it right,” she concludes.

Remote working and digital transformation plans won’t go back to normal following the release a COVID-19 vaccine, according to IBM’s former CEO Ginni Rometty.

Speaking to CNBC, IBM’s executive chair said that remote work was «here to stay» as part of a hybrid model of working. 

The comments come just days after reports of a potential coronavirus vaccine with a 90% success rate in late-stage trials. Shares in services that had been heavily used during the pandemic, such as Zoom, Amazon and Netflix, all slumped after the announcement, suggesting a return to the old ways once the vaccine is ready. 

However, Rometty doesn’t believe that will be the case, saying it would be hard to go back to the old ways now the world had seen what is possible. 

«I actually don’t think these technology trends are going to reverse themselves,» Rometty told CNBC. She said that a vaccine «allows us to return to perhaps a bit of a more new normal. But a number of these things in the hybrid way of working I believe will remain, and the digital acceleration will continue because people have now seen what is possible.»

A number of businesses began welcoming employees back into the workplace after the first lockdown, with the government also urging a return to work to help boost the economy. However, a second national spike in coronavirus cases has led to a second autumn lockdown. 

The promise of a vaccine is seen as the safest way to move out of the pandemic, but many want a more balanced home-work setup. Early in the year reports suggested the UK public wanted to move to two or three days in office, with many keen not to go back at all.

Not everyone agrees, however. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that switching fully to remote working could have negative effects on wellbeing, learning and collaboration – despite his own company ushering in more varied remote working policies. 

«Learning, reskilling, onboarding is going to become a huge issue and we need to be able to incorporate the learning content into a workflow that is natural,» he said.

Adobe has announced its intent to acquire Workfront for $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) as it looks to add collaboration tools to its marketing business. 

The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year, subject to regulatory approval, Adobe said. 

Utah-based Workfront develops project management software for enterprise customers. It will add some 3,000 corporate customers and around one million users to Adobe, with Bloomberg suggesting the takeover could potentially be completed within a week. 

Whenever the deal goes through, it will be the first major action by executive vice president Anil Chakravarthy, who joined Adobe in January.

“Adobe is the undisputed leader in content creation, management, delivery, and measurement and a trusted partner to digital leaders around the globe,” said Chakravarthy. 

“The combination of Adobe and Workfront will further accelerate Adobe’s leadership in customer experience management, providing a pioneering solution that spans the entire lifecycle of digital experiences, from ideation to activation.”

The deal is seen as Adobe’s biggest effort to boost its Experience Cloud division, which includes its marketing, advertising and analytics services. The idea is to make its creative and business applications more collaborative, enabling teams to work closer on projects as they continue to operate remotely. 

Workfront has seen growing interest in its services during the pandemic as marketing firms have sought more insight into their operations. The company’s CEO, Alex Shootman, called the Adobe takeover an «awesome outcome».

«When you have an opportunity to work with the company that CMOs rely on to run their business, which is Adobe, and you’re a company like Workfront, that takes us forward years in terms of what we would have been able to accomplish on our own,» he said.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reached a settlement with Zoom after it sued the company for «unfair and deceptive security practices». 

Following the FTC’s announcement, shares in the video conferencing service tumbled. Zoom closed at 17.4% lower on Monday, with news of positive coronavirus vaccine data also having an impact, according to CNBC. 

This also affected a number of stocks for service that had been boosted by the pandemic, such as Netflix (8.6% decline) and Amazon (5.1%), but Zoom appeared to be the worst-hit.

With the onset of the pandemic, and the sudden need to stay home, Zoom saw a massive spike in users, turning into a household name almost overnight. This brought greater scrutiny on the firm and highlighted a number of security issues, one of which being a lack of end-to-end encryption. 

In its settlement reached with the FTC, the company was accused of collecting user data during recorded conferences. Zoom initially said it had «end-to-end, 26-bit encryption», but in fact, it «provided a lower level of security,» the FTC said. 

«During the pandemic, practically everyone – families, schools, social groups, businesses – is using video conferencing to communicate, making the security of these platforms more critical than ever,» said Andrew Smith, the FTC’s director of consumer protection.

«Zoom’s security practices didn’t line up with its promises, and this action will help to make sure that Zoom meetings and data about Zoom users are protected.»

The FTC has called on Zoom to «implement a robust information security programme» as well as a «prohibition on privacy and security misrepresentations».

Zoom is arguably one of the biggest success stories of the year, reportedly recording a 355% revenue increase in the second quarter of 2020. The figures are even more impressive when considering the number of privacy issues it also had to deal with, such as ‘Zoom bombing‘ where unwanted actors invade meetings. 

The service has been used by both remote workers and those stuck at home, to keep in touch with friends and family, but the announcement from Pfizer and BioNTech of a vaccine candidate with a 90% success rate during late-stage trials have suggested Zoom might not enjoy continued success beyond the pandemic.