An anonymous reader quotes long-time technology pundit Robert Cringely:
Forty-five days from now, we’re told, President Trump will shut down TikTok and WeChat. TikTok, maybe, but WeChat? Impossible… Trump has a chance of taking down TikTok, the short form video sharing site, because that service is dependent on advertising. He can force the app out of U.S. app stores (though not out…
Tag: skype
What Comes After Zoom?
Analyst Benedict Evans writes: There will be video in everything, just as there is voice in everything, and there will be a great deal of proliferation into industry verticals on one hand and into unbundling pieces of the tech stack on the other. On one hand video in healthcare, education or insurance is about the workflow, the data model and the…
A Virus-Hunter Falls Prey To a Virus He Underestimated
Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him “like a bus” in March. From a report:”This is the revenge of the viruses,” said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “I’ve made their lives difficult. Now they’re trying to get me.”…
Slack CEO: Microsoft is ‘Unhealthily Preoccupied With Killing Us’
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield claimed earlier this month that Microsoft Teams isn’t a competitor to Slack. In an interview with The Verge, Butterfield has revealed that, inside Slack, the company feels that “Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that.” From a report: Butterfield expands on why he thinks Microsoft is “unhealthily preoccupied”…
Microsoft Promises New Skype Features Despite Teams For Consumers Launch
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has shared few usage numbers since acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in October 2011. Skype’s monthly active users, for example, haven’t been updated since August 2015 — 300 million has been the number for years. But the coronavirus has shaken up the communications space for everyone, even Skype. With usage exploding due to COVID-19 and working…
LinkedIn Adds Polls and Live Video-based Events in a Focus on More Virtual Engagement
With a large part of the working world doing jobs from home when possible these days, the focus right now is on how best to recreate the atmosphere of an office virtually, and how to replicate online essential work that used to be done in person. Today, LinkedIn announced a couple of big new feature updates that point to how it’s…
Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS ‘Focal Fossa’, Featuring Linux 5.4 Kernel and WireGuard VPN, Now Available For Download
Canonical has released the newest version of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 20.04. This long-term-support (LTS) version is more than just the latest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions; it’s a major update for desktop, server, and cloud users. From a news story: Called “Focal Fossa,” it is an LTS version, meaning “Long Term Support.” Just how long…
Programmer’s Real-Time Deepfake Lets Him Impersonate Elon Musk on Zoom
Motherboard reports on a new open source program “that superimposes someone else’s face onto yours in real-time, during video meetings.”
Programmer Ali Aliev used the open-source code from the “First Order Motion Model for Image Animation,” published on the arxiv preprint server earlier this year [and developed by researchers at the University of Trento in Italy as well as Snap]… With other…
Skype Audio Graded by Workers in China With ‘No Security Measures’
A Microsoft program to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with “no security measures,” according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company. From a report: The recordings, both deliberate…
Skype, Slack, Other Electron-Based Apps Can Be Easily Backdoored
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Electron development platform is a key part of many applications, thanks to its cross-platform capabilities. Based on JavaScript and Node.js, Electron has been used to create client applications for Internet communications tools (including Skype, WhatsApp, and Slack) and even Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code development tool. But Electron can also pose a…