Technology

Creeping erosion of privacy? Desperately needed technology-based solution to a global life-or-death problem? A little of both? Here is what we think we know now about the Apple/Google contact tracing technologyannounced on Friday.

What has happened?

Apple and Google are working together to develop COVID-19 contact tracing technologyfor both Android and iOS devices.

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The Covid-19 outbreak has led to a worldwide experiment in remote working as employees across the world are forced to self-isolate. But will workers return to the office en masse once the disruption caused by the pandemic ends? Or will working from home become the new normal?

Remote working, once quaintly known as telecommuting, has been on the rise for decades, thanks to the availability of digital communication and collaboration tools that enable staff to do their jobs outside of physical office. The trend has accelerated in recent years, aided by a new breed of business-focused group chat apps like Slack and more reliable, user-friendly videoconferencing tools that make it easier to connect with colleagues and be productive without sitting the same office, or even the same country.

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Millions of people across a diverse array of industries are working from home for the foreseeable future. For some, ittheir first time doing so for more than a few days at a time. While we&ve all been adjusting to remote work, we&ve become increasingly reliant on collaboration tools such as Slack, Zoom and Microsoft Teams & but are they actually making us more productive? And once itsafe to return to an office, will employees be willing to give up their remote work lifestyles? ComputerworldMatthew Finnegan joins Juliet to talk collaboration, effectively working from home and how remote work tools will shape the events business and entire industries.

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Due to you-know-what (if I have to type "corona" or "COVID" again, I'll scream), enterprises have been forced to send a massive number of employees into makeshift home offices within just a few days. That means that there was no time for the security niceties, such as properly processing RFPs for apps that were thoroughly vetted. Given the emergency, employees and IT teams worked with what they could, figuring that they would improve security on the fly as soon as circumstances permitted.

That brings us to MFA. Multifactor authentication is supposed to be just that, but it's typically deployed in the least secure manner — sending straight numeric texts to a mobile device, a tactic that is well-known to be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. So, are there better ways to deploy MFA, something that can be easily executed under today's far-less-than-ideal conditions? Let's dig in.

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Patch Tuesday arrives tomorrow, April 14, later in the month than usual. Microsoft has had a truly wretched series of patches going out the chute on Patch Tuesdays.

In spite of what you&ve read and all those Chicken Little cries of impending doom, we haven&t seen a single bonafide emergency security patch in more than a year.

To be sure, we&ve seen a bunch of dire warnings that simply never came true. We've also seen more than our fair share of buggy patches. Don't believe it? Herea detailed list going back almost three years.

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Way back when, in the days before Mark Zuckerbergtreachery was a trending Twitter topic, the tech industry was said to have boundless potential to improve the world. Plus, there was boundless money to be made! Then the trolls, criminals, predators, and demagogues marched into the public squares that tech built, and the tragedy of the digital commons unfolded on a global scale. And big tech wasn&t averse to monetizing that, either.

So tech was disastrously tarnished — until a few weeks ago, when, torn from our open-plan offices and trapped in our homes, we discovered the digital tools that connect us are lifelines. Those of us lucky enough to continue working as the economy implodes are compulsively embracing collaboration software, from project planners to videoconferencing apps. Suddenly, public appreciation for what engineers labor tirelessly to build has risen again.

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