This week we’re asking you for answers. COVID-19 has altered the workplace in a variety of ways, with a lot of people now working from home, possibly for the first time. We’ve already shared our recommendations for must-have home-office tech — now we want to hear from you. Whether it’s a VPN, a Wacom tablet or even something as simple as a lap desk (I love my lap desk), share your best advice with your fellow readers.
Weigh in with your advice in the comments — and feel free to send your own questions along to ask@engadget.com!
This week, Devindra chats with TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha about Quibi, the mobile video startup from Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg. Is it any good? (Spoiler: Not really.) And what does it mean for the future of mobile only video? Also, Devindra interviews Alex Garland, the director of Annihilation and Ex Machina, about his new FX series Devs, a trippy exploration of free will in the quantum computing era.
‘Final Fantasy 7 Remake’ is a gamble that paid off
The new story twists help change things up just enough.
Square Enix
Decades in the making, Square Enix’s refreshed vision of Final Fantasy VII is here. Mat Smith had some doubts about the project, but now he says “it delivers.” Continue reading.
LG V60 5G ThinQ review
‘A compromised phone I like anyway.’
Engadget
LG is still trying to make its version of dual-screen mobile devices happen, with two screens linked by a case instead of one foldable display. The V60’s software isn’t exactly up to par with other flagships, but LG’s hardware decisions make it easier to use than many other top of the line phones and — perhaps most importantly — a lot cheaper. Let Chris Velazco explain why this might be the two-screen device to choose right now. Continue reading.
The note also mentions that wearables like the Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Active already have an update with Bixby available, while the Gear S3 and Gear Sport will get one after S Voice shuts down. The feature never really worked well enough to suggest that many people are still using it, but it’s possibly an issue for someone making use of hands free features on older hardware who can’t afford to upgrade. Still, on those older phones or even cheap modern devices, features like Bixby, Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa are widely available now.
One of the great things about Zoom is the ability to change backgrounds. You can use any image you want to cover up the laundry piling up behind you, for instance, or to ensure your privacy in calls with workmates you don’t really know. Now that most people are turning to video calling platforms while working for home, Microsoft has rolled out a Teams update that also gives it the capability to change your background environment.
While you can’t upload your own image yet like you can with Zoom — Microsoft promises to launch that feature later — you can choose from several backgrounds provided by the collaboration platform. The tech giant explains that the capability builds upon background blur that uses AI to blur the environment behind you.
Just a month after launch, Activision’s new battle royal entry Call of Duty: Warzone has topped 50 million players. The free-to-play add-on for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has launched at an interesting time, and appears to be roughly on pace with the growth seen last year by EA’s Fortnite challenger Apex Legends. That game also topped 50 million players in a month, although maintaining that momentum is the hard part.
Coming out of the gate with cross platform play between PS4, Xbox One and PC should help keep the player base consistent and growing. It only took four days to reach 15 million players, ten days to reach 30 million then addressed early player gripes with its recent update, a solo mode and four player squads.
Another classic album is finally coming to streaming services, and with particularly good timing at that. Dr. Dre’s influential hit The Chronic is reaching all streaming music services on April 20th — can you imagine it arriving on any other day? It’s been available on Apple Music since 2015 (not surprising given Dre’s involvement with Apple), but now you won’t have to be picky about where and how you hear “Nuthin’ But A G Thang.”
It’s not certain what prompted the wider release besides an extremely appropriate date. Pragmatism frequently plays a role when holdouts make albums widely available online, though. Whether artists like it or not, streaming services dominate music revenue these days. They’re limiting their income if they stick to one service, not to mention their ability to reach audiences that wouldn’t even consider buying a CD. This ensures that millions more people can hear that definitive West Coast sound and understand where modern hip hop and rap find their roots.
Discord voice chats are particularly important when the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing many to work and play at home, and there’s now a tool to make sure your ambient home sounds don’t intrude on those chats. It’s deploying a noise suppression beta feature for the desktop that removes (or at least reduces) background sounds so that voice and video chat participants only hear you speaking. Friends and coworkers shouldn’t hear that loud mechanical keyboard or that talkative housemate.
The company stressed that the technology, from Krisp, runs entirely locally and doesn’t share data with anyone else.
Which is why it’s especially cynical for many of us that Google banned employees from using Zoom’s shady desktop app on the same day that Zoom hired Facebook’s former security bobblehead as a consultant on its hazy privacy and security triage campaign.
Everyone working remotely: ZOOM monitors the activity on your computer and collects data on the programs running and captures which window you have focus on. If you manage the calls, you can monitor what programs users on the call are running as well. It’s fucked up.
On top of all that, a Zoom shareholder this week filed a lawsuit over its now-sliding stock price, accusing the company of “deliberately hiding security flaws in its platform.” Don’t confuse it with the other lawsuit, filed at the end of March over Zoom’s improper (and possibly illegal in California) data-trading deal with Facebook.
The Trump administration’s DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, on the other hand, loves it and thinks Zoom is doing a great job.
I’m sorry, I should back up. I know every day is ten years long now so let’s anger-cry our way through a Zoom highlight reel.
Uber, but for teleconferencing
Zoom founder Eric Yuan poses in front of the Nasdaq building in NYC.
Kena Betancur via Getty Images
When February became March, quarantine became the rule for most of North America. Zoom, a “unicorn” founded by a Valley billionaire, was a security- and privacy-challenged teleconferencing app for businesses that had already wormed its way into daily use by ten million users. Founded in 2013, the company achieved quick adoption through partnerships with businesses like Facebook, and probably the same greasiness and hubris wealthy founders enjoy. But also likely because the founder made his billions selling Zoom’s ugly, clunky first iteration, WebEx, to Cisco, and had the connections.
Anyway, quarantine life was a violent change for most people and absolutely brutal for many businesses and educational institutions. Zoom’s use spiked to 200 million in March. These new users were desperate people trying to keep their jobs, educate their children, seek help from doctors, and yes, families and everyday people scrabbling for a shred of normalcy (human connection) while a mysterious and terrifying virus began to endlessly fill refrigerated trucks with dead bodies outside their living room windows.
Why Zoom? Good question. One answer is certainly its ease of use and robustness. The video quality is consistently good, calls seldom get dropped, and routine problems with other conferencing apps (like inconsistent or confusing UI) are far less. Zoom also did things a whole lot of people really want from old fuddy-duddy apps like Skype; namely, customizable backgrounds, a Brady Bunch-style grid view, and more. You still needed to download a third-party app like Snap Camera or iGlasses to get cool filters, but whatever.
The answer to “why Zoom?” may also lie in the fact that while Zoom saw its profits explode thanks to a terrified and literally captive user base, its founder decided to give away unlimited memberships to K-12 schools in Japan, Italy and the United States. He started, of course, with what press described as “a prestigious school in Silicon Valley.”
Re: NYC blocking Zoom I like Matthew a lot, but I don’t feel this is a “dumb overreaction.” As a security admin overseeing 40K+ students and participating in communities serving over 1.5M students, I would love to shed some light on the difficulties Zoom has created for us. https://t.co/sruZap9VnA
It’s probably cynical to think that while a trapped user base is good for the stock portfolio, a similarly desperate and non-tech-savvy set of captives is an atmosphere conducive to sidelining privacy and security concerns.
This isn’t to say “people should have known.” This is to say instead, Zoom should have been better digital citizens than that.
Aspirational malware
In 2018, security company Tenable found a Zoom vuln “that allows an attacker to hijack screen controls, spoof chat messages or kick and lock attendees out of meetings.” Zoom then released updates for macOS, Windows and Linux, but its fix didn’t work all the way. Zoom offered the Tenable researcher money for reporting the problem — as long as the researcher kept his mouth shut about it. The money was declined.
The end of 2018 is also when people tried to raise the alarm about what happened when people installed Zoom on a Mac; basically that Zoom *also* installed its own web server that could re-install Zoom even if you tried to remove it. The server also introduced security holes that let attackers hijack Mac users’ webcams. At the time, Zoom’s CISO said this server was meant to “bypass a security feature introduced by Apple in Safari 12” — under the guise of saving people a click.
2019 brought more of the same. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed an FTC complaint alleging Zoom “committed unfair and deceptive practices,” saying the company “intentionally designed its web conferencing service to bypass browser security settings and remotely enable a user’s web camera without the knowledge or consent of the user.”
Zooming in on the fine print
But that was then and this is now. When Zoom was suddenly in everyone’s homes, a lot of privacy focused orgs were like, please no. Proton Mail delivered a laundry list of everything rotten about the company’s privacy practices, including the extremely scary privacy choices around who can see your private messages (and more). Then, the Intercept dissected Zoom’s claims and practices of end-to-end encryption, finding that the company had made up its own (misleading) definition of encryption — followed by Citizen Lab’s brutal report on Zoom’s terrible encryption practices.
As more articles came out about Zoom’s problems, Zoom finally started to take some action. For instance, two days after Vice’s report on the company’s Facebook iOS data sharing (including how it fed Facebook’s shadow profiles), Zoom removed the code that sent data to Facebook.
Examples like “Zoombombing” — call hijacking — hit critical mass this month when attackers got organized. Zoombombs have included flashers, hate speech, porn, and threats. According to NPR, those affected include: “an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New York, Sunday school in Texas, online classes at the University of Southern California and a city meeting in Kalamazoo, Mich.” And Washington Post just reported that thousands of Zoom recordings of private meetings and calls were exposed online. These included therapy sessions, elementary school classes, business meetings and, because horny always finds a way, nudes.
Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps Zoom is the Facebook of video apps https://t.co/HPe9qXqBqu
Look, people are already calling Zoom “the Facebook of video apps.” I guess they just had to complete the vicious cycle by hiring that Facebook security guy.
That’s Alex Stamos. He was Facebook’s CSO when Facebook got caught giving advertisers people’s security information (phone numbers users provided for two-factor security purposes) for ad targeting. When infosec folks complained about giving Facebook their phone number for two-factor and then got SMS spammed via the number they provided, Stamos attempted to soothe the betrayal by writing: “The last thing we want is for people to avoid helpful security features because they fear they will receive unrelated notifications.”
I’m sure Mr. Stamos will help Zoom get its security story together for prime time. It’s just a hell of a dark comedy PR move, at least if your perspective isn’t looking down from management. And that’s what got us here with Zoom, really.
What we really want to know is how this is all still happening. I mean, we know the system is broken; billionaire jerkwads and their bros get rewarded for exploiting us, ruining our lives, making us feel unsafe, destroying democracy, and get a big ‘ol unicorn pat on the back for it.
They’ll never have true ethics and compassion for true otherness because they’ll never experience true consequences. They genuinely don’t have all-stakes relationships with people outside their class. Right now their jobs are secure, they just bought all this new stuff to stay entertained in quarantine, they have concierge doctors, they don’t really see that it’s a big deal. They never thought Zoombombing would be a real problem for anyone whose opinion or business that matters to them, because they’ve probably never experienced the “poor people” (or working class, or scared) side of their product’s use. For them, privacy is like money, insofar as it is a moral reward for those who “deserve” it.
It’s no coincidence that the people most affected by COVID-19 are the exact same people who are marginalized, sidelined, excluded, left behind, exploited, and silenced by tech (and there are a lot of us).
How to survive a Zoombie apocalypse
VectorPocket via Getty Images
The question is how this keeps happening to those of us who are lucky to know a little bit more about tech than our friends and family. And the answer right now is that the stakes are impossibly high, while the options are unbelievably bad. Think about it. Like all of us, schoolteachers suddenly woke up in The Walking Dead. Even if they had jumped on Google and searched “Zoom: best privacy and security practices” the search would have been meaningless — because Zoom’s bad practices were baked in and its statements could not be trusted.
In light of the privacy and security avalanche raining on Zoom right now, the company’s CEO is eager for all of this to go away. Eric Yuan told TIME that basically, he can’t wait for the pandemic to be over so they can go back to focusing on their enterprise customers. Er, as in, going back to the way it was before? When they were unmasking people’s employees, deceiving their enterprise customers about encryption, exposing businesses to vulns, and who knows what else?
Yeah. So.
I would like to encourage everyone, especially companies that have been skating by on BS privacy and security practices, to think of quarantine 2020 like one big, long, super-angry hacking and security conference. Because the 20,000 who normally attend Black Hat USA (or the 30,000 at DEF CON) may not be going this year. They’re certainly not at the security conferences they usually go to this time of year. The new hacking conference is your bad practices, Zoombros. And all those bored researchers get pretty mad when you put their families at risk during a goddamn pandemic.
Besides giving people something to watch, the league is for a good cause. The MLB, MLB Players Association and Sony will donate $5,000 on behalf of each player to their team’s local Boys and Girls Club affiliate. Whoever ultimately takes the postseason crown will earn an additional $25,000 for their community, for a total of $175,000 going out to charity.
The MLB will livestream each and every game to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Twitch. MLB Network hosts Robert Flores and Heidi Watney will provide commentary, recaps and analysis, plus player interviews, between games. You’ll also be able to watch the games through the players’ personal Twitch and YouTube accounts, which should hopefully lead to some candid moments.
The latest model of the Apple Watch remains on sale at Best Buy for $350. Sales on the latest Apple Watch don’t come by often, and when they do, you typically won’t see the price drop more than this. The Series 5 has all of the stellar features of the previous Apple Watch models, and it has a few unique features including an always-on LTPO display, a built-in compass and international emergency calling.
From now until May 30, you can get Ableton Live 10 audio production software for 30 percent off. This knocks the price of the Intro tier to $70, the Standard tier to $325 and the Suite tier to $525, making this deal better than what Ableton offered last Black Friday. A digital audio workstation like Live 10 is essential if you want to start making beats on your computer, and Ableton’s software lets you produce as well as perform your own music. If you’re not ready to take the plunge with Live 10, Ableton also increased its free-trial period from 30 days to 90 days. You can even get its Making Music instructional book for free, too (it normally costs $30 for a physical version).
Adorama still has a great deal on a mirrorless camera: get the Olympus O-MD E-M10 Mark II Micro Four Thirds with an M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens for $300. While this isn’t the latest model, it’s quite capable with its five-axis in-body stabilization, 16-megapixel sensor, tilting display and its 2.36-million-dot electronic viewfinder. The only downside is that it’s video recording abilities max out at 1080p at 60fps. Nevertheless, $300 for a mirrorless camera of this quality and a lens is a great deal.
The Amazon Echo is back down to its Black Friday price of $60 at Best Buy and Amazon. This smart speaker normally costs $100 and we sometimes see it drop close to $80. This is probably the best price we’ll see this Alexa speaker drop to before Amazon Prime Day. We gave the Echo a score of 90 for its solid audio quality, responsive mics and relatively affordable price. If you want to start a smart home ecosystem, you can add an Amazon Smart Plug to your order for only $10 more.
Sonos is still offering discounts on some of its popular speakers. You can get the Sonos Beam soundbar for $350, the Sonos One for $150, and the Sonos One SL for $130. While all three sales are great, the $150 Sonos One is arguably the best option for most users, particularly those who want to start building a home sound system. We gave the Sonos One a score of 90, praising it for its excellent audio quality, subtle design and voice-assistant compatibility, among other things.
Let’s be honest – we could all use a massage right now. Theragun is offering up to $150 off its massage devices, knocking a decent amount off of the prices of its three models. The G3 Pro now costs $450, the G3 costs $350 and the Liv (currently sold out) costs $200. Originally made for professionals, Theragun machines deliver something close to deep-tissue massages that can be rejuvenating for your muscles. The more advanced the model, the more amplitude and speed settings you’ll get.
Walmart has the Google Home for only $50 right now. This is a great deal because this smart speaker typically goes for $75 to $100, and has an original price of $120. One of the original Google Assistant speakers, the Google Home provides more robust audio than the Google Home Mini and it can control smart home devices, music playback and basically anything else you can ask the Google Assistant to manipulate.
Accessory maker Satechi is having a site-wide spring sale from April 10 through April 12 – just use code SPRING15 to get 15 percent off your order. It’s a good opportunity to look for a USB-C hub, wireless mouse or keyboard (I use the aluminum Bluetooth keyboard often and love it) or laptop stand to level-up your home office.
