I’ve been testing the newest entry in Logitech’s growing line of Brio webcams over the past week and will reserve my final judgment (and rating) for some time later. What’s certain to me is that it’s an impressive computer-top camera, with several smart features that are clearly becoming a commonality in this new wave of hybrid webcams. More: The 10 best webcams you can buy today Let’s get the basics out of the way first....

“We’re building Lyft Maps to be able to optimize the entire Lyft experience,” Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer said on the conference call. “We’re incredibly excited about this work. The team has been heads down for several years.” Lyft’s decision to build its own mapping platform may seem strange, given that Google and Apple have already spent several years and huge sums of money to create top-notch maps that are nearly ubiquitous....

Crypto investing isn’t currently up yet on M1’s platform, but M1’s investors can sign up on a waitlist to begin crypto trading on its new interactive portfolio dashboard called Pies. M1, however, didn’t provide a date when investors will be able to start crypto trading other than to keep an eye out for it in the coming months. Available cryptocurrency includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, and, according to the company’s blog post, “other large-cap liquid crypto assets....

In addition, the company is reducing its portfolio management fee from 0.35% to 0.25%. These are welcomed changes to the robo-advisory investment platform. A robo-advisor investment platform manages a selection of portfolios on behalf of investors. According to Harshal Goel, managing director of Marcus by Goldman Sachs, portfolios are based on models created by the Goldman Sachs Investment strategy group. The portfolios are matched with investors based on their answers to questions as they create an account, as well as according to investment goals they set....

You’re desperate to get away, but the virus has kept you at home. You want everything to be back to normal, but you fear it never will be. You simply want to feel good again. You want fulfillment in your life, or at least something that resembles it. Please don’t worry, there’s finally a solution and it comes from that fine purveyor of relaxing environments, Marriott. The hotel chain is promising to give you a more fulfilling travel experience....

The company beat analyst expectations, which had estimated that Q4 earnings per share would come in at $2.19. Revenue for the full year is also up 23% to $18.9 billion. Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said in the press release that the increase in revenue is due in part to an increase in consumer cross-border spending, which the company reports is now above pre-pandemic levels. Mastercard’s full-year EPS was reported at $8....

The BlenderBot 3 demo is accessible online for US-based visitors and should be available in other countries soon. “BlenderBot 3 is capable of searching the internet to chat about virtually any topic, and it’s designed to learn how to improve its skills and safety through natural conversations and feedback from people ‘in the wild’,” Meta says in a blogpost. A key part of Meta’s research in releasing the chatbot to the public is to help develop safety measures for the chatbot....

During the week, PrintNightware, a critical Windows print spooler vulnerability that allowed for remote code execution was known as CVE-2021-1675. Exploits were publicly available after Microsoft’s patches failed to fix the issue completely and the security researchers had already published their code, said they deleted it, but it was already branched on GitHub. In short, if it was a supported version of Windows, it had a hole in it. “Microsoft has partially addressed this issue in their update for CVE-2021-1675....

The patches released address common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) in: Microsoft Windows and Windows Components; Azure, Azure Arc, and Azure DevOps; Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based); Office and Office Components; Visual Studio Code; Active Directory Domain Services and Active Directory Certificate Services; Nu Get Client; Hyper-V; and the Windows Resilient File System (ReFS). This release comes on top of 12 patches for CVEs in Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based) released earlier this month. Also: What, exactly, is cybersecurity?...

The security flaws impact Microsoft products including Windows, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office and more, some of which have been targeted by malicious hackers for months. Two of the critical updates address security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, which have actively been under attack since September – CVE-2022-41028 and CVE-2022-41040. Also: The scary future of the internet: How the tech of tomorrow will pose even bigger cybersecurity threats CVE-2022-41040 is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability, an exploit that allows attackers to make server-side application requests from an unintended location – for example, allowing them to access internal services without being within the perimeter of the network....

One side sees everything only from its perspective and knows it’s right. The other side sees everything from its own perspective and wonders what the first side is talking about. It makes for unbearable watching. Mercifully I’m not talking about politics. Well, I’m trying not to because in politics too much has been too evident for too long. (At least that’s how it appears from my side.) No, today’s subject is remote work, the new hybrid life and how bosses and employees see it differently....

Teams now supports third-party CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) providers within the same window instead of a secondary one, Microsoft announced in its November Teams update. CART, or real-time captioning, is an accessibility feature to support people with hearing difficulties, but is also useful for everyone participating in an online video meeting. This should streamline the experience for people who use a CART captioner. It’s also available for Microsoft’s government (GCC) customers....

The Teams PWA is intended as the replacement for the Teams Linux client, which Microsoft finally launched in 2019 but last month encouraged Linux users to ditch for the upcoming Teams PWA, which can be installed via Chrome and Edge. The PWA option is only available for Linux and is offered as an install via a browser notification. Microsoft will retire the Teams Linux desktop client in December, according to Petri....

Microsoft has spent the last year aligning Teams to users’ needs during the pandemic, and is continuing its efforts to refine key features, such as breakout rooms. This feature arrived in December and lets meeting organizers split participants into smaller focus groups for brainstorming. Zoom has a similar feature, and both companies are battling it out on new features and management controls. While meeting organizers already had the ability to create and manage breakouts, Microsoft is adding a new control that allows them to delegate breakout room controls to specific presenters....

Indeed, the Blueprint for Critical Technologies [PDF] is like a reverse fractal. The closer you look at it and its rather generously titled action plan [PDF], the less detail there is to see. “Our aim in developing the list is to provide guidance and a clear signal about the critical technologies that may have national interest implications for Australia today or within the next ten years,” says the action plan....

Responding to the tweet days later and calling out the browser maker were Jamie Zawinski and Peter Linss. “Hi, I’m sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded Mozilla and I’m here to say fuck you and fuck this,” Zawinski said. “Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.” Linuss was no less withering in his criticism....

A common criticism across recent years over the direction of Twitter has been whether those at the top use the site like its regular users do. Rather than tackle abuse properly by giving everyone access to the German option of autobanning neo-Nazi and white supremacist content, Twitter gave us Fleets, which didn’t even survive a year. That sort of approach looks really good as a box ticking exercise for project managers, but for users, it looks like the company is distracted and doesn’t really understand its own service....

“Other missions found hydration on the Moon, but that could indicate hydroxyl or water. If it’s water, where did it come from? Is it indigenous to the formation of the Moon, or did it arrive later by comet impacts? How much water is there? We need to answer these questions because water is critical for survival and can be used to make fuel for further exploration,” said Dr. Bulcha. SEE: NASA enters contract for computing processor that will change space exploration NASA prioritizes identifying water and other resources because it is crucial to exploring the Moon and other objects in the solar system....

Can you say, “Ow!"? The power to grab root privileges is the ultimate evil in Unix and Linux systems. Kevin Backhouse, a member of the GitHub Security Lab, found the polkit security hole in the course of his duties. He revealed it to the polkit maintainers and Red Hat’s security team. Then, when a fix was released on June 3, 2021, it was publicly disclosed as CVE-2021-3560. Backhouse found an unauthorized local user could easily get a root shell on a system using a few standard shell tools such as bash, kill, and dbus-send....

In the company’s last report, they pegged the figure at around $350 million, but increased the figure “due to both underreporting by ransomware victims and our continuing identification of ransomware addresses that have received previous victim payments.” Right now, the latest figures show more than $692 million was spent on ransomware payments in 2020. For 2021, they have already tracked over $602 million worth of ransomware payments but noted that like 2020, it is an underestimate....