Zoom Debuts New Advanced Enterprise Features

Zoom has announced several new advanced features targeting enterprise customers, including improved security, reliability, and regulatory compliance.

As Zoom points out in its press release, regulatory compliance, often relating to cybersecurity, has become a growing challenge for business.

In 2023 alone, over $549 million in non-compliance penalties were issued globally, more than 353 million individuals were impacted by security breaches, and 31 percent of enterprises experienced unstable network or bandwidth constraints. Companies face urgent pressures to manage often complex compliance obligations, avoid hefty fines, safeguard their reputations against security threats, and prevent user dissatisfaction stemming from unreliable connectivity. Zoom’s newest additions to its advanced enterprise offerings are poised to help companies overcome these challenges.

Zoom is adding four features designed to help enterprise companies.

• Zoom Compliance Manager Plus: Launched in March and powered by Theta Lake, Zoom Compliance Manager (ZCM) is an all-in-one offering that provides archiving, eDiscovery, legal hold, and information protection offerings for enterprises. Zoom Compliance Manager Plus enhances ZCM with advanced features such as risk detection, data loss protection, and advanced trends analysis. These enhanced capabilities will further help organizations fulfill regulatory obligations and mitigate organizational communications compliance risks.
• Zoom Meeting Survivability: Introduces a new level of network redundancy and enables business continuity, helping to ensure uninterrupted Zoom meeting service even during internet disruption due to outages from a storm, natural disaster, or carrier failure. Utilizing Zoom Node, a central hub for hosting Zoom workloads on premises, this functionality keeps meetings running smoothly via a failover to data centers where meetings are hosted on your local servers with minimal disruption to the end users.
• Zoom Mesh for Meetings: With Zoom Mesh, companies can optimize bandwidth usage and save up to 60 percent on internet bandwidth and associated costs. Already available for Zoom Webinars and Zoom Events, this capability now extends to Zoom Meetings for an exceptional user experience regardless of bandwidth constraints.
• Zoom Customer Managed Key (CMK) Hybrid: CMK Hybrid enhances Zoom’s current CMK data privacy offering by providing customers with more options to manage the encryption keys used to protect data maintained by Zoom. CMK Hybrid allows customers to control the entire encryption/decryption process on premises. Zoom Team Chat messages, for example, can be encrypted locally by the Zoom Workplace app (some Zoom cloud-based Team Chat functionalities will not be available as a result). Zoom CMK Hybrid will be available for Zoom Workplace starting with the support of Zoom Team Chat in Q4 2024.

“Zoom’s advanced enterprise offerings reflect our commitment to empowering businesses and providing them with offerings that enable them to be more efficient, secure, compliant, and reliable,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer, Zoom. “Our advanced enterprise products and features are essential tools built for Zoom Workplace and Zoom Business Services like Zoom Events and Zoom Contact Center that work behind the scenes as part of the Zoom network infrastructure to provide exceptional experiences to our customers. Our goal is to make communication and collaboration on Zoom foolproof, future-proof, and fail-proof.”

Zoom has been building out its enterprise offerings, increasingly competing against Microsoft and Google in the office and collaboration space. These latest editions should go a long way toward helping enterprise companies meet the growing security and regulator challenges they face.

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California Law Forces Companies to Be Honest About Digital Purchases vs Licensing

California is addressing one of the biggest irritations surrounding digital “purchases,” forcing companies to disclose when customers are really just licensing digital content.

Online platforms have increasingly switched from selling consumers digital goods to merely licensing them. The practice has drawn growing criticism, especially as companies later disable or revoke access to content or games that customers have paid for.

Calfornia’s AB 2426 legislation addresses this, forcing companies to be honest about whether they are selling content, or just leasing it.

The bill, which has already passed and been signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, was authored by Jacqui Irwin.

Existing law makes it unlawful for any person doing business in California and advertising to consumers in California to make any false or misleading advertising claim. Existing law makes a person who violates specified false advertising provisions liable for a civil penalty, as specified, and provides that a person who violates those false advertising provisions is guilty of a misdemeanor.

This bill would, subject to specified exceptions, additionally prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental, unless the seller receives at the time of each transaction an affirmative acknowledgment from the purchaser, or the seller provides to the consumer before executing each transaction a clear and conspicuous statement, as specified. By expanding the scope of a crime, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program.

The law is a welcome counter to what has become a common practice in the computer software, gaming, and digital media industries, and will hopefully help provide customers with what they need to make informed decisions.

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Tor Project and Tails OS Have Merged

The Tor Project announced it has merged with the Tails OS project, in an effort to improve collaboration, reduce overhead, and improve users’ access to freedom-preserving options.

Tor is the leading privacy option for users trying to circumvent surveillance, designed from the outset to route traffic through multiple encrypted servers, masking a user’s browsing activity even when a network is being monitored. Tails OS is a Debian-based Linux distro that is designed to be run 100% from a USB stick. As a result, an individual can temporarily use any computer as their own by booting off of the USB stick, leaving not trace behind when they power the machine down and leave.

Catch our chat on the big merger between Tor Project and Tails OS!

 

The projects are joining forces to pool their resources and make privacy-preserving tools more readily available to at-risk individuals, as well as average users.

Countering the threat of global mass surveillance and censorship to a free Internet, Tor and Tails provide essential tools to help people around the world stay safe online. By joining forces, these two privacy advocates will pool their resources to focus on what matters most: ensuring that activists, journalists, other at-risk and everyday users will have access to improved digital security tools.

In late 2023, Tails approached the Tor Project with the idea of merging operations. Tails had outgrown its existing structure. Rather than expanding Tails’s operational capacity on their own and putting more stress on Tails workers, merging with the Tor Project, with its larger and established operational framework, offered a solution. By joining forces, the Tails team can now focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of The Tor Project.

The merger builds on 15 years of collaboration and solidarity between the two projects, but will allow Tails to tap into Tor’s resources.

“Running Tails as an independent project for 15 years has been a huge effort, but not for the reasons you might expect. The toughest part wasn’t the tech–it was handling critical tasks like fundraising, finances, and HR. After trying to manage those in different ways, I’m really relieved that Tails is now under the Tor Project’s wing. In a way, it feels like coming home,” says intrigeri, Team Lead Tails OS, The Tor Project.

A History of Collaboration

Merging the two projects will expand Tor’s focus, allowing it to address privacy and security issues beyond just the web browser.

Whether it’s someone seeking access to the open web or facing surveillance, Tor and Tails offer complementary protections. While Tor Browser anonymizes online activity, Tails secures the entire operating system–from files to browsing sessions. For journalists working in repressive regions or covering sensitive topics, Tor and Tails are often used as a set to protect their communications and safeguard their sources. The merger will lead to more robust treatment of these overlapping threat models and offer a comprehensive solution for those who need both network and system-level security in high-risk environments.

It will also open up broader training and outreach opportunities. Until now, Tor’s educational efforts have primarily focused on its browser. With Tails integrated into these programs, we can address a wider range of privacy needs and security scenarios. Lastly, this merger will lead to increased visibility for Tails. Many users familiar with Tor may not yet know about Tails OS. By bringing Tails within the Tor Project umbrella, we can introduce this powerful tool to more individuals and groups needing to remain anonymous while working in hostile environments.

Joining Forces a Win for Users

“Joining Tor means we’ll finally have the capacity to reach more people who need Tails. We’ve known for a long time that we needed to ramp up our outreach, but we just didn’t have the resources to do so,” intrigeri.

“By bringing these two organizations together, we’re not just making things easier for our teams, but ensuring the sustainable development and advancement of these vital tools. Working together allows for faster, more efficient collaboration, enabling the quick integration of new features from one tool to the other. This collaboration strengthens our mission and accelerates our ability to respond to evolving threats,” says Isabela Fernandes, Executive Director, The Tor Project.

The announcement is good news for the privacy community, and will be a major help to journalists, activists, and other at-risk groups who depend on such software for their life and work.

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TikTok Music Is Shutting Down

ByteDance has informed users it is killing off the TikTok Music service, with November 28, 2024 slated as the shutdown date.

The company made the announcement on its website.

We are sorry to inform you that TikTok Music will be closing on 28 November 2024.

We would like to thank you for all of your support, and we hope you enjoyed the music. For more information, please click Help.

TikTok has been struggling on multiple fronts, with the company facing a potential ban in the US. At the same time, TikTok has had issues with the music industry, with Universal Music Group pulling its catalog from the service in early 2024, before the companies managed to come to an agreement.

In a statement to TechCrunch, TikTok said it was shutting the service down to better focus on driving value to existing music streaming services.

“Our Add to Music App feature has already enabled hundreds of millions of track saves to playlists on partner music streaming services. We will be closing TikTok Music at the end of November in order to focus on our goal of furthering TikTok’s role in driving even greater music listening and value on music streaming services, for the benefit of artists, songwriters, and the industry,” Ole Obermann, TikTok’s Global Head of Music Business Development, told the outlet.

As TechCrunch points out, TikTok’s legal issues in the US are likely a significant factor in the company’s decision to shutter its music service. With the entire platform’s future very much in question in the US, it puts the company at a huge disadvantage when it comes to negotiating content deals with other industries.

Only time will tell if the music service will reappear in the event TikTok prevails in its legal fight to stay alive in the US.

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Microsoft Releases ‘Correction’ Tool to Address AI Hallucinations

Microsoft has released a new tool, called “Correction,” aimed at addressing one of the biggest issues challenging facing the AI industry

All AI models hallucinate, or manufacture details in response to queries. It’s unclear why the phenomenon occurs, but all AI firms are working on ways to address the problem. Microsoft’s solution is Correction, a tool that uses “Groundless Detection” to check and correct AI-generated content.

As Microsoft describes, groundless detection uses provided source documents to cross-check AI responses for accuracy.

This feature automatically detects and corrects ungrounded text based on the provided source documents, ensuring that the generated content is aligned with factual or intended references. Below, we explore several common scenarios to help you understand how and when to apply these features to achieve the best outcomes.

Groundless Detection is available both with reasoning and without. For example, without reasoning, groundless detection uses a simple true or false mechanism.

In the simple case without the reasoning feature, the Groundedness Detection API classifies the ungroundedness of the submitted content as true or false.

In contrast, using the Groundless Detection feature with reasoning enabled does a better job correcting the hallucinated content to align with the provided sources.

The Groundedness Detection API includes a correction feature that automatically corrects any detected ungroundedness in the text based on the provided grounding sources. When the correction feature is enabled, the response includes a “correction Text” field that presents the corrected text aligned with the grounding sources.

Microsoft says its new Correction feature builds on groundless detection, which was first introduced in March 2024, giving customers far more control.

Since we introduced Groundedness Detection in March of this year, our customers have asked us: “What else can we do with this information once it’s detected besides blocking?” This highlights a significant challenge in the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape, where traditional content filters often fall short in addressing the unique risks posed by Generative AI hallucinations.

This is why we are introducing the correction capability. Empowering our customers to both understand and take action on ungrounded content and hallucinations is crucial, especially as the demand for reliability and accuracy in AI-generated content continues to rise.

Building on our existing Groundedness Detection feature, this groundbreaking capability allows Azure AI Content Safety to both identify and correct hallucinations in real-time before users of generative AI applications encounter them.

The company goes on to describe how the feature works, step-by-step.

• The developer of the application needs to enable the correction capability.
• Then, when an ungrounded sentence is detected, this triggers a new request to the generative AI model for a correction.
• The LLM then assesses the ungrounded sentence against the grounding document.
• If the sentence lacks any content related to the grounding document, it may be filtered out completely.
• However, if there is content sourced from the grounding document, the foundation model will rewrite the ungrounded sentence to help ensure it aligns with the grounding document.

The Hallucination Problem

It remains to be seen if Groundless Detection will completely solve the issue of AI hallucinations, but it appears to be a step in the right direction, at least until AI firms can better better understand why they happen. Unfortunately, that has proved to be a difficult task, as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pointed out.

“No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” Pichai said. “All models do have this as an issue.”

“There is an aspect of this which we call—all of us in the field—call it a ‘black box,’” he added. “And you can’t quite tell why it said this, or why it got it wrong.”

Even Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged the problem, saying he would never claim the company’s AI models are free of the issue.

“It’s not 100 percent. But I think we have done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we’re using it in,” Cook replied to Washington Post columnist Josh Tyrangiel. “So I am confident it will be very high quality. But I’d say in all honesty that’s short of 100 percent. I would never claim that it’s 100 percent.”

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Finding the Right HR Tech PR Fit for Your Business

Many aspects of daily life have been altered by modern technology, and the human resources (HR) department of most major companies are not exempt from this transformation. The use of this technology is supported by a third of all HR professionals. HR tech includes a broad range of software and hardware intended to improve employee-related tasks such as recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and retention. These procedures are essential to a business’ success, as top talent will only remain loyal to a company they have a positive experience at. Thankfully, HR tech can ensure that this happens. 

There are many different types of HR tech that are available. One of the more inventive forms is employee referral systems. With incentives like bonuses or gifts, these platforms encourage current employees to recommend prospective hires with skills they think would be a great addition to the company. This referral based approach has been proven to have a lot of success. In fact, 45% of the employees who are referred stay with the company for more than four years, which saves about $7,500 for each hire. Software companies providing employee referral systems, such as Erin, can help companies see a five-fold rise in hires from employee referrals and a 50% decrease in turnover. 

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are another important form of HR tech. They expedite the hiring process and monitor candidates from end-to-end, including recruitment and hiring. A well-known applicant tracking system, Fountain, has successfully reduced hiring time by 93%. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that 97.4% of Fortune 500 companies rely on an ATS to support their recruitment. 

Platforms for talent marketplaces, candidate relationship management software, and workflow automation tools are other HR tech options. By automating tedious procedures, workflow automation can increase recruiting rates by 7x. Candidate relationship management systems nurture positive relationships with candidates and cut down on 250 hours of labor per year for program managers. There are also talent marketplace platforms that allow companies to apply to top tech talent, instead of the other way around. Hiring time is reduced by 40% thanks to talent marketplace platforms such as Hackajob.

Stakeholders strongly embrace the change in hiring that HR technology has brought about. Studies show that 78% of employees think this technology makes their work experience better overall, and 75% of HR professionals say it makes the hiring process better for applicants. According to 82% of businesses, HR technology is crucial for streamlining employee-related activities and is now an integral part of their operations. HR technology offers many advantages. Employee turnover rates have dropped by 17%, recruitment processes have sped up by 23%, and HR duties can now be completed 40% faster.

It is not surprising that 83% of HR professionals say that HR technology has returned a positive investment given these benefits. Despite the numerous software options that are available for HR tech solutions, all are united by a common objective to improve employee satisfaction and improve HR processes. Clearly, this goal has not only been achieved, but surpassed. Learn more about finding the right HR Tech PR agency to fit your needs below.

Source: Talent Tech PR

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DOJ Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Visa

The Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Visa, accusing the company of maintaining an illegal monopoly and thwarting competition.

According to the DOJ, Visa’s network handles more than 60% of the debit transactions in the US, resulting in more than $7 billion in fees annually. The complaint goes on to allege that Visa uses its market dominance to lock banks and merchants into exclusionary contracts, making it nearly impossible for companies to compete.

Don’t miss our take on the DOJ’s antitrust showdown with Visa!

 

For example, Visa wields its dominance, enormous scale, and centrality to the debit ecosystem to impose a web of exclusionary agreements on merchants and banks. These agreements penalize Visa’s customers who route transactions to a different debit network or alternative payment system. In so doing, the complaint alleges, Visa locks up debit volume, insulates itself from competition, and smothers smaller, lower-priced competitors. Visa also induces would-be competitors to become partners instead of entering the market as competitors by offering generous monetary incentives and threatening punitive additional fees. As the complaint alleges, Visa coopted the competition because it feared losing share, revenues, or being displaced by another debit network altogether.

Unfortunately, because debit card transactions are so popular in the US, Visa is in a position to charge billions in fees, effectively controlling both sides of the market—merchants and consumers.

“We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service. As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing – but the price of nearly everything.”

The DOJ says Visa so heavily penalizes partner companies for using competing payment networks that the vast majority don’t dare use anything but Visa, regardless of what benefits competitors may offer. The company also has allegedly made it a practice “to pay potential competitors to partner instead of innovating,” ensuring its stranglehold on the market is never disrupted.

“Anticompetitive conduct by corporations like Visa leaves the American people and our entire economy worse off,” said Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer. “Today’s action against Visa reminds those who would stifle competition rather than competing on price or investing in innovation that the Justice Department will never hesitate to enforce the law on behalf of the American people.”

“Visa fears competition and innovation, and instead chooses unlawful cooperation and monopolization,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “Visa abuses its power over its customers and buys off would-be rivals at the expense of American consumers, merchants, banks, and the competitive process itself. Today’s lawsuit holds Visa accountable for its conduct in a market that forms the backbone of American commerce.”

If the DOJ is successful in its case against Visa, the result could be a monumental change to the US financial industry.

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