it261: July 2018

Tuesday, 31 July 2018

Outlook.com has a dark mode. Here's how to turn it on - CNET

Microsoft's webmail service lets you paint it black.

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Send & Receive Email With Cloud Hosting

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Evo 2018: How to watch, start time, tournament schedule - CNET

DEK: Start times for all eight tourneys.

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WordPress Sites make CPU High load in vps

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How to Save Media Taken in Notes App to Photos on iPhone and iPad

The Notes app on iPhone and iPad is obviously useful for keeping notes for many purposes, and the latest versions of iOS Notes app includes a great feature that allows capturing photos and videos directly into Notes on iOS. But depending on how your Notes app settings are configured, you may find that the media ... Read More

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How to attract new customers to our hosting?

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Zoho One Gets Smarter. Features To Power Growing Businesses. New Event Manage Solution Launches.

Zoho is one of the leading companies enabling the success of small business. With an executive team keenly focused on serving the needs of small business owners, entrepreneurs and consultants Zoho has launched a new solution focused on event management and an upgrade to Zoho One.

Zoho One is now “smarter” bringing it’s growing list of apps together in a more integrated fashion, enabling data to be used between applications based on user queries.

What most excites me about the update is Zoho Backstage, a robust solution for complete event management. Included in Zoho Backstage is the ability to build an event website, create an agenda, manage speakers (and sponsors), promote the event and manage ticket sales.

Zoho has built a rich set of audience engagement tools into Backstage as well, enabling presentations and agendas to be a seamless part of the attendee experience.

Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist for Zoho says that Zoho’s aim is to provide just about every tool a business needs to start and grow – an operating system for a business.

While most of the 40 plus applications in Zoho’s suite of tools are first class, Raju also acknowledges and encourages partnerships. A business might want to use a competitors tool for CRM and Zoho’s tools for back end operations. Another business might want to use Zoho for CRM and customer contact management and another product for collaboration or email management.

Today’s announcements continue to prove that Zoho is one of the best friends a growing business could have and that their management is in tune to the needs of all independent businesses.

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How to force close apps on the iPhone X - CNET

With iOS 12, force closing apps is going back to the good ol' days.

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Managed Wordpress Dedicated Server

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How to use Alexa Cast - CNET

Amazon rolled out a new feature for Alexa that lets users send Amazon Music from their phones to speakers.

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5 features coming to the iPad in iOS 12 - CNET

Apple didn't forget about the iPad with iOS 12.

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Video Hosting ?

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How to attract new customers to our hosting?

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Making it easier to discover data in Search

In a polarized world, facts and data can provide valuable context for the debates swirling around us. And there has never been more data out there, with record numbers of data journalists working to make sense of it all. In

The post Making it easier to discover data in Search appeared first on CloudTweaks.

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The myth of midgrade gas - Roadshow

Need midgrade gas? Save money by blending your own.

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Everything you need to know about convection ovens - CNET

Here's why the next oven you buy should be convection.

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The Istio service mesh hits version 1.0

Istio, the service mesh for microservices from Google, IBM, Lyft, Red Hat and many other players in the open source community, launched version 1.0 of its tools today.

If you’re not into service meshes, that’s understandable. Few people are. But Istio is probably one of the most important new open source projects out there right now. It sits at the intersection of a number of industry trends like containers, microservices and serverless computing and makes it easier for enterprises to embrace them. Istio now has over 200 contributors and the code has seen over 4,000 check-ins since the launch of version 0.1.

Istio, at its core, handles the routing, load balancing, flow control and security needs of microservices. It sits on top of existing distributed applications and basically helps them talk to each other securely, while also providing logging, telemetry and the necessary policies that keep things under control (and secure). It also features support for canary releases, which allow developers to test updates with a few users before launching them to a wider audience, something that Google and other webscale companies have long done internally.

“In the area of microservices, things are moving so quickly,” Google product manager Jennifer Lin told me. “And with the success of Kubernetes and the abstraction around container orchestration, Istio was formed as an open source project to really take the next step in terms of a substrate for microservice development as well as a path for VM-based workloads to move into more of a service management layer. So it’s really focused around the right level of abstractions for services and creating a consistent environment for managing that.”

Even before the 1.0 release, a number of companies already adopted Istio in production, including the likes of eBay and Auto Trader UK. Lin argues that this is a sign that Istio solves a problem that a lot of businesses are facing today as they adopt microservices. “A number of more sophisticated customers tried to build their own service management layer and while we hadn’t yet declared 1.0, we hard a number of customers — including a surprising number of large enterprise customer– say, ‘you know, even though you’re not 1.0, I’m very comfortable putting this in production because what I’m comparing it to is much more raw.'”

IBM Fellow and VP of Cloud Jason McGee agrees with this and notes that “our mission since Istio’s launch has been to enable everyone to succeed with microservices, especially in the enterprise. This is why we’ve focused the community around improving security and scale, and heavily leaned our contributions on what we’ve learned from building agile cloud architectures for companies of all sizes.”

A lot of the large cloud players now support Istio directly, too. IBM supports it on top of its Kubernetes Service, for example, and Google even announced a managed Istio service for its Google Cloud users, as well as some additional open source tooling for serverless applications built on top of Kubernetes and Istio.

Two names missing from today’s party are Microsoft and Amazon. I think that’ll change over time, though, assuming the project keeps its momentum.

Istio also isn’t part of any major open source foundation yet. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of Kubernetes, is backing linkerd, a project that isn’t all that dissimilar from Istio. Once a 1.0 release of these kinds of projects rolls around, the maintainers often start looking for a foundation that can shepherd the development of the project over time. I’m guessing its only a matter of time before we hear more about where Istio will land.

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Anyone Have Experience With DomainRacer?

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There is any cheap vps/rdp hosting ?

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The 2018 Cloud Security Guide: Platforms, Threats, and Solutions

Today, nearly every American enterprise relies on digital data and services to operate their business. Many organizations must abide by government regulations, such as GDPR, to store and access data when processing customer information. Consequently, businesses need a safe and secure

The post The 2018 Cloud Security Guide: Platforms, Threats, and Solutions appeared first on CloudTweaks.

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Linen vs. percale vs. sateen: What sheets should you buy? - CNET

What's the deal with all of the fancy sheets out there?

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How the Cloud Has Changed the Construction Industry

Cloud Construction Industry Cloud and remote computing have transformed the modern world in many ways. One may not expect so, but the technology has even taken hold in completely unrelated industries — construction and development is a great example. Why

The post How the Cloud Has Changed the Construction Industry appeared first on CloudTweaks.

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SamSam: The (almost) $6 million ransomware

New research reveals that SamSam ransomware has affected far more victims, and raised far more ransom, than previously thought.

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NSA hasn’t closed security windows Snowden climbed through

One of three problems found in an audit: two-person access controls haven't been properly implemented at data centers and equipment rooms.

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Software maker Freshworks raises $100 million; valuation at $1.5 billion

(Reuters) – U.S. business software provider Freshworks on Tuesday said it raised $100 million from investors led by Sequoia and Accel Partners, giving it a valuation of $1.5 billion and unicorn status. The latest funding round took the startup’s total

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Reliable, cost-effective Workspace connectivity – Part 3

In last week’s installment of my blog series on reliable, cost-effective connectivity with Citrix Workspace, we uncovered a multitude of benefits from using Citrix SD-WAN between office locations and the data center VDA (Virtual Delivery Agent) servers used to deliver …

Football team in trouble over unauthorized access to rivals’ videos

An investigation found that Braden River High football coaching staff got unauthorized access to rivals' practice and game video footage.

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WHMCS clientarea reset password problem

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No Cheap Brands, 7 Eleven Small Business Owners Push Back., Less for All About Brand Power

The NY Times reports that 7 Eleven franchisees, independent business operators, small businesses are pushing back against the 7 Eleven HQ or franchisor in a few areas. I’ll address one area.

Often when you walk into a local convenience store you see two main brands – the store brand and the name brand you know.

The retailer makes a higher profit margin on the store brand – but 7 Eleven owner operators are saying that their customers aren’t buying the store brand.

This goes to show you the power of BRAND. If you have a STRONG brand, you can charge a higher price.

Frankly, I’ve tasked the off-brand food and it often doesn’t even taste as good most of the time.

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Leaky radio devices broadcast chipset data, discover researchers

Researchers at EURECOM S3 Group found that they can extract crypto keys from a set of run-of-the-mill communications chips just by listening to the noise it makes.

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Spectre chip weakness can be used to steal data remotely

Researchers have found a new variant of the Spectre CPU flaw that shows how attackers could steal data remotely without having to run malicious code on a local system.

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Breach at Electronics Retailer Might Have Exposed 10M Data Records

A 2017 breach at one of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Europe might have exposed 10 million records containing personal data. On 31 July, Dixon’s Carphone issued an “Update on Investigation into Unauthorized Data Access.” The retailer explained in its statement it has reason to believe that unauthorized individuals might have accessed approximately 10 […]… Read More

The post Breach at Electronics Retailer Might Have Exposed 10M Data Records appeared first on The State of Security.

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Cryptojacking for beginners – what you need to know

Cryptojacking has hit the headlines in recent months. But what is it? And do you need to be worried?

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Saying goodbye to Stablehost and thinking about moving to Hawk Host

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Independent Workers Feeling More Secure

One of findings that most surprised us when we first started researching independent workers was how many think independent work is more secure than traditional jobs.

Back in 2011 when we first starting asking about this in surveys, we assumed the vast majority of independent workers would view self-employment as being less secure than having a traditional job.

But as the chart below shows (the data is from the MBO Partners State of Independence study series), we were wrong.

In 2018 49% of full-time independent workers feel working independently is more secure than having a traditional job. This is up from 41% in 2012.

There are several reasons about half of independents feel independent work is more secure.

The main reason given by independents is having multiple sources of income and/or customers provides more security than having a single employer.

Independents also point out that being charge of their work lives makes them more able to adjust to changing economic conditions, which makes them more secure.

They also say traditional jobs are no longer as secure as they once were, making independent work relatively more secure.

The data is trending up for several reasons.

First, the improving economy has made it easier for independent workers to find work. This is particularity true for independent workers with sought after skills and experience.

The strong economy is also allowing reluctant independent workers - those that would prefer a traditional job- to go back to traditional jobs.

Reluctants, on average, report feeling independent work is much less secure than traditional employment. So as they leave independent work, it raises the share of independents who feel more secure working independently.

The growing infrastructure of products and services that make being an independent easier is also making independent work more secure.

These include low-cost, Internet-based tools and services for everything from billing and project management to marketing and sales. It also includes things like the ACA (Obamacare), which makes it easier for independents to get health insurance.

But being independent is still not secure enough, especially for those without in-demand skills. We'll have more on this topic in the near future.

We contribute to the MBO Partners State of Independence report series.

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About crawl status of my website

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Is this PTR correct? Dynamic IP address?

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The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Execution

Of all the tactics that an adversary will take on in their campaign, none will be more widely abused than Execution. When taking into consideration off-the-shelf malware, traditional ransomware, or state of the art advanced persistent threat actors, all of them have execution in common. There’s a great quote from Alissa Torres which says “Malware […]… Read More

The post The MITRE ATT&CK Framework: Execution appeared first on The State of Security.

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Monday, 30 July 2018

Preferred Networking Equipment Store in USA

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OnraHost/OneHost Review

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4 Ways Technology Can Save Your Small Business Money

As you run your business, you probably take numerous steps to save as much money as possible. Reusing equipment and changing the lightbulbs you use will save you small amounts of money – and every little bit helps – but it may not offer you the savings you want and need. According to Observer, 29 percent of businesses failed because they ran out of capital. This is why it’s important to turn to other effective ways that will allow you to save bigger chunks of cash and better your business at the same time. While the price of new tech is sometimes high on the front end, it will save you a lot of money in the long run. Check out these four ways technology can save your small business money.

It allows your team to work remotely

It’s expensive to maintain an office, and if your employees take a couple days off when they’re sick, stuck at home for some reason or traveling, a lot of money is at stake. Technology gives your employees the opportunity to work remotely and communicate with customers and coworkers effectively. The prevalence of mobile devices and the cloud and the readily available Internet make it easier than ever for staff to work from anywhere and still earn money. And when your team is working efficiently, you’ll save money too.

It saves time

The phrase “time is money” is often said, but it may never had rung so true as it does when you’re a small business owner. As you run your business, you know that the more time you spend on a project means the more money you’re spending on a project. As you upgrade your technology, like your computers or software, you’ll be able to work more efficiently. Make sure to utilize the things you can find online too. For instance, you can use the Internet to identify the least expensive options for electric and gas prices with the help of sites such as Quote My Energy. Do what you can to save yourself time and money.

It allows you to advertise for less

It’s a good idea to turn to various advertising mediums like fliers, mailers and so on to advertise your business, but it’s a smart idea to focus on digital advertising. The reason is that there are ways to advertise your business for free online. There are cost-effective ways to engage Facebook followers that don’t cost a thing. Even if you can’t reach your target audience with the free ways to advertise, you still can advertise effectively online for less money than many other traditional mediums of advertising.

It slashes the amount of paper you use

You know that running a business means there are countless things you need to document. A couple decades ago, you had to print everything on paper and store it in filing cabinets. Still today, some business use much more paper than is needed. Technology like the cloud and email mean using much less paper, reducing your costs simultaneously.

Running a business costs money, but there are always new ways you can save cash and keep it in your bank account. Whether you opt to allow your workers to work from remote locations or utilize free methods of advertising online, it’s undeniable that technology helps your business save money.

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How to Start a Simple Web Server in Python 3 on Mac

If you’re a Python user you may already be familiar with the handy trick that allows you to instantly create a simple web server using an easy command string entered in the command line of Mac OS. But if you’re a Mac Python user who has installed or updated to Python 3, then you will ... Read More

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Avengers 4: Release date, cast, plot and title rumors - CNET

Think Avengers: Infinity War was intense? Marvel fans have a year to predict which beloved characters are taking the long dirt nap for good.

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Top dedicated server/hosting companies in UAE

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follow.net alternatives

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The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Node.js

Update: We have published an article on the most important Node.js Security Tips. You should check it out after you have read through this one. There’s no shortage of Node.js tutorials out there, but most of them cover specific use cases or

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Now you can accept PayPal within India

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How to create and schedule Google Home Routines - CNET

Everything you need to know about Google Home Routines and how to schedule them to run on their own.

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Free Uptime Monitor

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Beta 5 of iOS 12 & MacOS Mojave Released for Testing

Apple has released iOS 12 beta 5 to iPhone and iPad users enrolled in the developer beta testing program, along with macOS Mojave beta 5 for Mac users participating in the Mac developer beta program. The accompanying public beta release builds typically arrive soon after. Additionally, Apple has released tvOS 12 beta 5 and watchOS ... Read More

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A pickaxe for the AI gold rush, Labelbox sells training data software

Every artificial intelligence startup or corporate R&D lab has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how humans annotate training data to teach algorithms what to look for. Whether its doctors assessing the size of cancer from a scan or drivers circling street signs in self-driving car footage, all this labeling has to happen somewhere. Often that means wasting six months and as much as a million dollars just developing a training data system. With nearly every type of business racing to adopt AI, that spend in cash and time adds up.

LabelBox builds artificial intelligence training data labeling software so nobody else has to. What Salesforce is to a sales team, LabelBox is to an AI engineering team. The software-as-a-service acts as the interface for human experts or crowdsourced labor to instruct computers how to spot relevant signals in data by themselves and continuously improve their algorithms’ accuracy.

Today, LabelBox is emerging from six months in stealth with a $3.9 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins and joined by First Round and Google’s Gradient Ventures.

“There haven’t been seamless tools to allow AI teams to transfer institutional knowledge from their brains to software” says co-founder Manu Sharma. “Now we have over 5000 customers, and many big companies have replaced their own internal tools with Labelbox.”

Kleiner’s Ilya Fushman explains that “If you have these tools, you can ramp up to the AI curve much faster, allowing companies to realize the dream of AI.”

Inventing The Best Wheel

Sharma knew how annoying it was to try to forge training data systems from scratch because he’d see it done it before at Planet Labs, a satellite imaging startup. “One of the thing that I observed was that Planet Labs has a superb AI team, but that team had been for over 6 months building labeling and training tools. Is this really how teams around the world are approaching building AI?” he wondered.

Before that, he’d worked at DroneDeploy alongside Labelbox co-founder and CTO Daniel Rasmuson who was leading the aerial data startup’s developer platform. “Many drone analytics companies that were also building AI were going through the same pain point” Sharma tells me. In September, the two began to explore the idea and found that 20 other companies big and small were also burning talent and capital on the problem. “We thought we could make that much smarter so AI teams can focus on algorithms” Sharma decided.

Labelbox’s team Co-founders: Ysiad Ferreiras (third from left), Manu Sharma (fourth from left), Brian Rieger (sixth from left), Daniel Rasmuson (seventh from left)

Labelbox launched its early alpha in January and saw swift pickup from the AI community that immediately asked for additional features. With time, the tool expanded with more and more ways to manually annotate data, from gradation levels like how sick a cow is for judging its milk production to matching systems like whether a dress fits a fashion brand’s aesthetic. Rigorous data science is applied to weed out discrepancies between reviewers’ decisions and identify edge cases that don’t fit the models.

“There are all these research studies about how to make training data” that Labelbox analyzes and applies, says co-founder and COO Ysiad Ferreiras, who’d led all of sales and revenue at fast-rising grassroots campaign texting startup Hustle. “We can let people tweak different settings so they can run their own machine learning program the way they want to, instead of being limited by what they can build really quickly.” When Norway mandated all citizens get colon cancer screenings, it had to build AI for recognizing polyps. Instead of spending half a year creating the training tool, they just signed up all the doctors on Labelbox.

Any organization can try Labelbox for free, and Ferreiras claims hundreds of thousands have. Once they hit a usage threshold, the startup works with them on appropriate SAAS pricing related to the revenue the client’s AI will generate. One called Lytx makes DriveCam, a system installed on half a million trucks with cameras that use AI to detect unsafe driver behavior so they can be coached to improve. Conde Nast is using Labelbox to match runway fashion to related items in their archive of content.

The big challenge is convincing companies that they’re better off leaving the training software to the experts instead of building it in-house where they’re intimately, though perhaps inefficiently, involved in every step of development. Some turn to crowdsourcing agencies like CrowdFlower, which have their own training data interface, but they only work with generalist labor, not the experts required for many fields. Labelbox wants to cooperate rather than compete here, serving as the management software that treats outsourcers as just another data input.

Long-term, the risk for Labelbox is that it’s arrived too early for the AI revolution. Most potential corporate customers are still in the R&D phase around AI, not at scaled deployment into real-world products. The big business isn’t selling the labeling software. That’s just the start. Labelbox wants to continuously managage the fine-tuning data to help optimize an algorithm through its entire lifecycle. That requires AI being part of the actual engineering process. Right now it’s often stuck as an experiment in the lab. “We’re not concerned about our ability to build the tool to do that. Our concern is ‘will the industry get there fast enough?'” Ferreiras declares.

Their investor agrees. Last year’s big joke in venture capital was that suddenly you couldn’t hear a startup pitch without ‘AI’ being referenced.. “There was a big wave where everything was AI. I think at this point it’s almost a bit implied” says Fushman. But it’s corporations that already have plenty of data, and plenty of human jobs to obfuscate, that are Labelbox’s opportunity. “The bigger question is ‘when does that [AI] reality reach consumers, not just from the Googles and Amazons of the world, but the mainstream corporations?”

Labelbox is willing to wait it out, or better yet, accelerate that arrival — even if it means eliminating jobs. That’s because the team believes the benefits to humanity will outweigh the transition troubles.

“For a colonoscopy or mammogram, you only have a certain number of people in the world who can do that. That limits how many of those can be performed. In the future, that could only be limited by the computational power provided so it could be exponentially cheaper” says co-founder Brian Rieger. With Labelbox, tens of thousands of radiology exams can be quickly ingested to produce cancer-spotting algorithms he says studies show can become more accurate than humans. Employment might get tougher to find, but hopefully life will get easier and cheaper too. Meanwhile, improving underwater pipeline inspections could protect the environment from its biggest threat: us.

“AI can solve such important problems in our society” Sharma concludes. “We want to accelerate that by helping companies tell AI what to learn.”

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Google Calendar makes rescheduling meetings easier

Nobody really likes meetings — and the few people who do like them are the ones with whom you probably don’t want to have meetings. So when you’ve reached your fill and decide to reschedule some of those obligations, the usual process of trying to find a new meeting time begins. Thankfully, the Google Calendar team has heard your sighs of frustration and built a new tool that makes rescheduling meetings much easier.

Starting in two weeks, on August 13th, every guest will be able to propose a new meeting time and attach to that update a message to the organizer to explain themselves. The organizer can then review and accept or deny that new time slot. If the other guests have made their calendars public, the organizer can also see the other attendees’ availability in a new side-by-side view to find a new time.

What’s a bit odd here is that this is still mostly a manual feature. To find meeting slots to begin with, Google already employs some of its machine learning smarts to find the best times. This new feature doesn’t seem to employ the same algorithms to proposed dates and times for rescheduled meetings.

This new feature will work across G Suite domains and also with Microsoft Exchange. It’s worth noting, though, that this new option won’t be available for meetings with more than 200 attendees and all-day events.

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Tuesday, 31 July 2018

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