Microsoft has announced the launch of a free version of its collaborative chat app ‘Teams’ which doesn’t require an Office 365 subscription.

What Is Teams?

Introduced back in November 2016, ‘Teams’ (as the name suggests) is a platform designed to help collaborative working, and combines features such as workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments. Described by Microsoft as a “complete chat and online meetings solution”, it normally integrates with the company’s Office 365 subscription office productivity suite, and Teams is widely considered to be Microsoft’s answer to ‘Slack’.

Slack is a popular, multi-channel collaborative working hub that offers chat channels with companies and businesses you regularly work with, direct voice or video calls and screen-sharing, integrated drag-and-drop file sharing, and an App Directory with over 1,500 apps that can be integrated into Slack.

Teams is now believed to be used by around 200,000 organizations.

Free Version

The free version of Teams, which does not require an Office 365 account, offers the same basic features as regular Teams to anyone who wants to try it out. The hope is, of course, that this will increase user numbers, and tempt users away from Slack. Microsoft is also extending 365 cloud suite with the free version of Teams to try and bridge Microsoft 365 with Office 365.

Space and Features

The free version of Teams offers 10GB of team storage plus an additional 2GB for each user, with up to 300 people supported. Also, users have unlimited messages and search, there is guest access, as well as audio and video calls and screen sharing.

Within the Teams app, users can collaborate with colleagues on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

What’s Missing?

Even though the free version offers quite a lot of storage space, the full version would offer users a massive 1TB. Also, unlike the full version, the free version doesn’t come with Yammer, Planner, SharePoint and OneDrive, plus the free version lacks some of the security features of the full version. This could make it less attractive to enterprises that are also looking to maximise compliance.

Warning To Help With Team Etiquette

One interesting aspect of Microsoft’s approach to the collaborative working platform is to build-on features that warn a user when they are doing something that goes against good practice and etiquette within teams. One key example of this is, with MyAnalytics, which works as an intelligent collaboration assistant in Outlook, is where users are warned / alerted if they are sending emails to co-workers outside their normal working hours.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

One good way to increase user numbers quickly, gain some ground in a battle with competitors, and to entice people to try and perhaps switch to a new service is to offer a good, usable, value-adding version of that service for free. That’s exactly what Microsoft is doing with its version of Teams.

Although larger enterprises may already be a long way down the road with their chosen collaborative working platform, and might be a bit put off by the idea of using a free version of a platform that is not quite on a par with the full version in terms of security features, a free version of Teams may be very attractive to SMEs looking to move into collaborative working with a low risk, trusted, scalable solution.

A new website has been launched by manufacturer Nextbase allowing drivers to upload their dash-cam footage of dangerous drivers they’ve filmed, thereby making it easy for drivers to submit their footage to the police.

Initiative

The initiative, which has already received widespread praise, allows owners of any brand of dash-cam, action camera, mobile phone or any other type of camera from any manufacturer to upload footage to the National Dash-Cam Safety Portal (NDSP), and then to send it on to the appropriate local England or Wales police force.

As well as uploading footage, drivers can use the free portal to submit witness statements, all of which are securely stored, and only viewable by the police force to which they are submitted.

How Does It Work?

Part of the Nextbase website, the portal at https://www.nextbase.co.uk/national-dash-cam-safety-portal/ shows a clickable map of England and Wales divided into regions. Drivers with footage to submit are asked to click on the region where the incident recorded took place. Clicking on the geographic region then reveals the police force for all regions. Clicking on the relevant police force region should, when / if the police force has chosen to use the portal, send you to the relevant police force website and allow you to submit your statement and footage.

Drivers submitting footage are also prompted to contact their local force by email or by calling 101, and to email their witness statement to a given police email address in order to help speed up the process of reporting the incident.

Since the initiative is still in its early stages, many of the relevant police forces are not yet fully participating in the video-submitting system.

Dash-Cam Footage Can Be Used In Court

Dash-cam footage can provide useful information and evidence in court cases and the first jail sentence for dangerous driving that used dash cam footage as its main evidence took place in 2015.

Things To Remember

Drivers submitting footage and statements via the portal should be aware that by doing so they are filing an official police report, the process can require the driver to take time to answer lots of questions, and that there is a possibility that they may be required to appear in court. Also, if the footage shows the driver who submitted the footage to be breaking the law e.g. speeding to catch up with and film the perpetrator, they may also be prosecuted.

The NDSP web page provides FAQs to answer questions about the type / quality of footage and the process.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Anyone who drives on UK roads, particularly as part of their job and / or their daily commute is likely to have witnessed dangerous or irresponsible driving. Dash-cams have provided one way for drivers to have some fall-back protection against the reckless and / or criminal actions of others and against potentially costly insurance implications. Footage provides something more than just testimony and conjecture.

The big advantage of the NDSP portal is that, for the first time, it provides a central point for drivers to go to submit footage, and it simplifies the process of submitting footage and statements to the correct police force.

Critics could argue, however, that this initiative could be promoting a trade-off between road safety and privacy, and could be encouraging a culture of citizen surveillance and suspicion.

For Nextbase, the portal (and the media reports about it) will provide some positive publicity if the system works properly and securely, and since it is part of their product website, could even lead to some more sales of dash-cams.

The non-profit, global trade group, the Wi-Fi Alliance, has announced the commencement of the rollout of the new Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol WPA3 which should bring improvements in authentication and data protection.

What’s Been The Problem?

There are estimated to be around 9 billion Wi-Fi devices in use in the world, but the current security protocol, WPA2, dates back to 2004. The rapidly changing security landscape has, therefore, left many Wi-Fi devices vulnerable to new methods of attack, fuelling the calls for the fast introduction of a new, more secure standard.

WPA2 Vulnerabilities

For example, WPA2 which is mandatory for Wi-Fi Certified devices, is known to be vulnerable to offline dictionary attacks to guess passwords. This is where an attacker can have as many attempts as they like at guessing Wi-Fi credentials without being on the same network. Offline attacks allow the perpetrator to either passively stand and capture an exchange, or even interact with a user once before finding-out the password. Using Wi-Fi on public networks with the current protocol has also left people vulnerable to ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks or ‘traffic sniffing’.

One key contributor to the vulnerability of using Wi-Fi with the WPA2 standard is the home / business using obvious / simple passwords.

What’s So Good About The New Standard?

The new WPA3 standard has several advantages. These include:

• The fact that it has been designed for the security challenges of businesses, although it has two modes of operation: Personal and Enterprise.
• The equivalent of 192-bit cryptographic strength, thereby offering a higher level of security than WPA2.
• The addition of Easy Connect, which allows a user to add any device to a Wi-Fi network using a secondary device already on the network via a QR code. This makes the connection more secure and helps simplify IoT device protection.
• WPA3-Personal mode offers enhanced protection against offline dictionary attacks and password guessing attempts through the introduction of a feature called Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE). Some commentators have suggested that it ‘saves users from themselves’ by offering improved security even if a user chooses a more simple password. It also offers ‘forward secrecy’ to protect communications even if a password has been compromised.

In Tandem For The Time Being

The current standard WPA2 will be run in tandem with the new WPA3 standard until the standard becomes more widely used.

Protection Against Passive Evesdropping

In June, the Wi-Fi Alliance also announced the rollout of the Wi-Fi Enhanced Open, a certification program. This provides protection for unauthenticated networks e.g. coffee shops, hotels and airports, and protects connections against passive eavesdropping without needing a password by providing each user with a unique individual encryption that secures traffic between their device and the Wi-Fi network.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Wi-Fi security and the security of a growing number of IoT devices has long been a source of worry to individuals and businesses, particularly as the nature and variety of attack methods have evolved while the current security standard is 14 years old.

The introduction of a new, up-to-date standard / protocol which offers greater security, has been designed with businesses in mind, offers more features, and protects the user from their own slack approach to security is very welcome. WPA3 will be particularly welcomed by those who use networks to send and receive very sensitive data, such as the public sector or financial industry.

The ‘Deceived By Design’ report by the government-funded Norwegian Consumer Council has accused tech giants Microsoft, Facebook and Google of being unethical by leading users into selecting settings that do not benefit their privacy.

Illusion of Control

The report alleges that, far from actually giving users more control over their personal data (as laid out by GDPR), the tech giants may simply be giving users the illusion that this is happening. The report points to the possible presence of practices such as:

– Facebook and Google making users who want the privacy-friendly option go through a significantly longer process (privacy intrusive defaults).

– Facebook, Google and Windows 10 using pop-ups that direct users away from the privacy-friendly choices.

– Google presenting users with a hard-to-use dashboard with a maze of options for their privacy and security settings. For example, on Facebook it takes 13 clicks to opt out of authorising data collection (opting in can take just one).
– Making it difficult to delete data that’s already been collected. For example, deleting data about location history requires clicking through 30 to 40 pages.

– Google not warning users about the downside of personalisation e.g. telling users they would simply see less useful ads, rather than mentioning the potential to be opted in to receive unbalanced political ad messages.

– Facebook and Google pushing consumers to accept data collection e.g. with Facebook stating how, if users keep face recognition turned off, Facebook won’t be able to stop a stranger from using the user’s photo to impersonate them, while not stating how Facebook will use the information collected.

Dark Patterns

In general, the reports criticised how the use of “dark patterns” such as misleading wording and default settings that are intrusive to privacy, settings that give users an illusion of control, hiding privacy-friendly options, and presenting “take-it-or-leave-it choices”, could be leading users to make choices that actually stop them from exercising all of their privacy rights..

Big Accept Button

The report, by Norway’s consumer protection watchdog, also notes how the GDPR-related notifications have a large button for consumers to accept the company’s current practices, which could appear to many users to be far more convenient than searching for the detail to read through.

Response

Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all reported to have responded to the report’s findings by issuing statements focusing on the progress and improvements they’ve made towards meeting the requirements of the GDPR to date.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

GDPR was supposed to give EU citizens much more control over their data, and the perhaps naive expectation was that companies with a lot to lose (in fines for non-compliance and reputation), such as the big tech giant and social media companies would simply fall into line and afford us all of those new rights straight away.

The report by the Norwegian consumer watchdog appears to be more of a reality check that shows how our personal data is a valuable commodity to the big tech companies, and that, according to the report, the big tech companies are willing to manipulate users and give the illusion that they are following the rules without actually doing so. The report appears to indicate that these large corporations are willing to force consumers to try to fight for rights that have already been granted to them in GDPR.