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An anonymous reader shares a report: Verkada, a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup, equips its offices in downtown San Mateo, California, with its own state-of-the-art security cameras. Last year, a sales director on the company's sales team abused their access to these cameras to take and post photos of colleagues in a Slack channel called #RawVerkadawgz where they made sexually explicit jokes about women who worked at the company, according to a report in IPVM, which Motherboard independently verified and obtained more information about. "Face match... find me a squirt," the sales director wrote in the company Slack channel in August 2019, according to one screenshot obtained by Motherboard. The comment was posted along with a series of photos of employees' faces captured with the office's surveillance system which were patched together using a Verkada facial recognition feature. "Face search," as it's called, can pinpoint an individual in a sea of faces. The pinpointed face, in this instance, belonged to a Verkada employee, her mouth wide open. In addition to verifying the incident with three sources who worked at Verkada at the time, Motherboard compared the format of the images posted to those included in Verkada's publicly available demo videos to verify that they were indeed captured by the company's surveillance cameras.

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One of the world's leading COVID-19 experimental vaccines produces an immune response in both young and old adults, raising hopes of a path out of the gloom and economic destruction wrought by the novel coronavirus. From a report: The vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford, also triggers lower adverse responses among the elderly, British drug maker AstraZeneca Plc, which is helping manufacture the vaccine, said on Monday. A vaccine that works is seen as a game-changer in the battle against the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 1.15 million people, shuttered swathes of the global economy and turned normal life upside down for billions of people. "It is encouraging to see immunogenicity responses were similar between older and younger adults and that reactogenicity was lower in older adults, where the COVID-19 disease severity is higher," an AstraZeneca spokesman said. "The results further build the body of evidence for the safety and immunogenicity of AZD1222," the spokesman said, referring to the technical name of the vaccine. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to be one of the first from big pharma to secure regulatory approval, along with Pfizer and BioNTech's candidate, as the world tries to plot a path out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Can apps become the key to education?

Interest in e-learning has been growing over the last few years but, with the emergence of distance learning, it’s poised to change all types of education. In the first episode, we talk with Elliott Rayner, Head Of Product Marketing, and John Quintana, Head of Guided Learning Experiences, from online language learning developer Babbel. Elliott and John discuss how Babbel is transforming and "thinking big" about the future of education: Can apps take the place of traditional classroom education? How can we make new models of language learning effective across various needs and learning styles? 

How do you get 250 million players to take action on climate change?

The recent Green Games Jam brought together 11 games studios to find  engaging ways to educate and empower 250 million players  to take action on climate change. Jennifer Estaris, Game Director at SYBO Games and Deborah Mensah-Bonsu, Founder of Games for Good and formerly from Space Ape Games, explain what the game jam is really about and how others can raise awareness to fight climate change through their businesses. They also share new approaches to climate change education led to planting trees, saving wolves and more. 

How do you create a successful 4x strategy game?

If you ever played one of those games where you build an empire, you’ve been playing a 4x strategy game. We hear from David Eckleberry, General Manager for Star Trek Fleet Command and Vice President at Scopely, about how they successfully built a loyal player base. Alongside Howard Chen, Google Play Growth Consultant, they shed light on how to create games that find and keep players, and discuss player affinity and KPI growth.

How do you reflect humanity’s diversity in an app?

Drops CEO and Co-Founder Daniel Farkas and Chief Customer Officer Drew Banks join us to explain how they work with native speakers and language experts to bring awareness and encourage people to learn a less spoken language. Daniel and Drew also discuss their initiatives to make the app more inclusive and accessible to all, such as by reviewing the depiction of women in graphics used to support word learning.

How do businesses build quality into an app?

Imagine the scenario: after downloading a great app or game, you  find that it’s not quite the great experience you were hoping for, or worse, it keeps misbehaving and crashing. For developers and  businesses, delivering a quality app is essential for both acquiring and retaining users. To explore how developers can ensure that users are getting the quality experiences they deserve, we’re joined by Maria Neumayer, Staff Software Engineer, at food delivery service Deliveroo, who talks about how Deliveroo has adapted during COVID-19, and Shobhit Chugh, Product Manager, Firebase, who discusses how businesses can rectify quality problems in testing and production.  

Why are your favorite games getting smaller these days?

Well ok, not necessarily smaller per se, but games are being taken to the small screen.. You’ve probably  noticed that many of your favorite PC and console games are now appearing on your mobile phone and tablet. Game developers want to give you the opportunity to stay engaged with your favorite game throughout the day, whether you’re on the move, or away from your computer or games console. However, going mobile can be challenging, so we speak to Jen Donahoe, Marketing and Growth Lead - Teamfight Tactics at Riot Games who enlightens us on how they develop mobile games and keep their players happy.

How do apps help people overcome failures to achieve life goals?

It can be a struggle to change habits, such as diet and exercise, with the goal of living a healthier life. Keeping people motivated through the ups and downs of lifestyle changes is a core challenge for health and fitness app developer Lifesum. Marcus Gners, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder at Lifesum, together with best-selling author of “Hooked” and “Indistractable,” Nir Eyal, explore the ways apps can help make sure people don’t fall off the wagon, and remain motivated to achieve their goals.

We don’t want to give the whole game away, so we are keeping the details of our final episode under wraps. Keep an eye out for more details shortly.

How to stay tuned in

Listen to the first episode of series 2 here. Subscribe to the podcast and listen to the latest episodes on your favorite podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple, Libsyn, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts and Overcast.

Also, keep an eye out on @GooglePlayDev and @AndroidDev on Twitter where we will be announcing the launch of each new episode of the Apps, Games, & Insights podcast.

The new series brings stories and insights from leading businesses in the app and game industry, with discussion from Google experts.

More than 100 smart irrigation systems were left exposed online without a password last month, allowing anyone to access and tamper with water irrigation programs for crops, tree plantations, cities, and building complexes. From a report: The exposed irrigation systems were discovered by Security Joes, a small boutique security firm based in Israel. All were running ICC PRO, a top-shelf smart irrigation system designed by Motorola for use with agricultural, turf, and landscape management. Security Joes co-founder Ido Naor told ZDNet last month that companies and city officials had installed ICC PRO systems without changing default factory settings, which don't include a password for the default account. Naor says the systems could be easily identified online with the help of IoT search engines like Shodan. Once attackers locate an internet-accessible ICC PRO system, Naor says all they have to do is type in the default admin username and press Enter to access a smart irrigation control panel. Here, Naor says attackers can pause or stop watering events, change settings, control the water quantity and pressure delivered to pumps, or lock irrigation systems by deleting users.

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A Georgia county has reverted to matching some absentee ballot signatures to paper backups, rather than an online system, after a ransomware infection spread to part of its election department. From a report: Poll workers in Hall County have since caught up on a backlog of absentee ballots, state officials said, and said there's no danger of the ransomware extending to systems used to cast or count votes. But the infection is the first known example in the 2020 general election of opportunistic criminal hackers incidentally slowing the broader election process, something that federal cybersecurity officials have warned is a strong possibility. But the attack does not indicate any broad effort to tamper with U.S. voting or show systemic vulnerabilities to the U.S. election system. "They switched over to their paper backups, which is required of them," said Jordan Fuchs, Georgia's deputy secretary of state. "It took a little bit of work on their part -- I think they had 11 days of catch-up to do -- and they completed their task," she said.

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