Interesting things do happen! Over the past weekend, Shade, a trojan-encryptor announced shutdown, and released decryption keys on GitHub.
Google is making its Meet feature free for all, and the 60 minute limit on calls will not be implemented until September 30. Separately, YouTube will be streaming a Global Film Festival on its platform from May 29th – June 7th.
Zoom admits to error in reporting its daily active users metric. And lastly, NetApp buys a remote desktop infrastructure provider.
Google’s Meet premium is now free for all
Google is offering its video conferencing product Meet for free to all users.
You can now use Meet to schedule, join or start secure video meetings with anyone. Earlier, this feature was available to only G Suite users.
Google is making Meet available on the web, via mobile apps for both iOS and Android. For existing Google Accounts, users can simply sign in at meet.google.com to get started.
Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, but Google said it won’t enforce the time limit until after September 30.
Meet’s usage has been growing since March. The platform has been hosting three billion minutes of video meetings and adding about three million users every day, according to Google.
The service gives host control to admit or deny entry to meeting, and to mute or remove participants, as and when needed.
Meet will begin its free version roll out from next week, and gradually expand it to more users in the following weeks.
A ransomware shuts down, releases decryption keys
Shade ransomware operators closed down over the past weekend and have released thousands of decryption keys, ZDNet reported.
The operators have released over 750,000 decryption keys that victims can use to decrypt their stolen files. The team has created trojan-encryptor mostly known as Shade, Troldesh or Encoder.858.
Sergey Golovanov, a security research at Kaspersky Lab, confirmed the release by Shade in a tweet.
“And yes. Keys are real. Just checked,” he added.
The Shade team hopes that with the keys, antivirus companies can issue their own user-friendly decryption tool. They have also irrevocably destroyed all data relating to their activity.
“We apologize to all the victims of the trojan and hope that the keys we published will help them to recover their data,” Shade team said in post on GitHub.
The short post did not explain Shade’s reason behind the decision to shut down.
The malware was not perfect during its lifetime as security researchers at Intel Security and Kaspersky have released multiple decryption apps to help victims recover files.
However, those decrypters worked only against a small number of Shade versions.
Shade’s keys release on Monday will help all users who had files encrypted by the ransomware.
Watch global film festival on YouTube
As the COVID-19 situation has shut various events globally, YouTube is making a global film festival available to viewers for free.
YouTube will host the first ever 10-day global film festival co-curated by over 20 film festivals across the world.
The festival will feature programming curated by Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), and New York Film Festival among others.
The ‘We Are One’ event will be streamed on YouTube from May 29 – June 7, 2020.
The streaming festival will feature documentaries, short films, comedies, music and feature films.
A full schedule of the event will be posted on festival’s pae soon.
The funds raised during the event will benefit COVID-19 relief funds, according to the description on the festival’s page on YouTube.
NetApp buys virtual desktop infrastructure provider
Cloud data service firm NetApp announced on Wednesday that it acquired CloudJumper, a software company in virtual desktop infrastructure and remote desktop services.
The acquisition will help improve NetApp’s public cloud virtual desktops for work from home, branch offices and enterprise deployments, the company said in a statement.
It will also allow the cloud service firm’s clients to deploy, manage, monitor and optimize virtual desktop service and application management environment, and help them get a total solution from a single company on the public cloud of their choice.
"NetApp and CloudJumper provides a simplified management platform for delivering virtual desktop infrastructure, storage and data management across Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud with best in class virtual desktop management combined with best in class storage and data services," Anthony Lye, SVP and GM at NetApp’s Cloud Data Services unit said.
CloudJumper provides simple and secure path for companies to manage their on-premises technologies focused on remote desktop services, and cloud-hosted desktops using Windows Virtual Desktops (WVD).
NetApp’s virtual desktop service will be available immediately on NetApp Cloud Central and integrated with Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes, the company said.
Zoom admits it doesn’t haven 300 million daily active users
Zoom had originally mentioned in a post that it has 300 million daily active users.
The video-conferencing platform later deleted that reference from the post, and now claims it has 300 million daily Zoom meeting participants, TheVerge reported.
The difference between daily active users and number of meeting participants is significant. A meeting participant can be counted several number of times a day based on the number of meetings that person attends.
But, a daily active user is counted only once each day, and this is an important metric used by companies to guage usage.
The misleading number was edited a day after Zoom’s numbers were widely used in headlines worldwide. Noticing the change, TheVerge reached out to Zoom for a comment.
The company accepted its error and gave the below statement.
“We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic. In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as “users” and “people.” When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to “participants.” This was a genuine oversight on our part.”
Zoom’s daily number of participants has soared from 10 million in December to 300 million in April.
Many players, including Microsoft’s Teams, Google’s Meet and Facebook’s Messenger, are competing to gain market share in the video-calling market. And they are making significant progress each day with new user additions and features.
