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The U.S. House of Representatives Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), Catherine Szpindor, informed congressional staffers this week that WhatsApp is now banned from government phones. The move came after the CAOs Office of Cybersecurity deemed the Meta-owned app to be high-risk to usersa claim that WhatsApp quickly rebutted. But the CAO is correct. While WhatsApp is one of the more secure messaging apps out there, it does have some privacy and security risks. Users can mitigate some of these risks, but others are beyond their control. Heres why WhatsApp is now banned in the U.S. House of Representatives and how you can make the app more secure on your phone. What the Office of Cybersecurity said, exactly The news that the CAOs Office of Cybersecurity had announced a ban on WhatsApp this week came from Axios. On Tuesday, the publication published parts of an internal CAO memo it received, which was sent to congressional staffers on Monday, announcing that WhatsApp was now verboten on government phones. The memo stipulated that “House staff are NOT allowed to download or keep the WhatsApp application on any House device, including any mobile, desktop, or web browser versions of its products. It went on to add: “If you have a WhatsApp application on your House-managed device, you will be contacted to remove it. The reason? According to the memo, “The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use. The CAO didnt provide further details in the memo regarding the above risks. Still, it’s easy to interpret some of the things that may have made the CAO leery about the continued use of WhatsApp by Congressional staffers. WhatsApp’s transparency issue WhatsApp, like competing secure messaging apps including Apples iMessages and Signal, is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that no parties other than the ones in the chat, even including Meta, can read the chat messages. But WhatsApp collects a lot more metadata from each chat than other secure messaging apps do, and it sends this info to Meta A chats metadata includes information such as the identities of the chat participants, IP addresses, phone numbers, and the timestamps of messages. No one knows exactly what Meta does with this metadata. Still, it is shared with Metas other platforms, including Instagram and Facebook. It is likely used to help the company build social graphs of users, leveraged for advertising purposes, and analyzed by the company to understand who is using their apps, and when and where. This opaqueness is likely some of the lack of transparency risk that the CAO was referring to. As for the absence of stored data encryption, the CAO may have been referring to the default method by which WhatsApp backs up a users chats. While WhatsApp chats are end-to-end encrypted, if a user backs up those chats to the cloud, the backup itself is not end-to-end encrypted by default. This means that if a bad actor gains access to a WhatsApp users cloud backup, they could read all of that users messages. Its no wonder the CAOs Office of Cybersecurity finds this worrying. WhatsApp also doesnt have other privacy and security features on by default, including the ability to lock the app behind biometrics and requiring two-step verification when a WhatsApp account is installed on another phone. If you dont work in the House of Representatives, you can still keep WhatsApp on your phone. But you might want to mitigate its privacy and security risks. Heres how. How to make WhatsApp more secure on your phone Unfortunately, theres nothing you can do about WhatsApps metadata problem. Meta designs WhatsApp so that the metadata of your chats is sent directly to the company. Theres no way you can turn this data collection off. But you can make the app more secure on your phone by following some simple steps, including: End-to-end encrypt your WhatsApp backups: In WhatsApp, go to Settings>Chats>Chat Backup>End-to-End Encrypted Backup and turn this option on. Now your chat backups saved in the cloud will be end-to-end encrypted. Lock WhatsApp: You can set WhatsApp to refuse to open without further authentication by locking the app. This means that even if someone has access to your unlocked phone, they wont be able to open WhatsApp unless they know your phones PIN, or have your face or fingerprint. To lock WhatsApp, go to WhatsApps Settings>Privacy>App Lock and toggle the feature on. Enable two-step verification: If someone logs into your WhatsApp account on their phone, theyll be able to see your messages. Thats why you should set up two-step verification for your account. This will require a PIN that you set to be entered whenever an attempt is made to log into your WhatsApp account on a new device. If the PIN isnt entered correctly, the new device wont have access to your account. To enable two-step verification, go to WhatsApps Settings>Account>Two-Step Verification and toggle the feature on. Apps the CAO suggests using instead When reached for comment on the CAOs decision to ban WhatsApp, the organization’s chief administrative officer, Catherine Szpindor, told Fast Company, “Protecting the People’s House is our topmost priority, and we are always monitoring and analyzing for potential cybersecurity risks that could endanger the data of House Members and staff. We routinely review the list of House-authorized apps and will amend the list as deemed appropriate.” In the past, the CAO has banned or imposed partial bans on various foreign apps, including those from ByteDance, such as TikTok. But the CAO has also previously announced bans or restrictions on apps made by American companies, including Microsoft Copilot and the free versions of ChatGPT. As for Meta, a company spokesperson told Fast Company that it disagrees with the CAOs characterization of WhatsApp in the strongest possible terms. The spokesperson also asserted that, when it comes to end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp offers “a higher level of security than most of the apps on the CAOs approved list that do not offer that protection.” In the Office of Cybersecurity’s memo, the agency provided guidance on alternative secure messaging apps that House staffers could use now that WhatsApp had been banned. According to Axios, those apps include Apples iMessage and FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, Wickr, and Signal. House workers have no choice in the matter, but you still do. If you decide to continue using WhatsApp, consider enhancing the privacy and security it already offers by enabling the optional protections described above.
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Bill McGowan is the founder and CEO of Clarity Media Group. He is a two-time Emmy Award-winning correspondent who now coaches everyone from CEOs to celebrities on how to captivate audiences. Juliana Silva is a journalist with vast experience in global media brand strategy who acts as a communications specialist at Clarity Media Group. As a media coach, she has transformed experts from a variety of professions into on-air network contributors. Whats the big idea? One of lifes great gifts is to have what we say remembered because, when our words stick with people, we have a golden opportunity to persuade, influence, motivate, or inspire. But every day, in offices all over the world, businesspeople squander those opportunities by speaking in bland, boring, and forgettable ways. Speak, Memorably outlines a host of techniques designed to help you captivate an audience by making your message so distinctive that it rises above the incessant noise swirling all around us these days. Below, coauthors Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva share five key insights from their new book, Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience. Listen to the audio versionread by Bill and Julianain the Next Big Idea App. 1. Location, location, location Where you place your big ideas matters in public speaking. This concept is called the primacy/recency effect, and it says that what you communicate at the beginning and end of a learning episode tends to be retained better than information presented in the middle. This theory has been validated in memory experiments. The great filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola uses this concept for making movies. He starts by identifying his three top storytelling points, takes the best one, and puts it at the end. He places the second-best point at the beginning and then finds a place in the middle to insert his third-best point. He may be talking about storytelling, but the same idea can be applied to your presentations at work. Throughout our years of coaching, we frequently see people missing the opportunity to capture the audiences attention. Unfortunately, presenters often resort to the dreaded agenda slide deck. It is the most overused and underwhelming tool in any public speakers arsenal. The scourge of telling people what youre going to tell them is rampant. We call this signposting, meaning warning your audience of what youre about to tell them. This doesnt just happen at the beginning of a presentation. It often happens at the beginning of each and every slide. The strategy you should embrace in public speaking is inform, dont warn. 2. Learning is a laughing matter Humor plays an important role in delivering memorable remarks. There has been extensive research on the power of levity in public speaking. Research from both the University of Pennsylvania and Ohio State University has shown that humor is a key contributor to both virality and retention. When 18- to 34-year-olds were shown both humorous and non-humorous news stories about politics and government policy, the viewers remembered and shared the funny stories more often. There is a wrong way to go about inserting humor into your presentations. If youve ever been told to start with a joke, unfortunately, thats probably the worst piece of advice. Leave the joke telling to professional comedians and instead think of your job as finding a humorous lens through which you want the audience to view your content. If youve ever been told to start with a joke, unfortunately, thats probably the worst piece of advice. Levity is the ultimate high-wire act of public speaking. Its high risk, but its also high reward. There are physiological benefits to using humor in public speaking. Not only does it make the speaker calmer and more confident, but it also boosts the audiences dopamine levels. Dopamine is the hormone in our bodies thats been called the pathway to pleasure. When dopamine hits our brains, it generates pleasure and makes us feel good. Laughter can also minimize stress. Studies at the Mayo Clinic have found that laughter can relieve stress by increasing the release of endorphins. They concluded that laughter stimulates circulation and muscle relaxation, both of which can help reduce stress. Reluctance to be clever or funny in a business setting is completely understandable. Everybody feels anxiety due to the nature of the risk, but research clearly shows that the payoff in terms of being memorable can be enormous. 3. The Magnificent Seven The Magnificent Seven is a series of linguistic devices that you can use to convert your ideas into punchy and memorable messages. 1. Analogy and Metaphor: These make it possible for your audience to understand a complex concept quickly and easily by comparing it to something common to all of us. For example, Sitting is the new smoking. Or, describing the supply chain crisis as a six-lane freeway trying to merge into a one-lane country road. 2. Creative Label: A pithy expression that you coin. The Great Resignation is a creative label. Quiet quitting is also a creative label. Or The Goldilocks Economy. You can see the viral nature of all these. 3. Twisted Cliché: When you take a very common expression and alter it slightly to turn it into something brand new. For instance, in 2023, when there was an oversaturation of startup investors in Silicon Valley, we called it a seating frenzy. 4. Wordplay: Perhaps the most famous example is from Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have a Dream speech when he said, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. 5. Data with Context: Overloading an audience with numbers and statistics is not memorable unless you bring some context and meaning to it. If you tell me that a windmill farm generates over 1,800 megawatts of power, I might not be impressed or interested. But if you tell me that it creates enough energy to power over a million homes, now I sit up and take notice. 6. Original Definitions: A fresh and different way to define certain terms. It is not the definition you find in the dictionary, but rather a complimentary meaning that helps you emphasize one of your points. For instance, you can redefine leadership as where empathy and vision meet. 7. Mathematical Equation: This actually requires no actual math. You could describe ratios in terms like the more you have this, the more you get that, such as the more conversational your tone becomes, the more confidence you exude. Or it could be an actual equation, like Authenticity = Passion + Warmth. 4. Zoomnesia and technostress Nearly all of us have to cope with virtual communication on a daily basis. Zoom fatigue is real. It was validated in a European study titled Technostress in Organizations, which examined the effects of video conferencing on a group of college students attending lectures remotely comparedto those attending in-person classes. Fatigue levels and mood were measured with medical equipment, and researchers found notable differences between the in-person and online students. Fatigue levels grew for the video conference. In contrast, the in-person groups reported feeling more lively, happy, and active. Another strange effect we discovered from our own daily online meetings was something we called Zoomnesia, which is a decreased ability to remember and differentiate between one Zoom call and another. In our own work, virtual meetings were starting to merge in our minds, and we asked ourselves what could be causing this. We realized that the setting for all these meetings was identical. Every day you sit in the same chair at the same desk, staring at the same computer screen, and you have a lack of audio and visual cues to help trigger your memories and distinguish them from one another. In our own work, virtual meetings were starting to merge in our minds. We had to validate our theory. Interestingly, we found a COVID-19-era study in which healthcare workers discovered this same phenomenon. The goal was to compare how well patients remembered medical instructions given during in-person consultations versus once given through telehealth. Participants were asked to recall the instructions immediately after the session, and then a week later. Overall, the number of details both younger and older patients were able to recall was significantly lower when they were provided through telehealth. This was true both immediately after the session and after one week. 5. Theft-tosterone This is such a common problem that it deserves its own creative label. We call it theft-tosterone, which is what happens when a woman shares an idea with her colleagues and then later a man says almost the exact same thing and takes credit for it. It happens in all kinds of workplaces, even at the United States Supreme Court. Recently, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she frequently sees examples of theft-tosterone when court is in session. Despite all the professional gains women have made over the past 20 years, episodes of theft-tosterone have increased 20% over the past several years. The roots of this phenomenon take hold early in life. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Deborah Tannen, notes that research shows how young boys use language to maintain and negotiate status within a group. Boys gain status by taking center stage and holding it. They do this through speech, giving information, telling stories, and maybe even boasting. But according to Tannen, its frowned upon for a girl to seek center stage by acting the exact same way. Equally interesting as theft-tosterones origins are effective ways women can cope with or prevent these episodes. After all, its impossible to be memorable if someone else is taking credit for your ideas. We detail strategies to combat theft-tosterone in the book. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
Tales of turning water into wine or weaving straw into gold are one thing, but a new study shows that scientists can transform trash into . . . Tylenol? Scientists at the University of Edinburgh were able to convert plastic waste into paracetamol, aka acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the pain reliever Tylenol. Stranger yet, they pulled off the alchemical feat using the bacteria E. coli. Were able to transform a prolific environmental and societal waste into such a globally important medication in a way thats completely impossible, using chemistry alone or using biology alone, says study coauthor Stephen Wallace, a chemical biotechnologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The research team began with polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic found in food packaging and polyester clothing. Using established chemical methods, they broke down the PET plastic into a precursor molecule and then added it into a cell culture of E. coli that was genetically modified. Enzymes in the modified E. coli bacteria were able to convert the plastic precursor into paracetamol 92% of the time. The transformation relies on a chemical process known as a Lossen rearrangement, which can convert one kind of molecule into a different kind of molecule. Scientists have known about the Lossen rearrangement for more than 100 years, but generally observe the phenomenon in a flask or a test tube. The research group is now working with pharmaceutical makers including AstraZeneca, one of the studys sponsors, to replicate the same chemical transformations on a larger scale. The new research isnt the first to observe the way that bacteria can be deployed to usefully break down plastic. Researchers have previously studied how wastewater bacteria found in urban waterways use a special enzyme to chew up plastic trash and convert it into carbon-based food. As we grapple with the cascading environmental and health effects that decades of proliferating plastics have wrought on the planet, bacteria capable of converting plastic into harmless or even useful molecules is a promising area of research.
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E-Commerce
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