GlobalLogic partners with Cybereason to develop next-generation cyber defense solutions

GlobalLogic announced that it has been selected by Cybereason to help develop its next-generation cyber security platform and services.

Deployed by large enterprises, governments, and major cloud providers worldwide, Cybereason’s future-ready attack protection spans across endpoints, the enterprise, the cloud, and everywhere the defenders battle cyber criminals. The collaboration will draw on GlobalLogic’s broad and deep expertise in security and data management software across devices through to the cloud, including the integration of advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

The program is one of the largest won by GlobalLogic in this field to date. It requires quickly scaling to hundreds of specialized engineers supporting Cybereason’s development roadmap over the next year. This program scope highlights the market’s need for stronger, better cybersecurity as cloud use, network expansions and other technology usage continued their upward trend and surged during the pandemic.

“Cyber threats have become considerably more frequent and sophisticated in recent years. We’ve become dangerously more vulnerable in areas traditional security solutions could not adequately protect—the network and the cloud,” said Rajaram Radhakrishnan, CRO, GlobalLogic. “Having operated in the cybersecurity space for more than a decade, GlobalLogic has become adept at successfully responding to complex requirements. Cybereason is a premier example of a crucial innovator building disruptive defense solutions, redefining what government-grade protection can be. We are honored to now be a part of their team.”

Cybereason delivers the most comprehensive protection available on the market today, analyzing more than 23 trillion security-related events per week—five times the volume of any other market solution. Using its patented Malicious Operations (MalOps) engine, Cybereason reveals the full attack story across every device, user identity, application, and cloud deployment.

One of Cybereason’s key solutions delivering this capability is the company’s Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solution—a unified detection and response tool that thwarts malicious operations across the entire IT stack. XDR is one of the several advanced technologies that GlobalLogic’s team will help Cybereason develop and enhance through the partnership.

“Cybereason’ operation-centric security approach is helping defenders combat sophisticated and persistent threats to their organizations. While other companies have security analysts chasing alerts without offering valuable insight, Cybereason helps organizations around the world leverage our award-winning technology each day to outthink and outpace attackers,” said Sam Curry, Chief Security Officer, Cybereason.

“GlobalLogic’s track record along with its responsiveness and collaborative approach to R&D stood out as major factors in finalizing our partnership. Together, we will deliver next-gen cyber defense solutions that will help technology users better control their sensitive data and operations—no matter where they reside.”

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Play collaborates with Allot to offer cybersecurity services for their consumer customers

Allot announced that Play, a mobile operator in Poland with over 15 million subscribers, has launched zero-touch, clientless cybersecurity and content control services for their consumer customers.

Allot Secure is a platform to provide mobile users with a unified user experience for on-net and off-net cybersecurity, including configuration, reporting and alarm management. Play is now offering two solutions in the Allot family: NetworkSecure and EndpointSecure.

NetworkSecure is a network-based solution, offering zero-touch, clientless operation, requiring no application installation by the end customer. With NetworkSecure, Play can now offer its customers protection from cybersecurity threats, including malware, viruses, phishing and ransomware.

An easy-to-use interface provides branded alerts and reporting that help strengthen brand loyalty. The NetworkSecure solution is supplemented with Allot EndpointSecure, which ensures that customers are protected from cyberthreats even when they are off Play’s network.

“Play is highly aware of cyber threats and wants to provide customers with easy to activate solutions to improve their security and comfort. The latest offering demonstrates our dedication to protecting customers both on and off the network” sai5d Mikkel Noesgaard, Board Member and Chief Marketing Officer at Play. “Allot’s cybersecurity platform provides a flexible solution to protect our customers from both existing and emerging threats.”

“One of our primary goals is to provide customers with the solutions they need to protect their subscribers from cyberattacks and give them peace of mind,” said Vered Zur, Vice President of Marketing for Allot. “The Allot Secure solutions enable Play to offer cyber protection to their consumer customers while increasing brand loyalty and Net Promoter Score and generating new revenue.”

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Secure Code Warrior partners with AWS to enhance developer-led security

Developer-led security has received a much-needed elevation due to a strategic partnership between Secure Code Warrior and AWS, with enterprises now able to ensure enhanced cloud security and compliance.

Secure Code Warrior is now a part of the AWS Global Startup Program, in addition to being listed on the AWS Marketplace. This partnership is advantageous for both AWS and Secure Code Warrior’s customers as it fulfils the need for security to be intrinsic to a developer’s workflow and central to a company’s culture—meeting the growing market demand and increasing requirements to stop application vulnerabilities from day one.

Vikram Ghosh, Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Secure Code Warrior, said the increased backing from AWS will support the business to accelerate its global growth, particularly across North America, and provide customers with the tools they need to be secure in the cloud as cybersecurity becomes critical to companies moving their entire operations to this platform.

“Customers of Secure Code Warrior now know that while AWS is ensuring the security of the cloud, we [SCW] ensure their security within the cloud, thanks to our human-led approach that embeds secure coding into the developer’s DNA,” said Ghosh.

This partnership between AWS and Secure Code Warrior also means customers can easily access and use its software through the AWS Marketplace. To date, this software meets AWS’ and Secure Code Warrior’s shared values around developer-driven security by offering exceptional customer support, keeping aligned software consistently updated, following industry best practices, and facilitating quality, secure code at scale—which aligns with AWS’ Shared Responsibility Model.

Secure Code Warrior is one of a small number of Australian organizations that have been accepted into the coveted invite-only, Global Startup Program. Through this partnership, AWS came to understand Secure Code Warrior’s vision for human-driven secure coding, which ensures organizations are able to release quality, compliant code to customers with confidence.

Now available for purchase on the AWS Marketplace, Secure Code Warrior is granting customers the opportunity to scale in their respective markets by elevating code quality, empowering developers, and delivering secure software, faster.

Ghosh added, “We’re excited by this evolution in Secure Code Warrior’s partnership with AWS, which through its Global Startup Program has a proven track record of driving company visibility and powering growth at speed. Through this partnership, we see a great opportunity for Secure Code Warrior to continue achieving growth at scale, while working to ensure software security is intrinsic to both developer and customer.”

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Armis raises $300M to accelerate strategic platform development and regional expansion

Armis announced that it has closed its latest investment round and increased its valuation to $3.4 billion. One Equity Partners (“OEP”), in conjunction with existing investors, made a combined $300 million investment to accelerate strategic platform development and global GTM initiatives, and to support future acquisitions. OEP will also be joining the board of directors.

“One Equity Partners is the exact type of investor we need at this juncture. They deeply understand our sector and their acquisition expertise will help support us in achieving our expansion goals and objectives,” said Yevgeny Dibrov, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Armis. “We look forward to OEP joining our board and working with our investor group to continue to scale and to acquire a number of strategically important assets.”

Armis’ tremendous growth has been fueled by capturing an ever-increasing market share in a rapidly growing market and by expanding into new verticals and regions. Prior to this investment, Armis raised $300 million in total financing.

Over the past 3 years, Armis drove a staggering 8,826% increase in revenue and is among the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies globally. In recognition of the rapid expansion, Deloitte recently ranked Armis as the 25th fastest-growing technology company in North America in the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

Armis provides complete visibility, vulnerability detection, and risk management to all assets across the IT, enterprise, medical, operational technology, ICS, IoT, and IIoT environments. Armis has the most robust partner ecosystem, supercharging hundreds of existing IT and security investments with real-time threat detection using the world’s largest device knowledgebase, tracking more than one billion devices⁠ and growing.

“Armis is the industry leader when it comes to asset visibility and security,” said Ori Birnboim, Managing Director, OEP. “We see a growing need for enterprises in a unified offering, and we are excited to work together with our partners to further accelerate the growth trajectory of the company and safeguard assets around the world.”

The close alignment of the OEP portfolio and the capabilities of Armis across healthcare, industrial OT, and technology will drive significant investments in customer acquisition and expansion. Allegro MicroSystems, a global leader in sensing and power semiconductor technology for motion control and energy efficiency, will be the first OEP portfolio company to deploy Armis protection throughout their networks.

Armis was rated in Gartner‘s Market Guide for OT Security, named a Leader in OT Security by ISG, and most recently secured top marks in the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations for ICS, delivering 100% visibility across both IT and OT.

“OEP and Armis see great value in quickly deploying the industry-leading asset security capabilities of Armis across global companies within the OEP portfolio,” said Andrew Dunn, Managing Director, OEP. “Given our experience in the cybersecurity market, we also plan to assist Armis in quickly extending its asset security leadership through strategic acquisitions.”

OEP will join the board of directors and lead acquisitions initiatives alongside existing investors Insight Partners, Brookfield Asset Management, Georgian, RedDot, and CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund. Insight Partners will remain the majority owner, and Armis will continue to operate independently, fully managed by its two co-founders, Yevgeny Dibrov, CEO, and Nadir Izrael, CTO, and the executive team.

“Armis continues expansion into Healthcare, Federal, SLED, and OT sectors in addition to our traditional IoT, IT, Medical, and Enterprise services and capabilities. The investment by One Equity Partners will fuel platform development, regional expansion, and an enhanced go-to-market team,” said Nadir Izrael, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Armis. “We are winning market share in all our new verticals and have become the leading cybersecurity player when it comes to seeing all assets and devices.”

Armis ranks as the leading platform provider by industry analysts. Through the Armis Partner Experience Program (APEX), we partner with the world’s leading organizations, including Crowdstrike, IBM, Fortified Health, PWC, Checkpoint, Accenture, Gigamon, Optiv, Capgemini, Mcloud, Deloitte, Cyvatar, and hundreds of other firms around the world.

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Upbound raises $60M to broaden its worldwide go-to-market efforts

Upbound announced that it raised $60M in new funding, including a Series B round led by Altimeter Capital with participation from GV, Intel Capital, and Telstra Ventures.

The funding follows 10x quarter-over-quarter recurring revenue growth fueled by Crossplane adoption and enterprise demand for Upbound’s product offering. Upbound will use the funding to broaden its worldwide go-to-market efforts, accelerate product development, and expand its services and support offerings. To-date, Upbound has raised $69 million.

“We believe that Upbound is distinctly positioned to be the convergence point for cloud infrastructure,” said Ram Woo, partner at Altimeter Capital. “The Crossplane project they invented builds on the momentum of the cloud-native community, and the company’s remarkable growth is a testament to the Kubernetes-first approach desired by platform engineers. We have been watching Upbound for a while and are excited to partner with Bassam and team.”

With the rise of Kubernetes and the cloud-native movement, enterprise infrastructure is undergoing a wave of modernization not seen since the dawn of cloud computing. Legacy Infrastructure-as-Code tooling is no longer adequate to manage multiple cloud vendor environments, deploy applications into different clouds, and accelerate the application development cycle.

Upbound created Crossplane in 2018 to offer the cloud-native community a Universal Control Plane for this new era of cloud computing. For the first time, the industry has rallied around a consistent, declarative, and vendor-neutral API for the cloud.

Upbound’s Universal Cloud Platform makes it easy for enterprises to transform their internal operations into a comprehensive cloud platform, simplifying infrastructure management and empowering developers with self-service capabilities. In an era where cloud computing is heading towards more horizontal integration, enterprises can truly achieve a single point of control for all their teams, applications, workloads and vendors.

Infrastructure managed via Upbound adheres to an organization’s policy guardrails and is continuously reconciled, simplifying Day 2 operations, eliminating configuration drift entirely, and enabling a much higher degree of automation than was previously possible.

“We’re going all-in on the Universal Control Plane approach Upbound is bringing to market,” said Sidarta Oliveira, Director of Infrastructure & Cloud at Grupo Boticário. “Thanks to Upbound, we’re rapidly transforming our approach to infrastructure management and application development and are able to bring the same cloud native practices and tooling to both our operator and developer teams.”

Founded by open source industry veteran and Rook co-creator Bassam Tabbara in 2017, Upbound is quickly being recognized by leading enterprises around the world that have adopted Kubernetes. Enterprise customers are integrating Upbound into their existing software delivery pipelines enabling “GitOps for everything” workflows. Crossplane and Upbound work out of the box with thousands of tools and products in the cloud native ecosystem. In addition, cloud and Infrastructure vendors are building specific integrations into Crossplane.

“We are witnessing a convergence effect on Crossplane as a Universal Control Plane for the cloud that is built on top of Kubernetes and solid cloud native abstractions,” said Chris Aniszcyk, CTO at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “Upbound has done a phenomenal job stewarding the project by building a diverse open community around Crossplane. The CNCF is thrilled to cultivate and support the Crossplane project in its next evolution of growth.”

“We started Upbound four years ago realizing the industry was at a pivotal moment, and that customers more than ever wanted to consume services and deploy abstractions across multiple vendors,” said Upbound Founder and CEO Bassam Tabbara. “We see platform engineering teams everywhere building their own internal modern day Heroku. Today’s funding announcement ensures we continue to help them on their journey with innovative products and services.”

The company recently announced a fully self-hosted, self-managed version of its Universal Cloud Platform with strict security requirements in response to customer demand. Upbound also continues to invest in the open source Crossplane community. The company recently donated a code generation project to ensure operators using legacy Infrastructure-as-Code tooling can easily switch over to a modern control plane architecture, as Upbound continues to be at the forefront of innovation in the space.

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SpeQtral raises $8.3M to develop quantum-secure communication systems

SpeQtral announced that it has successfully closed a US$8.3 million financing led by Xora Innovation, an early-stage deep science investment platform of Temasek.

With quantum cryptography fast becoming mainstream and the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) market expected to be worth US$20 billion by 2035, this latest capital injection will allow SpeQtral to strengthen its position as a quantum-secure communications company. Specifically, the funds will be used to expand SpeQtral’s regional and international presence, establish strategic business partnerships, hire top talent, support the commercial rollout of terrestrial systems, and further develop its satellite-based systems.

While the emergence of fully functional quantum computers will spur breakthroughs in optimisation problems for applications across a broad spectrum of industries, it is only a matter of time before the same computational capabilities are used to break the fundamental cryptographic principles that safeguard today’s data communications – principally, public key encryption (PKE).

SpeQtral is on a mission to deliver tamper-proof and computationally uncrackable encryption keys, within and across global communications networks, securing data against present and future threats brought on by advances in computing. Together with partners, SpeQtral is reinventing cryptography for the quantum age, using satellites in low earth orbit to secure data networks across the globe.

SpeQtral’s QKD technology solution is a crucial element in building global quantum-secure communication networks. QKD uses quantum physics, as opposed to current mathematically based encryption technologies, to distribute symmetric encryption keys that can be used to secure communication networks. By using the laws of physics to generate the keys rather than mathematical algorithms, SpeQtral’s QKD platform enables the creation and distribution of computationally uncrackable encryption keys.

“Secure data communication is foundational to the ‘web of trust’ between buyers, sellers, and intermediaries in the modern digital economy,“ said Donna See, CEO of Xora Innovation. “SpeQtral’s QKD technology enables critical solutions for governments and enterprises seeking to ensure this web of trust in the quantum age. We are very excited to be a part of accelerating SpeQtral’s growth and success.”

Chune Yang Lum, Co-founder and CEO of SpeQtral, said “We are honoured to welcome our new investors, Xora Innovation and TIS, and are deeply appreciative of the continued support of our original investors who continue to believe in our vision. We feel very fortunate to have investors who are committed to rolling up their sleeves and helping us deliver best-in-class quantum technologies to governments, defence agencies, financial services institutions, data centres, cloud and telecommunication service providers.”

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Riya Shanmugam joins New Relic as Group VP of Global Alliances and Channels

New Relic has appointed Riya Shanmugam as Group Vice President of Global Alliances and Channels to further develop and strengthen the company’s partner strategy and channel programs.

As enterprises across every industry and region continue to realize the benefits of cloud-based observability as an open, connected, and programmable practice for every engineer across every stage of the software lifecycle, partners will continue to be essential in bringing the value of New Relic One to more engineers.

Cloud veteran to lead charge with partners

Shanmugam joins New Relic from Adobe, where she was the Global Head of Cloud Adoption and Customer Success. Prior to Adobe, Shanmugam served as a customer engineering leader at Google Cloud. She has also held technical and strategic advisory roles for IBM, AMD, Infosys, and several hyper-growth startups.

Shanmugam earned an MBA from the McCoy School of Business at Texas State University and a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the Amrita School of Engineering. She is also a beneficiary of the Leadership Academy at Harvard Business School Executive Education and the Stanford Graduate School of Business for Executive Education.

“New Relic’s mission is to empower engineers with a data-driven approach to observability across the entire software lifecycle so they can plan, build, deploy, and run amazing software that powers amazing digital experiences. Cloud providers, resellers, service partners, MSPs, and technology partners are all crucial to expanding our global observability footprint,” said Riya Shanmugam, Group Vice President of Global Alliances and Channels at New Relic.

“I’ve spent my career working with technology innovators globally to solve complex business challenges through software. New Relic mirrors this experience in its philosophical mindset and in our pursuit to help engineers and developers do their jobs better, faster, more easily, and more efficiently. I’m eager to lead the global channel and alliances organization at a momentous point in the company’s history.”

New Relic’s commitment to the channel

New Relic’s Channel Sales Program had a record year in 2021, driven by its work with AWS and strong channel performance with partners Carahsoft, Megazone, Rackspace, SHI International, SoftwareONE, and others.

Most recently, New Relic demonstrated its commitment to its partner ecosystem with several key initiatives, including a transition to usage-based pricing; the launch of New Relic Instant Observability, an open source ecosystem of 400+ quickstarts to help engineers instrument, dashboard, and alert their entire stack, featuring integrations with Cribl, Fastly, Gigamon, Kentik, Lacework, and Trend Micro; and a strategic five-year agreement with AWS.

Shanmugam’s first initiatives as Group Vice President of Global Alliances and Channels will be to strengthen New Relic’s partner programs, empower the partner ecosystem with resources and tools, and further simplify doing business with New Relic for partners and customers. She will also enhance New Relic’s global channel presence by working with global and regional partners and MSPs to further build practices and catalogs for the observability maturity journey and augment growth with new partners.

“Enterprises of every size and industry are realizing that cloud-based observability solutions are powering modern business. As we see increased demand from our customers in the Americas and abroad, engaging and working with the channel on a global scale will be vital to New Relic’s continued growth,” said Steve Hurn, Chief Sales Officer at New Relic. “Riya brings significant skills and experience in creating value for customers and partners through nurturing a culture of innovation. We’re thrilled to have Riya onboard to lead our next phase of partner and channel growth.”

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Exabeam appoints Gianna Driver as Chief Human Resources Officer

Exabeam announced the appointment of Gianna Driver as Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO). As CHRO, Driver is chartered with creating scalable processes that will enrich the employee experience and enable Exabeam employees to do their best work.

She will be responsible for architecting the company’s talent strategy, driving corporate culture and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and leading the global human resources function. Driver will also manage the strategy and processes related to building, investing in, and retaining top talent at Exabeam.

Gianna brings nearly 20 years of executive human resources management experience in small, large, private, and public global companies to Exabeam. Prior to Exabeam, Driver was the Chief People Officer at BlueVine, a private fintech company based in Redwood City, CA. Before BlueVine, Gianna led HR and People functions in high-growth technology, gaming, consumer, and SaaS organizations including Playstudios, Aristocrat, Actian Corporation, Talend, and Balsam Brands.

“I’m thrilled to join Exabeam, named a 2021 Best Place to Work by Inc., San Francisco Business Times, and Silicon Valley Journal and also recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in North America on the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list,” said Gianna Driver, chief human resources officer, Exabeam. “Exabeam is experiencing a transformative period of growth and achievement and I’m inspired by the team, vision, and leadership. I’m eager to bring my passions––building a high-performance culture, establishing operational excellence, and creating joy at work––to Exabeam. It is inspiring and energizing to join a company that is helping organizations remain safe and secure.”

“At Exabeam, values and culture are our top priorities and Gianna embodies our people first approach,” said Michael DeCesare, chief executive office and president, Exabeam. “Our people are our most valuable asset and I will work with Gianna to continue to empower everyone to do their best work. With Gianna’s technology and leadership experience, she’ll help us advance our workforce, culture, and DEI efforts. Together we will give our employees the tools they need to take not only Exabeam, but their personal and professional growth, to the next level.”

Exabeam helps thousands of security analysts around the world tackle complex cybersecurity issues by fully automating their Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response (TDIR) workflows. Exabeam Fusion SIEM and Exabeam Fusion XDR greatly accelerate the time it takes for security teams to conduct deep investigations and more quickly resolve security incidents across their organizations.

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Aqua Security gets AWS Graviton Ready designation to address security and compliance obstacles

Aqua Security announced that it has achieved the AWS Graviton Ready designation, part of the Amazon Web Services Service Ready Program. This designation recognizes that Aqua Security’s Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) has demonstrated successful integration with the AWS Graviton service.

Aqua’s platform solves the security and compliance challenges of cloud native environments with purpose-built runtime controls based on container behavioral profiling. This allows Aqua Security to prevent specific executables and protects against unauthorized network connections to further secure and address compliance requirements for workloads running on AWS Graviton2 instances.

Achieving the AWS Graviton Ready designation differentiates Aqua Security as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member with a product integrating with AWS Graviton and is generally available and fully supported for AWS customers. AWS Service Ready Partners have demonstrated success building products integrated with AWS services, helping AWS customers evaluate and use their technology productively, at scale, and with varying levels of complexity.

“Achieving the AWS Graviton Ready designation demonstrates how Aqua Security is continuously innovating its solutions to meet the security needs of organizations across the world,” said Amir Jerbi, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Aqua Security. “Automating compliance is a significant challenge when adopting new services. As an AWS partner, we are focused on removing that barrier and unlocking the value that AWS services provide through seamless integration of advanced cloud native security.”

To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Service Ready Program to help customers identify solutions integrated with AWS services and spend less time evaluating new tools, and more time scaling their use of solutions that are integrated with AWS.

Aqua Security is the pioneer in securing cloud native environments and is the industry’s gold standard for CNAPP, offering an integrated platform that embeds controls early in development and seamlessly bakes them in all the way into production, protecting applications wherever they’re deployed. Its purpose-built enforcer for AWS Graviton-powered workloads provides runtime controls and operates at the workload level to offer visibility and automated protection against unauthorized activity at scale.

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When You Should Donate Anonymously (and When You Shouldn't)

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If you’ve ever donated to a good cause online, you’re no doubt familiar with the last step—the potentially anxiety-inducing decision of whether to make your donation public, or keep it anonymous. If you’re anything like me, all kinds of conflicting thoughts rush in.

Is this amount enough? What if it’s too much, will I look showy? Do I want everyone to know I’m affiliated with this cause? If I donate publicly, should I go whole hog and post it on Facebook to get more donations? I don’t want anyone to think I’m holier-than-thou, though. But, if I promote the cause more people would donate—which is the goal, right?

Money is fraught. We want to have it, but we don’t want to be a pretentious jerk about it. We often worry what others might think when we donate, and rightly so. As this BBC article shows, overly kind and moral people are subject to “do-gooder derogation;” whereby their seemingly altruistic behavior is harshly judged as having ulterior motives designed to boost their reputation. Evolutionary psychologists have found that reputation is “positional,” however, meaning if one person rises, others fall. In this competitive environment, those who don’t donate feel threatened by public displays of altruism, as if they automatically diminish their own status in society.

So when should we donate publicly—and when shouldn’t we?

When to donate anonymously

In addition to avoiding do-gooder derogation, there are other reasons you may not want to advertise your donation.

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Controversial causes

If a cause is controversial, it may be best to keep your support quiet. This could be for reasons of personal safety, so as not to offend people you’re close to, or because you don’t want adjacent causes to approach you down the road.

To avoid being perceived as rich

Perhaps counterintuitively, given our culture’s obsession with money and status, you may not want to broadcast you’ve got cash to spare. It could lead people to inaccurately perceiving you as wealthier than you are, and cause them to expect continued—or greater—financial contribution from you in the future. (Or calling you “Moneybags,” which is also annoying.)

Advertising your donation also could lead to a sudden increase in donation requests from similar organizations—especially if you made a sizable one-time donation due to an inheritance or cash windfall that won’t be happening again anytime soon. (This may happen anyway, though, as mail-in donations can also cause an uptick in donation requests delivered straight to your mailbox.)

To protect your privacy

Perhaps you simply don’t want anyone to know—or make assumptions about— your financial situation. This is especially true for ex-spouses or estranged family members who may be prone to Googling your name in an effort to collect data to use against you in a future dispute. Likewise, if you become embroiled in an accident or legal dispute requiring you to pay damages, it’s better if lawyers for the aggrieved party don’t have access to your financial donation history.

To avoid offending family members

If you’ve ever had a GoFundMe circulate among your family, you understand the dilemma public donating can pose. If you had an amount in mind that’s higher than your parents, cousins, and siblings donated, you may not want to “upstage” them by contributing more. (Does this undermine the true spirit of the fundraiser? Yes. That doesn’t mean it’s not a real concern and long-term perception calculation to consider.)

When to Donate Publicly

In many cases, there’s a compelling argument for making your donations known. It may require prioritizing the cause itself over how people might perceive us—arguably the most altruistic approach. Could it come with some jealous side-eye, suspicion, and silent consternation? It could. But there are still some reasons why it’s better to go that route.

To inspire others to give

Publicizing your donation can be a form of positive peer pressure, making it more likely that people who look up to you will emulate your good deed. Sharing your philanthropy without fear of “do-gooder” recrimination or appearing self-congratulatory can encourage others in your network or community to do the same, thus increasing the total dollar amount contributed—whether to your charity or others.

I, for one, appreciate when friends talk about the causes they support on social media. It jolts me out of a largely self-focused cocoon and serves as a reminder to consider the needs of people I don’t ordinarily think about in my day-to-day.

To raise awareness for a cause near to your heart

Perhaps you prefer to do most of your charitable giving in silence, never letting anyone know of your good deed. Except for that one thing that trumps all other causes for personal reasons. Perhaps a loved one died of dementia, and you feel passionate about funding Alzheimer’s prevention research. Maybe you were, or have taken in, a foster child, and will shout from the rooftops to make sure kids in the child welfare system get proper Christmas presents. If you enjoy a high-profile in your business or community, your name can attract ever more funds to the cause.

To find new causes without doing all the legwork

If you find yourself in a position to donate more than you could in years past, you may be looking to find more worthwhile organizations to which you can contribute. Public acknowledgement of a donation is an efficient way to bring yourself to the attention of other causes as a potential donor. With enough visibility, they’ll approach you, minimizing the amount of research necessary on your end.

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This Is How You Choose the Perfect Christmas Tree

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Most people go to the local Christmas tree lot with no idea what they’re looking for. Just embarrassing themselves, going, “Uhhmm, that one looks good, I think?” Do not be a Christmas-tree ignoramus any longer. Check out the list below so you can confidently walk up to that guy with the knit hat and rugged flannel and say, “I’d like a six-foot Scotch pine, tree-tender, sir; and make it snappy!”

Most fragrant Christmas tree: Douglas fir 

If filling your home with that special Christmas musk is vital to your holiday happiness, you gotta go with a fir tree. Some people prefer the Balsan fir or a nice Fraser, but for my money, there is no tree more Christmas-smelling than the Douglas fir. Its sweet, strong, piney scent confidently announces, “It’s Christmas, asshole” to all.

Most resilient Christmas tree: Scotch pine

If you love Christmas, but you hate sweeping up piles of tree leavings, the Scotch pine is the tree of your dreams. These babies hold onto their needles with something resembling desperation—they’ll keep their needles even if you don’t put them in water. The tradeoff: Scotch pine needles are sharp, so this might not be the best choice if you have kids who run their eyes into things.

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Best Christmas tree for heavy ornaments: Blue spruce

The strong branches of the Blue spruce will remind you of the solid arms of a sensual lumberjack. Your dream woodsman would never let even the heaviest of ornaments fall, and neither will the Blue spruce. The downside: Like a lumberjack, it doesn’t smell very good.

Most pretentious Christmas tree: Korean fir

If you have to do Christmas just a little better than everyone else, I suggest getting a Korean fir this year. This tree’s exotic provenance—it’s native to Asia—silvery needles, and higher-than-average price tag offer endless opportunities to casually one-up friends who already barely tolerate you.

Most traditional Christmas tree: Balsam fir

If you like an old-fashioned Christmas, you can’t beat a Balsam fir. The Balsam fir were the first American Christmas trees, harvested and sold by enterprising tree-heads to Scandinavian immigrants in Chicago and Milwaukee. They smell great, and they have the most iconic Christmas tree look. Downside: The branches are far apart so they can look a little sparse; also, this is a boomer Christmas tree, so it watches Fox News.

Best Christmas tree if you have allergies: Leyland cypress

If you’re allergic to tree sap, might I suggest a Leyland cypress? This dark green tree doesn’t produce any Christmas-y odor at all, and it does not produce sap. So if you have tree allergies (or just hate when your house smells like a pine forest) you can put up a Leyland Cypress instead of explaining to everyone that you actually love Christmas, even though there’s no tree in your house.

Best Christmas tree for a large space: Noble fir

The Noble is the largest kind of fir tree; in nature, these suckers can grow to over 250 feet tall. So if you need to decorate a taller space, like the lobby at a depressing office building in an industrial court, or the stupid double-tall living room of your idiotic McMansion, get a Noble. They’re big!

Best Christmas tree if you just want to get this over with: Artificial tree

Some of us view the time between Thanksgiving and New Years as the “hassle season,” and just want it to be over. For us, there’s the artificial tree. Rather than spending Sunday paying a huge amount of money for a dead plant you’re going to throw out in a couple weeks, just drag the fake tree from the closet. Easy! While fake-Christmas-tree-technology has advanced to the point that better ones look almost real, there’s something to be said for the boldness of putting up an obviously artificial tree, like white, or silver ones.

Best Christmas tree overall: Fraser fir

They smell great. They have soft needles. They last a long time. They have that classic “triangle” shape that screams “Christmas.” There is simply no better choice for a Christmas tree than the Fraser fir, and I will defend that opinion with my fists if any of you mooks want to try me.

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Impress Your Guests With a Butter Board

Photo: rukxstockphoto (Shutterstock)

Food on boards is very popular, perhaps more popular than it’s ever been. Search “grazing table” on this world wide web, and you’ll find lots of photos of very large charcuterie and cheese boards, along with many blogs insisting that they are not just “big charcuterie boards.” Grazing tables are a different, new concept unlike any board you’ve ever seen before. (They’re also not a buffet. Buffets are ugly and grazing tables are beautiful.)

I fail to appreciate the distinctions, but it really doesn’t matter what you call them; it’s the same kind of food you always see on boards, scaled up. But you know what you don’t see on these vast, sprawling tables of food? You know what almost never makes an appearance, even though it has as much to give as brie or pork liver mousse or whatever Trader Joe’s item is popular that week? Butter. Butter should be on more boards. I could craft an entire board around butter.

Why you should make a butter flight

Duck butter is just one of the butters you should have in your flight.

Photo: Claire Lower

I will never turn down a collection of meat and cheeses, but I would be floored if I walked into someone’s home to find a neat little collection of churned dairy, with really good bread set out for tasting. This, to me, would be luxurious.

Butter is not a monolith. Beyond the simple unsalted sticks you get at the grocery store, there are tons of variation in “plain” butter (and there’s even more variation in those simple sticks). You’ve got cultured butter, Icelandic butter, Irish butter, European-style butter—and variation within each of those categories, depending on how the manufacturers source their milk and make their butter. These subtle differences from butter to butter should be explored and celebrated, and a butter flight (or board, or tasting, or whatever you want to call it) is a good way to do that. Supplement with some compound butters, and you’ve got a delicious and decadent food-on-board scenario.

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How to make a butter flight

Start by grabbing a couple of fancy “plain” butters—“snacking butters,” I call them. A couple of salted, cultured specimens from different regions will work just fine. (This is my current favorite snacking butter, if you are looking for suggestions.) Then, grab some cheaper sticks to make your compound butters. You are welcome to add as many butters to your board as you like, but I think two “plain” and three compound makes for an interesting and engaging board.

If you’ve never made a compound butter before, do not fret, it is very easy. Take some room-temperature butter, and blend it with something else that is not butter. My personal favorites are duck butter, chicken butter, bacon butter, brie butter, yogurt butter, and black garlic butter, but you can invent your own.

Cheese, vegetables, herbs, citrus zest, capers—all are good candidates for flavoring your buttery creation. There are no hard and fast rules about how to make compound butter, but you’ll want to keep water out of the equation. Cook down (and cool) vegetables before adding them to your butter, and keep water-based seasonings to a minimum if you want your butter to hold its form.

Blitz everything in the food processor until smooth. If you want your butter to be studded with flecks of capers or lemon zest or whatever, fold that stuff in after everything else is blitzed. Scrape the compound butter into a pretty dish, or onto some plastic wrap if you wish to shape it into a log. Roll and shape the butter using the plastic wrap, then chill until you are ready to serve.

How to serve a butter flight

Take all of your butters—plain and compound—out of the fridge an hour before you wish to serve them. Cold butter is hard to taste, and this is about appreciating butter’s subtler qualities.

Arrange your butters in a pleasing configuration on a board, just like you would cheese. Cut up a baguette and break out some seedy crackers, and arrange your butter delivery systems around the butter. Slice some radishes, preferably French breakfast radishes, and fan those out next to the bread and crackers. (A buttered radish is a simple, vastly underrated pleasure.)

For accoutrement, get some jam and honey involved. If you want to get weird, you can set out some hard boiled egg halves. (It may sound odd, but butter is transcendent on hard boiled eggs.) For the beverage, serve Champagne and/or an aggressive carbonated mineral water—both are great palate cleansers, and it’s good to reset with sips between butters.

   

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21 Times Celebrity Voiceover Stunt Casting Paid Off

Screenshot: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse/Sony Pictures

Last month, Universal delighted few, annoyed many, and baffled all but those with a pragmatic view of movies-as-product when it announced Chris Pratt will be taking over the role of Mario in an upcoming Super Mario Bros. animated movie. The actor was also recently cast as loveably outrageous cat stereotype Garfield for that franchise’s latest animated reboot, and has already voiced characters in both Lego Movies and Pixar’s Onward. Does this mean he is the world’s greatest voice actor? Well, he’s a famous actor, and he has a recognizable voice, but those aren’t really the same thing.

For studios, the appeal of celebrity voice casting is undeniable: star power puts butts in seats, or so conventional wisdom tells us. but it’s also the case that actors accustomed to performing with their entire bodies can’t always master the nuances of purely vocal performance. There’s a reason animation fans line up at conventions to meet people whose faces have never appeared on camera—I’m thinking of names like Tara Strong, Cree Summer, Steve Blum; in some circles, Mark Hamill is even better loved for his VO work than for Star Wars).

Voice acting is a distinct talent that some big names in live-action can sometimes master (either by creating a compelling performance or by making good use of a recognizable voice), and sometimes...not so much. But when it works, it really can deliver in all sorts of ways. Here are 21 times it did.

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How to Check Road Conditions When You Travel This Winter

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There’s only so much you can control when it comes to travel, especially during the holidays. Whether you’re embarking on a road trip to see family, or simply worried about driving through the snow to the other side of town, the cold winter months typically mean the start of increasingly dangerous road conditions.

Even if you swear by your trusted weather app, road conditions are constantly changing and can vary considerably over the same stretch of road. Up-to-date maps can be crucial to travel safely; at the same time, crowdsourced apps are not exactly foolproof, since they depend on active users to enter accurate, timely information. To best avoid unplowed, flooded, or otherwise compromised travel routes, here are some tools to embark safely on your next drive.

Waze

We’ve previously described Waze as “Google Maps with personality.” The biggest reason people seek out Waze over other map options is the popularity of its real-time traffic information provided by users.

To find current road conditions, go to the Hazards menu under Weather; during ice and snow, look specifically for the unplowed road report. However, like with an accident or a car on the side of the road, the feature only works if other drivers use the app to log the road conditions (not to mention log them accurately).

​​So long as other users are actively reporting, drivers using Waze will be kept informed when they are approaching a road that has already been identified by others as unplowed. Additionally, Waze also has a dedicated crisis response team, which handles all weather-related events, such as hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires, according to a Waze spokesperson. Here are some more wonderful Waze settings to try out.

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Google Maps

While the current version Google Maps has some clever settings you should be using, there isn’t a clear option to proactively look at specific weather conditions along a route. Instead, Google Maps is supposed to alert you to extreme weather conditions in real-time, so you don’t wind up driving on flooded or otherwise dangerous roads. When you’re en route to your destination, the app tries to provide route alerts that best keep you away from disaster-hit areas. For now, it might be wise to use a crowdsourced app like Waze (or some of the other options below) as a back-up to alerts from Google Maps.

Apple Maps

Similar to Google Maps, the current version of Apple Maps doesn’t quite compare to the real-time user reports that Waze promises. Here’s what you can do: Zoom in on a map until the weather icon appears in the lower-right corner; the icon shows the current conditions for that area. In some regions, the air quality index also appears in the lower-right corner.

While Google may own Waze, there are a few of the features popularized by that transit-tracking app making their way to Apple Maps. For instance, here’s how to report traffic conditions in Apple Maps.

SafeTravelUSA

The site SafeTravelUSA provides links to current road conditions reported by all participating states. Some of those state sites offer live webcam images so you can see what it looks like first-hand. Similarly, the National Weather Service has compiled a list of state-by-state numbers and sites that have road condition maps available, but SafeTravelUSA’s links are more up-to-date and direct.

Traffic Spotter app

There are a number of community-driven apps that seek to provide up-to-date traffic and weather information. Traffic Spotter seems to be one of the more moderately popular options where users can report not just traffic, but how weather conditions are affecting the roads. Plus, the weather radar and weather station components of the app let you see how conditions will affect your trip. Visit the Traffic Spotter site or download via Google Play.

Local Facebook groups

You might be surprised to see how many Facebook communities there are with people posting about weather and traffic conditions, either in your town or at your destination. If you join one of these groups, you can set notifications to stay up-to-date on the latest posts and replies.

Call 511

511 is a simple, easy-to-remember telephone number that connects citizens with information from the Department of Transportation. Call 511 the next time you need to find out about traffic, road construction, or issues with mass transit.

With the tools above, hopefully you won’t get blindsided by whatever weather comes your way.

  

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Why Your Friends Are Probably More Popular, Richer, and More Attractive Than You

Chances are good you are less popular than your friends. Poorer, too. Probably they are also better looking. Sorry. This is called “the friendship paradox,” and it’s just logical fact.

It its most basic level, the friendship paradox goes like this: Since you are more likely to be friends with people who are popular (they have more friends, after all) than people who are unpopular, the average number of friends your friends have is probably higher than your number of friends.

First observed by sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991, the truth of the friendship paradox is supported by real life observation, mathematics, and especially by social media, where analysis of social network connections show that people are more likely to follow others who have more connections, indicating that any one individual on a social network is, on average, less popular than their friends.

It’s an established enough idea that virologists use the friendship paradox to fight communicable diseases. If you ask a number of random people to suggest a friend to be vaccinated, a popular person will be chosen by more random people than an unpopular person. Since they have more social connections, they’re more likely to spread a disease to more people, and so a super-spreaders can be identified and inoculated, slowing the spread more effectively than would identifying “vulnerable” communities or giving out vaccines at random.

Researchers have taken the idea one step further, identifying the “generalized friendship paradox,” which posits that “popular” people are also more likely to be richer, more attractive, and happier than less-popular people—and since you are more likely to be friends with someone who is more popular, the average of your friends’ wealth, attractiveness, and happiness is likely to be higher than yours too.

But do not sink into a pit of despair over how ugly and useless you are compared to your friends. It’s actually not as bad as it seems.

Skewing the average

While the friendship paradox is real (and supported by complicated math) on a macro level, when you drill down to an individual level, it gets murkier and less depressing. At issue is the idea of “average” popularity, and the way a few individuals with a very high number of friends can skew the numbers for everyone else. For example, if you have 100 twitter followers, and you follow one twitter account with 100,000 followers and 10 twitter accounts with 50 followers each, the average popularity of your twitter friends is going to be higher than yours—even though 9 out of your ten friends have fewer followers than you. So you could easily be more popular than most of your friends and still be less popular than the average of all your friends. In other words: Very popular people ruin everything, even averages.

Selection bias

The other issue with the friendship paradox is your personal sampling bias. When comparing your own popularity, attractiveness, and wealth against that of others, you’re generally only looking at your own social circle.. There are likely huge tranches of the population who are uglier, less cool, and less rich than anyone in your friend group, but you barely know they exist, because why would you be friends with them?

Think of going to the gym. It’s easy to think, “I’m the weakest, most spaghetti-armed MFer on earth,” but it only seems that way because you’re looking at a bunch of people who bothered to go to the gym at all—everyone at home on their couch has been left out of your sample.

The friendship paradox versus the self-evaluation maintenance theory

All that said, while comparing your own accomplishments or popularity to an average of your entire social circle’s is useless (and comparing yourself at all can correlate to low-self esteem and social anxiety), measuring yourself against the people closest to you is inevitable.

The “self-evaluation maintenance theory” concerns the way we maintain our self-image through comparing ourselves to others. According to this theory, our self-esteem can go up when the people we care about succeed, as if their success has been reflected onto us. But the opposite can happen as well: The success of a loved one can lead to a decrease in our self-esteem.

There are a couple factors at play here:. The first is how close we are to the person we’re comparing ourselves to. A comparison is only meaningful if the person we’re comparing ourselves to is someone we’re close to. In other words: The success of a person you met at party once will (theoretically) have way less of an impact (either negative or positive) on your own self-evaluation than the success of your best friend.

The second factor concerns how we define ourselves. According to self-evaluation and maintenance theory, if a loved one succeeds at something we regard as important in ourselves, we are likely to compare ourselves to them and feel worse for it. If the activity is something that we don’t regard as important to us, we’re more likely to bask in reflected glory, and enjoy the self-esteem boost that comes from it. For example, if both you and your twin brother play baseball, and he makes varsity but you do not, you’re not going to feel great about yourself. But if you play baseball and he plays violin, you’re going to feel better about yourself if he is promoted to first chair in the orchestra.

All of the above assumes you are not one of those rare super-spreaders of popularity, of course. If you are, nice work. Thanks for making the rest of us feel bad about ourselves.

 

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How to Reduce Eye Strain When You're Staring at Screens All Day

Photo: myboys.me (Shutterstock)

The rise of screen use has raised a number of concerns, especially when it comes to eye health and the impacts of blue light on the eye. But what is blue light, and how much is it really to blame for the strain our daily screen activity is putting on our eyes?

What is blue light?

Blue light is just one wavelength of the visible light spectrum, which includes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. There are plenty of wavelengths that exist beyond what we can see with the naked eye, but those in the rainbow—including blue—are visible without any assistance.

You don’t just get blue light from the screens in your life; blue light exists in all white light, which means you get plenty of it from the sun you’re exposed to every day, too.

Is blue light worrisome?

While it is true that under certain laboratory conditions, blue light damages samples of retinal cells, that’s only in a lab. It’s vastly different from how your retinal cells might interact with the same light waves outside of those conditions. Blue light can negatively impact your circadian rhythms—but so can other wavelengths in the light spectrum. Light, in general, helps trick your brain into thinking the sun is still up, so it doesn’t start producing melatonin (the sleep hormone) until much later.

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Eye strain, on the other hand, is very real and can happen as a direct result of spending too much time staring at a screen. It has nothing to do with the blue light, though, and everything to do with the fact that you are exhausting your eyes by not looking away from a screen for long periods.

Reducing blue light

While blue light isn’t necessarily the villain here, you might find reducing it aids with eye strain. If you don’t want to invest in a pair of blue light glasses, here are some things you can do to reduce the levels your eyes are exposed to:

Move your screen farther away

Sometimes, it really is that simple. Experts have found that moving your screen just one inch farther away from your face has the same impact as installing a blue light filter on your device. That’s because most modern blue-light-blocking coatings only cut about 15% of the blue light a device emits.

Install a blue light filter program

There are a number of programs available that can automatically adjust the frequency of the light waves your screen is emitting. F.lux, for example, is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux and gives you the option to adjust the brightness manually or set it up to do so automatically based on the sunrise and sunset times in your part of the world.

Use your device’s built-in filters

You may not need to install a secondary program. Most devices now come with a built-in “night mode” that allows you to do the same thing as the above-mentioned program without wasting storage space on your device. Using the night mode feature, you can choose how intense the filter is (which controls how “orange” your screen will look), and set specific times for the filter to turn on and off.

Upgrade your screens

With the concern about blue light and eye strain on the rise, many manufacturers have started creating low blue light monitors that naturally emit less blue light while still providing the other functionality we’ve come to expect from these devices. You can find monitors in this category made by major manufacturers like Asus, Samsung, and ViewSonic.

Take frequent breaks

The easiest way to avoid eye strain when you’re behind a screen for long periods is to take frequent breaks: The 20-20-20 method is a good rule of thumb—for every 20 minutes you are behind a screen, take a 20-second break to look at something 20 feet away. Bonus points if you actually get up and walk around a bit before getting back to work.

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Why You Should Replace Your Old Christmas Lights With LED Lights

Photo: Arina P Habich (Shutterstock)

Holiday lights are a cozy tradition—as the days get shorter, a few sparkly strands can really brighten up the endless evenings. While this holiday tradition is worth keeping, traditional filament light bulbs are not. Here’s why you should make the switch to LED lights this year.

LED lights are more efficient

LED lights don’t use a filament to create light, but instead produce light by passing electricity through light-emitting diodes. As a result, they use about a tenth of the power that filament lights use. This can mean big savings on your electric bill, but it also means that you can plug more strands together without maxing out your outlet. Check the packaging for exact instructions, but on average, you can plug in eight to 10 times more bulbs per outlet.

They last longer

In addition to being more efficient, LEDs also last longer than their traditional counterparts—the typical LED bulb lasts about 50 times longer than a filament bulb. Not only does this make a difference in terms of waste, but it also makes maintenance a breeze, giving you 50,000 hours of light before the bulbs need to be replaced. Plus, if you’re using light strands outdoors, filament bulbs can burst if it gets too cold; LEDs, on the other hand, can actually get more efficient as the temperature drops.

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They come in more shapes and colors

LEDs come in all the traditional colors that conventional Christmas lights come in—and more. You can choose cool or warm white light, and a variety of shades of color. In addition, they come in lots of different shapes and sizes, making them a good choice if you’re going for a modern or traditional look with your light display.

They can run on batteries

Because LEDs use so much less power than filament lights, there are varieties that can be run on batteries. This means you can use them even if you don’t have an outlet nearby, making them both convenient and efficient. For places where it’s hard to hide a chord, LEDs can be a great way to add some sparkle without all the hassle. (Make sure to check the packaging of your lights to determine if it is safe to use them outdoors.)

They’re safer

LEDs can also be safer than regular bulbs because they don’t heat up. While a regular light bulb will be hot to the touch after being on for a few hours, LEDs remain cool to the touch, reducing the risk of fire and making them safer for kids and pets.

A few caveats

While it is cheaper, long term, to use LED lights, they can be more expensive to purchase up front. Some people also report having a negative reaction to blue LED lights, so going all blue for your display might not be a great idea. Always read all the safety information included in the packaging of your lights before you hang them, and pay attention to the limits on how many strands you should connect together to reduce the risk of fire.

  

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Apple Music Can Give You Spotify Wrapped-Style Stats, Sort of

At the end of each year, Spotify’s Wrapped feature takes over social media, as seemingly all of your friends start sharing their year in music—the one song they played the most, the artists in their top 5, the genres that define their taste. Unfortunately, you use Apple Music, so you’re out of luck.

Well, not entirely: Though Apple Music doesn’t make it nearly so easy to view this data or to share it with friends, the service does log some nifty playback stats. If you’re feeling left out because you didn’t choose Spotify, there are a couple ways to get what you need from Apple Music so you, too, can impress the world with your excellent taste in tunes. Here’s how to do it.

How to use Apple Music Replay to find your playback stats

Apple almost goes out of its way to hide your playback stats from you, to the point that there’s no way to easily access those numbers from Apple Music’s apps. However, you can visit Apple Music on the web to find them (sure, OK). Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the Apple Music Replay webpage and sign in with your Apple ID.
2. On the Apple Music Replay page, click the pink Get Your Replay Mix button.
3. Wait for a bit while Apple generates your Replay stats for 2021. Once the process is done, you’ll be able to see all the details on the same page, from how many hours of music you’ve listened to, to your most played songs of 2021. Keep scrolling down to discover more stats. There’s no share button, so you’ll need to take screenshots and share them manually to your social media profiles.

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Apart from most played songs and total listening time, Apple Music lets you see which artists you played the most, and how many hours you’ve spent listening to music by each of them.

Third-party apps can provide more advanced Apple Music stats

If sharing is important to you, there are third-party apps that let you access your Apple Music stats in a much more attractive and in-depth fashion than Apple’s own offering. There’s a caveat, however: None of them apps can access historical data to give you all-time Apple Music stats; they simply start gathering your data at the time you install them.

That means you can’t get playback information from time periods before you installed the app. This makes them less useful immediately, but over time they gather and present your listening data much better than Apple does. Something to plan on for next year—so here are a few options to consider.

PlayTally

PlayTally ($1.99) takes an Apple Watch-like approach to your Apple Music playback stats. It has an entire section labeled Trending, where you can see the music you’ve often listened to and spot your listening patterns. It also has Apple Watch-style awards for hitting certain milestones, such as playing a certain number of songs. There are even silly awards, such as one for playing “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Snd.wave

Snd.wave is free to download and uses a different presentation style than PlayTally, focusing more on highlighting the number of minutes you listened, and its graphics may appeal more to some people. Snd.wave also gives you access to neat shareable cards featuring your music stats, which is a lovely feature. The $2.99 premium tier allows you to access more data about the song you’re currently listening to, produces better charts and graphs for your music, and will also remind you of songs that used to be in your frequent rotation in the past.

Perhaps Apple will eventually realize people are interested in the social aspects of streaming music, but until then, you’ll have to make do with what you have—or give in and finally switch to Spotify.

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How to Surprise Your Kid on Christmas Without Being a Jerk

Photo: Monkey Business Images (Shutterstock)

We recently asked Lifehacker readers “What’s the Worst Christmas Gift You’ve Ever Received?” and the comments were...disheartening. I mean, some were funny (a toilet seat, a family member’s headshot, an unwrapped DVD of Footloose) but many brought a sting to the eye. Stories abounded of parents ostensibly trying to “surprise” their kids—by being royal, therapy-inducing assholes along the way.

You want a Sega Genesis? Ok, but you have to open several boxes of rocks first in front of the whole family, be asked whether you’ve been good, and cry—at age 6! Think you’re getting an Xbox 360? Here’s the box to get you excited, but it’s just filled with socks. Are you 8 years old, buying Christmas gifts for the first time, and want to be extra thoughtful by sending presents to your recently remarried Dad and new half-siblings? Well, be prepared to get a package a week later from them—containing all the gifts you sent, re-wrapped for your opening pleasure.

Parents, don’t do this. There is a difference between hiding the “big gift” in a closet to be found after all the smaller ones, and cruelly embarrassing and tricking your child into thinking all they’re getting is pebbles. It’s not cool to make a child shed tears and feel like shit on Christmas morning (or any morning, but especially not on one that carries so much significance in their young lives). With this in mind, here are some sweet ways you can surprise—not traumatize—your kids for the holiday.

Create a scavenger hunt

One way to make the main gift stand out is to send your kids on a treasure hunt. Write up a series of successive clues (bonus points if they rhyme), hide them around the house, and watch them race around excitedly to that video game console or brand new bike hidden in the garage.

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Leave traces of Santa

Depending on their age, leaving come convincing remnants of Father Christmas’s visit can spark joy in little eyes. In addition to making those cookies and milk disappear, have the kids leave carrots out for the reindeer (from which you’ll take large bites). Leave sleigh tracks in the lawn with a shovel or stick, dirty footprints in the fireplace, or a piece of red fabric stuck in the chimney, signaling he got stuck at some point during his hasty visit.

If you like to live dangerously, go the extra mile and take a selfie with Santa. Dress up in a Santa suit, snap a quick pic with them while they’re sleeping, print and leave it with a Merry Christmas note. (Best to only attempt with deep sleepers.)

Leave a reindeer behind

Consider leaving a plush reindeer “drop-out” behind, for them to wake up with. Attach a note that says something like, “Yay, Santa says I can stay with you!” or “I need a break from all that cold weather, can I stay here with you?” We bet your child will hang on to that special reindeer until they’re grown and can pass it along to their kids.

Spell out the gift in balloons

For an extra layer of suspense, consider spelling out the name of the gift one letter at a time in balloons. Write one letter on a piece of paper or index card, roll it up and insert it in the balloon before blowing it up. Have your kid(s) pop the balloons and unscramble the letters to figure out what the gift is. This works especially well for intangible gifts, like vacations.

Hide the big gift

If you’re fortunate enough to be able to splurge on a “big gift” for your kids, but don’t want to spoil the surprise as soon as they wake up, hide it someplace they won’t find without some prompting. Have them cycle through the smaller presents first, and when they think they’re done, ask them to fetch some cocoa from the pantry, or a box from the basement, where the day’s big-ticket item want will be waiting to amaze them.

Get them an heirloom ornament

While this may not dazzle a child when they’re 9, gifting them an annual personalized ornament will afford them a beautiful collection filled with childhood memories down the road. It could be geared to their interests of that year (a soccer ball, or Yoda figurine), a priceless moment (a framed picture of them whitewater rafting), or a simple, elegant silver ornament engraved with their name and the year. We’ve compiled more ideas here.

Go forth and fill children’s hearts with awe and wonder! (Not stories for their future therapist.)

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Why You Should Sign Into All of Your Accounts Every Now and Then

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We all juggle a lot of online accounts these days. From streaming subscriptions, to multiple email addresses, to accounts for movie theaters, airlines, and restaurants—if it has a website, you likely have an account for it. If you’re like me, you hardly use most of these accounts, if you use them at all. Even still, you should probably sign into them every now and then.

Inactive accounts can be a huge headache

Use me as a sad example: Years ago, I set up a Google account for the sole purpose of opening a YouTube channel to host the videos my friends and I made together in high school. I figured it was a great way to keep them somewhere safe and reliable, where we could all access and watch them wherever and whenever we wanted. After all, YouTube isn’t going anywhere, right?

Well, come to find out, for some reason, all of these videos have been set to private. Weird, but no problem. I can log into the account and flip the videos back to unlisted. I have my password saved in my iCloud Keychain, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

After correctly entering the password, however, Google asked me to verify the account via email, since this is the first time I’ve logged into the account from this computer. Again, no problem; the email address is an old Microsoft Live account I made, but I have the password to that saved as well. I go to Microsoft’s site to login, and...the account no longer exists.

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Unbeknownst to me, Microsoft deletes “inactive” accounts that haven’t been logged into for two years. I suppose mine fell into this category, since my Live account is, er, no longer alive. Two years might sound like a long enough time to sign into an email account, but I usually have no reason to, since I only created it to establish that YouTube account.

So, now I’m left to deal with Google, and to somehow prove that my account, which is tied to a now-defunct, non-Google email address, is really mine. Pray for me.

Sign into your accounts to avoid unwanted deletion

The lesson here is that it’s worth signing into all of your various accounts every now and then, even if you don’t think you need the service they provide at the time. Giving the company a heads up, that, “Hi, yes, I’m still here; please don’t delete this” can make sure you don’t end up on the chopping block.

You don’t need to do this often. The span of time companies wait before deleting accounts is usually quite long. If you sign into a Microsoft account, you’re set for the next two years; Dropbox gives you one year; Twitter sets the cap at 6 months. It might be worth researching your various services’ inactive account policies to find out how often you need to sign into them.

And don’t ignore any notices you receive about account deletion, either; usually, companies will let you know you’re coming up on their deadline, and alert you that you simply need to sign in to keep your account in good standing. Of course, if the account in question is (or is tied to) an email address you never use, you likely won’t receive those notices. So if you want to make sure you maintain a connection to all of your accounts, sign into them once every six, 12, or 24 months. You never know when you’ll suddenly need to get back in, and you want them to be there when you do.

  

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How to Keep Your Poinsettias Alive Until Christmas

Photo: Pixel-Shot (Shutterstock)

Bright red poinsettias are popular holiday-season decor, and like a lot of plants, have particular preferences when it comes to placement in your home. To help your flowers survive and thrive throughout the season—especially if plant care isn’t your jam—make sure you know how much water, sunlight, and heat your poinsettias need.

Where to place your poinsettias

First and foremost, do not keep your poinsettias in your windowsills or out on your front porch, no matter how much you want passers-by to see them. Native to Mexico, poinsettias thrive in more tropical environments and do not do well in cold and drafty spaces.

Instead, place your poinsettias in an area with temperatures between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit during the day and 60 to 65 degrees at night—definitely no colder than 55 degrees. Avoid any extreme temps by keeping them away from heating vents and appliances, as well as doors to the outside. The space should also get at least six hours of bright, indirect sunlight per day.

Poinsettias aren’t healthy for pets to ingest, so find a place out of their reach if your critters tend to eat plants.

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How much water does a poinsettia need?

Poinsettias prefer moist soil—not soaked and not dry. When the soil is dry to the touch, or when you lift the plant and it feels light, saturate the soil with room temperature water and allow it to drain. A small glass of water is usually enough for a standard poinsettia. You can also soak the plant from a dish below.

The ideal frequency of watering depends on how warm and dry your space is, so you may want to check the soil every day until you figure out a routine. Generally, soil that’s a little dry is better than soil that is overly drenched. Misting the plant in between waterings can be helpful if your home’s heat often runs on high.

What to do with poinsettias after the holidays

Decorating with poinsettias doesn’t have to be limited to the holiday season. Once the blooms drop, cut back watering to once a week, and prune plants in early spring (March or April). Continue following recommendations for temperature and sunlight. Repot your poinsettias in May, and store them in a cool, bright place for the summer.

 

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What Fitness Tracker Data Is Actually Useful for Your Doctor?

Photo: Jacob Lund (Shutterstock)

Whether a smartwatch or a ring, many of us now wear fitness trackers, which means we have collected a lot of data on how much we are moving and sleeping, as well as how our heart rates change with our activity levels. All of this information can be a good motivator for getting you moving more regularly and monitoring your overall health—but it might also be useful to your doctor.

It’s not always clear to the users what all that health data means, which means you might not know what and how to address it with your doctor. In order to gain a better understanding of what fitness tracking data will actually be useful for your doctor to know, we asked a cardiologist and sleep specialist for their thoughts.

“The algorithms that are used are all different across the different companies and different devices, so we have to take these details with a grain of salt, but there is still a lot of information we can get from it,” said Tomiteyo Oyegbile-Chidi, MD Ph.D., a neurologist and sleep specialist and a faculty member at UC Davis. “I wouldn’t make any diagnoses based on [tracker data], but it helps to make inferences on what tests to do.”

Activity trackers can function as a sleep diary

Oyegbile-Chidi often asks her patients to write a sleep diary, including when they go to bed and when they wake up. This is where an activity tracker can be handy, as they often automatically record this information, and their data is likely more reliable than what we might write down ourselves.

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“The most important thing is seeing the bed-time and rise time,” Oyegbile-Chidi said. “That tends to be pretty accurate and can be helpful.” Sleep data from an activity tracker can also help her get a sense of how restless a person is during sleep. “This gives a general sense of whether you tend to wake up a lot and walk around or if you are someone who stays in bed most of the time,” Oyegbile-Chidi said. “That can be helpful, too.”

Fitness tracker data is most useful when looking for behavior patterns that might affect your overall health, such as the average time you go to sleep, average time you wake up, as well as any periods of reduced sleep. “Trends are very, very helpful,” Oyegbile-Chidi said.

Sleep information can also be helpful for a cardiologist. “Poor sleep can affect blood pressure and arrhythmias,” said John Higgins, MD, a cardiologist with the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, so an established record of disrupted sleep can indicate a problem that warrants deeper consideration.

What isn’t all that helpful are your tracker’s estimates of when you enter various sleep stages, as well as its gauge of your overall sleep quality, as those tend not to be all that accurate.

Resting heart rate information can act as a barometer for your health

Your tracker’s heart rate data, which can include resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and heart rate during exercise, covers a lot of ground. As with sleep data, you need to take this information with a grain of salt, as it’s not always 100% accurate, but looking at long-term trends can be useful for your doctor.

“Average resting heart rate is a barometer of health for healthy patients,” Higgins said. If you notice your average resting heart rate is trending up or down over a period of time, that’s something that you might want to talk to your doctor about.

Resting heart rate data can also be useful for patients with heart conditions, as it can help indicate whether their medications are working or if they need to have their dosage adjusted.

Heart rate variability can indicate overtraining or stress

When we talk about rest and recovery, heart rate variability is a useful metric for detecting the effects of stress, poor sleep, or overtraining. Unlike your resting heart rate, which tends to be fairly stable over a long period, heart-rate variability is responsive to short-term conditions.

For a cardiologist, this data can also be helpful when monitoring their patients. “Trackers that monitor heart rate variability may give an early warning of worsening in heart condition,” Higgins said. Some trackers are now able to detect abnormal heart rhythms, such as atrial fibrillation. If your tracker detects this type of activity, you’ll want to talk to your doctor right away so they can follow this up with further tests.

Bring up any concerns with your doctor

The data a fitness tracker collects can be hard to parse, and though it can be useful for helping you doctor detect certain long-term trends or provide them evidence of what they might need to test for, the information isn’t definitive. Before you start worrying too much about what you think your smartwatch is telling you about your health, talk over your concerns with your doctor. “It’s not necessarily the gospel truth,” Oyegbile-Chidi said.

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Controversial face matchers Clearview set to be fined over $20m

Scraping data for a facial recognition service? "That's unlawful", concluded both the British and the Australians.
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Implications of strengthening the cybersecurity of small business in America

On November 2, 2021, the House of Representatives passed two bills with the goal of strengthening the cybersecurity of small businesses in America.

The first bill, the Small Business Administration (SBA) Cyber Awareness Act, was unanimously approved to expand cybersecurity operations at the SBA. The bill requires the Small Business Administration to issue a report assessing the agency’s ability to combat cyber threats within six months of passage. The report must disclose:

• SBA’s cybersecurity infrastructure
• The SBA’s strategy to improve cybersecurity protections
• Any equipment used by the SBA and manufactured by a company headquartered in China, and
• Any incident of cyber risk at the SBA and the agency’s actions to confront it

Additionally, the bill requires that the SBA notify Congress of future breaches while detailing who was affected in said breach as well as how the breach occurred.

The bill was introduced by Reps. Young Kim (CA-39) and Jason Crow (CO-06).

“For more than two decades, the SBA’s Inspector General has listed IT security as one of the most pressing challenges facing the SBA. Unfortunately, SBA cybersecurity vulnerabilities were brought to light with unprecedented demand of SBA loan programs during COVID-19, discouraging entrepreneurs from starting a business and creating jobs,” said Congresswoman Kim. “We must address this issue now and secure our systems so small business owners can safely utilize SBA’s resources as they work to recover from the pandemic, hire workers and adjust to rising costs of supplies.”

The second bill, the Small Business Development Center Cyber Training Act, aims to give small businesses the resources necessary to manage cyber-attacks on their own. The bill would help improve the training of Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) to ensure they can better support and counsel small businesses on cybersecurity-related matters. As it stands, the bill would enable the SBA to reimburse SBDCs for employee certification and training costs, upwards of $350,000 annually.

The bill was introduced by Congressman Andrew Garbarino (R-NY). In a recent release he stated, “As both a member of the House Small Business Committee and Ranking Member of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Cybersecurity Subcommittee, I have seen how difficult it is for small businesses to arm themselves against these kinds of attacks due to resource constraints. It is my hope that this bipartisan legislation will be an impactful first step to getting small businesses the training they need to protect themselves from cyber criminals.”

Why do these bills matter?

Given the rapidly evolving threat landscape and increased frequency of attacks, establishing strong cybersecurity education is a critical business opportunity.

As a small business, using resources made available to you by regulatory authorities provides room for differentiation in the market and establishes security as a key deliverable to your customers. This looks like an ability to:

• Prevent loss of customer data
• Execute on and communicate secure data procedures throughout all lines of business
• Secure the storage valuable business information in the face of threats, and
• Define and implement a threat-informed business strategy

What action items can small businesses take away today?

• Attend a free training: When taking the first steps to prioritize cybersecurity across your business, it’s critical to gather information in cost-effective, accurate ways.
• Research cybersecurity trends: At the heart of threat evolution lies digital transformation. As digital transformation continues at full speed, finding a cybersecurity resource hub to use as your central source of truth will aid the learning process.
• Spark conversation: Start conversations around cybersecurity with industry peers and establish a strong network of trusted subject matter experts. Staying informed and creating a community of people to learn with is key in standing up strong cybersecurity awareness throughout your business.
• Begin strategizing: Identify key gaps in your understanding of cybersecurity awareness and begin gathering resources to aid you as you strategize on how to mitigate your risk areas.

I firmly believe that weaving the fabric of trust throughout your organization is an opportunity for business differentiation and a key to empowering efficient workflow in every business dynamic, no matter its size. The bills focus on strengthening Small Business Cybersecurity, of which establishing a trust-based cybersecurity program is essential.

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