A new feature would soon let anyone from outside your company send you a Slack DM (that’s a direct message).Slack Connect allows two Slack users to directly message each other, even if they work at different companies.

But tightly packed in-person gatherings are likely to be among the last types of events that resume once the pandemic ends, which means that conference organizers will hang on to many of the virtual elements that were very much their Plan B.

“The inflections in our voice get lost, and we're not able to hear or emphasize body language that sometimes speaks louder than words.” Couple that with notification overload and water cooler talk spamming your work channels, and you’re bound to get a little frustrated with your colleague’s Slack usage—or vice versa.

Slack , the messaging platform now favored by actual offices around the world, launched almost exactly three months later, effectively rendering the kind of workplace humor The Office traded in—outbursts by coworkers, awkward silences, communal birthday cake—moot.

Ars Technica reporter Dan Goodin brings the news of a major new privacy failure recently unearthed by security researchers: widely used Chrome and Firefox browser extensions scraped and sold the data of more than 4.1 million people, until the researcher alerted Google and Mozilla.

But Slack's public listing followed two less hyped, but likewise successful, business-to-business IPOs: video conferencing company Zoom in April and network and security company Fastly in May. Together these IPOs suggest that even as the consumer tech market is dominated by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, companies that sell to businesses can still find ways to compete with the big guys.

I use Death Clock, a Chrome extension that calculates your life expectancy and then displays your waning days, hours, and minutes every time you open a new tab.

Customize your notification settings by navigating to the gear icon in the top right corner of a channel. You can also set times when Slack won’t send you notifications at all, like after you've gone home for the day.