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Google, a company that has changed the world – or at least the internet, has been in a bad way for months. The company continues to clash with their own employees over ethical growth and how HR addressed several employee issues (poorly).
Even as these issues unfold, Google is pushing forward their Kubernetes container platform, their enterprise cloud strategy, and their hardware initiatives. But… all of this other noise has to impact operations.
Meanwhile Amazon warehouse operations have their own HR issues with reports that the company has skirted around safety issues and violations for years.
Acquisitions/Investments
- Palo Alto Networks acquires Aporeto for cloud security
Palo Alto Networks on Monday announced plans to acquire Aporeto Inc., a machine identity-based microsegmentation company, for $150 million in cash. Aporeto’s technology should bolster Palo Alto’s cloud security suite, Prisma. The deal is expected to close during Palo Alto’s fiscal second quarter.
Founded in 2016 and based in San Jose, Calif., Aporeto uses identity-based access control to secure workloads across all infrastructures. Its technology should help strengthen the Prisma suite of cloud security services, which it launched earlier this year.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/palo-alto-networks-acquires-aporeto-for-cloud-security/
- Intel Seeks Buyers for Home Connectivity Chips Unit
The chipmaker has hired a financial adviser and is seeking to sell the unit that has annual sales of about $450 million, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
Intel Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan has said he’s looking at the company’s operations and will explore options for areas where it isn’t competitive. The company sold its smartphone modem business to Apple Inc. in a $1 billion deal in July. Swan has pointed to the money-losing memory business as an area where he might look for a partnership.
- Panasonic to Sell Semiconductor Unit to Taiwan’s Nuvoton Technology
The $250 million deal is expected to close by June next year, subject to approvals by authorities, Panasonic said.
Japanese companies used to dominate the global semiconductor market but have become sidelined by an aggressive push by rivals from China and Taiwan. Panasonic has one of the longest histories in making semiconductor products, but it has recently scaled back operations.
Panasonic said it would be difficult to keep up with the high levels of investment needed for the business.
Cloud
- ‘Kubernetes’ Is the Future of Computing. What You Should Know About the New Trend.
To understand the trend, let’s start with the changing dynamics of software in the cloud. Cloud apps increasingly run in aptly-named containers. The containers hold an application, its settings, and other related instructions. The trick is that these containers aren’t tied down to one piece of hardware and can run nearly anywhere—across different servers and clouds. It’s how Google manages to scale Gmail and Google Maps across a billion-plus users.
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Gartner says more than 75% of global companies will run containerized applications by 2022, from less than 30% today. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for these managing containers.
“As enterprises modernize their infrastructure and adopt a hybrid multicloud strategy, we see Kubernetes and containers rapidly emerging as the standard,” Jason McGee, chief technology officer of IBM Cloud Platform, told Barron’s in an email.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/kubernetes-is-the-future-of-computing-heres-why-51574863351
Security/Privacy
- SMS Replacement is Exposing Users to Text, Call Interception Thanks to Sloppy Telecos
The Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard is essentially the replacement for SMS. The news shows how even as carriers move onto more modern protocols for communication, phone network security continues to be an exposed area with multiple avenues for attack in some implementations of RCS.
“I’m surprised that large companies, like Vodafone, introduce a technology that exposes literally hundreds of millions of people, without asking them, without telling them,” Karsten Nohl from cybersecurity firm Security Research Labs (SRLabs) told Motherboard in a phone call.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5ywxb/rcs-rich-communications-services-text-call-interception
- Ordered by Singapore, Facebook Posts a Correction
Appearing near the bottom of a post from earlier this month, the notice—which Facebook called a label—reads, “Facebook is legally required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information.”
The government had ordered the notice Friday on the post, which alleges authorities had made a wrongful arrest. The government said no such arrest had been made.
With governments world-wide seeking to tackle social media’s darker consequences—concerns range from privacy violations and election interference to killings provoked by misinformation and hate speech—Singapore is testing new terrain in online regulation.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-complies-with-order-under-singapore-fake-news-law-11575116149
Other
- Amazon dodged workplace safety regulators for years, investigation shows
In at least a dozen cases, Amazon either ignored these employee requests or provided only partial records, in apparent violation of federal regulations. Amazon told some workers that they were entitled only to the records for the time period they worked there; an OSHA spokesperson, Kimberly Darby, said that’s incorrect. And when Amazon did provide records, warehouse managers used identical language to call them confidential and request they be kept secret. Yet OSHA guidance says, and Darby confirmed, that employers are not allowed to restrict workers from sharing the records. Some workers said they felt intimidated by the notice, fearing they might get sued by Amazon for sharing the records with a news organization.
- Firing 4 Google Workers Is ‘Illegal Retaliation,’ Organizers Say
Organizers say Google recently revamped its policies around accessing certain documents with vague and purposefully unclear language in order to target organizers when necessary, as they claim to be the case with the “Thanksgiving Four.” The organizers deny that the fired workers leaked the content of internal documents.
“With these firings, Google is ramping up its illegal retaliation against workers engaging in protected organizing,” Google organizers said in response to the firings. “This is classic union busting dressed up in tech industry jargon, and we won’t stand for it….They think this will crush our efforts, but it won’t.”
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Last month, Google also installed a tool on internal web-browsers that flags calendar events involving more than 100 participants or 10 meeting rooms. Many employees believed the browser extension was being used to monitor labor organizing.https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5wa3/firing-4-google-workers-is-illegal-retaliation-organizers-say
Google is accused of union busting after firing four employeesBloomberg reports that Google sent out a company-wide memo today confirming that it had fired four employees for “clear and repeated violations of our data security policies,” saying those workers “were involved in systematic searches for other employees’ materials and work,” continued to do so after warnings, and leaked some of that information outside the company. Google confirmed to Bloomberg and The Verge that the memo was legitimate.