Microsoft employees are pushing back on the company’s newest government contract. The $480m deal is to provide VR headsets to the military and despite the feedback the company does plan to move forward.
Speaking of government contracts, Amazon is still fighting to win the JEDI cloud deal with the DoD after new conflict of interest information coming to light.
Meanwhile, there is more information about how Facebook uses other phone applications to collect data on users, even if you don’t have a Facebook account.
Acquisitions
- Palo Alto Networks to acquire Demisto for $560M
The company sees a tool that can help enhance the Palo Alto security portfolio by adding a higher level of automation. “The addition of Demisto’s orchestration and automation technologies will accelerate Palo Alto Networks Application Framework strategy and serve as a critical step forward in the company’s aim to deliver immediate threat prevention and response for security teams,” the company explained in a statement.
Palo Alto also hopes that Demisto’s automated solutions will help accelerate its AI and machine learning capabilities to bring intelligent automation across the platform. The company brings more than technology, of course. It also brings its 150 customers to Palo Alto, a quarter of which are in the Fortune 500.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/palo-alto-networks-to-acquire-demisto-for-560m/
- Google acquires a small cloud start-up as it looks to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft
Google is making another play in the cloud space with a new acquisition. The company announced Tuesday it plans to acquire cloud migration company Alooma, which helps other companies move their data from multiple sources into one data warehouse.
Google did not disclose how much it will pay for Alooma, which is based in Israel and California, but it’s likely a relatively small acquisition. Alooma has raised about $15 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequioa Capital Israel, according to Crunchbase.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/19/google-plans-to-acquire-cloud-migration-company-alooma.html
Artificial Intelligence
- OpenAI built a text generator so good, it’s considered too dangerous to release
OpenAI said its new natural language model, GPT-2, was trained to predict the next word in a sample of 40 gigabytes of internet text. The end result was the system generating text that “adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text,” allowing the user to “generate realistic and coherent continuations about a topic of their choosing.” The model is a vast improvement on the first version by producing longer text with greater coherence.
But with every good application of the system, such as bots capable of better dialog and better speech recognition, the non-profit found several more, like generating fake news, impersonating people, or automating abusive or spam comments on social media.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/17/openai-text-generator-dangerous/
Cloud
- Why Alphabet and Microsoft Are Better-Positioned Than You Think
Each year, Stack Overflow polls over 100,000 professional developers to get a read on their favorite platforms — what they use most, what they love most, what they dread most, and what they want most. Linux was the winner, by far, which is really good news for both Alphabet and Microsoft.
Why? Let’s start with Linux itself. The world’s most popular open-source operating system is available in a number of varieties commonly known as distributions. Red Hat has a very popular one that IBM is in the process of acquiring. In the cloud, Ubuntu is extremely popular. So are Fedora (a completely free version of Red Hat) and Arch Linux.
Alphabet is far and away the biggest consumer of open-source software built for Linux and related technologies. Microsoft is the biggest overall contributor of open-source ideas to GitHub, the development community it acquired in August for about $7.5 billion in stock. Both companies are also making it easier to run Linux installations in their clouds (i.e., Azure and Google Cloud, respectively). As developers continue to up their intake of Linux — and last year usage doubled, according to Stack Overflow — they’re more likely to run into open-source offerings from Alphabet and Microsoft.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/22/why-alphabet-and-microsoft-are-better-positioned-t.aspx
- Pentagon Cloud-Computing Contract Sought by Amazon Faces New Hurdle
The contract was expected to be awarded this spring. Rival Oracle Corp. sued to halt the process until the government thoroughly investigates Oracle’s claims of alleged conflicts, which center on a former government employee who worked at Amazon before and after playing a role in the Pentagon’s procurement process.
The Defense Department largely dismissed conflict of interest claims earlier, making Tuesday’s motion to seek the stay a potential turning point.
“DoD can confirm that new information not previously provided to DoD has emerged related to potential conflicts of interest,” Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said in a statement. “As a result of this new information, DoD is continuing to investigate these potential conflicts.”
Security
- You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.
The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed.
It is already known that many smartphone apps send information to Facebook about when users open them, and sometimes what they do inside. Previously unreported is how at least 11 popular apps, totaling tens of millions of downloads, have also been sharing sensitive data entered by users. The findings alarmed some privacy experts who reviewed the Journal’s testing.
- The Hot, Lucrative Market in IT Security Talent
“What you’ve been seeing for the last year or two is more demand than supply” in cybersecurity, says Ryan Sutton, district president at the Robert Half Technology staffing agency. “As demand stays high and supply more or less stays constant,” upward pressure on wages is likely to increase, he says.
In addition to pushing up salaries, the competition for talent is forcing companies to snatch up candidates more quickly than they have in the past, Mr. Sutton says.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hot-lucrative-market-in-it-security-talent-11550763976
Software/SaaS
- Snapchat is in the middle of an identity crisis
There are many reasons why Snapchat hasn’t caught up to Facebook or Instagram, Keath said, but the lack of public profiles and embeddable content on the web are the main ones to blame for its growth troubles. Another big issue has been the app’s janky user interface, particularly on Android, which Snapchat has been vowing to fix for a couple of years now.
Then there’s Snapchat’s dependence on ephemeral posts, though rumors suggest it may soon allow public Stories that don’t disappear. If Snapchat were to come up with a way to make Stories last longer or be permanent on someone’s account, it could help it better compete with Instagram and other social networks.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/22/snapchat-bhad-bhabie-nike-augmented-reality-identity-crisis/
Datacenter/Hardware
- The Dirty Energy Powering Data Center Alley
Despite significant new investment in renewable generation by utilities in other data center hot spots such as Iowa, the dramatic expansion of Virginia’s Data Center Alley continues to fuel and increase demand in coal and natural gas. At present, power generation in Virginia is dominated by fossil fuels, with less than 5 percent coming from renewable sources, lagging far behind other regions. Dominion Energy, Virginia’s largest electricity provider and the primary electric utility for Data Center Alley, has strongly resisted any meaningful transition to renewable sources of electricity, currently representing only 4 percent of its generation mix, with plans to increase to only slightly over 10 percent by 2030.
Dominion’s lack of renewable energy supply and insistence on making significant new investments in fossil fuels will both delay Virginia’s transition to cleaner sources of energy, and make it much more costly to do so. Yet many of the largest data center companies with commitments to 100 percent renewable energy have continued to rapidly expand their presence in Virginia, thus fueling even more demand for dirty electricity, with Amazon Web Services the biggest culprit. Amazon Web Services (AWS) already ranked as one of Dominion Energy’s largest electricity customers when it made its commitment to 100 percent renewable energy in late 2014, and Greenpeace‘s analysis shows AWS has tripled its data center operations in Virginia since that time. Even though AWS did add a sizable amount of renewable energy locally from 2015 to 2016, its dramatic growth in Virginia during this period continued to far exceed the additional electricity supply from its renewable projects.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/click-clean-virginia/
Amazon aims to make half of its shipments carbon neutral by 2030The company is calling this program “Shipment Zero.” Details on this long-term project weren’t yet available, but Amazon says it plans to share its company-wide carbon footprint “along with related goals and programs,” at a later date. That seems to indicate Amazon will offer an update on the progress of its other sustainability goals, as well.
It’s important for Amazon to be transparent on these plans, as the size of its business means its impact to the environment, energy consumption and, ultimately climate change, is significant.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/18/amazon-aims-to-make-half-of-its-shipments-carbon-neutral-by-2030/
- Apple’s move to ARM-based Macs creates uncertainty
The move could give developers a way to reach a bigger market with a single app, although the transition could be bumpy. For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line.
The key question is not the timeline but just how smoothly Apple is able to make the shift. For developers, it will likely mean an awkward period of time supporting new and classic Macs as well as new and old-style Mac apps.
https://www.axios.com/apple-macbook-arm-chips-ea93c38a-d40a-4873-8de9-7727999c588c.html
- Microsoft workers demand it drop $480 million U.S. Army contract
Microsoft won a contract in November to supply the Army with at least 2,500 prototypes of augmented reality headsets, which digitally display contextual information in front of a user’s eyes. The government has said the devices would be used on the battlefield and in training to improve soldiers “lethality, mobility and situational awareness.”
In the petition to Microsoft executives, posted on Twitter, the workers said they “did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used.” They called on the company to develop “a public-facing acceptable use policy” for its technology and an external review board to publicly enforce it.
Microsoft said in a statement that it always appreciates employee feedback. It also referred to an October blog post by its president, Brad Smith, in which he said the company remained committed to assisting the military and would advocate for laws to ensure responsible use of new technologies.
Other
- Nestlé, McDonald’s, Others Pull Ads From YouTube
The advertisers’ withdrawals come after video blogger Matt Watson posted a video on YouTube on Sunday that showed inappropriate user comments about videos featuring underage girls, including some that identified precise segments where children appear in compromising positions.
The video, which had received over 1.7 million views as of Wednesday afternoon, said YouTube’s recommendation algorithm leads users to similar content.
McDonald’s Corp. , which was among the several brands whose ads ran alongside the objectionable content, also paused spending on YouTube, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nestle-mcdonalds-others-pull-ads-from-youtube-11550705643
- Apple is reportedly closing two stores in a Texas district to avoid patent trolls
As MacRumors notes, the Eastern District of Texas is known for its patent cases (an SMU Dedman School of Law paper backs up that claim), and per US law, patent lawsuits can be filed in places where the defendant “has a regular and established place of business.” By closing its two stores in the district, Apple reportedly hopes to shield itself from those suits.
The Apple Willow Bend store in Plano and the Apple Stonebriar store in Frisco are both expected to close up shop on April 12th. Apple is planning to open a new store at the Galleria Dallas shopping mall just outside of the Eastern District border to continue to have a retail presence in the area.
- Two Former Cognizant Executives Charged in Bribery Probe
Gordon Coburn, the company’s former president, and Steven Schwartz, its former chief legal officer, authorized a $2 million bribe to at least one government official in India to secure permits necessary for the construction of an office campus there to support roughly 17,000 employees, prosecutors said.
To conceal Cognizant’s role in the bribery scheme, Messrs. Coburn and Schwartz, and others, agreed to use a construction company to secure the permit, prosecutors said. The construction company would pay the bribe, and Cognizant would later reimburse the firm through disguised cost overruns on the project, located in Chennai, India, prosecutors said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cognizant-to-pay-25-million-to-settle-bribery-claims-11550252878
- IBM is the top choice for Gen Z employees in tech: Glassdoor
Glassdoor economics research analyst Amanda Stansell attributed Gen Zers’ top choice to a number of factors, including a good work-life balance at IBM and IBM employees’ ability to work from home.
Another factor that may play a role in IBM being the top choice? Lack of controversy.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-glassdoor-gen-z-193615566.html
But they are cutting back from work at home options, cutting staff, and are still in transition…
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