Photo by Sid Leigh on Unsplash
It seems that big companies used the holidays as a time to rest their wallets and take a break from the M&A activity of the last few weeks… or perhaps they were distracted with some other concerns.
Google contractors in Pennsylvania are attempting to unionize due to poor working conditions. The company was also hit with a $200M fine due to YouTube violating children’s privacy.
Speaking of privacy… Google called out a major security threat for Apple iPhones. Several websites were infected with in an injection attack that iPhones were particularly vulnerable to.
Acquisitions/Investments
Artificial Intelligence
- The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot
More advanced systems require “human supervisory control,” where the robot or vehicle’s onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn’t dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator.
For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same.
Most companies in the space have opted for something short of true teleoperation, which is dependent on an absolutely reliable and fast wireless connection as well as the skill of the human remote operator. Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo’s remote operation system and another being tested by Nissan rely on humans to either confirm the vehicle’s choices when it’s unsure what to do or help it navigate around obstacles.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-hot-job-pretending-to-be-a-robot-11567224001
Cloud
- How Microsoft and Oracle became cloud buddies, and what’s next for their improbable partnership
The companies are counting on the cloud to fuel their growth, raising the stakes for their partnership. They describe the alliance, in part, as a way for their customers to avoid being locked into a single cloud vendor. In that way, the companies are effectively teaming up against their common competitors, the biggest of them being Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
Oracle is playing catch-up in the cloud, aiming to expand beyond its legacy in databases to build out a fully-fledged public cloud platform, attempting to go toe-to-toe with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for a wider range of cloud contracts. Oracle reportedly laid off hundreds of people from its cloud-focused Seattle office earlier this year in an indication of the uphill climb it faces.
- Never tell me the odds! Oracle makes fresh appeal against $10bn JEDI ruling
Dorian Daley, General Counsel, Oracle Corporation, released the following statement on its latest appeal:
The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle’s purported lack of standing. Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements. The opinion also acknowledges that the procurement suffers from many significant conflicts of interest. These conflicts violate the law and undermine the public trust. As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds.The battle is likely far from over both regardless of the progress of the lawyers as the deal has also become a political football.
US President Donald Trump weighed in when he belatedly heard the contract might go to a company partly owned by his arch-nemesis Jeff Bezos, also of course publisher of “fake news” provider The Washington Post.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/28/oracles_last_ditch_jedi_appeal/
- Microsoft vendors win $7.6 billion government deal
The federal government’s award of a massive 10-year, $7.6 billion computing contract to a trio of vendors led by General Dynamics Corp. to provide Microsoft Corp. office software for the Pentagon late Thursday is the latest indication that cloud-computing leaders are the preferred vendors of choice.
The Defense Department and General Services Administration announced the winners of the coveted Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) following a months-long evaluation process by the GSA. DEOS would provide email, calendar, video-calling and other productivity tools to the U.S. military.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-vendors-win-76-billion-government-deal-2019-08-29
Security/Privacy
- Google to pay up to $200M to settle FTC YouTube investigation
Privacy groups had complained to the FTC that YouTube violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal information about minors and using it to target advertisements without getting consent from parents.
The settlement dwarfs the FTC’s largest fine to date for COPPA violations: $5.7 million levied in February against the operators of Musical.ly, the China-based social video app that’s become a juggernaut since rebranding as TikTok.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/30/google-ftc-investigation-youtube-1479044
- Apple still has work to do on privacy
On the surface, the notion of Apple having a stronger claim to privacy versus Google — an adtech giant that makes its money by pervasively profiling internet users, whereas Apple sells premium hardware and services (including essentially now ‘privacy as a service‘) — seems a safe (or, well, safer) assumption. Or at least, until iOS security fails spectacularly and leaks users’ privacy anyway. Then of course affected iOS users can just kiss their privacy goodbye. That’s why this is a thought experiment.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/31/apple-still-has-work-to-do-on-privacy/
Malicious websites were used to secretly hack into iPhones for years, says GoogleThe researchers found five distinct exploit chains involving 12 separate security flaws, including seven involving Safari, the in-built web browser on iPhones. The five separate attack chains allowed an attacker to gain “root” access to the device — the highest level of access and privilege on an iPhone. In doing so, an attacker could gain access to the device’s full range of features normally off-limits to the user. That means an attacker could quietly install malicious apps to spy on an iPhone owner without their knowledge or consent.
Google said based off their analysis, the vulnerabilities were used to steal a user’s photos and messages as well as track their location in near-real time. The “implant” could also access the user’s on-device bank of saved passwords.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/29/google-iphone-secretly-hacked/
- The frighteningly simple technique that hijacked Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account
As it turns out, getting control of Dorsey’s phone number wasn’t as hard as you might think. According to a Twitter statement, a “security oversight” by the provider let the hackers gain control. In general terms, this kind of attack is called SIM hacking — essentially convincing a carrier to assigning Dorsey’s number to a new phone that they controlled. It’s not a new technique, although it’s more often used to steal Bitcoin or high-value Instagram handles. Often, it’s as simple as plugging in a leaked password. You can protect yourself by adding a PIN code to your carrier account or registering web accounts like Twitter through dummy phone numbers, but those techniques can be too much to ask for the average user. As a result, SIM swapping has become one of online troublemakers’ favorite techniques — and as we found out today, it works more often than you’d think.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/31/20841448/jack-dorsey-twitter-hacked-account-sim-swapping
Software/SaaS
- Mozilla CEO Chris Beard will step down at the end of the year
Beard was appointed interim CEO for Mozilla in April 2014, coming on as full-time chief executive in July of that same year. The company has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years, after having ceded much of its browser market share to the likes of Google and Apple. Firefox has undergone something of a renaissance over the past year, as have the company’s security tools.
“Today our products, technology and policy efforts are stronger and more resonant in the market than ever, and we have built significant new organizational capabilities and financial strength to fuel our work,” Beard said in the blog post. “From our new privacy-forward product strategy to initiatives like the State of the Internet we’re ready to seize the tremendous opportunity and challenges ahead to ensure we’re doing even more to put people in control of their connected lives and shape the future of the internet for the public good.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/29/mozilla-ceo-chris-beard-will-step-down-at-the-end-of-the-year/
- Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged
Previous studies had documented that owners of small businesses tended to be in their late 30s and 40s. But most small businesses stay fairly small: restaurants, dry cleaners, retail stores and the like. They are important but aren’t central to innovation in the economy.
The new study was able to zero in on high-flying start-ups by bringing together anonymized data collected by different agencies within the federal government. The government matched sales and employment data for start-ups collected by the Census Bureau with information on the founders extracted from Internal Revenue Service filings.
After stripping identifying information, the government provided the researchers with a data set including 2.7 million business founders. The researchers calculated that the founders’ average age was 42. And for the founders of the 0.1 percent fastest-growing firms, the average age was 45. Firms that were successful enough to have an initial public offering or be acquired by a larger company showed the same pattern: Their founders were generally middle-aged.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/tech-start-up-founders-nest.html
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Amazon buys big in Virginia
Amazon has paid six times over the valuation for prime land in the data center hotspot of Virginia.
It bought nearly 90 acres in two plots in Loudoun County, in a part of Virginia outside the US capital Washington DC where Amazon has built nearly 40 data centers already. It paid $118m for land that had been valued at $19.7m, according to the County records office.
“That’s the way things are going right now. Data centers are going up like hot cakes, ” Erik Larson, manager of the Loudoun County Land Records Office, told DCD.
Amazon had 38 data centers in Virginia in 2015, according to a document leaked by Wikileaks last year. It had about 100 spread around the US and other countries. But approaching half of all them were in Virginia, close to the Beltway of Washington, where government and military contractors compete for business. It is where Amazon Web Services began operating in 2006.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/amazon-buys-big-virginia/
Other
- 20,000 AT&T Employees Are Striking
CWA says AT&T is “bargaining in bad faith” and that it has “unfair labor practices.” AT&T sent to the bargaining table people who “do not have the real authority to make proposals or to reach an agreement” in addition to “changing our agreement about how we meet and bargain,” the union said in a blog post.
CWA’s bargaining team has been fighting for the past few months to renegotiate the AT&T employee contract to share the company’s record-breaking profits. In 2018, AT&T promised to use the windfall from the Republicans’ corporate tax cut to “invest an additional $1 billion” to create “7,000 good-paying jobs for American workers.” The December tax cuts helped AT&T achieve a $19 billion profit in the fourth quarter and $3 billion in annual tax savings. But AT&T has had layoffs, cutting 23,000 jobs.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kwyd/20000-atandt-employees-are-striking
- Google Contractors Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union
66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they’re asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at “helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively.”
“Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long,” HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a press release. “While on-site management tries to do what they can, where they can, their hands are often tied by arbitrary corporate policy.”
- Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say
Ultimately, the rider paid $65 for the half-hour trip, according to a receipt viewed by Jalopnik. But Dave made only $15 (the fares have been rounded to anonymize the transaction).
Uber kept the rest, meaning the multibillion-dollar corporation kept more than 75 percent of the fare, more than triple the average so-called “take-rate” it claims in financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Had he known in advance how much he would have been paid for the ride relative to what the rider paid, Dave said he never would have accepted the fare.
“This is robbery,” Dave told Jalopnik over email. “This business is out of control.”
https://jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-take-a-lot-more-from-drivers-than-they-sa-1837450373
