Tag: Facebook

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News You Can Use: 3/28/2018

  • Facebook asks users: should we allow men to ask teenagers for images?

    On Sunday, the social network ran a survey for some users asking how they thought the company should handle grooming behaviour. “There are a wide range of topics and behaviours that appear on Facebook,” one question began. “In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebook’s policies, how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures.”

    The options available to respondents ranged from “this content should not be allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it” to “this content should be allowed on Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it”.
    **
    In neither survey question did Facebook allow users to indicate that law enforcement or child protection should be involved in the situation: the strictest option allowed involved turning to the social network as arbiter.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/05/facebook-men-children-sexual-images
    I called out Facebook on SourceCast 106 for “outsourcing” policy to users instead of doing it themselves. This survey is even worse. Facebook needs to decide what kind of community it wants to be. Users will come and go as a result. Also – Facebook should not be trying to attract children and teens, so this line of question is problematic on a whole other level.

  • For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.

    On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

    There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

    Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/technology/two-months-news-newspapers.html

  • What Happens In One Lifetime?
  • Another new survey underscores that skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want

    According to feedback from more than 1,005 workforce hiring decision-makers conducted on Upwork’s behalf by the company Inavaro, skilled workers can pretty much live wherever they want and employers will come to them. The reason: companies say they are struggling to find talent, with the average position open for 36 days and some engineering jobs vacant for up to 45 days.

    In fact, though the majority of organizations surveyed — 57 percent — don’t support a work-from-home policy, those that do say they’ve become increasingly inclusive of people who work outside the office, and five times as many hiring managers expect more of their team to work remotely in the next decade than expect less. Put simply, they say the most skilled person for the job outweighs that person’s ability to work in the same location as the rest of the team.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/09/another-new-survey-underscores-that-skilled-workers-can-pretty-much-live-wherever-they-want/?ncid=rss

  • United Airlines’ Bonus Lottery Was Doomed to Fail. Don’t Make the Same Mistake With Your Team.

    If you want to know what your employers need or want, try asking them what they’d change about the culture of your workplace. I doubt the answer will be, “We need a Ping-Pong table” or, “I’d love to have my name picked out of a hat for a bonus” but instead, “I don’t understand what I need to do to get promoted or a raise,” “I’d love to be able to attend a conference to learn more about our industry” or, “I would love a mentor who could help guide me.”

    If your employees want to play the lottery, they have that option outside of work. Adults don’t want to play games at work, and United Arilines found that out the hard way. We don’t need toys; we want job satisfaction. And most importantly, employees want predictability.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309984

Photo: Joshua Earle

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Supplier Report: 3/23/3018

Oracle and MicroFocus had a very rough week at the stock market.  MicroFocus dropped over 50% in value due to complications integrating HP software assets. Oracle investors are reacting to a lack of progress in cloud sales.

SAP settled a $600M software dispute with Anheuser-Busch, terms were not disclosed, but I am sure all parties need a drink after those discussions.

As China gains more traction in artificial intelligence, the US is attempting to curb any domestic growth in consumer goods or tech acquisitions.  Is this a sound strategy or is this the start of a potential trade war?

Acquisitions

  • Sources: Google is buying Lytro for about $40M

    Multiple sources tell us that Google is acquiring Lytro, the imaging startup that began as a ground-breaking camera company for consumers before pivoting to use its depth-data, light-field technology in VR.

    One source described the deal as an “asset sale” with Lytro going for no more than $40 million. Another source said the price was even lower: $25 million. A third source tells us that not all employees are coming over with the company’s technology: some have already received severance and parted ways with the company, and others have simply left. Assets would presumably also include Lytro’s 59 patents related to light-field and other digital imaging technology.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/sources-google-is-buying-lytro-for-about-40m/

  • Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5 billion

    But of course Salesforce gets more than tech with this purchase, which it can integrate into its growing family of products. It also gets major customers like Coca-Cola, VMware, GE, Accenture, Airbus, AT&T and Cisco. While Salesforce may have a presence already in some of these companies already, Mulesoft gives them entree into areas they might not have had and gives them the ability to expand that presence.

    What’s more, the company has big revenue goals. Having reached $10 billion in revenue faster than any software company ever has, a point that Chairman and co-founder Marc Benioff has been happy to make, they have actually set their sites on $60 billion by 2034. That’s a long way away, of course, but having a company like MuleSoft in the fold, which made almost $300 million in revenue in fiscal 201, will certainly help.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/salesforce-is-buying-mulesoft-at-enterprise-value-of-6-5-billion/

  • Google’s Cloud Boss Is Eyeing a ‘Major Acquisition’ to Get Ahead

    For 2018, Greene and her deputies mentioned a focus on winning customers in health care, energy and financial services. Greene said Google will keep working to sign cloud deals with the government, too. The company recently got its FedRAMP certification, a key clearance needed to provide cloud services to the U.S. government.

    Over the past two years, Alphabet has scaled back several costly initiatives, including projects in fiber broadband and drones. But the company has plowed money into Greene’s division. (Greene, an Alphabet director, said she recuses herself from board votes on cloud acquisitions.) That investment is indicative of the support that Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page has for the business, Greene noted.

    “The entire board, including Larry, is pretty thrilled with what’s going on in cloud,” she said. “How could they not be? It’s phenomenal what the team has achieved.”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-16/google-s-cloud-boss-eyeing-major-acquisition-to-get-ahead

  • Qualcomm’s Jacobs to Leave Board as He Explores Acquisition

    Qualcomm Inc. said director Paul Jacobs, son of the chipmaker’s founder and a former chief executive officer, will leave the board after he decided to explore an acquisition of the company.

    “The board reached that decision following his notification to the board that he has decided to explore the possibility of making a proposal to acquire Qualcomm,” the company said in a statement on Friday.

    Jacobs, 55, was stripped of his executive chairman title last week as the company sought to fend off a $117 billion hostile takeover bid from Broadcom Ltd. The board largely agreed with Jacobs that Broadcom’s bid was too low. However, early counts in a board vote tied to the Broadcom bid showed many Qualcomm shareholders had voted to replace Qualcomm directors, including Jacobs and Chief Executive Officer Steve Mollenkopf. U.S. President Donald Trump blocked the deal earlier this week.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-16/qualcomm-s-jacobs-to-leave-board-as-he-explores-possible-buyout

Artificial Intelligence

  • Look out, Alexa and Google Assistant — Watson Assistant is coming for you

    One of the key differentiating factors between Watson and all other smart assistants is its status as a white label product. That means that there’s no specific way in which to use Watson Assistant — there is no set wake word, nor a dedicated smart speaker in which the assistant will live. Rather, companies will be able to leverage Watson however they see best, making it easier to add actions and commands. And perhaps most importantly, every individual application of Watson Assistant will keep its data to itself, which means that large companies can’t, as The Verge notes, “pool information on users’ activities across multiple domains.”

    As IBM’s vice president of Watson Internet of Things, Bret Greenstein, explained to The Verge, “If you start running the entire world through Alexa, it’s an enormous amount of data and control to give to one company.” But Watson Assistant hopes to avoid that situation.

    https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/watson-ibm-assistant/

  • FedEx Follows Amazon Into the Robotic Future

    Yes, the robots replaced a few jobs right away. And in time, they will replace about 25 jobs in a facility that employs about 1,300 people. But the hub creates about 100 new jobs every year — and a robot work force still seems like the distant future.

    “Everyone will have a job,” said Galen Steele, the senior manager who oversees the depot. “It just might be in a different place.”

    As people have become more comfortable buying online, big and bulky goods like car tires, canoes and boxes as big as a coffin have accounted for an increasing percentage of the packages flowing through FedEx’s distribution centers, said Ted Dengel, who oversees operations technology for the FedEx Ground network, which includes 35 shipping hubs across the United States and Canada, including the facility in North Carolina.

    These ungainly items can’t fit on a conveyor belt. That’s where the robots, which cost several thousand dollars and are made by a Massachusetts company called Vecna, come in.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/technology/fedex-robots.html

  • China wants to shape the global future of artificial intelligence (Thanks JD)

    “[The Chinese government] sees standardization not only as a way to provide competitiveness for their companies, but also as a way to go from being a follower to setting the pace,” says Jeffrey Ding, a student at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute who studies China’s nascent AI industry, and who translated the report. The government’s plan cites the way US standards bodies have influenced the development of the internet, expressing a desire to avoid having the same thing happen with AI.

    China’s booming AI industry and massive government investment in the technology have raised fears in the US and elsewhere that the nation will overtake international rivals in a fundamentally important technology. In truth, it may be possible for both the US and the Chinese economies to benefit from AI. But there may be more rivalry when it comes to influencing the spread of the technology worldwide.

    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610546/china-wants-to-shape-the-global-future-of-artificial-intelligence/

Cloud

  • Oracle stock heads for worst day in nearly 5 years, analysts run for shelter after cloud bursts

    In Oracle’s earnings conference call, CEO Safra Catz told analysts that the firm expects to report adjusted earnings of $0.92 to $0.95 per share and revenue growth of 1% to 3% for the fourth quarter. Heading into the report data, our Zacks Consensus Estimates were calling for earnings of $0.90 per share and revenue growth of 2.6%.

    But the real concern for investors is Oracle’s slowing cloud growth. Management guided for total cloud revenues to improve between 19% and 23% in Q4, which is sluggish compared to the 32% growth it saw this quarter-and even worse considering the 51% and 44% rates it witnessed in Q1 and Q2.

    https://www.nasdaq.com/article/is-oracle-orcl-worth-buying-on-the-post-earnings-dip-cm937297

Security

  • Best Buy to Stop Selling Huawei Phones

    U.S. intelligence leaders have recently recommended against Americans using phones from Huawei or Chinese rival ZTE Corp. The most recent to do so was Paul Nakasone, the nominee to head both the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, who said at a Senate hearing last week that he wouldn’t want his friends or family using such devices.

    In addition to selling smartphones, Huawei is the world’s top maker of the equipment that goes into cellular towers and related infrastructure. The U.S. government’s broad concern is that the Chinese government could order Huawei to exploit knowledge of how its electronics are designed to spy or launch cyberattacks. Huawei says it is employee-owned and that no government has ever asked it to spy on or sabotage another country.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/best-buy-to-stop-selling-huawei-phones-1521725835

Software/SaaS

  • DocuSign has filed confidentially for IPO

    Like Dropbox, which is finally going public this week, San Francisco-based DocuSign has been an anticipated IPO for several years now. It’s raised over $500 million since it was founded in 2003 and has been valued at $3 billion. Kleiner Perkins, Bain Capital, Intel Capital, GV (Google Ventures) and Dell are among the many well-known names which have invested in DocuSign.

    But like many “unicorns” these days, the company took its time, spending 15 years as a private company. The DocuSign team decided that 2018 is the year for its debut and is targeting an IPO in either the second or third quarter.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/docusign-has-filed-confidentially-for-ipo/

  • Coca-Cola and US government use blockchain to curb forced labor

    Coca-Cola, the US State Department and a trio of crypto organizations (Bitfury Group, Blockchain Trust Accelerator and Emercoin) have launched a pilot project that will use blockchain to enforce worker rights. The initiative would use blockchain’s distributed ledger technology to create a secure, decentralized registry for workers and their contracts. They’d not only have the sort of identification that isn’t always guaranteed, but a trail of evidence in case employers abuse their power or don’t honor their end of a bargain.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/18/coca-cola-and-us-government-use-blockchain-to-curb-forced-labor/

  • Microsoft’s Edge Browser Could Soon Be Harder to Ignore in Windows 10

    But if you keep scrolling, near the bottom of the patch notes for build 17623, there’s a bullet point that says Insiders on the Skip Ahead ring “will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge.” Please say it ain’t so. This means that regardless of what your default browser is set to in Windows 10, any hyperlink you click in the Mail app would open in Edge, whether you like it or not.

    Microsoft justifies this by saying Edge “provides the best, most secure and consistent experience on Windows 10 and across your devices” and that “With built-in features for reading, note-taking, Cortana integration, and easy access to services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Microsoft Edge enables you to be more productive, organized and creative without sacrificing your battery life or security.”

    https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-s-edge-browser-could-soon-be-harder-to-ignore-1823843562

  • LinkedIn’s $27 Billion Challenge: Get People to Use It More

    Just 18% of LinkedIn members used the service daily in April 2016, according to Pew Research’s most recent look at the service’s usage in November 2016, a month before Microsoft MSFT 0.45% closed the deal. That’s down from 21% a year earlier.

    What’s more, more than half of members, 51%, used LinkedIn every few weeks or less often, Pew found. By comparison, 76% of Facebook Inc. members used the service at least daily, Pew found.

    At the time of the deal, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said one goal was to weave together the tools people use to get their jobs done and professional networks that connect workers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/linkedins-27-billion-challenge-get-people-to-use-it-more-1521201600

  • Oracle claims database 10 times cheaper than AWS, analyst says cloud on ‘continual slide’

    Speaking on an earnings call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha, Hurd talked up Oracle’s new autonomous database.

    “The amazing thing about the autonomous database is that it is the only database on the planet that requires no human labor to administer,” he said.

    “Oracle has a faster database than Amazon, it’s no big surprise there, but the interesting thing [is that] Amazon charges by the minute and we charge by the minute; our prices are essentially the same or close enough.

    “If we run 10 times faster, we are one-tenth the cost of Amazon’s database. We’ve been through all the public benchmarks – you can go and look at them – we’re one-tenth the cost.”

    https://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/3028817/oracle-claims-database-is-ten-times-cheaper-than-aws

  • Hewlett Packard Spin-Off Falters, as Shares Drop 55% in London

    It hasn’t worked out as planned. Micro Focus shares plunged 46% Monday after it said technical problems related to combining the computer systems of Micro Focus and HPE would lead to lower-than-expected sales.

    Micro Focus also said its chief executive, Chris Hsu, resigned after a 6½-month tenure. Previously HPE’s chief operating officer, Mr. Hsu was appointed CEO in January 2017 and officially took the position when the merger was completed this past September.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-spin-off-falters-as-shares-drop-55-in-london-1521471054

Other

  • Facebook Suspends Data Firm That Helped Trump Campaign

    Facebook said late Friday that it been given information that Cambridge Analytica, along with two individuals who don’t work there, improperly kept Facebook user data for years despite telling the social network that it had destroyed those records. Facebook didn’t say how Cambridge Analytica used that data or if it gave the data to the Trump campaign.

    Facebook, which didn’t elaborate on the source of its information, said it is suspending Cambridge Analytica, its parent Strategic Communication Laboratories and the two individuals from buying ads or administering clients’ pages while it investigates the reports.

    The move once again spotlights Facebook’s role during the 2016 presidential election and its shortcomings in policing manipulation and misuse of its platform.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-suspends-cambridge-analytica-for-failing-to-delete-user-data-1521260051

  • SAP settles licensing dispute with AB InBev

    Questioned about the settlement, an SAP spokesman added just one adjective: “There is nothing more to say than ‘There was a dispute and it was resolved amicably,’” he said via email.

    That the companies were able to conclude the dispute so amicably and quietly comes down to the framework SAP used to enforce its licensing agreement: the Commercial Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association.

    Commercial arbitration proceedings are usually conducted in private, and unlike in U.S. courts, filings and rulings are not matters of public record.

    When a licensing dispute goes to court, it’s generally a lot harder to keep quiet, as another alcoholic beverage maker, Diageo, found when SAP sued it for accessing data stored in its SAP system without the appropriate licenses. In February 2017 a U.K. court ruled that Diageo needed named-user licenses for customers and employees to access the SAP system, even when they did so indirectly through a Salesforce.com app. The court didn’t immediately rule on how much Diageo had to pay, but SAP was asking for £54,503,578 (around $76 million).

    https://www.cio.com/article/3263717/enterprise-resource-planning/sap-settles-licensing-dispute-with-ab-inbev.html

  • Cutting “old heads” at IBM

    The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would “correct seniority mix.” It slashed IBM’s U.S. workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its estimated total U.S. job cuts during those years.

    In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked U.S. laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees.

    https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/

  • Trump strikes back at Chinese tech practices with new tariffs

    Trump directed his administration to take action that will likely result in tariffs on a proposed list of 1,300 products as punishment for Beijing’s intellectual property practices, senior White House officials said ahead of the announcement.

    The officials said the list of targeted products will largely focus on technology China is accused of forcefully taking from U.S. companies. The value of that list represents the harm that U.S. companies have suffered from China’s practices, they said.

    “What you’ll see is that many of these areas are those where China has sought to acquire advantage through the unfair acquisition or forced technology transfer from U.S. companies with an aim toward establishing its own competitive advantage,” said Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, during a call with reporters.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/22/trump-chinese-tech-practices-tariffs-428551

Photo by Guzmán Barquín on Unsplash

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News You Can Use: 3/21/2018 (Special Edition)

This week’s “News You Can Use” is a special edition covering the Facebook Cambridge Analytica issue.  It is popping up in a few of my posts, so I decided to consolidate everything into one post.

  • Cambridge Analytica: all the news about Facebook’s data privacy scandal

    Facebook said late Friday that it had suspended Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), along with its political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, for violating its policies around data collection and retention. The companies, which ran data operations for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, are widely credited with helping Trump more effectively target voters on Facebook than his rival, Hillary Clinton. While the exact nature of their role remains somewhat mysterious, Facebook’s disclosure suggests that the company improperly obtained user data that could have given it an unfair advantage in reaching voters.

    Also:

    The CEO of controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was suspended today after he was filmed by undercover journalists appearing to encourage the use of beautiful women to entrap politicians as part of election influence campaigns. Alexander Nix will face a “full, independent investigation” of his comments, the company’s board said in a press release.

    “In the view of the Board, Mr. Nix’s recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation,” the company said in a statement posted to its website. “We have asked Dr. Alexander Tayler to serve as acting CEO while an independent investigation is launched to review those comments and allegations.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17141266/facebook-cambridge-analytica-user-data-donald-trump-campaign-2016-election

  • Facebook Ignites Debate Over Third-Party Access to User Data

    The current controversy has its roots in a 2007 decision by Facebook to give outsiders access to the company’s “social graph”—the friend lists, interests and “likes” that tied Facebook’s user base together. Tapping that rich store of information required that a person create an app and plug it into Facebook’s platform.

    The move helped Facebook become a fixture in its members’ lives, catapulting the company from 58 million users to more than 2 billion today. It also addressed criticism from people who argued the company shouldn’t have sole custody over the data generated by users.

    Also:

    In 2014, Facebook said it would reverse course after users questioned their data being shared with outsiders without their knowledge. Those changes went into effect in 2015, forcing many dating, job-search and political apps to close their doors, and sparking a fresh round of criticism that Facebook changed its rules at whim.

    Despite the changes, Facebook couldn’t ensure data already gleaned by developers wasn’t shared with third parties. Such a move would violate the Facebook policies governing how third-party developers can deploy data they obtained from the company.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ignites-debate-over-third-party-access-to-user-data-1521414746

  • Facebook under fire over claims Trump consultants mined data

    So…I don’t normally use Fox News clips on this blog, but the first 4 videos on this topic are from Fox, which made me think of this article from Wired that documents Murdoch’s displeasure at Facebook changing their news algorithm and how there would be a price to pay if it wasn’t fixed.
  • The Problem Is Facebook, Not Cambridge Analytica

    There’s plenty of evidence that Brad Parscale, who ran the digital side of Trump’s campaign, worked closely with Facebook. Using the platform’s “Lookalike Audiences,” he could find people who resemble known Trump supporters. Facebook also has the capacity to target ads to the friends of people who have “liked” a page — a Trump campaign page, for example.

    Targeting messages to millions of specific people without going directly through Facebook is messier and probably more expensive than using the social platform’s own tools. All Facebook requires for access to its data trove is a reasonable fee.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-20/facebook-not-cambridge-analytica-is-the-source-of-the-problem

  • How to delete Facebook

    If you are ready to delete your account, you can click this link, which will take you to the account deletion page. (Facebook doesn’t have the delete account option in its settings, for some reason.) Once you click “Delete My Account,” your account will be marked for termination, and inaccessible to others using Facebook.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142806/how-to-delete-facebook-page-account-data-privacy

  • Google is taking advantage of Facebook’s weak news reputation:

    There are three specific goals of the Google News Initiative: highlight accurate journalism while fighting misinformation, particularly during breaking news events; help news sites continue to grow from a business perspective; and create new tools to help journalists do their jobs. Google is serious about supporting these goals, too, pledging to invest $300 million over the next three years.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17142788/google-news-initiative-fake-news-journalist-subscriptions

Extra Content:
How could I not share my recent SourceCast episode on Facebook’s methods of attracting children to the platform

Photo by Alexandre Croussette on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 3/2/2018

Facebook and Twitter are fighting for the hearts and minds of social media users.  As Facebook struggles with “fake news” and changes their algorithms (hurting some legitimate sites in the process), Twitter is using this moment to embrace the press… but will anything improve?

Amazon has purchased another home camera company.  It was announced they purchased Ring (a video doorbell maker) after purchasing Blink in December.  Amazon really wants to find away to make customers comfortable with letting them into their homes…

On the Amazon topic, they are in a race with Apple to become the first company to be worth a trillion dollars…

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Acquires Ring, Maker of Video Doorbells

    Amazon.com Inc. acquired Ring, maker of video doorbells, in a deal valued at more than $1 billion, a person familiar with the transaction said, giving the online giant a bigger foothold in the burgeoning internet business of home security.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-acquires-ring-maker-of-video-doorbells-1519768639

  • Nokia acquires Unium, a mesh WiFi startup that works with Google Fiber, as part of big home WiFi push

    While Nokia’s former handset business forges ahead with its new device strategy under licensee HMD, Nokia itself has taken one more step to build out its business with carriers in a new wave of services. To coincide with MWC in Barcelona and a bigger step into the WiFi business, the company today announced that it has acquired Unium, a startup out of Seattle that builds technology for mesh WiFi for home networking services.

    Unium’s tech is used to address one of the biggest pain-points in home WiFi today: it helps fill in dead spots in home WiFi arrangements, where you may not get signal or interference from other networks, and the accompanying security issues that might come alongside those.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/25/nokia-acquires-unium-a-mesh-wifi-startup-that-works-with-google-fiber-as-part-of-big-home-wifi-push/?ncid=rss

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Future of Policing Is Being Hashed Out in Secret (thanks JD)

    It should go without saying that experimenting with predictive AI in real-world law enforcement demands public oversight and awareness. The debate that is now beginning should have been had before the technology was used to build indictments, not afterward. Nevertheless, it would also be a mistake if the only outrage is over the failure to make public disclosures. The more important conversation must address the deeper issues this case raises.

    Law enforcement — and criminal justice more broadly — must be evaluated on two separate criteria: pragmatic effectiveness and legal justice. On the first criterion, it’s important to note that there isn’t yet any clear evidence that the Palantir-New Orleans partnership works. Palantir would like to take credit for a New Orleans crime dip, but the data and the timing don’t necessarily support that. For now, the efficacy of machine-based crime prediction and protection must be treated as unproven at best.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-28/artificial-intelligence-in-policing-advice-for-new-orleans-and-palantir

  • Amazon vs. Google vs. Microsoft: Big tech firms gird for AI talent battle

    As Quartz points points out, top AI talent is scarce “and companies are willing to pay millions to obtain new talent.” A case-in-point, Google paid more than $500 million in 2014 for UK-based AI startup DeepMind. And we’ll see millions more paid for AI startups, scientists and engineers as the talent war heats up.

    Separately, Microsoft’s Cortana has a new boss. Javier Soltero, who formerly worked on Office will now be in charge of Cortana. He’ll report to Harry Shum, who’s the head of AI for the company.

    https://martechtoday.com/amazon-vs-google-vs-microsoft-big-tech-firms-gird-ai-talent-battle-211894
    They went with “gird” in the headline, I wonder if AI wrote it.

Cloud

  • The Best Thing for Dropbox Was Breaking Up With the Cloud

    Those paragraphs in the public offering document (page 67) summarize the difficult and nerdy work to shift a vast volume of Dropbox users’ digital files from Amazon’s computer networks to Dropbox’s own and to close dormant accounts to free up storage capacity. This yearslong shift to wean Dropbox off Amazon Web Services wasn’t glamorous work, but it improved Dropbox’s finances substantially. Without exaggeration, the shift away from cloud computing is one of the biggest reasons Dropbox is able to go public now.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-03-01/dropbox-s-best-move-was-breaking-up-with-amazon-s-cloud

  • Nasty, new security threats are scaring .govs to the cloud

    “I believe that the leadership within the government is ready for this change,” Wood said. AWS’ Commercial Cloud Services, or C2S, and Secret Commercial Cloud Service, or SC2S, are the “secret” and “top secret” clouds, respectively, Wood explained. The intelligence community — including its military components — have been working together to assess the security features of these clouds. The group of 38 assessors clearly see the benefits and are gaining confidence that the data is protected and are now closer to reciprocity than ever before.

    A common vernacular for cybersecurity pros has hurt attempts to build expertise and strong security standards and systems in the past. The signing of the president’s executive order on cybersecurity is now mandating the adoption of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

    https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/02/23/nasty-new-security-threats-scaring-govs-cloud-awspublicsector/

  • Apple may no longer be using Microsoft’s Azure

    The updated Apple security guide now lists Amazon’s S3 and the Google Cloud Platform as where some encrypted “chunks” of files are stored. Apple’s iCloud stores users’ contacts, calendars, photos and documents, among other types of information. iCloud also is used by some third-party apps to store and sync documents and key values for app data, Apple’s security guide notes.

    CRN reported in March 2016 that Google signed on Apple as a customer for the Google Cloud platform, citing “multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.” At that time, CRN also reported that Apple had “significantly reduced its reliance on Amazon Web Services,” though had not abandoned AWS entirely.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-may-no-longer-be-using-microsofts-azure/
    Interesting timing to reduce reliance on AWS as both companies race to be the first one trillion dollar company.

Security

  • Equifax finds another 2.4 million people affected by its data breach

    “This is not about newly discovered stolen data,” Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr., Equifax’s Interim CEO, said in a statement. “It’s about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals.” Equifax said that because the attackers appeared to be focused on obtaining social security numbers, that’s what their investigation centered on during its initial phases. These additional 2.4 million individuals didn’t have their social security numbers stolen and were therefore not spotted earlier in the investigation.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/01/equifax-2-4-million-more-people-affected-data-breach/

  • Apple to Start Putting Sensitive Encryption Keys in China

    The keys are complex strings of random characters that can unlock the photos, notes and messages that users store in iCloud. Until now, Apple has stored the codes only in the U.S. for all global users, the company said, in keeping with its emphasis on customer privacy and security.

    While Apple says it will ensure that the keys are protected in China, some privacy experts and former Apple security employees worry that moving the keys to China makes them more vulnerable to seizure by a government with a record of censorship and political suppression.

    “Once the keys are there, they can’t necessarily pull out and take those keys because the server could be seized by the Chinese government,” said Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University. Ultimately, he says, “It means that Apple can’t say no.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-start-putting-sensitive-encryption-keys-in-china-1519497574

  • GitHub survives massive DDoS attack relatively unscathed

    GitHub, a web-based code distribution and version control service, survived a massive denial of service attack on Wednesday. According to a report at Wired, a staggering 1.35 terabits per second (Tbps) of traffic hit the site at once. Within 10 minutes the company called for help from a DDoS mitigation service similar to Google’s Project Shield, Akamai’s Prolexic, which took over to filter and weed out malicious traffic packets. The attack, says Wired, ended after eight minutes. This may have been the largest DDoS attack ever; Wired notes the attack on domain name server Dyn in late 2016 reached 1.2 Tbps of traffic.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/01/github-survives-massive-ddos-attack-relatively-unscathed/

Software/SaaS

  • LittleThings blames its shutdown on Facebook algorithm change

    Then Facebook made another big change to its algorithm, one that was supposed to prioritize content from friends and family over news publishers. Speiser said this cut LittleThings’ influencer and organic traffic (which was its most valuable traffic) by 75 percent.

    “No previous algorithm update ever came close to this level of decimation,” he wrote. “The position it put us in was beyond dire. The businesses looking to acquire LittleThings got spooked and promptly exited the sale process, leaving us in jeopardy of our bank debt convenants and ultimately bringing an expedited end to our incredible story.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/littlethings-shutdown/?ncid=rss
    This is what happens when you base a business model completely on a platform you don’t own or control.

  • While Facebook spars with critics, Twitter goes for humility on social media

    Twitter’s smaller size relative to Facebook also may help it repair its image because it’s not as dominant as Facebook. The media and marketing community is also eager for platform allies to counter Facebook and Google’s enormity, and Twitter has given the impression it wants to get out ahead of the trolls, bots and other abuses of its service. But as with Facebook, Twitter is vulnerable for having let the abuse problem continue as long as it has, and the PR goodwill will only last so long. It also has a chance to get out ahead of its role being spotlighted in probes of Russia’s meddling in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

    To one publishing executive, Dorsey came off as “sincere, not defensive. But they have to actually do something. Talk is cheap. If they want to become a credible publishing entity, they need to take responsibility. And that means action.”

    https://digiday.com/media/facebook-spars-critics-twitter-goes-humility-social-media/

Other

  • Apple Is Going to Be the First Trillion-Dollar Company

    Apple’s board of directors had most recently authorized a $210 billion share-repurchase program that is expected to be completed by March 2019, according to Apple investor relations. That was before the very corporate friendly 2017 tax reform bill was passed. I would expect that bill will encourage even more share repurchases. We should not be surprised to see a 10 or even 20 percent share count reduction over the next five years.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-01/apple-is-going-to-be-the-first-trillion-dollar-company

  • IBM gives Services staff until 2019 to get agile

    IBM has spent years telling the world that its Notes suite is as fine a collaboration environment as there is to be found anywhere, if only you’d give it a chance and appreciate its charms. But among the changes required to demonstrate agility is cessation of email use in favour of devops darling Slack. Staff are also expected to start using WebEx.

    Come September 30, IBM wants its services staff to have hit level-three agility maturity, and to see “positive trending of agile metrics.” Come December 30, Big Blue wants “continuous improvement leading to client advocacy.”

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/26/ibm_gives_services_staff_until_2019_to_get_agile/
    IBM report, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?”

    “There’s been a feeling historically that the elephants can’t dance, the incumbents will find it hard to respond and that everyone will be Uber-ed or Airbnb-ed out of existence,” Mark Foster, senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, told Reuters in an interview.

    “But what we are seeing is, actually, there is a limit as to how far that can go.”

    While some sectors had been hugely disrupted by new digital entrants and some intermediaries were pushed out, many of those changes were now being led by existing industry players, he said.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/02/ibm-report-elephants-dance-180225153412288.html

  • How SoftBank, World’s Biggest Tech Investor, Throws Around Its Cash

    They describe a man who sometimes makes gut-instinct decisions in businesses he knows little about—such as the time he spent about 30 minutes deciding he wanted to invest $200 million in a startup that grows vegetables indoors. Other times, he compiles an elaborate analysis, inundating his directors with hundreds of pages of documents to help explain an investment target.

    To strike quickly, he sometimes commits to investments before getting approval from his fund’s investment committee, some of these people say. And he often spars with his executives and board members over his proposals until they are convinced or acquiesce.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-does-the-worlds-biggest-tech-investor-make-its-bets-unpredictably-1519661008

Photo: Kevin Stoop