Google walkout organizers demand company investigate HR department
In a Medium post from the official walkout account, the employees released a series of demands. On the list: meeting previous demands made during the November walkout, having Alphabet CEO Larry Page address those demands, reversing alleged retaliation against organizers, and opening an investigation into the company’s “abysmal handling of employee complaints.”
“Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” the post reads. “As the company progresses from crisis to crisis, it is clear Google management is failing, along with HR.” The post demands that an investigation be conducted by a third party and that the results be released publicly.
New study shows human development is destroying the planet at an unprecedented rate
In the most comprehensive effort undertaken to date, some 145 expert authors from 50 countries working with another 310 contributing authors spent the last three years compiling and assessing changes in global biodiversity over a 50-year period for a study conducted under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
They found there are now 1 million species that are threatened with extinction; that more than one-third of the world’s land surface and 75% of all freshwater resources are devoted to crop or livestock production; that 60 billion tons of renewable and non-renewable resources are extracted globally every year; that land degradation has reduced the productivity of global land surface area by 23% and roughly $577 billion worth of crops are at risk from pollinator loss annually; and, finally, that up to 300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of the loss of coastal habitats.
Slack’s head of workplace design thinks open floor plans “suuuck”
At Slack we’ve done a lot of different things. We do have open offices—we’re actually making them smaller, the desk per square foot smaller, and swatches of open office much smaller. We also have a variety of privacy phone booth options, small quad and double rooms, and one-person rooms. Some of them are bookable, some are not bookable, so people can really drop in and book them.
We also have the luxury of having a human right now. Her role is space and room planning, so if you need a space you can air a complaint. And we have a human being who has purview into all your rooms and spaces and is able to help you.
Why AT&T Was Right About HBO. In a Word, We’re Talking … ‘Silos.’
Now, consider the impact of silos on a startup. Whatever their cause, silos of all types — to my way of thinking — end up encouraging stagnation and stunting growth. When each department looks out for itself, employees come to fear outside opinions and new ideas because they threaten the security of the walled-off group.
Silos are part of the reason Microsoft lagged behind when the world went mobile. They also played a part in some of Google’s big stumbles, such as the demise of Google Plus.
Now, think again about startups: It’s not enough for a startup to grow; it has to be able to handle that growth. Silos tend to spring up when management fails to recognize that a company is no longer a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs but an increasingly large, successful organization. To ensure that growth doesn’t kill your startup, it’s important that you be proactive when it comes to breaking down these walls –before it becomes too late.
Apple and Microsoft are starting the push for the cloud… services. Apple is expected to derive 30% of their profits from services this year and much more in the future. For Microsoft, it isn’t enough to host, they want to be a platform for productivity, IOT, and blockchain.
And as those companies succeed, others like Verzion and Oracle are struggling with their cloud services and acquisitions. Verizon is now looking to sell off Yahoo assets like Tumblr after users have fled from the platform. Oracle is expecting weaker companies to consolidate.
Acquisitions
Artificial Intelligence
IBM’s decision to halt sales of Watson AI: strategic move or admission of failure?
At present, IBM says it will no longer develop or market the drug discovery application but will continue to support existing users of the software. It may be that the technology is simply not yet mature enough for deployment in certain capacities such as drug discovery, diagnosis and treatment recommendations despite indications of some success by other AI companies.
However, given that AI employs machine learning, with further input of data from a variety of sources, the abilities and accuracy of the AI will most likely increase. With the pressure to commercialize a driving factor for many companies, there may not be enough time set aside for the numerous iterations and human participation necessary for developing and fine-tuning the technology.
Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for ‘defective’ cyber-revamp
As Hertz endured the delays, it found itself immersed in a nightmare: a product and design that apparently didn’t do half of what was specified and still wasn’t finished. “By that point, Hertz no longer had any confidence that Accenture was capable of completing the project, and Hertz terminated Accenture,” the car rental company complained in a lawsuit [PDF] lodged against Accenture in New York this month.
Hertz is suing for the $32m it paid Accenture in fees to get to that aborted stage, and it wants more millions to cover the cost of fixing the mess. “Accenture never delivered a functional website or mobile app,” Hertz claimed.
Accenture told El Reg on Tuesday this week it believes Hertz’s lawsuit is “without merit.”
It is unclear how much Verizon might get for Tumblr, a free service with more than 400 million blogs. Yahoo paid about $1.1 billion for the New York-based site in 2013, when it was among a number of fast-growing startups such as online scrapbook Pinterest and news aggregation and commenting site Reddit.
But Tumblr struggled to generate meaningful revenue for Yahoo and was eclipsed by other social media, such as Medium, Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012. Yahoo wrote down Tumblr’s value by $230 million in 2016.
Microsoft’s Satya Nadella uses a subtle fear tactic to win cloud business away from Amazon
Nadella was reminding Read that unlike giant cloud provider Amazon, Microsoft isn’t competing with WPP. It isn’t a retailer competing with WPP’s customer’s either. And although it does have Bing and does sell ads, it also has an ad sales partnership with WPP.
Nadella’s sales pitch is simple, and one used not just with ad agency giant WPP but with retailers, an industry Amazon has really clobbered: Do you trust a technology partner to store their data, handle their transactions, know the most intimate details of their business, if that tech partner is also a competitor?
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says that consolidation is coming as ‘underfunded’ cloud software companies get bought up: ‘Many of the companies will go away’
“Hurd’s analysis is correct,” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, told Business Insider.
“Smaller SaaS companies are underfunded and will have trouble competing with the big players in this market. If they have unique technology they could become M&A targets. It is expensive to market and serve the SaaS markets and being under-capitalized will hurt their chances to compete for the same businesses big SaaS companies go after today.”
Ray Wang, president of Constellation Research, agreed, saying: “We are still in a market of consolidation.”
Zero-day attackers deliver a double dose of ransomware—no clicking required
Attackers have been actively exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability in the widely used Oracle WebLogic server to install ransomware, with no clicking or other interaction necessary on the part of end users, researchers from Cisco Talos said on Tuesday.
The vulnerability and working exploit code first became public two weeks ago on the Chinese National Vulnerability Database, according to researchers from the security educational group SANS ISC, who warned that the vulnerability was under active attack. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and gives attackers the ability to execute code of their choice on cloud servers. Because of their power, bandwidth, and use in high-security cloud environments, these servers are considered high-value targets. The disclosure prompted Oracle to release an emergency patch on Friday.
Large GDPR Fines Are Imminent, EU Privacy Regulators Say
Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data-protection commissioner, said at an event here that her office has received about 6,000 complaints since GDPR went into effect. Most have been minor, such as individuals having problems deleting their accounts with certain firms. But her office is now investigating 18 cases involving large data breaches, systemic privacy issues and other serious violations at technology firms, she said.
Ms. Dixon said she plans to bring her first draft decisions for enforcement actions to the European Data Protection Board this summer. Other data protection authorities can raise objections.
Microsoft launches a fully managed blockchain service
We’re not talking cryptocurrencies here, though. This is an enterprise service that is meant to help businesses build applications on top of blockchain technology. It is integrated with Azure Active Directory and offers tools for adding new members, setting permissions and monitoring network health and activity.
The first support ledger is J.P. Morgan’s Quorum. “Because it’s built on the popular Ethereum protocol, which has the world’s largest blockchain developer community, Quorum is a natural choice,” Azure CTO Mark Russinovich writes in today’s announcement. “It integrates with a rich set of open-source tools while also supporting confidential transactions—something our enterprise customers require.” To launch this integration, Microsoft partnered closely with J.P. Morgan.
Services really are becoming a bigger part of Apple’s business
This shift is already playing out in the company’s financials. While product sales dipped a bit year-over-year — down from $51.3 billion in the quarter that ran from January to March 2018 to $46.6 billion in the same quarter of 2019 — revenue from the services business climbed from $9.9 billion to $11.5 billion.
In this fiscal Q2 quarter of 2018, Apple’s total revenue came in at roughly $61.1 billion; in the same quarter of 2019, it dipped to $58 billion. This works out to services accounting for 16.1% of Apple’s revenue in fiscal Q2 2018, but nearly 20% in fiscal Q2 2019. Apple CFO Luca Maestri says services now account for “one-third” of the company’s gross profits.
Foxconn Chairman Meets With Trump as Wisconsin Plant Plans Fall Behind
The Foxconn project is one of the biggest U.S. public-incentive deals ever offered to a foreign company, a more than $4 billion package of state and local tax breaks and infrastructure investment.
President Trump has been involved with the Wisconsin project since its inception, and said he was the one who advised Mr. Gou to build in rural southeastern Wisconsin. At last year’s groundbreaking, President Trump touted the plant as a pillar of his plan to bring advanced-manufacturing jobs to the industrial Midwest and described Chairman Gou as “one of the most successful businessmen in the world, very few people even close.”
But President Trump didn’t mention Foxconn in a Saturday night rally in Green Bay, a rare omission for a project he has described as “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Alphabet Falls $1 Billion Short of Revenue Forecasts, Blaming Strong Dollar
The law of large numbers is simple: As a company gets bigger, it becomes difficult to find new ways to make money and maintain rapid growth. The issue has dogged other big tech companies like Apple in recent years.
Alphabet explained the revenue shortfall with a very big-company answer. It said the strong United States dollar dented revenue by $1.2 billion. Google executives rattled off a long list of currencies weakening against the dollar, including the euro, the British pound, Brazilian real and Indian rupee. The company said it expected foreign currency to be an issue again in the current quarter.
Shares of Alphabet fell more than 7 percent in early trading on (last) Tuesday.
Mr. Schmidt, 64 years old, was appointed CEO in 2001, when Google was still privately traded and just three years old. Already a Silicon Valley veteran, he was brought in to provide managerial heft to the less experienced founders of the company, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The interview process included a trip by the three men to the free-spirited Burning Man festival in Nevada.
Board member Diane Greene, who was replaced as chief executive of the cloud division in January, also will leave the board, the company announced. Cloud has been a sore spot for Google, despite a big hiring push and the attention of some of the company’s top executives.
Google continues to make moves in the cloud with new hires and policy changes that should make their services more attractive under the leadership of Thomas Kurian but news continues to leak about failing AI ethics boards and past behavior with open source competitors that makes me wonder if Google is actually evil (sometimes). But there is good news… Google’s streaming beef with Amazon seems to be squashed…for now.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile is facing an uphill battle with the DOJ on their Sprint merger plans and Wisconsin might actually push back against Foxconn.
Acquisitions
T-Mobile-Sprint Deal Runs Into Resistance From DOJ Antitrust Staff
The nation’s third- and fourth-biggest carriers by subscribers are facing challenges on several fronts, but their most immediate hurdle comes from the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which is considering whether the deal would present an unacceptable threat to competition.
In a meeting earlier this month, Justice Department staff members laid out their concerns with the all-stock deal and questioned the companies’ arguments that the combination would produce important efficiencies for the merged firm, the people said.
Salesforce is buying MapAnything, a startup that raised over $84 million
The companies did not reveal the selling price, and Salesforce didn’t have anything to add beyond a brief press release announcing the deal.
“The addition of MapAnything to Salesforce will help the world’s leading brands accurately plan: how many people they need, where to put them, how to make them as productive as possible, how to track what’s being done in real time and what they can learn to improve going forward,” Salesforce wrote in the statement announcing the deal.
Why it just might make sense that Salesforce.com is buying Salesforce.org
Salesforce has always made a lot of hay about being a responsible capitalist. It’s something it highlights at events and really extends with the 1-1-1 model it created, which gives one percent of profit, time and resources (product) to education and nonprofits. Its employees are given time off and are encouraged to work in the community. Salesforce.org has been the driver behind this, but something drove the company to bring Salesforce.org into the fold.
While it’s easy to be cynical about the possible motivations, it could be a simple business reason, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. As he pointed out, it didn’t make a lot of sense from a business perspective to be running two separate entities with separate executive teams, bookkeeping systems and sales teams. What’s more, he said there was some confusion over lack of alignment and messaging between the Salesforce.com education sales team and what was happening at Salesforce.org. Finally, he says because Salesforce.org couldn’t issue Salesforce.com stock options, it might not have been attracting the best talent.
Microsoft acquires Express Logic for its real-time internet of things operating system
Microsoft today announced that it’s acquired Express Logic, a 23-year-old San Diego, California-based developer of real-time operating systems (RTOS) for internet of things (IoT) and edge devices powered by microcontroller units (MCUs), for an undisclosed amount.
“With this acquisition, we will unlock access to billions of new connected endpoints, grow the number of devices that can seamlessly connect to Azure and enable new intelligent capabilities,” wrote Microsoft’s director of IoT Sam George in a blog post. “Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS joins Microsoft’s growing support for IoT devices and is complementary with Azure Sphere, our premier security offering in the microcontroller space.”
CloudBees acquires Electric Cloud to build out its software delivery management platform
CloudBees, the enterprise continuous integration and delivery service (and the biggest contributor to the Jenkins open-source automation server), today announced that it has acquired Electric Cloud, a continuous delivery and automation platform that first launched all the way back in 2002.
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but CloudBees has raised a total of $113.2 million while Electric Cloud raised $64.6 million from the likes of Rembrandt Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and Next47.
The most overlooked path to commercialize AI is for companies to do it themselves
Scaling these teams is expensive and operationally intensive. Going full stack opens up opportunities for companies to integrate labeling workflows into other jobs. Employees traditionally tasked with performing a consumer or enterprise service can take on the extra task at reduced expense. And if their role is assisted by a machine, they will gradually become more productive over time as their assistive models get more accurate with more labeled data.
A second and inherently related benefit of going full stack is that these startups are able to generate — and own — powerful virtuous data feedback loops. Owning data flows creates more impressive moats than merely locking down static data sets. Deep Sentinel has a natural moat in the consumer security space, for example, as it not only has accurate classifiers, but accurate classifiers that continue to improve with real-world data generated in an environment it can control.
Amazon is currently working with six business partners — Livongo, Express Scripts, Cigna Health Today, Swedish Health Connect, Atrium Health and ERAS, a program of Boston Children’s Hospital — to help customers make appointments, access medical instruction, track a prescription and other services. It’s a big step for one of the world’s most powerful companies, giving it a stronghold in the $3.5 trillion health care industry.
Amazon had been working for some time to develop software that would meet federal HIPAA regulations, and it even created a health team within its Alexa division a year ago to work on the project, according to Business Insider. Meeting HIPAA standards is important, but the professors questioned whether it is enough.
“I’m not sure that Amazon’s checking off the regulatory box on HIPAA compliance begins to answer the privacy concerns that we ought to have,” Rosoff said.
Google Cloud brings on 27-year SAP veteran as it doubles down on enterprise adoption
Unsurprisingly, Kurian is also looking to put his stamp on the executive team, too, and today announced that former SAP executive Robert Enslin is joining Google Cloud as its new president of Global Customer Operations.
Enslin’s hire is another clear signal that Kurian is focused on enterprise customers. Enslin, after all, is a veteran of the enterprise business, with 27 years at SAP, where he served on the company’s executive board until he announced his resignation from the company earlier this month. After leading various parts of SAP, including as president of its cloud product portfolio, president of SAP North America and CEO of SAP Japan, Enslin announced that he had “a few more aspirations to fulfill.” Those aspirations, we now know, include helping Google Cloud expand its lineup of enterprise customers.
Facebook admits harvesting 1.5 million people’s email contacts without consent
Facebook has admitted to accessing and storing the email contacts of as many as 1.5 million of its users without their consent. Business Insider reports that between May 2016 and last month, the social media platform asked some of its new users to verify their email address by providing the password to their email account. After doing so, the users’ contacts would be automatically imported, without any option for the user to opt out.
Responding to the report, a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that email contacts were “unintentionally uploaded” as part of the process. They said that these contacts had never been shared with anyone, and that the company is now deleting the contacts that were uploaded. Facebook also claims to have fixed the “underlying issue” that led to the problem.
Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years
“Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We’ll fix it soon. We want the same things. We’re on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?”
“I’m all for ‘don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence’ but I don’t believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,” Nightingale said.
Goldman Sachs analysts said they were encouraged by IBM’s results, but added that investors remain skeptical of the company’s ability to sustain improvements. Cloud revenue accounted for one-quarter of IBM’s total revenue over the past 12 months, up from 22% a year earlier, an IBM representative said.
Shares in IBM fell 4.2% to $139.11 on Wednesday. The stock is down 14% over the past year.
IBM’s year-over-year revenue had fallen in virtually every quarter since Ms. Rometty took over until the last quarter of 2017. The company also posted revenue growth in the first half of last year, but that turnaround proved short-lived: Revenue declined again in the last two quarters of 2018.
Apple and Qualcomm settle dispute, paving way for 5G iPhone
The two U.S. companies have been negotiating details of the settlement for weeks, sources told the Nikkei Asian Review. They have agreed to drop all litigation worldwide and struck a six-year licensing agreement, that will ensure the launch of the first 5G iPhone in 2020. The settlement included an undisclosed payment to Qualcomm by Apple, which several weeks ago asked its suppliers to begin testing the chipmaker’s 5G modems, sources said.
Intel followed up news of the settlement by announcing its exit from 5G chips and raising questions over the future potential of the next generation technology, which the smartphone industry is hoping will help to revive a market suffering its third consecutive year of decline.
Intel to Exit 5G Smartphone Modem Business, Focus 5G Efforts on
Network Infrastructure and Other Data-Centric Opportunities
The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020.
“We are very excited about the opportunity in 5G and the ‘cloudification’ of the network, but in the smartphone modem business it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns,” said Intel CEO Bob Swan. “5G continues to be a strategic priority across Intel, and our team has developed a valuable portfolio of wireless products and intellectual property. We are assessing our options to realize the value we have created, including the opportunities in a wide variety of data-centric platforms and devices in a 5G world.”
Microsoft’s green plan: Our data centers will run on 60% renewable energy by 2020
With the 60 percent milestone in sight, the company is now targeting over 70 percent renewable energy for its data centers by 2023.
Microsoft is aiming to cut its carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 and as part of that effort has raised its internal carbon ‘tax’ to $15 per metric ton on all carbon emissions, which is nearly double the current rate for carbon emissions, according to Microsoft president Brad Smith.
Microsoft has had a carbon tax in place since 2012 that puts the burden on business divisions financially to cut their own carbon emissions.
Gov. Tony Evers wants to renegotiate Foxconn deal, says company won’t employ 13,000
“Clearly the deal that was struck is no longer in play and so we will be working with individuals at Foxconn and of course with (the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.) to figure out how a new set of parameters should be negotiated,” Evers told reporters in his Capitol office.
He said it was premature to say what specific changes he would be seeking. Under existing deals, the state and local governments could provide the company up to $4 billion to establish a massive facility in Racine County and create up to 13,000 Wisconsin jobs.
Google and Amazon end their ridiculous streaming video spat
This should mark the end of a long, contentious relationship between Amazon and Google. For a while, Amazon declined to sell Google’s Chromecast devices, products that compete directly with Amazon’s own Fire TV products. Amazon also didn’t include support for Google Cast in the Prime Video app, which made it essentially impossible to get Prime Video on bigger screens if you used Google products. Google responded by pulling support for the YouTube apps on Fire TV as well as the Echo Show
The EU has officially passed its controversial copyright law
A total of 19 European Council members, including France and Germany, voted in favor of the new Copyright Directive. Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland and Sweden voted against adopting the directive, whereas Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia abstained — but their opposition ultimately didn’t matter. EU countries now have 24 months to apply the directive to their national legislations.
Under the new rules, the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram will be required to obtain licenses for copyrighted works from rights holders in order to host their content. They’ll also be forced to police copyrighted material through the use of tools such as filters. Critics, including Google, fear a surge in takedown requests could turn the web into a ghost town. Internet campaigners, meanwhile, have warned that the resulting censorship could quell unique forms of online expression, from GIFs to memes.
IBM and Oracle have been eliminated from the Pentagon’s “Project JEDI” RFP, after almost a year of complaints and public accusations that the bidding event was rigged in Amazon’s favor.
Meanwhile Google, who bowed out of Project JEDI bidding early, made several cloud-based announcements this week to differentiate themselves from AWS and Microsoft. Thomas Kurian is wasting no time.
Foxconn is getting blasted in the press this week due to their (lack of) plans at their Wisconsin manufacturing plant. There are reports that rented office buildings are almost completely empty and the overall strategy for the new plant make absolutely no sense.
Acquisitions
Accenture announces intent to buy French cloud consulting firm
Accenture says that Cirruseo’s strength and deep experience in Google’s cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions should help as Accenture expands its own AI practice. Google TensorFlow and other intelligence solutions are a popular approach to AI and machine learning, and the purchase should help give Accenture a leg up in this area, especially in the French market.
“The addition of Cirruseo would be a significant step forward in our growth strategy in France, bringing a strong team of Google Cloud specialists to Accenture,” Olivier Girard, Accenture’s geographic unit managing director for France and Benelux said in a statement.
In a new paper, Google Brain researchers propose using neural networks to model human source code editing. Effectively this means treating code editing as a sequence and having a machine learn how to “write code” like in a natural language model — by analysing a short paragraph of editing, the model can extract intent and leverage that to generate subsequent edits.
To understand the intent behind developers’ source code editing actions, the main challenge was how to learn from earlier editing sequences in order to predict upcoming edits. Researchers explain the AI models needed to understand “the relationship of the change to the state” rather than “the content of the edits” or “the result of the edit.”
Google’s hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure
So with Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That’s a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google’s approach from its competitors’. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure.
What’s Been Lacking at Google’s Cloud? Enough Humans
Google Cloud had prioritized developing technology over sales and support, said Gene Reznik, strategy chief at the consulting firm Accenture PLC, which helps clients deploy tech from major cloud services including Google’s.
“There is a lot of hand-holding required” with big corporate customers, Mr. Reznik said. But Google often had product engineers rather than account managers handle customer calls. “It really wasn’t their day job,” he said, adding that Mr. Kurian brings a corporate credibility to Google’s “consumer-centric culture.”
Amazon and Microsoft Are 2 Finalists for $10 Billion Pentagon Contract
The Pentagon said Wednesday that Amazon and Microsoft were the final candidates for a hotly contested $10 billion contract to bring modern cloud computing to the Defense Department.
IBM and Oracle had also bid for the project, known as the joint enterprise defense infrastructure, or JEDI. But the Defense Department concluded that they did not meet the minimum requirements for the program.
Rather than scrabbling over marketshare in the marketing cloud space, where Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle have been dropping billions, IBM is focusing on core technologies and infrastructure, AI, blockchain, global services, consulting and creating a cloud environment to compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
“That’s the big game IBM is hunting,” Stanhope said.
But even back when IBM seemed like it was ramping up its focus on marketing technology, there wasn’t necessarily buy in from the big wigs at the top. IBM also lost one of its marketing product cheerleaders when David Kenny, who led efforts at IBM Watson, left to take on the CEO role at Nielsen in November 2018.
Amazon’s Alexa isn’t just AI — thousands of humans are listening
What the company doesn’t tell you explicitly, as highlighted by an in-depth investigation from Bloomberg published this evening, is that one of the only, and often the best, ways Alexa improves over time is by having human beings listen to recordings of your voice requests. Of course, this is all buried in product and service terms few consumers will ever read, and Amazon has often downplayed the privacy implications of having cameras and microphones in millions of homes around the globe. But concerns about how AI is trained as it becomes an ever more pervasive force in our daily lives will only continue to raise alarms, especially as most of how this technology works remains beyond closed doors and improves using methods Amazon is loathe to ever disclose.
Nearly 70 percent of hotel websites leak personal data, Symantec study finds
The main issue involved booking confirmation emails, according to Symantec principal threat researcher Candid Wueest. Many of the messages include an active link that directs to a separate website where guests can access their reservation having to log in again. The booking code and the guest email are often in the URL itself, which in and of itself isn’t a big deal.
But, like many businesses, hotels share your personal data with third parties, meaning that your booking code and email are visible to them as well. The attacker would only need access to your booking code and email in order to find your address, full name, cell phone number, passport number and other highly sensitive information. Symantec also found that a smaller number of hotels didn’t encrypt the links sent in confirmation emails, giving attackers another window of opportunity.
Hackers publish personal data on thousands of US police officers and federal agents
TechCrunch spoke to one of the hackers, who didn’t identify his or her name, through an encrypted chat late Friday.
“We hacked more than 1,000 sites,” said the hacker. “Now we are structuring all the data, and soon they will be sold. I think something else will publish from the list of hacked government sites.” We asked if the hacker was worried that the files they put up for download would put federal agents and law enforcement at risk. “Probably, yes,” the hacker said.
The hacker claimed to have “over a million data” [sic] on employees across several U.S. federal agencies and public service organizations.
Google’s new AI tools scan documents, take phone calls, and search for products
Google today launched Document Understanding AI in beta, a serverless platform that automatically classifies, extracts, and structures data within contained within scanned physical and digital documents. It integrates with existing products from Iron Mountain, Box, DocuSign, Egnyte, Taulia, UiPath, Accenture, and others, and Google says that customers who’ve tapped it for custom document classification have seen up to 96% accuracy.
“Most companies have billions of documents — and moving that information into digital or cloud-native solutions where it can be easily accessed and analyzed can involve many hours of manual entry,” Besik said. “Document Understanding AI can help automate document processing workflows. This means you can … start making data-driven business decisions faster and more accurately.”
Microsoft says its data shows FCC reports massively overstate broadband adoption
Part of the issue is that internet providers essentially just report their own coverage via a form, and the FCC reports it more or less as fact. That’s a problem not just when a mistake on a form adds tens of millions of subscribers that don’t actually exist, but when large ISPs overstate their coverage so they don’t have to pay to fill in the gaps.
Microsoft’s suggestions, which it has made to Members of Congress and the FCC (though it won’t, as I originally wrote here, testify in the Senate on Wednesday) would make it far more difficult to fib on the Form 477, which as written seems to provide enormous leeway for a company to imply coverage that isn’t actually there.
Thousands of Amazon employees ask the company to adopt a climate change plan
Employees, citing Amazon’s work for oil and gas companies and what they describe as insufficient plans for action on climate change, are asking the company to commit to several goals. Among them, they ask the company to make “a complete transition away from fossil fuels,” and to advocate politically for climate-friendly policies. They also ask the company to adopt a shareholder resolution calling for a climate change plan.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson highlighted company initiatives, like work to reduce the carbon footprint of shipments, and described Amazon’s commitment to environmental issues as “unwavering.”
“Amazon’s sustainability team is using a science-based approach to develop data and strategies to ensure a rigorous approach to our sustainability work,” the spokesperson said. “We have launched several major and impactful programs and are working hard to integrate this approach fully across Amazon.”
In February, a Foxconn executive cheerfully likened the company’s vague, morphing plans to designing and building an airplane midflight.
Such statements have not been particularly reassuring to residents of Wisconsin, where state and local governments have already taken very concrete actions to prepare the way for what was supposed to be an enormous manufacturing facility. Taxpayers have already spent more than $300 million on roadwork, infrastructure, and land acquisition related to the project. In August, Moody’s downgraded Mount Pleasant’s credit rating over the extreme levels of debt it took on for the area’s $763 million incentive package, costs that have since grown closer to a billion, in part because it had to take out higher interest long-term loans after Foxconn’s plans changed. Dozens of residents have been relocated, some under threat of eminent domain.
Google Sued Over Abuse of Search Power, Opening Path for More Claims
In the suit filed in a Berlin court Friday, Idealo internet GmbH, a leading price-comparison service that is majority-owned by publisher Axel Springer SPR 2.61% SE, alleged that Google made it harder for users of its search engine to find links to Idealo after the U.S. company started promoting its own price-comparison offering, now called Google Shopping. Alphabet’s European entity, Google Ireland Ltd., is also targeted by the suit.
Net Neutrality Vote Passes House, Fulfilling Promise by Democrats
But the legislation, the Save the Internet Act, faces long odds in the Republican-led Senate. The Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, said this week that the legislation would be “dead on arrival.” Earlier this week, the Office of Management and Budget advised the White House to veto the law if it reached the president’s desk. The office said in a letter that since the law had been overturned, the broadband industry had thrived, a good sign of how deregulation helped the economy.
The legislation would prohibit blocking and throttling web traffic and would categorize broadband as a service open to heavy regulation. Supporters say the regulation would prevent companies from blocking or slowing the delivery of content like videos. Opponents say it would strap broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast with heavy-handed restrictions, and could lead to price controls.
First it was discovered that they lost AI researcher Ian Goodfellow to Apple, who has made a habit of stealing Google’s AI talent of late.
Then the company announced the dissolution of their AI ethics board…after only one week. Some of their board selections received critical feedback both internally and externally.
Finally, Google’s temp labor teams published a letter requesting better treatment. Google responded to these demands by announcing their temporary labor services suppliers will provide better pay and benefits, but the temps say that isn’t enough, as they are looking to be treated with dignity.
Acquisitions
Artificial Intelligence
IBM Watson knows when you’re planning to quit your job
At CNBC’s Work Talent + HR Summit, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty revealed that the company AI has got so adept at detecting employee satisfaction that it’s now in the “95 per cent accuracy range.”
Rometty wouldn’t be drawn on what data points Watson consults, but Googling the spelling of “curriculum vitae”, alongside extended periods on LinkedIn would be our first clue. Nobody has ever visited LinkedIn recreationally, after all.
Watson’s “predictive attrition program” is used to retain talent, because as Rometty says, “the best time to get to an employee is before they go.” The company estimates that the early interventions will have saved it nearly $300m in retention costs.
The obvious answer may be that the management structure is likely to get more centralized and rigid. After all, AI will help managers track more detailed data about everything their subordinates are doing, which should make it easier—and more inviting—to exercise stricter controls.
This will no doubt be true in some cases. But look more closely, and I believe the opposite is much more likely to happen in many cases. That’s because when AI does the routine tasks, much of the remaining nonroutine work is likely to be done in loose “adhocracies,” ever-shifting groups of people with the combinations of skills needed for whatever problems arise.
Apple has poached another of Google’s top AI researchers
Ian Goodfellow is one of the most prominent names in artificial intelligence, and previously worked at both Google and the Elon Musk-founded lab OpenAI. But, as first reported by CNBC, Goodfellow recently updated his LinkedIn profile to note that he is now working at Apple as a director for machine learning at the company’s Special Projects group.
It’s not the first time Apple has used Google as an AI talent incubator, with the iPhonemaker luring away Goodfellow’s former boss, Google’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, last April.
Google dissolves AI ethics board just one week after forming it
Google today disclosed that it has dissolved a short-lived, external advisory board designed to monitor its use of artificial intelligence, following a week of controversy regarding the company’s selection of members. The decision, reported first today by Vox, is largely due to outcry over the board’s inclusion of Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James, a noted conservative figure who has openly espoused anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and, through the Heritage Foundation, fought efforts to extend rights to transgender individuals and to combat climate change.
The advisory board, called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), included a number of prominent academics in fields ranging from AI and philosophy to psychology and robotics. But it also included those with policy backgrounds, like James and members of former US presidential administrations.
Facebook will stop asking new users for their email passwords
Facebook told Axios that “a very small group of people have the option of entering their email password to verify their account when they sign up for Facebook,” but noted that people could choose instead to confirm their account with a code or link sent to their phone or email.
“That said, we understand the password verification option isn’t the best way to go about this, so we are going to stop offering it,” the company said in a statement.
PwC Tests Blockchain for Validating Job Candidates’ Credentials
If the technology becomes widely used, staffers won’t have to verify a candidate’s credentials by calling universities and previous employers, which can sometimes take weeks, Mr. Cushley said. The challenge, though, will be getting enough schools and companies on board to make blockchain truly valuable for validating credentials, he said.
American Express, SAP Ariba join forces for End-to-End B2B payments
Sources close to the move claim that American Express, as a network extension partner, will use Ariba Network APIs to allow its virtual Card potentials within the SAP Ariba platform & process to facilitate secure payments, seamless commerce, and easy settlement between businesses on a single platform.
Moreover, businesses, through the new integration, will have the opportunity to use their current American Express® Corporate Cards to make virtual Card payments, further making it easy for customers to get started without the need to create and maintain a standalone account.
Put another way, how is it that Oracle can be such a miss with developers and yet still print billions of dollars in revenue? I’m guessing Hurd doesn’t care much about developer adoption. He likely doesn’t care that, measured in popularity, Oracle has been in terminal decline for many years, as DB-Engines’ data suggests. In fact, if you look at the database technologies for which developers ask the most questions (indicating production use) on Stack Overflow, only MongoDB and PostgreSQL are booming (of the top-five database technologies).
No, what Hurd cares about, as he acknowledges in his remarks to CNBC, is the fact that Oracle still controls roughly half of the global database market, worth tens of billions of dollars. Never mind that, as Gartner analyst Merv Adrian has highlighted, Oracle has lost market share every year since 2013, and collectively the old guard relational database players have shed nearly five percentage points.
Samsung Expects 60% Decline in First-Quarter Operating Profit
The world’s largest smartphone and memory chips maker by shipments has felt the economic slowdown acutely. Companies and consumers, hesitant to spend amid the U.S.-China trade fight, according to tech industry executives, have delayed smartphone purchases and moderated investments into areas like data servers.
Samsung’s results are closely watched because of its dual role as one of the world’s biggest hardware makers and a major supplier of electronics companies—including to rivals such as Apple Inc., which buys displays and chips from the Suwon, South Korea, company.
Verizon’s 5G network is blazing fast, but it barely exists
Yesterday, the leading US carrier triumphantly announced the debut of 5G service in “select areas of Chicago and Minneapolis,” and said that “for the first time ever, customers can access a commercial 5G network with the world’s first commercially available 5G-enabled smartphone.” Verizon welcoming customers onto its 5G network came a week earlier than initially planned. Verizon hasn’t said why it abruptly moved things up, but carriers in South Korea also went live with 5G yesterday, so it’s possible the company didn’t want to get beat by its global peers.
I know you want speed tests, so to get started, yes, Verizon’s 5G data speeds are quite fast compared to what your smartphone can handle right now. I’m hitting between 400 and 600 Mbps on downloads. I can also tell you that, at least in Chicago, this feels like a premature launch, and 5G can be awfully hard to come by. When you do find it, you’ve basically got to stay where you are to see what it’s capable of.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon C.E.O., and MacKenzie Bezos Finalize Divorce Details
Mr. Bezos will keep 75 percent of the couple’s Amazon stock and all of their ownership of The Washington Post and the Blue Origin space company, Ms. Bezos wrote. Mr. Bezos will also have “sole voting authority” over Ms. Bezos’ Amazon shares, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
After the divorce, Ms. Bezos will own roughly 4 percent of Amazon, a stake that was worth almost $36 billion on Thursday. By keeping 75 percent of the couple’s Amazon shares, or about 12 percent of the company, Mr. Bezos will most likely remain the richest person in the world. His remaining stake in the company was worth almost $108 billion on Thursday. (Bill Gates, the second wealthiest, is worth $102 billion, according to Bloomberg.)
UN says US fears over Huawei’s 5G are politically motivated
The secretary general of the UN’s internet and telecoms agency has suggested US concerns about 5G networks built using Huawei equipment have more to do with politics and trade, rather than legitimate worries over security. “There is no proof so far,” Houlin Zhao, head of the International Telecommunication Union, said regarding claims about Huawei’s security. He noted it’s in telecoms’ best interests to make sure their infrastructure is secure as they might otherwise feel the wrath of authorities.
“I would encourage Huawei to be given equal opportunities to bid for business, and during the operational process, if you find anything wrong, then you can charge them and accuse them,” Zhao said, according to Reuters. “But if we don’t have anything then to put them on the blacklist — I think this is not fair.”
Google staff condemn treatment of temp workers in ‘historic’ show of solidarity
TVCs make up 54% of Google’s global workforce, and more than half of the people on the personality team, according to the letter. The TVCs on the personality team sit alongside Google FTEs in offices around the world, but they are employed by a staffing agency on contracts ranging from two to six months at a time.
On 8 March, about 80% of the TVCs on the team – 34 people – were informed that their contracts were ending ahead of schedule, either on 5 April or, in a few cases, on 31 July, according to the letter.
The layoffs took place around the globe, starting in Seoul, and hitting London just as TVCs in New York were heading to work.
“During the process, our managers and the full-time workers on our team were silent,” the letter states. “Google told them that offering support or even thanking us for years of work would make the company legally liable. Our teammates were told to distance themselves from us at the moment when we were most in need – just so that Google could avoid legal responsibility.”
The EU Is Pissed at Steam for Region-Locking Games
“Valve believes that the EC’s extension of liability to a platform provider in these circumstances is not supported by applicable law,” he wrote. Lombardi claimed that without the ability to geo-block games in the EU, publishers will have to raise prices in “less affluent regions” to avoid people in more affluent regions buying games there rather than at home. Traditionally, prices on Steam vary from region to region.
The recipients of the Commission’s objections will now have the opportunity to examine the Commission’s investigation files, respond in writing, and request a hearing. If the Commission concludes that there was an infringement, it could prohibit the alleged conduct and impose a fine of “up to 10% of a company’s annual worldwide turnover.”
