Foxconn offices in Wisconsin are still empty. This is after the company assured the press that said emptiness was not the case. With recent news that AT&T did not live up to terms to get a large tax refund, should we be asking if these rebate programs are a good thing for the cities and states that leverage them?
SalesForce had a massive outage last week due to a database configuration gone wrong. The company shut down services to address a configuration that “broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.”
Finally – AI voice replication is getting really good. Google voice translation has improved the ability to detect tone and intent and there is a company called Dessa that published a voice cloning of podcaster Joe Rogan that is eerily good (NSFW).
Acquisitions/Investments
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray
Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Friday said it agreed to buy supercomputer maker Cray Inc. for $35 a share in cash in a deal valued at about $1.3 billion, net of cash.
The deal represents a 17.4% premium to Cray’s Thursday closing price of $29.81.
HPE said it expects the acquisition will add to adjusted operating profit and earnings in the first full year. The company said integration costs associated with the deal will be absorbed within its fiscal 2020 free cash flow outlook, which remains unchanged at $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprises-to-buy-supercomputer-maker-cray-11558094554
- Amazon leads $575M investment in Deliveroo
London-based Deliveroo operates in 14 countries, including the U.K, France, Germany and Spain, and — outside of Europe — Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and the UAE. Across those markets, it claims it works with 80,000 restaurants with a fleet of 60,000 delivery people and 2,500 permanent employees.
It isn’t immediately clear how Amazon plans to use its new strategic relationship with Deliveroo — it could, for example, integrate it with Prime membership — but this isn’t the firm’s first dalliance with food delivery. The U.S. firm closed its Amazon Restaurants UK takeout business last year after it struggled to compete with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. The service remains operational in the U.S, however.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/16/amazon-takes-a-bite-into-deliveroo/
- Apptio Acquires Cloudability Multi-Cloud Spending Management Software
Bellevue, Washington-based technology business management software company Apptio Inc is acquiring Cloudability, a Portland, Oregon company that makes software to manage public cloud spending across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Artificial Intelligence
- Google’s prototype AI translator translates your tone as well as your words
Although capturing the inflection of a speaker’s voice is what’s most impressive to laypeople, Translatotron’s attraction for AI engineers is that it translates speech directly from audio input to audio output without translating it into the usual intermediary text.
This sort of AI model is known as an end-to-end system, because there are no stops for subsidiary tasks or actions. Google says making translation end-to-end produces results faster while avoiding the risk of introducing errors during multiple translation steps.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18628980/google-ai-translation-tone-cadence-voice-translatotron
- Microsoft invests in seven AI projects to help people with disabilities
Microsoft is awarding grants to AI projects meant to make the world more inclusive. The grants are part of a five-year initiative that will invest $25 million in AI-based accessibility tools. This year, seven recipients will receive access to the Azure AI platform (through Azure compute credits) and Microsoft engineering support.
Over the next year, the recipients will work on things like a nerve-sensing wearable wristband. That device detects micro-movements of the hands and arms and translates them into actions like a mouse click. Another project seeks to develop a wearable cap that reads a person’s EEG data and communicates it to the cloud to provide seizure warnings and alerts. Other tools will rely on speech recognition, AI-powered chatbots and apps for people with vision impairment.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/16/microsoft-ai-accessibility-grants/
- IBM Unveils Watson-powered Supply Chain Management Tool at Gartner Summit
The Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI) service is powered by Watson and aims to help businesses detect anomalies that could potentially interrupt a company’s supply chain distribution.
BTI uses machine learning to identify velocity, volume and value patterns in an organisations data by ingesting all of the supply chain documents and transactions. Using this data it learns to spot patterns about which it can suggest optimisations, or it may detect anomalies causing it to send an alert to the client.
https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-supply-chain-business-network-business-transactional-intelligence
Cloud
- Faulty database script brings Salesforce to its knees
At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.
According to reports on Reddit, users didn’t just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company’s data.
In a status update, the company blamed the issue on “a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended.”
Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/faulty-database-script-brings-salesforce-to-its-knees/
Security/Privacy
- San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology
The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.
The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html
- Intel Zombieload bug fix to slow data centre computers
Intel has confirmed that new problems discovered with its processor chips mean that some computer owners face a performance slowdown.
The company has said that data centres are likely to be worst affected by the fixes required. But it added that the impact on most PC owners should be minimal.
The so-called Zombieload vulnerability follows the disclosure of the earlier Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow bugs last year.
The latest flaw could theoretically allow an attacker to spy on tasks being handled by any Intel Core or Xeon-branded central processing unit (CPU) released since 2011.
- Hacktivist attacks dropped by 95% since 2015
According to IBM, security incidents caused by hacker groups operating under hacktivism causes has been on a decline since 2015, when the company recorded a peak, with 35 publicly reported incidents.
Since then, incidents have gone down at a steady pace, with only five reported in 2017, two in 2018, and zero during the first months of the year.
Attacks from hacktivist groups have continued to happen, but the number of actual incidents (successful breaches) has gone down at a constant pace.
Researchers blame two factors for this decline — the death of the Anonymous hacker collective and a sustained crackdown by law enforcement officials that have thinned out hacktivist ranks
https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacktivist-attacks-dropped-by-95-since-2015/
Software/SaaS
- Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop
Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned.
“We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”
Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions.
Other
- One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are
At the event announcing the Madison project, Foxconn’s Alan Yeung said the innovation centers were “not empty,” which prompted laughter from the crowd. Yeung also said The Verge’s story contained “a lot of inaccuracies” and that the company would issue a correction soon. He did not say what those inaccuracies were, and Foxconn never issued a correction, nor has it responded to repeated requests to clarify Yeung’s statement.
One month after Yeung’s comments and promise of a correction, every innovation center in Wisconsin is still empty, according to public documents and sources involved with the innovation center process. Foxconn has yet to purchase the Madison building Yeung announced, according to Madison property records. No renovation or occupancy permits have been taken out for Foxconn’s Racine innovation center, though a permit has been taken out for work on the roof of another property Foxconn bought for “smart city” initiatives. There has been no activity in Foxconn’s Green Bay building, either.
- AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead
The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.
But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.
AT&T’s total employment was 254,000 as of December 31, 2017 and rose to 262,290 by March 31, 2019. But AT&T’s overall workforce increased only because of its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. and two smaller companies, which together added 31,618 employees during 2018, according to an AT&T proxy statement cited in the CWA report.
- HCL to bring 2,000 IBM staff onboard as part of $1.8-billion deal
As part of a $1.8-billion deal, HCL Technologies will take onboard nearly 2,000 employees of IBM. The deal between the two companies involved HCL acquiring some of IBM’s software assets. The move comes as the former company is strategising to shore up its IP-led business faster than the traditional software services.
The deal is expected to be complete by June. The acquisition of IBM’s products would give HCL access to over 5,500 clients globally. Chief Human Resources officer for HCL Tech, Apparao VV said to Economic Times in an interview, “Mode 3, which is the products and platforms segment, has their own salesforce. (With the IBM products), we have inherited somewhere around 1,500-2,000 people.” Mode 2 and 3 are categories for the company’s emerging tech and IP-led businesses that garner more than 28 per cent revenue.
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash