Scratching the Itch: Knowing When to Leave a Job or to Stay
Because talent can be difficult to come by, an employer should do something that recognizes your worth. Despite it being in the HR department’s best interests to retain talent, incentives are actually skewed to get employees to leave. Employees more quickly leave “incentivizing” companies in favor of companies that help them visualize their path within the organization.
It’s hard to walk away from a clearly communicated path to success. That’s the bet that companies are making in the HR space. For example, Instructure introduced Bridge, an employee development platform that creates a visual roadmap for success. Bridge also connects employees with mentors, but the real benefit is that it allows each employee to visualize what he has to do in the next six months to get promoted to get where he ultimately wants to be in his career in the next three years.
“In the 1990s and early 2000s, customer centricity was used by corporations who wanted to effectively connect with and understand their clients,” noted Dan Goldsmith, CEO of Instructure. “We see a similar focus by companies today who want to be more employee-centric.”
Meetings aren’t the biggest time waster at work. This thing is
“There’s been an explosion in the number of software applications available,” says Jody Shapiro, Productiv founder and former head of Google Analytics. “The struggle is in the organic adoption of these tools. Ten years ago, everybody used Microsoft Office and Adobe tools. Today, SaaS [software as a service] vendors are selling directly to business units, and we are experiencing a sprawl of applications meant to increase productivity. The problem is that different departments are using different tools, and that slows everyone down.”
Shapiro says the biggest challenge is redundancy. “Within a company, the legal team might use Microsoft Word, the engineers are using Google Docs and the marketing team is using Dropbox Paper. If you want to find a document, you may need to check five different tools. This is a massive productivity killer, and it can impact morale.”
Millennial and Gen Z employment: 7 things young talent wants in a job
Working in the field often requires on the spot decision-making. Without a supervisor hovering over you, one of the most essential skills field service technicians have to master is how best to solve problems. Armed with tools like augmented reality interfacing and video tutorials, service technicians are given the freedom and trust to reach the best conclusion for each customer.
This kind of autonomous work environment demands independent thinking, keen insight, clever workarounds, and confidence in one’s own abilities. Millennials, accustomed to seeking out information just within reach of their fingertips, are ideally suited to handle the pressure and reap the rewards of satisfying tough customer requests. And this in turn explains the trend towards a gig economy.
There has been talk of a recession coming and now we are starting to see the first signs. HP and WeWork announced thousands of employee eliminations as both companies struggle to realign and meet market expectations. Will this trend continue or was it specific to each company and their ongoing operational problems?
Facebook’s “cryptocurrency” Libra lost a major partner in PayPal and is coming under fire from Apple CEO Tim Cook. The company is also developing strategies should Elizabeth Warren take the White House and push for the company to break up.
Acquisitions/Investments
Verizon is buying virtual reality company Jaunt
Verizon has acquired some assets of virtual reality video start-up Jaunt XR, the company announced Monday. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
As part of the deal, Verizon will own Jaunt’s software and technology, among other assets.
The company, which was founded in 2013, established a foothold in virtual reality technology, developing hardware, software, tools and apps that enable brands and consumers to make high-quality VR content. Jaunt later launched a Netflix-style content library for VR headsets, before announcing in 2018 it would transition to augmented reality technology. The company has raised about $100 million in funding from Disney, Google’s venture arm GV and Redpoint Ventures, among others, and made the CNBC Disruptor List for 2017.
Apple May Have Acquired Motion Capture Company IKinema
Apple may have recently acquired UK-based motion capture company IKinema, based on evidence from company filings and information shared by a MacRumors reader.
IKinema offers animation technology that’s used for games, virtual reality, and more. Earlier this year, for example, IKinema partnered with Ubisoft for IKinema’s RunTime software for character creation. IKinema specialized in technology that allowed for real-time motion animation of virtual characters.
Inside Microsoft and Google Cloud’s battle for the enterprise
Behind the scenes, however, Microsoft has made some not-so-subtle changes to their licensing that make it more expensive for organizations to transfer their on-premise Microsoft solutions to any cloud that doesn’t belong to Microsoft. In other words, Microsoft is sending a clear message that it wants you running your workloads on Azure. This type of behavior is not new for Microsoft.
Cost reductions sound great but there is a large asterisk next to that cost reduction potential; you have to use Microsoft’s cloud. If you choose a competitor’s cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft is going to hit you with increased fees. In reality, this is really just a penalty for engaging with Microsoft’s competition.
The lack of cybersecurity talent is ‘a national security threat,’ says DHS official
“It’s a national security risk that we don’t have the talent regardless of whether it’s in the government or the private sector,” said Manfra. “We have a massive shortage that is expected that will grow larger.”
Homeland Security is already responding, working on developing curriculum for potential developers as soon as they hit the school system. “We spend a lot of time invested in K-12 curriculum,” she said.
The agency is also looking to take a page from the the tech industry’s playbook and developing a new workforce training program that’s modeled after how to recruit and retain individuals.
Google Draws House Antitrust Scrutiny of Internet Protocol
The new standard would encrypt internet traffic to improve security, which could help prevent hackers from snooping on websites, and from spoofing—faking an internet website to obtain a consumer’s credit-card information or other data.
But the new standard could alter the internet’s competitive landscape, cable and wireless companies said. They fear being shut out from much of user data if browser users move wholesale to this new standard, which many internet service providers don’t currently support. Service providers also worry that Google may compel its Chrome browser users to switch to Google services that support the protocol, something Google said it has no intention of doing.
“Right now, each internet service provider has insight into the traffic of their users, and that’s going to shift” as a result of the change, said Andy Ellis, chief security officer at Akamai Technologies Inc., which provides internet services to corporations but doesn’t support the new standard.
Zuckerberg Hates Warren’s Plan to Break Up Facebook. She Doesn’t Care.
“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” he said.
“Does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. That’s not like the position you want to be in. We care about our country and want to work with our government to do good things,” he added. “But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”
Shortly after The Verge published Mr. Zuckerberg’s remarks, Ms. Warren responded by renewing her criticism of Facebook.
“What would really ‘suck,’” she said, mimicking Mr. Zuckerberg’s language, “is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook slams Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency as a power grab
Speaking with the French newspaper Les Echos, Cook shot down any notion that Apple might be considering launching a digital currency of its own, given its recent investments in digital wallets, mobile payments, and consumer credit with the new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card.
“No. I really think that a currency should stay in the hands of countries. I’m not comfortable with the idea of a private group setting up a competing currency,” Cook told the publication in an interview published today. “A private company shouldn’t be looking to gain power this way.”
A high-profile, would-be partner like PayPal backing out from the effort before it’s even gotten off the ground is a big blow to Facebook and the Libra Association, which has been struggling under the weight of speculation that some of the big organizations, initially interested in collaborating on Libra, are now on the fence about the project, put off by wave of negative reaction from regulators and others that might lead to problems launching and ultimately growing the service.
WeWork, the co-working business once valued at $47 billion, is expected to announce significant layoffs this month, Bloomberg reports. This follows reports the company was looking to slash as many as 5,000 roles, or one-third of its workforce.
Now expected to go public in 2020 at a valuation as low as $10 billion, WeWork is also in negotiations with JPMorgan for a last-minute cash infusion to replace the capital expected from the now-postponed IPO, per reports. The company, now a cautionary tale, has been working with bankers in recent weeks to reduce the sky-high costs of its money-losing operation.
HP to Cut Up to 9,000 Jobs in New CEO’s Restructuring Plan
HP Thursday said it could eliminate 7,000 to 9,000 jobs from its roughly 55,000 workforce over the next three years. The cuts, once completed, should yield annual savings of about $1 billion, the company said at its annual securities-analyst meeting. HP is nearing the end of a three-year-old layoff plan that could eliminate up to 5,000 jobs.
HP has been under pressure in recent quarters from a decline in the printing-supplies business that was once its biggest moneymaker. To help reinject growth, it plans to offer new ways to sell its products.
Kroger will lay off hundreds of employees as online competition from Amazon bites
Currently the grocer has 443,000 full-time and part-time employees across all of the chains it owns, including Kroger-branded stores, and Harris Teeter, Ralphs, and Fred Meyer stores. As for what roles the layoffs will hit the hardest, a Kroger spokesperson told CNBC that middle management roles were one of the ones being evaluated:
As part of ongoing talent management, many store operating divisions are evaluating middle management roles and team structures with an eye toward keeping resources close to the customer.
Salesforce is building an office tower in Sydney, pledging 1,000 new jobs in the next five years
Salesforce announced this week that it’s building another shiny tower. This one will be in Sydney with views of the harbor and the iconic Sydney Opera House. The company has also committed to adding 1,000 new jobs in the next five years and to building the tower in a sustainable fashion.
As is Salesforce’s way, it’s going to be the tallest building in the city when it’s done, and will sit in the Circular Quay, part of the central business district in the city, and will house shops and restaurants on the main floor. As with all of its modern towers, it’s going to dedicate the top floor to allow for flexible use for employees, customers and partners. The building will also boast a variety of spaces including a Salesforce Innovation Center for customers along with social lounges, mindfulness areas and a variety of spaces for employees to collaborate.
Such engagement has proved risky for other chief executives. Facing public pressure, Under Armour Inc. ’s Kevin Plank, Tesla Inc. ’s Elon Musk and Uber Technologies Inc. ’s Travis Kalanick resigned from presidential advisory councils over disagreements with the administration. A similar resignation by Merck & Co. CEO Kenneth Frazier, who publicly criticized the president’s handling of violence in Charlottesville, Va., led Mr. Trump to unleash a barrage of tweets castigating the drugmaker for high prices.
“There are only a handful [of executives] who have been able to thread the needle,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who has informally advised Mr. Trump over the years before he became president. “This is a newfound capability for Apple. Steve Jobs didn’t have influence in Washington, and Tim Cook has offered it.” He added that Mr. Trump’s volatility means the relationship with Mr. Cook could change, but that was unlikely in the near term.
September was the month of the failed CEO. Adam Neumann of WeWork has stepped down. Mark Hurd is out on sick leave. Devin Wenig of eBay quit. And Herbert Diess if Volkswagen is under investigation for fraud.
What is the takeaway? Nobody is perfect. And – the time of the unicorns is coming to a close (thankfully). A business has to have a profitable model and if they don’t… heads are going to roll.
With SoftBank coming under more scrutiny for these runaway business valuations, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for the darlings of Silicon Valley.
Acquisitions/Investments
Facebook has acquired Servicefriend, which builds ‘hybrid’ chatbots, for Calibra customer service
As Facebook prepares to launch its new cryptocurrency Libra in 2020, it’s putting the pieces in place to help it run. In one of the latest developments, it has acquired Servicefriend, a startup that built bots — chat clients for messaging apps based on artificial intelligence — to help customer service teams, TechCrunch has confirmed.
Although Facebook isn’t specifying what they will be working on, the most obvious area will be in building a bot — or more likely, a network of bots — for the customer service layer for the Calibra digital wallet that Facebook is developing.
Facebook’s plan is to build a range of financial services for people to use Calibra to pay out and receive Libra — for example, to send money to contacts, pay bills, top up their phones, buy things and more.
Ex-Google worker fears ‘killer robots’ could cause mass atrocities
Nolan, who has joined the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and has briefed UN diplomats in New York and Geneva over the dangers posed by autonomous weapons, said: “The likelihood of a disaster is in proportion to how many of these machines will be in a particular area at once. What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed.
“There could be large-scale accidents because these things will start to behave in unexpected ways. Which is why any advanced weapons systems should be subject to meaningful human control, otherwise they have to be banned because they are far too unpredictable and dangerous.”
Microsoft launches its AI presentation coach for PowerPoint
The new PowerPoint Presentation Coach aims to take the hassle out of practicing. In its current version, the tool looks at three things: pace, slide reading and word choice. Pace is pretty self-explanatory and looks at how fast or slow somebody is speaking. The “slide reading” feature detects when you are simply reading the words from your slides word for word. Nobody wants to sit through that kind of presentation. The “word choice” tool doesn’t just detect how often you say “um,” “ah,” “actually” or “basically,” it also gives you feedback when you are using culturally insensitive phrases like “you guys” or “best man for the job.”
Oracle reportedly funding anti-Amazon lobbying group
Oracle Vice President Kenneth Glueck, who runs the company’s lobbying efforts out of an office in Washington, D.C., confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that Oracle has backed Free and Fair Markets. Oracle declined to comment on the report to CRN.
Glueck has been the chief architect of Oracle’s strategy to lobby the U.S. government against AWS winning the entirety of the looming JEDI contract—the centerpiece of the military’s potentially $10 billion cloud transformation initiative from which Oracle has been knocked out of contention. Only AWS and Microsoft remain on a short-list, but delivery of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure award has been delayed because of political factors.
Oracle speaking with Google’s antitrust investigators
The House Judiciary Committee has asked for information from dozens of companies potentially harmed by anti-competitive actions of the tech giants. The committee will issue subpoenas based on how many voluntarily answer the requests.
Oracle and Google have a long-standing legal battle over whether Google infringed on Oracle’s Java copyright to make the Android OS. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take up a Google appeal to the suit.
DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9 million customers, workers and merchants
The breach happened on May 4, the company said, but added that customers who joined after April 5, 2018 are not affected by the breach.
It’s not clear why it took almost five months for DoorDash to detect the breach.
DoorDash spokesperson Mattie Magdovitz blamed the breach on “a third-party service provider,” but the third-party was not named. “We immediately launched an investigation and outside security experts were engaged to assess what occurred,” she said.
Facebook’s Suspension of ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Apps Reveals Wider Privacy Issues
The social network said in a blog post that an investigation it began in March 2018 — following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy, had retrieved and used people’s Facebook information without their permission — had resulted in the suspension of “tens of thousands” of apps that were associated with about 400 developers. That was far bigger than the last number that Facebook had disclosed, of 400 app suspensions in August 2018.
CEO of WeWork, Which Has Lost an Unfathomable Amount of Money, Is Stepping Down
Adam Neumann, the eccentric co-founder of WeWork, is stepping down as CEO after a torrent of news cycles that read like pulp fiction, the New York Times reported. The Times reports that pressure came from investors and board members, and Neumann will stay on as the nonexecutive chairman of WeWork’s parent, the We Company.
In a press release, Neumann said “While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive.”
Adam Neumann stepped down as chief executive of WeWork after a botched attempt to take the company public. Devin Wenig left his role as chief of eBay after the company’s board grew impatient with poor performance. And Herbert Diess, the chief executive of Volkswagen, was charged with stock market manipulation and misleading investors. Mr. Diess remains in his job, but all week, smartphone push alerts seemed to ping with the news of executive heads rolling.
Those three executives joined the recently departed chiefs of Juul, Nissan, comScore and HSBC as reminders that at the end of the trading day, corporate chieftains are there to make shareholders money.
Poll: Two-thirds of Americans want to break up companies like Amazon and Google
Across political party identification, Americans are pretty consistent about breaking up Big Tech. The poll shows that on the more extreme ends of both the left and the right, there is more enthusiasm on the matter.
Forty-two percent of Americans who consider themselves very liberal and 40 percent of those who say they’re very conservative strongly support breaking up tech companies to foster competition, while about 30 percent of those who identify as liberal or conservative say the same. (Moderates and people unsure of their political affiliation showed the lowest support). On breaking up for content, 56 percent of people who say they’re very liberal and 47 percent of people who say they’re very conservative back breaking up Big Tech.
News about massive acquisitions, mergers, and government fines can make it easy to lose track of the true value of a dollar.
WeWork and Uber continue to struggle justifying their value and become cash-flow positive. Google, through all of their own self-inflicted wounds are being treated like a piggy bank for foreign and the US governments.
Meanwhile critics of IT companies keep touting the value of data over the value of hard cash. Interesting times indeed.
Acquisitions/Investments
None this week
Artificial Intelligence
How to Build Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust
For certain A.I. tasks, the dominant data-correlation approach works fine. You can easily train a deep-learning machine to, say, identify pictures of Siamese cats and pictures of Derek Jeter, and to discriminate between the two. This is why such programs are good for automatic photo tagging. But they don’t have the conceptual depth to realize, for instance, that there are lots of different Siamese cats but only one Derek Jeter and that therefore a picture that shows two Siamese cats is unremarkable, whereas a picture that shows two Derek Jeters has been doctored.
In no small part, this failure of comprehension is why general-purpose robots like the housekeeper Rosie in “The Jetsons” remain a fantasy. If Rosie can’t understand the basics of how the world works, we can’t trust her in our home.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, announced the probe in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building, joined by about a dozen other attorneys general. In all, 48 states are part of the investigation of the Alphabet Inc. unit, plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, officials said.
Mr. Paxton said the states for now would focus on Google’s practices in online advertising markets. “But the facts will lead where the facts lead,” he said, adding, “We don’t know all the answers.”
The states sent Google a civil subpoena on Monday seeking information about its ad practices, officials said.
Google, Amazon and Microsoft in Battle to Store Health Data in the Cloud
Google will announce Tuesday a 10-year deal with the Mayo Clinic to store the hospital system’s medical, genetic and financial data. Providence St. Joseph Health in July said it reached a data-storage agreement with Microsoft. Later that month, Cerner Corp. CERN -0.24% , one of the largest electronic-health-record companies, unveiled its cloud-storage agreement with Amazon’s cloud-computing unit, Amazon Web Services.
Some hospital-system and company officials said they expect to jointly develop new software by combining data and expertise of health-care companies with tech giants’ computing power and engineering know-how. “Google can’t do this alone. We can’t do this alone,” said Cris Ross, Mayo’s chief information officer. The terms weren’t disclosed.
Patient records will be kept private and access will be controlled by Mayo, Mr. Ross said. Data used to develop new software will be stripped of any information that could identify individual patients before it is shared with the tech giant.
Over the years, these growing companies have successfully skirted legal recourse for bad actors on their sites. They have had the law on their side: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shields internet platforms from liability for what others post.
Now, as global behemoths, it seems that with greater power comes greater legal responsibility. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit earlier this year held that a customer in Pennsylvania could sue Amazon over a product that was allegedly unsafe. Meanwhile, Facebook was recently fined $5 billion over privacy violations—the largest privacy-related fine in the history of the Federal Trade Commission. Google was also just hit with a $170 million FTC fine over its YouTube operation, for which the company made changes such as disabling comments on children’s videos.
51 tech CEOs send open letter to Congress asking for a federal data privacy law
Many privacy advocates (and even some tech CEOs) believe tech companies aren’t really looking after users’ interests, but their own. There’s a belief that companies are trying to aggregate any privacy lawmaking under one roof, where lobby groups can water-down any meaningful user protections that may impact bottom lines.
Many companies make money by selling customers’ personal or device-usage data to online advertisers. A privacy framework with too many teeth could prevent companies from selling certain types of data.
To help speed up the legislative process, the Business Roundtable group released their own consumer privacy framework [more here] that they’d like Congress to analyze and use as a base for any future law. This proposal includes many of the same provisions of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); however, in very broad terms.
1B Mobile Users Vulnerable to Ongoing ‘SimJacker’ Surveillance Attack
Researchers on Thursday disclosed what they said is a widespread, ongoing exploit of a SIM card-based vulnerability, dubbed “SimJacker.” The glitch has been exploited for the past two years by “a specific private company that works with governments to monitor individuals,” and impacts several mobile operators – with the potential to impact over a billion mobile phone users globally, according to by researchers with AdaptiveMobile Security.
“Simjacker has been further exploited to perform many other types of attacks against individuals and mobile operators such as fraud, scam calls, information leakage, denial of service and espionage,” said researchers with AdaptiveMobile Security in a post breaking down the attack, released Thursday.
The mainframe business is alive and well, as IBM announces new z15
IBM announced last month that it was making OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based cloud-native tools, available on the mainframe running Linux. This should enable developers, who have been working on OpenShift on other systems, to move seamlessly to the mainframe without special training.
IBM sees the mainframe as a bridge for hybrid computing environments, offering a highly secure place for data that when combined with Red Hat’s tools, can enable companies to have a single control plane for applications and data wherever it lives.
California Bill Makes App-Based Companies Treat Workers as Employees
The bill passed in a 29-to-11 vote in the State Senate and will apply to app-based companies, despite their efforts to negotiate an exemption. On Wednesday morning, the Assembly gave its final approval, 56 to 15. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, endorsed the bill this month and is expected to sign it. Under the measure, which would go into effect Jan. 1, workers must be designated as employees instead of contractors if a company exerts control over how they perform their tasks or if their work is part of a company’s regular business.
The bill may influence other states. A coalition of labor groups is pushing similar legislation in New York, and bills in Washington State and Oregon that were similar to California’s but failed to advance could see renewed momentum. New York City passed a minimum wage for ride-hailing drivers last year but did not try to classify them as employees.
Mark Hurd, the co-CEO of Oracle, is taking a leave of absence, citing health reasons
With Hurd’s departure for now, Catz will become the sole CEO of Oracle. Ellison, who remains the company’s CTO, is also expected to take on some of Hurd’s responsibilities, says CNBC.
Safra Catz has long been Oracle’s secret weapon, and analysts say that it’s her time to shine as sole CEO: ‘This will test her, but she will prevail’
Ray Wang of Constellation Research described Catz as “an extraordinary operator” who has not drawn as much attention as Oracle’s other high-profile — and sometimes controversial — top execs.
“Many folks underestimate her because she doesn’t want to take the limelight, but she has a silent power,” he told Business Insider. “I think she’s not sought the limelight but internal folks will always tell you she’s the one running the company in the background. Her biggest weakness is a strength in today’s climate. She’s not seeking the limelight. She’s focused on getting the job done.”
Ma will continue serving on Alibaba’s board until its annual general shareholders’ meeting next year. He also remains a lifetime partner of Alibaba Partnership, a group drawn from the senior management ranks of Alibaba Group companies and affiliates that has the right to nominate (and in some situations, appoint) up to simple majority of its board.
Ma said in last year’s announcement that he plans for his departure from Alibaba Group to be very gradual: “The one thing I can promise everyone is this: Alibaba was never about Jack Ma, but Jack Ma will forever belong to Alibaba.”
WeWork and Uber are proof valuations are meaningless
Up top, we dug into WeWork and the latest from the company’s continuing IPO saga. The question regarding the co-working company’s public offering has changed to whether the IPO will happen this year, not just at what price the firm can entice enough investment to actually get public.
Alex has written about the company’s cash appetite a few times now, which raise the question of how long the company can survive without some sort of large, external investment. If SoftBank is willing to commit more capital is an open question
WeWork started off as a great customer of Hines Interests LP and other landlords, leasing unused space and renting it to businesses too tiny to be ordinary tenants, Hines executive Charlie Kuntz said in a presentation after dessert, according to several people present.
But WeWork didn’t stop there. It began cutting deals with large corporations too, making it a threat to Hines’s core business. WeWork’s move reminded some at the dinner of how Airbnb Inc. stole business from hotels and how taxicab companies saw Uber Inc. eat their lunch.
“It’s not too late for us,” Gerald Hines, the 94-year-old family patriarch and CEO’s father, told the group.
This June, the big landlord punched back. It launched its own co-working business, called Hines Squared, as a direct competitor to WeWork.
It seems that big companies used the holidays as a time to rest their wallets and take a break from the M&A activity of the last few weeks… or perhaps they were distracted with some other concerns.
Google contractors in Pennsylvania are attempting to unionize due to poor working conditions. The company was also hit with a $200M fine due to YouTube violating children’s privacy.
Speaking of privacy… Google called out a major security threat for Apple iPhones. Several websites were infected with in an injection attack that iPhones were particularly vulnerable to.
Acquisitions/Investments
Artificial Intelligence
The Next Hot Job: Pretending to Be a Robot
More advanced systems require “human supervisory control,” where the robot or vehicle’s onboard AI does the basic piloting but the human gives the machine navigational instructions and other feedback. Prof. Cummings says this technique is safer than actual remote operation, since safety isn’t dependent on a perfect wireless connection or a perfectly alert human operator.
For every company currently working on self-driving cars, almost every state mandates they must either have a safety driver present in the vehicle or be able to control it from afar. Guidelines from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggest the same.
Most companies in the space have opted for something short of true teleoperation, which is dependent on an absolutely reliable and fast wireless connection as well as the skill of the human remote operator. Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Waymo’s remote operation system and another being tested by Nissan rely on humans to either confirm the vehicle’s choices when it’s unsure what to do or help it navigate around obstacles.
How Microsoft and Oracle became cloud buddies, and what’s next for their improbable partnership
The companies are counting on the cloud to fuel their growth, raising the stakes for their partnership. They describe the alliance, in part, as a way for their customers to avoid being locked into a single cloud vendor. In that way, the companies are effectively teaming up against their common competitors, the biggest of them being Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
Oracle is playing catch-up in the cloud, aiming to expand beyond its legacy in databases to build out a fully-fledged public cloud platform, attempting to go toe-to-toe with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for a wider range of cloud contracts. Oracle reportedly laid off hundreds of people from its cloud-focused Seattle office earlier this year in an indication of the uphill climb it faces.
Never tell me the odds! Oracle makes fresh appeal against $10bn JEDI ruling
Dorian Daley, General Counsel, Oracle Corporation, released the following statement on its latest appeal: The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle’s purported lack of standing. Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements. The opinion also acknowledges that the procurement suffers from many significant conflicts of interest. These conflicts violate the law and undermine the public trust. As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds.
The battle is likely far from over both regardless of the progress of the lawyers as the deal has also become a political football.
US President Donald Trump weighed in when he belatedly heard the contract might go to a company partly owned by his arch-nemesis Jeff Bezos, also of course publisher of “fake news” provider The Washington Post.
Microsoft vendors win $7.6 billion government deal
The federal government’s award of a massive 10-year, $7.6 billion computing contract to a trio of vendors led by General Dynamics Corp. to provide Microsoft Corp. office software for the Pentagon late Thursday is the latest indication that cloud-computing leaders are the preferred vendors of choice.
The Defense Department and General Services Administration announced the winners of the coveted Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) following a months-long evaluation process by the GSA. DEOS would provide email, calendar, video-calling and other productivity tools to the U.S. military.
Google to pay up to $200M to settle FTC YouTube investigation
Privacy groups had complained to the FTC that YouTube violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal information about minors and using it to target advertisements without getting consent from parents.
The settlement dwarfs the FTC’s largest fine to date for COPPA violations: $5.7 million levied in February against the operators of Musical.ly, the China-based social video app that’s become a juggernaut since rebranding as TikTok.
On the surface, the notion of Apple having a stronger claim to privacy versus Google — an adtech giant that makes its money by pervasively profiling internet users, whereas Apple sells premium hardware and services (including essentially now ‘privacy as a service‘) — seems a safe (or, well, safer) assumption. Or at least, until iOS security fails spectacularly and leaks users’ privacy anyway. Then of course affected iOS users can just kiss their privacy goodbye. That’s why this is a thought experiment.
The researchers found five distinct exploit chains involving 12 separate security flaws, including seven involving Safari, the in-built web browser on iPhones. The five separate attack chains allowed an attacker to gain “root” access to the device — the highest level of access and privilege on an iPhone. In doing so, an attacker could gain access to the device’s full range of features normally off-limits to the user. That means an attacker could quietly install malicious apps to spy on an iPhone owner without their knowledge or consent.
Google said based off their analysis, the vulnerabilities were used to steal a user’s photos and messages as well as track their location in near-real time. The “implant” could also access the user’s on-device bank of saved passwords.
The frighteningly simple technique that hijacked Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account
As it turns out, getting control of Dorsey’s phone number wasn’t as hard as you might think. According to a Twitter statement, a “security oversight” by the provider let the hackers gain control. In general terms, this kind of attack is called SIM hacking — essentially convincing a carrier to assigning Dorsey’s number to a new phone that they controlled. It’s not a new technique, although it’s more often used to steal Bitcoin or high-value Instagram handles. Often, it’s as simple as plugging in a leaked password. You can protect yourself by adding a PIN code to your carrier account or registering web accounts like Twitter through dummy phone numbers, but those techniques can be too much to ask for the average user. As a result, SIM swapping has become one of online troublemakers’ favorite techniques — and as we found out today, it works more often than you’d think.
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard will step down at the end of the year
Beard was appointed interim CEO for Mozilla in April 2014, coming on as full-time chief executive in July of that same year. The company has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years, after having ceded much of its browser market share to the likes of Google and Apple. Firefox has undergone something of a renaissance over the past year, as have the company’s security tools.
“Today our products, technology and policy efforts are stronger and more resonant in the market than ever, and we have built significant new organizational capabilities and financial strength to fuel our work,” Beard said in the blog post. “From our new privacy-forward product strategy to initiatives like the State of the Internet we’re ready to seize the tremendous opportunity and challenges ahead to ensure we’re doing even more to put people in control of their connected lives and shape the future of the internet for the public good.”
Founders of Successful Tech Companies Are Mostly Middle-Aged
Previous studies had documented that owners of small businesses tended to be in their late 30s and 40s. But most small businesses stay fairly small: restaurants, dry cleaners, retail stores and the like. They are important but aren’t central to innovation in the economy.
The new study was able to zero in on high-flying start-ups by bringing together anonymized data collected by different agencies within the federal government. The government matched sales and employment data for start-ups collected by the Census Bureau with information on the founders extracted from Internal Revenue Service filings.
After stripping identifying information, the government provided the researchers with a data set including 2.7 million business founders. The researchers calculated that the founders’ average age was 42. And for the founders of the 0.1 percent fastest-growing firms, the average age was 45. Firms that were successful enough to have an initial public offering or be acquired by a larger company showed the same pattern: Their founders were generally middle-aged.
Amazon has paid six times over the valuation for prime land in the data center hotspot of Virginia.
It bought nearly 90 acres in two plots in Loudoun County, in a part of Virginia outside the US capital Washington DC where Amazon has built nearly 40 data centers already. It paid $118m for land that had been valued at $19.7m, according to the County records office.
“That’s the way things are going right now. Data centers are going up like hot cakes, ” Erik Larson, manager of the Loudoun County Land Records Office, told DCD.
Amazon had 38 data centers in Virginia in 2015, according to a document leaked by Wikileaks last year. It had about 100 spread around the US and other countries. But approaching half of all them were in Virginia, close to the Beltway of Washington, where government and military contractors compete for business. It is where Amazon Web Services began operating in 2006.
CWA says AT&T is “bargaining in bad faith” and that it has “unfair labor practices.” AT&T sent to the bargaining table people who “do not have the real authority to make proposals or to reach an agreement” in addition to “changing our agreement about how we meet and bargain,” the union said in a blog post.
CWA’s bargaining team has been fighting for the past few months to renegotiate the AT&T employee contract to share the company’s record-breaking profits. In 2018, AT&T promised to use the windfall from the Republicans’ corporate tax cut to “invest an additional $1 billion” to create “7,000 good-paying jobs for American workers.” The December tax cuts helped AT&T achieve a $19 billion profit in the fourth quarter and $3 billion in annual tax savings. But AT&T has had layoffs, cutting 23,000 jobs.
Google Contractors Are Unionizing With a Steel Workers Union
66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they’re asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at “helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively.”
“Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long,” HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a press release. “While on-site management tries to do what they can, where they can, their hands are often tied by arbitrary corporate policy.”
Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say
Ultimately, the rider paid $65 for the half-hour trip, according to a receipt viewed by Jalopnik. But Dave made only $15 (the fares have been rounded to anonymize the transaction).
Uber kept the rest, meaning the multibillion-dollar corporation kept more than 75 percent of the fare, more than triple the average so-called “take-rate” it claims in financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Had he known in advance how much he would have been paid for the ride relative to what the rider paid, Dave said he never would have accepted the fare.
“This is robbery,” Dave told Jalopnik over email. “This business is out of control.”
None this week
