Supplier Report: 8/16/2019


Photo by Kong Jun on Unsplash

As the summer comes to a close, we are starting to see M&A activity ramp up. Several companies announced acquisitions over the last two weeks showing that there is money to burn for the right investments.

Meanwhile, Equifax seems to be burning money on settlements, but do they have enough cash to give every American $125? They do not. And critics are not happy.

Finally… Are Uber and Lyft ruing metropolitan traffic patterns? Maybe.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Broadcom Makes $10.7 Billion Deal to Buy Symantec’s Corporate-Focused Security Business

    The part of Symantec, best known for its antivirus software, that Broadcom is buying focuses on sales to companies. That part contributes about half of Symantec’s $5 billion in annual revenue. The consumer segment accounts for the rest of the 37-year-old company’s revenue.

    Broadcom Chief Executive Hock Tan has been focused on diversifying beyond the company’s core chip business and pushing into the lucrative software arena. Last year, he struck a roughly $19 billion deal to buy software firm CA Technologies, formerly Computer Associates.

    The Symantec business will add an expected $2 billion to Broadcom’s annual revenue going forward, Broadcom said, and would generate savings of more than $1 billion by eliminating cost overlaps in the year after the deal closed.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/broadcom-makes-10-7-billion-deal-to-buy-symantecs-corporate-focused-security-business-11565298059

  • Salesforce to Buy Workforce Management Software Firm

    Salesforce Inc. said Wednesday it struck a $1.35 billion deal to buy ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd., as the company aims to bolster the services it offers to customers.

    ClickSoftware is used by companies to schedule field service work and develops workplace management software. Private-equity firm Francisco Partners Management L.P. bought the company in 2015 for $438 million.

    “Our acquisition of ClickSoftware will not only accelerate the growth of Service Cloud, but drive further innovation with Field Service Lightning to better meet the needs of our customers,” Bill Patterson, general manager of the Salesforce Service Cloud unit, said in a statement.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/salesforce-to-buy-workforce-management-software-firm-11565215962

  • Amazon acquires flash-based cloud storage startup E8 Storage

    E8 Storage’s particular focus was on building storage hardware that employs flash-based memory to deliver faster performance than competing offerings, according to its own claims. How exactly AWS intends to use the company’s talent or assets isn’t yet known, but it clearly lines up with their primary business.

    AWS acquisitions this year include TSO Logic, a Vancouver-based startup that optimizes data center workload operating efficiency, and Israel-based CloudEndure, which provides data recovery services in the event of a disaster.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/amazon-acquires-flash-based-cloud-storage-startup-e8-storage/

  • Cisco scoops up Voicea to infuse more AI into its collaboration products

    Voicea, incorporated as Rizio Inc., has raised $20 million in funding since hitting the scene three years ago. Cisco’s venture capital arm contributed to the startup’s Series A round in 2017. Salesforce.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund and Battery Ventures were among the other high-profile investors that backed Voicea.

    The Mountain View, California-based startup has developed an artificial intelligence called Eva that can join conference calls to take notes. The assistant transcribes the conversation and enables participants to organize key highlights into an easily browsable list for future reference. Users can instruct Eva to mark an item as important with their voice, which removes the need to scribble notes while a call is ongoing.

    Cisco will bake Voicea’s technology into its Webex family of cloud-based collaboration services. The flagship product of the lineup is the Webex Meetings video conferencing tool, which competes with applications such as Microsoft Corp.’s Skype for Business. Cisco also offers versions of the tool for team collaboration, customer support and webinars along with a line of conference call equipment.

    https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/06/cisco-scoops-voicea-infuse-ai-collaboration-products/

  • Microsoft acquires data privacy and governance service BlueTalon

    Microsoft today announced that it has acquired BlueTalon, a data privacy and governance service that helps enterprises set policies for how their employees can access their data. The service then enforces those policies across most popular data environments and provides tools for auditing policies and access, too.

    Neither Microsoft nor BlueTalon disclosed the financial details of the transaction. Ahead of today’s acquisition, BlueTalon had raised about $27.4 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Bloomberg Beta, Maverick Ventures, Signia Venture Partners and Stanford’s StartX fund.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/microsoft-acquires-data-privacy-and-governance-service-bluetalon/

  • Salesforce closes $15.7B Tableau deal

    In an amazingly quick turnaround for a deal of this scope, Salesforce announced today that it has closed the $15.7 billion Tableau deal announced in June. The deal is by far the biggest acquisition in Salesforce history, a company known for being highly acquisitive.

    A deal of this size usually faces a high level of regulatory scrutiny and can take six months or longer to close, but this one breezed through the process and closed in less than two months.

    With Tableau and MuleSoft (a company it bought last year for $6.5 billion) in the fold, Salesforce has a much broader view of the enterprise than it could as a pure cloud company. It has access to data wherever it lives, whether on premises or in the cloud, and with Tableau, it enables customers to bring that data to life by visualizing it.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/salesforce-closes-15-7b-tableau-deal/

Cloud

  • JEDI Cloud-Computing Contract Award to Be Delayed Weeks

    Mr. Esper said Aug. 1 he would be reviewing the program known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. He didn’t give a timeline for a review at the time. The Pentagon had previously signaled it could award the potentially $10 billion contract by the end of August, with Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as finalists.

    Mr. Deasy said it would take “a number of weeks” to brief Mr. Esper and that the contract isn’t likely to be awarded in August. He said he is planning a number of sessions to explain to Mr. Esper the need for a Pentagon-wide cloud-computing capability, the benefits it would have on the battlefield, and how officials have designed the contract.

    He stressed the program was for a minimum of $1 million over 2 years, and would only reach its $10 billion maximum value over a decade if the Pentagon exercises several options.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/jedi-cloud-computing-contract-award-to-be-delayed-weeks-11565361020

Security/Privacy

  • Capital One breach also hit other major companies, say researchers

    The data breach at Capital One may be the “tip of the iceberg” and may affect other major companies, according to security researchers.

    Israeli security firm CyberInt said Vodafone, Ford, Michigan State University and the Ohio Department of Transportation may have also fallen victim to the same data breach that saw more than 106 million credit applications and files copied from a cloud server run by Capital One by an alleged hacker, Paige Thompson, a Seattle resident, who was taken into FBI custody earlier this week.

    It follows earlier reports from Forbes and security reporter Brian Krebs indicating that Capital One may not have been the only company affected, pointing to “one of the world’s biggest telecom providers, an Ohio government body, and a major U.S. university,” according to Slack messages sent by the alleged hacker.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/capital-one-breach-vodafone-ford-researchers/

  • The Equifax Settlement Is a Cruel Joke

    As part of the $575 million settlement, up to $425 million was set aside to compensate those who could clearly prove they were victims of identity theft as a result of the breach.

    For those unable to prove clear financial harm (most of us), the settlement offered users either free credit reporting for ten years, or a $125 one time cash payout. But because the FTC only set aside $31 million to pay for these payouts, it quickly ran out of cash and is now falsely telling consumers the free credit reporting is a “much better value.”

    But because free credit reporting is routinely doled out as compensation for a steady parade of privacy breaches, it’s effectively worthless to most consumers. Many of these services also include terms of service restrictions that erode your legal rights.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3agv7/the-equifax-settlement-is-a-cruel-joke

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Cisco to Pay $8.6 Million to Settle Government Claims of Flawed Tech

    Cisco will pay civil damages in connection with software that it sold to various government agencies, including Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to a government complaint unsealed on Wednesday.

    The government said the video surveillance software it bought from Cisco was “of no value” because it did not “meet its primary purpose: enhancing the security of the agencies that purchase it.” In many cases, the Cisco software actually reduced the protection provided by other security systems, the complaint said.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/technology/cisco-tech-flaw-sales.html

  • Apple Reports Declining Profits and Stagnant Growth, Again

    On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley behemoth said that its net income had fallen 13 percent and that its revenue rose 1 percent in the latest quarter, with iPhone sales continuing to decline and gains in the company’s services and wearables business failing to make up the difference.

    The results showed persistent signs of weakness for one of the world’s financial standouts. Apple built its enormous business on the iPhone, but sales of the device have slipped for three straight quarters in a saturated market for smartphones.

    Yet the results also suggested that the company could be starting to halt declines in those sales and other key areas, including revenue from the Chinese market. Over the previous two quarters, Apple’s profits and revenue had fallen over all.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/technology/apple-earnings-iphone.html
    Shameless Plug: I did an entire podcast about Apple’s shrinking consumer base.

Other

  • Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities

    These figures suggest that Uber and Lyft are hitting some cities harder than previously thought. An independent study commissioned by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority looked at 2017 traffic patterns in the county and concluded that TNCs generated about 6.5 percent of the total VMT on weekdays, and 10 percent on weekends. (TNC, which stands for transportation network company, is an industry term used to describe ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft.)

    The findings from Fehr & Peers show totals “nearly twice that previous estimate,” said Gregory Erhardt, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who has researched Uber and Lyft’s effects on public transit ridership. “This difference may be due to the continued increase in TNC use over the intervening two years.”

    But some cities aren’t as hard hit as others. Uber and Lyft represent lower percentages of total VMTs in Chicago, LA, and Seattle. And New York City, the largest market for both companies in the US, was left out of the analysis altogether, likely because of the city’s low rate of car ownership and extensive public transportation network.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756945/uber-lyft-tnc-vmt-traffic-congestion-study-fehr-peers

  • Elizabeth Warren Promises to Kill State Laws That Ban Locally-Owned ISPs

    Warren’s proposal, outlined in a Medium post as part of a broader plan for rural America, includes doling out $85 billion to help fund broadband deployment to underserved areas. FCC data suggests that 39 percent of rural Americans still lack access to broadband.

    But the plan also does something notable: it takes aim at the growing roster of protectionist state laws telecom lobbyists have used to crush competition across the country.

    “Many small towns and rural areas have turned to municipal networks to provide broadband access in places that the private market has failed to serve—but today, as many as 26 states have passed laws hindering or banning municipalities from building their own broadband infrastructure to protect the interests of giant telecom companies,” Warren said.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmjja/elizabeth-warren-promises-to-kill-state-laws-that-ban-locally-owned-isps

Supplier Report: 1/11/2019

Apple is having a rough week because they (finally) realized that people don’t want to pay $1,400 for a new phone every year (can we make rotten apple jokes now?). The company needs to shift to a services model ASAP – will they build or will they buy?

IBM is selling IP because they need to get cash quickly to cover their acquisition of Red Hat. Their most recent sell off is a mortgage platform called Seterus to a company called Mr. Cooper Group. I am left wondering why IBM had a mortgage group in the first place.

Continuing 2018’s trend of “you data is never going to be safe” – password management app Blur accidentally exposed user data on their AWS platform.

Acquisitions

  • Mr. Cooper buys IBM mortgage platform that brought in $200 million last year

    Coppell-based Mr. Cooper Group Inc. is continuing to expand its mortgage servicing business with Thursday’s purchase of IBM’s Seterus platform.

    Mr. Cooper said the deal bolsters its portfolio by adding servicing rights to $24 billion in mortgages and a subservicing contract for an additional $24 billion in mortgages. Terms of the transaction weren’t immediately disclosed.

    https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2019/01/03/mr-cooper-buys-ibm-mortgage-platform-brought-200-million-last-year

  • Google picks up company behind Q&A app

    Google has quietly acquired Superpod, a startup that had built a question-and-answer mobile app, Axios has learned. Google paid less than $60 million to “acqui-hire” the founders and purchase some of Superpod’s assets, according to a source.

    The bigger picture: The search giant hasn’t been shy about its ambitions for Google Assistant, the voice-activated virtual assistant that it debuted in 2016. Superpod, which lets users ask questions and receive answers from experts, could help Google bolster its virtual assistant’s ability to answer users’ questions.

    https://www.axios.com/google-acquires-superpod-qa-app-38d68263-7122-447b-9d81-58fadc404cb9.html

Artificial Intelligence

  • Forbes is building more AI tools for its reporters

    Over the summer, the business publisher, which just had its most profitable year in more than a decade, rolled out a new CMS, called Bertie, which recommends article topics for contributors based on their previous output, headlines based on the sentiment of their pieces and images too. It’s also testing a tool that writes rough versions of articles that contributors can simply polish up, rather than having to write a full story from scratch. The CMS is currently available to Forbes’ editorial staff and senior contributors in North America, and will be rolled out to all of its contributors in North America and Europe in the first quarter of 2019. The AI story-writing tool, which Forbes’s product team is experimenting with, does not have an immediate roll-out date.

    https://digiday.com/media/forbes-built-a-robot-to-pre-write-articles-for-its-contributors/

  • PepsiCo is using robots to deliver snacks to college students

    The autonomous snackbots, built by Y-Combinator startup Robby Technologies, can travel 20 miles on a charge, and are equipped with a camera, headlights and all-wheel drive to handle rough or wet terrain. Once it arrives, you simply release the lid, grab your snacks and close it to complete the sale. The app presumably takes care of the security and dispensing end of things.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/04/pepsico-robot-snack-delivery/

Cloud

  • What’s Behind Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud: Q&A with Oracle VP Kyle York

    Why is Oracle calling the new technology “Gen 2”—what is different from other cloud technology?
    As with most new things, the first rev is not always built for the long-term success. First generation public cloud offerings were not architected to accommodate traditional application architectures. They were architected for net-new cloud native applications. Think websites, mobile apps, or ecommerce storefronts—certainly not financial systems, government workloads, or data-intensive applications. Many enterprise workloads simply cannot run in hypervisor-based environments, as they don’t provide the performance predictability and high availability often required by traditional enterprise applications. They also don’t play nice with the tooling and security infrastructure historically deployed on-premise, in a complex ecosystem cultivated over decades.

    Oracle offers the most flexibility in the public cloud, allowing companies to run traditional and cloud-native workloads on the same platform. This enables our customers to reduce operational overhead and costs and enable connectivity and shared data between these workloads.

    http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/News-Flashes/Whats-Behind-Oracles-Gen-2-Cloud-QandA-with-Oracle-VP-Kyle-York-129198.aspx

Security

  • Marriott Says Hackers Swiped Millions of Passport Numbers

    The incident marked one of the largest data breaches in history, rivaled only by a hack of Yahoo Inc. in 2013 and 2014.

    The company said early Friday in a release that the number of guests involved in the data breach is lower than the original 500 million, but it didn’t specify a number.

    Marriott said a total of about 383 million records was “the upper limit” for the number potentially compromised in the incident. That figure includes passport numbers, email addresses and payment-card data of some guests, the company said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/marriott-says-hackers-swiped-millions-of-passport-numbers-11546605000?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Hackers Dump Data on Merkel, Politicians in Giant German Leak

    It’s unclear at this point whether the data release is linked to the 2015 Bundestag hack, and how significant it is. It includes two email addresses and a fax number the perpetrators link to Merkel, and a letter by SPD lawmakers sent to the chancellor in 2016 that criticizes her handling of the refugee crisis. The data connected to Merkel was not considered sensitive, Fietz said.

    The data, which Germany is trying to remove, also includes what appears to be chat transcripts from Economy Minister Peter Altmaier. More mundane material includes rental-car contracts and letters, some of them several years old. The attack appears to have affected all major German political parties with the exception of the populist Alternative for Germany.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/hackers-release-personal-data-of-hundreds-of-german-politicians

  • Blur password manager exposes 2.4M users on misconfigured AWS cloud instance

    While finding no evidence that the document had been accessed, Abine is nonetheless warning users that their accounts may have been compromised. Users are being asked to reset their master passwords for Blur and to set up two-factor authentication as an additional security measure.

    Blur is not the first password manager to have had security issues. LastPass was infamously hacked in 2015 before having to issue an urgent patch in 2017 after it was discovered that plugins related to the product could expose customer passwords.

    LastPass, though, was a different case because it was specifically targeted by hackers. The fact that a company offering password protection software would “accidentally” expose user data on an AWS S3 instance is a different level of incompetence.

    https://siliconangle.com/2019/01/03/blur-password-manager-exposes-2-4m-user-details-misconfigured-aws-instance/

Software/SaaS

  • Apple’s Precarious and Pivotal 2019

    Today, the stock is down nearly 10%. Tens of billions of dollars have been shaved off of Apple’s market cap, literally overnight. The company is now the 4th most valuable corporation in the world. That sounds like a great thing until you remember that until recently, it was the most valuable company in the world — and for much of the past several years, this was the case by far.

    Also:

    And then there’s the real standout part of the paragraph: “consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies”. Once again, this translates into English as: we pushed the price of the iPhone too far. And whereas before, such prices were obfuscated by things like carrier contracts, that world is shifting. And Apple hasn’t shifted fast enough or strongly enough to account for this.

    https://500ish.com/apples-precarious-and-pivotal-2019-f4f8cea3993a

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Why the iPhone Is Finally Fading

    You’ve probably heard before that A.I. and voice are the future. That’s still on track to be true, even though it hasn’t happened overnight. (The future rarely does.) It’s coming first in the form of speakers such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, with Apple’s HomePod and others playing catch-up. While the big tech companies don’t yet report sales figures for these devices, studies show the market expanding rapidly, with nearly a quarter of U.S. households owning one as of last fall, according to Nielsen. Some analysts predict that figure will top 50 percent by 2022.

    Meanwhile, the sector is growing at rates reminiscent of smartphones’ early days. A report by Strategy Analytics estimated that Amazon’s Echo business grew 64 percent from 2017 to 2018, while Google’s Home sales boomed 420 percent. That’s before we even start counting all the other devices that are being sold with Alexa, Google Assistant, or other voice AI services built in, or the many more that are voice-compatible.

    https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/apple-iphone-decline-china-replacement-alexa-siri.html

Other

  • Salesforce’s Marc Benioff unplugged for two weeks, and had a revelation that could change the tech industry

    All that relaxation led Benioff to one big revelation: He’s too busy.

    Weeks at work are filled with dinners, parties, events and business council meetings exclusively for CEOs, meaning that if anyone from Salesforce is to attend, it has to be him. Meanwhile, he’s trying to run a 30,000-person company, build Salesforce towers across the globe, bolster his philanthropy, invest in start-ups, mentor other business leaders and become a louder voice on a number of social and political issues.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/30/salesforce-marc-benioff-talks-tech-ethics-time-magazine-and-vacation.html

  • The case for why Big Tech is violating antitrust laws

    The nearly 20-year-old case of US v. Microsoft illustrates how today’s tech giants are breaking the law. The court held that Microsoft used its monopoly power in “Intel-compatible desktop PC operating systems” to squash the Netscape browser by requiring computer makers to instead install Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser. Rather than competing on the merits, Microsoft used its monopoly power to try to take over the internet browser market. Ironically, if the Department of Justice had not sued Microsoft to stop its anticompetitive behavior, Google might not exist! After taking over the internet browser market, Microsoft could have required computer makers to use its own search engine, too.

    Google, Amazon and Facebook are following the same playbook. The tech giants have “platform privilege” — the incentive and ability to prioritize their own goods and services over those of competitors that depend on their platforms. By doing so, they contend they are improving their products and benefiting customers. An entrepreneur can create a superior product or service and still get crushed because Big Tech is controlling the game and playing it, too.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/02/perspectives/big-tech-facebook-google-amazon-microsoft-antitrust/index.html

Supplier Report: 6/29/2018

The Source: Amazon buys PillPack - Joey Lombardi

Amazon’s desires to get into the healthcare industry made major progress this week with their announced acquisition of PillPack. It seems that the company will finally meet their goal of selling pharmaceuticals on their e-commerce engine.

IBM had a big sales announcement, but there were also reports of lack of strategic direction in their medical AI efforts.

The IT industry is still facing fallout over technological support of the DHS and ICE. As employees push back on their leaders, companies are scrambling to find a balance.

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Buys Online Pharmacy PillPack for $1 Billion

    Amazon.com Inc. is buying online pharmacy PillPack Inc. giving the e-commerce giant the ability to ship prescriptions around the country, and overnight, making it a direct threat to the more than $400 billion pharmacy business.

    Amazon is paying roughly $1 billion in cash for PillPack, which presorts medications and ships them to customers’ homes in 49 U.S. states, excluding Hawaii, according to people familiar with the matter. The online retailer beat out Walmart Inc., which also was in talks for the five-year-old startup, one of the people said. Walmart had no immediate comment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-buy-online-pharmacy-pillpack-1530191443

  • Google admits it lost out to Microsoft buying GitHub

    Previous rumors suggest Google was also trying to acquire GitHub, alongside Microsoft’s bids. GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath reportedly chose Microsoft because of his relationship with CEO Satya Nadella. GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies to host projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/28/17512908/google-github-microsoft-acquisition-comments

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft’s facial recognition can better identify people with darker skin tones

    Microsoft says its facial recognition tools are getting better at identifying people with darker skin tones than before, according to a company blog post today. The error rates have been reduced by as much as 20 times for men and women with darker skin and by nine times for all women.

    The company says it’s been training its AI tools with larger and more diverse datasets, which has led to the progress. “If we are training machine learning systems to mimic decisions made in a biased society, using data generated by that society, then those systems will necessarily reproduce its biases,” said Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft senior researcher, in the blog post.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/26/17507304/microsoft-facial-recognition-darker-skin-tones

  • Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

    IBM’s goal, the Phytel employees said, was to create a fancy new product that combined the capabilities of Phytel and Explorys. However, the offering managers didn’t have a clear idea of what that product would be. “They couldn’t decide on a roadmap,” says the second engineer. “We pivoted so many times.”

    Both Phytel engineers say the offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible. While the engineers tried to follow the shifting directions from above, Phytel didn’t deliver anything new to the market. “And we were burning through money,” the second engineer says.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-at-watson-health-reveal-ibms-problem-with-ai

Cloud

  • Here’s how Amazon is able to poach so many execs from Microsoft

    In the three years between 2015 and 2017, at least 30 director or higher level executives went straight from Microsoft to Amazon. Google, the next most popular poaching ground for Amazon, lost just 5 executives to the e-commerce company during those three years. Apple and eBay both lost 2 executives to Amazon in that period, while Facebook, Walmart, and Netflix saw zero executives go to Amazon.

    Paysa’s data only includes people whose most recent jobs were at Microsoft and excludes the ones who may have worked elsewhere before joining Amazon. The company said it looked through at least 5 million resumes for this data, but may have missed the ones that did not update their resume profiles.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/amazon-favorite-poaching-ground-microsoft.html

Security

  • A new data breach may have exposed personal information of almost every American adult

    Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that Exactis, a data broker based in Palm Coast, Florida, had exposed a database that contained close to 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The haul comprises close to 2 terabytes of data that appears to include personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses. While the precise number of individuals included in the data isn’t clear—and the leak doesn’t seem to contain credit card information or Social Security numbers—it does go into minute detail for each individual listed, including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person’s children.

    https://www.wired.com/story/exactis-database-leak-340-million-records/

Software/SaaS

  • Salesforce Will Keep Ties to Border Agency After Protest

    “I’m opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral,” Benioff wrote Wednesday in a memo to Salesforce employees obtained by Bloomberg News. “I have personally financially supported legal groups helping families at the border. I also wrote to the White House to encourage them to end this horrible situation.”

    More than 650 Salesforce employees signed a letter to Benioff that called CBP’s actions “inhumane” and asked the San Francisco-based company to reconsider its contract providing tools to help with recruiting and communications. Some workers spoke Monday to Tony Prophet, the chief equality officer, about the letter, Bloomberg News reported. The staff’s effort is part of a growing wave of employee activism within the tech industry, as workers question how their products are used by U.S. law enforcement and the military.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/salesforce-s-benioff-keeps-ties-to-border-agency-after-protest

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM’s Competitive Advantage on Display in $320 Million Deal

    IBM announced a $320 million infrastructure outsourcing deal with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading suppliers of mission-critical software and IT services. IBM will provide KMD with IT infrastructure through 2024, and will assist KMD as it upgrades its infrastructure offerings for its clients. The scope of the agreement includes security, hybrid cloud, and machine learning, all growth areas for IBM.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/28/ibms-competitive-advantage-on-display-in-320-milli.aspx

Other

  • Amazon Workers to Jeff Bezos: Stop Weaponizing Our Tech

    Gizmodo reports that Amazon employees are demanding that the company halt the sale of Rekognition, its facial-recognition technology, to law-enforcement agencies. “Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents,” reads an internal letter to Bezos, per Gizmodo. “In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and D.H.S.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/amazon-workers-to-jeff-bezos-stop-weaponizing-our-tech

Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash