Venture capitalist Keith Rabois has harsh words for Silicon Valley, saying the recent layoffs resulted from a “vanity metric” of hiring.
Rabois is one of the “PayPal Mafia,” the group of tech execs that spent their early years at PayPal before going on to found successful companies of their own. Rabois was at the payment company at the same time as Elon Musk, another member of the group.
Rabois told Business Insider that many of Silicon Valley’s top companies, such as Google and Meta, were hiring for looks rather than out of a true need.
“All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways,” he said.
“There’s nothing for these people to do — they’re really — it’s all fake work,” he added. “Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.”
While it doesn’t seem like a good idea to hire unneeded personnel, Rabois said at least part of the motivation was to prevent talent from being picked up by other companies. This was especially true of Google, which led to a slew of engineers that were happy to “be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing.”
In contrast, Rabois had high praise for Elon Musk and how he has run Twitter since buying it.
“People are watching Elon and Twitter and he’s clearly setting an example — maybe it’s an extreme example,” Rabois told Insider.
Rabois is one of the few with praise for Musk. Since taking over Twitter, Musk has laid off thousands and stoked one controversy after another. The company has also experienced a major uptick in outages, likely the result of its reduced technical staff.
Despite the controversy Musk is generating, Rabois isn’t the only one who thinks his methods may catch on. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently said in an interview with Insider that “every CEO in Silicon Valley has looked at what Elon Musk has done and has asked themselves, ‘Do they need to unleash their own Elon within them?’”
The Biden Administration is preparing to regulate cloud security, viewing the industry as too great a security risk to ignore.
Cloud computing has become an increasingly integral part of daily life for companies, government organizations, and individuals alike. There’s hardly any aspect of daily life that isn’t touched by the cloud in some way. That ubiquity is a source of concern, especially with the growing number and scope of cybersecurity threats.
According to Politico, the Biden Administration now views the cloud industry as “too big to fail” and is beginning the process of regulating cloud computing security.
The industry has “become essential to our daily lives,” Kemba Walden, acting national cyber director, told Politico. “If it’s disrupted, it could create large potentially catastrophic disruptions to our economy and to our government.”
Industry veterans echoed those concerns.
“A single cloud provider going down could take down the internet like a stack of dominos,” said Marc Rogers, chief security officer at Q-Net Security and former Cloudflare head of information security.
Unfortunately while companies have raced to deploy cloud platforms and services, cloud security has often lagged behind, leaving organizations and individuals vulnerable. Even worse, critical infrastructure has come under attack as a result of cloud security lapses.
“The reality is that today cloud security is often separate from cloud,” said Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology. “We need to get to a place where cloud providers have security baked in with that.”
Her sentiments echo those of Google executives, who recently penned a blog post calling for companies to be held accountable for cybersecurity:
“The bottom line: People deserve products that are secure by default and systems that are built to withstand the growing onslaught from attackers,” the executives wrote.
The Biden Administration agrees:
“In the United States, we don’t have a national regulator for cloud. We don’t have a Ministry of Communication. We don’t have anybody who would step up and say, ‘It’s our job to regulate cloud providers,’” said Rob Knake, deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget. The cloud, he said, “needs to have a regulatory structure around it.”
The FBI has admitted to buying Americans’ location data from advertising companies, raising concerns across the spectrum.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that law enforcement agencies were required to obtain a warrant before tracking Americans’ locations using cell phone data. The case was a major blow to the FBI, and other agencies, many of whom had relied on warrantless location tracking.
It appears the FBI has found a way around the Supreme Court ruling, purchasing location data from advertising companies, according to Wired. The revelation came in the course of a US Senate hearing.
Senator Ron Wyden, a well-known privacy advocate, asked FBI Director Christopher Wray if the agency used commercial location data.
“Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?” Wyden asked.
“To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising,” Wray responded. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.”
Director Wray did say the FBI now relies on a “court-authorized process,” but did not go into detail regarding what that meant.
Even so, many were quick to jump on Wray’s admission, pointing out the dangerous precedent it sets.
“The public needs to know who gave the go-ahead for this purchase, why, and what other agencies have done or are trying to do the same,” said Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at Demand Progress. He also said Congress should ban the practice.
Users looking forward to a notch-less iPhone are in for a disappointment, with the feature postponed till 2025.
Apple has been rumored to be working on an under-display version of Face ID that would eliminate the need for the much-maligned notch. Unfortunately, according to well-known leaker Ross Young, Apple is experiencing issues with the necessary sensors:
Under panel Face ID is now expected to be pushed at least a year to 2025 or later due to sensor issues.
Bing has hit an important milestone, thanks to an AI-driven boost, now boasting 100 million Daily Active Users.
Bing may be the second-largest search engine in the world, but it’s still a distant second to Google. The company’s foray into AI-powered search has certainly helped it gain some ground, turning Bing into a household name and helping drive the search engine across the 100M Daily Active User mark.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s VP for Modern Life, Search and Devices, broke the news in a blog post:
We are pleased to share that after a number of years of steady progress, and with a little bit of a boost from the million+ new Bing preview users, we have crossed 100M Daily Active Users of Bing. This is a surprisingly notable figure, and yet we are fully aware we remain a small, low, single digit share player. That said, it feels good to be at the dance!
Interestingly, the uptick is not just old users returning to give Bing and its AI another try:
Of the millions of active users of the new Bing preview, it’s great to see that roughly one third are new to Bing. We see this appeal of the new Bing as a validation of our view that search is due for a reinvention and of the unique value proposition of combining Search + Answers + Chat + Creation in one experience.
Mehdi also attributes the growth to Bing’s search results being better than ever:
The second factor driving trial and usage is that our core web search ranking has taken several significant jumps in relevancy due to the introduction of the Prometheus model so our Bing search quality is at an all-time high.
It’s nice to see Bing gaining traction and continuing to provide an alternative to Google’s dominance.
United Kingdom users may be out of luck when it comes to messaging clients, with both WhatsApp and Signal prepared to leave.
The UK is currently working to pass its Online Safety Bill, a piece of legislation that virtually all critics say would have a devastating impact on encryption and online security. Proponents of the bill have been accused of “magical thinking,” in which they believe encryption can be selectively weakened to catch bad guys.
The UK’s government is
WhatsApp and Signal have both come out saying they will refuse to weaken their encryption, a decision that would lead to them leaving the UK.
“It’s a remarkable thing to think about,” said Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, via The Guardian. “There isn’t a way to change it in just one part of the world. Some countries have chosen to block it: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.
“The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” added Cathcart. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”
Similarly, Signal President Meredith Whittaker told the BBC: “We would absolutely 100% walk rather than ever undermine the trust that people place in us to provide a truly private means of communication.
“We have never weakened our privacy promises, and we never would.”
For its part, the British Home Office is recycling the age-old argument that there must be some way to protect privacy and simultaneously undermine it for the sake of catching criminals.
“It is important that technology companies make every effort to ensure that their platforms do not become a breeding ground for paedophiles,” the Home Office stated.
“The Online Safety Bill does not represent a ban on end-to-end encryption but makes clear that technological changes should not be implemented in a way that diminishes public safety – especially the safety of children online.
“It is not a choice between privacy or child safety – we can and we must have both.”
Unfortunately, as mathematicians, programmers, computer experts, privacy advocates, and many lawmakers have stated, that’s simply not how encryption works.
“Encryption is either protecting everyone or it is broken for everyone,” Whitaker added.
That fundamental law of mathematics is why Germany has come out opposed to a similar measure making its way through the EU, instead emphasizing the need to bolster traditional investigative methods to compensate.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release Linux distro, one that is something of a two-edged sword in terms of its features and usability.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is a well-engineered Linux distro and is often brought up as an alternative to Arch, the best-known rolling distro.
For the uninitiated, a rolling release distro is one that has no major or minor versions but is updated constantly as new packages become available. For example, Ubuntu is currently on version 22.10, with 23.04 right around the corner. Similarly, Fedora is on version 37, with 38 soon to be released. In contrast, a rolling release updates packages as they become available, eliminating the need to do a major upgrade or reinstall every couple of years.
Given how complicated a product openSUSE Tumbleweed is, this review will be broken into two parts. In this first part, we’ll provide an overview of some of openSUSE Tumbleweed’s hallmark features.
Background
openSUSE Tumbleweed is the upstream distro for SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLE), much like Fedora is upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This means that Tumbleweed essentially serves as a testing ground for what will eventually become SLE.
In contrast, openSUSE Leap is a point-release distro that is functionally identical to SLE, just without the paid support.
microOS, on the other hand, is openSUSE’s equivalent of Fedora Silverblue, an immutable distro where the root file system is protected from tampering.
‘Rolling Done Right,’ Thanks to openQA
One of the most common things said about Tumbleweed is that it’s “rolling done right.” Much of this is the result of openSUSE’s reliance on openQA, an automated quality control tool that runs packages and updates through their paces before pushing them out to users.
openQA allows openSUSE to accomplish one of the most reliable and rock-solid rolling releases with a much smaller team than some other distros have.
Despite the extra QA that goes into Tumbleweed, the distro still manages to roll at an impressive pace. In fact, it usually runs neck-and-neck with Arch. On any given day, Tumbleweed may get a package first, Arch may get it first, or they may get it at the same time.
However, the big difference between Tumbleweed and Arch is that the former generally manages to avoid some of the bigger issues that Arch users sometimes face.
The openSUSE installer is often maligned for being overly complicated, but that is an extremely unfair assessment. Calamares is the installer that most distros use and compared to it, openSUSE’s installer is a lot more complex.
It’s important to note, however, that complex doesn’t equal bad. The openSUSE installer is certainly more complex than Calamares, but it offers a level of control that is unrivaled by virtually any other graphical installer on any platform.
The installer gives you the option of choosing your partitioning scheme, setting up your network, and choosing the individual packages you want installed.
Desktop Environments
While some distributions focus on a single desktop environment (DE), openSUSE has options to install KDE, Gnome, and Xfce. With a little effort, users can install almost any other DE.
What makes openSUSE unique when it comes to DEs is that no single DE ever feels like a second-class citizen. In fact, thanks to the quality of openSUSE and its openQA, every DE is rock-solid and feels like it’s the only DE on the distro.
It should be noted, however, that contrary to popular opinion, KDE is not the default desktop environment. While that certainly may have been the case at one time, when Novell bought openSUSE, the focus for SLE shifted to Gnome, according to Richard Brown, Linux Distribution Engineer at SUSE. Therefore, it can be argued that openSUSE Tumbleweed does not have a default desktop, treating Gnome, KDE, and Xfce equally. If there was such a thing as a default, it would actually be Gnome, not KDE.
Security
Another area where openSUSE shines is in the area of security. Tumbleweed is built with a number of hardening options enabled that are not usually enabled. This results in one of the most secure Linux distros available.
In fact, using the Lynis security auditing tool — where 70 is considered a passing score — Tumbleweed routinely scores in the upper 80s. In contrast, the next best score I’ve gotten out of the-box is Fedora, which only comes in right at 70.
In Part 2 of this review, we’ll look at openSUSE Patterns, Yast, and how everything comes together.
Google is now giving all Google One plans free VPN access and has unveiled a tool to monitor personal data on the dark web.
Google One is the company’s storage plans that give users several tiers to choose from, depending on their needs. The company offered its VPN by Google One for free to its top-tier plans, but is now providing it to all plans, regardless of tier.
VPN by Google One adds more protection to your internet activity no matter what apps or browsers you use, shielding it from hackers or network operators by masking your IP address. Without a VPN, the sites and apps you visit could use your IP address to track your activity or determine your location. Plus, we take several steps to make sure no one can tie your network traffic to your identity.
Starting today, and rolling out over the next few weeks, we’re expanding VPN access to all Google One plans, including the Basic plan that starts at $1.99/mo. The VPN will be available in 22 countries across Android, iOS, Windows and Mac devices. You can also share the VPN with up to five others if they’re on your Google One plan.
The company is also including its dark web report, giving users the ability to see if and when their data is posted on the dark web:
Google One’s dark web report helps you scan the dark web for your personal info — like your name, address, email, phone number and Social Security number — and will notify you if it’s found. When you enable dark web report, you provide and select the information you’d like to keep an eye on within your monitoring profile. And if any matching info is found on the dark web, we’ll notify you and provide guidance on how you might protect that information. For example, if your Social Security number was found on the dark web, we might suggest you report it as stolen to the government or take steps to protect your credit.
As we have pointed out before, there’s still the issue of trusting Google as a VPN provider. The company has a long history of privacy abuses, including ignoring users’ preferences regarding tracking and privacy.
A VPN is only valuable if a user trusts the company providing the service. When the company providing the service primarily makes its money off of user data, it leaves one to wonder just how private their web browsing data will truly be.
As we have said before, most users would be far better off using Mullvad or NordVPN instead.
Salesforce has announced Einstein GPT a major upgrade to its Einstein AI that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to improve its abilities.
On the heels of an announcement by Microsoft that it was releasing Dynamics 365, the world’s first ERP/CRM copilot, Salesforce has fired back with Einstein GPT. The company describes it as “the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale.”
Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data. With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box, or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time.
“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated, and personalized ways,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. “Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.”
Sales personnel will be able to use Einstein GPT to generate personalized emails to customers, while service personnel will be able to use the tech to generate articles based on case notes, as well as auto-generate personalized interaction with customers.
Slack will also see Einstein GTP integration, giving users the ability to see in-depth insights.
Marketing personnel will be able to use Einstein GPT to generate personalized content and engage with customers across mobile, email, web, and advertising.
Even developers can get in on the action, using the technology to help generate code.
“We’re excited to apply the power of OpenAI’s technology to CRM,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI — a belief that Salesforce shares with us.”
Tech icon Marc Andreessen has weighed in on AI’s impact on the workplace, and he doesn’t believe it will lead to unemployment.
Artificial intelligence is dominating the news, thanks to OpenAI, ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s incorporation of the tech into its Bing search engine. One of the leading concerns surrounding AI is that it will lead to a mass wave of unemployment as AIs and chatbots replace human beings.
According to Andreessen, however, those fears are largely overblown and ignore historical precedence. He lays out his case in a Substack post:
We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.
Andreessen then goes on to say that he could make all the “standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment” that applied to outsourcing and robots, and apply them to AI. However, he says those arguments are not even needed because of a fundamental difference regarding AIs role in the current economy: it is illegal.
That’s right, according to Andreesseen, AI is already illegal in much of the economy, restricting how much of an impact it can make on the larger job market.
Andreessen breaks down the economy into two sectors: one that is heavily regulated, either by the government or by itself. These sectors, by their very nature, are “technologically stagnant.” In contrast, the other sectors are those industries where there is less regulation and technology is allowed to have a progressive and disruptive influence.
Now think about what happens over time. The prices of regulated, non-technological products rise; the prices of less regulated, technologically-powered products fall. Which eats the economy? The regulated sectors continuously grow as a percentage of GDP; the less regulated sectors shrink. At the limit, 99% of the economy will be the regulated, non-technological sectors, which is precisely where we are headed.
Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time. AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.
Andreessen’s take is an interesting and thought-provoking analysis. You can read his full post here.
Walmart is making a major move into retail software and services, teaming up with Salesforce to sell its solutions to other retailers.
Walmart revolutionized the retail market thanks to its focus on logistics, fulfillment, and delivery. The retail giant is looking to make money off of its innovative solutions by selling fulfillment and delivery solutions to other retailers and teaming up with Salesforce to make it happen.
“Through this partnership, retailers can leverage the same innovative and scalable technologies that power Walmart’s pickup and delivery experiences,” said Anshu Bhardwaj, senior vice president, technology strategy and commercialization, Walmart Global Technology. “The same technology that powers Store Assist has enabled Walmart to fulfill over 830 million orders across over 4,700 Walmart stores. Together with Salesforce, retailers can scale their business and deliver the personalized, convenient experiences shoppers expect.”
“Salesforce is thrilled to partner with Walmart as it transforms its business and further expands into the digital technology market,” said Tyler Prince, Executive Vice President, Alliances & Channels, Salesforce. “Through this partnership with Salesforce, Walmart can grow its business in new ways by productizing its proven retail processes – empowering other retailers to create new and personalized experiences for their customers.”
Walmart says retailers will be able to take advantage of three major features, including Buy Online and Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS), use Walmart GoLocal to manage local deliveries, and take advantage of Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Order Management to manage the entire omnichannel shopping experience.
“Shoppers continue to expect brands to deliver highly connected and frictionless experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. In fact, 1 in 5 online orders placed the weekend before Christmas were picked up in store,” said Rob Garf, vice president and general manager of retail, Salesforce. “With the combined power of Walmart and Salesforce, retailers can drive success with best-in-class technology to advance their omnichannel capabilities, drive efficiency and ensure that every purchase quickly gets into the hands of the shopper – no matter where they are.”
‘Untitled Goose Game,’ the popular macOS game by Panic, was rejected by Apple’s Mac App Store reviewers — twice.
Panic is well-known in the Mac community for making incredibly high-quality apps, some of which have even won Apple Design Awards. Unfortunately, when the company tried to submit its ‘Untitled Goose Game,’ App Store reviewers rejected it twice, according to co-founder Cabel Sasser.
A short story. We once submitted Untitled Goose Game to the Mac App Store. It was rejected by the reviewer because they thought you couldn’t skip the credits. (?!?) We explained that you could skip the credits by holding space. It was then rejected for something else and at that point we just gave up and never bothered to resubmit. Fin
Panic went on to release the game via Steam and the Epic Game Store.
Unfortunately, this example is just the latest that illustrates Apple’s overall lack of commitment to the Mac gaming market. For example, former App Store Editor Neil Long recently made the case that Apple doesn’t care about the gaming market and views game developers much as a “contemptuous landlord” would.
The woefully understaffed team of app reviewers couldn’t handle the volume of games coming through – and seemingly still can’t today. Ask any staffer at a mobile game studio and they’re guaranteed to have an app review horror story involving their game being repeatedly rejected for an arbitrary reason, or removed from sale entirely. Developers are being treated with contempt.
Given the success of Panic’s software in the market, and how much they have supported and contributed to the success of the Mac platform, Sasser would probably agree with Long’s sentiment.
Germany is poised to ban Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE from participating in its 5G networks, dealing another blow to the firms.
The US has already banned Huawei and ZTE, and has been pressuring its allies to do the same. Intelligence agencies have long expressed concerns over the companies’ ties to Beijing and their obligation to assist China’s foreign surveillance efforts.
According to Reuters, Germany is preparing to ban the two companies, prohibiting telecom operators from using their equipment. In addition, Germany may even require operators to remove existing equipment manufactured by Huawei and ZTE, similar to measures taken in the US.
Interestingly, although Huawei would not publicly speculate on Germany’s actions, a spokesperson told Reuters that the company had a “very good security record.”
Of course, that statement ignores the fact that Huawei had the ability to monitor calls on one of the largest Dutch wireless networks, even raising the possibility that it could have monitored the calls of then prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende.
Brave Search has unveiled its latest feature, the AI-powered Summarizer, which is designed to give users quick answers.
Microsoft Bing may be getting much of the news coverage for AI-powered search, but Brave is a popular, privacy-focused search engine that is also integrating AI capabilities. The company’s Summarizer tool is designed to give users “concise and to-the-point answers at the top of Brave Search results pages.”
Best known for its Brave web browser, the company acquired the open search engine Tailcat in early 2021 and used it as the basis for its Brave Search. The company’s search engine is unique in that it is one of the few independent search engines that has its own web index. In contrast, many other independent search engines use Google or Bing and strip out those companies’ trackers.
I personally am a big fan of Brave Search, using it more times than I can count throughout the day. While it’s not perfect, I find Brave to provide more relevant results than either Google or Bing in many categories.
The Summarizer began showing up at the top of Brave searches on March 2. In just the last few days, I’ve come to rely on the feature more and more, especially when looking for quick answers.
For example, searching for “best Linux text editor” produces this answer:
Brave Summarizer – Best Linux Text Editor
Asking “what is WebProNews” results in:
Brave Summarizer – What Is WebProNews
Just for laughs, I even asked, “who is matt milano tech journalist,” and received this:
Brave Summarizer – Who Is Matt Milano
At least Summarizer didn’t confuse me with a certain NFL player…
As the company points out and is evident in the above screenshots, Brave’s Summarizer is designed to provide authoritative answers, even backing them up with sources. The company emphasizes this advantage in its blog:
Unlike a purely generative AI model, which is prone to spout unsubstantiated assertions, we trained our large language models (LLMs) to process multiple sources of information present on the Web. This produces a more concise, accurate answer, expressed in coherent language.
In addition, the provenance of original sources of data is cited at all times via links. This maintains the rightful attribution of information, and helps users assess the trustworthiness of the sources, both of which are needed to mitigate the authority biases of large language models.
It’s clear from Brave’s approach that the company does not believe in relying solely on AI for answers but believes it should be used responsibly, in combination with “critical thinking.”
Using Web results enables the Summarizer to provide real-time information that is up to date with today’s events. Given the current advancements in AI, it’s crucial to remind users that one should not believe everything an AI system produces, in much the same way one should not believe everything that is published on the Web. At the risk of stating the obvious, we should not suspend critical thinking for anything we consume, no matter how impressive the results of AI models can be.
“With 22 million queries per day, Brave Search is the fastest growing search engine since Bing. We provide independent search results from our own index of the Web, and today we’re further improving the relevance of those results with our AI-powered Summarizer,” said Josep M. Pujol, Chief of Search at Brave. “Unlike AI chat tools which can provide fabricated responses, the Summarizer generates a plain-written summary at the top of the search results page, aggregating the latest sources on the Web and providing source attribution for transparency and accountability. This open system is available to all Brave Search users today to help them better navigate search results.”
Overall, I’m impressed with Brave’s implementation and will continue to rely heavily on it. Hopefully, the company will continue to evolve and improve it even more. In the meantime, all users can try it out without joining a waitlist.
Google has informed employees that there will be fewer promotions to senior roles, a reflection of the company’s changing workforce.
Like many in the tech industry, Google has conducted extensive layoffs, letting some 12,000 employees go. The company has also cut back on projects and has implemented various hiring freezes. As a result of these changes, it appears there are fewer senior roles than in past years.
The company informed employees via an email that was seen by CNBC:
“The process is manager-led and will be largely similar to last year — though with our slower pace of hiring, we are planning for fewer promotions into L6 and above than when Google was growing quickly.”
The company added that the adjustment is being made “to ensure that the number of Googlers in more senior and leadership roles grows in proportion to the growth of the company.”
“If your manager believes that you are ready to be promoted, they will nominate you,” the email said. Those who want to “self-nominate” have a “short window of time” from March 6-8.
Perhaps laying off a large portion of Twitter’s technical staff wasn’t such a good idea, with the platform experience yet another outage.
Elon Musk has been slashing Twitter’s headcount since taking over the company. Unfortunately, it looks like the cuts may be cutting into the company’s ability to operate.
According to BBC News, the company experienced technical issues for the second time in a week. Users experienced errors when clicking links in tweets. In fact, the problem was bad enough that Bloomberg posted a link to its coverage saying: “if you can click this link, Twitter’s fixed its bug.”
Musk took the opportunity to blame the platform’s ‘brittleness.’
This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.
Interestingly, as BBC points out, while Twitter certainly had issues prior to Musk’s takeover, there has been a marked increase since the acquisition.
“It started shortly before the Musk takeover itself,” Alp Toker, director of internet outage tracker NetBlocks, told the outlet. “The main spike has happened after the takeover, with four to five incidents in a month – which was comparable to what used to happen in a year.”
It’s a safe bet that eliminating such a large percentage of the company’s staff may be a factor.
Google is expanding its cloud services, bringing Retail Search to its clients in an effort to help them provide the best experience to their own customers.
One of the biggest issues online shoppers face is finding the products they’re interested in. This can especially be apparent when comparing retail platform search capabilities with the Google Search features customers have become accustomed to.
Google Cloud is now bringing the power of its search to retail clients, with Retail Search, which the company unveiled in a blog.
This fully managed service is easily customizable, enabling organizations to craft shopper-focused search experiences. Our site search solution builds upon decades of Google’s experience and innovation in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Retailers can make product discovery even easier for shoppers, while optimizing for their business goals with advanced capabilities
Retail Search gives clients the ability to offer advanced query understanding, meaning customers will have better success finding what they’re looking for even with the broadest of search terms. The service also includes semantic search, which matches product attributes with relevant products.
Customers are already seeing the benefit of Retail Search.
“With limited customer signals and no historical data, descriptive long-tail searches are some of the most challenging queries to understand,” said Neelima Sharma, senior vice president, technology, e-commerce, marketing and merchandising at Lowe’s. “We have been partnering with Google Cloud to give our customers relevant results for long-tail searches and have seen an increase in click-through and search conversion and a drop in our ‘No Results Found’ rate since we launched.”
Google Cloud customers interested in learning more can visit Discovery Solutions for Retail or contact their Google Cloud field sales representative.
Norway may soon join the list of EU countries banning Google Analytics following an initial conclusion that it violates the GDPR.
Google Analytics has increasingly come under fire by EU jurisdictions, accused of violating European data protection laws, specifically the GDPR. According to Simple Analytics, the Norwegian data protection authority (Datatilsynet) has issued a preliminary decision that “the use of Google Analytics was in violation of the GDPR’s transfer rules.”
At the heart of the issue is a 2020 EU ruling that US cloud providers are not in compliance with the GDPR. There have long been concerns regarding the transmission of EU user data to US cloud providers, especially given US cloud providers’ obligation to assist US intelligence agencies.
When Austria became one of the first jurisdictions to issue an adverse ruling against Google Analytics, Max Schrems, honorary chair of The European Center for Digital Rights (noyb), predicted it would simply be the first of many such rulings.
“We expect similar decisions to now drop gradually in most EU member states,” Schrems said. “We have filed 101 complaints in almost all Member States and the authorities coordinated the response. A similar decision was also issued by the European Data Protection Supervisor last week.
“This is a very detailed and sound decision,” Schrems continued. “The bottom line is: Companies can’t use US cloud services in Europe anymore. It has now been 1.5 years since the Court of Justice confirmed this a second time, so it is more than time that the law is also enforced.”
As Simple Analytics points out, it is possible — although unlikely — that Norway’s final conclusion will differ from its initial conclusion. If Norway’s final decision is in line with its preliminary one, it will join Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, and Italy, all of whom have ruled against Google.
Linux distro openSUSE has begun enforcing Kernel Lockdown when Secure Boot is enabled, creating issues for many users.
Kernel Lockdown was introduced in version 5.4 of the Linux kernel and is designed to help protect the kernel from tampering and unauthorized modification, and serves as an important security feature. It works together with Secure Boot, which is a system to ensure the bootloader process is running legitimate, trusted code signed by Microsoft-controlled master keys.
While openSUSE has long supported Secure Boot, it did not have Kernel Lockdown enabled for its Tumbleweed distro. Because Tumbleweed is a rolling distro, where updates are pushed out as they become available instead of waiting for a point release, leaving Kernel Lockdown disabled made it easier for users to deal with unsigned kernel modules and drivers, such as Nvidia drivers.
Evidently, according to a Reddit thread that also links to an openSUSE mailing list, Microsoft evidently refused to continue signing openSUSE’s bootload shim unless Kernel Lockdown was enabled. As a result, beginning with kernel 6.2.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed will enable Kernel Lockdown whenever Secure Boot is also enabled.
Microsoft’s reasons for insisting on Kernel Lockdown being enabled are easy to understand. Without it, Secure Boot is essentially useless, giving anyone who had it enabled a false sense of security.
At the same time, users that rely on Nvidia drivers on the fast-moving Tumbleweed now have a choice to make: either disable Secure Boot or manually sign those modules so that the kernel can load them.
Even for users without Nvidia cards, hibernation is another casualty of the change, and no longer works on systems with Secure Boot enabled, although there is ongoing discussion about how to re-enable it with Secure Boot.
Contrary to many opinions, while Microsoft does serve as the central signing authority, Secure Boot is not a Microsoft attempt to control people’s hardware, as evidenced by the fact that users can sign their own modules. openSUSE provides instructions on how to do so in the following link:
LinkedIn is introducing AI-powered collaborative articles to help users tap into “~10 billion years of professional experience.”
LinkedIn is the leading professional networking platform, giving users a place to connect and communicate with peers. Daniel Roth, Editor in Chief, VP at LinkedIn, also wants the site to serve as a destination for professionals looking to share knowledge and learn from their combined experience.
The idea came to Roth when talking with an entrepreneur who was trying to figure out how to restructure his company without angering his employees. When Roth asked him where he planned to get help, his response was: “The internet, I guess?”
Using that moment as inspiration, Roth and his colleges created a way to use AI to jump-start conversations where professionals can share their experience on specific topics:
We are introducing collaborative articles — knowledge topics published by LinkedIn with insights and perspectives added by the LinkedIn community. These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team. Then, using LinkedIn’s Skills Graph, we match each article with relevant member experts who can contribute their lessons, anecdotes, and advice based on their professional experience.
And, that’s when the real magic happens: when professionals share real-life, specific advice by contributing their perspectives to the work questions we’re all facing every day. Because starting a conversation is harder than joining one, these collaborative articles make it easier for professionals to come together and add and improve ideas — which is how shared knowledge is created.
The collaborative articles provide a way for readers to give feedback, marking helpful contributions as “insightful.” Similarly, contributors earn a Community Top Voice badge in recognition of their insights.
The new feature is a good example of what can be achieved when combining AI with the human element to create unique and helpful experiences.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has some good — or bad — news, depending on whether or not you’re a fan of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk may be the world’s richest man, but he certainly didn’t get there by winning any popularity contests. What popularity he did have has taken a major hit since his Twitter acquisition. The mercurial CEO has slashed the workforce, axed his most loyal executives, made demands of staff that many consider unreasonable, introduced drastic changes seemingly on a whim, and raised prices or begun charging for various services.
While Musk’s management style has put many off, Benioff believes it may become far more common, with many tech CEOs already asking if they need to follow his example.
“Every CEO in Silicon Valley has looked at what Elon Musk has done and has asked themselves, ‘Do they need to unleash their own Elon within them?’” Benioff told Business Insider in an interview.
“That is an existential question that if you are any kind of executive in the company,” Benioff added. “You have to look at him and say, ‘Wow, it’s a very unorthodox management style,’ but, as I’ve said, you can’t underestimate what he’s done.”
While Benioff has not taken such drastic measures as Musk, he did say that he had to step back into more of a hands-on role following the departure of co-CEO Bret Taylor. The company’s recent layoffs and cost-cutting measures reflect that involvement.
“I had no choice but to step in and to guide the company’s performance,” Benioff told Insider. “And that’s the results that you’re seeing here today with these numbers.”
While there’s no denying Musk’s approach may meet with a measure of success, it’s hard to imagine it as a sustainable business model. After all, at some point, every CEO still need employees that are willing to work for them.
