Tech

Jeff Benson / Decrypt: US Marshals Service has given a $6.6M+ contract to crypto startup Anchorage to manage seized crypto assets; BitGo had won a similar $4.5M contract in April  —  Anchorage sells institutional custody solutions for nearly 60 digital assets, including everything from Bitcoin to Zcash.  —  Bitcoin

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Cairo and Dubai-based Swvl, a bus-hailing and ridesharing provider in emerging markets, plans to go public in the US in a SPAC merger at a valuation of ~$1.5B  —  Cairo and Dubai-based ride-sharing company Swvl plans to go public in a merger with special purpose acquisition company Queen's Gambit Growth Capital, Swvl said Tuesday.

Tiernan Ray / ZDNet: OpenAI introduces Triton 1.0, an open-source programming language for writing GPU code for neural networks, and claims it is easier to write than Nvidia's CUDA  —  SEO: Python-like language promises to be easier to write than native CUDA and specialized GPU code but has performance comparable …

Digital marketing is an ever-growing part of business success. According to Statista, in February 2020, U.S. marketing executives were devoting a whopping 13.2% of their company’s revenue toward marketing budgets. The allotted budget spend was up from an average of 7% to 10% in previous years. The statistics website also reiterated that digital marketing continues […]

The post 5 Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Efforts appeared first on ReadWrite.

Gathering and analyzing data has been the craze of business for quite some time now. Yet, too often, the former takes hold of companies at such strength that no care is given to the thought of utilizing data. There’s a reason we had to invent a name for this phenomenon – “dark data.” Unfortunately, data […]

The post Building a (Big) Data Pipeline the Right Way appeared first on ReadWrite.

There’s no denying that videos are the most powerful tool to impact the viewer’s mind. This is because the human brain processes image 60,000 times faster than textual content. As a result, numerous major brands harness video marketing’s power to make the most out of their marketing endeavors. From a marketing standpoint, they’ve positioned themselves […]

The post How SMBs Can Utilize Video Marketing to Boost Their Revenue appeared first on ReadWrite.

Tech companies continue to be at the forefront of how employers respond to the pandemic.

As countless offices prepare to reopen this fall, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the specifics, namely whether or not employees will need to be vaccinated. Tech companies are now some of the first employers to make their position clear: If workers want to return to the office, they will need to get a Covid-19 vaccine.

Google and Facebook — two of the largest tech companies in the world — announced on Wednesday that they will be requiring that all employees returning to their US offices get vaccinated. Google was the first to announce this at the beginning of the day, and Facebook followed suit a few hours later. The news comes as the US government struggles to get its adult population vaccinated (currently fewer than half of eligible Americans have received one vaccine dose), and cases across the nation are rising as the more contagious delta variant spreads. So far, President Biden has not placed a federal mandate on vaccines, which leaves it largely up to employers to exert pressure if they want their employees to avoid getting Covid-19.

Tech firms were some of the first workplaces to require employees to work from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Now, these same companies are some of the first major employers in the private sector to mandate that employees be vaccinated before they return. And other companies outside the tech industry are likely to follow.

“I hope these steps will give everyone greater peace of mind as offices reopen,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post announcing the requirements. Google is also pushing back the date when it will mandate employees to return to the office from September to October at the soonest, citing concerns about the delta variant. Google also is letting some 20 percent of its employees permanently work from home, and 60 percent work a few days a week in person.

Lori Goler, VP of People at Facebook, released a statement saying that any of the company’s employees working in a US office will need to be vaccinated. Both Google and Facebook said they will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons. “We continue to work with experts to ensure our return-to-office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety,” wrote Goler in a partial statement.

Under federal law, it’s been considered legal for employers to require employees to be vaccinated. The courts have recently tossed out cases by people trying to sue hospitals and universities that have required vaccines.

Google and Facebook are also both headquartered in Silicon Valley, a geographic area with one of the highest vaccination rates in the country. But these companies are global firms that employ workers across the political and vaccine-hesitancy spectrum.

At Google, while most employees chiming in on company listservs have so far seemed supportive of the vaccine mandate, some employees have complained, questioning the effectiveness of the vaccines and whether Google has a right to require one, according to a source at the company.

Given how politicized vaccines have become in the US, where many conservative leaders have been slow to support vaccination and stoked vaccine skepticism, it’s likely there will be more resistance.

Nevertheless, these major tech companies are once again setting the tone for how corporate America adapts its working conditions to the realities of the ongoing pandemic.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has proposed changing the internet law Section 230 in order to combat health misinformation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced new legislation today that aims to finally hold tech companies responsible for allowing misinformation about vaccines and other health issues to spread online.

The bill, called the Health Misinformation Act and co-sponsored by Sen. Ray Luján (D-NM), would create an exception to the landmark internet law Section 230, which has always shielded tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter from being sued over almost any of the content people post on their platforms.

Klobuchar’s bill would change that — but only when a social media platform’s algorithm promotes health misinformation related to an “existing public health emergency.” The legislation tasks the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to define health misinformation in these scenarios.

“Features that are built into technology platforms have contributed to the spread of misinformation and disinformation,” reads a draft of the law seen by Recode, “with social media platforms incentivizing individuals to share content to get likes, comments, and other positive signals of engagement, which rewards engagement rather than accuracy.”

The law wouldn’t apply in cases where a platform shows people posts using a “neutral mechanism,” like a social media feed that ranks posts chronologically, rather than algorithmically. This would be a big change for the major internet platforms. Right now, almost all of the major social media platforms rely on algorithms to determine what content they show users in their feeds. And these ranking algorithms are generally designed to show users the content that they engage with the most — posts that produce an emotional response — which can prioritize inaccurate information.

The new bill comes at a time when social media companies are under fire for the Covid-19 misinformation spreading on their platforms despite their efforts to fact-check or take down some of the most egregiously harmful health information. Last week, as Covid-19 cases began surging among unvaccinated Americans, President Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” with vaccine misinformation (a statement he later partially walked back).

At the same time, major social media companies continue to face criticism from some Republicans, who have opposed the Surgeon General’s recent health advisory focused on combating the threat of health misinformation. Conservatives, and especially Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), have also pushed back against the White House’s work flagging problematic health misinformation to social media platforms, calling the collaboration “scary stuff” and “censorship.”

Even though tech giants are facing bipartisan criticism, Klobuchar’s plan to repeal Section 230 — even partially — will likely be challenging. Defining and identifying public health misinformation is often complicated, and having a government agency decide where to draw that boundary could run into challenges. At the same time, a court would also have to determine whether a platform’s algorithms were “neutral” and whether health misinformation was promoted — a question that doesn’t have a simple answer.

Also, it may prove difficult for individual users to successfully sue Facebook, even if Section 230 is partially repealed, because it’s not illegal to post health misinformation (unlike, say, posting child pornography or defamatory statements).

And free speech advocates have warned that repealing Section 230 — even in part — could limit free speech on the internet as we know it because it would pressure tech companies to more tightly control what users are allowed to post online.

Regardless, the bill’s introduction reflects the political will on Capitol Hill among Democrats to force tech companies to more effectively combat misinformation on their platforms.

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans,” said Sen. Klobuchar in a statement. “These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world, and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.”

Earlier this year, Sen. Klobuchar wrote a letter with Sen. Luján to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook demanding they more aggressively take down misinformation on their platform, as Recode first reported. The letter cited research by a nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which found that 12 anti-vaccine influencers — a “Disinformation Dozen” — were responsible for 65 percent of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter.

In responses to those letters, which were seen by Recode, both platforms largely defended their approach to these influencers, noting that they’d taken some actions on their accounts. Across both platforms, many of the accounts are still up. While data revealing the extent to which misinformation on Facebook has exacerbated vaccine hesitancy is limited, longtime online advocates for vaccines told Recode earlier this year that Facebook’s approach to vaccine content has made their job harder, and that content in Facebook groups, in particular, has made some people more opposed to vaccines.

It’s also not the first time that Congress has tried to repeal parts of Section 230. Most recently, Congress introduced the EARN IT Act, which would take away Section 230 immunity from tech companies if they don’t adequately address child pornography on their platforms. That bill, which had bipartisan support when introduced, is still in Congress. Earlier this year, Reps. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) also reintroduced their proposal, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, which would remove platforms’ Section 230 protections in cases where their algorithms amplified posts that involved international terrorism or interfered with civil rights.

President Trump also attempted to repeal Section 230 through a legally unenforceable executive order, a few days after Twitter started fact-checking his misleading posts about voting by mail in the 2020 elections.

Despite potential hurdles to their proposal, Sens. Klobuchar and Luján’s bill is a reminder that lawmakers concerned about misinformation are thinking more and more about the algorithms and ranking systems that drive engagement on this kind of content.

“The social media giants know this: The algorithms encourage people to consume more and more misinformation,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO for the Center for Countering Digital Hate, told Recode in February. “Social media companies have not just encouraged growth of this market and tolerated it and nurtured it, they also have become the primary locus of misinformation.”

The future of work, according to a remote work expert.

After a year-and-a-half hiatus, many offices will open back up in September. Most companies are asking that employees return on a hybrid basis, meaning they come into the office at least some of the time. But what exactly that will look like is uncertain.

What is certain is that more people will work from home than ever before, and this shift has the potential to disrupt everything from physical office space to the way people feel about work. And as US companies face a hiring crisis, companies that don’t offer remote work could find themselves at a significant disadvantage when it comes to recruiting new talent.

Recode talked with Tsedal Neeley, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, about the many issues that are coming up as the nature of work changes.

The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

There were already a lot of perks to being a white-collar worker: You generally make more money, you work in an air-conditioned office, and now you get to work from home, which can make life so much easier. Do you think this will lead to growing animosity between blue-collar and white-collar workers?

Whether or not people have access to virtuality — or hybrid work, or dynamic work, depending on who you’re talking to — can easily become a diversity and inclusion question. First of all, we have to truly understand, in a given organization, whether or not anything that people are doing can be done remotely. We have a tendency to look at roles from a global standpoint and say, “Well, these jobs can’t be done remotely and these jobs can,” and quickly start assigning people to remote or non-remote. When we start scrutinizing the tasks that people do and the work that they do, one option that many companies have been pursuing is, “Can we pool and rotate?” So instead of all these people being attached physically to these job areas, can we do something where we look at tasks, what can be done virtually, what requires physical presence, and all of us share in that?

The second thing is, if we can’t give people remote work opportunities because of what they do, we have to give people remote learning days. We have to give people some kind of remote experiences that they can do some self-development around. And this is where you can have parity. Blue-collar workers — I’m thinking in warehouses that are not outfitted with technology, or delivery folks — I don’t think that’s going to change much. But I also don’t think that it’s going to create as bad a division as we expect. Because hybrid, by definition, means you have some in-person, you have some remote, there’s going to be a mix.

So if people don’t go into the office as often — if I’m only going into the financial district one or two days a week — what does that mean for the people who work at the salad bars, the service counters, where I used to get my nails done? What are the repercussions for them when more people work remotely?

If you are there twice a week, another person for another company is there twice a week, another person is around once a week. I am firmly convinced that the patterns of movement may differ, but people will still be there. Even if companies reduce their commercial footprint, there will be more smaller organizations in the same entity, as opposed to one having a lot of floors in a building.

But overall, if everyone went in five days before, now everyone’s working two days, there are fewer total days that people are actually going in. So there has to be some sort of reduction, right?

There will be some kind of reduction. But I don’t think we’re going to have these empty buildings as we imagine. I think there’s going to be a redistribution of who’s there and when, but the activities will be similar.

Let’s talk about companies like Goldman Sachs, that have been really hardline on everyone coming into the office. Are they going to lose talent going forward? Are people going to be like, “I’m not going to work at this company or in this industry if they’re not going to let me have any flexibility in my work and life”?

We’re in an era where people have tasted a different way of working, a different way of connecting with the people they cohabitate with, a reduced level of stress from the reduction of commutes, saving more money. And because they’ve tasted this, they’re demanding it, they want it. Given that, will incumbents remain as powerful as they’ve always been in drawing and retaining top talent? With the kind of great resignation and turnover that we’re already starting to see, I would be surprised that if in the long run they won’t start seeing people leave. This is the era for employees. The power is in employees’ hands today because of the sheer scale and magnitude of the people who want to retain some kind of work-life flexibility in their professional arrangements. And if they can’t get it here, why not get it elsewhere?

Why are some companies asking employees to be in the office all the time, if the pandemic has proved they don’t have to be?

It’s this belief and this bias that it is through in-person presence that we are able to connect, to communicate, to collaborate, to learn. It’s this bias that culture building and culture maintenance can only happen in in-person settings. But that is not empirically true. The emphasis of their work is very much process-focused, as opposed to outcome-focused. In order for remote-hybrid to work, people have to change their performance metric, and trust employees, and let go of control, and allow empowered autonomous employees to achieve organizational goals.

That makes me think of Apple, which might have to backtrack a little bit on its work-from-home policy so people don’t quit. We’re in a very tight hiring crunch right now, so employers have to offer more perks like working from home to attract talent. But what happens when there isn’t a hiring crunch? Do we go back to normal?

We may. These things are cyclical, but the cost of turnover for companies is a year and a half of that individual’s salary. Think about that and the institutional memory that walks out the door. And we’re actually seeing early retirements, people who are saying, “We like to be home, we’ve been through this crazy crisis, I don’t want that stress anymore.” The losses of drastic turnover, it’s not just that you’re losing talent. You’re also messing with the culture of your organization. Think about a place where there’s an exodus. That’s not a motivating environment. Not only are there pragmatic losses when someone leaves, but there’s also cultural, social, emotional, psychological blows that companies will take. If I was a company right now, I would fight to keep my best people. Because my best people will ensure that I do well.

I’ve been writing about how working mothers really want to work from home, but they’ve also been having a really hard time doing so, reporting higher rates of stress and burnout. There’s an expectation that women have to both be ideal workers and ideal mothers. Obviously things are extra hard due to the pandemic, but it seems like it’s always been sort of an impossible situation for women. How does remote work fit into that?

It’s been bad, but it’s gotten worse. I have been alarmed. US labor statistics data showed that 3 million women have left the workforce [in 2020]. It made my head explode. And then another survey that looked at the same data was able to identify that almost 600,000 are mothers and caretakers. What a shame, if organizations are not leaning into the gift that virtuality and remote work gives, so that they can take advantage of flex time and flex jobs to retain their women. Or to also incorporate some kind of child care apparatus in order to support mothers. Some of the smart companies that I’ve talked to have done things like, from this time to this time every day we’re actually going to have online programs so that mothers with children between the ages of 5 and 10 can get some kind of respite. We can’t send you babysitters in the middle of a global pandemic, but these companies have found ways to support women and mothers — but these are in the minority.

We talk about diversity, and gender and women, and then we see amazing women leaving. We have to work hard to bring them back and to reintegrate them into our organizations. Even the pre-pandemic ways of handling young families and professional demands were not great. If I can work from home, my pickup would be much easier than me breaking my neck to get to my child between 5 and whatever time. All of that goes away.

Working from home can benefit certain groups: people with disabilities, people who were never that good at schmoozing in the office in the first place. Some Black people say they prefer working from home because they feel a better sense of belonging and experience fewer microaggressions. What does this mean for diversity inclusion? Is working from home the ticket to making a little more equity at work?

I think so. Folks who have always been out of the mainstream in their organizations suddenly feel like they’re not only at the table, but that no one is calling them the wrong name. They don’t have to take that psychological commute every day in order to code switch and fit in. Those with physical disabilities, or even neurodiversity challenges and concerns, are finding so much more peace. The lessons we can learn, however, is why is it that people have had these experiences, and what can we do to make changes in our organization so that they have the sense of belonging that they’ve experienced through this remote environment?

I’ve made some really bad predictions, so I want you to make a prediction instead. What is this going to look like in a year or two, or five, from now?

Guidelines and the policies will settle. Competencies around flexible workplaces will rise. Individual managers will level up to figure out how to lead a distributed workforce. People will be more agile with using digital tools, so things like tech exhaustion will go away. After people experience the hybrid format, they will settle into a rhythm that really works for them. And I think that we’ll see more remote than in-person days. I also predict that physical spaces — office spaces — will look very different. The remote year has totally influenced what people want: smart boards, movable furniture, outdoor space for work. So we’re going to see physical spaces of offices look very different than they are today.

רוצים להחליף סמארטפון? המעבר בין מערכות ההפעלה צפוי להיות פחות כואב. תמונות חדשות חושפות חלק מהתהליך עליו דווח כבר בעבר. כך זה נראה

לאחר שהחולשה כבר נוצלה על ידי חברת הריגול הישראלית באופן פעיל, ענקית הטכנולוגיה שחררה עדכון אבטחה קריטי לאייפון ולאייפד שפותר את הבעיה. "נתנה גישה לליבת המערכת"

בכל פרק ננתח את הסיפורים מהשבוע החולף שכדאי שתדע - וגם נענה על השאלות שלכם, הגולשים. ובפרק הראשון: סמסונג באירוע הכרזה, שמועות לקראת האייפון 13 ואפליקציות זדוניות שכדאי שתסירו עכשיו מהמכשיר. האזינו