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Growing cybersecurity demand opportunity to create more racially inclusive workforce

Cybersecurity experts are in demand, but the current workforce contains too few African Americans and other minorities. Creating a more racially inclusive workforce benefits everyone and is vital to better identify technological risks and vulnerabilities. David Lee, founder of The Identity Jedi, explains how the industry can improve representation and the benefits that will offer.

 

 

MARIETTA, Ga.  — African Americans make up only 9.2% of cybersecurity analysts.1 This lack of representation is not merely unfortunate; it presents multiple issues in terms of creating effective security protocols and addressing critical vulnerabilities.

 

David Lee, and expert on identity access management and founder of The Identity Jedi, explains, “We live in a world where tech is intertwined in everything we do. In order to create products that serve all people, we need to make sure that we have all people building those products.”

 

The value behind bridging the diversity gap

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has become a hot topic in all industries, with research indicating how these initiatives can improve a company’s performance and outcomes. Companies that reported above-average diversity on their management teams also reported innovation revenue that was 19% higher than that of companies with below-average leadership diversity—45% of total revenue versus just 26%.2

 

Other benefits to DEI for organizations include greater cash flow and the ability to capture new markets as well as increased profitability. Studies have found 2.3 times higher cash flow than those of companies with more monolithic staff.3 Diverse organizations are also 70% more likely to capture new markets than companies that do not incorporate under-represented groups in their recruitment processes.4 Finally, a 1% increase in racial diversity similarity between upper and lower management increases firm productivity by between $729 and $1,590 per employee per year.5

 

The first step in bridging the diversity gap is to develop representation. As Lee says, “There are a million ways to accomplish something in tech. The more diverse perspective you have, the stronger product you get. Tech is used by everyone, so it should be created by a representation of everyone.”
He challenges organizations to:

  • Actually want to solve the problem. If an organization doesn’t really care, then it will show in their efforts and results.
  • Talk to current Black employees and create a safe space for them to talk about their experience.
  • Engage with the local community, from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to Black tech organizations such as Cyversity, NSBE and ACM, among others, and connect talent departments to these pipelines.

 

Become intentional about diversity, equity and inclusion

Lee finds that having an intentional DE&I program helps bring awareness and representation to the field of cybersecurity. “Organizations need to engage with HBCU’s,” he advises “Connect with their computer science and engineering departments to host events and provide pathways to connect with candidates.”

 

Other ways that cybersecurity companies or any organization can boost their employee diversity include creating a safe space for workers to connect with their co-workers and embrace their culture via employee resource groups. Offering leadership training on bias that includes open and intentional conversations with company leaders about bias can also be beneficial.

 

Lee’s firsthand experiences as a Black professional within the technology industry inspired him to write “The Only One in the Room: The Unwritten Laws of Being Black in Tech.” The book shares the challenges he and other African Americans have faced in that sector, in addition to drawing attention to the importance of representation and diversity in reshaping the industry.

 

About The Identity Jedi

David Lee transitioned from a software engineering background to become a harbinger of change and inclusivity in the tech world. With over two decades of experience, he has left his mark on government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and numerous fields, specializing in identity and access management. Recognizing that for technology to truly transform the world, it must embrace diversity, David serves as an agent of transformation, inspiring individuals to unlock their full potential. His influential voice and actionable insights have solidified his reputation as a respected figure in the ever-evolving tech landscape. When he speaks people listen. He is The Identity Jedi. www.theidentityjedi.com

 

References:

  1. “Cyber Security Analyst demographics and statistics in the US”; Zippia; Accessed October 26, 2023; zippia.com/cyber-security-analyst-jobs/demographics/.
  2. Rocío Lorenzo, Nicole Voigt, Miki Tsusaka, Matt Krentz, and Katie Abouzahr; “How Diverse Leadership Teams Boost Innovation”; January 23, 2018; Boston Consulting Group; bcg.com/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation. 
  3. Reiners, Bailey; “50 Diversity in the Workplace Statistics to Know”; Built in; updated March 28, 2023; builtin.com/diversity-inclusion/diversity-in-the-workplace-statistics#0.
  4. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Melinda Marshall, Laura Sherbin; “How Diversity Can Drive Innovation”; Harvard Business Review; December 2013; hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation.
  5. Lauren Turner, Maya Fischhoff; “How Diversity Increases Productivity”; Network for Business Sustainability; January 19, 2021; nbs.net/how-diversity-increases-productivity/.

 

–– jotopr.com

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On Instagram, journalists and creators inside Gaza see a surge in followers as they document the Israel-Hamas war

—  One journalist has added more than 12 million followers.  The work highlights some of the challenges and dangers of covering the conflict.

 

 

NBC News:

 

Before early October, Motaz Azaiza’s Instagram account documented life in Gaza to about 25,000 followers with a mix of daily life and the ongoing hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

 

That began to change in the days after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel and the retaliation on Gaza. Since then, more than 12.5 million people have begun following Azaiza’s feed, which has become a daily chronicle of Israeli strikes.

Many other journalists, digital creators and people active on social media based in the region have seen a similar uptick in followers. Plestia Alaqad, a journalist whose work has been featured by NBC News, has gained more than 2.1 million, according to the social media analytics company Social Blade. Mohammed Aborjela, a digital creator, gained 230,000. Journalist Hind Khoudary drew 273,000 in the last five days of October. Photographer and videographer Ali Jadallah added more than 1.1 million.

 

Those surges have made Instagram, an app generally associated with lighthearted social media posts and lifestyle influencers, a suddenly crucial view into Gaza. The app has previously been embraced by some journalists, most notably photojournalists, but the sudden increase in followers appears to have no precedent.

 

The posts can at times be difficult to absorb. Most if not all appear to be firsthand videos rather than recycled content: People pulled from rubble, children crying over the bodies of their parents, and to-camera accounts of what the journalists are seeing and feeling.

 

The unfiltered coverage, as seen in the Instagram post below, adds a unique element to the broader journalistic efforts to capture what’s happening in Gaza.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzBI6aigIqX/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

 

It’s a role that Instagram may not fully embrace (parent company Meta has broadly moved away from the news), but it appears the company is doing little to discourage the growth of the accounts. The app has rules against graphic content but does make exceptions for posts that are “newsworthy and in the public interest.” Some posts are initially covered by a “sensitive content” warning.

 

Instagram and other social media apps have come under some scrutiny over concerns that pro-Palestinian voices have been censored or suppressed. Meta confirmed in October that the company had accidentally limited the reach of some posts but said the problem was a bug that did not apply to one specific type of content and denied any censorship.

 

Meta also worked with the people behind the account Eye on Palestine after the company said it had detected a possible hacking attempt. That account had already been among the most-followed accounts focused on Palestinians before the war, with about 3.5 million followers. The account is back online after a multiday outage and now has more than 7 million.

 

The emergence of Instagram also comes as the social media platform X, once the go-to destination for journalists and witnesses to breaking news, has come under fire for its shortcomings around misinformation related to the conflict. Telegram is also a popular app for unfiltered updates but has a relatively small user base in the U.S.

 

A Meta spokesperson declined to make anyone from Instagram available for an interview.

 

Foreign journalists covering the Israel-Hamas war are facing enormous challenges obtaining firsthand information, and that dynamic is having a deep effect on the world’s understanding of what’s happening especially in Gaza, according to organizations that monitor press freedom.

 

The obstacles for reporters are wide-ranging even for a war zone. These include physical danger to journalists, lack of access to Gaza itself and the logistical challenges of operating within Gaza such as electricity and internet blackouts.

 

Many major media operations including NBC News have sent reporters to Israel to cover Hamas’ attack and the ongoing conflict, during which more than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed and more than 200 have been taken hostage, according to Israeli authorities. More than 9,000 people have been killed in Gaza from the Israeli counteroffensive, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

 

Few foreign reporters are believed to be in Gaza, according to journalists outside the territory. Israel and Egypt control entry to Gaza and have not allowed in foreign journalists, according to a petition this week signed by nearly 100 French journalists demanding access to the strip, France 24 reported Tuesday.

 

Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who closely follows social media, said the accounts are important “precisely because of the chaotic and toxic information environment that is so heavily mediated and sanitised.”

 

“It is so hard for anyone to get into Gaza that these journalists using Instagram are one of the only windows into bearing witness,” he said in a text message.

 

Those challenges were most apparent last Friday when a near-total communications blackout and Israeli bombing made it almost impossible to tell what was happening in Gaza. Also Friday, Reuters reported that Israel’s military had told international news organizations that it could not guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in Gaza.

 

As communication systems were gradually restored, voices from Gaza began to cut through the silence on social media.

 

A video of Khoudary and Azaiza uploaded on Saturday served as a sort of public service announcement confirming they were alive. Many commenters expressed their concern, worried that their lack of posts meant they had been hurt or killed. Neither responded to interview requests.

 

They both said they were struggling to get in touch with family members in other parts of the Gaza Strip.

 

“We don’t know where our families are and we don’t know if they’re ok and we really need to know what they’re going through because yesterday was a very bad night,” Khoudary said. “It was one of the deadliest nights on the Gaza strip.”

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cy8gT7PtfwX/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

 

More than 30 journalists and media workers have been killed in the conflict as of Tuesday, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom organization based in New York. Another nine journalists were reported missing or detained, it said.

 

Sherif Mansour, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said any journalist working in Gaza is in danger.

 

“In a way, the people who are needed the most are the ones who are most vulnerable right now,” Mansour, who is based in the U.S., said in a phone interview.

 

He said that Hamas has contributed to the censorship of journalists within Gaza including through harassment.

 

“It’s basically hard to get by or be able to do work, but there has always been enough people trying to tell the story,” he said.

 

A regular stream of videos and images has made it out of Gaza, but the spread of misinformation and unverified claims — often in the form of legitimate content that is old or inaccurately described — has added to the challenge of verifying information from the region. On Instagram, many of the Palestinian journalists are verified, which means Instagram confirmed the identity of the person behind the account.

 

Jones noted that declining trust in the media has pushed some people to seek information directly from firsthand sources.

 

“They are also providing unfiltered coverage that has a raw and authentic quality, and the current distrust of the mainstream media is not helped by the more sanitised (for understandable reasons) content,” he wrote.

 

 

CORRECTION (Nov. 3, 2023, 9:30 a.m. ET): A pervious version of this article misstated Marc Owen Jones’ position at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. He is an associate professor, not assistant.

 

— Techmeme

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Sources: Bungie cut ~100 jobs after executives said the company’s revenue was 45% below projections for the year, citing a drop in Destiny 2’s popularity

—  Sales at studio were running 45% below projections for year 

— Layoffs are part of a bigger revamp at Sony PlayStation unit

 

 

Jason Schreier / Bloomberg:

 

Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2.

Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting.

Attendees play Bungie’s “Destiny 2” during E3 in Los Angeles. Attendees play the “Destiny 2” video game developed by Bungie Inc. and published by Activision Blizzard Inc. during the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Tuesday, June 13, 2017. For three days, leading-edge companies, groundbreaking new technologies and never-before-seen products is showcased at E3. — Photographer: Troy Harvey/Bloomberg — Photographer: Troy Harvey/Bloomberg

Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall.

 

The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product.

In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up.

But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts.

Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month.

The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office.

TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.”

PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign.

Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.

 

 

— Techmeme

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Google completes its switch to mobile-first indexing of Search, a process that began in November 2016, and plans to reduce use of its legacy desktop crawler

—  Google said it will turn off the indexing crawler information in the settings page in Search Console.

 

 

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:

 

Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative that started just about seven years ago is now complete, according to Google. “It’s been a long road, getting from there to here. We’re delighted to announce that the trek to Mobile First Indexing is now complete,” John Mueller from Google wrote on the Google blog.

 

History. As a reminder, Google started mobile-first indexing over 6.5 years ago, and eventually, after publishing deadline after deadline, Google removed the deadline. Google first introduced mobile-first indexing back in November 2016, and by December 2018, half of all sites in Google’s search results were from mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing simply means that Google will crawl your site from the eyes of a mobile browser and use that mobile version for indexing and ranking.

 

Google in early March 2020, before all the lockdowns began across most of the world, announced the deadline for all sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing would be September 2020. At that time, Google said, “To simplify, we’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.”  Then in July 2020, Google moved that deadline once again to March 2021.

 

But in May, Google told us that it was done switching sites over to mobile-indexing, so this announcement, that it is “done” now is a bit confusing.

 

What now. Google said there is “a very small set of sites which do not work on mobile devices at all.” Google explained that those “are primarily that the page shows errors to all mobile users, that the mobile version of the site is blocked with robots.txt while the desktop version is allowed for crawling, or that all pages on the mobile site redirect to the homepage.”

 

Google said these types of issues are issues that Google cannot workaround. Google said it will “continue to try to crawl these sites with our legacy desktop Googlebot crawler for the time being, and will re-evaluate the list a few times a year.”

 

Google will also reduce its crawling with legacy desktop Googlebot.

 

Search Console changes. Google also announced that it will be turning off the indexing crawler information in the settings page in Google Search Console. Google is removing this because the “information is no longer needed since all websites that work on mobile devices are now being primarily crawled with our mobile crawler,” Google explained.

 

Why we care. That is all folks – this is one for the history books. Mobile-first indexing is now really done, and Google will soon stop crawling via its legacy desktop crawler completely.

 

 

Read more here:

Google says mobile-first indexing is complete after almost 7 years

 

— Techmeme

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Align receives Best Cloud Services Provider Award in the 2023 Hedgeweek US Awards for its innovative Managed IT Solutions

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#alternativeinvestment–Align, the premier global provider of technology infrastructure solutions and Managed IT Services, announces today that it has been awarded Best Cloud Services Provider in the 2023 Hedgeweek US Awards.

 

This annual award recognizes excellence among fund managers and service providers in the US across a wide range of categories. As the top Cloud Service Provider, Align prides itself on offering the highest-quality managed IT services for hedge funds. The Align IT Suite, Align’s complete Managed Services platform, is built on the foundation of the Microsoft public cloud, offering flexible, secure, compliant managed services for clients, particularly those in the alternative investment industry.

 

Chris Zardima, Managing Director of Align Managed Services, expresses his gratitude for the recognition for Hedgeweek, stating, ” We are honored to have received recognition as the top Cloud Services Provider by Hedgeweek. In response to the dynamic demands and security concerns brought about by the changing financial services landscape, we have taken a proactive stance. Our cornerstone managed IT solution, the Align IT Suite, is strategically hosted within the Microsoft public cloud. This deliberate decision empowers us to provide our clients with IT solutions that exhibit both scalability and adaptability, while also proactively addressing the evolving regulatory and threat landscapes.”

 

As a trailblazer in the industry, Align became the first Managed Services Provider to introduce an all-encompassing Public Cloud-based platform tailored exclusively for the Alternative Financial Services sector. As a premier Tier 1 Microsoft Azure cloud services provider with a singular focus on the alternative investment industry, Align has broadened its portfolio by delivering cybersecurity solutions meticulously designed for Registered Investment Advisors and the Alternative Investment (ALT) community. Align has been a pioneering advocate for the adoption of public cloud computing as the ideal foundation for shaping a modern IT environment for fund managers. Respected organizations from around the world place their unwavering trust in Align for the management of their IT infrastructure.

 

“Our award-winning solution simplifies IT management while addressing the critical needs of security and compliance,” remarks Vinod Paul, Chief Operating Officer.

 

“Our services provide the Alternative Financial Services industry with the confidence, reliability, and adaptability necessary to excel in the dynamic IT environment of today. Through Align Managed Services, clients can harness solutions engineered to lower operational expenses, expedite workflows, mitigate risks, and enhance and streamline the multitude of controls essential for meeting both existing regulatory compliance standards and the ongoing expectations of due diligence.”

 

To learn more about Align, go to www.align.com and follow Align on LinkedIn and at @AlignITAdvisor on Twitter.

 

About Align

Align is a premier global provider of technology infrastructure solutions. For over 35 years, leading firms worldwide have relied on Align to guide them through IT challenges, delivering complete, secure solutions for business change and growth. Align is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and has offices in New York City, London, Chicago, San Francisco, Arizona, New Jersey, and Virginia. Learn ore at https://www.align.com/managed-services.

Contacts

Ashley Holbrook

aholbrook@align.com
212-546-6159

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A look at the hard right tilt of X, which once served as a hub of real-time news and global debate, and how its political shift could intensify business woes

—  The billionaire bought Twitter to revive its business and make it less “woke.”  He has succeeded at only one of those goals.

 

Washington Post:

 

 

One year after billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, aiming to rid it of a “woke mind virus” that he believed was suppressing free speech, the site’s business outlook appears dire.

The number of people actively tweeting has dropped by more than 30 percent, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post, and the company — which the entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX has renamed X — is hemorrhaging advertisers and revenue, interviews show.

But in at least one respect, Musk has delivered on his original promise: Twitter has become far less “woke.”

Through dramatic product changes, sudden policy shifts and his own outsize presence on the platform, Musk has rapidly re-engineered who has a voice on a service that used to be the hub of real-time news and global debate. A site that fueled social movements such as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo has veered noticeably rightward under Musk, especially in the United States, say organizers from across the political spectrum.


— Elon Musk at a Paris start-up and innovation fair in June. The number of people actively tweeting on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has fallen sharply, according to previously unreported data obtained by The Washington Post. (Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)

Those accounts have been on a  shallow upward trend, but then turn more sharply upward on Oct 27, 2022, the day Elon Musk bought Twitter, and  have stayed on a steeper upward trend since then.
A Post analysis of dozens of conservative and right-wing influencers and media figures found that many saw their follower counts rise on the day Musk became owner and continue rising at a rate higher than under Twitter’s previous ownership. None of the dozens of popular liberal and left-wing accounts examined by The Post show the same pattern.

 

Read more here:

A look at the hard right tilt of X, which once served as a hub of real-time news and global debate, and how its political shift could intensify business woes

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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Sources: Byju’s plans to sell Epic, acquired for $500M, to settle debts after defaulting on $1.2B+ in loans, and may also sell Great Learning, bought for $600M

—  Online education company was once India’s most valuable start-up but now plans asset sales to settle debts

 

 

Chloe Cornish / Financial Times:

 

 

An educational technology empire rapidly assembled by Byju’s during a pandemic funding boom is now set to be dismantled, as what was once India’s most valuable start-up looks to asset disposals to settle its pressing debts.

 

Byju’s had used loans and a war chest of more than $2bn, gathered from venture capital during the pandemic, to go on an acquisition spree, aiming to capitalise on the trend towards online learning and become a global edtech powerhouse. But overexpansion and a post-pandemic contraction in its market have left it desperate for cash to pay off creditors. The principal ones hold notes for a $1.2bn dollar-denominated term loan it took out in 2021 and has defaulted on, embroiling it in lawsuits and countersuits across the US.

 

In addition, it has borrowed $250mn this year from investment firm Davidson Kempner Capital Management, although two people with knowledge of the situation said under $100mn was disbursed before Byju’s defaulted on that loan too.

 

A lawyer familiar with the situation said he expected “Byju’s to drive a lot of M&A in the coming months.” Its efforts to realise cash through disposals are set to begin with Epic, a California-based digital reading platform, which it acquired in 2021 for $500mn. One person familiar with the matter said term sheets had been drawn up for a deal and another said Moelis, the investment bank, was running the sales process. Moelis declined to comment.

 

Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, head of consumer and internet at Singapore-based Aletheia Capital, said “a battle for the spoils” was beginning, as “various parts of the business could be sold to people who are interested in buying an asset at a discount to its fair value.”

 

Those spoils could include Byju’s subsidiary Great Learning, which offers online higher education courses. Through legal action, Byju’s term lenders won the right to appoint financial firm Kroll to oversee the Singapore-based edtech company. Byju’s acquired Great Learning just two years ago for $600mn, but two people familiar with the matter said it was likely Great Learning would ultimately be sold to help settle debts.

 

Byju’s financial problems also extend to the presentation of its accounts. It is roughly one year late in filing them for its financial year that ended in March 2022 and its chief financial officer Ajay Goel is quitting the company at the end of this week. Goel is rejoining Indian conglomerate Vedanta as CFO, after only leaving it in April to join Byju’s. He told investors in June that the audit to March 2022 would be completed by September.

 

The edtech company, which delayed reporting a $560mn loss in its 2020-2021 year, has suffered the resignation of its auditor Deloitte and of three board members representing its backers. One of them, Prosus, has written down its stake to give Byju’s an implied valuation of just $5bn, down from $22bn last year.  Byju’s did not respond to a request for comment.

 

 

 

— Techmeme

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As Cruise suspends all driverless operations, a look at the lack of clear federal regulations and fragmented oversight governing self-driving cars in the US

—  The whiplash from approval to ban in just two months highlights the fragmented oversight governing the fledgling industry

 

 

Trisha Thadani / Washington Post:

 

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Two months before Cruise’s driverless cars were yanked off the streets here for rolling over a pedestrian and dragging her about 20 feet, California regulators said they were confident in self-driving technology and gave the company permission to operate its robotaxi service around the city.

 

That approval was a pivotal moment for the self-driving car industry, as it expanded one of the biggest test cases in the world for the technology. But now, following a horrendous Oct. 2 crash that critically injured a jaywalking pedestrian — and Cruise’s initial misrepresentation over what actually happened that night — officials here are rethinking whether self-driving cars are ready for the road, and experts are encouraging other states to do the same.

This Thursday, just two days after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s driverless permits, the company said it would suspend all driverless operations around the country to examine its process and earn back public trust.

“It was just a matter of time before an incident like this occurred,” San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said of the Oct. 2 crash. “And it was incredibly unfortunate that it happened, but it is not a complete surprise.”

Immediately after California’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted in August to allow General Motors’ Cruise and Google’s Waymo to charge for rides 24/7 around San Francisco, Chiu filed a motion to halt the commercial expansion, arguing the driverless cars had serious “public safety ramifications.”

Here in California, the whiplash from approval to ban in just two months highlights the fragmented oversight governing the self-driving car industry — a system that allowed Cruise to operate on San Francisco’s roads for more than three weeks following the October collision, despite dragging a human pinned underneath the vehicle.

California Assembly member Phil Ting (D), whose district includes San Francisco, said the DMV did “the right thing” by suspending the permits when it learned the full extent of the crash. While state legislators are grappling with how to control this rapidly developing industry, he said the DMV already has a rigorous permit approval process for autonomous vehicles. Cruise, for example, said it has received seven different permits over the past few years from the DMV to operate in California.

In California alone, there are more than 40 companies — ranging from young start-ups to tech giants — that have permits to test their self-driving cars in San Francisco, according to the DMV. According to a Washington Post analysis of the data, the companies collectively report millions of miles on public roads every year, along with hundreds of mostly minor accidents.

“It’s hard being first, that’s the problem,” Ting said. “We are doing the best we can with what we know, while knowing that [autonomous vehicles] are part of our future. But how do we regulate it, not squash it?”

 

Read more here:

As Cruise suspends all driverless operations, a look at the lack of clear federal regulations and fragmented oversight governing self-driving cars in the US

 

 

— Techmeme

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A Twitter user since 2007 reflects on leaving due to Elon Musk swapping stasis at the company for chaos

Leaving Twitter

I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future

Benedict Evans:

 

 

—  Twitter always used to look a lot like Craigslist.

 

It stumbled into something that a lot of people found very useful, with very strong network effects, and then it squatted on those network effects for a generation, while the tech industry moved on. Twitter, as a technology company, has been irrelevant to everything that’s going on for a decade. It was the place where we talked about what mattered, but Twitter the company didn’t matter at all – indeed it did nothing for so long that people got bored of complaining about it.

 

Meanwhile, lots of people tried to build a better Craigslist and a better Twitter, but though a better product was pretty easy, the network effects were too strong and none of them really worked. Instead, we unbundled use cases one by one. As Andrew Parker pointed out in 2010, a whole range of people from Airbnb to Zillow to Tinder unbundled separate pieces of Craigslist into billion dollar companies that didn’t look like Craigslist and solved some individual need much better. This is often the real challenge to tech incumbents: once the network effects are locked in, it’s very hard to get people to switch to something that’s roughly the same but 10% better – they switch to something that solves one underlying need in an entirely new way.

 

Hence, Mastodon has been around since 2016 without getting much traction, but slices of conversation, content or industry have been unbundled to Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Signal, Discord or, more recently, Substack, which someone joked was Twitter’s paywall.

 

Meanwhile, Twitter itself drifted aimlessly for a decade, becoming known in Silicon Valley as a place where no-one could get anything done. This is a big part of why Elon Musk was able to buy it – $44bn was a top-of-the-market price, but even Snap was worth $75bn in January 2022, when he started building a stake – how much bigger should Twitter have been? And so, when he made his bid, there was, briefly, a lot of enthusiasm in tech: pent-up frustration with the existing product and a sense of how much better it could be; enthusiasm that there could be innovation and new product ideas (and, from a small but noisy group, frustration with the politics of Twitter’s content policies, of which more in a moment).

 

It didn’t work out like that. The last year swapped stasis for chaos. Stuff breaks at random and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a decision. The advertisers have fled, and no-one knows what will be broken by accident or on purpose tomorrow. The example that’s closest to home for me was that the in-house newsletter product was shut down – and then links to other newsletters were banned. Pick one! It’s hard to see anyone who depends on having a long-term platform investing in anything that Twitter builds, when it might not be there tomorrow.

 

There are various diagnoses for this. Tesla has sometimes been run in chaos as well, but the pain of that is on the employees, not the customers: you can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide the car should have five wheels and ship that the next day, but you can make those kinds of decisions in software, and Elon Musk does, all the time. Perhaps it’s a fundamental failure to understand how you run a community. Or something else. But whatever the explanation, Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech – ‘Watch One Man Turn $40bn Into $4 In 24 Months!’

 

Meanwhile, beyond the chaos, there has been no sense for the actual users of where we’re going. There was a plan, both ruthless and chaotic, to reset a broken and grotesquely overstaffed company culture and turn it into a place that can execute, but no coherent sense of what it should be executing. What should those newly hard-core engineers be shipping? A ‘super app’? A universal content platform with no external links? Your financial life? Seriously?

 

And then, there are the Nazis.

 

This is a debate with baggage. Part of the criticism of Old Twitter was a perceived tendency to trigger-happy moderation, and there is in fact a pretty mainstream view in the content moderation world that you shouldn’t (or indeed can’t, practically) try to ban and block anything you don’t like (unless it’s actually illegal), but instead you should have a spectrum of what’s objectionable and control things within that by controlling visibility. Keep things out of the recommendations and suggestions, down-rank them in the feed and replies, and don’t let them monetise or advertise. There will be some bad stuff, but the worse it is the fewer people will see it. Meanwhile, pour your effort into stopping scammers and state manipulation, and think about how your product design might encourage or discourage the rest of us from being mean. Reasonable people can disagree about that. But.

 

But it didn’t work out like that. The teams that looked for bots, scammers and state actors were mostly fired, and the scammers, Nazis and propagandists all bought the ‘Blue Ticks’. These little badges used to mean ‘notable person’ (in a chaotic and inconsistent way typical of the old Twitter) and are now supposed only to mean ‘real person’ (but often don’t) – and they give you both amplification in all the algorithms and a share of revenue if you drive a lot of replies. The more you troll, and the more furious replies you generate, the more Twitter promotes you and the more Twitter pays you. We saw this at its logical conclusion in the last week, with deliberate misinformation promoted by what we used to call ‘fake accounts’ that now get promoted by the algorithm because they pay their $8/month. It turns out that social networks are harder than rocket science.

 

And then, there’s Elon.

 

I once called Elon Musk ‘a bullshitter who delivers’ – he says a lot of stuff, and yet, there are the cars and the self-landing rockets. People generally struggle with one or other of these – they will refuse to accept the problem in selling a car that can’t drive itself as ‘full self driving’, or they will say ‘he didn’t found Tesla!’, forgetting that he’s run it for the last 15 years. Most of what you see at Tesla or SpaceX really is his creation – but half of what he says is bullshit.

 

Until recently, though, the bullshit was mostly about cars or tunnels. It wasn’t repeating obvious anti-semitic dog-whistles. It wasn’t telling us that George Soros is plotting to destroy western civilisation. It wasn’t engaging with and promoting white supremacists. It wasn’t, as this week, telling us all to read a very obvious misinformation account, with a record of anti-semitism, as the best source on Israel. Of course, it had bought a Blue Tick.

 

In talking about this, I am reminded very much of talking about the last leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who had somehow spent much of a career devoted to anti-racism, well, supporting and praising anti-semites (‘the world’s most unlucky anti-racist’). The Chief Rabbi declared that British Jews were afraid of a Labour election victory, and yet too many people with a tribal loyalty to the party just refused to read, see or hear any of this. They decided to blind themselves.

 

If you see a man claim that he’ll have ‘full self-driving’ working ‘next year’ for half a decade and can’t make fun of that just a little, you are probably blinding yourself too, but it does’t matter much. And maybe you don’t care much about this, or have decided not to see it. But I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all, for the foreseeable future, because I think it does matter.

 

 

— Techmeme

Categories
Business International & World Regulations & Security Technology

WIPO: In 2022, Chinese entities applied for 29,853 AI patents, up from 29,000 in 2021, almost 80% more than the 16,800 US filings, down from 17,800 in 2021

—  Patent filings from China almost doubles the sum of US in 2022 

— Top players like Baidu, Alibaba race to monetize AI products

 

 

Bloomberg:

 

China is increasing its lead over the US in AI patent filings, underscoring the Asian nation’s determination to shape and influence a technology that could have broad implications for the world’s richest economies.

Chinese institutions applied for 29,853 AI-related patents in 2022, climbing from 29,000 the year prior, according to data that the World Intellectual Property Organization provided to Bloomberg News. That’s almost 80% more than US filings, which shrank 5.5%. Overall, China accounted for more than 40% of global AI applications over the past year, the data from the United Nations-affiliated agency showed. Japan and South Korea rounded out the 2022 leaders, with a combined 16,700 applications.

 

 

R&D Drive

Patent applications for AI-related inventions

World Intellectual Property Organization

Data are subject to revision

 

The numbers illustrate how Beijing has pushed Chinese companies and agencies to gain an edge in areas such as chipmaking, space exploration and military sciences. More recently, President Xi Jinping has ordered the nation to accelerate fundamental research in response to US efforts to curtail its access to advanced technologies. That’s triggered a flood of investment by Chinese companies in AI and quantum computing.

Baidu Inc. is now vying with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.  as well as startups such as Baichuan and Zhipu to develop a local answer to US rival OpenAI’s groundbreaking generative AI chatbot ChatGPT.

 

China is Leading the World in AI Patents Filing

It overtook the US in 2017 and has widened the gap since

Source: WIPO

 

Academics close to decision-makers in Beijing have argued that building an arsenal of patents is one of the most effective ways to counter Washington’s campaign of restrictions. Not all patent filings result in real-world inventions, but Chinese firms such as Huawei Technologies Co.  have established a track record of leading innovation in the past in sectors such as networking, supercomputing and image recognition.

China surpassed the US in the number of AI filings as far back as 2017, when local firms accelerated the use of algorithms in an array of businesses from car-hailing to online shopping.

 

— With assistance by Thomas Pfeiffer and Yuan Gao

— Techmeme