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Workers Don't Seem to Mind Their Company Spying on Them

Charlotte Henry ·

Employers are finding an ever increasing number of ways to keep tabs on what their staff are up to. You might think this would trigger an employee revolt. Yet, aside from some high profile examples, that is not the case. Fast Company explored why workers do not seem to mind being monitored.

While the specter of employers widely abusing workers’ privacy looms large, it doesn’t seem to be much of a real issue in most offices, factories, and shops across the country. “Concern is very broad but not very deep,” says Lewis Maltby, the president of the National Workrights Institute and a longtime advocate for protecting the civil liberties of employees. When he hears from workers, he notes, it’s typically not because management is poking around into private matters; it’s because their personal information was erased without any warning when they left their job and their employer reclaimed a company-owned cellphone.

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Would You Give Apple More of Your Data?

Andrew Orr ·

Here’s a question to ask yourself: Would you let Apple collect more of your data to improve its services? The company already collects some stuff, but it doesn’t seem to be enough for services like Siri. Mark Sullivan’s answer to that question is yes.

Everyone is waking up to the fact that big tech companies have been skimming personal data for years and not saying much about it. And don’t get me wrong, the tech companies deserve all the mistrust and scrutiny they’re getting. But I hope they get a second chance with user data, because there’s so much cool stuff they could do with it, especially in the age of AI. I think they might find that many of us would be fine with giving up more of our personal data–if we get more in return.

I think my answer is yes as well. I would love for Apple’s services to be more personalized to me. I just don’t want my data to be used for advertising. The premium price I pay in lieu of ads is for the hardware.

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Kaspersky Lab Jumps on Apple Monopoly Bandwagon

Andrew Orr ·

Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity company accused of having ties with the Kremlin, violated App Store rules and had its app removed. Now it says Apple uses its “position as platform owner and supervisor” to give itself special treatment.

From our point of view, Apple appears to be using its position as platform owner and supervisor of the sole channel for delivering apps to users of the platform to dictate terms and prevent other developers from operating on equal terms with it. As a result of the new rules, developers of parental control apps may lose some of their users and experience financial impact.

You can obviously tell I think this is hilarious. To be fair, developers getting sherlocked by Apple is a real thing, but having your app removed because it breaks the rules isn’t getting sherlocked.

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Google Hit With $1.69 billion EU Anti-Trust Fine Over Adsense Restrictions

Charlotte Henry ·

LONDON – Google was hit by its third anti-trust fine from EU regulators Wednesday. EU competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said the company had stifled competition in the online advertising market and had to pay €1.49 billion ($1.69 billion), CNBC reported. Google’s rivals had claimed that the company placed Adsense ads on websites on the proviso that other advertising systems were not present not the same page.

Google’s Adsense pushes ads triggered by search engines embedded websites. Rival firms to Google had claimed the product was placed on websites with the understanding that no other systems could be on the same page. The Alphabet company has previously defended its use of the technology, claiming it has been in place since 2006, is now superseded, and is a minor product. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Google’s core advertising business saw revenue increase 20 percent from the previous quarter to $32.6 billion — the same rate of growth as the last quarter.

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Pandora Now Lets Users Pick the Algorithm That Selects Their Music

Charlotte Henry ·

Pandora is now letting users select which algorithm their music is picked by. The music streaming service added 5 choices on top of its classic algorithm, The Verge reported. The new options, called Pandora Modes, are available to both free and premium account holders.

There are now 6 listening modes: My Station, which is Pandora’s original algorithm; Crowd Faves, which will favor the songs that get the most thumbs-ups by other users in that station; Deep Cuts, which will serve up lesser-known songs by an artist or in a genre; Discovery, which will play more artists that aren’t usually on that station; Newly Released, which will only pick the newest songs from an artist or in a genre; and Artist Only, which will let you binge entirely on a single artist’s catalog.

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US DoE and Intel Building First Exascale Supercomputer

John Martellaro ·

Intel’s newsroom reports: “Targeted for 2021 delivery, the Argonne National Laboratory Supercomputer will enable high-performance computing [HPC] and artificial intelligence [AI] at Exascale” The work is being done with sub-contractor Cray Inc.

This means 10^18 floating point operations per second, or exaFLOPS.  Intel continues:

The Aurora system’s exaFLOP of performance – equal to a “quintillion” floating point computations per second – combined with an ability to handle both traditional high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) will give researchers an unprecedented set of tools to address scientific problems at exascale. These breakthrough research projects range from developing extreme-scale cosmological simulations, discovering new approaches for drug response prediction and discovering materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells. The Aurora system will foster new scientific innovation and usher in new technological capabilities, furthering the United States’ scientific leadership position globally.

The Argonne National Laboratory is in Lemont, Illinois.