Monthly Archives: May 2022

The world's largest technology companies have shed over $1 trillion in value in just three trading sessions.

Stocks at large have sold off since the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday, but technology has endured more pain than other sectors of the economy.

Investors now have less interest in what drove business during a strong bull market in recent years, including during the pandemic, and are now pushing more money toward safer pockets of the market, including staples like Campbell Soup, General Mills and J.M. Smucker.

Market cap lost during last three trading sessions.

CNBC

Apple, the world's most valuable public company, has shed $220 billion in value since the close of trading on Wednesday, the day Fed Chair Jerome Powell declared that inflation was running too high and that there were no plans for a rate hike more than half of a percentage point.

Markets first moved up on Powell's comments, but the optimism sputtered out in the following days. Stocks went lower on Thursday, fell again on Friday and then still lower on Monday. The S&P 500 U.S. stock index fell below the 4,000 mark on Monday, having declined by 7% since Wednesday's close, while the Invesco Nasdaq 100 ETF is off by nearly 10% during the same period.

Here are the other big losses over the last three trading days:

WATCH: 'We like Big Tech stocks like Amazon and Apple right now,' says Needham's Laura Martin

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Tech giants lost more than $1 trillion in value in the last three trading days - CNBC

Apple, Google and Microsoft announced Thursday that they planned to expand support for a common standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium that does not require a password to sign in.

"This will simplify sign-ins across devices, websites and applications no matter the platform without the need for a single password," wrote Sampath Srinivas, PM director of Secure Authentication at Google and president of the FIDO Alliance, in a blog.

WHY IT MATTERS

The FIDO Alliance whose executive council comprises Srinivas along with representatives from Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Thales and NTT DoCoMo has been working toward a passwordless authentication protocol since 2012.

As noted in a joint press release, password-only authentication can create security issues that span industries leading to account takeovers, data breaches and disrupted services.

"While password managers and legacy forms of two-factor authentication offer incremental improvements, there has been industry-wide collaboration to create sign-in technology that is more convenient and more secure," said the companies.

Srinivas explained that the collaboration among Google, Apple and Microsoft means that a phone can store a FIDO credential called a passkey, which is used to unlock online website accounts or apps without a password.

"The passkey makes signing in far more secure, as its based on public key cryptography and is only shown to your online account when you unlock your phone," said Srinivas. "To sign into a website on your computer, youll just need your phone nearby and youll simply be prompted to unlock it for access.

"Once youve done this, you wont need your phone again and you can sign in by just unlocking your computer. Even if you lose your phone, your passkeys will securely sync to your new phone from cloud backup, allowing you to pick up right where your old device left off," Srinivas continued.

The capabilities are expected to become available across Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms over the course of the coming year.

"The complete shift to a passwordless world will begin with consumers making it a natural part of their lives. Any viable solution must be safer, easier and faster than the passwords and legacy multi-factor authentication methods used today," said Alex Simons, corporate vice president of Identity Program Management at Microsoft, in a statement.

"By working together as a community across platforms, we can at last achieve this vision and make significant progress toward eliminating passwords," Simons said. "We see a bright future for FIDO-based credentials in both consumer and enterprise scenarios and will continue to build support across Microsoft apps and services."

Privacy and security experts cheered the decision, saying it will help enable best practices.

"At CISA, we are working to raise the cybersecurity baseline for all Americans. Today is an important milestone in the security journey to encourage built-in security best practices and help us move beyond passwords," said Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in a statement.

"Cyber is a team sport, and were pleased to continue our collaboration," said Easterly.

THE LARGER TREND

Although not specifically geared toward healthcare, the passwordless strategies supported by Google, Microsoft and Apple have been used by some health systems to bolster their cybersecurity profile.

North York General Hospital, an academic medical center in Toronto, has worked with Thales whose head of consulting and industry relations,Alain Martin, serves as the FIDO Alliance's treasurer to provide hardware-based encryption technology and with IDENTOS to enable FIDO authentication.

The need for a more powerful cyber defense strategy is self-evident. Phishing incidents have troubled health systems for years, allowing bad actors access to sensitive data.Poor password hygiene makes hackers' jobs even easier.

ON THE RECORD

"Just as we design our products to be intuitive and capable, we also design them to be private and secure," said Kurt Knight, Apples senior director of platform product marketing, in a statement.

"Working with the industry to establish new, more secure sign-in methods that offer better protection and eliminate the vulnerabilities of passwords is central to our commitment to building products that offer maximum security and a transparent user experience all with the goal of keeping users personal information safe," Knight said.

Kat Jercich is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.Twitter: @kjercichEmail: kjercich@himss.orgHealthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

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Tech giants expand support for 'a passwordless world' - Healthcare IT News

Employees are quitting at record rates, and tech companies are scrambling to manage the turnover.

This problem is even hitting tech's biggest firms, which have long been magnets for talent. Employees at companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft told Insider they feel undervalued and underpaid compared with new hires scoring bigger compensation offers in the red-hot job market.

This market dynamic is sparking tensions among teams and a ripple effect of departures, as well as forcing companies to rethink how they hire and pay. The e-commerce firm Shopify recently addressed attrition woes in a town hall, while Amazon more than doubled its salary cap on base positions, to $350,000. Google sped up its hiring process, and DoorDash drastically changed how it compensates employees through equity in an attempt to stay competitive in the tough talent market.

But employees at various tech companies say these efforts don't go far enough, saying that pay remains unfair and that management has been dismissive of complaints about low compensation. At the same time, managers trying to move the needle say they're being met with pushback from higher-ups and struggling to maintain morale on their teams.

"My team saw that our software kept growing, but our salary wasn't growing to match," one former Salesforce manager, who recently left the company and asked to remain anonymous because he wasn't authorized to speak to the press, told Insider. "When new hires make more, it's a slap in the face, and it kills morale."

While companies like Amazon have overhauled their pay structures, some employees and hiring managers say pay increases are not applied evenly within tech firms.

One engineer who works at Amazon previously told Insider that despite Amazon's attempts to stay competitive, their pay was $127,000 and they'd had three managers in the past year. Since the company's pay-cap announcement in February, Amazon employees have described uneven pay increases some said they got raises of 60% or even 90%, while others said they got single-digit pay bumps barely keeping pace with inflation.

At a recent all-hands meeting, CEO Andy Jassy dodged employees' concerns about pay.

An Amazon spokesperson previously told Insider total compensation, which consists of base pay and equity-based pay such as restricted stock options, is based on an employee's role and level and informed by location, performance, and other factors. The spokesperson added that employees and candidates had choices about where they work and that the company regularly reviewed its compensation and benefits to ensure pay stayed competitive.

The issue isn't specific to Amazon. Other tech workers say upper management has continually dismissed their complaints of low pay. One manager at a large UK tech firm said a key member of his team quit after the company didn't raise her $120,000 salary to meet a competing offer but when the manager backfilled the role after she left, the company offered a new candidate with less experience $200,000.

Similarly, the former Salesforce manager, who worked at the company between 2019 and 2021, told Insider that across his 25-person team he received multiple complaints that tenured employees were being paid considerably less than new hires.

He said new hires in 2021 were paid on average $4,500 more than employees who'd worked at the company more than a year. For example, he said, one employee hired in 2021 was offered a $72,000 salary while another employee who had been in the same role for over a year made only $63,000.

He said that when he went to human resources to negotiate higher raises across his team, he was consistently shot down for "budget reasons," adding that management was prioritizing competitive hiring rather than increasing wages for current employees. He said that as employees started discussing pay in light of the job market, the disparities pushed three team members to leave for other companies.

Salesforce did not respond to a request for comment.

"I was told by management that employees specifically have to come out and ask for a raise, and they have to give you a number; you cannot just offer them a raise. Yet requests were tied up in so much red tape," the former manager told Insider.

While some companies are increasing base pay, a recent survey conducted by Global Equity Organization suggests that some tech firms are offering employees more equity.

But stock-market performance has led to concerns about this strategy, as increasing the equity portion of compensation becomes costly for employees when the stock underperforms. Buzzy companies like Shopify that were once able to offer employees lucrative packages because of their competitive stock prices are now having to address employee apprehension about plummeting shares.

An employee at a well-known payments company, who also requested to remain anonymous, said stock plays a significant part in the pay disparity between new hires and tenured employees.

The employee said they joined the firm in April 2021 with what they thought was a competitive compensation package. But they said the value of their restricted stock units had since dropped by nearly 40% compared with newer colleagues who joined in February.

The employee said that because of this they're looking to switch jobs again.

While some tech executives are taking steps to stop attrition, employees say companies aren't getting to the root causes of the issue: pay, transparency, and flexibility.

While Google has sped up its hiring process, some employees are leaving because of its return-to-work policy, which involves cutting pay if workers relocate. Meanwhile, companies like Airbnb have offered to let employees work from anywhere for the same pay.

One Google employee, who requested to remain anonymous because they aren't authorized to speak to the press, told Insider that Google's policy isn't "forward-thinking."

A Google representative told Insider that the company had "always provided top of market compensation" and that its "approach hasn't changed as we've shifted to a hybrid work model." They said Google believes that "the future of work will be flexible," pointing to a Work Location tool the company created last year to help employees approximately calculate how their salary would change if they moved to another region or state.

The spokesperson said that over 85% of requests to work remotely or transfer locations had been approved. But Google employees have told Insider that work-from-home approval has been unevenly applied.

Flexibility is proving to be a sticking point for many tech employees, but pay equity and transparency are still driving issues. In a survey of 3,252 members of the professional-networking company Elpha, 87% of respondents said they would value a companywide salary-transparency policy. But many tech companies discourage employees from openly discussing pay.

In one approach, the compliance-training startup Ethena recently changed its pay structure, saying it would use a formula accounting for things like level, performance reviews, and tenure. It said that if it were to bring on a new employee at a higher rate than it's currently paying employees, it would raise the pay of current employees in the same role to match.

Matt Dean, the company's vice president of engineering, told Insider that implementing the formula had been more "difficult than it seems at first," especially since the startup went from offering all employees the same below-market salary to paying employees at different rates. But he said he hopes transparency can lead to better retention.

"The last few years have given people a sense of clarity about what matters most to them," Dean said. "I think a lot of companies are losing in this new world companies with toxic cultures and ones that don't treat their team members with respect."

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How Tech Companies Are Responding to the 'Great Resignation' - Business Insider

The Department of Homeland Security revealed last week that it was creating a Disinformation Governance Board to distribute "best practices" for countering disinformation. The new board joins a growing choruswhich includes President Biden and former President Barack Obamathat views disinformation disseminated on social media as one of the biggest threats facing our democracy.

But there's a much bigger threat to democracy coming out of Silicon Valley and it's this: America's largest financial and tech increasingly act as independent countries, routinely exporting jobs, money and technology to our most significant global adversary. These companies, their assets, and increasingly their workers, exist wholly outside of America's democratic borders and under the auspices of China's anti-democratic ones. And they are bringing these undemocratic pressures back home with them, subverting our democracy from within.

Apple Computers, once the ultimate expression of American entrepreneurial innovation, epitomizes this new corporate mindset. With ever-increasing dependence on Beijing, the company is much more in line with Xi Jinping's promised "China dream" of greater wealth and technological supremacy than it is with the American Dream. The company may be based in Cupertino, but it produces two-fifths of its products in China, four times more than the share made in the U.S., and despite rising concerns about China's ascendancy, Apple is doubling down on its support for the emerging authoritarian world-state.

In 2016, Apple negotiated a $275 billion deal with China that guarantees the firm's continued dependence on the Middle Kingdom, with additional promises to share vital technology with our most important global adversary. The company recently announced plans to source some of its chips in China, and Apple also contributes to and profits from China's ever-expanding surveillance system.

But the growing divergence between Apple's interests and America's is not unique. As economic power consolidates here, some companies, notably Wall Street and the tech giants, have grown so large and powerful that they have become in essence their own nation states.

By 2020, the five largest tech companies had total revenue amounting to half of those of all state governments combined. In January this year, Apple's market cap was larger than the GDPs of all but seven countries. But this is not exceptional. Microsoft's market cap is larger than that of Canada, Brazil, Russia, Korea, or Mexico. Amazon does about the same.

But these companies don't employ masses of Americans to make their money; production is generally shifted elsewhere. Those non-elite jobs which do exist are often dangerous, short-term and driven by relentless monitoring. And even when it comes to tech workers, Big Tech goes elsewhere for (cheap) talent: Some 75 percent of Silicon Valley's workforce are not U.S. citizens. Many have H-IB visas, which make their holders essentially indentured servants, brought into the U.S. on short-term contracts to do work for tech companies that evade the burden of paying wages as high as they would to American workers.

Meanwhile, businesses like Apple have profited handsomely from China's industrial expansion. Throughout the period between 2004 and 2017, our reliance on Chinese inputs doubled. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this has cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000.

We saw the high cost of this dependency during the pandemic, when we could not even get basic medical supplies, and you can see it now in the seemingly endless shortages that continue to bedevil the economy, going a long way toward causing the staggering inflation we're experiencing.

Yet rather than increase our capacity to meet our own needs, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech giants and Wall Street firms are much less interested in American resilience than in benefiting from "a Chinese century."

It's China's future they are buildingwhile undermining ours.

This comes out in bizarre hypocrisies that go beyond resources and economics. Grandees will pay lip service to Black Lives Matter and the progressive race industry out of one side of their mouths, then happily look the other way when it comes to gross violations of human rights in China. Ray Dalio, founder of the giant Bridgewater Associates hedge fund, infamously dismissed China's repression of its Uyghur population and its crackdown on democratic sentiment in Hong Kong as the result of a "sacrosanct" desire for sovereignty. Facebook and Google partner with the Chinese Communist Party whose priority is to track down and punish dissenters. Here in the U.S., systemic racism is detected in the most minute form, but massive repression in China produces only excusesand assistance.

Similarly, the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) requirements pushed by Wall Street on U.S. companies reflect a de-nationalized globalism; the enlightened oligarch's "net zero" demands, celebrated by the media and many progressives, effectively place greater burdens on U.S. firms to cut carbon while demanding little from China. This bolsters the Middle Kingdom's notoriously high carbon supply chains in a country that emits more greenhouse gases than the United States and the EU combined.

The hypocrisy of financial firms like Blackrock calling to shut down U.S. energy while sending cash to China, which continues to build new coal plants, seems extreme even by Wall Street standards.

Given the size and might of these firms, only powerful entities like individual states or the U.S. government can curb their power. They mustthough it won't be easy; Wall Street has long wielded power in both parties, and tech firms are now among the most powerful lobbies in Washington, employing lobbyists on both the Right and Left. They recently dragooned a host of former defense and intelligence officials to sign a letter arguing that these companies are essentially "national treasures" and should not be subject to anti-trust or other regulatory curbs.

Not surprisingly, many of these worthies, including former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former Trump Director of National Intelligence chief Dan Coats, have close ties with firms that count Big Tech among their biggest clients.

Curbing the powers of Apple and the other Chinese satraps and bringing productive industry home can only be accomplished by looking out for fundamental American interests. This is not socialism or ultra-nationalism but common sense: Big companies are not intrinsically "post-national" and some, like Intel, are investing heavily in U.S. production. They should be encouraged to do so and rewarded for it. Returning to anti-trust enforcement would also provide running room for startups and help slow what one analyst described as "the transformation of disruptive tech companies into rent seeking monopolies."

Only a bipartisan opposition to Big Tech on the grounds of U.S. interests will achieve crucial goals like restoring competition and fending off Chinese assaults on this critical sector. And we've been missing the mark because our conversation about how to curb Big Tech has been too polarized, pitting a censored Right against a woke Left that enjoys censorship and fears any threats to it.

To stand up against such wealth and power will require a melding of the two populist movements, the right-wing nationalists and the traditional, pro-worker Left. Traditional progressivesnot the woke Astro-turf version funded by oligarchsmust eschew intersectionality if they wish to make common cause with an increasingly Republican working class. Similarly, Republicans need to recognize their constituents are not instinctively pro-business; if in 2020, 57 percent of Republicans said they were satisfied with big business, today it's only 31 percent.

While the oligarchs of both parties may struggle to understand the threat of the globalism embraced by Apple and other companies, the American people are wise to it. Public opinion toward China has cratered in the past five years from over 50 percent positive to barely 20 percent. Already both parties now include factions that favor more robust efforts to meet China's mounting challenge in science and technology, such as the U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which passed the Senate by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration has produced distinctly contrary signals by seeming to favor anti-trust and backing U.S. competitiveness but also pushing the appointment of pro-Beijing acolytes and weakening patent protection.

But this is more than the story of one administration. It's far more fundamental. We are at a crossroads right now with a major question that every American must answer for his or herself: Are we a nation with an economy, or just a convenient address for a few large, global companies who act essentially as nation states?

A democracy cannot work as a concert played by a few privileged players; it only works as symphony that includes the diversity and breadth of the citizenry.

It's time for the U.S. to reign in its Big Tech companies. They, not "disinformation," are the biggest threat to our democracy.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter. You can follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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The Independent Republics of Big Tech Are the Biggest Threat to Democracy - Newsweek

Hello, and welcome to Protocol Policy! Today, were talking about tech platforms responsibility in fighting misinformation in a post-Roe world. Plus, the Biden administration strikes a deal with ISPs, and Trump loses a court battle.

It took about a day from the leak of the Supreme Courts Roe decision for internet sleuths to decide theyd figured out whodunnit.

It started with a Twitter thread, which sent searches for the clerks name soaring moments later. Pretty soon, posts about the alleged leaker were lighting up Facebook. According to social media monitoring firm Brandwatch, mentions of the alleged leakers name (which were not sharing here) spiked by 7,300% within a few days.

The Supreme Court marshal is now investigating the leak, and its anyones guess whether this social media-fueled theory will turn out to be true. The question is: What responsibility do platforms have in the event that its not?

The Roe decision is about to become techs next big infowar and charting a path forward isnt going to be easy. Take the leaker posts.

Its not just about the leaker. Its also unclear where platforms will draw the line when it comes to medical misinformation about abortion. Its already popping up in ads.

Its no big surprise that tech giants arent interested in drawing bright lines around one of the most polarizing issues in America. Meta, Twitter and Google all directed Protocol to their existing policies but as in all things, your interpretation of how those policies apply to abortion misinformation probably depends a lot on your views about abortion.

None of these questions are exactly new. Pro- and anti-abortion groups have been fighting it out on social media for years, and fighting it out with picket signs for even longer. But with in-person clinics expected to evaporate across wide swaths of America, the ability for people to get reliable information about abortion online has arguably never been more critical.

Twenty ISPs will dramatically cut costs for low-income Americans after striking a deal with the Biden administration. The providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, will offer high-speed plans for no more than $30 a month. That deal, combined with the $30 monthly broadband benefits in the infrastructure law, means eligible Americans should be able to get high-speed service for free.

A federal judge dismissed Trumps censorship lawsuit against Twitter, which argued that the company had violated the former presidents First Amendment rights. Plaintiffs are not starting from a position of strength, the judge wrote.

Tesla is suing a former engineer, alleging he stole confidential information about Teslas efforts to build an in-house supercomputer. The company says the engineer then tried to pass off a dummy computer for inspection.

Oral arguments began in Texas appeal of a ruling against its social media law. The law was already blocked on the grounds that it was unconstitutional after Texas was sued by NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association.

New polling shows that American voters do not see regulating tech companies as a priority. Their top concerns are strengthening the national economy (38%), followed by controlling inflation (37%). By contrast, only 5% of respondents prioritized regulating tech companies.

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The fossil fuel industry is pushing a new (factually dubious) narrative on Facebook. According to an analysis by Media Matters, some of the industrys most popular recent posts focus on the need for energy independence to justify more drilling, even though the U.S. is a net exporter of liquid natural gas. Only two of the 100 posts analyzed had climate misinfo labels attached.

Could labeling junk news discourage people from reading it? Not likely, according to new research from NYU. The study found that rating news outlets by reliability didnt nudge most people to more reliable outlets unless they were among the most voracious readers of unreliable news to begin with.

Google is blocking paid app downloads in Russia, citing payment system disruption. While sanctions prohibit certain financial transactions, free apps and other free Google services are still available there.

COVID-19 restrictions in China have forced Apple to rely on local engineers to oversee its manufacturing operations in the country. The company had previously sent U.S. engineers to China to do the work, but limits on foreign visas during the pandemic prohibit that kind of travel.

An analysis of Russian state media shows how the country is using its vast propaganda network not only to mislead Russian people about the war in Ukraine, but also to confuse them to the point of not knowing what to trust.

Former U.S. TikTok employees say they averaged 85 hours of meetings a week while working for the company, which has adopted a grueling work environment, according to the Wall Street Journal. If I knew that working at TikTok would cost me this much, I would never have taken the job, one former employee wrote in a Medium post.

Uber is cutting costs and treating hiring as a privilege, according to a leaked email to employees from CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Khosrowshahi wrote that the changes are a response to a seismic shift in the market. Meta made a similar declaration about hiring last week.

New polling shows voters' top tech policy concerns are cybersecurity and data privacy. Only 7% of respondents prioritized antitrust action and 1% prioritized changes to app store rules. In fact, the majority (58%) believe the pending tech antitrust legislation would cause more harm than help to consumers.

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Elon Musk might want to think twice about banning bots on Twitter: Theyve been awfully good to Tesla, after all. According to The Washington Post, researchers at the University of Maryland found one account in particular, @danrocks4, that has posted about Tesla, on average, every three hours for more than six years.

Thanks for reading see you Wednesday!

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Techs not ready for the post-Roe infowar - Protocol