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Airbnb is letting go of a quarter of its workforce, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told employees in a memo on Tuesday, as the coronavirus pandemic has decimated demand for his company’s services. The home-sharing platform, which was widely expected to go public this year, becomes the latest sharing economy company to institute or consider instituting significant layoffs. Uber is reportedly considering laying off 20% of its workers while Lyft has already laid off 17% of its employees. "We are collectively living through the most harrowing crisis of our lifetime, and as it began to unfold, global travel came to...

Indian discrimination against non-Indians and other out-group Indians is pervasive in the IT sector in locations where Indians have emigrated. This discrimination is invisible and uncovered by the major IT media entities. For this reason, this article you are about to read will seems dramatically different than any article published in any major IT media entity. We cover why this issue is blacked out in IT media in the article.

The emerging global movement of rightwing populists is guilty of many things but ideological incoherence in choosing their enemies is generally not one of them. Whether it is Steve Bannon bashing Pope Francis, Matteo Salvini attacking the “do-gooders” in humanitarian NGOs or Marine Le Pen venting against the dull technocrats in Brussels, the populists go after a predictable, well-calculated set of targets. If anyone chooses their enemies well, it’s them.

Here's a timeline of Zoom's rapid rise and the security problems that have come to light. As the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of people to stay home over the past month, Zoom suddenly became the video meeting service of choice: Daily meeting participants on the platform surged from 10 million in December to 200 million in March. With that popularity came Zoom's privacy risks extending rapidly to massive numbers of people. From built-in attention-tracking features to recent upticks in "Zoombombing" (in which uninvited attendees break into and disrupt meetings with hate-filled or pornographic content), Zoom's security practices have been drawing...

Estimote, Inc. has created a set of devices and software that’ll allow a business owner to keep track of their workers remotely. With a “contact tracing dashboard” and Bluetooth devices (worn by each employee), a business owner can keep track of the location and relative health of their workforce. Each wearable device scans for other wearable devices in the area and “registers close interactions.” ...the Estimote system, “in the event of a symptomatic employee, companies can quickly locate other exposed team members who are at risk.” Tracking is done with indoor GPS, working with Bluetooth beacons that the employer has...

Today, researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group.Requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.Now, The White House joins these...

Surprising reports paints Linux and Android as less secure than Windows Which operating system has suffered the most vulnerabilities since around the turn of the millennium? That would be Linux, not Microsoft’s Windows, at least according to a freshly released report. An analysis of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerability Database, compiled by Thebestvpn.com, tracked ‘technical vulnerabilities’ in popular pieces of software between 1999 and 2019. And Debian, a flavor of Linux, was top of the table with 3,067 vulnerabilities over the last two decades. Reasonably close behind was Android on 2,563 vulnerabilities, with the Linux kernel...

It’s no wonder he chose to skip the Iowa caucus, given that former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg apparently thinks farmers and manufacturers all across America lack “gray matter." In a clip just now circulating online, Bloomberg, while speaking at Oxford’s Said Business School back in 2016, explained that "anybody [can] be a farmer," but that it takes "a lot more gray matter" to "think and analyze" enough to work in the tech field. “I could teach anybody – even people in this room, no offense intended – to be a farmer,” Bloomberg explained. “It's a process. You dig a hole,...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant. The machines' AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there's no electricity. They'd be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes. For example, to keep the $100 laptops from being widely stolen or sold off in poor countries, he expects to make them so pervasive in schools and so distinctive in design that it would be...

Rwanda’s Mara Group has grand ambitions. The company hopes to help turn Rwanda into a regional tech hub, and it just got one step closer to completing that mission. This week, the company released two smartphones, earning Mara Group the title of the first smartphone manufacturer in Africa. advertisement Rwanda President Paul Kagame has announced Africa’s “first high tech smartphone factory,” CNN reported. While smartphones are assembled in other African nations (Egypt, Algeria, and South Africa all have assembly plants), according to Reuters, those companies all import the components. But at Mara, they manufacture the phones from the motherboards to the packaging,...

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference. The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website firewall, and anti-bot protections.

LAS VEGAS - CES 2020 officially kicks off here in Las Vegas on Tuesday, and companies from around the world are rolling out the forklifts to build out some of the massive exhibits that will be on display for the 170,000 attendees at this year’s edition of the tech industry’s trade show. But we’ve already got a good idea of the kinds of major announcements we’ll get during the biggest week in tech. Here’s what to expect, from 8K TVs to smart toilets to smartphones with foldable displays. As usual, some of the hottest news will come from the TV...

Full Title: Former Operator of Illegal Booter Services Sentenced for Conspiracy to Commit Computer Damage and Abuse Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Friday, November 15, 2019 An Orland Park, Illinois, resident was sentenced yesterday to 13 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release on one count of conspiracy to cause damage to internet-connected computers for his role in owning, administering and supporting illegal booter services that launched millions of illegal denial of service, or DDoS, attacks against victim computer systems in the United States and elsewhere. Chief U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle...

Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee is expected to try again on Thursday to pass his S.386 bill, which helps India’s graduates grab hundreds of thousands of college level jobs from American graduates. All GOP Senators are expected to stay silent while Lee pushes his bill that rewards roughly 300,000 of India’s contract workers in the United States with a fast track to citizenship. Silicon Valley investors back his bill, which also allows companies to annually pay 60,000 of India’s contract workers — plus 60,000 family members — with government-provided green cards after they take jobs from American graduates. Existing “country...

Automatic emergency braking will be standard in most cars in 2022. The technology is expected to cut the number of rear-end crashes in half, but hundreds of drivers say sometimes the system slams on the brakes – apparently for no reason. CBS News found reports of several accidents and injuries that drivers blamed on false activations of emergency automatic braking systems. Safety advocates and carmakers say in the vast majority of cases it works, but it is not perfect. For Cindy Walsh, getting behind the wheel of her 2018 Nissan Rogue raises her anxiety level. Since she bought the SUV...

Yahoo has announced it will be removing all content from its free long-running online discussion boards, Yahoo Groups. While Yahoo said in a statement that the Yahoo Groups site will continue to exist, users will no longer be able to upload any new content to the site as of October 21, and from December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. The content that will be affected include files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digest, and message history. "You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded," the...

Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would. Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it was.“Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town,” mused  Bourdain. “A flood of them—tech industry workers … derisively referred to as tech boys or tech bros—is rapidly changing the DNA of the city, rewiring it to satisfy their own newly-empowered nerdly appetites.”That the “tech...

About 40 state attorneys general will participate in an antitrust investigation of Facebook led by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), The Washington Post reported on Monday, citing three people familiar with the matter. In September, James had announced an investigation with seven other states and the District of Columbia into whether the social media giant has “endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.” The three people who spoke to the Post said the larger inquiry is still confidential, and that New York could enlist further states before the probe is...

Tech IPOs have long been viewed as a boon for Silicon Valley workers, ushering in a new era of corporate stability and stock-driven wealth. That’s not been the case at Uber, where the stock price has fallen roughly 30 percent since going public in May and employees say they’ve noticed cuts to amenities as basic as the brands of coffee available for brewing. Uber is changing as it shifts from a closely held unicorn start-up to a publicly traded company that appears to be losing investors’ confidence, according to interviews with current and former workers. Those changes include laying off...

Contract employees at Google's Pittsburgh campus are voting on whether to unionize Tuesday. If successful, this will be the first union with the Pittsburgh Association of Tech Professionals, a new arm of the United Steelworkers. Renata Nelson, a Google contractor in Pittsburgh, said the main priorities are to improve wages and benefit, and to cement job security. "Our salaries are fairly low compared to industry average," Nelson said. "We've seen people being hired at lower and lower rates recently." Google contractors in Pittsburgh are employed through international consulting company HCL Technologies. According to United Steelworkers, HCL employees work at Google's...