Your Voice Is Power – Shopify attacks Peter Principle, and “Buddy can you spare a drop of oil?”
Welcome to trending hashtags for Monday, March 6th.
I’m your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada and TechNewsday in the US – here’s today’s top tech news.
Your Voice is Power is a unique program that teaches high school students the basics of coding and helps them understand the experiences of First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada. Discussions included residential schools, the Sixties Scoop and the 94 recommendations of the Conciliation Commission.
Students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, can compete with their own remixes of music from Indigenous artists such as Jaylee Wolf, Dakota Bears and Samian using EarSketch, a free online code editor available in English, French, Ojibwe and Inuktitut.
Two winners—one identifying as Indigenous and one as an affiliate—could win a $5,000 scholarship, donated by Amazon Music.
The program, in partnership with youth empowerment charity TakingITGlobal, is designed to close the opportunity gap for underrepresented students in technology. A 2020 report by the Conference Board of Canada estimated that less than two percent of people working in science, technology, engineering and math, so-called STEM occupations, are Indigenous.
While this program is specific to a particular Canadian experience, it provides a model for addressing a broader North American issue as companies struggle to bring youth into STEM studies and occupations.
Ever heard of the Peter Principle? Being a manager has zero impact on compensation at Shopify
In the 1980s a popular book by Peter Princip lamented the fact that in too many companies, the only way to get ahead was by pushing promotions to higher and higher levels of management, which he claimed would eventually lead to All reached “our”. level of disability. ,
A new program from Shopify has changed their compensation plan so that employees do not have to become managers to reach the higher levels of compensation. Under the program, employees will have two tracks – manager or “crafter” and will be assessed on products and projects under direct report or management of deliverables.
Shopify hopes this will create “unlimited growth potential” for so-called “craftsmen” and offer career development incentives for more than one set of employees.
“Management shouldn’t be something you have to do to get ahead,” a Shopify spokesperson told the website BetaKit, adding, “Our new talent approach turns this ancient management thinking on its head.”
It’s one of a series of changes that Shopify is implementing, hopefully to get the company back on the high growth track it enjoyed during the COVID crisis. Earlier this year, Shopify introduced a new meeting policy that eliminated thousands of meetings across the company by barring any meeting of three or more people. COO Kas Nejtian referred to the meetings as the bugs that destroy a producer’s schedule.
The BetaKit article acknowledges the validity of Shopify’s program but says that Shopify is “late to the game” and that other high-tech companies have long adopted this model where management and “tech tracks” for employees Both are there. Seek career growth without management responsibilities.
Nora Jenkins Townson from HR Consultancy bright + earlyFarther were more kind, commenting, “Pushing people who aren’t interested in (or suited to) managing people into roles is a common HR mistake, so I’m glad to see Shopify join the ranks of those companies.” Gone are those who recognize it.”
Three quarters of CISOs expect a serious email-based cyber attack next year
This is according to the mimecast”State of email security 2023Report.
According to the study, 82 percent of organizations reported an increase in the use of email over the past twelve months. With that growth has come an increase in email-based threats and attacks, according to nearly three out of four IT security leaders surveyed.
While the volume of attacks was troubling, the increasing sophistication of attacks was the biggest concern for nearly 60 percent of respondents.
More than 8 in 10 surveyed said they had seen an increase in these attacks within the last 12 months, with phishing being the most prevalent. More than half (59 percent) said their organizations saw more phishing attacks in the past year than in previous years. Large corporations with more than 10,000 employees were reported most affected.
Phishing, of course, is where threatening individuals send convincing, but fraudulent emails designed to entice employees to give up their credentials or download malicious software. These attacks can be generic in nature or well-researched and very precise social engineering, known as “spear-phishing”.
But another, not as well-known, but increasingly popular attack vector is “domain spoofing” where a company’s email domain is spoofed as part of a phishing or other campaign. But the survey identified that only a third of organizations had any plans to address illegal use of their domains. While nearly 90 percent of organizations intend to use DMARC, Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, only 27 percent have implemented it.
Google and Facebook – witnesses for the prosecution
We’re Accustomed to Law Enforcement Using Social Media Postings in Prosecutions, as on Jan. 6th The defendants have found, to their chagrin. But social media also has a dark side as Google and Facebook are set to go a step further to help law enforcement identify women who are seeking abortions.
As abortion restrictions are implemented across the US, law enforcement is turning to social media platforms to build cases and prosecute women seeking abortions and even abortion-inducing medication. Used to be.
According to an article in TechCrunch, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will go on trial for allegedly performing illegal abortions with a key piece of evidence provided by Facebook. TechCrunch reported that internal chat logs were provided to law enforcement where the mother and daughter discussed their plan to find the drug using the social media app.
Facebook’s parent company Meta said in a statement that it responded to a “valid legal warrant from local law enforcement”. The warrant Meta responded to in this case “did not mention abortion”—law enforcement had requested the chat logs under other guises, but the conversations released to law enforcement revealed the use of abortion pills.
It goes to show that conversations on social media are not private. Law enforcement may request access and your conversation may be used for other legal proceedings against you, even if you are allegedly being investigated for other reasons.
Will a Robot Replace You on the Unemployment Line?
Alphabet, the parent of Google, has apparently ‘shut down’ around one hundred robots as part of its cost-cutting measures. These “single-armed” automated creatures, called “daily robots”, were used to clean and maintain Google’s cafeteria. They were part of a project being developed by Google for consumer applications. The robots were used to clean, recycle, and even open doors for Google employees and visitors to the campus.
According to a report from Mashable over the weekend, the robots were part of several “non-profit” ventures at Google. According to that report, with Google set to lose 6.1 billion in 2022, it put in place a strict performance rating-based layoff program where six percent of its workforce was to be let go.
While we don’t have concrete reports on the performance ratings of the laid off robots, the same reports claim that in the flurry of extreme layoffs, even top performers were let go. So don’t feel bad robot.
This is today’s top tech news
Links to these stories can be found in articles posted at itworldcanada.com/podcasts. You can also find more great stories and more in-depth coverage at itworldcanada.com or technewsday.com in the US.
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I’m your host Jim Love – have a wonderful Monday!
