24Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

IBM reportedly targeted older workers in layoffs

News Items, Software Events
IBM reportedly targeted older workers in layoffs IBM has been put into the spotlight for the wrong reason. The computer giant now deems older workers obsolete and puts them into the front when layoffs occur.  This disregards the federal law on discrimination against aged workers. ProPublica and Mother Jones  co-published an exhaustive report that alleges IBM has for years disregarded age discrimination laws in an attempt to push out employees over 40 and replace them with younger workers. The company is believed to have laid off around 20,000 US employees over 40 years of age over the past five years. Former workers say performance reviews suddenly became much harsher with the pivot in business focus. Some felt forced to accept an early retirement package when the alternative was being fired outright. IBM encouraged some…
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22Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Facebook is reportedly under FTC investigation

News Items, Software Events
Facebook is reportedly under FTC investigation Facebook has confronted a major issue where personal information was given to a vendor.  Is that a good or bad thing ?  First, this had nothing to do with the 2016 election but our private information was given to a 3rd party vendor.  Now that is the problem here.  Most Facebook users know that whatever is posted on their web sites is Facebook property so you give up on the photos, information, etc. over to the Facebook folks to use whenever they want. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated a government privacy agreement by allowing Cambridge Analytica to obtain users’ personal data, according to a report from Bloomberg. Facebook agreed to the settlement, known as a consent decree, in 2011, after allegedly deceiving users…
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22Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

High number of adults unable to do basic mathematical tasks

News Items, Software development Concepts
High number of adults unable to do basic mathematical tasks Adults have had difficult times dealing with employment and career advancement but now there is proof that Adults cannot perform simple math. Participants were asked questions such as: "Suppose, upon your trip to the grocery store you purchase four types of tea packs: Chamomile Tea (US$4.60), Green Tea (US$4.15), Black Tea (US$3.35) and Lemon Tea (US$1.80). If you paid for all these items with a US$20 bill, how much change would you get?" Four in every ten adults in places like England, Canada, Spain and the US can't make this straightforward calculation even when they had a calculator to hand. Similarly, less than half of adults in places like Chile, Turkey and South Korea can get the right answer. The results clearly highlight how…
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08Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

GitHub DDoS attack put them offline for 10 minutes

News Items
GitHub DDoS attack put them offline for 10 minutes GitHub recently revealed that the web site was crippled for a full 10 minutes forcing it to be offline for 10 minutes while the engineers recovered the systems.  This is one of the largest-known DDoS attack in history. DDoS or distributed denial of service in full is a cyber attack that aims to bring websites and web-based services down by bombarding them with so much traffic that their services and infrastructure are unable to handle it all. It’s a fairly common tactic used to force targets offline. The Chinese government was widely suspected to be behind a five-day-long attack in 2015 and this newest assault tipped the scales at an incredible 1.35Tbps at peak.  This time there has been no culprit discovered but this…
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07Mar 2018 by richard@baronsoftware.com

Google reports that Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today

Computer PC Tips - bits and bytes, News Items
Google reports that Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today The percentage of daily Chrome users who've loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018. These statistics on Flash's declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, during a keynote speech at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) which was held recently in San Diego. Flash's demise was to be expected, though. Adobe announced last year plans to stop supporting the Adobe Flash Media Player by the end of 2020.  But while Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and all major browsers have already moved from a Flash-enabled-by-default to a Flash-click-to-play policy since last year, the massive…
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