Tag: software

Google memo emphasising male-female differences causing outrage

A 10-page memo that went viral inside Google and has been obtained by Gizmodo sees a Google software engineer arguing that women are underrepresented in tech not due to bias, but rather because of inherent psychological differences from men.

The memo has been shared repeatedly on the internal network and Google+. Motherboard first reported that the memo existed, and Gizmodo published it in its entirety.

The memo titled ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber’ is essentially the personal opinion of a male software engineer working for Google.

In the document, the employee argues that he “values diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.” However, some topics, he adds, now involve “shaming into silence.”

“This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed,” and the lack of discussion brings about “the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology,” the memo says.

The software engineer goes on to claim that the reason why women don’t have a 50-percent representation in tech may be the “differences in distributions of traits between men and women,” and “discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”

The traits in question include “biological differences” that are “universal across human cultures” and are “highly heritable.”

Women in general have more “openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas,”“a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men,” so they end up working for front desk rather than coding, the memo’s author argues.

Women also have “extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness,” hence, “higher agreeableness,” and consequently, “women generally have a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading,” according to the memo.

“We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism,” the document says.

Feminists on Twitter have reacted with outrage and four-letter expletives.

Another issue the author highlights is that “feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role.”

“If we, as a society, allow men to be more ‘feminine,’ then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.”

The author concludes that “despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change.”

Following the heated debate that surrounded the memo both inside and outside Google, the company’s new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance, Danielle Brown, issued a statement saying, “Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.”

Hacker implants chip to exploit Android phones

Plenty of people these days are prepared to augment their bodies with face furniture, piercings, rings and tattoos.

But would you implant a chip in your hand to show how easy it is to exploit an Android phone?

That’s what former US navy petty officer Seth Wahle did, in an attempt to demonstrate how business networks could be compromised.

Wahle took an NFC chip, similar to the kind found in many of today’s smartphones, and injected it between the thumb and finger of his left hand. According to Forbes, the injection was something of an eye-watering experience.

But implants aren’t for the squeamish. Wahle says the needle was bigger than he’d expected when he had the chip implanted by an “unlicensed amateur” for $40, enough to make him want to vomit. He says he had to go through a backstreet operation due to Florida’s restrictive body modification laws.

Unfortunately for lovers of Hollywood techno-thrillers, the attack itself is fairly lame.

As the article in Forbes describes, for the exploit to be successful the victim has to click on a link sent to his Android device by the implanted NFC chip:

It has an NFC (Near Field Communications) antenna that pings Android phones, asking them to open a link. Once the user agrees to open that link and install a malicious file, their phone connects to a remote computer, the owner of which can carry out further exploits on that mobile device.

Put simply, that Android device is compromised. In a demo for FORBES, Wahle used the Metasploit penetration testing software on his laptop to force an Android device to take a picture of his cheery visage.

Source: Trip Wire

Cyber attack on Merkel’s aide

The German chancellor’s office has fallen victim to a hacking attack, according to a German newspaper. The Regin malware in question has been linked to British and US spy agencies.

The complex spying malware arrived via a USB stick to the work computer of the unit head in the Department for European Policy, where it was picked up by virus scanning software, according to Monday’s edition of the German newspaper Bild.

According to the report, the staff member, who works in close contact with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had written a draft of a speech on her work computer, which she then took home using a USB stick at the end of the day and worked on it using her private laptop.

She later saved the document again on her private USB stick and brought it back into the office, to use on her work laptop. A virus alert went off and it was detected that the USB stick was infected with the spying software Regin. Checks of all other high-security laptops in the Federal Chancellery revealed no additional infections.

The cybersecurity company Symantec first warned of the highly-sophisticated malware at the end of November. According to them, the Regin spying software can make screenshots, control the mouse cursor, steal passwords, monitor data traffic and restore deleted data.

According to US news website “The Intercept,” which was co-created by Edward Snowden confidant Glenn Greenwald, Regin was deployed to steal information from governments, companies and research institutions. According to them, the British spy agency GCHQ and the United States spy agency NSA were involved in the development of the sophisticated spying software, which is particularly difficult to detect.

Source: AFP, dpa

Soros puzzles analysts, investors with cloud investment

Analysts and investors have never disagreed more about what price to pay for shares in ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. (CKSW), the Israeli developer whose largest stockholder is billionaire George Soros.

ClickSoftware, which makes computer programs to manage workforces, reached a five-month low on June 4 and has plunged 25 percent to $7.60 this quarter, the second-worst performance on the Bloomberg Israel-US Equity Index. Still, analysts maintain the shares will climb to an average price of $13.33 in the next 12 months. That marks the biggest difference on record, according to Bloomberg compiled data going back to 2007.

While the Nasdaq Composite Index (CCMP) has rebounded from its selloff earlier this year, small-capitalization software companies like ClickSoftware that are transitioning their business to cloud computing have missed the recovery rally. Investors dumped the stock even after the company boosted its 2014 revenue forecast, citing increased sales to cloud customers.

The company “was a bystander getting hit by the market accident we saw,” Shaul Eyal, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said by phone from Tel Aviv on June 27. “I’m approaching the quarter with a positive bias, I’m not expecting any major negative surprises.”

Eyal, one of four analysts covering the stock, has a buy rating on the shares and raised his price target to $13 after the first-quarter earnings report. ClickSoftware’s stock has risen 1.3 percent during the first half of the year, lagging the 5.5 percent gain on the Bloomberg index of the most-traded Israeli shares.

Cloud computing allows information to be stored online instead of on a specific computer. Moving to the cloud means forgoing upfront contracts with lofty profit margins in favor of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that pay off monthly and can be canceled if customers aren’t satisfied.

Soros Fund Management owned a 9.9 percent stake in ClickSoftware as of March 31, according to regulatory filing. With a net worth of $26.4 billion, Soros is the 23rd-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Michael Vachon, a New York-based spokesman for the fund, didn’t respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

ClickSoftware’s 25 percent drop in the second quarter compares with an average decline of 3.4 percent on a total return basis among information technology and software industry peers.

Still, three of the four analysts covering the company maintain a buy rating on the stock.

“We too are perplexed by the decline in the stock, and can only point to the overall weakness in SaaS-related stocks over this same period as a possible explanation,” Matt Blazei, an analyst at Lake Street Capital Markets LLC in San Francisco says.

Did Romney kill his own campaign?

As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely.

A source within the Romney campaign agreed to share his reflections on Project Orca with Breitbart News:

It’s easy to point fingers after a loss and I wouldn’t normally do it, but consider what happened.

Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.

I worked on the Colorado team, and we were called by hundreds (or more) volunteers who couldn’t use the app or the backup phone system. The usernames and passwords were wrong, but the reset password tool didn’t work, and we couldn’t change phone PINs. We were told the problems were limited and asked to project confidence, have people use pencil and paper, and try to submit again later.

Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn’t work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren’t allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.

I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN’s. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

Regardless of the specific difficulties, this idea would only help if executed extremely well. Otherwise, those 37,000 swing state volunteers should have been working on GOTV…

Somebody messaged me privately after my email and told me that North Carolina had the same problems — every pin was wrong and not fixed until 6PM — and was also told it was localized to North Carolina. 

The problems with Orca appear to have been nationwide, and predated Election Day itself. At Ace of Spades, John Ekdahl reported his frustrations as a volunteer in the field:

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of “rah-rahs” and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like “Has this been stress tested?”, “Is there redundancy in place?” and “What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?”, among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

Ekdahl describes how volunteers were expected to print their own materials, and were mistakenly not told to bring their poll watching credentials to polling places. Attempts to communicate with the Romney campaign to ask for assistance were unsuccessful:

By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here’s the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either.

Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked.

Romney volunteers in Virginia confirmed that the campaign had relied entirely on Project Orca to turn out the vote in key areas such as Roanoke, where Romney and Ryan had made appearances. Volunteers who had driven to Virginia from safely-Republican Tennessee were shocked at the disorganization they encountered.

While the Romney campaign waited for Orca to function as planned, the Obama campaign had placed signs outside every one of the city’s thirty-three polling places, and was fully staffed with two volunteers outside each polling place, and a strike list volunteer inside, all day long from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. The best that the short-handed Tennessee volunteers could manage was 40% coverage of polling places; the local GOP, they said, had relied entirely on the campaign’s centralized Orca system in Boston to turn out the local vote.

Ekdahl concludes his account by hoping that the failures of Orca did cost Romney the election:

We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.

In fact, Orca diverted scarce resources that would have been better used physically moving voters to polling places. By a rough calculation, Romney lost the election by falling 500,000 to 700,000 votes short in key swing states. If each of the 37,000 volunteers that had been devoted to Orca had instead brought 20 voters to the polls in those states over the course of the day, Romney would have won the election.

Before the election, there was much fear-mongering on the Democratic side about the Republicans’ supposed plans to suppress turnout among Obama voters. After the election, GOP strategist Karl Rove accused the Obama campaign of “suppressing the vote” by running a negative campaign against Romney that kept voters at home.

The truth is much worse. There was, in fact, massive suppression of the Republican vote–by the Romney campaign, through the diversion of nearly 40,000 volunteers to a failing computer program.

There was no Plan B; there was only confusion, and silence. Microsoft wrote the software and they tested it for months, however.

Microsoft in Washington State was very much against the Romney campaign. It wouldn’t be difficult to sabotage, said one technical advisor, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. You could have a problem and blame the end user if you had an agenda, he said. – breitbart.com