Will Twitter Release Data?

U.S. civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson is urging Twitter to release its employee diversity information, which its Silicon Valley peers such as Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Facebook have already done.

The Rainbow Push Coalition, founded by Jackson, has also asked Twitter to signal its commitment to inclusion by hosting a public community forum to address the company’s plan to recruit and retain more African American talent.

The coalition and black empowerment group, ColorOfChange.org, plans to launch a Twitter-based campaign to challenge the company, the coalition said in a statement late last week.

On Friday at the Netroots Nation conference in Detroit, ColorofChange will lead a “Black Twitter” plenary session where activists will push out the petition campaign over Twitter and other social media.

Tech companies have been under pressure to release employee diversity data since Jackson took up the campaign to highlight the underrepresentation of African-Americans in Silicon Valley companies, starting with a delegation to Hewlett-Packard’s annual meeting of shareholders.

“….Twitter has remained silent, resisting and refusing to publicly disclose its EEO-1 workforce diversity/inclusion data,” according to the joint petition by the coalition and ColorOfChange.org.

The diversity reports are typically filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and companies are not required to make the information public.

Twitter has not commented on the matter.

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Is Google Diverse?

Google Inc  shared the gender and ethnic makeup of its 50,000-strong workforce on Wednesday, disclosing a significantly below-average proportion of minorities and women employees that it said was “miles from where we want to be.”

Google’s disclosure of its workforce demographics represented a rare move for a U.S. company, even if the figures came as no surprise to those familiar with Silicon Valley, an industry long scrutinized for its lack of diversity. Blacks and Hispanics made up just 2 and 3 percent of overall employees at Google, respectively, while women accounted for 30 percent, the company said in a detailed blogpost.

That compares with the U.S. workforce average of about 47 percent women in 2012, according to the Department of Labor. For blacks and people of Hispanic descent, it was 12 and 16 percent, respectively.

“Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations,said in the blog posting.

The employment gaps for women and minorities in the tech sector may stem from education, Bock said. Women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States; blacks and Hispanics make up less than 10 percent of U.S. college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in computer science majors, respectively, he argued.

But Bock, who added that Google has donated more than $40 million to organizations promoting computer science education among women, said Google recognized the extent of the internal problem and was open to discussion about possible solutions.

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Malware Targets Job-seekers

A new version of the Gameover computer Trojan is targeting job hunters and recruiters by attempting to steal log-in credentials for Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com accounts.

Gameover is one of several Trojan programs that are based on the infamous Zeus banking malware, whose source code was leaked on the Internet in 2011. Like Zeus, Gameover can steal log-in credentials and other sensitive information by injecting rogue Web forms into legitimate websites when accessed from infected computers.

The ability to inject content into browsing sessions in real time has traditionally been used by computer Trojans to steal online banking credentials and financial information. However, cybercriminals are increasingly using this technique to compromise other types of accounts as well.

For example, in February, researchers from security firm Adallom found a Zeus variant that stole Salesforce.com log-in credentials and scraped business data from the compromised accounts.

The latest development involves a new Gameover variant that contains a configuration file to target Monster.com accounts, one of the largest employment websites in the world, security researchers from antivirus firm F-Secure said.

“A computer infected with Gameover ZeuS will inject a new ‘Sign In’ button [into the Monster.com sign-in page], but the page looks otherwise identical,” they said.

After the victims authenticate through the rogue Web form the malware injects a second page that asks them to select and answer three security questions out of 18. The answers to these questions expose additional personal information and potentially enable attackers to bypass the identity verification process.

Targeting Monster.com is a new development, but the Gameover malware had already been targeting CareerBuilder.com, another large employment website, for some time.

Recruiters with accounts on employment websites should be wary of irregularities on log-in pages, especially if those accounts are tied to bank accounts and spending budgets, the F-Secure researchers said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for sites such as Monster to introduce two factor authentication beyond mere security questions.”

The authors of the Gameover Trojan program have been particularly active recently. In early February researchers from security firm Malcovery Security reported that a new variant of Gameover was being distributed as an encrypted .enc file in order to bypass network-level defenses. Later that month researchers from Sophos detected a Gameover variant with a kernel-level rootkit component that protected its files and processes, making it harder to remove.

Unlike most other Zeus spinoffs, Gameover is also using peer-to-peer technology for command-and-control instead of traditional hosted servers, which improves its resilience to takedown efforts by security researchers.

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IT Dissatisfaction Growing

Companies want to reduce spending on IT operations and infrastructure and shift resources to revenue-producing areas, according to two new studies. But businesses leaders and IT executives are also registering higher levels of dissatisfaction with IT as more demands are placed on technology.

The reports, by the Hackett Group and McKinsey & Co., both agree that business executives want IT to do more to improve the bottom line while companies spend less on infrastructure in the process.

The bad news for people who work in IT operations is that large businesses expect to cut IT staff positions by about 2% this year, thanks to automation and outsourcing, according the Hackett’s survey of 160 businesses with revenues above $1 billion.

One path to improved automation will likely be through adoption of software-defined infrastructures, something Bank of America plans to do.

IT budgets will grow by 1.7% this year as IT pivots, increasingly, from a service-providing operation to a revenue-generating one, the Hackett Group said in its study.

IT managers are being told that “you’ve got to grow the business, not just run the business,” said Mark Peacock, an IT transformation practice leader and principal at Hackett.

McKinsey & Co., in its online survey of more than 800 executives — with 345 having a technology focus — also found that executives want less of their budgets to go to infrastructure so more resources can be shifted to analytics and innovation.

The McKinsey survey found that business executives are less likely to say now that IT performs effectively, compared to their views two years ago.

“The IT executives are even more negative,” wrote McKinsey, with only 13% of them saying their IT organizations “are completely or very effective at introducing new technologies faster or more effectively than competitors.” That percentage was down from 22% in 2012.

The negative results “likely reflect the overall rising expectations for corporate IT,” wrote McKinsey.

When asked how to fix IT shortcomings, respondents cited improved business accountability, more funds for priority projects and a higher the level of IT talent, the report said.

The Hackett Group survey didn’t report on dissatisfaction, but it did find that the top goal for IT organizations this year is “to strengthen partnership and goal alignment between IT and the business.”

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IBM Breaks Big Data Record

IBM Labs claims to have broken a speed record for Big Data, which the company says could help boost internet speeds to 200 to 400Gbps using “extremely low power”.

The scientists achieved the speed record using a prototype device presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.

Apparently the device, which employs analogue-to-digital conversion (ADC) technology, could be used to improve the transfer speed of Big Data between clouds and data centres to four times faster than existing technology.

IBM said its device is fast enough that 160GB – the equivalent of a two-hour 4K ultra-high definition (UHD) movie or 40,000 music tracks – could be downloaded in a few seconds.

The IBM researchers have been developing the technology in collaboration with Swiss research institution Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to tackle the growing demands of global data traffic.

“As Big Data and internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates,” the IBM researchers explained, comparing data transfer per day in 1992 of 100GB to today’s two Exabytes per day, a 20 million-fold increase.

“To support the increase in traffic, ultra-fast and energy efficient analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) technology [will] enable complex digital equalisation across long-distance fibre channels.”

An ADC device converts analogue signals to digital, estimating the right combination of zeros and ones to digitally represent the data so it can be stored on computers and analysed for patterns and predictive outcomes.

“For example, scientists will use hundreds of thousands of ADCs to convert the analogue radio signals that originate from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to digital,” IBM said.

The ADC technology has been developed as part of an international project called Dome, a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), DOME-South Africa and IBM to build the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope when it’s completed.

“The radio data that the SKA collects from deep space is expected to produce 10 times the global internet traffic and the prototype ADC would be an ideal candidate to transport the signals fast and at very low power – a critical requirement considering the thousands of antennas which will be spread over 1,900 miles,” IBM expalined.

IBM Research Systems department manager Dr Martin Schmatz said, “Our ADC supports Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for data communication and brings together speed and energy efficiency at 32 nanometers, enabling us to start tackling the largest Big Data applications.”

He said that IBM is developing the technology for its own family of products, ranging from optical and wireline communications to advanced radar systems.

“We are bringing our previous generation of the ADC to market less than 12 months since it was first developed and tested,” Schmatz added, noting that the firm will develop the technology in communications systems such as 400Gbps opticals and advanced radars.

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Disney To Lay Off Workers

Walt Disney Co is making plans to lay off several hundred people in its interactive unit, the division that includes gaming products and the Disney.com website, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.

The job eliminations are expected to begin after Disney releases its quarterly earnings today, the Journal said. Playdom, a social gaming business Disney acquired in 2010, is one division expected to see cutbacks, the newspaper said.

Disney is trying to turn around the interactive unit, which has about 3,000 employees. Its new Infinity video game enjoyed strong initial sales after its release last August, helping the division report a $16 million profit for the quarter that ended in September, an improvement from the $76 million loss a year earlier.

A Disney spokeswoman had no comment.

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Techies Demand More Money

Employers may need to loosen their purse strings to retain their IT staffers in 2014, according to a salary survey from IT career websiteDice.com.

Among the tech workers who anticipate changing employers in 2014, 68 percent listed more compensation as their reason for leaving. Other factors include improved working conditions (48 percent), more responsibility (35 percent) and the possibility of losing their job (20 percent). The poll, conducted online between Oct. 14 and Nov. 29 last year, surveyed 17,236 tech professionals.

Fifty-four percent of the workers polled weren’t content with their compensation. This figure is down from 2012′s survey, when 57 percent of respondents were displeased with their pay.

The decrease in salary satisfaction could mean companies will face IT staff retention challenges this year, since 65 percent of respondents said they’re confident they can find a new, better position in 2014.

This dissatisfaction over pay comes even though the survey, released Wednesday, showed that the average tech salary rose 2.6 percent in 2013 to US$87,811 and that more companies gave merit raises. The main reason for last year’s bump in pay, according to 45 percent of respondents, was a merit raise. In comparison, the average tech salary was $85,619 in 2012 and 40 percent of those polled said they received a merit raise.

Meanwhile, 26 percent of respondents attributed their 2013 salary increase to taking a higher-paying job at another company.

Employers realize tech talent is coveted and are attempting to keep workers satisfied by offering them a variety of incentives, the survey found. In 2013, 66 percent of employers provided incentives to retain workers. The two most popular incentives were increased compensation and more interesting work. Incentives that allow employees to better balance their work and personal lives were also offered, such as telecommuting and a flexible work schedule.

Skills that commanded six-figure jobs in 2013 came from some of the hottest areas of IT. Data science led the way with big data backgrounds yielding some of the highest salaries. People skilled in Knowing R, the popular statistical computing language, can expect to make $115,531 on average, while those with NoSQL database development skills command an average salary of $114,796. IT pros skilled in MapReduce to process large data sets make $114,396 on average.

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Is The Tech Industry Going Independent?

The tech industry is undergoing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. And while that trend might not be cause for alarm for retiring baby boomer IT professionals, it could mean younger and mid-career workers need to prepare to make a living solo.

About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%.

The definition of independent workers covers people who work at least 15 hours a week.

Steve King, a partner at Emergent, said the growth in independent workers is being driven by companies that want to stay ahead of change, and can bring in workers with the right skills. “In today’s world, change is happening so quickly that everyone is trying to figure out how to be more flexible and agile, cut fixed costs and move to variable costs,” said King. “Unfortunately, people are viewed as a fixed cost.”

King worked with MBO Partners to produce a recent study that estimated the entire independent worker headcount in the U.S., for all occupations, at 17.7 million. They also estimate that around one million of them are IT professionals.

A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. Over the last two years, there has been a spike in the use of contract labor among large IT organizations — firms with IT operational budgets of more than $20 million, according to John Longwell, vice president of research at Computer Economics.

This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization’s IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts. Computer Economics recently published a research brief on the topic.

“The difference now is that use of contract or temporary workers is not being driven by a boom, but rather by a reluctance to hire permanent workers as the economy improves,” Longwell said.

Computer Economics expects large IT organizations to step up hiring in 2014, which may cause the percentage of contract workers to decline back to a more normal 10% level. But, Longwell cautioned, it’s not clear whether that new hiring will be involve full-time employees or even more contract labor.

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Tech Hiring Up This Year

Hiring of technology professionals has been increasing since the first half of this year, with new IT hires accounting for about 10% of all the job growth in the U.S. in June, according to two independent assessments.

Total tech employment reached 4.47 million in June, an increase of 22,600 jobs from the prior month, or a .51% gain, according to TechServe Alliance, an IT services industry group which tracks employment data month-to-month. The total excludes tech manufacturing employment.

Similarly, Foote Partners, which researches IT employment trends, reported a gain of 18,200 new tech jobs last month.

These gains are coming at the same time that some tech employers are cutting jobs.

IBM has cut more than 3,000 workers over the past few weeks, struggling Hewlett-Packard is still eliminating jobs, and Symantec is seeing layoffs as well.

The U.S. economy added 195,000 jobs overall in June, according to the Labor Dept.

Foote said that IT employment in the first half of this year is averaging 13,500 new jobs per month.

“While the pace of job creation in the national labor force appears stuck at 7.6% unemployment and new jobs are heavily in part-time positions and low wage full-time segments, IT jobs have been on a sustained growth upswing and wages are holding steady if not growing slightly,” said David Foote, chief analyst, in a statement.

Reports on IT employment figures from analyst can differ widely depending on what U.S. labor department categories are use in the calculations.

Another firm that analyzes the labor market, Janco Associates, reported a gain of 9,900 jobs in June based on the categories it tracks.

Despite the increase in hiring, IT salaries remain flat, said Janco.

“Based on our interviews with over 96 CIOs in the last 30 days, we concluded that CIOs are not in a great hurry to hire new staff except to meet short term needs until they see a clear trend as to what is happening with the economy,” said Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis in a statement.

Janulaitis said that “67% of the CIOs we interviewed do not see any real push to expand staffing over the next 12 months.”

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HP Aims To Boot ‘Useless’ Data

Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations rid themselves of useless data, all the information that is no longer necessary, yet still occupies expensive space on storage servers.

The company’s Autonomy unit has released a new module, called Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, that can delete data automatically based on the material’s age and other factors, according to Joe Garber, who is the Autonomy vice president of information governance.

Hewlett-Packard announced the new software, along with a number of other updates and new services, at its HP Discover conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.

For this year’s conference, HP will focus on “products, strategies and solutions that allow our customers to take command of their data that has value, and monetize that information,” said Saar Gillai, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for the converged cloud.

The company is pitching Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup for eliminating no-longer-relevant data in old SharePoint sites and in e-mail repositories. The software requires the new version of Autonomy’s policy engine, ControlPoint 4.0.

HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup evaluates whether to delete a file based on several factors, Garber said. One factor is the age of the material. If an organization has an information governance policy of only keeping data for seven years, for example, the software will delete any data older than seven years. It will root out and delete duplicate data. Some data is not worth saving, such as system files. Those can be deleted as well. It can also consider how much the data is being accessed by employees: Less consulted data is more suitable for deletion.

Administrators can set other controls as well. If used in conjunction with the indexing and categorization capabilities in Autonomy’s Idol data analysis platform, the new software can eliminate clusters of data on a specific topic. “You apply policies to broad swaths of data based on some conceptual analysis you are able to do on the back end,” Garber said.

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