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Former Twitter employee wins €550k dismissal case, and NIST releases Quantum standards

James Pearce — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 10:26:44 +0000

Former Twitter employee wins £470k after Musk dismissal email

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has been ordered to pay former employee Gary Rooney a record fine of more than €550,000 (£470k/$606k) after an Irish tribunal found he was dismissed unfairly from the company.

Rooney, previously a director of “source to pay” procurement in Twitter’s European HQ, left the firm in October 2022 following Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover.

Within weeks of completing the acquisition, Musk outlined his plans for the social media platform, including an email in which he said staff going forward needed to be “extremely hardcore”.

The message, labelled “the fork in the road,” asked employees to click a link with “yes” or “no” if they wanted “to be part of the new Twitter.” Musk added that those who clicked “no” would receive three months’ severance pay.

Rooney told Ireland’s Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) tribunal that he did not click either option but days later received another email acknowledging his decision to leave.

The WRC found in Rooney’s favour. The €550,131 total unfair dismissal award, an Irish record, consists of Rooney’s lost remuneration of €350,131 from January 2023 to May 2024 and estimated lost future remuneration of €200,000.

Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies aged 56

Susan Wojcicki, the former Google executive who led YouTube for almost a decade, has died at the age of 56, according to an announcement by the tech company.

Wojcicki, who joined Google as its first marketing manager in 1998, passed away after two years of living with lung cancer, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced.

Pichai, who heads up Google’s parent company, Alphabet, used his X profile to say he was “unbelievably saddened” by the passing of someone who was “as core to the history of Google as anyone.”

Prior to joining the search engine firm, Wojcicki worked at chipmaker Intel. She rented her Menlo Park garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page before joining them as the company’s 16^th employee.

After Google acquired YouTube, she became CEO of the video-sharing platform from 2014 until 2023, when she stepped down to focus “on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.”

She leaves behind five children and husband Dennis Troper, who said: “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small-cell lung cancer.”

NIST unveils quantum standards

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has finalised its principal set of encryption algorithms designed to withstand cyberattacks from a quantum computer.

Developed over the past eight years, the standards are part of its post-quantum cryptography (PQC) project and have been made available for immediate use.

Progress towards the standards’ debut has been a collaborative effort involving cryptography experts from all over the world who have conceived, submitted, and evaluated quantum-safe algorithms.

Overall, NIST assessed 82 algorithms contributed by researchers from 25 countries and whittled them down to a top 14.

The first standard, FIPS 203, has been launched to secure information transmitted over public networks. It is set to become the primary standard for general encryption and is based on the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm, now renamed Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM).

The second standard, FIPS 204, is designated as the main standard for safeguarding digital signatures. It utilises the CRYSTALS-Dilithium algorithm, now known as Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA).

Finally, the third also addresses digital signatures but uses a different mathematical approach compared to ML-DSA and is used as a backup solution in case ML-DSA proves to become vulnerable.

NIST head of the PQC standardisation project, Dustin Moody, said: “There is no need to wait for future standards.

“We need to be prepared in case of an attack that defeats the algorithms in these three standards, and we will continue working on backup plans to keep our data safe. But for most applications, these new standards are the main event.”

Post Office IT chief quits

The UK Post Office’s chief transformation officer, Chris Brocklesby, is set to leave the troubled delivery service amid long delays in replacing the troubled Horizon IT system.

Brocklesby joined the Post Office on a one-year deal in 2023 but will leave the scandal-hit firm on September 6, according to a note sent to staff by CEO Owen Woodley.

The Post Office has faced lengthy delays and rising costs to replace Fujitsu’s Horizon — which produced incorrect accounting shortfalls that led to hundreds of innocent postmasters being wrongly prosecuted and convicted.

A plan to build a new system running on Amazon’s cloud computing system had to be abandoned in 2022, but pressure on the Post Office to axe Horizon increased drastically this year after a Channel 4 dramatisation of the Subpostmaster scandal highlighted the flaws in the system.

Brocklesby is set to be replaced on an interim basis by Camelot transformation director Andy Nice, who recently led a turnaround at the National Lottery operator.

Disney discloses employee communications hack

James Pearce — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 12:11:43 +0000

Disney breach blamed on Russian hacktivists

Disney Corporation has revealed it was the target of a massive breach of internal documents. The breach was carried out by a hacking group that claimed to be defending artists’ rights.

The Nullbulge hackers said they had gained access to thousands of communications from Disney staffers.

The Mouse House confirmed it was investigating the breach to discover if any of the data accessed was commercially sensitive.

“Disney was our target due to how it handles artist contracts, its approach to AI, and its pretty blatant disregard for the consumer,” the hacking group told the BBC.

The leak was first reported in the gaming press and then picked up by the Wall Street Journal. According to WSJ, some of the leaked material was related to advertising campaigns and interview candidates, with some dating back as far as 2019.

Musk plots to move SpaceX and X from California to Texas

Elon Musk has revealed plans to relocate the headquarters of two of his biggest companies: SpaceX and social media platform X.

Both companies are currently headquartered in California, but Musk claims he will move them to Texas, citing recent laws passed in the Golden State.

Musk opposes new Californian laws, in particular one which prevents schools from making rules requiring staff to tell anyone, including parents, information about a child’s gender identity.

Using X, which he bought as Twitter, Musk called it the “last straw” and said he would follow Tesla’s movement to Texas by bringing his other companies to the state, where he also lives.

New Quantum chip could see mass production in just three years

Oxford Ionics has unveiled a new computer chip that experts claim could play a pivotal role in building useful quantum computers.

The chip can be mass-produced, the manufacturer said, meaning the first commercial quantum computer could hit the market in around three year’s time.

University of Oxford Associate Professor of Quantum Computing Aleks Kissinger said the new chip was “very promising”.

The chip uses “trapped ion” technology to provide over twice the performance of previous quantum chips and offers what is needed to mass produce a quantum computer capable of real-world applications.

However, some — including Ravinder Singh, who heads up the UK Cabinet Office’s digital and systems team — have warned that quantum computing may not see full-scale deployment for at least another decade.

Trump picks former tech VC JD Vance for VP

Former US President Donald Trump has named former tech venture capitalist JD Vance his running mate for the 2024 US election later this year.

Vance — who is also an author and currently serves as the Senator for Ohio — spent two years as a tech venture capitalist at Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital between 2016 and 2017.

PayPal founder Thiel is one of Vance’s major financial backers, donating $15 million to support his senate campaign in the 2022 mid-terms.

In 2017, Vance joined the Steve Case-backed firm Revolution LLC in Washington as a partner focusing on startups

“His experience in tech has absolutely influenced his thinking,” Nathan Leamer, the chief executive of Fixed Gear Strategies, a tech policy consulting firm, told the NYT. “He built rapport with some important influencers now onboard with Trump.”

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