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Technology
Microsoft will release a production-quality version of its recast Edge browser Jan. 15, or in just over 10 weeks.
What the Redmond, Wash. company this week called a "release candidate" of the final version can be downloaded from the firm's website. The build -- the label usually applies to finished code that may still harbor some bugs -- has been marked 79.0.309.11 and issued as the latest Beta for Windows and macOS.
Microsoft first broached the idea of remaking Edge in December 2018, when it announced it was discarding its own rendering and JavaScript engines -- the technologies at the core of any browser -- and instead adopting those built by the Chromium project, the open-source effort led by Google that fuels Chrome. With that declaration, Microsoft gave up on building a modern browser -- one that would replace the ancient and obsolete Internet Explorer (IE) -- and follow in the footsteps of such niche applications as Opera and Brave.
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Pilot fish is deployed at a small military base in the desert in Iraq when a lone on-site IT engineer arrives. And hevery gung-ho.
&He was tired of being a mere fobbit — someone who never leaves the FOB (forward operating base),& says fish. &He too wanted to be able to brag about his time ‘outside the wire,& so he came up with a novel excuse.&
The base has a small wireless network using WEP encryption, and the engineer decides he has to make sure the network isn&t being cracked and monitored by insurgents.
Which isn&t a bad idea, except that 1) the base is in flat desert and any outsider is easy to spot; 2) wireless just doesn&t have much range; and 3) &I miss you, honey& emails aren&t exactly top-secret material.
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So, you've got email, you say? Lots of it? More than you can possibly manage without losing the few metaphorical marbles still sloshing around in that soggy ol' brain of yours?
I hear ya. In fact, I think we all can relate (even those of us whose brains are, erm, slightly less soggy). And I'm here to tell you: It doesn't have to be so difficult.
Gmail has a variety of built-in tools for making your messages more manageable. Some of 'em are a little bit different from what you might be accustomed to using in more traditional email clients (here's lookin' at you, Outlook) — but if you take the time to figure out how they work, you might just be surprised at how effective they can be.
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Alphabetboard of directors has opened an investigation into how executives at the company have handled misconduct claims, CNBC reported earlier today after viewing materials that it says show an independent subcommittee has been formed — and a law firm hired — to look into the issues.
One of the subjects of those claims is the companychief legal officer, David Drummond, whose long-ago extramarital affair with an employee was first surfaced in a story by The Information in 2017, one day after the outlet reported that another former executive, Android creator Andy Rubin, had earlier left the company after an internal investigation determined that he had carried on an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.
Rubin, who has since cofounded the consumer electronic products startup Essential, has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Still, it infuriated Google employees who learned nearly a year later in a New York Times investigation that he&d negotiated a $90 million severance pay package on his way out the door.
He wasn&t the only executive who was paid by Google after being accused of sexual harassment. Former senior search vice president Amit Singhal was also accused of sexual harassment, deciding to leave the company as it was reportedly looking into the incident. Singhal, who spent 15 years with Google and also denied any wrongdoing, was given a payout that ultimately amounted to $15 million.
Both payouts were approved by GoogleLeadership Development and Compensation Committee. Today, that committee is helmed by investors John Doerr and Ram Shriram, along with GIlead Sciences CFO Robin Washington, though Washington was only brought onto Alphabetboard in April.
Other employees have also accused the company of not doing enough to stop sexual harassment in previous years, including a former Google engineer who announced on Twitter in 2015 that she was long sexually harassed by management at Google and that the company, despite her complaints, did nothing about it and even supported her harassers.
Why the company has waited until now to take this action isn&t yet clear, but CNBC suggests that recent headlines involving Drummond are at least part of the driver.
It was in late August that his former colleague, Jennifer Blakely, published a post on Medium in which she described Drummond as a serial philanderer who left his wife for Blakely, then left Blakely and the son that he fathered with her for another now-former Google employee.
Blakely also claimed Drummond had had &an affair with his ‘personal assistant& who he moved into one of his new homes.&
One day later, Drummond issued a statement of his own, acknowledging his relationship with Blakely and their &difficult break-up 10 years ago.& He went on to state that, &As you would expect, there are two sides to all of the conversations and details Jennifer recounts, and I take a very different view about what happened. I have discussed these claims directly with Jennifer, and I addressed the details of our relationship with our employer at the time.&
Then Drummond said in his statement that he wanted to &address one claim that touches on professional matters. Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet. Any suggestion otherwise is simply untrue.&
Days after issuing the statement, Drummond married a Google employee who he&d been dating.
Drummond, who has continued on in his top role at Alphabet and was paid $47 million last year, this week sold $27 million worth of shares, according to SEC filings. He may need some of it for legal fees.
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Saudi Arabian officials allegedly paid at least two employees of Twitter to access personal information on users the government there was interested in, according to recently unsealed court documents. Those users were warned of the attempt in 2015, but the full picture is only now emerging.
According to an AP report citing the federal complaint, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah were both approached by the Saudi government, which promised &a designer watch and tens of thousands of dollars& if they could retrieve personal information on certain users.
Abouammo worked for Twitter in media partnerships in the Middle East, and Alzabarah was an engineer; both are charged with acting as unregistered Saudi agents — spies.
Alzabarah reportedly met with a member of the Saudi royal family in Washington, D.C. in 2015, and within a week he had begun accessing data on thousands of users, including at least 33 that Saudi Arabia had officially contacted Twitter to request information on. These users included political activists and journalists critical of the royal family and Saudi government.
This did not go unnoticed and Alzabarah, when questioned by his supervisors, reportedly said he had only done it out of curiosity. But when he was forced to leave work, he flew to Saudi Arabia with his family literally the next day, and now works for the government there.
The attempt resulted in Twitter alerting thousands of users that they were the potential targets of a state-sponsored attack, but that there was no evidence their personal data had actually been exfiltrated. Last year, The New York Times reported that this event had been prompted by a Twitter employee groomed by Saudi officials for the purpose. And now we learn there was another employee engaged in similar activity.
The cases in question are still open and as such more information will likely come to light soon. I asked Twitter for comment on the events and what specifically it had done to prevent similar attacks in the future. It did not respond directly to these queries, instead providing the following statement:
We would like to thank the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice for their support with this investigation. We recognize the lengths bad actors will go to try and undermine our service. Our company limits access to sensitive account information to a limited group of trained and vetted employees. We understand the incredible risks faced by many who use Twitter to share their perspectives with the world and to hold those in power accountable. We have tools in place to protect their privacy and their ability to do their vital work. We&re committed to protecting those who use our service to advocate for equality, individual freedoms, and human rights.
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As COO of a company with more than 350 employees from 40 different nationalities of all ages who speak 20+ languages, I&ve noticed that everyone likes to know where they stand when it comes to their job performance.
Yet, for many managers, giving feedback often falls to the bottom of their priority list. According to Gallup, less than half of employees surveyed said they received feedback even a few times a year. So, if 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were better recognized, implementing more regular feedback practices would seem like a no-brainer.
Whatstopping us?
Anyone who has experienced startup life knows there are times when it feels as though everything is moving at warp speed — thatcertainly the rate things have been moving at MessageBird for the last 18 months. After our Series A in late 2017, we hired aggressively to rapidly execute on our product roadmap and increased our employee base by more than 100% in a matter of months. For established companies, that would be a pretty aggressive hiring blitz, but for a younger business without all the necessary processes in place, the times occasionally bordered on chaotic.
Itdifficult to call that hiring frenzy a mistake, because we learned so much from it. Most notably, you can&t put performance feedback on hold until you have everything &ironed out.& The pace of business today is too quick to wait for the perfect time, because the &perfect time& may be too late or worse — it may never come at all.
What you lose in time, you&ll gain in dollars
It turns out that when the word &continuous& is added to the words &performance management,& you can almost hear the groans. Taking time to give feedback may feel like a luxury that managers don&t have when a startup is in hyper-growth mode, and giving employees feedback &continuously& sounds a bit obsessive, but the fact is, you can&t afford not to do it. Companies that implement regular performance feedback are reported to have nearly 15% less turnover, and with the staggering cost of rehiring estimated to be between 90 and 200% of an employeesalary, keeping them engaged is a good investment.
Whether you put these strategies under the banner of continuous performance management, internal communications strategies or management 101, here are four learnings around giving regular feedback that have proven to be effective for us:
You don&t need to have everything figured out before setting short-term goals
It would certainly be easier if every road we headed down led directly to our intended destination, but thatnot always the case. Sometimes we&re faced with detours, roadblocks, or may even decide on another destination altogether. Itthe same with building a startup, where being customer-oriented means that priorities will often change to reflect the needs of your customer base.
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