Michele Thomas’ Post

This shouldn’t bear repeating; and it still requires more action to address. I’m talking about pay equity for men and women, and in this case for women in IT where it’s really bad. I live in the DMV area (DC, Maryland, Virginia), where only DC and MD have enacted pay transparency and pay protection laws. Virginia, where are you? And fewer than 10 other states have enacted such laws. The representation of women working in the IT industry in 1984 stood at 35%. In 2023, it stood at just 27%. This is according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology. And, according to research by Accenture, 50% of women leave the tech industry by age 35, compared with just 20% in other industries. Fifty-two percent (52%!) of women who work in the tech industry said that they have experienced gender bias or discrimination in the workplace. What sad statistics! We need to fix this so pay transparency can truly work. “Under the federal Equal Pay Act of 1963, employers can’t pay different salaries “on the basis of sex” to employees who do “equal work.” States have similar protections. Nevertheless, women on average have been paid less than men as far back as federal data has been collected. Women on average earn about 84 cents for every dollar that men earn, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Federal data also shows a racial pay gap: Latino, Black and Native American workers on average earn from 73 cents to 77 cents for every dollar a white worker earns.” https://lnkd.in/ge3kmFwJ

Right, left, or up…. it’s not a bad thing. But what about job skills training?

Alrighty then! Zero Trust, where are you? Anyone signed up to any online service must assume that a password that they use is on this list. Cybersecurity people (like me!!!) recommend that users update their passwords and enable multi-factor authentication wherever possible. Oy…..

The world of IoT devices usually results in people thinking of their networks....the work enterprise. But what about all the smart devices we have in our homes and cars? Since at least 2017 it's been possible to hack into home IoT devices and wreak havoc. I know because in 2016 I challenged our son to hack into our smart home devices like our oven, frig, grill, and car. This was after a discussion with him about how easy it was. Well, he accepted the challenge, put down the controller for his Xbox, and succeeded with two of the four in just a couple hours. He had no programming skills, scripting skills, none of that stuff. All he used was his iPhone and the Internet. That was eight years ago. He's now a second year resident and a surgeon. And he sometimes thinks about how easy it would be to adapt some of the OR tech he encounters at hospitals. IoT manufacturers need to be thinking about how to adapt their tech to accommodate AuthN and AuthZ. And, they need to look at how Traeger does it instead of being lazy about software updates and expecting owners to download and update software on their smart grills by themselves. https://lnkd.in/eedmTKTB

The state of disclosure legislation, especially for financial institutions, could use some improvement.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that we will be seeing more of these….

This interesting article by @MikeElgan presents a different point of view on AI, one that caught my interest in a way that made me really think about where this industry is headed. There are several types of AI washing. One type is when companies claim to use AI but they actually use less-sophisticated computing. Other companies exaggerate the value of their AI over existing or other techniques, or they suggest that their AI solutions are fully operational when, in fact, they are not. There are a lot of those. And then there are companies who simply bolt on an AI chatbot (that often doesn't work well because they fail to adequately train it) to their existing non-AI operating software.

The Apple AI approach to privacy….

I expected maybe a third? Wow…..! “Technical impacts that organizations face as a result of being scraped, whether the scraping was done with malicious or beneficial intentions, include website performance degradation, site metric pollution, compromised credentials attacks from phishing sites, increased compute costs, and more.”