​Microsoft’s decision to replace journalist with AI on the MSN home page appears to have backfired within just a week. 

As reported by The Guardian, the AI software the company is using to curate stories illustrated an article about racism with an image of the wrong band member of Little Mix.

A story about Jade Thirlwall’s personal reflections on racism was illustrated with a picture of her fellow band member, Leigh-Anne Pinnock. What’s more, despite its human editors correcting the image, the software is also said to be surfacing reports of the mistake on the home page. 

The error, which was first spotted on Friday, couldn’t have come at a worse time as people across the UK and US are taking to the streets to protest racial injustice. It also follows Microsoft’s work to restructure its AI policies, aimed at preventing mishaps of this kind. 

Thirlwall, who has been attending recent Black Lives Matter protests in London, criticised MSN for the post, calling it ignorant, unaware that the error was made by artificial intelligence.  

“@MSN If you’re going to copy and paste articles from other accurate media outlets, you might want to make sure you’re using an image of the correct mixed-race member of the group,” she said. 

At the start of June, contracted journalists were told they would no longer be employed by Microsoft to curate news on the MSN home page. Microsoft doesn’t carry out any original reporting or content creation, but it employs human editors to select, edit and repurpose articles from certain publications which it shares advertising revenue with.

With the coronavirus pandemic hitting media jobs hard, the company began terminating the contracts for dozens of its temporary journalists, according to The Guardian, with the aim of replacing them with AI. A number of those whose contracts were terminated suggested the tech giant had already begun using software to curate stories on the website. 

The human editors are thought to be unable to prevent the robot editor from selecting stories from other sites, according to The Guardian, as such editors have been told to stay alert and delete any version of the Little Mix article that software selects.

IT Pro has approached Microsoft for comment, but a staff member told The Guardian that the company was deeply concerned about reputational damage to its AI product. 

“With all the anti-racism protests at the moment, now is not the time to be making mistakes,” they said. 

​Amazon has filed a lawsuit against former Amazon Web Services (AWS) VP of product marketing Brian Hall, alleging that his new role at Google Cloud fails to comply with the terms of his confidentiality agreement.

Hall signed the contract with Amazon in June 2018, but his lawyers argued that executives at the company, including former AWS VP of worldwide marketing Ariel Kelman, led him to believe the company would not enforce its non-compete provisions. 

According to court filings, Hall slams the clause as “overbroad, unreasonable, and unenforceable”, adding that his new role at Google Cloud “will not require him to use or disclose any Amazon confidential information”.

“To Hall, that was understandable: as drafted, the clause sweeps far more broadly than necessary to protect Amazon’s legitimate business interests,” the court filings state. 

“Kelman also told Hall that he had never seen Amazon attempt to enforce the clause against a marketing employee, even though several such employees had previously departed for similar positions at Amazon’s rivals. Hall accepted his position with Amazon in reliance on those representations.”

Amazon believes that Hall’s position at Google Cloud, one of AWS’ biggest rivals, could sabotage the confidentiality of Amazon’s competitive information.

The company is planning to enforce the non-compete provisions of Hall’s contract, banning him from working in cloud product marketing for Google, or any other AWS competitor, for 18 months.

According to Amazon, which filed the lawsuit on 18 May, Hall “helped develop and knows the entire confidential Amazon cloud product roadmap for 2020-21”.

“Virtually every day, Hall worked with Amazon’s most senior cloud executives to create and execute those plans. As a result, he was entrusted with an unusually broad view into Amazon’s cloud product plans; its priorities; and its competitive strategy”, the filing reads.

The case could set a precedent for the treatment of similar non-compete provisions which, until now, most often concerned employees in the engineering sector, and not marketing leaders.

The news of the lawsuit comes days after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk blasted Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, on Twitter, telling the company that “monopolies are wrong”

​IBM has decided to “sunset” its general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software suite over ethical concerns following a fortnight of Black Lives Matter protests.

Despite putting a lot of efforts into developing its AI-powered tools, the cloud giant will no longer distribute these systems for fear that it could be used for purposes that go against the company’s principles of trust and transparency. 

Specifically, there are concerns the technology could be used for mass surveillance, racial profiling and the violations of basic human rights and freedoms. This is in addition to the company now deploring the use of facial recognition in principle, and by rival vendors, for such purposes.

“We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies,” CEO Arvind Krishna outlined in a letter to the US Congress.

“Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe. But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularity when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.”

The announcement represents a major shift, given the company has previously ploughed considerable money and effort into building out its capabilities, and has occasionally courted controversy in the process.

In March 2019, for example, IBM was called out for using almost a million photos from photo-sharing site Flickr to train its facial recognition algorithms without the consent of the subjects. Those in the pictures weren’t advised the firm was going to use their images to help determine gender, race and other identifiable features, such as hair colour.

Several months before that, the company was found to have been secretly using video footage collected by the New York Police Department (NYPD) to develop software that can identify individuals based on distinguishable characteristics.

IBM had created a system that allowed officers to search for potential criminals based upon tags, including facial features, clothing colour, facial hair, skin colour, age, gender and more. Overall, it could identify more than 16,000 data points, rendering it extremely accurate in recognising faces.

While the general use of facial recognition in law enforcement is not entirely uncommon, it has run into legal blockades, with jurisdictions, such as San Francisco, banning its use altogether, for example.

Police forces in the UK, meanwhile, have been trialling such systems, but the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has effectively neutered these plans after urging branches to assess data protection risks and ensure there’s no bias in the software being used.

In addition to permanently withdrawing its facial recognition technology, IBM has called for a national policy that encourages the use of technology to bring greater transparency and accountability to policing. These may include body cameras and data analytics techniques.

Much in step with IBM until now, a number of other major companies have engaged in developing their own AI-powered facial recognition capabilities which have often also courted controversy. 

AWS has come under fire for building its highly sophisticated Rekognition technology with alleged racial and gender bias. The company’s shareholders overturned an internal revolt over the sale of Rekognition to the police by an overwhelming majority of 97% in May 2019, for example.

The claims were based on MIT research that found it mistakenly identified some pictures of woman as men 31% of the time, which was more prevalent when it was shown pictures of darker-skinned women. This was against an error rate of 1.5% with Microsoft’s software.

Rackspace is ushering in a four-point plan to transform its business into a multi-cloud specialist under the name Rackspace Technology. 

The move follows a series of acquisitions and partnerships that have helped bolster the companies’ services. 

The four areas focus on cloud optimisation, security, cloud-native enablement and data modernisation, and the name change is the culmination of the company’s transformation over the past year, led by CEO Kevin Jones. 

“Our technical acumen with the world’s leading cloud technologies – across apps, data and security – empowers our customers to build new revenue streams, increase efficiency, and create incredible experiences,” Jones said. 
 
“Our new name, mission and multi-cloud solutions better represent the full value we bring to market. Our mission is simple. Embrace technology. Empower customers. Deliver the future.”
 
Under its new branding, the company will offer multi-cloud services. These include cloud optimisation that improves cost and performance, cloud security with compliance services for enterprise cloud customers, cloud-native enablement which accelerates multi-cloud transformation with cloud-native application and data, and finally, a data modernisation service that aims to help customers make predictive, data-driven decisions and increase the return of investment with data analytics.
 
In terms of value for money, Rackspace has already shown it can usher in multi-cloud transformations at low costs, according to Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

“Our first year of savings with Rackspace was in the 40-45% range versus our historical run costs. As we’ve continued to optimise, our second and third year of savings will be more than 60%,” said Scott Strickland, EVP & CIO, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. 

“Rackspace has been a tremendous partner, and their strategic shift to double down on new multi-cloud solutions addresses our long-term business needs.”

This is also the latest in a string of name changes for the tech firm. It was previously known as Rackspace.com, Rackspace Managed Hosting, Rackspace Hosting and, most recently, simply Rackspace.

A third of people using their home broadband to continuing working during the pandemic say they have seen disruption to their services, according to YouGov. 

2,031 people took part in a survey, with three-quarters (73%) stating that they have been using their household connection more heavily than usual since entering lockdown. 

However, 35% of UK households have revealed that they have experienced worse internet performance since the outbreak of COVID-19. 

According to YouGov data, 52% of those who have experienced poor internet connectivity have also had difficulty doing work activity, with 15% suggesting they’ve experienced “a lot” of disruption. Six in ten (59%) also say they’ve had trouble with video and audio calls, which has become the main method of business communication under lockdown. 

Poor internet performance was cited as a reason for low productivity in remote working in a report from Aternity in April. The COVID-19 Remote Work Productivity Tracker, which was compiled with data from millions of employee devices from over 500 Global 2000 companies, suggested that productivity had declined by 20%. 

Speaking about the findings, Forrester VP of research, Martin Gill suggested the drop in productivity could be simply “user error”.

“The primary issue seems to be broadband issues, what I’d categorise as user error, so people not knowing how to switch microphones on, people talking over each other in meetings, people just not used to the whole etiquette of remote working,” he said.

YouGov’s evidence suggests that internet performance is worse for those with more people in their households, which is particularly problematic if more than one person is work from home. 

Four in ten (41%) of those living in homes with three or more people say their connection has deteriorated during the pandemic, increasing to 43% for those in households of four or more. 

Slack has agreed on a multi-year partnership with AWS that will see its voice and video calling features integrated with Amazon Chime.

The partnership announcement comes a day after Slack reported its revenues increased 50% to $201.7 million in its first-quarter earnings. This also included a 28% rise in paid customers.

Its latest paid customer is tech giant Amazon, which has agreed to adopt Slack within its workforce as part of the deal. In the other direction, Slack will use a range of AWS services, including storage, compute, database, security, analytics, and machine learning, to develop new collaboration features.

The agreement will see ‘Slack Calls’, it’s service for all voice and video calling, integrated into Amazon’s video conferencing platform Chime, a service that has similar call functions to Microsoft Teams.

“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack.

“By integrating AWS services with Slack’s channel-based messaging platform, we’re helping teams easily and seamlessly manage their cloud infrastructure projects and launch cloud-based services without ever leaving Slack.”

Slack will also use AWS’s global infrastructure to support enterprise customers adopting its platform, making use of the recently announced data residency. Revealed in May, the updated zones allow Slack customers to select from a greater number of regions in Europe to help them store their data locally and fulfil compliance requirements. The deal will allow Slack to build on this offering by taking advantage of AWS infrastructure.

While Slack’s first-quarter results beat expectations, the 50% jump was in fact lower than many investors had anticipated, according to TechCrunch. Immediately after its earnings report, an investor sell-off resulted in a 4.4% drop in shares.

The firm reported rapid growth following the outbreak of the coronavirus in March. The mass adoption of cloud-based services led some investors to expect a little more than 50%.

Lots of us have more time for reading ebooks at the moment, and you don’t need an e-reader to do so. These are some of the best free options for organising and reading books on a PC.

Calibre

What we liked:

Calibre’s main function is as a book-management tool for ebook readers, giving you somewhere to store books you own and letting you choose which titles you want to send to your e-reader. However, because it’s not affiliated to any particular brand of ebook reader, you can use it to manage books on any device, including Amazon’s Kindles. This is a huge benefit if you own a Kindle device, because you can easily transfer books you didn’t buy from Amazon, including free books from sources such as Project Gutenberg.

Whether you have an ebook reader or not, Calibre is a handy place to organise your library of digital books. At it’s default settings, however, it’s not the best option for reading ebooks (see How it can be improved, right). Thankfully, if you tinker with font sizes and screen arrangements, you should be able to wrangle a book into a format you can comfortably read on your PC.

The software’s particular strength lies in its willingness to import any kind of file, so whatever format your files are saved in, Calibre can decipher them and turn them into a readable document on your screen. The only format we found it couldn’t handle was the humble PDF, which was rather strange. Although you can add PDF files to your library and organise them, Calibre launches your PC’s default PDF viewer when you actually want to view the files. If you don’t already have a satisfactory PDF tool for reading books, Sumatra PDF Reader (see review, right) is a useful portable companion.

How it can be improved:

When you double-click a book, it opens in a new window that’s about the size and shape of an ebook reader screen, but without the intuitive touch interface. To browse through the book, you have to press the Page Up and Page Down buttons on the keyboard, while to access the menu – where you can tweak the program’s unfortunate default settings – you press the Escape key.

Our verdict:

Calibre isn’t the easiest software to use for reading a book on your PC or laptop, but it’s very good at storing and managing your library, no matter where your books come from. We think you’ll need to reconfigure its default settings to read books comfortably on your PC, but it’s worth the effort.

Polar

What we liked:

Polar is an open-source book-management tool. It’s designed to help university-level students manage text books, which is probably why it has such a functional look and feel, but if you can live with lists of books rather than attractive libraries of thumbnail covers, you’ll find it has a lot of useful extra tools. Every book you open appears in a new window, which is helpful if you’re working on a research project and want to cross-reference multiple titles.

One of the best things about Polar is the tree-like structure it uses for grouping files and projects together. There are two types of tree. The first is a folder-like system that’s perfect for grouping projects together, for example. The other is very similar but uses tags, so you can group publications by type, author or any other attribute you can think of. Both features are easy to access from the window on the left.

How it can be improved:

We found Polar a little temperamental when opening some file formats, particularly free books in the EPUB format that we downloaded from Project Gutenberg. It’s more suitable for organising large quantities of non-fiction resources than libraries of novels.

Our verdict:

If your digital library is huge and varied, Polar is a great way to catalogue and organise it. However, it’s probably overkill if you’re the kind of reader who keeps books in a pile and steadily works through them one at a time.

Kindle

What we liked:

If you’re one of the millions of people who read books on an Amazon Kindle, it makes sense to install the company’s Windows software on your PC so your collection of synced books is available on all your devices.

The Kindle software isn’t resplendent with features but it’s good enough, emulating the experience of using a Kindle device, which makes it familiar and relatively user-friendly. If you use tools such as Notes and Flashcards, you’ll find they sync seamlessly between this software and your device.

The Kindle is linked to Amazon’s store, which means a huge library of commercial books is available. You can also add PDF files, but that’s the only format of document you can import directly. 

The software’s interface for reading books is simple but effective, and is one of the main reasons we like it. However, you really need to buy into the whole concept and sell your book-buying soul to Amazon to get the most out of it.

How it can be improved:

The biggest problem with the Kindle app is that it only accepts ebooks bought from Amazon. This is extraordinarily limiting. There are ways of getting books from other sources into your Kindle account, but Amazon doesn’t make it easy.

Our verdict:

The beauty of the Kindle software is that it links to your Amazon account, and if you own a Kindle device, your books sync between them. However, the software doesn’t welcome books from other sources, as Calibre does, so you have to buy into Amazon’s world.

​Zoom has defied fears that an explosion in activity and new users would not translate to rising revenues, boasting 169% year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2020.

The video conferencing platform recorded revenues of $328.2 million for the quarter ending 30 April 2020, driven mainly by acquiring new customers and expanding across existing customers. Zoom previously reported in April that it gained 100 million new users within a three-week period.

The surge in demand for Zoom’s services been almost exclusively fuelled by the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of people around the world desperate to keep in touch with colleagues and loved ones while under lockdown.

Figures from Zoom’s financial results suggest the company has managed to capitalise on this growth in users, with a net income of $27 million, despite offering a solid and reliable service for non-subscribers.

“The COVID-19 crisis has driven higher demand for distributed, face-to-face interactions and collaboration using Zoom,” said founder and CEO Eric Yuan. “Use cases have grown rapidly as people integrated Zoom into their work, learning, and personal lives. 

“I am proud of our Zoom employees who dedicated themselves to support customers and the global community during this crisis. With their tremendous efforts, we were able to provide high-quality video services to new and existing customers.”

The company has also revealed a more detailed breakdown of its customer base, recording 354% year-on-year growth in the number of customers with more than ten employees to 265,400. Meanwhile, 769 customers contributed more than $100,000 in revenue, which is approximately 90% higher than in the same quarter last year.

Zoom has projected that its revenue will be between $495 million and $500 million in the next quarter, with a full fiscal year revenue of between $1.775 billion and $1.8 billion. 

The firm has announced its financial success days after pledging to improve encryption standards for paid users. End-to-end encryption will arrive for subscribers, but not free users, because of Zoom’s intentions to co-operate with law enforcement agencies. 

“Free users for sure we don’t want to give that because we also want to work together with FBI, with local law enforcement in case some people use Zoom for a bad purpose,” Yuan said, according to Bloomberg tech reporter Nico Grant.

Alex Stamos, recently hired by the company as a security consultant, elaborated that while all members will continue to benefit from 256-bit encryption after its recent implementation, end-to-end encryption will be rolled out on an opt-in basis for now. 

“We have to design the system to securely allow hosts to opt-into an E2E meeting and to carefully communicate the current security guarantees to hosts and attendees. We are looking at ways to upgrade to E2E once a meeting has started, but there will be no downgrades,” he explained on Twitter.

“So this creates a difficult balancing act for Zoom, which is trying to both improve the privacy guarantees it can provide while reducing the human impact of the abuse of its product.

“Lots of companies are facing this balancing act, but as a paid enterprise product that has to offer E2EE as an option due to legitimate product needs, Zoom has a slightly different calculus. The current decision by Zoom’s management is to offer E2EE to the business and enterprise tiers and not to the limited, self-service free tier.”

Google Cloud has entered into an agreement with the UK’s Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to provide cloud computing to the country’s public sector agencies. 

The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which is an agreement that isn’t legally binding. 

The purpose of the MoU is to make it easier and more affordable for public sector agencies to use the full range of Google Cloud services for digital transformation. CCS, the UK Cabinet Office executive agency and trading fund, approached Google in 2019 to discuss cloud services. 

The result is an agreement that aims to open up the cloud services market to more suppliers to provide the best value for public sector agencies investing in the technology. Google Cloud has even confirmed a discount for qualifying public sector bodies based on aggregated cloud service demand and their expected spend. 
 
The MoU will also include access to Google Cloud’s managed and serverless offerings, such as its comprehensive hybrid and multi-cloud services and Anthos.

“This is a significant milestone for us, as we see the results of our focused investment in cloud services and solutions primed and tailored for the public sector,” said Mark Palmer, head of public sector EMEA, Google Cloud. 

“The UK public sector is a major focus for Google Cloud, and this is an opportunity to further support Her Majesty’s government in their digital transformation.”

According to Google, the fund will allow organisations, such as the NHS and government bodies, to take full advantage of a range of technologies across Google Cloud, including infrastructure, analytics, AI, application modernisation and development, and collaboration services. 

The MoU marks the beginning of an expanded relationship between CCS and Google Cloud, according to both organisations, and they will maintain regular dialogue and strategy sessions to ensure the UK public sector has access to Google Cloud’s latest innovations.