IBM has promoted Arvind Krishna to CEO after Ginni Rometty announced she was stepping down from the role and will retire at the end of the year. 

The change marks the end of a 39-year career for Rometty, eight of which were at the top as its CEO. She will stay on as executive chairman of the board until the end of the year before retiring. Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst will replace Rometty as the company’s president.

In a statement, Rometty said that Krishna and Whitehurst were a «proven technical and business-savvy leadership team».

«Arvind has grown IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software business and led the largest acquisition in the company’s history,» Rometty said. «He is well-positioned to lead IBM and its clients into the cloud and cognitive era.»

«Jim is also a seasoned leader who has positioned Red Hat as the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT software solutions and services, and has been quickly expanding the reach and benefit of that technology to an even wider audience as part of IBM.»

Virginia ‘Ginni’ Rometty’s career at IBM started in 1981 as a systems analyst. She spent her first ten years working in many technical positions and went on to led the integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. She spent the 1990’s working in sales before taking on a number of leadership roles in the next decade.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Rometty became IBM’s ninth CEO as well as its first female chief executive. During her time at the helm, the company set up a number of partnerships with the likes of Apple, SAP and Box, reportedly taking it into higher-growth areas such as cloud and AI.

«Ginni has provided outstanding leadership for IBM, substantially transforming the company and ushering in a new cloud and cognitive era,» said Michael Eskew, lead director of IBM’s Board. «She has taken bold strategic actions to reposition IBM for the future, shedding businesses and growing new units organically and through acquisition, all while achieving record diversity and employee engagement and setting the industry standard for responsible technology ethics and data stewardship.»

She steps down as CEO with the company recently reporting its first-quarter growth since 2018, fueled largely by its cloud division.

Check Point security researchers spotted flaws in Microsoft Azure that could have let hackers take control over the cloud servers.

The work was part of a wider project looking at cloud infrastructure, dubbed «Attack the Cloud», in which Check Point wants to «break the assumption that cloud infrastructures are secure».

With Microsoft Azure, the researchers spotted two flaws. The first was in Azure Stack, and could have let criminals take screenshots or see other sensitive information by taking advantage of a vulnerability in the «DataService» function, which didn’t require authentication.

«This security flaw would enable a hacker to get sensitive information of any business that has its machine running on Azure,» the researchers said. «In order to execute the exploitation, a hacker would first gain access to the Azure Stack Portal, enabling that person to send unauthenticated HTTP requests that provide screenshots and information about tenants and infrastructure machines.»

The second flaw was in the Azure App Service, where businesses provision and deploy apps and business processes, and could have allowed hackers to take control of a server.

«The end result would be that a hacker could potentially take control over the entire Azure server, and consequently take control over all your business code,» the researchers said.

The researchers could get into applications, see data and take over accounts by creating a free user in Azure Cloud and running malicious functions.

«Exploiting this vulnerability in all of the plans could allow us to compromise Microsoft’s App Service infrastructure,» the researchers explain. «However, exploiting it specifically on a Free/Shared plan could also allow compromising other tenant apps, data, and account.»

Check Point disclosed the findings to Microsoft in January and June last year, with patches for both issued at the end of 2019. The first flaw was awarded $5,000 from Microsoft’s bug bounty programme; the second earned $40,000.

The researchers emphasised in a report on the second flaw that while the cloud is «considered safe», it can still have vulnerabilities: «The cloud is not a magical place.»

​Avast has announced it will be closing down its Jumpshot data analytics unit, only a day after launching an internal investigation into data-sharing practices following user complaints.

On Tuesday, the company was accused of collecting customer online behaviour data and passing it on to its Jumpshot unit, where it was then sold to third parties, according to an investigation by PC Mag and Motherboard.

Avast has denied the allegations contained in the report and, according to company CEO Ondrej Vlcek, both Avast and Jumpshot have «acted fully within legal bounds» and have «committed themselves to 100% GDPR compliance».

However, announcing the decision on Thursday, Vlcek said that a review of Avast’s practices revealed that the «data collection business is not in line with our privacy priorities as a company».

«Protecting people is Avast’s top priority and must be embedded in everything we do in our business and in our products. Anything to the contrary is unacceptable,» said Vlcek.

«I firmly believe it will help Avast focus on and unlock its full potential to deliver on its promise of security and privacy. And I especially thank our users, whose recent feedback accelerated our decision to take quick action,» he added. «As CEO of Avast, I feel personally responsible and I would like to apologize to all concerned.»

Vlcek also said the decision would impact «hundreds» of Jumpshot employees and customers, but that it was «the right thing to do».

Avast intends to continue paying Jumpshot vendors and suppliers in full during the wind-down process, and will begin notifying customers shortly. It also added that the closure would not affect its 2019 fiscal results.

Having once led the anti-virus market, Avast is now considered the fifth-largest provider of security software behind Symantec, McAfee, ESET and Bitdefender.​

Google has demonstrated a real time translation and transcription tool powered by AI, that will take lectures and other long-form voice in one language and output it in another. 

Part of Google Translate, the tool will let a smartphone act as interpreter, listening to speech via the microphone and transcribing translated text in real time. So far, the system only supports a few languages, including English, French, German and Spanish. The demo showed English being translated to Spanish. 

«With this, your Android mobile phone will effectively turn into an almost real time translator device for long-form speech,» Google said at the demonstration according to reports, adding it could «unlock continuous speech translations in this world at scale» in the longer term.

However, the transcription and translation won’t happen on your device. Instead, the audio recording will be uploaded to Google’s servers – so you’ll need a decent Wi-Fi connection or solid data package, as well as a willingness to share the audio with Google, to use this tool. 

Google didn’t say when the feature would arrive. 

The Google Translate tool was unveiled as part of a showcase of Google’s AI projects at its San Francisco office, which also included a neural network used to track and monitor whales using underwater microphones, which is now being used in Canada.  

«With this information, marine mammal managers can monitor and treat whales that are injured, sick or distressed,» said Julie Cattiau, product manager for Google AI, in a blog post. «In case of an oil spill, the detection system can allow experts to locate the animals and use specialised equipment to alter the direction of travel of the orcas to prevent exposure.» 

That machine-learning system was trained on 1,800 hours of underwater audio recordings that were labelled and supplied by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

The AI demonstrations come a week after Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a column urging sensible regulation of artificial intelligence to avoid misuse of the technology. 

Google is reportedly gearing up to take on Slack and Microsoft Teams with its own business communications app.

The app will combine its raft of G Suite services, including Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat, into a single mobile entity, according to The Information, which cites two people who have used it.

A prototype of the app is currently being tested internally at Google, with the CEO of its cloud division, Thomas Kurian, reportedly sharing details about the project with cloud salespeople and business partners.

The tech giant announced a range of AI and communication-based features at its Cloud Next conference in November, including voice assistant capabilities for parts of G Suite, smart compose functions for Google Docs and a new video chat feature on Gmail.

More recently, it demonstrated a real-time translation feature for Android that will allow users to hear one language and read it in another. 

If the reports are true, the new comms app could see Google in the middle of Slack and Microsoft’s on-going battle for business communications.

Microsoft Teams is currently the more popular service with 13 million active users, according to figures released in July 2019. However, the numbers are boosted by companies using Office 365, of which teams is an integral part. It’s worth noting that Google’s rumoured new app is said to be part of its G Suite service and so could fulfil a similar role.

Slack is also hugely popular, particularly with startups, where it has 10 million daily users according to the latest figures. Despite falling behind Microsoft Teams, the company has called out the tech giant on a few occasions.

In November, Slack tweeted a video suggesting a Teams advert had copied one of its own and captioned the tweet «ok boomer». The company’s CEO Stewart Butterfield has also criticised Microsoft for its «surprisingly unsportsmanlike» behaviour bundling Teams into Office 365.

Cisco’s flagship collaboration suite, WebEx Meetings, will introduce a voice assistant alongside transcription and translation tools to help customers mine insights from the voice data collected by the platform.

The added tools, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), will allow teams using the platform to streamline the entire meetings process, from automating aspects like minute-taking, and recording actionable items.

In addition to an Alexa-like voice assistant, real-time transcription tools will combine with advanced analytics so businesses can derive insights from the voice data that’s collected internally during all meetings.

This technology, which Cisco adopted following its Voicea acquisition in September last year, generates a word cloud following each meeting, and automates clips and videos that can serve as packaged highlights. The system, moreover, can be trained to learn corporate taxonomy specific to each business.

“Voicea users have reported saving more than six hours per week per user with more actionable and efficient meetings, and we believe Webex users will experience similar results,” said VP and GM for team collaboration at Cisco, Sri Srinivasan.

“We’re excited to bring this and other cognitive features to the 300 million users we already serve with Cisco Collaboration. This technology will fundamentally change how we are able to deliver massively personalised experiences and transform the way we work.”

The company says the added automation, particularly on action points and highlights that can be distributed to absentees or attendees to serve as reminders, will lead to more productive meetings overall. The engine can also determine information such as what the meeting was about and even the tone of the meeting.

The addition of aspects like live closed-captioning, meanwhile, will allow people to tune into meetings remotely while they’re in busy or noisy environments. All users, meanwhile, will be able to read back through a transcript that’s automatically generated to recap on certain points and even search this for particular information.

Cisco’s Webex assistant and voice tools feed into the company’s idea of «cognitive collaboration», which essentially amounts to giving customers the right information, at the right time and in the right context. This is, as the company sees it, paramount to giving businesses the ability to gain insights from a new pool of data that’s been relatively untapped.

“We think of transcription and the capabilities around it … as the next frontier as information as a currency,” Srinivasan added. “It is the next data quorum – the largest data quorum – that we can create at Cisco collaboration.

“And when you think about 300 million users across calling, across meetings, starting to bring this information forward, we are able to bring that information – that data – and convert that into information. So there’s a number of capability sets that come; for example, analytics at the end of the meeting.”

The firm also moved to quash any concerns from businesses over whether Cisco might itself gather their voice data, suggesting that users can set their own privacy controls, and that all its services are GDPR-compliant. All data is also end-to-end encrypted, which customers can either manage themselves or give Cisco the keys to.

Avast has been caught up in yet another privacy scandal, with a joint investigation by PC Mag and Motherboard revealing the extent to which the security firm is collecting user browser histories and selling the data on to third parties. 

Last year, Avast browser extensions were spotted collecting browsing data to sell to advertising firms, sparking Chrome, Opera and Firefox to pull the add-ons from their marketplaces, though some have since returned.

Avast said at the time that it removed any identifying information from the browsing history. The PC Mag and Motherboard investigation suggested it’s possible to re-identify that data once it’s in the hands of marketers. 

The investigation revealed that Avast sells the collected data via its Jumpshot division to third parties such as marketing companies. The browsing history being collected includes every click, keyword search, and entered URLs, harvested not only from browser extensions but also from users of Avast’s free antivirus software. 

The collected data is «de-identified» by stripping out personal details, and tagged with an identifying code. However, research casts doubt on whether any large sample of user data can be truly anonymised. Jumpshot’s data does not directly identify any specific individual, but when it is combined with other data, it’s simple to see who is clicking what, the investigation claims. 

For example, if a data harvesting company or marketer bought data from Avast and also from a website you’re logged into (for example Amazon), the information provided would make it possible to link the Avast data to your Amazon account, therefore revealing your identity, and tying it to your entire browsing history. The data seen by the investigators includes searches, GPS coordinates on maps, visits to social media accounts, and even what video was watched on a porn site. 

The investigation showed Jumpshot was selling that data to companies that aggregate such information, with customers buying access to that «all clicks feed» for millions of dollars. 

Avast stopped sharing such data collected via extensions after the revelations last year, and in July 2019 started asking users for permission before sharing their browsing data with Jumpshot. It will now also ask all existing users of its free antivirus to opt-in to data sharing in February. 

An Avast spokesperson said the company stopped sharing browser extension data with Jumpshot in December, only using collected information for core security tasks.

«We ensure that Jumpshot does not acquire personal identification information, including name, email address or contact details,» the spokesperson added.

Avast also noted that users have always had the ability to opt out of such data sharing: «As of July 2019, we had already begun implementing an explicit opt-in choice for all new downloads of our AV, and we are now also prompting our existing free users to make an opt-in or opt-out choice, a process which will be completed in February 2020.»

The spokesperson added: «We have a long track record of protecting users’ devices and data against malware, and we understand and take seriously the responsibility to balance user privacy with the necessary use of data for our core security products.»

This isn’t the first data privacy scandal to hit Avast: in 2018, Avast pulled an update to its CCleaner tool over data collection concerns.