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Tag: Zoom

  • Tech-layoffs: Zoom shreds 15% of its staff in post-pandemic ‘reset’

    Tech-layoffs: Zoom shreds 15% of its staff in post-pandemic ‘reset’

    Zoom, a well-known provider of video conferencing services that saw a surge in remote work during the Covid pandemic, is dismissing 1,300 employees.

    About 15% of its staff will be impacted by the change, which comes as user growth and profits have recently slowed.

    Boss Eric Yuan announced that, as the company focuses on making sure it can weather the slowdown, he and other leaders will also take significant pay cuts.

    It is one of many tech companies that are making similar changes.

    “As the world transitions to life post-pandemic, we are seeing that people and businesses continue to rely on Zoom,” Mr Yuan wrote in a message to employees shared by the company.

    “But the uncertainty of the global economy, and its effect on our customers, means we need to take a hard – yet important – look inward to reset ourselves so we can weather the economic environment, deliver for our customers and achieve Zoom’s long-term vision.”

    Amazon and Salesforce are among the other heavyweights to have announced big job cuts, saying the boom in business they saw during the pandemic was ending.

    More than 300 tech firms have laid off nearly 100,000 workers globally since the start of the year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks such announcements.

    Zoom especially has faced challenges as rival tech firms upgrade their video offerings.

    The firm’s revenue more than tripled in 2020 and grew about 55% in 2021. But last year, the gains slowed to the single digits and its profits dropped sharply.

    Shares in the company have plunged more than 80% from their 2020 peak.

    Mr Yuan said the cuts would affect every part of the organisation and were aimed at reducing duplicative roles and refocusing on the firm’s top priorities.

    Zoom said it expected the restructuring to cost $50m to $68m, with affected staff to receive 16 weeks of salary and health care coverage, as well as other support.

    Mr Yuan said he would also reduce his salary in the coming fiscal year by 98% and forego his bonus. Other members of the executive leadership team will see their base salaries fall by 20% and lose bonuses, he added.

    “We worked tirelessly.. but we also made mistakes. We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities,” Mr Yuan said.

    “As the CEO and founder of Zoom, I am accountable for these mistakes and the actions we take today – and I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions.”

    Shares in the firm jumped more than 8% following the announcement.

  • Microsoft and Zoom join Hong Kong data ‘pause’

    Microsoft and Zoom have said they will not process data requests made by the Hong Kong authorities while they take stock of a new security law.

    They follow Facebook, Google, Twitter and the chat app Telegram, which had already announced similar “pauses” in compliance over the past two days.

    China passed the law on 30 June, criminalising acts that support independence, making it easier to punish protesters.

    Apple says it is “assessing” the rules.

    If the tech firms make their non-compliance policies permanent, they could face restrictions or a ban on their services in the semi-autonomous region.

    And while Facebook, Google, Twitter and Telegram’s services are blocked in mainland China, the same is not true of Microsoft, Zoom and Apple.

    In a related development, TikTok – which is owned by the Chinese firm Bytedance – has said it plans to exit Hong Kong within days.

    The business had previously said it would not comply with Chinese government requests to access TikTok users’ data. It operates a similar service called Douyin in its home market, which could theoretically become a substitute. However, Bytedance has indicated it does not have plans to do so at this time.

    ‘Seeking guidance’

    Microsoft directly offers its Office 365 work app and LinkedIn social networks to both Hong Kong residents and citizens in mainland China.

    But while Office 365 is provided directly by the firm to Hong Kong residents, the service is run by a local firm 21Vianet on the other side of the border, allowing Microsoft to remain one step removed.

    In the case of LinkedIn, law enforcement data requests have to go via the US government, although the division says it does sometimes “make an exception in an emergency”.

    According to Microsoft’s latest transparency report, it received requests for data linked to 81 accounts from Hong Kong’s government between July and December 2019, and provided “non-content data” in most cases.

    “As we would with any new legislation, we are reviewing the new law to understand its implications,” said a spokesman for the American firm.

    “In the past, we’ve typically received only a relatively small number of requests from Hong Kong authorities, but we are pausing our responses to these requests as we conduct our review.”

    The video chat provider Zoom is based in the US, but has ties to China.

    Its founder and chief executive Eric Yuan was born in Tai’an before emigrating to Silicon Valley 23 years ago.

    Most of its product development workers are based in mainland China.

    And it recently made headlines for:

    suspending the account of a group of US-based activists, who had held a meeting on the platform to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Zoom acknowledged it did this at the behest of Beijing routing some non-China-based users’ video calls via computer servers based in the country, which it said had happened by mistake “Zoom supports the free and open exchange of thoughts and ideas,” a spokeswoman said in response to the latest development.

    “We are proud to facilitate meaningful conversations and professional collaboration around the world.

    “We’re actively monitoring the developments in Hong Kong SAR [Special Administrative Region], including any potential guidance from the US government. We have paused processing any data requests from, and related to, Hong Kong SAR.”

    US treaty

    Apple uses end-to-end encryption to protect Messages and Facetime conversations carried out by Hong Kong residents, meaning only the device owners can unscramble the messages transmitted.

    However, the firm does hold encryption keys to data stored in users’ iCloud accounts, which can include back-ups of their text-based chats.

    In theory, this means it could pass this information to the authorities if demanded.

    However, since both the keys and the data are stored in the States, it says the US government has the power to intervene.

    “Apple has always required that all content requests from local law enforcement authorities be submitted through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty in place between the United States and Hong Kong,” it said.

    “As a result, Apple doesn’t receive content requests directly from the Hong Kong government. Under the MLAT process, the US Department of Justice reviews Hong Kong authorities’ requests for legal conformance.

    “We’re assessing the new law, which went into effect less than a week ago, and we have not received any content requests since the law went into effect.”

    Apple has, however, complied with requests in the past.

    Its latest transparency report indicates it received requests for data concerning 358 devices from Hong Kong’s government between January and June, and that it provided data in 91% of the cases.

    In mainland China, users’ iCloud files are stored in a data centre controlled by a local firm, so the government does not need to involve the US authorities when seeking access.

    Source: bbc.com

  • Son ‘kills father’ during Zoom video chat in New York state

    A 72-year-old man has been stabbed to death by his son in New York state during a Zoom video chat with 20 other participants, police say.

    Dwight Powers was attacked by his 32-year-old son, Thomas Scully-Powers, who then jumped out of a window and fled in Long Island’s Amityville village.

    He was held within an hour after chat guests had called the police. The motive of the attack was not yet clear.

    Mr Scully-Powers was later charged with second-degree murder.

    In a statement, Suffolk County police said further information would be provided once the suspect, who sustained minor injuries, was treated and discharged from hospital.

    Police said it had been alerted of the incident on Thursday afternoon after several of the chat’s participants noticed the man fall, but that it took some time for them to locate the house because the guests did not know where Mr Powers lived.

    Some of the people may have witnessed the attack, reports said. It was not clear what type of meeting was being held.

    Source: bbc.com

  • Man sentenced to death in Singapore via Zoom

    A man has been sentenced to death via a Zoom video call in Singapore, as the country remains on lockdown following a spike in Coronavirus cases.

    Punithan Genasan, 37, received the sentence on Friday for his role in a drug deal that took place in 2011.

    It marks the city’s first case where such a ruling has been done remotely.

    Human rights groups argued that pursuing the death penalty at a time when the world is being gripped by a pandemic was “abhorrent”.

    The vast majority of court hearings in Singapore have been adjourned until at least 1 June, when the city’s current lockdown period is due to end.

    Cases which have been deemed to be essential are being held remotely.

    “For the safety of all involved in the proceedings, the hearing for Public Prosecutor v Punithan A/L Genasan was conducted by video-conferencing,” a spokesperson for Singapore’s Supreme Court told Reuters.

    Mr Genasan’s lawyer, Peter Fernando, said his client is considering an appeal.

    Singapore has a zero-tolerance policy for illegal drugs. In 2013, 18 people were executed – the highest figure in at least two decades, according to Amnesty International.

    Of those 18, 11 had been charged with drug-related offenses.

    Source: bbc.com

  • Zoom admits calls got ‘mistakenly’ routed through China

    Zoom has admitted that some call data was routed through China for non-China users.

    • CEO Eric Yuan said the calls were routed “mistakenly” after the company ramped up capacity to cope with a huge increase in demand.
    • Separately, researchers at Toronto’s Citizen Lab found Zoom used encryption keys issued by servers in China, raising further surveillance worries.
    • China does not enforce strict data privacy laws and could conceivably demand that Zoom decrypt calls, they said.
    • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories .

    Zoom’s ongoing security woes just won’t let up.

    The video conferencing provider has admitted that some non-China users had their calls routed through China.

    “In our urgency to come to the aid of people around the world during this unprecedented pandemic, we added server capacity and deployed it quickly starting in China, where the outbreak began,” Yuan said. “In that process, we failed to fully implement our usual geo-fencing best practices. As a result, it is possible certain meetings were allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect.”

    He did not say how many users were affected.

    During spells of heavy traffic, the video-conferencing service shifts traffic to the nearest data center with the largest available capacity but Zoom’s data centers in China aren’t supposed to be used to reroute non-Chinese users’ calls.

    This is largely due to privacy concerns: China does not enforce strict data privacy laws and could conceivably demand that Zoom decrypt the contents of encrypted calls.

    Separately, researchers at the University of Toronto also found Zoom’s encryption used keys issued by servers in China, even when call participants were outside of China.

    They wrote: “During a test of a Zoom meeting with two users, one in the United States and one in Canada, we found that the AES-128 key for conference encryption and decryption was sent to one of the participants over TLS from a Zoom server apparently located in Beijing, 52.81.151.250.”

    They added: “A companyprimarily cateringto North American clients that sometimes distributes encryption keys through servers in China is potentially concerning, given that Zoom may belegally obligated to disclose these keys to authorities in China.”

    The researchers noted that Zoom has some 700 employees in China, across several Chinese subsidiaries.

    Zoom has faced multiple high-profile security issues in recent weeks as it struggles to cope with an unprecedented surge in traffic and new users.

    Zoom did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment and clarification.

    Source: www.pulse.com.gh