This Week in Tech Updates from Richart Ruddie

Google ads and Google as a company is finally getting serious about privacy. They've been tightening up and making changes to Analytics and working on a cookie free future and this past week they just released this announcement: "New data protection laws, which apply to the collection and processing of personal information, will be coming into effect in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and Utah in 2023." While we're at it and dealing with privacy issues Google settled with 40 out of 50 states here over tracking issues and is paying a few hundred million in fines. Read about the not so not evil company practices here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/google-settles-location-history-lawsuit-with-40-states-will-pay-392-million/

CBS News got off of Twitter for what they said was security purposes and then got back on a day later. It's been purported that their followers are fake or that they have extremely low engagement on Twitter and that may be to fraudulent followers or bots.

If you use Wix for SEO or have client sites that are created on Wix then this resource SEO guide released this week may also be helpful: https://www.wix.com/seo/learn/resource/manage-seo-edit-by-page

Sucuri is a popular wordpress plugin and they have just uncovered a WIDESPREAD hack that appears to be designed to improve someone's SEO performance which is a tricky and clever hack to send malware using black hat hacking techniques. https://blog.sucuri.net/2022/11/massive-ois-is-black-hat-redirect-malware-campaign.html )

Artificial Intelligence news for the week courtesy of The University of Cambridge states that "claims AI can boost wordplace diversity are 'spurious and dangerous'"https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/claims-ai-can-boost-workplace-diversity-are-spurious-and-dangerous-researchers-argue and here's some more cool AI News: https://www.engadget.com/mit-century-old-differential-equation-liquid-ai-computational-bottleneck-160035555.html

QUANTA MAGAZINE PROFILES A NEW "energy-efficient [AI] chip" that promises to revolutionize chip design and artificial inteligence research https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-brain-inspired-chip-can-run-ai-with-far-less-energy-20221110/ ). The chips use (relatively newly developed) Resistive RAM memory and the chips are called NeuRRAM (neuromorphic resistive RAM). These memory chips operate in ANALOG rather than DIGITAL mode, which is revolutionary. Analog computers predate digital computers but they didn't have memory systems like RAM.

Now companies are laying off en masse and doing a RIF which means a Reduction in Force or workforce for those who keep on hearing about these RIF's and had wondered what the acronym meant. These companies over-hired during the pandemic, expecting a much larger economic bounce back that was pent up with money flooded into the system and for the last year we've been bearing the outpouring of that money.