Techstrong News Recap – October 13, 2022
On Oct. 13, William Willis covered Meta’s new Quest Pro VR headset, The U.S. Labor Department’s proposed rule that could reclassify gig workers as employees and how Google is working with Coinbase to accept cryptocurrency payments in its cloud division. He also talked about a court ruling in favor of an employee who was fired because his camera was turned off. Finally, he previewed articles from DigitalCxO, DevOps.com and Security Boulevard, which covered using technology to improve customer experience in car repair shop management, GitLab’s launch of an open source Cloud Seed tool in collaboration with Google and how a group of pro-Russian attackers took several U.S. airport websites offline.
Transcript
Hi again, everyone here the headlines for October 13th. First up meta unveiled the flashy new metaquest Pro a hot new high-end virtual reality headset at the recent conference. The headset is set in a price of 1,500, but it's several new features such as a high resolution sensor allowing people to see mixed virtual and augmented reality as well as eye tracking.
VR headsets in the past have been popular with Gamers but medicine seems to be positioning this headset more as a productivity device in their ongoing quest to invest in the metaverse. Next the US Labor Department released a proposal earlier this week. That could make it possible for Gig workers to be reclassified as employees.
If the proposed rule were to be adopted it would raise costs for companies such as Uber and doordash that rely on contract work. The proposed rule would allow the classification of a worker to rely more holistically including to what the rule refers as whether the work is integral to the business. The new rule sent stocks of these gig companies down and is just the most recent development in the fight between contract and employed work.
In other news Google has said it would work with coinbase to start letting certain customers pay for cloud services with cryptocurrencies starting early next year. In the announcement coinbase also said they would be moving its data related applications from AWS to Google Cloud. Google will start out by letting a handful of customers from web 3 world who would like to pay using cryptocurrency before expanding to more people.
Blockchain technology has become a bigger Focus for Google recently and it originally said it would be exploring adding support for digital payments back in May. Next up a Dutch court has ruled that a worker who was fired after refusing to keep his webcam on while working has his rights breached after the worker declined to share his screen and have his camera on his company fired him for insubordination and refusal to do work. The court found that video surveillance of any kind would encounters an intrusion into an employee's private life.
This comes as we see more and more reports of workplace surveillance technology that has increased in use since the start of the pandemic. On digital cxr. We have an article about how technology can fix the traditional car repair shop customer experience.
The importance of good CX cannot be understated. com. We have an article looking at how gitlab has launched an open source Cloud seed tool in collaboration with Google that makes it easier for devops teams to use Google Cloud platform resources.
Gitlab has stated that the goal is to reduce friction by requiring developers to write code to consume these services using a set of lower level apis. com. Finally on Security Boulevard.
We have an article looking at how a group of pro-russian hackers took several US airports offline earlier this week. Kilnet, the hacker group behind the attack used denial of service attacks to block access to 14 airport websites. The airports operations were not affected though, and the websites were brought back up quickly.
com. And that's today's Tech strong news recap.
