Global market update and executive summary of tech industry news headlines, brought to you Hunter Muller and the editorial team at HMG Strategy.
Markets Inch Up as Investors Weigh Risks
Major financial markets in the U.S. edged upward or held steady on Friday as investors responded to the war in Ukraine, surging energy prices and rising domestic inflation.
The FBI is warning U.S. businesses and local governments that cyberattacks may escalate in the wake of Russian military operations in Eastern Europe.
“The US government is on high alert for the possibility of the conflict spilling over into cyberspace, where Russia has shown an ability to cause significant disruption and damage in the past,” writes Rishi Iyengar of CNN Business. “Some of the biggest cyberattacks against US infrastructure in the past two years have been linked to suspected Russian hackers. The list includes the SolarWinds hack that infiltrated several government agencies in 2020, the ransomware attack that forced a shutdown of one of America’s largest fuel pipelines for several days last year and another attack on one of the world’s largest meat producers, JBS.”
Google Relaxes Covid-19 Policies
Google appears to be relaxing some of its Covid-19 policies and bringing back some of the amenities that defined Silicon Valley culture.
“In an email to San Francisco Bay Area employees last week, Google said it was easing some of its pandemic restrictions. It will no longer require employees to be tested weekly to enter its U.S. offices. Also, it will not require staff to wear masks in the office, with the exception of Santa Clara County — home to Google’s main Mountain View headquarters,” writes Daisuke Wakabayashi of The New York Times. “Google also said it planned to restore many of its famed office amenities, such as fitness centers, cafeterias, massage services and commuter shuttles.”
Meta Plans to Build Real-Time Universal Speech Translator
Universal translators are standard equipment in science-fiction movies, but they’ve proven hard to build in real life, especially for languages that don’t generate huge volumes of written text. Meta, however, is aiming to develop real-time speech translators that work for all languages, even when there’s a lack of written text for AI systems to train with.
“Meta says it wants to overcome these challenges by deploying new machine learning techniques in two specific areas. The first focus, dubbed No Language Left Behind, will concentrate on building AI models that can learn to translate language using fewer training examples,” writes James Vincent of The Verge. “The second, Universal Speech Translator, will aim to build systems that directly translate speech in real-time from one language to another without the need for a written component to serve as an intermediary (a common technique for many translation apps).”
FBI Launches Unit to Focus on Digital Currencies and Justice Department Appoints Crypto Czar
In an effort to ramp up its ability to fight cybercrime, the FBI has created a new unit to deal with “virtual asset exploitation.” Additionally, the U.S. Department of Justice has named an experienced cyber crime prosecutor to head up its cryptocurrency enforcement efforts.
“In a speech at the Munich Cyber Security Conference in Germany, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced that Eun Young Choi, a prosecutor who led the case against a Russian hacker who helped steal information about more than 80 million JPMorgan & Chase Co customers, will lead the department’s cryptocurrency enforcement team,” according to a report filed by Sarah N. Lynch and Chris Prentice of Reuters.
