July 2013

The headaches for Huawei Technologies keep growing, fresh after the U.K. government said that it would conduct a review of the Chinese company's cybersecurity arrangements and a former U.S. intelligence official reportedly accused it of spying for Beijing.

Since last year, Huawei, the world's second-largest telecom equipment vendor after Sweden's Ericsson, has been under the spotlight because of questions raised in the U.S., Australia and the U.K. about potential national security risks based on concerns that the Shenzhen-based company might have deep ties to the Chinese government. The caution and suspicion toward Huawei comes amid China's growing importance and changing role in global technology industries, from being a manufacturer of simple goods to a provider of key technology.

A privacy proposal calling for mobile app developers to provide consumers with so-called “short-form notice,” which explains data collection practices in one or two words, seems to be gaining traction at the Commerce Department. But Carnegie Mellon University researchers say in a new paper, published this week, that the proposal in its current form could confuse consumers.

The Commerce Department's short-form notice proposal, which is still in draft form, calls for developers to describe the information collected in a single word, or very short phrase -- like “biometrics,” “health information,” “location,” and “browser history.” The proposal also says developers should use short phrases to describe the third-parties that will receive the data -- like “ad networks” or “social networks.” But Carnegie Mellon researchers say the proposed terminology is ambiguous.

The renewed attention to the composition of newsrooms comes in the wake of the American Society of News Editors’ (ASNE) annual survey of workforce diversity, which showed that minorities and women are less represented in newspaper newsrooms than in society at large.

In recent years, progress on the diversity front has largely stalled. ASNE has counted professional full-time newspaper journalists since it first released the census in1978. This year, 978 out of 1,382 daily print newspapers responded, representing 71% of all U.S. dailies. In addition to the continued reduction in the size of the daily newspaper workforce in 2012, some of the key findings in the ASNE report relate to diversity in the newsroom.

1. Overall, minority journalists accounted for 12% of the total newspaper newsroom workforce in 2012.
2. Smaller newspapers are less likely to employ minority journalists.
3. Women are often underrepresented in newspaper newsrooms.
4. About one-third of newsroom managers are women.
5. In the past two decades, there has been little overall change in the percentage of minorities in the newsroom.

Gary J. Beach has long been a close observer of technology, a frequent speaker on the conference circuit and a confidante of senior technology executives. He is a former publisher of Computerworld, Network World and CIO Magazine, where he is currently publisher emeritus. More than six years ago, Beach decided to begin studying in earnest a much-debated issue, and a subject of ritual complaint among technology executives — the apparently lagging skills of the American workforce. The result is his book, “The U.S. Technology Skills Gap: What Every Technology Executive Must Know to Save America’s Future” (John Wiley & Sons). Much of the book is an illuminating, idiosyncratic history of education in America, dating back to 1941. “The skills gap is really an education gap, and it affects us all,” Beach explained. America cannot compete with China or India in churning out engineers. Instead, the United States can thrive by being more innovative. Stronger math and science skills are needed, he writes, but so are other skills, which he calls the “5C’s — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity and confidence.”