Ex-Twitter employee wins £470,000 after Musk’s firing email
Platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been ordered to pay a record fine of more than 550,000 euros (£470,000/$606,000) after an Irish court ruled that former employee Gary Rooney was unfairly fired.
Looney was director of procurement for procure-to-pay at Twitter’s European headquarters, but left the company in October 2022 following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition.
Within weeks of the acquisition closing, Musk outlined his plans for the social media platform, including in an email saying future staffers would need to be “extremely hardcore.”
The message, titled “Crossroads,” asks employees to click a “yes” or “no” link if they “want to be part of the new Twitter.” Musk added that those who click “no” would be offered three months’ severance pay.
Rooney told the Irish Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) tribunal that neither option clicked for him, but he received another email a few days later confirming his decision to quit.
The WRC ruled in Rooney’s favour and awarded him a total of €550,131 compensation for unfair dismissal, an Irish record, made up of €350,131 in Rooney’s lost wages between January 2023 and May 2024, plus €200,000 in estimated lost future wages.
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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies at age 56
Susan Wojcicki, a former Google executive who led YouTube for nearly a decade, has died at the age of 56, Google said in a statement.
Wojcicki, who joined Google in 1998 as its first marketing manager, died after two years of battling lung cancer, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced.
Pichai, who heads Google’s parent company Alphabet, said in his X profile that he was “incredibly saddened” by the death of a man who was “more central to Google’s history than anyone else”.
Before joining the search engine company, Mr. Wojcicki worked at chipmaker Intel Corp. He rented his Menlo Park garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and later joined the company as its 16th employee.
After Google acquired YouTube, she served as CEO of the video-sharing platform from 2014 to 2023, before stepping down to focus on “family, health and personal passion projects.”
She leaves behind five children and her husband, Dennis Troper, who said: “My beloved wife of 26 years and mother of our five children passed away today after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer.”
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NIST Releases Quantum Standards
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has completed a core set of encryption algorithms designed to withstand cyberattacks from quantum computers.
Developed over the past eight years, the standard is part of the company’s Quantum-Resistant Cryptography (PQC) project and is ready for immediate use.
The progress towards the standard’s debut was a collaborative effort by cryptography experts from around the world who devised, submitted and evaluated quantum-safe algorithms.
Overall, NIST evaluated 82 algorithms submitted by researchers from 25 countries, narrowing it down to the top 14.
The first standard, FIPS 203, was introduced to protect information transmitted over public networks. It was intended to become the primary standard for general encryption and was based on the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm (now renamed Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM)).
The second standard, FIPS 204, is specified as the primary standard for securing digital signatures. It uses the CRYSTALS-Dilithium algorithm, now known as the Modular Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA).
Finally, the third also deals with digital signatures but uses a different mathematical approach than ML-DSA and is used as a backup solution in case ML-DSA proves to be weak.
“We don’t have to wait for future standards,” said Dustin Moody, director of NIST’s PQC standardization project.
“We need to prepare for attacks that break the algorithms in these three standards, and we continue to work on creating backup plans to keep our data safe, but for most applications, these new standards are the main event.”
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Japan Post IT chief resigns
The UK Post Office’s chief transformation officer, Chris Brocklesby, is to step down from the embattled delivery service amid a long-delayed replacement of its troubled Horizon IT system.
Brocklesby joined the Postal Service in 2023 on a one-year contract but is due to leave the scandal-hit company on September 6, according to a memo sent to staff by CEO Owen Woodley.
The Post Office faces long delays and rising costs in replacing Fujitsu’s Horizon systems, which have led to accounting irregularities and resulted in the wrongful prosecution and conviction of hundreds of innocent postmasters.
Plans to build a new system running on Amazon’s cloud computing systems were forced to abandon in 2022, but pressure on the Post Office to scrap Horizon increased significantly this year after Channel 4’s dramatisation of the deputy postmaster scandal highlighted the system’s flaws.
Mr Brocklesby will be replaced on an interim basis by Camelot’s transformation director, Andy Nice, who recently led the turnaround of the national lottery operator.
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