🏠 The Future of Work Feels Like Home

Last week I had a chance to speak during a class at my former University. The intent was to give first-year software engineering students a glimpse of what opportunities await them once they hit the job market. It's also a way for my employer to showcase the company for a cohort of possible interns. I was happy about the internal guidance we got. We were not to promote our cool offices or extra-curricular activities. Everything needed to be about how we used our computer science skills to solve some interesting problems. In short: the real work. But if there is real work, there must be fake work, doesn't it? Yes. Allow me to explain.

🏛 The TikToks Featuring High-Tech Offices is Fake Work

I will forever remember when I took my two oldest then-9 and 11-year-old kids to my employer's headquarters for the first time. "Wait dad, you got a pool table and a Nintendo Switch in your office? You don't actually work! I knew it!"

Futuristic offices with tons of perks have become a staple for high-tech companies, to the point that there is this new generation of TikTok influencers going viral by simply filming their day-to-day in tech. The extra-glamourous videos make it feel like working in tech is the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

If there is one takeaway I wish readers of the CYOF have, is that everything that happens in social media is not reality. I made a TikTok about it!

@ppferland #question from @ppferland why did I quit #facebook in 2014? How to #quitfacebook how #instagram makes girls miserable #socialmedia ♬ Will to Live - Jacob Yoffee

My point is this: the pool table is not for you. It is an artifact of the brand high-tech is selling. It's for Instagram.

📡 Forced Work From Home Changed the Game

The pandemic sent everybody home. People didn't miss the office perks. As a matter of fact, what we see from Apple, Meta, and Google is the opposite: workers not wanting to come back to the office! And no, bean bags won't fix it!

Employees love their jobs because they feel their colleagues and bosses trust and care for them.

So wait, if cool-looking offices are shallow, we don't need them, right?

Not really. Allow me to explain.

🏠 Future Workplaces Should Feel Like Home

Since pandemic restrictions were lifted I have been attending the office three to four days a week. I have yet to play pool or Nintendo. Why do I bother, then? Free coffee? I actually prefer the one I make at home!

See my point above: I enjoy face-to-face interactions with people. A big part of it is the exhaustion from parenthood. It's relieving to meet rational human beings.

Many avant-garde companies seem to have understood this. Time Magazine published a series on the Future of Work where Spotify shows its new offices. Despite a "work-from-anywhere" policy, employees still flock to the streaming giant's London offices. Highlights include "wellness rooms", lounge spaces and community areas. Slack CEO, in the same vein, instructed its employees not to sit on Zoom calls while in the office so they can talk face to face.

Butterfield's vision minimizes meetings and champions asynchronous work. Solutions are better communication tools (he's Slack's CEO after all!), both written and video.

This way, office time becomes premium for coworkers to enjoy themselves together.

I am harsh on high tech's marketing of its in-office perks. But I recognize how they have been instrumental in turning yesterday's workplace into an area where people had fun together and played. We need to push the logic to the next level. It's not about playing pool during your lunch break anymore. Tomorrow's "commute-worthy" offices will need to be all about having people together and well. We can always play online. Caring for each other in person carries that little extra many of us need.

🥊 Quick Hits

• Microsoft Misconfigured a storage solution, exposing the data of thousands of enterprise customers (Story). Security researchers released a search tool to allow companies to see whether they have been impacted by the breach, which Microsoft criticized.
• GitHub's AI coding assistant Copilot is under investigation for copyright infringement (Story). The reasonable step if you are working in an Enterprise setting is to scope Copilot's use solely to your public repositories. I would add that you should not use Copilot on any software you sell. Also, I'm not a lawyer. Get legal advice if you want to be sure.
• Frances Fines Clearview AI Maximum GDPR Penalty... $20 million (Story). You may know Clearview as the ulta-annoying camera staring at you like you are a thief at Walmart self-checkout. Watch this out. The Bad-Ass Illinois Biometrics Information Privacy Act (BIPA) will wallop Clearview AI in its upcoming class-action lawsuit for 10 times the price, and suddenly nobody's going to take GDPR enforcement seriously anymore. I love rooting for the underdogs, go Illinois!

Pictured: a dog under

🗣️5 Reasons Why Current Social Media Platforms Are Broken

If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Here is a traumatizing list of every evil ad-driven initiative big tech made in the past week alone.

🎯1. Uber's Targeted Ads Will Become Passive-Aggressive Cesspools

Uber and Meta have been convenient supervillains for the past 5 or 6 years, and their recent behaviours show they intend to continue to act as such.

Call Me Dog Vader

Vice learned that Uber will provide users with targeted ads based on their destination. The idea sounds nice on the surface, right? Going to a shopping mall? You get ads for the boutiques! The problem? Companies nowadays have to pay Google ads to ensure their own brand is first in the results. Look at this query for the project management app Hive, which I gave a rare 5-star rating:

So prepare to call an Uber for Mcdonalds' only to get bombarded with ads telling you about how much better Burger King is.

🎧 2. Meta Somehow Becomes More Evil With Eye-Tracking

Wearing a silly piece of plastic on our heads that messes up our hair is still the main reason why I believe the whole VR thing is going to end up as a niche product, if not a fiasco. However, Mark Zuckerberg's silly obsession with the medium may top the list soon. Gizmodo learned that Meta's headsets will track your eyes like in a science fiction dystopia to serve you better ads based on where you look.

And we thought Alexa's passive listening was bad...

We at ppfosec love technology. Except for VR headsets.

⏰ 3. TikTok's Chinese Parent ByteDance Monitors the Location of "People of Interest" in the U.S.

Forbes reports that TikTok's parent ByteDance's "Internal Audit and Risk Control", which is normally tasked to investigate employee fraud, set up a monitoring project to gather the exact location of select U.S. citizens such as members of the government, activists, public figures and journalists.

This is not a film. This is reality!

If you or a close relationship is in a position to be a person of interest to Chinese authorities, the wise action would be to uninstall TikTok. And Uber. And Facebook, who both tracked the location of journalists in the past according to the same Forbes article.

We should talk more about how courageous some journalists are in 2022 to keep pushing the envelope despite tremendous surveillance. Remember the Pegasus Spyware?

🎤 4. The Artist Formerly Known as Kanye West To Buy Alternative Social Media Parler

After going on antisemitic rants and getting kicked off Twitter and Instagram, Ye decides to purchase Parler, an alternative social media. I believe Ye, who has been public about his struggles with bipolar disorder, needs help dealing with what seems like a manic episode. Celebrity culture with such mental conditions is like mentos and coca-cola.

Parler actually has an interesting monetization model that allows influencers to receive direct payments from their audience. So, less targeting, but more xenophobia. One step forward, two steps back.

⛽️5. Teens' Newest Fad, Gas, Will Burn Out Quickly

Remember Clubhouse? How about BeReal? Or Shuffles? Seems everybody is looking for the new Instagram. Facebook lost its cool for me when my mother got an account, after all. Kids need a place away from their parents to do stupid things!

What is Gas? The App lighting up the app store is an "anonymous" way to send survey messages to a community: "The most beautiful person you have ever met", "Who do you secretly admire", etc. Think of those little papers you sent to your crush in high school, but with in-app currency. Teen's purchasing power is limited. I doubt the app's capacity to monetize itself. A purchase by another player such as Snapchat seems likely. Meta picked up Gas' predecessor, TBH, in 2017, only to shut it down (another reason to dislike Meta, yeah). Congress breathing down Zuckerberg's neck with antitrust concerns sure helps the future of social media.

Should you let your teens use the app? Social media is like alcohol. It can cause euphoria but if not consumed properly it will destroy you. The dosage matters most when looking at TikTok, Instagram, Gas, or whatever.

I feel this is an adequate conclusion for all the above bad news.

⛓️Web3 Shows Us a Path Forward

🔷Jack Dorsey's Bluesky Decentralized Social Media Platform Garners Interest

Meanwhile, Twitter's creator's new decentralized social media Bluesky has gotten 30,000 signups in its first 48 hours. The app embraces web3 concepts of making its code open source and interoperable. I would trust Bluesky more than Parler with the future of social media.

💠Reddit's NFT Foray an Apparent Success

Reddit's Chief Product Officer reports the company's experiment with NFT created 2.5 million avatar purchases.

NFTs have potential because they are bound to social capital. "I can just right-click save as your NFT, hu-hu!" Not if platforms start to enforce stricter criteria for avatars.

💔OFAC Sanctions on Ethereum Risk a Schism

An app named Tornado Cash is about to lead to a clash about Ehetreum's future. Will it crash? Ok, enough with the puns.

The US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) emitted a sanction against the app which allows for alleged untraceable transfers. Some nodes in the US enforced the directive and declined Tornado Cash's actions on the blockchain. The regulation has drawn criticism. Developers claim "two" blockchains will emerge: a regulated one and a neutral one. Full story on Coindesk.

What does this mean to you? The main concern relates to the ideology of the blockchain. I stand with the "blockchain is neutral" crowd. Just like the internet service providers who are merely providing the "pipes" for the internet, I don't think regulations should apply to the infrastructure.

This is the best path for a decentralized network that must be global to be useful for most people.

🎧 Quote of the Week