No Clowns. And while we're at it, no scrubs

Welcome to another installment of the globalGlob(**/*) newsletter. We're glad you're reading this and not literally anything else.

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News From Less Reputable Sources

The globalGlob(**/*) can't report on every story, even though we tried it once and were successful. But we can tell you about stories other people reported, and maybe cite them as a source. Here are some of those!

• Microsoft has been fined by Norway for telling people you're gay.
  • Not you specifically...well maybe.
  • Microsoft owns the ad company Xandr, which sold personal data of LGBTQIA+ people using the "dating" app Grindr to advertisers.
  • Xandr assumed Grindr had already received permission from its users, but that turned out to not be the case.
  • Microsoft said the privacy of users was a top priority, but given what happened, it's hard to believe that's true. It's more like a high priority.
  • Link
• Cancel Culture has gone too far. For what is likely the first time ever.
  • This year's Grace Hopper Celebration has been cancelled due to a lack of funds, from sponsorships and attendee registrations.
  • There's no doubt funding is being removed from any events celebrating minority groups. And while many people think women are a majority group in computing, due to all the women shown in video game advertisements, they're wildly under represented in the field.
  • Companies are no longer sponsoring the event at levels they did before. But not for any malicious reason, they just know they don't have to care anymore. All the U.S. companies stopped caring nearly 2 years ago. Oddly all at the same time.
  • Hopefully the event will happen next year. But as my favorite life-coach likes to say, outlook not so good.
  • Link
• The neocloud company CoreWeave is seeing their stock price crash after Gartner predicted most of those companies will go out of business by 2030.
  • Other neocloud stocks dropped, like DigitalOcean, Hut 8, Nebius, and IREN. I've only heard of one of those before. But given the news, it won't matter for long.
  • A neocloud is a smaller cloud company, primarily hosting A.I. datacenters. Given the competition for resources to build a datacenter, it makes sense these other companies will see many more hardships in the years to come.
  • Link

Sponsor

There's no sponsor this week. But if you know anyone interested, tell us!

But don't suggest any kind of clown. We don't trust those people.

Scoops on globalGlob.dev

A cybersecurity engineer accidentally mixed serious work with fun playtime by combining his two favorite pastimes into the same thing. Tabletop role playing during a cybersecurity training exercise. After a slow start, he was the life of the party. And sorry to spoil it, but he even saved the day with his unorthodox play style. Give it a read if you want to learn how to improve your own cybersecurity tabletop skills.

Cybersecurity Engineer Arrives To Tabletop Exercise Dressed As Eljor, Level 10 Elven Ranger, Plays On | globalGlob(**/*)

The cybersecurity team at Fantasmatic Systems held their bi-yearly tabletop breach exercise. This time the scenario simulated a malicious development dependency exfiltrating user access tokens from the accounting team. Cybersecurity engineer Laurence Sawyer arrived to the event thinking it was a different type of tabletop roleplaying game. He was dressed head to toe as an elf, calling himself Eljor. Ready to plunder dragons and fight dungeons, complete with plastic ear extensions and a children'...

Nobody likes layoffs. Nobody wants to be included in a layoff. Except this guy apparently. As a game dev, it's a rite of passage to be laid off from a company. It happens to most game devs every few years because the industry is just...so bad. But this developer hasn't been through that yet, and justs want to have it on their resume. Just to experience it the one time.

Game Developer Hasn't Been Laid Off Before, Hoping Today's The Day | globalGlob(**/*)

Game developer Mason Palmer has worked at 7 different video game publishers during his career. Each one has had multiple rounds of layoffs, and 2 shut down *after* Palmer voluntarily left the company. And yet, Palmer has yet to be included in any layoffs. After being skipped over for so many years, he's hoping the latest rumors of layoffs include him.

Log Level Debug

Log Level Debug is our weekly news roundup show from news around the world. Think of it as news globalGlob(**/*) would have had the scoop on if we weren't busy with other, more important stories.

In this week's Log Level Debug news roundup we cover yet another supply chain attack, the Apple HomePod announcement, and as always, the many A.I. stories that happened over the last week.

Coding Puzzle of the Week

See if you can pull this off without an agent.

Create a program that receives a number greater than 0 and less than 100. Create a custom algorithm that will output the line number (on each line!), one at a time. It's tempting to use parallelism for a quick performance gain. But I'll give you a tip, don't do that.