State of the Market

[willendure]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62x4zxe418o

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg72kg5yn2ko

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg72k851dd8o

It was only a matter of time, before the lack of investment in IT has caught up with them.

I suspect this maybe a catalyst to start investing and upgrading IT systems for many companies.

I saw this in the Co-Op article, instructions given to employess: "Don't record or transcribe Teams calls", the instructions say.

I wonder why, is this some kind of exploit in Teams? Curious as where I currently work Teams calls are regularly recorded or transcribed. If that is somehow dangerous I feel I should pass it on.

Teams is just about one of the worst pieces of software I have ever used. The whole microsoft productivity suite is garbage, should really be called an anti-productivity suite in my view.

I guess any company can get hacked even ones that have invested in decent people and up to date systems. Tescos bank for example. That was all developed in the UK in the years just prior to being hacked.

==========

Actually saw this comment:

"That instruction issued 'not to record or transcribe' meetings relates to AI bots which many online meeting software will enable in the background unknown to users. Really this is another case of gates and horses bolting - weakly tested new functionality is added and all too often this proves to be the problem."

So some kind of risk the AI bot will be leaky. I would hope microsofts own AI bots would not, but I guess there are also 3rd party plugins for teams, zoom, and so on.

[WTFH]

"That instruction issued 'not to record or transcribe' meetings relates to AI bots which many online meeting software will enable in the background unknown to users. Really this is another case of gates and horses bolting - weakly tested new functionality is added and all too often this proves to be the problem."

So some kind of risk the AI bot will be leaky. I would hope microsofts own AI bots would not, but I guess there are also 3rd party plugins for teams, zoom, and so on.

The whole point of AI is that it can only work by being "leaky", unless it's not really AI.
It "learns" by "listening", and each company that uses Teams is using the same Microsoft software. So, if Co-op have a meeting where they talk about "Co-op's plans for the future", and Microsoft AI learns that phrase, then all it takes is for someone at Sainsbury's to ask Bing "what are co-op's plans for the future?"
Microsoft AI then says "I know, I've learned this one from several teams transcriptions, the answer is..."

[Snooky]

The whole point of AI is that it can only work by being "leaky", unless it's not really AI.
It "learns" by "listening", and each company that uses Teams is using the same Microsoft software. So, if Co-op have a meeting where they talk about "Co-op's plans for the future", and Microsoft AI learns that phrase, then all it takes is for someone at Sainsbury's to ask Bing "what are co-op's plans for the future?"
Microsoft AI then says "I know, I've learned this one from several teams transcriptions, the answer is..."

One way round this is for the company to pay Microsoft for a "non-leaky" local copy of CoPilot and/or Teams, where anything from within the company network is used to inform the local CoPilot but will never be sent back to HQ for use in general AI, while anything generally available in the rest of the world is also still available to the local CoPilot. At least it's something like that, kind of like an AI firewall. We have it at the company I currently work for. For this reason, we're not supposed to use other AI tools like ChatGPT for any company work.

[oliverson]

Good luck mate.

I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone here. Yet I am;

This is one of the hardest things about contracting, the emotional investment into a potential role and the let-down if it doesn't work out.
I've really had to work on that.

I keep running through the list I posted earlier, all the things that are not strongly related.
The job spec and the initial talk might have been great, but might have nothing to do with what the role would become with you in it.
It might not be a real role. There might not be budget. There might be someone better. etc..

Just nothingburger it and apply to as many roles as you can. It's a numbers game.

But on this one role, best of luck.

Thanks, but it looks like this one's bitten the dust. I've been in this game a long time but it never ceases to amaze me how something so positive, talking about next stage interview, etc. just dies off. No response from agent to my update request.

Market gone quiet again for me, not that it was too noisy. I'm figuring the nice weather we've been having has seen many agents doing **** all, sat in the pub beer garden whilst pretending to be working from home, combined with yet another long weekend. ******* disillusioned now, that role seemed like a very high probability and it would have been perfect. Still, the show goes on.

[SussexSeagull]

Companies not investing in IT to the point it must cost them more to keep a legacy system running than get a new now isn't a new thing but in the current economc situation is going to get more widespread. Not keeping your cyber security up to data is fairly inexcusable though.

[hobnob]

I saw this in the Co-Op article, instructions given to employess: "Don't record or transcribe Teams calls", the instructions say.

I wonder why, is this some kind of exploit in Teams? Curious as where I currently work Teams calls are regularly recorded or transcribed. If that is somehow dangerous I feel I should pass it on.

The article also talks about people having their cameras turned on (to prove that nobody has infiltrated the meeting), and they ask people not to share sensitive info during a meeting. So, I think these are all related. I.e. if you store a transcript/recording of the Teams call, and an attacker can get onto your network, they can find out everything that was said in the call.

[BlueSharp]

Companies not investing in IT to the point it must cost them more to keep a legacy system running than get a new now isn't a new thing but in the current economc situation is going to get more widespread. Not keeping your cyber security up to data is fairly inexcusable though.

I'm starting to see a return of digitalisation projects as cost-cutting investments across the business. Many places, including client co, have cut so much IT that they have nothing less to cut and are using IT digitalisation initiatives as a way to reduce headcount across the business.

[SussexSeagull]

The whole point of AI is that it can only work by being "leaky", unless it's not really AI.
It "learns" by "listening", and each company that uses Teams is using the same Microsoft software. So, if Co-op have a meeting where they talk about "Co-op's plans for the future", and Microsoft AI learns that phrase, then all it takes is for someone at Sainsbury's to ask Bing "what are co-op's plans for the future?"
Microsoft AI then says "I know, I've learned this one from several teams transcriptions, the answer is..."

Lest we forget

If companies buy/license their own AI silo then it does restrict the effectiveness of AI.

[dsc]

Thanks, but it looks like this one's bitten the dust. I've been in this game a long time but it never ceases to amaze me how something so positive, talking about next stage interview, etc. just dies off. No response from agent to my update request.[...]

Cause it's very often a load of tulipe, agents just spruce it up to make it more positive, get you more invested etc. even talk about budgets etc. is all fluff imho, as I can't imagine a scenario where a manager kicks off agents to look for people before a position is open with an approved budget.

[eek]

The whole point of AI is that it can only work by being "leaky", unless it's not really AI.
It "learns" by "listening", and each company that uses Teams is using the same Microsoft software. So, if Co-op have a meeting where they talk about "Co-op's plans for the future", and Microsoft AI learns that phrase, then all it takes is for someone at Sainsbury's to ask Bing "what are co-op's plans for the future?"
Microsoft AI then says "I know, I've learned this one from several teams transcriptions, the answer is..."

Um Transcription is completely self contained and the AI is deleted at the end - at MS (at least) the information isn't used as a learning source.