An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: The revelation earlier this year that General Motors had been selling driver behavior patterns to data brokers -- who in turn packaged and resold it to insurers -- has led at least one of two major data brokers to shut down its related product. That data broker, Verisk, disclosed last month that it has stopped accepting data from car makers and no longer sells the information to insurers, according to the organization Privacy4Cars, which received the response after sending the data broker an inquiry. "Verisk received driving data from vehicles manufactured by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai and may have provided a Driving Behavior Data History Report ("Report") to insurers upon request, as a service provider to such insurers, that included certain data provided by these manufacturers," the Verisk response to Privacy4Cars said. "Please note that Verisk no longer receives this data from these automakers to generate Reports and also no longer provides Reports to insurers," the statement added. While Verisk has stopped selling car company-provided driver behavior patterns to insurers, LexisNexis Risk Solutions continues to prominently promote its driver behavior data product for insurers despite the mounting backlash from state governments, federal officials and consumer groups. LexisNexis Risk Solutions' Telematics OnDemand page remains online, boasting that it is "bringing automakers and insurance carriers together." "By partnering directly with automotive OEMs, LexisNexis is able to turn connected car data into tangible driving behavior insights that can be leveraged within insurance carriers' existing workflows," the page says. Much of LexisNexis Risk Solutions' work remains shrouded in secrecy.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's continued abuse of the Fitbit brand is continuing with the shutdown of the web dashboard;. Fitbit.com used to be both a storefront and a way for users to get a big-screen UI to sift through reams of fitness data. The store closed up shop in April, and now the web dashboard is dying in July. In a post on the "Fitbit Community" forums, the company said: "Next month, weâ(TM)re consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app. The web browser will no longer offer access to the Fitbit.com dashboard after July 8, 2024." That's it. There's no replacement and no new Fitness thing Google is more interested in; web functionality is just being removed. Google, we'll remind you, used to be a web company. Now it's a phone app or nothing. Google did the same thing to its own Google Fit product in 2019, killing off the more powerful website in favor of an app focus.

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Qualcomm faces potential disruption to its Windows on Arm laptops due to a legal battle with Arm, while MediaTek prepares to enter the market. Qualcomm's exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Copilot+ PCs, based on its Snapdragon SoCs, is set to expire this year. MediaTek plans to launch its own Windows on Arm chip in late 2024, though it's unclear if it has Microsoft's approval. The legal dispute stems from Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia, with Arm claiming Nuvia's licenses are non-transferable without permission. Arm terminated the licenses, requiring Qualcomm to stop using processor designs developed under those agreements. Arm asserts current Copilot+ SoCs descend from Nuvia's chips, potentially subjecting them to an injunction if Arm prevails in court. Qualcomm maintains its existing Arm license rights cover its custom CPUs. Both companies declined to comment on the ongoing legal matter.

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A hacker has gained access to internal tools used by the location tracking company Tile, including one that processes location data requests for law enforcement, and stolen a large amount of customer data, such as their names, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, 404 Media reports. From the report: The stolen data itself does not include the location of Tile devices, which are small pieces of hardware users attach to their keys or other items to monitor remotely. But it is still a significant breach that shows how tools intended for internal use by company workers can be accessed and then leveraged by hackers to collect sensitive data en masse. It also shows that this type of company, one which tracks peoples' locations, can become a target for hackers. "Basically I had access to everything," the hacker told 404 Media in an online chat. The hacker says they also demanded payment from Tile but did not receive a response. Tile sells various tracking devices which can be located through Tile's accompanying app. Life360, another location data focused company, acquired Tile in November 2021. The hacker says they obtained login credentials for a Tile system that they believe belonged to a former Tile employee. One tool specifically says it can be used to "initiate data access, location, or law enforcement requests." Users can then lookup Tile customers by their phone number or another identifier, according to a screenshot of the tool.

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Activision has clarified Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 isn't 309GB after all -- or at least, you can download the core of it for less. From a report: This is despite Xbox's store page for the game stating that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's install size is a rather chunky 309.85 GB. This made many heads turn, because that seemed excessive. The Call of Duty team has now issued a correction with more detail. Writing on social media platform X, Activision stated the file size currently listed for Black Ops 6 "does not represent the download size or disk footprint" for its upcoming Call of Duty game. "The sizes as shown include the full installations of Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, Warzone and all relevant content packs, including all localised languages combined which is not representative of a typical player install experience," it explained, before adding: "Players will be able to download Black Ops 6 at launch without downloading any other Call of Duty titles or all of the language packs."

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is prioritizing enforcement actions against major technology companies that cause the most harm, FTC Chair Lina Khan said at an event. Khan emphasized the importance of targeting "mob bosses" rather than lower-level offenders to effectively address illegal behaviors in the industry. The FTC has recently launched antitrust probes into Microsoft, Open AI, and Nvidia, and has taken legal action against Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple in recent years. TechCrunch adds: Khan said that in any given year, the FTC sees up to 3,000 merger filings reported to the agency and that around 2% of those deals get a second look by the government. "So you have 98% of deals that, for the most part, are going through," she said. "If you are a startup or a founder that is eager for an acquisition as an exit, a world in which you have five or six or seven or eight potential suitors, I would think, is a better world in which you just have one or two, right? And so, actually promoting more competition at that level to ensure that startups have you know more of a fair chance of getting a better valuation, I think would be beneficial as well."

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An anonymous reader shares a report An unofficial site tracking titles in the Epic Games library may have just leaked a ton of upcoming games, as reported earlier by Wccftech. The site, called EpicDB, was taken offline shortly after it posted information scraped from the Epic Games Store catalog on Monday, but that didn't stop people from scanning the list and posting their findings. You can see the list of games from publishers like Bethesda, Sega, Sony, Square Enix, and others in a series of screenshots posted by a user on a ResetEra forum. While some, like Turok, are easy to spot, others are listed under previously rumored codenames, such as "Parkside" or BioShock 4. There are still other titles under codenames we haven't heard about. Some users speculate that "Momo" could point to a Final Fantasy 9 remake, while "Selma" may be the PC port of Red Dead Redemption 1. The codename "Utah" could also hint at the PC version of The Last of Us Part 2, which is rumored to be almost ready to launch.

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T-Mobile's recent price hikes of up to $5 per line on older smartphone plans have left many customers shocked due to the company's previous "Un-contract" promise. Announced in 2017, T-Mobile pledged never to change the price customers pay for their plans. However, a now-removed FAQ revealed that the guarantee only ensured T-Mobile would pay the final month's charges if prices increased and customers chose to leave within 60 days. The price increases affect various plans, despite T-Mobile's earlier promises of "no crazy strings, no hoops to jump through, no hidden fees, no BS."

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Apple's upcoming macOS 15 Sequoia will allow users to sign into iCloud and other Apple ID-related services from within virtual machines. This feature will be available for VMs running macOS 15 or newer, hosted on a Mac with macOS 15 or newer. ArsTechnica adds: But up until now, you haven't been able to sign into iCloud using macOS on a VM. This made the feature less useful for developers or users hoping to test iCloud features in macOS, or whose apps rely on some kind of syncing with iCloud, or people who just wanted easy access to their iCloud data from within a VM.

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Waymo is issuing a voluntary software recall after one of its driverless vehicles collided with a telephone pole in Phoenix, Arizona, last month, the company said. The vehicle was damaged, but no passengers or bystanders were hurt in the incident. From a report: The company is filing the recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after completing a software update to 672 vehicles -- the total number of driverless-capable vehicles in Waymo's fleet. The update corrects an error in the software that "assigned a low damage score" to the telephone pole, and updates its map to account for the hard road edge in the alleyway that was not previously included. This is Waymo's second recall ever, after two minor collisions prompted a recall of 444 vehicles last February. And it comes at a time of increased regulatory scrutiny of the driverless vehicle industry, in which federal investigators are probing almost all the major companies operating autonomous vehicles in the US.

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Morgan Stanley, in a note -- seen by Slashdot -- sent to its clients on Wednesday: From our continuing discussions with automotive management teams and industry experts, the car is an extension of the phone. The phone is an extension of the car. The lines between car and phone are truly blurring. For years, we have been writing about the potential for Tesla to expand into edge compute domains beyond the car, including last October where we described a mobile AI assistant as a 'heavy key.' Following Apple's WWDC, Tesla CEO Elon Musk re-ignited the topic by saying that making such a device is 'not out of the question.' As Mr. Musk continues to invest further into his own LLM/genAI efforts, such as 'Grok,' the potential strategic and userexperience overlap becomes more obvious. From an automotive perspective, the topic of supercomputing at both the datacenter level and at the edge are highly relevant given the incremental global unit sold is a car that can perform OTA updates of firmware, has a battery with a stored energy equivalent of approx. 2,000 iPhones, and a liquid cooled inference supercomputer as standard kit. What if your phone could tap into your vehicle's compute power and battery supply to run AI applications? Edge compute and AI have brought to light some of the challenges (battery life, thermal, latency, etc.) of marrying today's smartphones with ever more powerful AI-driven applications. Numerous media reports have discussed OpenAI potentially developing a consumer device specifically designed for AI. The phone as a (heavy) car key? Any Tesla owner will tell you how they use their smartphone as their primary key to unlock their car as well as running other remote applications while they interact with their vehicles. The 'action button' on the iPhone 15 potentially takes this to a different level of convenience.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hackers working for the Chinese government gained access to more than 20,000 VPN appliances sold by Fortinet using a critical vulnerability that the company failed to disclose for two weeks after fixing it, Netherlands government officials said. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-42475, is a heap-based buffer overflow that allows hackers to remotely execute malicious code. It carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. A maker of network security software, Fortinet silently fixed the vulnerability on November 28, 2022, but failed to mention the threat until December 12 of that year, when the company said it became aware of an "instance where this vulnerability was exploited in the wild." On January 11, 2023 -- more than six weeks after the vulnerability was fixed -- Fortinet warned a threat actor was exploiting it to infect government and government-related organizations with advanced custom-made malware. Netherlands government officials wrote in Monday's report: Since the publication in February, the MIVD has continued to investigate the broader Chinese cyber espionage campaign. This revealed that the state actor gained access to at least 20,000 FortiGate systems worldwide within a few months in both 2022 and 2023 through the vulnerability with the identifier CVE-2022-42475 . Furthermore, research shows that the state actor behind this campaign was already aware of this vulnerability in FortiGate systems at least two months before Fortinet announced the vulnerability. During this so-called 'zero-day' period, the actor alone infected 14,000 devices. Targets include dozens of (Western) governments, international organizations and a large number of companies within the defense industry. The state actor installed malware at relevant targets at a later date. This gave the state actor permanent access to the systems. Even if a victim installs security updates from FortiGate, the state actor continues to have this access. It is not known how many victims actually have malware installed. The Dutch intelligence services and the NCSC consider it likely that the state actor could potentially expand its access to hundreds of victims worldwide and carry out additional actions such as stealing data. Even with the technical report on the COATHANGER malware, infections from the actor are difficult to identify and remove. The NCSC and the Dutch intelligence services therefore state that it is likely that the state actor still has access to systems of a significant number of victims.

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SoftBank has developed AI voice-conversion technology aimed at reducing the psychological stress on call center operators by altering the voices of angry customers to sound calmer. Japan's The Asahi Shimbun reports: The company launched a study on "emotion canceling" three years ago, which uses AI voice-processing technology to change the voice of a person over a phone call. Toshiyuki Nakatani, a SoftBank employee, came up with the idea after watching a TV program about customer harassment. "If the customers' yelling voice sounded like Kitaro's Eyeball Dad, it would be less scary," he said, referring to a character in the popular anime series "Gegege no Kitaro." The voice-altering AI learned many expressions, including yelling and accusatory tones, to improve vocal conversions. Ten actors were hired to perform more than 100 phrases with various emotions, training the AI with more than 10,000 pieces of voice data. The technology does not change the wording, but the pitch and inflection of the voice is softened. For instance, a woman's high-pitched voice is lowered in tone to sound less resonant. A man's bass tone, which may be frightening, is raised to a higher pitch to sound softer. However, if an operator cannot tell if a customer is angry, the operator may not be able to react properly, which could just upset the customer further. Therefore, the developers made sure that a slight element of anger remains audible. According to the company, the biggest burdens on operators are hearing abusive language and being trapped in long conversations with customers who will not get off the line -- such as when making persistent requests for apologies. With the new technology, if the AI determines that the conversation is too long or too abusive, a warning message will be sent out, such as, "We regret to inform you that we will terminate our service." [...] The company plans to further improve the accuracy of the technology by having AI learn voice data and hopes to sell the technology starting from fiscal 2025. Nakatani said, "AI is good at handling complaints and can do so for long hours, but what angry customers want is for a human to apologize to them." He said he hopes that AI "will become a mental shield that prevents operators from overstraining their nerves."

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Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who made significant contributions to VLSI design and microelectronics, and a prominent advocate for transgender rights, died Sunday from a heart condition. She was 85. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik remembers Conway in a column for the Los Angeles Times: As I recounted in 2020, I first met Conway when I was working on my 1999 book about Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning, for which she was a uniquely valuable source. In 2000, when she decided to come out as transgender, she allowed me to chronicle her life in a cover story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine titled "Through the Gender Labyrinth." That article traced her journey from childhood as a male in New York's strait-laced Westchester County to her decision to transition. Years of emotional and psychological turmoil followed, even as he excelled in academic studies. [Conway earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1961, quickly joining a team at IBM to design the world's fastest supercomputer. Despite personal success, she faced significant emotional turmoil, leading to her decision to transition in 1968. Initially supportive, IBM ultimately fired Conway due to their inability to reconcile her transition with the company's conservative image.] The family went on welfare for three months. Conway's wife barred her from contact with her daughters. She would not see them again for 14 years. Beyond the financial implications, the stigma of banishment from one of the world's most respected corporations felt like an excommunication. She sought jobs in the burgeoning electrical engineering community around Stanford, working her way up through start-ups, and in 1973 she was invited to join Xerox's brand new Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. In partnership with Caltech engineering professor Carver Mead, Conway established the design rules for the new technology of "very large-scale integrated circuits" (or, in computer shorthand, VLSI). The pair laid down the rules in a 1979 textbook that a generation of computer and engineering students knew as "Mead-Conway." VLSI fostered a revolution in computer microprocessor design that included the Pentium chip, which would power millions of PCs. Conway spread the VLSI gospel by creating a system in which students taking courses at MIT and other technical institutions could get their sample designs rendered in silicon. Conway's life journey gave her a unique perspective on the internal dynamics of Xerox's unique lab, which would invent the personal computer, the laser printer, Ethernet, and other innovations that have become fully integrated into our daily lives. She could see it from the vantage point of an insider, thanks to her experience working on IBM's supercomputer, and an outsider, thanks to her personal history. After PARC, she was recruited to head a supercomputer program at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA -- sailing through her FBI background check so easily that she became convinced that the Pentagon must have already encountered transgender people in its workforce. A figure of undisputed authority in some of the most abstruse corners of computing, Conway was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989. She joined the University of Michigan as a professor and associate dean in the College of Engineering. In 2002 she married a fellow engineer, Charles Rogers, and with him lived active life -- with a shared passion for white-water canoeing, motocross racing and other adventures -- on a 24-acre homestead not far from Ann Arbor, Mich. In 2020, Conway received a formal apology from IBM for firing her 52 years earlier. Diane Gherson, an IBM senior vice president, told her, "Thanks to your courage, your example, and all the people who followed in your footsteps, as a society we are now in a better place.... But that doesn't help you, Lynn, probably our very first employee to come out. And for that, we deeply regret what you went through -- and know I speak for all of us."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The news was featured on MSN.com: "Prominent Irish broadcaster faces trial over alleged sexual misconduct." At the top of the story was a photo of Dave Fanning. But Mr. Fanning, an Irish D.J. and talk-show host famed for his discovery of the rock band U2, was not the broadcaster in question. "You wouldn't believe the amount of people who got in touch," said Mr. Fanning, who called the error "outrageous." The falsehood, visible for hours on the default homepage for anyone in Ireland who used Microsoft Edge as a browser, was the result of an artificial intelligence snafu. A fly-by-night journalism outlet called BNN Breaking had used an A.I. chatbot to paraphrase an article from another news site, according to a BNN employee. BNN added Mr. Fanning to the mix by including a photo of a "prominent Irish broadcaster." The story was then promoted by MSN, a web portal owned by Microsoft. The story was deleted from the internet a day later, but the damage to Mr. Fanning's reputation was not so easily undone, he said in a defamation lawsuit filed in Ireland against Microsoft and BNN Breaking. His is just one of many complaints against BNN, a site based in Hong Kong that published numerous falsehoods during its short time online as a result of what appeared to be generative A.I. errors. Mr. Fanning's complaint against BNN is one of many. The site based published numerous falsehoods during its short time online.Credit...Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times BNN went dormant in April, while The New York Times was reporting this article. The company and its founder did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Microsoft had no comment on MSN's featuring the misleading story with Mr. Fanning's photo or his defamation case, but the company said it had terminated its licensing agreement with BNN. During the two years that BNN was active, it had the veneer of a legitimate news service, claiming a worldwide roster of "seasoned" journalists and 10 million monthly visitors, surpassing the The Chicago Tribune's self-reported audience. Prominent news organizations like The Washington Post, Politico and The Guardian linked to BNN's stories. Google News often surfaced them, too. A closer look, however, would have revealed that individual journalists at BNN published lengthy stories as often as multiple times a minute, writing in generic prose familiar to anyone who has tinkered with the A.I. chatbot ChatGPT. BNN's "About Us" page featured an image of four children looking at a computer, some bearing the gnarled fingers that are a telltale sign of an A.I.-generated image. "How easily the site and its mistakes entered the ecosystem for legitimate news highlights a growing concern: A.I.-generated content is upending, and often poisoning, the online information supply," adds The Times. "NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation, identified more than 800 websites that use A.I. to produce unreliable news content. The websites, which seem to operate with little to no human supervision, often have generic names -- such as iBusiness Day and Ireland Top News -- that are modeled after actual news outlets. They crank out material in more than a dozen languages, much of which is not clearly disclosed as being artificially generated, but could easily be mistaken as being created by human writers."

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According to The Verge, Best Buy conducted another round of layoffs and job restructurings to "right size" the business in response to declining sales post-pandemic. Further layoffs and changes are expected throughout the year. From the report: The layoffs appeared to have mostly targeted in-home sales roles called designers, who would go to customers' homes to help identify products that would work in their space. It's not clear how many were let go, but designers who weren't laid off have been moved into a different, largely in-store role. Also, pay scales for a similar, existing in-store "consultant" position were revamped. Best Buy confirmed the layoffs in an email to The Verge but declined to share how many people were let go or how pay was changing. "Many of our team members were moved to new areas or roles where our customers need it most," Best Buy spokesperson Ryan Furlong told The Verge. He said some employees in Best Buy's "Design and Consult workforce" -- the collection of roles with in-store workers (called consultants) and in-home field sales positions (called designers) -- will be transitioned into a new "Premium Designer role." Best Buy has been drastically restructuring in recent months, responding to factors like falling sales after the pandemic spiked consumer electronics spending. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry told investors in February that they should expect layoffs this year, and two months ago, mass layoffs of Geek Squad employees were reported. Barry repeated similar things during the company's first quarter earnings call in May, saying that many of Best Buy's moves to "right size" its business "are being implemented throughout this year."

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Brazil's government is partnering with OpenAI to use AI for expediting the screening and analysis of thousands of lawsuits to reduce costly court losses impacting the federal budget. Reuters reports: The AI service will flag to government the need to act on lawsuits before final decisions, mapping trends and potential action areas for the solicitor general's office (AGU). AGU told Reuters that Microsoft would provide the artificial intelligence services from ChatGPT creator OpenAI through its Azure cloud-computing platform. It did not say how much Brazil will pay for the services. AGU said the AI project would not replace the work of its members and employees. "It will help them gain efficiency and accuracy, with all activities fully supervised by humans," it said. Court-ordered debt payments have consumed a growing share of Brazil's federal budget. The government estimated it would spend 70.7 billion reais ($13.2 billion) next year on judicial decisions where it can no longer appeal. The figure does not include small-value claims, which historically amount to around 30 billion reais annually. The combined amount of over 100 billion reais represents a sharp increase from 37.3 billion reais in 2015. It is equivalent to about 1% of gross domestic product, or 15% more than the government expects to spend on unemployment insurance and wage bonuses to low-income workers next year. AGU did not provide a reason for Brazil's rising court costs.

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New York has launched its mobile ID program, "giving residents the option to digitize their driver's license or non-driver ID," reports The Verge. From the report: Beginning today, the New York Mobile ID app is available from Apple's App Store and Google Play. The app can be used for identity verification at airports. A physical license, permit, or non-driver ID is required to activate a mobile ID; you'll need to take a photo of the front and back with your phone during the enrollment process. The news was announced during a media briefing at LaGuardia Airport on Tuesday that included New York's and Transportation Security Administration federal security director Robert Duffy, among other speakers. Their pitch is that mobile IDs "will revolutionize the way New Yorkers protect their identities and will significantly enhance the way they get through security at airports across the nation." State officials are also emphasizing that it's a voluntary option meant for convenience. "When you offer your mobile ID to TSA or anyone else who accepts it, you are in full control of sharing that information. They can only see the information they request to see," Schroeder said. "If you only need to prove your age, you can withhold other information that a verifier doesn't need to see." The app is designed so that your phone remains in your possession at all times -- you should never freely hand a device over to law enforcement -- and shows a QR code that can be scanned to verify your identity. Any changes to your license status such as renewals or suspensions are automatically pushed to the mobile version, and the digital ID also mirrors data like whether you're an organ donor. For now, acceptance of mobile IDs by businesses (and the police) is completely voluntary -- and there's no deadline in place for compliance -- so it's definitely too soon to start leaving your physical one at home. But bars and other small businesses can start accepting them immediately if they install the state's verifier app. The New York Mobile ID app can be used "at nearly 30 participating airports across the country including all terminals at LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports," according to a press release from Governor Kathy Hochul. New York joins a small list of states that have rolled out mobile driver's licenses, including Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, and Utah.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Mercury News: Krista DeWeese has been laid off four times in the last eight years. She wakes up every morning feeling anxious. Will I lose my job today -- again? Will I have enough to pay the rent? Even though she's an educated, experienced marketing professional, worrisome thoughts trail the 47-year-old Fremont native's every waking moment. Currently a contract worker at a health science company, she has been struggling to find secure work that pays enough to keep up with the exorbitant cost of living in the Bay Area. She has a lot of company. The past year has been tough for the Bay Area, as thousands of layoffs skittered across the region. Even workers at Silicon Valley's tech titans -- including Meta, Apple and Google -- have faced job cuts. Since 2022, tech companies in the region have slashed roughly 40,000 jobs. And with each layoff, workers are entering a market that is less friendly to job seekers than it used to be. New research from tech advocacy organization Women Impact Tech, which examined job and salary data nationwide from 2020 to 2023, affirmed what many people already know: companies are tightening their belts -- slicing jobs and salaries alike -- and many people are struggling to find work that pays enough to live comfortably in the Bay Area. Despite having the highest tech salaries in the country, Silicon Valley has experienced the biggest drop in pay compared to other tech hubs, falling 15% from 2022 to 2023, according to Women Impact Tech. And with inflation, DeWeese and others are watching their spending power shrink. More than 10 years ago, she was earning over $100,000 in total compensation. That amount has dropped 15% since she was laid off from Yahoo in 2016, and has not increased since. "I feel like my career has been frozen in time," DeWeese said. "Things have been at a standstill." Paula Bratcher Ratliff, president of New York-based Women Impact Tech, said that the shrinking pay hits especially hard for women, given the continuing gender pay gap. "The Bay Area took one of the largest hits," Ratliff said. "Women make up about 28% of the entire workforce in tech. When you're seeing an overall decline at 15%, and for pay equity, women have not made much traction." [...] Despite the trend of shrinking salaries in the world's tech capital, Ratliff, with Women Impact Tech, doesn't believe it's necessarily a race to the bottom. "Today, about every company is a tech company, whether they're in retail, consumer goods or hospitality," Ratliff said. "There's so many opportunities in tech without having to focus on those jobs with the tech organizations alone. We're seeing great companies emerge." While it's still unclear where the light is at the end of the tunnel for DeWeese, she remains hopeful her situation will improve. "You have to have hope or else you're just going to live in fear of being let go, again and again," she said.

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