Palantir Discriminated Against Asians, Labor Department Alleges

Palantir CEO Alex Karp

Sean Gallup / Getty Images

The Department of Labor is suing Palantir, accusing the data analysis company of systematic discrimination against Asian job applicants.

The government agency said that it filed the suit after being “unable to resolve the findings” in negotiations with the Silicon Valley company, which works with government clients including the the FBI, the U.S. Special Operations Command, and the U.S. Army.

The suit alleges that, beginning in 2010, Asian applicants were “routinely eliminated during the resume screen and telephone interview phases despite being as qualified as white applicants with respect to the QA Engineer, Software Engineer, and QA Engineer Intern positions,” and that the company&;s employee referral program also unfairly discriminated against Asian applicants.

Palantir denies the allegations and intends to contest the lawsuit. “Despite repeated efforts to highlight the results of our hiring practices, the Department of Labor relies on a narrow and flawed statistical analysis relating to three job descriptions from 2010 to 2011,” the company said in a statement.

When comparing the number of qualified Asian applicants for a position with the number eventually hired, the Labor Department&039;s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found evidence of discrimination.

In one case where Asian applicants made up 85% of the the qualified candidates for a job but only 11 of the 25 people eventually hired, Labor Department calculated that the the odds of such a hiring pattern happening by chance were “approximately one in 3.4 million.” In another case, it said the odds were more like one in a billion.

Department of Labor / Via dol.gov

As a government contractor, Palantir “has agreed not to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” the complaint notes.

The Labor Department is seeking compensation for those affected by the company&039;s hiring practices, including for “lost wages, interest, retroactive seniority and all other lost benefits of employment.” If the company is ordered to provide such relief, and fails to do so, it could lose its current government contracts and be barred from bidding on future ones.

The full complaint is available to read here.

Quelle: <a href="Palantir Discriminated Against Asians, Labor Department Alleges“>BuzzFeed

Inside Apple Music's Second Act

Inside Apple Music's Second Act

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Music streaming is a buyer’s market, and over the course of its first 14 months, Apple Music has pitched itself to customers in a few marquee ways. There’s the army of in-house music experts, working to craft note-perfect playlists for your commute and workout; the radio station Beats 1, which seeks to reinvent real-time, communal music discovery; and the exclusive releases from big-name artists — including Drake and Taylor Swift — before fans can get them anywhere else.

But for music streaming services, which rely on a delicate web of relationships with the artists, publishers, and record labels that supply them, keeping customers satisfied is only half of the equation. Viewed from up close, it’s the benefits Apple Music has promised its industry partners — still reeling from decades of digital disruption — that have arguably defined the service’s short life more than anything else.

“I don&;t know how to do this any other way, except to help make really good music, get it exposed, and get it handled and treated the way it deserves to be treated,” Jimmy Iovine, who runs Apple Music after a long tenure as the founder and chief executive of Interscope Records, told BuzzFeed News in a recent interview. “That&039;s the only thing that we know how to do coming from where we&039;re coming from. You use all the tools you have to do that.“

Iovine was striking a rare note of contrition, one month after a controversy over the implications of Apple Music’s exclusives caused the world’s largest label group, Universal Music Group, to distance itself from his company. UMG decided it would end most exclusives in late August after it was embarrassed by a lucrative deal between Apple Music and Frank Ocean, which enabled the superstar to go independent. The ban upended one of Apple Music’s main selling points, and it left Iovine — a former record producer who sees bridging the worlds of music and technology as a personal calling — caught between the existential demands of his old business and his new one.

Apple’s streaming service has tried to position itself as a kind of sixth man for the established music industry.

The clash over exclusives, which came to a head just weeks before Apple Music underwent a much-anticipated relaunch designed to make it more appealing to users, served as a reminder that the music service faces a war on two fronts: It’s vying to lure subscribers from a field of strong competitors on the one hand, while defending its aggressive plans to skittish content owners on the other.

“We put a lot into this, we’ve had some real successes, and we always hold up our end of the relationship,” Iovine said, insisting that he has no intention of encroaching on record labels’ territory. “We’re feeling our way around and seeing what works … Every time we do [an exclusive], we learn something new.” He added that Apple Music would move forward with its pursuit of exclusives from other partners, such as Sony Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group, noting, “It’s Apple’s show. As long as Apple’s asking me to do what I’m doing, I’m gonna keep doing it.”

Kanye West criticized Apple Music and Tidal&039;s rivalry over exclusives.

Twitter.com

If exclusives have drawn the ire of some record labels, they haven’t always endeared Apple Music to consumers, either. Fragmentation in music streaming — requiring fans to either pivot between services to access exclusive albums, wait days or weeks until they are released widely, or download them illegally — has accelerated in the past year, as artists are increasingly pledged to one service or another. Responding to whether fragmentation would hurt the business in the long term (as Kanye West and others have argued), Iovine was unfazed.

“I don’t think we know yet, I don’t think anyone knows yet,” he said, musing that people could end up paying for multiple music streaming services, as they do with Netflix and Hulu. “A year from today could look extremely different from what it looks like right now.”

More concerning to Iovine is something that directly impacts his company’s bottom line: the proliferation of free, ad-supported music on competing services like Spotify and YouTube. Both have been accused by artists and labels of using a business model that takes money out of their pockets, and both boast user bases that dwarf Apple Music&039;s (it has 17 million subscribers compared to Spotify’s 40 million; YouTube says it has over a billion users). “The rights holders, whoever they are, have to do something, because there&039;s a lot of free [music] out there, and it&039;s a problem,” Iovine said. “There&039;s enough out there to make people say, ‘Why should I subscribe to something?&039;”

The tension over exclusives highlights a central challenge for Apple Music, which believes its future relies on forging ever-closer ties with artists and record labels. More so than any of its competitors, whom have had to contend with the deep suspicion of rights holders, Apple’s streaming service has tried to position itself as a kind of sixth man for the established music industry, a white knight riding in to restore the commercial and cultural value of music after decades of decline.

The feasibility of such a commitment was tested even before Apple Music launched. In June 2015, Taylor Swift, an industry unto herself, joined critics who protested that the service wasn’t planning to pay royalties for music streamed during its free three-month trial period. Apple responded by quickly reversing the policy, eating the costs of the trials and earning a distinction as the only on-demand streamer to carry Swift’s music in the process.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“I think Apple Music is the place that helps artists tell their stories,” said Zane Lowe, who presides over Apple Music’s radio station Beats 1. Lady Gaga, in an interview with Lowe, recently used the station to announce the title of her forthcoming comeback album, Joanne. And Drake, who is among a growing roster of paid contributors to Apple Music and has his own Beats 1 show, used it to premiere “Hotline Bling.” “It’s where artists can come and feel comfortable,” Lowe said. “And that’s not just on Beats 1, it&039;s through the releasing of their records, it&039;s through our editorial, through content, all sorts of ways.”

For the moment, Apple Music executives trying to make their case to music owners have the numbers on their side. Revenues for recorded music in the US — driven by the growth of services like Apple’s and Spotify’s — are up by 8.1% in the first half of 2016, which puts them on track for the second full year of growth in a row. The music industry hasn’t seen back-to-back revenue increases since 1998–1999, and the money, as always, talks. Work with us and the happy days will come again.

“We were too ambitious in the beginning — we put too much into it.”

Looking at the new version of Apple Music offers some clues as to where subscription music is going. At this point, the most coveted new audience for the service, which comes preloaded on every iPhone and iOS device, consists of older and international users who have no prior experience with streaming music. The redesign answers criticism that the first iteration was overly complicated, introducing a cleaner interface with larger images and text care of Apple design guru Jonny Ive. Additionally, the tabs at the bottom of the screen have been re-ordered, with the one that gets the most use — the music library — moved to the first, far-left position.

An Apple Music ad with James Corden.

Apple.

“The question we ask is: In the normal course of your day, how are you actually interacting with music?” Bozoma Saint John, head of global consumer marketing for Apple Music and iTunes, told BuzzFeed News. She co-stars in a new ad for the service with Iovine and “Carpool Karaoke” star James Corden. “What are you going to it for? And how can we better serve that up?”

The other big change is the addition of two new personalized playlists: My Favorites Mix and My New Music Mix. The playlists are generated by algorithms, a first for the service, which has largely relied on human curation for its playlists up to this point. Revealing how the mixes operate for the first time to BuzzFeed News, Apple claimed a potential advantage over similar algorithmically personalized playlists, including Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Pandora’s Thumbprint Radio: deep historical knowledge of individual users’ tastes and habits, based on years of data carried over from iTunes.

If you gave high ratings to a song or album in your old iTunes library, or just played it a lot more than others, you’ll find that behavior reflected in your My Favorites Mix. Meanwhile, the My New Music Mix algorithm serves recently released songs — as well as songs that Apple Music knows you haven’t played before — that the service’s music experts have flagged as similar to others in your taste profile. Apple Music executives suggested even more personalized playlists will follow in the series; but only after prototypes have been vetted, with all possible outcomes — intentional and otherwise — given careful consideration.

“We were too ambitious in the beginning — we probably put too much into it,” said Iovine. “But we’re getting there now, one foot in front of the other, and the stuff we’re creating I don’t think anyone is gonna see coming.”

Quelle: <a href="Inside Apple Music&039;s Second Act“>BuzzFeed

Improving Developer / IT Collaboration with Application Insights Connector for OMS Log Analytics

Now IT Pros can see the health of applications monitored by Visual Studio Application Insights. Application Insights can now send app data to Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), enabling the app developer and their IT Pro counterpart to each monitor the health of critical applications in the tool they are most experienced with.  Views of the same application telemetry you see in Application Insights will be available in OMS, facilitating more effective collaboration between developers and IT Pros, and thus reducing the time to detect and resolve both application and platform issues.

Information about your application’s health and usage is surfaced in OMS by the Public Preview of the Application Insights Connector for OMS Log Analytics. Telemetry streams from web tests, page views, server requests, exceptions, and custom events are included.

With this facility, OMS users can correlate any infrastructure issues with the impact on applications running in that environment. IT staff can contribute more fully to monitoring the whole stack from the infrastructure and configuration management provided by other OMS solutions, to the application layer data provided by Application Insights.

Drill into different applications

The solution provides a summary of the Application Insights resources that have been integrated with OMS:

Click any of the rows from the summary to show  data from a particular application:

From here, the visualization can be changed to the OMS list or table view:

Then fine tune a query to a time range or other property of interest:

One click to diagnosis in Application Insights

The solution makes it easy to dive deeply into problems, leveraging Application Insights powerful developer-focused diagnostics and analysis tools to get to the bottom of application issues.

It’s a one-click pivot from the OMS solution to this application’s telemetry overview in the Azure portal:

Get started

Want to get started? Check out this blog post by Cigdem Kontaci from the OMS team with the details of how an OMS workspace administrator can configure this solution and dramatically enhance the collaboration between your organization’s developers and IT pros.

To use this solution your app must be in either the Standard or Premium pricing tier of Application Insights.

As you get this integration enabled in your organization, feel free to leave feedback about this integration at UserVoice.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft Cloud is first CSP behind the Privacy Shield

Microsoft was proud to become the first global cloud service provider to appear on the Department of Commerce’s list of Privacy Shield certified entities as of August 12th 2016. The European Commission adopted The EU-US Privacy Shield Framework on July 12th 2016, replacing the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles as the mechanism for allowing companies in the EU and the US to transfer personal data across the Atlantic in a manner compliant with the EU data protection requirements. As stated on PrivacyShield.gov,

“The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework was designed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and European Commission to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States in support of transatlantic commerce.”

Adherence to this framework underscores the importance and priority we at Microsoft put on privacy, compliance, security, and protection of customer data around the globe.  A link to Microsoft’s statement of compliance can be found here.  The Microsoft Cloud offers an array of integrated tools which can enhance an IT professional’s productivity, supports a broad spectrum of operating systems, is highly scalable, and can integrate with existing customer IT environments.  These highly competitive attributes attract a globally diverse customer population whose compliance needs and regulations we are ready and able to support.  Check out the Microsoft Trust Center to learn more about our expansive compliance capabilities including our commitment and compliance with the Privacy Shield Framework.
Quelle: Azure

Kubernetes 1.4: Making it easy to run on Kubernetes anywhere

Today we’re happy to announce the release of Kubernetes 1.4.Since the release to general availability just over 15 months ago, Kubernetes has continued to grow and achieve broad adoption across the industry. From brand new startups to large-scale businesses, users have described how big a difference Kubernetes has made in building, deploying and managing distributed applications. However, one of our top user requests has been making Kubernetes itself easier to install and use. We’ve taken that feedback to heart, and 1.4 has several major improvements.These setup and usability enhancements are the result of concerted, coordinated work across the community – more than 20 contributors from SIG-Cluster-Lifecycle came together to greatly simplify the Kubernetes user experience, covering improvements to installation, startup, certificate generation, discovery, networking, and application deployment.Additional product highlights in this release include simplified cluster deployment on any cloud, easy installation of stateful apps, and greatly expanded Cluster Federation capabilities, enabling a straightforward deployment across multiple clusters, and multiple clouds.What’s new:Cluster creation with two commands – To get started with Kubernetes a user must provision nodes, install Kubernetes and bootstrap the cluster. A common request from users is to have an easy, portable way to do this on any cloud (public, private, or bare metal).Kubernetes 1.4 introduces ‘kubeadm’ which reduces bootstrapping to two commands, with no complex scripts involved. Cluster setup is now transparent, reliable and customizable without having to reverse engineer opaque pre-built solutions. Installation is also streamlined by packaging Kubernetes with its dependencies, for most major Linux distributions including Red Hat and Ubuntu Xenial. This means users can now install Kubernetes using familiar tools such as apt-get and yum.Add-on deployments, such as for an overlay network, can be reduced to one command by using a DaemonSet.Enabling this simplicity is a new certificates API and its use for kubelet TLS bootstrap, as well as a new discovery API.Expanded stateful application support – While cloud-native applications are built to run in containers, many existing applications need additional features to make it easy to adopt containers. Most commonly, these include stateful applications such as batch processing, databases and key-value stores. In Kubernetes 1.4, we have introduced a number of features simplifying the deployment of such applications, including: ScheduledJob is introduced as Alpha so users can run batch jobs at regular intervals.Init-containers are Beta, addressing the need to run one or more containers before starting the main application, for example to sequence dependencies when starting a database or multi-tier app.Dynamic PVC Provisioning moved to Beta. This feature now enables cluster administrators to expose multiple storage provisioners and allows users to select them using a new Storage Class API object.  Curated and pre-tested Helm charts for common stateful applications such as MariaDB, MySQL and Jenkins will be available for one-command launches using version 2 of the Helm Package Manager.Cluster federation API additions – One of the most requested capabilities from our global customers has been the ability to build applications with clusters that span regions and clouds. Federated Replica Sets Beta – replicas can now span some or all clusters enabling cross region or cross cloud replication. The total federated replica count and relative cluster weights / replica counts are continually reconciled by a federated replica-set controller to ensure you have the pods you need in each region / cloud.Federated Services are now Beta, and secrets, events and namespaces have also been added to the federation API.Federated Ingress Alpha – starting with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), users can create a single L7 globally load balanced VIP that spans services deployed across a federation of clusters within GCP. With Federated Ingress in GCP, external clients point to a single IP address and are sent to the closest cluster with usable capacity in any region or zone of the federation in GCP.Container security support – Administrators of multi-tenant clusters require the ability to provide varying sets of permissions among tenants, infrastructure components, and end users of the system.Pod Security Policy is a new object that enables cluster administrators to control the creation and validation of security contexts for pods/containers. Admins can associate service accounts, groups, and users with a set of constraints to define a security context.AppArmor support is added, enabling admins to run a more secure deployment, and provide better auditing and monitoring of their systems. Users can configure a container to run in an AppArmor profile by setting a single field.Infrastructure enhancements – We continue adding to the scheduler, storage and client capabilities in Kubernetes based on user and ecosystem needs.Scheduler – introducing inter-pod affinity and anti-affinity Alpha for users who want to customize how Kubernetes co-locates or spreads their pods. Also priority scheduling capability for cluster add-ons such as DNS, Heapster, and the Kube Dashboard.Disruption SLOs – Pod Disruption Budget is introduced to limit impact of pods deleted by cluster management operations (such as node upgrade) at any one time.Storage – New volume plugins for Quobyte and Azure Data Disk have been added.Clients – Swagger 2.0 support is added, enabling non-Go clients.Kubernetes Dashboard UI – lastly, a great looking Kubernetes Dashboard UI with 90% CLI parity for at-a-glance management.For a complete list of updates see the release notes on GitHub. Apart from features the most impressive aspect of Kubernetes development is the community of contributors. This is particularly true of the 1.4 release, the full breadth of which will unfold in upcoming weeks.AvailabilityKubernetes 1.4 is available for download at get.k8s.io and via the open source repository hosted on GitHub. To get started with Kubernetes try the Hello World app.To get involved with the project, join the weekly community meeting or start contributing to the project here (marked help). Users and Case StudiesOver the past fifteen months since the Kubernetes 1.0 GA release, the adoption and enthusiasm for this project has surpassed everyone’s imagination. Kubernetes runs in production at hundreds of organization and thousands more are in development. Here are a few unique highlights of companies running Kubernetes: Box — accelerated their time to delivery from six months to launch a service to less than a week. Read more on how Box runs mission critical production services on Kubernetes.Pearson — minimized complexity and increased their engineer productivity. Read how Pearson is using Kubernetes to reinvent the world’s largest educational company. OpenAI — a non-profit artificial intelligence research company, built infrastructure for deep learning with Kubernetes to maximize productivity for researchers allowing them to focus on the science.We’re very grateful to our community of over 900 contributors who contributed more than 5,000 commits to make this release possible. To get a closer look on how the community is using Kubernetes, join us at the user conference KubeCon to hear directly from users and contributors.ConnectPost questions (or answer questions) on Stack Overflow Connect with the community on SlackFollow us on Twitter @Kubernetesio for latest updatesThank you for your support! — Aparna Sinha, Product Manager, Google
Quelle: kubernetes

Announcing Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI) 2.0 Preview

With the continued growth of Azure, we’ve seen a lot of customers using our command-line tools, particularly the Windows PowerShell tools and our Azure XPlat command-line interface (CLI).  We’ve received a lot of feedback on the great productivity provided by command-line tools, but have also heard, especially from customers working with Linux, about our XPlat CLI and its poor integration with popular Linux command-line tools as well as difficulties with installing and maintaining the Node environment (on which it was based).

Based on this feedback – along with the growth in the Azure Resource Manager-based configuration model – we improved the CLI experience and now provide a great experience for Azure. Starting today, we’re making this new CLI available. We’re calling it the Azure Command-Line Interface (Azure CLI) 2.0 Preview, now available as a beta on GitHub. Please try it out and give us your feedback!

Now, if you’re interested in how we approached this project and what it means for you, read on!

What Makes a Great, Modern CLI?

As we set out to develop our next generation of command-line tools, we quickly settled on some guiding principles:

It must be natural and easy to install: Regardless of your platform, our CLI should be installed from where you expect it, be it from “brew install azure-cli” on a MacBook, or from “apt-get install azure-cli” for BASH on Windows (coming soon).

It must be consistent with POSIX tools: Success with command-line tools is the result of the ease and predictability that comes with the implementation of well-understood standards.

It must be part of the open source ecosystem: The value of open source comes from the community and the amazing features and integrations they develop, from DevOps (Chef, Ansible) solutions to query languages (JMESPath).

It must be evergreen and current with Azure: In an age of continuous delivery, it&;s not enough to simply deploy a service. We must have up-to-date tools that let our customers immediately take advantage of that service. 

As we applied these principles, we realized that the scope of improvements went beyond a few breaking changes, and when combined with the feedback we’ve received about our XPlat CLI, it made sense to start from the ground up. This choice allowed us to focus exclusively on our ARM management and address another common point of feedback: the ASM/ARM “config mode” switch of our XPlat CLI.

Introducing the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview

While we are building out support for core Azure services at this time, we would like to introduce you to the next generation of our command-line tool: Azure CLI 2.0 Preview.

Get Started without delay with a quick and easy install, regardless of platform

Your tools should always be easy to access and install, whether you work in operations or development. Soon, Azure CLI 2.0 Preview will be available on all popular platform package services.

Love using command-line tools such as GREP, AWK, JQ?  So do we!

Command-line tools are the most productive when they work together well. The Azure CLI 2.0 Preview provides clean and pipe-able outputs for interacting with popular command-line tools, such as grep, cut, and jq.

Feel like an Azure Ninja with consistent patterns and help at your fingertips

Getting started in the cloud can feel overwhelming, given all the tools and options available, but the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview can help you on your journey, guiding you with examples and educational content for common commands.  We&039;ve completely redesigned our help system with improved in-tool help.

In future releases, we will expand our documentation to include detailed man-pages and online documentation in popular repositories.

The less you type, the more productive you are

We offer &039;tab completion&039; for commands and parameter names. This makes it easy to find the right command or parameter without interrupting your flow. For parameters that include known choices, as well as resource groups and resource names, you can use tab completion to look-up appropriate values.

Moving to the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview

What does this mean to existing users of the XPlat CLI? We&039;re glad you asked! Here are a few key answers to some questions we&039;ve anticipated:

You don&039;t need to change anything: The XPlat CLI will continue to work and scripts will continue to function. We are continuing to support and add new features to the CLI.

You can install and use both CLIs side-by-side: Credentials and some defaults, such as default subscriptions, are shared between CLIs. This allows you to try out the CLI 2.0 Preview while leaving your existing Azure XPlat CLI installation untouched. 

No, ASM/Classic mode is not supported in the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview: We&039;ve designed around ARM primitives, such as resource groups and templates. ASM/Classic mode will continue to be supported by the XPlat CLI.

Yes, we&039;ll help you along the way: While we can&039;t convert scripts for you, we&039;ve created an online conversion guide, including a conversion table that maps commands between the CLIs.

Please note: credential sharing with the Azure XPlat CLI requires version 0.10.5 or later.

Interested in trying us out?

We&039;re on GitHub, but we also publish on Docker: get the latest release by running "$ docker run -it azuresdk/azure-cli-python".

If you have any feedback, please type "az feedback" into the CLI and let us know!

Attending the Microsoft Ignite conference (September 26-30, 2016, Atlanta, GA)? Come visit us at the Azure Tools booth for a demo or attend our session titled:  Build cloud-ready apps that rock with open and flexible tools for Azure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this mean to existing users of the XPlat CLI?

The XPlat CLI will continue to work and scripts will continue to function. Both of them support a different top level command (‘azure’ vs ‘az’), and you can use them together for specific scenarios. Credentials and some defaults (such as default subscription) are shared between CLIs allowing you to try out Azure CLI 2.0 Preview while leaving your existing CLI installation untouched. We are continuing to support and add new features the XPlat CLI.

I have scripts that call the “azure” command – will those work with the new tool?

Existing scripts built against the Azure XPlat CLI ("azure" command) will not work with the Azure CLI 2.0 Preview. While most commands have similar naming conventions, the structure of the input and output have changed. For most customers, this means changing scripts to &039;workarounds&039; required by the Azure XPlat CLI, or relying on the co-existence of both tools.

Are you going to discontinue the Azure XPlat CLI? When will you take Azure CLI 2.0 out of preview?

The current XPlat CLI will continue to be available and supported, as it is needed for all ASM/Classic based services. The new Azure CLI 2.0 will stay in preview for now as we collect early user feedback to drive improvements up until the final release (date TBD).

Is .NET Core and PowerShell support changing on this release?

Support for .NET Core and PowerShell is not changing with this release. They will continue to be available and fully supported. We feel that PowerShell and POSIX-based CLIs serve different sets of users and provides the best choice for automation/scripting scenarios from the command-line. Both of these options are available on multiple platforms.  Both are open source now and we are investing in both of them.
Quelle: Azure