Today’s topics include the U.S. Labor Department lawsuit against Oracle for alleged discriminatory pay and hiring practices, the release of Red Hat’s latest OpenShift Container Platform, Google’s acquisition of Twitter’s mobile application development platform Fabric and the 2017’s Pwn2Own hacking competition is setting its sights on a wider array of IT targets.
The U.S. Department of Labor on Jan. 18 filed a lawsuit claiming that Oracle pays white men more than other men and women and unfairly favors Asian candidates when recruiting and hiring for technical positions.
The Labor Department also filed a similar lawsuit Jan. 18 regarding unfair labor-practice allegations against JP Morgan Chase. In September 2016, the department filed litigation against federal government security and analytics contractor Palantir for allegedly discriminating against Asian job applicants.
Oracle released a statement saying the lawsuit’s allegations were false and “politically motivated.” The company has been in business since 1977 and employs 136,000 globally, 37 percent of which are classified as minorities and 29 percent of which are women. Women comprise 25 percent of the company’s management positions.
Red Hat announced the release of its OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 on Jan. 18, providing enterprises with new container management capabilities. The new release follows the OpenShift Container Platform 3.3 milestone that debuted in September 2016.
OpenShift is comprised of components from the open-source Kubernetes container management project, including additional capabilities and enhanced interfaces from Red Hat’s development efforts. The OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 update is based on the Kubernetes 1.4 release that came out in October 2016.
“The most interesting features from Kubernetes 1.4 are around dynamic provisioning of storage and related functionality, like storage tier labeling,” Joe Fernandes, senior director, product management for OpenShift at Red Hat, told eWEEK.
Google has agreed to acquire Fabric, Twitter’s application development platform for an undisclosed amount of cash.
Once the deal is approved, Fabric’s team will join Google’s Developer Products Group and work with the company’s Firebase application development platform team. Twitter announced Fabric in October 2014 as a modular platform for building mobile applications.
The platform consists of multiple kits that are designed to help developers address mobile app stability issues as well as those pertaining to application distribution and revenue generation.
Over the past decade, the Zero Day Initiative’s annual Pwn2Own competition has become one of the premiere events on the information security calendar and the 2017 edition does not look to be any different.
By the end of the two-day event in 2016, $460,000 in prize money was awarded to researchers that demonstrated a total of 21 zero-day vulnerabilities. This year the competition will focus on an expanded number of targets including Virtual Machines, including both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V systems.
ZDI will pay a $100,000 reward to the security researcher that is able to successfully execute a Virtual Machine escape. Pwn2Own will take place March 15-17 at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, Canada.