#telecommunication training

[skillaustraliame]

There is no doubt that telecommunications courses are going to be the next big thing in the modern age. We live in a world where communication has become a necessity for interacting with others. Students receive practical and theoretical training in these courses with relevant skills and knowledge. The students will be qualified to work in telecommunications companies and other government and private companies after completing these courses. In these courses, Skills Australia Institute (RTO number 52010|CRICOS code 03548F) provides the best vocational education and training.

Now is the time for you to become an expert in telecom courses at Skills Australia Institute.

[thegeorgetelegraph]

How to Get Placement After Electronics Engineering?

Graduating with a diploma in Electronics Engineering is a significant milestone, but the journey doesn’t end with the final exam. Securing a placemen

[zitintechnologies]

Zitin technologies is a leading recruiting and staffing agency which is focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Zitin Technologies | Best Staffing Services in USA | As your business grows and changes, your need for qualified workers increases. You may be hesitant to invest in staffing, but it is the best way to preserve and improve the quality.

[onlinetrainingspot]

Telecom Domain Training | Introduction Telecom Domain course - Telecom T...

Telecom Domain Knowledge 

[reportwire]

Supermom In Training: Self-care is the best thing I got from living in a pandemic | Parenting 101

Supermom In Training: Self-care is the best thing I got from living in a pandemic | Parenting 101

“Self-care” – it’s one of those words I heard all the time but scoffed at, thinking “yeah right!” But when the pandemic moved in and we found ourselves stuck at home a lot, I realized about a month in that I needed some “me time” or I was truly going to lose my mind and go bat-sh*t-crazy. It started simply enough: weekly video calls with my closest friends where I’d paint my nails (because it…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech is a scam - and a harbinger of your future

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Here's how the shitty technology adoption curve works: when you want to roll out a new, abusive technology, look for a group of vulnerable people whose complaints are roundly ignored and subject them to your bad idea. Sand the rough edges off on their bodies and lives. Normalize the technological abuse you seek to inflict.

Next: work your way up the privilege gradient. Maybe you start with prisoners, then work your way up to asylum seekers, parolees and mental patients. Then try it on kids and gig workers. Now, college students and blue collar workers. Climb that curve, bit by bit, until you've reached its apex and everyone is living with your shitty technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Prisoners, asylum seekers, drug addicts and other marginalized people are the involuntary early adopters of every form of disciplinary technology. They are the leading indicators of the ways that technology will be ruining your life in the future. They are the harbingers of all our technological doom.

Which brings me to Minnesota.

Minnesota is one of the first states make prison phone-calls free. This is a big deal, because prison phone-calls are a big business. Prisoners are literally a captive audience, and the telecommunications sector is populated by sociopaths, bred and trained to spot and exploit abusive monopoly opportunities. As states across America locked up more and more people for longer and longer terms, the cost of operating prisons skyrocketed, even as states slashed taxes on the rich and turned a blind eye to tax evasion.

This presented telco predators with an unbeatable opportunity: they approached state prison operators and offered them a bargain: "Let us take over the telephone service to your carceral facility and we will levy eye-watering per-minute charges on the most desperate people in the world. Their families – struggling with one breadwinner behind bars – will find the money to pay this ransom, and we'll split the profits with you, the cash-strapped, incarceration-happy state government."

This was the opening salvo, and it turned into a fantastic little money-spinner. Prison telco companies and state prison operators were the public-private partnership from hell. Prison-tech companies openly funneled money to state coffers in the form of kickbacks, even as they secretly bribed prison officials to let them gouge their inmates and inmates' families:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/mississippi-corrections-corruption-bribery-private-prison-hustle/

As digital technology got cheaper and prison-tech companies got greedier, the low end of the shitty tech adoption curve got a lot more crowded. Prison-tech companies started handing out "free" cheap Android tablets to prisoners, laying the groundwork for the next phase of the scam. Once prisoners had tablets, prisons could get rid of phones altogether and charge prisoners – and their families – even higher rates to place calls right to the prisoner's cell.

Then, prisons could end in-person visits and replace them with sub-skype, postage-stamp-sized videoconferencing, at rates even higher than the voice-call rates. Combine that with a ban on mailing letters to and from prisoners – replaced with a service that charged even higher rates to scan mail sent to prisoners, and then charged prisoners to download the scans – and prison-tech companies could claim to be at the vanguard of prison safety, ending the smuggling of dope-impregnated letters and other contraband into the prison system.

Prison-tech invented some wild shit, like the "digital stamp," a mainstay of industry giant Jpay, which requires prisoners to pay for "stamps" to send or receive a "page" of email. If you're keeping score, you've realized that this is a system where prisoners and their families have to pay for calls, "in-person" visits, handwritten letters, and email.

It goes on: prisons shuttered their libraries and replaced them with ebook stores that charged 2-4 times the prices you'd pay for books on the outside. Prisoners were sold digital music at 200-300% markups relative to, say, iTunes.

Remember, these are prisoners: locked up for years or decades, decades during which their families scraped by with a breadwinner behind bars. Prisoners can earn money, sure – as much as $0.89/hour, doing forced labor for companies that contract with prisons for their workforce:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

Of course, there's the odd chance for prisoners to make really big bucks – $2-5/day. All they have to do is "volunteer" to fight raging wildfires:

https://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-desk-wildfire-california-incarcerated-firefighters-face-dangerous-work-low-pay-and-covid19/

So those $3 digital music tracks are being bought by people earning as little as $0.10/hour. Which makes it especially galling when prisons change prison-tech suppliers, whereupon all that digital music is deleted, wiping prisoners' media collection out – forever (literally, for prisoners serving life terms):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/captive-audience-how-floridas-prisons-and-drm-made-113m-worth-prisoners-music

Let's recap: America goes on a prison rampage, locking up ever-larger numbers of people for ever-longer sentences. Once inside, prisoners had their access to friends and family rationed, along with access to books, music, education and communities outside. This is very bad for prisoners – strong ties to people outside is closely tied to successful reentry – but it's great for state budgets, and for wardens, thanks to kickbacks:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/12/21/family_contact/

Back to Minnesota: when Minnesota became the fourth state in the USA where the state, not prisoners, would pay for prison calls, it seemed like they were finally breaking the vicious cycle in which every dollar ripped off of prisoners' family paid 40 cents to the state treasury:

https://www.kaaltv.com/news/no-cost-phone-calls-for-those-incarcerated-in-minnesota/

But – as Katya Schwenk writes for The Lever – what happened next is "a case study in how prison communication companies and their private equity owners have managed to preserve their symbiotic relationship with state corrections agencies despite reforms — at the major expense of incarcerated people and their families":

https://www.levernews.com/wall-streets-new-prison-scam/

Immediately after the state ended the ransoming of prisoners' phone calls, the private-equity backed prison-tech companies that had dug their mouth-parts into the state's prison jacked up the price of all their other digital services. For example, the price of a digital song in a Minnesota prison just jumped from $1.99 to $2.36 (for prisoners earning as little as $0.25/hour).

As Paul Wright from the Human Rights Defense Center told Schwenk, "The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain."

The state's new prison-tech supplier promises to double the amount of kickbacks it pays the state each year, thanks to an aggressive expansion into games, money transfers, and other "services." The perverse incentive isn't hard to spot: the more these prison-tech companies charge, the more kickbacks they pay to the prisons.

The primary prison-tech company for Minnesota's prisons is Viapath (nee Global Tel Link), which pioneered price-gouging on in-prison phone calls. Viapath has spent the past two decades being bought and sold by different private equity firms: Goldman Sachs, Veritas Capital, and now the $46b/year American Securities.

Viapath competes with another private equity-backed prison-tech giant: Aventiv (Securus, Jpay), owned by Platinum Equity. Together, Viapath and Aventiv control 90% of the prison-tech market. These companies have a rap-sheet as long as your arm: bribing wardens, stealing from prisoners and their families, and recording prisoner-attorney calls. But these are the kinds of crimes the state punishes with fines and settlements – not by terminating its contracts with these predators.

These companies continue to flout the law. Minnesota's new free-calls system bans prison-tech companies from paying kickbacks to prisons and prison-officials for telcoms services, so the prison-tech companies have rebranded ebooks, music, and money-transfers as non-communications products, and the kickbacks are bigger than ever.

This is the bottom end of the shitty technology adoption curve. Long before Ubisoft started deleting games that you'd bought a "perpetual license" for, prisoners were having their media ganked by an uncaring corporation that knew it was untouchable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

Revoking your media, charging by the byte for messaging, confiscating things in the name of security and then selling them back to you – these are all tactics that were developed in the prison system, refined, normalized, and then worked up the privilege gradient. Prisoners are living in your technology future. It's just not evenly distributed – yet.

As it happens, prison-tech is at the heart of my next novel, The Bezzle, which comes out on Feb 20. This is a followup to last year's bestselling Red Team Blues, which introduced the world to Marty Hench, a two-fisted, hard-bitten, high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years busting Silicon Valley finance scams:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

In The Bezzle, we travel with Marty back to the mid 2000s (Hench is a kind of tech-scam Zelig and every book is a standalone tale of high-tech ripoffs from a different time and place). Marty's trying to help his old pal Scott Warms, a once-high-flying founder who's fallen prey to California's three-strikes law and is now facing decades in a state pen. As bad as things are, they get worse when the prison starts handing out "free" tablet and closing down the visitation room, the library, and the payphones.

This is an entry to the thing I love most about the Hench novels: the opportunity to turn all this dry, financial skullduggery into high-intensity, high-stakes technothriller plot. For me, Marty Hench is a tool for flensing the scam economy of all its layers of respectability bullshit and exposing the rot at the core.

It's not a coincidence that I've got a book coming out in a week that's about something that's in the news right now. I didn't "predict" this current turn – I observed it. The world comes at you fast and technology news flutters past before you can register it. Luckily, I have a method for capturing this stuff as it happens:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Writing about tech issues that are long-simmering but still in the periphery is a technique I call "predicting the present." It's the technique I used when I wrote Little Brother, about out-of-control state surveillance of the internet. When Snowden revealed the extent of NSA spying in 2013, people acted as though I'd "predicted" the Snowden revelations:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-writing-radicalized-young-hackers-now-he-wants-to-redeem-them/

But Little Brother and Snowden's own heroic decision have a common origin: the brave whistleblower Mark Klein, who walked into EFF's offices in 2006 and revealed that he'd been ordered by his boss at AT&T to install a beam-splitter into the main fiber trunk so that the NSA could illegally wiretap the entire internet:

https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declaration

Mark Klein inspired me to write Little Brother – but despite national press attention, the Klein revelations didn't put a stop to NSA spying. The NSA was still conducting its lawless surveillance campaign in 2013, when Snowden, disgusted with NSA leadership for lying to Congress under oath, decided to blow the whistle again:

https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad

The assumption that let the NSA get away with mass surveillance was that it would only be weaponized against the people at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve: brown people, mostly in other countries. The Snowden revelations made it clear that these were just the beginning, and sure enough, more than a decade later, we have data-brokers sucking up billions in cop kickbacks to enable warrantless surveillance, while virtually following people to abortion clinics, churches, and protests. Mass surveillance is chugging its way up the shitty tech adoption curve with no sign of stopping.

Like Little Brother, The Bezzle is intended as a kind of virtual flythrough of what life is like further down on that curve – a way for readers who have too much agency to be in the crosshairs of a company like Viapath or Avently right now to wake up before that kind of technology comes for them, and to inspire them to take up the cause of the people further down the curve who are mired in it.

The Bezzle is an intense book, but it's also a very fun story – just like Little Brother. It's a book that lays bare the internal technical workings of so many scams, from multi-level marketing to real-estate investment trusts, from music royalty theft to prison-tech, in the course of an ice-cold revenge plot that keeps twisting to the very last page.

It'll drop in six days. I hope you'll check it out:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

“Failed presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill late last week barring Florida localities from requiring employers to provide outdoor workers with access to water, rest and shade, outraging workplace safety advocates who say the new law will kill people.

Backed by the agricultural and construction industries, the controversial legislation is what’s known as a “preemption” law: It forbids cities and counties from pursuing their own ordinances on a particular subject, in this case protections from extreme heat.

The law effectively nullifies a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would require some employers to maintain a heat safety program and provide employees with water and shade on hot days. The county commission recently withdrew the proposal after the state legislation put its legality in doubt.

The preemption bill recently passed the Republican-controlled state House and Senate, along with a similar measure that prevents jurisdictions from requiring employers to pay livable wages on government-funded projects.

Unions and other progressive groups said blocking heat regulations would endanger farm and construction workers and anyone else who labors in one of the hottest states in the country.

“Someone is going to die as a result of this legislation,” Kim Smith, a telecommunications technician, told HuffPost last month.

Last year, Texas Republicans passed a similar preemption bill that blocked localities from implementing heat protections as well as other ordinances related to housing and labor. The legislation, known as Texas’ “death star bill,” appeared designed to thwart local laws in Austin and Dallas that guaranteed water breaks for workers.

The bill Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) just signed blocks jurisdictions like Miami-Dade County from implementing their own heat safety standards.

The bill Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) just signed blocks jurisdictions like Miami-Dade County from implementing their own heat safety standards. SOPA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES

Florida Republicans pushing for the preemption law said they wanted to avoid a “patchwork” of local regulations around the state related to heat safety, arguing the matter was better left to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

But OSHA does not yet have a heat-specific safety rule, and proposals to create a uniform, statewide standard in Florida have gone nowhere over the years because of a lack of Republican support.

More than 430 workers have died due to environmental heat exposure since 2011, according to OSHA. But relatively few jurisdictions have laws in place that require employers to provide water, shade and heat safety training. Just three — California, Oregon and Washington — mandate heat breaks for outdoor workers. Minnesota has heat standards for indoor workers, while Colorado does for farmworkers.

“Overheating is one of the most common and most serious dangers in the workplace,” Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), who recently co-authored a federal bill ordering OSHA to regulate heat exposure, told HuffPost. “Is requiring a glass of water and some shade too much to ask?”

Climate change is making heat waves both more intense and more frequent, raising fears that a growing number of workers could die if governments don’t implement safety measures.

A farmworker in Miami-Dade County died last July during what would become the hottest month ever recorded. The man’s family told NBC South Florida that he’d recently suffered symptoms consistent with heat stress. A farmworker in the county told HuffPost last month that the foreman at the plant nursery where he works prohibited even 30-second breaks in the blazing sun since this is the busiest growing season for exotic flora.

The Biden administration is currently crafting a federal heat safety standard through OSHA, but federal rules take years to develop, often face litigation and can be undermined by subsequent administrations. Former President Donald Trump could simply drop pursuit of the rule if he defeats Biden in their expected rematch in November.”

[thesimblrofficedirectory]

Welcome to The Simblr Office Directory

This blog is an archive of the submissions for the office-centric OC prompt posted by the light of Simblr, @kashisun.

Here you can browse all the amazing creations submitted by your fellow simblrs. Feel free to scroll to your delight or click one of the links under the cut to see who's on roster under (or over) a particular bureau or delegation.

Want to be added to the directory or confirm that you've been queued? Just include a link to your post in an ask off anon and it will be queued within 48 hours. Until we get through the backlog and can queue at a more leisurely pace, all ask submissions will receive a confirmation. You can always mention us, but we won't be able to provided confirmation for that method.

Leaving the company? If you'd like your post removed, just include a link to the post in an ask off anon and it will be removed. Sideblogs may require additional verification. Please allow, at most, 48 hours for the request to be honored. Removal requests will not be confirmed, only acted upon.

Every company's hierarchy is a little different. Designations for this directory are based on some of the companies I've worked for, but especially on the multi-media marketing company I work for now.

Bureaus and Their Delegations

Delegations with an * currently have low or no headcount (posted and queued). Excludes leadership.

Bureau of Client Engagement

Leadership

Billing*

Escalations*

Product Support*

Quality Assurance*

Sales*

Bureau of Compliance (Bureau-specific Internal Affairs and Auditing)

Leadership

Client Engagement*

Facilities*

Finance*

Human Resources*

Information and Technology*

Legal (General)

Legal (Leadership)

Marketing*

Bureau of Facilities

Leadership

Catering*

Environmental (Janitorial, HVAC, and Plumbing)*

Mechanical (Electrical, Elevators, Equipment Maintenance)*

Premise* (Grounds Maintenance and Real Estate)

Purchasing* (From pushpins to pallet jacks)

Security

Warehousing* (Shipping, Receiving, Mail room, and Inventory)

Bureau of Finance

Leadership

Accounting

Asset Management*

Investments*

Travel and Accommodations*

Vendor Relations*

Bureau of Human Resources

Leadership

Career Development (Internships and Internal Role Transitions)

Dependent Care*

Employee Activities Committee (Members are volunteers)

Employee Benefits*

Floating Delegates (Administration) (For profiles that list a nondescript secretary/admin/receptionist/assistant role)

Floating Delegates (General) (For profiles that do not list a position)

Floating Delegates (Leadership) (For profiles that list a nondescript managerial role)

Health Services*

Payroll*

Recruiting*

Training*

Union Relations*

Bureau of Information & Technology

Leadership

Data Security*

Infrastructure*

Public Relations

Research and Development*

Systems and Devices*

Telecommunications*

Bureau of Marketing

Leadership

Copy

Design

Planning and Implementation*

Board of Directors

Chief Officers

CEO - Chief Executive Officer/President

COO - Chief Operations Officer/Vice President

CCO - Chief Compliance Officer/Vice President

CFO - Chief Finance Officer/Vice President

CITO - Chief Information and Technology Officer/Vice President

CMO - Chief Marketing Officer/Vice President

Executive Administration* (Admins that report to chief officers)

[therainbowwarrior4]

Project 2025 is a plan to, in the words of project Director Paul Dans, "...march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the Deep State".It is organized by the Heritage Foundation, to "muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government", "gut the administrative state" (HUD, FEMA, DOJ, DHS, the Federal Reserve, CDC, FDA, EPA, etc.) and concentrate power into the hands of the President (Leeja Miller, in a video that is linked below, goes into detail on how this would work).Their claim is that "Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful".The plan includes a [180 Day Playbook](https://www.project2025.org/playbook/), described as "...a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency."

The plan is "the conservative movement's unified effort to be ready for the next conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025".Project 2025 promises to "rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left" and to "unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors".Project 2025 lists problems with America such as:* The breakdown of the family* Immigration* The "totalitarian cult known today as The Great Awokening"* The erosion of constitutional accountability in Washington* Children suffering the "toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries"* An "overseas, totalitarian Communist dictatorship" that is "not a strategic partner or fair competitor" and is "engaged in a strategic, cultural and economic Cold War against America's interests, values and people"* "Low-income communities" that are "drowning in addiction and government dependence"* "America's elites have betrayed the American People"* The left using climate change "to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty crushing regulations"They believe that "These are problems not of technocratic efficiency, but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves, but by ripping out the trees -- root and branch."

Their broad goals are to:1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life, and protect our children2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people3. Defend our nation's sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely - what our constitution calls "the Blessings of Liberty"Dans states that "The long march of Cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before".Project 2025 is, in my words, a distinctly terrifying and highly detailed roadmap for:* Installing a Chriso-fascist oligarchy* Rolling back civil and human rights* Removing bodily autonomy from women and transgender individuals* The systematic eradication of minorities and other vulnerable groupsI don't use the words "systematic eradication" lightly or with hyperbole.

They obviously don't come right out and say it, but they state that:* Pornography should be outlawed* The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned* Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders* Telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shutteredThe real problem with the above, apart from the obvious, is that they label the existence of LGBTQIA+ people as "inherently pornographic". They say that pornography is “manifested today through the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology".They say that the fix "starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity ('SOGI'), diversity, equity and inclusion ('DEI'), gender, gender equality, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists".They also state that "The president should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc."

They want to "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family" which would remove protections for same-sex marriage.Leeja Miller helpfully points out that the above language does not simply include transgender individuals, it includes cis women as well. I'd argue that removing the DEI language also allows them to target anyone that isn't a white, cis, heterosexual, evangelical (or other approved flavor of Christianity) male.Some other points of note:* They want to eliminate the Department of Education* They want to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory* They want to bring back the practice of impounding funds

**References*** A direct link to a PDF copy of the project's Policy Agenda, aka their "Mandate for Leadership": [https://thf\_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025\_MandateForLeadership\_FULL.pdf](https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf), this can be found on the Policy page of the Project 2025 website.* A video from Leeja Miller: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k3UvaC5m7o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k3UvaC5m7o)* An NPR article focusing on the climate policy aspect: [https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192634090/if-republicans-win-the-white-house-in-2024-climate-policy-will-likely-change](https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192634090/if-republicans-win-the-white-house-in-2024-climate-policy-will-likely-change)* A UC Berkeley write up: [https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2023/11/17/project-2025-democratic-doomsday/](https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2023/11/17/project-2025-democratic-doomsday/)* An article from the NECC Observer: [http://observer.necc.mass.edu/blog/2023/11/20/the-danger-of-project-2025/](http://observer.necc.mass.edu/blog/2023/11/20/the-danger-of-project-2025/)* An article from PBS: [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/conservatives-aim-to-restructure-u-s-government-and-replace-it-with-trumps-vision](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/conservatives-aim-to-restructure-u-s-government-and-replace-it-with-trumps-vision)

[skillaustraliame]

Telecom courses

One of the best colleges in Australia, Skills Australia Institute, offers courses in telecommunications, including the Advanced Diploma Of Information Technology (Telecommunications Network Engineering). The course covers many topics such as managing IP, ethics and privacy in ICT environments, choosing the best topologies for wide area networks, planning and monitoring business analysis activities in an ICT environment, and evaluating networking regulations and legislation for the telecommunications industry and much more. A Telecommunications Network Administrator, Telecommunications Network Planner, Telecommunications Technologist are some of the career options available after completing this course. We offer telecom training at SAI, so if you're looking to learn more, register today.

[thegeorgetelegraph]

What Is The Highest Package For Electronics And Telecommunication Engineering?

India’s engineering landscape has always been a hotbed of talent and innovation, and the field of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering is no exception. With the advent of technology and the ever-growing need for connectivity, the demand for skilled professionals in this domain is on the rise. A common question on the minds of aspiring students and their families is, “What is the highest…

[zitintechnologies]

Zitin technologies is a leading recruiting and staffing agency which is focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Zitin Technologies | Best Staffing Services in USA | As your business grows and changes, your need for qualified workers increases. You may be hesitant to invest in staffing, but it is the best way to preserve and improve the quality.

[treethymes]

With the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, the communist world has merged onto the capitalist highway in a couple different ways during the twenty-first century. As you’ve read, free-trade imperialism and its cheap agricultural imports pushed farmers into the cities and into factory work, lowering the global price of manufacturing labor and glutting the world market with stuff. Forward-thinking states such as China and Vietnam invested in high-value-added production capacity and managed labor organizing, luring links from the global electronics supply chain and jump-starting capital investment. Combined with capital’s hesitancy to invest in North Atlantic production facilities, as well as a disinclination toward state-led investment in the region, Asian top-down planning erased much of the West’s technological edge. If two workers can do a single job, and one worker costs less, both in wages and state support, why pick the expensive one? Foxconn’s 2017 plan to build a U.S. taxpayer–subsidized $10 billion flat-panel display factory in Wisconsin was trumpeted by the president, but it was a fiasco that produced zero screens. The future cost of labor looks to be capped somewhere below the wage levels many people have enjoyed, and not just in the West.

The left-wing economist Joan Robinson used to tell a joke about poverty and investment, something to the effect of: The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by capitalists. It’s a cruel truism about the unipolar world, but shouldn’t second place count for something? When the Soviet project came to an end, in the early 1990s, the country had completed world history’s biggest, fastest modernization project, and that didn’t just disappear. Recall that Cisco was hyped to announce its buyout of the Evil Empire’s supercomputer team. Why wasn’t capitalist Russia able to, well, capitalize? You’re already familiar with one of the reasons: The United States absorbed a lot of human capital originally financed by the Soviet people. American immigration policy was based on draining technical talent in particular from the Second World. Sergey Brin is the best-known person in the Moscow-to-Palo-Alto pipeline, but he’s not the only one.

Look at the economic composition of China and Russia in the wake of Soviet dissolution: Both were headed toward capitalist social relations, but they took two different routes. The Russian transition happened rapidly. The state sold off public assets right away, and the natural monopolies such as telecommunications and energy were divided among a small number of skilled and connected businessmen, a category of guys lacking in a country that frowned on such characters but that grew in Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika era. Within five years, the country sold off an incredible 35 percent of its national wealth. Russia’s richest ended the century with a full counterrevolutionary reversal of their fortunes, propelling their income share above what it was before the Bolsheviks took over. To accomplish this, the country’s new capitalists fleeced the most vulnerable half of their society. “Over the 1989–2016 period, the top 1 percent captured more than two-thirds of the total growth in Russia,” found an international group of scholars, “while the bottom 50 percent actually saw a decline in its income.” Increases in energy prices encouraged the growth of an extractionist petro-centered economy. Blood-covered, teary, and writhing, infant Russian capital crowded into the gas and oil sectors. The small circle of oligarchs privatized unemployed KGB-trained killers to run “security,” and gangsters dominated politics at the local and national levels. They installed a not particularly well-known functionary—a former head of the new intelligence service FSB who also worked on the privatization of government assets—as president in a surprise move on the first day of the year 2000. He became the gangster in chief.

Vladimir Putin’s first term coincided with the energy boom, and billionaires gobbled up a ludicrous share of growth. If any individual oligarch got too big for his britches, Putin was not beyond imposing serious consequences. He reinserted the state into the natural monopolies, this time in collaboration with loyal capitalists, and his stranglehold on power remains tight for now, despite the outstandingly uneven distribution of growth. Between 1980 and 2015, the Russian top 1 percent grew its income an impressive 6.2 percent per year, but the top .001 percent has maintained a growth rate of 17 percent over the same period. To invest these profits, the Russian billionaires parked their money in real estate, bidding up housing prices, and stashed a large amount of their wealth offshore. Reinvestment in Russian production was not a priority—why go through the hassle when there were easier ways to keep getting richer?

While Russia grew billionaires instead of output, China saw a path to have both. As in the case of Terry Gou, the Chinese Communist Party tempered its transition by incorporating steadily increasing amounts of foreign direct investment through Hong Kong and Taiwan, picking partners and expanding outward from the special economic zones. State support for education and infrastructure combined with low wages to make the mainland too attractive to resist. (Russia’s population is stagnant, while China’s has grown quickly.) China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, gave investors more confidence. Meanwhile, strong capital controls kept the country out of the offshore trap, and state development priorities took precedence over extraction and get-rich-quick schemes. Chinese private wealth was rechanneled into domestic financial assets—equity and bonds or other loan instruments—at a much higher rate than it was in Russia. The result has been a sustained high level of annual output growth compared to the rest of the world, the type that involves putting up an iPhone City in a matter of months. As it has everywhere else, that growth has been skewed: only an average of 4.5 percent for the bottom half of earners in the 1978–2015 period compared to more than 10 percent for the top .001 percent. But this ratio of just over 2–1 is incomparable to Russia’s 17–.5 ration during the same period.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain trends have been more or less unavoidable. The rich have gotten richer relative to the poor and working class—in Russia, in China, in the United States, and pretty much anywhere else you want to look. Capital has piled into property markets, driving up the cost of housing everywhere people want to live, especially in higher-wage cities and especially in the world’s financial centers. Capitalist and communist countries alike have disgorged public assets into private pockets. But by maintaining a level of control over the process and slowing its tendencies, the People’s Republic of China has built a massive and expanding postindustrial manufacturing base.

It’s important to understand both of these patterns as part of the same global system rather than as two opposed regimes. One might imagine, based on what I’ve written so far, that the Chinese model is useful, albeit perhaps threatening, in the long term for American tech companies while the Russian model is irrelevant. Some commentators have phrased this as the dilemma of middle-wage countries on the global market: Wages in China are going to be higher than wages in Russia because wages in Russia used to be higher than wages in China. But Russia’s counterrevolutionary hyper-bifurcation has been useful for Silicon Valley as well; they are two sides of the same coin. Think about it this way: If you’re a Russian billionaire in the first decades of the twenty-first century looking to invest a bunch of money you pulled out of the ground, where’s the best place you could put it? The answer is Palo Alto.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dave Jamieson and Alexander C. Kaufman at HuffPost:

Failed presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill late last week barring Florida localities from requiring employers to provide outdoor workers with access to water, rest and shade, outraging workplace safety advocates who say the new law will kill people.

Backed by the agricultural and construction industries, the controversial legislation is what’s known as a “preemption” law: It forbids cities and counties from pursuing their own ordinances on a particular subject, in this case protections from extreme heat. The law effectively nullifies a proposal in Miami-Dade County that would require some employers to maintain a heat safety program and provide employees with water and shade on hot days. The county commission recently withdrew the proposal after the state legislation put its legality in doubt. The preemption bill recently passed the Republican-controlled state House and Senate, along with a similar measure that prevents jurisdictions from requiring employers to pay livable wages on government-funded projects. Unions and other progressive groups said blocking heat regulations would endanger farm and construction workers and anyone else who labors in one of the hottest states in the country. “Someone is going to die as a result of this legislation,” Kim Smith, a telecommunications technician, told HuffPost last month.

[...] Last year, Texas Republicans passed a similar preemption bill that blocked localities from implementing heat protections as well as other ordinances related to housing and labor. The legislation, known as Texas’ “death star bill,” appeared designed to thwart local laws in Austin and Dallas that guaranteed water breaks for workers.

Florida Republicans pushing for the preemption law said they wanted to avoid a “patchwork” of local regulations around the state related to heat safety, arguing the matter was better left to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But OSHA does not yet have a heat-specific safety rule, and proposals to create a uniform, statewide standard in Florida have gone nowhere over the years because of a lack of Republican support. More than 430 workers have died due to environmental heat exposure since 2011, according to OSHA. But relatively few jurisdictions have laws in place that require employers to provide water, shade and heat safety training. Just three — California, Oregon and Washington — mandate heat breaks for outdoor workers. Minnesota has heat standards for indoor workers, while Colorado does for farmworkers.

Just another terrible anti-workplace safety law signed in by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[mariacallous]

In a sunlight-filled classroom at the US State Department’s diplomacy school in late February, America’s cyber ambassador fielded urgent questions from US diplomats who were spending the week learning about the dizzying technological forces shaping their missions.

“This portfolio is one of the most interesting and perhaps the most consequential at this moment in time,” Nathaniel Fick, the US ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy, told the roughly three dozen diplomats assembled before him at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia. “Getting smart on these issues … is going to serve everyone really well over the long term, regardless of what other things you go off and do.”

The diplomats, who had come from overseas embassies and from State Department headquarters in nearby Washington, DC, were the sixth cohort of students to undergo a crash course in cybersecurity, telecommunications, privacy, surveillance, and other digital issues, which Fick’s team created in late 2022. The training program—the biggest initiative yet undertaken by State’s two-year-old cyber bureau—is intended to reinvigorate US digital diplomacy at a time when adversaries like Russia and China are increasingly trying to shape how the world uses technology.

During his conversation with the students, Fick discussed the myriad of tech and cyber challenges facing US diplomats. He told a staffer from an embassy in a country under China’s influence to play the long game in forming relationships that could eventually help the US make inroads there. He spoke about his efforts to help European telecom companies survive existential threats from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in the battle for the world’s 5G networks. And he warned of a difficult balancing act on AI, saying the US needed to stave off excessive regulation at the UN without repeating past mistakes.

“We really screwed up governance of the previous generation of tech platforms, particularly the social [media] platforms,” Fick said. “The US essentially unleashed on the world the most powerful anti-democratic tools in the history of humanity, and now we’re digging our way out of a credibility hole.”

Restoring that credibility and expanding American influence over digital issues will require tech-savvy diplomacy, and the State Department is counting on Fick’s training program to make that possible. To pull back the curtain on this program for the first time, WIRED received exclusive access to the February training session and interviewed Fick, the initiative’s lead organizer, five graduates of the course, and multiple cyber diplomacy experts about how the program is trying to transform American tech diplomacy.

Fick has called the training program the most important part of his job. As he tells anyone who will listen, it’s a project with existential stakes for the future of the open internet and the free world.

“Technology as a source of influence is increasingly foundational,” he says. “These things are more and more central to our foreign policy, and that’s a trend that is long-term and unlikely to change anytime soon.”

Maintaining an Edge

From Russian election interference to Chinese industrial dominance, the US faces a panoply of digital threats. Fighting back will require skillful diplomatic pressure campaigns on every level, from bilateral talks with individual countries to sweeping appeals before the 193-member United Nations. But this kind of work is only possible when the career Foreign Service officers on the front lines of US diplomacy understand why tech and cyber issues matter—and how to discuss them.

“The US needs to demonstrate both understanding and leadership on the global stage,” says Chris Painter, who served as the first US cyber ambassador from 2011 to 2017.

This leadership is important on high-profile subjects like artificial intelligence and the 5G war between Western and Chinese vendors, but it’s equally vital on the bread-and-butter digital issues—like basic internet connectivity and fighting cybercrime—that don’t generate headlines but still dominate many countries’ diplomatic engagements with the US.

Diplomats also need to be able to identify digital shortcomings and security gaps in their host countries that the US could help fix. The success of the State Department’s new cyber foreign aid fund will depend heavily on project suggestions from tech-savvy diplomats on the ground.

In addition, because virtually every global challenge—from trade to climate—has a tech aspect, all US diplomats need to be conversant in the topic. “You’re going to have meetings where a country is talking about a trade import issue or complaining about a climate problem, and suddenly there’s a tech connection,” says Justin Sherman, a tech and geopolitics expert who runs Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington, DC, research and advisory firm.

Digital expertise will also help the US expand coalitions around cybercrime investigations, ransomware deterrence, and safe uses of the internet—all essentially proxy fights with Russia and China.

“We are in competition with the authoritarian states on everything from internet standards … to basic governance rules,” says Neil Hop, a senior adviser to Fick and the lead organizer of the training program. “We are going to find ourselves at a sore disadvantage if we don't have trained people who are representing [us].”

Diplomats without tech training might not even realize when their Russian and Chinese counterparts are using oblique rhetoric to pitch persuadable countries on their illiberal visions of internet governance, with rampant censorship and surveillance. Diplomats with tech training would be able to push back, using language and examples designed to appeal to those middle-ground countries and sway them away from the authoritarians’ clutches.

“Our competitors and our adversaries are upping their game in these areas,” Fick says, “because they understand as well as we do what’s at stake.”

Preparing America’s Eyes and Ears

The Obama administration was the first to create a tech diplomacy training program, with initial training sessions in various regions followed by week-long courses that brought trainees to Washington. Government speakers and tech-industry luminaries like internet cocreator Vint Cerf discussed the technological, social, and political dimensions of the digital issues that diplomats had to discuss with their host governments.

“The idea was to create this cadre in the Foreign Service to work with our office and really mainstream this as a topic,” says Painter, who created the program when he was State’s coordinator for cyber issues, the predecessor to Fick’s role.

But when Painter tried to institutionalize his program with a course at the Foreign Service Institute, he encountered resistance. “I think we kind of hit it too early for FSI,” he says. “I remember the FSI director saying that they thought, ‘Well, maybe this is just a passing fad.’ It was a new topic. This is what happens with any new topic.”

By the time the Senate unanimously confirmed Nate Fick to be America’s cyber ambassador in September 2022, tech diplomacy headaches were impossible to ignore, and Fick quickly tasked his team with creating a modern training program and embedding it in the FSI’s regular curriculum.

“He understood that we needed to do more and better in terms of preparing our people in the field,” Hop says.

The training program fit neatly into secretary of state Antony Blinken’s vision of an American diplomatic corps fully versed in modern challenges and nimble enough to confront them. “Elevating our tech diplomacy” is one of Blinken’s “core priorities,” Fick says.

As they developed a curriculum, Fick and his aides had several big goals for the new training program.

The first priority was to make sure diplomats understood what was at stake as the US and its rivals compete for global preeminence on tech issues. “Authoritarian states and other actors have used cyber and digital tools to threaten national security, international peace and security, economic prosperity, [and] the exercise of human rights,” says Kathryn Fitrell, a senior cyber policy adviser at State who helps run the course.

Equally critical was preparing diplomats to promote the US tech agenda from their embassies and provide detailed reports back to Washington on how their host governments were approaching these issues.

“It's important to us that tech expertise [in] the department not sit at headquarters alone,” Fick says, “but instead that we have people everywhere—at all our posts around the world, where the real work gets done—who are equipped with the tools that they need to make decisions with a fair degree of autonomy.”

Foreign Service officers are America’s eyes and ears on the ground in foreign countries, studying the landscape and alerting their bosses back home to risks and opportunities. They are also the US government’s most direct and regular interlocutors with representatives of other nations, forming personal bonds with local officials that can sometimes make the difference between unity and discord.

When these diplomats need to discuss the US tech agenda, they can’t just read monotonously off a piece of paper. They need to actually understand the positions they’re presenting and be prepared to answer questions about them.

“You can’t be calling back to someone in Washington every time there’s a cyber question,” says Sherman.

But some issues will still require help from experts at headquarters, so Fick and his team also wanted to use the course to deepen their ties with diplomats and give them friendly points of contact at the cyber bureau. “We want to be able to support officers in the field as they confront these issues,” says Melanie Kaplan, a member of Fick’s team who took the class and now helps run it.

Inside the Classroom

After months of research, planning, and scheduling, Fick’s team launched the Cyberspace and Digital Policy Tradecraft course at the Foreign Service Institute with a test run in November 2022. Since then, FSI has taught the class six more times—once in London for European diplomats, once in Morocco for diplomats in the Middle East and Africa, and four times in Arlington—and trained 180 diplomats.

The program begins with four hours of “pre-work” to prepare students for the lessons ahead. Students must document that they’ve completed the pre-work—which includes experimenting with generative AI—before taking the class. “That has really put us light-years ahead in ensuring that no one is lost on day one,” Hop says.

The week-long in-person class consists of 45- to 90-minute sessions on topics like internet freedom, privacy, ransomware, 5G, and AI. Diplomats learn how the internet works on a technical level, how the military and the FBI coordinate with foreign partners to take down hackers’ computer networks, and how the US promotes its tech agenda in venues like the International Telecommunication Union. Participants also meet with Fick and his top deputies, including Eileen Donahoe, the department’s special envoy for digital freedom.

One session features a panel of US diplomats who have helped their host governments confront big cyberattacks. “They woke up one morning and suddenly were in this position of having to respond to a major crisis,” says Meir Walters, a training alum who leads the digital-freedom team in State’s cyber bureau.

Students learn how the US helped Albania and Costa Rica respond to massive cyberattacks in 2022 perpetrated by the Iranian government and Russian cybercriminals, respectively. In Albania, urgent warnings from a young, tech-savvy US diplomat “accelerated our response to the Iranian attack by months,” Fick says. In Costa Rica, diplomats helped the government implement emergency US aid and then used those relationships to turn the country into a key semiconductor manufacturing partner.

“By having the right people on the ground,” Fick says, “we were able to seize these significant opportunities.”

Students spend one day on a field trip, with past visits including the US Chamber of Commerce (to understand industry’s role in tech diplomacy), the Center for Democracy and Technology (to understand civil society’s perspective on digital-rights issues), and the internet infrastructure giant Verisign.

On the final day, participants must pitch ideas for using what they’ve learned in a practical way to Jennifer Bachus, the cyber bureau’s number two official.

The course has proven to be highly popular. Fick told participants in February that “there was a long wait list” to get in. There will be at least three more sessions this year: one in Arlington in August (timed to coincide with the diplomatic rotation period), one in East Asia, and one in Latin America. These sessions are expected to train 75 to 85 new diplomats.

After the course ends, alumni can stay up-to-date with a newsletter, a Microsoft Teams channel, and a toolkit with advice and guidance. Some continue their education: Fifty diplomats are getting extra training through a one-year online learning pilot, and State is accepting applications for 15 placements at leading academic institutions and think tanks—including Stanford University and the Council on Foreign Relations—where diplomats can continue researching tech issues that interest them.

Promising Results, Challenges Ahead

Less than two years into the training effort, officials say they are already seeing meaningful improvements to the US’s tech diplomacy posture.

Diplomats are sending Washington more reports on their host governments’ tech agendas, Fitrell says, with more details and better analysis. Graduates of the course also ask more questions than their untrained peers. And inspired by the training, some diplomats have pushed their bosses to prioritize tech issues, including through embassy working groups uniting representatives of different US agencies.

State has also seen more diplomats request high-level meetings with foreign counterparts to discuss tech issues and more incorporation of those issues into broader conversations. Fick says the course helped the cyber officer at the US embassy in Nairobi play an integral role in recent tech agreements between the US and Kenya. And diplomats are putting more energy into whipping votes for international tech agreements, including an AI resolution at the UN.

Diplomats who took the course shared overwhelmingly positive feedback with WIRED. They say it was taught in an accessible way and covered important topics. Several say they appreciated hearing from senior US officials whose strategizing informs diplomats’ on-the-ground priorities. Maryum Saifee, a senior adviser for digital governance at State’s cyber bureau and a training alum, says she appreciated the Morocco class’s focus on regional issues and its inclusion of locally employed staff.

Graduates strongly encouraged their colleagues to take the course, describing it as foundational to every diplomatic portfolio.

“Even if you're not a techie kind of a person, you need to not shy away from these conversations,” says Bridget Trazoff, a veteran diplomat who has learned four languages at the Foreign Service Institute and compares the training to learning a fifth one.

Painter, who knows how challenging it can be to create a program like this, says he’s “heard good things” about the course. “I’m very happy that they've redoubled their efforts in this.”

For the training program to achieve lasting success, its organizers will need to overcome several hurdles.

Fick’s team will need to keep the course material up-to-date as the tech landscape evolves. They’ll need to keep it accessible but also informative to diplomats with varying tech proficiencies who work in countries with varying levels of tech capacity. And they’ll need to maintain a constant training tempo, given that diplomats rotate positions every few years.

The tone of the curriculum also presents a challenge. Diplomats need to learn the US position on issues like trusted telecom infrastructure, but they also need to understand that not every country sees things the way the US does. “It's not just knowing about these tech issues that’s so essential,” Sherman says. “It's also understanding the whole dictionary of terms and how every country thinks about these concepts differently.”

The coming years could test the course’s impact as the US strives to protect its Eastern European partners from Russia, its East Asian partners from China and North Korea, and its Middle Eastern partners from Iran, as well as to counter Chinese tech supremacy and neutralize Russia’s and China’s digital authoritarianism.

Perhaps the biggest question facing the program is whether it will survive a possible change in administrations this fall. Officials are optimistic—Fick has talked to his Trump-era counterparts, and Painter says “having an FSI course gives it a sense of permanence.”

For Fick, there is no question that the training must continue.

“Tech is interwoven into every aspect of … American foreign policy,” he says. “If you want to position yourself to be effective and be relevant as an American diplomat in the decades ahead, you need to understand these issues.”