Archive for February 3, 2023

TELUS ranks highest among North American telecoms on Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 3, 2023 by itnerd

TELUS has been recognized by Corporate Knights in its Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations as the top North American telecommunications company, ranking 37th overall for its global leadership and commitment to building a better, more sustainable future. This improved placement is an increase from 49th in 2022 and 54th in 2021, recognizing TELUS’ ongoing commitment to make sustainability a core part of its business and allocating meaningful resources to reduce its carbon footprint. The Corporate Knights ranking is based on a rigorous assessment of nearly 7,000 public companies with more than US$1 billion in revenues and is one of the world’s most valued and transparent rules-based sustainability ratings. TELUS was also recently recognized on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the 22nd year in a row, leading the Canadian telecommunication industry in environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance.

TELUS’ recognition by the Corporate Knights and Dow Jones Sustainability Index follows a number of international accolades recognizing TELUS’ global leadership in sustainability, corporate citizenship, social purpose, and environmental and social reporting, including:

  • Received an A- rating from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), placing in the top 10 per cent globally
  • Being named one of Canada’s Top 100 Greenest Employers
  • Recognized as the only telecommunications company listed in the Wall Street Journal’s top 100 Most Sustainably Managed Companies in the World
  • Awarded the Terra Carta Seal for leadership on climate change energy transition
  • Recipient of several 2022 Loyalty360 Awards including the Social Impact and Corporate Social Responsibility and CSR & Social Impact Awards
  • Featured in Sustainability Magazine’s Top 100 Companies in Sustainability, ranking 8th
  • Recognized by Corporate Knights as one of 2022’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada

To learn more about TELUS’ commitment to a more sustainable future, visit telus.com/sustainability.

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BlackFog Releases Its State Of Ransomware Report For January 2023

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 3, 2023 by itnerd

BlackFog has today released the State of Ransomware Report for January 2023. BlackFog issues these reports monthly to provide insight into the varying countries, threat groups, variants and more, by tracking both publicly disclosed and unreported ransomware attacks. 

Darren Williams, CEO and Cofounder, BlackFog had this comment:

“After a record-breaking 2022, we start January with yet another record, this time the highest January on record with 32 attacks, a 22% increase over 2022. We also start 2023 with new statistics and now include unreported attacks so we can see the scope of the problem. This month we see that 478% of attacks have gone unreported, a growing trend we have seen over the past year.

We also start 2023 with education leading the way with 10 attacks, 30% of the total for the month. This continues the trend we saw in 2022 followed closely by healthcare and government with 8 and 6 attacks respectively.

January also saw some big changes in data exfiltration, which is dominated by China, representing 36% compared to Russia at 9%. As of 2022, we see that exfiltration is now the dominant technique for ransomware and was involved in 88% of all attacks in January.

Lastly, we see that LockBit continues to be the dominant variant and expect this to increase further over the coming months and was involved in 18.8% of reported attacks, but crucially 32.6% of unreported attacks. We expect to see this reflected in next month’s statistics as we see some pull-through from unreported to reported.”

The full report can be found here.

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Elon Musk Has Temporarily Locked His Twitter Account…. Here’s Why

Posted in Commentary with tags on February 3, 2023 by itnerd

Something odd is happening over at Twitter. Elon Musk has locked his twitter account. Is he hiding something. Is he sick of hearing from people that Twitter sucks since he took over?

Actually, he is testing to see if the Twitter algorithm is broken. I’ll explain why this course of action seems odd to me. But here’s the sequence of events as best as I can figure out. Twitter users have noted that since Elon took over, their Twitter feeds have changed. All sorts of random tweets people’s “For You” feeds from accounts they weren’t following or had never interacted with. Elon acknowledged the issue and said that it was an algorithm update which had been fixed. But clearly that isn’t true as Elon’s friends complained that their engagement was down due to whatever he had done.

Then something weird was discovered. Users were seeing more engagement, such as likes and retweets, when they had locked their accounts. Now locking your account essentially makes tweets private and only visible to their current followers. So there should be less engagement not more based on that. But this was confirmed by one of Elon’s right wing friends:

Elon then responded with this:

Here’s why this is odd. The fact that Elon himself is testing this makes zero sense. Even with Twitter staff being decimated by Elon’s job cuts, surely he has programmers, engineers and developers who can test this stuff out and come up with a fix of some sort? I ask because by the time a CEO is in the trenches testing something himself, something is seriously wrong with the company. Another reason why this is an odd course of action by Elon is that he is essentially using a sample size of one, himself, to test this. Correct me if I am looking at this wrong, but that seems flawed. No?

In any case, I think that this highlights what is not only wrong with social media driven by algorithms, but it also illustrates that Elon’s changes have made Twitter worse and not better.

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