The Bank of Montreal slashes thousands of jobs, the US and UK take down a Russian cyberhacking ring called Evil Corp., and TikTok admits to suppressing the reach of content created by certain users.
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The Bank of Montreal has announced that it’s cutting five per cent of its global workforce, impacting about 2,275 positions. It marks one of the most dramatic job cuts by a Canadian bank in more than 15 years, according to Bloomberg. BMO has spent $357 million on its drive to improve efficiency, mostly for severance payments. BMO has not revealed details about when or where the job cuts will occur. The news, which is trending on LinkedIn, has prompted a lot of users to comment on how the cuts came during a non-recession event, leaving the door open for even more job cuts to occur once the overdue event does come around.
Twitter is having all sorts of fun with this news – Intelligence agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom worked jointly to expose a Russian cybercrime group called – get ready for this one – Evil Corp. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of the alleged ringleader, Maksim Yakubets. A BBC reporter tweeted that as well as his alleged criminality, Yakubets is said by the US authorities to have worked for the FSB – a leading Russian intelligence organization and one of the successors to the KGB.
And lastly, trending on Reddit is the news that the social network app with more than 1 billion downloads recently admitted that it has policies that suppress the reach of content created by users who are “assumed to be vulnerable to cyberbullying.” This means people with facial disfigurement, autism, Down syndrome, and “disabled people or people with some facial problems such as birthmarks, or slight squint.” German site Netzpolitik says a recently obtained list of flagged users included people with and without disabilities and people whose bios included hashtags like #fatwoman or had rainbow flags and other LGBTQ identifiers.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing.