Dell ends hybrid work policy despite remote work pledge

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image via theregister.com

Dell justified the policy change by asserting a thirty-second in-person conversation can replace an email discussion that goes on for hours or days and by noting that specific groups within the company – sales, manufacturing, and engineering – have already adjusted to being in the office five days per week. Many companies, such as Amazon, have trimmed back or ended remote work arrangements over the past year. These return to office (RTO) mandates, however, have failed to improve corporate financial performance, according to a study last year by University of Pittsburgh business school associate professor Mark Ma and Yuye Ding, a doctoral student.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/31/dell_ends_hybrid_work_policy/?td=rt-3a

Foursquare to close, but Swarm game lives on

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image via theregister.com

Instead, the company has announced that in mid-December, it will sunset the City Guide. However, although the Foursquare app is going away, the company is opening its Places database to the world. Django co-creator Simon Willison has already investigated the database and has some info on how it's hosted and how to access it.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/27/foursquare_to_close/

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

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image via theregister.com

A study has found that projects adopting Agile practices are 268 percent more likely to fail than those that do not. Even though the research commissioned by consultancy Engprax could be seen as a thinly veiled plug for Impact Engineering methodology, it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it's cracked up to be.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/

Google pays Apple $18B+ a year to keep its search in iPhone

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image via theregister.com

"We believe there is a possibility that federal courts rule against Google and force it to terminate its search deal with Apple," said Bernstein in the report sent to The Register. "We estimate that the ISA is worth $18B-20B in annual payments from Google to Apple, accounting for 14-16 percent of Apple's annual operating profits."

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/10/google_pays_apple_18_20_claims_bernstein/?td=rt-3a

WordPress plugin flaw puts ‘millions of websites’ at risk

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image via theregister.com

WordPress users with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on their website should upgrade after the discovery of a vulnerability in the code that could open up sites and their visitors to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Essentially, it allows someone to run JavaScript within another person's view of a page, allowing the attacker to do things like steal information from the page, perform actions as the user, and so on. That's a big problem if the visitor is a logged-in administrative user, as their account could be hijacked to take over the website.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/08/wordpress_plugin_vulnerability/?td=rt-3a