Google and Mozilla each announced this week that their Web browsers will be dropping default support for Adobe Flash, citing the plug-in software’s newly discovered vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. These moves came only a few days after Facebook’s chief of security called for Adobe to set an “end of life” date for the oft-exploited 20-year-old platform.
Even if you don’t exactly know what Adobe Flash is, this is important news. Whether you know it or not, odds are pretty high that Adobe Flash is on your computer right now, possibly putting your system and your personal information at risk.
Don’t panic. Take a deep breath and read our Adobe Flash security threat guide. We’ll help you figure out why it might be best to banish Flash from your life, just like Google, Mozilla, and Facebook want you to do. And we’ll tell you how to go about doing exactly that.
So what is Flash, exactly?
Adobe Flash is a software platform that runs video, animation, and games inside of Web pages. Flash was born at the dawn of the Web in 1996 and quickly became the standard for Web video, especially after a little startup called YouTube began using it in 2005. But now it’s largely obsolete, as most Web sites and apps use different technologies for the same purpose.
Why is Flash a problem?
The very thing that made Flash so popular — its ability to run complex scripts from websites you visit — can also be used for malicious purposes.
Computer scripts written in Flash can directly access the memory on your computer, which is just inviting attacks, or “exploits,” says Chase Cunningham, a cyberthreat expert at security company FireHost. “Anytime a site is able to access your computer’s memory, it’s able to make changes on the local machine itself [your PC]. That’s when you run into exploits.”
Flash has long been one of the biggest attack methods of choice for cybercrooks and spying governments, as security vulnerabilities turn up on an almost daily basis. Just this month, Adobe put out security alerts and fixes for 38 vulnerabilities in Flash Player. Last week, it came out that a company called Hacking Team had been using previously unknown flaws in Flash to create spyware that it sold to oppressive governments in countries such as Sudan and Saudi Arabia.
Flash also uses up a lot of computing resources and can bog systems down. “We … know firsthand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash,” wrote Steve Jobs in an Apple blog post from April 2010.
Do I have Flash on my computer?
You probably do — especially if you are using a Windows PC, rely on an older browser, or were prompted by a Web site to install it.
In October 2010, Apple announced that it would no longer install Flash Player on its computers — including its Safari Web browser — although users could install it on their own if they wanted to.
(BBC)
The latest version of Mozilla Firefox launched with a block for Flash Player (though after an update Tuesday by Adobe, Mozilla has re-enabled use of the plugin in its browser). Google’s Chrome browser comes with Flash, but it is disabled by default.
However, you may have installed or enabled Flash Player if a website prompted you to. “I would say probably 97 to 98 percent of systems out there have some version of Flash running on them,” said Cunningham.
You can visit this page on Adobe’s website to see if the computer you’re using has Flash installed.
What about my phone?
Chances are good that Flash is not on your smartphone or tablet.
Apple completely banned Flash from its mobile devices running the iOS operating system, such as the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Apple’s rejection of Flash helped spur Web and software developers to use other technologies for delivering video or animating games.
Google’s Android mobile software briefly supported Flash, but it was generally choppy and used up more battery than other formats. In 2012, Adobe dropped support for Android, and Flash has been absent since Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), which came out that same year. (Adobe also dropped support for BlackBerry and Windows Phone.) If you have an iPhone, or any other smartphone bought in the past couple of years, you don’t have Flash.
Don’t I need it on my computer?
Generally not. Most websites have switched over to another video format, called HTML 5. It’s the default on both YouTube and Vimeo, for example. So unless you know you need Flash for a specific site, it’s best to uninstall it or block it.
For Firefox, type “about:addons” into the browser’s address bar, click Plugins on the left side of the page, scroll down to Shockwave Flash, then click the dropdown menu on the right and select Never Activate. With Firefox, you can also install a Web browser extension calledNoScript, which blocks not only Flash but also other scripts that attackers can exploit, such as JavaScript.
Once Flash is gone, will older videos still play on my computer?
If a website requires Flash to display videos or animation, you will need to install Flash to watch it. There’s no way around that.
It’s typical for Flash-based sites to display alerts when they detect that Flash is not installed. If you see this — and you absolutely must view that video — we recommend downloading and installing Flash directly from Adobe.com, as fake installation popups that lead to spyware are an age-old trick employed by untrustworthy websites.
Amazon’s Echo Brings the ‘Star Trek’ Computer to Your Home
David Pogue chats with the Amazon Echo and puts its features to the test.
How often does a truly new electronics category come along? The first television. The Walkman. The iPhone. The iPad. Each time, the industry spends years making copycats and refinements, but the original concept doesn’t change much.
Frankly, Amazon is the last company I would have expected to come up with the next completely new idea. I mean, its hardware ventures so far have been very much in the Us Too department. E-book readers, touchscreen phones, tablets — we’d seen all that before.
But not the Amazon Echo, which just became available for sale to the public (following an invitation-only, testing-the-waters release last November). Somehow, nobody’s thought of this before.
The big idea: Create a voice-activated smartphone assistant like Siri or Google Now — but take it off the phone. Make it a smart, always-listening machine in your house. Engineer it to understand you from across the room, hands free, as you’re cooking, reading, doing homework, discussing, living. Make it good enough to be just like the conversational, environmental computers on Star Trek or in the Iron Man movies.
That’s what the Amazon Echo attempts to be. And you know what? I’ve never been so excited about something that did so little.
Meet the Echo
If you wanted to make a conversational computer for the home, what should it look like? Because Amazon was creating the first one of something, there was no existing design model, no accepted size or shape.
So Amazon went with a nine-inch-tall, sleek black metal cylinder. And why not? It works. It fades into the clutter of your house, along with whatever else is on your bookcase or shelving unit or kitchen counter, just as it should.
The bottom part is perforated, hinting at the speakers inside. The top disc rotates — it’s a giant volume knob — and lights up in various cool LED colors and patterns to telegraph what the thing is doing. On the very top is a power button and a mute button that means both “stop speaking” and “stop listening.”
The Echo is indeed listening all the time to the conversation in your home, but it doesn’t pay attention until you say, “Alexa.” (You can change the attention word to “Amazon,” but that’s your only option. It would be so much more fun if you could make it any name you liked — say, “Hal,” “Jarvis,” or “Skynet.” But you can’t do that. Yet, anyway.)
Why is the product called Amazon Echo, but its starter name is Alexa?
Anyway, once you say “Alexa,” the Echo is just like Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. You ask things in conversational English, and it answers in a clear, fluid, natural-sounding woman’s voice. Actually, Alexa sounds much better than Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. In part, that’s because she’s being projected by a 2.5-inch woofer and a 2.0-inch tweeter instead of a phone speaker the size of a fingernail clipping.
The most amazing engineering achievement is the Echo’s ability to understand commands in terrible acoustic conditions. It understands you whether you’re close to it or a whole room away. It understands every member of the family without training. It understands you when there’s background noise. It even understands you over the musicit’s playing.
Above all, it understands you despite the natural echoes and reverberations of a room. Amazon says that’s because it has an array of seven microphones on top. Apparently, even though they’re just inches apart, they can measure the relatively delayed arrivals of incoming sound waves from your voice, and thereby cancel out any echo.
Now, the Echo doesn’t understand you every time. If you ask something beyond its limited circle of commands, you get either a beep or a “Sorry, I can’t find the answer to the question I heard”-type message. And sometimes it mis-hears you completely. (That situation crops up most often when you’re ordering a certain song or band to play.)
But considering the fact that your voice commands have to be transmitted to the mother ship (Amazon’s computers) and back across the Internet, the accuracy and speed of Echo’s responses are really impressive.
Oh, that’s right: Your recorded commands are collected for study by Amazon, for the purposes of improving Echo’s recognition skills. Amazon says that these recordings are not anonymous, and they’re not deleted unless you delete them. You can delete these recordings yourself, either one at a time or all at once (but that “may degrade your experience using Amazon Echo”).
In short, the easily spooked should not buy an Amazon Echo.
What Can I Say?
At 6 months old, the Echo isn’t nearly as capable as, say, Siri; it doesn’t recognize as many commands or do as many things.
But Amazon promises that the Echo’s talents will rapidly expand. And indeed, the number of requests the device can handle has already doubled since its early adopter beginnings six months ago.
Here’s what the Echo responds to, in order of usefulness:
“Alexa, play Billy Joel.” Music is the killer app. You walk into the kitchen and ask for virtually any band, song, album, genre, or even activity (“play some cooking music”) — and the music just starts. It’s as close as you’re going to get to owning the Star Trek computer.
This feature works best if you’re an Amazon Prime member ($100 a year), because it gives you instant access to a million songs, plus thousands of playlists created by your fellow members.
If you’re not a Prime member (or even if you are), you can also request any of the personalized radio stations you’ve created on a Pandora or iHeartRadio account (free or paid). “Play my Coldplay channel from Pandora,” you can say. Here’s what else you can say.
You can also upload 250 of your own song files to Amazon, to play upon vocal command.
Spotify and Apple Music are more limited; they’re not integrated with the Echo (yet, says Amazon). For services like these, you’re supposed to use the Echo as a glorified wireless Bluetooth speaker for your phone.
You start by saying, “Alexa, connect my phone,” which starts directing playback to the Echo instead of your phone’s speaker. Then you open the music app (Spotify or whatever) on your phone. From here, you can command playback by voice, without needing your phone: “Play,” “Next,” “Previous,” “Resume,” “Softer,” Louder,” and so on.
When music plays, you can adjust the volume by voice, buy the song by voice, or say “Alexa, thumbs up” to “like” the song (for Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Prime Music).
“Alexa, play WCBS.” You can also request any radio station in the country, just by asking for it. That’s a feature of TuneIn.com, which is built right into the Echo and doesn’t require an account or setup. It’s the best.
“Alexa, what’s the news?” Alexa instantly begins playing NPR’s latest headline summary. Using the Echo app on your phone, you can also turn on the option to request the news from the BBC, ESPN, the Economist, or TMZ.
“Alexa, how’s the traffic?” Once you’ve entered your home and work addresses in the phone app, Alexa can tell you exactly how many minutes your commute will be if you leave now.
“Alexa, what’s the weather in Dallas this weekend?” As you’d expect.
“Alexa, read ‘The Casual Vacancy.’” If you’ve bought an audio book from Audible, the Echo begins playing your most recent book. It picks up where you stopped before, even if you were listening to it on a different device.
“Alexa, wake me up at 7:20 a.m.” The Echo is rock-solid on alarms and timers. (If Echo is in the kitchen, you’ll use “Set a timer for 20 minutes” a lot. One night, my wife, with no idea if it would work, said, “Alexa, how much time is left on my timer?” — and bingo, Alexa answered. It was awesome.)
“Alexa, how far is it from Chicago to Tampa?” Alexa is really good at facts. She’ll convert units for you, give you historical or geographical facts, calculate the days of the week for dates, fill you in on movie and music trivia, and on and on. Same kind of thing Siri, Cortana, and Google Now do. Here are a few examples.
She knows sports scores and schedules, too. (“When do the Giants play next?”)
“Alexa: Wikipedia ‘The Rolling Stones.’” This command reads the first couple of lines from the corresponding Wikipedia entry.
“Alexa, put nutmeg on my shopping list.” Alexa doesn’t buy anything without your confirmation. But she will put things onto a shopping list that’s maintained in the Echo app on your phone. Same thing with To Do items: “Put ‘Paint the living room’ on my To Do list.”
“Alexa, reorder cat food.” You can buy stuff by voice — if you’ve previously bought them from Amazon. Alexa describes, aloud, any matching item from your order history, tells you price, and asks if you want to go ahead and order it. For things you order often, it’s pretty cool. (If you make a mistake, you can return the stuff for free. And if you have mischievous teenagers in the house, you can also disable this feature, or require a spoken password.)
“Alexa, how do you spell fluorescent?” She’s a great dictionary. She’ll also define any word for you.
“Alexa, turn off the living-room lights.” In one of Amazon’s recent feature updates, the Echo gained the ability to control home-automation gear from Wink, Belkin, and Philips (that is, the Philips Hue light bulbs). Here’s the complete list of compatible gear.
Once you’ve set all this up, you can use your voice to control lights, light switches, and — here’s the limitless part — power outlets. I tried it with a couple of Belkin WeMo Internet-controllable outlets, and it was wild.
“Alexa, when’s my next appointment?” You can ask various things about your Google calendar, once you’ve told the Echo app your Google account details. You cannot, however, create, delete, or move appointments by voice, as you can with Siri; you can only look things up. (“What’s on my calendar for Tuesday?”)
“Alexa, tell me a joke” quickly became a favorite command in our household of kids. She’s always good for a short, painful pun or two (“Why don’t bicycles wake up early? They’re two-tired”), but now and then she gets the adults laughing. (“How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.”)
Alexa’s Personality
Amazon has put a lot of work into giving Alexa witty responses to silly questions, just like Siri or Cortana — especially when you feed her movie quotes. For example:
You say: “Beam me up.” (She says: “At warp speed, Captain? The engines will never take it!”)
“Which came first: The chicken or the egg?” (”The chicken. Or the egg. No, the chicken. I’m not sure.”)
“Do you want to take over the world?” (”I don’t want to take over the world; I just want to help you.”)
“Earl grey tea. Hot.” (”Unable to comply. Replicators are offline.”)
“How much is that doggie in the window?” (”That one’s not for sale. But the one with the fluffy tail is really nice, too.”)
“I am your father.” (”No! No, no, no!”)
“All your base are belong to us.” (”You have no chance to survive. Make your time.”)
“I want the truth.” (“You can’t handle the truth!”)
“Inconceivable!” (”You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.”)
“Is Santa Claus real?” (”I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard a lot of good things…”)
“Klaatu barada nikto.” (“Well remembered! Unfortunately, I’m not Gort, and I have no powers of resurrection.”)
“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” (”A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”)
“What is your favorite color?” (”Infrared is superpretty.”)
“Knock-knock.” (She tells a knock-knock joke.)
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” (”More fair by far are you than all…” etc.)
“Party on, Wayne.” (”Party on, Garth.”)
“Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” (”Deny thy father and refuse thy name; / Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet!”)
“What do you think about Siri?” (”Siri’s a great app, but I’m different.”)
“What does the fox say?” (”Waa, was, way do.”)
“What is your quest?” (”To seek the Holy Grail.”)
“Who’s your daddy?” (”A team of inventors at Amazon.com.”)
“Open the pod bay doors.” (“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’m not Hal, and you’re not in space.”)
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” (”I want to be the computer from Star Trek!”)
The App and the Remote
You don’t have to spend much time in the companion Echo app (for iPhone, Android, or Fire OS). But it serves as the only screen the Echo’s got. Here’s where you see your To Do and Shopping lists, for example. It’s where you set up your music-service accounts, specify which news services you want on call, get help, see manual music playback and volume controls, and take the voice-training exercise. (This asks you to read 25 typical Echo commands. It’s supposed to improve accuracy, but it’s optional.)
The app also keeps written and audio records of your voice commands — and lets you indicate which ones didn’t work, for the benefit of Amazon’s engineers.
For another 30 bucks you can get a remote control. It offers music-playback and volume controls, plus three key benefits:
You can command the Echo quietly, by speaking into its microphone.
You don’t have to say “Alexa” before every command (just press the microphone button and talk).
*You can make the Echo say anything you want. Hold down the microphone button, say “Simon says…” and then say what you want Alexa to say in her own voice. (That’s how I got the Echo to say the goofy things in my video above.) Great for pranks.
Where Echo should go from here
Amazon still has plenty of work to do on the Echo.
You should be able to add appointments to your calendar. Make restaurant reservations. Look up movie schedules. Make phone calls (why isn’t it a speakerphone?). Send and read text messages. Add notes to your Notes app. Check stock prices. Post to Facebook or Twitter.
The To Do and Shopping List features should integrate with the ones you’ve already got on your iPhone or Android phone, rather than being confined to the Echo app.
Some people complain that Echo has no batteries, so it’s not really mobile, although that seems beside the point; it’s meant to become part of your home environment.
The price
If Echo were $500 or even $300, well, no: It would just be a gimmick.
But the price is $180, which is about what you’d pay for a similarly sized Bluetooth wireless speaker. You get the whole voice-assistant thing for nothing.
I know, I know: “But my phone does the same thing.” No, it really doesn’t.
Most smartphones can take commands like “OK, Google, what’s 17 times 12?” or “Siri, what’s the weather?” (Siri responds hands-free only if your iPhone is plugged into power.) But the details make the difference. The Echo doesn’t require your hands. Doesn’t require you to be close. Doesn’t have to come out of your pocket — or require you to hunt around the house for it. Doesn’t require you to be you(anyone’s voice works). Doesn’t sound tiny and tinny.
I’m telling you, a voice assistant is a totally different concept once it’s untethered from your phone and always available. It grows on you. As you experiment and live with Echo, you master its vocabulary and begin using it more.
You should give Amazon a huge mental high-five for a) having the imagination to create a whole new product category and b) being able to actually pull it off.
And you should keep the Echo in mind — maybe to get for yourself, maybe at holiday gift-giving time, or maybe just to keep your eye on. I’m telling you, it’s going to be a thing.
David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes nontoxic comments in the Comments below.
One of the earliest major setbacks in the war against ISIS came last June when the U.S.-backed Iraqi army was routed by Islamic militants in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. Government forces retreated from the Islamic jihadists’ assault. They left behind a trove of costly military hardware, including U.S.-made armored Humvees, trucks, rockets, machine guns and even a helicopter.
Last weekend, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, gave Iraqi state television the first detailed accounting of those lost weapons. Some were old or barely functioning, but others were in good shape and of great value to the ISIS militants.
According to Reuters, the U.S.-made weaponry that fell into enemy hands including 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems, plus small arms and ammunition.
Although al-Abadi and other Iraqi and U.S. officials haven’t attached a dollar sign to the lost weaponry and vehicles, a back-of-the-envelope calculation of those losses might look something like this:
2,300 Humvee armored vehicles @ $70,000 per copy. Total: $16 million
40 M1A1 Abram tanks @ $4.3 million per copy. Total: $172 million
52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems @ $527,337 per copy. Total: $2.7 million
74,000 Army machine guns @ $4,000 per copy. Total: $29 million
The grand total comes to $219.7 million, but experts say those losses represent a fraction of the many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-supplied military equipment that has fallen into ISIS’s hands and is being used against the U.S. and allied forces on the ground in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
ISIS added to its armada of captured U.S. military vehicles and tanks when Iraqi Security Forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi late last month and left behind their equipment, according to Military.com. A Pentagon spokesman said that some artillery pieces had been left behind, but he could not say exactly how many. He said about 100 wheeled vehicles and dozens of tracked vehicles were lost to ISIS when the last remaining Iraqi defenders abandoned the city, which is 60 miles west of Baghdad.
With hundreds of millions of dollars that they stole from banks and businesses, and profits from the black market sale of oil, ISIS has amassed a huge arsenal of weaponry, including heavy armored vehicles and artillery during its two-year offensive in Syria and Iraq. According to the International Business Times, the armaments “are predominantly a mix of veteran Soviet tanks, large, advanced U.S.-made systems, and black market arms.”
James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, warned last year that ISIS had assembled an extraordinarily formidable fighting force that would be difficult to take down. ““The problem [for the U.S. and its allies] is that ISIS is armed as well if not better than the other people they are fighting right now,” he said at the time.
Add to that the many hundreds of U.S.-manufactured weapons and vehicles left behind by Iraqi troops on the battle field, and ISIS apparently doesn’t have to worry about running short on weapons and ammunition
Gordon Adams, a military expert at American University, said on Wednesday that while gauging the extent of military equipment losses to ISIS is a risky game, “There is a fair amount of evidence that ISIS is walking off with not only tons of our equipment but a fair amount of the Syrian government’s equipment as well.”
Whatever the numbers, Adams added, it’s an unusual and troubling phenomenon that “we’re helping to arm our enemy.”
Others offer varying guestimates of the extent of the losses of U.S.-made military equipment and weapons to ISIS. “If you say they have captured the equivalent of at least three to four [Iraqi Army] divisions’ worth of equipment, much of it American-supplied, you would be very safe,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
While President Obama has vowed to “degrade and eventually destroy” the ISIS forces, recent setbacks in Ramadi and elsewhere have signaled that the war is not going well for the United States and its nearly two-dozen allies. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently publicly berated Iraqi troops for lacking the “will to fight” ISIS and for retreating from a showdown in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. Then last Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan offered at best a perfunctory defense of the president’s air-strike strategy on CBS’s Face the Nation.
In order to help replenish Iraq’s depleted military arms and equipment, the State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers, according to Peter Van Buren of Reuters. The U.S. previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers to Iraq, as well as huge amounts of material left behind when American combat forces departed Iraq in 2011.
Moreover, the U.S. is shipping to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 55,000 rounds of tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets, according to Reuters.
Michael Knights, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an authority on the Iraq war, cautioned yesterday that too much is being made of the loss of U.S.-made military equipment to ISIS. “A lot of that equipment was not operational when it was lost,” he said in an interview. “A lot of it was burned by ISIS. A lot of it has been subsequently destroyed by the coalition, and a lot of it has been used as suicide vehicles by ISIS.”
“This is a no-kidding war,” Knights said, “and in serious wars you lose thousands of vehicles and you lose hundreds of artillery pieces, and the enemy captures it and use it against you.”
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Last Task
After Layoff at Disney: Train Foreign Replacements
ORLANDO,
Fla. — The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney
fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to
meetings with their boss.
While
families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles
in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings
nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases
and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so
well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.
Instead,
about 250 Disney employeeswere told in late Octoberthat they would be laid off. Many of their
jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled
technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India.
Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their
replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
“I
just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take
over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who
remains unemployed since hislast day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so
humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp
it.”
The
layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California
Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and
outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place
immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the
center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American
workers or displace them.
According
to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced
science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers
with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not
“adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. Because of
legal loopholes, however, in practice companies do not have to recruit American
workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.
Too
often, critics say, the visas are being used to import immigrants to do the
work of Americans for less money, with laid-off American workers having to
train their replacements.
“The
program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper
H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” said Ronil Hira, a professor of
public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs and hastestified before Congress about
H-1B visas.
A
limited number of the visas, 85,000, are granted each year, and they are in hot
demand. Technology giants like Microsoft, Facebook and Google repeatedly press
for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with
the skills they need.
Many
American companies use H-1B visas to bring in small numbers of foreigners for
openings demanding specialized skills, according to official reports. But for
years most top recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting
firms based in India, or their American subsidiaries, which import workers for
large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units — and to cut
costs. The immigrants are employees of the outsourcing companies.
In
2013, those firms — including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and HCL
America, the company hired by Disney — were six of the top 10 companies granted
H-1Bs, with each one receiving more than one thousand visas.
H-1B
immigrants work for less than American tech workers, Professor Hira said at a
hearing in March of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because of weaknesses in
wage regulations. The savings have been 25 percent to 49 percent less in recent
cases, he told lawmakers.
In
a letter in April to top federal authorities in charge of immigration, a
bipartisan group of senators called for an investigation of recent “H-1B-driven
layoffs,” saying “their frequency seems to have increased dramatically in the
past year alone.”
Last
year, Southern California Edison initiated 540 technology layoffs while hiring
two Indian outsourcing firms for much of the work. Three Americans who had lost
jobs told Senate lawmakers that many of those being laid off had to teach
immigrants to perform their functions.
In
a statement, the utility said the layoffs were “a difficult business decision,”
part of a plan “to focus on making significant, strategic changes that can
benefit our customers.” It noted that some workers hired by the outsourcing
firms were American citizens.
Fossil,
the fashion watch maker, said it would lay off more than 100 technology
employees in Texas this year, transferring the work to Infosys. The company is
planning “knowledge sharing” between the laid-off employees and about 25 new
Infosys workers, including immigrants, who will take jobs in Dallas. Fossil is
outsourcing tech services “to be more current and nimble” and “reduce costs
when possible,” it said in a statement.
Among
350 tech workers laid off in 2013 after a merger at Northeast Utilities, an
East Coast power company, many had trained H-1B immigrants to do their jobs,
several of those workers reported confidentially to lawmakers. They said that
as part of their severance packages, they had to sign agreements not to
criticize the company publicly.
In
Orlando, Disney executives said the layoffs were part of a reorganization of
technology operations to focus on producing more innovations. They said the
company opened more positions than it eliminated, with a net gain of 70 tech
jobs.
“Disney
has created almost 30,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the past decade,” said Kim
Prunty, a Disney spokeswoman, adding that the company expected its contractors
to comply with all immigration laws.
The
tech workers laid off were a tiny fraction of Disney’s “cast members,” as the
entertainment conglomerate calls its theme park workers, who number 74,000 in
the Orlando area. Employees who lost jobs were allowed a three-month transition
with résumé coaching to help them seek other positions in the company, Disney
executives said. Of those laid off, 120 took new jobs at Disney, and about 40
retired, while about 90 did not find new Disney jobs, executives said.
Living
in a company town, former Disney workers were reluctant to be identified,
saying they feared they could jeopardize their chances of finding new jobs with
the few other local tech employers. Several workers agreed to interviews, but
only on the condition of anonymity.
They
said only a handful of those laid off were moved directly by Disney to other
company jobs. The rest were left to compete for positions through Disney job
websites. Despite the company’s figures, few people they knew had been hired,
they said, and then often at a lower pay level. No one was offered retraining,
they said.
One
former worker, a 57-year-old man with more than 10 years at Disney, displayed a
list of 18 jobs within the company he had applied for. He had not had more than
an initial conversation on any one, he said.
Disney
“made the difficult decision to eliminate certain positions, including yours”
as a result of “the transition of your work to a managed service provider,”
said a contract presented to employees on the day the layoffs were announced.
It offered a “stay bonus” of 10 percent of severance pay if they remained for
90 days. But the bonus was contingent on “the continued satisfactory
performance of your job duties.” For many, that involved training a
replacement. Young immigrants from India took the seats at their computer
stations.
“The
first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who
worked 10 years in his Disney job. “The next 30 days they worked side by side
with me, and the last 30 days they took over my job completely.” To receive his
severance bonus, he said, “I had to make sure they were doing my job correctly.”
In
late November, this former employee received his annual performance review,
which he provided to The New York Times. His supervisor, who was not aware the
man was scheduled for layoff, wrote that because of his superior skills and
“outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars. The
supervisor added that he was looking forward to another highly productive year
of having the employee on the team.
The
employee got a raise. His severance pay had to be recalculated to include it.
The
former Disney employee who is 57 worked in project management and software
development. His résumé lists a top-level skill certification and command of
seven operating systems, 15 program languages and more than two dozen other
applications and media.
“I
was forced into early retirement,” he said. The timing was “horrible,” he said,
because his wife recently had a medical emergency with expensive bills. Shut
out of Disney, he is looking for a new job elsewhere.
Former
employees said many immigrants who arrived were younger technicians with
limited data skills who did not speak English fluently and had to be instructed
in the basics of the work.
HCL
America, a branch of a global company based in Noida, India, won a contract
with Disney in 2012. In a statement, the company said details of the agreement
were confidential. “As a company, we work very closely with the U.S. Department
of Labor and strictly adhere to all visa guidelines and requirements to be
complied with.”
The
chairman of the Walt Disney Company, Robert A. Iger, is co-chairman with
Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Rupert Murdoch, the
executive chairman of News Corporation, in thePartnership
for a New American Economy, which pushes for an overhaul of
immigration laws, including an increase in H-1B visas.
But
Disney directly employs fewer than 10 H-1B workers, executives said, and has
not been prominent in visa lobbying. Mr. Iger supports the partnership’s
broader goals, including increased border security and a pathway to legal
status for immigrants here illegally, officials of the organization said.
