Category: Tech news

Getting an H-1B skilled-worker visa is like winning the lottery — literally: With the number of new visas issued each year capped at 85,000, most of this year’s over 200,000 applicants face disappointment. But if you’re already working in the United States, then you’ve already won the H-1B lottery, and that makes you a hot commodity.

With H-1Bs in short supply, successful companies frequently poach skilled workers. Everyone knows the tech sector thrives on this free exchange of people and ideas, so if another employer needs your skills, why not start working for them?

Well, not so fast. H-1B holders can work only for the company that originally sponsored their visa application. So if you want to change employers, you’ll need to “transfer” your H-1B.

That process used to be relatively straightforward but not in the Trump era. (Boundless recently underwent this process with an employee, so we understand the pain.) The denial rate for initial H-1B applications spiked over five-fold to 32 percent just in the first quarter of fiscal 2019, up from 6 percent in 2015. Crucially, the Trump administration is targeting “continuing” H-1B applications used by existing employees to either renew their H-1B or switch it to a new employer. Even tech giants like Amazon are now seeing double-digit rejection rates.

The bottom line: The days of getting an H-1B transfer quickly rubber-stamped are long gone, and that makes it vital to do whatever you can to keep the odds in your favor. The stakes are high — if things go south, you could lose your right to live and work in the United States. Here’s what H-1B holders need to know about the right — and wrong — ways to set about switching employers:

Don’t take your transfer for granted.

First, understand that an H-1B “transfer” is actually a brand new visa application, not a simple handover of your existing H-1B visa from one employer to another — there’s no such thing.

HBO’s horror-comedy speaks to viewers in a whole new way.

You weren’t going to try to buy a place on TechCrunch for $20. You, dear reader, are smarter than that. But that doesn’t make it any less concerning when a reader emails you in the middle of the night to let you know that someone’s posing as you on Fiverr, name, biography, picture and all.

Heck, it barely even bothered me that the U.K.-based individual was charging a mere $20 for “basic” TechCrunch writing, versus $30 for “standard” Forbes and $50 for “premium” New York Times. Okay, that one stung a little.

I’ve heard stories of individuals targeting colleagues for access to people and companies or review units, but this particular approach was a relatively new one for me. The listing stated that “I will publish your articles on TechCrunch and other high profile websites,” adding that I both write for a number of high-profile sites and have connections at others and, as such, “am ready to help as many people as I can with this platform.”

I scrambled to find the customer service info. The process was a bit convoluted, but I ultimately found the form and fired off an email. Fiverr’s robot sent a message informing me that, “due to excessive demand, a reply may take longer than one business day. Please accept our apologies in advance for any reply that exceeds this time frame, but be assured we are working hard to get back to you as quickly as possible to provide a considerate response.”

One wonders whether such delays are the result of limited staffing or excessive takedown requests. Probably some combination of the two. I ultimately reached out to someone at Fiverr directly both in hopes of expediting the removal process and getting some insight into how easy it was to pretend to be someone for money.

“Obviously the integrity of our marketplace is something we take very seriously as authenticity is a cornerstone of the Fiverr community,” a rep for the company told me. “Any Fiverr profile page and gig created with the intent to mislead is against our Terms of Service. Therefore in order to ensure a safe and reliable customer experience, we are implementing ID-verification protocols across the marketplace which is successfully routing out instances like this.”

The whole thing went down a few weeks back, but upon hearing the news of the company IPOing, I did another search to see if there were any more users claiming to be a direct conduit to these hallowed pages. I only feel slightly better for the fact that whoever is claiming to get stories on Forbes and TechCrunch is charging a slightly more premium $50 per.

I reached out again to get more information on the ID verification feature. More info can obtained be here, though not specifics on when the feature is implemented. In the meantime, I took it upon myself to offer up Anthony Ha’s Stanford-honed writing skills for $5 an article. Creating the account (I’ve since deactivated) was simple enough using my email and phone number. In fact, the only bit that took any time was the 40-question test required to offer up one’s services as a writer.

Hopefully the newly public company will use some additional resources to further discourage bad actors such as myself from dragging Anthony’s good name into the gig economy for $5 a pop.

Rep. Will Hurd will no longer give the keynote address at the Black Hat security conference amid questions about his voting record on women’s rights.

Hurd, a Texas Republican congressman, was scheduled to headline the conference later this year, but the organizers decided to walk back the decision a day later.

“Black Hat has chosen to remove U.S. Representative Will Hurd as our 2019 Black Hat USA Keynote. We misjudged the separation of technology and politics,” said a statement. “We will continue to focus on technology and research, however we recognize that Black Hat USA is not the appropriate platform for the polarizing political debate resulting from our choice of speaker.”

“We are still fully dedicated to providing an inclusive environment and apologize that this decision did not reflect that sentiment,” the statement added.

A new keynote speaker has not yet been announced.

Hurd’s communications director Katie Thompson said the congressman was “honored” to be invited.

“Congressman Hurd has always sought to engage groups of people that don’t necessarily agree with all of his votes or opinions,” she said. “That’s why Rep. Hurd is one of the loudest voices for bipartisanship in Congress. This Congress alone he voted for equal pay for equal work, for the Violence Against Women Act and the Equality Act. Not to mention Congressman Hurd would have brought the prospective [sic] of a person of color and someone who served our nation abroad.”

We reported yesterday that some in the security community felt uncomfortable and described their unease with the decision to appoint Hurd as keynote speaker. Hurd has consistently voted against legislation supporting women’s rights, including efforts to financially support women in STEM fields, but also voting in favor of allowing states to restrict access and coverage to abortions and defunding access to women’s health organizations like Planned Parenthood.

Critics said the move alienated women at a time where diversity in security remains a challenge. Others criticized the choice of speaker on his views, calling access to women’s healthcare a human right.

Several long-time Black Hat attendees said on Twitter that they would not attend the conference following news of Hurd’s keynote.

Updated with remarks from Hurd’s communications director. 

Elizabeth Warren, who earlier this year confirmed her intent to run for president in 2020, has an ambitious plan to advance entrepreneurs of color.

In a series of tweets published this morning, the Massachusetts senator proposed a $7 billion Small Business Equity Fund to provide grants to Black, Latinx, Native American and other minority entrepreneurs, if she’s elected president. The initiative will be covered by her “Ultra-Millionaire Tax,” a two-cent tax on every dollar of wealth above $50 million the presidential hopeful first outlined in January.

The fund would be managed by the Department of Economic Development, a new government entity to be constructed under the Warren administration. With a goal of creating and defending American jobs, the Department of Economic Development would replace the Commerce Department and “subsume other agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office, and include research and development programs, worker training programs, and export and trade authorities like the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative,” Warren explained.

The Small Business Equity Fund will exclusively issue grant funding to entrepreneurs eligible to apply for the Small Business Administration’s existing 8(a) program and who have less than $100,000 in household wealth, aiming to provide capital to 100,000 new minority-owned businesses, creating 1.1 million new jobs.

Founders of color receive a disproportionate amount of venture capital funding. There’s insufficient data on the topic, but research from digitalundivided published last year suggests the median amount of funding raised by black women, for example, is $0. According to the same study, black women have raised just .0006% of all tech venture funding since 2009.

Startups founded by all-female teams, despite efforts to level the playing field for female entrepreneurs, raised just 2.2% of venture capital investment in 2018.

VCs are a majority white and male. Plus, they have a proven tendency to invest their capital into entrepreneurs who look like them or who resemble founders that were previously successful. In other words, VCs are continuously on the hunt for the next Mark Zuckerberg .

“Even if we fully close the startup capital gap, deep systemic issues will continue to tilt the playing field,” Warren wrote. “86% of venture capitalists are white, and studies show that investors are more likely to partner with entrepreneurs who look like them. This tilts the field against entrepreneurs of color. So I plan to address this disparity head on too. I will require states and cities administering my new Fund to work with diverse investment managers—putting $7 billion in the hands of minority-and women-owned managers.”

Freelance marketplace Fiverr has become closely associated with the gig economy, but Micha Kaufman argued that not all gig economy companies are created equal.

I spoke to Kaufman yesterday afternoon, after Fiverr debuted on the New York Stock Exchange and spent the day climbing to 90% above the IPO price.

As we talked about Fiverr’s community of freelancers, I brought up the driver strikes before Uber’s IPO and wondered how Kaufman can ensure freelancers can benefit from the company’s success. In response, he pointed out that Fiverr sellers are often highly skilled, and they determine the terms of the job and of payment.

“That is very different than [some of the] other platforms called gig economy,” he said.

He added that this structure means a freelance designer in (say) San Francisco doesn’t have to worry as much about about matching the prices of someone across the world, who has much lower costs and can charge less.

Fiverr at the NYSE

“I think that if you have a market that pushes for bidding, then definitely, yes, there’s a downward pressure,” he said. “In a market where freelancers get to define their own scope, timing and price, you see the opposite trend. What we’re seeing is freelancers all around the world making more and more money very year. It’s a counterintuitive, or countercyclical rather, race to the top.”

To get a little more specific about that: While the company’s S-1 filing doesn’t discuss the income of individual sellers, it says the total value of all transactions on the platform increased from $213 million in 2017 to $293.5 million in 2018, and that it had 255,000 active sellers at end of the first quarter of 2019.

The S-1 also reported that the company saw a net loss of $36.1 million on revenue of $75.5 million in 2018, but Kaufman noted that the losses — as measured in negative EBITDA — are shrinking: “We are on the path to profitability. That’s the balance we’re trying to keep — focusing on growth while building a business that would be profitable in the long term.”

And he suggested that one of the things that impressed Wall Street investors was the fact that Fiverr operates less like a traditional hiring site and is “much more similar to traditional e-commerce businesses like Etsy and Amazon,” where you can browse and purchase the services you need.

As for how going public changes the company, Kaufman said it means he has “a larger constituency to report to now.” But beyond that, he said, “I don’t think that that’s going to change the culture of the business or our focus. What we’re trying to create is this everything store for digital services.”

Kaufman suggested there’s room for geographic expansion, particularly in non-English-speaking countries, and to add new categories of work. More broadly, he said he wants to change the fact that the vast majority of freelancers still get hired via offline channels.

“The average time to order a service on Fiverr is 15 minutes,” he said. “Why would you spend a minute more doing it any other way?”

Gabe Grunewald wanted to help scientists working to fight the rare cancers that strike so many of us. She died on Tuesday, at the age of 32.

The average distance of PGA drives has been rising steadily due to changes in equipment and training. But it’s still almost impossible to hit 450 yards.

The number of female protagonists in games showcased at E3 has remained low for years.

If you’re still in the dark about the latest advancement in videogame graphics, we’re here to show you the light.

Emotional videos, often paid for by clinics, are attracting desperate patients to unproven stem-cell treatments that can be dangerous—or even deadly.

California is built to burn—explosively. Given we can’t depopulate the entire state, what has made the wildfire problem so bad, and how do we fix it?

Cursed images, a meme genre that began on Tumblr, don’t just titillate us in an ew-lol way. They also bind us together.

E3 2019 was packed with gaming news, new game preorders, and quite a few killer console and PC deals. These are our favorites.

The same hackers behind a potentially lethal 2017 oil refinery cyberattack are now sniffing at US electrical utility targets.