Technology

Itnot just inciting violence, threats and hate speech that will get Facebook to remove posts by you or your least favorite troll. Endangering someone financially, not just physically, or tricking them to earn a profit are now also strictly prohibited.

Facebook today spelled out its policy with more clarity in hopes of establishing a transparent set of rules it can point to when it enforces its policy in the future. That comes after cloudy rules led to waffling decisions and backlash as it dealt with and finally removed four Pages associated with Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The company started by repeatedly stressing that it is not a government — likely to indicate it does not have to abide by the same First Amendment rules.

&We do not, for example, allow content that could physically or financially endanger people, that intimidates people through hateful language, or that aims to profit by tricking people using Facebook,& its VP of policy Richard Allen published today.

Web searches show this is the first time Facebook has used that language regarding financial attacks. We&ve reached out for comment about exactly how new Facebook considers this policy.

This is important because it means Facebookpolicy encompasses threats of ruining someonecredit, calling for people to burglarize their homes or blocking them from employment. While not physical threats, these can do real-world damage to victims.

Similarly, the position against trickery for profit gives Facebook a wide berth to fight against spammers, scammers and shady businesses making false claims about products. The question will be how Facebook enforces this rule. Some would say most advertisements are designed to trick people in order for a business to earn a profit. Facebook is more likely to shut down obvious grifts where businesses make impossible assertions about how their products can help people, rather than just exaggerations about their quality or value.

The added clarity offered today highlights the breadth and particularity with which other platforms, notably the wishy-washy Twitter, should lay out their rules about content moderation. While there have long been fears that transparency will allow bad actors to game the system by toeing the line without going over it, the importance of social platforms to democracy necessitates that they operate with guidelines out in the open to deflect calls of biased enforcement.

Back when Dennis Woodside joined Dropbox as its chief operating officer more than four years ago, the company was trying to justify the $10 billion valuation it had hit in its rapid rise as a Web 2.0 darling. Now, Dropbox is a public company with a nearly $14 billion valuation, and it once again showed Wall Street that itable to beat expectations with a now more robust enterprise business alongside its consumer roots.

Dropboxsecond quarter results came in ahead of Wall Streetexpectations on both the earnings and revenue front. The company also announced that Dennis Woodside will be leaving the company. Woodside joined at a time when Dropbox was starting to figure out its enterprise business, which it was able to grow and transform into a strong case for Wall Street that it could finally be a successful publicly traded company. The IPO was indeed successful, with the companyshares soaring more than 40 percent in its debut, so it makes sense that Woodside has essentially accomplished his job by getting it into a business ready for Wall Street.

&I think as a team we accomplished a ton over the last four and a half years,& Woodside said in an interview. &When I joined they were a couple hundred million in revenue and a little under 500 people. [CEO] Drew [Houston] and Arash [Ferdowsi] have built a great business, since then we&ve scaled globally. Close to half our revenue is outside the U.S., we have well over 300,000 teams for our Dropbox business product, which was nascent there. These are accomplishments of the team, and I&m pretty proud.&

The stock initially exploded in extended trading by rising more than 7 percent, though even prior to the market close and the company reporting its earnings, the stock had risen as much as 10 percent. But following that spike, Dropbox shares are now down around 5 percent. Dropbox is one of a number of SaaS companies that have gone public in recent months, including DocuSign, that have seen considerable success. While Dropbox has managed to make its case with a strong enterprise business, the company was born with consumer roots and has tried to carry over that simplicity with the enterprise products it rolls out, like its collaboration tool Dropbox Paper.

Herea quick rundown of the numbers:

• Q2 Revenue: Up 27 percent year-over-year to $339.2 million, compared to estimates of $331 million in revenue.
• Q2 GAAP Gross Margin: 73.6 percent, as compared to 65.4 percent in the same period last year.
• Q2 adjusted earnings: 11 cents per share compared, compared to estimates of 7 cents per share.
• Paid users: 11.9 million paying users, up from 9.9 million in the same quarter last year.
• ARPU: $116.66, compared to $111.19 same quarter last year.

So, not only is Dropbox able to show that it can continue to grow that revenue, the actual value of its users is also going up. Thatimportant, because Dropbox has to show that it can continue to acquire higher-value customers — meaning itgradually moving up the Fortune 100 chain and getting larger and more established companies on board that can offer it bigger and bigger contracts. It also gives it the room to make larger strategic moves, like migrating onto its own architecture late last year, which, in the long run could turn out to drastically improve the margins on its business.

&We did talk earlier in the quarter about our investment over the last couple years in SMR technology, an innovative storage technology that allows us to optimize cost and performance,& Woodside said. &We continue to innovate ways that allow us to drive better performance, and that drives better economics.&

The company is still looking to make significant moves in the form of new hires, including recently announcing that it has a new VP of product and VP of product marketing, Adam Nash and Naman Khan, respectively. Dropboxnew team under CEO Drew Houston are tasked with continuing the companypath to cracking into larger enterprises, which can give it a much more predictable and robust business alongside the average consumers that pay to host their files online and access them from pretty much anywhere.

In addition, there are a couple executive changes as Woodside transitions out.Yamini Rangan, currently VP of Business Strategy - Operations, will become Chief Customer Officer reporting to Houston, and comms VP Lin-Hua Wu will also report to Houston.

Dropbox had its first quarterly earnings check-in and slid past the expectations that Wall Street had, though its GAAP gross margin slipped a little bit and may have offered a slight negative signal for the company. But since then, Dropboxstock hasn&t had any major missteps, giving it more credibility on the public markets — and more resources to attract and retain talent with compensation packages linked to that stock.

&Our retention has been quite strong,& Woodside said. &We see strong retention characteristics across the customer set we have, whether itlarge or small. Obviously larger companies have more opportunity to expand over time, so our expansion metrics are quite strong in customers of over several hundred employees. But even among small businesses, Dropbox is the kind of product that has gravity. Once you start using it and start sharing it, it becomes a place where your business is small or large is managing all its content, it tends to be a sticky experience.&

As a relentless swarm of successful cyber attacks severely disrupt companies in every industry and require enormous expenditures to repair the damage, what typically gets lost in the shuffle is that some industries are victimized more than others — sometimes far more. The corporate victim that almost always grabs this dubious spotlight is the healthcare industry — the second-largest industry in the U.S. and one in which hacker meddling of operations not only costs lots of time, money and operational downtime, but threatens lives.

The healthcare industry itself is partly responsible. In a seemingly admirable quest to maximize the quality of patient care, tunnel vision gives short shrift to other priorities, specifically cybersecurity.

In aggregate, healthcare organizations on average spend only half as much on cybersecurity as other industries. For this and other reasons, such as the unusually high value of stolen patient records on the black market, attracting extra-large flocks of hackers, hospitals especially find themselves in a never-ending cyber war zone. FortiGuard Labs, a major security protection firm,reports that in 2017, healthcare saw an average of almost 32,000 intrusion attacks per day per organization as compared to more than 14,300 per organization in other industries.

Some attacks are outright deadly. For example, MedStar Health, a huge, Maryland-based healthcare system, was severely incapacitated by a ransomware attack that made national headlines when, among other things, it threatened lives. Compromised by a well-known security vulnerability, MedStar Health was not only forced to shut down its email and vast records database, but was unable to provide radiation treatment to cancer patients for days.

Such trouble typically starts when a doctor or other healthcare worker is persuaded to open an email sent by an attacker and click a link or attachment that downloads malware to his computer, a so-called &phishing& attack. The attacker can then use this software to gain access to the healthcare organizationfinancial, administrative and clinical information systems.

Attackers also can use the health network to spread into connected medical devices and equipment, such as ventilators, X-ray and MRI machines, medical lasers and even electric wheelchairs.

Any medical device connected to a network is potentially at risk from being taken over and exploited by hackers.

Compounding the threat are prevalent and vulnerable Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices, which integrate components and software from dozens of suppliers with minimal concern for security. Even individual patients can be targeted. A few years ago, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheneydoctors disabled his pacemakercapabilities because there were concerns about reports that attackers could hack such devices and kill the patient.

Ita dire situation that must be addressed. Hospitals and other healthcare providers must practice better cybersecurity hygiene. For starters, healthcare organizations must improve the speed and thoroughness of software patching and update processes. As much as possible, organizations also need to use threat intelligence and automation, as well as institute cyber-awareness training programs to protect against social media attacks and other attack vectors.

As IoMT devices proliferate, more elaborate network segmentation and inspection is required. A segmented strategy enables organizations to institute checks and policies at various points of the network to control users, applications and data flow and to more quickly identify and isolate security threats. And on the network visibility front, healthcare organizations need more insight throughout the network, including the cloud.

Hospitals and other healthcare organizations must do a better job of protecting patientrecords, as well. Since the transformation from paper records to digitized Electronic Health Records (EHRs), records are commonly updated and then sent by doctors to specialists in other hospitals. The problem is that hospitals are not banks, where financial information is locked up and not shared. This unencrypted information is vulnerable to profit-hungry hacker attacks.

A solution to this is likely to behomomorphic encryption, an impressive technology that allows for the encryption of data-in-use and that has tremendous potential to lock down the most valuable medical information. Specifically, this technology can secure and protect sensitive medical records and personally identifiable information (PII), often the target of cyber thieves.

Notwithstanding the fact that data-rich healthcare records are worth more than 10 times a credit card on the black market,this would shut down the most aggressive &data-focused& hackers.

These improvements will not occur without substantial monetary investment and effort. Itcommendable that hospitals focus overwhelmingly on day-to-day quality of care, but times change, and they must look at their mission with a broader perspective. Because they fail to do so, hospitals typically pay up in almost non-stop ransomware attacks, minimizing the possibility of additional health threats while systems are down.

Among the obstacles that hospitals face in pursuing the path toward change is intensifying merger and acquisition activity in the healthcare sector. IT integration challenges, including different medical technologies, create additional vulnerabilities, as does the need to share information between newly merged organizations.

The reputation of and trust in healthcare organizations depends on their understanding of the true extent of threats and taking sufficient measures to guard against them. The healthcare industry has no choice but to improve its capabilities regarding security. Nothing short of our lives are at stake.