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Sara Peters

A service-oriented newsroom leader with a passion for features.

The Jobless New Yorker •

Visiting the Workers' Chapel, With No Work or Religion

Beneath the gothic spires and the stained glass, buttressing the sides of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, stretches a small banner. It reads: NEW YORK KNICKS: 2026 Eastern Conference Champions.
The Franciscan Catholic church in Manhattan, on W. 31st Street, between 7th and Broadway, is just a stone’s throw from Madison Square Garden, so it’s only right for the building to represent. There’s another sign too. A humble metal one, simply engraved “Workers Chapel.”
The Jobless New Yorker •

What New York City Local Law 144 Means for Job Seekers

“If an employer can’t reasonably explain why an AI tool screened out a qualified, applicant, we should be afraid,” says Ashley Upkins, president of the National Bar Association. Yesterday, I wrote about automated employment decision tools (AEDTs), like applicant tracking systems (ATS) and AI video interview tools. I discussed what they are, how they work, and what job seekers should understand about the concepts of “AI bias” and “algorithmic monoculture.”
The Jobless New Yorker •

'Algorithmically Blackballed': What NYC Job Seekers Should Know About AI Bias

Frustrated job applicants who suspect that no human being has ever looked at their resumé might have a point. As both employers and job applicants increase their use of AI and automation, researchers and regulators are taking a closer look at these tools. Two key questions: does employment decision technology make the hiring process fairer, by reducing the impact of hiring managers’ personal biases? Or does this technology make the hiring process less fair, by automatically weeding out the same...
The Jobless New Yorker •

Before You Buy Anything, Check the Library

We jobless people are easy marks. Salespeople and fraudsters can smell our fear. If we’re not careful, “career services” peddlers or actual criminals will quickly shake us down for a $500 “ATS optimization” here and a $600 training module there, soothing us with reminders to “invest in ourselves” as they pocket our severance checks before we even know what ATS optimization means. True, many professionals in the career services industry are wonderful, ethical angels who provide exceptional practi...
Information Week •

Special Report: How Fragile is the Cloud, Really? | InformationWeek

A severe cloud infrastructure outage often feels less like a service disruption and more like an earthquake. One incident can barrel its way across an entire region, indiscriminately disrupting commerce, travel, medical care, and communication. Reverberations are felt far, far from the site of the event. There's nothing most of us can do to prevent it from happening or stop it once it starts. We just have to wait for the shaking to end and hope that none of our most valuable stuff got smashed.Th...
Information Week •

Special Report: What's the Environmental Impact of a Data-Driven Organization? | InformationWeek

Environmental science and technology researchers alike are ardently studying the voracious energy demands and carbon emissions of machine learning and artificial intelligence, searching for "green AI." Efforts like Digital Cleanup Day urge the average user to tidy up their overflowing inboxes to reduce the pressure on hot, panting cloud servers. But "Green AI" surely will not be green enough. And when data storage gets too tight, most of us respond by loosening the belt on iCloud, OneDrive, or G...
Information Week •

Log4J Attacks Confirm Need for DevSecOps, Automation, SBOM | InformationWeek

Alarm claxons are blaring about a barrage of cyberattacks exploiting critical vulnerabilities in Log4J -- Apache’s Java-based logging utility. Federal government agencies have only two days left to institute mitigations to comply with an emergency directive issued by the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yet despite the attention, don’t expect the attacks to end anytime soon. And don’t expect your systems to be fully patched in a hurry....
Dark Reading •

The Right to Be Patched: How Sentient Robots Will Change InfoSec Management

As though prioritizing patches isn't hard enough, how much worse will it be when the unpatched machine can stalk over to your desk, fold its arms, raise an eyebrow, and ask why its vulnerability is still waiting for a fix? Right now, artificial intelligence (AI) is just a tool — a tool we're barely using — but science-fiction always has its way. We already carry the "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in our pockets; soon enough we'll be throwing build-day parties for our robot co-workers.And it w...