Dr. Mark Dean (Photo: University of Tennessee)
It s no secret that success for African Americans in tech has not come easily. As part of a cultural group that has been on the receiving end of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and blatant terror extending back hundreds of years, Black engineers and tech executives often feel like they must perform at twice the level just to break even with their non-minority counterparts.
Despite those immense challenges, a handful of Black professionals in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s broke through and succeeded at high-tech firms. Their faces might not be as prominent or well-known as those of white tech pioneers, but their contributions to the industry are no less important.
Jim Clark, chairman and co-founder, Beyond Identity When he co-founded the firm Beyond Identity in 2020, serial entrepreneur Jim Clark said he felt somewhat responsible for the proliferation of passwords. Now he and partner Tom Jermoluk are doing something about it. They are providing access to their passwordless technology for free.
The giveaway is part of a new marketing campaign. Starting Jan. 26, Beyond Identity says, it will provide access to its passwordless identity platform free of charge to “any company that wants to offer its employees or customers a completely frictionless and fundamentally secure authentication experience.”
Why? The best answer is: The world desperately needs it, and we know how to do it,” Clark says in an exclusive video interview with Information Security Media Group.
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These classic books tell how modern capitalism in Europe and the US changed from a system that manufactured actual products into a financialized trading desk for credit derivatives and leverage.
They also describe how modern inequality developed.
And they are all absolutely riveting.
Fifty years ago, capitalism in the West was based on manufacturing which provided well-paid, lifelong jobs and close to full employment. By the 1970s and 1980s that system was carrying a layer of credit and debt that made it more lucrative for banks to extract profits from deals and transactions than to provide finance for the creation of actual products.
Windmill Books
Writer Liaquat Ahamed tells the story of the crash of 1929 told from the point of view of the central bank chiefs of the US, Britain, France, and Germany.
It s a fantastically detailed personal account based on letters and diaries of the men who controlled the world s currencies during the historic financial crisis that continues to dominate how we think about economics today.
The power of the drama lies in the book s gradually unfolding revelation that those in charge of the great banks of the day did not themselves truly understand how capitalism worked (even though many of their colleagues had personal fortunes at stake) as they made error after error after error .