Satish Thomas, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft who spent two decades at the Redmond tech giant, is taking a new job at Google.

“I’m joining during what feels like one of the most consequential moments in tech history — right in the heart of the AI era,” Thomas wrote on LinkedIn. He did not specify what role he’s taking at Google.

Thomas said Microsoft “shaped me in ways I never imaged.” He began his two-decade run at the company as an intern. “I’m deeply grateful to the amazing people and teams I’ve had the privilege to work with,” he said. “Leaving isn’t easy — but some opportunities are so special and unique that you just have to go for them.”

Thomas spent the past six years as a corporate vice president at Microsoft, where he led strategy, product management, and engineering execution for Microsoft Cloud for Industry. He previously held leadership roles in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource.

— Raji Rajagopalan has a new role at Microsoft: GitHub’s vice president of engineering.

Rajagopalan has been with the tech giant for more than 20 years, joining the company as a software engineer. She’s leaving the Microsoft Foundry Team for the new role.

“My goal is to help GitHub continue to be the place loved by devs, where innovation happens and human-agent workflows thrive, as we move into this new era of AI-driven development,” Rajagopalan said on LinkedIn.

— Katie Bardaro is senior VP of customer experience at Avante, a Seattle startup building software to help companies decrease HR administration workload and reduce overall benefits program costs. It also offers an AI assistant designed to provide benefits guidance to employees.

“What drew me here is the opportunity to work at the intersection of data, AI, and total rewards, all while helping companies and employees navigate one of the most complex (and impactful) parts of the employee experience: benefits,” Bardaro said on LinkedIn.

Bardaro was previously chief customer officer at Syndio, a company that analyzes workplace pay equity issues and provides strategies for fixing disparities. Prior to that she was at Payscale for more than a decade.

— Vivek Sharma is leaving Stripe for a cryptic new venture focused on “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”

Sharma, who has held executive roles at Microsoft and Meta, didn’t provide further details about the stealthy startup in a LinkedIn post, but did name his collaborators:

• Tore Hanssen, who was a founding engineer at Statsig, the Bellevue, Wash.-based startup acquired in September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
• Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist at Meta’s Seattle office, clocking nearly 11 years with the company before going to Atlassian early last year.
• Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as a Facebook director of engineering, based in Seattle. He was most recently at Stripe.

“More details coming soon,” Sharma said of the startup. “But if you want to be an early adopter or just want to chat, please reach out!”

— Jeff Carr is now CEO of Atana, a startup building workplace training content that incorporates behavior-based learning and development. Carr joined the Bellevue company in August as president. He succeeds Atana co-founder and former CEO John Hansen, who will remain as executive chair.

In announcing the news, Hansen said that Carr “aligned with Atana’s vision immediately and has been instrumental in bringing us into new opportunities and new strategic relationships in a very short period of time.”

Carr has held multiple CEO roles in the past, including leadership of workforce training company Inkling and at the HR company PeopleFluent.

Atana originally launched in 1993. Hansen, a startup veteran and longtime lecturer at the University of Washington, acquired the business in 2016 and oversaw the expansion of new learning content.

— Longtime Microsoft gaming leader Larry Hyrb shared on LinkedIn that he was laid off from Unity after 18 months on the job.

Hyrb, known by his longtime handle “Major Nelson,” left Microsoft in 2023 after more than two decades in corporate communications, promoting the launches of games and other products. He was the host of one of the company’s earliest podcasts, Major Nelson Radio, which later became Xbox Podcast.

At Unity, a San Francisco-based gaming company, Hyrb worked with the Community and Advocacy Team, supporting connections among creators, developers and gamers.

— Serial tech entrepreneur Jay Bartot is now a technical advisor and chief technologist for TheFounderVC, a Seattle-based venture capital firm that launched in 2024.

Bartot is also co-founder and CTO of the software startup AirSignal, an affiliate professor at the UW, and a startup mentor at Creative Destruction Lab.

Bartot said on LinkedIn that he looks forward to working with the TheFounderVC team “to help exceptional early-stage founders build the next generation of great Vertical AI companies and products.”

— Auger, a startup building logistics and supply chain software, named Tucker Reimer as principal of supply chain innovation. Reimer joins the Bellevue startup from the Johnsonville sausage company where he served as vice president of global planning and analytics.

Dave Clark, the former Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO and Flexport CEO, launched Auger in 2024 with $100 million in Series A funding.

— Lucas Dickey joined Stripe as a product builder focused on Stripe Atlas, a tool that helps entrepreneurs incorporate their business.

Dickey said on LinkedIn that he has used Atlas four times to start his own companies and aligns with Stripe’s goal of “making the administrative layer a breeze — and helping new companies start strong from day one.”

His startups include Deepcast, a podcast platform, and Fernish, a decor-focused business that was acquired.

OPINION — “The [Defense] Secretary [Pete Hegseth] sent nonpublic DoD information [on March 15 at 11:44 EDT] identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile [Houthi] territory [in Yemen] over an unapproved, unsecure network [Signal] approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those [U.S. aircraft] strikes. Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.”

That was one finding from the December 2, Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG)] report entitled Evaluation of the Secretary of Defense’s Reported Use of a Commercially Available Messaging Application for Official Business that was released last Wednesday.

Another finding was “We [Office of the DoD IG] concluded that the [Defense] Secretary [Hegseth] sent sensitive nonpublic, DoD operational information that he determined did not require classification over Signal on his personal cell phone. Although EO 13526 [Executive Order on Classified National Security Information] grants the [Defense] Secretary the authority to determine the proper level of classification of DoD information, we concluded that the Secretary’s actions did not comply with DoDI 8170.01 [DoD Policy for social media accounts] which prohibits using a personal device for official business and sending nonpublic information over a non-approved commercially available messaging application.”

So in that first finding the DoD IG found Hegseth’s message potentially endangered U.S. military members and their mission, and in the second finding the DoD IG said the Defense Secretary had violated DoD policy.

On Wednesday evening, after public release of the DoD IG report, Hegseth on X messaged, “No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report.” At roughly the same time, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell in a statement said: “Total exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we all knew – no classified information was shared. The matter is resolved and the case is closed.”

Of course the DoD IG report is the opposite of “total exoneration,” and by no means should the case be closed. In fact, this entire matter should have been an illustration to the Trump administration that it cannot get away with lying about serious matters, but nonetheless they have continued to try.

The history of this DoD IG report shows that Hegseth and others in the Trump administration even failed to cooperate in the IG’s investigation.

For example, the DoD IG report said frankly, “The Secretary declined to be interviewed for this evaluation.” Hegseth did, after four months, supply to the IG Office a July 25, one-page, five paragraph statement. In it, Hegseth used two paragraphs to defend the questioned details in his March 15, Signal chat message, arguing at one point the information was “either not classified, or that I could safely declassify [it].”

Meanwhile, there were other times of non-cooperation. The DOD IG report said, “We requested a copy of the Secretary’s communications on Signal on or about March 15. According to a senior official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Secretary declined to provide us direct access to his personal cell phone.”

At another point, when the DoD IG was trying to get a full transcript of the March 15, Signal chat, it found that OSD had a consolidated version it received from the White House Counsel’s Office, but the request for a copy was declined “because it was not a DoD-created record.”

The DOD IG report, itself, originated from a request back on March 26, by Sens, Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The two Senators were reacting to two articles dated March 24, and March 26, on The Atlantic website written by Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who had described that somehow then-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz had made Goldberg part of a Signal chat group of senior Trump administration officials named the Houthi PC small group. The chat group included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary Hegseth, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

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Goldberg’s March 24, Atlantic article alleged that on March 15, the Signal chat group received from Hegseth sensitive war plans about the U.S. air strikes before they took place on Yemen that day. The Atlantic initially chose not to print those war plan details because potentially they contained classified information. Although the White House initially said the story seemed authentic, Hegseth initially said, “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that."

By the next day, the Trump administration had settled on their response. Appearing on March 25 before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, CIA Director Ratcliffe said, “The Secretary of Defense is the original classification authority, and my understanding is that his comments are that any information that he shared was not classified.” DNI Gabbard, appearing with Ratcliffe, echoed him saying, “There were no classified or intelligence equities that were included in that chat group at any time.”

After the denials, The Atlantic on March 26, then published Goldberg’s subsequent article which contained Hegseth’s pre-strike details. They gave the scheduled March 15 time of the first F-18 launch package; the time the first strike F-18s should reach “Target Terrorist;” the time of launch of MQ-9 strike drones; the time launch of second F-18 package; the time “when first bombs will definitely drop,” and the time when F-18 2nd package strike begins; and the time when the first sea-based Tomahawk missiles launched.

Although Hegseth claimed, “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission,” anyone who knew where the F-18s were based, their time of departure and the expected time bombs were to be dropped in Yemen might have been be able to determine the targets.

The DoD IG report concluded, “If this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

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Another issue raised by the DOD IG report is that Hegseth was involved in other Signal chat groups into which he could have put additional classified information.

For example, the DOD IG reported, “One of the officials we spoke with stated that the Secretary posted the same sensitive operational information concerning the March 15, Houthi attack plans on the ‘Defense Team Huddle’ group chat.” That was a chat group Hegseth established from his personal and professional inner circle in January 2025, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and included Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, who is a former Fox News producer.

The New York Times reported the Defense Team Huddle chat group also included Hegseth’s younger brother, Phil Hegseth, who has since become a senior adviser to the Defense Secretary and a DoD liaison officer to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Other OSD officials told DoD IG investigators there are “multiple additional Signal group chats in which the Secretary allegedly participated to conduct official DoD business and transmit nonpublic DoD information,” according to the IG report. “Two officials stated that they were part of several group chats, and one of them stated that the Secretary and others used the chats to coordinate meetings, respond to media inquiries, or alert staff to check their official email accounts.”

That was another reason, the report said, “why we [DoD IG] requested copies of messages from these other Signal group chats, as well as access to the Secretary’s personal cell phone,” which so far have been unsuccessful.

I must conclude this article by saying that much credit goes to the DoD IG office, and Acting DoD IG Steven A. Stebbins. They did an admirable job on this inquiry given the lack of cooperation from their top bosses to this inquiry. They showed the professionalism looked for and needed in federal government employees.

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The private messaging app Signal just announced the much-awaited feature for its users – secure…

Signal App Introduces Secure Cloud Backup For Chats on Latest Hacking News | Cyber Security News, Hacking Tools and Penetration Testing Courses.

There are numerous free messaging apps around, but one of the most popular is Telegram. Telegram earned that reputation mainly because of two features: group chat facilities and security.  Its huge possibilities for groups and channels are unchallenged, but concerning security, there are some issues we have to explore.

Telegram is an open source app created by two Russian brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov. The app was banned from Russia, however, and the company now has offices in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Dubai. Concerning data storage, Telegram has a hybrid system where you can decide whether to store the data on your phone or one of the several servers worldwide. The first point of concern: Telegram has not subjected its app to an independent and experienced auditor. For that reason, it is wise to be suspicious.

You need a mobile phone number to register and use Telegram. Apart from that, the phone is not a necessary tool because Telegram also has desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, essential features like secret chats are not available on the desktop version. That can be confusing because you are not necessarily aware of some contacts not having read your secret chats because they do not use a mobile device.

How safe are these normal, secret chats? To start with normal chats, they are not encrypted at all. Even WhatsApp is safer in this regard. Sending normal messages in Telegram, therefore, is an absolute no-go. It is kind of confusing and problematic that encryption is not applied by default. Other secure messaging services – such as Signal – apply end-to-end (E2E) encryption on all communications (normal chats, group chats, and voicecalls) by default.

The group chat possibilities on Telegram are huge, with support for up to 200.000 members per group. These chats (cloud chats) are securely encrypted only in transit between devices. But the group chats are not safe. Telegram can read chat data since it handles the encryption and decryption of messages at the servers.

If you use the secret chat option, all messages are end-to-end encrypted using MTProto. Secret chats are not stored on the Telegram servers and can only be accessed through the sending and receiving devices. Secret chats also have auto self-destruct options and informs about the other end taking a screenshot, further increasing the security. Finally, voicecalls are automatically E2E encrypted and are considered to be secure.

If we take a closer look at the privacy policy and the encryption method – MTProto security – things start to get worse. The protocol has been criticized by several cryptography experts. Concerning Telegram’s privacy policy, Telegram can collect lots of personal information like IP address, devices, and history of usernames and keep it for up to twelve months. They will probably also use this to utilize aggregated metadata. Finally, the information in the cloud chats is not safe either, can be shared with linked companies, and could be provided to law enforcement institutions.

Sophos post exploring Signal’s new PIN Secure Value Recovery system to help you maintain your @signalapp account even if you lose or change phones. I learned they’re using @Intel SGX. https://t.co/oFwBE6qJgf #IAmIntel #security #privacy #messaging

— Jim St. Leger (@JimStLeger) May 22, 2020

To be on the safe side, go for a more secure alternative like Signal. If you wish to continue using Telegram, be aware that your IP address will be saved. Therefore, install a VPN when making an account and to use the app. Furthermore, do not use your own phone number when creating an account, but use a paid or free SMS service (disposable SMS). Finally, only use secret chats and voicecalls. Keep these precautions in mind, and some Telegram features can be safe.

For individuals or groups who place high importance on privacy and security, there are far better alternatives, free or paid. Some examples are Signal, Threema, and Wire.

The post Is Telegram messenger secure? appeared first on Rana News.