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Novelist Kyla Zhao, a 26-year-old Singapore native who moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, used the extra alone time that came with stay-home orders to work on her writing.

After graduation and a short stint as a fashion writer, she started working as an analyst in the male-dominated Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. Now her third novel, May the Best Player Win, is scheduled to come out this fall.

Q: Can you talk about how you came up with the ideas for your most recent book, Valley Verified?

A: A few months after graduation I made the switch from the high fashion industry to the high tech industry. With that came a lot of impostor syndrome and a massive confidence crisis.

I was feeling really down about myself, and I didn’t think I could really confide in anyone, because all my friends seemed so successful and accomplished.

So I kept it all bottled up within myself. But at some point, I just had to get all these feelings out of me, so I started writing this story of this young woman who works in fashion in New York City, but because of circumstance, she’s forced to move across the country to Silicon Valley to take on a new role and a tech startup. And she’s like a fish out of water. read more

By Anna Helhoski | NerdWallet

Wading through unnecessary paperwork is no one’s idea of a good time. Same goes for being forced to hear a dreaded loop of Muzak while waiting on hold for what feels like eternity.

In the hopes of removing some of the suffering from the pain of customer service interactions, the Biden administration announced a new bundle of government-wide actions today nicknamed “Time Is Money.” The administration says the hassles that Americans face are often designed to deter people from activities that could hurt a company’s bottom line, such as refunds or subscription cancellations.

“This work came from scores of conversations with people — consumer advocates and others — about practices that are really designed to get people crazy and, honestly, they’re really designed for you to give up.” says Neera Tanden, director of the Domestic Policy Council of the United States.

During his presidency, Biden has addressed a bevy of corporate-instituted annoyances that everyday Americans face, including things like junk fees. These new actions also provide a glimpse into what areas of consumer protection Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to emphasize on the campaign trail. read more

Jon Healey | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.

The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.

“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interview. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”

According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X. read more