Bytes: What’s new in tech

What is TikTok without its algorithm?

Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s plan to buy TikTok might not include its “secret sauce,” said Elizabeth Dwoskin and Drew Harwell in The Washington Post. The investor, who ran the Treasury Department under President Trump, told potential backers that “omitting TikTok’s algorithm” could be “the key to unlocking control of one of the world’s most popular apps.” That could enable Mnuchin’s consortium to “get TikTok at a discount.” But without the algorithm, they would have to “remake a service built on billions of lines of code before it could be usable again.” Tech experts questioned the idea, saying Tik Tok’s algorithm is impossible to fully replicate, as other tech giants like Meta and Google have tried to do. China updated its export-control list to include “personalized-recommendation software” in 2020, and could block any Tik Tok sale that included its algorithm.

Workers sue over H-1B replacements

A group of American workers is accusing an Indian IT outsourcing giant of giving their jobs to holders of H-1B visas for foreign workers, said Newley Purnell in The Wall Street Journal. “At least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” against India’s Tata Consultancy Services, whose clients include dozens of large U.S. companies. The workers say that TCS barely hid the fact that it was “trying to reduce the number of Americans it employs in the U.S.” and wanted “to provide more jobs to Indian nationals.” Tech companies have been accused of colluding to boost their chances of getting workers to win H-1B visas designated for skilled foreigners.

Gmail’s 20-year legacy

Gmail had its 20th birthday this week, said Lance Ulanoff in TechRadar. When Google announced it was launching a free email service on April Fools’ Day in 2004, “no one was quite sure if the search giant was serious.” But two decades later, it’s “hard to imagine a world without Gmail.” Its most controversial innovation was that instead of using pop-up or banner ads, it used the text of your email to serve up ads. “Computers, at least back then, didn’t really ‘read’ anything,” and Google was “anonymizing” the data. Still, it was clear even then that Google was on a quest to organize pretty much all of the world’s information—and Gmail set off a 20year debate about whether Google controls too much of it.