Intel under scanner for age discrimination during 12,000 layoffs

In a latest instance of discrimination in the tech industry, chip maker Intel has been accused of laying off some of its staff based on their age. 

The company is under investigation for potential age discrimination when it announced 12,000 layoffs and restructuring initiated in 2016. Intel allegedly sought to retain younger employees and terminate the older ones, The Verge reported. Intel, in its defence, maintains that personal demographics such as age, race, and gender were not part of the lay off process. 

Recently, Intel and Microsoft disclosed a newly found variant of the security flaws revealing another vulnerability in chips used in hundreds of millions of computers and mobile devices, Cnet reported. The new strain is called Variant 4 and uses a different method to extract sensitive information from computers. It uses Speculative Store Bypass method which could allow your processor to load sensitive data to potentially insecure spaces. It taps into many of the same vulnerabilities that were first revealed in January.

The new strain is being classified as medium risk because many of the exploits it uses in web browsers were fixed in the original set of patches. However, the flaw has not been used by hackers. Intel is releasing a complete fix for the flaws over the coming weeks. 

With inputs from ANI