Fletcher Previn seemed destined for a career in the entertainment industry.

He has the pedigree—his mother is actress Mia Farrow, and his father is the late composer André Previn. But life had a different path for the younger Previn, who was drawn to tech from an early age.

Today, Previn is CIO at Cisco. He has been recognized as one of the best CIOs in the business by Technology Magazine and Wire19, and has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

“I’m an IT practitioner by training,” Previn told IT Brew. “I’ve stayed the course of being in the IT department my whole career.”

Origin story. Previn was attracted to computers and tech as a boy, he told IT Brew.

“Early on, my parents bought the family a Commodore 64 when that came out, and I really loved exploring everything that the Commodore 64 could do and learning how to do basic programming,” Previn said. “Later on, I kind of built my own clone PC.”

Still, Previn gave showbiz a shot. He worked on movie sets and as an intern on late-night shows with David Letterman and Conan O’Brien in college. But tech was his calling; during work as a production assistant on the 1998 film Primary Colors, Previn realized he was far more interested in the phone system on-set than the movie.

He shifted course and started applying for jobs in the Bay Area. After a few years, the firm he was working for was acquired by Walmart and the new parent company wanted to make him their Windows administrator. He was hesitant because he didn’t know much about Walmart, but a pep talk with a friend from back home convinced him to apply. He got the job and rose through the ranks.

Read more here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Parts of Twitter’s source code were posted online via GitHub—and the company appears to have taken months to notice and ask for it to be removed, according to legal filings obtained by the New York Times.

The “rare and major exposure of intellectual property” resulted in Twitter submitting a takedown notice to GitHub on March 24, the Times wrote, and GitHub subsequently removed the code. A partially redacted version of the takedown notice posted to GitHub’s repository of requests identified the GitHub user who uploaded the code as using the handle “FreeSpeechEnthusiast,” a possible reference to Twitter owner Elon Musk, who throughout his troubled term at the helm of the company has referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist.”

The user in question contributed to a single repository in January, indicating the source code had been available for weeks. The timeline roughly matches one of the several rounds of layoffs at Twitter since Musk bought out the site for $44 billion and sought to rapidly cut costs.

It’s not clear exactly what source code—or how much of it—was in the repository. A company’s proprietary source code is usually a closely held trade secret, and for good reason: The code could be useful not only to competitors, but threat actors eager to look for vulnerabilities, which could lead to big paydays.

Twitter responded to IT Brew’s request for comment with its auto reply, which is a poop emoji.

Keep reading here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 35%. That’s the percentage of employees who are entitled to WFH full-time and choose to. The figure is down from earlier in the pandemic, but way up from a pre-pandemic 7%. (Pew Research Center)

Quote: “In some ways, I feel like we took a souped-up Civic [and] put it in a race with more powerful cars.”—Google CEO Sundar Pichai, referring to the company’s language model, Bard (the New York Times)

Read: Wondering how to use Nmap to scan for vulnerabilities? (StationX)

None shall pass: Defend your data against cyber risks and ransomware. This AWS webinar will help you strengthen your data recovery strategy and prepare for cyber threats. Hear customer use cases and build your modern protection strategy.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}