The sky didn’t fall. The clocks didn’t stop. The Securities and Exchange Commission officially released its proposal to make quarterly reporting optional, upending a rule that’s been in place for US public companies since 1970, and everything seems…fine?

That calm, serene feeling you’ve been experiencing ever since the proposal came out likely boils down to a simple realization: This might not drastically change life in the top finance seat all that much, as experts have argued.

Lisa Bragança, a former SEC branch chief who leads a securities defense law firm, thinks the proposal won’t end up being “as big a deal as lots of folks think it will be” for one primary reason: investor expectations.

“There will be companies who opt into it, but I don’t think that huge companies will necessarily embrace it because they have investors who expect quarterly reports and are set up to do quarterly evaluations,” she told CFO Brew. “It may be a process over time that, once adopting this, more firms will transition into it, but I don’t think it’s going to be a deluge right away.”

But the business-as-usual approach would also create an awkward dynamic for smaller companies that might be considering a switch to semiannual reporting: There’s likely very little advantage to being an early mover, Bragança said.

Keep reading for more on how CFOs might change the reporting cadence.—NP

You’d be forgiven for losing track of tech layoffs. But no matter who’s doing the counting, the numbers just keep rising.

In recent days (yes, days, not weeks), we’ve gotten news of layoff plans from LinkedIn and Cisco amounting to thousands of job cuts, while automaker GM cut hundreds of IT roles.

It’s all adding up to a particularly grim tech landscape: There have been over 135,700 people either laid off or part of announced cuts at tech companies thus far in 2026, according to data from TrueUp, a job search platform that tracks layoffs. By comparison, TrueUp said, in the whole of 2025, there were approximately 246,000 tech layoffs.

Already, the month of May has ushered in nearly 16,000 tech layoffs, compared with about 18,600 in April. April’s figures included announced layoffs at tech giants Meta and Snap, while marking an improvement from March’s grisly stats (almost 50,000 layoffs, largely due to an immense layoff push from Oracle that affected 30,000 jobs).

We’ve seen similar figures sliced and diced in different ways lately. In the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on May 5, the professional and business services sector, which includes many tech roles, reported the steepest drop in job openings in March: a decline of 318,000. Employers in the sector also laid off the most workers (527,000).

Keep reading for thoughts on what’s driving all this turnover.—NP

A long-winded email isn’t just a cure for insomnia...it’s becoming a cybersecurity threat, with attackers using excessive dummy text to lull AI defenses to sleep.

The tactic—spotted recently by email security company Sublime Security—is less an example of flashy, model-breaking commands like “ignore all previous instructions” and instead more like, “nothing to see here, drowsy LLM.”

“They’re sort of poking the bear a little bit, and seeing what they can get away with,” Luke Wescott, Sublime’s threat detection engineer, told IT Brew.

For more on how the tactic works, keep reading on IT Brew.—BH

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