Whoa, I didn’t know that Sega hired lore masters. Screenshot: Sega / SnapCube / Kotaku
Today in job listings that exude a menacing aura: Sega is looking to hire a Sonic loremaster to keep track of the blue hedgehog’s canon and non-canon antics.
If you have a degree in the arts and just so happened to be doomscrolling through the job hiring website, LinkedIn, you might’ve come across a job application from Sega of America for a lore associate manager for the Sonic Team. Yes, Sonic has established lore within its video games, movies, and its low-key slept on comic books. Though many might be scratching their heads at the existence of Sonic lore, one doesn’t simply go fast without having a pre-established reason to. Over the past 31 years of Sonic’s existence, the hedgehog’s lore has involved a plethora of bizarre storylines like him being cuckholded by Shadow after the Hot Topic hedgehog stole his then-girlfriend, Sally, and his often-brought-up smooch with a human, which has been burned into everyone’s memory. So you can see why Sega is in dire need of someone to keep the blue hedgehog’s lore straight.
Read More: Sonic Frontiers Is Nostalgic But Tedious, Say Critics
As the name would imply, the responsibilities of the lore associate manager include reviewing and verifying story content for “accuracy and consistency” as well as brainstorming, script writing, and providing feedback for new Sonic stories and characters. The loremaster job listing also happens to coincide with the release of Sonic Frontiers on Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Switch tomorrow.
“With both project management and creative duties, you will be immersed in the organizing and shaping of Sonic lore, canon, characters, and universes, helping to bring consistency, connectivity, and creativity to all things Sonic across various forms of media including games, animation, comics, and more,” Sega of America wrote in the job description.
As of the time of writing, the job is listed as a full-time mid to senior-level position within the company. If you’re looking to throw your hat in the game, you’d be in a pool of 371 other Sonic fanatics, 136 of whom are entry-level applicants and 54 qualifying as senior-level applicants.
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Read More:Sonic’s Original Backstory Took Place In World War II
ImmaSonic1
Sonic’s expansive lore has provided both fans and bystanders alike with a treasure trove of good and “lawfully evil” phenomena over the past 31 years of the character’s existence. On the one hand, you’ve got hidden gems such as the 1996 Sonic OVA, Machinima’s YouTube comedy series Sonic For Hire, and YouTuber SnapCube’s hilarious real-time fandub series.
Then there’s the dark side of Sonic fan lore. Last year when then-President Donald Trump tried to launch the social media website, GETTR, off the ground it was met with leftist Sonic memes, furry vore artwork, and—of course—mpreg art. This just goes to show that championing a “free speech, independent thought and rejecting political censorship and ‘cancel culture’” Twitter alternative can lead to hashtags like #sonicfeet, #sonicismygod, #soniclovescommunism, #sonicmylove, and #sonic_came_in_my_bussy running wild in your virtual town square.
Read More: SEGA Of America’s Invented Sonic The Hedgehog Origins
If it were me getting hired as the “lore guy” for Sonic, I’d make reciting the theme song for the ‘99 cartoon, Sonic Underground, mandatory before the start of any lore meeting like the Pledge of Allegiance. It is important to not forget your history.
A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate accounts — are creating major headaches for corporate HR departments and for those managing invite-only LinkedIn groups.
Some of the fake profiles flagged by the co-administrator of a popular sustainability group on LinkedIn.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity examined a flood of inauthentic LinkedIn profiles all claiming Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at various Fortune 500 companies, including Biogen, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Hewlett Packard.
Since then, the response from LinkedIn users and readers has made clear that these phony profiles are showing up en masse for virtually all executive roles — but particularly for jobs and industries that are adjacent to recent global events and news trends.
Hamish Taylor runs the Sustainability Professionals group on LinkedIn, which has more than 300,000 members. Together with the group’s co-owner, Taylor said they’ve blocked more than 12,700 suspected fake profiles so far this year, including dozens of recent accounts that Taylor describes as “cynical attempts to exploit Humanitarian Relief and Crisis Relief experts.”
“We receive over 500 fake profile requests to join on a weekly basis,” Taylor said. “It’s hit like hell since about January of this year. Prior to that we did not get the swarms of fakes that we now experience.”
The opening slide for a plea by Taylor’s group to LinkedIn.
Taylor recently posted an entry on LinkedIn titled, “The Fake ID Crisis on LinkedIn,” which lampooned the “60 Least Wanted ‘Crisis Relief Experts’ — fake profiles that claimed to be experts in disaster recovery efforts in the wake of recent hurricanes. The images above and below show just one such swarm of profiles the group flagged as inauthentic. Virtually all of these profiles were removed from LinkedIn after KrebsOnSecurity tweeted about them last week.
Another “swarm” of LinkedIn bot accounts flagged by Taylor’s group.
Mark Miller is the owner of the DevOps group on LinkedIn, and says he deals with fake profiles on a daily basis — often hundreds per day. What Taylor called “swarms” of fake accounts Miller described instead as “waves” of incoming requests from phony accounts.
“When a bot tries to infiltrate the group, it does so in waves,” Miller said. “We’ll see 20-30 requests come in with the same type of information in the profiles.”
After screenshotting the waves of suspected fake profile requests, Miller started sending the images to LinkedIn’s abuse teams, which told him they would review his request but that he may never be notified of any action taken.
Some of the bot profiles identified by Mark Miller that were seeking access to his DevOps LinkedIn group. Miller said these profiles are all listed in the order they appeared.
Miller said that after months of complaining and sharing fake profile information with LinkedIn, the social media network appeared to do something which caused the volume of group membership requests from phony accounts to drop precipitously.
“I wrote our LinkedIn rep and said we were considering closing the group down the bots were so bad,” Miller said. “I said, ‘You guys should be doing something on the backend to block this.”
Jason Lathrop is vice president of technology and operations at ISOutsource, a Seattle-based consulting firm with roughly 100 employees. Like Miller, Lathrop’s experience in fighting bot profiles on LinkedIn suggests the social networking giant will eventually respond to complaints about inauthentic accounts. That is, if affected users complain loudly enough (posting about it publicly on LinkedIn seems to help).
Lathrop said that about two months ago his employer noticed waves of new followers, and identified more than 3,000 followers that all shared various elements, such as profile photos or text descriptions.
“Then I noticed that they all claim to work for us at some random title within the organization,” Lathrop said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “When we complained to LinkedIn, they’d tell us these profiles didn’t violate their community guidelines. But like heck they don’t! These people don’t exist, and they’re claiming they work for us!”
Lathrop said that after his company’s third complaint, a LinkedIn representative responded by asking ISOutsource to send a spreadsheet listing every legitimate employee in the company, and their corresponding profile links.
Not long after that, the phony profiles that were not on the company’s list were deleted from LinkedIn. Lathrop said he’s still not sure how they’re going to handle getting new employees allowed into their company on LinkedIn going forward.
It remains unclear why LinkedIn has been flooded with so many fake profiles lately, or how the phony profile photos are sourced. Random testing of the profile photos shows they resemble but do not match other photos posted online. Several readers pointed out one likely source — the website thispersondoesnotexist.com, which makes using artificial intelligence to create unique headshots a point-and-click exercise.
Cybersecurity firm Mandiant (recently acquired by Google) told Bloomberg that hackers working for the North Korean government have been copying resumes and profiles from leading job listing platforms LinkedIn and Indeed, as part of an elaborate scheme to land jobs at cryptocurrency firms.
Fake profiles also may be tied to so-called “pig butchering” scams, wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out.
In addition, identity thieves have been known to masquerade on LinkedIn as job recruiters, collecting personal and financial information from people who fall for employment scams.
But the Sustainability Group administrator Taylor said the bots he’s tracked strangely don’t respond to messages, nor do they appear to try to post content.
“Clearly they are not monitored,” Taylor assessed. “Or they’re just created and then left to fester.”
This experience was shared by the DevOp group admin Miller, who said he’s also tried baiting the phony profiles with messages referencing their fakeness. Miller says he’s worried someone is creating a massive social network of bots for some future attack in which the automated accounts may be used to amplify false information online, or at least muddle the truth.
“It’s almost like someone is setting up a huge bot network so that when there’s a big message that needs to go out they can just mass post with all these fake profiles,” Miller said.
In last week’s story on this topic, I suggested LinkedIn could take one simple step that would make it far easier for people to make informed decisions about whether to trust a given profile: Add a “created on” date for every profile. Twitter does this, and it’s enormously helpful for filtering out a great deal of noise and unwanted communications.
Many of our readers on Twitter said LinkedIn needs to give employers more tools — perhaps some kind of application programming interface (API) — that would allow them to quickly remove profiles that falsely claim to be employed at their organizations.
Another reader suggested LinkedIn also could experiment with offering something akin to Twitter’s verified mark to users who chose to validate that they can respond to email at the domain associated with their stated current employer.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, LinkedIn said it was considering the domain verification idea.
“This is an ongoing challenge and we’re constantly improving our systems to stop fakes before they come online,” LinkedIn said in a written statement. “We do stop the vast majority of fraudulent activity we detect in our community – around 96% of fake accounts and around 99.1% of spam and scams. We’re also exploring new ways to protect our members such as expanding email domain verification. Our community is all about authentic people having meaningful conversations and to always increase the legitimacy and quality of our community.”
In a story published Wednesday, Bloomberg noted that LinkedIn has largely so far avoided the scandals about bots that have plagued networks like Facebook and Twitter. But that shine is starting to come off, as more users are forced to waste more of their time fighting off inauthentic accounts.
“What’s clear is that LinkedIn’s cachet as being the social network for serious professionals makes it the perfect platform for lulling members into a false sense of security,” Bloomberg’s Tim Cuplan wrote. “Exacerbating the security risk is the vast amount of data that LinkedIn collates and publishes, and which underpins its whole business model but which lacks any robust verification mechanisms.”
If he had thought about it longer, Braden Wallake might not have posted a picture of himself crying on LinkedIn.
But Wallake, the 32-year-oldchief executive of HyperSocial, a marketing start-up, had just laid off employees for the first time, he said in an interview with The Washington Post. He had tried to avoid making his small team smaller. He had cut his paycheck and made other business adjustments. In the end, though, he had decided to let two of his 17 employees go.
“This will be the most vulnerable thing I’ll ever share,” he began, in a long post paired with a photo of himself with tears visible. Wallake wanted to own his mistakes, he said, and reach out to other business owners who might be “feeling the pain” behind their tough decisions. He wanted them to feel less alone.
“I just want people to see,” he wrote, “that not every CEO out there is cold-hearted and doesn’t care when he/she have to lay people off.”
Gen Z workers demand flexibility, don’t want to be stuffed in a cubicle
The post quickly went viral on LinkedIn and beyond, as many accused Wallake of being insensitive and “cringe.” With more than 68,000 workers in tech laid off so far in 2022, many read Wallake’s post as privileging the chief executive’s pain over that of the employees being let go.
“This does comes across as tone-deaf, self indulgent and a tad inauthentic,” one commenter said. “Maybe you could have made the post about the people your decisions have impacted, rather than about yourself?”
“If my boss had posted a picture of themselves crying about having to lay me off with zero apologies I would be [angry],” said another.
But comments and messages of support also trickled in from fellow executives and others who praised him for showing vulnerability and humanity.
Big Tech is bracing for a possible recession, spooking other industries
“Thank you for having shared that and having restored my faith in the business world again,” one DM read.
“When I see this post — I see a guy who is literally just trying his best,” said one commenter. “This guy cares about his employees — he decided to process some of this online. Could he have tagged the employees and said how great they were — sure, but did he expect this post to blow up like this? Probably not.”
Wallake did not. Once he realized what was happening, he reached out to the two employees affected to show them the post and let them know that it wasn’t meant to make his “tough journey” seem worse than theirs. He shared about the job opportunities the post was already generating. Both are still taking time to think about their next steps, he said.
As cracks form in the economy, tech start-ups have been among the first and hardest hit, with widespread layoffs wracking the industry in recent months. The industry has served as a sort of canary in the coal mine for slowing growth, with executives such as Tesla’s Elon Musk and Google’s Sundar Pichai among early voices of recession fears.
Other executives have made headlines for their approach to layoffs. Vishal Garg, chief executive of online mortgage company Better.com, sparked ire after he laid off 900 employees in December in a Zoom call lasting less than three minutes.
“If you’re on this call, you’re part of the unlucky group that’s being laid off,” Garg announced over Zoom, according to reporting from National Mortgage Professional. “Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”
Days later, Garg penned a letter apologizing to his staff, acknowledging he had “embarrassed” them.
“I own the decision to do the layoffs, but in communicating it I blundered the execution,” Garg wrote. “I realize that the way I communicated this news made a difficult situation worse.”
Walmart corporate layoffs add to signs of slowing job market
Wallake said he knows that the public has an image of wealthy executives that “are doing layoffs just to pad their own pockets.” He lives in a van with his girlfriend, who is also his business partner, and their dog, Roscoe. In his LinkedIn profile, he notes that he’s a “5x college dropout.”
In some ways, Wallake said, his post was meant to push back against the idea that chief executives are supposed to “be brave.”
“Being a business owner and letting people go, I know it’s not fun on the other end,” he continued,“but we’re human, too, and we feel like we’re losing a friend.”
A woke Universal Music Group worker claims he was fired for “speaking up” about abortion rights — after he admitted he refused to work because he was in “mourning” over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Michael Lopez, a production coordinator at Universal Music Enterprises, blasted the company as “anti-gay” for terminating a “queer brown person” during Pride Month for “speaking up in defense of abortion rights,” according to a lengthy note on LinkedIn that went viral last week.
“Last Friday, like countless other folks, I was devastated by the news of the supreme court’s [sic] attack on abortion rights,” Lopez wrote.
“Paired with the flood of anti-queer and anti-trans legislation, it’s been hard to process how company’s [sic] expect us to be productive while our rights are being stripped away.”
Lopez then went on to explain that each Friday “one of my tasks was to process reports for upcoming releases” and then to email his work to 275 people.
But instead of doing the usual process reports, he wrote an email that read: “I didn’t do them today.”
“I’m in mourning due to the attack on people with uteruses in the US. Federally guaranteed access to abortion is gone,” the email continued.
Lopez posted a lengthy update on LinkedIn that quickly went viral.
“Last Friday, like countless other folks, I was devastated by the news of the supreme court’s [sic] attack on abortion rights,” Lopez wrote.
“Vivendi and Universal Music Group must stop donating to anti-abortion, anti-queer and anti-trans politicians. Politicians like Marsha Blackburn, Ken Buck, Victoria Spartz, etc. Or expect more unproductive days,” he wrote, signing off with “Yours in fury, Michael Lopez.”
The Post has sought comment from Universal Music Group.
After sending the loaded email, Lopez said he received several supportive replies from co-workers — but was told by a manager to “take the rest of the day off.”
When he returned to work the following Monday, he said he was greeted with “a surprise Zoom video chat with HR.”
“I was being let go for (paraphrasing) ‘Not doing your job, disrupting the day of 275 people and poor judgement’,” Lopez wrote.
Lopez then said he sent a “follow up” to the email list, informing his colleagues.
“Just got fired for this email from Friday, so they’re letting you know where they stand on employees speaking out on politicians that support marginalization for folks like me,” he reportedly wrote, according to his lengthy LinkedIn post.
He opined: “A brown queer person terminated during Pride month speaking in support of abortion rights. Seems like that’s exactly what America is all about right now.”
Abortion-rights protesters demonstrate outside the Supreme Court on June 25.APProtestors attempt to block a disrupter outside the Supreme Court.Getty Images
Lopez’s note on LinkedIn went viral, generating more than 3,200 reactions, some 250 comments and more than 60 shares.
While some commenters were supportive, others were less sympathetic.
One LinkedIn user called Lopez “entitled, lazy, and obviously ignorant,” writing: “Yeah this is pretty pathetic…You a grown man pretending to have ‘grief’ so unbelievably unbearable over something that will never affect you in any way that you can’t perform a simple task at work.”
Another LinkedIn commenter wrote: “If you just sent the report like they asked every Friday… would you have lost your job? Most likely no.”
The commenter added: “You didn’t lose your job based on your color or sexual orientation so please stop thinking that. Your actions are childish cause for termination.”
Lopez’s protest echoed the sentiments of hundreds of people who have mobilized in the wake of the June 24 decision.AFP via Getty Images
Another straight-shooting critic pointed out: “You made a stand based upon principle. But such stands come with consequences — that’s what makes them brave…I respect your decision to withhold your labor as a form of protest, but you left your employer little choice.”
Video game companies are notoriously cagey about sharing their plans. In a market saturated with sequels and spin-offs, developers nevertheless treat every new project with extreme secrecy. They’ll rarely even be up-front about what they aren’t working on, but today the PlayStation studio behind Ghost of Tsushima did just that.
As it approaches its 25th anniversary, Sucker Punch took the unusual step of letting fans know what not to expect from its next game, killing rumors of a potential sequel to superhero sandbox series Infamous, or stealth platformer Sly Cooper, happening anytime soon.
Sucker Punch wrote:
As our games continue to grow in scale and complexity, they require the full attention of our studio. With our focus on our current project, we have no plans to revisit inFAMOUS or Sly Cooper right now, and no other studio is currently working on projects related to those franchises either. These characters are very special and near and dear to our hearts, so while we’d never say never to re-opening those doors down the road, for now there are no inFAMOUS or Sly Cooper games in development.
Previously, some PlayStation fans were eager to believe the opposite. On the heels of rumor mongering by self-proclaimed insider Twitter accounts and mysterious updates to various web pages, it seemed like the fan-favorites might resurface. But rather than let false hope spring eternal, like some game studios have been known to, Sucker Punch came clean with fans.
In the meantime, the studio said that following some upcoming maintenance it will keep Infamous 2‘s level editor servers alive for a little bit longer and it plans to make the Infamous Second Son DLC Cole’s Legacy purchasable separately from the Collector’s Edition. The Sly games, on the other hand, remain completely inaccessible on modern platforms. While previously available as part of PS Now, none of them are currently included in the revamped PS Plus library.
Founded in 1997, Sucker Punch’s first game was the underappreciated, physics-based platformer Rocket: Robot on Wheels for Nintendo 64. It later entered into a publishing agreement with Sony and released the first Sly Cooper on PS2 in 2002, and the first Infamous on PS3 in 2009. Sony bought the studio outright a couple years later, and in 2020 it delivered Ghost of Tsushima, which catapulted it into the top tier of PlayStation studios.
While Sucker Punch didn’t come out and say it’s working on a sequel to Tsushima, it seems like a good bet considering the first one has sold over eight million copies and several LinkedIn pages and job postings have referenced an upcoming project with similar attributes. The bigger question is whether it will remain focused on a single-player narrative, or branch out even more deeply into multiplayer combat.
Ghost of Tsushima’s online mode called Legends added co-op quests, horde survival, and end-game raids. It was a cautious but successful initial foray into a new way to play the game, and something Sucker Punch might pivot to in the future. Earlier this year, following the announcement it was acquiring Destiny 2 maker Bungie, PlayStation laid out big plans for a raft of 10 new live-service games by 2026. A new online-only The Last of Us spin-off will be one of those. Time will tell if Ghost of Tsushima 2 ends up being another.
Clarification: 7/1/22, 4:36 p.m. ET: The online content being preserved in Infamous 2 is its community level editor, not a full multiplayer mode.
LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, has reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor to pay $1.8 million to female employees who the agency said received far less compensation than their male colleagues from 2015 to 2017, the department said on Tuesday.
According to a statement released by the agency, LinkedIn denied 686 women equal pay at its San Francisco office and at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. The women worked in engineering, marketing and product roles.
During a routine evaluation, the agency found that the women in question had been paid “at a statistically significant lower rate” than their male counterparts even after taking into account “legitimate explanatory factors,” according to the conciliation agreement between LinkedIn and the Labor Department.
“Our agreement will ensure that LinkedIn better understands its obligations as a federal contractor,” Jane Suhr, a regional director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, said in the agency’s statement.
In a statement on Tuesday, LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, denied that it discriminated against certain employees.
“While we have agreed to settle this matter, we do not agree with the government’s claim,” the statement said.
The settlement includes around $1.75 million in back pay and more than $50,000 in interest to be paid to the women, according to the conciliation agreement.
As part of the settlement, LinkedIn also agreed to send the agency reports over the next three years as it evaluates its compensation policies and makes salary adjustments, the Labor Department said. The company agreed to run an employee training program on “nondiscrimination obligations.”
LinkedIn reported that, last year, its female employees made $0.999 for every dollar its male employees earned. The company said on its website that it employed more than 19,000 people worldwide.
“LinkedIn pays and has paid its employees fairly and equitably when comparing similar work,” the company’s statement said.
Under a 1965 executive order, federal contractors, including LinkedIn, must provide “equal opportunity” to its employees and cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, gender identity or other factors.
In general, women in the United States have been paid less than men. In 2021, women working full time earned about 83 percent of what their male counterparts did, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January.
Tech companies have faced particular scrutiny over what critics say are failures to provide equal opportunities to women and people of color.
In February 2021, Google reached a $3.8 million settlement with the Labor Department amid accusations that it made hiring and compensation decisions that discriminated against female and Asian employees and applicants.
Under an agreement with state authorities in Rhode Island, Pinterest pledged $50 million in November 2021 to making reforms, in order to resolve allegations that it discriminated against women and people of color.
Did log4j, the buggy software utility from hell, get NASA’s experimental Mars helicopter hacked? The answer is: Nope—according to NASA, it doesn’t even use the doomed tool.
The Register originally reported that Ingenuity, one of two Mars-based vehicles operated by America’s space agency, uses log4j. In fact, Apache, the maker of the ubiquitous, vulnerability-ridden tool, apparently tweeted back in June that the space-chopper was “powered by” log4j. (File that under things that haven’t aged particularly well.) Predictably, the tweet has since been deleted but the Wayback Machine shows the evidence.
All that “powered by” business was apparently incorrect, with the company telling Futurism that it was “misinformed.”
Log4j, in case you’ve missed it, is a widely used Apache logging program that was recently discovered to be afflicted with serious security vulnerabilities that could easily get you hacked. It has been used by virtually everyone, from coders at Twitter and Apple to those at Amazon and LinkedIn. But not, apparently, the NASA engineers who built Ingenuity.
Ingenuity, which is the first man-made vehicle to fly on an alien planet, was launched last year and landed on Mars in March along with its partner, the Perseverance rover. The automated chopper recently took its 17th flight over the surface of the planet—breaking its previous record by staying aloft for a little over 30 minutes. However, while the flight was mostly a success, the vehicle temporarily disappeared from NASA’s view after suffering a minor network issue. “The rotorcraft’s status after the Dec. 5 flight was previously unconfirmed due to an unexpected cutoff to the in-flight data stream as the helicopter descended toward the surface at the conclusion of its flight,” the space agency reported, in a recent press release.
Ingenuity’s use of the unfortunate Apache utility, coupled with its recent unexpected data disruption, led some to wonder: Did Apache’s bug get NASA’s space chopper hacked?
Absolutely not, according to NASA, which told Futurism this in a statement: “NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter does not run Apache or log4j nor is it susceptible to the log4j vulnerability. NASA takes cybersecurity very seriously and, for this reason, we do not discuss specifics regarding the cybersecurity of agency assets.”
We’ve reached out to NASA for additional information and will update when we hear back.
That it was even plausible that Ingenuity could have used log4j (pronounced “log for j,” as in “log for Java,” according to its creator) more speaks to its ubiquity more than it does to some mystical off-world hacking incident. And, while the bug-ridden utility did not, according to NASA, have anything to do with Ingenuity, it’s still a huge problem. As companies throughout the world race to patch their systems, cybercriminals are hot on their heels—and are already beginning to cause substantial damage.
The Epic Log4j Bug Saga Continues
Case in point, ransomware gangs are now targeting log4j like there’s no tomorrow. It was reported earlier this week that a new ransomware family dubbed “Khonsari” had been going after vulnerable Microsoft computers to attempt exploits. Since then, we’ve also seen hackers affiliated with Conti, a well-known ransomware gang, begin targeting vulnerable systems. In fact, the gang may have just attacked McMenamins—the funky brewery/hotel/events franchise based in Portland, Oregon, which reported an attack Friday. Conti is only suspected at this point.
However, ransomware hackers aren’t the only kids on the block taking advantage of this situation. All kinds of exploitation attempts have been seen throughout the internet, with cybercriminals swarming around the vulnerabilities and trying everything from cryptomining to data theft to everything in between. Additionally, reports of state-backed hacking activities have also popped up, with reports that China, North Korea, Iran, and others, are all leveraging the vulnerabilities for their espionage activities.
Meanwhile, the federal government took emergency action on Friday to secure itself, issuing an order from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to all federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies that mandates they patch the Apache bug within the next six days. CISA director Jen Easterly urged all relevant agencies to “join us in this essential effort.”
Yes, it’s all pretty bad. Only time will tell how big the mess wrought by log4j is but don’t hold your breath. It’s going to take awhile to find out how screwed we all are.
SEATTLE — LinkedIn said on Thursday that it was shutting down its professional networking service in China later this year, citing “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements.”
The service, which is owned by Microsoft, said it would offer a new app focused solely on job postings in China. The new app will not have social networking features such as sharing posts and commenting, which have been critical to LinkedIn’s success in the United States and elsewhere.
LinkedIn’s move ends what had been one of the most far-reaching experiments by a foreign social network in China, where the internet is closely controlled by the government. Twitter and Facebook have been blocked in the country for years, and Google pulled out more than a decade ago. China’s internet, which operates behind a system of filters known as the Great Firewall, is heavily censored and has gone in its own direction.
When LinkedIn expanded in China in 2014 with a localized service, it offered a tentative model for other major foreign internet companies looking to tap the country’s huge, lucrative and highly censored market. The company partnered with a well-connected venture capital firm, which it said would help it with government relations.
But to do business in China, LinkedIn also agreed to censor the posts made by its millions of Chinese users in accordance with Chinese laws, something that other American companies were often reluctant or unable to do. Even in 2014, LinkedIn acknowledged the challenge, saying, “LinkedIn strongly supports freedom of expression and fundamentally disagrees with government censorship. At the same time, we also believe that LinkedIn’s absence in China would deny Chinese professionals a means to connect with others.”
Seven years on, it has become apparent the experiment did not work. No major internet platform has followed in LinkedIn’s footsteps. Its business in China struggled as it ran up against major local competitors and a population skeptical about publicly listing valuable contacts.
The operating environment in China has also become more difficult. Since President Xi Jinping took the reins of the Communist Party in 2012, he has repeatedly cracked down on what can be said online. Presiding over the rising power of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet regulator, Mr. Xi turned China’s internet from a place where some sensitive topics were censored to one where critics face arrests for a constantly shifting set of infractions, like jokes at Mr. Xi’s expense.
In March, the regulator rebuked LinkedIn for failing to control political content, three people briefed on the matter said at the time. Officials required LinkedIn to perform a self-evaluation and offer a report. The service was also forced to suspend new sign-ups of users inside China for 30 days.
The site also suffered as the U.S. relationship with China soured, with anger about LinkedIn’s complicity in China’s information controls rising in Washington. In recent months, after LinkedIn stopped displaying the profiles of several activists and journalists in China, American lawmakers criticized the company.
In one letter last month, Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, wrote to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, demanding to know why it had censored the accounts of three journalists. Mr. Scott called the censorship “gross appeasement and an act of submission to Communist China.”
LinkedIn’s business has also grown, with China contributing minimally. Since Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016, revenue from the business has tripled. Mr. Nadella told investors in July that LinkedIn’s revenue had surpassed $10 billion in annual sales, up 27 percent from the previous year.
LinkedIn declined to comment beyond its announcement.
While Microsoft has tried to build a market in China for more than a decade, it has had only modest success. Last year, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said the country accounted for less than 2 percent of its revenue.
Microsoft Windows and Office are common in China, but a large number are using pirated copies. The company has tried to overcome the issue, by hosting its software online and by tapping a major Chinese military contractor to help it offer an operating system better trusted by China’s government. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, one of China’s last remaining portals to the global internet, briefly appeared to have been blocked by government censors in 2019, even though the service directed users in China to state media accounts on disputed topics like the Dalai Lama.
It remains unclear precisely what will happen to the millions of Chinese user accounts on LinkedIn. In the past, when foreign internet firms have stopped offering locally censored services, their sites have been quickly blocked by the government.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
LinkedIn said it would shut the version of its professional-networking site that operates in China, marking the end of the last major American social-media network operating openly in the country.
LinkedIn, in a statement Thursday, said that it made the decision after “facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”
In March, China’s internet regulator told LinkedIn officials to better regulate its content and gave them 30 days to do so, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent months, LinkedIn notified several China-focused human-right activists, academics and journalists that their profiles were being blocked in China, saying they contained prohibited content.
LinkedIn said it would replace its Chinese service, which restricts some content to comply with local government demands, with a job-board service lacking social-media features, such as the ability to share opinions and news stories.
LinkedIn’s exit is the latest chapter in the struggle Western internet companies have faced operating in China, which has some of the world’s most stringent censorship rules.
Twitter Inc.
and
Facebook Inc.’s
platforms have been blocked since 2009.
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google left in 2010 after declining to censor results on its search engine. The chat messenger app Signal and audio discussion app Clubhouse were also blocked this year.
Cars today offer high-tech features and gather troves of data to train algorithms. As China steps up controls over new technologies, WSJ looks at the risks for Tesla and other global brands that are now required to keep data within the country. Screenshot: Tesla China
Savvy internet users in China can still access these Western services using workarounds such as virtual private networks, or VPNs, but many people don’t use them.
LinkedIn entered China in 2014 after making rare concessions to abide by local censorship rules. Microsoft agreed to buy the platform two years later. In 2014, then-LinkedIn boss
Jeff Weiner
said that while the company supported freedom of expression, offering a localized version of its service in China meant adhering to local censorship requirements—a view the company has since repeated.
In the Thursday statement, LinkedIn said that after seven years of operating in China it had “not found the same level of success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed.”
Microsoft has had a difficult relationship with China, where it battled for years against software piracy.
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Earlier this year, the software giant said a Chinese hacking group thought to have government backing was targeting previously unknown security flaws in an email product used by businesses. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is also available in China, drew controversy earlier this year after it blocked the iconic “Tank Man” image linked to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre not just in China, but also for its U.S. users. The company blamed “accidental human error” and restored the image.
LinkedIn was one of the few bright spots Microsoft had in China, with more than 50 million users in the country. Even so, the platform had come under greater scrutiny from regulators this year. In May, Microsoft was the only foreign firm among 105 apps called out by China’s internet regulator for “improper data collection,” with both LinkedIn and Bing named on the list.
Microsoft President
Brad Smith
told journalists in September that China accounted for less than 2% of the technology company’s revenue, and that percentage has been declining for the past few years.
China’s Corporate Crackdown
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com and Liza Lin at Liza.Lin@wsj.com
Salesforce made one of the biggest moves in the tech industry in light of a highly restrictive Texas abortion law on Friday. In a message to employees on Slack, the company said it would help them and their immediate families relocate if they are worried about access to reproductive healthcare in their state.
Although the message, which was obtained by CNBC, appeared not to single out Texas, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff later went on Twitter to explicitly say the company would help any employees move from the state. Nonetheless, CNBC reported that Salesforce did not take a stance on the law in its Slack message, emphasizing that it respected different views but also stood in solidarity with women.
“These are incredibly personal issues that directly impact many of us — especially women,” Salesforce said. “The company did not take a stance on the law. “We recognize and respect that we all have deeply held and different perspectives. As a company, we stand with all of our women at Salesforce and everywhere.”
Salesforce has offices in Dallas, according to its corporate website. A CNBC analysis of LinkedIn profiles found that about 2,000 people work for the company in Dallas.
Tech companies have come under scrutiny in recent weeks for their silence on the Texas abortion law. The law bans abortions after six weeks, a time when most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant, and allows individuals to sue anyone who helps women get an abortion after the authorized period.
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A small number of tech companies have spoken out or taken action, while others have had their views revealed by Texas politicians.
Uber and Lyft announced they would cover all legal fees for drivers sued for taking women to get abortions. Bumble said it was setting up a relief fund to finance organizations supporting women’s reproductive rights in the state. Meanwhile, Shar Dubey, the CEO of Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, said she was personally creating a fund that would help Match employees in Texas obtain abortions elsewhere.
GoDaddy, for its part, booted a site from its servers that aims to help Texas anonymously snitch on people who have abortions after six weeks or anyone who assists them.
Then you have Elon Musk, who heads Tesla and SpaceX. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in an interview that Musk liked the social policies in the state, which the CEO did not confirm or deny.
“In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness,” Musk tweeted. “That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.”
