Long-time Slashdot reader tinskip shares a report from BleepingComputer: Nickolas Sharp, a former employee of networking device maker Ubiquiti, was arrested and charged today with data theft and attempting to extort his employer while posing as a whistleblower and an anonymous hacker. "As alleged, Nickolas Sharp exploited his access as a trusted insider to steal gigabytes of confidential data from his employer, then, posing as an anonymous hacker, sent the company a nearly $2 million ransom demand," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said today. "As further alleged, after the FBI searched his home in connection with the theft, Sharp, now posing as an anonymous company whistleblower, planted damaging news stories falsely claiming the theft had been by a hacker enabled by a vulnerability in the company's computer systems."

According to the indictment (PDF), Sharp stole gigabytes of confidential data from Ubiquiti's AWS (on December 10, 2020) and GitHub (on December 21 and 22, 2020) infrastructure using his cloud administrator credentials, cloning hundreds of GitHub repositories over SSH. Throughout this process, the defendant tried hiding his home IP address using Surfshark's VPN services. However, his actual location was exposed after a temporary Internet outage. To hide his malicious activity, Sharp also altered log retention policies and other files that would have exposed his identity during the subsequent incident investigation. "Among other things, SHARP applied one-day lifecycle retention policies to certain logs on AWS which would have the effect of deleting certain evidence of the intruder's activity within one day," the court documents read.

After Ubiquiti disclosed a security incident in January following Sharp's data theft, while working to assess the scope and remediate the security breach effects he also tried extorting the company (posing as an anonymous hacker). His ransom note demanded almost $2 million in exchange for returning the stolen files and the identification of a remaining vulnerability. The company refused to pay the ransom and, instead, found and removed a second backdoor from its systems, changed all employee credentials, and issued the January 11 security breach notification. After his extortion attempts failed, Sharp shared information with the media while pretending to be a whistleblower and accusing the company of downplaying the incident. This caused Ubiquiti's stock price to fall by roughly 20%, from $349 on March 30 to $290 on April 1, amounting to losses of over $4 billion in market capitalization.

mrflash818 shares a report from PCMag: To avoid a lawsuit, Donald Trump's social media site is quietly acknowledging the computer code powering the platform comes from Mastodon. Trump's "Truth Social" site now features a dedicated section labeled "open source," which contains a Zip archive to Mastodon's source code. "Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That's why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not 'Big Tech,'" the site adds. Truth Social created the section on Nov. 12, two weeks after social networking provider Mastodon threatened to sue Trump's platform for violating its open-source license.

Since Mastodon is an open-source software project, anyone can use it for free. But if you do, the software license demands the code and any ensuing modifications to your Mastodon-powered platform be made publicly available, allowing the entire Mastodon community to benefit. (This doesn't include publishing any user data or disclosing admin access, though.) [...] However, it appears the uploaded Zip archive is simply a barebones version of the existing Mastodon source code you can already find on GitHub. The archive itself is only a mere 30MB in size. Nevertheless, Rochko said the Zip archive might "become more interesting" once Truth Social finally launches.

Thousands of networking devices belonging to AT&T Internet subscribers in the US have been infected with newly discovered malware that allows the devices to be used in denial-of-service attacks and attacks on internal networks, researchers said on Tuesday. From a report: The device model under attack is the EdgeMarc Enterprise Session Border Controller, an appliance used by small- to medium-sized enterprises to secure and manage phone calls, video conferencing, and similar real-time communications. As the bridge between enterprises and their ISPs, session border controllers have access to ample amounts of bandwidth and can access potentially sensitive information, making them ideal for distributed denial of service attacks and for harvesting data.

Researchers from Qihoo 360 in China said they recently spotted a previously unknown botnet and managed to infiltrate one of its command-and-control servers during a three-hour span before they lost access. "However, during this brief observation, we confirmed that the attacked devices were EdgeMarc Enterprise Session Border Controller, belonging to the telecom company AT&T, and that all 5.7k active victims that we saw during the short time window were all geographically located in the US," Qihoo 360 researchers Alex Turing and Hui Wang wrote. They said they have detected more than 100,000 devices accessing the same TLS certificate used by the infected controllers, an indication that the pool of affected devices may be much bigger. "We are not sure how many devices corresponding to these IPs could be infected, but we can speculate that as they belong to the same class of devices the possible impact is real," they added.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has agreed for the first time to testify before Congress, as bipartisan anger mounts over harms to young people from the app. From a report: Mr. Mosseri is expected to appear before a Senate panel during the week of Dec. 6 as part of a series of hearings on protecting children online, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, who will lead the hearing. Mr. Mosseri's appearance follows hearings this year with Antigone Davis, the global head of safety for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, and with Frances Haugen, a former employee turned whistle-blower. Ms. Haugen's revelations about the social networking company, particularly those about Facebook and Instagram's research into its effects on some teenagers and young girls, have spurred criticism, inquiries from politicians and investigations from regulators.

In September, Ms. Davis told Congress that the company disputed the premise that Instagram was harmful for teenagers and noted that the leaked research did not have causal data. But after Ms. Haugen's testimony last month, Mr. Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, suggesting that his company had "provided false or inaccurate testimony to me regarding attempts to internally conceal its research." Mr. Blumenthal asked that Mr. Zuckerberg or Mr. Mosseri testify in front of the consumer protection subcommittee of the Senate's Commerce Committee to set the record straight.

China is accelerating plans to replace American and foreign technology, quietly empowering a secretive government-backed organization to vet and approve local suppliers in sensitive areas from cloud to semiconductors, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From a report: Formed in 2016 to advise the government, the Information Technology Application Innovation Working Committee has now been entrusted by Beijing to help set industry standards and train personnel to operate trusted software. The quasi-government body will devise and execute the so-called "IT Application Innovation" plan, better known as Xinchuang in Chinese. It will choose from a basket of suppliers vetted under the plan to provide technology for sensitive sectors from banking to data centers storing government data, a market that could be worth $125 billion by 2025.

So far, 1,800 Chinese suppliers of PCs, chips, networking and software have been invited to join the committee, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. The organization has so far certified hundreds of local companies this year as committee members, the fastest pace in years, one of the people said. The existence of the Xinchuang white-list, whose members and over-arching goals haven't been previously reported, is likely to inflame tensions just as Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping wrapped up their first face-to-face virtual summit. It gives Beijing more leverage to replace foreign tech firms in sensitive sectors and quickens a push to help local champions achieve tech self-sufficiency and overcome sanctions first imposed by the Trump administration in fields like networking and chips.

HPE has confirmed that a "limited subset" of customer data was taken in a data breach involving its subsidiary Aruba Networks, a maker of networking equipment. From a report: The enterprise technology giant said in a statement that an unauthorized person used a private key to gain access to customer data stored in its Aruba Central cloud. HPE did not say how the hacker obtained the private key, but said the key allowed access to cloud servers in multiple regions where customer data was stored. HPE bought Aruba Networks in 2015 for $3 billion in cash. Aruba provides networking gear, like wireless access points, and network security for companies. Through its dashboard, Aruba Central, companies can centrally monitor and manage their Wi-Fi networks. It's the Wi-Fi data collected in Aruba Central that HPE said was compromised. HPE said two datasets were exposed: one for network analytics containing information about devices accessing a customer's Wi-Fi network, and a second dataset containing location data about devices on the network.

Coinbase Global is adding a slew of social-networking capabilities, one of which will make it easier for traders to share information about their allocations on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. From a report: The biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange said Friday it's adding a Share button that will let traders detail what coins they own on social networks. More ways of sharing data about trades are in the works as well, the company said in a blog. The effort is likely aimed at harnessing word of mouth about crypto investing to attract more users. Coinbase said this week that its monthly transacting users had decreased sequentially in the third quarter. At the same time, the firm boosted its recurring-user forecast for the full year.

Amazon plans to launch its first prototype broadband satellites in Q4 2022, which would be nearly four years after SpaceX launched its first prototype Starlink satellites. Ars Technica reports: "This morning, we filed an experimental license application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch, deploy, and operate two prototype satellites for Project Kuiper," Amazon said in a blog post. "These satellites -- KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 -- are an important step in the development process. They allow us to test the communications and networking technology that will be used in our final satellite design, and help us validate launch operations and mission management procedures that will be used when deploying our full constellation."

Amazon said it will launch the satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on ABL Space Systems' RS1 rocket, as part of a multilaunch deal the companies announced today. Amazon's prototype satellites will operate at an altitude of 590 km. "While operating under the experimental license, the KuiperSats will communicate with TT&C [telemetry, tracking, and control] Earth stations in South America, the Asia-Pacific region, and McCulloch, Texas, as well as with customer terminal units and a single gateway Earth station located in McCulloch, Texas," Amazon told the FCC.

ISayWeOnlyToBePolite writes: The new social network founded by former President Trump may violate the terms of use of the software on which it is based. On Wednesday night, after Trump revealed the TRUTH social app, Twitter users began to note that the network appeared to be based on an open-source social networking software called Mastodon, which allows people to modify the underlying code so long as they abide by its license. But the Trump network appears to have taken the publicly available code for the website while violating the terms that make it free to use.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told TPM in an email that TRUTH appeared to violate the terms of use that the software sets forth: making the source code available, and having a copy of the general product license available to users. "I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation though," Rochko told TPM, while declining to discuss any specific legal action he may be contemplating. "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free," Rochko added.

The AGPL license mandates that software developed for free -- like Mastodon -- remain publicly available after its been modified. Under the license, TRUTH needs to share any modifications to Mastodon's code. The requirement allows developers to remain aware of how the software is being used so long as its run on public servers, continuing the chain by which different open-source developers continue to work on and further modify code that's been created. Former President Trump announced plans to launch the social media platform yesterday, saying his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise. TRUTH social will be open to "invited users" for a beta launch in November, with plans for it to launch publicly beginning early next year.

With that said, the "invite only" system has already run into some problems, according to Slashdot reader slack_justyb. Some users were able to sign up to create accounts using a publicly available link, allowing them to generate their own handles, like @donaldtrump.

The networking giant says it has turned a corner in its attempt to adapt to the cloud era. From a report: Cisco is hardly a failure. It produces billions of dollars in annual profits and is generally regarded as stable and well-run. But investors feared that its steady operations could lead to a slow-motion descent into obsolescence in an industry that can be brutal to anyone who falls a half-step behind. The best example of a tech giant stumbling then regaining its dominance is probably Microsoft, and analysts regularly hold it up as a role model for Cisco. Microsoft's decline, which began about the same time as Cisco's, was largely the result of a progression of disappointing products. That began to change in 2014, when new Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella started selling tons of copies of popular software such as Excel and Word as subscription services rather than one-time purchase products and built a formidable cloud computing division. Microsoft is now the only U.S. company other than Apple with a market value of more than $2 trillion.

Chuck Robbins has held his job as Cisco's CEO just one year less than Nadella. In recent months, he's begun to insist that his company has finally reached its inflection point. Cisco acknowledged years ago that it had failed to capitalize on the chance to build the initial infrastructure for cloud computing, says Robbins, and responded with a significant, if slow-developing, overhaul of its strategy. "We were going to build technology for the next transition," he says. "We did that. Now we're seeing the benefit." Cisco's initial problem was partially a lack of flexibility. When Amazon, Google, and Microsoft began building cloud computing data centers, they wanted components, software, and machines that were tailored to their needs. Cisco insisted on selling the same expensive, uncustomizable equipment that was always the core of its business. The burgeoning cloud companies were only too happy to take their business elsewhere. Robbins can point to significant changes during his six-year tenure. Cisco has made a string of acquisitions that have turned it into one of the top 10 software companies in the world by revenue. Software and services have surpassed hardware and now make up more than half of Cisco's revenue. Its expected future revenue for outstanding fees from these products totals $30 billion.

A coalition of nonprofits on Wednesday debuted HowToStopFacebook.org, a fresh push to encourage greater government regulation of the social networking giant aimed at forcing the company to change its business model. From a report: The campaign hopes to take the outrage expressed by legislators over the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen and translate it into action. The campaign is pushing for two goals: A Congressional investigation with subpoena power into harms caused by Facebook; and a strong federal data privacy law that makes it illegal for companies like Facebook and YouTube to collect the vast amounts of data they use to personalize recommendations. The more than 30 groups involved include Accountable Tech, Article 19, Center for Digital Democracy, Fairplay, Global Voices, Media Justice, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Presente, Public Knowledge, United We Dream, Ranking Digital Rights, SumOfUs, Win Without War, and the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center.

Microsoft said its Azure cloud service mitigated a 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps) distributed denial of service attack this year, at the end of August, representing the largest DDoS attack recorded to date. From a report: Amir Dahan, Senior Program Manager for Azure Networking, said the attack was carried out using a botnet of approximately 70,000 bots primarily located across the Asia-Pacific region, such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as the United States. Dahan identified the target of the attack only as "an Azure customer in Europe."

The Microsoft exec said the record-breaking DDoS attack came in three short waves, in the span of ten minutes, with the first at 2.4 Tbps, the second at 0.55 Tbps, and the third at 1.7 Tbps. Dahan said Microsoft successfully mitigated the attack without Azure going down. Prior to Microsoft's disclosure today, the previous DDoS record was held by a 2.3 Tbps attack that Amazon's AWS division mitigated in February 2020.

A developer who made a tool that let people automatically unfollow friends and groups on Facebook says he's been banned permanently from the social networking site. From a report: Louis Barclay was the creator of "Unfollow Everything," a browser extension that allowed Facebook users to essentially delete their News Feed by unfollowing all their connections at once. Facebook allows users to individually unfollow friends, groups, and pages, which removes their content from the News Feed, the algorithmically-controlled heart of Facebook. Barclay's tool automated this process, instantly wiping users' News Feed.

[...] In response, Facebook sent Barclay a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year, saying he'd violated the site's terms of service by creating software that automated user interactions. Barclay says the company then "permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts" and "demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Outsiders have long profited from Africa's riches of gold, diamonds, and even people. Digital resources have proven no different. Millions of internet addresses assigned to Africa have been waylaid, some fraudulently, including through insider machinations linked to a former top employee of the nonprofit that assigns the continent's addresses. Instead of serving Africa's internet development, many have benefited spammers and scammers, while others satiate Chinese appetites for pornography and gambling. New leadership at the nonprofit, AFRINIC, is working to reclaim the lost addresses. But a legal challenge by a deep-pocketed Chinese businessman is threatening the body's very existence. The businessman is Lu Heng, a Hong Kong-based arbitrage specialist. Under contested circumstances, he obtained 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. That's about 5% of the continent's total -- more than Kenya has.

The internet service providers and others to whom AFRINIC assigns IP address blocks aren't purchasing them. They pay membership fees to cover administrative costs that are intentionally kept low. That left lots of room, though, for graft. When AFRINIC revoked Lu's addresses, now worth about $150 million, he fought back. His lawyers in late July persuaded a judge in Mauritius, where AFRICNIC is based, to freeze its bank accounts. His company also filed a $80 million defamation claim against AFRINIC and its new CEO. It's a shock to the global networking community, which has long considered the internet as technological scaffolding for advancing society. Some worry it could undermine the entire numerical address system that makes the internet work.

Car buyers are discovering that supply chain constraints "have thrusted prices upwards considerably for new and used vehicles alike," notes Jalopnik.

But while last month Fortune ran an article headlined "Chipmakers to carmakers: Time to get out of the semiconductor Stone Age," Jalopnik argues it's not that simple. The implication here is that the auto industry is far too reliant on archaic tech that isn't applicable to other consumer tech fields. It's now finally reckoning with its reluctance to change, and only a fool would invest in shops to pump out the outdated silicon cars require. But is that a fair assessment? As Fortune notes in its own piece, there are reasons why carmakers — some of the largest corporations in the world — choose the chips they do. The comparison to smartphones is moot... The potential ramifications of a glitch in a metal box traveling at many miles per hour are a little more severe. That's especially true if you're talking about modern vehicles with driver-assist functions...

I asked some auto industry veterans to weigh in... What automakers require is somewhat at odds with what chipmakers prefer and are tooled to produce: smaller, more densely packed chips, that can be manufactured at lower cost and yield more units.... However, to suggest as [Intel CEO] Gelsinger did that the burden to adapt should fall squarely on automakers simplifies the issue. General purpose chipmakers don't seem to grasp the unique challenges of the automotive sector — something that became clear to me after chatting with Jon M. Quigley, Society of Automotive Engineers member and columnist at Automotive Industries. "Qualifying a product, specifically testing activities, are costly and requires time, talent, and equipment," Quigley said. "Some of the test equipment requirements are expensive and often not on hand at the OEM but will require an external lab, and booking time at this lab can be a long lead time activity, and is necessary for certain product certifications. Depending upon the vehicle system commonality, this testing might have to be performed on multiple vehicle platforms. Making changes to an existing product, changing an integrated circuit that only has the difference in the manufacturing processes would still require this sort of testing. Unless there are some compelling associated cost improvements to recoup the investment, this is not very plausible."

It's easy for those of us on the outside to miss the many steps of validation automotive components are required to go through before they end up in what we drive. Ultimately, carmakers don't care how small or new a chip is; all that matters is that it works for its intended purpose and is properly vetted... Chipmakers want as much miniaturization as possible to maximize production efficiency, automakers need significant lead time to make sure a chip will work for them. Each industry has reasons for operating the way it does. That doesn't change the fact that someone's going to have to budge to address this shortfall....

Over time, the transition to newer technology may naturally happen, but certainly not quickly enough to Band-Aid the snags of the present moment. That doesn't give anyone a single, solitary scapegoat, and it's not the easy answer anyone likely wants to hear — not prospective shoppers, not automakers and not the CEO of Intel. But it's the most realistic answer nonetheless.
In the meantime, one analyst that Jalopnik spoke to predicted automakers will try strategic partnerships with chipmakers — that is, "find ways to own or control more of the chip supply base going forward by partnering with ASIC design companies who do similar design service for networking companies."

"The global semiconductor shortage that has paralyzed automakers for nearly a year shows signs of worsening," reports the Washington Post, "as new coronavirus infections halt chip assembly lines in Southeast Asia, forcing more car companies and electronics manufacturers to suspend production." A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips...

Demand for the components is soaring as more consumer goods become computerized, but supply is scarce because semiconductor factories are extremely expensive and time-consuming to build... The debacle is likely to cost the auto industry $450 billion in global sales from the start of the crisis through the end of 2022, according to Seraph Consulting. Martin Daum, chief executive of the Daimler AG division that makes trucks and buses, described the problem as intensifying. "Until the second quarter we were able to manage the situation quite well at Daimler Truck," Daum said Wednesday. "But since summer the semiconductor situation has worsened for us. Our production in Germany and the U.S. was affected, which led to a situation in which we could deliver fewer vehicles to our customers."

Even automakers such as Toyota and Hyundai, which planned for potential shortages and initially managed to avoid crippling shutdowns, are starting to encounter problems. Toyota this month was forced to slash production at 14 factories in Japan over a lack of semiconductors. Some of the cuts will continue into October due to a lack of components from Southeast Asia, Toyota has said. Ford and General Motors in recent months have been suspending production for weeks at a time at more than a dozen North American factories... [T]he problem is hurting industries beyond autos. "This is having an impact all across the economy, with automobiles, yes, but even beyond that, into medical devices, networking equipment — we're hearing regularly from companies that cannot get the supply they need," one of the Biden administration officials said...

Some chipmakers have taken steps to help auto manufacturers. Taiwan's TSMC, which produces a type of chip called a microcontroller that is widely used by automakers, said it is increasing output of the components by 60 percent this year compared with 2020. GlobalFoundries is adding manufacturing equipment to a factory near Albany, N.Y., to increase output for all types of chips, and recently broke ground on a $4 billion expansion of its factory in Singapore, with financial support from the Singaporean government. Globally, chip factories have increased their production capacity by 8 percent since early 2020 and plan to boost it by over 16 percent by the end of 2022, according to the U.S.-based Semiconductor Industry Association. Global spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is likely to grow by more than 30 percent this year to $85 billion, showing that chipmakers are expanding production, according to C.J. Muse, a semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI.

But that comes after chip companies had "underinvested over the last five years," he said...

Intel on Friday will break ground on two new chip factories in Arizona, on which it plans to spend $20 billion.

The British government is preparing to launch a full-scale policy assault against Facebook as the company gears up to introduce end-to-end encryption across all of its services. The Register reports: Prominent in details briefed to the news media this week (including The Register) were accusations that Facebook harbours paedophiles, terrorists, and mobsters and that British police forces would effectively be blinded to the scale of criminality on the social networking platform, save for cases where crimes are reported. It's a difficult and nuanced topic made no simpler or easier by the fact that government officials seem hellbent on painting it in black and white.

Government and law enforcement officials who briefed the press on condition of anonymity earlier this week* sought to paint a picture of the internet going dark if Facebook's plans for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) went forward, in terms familiar to anyone who remembers how Western nation states defended themselves from public upset after former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations of illegal mass surveillance. The US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) generates around 20 million reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) every year, of which 70 per cent would be "lost" if E2E encryption were put in place, claimed British officials.

The government's long-signaled push to deter Facebook from implementing E2EE comes, inevitably, at a significant cost to taxpayers: London ad agency M&C Saatchi has been hired at an undisclosed cost by the Home Office to tell the public that Facebook (and WhatsApp) harbours criminals. The ad campaign will run online, in newspapers and on radio stations with the aim of turning public opinion against E2EE -- and, presumably, driving home the message that encryption itself is something inherently bad. Other announcements due this week, from notoriously anti-encryption Home Secretary Priti Patel and intergovernmental meetings, will explicitly condemn Facebook's contemplated rollout of E2EE.

Twitter debuted a new product called Safety Mode that will automatically block users who are being aggressive or hateful toward another person in an effort to help reduce harassment. From a report: The social networking company said it will use automated technology to look at the content of a tweet and "the relationship between the Tweet author and replier" to determine if a block is warranted. Twitter previously introduced the feature during an Analyst Day presentation in February. If the company detects that one user is "using potentially harmful language -- such as insults or hateful remarks -- or sending repetitive and uninvited replies or mentions," it will automatically block the offending user on behalf of the targeted person, Twitter said Wednesday in a blog post. Automatic blocks last for seven days. The goal is to stop "overwhelming and unwelcome interactions that can interrupt" a user's experience, the company said in the post.

Since early in the pandemic, soaring demand for consumer electronics led to persistent chip shortages. Some recent signs suggest the situation may finally be starting to change. From a report: An executive at the memory chip maker Micron Technology said last week at an investor conference that demand for consumer PCs is slowing and that some of its customers have more chips lying around. A day later, Morgan Stanley downgraded several chip stocks in a note titled "Winter is Coming." The analysts said PC inventory is rising and that the smartphone market is likely to experience similar deterioration. An old investor maxim says technology companies tend to handily outperform during cyclical upswings while the reverse is true on the downside. Well, the industry is beginning to fall short of estimates.

Global PC shipments grew by 13% in the second quarter, according to research firm IDC. That was below Evercore ISI's expectation of 18% and a big deceleration from the 55% rise in the first quarter. Furthermore, wireless router manufacturer Netgear Inc. gave disappointing guidance last month, adding that sales were worse-than-expected in its consumer networking category. Still, it's probably too soon to declare an end. Outbreaks of the delta variant and the long-term efficacy of vaccines make predictions even harder than usual. Some chip analysts have said reports of weakness are primarily seasonal and that sales will pick up through next year. Shortages also vary by part. So even if you can walk into a store and find plenty of laptops, you'll still struggle to get a new car or a video game console.

In some cases, chip delivery times are longer than 20 weeks, the longest wait in at least four years. But as I wrote last month, the pandemic rush to computers and printers won't repeat itself. Once a worker or student buys a laptop, they don't need another one for several years. Retailers are offering extensive discounts on nearly every PC-related category, with the exception of graphics cards. (It's still a good time to be in the games business.) The waning demand for PCs will likely last for at least several more quarters.

There is a corner of LinkedIn free from humble brags, self-promotion, thought leadership and strict decorum. You just need to connect with a zoomer. Although LinkedIn is not a popular online hangout for Generation Z, some of their most viral posts are parodies of LinkedIn itself. From a report: Shiv Sharma graduated from the University of Southern California last year, according to his LinkedIn. A few months ago, he updated his profile listing himself as the assistant chef at the fictional restaurant from Sponge Bob Square Pants. "I have accepted an offer to work for The Krusty Krab Restaurant as part of their Entry Level Chef Program in Bikini Bottom," he wrote. The post garnered more than 5,000 reactions and dozens of comments. Harry Tong is a software development intern at a tech company. But, according to a popular post on his profile: "I am officially the CEO of a BILLION dollar company," he wrote. "For my series Z, my mom invested $10 for 0.000001% of my company, giving it a $1 billion valuation."

This subculture of subversion on LinkedIn has inspired countless TikTok videos, a Twitter account called @LinkedinFlex and a devoted Reddit community called LinkedInLunatics. The memes reflect the weariness people feel toward the site -- "primarily a place for bragging," said Jake Zhang, a Toronto-based college student. "People tell stories about how their entire lives have built up to this one moment of getting a job or a promotion, or experts claim they'll change your life with a piece of advice," Tong said. "And I'm just here to poke at the facade a little bit." Most young people treat LinkedIn as a "purely transactional job hunting tool" to be used sparingly, said AJ Wilcox, founder of B2Linked, an advertising agency that specializes in the Microsoft Corp.-owned professional networking site. Maintaining a profile is a "necessary evil," Zhang said. "Everyone I know creates an account due to school or peer pressure," Zhang said. "We use it because there's no alternative for job hunting. But with all the toxic content and bragging, no one I know really likes it." Which is what makes the parodies on LinkedIn so interesting. Most people wouldn't put a joke on their resume. The posts are a byproduct of a generation that lives fearlessly on the internet, eager to entertain and call out any whiff of inauthenticity.