Microsoft plans to shut down LinkedIn in China due to increased operating environment challenges and compliance requirements. In June, some academics in China had their LinkedIn accounts blocked due to "prohibited content."

• In September, U.S. journalists in China lost access to their accounts in the local version of LinkedIn, which the platform cited as prohibited content.
• LinkedIn plans to replace the local version of the platform with a job board without social media features.

Chinese businesses have collectively acquired ~$32B worth of chip manufacturing equipment over the last year, reports Bloomberg; an analysis of trade data shows firms increased spending by ~20 percent when compared with 2019; China also imported $380B worth of chips in 2020, equal to ~18 percent of the country’s total product imports for the year.

European tech companies are selling digital surveillance technology to China, according to rights group Amnesty International.

Amnesty's findings, published Monday, come ahead of negotiations this week in Brussels on European surveillance export rules, known as Recast Dual Use Regulation.

The research found that three companies in France, Sweden and the Netherlands sold surveillance tools including facial recognition technology and network cameras to Chinese security agencies.

In some cases, European technology is used in China’s indiscriminate mass surveillance programs, and may also be deployed to suppress Uighurs and other vulnerable minorities, according to the human rights group.

Over the years, Apple has made it prohibitively difficult to install unapproved software on its locked-down devices. But on Saturday, a hacker group called Unc0ver released a tool that will "jailbreak" all versions of iOS from 11 to 13.5. It's been years since a jailbreak has been available for a current version of iOS for more than a few days—making this yet another knock on Apple's faltering security image.

Unc0ver says that its jailbreak, which you can install using the longtime jailbreaking platforms AltStore and Cydia (but maybe don't unless you're absolutely sure you know what you're doing), is stable and doesn't drain battery life or prevent use of Apple services like iCloud, Apple Pay, or iMessage. And the group claims that it preserves Apple's user data protections and doesn't undermine iOS' sandbox security, which keeps programs running separately so they can't access data they shouldn't.

"This jailbreak basically just adds exceptions to the existing rules," Unc0ver's lead developer, who goes by Pwn20wnd, told WIRED. "It only enables reading new jailbreak files and parts of the file system that contain no user data."

China used locational and other data from hundreds of millions of smartphones to contain the spread of Covid-19, according to Chinese sources familiar with the program.

In addition to draconian quarantine procedures, which kept more than 150 million Chinese in place at the February peak of the coronavirus epidemic, China used sophisticated computational methods on a scale never attempted in the West.

With more than 80,000 cases registered, China reported only 126 new cases yesterday, compared to 851 in South Korea and 835 in Iran, out of a total of 1,969 new cases worldwide. Chinese sources emphasize that the artificial intelligence initiative supplemented basic public health measures, which centered on quarantines and aggressive efforts to convince Chinese citizens to change their behavior.

Chinese government algorithms can estimate the probability that a given neighborhood or even an individual has exposure to Covid-19 by matching the location of smartphones to known locations of infected individuals or groups. The authorities use this information to use limited medical resources more efficiently by, for example, directing tests for the virus to high-risk subjects identified by the artificial intelligence algorithm.

All smartphones with enabled GPS give telecom providers a precise record of the user’s itinerary. Smartphone users in the United States and Europe can access their own data, but privacy laws prevent the government from collecting this data. China has no such privacy constraints, and telecom providers have used locational data for years for advertising.

A Chinese bank executive reports that his company purchases locational data from telecom providers. “If you have walked by an auto dealership three times in the last few weeks, we send you a text advertising an auto loan,” the executive said. “We wouldn’t be allowed to do that in the West.

According to The Guardian, "China has ordered that all foreign computer equipment and software be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years, the Financial Times reports.

The government directive is likely to be a blow to US multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft and mirrors attempts by Washington to limit the use of Chinese technology, as the trade war between the countries turns into a tech cold war.

The Trump administration banned US companies from doing business with Chinese Chinese telecommunications company Huawei earlier this year and in May, Google, Intel and Qualcomm announced they would freeze cooperation with Huawei.

By excluding China from western know-how, the Trump administration has made it clear that the real battle is about which of the two economic superpowers has the technological edge for the next two decades.

This is the first known public directive from Beijing setting specific targets limiting China’s use of foreign technology, though it is part a wider move within China to increase its reliance on domestic technology.

The FT reported that the directive would result in an estimated 20m- to 30m pieces of hardware needing to be replaced and that this work would begin in 2020. Analysts told the FT that 30% of substitutions would take place in 2020, 50% in 2021 and 20% in 2022."

EBay, Stripe, Mastercard and Visa are all dropping out of Facebook’s libra cryptocurrency project, the companies announced Friday. The news comes one week after PayPal announced its withdrawal as government regulators continue to scrutinize the plans.

In statements following the news, the companies said they respect and see potential in the project, but have chosen to focus on other efforts. A Stripe spokesperson said in a statement that the company “is supportive of projects that aim to make online commerce more accessible for people around the world.” Stripe will “remain open to working with the Libra Association at a later stage,” the spokesperson said.

A Visa spokesperson said the company “will continue to evaluate and our ultimate decision will be determined by a number of factors, including the Association’s ability to fully satisfy all requisite regulatory expectations. Visa’s continued interest in Libra stems from our belief that well-regulated blockchain-based networks could extend the value of secure digital payments to a greater number of people and places, particularly in emerging and developing markets.”

The original coalition of 28 corporate backers of the libra cryptocurrency seems to be dwindling as lawmakers continue to question how it will impact sovereign currencies and how the project’s leaders can ensure consumers’ protection. Mercadopago and PayU are now the only two payments companies continuing to back the cryptocurrency as of Friday afternoon. Original backers Uber and Lyft told CNBC there has been no change to their involvement in the project.

The backers abandoning the project may have found safety in numbers after PayPal announced its exit last week. News that eBay, Stripe and Mastercard were each dropping out quickly followed one another Friday afternoon, indicating all three had likely been thinking about leaving during the same period. The decisions come ahead of a planned Libra Association Council meeting on Oct. 14. A week later, libra’s cryptocurrency project will take center stage in front of U.S. lawmakers once again when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of the House Financial Services Committee later this month.

David Marcus, who leads the libra project and was previously the president of PayPal, weighed in on Twitter hours after the announcements. He cautioned “against reading the fate of Libra into this update.”

Chinese state-sponsored group Hafnium reportedly used four zero-day flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server to infiltrate at least 30,000 organizations in the US.

A user of a low-level cybercriminal forum is selling access to a database of phone numbers belonging to Facebook users, and conveniently letting customers look up those numbers by using an automated Telegram bot.

Although the data is several years old, it still presents a cybersecurity and privacy risk to those whose phone numbers may be exposed—one person advertising the service says it contains data on 500 million users. Facebook told Motherboard the data relates to a vulnerability the company fixed in August 2019.

"It is very worrying to see a database of that size being sold in cybercrime communities, it harms our privacy severely and will certainly be used for smishing and other fraudulent activities by bad actors," Alon Gal, co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, and who first alerted Motherboard about the bot, said.

Upon launch, the Telegram bot says "The bot helps to find out the cellular phone numbers of Facebook users," according to Motherboard's tests. The bot lets users enter either a phone number to receive the corresponding user's Facebook ID, or visa versa. The initial results from the bot are redacted, but users can buy credits to reveal the full phone number. One credit is $20, with prices stretching up to $5,000 for 10,000 credits. The bot claims to contain information on Facebook users from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and 15 other countries.

A DANE, A Swede, a German and a Dutchman walk into a bar. It is 1979 and spooks from the four countries are conferring in Munich over dark and malty lagers. For years, they had co-operated in the business of signals intelligence, or SIGINT—intercepting messages and cracking codes—and wanted a name for their budding spy pact. “They looked at their glasses, filled with Doppelbock beer of the local brand Maximator,” writes Bart Jacobs, a Dutch computer-science professor, “and reached a decision”.

In a paper published last month, Mr Jacobs publicly revealed the existence of the Maximator alliance for the first time, to the considerable irritation of those who had kept it under wraps for decades. The group was formed in 1976, when Denmark joined forces with Germany and Sweden to intercept and decipher messages sent by satellites, a burgeoning method of communication. The Netherlands joined two years later, bringing its intercept stations in the Carribean to the table, and France in 1985. The group is alive and well today.

Maximator’s history is a fine illustration of the layers of chicanery involved in good cryptology. As well as plucking signals out of the ether, the group would swap details of weaknesses in cipher machines which encrypted diplomatic and military messages. Luckily for them, says Mr Jacobs, the companies that made those machines “were mostly controlled by Western intelligence organisations.” Crypto AG, a Swiss firm that dominated the global market, turns out to have been jointly owned by the CIA and its German counterpart, the BND. They would sell rigged machines to friends and enemies alike, including several NATO countries.

A century ago, a single square mile in the capital of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire was home to some of the most remarkable men of the 20th Century, as it played host to Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Tito, Sigmund Freud and Joseph Stalin.

The BBC telles us that "in January 1913, a man whose passport bore the name Stavros Papadopoulos disembarked from the Krakow train at Vienna's North Terminal station.

Of dark complexion, he sported a large peasant's moustache and carried a very basic wooden suitcase.

"I was sitting at the table," wrote the man he had come to meet, years later, "when the door opened with a knock and an unknown man entered.

"He was short... thin... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks... I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness."

The writer of these lines was a dissident Russian intellectual, the editor of a radical newspaper called Pravda (Truth). His name was Leon Trotsky.

The man he described was not, in fact, Papadopoulos.

He had been born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was known to his friends as Koba and is now remembered as Joseph Stalin.

Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century.

It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established.

The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practised on the city's Berggasse.

The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia's leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times.

Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler."

WhatsApp has filed a suit in federal court accusing Israeli mobile surveillance maker NSO Group of creating an exploit that was used hundreds of times to hack into target’s phone.

The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court, said the mobile surveillance outfit “developed their malware in order to access messages and other communications after they were decrypted” on target devices.

The attack worked by exploiting an audio-calling vulnerability in WhatsApp. Users may  appear to get an ordinary call, but the malware would quietly infect the device with spyware, giving the attackers full access to the device.

In some cases it happened so quickly, the target’s phone may not have rung at all.

Because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, it’s near-impossible to access the messages as they traverse the internet. But in recent years, governments and mobile spyware companies have begun targeting the devices where the messages were sent or received. The logic goes that if you hack the device, you can obtain its data.

That’s what WhatsApp says happened.

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, quickly patched the vulnerability. Although blame fell fast on NSO Group, WhatsApp did not publicly accuse the company at the time — until now.

In an op-ed posted shortly after the suit was filed, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said the messaging giant “learned that the attackers used servers and Internet-hosting services that were previously associated” with NSO Group, and that certain WhatsApp accounts used during the attacks were traced back to the company.

“While their attack was highly sophisticated, their attempts to cover their tracks were not entirely successful,” said Cathcart.

The attack involved disguising the malicious code as call settings, allowing the surveillance outfit to deliver the code as if it came from WhatsApp’s signaling servers. Once the malicious calls were delivered to the target’s phone, they “injected the malicious code into the memory of the target device — even when the target did not answer the call,” the complaint read. When the code was run, it sent a request to the surveillance company’s servers, and downloaded additional malware to the target’s device.

In total, some 1,400 targeted devices were affected by the exploit, the lawsuit said.

Most people were unaffected by the WhatsApp exploit. But WhatsApp said that more than 100 human rights defenders, journalists and “other members of civil society” were targeted by the attack.

Other targets included government officials and diplomats.

In a statement, NSO Group said: “In the strongest possible terms, we dispute today’s allegations and will vigorously fight them.”

PayPal is withdrawing from Facebook’s Libra Association, the company announced Friday.

“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations,” PayPal said in a statement.

David Marcus, who leads the project at Facebook, was previously the president of PayPal. PayPal said it is still “supportive of Libra’s aspirations” and that it will continue to partner with Facebook in the future.

Dante Disparte, head of policy and communications for the Libra Association, said in an emailed statement, “We recognize that change is hard, and that each organization that started this journey will have to make its own assessment of risks and rewards of being committed to seeing through the change that Libra promises.”

Libra was greeted with widespread criticism after the cryptocurrency was announced in June. Facebook’s involvement caught the attention of senior congressional finance committee members, global regulators, former lawmakers and industry insiders who questioned Facebook’s motives.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said this summer that libra raises “serious concerns regarding privacy, money laundering, consumer protection, financial stability” and the Fed had launched a working group to examine it.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, told CNBC in June that “it’s very important for them to stop right now what they’re doing so that we can get a handle on this” and Congress would “move aggressively” to deal with it.

Facebook has tried to mitigate lawmakers’ fears of libra in part by assuring them that Facebook would not have unilateral control of the currency.

The Libra Association had been made up of 28 corporate backers, including Facebook, who are meant to help govern libra. All founding members were expected to invest a minimum of $10 million to fund the operating costs of the association and launch an incentive program to drive adoption, according to Facebook’s initial announcement of the project, but those investments had not yet been made.

PayPal’s public defection could indicate the alliance is starting to fray.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Visa, Mastercard and other financial partners that signed on are “reconsidering” involvement following a backlash from government officials.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Tex., a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said on a call with reporters Friday that PayPal’s decision to back out is “a clear indication that something’s amiss.” Garcia said she already had concerns about the members of the association, since Facebook seemed to be able to select its founding members.

“If I’m doing the inviting, then that’s controlling the entire agenda,” she said.

Lawmakers in the House Financial Services Committee are now seeking to bring Facebook’s top executives back to Capitol Hill to testify on libra, CNBC reported Friday. Two sources familiar with the situation told CNBC that the committee has been in talks with Facebook about bringing COO Sheryl Sandberg to testify this month, but that the hearing would be contingent on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s agreement to appear before the committee.