The ratio of vacant U.S. jobs to jobless workers "has fallen from a record of 2 in 2022 to 1.1 in November," reports the Wall Street Journal — which adds that "the balance of power between employers and employees has shifted as the labor market has gone from white-hot to merely solid."

JP Morgan's five-days-a-week return-to-office mandate was only the beginning, with big companies like Amazon and Dell "tightening remote-work policies, shrinking travel budgets and cutting back on benefits... Companies are slashing perks such as college-tuition assistance and time off for a sick pet... " 76% of [U.S.] job growth in the past year has been in healthcare and education, leisure and hospitality, and government. In fields such as finance, information, and professional and business services, job growth has been far weaker. While a shift in leverage to employers might have shown up in layoffs or wage cuts in the past, now it is more subtle, often in changes to working conditions. For example, knowing that some workers will quit rather than return to the office, some companies are ending remote work as a way of trimming payroll. "Quiet quitting" — workers who slacked off rather than quit — has been replaced by "quiet cutting" — employers who cut jobs without actually announcing job cuts...

Michael Gibbs, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, said the new mandates might simply be a message to workers that times have changed. "Firms are trying to reset expectations," he said... [After refusing her employers return-to-office four-days-a-week mandate, Mayrian] Sanz, who now works as an independent business and leadership coach, said she applied for 25 to 30 jobs listed as remote but initially got no responses. When some hiring managers finally replied, they had a surprise: Jobs listed as remote would now be in-office. "They just say everything is shifting to going back to the office," she said.

Among tech workers, the share receiving perks such as paid volunteer hours, college-tuition reimbursement, free financial advice and mental-health programs all declined by about 4 percentage points in 2024 from 2023, according to Dice, a technology job board. Average bonuses fell by more than $800, from $15,011 to $14,194. Meanwhile, Netflix has quietly backed off from its unlimited parental leave in a child's first year, The Wall Street Journal reported last month. A company spokesman said at that time that employees have the freedom and flexibility to determine what is best for them.
The article notes that "The actual impact of return-to-office directives remains to be seen," with economists "skeptical" the directives make companies more productive and faster-growing: Many workers now being called in were already spending some time in their cubicles. Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, said most of the benefits of collaboration can be achieved with just a few days in the office, while some tasks that require concentration are better done at home.
Elsewhere the Wall Street Journal that looking for a job "is set to get less miserable this year," since roughly two-thirds of U.S. employers plan to add permanent roles within the next six months, "according to a new survey by staffing and consulting firm Robert Half."

And Computerworld notes that the IT unemployment rate is now just 2% in the U.S. (according to official figures from the US Bureau of Labor statistics).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Toyota Motor unit Hino Motors has agreed a $1.6 billion settlement with U.S. agencies and will plead guilty over excess diesel engine emissions in more than 105,000 U.S. vehicles, the company and U.S. government said on Wednesday. The Japanese truck and engine manufacturer was charged with fraud in U.S. District Court in Detroit for unlawfully selling 105,000 heavy-duty diesel engines in the United States from 2010 through 2022 that did not meet emissions standards. The settlement, which still must be approved by a U.S. judge, includes a criminal penalty of $521.76 million, $442.5 million in civil penalties to U.S. authorities and $236.5 million to California.

A company-commissioned panel said in a report in 2022 Hino had falsified emissions data on some engines going back to at least 2003. Hino agreed to plead guilty to engaging in a multi-year criminal conspiracy and serve a five-year term of probation, during which it will be barred from importing any diesel engines it has manufactured into the U.S., and carry out a comprehensive compliance and ethics program, the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency said. [...] The settlement includes a mitigation program, valued at $155 million, to offset excess air emissions from the violations by replacing marine and locomotive engines, and a recall program, valued at $144.2 million, to fix engines in 2017-2019 heavy-duty trucks

The EPA said Hino admitted that between 2010 and 2019, it submitted false applications for engine certification approvals and altered emission test data, conducted tests improperly and fabricated data without conducting any underlying tests. Hino President Satoshi Ogiso said the company had improved its internal culture, oversight and compliance practices. "This resolution is a significant milestone toward resolving legacy issues that we have worked hard to ensure are no longer a part of Hino's operations or culture," he said in a statement. Toyota's Hino Motors isn't the only automaker to admit to selling vehicles with excess diesel emissions. Volkswagen had to pay billions in fines after it admitted in 2015 to cheating emissions tests by installing "defeat devices" and sophisticated software in nearly 11 million vehicles worldwide. Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), BMW, Opel/Vauxhall (General Motors), and Fiat Chrysler have been implicated in similar practices.

A recent 200-page report published by Epyllion reveals that PC gaming has been outperforming consoles over the last decade, "breezing past console platforms and generating more content spending and revenue," reports Insider Gaming. From the report: One slide revealed that since 2011, PC's content spend has dominated 'living room' console revenue by more than 65%, and it has earned 225% more than 'combined console' spend. That's a total of $30 billion if you want to put a number on it. Those numbers exclude hardware and accessories.

The report also showed that mobile gaming is leagues ahead of both PC and console platforms, representing the number one money maker in the games industry. This stat has been recorded despite an $18 billion increase in spending on console platforms in 2024 compared to 2011. That 75% increase is still trumped by content spend on PC platforms. But why is PC becoming increasingly popular and much more profitable? Epyllion suggested it boils down to a few core reasons:

- PC platforms have a much larger library of games and 'near-full backwards compatibility'
- On a PC, you can multi-task (stream, communicate, alt+tab, multiple monitors)
- Lower entry price point than consoles
- Higher top-end performance
- Better for esports and competitive gaming
- Able to play more early-access games
- More annual game releases
- Console 'exclusives' are now finding their way to PC

A pastor in Pasco, Washington, has been indicted on 26 counts of fraud for orchestrating a cryptocurrency scam that defrauded over 1,500 investors of nearly $5.9 million between 2021 and 2023. Many of the investors were members of his congregation. BleepingComputer reports: The US Department of Justice says the pastor, Francier Obando Pinillo, 51, used his position to recruit investors into a fraudulent cryptocurrency venture called "Solano Fi," which he told them "came to him in a dream" and was a guaranteed investment. "Pinillo used his position as pastor to induce members of his congregation and others to invest their money in a cryptocurrency investment business known as Solano Fi," reads the US Department of Justice announcement. "Pinillo claimed the idea for Solano Fi had come to him in a dream and that it was a safe and guaranteed investment."

The pastor also set up a Facebook page for Solano Fi to attract more investors outside his direct sphere of influence, as well as a Telegram group named 'Multimillionarios SolanoFi,' which had 1,500 members. The indictment alleged that Pinillo promised investors they would receive guaranteed monthly investment returns of 34.9% at no risk whatsoever. The indictment further claims he directed the victims to make cryptocurrency transfers to wallets under his control, and instead of investing the funds, he diverted them for personal use. Investors were provided access to a Solano Fi web app where they could manage their funds; however, the app showed fake balances and investment returns. Those convinced by the fraud were encouraged to recruit more investors for additional returns, expanding the victims' circle. As in similar scams, when the victims attempted to withdraw money from the Solano Fi app, the transaction failed.

Sweden has begun constructing a long-term storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Forsmark, making it only the second country after Finland to build such a site. It is not expected to be completed until the 2080s, but once finished, it will securely house radioactive waste for up to 100,000 years. Reuters reports: The Forsmark final repository, about 150 kilometers north of Stockholm on Sweden's east coast, will consist of 60 km of tunnels buried 500 meters down in 1.9 billion year old bedrock. It will be the final home for 12,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, encased in 5 meter long, corrosion-resistent copper capsules that will be packed in clay and buried. The facility will take its first waste in the late 2030s but will not be completed until around 2080 when the tunnels will be backfilled and closed, Sweden's Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) said. [...]

The Forsmark repository will cost around 12 billion crowns($1.08 billion) and be paid for by the nuclear industry, SKB said. It will have room to hold all the waste produced by Sweden's nuclear power plants. However, it will not hold fuel from future reactors. Sweden plans to build 10 more reactors by 2045.

The FTC is issuing refunds for 6,764 customers who purchased Razer's Zephyr face mask, which falsely advertised as meeting N95 standards. GameSpot reports: In May 2024, the FTC announced that a settlement was reached with Razer for more than $1 million. The fine occurred because Razer claimed its face mask met N95 requirements, even though it was never submitted for certification to test whether it removed 95% of airborne particles, per the FTC.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Razer revealed the N95 face mask with RGB lighting and voice amplification at CES in January 2021. The Razer Zephyr face mask eventually launched in October 2021 for $100. However, just months later in January 2022, Razer removed the N95 claims about the face mask.

At the time of the settlement with the FTC, Razer stated that it disagreed with the agency's allegations and didn't "admit to any wrongdoing." Meanwhile, the FTC says checks must be cashed within 90 days for the Zephyr face mask refunds, while PayPal payments need to be redeemed within 30 days.

Meta is cutting roughly 5% of its staff through performance-based eliminations and plans to hire new people to fill their roles this year, according to a company memo. From a report: As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs. "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the note posted to an internal message board and reviewed by Bloomberg News. "We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year," he said, "but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced a playful giveaway for kernel contributors: he'll hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky developer selected at random, using his holiday hobby skills with pedal kits. To qualify, developers must have a 2024 commit in Torvalds' kernel git tree and email him with the subject "I WANT A GUITAR PEDAL". He'll pick a winner at random, use his own money to buy a pedal kit from a company called Aion FX, and then 'build it with my own shaky little fingers, and send it to the victim by US postal services.'" The Register reports: The odd offer appeared in his weekly state-of-the-kernel post, which on Sunday US time informed the Linux world that release candidate (rc) seven for version 6.13 of the Linux kernel "is slightly bigger than normal, but considering the timing, it's pretty much where I would have expected, and nothing really stands out." Torvalds therefore expects version 6.13 to debut next week, meaning it will arrive after his preferred seven release candidates and without delays caused by the usual holiday-period slowdown. Torvalds then added a postscript in which he revealed that he often uses the holiday season to build LEGO, which he frequently receives for Christmas and his late December birthday.

He kept up that tradition last year, but "also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds" which he described as "LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron." [...] Torvalds doesn't play guitar, but did the builds "because I enjoy the tinkering, and the guitar pedals actually do something and are the right kind of "not very complex, but not some 5-minute 555 LED blinking thing.'" He enjoyed the experience and wants to build more pedals, so has decided to give one away to a random kernel developer -- both as an act of generosity and to "check to see if anybody actually ever reads these weekly rc announcements of mine." Torvalds rated his past pedal-building efforts a "good success so far" but warned entrants "I'm a software person with a soldering iron."

"I will test the result to the best of my abilities, and the end result may actually work ... but you should set your expectations along the lines of "quality kit built by a SW person who doesn't know one end of a guitar from the other.'"

U.S. companies are increasingly using AI to curb hiring plans, citing "cost avoidance" as a key metric to justify AI investments amid pressure to show returns. At software firm TS Imagine, AI-powered email sorting saves 4,000 work hours annually at 3% of employee costs, while Palantir reported AI reduced future headcount needs by 10-15%, according to company executives.

The trend is most pronounced in software development and customer service sectors, where companies are deferring or scaling back hiring plans, said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. This shift comes as long-term unemployment in the U.S. has risen more than 50% since late 2022, though tech sector unemployment dropped to 2% in December.

"JPMorgan Chase shut down comments on an internal webpage announcing the bank's return-to-office policy," reports the Wall Street Journal, "after dozens of them criticized the move and at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize, according to people familiar with the matter." The bank's senior executives announced in an internal memo Friday that JPMorgan Chase would require all of its roughly 300,000 employees to work full time from the office starting in March, with only a limited number of exceptions. More than half of the bank's full-time workers, including senior managers and those with client-facing roles such as branch workers, have already been working full time from offices. The move primarily impacts back-office roles such as call-center workers who had still been able to work remotely two days a week...

Many employees shared concerns such as increased commuting costs, child-care challenges and the impact on work-life balance. One person suggested that they should consider unionizing to fight for a hybrid-work schedule, the people familiar with the matter said. Soon after, the bank disabled comments on the article...

The bank's executives said when announcing the move that affected employees would receive a 30-day notice before they are expected to return to the office full time. They also said there will be a limited number of teams that can work remotely or on a hybrid basis if their "work can be easily and clearly measured."
The bank's executives said yesterday a limited number of teams can still work remotely (full or part-time) — but only if their work "can be easily and clearly measured," according to the article. But they also announced how they'd implement the new policy.

Affected employees will receive a 30-day notice before being expected to return to the office full time.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AsylumWraith for sharing the news.

Friday America's consumer watchdog agency "proposed a rule to give virtual video game currencies protections similar to those of real-world bank accounts..." reports the Washington Post, "so players can receive refunds or compensation for unauthorized transactions, similar to how banks are required to respond to claims of fraudulent activity." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking public input on a rule interpretation to clarify which rights are protected and available to video game consumers under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. It would hold video game companies subject to violations of federal consumer financial law if they fail to address financial issues reported by customers. The public comment period lasts from Friday through March 31. In particular, the independent federal agency wants to hear from gamers about the types of transactions they make, any issues with in-game currencies, and stories about how companies helped or denied help.

The effort is in response to complaints to the bureau and the Federal Trade Commission about unauthorized transactions, scams, hacking attempts and account theft, outlined in an April bureau report that covered banking in video games and virtual worlds. The complaints said consumers "received limited recourse from gaming companies." Companies may ban or lock accounts or shut down a service, according to the report, but they don't generally guarantee refunds to people who lost property... The April report says the bureau and FTC received numerous complaints from players who contacted their banks regarding unauthorized charges on Roblox. "These complaints note that while they received refunds through their financial institutions, Roblox then terminated or locked their account," the report says.

While CES wraps up this week, "Not all innovation is good innovation," warns Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's Director of Sustainability (heading their Right to Repair advocacy team). So this year the group held its fourth annual "anti-awards ceremony" to call out CES's "least repairable, least private, and least sustainable products..." (iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens mocked a $2,200 "smart ring" with a battery that only lasts for 500 charges. "Wanna open it up and change the battery? Well you can't! Trying to open it will completely destroy this device...") There's also a category for the worst in security — plus a special award titled "Who asked for this?" — and then a final inglorious prize declaring "the Overall Worst in Show..."

Thursday their "panel of dystopia experts" livestreamed to iFixit's feed of over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, with the video's description warning about manufacturers "hoping to convince us that they have invented the future. But will their vision make our lives better, or lead humanity down a dark and twisted path?" The video "is a fun and rollicking romp that tries to forestall a future clogged with power-hungry AI and data-collecting sensors," writes The New Stack — though noting one final irony.

"While the ceremony criticized these products, YouTube was displaying ads for them..."

UPDATE: Slashdot reached out to iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens, who says this teaches us all a lesson. "The gadget industry is insidious and has their tentacles everywhere."

"Of course they injected ads into our video. The beast can't stop feeding, and will keep growing until we knife it in the heart."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland summarizes the article: "We're seeing more and more of these things that have basically surveillance technology built into them," iFixit's Chamberlain told The Associated Press... Proving this point was EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, who gave a truly impassioned takedown for "smart" infant products that "end up traumatizing new parents with false reports that their baby has stopped breathing." But worst for privacy was the $1,200 "Revol" baby bassinet — equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor. The video also mocks Samsung's "AI Home" initiative which let you answer phone calls with your washing machine, oven, or refrigerator. (And LG's overpowered "smart" refrigerator won the "Overall Worst in Show" award.)

One of the scariest presentations came from Paul Roberts, founder of SecuRepairs, a group advocating both cybersecurity and the right to repair. Roberts notes that about 65% of the routers sold in the U.S. are from a Chinese company named TP-Link — both wifi routers and the wifi/ethernet routers sold for homes and small offices.Roberts reminded viewers that in October, Microsoft reported "thousands" of compromised routers — most of them manufactured by TP-Link — were found working together in a malicious network trying to crack passwords and penetrate "think tanks, government organizations, non-governmental organizations, law firms, defense industrial base, and others" in North America and in Europe. The U.S. Justice Department soon launched an investigation (as did the U.S. Commerce Department) into TP-Link's ties to China's government and military, according to a SecuRepairs blog post.

The reason? "As a China-based company, TP-Link is required by law to disclose flaws it discovers in its software to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology before making them public." Inevitably, this creates a window "to exploit the publicly undisclosed flaw... That fact, and the coincidence of TP-Link devices playing a role in state-sponsored hacking campaigns, raises the prospects of the U.S. government declaring a ban on the sale of TP-Link technology at some point in the next year."

TP-Link won the award for the worst in security.

India's homegrown digital payments ecosystem, anchored by two systems, is challenging Visa and Mastercard's dominance in the world's most populous nation. The backbone is UPI, a nine-year-old bank-to-bank payment network that processes over 13 billion monthly transactions through QR codes and phone numbers, accounting for 71% of all transactions and 36% of consumer spending, according to Bernstein.

RuPay, India's domestic card network, has leveraged its exclusive right to process credit card transactions through UPI to double its volume to $7.43 billion in fiscal 2025's first seven months. It now represents 28% of credit card transactions, up from 10% last year. Small merchants are adopting the system as RuPay only charges fees on transactions above $23.3. India's central bank has also mandated banks let customers choose their card network, ending exclusive deals with global providers.

MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings and a tech investment fund are commanding extraordinary premiums in U.S. markets, highlighting unusual price anomalies reminiscent of past market distortions. MicroStrategy shares are trading at more than double the market value of their main asset -- bitcoin holdings -- while closed-end fund Destiny Tech100 recently traded at 11 times its net asset value, down from 21 times earlier in 2024.

Similar market irregularities have emerged throughout history. In 1923, investor Benjamin Graham profited from a disconnect between DuPont and General Motors shares. During the 1929 bull market, closed-end fund Capital Administration Co. traded at a 1,235% premium to its net asset value. WSJ adds: The PalmPilot during the 1990s and early 2000s was a hand-held device and personal assistant that came with a touch-screen display and a stylus. Palm was the biggest maker of hand-held computer devices, with 70% market share, and it held its initial public offering in March 2000, about a week before the Nasdaq Composite Index's peak during the dot-com bubble.

Palm's shares jumped 150% on their first day of trading, giving Palm a stock-market value of about $53 billion. Palm was still 94%-owned by parent 3Com at the time. Yet on Palm's first day of trading, 3Com's shares fell 21%.

The funny part: According to the stock market, 3Com was worth about $23 billion less than the value of the Palm shares that 3Com owned. This made no sense, yet the valuations remained out of whack for months. In time, both stocks came down to earth, sanity prevailed and the world eventually moved on to smartphones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa has said Meta's decision to end factchecking on its platforms and remove restrictions on certain topics means "extremely dangerous times" lie ahead for journalism, democracy and social media users. The American-Filipino journalist said Mark Zuckerberg's move to relax content moderation on the Facebook and Instagram platforms would lead to a "world without facts" and that was "a world that's right for a dictator."

"Mark Zuckerberg says it's a free speech issue -- that's completely wrong," Ressa told the AFP news service. "Only if you're profit-driven can you claim that; only if you want power and money can you claim that. This is about safety." Ressa, a co-founder of the Rappler news site, won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 in recognition of her "courageous fight for freedom of expression." She faced multiple criminal charges and investigations after publishing stories critical of the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Ressa rejected Zuckerberg's claim that factcheckers had been "too politically biased" and had "destroyed more trust than they've created."

"Journalists have a set of standards and ethics," Ressa said. "What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform." The decision meant "extremely dangerous times ahead" for journalism, democracy and social media users, she said. [...] Ressa said she would do everything she could to "ensure information integrity." "This is a pivotal year for journalism survival," she said. "We'll do all we can to make sure that happens."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters." One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter.

The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants. The Justice Department filed an amended complaint (PDF) today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said. "The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said. The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said: "For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to 'price fixing laws,' the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, 'Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much.'"

The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

Further reading: Are We Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia?

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese venture capitalists are hounding failed founders [non-paywalled source], pursuing personal assets and adding the individuals to a national debtor blacklist when they fail to pay up, in moves that are throwing the country's startup funding ecosystem into crisis. The hard-nosed tactics by risk capital providers have been facilitated by clauses known as redemption rights, included in nearly all the financing deals struck during China's boom times.

"My investors verbally promised they wouldn't enforce them, that they had never enforced them before -- and in '17 and '18 that was true -- no one was enforcing them," said Neuroo Education founder Wang Ronghui, who now owes investors millions of dollars after her childcare chain stumbled during the pandemic.

While they are relatively rare in US venture investing, more than 80% of venture and private equity deals in China contain redemption provisions, according to Shanghai-based law firm Lifeng Partners estimates. They typically require companies, and often their founders as well, to buy back investors' shares plus interest if certain targets such as an initial public offering timeline, valuation goals or revenue metrics are not met.

Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion dollars in a deal that would value it at $60 billion, making it the latest artificial-intelligence startup to seize upon investor euphoria for the technology. WSJ: The funding round is being led by the venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, people familiar with the matter said. The $60 billion valuation includes the money Anthropic plans to raise in the round.

The deal would make Anthropic the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights. It was valued last year at $18 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures. There has been a dealmaking frenzy among AI companies since OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in an October round that nearly doubled its value to $157 billion. Two other startups, Elon Musk's xAI and Perplexity, subsequently raised money at substantially increased valuations.

More than 1.6 million Americans have been jobless for at least six months, up 50% since late 2022, despite the economy adding over two million jobs last year, Labor Department data shows.

The average job search now takes six months, primarily affecting high-paying sectors like tech, law, and media. While the 4.2% unemployment rate remains below pre-pandemic averages, job postings have dropped to one per unemployed worker from two in early 2022.

Software development, data science, and marketing roles are 20% below pre-pandemic levels, while healthcare and government sectors account for half of recent job creation. The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits reached 1.8 million in late December, approaching post-pandemic highs, as wage growth declined to 4% from 6% during the early 2020s hiring peak.

In a potential U.S.-China conflict, cyberattackers are military weapons. That's the thrust of a new article from the Wall Street Journal: The message from President Biden's national security adviser was startling. Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies' help to root out the intruders.

What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China's hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too. The two massive hacking operations have upended the West's understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors — once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars. China's hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons. U.S. computer networks are a "key battlefield in any future conflict" with China, said Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, who closely tracked China's hacking operations against American infrastructure. He said prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers "are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home."

As China increasingly threatens Taiwan, working toward what Western intelligence officials see as a target of being ready to invade by 2027, the U.S. could be pulled into the fray as the island's most important backer... Top U.S. officials in both parties have warned that China is the greatest danger to American security.

In the infrastructure attacks, which began at least as early as 2019 and are still taking place, hackers connected to China's military embedded themselves in arenas that spies usually ignored, including a water utility in Hawaii, a port in Houston and an oil-and-gas processing facility. Investigators, both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the private sector, found the hackers lurked, sometimes for years, periodically testing access. At a regional airport, investigators found the hackers had secured access, and then returned every six months to make sure they could still get in. Hackers spent at least nine months in the network of a water-treatment system, moving into an adjacent server to study the operations of the plant. At a utility in Los Angeles, the hackers searched for material about how the utility would respond in the event of an emergency or crisis. The precise location and other details of the infrastructure victims are closely guarded secrets, and couldn't be fully determined.

American security officials said they believe the infrastructure intrusions — carried out by a group dubbed Volt Typhoon — are at least in part aimed at disrupting Pacific military supply lines and otherwise impeding America's ability to respond to a future conflict with China, including over a potential invasion of Taiwan... The focus on Guam and West Coast targets suggested to many senior national-security officials across several Biden administration agencies that the hackers were focused on Taiwan, and doing everything they could to slow a U.S. response in a potential Chinese invasion, buying Beijing precious days to complete a takeover even before U.S. support could arrive.
The telecom breachers "were also able to swipe from Verizon and AT&T a list of individuals the U.S. government was surveilling in recent months under court order, which included suspected Chinese agents. The intruders used known software flaws that had been publicly warned about but hadn't been patched."

And ultimately nine U.S. telecoms were breached, according to America's deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity — including what appears to have been a preventable breach at AT&T (according to "one personal familiar with the matter"): [T]hey took control of a high-level network management account that wasn't protected by multifactor authentication, a basic safeguard. That granted them access to more than 100,000 routers from which they could further their attack — a serious lapse that may have allowed the hackers to copy traffic back to China and delete their own digital tracks.
The details of the various breaches are stunning: Chinese hackers gained a foothold in the digital underpinnings of one of America's largest ports in just 31 seconds. At the Port of Houston, an intruder acting like an engineer from one of the port's software vendors entered a server designed to let employees reset their passwords from home. The hackers managed to download an encrypted set of passwords from all the port's staff before the port recognized the threat and cut off the password server from its network...