Wired: Last spring, At an event in New York City, Robert Triefus, then Gucci's CEO of Vault -- the brand's virtual marketplace -- argued the recent deflation in hype around the metaverse was just a brief hiccup. "I see it more as a correction," he told the crowd. "We're now at a much more sensible place, where you've got individuals [and] companies ... who are very serious about what they're doing." When asked how buying real estate in The Sandbox aligned with Gucci's broader goals as a brand, he responded with quasi-mystical language: "The metaverse is an opportunity to embrace the digital self."

The following month, Triefus left Gucci "abruptly," according to Vogue Business. He was off "to pursue other opportunities," the brand said at the time. A month later, Vogue Business revealed that Triefus was to be the new Stone Island CEO. Immediately there was speculation on whether Stone Island would enter the metaverse. So far it has not. Triefus' public zeal for all things virtual and his short-lived tenure as the head of Gucci's metaverse strategy are both part of a broader trend that briefly convulsed the private sector starting in late 2021: the hastily recruited "chief metaverse officer."

Following a wave of excitement around the metaverse as a golden new opportunity for commerce, a legion of brands rushed to launch their own virtual storefronts. Three quarters of CEOs surveyed by Russell Reynolds in 2022 said they were hiring dedicated talent to lead in the space, or expanding current roles to cover it. While the actual titles varied, their main role seemed to involve helping their respective brands devise new strategies with then-buzzy technologies such as NFTs and crypto. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has quietly shifted focus from virtual reality to augmented reality, signaling a retreat from the company's ambitious metaverse plans. At Meta's recent developer conference, Zuckerberg mentioned "metaverse" only three times in his hour-long keynote, instead highlighting AR innovations like smart glasses.

The move follows a broader cooling of corporate enthusiasm for the metaverse. Luxury brands that once rushed to establish virtual presences have scaled back efforts, with some chief metaverse officers pivoting to AI-focused roles. "Many brands were quick to experiment -- there was a sense of a land grab," said Matthew Ball, tech investor and author. "They didn't want to be last, and they were excited to try and be first." Wired notes that the shift reflects disappointing user engagement with existing metaverse platforms and growing interest in more accessible AR technologies.

TechCrunch's Paul Sawers reports: Fledgling fintech startup OpenBB is revealing the next step in its plans to take on the heavyweights of the investment research world. The company is launching a new, free version of a product that will open its arsenal of data and financial tooling to more users. OpenBB is the handiwork of software engineer Didier Lopes, who launched the Python-based platform back in 2021 as a way for amateur investors and enthusiasts to do investment research using different datasets for free, via a command line interface (CLI). The company went on to raise $8.5 million in seed funding from OSS Capital and angel investors such as Ram Shriram, an early backer of Google. While the community-based, open source project has amassed some 50,000 users, OpenBB has also been building an enterprise incarnation called Terminal Pro. This paid version gives teams access to an interface, pre-built database integrations, an Excel add-in, and various security and support bolt-ons that would appeal to larger businesses. [...]

The all-new OpenBB Terminal -- not to be confused with the previous CLI-based OpenBB Terminal that the startup sunsetted in March -- is a full-fledged web app, though it strips out many of the premium features of Terminal Pro. It's fully customizable, can run on any operating system or platform, and provides access to an AI-enabled OpenBB copilot. Like the previous OpenBB Terminal, the all-new web app is also free to use. OpenBB Terminal is perhaps something of a middle ground between the CLI centricity of the open source project and the bells-and-whistles feature set of the enterprise product.

The OpenBB Terminal serves as a single end point for accessing financial information from some 100 data sources, spanning equity, options, forex, the macro economy, and more. Users can also throw all their new data into the mix -- the community has previously contributed financial datasets such as historical currency exchange rates and crypto pricing data. There are also a slew of extensions and toolkits to bring more functionality to OpenBB -- such as an AI stock analysis agent. Users are free to incorporate their own AI systems and large language models (LLMs), which might be particularly important for security and compliance use cases. But with the OpenBB Copilot, categorized as a "compound AI system," users can run natural-language queries about their data out of the box. While OpenBB has been likened to an "open-source Bloomberg," TechCrunch notes that it's not a direct competitor due to Bloomberg's massive data resources and built-in chat functionality. OpenBB, however, offers flexibility with its open-source platform and customization options.

OpenBB filed for a trademark, but Bloomberg has requested an extension to potentially oppose it, despite the company asserting there's no link between OpenBB and Bloomberg's abbreviation "BBG". Lopes says the name originates from BlackBerry stock, where the founders had lost money during the meme stock craze.

U.S. exchanges' four-character limit for ETF tickers is creating fierce competition in the $10 trillion industry, particularly for single-stock funds. With 456,976 possible combinations, options narrow drastically when built around existing company tickers. MicroStrategy-inspired ETFs, for instance, leave issuers with just 52 choices using 'MST'. Memorable tickers are crucial for differentiation and can improve stock liquidity.

Amazon will likely eliminate around 14,000 corporate jobs by early next year as part of ongoing efforts to reduce costs, according to a note Morgan Stanley sent to clients that Slashdot has reviewed. Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley estimated Amazon could cut approximately 13,800 manager positions by the end of the first quarter of 2025, based on the company's stated goal of increasing the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%.

"AMZN management's recent letter laying out an increased focus on efficiency should lead to further EBIT cushion and (potential) upside in '25," Nowak wrote. The potential headcount reduction could result in $2.1 billion to $3.6 billion in annual cost savings for Amazon, adding 3% to 5% to the company's 2025 operating profit, according to Nowak's analysis. Amazon has already cut over 27,000 jobs since late 2022 as part of a major cost-cutting push. The company employed 1.54 million people globally as of the end of June.

Google's grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business is loosening. From a report: For years, the tech giant has seemed invincible in this corner of the ad market, which is the foundation of its business. Now, rivals are beginning to eat into its lead, and new offerings -- fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence and social video -- threaten to reshape the landscape. TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video platform, has recently started allowing brands to target ads based on users' search queries -- a direct challenge to Google's core business.

Perplexity, an AI search startup backed by Jeff Bezos, plans to introduce ads later this month under its AI-generated answers. Until now, it has made revenue mostly from a $20-a-month subscription offering that grants access to more-powerful AI technology. The new initiatives add to the pressure on Google from the rise of Amazon.com, which has taken a chunk of search ad spending. Many consumers begin product searches on the e-commerce platform.

Google's share of the U.S. search ad market is expected to drop below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade, according to the research firm eMarketer. Amazon is expected to have 22.3% of the market this year, with 17.6% growth, compared with Google's 50.5% share and its 7.6% growth.

Amazon launched "cashierless checkout" stores In 2018, reports CNBC — but by 2020 it was licensing the "Just Walk Out" technology to other stores in airports, hospitals, and stadiums. In April, Amazon announced it was removing cashierless checkout from its U.S. Fresh stores and Whole Foods locations... In place of Just Walk Out, which typically requires ceiling-mounted cameras, shelf sensors and gated entry points, Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods supermarkets will feature Dash Carts. The carts track and tally up items as shoppers place them in bags, enabling people to skip the checkout line. Amazon continues to use Just Walk Out in its grab-and-go marts and UK Fresh stores...

While it's no longer featuring Just Walk Out as prominently in its own stores, Amazon says it has inked deals with a growing list of customers. More than 200 third-party stores have paid Amazon to install the cashierless system. The company expects to double the number of third-party Just Walk Out stores this year, Jon Jenkins, who previously served as vice president of Amazon's Just Walk Out technology, said in a recent interview... Amazon's "primary focus" is selling the technology to third-party businesses and deploying it in small to medium-sized store formats, where the system "tends to generate a little better [return on investment]," Jenkins said...

At one Just Walk Out store, inside Seattle's Lumen Field, home to the NFL's Seahawks, the company said it boosted sales by 112% last season, with 85% more transactions during the course of a game.
Two interesting points from the article:

• "Earlier this year, Amazon also began selling its connected grocery carts to third parties."

• "With Just Walk Out, Amazon faces the challenge of convincing retailers that they can trust one of their biggest competitors with handling valuable shopper data..."

Wired reports on "AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, initially designed to capture license plates, but which are now photographing political lawn signs outside private homes, individuals wearing T-shirts with text, and vehicles displaying pro-abortion bumper stickers — all while recordi00ng the precise locations of these observations..."

The detailed photographs all surfaced in search results produced by the systems of DRN Data, a license-plate-recognition (LPR) company owned by Motorola Solutions. The LPR system can be used by private investigators, repossession agents, and insurance companies; a related Motorola business, called Vigilant, gives cops access to the same LPR data. However, files shared with WIRED by artist Julia Weist, who is documenting restricted datasets as part of her work, show how those with access to the LPR system can search for common phrases or names, such as those of politicians, and be served with photographs where the search term is present, even if it is not displayed on license plates... Beyond highlighting the far-reaching nature of LPR technology, which has collected billions of images of license plates, the research also shows how people's personal political views and their homes can be recorded into vast databases that can be queried.

"It really reveals the extent to which surveillance is happening on a mass scale in the quiet streets of America," says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "That surveillance is not limited just to license plates, but also to a lot of other potentially very revealing information about people."

DRN, in a statement issued to WIRED, said it complies with "all applicable laws and regulations...." Over more than a decade, DRN has amassed more than 15 billion "vehicle sightings" across the United States, and it claims in its marketing materials that it amasses more than 250 million sightings per month. Images in DRN's commercial database are shared with police using its Vigilant system, but images captured by law enforcement are not shared back into the wider database. The system is partly fueled by DRN "affiliates" who install cameras in their vehicles, such as repossession trucks, and capture license plates as they drive around. Each vehicle can have up to four cameras attached to it, capturing images in all angles. These affiliates earn monthly bonuses and can also receive free cameras and search credits...

"License plate recognition (LPR) technology supports public safety and community services, from helping to find abducted children and stolen vehicles to automating toll collection and lowering insurance premiums by mitigating insurance fraud," Jeremiah Wheeler, the president of DRN, says in a statement... Wheeler did not respond to WIRED's questions about whether there are limits on what can be searched in license plate databases, why images of homes with lawn signs but no vehicles in sight appeared in search results, or if filters are used to reduce such images.
Privacy experts shared their reactions with Wired

• "Perhaps [people] want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don't necessarily want to be logged into a nationwide database that's accessible to police authorities." — Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union

• "When government or private companies promote license plate readers, they make it sound like the technology is only looking for lawbreakers or people suspected of stealing a car or involved in an amber alert, but that's just not how the technology works. The technology collects everyone's data and stores that data often for immense periods of time." — Dave Maass, an EFF director of investigations

• "The way that the country is set up was to protect citizens from government overreach, but there's not a lot put in place to protect us from private actors who are engaged in business meant to make money." — Nicole McConlogue, associate law professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law (who has researched license-plate-surveillance systems)

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Comcast says data on 237,703 of its customers was in fact stolen in a cyberattack on a debt collector it was using, contrary to previous assurances it was given that it was unaffected by that intrusion. That collections agency, Financial Business and Consumer Solutions aka FBCS, was compromised in February, and according to a filing with Maine's attorney general, the firm informed the US cable giant about the unauthorized access in March. At the time, FBCS told the internet'n'telly provider that no Comcast customer information was affected. However, that changed in July, when the collections outfit got in touch again to say that, actually, the Comcast subscriber data it held had been pilfered.

Among the data types stolen were names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and the Comcast account numbers and ID numbers used internally at FBCS. The data pertains to those registered as customers at "around 2021." Comcast stopped using FBCS for debt collection services in 2020. Comcast made it clear its own systems, including those of its broadband unit Xfinity, were not broken into, unlike that time in 2023. FBCS earlier said more than 4 million people had their records accessed during that February break-in. As far as we're aware, the agency hasn't said publicly exactly how that network intrusion went down. Now Comcast is informing subscribers that their info was taken in that security breach, and in doing so seems to be the first to say the intrusion was a ransomware attack. [...]

FBCS's official statement only attributes the attack to an "unauthorized actor." It does not mention ransomware, nor many other technical details aside from the data types involved in the theft. No ransomware group we're aware of has ever claimed responsibility for the raid on FBCS. When we asked Comcast about the ransomware, it simply referred us back to the customer notification letter. The cableco used that notification to send another small middle finger FBCS's way, slyly revealing that the agency's financial situation prevents it from offering the usual identity and credit monitoring protection for those affected, so Comcast is having to foot the bill itself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The European Union's top court has sided with a privacy challenge to Meta's data retention policies. It ruled on Friday that social networks, such as Facebook, cannot keep using people's information for ad targeting indefinitely. The judgement could have major implications on the way Meta and other ad-funded social networks operate in the region. Limits on how long personal data can be kept must be applied in order to comply with data minimization principles contained in the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Breaches of the regime can lead to fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover -- which, in Meta's case, could put it on the hook for billions more in penalties (NB: it is already at the top of the leaderboard of Big Tech GDPR breachers). [...]

The original challenge to Meta's ad business dates back to 2014 but was not fully heard in Austria until 2020, per noyb. The Austrian supreme court then referred several legal questions to the CJEU in 2021. Some were answered via a separate challenge to Meta/Facebook, in a July 2023 CJEU ruling -- which struck down the company's ability to claim a "legitimate interest" to process people's data for ads. The remaining two questions have now been dealt with by the CJEU. And it's more bad news for Meta's surveillance-based ad business. Limits do apply. Summarizing this component of the judgement in a press release, the CJEU wrote: "An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data."

The ruling looks important on account of how ads businesses, such as Meta's, function. Crudely put, the more of your data they can grab, the better -- as far as they are concerned. Back in 2022, an internal memo penned by Meta engineers which was obtained by Vice's Motherboard likened its data collection practices to tipping bottles of ink into a vast lake and suggested the company's aggregation of personal data lacked controls and did not lend itself to being able to silo different types of data or apply data retention limits. Although Meta claimed at the time that the document "does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations." How exactly the adtech giant will need to amend its data retention practices following the CJEU ruling remains to be seen. But the law is clear that it must have limits. "[Advertising] companies must develop data management protocols to gradually delete unneeded data or stop using them," noyb suggests. The court also weighed in a second question that concerns sensitive data that has been "manifestly made public" by the data subject, "and whether sensitive characteristics could be used for ad targeting because of that," reports TechCrunch. "The court ruled that it could not, maintaining the GDPR's purpose limitation principle."

On Wednesday, the SEC filed (PDF) to appeal a 2023 court ruling that determined XRP is not considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges. The announcement sent the price of XRP tumbling more than 8%. "XRP, which was created by the founders of Ripple, is the native token of the open source XRP Ledger, which Ripple uses in its cross-border payments business," notes CNBC. "It is the fifth-largest coin by market cap, excluding stablecoins Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC)." CNBC reports: Ripple, the largest holder of XRP coins, scored a partial victory last summer after a three-year battle with the SEC. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the decision, which was hailed as a landmark win for the crypto industry. Still, while XRP isn't considered a security when sold to retail investors on exchanges, it is considered an unregistered security offering if sold to institutional investors.

Ripple declined to comment but referred to Wednesday evening posts on X by CEO Brad Garlinghouse and chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty. Alderoty said the company is evaluating whether to file a cross appeal, and called the SEC's decision to appeal "disappointing, but not surprising." The SEC, under Chair Gary Gensler, has become notorious for its refusal to provide clear guidance for crypto businesses, instead opting to regulate by enforcement actions. "XRP's status as a non-security is the law of the land today - and that does not change even in the face of this misguided - and infuriating - appeal," Garlinghouse said on X.

Google is testing a new verification feature in search, in a move aimed at helping users avoid fake or fraudulent websites. The Verge's Jess Weatherbed reports: My colleague Jay Peters spotted checkmarks next to official site links for Microsoft, Meta, Epic Games, Apple, Amazon, and HP, but these were no longer displayed once he logged into a different Google account -- meaning this experiment isn't being rolled out widely just yet. Hovering over a checkmark will display a message that explains "Google's signals suggest that this business is the business that it says it is," which is determined by things like website verification, Merchant Center data, and manual reviews according to Shaheen.

Cybersecurity firm IronNet, founded by former NSA director Keith Alexander, has collapsed after failing to deliver on its promise to revolutionize cyber defense. The company, which went public in 2021 with a $3 billion valuation, shut down in September 2023 after running out of money.

IronNet's downfall has left investors and former employees bitter, with some accusing the company of misleading them about its financial health. "I'm honestly ashamed that I was ever an executive at that company," said Mark Berly, a former IronNet vice president. He said the company's top leaders cultivated a culture of deceit "just like Theranos." Critics point to questionable business practices, subpar products, and associations that potentially exposed the firm to Russian influence. The company's board included high-profile national security figures, which helped attract investments and contracts. However, IronNet struggled to secure major deals and meet revenue projections.

Tencent and Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family are weighing a potential buyout of the French game maker, according to Bloomberg News. The move comes as Ubisoft's shares plunged 54% this year, hitting decade-lows after production delays and weak sales. Tencent, which bought 49.9% of Guillemot Brothers in 2022, holds 9.2% of Ubisoft's voting rights, while the Guillemots control 20.5%.

Further reading: Star Wars Outlaws Is A Crappy Masterpiece.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has seen a reduction of about 8.4% to its workforce after 159 employees accepted severance packages, CEO Matt Mullenweg said. The move follows disputes over the company's direction and its clash with web host WP Engine. Most departures hit the WordPress division, with some from other business units. Employees received $30,000 or six months' pay, but are ineligible for rehire, Mullenweg added.

The one-and-done nature of 23andMe is "indicative of a core business problem with the once high-flying biotech company that is now teetering on the brink of collapse," reports NPR. As 23andMe struggles for survival, many of its 15 million customers are left wondering what the company plans to do with all the data it has collected since it was founded in 2006. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Andy Kill, a spokesperson for 23andMe, would not comment on what the company might do with its trove of genetic data beyond general pronouncements about its commitment to privacy. "For our customers, our focus continues to be on transparency and choice over how they want their data to be managed," he said. When signing up for the service, about 80% of 23andMe's customers have opted in to having their genetic data analyzed for medical research. "This rate has held steady for many years," Kill added. The company has an agreement with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, or GSK, that allows the drugmaker to tap the tech company's customer data to develop new treatments for disease. Anya Prince, a law professor at the University of Iowa's College of Law who focuses on genetic privacy, said those worried about their sensitive DNA information may not realize just how few federal protections exist. For instance, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, does not apply to 23andMe since it is a company outside of the health care realm. "HIPAA does not protect data that's held by direct-to-consumer companies like 23andMe," she said.

Although DNA data has no federal safeguards, some states, like California and Florida, do give consumers rights over their genetic information. "If customers are really worried, they could ask for their samples to be withdrawn from these databases under those laws," said Prince. According to the company, all of its genetic data is anonymized, meaning there is no way for GSK, or any other third party, to connect the sample to a real person. That, however, could make it nearly impossible for a customer to renege on their decision to allow researchers to access their DNA data. "I couldn't go to GSK and say, 'Hey, my sample was given to you -- I want that taken out -- if it was anonymized, right? Because they're not going to re-identify it just to pull it out of the database," Prince said.

Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in privacy and technology policy, said the patchwork of state laws governing DNA data makes the generic data of millions potentially vulnerable to being sold off, or even mined by law enforcement. "Having to rely on a private company's terms of service or bottom line to protect that kind of information is troubling -- particularly given the level of interest we've seen from government actors in accessing such information during criminal investigations," Eidelman said. She points to how investigators used a genealogy website to identify the man known as the Golden State Killer, and how police homed in on an Idaho murder suspect by turning to similar databases of genetic profiles. "This has happened without people's knowledge, much less their express consent," Eidelman said.

Neither case relied on 23andMe, and spokesperson Kill said the company does not allow law enforcement to search its database. The company has, however, received subpoenas to access its genetic information. According to 23andMe's transparency report, authorities have sought genetic data on 15 individuals since 2015, but the company has resisted the requests and never produced data for investigators. "We treat law enforcement inquiries, such as a valid subpoena or court order, with the utmost seriousness. We use all legal measures to resist any and all requests in order to protect our customers' privacy," Kill said. [...] In a September filing to financial regulators, [23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki] wrote: "I remain committed to our customers' privacy and pledge," meaning the company's rules requiring consent for DNA to be used for research would remain in place, as well as allowing customers to delete their data. Wojcicki added that she is no longer considering offers to buy the company after previously saying she was.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's not exactly breaking news that people reuse passwords, but you might expect password manager subscribers to avoid the practice. You'd be wrong, according to a new study. Dashlane's downer of a report draws on saved logins analyzed on-device by Dashlane's software across "millions" of individual and business accounts. It finds dismally high percentages of password reuse worldwide. The US and Canada rank the worst of every region Dashlane tracked, with 48% of passwords in individual password vaults being reused. Another 15% rate as compromised, meaning those passwords have shown up in data breaches.

Combined with other security data points, the US and Canada land at a security score of 72.6 out of 100 in Dashlane's report, the lowest of all 14 regions covered in the study. The report, along with the Password Health score that Dashlane's software computes for individual users, emphasizes the longstanding problem of password reuse because that practice leaves its practitioners so vulnerable to getting hacked.Â

PayPal completed its first business payment using its proprietary stablecoin as a way to demonstrate how digital currencies can be used to improve often-clunky commercial transactions. From a report: PayPal paid an invoice to Ernst & Young LLP on Sept. 23 using PYUSD, the stablecoin the firm launched last year, relying on an SAP SE platform to complete the transaction. SAP's platform, known as the digital currency hub, allows enterprises to send and receive digital payments instantly, around the clock. The invoice amount wasn't disclosed.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies usually designed to track traditional currencies one-to-one. PYUSD, which has a current market capitalization of almost $700 million, tracks the US dollar. While the consumer-facing benefits of stablecoins often dominate conversations, this payment demonstrates other use cases for the digital currency, according to Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal's senior vice president of its blockchain, cryptocurrency and digital currency group.

Private equity firms are using US public sector workers' retirement savings to fund fossil fuel projects pumping more than a billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere every year, according to an analysis. From a report: They have ploughed more than $1tn into the energy sector since 2010, often buying into old and new fossil fuel projects and, thanks to exemptions from many financial disclosures, operating them outside the public eye, the researchers say. In many cases they are mortgaging workers' futures by taking the money they have put away for old age and investing it in assets that risk serious damage to the climate, the report claims.

"Public sector workers' money, through national, state, and retirement pensions, provides much of the capital for private equity firms' energy investments, but there is limited disclosure to the pension fund managers that the deferred earnings of their beneficiaries have potential climate impacts," it says. Researchers at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Global Energy Monitor and Private Equity Stakeholder Project assessed the holdings of 21 private equity firms, overseeing a combined $6tn in assets under management. Together, the analysis found that the 21 firms were funding projects responsible for releasing more than 1.17bn tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) a year.

"Job hopping as a way to boost your earnings may not be as profitable as it was in 2022," writes Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm. "Data from ADP, based on payroll data of almost 10 million employees, suggests the salary gain between 'stay' and 'jump' has definitely narrowed across all age groups, gender classes, industries, and company sizes." Yahoo Finance reports: New data from ADP released Wednesday showed that the median year-over-year pay increase for job switchers fell to 6.6% in September, down from 7.3% in August and the lowest growth rate since April 2021. The gap between pay gains for job changers and those of job stayers, which grew at a 4.7% pace in August, is at its narrowest since January and a far cry from 2022-2023 levels during the "Great Resignation." ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said that the narrowing gap in pay gains is a sign the labor market is "less tight ... less dynamic."

"The payoff for job changing is not quite as complex as it was earlier this year," Richardson added. "That points to some stability in this labor market."

After fifteen years of fighting to make the web safer and more accessible, the World Wide Web Foundation is shutting down. From a report: In a letter shared via the organization's website, co-founders Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- inventor of the World Wide Web -- and Rosemary Leith explain that the organization's mission has been somewhat accomplished and a new battle needs to be waged. When the foundation was founded in 2009, just over 20 percent of the world had access to the web and relatively few organizations were trying to change that, say Sir Tim and Leith. A decade and a half later, with nearly 70 percent of the world online, there are many similar non-governmental organizations trying to make the web more accessible and affordable.

The two founders thank their supporters over the years who "have enabled us to move the needle in a big way" with regard to access and affordability. But the issues facing the web have changed, they insist, and the foundation believes other advocacy groups can take it from here. Chief among the more pressing problems, claim Sir Tim and Leith, is the social media business model that commoditized user data and concentrates power with platforms, contrary to Sir Tim's original vision for the web. To address that threat, Sir Tim intends to dismantle his foundation so he can focus on decentralized technology. "We, along with the Web Foundation board, have been asking ourselves where we can have the most impact in the future," the authors say. "The conclusion we have reached is that Tim's passion on restoring power over and control of data to individuals and actively building powerful collaborative systems needs to be the highest priority going forward. In order to best achieve this, Tim will focus his efforts to support his vision for the Solid Protocol and other decentralized systems."