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The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has apologized to Republican Roy Moore for funding an organisation that faked a ‘Russian bot’ involvement to mar his election campaign in Alabama. American Engagement Technologies (AET), which Hoffman gave $750,000 to, put $100,000 of the entrepreneur’s money towards New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm which fabricated some 1,000 Russian language Twitter accounts to follow Moore. The company used the tactic to link the controversial Republican to so-called Russian influence campaigns and then fed it to the mainstream media. They also created misleading Facebook pages urging Republicans to support a ‘write-in’ candidate instead of supporting...

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday that his office is exploring whether disinformation tactics deployed against Republican Roy Moore during last year's special election violated state campaign laws and said he was worried that the operation could have affected the closely fought Senate race. "The information is concerning," Marshall, a Republican, said in a phone interview. "The impact it had on the election is something that's significant for us to explore, and we'll go from there." Moore lost the election to his Democratic rival, Sen. Doug Jones. Marshall, who said he learned of the disinformation campaign called Project Birmingham...

Internet billionaire Reid Hoffman apologized on Wednesday for funding a group linked to a “highly disturbing” effort that spread disinformation during last year’s Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, but said he was not aware that his money was being used for this purpose. Hoffman’s statement is his first acknowledgement of his ties to a campaign that adopted tactics similar to those deployed by Russian operatives during the 2016 presidential election. In Alabama, the Hoffman-funded group allegedly used Facebook and Twitter to undermine support for Republican Roy Moore and boost Democrat Doug Jones, who narrowly won the race. Hoffman, the...

Roughly a year since stories of harassment and discrimination at work started to dominate the headlines, professionals in entertainment say the problems facing their industry are more pervasive than what you might think. This reality surfaces in our survey, in partnership with CNBC’s Closing The Gap series, on the state of gender in the entertainment industry. (The first LinkedIn-CNBC analysis, revealed in June, focused on the gap in the finance industry.) We received more than 1,000 responses from LinkedIn members working in entertainment and the motion picture/film industry in the U.S. (snip)In the charts below, you’ll see that workers in...

A top U.S. counterintelligence official is warning LinkedIn not to “be like Facebook” after finding that Chinese intelligence operatives are using its platform. William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told Reuters that China is creating fake profiles on the networking platform to recruit Americans with access to government and commercial secrets. China is being “super aggressive” in its use of the site, Evanina said. The official is asking LinkedIn to get aggressive in response. Evanina recommended a response similar to how Twitter has handled fake accounts from foreign operatives attempting to use its social media...

Antifa, a violent, so-called anti-fascist group, tweeted out a list of over 1,500 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ identities. The Twitter account “nebraska antifa” sent out a tweet to its followers on Tuesday that linked to the personal information of ICE officers compiled from information found on LinkedIn. “Some enterprising hero archived the ICE employees listed on linkedin,” the tweet reads. A Twitter user who goes by Sam Lavigne compiled the list of ICE agents’ identities, titles and locations. In a tweet on Tuesday morning he says he “scraped LinkedIn for people that work for ICE.”

LinkedIn: The mission of LinkedIn is simple: connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. Several years ago I joined LinkedIn more to try to connect with former Army buddies, not trying to get a job. Got an email from them today that "You appeared in 3 searches this week" The searchers were: Alabama Department of Mental Health and Veterans Evaluation Services Stuff like this causes conspiracy theories and paranoia. Why are the VA and Alabama Mental Health searching LinkedIn? Possible gun control comes to mind. As far as I know I have not initiated any recent...

HEADHUNTER Josh Harrison made headlines after he branded unemployed young people “lazy little s***s” online — but he’s standing by his controversial comments. Mr Harrison, a headhunter from UK firm Harrison Allwood, made the comments in response to a LinkedIn post penned by entrepreneur Jack Parsons earlier this month. Mr Parsons, 24, had shared his own story of unemployment and rejection, and said the UK’s job market was “broken” for young people. But Mr Harrison, who is a millennial himself, responded by “calling bulls***” on Mr Parsons’ “poor us attitude”. “I’ll tell you right now that it has never been...

A former employee of YouTube (a subsidiary of Alphabet, parent of Google) alleged in a recently filed lawsuit that YouTube is discriminating against white and Asian men. “YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity,” the suit alleges. Liberal discrimination against white men is nothing new, but many people are caught by surprise to see such explicit discrimination against Asian males in the name of diversity from one of the most progressive companies in one of the most liberal zip codes....

China is using fake LinkedIn profiles to gather information on German officials and politicians, the German intelligence agency (BfV) has said. The agency alleges that Chinese intelligence used the networking site to target at least 10,000 Germans, possibly to recruit them as informants. It released a number of fake profiles allegedly used for this purpose. BfV head Hans-Georg Maassen said the accounts show China's efforts to subvert top-level German politics. "This is a broad-based attempt to infiltrate in particular parliaments, ministries and government agencies," he said. China has denied similar allegations of cyber espionage in the past and has not...

After the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had warned that China was trying to recruit German informants for intelligence services via social media networks, Beijing denied these accusations on Monday. They are “baseless accusations” for which there is no evidence, said Lu Kang, a Chinese state department spokesman, adding that the relevant organizations and the German government should act “more responsibly.” The BfV had previously warned that Chinese intelligence were trying to infiltrate parliaments, ministries and authorities with informants, particularly via the professional social media network LinkedIn. […] The BfV added that the aim of Chinese...

[snip]The murky case has so far thrown up far more questions than answers, but one thing is clear: US authorities are determined to extradite the 29-year-old Muscovite, who drove a Lamborghini and socialised with the children of top Russian officials, and Moscow is determined to get him back, filing its own extradition request. [snip] The affidavit relates solely to the hacking of LinkedIn, Dropbox and Formspring in 2012, and does not mention any election hacking. However, Nikulin wrote in a letter from prison that Miller had interrogated him in Prague on 7 February and raised the election hacking. Excerpts of...

Student also had her LinkedIn profile posted, called racist. Jessica Murphy, a 20-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, recently published a column that represented the culmination of months’ worth of work and research, including a dozen public records act requests to the University of Wisconsin system. Her target? Biased classes offered through the public university system that indoctrinate rather than teach, and “degrade capitalism, praise Marxism and encourage a ‘social justice warrior’ ideology,” she wrote in her piece, headlined “Top Five Wasteful Classes in the UW System.” Published Monday by the MacIver Institute, a Wisconsin-based think tank...

According to a report in Newsweek by Tom O’Connor, a Russian hacker who had been detained in Prague at the request of US authorities, was visited multiple times by FBI agents, who pressed him to confess to hacking the Podesta emails at the behest of Putin, and to help Trump. They allegedly (and unsuccessfully) offered generous inducements, to say the least. Yevgeniy Nikulin, 29, has found himself in the middle of an international dispute between Washington and Moscow, at the very center of which lies U.S. allegations that Russia sponsored a series of hacks targeting Democratic Party candidate and former...

A Russian citizen accused of being a hacker by both Russia and the U.S. has claimed U.S. officials offered to cut him a deal if he admitted to interfering in the 2016 presidential election. Yevgeniy Nikulin, 29, has found himself in the middle of an international dispute between Washington and Moscow, at the very center of which lies U.S. allegations that Russia sponsored a series of hacks targeting Democratic Party candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in favor of Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump. On October 5, 2016, days before U.S. intelligence publicly accused Russia of...

Yevgeniy Nikulin faces extradition requests from both countries amid lingering disquiet over Moscow’s alleged interference in the US presidential electionAn alleged computer hacker being held in the Czech Republic is at the centre of an international legal tussle between the United States and Russia amid lingering disquiet over Moscow’s alleged interference in the recent US presidential election. Yevgeniy Nikulin, 29, faces extradition requests from both countries after being detained by Czech police on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by US authorities. Nikulin, a Russian citizen, was arrested in a restaurant in Prague on 5 October shortly after arriving in the...

I just checked my Linkedin deal. Wowee Zowee. Never have I seen so many muey importante hombres. Holy Mackerel! Gee Whiz! Everybody on those “friends you might want” pages is either the CEO or President of something. “President and fluffer at PUREGENIUS Movies, CEO of the Timmy Tinklenuts Foundation for the advancement of multi-talented savants. Wow. Aren’t there any regular people on Linkedin? or for that matter Twitter or Facebook, you know like you and me. Jeez! Wouldn’t you like to investigate some of these companies that these people are president or CEO of? There she is, she’s Meryl Stench...

Is anyone else seeing issues with Internet sites right now? I just had both LinkedIn and Reddit give me the following message: Safari can't open the page "here the link is spelled out in the message unique to the site I was trying to get to". The certificate for this site is invalid. You might be connecting to a server pretending to be "again the site here" which could put your confidential information at risk. I was using long saved bookmarks and also tried to type in the addresses manually but got the same thing. Possible another DOS attack similar...

The billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has pledged to give up to $5 million to veterans groups if Donald J. Trump agrees to release his tax returns before the Oct. 19 presidential debate.

LinkedIn has created a freelance marketplace. Launched on Wednesday, "LinkedIn ProFinder" asks employers to submit contract jobs in categories such as design, writing, or financial services and promises to send them up to five free quotes from LinkedIn users in response. Connecting freelancers to work has become a big business for other companies. Thumbtack, a company that uses a similar match-making strategy by asking workers to submit quotes for jobs from wedding planning to accounting to home repair, charges workers a fee each time they bid on a job. Last year, its investors valued the company at $1.3 billion. Upwork,...