IBM has filed a lawsuit against Micro Focus, alleging the enterprise software company copied and reverse-engineered its CICS mainframe service to develop a rival product, the Micro Focus Enterprise Server. From a report: Big Blue has brought the case in the US District Court in New York, citing violation of copyright law and claiming that Micro Focus was in "blatant breach" of its contractual obligations with IBM. In a strongly worded complaint, the company accused UK-based Micro Focus of "brazen theft" of IBM software and said the suit was filed to "protect [its] valuable intellectual property." IBM is seeking compensation as well as an injunction against Micro Focus that would prohibit the company from distributing the products Big Blue labels as "derivative works" it claims are based upon IBM's own computer software.

Meta says it is taking additional steps to help protect the youth on its platforms. Now, anyone under the age of 16 years old can enroll in new privacy settings that are meant to limit who can see their Facebook profile. Likewise, Meta says it's also testing the removal of the messaging button on teen's Instagram profiles when viewed by an adult. From a report: In a company press release, Meta further detailed its initiative to add safeguards to its Facebook and Instagram products that will hopefully protect teenage users from "potentially suspicious adults." The major overhaul in this initiative was Meta setting new privacy defaults for teen Facebook profiles.

Any new users under 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will automatically be enrolled in the new settings, which includes restricting who is able to view your friends list, tagged posts, pages and people you follow, as well as who is allowed to comment on your posts. Pre-existing teenage users will not be automatically enrolled in the new settings, but can opt in whenever they want. On both Instagram and Facebook, teen users will also now be able to report a user immediately after they have blocked them in both app's messaging interface. Users will first be greeted with a prompt that asks if they know the person they are messaging, and will then be able to block, restrict, or report the user depending on the platform. The dialogue box also explains what blocking and reporting will do, and guides the user to more detailed information pages. Further reading: Meta Sued in UK To Stop Personal Data Collection for Ads.

The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is initiating an investigation into Broadcom's proposed $61 billion deal to buy virtualization software giant VMware. From a report: The news comes shortly after news emerged that the European Commission (EC) was also proceeding with an investigation into what would be one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time. In the companies' domestic U.S. market, meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last month progressed its investigation into a deeper second review phase, which means that the FTC saw enough during its initial analysis to warrant a more extensive look. The crux of the deal is chip giant Broadcom seeking to diversify by expanding deeper into the enterprise infrastructure software fray. While VMware's shareholders greenlighted the proposal a couple of weeks back, a deal of this size was always going to garner regulatory scrutiny, so there is little surprise that we're seeing multiple authorities look into the deal. Broadcom had previously stated that it hoped to close the deal by October, 2023, so it was aware that this was going to be a long journey.

The BBC reports: Leprosy bacteria may hold the secret to safely repairing and regenerating the body, researchers at the University of Edinburgh say. Animal experiments have uncovered the bacteria's remarkable ability to almost double the size of livers by stimulating healthy growth.

It is a sneakily selfish act that gives the bacteria more tissue to infect. But working out how they do it could lead to new age-defying therapies, the scientists say....

The bacterium that causes [leprosy], Mycobacterium leprae, has other, unusual properties, including the ability to perform "biological alchemy", converting one type of bodily tissue into another, which are fascinating scientists. So the researchers turned to another animals that catches the disease — armadillos. The experiments, which were performed in the US, showed the infection heads to the armoured animals' livers, where it performed a controlled hijacking of the organ to reprogram it for its own purpose.... You might expect such growth to be defective or even cancerous — but detailed analysis showed it was both healthy and functional, complete with the usual array of blood vessels and bile ducts.

"It is kind of mind-blowing," Prof Rambukkana said. "How do they do that? There is no cell therapy that can do that."
The bacteria appears to be "rewinding the developmental clock" on the liver cells, the BBC writes, transforming them into a younger, faster-growing state. "The hope is the approach can be harnessed for repairing the livers of people waiting for a transplant — or even to reverse some of the damage caused by ageing elsewhere in the body."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for submitting the story!

Slashdot has been covering plans for the UK's largest chip plant to be acquired by Chinese-owned firm Nexperia.

But this week the U.K. government "has blocked the takeover of the country's largest microchip factory by a Chinese-owned firm," CNBC reported this week, "over concerns it may undermine national security." Grant Shapps, minister for business, energy and industrial strategy, on Wednesday ordered Dutch chipmaker Nexperia to sell its majority stake in Newport Wafer Fab, the Welsh semiconductor firm it acquired for £63 million ($75 million).

Nexperia is based in the Netherlands but owned by Wingtech, a partially Chinese state-backed company listed in Shanghai. Nexperia completed its acquisition of Newport Wafer Fab in 2021, and the firm subsequently changed its name to Nexperia Newport Limited, or NN.

"The order has the effect of requiring Nexperia BV to sell at least 86% of NNL within a specified period and by following a specified process," the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement. Nexperia had initially owned 14% of Newport Wafer Fab, but in July 2021 it upped its stake to 100%.

"We welcome foreign trade & investment that supports growth and jobs," Shapps tweeted Wednesday. "But where we identify a risk to national security we will act decisively."
Nexperia plans to appeal the decision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Say hello to ronnagrams and quettameters: International scientists gathered in France voted on Friday for new metric prefixes to express the world's largest and smallest measurements, prompted by an ever-growing amount of data. It marks the first time in more than three decades that new prefixes have been added to the International System of Units (SI), the agreed global standard for the metric system. Joining the ranks of well-known prefixes like kilo and milli are ronna and quetta for the largest numbers -- and ronto and quecto for the smallest.

The change was voted on by scientists and government representatives from across the world attending the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, which governs the SI and meets roughly every four years at Versailles Palace, west of Paris. The prefixes make it easier to express large amounts -- for example, always referring to a kilometer as 1,000 meters or a millimeter as one thousandth of a meter would quickly become cumbersome. Since the SI was established in 1960, scientific need has led to a growing number of prefixes. The last time was in 1991, when chemists wanting to express vast molecular quantities spurred the addition of zetta and yotta.

The new prefixes can simplify how we talk about some pretty big objects. "If we think about mass, instead of distance, the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams," which is a six followed by 27 zeroes, [sad Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK's National Physical Laboratory]. "Jupiter, that's about two quettagrams," he added -- a two followed by 30 zeros. Brown said he had the idea for the update when he saw media reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as brontobytes and hellabytes. Google in particular has been using hella for bytes since 2010. "Those were terms that were unofficially in circulation, so it was clear that the SI had to do something," he said.

The UK Treasury has opened an account on Discord to a torrent of abuse from users of the gamer-focused chat app -- abuse they managed to send despite the government blocking all comments on the service. The Guardian reports: With its community-focused approach, where servers encourage tight-knit groups to form and discuss issues related to the overall focus of the topic, Discord may seem an odd fit for the strait-laced world of government communications. But the app has a lot of users interested in finance, thanks to solid take-up among day traders and crypto fans, two groups the Treasury is eager to connect with. The result: a read-only Discord server, where the only user who is allowed to post is the snappily named HMTreasurySocialAdmin1, who shares tweet-length news about the Treasury and chancellor.

But trolls will always find a way. Although posting is banned, emoji reactions are enabled, letting any user respond to a post from the Treasury with a single emoji, and new users are cheerily announced in a "welcome" channel. That means the Treasury's server has been eagerly posting automated messages such as, "Welcome, LOCK UP PRINCE ANDREW. We hope you brought pizza," and "Welcome Jeremy Corbyn. Say hi!". The latter does not appear to be the real account of the former leader of the opposition. [...] UPDATE: Emoji reactions and the welcome channel vanished but eventually returned. According to the HM Treasure admin, Discord is the reason to blame for the issues.

"Due to the rapid growth of today's channel which has seen over 7,000 members join, a technical difficulty has led to reactions being paused," a post in the news channel read. "We are working with Discord to get reactions turned back on." The trolling can be continued here.

Apple on Tuesday announced that Emergency SOS via satellite is officially available to iPhone 14 users in the US and Canada. Next month, Apple will launch Emergency SOS via satellite in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. Apple is enabling the feature on all iPhone 14 models that are running iOS 16.1, which was released near the end of October. From a report: If you have the feature, you'll see a new section detailing your phone's new capability of connecting to satellites, and offering a demo mode for you to get a feel for what the process is like should you ever have to use it. For those unfamiliar, Emergency SOS via Satellite will allow an iPhone 14 owner to contact emergency services when in an area without cellular or Wi-Fi coverage. The feature is triggered by calling 911 when "SOS" is shown at the top of the iPhone's screen where the cellular coverage bars are normally visible. Once you're connected to a satellite, you'll either directly exchange messages with a local dispatcher if they accept text messages, or talk with local emergency services using an Apple-trained emergency specialist as a go-between.

Britain has lost its position as Europe's largest stock market, as Paris overtook London for the first time since records began in 2003. The Independent reports: According to Bloomberg, the combined market value of primary listings on Monday on the Paris bourse ($2.823 trillion ) surpassed that of the London Stock Exchange ($2.821 trillion) -- finally closing a gap of around $1.5 trillion which has been narrowing since the Brexit referendum. The milestone shift on Monday came as French stocks were buoyed by optimism over the demand for French luxury goods in response to China's slight easing of Covid-19 restrictions, while the sharper fall in the pound's value against the dollar compared with that of the euro this year has also played a role, Bloomberg noted.

While the UK's FTSE 100 index has remain relatively stable this year, thanks in part to export revenues boosted by a lower pound, the FTSE 250 index -- comprising smaller, medium-sized businesses -- has plummeted in value by 17 per cent. This fall has been fueled by concerns over rocketing energy bills and interest rates, the latter of which surged in the wake of Liz Truss's disastrous mini-Budget which spooked investors with her rapidly-announced raft of unfunded tax cuts. By the fourth week of Ms Truss's premiership, British stock and bond markets had lost roughly $500 billion in combined value, Bloomberg reported.

Speaking as Office for National Statistics figures showed that Britain's was the only G7 economy to shrink in the three months to September, the chancellor said on Friday he was "under no illusion that there is a tough road ahead" requiring "extremely difficult decisions to restore confidence and economic stability." "But to achieve long-term, sustainable growth, we need to grip inflation, balance the books and get debt falling," Mr Hunt insisted, adding: "There is no other way." However, Michael Saunders -- an economist who, until August, spent six years as one of the nine members on the Bank of England committee responsible for setting interest rates -- suggested on Monday that, were it not for Brexit, "we probably wouldn't be talking about an austerity budget this week."

NPR reports that "two teams of scientists — one at Northeastern University in Boston; the other at the University of Cambridge in the UK — recently announced that they managed to manufacture, in a lab, a material that does not exist naturally on Earth."

"It — until now — has only been found in meteorites." We spoke to Laura Henderson Lewis, one of the professors on the Northeastern team, and she told us the material found in the meteorites is a combination of two base metals, nickel and iron, which were cooled over millions of years as meteoroids and asteroids tumbled through space. That process created a unique compound with a particular set of characteristics that make it ideal for use in the high-end permanent magnets that are an essential component of a vast range of advanced machines, from electric vehicles to space shuttle turbines.

The compound is called tetrataenite, and the fact that scientists have found a way to make it in a lab is a huge deal. If synthetic tetrataenite works in industrial applications, it could make green energy technologies significantly cheaper. It could also roil the market in rare earths, currently dominated by China, and create a seismic shift in the industrial balance between China and the West....

But it will be a long time before tetrataenite is in a position to disrupt any existing markets, Laura Lewis says. She says there is still a lot of testing to be done to find out whether lab tetrataenite is as hardy and as useful as the outer space material. And even if it turns out to be as good, it will be five to eight years "pedal to the metal" before anyone could make permanent magnets out of it. In the meantime, China's competitors are working hard to source rare earths of their own. The US is investing in mines in Australia; there's exploration ongoing in Malaysia, and the Japanese are researching ways to extract elements from mud mined from the sea bed.

France opened a hub for testing electric air taxis as it seeks to introduce the world's first service with the new category of aircraft in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. From a report: Aeroports de Paris, which runs the French capital's major airports, will operate the facility alongside UK-based Skyports, a leading developer of so-called vertiports, as flying-taxi bases have been termed. The hub at Pontoise Cormeilles aerodrome, unveiled Thursday, combines a passenger terminal, take-off and landing area, mission control zone and hangar, all as close as possible to the configuration envisaged for 2024.

As part of the launch, Volocopter GmbH, a German developer of electric vertical take-off and landing craft or eVTOLs, as flying taxis are known, carried out a flight integrated into conventional air traffic. The project is also backed by RATP Group, which provides public transport in the Paris area, and the DGAC aviation regulator, as well as the transport ministry and Ile-de-France region.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Draconian licensing rules and a lack of public funding are holding back the emerging field of psychedelic medicine in the UK, leading scientists have warned after the release of groundbreaking results on the use of psilocybin to treat depression. The latest clinical trial found that a single dose of the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, combined with psychotherapy, helped alleviate depression in nearly a third of patients with severe depression. The finding follows other promising results suggesting that psychedelic drugs could be used in treating conditions including anxiety, PTSD, addiction and anorexia.

However, Prof David Nutt, the former government drug adviser and director of the neuropsychopharmacology research unit at Imperial College London, said that unless regulations and attitudes changed, potential treatments would remain "in limbo" at an experimental stage and available only to those who could pay for them in private clinics. "Patients are being denied access because of the regulations," he said. "The research is really hampered by the legal status."

Despite what some are hailing as a "psychedelic renaissance," Nutt said there had been minimal public funding for research in this area, besides a grant he received from the Medical Research Council to study psilocybin and funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research for a trial published last week. "I don't think there's any other funding. It's all philanthropists and private sector funding," he said. "It reflects the fact that we still see illegal drugs as drugs to be banned." He said basic scientific research was vital for the development of new potential treatments. "This isn't just some public groundswell of hippy resurrection," he said. "The science has driven the clinical work."

Microsoft's proposed $69 billion takeover of games developer Activision Blizzard faces an in-depth European Union probe after regulators said they're concerned the software giant could thwart access to blockbuster franchises such as Call of Duty. From a report: The European Commission said in a statement on Tuesday that Microsoft may "foreclose access to Activision Blizzard's console and PC video games, especially to high-profile and highly successful games." The EU's merger watchdog set a March 23 deadline for its so-called phase 2 investigation.

The combination with Activision -- which owns some of the most popular games also including World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero -- would make Microsoft the world's third-largest gaming company and boost the Xbox maker's roster of titles for its Game Pass subscribers. But the deal is already facing protracted scrutiny from antitrust agencies across the globe. Microsoft last month accused the UK's Competition and Markets Authority of relying on "self-serving" input from rival Sony Group in its deliberations. The US Federal Trade Commission is also reviewing the transaction, including looking into how it might impact workers.

Less than 1% of used clothing gets recycled into new garments, overwhelming countries like Ghana with discards. From a report: It's a disaster decades in the making, as clothing has become cheaper, plentiful and ever more disposable. Each year the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion apparel items, roughly 14 for every person on Earth and more than double the amount in 2000. Every day, tens of millions of garments are tossed out to make way for new, many into so-called recycling bins. Few are aware that old clothes are rarely recycled into new ones because the technology and infrastructure don't exist to do that at scale.

Instead, discarded garments enter a global secondhand supply chain that works to prolong their life, if only a little, by repurposing them as cleaning rags, stuffing for mattresses or insulation. But the rise of fast fashion -- and shoppers' preference for quantity over quality -- has led to a glut of low-value clothing that threatens to tank the economics of that trade and inordinately burdens developing countries. Meanwhile, the myth of circularity spreads, shielding companies and consumers from the inconvenient reality that the only way out of the global textile waste crisis is to buy less, buy better and wear longer. In other words, to end fast fashion.

[...] Globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually remade into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK nonprofit. (In contrast, 9% of plastic and about half of paper gets recycled.) The retailers have vowed that what they collect will never go to landfill or waste. But the reality is far messier. Garments dropped at in-store take-back programs enter the multibillion-dollar global secondhand supply chain, joining a torrent of discards from charity bins, thrift stores and online resale platforms like ThredUp and Sellpy. The complex task of sorting through that waste stream falls to a largely invisible global industry of brokers and processors. Their business depends on exporting much of the clothing to developing countries for rewear. It's the most profitable option and, in theory, the most environmentally responsible, because reusing items consumes less resources than recycling them.

Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say. From a report: Tiny amounts -- equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls -- are being tested to see how it performs inside the body. The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of. These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia.

If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups. Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate. At the moment, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group -- first identified in India -- in stock across the whole of the UK.

"Microsoft's GitHub Copilot is being sued in a class action lawsuit that claims the AI product is committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale," reports IT Pro.

Programmer/designer Matthew Butterick filed the case Thursday in San Francisco, saying it was on behalf of millions of GitHub users potentially affected by the $10-a-month Copilot service: The lawsuit seeks to challenge the legality of GitHub Copilot, as well as OpenAI Codex which powers the AI tool, and has been filed against GitHub, its owner Microsoft, and OpenAI.... "By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more), we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licences on GitHub," said Butterick.

These licences include a set of 11 popular open source licences that all require attribution of the author's name and copyright. This includes the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence. The case claimed that Copilot violates and removes these licences offered by thousands, possibly millions, of software developers, and is therefore committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale.

Copilot, which is entirely run on Microsoft Azure, often simply reproduces code that can be traced back to open-source repositories or licensees, according to the lawsuit. The code never contains attributions to the underlying authors, which is in violation of the licences. "It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall...." Moreover, the case stated that the defendants have also violated GitHub's own terms of service and privacy policies, the DMCA code 1202 which forbids the removal of copyright-management information, and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
The lawsuit also accuses GitHub of monetizing code from open source programmers, "despite GitHub's pledge never to do so."

And Butterick argued to IT Pro that "AI systems are not exempt from the law... If companies like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI choose to disregard the law, they should not expect that we the public will sit still." Butterick believes AI can only elevate humanity if it's "fair and ethical for everyone. If it's not... it will just become another way for the privileged few to profit from the work of the many."

Reached for comment, GitHub pointed IT Pro to their announcement Monday that next year, suggested code fragments will come with the ability to identify when it matches other publicly-available code — or code that it's similar to.

The article adds that this lawsuit "comes at a time when Microsoft is looking at developing Copilot technology for use in similar programmes for other job categories, like office work, cyber security, or video game design, according to a Bloomberg report."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country's cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities. The goal is to assess UK's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture. "These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact," the agency said. "The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK's exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time."

NCSC's scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231). The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet. "We're not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose," NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained. "We're beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we're doing (and why we're doing it)." The NCSC says it will "take steps to remove [any sensitive or personal data] and prevent it from being captured again in the future."

British organizations can opt out of having their servers scanned by emailing a list of IP addresses they want to be excluded at scanning@ncsc.gov.uk.

Stadiums around the world, including at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, are subjecting spectators to invasive biometric surveillance tech. From a report: This fall, more than 15,000 cameras will monitor soccer fans across eight stadiums and on the streets of Doha during the 2022 World Cup, an event expected to attract more than 1 million football fans from around the globe. "What you see here is the future of stadium operations," the organizers' chief technology officer, Niyas Abdulrahiman, proudly told AFP in August. "A new standard, a new trend in venue operations, this is our contribution from Qatar to the world of sport." Qatar's World Cup organizers are not alone in deploying biometric technology to monitor soccer fan activity. In recent years, soccer clubs and stadiums across Europe have been introducing these security and surveillance technologies.

In Denmark, Brondby Stadium has been using facial recognition for ticketing verification since 2019. In the Netherlands, NEC Nijmegen has used biometric technology to grant access to Goffert Stadium. France's FC Metz briefly experimented with a facial recognition device to identify fans banned from Saint-Symphorien Stadium. And the UK's Manchester City reportedly hired Texas-based firm Blink Identity in 2019 to deploy facial recognition systems at Etihad Stadium. In Spain, Atletico Osasuna uses facial recognition to monitor and control access to El Sadar Stadium, while Valencia CF signed a deal in June 2021 with biometrics company FacePhi to design and deploy facial-recognition technology at Mestalla Stadium in the upcoming season. The sport club then became a global ambassador for the company's technology. FacePhi's biometric onboarding technology was already used for a pilot project to enroll Valencia CF fans in an automated access control system that allowed them to get into the stadium using a QR code via the football club's mobile app. (A FacePhi spokesperson declined to provide details about the project but said "that we are not yet in the implementation phase with Valencia CF.")

The UK parliament started an inquiry into nonfungible tokens, the digital collectibles for which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been a champion. From a report: The Digital, Culture, Media & Sport committee in the House of Commons announced the initiative in a statement on Friday, adding that it will also study the wider blockchain technology that underpins NFTs. "MPs are expected to consider whether NFT investors, especially vulnerable speculators, are put at risk by the market," the DCMS committee said in the statement. "The inquiry may also look into the wider benefits that NFTs and the blockchain could provide the UK economy." NFTs rose into public consciousness in 2021, driven by the success of the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection that became a hit with celebrities. But interest in NFTs has dried up this year as crypto assets crashed, with trading tumbling more than 95% between January and September by one estimate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Remote working may have peaked in the UK as a loosening labor market hands power back to employers, according to research by LinkedIn. In September, 12% of UK jobs advertised on the site were remote, compared with 16% in January, as "paranoid" employers worry about the productivity of working from home, said Josh Graff, the managing director of LinkedIn for EMEA and Latin America. The company also found that three out of four bosses in the UK are concerned that the current economic slowdown means they will have to go back on flexible working, in a global survey of around 3,000 C-suite executives at large organizations.

Despite the falling percentage of remote and hybrid work being advertised, it is still popular with candidates, said Graff. He noted that although just 12% of jobs advertised were remote, they got 20% of all applications. Graff described this as a "growing disconnect between what professionals want and what employers are offering." Graff added that staff and bosses also disagree about the efficacy of working from home, with "paranoia" about the amount getting done. Microsoft research found that 80% of managers felt their teams were less productive when they were not in the office. About 85% of managers worry they can't tell if employees are getting enough done, while 87% of workers say their productivity is just fine, Microsoft found.

The UK labor market is still running hot with the 3.5% unemployment rate the lowest since 1974, according to the Office for National Statistics. However, Graff said the hiring rate on LinkedIn fell by 10% in the UK in September from a year earlier, in a sign of slowdown. Graff cautioned that returning to "command and control" structures might not be good for businesses, as they risk losing "motivated employees at a moment when they need them most." "While difficult decisions undoubtedly have to be taken, it's important to remember that your employees are your company's most precious asset," he said. "They have experience of your systems, your processes. They're aligned with your culture and values and importantly they are the ones that hold deep customer relationships as well."