Correction, 12:50 p.m. PST: This story initially mischaracterized a statement made by John Challenger regarding the severity of recent tech-related job cuts. He does not expect them to be as severe as those during the dot-com bust. Also the percentage figures cited within the various sectors reflect the increase in layoffs last year compared with 2007, and not the percentage of jobs cut.
Job cuts in the tech sector increased 74.2 percent in 2008 compared with the previous year, as the industry was battered by an unrelenting wave of layoffs, according to a report released Thursday.
Last year, 186,955 jobs in the telecommunications, computer, and electronics sectors were slashed, according to the report by outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
And the bulk of those cuts, nearly three-quarters, came during the last six months of the year, the report noted. That drove the tech sector to unemployment levels not seen since 2003, according to the report.
"Through the first half of 2008, it looked as though the tech sector might be one of the few areas of the economy to remain resistant to recessionary pressures. However, the economy's continued slide here and overseas saw consumer and corporate demand for technology products and services drop rapidly, and these firms were suddenly under pressure to make significant cost-cutting moves," John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in statement.
AT&T, for example, announced 12,000 job cuts last year, while Sun Microsystems unveiled plans to cut 6,000 positions, and Xerox 3,000 jobs.
Within the various sectors in tech, electronics firms saw losses of 73,447 jobs, an increase of 89.7 percent over the previous year; the telecommunications industry saw an increase of 72.5 percent; and cuts in the computer industry were up 61.3 percent.
And in the Silicon Valley, for just the month of December, the unemployment rate rose to 7.7 percent in Santa Clara County and 5.9 percent in San Mateo County. Nationwide, the unemployment rate reached 7.2 percent for the month of December.
And the forecast for 2009 is not looking much better.
"Cuts could reach even higher in 2009, as there is no evidence yet that the economy has hit the bottom of this downward portion of the cycle. We almost certainly will not see a repeat of the 2008 first quarter, in which tech cuts totaled just 17,345," Challenger said in a statement.
He added, however, he does not expect technology-related job cuts to be as severe as the dot-com bust, when 36 percent of all layoffs across a wide swath of industries came from tech.
It is a hoax, Wired reported Thursday -- an article that looks like a story on Wired.com and that claims Apple CEO Steve Jobs has had a heart attack.
"A widely-circulated URL which points to an image that purports to be a wired.com story about Steve Jobs health is a hack job," Wired.com said. "We won't provide the URL here but the Twitterverse quickly surmised that the item was not correct." It appears to have first been reported by Mashable.
Someone created a legitimate-looking Web page using Wired's public upload image viewer, which generates a page containing an image under a Wired logo banner, Wired.com said. The hole has been patched, the news site added.
While characteristics of the fake post--such as the Wired logo, byline, and accompanying related stories list--make it look legitimate, the post is plagued with misspellings and grammatical problems.
Rumors about Job's health have been a big deal for the last 12 months, including a fake news item in October about Jobs purportedly having a heart attack. That allegation was reported on CNN's iReport citizen journalism site and led to a drop in the price of Apple stock.
Jobs, who had surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, announced this month that he will take a medical leave of absence to treat a hormone imbalance.
Mashable got a screen shot of the fake Wired.com page with the Steve Jobs hoax report.
(Credit: Mashable)
(Credit:
Topherchris.com)
Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health and general inanity (i.e. "SEX ME") before finally succumbing to "technical difficulties."
It remains uncertain whether the pranksters actually brought down the site, or whether MacRumors voluntarily took it down to keep things under control.
It's pretty clear, however, that this was the work of 4Chan, which has gained both respect and notoriety (depending on who you ask) over the past year for its persistent protests against the controversial Scientology sect in the form of an offshoot group called "Anonymous."
Over on 4Chan's labyrinthine forums, a couple of threads (warning: contains explicit language) hint at members' collusion to take down MacRumors Live, and the hacked live blog was peppered with declarations of "4CHAN FTW" (that's "for the win," for those who stepped in late).
This year's Macworld Expo has gained particular attention because Apple has announced that it's the last in which it will have a presence. Additionally, iconic CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of the keynote presentation. took his place.
The 4Chan skulduggery appears to have first been noticed by Twitter users and independent blogs like Topherchris.com, which took the screenshot above.
One Twitter user pointed to rumors on social-news site Digg that 4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords on Monday night.
It's a silly prank, yes. But it could have a big impact on MacRumors: this is likely the site's biggest day of the year, and the event could have an impact on both ad revenues and server costs.
UPDATE: It's not totally clear who's actually responsible for this attack. We've been getting a handful of e-mails indicating that it may have been a non-4chan group called Myg0t that was using the 4chan forums to organize, and another e-mail claimed credit on behalf of another forum community, Ebaumsworld. Indeed, screenshots show that one of the hacker messages read, "We are from Ebaumsworld. We are hackers on steroids."
Honestly? The world may never know.
This post was updated at 2:13 p.m. PT.
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