Linked List: September 4, 2026

Friday, 4 September 2026

Adobe Names Anil Chakravarthy as CEO, Replacing Shantanu Narayen ★

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Adobe on Thursday named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who announced he would step down earlier this year. Chakravarthy, who most recently served as president of Adobe’s customer experience orchestration and worldwide field operations, will take the helm Dec. 1, the company said. He will also join Adobe’s board.

I’m sure promoting the head of “customer experience orchestration” to CEO will restore Adobe’s focus on creating great tools for artists and designers.

NBA Brings the Hammer on the Clippers – $30 Million Fine, 5 First-Round Draft Picks, and Steve Ballmer Is Banned for a Year ★

Mike Vorkunov, reporting for The Athletic (gift link):

The NBA levied the largest punishment in league history on the LA Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday after a year-long investigation determined that they circumvented the league’s salary cap rules to help funnel millions to Kawhi Leonard. The Clippers will lose five first-round picks — selections in 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032 and 2033 — and are being fined $30 million, the league announced.

Ballmer has been suspended for one year, the NBA said, “for knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities.” The NBA said Ballmer approved a Clippers deal with Aspiration because he knew it was a precondition for the company to enter into a sponsorship deal with Leonard.

The Clippers, according to NBA investigators, tried to evade NBA rules on circumvention by creating a “novel theory” that it was OK to introduce business partners to players if the player or their representative asked for introductions. The NBA did not find that persuasive.

Basically Steve Ballmer invested over $50 million in a now-bankrupt startup named Aspiration. Aspiration was the jersey-patch sponsor for the Clippers, and after Leonard signed with the Clippers, Aspiration signed Leonard to a $28 million no-show “endorsement” deal. Leonard asked for, and then received, more money than his on-the-books salary.

It’s a classic Microsoft dirty-tricks move to circumvent the NBA’s player salary cap. There’s nothing illegal about what Ballmer and the Clippers did. They violated league rules, not the law. The difference is that the NBA is a league with a strong commissioner’s office that can investigate cheating and impose serious penalties. If tech companies were teams in a similar league, Microsoft would have been fined dozens of times throughout the ’80s and ’90s and ’00s. Ballmer would have been suspended multiple times and Bill Gates would have been suspended so many times he probably would have been kicked out of the league. If there was anything underhanded Microsoft could do to get ahead — or to stick the knife in a competitor — they did it.

That worked out fabulously well for Microsoft. It doesn’t work in the NBA. The Clippers remain a loser franchise that not only has never won a title, but has never even appeared in the Finals. Losing a first-round draft pick each year from 2029–2033 (inclusive) certainly won’t help get them off the schneid.

Apple Fixed ‎TestFlight’s Screwy Sort Order ★

I wrote two weeks ago about how the v4.3.0 update to TestFlight (released on July 21) broke the sort order for apps in the sidebar. Apple yesterday released v4.3.1, with these helpful release notes:

This update includes stability improvements and bug fixes.

One of the weirdest parts about this sort-order bug is that it only affected some people. I was obviously one of them; so was John Siracusa. For both of us, yesterday’s v4.3.1 update fixes the bug.

Vinted ★

Remarking on MapQuest taking the #1 spot in the App Store (in the wake of their decision to ignore President Trump’s fiat renaming of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”), I mentioned yesterday that I’d never heard of Vinted, the #3 app. (A day later and MapQuest is still #1, by the way.)

Vinted, it turns out, is an eBay-like market for buying and selling used clothing. From a Lithuanian startup and the whole thing has been popular in Europe for a while, and obviously now is gaining popularity in the U.S.

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses ★

Brian Krebs, reporting at KrebsOnSecurity:

On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).

Krebs seemingly tracked down the source: IDScan.net, an outfit that is used by car rental agencies like Hertz (seemingly where they got Krebs’s own drivers license) and marijuana dispensaries. They kept over 150 million ID card scans and lost them all in a data breach. Unreal.