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Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it was buying business-oriented social network LinkedIn for a casual $26.2 billion dollars. It didn't make a whole lot of sense then, and now, having slept on it and taken the time to think it over, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Microsoft's track record at big budget acquisitions is poor. Marketing firm aQuantive was bought for $6 billion in 2007; that led to a $6.2 billion write-down in 2012. Nokia's mobile phone division was bought in 2014 for €5.4 billion (about $6.1 billion). This led to write-downs totalling about $8.5 billion in 2015 and 2016. The company bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, and while Skype continues to be a going concern, it has ceded ground in many areas. Messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have boomed, leaving Skype behind. Upstarts such as Discord are also becoming viable alternatives for many users, and Skype users continue to have gripes about the clients, the quality of the network, and Microsoft's uncertain strategy for future development.

The LinkedIn deal—$26.2 billion dollars for a company that doesn't make a (GAAP) profit—dwarfs these past purchases.

The database of the Air Force's Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS)—which is used by the Air Force Inspector General's Office to manage investigations into complaints from whistleblowers of waste, fraud, and abuse; Freedom Of Information Act requests; and congressional inquiries—has become corrupted, rendering over 10,000 case files dating back to 2004 unreadable. And because of the way the database was backed up, an Air Force spokesperson said that neither the service nor Lockheed Martin—the contractor that operates the ATCS system for the Air Force—can recover the data.

"The database crashed and there is no data," Ann Stefanak of Air Force Media Operations said in a statement to press. "We’ve kind of exhausted everything we can to recover [the data internally]... and now we’re going to outside experts to see if they can help." Efforts are being made to see if the data was backed up in other locations, and the Air Force has begun asking for help from other organizations within the Department of Defense and from outside experts in recovering the database's contents.

Air Force officials were informed by Lockheed Martin employees of the database crash on June 6, after two weeks of attempting to recover the data. While much of the data in the system was historical, ACTS is primarily used to track ongoing investigations and inquiries—and those cases are now "experiencing significant delays,” Stefanek said.

Siri is opening up. Kind of.

Apple's "intelligent personal assistant" came before Google Now and Cortana and Alexa, but all of those assistants have caught up to and lapped Siri in one important way: they let third-party applications and services use them to do stuff. As it stands today, Siri can be used to launch third-party apps, but it isn't able to do anything else.

That will change in iOS 10, which is extending Siri to third-party developers via "SiriKit." Developers can't quite do everything that Apple can do—even when letting developers in, Apple still holds them at arm's length with clearly defined extension points and rules—but the company is making it possible to do more stuff without actually launching an app and digging around. Based on the developer documentation that Apple has published so far, here are the kinds of things that third-party apps are going to be able to do with Siri in iOS 10 and what developers have to do behind the scenes to make it work.

In the keynote presentation of this week's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, Apple announced that it would allow website developers to add an Apple Pay button to the checkout part of their sites. The company also revealed that iMessage will now be open to apps from third-party developers, and one of Apple's spokespeople demonstrated this new openness by sending money to a friend using an iMessage-compatible Square Cash app. Both of these new announcements will make buying things easier in the Apple ecosystem, but neither seems to be the kind of development that will (singlehandedly) propel Apple to dominate the payments market.

Apple's Web-payments function, called “Pay with Apple Pay,” only works in Safari for now. The aim is to reduce any friction a customer might experience while checking out after a little e-shopping spree—the customer just selects the Apple Pay button during checkout and then authenticates the transaction using TouchID on their phone or by tapping an Apple Watch associated with the computer the purchase is being made on. After all, if you don't have to track down your credit card and find the right security code to input, you're less likely to get distracted from your capitalist urges or have time to think about whether you should really be buying a 5lb gummy bear.

That's something PayPal and Amazon have tried to perfect, and although Apple Pay's latest features have been described as challenging PayPal, there's room for some caution in that prediction. Thad Peterson, a Senior Analyst at independent research firm Aite Group, noted that PayPal is global, platform agnostic, and has a 12-year head start on Apple Pay.

Attackers are exploiting a critical vulnerability in Adobe's widely used Flash Player, and Adobe says it won't have a patch ready until later this week.

The active zero-day exploit works against the most recent Flash version 21.0.0.242 and was detected earlier this month by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab, according to a blog post published Tuesday by Costin Raiu, the director of the company's global research and analysis team. It's being carried out by "ScarCruft," the name Kaspersky has given to a relatively new hacking group engaged in "advanced persistent threat" campaigns that target companies and organizations for high-value information and data. Raiu wrote:

ScarCruft is a relatively new APT group; victims have been observed in several countries, including Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, India, Kuwait and Romania. The group has several ongoing operations utilizing multiple exploits—two for Adobe Flash and one for Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Currently, the group is engaged in two major operations: Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus. The first of them, Operation Daybreak, appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown (0-day) Adobe Flash Player exploit, focusing on high profile victims. The other one, “Operation Erebus” employs an older exploit, for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes. It is also possible that the group deployed another zero day exploit, CVE-2016-0147, which was patched in April.

We will publish more details about the attack once Adobe patches the vulnerability, which should be on June 16. Until then, we confirm that Microsoft EMET is effective at mitigating the attacks. Additionally, our products detect and block the exploit, as well as the malware used by the ScarCruft APT threat actor.

The currently unfixed vulnerability is indexed as CVE-2016-4171. Adobe's bare-bones advisory is here.

Editor's note: This article contains minor spoilers throughout. (Unless you're an avid WoW player, that is.)

"Blizzard should make a movie" has been a wish for just about every fan that has seen one of the company's gorgeous CG cinematics. And this weekend, these gamers sort of got their wish when the Warcraft movie finally arrived stateside.

Sadly, I can't imagine many fans wanted to see this Warcraft story get made into a movie. While the film was obviously created due to the success of World of Warcraft, it is not "World of Warcraft: The Movie." The story simply doesn't take place in the "Modern" Warcraft era depicted in WoW and Warcraft 3. Instead, this is the "First War" film—depicting the battle between the Orcs and Humans. If you're going by the games, the story more or less follows "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans" (aka "Warcraft 1"), the original DOS real-time strategy game from 1994.

A few weeks ago, the BBC's new season of Top Gear debuted, complete with a brand new cast (and an online addition, Extra Gear). We weren't too impressed with the premiere, suggesting that it was time for the broadcaster to think outside its (gear)box. But three episodes in, we're happy to relay that the rebuilt transmission appears to be bedding in, and things are looking up. And even better, Chris Harris and Neil Carey will be working together again to produce more of the long-form car videos beloved by car nerds on the Internet.

Back to the main event. After the stilted and at times boring season opener, Top Gear appears to be finding its feet (tires?). We got to see Sabine Schmitz make Chris Evans lose his breakfast—strawberries, in case you were curious—by lapping Laguna Seca in an Audi R8. Harris also made his first appearance on the big show, driving a Ferrari 250 Tour de France back to back with its new descendent, the F12 TdF. Rory Reid gave us a great piece on the Ford Focus RS, a car that apparently anyone can drift like the Stig. (We'll be putting that to the test next month when Ford lets us drive the Focus RS, and the company is even bringing one of the former Stigs along to offer some tuition.)

We also got to see the piece that caused a media scandal in the UK earlier this year. Months before Top Gear's new season started, the show was making negative headlines after Ken Block (the hoonatic with a billion YouTube views) showed off his drifting skills in London. Burning rubber and doing donuts within sight of the Cenotaph (a war memorial) did not go down well with UK "Red Tops" that were already on the hunt for bad news about Top Gear.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—Your history and experience with video games may very well be defined by the acronyms you hold near and dear. All-caps letter slams like WASD, LFG, GLHF, QTE, and HPB represent a lot for certain gaming genres or eras (and probably read like gobbledygook to outsiders), but in the console gaming space, one acronym may very well count as the longest-lasting of them all: ATB.

That stands for the Active-Time Battle system from Final Fantasy, which debuted in its fifth game and has remained a constant in a series that otherwise revels in full memory-slate wipes with its every sequel. Sure, the games share constants like Chocobos, mechanics named Cid, and elemental magic mixed with giant-monster summons, but the RPG series is probably best known for, and identified by, its meter-charging twist on turn-based combat.

The upcoming release of Final Fantasy XV is interesting in a lot of ways, from its enormity to its car-cruising "band of bros" premise. But after being given full room to roam in the game's entire first chapter, the largest takeaway by far is its battle-system shift. Forget the teases and dances with real-time active combat in games like FFXIII; Square Enix has finally, truly pushed its golden child into the real-time combat realm.