Adidas has removed Bella Hadid from its social media pages after issuing an apology for “any upset or distress caused” by its release of an ad campaign for retro sneakers based on shoes first released during the 1972 Munich Olympics.

The company selected Hadid as the face of its SL72 project, which marks the 52nd anniversary of the Munich Olympics with a throwback to Adidas’ popular shoe from the 1970s.

In 1972, the Games were marred by the infamous Munich massacre, which happened after Palestinian militant group Black September orchestrated a terrorist attack targeting Israeli Olympic team members, nine of whom were taken hostage. By the time it was over, 11 Israelis, a West German police officer and five of the terrorists died.

The controversy follows the sportswear company’s decision to hire Hadid, who is Palestinian American and vocal about her advocacy for Palestinian relief efforts. Hadid, 27, has been posting her support for the Palestinian cause on social media for years. In 2017, the model spelled out her thoughts on Instagram.

“Watching the news and seeing the pain of the Palestinian people makes me cry for the many many generations of Palestine. Seeing the sadness of my father, cousins, and Palestinian family that are feeling for our Palestinian ancestors makes this even harder to write,” Hadid said. “The TREATMENT of the Palestinian people is unfair, one-sided and should not be tolerated. I stand with Palestine.”

Adidas faced criticism from Jewish organizations and Israel for aligning the SL72 campaign with a model known for her pro-Palestinian sentiments. The American Jewish Committee condemned Adidas’ decision, labeling it either a “massive oversight or intentionally inflammatory.”

“For Adidas to pick a vocal anti-Israel model to recall this dark Olympics is either a massive oversight or intentionally inflammatory. Neither is acceptable. We call on Adidas to address this egregious error,” the AJC said in a post on the social media platform X.

Adidas subsequently issued its apology.

“The adidas Originals SL72 campaign unites a broad range of partners to celebrate our lightweight running shoe, designed more than 50 years ago and worn in sport and culture around the world,” a spokesperson told The Times via email.

“We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events — though these are completely unintentional — and we apologize for any upset or distress caused. As a result we are revising the remainder of the campaign. We believe in sport as a unifying force around the world and will continue our efforts to champion diversity and equality in everything we do.”

Representatives for Hadid were not reachable for comment Friday. A pinned post on the model’s Instagram account from 2021 underscores her commitment to raising awareness about Palestinian issues.

“A Palestinian girl on the cover of Vogue. The joy it brings me to say that….I won’t stop talking about the systematic oppression, pain and humility that Palestinians face on a regular basis. With only love in my heart and an open mind to educate myself and learn more every day…. No matter what.”

Talk about irony: The software that paralyzed Windows computers around the world late Thursday night and early Friday morning was planted by a company that protects Windows computers against malware.

That company is CrowdStrike, a publicly traded cybersecurity firm based in Austin, Texas. It acknowledged the problem around 11 p.m. Thursday and started working on a solution, offering a workaround in the wee hours Friday and a fix a few hours later.

The vast sea of Blue Screens of Death triggered by CrowdStrike’s error is a testament to the market-leading status of the company’s software, which detects and defends against malicious code planted by hackers. Its approach is known as “endpoint security” because it installs its defenses on devices that connect to the internet, such as computers and smartphones.

According to the website 6sense.com, CrowdStrike has more than 3,500 customers, which represent about one of every four companies buying endpoint security. Although most of its customers are based in the United States, it has hundreds in India, Europe and Australia, 6sense reports.

Here’s a quick explanation for how things went wrong so quickly for so many Windows users around the world, including airlines, hospitals, banks and government agencies.

The Falcon Sensor update

One of the selling points of CrowdStrike service is that it can improve its defenses rapidly as new threats are discovered. As part of that service, it continuously and automatically updates the Falcon Sensor software on its customers’ machines.

Automatic updates are, under normal circumstances, a good cybersecurity practice because they prevent clients from having machines with outdated defenses on their networks. But the latest incident reveals the flip side of the coin.

According to CrowdStrike, the problem was triggered by a “single content update” for its customers with Windows PCs. The buggy code wasn’t detected until after it had downloaded and installed on many of CrowdStrike’s clients machines.

Once loaded, the bad update interfered with core functions of the PC, causing Microsoft’s infamous blue error screen to pop up and convey a message along the lines of, “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart.” And as long as the update remained in place, restarting the machine led to the same errant result.

The fix offered by CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike stopped sending out the faulty update early Friday morning, so machines that had not loaded it yet were spared the turmoil.

For machines caught in the cycle of blue-screen hell, the company initially offered step-by-step instructions for how to reboot Windows in a mode that would allow them to find and delete the buggy update. The drawback, as many commenters online noted, is that this machine-by-machine approach isn’t much help for organizations with hundreds or thousands of bricked PCs.

According to the tech website 404, Microsoft also suggested rebooting a crashed machine multiple times — as many as 15 — could solve the problem.

Within a few hours, CrowdStrike was distributing a piece of software that removed the buggy code. This worked only for customers whose machines were able to connect to the internet and download the fix, though; everyone else would be left with the PC-by-PC workaround.

The lessons from the CrowdStrike debacle

Some Macintosh and Linux users, who were immune to the CrowdStrike-induced upheaval, devoted a portion of their morning Friday to spiking the football on Windows, even though the problem wasn’t caused by Microsoft.

Other observers argued that the incident demonstrated the risk of having one potential point of failure affecting millions of computers — a problem that has been demonstrated repeatedly during the broadband era.

Steve Garrison, founder of Stellar Cyber in San Francisco, said it’s more important to figure out how to make improvements than to play the blame game. This incident, he said, underscores the need for companies to spend plenty of time checking the quality of their products in a controlled environment before releasing them to customers.

Another lesson, he said, is the need for companies, their competitors and their customers to work together as a community to spot problems. “What do we need to do to check the checkers of our supply chain?” he asked.

Dan O’Dowd, a developer of security software for the military, said the fiasco demonstrates that we need better software in critical systems.

“The immense body of software developed using Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast and break things’ culture means that the software our lives depend on is riddled with defects and vulnerabilities,” O’Dowd said in a statement. “Defects in this software can result in a mass failure event even more serious than the one we have seen today.”

He added, “We must convince the CEOs and Boards of Directors of the companies that build the systems our lives depend on to rewrite their software so that it never fails and can’t be hacked. … These companies will not take cybersecurity seriously until the public demands it. And we must demand it now, before a major disaster strikes.”

Here’s a handy two-step process for taking a thoughtful and judicious approach to the burning social and political issues of our time:

1. Examine closely the position taken by Elon Musk, and;

2. Go the other way.

Musk’s drift — more precisely, his headlong dive — into right-wing orthodoxies has been well-chronicled. He has openly endorsed antisemitic tropes, called for the prosecution of the respected immunologist Anthony Fauci (evidently buying into the right-wing fantasy that Fauci helped create the COVID-19 pandemic), and associated himself with a grotesquely ugly conspiracy theory about the assault on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He reversed policies at X, formerly Twitter, designed to block hate speech, including racist and antisemitic tweets. That has turned the platform into a hive of repulsive partisan commentary.

(Musk blames an imaginary advertisers’ “boycott” for the user decline at X, though the repulsive atmosphere of the platform since his acquisition probably has done more to drive users and advertisers away.)

Musk again put his acrid personal worldview vividly on display with his announcement Tuesday that he would move two of his private companies, Hawthorne-based SpaceX and San Francisco-based X, to Texas.

He made clear that his decision was triggered by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signing of a law that bars school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents of their children’s gender identity changes. Newsom signed the law on Monday.

“This is the final straw,” Musk posted on X. He described the law as one of “many others” in California “attacking both families and companies.”

A few things about this.

If anything, Musk’s corporate activities point to what is often described as a “whim of iron.” He defends his policies and politics as derived from painstaking consideration based on immutable laws of human behavior, but they don’t hold water on those terms. Instead, they point to the social dangers of endowing self-interested personalities with the money to buy unaccountable influence in conflict with the public interest.

Musk appears to have a real problem with transgender rights. According to the Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, this may have originated with the decision of his eldest child, Xavier, to transition at the age of 16. “I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted a relative. “Don’t tell my dad.”

Jenna followed up with a political awakening that Musk ascribed to her attendance at a private school in California. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he told Isaacson. Jenna broke off all contact with him.

Further, as is the case with much of Musk’s worldview, his claim about California’s attacks on families and companies is fundamentally incoherent.

The new California law is the antithesis of an attack on families. It aims to protect the right of parents to seek the most appropriate medical treatments for their children. Anti-transgender activists who have gotten laws enacted in 20 red states interfering with these medical consultations typically characterize them as “parents’ rights” measures, when they’re just the opposite — they interpose right-wing ideologies between these families and their doctors.

That’s the state of play in Texas, the putative new home of SpaceX and X. There, a law that became effective on Sept. 1, 2023, prohibited treatments widely accepted by medical professionals for “gender dysphoria” experienced by adolescents.

These are chiefly the use of puberty blockers to give the patients more time to affirm their gender perception, and once that stage is achieved the use of cross-sex hormones —estrogen for males transitioning to female, and testosterone for females transitioning to male.

The Texas law threatens physicians who violate the law in treating their patients with the loss of their medical license.

A trial judge, ruling in a lawsuit brought by parents of transgender youths and by doctors who treat patients in that position, blocked the law shortly before it was to take effect. The injunction was overturned late last month by the Texas Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision.

The majority made clear that its decision had nothing to do with the weight of medical opinion, which overwhelmingly supported the treatments at issue when undertaken through careful consultation.

The issue at the heart of the debate, asserted Justice James D. Blacklock in a concurring opinion, “is one of philosophy, morality, even religion. The medical debates at issue in this litigation are merely the surface-level consequences of deep disagreement over the deepest of questions about who we are.”

The majority justices ruled that the Legislature was entirely within its rights to place limits on medical practice and parental authority in Texas. They asserted that barring parents from seeking medically indicated treatment of their children’s gender dysphoria was no different from a state law forbidding minors from getting tattoos, even with their parents’ permission.

“Of course,” responded Justice Debra H. Lehrmann, the court’s lone dissenter, “there is nothing remotely medically necessary about tattooing.” Depriving adolescents of gender dysphoria therapies, on the other hand, can be severely injurious to the patient’s physical and mental health.

If Musk thinks that Texas’ policies on parental rights are superior to California’s, he might ask the parents of transgender youths who have been driven out of Texas to seek treatment because of this ignorant and ideologically infected law.

Texas boosters, Musk included, like to describe the state as the coming place for venture investing. The truth is rather different. According to the National Venture Capital Assn., Texas has been mired in also-ran status for at least the last decade, a period in which it has been supposedly booming.

California’s position as the top state in venture funding has never been seriously challenged. In 2023, California VC funds raised $37 billion; Texas ranked seventh, with less than $1.2 billion. Of the top 10 venture deals by value last year, the NVCA reckons, eight involved California companies. The others were located in New York and Washington, D.C. Texas had none.

And in terms of assets under management by firms based in the state, California continues to reign with $644.5 billion as of last year. Texas ranks fifth, at less than $32.5 billion. It was edged out by No. 4 Florida, with $33.6 billion, but the figures for both Florida and Texas are a big drop-off from No. 3, Massachusetts, with $121.7 billion.

It’s not as if Austin, where Musk is hanging his Texas Stetson, offers newcomers a paradisiacal environment. In 2022, TechCrunch dubbed Austin “a city of unicorns and tech giants.” The thrill hasn’t lasted. Recent transplants have found that its boosters’ depiction of a vibrant intellectual climate was oversold. “Austin is where ambition goes to die,” an unhappy California immigrant told Business Insider.

Then there are its punishing summers — 78 days of triple-digit temperatures in 2023 — and soaring housing prices. Although Austin boasts one of the features of tech hubs, a leading research institution in the University of Texas, the state’s partisan political environment has turned increasingly hostile, with bills passed into law this year banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and narrowing faculty tenure protections.

Texas has the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the nation, with an almost total ban and a prohibition even on private health plan coverage of abortions. That hardly makes for an inviting prospect for women of childbearing age or for young families interested in the full range of reproductive healthcare options.

One advantage Texas has over California is something a rich entrepreneur like Musk would appreciate the most: It has no state income tax.

Musk can scarcely claim that his own corporate policies are family-friendly. They are, however, arguably self-destructive. Consider his treatment of thousands of former Twitter employees who were summarily fired after he took over the platform in October 2022 and are suing to receive severance payments, bonuses and other benefits they were promised before the takeover.

The mass firings have given rise to about 2,000 arbitration cases and a dozen class-action lawsuits, according to Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Massachusetts labor lawyer who represents the workers in arbitration and filed the lawsuits.

Among the workers’ claims is that while Musk was working to close his acquisition of Twitter, as it was then known, the company promised employees that they would be entitled to “benefits and severance at least as favorable” as what Twitter provided before the Musk takeover. The promises were made by company executives in a series of all-hands meetings at Twitter headquarters and were written into the merger agreement Musk and Twitter management negotiated in April 2022.

“The promises were made to keep employees from fleeing the company during those chaotic months before Musk closed on the acquisition,” Liss-Riordan told me. “Then after he closed, he just defaulted on that promise.”

Neither Musk nor spokespersons for X or SpaceX could be reached for comment.

Although many if not most of the X employees were required to bring their claims to arbitration, Musk initially refused to pay the arbitration fees that are typically charged to the employer in such cases.

That has frozen the proceedings in more than 800 cases, though not those originating in California, Oregon and Nevada, where employers don’t have the legal ability to refuse. About a third of the 2,000 arbitration claims are in California, Liss-Riordan says.

Leaving aside the ethical implications of a company’s forcing employees into arbitration and then refusing to allow the cases to proceed, Musk’s demand that ex-employees submit to arbitration may be exceptionally more costly for the company than trying to reach a general settlement. Arbitration fees can average $100,000 per case, Liss-Riordan told me; hundreds of millions of dollars in claims may be at issue.

“You have to scratch your head over why Elon Musk has to fight this so hard,” she says. “Would it really be that big a deal to pay the employees what was promised to them? Frankly, it doesn’t seem worth his time.”