推特松散的账户安全应该让在线活动人士暂停

我写这篇关于社交网络的时事通讯的一个原因是报道国家行为体用来让公众屈服于他们意愿的新的奇异方法。在过去两年中，人们谈论的话题大多围绕着“巨魔农场”或“巨魔军队”——本质上是试图用笔记本电脑对世界各地的目标进行破坏的远程劳动力。...

我写这篇关于社交网络的时事通讯的一个原因是报道国家行为体用来让公众屈服于他们意愿的新的奇异方法。在过去两年中，人们谈论的话题大多围绕着“巨魔农场”或“巨魔军队”——本质上是试图用笔记本电脑对世界各地的目标进行破坏的远程劳动力。

上周六，我们了解到一种更令人不安的社交媒体黑客攻击方法。凯蒂·本纳、马克·马泽蒂、本·哈伯德和迈克·艾萨克都有阿里·阿尔扎巴拉（Ali Alzabarah）的故事。阿里·阿尔扎巴拉是沙特阿拉伯招募的一名推特工程师，利用他的职位来识别**批评者：

Twitter executives first became aware of a possible plot to infiltrate user accounts at the end of 2015, when Western intelligence officials told them that the Saudis were grooming an employee, Ali Alzabarah, to spy on the accounts of dissidents and others, according to five people briefed on the matter. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Alzabarah had joined Twitter in 2013 and had risen through the ranks to an engineering position that gave him access to the personal information and account activity of Twitter’s users, including phone numbers and I.P. addresses, unique identifiers for devices connected to the internet.

也许你之前就想到过，国家行为体会试图招募工程师和其他社交网络雇员作为间谍。我花在思考这件事上的时间比我本该花的时间要少！无论如何，这是令人心寒的，并产生了现实世界的后果。Alzabarah被解雇了，据报道现在为沙特**工作。他访问了数十个账户，作为广泛努力的一部分，以确定沙特最有影响力的批评者，并恐吓他们保持沉默。

这项工作的另一部分涉及咨询公司麦肯锡（McKinsey），麦肯锡最著名的地方是你的大学朋友在商学院毕业前在那里度过两个懒散的研究生年。正如《****》报道的那样，麦肯锡代表沙特人撰写了一份长达9页的报告，点名了著名的沙特持不同政见者。其中一名男子和他的两个兄弟被捕，一名匿名评论家的报道也被关闭(麦肯锡否认了一切，相当无力。）

Facebook过去经常谈到它对用户帐户的严格控制，以阻止Alzabarah发起的攻击。每次用户的数据被访问时，Facebook的员工都会这样做，并定期审核日志，寻找可疑行为。

在Twitter上，情况要宽松得多。也许你已经忘记了一名合同工曾短暂停用特朗普总统的账户；我当然没有。从我去年的故事来看，Twitter考虑安全问题的严肃性如下：

In the wake of Trump’s account deactivation shortly before 10PM ET on Thursday, former employees gathered in a private Slack that they use to discuss the company’s travails. The rogue employee, who has not been identified, was an immediate source of fascination. “We’re now referring to this individual as ‘the legend,’” one former employee told The Verge. At the same time, the former employee was not surprised by the incident. “People have ‘dropped the mic’ in the past and deleted accounts, verified users, and otherwise abused their power on the last day,” the employee said. In each case, the employee said, the abuse was caught quickly and did not become public.

These “mic drops” were possible because of the broad availability of customer support tools inside Twitter. The company won’t say how many people have access to the tools necessary to deactivate an account like Trump’s — and after today, the number is likely much lower. But up until now, as many as hundreds of people have had access to the tools, which let employees see a broad range of information about the account. The access does not allow employees to send tweets from other users’ accounts, or to read a user’s direct messages.

这名男子最终被证实是一名名叫Bahtiyar Duysak的德国公民。他说他犯了一个错误。然而，当考虑到《****》关于间谍活动的报道时，它应该让大量使用推特作为激进主义工具的人停下来。

它也应该让其他社交网络暂停。我四处打听其他一些公开案件，其中一家社交网络在其队伍中抓到了一名间谍，结果一无所获。但可以肯定的是，其他人已经在推特和其他地方尝试了沙特人已经尝试过的策略，并且可能成功了。对于那些在推特上冒着自由危险的活动人士来说，这是一个令人毛骨悚然的提醒，提醒他们要采取额外措施保护自己的身份，以免他们在麦肯锡的下一份报告中落空。对于推特来说，这是一年来的又一大尴尬，因为推特的数量太多了。

民主

来自不明支持者的Facebook广告瞄准英国脱欧计划

亚当·萨塔里亚诺（Adam Satariano）调查了更多的Facebook黑钱：一个推动英国退出欧盟的组织，其条款比其计划的要严厉得多。Facebook表示，它将很快要求英国广告商确认并披露他们的真实身份：

In the past 10 months, the organization spent more than 250,000 pounds on ads pushing for a more severe break from the European Union than Mrs. May has planned. The ads reached 10 million to 11 million people, according to a report published on Saturday by a House of Comm*** committee investigating the manipulation of social media in electi***.

The ads, which disappeared suddenly this week, linked to websites for people to send prewritten emails to their local member of Parliament outlining their opposition to Mrs. May’s negotiati*** with the European Union.

#巨魔追踪者：对俄罗斯巨魔农场提起刑事诉讼

数字取证研究实验室（Digital Forensics Research Lab）深入调查了10月19日对一名俄罗斯国民的起诉，该人涉嫌干涉美国中期选举。关键点：俄罗斯今年的竞选支出比2016年要多。（假账户越来越贵！）

The first financial detail included in the criminal complaint against Elena Khusyaynova showed that between January 2016 and June 2018, Project Lakhta’s proposed operating budget was more than two billion Russian rubles ($35 million USD). In the first half of 2018, the proposed operating budget was 650 million Russian rubles (over $10 million USD).

Put simply, the budget for first half of 2018 nearly matched the total troll farm budgets from 2016 and 2017. The itemized budget requests, which Khusyaynova allegedly organized, increased every single month in 2018.

政治竞选如何扰乱你的思想

Sue Halpern调查了《后剑桥分析》（Cambridge Analytica）的政治前景，发现仍有许多公司投资于同样的心理定位。从表面上看，它比剑桥分析公司做的任何事情都更具侵入性：

Judging personalities, measuring voice stress, digging through everything someone has ever said—all of this suggests that future digital campaigns, irrespective of party, will have ever-sharper tools to burrow into the psyches of candidates and voters. C***ider Avalanche Strategy, another startup supported by Higher Ground Labs. Its proprietary algorithm ****yzes what people say and tries to determine what they really mean—whether they are perhaps shading the truth or not being completely comfortable about their views. According to Michiah Prull, one of the company’s founders, the data firm prompts survey takers to answer open-ended questi*** about a particular issue, and then ****yzes the specific language in the resp***es to identify “psychographic clusters” within the larger population. This allows campaigns to target their messaging even more effectively than traditional polling can—because, as the 2016 election made clear, people often aren’t completely open and honest with pollsters.

“We are able to identify the positioning, framing, and messaging that will resonate across the clusters to create large, powerful coaliti***, and within clusters to drive the strongest engagement with specific groups,” Prull said. Avalanche Strategy’s technology was used by six female first-time candidates in the 2017 Virginia election who took its insights and created digital ads based on its recommendati*** in the final weeks of the campaign. Five of the six women won.

Snapchat是大学生中流行的新闻来源

根据奈特基金会的最新数据，Snapchat是孩子们获取新闻的一个出人意料的热门场所：

In a survey of 5,844 college students from 11 US instituti***, 89 percent said they got at least some of their news from social media over the previous week. And Facebook was the most popular outlet, with 71 percent of respondents saying they got news from the platform during that time period. Interestingly, Snapchat came in second place, with 55 percent of the students saying they had gotten news from the app during the past week. And YouTube, Instagram and Twitter followed, pulling 54 percent, 51 percent and 42 percent of respondents, respectively.

YouTuber将进入政界，如果他们这样做，他们很可能会赢

Ryan Broderick回顾了一群年轻人当选巴西国会议员所取得的政治成功：

Kim Kataguiri is known in Brazil for a lot of things. He’s been called a fascist. He’s been called a fake news kingpin. Is he a YouTuber? He definitely usesYouTube. He’s definitely a troll. A troll with a c***istent message, though, he points out. Maybe he’s Brazil’s equivalent of Milo Yiannopoulos. His organization, Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) — the Free Brazil Movement — is like the Brazilian Breitbart. Or maybe it’s like the American tea party. Maybe it’s both. Is it a news network? Kataguiri says it isn’t. But it’s not a political party, either. He says MBL is just a bunch of young people who love free market economics and memes.

One thing is very clear: His YouTube channel, the memes, the fake news, and MBL’s army of supporters have helped Kataguiri, 22, become the youngest person ever elected to Congress in Brazil. He’s also trying to become Brazil’s equivalent of speaker of the House.

YouTube Creator博客：关于2018年优先事项的最终更新

YouTube产品负责人尼尔·莫汉（Neal Mohan）告诉YouTube反对欧盟第13条，该条对技术平台制定了严厉的新要求，以检查版权侵权。

This legislation poses a threat to both your livelihood and your ability to share your voice with the world. And, if implemented as proposed, Article 13 threatens hundreds of thousands of jobs, European creators, businesses, artists and everyone they employ. The proposal could force platforms, like YouTube, to allow only content from a **all number of large companies. It would be too risky for platforms to host content from **aller original content creators, because the platforms would now be directly liable for that content. We realize the importance of all rights holders being fairly compensated, which is why we built Content ID and a platform to pay out all types of content owners. But the unintended c***equences of article 13 will put this ecosystem at risk. We are committed to working with the industry to find a better way. This language could be finalized by the end of the year, so it’s important to speak up now.

在别处

前Oculus首席执行官布伦丹·伊里贝（Brendan Iribe）即将离开Facebook

Brendan Iribe将离开，他在2016年之前一直领导Facebook旗下的虚拟现实公司Oculus，之后将领导其PC虚拟现实部门。他是今年辞职的第十位Facebook高层。还保留了一个专用接口是Oculus多样性和包容性负责人乌木·皮伊·拉米雷斯。Ramirez在Oculus工作了四年，周五是她的最后一天。

Iribe was an Oculus co-founder, helping Rift inventor Palmer Luckey to launch the experimental headset on Kickstarter in 2012. He served as CEO until 2016, when he stepped down to lead Oculus’ PC-based Rift VR division, and the CEO position was replaced by a “Facebook VP of VR” role held by Hugo Barra. Iribe was c***picuously absent at last month’s Oculus Connect conference, where fellow co-founder Nate Mitchell handled press interviews — and where PC-based VR was basically an afterthought, compared to standalone mobile headsets. VRFocus confirms that Mitchell will lead the division going forward.

Facebook正在寻求大规模网络安全收购（美元）

里德·阿尔贝戈蒂（Reed Albertgotti）和莎拉·库兰达（Sarah Kuranda）表示，Facebook希望进行一次大规模的网络安全收购，可以在下次国会听证会上提出。

The company’s push comes in the wake of a devastating security breach that affected 30 million users, an incident that added to a litany of security and privacy concerns swirling around the social media company in recent months. Facebook is betting that a splashy acquisition of a security company might serve the dual purpose of bolstering its talent in that field and delivering a much-needed public relati*** win. It formed a team of people inside its corporate development department to search for cybersecurity companies that might be willing to be acquired, said one of the people familiar with Facebook’s strategy. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment.

区块链如何打破Big Tech对人工智能的控制。

Nathaniel Popper着眼于一些可能挑战谷歌和Facebook的区块链公司。或者，至少，被他们收购！

Ocean Protocol, a project based in Berlin, is building the infrastructure so that anyone can set up a marketplace for any kind of data, with the users of data paying the sources with digital tokens.

Unlike Google and Facebook, which store the data they get from users, the marketplaces built on Ocean Protocol will not have the data themselves; they will just be places for people with data to meet, ensuring that no central player can access or exploit the data.

即将离任的Nextdoor CEO对@bestofnextdoor不感兴趣

我怎么会错过这个关于NextDoor即将离任的首席执行官的精彩故事呢？NextDoor是一个非常愚蠢的社交网络，当你看到一个陌生人走过街区时，他会对一个非常有趣的推特账户发疯，这个推特账户上写着“发狂”？嗯，是的。读一下：

“I was surprised [that] this was the first time Nirav has publicly acknowledged @bestofnextdoor!” Jenn Takahashi, the parody account’s creator, tells The Verge. “I heard through the grapevine that he wasn’t a fan of the account, and I’m still not sure why.

“I did meet up with the [Nextdoor] head of community recently and really tried to emphasize that I’m not trying to take them down or anything,” she adds. “I only post things to make people laugh, and I do my best to retract private info and protect their users’ privacy. I get a ton of really depressing submissi*** (I’m sure you can imagine), but I don’t post those, because I’m just trying to bring a little bit of levity back to the internet.”

发射

Slack engineer找到了将消息加载到1995 SNES游戏中的方法

让我们严肃点：Bertrand Fan的“SNES松弛”项目是Slack在2018年推出的最好的项目。

拿

面对Facebook的失败

大卫·柯克帕特里克（David Kirkpatrick）撰写了Facebook的早期历史，他根据过去两年的经历重新审视了他的书。他发现公司行动太慢，防御力太强，对下一步该怎么办没有明确的答案。

The last 150 years of global progress towards universal democracy may be imperiled. But it’s not only Facebook’s fault. And the company can’t fix the problems alone. Karen Kornbluh served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) under President Barack Obama and is now senior fellow for digital policy at the Council on Foreign Relati***. “The leaders of Facebook are being asked by the market to generate growth and continued profits,” Kornbluh explains, “but so far there’s no clear ask from society or government to do anything different. Their motto of ‘move fast and break things’ made sense for an internet that was a tiny piece of the economy and society. But when our whole lives moved online, we needed to have a societal conversation. And we didn’t have that. Shame on all of us. So the question, really, is what is society going to do?”

硅谷颠覆的另一种历史

回顾最近三本关于劳工、经济和硅谷巨人的书，Nitasha Tiku重新思考了“颠覆”的含义

It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relati***hips. The tech visionaries’ predicti*** did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.

They promised the open web, we got walled gardens. They promised individual liberty, then broke democracy—and now they’ve appointed themselves the right men to fix it.

不，人工智能不能解决假新闻的问题

神经科学和计算机科学教授加里·马库斯（Gary Marcus）和欧内斯特·戴维斯（Ernest Davis）告诉Facebook不要依靠人工智能来清理新闻提要：

To get to where Mr. Zuckerberg wants to go will require the development of a fundamentally new A.I. paradigm, one in which the goal is not to detect statistical trends but to uncover ideas and the relati*** between them. Only then will such promises about A.I. become reality, rather than science fiction.