Stedman Summaries #2
Julutskick om djärva politiker, tålmodiga hackers, cyniska porrbolag, modiga mammor, självdestruktiva visionärer, obotliga optimister och desperata socialister
Det här är andra utskicket av nyhetsbrevet Stedman Summaries, arvtagaren till min Facebook-sida med samma namn. Den här är ett specialutskick utöver söndagsutskicket, julen till ära! (även om ämnena inte är julrelaterade). Nästa utskick blir på söndag som vanligt.
Kommentera gärna via knappen längst ner, eller kom med privat feedback! Och dela gärna med andra om du gillar det.
Årtiondets modigaste prank call?
Fascinerande att läsa transcriptet hur den förgiftade ryske oppositionspolitikern Navalny i 49 minuter personligen lyckas intervjua en av de personer som organiserat mordet på honom:
M [Navalny]: …Let’s summarize it again. This person survived because the plane landed too soon – is that the main reason?
K: It seems to me that yes. If it had taken a little longer, maybe it would have ended differently. See, that’s where coincidence is the worst factor we can have in our work.
M: I see. By coincidence we mean circumstance number 1 – that the plane landed. Circumstance number 2 is what?
K: The fact that the ambulance arrived, and so on. They performed these primary measures, which they usually … they lowered the acidity level, injected an antidote of some kind. [ …]
Nästan lika fascinerande att läsa om hur de undersökande journalisterna i Bellingcat och dess partners arbetat för att hitta förövarna. Ryssland verkar ha sin egen, informella, version av den svenska offentlighetsprincipen…
Due to porous data protection measures in Russia, it only takes some creative Googling (or Yandexing) and a few hundred euros worth of cryptocurrency to be fed through an automated payment platform, not much different than Amazon or Lexis Nexis, to acquire telephone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests, and residential data. […] The humans who manually fetch this data are often low-level employees at banks, telephone companies, and police departments. […] While there are obvious and terrifying privacy implications from this data market, it is clear how this environment of petty corruption and loose government enforcement can be turned against Russia’s security service officers. A few hundred euros could — and does — provide you with months of phone call data for an FSB or GRU officer, allowing investigators to trace the intelligence services’ operations, identify the colleagues of research targets, and follow the physical tracks of spies across Russia and abroad.
Bellingcat: Hunting the Hunters: How We Identified Navalny's FSB Stalkers
“It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians [now] control and which ones they just occupy”
För dig som läst om hackerattacken mot amerikanska företag och myndigheter och vill veta lite mer om vad som egentligen hände:
To carry out the breach, the hackers first broke into the systems of SolarWinds, an American software company. There, they inserted a back door into Orion, one of the company’s products, which organizations use to see and manage vast internal networks of computers. For several weeks beginning in March, any client that updated to the latest version of Orion—digitally signed by SolarWinds, and therefore seemingly legitimate—unwittingly downloaded the compromised software, giving the hackers a way into their systems. [..] Standard cybersecurity practice is to keep your software up to date—so most SolarWinds customers, ironically, were protected because they had failed to heed that advice. […]
Sunburst stayed quiet for up to two full weeks before it woke up and began communicating with the hackers, according to the report. The malware disguises its network traffic as the “Orion Improvement Program'' and stores data inside legitimate files in order to better blend in. It also searches for security and antivirus tools on the infected machine in order to avoid them. […]
The suspected hackers are from Russia’s SVR, the country’s primary foreign intelligence agency. Known alternately as Cozy Bear and APT29, they have compiled a long list of breaches, including the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Russia denies involvement.
Många verkar ganska bekymrade, t ex Trumps fd nationelle säkerhetsrådgivare:
The Russian S.V.R. will surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets. For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call “persistent access,” meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.
While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy. […]
In the networks that the Russians control, they have the power to destroy or alter data, and impersonate legitimate people. Domestic and geopolitical tensions could escalate quite easily if they use their access for malign influence and misinformation — both hallmarks of Russian behavior.
Ja, de flesta i alla fall:
Something for everybody
Om du är lagd åt det pessimistiska hållet har ju 2020 som bekant innehållit en hel del händelser att stressa upp sig över, och det går fint att dra ut trenden:
The startling aspect about the Dolchstosslegende [the myth that if it had not been for a ‘stab in the back’ by Social Democrats and Jews back home, Germany would not have lost the war] is this: It did not grow weaker after 1918 but stronger. In the face of humiliation and unable or unwilling to cope with the truth, many Germans embarked on a disastrous self-delusion: The nation had been betrayed, but its honor and greatness could never be lost. And those without a sense of national duty and righteousness — the left and even the elected government of the new republic — could never be legitimate custodians of the country.
In this way, the myth was not just the sharp wedge that drove the Weimar Republic apart. It was also at the heart of Nazi propaganda, and instrumental in justifying violence against opponents. The key to Hitler’s success was that, by 1933, a considerable part of the German electorate had put the ideas embodied in the myth — honor, greatness, national pride — above democracy. […]
Alarmingly, that seems to be exactly what is happening in the United States today. According to the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of Trump supporters believe that a Joe Biden presidency would do “lasting harm to the U.S.,” while 90 percent of Biden supporters think the reverse. […]
In such a landscape of social fragmentation, Mr. Trump’s baseless accusations about electoral fraud could do serious harm. A staggering 88 percent of Trump voters believe that the election result is illegitimate, according to a YouGov poll. A myth of betrayal and injustice is well underway.
Men för optimisterna ibland oss finns å andra sidan också ett case att nu vänder det:
The same happened after 1918. There was a big baby boom in the 1920s — with a whole generation marked as “sons of the flu” — many, horrifyingly, the products of rape. In Britain, 1920 still holds the record as the biggest year for newborns in history. And as Spinney notes, Rio’s 1919 Carnival was one of its bawdiest ever: “Newspapers documented the ‘unusual joy’ that engulfed the city. ‘We had a party’ wrote one chronicler, with droll understatement; ‘the binge was full’, another. ‘Carnival began and overnight, customs and modesty became old, obsolete, spectral … Folks started to do things, think things, feel un-heard of and even demonic things’”.
Pornhubs helomvändning
En av USA:s mest kända journalister i sin genre, Nicholas Kristof, gjorde för tre veckor sedan ett gripande reportage om hur de stora porrsajterna sprider material av unga tjejer som delas utan deras tillåtelse:
Serena K. Fleites, 19, was 14 when a boy she had a crush on asked her to make a naked video and send it to him. She did, and it ended up on Pornhub. […] Fleites’s world imploded. It’s tough enough to be 14 without having your classmates entertain themselves by looking at you naked, and then mocking you as a slut. “People were texting me, if I didn’t send them a video, they were going to send them to my mom,” she said. […] Next she hanged herself in the bathroom; her little sister found her, and medics revived her. As Fleites spiraled downward, a friend introduced her to meth and opioids, and she became addicted to both. She dropped out of school and became homeless. At 16, she advertised on Craigslist and began selling naked photos and videos of herself. […] “A whole life can be changed because of one little mistake.” […]
I Sverige pågår en parallell debatt om ålderskontroll av pornografi med hjälp av BankId, som känns snarast som ett försök att helt förbjuda porr (många skulle nog se det som problematiskt att staten och/eller BankId kan bygga en databas över alla svenskars porrsurfande), men Kristof ambitioner var inriktade mot utbudet, inte konsumtionen, och specifikt att få bort det material där personer deltar ofrivilligt:
“I don’t want people to hear ‘No porn!’” Lydia told me. “It’s more like, ‘Stop hurting kids.’” […]
I don’t see any neat solution. But aside from limiting immunity so that companies are incentivized to behave better, here are three steps that would help: 1.) Allow only verified users to post videos. 2.) Prohibit downloads. 3.) Increase moderation.
These measures wouldn’t kill porn or much bother consumers of it; YouTube thrives without downloads. Siri Dahl, a prominent porn star who does business with Pornhub, told me that my three proposals are “insanely reasonable.”
Helt plötsligt vändes världens ögon mot bolaget MindGeek, som äger bl a Pornhub:
Despite this, basic facts about the company are largely unknown. That includes its main owner—a businessman called Bernard Bergemar, whose name is almost completely invisible on the Internet but who has a claim to the title of the world’s most successful porn tycoon. Until this Financial Times investigation, his identity was secret, known only to a small circle of MindGeek executives and their advisers.
MindGeek’s website bears little trace of the adult industry. Instead, the company bills itself as a “leader in the design, development... and management of highly trafficked websites.”
Ars Technica: MindGeek: The secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube
Ibland kan verkligen en enskild person göra skillnad! Efter reportaget beslöt sig Visa och Mastercard för att vägra ta emot betalningar från Pornhub och andra sajter i nätverket, och efter bara några dagar bekräftade Pornhub att de tar ner allt material från alla som inte är officiella partners eller modeller:
Pornhub is removing all videos on its site that weren't uploaded by official content partners or members of its model program, a fundamental shift in the way one of the largest porn sites in the world operates. This means a significant portion of its videos will disappear. […] Pornhub said the videos will be removed pending verification and review, and the verification process will begin in the new year. Prior to this change, anyone could create an account on Pornhub and upload any video they wanted to, since the platform's launch in 2007.
Vice: Pornhub Just Purged All Unverified Content From the Platform
Tre porträtt
Tre porträtt: tre personer som alla påverkat sin omvärld, fast på väldigt olika sätt.
Spionchefen
Years ago, CIA would be able to fabricate a passport as well as a visa and go across a border and — as a CIA officer would say — with a fistful of 50s be able to operate rather well, even in denied areas because you didn’t have all of the closed-circuit televisions. […]
You didn’t have the digital dust that we all leave, whether it be with a credit card or with our iPhone or whatever else. So, operating clandestinely in heavily digitized, sensor-rife environments is really difficult. Traditional spycraft really has had to be transformed so that you’re able to operate in a very busy digital environment and one where the local services have so many opportunities to pick up on your every move.
Being able to go dark and to operate covertly and clandestinely overseas is much more challenging, but thankfully, I think CIA officers have done a tremendous job of operating in that digital noise.
Den modigaste mamman
She had been hunting him for a year, stalking him online, interrogating the criminals he worked with, even befriending unwitting relatives for tips on his whereabouts. Now she finally had one — a widow called to tell her that he was peddling flowers on the border.
Ever since 2014, she had been tracking the people responsible for the kidnapping and murder of her 20-year-old daughter, Karen. Half of them were already in prison, not because the authorities had cracked the case, but because she had pursued them on her own, with a meticulous abandon. […]
She jammed her handgun into his back. “If you move, I’ll shoot you,” she told him, according to family members involved in her scramble to capture the florist that day. She held him there for nearly an hour, awaiting the police to make the arrest.
In three years, Mrs. Rodríguez captured nearly every living member of the crew that had abducted her daughter for ransom […] In all, she was instrumental in taking down 10 people, a mad campaign for justice that made her famous, but vulnerable. No one challenged organized crime, never mind put its members in prison. […]
They knew they were among the fortunate few who at least had somewhere to mourn them. So many families never found their loved ones. That Karen and Mrs. Rodríguez now lay together was a small solace.
NYT: She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One
Den självdestruktive visionären
But within a day, Jewel abruptly left. Shortly after, the singer sent Hsieh a letter via FedEx, since he had forsworn email and texts as part of a digital cleanse.
“I am going to be blunt,” she wrote in the letter, the content of which was shared with Forbes. “I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. I think you are taking too many drugs that cause you to disassociate.”
She continued: “The people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself.”
Forbes: Tony Hsieh’s American Tragedy: The Self-Destructive Last Months Of The Zappos Visionary
Avslutningsvis
Slutligen, några uppiggande uppdateringar — on a lighter note, som man säger:
It appears that [Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro’s] last ditch effort to buoy Venezuela’s shriveling economy is to dig deep for [bitcoin] and sell it for hard cash. […] “This center of digital asset production will ensure self-financing sufficiency within the military,” the Venezuelan state TV official explains. “These mining activities will be key for increasing revenues for the country.”
Vice: Venezuela's Socialist Regime Is Mining Bitcoin In a Bunker to Generate Cash
One of President Donald Trump’s former Atlantic City casinos will be blown up next month, and for the right amount of money, you could be the one to press the button that brings it down. […] The demolition of the former Trump Plaza casino will become a fundraiser to benefit the Boys & Girls Club of Atlantic City that the mayor hopes will raise in excess of $1 million.
AP: City to auction spot to push demolish button on Trump casino
Det verkar som jag håller på att bli utkonkurrerad innan jag ens börjat ;)
During Tuesday’s meeting, [Facebook] also unveiled an AI assistant tool called “TLDR,” which could summarize news articles in bullet points so that a user wouldn’t have to read the full piece. Named after the online acronym for “too long, didn’t read,” the tool supposedly could also provide audio narration, as well as a vocal assistant to answer.
Buzzfeed: Facebook Is Developing A Tool To Summarize Articles So You Don’t Have To Read Them
Vi hörs på söndag!
—Jacob