Edward Snowden’s New Job Is To Protect Reporters From Spies | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/2017/02/reporters-need-edward-snowden
Snowden has focused the next phase of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon problem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them information in an era of eroding privacy—without requiring them to have an NSA analyst’s expertise in encryption or to exile themselves to Moscow.
Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex | WIRED
►https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news
In the final weeks of the US presidential election, Veles attained a weird infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news. (The imminent criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton was a popular theme; another was the pope’s approval of Trump.) The sites’ ample traffic was rewarded handsomely by automated advertising engines, like Google’s AdSense. An article in The New Yorker described how President Barack Obama himself spent a day in the final week of the campaign talking “almost obsessively” about Veles and its “digital gold rush.”
Within Veles itself, the young entrepreneurs behind these websites became subjects of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites. The average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.
What Veles produced, though, was something more extreme still: an enterprise of cool, pure amorality, free not only of ideology but of any concern or feeling about the substance of the election. These Macedonians on Facebook didn’t care if Trump won or lost the White House. They only wanted pocket money to pay for things—a car, watches, better cell phones, more drinks at the bar. This is the arrhythmic, disturbing heart of the affair: that the internet made it so simple for these young men to finance their material whims and that their actions helped deliver such momentous consequences.
Boris developed a routine. Several times a day he dredged the internet for pro-Trump articles and copied them into one of his two websites; if JavaScript prevented an easy copy-paste, he opened a Notepad file and typed the articles out. After publishing a piece, he shared the link in Facebook groups with names like My America, My Home; the Deplorables; and Friends Who Support President Donald J. Trump. Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”) He posted under his own name but also under the guise of one of 200 or so bogus Facebook profiles that he’d purchased for this purpose. (A fake profile with a Russian name cost about 10 cents; for an American name, the price went up to 50 cents.)
At one point, practically all of Boris’ friends had set up similar websites, and they all had money to blow. As a posse, they’d go to one of Veles’ three nightclubs—Tarantino or Club Avangard or Club Drama—and order $100 bottles of Moët to shake and spray. “I don’t drink champagne,” Boris says. “I bought it for spraying. All eyes on me!” It was nothing but the best for Boris.
Boris still goes to the clubs, but he says he has lost his taste for expensive things. “It isn’t interesting anymore.” Which is just as well, because on November 24, after an eruption of concern about the malign effects of fake news, Google suspended the ads from his websites.
Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex | Wired
►https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news
THE FIRST ARTICLE about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course. Boris had found the article somewhere online, and he needed to feed his website, Daily Interesting Things, so he appropriated the text, down to its last misbegotten comma. He posted the link on Facebook, seeding it within various groups devoted to American politics; to his astonishment, it was shared around 800 times. That month—February 2016—Boris made more than $150 off the Google ads on his website. Considering this to be the best possible use of his time, he stopped going to high school.
#infoguerre #fake_news #Macédoine #États-Unis #élections (via @opironet)
How the New York Times Is Using Strategies Inspired by Netflix, Spotify, and HBO to Make Itself Indispensible
▻https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journalism
Sulzberger, like more than three dozen other executives and journalists I interviewed and shadowed at the Times, is working on the biggest strategic shift in the paper’s 165-year history, and he believes it will strengthen its bottom line, enhance the quality of its journalism, and secure a long and lasting future.
The main goal isn’t simply to maximize revenue from advertising—the strategy that keeps the lights on and the content free at upstarts like the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox. It’s to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering (which, for the Times, is journalism) while continuously adding new online services and features (from personalized fitness advice and interactive newsbots to virtual reality films) so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones. “We think that there are many, many, many, many people—millions of people all around the world—who want what The New York Times offers,” says Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor. “And we believe that if we get those people, they will pay, and they will pay greatly.”
Russians find a brilliant way to cheat slot machines, and Casinos have no fix
This cheat exploits the PRNG, pseudo-random number generator in the machine by finding a way to predict the outcome based on patterns.
▻https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix
the operatives [persons operating the slot machine] use their phones to record about two dozen spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, the St. Petersburg team transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate roughly 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.
[...]
most casinos can’t afford to invest in the newest slot machines, whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets; as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers, the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept the occasional loss to scammers.
How did they find out ? After they noticed they were losing money they started researching.
Casino security pulled up the surveillance tapes and eventually spotted the culprit, a black-haired man in his thirties who wore a Polo zip-up and carried a square brown purse. Unlike most slots cheats, he didn’t appear to tinker with any of the machines he targeted, all of which were older models manufactured by Aristocrat Leisure of Australia. Instead he’d simply play, pushing the buttons on a game like Star Drifter or Pelican Pete while furtively holding his iPhone close to the screen.
He’d walk away after a few minutes, then return a bit later to give the game a second chance. That’s when he’d get lucky. The man would parlay a $20 to $60 investment into as much as $1,300 before cashing out and moving on to another machine, where he’d start the cycle anew. Over the course of two days, his winnings tallied just over $21,000. The only odd thing about his behavior during his streaks was the way he’d hover his finger above the Spin button for long stretches before finally jabbing it in haste; typical slots players don’t pause between spins like that.
Gun Violence Researchers Race to Protect Data From Trump
Wintemute, epidemiologist and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program, was prepared. After seeing that climate scientists were systematically downloading crucial information from federal databases, he had drawn up a spreadsheet of the gun-related datasets he uses every day: lists of gun licensees, retailers, and manufacturers; gun tracing data; firearm-related death and injury numbers sorted by categories like race, location, or age. “I basically walked around the building saying, ‘Get it done now,’” Wintemute says. So on inauguration day, as Cerdá says, the #Violence_Prevention_Research_Program was less of a lab and more of a “little downloading bootcamp.”
▻https://www.wired.com/2017/02/gun-violence-researchers-race-protect-data-trump
#armes #armement #recherche #chercheurs #violence #Trump #données #données_sensibles
cc @reka @fil