Author: trent

Being prolific doesn’t mean that everything you produce has to be absolute gold. But the process of producing large quantities of work ultimately leads to a higher quality of work.

He thought about this in November 2016. While he was fidgeting, half-naked, in his buddy Frank’s backyard. None of his previous stunts really matched the idiocy or ambition of what he was about to do. Zach had used all his money that day to get 1,000 Black Cats at the year-round fireworks stand near Hobart. The clerk had inquired about the reason for such a purchase, and then said, almost sighing, “That is a bad idea.” The fireworks were strapped to Zach’s bare chest. The clerk’s words were in his ears, his nipples hard under the duct tape. He tried to calm himself by focusing on the pleasantries of the yard, the little frozen pond, the rooster statue with a cap of snowflakes, the wooden bench and the wind chime, the truck marooned in the drive, as he exhaled a plume into the fall Indiana air. He and Frank had bought a camera off eBay, and Frank pointed it toward Zach, and began to record.

Scott tries to hang himself in the attic. He grabs his mother by the arms and screams, “It’s all your fault! You did this to me!” And then: “Why did you let me play football?”

In Pittsburgh, Marlinspike uncovered an Internet vulnerability that affected nearly every popular browser. It enabled malicious actors to mount what is called a “man-in-the-middle attack”—a type of exploit in which the attacker can view and potentially alter communications between two parties and siphon data, such as log-in credentials, without detection. In 2009, Marlinspike presented the vulnerability at Black Hat D.C., an annual security conference in Washington. He took the opportunity to politely criticize the keynote speaker, Paul Kurtz, a homeland-security expert who had served under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and who had spoken about the need for the U.S. to take “leadership in cyberspace,” arguing for collaboration among the N.S.A., law enforcement, and private industry. “You know,” Marlinspike said during his presentation, “ten years ago, I feel like we would have been talking about protecting our communications from the state and the cops—not centralizing them in the hands of the state and the cops.” He paused. “So I think a lot has changed.” At the end of his talk, he released a new tool, SSLstrip, that automatically mounted man-in-the-middle attacks using the vulnerability he had discovered. SSLstrip elevated Marlinspike to expert status. These days, according to Dan Boneh, a cryptographer and a professor at Stanford, the practice of exposing vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed by other engineers, as SSLstrip has done, is “the bread and butter of computer security.” Boneh, who teaches SSLstrip to his undergraduate students, told me, “It changed how browsers work. His attack caused the Web to change.”

Matthew Feldman, a professor at the University of York who studies right-wing extremism, said that November 3rd has all the hallmarks of being a potential “trigger moment.” He told me that polarization is growing on both sides, but he, too, believes that the far right represents a more lethal threat. “At the fringes on the right, a narrative is building that the left is stealing the election,” he said, warning that extremists may decide that “their way of life” will disappear “if they don’t take action.” But, he added, would-be attackers often await a signal from leaders that violence is acceptable. “Scholars have long talked about a kind of license that comes from the top,” Feldman told me. “One of the surest signs of these trigger events is an increasingly apocalyptic tone. And, of course, the biggest culprit has been Donald Trump.”

In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem. In Clegg’s recent blog post, he wrote that Facebook takes a “zero tolerance approach” to hate speech, but that, “with so much content posted every day, rooting out the hate is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” This metaphor casts Zuckerberg as a hapless victim of fate: day after day, through no fault of his own, his haystack ends up mysteriously full of needles. A more honest metaphor would posit a powerful set of magnets at the center of the haystack—Facebook’s algorithms, which attract and elevate whatever content is most highly charged. If there are needles anywhere nearby—and, on the Internet, there always are—the magnets will pull them in. Remove as many as you want today; more will reappear tomorrow. This is how the system is designed to work.