Category: You Should See This

Whenever President Donald Trump is questioned about why the United States has nearly three times more coronavirus cases than the entire European Union, or why hundreds of Americans are still dying every day, he whips out one standard comment. We find so many cases, he contends, because we test so many people. The remark typifies Trump’s deep distrust of data: his wariness of what it will reveal, and his eagerness to distort it. In April, when he refused to allow coronavirus-stricken passengers off the Grand Princess cruise liner and onto American soil for medical treatment, he explained: “I like the numbers where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.” Unable—or unwilling—to fix the problem, Trump’s instinct is to fix the numbers instead.

No consensus exists regarding how to counter the explosion of false information online, or its exploitation by politicians. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a former tech executive, told me that the amplification of information online, rather than the posting of it, could become a useful focus for regulation. “Should you have a right to say crazy, stupid, false things?” he asked. “Maybe you should have that right. But do you have that right then to have it amplified?” Warner called finding a way to create “guardrails” for the Web extraordinarily difficult. But, he said, “for companies to say, ‘We bear no responsibility’—it doesn’t pass the smell test.” Americans increasingly agree: a recent Knight Foundation survey found that seventy-three per cent of respondents wanted to see Internet companies find ways to exclude false or hateful information. Many also said that the news media was politically biased and contributed to polarization; sixty-two per cent said that it is becoming increasingly difficult for citizens to be well informed.

A few months later, NBC News published an online exposé about the Epoch Times’ rise as a right-wing media outlet. It revealed the paper’s massive spending on pro-Trump Facebook ads. It also identified employees who had splintered off to create hugely popular YouTube channels, including Edge of Wonder, which had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The channel’s upbeat hosts pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory with a smile. Klett recognized them from the paper’s print side.

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.”