Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

On August 23rd, the Washington Post and CNN published stories about alleged security failures at Twitter, based on documents provided by Peiter Zatko, the company’s former head of security. Among Zatko’s more serious allegations were that Twitter executives, including Parag Agrawal, its CEO, deliberately misled both the company’s board of directors and federal regulators about Twitter’s security procedures, and that the company gave agents of foreign governments access to “sensitive user data.” The document that Zatko gave to the Post and CNN was also shared with several members of Congress as well as the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. On Tuesday, Zatko appeared before a hearing of the Senate Justice Committee to discuss the document, and spent more than two-and-a half hours providing more detail on his accusations.

Some of the most serious allegations came during Zatko’s testimony about foreign agents he said were on Twitter’s payroll. Zatko told the committee that just a week before he was fired by Twitter, the FBI notified the company that “there was at least one agent” of China’s Ministry of State Security “on the payroll inside Twitter.” Zatko also alleged that Twitter was incapable of tracking when and where its own employees accessed its systems, and this made it impossible for Twitter to find foreign agents who might be gaining access to internal data. According to Zatko, the company was only able to find these agents when informed of their presence by external entities such as the FBI. In one case, Zatko said he told a Twitter executive he was “confident” there was a foreign agent inside the company. “Their response was: ‘Well, since we already have one, what does it matter if we have more. Let’s keep growing the office,’” Zatko told the committee.

In 2019, the New York Times reported that two former Twitter employees were charged with acting as agents of the government of Saudi Arabia and using their positions to get access to information about users who were critical of the Saudi government (one of the individuals was convicted last month by a court in California, and the other left the country before he could be arrested). Zatko also told the committee that , the Chinese government could easily have gotten information about Twitter users who clicked on ads, including the locations of those users. “Twitter’s unsafe handling of the data of its users and its inability or unwillingness to truthfully represent issues to its board of directors and regulators have created real risk to tens of millions of Americans, the American democratic process, and America’s national security,” Zatko told the committee.

Continue reading “Twitter whistleblower, Congress, and social media”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The official beekeeper to the Royal Family, John Chapple, 79, told MailOnline how he travelled to Buckingham Palace and Clarence House on Friday following news of The Queen’s death to inform the bees of the monarch’s passing. The ritual, which dates back hundreds of years, involves notifying honey bees of major events such as a death or marriage. While the traditions varied, “telling the bees” always involved notifying the insects of a death in the family—so that the bees could share in the mourning. This generally entailed draping each hive with black crepe. It was required that the sad news be delivered to each hive, by knocking once and then verbally relaying the tale of sorrow.

This man can identify any image from Google Maps in less than a second

Trevor Rainbolt has a special talent for being able to look at any image on Google Maps and pinpoint where it was taken with astonishing speed and accuracy. He can do so after only looking at the image for 0.1 seconds, five times in a row, and even if he is looking at images from two separate countries at once. Rainbolt can identify a country using only half of a distorted image, or an image that has been scrambled into pieces. He can look at only the trees. Or only the grass. Or only the sky. Sometimes, he can even name a country while blindfolded, just by having someone else describe the dirt.

Continue reading “The man who had to tell the bees the Queen was dead”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Tulsi Gowind Gowda has spent most of her more than 80 years planting and nurturing trees in southern India. “I like them more than anything else in my life,” she said. She has walked for miles, deep into tropical rainforests, carefully cutting healthy branches from hundreds of trees and replanting and grafting them. Her eyes light up when she talks about rare seeds or a sapling. And when she dies, she would like to be reborn, she says, as a big tree. Gowda — who doesn’t know the year of her birth but believes she is more than 80 — has devoted her life to transforming vast swaths of barren land in her native state of Karnataka, in southern India, into dense forests.

Chess player Hans Niemann hits back over ‘cheating’ controversy in St Louis

Chess master Magnus Carlsen’s shock withdrawal from the $350,000 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis following his third-round defeat to the newcomer Hans Niemann has triggered a variety of “cheating” claims. It is potentially the most serious such case for international chess since the 2005 Toiletgate world championship match, when Veselin Topalov accused Vlad Kramnik of analysing games in the lavatory. Carlsen’s loss to Niemann, 19, was his first for several years with White to a much lower rated opponent, and it was the first withdrawal of the Norwegian’s entire career. His only explanation was a cryptic video clip of José Morinho saying “If I speak I am in big trouble,” during a press conference about referees.

Continue reading “The woman who is bringing India’s forests back to life”

from The Gift of India by Sarojini Naidu, via Stacy-Marie Ishmael’s newsletter

Is there aught you need that my hands withhold,
Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?
Lo! I have flung to the East and West
Priceless treasures torn from my breast,
And yielded the sons of my stricken womb
To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

In December 2003, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first flight of the Wright brothers, the New York Times ran a story entitled “Staying Aloft; What Does Keep Them Up There?” The point of the piece was a simple question: What keeps planes in the air? To answer it, the Times turned to John D. Anderson, Jr., curator of aerodynamics at the National Air and Space Museum and author of several textbooks in the field. What Anderson said, however, is that there is actually no agreement on what generates the aerodynamic force known as lift. “There is no simple one-liner answer to this,” he told the Times. People give different answers to the question, some with “religious fervor.”

Hidden items found in Vermeer’s famed ‘Milkmaid’ painting

The discoveries in the work painted some 350 years ago shed new light on the technique of the enigmatic artist, ahead of the largest ever exhibition of Vermeer’s work starting at the museum in 2023. Advanced scanning techniques revealed that beneath the plain white wall that makes the milkmaid’s bright yellow and blue clothes stand out, Vermeer had originally painted extra details. “This reveals a new unexpected Vermeer, it’s astonishing,” Gregor Weber, head of fine arts and at the Rijksmuseum, told a news conference.

Continue reading “No one can explain exactly how planes stay in the air”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Shoji Morimoto has what some would see as a dream job: he gets paid to do pretty much nothing. The 38-year-old Tokyo resident charges 10,000 yen ($71) an hour to accompany clients as a companion. “Basically, I rent myself out. My job is to be wherever my clients want me to be and to do nothing in particular,” Morimoto told Reuters, adding that he had handled some 4,000 sessions in the past four years. Morimoto now boasts nearly a quarter of a million followers on Twitter, where he finds most of his clients. Roughly a quarter of them are repeat customers, including one who has hired him 270 times.

The fascinating case of the legless duchess

As The Browser describes this story from The Critic: “This story has it all: The world’s most expensive painting; the model for Holmes’s Professor Moriarty; J.P. Morgan (twice); a ransomed prisoner; a “gambler and sometime art dealer named Patrick Francis Sheedy”; a casino in Constantinople; a Murillo stolen from a monastery in Mexico; a chief of police who kept his composure while a tiger ate his arm; and the 11th Duke of Devonshire.” It all began in 1876, when Thomas Agnew & Sons in London put on display Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The portrait was not just a spectacular work of art, but the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Continue reading “Dream job: the Japanese man who gets paid to do nothing”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Deep in the waters along a volcanic ridge in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, sea explorers using a remotely operated vehicle to examine largely unexplored areas found a pattern of holes in the sand. During the dive, north of the Azores, near Portugal’s mainland, on July 23, they saw about a dozen sets of holes resembling a track of lines on the ocean floor, at a depth of 1.6 miles. Then about a week later, on Thursday, there were four more sightings on the Azores Plateau, which is underwater terrain where three tectonic plates meet. Those holes were about a mile deep and about 300 miles away from the initial discovery. There is no known cause for the holes, which appear to have been excavated.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

Author Douglas Rushkoff writes about being invited to speak at an event organized by a group of millionaires and billionaires, who wanted to know how they should save themselves from the coming apocalypse. “They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination?”

Continue reading “Scientists can’t explain these holes in the ocean floor”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

In August, local police arrived at Clare Sorrenti’s apartment in London, Ontario with a search warrant, which they used to confiscate her computer, her cellphone, and some other possessions. Sorrenti, a trans political commentator who streams on Microsoft’s Twitch network, says she was held for 11 hours, and questioned about an email a number of local city councillors said they received that used her former name. The email contained a photo of a handgun and allegedly made threats of harm. Sorrenti, who was released without charges, believes the fake email was a “swatting” attempt—a tactic some online trolls use to attack their enemies, by calling in threats designed to trigger a visit by police or SWAT teams. Although the identity of the email sender remains unknown, Sorrenti had warned local police that a swatting attempt might occur, because of the abuse she had received from users of an online forum known as Kiwi Farms. She said she was repeatedly doxxed (had her personal information, including her physical address, posted onlne) and had also a number of her online accounts hacked by unknown actors.

Ben Collins and Kat Tenbarge of NBC News describe Kiwi Farms as “an internet message board known for being an epicenter of vicious, anti-trans harassment campaigns.” The forum, previously known as CWCki Forums, is an offshoot of 8chan, another notoriously lawless online community that helped give birth to the QAnon conspiracy movement. Collins and Tenbarge say Kiwi Farms has become known for targeting trans and gay personalities by doxxing and swatting, and is also infamous for collecting and archiving the racist and homophobic “manifestos” written by mass shooters. After being swatted, Sorrenti and her supporters started lobbying Cloudflare, a company that provides hosting and security services to websites, asking it to cut off Kiwi Farms. At first, the company said it would not do so: Matthew Prince, the CEO, wrote in a blog post that removing services from even reprehensible content “is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character,” calling it “a dangerous precedent.”

Just a few days later, however, Prince changed his mind, and wrote in a new blog post that Cloudflare had removed its security protections from Kiwi Farms, opening the site up to attacks such as a distributed denial of service (Prince also noted that Cloudflare had never provided hosting services to Kiwi Farms). “This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare’s role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with,” Prince wrote. The decision was made not because of Sorrenti’s lobbying campaign, he said, but because “the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life.” Cloudflare’s about-face was hailed by Sorrenti and others as a victory for human rights, among other things, since it likely means that Kiwi Farms has been removed from the internet. But it also raises difficult questions, including who gets to decide what content we see.

Continue reading “Cloudflare, Kiwi Farms, and the challenges of deplatforming”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Swearing varies a lot from place to place, even within the same country, in the same language. But how do we know who swears what, where, in the big picture? We turn to data – damn big data. With great computing power comes great cartography, writes Stan Carey from the Strong Language blog. Jack Grieve, lecturer in forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, has created a detailed set of maps of the US showing strong regional patterns of swearing preferences. The maps are based on an 8.9-billion-word corpus of geo-coded tweets collected by Diansheng Guo in 2013–14 and funded by Digging into Data.

Peter Eckersley made the internet a safer place for everyone

Technologist, activist, and cybersecurity expert Peter Eckersley passed away suddenly last week after being diagnosed with colon cancer. Peter worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for a dozen years and was the EFF’s Chief Computer Scientist for many of those. “The impact of Peter’s work on encrypting the web cannot be overstated,” wrote Cindy Cohn of the EFF. “The fact that transport layer encryption on the web is so ubiquitous that it’s nearly invisible is thanks to the work Peter began. It’s a testament to the boldness of his vision that he decided that we could and should encrypt the web, and to his sheer tenacity that he kept at it.”

Continue reading “Mapping the United Swears of America”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Evan Kail collects historical memorabilia. He recently found a book he believed contained never-before-seen photos of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. The first 20 pages appear to be from a U.S Navy service member sent to China around 1938. But after that he found black and white photos showing piles of bodies, beheadings, and other acts of torture. “Somehow that guy who took those photos was present for the Rape of Nanjing,” Kail said. But Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, a research historian and creator of the Fake History Hunter account on Twitter said that while the photos may be authentic, she doesn’t believe they are from the Nanjing massacre.

Humpback whales pass their songs across oceans

One of the most remarkable things about our species is how fast human culture can change. It turns out that humpback whales have their own long-range, high-speed cultural evolution, and they don’t need the internet or satellites to keep it running. In a study published on Tuesday, scientists found that humpback songs easily spread from one population to another across the Pacific Ocean. It can take just a couple of years for a song to move several thousand miles. “Half the globe is now vocally connected for whales,” said marine biologist Ellen Garland. “And that’s insane.”

Continue reading “Did this TikToker find unseen photos of a 1937 massacre?”

A poem by Fernando Pessoa

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn’t come.
I’m free, and against organized, clothed society.
I’m naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It’s too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time…
No matter, I’ll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can’t even light the next cigarette… If it’s an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the non-meeting called life.

© Translation: 1998, Richard Zenith
From: Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems
Publisher: Grove Press, New York, 1998

Had to post this from Helena Fitzgerald’s great Substack newsletter, Griefbacon. Helena is such a great writer that I am more than willing to read her writing about any topic, no matter how boring, including air conditioning — which is really (as most of Helena’s pieces are) about life, and loss, and desire:

“Westfield is like if a mall dressed as a mall for Halloween, like if three malls stood on each other’s shoulders in a trench-coat to try to fake their way into a job as a mall. Everything in it is too blank and too white and too vast. Everything at Westfield seems to want to make you comfortable and actually wants to make you angry. Soft music is always playing, and a child is always throwing up near you, and something is always on sale. You can always smell food and the food smells just ok yet still makes you hungry even though you’re not actually hungry.

Everything at Westfield is about want, and nothing is about bodies. Mall air-conditioning is the dream of being able to want things without having to admit it is your sticky, sweaty, soggy body doing the wanting. This is the same dream as money, desire unweighted and without human consequences, always sowing and never reaping. When I leave the mall, for a few minutes I am overjoyed to be back outside in the weather and aware of my own skin. Outside, it’s a thrill to be able to experience consequences again. That’s what the body is, after all: an endless slapstick staircase of consequences, banana peel after banana peel. We accumulate our own lives and eventually they show on our faces, in our posture, in our torn-up feet and our bad knees. Mall air-conditioning says all of this is optional.”

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Last week, members of both houses of Congress—including Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota; John Kennedy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, and David Cicilline, the Democratic member of the House of Representatives for Rhode Island—introduced a revised version of a bill they say will allow news outlets to bargain for “fair terms from gatekeeper platforms that regularly access news content without paying for its value.” The bill, called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, was originally introduced by Klobuchar last year; that in turn was based on a similar bill with an identical name, which Cicilline introduced in the House in 2018. The law would allow media outlets to negotiate as a group with platforms such as Google and Facebook for compensation, in return for allowing the platforms to aggregate and/or distribute their articles. Competitors coordinating their behavior would normally be collusion, but the JCPA gives media companies “safe harbor” from antitrust laws.

The act is similar to an Australian law known as the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, which that country passed last year amid a storm of controversy. Before the code became law, Facebook tried to dissuade Australia’s parliament from passing it by blocking the country’s news publishers from posting their content, and even blocked Facebook users in Australia from posting news provided by non-Australian outlets (Google showed users a warning popup saying their internet experience would be degraded by the law). Like the Australian law, the bill proposed by Klobuchar and Cicilline requires Google and Facebook to enter into negotiations—either with individual media outlets or with groups of outlets—over payment for their news content. If the two sides are unable to reach an agreement, both the Australian law and the US version require the digital platforms to submit to binding arbitration (there have been no cases of arbitration since the Australian law was passed in March of 2021).

Google and Facebook quickly signed deals with news publishers and broadcasters after the code became law, including one where Google pays Nine Entertainment—which owns a TV channel, radio stations, the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age in Melbourne—$22 million a year for five years (Facebook agreed to pay the same company about $15 million). Critics argued the law would benefit only large entities such as those owned by News Corp. (which got an estimated $50 million), but supporters say that hasn’t been the case. Bill Grueskin, a professor in Columbia University’s School of Journalism, wrote in a recent report on Australia’s media industry that some local journalists believe the law has revived the news business. Monica Attard, a journalism professor, “says she can’t persuade many students to take internships these days because it’s so easy for them to land full-time job—and that change coincides with the gusher of code money,” Grueskin wrote. Attard added: “I swear to God, I have not seen it like this in twenty years.”

Continue reading “The Journalism Competition Act and the media industry”