Vindu Goel

In a twist on the peddling of fake news to real people, researchers say that a Russian cyberforgery ring has created more than half a million fake internet users and 250,000 fake websites to trick advertisers into collectively paying as much as $5 million a day for video ads that are never watched.

The fraud, which began in September and is still going on, represents a new level of sophistication among criminals who seek to profit by using bots — computer programs that pretend to be people — to cheat advertisers. “We think that nothing has approached this operation in terms of profitability,” said Michael Tiffany, a co-founder and the chief executive of White Ops, the ad-focused computer security firm that publicly disclosed the fraud in a report. “Our adversaries are bringing whole new levels of innovation to ad fraud.” The thieves impersonated more than 6,100 news and content publishers, stealing advertising revenue that marketers intended to run on those sites, White Ops said. The spoofed outlets include a who’s who of the web: video-laden sites like Fox News and CBS Sports, large news organizations like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, major content platforms like Facebook and Yahoo and niche sites like Allrecipes.com and AccuWeather. Although the main targets were in the United States, news organizations in other countries were also affected. “It will be a big shock to all of these publishers that someone was selling inventory supposedly on their sites,” Tiffany said.

Yahoo, already under a cloud from its summertime disclosure that 500 million user accounts had been hacked in 2014, disclosed that another attack a year earlier had compromised more than 1 billion Yahoo accounts. The newly disclosed attack involved more sensitive user information, including unencrypted security questions. Yahoo is forcing all of the affected users to change their passwords and it is invalidating the security questions. Yahoo had agreed to sell its core businesses to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion. Verizon said that it might seek to renegotiate the terms of the transaction after the first hacking was disclosed. It’s unclear how the newest information will affect its view of the purchase.

Hours after Donald J. Trump won the race for the White House, scores of regulations that have reshaped corporate America in the last eight years suddenly seemed vulnerable. While many questions remain about how President-elect Trump will govern, a consensus emerged in many circles in Washington and on Wall Street about at least one aspect of his impending presidency: President-elect Trump is likely to seek vast cuts in regulations across the banking, health care and energy industries.

The idea of a Trump presidency triggered a sense of dread among many people in the liberal-leaning technology business. Trump is seen as less favorably disposed toward the concentration of power among the handful of large companies that dominate the internet, including Facebook, Google and Amazon, said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate firm. Trump has called for the rejection of AT&T’s bid for Time Warner. Still, analysts expect that he will appoint antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department who will largely follow traditional Republican approaches to the free market. Trump will be under pressure by major telecom and cable firms to roll back aspects of net neutrality. The rule inhibits how broadband providers manage traffic on their networks to ensure any website is equally accessible to consumers. Telecom and cable firms continue to challenge the rules in court and Mr. Trump, with the encouragement of Republicans in Congress, may seek to abandon the regulation.

Yahoo’s board has agreed to sell the company’s core internet operations and land holdings to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion.

After the sale, Yahoo shareholders will be left with about $41 billion in investments in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, as well as Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents. That compares with Yahoo’s peak value of more than $125 billion, reached in January 2000. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, is not expected to join Verizon, but she is due to receive a severance payout worth about $57 million, according to Equilar, a compensation research firm.

For Verizon, the deal simply adds another piece to the digital media and advertising business it is trying to build. Verizon is building a portfolio of online content and aiming to monetize it via advertising. Its current assets include Huffington Post and TechCrunch, which it acquired in last year’s AOL deal, and its own mobile video app, called go90. Acquiring Yahoo will bring in millions more viewers from Yahoo sites like Finance, Sports and News. Verizon also hopes to plug data derived from smartphones into AOL, and now Yahoo’s, digital advertising systems, and it is aiming to build a competitor to online advertising giants Facebook and Google. But a combined Yahoo and AOL would be far outpaced by its now far-larger rivals.

The companies said the deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by Yahoo’s shareholders, and is expected to close in early 2017. Until the closing, the companies said, Yahoo will continue to operate independently.

CORRECTION: Our headline originally stated EFF filed the complaint.

A leading privacy group filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over a 2012 study in which Facebook manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users of the social network to see what effect the changes would have on their emotions.

The group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Facebook had deceived its users and violated the terms of a 2012 consent decree with the FTC, which is the principal regulatory agency overseeing consumer privacy in the United States.

“The company purposefully messed with people’s minds,” the advocacy group wrote in its complaint. “At the time of the experiment, Facebook did not state in the Data Use Policy that user data would be used for research purposes. Facebook also failed to inform users that their personal information would be shared with researchers.”

Defining the scope of a problem is the first step toward solving it. Yet when it comes to the persistent lack of diversity in their work forces, Silicon Valley companies are quick with excuses and slow -- very slow -- to disclose even the barest data about the problem, even though they have been collecting and reporting the information to the federal government for decades.

Yahoo became one of the few companies to share basic demographic information on the diversity of its work force. Globally, about 37 percent of the Internet company’s more than 12,000 workers are women, and just 23 percent of the senior managers are women, Yahoo wrote. (The company declined to give a gender breakdown for the United States.)

Yahoo, which is one of the few tech companies run by a woman, Marissa Mayer, also provided data on the ethnicity of its United States work force, saying that 50 percent of its workers are white, 39 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black and 4 percent undisclosed or more than one race. Asians make up 57 percent of Yahoo’s tech workers, compared with the 35 percent of the tech work force that is white. Yet when it came to leading technology teams, nearly four out of five of the bosses were white and less than a fifth were Asian.

Whites also dominated the nontechnical management jobs, although to a lesser extent. Yahoo’s disclosure, which came without commentary on causes or solutions, came in response to Google’s disclosure of its own diversity data at the end of May, which prompted some self-reflection at other Silicon Valley firms.

When Facebook ended negotiations to buy Snapchat in 2013, that did not mean the company stopped thinking about the disappearing photo messages that have made Snapchat so popular for casual conversations, especially among younger users.

Now Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is rolling out Slingshot, its own service for sending self-destructing selfies to friends.

The new app, which will be available in the Apple and Android mobile app stores in the United States and later in other countries, aims to create a sense of community by encouraging users to send a photo or video to a group of friends. Its unique twist is that the recipients are required to share a visual moment of their own before they can see what was sent to them.

Every major Internet browser has a feature that lets you tell a website that you don’t want it to collect personal information about you when you visit. And virtually every website ignores those requests. Tracking your online activities -- and using that data to tailor marketing pitches -- is central to how Internet companies make money.

Now California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, wants every site to tell you -- in clear language -- if and how it is respecting your privacy preferences.

The guidelines, published on Wednesday, are intended to help companies comply with a new state privacy law that went into effect on Jan. 1. That law requires sites to prominently disclose all their privacy practices, including how they respond to “do not track” requests.

Listen to executives at Twitter and Facebook talk about how we watch television and you might walk away thinking that Americans are chattering nonstop on the social networks while watching their favorite shows. The reality is that most of us don’t tweet or post at all while we’re plopped in front of the tube.

When we do, half the time we’re talking about something other than TV. And social media conversation is far weaker than traditional factors, like TV commercials for new shows or our sheer laziness in changing channels, in prompting us to tune into each season’s new offerings.

Those are among the crucial findings of a new study to be released by the Council for Research Excellence, a Nielsen-funded group that does in-depth research on how Americans use media that is shared with its member broadcasters, advertisers, publishers and social media companies. The council surveyed 1,665 respondents, ages 15 to 54, who were selected to be representative of the online population.

The participants used a mobile app to report any time they saw, heard or communicated something about prime-time TV shows over the course of 21 days last fall, as the new season’s lineup of TV shows made their debuts. Only 16.1 percent of the survey respondents said they had used social media while watching TV during prime time. And less than half of the people using social media were actually discussing the show they were watching.