1. Monthly archive
  2. July 2016

July 2016

Foreign Hackers Target Thousands of Gmail Users Every Month

Since 2012, Google has been notifying Gmail customers when they come under attack from hackers who may be working for foreign governments. The company has long remained vague about the the way it detects and identifies these hackers—“we can’t reveal the tip-off,” the company tells users—and about the number of notifications it routinely sends. Until now.

When these warnings were introduced, they appeared as thin red bars tacked to the top of users’ inboxes. But just a few months ago, Google redesigned the notifications to be considerably more in-your-face: Now, they take up the entire screen, announcing themselves with an angry red flag. “Government-backed hackers may be trying to steal your password,” the alert reads, advising users to enable two-factor authentication. The new alert says that fewer than one in a thousand Gmail users are targeted by foreign hackers—but for a product with more than a billion active users, that could still be a really big number. (0.1 percent of 1 billion is 1 million.) On July 11, Google provided its most precise estimate ever of the number of cyberattacks it detects that target Gmail users. Google Senior Vice President Diane Greene said the company notifies 4,000 users each month of state-sponsored cyberattacks.

Donald Trump is crashing the system. Journalists need to build a new one.

[Commentary] Journalists commonly divide information from persuasion, as when they separate the “news” from the “opinion” section, or “reporters” from “columnists.” This is fine as far as it goes (and they get criticized harshly when they don’t honor this norm), but the distinction won’t help much in understanding why the 2016 campaign has been such an intellectual challenge for the media. Everything that happens in election coverage is premised on a kind of opinion: that our votes should be based on reliable information about what the candidates intend to do if elected. Remove that assumption and the edifice crashes. But this is exactly what the candidacy of Donald Trump does. It upends the assumptions required for the traditional forms of campaign journalism even to make sense.

Journalists may need to collaborate across news brands in ways they have never known. They may have to call Trump out with a forcefulness unseen before. They may have to risk the breakdown of decorum in interviews and endure excruciating awkwardness. Hardest of all, they will have to explain to the public that Trump is a special case, and the normal rules do not apply.

[Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University and writes the blog PressThink.]

What the Comcast-Netflix deal says – and doesn’t say – about the Internet ecosystem

[Commentary] The investment advisory press is having a field day with the recently announced Comcast-Netflix deal. The deal, as the companies hope to eventually present it to consumers, will permit Comcast customers to subscribe to Netflix much as they already do to such premium offerings as HBO, Showtime, and Starz. Simple. But some in the blogosphere want to portray this deal as not just business but as détente in a war.

Reduced to its most simple elements, this deal illuminates a common story in the Internet ecosystem — a story long told in the cable world — carriers (Comcast) and content providers (Netflix) are complementary industries and together provide a product that consumers find desirable. To be sure, the exact terms of the deal will depend on a wide mix of variables that influence each party’s bargaining power — relative market size, relative consumer demand, market substitutes and, yes, potential regulatory intervention and pressure. The deal is exciting not because it is good against evil, but because it promises a product consumers may enjoy. It’s the excitement of the free market system doing what it does best — innovating.

[Babette Boliek is an associate professor of law at Pepperdine University School of Law.]

The Case for 18F: Why Federal IT Procurement, Contracting Need to Change

A Q&A with General Services Administration Administrator Dan Tangherlini

Only a couple years old now and the federal digital consultancy 18F has a lot to deal with. The innovation group, which helps agencies build, buy and share modern tech, is under fire from sources within and outside of government. Externally, 18F is defending itself from IT lobbyists, representing companies like IBM, Deloitte, Cisco Systems and others, that allege 18F is hindering revenues as a competing government tech provider — a message they shared at a recent hearing evaluating 18F's effectiveness. Internally, the group has met resistance from CIOs unsure of its private-sector development practices, and within the General Services Administration (GSA), 18F's parent agency, insiders say that the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) that funds 18F is actively working to terminate the group. Tangherlini said 18F, one of the contributors responsible for saving Healthcare.gov, should be allowed to innovate, especially considering the federal government’s nearly $90 billion in IT spending, 75 percent of which is spent on outdated technology, according to a recent 18F oversight report by the Government Accountability Office.

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