New York Times

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.

An investigation reveals missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of a campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing e-mails and zeros and ones.

An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama Administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack. The DNC’s fumbling encounter with the FBI meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks.

The low-key approach of the FBI meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top DNC officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems. In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the DNC, including Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private e-mail account was hacked months later.

The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) is a summary of high-level intelligence and analysis about global hot spots and national security threats written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. While the intelligence community produces many reports and assessments, the PDB is written specifically for the president and his top advisers.

Its origins trace back to a daily intelligence summary given to President Harry Truman starting in 1946, according to the C.I.A. Its current form began with CIA briefings for President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The intelligence community tailors the PDB to each president’s interests and style of absorbing information. At times, the briefing has included a “deep dive” into a specific question that a president may have asked or information that briefers believed he needed to know, such as the early August 2001 briefing President Bush received at his Texas ranch reporting that Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush received a supplement called the “threat matrix,” which listed more detailed intelligence about potential terrorist plans. Under President Obama, the brief has taken on some new topics and different forms, including a periodic update on cyberthreats against the United States. The P.D.B.’s form has also evolved. For example, President Bush preferred oral briefings to accompany the document, while President Obama has preferred to read the briefing on a secure tablet computer that lets him page through, underlining specific details.

[Commentary] Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Facebook are among the 10 largest companies in the world. Alphabet alone has a market capitalization of around $550 billion. AT&T and Time Warner combined would be about $300 billion. Alphabet has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market. AT&T has a 32 percent market share in mobile phones and 26 percent in pay TV. The combined AT&T-Time Warner will have $8 billion in cash but $171 billion of net debt, according to the research company MoffettNathanson. Compare that to Alphabet’s balance sheet, with total cash of $76 billion and total debt of about $3.94 billion. In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley. Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it themselves. Instead, they both have built their advertising businesses as “free riders” on content made by others, some of it from Time Warner. The rise of these digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries of our country.

[Taplin is the author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”]

[Commentary] Television news is going to have to do its part should President-elect Donald Trump and his administration try to make policy based on false assertions, the same way he used them on the campaign trail. (And, yes, television will have to be just as vigilant should Mr. Trump’s opponents use falsehoods to fight him, too.) The same holds for all of the news media, of course. But live television can be a safe harbor for falsehood and deflection. It’s easy for me to criticize as a columnist who has time to analyze and fact-check before writing. On television, in real time, even the best-prepared interviewers may have neither the time nor the facts to catch a lie and call it out. Even when they do, their attempts to call foul can turn into stalemates if the interviewee insists on continuing to forward something that’s false or unsubstantiated, which seems to be the latest craze. CNN’s Jake Tapper said, in this “year in which basic facts and basic decency are at risk, persistence is important at the end of the day.”

As increasing focus is being paid to the wealth and jobs created by tech companies outside Silicon Valley, Google’s arrival in small-town Pryor (OK) serves as a complex example of what happens when a modern internet company builds one of its data centers in a community. While they do bring in some work, these mostly automated facilities will never provide the thousands of good-paying blue-collar jobs that come with a new auto plant. What they do bring, however, is some stability to local tax revenues, and — at least in the case of Google — a cash-rich megacompany looking to make nice with the locals.

President-elect Donald Trump is entering office with financial entanglements that are exotic and far-flung: a condominium project in Manila, a luxury furniture maker in Istanbul, golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, and a hotel in Azerbaijan. But starting in January, Trump’s most visible business interest will be beamed directly into millions of American living rooms: “The Celebrity Apprentice” is back, and the president-elect is coming with it.

Just weeks before Inauguration Day, President-elect Trump will resume his role as an executive producer of the NBC reality show, an unlikely side project for a commander in chief, and one that is poised to bring him hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. Modern presidents, including the current one, have received royalties from sales of memoirs and book projects. But Trump’s ties to the show — now starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and renamed “The New Celebrity Apprentice” — potentially thrust the president-elect into a host of potential conflicts, from coziness with the brands that advertise on the show to his relationship with the network that airs it.

President Barack Obama has ordered American intelligence agencies to produce a full report on Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. He also directed them to develop a list of “lessons learned” from the broad campaign the United States has accused Russia of carrying out to steal e-mails, publish their contents and probe the vote-counting system. “We may have crossed a new threshold here,” said Lisa Monaco, one of President Obama’s closest aides and the former head of the national security division of the Justice Department. “He expects to receive this report before he leaves office.”

The report, according to senior administration officials, will trace the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and on prominent individuals like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it is unclear that the contents of the report will be made public. Intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which still has an active investigation of the hacking underway, have been reluctant to make public any of their findings; they fear it will reveal sources and methods of how the incursions were traced back to Russia. After past investigations involving sensitive intelligence information, declassified versions of reports were sometimes published, with a classified version sent to congressional committees and some agencies.

Thirty years as a union boss in Indiana have given Chuck Jones a thick skin. But even threats to shoot him or burn his house down did not quite prepare him for becoming the target of a verbal takedown by the next president of the United States.

In what one Republican strategist described as “cyberbullying,” President-elect Donald J. Trump derided Jones on Twitter, accusing him of doing “a terrible job representing workers” and blaming him for the decisions by companies that ship American jobs overseas. The messages continued Mr. Trump’s pattern of digital assaults, most of them aimed at his political rivals, reporters, Hollywood celebrities or female accusers. But rarely has Trump used Twitter to express his ire at people like Jones, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, who described himself as “just a regular working guy.” With the full power of the presidency just weeks away, Trump’s decision to single out Jones for ridicule has drawn condemnation from historians and White House veterans.