av Mikael Winterkvist | feb 1, 2021 | Lästipset
Donald Trump ansågs vara en tillgång av den ryska underrättelsetjänsten i över 40 år och ryssarna sig noga till att kartlägga Trumps svagheter.
I ett längre reportage berättar brittiska The Guardian om ryssarnas intresse för Donald Trump och de har öven intervjuat en före detta KGB-agent.
Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 24, 2021 | Lästipset
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram och Twitch har stängt ut Donald Trump vilket betyder att just nu så har vi ett nät utan Trump.
HOW HUMANS CONNECT is determined by the prevailing mediums of their era. In the political sphere, beginning in the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt leveraged public radio for his “fireside chats.” Later, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama drew on the visual charm of TV, where they excelled as gifted orators. Not all presidents are as adept at using the tools afforded to them, but there are certain political figures who understand the rhythms of the time they inhabit better than others.
That includes Donald Trump. He was made from TV and thus the ideal avatar for an internet populace that feeds on the unpredictable theatrics of its public figures. With the guile of an arrogant con man, he played to an increasingly fractured nation using social media. Trump took a distinct liking to Twitter, where he adopted the rhetorical flair of a WWE brawler. He wasn’t just the reality-TV president; it was that he lived somewhere beyond actual reality. Online, he was seemingly omnipresent: in meme form and GIFs, hectoring in soundbites, mocked on Saturday Night Live. In time, it began to feel like Trump was the only fixed point around which all of us orbited, even as many tried to avoid his dangerous pull.
Amerikanska Wired har tagit sig en titt på nätet utan ett av dessa värsta troll på senare år – Donald Trump.
Wired
av Mikael Winterkvist | jan 10, 2021 | Lästipset
Jan. 6, 2021, was always on the country’s radar.
Two runoff elections that would determine control of the Senate still had not been decided as Tuesday became Wednesday. A joint session of Congress convened to certify Joe Biden’s electoral-vote win while thousands gathered on the Mall in support of President Trump, who continued to falsely claim that the election was stolen from him.
As the scene in D.C. continued to darken, smaller demonstrations across the nation also flared, forcing officials in several statehouses to evacuate.
This is how the day unfolded.
Washington Post
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 29, 2020 | Lästipset
Safe-Inet, VPN, skulle var ett säkert, absolut säkert sätt att dölja sina aktiviteter ute på nätet och VPN-lösningen blev snabbt populär bland kriminella. Tisdagen före julhelgen slog Eurpol till tillsammans med en rad polismyndigheter. Wired har hela historien.
AS 2020 COMES to a close, it is perhaps only fitting that the US government and private sector are both scrambling to grasp and mitigate the fallout of a massive hacking spree widely attributed to Russia. There will be more news to come about the SolarWinds supply chain attack and possible other elements of the extensive campaign, but in the meantime officials, security practitioners, and researchers are all puzzling over questions of where to draw the line on global espionage and how to deter destructive and otherwise unacceptable hacking.
To understand where things stand today, it’s important to take a look back at the Trump administration’s approach to cybersecurity policy, its merits (some of them accidental), and its shortcomings. Read on below for president-elect Joe Biden’s first substantive commentary on how his administration may approach the increasingly crucial, yet tricky, question of how to enforce effective global norms in cyberspace.
Wired
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 25, 2020 | Lästipset
Under Trumps tid i Vita Huset så har en lång rad myndigheter, övervakningsorganisationer och funktioner monterats ned helt eller har fått se sina anslag kraftigt nedskurna. Ett sådant område är övervakningen av datorsystem. Trump sparkade chefen för the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) och har upprepade gånger tonmat ned attacks rich intrång – Solarwinds är bara det senaste exemplet.
Amerikanska Wired har granskat och gått ungdom faran med att montera ned skyddet mot dataattacker.
WHEN IT COMES to cybersecurity policy, the Trump administration’s head and body have rarely seemed to agree. Take the past two months, for instance. In late October, the president made an absurd declaration at a campaign rally that “nobody gets hacked.” That same week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA), Justice Department, and Treasury Department all took separate, landmark steps to counter Russian hacking—unsealing an indictment against six hackers in Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, imposing new sanctions on the Moscow research institute responsible for a uniquely dangerous piece of malware, and warning of an ongoing hacking campaign believed to be carried out by the FSB.
A few weeks later, Donald Trump lost the election and laid the blame on false conspiracy theories about electoral hacking and fraud. When CISA released a statement lauding the election as the ”most secure in American history,” contradicting the president’s claims, Trump summarily fired CISA director Chris Krebs. This year was finally capped off by revelations of a disastrous hacking campaign that hijacked the software updates of IT management firm SolarWinds to breach a slew of federal agencies and tech firms. Now, even as attorney general William Barr and secretary of state Mike Pompeo have pointed to Russia as the culprit, Trump has responded by downplaying the crisis, suggesting intrusions might have been carried out by China instead.
Wired
av Mikael Winterkvist | dec 19, 2020 | Lästipset
Facebook har attackerat Apple i en rad tidningsannonser som köpts och publicerats i flera av USAs största dagstidningar. Detta sedan Apple beslutat att rulla ut en teknisk lösning som krftigft försvårar den sociala mediajättens möjligheter att samla in användares information.
Kara Swisher, känd amerikansk journalist och teknikskribent har givit sin syn på en striden mellan Apple och Facebook:
If there’s anything that Facebook has learned from its many years of cozying up to the Trump administration, it’s figuring out that shamelessness works.
That is the only explanation I can come up with after seeing the social networking giant’s righteous ad campaign this week against Apple.
Casting itself as the protector of small businesses in full-page ads in — irony alert — big newspapers, Facebook is criticizing Apple for planning to give users of its popular devices like the iPhone more control over the data they share with third-party apps.
Starting next year, Apple will ask mobile users to “opt in” to accept third-party tracking of their digital activity (right now, the system defaults to tracking and requires users to “opt out” if they don’t want to be followed). Facebook relies on tracking to target ads at customers.
New York Times
