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I’ll see your emails and raise them a server: Franklin Foer reports for Slate on a group of computer scientists who track malware and have been monitoring a server tied to the Trump Organization, which they believe has been communicating with Alfa Bank, a Russian bank with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
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This New York Times story, which appeared a few hours after Foer’s, by Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, reports that the FBI doesn’t believe there is a direct connection between Trump and the Russian government, despite having chased many leads, including the one conjured up by Foer in Slate. They report that “the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts” between Alfa Bank and the Trump server.
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Security expert Rob Graham debunks Foer’s story, pretty convincingly if you ask me, and says the supposed Trump server was actually one of many controlled by a company that does hotel marketing, sending spam emails out for many clients, including Trump.
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And Chris Soghoian, the ACLU’s chief technologist, says the “The most alarming part of this story is that a techie with access to DNS logs is leaking them to the press & FBI.”
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Tech and politics: Facebook board member Peter Thiel held a press conference yesterday at the National Press Club to explain why he is backing Donald Trump. Vox’s Dara Lind argues that he is being “monstrously naive” about the Republican presidential candidate.
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More than 70 social justice and human rights groups have sent a letter to Facebook calling on the company to stop censoring postings that document human rights violations, Dustin Volz reports for Reuters
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“With Cookie Monster, we built on what the Obama campaign did in 2012 to bring digital and data to the next level. We’ve married digital and data so that we can gobble up massive amounts of data about our supporters. Our data-driven approach allows us to explore voters at a microscopically granular level.” That’s every digital consultant quoted in every story on tech in campaigns ever written by every gullible political reporter, according to Nick Marcelli who penned this terrific satire.
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Michael Hendrix of the American Enterprise Institute has posted a short but fascinating essay on “the rise of networked tribal politics and the fall of traditional institutional systems.” He writes, “If today’s political right or left often seems rudderless or leaderless […], it is because our institutions and elite have been replaced by networks of individuals within tribes, and everyone is trying to figure out how to navigate this new reality.”
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This is civic tech: Julie Menter of New Media Ventures has a modest request of tech innovators: stop fixing things that aren’t broken, diversify who builds your algorithms, respect our time and use your platforms for civic purposes.
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Lots of Facebook users are checking in at Standing Rock, where protestors are trying to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which probably won’t confuse police monitoring local social media use, but has certainly raised the profile of the protest. “We support the tactic, and think it is a great way to express solidarity,” organizers of the Sacred Stone Camp told Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica.
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SeeClickFix has just launched SeeClickFix Work, a new technology suite that helps government agencies manage roles, abilities and permissions for their staff and helps them track their internal workflows. The SeeClickFix platform is now being used by nearly 300 governments and counts nearly a million users across the world.
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Boston.gov is open-sourcing its website’s code base, Jason Shueh reports for Statescoop.
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What sharing economy? A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Uber and Lyft drivers in Seattle and Boston discriminate against passengers with African-American sounding names, canceling twice as often than they do with other people hailing a ride, causing as much as 35 percent longer waiting times.
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