Details about the massive Russian attack on the United States are starting to emerge and it seems devastating to even comprehend. President Trump, who would not even be president were it not for a previous Russian attack on our electoral system and on whose watch this new attack occurred, has of course said nothing.

Thomas Bossert, homeland security adviser to President Trump and deputy homeland security adviser to George W. Bush, penned an op-ed in the Times that includes the kinds of details one would expect from a functioning federal government, as well as a mitigation strategy.

While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy.

The logical conclusion is that we must act as if the Russian government has control of all the networks it has penetrated. But it is unclear what the Russians intend to do next. The access the Russians now enjoy could be used for far more than simply spying.

It’s staggering and yet completely unsurprising that a president who has openly admired dictators like Putin would allow this kind of military attack on the United States to just happen. It’s not terribly prescient to predict the results of this attack are going to be long reaching and Putin will use whatever material or leverage he has to hamper the Biden administration, which Republicans will gleefully accept. In fact, the Republicans are already failing to respond: in the midst of this unprecedented attack, Trump’s acting defense secretary has halted all transition talks with the incoming Biden administration.

A few more source: Bruce Schneier’s blog is longstanding source of excellent security information, as is Brian Krebs’s. And Marcy Wheeler’s Empty Wheel blog is stellar, plus she’s a fantastic twitter follow to boot.

A confluence of factors led more people than ever to bet on the election — twice as much money as the past two Super Bowls combined — though ultimately it may just come down to the type of person who bets online and loves Trump.

A few factors might explain the yearlong surge in pro-Trump bets. First, think about the median person who regularly engages in online betting. The stereotype that popped into your brain is probably correct.

As a shameless bookshelf snob aficionado, I’ve very much enjoyed this series. Previously, previously.

As predicted earlier this year, there is once again a global resurgence in infections from the virus. Once again the United States has failed to respond.

David Leonhardt, in The New York Times:

The U.S. was not alone in suffering a resurgence this fall. Much of the world did. But many other countries responded to that surge with targeted new restrictions and, in a few cases, with an increase in rapid-result testing.

Those measures seem to be working. Worldwide, the number of new cases has fallen over the past week.

In some countries, the declines are large: more than 50 percent over the past month in Belgium, France, Italy, Kenya and Saudi Arabia; more than 40 percent in Argentina and Morocco; more than 30 percent in India and Norway.

And in the U.S.? The number of new cases has risen 51 percent over the past month.

The causes are not a mystery. The U.S. still lacks a coherent testing strategy, and large parts of the country continue to defy basic health advice. One example is Mitchell, a small South Dakota city, where deaths have spiked recently — including the loss of a beloved high school coach. Yet anti-mask protesters continue to undermine the local response.

Simply looking at a map of cases per capita is damning. The same map as a function of GDP would be an order of magnitude worse — the wealthiest country on earth has failed by every measure.

The failure is obvious: our ostensible leaders simply failed to do what was necessary. Nearly every other nation on earth showed what was possible but the U.S. stood with dictators and other failed governments like Russia and Brazil.

The root of the failure is also obvious and it’s the Republican party. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since they’ve been telling us for decades their mission is to reduce the efficacy of government in favor of markets and individual freedom. When they are in power, their only goals are to dismantle government as much as possible, reduce taxes and regulations, and corrupt the political process so they maintain that power even as a minority. This story, also from yesterday’s Times, detailing how Republicans systematically dismantled the CDC, is a perfect example of the GOP’s approach. And in the middle of all of this abject failure, they barely lost a presidential election, maintained control of the Senate, expanded representation in the House, and kept control over the majority of state governments.

This pandemic will end at some point. The vaccine is here and we’ll slowly begin to sort out what our lives look like. The more intractable problem of how to deal with why we failed so badly will remain with us for much longer.

The newsletter/blogging platform Substack released a beta of a new reader app today that lets you corral all of your newsletter subscriptions into one place. It’s good!

There’s an intriguing piece that barely got mentioned (for probably obvious reasons) — the ability to add any RSS feed, thus making it a more universal reader app than just another place to read your Substack newsletters. Substack could quietly become the app that solves feeds for normies without having to resort to the fasutian bargain of social media.

(Substack Reader doesn’t currently support jsonfeed and I haven’t fixed my RSS feeds yet, but most plain-jane RSS feeds seem to work just fine. I’m likely sticking with Feedbin + NetNewsWire.)

For the past twenty years or so, cities have been the victims of their own success. The pandemic has exposed how the excesses of capital have driven that. I’m not optimistic we’ll learn the lessons, even if all those glittery luxury condos stay empty.

This sounds promising: Newscatalyst and LION Publishers are working to bootstrap hundreds of local, independent newsrooms across the country. They’ll share infrastructure, which will lower the cost on necessities like libel insurance, legal assistance, and accounting, as well as technical infrastructure (“a super scalable publishing platform”).

Our mission is to help bring equity into the news and information ecosystem by democratizing the process of starting sustainable local news businesses and supporting people who have been historically excluded from media and media ownership.

I just love the call-to-action on their website — “Start a newsroom”

Over the weekend, a number of federal agencies revealed they’d been hacked by the Russian Cozybear espionage team. They were able to breach the networks via a backdoor that had been planted in the SolarWinds network management software, essentially giving the hackers access to the lowest level of the stack.

“SolarWinds by its nature has very privileged access to other parts of your infrastructure,” Chapple, a former computer scientist at the National Security Agency, said in an interview. “You can think of SolarWinds as having the master keys to your network, and if you’re able to compromise that type of tool, you’re able to use those types of keys to gain access to other parts of the network. By compromising that, you have a key basically to unlock the network infrastructure of a large number of organizations.”

The hack was discovered by security researchers FireEye, apparently by accident when they realized their own network had been compromised.

The Washington Post also has a good overview.

The scale of the Russian espionage operation appears to be large, said several individuals familiar with the matter. “This is looking very, very bad,” said one person. SolarWinds products are used by organizations across the world. They include all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, the world’s top electronic spy agency, according to the firm’s website.

Its clients also include the top 10 U.S. telecommunications companies.

The vast majority of cybersecurity experts agree that the Trump administration has severely undermined national network security. Trump fired Christopher Krebs, who lead cybersecurity for the election, after Krebs disputed the president’s baseless claim the election was somehow rigged.

And not just the big ones (Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok/ByteDance) but Snap, Reddit and even Discord.

This is just a preliminary review, though similar to a review of tech acquisitions that presumably led to the current suit against Facebook. It suggests the government may go beyond anti-trust and possibly regulate how tech goes about collecting all the data that’s so valuable to them. In a better world, strong consumer protections would have stopped this before it even started, but it’s heartening to see this response.

Cloudflare’s mission reminds me a lot of the early web days, and they’ve built an incredible product to boot — I sincerely hope they can keep the two aligned.

I installed the snippet on this very website and it couldn’t have been easier. The dashboard is great and provides a solid high level overview of your web traffic. If you’re used to the deep dive of Google Analytics, you’ll find there’s a lot missing, but that’s perhaps also an opportunity to reevaluate how much analysis you really need. I’ve also got server-side analytics via Netlify to keep an eye on things like 404s (welcome back, everyone who subscribed to the old Atom feed four years ago!); Netlify’s approach is also plenty sufficient for my needs without adding a layer of surveillance I neither want nor need.