The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Consider the meaning of elastic in many of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) service names. When you see the word elastic, you should think of the ability to stretch and contract. All the AWS documentation alludes to this fact, but it often makes the whole process sound quite complicated when it really isn’t. Just think about a computer that can stretch when you need more resources and contract when you don’t.

With AWS, you pay only for the services you actually use, so this capability to stretch and contract is important because it means that your organization can spend less money and still end up with just the right amount of services needed.

Even though some members of your organization might fixate on the issue of money, the real value behind the term elastic is time. Keeping your own equipment right sized is time consuming, especially when you need to downsize. Using EC2 means that you can add or remove computing capacity in just a few minutes, rather than weeks or months. Because new requirements tend to change quickly today, the capability to right size your capacity in minutes is crucial, especially if you really do want that pay raise.

As important as being agile and keeping costs low are to an administrator, another issue is even more important: being able to make the changes without jumping through all sorts of hoops. EC2 provides two common methods for making configuration changes:

• Manually using the AWS Console
• Automatically using the AWS Application Programming Interface (API)

Just as you do with your local server, you __have choices to make when building an EC2 instance (a single session used to perform one or more related tasks). The instance can rely on a specific operating system, such as Linux or Windows. You can also size the instance to provide a small number of services or to act as a cluster of computers for huge computing tasks (and everything in between). AWS bases the instance size on the amount of CPU type, memory, and storage required to perform the tasks you assign to the instance. In fact, you can create optimized instances for tasks that require more resources in the following areas:

• CPU
• Memory
• Storage
• GPU

As the tasks that you assign to an instance change, so can the instance configuration. You can adjust just the memory allocation for an instance or provide more storage when needed. You can also choose a pricing model that makes sense for the kind of instances you create:

• On Demand: You pay for what you use.
• Reserved Instance: Provides a significantly reduced price in return for a one-time payment based on what you think you might need in the way of service.
• Spot Instance: Lets you name the price you want to pay, with the price affecting the level of service you receive.

Autoscaling is an EC2 feature that you use to ensure that your instance automatically changes configuration as the load on it changes. Rather than require someone to manage EC2 constantly, you can allow the instance to make some changes as needed based on the requirements you specify. The metrics you define determine the number and type of instances that EC2 runs. The metrics include standards, such as CPU utilization level, but you can also define custom metrics as needed. A potential problem with autoscaling is that you’re also charged for the services you use, which can mean an unexpectedly large bill. Every EC2 feature comes with pros and cons that you must balance when deciding on how to configure your setup.

AWS also provides distinct security features. The use of these security features will become more detailed as the book progresses. However, here is a summary of the security features used with EC2:

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Separates every instance running on the physical server from every other instance. Theoretically, no one can access someone else’s instance (even though it can happen in the real world).
• Network Access Control Lists (ACLs) (Optional): Acts as a firewall to control both incoming and outgoing requests at the subnet level.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM) Users and Permissions: Controls the level of access granted to individual users and user groups. You can both allow and deny access to specific resources managed by EC2.
• Security Groups: Acts as a firewall to control both incoming and outgoing requests at the instance level. Each instance can __have up to five security groups, each of which can have different permissions. This security feature provides finer-grained control over access than Network ACLs, but you must also maintain it for each instance, rather than for the virtual machine as a whole.
• Hardware Security Device: Relies on a hardware-based security device that you install to control security between your on-premises network and the AWS cloud.

No amount of security will thwart a determined intruder. Anyone who wants to gain access to your server will find a way to do it no matter how high you build the walls. In addition to great security, you must monitor the system and, by assuming that someone will break in, deal with the intruder as quickly as possible. Providing security keeps the less skilled intruder at bay as well as helps keep essentially honest people honest, but skilled intruders will always find a way in. The severity of these breaches varies, but it can actually cause businesses to fail, as in the case of Code Spaces. A number of security researchers warn that AWS is prone to security lapses. However, don’t assume that other cloud services provide better security. Any time you use external services, you take significant risks as well.

A final consideration is the use of storage. Each instance comes with a specific amount of storage based on the kind of instance you create. If the instance storage doesn’t provide the functionality or capacity you need, you can also add Elastic Block Store (EBS) support. The main advantage of using EBS, besides capacity and flexibility, is the capability to define a specific level of storage performance to ensure that your application runs as expected.

How to Create an AWS Administrator User

15

Select Users in the Navigation pane.

You see the Users page. This page shows all the users who can access the EC2 setup, what level of access they have, password details, access keys, and the time you created the account.

25

Click Create New Users.

You see the Create User page. You can create up to five new users at a time. Each username can contain up to 64 characters.

Type the username you want to use in field 1, deselect the Generate an Access Key for Each User check box, and click Create.

Amazon creates a new user with the name you specify and returns you to the Users page. Your new user account still doesn’t belong to the Administrators group, however, so that’s the next step in the process.

35

Click the link associated with the username you specified for the administrator account.

You see the user specifics on the Summary page, as shown. Notice the tabs at the bottom of the page that you can use to configure the account.

Click Add User to Groups. You see a list of available groups.

Check the Administrators entry and click Add to Groups. The IAM Console returns you to the Summary page for the user shown. However, the Groups tab now shows that the user is part of the Administrators group. Note that you can remove access to a group by clicking the Remove from Group link next to the group entry.

45

Select the Security Credentials tab of the Summary page.

The Security Credentials tab displays the user’s security information. You see a number of security entries, including the Sign-In Credentials section shown.

55

Click Manage Password.

You see the Manage Password page. Note that you can assign an auto-generated password to the account or rely on a custom password. When creating accounts for other users, make sure to check the Require User to Create a New Password at Next Sign-in check box.

Type the same password in the Password and Confirm Password fields and then click Apply. The IAM Console returns you to the Summary page, where you see that the user now has a password but hasn’t ever used it.

Sign out of your root user account. You need to sign back into AWS using the new administrator account that you just created.

Back Next

How to Create the AWS Administrators Group

14

Click Groups on the left side (Navigation pane) of the IAM Console page.

You see the Groups page, shown. The page currently lacks any groups because you haven’t created any. As you create new groups, the page shows each of them, along with a list of users, the policy associated with the group, and when you created the group.

24

Click Create New Group.

You see the Set Group Name page shown. You type the name of the group you want to create in the Group Name field. The group name field can support names up to 128 characters long, but you normally don’t make them that long. Choose something simple, like Administrators, to describe your group.

34

Type Administrators (or the name of the group you want to create) and click Next Step.

You see the Attach Policy page. Each group can __have one or more policies attached to it. In this case, the IAM Console automatically shows the only existing policy, which is AdministratorAccess.

44

Check AdministratorAccess and click Next Step.

You see the Review page. This page tells you the group name and shows the policies that are attached to it. If you find that the group name is wrong, click Edit Group Name. Likewise, if the policy is incorrect, click Edit Policies. The IAM Console helps you make required changes to the name or policy.

Verify the group information and click Create Group. You see the group added to the Group page.

Back Next

Define AWS Permissions and Policies

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the whole idea behind permissions and policies in AWS (Amazon Web Services). To begin with, a permission defines the following:

• Who can access a resource
• What actions individuals or groups can perform with the resource

Every user starts with no permissions at all. In other words, a user can’t do anything, not even view security settings or use access keys to interact with a resource. This is a good practice because it means that you can’t inadvertently create a user with administrator rights simply because you forget to assign the user specific permissions.

Of course, assigning every user every permission required to perform what amounts to the same tasks is time consuming and error prone. A policy is a package of permissions that applies to a certain group of people. AWS comes with only the AdministratorAccess policy configured, so if you want to use other policies, you must define them yourself.

Fortunately, policies come in several forms to make them easier to work with. The following list describes the policy types and describes how you use them:

• Managed: Stand-alone policies that you can attach to users and groups, but not to resources. A managed policy affects identities only. When creating a managed policy, you use a centralized management page to create, edit, monitor, roll back, and delegate policies. You __have access to two kinds of managed policies.
  • AWS-Managed: A policy that AWS creates and manages for you. These policies tend to support obvious needs that most organizations have. The reasons to use AWS managed policies are that they’re simple to implement and they automatically change to compensate for changes to AWS functionality.
  • Customer-Managed: A policy that you create and manage. Use these policies to support any special organizational requirements. The main reason to use a policy of this type is to gain flexibility that the AWS-managed option doesn’t provide.
• Inline: Embedded policies that you create and attach to users, groups, or resources on an individual basis (without using a centralized manager). AWS views identity policies (those used for users and groups) differently from resource policies as described in the following list:
  • Embedded User, Group, or Role: An identity policy that you embed directly into a user, group, or role. You use an identity policy to define the actions that an entity can perform. For example, a user can __have permission to run instances of EC2. In some cases, in addition to defining what action a user can take, the policy can also define the specific resource with which the user can work. This additional level of control is a resource-level permission, one that defines both the action and the specific resource.
  • Resource: One or more permissions that determine who can access the resource and what actions they can perform with it. You can add resource-based permissions to Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon Glacier vaults, Amazon SNS topics, Amazon SQS queues, and AWS Key Management Service encryption keys. Unlike policies created for identities, resource-based permissions are unmanaged (inline only).

Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volume Types for AWS

Just as there isn’t one kind of hard drive, there isn’t one kind of EBS volume. Amazon Web Services (AWS) currently provides access to both Solid-State Drive (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) volumes. SSD provides high-speed access, while HDD provides lower-cost access of a more traditional hard drive. Amazon further subdivides the two technologies into two types each (listed in order of speed):

• EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD: Provides high-speed data access that you commonly need for data-intensive applications that rely on moderately-sized databases.
• EBS General Purpose SSD: Creates a medium-high-speed environment for low-latency applications. Amazon suggests this kind of volume for your boot drive. However, whether you actually need this amount of speed for your setup depends on the kinds of applications you plan to run.
• Throughput Optimized HDD: Defines a high-speed hard drive environment, which can’t compete with even a standard SSD. However, this volume type will work with most common applications and Amazon suggests using it for big data or data warehouse applications. This is probably the best option to choose when money is an issue and you don’t really need the performance that SSD provides.
• Cold HDD: Provides the lowest-speed option that Amazon supports. You use this volume type for data you access less often than data you place on the other volume types (think data you use once a week, rather than once every day). This isn’t an archive option; it’s more like a low-speed option for items you don’t need constantly, such as a picture database.

As you move toward higher-speed products, you also pay a higher price. For example, at the time of writing, a Cold HDD volume costs only $0.025/GB/month, but an EBS Provisioned SSD volume costs $0.125/GB/month. You can find price and speed comparison details online. The table provided contains some interesting statistics. For example, all the volume types top out at 16TB and support a maximum throughput per instance of 800MB/s.

How to Create an EBS Volume for AWS

Before you can use an Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume for Amazon Web Services (AWS), you must create it. EBS volumes can take on many different characteristics. The following steps describe how to create a simple volume that you can use with EC2.

1. Sign into AWS using your administrator account.
2. Navigate to the EC2 Console.
   You see the page shown. Notice the Navigation pane on the left, which contains options for performing various EC2-related tasks. The Resources area of the main pane tells you the statistics for your EC2 setup, which currently includes just the one security group.

   
   

   The EC2 Console tells you all about your current EC2 configuration.
3. Choose a EC2 setup region from the Region drop-down list at the top of the page.
   The example uses the Oregon region.
4. Select Volumes in the Navigation pane.
   The EC2 Console shows that you don’t currently __have any volumes defined.
5. Click Create Volume.
   You see the Create Volume dialog box, shown in the following figure. Notice that you can choose a volume type and size, but not the Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) or the throughput, which are available only with certain volume types. The Availability Zone field contains the location of the storage, which must match your EC2 setup. The Snapshot ID field contains the name of an S3 storage location to use for incremental backups of your EBS data. You can also choose to encrypt sensitive data, but doing so places some limits on how you can use EBS. For example, you can’t use encryption with all EC2 instance types.

   
   

   A new volume displays all pertinent statistics, such as the size and speed.
6. Click Create.

   AWS creates a new volume for you and displays statistics about it, as shown. The new volume lacks any sort of backup. The next step configures a snapshot that AWS uses to perform incremental backups of the EBS data, reducing the risk of lost data.

7. Choose Actions→ Create Snapshot.
   You see the Create Snapshot dialog box. Notice that AWS fills in the Volume field for you and determines the need for encryption based on the volume settings.

   
   

   To start an instance, you must select one of the available AMIs.
8. Type EBS.Backup in the Name field, type Test Backup in the Description field, and then click Create.
   You see a dialog box telling you that AWS has started the snapshot.
9. Click Close. The volume is ready to use.

When you finish this example, you can delete the volume you created by selecting its entry in the list and choosing Actions →Delete Volume. In a real-world setup, you can attach this volume to any EC2 instance or detach it when it’s no longer needed.

The Silverstone ST30SF & ST45SF SFX Power Supply Review

With the vast selection of advanced ATX PSUs available today, PC users can easily pick one that perfectly suits their budget and needs. When shopping for an SFX PSU however, the options are very limited, as very few companies do market advanced high quality SFX PSUs. Even when the company has a few SFX units available, most of the time these are expensive top-tier models, leaving budget-driven users bewildered.

One of the companies that invests a lot on small form factor systems is SilverStone. The company currently markets dozens of proprietary PC cases, many of which require SFX PSUs. SilverStone is also marketing some of the most advanced SFX PSUs available, such as the 700W SX700-LPT that we reviewed a few months ago and their newly released 800W SX800-LTI with 80Plus Titanium compliance. Outrageously powerful (and expensive) SFX PSUs are not useful to users that want to build simple, compact media or office PCs. Their “SFX extended” form factors make them incompatible with very compact case designs anyway, including many of SilverStone’s own products.

Today we are having a look at the two SFX units that SilverStone is offering for budget-conscious builders, the ST30SF and the ST45SF. Although they are not as grand as the top-tier PSUs we mentioned before, they do __have a high power output of 300W and 450W respectively, sufficient for typical media and gaming PCs. They only __have an 80Plus Bronze efficiency certification, but what they lack in technology they make up for in price. We should clarify that the units in this review are the latest version, V2.0 for the ST30SF and the V3.0 for the ST45SF, that have been reengineered for improved performance in home and gaming PCs. Most of the differences over their previous versions will be highlighted in the following pages, but the first difference that we should point out is that the new units are rated at 40°C ambient temperature, whereas the previous versions were rated at 50°C.

SilverStone ST30SF Power specifications ( Rated @ 40 °C )
AC INPUT	100 - 240 VAC, 50 - 60 Hz
RAIL	+3.3V	+5V	+12V	+5Vsb	-12V
MAX OUTPUT	16A	16A	25A	3A	0.3A
	90W		300W	15W	3.6W
TOTAL	300W

SilverStone ST45SF Power specifications ( Rated @ 40 °C )
AC INPUT	100 - 240 VAC, 50 - 60 Hz
RAIL	+3.3V	+5V	+12V	+5Vsb	-12V
MAX OUTPUT	20A	20A	37.5A	3A	0.3A
	110W		450W	15W	3.6W
TOTAL	450W

 

Packaging & Bundle

SilverStone supplies their cost-effective SFX PSUs in aesthetically simple, practical cardboard boxes. The artwork on the black boxes is minimal, but SilverStone had every worthwhile bit of information printed on them and they should provide ample shipping protection to the lightweight units.

We expected to find only the absolute minimum of items bundled alongside such units but SilverStone had us surprised. Except from the thorough manual, black mounting screws and the necessary AC cable, the company also supplies an ATX to SFX adapter frame, allowing these SFX units to be installed into ATX compatible cases. This greatly enhances the value of the units, ensuring that they may fit into other cases into the future, as well as their potential market group, as they may be appealing to modders and other people that wish to save some space in their PSU compartment for some reason.

Connector type	SilverStone ST30SF	SilverStone ST45SF
ATX 24 Pin	1	1
EPS 4+4 Pin	1	1
EPS 8 Pin	-	-
PCI-E 6+2 Pin	-	1
PCI-E 6 Pin	1	1
SATA	3	3
Molex	2	2
Floppy	1	1

@Ivanka from Brighton's message for Trump: 'Please pay attention to climate change' Donald Trump mistakes Ivanka from Brighton for his daughter What do Donald Trump's Twitter tastes tell us about him?

A digital consultant from Brighton whom Donald Trump mistook for his daughter on Twitter says she is more concerned by the prospect of a climate change denier in the White House than someone who makes slip-ups on social media.

Ivanka Majic, 42, a former digital director for the Labour party, said it was “very surreal” to discover that the president-elect had retweeted a message intending to praise his daughter, Ivanka Trump, that included her Twitter name instead.

Trump quoted a praiseworthy tweet directed to him by Lawrence Goodstein, a Twitter user in Seekonk, Massachusetts, that described his daughter Ivanka as “a woman with real character and class” late on Monday.

But Goodstein had mistakenly put @Ivanka, not @IvankaTrump – not a significant mistake in light of Goodstein’s 160-odd followers, but of far greater consequence circulated by Trump to his 20.1 million.

Overnight Majic’s Twitter followers more than doubled as she found herself thrust into the spotlight by a man who will be sworn in as president on Friday.

She said she was keen to use the attention to speak out on the environment. “I’ve got my 15 minutes of fame and this is how I’m choosing to use it,” Majic told the Guardian.

Replying to Trump, she tweeted: “And you’re a man with great responsibilities. May I suggest more care on Twitter and more time learning about #climatechange.”

She also tweeted data pointing out that 97.5% of publishing climatologists and about 90% of all publishing scientists supported the human-induced climate change theory.

Majic said Trump’s error was a careless mistake. “One would hope that the future president of the US would pay a little more attention, but I’m sure anybody could __have made the same mistake.

“What is of more concern to me is that we __have a president-elect who is a climate change denier.”

Majic said that because of her Twitter name, @Ivanka, she had often been mistaken for Ivanka Trump on the social network, but her politics were very different from the Trump family’s.

She said: “It is not the first time I’ve been included in a tweet to him or to his daughter, but it is the first time I’ve been mentioned in something that Donald Trump has retweeted. So this isn’t new, but it is new for it to be this big.

“My politics are very different from Donald Trump’s. During the election campaign I had a Twitter bot that replied to anyone who had @Ivanka and Trump in the same tweet, with the message: ‘Don’t know about you but I’m voting for Hillary.’

“The other thing I get mistaken for is a Hungarian concrete company called Ivanka Concrete, but that’s easy to deal with.”

Majic, whose father was a Croat from Bosnia-Herzegovina, said: “Ivanka is an incredible common Slavic name. It is about as boring as you can get. So Ivanka Trump and I share that at least.”

She added: “I came down in morning to find lots of Twitter notifications. It’s very surreal. There is no other word for it.

“None of this annoying. It is remarkable. Even 10 years ago it could have never have happened that a president-elect of the United States of America accidentally mentions a fairly normal citizen from Brighton. It is a 21st-century story that raises lots of interesting questions … about how you choose your Twitter handle, for starters.”

As a freelance digital consultant, Majic advises clients to keep a low profile when caught up in social media storms. “I am probably not doing what I would advise others to do. I would advise them to switch off their phones and go for a nice walk.

“If one is given a platform for a day, I don’t think me slinging any insults or being disparaging towards the president will be helpful, but I do think mentioning climate change might invite some people to reconsider their views, or learn something, or read something.”

Majic said Trump’s cabinet nominations, notably the choice of the ExxonMobile chief executive, Rex Tillerson, as secretary of state, meant these were “worrying times for the world”.

Majic, who has a young daughter, is also troubled by Trump’s sexism. She said: “That a man got elected after making comments that he did about women is really worrying.

“A conversation about climate change may be slightly easier to elevate online than a conversation about being respectful to women. And that is itself a problem, but there you go.”

Majic said she wanted to engage in a “polite” debate rather than trading insults with Trump. But she does not expect Trump to continue the conversation. “I don’t expect a reply – I don’t think he’s a man who likes to make mistakes,” she said.

“I am happy to tweet a polite message to Donald Trump saying: ‘Please pay attention to climate change.’ What I don’t want to get embroiled in is some flame war about calling him something.

“Of course I’m worried about Donald Trump being president of the United States, but let’s hope he does a good job.”

CIA makes 12m pages of declassified documents searchable online Obama gives US intelligence greater access to warrantless data on foreigners

The CIA has published more than 12 million pages of declassified documents online, making decades of US intelligence files more easily accessible and searchable.

The agency published the roughly 930,000 documents that make up the CIA Records Search Tool (Crest) on Tuesday. The online publication of the files was first reported by BuzzFeed News.

Although all of the documents in Crest were part of the public record before Tuesday, they could only be inspected by visiting the National Archives in Maryland in person. Once at the archives, just four computers available only during business hours provided access to Crest. A lawsuit from the open-government nonprofit MuckRock prompted the CIA to make the documents available online. Further pressure to publish the documents came from the transparency advocate and journalist Michael Best, who began steadily scanning and uploading the documents one by one.

“Previously, in order to directly access Crest, a researcher was required to visit the National Archives at College Park, Maryland,” according to the program’s webpage. “CIA recognized that such visits were inconvenient and presented an obstacle to many researchers.”

The Crest database features a wide range of different files, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s papers, and documents on Nazi war crimes. The collection also has files on UFOs, recipes for invisible ink and reports on research into telepathy.

This research included the Stargate Project, an initiative to investigate the possibilities of telepathy for intelligence use. A 1995 review of the research concluded it was “unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated”.

The CIA also kept files and documents on media organizations and individual reporters. A letter attached to a photocopy of a Mother Jones article from 1978 describes the newsmagazine as a “locally-produced scandal sheet published by a dissident group”. The author and the recipient of the letter __have been redacted from the files.

An internal CIA letter notes the appointment of Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal, as the Washington program manager for ABC. The sender of the letter notes his desire to “find out what kind of person he is”. Crest includes dozens of documents related to Bob Woodward, the other half of the team that reported on Watergate, and a brief 1985 note expresses concern about Woodward’s future reporting: “I learned from CIA source that Washington Post’s Watergate reporter, Bob Woodward, has cast evil eye on CIA chief Bill Casey,” the note reads. “Woodward is questioning everyone who ever knew Casey.”

Woodward published a book about Casey’s time as director of central intelligence in 1987.

A 1995 executive order requires all non-exempt historically valuable documents that are more than 25 years old to be declassified.

New online generation takes up Holocaust denial Prince Charles: rising intolerance risks repeat of horrors of past

A new generation of Holocaust deniers is emerging through a clutch of popular “gateway” conspiracy theories, according to one of the UK’s leading experts on the subject.

As Denial, a film about the disgraced historian and notorious Holocaust denier David Irving, hits cinemas later this month, attention is focusing on the ageing generation of deniers who emerged with Irving at its vanguard and are now dying out. But it appears that Holocaust denial has found new momentum in the digital age.

The UK’s foremost academic on the subject claims a new internet-based generation is embracing denial, having been drawn to it out of antisemitism or a belief in conspiracy theories.

Dr Nicholas Terry, a history lecturer at Exeter University, estimates that there are now thousands of “low-commitment” Holocaust deniers online. Rather than recruiting from established far-right denial forums, they are attracting followers drawn to outlandish theories such as those surrounding the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the moon landing and the Sandy Hook school massacre.

“In one sense, the internet means Holocaust deniers __have got a lot of competition,” Terry said. “On the other, in this more free-form world, deniers __have been able to attract a certain minority from the world of conspiracy theories. There’s a sense of disorientation taking place when it comes to where people are getting their news from.

“This kind of free-for-all on the internet creates a milieu that has seen people who would normally identify along the left of the political spectrum gravitate towards ideas that are more at home on the far right.”

The release of Denial – which centres on the libel trial brought by Irving against the Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt – follows the controversy that erupted when it emerged Google’s algorithms were recommending antisemitic, white nationalist and Holocaust denier websites for searches of the question: “Did the Holocaust happen?" The film has already been attacked by the new generation of deniers on YouTube, Reddit and Twitter.

Terry, who has monitored Holocaust denial online for 10 years and is co-editing a forthcoming book, Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective, has personal experience of their tactics, having been trolled online. He founded the anti-denial blog, Holocaust Controversies, to “debunk” their claims.

He said that many claiming that the Holocaust did not happen were often less intellectual than the earlier generation of deniers. They were an “international crowd – lots of Americans, British, Scandinavians, and west Europeans, as well as some Brits” – who made little attempt to justify their views with facts, resulting in what Terry termed a “Twitterification” of denial.

Several of the new generation of deniers have become well known online. Eva Lion, a Canadian nationalist on the extreme right, was banned from YouTube having amassed tens of thousands of followers. Reality-TV star Tila Tequila was thrown off Celebrity Big Brother after it emerged she had posted messages defending Hitler, as well as antisemitic and white nationalist comments.

While the majority of new deniers are young and hail largely from the “alt-right”, a significant number are middle-aged or older, Terry said.

“What I’ve observed in the last 10 years is that, while the majority of deniers one encounters are still rightwing and Nazis, they are always peppered with a number of unaffiliated individuals who would consider themselves to be liberal or leftwing and have arrived at their position having been anti-Zionist or anti-Israel.”

Their attraction to Holocaust denial, Terry said, had coincided with an upsurge in antisemitism on the internet. Many drawn to such beliefs, he suggested, were vulnerable to lies being peddled as truth.

“They are people who have reached their 40s or 50s and have embraced the internet as it has grown and new platforms have come along. They have moved away from quality newspaper-reading mentality; maybe they’re professionals, some may have degrees, but they are not skilled in assessing sources in history. When you interact with them, you realise that they have no clue as to how we know anything about the past, about how history works, what information is available. They are willing to go along with certain ideas that are summarised for them and simplified in web articles or videos.”

He added: “Lipstadt said that arguing with a denier was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I would say it’s now like trying to nail smoke to a wall. There’s almost no substance.”

Amazon and Google fight crucial battle over voice recognition

Amazon and Google always thrive in the fourth quarter as people get out their wallets for Christmas. Both companies – or in Google’s case, its parent group, Alphabet – are therefore expected to announce booming revenues in their fourth-quarter results over the next fortnight, with Alphabet going first on Thursday and Amazon the following week. But analysts are already looking beyond the simple question of how many cardboard boxes Amazon filled and how many searches Google answered. They’re wondering which company will win the battle to control your home.

That battle is being fought by two carafe-sized cylinders from the respective companies. One is Amazon’s Echo, with its voice-operated “personal assistant”, Alexa; the other is Google Home, which responds to the phrase “OK Google”. Both are internet-connected, home-based devices which can be command to do things: give the weather forecast; play music; read out news headlines; update shopping lists; and control “smart” devices in the home such as light bulbs or power points. In theory, if a device can be linked to it, the Echo can control or monitor it, and keep you informed. And simply by saying “Alexa, add sugar to the shopping list”, users can keep up to date on house supplies and even purchase them directly.

Amazon is in the lead, having launched the Echo in November 2014, two years before Google Home came out. Though Amazon has not – and does not – release sales figures for any individual item, investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates that 11m Echos had been sold by the end of November 2016; other estimates suggest a further 7m __have been sold since. About 700,000 were estimated to __have been sold in the UK and Germany, the only countries outside the US where it is available.

The Morgan Stanley estimate would put an Echo in more than 8% of US households. This is a significant figure, especially compared with the best estimates for Google Home, which put its sales at less than a million since its launch in October 2016.

Why should Google care about Amazon? Because voice is seen as the next big field for computer interaction, and the home is a far better environment for voice detection than the great outdoors. Research company Gartner reckons that by 2018, 30% of all interactions with devices will be voice-based, because people can speak up to four times faster than they can type, and the technology behind voice interaction is improving all the time.

The risk to Google is that at the moment, almost everyone starting a general search at home begins at Google’s home page on a PC or phone. That leads to a results page topped by text adverts – which help generate about 90% of Google’s revenue, and probably more of its profits. But if people begin searching or ordering goods via an Echo, bypassing Google, that ad revenue will fall.

And Google has cause to be uncomfortable. The shift from desktop to mobile saw the average number of searches per person fall as people moved to dedicated apps; Google responded by adding more ads to both desktop and search pages, juicing revenues. A shift that cut out the desktop in favour of voice-oriented search, or no search at all, would imperil its lucrative revenue stream.

Amazon is copying one feature of Google’s success in smartphones: it is offering methods to connect and control smart devices via the Echo for free, rather as Google’s Android software was offered as a free platform for smartphones. There are signs it is paying off: Wynn hotels in Las Vegas announced in December that it would be adding Echos to all 5,000 rooms, for functions such as playing music and controlling curtains and blinds. That gained some notice, as much as anything because the life cycle of such hotels implies they will be there for a decade or so.

Similarly, at January’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), also in Las Vegas, commentators were struck by how many devices incorporated Alexa. And Amazon is even stealing into Google’s territory: some phones sold in the US from China’s Huawei, which uses Android, will incorporate Alexa rather than Google’s Assistant programme.

Google’s natural reaction is to have its own voice-driven home system, in Home. But that poses a difficulty, illustrated by the problems it claims to solve. At the device’s launch, one presenter from the company explained how it could speak the answer to questions such as “how do you get wine stains out of a rug?” Most people would pose that question on a PC or mobile, and the results page would offer a series of paid-for ads. On Home, you just get the answer – without ads.

What analysts wonder is: how can Home bridge that revenue gap? So far, Google hasn’t explained. Even if it can fend off the Echo, it may not be able to defend its core business.

By contrast, the Echo’s benefit to Amazon is much clearer: it can make online shopping (at Amazon) a breeze, play music from Amazon’s paid-for subscription service, and generally act as a passive block on your using rival shopping sites – rather as Google cemented its dominance by being the default search engine on multiple browsers in the mid-2000s.

Richard Windsor of Edison Investment Research suggests that time is running out for Google: “It has to act quickly, as Amazon is on the brink of becoming the industry standard for controlling smart home devices.

“At CES, everyone was integrating with Echo, with Google Home and Apple HomeKit barely present.”

Indeed, where are Apple and Microsoft, which also have their own voice-driven assistants in the form of Siri and Cortana? Although both can be used in the home – Siri on the iPhone or iPad, and to play content on the Apple TV set-top box, and Cortana on the Xbox games console – neither seems to be intent on the “home assistant” market.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice-president of marketing, seemed to suggest recently that Apple wouldn’t follow Amazon and Google into offering a voice-only device: “Having my iPhone with me as the thing I speak to is better than something stuck in my kitchen or on a wall somewhere.” He also emphasised the importance of a visual display: “We still like to take pictures and we need to look at them, and a disembodied voice is not going to show me what the picture is.”

Even so, there are persistent rumours that Apple has prototyped an Echo-like device in secret but is undecided on whether to release it. The company hasn’t commented. It could be ready to unveil something – or may never do so. Microsoft, meanwhile, is in more homes than the Echo via the Xbox, but isn’t trying to make itself a listening device linked to a shop.

So, will we all be burbling away to thin air in a few years, asking how long our commute will take while our smartphones sit unused in the kitchen? Perhaps – though Ken Sena, a senior analyst at investment bank Evercore ISI, suggests that home-based voice assistants will never be used as widely as smartphones. According to Sena, they are not such a must-have.

Yet, they were a hot Christmas present – and voice interaction is still in its early days, perhaps comparable to the smartphone market in 2005, when BlackBerry, Palm and Microsoft dominated. Or, it could be like the smartphone market now, effectively dominated by Google and Apple. But which?

Alexa, can you see into the future?

Modern tribes: the password bore Modern tribes: the office stoic

Oh please, can you believe Hillary Clinton, seriously, what kind of loser goes in for that level of data housekeeping? Fine, I know you liked her, but if you ask me, there are two kinds of people in this world: people who take their online security seriously, and ancient, technologically illiterate throwbacks who deserve only our pity. Well, can you imagine her picking her nuclear codes password – hey, how about 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero, then adding an ! and an & to make it more Bletchley? No, wait, it was probably Rodham1, like she uses for all her online shopping, just so she’d never forget it if she had to bomb North Korea. Actually, I don’t know why she didn’t just write them a letter: “Dear Kim, in case you were interested, my top secret password is PASSWORD123, your friend, Hillary.”

Mind, she did us a favour really, most people I know, we went home, changed every single password. Well, I’ve over 100, good password practice means a different one for each site, right, otherwise you might as well put a huge sign on your door saying, PLEASE ROB ME, I DESERVE IT. Course I don’t know them all, cybersecurity 101, if you can remember all your passwords, either you haven’t got enough or they’re too easy, do you know what the most common password is, literally, 123456? Seriously, you’re kidding me? Quick, you’ve got to change it, all of them – God, don’t tell me they’re all the same. Get some proper ones.

Well, I’d like to help, except then I’d __have to kill you, haha, no, basically, you go with a password manager, which is what I did until LastPass got hacked? No? Well, forget it, now I’ve gone for military-grade VPN encryption and changing all my passwords and security questions every other day, it only takes a couple of hours, but for simple password hygiene, start with two-step verification – well, because if not, you might as well take all your money, build a huge bonfire and burn it. See, I log in, then it’ll send a code to my phone – wait, Christ, where is my phone?

Beware the Slenderman review – documentary on a deadly meme Inside Netflix’s Amanda Knox: ‘She was cast as a she-devil’ Slender Man: the shadowy online figure blamed in grisly Wisconsin stabbing

Due to an over-reliance on shock sensationalism, the true crime genre had been mostly discarded by documentary film-makers and relegated to tawdry late-night television. But it’s experienced something of a respectable makeover in recent years, thanks to the phenomenally successful Serial podcast, the Netflix breakout Making a Murderer and the critically adored OJ: Made in America, which is currently favorite to win the best documentary Oscar next month.

Tackling the difficult subject of Slenderman, the notorious meme turned moral panic, acclaimed documentarian Irene Taylor Brodsky was always going to be toeing a dangerous line. Balancing the sick curiosity factor of an undeniably terrifying figure with the horrific real-world implications of a crime he inspired would require sensitivity and tact, two qualities only recently rediscovered within the genre. But what Brodsky creates, with admirable restraint, is both chilling yet sympathetic, as much about the dangers online as it is about the devastating effects of untreated mental illness.

The story of Slenderman is both contemporary and classic. He’s a faceless tentacled ghoul born from the web, created by one person, his mythology pieced together digitally by others. But as much as he might be viewed as a damning reflection of the times, he’s also nothing but an updated boogeyman, a flashier Pied Piper, his tale spread by kids wanting a good scare. In 2014, he became something far worse: the inspiration for the brutal stabbing of a 12-year-old girl. In an even more shocking twist, her assailants were her friends: two other 12-year-old girls.

Assigning blame for real-world violence to an element of the media is not a unique narrative. Everything from Marilyn Manson to the Child’s Play franchise has been accused of poisoning the minds of youths and leading them to commit terrible acts. But there’s something more insidious about the reach and the influence of Slenderman. The digital spaces within which he lives __have allowed for seemingly endless permutations of him inserted into video footage and old photographs. His story is constantly shifting and growing, cleverly adapted to appeal to lonely and bullied kids. Despite the ease with which many outlets at the time blamed the internet, the narrative here isn’t as simplistic. Because a scary meme isn’t the sole explanation provided and, with sensitivity and grace, the film also delves into the effects of schizophrenia.

In one particularly heartbreaking scene, Brodsky interviews the father of one of the girls on trial who also has the same condition that his daughter has been diagnosed with. It’s a remarkable, raw piece of film-making, his insights into the everyday struggle he faces (“Even though you know the devil isn’t in the backseat, the devil is in the backseat”) make for powerful and important viewing. It’s also vital that the film notes that it isn’t schizophrenia alone that leads to violence – it’s untreated and undiagnosed schizophrenia that can be dangerous. There’s a refreshingly un-staged and seemingly off-the-cuff nature to all the parental interviews in the film which make the emotions feel more real as they all discuss the signs they didn’t realize were warnings.

Unlike many true-crime documentaries, the focus isn’t on who but why and how. With access to the police interviews conducted with the girls directly after they were found, the film provides us with untouched and un-doctored evidence. It’s chilling to watch as two 12-year-olds discuss the intricacies of how to plan a murder and, given that a lot of the tension of the film relies on whether they will be tried as children or adults, it’s important to contrast this with evidence of their youth. A smart scene surveys the many YouTube videos liked by one of the girls: even a potential murderer likes cat videos.

Beware the Slenderman is both haunting and poignant, a sad tale of what bullying, untreated mental illness and crushing loneliness can create. It’s pre-empting a fictional horror film about Slenderman, now in production, that seems somewhat irresponsible in comparison.

• Beware the Slenderman premieres on HBO at 10pm on Monday 23 January and airs in the UK on Sky Atlantic on Thursday 26 January at 10pm.

The Guardian The Trump bump – when a diss from Donald is good for business The Trump bump – when a diss from Donald is good for business How celebrities will protest around Trump's inauguration

When Donald Trump tweets, PR departments tremble in their designer footwear. “Pretty much everybody is dreading being the subject of a tweet,” said Kristin Dziczek of the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research. “Getting hauled out into the court of public opinion with virtually no warning is not something anybody wants to get engaged with.”

No wonder: if, like General Motors, Ford or Toyota, you’re a car-maker manufacturing outside the US, having the president-elect attack your business model and threaten you with a massive tax bill (eg: “General Motors is sending Mexican-made model of Chevy Cruze to US car-dealers tax free across border. Make in USA or pay big border tax!”) is calamitous.

But not everybody need fear the tweeter. Meryl Streep couldn’t buy better publicity than __have Trump tweet that she is “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes”. Truly, there is literally nothing that makes me want to programme a double bill of Sophie’s Choice and Out of Africa more than reading that. As someone – whose spell checker doesn’t work – counter-tweeted: “havnt you got a job to do like running a country isntead of bitching like some z list celebrity, im embaressed for you”, with good reason.

In his eight years on Twitter, Trump has sent 34,300 tweets to followers now counted at 19.2 million, attacking 61 companies or brands. Among them the BBC (“a scandal ridden wasteland – a one-sided piece of garbage!”), the makers of Glenfiddich (“We are getting rid of all Glenfiddich garbage alcohol from Trump properties”), Coca-Cola (“The Coca-Cola company is not happy with me – that’s OK, I’ll still keep drinking that garbage”) and – love this – Twitter: “Wow, Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media!”

Why does Donald diss? Trump has “like many bullies, a skin of gossamer”, observed Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair and longtime Trump enemy. On the plus side, let’s not forget, he is quite the wordsmith. “I hope everybody possible cancels their subscription to the failing, boring abd [sic] totally biased New York “Ragazine” – SAVE YOUR MONEY!” Did you see what he did there? “Ragazine”? Genius. And caps lock? Nice touch.

Whether Trump grows a thicker skin and stops using what Carter once described as his “abnormally stubby” fingers to terror-tweet from the Oval Office remains to be seen. But many must be hoping not. After all, for some, a late-night, rancorous terror-tweet from the most powerful man on Earth is just the thing to keep shareholders sweet. Here are some people and brands who got a bump thanks to Trump.

John Lewis

Last week, the Democrat congressman and civil rights veteran told NBC that he did not regard the recent election as legitimate and was not planning to attend Trump’s inauguration this Friday. “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton,” he said. Furious, Trump tweeted: “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart. All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!”

Lewis responded at a memorial breakfast on Martin Luther King Day this week with a speech in which he didn’t deign to name Trump, but clearly alluded to him: “So I say to the future leaders of this state, the future leaders of this nation, of the world – you must never, ever hate. The way of love is a better way. The way of peace is a better way,” he said.

One result of the row is that March, Lewis’s graphic novel about the US civil rights movement, shot from 451st place in the overall bestseller lists to No 1, while his memoir Walking the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement rose 8,699 places to No 2. Further down the charts, his 2012 book Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, which recounts lessons learned as an activist, leapt from 34,480 to 175 in the overall bestseller list on Amazon.com and took top spot on the online bookseller’s philosophy of ethics and morality chart.

Think of it this way: some industry experts __have been sceptical about whether a Trump presidency will be good for American business. But, in fact, even before he takes office, Trump is having a positive impact. Albeit unwittingly.

Vanity Fair

Restaurant critic Tina Nguyen once accepted a dare to eat an eyeball that a butcher had popped out of the skull of a roasted pig. “That eyeball,” she wrote, “tasted better than the Trump Grill’s Gold Label Burger, a ... short-rib burger blend moulded into a sad little meat thing, sitting in the centre of a massive, rapidly staling brioche bun, hiding its shame under a slice of melted orange cheese. It came with overcooked woody batons called ‘fries’ – how can someone mess up fries? – and ketchup masquerading as Heinz. If the cheeseburger is a quintessential part of America’s identity, Trump’s pledge to ‘make America great again’ suddenly appeared not very promising.”

Nguyen’s review appeared in Vanity Fair under the headline “Trump Grill could be the worst restaurant in America” (just imagine the competition for that title) before Christmas, prompting Trump to tweet: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”

Unfortunately for Trump’s thesis, someone looked at Vanity Fair’s numbers and found that the magazine was not in trouble. Its website had 14.3 million unique visitors in October 2016, a 26% increase since October 2015, and more than double its October 2014 traffic. And paid circulation averaged 1.2m for the first six months of 2016, slightly higher than it was five years ago. The Condé Nast lifestyle magazine is bucking the trend of the print magazine sector beset by falling advertising revenues and plummeting sales.

But Trump’s tweet was only the latest salvo in a feud between him and Carter dating back more than a quarter of a century. When the former was an upcoming Manhattan real estate magnate, the latter was a writer for the satirical Spy magazine amused by Trump’s “vainglorious self-image”. “Just to drive him a little bit crazy,” recalled Carter, “I took to referring to him as a ‘short-fingered vulgarian’.” Carter still receives letters from Trump. “There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.” Just before Trump decided to stand for the Republican presidential nomination, Carter got the latest. “Like the other packages, this one included a circled hand and the words, also written in gold Sharpie: ‘See, not so short!’ I sent the picture back by return mail with a note attached, saying, ‘Actually, quite short.’ Which I can only assume gave him fits.”

When Carter invested in prominent restaurants in Manhattan, it wasn’t long before Trump delivered his assessment. “Worst food in city,” Trump wrote about the Waverly Inn in 2013. For the past four years, the tweet has been printed at the top of the Waverly Inn menu – presumably for its diners there could be no greater enticement to eat there than the short-fingered vulgarian’s opprobrium.

American Civil Liberties Union

Last week, the ACLU announced it had received more than $7.2m (£5.8m) from 120,000 individual donations. “This is the greatest outpouring of support for the ACLU in our nearly 100-year history, greater than the days after 9/11,” said the union’s executive director, Anthony Romero.

Why now? Because many are worried about what Trump will do to American civil liberties. Writing in the New York Review of Books, the ACLU’s incoming legal director, David Cole, said: “Will he be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change treaty responsibilities; expanding libel law; criminalising abortion; jailing his political opponents; supporting aggressive stop-and-frisk policing; reviving mass surveillance and torture?” Not on Professor Cole’s watch.

He could well be a busy man. The day after Trump’s election, the ACLU tweeted: “Should President-elect Donald Trump attempt to implement his unconstitutional campaign promises, we’ll see him in court.”

New York Times

Vanity Fair isn’t the only part of the lamestream media to be getting a boost thanks to Trump. Subscriptions to the Gray Lady have soared by 132,000 since Trump’s election – a tenfold rise on the previous year, even though he had claimed that the paper was failing, and railed against it for backing Hillary Clinton. “Far from failing,” retorted Mark Thompson, the Times’s CEO, “we’re seeing remarkable response”.

Just maybe Trump has helped end the post-truth era he arguably created and is inadvertently helping catalyse the revival of quality journalism in an era dominated by the kind of fact-unchecked Twitter rants so virtuosically pioneered by the president-elect. Yeah, right. Let’s not go nuts.

Hamilton

In November, vice-president elect Mike Pence took in a Broadway show. According to Trump, it didn’t go well. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior,” he tweeted.

Hold on. Who told Trump the musical was overrated? Presumably not his daughter Ivanka, who saw the show earlier in the year and wrote that it had surpassed her expectations. An unlikely Broadway hit about Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, the hip-hop musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda has an intriguingly anachronistic multi-ethnic cast and last year it won 11 Tony awards.

No matter. “The theatre must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologise!” Trump said, in a followup tweet. According to Miranda, though, there was nothing to apologise for. “When we found out he was coming, we welcomed him, we asked him to lead on behalf of all Americans and we related to him the anxieties that some of us feel,” he said.

Trump’s attack hasn’t harmed the show. It may have had the opposite effect. Hamilton took in more than $3m over the holiday season. And its Chicago run has sold out months in advance. Bookings have just opened for its London run, which starts in November. Just possibly, Trump is inadvertently doing his bit for American exports.

Planned Parenthood

The women’s health service provider has 2.5 million patients and has long been in the incoming administration’s crosshairs. “I long for the day that Roe v Wade is sent to the ash heap of history, when we move past the broken hearts and the broken lives of the past 38 years,” Mike Pence said in 2011. During his primary campaign, Trump said he believed there should be “some form of punishment” for a women who had abortions.

Last week, House speaker Paul Ryan said that Republicans would legislate to defund Planned Parenthood as part of their attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

One unintended consequence of such remarks and attacks on Planned Parenthood is a rise in donations. Some 20,000 have been made in Pence’s name to Planned Parenthood. According to the artist Bethany Cosentino, Pence gets a certificate for each donation. I don’t know how big the Veep’s office is, but he may have run out of wall space to display them all.

Megyn Kelly

“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals,” said the then Fox News host to Trump when she moderated the first Republican primary debate in 2015. Trump didn’t like her journalistic tone and fired back on Twitter: “Wow, @megynkelly really bombed tonight. People are going wild on Twitter! Funny to watch.” But it didn’t end there: he later branded her “overrated”, “angry”, “crazy” and “a bimbo”. In a later interview, he implied that she had been hostile to him because she was menstruating, saying she “had blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”.

Kelly described the abuse as “an attempt at bullying” that failed, and blamed Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, for encouraging hostile and abusive elements online. After a heated exchange between Kelly and Trump ally Newt Gingrich in October, Scavino issued an ominous tweet: “Megyn Kelly made a total fool out of herself tonight – attacking Donald Trump. Watch what happens to her after this election is over.”

Kelly said she received death threats and obscene phone calls after her run-in with Trump and that she and her children had been under armed guard for 16 months as a result. “I understand he’s a fighter, he’s a counter-puncher, I get all that – but even then he has such power that a single tweet can unleash hell in somebody’s life,” she said.

What did happen to Kelly after the election? Nothing like the career-ruining nightmare Scavino seemed to be suggesting. This month, she quit Fox News for NBC, where she will host a daily daytime show and a Sunday news magazine programme. It’s not clear how much she will earn, but she was reportedly in contract talks with Fox seeking $20m and had been due to collect $15m for the final year of her contract. Most likely, while Kelly’s run-in with Trump was hell for her and her family, it didn’t damage her professional standing or earning power. Quite possibly the reverse.

Saturday Night Live

Late last year, Trump tweeted about Saturday Night Live. “Time to retire the boring and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!” Is there any greater praise that a satirist can get than the target whining on social media about how he’s portrayed? Of course there isn’t. True, if us in the media did in fact rig the election we did a useless job at it, but let’s not go there.

Trump’s gossamer skin prickled anew this week. “Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!” he tweeted. His incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer, was singing from the same hymn sheet: “It’s gone from being funny to just bad. Those aren’t jokes. They’re inappropriate,” he told Fox News. “I think for a lot of people, regardless of your political persuasion, that’s not what you’re tuning in for.”

Sean, baby, you could not be more wrong. The latest season of the long-running satirical show was an eight-year high. Some 8.3 million viewers watched the season premiere in October, making it the highest-rated SNL season premiere among 18 to 49-year-olds since 2013.

Why is it doing so well? Chiefly because of Alec Baldwin’s performance as the Donald. He’s proved even more hilarious as Trump than Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin, than Larry David’s take off of Bernie Sanders or even the half-naked guy who impersonates Vladimir Putin.

Most recently, Baldwin sent up the Donald’s recent, calamitous first press conference as president-elect. “I’d like to ask you about your big Russian pee pee party,” asked the first reporter. “I don’t want to talk about the pee pee,” responded Baldwin’s Trump. “I want to talk about jobs. I am going to bring back a thick stream of jobs to this country. This country will literally be showered with jobs. Because I’m a major whizz at jobs.” And he is too: Trump’s going to be keeping Baldwin in work for the forseeable future.

GCHQ targets teenage girls to find cyber spies of the future Cyber security takes centre stage in the age of Trump

Teenage girls are being invited to put their technology skills to the test in a competition that could unearth the cyber spies of the future.

The contest has been set up by GCHQ’s new National Cyber Security Centre as part of efforts to inspire more women to join the fight against online crime. Only 10% of the global cyber workforce are female, the intelligence agency said.

Girls aged 13 to 15 can enter the CyberFirst Girls Competition in teams of four. The first stage of the competition involves a series of online challenges, with the top 10 teams then progressing to a national final in London in March.

The GCHQ director, Robert Hannigan, said: “I work alongside some truly brilliant women who help protect the UK from all manner of online threats.

“The CyberFirst Girls Competition allows teams of young women a glimpse of this exciting world and provides a great opportunity to use new skills. My advice to all potential applicants would be: enjoy the experience and I look forward to meeting some of you.”

National Parks Service 'goes rogue' in response to Trump Twitter ban Congress moves to give away national lands, discounting billions in revenue and millions of jobs

If you had “National Parks subtweet the new president” on your 2017 bingo card, today’s your lucky day.

After the US National Parks Service was temporarily banned for retweeting images comparing Trump and Obama’s inaugurations, the official Twitter account of the appropriately named Badlands National Park, based in South Dakota, appeared to go rogue by posting a series of now-deleted tweets on climate change.

The tweets were eventually deleted, and, while the official accounts may not be saying much right now, some “alternative” accounts __have been set up. One, @BadHombreNPS tweeted: “Hey, friends. Here to support @BadlandsNPS with the science facts they can no longer share!”

The most popular is @AltNatParkSer, which bills itself as the unofficial “resistance” team of the US National Parks Service.

One of its initial tweets read: “Mr Trump, you may __have taken us down officially. But with scientific evidence & the Internet our message will get out.”

The owner of the account has yet to respond to the Guardian’s request for comment, but told reporters:

As of yet, it has not been verified whether the account is actually run by National Park employees. Eagle-eyed tweeters noticed the account had tweeted about the British general election in 2015.

A National Parks official told BuzzFeed the climate change tweets were posted by a “former employee” who was not authorised to use the account.

They added: “The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realised that their account had been compromised.”

This isn’t even the first time National Parks Twitter accounts have run afoul of the Trump administration. Over the weekend, they were temporarily told to halt tweeting after its main account retweeted pictures comparing the turnouts of Trump and Obama’s inaugurations. They later apologised for the “mistaken RTs”.

Lee ‘Q’ O’Denat: the mogul who created modern blaxploitation with WorldStar WorldStarHipHop founder Lee ‘Q’ O’Denat dies aged 43 The year of the mixtape: the 15 greatest releases of 2016

Like many successes in the digital world, WorldStarHipHop.com began as something entirely different than what it became known for, pivoting to meet a need that it didn’t know existed. When Lee “Q” O’Denat founded WorldStar in 2005, he intended it to be a technological leap from his previous site, NYCFatMixtapes.com – instead of an online store where listeners could order physical copies of underground rap releases, they would now be able to download them straight to their computers, a relative novelty at the time.

But after a hack derailed the site for several months, in 2008 O’Denat took what had been WorldStar’s supplementary material and made it the focus, turning it into an industrious aggregator of online videos that others were often too timid to share. It soon became the go-to resource for twerking clips, recordings of police confrontations, micro-budget showcases of unsigned rappers, public transit craziness, celebrity grievances and confessions, and (most famously) cameraphone footage of people young and old beating each other up. Videos got titles that were both matter of fact and contained their own strange poetry, (example: “Outta Nowhere: Sharkeisha Confronts Girl And Super Falcon Punches Her ‘You F*cked With The Right One’ ( So Wrong For This This)”. It predicted many websites’ move towards video content that is easily shareable on social media. According to Alexa, the web traffic analytics website, WorldStar is currently the 314th most popular website in the United States, a dip from its high point in the low 200’s around the turn of the decade.

O’Denat, who was the owner, mastermind and public face of WorldStar in his ubiquitous designer sunglasses, died unexpectedly Monday afternoon in San Diego, California. According to the coroner’s office, the cause of death was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with obesity listed as a contributing factor. He was 43 years old.

Raised by a Haitian mother in the Hollis neighborhood of Queens, New York, (the same place that produced rap legends Run-DMC and LL Cool J), O’Denat dropped out of high school after his freshman year. In the 90s he worked jobs in the fast-food industry and at the now defunct electronics retail chain Circuit City. It was there that he first became interested in computers. His first venture, a porn site, failed, and he was soon back in the service industry, but he didn’t give up his belief in the nascent internet economy.

As WorldStar’s success eventually grew, O’Denat said he turned down several multimillion-dollar deals from others who wanted to buy a portion of the site, most notably Sean “P Diddy” Combs. Instead O’Denat decided to keep the company to himself so he could __have autonomous control over its future. During a 2014 interview on the Verge’s video series Small Empires, host Alexis Ohanian asked O’Denat if he had any mentors as he built his company, to which he replied: “Honestly, I ain’t __have no one help me. Know what I’m sayin’? I had to learn on my own, it was tough. I have that mentality, I don’t like to owe anyone anything.”

The site’s cultural currency also rose. Artists and record labels paid to have their videos featured prominently, and that became the site’s main source of revenue. On Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet album, Donald Glover named a song II. Worldstar and sampled videos of fights he found on the site. Even HBO’s southern dirtbag comedy Eastbound & Down worked a WorldStar joke into its series finale, as a character hollered “Whoaaa! WorldStar! WorldStar!” when another got knocked out.

Still the company remained lean, with fewer than a dozen employees contributing remotely throughout the country. O’Denat moved out west, first to Scottsdale, Arizona, and then San Diego. WorldStar got representation from the famed talent agency Creative Artists Agency and then William Morris Endeavor. O’Denat spoke often in the press about looking to build the brand into something bigger than just the website. A film project with Paramount that was to be produced by Russell Simmons hasn’t made it out of development and its Laff Mobb standup comedy tour never gained much traction, but this February will see the release of World Star TV, a show on MTV2 where comedians and panelists add commentary to videos popularized on the site.

WorldStar has received criticism for its content, particularly the fights. In a 2013 open letter to O’Denat, Quadeer Shakur, the Universal Zulu Nation’s minister of information, wrote: “Doesn’t it bother you just a little that another black man (that man being yourself), has ‘made it’ out of the ‘ghetto’, only to display unnerving images and videos of young adults berating, belittling, and beating each other solely for the purpose of the enjoyment of who you are led to believe are ‘millions of Hip-Hoppers?’”

In response, O’Denat often argued that the existence of WorldStar was actually a deterrent against embarrassing or criminal behavior. In 2012 he told New York magazine, “How it is now, whatever you do, there’s going to be someone filming. You’re gonna be seen, you’re going to be recorded. The night got a million eyes. It is a surveillance society. Go out and do some dumb crap, there’s a good chance you’re gonna wind up on WorldStar for everyone to see. So maybe you’ll think twice.”

He put himself in the lineage of hip-hop artists like Tupac Shakur, NWA, Eminem, and 2 Live Crew. He defended the site using the same tactics as these once controversial figures, sometimes more effectively than others, by saying he didn’t create the situations he was drawing attention to by posting the videos, he was simply reflecting the reality of their existence. As he told the Champs podcast in 2013, “If I turn the cameras off, or if I turn the WorldStarHipHop site off, this stuff will still occur.”

There is currently no mention of O’Denat’s death on the WorldStarHipHop site. (Though it was acknowledged on its various social media accounts.) On the day the news broke, only 25 videos were posted on WorldStar, down from a count that is usually in the 30s and 40s. The most popular one of the day was “Wannabe ‘Thug’ Who Disrespected Her Mother On Dr Phil Show Gets Her Ass Beat On The Streets!” It had more than 1.3 million views.

Anti-hacking boss at Russian cybersecurity firm faces treason charge

A manager at Russia’s biggest cybersecurity firm in charge of investigating hacking attacks has been arrested, the company has said.

Kaspersky Lab on Wednesday confirmed reports in Russia’s respected Kommersant newspaper that Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of its computer incidents investigations unit, was arrested in December. Kommersant said Stoyanov was detained along with a senior Russian FSB intelligence officer and that they both faced charges of treason.

Kaspersky’s spokeswoman, Maria Shirokova, said in a statement that Stoyanov’s arrest “has nothing to do with Kaspersky Lab and its operations”. She said the company had no details of the charges Stoyanov faced, but added that the investigation dated back to the time before Stoyanov was hired by Kaspersky.

According to his LinkedIn page, Stoyanov’s previous jobs include a position at the cybercrime unit at the Russian interior ministry in the early 2000s.

US intelligence agencies __have accused Russia of meddling in the presidential election through hacking to help Donald Trump win – claims that Russia has rejected. US and EU officials __have also accused Russia of hacking other western institutions and voiced concern that Russia may try to influence this year’s elections in Germany, France and the Netherlands. It was not immediately clear if the arrests were linked to these allegations.

The FSB’s press office was not immediately available for comment. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also declined to comment.

Andrei Soldatov, who has studied the internet and Russian security services for more than a decade, said the arrest of the Kaspersky manager was unprecedented.

“It destroys a system that has been 20 years in the making, the system of relations between intelligence agencies and companies like Kaspersky,” he told the Associated Press. “Intelligence agencies used to ask for Kaspersky’s advice, and this is how informal ties were built. This romance is clearly over.”

Pod Save America – the podcast that won Obama’s last interview

The much-talked-about Pod Save America (Crooked Media, iTunes) dropped two instalments in one week to reluctantly usher in the Trump era. It is presented by former White House aides Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau (not the one from Swingers, but Barack Obama’s head speechwriter).

Pod Save America offers an irreverent view of US politics from men who __have been at the heart of it. They documented the primaries and campaign trail last year in Keepin’ it 1600, and launched this podcast a couple of weeks ago. They’re more Veep cast come to life than dry politicos, talking at breakneck speed and swapping ideas. But they are also listening, as they demonstrate in the Obama’s Last Interview episode, where the outgoing president sounds relaxed, humorous and just so, well, human.

Obama is gracious when he talks about making Donald Trump’s transition to power as smooth as possible and recalling “the enormous ups and downs of this place. The way in which everything feels like it’s going great, then suddenly you can hit a pothole and you’re careering off the side of the road.” His favourite moment by far was passing the Affordable Care Act. “That was a big piece of business, but it was hard,” he says. “It was very personal for a lot of people and it was a moment when you saw real courage out of members of Congress.”

Moving on to Trump’s inauguration, in an episode titled The Mall Sank into the Earth, the hosts are joined by Seth Meyers. Trump’s inaugural address is pulled apart, and they pick up on his use of the word “blood” and habit of sticking “America” before everything to make it sound powerful.

More noteworthy is their take on Sean Spicer’s attack on the press. “The first briefing is a monumental moment for the White House,” says Vietor. “It’s your first chance to engage with the press. He went out there on a Saturday night and just tore these people a new asshole for five minutes and walked out.”

In an echo chamber full of people depressed about Trump’s ascent to power, Pod Save America’s commentators are sparky and funny – and they __have a habit of talking a whole lot of sense.

If you like this, try … Slate’s Trumpcast.

Mark Carney: internet-only lenders pose risk to UK financial system

The Bank of England governor has warned that a new breed of internet-only lenders are beginning to pose risks to the financial system and without tighter regulation they could trigger the next financial crash.

Mark Carney said high street banks were being displaced by online lenders that were untested in a recession, when bankruptcies might make their loans worthless.

Cyber-attacks could also strip customers of digital money, leaving them to face huge losses without the traditional protection offered by regulators, he said.

The warning follows a speech last year by Adair Turner, the former chief financial regulator, who said losses on loans made over the internet could make the worst bankers look like “lending geniuses”.

Speaking at a conference in Germany, Carney said digital money held out the prospect of allowing millions of people excluded from the mainstream banking system to access loans securely.

Threadneedle Street has several initiatives under way to allow peer-to-peer online lenders access to central bank funds and facilitate transactions.

But he expected the authorities “to pursue a more intense focus” on financial regulations, lending rules “and a more disciplined management of operational and cyber risks” as the price of the industry’s growing influence.

In the UK, about 14% of new lending last year to small and medium-sized businesses was by so-called fintech lenders, which typically offer loans with funds provided directly by investors.

He likened the growth in recent months to the explosion in securitised loans used by banks such as Northern Rock before the 2008 financial crash.

“It is not clear the extent to which P2P lending can grow without business models evolving in ways that introduce conventional risks. Were these changes to occur, regulators would be expected to address such emerging vulnerabilities,” he said.

The UK is expected to become a global leader in online lending, putting pressure on the Bank to adopt regulations that protect customers without stifling a still young industry.

Bitcoin is the best known digital currency, but swings in its value __have undermined consumer confidence and limited its growth.

The currency has a fixed number of coins which can be used to buy goods and services from providers that accept them. A recovery in Bitcoin’s value in recent months and the popularity of the blockchain electronic wallet, which mimics a bank account, has prompted some analysts to predict it will take off this year.

“Payment services traditionally relied on cash, debit and credit cards, and wire transfers. Now fintech companies are providing domestic and cross-border payment services on significant scale through digital wallets or pre-funded eMoney,” Carney said.

“Tech firms take a slice of payment revenues and, in many cases, the totality of customer transaction data. In the process, they are systematically capturing the type of knowledge I used to gain from my daily interactions with customers in the bank branch,” he said, referring to his first job as a bank teller.

The Guardian Why does it take so long to connect to a wifi network? Why does it take so long to connect to a wifi network?

Next time you feel frustrated while trying to connect to a wifi network, take solace in the fact that you aren’t alone: millions of others __have the same problem.

Researchers from Tsinghua University and Tencent, the developer of WeChat, found for 15% of users it takes longer than five seconds to connect to a network and for 5%, more than 10 seconds.

Connection setup failures and large connection setup time costs are common in today’s wifi use, they say, with as many as 45% of the users suffering some level of connection setup failures.

Some of the reasons for failed connections can charitably be put down to user error: an incorrect password was to blame for 8% of dropped connections, while another 8% failed when the user switched to another network – presumably a large number of them the result of them realising they were about to join the wrong network.

But many more of the failed connections come down to something going wrong with the network: 15% of connections timed out, and 9% of them suffer a DHCP failure, resulting in an IP address not being allocated to the device.

Using a data set collected from an iOS/Android wifi manager app, the researchers analysed the connections of 5 million mobile users from four cities, eventually gathering information about 7 million mobile access points and 400 million wifi sessions.

Breaking the connection down into four phases – scanning for the network, associating with it, authenticating with it, and obtaining an IP address – the researchers find that the first phase is responsible for the plurality of long delays. Scanning for a network involves listening for packets from wireless networks to find which are available, and then replying to them asking things like their data rates. If the answers are satisfactory, the access point gets added to the list of compatible wifi networks.

For connection delays longer than 15 seconds, 40% of them also feature a scan time of 11.6 seconds or longer. The potential reason, according to the paper, is that the response packets from the wireless network aren’t heard by the phone, which forces the entire process to restart from the top. In a particularly noisy environment, that can cycle multiple times, lengthening the connection time greatly.

The authors argue that the issue is potentially solvable: by intelligently sorting access points before the user picks which they connect to, devices could push users to ones which are likely to be faster. Doing so, in their tests, pushed the proportion of failed connections down to just under 4%.

The downside, of course, is that a chunk of wifi networks will be categorised as “slow” and rendered unavailable for connection. In the long run, whether such an approach would work depends on how you deal with wifi networks: if you connect to open networks regularly, looking for a better or cheaper connection than your mobile data, it would help you pick which to join. But if you’re a more security-conscious user, who only connects to a small number of known networks, your better bet is to try and fix those networks themselves. Get a new router, move closer to the aerials, or maybe just find a new coffee shop.

• Battle lines drawn in the wifi wars – but is a truce possible?
  
• How can I extend wifi to the other side of my house?
  
• How can I provide guests with wifi without giving them my password?
  

Trump bans agencies from 'providing updates on social media or to reporters' Trump orders revival of Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture __have been placed under de facto gag orders by the Trump administration, according to documents obtained by news organizations.

The president has banned EPA employees from “providing updates on social media or to reporters”, according to interagency emails first obtained by the Associated Press, and barred them from awarding new contracts or grants as well. Trump is reportedly planning massive cuts and rollbacks for the agency.

This follows similar guidance to USDA employees, who were instructed in an internal memo obtained by BuzzFeed not to release “any public-facing documents” including “news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content” until further notice. Specifically the request was made to employees of the Agricultural Research Service, the USDA’s primary research wing, which is heavily involved in research regarding climate change.

In a statement Tuesday, the USDA called the email sent to staff “flawed” and said the proposed policy would be replaced. “This internal email was released without departmental direction, and prior to departmental guidance being issued,” the statement read. “ARS values and is committed to maintaining the free flow of information between our scientists and the American public.”

The two blackouts reported on Tuesday bring to at least five the number of federal agencies which __have been ordered silent by Trump in as many days. In his briefing on Tuesday, Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer said he needed to look further into the matter before making any comment.

Over the weekend, the Department of the Interior’s social media privileges were briefly suspended by the president after the National Park Service published a picture comparing Trump’s inauguration crowd to that of Barack Obama in 2009.

The tweet has since been deleted, and the NPS Twitter account has apologized for tweeting it.

“They had inappropriately violated their own social media policies,” Spicer told reporters on Tuesday. “There was guidance that was put out to the department to act in compliance with the rules that were set forth.”
Around the time of Spicer’s briefing, the social media account for the Badlands National Park seemed to defy whatever guidance had been given them by the Trump administration. The Badlands account started tweeting facts about the perils of global warming, noting for instance that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “than at any time in the last 650,000 years”. No one replied to requests for interviews at the South Dakota branch of the NPS.
As of approximately 5.30pm on Tuesday, their tweet thread had apparently been deleted.

Then, according to Politico, Department of Transportation employees were instructed on Monday “not to publish news releases or engage on Dot’s social media accounts”. This was not described as an order, but a “recommendation”.

Huffington Post also reported that officials at sub-agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services have been told not to send “any correspondence to public officials”.

Social media, and specifically Twitter, was integral to Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Since his inauguration, he has tweeted almost 40 times, from his two accounts.

The Department of Defense tweeted on Monday: “Social media postings sometimes provide an important window into a person’s #mentalhealth”, which some pundits considered a reference to Trump’s occasional early morning Twitter rants.

Additional reporting by Alan Yuhas

The rise of dating scams reveals our endless capacity to hope

Almost everyone I know who has tried out dating apps or sites has had encounters that __have not been quite as advertised, from the married man on Grindr who revealed plenty about – and of – himself, but never his face, to the date who was a decade older than her profile pictures, and lied about the children she could not __have had were she the age she said she was. Or the man who sweet-talked his way to a drink over Tinder, only to be undone when a picture of him with his arm around his very current girlfriend appeared on his match’s Facebook feed.

These days, it seems to be part of the deal to expect these small-scale scams, and to sift through them on the promise that there might be a good one in the pack. And often, there is. Perhaps it’s because I’m in my 30s, but people going for a drink with someone they swiped right on has started to morph into marriage and babies at an alarmingly rapid rate.

Yet there’s an increasing number of people who make their fortunes out of romantic racketeering. A report on the Victoria Derbyshire programme this week revealed that in 2016, £39m was frittered away on a false promise of love. The UK’s national fraud and cyber crime reporting centre, Action Fraud, breaks down the figures into more than 350 scams a month, based on the reports it receives. Who knows how many other people are too ashamed to admit that they have been conned, particularly in an area so sensitive and fraught as this.

The stories are novel-worthy concoctions of loneliness and precision opportunism. One woman, a university professor, told the programme that she had lost £140,000 through a series of cons, all related to the same man, who first asked for money to support a business deal in South Africa, and then, in what could be the scene from a second-rate gangster movie, told her to go to Amsterdam to release money from a safety deposit box. It had gone so far that there were other people involved, playing parts of the story necessary to make it seem real. The average amount gambled away on these imagined futures is £10,000, but some have lost hundreds of thousands. One cannot begin to imagine the emotional cost.

Recently, a friend fell victim to an online scam, although not a love scam, after paying a substantial amount of money for a “bargain” trip of a lifetime, only to see the so-called holiday firm disappear once the cash had been transferred. It had seemed perfectly legitimate and above board: not too cheap to be absurd, but just enough of a deal to seem worth it, with all of the correct window-dressing to suppress any potential alarm bells. Although not insignificant, the money lost was not life-ruining, either, but still, it was a crushing experience for those involved. They worried that if they could fall for this, they might fall for anything, and felt stupid, and blamed themselves.

When you hear about these stories of being fooled, who do you blame? Some may feel that the victim was daft to be tricked in the first place, given the absurdity of some of the online fictions. It’s understandable and human, but it’s also not fair, and with time that gut reaction should subside for anyone with even a tiny sliver of compassion. Hope is open-hearted and loneliness is desperate, and a combination of these two can widen the cracks in anyone. That instinctive head-shaking is largely based on a fear that we might one day be swept up in something similar ourselves. Catfish, the documentary film that became a TV series, dealt with this kind of trickery on a weekly basis, where people in different states of the US would be in years-long online relationships, with supermodels, pop stars, pretty girls and handsome boys, only to become suspicious about abandoned plans to meet, aborted phone calls, that feeling that something wasn’t right. But that feeling was never enough to truly cancel out the hope.

There is an old episode of the This American Life podcast that emphasises just how powerful optimism can be. It tells the true story of Don Lowry, who set up a lonely hearts club business, in which men would pay to receive deeply personal love letters from women he called “angels”. The women were not real, but the “relationships” went on for years. Eventually, it grew beyond letters and many men lost a lot of money to their correspondents. Lowry was charged with mail fraud, conspiracy and money-laundering and went to prison for 10 years. A lot of the men who had been defrauded were angry. But incredibly, some defended Lowry, picketing the courtroom during his trial, even after they had realised they had spent years pouring their hearts out to him. Because the hope of love was better than not having love at all.

In the face of just how ruinous and inhuman love scams must be, how devastating the impact is, that is the parable I want to remember. Not because the promise of love, no matter how flimsy, is worth losing your life savings over, but because it shows that hope, one of the most important currencies we have in this era of alternative truths, can be so unbreakable that it can face anything, even as these modern bogeymen and women, who turn daydreams into nightmares, have the audacity to try to chip away at it.