"Dorsey’s exaltation of Musk evoked 'great man' thinking — a theory of history in which individual heroes direct world affairs through force of will and intellect. Antiquated among academic historians, 'great man' theory has enjoyed a renaissance in the technology industry.... What 'great man' thinking obscures is that technological breakthroughs invariably build on the work of others....
Of course Musk can’t build cars or rockets or a social network without help. But the importance of the teams he assembled at Tesla and SpaceX has been overlooked by many, including Dorsey, in assessing his takeover of Twitter.
In short, Musk can’t transform Twitter, or even keep it moving forward, without a workforce of highly capable developers, designers, product and policy thinkers who truly believe in his plans for the company. And that is exactly what, by all accounts, he does not have at Twitter right now.... He could try to win over Twitter’s existing employees....
On Tuesday and Wednesday, he issued a series of tweets critical of both Twitter as a company and individual Twitter employees, including its top policy executive, Vijaya Gadde. Those tweets have helped to fuel an ugly, and at times violently racist, harassment campaign against her...."
There's no link on any part of "ugly, and at times violently racist, harassment campaign," and I do not know what it refers to. I went to Musk's Twitter feed, but am I supposed to sift through all manner of crazy stuff like this...
Slate's Will Oremus examines the story, propounded by the NYT, that John Podesta relied on advice from an IT guy who wrote "This is a legitimate email" but says he'd made a "typo" and had meant "This is an illegitimate email." Oremus asks the obvious question: Did you also typo "a" for "an"?
The IT guy, Charles Delavan, told Podesta to change his password and to set up two-factor authentication, but he gave him a correct link to Google's website. Podesta reacted by clicking on the link in the original nonlegitimate email, which is a mistake that anyone using email should know about.
Asked about the a/an discrepancy, Delavan told me the Times had the wording wrong. Delavan had actually meant to type that it was “not a legitimate email,” but mistakenly omitted the word not. Are you sure, I asked? “Yes,” he said. I asked why, if Delavan knew the email was not legitimate, he still directed Podesta to change his password.... Delavan said he recommended the password change “out of an abundance of caution,” even though he knew the request was a scam.
There would have been no problem if Podesta hadn't gone to the bad link. Delavan's "abundance of caution" failed to take 2 steps of caution that could have helped save Podesta from his own personal witlessness. Delavan should have had that "not" and should have said don't click the link in that email.
Actually, I don't think Podesta was personally involved in any of this. Delavan interacted with Podesta's chief of staff, Sara Latham. Podesta looks like a fool, and there's this lame effort to shift the blame to Delavan. How about paying more attention to Latham? Are women just invisible?
"John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account. He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both,” the staffer said. "It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP."
His chief of staff, Sara Latham, wrote to another Podesta aide, Milia Fischer: "The gmail one is REAL Milia, can you change - does JDP have the 2 step verification or do we need to do with him on the phone? Don't want to lock him out of his in box!”...
So it was Milia Fischer who failed to use the correct Google link but went back into the original phishing email? How many layers of unsophistication did they have over there at the Clinton campaign?
And as long as we're shining a light on Milia Fischer, there's this Breitbart item from October 16th, "WikiLeaks Reveals Podesta’s Obsession with Aliens… Space Aliens!" in which we learn that Fischer once forwarded Podesta a message from Tom DeLonge (a pop singer, late of Blink-182).
“Please show Mr. Podesta this private teaser. Let him know that I am spending all afternoon interviewing a scientist that worked on a spacecraft at Area 51 tomorrow,” DeLonge wrote.
Fischer's forwarding message said that DeLonge seems to have met with Steven Spielberg about some project that he wanted to get Podesta in on. Here's Podesta enthusing about aliens:
Maybe aliens hacked the election. All that "Russians" business is code, you know.
While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.
The story is about the idiocy of falling for phishing! How is that "hard to see coming"? And what's the point of tracing it? Just never fall for it and the problem is solved, wherever the hell it came from. The Russians don't deserve special credit for devious genius. The Clinton campaign deserves to be lambasted for its shocking stupidity. And these are people who wanted to be trusted with the nuclear codes and who relied on the argument that Donald Trump is a dangerous ignoramus.
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