Bytes: What’s new in tech
Recovering lost crypto passwords
“There’s a market for companies that promise to recover lost Bitcoin,” said Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai in Vice. When Ebet Kuefler decided to cash in the seven bitcoins he owned, he realized he’d forgotten “the 24-character complex password that protected his crypto wallet.” Kuefler turned to Wallet Recovery Service, a startup run by somebody called DaveBitcoin, who eventually uncovered “the right password to unlock” the wallet. “What these companies do” is try to “brute force” their way into a wallet by trying “as many password or passphrase combinations as fast as they can.” The only way it’s achievable is if the client remembered at least some clues to the password; a computer-generated password is “essentially uncrackable.” But the father-son duo that runs Crypto Asset Recovery said their success rate is 32 percent.
Silicon Valley runs from Russia
Tech firms in Silicon Valley are scrambling to cut, explain, or cover up Russian connections, said Joseph Menn in The Washington Post. “Russian investments make up a significantly smaller slice of foreign money flowing into Silicon Valley than Chinese funds,” but the “opacity of Russian money has made it harder to determine the penetration by the
Kremlin.” Many firms worry about being “unfairly tarred” for accepting common, undisclosed international funding or for investing in companies “with Russian founders or technical talent, which are abundant.” Other companies with less obvious Russian ties have rushed to distance themselves—or faced the consequences. A grocery-delivery startup, Buyk, abruptly closed its doors last month, terminating hundreds of employees, “because it had been relying on cash infusions from its Russia-based founders.”
Facebook’s misinformation bug
A software bug in Facebook’s algorithm was discovered to be amplifying misinformation and other harmful content, said Alex Heath in The Verge. In October, Facebook engineers said they began noticing that rather than “suppressing posts from repeat misinformation offenders, the News Feed was instead giving the posts distribution, spiking views by as much as 30 percent globally” essentially reversing the decisions of Facebook’s own factcheckers. The glitch didn’t affect Facebook’s other moderation tools, but it did expose vulnerabilities in the algorithms the company was using to “downrank,” or suppress, “borderline” content—such as clickbait and political ads—in its News Feed.