Linked List: August 5, 2024

Monday, 5 August 2024

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. In a 2023 survey of IT and security professionals, 50 percent of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent”. That’s good for them. But it also leaves a full half of respondents without enough support from leadership.

If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s blog post, and come prepared.

Federal Judge Rules Google Search an Illegal Monopoly ★

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times:

Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business.

Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in a 277-page ruling that Google had abused a monopoly over the search business. The Justice Department and states had sued Google, accusing it of illegally cementing its dominance, in part, by paying other companies, like Apple and Samsung, billions of dollars a year to have Google automatically handle search queries on their smartphones and web browsers.

“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta said in his ruling. [...]

Monday’s ruling did not include remedies for Google’s behavior. Judge Mehta will now decide that, potentially forcing the company to change the way it runs or to sell off part of its business.

It’s worth a reminder that under U.S. antitrust law, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It’s just that monopolies must operate under different rules, and Mehta has ruled that Google broke (and continues now to break) those rules.

And you don’t have to be an expert to know that Google Search is a monopoly. By market share it’s possibly the biggest monopoly in all of computing today. Maybe it’s still Windows, but most estimates peg the Mac’s share of the U.S. PC market at about 15 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer than 10 percent of Americans even know there exist search engines other than Google, let alone use one as their default.

What the remedies should — or even could — be for Google here, I don’t know. Microsoft lost a similarly huge antitrust case in the U.S. in the 1990s and effectively escaped unscathed.

One possible outcome is that Apple winds up paying a bigger penalty, effectively, than Google. Let’s say the remedies include Google being banned from paying for traffic acquisition. Then Apple changes Safari from making Google the default search engine to prompting users with a choice for default search, and 90 percent of Safari users choose Google — the search engine they’ve been using since forever ago, and for many people the only one they even recognize by name. Now Google gets that search traffic for free and Apple gets bupkis.

Bloomberg Fires One of the Two Reporters Whose Byline Was on Embargo-Breaking Gershkovich-Release Story ★

Charlotte Klein, who wrote the New York Magazine piece over the weekend reporting on how Bloomberg shit the bed by publishing news of Evan Gershkovich’s release in a prisoner swap before he was actually released from Russian custody:

Jennifer Jacobs — one of the two Bloomberg reporters who bylined the embargo-breaking Gershkovich piece — has been fired, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Accountability comes for every organization, eventually.

Update: Jacobs, on X, credibly claims it was her editors at Bloomberg who published the story too early, not her:

In reporting the story about Evan’s release, I worked hand in hand with my editors to adhere to editorial standards and guidelines. At no time did I do anything that was knowingly inconsistent with the administration’s embargo or that would put anyone involved at risk.

Reporters don’t have the final say over when a story is published or with what headline. The chain of events here could happen to any reporter tasked with reporting the news. This is why checks and balances exist within the editorial processes.