Showing 1 - 10 of 28
Putin lacks the clout to cut isles deal with Abe
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 24/01/2019
» The window of opportunity for Russia and Japan to officially end World War II with a peace treaty narrowed again after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's visit to Moscow on Tuesday failed to end in a breakthrough. There's still time for Mr Abe to secure his legacy, but a lot depends on President Vladimir Putin's increasingly shaky domestic standing.
What's scary about Facebook's new troll findings
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/08/2018
» Facebook's widely publicised discovery of a possible influence operation through "inauthentic" accounts warrants some scrutiny -- and some reflection about the difference between a genuine political debate on social networks versus its simulated version.
Putin, Trump have nothing to talk about
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 29/06/2018
» The Singapore meeting between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un made for a great propaganda film for North Korean TV, with swelling music, a swooning commentator and swanky pageantry. The planned summit between Mr Trump and President Vladimir Putin won't even produce that; it will be a pure waste of time for everyone involved.
Google breakup would fit the EU's logic
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 24/04/2018
» On Thursday, the European Parliament backed the idea of breaking up Google. It doesn't have the power to do it, but the legislators' decision is a notable part of a backlash against the remedial action Google took after the European Commission fined it US$2.95 billion for abusing its dominant position in shopping search. That backlash could lead to dire consequences for the search giant.
The Cambridge Analytica red herring
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/03/2018
» Facebook is being hammered for allowing the data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the US, which it may or may not have used to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There's nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn't offer political clients.
Facebook's new mission looks well nigh impossible
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/01/2018
» If Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is sincere in a recent post about gradually taking the media element out of "social media", he's striking a powerful blow for tech self-regulation, as well as preparing to pay a heavy price for the evolution of his vision. But getting the genie back into the bottle may be too difficult even for Mr Zuckerberg, and, in any case, his creation's problems go far beyond his proposed fix.
The cyber whodunnit and the global blame game
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/12/2017
» The US government has officially attributed to North Korea the WannaCry ransomware attack, which encrypted hundreds of thousands of computer drives around the world in May, 2017. And yet as with a series of other highly public cyberattack attributions, little evidence for the claim was made public. It's time for the cybersecurity world to follow the advice of the Rand Corporation and set up an unbiased international consortium that would seek to attribute attacks based on a common set of rules.
Coup against Mugabe is really nothing to celebrate
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 17/11/2017
» As leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has survived longer than Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China. If it's coming to an end -- which seems likely given his apparent inability to emerge from house arrest after the military took charge -- it's worth reflecting on the mistakes he made to end such a remarkable run.
No, separatism isn't the continent's next major crisis
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/11/2017
» Those who are always on the lookout for the next European crisis -- Brexiters not least among them -- have latched on to Catalonia's symbolic "secession" as another sign that Europe isn't working well. The Catalan events, however, merely confirm that today, Western European countries are secession-proof -- too fat to fail. Belgium, the country where ousted Catalan First Minister Carles Puigdemont is hiding out from prosecution (or, to Catalan secessionists, leading a government in exile) is another example.
The key to tackling North Korea is Vladimir Putin
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 19/05/2017
» The idea of a grand bargain between the United States and Russia is less popular in Washington than ever before. And yet one of the biggest foreign policy problems for the US -- that of North Korea -- cannot be resolved without Russia's participation. In recent years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made sure to rebuild a close relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, and it's no longer enough to talk to China to mitigate the Stalinist state's aggressiveness.