The Verge: Germany investigates fake news after bogus Breitbart story

The investigation comes after police in the city of Dortmund were forced to debunk a story published on Breitbart over the weekend. The Breitbart article claimed that a “1,000-man mob” chanting “Allahu Akbar” set fire to a church on New Years Eve, but police said that no incident occurred. A local newspaper said that Breitbart distorted its original report. Breitbart, which has stood by the article, plans to launch websites in both Germany and France ahead of elections this year.

German officials tell Reuters that the government has considered setting up a bureau under the press office that would be dedicated to tracking and combatting fake news. “We are dealing with a phenomenon of a dimension that we have not seen before,” Steffen Seibert, a German government spokesperson, tells Reuters. The Czech Republic created a similar “anti-fake news” unit last month, though plans for the German bureau remain unclear due to concerns over the government regulating news.

Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency also tells Reuters that a December cyberattack on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) last month exhibited the same “infrastructure” as a 2015 attack on the German parliament. That attack was attributed to APT28, a Russian hacking group that is believed to have infiltrated the Democratic National Committee (DNC) last year, US officials have said.

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The Verge: Why Trump’s Russian server connection is less suspicious than it sounds

What if a major presidential candidate were in secret communication with Russia, through a secret internet channel kept hidden from the rest of the web? That’s the scenario laid out last night in a Slate report by Franklin Foer. Drawing on DNS (or domain name system) records, the report lays out months of communications between a mail server owned by the Trump Organization and another owned by Russia’s Alfa Bank. We don’t know what data passed between the servers, but given Trump’s extensive financial ties to Russia, that communication struck Foer as suspicious, potentially even evidence of coordination between Trump and a foreign power.

Not everyone is convinced. Hours after the Slate piece arrived, The New York Times followed up with a report that the FBI had investigated the server and come away with no evidence tying Trump to Russia’s efforts to influence the election. At the same time, doubts have surfaced about many of the technical details of the piece, raising serious questions about the exposé. The researchers consulted by Foer are among the most respected analysts in their field, and it’s clear something unusual is happening between the servers — but whether that means anything for Trump’s relationship with Russia is far less clear.

he biggest problem is the nature of the data the story is based on. The core of the story is a set of DNS records first published in part on October 5th, showing ongoing queries between the two servers. DNS works as a kind of phone book for the internet, connecting URLs (like theverge.com) to IP addresses (like 151.101.193.52) — the same system that was attacked earlier this month, bringing down a number of basic internet functions. Observers saw consistent queries from the Alfabank’s server to mail1.trump-email.com, like spotting them looking up his address in the phonebook again and again over a long period of time. Typically, those queries are made before a more tangible data connection, like looking up a website’s IP address before you load it or looking up an email server’s IP address before you download recent messages.

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