Twelve Russians have been charged with interfering in the 2016 US election, Jeff Bezos is the richest person in modern history, and Amazon Prime Day is affected by mass worker strikes in Europe.
First up from Twitter is news that broke this weekend and is still trending. The US Justice Department officially charged 12 Russian military officers with interfering in the 2016 US election by hacking into computers and stealing confidential documents, which they later released to the public on Twitter. According to the indictment, the defendants used spear phishing attacks to target over 300 people associated with the Democratic party, and eventually hacked the party itself through technical vulnerabilities in their network. These 12 Russian officers apparently monitored computers covertly, implanted hundreds of files of malicious computer code, and stole emails and documents. They also created a Twitter persona called Guccifer 2.0, which was found to be controlled by Russia’s military intelligence directorate. This account has since been shut down. I have a feeling this is the first indictment of many to come around the 2016 election.
Next up from LinkedIn is news that you’re poor. Seriously. Jeff Bezos has surpassed $150 billion in wealth according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires index, which now makes him the richest person not just right now, but in all of modern history. Bezos has officially topped Microsoft founder Bill Gates in inflation-adjusted terms. Gates hit the $100 billion mark in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, which would be worth about $149 billion in today’s money. Bezos’ net worth has gotten a boost of $52 billion this year and he’s also now within a billion of being richer than the world’s richest family dynasty, the Walton’s, which are worth $151.5 billion.
And as an interesting followup to that, from Reddit, apparently Amazon workers in three different countries are striking on Amazon Prime Day to back their demand for better working conditions, pay, and health benefits at fulfillment centres run by Amazon. More than 1800 workers in Spain went on strike on Monday, including 96 per cent of workers from the centre closest to Madrid, while locations in Germany, Italy, and Poland plan to join as well on Tuesday for the second part of Prime Day. Amazon says that there should be no impact on Prime Day deliveries, but with the site crashing late Monday afternoon, things aren’t looking so good for the world’s largest e-commerce company.
