Flipboard is the latest company to fall foul of a data breach.

The news aggregation app announced in a post that it had identified unauthorized access of some of its internal systems, which contained some Flipboard users’ account information and credentials.

For more than nine months, the unauthorized person had access to Flipboard’s systems, potentially able to obtain copies of databases which hosted users’ information. 

It’s unclear yet how many users were affected by the breach, but an investigation commissioned by the company revealed there was unauthorised access between June 2018 and April 2019.

Passwords reset, most are secure

While the information on these databases included their name, Flipboard username, and email address, the passwords were cryptographically protected with an algorithm called bcrypt. 

The algorithm adds a unique, random set of characters called a salt, on top of the usual hashing of the password, in which it is scrambled to make it difficult to figure out. This makes the passwords very tough to crack, requiring significant computing power to do so.

SEE ALSO: Google stored some users’ passwords in plain text for years

Passwords which were set before Mar. 14, 2012 were hashed and salted with an algorithm called SHA-1, a once-widely used function now long obsolete in the realm of internet security.

Flipboard said all user passwords have been reset in light of the breach, despite only some users being affected by the incident.

No third-party accounts accessed

The company also said its internal database contained digital tokens. These allowed Flipboard and a third-party to connect, for example when a user links their Flipboard account to social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. 

This allowed users to see content from these third-party accounts (i.e. making your Facebook News Feed readable on Flipboard), as well as comment on or share articles. The company said it had not seen unauthorized access to third-party accounts.

“We have not found any evidence the unauthorized person accessed third-party account(s) connected to users’ Flipboard accounts. As a precaution, we have replaced or deleted all digital tokens,” the post read.

“Importantly, we do not collect from users, and this incident did not involve Social Security numbers or other government-issued IDs, bank account, credit card, or other financial information.”

Flipboard said it has already notified law enforcement of the incident, which it discovered on Apr. 23. 

For users, they’ll be prompted to change your password next time at login, and some will be prompted to reconnect to third-party services which were previously linked to Flipboard.

The same scientific agencies that rocketed Neil Armstrong to the moon and forecast the landfall of hurricanes that pummel the U.S. coast also expect dramatic changes to Earth’s climate this century, should humanity continue to heat the planet. 

But the Trump administration no longer wants many federal scientists to consider longer-term consequences of saturating the atmosphere with the potent heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide, now likely at its highest level in millions of years.

As The New York Times reported on Monday, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) ordered the agency’s researchers to only project climate change impacts through 2040, as opposed to the end of the century. What’s more, The Times reported that the Trump administration might not include future high carbon emission scenarios (which are quite likely) in forthcoming climate reports, including the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — a major report closely reviewed by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  

These actions boil down to withholding climate modeling research that’s being done at advanced research centers, universities, and government agencies around the nation.  

“These models are based on physics that have been developed over the course of a century,” said Bob Kopp, an author of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in November 2018.

“These are not random number generators. They’re analogous to models used to simulate how an airplane flies,” added Kopp, who is also the director of the Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Rutgers University.

“Models use physics and chemistry to model how the climate behaves with known amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” noted Sarah Green, a chemist at Michigan Technological University.

It’s of little surprise that the Trump administration — which has publicly fostered misinformation about climate science and deleted government climate change web pages — would continue its campaign to quell climate science. But for the most interested parties (those inhabiting the Earth in 2040 and beyond) the administration’s latest efforts are ever pertinent. 

“I intend to survive past 2040 and so I care about future projections,” said Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “Besides, we make lots of investments — homes, infrastructure, insurance policies — that last more than 21 years.”

“I intend to survive past 2040 and so I care about future projections.”

“Climate change won’t suddenly stop in 2040,” added Marvel, noting that even if global society miraculously stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow  (it won’t), carbon dioxide is already loaded in the atmosphere, and it will continue to warm the planet.

“It makes no sense to stop projections in 2040, because the consequences of our emission decisions will play out on a much longer time scale, until the end of this century and beyond,” emphasized Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Germany. “Cutting these projections off in 2040 would be like sailing into uncharted waters while deliberately putting a highly short-sighted lookout into the crow’s nest.”

The Trump administration can’t stop climate science from advancing outside of government, at research institutions throughout the nation and the greater world, like at Rahmstorf’s institute. So the end result of expunging future climate modeling and certain climate scenarios will only serve to weaken congressionally-mandated scientific reports in the U.S. And that may be the administration’s plan. 

“They don’t want people to look down the road,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. “They hope to impose a dangerous myopia when it comes to the greatest potential threat we face as a civilization.”

SEE ALSO: This scientist keeps winning money from people who bet against climate change

To Mann, the reason why is clear. It’s “all in the name of record profits for their fossil fuel industry executive friends,” he said. Even before Trump took office the U.S oil industry boomed, and now continues to flourish. The U.S. became the world’s largest oil producer in 2018, and may now challenge Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil exporter, reports Axios. Meanwhile, a former coal lobbyist heads the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a former oil lobbyist leads the Department of Interior, and ardent carbon dioxide advocate William Happer serves on the president’s National Security Council.

In short, if the Trump administration has its way, heat-trapping CO2 will pour into the skies. This makes modeling future high-emission carbon scenarios all the more relevant. The National Climate Assessment published a variety of future scenarios that included a “worst case” high emissions scenario commonly called “business as usual,” meaning that emissions will continue trending up. 

“It’s the policy of this administration to make that scenario more likely,” noted Kopp. “They can complain about us evaluating the worst case, but of the scenarios available, it’s the one closest to historical emissions.”

The Trump administration does not like this high-emissions scenario, and has repeatedly accused the National Climate Assessment of promoting it over other scenarios, most recently telling The New York Times that it’s “inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios.” This is easily debunked. The most recent report assessed a number of scenarios from low to high carbon emissions, noted Rahmstorf; no one future scenario is emphasized (see pages 81 and 82). 

“It’s not true that the climate assessment focused on that [high-emissions] to the exclusion of other scenarios,” noted Kopp.

If the Trump administration does decide to erase the high-emissions scenario from future National Climate Assessment reports, Kopp notes that the move might be illegal. After all, congressional law clearly states that the report is supposed to look at 25- to 100-year time scales, not just 20 years.

The greatest uncertainty 

To climate scientists, the greatest source of climate uncertainty has nothing to do with their understanding of how the carbon dioxide molecule traps heat (a reality known since the 1860s) or how the carbon cycle works.

It’s us.

“The biggest uncertainty in modeling future climate is how much greenhouse gases will be emitted by humans,” said Green.

“The biggest uncertainty in climate science is human behavior,” agreed NASA’s Marvel. 

“We simply don’t know what society’s emissions will look like in the future,” she said. “But we can make some educated guesses about reasonable scenarios, and explore the climate consequences of those scenarios.”

Millions and millions of Americans, objectively, have a vested interest in where the climate is headed — even if that potential reality is unenviable. Indeed, it’s rife with increased disruptions to the water system, meaning severe drought, wildfires, and pummeling deluges. 

It’s how the physics of a warming planet works. 

Only looking to 2040 can’t change physics. But it can shroud scientific information from taxpayers. “They’re trying to hide the disastrous impacts that climate change will have on our children and grandchildren by limiting the projections to only the next two decades,” said Mann. “They well know that if we fail to act to bring down our carbon emissions over the next decade, this will lock in disastrous melting of the ice sheets, sea level rise, and a rise in devastating weather extremes down the road.”

Under a geologically unprecedented rise in the rate of carbon dioxide levels, extremes are already afoot. 

“My son is going to graduate from college in around 2040,” said Kopp. “It’s irresponsible for the government to say it doesn’t care about the world that he’s going to be graduating into.”

“President Trump may not be around then, but a lot of us will be.”

Who do the ladies love the most? Trump and Biden are hoping it’s them.

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has been pouring money into Facebook ads, particularly those targeting older women, according to Facebook data recently highlighted by the New York Times. There’s only one candidate who can hold a candle to the Trump campaign’s Facebook spending: Joe Biden.

SEE ALSO: Facebook wants to become more private, but not in the ways that matter most

Thanks to Facebook’s Ad Library, anyone is able to see just how much cash each campaign is spending on Facebook, what kind of ads they’re buying, and who those ads are reaching. This year, President Trump’s campaign has spent about $5 million on Facebook ads. Not until mid-March did all twenty-freaking-two of the democratic candidates combine to spend as much as Trump on Facebook advertising. 

Now, Trump isn’t the only candidate relying heavily on the social network. Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden outspent Trump on Facebook in May, giving Zuck enterprises $1.1 million, compared to about $940,000.

Their ads both feature (relatively) dashing images of the 70-year-old men, but substantively, couldn’t be more different. Biden’s ads saber rattle about tax cuts for the ultra wealthy, while Trump’s ads have more recently been asking viewers to wish the president a happy birthday, or to get a signed MAGA hat.

One thing does look very similar: the extent to which they’re wooing women over 45.

“Older people are more likely to vote than younger folks, and both Biden and Trump both know that women are key to winning in 2020,” Jane Hughes, a director at Democratic communications agency Bully Pulpit Interactive, said. 

According to Bully Pulpit’s analysis, Biden is targeting a whopping 82 percent of his Facebook ads to people over 45. Trump is allocating 75 percent for the same.

Joe is also apparently wooing the demographic made famous by Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation: women who love Joe Biden. The audience for his ads was more than 65 percent women. 

Ads for the “Nobody has more respect for women than I do” president skewed 56 percent female.

As the Times points out, white women in particular are an important demographic for Trump. They helped swing the election the president’s way in 2016, and in 2018 the same demographic helped usher in a blue tsunami in the House. Furthermore, while there aren’t a disproportionate amount of U.S. women on Facebook, they are among the most active Facebook users, according to Bully Pulpit. And in the political arena, it’s not clear who the majority of this demographic will back.

“White women are catching up with women of color who have a long history of supporting Democrats,” Hughes said. “Biden, who faces a primary field of talented and qualified woman opponents, is looking to seize that momentum. Trump, whose party is facing backlash for unprecedented abortion bans in states across the country, is trying to pull women back in his direction.”

Other candidates are also going after the same demographic. But Biden is outspending Kamala Harris – his closest competitor, in terms of Facebook ad dollars — two to one.

In the past, candidates hoped to reach voters who voted based on network news. But the Trump campaign showed how Facebook’s microtargeted ads could be a powerful way to reach voters in unprecedented ways. 

Ultimately, it’ll be up to all the (hopefully wise) women out there to decide who they love more.