Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Thursday, January 17th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today,

Tim Cook calls for a data broker clearinghouse, a possible criminal case against

Huawei, the largest leak of user credentials ever found in the wild, and why we probably need a Unix for machine learning. Here's what you

miss today in the world of tech. Facebook this morning announced it has

taken down 471 Facebook pages and accounts as well as 41

Instagram accounts for the usual coordinated inauthentic behavior. But this time, well maybe this is usual as well, originating in Russia.

Quoting from Facebook's blog post on the matter, the two operations we found originated in Russia and one was active in a variety of countries

while the other was specific to Ukraine. We didn't find any links between these operations,

but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead

others about who they were and what they were doing. Despite their misrepresentations of their identities,

we found that these pages and accounts were linked to

employees of Sputnik, a news agency based in Moscow and that some of the pages

frequently posted about topics like anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption," end quote.

Among the details, the accounts involved had about 790,000 followers and the groups spent

about $135,000 advertising on Facebook's

platform paying in euros, rubles and US dollars. Around 190 events were

hosted by the pages.

The first was scheduled for August of 2015

and the most recent was scheduled for January.

Up to 1,200 people express interest

in at least one of these events, but Facebook couldn't confirm

whether any of the events actually occurred.

...