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Some investors and CEOs are choosing to fight a powerful target in their quest to make Silicon Valley more friendly to women: The Young Presidents Organization.

As the tech industry grapples with a spate of sexual harassment allegations, prominent voices are quietly organizing behind a new rival to YPO, a networking league of executives that is largely male, Recode has learned.

The YPO rival called Leaders in Tech has in recent weeks been pitching top venture capitalists on its effort, and the organization is a topic at a Thursday evening dinner of female general partners at VC firms.

The new organization shifts the broader battle over gender discrimination to untrodden turf: While firms have been evaluating their own culpability after women entrepreneurs emerged this year to name their accusers, the conversation has largely avoided the heavily male social networks that can route deals and connections to other men.

YPO admits members who are CEOs under the age of 45 that have met certain thresholds, such as having 50 full-time employees or lead companies valued at over $20 million. While YPO is more prominent on the East Coast than on the West Coast, these networking organizations can make it difficult for women to find deals.

The push at LIT, described by sources familiar with its behind-the-scenes moves, has not yet been publicly announced. The leader of the organization, Sue Khim, the co-founder of the startup Brilliant, declined to comment.

But the nonprofit has been gauging the temperature of Silicon Valley heavyweights, and its central ideas are spelled out on its once-public website, which was taken down after contact from Recode. (The website is a few months old, according to a person with knowledge of the effort.) Backers include Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital and David Hornik of August Capital.

In tech and venture capital, the preponderance of gatekeepers and people in power are men, who preferentially socialize with, recruit, promote, fund, and make introductions for other men. Male voices are powerfully amplified in such an ecosystem, the organization writes.

The current environment offers only self-perpetuating mens clubs, in which existing male members refer and vet prospective new members, or womens clubs, through which the female members are unable to forge relationships with the large number of men in their industry. It is time for these networks to start to merge.

LIT draws many lessons from existing social and professional leagues such as Young Presidents Organization (YPO), which are incredibly valuable for members, empowering them to connect with talent, funding, and customers. But such organizations typically have an overwhelmingly male membership, and are only open to the CEOs of large companies a position that few women ever attain.

YPO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The goals of LIT include providing a safe community to come forward with stories of harassment without fear of negative repercussions from a tightly networked male establishment.

LIT will have similar membership requirements to YPO; it will admit people who are senior executives at startups and perhaps those leading a company with at least $2 million in annual revenue. Candidates must be signed off on by LITs vetting committee.

LIT invites startup CEOs to peer group meetings and dinners and gives them access to luminary tech entrepreneurs and top venture capitalists, according to the website. The initiation fee for the organization is $3,375, along with annual dues of the same amount. Fees are waived for the first year, and membership fees could still change, according to the person with knowledge.

Sponsors who give money to LIT will earn early access to deals and board observer seats, the website says.

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There's a new rival to the mostly male networking organizations that make deals happen in Silicon Valley - Recode

Facebook told congressional investigators on Wednesday that it sold political ads during the 2016 U.S. presidential election to a so-calledRussian troll farmthat was looking to target American voters.

In reviewing the ads buys, we have found approximately $100,000 in ad spending from June of 2015 to May of 2017 associated with roughly 3,000 ads that was connected to about 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of our policies, Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos saidin a statement.

Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia, Stamos said.

The revelation,first reported by the Washington Post, comes amid ongoing investigations into Russias interference in the U.S. election, including the use of social media to spread fake news and propaganda.

The ads both traditional advertisements and sponsored posts were intended to sow discord among the American electorate by amplifying divisive social and political messages, Stamos said. These ranged from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.

Roughly one quarter of the ads were geographically targeted, Stamos said, though a Facebook spokesperson declined to specify the locations where those ads were targeted.

In an interview with CNNs Wolf Blitzer Wednesday afternoon, Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the committee would be looking into the nature of the advertisements, and whether they were at a level of sophistication where [the ad buyers] would have needed help or assistance from the campaign.

I think we already knew that the Russians were using paid social media trolls to try to influence the election, try to sow discord, this certainly confirms that finding, Schiff said. What we want to explore, not only with Facebook, with other social media platforms as well, [is] what evidence, to what degree.

It is possible that there are more shadowy ad buys that Facebook has yet to identify.

In the review presented to Congressional investigators, Facebook said it had found an additional $50,000 in political ad spending during the election from other accounts connected to Russia.

Facebook sells its advertising through a self-service ad model, through which buyers can choose demographic, geographic and interest-based targets, the Facebook spokesperson said. Due to the volume of these ad buys, Facebook said it was unable to identify the inauthentic nature of these ad buys at the time.

In his statement, Stamos said Facebook had shut down accounts involved that were still active. But the company is facing criticism over its decision not to release the ads or explain what role it played in the targeting of these ads.

It is completely unacceptable that Facebook says it will not release the actual ads it showed to its users, Pierre Omidyar, the entrepreneur and eBay founder, wrote on Twitter.

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Russian 'Troll Farm' Bought Political Ads During 2016 Campaign on Facebook, Social Networking Site Says - KTLA

Indorse, a blockchain-powered decentralized social network for professionals, today announced anairdropof 65,000 IND tokens to holders of TenX (PAY), Digix (DGD), Coindash (CDT) and 0x ZeroX (ZRX) tokens.

Indorse Co-Founder and CEO, David Moskowitz said:

The Indorse network presents a revolutionary approach to professional networking by providing a platform on which users can use crowd-verified endorsements to further their reputations. As such, our ecosystem flourishes as active and engaged participants, receive financial rewards from engaging on the network, in the form of IND tokens.

In choosing to airdrop our tokens to these communities, we ensure not only wide distribution, but also that our tokens will be placed in the hands and wallets of some of the most active and engaged token holders in the Ethereum network, Moskowitz added.

A snapshot of PAY, DGD, CDT and ZRX token holders was taken on August 18, 2017. Accounts with the equivalent of 3,000 ether or more, and less than .01 ether, will be scrubbed to prevent sending tokens to exchange accounts and dust accounts.

Speaking on the announcement, Adam Efrima COO of Coindash said, The IND token will be added to CoinDash ecosystem soon, following the airdrop our users will be able to manage one more asset in their Coindash portfolio.

We are thrilled that our PAY holders will receive IND tokens in this airdrop, as while Indorse provides a way for people to earn tokens, TenX gives them a way to spend them, added Airdrop partner and Tenx Co-founder, Dr. Julian Hosp.

The team at Indorse have been long time supporters of the ethereum and Digix communities. We are very happy to support them in their efforts to expand the universe of IND holders, noted Shaun Djie, Co-founder of Digix Global.

The Indorse token sale will run until September 7, 2017 where the Indorse Tokens (IND) will be distributed to token sale participants, representing approximately 35% of the total supply created. The IND token is a tradeable token, and participants will also receive Indorse Score (SCR) tokens, which are a non-tradeable reputation token required to post updates to the member profile or indorse and flag claims, once the platform is released on the main network.

In addition, following a successful engagement with WINGS, the Ethereum-based price discovery and social promotion DAO, in their presale, Indorse is again integrating with the DAO that has forecasted and promoted several funding campaigns which have raised in excess of $150 million.

We aim to tackle the fundamental flaws associated with social networks such as data ownership and privacy leak by putting the power into the hands of the user, as opposed to the owners and advertisers. The significant interest in our project to date paired with the extensive community support of our Airdrop partners has positioned Indorse as a truly revolutionary undertaking, Moskowitz concluded.

While holders of the aforementioned tokens, as of August 18, 2017 will automatically receive IND tokens during the Airdrop, holders can register for this Airdrop athttps://indorse.io/air-dropuntilSeptember 4, 2017to receive double the amount of IND.Please take note, any site claiming to be Indorse and asking for your private key is a scam.

For more information on the token sale, visitwww.indorse.io.

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Indorse, the Decentralized Social Network for Professionals, Announces Airdrop - Blockchain News

In the United States social networks are considered to be public spaces and any information shared there is covered under the so-called third-party doctrine, which means that users have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the data their service providers collect about them. Any data you post online in any format (regardless of privacy settings), or any data collected by the third parties with whom you may have an agreed-upon business relationship, is not considered private, yet many people willingly stream data and images to their network in the mistaken belief that they are the only one who will see or have access to it.

In 2010, Eric Schmidt of Google said that the world produced as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. In 2014 it was estimated that each day the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, so much that 90 percent of the data in the world at that time was created in the previous two years. As of 2016, we produced as much information in 10 minutes as did the first 10,000 generations of human beings. There is no way humanly possible to monitor and protect all of that data. The more data, the more data breaches.

Facebook admitted in 2011 (when it had just 500 million users) that more than 600,000 of its accounts were compromised every single day. Each of those security breaches could have been used for identity theft, criminal impersonation, tax fraud, health insurance scams, or a plethora of other possible criminal offenses. According to Facebooks 2014 annual report, up to 11 percent of its accounts are fake, meaning more than 140 million accounts at that time. Any data we entrust to social media can be leaked to criminals, terrorists, or others.

It is estimated that at least 40 percent of social media users have been exposed to at least one form of malware, and more than 20 percent have had their social networking or e-mail account compromised or taken over by a third-party without permission. To better understand how simple it is for that to happen, if you happen to check your Facebook account at your local Starbucks while in the process sharing its network with 30 other people, and if one of them happens to be a hacker running a program called Firesheep, the hacker could use the plug-in to log in as you on your own Facebook account. Known as sidejacking, this happens all the time.

Cyber stalkers send unwanted e-mails, tweets and text messages, or spread rumors online. They easily obtain detailed information about their victims, such as home address and phone number.

With an estimated two-thirds of college-aged students engaging in sexting (sharing sexually explicit SMS photographs via their phones), the scope for a problem continues to grow rapidly. In January 2017, Facebook had to assess nearly 54,000 potential cases of revenge pornography and sextortion for the month, disabling more than 14,000 accounts related to this type of sexual abuse, with 33 of the cases reviewed involving children.

Criminals no longer wait to see if your newspaper delivery has built up on your front doorstep before they target you for a burglary. Today, either they, or the data brokers they may use, scrape information from your social media for lead generation. Another way they target their future victims is via locational data in files posted online-the silently implanted metadata in photographs, videos and status updates shared by mobile devices, which reveal the date, time and GPS coordinates where photos and videos were taken, as well as the serial number of the phone or camera. The metadata is easily accessible by anyone who knows how to download a simple browser plug-in to access them. With any one of hundreds of free tools, your photos and videos can be made to appear on a Google Map that allows anyone to zoom in on the precise location where the picture was taken.

Social media platforms should build awareness regarding security precautions and information disclosure, so that users are encouraged to take more care and become more conscious about revealing their personal information in their profiles. Ideally, the platforms would embark on broadly-based educational campaigns and governments would do the same. Ultimately, however, it is incumbent upon social media users to do their part to take some basic precautions to protect themselves, and take the question of security more seriously. They are the first and last firewall, for it is they who decide what sites to go to and which links to click on.

*Daniel Wagner is author of the new book Virtual Terror and Managing Director of Risk Cooperative.

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Social Media's Contribution To Virtual Terrorism - HuffPost

Latin American social networking site Taringa has suffered a database breach that has resulted in the spill of more than 28 million records.

Usernames, hashed passwords (using the weak MD5 algorithm) and personal email addresses have been exposed by the breach. Argentinia-based Taringas breach statement (in Spanish) can be found here. Neither phone numbers nor addresses from Bitcoin wallets associated with a Taringa program were exposed by the breach, according to the Reddit-like social networking site.

LeakBase claims that it has already cracked 94 per cent of password hashes exposed in the latest dumps.

In response, Taringa which has users all over the Spanish-speaking world has applied a password reset as well as urging consumers to review their use of login credentials elsewhere to make sure they are not using the same (now compromised) passwords on other sites.

Although the breach affects a consumer site, it poses a risk for corporates because it opens the door to the well-practised hacker tactic of using the same login credentials to break into more sensitive (webmail, online banking) or corporate accounts. The still widespread practice of password reuse opens the door to such credential stuffing attacks.

A list of top 50 common/worst passwords chosen by Taringa users can be found here.

Andrew Clarke, EMEA director at One Identity, opined: "The reported breach at Taringa highlights some fundamental issues. The fact that an administrative file holding passwords was accessible demonstrates little or no control over privileged accounts.Then the passwords were easily cracked since the company used a weak MD5 (128-bit) algorithm rather than SHA-256.

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Bazinga! Social network Taringa 'fesses up to data breach - The Register