Recovery from Covid-19 will be threatened if we don't learn to control big tech

Last Wednesday, Twitter suffered the biggest hacking attack in its history. A scammer got into its system, probably by hacking the account of someone working in the company, and acquired some of the special privileges that internal staff possess in order to do their work. This enabled the intruder to take over the accounts of some very prominent Twitter users, including Barack Obama, though not – interestingly – Donald Trump, to send out invitations to donate Bitcoin to a particular cryptographic “wallet” that would then return twice the amount donated. You’d have to be pretty dumb to fall for this, though apparently some people did. In fact, it was just a variation on a known scam-genre....