Preparing for the November election. Also, think
about other things that may be influenced.
Report –
Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social
Media Manipulation
Computational
Propaganda Research Program – Oxford Internet Institute –
Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social
Media Manipulation, July 20, 2018: “The manipulation of public
opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat
to public life. Around the world, a range of government agencies and
political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread
junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and
undermine trust in the media, public institutions, and science. At a
time when news consumption is increasingly digital, artificial
intelligence, big data analytics, and “blackbox” algorithms are
being leveraged to challenge truth and trust: the cornerstones of our
democratic society. In 2017, the first Global Cyber Troops inventory
shed light on the global organization of social media manipulation by
government and political party actors. This 2018 report analyses the
new trends of organized media manipulation, and the growing
capacities, strategies and resources that support this phenomenon.
Our key findings are:
-
We have found evidence of formally organized social media manipulation campaigns in 48 countries, up from 28 countries last year. In each country there is at least one political party or government agency using social media to manipulate public opinion domestically.
-
Much of this growth comes from countries where political parties are spreading disinformation during elections, or countries where government agencies feel threatened by junk news and foreign interference and are responding by developing their own computational propaganda campaigns in response.
-
In a fifth of these 48 countries—mostly across the Global South—we found evidence of disinformation campaigns operating over chat applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat.
-
Computational propaganda still involves social media account automation and online commentary teams, but is making increasing use of paid advertisements and search engine optimization on a widening array of Internet platforms.
-
Social media manipulation is big business. Since 2010, political parties and governments have spent more than half a billion dollars on the research, development, and implementation of psychological operations and public opinion manipulation over social media. In a few countries this includes efforts to counter extremism, but in most countries this involves the spread junk news and misinformation during elections, military crises, and complex humanitarian disasters…”
Not the most common vector of attack. Consider
why this data might be valuable.
State-Actors
Likely Behind Singapore Cyberattack: Experts
State-actors
were likely behind Singapore's biggest ever cyberattack to date,
security experts say, citing the scale and sophistication of the hack
which hit medical data of about a quarter of the population.
The
city-state announced Friday that hackers had broken
into a government database and stolen the health records of 1.5
million Singaporeans, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who
was specifically targeted in the "unprecedented" attack.
Singapore's
health minister said the strike was "a deliberate, targeted, and
well-planned cyberattack and not the work of casual hackers or
criminal gangs".
While
officials refused to comment on the identity of the hackers citing
"operational security", experts told AFP that the
complexity of the attack and its focus on high-profile targets like
the prime minister pointed to the hand of a state-actor.
"A
cyber espionage threat actor could leverage disclosure of sensitive
health information... to coerce an individual in (a) position of
interest to conduct espionage" on its behalf, said Eric Hoh,
Asia-Pacific president of cybersecurity firm FireEye.
… Jeff
Middleton, chief executive of cybersecurity consultancy Lantium, said
healthcare data is of particular interest to hackers because it can
be used to blackmail people in positions of power.
"A
lot of information about a person's health can be gleaned from the
medications that they take," Middleton told AFP Saturday.
… The
hackers used a computer infected with malware to gain access to the
database between June 27 and July 4 before administrators spotted
"unusual activity", authorities said.
Something is off here. A privacy App that
violates privacy?
India
threatens iPhone ban if Apple doesn’t accept regulator’s
anti-spam app
The last few years have seen Apple expanding into
India with the iPhone, but now the company is facing a serious
problem if it doesn’t cater to the demands of the country’s
telecom regulator. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)
has put new rules in place in an effort to protect mobile users’
privacy and block spam calls and messages. Part of this policy
involves making an app available to every subscriber, but Apple
refuses to allow it on the App Store, ironically, due
to privacy concerns.
The regulator requires that all carriers in India
make TRAI’s “Do Not Disturb” app available for users to
download and install on their device. The app then gives users the
ability to report unsolicited calls and messages. Apple has not
allowed it on their App Store, however, due to the fact that the app
requires access to call history and message logs in order to send
reports to the agency.
While Apple has been butting heads with TRAI for
over a year now, the regulator has moved forward with the policy,
giving all carriers six months to make sure the app can be installed
on every device they offer. Any phones that can’t install the app
after that period will be cut off from the carrier’s network. As
for Android, the app is already available via Google’s
Play Store.
How do you explain religion to a computer? Or the
a-religious?
Can
Artificial Intelligence Predict Religious Violence?
Imagine you’re the president of a European
country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle
East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your
population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers
seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but
you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest
in the refugees’ education; another says providing jobs is the key;
yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth
opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do?
Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy
you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded
great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your
particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens,
you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button
and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a
different policy. But of course, you can’t experiment like that,
not with real people.
You can, however, experiment like that with
virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling
Religion Project does.
One source of “Big Data.”
NASA helps
businesses make use of its satellite data
NASA has made its raw satellite data widely
available for a long while. Now that it has a
privatization-minded
leader, though, it's looking to make that data more palatable for
the business crowd. The administration has released
a Remote Sensing Toolkit that should make it easier to use
observational satellite info for commercial purposes, including
straightforward business uses as well as conservation and research.
The move consolidates info that used to be scattered across "dozens"
of websites, and helps you search that unified database for helpful
knowledge – you don't have to go to one place for atmospheric
studies and another to learn
about forests.
The kit includes both some ready-to-use tools for
making sense of satellite content as well as the code companies can
use to craft their own tools.
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