A model for the coming US elections?
Meet The
29-Year-Old Trying To Become The King Of Mexican Fake News
The first tweets using the hashtag
#GanaConVictoryLab started appearing around 6 p.m. on the afternoon
of June 15. Within two hours, it began rising through Mexico’s
national trending topics on Twitter. By 8 p.m., it was the
fourth-most-tweeted hashtag in Mexico, pushing down mentions of
Cristiano Ronaldo’s World Cup performance that afternoon.
The only problem: Every one of the accounts
tweeting the hashtag was a fake.
… Merlo’s Victory Lab is one of the
estimated hundreds of homegrown Mexican Cambridge Analytica – like
marketing firms that are constantly filling up the country’s social
media platforms with junk. Victory
Lab will make anything trend on any platform for a fee.
… Merlo estimates that these days, around 90%
of all trending topics in Mexico are controlled by digital marketing
firms. He said that Mexico is still trailing behind the US, though,
which most Mexican digital marketing firms see as the global capital
of misinformation.
Disaster Recovery: Interesting that a system
intended to ensure communications during a nuclear war can be brought
down by a backhoe cutting a cable. (Or was this not an accident?)
Comcast
outage brings down internet, TV service across US
… The outage, triggered by cut fiber lines,
brought down internet, television and phone service for Comcast
XFINITY customers in markets including New York and Philadelphia.
DownDetector.com
Opens a New Window a website that follows outages, also tracked
large outages in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, Dallas, Denver and
Seattle.
… “We identified two,
separate and unrelated fiber cuts to our network backbone
providers,” the Philadelphia-based company said.
Who can sort out this mess? Lawyers? The big
audit firms?
The arrival of the General Data Protection
Regulation a month ago led to a flurry of activity, clogging email
inboxes and flooding people with tracking consent notices. But
experts say much of that activity was for show because much of it
fails to render companies compliant with GDPR.
Part of the issue, experts say, is the vague
regulation has been interpreted in wildly different ways. GDPR
consent-request messages vary wildly across sites. There are default
pre-ticked opt-ins, buried options that require users to hunt for
them, consent banners with information only available at a further
click but no button to reject, and implied consent approaches.
Others have used what some industry execs refer to as “nuke
buttons,” which let the user reject everything without explaining
what they’re rejecting or what they’re agreeing to. Others have
simply reskinned cookie-banner messages required under the existing
ePrivacy directive.
Limits to search…
Orin Kerr writes:
As regular readers know, I have argued in my academic writing that the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted to impose use restrictions on nonresponsive data seized pursuant to a computer search warrant. In a new decision, State v. Mansor, the Oregon Supreme Court appears to have adopted my approach under Oregon’s state equivalent of the Fourth Amendment.
Read more on
The Volokh Conspiracy.
[From
the article:
Computer warrant searches require the government
to find a needle in an enormous electronic haystack. When the police
execute a warrant to search for and find the needle of evidence, they
usually need to seize the haystack first to search it. I have argued
that a warrant to seize the needle should allow the police to seize
the haystack to search for the needle. But there's a catch: The
government should ordinarily not be allowed to use whatever else
they find in the haystack. If the warrant is only to seize a needle,
the police can only take away and use the needle, unless there are
exigent circumstances exposed by the discovery of other evidence.
The nonresponsive data – other evidence that may exist in the
haystack but is not described in the warrant – ordinarily can't be
used. For the details of my view, see
this article.
“acceptable to technology firms?” How about
citizens?
Google no
longer accepting state, local election ads in Maryland as result of
new law
Google stopped
accepting state and local election ads in Maryland Friday as a result
of a new law passed by the General
Assembly that requires
disclosure of who is paying for political advertising and how much is
being spent.
Google spokeswoman Alex Krasov said the Silicon
Valley company is unsure it can comply with the law’s regulations,
which state officials are reviewing to forge into a
national model acceptable to technology firms.
“Our systems are not currently built to collect
and provide the information in the time frame required by Maryland’s
new disclosure law,” Krasov said.
You can see where this might be useful.
DARPA Is
Racing To Develop Tech That Can Identify Hoax Videos
Fake videos have become such a potentially
disruptive threat that the high-tech research arm of the Pentagon is
launching a contest in early July aimed at detecting “deepfakes,”
hoax videos so realistic that they could trigger political scandal or
even spark violent conflict.
… “The goal is to provide the general public
— a set of tools that we can use to verify images, video and
audio,” said Siwei Lyu, a computer scientist at the University at
Albany that leads one of the research teams taking part in the
contest, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency.
Fake videos, sometimes known as deepfakes, harness
artificial intelligence and can be used to place people where they
did not go, and say things they never said. As fake videos improve,
they could rock both people and nations, even inflame religious
tensions, experts said.
Tilting at windmills? Un-faking the news?
Steve
Ballmer: Why Good Data Are Hard to Find – and How to Fix That
When former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer retired in
2014, a lot of media attention was focused on his new passion as the
owner of a professional basketball team, after he bought the L.A.
Clippers for a reported $2 billion. Far less attention went to his
creation of USAFacts,
a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that strives to shine a light
on the U.S. government’s financial status and report the findings
to its stakeholders, the American people.
… Ballmer began searching for government data
and he found a lot of figures, but they weren’t always organized
coherently. Government agencies tend to be siloed and their figures
don’t always fit with each other. Because
of how the data is kept, he pointed out, politicians can rattle off
an isolated figure devoid of context to support their agendas.
“Government data is not always timely or accessible, or frankly,
it doesn’t always agree with itself,” he said. “How does
anybody make a decision with data which sometimes doesn’t reconcile
and isn’t out on a timely basis?”
Perspective. It’s called ‘Mission Creep.’
It started
with your shoes, then your water. Now the TSA wants your snacks.
… Passengers at airports across the country —
including all three of the Washington region’s major airports —
are reporting a rise in TSA agents instructing them to remove their
snacks and other food items from their carry-ons and place them in
those ubiquitous plastic bins for a separate screening.
It’s not part of the agency’s standard policy,
according to TSA spokesman Mike England. It’s simply a
recommendation issued
by the agency last year to
help speed the bag-check process.
… The line, Gaul said, was moving noticeably
slower than normal.
“It definitely caused a delay — not huge, but
at least by like five or 10 minutes,” the Georgetown University PhD
student said. “Mostly it was just bizarre and absurd.”
… England said the concern is not that people
may be hiding explosives or other illicit material inside of food.
Rather, it’s that the food itself can look similar to the
components of an explosive — therefore making it more likely that
bags with snacks would be flagged for a time-consuming manual search.
Officials thought it might be more efficient, in some cases, to have
passengers remove the snacks from their bags ahead of time.
England said he could not provide specific
information on how a pack of pretzels could resemble an explosive.
… “Some terrorist is making bombs out of
Frito-Lay,” mused
a passenger waiting at Orlando International Airport.
Perspective. “You better not ignore us!”
Trump’s
Pentagon Quietly Made A Change To The Stated Mission It’s Had For
Two Decades
For at least two decades, the Department of
Defense has explicitly defined its mission on its website as
providing “the military forces needed to deter war and to protect
the security of our country.” But earlier this year, it quietly
changed that statement, perhaps suggesting a more ominous approach to
national security.
The Pentagon’s official
website now defines its mission this way: “The mission of the
Department of Defense is to provide a lethal Joint Force to defend
the security of our country and sustain American influence abroad.”
The new mission statement — featured at the
bottom of every page on the site — removes the words “to deter
war” while adding that it is the Pentagon’s job to “sustain
American influence” overseas.
The self-driving vehicle market just got bigger.
This
self-driving grocery delivery car will sacrifice itself to save
pedestrians
… A pilot program involving Nuro and the
grocery chain Kroger is scheduled to kick off this fall in a
to-be-announced city, meaning that in the autumn, people in a test
urban area should be able to order groceries by app, then have them
delivered by a little independent car.
… “If you’re no longer trying to protect
an occupant above all else, and in fact you’re trying to protect
the most vulnerable road users—a pedestrian, cyclists—at all
costs, then you can do things like self-sacrificing the vehicle,”
he says. Given a situation where the car has to decide between
hitting a person or a tree, Ferguson imagines, “we will always
drive into the tree.” Or even, he says, a parked car.
For my smartphone using students.
