Tuesday, July 02, 2019


Who would you like to win the 2020 election and by how much?
Internet Research Agency Twitter activity predicted 2016 U.S. election polls
First Monday – Volume 24, Number 7 – 1 July 2019 > Ruck “In 2016, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) deployed thousands of Twitter bots that released hundreds of thousands of English language tweets. It has been hypothesized that this affected public opinion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Here we test that hypothesis using vector autoregression (VAR) comparing time series of election opinion polling during 2016 versus numbers of re-tweets or ‘likes’ of IRA tweets. We find that changes in opinion poll numbers for one of the candidates were consistently preceded by corresponding changes in IRA re-tweet volume, at an optimum interval of one week before. In contrast, the opinion poll numbers did not correlate with future re-tweets or ‘likes’ of the IRA tweets. We find that the release of these tweets parallel significant political events of 2016 and that approximately every 25,000 additional IRA re-tweets predicted a one percent increase in election opinion polls for one candidate. As these tweets were part of a larger, multimedia campaign, it is plausible that the IRA was successful in influencing U.S. public opinion in 2016.”




Another checklist for my Computer Security students.
CYBER RESILIENCE – THE 6 BIGGEST THREATS RIGHT NOW FOR LEGAL
The threat constantly evolves and grows – and legal firms are at particular peril. In this article, we look at the 6 biggest current threats as we perceive them.




Because we can?
How Amazon and the Cops Set Up an Elaborate Sting Operation That Accomplished Nothing
… New documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information request show how Amazon, Ring, a GPS tracking company, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service collaborated on a package sting operation with the Aurora, Colorado Police Department in December. The operation involved equipping fake Amazon packages with GPS trackers, and surveilling doorsteps with Ring doorbell cameras in an effort to catch someone stealing a package on tape.
The documents show the design and implementation of a highly elaborate public relations stunt, which was designed both to endear Amazon and Ring with local law enforcement, and to make local residents fear the place they live. The parties were disappointed when the operation didn’t result in any arrests.




Interesting idea.
AI and the Social Sciences Used to Talk More. Now They’ve Drifted Apart.
Artificial intelligence researchers are employing machine learning algorithms to aid tasks as diverse as driving cars, diagnosing medical conditions, and screening job candidates. These applications raise a number of complex new social and ethical issues.
So, in light of these developments, how should social scientists think differently about people, the economy, and society? And how should the engineers who write these algorithms handle the social and ethical dilemmas their creations pose?
These are the kinds of questions you can’t answer with just the technical solutions,” says Dashun Wang, an associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. “These are fundamentally interdisciplinary issues.”




We will need thousands of very specific laws if we go this way.
Deepfake revenge porn distribution now a crime in Virginia
As of today, Virginia is one of the first states in the country to impose criminal penalties on the distribution of non-consensual "deepfake" images and video.
The new law amends existing law in the Commonwealth that defines distribution of nudes or sexual imagery without the subject's consent —often called revenge porn —as a Class 1 misdemeanor. The new bill updated the law by adding a category of "falsely created videographic or still image" to the text.
New laws in Virginia take effect on July 1.




Pick one (or all five) for your toolkit now, before something goes wrong.




For Kindle lovers…




For our programming students?



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