The night before America’s election, Fast Company reported: On the internet, we’re subject to hidden A/B tests all the time, but this one was also part of a political weapon: a multimillion-dollar tool kit built by a team of Facebook vets, data nerds, and computational social scientists determined to defeat Donald Trump. The goal is to use microtargeted ads, follow-up surveys,…
Tag: Mueller
Judge Orders Twitter To Unmask FBI Impersonator Who Set Off Seth Rich Conspiracy
AmiMoJo shares a report from NPR: A federal judge in California has ordered that Twitter reveal the identity of an anonymous user who allegedly fabricated an FBI document to spread a conspiracy theory about the killing of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who died in 2016. The ruling could lead to the identification of the person behind the Twitter…
Mueller’s Investigative Team Members Claimed To Have ‘Accidentally Wiped’ Phones
An anonymous reader writes: Newly released DOJ records show that multiple top members of Mueller’s investigative team claimed to have “accidentally wiped” at least 15 phones used during the anti-Trump investigation after the DOJ OIG asked for the devices to be handed over.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/09/11/1717229/muellers-investigative-team-members-claimed-to-have-accidentally-wiped-phones?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed…
Microsoft Dropped for Open Source Again in Germany: Hamburg Follows Munich’s Lead
“The trend towards open-source software on government computers is gathering pace in Germany,” reports ZDNet: In the latest development, during coalition negotiations in the city-state of Hamburg, politicians have declared they are ready to start moving its civil service software away from Microsoft and towards open-source alternatives. The declaration comes as part of a 200-page coalition agreement between the Social Democratic…
The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A staff writer at The Atlantic published a 7,800-word warning about election security considering the possibility of everything from ransomware to meddling with voter-registration databases — and of course, online disinformation. But it starts with Jack Cable, a Stanford student who discovered security holes in Chicago’s Board of Elections website — then spent months trying to find…
Scientists reveal new insights of exploding massive stars and future gravitational wave detectors
In a study recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Jade Powell and Dr. Bernhard Mueller from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) simulated three core-collapse supernovae using supercomputers from across Australia, including the OzSTAR supercomputer at Swinburne University of Technology. The simulation models—which are 39 times, 20 times and 18 times…
Russian Trolls Now Just Push Divisive Content Created By Others
“Americans don’t need Russia’s polarizing influence operations. They are plenty good enough at dividing themselves,” writes the Atlantic’s national security reporter, arguing that “the new face of Russian propaganda” is just a carefully-curated selection of inflammatory content made by Americans themselves. Citing the Mueller investigation, the article notes the irony that America’s two front-runners for the presidency are now “both candidates…
Massive New Cambridge Analytica Leak Will Show Global Voter Manipulation on ‘Industrial Scale’
A new leak of more than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica’s work in 68 different countries “will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on ‘an industrial scale,'” writes the Guardian. Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed shares their report: The release of documents began on New Year’s Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links…
New Clean-Combustion ‘Ducted Fuel Injection’ Could Eliminate Soot From Diesel Engines
Thelasko shared Sandia’s report:
Ducted fuel injection, developed by Chuck Mueller at Sandia’s Combustion Research Facility, is able to fine-tune the amount of diesel used in an engine to the point of eliminating between 50 and 100% of the soot… [H]e and his team, Christopher Nilsen, Drummond Biles and Nathan Harry, began experiments that have now resulted in an assembly of four…
10 amazing places for year-round stargazing
The stars are accessible to everyone, but where can you get the most from the night sky? Here are 10 great dark-sky places – mostly in the U.S. but also in Australia, New Zealand and Chile – for skywatching and stargazing. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/10-amazing-places-for-year-round-stargazing…