Ammalgam shares a report from Unirobotica: Last year, Facebook announced measures to protect the 2020 U.S. election from foreign influence and misleading information last year. Now, in addition to those, [The Washington Post reports] the firm has announced that it is banning deepfakes — manipulated photos and videos — from its platforms, a move aimed to curb misinformation ahead of the…
Tag: Presidential Election
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…
‘Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security’
The network’s furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous. Garrett M. Graff, writing for Wired earlier this month: Monday’s split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department’s inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI’s handling of its 2016 investigation into…
Defecting Chinese Spy Offers Information Trove To Australian Government
schwit1 shares a report from The Age, a daily newspaper published in Australia: A Chinese spy has risked his life to defect to Australia and is now offering a trove of unprecedented inside intelligence on how China conducts its interference operations abroad. Wang “William” Liqiang is the first Chinese operative to ever blow his cover. He has revealed the identities of…
Thousands of Bots Are Retweeting Claims of Voter Fraud In Kentucky
“It’s deeply concerning to see shady coordinated disinformation campaigns trying to undermine our democracy,” says the man who apparently defeated Kentucky’s Republican governor Bevin in a close election last Tuesday. The New York Times reports on what happened in the hours after Twitter user “Overlordkraken1” decided to tweet to his 19 followers that he’d “just shredded a box of Republican mail-in…
US Begins Formal Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord
The Trump administration is formally withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, “the first step in a year-long process to leave the landmark agreement to reduce emissions of planet-warming gases,” reports CNN. President Trump first announced the intent to officially withdraw from the agreement in June 2017. From the report: “Today the United States began the process to withdraw from…
‘I Worked on Political Ads at Facebook. They Profit By Manipulating Us.’
Yael Eisenstat, a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech in the Digital Life Initiative and a former elections integrity head at Facebook, CIA officer, and White House adviser, writes for the Washington Post: As the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t…
Does The Military Need Agile Programming?
OneHundredAndTen writes: According to this Forbes article, the Pentagon is worried that many in the USA’s military nerve center claim to use Agile methods, when in fact, they aren’t. Those responsible for these things at the Pentagon have therefore come up with a Detecting Agile BS document, so people can tell when they are doing Agile vs. when they are doing…
Russia Carried Out a ‘Stunning’ Breach of FBI Communications System, Escalating the Spy Game on US Soil
Zach Dorfman, Jenna McLaughlin, and Sean D. Naylor, reporting for Yahoo News: On Dec. 29, 2016, the Obama administration announced that it was giving nearly three dozen Russian diplomats just 72 hours to leave the United States and was seizing two rural East Coast estates owned by the Russian government. As the Russians burned papers and scrambled to pack their bags,…
US Officials Fear Ransomware Attack Against 2020 Election
The U.S. government plans to launch a program in roughly one month that narrowly focuses on protecting voter registration databases and systems ahead of the 2020 presidential election. From a report: These systems, which are widely used to validate the eligibility of voters before they cast ballots, were compromised in 2016 by Russian hackers seeking to collect information. Intelligence officials are…