Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is affecting most of the game’s community. Engadget reports: The hack started to spread through the game’s userbase on Thursday evening. It causes players to spam their…
Tag: troll
Citigroup Tech Executive Unmasked as Major QAnon ‘High Priest’
QAnon’s biggest news hub was run by a senior vice president at Citigroup, the American multinational investment bank and financial services company Citigroup. Jason Gelinas worked in the company’s technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers, according to Bloomberg. [Alternate URL] He was married with kids and had a comfortable house in a…
13 Scientists Troll Scientific Journal With a Bogus Paper about Earth’s Black Hole
“They’re trolling us… we think. But how the hell did this get published?” asks Popular Mechanics. Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra shares their report: Scientists have uncovered a bizarre, indefensible paper that squeaked through peer review at what appears at first pass to be a legitimate medical journal… 13 listed authors from wildly different fields throw together a series of escalating falsehoods. “Recently,…
Facebook Busts Russian Disinfo Networks As US Election Looms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Facebook announced on Thursday that it has taken down three “coordinated inauthentic behavior” networks promoting disinformation that included nearly 300 Facebook and Instagram accounts along with dozens of Facebook Pages and Groups. While the efforts were seemingly run independently, and focused primarily outside of the US, each has ties to Russian intelligence –…
US Teens Are Being Paid to Spread Disinformation on Social Media
The Washington Post covered “a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia” during America’s last presidential campaign in 2016. According to four people with knowledge of the effort, “Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages…”…
Hoax That Fooled Armed Protesters Was Created By a Socialist Troll on Food Stamps
Remember that anonymous online hoaxster who urged hundreds of armed protesters to counter a non-existent flag-burning event at America’s historic Civil War battefield at Gettysburg? An investigation by the Washington Post reveals that the hoaxster had in fact been a “lifelong Democrat” before instead registering in 2015 with the Socialist Party — and that he now collects food stamps:
Adam Rahuba, a…
Super Secretive Russian Disinfo Operation Discovered Dating Back To 2014
Social media research group Graphika published today a 120-page report unmasking a new Russian information operation of which very little has been known so far. ZDNet reports: Codenamed Secondary Infektion, the group is different from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Sankt Petersburg company (troll farm) that has interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Graphika says this new and separate…
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…
Predictive Text Patent Troll Tries To Shake Down Wikipedia
martiniturbide writes: WordLogic (patent troll) claims it has the rights of the concept of predictive text writing and went after the Wikimedia foundation. WordLogic offered a “discounted, lump sum fee of $30,000 in exchange for a paid-up one-time license,” an easy win they thought, but Wikimedia fought back. “Wikimedia notes that (1) WordLogic’s patents are invalid due to prior art, (2)…