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Paul Merrell

Information Warfare: Automated Propaganda and Social Media Bots | Global Research - 0 views

  • NATO has announced that it is launching an “information war” against Russia. The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation. It’s well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion. Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies. Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this. In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there’s even less to constrain propaganda than before.
  • Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes: The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues … to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral “Controlling, infiltrating, manipulating and warping” online discourse Use of artificial intelligence programs to try to predict how people will react to propaganda
  • Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs. We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media. One of America’s top cyber-propagandists – former high-level military information officer Joel Harding – wrote in December: I was in a discussion today about information being used in social media as a possible weapon.  The people I was talking with have a tool which scrapes social media sites, gauges their sentiment and gives the user the opportunity to automatically generate a persuasive response. Their tool is called a “Social Networking Influence Engine”. *** The implications seem to be profound for the information environment. *** The people who own this tool are in the civilian world and don’t even remotely touch the defense sector, so getting approval from the US Department of State might not even occur to them.
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  • How Can This Real? Gizmodo reported in 2010: Software developer Nigel Leck got tired rehashing the same 140-character arguments against climate change deniers, so he programmed a bot that does the work for him. With citations! Leck’s bot, @AI_AGW, doesn’t just respond to arguments directed at Leck himself, it goes out and picks fights. Every five minutes it trawls Twitter for terms and phrases that commonly crop up in Tweets that refute human-caused climate change. It then searches its database of hundreds to find a counter-argument best suited for that tweet—usually a quick statement and a link to a scientific source. As can be the case with these sorts of things, many of the deniers don’t know they’ve been targeted by a robot and engage AI_AGW in debate. The bot will continue to fire back canned responses that best fit the interlocutor’s line of debate—Leck says this goes on for days, in some cases—and the bot’s been outfitted with a number of responses on the topic of religion, where the arguments unsurprisingly often end up. Technology has come a long way in the past 5 years. So if a lone programmer could do this 5 years ago, imagine what he could do now. And the big players have a lot more resources at their disposal than a lone climate activist/software developer does.  For example, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type” (and see this).  So if the lone programmer is doing it, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the big boys are widely doing it.
  • How Effective Are Automated Comments? Unfortunately, this is more effective than you might assume … Specifically, scientists have shown that name-calling and swearing breaks down people’s ability to think rationally … and intentionally sowing discord and posting junk comments to push down insightful comments  are common propaganda techniques. Indeed, an automated program need not even be that sophisticated … it can copy a couple of words from the main post or a comment, and then spew back one or more radioactive labels such as “terrorist”, “commie”, “Russia-lover”, “wimp”, “fascist”, “loser”, “traitor”, “conspiratard”, etc. Given that Harding and his compadres consider anyone who questions any U.S. policies as an enemy of the state  – as does the Obama administration (and see this) – many honest, patriotic writers and commenters may be targeted for automated propaganda comments.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputatio... - 1 views

    • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.
       
      [# Via Jerry Ashton's LinkedIn[
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    Glenn Greenwald 2014-02-24T23:25:32+00:00 One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempt...ing to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. ...
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

BitTorrent downloads linked to Hollywood film studios - Neowin - 1 views

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    # ! #Entertainment #Politics. [# ! Guess who -mainly- drives piracy to manipulate politics... #clue: http://www.neowin.net/news/bittorrent-downloads-linked-to-hollywood-film-studios] "By John Callaham @JCalmn · Dec 14, 2011 · Hot! 36 There's a lot of pirated movies, TV shows, games and other copyrighted content that's transferred via BitTorrent web sites. Now there's a new web site, YouHaveDownloaded.com, that can not only trace the IP addresses that have been used for BitTorrent file downloading but also what kinds of files those IP addresses have accessed in their history."
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    [# ! they create piracy manipulate laws Intenet media else. ee below...] "By John Callaham @JCalmn · Dec 14, 2011 · Hot! 36 There's a lot of pirated movies, TV shows, games and other copyrighted content that's transferred via BitTorrent web sites. Now there's a new web site, YouHaveDownloaded.com, that can not only trace the IP addresses that have been used for BitTorrent file downloading but also what kinds of files those IP addresses have accessed in their history."
Paul Merrell

Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet - The In... - 0 views

  • The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.
  • he “tools” have been assigned boastful code names. They include invasive methods for online surveillance, as well as some of the very techniques that the U.S. and U.K. have harshly prosecuted young online activists for employing, including “distributed denial of service” attacks and “call bombing.” But they also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time—raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft’s cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype’s encryption. Here’s a list of how JTRIG describes its capabilities: • “Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS) • “Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign” (BADGER) and “mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign” (WARPARTH) • “Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal.” (SILVERLORD)
  • • “Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.” (MINIATURE HERO) • “Find private photographs of targets on Facebook” (SPRING BISHOP) • “A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer” (ANGRY PIRATE) • “Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website” (GATEWAY) and “ability to inflate page views on websites” (SLIPSTREAM) • “Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)” (GESTATOR) • “Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers” (PREDATORS FACE) and “Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG” (ROLLING THUNDER)
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  • • “A suite of tools for monitoring target use of the UK auction site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk)” (ELATE) • “Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity” (CHANGELING) • “For connecting two target phone together in a call” (IMPERIAL BARGE) While some of the tactics are described as “in development,” JTRIG touts “most” of them as “fully operational, tested and reliable.” It adds: “We only advertise tools here that are either ready to fire or very close to being ready.”
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Guest Post: Five Reasons Why The Major Labels Didn't Blow It With Napster by @thetrickn... - 1 views

    • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.
       
      # ! #Industry (#Politics) just don't want to share their business (of culture/thinking/VALUES Manipulation) with third partires...
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    [ay 30, 2015 Editor Charlie Leave a comment Go to comments [Editor Charlie sez: We're pleased to get a chance to repost this must read piece by industry veteran Jim McDermott who brings great insights into the Napster history and the flaws in the narrative that the tech press has so eagerly promoted. You can also read Chris's 2008 interview about Napster with Andrew Orlowski in The Register, The Music Wars from 30,000 Feet.] ...]
Gary Edwards

SVG Is The Future Of Application Development | SitePoint » - 0 views

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    I could see this coming a mile away, ana it's about time! ".... So if HTML can't deliver for us here, what will? Microsoft wants us to use Silverlight and Adobe wants us to use Flash and AIR, of course. And Apple…? Apple ostensibly wants us to use HTML5's canvas. Both Microsoft's and Adobe's contenders are proprietary, which seems to be reason enough for web developers to avoid them to a certain degree, and all of them muddy HTML, which is a dangerous thing for the semantic web. But Apple actually has a trick up its sleeve. Like Mozilla's been doing with Firefox, Apple has quietly been implementing better support for SVG, the W3C's Recommendation for XML-based vector graphics, into WebKit. SVG delivers the same kind of vector graphics capabilities that Flash does, but it does so using all the interoperability benefits that XML brings along for the ride. SVG is great for graphically displaying both text and images, manipulating them with declarative visual primitives, and it comes with a host of lickable effects. Ironically, SVG was originally jointly developed by both Adobe and Sun Microsystems but recently it's Sun Labs that has been doing interesting stuff with the technology. The most compelling experiment of this kind has to be Sun Labs's Lively Kernel project....."
Gary Edwards

Sun Labs Lively Kernel - 0 views

  • Main features The main features of the Lively Kernel include: Small web programming environment and computing kernel, written entirely with JavaScript. In addition to its application execution capabilities, the platform can also function as an integrated development environment (IDE), making the whole system self-contained and able to improve and extend itself on the fly. Programmatic access to the user interface. Our system provides programmatic access from JavaScript to the user interface via the Morphic user interface framework. The user interface is built around an event-based programming model familiar to most web developers. Asynchronous networking. As in Ajax, you can use asynchronous HTTP to perform all the network operations asynchronously, without blocking the user interface.
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    "The Sun Labs Lively Kernel is a new web programming environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. The Lively Kernel supports desktop-style applications with rich graphics and direct manipulation capabilities, but without the installation or upgrade hassles that conventional desktop applications have. The system is written entirely in the JavaScript programming language, a language supported by all the web browsers, with the intent that the system can run in commercial web browsers without installation or any plug-in components. The system leverages the dynamic characteristics of the JavaScript language to make it possible to create, modify and deploy applications on the fly, using tools built into the system itself. In addition to its application execution capabilities, the Lively Kernel can also function as an integrated development environment (IDE), making the whole system self-sufficient and able to improve and extend itself dynamically....." Too little too late? Interestingly, Lively Kernel is 100% JavaScript. Check out this "motivation" rational: "...The main goal of the Lively Kernel is to bring the same kind of simplicity, generality and flexibility to web programming that we have known in desktop programming for thirty years, but without the installation and upgrade hassles than conventional desktop applications have. The Lively Kernel places a special emphasis on treating web applications as real applications, as opposed to the document-oriented nature of most web applications today. In general, we want to put programming into web development, as opposed to the current weaving of HTML, XML and CSS documents that is also sometimes referred to as programming. ...." I agree with the Web document <> Web Application statement. I think the shift though is one where the RiA frames web documents in a new envirnement, blending in massive amounts of data, streaming media and graphics. The WebKit docuemnt model was designed for this p
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Children Are Leading The Cord Cutting Revolution | Techdirt - 1 views

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    "from the mikey-doesn't-like-it dept The cable industry has long pretended that the cord cutting phenomenon either isn't real or that the only people cutting the cord are aging losers living in their parents' basement. Of course when you actually look at the data, while cord cutting remains a slow but growing phenomenon, most of the cord cutters are young, highly educated, employed, and make a good amount of money." [# ! … #Freedom from The #Start: #Good #Move. # ! Notwithstanding '#OldSchool' #manipulators' #criticism…]
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    "from the mikey-doesn't-like-it dept The cable industry has long pretended that the cord cutting phenomenon either isn't real or that the only people cutting the cord are aging losers living in their parents' basement. Of course when you actually look at the data, while cord cutting remains a slow but growing phenomenon, most of the cord cutters are young, highly educated, employed, and make a good amount of money."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

RIAA: The Pirate Bay Assaults Fundamental Human Rights | TorrentFreak - 0 views

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    " Ernesto on October 28, 2014 C: 50 Breaking The RIAA has just submitted its latest list of "rogue" websites to the U.S. Government. The report includes many of the usual suspects and also calls out websites who claim that they're protecting the Internet from censorship, specifically naming The Pirate Bay. "We must end this assault on our humanity and the misappropriation of fundamental human rights," RIAA writes." [# ! Funny # ! ... coming from those who #scorn #culture, keep #prices artificially # ! high, treat all Pe@ple as #Thieves, and #lobby #politics to # ! #manipulate #laws for the (#extreme) #benefit of just a #few...]
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    " Ernesto on October 28, 2014 C: 50 Breaking The RIAA has just submitted its latest list of "rogue" websites to the U.S. Government. The report includes many of the usual suspects and also calls out websites who claim that they're protecting the Internet from censorship, specifically naming The Pirate Bay. "We must end this assault on our humanity and the misappropriation of fundamental human rights," RIAA writes."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

The Linux Digital DJ - 0 views

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    "BeatForce a computer DJ system for two players with independent playlists, song databases, mixers, samplers, et cetera BpmDj very interesting set of programs for the Linux DJ DBMix software DJ digital audio mixing system DJ Krazy a neat MP3/CD mixer for the Linux DJ in us all... DJPlay "aims to be a high-class live DJing application for Linux" Final Scratch pro-audio computerized DJ system from Stanton Magnetics GDAM Geoff & Dave's Audio Mixer, a new mixer for the Linux digital DJ Jay'O'Rama cool DJ tool for PCM/MP3/OGG playback and manipulation Mixxx a cool DJ mixer from the Andersen brothers MP3Mixer a system for mixing multiple MPEG audio streams in realtime Oolaboola virtual turntable fun with Eric Tiedemann's "open-source cyber-shamanic noise-maker" OpenJay dedicated site for open-source DJs OpenJay Development Krew Forum a site dedicated to discussing "...problems, code, techniques, tips & tricks and all issues related to the computer DJing world" UltraMixer very cool virtual DJ mixing software, requires Java terminatorX enables hip-hop style "scratching" of WAV files "
Paul Merrell

Assange Keeps Warning Of AI Censorship, And It's Time We Started Listening - 0 views

  • Where power is not overtly totalitarian, wealthy elites have bought up all media, first in print, then radio, then television, and used it to advance narratives that are favorable to their interests. Not until humanity gained widespread access to the internet has our species had the ability to freely and easily share ideas and information on a large scale without regulation by the iron-fisted grip of power. This newfound ability arguably had a direct impact on the election for the most powerful elected office in the most powerful government in the world in 2016, as a leak publishing outlet combined with alternative and social media enabled ordinary Americans to tell one another their own stories about what they thought was going on in their country.This newly democratized narrative-generating power of the masses gave those in power an immense fright, and they’ve been working to restore the old order of power controlling information ever since. And the editor-in-chief of the aforementioned leak publishing outlet, WikiLeaks, has been repeatedly trying to warn us about this coming development.
  • In a statement that was recently read during the “Organising Resistance to Internet Censorship” webinar, sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site, Assange warned of how “digital super states” like Facebook and Google have been working to “re-establish discourse control”, giving authority over how ideas and information are shared back to those in power.Assange went on to say that the manipulative attempts of world power structures to regain control of discourse in the information age has been “operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears likely to eclipse human counter-measures.”What this means is that using increasingly more advanced forms of artificial intelligence, power structures are becoming more and more capable of controlling the ideas and information that people are able to access and share with one another, hide information which goes against the interests of those power structures and elevate narratives which support those interests, all of course while maintaining the illusion of freedom and lively debate.
  • To be clear, this is already happening. Due to a recent shift in Google’s “evaluation methods”, traffic to left-leaning and anti-establishment websites has plummeted, with sites like WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, Truthout, and WSWS losing up to 70 percent of the views they were getting prior to the changes. Powerful billionaire oligarchs Pierre Omidyar and George Soros are openly financing the development of “an automated fact-checking system” (AI) to hide “fake news” from the public.
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  • To make matters even worse, there’s no way to know the exact extent to which this is going on, because we know that we can absolutely count on the digital super states in question to lie about it. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked point-blank if Twitter was obstructing the #DNCLeaks from trending, a hashtag people were using to build awareness of the DNC emails which had just been published by WikiLeaks, and Dorsey flatly denied it. More than a year later, we learned from a prepared testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism by Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean J. Edgett that this was completely false and Twitter had indeed been doing exactly that to protect the interests of US political structures by sheltering the public from information allegedly gathered by Russian hackers.
  • Imagine going back to a world like the Middle Ages where you only knew the things your king wanted you to know, except you could still watch innocuous kitten videos on Youtube. That appears to be where we may be headed, and if that happens the possibility of any populist movement arising to hold power to account may be effectively locked out from the realm of possibility forever.To claim that these powerful new media corporations are just private companies practicing their freedom to determine what happens on their property is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the extent to which these digital super states are already inextricably interwoven with existing power structures. In a corporatist system of government, which America unquestionably has, corporate censorship is government censorship, of an even more pernicious strain than if Jeff Sessions were touring the country burning books. The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more adept these power structures will become at manipulating us. Time to start paying very close attention to this.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

BBC News - Who is the most pirated artist near you? - 0 views

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    [... + Top 20 sharing countries The United States tops the bill as the country with the most illegal shares, with the UK in second position. Here we show the top 20 downloading countries, the total number of torrent downloads over the past six months and the most popular shared artist in each country. ...]
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Pirates Switch From Torrents to Streaming and Download Sites - TorrentFreak - 1 views

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    " By Ernesto on April 26, 2016 C: 37 News A new report from piracy tracking firm MUSO reveals that the piracy landscape continues to evolve. Pirate sites received a staggering 140 billion visits last year, but there's a clear shift from torrents to direct download and streaming sites. Interestingly, traffic to private trackers remains relatively stable."
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    " By Ernesto on April 26, 2016 C: 37 News A new report from piracy tracking firm MUSO reveals that the piracy landscape continues to evolve. Pirate sites received a staggering 140 billion visits last year, but there's a clear shift from torrents to direct download and streaming sites. Interestingly, traffic to private trackers remains relatively stable."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Chile's New Copyright Legislation Would Make Creative Commons Licensing Impossible For ... - 0 views

    • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.
       
      # ! Copyright to stiffle the right to creation... ()# ! Think that, in fact, every work is always a 'derivative' work...( :/
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    "Techdirt has written many times about the way in which copyright only ever seems to get stronger, and how different jurisdictions point to other examples of excessive copyright to justify making their own just as bad. In Chile, there's an interesting example of that kind of copyright ratchet being applied in the same country but to different domains. It concerns audiovisual works, and aims to give directors, screenwriters and others new rights to "match" those that others enjoy"
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    "Techdirt has written many times about the way in which copyright only ever seems to get stronger, and how different jurisdictions point to other examples of excessive copyright to justify making their own just as bad. In Chile, there's an interesting example of that kind of copyright ratchet being applied in the same country but to different domains. It concerns audiovisual works, and aims to give directors, screenwriters and others new rights to "match" those that others enjoy"
Paul Merrell

The Internet of Things Will Turn Large-Scale Hacks into Real World Disasters | Motherboard - 0 views

  • Disaster stories involving the Internet of Things are all the rage. They feature cars (both driven and driverless), the power grid, dams, and tunnel ventilation systems. A particularly vivid and realistic one, near-future fiction published last month in New York Magazine, described a cyberattack on New York that involved hacking of cars, the water system, hospitals, elevators, and the power grid. In these stories, thousands of people die. Chaos ensues. While some of these scenarios overhype the mass destruction, the individual risks are all real. And traditional computer and network security isn’t prepared to deal with them.Classic information security is a triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. You’ll see it called “CIA,” which admittedly is confusing in the context of national security. But basically, the three things I can do with your data are steal it (confidentiality), modify it (integrity), or prevent you from getting it (availability).
  • So far, internet threats have largely been about confidentiality. These can be expensive; one survey estimated that data breaches cost an average of $3.8 million each. They can be embarrassing, as in the theft of celebrity photos from Apple’s iCloud in 2014 or the Ashley Madison breach in 2015. They can be damaging, as when the government of North Korea stole tens of thousands of internal documents from Sony or when hackers stole data about 83 million customer accounts from JPMorgan Chase, both in 2014. They can even affect national security, as in the case of the Office of Personnel Management data breach by—presumptively—China in 2015. On the Internet of Things, integrity and availability threats are much worse than confidentiality threats. It’s one thing if your smart door lock can be eavesdropped upon to know who is home. It’s another thing entirely if it can be hacked to allow a burglar to open the door—or prevent you from opening your door. A hacker who can deny you control of your car, or take over control, is much more dangerous than one who can eavesdrop on your conversations or track your car’s location. With the advent of the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in general, we've given the internet hands and feet: the ability to directly affect the physical world. What used to be attacks against data and information have become attacks against flesh, steel, and concrete. Today’s threats include hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks, and remotely disabling cars, either when they’re turned off and parked or while they’re speeding down the highway. We’re worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting machines, frozen water pipes through hacked thermostats, and remote murder through hacked medical devices. The possibilities are pretty literally endless. The Internet of Things will allow for attacks we can’t even imagine.
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    Bruce Scneier on the insecurity of the Internet of Things, and possible consequences.
Paul Merrell

Commentary: Don't be so sure Russia hacked the Clinton emails | Reuters - 0 views

  • By James Bamford Last summer, cyber investigators plowing through the thousands of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee uncovered a clue.A user named “Феликс Эдмундович” modified one of the documents using settings in the Russian language. Translated, his name was Felix Edmundovich, a pseudonym referring to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the chief of the Soviet Union’s first secret-police organization, the Cheka.It was one more link in the chain of evidence pointing to Russian President Vladimir Putin as the man ultimately behind the operation.During the Cold War, when Soviet intelligence was headquartered in Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow, Putin was a KGB officer assigned to the First Chief Directorate. Its responsibilities included “active measures,” a form of political warfare that included media manipulation, propaganda and disinformation. Soviet active measures, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin told Army historian Thomas Boghart, aimed to discredit the United States and “conquer world public opinion.”As the Cold War has turned into the code war, Putin recently unveiled his new, greatly enlarged spy organization: the Ministry of State Security, taking the name from Joseph Stalin’s secret service. Putin also resurrected, according to James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, some of the KGB’s old active- measures tactics.&nbsp;On October 7, Clapper issued a statement: “The U.S. Intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” Notably, however, the FBI declined to join the chorus, according to reports by the New York Times and CNBC.A week later, Vice President Joe Biden said on NBC’s Meet the Press that "we're sending a message" to Putin and "it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact." When asked if the American public would know a message was sent, Biden replied, "Hope not."&nbsp;Meanwhile, the CIA was asked, according to an NBC report on October 14, “to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging ‘clandestine’ cyber operation designed to harass and ‘embarrass’ the Kremlin leadership.”But as both sides begin arming their cyberweapons, it is critical for the public to be confident that the evidence is really there, and to understand the potential consequences of a tit-for-tat cyberwar escalating into a real war.&nbsp;
  • This is a prospect that has long worried Richard Clarke, the former White House cyber czar under President George W. Bush. “It’s highly likely that any war that began as a cyberwar,” Clarke told me last year, “would ultimately end up being a conventional war, where the United States was engaged with bombers and missiles.”The problem with attempting to draw a straight line from the Kremlin to the Clinton campaign is the number of variables that get in the way.&nbsp;For one, there is little doubt about Russian cyber fingerprints in various U.S. campaign activities.&nbsp;Moscow, like Washington, has long spied on such matters.&nbsp;The United States, for example, inserted malware in the recent Mexican election campaign. The question isn’t whether Russia spied on the U.S. presidential election, it’s whether it released the election emails.Then there’s the role of Guccifer 2.0, the person or persons supplying WikiLeaks and other organizations with many of the pilfered emails.&nbsp;Is this a Russian agent? A free agent? A cybercriminal? A combination, or some other entity? No one knows.There is also the problem of groupthink that led to the war in Iraq. For example, just as the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the rest of the intelligence establishment are convinced Putin is behind the attacks, they also believed it was a slam-dunk that Saddam Hussein had a trove of weapons of mass destruction.&nbsp;Consider as well the speed of the political-hacking investigation, followed by a lack of skepticism, culminating in a rush to judgment. After the Democratic committee discovered the potential hack last spring, it called in the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in May to analyze the problem.
  • CrowdStrike took just a month or so before it conclusively determined that Russia’s FSB, the successor to the KGB, and the Russian military intelligence organization, GRU, were behind it. Most of the other major cybersecurity firms quickly fell in line and agreed. By October, the intelligence community made it unanimous.&nbsp;That speed and certainty contrasts sharply with a previous suspected Russian hack in 2010, when the target was the Nasdaq stock market. According to an extensive investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014, the NSA and FBI made numerous mistakes over many months that stretched to nearly a year.&nbsp;“After months of work,” the article said, “there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why.”&nbsp; There was no consensus­, with just a 70 percent certainty that the hack was a cybercrime. Months later, this determination was revised again: It was just a Russian attempt to spy on the exchange in order to design its own.&nbsp;The federal agents also considered the possibility that the Nasdaq snooping was not connected to the Kremlin. Instead, “someone in the FSB could have been running a for-profit operation on the side, or perhaps sold the malware to a criminal hacking group.”&nbsp;Again, that’s why it’s necessary to better understand the role of Guccifer 2.0 in releasing the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails before launching any cyberweapons.
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  • t is strange that clues in the Nasdaq hack were very difficult to find ― as one would expect from a professional, state-sponsored cyber operation. Conversely, the sloppy, Inspector Clouseau-like nature of the Guccifer 2.0 operation, with someone hiding behind a silly Bolshevik cover name, and Russian language clues in the metadata, smacked more of either an amateur operation or a deliberate deception.Then there’s the Shadow Brokers, that mysterious person or group that surfaced in August with its farcical “auction” to profit from a stolen batch of extremely secret NSA hacking tools, in essence, cyberweapons. Where do they fit into the picture? They have a small armory of NSA cyberweapons, and they appeared just three weeks after the first DNC emails were leaked.&nbsp;On Monday, the Shadow Brokers released more information, including what they claimed is a list of&nbsp;hundreds of organizations that the NSA has targeted over more than a decade, complete with technical details. This offers further evidence that their information comes from a leaker inside the NSA rather than the Kremlin. The Shadow Brokers also discussed Obama’s threat of cyber retaliation against Russia. Yet they seemed most concerned that the CIA, rather than the NSA or Cyber Command, was given the assignment.&nbsp;This may be a&nbsp;possible indication of a connection to NSA’s elite group, Tailored Access Operations, considered by many the A-Team of hackers.“Why is DirtyGrandpa threating CIA cyberwar with Russia?” they wrote. “Why not threating with NSA or Cyber Command? CIA is cyber B-Team, yes? Where is cyber A-Team?”&nbsp;Because of legal and other factors, the NSA conducts cyber espionage, Cyber Command conducts cyberattacks in wartime, and the CIA conducts covert cyberattacks.&nbsp;
  • The Shadow Brokers connection is important because Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, claimed to have received identical copies of the Shadow Brokers cyberweapons even before they announced their “auction.” Did he get them from the Shadow Brokers, from Guccifer, from Russia or from an inside leaker at the NSA?Despite the rushed, incomplete investigation and unanswered questions, the Obama administration has announced its decision to retaliate against Russia.&nbsp; But a public warning about a secret attack makes little sense. If a major cyber crisis happens in Russia sometime in the future, such as a deadly power outage in frigid winter, the United States could be blamed even if it had nothing to do with it.&nbsp;That could then trigger a major retaliatory cyberattack against the U.S. cyber infrastructure, which would call for another reprisal attack ― potentially leading to Clarke’s fear of a cyberwar triggering a conventional war. President Barack Obama has also not taken a nuclear strike off the table as an appropriate response to a devastating cyberattack.
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    Article by James Bamford, the first NSA whistleblower and author of three books on the NSA.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Tech giants, government struggle with online speech policies | ITworld - 0 views

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    " Officials with Google and State Department are struggling to craft a balanced policy that combats terrorist messages without unduly curbing Internet freedom. By Kenneth Corbin"
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

ICANN: We Won't Pass Judgment on Pirate Sites - TorrentFreak - 0 views

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    " By Andy on July 2, 2016 C: 10 Breaking Following more pressure from rightsholders, domain name oversight body ICANN has again made it clear that it will not act as judge and jury in copyright disputes. In a letter to the president of the Intellectual Property Constituency, ICANN chief Stephen Crocker says that ICANN is neither "required or qualified" to pass judgment in such cases."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Millennials Listen to 75% More Music Than Baby Boomers, Study Finds - 0 views

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    "Data keeps debunking myths about Millennials and their music. Baby Boomers are famously self-important when it comes to the importance of their generation and the music it created. But a new study shows that the 55+ demographic actually listens to substantially less music than their 16-34 cohorts. In fact, Millennials - loosely defined as those born in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s - listen to 75.1% more music on a daily basis, according to data shared this morning with Digital Music News."
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    "Data keeps debunking myths about Millennials and their music. Baby Boomers are famously self-important when it comes to the importance of their generation and the music it created. But a new study shows that the 55+ demographic actually listens to substantially less music than their 16-34 cohorts. In fact, Millennials - loosely defined as those born in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s - listen to 75.1% more music on a daily basis, according to data shared this morning with Digital Music News."
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

"Media: when oligarchs go shopping" - RSF's latest report | RSF - 0 views

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    "It was in Russia that the word "oligarchs" was first used to denote very rich businessmen. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has adopted the term to refer to billionaires who create or take over media empires to serve their business or political interests. There is a worldwide trend towards increasingly concentrated ownership of conglomerates that combine media outlets (TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and news websites) with banks, telecoms, property firms and construction companies. All this suits the rulers of countries such as China that espoused capitalism in order to better suppress democracy. "
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    "It was in Russia that the word "oligarchs" was first used to denote very rich businessmen. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has adopted the term to refer to billionaires who create or take over media empires to serve their business or political interests. There is a worldwide trend towards increasingly concentrated ownership of conglomerates that combine media outlets (TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and news websites) with banks, telecoms, property firms and construction companies. All this suits the rulers of countries such as China that espoused capitalism in order to better suppress democracy. "
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