Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 5, 2020

Six Degrees of Corona – McConnell Edition

Filed under: Politics,Social Networks,Weaponize Data,Weaponized Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 7:08 pm

This post is an extension of Six Degrees of Corona (New OSINT Game) which you should read first.

Six Degrees of Corona – Mitch McConnell Edition

You know the gist of the game from its similarity to six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but where would you find information for McConnell? He has no known movie credits for constructing degrees of separation.

That’s easy enough to fix. Let’s do a short list and see what others add to it:

  1. Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senator from Kentucky – McConnell’s official website. Lots of data on him and people around him. Could do a lot worse as a starting point.
  2. Federal Election Commission – You are looking for major donors, the larger the better. $20 will get you a seat to see McConnell walking away from you. I’d discard anything less than $1K.
  3. Kentucky newspapers (by circulation): The Courier-Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader, Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, Bowling Green Daily News, and, Ashland Independent. All of these will carry news about who met with McConnell, where McConnell appears at during campaigns, fund raisers, etc. (Think co-occurrence searches.)
  4. Campaign events, photograph everyone on stage but also support personnel, who come and go without even being seen. Run image recognition on your photos.

Other sources? Put your thinking hats on!

BTW, I should mention that completing your Six Degrees of Corona – Mitch McConnell edition by reducing the degrees of separation, say by becoming a waiter or busser is cheating. Complete the six degrees of separation.

May 4, 2020

Six Degrees of Corona (New OSINT Game)

Filed under: Open Source Intelligence,Politics,Social Networks,Weaponize Data,Weaponized Open Data — Patrick Durusau @ 3:54 pm

Most of you have heard of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,”

The game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, requires players to link celebrities to Bacon, in as few steps as possible, via the movies they have in common. The more odd or random the celebrity, the better. For example, O.J. Simpson was in “The Naked Gun 33⅓” with Olympia Dukakis, who was in “Picture Perfect” with Kevin Bacon.

Kevin Bacon on ‘Six Degrees’ game: ‘I was horrified’ by Brandon Griggs. March 12, 2014.

The more general case, “six degrees of separation” between any two people in the world is usually shown as:

Generic Six Degress of Separation Diagram

Kevin Bacon is interesting for trivia purposes but he returns only 49K mentions on Twitter today. Compare President Trump grosses ~3.2 million and Joe Biden at ~2.6 million (both exact phrases so didn’t capture nicknames or obcenities).

To make an OSINT game, who are the people you can identify with either Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Those go between #5 and #6, then proceeding from them, who should go between #4 and #5? As you proceed right to left, it requires more digging to fish up people who can provide the bridge.

You will need all your OSINT skills as you compete against others to find the best path to people more popular, or should I say more notorious than Kevin Bacon?

Here are two templates, depending upon your political persuasion to get you started with the Six Degrees of Corona:

Six Degrees of Corona – Trump version.

Six Degrees of Corona – Biden version

Some wag is going to gift us with their deep legal knowledge to proclaim that intentional transmission of a disease is illegal. It’s also a violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. It’s also likely a battery (civil and criminal) in most jurisdictions. None of which is relevant to an OSINT game to sharpen your skills. The choices of images (you can supply your own) is only a matter of motivation.

Feel free to circulate these images or to create your own Six Degrees of Corona OSINT game, substituting other images as you deem appropriate.

PS: My money is on Jared being #5 for Trump. No data science for that opinion but he reeks of the closeness that would transmit most diseases.

May 2, 2020

Michigan: Cosplayers Come In Out Of Rain

Filed under: #DAPL,Politics,Protests — Patrick Durusau @ 4:47 pm

Protest in Michigan answers a lingering question from the 20th century, do ignorant white cosplayers do have enough sense to come in out of the rain?

One of the more popular images from protests at the Michagan State House seems to support the “storming” of the building by armed white folks.

Cosplayer in out of the rain.

The “storming” narrative is sweeping social media, driven by people who are soliciting your money, either now or soon. The problem is none, repeat none of the “storming” narratives is true. They are completely and utterly false! NBC captures what happened in a single paragraph:

As the protests moved indoors from the rainy steps of the Capitol, police took the temperatures of those entering the building using forehead thermometers, according to NBC affiliate WOOD of Grand Rapids.

Hundreds of protesters, some carrying guns in the state Capitol, demonstrate against Michigan’s emergency measures April 30, 2020 by Dartunorro Clark.

Armed white cosplayers, came in out of the rain in Michigan, after having their temperatures checked by the police. Not my idea of “storming” a state capital. Yours?

PS: Yes, police have reacted with extreme violence against unarmed Black Children (Children’s Crusade, Birmingham, AL May 2-3, 1963) and peaceful Native Americans (Standing Rock, for example, 2016-2017), but not against these armed white people. Your point? Over 500 years, white settlers have practiced and refined racism into the warp and woof of North America. Shaming it for being the society they built, one injustice at a time isn’t a winning strategy.

March 23, 2020

#DontRiotAtHome

Filed under: Politics,Protests,Social Sciences — Patrick Durusau @ 1:53 pm

Race Troubles: 109 U.S. Cities Faced Violence in 1967 Over fifty years ago U.S. News and World Report wrote:

More than 100 cities of the U. S. have been hit by Negro violence this year. At least 177 persons have been killed, thousands injured. Property damage has approached 1 billion dollars.

I remember the summer the cities burned. I was puzzled at the time, being 13 years old, why the rioters didn’t attack wealthy sections of town, instead of burning their own?

One explanation of the riots identified this recurrent pattern:

A particular pattern emerged: What usually ignited the powder keg of resentments was police brutality or abuse. Triggering the rioting in Newark was an incident on the hot summer night of July 12 in which police arrested John Smith, an African-American taxi driver, pulling him roughly from his cab during a traffic stop. The cops beat Smith and dragged him into the nearby Fourth Precinct station. Hundreds of residents watched from a large public housing project and an angry crowd quickly gathered outside the police building. A false rumor swirled through the streets that Smith had been killed, adding to the outrage.


The location of riots looks like happenstance, people riot where they are located when a triggering event takes place. In the 1967 riots, those locations were the ghettos where so many Black Americans were imprisoned and remain so to this day.

Data question: What if oppressed people assembled (not marched to) at locations frequented by the owners of government? Say gated communities for instance. If those assemblies were met with police brutality or abuse, would people riot? Any empirical evidence on that question? Asking for a friend.

September 28, 2019

2020 General Election: How Are Your Hacking Skills?

Filed under: Hacking,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 3:53 pm

5 Websites That Teach You How to Hack Legally by Simon Batt.

Despite news stories of hacks ranging from health providers to porn sites, you don’t hear of hacks of members of Congress. There is an off chance that security for congressional IT is that good. That’s possible but I suspect the real answer is most hackers are looking to make money, not political noise.

But the only way to know if congressional IT security is that good, is to develop hacker skills yourself and get hired to test their security.

The websites Batt has collected will give you a jump start on developing the sort of hacking skills you will need to test, with permission, congressional IT. Who knows? You may be able to add congressional websites to the IT hacking news.

Circulate this and encourage others to develop hacking skills so every member of Congress will have the opportunity for their IT security to be tested.

September 26, 2019

Thirty-Two Tips For…Propaganda And Manipulation

Filed under: #DAPL,Environment,Politics,Protests — Patrick Durusau @ 4:30 pm

Thirty-Two Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation by Caitlin Johnstone.

Johnstone in full voice and possibly at her best! Her automatic condemnation of propaganda and manipulation does cause concern.

What if propaganda and manipulation could end the $5.2 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies? (direct and indirect) What if propaganda and manipulation could lead to a non-development economy? Or propaganda and manipulation moving us towards less sexism and racism? Any objectors?

I’ll go first. No objections. What about you?

Society being full of propaganda and manipulation isn’t a recent thing. The slaver “founding fathers” of the United States rather handily manipulated the public into the U.S. farce known as a “democracy.” It is a very long way from any sane definition of democracy. The senate, electoral college, supreme court, wage/wealth gaps, just to name a few of the departures from “democracy.”

Climate news grows worse with every report, while industry plots to use the same techniques that drive climate change to save us, for a price. Now is not the time to be picky about how we enlist others to save themselves and the planet.

Study Johnstone’s list to avoid being manipulated and to perfect your techniques for a worthy cause.

January 24, 2019

What The Hell Happened (2016) – Data Questions

Filed under: Data,Politics,Survey — Patrick Durusau @ 9:12 pm

What The Hell Happened (WTHH)

From the homepage:

Every progressive remembers waking up on November 9th, 2016. The question on everyone’s mind was… “What the hell happened?”

Pundits were quick to blame “identity politics” for Clinton’s loss. Recent research suggests this framing may have led voters to be less supportive of women candidates and candidates of color.

That’s why we’re introducing the What The Hell Happened Project, where we will work with academics, practitioners and advocates to explain the 2018 election from beginning to end.

Let’s cut to the data:

This survey is based on 3,215 interviews of registered voters conducted by YouGov. The sample was weighted according to age, sex, race, education, urban/rural status, partisanship, marital status, and Census region to be nationally representative of 2018 voters according to Catalist, and to a post-election correction consisting of the national two-party vote share. Respondents were selected from YouGov and other opt-in panels to be representative of registered voters. The weights range from 0.28 to 4.6, with a mean of 1 and a standard deviation of 0.53.

The survey dataset includes measures of political participation such as activism, group consciousness, and vote choice. It also includes measures of interest including items from a hostile sexism battery, racial resentment, fear of demographic change, fear of cultural change, and a variety of policy positions. It includes a rich demographic battery of items like age, race, ethnicity, sex, party identification, income, education, and US state. Please see the attached codebook for a full description and coding of the variables in this survey, as well as the toplines for breakdowns of some of the key variables.

The dataset also includes recodes to scale the hostile sexism items to a 0-1 scale of hostile sexism, the racial animus items to a 0-1 scale of racial animus, and the demographic change items to a 0-1 scale of fear of demographic change. See the codebook for more details. We created a two-way vote choice variable to capture Democrat/Republican voting by imputing the vote choice of undecided respondents based on a Catalist partisanship model for those respondents, who comprised about 5% of the sample.

To explore the data we have embedded a Crunchbox, which you can use to easily make crosstabs and charts of the data. Here, you can click around many of the political and demographic items and look around for interesting trends to explore.

If you want a winning candidate in 2020, repeat every morning: Focus on 2020, Focus on 2020.

Your candidate is not running in 2016 or even 2018.

And, your candidate needs better voter data than WTHH offers here.

First, how was the data gathered?

Respondents were selected from YouGov and other opt-in panels to be representative of registered voters.

Yikes! That’s not how professional pollers do surveys. It may be ok for learning analysis tools but not for serious political forecasting.

Second, what manipulation, if any, of the data, has been performed?

The sample was weighted according to age, sex, race, education, urban/rural status, partisanship, marital status, and Census region to be nationally representative of 2018 voters according to Catalist, and to a post-election correction consisting of the national two-party vote share.

Oh. So we don’t know what biases or faults the weighting process may have introduced to the data. Great.

How were the questions constructed and tested?

Don’t know. (Without this step we don’t know what the question may or may not be measuring.)

How many questions were asked? (56)

Fifty-six questions. Really?

In the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy’s staff has a matrix of 480 voter types and 52 issue clusters.

Do you see such a matrix coming out of 56 questions? Neither do I.

The WTHH data is interesting in an amateurish sort of way but winning in 2020 requires the latest data gathering and modeling techniques. Not to mention getting voters to the polling places (modeling a solution for registered but non-voting voters would be a real plus). Your Secretary of State should have prior voting behavior records.

December 5, 2018

Open Letter to NRCC Hackers

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Government,Hacking,Politics,Wikileaks — Patrick Durusau @ 11:04 am

We have never met or communicated but I wanted to congratulate you on the hack of top NRCC officials in 2018. Good show!

I’m sure you remember the drip-drip-drip release technique used by Wikileads with the Clinton emails. I had to check the dates but the first batch was in early October 2016, before the presidential election in November 2016.

The weekly release cycle, with the prior publicity concerning the leak, kept both alternative and mainstream media on the edge of climaxing every week. Even though the emails themselves were mostly office gossip and pettiness found in any office email system.

The most obvious target event for weekly drops of the NRCC emails is the 2020 election but that is subject to change.

Please consider the Wikileaks partial release tactic, which transformed office gossip into front-page news, when you select a target event for releasing the NRCC emails.

Your public service in damaging the NRCC will go unrewarded but not unappreciated. Once again, good show!

November 15, 2018

Before You Make a Thing [Technology and Society]

Filed under: Computer Science,Ethics,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 10:55 am

Before You Make a Thing: some tips for approaching technology and society by Jentery Sayers.

From the webpage:

This is a guide for Technology and Society 200 (Fall 2018; 60 undergraduate students) at the University of Victoria. It consists of three point-form lists. The first is a series of theories and concepts drawn from assigned readings, the second is a rundown of practices corresponding with projects we studied, and the third itemizes prototyping techniques conducted in the course. All are intended to distill material from the term and communicate its relevance to project design and development. Some contradiction is inevitable. Thank you for your patience.

An extraordinary summary of the Prototyping Pasts + Futures class, whose description reads:

An offering in the Technology and Society minor at UVic, this course is about the entanglement of Western technologies with society and culture. We’ll examine some histories of these entanglements, discuss their effects today, and also speculate about their trajectories. One important question will persist throughout the term: How can and should we intervene in technologies as practices? Rather than treating technologies as tools we use or objects we examine from the outside, we’ll prototype with and through them as modes of inquiry. You’ll turn patents into 3-D forms, compose and implement use scenarios, “datify” old tech, and imagine a device you want to see in the world. You’ll document your research and development process along the way, reflect on what you learned, present your prototypes and findings, and also build a vocabulary of keywords for technology and society. I will not assume that you’re familiar with fields such as science and technology studies, media studies, critical design, or experimental art, and the prototyping exercises will rely on low-tech approaches. Technical competency required: know how to send an email.

Deeply impressive summary of the “Theories and Concepts,” “Practices,” and “Prototyping Techniques” from Prototyping Pasts + Futures.

Whether you want a benign impact of your technology or are looking to put a fine edge on it, this is the resource for you!

Not to mention learning a great deal that will help you better communicate to clients the probable outcomes of their requests.

Looking forward to spending some serious time with these materials.

Enjoy!

October 13, 2018

“Oh I wish that I could be Melania Trump [Richard Cory]”

Filed under: Feminism,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 2:24 pm

Among the shallow outpourings of scorn on Melania Trump, Arwa Mahdawi‘s Melania Trump claims of victimhood have a hollow ring, is representative of the rest.

Consider this snippet from her post:

…
In an interview with ABC News, the first lady said, “I support the women and they need to be heard” but added that if they come forward as victims they must “show the evidence”. Unfortunately, Melania did not elaborate on what sort of evidence she considers acceptable. Might she accept, for example, a tape of her husband boasting about grabbing women’s crotches without their consent?

Despite her immense advocacy for women, I’m sorry to report that Melania feels let down by the sisterhood. “I could say I’m the most bullied person in the world,” she said in her interview.

Listen, I support the Melanias and they need to be heard, but if you’re going to come forward as a victim, you must show the evidence. And right now all the evidence seems to point at the first lady being just as morally bankrupt as the president and deserving every ounce of criticism she attracts. If you do feel any spark of sympathy for Melania, I suggest you redirect your attention to the thousands of migrant children the Trump administration has kidnapped.
…

As far as Melania’s “show the evidence” comment, in context she clearly says that the media, emphasis on the media, goes too far when someone says they have been assaulted. Not quite the same impression as you get from Mahdawi’s account.

Melania may have been sexually abused or assaulted and being unable to “show the evidence,” she has suffered in silence along with millions of women around the world. If speaking out without evidence makes your life worse, then her advice may not be too far off the mark.

If she has abuse issues in her past, like any other survivor, she has an absolute right to speak or NOT speak about her prior abuse. Neither Mahdawi nor anyone else has the right to demand Melania shed her personal privacy so they can judge her legitimacy.

It’s not clear what Mahdawi find surprising about:

I could say I’m the most bullied person in the world

A question was asked and Melania answered. What other source of information would you use to judge a person’s view of the world?

Mahdawi’s projection of an imaginary world that Melania occupies reminds me of Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson, re-written by Paul Simon as Paul Simon – Richard Cory Lyrics, which reads in part:

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town
with political connections to spread his wealth around
born into society a banker’s only child
He had everything a man could want power, grace and style
But I work in his factory and I curse the life I’m living
and I curse my poverty and I wish that I could be
Oh I wish that I could be, Oh I wish that I could be Richard Cory

…

oh he surely must be happy with everything he’s got

…

“Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head.”

In Mahdawi’s imaginary world projection, Melania is not bullied by Trump and his band-of-sycophants. Nor has she paid a high price reach her present position and/or to remain there. Mahdawi is welcome to her fiction, but it’s not a valid basis for judging the words or actions of Melania Trump.

Spend less time fantasying about the First Lady and more on bringing the Trump administration to an end.

PS: To help you remember this lesson in the future:

October 11, 2018

Morally Blind Reporting – 32 million Muslim Dead vs. Trade Secrets

Filed under: Government,News,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 2:17 pm

You don’t need citations from me to know bias in news coverage is all the rage these days. But there is precious little discussion of what is meant by “bias,” other than the speaker knowing it when they see it.

Here’s my example of morally blind (biased) news reporting or the lack thereof:

“Yanjun Xu, a high-ranking director in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the country’s counter-intelligence and foreign intelligence agency…” was arrested for alleged economic espionage and attempts to steal trade secrets in the United States.

You will see much hand wringing and protests of how necessary such a step was to protect American companies and their trade secrets. Add in a dash of prejudice against China and indignation that a nation of thieves (the U.S.) should be stolen from by others and you complete the scene.

When you find stories about Yanjun Xu, check the same sources for reporting on U.S. responsibility for 32 million Muslim dead since 9/11.

In any moral calculus worthy of the name “moral,” surely the deaths of millions are more important than the intellectual property rights of U.S. industries. Yes?

The value U.S. news organizations place on Muslim deaths versus theft of trade secrets is made self-evident by their reporting.

I don’t want to re-live the 1960’s where people dying were a daily staple of the evening news (even then it was almost always Americans). However, fair and balanced reporting does not exist when millions perish without every man, woman and child being made aware of it on a daily basis. Along with the lack of even a flimsy excuse for their murders.

The U.S. media can start by televising the nearly daily murder of protesters in Gaza and work their way out from there. Close-ups, talk to families, bring the cruelty the U.S. is financing into our living rooms. Sicken us with our own inhumanity.

PS: Don’t bother commenting the media lacks access, permission, etc. If you want to be butt-puppets of government, say so, don’t sully the title reporter.

August 1, 2018

Printable Guns – When Censorship Fails

Filed under: 3D Printing,Government,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 7:24 pm

It’s always nice when censorship fails. If you think about it for a minute, there were several places this AM where printable guns could be downloaded.

In anticipation that you will find unlooked for places with 3D printable gun designs, these may be useful resources:

20 Best 3D Printing Software Tools of 2018 (All Are Free)

20 Best Free STL File Viewer Tools of 2018

Before you try firing a printed gun, be sure to read 2018 3D Printed Gun Report – All You Need to Know very carefully.

There are reasons why no known military force uses 3D printed guns. Failure of the weapon and injury to its operator are two of them.

Interest in 3D printed guns has the potential to drive the market for better and cheaper 3D printers, as well as faster development of the technology.

All in all, not a bad result.

July 31, 2018

Assassination Market Clickbait

Filed under: CryptoCurrency,Government,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 3:46 pm

The First Augur Assassination Markets Have Arrived by David Floyd.

From the post:

“Killed, not die of natural causes or accidents.”

Pretty much everyone saw them coming, but it was no less disturbing when assassination markets actually began to appear on Augur, a decentralized protocol for betting on the outcomes of real-world events and that launched two weeks ago on ethereum.

The markets – which allow users to bet on the fates of prominent politicians, entrepreneurs and celebrities – in some cases explicitly specify assassination, as the quote above shows. (CoinDesk is intentionally not providing links to these markets or naming the individuals concerned.)

In addition to targeting individuals, some markets offer bets on whether mass shootings and terrorist attacks with certain minimum numbers of casualties will occur.

…

By creating a market for an assassination and placing a large “no” bet (actually, selling shares in the outcome), an individual or group could in effect place a bounty on the targeted person. The would-be assassin could then place a bet on “yes” (buy shares) and manipulate the outcome, to put it delicately.

…

An Augur assassination markets sounds like a way to democratize murder. Governments spend $billions every year killing people with their citizens exercising little or no influence of the choice of murder targets. An assassination market has the potential for a more democratic process. Or so it would seem.

The first thing you need is an Ethereum wallet. I choose a FireFox browser extension called MetaMask, but there are others, The Top 10 Best Ethereum Wallets (2018 Edition) by Sudhir Khatwani.

Next up, the Augur app. (GitHub) Augur isn’t long on documentation for the beginning users so here are screen shots and text about my installation process.

  1. I used sudo dpkg -i linux-Augur-1.0.7.deb, encountered dependency issues and so then ran apt-get install -f.

    OK, first screen shot, the default screen when I started Augur from the panel bar:

    I accepted all of the defaults, saved the configuration.

  2. After selecting connect, with the default configuration values, this is the next screen:

    As you can tell by the % meter, this is going to take a while. I didn’t time it precisely but would guess it is 90 minutes or longer to synch up.

  3. You probably don’t have to wait as long as I did but when it was over 99% synched, I connected with the Augur app:

  4. I should have expected it, next was the scroll down agreement to activate the checkbox and then agree to terms window, which in part reads:

    Right! I’ve taken numerous steps to conceal both my identity and activity, so sure, I’m going to try to tag Augus in court if something goes sideways.

    Sigh, old habits die hard. 😉

  5. The Augur default homepage (in part only):

    Then you choose “MARKETS” in the upper left-hand corner and look for assasinations.

A lot of installing to realize the reason why:

(CoinDesk is intentionally not providing links to these markets or naming the individuals concerned.)

There’s only one (1) such market and it has only one target, without any “no” money. As you might suspect, it’s the fav of all late night talk show hosts:

I don’t regret installing the new tools but was disappointed by the “assassination market clickbait” approach.

PS: Putin doesn’t even make my top 100. You?

July 22, 2018

Universal Feminine Hygiene

Filed under: Feminism,Government,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 6:30 pm

It’s Not Just the Tampon Tax: Why Periods Are Political by By Karen Zraick reminded me to post a “progressive” proposal on feminine hygiene products.

Removing taxes on feminine hygiene products is a step in the right direction but why not go all the way and make those products universally available, at no cost?

The existing distribution chain for feminine hygiene products needs only a few minor tweaks to make that possible. Here’s my solution in three steps:

  1. Retailers provide feminine hygiene products to any customer, free of charge.
  2. Customers are free to choose any brand or type of feminine hygiene product.
  3. Retailers have a tax credit equal to feminine hygiene products distributed, at their retail “price.”

Charging customers for feminine hygiene products, directly or indirectly becomes illegal and states/localities are forbidden from limiting or regulating such sales in anyway.

A direct benefit to all women that preserves their freedom of choice of products. It re-uses existing distribution systems, without any additional forms or paperwork.

Share this with progressives seeking public office.

June 26, 2018

Reading While White

Filed under: Bias,News,Politics,Texts — Patrick Durusau @ 12:54 pm

40 Ways White People Say ‘White People’ Without Actually Saying ‘White People’ came up on my Facebook feed. I don’t think people of color need any guidance on when “white people” is being said without saying “white people.” They have a lifetime of experience detecting it.

On the other hand, “white people” have a lifetime of eliding over when someone says “white people” without using those precise terms.

What follows is a suggestion of a tool that may assist white readers in detecting when “white people” is being said, but not in explicit terms.

Download the sed script, reading-while-white.txt and Remarks by President Trump at Protecting American Workers Roundtable (save as HTML page) to test the script.

Remember to chmod on the sed script, then:

reading-while-white.sed remarks-president-trump-protecting-american-workers-roundtable > reading.while.white.roundtable.html

The top of the document should read:

The replacement text will appear as:

and,

I use “white people” to replace all implied uses of white people and preserve the text as written in the following parentheses.

Hard coded for HTML format of White House pages but just reform the <h1> line to apply to other sites.

Places to apply Reading While White:

  1. CNN
  2. Fox News
  3. The Guardian
  4. National Public Radio
  5. New York Times
  6. Wall Street Journal
  7. Washington Post

Save your results! Share them with your friends!

Educate white readers about implied “white people!”

I’m looking for an easier way to share such transformations in a browser.

Do you know of a browser project that does NOT enforce a stylesheet and file having to originate from the same source? That would make a great viewer for such transformations. (Prohibited in most browsers as a “security” issue. Read “content provider in control” for “security” and you come closer to the mark.)

June 16, 2018

Thumbprint Loans @ Post Offices?

Filed under: Government,Politics,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 12:32 pm

In case you haven’t heard, payday loans are the ban of the poor. Aboutpayday.com

I created a graphic that captures the essential facts of a thumbprint loan proposal, which I suggest locating at US Post offices.

The essence of the proposal is to eliminate all the paperwork for government sponsored payday loans at prime plus 1% simple interest.

To do that, all that is required for a loan is a thumbprint. That’s it. No name, location, where your job is located, etc.

When paid, users can choose to create a credit history for their thumbprint, or, have it deleted from the system. Users who create a credit history can build up a record in order to borrow larger than base amounts, or to create a credit history for export to more conventional lenders.

When I first starting thinking about this proposal, I envisioned interactions with Post Office personnel but even that is unnecessary. Thumbprint loans could be wholly automated, up to and including dispersal of cash. That has the added feature of not being limited to post office hours of operation.

A rough sketch to be sure but reducing the APR of payday loans by 791% to 532% for 24 million Americans is worth being on the national agenda.

May 21, 2018

Contrived Russian Facebook Ad Data

Filed under: Data Preservation,Data Quality,Data Science,Facebook,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 2:16 pm

When I first read about: Facebook Ads: Exposing Russia’s Effort to Sow Discord Online: The Internet Research Agency and Advertisements, a release of alleged Facebook ads, by Democrats of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I should have just ignored it.

But any number of people whose opinions I respect, seem deadly certain that Facebook ads, purchased by Russians, had a tipping impact on the 2016 presidential election. At least I should look at the purported evidence offered by House Democrats. The reporting I have seen on the release indicates at best skimming of the data, if it is read at all.

It wasn’t until I started noticing oddities in a sample of the data that I cleaned that the full import of:

Redactions Completed at the Direction of Ranking Member of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

That statement appears in every PDF file. Moreover, if you check the properties of any of the PDF files, you will find a creation date in May of 2018.

I had been wondering why Facebook would deliver ad data to Congress as PDF files. Just seemed odd, something nagging in the back of my mind. Terribly inefficient way to deliver ad data.

The “redaction” notice and creation dates make it clear that the so-called Facebook ad PDFs, are wholly creations of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and not Facebook.

I bring that break in the data chain because without knowing the content of the original data from Facebook, there is no basis for evaluating the accuracy of the data being delivered by Congressional Democrats. It may or may not bear any resemblance to the data from Facebook.

Rather than a blow against whoever the Democrats think is responsible, this is a teaching moment about the provenance of data. If there is a gap, such as the one here, the only criteria for judging the data is do you like the results? If so, it’s good data, if not, then it’s bad data.

Why so-called media watch-dogs on “fake news” and mis-information missed such an elementary point isn’t clear. Perhaps you should ask them.

While cleaning the data for October of 2016, my suspicions were re-enforced by the following:

Doesn’t it strike you as odd that both the exclusion targets and ad targets are the same? Granting it’s only seven instances in this one data sample of 135 ads, but that’s enough for me to worry about the process of producing the files in question.

If you decide to invest any time in this artifice of congressional Democrats, study the distribution of the so-called ads. I find it less than credible that August of 2017 had one ad placed by (drum roll), the Russians! FYI, July 2017 had only seven.

Being convinced the Facebook ad files from Congress are contrived representations with some unknown relationship to Facebook data, I abandoned the idea of producing a clean data set.

Resources:

PDFs produced by Congress, relationship to Facebook data unknown.

Cleaned July, 2015 data set by Patrick Durusau.

Text of all the Facebook ads (uncleaned), September 2015 – August 2017 (missing June – 2017) by Patrick Durusau. (1.2 MB vs. their 8 GB.)

Seriously pursuit of any theory of ads influencing the 2016 presidential election, has the following minimal data requirements:

  1. All the Facebook content posted for the relevant time period.
  2. Identification of paid ads and by what group, organization, government they were placed.

Assuming that data is available, similarity measures of paid versus user content and measures of exposure should be undertaken.

Notice that none of the foregoing “prove” influence on an election. Those are all preparatory steps towards testing theories of influence and on who, to what extent?

April 29, 2018

Processing “Non-Hot Mike” Data (Audio Processing for Data Scientists)

Filed under: Ethics,Politics,Privacy,Speech Recognition — Patrick Durusau @ 6:32 pm

A “hot mike” is one that is transmitting your comments, whether you know the mike is activated or not.

For example, a “hot mike” in 2017 caught this jewel:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the European Union “crazy” at a private meeting with the leaders of four Central European countries, unaware that a microphone was transmitting his comments to reporters outside.

“The EU is the only association of countries in the world that conditions the relations with Israel, that produces technology and every area, on political conditions. The only ones! Nobody does it. It’s crazy. It’s actually crazy. There is no logic here,” Netanyahu said Wednesday in widely reported remarks.

Netanyahu was meeting with the leaders of Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland, known as the Visegrad Group.

The microphone was switched off after about 15 minutes, according to reports.
…

A common aspect of “hot mike” comments is the speaker knew the microphone was present, but assumed it was turned off. In “hot mike” cases, the speaker is known and the relevance of their comments usually obvious.

But what about “non-hot mike” comments? That is comments made by a speaker with no sign of a microphone?

Say casual conversation in a restaurant, at a party, in a taxi, in a conversation at home or work, or anywhere in between?

Laws governing the interception of conversations are vast and complex so before processing any conversation data you suspect to be intercepted, seek legal counsel. This post assumes you have been properly cautioned and chosen to proceed with processing conversation data.

Royal Jain, in Intro to audio processing world for a Data scientist, begins a series of posts to help bridge the gap between NLP and speech/audio processing. Jain writes:

Coming from NLP background I had difficulties in understanding the concepts of speech/audio processing even though a lot of underlying science and concepts were the same. This blog series is an attempt to make the transition easier for people having similar difficulties. The First part of this series describes the feature space which is used by most machine learning/deep learning models.
…

Looking forward to more posts in this series!

Data science ethics advocates will quickly point out that privacy concerns surround the interception of private conversations.

They’re right!

But when the privacy in question belows to those who plan, fund and execute regime-change wars, killing hundreds of thousands and making refugees out of millions more, generally increasing human misery on a global scale, I have an answer to the ethics question. My question is one of risk assessment.

You?

April 25, 2018

Breaking Non-News: Twitter Has Echo Chambers (Co-Occupancy of Echo Chambers)

Filed under: Politics,Social Media,Social Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 9:55 am

Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship by Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, Michael Mathioudakis.

Abstract:

Echo chambers, i.e., situations where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own, are an increasing concern for the political discourse in many democratic countries. This paper studies the phenomenon of political echo chambers on social media. We identify the two components in the phenomenon: the opinion that is shared (‘echo’), and the place that allows its exposure (‘chamber’ — the social network), and examine closely at how these two components interact. We define a production and consumption measure for social-media users, which captures the political leaning of the content shared and received by them. By comparing the two, we find that Twitter users are, to a large degree, exposed to political opinions that agree with their own. We also find that users who try to bridge the echo chambers, by sharing content with diverse leaning, have to pay a ‘price of bipartisanship’ in terms of their network centrality and content appreciation. In addition, we study the role of ‘gatekeepers’, users who consume content with diverse leaning but produce partisan content (with a single-sided leaning), in the formation of echo chambers. Finally, we apply these findings to the task of predicting partisans and gatekeepers from social and content features. While partisan users turn out relatively easy to identify, gatekeepers prove to be more challenging.

This is an interesting paper from a technical perspective, especially their findings on gatekeepers, but political echo chambers in Twitter is hardly surprising. Nor are political echo chambers new.

SourceWatch has a limited (time wise) history of echo chambers and attributes the creation of echo chambers to conservatives:

…conservatives pioneered the “echo chamber” technique,…

Amusing but I would not give conservatives that much credit.

Consider the echo chambers created by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) versus the Guardian (formerly National Guardian, published in New York City), a Marxist publication, in the 1960’s.

Or the differing content read by pro verus anti-war activists in the same time period. Or racists versus pro-integration advocates. Or pro versus anti Row v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (more) 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147, 1973 U.S. LEXIS 159) supporters.

Echo chambers existed before the examples I have listed but those are sufficient to show echo chambers are not new, despite claims by those who missed secondary education history classes.

The charge of “echo chamber” by SourceWatch, for example, carries with it an assumption that information delivered via an “echo chamber” is false, harmful, etc., versus their information, which leads to the truth, light and the American way. (Substitute whatever false totems you have for “the American way.”)

I don’t doubt the sincerity SourceWatch. I doubt approaching others saying “…you need to crawl out from under your rock so I can enlighten you with the truth” leads to a reduction in echo chambers.

Becoming a gatekeeper, with a foot in two or more echo chambers won’t reduce the number of echo chambers either. But that does have the potential to have gateways between echo chambers.

You’ve tried beating on occupants of other echo chambers with little or no success. Why not try co-occupying their echo chambers for a while?

April 24, 2018

Western Press Definition of “Disinformation”

Filed under: Journalism,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 9:09 am

The debunking of claims of a chemical weapons attack in Syria by award winning journalist Robert Fisk, is the most fresh evidence “disinformation” is entirely a matter of perspective.

All the major media channels dutifully repeated the false/no-evidence claims of gas attacks in Syria. The same media channels that decry “disinformation,” and call for censoring for non-traditional news sources.

“Disinformation,” means claims, truthful or not, unsanctioned by a Western government.*

To counter attempts to discount the reporting by Fisk, consider the recitation of awards over his career by Wikipedia:

…
Fisk has received the British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times, and twice won its “Reporter of the Year” award. He also received Amnesty International UK Media Awards in 1992 for his report “The Other Side of the Hostage Saga”, in 1998 for his reports from Algeria and again in 2000 for his articles on the NATO air campaign against the FRY in 1999.

  • 1984 Lancaster University honorary degree
  • 1991 Jacob’s Award for coverage of the Gulf War on RTÉ Radio 1
  • 1999 Orwell Prize for journalism
  • 2001 David Watt Prize for an investigation of the 1915 Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire
  • 2002 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism
  • 2003 Open University honorary doctorate
  • 2004 University of St Andrews honorary degree
  • 2004 Carleton University honorary degree
  • 2005 Adelaide University Edward Said Memorial lecture
  • 2006 Ghent University honorary degree Political and Social Sciences
  • 2006 American University of Beirut honorary degree
  • 2006 Queen’s University Belfast honorary degree
  • 2006 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize worth $350,000
  • 2008 University of Kent honorary degree
  • 2008 Trinity College Dublin honorary doctorate
  • 2009 College Historical Society’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse
  • 2009 Liverpool Hope University honorary degree
  • 2011 International Prize at the Amalfi Coast Media Awards, Italy

…

*I don’t automatically credit claims by non-Western governments. There is no evidence to show non-Western governments are more prone to lie than Western governments. All governments, Western and non-Western lie.

Anyone worthy of the title “journalist” who doesn’t start with that premise has already betrayed the reading public.

March 23, 2018

BaseX 9.0 – The Spring Edition – 229 Days to US Mid-Term Elections

Filed under: BaseX,Politics,XML,XQuery — Patrick Durusau @ 7:32 pm

Christian Grün writes:

We are very happy to announce the release of BaseX 9.0!

The new version of our XML database system and XQuery 3.1 processor includes some great new features and a vast number of minor improvements and optimizations. It’s both the usage of BaseX in productive environments as well as the valuable feedback of our open source users that make BaseX better and better, and that allow and motivate us to keep going. Thanks to all of you!

Along with the new release, we invite you to visit our relaunched homepage: http://basex.org/.

Java 8 is now required to run BaseX. The most prominent features of Version 9.0 are:
…

Sorry! No spoilers here! Grab a copy of BaseX 9.0 and read Christian’s post for the details.

Take 229 days until the US mid-term elections (November 6, 2018) as fair warning that email leaks are possible (likely?) between now and election day.

The better your skills with BaseX, the better change you have to interfere with, sorry, participate in the 2018 election cycle.

Good luck to us all!

March 11, 2018

Phishing, The 43% Option

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Politics,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 2:54 pm

How’s that for a motivational poster?

You can, and some do, spend hours plumbing in the depths of code or chip design for vulnerabilities.

Or, you can look behind door #2, the phishing door, and find 43% of data breaches start with phishing.

Phishing doesn’t have the glamor or prestige of finding a Meltdown or Spectre bug.

But, on the other hand, do you want to breach a congressional email account for the 2018 mid-term election, or for the 2038 election?

Just so you know, no rumors of breached congressional email accounts have surfaced, at least not yet.

Ping me if you see any such news.

PS: The tweet points to: https://qz.com/998949/can-you-outwit-a-hacker/, an ad for AT&T.

Spreading “Fake News,” Science Says It Wasn’t Russian Bots

Filed under: Fake News,Politics,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 2:04 pm

The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. (Science 09 Mar 2018: Vol. 359, Issue 6380, pp. 1146-1151 DOI: 10.1126/science.aap9559)

Abstract:

We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Real data science. The team had access to all the Twitter data and not a cherry-picked selection, which of course can’t be shared due to Twitter rules, or so say ISIS propaganda scholars.

The paper merits a slow read but highlights for the impatient:

  1. Don’t invest in bots or high-profile Twitter users for the 2018 mid-term elections.
  2. Craft messages with a high novelty factor that disfavor your candidates opponents.
  3. Your messages should inspire fear, disgust and surprise.

Democrats working hard to lose the 2018 mid-terms will cry you a river about issues, true facts, engagement on the issues and a host of other ideas used to explain losses to losers.

There’s still time to elect a progressive Congress in 2018.

Are you game?

February 26, 2018

#7 Believing that information leads to action (Myth of Liberals)

Filed under: Advertising,Persuasion,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 3:29 pm

Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change

Slides from Stanford University’s Persuasive Tech Lab, http://captology.stanford.edu.

A great resource whether you are promoting a product, service or trying to “interfere” with an already purchased election.

I have a special fondness for mistake #7 on the slides:

Believing that information leads to action

If you want to lose the 2018 mid-terms or even worse, the presidential election in 2020, you keep believing in “educating” voters.

Ping me if you want to be a winning liberal.

February 20, 2018

The EFF, Privilege, Revolution

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Politics,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 8:57 pm

The Revolution and Slack by Gennie Gebhart and Cindy Cohn.

From the post:

The revolution will not be televised, but it may be hosted on Slack. Community groups, activists, and workers in the United States are increasingly gravitating toward the popular collaboration tool to communicate and coordinate efforts. But many of the people using Slack for political organizing and activism are not fully aware of the ways Slack falls short in serving their security needs. Slack has yet to support this community in its default settings or in its ongoing design.

We urge Slack to recognize the community organizers and activists using its platform and take more steps to protect them. In the meantime, this post provides context and things to consider when choosing a platform for political organizing, as well as some tips about how to set Slack up to best protect your community.
…

Great security advice for organizers and activists who choose to use Slack.

But let’s be realistic about “revolution.” The EFF, community organizers and activists who would use Slack, are by definition, not revolutionaries.

How else would you explain the pantheon of legal cases pursued by the EFF? When the EFF lost, did it seek remedies by other means? Did it take illegal action to protect/avenge injured innocents?

Privilege is what enables people to say, “I’m using the law to oppose to X,” while other people are suffering the consequences of X.

Privilege holders != revolutionaries.

FYI any potential revolutionaries: If “on the Internet, no one knows your a dog,” it’s also true “no one knows you are a government agent.”

February 14, 2018

Russian Influence! Russian Influence! Get Your Russian Influence Here!

Filed under: Journalism,News,Politics,Reporting,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 3:54 pm

Twitter deleted 200,000 Russian troll tweets. Read them here. by Ben Popken (NBC News)

From the post:

NBC News is publishing its database of more than 200,000 tweets that Twitter has tied to “malicious activity” from Russia-linked accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

These accounts, working in concert as part of large networks, pushed hundreds of thousands of inflammatory tweets, from fictitious tales of Democrats practicing witchcraft to hardline posts from users masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators have traced the accounts to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit founded in 2013 known as the Internet Research Association (IRA). The organization has been assessed by the U.S. Intelligence Community to be part of a Russian state-run effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential race. And they’re not done.

“There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 US midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday.
…

Wow!

What’s really amazing is that NBC keeps up the narrative of “Russian influence” while publishing data to the contrary!

No, I confess I haven’t read all 200K tweets but then neither has NBC, if they read any of them at all.

Download tweets.csv. (NBC link) (Don’t worry, I’ve stored a copy elsewhere should that one disappear.)

On Unix, try this: head -100 tweets.csv | awk -F "," '{ print $8 }' > 100-tweets.txt

The eight field of the csv file containing the text in each tweet.

Walk with me through the shadow of Russian influence and see how you feel:

  1. “RT @LibertyBritt: He’s the brilliant guy who shoots himself in the foot to spite his face. And tries to convince us to do it too. https:/…”
  2. “RT @K1erry: The Marco Rubio knockdown of Elizabeth Warren no liberal media outlet will cover https://t.co/Rh391fEXe3”
  3. “Obama on Trump winning: ‘Anything’s possible’ https://t.co/MjVMZ5TR8Y #politics”
  4. “RT @bgg2wl: Walmart
  5. “it’s impossible! #TexasJihad”
  6. “RT @LibsNoFun: Who will wave the flag? #DayWithoutImmigrants https://t.co/Cn6JKqzE6X”
  7. “Bewaffnete attackieren Bus mit koptischen Christen #Islamisten #ISIS
  8. “”
  9. “The bright example of our failing education https://t.co/DgboGgkgVj”
  10. “@sendavidperdue How are they gonna protect us if they just let a bunch of terrorist walk the cities of our city? #StopIslam #IslamKills”

Only ten “Russian influence” tweets and I’m already thinking about vodka. You?

Let’s try another ten:

  1. “FC Barcelonas youth academy! La Masia doin work! Double tap for these little guys! https://t.co/eo1qIvLjgS”
  2. “When I remember it’s #Friyay https://t.co/yjBTsaFaR2”
  3. “RT @Ladydiann2: Remove these Anti Americans from America enough is enough abuse American freedoms how dare you low lives https://t.co/G44E6…”
  4. “RT @BreitbartNews: This week’s “”Sweden incident.”” https://t.co/EINMeA9R2T”
  5. “RT @alisajoy331: Prayer sent Never stop fighting💔 https://t.co/B9Tno5REjm”
  6. “RT @RossMoorhouse: #ItsRiskyTo
  7. “”
  8. “RT @RedState: The KKK Says A&E Producers Tried to Stage Fake Scenes for Cancelled Documentary https://t.co/HwaebG2rdI”
  9. “RT @hldb73: Bryan or Ryan Adams #whenthestarsgoblue #RejectedDebateTopics @WorldOfHashtags @TheRyanAdams @bryanadams https://t.co/wFBdne8K…”
  10. “RT @WorldTruthTV: #mutual #respect https://t.co/auIjJ2RdBU”

Well comrade. Do you feel any different about the motherland? I don’t. Let’s read some more of her tweets!

  1. “tired of kids how to get rid #SearchesGoogleIsAshamedOf”
  2. “RT @crookedwren: “”Praise be to the Lord
  3. “RT @deepscreenshots: https://t.co/1IuHuiAIJB”
  4. “Kareem Abdul Jabber #OneLetterOffSports @midnight #HashtagWars”
  5. “#God can be realized through all paths. All #religions…”
  6. “RT @RawStory: ‘Star Wars’ Han Solo movie to begin production in January https://t.co/bkZq7F7IkD”
  7. “RT @KStreetHipster: Hamner-Brown is already on its way here. It’s been on it’s way for billions of years. #KSHBC https://t.co/TQh86xN3pJ”
  8. “RT @TrumpSuperPAC: Obama’s a Muslim & this video from @FoxNews proves it! Even @CNN admits Obama’s training protesters/jihadists! #MAGA htt…”
  9. “RT @schotziejlk: .@greta Who is your #SuperBowl favorite?”
  10. “RT @LefLaneLivin: @trueblackpower As Black People we need to Support

I’m going to change my middle name to Putin out of respect for our glorious leader!

Is it respectful to get a Putin tatoo on your hiney?

(Recovers from Russian influence)

This is NBC’s damning proof of Russian influence. Like I said at the beginning, Wow!

As in Wow! how dumb.

OK, to be fair, any tweet set will have a lot of trash in it and grepping for Clinton/clinton and Trump/trump returns 20,893 for Clinton and 49,669 for Trump.

I haven’t checked but liberals talking about Clinton/Trump pre-election ran about 2 1/2 times more mentions of Trump than Clinton. (Odd way to run a campaign.)

So, the usual grep/head, etc. and the first ten “Clinton” tweets are:

  1. “Clinton: Trump should’ve apologized more
  2. “RT @thomassfl: Wikileaks E-Mails:  Hillary Clinton Blackmailed Bernie Sanders https://t.co/l9X32FegV6.”
  3. “Clinton’s VP Choice: More Harm Than Good https://t.co/iGnLChFHeP”
  4. “Hillary Clinton vows to fight
  5. “RT @Rammer_Jammer84: I don’t know about Hilary Clinton having a body double but it’s super weird that she came out by herself considering s…”
  6. “RT @Darren32895836: After Hillary Clinton Caught 4attempting 2take advantage of Americans hardships &tears changes Strat #PrayForFlorida ht…”
  7. “RT @steph93065: Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump’s Veterans Press Conference ‘Disgraceful’ – Breitbart https://t.co/CVvBOrTJBX”
  8. “RT @DianeRainie1: Hey @HillaryClinton this message is for you. Pack it up & go home Hillary
  9. “”
  10. “”RejectedDebateTopics””

and the first ten “Trump” tweets are:

  1. “Clinton: Trump should’ve apologized more
  2. “RT @AriaWilsonGOP: 3 Women Face Charges After Being Caught Stealing Dozens Of Trump Signs https://t.co/JjlZxaW3JN https://t.co/qW2Ok9ROxH”
  3. “RT @America_1st_: CW: “”The thing that impressed me was that Trump is always comfortable in own skin
  4. “Dave Chappelle: “”Black Lives Matter”” is the worst slogan I’ve ever heard! How about “”enough is enough””? VotingTrump! https://t.co/5okvmoQhcj”
  5. “Obama on Trump winning: ‘Anything’s possible’ https://t.co/MjVMZ5TR8Y #politics”
  6. “RT @TrumpSuperPAC: Obama’s a Muslim & this video from @FoxNews proves it! Even @CNN admits Obama’s training protesters/jihadists! #MAGA htt…”
  7. “Deceitful Media caught on act when trying to drive the “”Donald Trump is racist”” rhetoric.
  8. “”
  9. “RT @Veteran4Trump: A picture you will never see on @CNN or @MSNBC #BlacksForTrump Thumbs up for Trump 👍#MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Blacks4Trump…”
  10. “RT @steph93065: Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump’s Veterans Press Conference ‘Disgraceful’ – Breitbart https://t.co/CVvBOrTJBX”

That’s a small part of NBC’s smoking gun on Russian influence?

Does it stand to reason that the CIA, NSA, etc., have similar cap-gun evidence?

Several options present themselves:

  • Intelligence operatives and their leaders have been caught lying, again. That is spinning tales any reasonable reading of the evidence doesn’t support.
  • Intelligence operatives are believing one more impossible thing before breakfast and ignoring the evidence.
  • Journalists have chosen to not investigate whether intelligence operatives are lying or believing impossible things and report/defend intelligence conclusions.

Perhaps all three?

In any event, before crediting any “Russian influence” story, do take the time to review at least some of the 200,000 pieces of “evidence” NBC has collected on that topic.

You will be left amazed that you ever believed NBC News on any topic.

February 12, 2018

Reducing the Emotional Toll of Debating Bigots, Fascists and Misogynists

Filed under: Keras,Politics,Python,TensorFlow — Patrick Durusau @ 5:08 pm

Victims of bigots, fascists and misogynists on social media can (and many have) recounted the emotional toll of engaging with them.

How would you like to reduce your emotional toll and consume minutes if not hours of their time?

I thought you might be interested. 😉

Follow the link to DeepPavlov. (Ignore the irony of the name considering the use case I’m outlining.)

From the webpage:

An open source library for building end-to-end dialog systems and training chatbots.

We are in a really early Alfa release. You have to be ready for hard adventures.

An open-source conversational AI library, built on TensorFlow and Keras, and designed for

  • NLP and dialog systems research
  • implementation and evaluation of complex conversational systems

Our goal is to provide researchers with:

  • a framework for implementing and testing their own dialog models with subsequent sharing of that models
  • set of predefined NLP models / dialog system components (ML/DL/Rule-based) and pipeline templates
  • benchmarking environment for conversational models and systematized access to relevant datasets

and AI-application developers with:

  • framework for building conversational software
  • tools for application integration with adjacent infrastructure (messengers, helpdesk software etc.)

… (emphasis in the original)

Only one component for a social media engagement bot to debate bigots, fascists and misogynists but a very important one. A trained AI can take the emotional strain off of victims/users and at least in some cases, inflict that toll on your opponents.

For OpSec reasons, don’t announce the accounts used by such an AI backed system.

PS: AI ethics debaters. This use of an AI isn’t a meaningful interchange of ideas online. My goals are: reduce the emotional toll on victims, waste the time of their attackers. Disclosing you aren’t hurting someone on the other side (the bot) isn’t a requirement in my view.

January 21, 2018

Are You Smarter Than A 15 Year Old?

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Government,Hacking,Politics,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 1:27 pm

15-Year-Old Schoolboy Posed as CIA Chief to Hack Highly Sensitive Information by Mohit Kumar.

From the post:

A notorious pro-Palestinian hacking group behind a series of embarrassing hacks against United States intelligence officials and leaked the personal details of 20,000 FBI agents, 9,000 Department of Homeland Security officers, and some number of DoJ staffers in 2015.

Believe or not, the leader of this hacking group was just 15-years-old when he used “social engineering” to impersonate CIA director and unauthorisedly access highly sensitive information from his Leicestershire home, revealed during a court hearing on Tuesday.

Kane Gamble, now 18-year-old, the British teenager hacker targeted then CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, as well as other senior FBI figures.

Between June 2015 and February 2016, Gamble posed as Brennan and tricked call centre and helpline staff into giving away broadband and cable passwords, using which the team also gained access to plans for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran.

…

Gamble said he targeted the US government because he was “getting more and more annoyed about how corrupt and cold-blooded the US Government” was and “decided to do something about it.”
…

Your questions:

1. Are You Smarter Than A 15 Year Old?

2. Are You Annoyed by a Corrupt and Cold-blooded Government?

3. Have You Decided to do Something about It?

Yeses for #1 and #2 number in the hundreds of millions.

The lack of governments hemorrhaging data worldwide is silent proof that #3 is a very small number.

What’s your answer to #3? (Don’t post it in the comments.)

January 18, 2018

Launch of DECLASSIFIED

Filed under: Government,Intelligence,Politics — Patrick Durusau @ 11:48 am

Launch of DECLASSIFIED by Mark Curtis.

From the post:

I am about to publish on this site hundreds of UK declassified documents and articles on British foreign policy towards various countries. This will be the first time such a collection has been brought together online.

The declassified documents, mainly from the UK’s National Archives, reveal British policy-makers actual concerns and priorities from the 1940s until the present day, from the ‘horse’s mouth’, as it were: these files are often revelatory and provide an antidote to the often misleading and false mainstream media (and academic) coverage of Britain’s past and present foreign policies.

The documents include my collections of files, accumulated over many years and used as a basis for several books, on episodes such as the UK’s covert war in Yemen in the 1960s, the UK’s support for the Pinochet coup in Chile, the UK’s ‘constitutional coup’ in Guyana, the covert wars in Indonesia in the 1950s, the UK’s backing for wars against the Iraqi Kurds in the 1960s, the coup in Oman in 1970, support for the Idi Amin takeover in Uganda and many others policies since 1945.

But the collection also brings together many other declassified documents by listing dozens of media articles that have been written on the release of declassified files over the years. It also points to some US document releases from the US National Security Archive.
…

A new resource for those of you tracking the antics of the small and the silly through the 20th and into the 21st century.

I say the “small and the silly” because there’s no doubt that similar machinations have been part and parcel of government toady lives so long as there have been governments. Despite the exaggerated sense of their own importance and the history making importance of their efforts, almost none of their names survive in the ancient historical record.

With the progress of time, the same fate awaits the most recent and current crop of government familiars. While we wait for them to pass into obscurity, you can amuse yourself by outing them and tracking their activities.

This new archive may assist you in your efforts.

Be sure to keep topic maps in mind for mapping between disjoint vocabularies and collections of documents as well as accounts of events.

January 8, 2018

Bait Avoidance, Congress, Kaspersky Lab

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Government,Politics,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 2:56 pm

Should you use that USB key you found? by Jeffrey Esposito.

Here is a scenario for you: You are walking around, catching Pokémon, getting fresh air, people-watching, taking Fido out to do his business, when something catches your eye. It’s a USB stick, and it’s just sitting there in the middle of the sidewalk.

Jackpot! Christmas morning! (A very small) lottery win! So, now the question is, what is on the device? Spring Break photos? Evil plans to rule the world? Some college kid’s homework? You can’t know unless…

Esposito details an experiement leaving USB keys about at University of Illinois resulted in 48% of them being plugged into computers.

Reports like this from Kaspersky Lab, given the interest in Kaspersky by Congress, could lead to what the pest control industry calls “bait avoidance.”

Imagine members of Congress or their staffs not stuffing random USB keys into their computers. This warning from Kaspersky could poison the well for everyone.

For what it’s worth, salting the halls and offices of Congress with new release music and movies on USB keys, may help develop and maintain insecure USB practices. Countering bait avoidance is everyone’s responsibility.

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