sfgate | In the video above, the technology is initially developed with the
intention of combating crime and terrorism, but the drones are taken
over by an unknown forces who use the powerful weapons to murder a group
of senators and college students. The video does contain some graphic
content.
Russell, an expert on artificial intelligence, appears at the end of
the video and warns against humanity's development of autonomous
weapons.
"This short film is just
more than speculation," Russell says. "It shows the results of
integrating and militarizing technologies that we already have." Fist tap Big Don.
edge | The big question that I'm asking myself these days is how can we make
a human artificial intelligence? Something that is not a machine, but
rather a cyber culture that we can all live in as humans, with a human
feel to it. I don't want to think small—people talk about robots and
stuff—I want this to be global. Think Skynet. But how would you make
Skynet something that's really about the human fabric?
The first thing you have to ask is what's the magic of the current AI? Where is it wrong and where is it right?
The good magic is that it has something called the credit assignment
function. What that lets you do is take stupid neurons, these little
linear functions, and figure out, in a big network, which ones are doing
the work and encourage them more. It's a way of taking a random bunch
of things that are all hooked together in a network and making them
smart by giving them feedback about what works and what doesn't. It
sounds pretty simple, but it's got some complicated math around it.
That's the magic that makes AI work.
The bad part of that is, because those little neurons are stupid, the
things that they learn don't generalize very well. If it sees something
that it hasn't seen before, or if the world changes a little bit, it's
likely to make a horrible mistake. It has absolutely no sense of
context. In some ways, it's as far from Wiener's original notion of
cybernetics as you can get because it's not contextualized: it's this
little idiot savant.
But imagine that you took away these limitations of current AI.
Instead of using dumb neurons, you used things that embedded some
knowledge. Maybe instead of linear neurons, you used neurons that were
functions in physics, and you tried to fit physics data. Or maybe you
put in a lot of stuff about humans and how they interact with each
other, the statistics and characteristics of that. When you do that and
you add this credit assignment function, you take your set of things you
know about—either physics or humans, and a bunch of data—in order to
reinforce the functions that are working, then you get an AI that works
extremely well and can generalize.
In physics, you can take a couple of noisy data points and get
something that's a beautiful description of a phenomenon because you're
putting in knowledge about how physics works. That's in huge contrast to
normal AI, which takes millions of training examples and is very
sensitive to noise. Or the things that we've done with humans, where you
can put in things about how people come together and how fads happen.
Suddenly, you find you can detect fads and predict trends in
spectacularly accurate and efficient ways.
Human behavior is determined as much by the patterns of our culture
as by rational, individual thinking. These patterns can be described
mathematically, and used to make accurate predictions. We’ve taken this
new science of “social physics” and expanded upon it, making it
accessible and actionable by developing a predictive platform that uses
big data to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior.
The idea of a credit assignment function, reinforcing “neurons” that
work, is the core of current AI. And if you make those little neurons
that get reinforced smarter, the AI gets smarter. So, what would happen
if the neurons were people? People have lots of capabilities; they know
lots of things about the world; they can perceive things in a human way.
What would happen if you had a network of people where you could
reinforce the ones that were helping and maybe discourage the ones that
weren't?
wired | The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind
at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo,
Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal
Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the
new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run
it.
The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the
realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial
Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”
That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The
religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry
leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially
targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the
worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church
“plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San
Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”
That timeline may be
overly ambitious, given that the Waymo-Uber suit, in which Levandowski
is accused of stealing self-driving car secrets, is set for an early
December trial. But the Dean of the Way of the Future, who spoke last
week with Backchannel in his first comments about the new religion and
his only public interview since Waymo filed its suit in February, says
he’s dead serious about the project.
“What is going to be created
will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest
mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a
god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if
there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what
else are you going to call it?”
During our three-hour interview, Levandowski made it absolutely clear
that his choice to make WOTF a church rather than a company or a think
tank was no prank.
“I wanted a way for everybody to participate in
this, to be able to shape it. If you’re not a software engineer, you
can still help,” he says. “It also removes the ability for people to
say, ‘Oh, he’s just doing this to make money.’” Levandowski will receive
no salary from WOTF, and while he says that he might consider an
AI-based startup in the future, any such business would remain
completely separate from the church.
“The idea needs to spread
before the technology,” he insists. “The church is how we spread the
word, the gospel. If you believe [in it], start a conversation with
someone else and help them understand the same things.”
Levandowski
believes that a change is coming—a change that will transform every
aspect of human existence, disrupting employment, leisure, religion, the
economy, and possibly decide our very survival as a species.
“If
you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9
percent will say that’s science fiction,” he says. “ Actually, it’s
inevitable. It’s guaranteed to happen.”
We’ve
been worried about a massive frontal assault, a work of Internet
sabotage that would shut down commerce or choke off the power grid. And
with good reason. The recent exploratory raid by Russian hackers on American nuclear facilities reminds us that such threats are real.
But
we failed to prepare for an attack of great subtlety and strategic
nuance. Enemies of the West have hacked our cultural advantages, turning
the very things that have made us strong — technological leadership,
free speech, the market economy and multi-party government — against us.
The attack is ongoing.
With each passing week, we learn more. Russia
and its sympathizers have cranked up the volume on existing political
and cultural divisions in the West, like some psychic version of the Stuxnet hack
that caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to spin so fast they tore
themselves to pieces. They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of
Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to
believe and spread it. They have targeted online ads designed to
intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.
They have partnered with WikiLeaks, the supposed paragon of free speech,
to insert propaganda into influential Twitter accounts — including
@realDonaldTrump.
They have created thousands of phony online identities
to add heat to political fever swamps.
The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work.
Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes
us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll
farms. Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital
communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers. The West
has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.
DailyMail | The wildly popular Toy Freaks YouTube
channel featuring a single dad and his two daughters has been deleted,
amid a broader crackdown on disturbing children's content on the video
streaming platform.
Toy Freaks, founded
two years ago by landscaper Greg Chism of Granite City, Illinois, had
8.53million subscribers and was among the 100 most-viewed YouTube
channels before it was shutdown on Friday.
Though
it's unclear what exact policy the channel violated, the videos showed
the girls in unusual situations that often involved gross-out food play
and simulated vomiting. The channel invented the 'bad baby' genre, and
some videos showed the girls pretending to urinate on each other or
fishing pacifiers out of the toilet.
Another series of videos showed the younger daughter Annabelle wiggling her loose teeth out while shrieking and spitting blood.
'He is profiting off of his children's pain and suffering,' one indignant Reddit user
wrote about the channel last year. 'It's barf inducing and no mentally
stable person or child should ever have to watch it.'
A
YouTube spokesperson said in a statement: 'It's not always clear that
the uploader of the content intends to break our rules, but we may still
remove their videos to help protect viewers, uploaders and children.
We've terminated the Toy Freaks channel for violation of our policies.
counterpunch | The New York Times recently
published a list of 25 men “accused of sexual misconduct” since the
Harvey Weinstein revelations first came out in early October. The list
is a who’s-who of “players” in the entertainment, political, media and
corporate worlds. Even scandalous stories about Bush-the-elder are
finally coming out after decades of suppression. In being outed, many
of the male predators have lost their jobs or contracts, some of their
marriages ended, high-priced defense lawyers have been retained and a
few say they are seeking professional counseling.
Many of those identified as being or having been a sexual aggressor
are being subject to public shaming. For a while, their lives might be
miserable, under a public magnifying glass as to how he could have done
what he is “accused” of doing and, therefore, who really is this
man? However, for some, the price to be paid may be far harsher,
including an arrest, trial and (if found guilty) jail as a sex
offender. Prosecutors in New York, Los Angeles and London are
sharpening their legalistic claws as they seek criminal indictments
against Weinstein. Who will be the next player to fall?
Since the Reagan-era of the 1980s, the U.S. has engaged in two
domestic wars – a war on drugs and a war on sex. Both have roots dating
from the 1920s Prohibition campaign; both rejected the 1960s-70s
countercultural insurgency. Both have been played out at federal and
local levels — and both are failures!
The country’s drug-addiction “epidemic” has shifted from black to
while, from the inner-city or urban ghettos to the suburbs and rural
heartland. Throughout the country, low-level drug offenses are being
decriminalized, criminal penalties are being lessened and the
traditional ethos of harsh punishment is being undercut by calls for
restorative justice.
When launched, the war on sex drew politicians, law enforcement and
people of good intentions, conservative and liberal (including anti-porn
feminist and gay-rights advocates), into alignment with the religious
right. They joined forces in a campaign to forcefully suppress what was
broadly conceived as a domestic security threat, violation of the
sexually acceptable.
The sex offender was – and remains — a perfect target for moral
outrage. He (mostly) is someone who crossed a moral line and committed
an unpardonable offense. If he cannot be executed for his affront to
civil and religious decency than, at least, he can be shamed or
stigmatized, imprisoned, placed in indefinite detention and listed on a
sex-offender’s registry.
The 25 men identified by the Times are “players” in the
entertainment, political, media and corporate worlds. Others will
surely be added to the list. Their outing is a friction point in the
seismic shift in American social values now underway. Those so far
identified come from the celebrate sector, not most people everyday
life. Unfortunately, misogyny is endemic to American life, but gets
little local media or public attention until it becomes a media
spectacle like what’s happening today. Its all-to-often considered a
private matter, rather than a social practice.
twitchy | The lengths some people are willing to go to in order to defend Al Franken …
Leeann Tweeden is NOT a newswoman.. She was a
Playboy model & bikini fitness model.. she on cover of Playboy 2x
MAXIM 3x and FHM 5x… and Howard stern. She was brought on USO tour as
part of comedy skit so that she COULD be groped !
Huh. So because she is a Playboy model and has been on
Howard Stern that apparently means what? That she doesn’t count? Oh and
please with that last line, ‘… she was on USO tour as part of a comedy
skit so that she could be groped.’
Sadly this oddly angry meteorologist wasn’t the only one playing
the ‘her skirt was too short’ game with Leeann Tweeden, but this is
certainly one of the uglier tweets we’ve seen on Twitter. Fist tap MVD.
dailywire | While it’s certainly encouraging to see progressive pundits,
politicians, and celebrities finally give some credibility to Bill
Clinton’s accusers, it all feels forced. It’s as though progressives are
being forced to acknowledge these women — at least in passing — simply
because the topic of sexual abuse is so prevalent in the news. It’s all
too little, too late.
Clinton was accused of several heinous
crimes. Juanita Broaddrick says Clinton violently raped her in 1978;
Kathleen Willey says he sexually assaulted her in 1993; Paula Jones says
he exposed himself to her in 1991.
theatlantic | If the ground beneath your feet feels cold, it’s because hell froze over the other day. It happened at 8:02 p.m. on Monday, whenThe New York Timespublished an op-ed called “I Believe Juanita.”
Written by Michelle Goldberg, it was a piece that, 20 years ago, likely would have inflamed the readership of the paper and scandalized its editors. Reviewing the credibility of Broaddrick’s claim, Goldberg wrote that “five witnesses said she confided in them about the assault right after it happened,” an important standard in reviewing the veracity of claims of past sex crimes.
But Goldberg’s was not a single snowflake of truth; rather it was part of an avalanche of honesty in the elite press, followinga seemingly innocuous tweetby the MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “As gross and cynical and hypocritical as the right’s ‘what about Bill Clinton’ stuff is,” he wrote, “it’s also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.”
As gross and cynical and hypocrtical as the right's "what about Bill Clinton" stuff is, it's also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.
What happened next can only be compared to the moment when Glinda the Good Witch of the North came to Munchkinland and told the little people that it was finally safe.Come out, come out, wherever you are!
thewrap | Donald Trump drew outrage in October 2016 for his “Access Hollywood”
boast about kissing and grabbing women without their consent. Now Los
Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden says Sen. Al Franken kissed her
without consent on a 2006 USO tour — and produced a photo of him groping
her while she slept.
So how did Franken respond when the video emerged of Trump talking
about doing something very similar to what Franken is now accused of
doing?
weeklystandard | Anyone who has followed the career of Al Franken should be unsurprised to learn that he was a jerk to Leeann Tweeden. Because if you go back to Live from New York, Tom Shales’ brilliant oral history of Saturday Night Live, Franken appears as a lying, drug-abusing (and distributing), jackass.
A couple choice excerpts—remember, this is an oral history, so they’re from the primary sources:
Al Franken: There was not as much cocaine as you
would think on the premises. Yeah, a number of people got in trouble.
But cocaine was used mainly just to stay up.
There was a very
undisicplined way of writing the show, which was staying up all night on
Tuesday. We didn't have the kind of hours that normal people have. And
so there was a lot of waiting until Tuesday night, and then going all
night, and at two or three or four in the morning, doing some coke to
stay up, as opposed to doing a whole bunch, and doing nitrous oxide, and
laughing at stuff.
People used to ask me about this and I'd always say,
"No, there was no coke. It's impossible to do the kind of show we were
doing and do drugs." And that was just a funny lie that I liked to tell.
Kind of the opposite was true, unfortunately, for some people, it was
impossible to do the show without the drugs.
So Franken liked to tell funny lies about not using drugs when he
wasn’t writing a book castigating Republicans which was titled—this is
so great—Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
"Another example of giving the game away in few words came two nights
ago when the liberal-elitist 'Inside Elections' political analyst Stuart
Rothenburg spoke on the PBS NewsHour. 'The Democrats as a party'
Rothenburg told NewsHour host and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
member Judy Woodruff, 'are divided between the Bernie Sanders wing and
Hillary Clinton wing, the pragmatists and ideologues.'
For Rothenburg, the Clinton wing members are the 'pragmatists,' the
realistic adults who want to 'get things done' (one of the great
neoliberal president Obama’s favorite phrases and claims). The Sanders
folks are 'ideologues,' a pejorative term meaning people who are mainly
about ideology and who are carried away by their own flighty and
doctrinal world view.
This was a slap (an ideological one I might add) at the more progressive
and social-democratic faction of the Democratic Party – a blow
masquerading as 'objective' and detached political analysis."
If you watch this relatively short video much of what has been puzzling
you about the failure of our political system will be made clearer.
Franklin Roosevelt could work tirelessly for the common person because
he was already comfortable in his own skin with regard to his social
status. And more importantly, as a result of his long term paralysis he
knew how little social status really meant. As suffering sometimes
does, it introduces compassion and empathy, even among the upper crust.
But the New Deal principles were shunned for the credentialed
aspirations of those class-climbing, middle class kids who would be rich
and acknowledged as members of an elite crowd with the right kinds of
bona fides. There are probably few better recent examples than the
Clintons. Their attitudes towards the average American are
paternalistic at best, and highly cynical and patronizing at worst.
They attempted to disguise their credentialed, professional class
preferences with 'identity politics.' But if you look at the
culmination of actual policy initiatives, versus platform platitudes,
the Democrats, similarly to the GOP, serve no one but themselves. Winning...
They rely on the 'lesser of two evils' to scrape out the occasional win,
when the excesses of the other party drive people to embrace 'hope and
change,' and to be largely betrayed once again.
therealnews | PAUL JAY: All right,
let me introduce our guest, Norman Solomon. Norman is the co-founder of
rootsaction.org, and he's co-author of a new report, "Autopsy: The
Democratic Party in Crisis." Thanks for joining us, Norman.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Thanks, Paul.PAUL
JAY: There's kind of two arguments there. One, let's start with the
first, that now's not the time to rehash all of this, that Trump
represents a kind of -- they are not using this language, but I will -- a
kind of neo-fascism. There's a broad front called the Resistance, and
people like Hilary Rosen and others are saying that this isn't a time
to, they use the word re-litigate what the DNC did or didn't do. There
should just be a constructive outlook in terms of reforming the DNC.
Don't rehash who did what to whom, and focus on attacking Trump. How do
you respond to that?
NORMAN SOLOMON: Ideally, there's a united
front against the horrific Trump presidency. There's not usefulness in
getting united behind bad strategies and undemocratic internal processes
of the Democratic Party. After all, "Democratic" is the first name of
the party, and when we see so clearly that contempt for basic democratic
principles were in play and in force inside the Democratic National
Committee, then it doesn't work to just shrug and say well, that's the
past so let's move on. The reality is that the same basic forces, the
political corporate tendencies and power, that held the DNC last year
still control it this year. So it's all well and good to say hey, just
move on, but we can't move on without being real about what happened and
what continues to be in play in terms of the top-down power at the DNC.
PAUL
JAY: The media has on the whole been very antagonistic to Donna
Brazile, at least the media I've seen, led of course by MSNBC, and I've
seen CNN, especially the first few days after Brazile's book was started
to be released by the Washington Post. There was one report I saw, it
was a CNN journalist, who just lambasted Brazile. We couldn't find the
clip, but NBC had released this agreement between the Clinton campaign
and the DNC, and according to a couple of sentences in that agreement,
the money that Clinton was controlling and the power she had over the
DNC was all supposed to be directed towards the general election, which
would have been appropriate. But NBC later actually, it got revealed,
when people look at the dates, and I understand NBC even had to retract
this, that the dates actually showed it was clearly about the primary,
and Donna Brazile clearly makes that this control of Clinton was all
about the primary. But the attack continued. Here's Robby Mook, a former
campaign manager for Clinton, on CNN.
medium | We know
from the Snowden leaks on the NSA, the CIA files released by WikiLeaks,
and the ongoing controversies regarding FBI surveillance that the US
intelligence community has the most expansive, most sophisticated and
most intrusive surveillance network in the history of human
civilization. Following the presidential election last year, anonymous
sources from within the intelligence community were hemorrhaging leaks
to the press on a regular basis that were damaging to the incoming
administration. If there was any evidence to be found that Donald Trump
colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election using
hackers and propaganda, the US intelligence community would have found
it and leaked it to the New York Times or the Washington Post last year.
Mueller
isn’t going to find anything in 2017 that these vast, sprawling
networks wouldn’t have found in 2016. He’s not going to find anything by
“following the money” that couldn’t be found infinitely more
efficaciously via Orwellian espionage. The factions within the
intelligence community that were working to sabotage the incoming
administration last year would have leaked proof of collusion if they’d
had it. They did not have it then, and they do not have it now. Mueller
will continue finding evidence of corruption throughout his
investigation, since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to fish,
but he will not find evidence of collusion to win the 2016 election that
will lead to Trump’s impeachment. It will not happen.
This sits on top of all the many, many, many reasons to be extremely suspicious of the Russiagate narrative in the first place.
Humans
are storytelling creatures. The most significant and most
underappreciated facet of our existence is how much of our interface
with the world consists not of our direct experience of it, but of our
mental stories about it. Combine that fact with the century of research and development that has gone into refining propaganda tactics and the US plutocracy’s stranglehold on mainstream media,
and you get a nation lost in establishment narratives. People forming
their worldviews based on phantasms of the mind instead of concrete
facts.
I’ve
noticed a strange uptick in establishment loyalists speaking to me as
though Trump-Russia collusion is already an established fact, and that
I’m simply not well-informed. There is still the same amount of publicly
available evidence for this collusion as there ever was (zero), so this
tells me that the only thing which has changed is the narrative.
Pundits/propagandists are increasingly speaking as though this is
something that has already been established, and the people who consume
that propaganda go out and circulate it as though it’s an established
fact. When you’re not plugged into that echo chamber, though, it looks very weird.
This
is why Russiagaters find my certainty that collusion will never be
proven so intensely abrasive. Their entire worldview consists of pure
narrative — literally nothing other than authoritative assertions from
pundits who speak in a confident tone of voice — so when they encounter
someone doing the same thing but with hard facts, it causes
psychological discomfort. This discomfort is called cognitive
dissonance. It’s what being wrong feels like.
slate |Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton, have already gotten in hot water more than once for acting like out-of-touch snobs whose primary hobby is wasting taxpayer money on their extravagant lifestyle. (Linton went so far as to label an Instagram picture of herself deboarding a government-funded private jet with the names of the numerous luxury products she’s depicted wearing in it.) Helpfully, as you can see above, they have now provided the media with a perfect distillation of their public image for use if and when Mnuchin is axed from the administration as a PR scapegoat after the backlash against Trump’s extremely rich-person-friendly tax bill reaches a fever pitch.
medium | The author of the Atlantic
article, Julia Ioffe, put a period rather than a comma at the end of
the text about not wanting to appear pro-Trump or pro-Russia, and
completely omitted WikiLeaks’ statement following the comma that it
considers those allegations slanderous. This completely changes the way
the interaction is perceived.
This
is malpractice. Putting an ellipsis (…) and then omitting the rest of
the sentence would have been sleazy and disingenuous enough, because
you’re leaving out crucial information but at least communicating to the
reader that there is more to the sentence you’ve left out, but
replacing the comma with a period obviously communicates to the reader
that there is no more to the sentence. If you exclude important
information while communicating that you have not, you are blatantly
lying to your readers.
There is a
big difference between “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a
‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source” and “because it won’t be perceived as
coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.”
Those are not the same sentence. At all. Different meanings, different
implications. One makes WikiLeaks look like it’s trying to hide a
pro-Trump, pro-Russian agenda from the public, and the other conveys the
exact opposite impression as WikiLeaks actively works to obtain Donald
Trump’s tax returns. This is a big deal.
And
it made a difference in the way WikiLeaks was perceived, as evidenced
by the things people who read the article are saying about Ioffe’s
version:
WaPo | “Something is wrong on the internet,” declares an essay trending in tech circles. But the issue isn’t Russian ads or Twitter harassers. It’s children’s videos.
The piece, by tech writer James Bridle, was published on the heels of a report from the New York Times
that described disquieting problems with the popular YouTube Kids app.
Parents have been handing their children an iPad to watch videos of
Peppa Pig or Elsa from “Frozen,” only for the supposedly family-friendly
platform to offer up some disturbing versions of the same. In clips
camouflaged among more benign videos, Peppa drinks bleach instead of
naming vegetables. Elsa might appear as a gore-covered zombie or even in a sexually compromising position with Spider-Man.
The phenomenon is alarming, to say the least, and YouTube has said that it’s in the process
of implementing new filtering methods. But the source of the problem
will remain. In fact, it’s the site’s most important tool — and
increasingly, ours.
YouTube suggests search results and “up next” videos using proprietary
algorithms: computer programs that, based on a particular set of
guidelines and trained on vast sets of user data, determine what content
to recommend or to hide from a particular user. They work well enough —
the company claims that in the past 30 days, only 0.005 percent of YouTube Kids videos have been flagged as inappropriate. But as these latest reports show, no piece of code is perfect.
WaPo | Missouri’s attorney general said Monday that he has launched an
investigation into whether Google has mishandled private customer data
and manipulated its search results to favor its own products, a further
sign that Silicon Valley’s political fortunes may be on the descent.
The
probe comes after European antitrust regulators levied a $2.7 billion
fine against Google in June and as Washington is taking a harder look
into the influence of dominant tech companies in American society.
Attorney
General Josh Hawley said that the investigation will focus on three
issues: the scope of Google's data collection, whether it has abused its
market position as a dominant search engine and whether the
company used its competitors content as its own in search results. The state has issued Google a subpoena seeking information about its business practices.
Hawley, who recently announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, said that the investigation was
prompted in part by the fine levied against Google by European
officials for favoring its own search results, as well as concerns that
Google was engaging in similar behavior in the United States. Hawley
said that a preliminary investigation suggests that Google may not be
accurately disclosing how much data it collects about customers and
that people don't have a meaningful choice to opt out of Google's
data collection.
wikileaks |Hivesolves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no way for it to communicate with its operators in a secure manner that does not draw attention. UsingHiveeven if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet.Hiveprovides a covert communications platform for a whole range of CIA malware to send exfiltrated information to CIA servers and to receive new instructions from operators at the CIA.
Hivecan serve multiple operations using multiple implants on target computers. Each operation anonymously registers at least one cover domain (e.g. "perfectly-boring-looking-domain.com") for its own use. The server running the domain website is rented from commercial hosting providers as a VPS (virtual private server) and its software is customized according to CIA specifications. These servers are the public-facing side of the CIA back-end infrastructure and act as a relay for HTTP(S) traffic over a VPN connection to a "hidden" CIA server called'Blot'.
The cover domain delivers 'innocent' content if somebody browses it by chance. A visitor will not suspect that it is anything else but a normal website. The only peculiarity is not visible to non-technical users - a HTTPS server option that is not widely used:Optional Client Authentication. ButHiveuses the uncommonOptional Client Authenticationso that the user browsing the website is not required to authenticate - it is optional. But implants talking toHivedo authenticate themselves and can therefore be detected by theBlotserver. Traffic from implants is sent to an implant operator management gateway calledHoneycomb(see graphic above) while all other traffic go to a cover server that delivers the insuspicious content for all other users.
Digital certificates for the authentication of implants are generated by the CIA impersonating existing entities. The three examples included in the source code build a fake certificate for the anti-virus companyKaspersky Laboratory, Moscowpretending to be signed byThawte Premium Server CA, Cape Town. In this way, if the target organization looks at the network traffic coming out of its network, it is likely to misattribute the CIA exfiltration of data to uninvolved entities whose identities have been impersonated.
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
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My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
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