AI fake-face generators can be rewound to reveal the real faces they trained on Researchers are calling into doubt the popular idea that deep-learning models are “black boxes” that reveal nothing about what goes on inside by Will Douglas Heaven archive page October 12, 2021 https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/12/1036844/ai-gan-fake-faces-data-privacy-security-leak/
Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites
Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor that operates in Israel, has now acquired four different VPN services and a collection of VPN “review” websites that rank Kape’s VPN holdings at the top of their recommendations. This report examines the controversial history of Kape Technologies and its rapid expansion into the VPN industry.
As is normal in the tech industry, the VPN world is undergoing some major changes and consolidation. The most recent example of this is with ExpressVPN, which announced plans this week to be acquired by Kape Technologies. While this may come as a surprise to many people, it is nothing new in the industry. In fact, Kape has been on a VPN buying spree since 2017.
Unfortunately, many VPN users remain oblivious about the real owners of the VPN they are using as well as the questionable history behind some of these entities. This in-depth report intends to reveal the details for all to see. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Kape (formerly Crossrider) was a distributor of malware and adware
The people behind Kape and Crossrider
Crossrider begins purchasing VPN services, then changes name to Kape Technologies
Kape purchases a collection of VPN “review” websites, then changes the rankings
The future of Kape’s VPN ventures
To get a better understanding of the situation, we must first examine the history of Kape.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg added to D.C. privacy lawsuit The attorney general for the District of Columbia plans has added Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, one of the first times the tech scion has personally been targeted by regulators. Back in 2018, Attorney General Karl A. Racine sued the social media giant on accusations of unfair and deceptive trade practices under the District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act. Under the CPPA, individuals are liable for the actions of a company if they were aware of them at the time. But after reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of internal documents and interviewing former employees and others, it became evident that Zuckerberg “knowingly and actively” participated in each decision leading up to Cambridge Analytica’s mass collection of user data and misrepresented how secure that data was, Racine said Wednesday in a statement. < - > https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/20/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-racine/
Fighting disinformation with media literacy—in 1939 “There are three ways to deal with propaganda—first, to suppress it; second, to try to answer it by counterpropaganda; third, to analyze it,” the journalist turned educator Clyde R. Miller said in a public lecture at Town Hall in New York in 1939. At that time, faced with the global rise of fascist regimes who were beaming propaganda across the world, as well as US demagogues spouting rhetoric against the government and world Jewry, the rise of Stalinism, and the beginning of the Red-baiting that foreshadowed McCarthyism, scholars and journalists were struggling to understand how people could fall for lies and overblown rhetoric. In response to this growing problem, Miller, who had been a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937. To get the institute up and running, Miller got a $10,000 grant from the department store magnate Edward A. Filene, who had by then begun making a name for himself as a liberal philanthropist. Based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, with a staff of seven people, the IPA devoted its efforts to analyzing propaganda and misinformation in the news, publishing newsletters, and educating schoolchildren to be more tolerant of racial, religious, and ethnic differences. In order to understand what kind of people, under certain circumstances would be susceptible to fascism, some sociologists studied personality traits. While it was clear that Germany’s defeat in World War I and subsequent economic conditions there, including widespread unemployment, had paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler, academics and journalists tried to parse just what made Nazi propaganda so effective at galvanizing public support for the regime. Theodor Adorno produced his famous “F-scale” (the “F” stands for fascist), which aimed to identify individuals more susceptible to the persuasions of authoritarianism. In recent years, the research of behavioral economist Karen Stenner has similarly examined the ways that innate personality traits coupled with changing social forces can push some segments of society toward intolerance.) < - > https://www.cjr.org/innovations/institute-propaganda-analysis.php
It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda. You don’t need fake accounts to spread ampliganda online. Real people will happily do it.By Renée DiResta About the author: Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Updated at 12:10 p.m. ET on October 11, 2021 One Sunday morning in July of last year, a message from an anonymous account appeared on “Bernie or Vest,” a Discord chat server for fans of Senator Bernie Sanders. It contained an image of Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco activist challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 congressional runoff, and offered explicit instructions for how to elevate the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to the nationwide Trending list on Twitter. “Shahid Says…,” read the large print, “Draft some tweets with #PelosiMustGo—don’t forget to capitalize #EachWord. Don’t use more than two hashtags—otherwise you’ll be marked as spam.” The call to action urged people to start posting at noon Pacific time, attach their favorite graphics, and like and retweet other Buttar supporters’ contributions. I was living in San Francisco then and had been following Buttar’s efforts to get attention, as traditional outlets largely ignored the democratic socialist’s underdog campaign. The day before, incensed at Pelosi’s refusal to debate him, he had sparred with an unoccupied chair outdoors on a public street. But on Twitter that Sunday morning, the challenger had a more promising strategy: If the ploy worked, his slogan would show up on millions of screens across the entire country without costing him a dime. Team Buttar’s message was sent at 10:30 a.m. I wondered whether the online armies would turn out for him. “Did you see this?” I asked a colleague at the Stanford Internet Observatory over Slack, dropping the anonymous call to action into the channel. Then I made a pot of coffee and waited to see whether Buttar’s supporters could pull it off. Through my work at the Internet Observatory, I’d witnessed many attempts to push messages by gaming the algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms use to identify popular content and surface it to users. Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion. In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda. That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening. Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification. It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society. < - > https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/disinformation-propaganda-amplification-ampliganda/620334/
Fighting disinformation with media literacy—in 1939 “There are three ways to deal with propaganda—first, to suppress it; second, to try to answer it by counterpropaganda; third, to analyze it,” the journalist turned educator Clyde R. Miller said in a public lecture at Town Hall in New York in 1939. At that time, faced with the global rise of fascist regimes who were beaming propaganda across the world, as well as US demagogues spouting rhetoric against the government and world Jewry, the rise of Stalinism, and the beginning of the Red-baiting that foreshadowed McCarthyism, scholars and journalists were struggling to understand how people could fall for lies and overblown rhetoric. In response to this growing problem, Miller, who had been a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937. To get the institute up and running, Miller got a $10,000 grant from the department store magnate Edward A. Filene, who had by then begun making a name for himself as a liberal philanthropist. Based at Columbia University’s Teachers College, with a staff of seven people, the IPA devoted its efforts to analyzing propaganda and misinformation in the news, publishing newsletters, and educating schoolchildren to be more tolerant of racial, religious, and ethnic differences. In order to understand what kind of people, under certain circumstances would be susceptible to fascism, some sociologists studied personality traits. While it was clear that Germany’s defeat in World War I and subsequent economic conditions there, including widespread unemployment, had paved the way for the rise of Adolf Hitler, academics and journalists tried to parse just what made Nazi propaganda so effective at galvanizing public support for the regime. Theodor Adorno produced his famous “F-scale” (the “F” stands for fascist), which aimed to identify individuals more susceptible to the persuasions of authoritarianism. In recent years, the research of behavioral economist Karen Stenner has similarly examined the ways that innate personality traits coupled with changing social forces can push some segments of society toward intolerance.) < - > https://www.cjr.org/innovations/institute-propaganda-analysis.php
EU slammed for dangerous child abuse imagery scanning plans
Security researchers say that Apple’s CSAM prevention plans, and the EU’s similar proposals, represent “dangerous technology,” that expands the “surveillance powers of the state.”
Apple has not yet announced when it intends to introduce its child protection features, after postponing them because of concerns from security experts. Now a team of researchers have published a report saying that similar plans from both Apple and the European Union, represent a national security issue.
According to the New York Times, the report comes from more than a dozen cybersecurity researchers. The group began its study before Apple’s initial announcement, and say they are publishing despite Apple’s delay, in order to warn the EU about this “dangerous technology.”
< – >
Report link @ https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/bugs21.pdf
Esteemed security pros slam child abuse imagery scanning plans
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg added to D.C. privacy lawsuit The attorney general for the District of Columbia plans has added Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg to a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, one of the first times the tech scion has personally been targeted by regulators. Back in 2018, Attorney General Karl A. Racine sued the social media giant on accusations of unfair and deceptive trade practices under the District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act. Under the CPPA, individuals are liable for the actions of a company if they were aware of them at the time. But after reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of internal documents and interviewing former employees and others, it became evident that Zuckerberg “knowingly and actively” participated in each decision leading up to Cambridge Analytica’s mass collection of user data and misrepresented how secure that data was, Racine said Wednesday in a statement. < - > https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/20/mark-zuckerberg-lawsuit-racine/
Password Auditing Tool L0phtCrack Released as Open Source By Eduard Kovacs on October 18, 2021 https://www.securityweek.com/password-auditing-tool-l0phtcrack-released-open-source The password auditing and recovery tool L0phtCrack is now open source and the project is looking for both maintainers and contributors. First released in 1997, L0phtCrack can be used to test password strength and recover lost Windows passwords via dictionary, brute-force, and other types of attacks. L0phtCrack was originally developed by Peiter Zatko, also known as Mudge, of the L0pht hacker think tank. L0pth then merged with @stake, which was acquired by Symantec in 2004. It was owned by Symantec between 2004 and 2009, when it was acquired from the cybersecurity firm by Zatko and other original authors. By that time, Symantec had stopped selling the tool. Terahash announced buying L0phtCrack in 2020, but it was repossessed in July 2021 after Terahash defaulted on its installment sale loan. When the announcement was made in July, its owners said L0phtCrack would no longer be sold or supported. “The current owners are exploring open sourcing and other options for the L0phtCrack software. Open sourcing will take some time as there are commercially licensed libraries incorporated in the product which must be removed and/or replaced. License activation for the existing licenses has been re-enabled, and should function as expected until an open source version can be made available,” they said at the time. And on Sunday, October 17, they officially announced the open source availability of L0phtCrack, specifically version 7.2.0. People interested in maintaining the project or contributing to it have been encouraged to contact developers. The L0phtCrack source code is available on GitLab --- https://gitlab.com/l0phtcrack/l0phtcrack