Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook mission statements hide his real aim

The Cambridge Analytica scandal changed the world – but it didn’t change Facebook

t can be hard to remember from down here, beneath the avalanche of words and promises and apologies and blogposts and manifestos that Facebook has unleashed upon us over the course of the past year, but when the Cambridge Analytica story broke one year ago, Mark Zuckerberg’s initial response was a long and deafening silence.

It took five full days for the founder and CEO of Facebook – the man with total control over the world’s largest communications platform – to emerge from his Menlo Park cloisters and address the public. When he finally did, he did so with gusto, taking a new set of talking points (“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you”) on a seemingly unending roadshow, from his own Facebook page to the mainstream press to Congress and on to an oddly earnest discussion series he’s planning to subject us to at irregular intervals for the rest of 2019.

The culmination of all that verbosity came earlier this month, when Zuck unloaded a 3,000-word treatise on Facebook’s “privacy-focused” future (a phrase that somehow demands both regular quotation marks and ironic scare quotes), a missive that was perhaps best described by the Guardian’s Emily Bell as “the nightmarish college application essay of an accomplished sociopath”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook mission statements hide his real aim
This article is more than 4 years old Emily Bell
Every time he articulates his plans, it is like reading the nightmarish college application essay of an accomplished sociopath.  From the gibberish motivational epithets – “move fast and break things!” – to sweeping statements about human nature and society, his words paint a picture of breathtaking vision, titanic endeavor and constant self-improvement.

The Cambridge Analytica story

More Cambridge Analytica use the search tool on this site 

 

[ECP] NetHappenings: We are just sick and tired of it

WE ARE JUST SICK AND TIRED OF IT

Supreme Court: D.C. is not entitled to a vote in Congress

John Eastman, Trump’s coup lawyer, long record of extremist activity.

Doctors who spread misinformation about COVID-19 *must* be held accountable. An Ohio COVID patient who was treated with ivermectin after his wife sued to force a hospital to give it to him has died.
UCLA anesthesiologist Dr. Chris Rake, a COVID-19 vaccine mandate opponent, was escorted out of the UCLA medical plaza yesterday and placed on unpaid administrative leave for refusing to get vaccinated or request an exemption. “I’m willing to go lose everything…even my life.”

If Facebook can be dragged before congress over disinformation – and they should be – why haven’t the Murdochs and top management at Fox, OANN, Newsmax, etc?

Megarich Democratic Donor Says ‘Tax Rich People Like Me’ or He’s Done With the Party

HEY Elizabeth Warren why don’t you stay in  your own lane and deal with something you’re supposed to know about? FIAT
In the Pandora Papers, 99.9% of all corruption is happening with fiat money rather than crypto.

IT’S ABOUT TIME THAT Elizabeth Warren Calls for an Insider Trading Inquiry at the Fed – “billionaires shouldn’t be taxed because they’ll donate the money to better causes” YEAH LIKE THE ARMY OF LAWYERS THEY SEND TO K STREET
400 richest Americans in last year:
*Wealth up 40%
*47% donated less than 1% of their wealth
*2% donated at least 20% of their wealth
And those gifts were tax deductible
This new founded crypto obsession is making @SenWarren forget her past work to break up the power big banks & big tech have over markets.She’s failing to recognize data is the new financial market of the 21st century & crypto is merely the plumbing innovating. If anything, the open nature of crypto has ushered in a new wave of innovation that offers new biz models in markets that were staved off by monopoly powers lobbying for favorable regulations. Regulate the centralized intermediaries, don’t use crypto as an excuse to centralize more surveillance power by the Fed & IRS.
As a progressive it’s shocking to see her build up a tower of regulatory policy to empower the Fed with a CCP toolbox in the name of consumer protection. ~ Ma/ya Zehavi

New Documents Show the Fed’s Trading Scandal Includes Two of the Wall StreetBanks It Supervises: Goldman Sachs and Citigroup

N.C. school board passes strict rules for teaching about race after threat to cut funding
So the folks that tried to stop and prevent a black girl from going to school in 1957 don’t want their grandchildren to learn that these racist MOFO’s tried to stop and prevent a black girl from going to school in 1957.
RETHUGLICAN RACIST  Butch Miller: “We have attracted many people to the state of Georgia that don’t think like us. We need to make sure we are attracting people to Georgia that do think like us. And if they don’t think like us, they need to assimilate into our values and our culture.”

ZUCKERBERG FACEBOOK FAIL

Every Facebook Spokesperson on TV is A misleading bullshitter.

For all of Big Tech’s power and resources, a few lines of code can still bring down an entire global service if written badly enough.

HOW FARTBOOK DISAPPEARED

Zuckerberg Loses $6 Billion in Hours as Facebook Plunges
“If only they didn’t merge all the platforms into one backend.
“Facebook employees can’t enter the headquarters because their badges don’t work, and those already inside can’t enter various rooms because access is linked through the IoT (Internet of Things) and so goes through the same DNS routes that no longer exist:

“Facebook is being led by metrics, not by people. The metrics make the decisions.” – Frances Haugen

And a human—with all their limitations and prejudices—programmed the metrics. AND that is a decision that Zuckerberg made! No one can fire him.

Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth dipped by $7 billion yesterday.
But guess what? He’s still the 6th richest person on the face of the earth. Meanwhile, 63% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck when Covid hit. We need to tax the rich and break up Big Tech.

Data of Over 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum

DEMOCRATS

Today would be a perfect day to kill the filibuster.

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will question Jonathan Kanter, trustbuster and nominee to lead the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. We’ll be watching!

Trump’s 2015 Deal In Moscow Is Directly Tied to His Ocean Club Hotel in Panama

BIDEN SAYS IN THE DAYS AHEAD PEOPLE MAY SEE THEIR RETIREMENT ACCOUNT VALUES SINK AND INTEREST RATES GO UP

A year later, 45% of COVID patients in Wuhan still have symptoms

WCYB Cybercrime Radio, Northport, N.Y. – Listen Live!

Today is a great day to get rid of both Louis DeJoy AND the filibuster.

When Latin America’s elite wanted to hide their wealth, they turned to this Panama firm

A global treasure hunt leads to an indicted art dealer’s offshore trusts – and the Met: The records reveal how a notorious art dealer, Douglas Latchford, and his family set up trusts in tax havens shortly after U.S. investigators began linking him to looted Cambodian artifacts. The Post and its ICIJ partners launched a hunt for antiquities that Latchford and his associates are suspected of selling and examined how offshore companies are used to conceal wrongdoing in the global art trade. Although some museums have returned Cambodian antiquities in years past, dozens tied to the indicted dealer remain in prominent collections, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the British Museum in London. These museums and others said that they take many precautions to ensure the items they acquire weren’t stolen, and that standards for provenance have changed over the years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/03/takeaways-pandora-papers/

When Latin America’s elite wanted to hide their wealth, they turned to this Panama firm

Trump’s 2015 Deal In Moscow Is Directly Tied to His Ocean Club Hotel in Panama

Africa internet riches plundered, contested by China broker
New leadership at the nonprofit, AFRINIC, is working to reclaim the lost addresses. But a legal challenge by a deep-pocketed Chinese businessman is threatening the body’s very existence.
The businessman is Lu Heng, a Hong Kong-based arbitrage specialist. Under contested circumstances, he obtained 6.2 million African addresses from 2013 to 2016. That’s about 5% of the continent’s total — more than Kenya has.
The internet service providers and others to whom AFRINIC assigns IP address blocks aren’t purchasing them. They pay membership fees to cover administrative costs that are intentionally kept low. That left lots of room, though, for graft.

Chinese detective in exile reveals extent of torture against Uyghurs

Company That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Says It Was Hacked [for years]

BITCOIN

U.S. Postal Inspection Service Oversight of Its Use of Cryptocurrency

Centralized systems go down that’s why BITCOIN is decentralized and why anything about money and a zuckerberg coin is disgusting
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

Bitcoin is $50K Now .. only +26% to $63K BTC is a trillion dollar asset class.

#Bitcoin price on October 6, 2009 – $0.00099
#Bitcoin price on October 6, 2021 – $54,000

Bitcoin Surpasses Facebook In Market Capitalization
People Are Not Interested in Buying Bitcoin at $41K, but Rush To Buy at $47K but it’s already at $52K!! What are you waiting for?
Bitcoin market cap is now worth $1.02 Trillion

Bitcoin Embodies Nikola Tesla’s Vision For Peace And Energy Abundance

Remember when #InternetShutDown and corporate, government and bank networks are down .. #bitcoin is the only money network that can be used to keep our economies afloat, the last money standing!

Bitcoin could become legal tender in Tonga under plan by MP and barrister Lord Fusitu’a

MUSIC AND SCIENCE

Quenching the world’s thirst with off-grid water desalination

John Oliver enlists Danny DeVito to explain why DuPont’s been poisoning you with PFAs for 70 years

50 years ago, the first CT scan let doctors see inside a living skull – thanks to an eccentric engineer at the Beatles’ record company https://theconversation.com/50-years-ago-the-first-ct-scan-let-doctors-see-inside-a-living-skull-thanks-to-an-eccentric-engineer-at-the-beatles-record-company-149907

Solar energy is a new cash crop for farmers – when the price is right

WhyHunger’s Drum Together

Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings News SECURITY 4-15-2021

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THIS IS VERY VERY LONG……

MAKE SURE YOU SCROLL ALL THE WAY DOWN

A Casino Gets Hacked Through a Fish-Tank Thermometer
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/368943
Are your fish tanks secure? Secure yourlaptop. Secure your smart phone. Secure your tablet. And, before I forget, secure your fish tank. Yes, you heard me. Your fish tank. That was the lessoned learned a few years ago from the operators of a North American casino. According to a 2018 Business Insider report, cybersecurity executive Nicole Eagan of security firm Darktrace told the story while addressing a conference.
“The attackers used that (a fish-tank thermometer) to get a foothold in the network,” she recounted. “They then found the high-roller database and then pulled that back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud.” Can this really be possible?  It certainly can. And you can blame the Internet of Things.

AI Security: How Human Bias Limits Artificial Intelligence
April 15, 2021 | By Mark Stone
https://securityintelligence.com/articles/ai-security-human-bias-artificial-intelligence/
For cybersecurity experts, artificial intelligence (AI) can both respond to and predict threats. But because AI security is everywhere, attackers are using it to launch more refined attacks. Each side is seemingly playing catch-up, with no clear winner in sight.
How can defenders stay ahead? To gain context about AI that goes beyond prediction, detection and response, our industry will need to ‘humanize’ the process. We’ve explored some of the technical aspects of AI, like how it can both prevent and launch direct-denial-of-service attacks, for instance. But to get the most out of it in the long run, we’ll need to take a social sciences approach instead.
What AI Security Can’t Do
First, let’s establish what AI and machine learning are. AI, much like its name, represents the higher concept of machines carrying out ‘smart’ tasks. Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI. It provides data to computers so they can process that data and learn for themselves. Whether it’s AI or machine learning, algorithms are built based on data that determine what patterns are expected and what are considered abnormal.
The best AI requires data scientists, statistics and as much human input as possible. As you train it, AI learns to create results that may not be visible to the human running it. It can even make judgments based on data for which you didn’t train it. This ‘black box’ nature means there’s also a push to make AI that can reveal how it makes decisions.

No matter how well AI trains itself, human oversight and input are key to its success. That’s the takeaway from Julie Carpenter, research fellow in the ethics and emerging sciences group at California Polytechnic State University.

“Every decision you make in AI should have a human in the loop at this point,” she says. “We don’t have any sort of genius AI that understands human context, or human ways of life or sentience. Some sort of oversight is necessary.”

AI Can’t Outthink Us
Carpenter explains that AI’s original goal is to replicate human-like thinking, an attempt that remains true today for most AI products. AI cybersecurity — and AI in general — is there to serve humans in one way or another, she said. But it still doesn’t understand human context, culture or meaning.

The belief that AI will, sometime in the future, outsmart and outthink us is incorrect, Carpenter said. She also shared her strong doubts about the current state of AI reading emotion. ‘Affective’ AI like this is being used in advertising to try to read consumers’ attitudes toward products and marketing campaigns.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a good direction for AI to go,” she warned. “How can we teach AI to do something we (ourselves) cannot do — which is perfectly read each other’s emotions?”

How AI Bias Hurts Cybersecurity
Is artificial intelligence a threat? Maybe not in the science fiction sense of machines taking over the world. But it does open up new avenues of attack. And because AI is trained by humans, it can include human bias — or fail to account for human bias. Instead of approaching AI security from an external standpoint (i.e. preventing breaches) we must also consider the impact it might have internally.

Suppose you decide you’re going to start using AI to prevent breaches in your company. In that case, you may not want to worry so much about how to block clever threat actors. Instead, you should worry more about how to keep your own users, customers or employees safe. By using AI security in some form, are you putting them at risk? In today’s threat landscape, where personal devices are on corporate networks with people working from home, enterprise networks are handling much more personal traffic than ever before.

How to Overcome Bias
Carpenter advises that companies look for the broader impacts that go beyond just the intended use of the AI product.

In our industry, protecting personal information is critical. But what happens when AI security glosses over something that may, at first glance, seem harmless but is, in fact, sensitive to certain groups?

Carpenter offers an example. Let’s say a company suffers a data breach in which the only information that leaked was employees’ genders. For many people, that might not be a concern.

“But having someone’s gender hacked and put out there could be a really big deal for a lot of people,” she said. “It could be life changing … devastating … traumatizing … because gender is such a complicated social and cultural issue.”

Depending on what kind of service you handle and what kind of data is linked, you may have different kinds of outcomes.

The Limits on ‘Reading People’
Another potential pitfall for the use of AI in cybersecurity is with advanced biometrics — especially when it comes to specifics like facial expressions. Even looking ahead into the 2040s, Carpenter is skeptical that AI will understand visual cues. The subtleties, nuances and cultural differences are simply too complex.

“It’s going to disregard context, situations and suggestiveness,” she says. “You could have a frown on your face and the AI technology thinks that you’re frustrated or angry. But you pull back the picture, and the person is standing while they’re reading a book, and they’re actually just concentrating. It doesn’t really matter what other biometrics you triangulate it with. It’s a guessing game.”

Remember Ethical Frameworks
One piece of ‘low-hanging-fruit’ companies can take from a user perspective, Carpenter advises, is to look at things like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and any protocols that talk about the user’s rights and think about an ethical framework built on those rights.

“If you look at things like the rights for the citizen section of the GDPR, it explicitly defines what my rights are as a user and as a data person,” she says. “If my data is incorrect, how do I fix it, how can I get organizations to stop disseminating false data about me? These are the ethical questions that are out there, and things that are user-centered that can be a starting point for discussions in organizations.”

With any type of strategic planning, having the right people in place is a crucial element for success. With AI security, it’s no different.

Checklist for Working With AI
Carpenter insists organizations should have an important initial discussion about AI security and answer several key questions:

What are the goals of using AI, even beyond the business goals?
How does the organization think of AI as a concept?
What should the AI do, and what shouldn’t it do?
What is it we’re artificially replicating with AI?
Whose intelligence are we artificially replicating?
How will this intelligence be used?
What do we want the intelligence to do that goes above and beyond its primary functionality?

“There needs to be explicit discussions, smaller discussions and micro discussions between and within the teams and working groups,” she says. “We also need to make decisions about what to include and not to include, what to code and not to code, how to promote the product or not promote their product, who do we give it to and who we are designing it for.”

What’s Next for AI Security?
Carpenter recalls a recent talk with another very large tech company in which she asked how their AI security handles a huge data breach. Beyond its uses, she was curious about what the company learned about the group that carried out the attack.

“We’re not detectives,” the executive told her, “and all we can do is put a cork back in the leak and move on to predicting how they might attack us again.”

This type of reactive, short-term thinking is often the best we can do to keep up with the cycle of prediction, detection and response. Carpenter hopes that in the long term, cybersecurity can leverage people in social sciences more. They could help AI find forensic patterns, cultural patterns, how attacks were happening, who is behind the attacks and what their motivations are. When programmed and put in place correctly, AI security could someday predict and forecast how future events might emerge.

Use Some AI … But Not Too Much
“AI should provide more refined insights, not so much in terms of quantity but in terms of quality,” Carpenter says. “Because you’re looking at this diverse set of rules, and you’re not stuck in an echo chamber with the same ideas and the same concepts. Frankly, if I was working in cybersecurity, and I was working in an organization with everybody throwing around the term AI (too much), I’d be a little concerned.”

Cybersecurity experts, she suggests, must learn to think like social scientists, taking a step back, so everyone in the enterprise is on the same page — increasing communication to help everybody’s plan.

“People from social sciences are specifically trained to help you give AI more understanding,” she says.

Better AI Security By Thinking Like a Human
In fact, it’s difficult not to come away with the perception that winning in cybersecurity is about taking human psychology and social sciences into account in other areas, too. Almost anyone who has instilled a culture of awareness in their enterprise will tell you that they’re much more confident about their security posture.

Learning about, adopting and getting the most out of AI security is no different. The more we understand about the human element and the more we add that understanding into AI input, the better off we’ll be as an industry.

FACEBOOK

So where did that cache of 500 million Facebook phone numbers come from? @lilyhnewman got to the bottom of it. Turns out it was scraped from the site directly by exploiting an undisclosed vulnerability in the site’s contact import feature, which allowed attackers to create a massive address book with millions of phone numbers in order to “match” those numbers against existing Facebook accounts. Facebook never fully disclosed the issue, instead this past week pointed back to similar — but only tangentially related — stories.

Motherboard: Cool, how about one more? There’s yet another cache of Facebook phone numbers in the form of a Telegram bot. @josephfcox ran the numbers.

Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition app

BuzzFeed News: Breathtakingly good reporting here. BuzzFeed News found more than 7,000 users from close to 2,000 public agencies using Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition app that checks faces against a database of 3 billion images scraped from social media sites. BuzzFeed News published the results in a searchable table — including ICE, the Air Force, and even public schools. This is incredible work that took the reporters over a year to complete.

THE BOTNET

Bitcoin should become a global, universal currency. In this context, asymmetric threats like embedded illegal data become a major challenge.

Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe.

There’s even illegal pornography and leaked classified documents. All of these were put in by anonymous Bitcoin users. But none of this, so far, appears to seriously threaten those in power in governments and corporations. Once someone adds something to the Bitcoin ledger, it becomes sacrosanct. Removing something requires a fork of the blockchain, in which Bitcoin fragments into multiple parallel cryptocurrencies (and associated blockchains). Forks happen, rarely, but never yet because of legal coercion. And repeated forking would destroy Bitcoin’s stature as a stable(ish) currency.

The botnet’s designers are using this idea to create an unblockable means of coordination, but the implications are much greater. Imagine someone using this idea to evade government censorship. Most Bitcoin mining happens in China. What if someone added a bunch of Chinese-censored Falun Gong texts to the blockchain?

Direct line. Now #IndictTrump

On the Insecurity of ES&S Voting Machines’ Hash Code

It turns out that ES&S has bugs in their hash-code checker: if the “reference hashcode” is completely missing, then it’ll say “yes, boss, everything is fine” instead of reporting an error. It’s simultaneously shocking and unsurprising that ES&S’s hashcode checker could contain such a blunder and that it would go unnoticed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s federal certification process. It’s unsurprising because testing naturally tends to focus on “does the system work right when used as intended?” Using the system in unintended ways (which is what hackers would do) is not something anyone will notice.

Also:

Another gem in Mr. Mechler’s report is in Section 7.1, in which he reveals that acceptance testing of voting systems is done by the vendor, not by the customer. Acceptance testing is the process by which a customer checks a delivered product to make sure it satisfies requirements. To have the vendor do acceptance testing pretty much defeats the purpose.

Capitol Police ignored intelligence warnings ahead of Jan. 6 riots, watchdog report finds

The Capitol Police ignored critical intelligence ahead of the Jan. 6th riot, including overlooking a warning that, “Congress itself is the target,” according to an internal watchdog report obtained by NBC News.

The police force tasked with protecting the U.S. Capitol also lacked policies and procedures that left them severely unprepared to deal with the deadly insurrection, the 104-page report prepared by the Capitol Police’s inspector general found. The report has not been made public.

Pennsylvania GOP launches ‘super MAGA Trump’ primary
Never mind Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Palm Beach, Fla., is where the party’s Senate nomination is likely to be decided.
“There’s no denying that the Republican Party in Pennsylvania is still a party of Trump.” Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist to Trump, told POLITICO that “any candidate who wants to win in Pennsylvania in 2022 must be full Trump MAGA.”

US formally names Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) as the culprit in SolarWinds hack

The former president of the united states of America acted like a Russian operative for 4 years, blew the pandemic response, got Covid, crashed the economy, insulted everyone in the world, hasn’t conceded, and incited an ongoing insurrection and violent attack on the capitol

For the first time EVER, the US government said Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik provided Russian intelligence agencies with the internal Trump campaign polling/strategy data he received from Manafort and Gates in 2016. Even Mueller didn’t go that far.

We knew Trump 2016 polling data went from Manafort > Kilimnik. Today, Treasury says that data went from Kilimnik > Russian intelligence agencies.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0126

Here’s KK with long term buds Manafort and….look, it’s Bernie’s 2016 Chief Strategist Tad Devine!

One of the most under-talked about pieces of the Mueller report. Manafort met Kilimnik to discuss polling data & Trump campaign strategy in the Midwest, but also discussed the Russian belief that Trump needed to win in order for Russia to effectively control Eastern Ukraine.

See https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20210415