“States Struggle to Vet Coders of Election Software”
September 4th, 2024I’m not sure when I first wrote this on Cryptogon, but here it is again: The U.S. is a banana republic with nuclear weapons.
Via: Politico:
When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists.
So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.
But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.
The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.
The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.
The company that conducted the scan, ReversingLabs, has also warned about those issues in a blog post and a talk at a hacking conference last year, though it did not specify the state and the vendor where the issues were found.
New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.
Related: Everyday ‘Placebo Buttons’ Create Semblance of Control
Robert Reich Calls for the Arrest of Elon Musk for Resisting Censorship
September 3rd, 2024Via: Jonathan Turley:
We have previously discussed the anti-free speech views of Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, who has tried to sell citizens on the perfectly Orwellian view that more freedom means tyranny when it comes to the freedom of expression. He also demanded that former president Donald Trump be banned from ballots as a “traitor” — all in the name of protecting democracy from itself. Last week, Reich wrote a column declaring Elon Musk “out of control” in his refusal to censor citizens and appeared to call for his arrest.
AI-Implanted False Memories
September 3rd, 2024Ex-Google CEO’s BANNED Interview LEAKED: “You Have No Idea What’s Coming”:
Via: MIT Media Lab:
This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories–recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction.
U.S. Close to Agreeing on Long-Range Missiles for Ukraine; Delivery to Take Months
September 3rd, 2024Via: Reuters:
The U.S. is close to an agreement to give Ukraine long-range cruise missiles that could reach deep into Russia, but Kyiv would need to wait several months as the U.S. works through technical issues ahead of any shipment, U.S. officials said.
The inclusion of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM) in a weapons package is expected to be announced this autumn, three sources said, though a final decision has not been made. The sources declined to be named because they are not authorized to discuss the topic.
Sending JASSMs to Ukraine could significantly alter the strategic landscape of the conflict by putting more of Russia in range of powerful, precision-guided munitions, an important concern of the Biden administration, the officials said.
Military analysts have suggested the introduction of JASSMs – which are stealthy and can strike further than most other missiles in Ukraine’s current inventory – could push Russian staging areas and supply depots back by hundreds of miles.
This would severely complicate Russia’s ability to sustain its offensive operations and potentially provide Ukraine with a strategic advantage.
Related: Russia Updating Nuclear Weapon Doctrine Due To Western ‘Escalation’ Of Ukraine War
“Your Phone Really Is Listening In On Your Conversations”
September 3rd, 2024
Via: Daily Mail:
Millions of people have long suspected it, but now a leak suggests that our phones really are listening to us.
An apparent pitch deck from one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partner appears to detail how the firm eavesdrops on users’ conversations to create targeted ads.
In a slideshow, Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its ‘Active-Listening’ software uses AI to collect and analyze ‘real-time intent data’ by listening to what you say through your phone, laptop or home assistant microphone.
‘Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,’ the deck states.
The pitch deck goes on to tout Facebook, Google and Amazon as clients of CMG, suggesting they could be using its Active-Listening service to target users.
When You Ask Alexa About Voting for Trump vs. Harris for President
September 3rd, 2024This is insane.
Can more people replicate this? pic.twitter.com/gz7KH95LVg
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 3, 2024
Alexa is a Commie operative! You won’t believe this. Volume UP! ?? pic.twitter.com/mOQaaWULhK
— John Rich?? (@johnrich) September 3, 2024
Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess?
September 3rd, 2024Via: Brownstone Institute:
Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilization and set the path of history on a dark course.
And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies.
When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.
…
Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said.
Then also you have the French arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, an event which surely rattles any major CEO of a communication platform. You have the arrest and incarceration of other dissidents like Steve Bannon and many others.
You also have the litigation over free speech back in play now that RFK, Jr has been cleared as having standing, kicking the case of Missouri v. Biden back to the Supreme Court, which wrongly decided last time to deny standing to other plaintiffs.
Zuckerberg of all people knows the stakes. He understands the implications and the scale of the problem, as well as the depths of the corruption and deception at play in the US, EU, UK, and all over the world. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve.
Berkeley Law School Dean: Constitution ‘Outdated,’ ‘Threatens the United States’
September 2nd, 2024Tell me another one, Professor.
Via: Armageddon Prose:
Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, promoting his very patriotic book “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” recently penned an op-ed and appeared on MSNBC to float the idea that we need to toss out the United States Constitution — arguably the most eloquent and functional if imperfect governing document ever written, which every Western nation has modeled their own on — and replace it with something a little more Democratic™.
Strange Noises on Starliner Spacecraft
September 2nd, 2024Update: “An Audio Configuration Between the Space Station and Starliner”
Via: Daily Mail:
NASA has identified the source of strange, ‘sonar-like’ sounds coming from inside Boeing’s Starliner capsule, and says that the noises have stopped as of now.
In an emailed statement, a NASA press officer told DailyMail.com that the cause was ‘an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner.’
…
An audio configuration issue could mean a lot of different things, but a retired NASA scientist told DailyMail.com that NASA is likely referring to a signal feedback loop.
—
NEW – Boeing's Starliner began emitting "strange sonar noises" on Saturday — Ars Technicapic.twitter.com/ootKg7XMn9
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) September 1, 2024
Via: Ars Technica:
On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.
“I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.”
Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via “hardline” to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.
Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. “Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.”
“I’ll do it one more time, and I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. “Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out.”
The End of Western Pluralist Democracy
September 2nd, 2024“Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political offenders.”
—A Clockwork Orange, 1971
Via: Craig Murray:
No major western leader is ever again going to be able to speak about human rights or ethical values, without attracting howls of derision. They are turning on their own people in order to prevent protest at a genocide they actively support.
Keir Starmer stepped up the pressure on opponents of Zionist genocide on Thursday with the arrest of journalist Sarah Wilkinson and the charging of activist Richard Barnard, both under the draconian Section 12 of the Terrorism Act which carries a sentence of up to 14 years in prison.
…
Starmer has always been MI5-controlled. The fact that, while a Tory government was in power, the Crown Prosecution Service destroyed all the key documentation revealing Starmer’s involvement in the Assange, Savile and Janner cases (the last being far more important than generally appreciated), shows the extent to which Starmer is a protected Deep State asset.
