Seit einigen Tagen beoabachte ich, dass auf Facebook veröffentlichte Links – gemessen an den Reaktionen – deutlich in der Sichtbarkeit heruntergestuft wurden. In Kombination mit der neuerdings eingeführten Unterdrückung von externen Links durch META kommt hier, sozusagen sicherheitshalber, eine Linkliste der lesenswerten Beiträge. Überwiegend zum Thema Desinformation mit einem sehr langen, aber extrem wichtigen Beitrag. Und zusätzlich noch ein wenig zu generativer KI und den aktuellen PHP-Problemen. Wie immer Lesestoff, den ich aus unterschiedlichen Quellen zusammengestellt, für interessant und lesenswert befunden habe: weil er über den Tellerrand der kurzfristigen Zusammenhänge weit hinausschaut auf »the bigger picture«.
Gerade im Zusammenhang mit den aktuellen Ausschreitungen in Frankreich und anderswo ist vor allem der erste Beitrag der Liste immens wichtig: Desinformation und gefälschte, komplett aus dem Zusammenhang gerissene und/oder KI-generierte Bilder zur Illustration des Geschehens werden zahlreich und sehr bedenkenlos im Netz geteilt. Dazu der Verweis auf den vorherigen Blogpost, in dem ich auch auf Möglichkeiten der Prüfung hingewiesen habe.
»Western journalists call them „Doppelgänger,“ but the team of Russian propagandists spreading fake content under the banner of legitimate foreign news outlets describe themselves instead —as “ideological troops” and “social architects.” The team, set up in 2022 by the Presidential Administration under Sergei Kiriyenko and PR specialist Ilya Gambashidze, was tasked with “natively promoting Russian narratives in unfriendly countries” — in other words, running a fake-news factory. Its operatives work both online and offline. While use their network of bots to amplify photos of antisemitic graffiti on Parisian buildings (itself painted by Russian agents), others try to get their fake stories about Zelensky noticed and retweeted by Elon Musk and JD Vance. The Presidential Administration oversees a team of hundreds, including MGIMO alumni and Foreign Ministry staff who fabricate stories in multiple languages and pass them off as Western media reports. Designers create deepfakes, while political strategists and professional propagandists use AI to identify each country’s most sensitive issues and make their disinformation as politically effective as possible.
(…)
By late June 2022, the operation was active in at least three countries – Germany, Italy, and the UK – according to documents reviewed by The Insider. Social media posts linked to fake websites impersonating well-known news outlets, with hundreds of dollars a day spent promoting them. Comments linking to these fake sites were also posted under posts by legitimate media outlets. Such inauthentic comments appeared not only on Facebook and Instagram but also on Telegram. Advertising on Meta’s platforms was paid for through the Agency for Social Design (ASD) and its affiliated group of companies, Structure, a Meta investigation found.«
Inside Putin’s „Doppelgänger“ operation, based on leaked correspondence, published by »The Insider«. Mehr Informationen über »The Insider« auf der Website des Projekts.
»“According to security officials, pro-Russian and far-right social media accounts linked to previous disinformation campaigns have spread violent videos in an attempt to sow more chaos. Iran and Algeria are also suspected of being behind some of the messaging, experts said. (…)
According to David Colon, researcher at Sciences Po who specialises in disinformation, “pro-Kremlin influencers” linked to the Russian campaign Storm-1516 have “amplified the events and spread a number of false narratives”. He also mentioned the Russian influence network called Matryoshka. (…)
Officials have generally cautioned that while there were indications of disinformation and foreign influence by state actors, it was unclear whether they had a significant impact.
“You have an authentic mobilisation of people who are angry at institutions because of their proper grievances, and foreign state actors try to amplify this,” said another European intelligence official. “Their role should not be overestimated. It would be much too simple to say this was the fault of the Russians.”« (Quelle: Financial Times – Paid content.)
Im Kontext der Ereignisse in Frankreich (und anderswo in Europa) sei auf den Film »La Haine« (»Hass«) hingewiesen; 1995 von Matthieu Kassovitz gedreht, schildert er das Leben Jugendlicher in den Banlieues Frankreich. Vinz aus einer jüdischen Familie, Saïd aus Nordafrika, Hubert aus Subsahara-Afrika – 24 Stunden im Leben der drei Freunde, die aus Gewalt, Drogen, Diskriminierung und Perspektivlosigkeit bestehen. 30 Jahre nach Veröffentlichung ist »La Haine«immer noch erschreckend aktuell – denn geändert hat sich an den Problemen nichts. Den Trailer zum Film »Hass« gibt es auf Youtube, den kompletten Film kann man auf AppleTV oder bei Prime Video leihen oder kaufen.
Themawechsel – zu den aktuellen PHP-Problemen:
»Both weaknesses, officially disclosed today, appear to have existed in PHP for more than a decade but were only just discovered with the use of AI tools. Hackers have already been detected trying to exploit them, likely with the help of AI, and implementing the fixes to address the vulnerabilities could take companies days or weeks. In the meantime, tens of millions of servers, databases, and devices are exposed. “PHP is one of the fundamental pieces of technology that supports the internet,” Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, told me. As of now, the websites of the Finnish health agency, the Port of Rotterdam, the Paris police force, 4Chan, and an unknown number of others are all down while they address the PHP vulnerabilities. (…)
»Michał Woźniak, an internet infrastructure expert, said: “There’s going to be a lot of automatic exploitation of this.” The bug might allow cryptocurrency miners to exploit vulnerable servers at other people’s expense, he said. He also said large crime organisations and Russian state actors could use the vulnerable sites as a launching pad from which to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) and other cyber-attacks.
The issue highlighted the poor state of internet infrastructure, Woźniak said, something that was being brought to light by advancing AI models but that had been a long-developing problem. The underlying vulnerabilities the researcher found were decades old. “This is an environmental problem in an industry where there’s an incentive to move fast and make changes,” he said. “There’s an incentive to deploy a thing and then never update it and not think about maintenance.”« (Quelle: The Guardian, frei lesbar)
Noch ein Themenwechsel, der eigentlich eine Erweiterung ist zum Thema »Künstliche Intelligenz«:
In time, we may forfeit that knowledge, too. Then we will no longer know who we are, or even if we are.(…)
And when this happens to a whole society, a whole species, when we can no longer rely on instincts that have been learned over centuries, passed down from generation to generation, when we can no longer trust our hearts, our eyes or our ears, when we can no longer tell truth from falsehood or the virtual from the real, when time collapses and the past, present and future run into each other, when a million languages and cultures are pureed into glop, when an ancient social compact – whatever its limitations and flaws – is smashed beyond recognition, are we setting ourselves up for mass psychosis? (…)« Die Schriftstellerin Arundhati Roy (»Der Gott der kleinen Dinge«) bei »Equator« über generative Künstliche Intelligenz. (Lang, überaus lesenswert und vor allem zum Nachdenken.)
Mehr über die junge Plattform »Equator« auf deren Website: »Equator is a movement as much as a magazine. We will publish unique longform stories about politics, culture, literature and art – but our work will also encompass public events, reading groups, screenings and exhibitions. (…) Equator seizes this liberating perception. It won’t derive its understanding from anything so simple as ethnic or civilisational identities ascribed to East or West, North or South. Rather, it will move beyond the easy certainties of Western exceptionalists while also spurning claims made on behalf of a supposedly unitary ‘Global South’. Equator will engage a new generation of writers and artists as we seek to express the monumental shifts taking place in not only the economic and political order of the world, but also, crucially, in the inner lives of individuals. (…)«