The British band Bring Me The Horizon included a hacking Easter egg in its new album. CC-licensed photo by April Woronowicz on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Play the stream backwards. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Delhi ‘unbearable’ as temperatures soar past 50ºC • BBC News
Meryl Sebastian and Kathryn Armstrong:
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Parts of northern and central India are sweltering under a severe heatwave, with a provisional record temperature of 52.3ºC (126.1ºF) registered in Delhi. If verified, it would be the highest ever recorded in India.
More than 37 cities in the country recorded temperatures over 45ºC this week.
Warnings of heat-related illnesses have been issued, with at least three deaths reported so far.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD)’s Soma Sen Roy told the BBC that a team had been sent to the Mungeshpur area in Delhi – where the 52.3ºC temperature was recorded – to verify it.The IMD described the recording as an “outlier compared to other stations”, which had recorded temperatures ranging from 45.2ºC to 49.1ºC in different parts of Delhi.
The city’s authorities have warned they will issue fines to those caught wasting water as the city deals with shortages and supplies have been cut to some areas.
Water minister Atishi announced that 200 teams would be deployed to crack down on people washing their cars with hosepipes and letting their tanks overflow.
“It’s been excruciatingly hot over the past couple of days and it’s got significantly worse as the days progress,” said BBC Business Correspondent Arunoday Mukharji, who is in Delhi.
A resident told news agency ANI earlier in the week that it was difficult to even eat properly because of the heat. “We have faced heat earlier as well, but this time it feels unbearable,” they said. “It’s difficult to even stand outside.”
The city’s power demand has soared to an all-time high, with residents turning to air conditioning, coolers and ceiling fans to cope with the heat.
A consumer court stopped hearing cases on Tuesday after the judge said it was too hot to work without air conditioning.
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What isn’t mentioned is the “wet bulb” temperature. That’s what can decide literal life or death.
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How it feels to get an AI email from a friend • Mrgan.com
Neven Morgan:
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Recently I received an AI-written email from a friend. It wasn’t sent to test AI, or to show it off, as in “ha ha check this out”; my friend had a question to ask me, and the email asked it over the course of a few paragraphs. It then disclosed that, oh by the way, I used AI to write this. My reaction to this surprised me: I was repelled, as if digital anthrax had poured out of the app. I’m trying to figure out why.
…What this did feel like was, it felt as if my friend had buzzed their secretary over the intercom and barked at them to send me a letter, signed “R. Jeeves on behalf of ——————.”
• It felt like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside, and no added well-wishes from the wisher’s own pen. An item off the shelf, paid for and handed over, transaction complete.
•Like getting a form letter, one of many thousands sent out by a large agency; except it was sent to me by, you know, a friend.
• It felt like the episode of Mrs. Maisel where Midge discovers that her husband’s comedy act features stolen Bob Newhart jokes.
• It felt like a family fridge decorated with printed stock art of children’s drawings.
• It felt like opening the front door at my birthday party to welcome in a group of iPads on wheels instead of people I like.
•It was like using a phone tree to kiss.
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I think the friend needs to reconsider his/her priorities. (Almost certainly “his”, isn’t it.)
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Once a sheriff’s deputy in Florida, now a source of disinformation from Russia • The New York Times
Steven Lee Myers:
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A dozen years ago, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla., sent voters an email posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff.
He later masqueraded online as a Russian tech worker with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential information in violation of state law, fooling officials in Florida who thought they were dealing with a foreigner.
He also posed as a fictional New York City heiress he called Jessica, tricking an adviser to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office into divulging improper conduct by the department. “And boy, did he ever spill ALL of the beans,” Mr. Dougan said in a written response to questions for this article, in which he confirmed his role in these episodes.
Those subterfuges in the United States, it turned out, were only a prelude to a more prominent and potentially more ominous campaign of deception he has been conducting from Russia.
Mr. Dougan, 51, who received political asylum in Moscow, is now a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. Back in 2016, when the Kremlin interfered in the American presidential election, an army of computer trolls toiled for hours in an office building in St. Petersburg to try to fool Americans online.
Today Mr. Dougan may be accomplishing much the same task largely by himself, according to American and European government officials and researchers from companies and organizations that have tracked his activities since August. The groups include NewsGuard, a company that reviews the reliability of news and information online; Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company; and Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.
Working from an apartment crowded with servers and other computer equipment, Mr. Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.
With the help of commercially available artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, he has filled the sites with tens of thousands of articles, many based on actual news events. Interspersed among them are also bespoke fabrications that officials in the United States and European Union have attributed to Russian intelligence agencies or the administration of President Vladimir Putin.
Between September and May, Mr. Dougan’s outlets have been cited or referred to in news articles or social media posts nearly 8,000 times, and seen by more than 37 million people in 16 languages, according to a report released Wednesday by NewsGuard.
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Vox Media and The Atlantic sign content deals with OpenAI • The Verge
Emilia David:
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Two more media companies have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI, allowing their content to be used to train its AI models and be shared inside of ChatGPT. The Atlantic and Vox Media — The Verge’s parent company — both announced deals with OpenAI on Wednesday.
OpenAI has been quickly signing partnerships across the media world as it seeks to license training data and avoid copyright lawsuits. It’s recently reached deals with News Corp (The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Daily Telegraph), Axel Springer (Business Insider and Politico), DotDash Meredith (People, Better Homes & Gardens, Investopedia, Food & Wine, and InStyle), the Financial Times, and The Associated Press.
The deals appear to range in price based on the number of publications included. News Corp’s deal with OpenAI is estimated to be worth $250m over the next five years, according to the Journal, while the deal with the Financial Times is believed to be worth $5m to $10m. Terms for the deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media weren’t disclosed.
The agreements also cover how content from the publishers is displayed inside of ChatGPT. Content from Vox Media — including articles from The Verge, Vox, New York Magazine, Eater, SBNation, and their archives — and The Atlantic will get attribution links when it’s cited.
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I didn’t expect ChatGPT to cite actual articles in its responses. It seems like the chatbot is turning into a search engine while Google, the search engine, turns itself into a chatbot.
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Rock band’s hidden hacking-themed website gets hacked • TechCrunch
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:
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On Friday, Pal Kovacs was listening to the long-awaited new album from rock and metal giants Bring Me The Horizon when he noticed a strange sound at the end of the record’s last track.
Being a fan of solving riddles and breaking encrypted codes, Kovacs wondered, Does this sound contain a hidden message?
His hunch led to the discovery of a hidden hacking-themed website that at some point actually got hacked.
Kovacs opened the song in the audio-editing app Audacity and, as he suspected, there was indeed a spectrogram — essentially a visual representation of the audio itself — which was actually a scannable QR code. Excited, Kovacs shared his findings on the Bring Me The Horizon’s subreddit.The QR code led to the hidden website, which is protected by a passcode that turned out to be a number (93934521) written on the album cover art, on the head of one of the characters, called M8. This M8 character speaks in some of the tracks and appears on the hidden site as a sort of guide.
The website is essentially an “alternate reality game,” or ARG, which bands like Nine Inch Nails have done before as a way to get fans more engaged with the band’s music and lore.
In this particular case, the game consists of a website where, among other things, the band uploaded some unreleased tracks, a folder protected by a “cipher,” which led to more password-protected files, more mysteries, and more hidden Easter eggs, some of which are still unresolved and locked by unknown codes.
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I’d never heard of Bring Me The Horizon: British band, apparently. It’s what I think of as cheeseburger rock – lots of layers which all get in the way of the principal element. (Style note: the band’s name has all initial capitals, but the Techcrunch stylistas downcapped “the” because that’s what they do in headlines. Bad form!)
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Increasing use of renewable energy in US yields billions of dollars of benefits • The Guardian
Dharna Noor:
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“From 2019 through 2022, wind and solar generation increased by about 55%,” said Dev Millstein, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “By 2022, wind and solar provided roughly 14% of total electricity needs for the US.”
During that time period, by reducing the use of fossil fuel power plants, the nation’s use of wind and solar power cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 900m metric tons, the authors found. That’s the equivalent of taking 71m cars off the road every year.
Those major climate benefits can obscure the air quality benefits renewable power yielded, wrote the authors, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the renewable consulting firm Clean Kilowatts. To illuminate those co-benefits, the researchers quantified how much the use of wind and solar reduced toxic air emissions, focusing specifically on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen dioxides (NOx), which are both produced during fossil fuel combustion.
They found emissions of SO2 and NOx – both linked to increased asthma risk and a variety of other health issues – decreased by a total of 1m metric tons over that three-year period.
To determine the impact of that reduction on public health, the authors “used air quality models to track the population exposed to pollution from power plants”, Millstein said. They also employed epidemiological research to examine the effects of those emissions, and quantified the benefits by using an Environmental Protection Agency dollar value establishing the value of reducing the risk of early death across the population, he said.
All told, the emission reductions from SO2 and NOx provided $249bn of climate and health benefits to the US, the authors found – a figure Millstein said he found was “noteworthy”.
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Meta takes down ‘inauthentic’ accounts on Facebook, Instagram linked to Israeli firm • WSJ
Salvador Rodriguez, Sam Schechner and Dustin Volz:
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Meta Platforms said its security team took down a network of hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to an Israeli technology firm that apparently used AI-generated comments to praise Israel and criticize campus antisemitism.
A network of more than 500 Facebook accounts and 32 Instagram accounts linked to an Israeli digital marketing and business-intelligence firm left comments on the pages of media organizations as well as political and public figures, including U.S. lawmakers, Meta said. The accounts posed as US and Canadian locals, including Jewish students and African-Americans, but were actually fake or compromised.
Meta didn’t link the fake accounts to the Israeli government. Campaigns to spread false information on social media can also emanate from commercial actors or political campaigns, disinformation researchers say.
The comments, which wouldn’t have been banned if they were from authentic users, were primarily in English and included calls for the release of Israeli hostages, praise for Israel’s military actions and criticisms of “radical Islam” and campus antisemitism.
A large portion of the inauthentic network, which also had a presence on other social platforms, was detected and disabled by Meta’s automated systems before its investigation began, the company said in a report released Wednesday. The company said about 500 accounts followed the pages. Fewer than 100 accounts joined a Facebook group created by the inauthentic network, and about 2,000 accounts followed the Instagram profiles.
…Some of the comments referred to in Wednesday’s report were likely generated using artificial intelligence, Meta said, giving a glimpse of how digital activists and online campaigners are starting to mobilize the new technology to add scale to their efforts to spread false or inauthentic claims on social media.
…Many of the potentially AI-generated comments that Meta cited on Wednesday weren’t related to the posts to which they responded, a tactic Meta has seen in unsophisticated campaigns, the company said.
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Notice the accounts were fake or compromised. One wonders what penalties Meta would impose on companies which use hacked accounts – though there might be the problem of proving that the company knew the accounts were hacked, or had done the hacking itself.
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New BYD hybrid can drive non-stop for more than 2,000km (1,250 miles) • Bloomberg via Yahoo
Danny Lee:
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BYD Co. unveiled a new hybrid powertrain capable of traveling more than 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) without recharging or refueling, intensifying the EV transition competition with the likes of Toyota and Volkswagen.
The upgraded tech, which aims to put more distance between BYD and its rivals, will be launched in two sedans immediately that cost under 100,000 yuan ($13,800), the automaker said at an event live-streamed Tuesday evening from China.
The longer range means some of BYD’s dual-mode plug-in electric hybrid cars can cover the equivalent of Singapore to Bangkok, New York to Miami, or Munich to Madrid on each charge and full tank of gas. The milestone marks BYD’s latest achievement in slashing fuel consumption since introducing its first hybrids in 2008.
Shenzhen-based BYD has upended China’s auto market with widespread price cuts — at some expense to its own profitability — and the positioning of the long-range hybrids may further stoke the price war. The company sold 3 million cars last year and has delivered almost 1 million this year through April. One of every two hybrids sold in China is a BYD, underlining the extent to which they’re a key revenue and profit driver for the manufacturer.
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BYD is ahead of the western carmakers – it stopped making purely fossil fuel-powered ones in 2022 – and rather as with PCs and smartphones, China is showing that it can do as well or better and at greater scale than the west. And Biden’s looking to stop this?
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Charges and seizures brought in fraud scheme, aimed at denying revenue for workers associated with North Korea • United States Department of Justice
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The Justice Department unsealed charges, seizures, and other court-authorized actions to disrupt the illicit revenue generation efforts of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea).
The charges include prosecutions of an Arizona woman, Ukrainian man, and three unidentified foreign nationals who allegedly participated in schemes to place overseas information technology (IT) workers—posing as US citizens and residents—in remote positions at U.S. companies.
As alleged in the court documents, DPRK has dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers around the world, who used stolen or borrowed US persons’ identities to pose as domestic workers, infiltrate domestic companies’ networks, and raise revenue for North Korea. The schemes described in court documents involved defrauding over 300 US companies using US payment platforms and online job site accounts, proxy computers located in the US, and witting and unwitting US persons and entities. This announcement includes the largest case ever charged by the Justice Department involving this type of IT workers’ scheme.
…“As alleged in the indictment, Chapman and her co-conspirators committed fraud and stole the identities of American citizens to enable individuals based overseas to pose as domestic, remote IT workers,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “The charges in this case should be a wakeup call for American companies and government agencies that employ remote IT workers. These crimes benefitted the North Korean government, giving it a revenue stream and, in some instances, proprietary information stolen by the co-conspirators. The Criminal Division remains firm in its commitment to prosecute complex criminal schemes like this one.”
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Endlessly inventive, the North Koreans. (This prosecution sponsored by The Owners Of Big City Office Blocks Where Workers Used To Work Every Damn Day.)
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Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine under DDoS cyber-attack • Internet Archive Blogs
Chris Freeland:
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The Internet Archive, the nonprofit research library that’s home to millions of historical documents, preserved websites, and media content, is currently in its third day of warding off an intermittent DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) cyber-attack. According to library staff, the collections are safe, though service remains inconsistent. Access to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine – which preserves the history of more than 866 billion web pages – has also been impacted.
Since the attacks began on Sunday, the DDoS intrusion has been launching tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. The source of the attack is unknown.
“Thankfully the collections are safe, but we are sorry that the denial-of-service attack has knocked us offline intermittently during these last three days,” explained Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. “With the support from others and the hard work of staff we are hardening our defenses to provide more reliable access to our library. What is new is this attack has been sustained, impactful, targeted, adaptive, and importantly, mean.”
Cyber-attacks are increasingly frequent against libraries and other knowledge institutions, with the British Library, the Solano County Public Library (California), the Berlin Natural History Museum, and Ontario’s London Public Library all being recent victims.
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The impossibility of discovering the source of DDOS attacks (by their nature) is always one of those big concerns. Why, too, would you carry out a DDOS against the Internet Archive? For fun? It can’t be for profit.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 