From what I’ve read in the past, Iranian state actors – influence campaigns and breaking into computers and such – have opposed another Trump presidency.

Trump greenlighted the hit on Soleimani, and is more-supportive of Israel.

Russian state actors, on the other hand, have been supportive of another Trump presidency.

I imagine that that’s something that Tehran and Moscow probably need to work out.

EDIT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/04/business/media/iran-disinformation-us-presidential-race.html

Iran Emerges as a Top Disinformation Threat in U.S. Presidential Race

With a flurry of hacks and fake websites, Iran has intensified its efforts to discredit American democracy and possibly tip the race against former President Donald Trump.

EDIT2: I was just (critically) discussing Microsoft’s naming scheme for hostile groups the other day. Russian ones are named “something Blizzard” and Iranian ones “something Sandstorm”.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-xdr/microsoft-threat-actor-naming

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/us-says-iranian-hackers-sent-trump-information-to-biden-camp/ar-AA1qNFnn

A hacker group with suspected ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps called Mint Sandstorm is suspected of successfully infiltrating the campaign of Trump, a US law enforcement official said at the time.

Those Iranian guys are APT42, aka “Mint Sandstorm”.

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-fancy-bear-us-hacking-campaign-government-energy/

referring to the Hillary Clinton campaign director whose emails were stolen and leaked by APT28 ahead of the 2016 election.

https://www.logpoint.com/en/blog/emerging-threats/forest-blizzard/

The Cyber espionage group Forest Blizzard is attributed to the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence agency).

Forest Blizzard is also known by its numerous aliases: APT 28, Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Sednit Gang, Sofacy Group, BlueDelta, and STRONTIUM.

And Russian guys, APT28, aka “Forest Blizzard”.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-accuses-russia-election-interference/

Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of efforts to influence the upcoming presidential election. He said an internal planning document created by the Kremlin stated one of the campaign’s goals is “securing Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.”

The campaigns involved using “cybersquatted” domains, which are intended to mimic another entity’s domain name and trick visitors into believing they are visiting the legitimate website. These sites, Garland said, were designed to look like major U.S.-based news outlets such as the Washington Post or Fox News, by using the same layout and design, but were fake sites spreading Russian propaganda created by the Kremlin.

Among the goals of the campaigns are to “reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests, and influence voters in the U.S. and foreign elections” while concealing the Russian government and its agents as the source of the content, according to the court filings.

The Justice Department accused Doppelganger of using “influencers” worldwide, paid social media advertisements and fake social media profiles purporting to be U.S. citizens to drive viewership to the domains, “all of which attempted to trick viewers into believing they were being directed to a legitimate news media outlet’s website.”

Projects directed at the U.S. include the “Good Old USA Project,” “Guerilla Media Campaign,” and “U.S. Social Media Influencers Network Project,” according to court filings.

The Justice Department obtained notes, project proposals, planning documents and other records during its investigation, some of which detail objectives, target audiences and campaign topics. The department redacted the names of the political parties and presidential candidates, labeling them only as U.S. Political Party A or B, or Candidate A or B, but the documents include information that makes them identifiable.

Objectives of the “Good Old USA” project include boosting the percentage of Americans who believe the U.S. is “doing way too much to support Ukraine,” and lowering President Biden’s confidence rating down to at least 29% in the lead-up to the November election, according to documents submitted by the Justice Department. The document appears to have been prepared in late 2023, when Mr. Biden was still seeking reelection.

EDIT3: Both the Russian and Iranian camps have been reported to be trying to increase political division and decrease trust in the American political system, so I guess they’re aligned on that much, at any rate.

Endoscope profile pics are the future.

I believe it’s ICOM, not Baofeng.

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-820735

What are the ICOM IC-V82 radios exploding in Lebanon?

On that note, one review on eham.net from twelve years back for this radio is amusing:

https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=5046

Watch out for fake v82’s! Only buy from authorized retailers or someone who did.

The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn’t want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn’t expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

And while in war, there are prohibitions on targeting non-combatants, they don’t require that there be no collateral damage. Israel’s pretty clearly targeting Hezbollah here, not random Lebanese.

I do wonder if Hezbollah can maybe agree to stay out of part of Lebanon. I don’t think that that’d need to compromise either Israel’s or Hezbollah’s war plans, so maybe it’d be possible to come to some sort of agreement like that; you’d need buy-in from both parties. Then that area could be used as a safe area for Lebanese non-combatants.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-crackdown-on-mobile-phones-in-schools

Mobile phones are set to be prohibited in schools across England as part of the government’s plan to minimise disruption and improve behaviour in classrooms.

New mobile phones in schools guidance issued today (19 February 2024) backs headteachers in prohibiting the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, including at break times.

Many schools around the country are already prohibiting mobile phone use with great results. This guidance will ensure there is a consistent approach across all schools.

I suppose if enough countries do that sort of thing, pagers might start doing a comeback.

EDIT: Though looking at the wording, I’m not actually sure if this is a “we’re banning cell phones” or a “we’re talking about policies that make it look like we’re banning cell phones to keep the anti-cell-phone crowd happy”.

I have not used it, but labwc is apparently an openbox-alike compositor for Wayland.

Firstly, we believe that there is a need for a simple Wayland window-stacking compositor which strikes a balance between minimalism and bloat approximately at the level where Window Managers like Openbox reside in the X11 domain. Most of the core developers are accustomed to low resource Desktop Environments such as Mate/XFCE or standalone Window Managers such as Openbox under X11. Labwc aims to make a similar setup possible under Wayland, with small and independent components rather than a large, integrated software eco-system.

While 44.3 percent of union members polled between April 9 and July 3 backed Biden compared to 36.3 percent for Trump, polling in the wake of the Republican and Democratic Party conventions found the Teamsters members support Trump over Harris.

In a union-commissioned survey conducted by an independent third party between July 24 and Sept. 15, 59.6 percent of Teamsters members voted to endorse Trump, compared to 34 percent for Harris.

Teamsters members seem to have been dramatically more supportive of Biden than they are of Harris. Hmm.

Don’t know if election models, like Five Thirty Eight’s or similar, take endorsements as an input, whether that may affect their projection.

There are a large number of people in Hezbollah. Israel is fighting them.

You’re talking about using a Hellfire R-9X.

In order to launch those concurrently against, I dunno, sounds like there are maybe hundreds or thousands of targets, you’re going to need to have hundreds or thousands of drones. You’re gonna need something like a TB-2 at least to be lobbing them, not a tiny little drone. You’re talking about a lot of medium-size UAVs. That’s where your scale limitation is gonna come from.

Those things are fine if you’re trying to kill one person. But Israel’s fighting a number of people, even if it can identify them. They aren’t gonna have thousands of drones above Lebanon.

And if they’re hitting buildings and such, then you’re gonna be collapsing buildings and stuff like that.

Secondly, I assume that the Lebanese government is not going to give Israel free reign to do drone strikes on Hezbollah on Lebanese territory, will shoot at those drones, so to use those, you’d need to destroy any air defense that Lebanon has. My guess is that Israel’s looking to just fight Hezbollah as much as possible.

There’s still gonna be some collateral damage with those, that can’t be employed at scale as readily – you’d have to concurrently target huge numbers of people from airborne platforms, and these are pretty small charges. Given that Hezbollah isn’t fighting in the open – understandably – this is probably about as good as it realistically gets in terms of collateral damage.

Israel could maybe use DIME charges to have a smaller difference between lethal radius and damaging radius, but that’s got its own unpleasant aspects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense_inert_metal_explosive

Dense inert metal explosive (DIME) is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material (such as phlegmatized HMX or RDX) and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten. It is intended to limit the effective distance of the explosion, to avoid collateral damage in warfare.

Upon detonation of the explosive, the casing disintegrates into extremely small particles, as opposed to larger pieces of shrapnel which results from the fragmentation of a metal shell casing. The HMTA powder acts like micro-shrapnel which is very lethal at close range (about 4 m or 13 ft), but loses momentum very quickly due to air resistance, coming to a halt within approximately 40 times the diameter of the charge. This increases the probability of killing people within a few meters of the explosion while reducing the probability of causing death and injuries or damage farther away. Survivors close to the lethal zone may still have their limbs amputated by the HMTA microshrapnel, which can slice through soft tissue and bone.

If Israel isn’t using those already, I guess we could send 'em some, if we have some sitting around. Realistically, though, I doubt that collateral damage is gonna be possible to reduce a whole lot, given the fact that Hezbollah’s hiding in a civilian population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_cup

looks dubious

The problem here is that if this is unreliable – and I’m skeptical that Google can produce a system that will work across-the-board – then you have a synthesized image that now has Google attesting to be non-synthetic.

Maybe they can make it clear that this is a best-effort system, and that they only will flag some of them.

There are a limited number of ways that I’m aware of to detect whether an image is edited.

• If the image has been previously compressed via lossy compression, there are ways to modify the image to make the difference in artifacts in different points of the image more visible, or – I’m sure – statistically look for such artifacts.

• If an image has been previously indexed by something like Google Images and Google has an index sufficient to permit Google to do fuzzy search for portions of the image, then they can identify an edited image because they can find the original.

• It’s possible to try to identify light sources based on shading and specular in an image, and try to find points of the image that don’t match. There are complexities to this; for example, a surface might simply be shaded in such a way that it looks like light is shining on it, like if you have a realistic poster on a wall. For generation rather than photomanipulation, better generative AI systems will also probably tend to make this go away as they improve; it’s a flaw in the image.

But none of these is a surefire mechanism.

For AI-generated images, my guess is that there are some other routes.

• Some images are going to have metadata attached. That’s trivial to strip, so not very good if someone is actually trying to fool people.

• Maybe some generative AIs will try doing digital watermarks. I’m not very bullish on this approach. It’s a little harder to remove, but invariably, any kind of lossy compression is at odds with watermarks that aren’t very visible. As lossy compression gets better, it either automatically tends to strip watermarks – because lossy compression tries to remove data that doesn’t noticeably alter an image, and watermarks rely on hiding data there – or watermarks have to visibly alter the image. And that’s before people actively developing tools to strip them. And you’re never gonna get all the generative AIs out there adding digital watermarks.

• I don’t know what the right terminology is, but my guess is that latent diffusion models try to approach a minimum error for some model during the iteration process. If you have a copy of the model used to generate the image, you can probably measure the error from what the model would predict – basically, how much one iteration would change an image or part of it. I’d guess that that only works well if you have a copy of the model in question or a model similar to it.

I don’t think that any of those are likely surefire mechanisms either.

Well, the only way questions show up if someone asks them.

checks post history

Looks like you’ve submitted three posts, one of which is asking whether people ask the same questions all the time. Can you yourself think up more than two? I mean, I’d reckon that you can, and that if you’re asking them, that they’d probably be relevant to you.

It did both the original link and archive.org

Internet Archive - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for Internet Archive:

MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America

I think that the MBFC database should probably have some special case for the Internet Archive. Either parse the archived domain out of Wayback Machine links and use the MBFC assessment for the domain or just don’t have a rating.

Any aggregate rating of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is going to basically be useless, because it shows archives of sites spanning the spectrum on politics and factuality.

On the subject of the repeated murder attempts against him, he added: “There’s something going on. I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country.”

On one hand, the Almighty appears to have thrown several assassins at Trump but had them fail. One might take that as an expression of divine endorsement for Trump’s leadership. But, then, on the other hand, He hasn’t sent any against Harris.

Definitely a tough theological knot, that one.

It doesn’t look like anyone’s built much by way of spacecraft intended to enter interstellar space recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_leaving_the_Solar_System

• Pioneer 10, launched 1972, last contact January 2003

• Pioneer 11, launched 1973, last contact November 1995

• Voyager 2, launched August 1977, still active

• Voyager 1, launched September 1977, still active

• New Horizons, launched 2006, still active

All NASA projects.

There’s one ESA-led project, Ulysses, launched in 1990, shut down in 2008. This is still in the solar system, but WP says that there’s some chance that in November 2098, it may undergo a gravitational slingshot induced by Jupiter that will eventually send it out of the solar system.

And…looks like that’s it. The sum total of what mankind has built to date that will make it out of the solar system. The last launch humanity did towards interstellar space was 18 years ago.

looks at list

Microsoft’s list of allocated names apparently includes:

• Crimson Sandstorm

• Diamond Sleet

• Ghost Blizzard

• Leopard Typhoon

• Luna Tempest

• Night Tsunami

• Silk Typhoon

• Star Blizzard

This does not pass my basic sniff test of being able to tell whether a name is a group from a hostile intelligence agency or the latest Razer gaming product, a cyberpunk video game gang name, or a video gaming guild name.

https://robinpiree.com/blog/guild-names

• Twilight Vanguard

• Crimson Shadows

That’s too similar in my book.

That characteristic sound you hear associated with falling bombs in movies and such was originally a noisemaker on World War II German dive bombers and bombs intended to intimidate soldiers on the receiving end.

https://www.slashgear.com/1370552/stuka-siren-ju-87-noise-explained/

As well as saving the Stuka from early retirement, it is thought that Ernst Udet also suggested its most famous feature — the siren (some sources say that this was an intervention by Hitler himself). The sirens were fitted to the legs of the plane’s fixed undercarriage. They were driven by propellers that spun in the airflow, and could be activated and deactivated from the cockpit.

The psychological effect of the siren was best explained French general Edouard Ruby, who reportedly said that on hearing the terrifying wail, his infantrymen “cowered in the trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the dive bombers.” But many Stuka pilots also didn’t like them. The sound was just as audible in the cockpit of the Stuka as it was to forces on the ground, and the bulky sirens added weight and reduced the speed of the already slow bomber. Reportedly, some squadrons fitted simple air whistles to the Stuka’s bombs instead, creating the famous “falling bomb whistle” that Hollywood still insists that all ordnance makes as it plummets to earth.

Both the Stuka’s terrifying wail and the falling bomb whistle became so famous that they have since become standard stock sound effects in movies, used whenever any airplane dives at high speed or any bomb is dropped. But, unless you’re old enough to have been on the battlefields of Europe in the very earliest days of WWII, these are sounds that you’ll only ever hear in movies now.

Stuka dive sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQzv-8pJSqY

Falling bomb whistle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlsHYKkmHoI

Maybe one could do the same thing with grenades.

Russia is not alone in its activity. Microsoft also saw efforts by a China-linked group, known as Storm-1852

rolls eyes

You give them a cool name, you make them sound cool.

Just do the plain ol’ number thing. Let them do their own marketing work if they want marketing.

https://www.infosecurityeurope.com/en-gb/blog/threat-vectors/understanding-threat-actor-naming-conventions.html

While APT43’s link with the North Korean government was confirmed for the first time in the Mandiant report, the threat actor was already known by threat analysts under other names, such as Thallium, Kimsuky, Velvet Chollima, Black Banshee and STOLEN PENCIL.

This confusion comes down to each cyber threat intelligence (CTI) vendor operating its own attribution process for cyber-attacks – something we recently investigated on Infosecurity Magazine.

The most prominent threat group name is the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). Commonly used by the whole CTI community, including US non-profit organization MITRE, which provides a standardized framework for tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), APT groups refer to clusters of sophisticated threat actors sponsored by, or acting on behalf of a government.

With geopolitical rather than financial motivations, APT groups typically operate cyber espionage campaigns and destructive cyber-attacks.

Once a threat actor has been confirmed to be a coherent group of hackers backed by a nation-state, the threat analysts who lead the cyber attribution allocate it a new APT number – the latest being APT43.

Other ‘sober’ naming conventions exist, consisting of codenames and numbers only. For example, APT-C groups are Chinese cybersecurity vendor 360 Security Technology’s equivalent to APT groups. APT-C numbers are sometimes used by other vendors.

Others, like MITRE’s G[XXX] (e.g. G1002) or SecureWorks’ legacy TG-[XXXX] (e.g. TG-3279), are mere identification numbers and their names do not reveal anything about the threat actor.

“We use a sober, or even dull, naming convention because we don’t want to glamorise those groups,” Collier added.

What is this, a Microsoft naming scheme?

kagis

Sounds like it.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/09/17/russian-election-interference-efforts-focus-on-the-harris-walz-campaign/

A Chinese-linked influence actor Microsoft tracks as Storm-1852 successfully pivoted to short-form video content that criticizes the Biden administration and Harris campaign before some of its assets disappeared from social media following reports of its activity. While most Storm-1852 personas masquerade as conservative US voters voting for Trump, a handful of accounts also create anti-Trump content and use political slogans and hashtags associated with American progressive politics.