170984903
submission
SpzToid writes:
Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end.
Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a “bright young man” living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.
Tejay Fletcher’s trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate “fraud on an industrial scale”, scamming victims out of £100m of their hard earned cash.
Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.
The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as “spoofing” and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions.
Fletcher’s luxury lifestyle
When police arrested Fletcher and raided his home, a rented east London apartment with views of the Royal Victoria Dock and the City skyline, they found riches including a £230,000 Lamborghini, two Range Rovers worth £120,000 and an £11,000 Rolex.
A Lamborghini Urus worth 230,000 were among the riches owned by Tejay Fletcher — Metropolitan Police/PA
A Lamborghini Urus worth £230,000 were among the riches owned by Tejay Fletcher — Metropolitan Police/PA
There was also a money counter, jewellery, and an Audemars Piguet watch which appeared to be fake.
It was a far cry from the early years of his life, which he spent in a succession of foster homes, according to his lawyer.
The son of a single mother who “simply was unable to cope”, his pathway to criminality was lined with stolen cars and the consumption of cannabis, Southwark Crown Court heard.
In 2020, he co-founded iSpoof.cc, which he built into what he called “the most sophisticated client spoofing platform available”, allowing scammers to change the number or identity displayed when they made calls so they appeared to be calling from a trusted organisation, often a bank or a bank’s fraud department.
After he earned nearly £2m in profits, police finally caught him and brought down the site.
His website was used for a large proportion of fraudulent activity in the UK – but copycats have since taken its place, and others are still falling victim to these types of scams, experts have warned.
170906697
submission
SpzToid writes:
Graphic images from a Texas mass shooting on Saturday that killed nine (including the gunman) and wounded seven are still circulating on Twitter after spreading virally all weekend. Critics told The New York Times that unlike other platforms, Twitter isn't doing enough to remove or label these "unusually graphic" images, especially in footage where dead bodies of some victims, including a young child, appear to be identifiable, Reuters reported.
Family members do "not deserve to see the dead relatives spread across Twitter for everybody to see,” photojournalist Pat Holloway told the Times. Over the weekend, Holloway joined others in tweeting directly at Twitter CEO Elon Musk to improve the platform's content moderation.
Twitter's policy on sharing content after a violent attack acknowledges that "exposure to these materials may also cause harm to those that view them." That policy is primarily focused on banning the distribution of content created by perpetrators of attacks, but it also places restrictions on "bystander-generated content" depicting "dead bodies" or "content that identifies victims."
Another policy on sharing sensitive media says that "there are also some types of sensitive media content that we don’t allow at all"—including some depictions of deaths, violent crimes, and bodily fluids like blood—"because they have the potential to normalize violence and cause distress to those who view them."
So far, Musk, Twitter trust and safety chief Ella Irwin, and the @TwitterSafety account have not tweeted or commented to clarify how Twitter's policies apply in this case.
Musk did respond to an account tweeting about the gunman and pushing back against a Washington Post report that described the gunman, Mauricio Garcia, as potentially holding neo-Nazi beliefs. A law enforcement official told The Daily Mail that federal agents had reviewed Garcia's social media accounts and found he "had expressed an interest in neo-Nazi views" and could be seen wearing "a patch on his chest reading RWDS"—an acronym used by extremists and white supremacists standing for "Right Wing Death Squad."
"Do they cite any evidence for him being a 'nazi white supremacist'?" Musk tweeted. He seemed to be asking for clarification after boasting that—unlike news reports describing the shooting, in his view—"this platform is hell bent on being the least untrue source of information."
170903401
submission
SpzToid writes:
Since U.S. forces left Afghanistan in 2021, the humanitarian situation there has gotten worse by the day.
This past week, the Biden administration took steps to allow some Afghans who fled after the Taliban to take over to extend their temporary stays in the United States. But for those still applying for asylum, it's proving increasingly difficult.
In Afghanistan today, over 28 million people, two thirds of the population, require humanitarian assistance. 6 million people are living in near famine conditions. Women and girls remain incredibly vulnerable under Taliban rule. All of these factors leading many Afghans to seek asylum here in the US now.
Machine learning technology is being used to translate the dozens of languages spoken in Afghanistan.
But a new investigation by the news organization Rest of World details how various forms of language translation technology are creating computer errors that put asylum seekers lives in danger.
We recently spoke with a translator who works with Afghan asylum seekers.
We've concealed her identity for her safety and the well-being of her family.
The raise in machine translation and apps are not only costing translators their jobs, but quite literally jeopardizing asylum cases.
Like a recent example of this is a Dari translation then by a machine mistranslated actually by a savvy.
This created an inconsistency between the asylum seeker initial interview and what was written in their asylum application.
This consistency was enough for the judge to reject the case.
Joining me to discuss how translation technology is putting asylum seekers at risk is Andrew Deck, who wrote the investigative story, and Leila Lorenzo, policy director at Respawn Crisis Translation, which provides translation services for migrants and refugees.
Thank you both so much for joining me.
Andrew, I'm going to start with you.
Why does the U.S. government say it's using this technology?
And what do we know about how widespread its uses.
You know, in the U.S. as of December 2022, there was a backlog of 1.6 million asylum applications.
And, you know, one way that this technology is framed as a way to speed up the processing of these applications, but what our reporting bore out is that it's also a way of kind of cutting corners in terms of cost, especially that has like a long tail impact on the quality of translations.
And that becomes concerning quickly when we're dealing with the safety and security of incredibly vulnerable communities like Afghan refugees.
And Leila, you are indeed part of this translation community.
So what are you seeing?
What are some of the problems that the people you're working with are experiencing in using this AI technology?
I think that we've seen a variety of problems with the translation technology, for example, with the CBP one out that's used at the border, there's only a few number of languages that can be used English, Spanish and in some cases Haitian Creole.
And we have received reports here at Respond Crisis translation that the Haitian Creole programing, for example, is mistranslated because they only use machine translation.
And we've seen several instances here of respond crisis translation of mistranslations and critical asylum documents that can result in seriously jeopardizing the case or completely invalidating them.
Andrew What are some of the most common problems that happen when these programs are used to help with the Afghan asylum process?
Machine translation really struggles with idioms, cultural nuances, different dialects and slang, and those problems are only exacerbated with Pashto and Dari.
So one translator I spoke with at Respon Crisis translation told me that machine translation tools he tested really struggled with things like military rank in Pashto and Dari.
That's concerning because so many refugees entering the asylum review process in the U.S., you know, they worked closely with the U.S. military and U.S. allied forces in Afghanistan, which is central to their claim of a, say, credible fear of persecution.
So these kinds of mistakes, they may seem trivial, you know, when we're talking about something like Google Translate, but we know that asylum review is a rigorous process where some of these small inconsistencies that it can properly jeopardize a claim.
And, Leila, as it happens, many of the people that were trying to flee the Taliban in the summer of 2021 were people who were providing translation and interpretation services for the United States.
Can you tell me about what your organization is doing to help those people?
And also, is it a missed opportunity for the United States government to not try to take advantage of this brainpower and at least help them help us in translating some of these Afghan languages?
I would shy away from framing it as a missed opportunity, rather, I think it's actually a failure on the part of the United States government.
This is a missed opportunity to provide paid work to families in Afghanistan where translators may have multiple members, like up to 11 family members that they are supporting on one income. And that's what we've directly observed of response in crisis translation. So our organization is working very hard to provide paid work and not only paid work, but finding ways to circumvent what can only be described as a collapsed economic system.
And if that's something that respond crisis translation can do on a very limited budget, that is something that bigger companies and the United States government can figure out a way to do.
And to both of you, you've clearly laid out some of the problems with using this technology. Are there any solutions here or is the overarching response simply not to use these automated translation services?
I mean, AA is largely an unregulated sector of the tech industry right now, and that includes machine translation.
You know, as a result, we're often relying and expecting right now for private companies to monitor harm and self-regulate the use of their own products.
But ultimately, I think we need to put the onus on, you know, agencies and aid organizations to more closely investigate and interrogate the use of this technology.
And, you know, not necessarily private companies that may be competing over lucrative government contracts.
Our position at response crisis translation is that we do not use machine translation.
And in especially in the case of Dadi, which is an under-resourced, under-resourced language, you'll notice on Google Translate, it is subsumed under Persian and Persian is a language with a dialect continuum.
There is the Persian that is spoken in Iran.
There is the Persion that is spoken in Afghanistan, and therefore I find it completely inappropriate.
And that would be the position that translators who are working in a context crisis such as respond crisis translation would would hold.Link to Original Source
170720502
submission
SpzToid writes:
Camouflage ranks highly among the arts of war. Thanks to innovations such as fractal colouration patterns, which mimic nature by repeating shapes at different scales, the distance from which naked eyes can quickly spot soldiers wearing the best camouflage has shrunk, by one reckoning, by a fifth over the past two decades. That is impressive.
On today’s battlefields, however, it is no longer enough to merely hide from human eyes. People and kit are given away as well by signals beyond the visual spectrum, and devices that detect these wavelengths are getting better, lighter and cheaper. Thermal sensors are a case in point. Today, one that costs about $1,000 and weighs as little as five sachets of sugar can, in good weather, detect a warm vehicle as far off as 10km.
As Hans Kariis, deputy head of signatures research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, notes, that is well beyond the range at which a small drone would be spotted. Two decades ago, he adds, a less sensitive thermal sensor weighing a kilogram cost ten times as much.
For forces in Ukraine keen to go unnoticed, the challenge is not just that precision sensors are multiplying, on land, in the skies and in orbit. It is also that better automatic target-detection software is helping operators find needles in the haystacks of data being collected.
Look out!
For example, software called Kestrel, developed by Sentient Vision Systems of Melbourne, Australia, scans feeds of visual, infrared and radar data, and places red boxes around people and other potential targets, even as their positions in the frame move. Sentient says Kestrel has been deployed on more than 3,500 crewed and uncrewed aircraft since its introduction in 2009. The pertinent data processing, which also classifies objects and calculates ranges, can be done aloft—a bonus, for an aircraft may collect more data than can be streamed to computers on the ground.
As Maksym Zrazhevsky, an analyst with Molfar, an intelligence firm in Dnipro, Ukraine, observes, the fighting in his country shows how these advances have made it far harder to camouflage military assets. This no doubt helps explain why, as Mr Zrazhevsky notes, Russian forces in Ukraine have resorted to using sections of timber to disguise military refuelling vehicles as civilian logging lorries. However clever that may seem, there’s a rub. The 1949 Geneva Convention on warfare bans “the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”, as Article 37’s “Prohibition of perfidy” puts it.
But there is a different, convention-compliant approach to reducing the chance of appearing in an enemy’s cross-hairs. Rather than make targets seem civilian, design special camouflage that tricks electronic sensors as well as human eyes.
One developer of such “multispectral” camouflaging is Saab, a Swedish industrial giant. Its Barracuda unit sells camouflage netting for vehicles and soldiers that reduces both radar reflections and heat signals. To handle radar, it contains a layer of specially crafted (but secret) semi-conducting polymers that absorb a portion of the incoming beam. That stops reflections revealing tanks and other military gear underneath. Formulating the polymer is tricky, says Johan Jersblad, a senior camouflage engineer at Saab. If it is too conductive, the netting itself will appear on a radar screen and become a target.
Saab’s nets’ heat-signature reduction comes from an insulating material, also of undisclosed composition, which reflects infrared radiation from what it is covering back towards its source, be it an engine, a gun or a body. To better fool soldiers or software scanning thermal imagery, the material also reflects cooler wavelengths emitted by surroundings like the ground and vegetation—in effect, stealing their temperature from them. The material in question is distributed unevenly, to mimic heat variation in the natural world. Dr Kariis reckons today’s multispectral camouflage cuts in half the range at which an asset can be spotted by many sensors.
170678794
submission
SpzToid writes:
The Biden administration has been trying to choke off use of hacking tools made by the Israeli firm NSO. It turns out that not every part of the government has gotten the message.
WASHINGTON — The secret contract was finalized on Nov. 8, 2021, a deal between a company that has acted as a front for the United States government and the American affiliate of a notorious Israeli hacking firm.
Under the arrangement, the Israeli firm, NSO Group, gave the U.S. government access to one of its most powerful weapons — a geolocation tool that can covertly track mobile phones around the world without the phone user’s knowledge or consent.
If the veiled nature of the deal was unusual — it was signed for the front company by a businessman using a fake name — the timing was extraordinary.
Only five days earlier, the Biden administration had announced it was taking action against NSO, whose hacking tools for years had been abused by governments around the world to spy on political dissidents, human rights activists and journalists. The White House placed NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, declaring the company a national security threat and sending the message that American companies should stop doing business with it.
The secret contract — which The New York Times is disclosing for the first time — violates the Biden administration’s public policy, and still appears to be active. The contract, reviewed by The Times, stated that the “United States government” would be the ultimate user of the tool, although it is unclear which government agency authorized the deal and might be using the spyware. It specifically allowed the government to test, evaluate, and even deploy the spyware against targets of its choice in Mexico.
Asked about the contract, White House officials said it was news to them.
“We are not aware of this contract, and any use of this product would be highly concerning,” said a senior administration official, responding on the basis of anonymity to address a national security issue.
Spokesmen for the White House and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to make any further comment, leaving unresolved questions: What intelligence or law enforcement officials knew about the contract when it was signed? Did any government agency direct the deployment of the technology? Could the administration be dealing with a rogue government contractor evading Mr. Biden’s own policy? And why did the contract specify Mexico?
ImageA close-up photo of President Biden speaking at a lectern.
President Biden signed an executive order further cracking down on the use of commercial spyware on Monday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
A close-up photo of President Biden speaking at a lectern.
The secret contract further illuminates the ongoing battle for control of powerful cyberweapons, both among and within governments, including the United States.
170570187
submission
SpzToid writes:
Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a hobbit hole than Moonbase Alpha.
There could be another solution, however, that would offer future colonists safer and far more expansive living space than any cramped base built on the surface. Writing in Acta Astronautica, Raymond Martin, an engineer at Blue Origin, a rocket company, and Haym Benaroya, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, explore the benefits of setting up a Moon base inside giant geological tunnels that lie just below the lunar surface.
First discovered during the Apollo programme, these lunar lava tubes are a legacy of when Earth’s nearest celestial neighbour was geologically hyperactive, with streams of boiling basaltic magma bursting from the interior to flow across the Moon’s surface as lava. Found on Earth (see picture), and identified on Mars, lava tubes form when the sluggish top layer of a lava stream slows and cools, forming a thick and rocky lid that is left behind when the rest of the lava underneath eventually drains away.
Lava tubes on Earth are usually up to 15 metres wide and can run for several kilometres. But the reduced gravity on the Moon makes them hundreds of times bigger, creating colossal cave systems that are up to a kilometre across and hundreds of kilometres long.
170348129
submission
SpzToid writes:
Twitter CEO Elon Musk had Twitter engineers set up a "special system" to boost his tweets after his post about the Super Bowl got fewer views than a tweet from President Biden, according to a report by Platformer yesterday.
Biden's tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles has 29.1 million views, while Musk's now-deleted tweet also supporting the Eagles received a mere 9.1 million. Hours after the Eagles' loss, Musk's cousin James Musk posted a message in Twitter's Slack asking anyone "who can make dashboards and write software" to help with "debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," the report said. James Musk's Slack message reportedly called the situation one of "high urgency."
Additionally, Elon Musk "flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team."
"Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person," Platformer wrote. "Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk's tweets weren't reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions."
Fix it or you’re fired
Earlier this month, Musk reportedly fired an engineer who tried to explain why his tweet views were down. More firings were threatened as Musk's "deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn't 'fixed,' they would all lose their jobs as well," the Platformer report said.
A solution was found by Monday. Musk's newfound reach was immediately noticeable to users in the default "For You" feed that isn't limited to accounts each user follows.
...meanwhile in related news, Slashdot's shadow ban on All News or Nerdy Discussions About Elon/Twitter remains in full effect.
170159084
submission
SpzToid writes:
A news site used AI to write articles. It was a journalistic disaster.
The tech site CNET sent a chill through the media world when it tapped artificial intelligence to produce surprisingly lucid news stories. But now its human staff is writing a lot of corrections.
168960596
submission
SpzToid writes:
Add to the many recent Twitter stories in the firehose, this too:
Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.
The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.
The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.
Here's the NY Times' front page version of the story as well:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/twitter-suspends-journalist-accounts-elon-musk.html
168891042
submission
SpzToid writes:
Ever since Musk's ownership, Slashdot refuses to post *any* news regarding Twitter. Here's a few examples of stories, with their related comments that include more links to /. news. Why the news blackout and exclusion of the subsequent discussions from the nerds that matter on the slashdots?
https://slashdot.org/submissio...
https://slashdot.org/firehose....
168836274
submission
SpzToid writes:
The Department of Energy plans to announce Tuesday that scientists have been able for the first time to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain — a major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion-dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power.
“To most of us, this was only a matter of time,” said a senior fusion scientist familiar with the work of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the discovery was made.
The development was first reported by the Financial Times on Sunday. It was confirmed by two people familiar with the research, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid getting ahead of the official announcement. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was slated to make the announcement Tuesday at a media event billed as the unveiling of “a major scientific breakthrough.”
168576130
submission
SpzToid writes:
Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions.
One proposal, literally as well as metaphorically green, is to recruit the services of chlorophyll-laden, photosynthesising organisms called cyanobacteria. That has allowed Prometheus Materials, a firm in Colorado, to develop a cement-making process in which the energy comes not from heat but light—something easily generated from electricity that has, in turn, been provided by renewable sources. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, photosynthesis subtracts CO2 from the atmosphere rather than adding it.
Prometheus raises its bacteria in water-filled “bioreactors” surrounded by light-emitting diodes, to allow the bugs to photosynthesise. The water contains inorganic nutrients the bacteria need, and is perfused by streams of air bubbles which provide the CO2. It also has calcium ions dissolved in it—for the purpose of the exercise is to encourage the bacteria to generate from the ingredients provided crystals of calcium carbonate a few microns across—a process called biomineralisation.
The number of bacteria in the bioreactors would double every four to six hours if permitted to do so. Instead, quantities of them are transferred regularly to another tank. Here, they are plied with a proprietary stimulant that accelerates biomineralisation and then allowed to sit for an hour or so to mature. When the crystal-rich gloop that results is mixed with an aggregate, the product is “bioconcrete”.
168368666
submission
SpzToid writes:
...
The breakdowns so far aren't in the core functions of Twitter — posting and reading messages — but around the edges.
Copyright: Twitter’s automated copyright takedown system was no longer functional as of Sunday evening, Forbes reported, allowing users to upload chunks of copyrighted movies that remained online for hours before getting taken down.
Hacked accounts: Users who have reported hacked accounts say the company has been slow to respond with solutions to recoup their profiles. One journalist who Axios spoke to said Twitter didn't respond to their report for days, and when it did, couldn't offer a viable solution to recover it.
Security: Last week, some users reported problems trying to generate two-factor authentication codes via SMS text messages that would help them log into their accounts.
Downloading data: Others reported issues trying to download archives of their data, per Wired. ...
168167088
submission
SpzToid writes:
Ticketmaster announced Thursday afternoon that it was halting Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour tickets on Friday due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory” to meet demand.
A mad rush this week for tickets to Swift’s tour crashed parts of Ticketmaster’s website and left fans waiting for hours to buy tickets.
The episode sparked calls to break up the large ticketing company, which some critics have accused of having a monopoly in online ticket sales. The company has cited extraordinary demand for Swift’s tour and tried to pace the rollout of tickets.
Angry Taylor Swift fans rail about Ticketmaster glitches
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) said Wednesday that his office has received complaints from people who tried purchasing tickets through Ticketmaster, and said he would look into whether the website violated consumers’ rights and antitrust regulations.
In a lengthy post published Thursday, Ticketmaster explained that “this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests” — four-times its previous web traffic peak.
166347791
submission
SpzToid writes:
More than 70 companies in Britain are undergoing a six-month experiment in which their employees get a paid day off each week. So far, most companies say it’s going well.
Most of the companies participating in a four-day workweek pilot program in Britain said they had seen no loss of productivity during the experiment, and in some cases had seen a significant improvement, according to a survey of participants published on Wednesday.
Nearly halfway into the six-month trial, in which employees at 73 companies get a paid day off weekly, 35 of the 41 companies that responded to a survey said they were “likely” or “extremely likely” to consider continuing the four-day workweek beyond the end of the trial in late November. All but two of the 41 companies said productivity was either the same or had improved. Remarkably, six companies said productivity had significantly improved.
Jo Burns-Russell, the managing director at Amplitude Media, a marketing agency in Northampton, England, said the four-day workweek had been such a success that the 12-person company hoped to be able to make it permanent. Employees have found ways to work more efficiently, she said. The result has been that the company is delivering the same volume of work and is still growing, even though half of the employees are off on Wednesdays and half on Fridays.
