cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/490647

Archived link

“[Russian] information operations are underway […] to gradually demoralise the public debate so that Russian narratives can be disseminated. These are part of an information war to stop the flow of material aid to a struggling Ukraine,” warned the Czech National Centre for Combating Organised Crime (NCOZ) in a report.

“The Kremlin’s efforts to diminish public trust in institutions and the state is not new, but the increase in the intensity of influence operations is a threat,” the Czech Strategic Communications Coordinator Otakar Foltýn said in reaction to the NCOZ report.

• According to the NCOZ, Russian activities are aimed at influencing the population of Western European countries while increasing the threat of sabotage against critical and transport infrastructure, with local residents and criminal networks are becoming more involved in various activities.

• These include gathering information, identifying targets, putting pressure on specific individuals, such as those from the exiled diaspora, and even direct attacks on infrastructure and public places.

• “This issue has been persistent for several years, with Russian and Chinese influence attempting to infiltrate Czech society,” Jurečka said. “We must cultivate a society that can critically think, resist disinformation, and not succumb to fear,” Jurečka added.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/488027

Archived link

• Russia has increased its information war against Moldova joining the European Union (EU), Kremlin disinformation campaigns are heavily using social media: Facebook, Tik Tok, Telegram and others.

• Russia’s disinformation in Moldova pursues three key goals: to derail Moldova’s accession to the EU, undermine support for the pro-Europe government of President Maia Sandu and bring Moldova back into Russia’s orbit.

• Some of the disinformation attacks are startlingly transparent lies: A prominent Russian, pro-Kremlin commentator, Vladimir Solovyov, last year posted a photo on social media of a Moldovan rally supporting EU membership, simply relabeling it an anti-EU demonstration in a different city. Other attacks are increasingly sophisticated, including the use of artificial intelligence to create “deepfaked” videos of President Maia Sandu, according to Moldova-based journalists and Sandu’s office.

The Russian campaign uses several core narratives, according to a study:

1. A risk of war over Transnistria, a separatist enclave at Moldova’s eastern edge, if Moldova should press for the withdrawal of Russian troops based there.

2. Risk of communal conflict between Moldova’s ethnic or linguistically Romanian citizens (roughly 80 percent or more of the population) and the minorities of Russians or other Russian-speaking citizens.

3. NATO’s threat of war. Moldova is constitutionally mandated to be militarily neutral, but it cooperates with NATO. Russia warns that Moldova may join NATO, making war almost inevitable.

4. Anti-LGBT propaganda. Russia warns that liberal EU policies include “homosexual propaganda” that will turn Moldovan children to homosexuality.

5. Russia is good, Europe is bad. Russian narratives say that deeply impoverished Moldova owes its few advantages — such as Soviet-built factories — to its rule from Moscow, while “nothing good came out of Europe.”

Russian Disinformation: Impact and Response

• Investigations have found that 35% of Moldovans are agreeing that "Russia invaded Ukraine to protect people marginalized by Nazi sympathizers.” Similarly, 31% agreed that “the Russian Federation is the guarantor of peace and stability in Moldova.” Russia’s disinformation campaigns “lead to decreased support for human rights, exacerbate relations between linguistic groups, and may increase vulnerability to political violence, especially among the youth.”

• Because Moldova is a small media market, the limited advertising or other revenue available to its news media leaves fact-based journalism massively overmatched by the millions of dollars per month that experts say Russia is spending on disinformation.

• International partners find ways to help Moldova’s Association of Electronic Press or other institutions build capacities for real-time detection and countering of faked information. This could include initiatives like StopFals, a fact-checking project run by Moldova’s Independent Press Association.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16717737

https://toast.ooo/post/3740832

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17653797

"Citizens of Indonesia, we apologize for the fact that it affected everyone," the team wrote in a statement shared by Singapore-based dark web intelligence outfit Stealth Mole.

In the statement, Brain Cipher detailed that it was releasing the decryptor of its own accord, without prodding by law enforcement or other agencies. It did, however, ask for public gratitude for its magnanimous behavior – and even provided an account at which it could receive donations. Good luck with that.

In case of paywall: https://archive.is/kZAgI

But just as Glaze's userbase is spiking, a bigger priority for the Glaze Project has emerged: protecting users from attacks disabling Glaze's protections—including attack methods exposed in June by online security researchers in Zurich, Switzerland. In a paper published on Arxiv.org without peer review, the Zurich researchers, including Google DeepMind research scientist Nicholas Carlini, claimed that Glaze's protections could be "easily bypassed, leaving artists vulnerable to style mimicry."

I wish I got to do fun little projects like this at my job. Anyway, this proof of concept shows that hydrogen would be a great alternative to propane and natural gas for cooking. Hat tip to @hypx@mastodon.social.

Google researchers have come out with a new paper that warns that generative AI is ruining vast swaths of the internet with fake content — which is painfully ironic because Google has been hard at work pushing the same technology to its enormous user base.

After all, the privacy of our mind may be the only privacy we have left.

OpenAI, which is co-defendant with Microsoft, is seeking an informal discovery conference to compel the Times to produce documents demonstrating the originality and ownership of the copyrighted works in question. According to OpenAI’s court filing, the information is critical to their defense against claims of copyright infringement.

The leap in emissions is largely due to energy-guzzling data centers and supply chain emissions necessary to power artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The report estimated that in 2023, Google’s data centers alone account for up to 10% of global data center electricity consumption. Their data center electricity and water consumption both increased 17% between 2022 and 2023.

Google released 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just last year, 13% higher than the year before.

Climate scientists have shown concerns as Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to invest billons of dollars into AI.

Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models.

Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s robots.txt, the text file that tells bots which pages they can access on a website. But, as Cloudflare points out in a post announcing its bot-combating tool, not all AI scrapers respect this.