Tag: internet

Starlink

SpaceX will make a massive network of 1000s of low earth orbit satellites to provide high-bandwidth, low-cost internet connection to every m2 of Earth. Gwynne Shotwell: We actually don’t chat very much about this particular project, not because we’re hiding anything, but this is probably one of the most challenging if not the most challenging project we’ve undertaken. No one has been successful deploying a huge constellation for internet broadband, or basically for satellite internet, and I don’t think physics is the difficulty here. I think we can come up with the right technology solution, but we need to make a business out of it, and it’ll cost the company about $10B or more to deploy this system. And so we’re marching steadily along but we’re certainly not claiming victory yet.

A roadmap:

Starlink 1.0 4K satellites 2021
Starlink 2.0 7K satellites 2023
Starlink 3.0 30K satellites 2027

and a look at the competition:

SpaceX Starlink satellites, Amazon new Kuiper and OneWeb are competing for the low latency low-earth satellite market. This market will be worth 10s of billions of $ per year.

Fake news reach

fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them. Fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126k contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust.

Gray Hat

Most of all, Hutchins was bored, and he wanted to work again. “Not having access to my botnet-monitoring stuff is depressing”. While Hutchins declined to discuss details of his case, except to maintain his innocence — the trial is still pending, though such cases often end in settlements — he feared the damage was already done. Cybersecurity is a business based in trust, and he worried that the allegations alone made him unemployable. (He had recently noticed a number of Twitter bots commenting on his case with anti-American bents, which he speculated could be someone trying to use his case to divide the American cybersecurity community.)

Family chat circle of hell

older generations trying to indoctrinate their family members with xenophobic chat messages. each new technology creates its own new hell.

“I’m really close to my parents, but I only have a tenuous connection with my relatives. A family WhatsApp group, in my opinion, is just a conduit to get into each other’s lives and decision-making, and I don’t like that.”

“There is certainly some charm in knowing that every single family member and extended relative is, well, alive. But it quickly fades away in the barrage of sexist jokes, casual xenophobia, and unverified facts.”

War for the Future

Not only that, it has created the opportunity for new forms of authoritarianism to emerge online. An authoritarianism that threatens to usher in a long night of repression and darkness. So far, I’ve identified 3 authoritarian movements (significant departures from the forms we’ve seen in the past), each dangerous in their own way: An open source insurgency, a socially networked orthodoxy, and an algorithmic lockdown.

High altitude balloon-drone

The unique GNSS “StarLight” LTA system is predicted to persist on station against prevailing winds at very high altitudes for 4 months for a fraction of the cost of a satellite. Solar electric energy provides the necessary power for all systems including both motors for station keeping and customer surveillance payloads.

Mondo 2000 returns online

I’ve found what RU has posted a surprisingly satisfying mix of reprints of old magazine content, summaries/commentaries on the print magazine (and its predecessors, High Frontiers and Reality Hacker), and new content, including new music from RU Sirius and friends. I’m really interested to see where he takes it. He’s not able to pay for contributions at this time, but so far, the response of interest to get involved, to write for it, seems high.

Automated Crowdturfing

Malicious crowdsourcing forums are gaining traction as sources of spreading misinformation online, but are limited by the costs of hiring and managing human workers. In this paper, we identify a new class of attacks that leverage deep learning language models to automate the generation of fake online reviews for products and services. Not only are these attacks cheap and therefore more scalable, but they can control rate of content output to eliminate the signature burstiness that makes crowdsourced campaigns easy to detect. Using Yelp reviews as an example platform, we show how a 2 phased review generation and customization attack can produce reviews that are indistinguishable by state-of-the-art statistical detectors. We conduct a survey-based user study to show these reviews not only evade human detection, but also score high on “usefulness” metrics by users. Finally, we develop novel automated defenses against these attacks, by leveraging the lossy transformation introduced by the RNN training and generation cycle. We consider countermeasures against our mechanisms, show that they produce unattractive cost-benefit tradeoffs for attackers, and that they can be further curtailed by simple constraints imposed by online service providers.

Furry Convention

One furry named DeoTasDevil, who I’m assuming is a large tasmanian devil, criticized a convention (they have conventions) for allowing other furries to threaten her. That’s my read of the situation, at least, but apparently there’s some huge, convoluted background to the whole damn thing that involves something called “raiders” and shit. You can read that whole story on the Furry News Website (those are 3 words I never thought I’d place together in my life) Dogpatch Press. As you would expect from people who have built what appears to be their entire lives around the image of themselves as a giant animal, the response of the convention organization, Rocky Mountain Fur Con, was…completely reasonable.

Automating Populism

Here’s how quickly populism can be automated:

  1. Trump or Bannon picks an issue: the narrower and more inflammatory the better. Make the vote a yes or no.
  2. Trump asks his supporters to tell him what they want.
  3. His supporters download the app to their smartphones and vote.
  4. A little programming and marketing magic radically improves the number of Trump supporters using the app and reduces spammers/non-supporters attempting to skew the vote down to a trickle.
  5. Millions of Trump supporters download the app and vote.
  6. Once the decision is in, the app makes it easy to call or spam message to the user’s Congressional representatives. Millions of calls roll in.
  7. A bill that codifies that issue is fast tracked in Congress. Massive pressure via the app and the White House gets it passed quickly.
  8. Connecting action and results quickly generates buzz. Repeat. This time with 10 m downloads.
  9. The app evolves. The pressure from the network increases. It consumes the Republican party.