There’s no one single model doing projections.

Five Thirty Eight’s, which is one prominent one, has favored Harris somewhat for a while.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/

Harris wins 64 times out of 100

in our simulations of the 2024 presidential election.

Trump wins 36 times out of 100.

There is a less than 1-in-100 chance of no Electoral College winner.

Nate Silver – who started Five Thirty Eight and is now off doing his own thing and runs a fork of the model that Five Thirty Eight used to run – had them, last I looked, had Harris and Trump at about about even chances.

Both Silver’s model and Five Thirty Eight’s model agreed that the debate improved Harris’s chances.

deleted by creator

Well, all your alternative major browser engines are from Google’s Chrome. If your concern is degree of tight association with Google, you probably don’t have preferable realistic alternatives.

I’d also add that I’m not particularly worried about Firefox. Maybe one day, but as things stand, I’m fine with 'em.

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.

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.

wordfreq is not just concerned with formal printed words. It collected more conversational language usage from two sources in particular: Twitter and Reddit.

Now Twitter is gone anyway, its public APIs have shut down,

Reddit also stopped providing public data archives, and now they sell their archives at a price that only OpenAI will pay.

There’s still the Fediverse.

I mean, that doesn’t solve the LLM pollution problem, but…

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.

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.

I don’t much like scary games myself, but here’s someone asking /r/HorrorGaming what their scariest games are:

https://old.reddit.com/r/HorrorGaming/comments/1303c5t/in_your_opinion_what_are_the_scariest_games_of/

EDIT: And yet somehow, despite not liking scary games, I’ve wound up owning some of these, like Darkwood, the Amnesia games, Clive Barker’s Undying – which I wouldn’t call that scary – Doom 3, Lone Survivor, Outlast, and Subnautica.

I’ve also played Clock Tower, which was on there.

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.

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.

For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.

Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.

If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.

PawSense is a Windows package that tries to detect when a cat is walking across a keyboard and locks it.

https://priceonomics.com/the-software-that-detects-when-a-cat-is-messing/

I don’t know of a Linux equivalent, though I’d swear I remember something similar that was targeted at the author’s young 2-year-old daughter, was named after her, but which I cannot now find.

YouTube desperately needs to fix the recommendations for music.

I mean, I guess if someone has a YouTube account, there’s nothing wrong with using YouTube as a music recommendations system, but it isn’t really the first thing I’d think of. I mean, music isn’t really what it was designed for.

And YouTube doesn’t know what a user would listen to offline, so unless all their music-listening is from YouTube tracks…I’m not sure how representative the listening data would be of what a user would listen to.

I don’t use them, because I don’t really want to hand them a profile of me, but if I wanted to get music recommendations, I’d probably use something like Audioscrobbler, which was designed for building a profile on someone’s music-listening habits and then handing them recommendations based on that.

This Popsie Funk channel is upfront, that the music is AI generated.

goes looking

Yeah, the description reads:

Popsie Funk is a fictitious creation. The tracks are A.I. generated from lyrics and musical compositions that I have created. The A.I. samples are then mixed and edited by me.

I am adding this disclaimer due to repeated questions about the genuine authenticity of Popsie Funk and his music.

I don’t think that the artist in question is faking this.

All that being said, while this particular case isn’t, I suppose one could imagine such a “trying to pretend to be human” artist existing. That is, if you think about all the websites out there with AI-generated questions and answers that do try to appear human-generated, you gotta figure that someone is thinking about doing the same with musicians…and at mass scale, not manually doing one or two.

One other interesting tidbit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569955

Funny enough the Apollo pagers website appears to be down.

What if the company itself was a front?

I’m not familiar with the company, but it looks like it goes way back on archive.org, so I don’t think that it was a front. Might just be all the interested people hitting the website simultaneously taking it down.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hezbollah-pagers-blast-israel-lebanon-1.7325913

What type of pager exploded?

Images of the destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back consistent with those made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwan-based pager manufacturer.

The firm did not immediately reply to questions from Reuters. Hezbollah did not reply to questions from Reuters on the make of the pagers.

TRTWorld – not my ideal source, but I don’t think that they have a reason to make anything up here – says AAA rather than AA, but in either case, IIRC alkalines are normally intrinsically safe, can’t discharge quickly enough to explode. So if it’s alkaline rather than lithium, then it’d need to be be a supply chain attack:

https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/ap-900-this-what-we-know-about-one-of-the-pagers-that-exploded-in-lebanon-18209359

The Alphanumeric Pager (AP-900) produced by Gold Apollo Co., Ltd. has been identified as one of the devices that exploded, killing and injuring scores in Lebanon.

At least nine people have been killed and over 2,750 others, including Hezbollah militants and medics, were injured when their paging devices exploded across Lebanon.

Speculation has emerged surrounding how the devices could have exploded and caused such high casualties, especially a pager like the AP-900 that operates on AAA alkaline batteries.

Initial investigations suggest that the pager’s standard battery configuration is unlikely to be the cause of the explosions.

Instead, authorities are leaning towards the possibility that the devices were intentionally rigged with explosive materials.

If explosives were rigged inside the device before it reached Hezbollah members, it could cause such significant damage when detonated by signal.

That probably isn’t good news for Hezbollah, but it’s good news for me, because I’m not in a fight with some nation-state and probably am not going to wind up with explosive-rigged devices.