…pull the other one [DOT 6/12/22]

…off-hand I forget if this is one of those lost-in-cultural-translation examples of the whole two-countries-seperated-by-a-common-language thing…but despite somewhat different origins…both of which are less than entirely clear but are possibly based in the one case on a practical joke played by miners uncoupling the anchor of what was euphemistically referred to as a “honey pot” whilst some poor bastard was availing themselves of it…& in the other on the idea of playing someone for the medieval kind of fool…otherwise known as jesters…whose motley came with bells attached…both are broadly used to suggest the same sort of acknowledgement that the speaker is aware that someone is making (or playing) a joke at their expense

The Conservative peer Michelle Mone made “extraordinarily aggressive” lobbying efforts on behalf of a company bidding to supply Covid tests during the pandemic, Matt Hancock has claimed in a serialisation of his diaries.

…eh…he just got back from being on “I’m a celebrity, get me out of here”…which I do not watch…even allowing for the dubious enticement of hancock being the one politician you might have been able to see forced to literally eat a dick…if you are unfamiliar with the tv show in question I beg your forgiveness for the “metaphor” but honestly you’re better off returning to your previous state of blissful ignorance than forcing yourself to live in a universe that includes the reality of that particular “reality” gameshow…either way…he’s now trying to flog a book…so…as far as quoting from that…ummm…bugger that for a game of soldiers…it’s already a bad enough joke

The Guardian revealed last month that bank records indicate Mone and her children secretly received £29m originating from the profits of a PPE business that was awarded large government contracts.
[…]
PPE Medpro secured contracts worth more than £200m in 2020, weeks after Mone recommended the company to the Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove and his then deputy Theodore Agnew.

Labour has said it will use its opposition day debate on Tuesday to oblige the government to release “all papers, advice, and correspondence involving ministers and special advisers, including submissions and electronic communications” relating to the contracts to the public accounts committee.

[…so…brief aside…it’s a funny thing…not in a good laugh kind of a way…though arguably laughable after a fashion…but these things go very differently in the UK to the US…not unlike train strikes in some ways…but…you’d be forgiven for thinking that by implication (not to mention the relatively subdued volume & stridency of the traction it’s achieved with the press) not enough of that sort of information was currently available to achieve a sufficiently damning overview of the untoward mechanics of the undue influence involved…but…you might be wrong?]

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said: “Britain is sick of being ripped off by the Tories. We want our money back.

…so…not to make out that angela is running a tad post-punchline or anything…but I really don’t feel like I need matt “I know I helped write the lockdown protocols but I’m trying to cheat on the mother of my children with a subordinate in the midst of governing during a pandemic so give me a break, will you?” hancock to tell me much of anything

Contacted last month about Mone’s apparent receipt of funds originating from PPE Medpro, a lawyer for the peer said: “There are a number of reasons why our client cannot comment on these issues and she is under no duty to do so.”

A lawyer who represents both PPE Medpro and Mone’s husband, Douglas Barrowman, who also appears to have received profits from the government contracts, said a continuing investigation limited what his clients were able to say on these matters.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/05/michelle-mone-covid-lobbying-extraordinarily-aggressive-claims-matt-hancock

…either way

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/05/donald-trump-daewoo-loan-financial-disclosure

…there’s a common theme in terms of bad trans-atlantic jokes & whose expense they seem to be at

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/05/rudy-giuliani-disciplinary-hearing-ethics-charges

…along with a plausible implication that it’s gone far enough

Texas’s top elections official resigned Monday after an intense year of trying to reassure election skeptics, navigating the rocky launch of new voting laws that resulted in thousands of discarded mail ballots and overseeing a limited audit of the 2020 election.

Secretary of state John Scott, who was appointed by Republican governor Greg Abbott, came under immediate scrutiny from the moment he took the job in October 2021. He was briefly part of former president Donald Trump’s legal team that challenged the results of the 2020 election but said upon taking the job in Texas that he did not dispute that Joe Biden was the winner.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/05/texas-top-elections-official-john-scott-resigns

…& we all know the internet is just a barrel of laughs

The bill has become a Frankenstein’s monster of legislation, in part thanks to the chaotic recent history of UK politics. Successive governments and successive culture secretaries have tried to put their stamp on the legislation, pulling it this way and that until it becomes meaningless. We are now on our fourth prime minister and fifth secretary of state since the idea of legislating the digital sphere was first introduced.

Many hands, in this instance, don’t make light work. The bill is a cloddish one, sinking and then suffocating good ideas into a morass of meaninglessness. It has changed from its initial intention – to focus on online abuse and harassment – into a clarion call for “free speech”, thanks to the work of Kemi Badenoch, an excuse that is often used by those who spew hatred as a shield for their online abuse.

At times, the focus of the legislation is myopically narrow, looking at a tiny part of a broader issue. The crime of downblousing, while a scourge against women and worth tackling, has been given its own focus in the bill, rather than as part of a more holistic attitude towards the creation and sharing of inappropriate, non-consensual sexual images.

Elsewhere, the online safety bill as written is impossibly broad, trying to encompass huge swaths of how the online world works in a simple way that doesn’t match reality. Prime among this? The idea that Ofcom, which struggles at times to regulate the TV sector, will be the arbiter of what’s allowed online.

The bill’s writing has been full of wilful contradictions: the past government sought desperately to introduce measures against “legal but harmful” speech; the current one demands tech companies don’t dare touch it. The legislative package has been touted as the best way to make the UK “the safest place to be online”, yet it also puts most of the onus on social media firms to self-police. Historically, letting tech firms handle moderation and regulation has led to the very issues that campaigners – such as the family of Molly Russell – hoped that this legislation would solve.

We are, in a sense, getting the bill we deserve from the politicians we deserve: not a very good one, from not a very good lot. It’s a shining beacon of mediocrity; of people too stupid to understand the nuance of one of the most nuanced-filled areas of our modern lives, over-promoted into positions of power and thinking they know better than researchers who have spent their lives looking at these issues.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/05/eu-regulators-elon-musk-britain-online-safety-bill-big-tech-brexit

…or…it’s elon following the thiel playbook writ large…with a different cast transposed into a different “platform”…you pays your money & you takes your shot…but…they’re just pulling your leg…right?

The comedian, who is Jewish, then turned his attention to antisemitism in the wake of Trump having dined at his Mar-a-Lago home with the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and Ye, who subsequently praised Adolf Hitler and was banned from Twitter for posting an image of a swastika.

Borat said: “Before I proceed, I will say I am very upset about the antisemitism in US and A. It not fair. Kazakhstan is No 1 Jew-crushing nation. Stop stealing our hobby. Stop the steal! Stop the steal!” Some guests burst into laughter while others sat in uncomfortable silence.

He continued: “Your Kanye, he tried to move to Kazakhstan and even changed his name to Kazakhstanye West. But we said: No, he too antisemitic, even for us.”

Borat proceeded to sing a short parody of U2’s song With or Without You with the lyrics changed to “With or without Jews”. He broke off and asked: “What’s the problem? They loved this at Mar-a-Lago. They chose Without Jews.”
[…]
Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, said: “I was surprised to see him,” and sped away without elaborating.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/dec/05/borat-targets-trump-ye-and-antisemitism-at-kennedy-center-honors

…& politics is a serious business

Go out on to the streets of Leeds, Keir Starmer told the BBC’s Chris Mason. And what you will hear is that people have a passion for constitutional reform. Not sure that’s exactly what I overhear when I’m out and about. The conversations I eavesdrop tend to be rather more mundane. Why the buses and trains aren’t running on time. Hospital appointments being cancelled. The cost of living. What they are planning on eating that night.

But no one can accuse Labour of ducking the difficult issues. Where the Conservatives are out of ideas, running on fumes and trying not to collapse under the weight of the latest daily crisis – the political entropy of 12 years in government – Starmer is trying to think beyond daily survival.

To come up with changes that might go some way to making sticking-plaster solutions a thing of the past. To offer a future that feels like a future. Rather than a repetition of the past. At least that was the promise. Even if it was all a bit sketchy.

Two years ago, the Labour leader sent Gordon Brown away to head up a commission on constitutional change. On Monday that report was launched at an event at Leeds University.

…& allegedly comedy is all in the timing

Labour would ditch a century of centralisation that had imploded in on itself with Tory sleaze and scandal. It believed the regions – not Whitehall – knew best and had identified 288 economic clusters that would regenerate the country. How they would all operate, he forgot to mention. You just needed to believe.

The change wouldn’t be incremental. It would be transformational. No more second jobs for MPs. Fifty thousand civil service jobs transferred out of London. An end to an unelected House of Lords. A transfer of power to all those who felt left behind.

Take Scotland. The country would be allowed to do almost anything it wanted just so long as it didn’t carry on asking for independence. There were limits to devolution after all, apparently.
[…]
Labour’s plans would not just change who governs but how the country was governed. For the many, by the many. Transport, housing and Jobcentre Plus would all become devolved powers. Proper levelling up, not the ersatz trickle down from the centre levelling up of the Tories.

The UK would almost be like a federal state though he would be careful not to call it that. Because the UK would never actually vote to become a federation. Best to try to imagine it as a more informal arrangement.
[…]
So was Starmer really expecting to get all this done in his first five years in office? “Absolutely,” he insisted. Though the rest of his answers suggested otherwise. This was a consultation document, he stressed, so it was important that everyone went away and had a good consult.

Who knew what would happen after the consultation? Could be everything. Could be nothing very much.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/dec/05/labour-embraces-constitutional-reform-especially-if-it-keeps-scotland-on-board

…complex systems, ladies & gentlemen…can’t live with(in?) them…can’t…what was it, again…”consciously uncouple” them

In April, a San Francisco artificial intelligence lab called Anthropic raised $580 million for research involving “A.I. safety.”

Few in Silicon Valley had heard of the one-year-old lab, which is building A.I. systems that generate language. But the amount of money promised to the tiny company dwarfed what venture capitalists were investing in other A.I. start-ups, including those stocked with some of the most experienced researchers in the field.

The funding round was led by Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and chief executive of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that filed for bankruptcy last month. After FTX’s sudden collapse, a leaked balance sheet showed that Mr. Bankman-Fried and his colleagues had fed at least $500 million into Anthropic.

Their investment was part of a quiet and quixotic effort to explore and mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence, which many in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s circle believed could eventually destroy the world and damage humanity. Over the past two years, the 30-year-old entrepreneur and his FTX colleagues funneled more than $530 million — through either grants or investments — into more than 70 A.I.-related companies, academic labs, think tanks, independent projects and individual researchers to address concerns over the technology, according to a tally by The New York Times.

Now some of these organizations and individuals are unsure whether they can continue to spend that money, said four people close to the A.I. efforts who were not authorized to speak publicly. They said they were worried that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s fall could cast doubt over their research and undermine their reputations. And some of the A.I. start-ups and organizations may eventually find themselves embroiled in FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings, with their grants potentially clawed back in court, they said.

The concerns in the A.I. world are an unexpected fallout from FTX’s disintegration, showing how far the ripple effects of the crypto exchange’s collapse and Mr. Bankman-Fried’s vaporizing fortune have traveled.
[…]
Over the last decade, many effective altruists have worked inside top A.I. research labs, including DeepMind, which is owned by Google’s parent company, and OpenAI, which was founded by Elon Musk and others. They helped create a research field called A.I. safety, which aims to explore how A.I. systems might be used to do harm or might unexpectedly malfunction on their own.

Effective altruists have helped drive similar research at Washington think tanks that shape policy. Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, which studies the impact of A.I. and other emerging technologies on national security, was largely funded by Open Philanthropy, an effective altruist giving organization backed by a Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz. Effective altruists also work as researchers inside these think tanks.
[…]
Among the Future Fund’s A.I.-related grants was $2 million to a little-known company, Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone runs the online discussion site LessWrong, which in the mid-2000s began exploring the possibility that A.I. would one day destroy humanity.

Mr. Bankman-Fried and his colleagues also funded several other efforts that were working to mitigate the long-term risks of A.I., including $1.25 million to the Alignment Research Center, an organization that aims to align future A.I. systems with human interests so that the technology does not go rogue. They also gave $1.5 million for similar research at Cornell University.

The Future Fund also donated nearly $6 million to three projects involving “large language models,” an increasingly powerful breed of A.I. that can write tweets, emails and blog posts and even generate computer programs. The grants were intended to help mitigate how the technology might be used to spread disinformation and to reduce unexpected and unwanted behavior from these systems.
[…]
But Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle A.I. lab, said that the views of the effective altruist community were sometimes extreme and that they often made today’s technologies seem more powerful or more dangerous than they really were.

He said the Future Fund had offered him money this year for research that would help predict the arrival and risks of “artificial general intelligence,” a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. But that idea is not something that can be reliably predicted, Mr. Etzioni said, because scientists do not yet know how to build it.

“These are smart, sincere people committing dollars into a highly speculative enterprise,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/technology/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-artificial-intelligence.html

…I’ll admit, though…compared to some of the other available rabbit holes

In their retaliation against the protesters, the security forces have killed at least 448 people, including 60 children and 29 women, and made up to 17,000 arrests. Thirty-six protesters have been charged with capital crimes, according to Hadi Ghaemi of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, including several people accused of killing members of the security forces. Still, the authorities insist that they have erred on the side of restraint. On 9 November the commander of Iran’s ground forces warned that Khamenei only needed to say the word and the opposition “flies” would “without question have no place left in the country”.

Every day there are fresh demonstrations, whether in universities, in the streets or in cemeteries where the victims of police bullets and truncheons are buried. And whenever a protester is killed, you can be sure that in another 40 days, when the Shia mourning period climaxes, there will be a graveside protest and the possibility of more deaths, extending the cycle of savagery and reaction. It was this cycle – of deaths leading to funerals, protests and further deaths – that sapped the Shah’s regime over the course of 1978 and culminated in his flight from Iran in January 1979.

This movement without a name, without a leader, is diverse and adaptable. It has harnessed a vast and hitherto underexploited resource – the latent dissatisfaction of women at their second-class status – and turned it into a mighty asset. And it has already scored a success, albeit a reversible one: for the first time since the early days of the revolution, significant numbers of women in cities across the country are going about their business without any form of hijab at all. On 4 December, Iran’s public prosecutor announced that the morality police had been “suspended”, suggesting that the authorities’ policy, discernible since the beginning of the protests, of turning a blind eye to women not wearing the hijab has been made permanent. Sceptics on social media countered that the announcement is a government ploy to divide and weaken the opposition.
[…]
The courage of the young Iranians who face the guns and truncheons of the security forces has won them admiration around the world. But the world’s attention is fickle, and the regime has huge resources. The question is whether today’s opponents of the Islamic Republic will have the numbers, staying power and tactical nous that their predecessors lacked: in other words, whether this time will be different.

The protesters’ avowed aim is regime change, but in the Islamic Republic of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei they face a formidable foe. Khamenei’s Iran is a state built on an idea – of a Shia cleric enacting God’s will on earth – that has seen off communism and senses that capitalism is in terminal decline. This idea is on the march even now.

The regime has been emboldened by recent successes in its many-pronged struggle against the United States. In the past decade, Iranian arms, men and advice helped save Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of the Islamic Republic, from an array of domestic and foreign enemies, including the US. By providing similar help to anti-US militias in Iraq, Iran contributed to President Joe Biden’s decision to end the American combat mission in that country in 2021. It also makes the long-range missiles and supplies military drones that Vladimir Putin is using to bomb Ukraine. All the while – and again in defiance of the US and its allies – the Islamic Republic has enriched enough weapons-grade uranium to be able to build a nuclear bomb, according to UN assessments of the country’s stockpile.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/06/irans-moment-of-truth-what-will-it-take-for-the-people-to-topple-the-regime

[…that’s actually a much longer piece that’s probably worth persevering with…but I’m going to be winding butcher up more than enough as it is without trying to do it justice…besides…that’s the whole deal with rabbit holes…they form warrens…on account of one tending to lead to another]

U.S. government officials expected the war to be over in days. It has so far lasted nearly nine months. Russia did not expect the conflict to last this long either. That was the Kremlin’s “original sin,” according to Mason Clark, a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

…& while a picture allegedly paints a thousand words…which means this really isn’t helping my appeal to butcher’s tender mercies…they’re obviously sometimes illustrative

…but when it comes to “the bigger picture”

Ukraine’s territory is about the same size as the state of Texas, or 6 percent of the United States. Although Ukraine can seem small when compared with the United States, it’s considered large in European standards — the second-largest country, in fact, after Russia.

Analysts say Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy is aimed at exhausting and outlasting Ukrainian troops, with the aim of decreasing allies’ confidence in Ukraine’s capabilities, all the while strengthening and training new forces.
[…]
While momentum seems to be on Ukraine’s side, the shape the war will take in the coming months still hangs in the balance. To Bergmann, the main question is whether Ukraine will be able to keep advancing in the weeks before the winter, when the rain and mud usually make military movements more difficult.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/21/russia-territory-gains-ukraine-war/

…but…at the risk of further blotting my copybook

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/5/2131920/-Ukraine-Update-Field-Guide-to-Drones-of-Ukraine-Part-1

…sometimes droning on is the name of the game

With hundreds of reconnaissance and attack drones flying over Ukraine each day, the fight set off by a land grab befitting an 18th-century emperor has transformed into a digital-age competition for technological superiority in the skies — one military annals will mark as a turning point.

In past conflicts, drones were typically used by one side over largely uncontested airspace to locate and hit targets — for example, in U.S. operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

…which…as it turns out…would be one of the other rabbit holes that led me off to this part of the warren

In the battle between Russia and Ukraine, drones are integrated into every phase of fighting, with extensive fleets, air defenses and jamming systems on each side. It is a war fought at a distance — the enemy is often miles away — and nothing bridges the gap more than drones, giving Russia and Ukraine the ability to see, and attack, each other without ever getting close.
[…]
Ukrainian forces have also used drones to strike targets far from the fighting — in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, and in Russia’s Belgorod border region, according to multiple Ukrainian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters but declined to say what type of drones were used. Russia has repeatedly struck Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure with self-detonating drones — a cheap substitute for high-precision missiles.

…&…well…what’s good for the goose?

“Two main developments are going to impact future war,” said Samuel Bendett, a military analyst at the Virginia-based research group CNA. “The proliferation and availability of combat drones for longer-ranged, more-sophisticated operations, and the absolute necessity to have cheap tactical drones for close-support operations.”

In Ukraine, that future is now.

…&…while I suppose a fully-functional digital panopticon might very well ameliorate some of humanity’s less flattering traits…if I’m honest…possibly more honest that anyone is liable to be once they’ve truly internalized quite what that might be like…I tend to think being the ones to live through the transitional period to get there would…in the parlance of our times…suck hind tit…so…I may have mixed feelings about the mother of invention this morning

It is these commercial drones — often small, relatively inexpensive and now ubiquitous — that make the war in Ukraine unique, providing unprecedented visibility and sharpening the accuracy of normally inexact artillery fire.

Military-grade combat drones such as the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 used by Ukraine, or the Iranian-made Shahed-136 deployed by Russia, are playing an expanded if more traditional role. But the most popular drone used by each side can fit in your hand — more a bug than a bird.

The small Mavic quadcopter, which like the Matrice 300 is produced by Chinese manufacturer DJI, costs less than $4,000 online. Yuri Baluyevsky, a retired general who served as chief of Russia’s armed forces, called it “a true symbol of modern warfare,” in a book on advanced military strategies published this year.

The use of Mavics is so widespread by each army that Ukrainian soldiers said they often don’t know if the drone they spot is friend or foe. If one hovers for too long rather than just passing by, that’s suspicious enough to warrant shooting it down.

…because…obviously I’m all for whatever might serve as either stone or sling where ukraine’s david facing off against russia’s goliath is concerned…but…I’m pretty sure I’d feel a tad differently if it was by way of “coming soon – to a neighborhood near you”?

A more common use of Mavics, however, is a sort of psychological warfare. […]

“We can make their lives a nightmare all of the time,” said Oleksandr Dubinskyi, a Khartia drone pilot.
[…]
Ukraine’s state crowdfunder, United24, has an “Army of Drones” initiative with contracts to buy nearly 1,000 UAVs, said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital transformation minister. But that’s still not enough.

The goal, Fedorov said, is 10,000 drones flying along the vast front line, to broadcast the fighting without interruption.

…but…there’s an aspect to this that wound up sending me off on a different tangent

Homegrown drones range from miniature planes that can fly nearly 30 miles and drop a five-pound missile — such as the Punisher drone preferred by Ukraine’s special forces — to reconnaissance gliders. The goal is to produce 2,000 small combat drones in Ukraine per month by year’s end, said Fedorov, the digital minister.

Russia’s failures, however, are not just due to lack of hardware. Its experience highlights how drone warfare requires not just advanced equipment but a modern mind-set for decision-making.

Russia’s rigid chain of command requires soldiers on the ground to seek senior approval for strikes, said Pavel Aksenov, a military expert and reporter with the BBC’s Russian service. So even when a Russian reconnaissance drone spots a target, by the time the go-ahead comes through, the target often has moved.

…so…having too many people in the chain…yanked or otherwise…seems like a disadvantage…which might be more a case of “the devil makes work for idle thumbs” than “too many cooks spoil the broth”…depending on a roll of the dice

The Iranian-made Shahed drone, with an explosive warhead at its nose, “is a moped in the sky,” moving slowly and loudly before diving into its target, said Solovey, the head of air defense for Ukrainian ground forces.

The Shahed is Russia’s solution to its domestic production woes — a powerful drone bought from another country ostracized by the West. Ukrainian officials said Moscow has recently ordered more from Tehran.
[…]
The Shahed has few metallic parts and flies low, making it difficult to detect. Expensive surface-to-air missile systems, such as an S-300 or Buk, can take them out, but doing so wastes resources that Kyiv would rather use against Moscow’s high-precision missiles. Lately, Ukraine has scrambled fighter jets to shoot down Shaheds.

This frustrating choice is partly the point, said Aksenov, the Russian military expert — to exhaust Kyiv’s resources while conserving Russia’s own arsenal.

…if that’s not too…provocative?

Ukraine was the first of the two sides to put foreign drones to use. And one — the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 — had a key role in provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin before the invasion.
[…]
The TB2s, which cost about $5 million each, are the most powerful drones in Ukraine’s fleet and offered the first evidence of how UAVs could help Kyiv compete against Russia’s far larger, better-equipped military. The TB2 carries four laser-guided missiles and can fly for more than 24 hours at an altitude of up to 25,000 feet.

Before being used in Ukraine, TB2s featured prominently in conflicts in Libya and Syria, and played a decisive role in Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/02/drones-russia-ukraine-air-war/

…you know…in context & all that sort of thing

North Korea’s military conducted its firing after detecting dozens of “projectiles” fired in the South near the shared border, state news agency KCNA reported, citing a spokesperson of the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army.

“The enemy should immediately cease military actions that cause escalation of tensions in areas near the front lines where visual surveillance is possible,” the unnamed spokesperson said, warning that the North would respond firmly and with overwhelming military action to any provocation.

“We sternly warn the enemy not to stir up unnecessary escalation of tension along the front lines.”

South Korea and the United States were conducting a joint land-based firing drill near the border in Cheorwon County in the middle of the peninsula on Monday. Their drill will continue on Tuesday.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-fires-100-artillery-shells-us-south-drills

…when is a drill not a drill? …when it’s in the press?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/dril-musk-twitter-future/

…sorry…but sorry punchlines do seem to be the order of the day

The theft of taxpayer funds by the Chengdu-based hacking group known as APT41 is the first instance of pandemic fraud tied to foreign, state-sponsored cybercriminals that the U.S. government has acknowledged publicly, but may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to U.S. law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts.

The officials and experts, most speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, say other federal investigations of pandemic fraud also seem to point back to foreign state-affiliated hackers.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/chinese-hackers-covid-fraud-millions

Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers and Nigerian scammers have used stolen identities to plunder tens of billions of dollars in Covid benefits, spiriting the money overseas in a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers, officials and experts say. And they say it is still happening.

Among the ripest targets for the cybertheft have been jobless programs. The federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment relief has been stolen, but credible estimates range from $87 billion to $400 billion — at least half of which went to foreign criminals, law enforcement officials say.

Those staggering sums dwarf, even on the low end, what the federal government spends every year on intelligence collection, food stamps or K-12 education.
[…]
Jeremy Sheridan, who directs the office of investigations at the Secret Service, called it “the largest fraud scheme that I’ve ever encountered.”
[…]
In some cases, overseas organized crime groups flooded state unemployment systems with bogus online claims, overwhelming antiquated computer software benefits in blunt-force attacks that siphoned out millions of dollars. On several occasions, states have had to suspend benefit payments while they tried to figure out what was real and what was not.

“It’s definitely an economic attack on the United States,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg, who is investigating cases as part of the Justice Department’s Covid fraud task force. “Tens of billions of dollars will be missing. … It’s a significant amount of money that’s gone overseas.”
[…]
“Nobody really understood how big the problem was until it was playing out,” said Najarian, the RSA security researcher. “We all accepted that there was fraud taking place, organized fraud and local fraud. But what we didn’t realize … was that the organized fraud was very aggressive and very efficient and moving very, very large sums of money offshore.”

The investigative journalism site ProPublica calculated last month that from March to December 2020, the number of jobless claims added up to about two-thirds of the country’s labor force, when the actual unemployment rate was 23 percent. Although some people lose jobs more than once in a given year, that alone could not account for the vast disparity.
[…]
Along with the huge losses inflicted on the U.S. Treasury, the criminals also hurt tens of thousands of people, many of whom suffered delays in getting much-needed benefits.
[…]
So far, there has been relatively little recovery of the stolen cash — or accountability for the criminals who took it.

The FBI has opened about 2,000 investigations, Greenberg said, but it has recovered just $100 million. The Secret Service, which focuses on cyber and economic crimes, has clawed back $1.3 billion. But the vast majority of the pilfered funds are gone for good, experts say, including tens of billions of dollars sent out of the country through money-moving applications such as Cash.app.
[…]
Through a public records request, NBC News obtained data from the Labor Department, which funds Covid relief unemployment benefits programs, that are riddled with blank values and underestimates. The data list just over a billion dollars in fraud across the three CARES Act unemployment programs — a figure experts say is off by orders of magnitude.
[…]
One of the few examples in which analysts have pointed the finger at a specific foreign group involves a Nigerian fraud ring dubbed Scattered Canary by security researchers. The group had been committing cyberfraud for years when the pandemic benefits presented a ripe target, Najarian said.
[…]
Scattered Canary took advantage of a quirk in Google’s system. Gmail does not recognize dots in email addresses — John.Doe@gmail.com and JohnDoe@gmail.com are routed to the same account. But state unemployment systems treated them as distinct email addresses.

Exploiting that trait, the group was able to create dozens of fraudulent state unemployment accounts that funneled benefits to the same email address, according to research by Najarian and others at Agari.

In April and May of 2020, Scattered Canary filed at least 174 fraudulent claims for unemployment benefits with the state of Washington, Agari found — each claim eligible to receive up to $790 a week, for a total of $20,540 over 26 weeks. With the addition of the $600-per-week Covid supplement, the maximum potential loss was $4.7 million for those claims alone, Agari found.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/easy-money-how-international-scam-artists-pulled-epic-theft-covid

…& I suppose there’s a variety of ways to interpret that

When I first started investigating China’s top spy agency in 2020 for my book, “Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World,” I thought espionage was its main game. But I soon realized that the Ministry of State Security’s covert influence operations have been at the forefront of its work to shape the world and our understanding of China. The United States must come to grips with China’s global covert power as Xi Jinping doubles down on international aggression, or risk allowing even more Chinese Communist Party interference in civil liberties and the functioning of democracy.
[…]
From this foundation, the MSS grew more confident and increasingly international. In the aftermath of China’s effort to funnel donations to President Bill Clinton — sometimes known as “Chinagate” — I found one top MSS spy’s recommendations for strengthening influence on the U.S. Congress. Agents seemed to understand that influence is a long-term game in which victories are often intangible.
[…]
Only in the past few years have Western intelligence agencies started waking up to these sophisticated and extensive operations. The Justice Department is suing businessman and former Republican Party booster Steve Wynn, alleging that he failed to register as a foreign agent for China when he sought to influence President Donald Trump in 2017. In January 2022, the United Kingdom’s security service warned parliamentarians that a donor and self-appointed Chinese community figure was an influence agent of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is only the very beginning of a process of learning about and countering China’s external influence. Many countries, including the United States, are working to combat espionage but lack laws suited to tackling covert influence operations. And many of these governments are playing catch up as they belatedly increase resourcing for China work.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/chinas-ministry-state-security-spies-are-threat-america

…see…sometimes it’s hard to see a thing for what it is…you know…when the whole point of the thing in question is to make out it’s something it’s not?

ChatGPT is a prototype dialogue-based AI chatbot capable of understanding natural human language and generating impressively detailed human-like written text.

It is the latest evolution of the GPT – or Generative Pre-Trained Transformer – family of text-generating AIs.
[…]
The new AI is the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded independent research body OpenAI foundation.
[…]
In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds.
[…]
However at its current stage, the chatbot lacks the nuance, critical-thinking skills or ethical decision-making ability that are essential for successful journalism.
[…]
ChatGPT can also give entirely wrong answers and present misinformation as fact, writing “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”, the company concedes.

OpenAI says that fixing this issue is difficult because there is no source of truth in the data they use to train the model and supervised training can also be misleading “because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/05/what-is-ai-chatbot-phenomenon-chatgpt-and-could-it-replace-humans

…&…I know…I’ve probably been on about searle’s chinese room exception to the turing test…but…well…after that brief foray into the realm of killer robots the other day…it occurred to me that the unconscious bias issue might be as much an aspect of the observer effect as the underlying flaws of the dataset…though arguably both would still be firmly in the GI:GO domain

…long story short…sort of…& to skip a bunch of embedded tweets of screenshots of chats with a confirmed bot…it seems like at one point a few folks managed to trip it up into making mistakes like claiming that between a kilo of one thing & a kilo of another the denser of the two would weigh more

…on the face of it, that would seem almost like you could interpret it as a poor bit of phrasing intended to convey the part where one of the two was composed of a weightier substance…another way of saying you’d need a much smaller volume of that to equal the weight of a much larger volume of the other…& lo & behold pretty soon other people asking the same question weren’t getting the “embarrassing” mistake as a response…it had been replaced by a much more erudite slice of dialogue that made the machine sound passably smart

…except…other people had tried to narrow down what had thrown it off in the first place…& in an equation involving a defined mass of air it turned out that its grasp of math was all over the shop…returning values for the weight of a kilogram of air between 0.02kg & up around the 0.8-0.9kg range…because it could collate a bunch of information about relative density & atmospheric composition & perform a variety of very fast calculations on the fly…but what it couldn’t do…beyond spotting its own error…was comprehend the concepts or relationships between mass, weight & our everyday shorthand about them for the purposes of conversation

…butcher may not be the only one quietly thanking his lucky stars for the fact that the entire thread has either been vanished from reddit…or my web fu this morning is insufficient to the task of retracing whatever meandering path it was that led me to it the first time…so apparently I’m falling back on asking you to take my word for that part…which is a special kind of ironic, I guess

…oh brave new world, that has such…”people”…innit…or something?