THE RAW STORY

Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people

These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your "friends" are.

But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my "friends" even real people?

In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online "personas," allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they'd like.

The revelation was among those contained in the company's emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group "Anonymous" broke into their systems.

In another document unearthed by "Anonymous," one of HBGary's employees also mentioned gaming geolocation services to make it appear as though selected fake persons were at actual events.

"There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas," it said.

Government involvement

Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of "persona management software."

While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple "official" social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.

Unfortunately, the Air Force's contract description doesn't help dispel suspicions. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be "replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent."

It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator's Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it's a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

The contract also sought methods to anonymously establish virtual private servers with private hosting firms in specific geographic locations. This would allow that server's "geosite" to be integrated with their social media profiles, effectively gaming geolocation services.


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You can find this post here


PLEASE READ - THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO EVERYONE WHO USES FACEBOOK FOR BUSINESS OR PERSONAL REASONS.

Have you noticed that you are only seeing updates in your newsfeed from the same people lately? Have you also noticed that when you post things like status messages, photos and links, the same circle of people are commenting and everyone else seems to be ignoring you? 

Don't worry, everyone still loves you and nobody has intentionally blocked you. The problem is that a large chunk of your friend/fan list can't see anything you post and here's why:

The "New Facebook" has a newsfeed setting that by default is automatically set to show ONLY posts from people who you've recently interacted with or interacted the most with (which would be limited to the couple of weeks just before people started switching to the new profile). So in other words, for both business and personal pages, unless your friends/fans commented on one of your posts within those few weeks or vice versa - you are now invisible to them and they are invisible to you!!

HERE'S THE FIX: On the homepage click the "Most Recent" title on the right of the Newsfeed, then click the drop down arrow and select "Edit Options", click on "Show Posts From" and change the setting to "All Of Your Friends and Pages" (you can also access the "Edit Options" link at the very bottom of the facebook homepage on the right) 
Note: This is the fix for personal pages but I am unsure of whether or not the business pages are set up the same way.

Simply posting an update about it won't do any good because lots of your friends/fans already can't see your posts by default. You'll either have to send out a message to everyone on your list (which I'm not even sure business pages can do and is a rather tedious method) or post an event like this one explaining the situation and invite your entire fan base and/or friend list. Feel free to invite them to this event since it is open to the public. You can also tweet about it, create a blog post or send out an email to your subscribers in hopes of reaching them all.

I've alerted some of the big facebook security sites and they are working on finding an easier solution for companies to let their customers know about the situation.

Shame on facebook for altering the default setting and not telling people about it! Just think about how many companies posted Christmas sales and discounts without having any idea that their customers couldn't see the updates.

ps. Welcome back to my newsfeed facebookers :)

NOTE: THERE WILL STILL BE SOME BUSINESS PAGE UPDATES THAT WON'T SHOW UP IN YOUR NEWSFEED. TO VIEW THE MISSING POSTS YOU MUST CLICK ON THE "MESSAGES" MENU LINK ON THE TOP LEFT OF THE HOMEPAGE, THEN CLICK THE "UPDATES" LINK THAT MAGICALLY APPEARS BELOW IT. 

*** A great tip while you're altering default settings is to make sure your fans can comment on your posts. To do this you must go to your Privacy Settings, then click on "Customize Settings >Can Comment On Posts >Everyone 
(Hat tip to Natacha)

FROM BLOOMBERG

‘Minority Report’ May Come to Real World With Iris Recognition
By Chris Dolmetsch - Feb 2, 2011 12:00 AM ET


If Hoyos Corp. has its way, the world will soon resemble a Tom Cruise movie.

A closely held company based in Puerto Rico, Hoyos makes devices that photograph human irises for identification purposes, like the technology featured in the films “Mission: Impossible” and “Minority Report.”

In the movies, the technology protects super-secret labs and high-security vaults, helps chase down criminals and flashes personalized ads. In the real world, it screens employees of Bank of America Corp. and travelers at London’s Heathrow Airport and helps New York City police track prisoners.

As key patents expire and costs fall, Hoyos wants to make the technology ubiquitous, installing it on mobile phones to verify online payments and cash machines to replace bank cards that require personal identification numbers, said Chief Development Officer Jeff Carter.

“The cost of the devices has come down and the fraud is going up at such an escalating rate that it’s beginning to make sense,” Carter said in an interview at the New York offices of Hoyos, formerly known as Global Rainmakers Inc. Civil libertarians warn that the technology’s use may come with complications for privacy, and increased reliance on it may heighten the risk of misidentification.

Physical Characteristics

Biometric technology such as iris recognition uses physical characteristics including facial shape, fingerprints, retinal photos and iris patterns to confirm identities.

The technology works by photographing the iris, the colored membrane that controls how much light reaches the retina, and converting the picture into a computer code. The code is compared with one in a database.

Its history goes back to 1936, when Frank Burch, an ophthalmologist in St. Paul, Minnesota, proposed identifying people using the furrows, ridges, rings and freckling that make every iris unique.

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UK startup 'Internet Eyes' crowdsources retail surveillance 

The UK is notorious for its use of CCTV cameras For a small monthly fee, UK shop owners can have their surveillance cameras watched by Internet users eager to catch shoplifters for a cash reward. But some Internet experts liken the concept to outsourcing police work. 

The United Kingdom is notorious for its widespread use of CCTV surveillance cameras. Now, a new Internet startup is adding a twist to the privacy debate by bringing live streams of footage to viewers online. Devon-based "Internet Eyes" hopes to profit by rewarding Internet users who spot and report shoplifters.

The rewards can be as much as 1,000 British pounds (1,144 euros), and Internet privacy and civil liberties advocates describe the system as a privatization of law enforcement.

Internet Eyes went online on October 4, and its founder, Tony Morgan, said the site has garnered more than 1,000 viewers who have reported more than 135 possible incidents. The site prevents voyeurism by anonymizing feeds, which are switched every 20 minutes.

You can't use Internet Eyes for voyeuristic pleasures," Morgan told Deutsche Welle. "We've made sure that there's no way this can be done. With Internet Eyes you don't know where you're watching."

Service fee for businesses

When a user reports suspicious activity, a text message is sent to two mobile phone numbers selected by the store owner. It is then followed by a picture message of what was on the camera at the time. Immediately after reporting activity, users are transferred to a new feed so they can't see what transpires in the store.

Internet Eyes plans to make its money by charging a 75 pound monthly fee to storeowners who subscribe to the service, making it significantly less expensive than hiring a security guard. The company is providing its service free of charge for three months in the UK in the hopes winning over customers.

"It's very, very inexpensive," Morgan said. "If a retailer doesn't lose more than that (to shoplifting) during the course of a month, then he doesn't need our service. But that's highly unlikely."

Morgan says the UK's Information Commissioner's Office withdrew its initial objections to the service after Internet Eyes agreed to charge users a nominal fee to prevent abuse and limit itself to the European Union.

From Uruknet
Will the Justice Department Be Authorized to Shut Down Internet Sites?
by Rich Muny
September 30, 2010

On September 20th, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced legislation — S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act — that seeks to give the Department of Justice the power to shut down websites anywhere in the world that are found to infringe on intellectual property rights.  This would be accomplished by ordering U.S. domain registrars and registries to stop resolving infringing sites’ domain names.  While this bill has the noble-sounding goal of preventing online piracy, handing the federal government authority over the Internet would set a troubling precedent that would imperil Internet freedom in America and across the world.

One disquieting issue is the lack of any requirement that these sites be found to violate the laws of the countries from where they operate. In fact, under this bill sites operating perfectly legally under the laws of their own nations could be shut down by the U.S. Justice Department.

The concept that domain names of Internet sites operating legally in their home nations could be shut down by other nations for violation of their laws is one that should concern everyone. For example, a few years ago a French court ordered Yahoo.com to block French citizens from accessing portions of the site deemed to contain content unlawful under French law. Yahoo.com resisted this demand, citing free speech issues. What if French courts had the capability to shut down the domain www.yahoo.com to force compliance with that decision? What if every nation had the right to shut down Internet domains to force the entire Internet to comply with their local laws? If the Combating Online Infringe.


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Read between the lines, they are not there to ensure the truth, quite the opposite. In the run up to the fake election, they are there to deem anyone and anything crazy which tries to effectively challenge the status quo, and preserve the Obama deception from the tea-tards, nothing more (hegelian dialectics).

'Truthy' Web Site to Search, Identify Smear Tactics, Twitter-Bombs Through Election Runup ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2010) —

Astroturfers, Twitter-bombers and smear campaigners need beware this election season as a group of leading Indiana University information and computer scientists have unleashed Truthy.indiana.edu, a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections.

Combing through thousands of tweets per hour in search of political keywords, the team based out of IU's School of Informatics and Computing will isolate patterns of interest and then insert those memes (ideas or patterns passed by imitation) into Twitter's application programming interface (API) to obtain more information about the meme's history.

"When we identify a trend we go back and examine how it was started, where the main injection points were, and any associated memes," said Filippo Menczer, an associate professor of computer science and informatics. "When we drill down we'll be able to see statistics and visualizations relating to tweets that mention the meme and basically reconstruct its history."

The team will then generate diffusion network images that visitors to Truthy.indiana.edu can view as groups of nodes and edges that identify retweets, mentions, and the extent of the epidemic. Visitors to the site will also see the output of a sentiment analysis algorithm that examines and extracts mood-identifying words and then assesses them on a known psychometric scale. That algorithm identifies the meme on scales ranging from anxious to calm, hostile to kind, unsure to sure, and confused to aware.


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