Titus (with Bradley) Satire “Press Conference vs. Press Conference” – Well, I laughed out loud (more than once)
Corey Ryan Forrester – “COVIS” vaccine – too subtle for Republicans?
Rocky Mountain Mike – Life With Barack (Right Wing Radio Told Me)
Beau – Let’s talk about Portland cops resigning and what to do…. None of this would have surprised TomCat – unless it were the unanimity of Mayor, Judge, and Prosecutor, which would have pleased him.
Yesterday a friend’s young adult son came by to mow the weeds in my front yard. I guess I should say “use a weedwhacker) rather than “mow” because they are were just that tall. At any rate, that should keep the county off my back for a while. I also received news of the death of someone who was a close friend in high school. There were four of us … now there are only three. I need to realize that this will continue to happen from time to time. I am hanging in.
Cartoon
Short Takes
The Hill – Supreme Court rules against NCAA in dispute over student-athlete compensation
Quote – Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the judgment but wrote a separate concurring opinion that contained a blistering critique of the NCAA’s business model, which generates considerable revenue, particularly from Division I football and basketball. “Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair market rate,” Kavanaugh wrote. “And under ordinary principles of antitrust law, it is not evident why college sports should be any different. The NCAA is not above the law.” Click through for story. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. On the principle of “never trust a Republican,” there;s probably some ulterior motive, possibly a setup to do future harm to colleges and universities(?). But it’s still amazing.
So, Al Franken is going on tour. It’s called “The Only Former U.S. Senator Currently on Tour Tour”.
Quote from email: Tickets for The Only Former U.S. Senator Currently on Tour Tour go on presale Wednesday at 10am in every time zone with the code word SENATOR. Just click HERE to find out when I’ll be in a city near you. I hope to see you there. My promise is that you’ll laugh, you’ll think, and you’ll leave hopeful about our future. Unless I’m in a bad mood that night. Click through for full dates and venues, and don’t forget to use the code word if interested.
The NM Political Report – The Great disconnect
Quote – On May 18, a judge overseeing the historic Yazzie-Martinez case ordered the New Mexico Public Education Department to take stock of the massive digital divide in the state and finally identify the roughly 76,000 students who lacked Internet connections they desperately needed for school. One of PED’s responses was to create a Google survey for students and staff to fill out online, an action that left advocates and school leaders mystified. Click through for the details. I really thought people in New Mexico were smarter than that … after they fired Susanna Martinez and elected Deb Haaland …
Glenn Kirschner seems to have taken a day off. Since he’s still at Lake Cherokee, and thcavactionwas timed to his son’s graduation, and yesterday was Fathers Day, I guess he’s allowed.
MSNBC – Rachel – “not a priority.”
The Damage Report – Guns t Disney
Now This News – Widower Plants 4,000 Trees in Memory of Late Wife(Ad at end*)
Now This News – “A giant Buddhist statue in Japan was outfitted with a custom face mask as a symbolic prayer for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. It took 4 workers 3 hours to place the mask on the 187-ft figure while suspended from cables.”
Puppet Regime – Well, thank God it didn’t go like THIS.
Beau – Let’s talk about Madison Cawthorn’s Vietnam comparison
Well, I really overslept – woke up only a few minutes before my grocery delivery arrived. But I did get it in without incident and put away. A few items missing, but at least no substitutions.
The Guardian – The martyr who may rise again: Christian right’s faith in Trump not shaken. This is not fun reading,but it is the reality, and we cannot afford to ignore it.
Quote: [Jonathan] Riches – a rightwing activist with a reputation for litigiousness and spreading falsehoods – booed Mike Pence during his speech on Friday because of the former vice president’s refusal to overturn the election result; others in the room shouted “Traitor!” and were escorted out. “We feel like he abandoned Trump,” Riches explained. “We needed him to challenge the election. He doesn’t represent our party. He’s now trying to redeem himself but we don’t want him.” Click through to skim as much as you can stand.
NBC News – Derek Chauvin sentencing thrusts Minnesota Judge Peter Cahill back into spotlight. Yes, that is this week.August is when the other three get tried.
Quote – In interviews, people who know Cahill and cases he has overseen say he is likely to land somewhere in the middle. They said he is a fair judge, though there is no guarantee he will mete out a punishment that will make either side entirely happy. “He’s been both a prosecutor and a defense attorney,” said Craig Cascarano, 72, a Minneapolis lawyer in private practice who met Cahill at the Hennepin County Public Defender’s Office when Cahill was a law clerk. “So he understands what it’s like to do both jobs. And he tries very hard to do the right thing.” Click through for full story (and a short video, kind of a montage.)
Food for Thought
We need to quit conceding that CRT is being taught in public schools.
Conservatives do this thing where they redefine words and then people use those definitions as if they are accurate.
We gotta stop doing that.
If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school.
A bonus “dad joke” from Eric Swalwell, belated from Fathers Day: “Why do seagulls fly over the ocean? Because if they flew over the bay, we’d call them bagels!”
Glenn Kirschner – DOJ Brief Says “Proud Boy” Defendant Committed Act of “Terrorism.” This is What Trump Incited
The Lincoln Project – Juneteenth
Now This News – Teen Receives Racist Attacks After Anti-Racist Graduation Speech
Ring of Fire – Former Nixon Lawyer Says Trump’s Behavior Was WAY Worse Than Nixon’s
Thom Hartmann – Choose: Voting Rights or The US Chamber? (w/ Karl Frisch)
What Happens When You Leave a Barrel Hanging in a forest
Beau – Juneteenth and reactions to it
(*On You Tube, I can cut miscellaneous stuff at the beginning .. but not at the end. So I like to let you know when you can stop one early without losing content.)
It is now possible to hear an opera broadcast on every Saturday all year round, and not just during the Metropolitan Opera’s season. Yesterday’s opera is “Tosca,” by Puccini, which premiered in 1900, based on an 1887 play. In it the political is the personal, and I would ccll it prescient except that, sadly, the struggle between authoritarians and the rest of us has been going on forever. But it does, at least to me, make it more poignant to consider that what happened to Tosca and Mario (and Angelotti) could conceivably happen to any of us at any time if we fail to preserve our democracy.
Cartoon TomCat has run this cartoon every Father’s Day since at least 2010 (probably before that, but I don’t think the prior blog, which was on Blogspot, remains accessible). He always protested strongly that the litter was nothis progeny.
Short Takes
INDEOENDENT (UK) – The Republican Party has turned fascist – it is now the most dangerous threat in the world. (And apparently everyone can see it except us.)
Quote: Two strategies, though never entirely absent from Republican behaviour in the past, have become far more central to their approach. One is a greater willingness to use or tolerate violence against their opponents, something that became notorious during the invasion of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters on 6 January. The other change among Republicans is much less commented on, but is more sinister and significant. This is the systematic Republican takeover of the electoral machinery that oversees elections and makes sure that they are fair. Minor officials in charge of them have suddenly become vital to the future of American democracy. Remember that it was only the refusal of these functionaries to cave in to Trump’s threats and blandishments that stopped him stealing the presidential election last November. Click through for the full article. Share it if you can.
Crooks and Liars – What’s The ‘Critical Race Theory’ Uproar Really About? Making Enemies For 2022
Quote : The whole campaign against CRT, in fact, appears to be primarily the work of a handful of astroturfing “dark money” right-wing organizations. And its central figure is named Christopher Rufo, a longtime right-wing think tank activist with a history of promoting various kinds of spurious enemy concoctions. Click through for details. But remember, just because only one person is behind it doesn’t mean it hasn’t already infected multitudes. Donald Trump** ia onlt one person too.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I’m afraid I’ve been sitting on this one for a while … and it’s not a new topic, but one the Furies and I have looked at in the past, more than once. And I’m sure we will again. The misuse of technology – any technology – is a situation in which those determined to subvert it for their own ends are in a constant race with those equally determined to to keep it useful and beneficial. So here’s the current state of the art.
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Study shows AI-generated fake reports fool experts
It doesn’t take a human mind to produce misinformation convincing enough to fool experts in such critical fields as cybersecurity. iLexx/iStock via Getty Images
· AIs can generate fake reports that are convincing enough to trick cybersecurity experts.
· If widely used, these AIs could hinder efforts to defend against cyberattacks.
· These systems could set off an AI arms race between misinformation generators and detectors.
If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation – flagged and unflagged – has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine.
There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as facultymembers doing research in cybersecurity, we studied a new avenue of misinformation in the scientific community. We found that it’s possible for artificial intelligence systems to generate false information in critical fields like medicine and defense that is convincing enough to fool experts.
General misinformation often aims to tarnish the reputation of companies or public figures. Misinformation within communities of expertise has the potential for scary outcomes such as delivering incorrect medical advice to doctors and patients. This could put lives at risk.
To test this threat, we studied the impacts of spreading misinformation in the cybersecurity and medical communities. We used artificial intelligence models dubbed transformers to generate false cybersecurity news and COVID-19 medical studies and presented the cybersecurity misinformation to cybersecurity experts for testing. We found that transformer-generated misinformation was able to fool cybersecurity experts.
Transformers
Much of the technology used to identify and manage misinformation is powered by artificial intelligence. AI allows computer scientists to fact-check large amounts of misinformation quickly, given that there’s too much for people to detect without the help of technology. Although AI helps people detect misinformation, it has ironically also been used to produce misinformation in recent years.
AI can help detect misinformation like these false claims about COVID-19 in India – but what happens when AI is used to generate the misinformation? AP Photo/Ashwini Bhatia
Transformers, like BERT from Google and GPT from OpenAI, use natural language processing to understand text and produce translations, summaries and interpretations. They have been used in such tasks as storytelling and answering questions, pushing the boundaries of machines displaying humanlike capabilities in generating text.
Transformers can also be used for malevolent purposes. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have already faced the challenges of AI-generated fake news across platforms.
Critical misinformation
Our research shows that transformers also pose a misinformation threat in medicine and cybersecurity. To illustrate how serious this is, we fine-tuned the GPT-2 transformer model on open online sources discussing cybersecurity vulnerabilities and attack information. A cybersecurity vulnerability is the weakness of a computer system, and a cybersecurity attack is an act that exploits a vulnerability. For example, if a vulnerability is a weak Facebook password, an attack exploiting it would be a hacker figuring out your password and breaking into your account.
We then seeded the model with the sentence or phrase of an actual cyberthreat intelligence sample and had it generate the rest of the threat description. We presented this generated description to cyberthreat hunters, who sift through lots of information about cybersecurity threats. These professionals read the threat descriptions to identify potential attacks and adjust the defenses of their systems.
We were surprised by the results. The cybersecurity misinformation examples we generated were able to fool cyberthreat hunters, who are knowledgeable about all kinds of cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities. Imagine this scenario with a crucial piece of cyberthreat intelligence that involves the airline industry, which we generated in our study.
An example of AI-generated cybersecurity misinformation. The Conversation, CC BY-ND
This misleading piece of information contains incorrect information concerning cyberattacks on airlines with sensitive real-time flight data. This false information could keep cyber analysts from addressing legitimate vulnerabilities in their systems by shifting their attention to fake software bugs. If a cyber analyst acts on the fake information in a real-world scenario, the airline in question could have faced a serious attack that exploits a real, unaddressed vulnerability.
A similar transformer-based model can generate information in the medical domain and potentially fool medical experts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, preprints of research papers that have not yet undergone a rigorous review are constantly being uploaded to such sites as medrXiv. They are not only being described in the press but are being used to make public health decisions. Consider the following, which is not real but generated by our model after minimal fine-tuning of the default GPT-2 on some COVID-19-related papers.
An example of AI-generated health care misinformation. The Conversation, CC BY-ND
The model was able to generate complete sentences and form an abstract allegedly describing the side effects of COVID-19 vaccinations and the experiments that were conducted. This is troubling both for medical researchers, who consistently rely on accurate information to make informed decisions, and for members of the general public, who often rely on public news to learn about critical health information. If accepted as accurate, this kind of misinformation could put lives at risk by misdirecting the efforts of scientists conducting biomedical research.
Although examples like these from our study can be fact-checked, transformer-generated misinformation hinders such industries as health care and cybersecurity in adopting AI to help with information overload. For example, automated systems are being developed to extract data from cyberthreat intelligence that is then used to inform and train automated systems to recognize possible attacks. If these automated systems process such false cybersecurity text, they will be less effective at detecting true threats.
We believe the result could be an arms race as people spreading misinformation develop better ways to create false information in response to effective ways to recognize it.
Cybersecurity researchers continuously study ways to detect misinformation in different domains. Understanding how to automatically generate misinformation helps in understanding how to recognize it. For example, automatically generated information often has subtle grammatical mistakes that systems can be trained to detect. Systems can also cross-correlate information from multiple sources and identify claims lacking substantial support from other sources.
Ultimately, everyone should be more vigilant about what information is trustworthy and be aware that hackers exploit people’s credulity, especially if the information is not from reputable news sources or published scientific work.
================================================================ Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I can certainly see how these examples could fool even professionals … and particularly the medical exacmple on side effects, simply because side effects are so unpredictable. But misstatements which in theory should have been more obvious have also fooled experts. And fooling experts can certainly have disastrous results. If there is any way we can all be on our guard any more than we already are, then dear Furies, please help us to do so.
