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!”
Commenting on Wendy’s recent (last Thursday) post “Hello Again” I volunteered to contact Terry Stein who worked w/ TC at the 7th Step Foundation.
I emailed Terry on Friday and got a response on Saturday. I asked her today if I could share it w/ you folks, and she kindly agreed. So here is a nice update from Terry – although I did break it down to paragraphs to make reading a bit easier. (That Wendy has been juggling more balls than even what we’re aware of.)
Hi Tom –
Thanks for contacting me. I knew of Tom’s death; Wendy had texted me and Sandi. It’s sad that he had to go through all that.
Sandi had been going to visit him at the care home (we talked about both going, but he could only have one visitor at a time) but she never made it. She told Sandi Tom wouldn’t even have known she was there, he was in so much pain. We, too, have been waiting to hear back from Wendy.
I did e-mail him after he had moved, to let him know I was thinking of him. He was very nervous, though, because there could be not even a hint of ANY association with prison – not even as a volunteer.
My mom died of pancreatic cancer (2001) – she was in a lot of pain – so I understood at least some of what Tom was experiencing, and I didn’t want to put any extra strain on him,.
As sad as we are to have lost him, it was a merciful release for him. I am glad, though, that he lived long enough to see trmp [sic – like a lot of us, probably doesn’t even want to write that word] voted OUT!
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.
Violence between Israel and the increasingly squeezed Palestinians has been going on for decades, but recently it suddenly exploded. Israel’s brutal persecution of the Palestinians has gone up several notches. And, of course, Israel’s tail continues to wag the U.S. dog.
Listen – I’m sorry about the way Jews have been demonized and persecuted over the last 2500 years. And I abhor Hitler and the Nazi scum as much as any gentile could. But that doesn’t mean I will knee-jerk take Israel’s side every time. Israel has a right to exist, but only if it acknowledges Palestine’s right to exist, and the human rights of the Palestinians whose ancestors were rudely robbed of their land more than seven decades ago. Israel has a right to defend itself, but it cannot use this as an excuse to commit genocide. The UN recognizes Israel as an apartheid state. Why won’t the United States do the same?
It is a sad irony Israel is inflicting on Palestinians the same kind of atrocities that have been directed at Jews for so long. One would think that Jews, having suffered from the worst instance of ethnic cleansing in history, would not do unto others as has been done unto them. Yet even while the ultimate evil of the Holocaust is still in living memory, Israel continues to exterminate Palestinians – whose numbers include Christians as well as Muslims.
Recently I learned that some US states have a shocking law: If you want government aid, such as to rebuild after a disaster, you have to promise not to boycott Israel. Don’t believe me? Here is a video:
Voltaire wrote, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.” If criticizing Israel gets your government funding cut off, what does that say?
More and more people around the world – including lots of Jews – are getting fed up with Israel’s status as a sacred cow. People from every walk of life here in the US are getting more and more vociferous about our support of Israel’s ethnic cleansing. I have signed numerous petitions calling for an end to aid for Israel until they accept a two-state solution and leave the Palestinians alone. I have marched on behalf of the Palestinians and for peace in the Middle East. I dare to wear a shirt that proclaims my support for Palestinian rights.
As I write this, Benjamin Netanyahu has been unseated as Israel’s Prime Minister. If his own government has had enough of his brutality towards Palestine, so much that disparate parties with a wide range of political standings were willing to unite in order to effect his ouster, that may indicate Israel is finally ready to face its own dark side.
Naturally, Zionist bugnuts attack anybody who refuses to bow and scrape before their favorite golden calf. They accuse pro-Palestine activists of being Nazis, or at least of being anti-Semitic. Excrementum tauri! Opposing Israel’s vicious persecution of Palestinians does not make you anti-Israel, let alone anti-Jewish. You can hate the sin but love the sinner.
Some claim that Jews are entitled to Israel just because Jews had a nation there over 2000 years ago. Bonjour! Paging all First Nations/Native Americans, whose lands were stolen within the last two to three centuries. If Jews are entitled to Israel, then American Indians and Hispanics are entitled to all of the Americas. If we can shove Palestinians out of the Levantine, we can send all the white people here back to Europe, all the Black people back to Africa, et cetera.
Zionists point out that Hamas’ one goal is the destruction of Israel. No love is lost between me and Hamas – indeed, no love is lost between me and any terrorist organization. However, we need to take a walk in Palestine’s shoes. Imagine that you are part of an ethnic minority whose ancestors were robbed of their rightful homes and lands. Imagine your oppressors have the support of a powerful nation that squelches any and all criticism of how your people are treated. Imagine that, whenever somebody so much as throws a rock at one of your oppressors’ goons, they react with bullets and missiles, killing not just the rock thrower but also anybody who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – including children and pregnant women. Imagine that your cries for justice, which have gone on not just for decades but for generations, have fallen on deaf ears. Do you really think that you would not become a terrorist? By drowning out the voices of Palestinians, Israel has sown the wind, and Hamas is the whirlwind it is reaping.
The only solution is a two-state solution, with Israel allowing the Palestinians to flourish. The time is long overdue for the lion to lie down with the lamb.
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.
================================================================
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.
