Tag: internet

Stanford professor blasts woke tattle-tale software which lets students anonymously report one another for discrimination, including boy spotted reading Mein Kampf: Creators live in $900k mansion and own VINEYARD

A group of Stanford professors are fighting back against a woke tattle-tale tool that lets students anonymously report each other for discrimination.

More than 75 professors argue in a petition to school administrators that the online tool threatens free speech on campus, with one telling the Wall Street Journal it reminded him of systems in place in the Soviet Union and China. 

The Maxient reporting system, employed at 1,300 institutions around the country, has already been challenged by free speech advocates in Florida, Texas, Michigan and Oklahoma.

It has apparently made Aaron Hark, 42, a millionaire, owning a $900,000 dollar home in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his family’s own vineyard. 

Hark set up the firm with wife Celeste, 41, with the pair now enjoying the fruits of their woke online hall monitor software in more ways than one. 

Back at Stanford, school administrators say the system is necessary to ensure a respectful campus, despite criticism that it is creepy and Orwellian. 

The school has been using the third-party system since 2021, when it became widely used at universities across the country for students to report their colleagues who were not wearing masks. 

But university professors said they did not know of the system, run by third-party contractor Maxient, until the school newspaper reported on an incident in which a student was reported for reading Mein Kampf.

‘I was stunned,’ Russell Berman, a professor of comparative literature who created the petition, told the Journal. ‘It reminds me of McCarthyism.’

According to the company’s website, Maxient is the ‘software of choice for managing behavior records at colleges and universities across North America.

‘Our centralized reporting and record-keeping helps institutions connect the dots and prevent students from falling through the cracks,’ it says, noting: ‘Maxient serves as an integral component of many schools overall early alert efforts, helping to identify students in distress and coordinate the efforts of various departments to provide follow-up.’ 

Maxient was founded in 2003 and is now being used at more than 1,300 institutions across the United States.

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The sudden global push for age verification to end online anonymity and drive digital ID uptake

Anonymity online, long considered by civil rights groups as a fundamental feature of the internet, is coming under fire from different directions, and through a range of methods: from criticism by political elites, to actual legislation.

One kind of new law that can undermine or do away with online anonymity are those mandating age verification before users are allowed on a website. Another effect these rules have is increasing the uptake of digital IDs.

Earlier this week, Senator Josh Hawley introduced the Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective (MATURE) Act, whose goal is to prevent minors under 16 from accessing social media.

In order to ensure this, all users would have to have their age verified before creating an account, by giving up information fully revealing their identity: legal name, date of birth and a copy of a government issued ID that proves this is their actual name and age.

Hawley’s explanation for this and similar initiatives is that social media is harmful to children, from monetizing their data to facilitating exploitation and manipulation. But the solution would clearly affect everyone’s privacy by further “unmasking” them to notorious data collectors and (ab)users, those same social sites.

Age verification is also being pushed in some states but, in Utah at least, the proposal that has just been adopted in the local Senate is leaving out the government ID requirement.

The bill, known as SB152 and which will next be considered in the House, makes it mandatory for companies behind social media platforms to make sure that children can sign up only with their parents’ consent. To ensure this is the case, the ages of all users would be verified.

However, how exactly these companies can accomplish that remains unclear for now, while the bill’s sponsor, state State Senator Mike McKell, is quoted as saying that “there are third-party options that use various technologies to verify ages without government IDs.”

Facial recognition is mentioned in reports as one such option, while another is to use “existing consumer data.” Once again, the need for such legislation is explained as a way to protect children from bad influences online.

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The UN calls for a “code of conduct” on social media

The United Nations is becoming heavily involved in several initiatives to regulate the digital space and online speech, and judging by the priorities the organization has for 2023, outlined on Monday in New York City, this trend is only picking up steam.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke about those priorities and suppressing the spread of online “hate” speech via what he called misinformation and disinformation made it to the list, among issues like rights-based approach, renewable energy, and a dire warning about the world being closer than ever to total catastrophe – all mentioned in his speech.

Guterres spoke about the subject of “mis- and disinformation” on the internet as a call for action to deal with these threats.

And Guterres had “everyone with influence” in mind – governments, regulators, policymakers, technology companies, the media, civil society. It’s notable that he “squeezed in” this warning about the need to “stop the hate” on the internet in the same paragraph he spoke about UN outreach programs that concern the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide.

He then moved on to the UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech, which included the “call for action.”

“Stop the hate. Set up strong guardrails. Be accountable for language that causes harm,” the UN secretary-general said and explaining the plan on how to do that: by creating a code of conduct for information integrity on digital platforms.

This, Guterres noted, is part of his 2021 report titled, “Our Common Agenda.” In May 2022, a meeting was held at the UN by delegates who gathered to discuss what was dramatically dubbed as “the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation.”

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Canada passes online censorship bill

Canada’s Senate has passed Bill C-11 (Online Streaming Act), which critics refer to as “the internet censorship bill,” along with several amendments.

The bill passed in the third reading with 43 votes in favor and 15 against, which means it is now inching ever closer to becoming law since in the next step it goes back to the House of Commons, which will consider the amendments.

The government proposed the bill as a way to amend the Broadcasting Act by modifying Canada’s broadcasting policy, and give the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) new powers as a regulator.

Opponents of the bill, including Conservative politicians and advocacy groups, however, see it as a way to increase the government’s ability to censor online speech it dislikes.

The effort to bring this legislation to life in Canada has quite a story behind it: initially, the Online Streaming Act, then known as Bill C-10, passed in the House of Commons in June 2021 but failed in the Senate.

It made a comeback as Bill C-11 in February 2022, got cleared by the House in June, and finally last week made it through the Senate.

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Pentagon Paves Road Map for Zero Trust by 2027

The Defense Department has finally laid out its plan for protecting its cyber networks after years of pledging to make it a commitment.

The Office of the Chief Information Officer released “The DoD Zero Trust Strategy” in November — which laid out metrics and deadlines for the department to achieve full zero trust adoption by 2027. Cybersecurity experts said the government and private sector should work together to leverage resources to successfully enter the new regime.

“Cyber physical threats to critical infrastructure really are one of our biggest national security challenges that we’re facing today, and that the landscape that we’re dealing with has gotten more complex,” Nitin Natarajan, deputy director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during a MeriTalk event in October.

Cyber attackers have more resources than they have in the past, and it’s less expensive to do a lot of damage to an unsecure system, he said. It’s not just lone wolf hackers, but nation states and cyber terrorists who can pose a threat.

For example, the 2019 SolarWinds cyber attack, which swept past the defenses of thousands of organizations, including the federal government, has been linked to Russia-backed operatives.

The new strategy’s basic tenet is that treating organizations’ security like a moat around a castle doesn’t keep out bad actors.

“Mission and system owners, as well as operators, increasingly embrace this view as fact. They also see the journey to [zero trust] as an opportunity to affect positively the mission by addressing technology modernizations, refining security processes and improving operational performance,” the document said.

Zero trust culture requires every person within a network to assume that it is already compromised and requires all users to prove their identities at all times.

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Utah bill would bring ID-based age verification to online platforms

A state lawmaker in Utah has introduced a bill that would require teens to get parental consent before they can use social media. The bill would require handing over more personal information to check the age of platform users.

This week, State Sen. Mike McKell introduced SB 152, a bill that would require social media platforms to not only verify age but also require children under the age of 18 to get a parent’s approval before creating a social media account.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill calls for users of platforms to show a valid driver’s license, a birth certificate, a currently valid passport, or a currently valid identification card or certificate.

The bill would also allow parents to have access to their child’s social media accounts.

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Social Media Is Influencing Teens To Adopt Mental Illness Identities, Researchers Say

Researchers have examined the troubling trend of teens self-diagnosing mental illness through social media. 

A new paper published earlier this month in Comprehensive Psychiatry proposed that “social contagion” through prolonged social media use can explain why some teens, mostly adolescent females, self-diagnose their purported rare mental illnesses and personality disorders online. 

“We believe there is an urgent need for focused empirical research investigation into this concerning phenomenon that is related to the broader research and discourse examining social media influences on mental health,” said the study’s lead author, John D. Haltigan, and co-author, Gayathiri Rajkumar, in a recent article for Reality’s Last Stand.

The paper focused on the uptick in teens presenting with tics with no known biological cause and the resurgence of the extremely rare multiple personality disorder, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), in which a person claims to harbor multiple distinct personalities. Also mentioned are the prevalence of autism, depression, eating disorders, and gender identity-related conditions on social media. 

“That rates of teen and adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation have risen precipitously since the advent of social media and smartphones is likely no coincidence,” the authors said.

The paper proposes that social media platforms like TikTok, whose core user base are teen girls, and the popularity of online communities that glamorize mental illness, may act as a “spread vector” for adolescents to adopt various disorders as part of their online personas.

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What Privacy? This AI Can Identify You by Your Computer Habits

The world of privacy is a constant battlefield. It’s not a static decision where once you’ve done this one single step, you’re now good until the end of time. Instead, you have to stay abreast of the research, studying the ways that privacy is constantly being diminished so that you can then take the appropriate steps to respond.

If you’ve read through a privacy policy for an app, website, or contract in the past, you’ve likely noticed that they state they may sell your data to third parties. Exactly who these third parties are, you never know, nor what your information is being used for in the first place.

But sometimes you find the privacy policy tries to add a feel-good clause here, saying something to the extent that “our data about you is completely anonymous.”

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The dark web’s criminal minds see Internet of Things as next big hacking prize

John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, likens his job to studying criminal minds through a soda straw. He monitors cyberthreat groups in real time on the dark web, watching what amounts to a free market of criminal innovation ebb and flow.

Groups buy and sell services, and one hot idea — a business model for a crime — can take off quickly when people realize that it works to do damage or to get people to pay. Last year, it was ransomware, as criminal hacking groups figured out how to shut down servers through what’s called directed denial of service attacks. But 2022, say experts, may have marked an inflection point due to the rapid proliferation of IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Attacks are evolving from those that shut down computers or stole data, to include those that could more directly wreak havoc on everyday life. IoT devices can be the entry points for attacks on parts of countries’ critical infrastructure, like electrical grids or pipelines, or they can be the specific targets of criminals, as in the case of cars or medical devices that contain software.

“What I wish is that the vulnerabilities of cybersecurity could never negatively affect human life and infrastructure,” says Meredith Schnur, cyber brokerage leader for US & Canada at Marsh & McLennan, which insures large companies against cyberattacks. “Everything else is just business.”

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Government Spending Billions To Expand Broadband but Can’t Tell Who Needs It

In November 2021, Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), a $1.2 trillion grab bag of public spending wish list items. One of those projects, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, would expand broadband access to communities that currently lack access to high-speed internet. BEAD would dole out $42.45 billion in state grants, and the Government Accountability Office estimated that the projects could require as many as 23,000 additional telecom workers to complete.

The only problem is that the government currently has no idea where broadband actually is and is not available.

The government defines broadband as any high-speed internet connection that is always on without needing to dial up. According to the text of the IIJA, “Access to affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband is essential to full participation in modern life in the United States,” especially in an era of remote work and Zoom schooling. As such, the law set out to bridge the so-called “digital divide” wherein some rural and low-income communities do not have easy broadband access.

To determine what areas need investment, the government relies on maps from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But despite costing $350 million, the FCC’s maps are notoriously unreliable and have been for many years. In 2021, The Washington Post noted the maps are based on census data, so “if even one household in a census block—a statistical area that conveys population data—has broadband available, then the agency considers the entire group served. In rural areas, one block could cover dozens of square miles.” The FCC’s maps also don’t take into account physical impediments, like trees and mountains, which can disrupt wireless signals.

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