Tag: internet

Israel to introduce sweeping online censorship law

The Israeli government has announced that it will adopt recommendations to regulate social media platforms to create a “safer” online environment. The recommendations are similar to the social media rules in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which will take effect next year.

Outgoing Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel announced that Israel would adopt recommendations made by the committee for examining legislation on online social media platforms, which was formed in October 2021. The committee, which was led by the Communications Ministry director-general Liran Avisar Ben-Horin, was created to find solutions to tackle the regulatory and ethical questions related to social media.

“This is an unregulated space where negative and harmful social phenomena have emerged,” said Hendel, as reported by the Times of Israel. “Legal responsibility needs to be applied to digital platforms in relation to the distribution of illegal sexual content, incitement to violence and terrorism, and more.”

“The step we are taking today brings us closer to a more protected and safer online space while preserving freedom of expression.”

The committee recommended that social media companies should be obligated to immediately remove illegal and offensive content, create an online hotline for reporting offensive and illegal content, create a system where users can appeal censorship and suspension decisions, and be more transparent.

Courts will be given the power to issue content removal orders, and a social media regulator will be created. Platforms operating in Israel will be required to set up offices in Israel.

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New web tracking technique is bypassing privacy protections

Advertisers and web trackers have been able to aggregate users’ information across all of the websites they visit for decades, primarily by placing third-party cookies in users’ browsers.

Two years ago, several browsers that prioritize user privacy—including Safari, Firefox, and Brave—began to block third-party cookies for all users by default. This presents a significant issue for businesses that place ads on the web on behalf of other companies and rely on cookies to track click-through rates to determine how much they need to get paid.

Advertisers have responded by pioneering a new method for tracking users across the Web, known as user ID (or UID) smuggling, which does not require third-party cookies. But no one knew exactly how often this method was used to track people on the Internet.

Researchers at UC San Diego have for the first time sought to quantify the frequency of UID smuggling in the wild, by developing a measurement tool called CrumbCruncher. CrumbCruncher navigates the Web like an ordinary user, but along the way, it keeps track of how many times it has been tracked using UID smuggling.

The researchers found that UID smuggling was present in about 8 percent of the navigations that CrumbCruncher made. They presented these results at the Internet Measurement Conference Oct. 25 to 27, 2022 in Nice, France. The team is also releasing both their complete dataset and their measurement pipeline for use by browser developers.

The team’s main goal is to raise awareness of the issue with browser developers, said first author Audrey Randall, a computer science Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. “UID smuggling is more widely used than we anticipated,” she said. “But we don’t know how much of it is a threat to user privacy.”

UID smuggling can have legitimate uses, the researchers say. For example, embedding user IDs in URLs can allow a website to realize a user is already logged in, which means they can skip the login page and navigate directly to content. It’s also a tool that a company that owns websites with different domains can use to track user traffic.

It’s also, of course, a tool for affiliate advertisers to track traffic and get paid. For example, a blogger who advertises a product using affiliate links might be paid a commission if anyone clicks their links and then makes a purchase. UID smuggling can identify which blogger should get the commision.

But there are potentially more dangerous uses that researchers worry about. For example, a data broker could use UID smuggling to gather a database of users’ Internet navigation.

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Major Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Authentication Company After Ties To US Military Contractor Exposed

This week several major web browsers quickly severed ties with a mysterious software company used to certify the security of websites, three weeks after the Washington Post exposed its connections to a US military contractor, the Post reports.

TrustCor Systems provided ‘certificates’ to browsers to Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, which vouched for the legitimacy of said websites.

“Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware,” said Mozilla’s Kathleen Wilson in an email to browser security experts. “Trustcor’s responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla’s concerns.”

According to TrustCor’s Panamanian (!?) registration records, the company has the same slate of officers, agents and officers as Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which has sold communication interception services to the U.S. government for over a decade.

One of those contracts listed the “place of performance” as Fort Meade, Md., the home of the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command.

The case has put a new spotlight on the obscure systems of trust and checks that allow people to rely on the internet for most purposes. Browsers typically have more than a hundred authorities approved by default, including government-owned ones and small companies, to seamlessly attest that secure websites are what they purport to be. -WaPo

Also of concern, TrustCor’s small staff in Canada lists its place of operation at a UPS Store mail drop, according to company executive Rachel McPherson, who says she told their Canadian staffers to work remotely. She also acknowledged that the company has ‘infrastructure’ in Arizona as well.

McPherson says that ownership in TrustCor was transferred to employees despite the fact that some of the same holding companies had invested in both TrustCor and Packet Forensics.

Various technologists in the email discussion said they found TrustCor to be evasive when it came to basic facts such as legal domicile and ownership – which they said was not appropriate for a company responsible for root certificate authority that verifies a secure ‘https’ website is not an imposter.

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CIA VENTURE CAPITAL ARM PARTNERS WITH EX-GOOGLER’S STARTUP TO “SAFEGUARD THE INTERNET”

TRUST LAB WAS founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.

Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.

The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

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The UK plots to ban private messaging

UK’s media regulator Ofcom will get more surveillance powers than spy agencies under the Online Safety Bill, according to a legal analysis by the Index on Censorship organization.

The legislation would allow Ofcom to force tech companies to clamp down on “child abuse” and “terrorist content” by ending end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger and force all communications to be scanned.

Human rights lawyer Matthew Ryder, in a legal opinion commissioned by Index on Censorship, said that the powers that Ofcom would be afforded by the bill allow “allow the state to compel [tech companies] to carry out surveillance of the content of communications on a generalized and widespread basis.”

The regulator would not need prior authorization before making a demand to a tech company to scan messages and there would be no independent oversight over how the regulator uses its powers.

Ryder added: “We are unable to envisage circumstances where such a destructive step in the security of global online communications for billions of users could be justified.”

Communications by journalists, whistleblowers, and victims would no longer be safe. Additionally, it is not clear if Ofcom would make public the demands it issues or whether it would keep them secret.

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Two Far-Right Websites Attributed to David DePape to Smear Conservatives Were FABRICATED – They Were Created Friday and Deleted Saturday

The mainstream media attributed two websites to the man arrested with Paul Pelosi on early Friday morning, David DePape.  However, this all appears to be another far-left farce.

David DePape was found with Paul Pelosi early Friday morning in his underwear at the Pelosi home by police in San Francisco.  The mainstream media immediately tried to cover for the Pelosi family.  They then attempted to align the man in his underwear found with Paul Pelosi as a conservative.  But it was all a lie.

There are numerous questions related to this case already.

In addition, the media tried to frame DePape as a conservative based on websites that were reportedly his.  DePape was homeless and a drug addict but the media insisted he was running a conservative website?  Makes perfect sense.

FOX News reported on the websites reportedly connected to DePape:

Facebook disabled DePape’s profile early Friday and declined to answer questions. At least two online blogs under DePape’s name are stocked with posts from the years of 2007 and 2022 speaking of “censorship,” “Big Brother,” and pedophiles. One contained calls for violence and antisemitic content. It was not immediately clear that he was responsible for the posts, and San Francisco police did not immediately respond to questions about DePape’s online presence.

The LA Times also reported as well on the websites.

In the months before police accused him of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Friday morning, David DePape had been drifting further into the world of far-right conspiracies, antisemitism and hate, according to a Times review of his online accounts.

In a personal blog that DePape maintained, posts include such topics as “Manipulation of History,” “Holohoax” and “It’s OK to be white.” He mentioned 4chan, a favorite message board of the far right. He posted videos about conspiracies involving COVID-19 vaccines and the war in Ukraine being a ploy for Jewish people to buy land.

DePape’s screeds included posts about QAnon, an unfounded theory that former President Trump is at war with a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring and control the world. In an Aug. 23 entry titled “Q,” DePape wrote: “Either Q is Trump himself or Q is the deepstate moles within Trumps inner circle.”

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Sabotage Again Suspected As More European Internet Cables Cut

Two European fibre optic cables have been severed in the last week, fuelling speculation of possible sabotage with both phone networks and internet traffic disrupted.

The first incident took place in the North Sea last week and saw an underwater fibre optic cable cut, shutting off the internet and mobile phone networking to the Shetland Islands, the northernmost islands of the United Kingdom for an entire night.

The incident affected the SHEFA2 submarine fibre optic cable, which was deployed in 2007 and connects the Shetlands, the Orkney Islands as well as the Faroe Islands, to mainland Scotland. Another cable connecting the Shetlands and the Faroe Islands had also been damaged the week prior, an incident which was blamed on a fishing ship.

According to a report from French broadcaster BFMTV, a second fibre optic cable severing incident was reported by the security firm Zscaler, which claimed that damage had been detected at a fibre optic hub in Aix-en-Provence, near Marseille last week.

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Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020

Aconsortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.

The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file “tickets” requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.  

Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.

In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with “monitoring intensif[ying] significantly” the week before and after Election Day.

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Biden Admin Spends Tens Of Millions To Deliver Fiber Internet To Only About 90 Rural Alaska Households

President Joe Biden’s Department of Agriculture (USDA) is spending tens of millions in tax dollars to bring fiber optic internet to rural southeast Alaska.

As part of USDA’s “Reconnect Program,” it awarded a roughly $33 million grant to the Alaska Telephone Company (ATC), the agency announced last Thursday. Fiber will be delivered to 92 households and a total of 211 people and five businesses in two Alaska native villages called Skagway and Chilkat, according to a federal grant award listing.

ATC’s fiber plan will cost around $204,000 per passing of each residence and business, according to an analysis by Fierce Telecom, a tech publication. ATC also said in a Sept. 22 statement it will invest roughly $11 million into the fiber project.

“The Klukwan-Skagway Fiber project will spur economic growth and significantly enhance quality of life in very remote, hard-to-serve locations, empowering rural Alaskans with options for remote work, distance learning, telemedicine, and more,” Mike Garrett, CEO of Alaska Power & Telephone Company, which oversees ATC, said in the statement.

Fiber is a type of broadband connection that involves plastic or glass cords and is used for cable television and telephone signals as well as internet. It is roughly 20 times faster than standard cable internet and 80 times faster than digital subscriber line (DSL), another internet technology, according to HP.

USDA’s reconnect program allocates up to $1.1 billion in grants and loans to areas in rural America that lack “sufficient access” to broadband internet, a type of internet through service providers. The program was authorized under Biden’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed in November 2021.

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The surprising power of internet memes

To most of the world they are just amusing pictures of an adorable cartoon bunny sitting beside, or sometimes inexplicably amidst, a bowl of rice. But in China, where these images have been circulating on social media, they carry a deeper, and more serious meaning.

“Rice bunny” (米兔), as this collection of images and emojis are known, emerged in 2018 as part of the global #MeToo movement among women to expose sexual harassment. In China, where state censorship saw hashtags related the campaign being blocked, internet users had to find an alternative to coordinate the movement in their country. Enter the rice bunny. As an image it looks innocuous enough, but when the words for the two seemingly unrelated subjects are said aloud, the true meaning becomes clear – they are pronounced “mi tu”.

Through the use of this translinguistic homophone, women in China were able for a time to share their stories and spread the word about the #MeToo movement within a country that can be highly suspicious of organised social movements.

On the surface, internet memes are a ubiquitous source of light entertainment – a way for people to express themselves through cleverly remixed templates of text, images and videos. They are arguably the wallpaper of our social media feeds and often provide us with a few minutes of idle, amusing fodder for procrastination during our day.

But memes also have a serious side, according to researchers looking at modern forms of communication. They are a language in themselves, with a capacity to transcend cultures and construct collective identities between people. These sharable visual jokes can also be powerful tools for self-expression, connection, social influence and even political subversion.

Internet memes “are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture”, says Paolo Gerbaudo, a reader in digital politics and director of the Centre for Digital Culture at Kings College London.

Gerbaudo describes memes as a “sort of a ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, in a way, to convey a certain content”.

According to social media site Instagram, at least one million posts mentioning “meme” were shared every day in 2020. But what is it that makes the internet meme so popular and why is it such an effective way of conveying ideas?

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