Belgium probes Russian 'interference' in EU elections | DW News

[Wandering Monk]

So why is it that such a thing DIDN'T happen in 2016 in the US?

Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced a probe on Friday into suspected Russian interference in the upcoming European Union elections. De Croo said investigators found that Russian groups are meddling in the elections to promote pro-Russia candidates, in an attempt to weaken European support for Ukraine.​

​

 

[Estro Felino]

I think that many people in Brussels are on the verge of committing a political suicide, because they do know that the era of technocracy is over.
The Sorosian EU will be dismantled, piece by piece and will be replaced by a democratic, popular, populist European Union where all countries keep their own self-determination and their own decisional power.

 

[Estro Felino]

Ah, I forgot: the EU will make peace with Russia.

 

[libre]

The Sorosian EU

 

[Secret Chief]

You'll get used to it.

 

[libre]

You'll get used to it.

I'd like to hope otherwise.

 

[Secret Chief]

I'd like to hope otherwise.

Ok, that was probably a bit optimistic.

 

[Brickjectivity]

A northern province in Germany is going to try improving security by switching to all open source software by 2026, including its email servers, its office software, its desktops et all. 'By 2026' seems far away, and yet here we are in 2024 which used to seem far away, too.

Of course interference in elections is not always down to electronic security. Much of it has to do with fake people talking about politics.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

A northern province in Germany is going to try improving security by switching to all open source software by 2026, including its email servers, its office software, its desktops et all. 'By 2026' seems far away, and yet here we are in 2024 which used to seem far away, too.

Of course interference in elections is not always down to electronic security. Much of it has to do with fake people talking about politics.

Interference in this day and age is done through psychological profiling and automated algorithms on "social" media to serve people with targetted fake news and propaganda to push their psychological buttons.

And with the advances in AI, this is only going to get worse.

Regulation of internet media is becoming a very urgent problem very very fast.

 

[Brickjectivity]

Interference in this day and age is done through psychological profiling and automated algorithms on "social" media to serve people with targetted fake news and propaganda to push their psychological buttons.

And with the advances in AI, this is only going to get worse.

Regulation of internet media is becoming a very urgent problem very very fast.

I hope they implement digital video signing from end to end. That would do it, because then you could have a protocol that checked the signer as the video was playing. This would probably piggyback off of the same root certificates used by internet browsers and would bounce you to a gpg server or similar server. Your browser would have not only a HTTPS but would also have a video playback protocol and image protocol which checked the signature in the video and image data. The signature would likely be included in the media frames or packages with sequences of frames. The cryptography is already sorted, so they just need to implement it end to end for things like news. All the new computers have enough power to handle it, too.

The benefits:
Knowing who makes media
Guaranteeing the media from them is unaltered
Media can still be copied and passed around
Altered media will not match the original signature and will be detected as altered media

The downside:
Some speed overhead for the digital signatures and fetching some extra info from servers
New media protocols which add digital signatures
More public servers that provide authentication information
When producing video, the produce would need to register and retain a key pair (or else a subkey pair) and register the public key on a public server. Its one extra technical step, but they could then provide signed media.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

I hope they implement digital video signing from end to end. That would do it, because then you could have a protocol that checked the signer as the video was playing. This would probably piggyback off of the same root certificates used by internet browsers and would bounce you to a gpg server or similar server. Your browser would have not only a HTTPS but would also have a video playback protocol and image protocol which checked the signature in the video and image data. The signature would likely be included in the media frames or packages with sequences of frames. The cryptography is already sorted, so they just need to implement it end to end for things like news. All the new computers have enough power to handle it, too.

The benefits:
Knowing who makes media
Guaranteeing the media from them is unaltered
Media can still be copied and passed around
Altered media will not match the original signature and will be detected as altered media

The downside:
Some speed overhead for the digital signatures and fetching some extra info from servers
New media protocols which add digital signatures
More public servers that provide authentication information
When producing video, the produce would need to register and retain a key pair (or else a subkey pair) and register the public key on a public server. Its one extra technical step, but they could then provide signed media.

That would certainly work. But it would still be limited to video.

It would make no difference to bots posting text.
Now they have troll farms to do such, which are already very efficient but which nevertheless still require some organization, budget and quite some man power to operate.

All of it could be replace by a single "troll farm" AI on a single reasonably powerful computer. That AI could also very easily fake an IP for every "bot" making it look as if they post from different locations inside whatever country they want.

I'm not one of those guys who's worried that AI is going to become some self-aware skynet-like entity hunting humans.
But I am VERY worried about the havoc it can cause online by blurring the lines between what is real and what is not.
Fake news was already a problem even without AI. Psychological profiling and targetted spread of fake news was also.

Imagine the damage a powerful AI could do by exploiting those same human vulnerabilities.

You just KNOW that that is exactly what countries like China and Russia are going to use it for.
And it won't even be hard to do either. In fact, it might even be easier to do then operating massive troll farms.
It would do everything on its own automatically and it would also generate its own fake news to push buttons, whereas pre-AI, someone still needs to create and write that fake news and then dozens / hundres / thousands of trolls need to spread it.

A properly coded AI engine would do all that by itself after you click the proverbial "start" button.

 

[Brickjectivity]

That would certainly work. But it would still be limited to video.

It would make no difference to bots posting text.
Now they have troll farms to do such, which are already very efficient but which nevertheless still require some organization, budget and quite some man power to operate.

All of it could be replace by a single "troll farm" AI on a single reasonably powerful computer. That AI could also very easily fake an IP for every "bot" making it look as if they post from different locations inside whatever country they want.

I'm not one of those guys who's worried that AI is going to become some self-aware skynet-like entity hunting humans.
But I am VERY worried about the havoc it can cause online by blurring the lines between what is real and what is not.
Fake news was already a problem even without AI. Psychological profiling and targetted spread of fake news was also.

Imagine the damage a powerful AI could do by exploiting those same human vulnerabilities.

You just KNOW that that is exactly what countries like China and Russia are going to use it for.
And it won't even be hard to do either. In fact, it might even be easier to do then operating massive troll farms.
It would do everything on its own automatically and it would also generate its own fake news to push buttons, whereas pre-AI, someone still needs to create and write that fake news and then dozens / hundres / thousands of trolls need to spread it.

A properly coded AI engine would do all that by itself after you click the proverbial "start" button.

That is a great point, and part of the charm of social networks is the anonymity. I won't give that up, however it is possible to sign text. That's how email works, so if you want you can prove your emails come from your business unchanged. A similar system could work in current social networks by adding only 1 new set of tags to BBcode or other code. Then if you were one of the public figures that wanted to insure people knew messages were from you or your business you could provide signed text posts. To make it work social networks would have to do like email does and bury MIME information in the text describing the sections in the text. All of this would be inside the new tag and so would be hidden. The texts would appear as normal. The code is already written mostly. It just takes someone to put it all together. Unfortunately I am too poor a programmer, but I know it would be a snap for most decent programmers to use the code already made for email and adapt it.

 

[libre]

I'm not one of those guys who's worried that AI is going to become some self-aware skynet-like entity hunting humans.
But I am VERY worried about the havoc it can cause online by blurring the lines between what is real and what is not.
Fake news was already a problem even without AI. Psychological profiling and targetted spread of fake news was also.

I agree.
I think an cause for concern is not that AI generated videos are going to convince us to believe all sorts of nonsense, but that they will cause us to distrust the real videos.

 

[Estro Felino]

A northern province in Germany is going to try improving security by switching to all open source software by 2026, including its email servers, its office software, its desktops et all. 'By 2026' seems far away, and yet here we are in 2024 which used to seem far away, too.

Of course interference in elections is not always down to electronic security. Much of it has to do with fake people talking about politics.

Well...we are in an era in which journalists like Julian Assange have been vilified, imprisoned, and silenced just for exposing the truth.
They have been trying to plug his mouth, hoping that he can't breathe any more.

But it's self-detrimental...I guess this repression.