• Gsus4@mander.xyzEnglish
    121·
    3 months ago

    anybody know how to distinguish Iranian, russian and Chinese disinfo efforts? They have different flavours and I see them out there, but don’t know which is which. Sure, it is stoking division, but some lean more on anti-NATO, some on anti-israel and some on “western decadence” in general…

    • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      122·
      3 months ago

      well, for other security research, they often rely on things like timestamps (even state sponsored hackers have nights and weekends), typos that only make sense with certain keyboards, and who is targeted. For example, Russian keyboarss don’t have the : symbol, so the :) emoji is usually typed as “))”, which can be a dead giveaway that the hacker uses a a Slavic language keyboard.

      However, let’s not pretend for a second that disinformation and propaganda are only pushed by the listed countries. I’m old enough to remember when lies pushed by the Bush administration to the New York Times that were used to manufacturer public consent for the Iraq war.

      Or how NATO promises they’re supporting Ukraine out of the goodness of their hearts and that it has absolutely nothing to do with their abundant natural gas supplies that are currently being sold off to oil companies based in NATO countries. (Slava Ukraini, for the record, but fuck the oil companies).

      https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/naftogaz-held-talks-with-big-us-oil-companies-about-ukraine-energy-projects-ft-2023-04-21/

      • zeephirus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        3 months ago

        why talk about past tense when this https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/ is happening now.

        https://theconversation.com/how-the-nigerian-and-kenyan-media-handled-cambridge-analytica-128473

        https://www.france24.com/en/technology/20230215-israeli-firm-boasted-of-meddling-in-more-than-30-elections-worldwide

        https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/04/israels-propaganda-machine-is-filling-the-internet-with-misinformation

        • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Yeah. Agreed. I just thought the Iraq war would be a great example because it is now pretty universally recognized as a major fuck up in US policy that lead to the deaths of around a million people and the eventual rise of the Islamic State. I mean, if you look up civilian casualty numbers in Ukraine vs Iraq and account for the shorter timeline (at least, since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine), the US is worse than Russia by a wide margin. And let’s not talk about Gaza or how to the US funnelled arms and funds to right wing nationalist groups in the former Yugoslavia before bombing civilian infrastructure in Belgrade in the name of preventing the genocide that the US helped to inflame and escalate. Hell, the shells that were dropped on Sarajevo in 1996 by the Serbian militias were given/sold to them by the US (during the cold war) and then they also sold arms to National separatist groups that are themselves accused of acts of genocide.

      • takeda@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        3 months ago

        Seems like OP is such a but, notice how he immediately turned “but West is even worse, they should just let Russia start unprovoked war on their borders”. BTW they love to work in pairs to help validate the message, and that’s the case with The other 2 week old account.

        Also: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81gVk1cpHCL.jpg

        And Ukraine relatively recently discovered the gas on their land. They had no time to build any infrastructure, because Russia invaded shortly after in 2014. Also Russia is occupying those territories since then, so nothing is being sold even if they wanted to.

        • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Unless you think Russia is capable of hacking google maps…

          Here’s an oil field owned by Halliburton in Ukraine. https://g.co/kgs/F7e761g

          For those of us not old enough to remember, Halliburton got famous for being deeply connected to George W. Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, and profited massively from the Iraq war.

        • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          lol. nah, homey. it’s a 7 month old account from the reddit exodus. Ukraine discovered natural gas in Crimea in 2014, threatening to box out Russia from the EU energy market, which is why it’s an existential threat for Russia if Ukraine pivots west. Consequently, Russia invaded. Here is a Wikipedia article that discusses the Shell-backed exploration of the gas field off the coast of Crimea.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skifska_gas_field

          Who the fuck said anything about supporting Russia? Genocidal regimes focused on the extraction of fossile fuels are fucked-- whether you’re talking Saudi Arabia, The US, or Russia. For the love of god, please educate yourself about the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. I’m really sorry that you can’t see beyond the binary worldview you’ve hinted to here.

          If I was a pro-Russia bot, why would I post this on an article, I posted, mocking Iranian hackers?

          Do you not realize that Iran is selling drones to Russia to bomb Ukraine?

          Do you not realize that Iran only has said drone technology because they captured a US drone flying over Pakistan and reverse engineered it? Seems like if the ill-informed war of terror never happened, Iran wouldn’t have drones and Russia wouldnt be using them in Ukraine to murder civilians. The world is way more complicated than the black and white worldview you’ve alluded to.

          Fuck Putin, fuck the us department of defense and fuck the police (just for good measure). Is that clear enough for you?

        • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Lol. you should check out that keyboard again. It’s a Qwerty AND Cyrillic keyboard which clearly shows the the Cyrillic letter ж uses the same key as the ;/: button on qwerty.

          In before this person uses the fact that I know how to type a Unicode character as “proof” of my bot-ness.

          I think you’ll find my post history about Linux, volunteering with refugees, and pictures of museums to be consistent with my anti-war stance and offer a hint as to why I know a bunch of historical facts.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      Throw political pacs in there as well. Anyone can hire one of those sweatshops in se Asia to do this stuff.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        Throw political pacs in there as well.

        …which can also be run by any of those countries. Hooray dark money.

    • stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pubEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      I’m not convinced you can. The NSA had the whistle blown on their little fingerprint gloves they would wear, highly doubt in todays age you could know definitively who is doing what

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    This is hilarious. It’s like the Iranians using (and paying for) Windows OneDrive for disinfo efforts, when they could use literally anything else.

    Don’t they actually have competent hackers though? I guess the knowledge intersection between the hacking space and LLM land is less than I thought.

    • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      51·
      3 months ago

      Oh. Yeah. I work as a systems guy on AI related tasks, but I have a strong mathematical background (my degrees are all in math), so I understand the AI stuff well. I just find the management of clusters and reliability engineering to be far more interesting than getting a computer to hallucinate nonsense. Anyway, the systems people are always dunking on the AI people for not knowing the basics of software like using ssh, setting up a firewall, or using version control software. We say things like, “yeah, but remember that the AI guys are the users, so we have to make it idiot proof” and “what’s the difference between malware and a neural network? Not much, but one only runs on Nvidia”

      Previously, I was the platform engineer for a self driving car project owned by a very large vehicle OEM. I would never get in a Tesla using “full self driving” and neither would any of my colleagues then or now. By the way, that self driving project collapsed because a very capable car manufacturer that produces more vehicles in a day than Tesla produces in a year realized it would never work at the consumer level and we had the benefit of a half a million dollars worth of military grade localization equipment, while Tesla is trying to get by on webcams and magic.

      Hell, you can pull up countless, peer reviewed papers in the AI field that don’t have error bars or any statistical hypothesis testing at all, authored by labs at MIT or Facebook. It’s terrifyingly bad.

      tl;dr AI people are generally the least competent people I’ve met in my field-- which is AI.

      • simplymath@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        also, I think most of their competent hackers leave. I work with a three Iranian systems dudes (not in Iran, despite the suggestion of another user here). If your choice is between working for the IRGC (becoming the target of western sanctions and security agencies) or a $250k/year job at Google, the choice is usually pretty easy.