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Foreign Malign Election Meddling Persists but Struggles to Gain Traction

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD): “In September 2024, FDD published a report documenting Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence operations targeting the 2024 U.S. elections. This follow-up report details the ongoing efforts of U.S. adversaries who seek to undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process in the weeks leading up to the November election.… Continue Reading

Generative AI Will Increase Misinformation About Disinformation

LawFare – Speculation about disinformation by users and the media can generate harmful political effects, amplifying existing biases. “…AI is about to significantly increase uncertainty in disinformation research, in an already highly uncertain field. Disinformation operations will be harder to identify, harder to map out, and harder to attribute. People have a tendency to interpret… Continue Reading

Free Phone Validation

“About Phone Validator: We are the service used by brands, apps and websites to learn more about phone numbers in their contact lists. They use it to find out if any U.S. or Canadian phone number line type is cell, landline, VOIP, toll-free or fake/invalid. Our approach is authoritative: We use the most accurate real-time… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 26, 2024

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 26, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and… Continue Reading

Questionable practices in machine learning

Academic paper: “Evaluating modern ML models is hard. The strong incentive for researchers and companies to report a state-of-the-art result on some metric often leads to questionable research practices (QRPs): bad practices which fall short of outright research fraud. We describe 43 such practices which can undermine reported results, giving examples where possible. Our list… Continue Reading

Post World War II Food

National Park Service: This article is part of the series, The American Home Front and World War II. It explores life on the home front by looking at the things people invented, created, and used and the ways that everyday life changed. They include the effects of war mobilization and of conflict and incarceration on the… Continue Reading

The Boomer Stuff Avalanche

Business Insider ungated – “Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated…In some ways, this is a timeless problem — every generation accumulates things, and younger generations rebel against older generations’ tastes. But the sheer size of the current problem is unprecedented given that baby boomers are an extra-materialistic breed.… Continue Reading