Yearly Archive: 2017
The convoluted history of Digital Rights Management
Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a concept that evolved in the mid to late 1980s as a means of securing artifact copyright in the digital era.
I was exposed to early attempts at DRM earlier than this, as PC software vendors struggled to prevent unlicensed copying of software programs. The attempts, involving the spending of increasingly larger amounts of money on increasingly complex copy-protection schemes, were largely unsuccessful. Nerds and hackers love nothing better than a large business stating confidently “our copy protection scheme is unbreakable”. That’s like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull, or red meat in front of a pride of lions. Once the hackers had done their jobs, the copy protection schemes were mostly circumvented, and the end of the attempts came when PC software prices fell to a point where the RoI for illegal copying became unfavorable.
This article explains the history of what is now known as DRM. It’s a long story.
Anatomy of an attempted coup in a US city
The city of Muscatine has seen churn all year as the city council attempted, via devious and illegal means, to depose the elected mayor. The court system has slapped down the Council, and an election is due in November where the mayor is running for office once more.
Anatomy of a bot conversion on Twitter
The Twitter account RightWingAngel was seemingly inactive for 3 years after 2013. Then, suddenly, on November 8th 2016, RightWingAngel came back online at a warp rate of tweeting. I wonder what happened then?
Also noteworthy: @RightWingAngel has no tweets between October 3, 2013 and November 8, 2016. I seem to recall an election that day. pic.twitter.com/FSnvmxGH3l
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 31, 2017
However, the really interesting information is the before and after for the tweet patterns from the account. here is the time-based analysis for 2013:
Note the patterns are what one would expect from a person living in the Continental USA.
Now here is the tweet timeline pattern from October 2017:
This is completely different, more widely and randomly distributed across the day. This is unlikely to be Tweet activity generated by a real person hammering on a keyboard.
The most likely explanation is that RightWingAngel has been converted to a Twitter account which is largely controlled as a bot. There may be human intervention occurring, but the overall pattern is that of a bot-controlled account.
The other interesting aspect of this account is pointed out here:
For a presumably American Trump supporter, @RightWingAngel sure likes UK spellings. Note "speciality", "centre", "defence", and "humour". pic.twitter.com/DumVVWmdI3
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 31, 2017
It is likely that the human feeding this bot account is not in fact a US resident or US citizen. The work looks like a person whose first or primary language is British English.
One final thing; the Profile picture for this account just screams “stock photo”.
Beware – Whataboutism
Whataboutism as a defense for bad behavior has become endemic on social media in the last few months. My own phrase for this is “but they did it too!”.
As a defense, it has no merit. You wouldn’t accept it from your own misbehaving child.
However, if you are a partisan supporter and Your Side is in trouble, oh yes, it is a great defense.
Right now, the deployment of whataboutism is being orchestrated on social media by a bot network supporting the Trump administration. Twitter user Conspirador Norteño, who is a data scientist, has been analyzing the conflation of the names “Manafort” and “Podesta” in tweetstorms that have appeared since the announcement that Paul Manafort has been indicted. The conflation is a campaign to point the finger of guilt back at the Democratic Party, for whom Tony Podesta operated as a lobbyist.
Volume since midnight for tweets containing both "Manafort" and "Podesta". I'm guessing we haven't seen the end of this one yet. pic.twitter.com/Py52xFfCUj
— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) October 30, 2017
It’s Whataboutism, Twitter-style. Don’t get played.
Quick Stuff – Monday 30th October 2017
1. Bot-based propaganda wars
Donald Trump has been accumulating new Followers at the rate of 100k a week for a number of weeks now. The interesting factoid is how many of them appear to be bots.
Trump: 400K new "followers" over the last few days.
The bots are lined up and ready to go, folks.
Be prepared.#MuellerMonday #TrumpRussia pic.twitter.com/pzneBKGvEQ— Steve Marmel (@Marmel) October 30, 2017
2. DisInfoCon
Somebody at that conference summarized the fundamental issue with the internet quite well:
A challenge for the disinformation age, via Mozilla’s Mark Surman #misinfocon pic.twitter.com/cPg3aROJzx
— Mike Hind (@MikeH_PR) October 25, 2017
3. The NFL defense against collusion over Colin Kaepernick
Unless a “smoking gun” piece of evidence is uncovered that proves collusion between two or more teams to deny Colin Kaepernick a job, the arguments for collusion are going to turn on circumstantial evidence.
A lawyer representing a defendant will almost always tell the defendant to stop talking about the case in public. This is in order to avoid any communication that prejudices the defense.
Unfortunately, the NFL, being a loose collection of 32 business owners, many of whom have large egos and an approach to publicity that often revolves around self-promotion and promotion of their teams, is not currently doing a very good job of stopping owners from talking about issues related to the Kaepernick grievance.
When a team owner like Bob McNair complains about “the inmates running the prison” in reference to player rights under the CBA, he s playing right into the hands of Colin Kaepernick’s lawyers.
Remember that Kaepernick and his lawyers are not just trying to win a grievance hearing. They are trying to win in the court of public opinion (since the grievance evidence may by itself be insufficient). Team owners shooting off comments that are racially insensitive at best, and at worst can be interpreted as downright racist, are slowly building an image of the NFL as an organization full of privileged white owners who are determined to get their way most of the time, and who think that the players should STFU and just do as they are told.
This is not good from a defense standpoint, and it is even worse from a PR standpoint. The NFL’s approach to this whole issue is starting to look like a case study in how not to manage PR.
More research on Brexit trolling and propaganda
While I have been busy with my day job, Mike Hind in the UK and France has been busy.
1. He has begun to investigate a woman in Sussex who claims to have been evicted from her apartment by a landlord who is a Remainer, and she now claims to be living in a tent. She has started a GoFundMe, claiming that she is writing a book and needs help.
Mike, in his usual meticulous way, asked the woman some questions, which she did not care to answer, so she blocked him on Twitter, and then started deleting his comments off her GoFundMe page and reported him to GoFundMe for violation of their Terms of Service.
In the meantime, other Twitter users are busy pointing out the bullshit parts of her story…
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2. Mike has collected a lot of his thoughts and findings about bot networks on Twitter on this timeline. One of the points he makes in the timeline is that many of the disinformation operations are set up under shell companies that superficially look like legitimate businesses, usually in marketing. Then they pump out propaganda as part of their “marketing”. The fake business Logical Campaign, the backers of which have been frantically trying to cover their tracks for a couple of weeks now, falls into that category.
Twitter activity correlations
As a regular on Twitter, I noticed that 2 weeks ago there was sudden surge in recycled allegations about Hillary Clinton being involved in the sale of uranium resources to opponents of the USA. It was also clear to me that many of the accounts pushing the narrative were bots or sockpuppet accounts. Many of the twitter accounts were acting as amplifiers, re-tweeting old allegations. Now you know why the horseshit uranium story was getting pushed so hard https://t.co/WpFuIopvcn — Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) October 28, 2017 “>This article shows the actual metrics for recent Twitter activity, confirming that the Uranium stories have been re-cycled.
We can expect a flurry of bot activity in the next few days if Robert Mueller’s activities lead to the arrest of Trump administration members. Do not be distracted. Expect to see any and all allegations against popular hate figures like the Clintons to be recycled. I would not be surprised if Pizzagate is revived by the botnets.
Pay no attention to what is going on in front of the curtain
Buckle up. We can expect Trump’s efforts to confuse and divide Americans against each other to shift into overdrive. Don’t fall for it.
— Evan McMullin (@Evan_McMullin) October 28, 2017
Now you know why the horseshit uranium story was getting pushed so hard https://t.co/WpFuIopvcn
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) October 28, 2017