In 2010, he and his colleague Konstantin Novoselov — who were by then working in England — won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their experiments creating graphene, the world’s thinnest and strongest material.

His list of honors goes on and on, and Mr. Geim has the unique distinction of having been awarded both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel, a satirical honor for strange scientific achievements (in his case, levitating a frog) that seem laughable but prompt thought.

Dutch authorities were happy to claim him as Dutch. The Netherlands knighted him for his contributions to science, an honor that is officially described as “rare, being given for example to Dutch Nobel Prize laureates.” He was made a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“My bronze bust is somewhere in Den Haag to show off,” he said, referring to The Hague.

Mr. Geim moved to Britain in 2001 to work at the University of Manchester, where he remains today. His trouble began after he was offered a British knighthood, though he would not discover it until more than a dozen years later.

 

A non-Briton can receive a British knighthood, but only a British citizen is entitled to use the accompanying title, Sir or Dame. So he obtained citizenship.

“I took it to get the U.K. knighthood and to be called officially ‘Sir Andre,’ prestigious in the U.K.,” he said. “I took it only to receive the British knighthood.”

But by adopting British citizenship, he ran afoul of rules in the Netherlands, which seeks to limit dual nationalities. Voluntarily acquiring another citizenship can set off an automatic loss of Dutch citizenship.

The Dutch citizenship rules are not new, and there is a movement to loosen them. Within the European Union, multiple citizenship is fairly common, but people can also move freely from one country to another, living and working in a new home without needing a new legal status. Britain officially left the union in 2020.

In retrospect, Mr. Geim says, he might have made a different choice. “I would probably decline this knighthood if I knew the consequences for my Dutch nationality, but that was before Brexit and no one informed me about the consequences at that time.”

 

Though he says he got no practical benefit from his Dutch nationality, and did not expect to do so in the future, Mr. Geim has long seen himself as European above all else.

In an essay he wrote when he received the Nobel Prize, the physicist described growing up in Russia and experiencing discrimination in his education because of his family’s German roots, concluding that, after moving to the West in 1990, his life and work improved.

“I consider myself European and do not believe that any further taxonomy is necessary,” he wrote.

His loss is far from being the most severe at a time when migrants face increasing pressure around the world, risking — and sometimes losing — their lives to reach new shores and borders, or having rights like birthright citizenship in the United States challenged.

But his struggle with the Dutch authorities does hint at the complications immigrants face everywhere in contending with conflicting and opaque requirements, politics and unforeseeable consequences. And his difficulties show that no one is exempt from bureaucracy.

Mr. Geim — Sir Andre — says he has “spent thousands” in legal fees trying to convince Dutch authorities to let him keep his citizenship, including by citing an exception to the rule if it is in “the interest of the Dutch state,” to no avail.

Nobel or not, he said, “I was kicked out of the country as a useless thing.”

Source: Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Is Stripped of Dutch Citizenship – The New York Times

There is a Dutch minority opinion buy the anti-islamist Geert Wilders which has become some sort of unassailable mantra that multiple citizenship is some sort of traitorous thing and the Netherlands has been tightening the rules more and more.

Edit: There are two laws going through the system, one since 2016 (!) and the other from 2023, aiming to allow multiple nationalities without having to give up the Dutch one:

Wetsvoorstel : Initiatiefvoorstel van Rijkswet-Paternotte en Mutluer opzegging hoofdstuk I Verdrag beperking van gevallen van meervoudige nationaliteit en militaire verplichtingen

and

34 632 (R2080) Voorstel van Rijkswet van de leden Sjoerdsma en Kuiken tot wijziging van de Rijkswet op het Nederlanderschap teneinde het nationaliteitsrecht te moderniseren, alsmede tot de in verband daarmee houdende goedkeuring van het voornemen tot opzegging van hoofdstuk I van het op 6 mei 1963 te Straatsburg tot stand gekomen Verdrag betreffende beperking van gevallen van meervoudige nationaliteit en betreffende militaire verplichtingen in geval van meervoudige nationaliteit (Trb. 1964, 4) en daarmee van het daarbij behorende Tweede Protocol (Trb. 1994, 265)

Let’s hope they can get through and end the ridiculousness.

NB Andre Geim is also the Winner of an Ig Nobel Prize

A US bankruptcy court has blocked the sale of Infowars to parody news site The Onion, ruling that the auction didn’t yield the best potential bids. At the same time, judge Christopher Lopez rejected claims by Infowars‘ owner, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, that any “collusion” was involved in the case.

The Onion reportedly outbid competitor First American United Companies, affiliated with a Jones business, for the rights to the site. Though its cash offer was lower, The Onion valued it at $7 million because Sandy Hook families would allow some of the proceeds to be distributed to other creditors.

However, the appeals judge said that the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee made a “good-faith error” by requesting final offers instead of allowing back-and-forth bidding between The Onion and First American. “This should have been opened back up, and it should have been opened back up for everybody,” Lopez said. “It’s clear the trustee left the potential for a lot of money on the table.”

Now, the trustee must work to resolve some of the disputes between creditors before making another attempt to sell Infowars. The trustee, Christopher Murray, said that First American only complained about the process after losing the bid.

Alex Jones was found liable in 2022 for nearly $1.5 billion in damages for spreading conspiracy theories about the 2012 shooting that killed 20 children and six adult staffers. One of the assets put up for sale was Jones’ Infowars site, and The Onion said it received the blessing of the families of the victims to acquire the site. It reportedly planned to transform the site into one with “noticeably less hateful disinformation,” and a gun safety nonprofit reportedly planned to advertise on the rebooted site. Last week, X said that The Onion wouldn’t be given Alex Jones’ Infowars X accounts, opening up a new can of worms about who owns social media handles.

Source: Judge rejects The Onion’s bid for Infowars

Over the years we’ve covered a lot of attempts by relatively clueless governments and politicians to enact think-of-the-children internet censorship or surveillance legislation, but there’s a law from France in the works which we think has the potential to be one of the most sinister we’ve seen yet.

It flew under our radar so we’re grateful to [0x1b5b] for bringing it to our attention, and it concerns a proposal to force browser vendors to incorporate French government censorship and spyware software in their products. We’re sure that most of our readers will understand the implications of this, but for anyone not versed in online privacy and censorship  this is a level of intrusion not even attempted by China in its state surveillance programme. Perhaps most surprisingly in a European country whose people have an often-fractious relationship with their government, very few French citizens seem to be aware of it or what it means.

It’s likely that if they push this law through it will cause significant consternation over the rest of the European continent. We’d expect those European countries with less liberty-focused governments to enthusiastically jump on the bandwagon, and we’d also expect the European hacker community to respond with a plethora of ways for their French cousins to evade the snooping eyes of Paris. We have little confidence in the wisdom of the EU parliament in Brussels when it comes to ill-thought-out laws though, so we hope this doesn’t portend a future dark day for all Europeans. We find it very sad to see in any case, because France on the whole isn’t that kind of place.

Source: Liberté, égalité, Fraternité: France Loses Its Marbles On Internet Censorship | Hackaday

Disgraced Theranos co-founder Elizabeth Holmes’ prison sentence has been reduced by two years, according to the Bureau of Prisons records. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison for defrauding investors by claiming her blood-testing company provided quick and reliable results but she was found to have lied about the reliability of those tests.

Holmes surrendered to the Bureau of Prisons in California on May 30 to serve out her sentence at a minimum-security all-female federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. Less than two months after she reported to prison, her sentence was quietly changed, with her new release date scheduled for December 29, 2032, the Bureau’s site says. The Bureau has not provided additional information for why Holmes’ projected release date was shortened, but its site says an inmate’s good behavior, substance abuse program completion, and time credits they receive for activities and programs they’ve completed can result in a lessened sentence.

Only last month, Theranos’ former president and chief operating officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani’s 13-year sentence was likewise reduced by two years, making his new projected release date April 11, 2034.

[…]

Holmes’s reduced sentence appears to be the latest in a string of leniencies granted to her by the court system including being allowed to remain at her California estate while she appealed her prison sentence, rather than waiting behind bars.

Theranos collapsed in 2018 after an explosive investigative piece by the Wall Street Journal revealed that Holmes had made false claims that the blood-testing technology was accurate.

[…]

Source: Elizabeth Holmes’ Prison Sentence Quietly Reduced by Two Years

That this scumbag can be released at all is incredible.

A couple of weeks back, we discussed how Google had delisted the app Downloader from the Play Store after a DMCA notice was issued by a firm representing several Israeli TV networks. The problem with all of this is simple: Downloader doesn’t have anything to do with copyright infringement or piracy. All it does is combine a file manager and basic web browser. The DMCA notice centered on the latter, complaining that users could get to piracy sites from the browser. You know, just like you can from any browser.

Well, take heart, dear friends, because Google reinstated Downloader on the Play Store 20 days after it was removed.

Google has reversed the suspension of an Android TV app that was hit with a copyright complaint simply because it is able to load a pirate website that can also be loaded in any standard web browser. The Downloader app, which combines a web browser with a file manager, is back in the Google Play Store after nearly a three-week absence.

In addition to the rejected appeal, Saba filed a DMCA counter-notification with Google. That “started a 10-business-day countdown for the [TV companies’] law firm to file legal actions against me,” Saba wrote today. “Due to the app being removed on a Friday and the Memorial Day holiday, 10 business days had elapsed with no word from the law firm on June 6th and I contacted Google to have the app reinstated.”

All of which is why Google, further down the article, is quoted as saying they followed the standard playbook to DMCA takedown notices. The counter-notification kicked off that process, giving the firm that issued the original notice time to decide whether to file a lawsuit or not, which it presumably did not. The quote has all the hallmarks of Google resting on that process to wipe its hands clean of the whole situation.

But that’s stupid. It also serves as an example proving Saba’s point: the DMCA takedown process is broken. That a bunch of foreign TV networks can get a perfectly legit app removed from the app store for weeks just by pushing paperwork around is absurd.

As is Google’s continued inability to get things right with regard to this particular app.

In yet another example of the Google Play Store’s absurdity, Google had determined that my app collected email addresses without declaring so. Since there is no way for my app itself to collect email addresses, and without any additional information or help from Google, I can only assume that Google is referring to the email mailing list signup form on this website, which loads by default in the web browser of the Downloader app.

Once again, that isn’t the app doing a thing; it’s the web browser doing it if someone signs up to be on an email list.

So, the app is back, a lawsuit has not yet been filed, and everyone will probably forget about this entire thing, meaning the broken nature of the DMCA process will remain broken. Bang up job all around.

Source: Google Finally Restores ‘Downloader’ App To Store

A Finnish newspaper is circumventing Russian media restrictions by hiding news reports about the war in Ukraine in an online game popular among Russian gamers.

“While Helsingin Sanomat and other foreign independent media are blocked in Russia, online games have not been banned so far,” said Antero Mukka, the editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat.

The newspaper was bypassing Russia’s censorship through the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike, where gamers battle against each other as terrorists and counter-terrorists in timed matches.

While the majority of matches are played on about a dozen official levels or maps released by the publisher Valve, players can also create custom maps that anyone can download and use.

The newspaper’s initiative was unveiled on World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday.

“To underline press freedom, [in the game] we have now built a Slavic city, called Voyna, meaning war in Russian,” Mukka said.

In the basement of one of the apartment buildings that make up the Soviet-inspired cityscape, Helsingin Sanomat hid a room where players can find Russian-language reporting by the newspaper’s war correspondents in Ukraine.

“In the room, you will find our documentation of what the reality of the war in Ukraine is,” Mukka said.

The walls of the digital room, lit up by red lights, are plastered with news articles and pictures reporting on events such as the massacres in the Ukrainian towns of Bucha and Irpin.

On one of the walls, players can find a map of Ukraine that details reported attacks on the civilian population, while a Russian-language recording reading Helsingin Sanomat articles aloud plays in the background.

This was “information that is not available from Russian state propaganda sources”, Mukka said.

Since its release on Monday, the map has been downloaded more than 2,000 times, although the paper cannot currently track downloads geographically.

“This definitely underlines the fact that every attempt to obstruct the flow of information and blind the eyes of the public is doomed to fail in today’s world,” Mukka said.

He said an estimated 4 million Russians played the game. “These people may often be in the mobilisation or drafting age.”

“I think Russians also have the right to know independent and fact-based information, so that they can also make their own life decisions,” he added.

Source: Finnish newspaper hides Ukraine news reports for Russians in online game | Censorship | The Guardian

Chronic pain patients were implanted with “dummy” pieces of plastic and told it would ease their pain, according to an indictment charging the  former CEO of the firm that made the fake devices with fraud.

Laura Perryman, the former CEO of Stimwave LLC, was arrested in Florida on Thursday. According to an FBI press release, Perryman was indicted “in connection with a scheme to create and sell a non-functioning dummy medical device for implantation into patients suffering from chronic pain, resulting in millions of dollars in losses to federal healthcare programs.” According to the indictment, patients underwent unnecessary implanting procedures as a result of the fraud.

Perryman was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and health care fraud, and one count of healthcare fraud. Stimwave received FDA approval in 2014, according to Engadget, and was positioned as an alternative to opioids for pain relief.

[…]

The Stimwave “Pink Stylet” system consisted of an implantable electrode array for stimulating the target nerve, a battery worn externally that powered it, and a separate, 9-inch long implantable receiver. When doctors told Stimwave that the long receiver was difficult to place in some patients, Perryman allegedly created the “White Stylet,” a receiver that doctors could cut to be smaller and easier to implant—but was actually just a piece of plastic that did nothing.

“To perpetuate the lie that the White Stylet was functional, Perryman oversaw training that suggested to doctors that the White Stylet was a ‘receiver,’ when, in fact, it was made entirely of plastic, contained no copper, and therefore had no conductivity,” the FBI stated. “In addition, Perryman directed other Stimwave employees to vouch for the efficacy of the White Stylet, when she knew that the White Stylet was actually non-functional.”

Stimwave charged doctors and medical providers approximately $16,000 for the device, which medical insurance providers, including Medicare, would reimburse the doctors’ offices for.

[…]

“As a result of her illegal actions, not only did patients undergo unnecessary implanting procedures, but Medicare was defrauded of millions of dollars,” FBI Assistant Director Michael J. Driscoll said. 

[…]

Source: People Were Unwittingly Implanted With Fake Devices in Medical Scam, FBI Alleges

“A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source),” reports the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Beast reports: Last month, a screenshot of a student reading Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf was reported in the system, according to the Stanford Daily. Faculty members leading the charge to shut the system down say they didn’t know it even existed until they read the student newspaper, one comparing the system to “McCarthyism.”

Launched in 2021, students are encouraged to report incidents in which they felt harmed, which triggers a voluntary inquiry of both the student who filed the report and the alleged perpetrator. Seventy-seven faculty members have signed a petition calling on the school to investigate in hopes they toss the system out. This comes as a larger movement by Speech First, a group who claim colleges are rampant with censorship, has filed suit against several universities for their bias reporting systems.

Source: Stanford Faculty Say Anonymous Student Bias Reports Threaten Free Speech – Slashdot

Amazing that people at a place like Stanford didn’t get that this was going to be abused and used to scare the shit out of people – a bit like how these systems were scary in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China, North Korea, etc etc.

• People against vaccine and mask mandates have argued that they impose on a person’s bodily autonomy.
• That rallying cry of “my body, my choice” was rooted in the abortion-rights battles of Roe v. Wade.
• Yet those people against vaccine and mask mandates are now encouraging the potential demise of abortion rights.

The leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would end Roe v. Wade has been met with approval by many conservatives who championed the very same notion of bodily autonomy and personal choice throughout the pandemic.

Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, for example, urged the justices to move ahead with the decision on Tuesday.

Yet, while railing against vaccine mandates last June, he said that they ultimately mean that “personal autonomy means nothing. It is no longer your body, it is no longer your choice.”

[…]

Source: Vaccine skeptics and anti-maskers who invoked ‘my body, my choice’ in the pandemic are now lining up to support the end of Roe v. Wade

For the past decade, unidentified miscreants have been planting incriminating evidence on the devices of human-rights advocates, lawyers, and academics in India seemingly to get them arrested.

That’s according to SentinelOne, which has named the crew ModifiedElephant and described the group’s techniques and targets since 2012 in a report published on Wednesday.

“The objective of ModifiedElephant is long-term surveillance that at times concludes with the delivery of ‘evidence’ – files that incriminate the target in specific crimes – prior to conveniently coordinated arrests,” said Tom Hegel, threat researcher at SentinelOne, in a blog post.

Hegel said the group has operated for years without attracting the attention of the cybersecurity community because of its limited scope of operations, its regionally-specific targeting, and its relatively unsophisticated tools.

ModifiedElephant prefers phishing with malicious Microsoft Office attachments to attack targets, and infect them with Windows malware.

In 2013, its messages relied on executable file attachments with deceptive double extensions in the file name (eg filename.pdf.exe). After 2015, the group used .doc, .pps, .docx, .rar, and password protected .rar files. In 2019, its attack vector involved links to hosted malicious files, and the group is also said to have employed large .rar archives to avoid detection.

The gang was also observed throwing Android malware at victims.

“There’s something to be said about how mundane the mechanisms of this operation are,” said Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, threat researcher at SentinelOne and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, via Twitter. “The malware is either custom garbage or commodity garbage. There’s nothing technically impressive about this threat actor, instead we marvel at their audacity.”

[…]

SentinelOne does not explicitly state that ModifiedElephant acts on behalf of the Indian government but notes how the group’s activities are consistent with the government’s interests.

“We observe that ModifiedElephant activity aligns sharply with Indian state interests and that there is an observable correlation between ModifiedElephant attacks and the arrests of individuals in controversial, politically-charged cases,” wrote Hegel.

According to the report, ModifiedElephant’s web infrastructure overlaps with Operation Hangover, a surveillance effort dating back to 2013 against targets of interest to Indian national security. The security firm also said that Wilson had been targeted by a second threat group, known as SideWinder [PDF], which has attacked government, military, and private sector organizations across Asia.

Hegel observes that SentinelOne last year reported on a threat actor operating in and around Turkey, dubbed EGoManiac, that planted incriminating evidence on the devices of journalists to support arrests made by the Turkish National Police.

Source: ModifiedElephant gang plants incriminating evidence on PCs • The Register

Blizzard’s work on cleaning up World of Warcraft in the wake of historical allegations of harassment at the company continues, with the latest round targeting a series of suggestive jokes and flirts that are being removed as part of update 9.1.5.

As detailed by Wowhead, there are a lot of changes, some of them leaving characters with as few as two lines of dialogue to cycle through. And while some are clearly the result of combing back through the archives and removing content that, in the wake of Blizzard’s current crisis, is clearly inappropriate, other cuts are simply down to the fact that it’s now 2021 and some of this stuff is either horribly dated or simply bad.

Some examples of jokes that are being removed are:

Draenei Male: If you could get your hands on my family jewels I would be deeply appreciative.

Goblin Female: I’m a modern goblin woman. Independent? I still let men do nice things to me. But I stopped giving them any credit.

Orc Female: What’s estrogen? Can you eat it?

Tauren Male: Homogenized? No way, I like the ladies.

Meanwhile here are some of the flirts being cut:

Blood Elf Demon Hunter Male: Are you sure you’re not part-demon? I find myself wanting to stalk you.

Blood Elf Female: Normally, I only ride on epic mounts… But, let’s talk.

Dwarf Male: You look pretty, I like your hair, here’s a drink… Are you ready now?

Goblin Male: I got what you need. *sound of zipper*

Highmountain Tauren Female: Are you staring at my rack?

Nightborn Male: Mmmm, I wanna tap that ley line.

Orc Male: Um… You look like a lady.

Troll Female: When enraged, and in heat, a female troll can mate over 80 times in one night. Be you prepared?

Source: World Of Warcraft Update Removes Suggestive Flirts & Jokes

Fine, they are not super clever jokes – but humor is allowed to be bad.

After Take-Two Interactive sent a legal letter to Github referencing a copyright infringement lawsuit against the people behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects, Github has now removed the repositories for a second time. Take-Two has also demanded the removal of many project forks and wants Github to take action under its repeat infringer policy. TorrentFreak reports: Just before the weekend, a new entry in Github’s DMCA repository revealed the existence of a letter (PDF) sent to Github from Take-Two’s legal team. Dated September 9, 2021 (a week after the copyright lawsuit was filed) it informs Github that legal action is underway and it has come to the company’s attention that the contentious content (and numerous ‘fork’ repositories) continue to be made available on Github’s website. “We request that Github take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the materials [in the attached exhibit], together with any other instances of the same materials available within the same primary ‘GTAmodding/re3’ fork network (e.g. in ‘private’ or newly-created repositories),” it reads.

In common with the first DMCA notice, Github has responded by taking the project’s repositories down. Given that the defendants in the case already stand accused of previously sending ‘bad faith’ counter-notices, it seems unlikely that they will follow up with another set of similar responses that will soon be under the scrutiny of the court. Take-Two also follows up with a line that is becoming more and more popular in copyright infringement matters, one that references so-called ‘repeat infringers.’ “Furthermore, it is requested that Github take appropriate measures to prevent further infringement by the parties responsible, including pursuant to any ‘repeat infringer’ policies maintained by Github.”

This means that if any of the contentious content is reposted to Github, Take-Two would like the code repository to implement its own ‘repeat infringer’ process. It states that “in appropriate circumstances and in its sole discretion, [Github will] disable and terminate the accounts of users who may infringe upon the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of GitHub or others.” The letter also provides a laundry list of repository forks that, on the basis they are also infringing, should be removed. While Github appears to have complied in many cases, there are two notable exceptions. After being targeted by earlier DMCA takedowns, Github users ‘td512‘ and ‘erorcun‘ filed DMCA counter-notices to have their repositories restored. The former previously informed TorrentFreak that he believed Take-Two’s infringement claims to be incorrect. At the time of writing, both repos are still online.

Source: GitHub Removes GTA Fan Projects re3 and reVC Following New Take-Two DMCA Notice – Slashdot

Well done alienating your biggest fans, TakeTwo

A stalkerware company that’s designed to let customers spy on their spouses’s, children’s, or employees’ devices is exposing victims’ data, allowing anyone on the internet to see screenshots of phones simply by visiting a specific URL.

The news highlights the continuing lax security practices that many stalkerware companies use; not only do these companies sometimes market their tools specifically for illegal surveillance, but the targets are re-victimized by these breaches.

[…]

The stalkerware company, called pcTattleTale, offers the malware for Windows computers and Android phones.

[…]

Security researcher Jo Coscia showed Motherboard that pcTattleTale uploads victim data to an AWS server that requires no authentication to view specific images. Coscia said they found this by using a trial version of the stalkerware. Motherboard also downloaded a copy of the trial version of pcTattleTale and verified Coscia’s findings.

The URL for images that pcTattleTale captures is constructed with the device ID—a code given by pcTattleTale to the infected device that appears to be sequentially generated—the date, and a timestamp. Theoretically, an attacker may be able to churn through different URL combinations to discover images uploaded by other infected devices

[…]

Coscia said they used the free trial version of pcTattleTale when discovering the issue. In promotional emails, pcTattleTale said it would delete users’ data after the free trial expired. But Coscia found the screenshots were still accessible after their free trial period ended.

[…]

In one video online, Fleming said he built the code for pcTattleTale in 2003 over the better part of a year before launching it. Then he rewrote the code base when he bought out his business partner in 2012, he added. At one point Fleming complains about his server crashing because more and more people are using the service. Later on he says that pcTattleTale receives about 40,000 unique visitors a month.

“The market’s good, you know,” he said.

“To catch a cheating spouse using an android phone you will need to know their pass-code and have access to the phone for about 5 minutes. The best time to do this is when they are sleeping,” one guide on the company’s website reads. Another separate post from the company tells users how to trick their spouse into handing over their iCloud password.

[…]

 

Source: A Stalkerware Firm Is Leaking Real-Time Screenshots of People’s Phones Online

Facebook said Tuesday that it has removed hundreds of accounts linked to a mysterious advertising agency operating out of Russia that sought to pay social media influencers to smear Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

A network of 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts was traced back to Fazze, an advertising and marketing firm working in Russia on behalf of an unknown client.

The network used fake accounts to spread misleading claims that disparaged the safety of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. One claimed AstraZeneca’s shot would turn a person into a chimpanzee. The fake accounts targeted audiences in India, Latin America and, to a lesser extent, the U.S., using several social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram.

[…]

The Fazze network also contacted social media influencers in several countries with offers to pay them for reposting the misleading content. That ploy backfired when influencers in Germany and France exposed the network’s offer.

[…]

Fazze’s effort did not get much traction online, with some posts failing to get even a single response. But, while the campaign may have fizzled, it’s noteworthy because of its effort to enlist social media influencers, according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy.

“Although it was sloppy and didn’t have very good reach, it was an elaborate setup,” Gleicher said on a conference call announcing Tuesday’s actions.

[…]

Facebook investigators say some influencers did post the material, but later deleted it when stories about Fazze’s work began to emerge.

French YouTuber Léo Grasset was among those contacted by Fazze. He told The Associated Press in May that he was asked to post a 45- to 60-second video on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube criticizing the mortality rate of the Pfizer vaccine.

When Grasset asked Fazze to identify their client, the firm declined. Grasset refused the offer and went public with his concerns.

The offer from Fazze urged influencers not to mention that they were being paid, and also suggested they criticize the media’s reporting on vaccines.

[…]

Source: Facebook says Russia-linked ad agency tried to smear Covid vaccines

Debian Project Secretary Kurt Roeckx has announced the results of a closely-watched vote on what statement would be made about Richard Stallman’s readmission to the Free Software Foundation’s board.
Seven options were considered, with the Debian project’s 420 voting developers also asked to rank their preferred outcomes:

• Option 1: “Call for the FSF board removal, as in rms-open-letter.github.io”

• Option 2: “Call for Stallman’s resignation from all FSF bodies”

• Option 3: “Discourage collaboration with the FSF while Stallman is in a leading position”

• Option 4: “Call on the FSF to further its governance processes”

• Option 5: “Support Stallman’s reinstatement, as in rms-support-letter.github.io”

• Option 6: “Denounce the witch-hunt against RMS and the FSF”

• Option 7: “Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue”

While all seven options achieved a quorum of votes, two failed to achieve a majority — options 5 and 6. (“Support Stallman’s reinstatement” and “Denounce the witch-hunt…”) The option receiving the most votes was #7 (not issuing a public statement) — but it wasn’t that simple. The vote’s final outcome was determined by comparing every possible pair of options to determine which option would still be preferred by a majority of voters in each possible comparision.

In this case, that winner was still the option which had also received the most votes:

Debian will not issue a public statement on this issue.
The Debian Project will not issue a public statement on whether Richard Stallman should be removed from leadership positions or not.

Any individual (including Debian members) wishing to (co-)sign any of the open letters on this subject is invited to do this in a personal capacity.

The results are captured in an elaborate graph. Numbers inside the ovals show the final ratio of yes to no votes (so a number higher than 1.00 indicates a majority, with much higher numbers indicating much larger majorities). Numbers outside the ovals (along the lines) indicate the number of voters who’d preferred the winning choice over the losing choice (toward which the arrow is pointing).

The winning option is highlighted in blue.

Source: Debian Votes to Issue No Statement on Stallman’s Return to the FSF Board – Slashdot

To be honest this is probably the best thing they could do from a community standpoint.

After a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Anti-Vax Watch found that a huge percentage of misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines can be traced back to just a dozen people, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter told Congress they weren’t sure they would ban them.

The CCDH/Anti-Vax Watch report found that some 73 percent of misinformation on Facebook, and 17 percent on Twitter, is linked to a group of 12 accounts including prominent anti-vaxxers Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ty & Charlene Bollinger, Sherri Tenpenny, and Rizza Islam. The report also identified what it concluded were clear violations of platform policies on the spread of disinformation about the novel coronavirus pandemic and vaccines in general. The report was prominently cited in a letter by 12 state attorneys general to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding they do more to fight coronavirus-related misinformation; according to the Washington Post, this mirrors internal Facebook research showing relatively tiny groups of users are primarily responsible for flooding the site with anti-vaccine content.

“Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen,” the report states. “Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’s terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform.”

“Research conducted by CCDH last year has shown that platforms fail to act on 95 percent of the Covid and vaccine misinformation reported to them, and we have uncovered evidence that Instagram’s algorithm actively recommends similar misinformation,” they added. “Tracking of 425 anti-vaccine accounts by CCDH shows that their total following across platforms now stands at 59.2 million as a result of these failures.”

[…]

Source: Big Tech CEOs Waffle on Banning the 12 Major Anti-Vaxxers

What do you do if Google disables your cloud life? Andrew Spinks, co-author of the Terraria game and president of Re-Logic Games, does not know either, but has declared Google “a liability” and cancelled the port of Terraria to its Stadia platform.Terraria, co-designed by Spinks, was first released for Windows in 2011 and has sold over 30 million copies across PC, consoles, and mobile devices, states a post on the official forums last year.The problems started, according to the official Twitter account, when Re-Logic Games received an email concerning its YouTube channel “saying there was a TOS [Terms of Service] violation but that it was likely accidental and as such, the account would receive no strikes.”Three days later, the entire Google account (YT, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over 15 years on Google Play Store) was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such the impact to us is quite substantial,” said Re-Logic.The YouTube channel itself was not disabled, only the access to it.The complaint was spotted on Twitter by YouTube support, which provided a link to the standard Google Account Recovery process. “We have attempted this process twice and received an automated response declining our request,” said Re-Logic.That was late last month. Now it seems the problem is still not fixed. “My account has now been disabled for over 3 weeks. I still have no idea why, and after using every resource I have to get this resolved you have done nothing but given me the runaround,” said Spinks. “My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on Google Play. I had just bought LOTR 4K and can’t finish it. My Google Drive data is completely gone. I can’t access my YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my gmail address of over 15 years.”I absolutely have not done anything to violate your terms of service, so I can take this no other way than you deciding to burn this bridge. Consider it burned. Terraria for Google Stadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward. I will not be involved with a corporation that values their customers and partners so little. Doing business with you is a liability.”The incident would be unremarkable except that Spinks is not the first to complain of shoddy treatment in the one-sided relationship users have with tech giants and Google in particular. Users complain that it is challenging getting past automated responses, or equally uninformative responses from support, and that discovering and correcting the real reason for bans and blocks is challenging.

Source: Terraria dev cancels Stadia port after Google disabled his email account for three weeks • The Register

In two reports, the researchers contended that an app on Google’s Android operating system that powers drones made by China-based Da Jiang Innovations, or DJI, collects large amounts of personal information that could be exploited by the Beijing government. Hundreds of thousands of customers across the world use the app to pilot their rotor-powered, camera-mounted aircraft.

The world’s largest maker of commercial drones, DJI has found itself increasingly in the cross hairs of the United States government, as have other successful Chinese companies. The Pentagon has banned the use of its drones, and in January the Interior Department decided to continue grounding its fleet of the company’s drones over security fears. DJI said the decision was about politics, not software vulnerabilities.

[…]

The security research firms that documented it, Synacktiv, based in France, and GRIMM, located outside Washington, found that the app not only collected information from phones but that DJI can also update it without Google reviewing the changes before they are passed on to consumers. That could violate Google’s Android developer terms of service.

The changes are also difficult for users to review, the researchers said, and even when the app appears to be closed, it awaits instructions from afar, they found.

“The phone has access to everything the drone is doing, but the information we are talking about is phone information,” said Tiphaine Romand-Latapie, a Synacktiv engineer. “We don’t see why DJI would need that data.”

[…]

Synacktiv did not identify any malicious uploads but simply raised the prospect that the drone app could be used that way.

A New York Times analysis of the software confirmed the functionality. An attempt to update the app directly from DJI’s servers delivered a message indicating that the phone The Times used “did not meet the qualifications for an update package.”

Source: Popular Chinese-Made Drone Is Found to Have Security Weakness – The New York Times

Note: nowhere do they say what data is supposedly being stolen, in fact they admit there has been no data stolen as far as they have seen. This is stirring the pot: you want your stuff to get updates in life. That’s called security.

The Washington Post’s Tony Romm reported on Monday night that Twitter has decided it will allow certain right-wing accounts to spread disinformation about the Iowa Democratic Caucuses, including tweets that suggest the results are being “rigged.”

Trump campaign manager Brad Pascal tweeted on Monday, “Quality control = rigged?,” citing a second Trump campaign official who had used the hashtag #RiggedElection.

There is no evidence of vote tampering in Iowa and the Trump campaign’s claims are entirely baseless. (Technical issues with an app used by election officials have caused delays in tallying the results.)

Twitter’s decision would seem to provide political fraudsters with a clear message: deceiving voters into believing U.S. election results have been falsified is an acceptable use of Twitter’s platform.

Twitter did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Earlier in the day, Charlie Kirk, the leader of a college-focused conservative group called Turning Point USA, tweeted that Iowa election officials were involved in “voter fraud” citing a debunked report by the right-wing activist group Judicial Watch.

The Judicial Watch report falsely claimed that the number of registered voters in Iowa exceeded the number of voting-age residents in each county. Judicial Watch’s fake figures were quickly shot down by Iowa’s Republican secretary of state, Paul D. Pate.

“It’s unfortunate this organization continues to put out inaccurate data regarding voter registration, and it’s especially disconcerting they chose the day of the Iowa Caucus to do this,” Pate said in a statement.

Pate continued: “My office has told this organization, and others who have made similar claims, that their data regarding Iowa is deeply flawed and their false claims erode voter confidence in elections. They should stop this misinformation campaign immediately and quit trying to disenfranchise Iowa voters.”

The Iowa secretary of state’s office pointed to “actual data” from the U.S. Census Bureau to say Judicial Watch’s claims about Iowa’s population are “greatly underestimated.”

Nevertheless, the tweet by Kirk invoking the debunked claim had over 42,500 retweets at press time.

Twitter spokesman Brandon Borrman told the Washington Post that the company would take no action against users working to sow mistrust in the official election results, which were not expected until Tuesday.

“The tweet is not in violation of our election integrity policy as it does not suppress voter turnout or mislead people about when, where, or how to vote,” Borrman told the Post, regarding tweets by prominent conservatives claiming the Democratic caucuses were “rigged.”

Twitter’s claim that such tweets do not “suppress voter turnout” is unlikely to go unchallenged by federal lawmakers who view this particular form of deception as an attempt to discourage participation in a “rigged” election.

The underlying message being propagated by the Trump campaign, Judicial Watch, and Turning Point USA seems an obvious one: Your vote doesn’t count, so why bother?

Source: Twitter Helps Spread Disinformation During Iowa Caucuses

Verizon, which bought Yahoo In 2017, has suspended email addresses of archivists who are trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be deleted permanently in a few weeks.

As Verizon announced in October, the company intends to wipe all content from Yahoo Groups. As of December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed.

The mass deletion includes files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digests, and message histories that was uploaded to Yahoo servers since pre-Google 1990s.

Verizon planned to allow users to download their own data from the site’s privacy dashboard, but apparently it has a problem with the work of The Archive Team who wants to save content to upload it to the non-profit Internet Archive, which runs the popular Wayback Machine site.

“Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data,” reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team.

“Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups – which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days).”

News of the apparently aggressive move from Verizon was first reported on boingboing.net.

The Yahoo Groups Archive Team argues that it is facing a near total “80% loss of data” because Verizon is blocking the team members’ email accounts.

The Yahoo Groups site isn’t widely used today but it was in the past. The size of the archive that the group is trying to save is substantial and the group had saved about 1.8 billion messages as of late 2018.

According to the Archive Team: “As of 2019-10-16 the directory lists 5,619,351 groups. 2,752,112 of them have been discovered. 1,483,853 (54%) have public message archives with an estimated number of 2.1 billion messages (1,389 messages per group on average so far). 1.8 billion messages (86%) have been archived as of 2018-10-28.”

Verizon has issued a statement to the group supporting the Archive Team, telling concerned archivists that “the resources needed to maintain historical content from Yahoo Groups pages is cost-prohibitive, as they’re largely unused”.

The telecoms giant also said the people booted from the service had violated its terms of service and suggested the number of users affected was small.

“Regarding the 128 people who joined Yahoo Groups with the goal to archive them – are those people from Archiveteam.org? If so, their actions violated our Terms of Service. Because of this violation, we are unable reauthorize them,” Verizon said.

Source: Verizon kills email accounts of archivists trying to save Yahoo Groups history | ZDNet

Fears of Russian interference ahead of a heated U.K. election were all but confirmed this week with a Reddit post.

In a post Friday, Reddit announced that its internal investigation found evidence that an account purportedly linked to Russian disinformation campaign was behind last month’s leak of contentious US-UK trade documents on the platform.

“We were recently made aware of a post on Reddit that included leaked documents from the UK. We investigated this account and the accounts connected to it, and today we believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia,” Reddit wrote.

The online message board went on to say it’s banned 61 accounts and suspended one subreddit, r/ukwhistleblower, behind the campaign for violating the platform’s policies against vote manipulation and misuse. Reddit also purportedly found evidence linking this operation to another group behind similar foreign interference on Facebook earlier this year. The Atlantic Council’s dubbed them “Secondary Infektion” in reference to a misinformation campaign from the Soviet era.

“Suspect accounts on Reddit were recently reported to us, along with indicators from law enforcement, and we were able to confirm that they did indeed show a pattern of coordination,” Reddit said. “We were then able to use these accounts to identify additional suspect accounts that were part of the campaign on Reddit. This group provides us with important attribution for the recent posting of the leaked UK documents, as well as insights into how adversaries are adapting their tactics.”

The account behind the original Reddit leak as well as a number of others that reposted the documents and manipulated its upvotes and karma (ways to earn a post a more prominent placement in a subreddit) all used identical tactics as Secondary Infektion, according to Reddit, “causing us to believe that this was indeed tied to the original group.”

The papers in question detail trade talks between America and the UK and have launched a fiery debate among British officials leading up to the country’s general election. Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn claims these documents prove officials plan to put the country’s National Healthcare Service is at risk of being privatized in the event of a post-Brexit trade agreement with America. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has denied this, saying NHS wouldn’t be on the table in any future trade negotiations.

This isn’t the first time Reddit’s struggled with sussing out foreign propaganda campaigns on its platform. Russian influence operations have become a particularly insidious and reoccurring problem, leading Reddit to ban 944 “suspicious” accounts in April 2018 after purportedly tracing them back to Russia’s Internet Research Industry (IRA), the infamous troll factory behind pro-Trump efforts during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Later that September, Reddit users began to speculate that the notoriously awful (and now, thankfully, quarantined) subreddit r/The_Donald had become infiltrated by Russian trolls as well. Suspicions began circulating among its three-quarters of a million subscribers after a viral post documented clear signs of a pattern: The same few articles from websites affiliated with the IRA were being upvoted and shared in the forum thousands of times, and it’d been going on for years, according to a Buzzfeed News report. Reddit later issued a platform-wide ban for three of the trolls’ most commonly linked websites, USA Really, GEOTUS.band and GEOTUS.army.

A separate investigation Reddit launched around that same time uncovered 143 accounts linked to another influence operation reportedly targeting polarized subreddits on both sides of the aisle with pro-Iranian political narratives. Reddit began its inquiry after cybersecurity group FireEye released a report detailing just how far the campaign’s influence spanned, as bad actors were purportedly “leveraging a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across multiple social media platforms.” Based on these findings, Facebook, Twitter, and Google also subsequently removed a bevy of accounts affiliated with Iran and Russia on their respective platforms.

Source: Reddit Uncovers Russian Interference Campaign Ahead of Pivotal UK Election