The US presidential election is coming up fast—it’s tomorrow! In cycles past, I would stay glued to daily coverage, lapping up polls and analysis, watching each debate, and even hosting election night parties. It was exhilarating…but anxiety-inducing.
So this time, for my own mental health, I’ve tried not to let too much in. It’s not clear the news and the polls and the analysis are useful to me in my day-to-day life, except to bring me anxiety. Even so, it’s hard not to feel anxious at this late hour, with so much more at stake than before.
And this year, we’ve seen something only hinted at four years ago: The disinformation machine has really come out in force. If you’ve spent much time on social media (or dealt with relatives spending too much time on social media), you’ve encountered bots…whether you know it or not. We’re entering a new era where bot networks are becoming more sophisticated, but out ability and our tools for spotting fakes have not really kept up. It’s something we’ve never had to deal with before, and we’re going to need technology at least as sophisticated to uncover disinformation to help us sort fake news and distracting narratives.
In this issue: A new era of disinformation, and how to fight it; what happens when critical open source packages are decommissioned without a good replacement; how hackers are increasingly relying on open source exploits; and a new reading list of open source critique.
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It can be very difficult to verify that a person you meet online is who they claim they are—or even a real person. And fraudsters have gotten increasingly clever about constructing fake online identities. The latest US presidential election cycle has underscored just how easy it is, in fact, to spread disinformation via armies of puppet accounts with fake identities, using bot technology to allow dozens of operators to impersonate hundreds or thousands of fake accounts. And it’s getting worse. Emerging AI technologies, such as generative adversarial networks and GPT-3, are capable of automatically generating content that can fool humans, whether it’s fake avatars or an an entire blog. Such generative tools are perfect for automating disinformation campaigns. As such, we need more than ever to understand how best to discern legitimate news narratives from generated fake news, because we will soon be awash in a sea of disinformation.
Speaking of spreading disinformation and bots. With the US presidential election coming up tomorrow, it’s worth looking at one attempt to sort out disinformation. The Mozilla Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League just announced a tool that looks at connections among political influencers on Twitter. It looks at how individual accounts are connected together by analyzing patterns of interactions (liking, responding, and retweeting). This information is useful: It can uncover suspicious patterns of tweeting by individual accounts. We can also discover the ways that various accounts are interconnected together, because bots that spread disinformation often work in a coordinated fashion, amplifying each others’ messages to help them spread. This blog post is an exciting look at how we might be able to use technology to defeat automated disinformation.
X.org, despite the unusual name, is a critical piece of software that powers Linux’s graphical user interface. It’s the software the manages keyboard and mouse input, and draws applications and their windows to the screen. And because it’s based on 36-year old technology, it’s got architectural and security problems that cannot be overcome. With the last release over two years ago, many have speculated that X.org is dead—and recently Adam Jackson, the only remaining maintainer, confirmed that speculation. This leaves Linux users in a difficult spot: X.org will see no new releases, but its nearest potential replacement, Wayland, is far from complete.
The lesson here for me is that relying on a technology-driven development model, instead of one that focuses on the needs of the people using the software, has left Linux users in the lurch. The Year of Linux on the Desktop is still a long ways away.
One of the longest-standing debates in tech ethics is whether security researchers can or should release the digital lock-picks they develop for testing the security of computer systems. One one hand, open source tools like metasploit are invaluable for testing security systems, and for training the next generation of security specialists. On the other hand, bad actors also have access to freely available open source tools to attack corporate and government networks. Curiously, until recently there have been no in-depth studies into how (and whether) the availability of open source tools facilitate security attacks. It turns out that the use of open source tooling is now extremely widespread, and state actors are increasingly relying on such tools to build sophisticated and difficult-to-trace attacks. And now security researchers are beginning to doubt how beneficial open source security tools really are.
Closing out this week’s list of long reads is…a list of long reads. As Kyle E. Mitchell shares, it’s easy to find articles extolling the many virtues of open source, but quite difficult to find dissenting voices. He recently assembled this compelling collection of articles (including one by me, so I’m a little biased) critiquing mainstream open source culture. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, so be prepared to dig in.
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And that’s it for Issue 9! Thanks for subscribing and reading, and thanks to the many folks who have been sharing content with me! If you enjoyed this issue, share with your friends! If you have an article that should be featured in an upcoming issue of The Ethical Technologist, let me know by either replying to this email (what, a newsletter you can reply to!?), or pinging me on Twitter.
Until next time,
yours,
Don Goodman-Wilson