Silicon Valley’s competing philosophies on tech ethics with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz

“If Silicon Valley is going to keep telling itself the story that the only uses of their technology will be the most optimistic, the most hopeful, the most salubrious, the most prosocial,” New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz told me in Part 1 of this recent conversation for Extra Crunch, “you can try to rebut that logically, or you can just disprove it by showing a very glaring counterexample. If somebody is going around and saying, ‘all swans are white,’ you can argue against that logically, or you can just show them a black swan.”

Image via Penguin Random House

Marantz, a brilliant and eclectic writer, has in recent years trained his attention on the tech world and its contribution to social unrest in the United States and beyond. He has just published a new book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation“, which, along with recent New Yorker essays expanding on the book’s themes, is sure to provoke debate.

How ‘the Internet broke America’ with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz

In part 2 of our conversation below, we discuss the Alt-Right and White Nationalists in tech and politics; Silicon Valley spirituality today; competing philosophies of tech ethics; and more.

Greg Epstein: If you look at the alt-right later that year and in 2017, I myself spent a lot of time poring over these figures like Richard Spencer and Gavin McInnes, and their videos, and their writings, and whatever thinking, ‘These guys are really taking over our society right now.

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Daily Crunch: China pressures Apple

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. China attacks Apple for allowing Hong Kong crowdsourced police activity app

Apple’s decision to greenlight an app called HKmaps, which is being used by pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong to crowdsource information about street closures and police presence, is attracting the ire of the Chinese government.

Specifically, an article in Chinese state mouthpiece China Daily attacks the iPhone maker for reversing an earlier decision not to allow the app to be listed on the iOS App Store.

2. What the hell is up with this Essential device?

Essential CEO Andy Rubin tweeted photos of what he called a “radically different formfactor” — basically, it’s a long, skinny phone.

3. Uber’s newest feature alerts drivers that pets will be joining the ride

With Uber Pet, riders will pay a “small surcharge” for the privilege of taking their pets with them. And drivers will have the option of avoiding trips with non-service animals by opting out of Uber Pet trips.

4. Twitter admits it used two-factor phone numbers and emails for serving targeted ads

Twitter finds itself in the same boat as Facebook, which last year was caught using phone numbers and email addresses — given to Facebook to secure users’ accounts — for targeted advertising.

5. Google’s Grasshopper coding class for beginners comes to the desktop

A larger screen and access to a keyboard makes learning to code on the desktop significantly easier than on mobile. For example, in the desktop app Google is able to put columns for the instructions, the code editor and the results next to each other.

6. Amazon, Walmart confront India’s slowing economy as holiday season growth stalls

Even India’s biggest festive season, featuring blinding marketing blitzkrieg and heavy discounts from Amazon India and Walmart’s Flipkart, has failed to escape the pains of a slowing economy.

7. With $15M round and 100K tablets sold, reMarkable CEO wants to make tech ‘more human’

The reMarkable tablet is a strange device in this era of ultra-smart gadgets, with a black and white screen meant for reading, writing and sketching — and nothing more. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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ROBEL: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots

Posted by Michael Ahn, Software Engineer and Vikash Kumar, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google

Learning-based methods for solving robotic control problems have recently seen significant momentum, driven by the widening availability of simulated benchmarks (like dm_control or OpenAI-Gym) and advancements in flexible and scalable reinforcement learning techniques (DDPG, QT-Opt, or Soft Actor-Critic). While learning through simulation is effective, these simulated environments often encounter difficulty in deploying to real-world robots due to factors such as inaccurate modeling of physical phenomena and system delays. This motivates the need to develop robotic control solutions directly in the real world, on real physical hardware.

The majority of current robotics research on physical hardware is conducted on high-cost, industrial-quality robots (PR2, Kuka-arms, ShadowHand, Baxter, etc.) intended for precise, monitored operation in controlled environments. Furthermore, these robots are designed around traditional control methods that focus on precision, repeatability, and ease of characterization. This stands in sharp contrast with the learning-based methods that are robust to imperfect sensing and actuation, and demand (a) a high degree of resilience to allow real-world trial-and-error learning, (b) low cost and ease of maintenance to enable scalability through replication and (c) a reliable reset mechanism to alleviate strict human monitoring requirements.

In “ROBEL: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots”, to be presented at CoRL 2019, we introduce an open-source platform of cost-effective robots and curated benchmarks designed primarily to facilitate research and development on physical hardware in the real world. Analogous to an optical table in the field of optics, ROBEL serves as a rapid experimentation platform, supporting a wide range of experimental needs and the development of new reinforcement learning and control methods. ROBEL consists of D'Claw, a three-fingered hand robot that facilitates learning of dexterous manipulation tasks and D'Kitty, a four-legged robot that enables the learning of agile legged locomotion tasks. The robotic platforms are low-cost, modular, easy to maintain, and are robust enough to sustain on-hardware reinforcement learning from scratch.

In order to make the robots relatively inexpensive and easy to build, we based ROBEL’s designs on off-the-shelf components and commonly-available prototyping tools (3D-printed or laser cut). Designs are easy to assemble and require only a few hours to build. Detailed part lists (with CAD details), assembly instructions, and software instructions for getting started are available here.

ROBEL Benchmarks
We devised a set of tasks suitable for each platform, D’Claw and D’Kitty, which can be used for benchmarking real-world robotic learning. ROBEL’s task definitions include both dense and sparse task objectives, and introduce metrics for hardware-safety in the task definition, which for example, indicate if joints are exceeding “safe” operating bounds or force thresholds. ROBEL also supports a simulator for all tasks to facilitate algorithmic development and rapid prototyping. D’Claw tasks are centered around three commonly observed manipulation behaviors — Pose, Turn, and Screw.

Left: Pose — Conform to the shape of the environment. Center: Turn — Turn the object to a specified angle. Right: Screw — Continuously rotate the object. (Click images for video.)

D’Kitty tasks are centered around three commonly observed locomotion behaviors — Stand, Orient, and Walk.

Left: Stand — Stand upright. Center: Orient — Align heading with the target. Right: Walk — Move to the target. (Click images for video.)

We evaluated several classes (on-policy, off policy, demo-accelerated, supervised) of deep reinforcement learning methods on each of these benchmark tasks. The evaluation results and the final policies are included as baselines in the software package for comparison. Full task details and baseline performances are available in the technical report.

Reproducibility & Robustness
ROBEL platforms are robust to sustain direct hardware training, and have clocked over 14,000 hours of real-world experience to-date. The platforms have significantly matured over the year. Owing to the modularity of the design, repairs are trivial and require minimal to no domain expertise, making the overall system easy to maintain.

To establish the replicability of the platforms and reproducibility of the benchmarks, ROBEL was studied in isolation by two different research labs. Only software distribution and documentation was used in this study. No in-person visits were allowed. Using ROBEL’s design files and assembly instructions both sites were able to replicate both hardware platforms. Benchmark tasks were trained on robots built at both sites. In the figure below we see that two D’Claw robots built at two different sites not only exhibit similar training progress but also converge to the same final performance, establishing reproducibility of the ROBEL benchmarks.

SAC training performance of a task on two real D’Claw robots developed at different laboratory locations.

Results Gallery
ROBEL has been useful in a variety of reinforcement learning studies so far. Below we highlight a few of the key results, and you can find all our results in this comprehensive gallery. D’Claw platforms are completely autonomous and can sustain reliable experimentation for an extended period of time, and has facilitated experimentation with a wide variety of reinforcement learning paradigms and tasks using both rigid and flexible objects.

Left: Flexible Objects — On-hardware training with DAPG effectively learns to turn flexible objects. We observe manipulation targeting the center of the valve where there is more rigidity. D'Claw is robust to on-hardware training, facilitating successful outcomes on hard to simulate tasks. Center: Disturbance Rejection — A Sim2Real policy trained via Natural Policy Gradient on MuJoCo simulation with object perturbations (amongst others) being tested on hardware. We observe fingers working together to resist external disturbances. Right: Obstructed Finger — A Sim2Real policy trained via Natural Policy Gradient on MuJoCo simulation with external perturbations (amongst others) being tested on hardware. We observe that free fingers fill in for the missing finger.

Importantly, D’Claw platforms are modular and easy to replicate, which facilitates scalable experimentation. With our scaled setup, we find that multiple D’Claws can collectively learn tasks faster by sharing experience.

On-hardware training with distributed version of SAC leaning to turn multiple objects to arbitrary angles in conjunction by sharing experience. Five tasks only need twice the amount of experience of single tasks, thanks to the multi-task formulation. In the video we observe five D'Claws turning different objects to 180 degrees (picked for visual effectiveness, actual policy can turn to any angle).

We have also been successful in deploying robust locomotion policies on the D’Kitty platform. Below we show a blind D’Kitty walking over indoor and outdoor terrains exhibiting the robustness of its gait in presence of unseen disturbances.

Left: Indoor – Walking in Clutter — A Sim2Real policy trained via Natural Policy Gradient on MuJoCo simulation with randomized perturbations learns to walk in clutter and step over objects. Center: Outdoor – Gravel and Branches — A Sim2Real policy trained via Natural Policy Gradient on MuJoCo simulation with randomized height field learns to walk outdoors over gravel and branches. Right: Outdoor – Slope and Grass — A Sim2Real policy trained via Natural Policy Gradient on MuJoCo simulation with randomized height field learns to handle moderate slopes.

When presented with information about its torso and objects present in the scene, D’Kitty can learn to interact with these objects exhibiting complex behaviors.

Left: Avoid Moving Obstacles — Policy trained via Hierarchical Sim2Real learns to avoid a moving block and reach the target (marked by the controller on the floor). Center: Push to Moving Goal — Policy trained via Hierarchical Sim2Real learns to push block towards a moving target (marked by the controller in the hand). Right: Co-ordinate — Policy trained via Hierarchical Sim2Real learns to coordinate two D'Kitties to push a heavy block towards a target (marked by two + signs on the floor).

In conclusion, ROBEL platforms are low cost, robust, reliable and are designed to accommodate the needs of the emerging learning-based paradigms that need scalability and resilience. We are proud to announce the release of ROBEL to the open source community and are excited to learn about the diversity of research and experimentation they will enable. For getting started on ROBEL platforms and ROBEL benchmarks refer to roboticsbenchmarks.org.

Acknowledgments
Google's ROBEL D'Claw evolved from earlier designs Vikash Kumar developed at the Universities of Washington and Berkeley. Multiple people across organizations have contributed towards the ROBEL projects. We thank our co-authors Henry Zhu (UC Berkeley), Kristian Hartikainen (UC Berkeley), Abhishek Gupta (UC Berkeley) and Sergey Levine (Google and UC Berkeley) for their contributions and extensive feedback throughout the project. We would like to acknowledge Matt Neiss (Google) and Chad Richards (Google) for their significant contribution to the platform designs. We would also like to thank Aravind Rajeshwaran (U-Washington), Emo Todorov (U-Washington), and Vincent Vanhoucke (Google) for their helpful discussions and comments throughout the project.

A personal plea for humanity at the US-Mexico border | Juan Enriquez

A personal plea for humanity at the US-Mexico border | Juan Enriquez

In this powerful, personal talk, author and academic Juan Enriquez shares stories from inside the immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border, bringing this often-abstract debate back down to earth -- and showing what you can do every day to create a sense of belonging for immigrants. "This isn't about kids and borders," he says. "It's about us. This is about who we are, who we the people are, as a nation and as individuals."

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

Gnarbox 2.0 backup SSD is a photographer’s best friend in the field and at home

Working photographers, and enthusiasts who just love taking plenty of pictures, know that even the biggest SD cards can sometimes fill up, especially when you’re working with large file sizes, shooting both JPG and RAW, and shooting 4K video. The solution? A good mobile backup drive. There are a number of options out there that fit the bill, but the newly released Gnarbox 2.0 might be the best of them all, because it works like a miniature independent photo computer in addition to packing speedy SSD storage onboard.

This is the second generation of Gnarbox’s backup solution, and while I used the original, HDD-based version to great effect for a long time, the 2.0 version adds a ton of useful features, including super-fast SSD storage ranging from 256GB to 1TB in capacity, a new OLED display that makes it even easier to use in the field, and a removable battery that means you can pack spares to stay powered up and ready.

Simple, no fuss backup

It’s not the fanciest feature that the Gnarbox 2.0 offers, but it might be the one you use most: Quick and painless backup of SD cards. There’s an SD port on the device itself that can transfer at speeds up of to 75MB/s, and it has USB-C ports that can transfer direct from cameras or from card readers at up to 350MB/s depending on their transfer capabilities. When you plug in an SD card or camera, you get an option on the screen to totally back up the contents of the attached drive with one click, which makes it incredibly easy to dump and delete and clear up space to keep shooting.

During a 9-day trip that included two events and a vacation to shoot, I made frequent use of this feature. Shooting with the new Sony A7R IV in both RAW and JPG, even my 128GB SD + 64GB SD backup cards filled up pretty quickly, but I would just slide one of the cards into the Gnarbox’s slot and hit the backup button before changing venues and it’d be fully backed up within a few minutes.

In my experience, this process has been rock-solid reliable, and gives me effectively 10x the space for a shoot vs. just relying on my cards alone (I don’t typically have a similar sized backup SD card on the road, let alone 10). By default, the Gnarbox 2.0 stores all your media in backup folders organized by capture date, too, which makes them super easy to sort through once you get back to base.

A mobile review and rating machine

Once all that great capture content is on your Gnarbox 2.0, you can also very easily connect to the drive using Gnarbox’s mobile apps to either review what you’ve got, or go through and rate your photos quickly to make the process of working through them once you’re installed at your workstation easier.

There are two apps from Gnarbox available right now, including Gnarbox Safekeep and Gnarbox Selects. Safekeep gives you access to all your device’s settings and can also act as a file browser for shuttling photos between apps. But Selects is probably what you’re going to be using most – it not only offers fast RAW previews (compatible with every major camera’s RAW formats) but also lets you quickly add ratings, keyboard tags and more to make sure your collection is primed for edit when you get back to your desktop.

With Selects, you can review either files on the Gnarbox SSD itself, or on attached memory cards or storage media (so yes, you can use this with something like a Samsung T5 if you’re already using that as a backup solution). All this info will then show up in applications like Adobe Lightroom to expedite your workflow.

This can shave hours off the process of organizing your photos, since it means you can do the rating and reviewing up front without having to wait for everything to import and then trying to recall what you were going for with the shoot in the field after the fact.

Easy sharing from the field

Speaking of saving time, the Gnarbox 2.0 also helps you move more quickly from capture to sharing, which is incredibly useful if you’re working on a live event or doing photojournalism of something happening in the moment. The device supports Lightroom mobile out of the box, meaning you can navigate to it as a source for a new collection and move files over directly when connected to your phone or tablet. This makes it awesome for adding quick edits to RAW files, exporting finished JPGs and sharing directly to social apps and websites.

With Apple’s new iOS 13 filesystem changes, the Gnarbox 2.0 can also be addressed as a mass storage device, so you should be pretty wide open in terms of options for working with various editing software. This is also great for mobile video workflows, since Gnarbox 2.0 works just as well for storing video capture as well as photos.

Home workstation companion

The Gnarbox 2.0 is great on the go, but it’s also perfect for plugging in as a home work drive once you’re back from the shoot. I’m reviewing the 1TB version, so the amount of available on board storage is a big advantage here, since it can essentially provide all the space you need to give you all of your working files in one place.

As mentioned, it supports high-speed USB-C transfer, which makes working with the files directly from the drive on your main workstation much more pleasant. That also means you don’t necessarily have to move things over local to get to work, which saves you a step and spares your computer’s disk space.

Gnarbox 2.0 switches to USB Mass Storage mode pretty easily, using the onboard OLED menu system. You do need to make this switch manually however, because by default the USB-C port that it uses to make the computer connection is used for charging the Gnarbox’s battery. Once you’re in that mode, however, it’s as easy as connecting Gnarbox 2.0 to your computer and then navigating to it as you would any other connected mass storage device.

Photos on the drive are organized by capture date, as mentioned (you can customize how it creates its folder structure if you want) and you can also select it as an import target in any photo editing software, like Lightroom or Capture One.

Bottom line

Gnarbox has taken their time to create a thoughtful and thorough successor to their original product with the Gnarbox 2.0. It’s a unique blend of field photo server and mini computer, made more versatile with clever touches like the removable battery packs and dust/splash resistance. Ultimately, there really isn’t anything in the market that can compete with the Gnarbox 2.0 on everything it provides, though devices like WD’s My Passport Wireless Pro and the LaCie Rugged Boss SSD can offer some key parts at lower prices depending on your needs.

At $899 for the 1TB version I reviewed, ($499 and $599 for the 256 and 512GB versions, respectively), the Gnarbox 2.0 clearly isn’t for everyone. It’s a professional tool for a professional workflow, and it’s priced as such. That said, the value it provides for busy photographers who need a companion storage solution with utmost flexibility for working both at home and on the road is definitely going to make it worth the cost of admission for some.

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European risk report flags 5G security challenges

European Union Member States have published a joint risk assessment report into 5G technology which highlights increased security risks that will require a new approach to securing telecoms infrastructure.

The EU has so far resisted pressure from the U.S. to boycott Chinese tech giant Huawei as a 5G supplier on national security grounds, with individual Member States such as the UK also taking their time to chew over the issue.

But the report flags risks to 5G from what it couches as “non-EU state or state-backed actors” — which can be read as diplomatic code for Huawei. Though, as some industry watchers have been quick to point out, the label could be applied rather closer to home in the near future, should Brexit comes to pass…

Some parts of the 5G report on risk of non-EU cyberattacks may accidentally gain a new unexpected meaning after #Brexit (https://t.co/o7gyV0hqCv) https://t.co/VgU30kRz4p

— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) October 9, 2019

Back in March, as European telecom industry concern swirled about how to respond to US pressure to block Huawei, the Commission stepped in to issue a series of recommendations — urging Member States to step up individual and collective attention to mitigate potential security risks as they roll out 5G networks.

Today’s risk assessment report follows on from that.

It identifies a number of “security challenges” that the report suggests are “likely to appear or become more prominent in 5G networks” vs current mobile networks — linked to the expanded use of software to run 5G networks; and software and apps that will be enabled by and run on the next-gen networks.

The role of suppliers in building and operating 5G networks is also noted as a security challenge, with the report warning of a “degree of dependency on individual suppliers”, and also of too many eggs being placed in the basket of a single 5G supplier.

Summing up the effects expected to follow 5G rollouts, per the report, it predicts:

• An increased exposure to attacks and more potential entry points for attackers: With 5G networks increasingly based on software, risks related to major security flaws, such as those deriving from poor software development processes within suppliers are gaining in importance. They could also make it easier for threat actors to maliciously insert backdoors into products and make them harder to detect.
• Due to new characteristics of the 5G network architecture and new functionalities, certain pieces of network equipment or functions are becoming more sensitive, such as base stations or key technical management functions of the networks.
• An increased exposure to risks related to the reliance of mobile network operators on suppliers. This will also lead to a higher number of attacks paths that might be exploited by threat actors and increase the potential severity of the impact of such attacks. Among the various potential actors, non-EU States or State-backed are considered as the most serious ones and the most likely to target 5G networks.
• In this context of increased exposure to attacks facilitated by suppliers, the risk profile of individual suppliers will become particularly important, including the likelihood of the supplier being subject to interference from a non-EU country.
• Increased risks from major dependencies on suppliers: a major dependency on a single supplier increases the exposure to a potential supply interruption, resulting for instance from a commercial failure, and its consequences. It also aggravates the potential impact of weaknesses or vulnerabilities, and of their possible exploitation by threat actors, in particular where the dependency concerns a supplier presenting a high degree of risk.
• Threats to availability and integrity of networks will become major security concerns: in addition to confidentiality and privacy threats, with 5G networks expected to become the backbone of many critical IT applications, the integrity and availability of those networks will become major national security concerns and a major security challenge from an EU perspective.

The high level report is a compilation of Member States’ national risk assessments, working with the Commission and the European Agency for Cybersecurity. It’s couched as just a first step in developing a European response to securing 5G networks.

“It highlights the elements that are of particular strategic relevance for the EU,” the report says in self-summary. “As such, it does not aim at presenting an exhaustive analysis of all relevant aspects or types of individual cybersecurity risks related to 5G networks.”

The next step will be the development, by December 31, of a toolbox of mitigating measures, agreed by the Network and Information Systems Cooperation Group, which will be aimed at addressing identified risks at national and Union level.

“By 1 October 2020, Member States – in cooperation with the Commission – should assess the effects of the Recommendation in order to determine whether there is a need for further action. This assessment should take into account the outcome of the coordinated European risk assessment and of the effectiveness of the measures,” the Commission adds.

For the toolbox a variety of measures are likely to be considered, per the report — consisting of existing security requirements for previous generations of mobile networks with “contingency approaches” that have been defined through standardisation by the mobile telephony standards body, 3GPP, especially for core and access levels of 5G networks.

But it also warns that “fundamental differences in how 5G operates also means that the current security measures as deployed on 4G networks might not be wholly effective or sufficiently comprehensive to mitigate the identified security risks”, adding that: “Furthermore, the nature and characteristics of some of these risks makes it necessary to determine if they may be addressed through technical measures alone.

“The assessment of these measures will be undertaken in the subsequent phase of the implementation of the Commission Recommendation. This will lead to the identification of a toolbox of appropriate, effective and proportionate possible risk management measures to mitigate cybersecurity risks identified by Member States within this process.”

The report concludes with a final line saying that “consideration should also be given to the development of the European industrial capacity in terms of software development, equipment manufacturing, laboratory testing, conformity evaluation, etc” — packing an awful lot into a single sentence.

The implication is that the business of 5G security will need to get commensurately large to scale to meet the multi-dimensional security challenge that goes hand in glove with the next-gen tech. Just banning a single supplier isn’t going to cut it.

Huawei opens a cybersecurity transparency center in the heart of Europe

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Social Media Bots Explained: Malicious Accounts and How to Spot Them

The term “social media bot” is no longer just associated with chatbots or customer service AI. Rather, social media bots have a far more unseemly reputation nowadays due to malicious misinformation campaigns.

But what exactly are these malicious social bots? How do you spot the different types? And are there tools that can help you sort real accounts from the fakes? Here’s what you need to know…

What Are Malicious Social Media Bots?

While there are different types of bots on social media platforms, we will be focusing on malicious political and malware bots. These bots differ from customer service bots or other automated accounts. For example, some bots such as Deep Question Bot are meant to be a fun tool for Twitter users to use. Meanwhile, bots like Thread Reader App turn Twitter threads into a page of text.

Malicious social media bots and fake accounts, however, pose as human users. They aim to manipulate public opinion on social media, spread fake news, increase polarization, sow distrust in institutions, spread government propaganda, and propel conspiracies.

According to the Academic Society, intent makes malicious bots different from other automated accounts.

“Malicious bots, in contrast, are designed with the purpose to harm. They operate on social media with a fake identity. Malicious bots include spam, the theft of personal data and
identities, the spreading of misinformation and noise during debates, the infiltration of companies and the diffusion of malware,” the organization says in its 2018 guide on the topic.

Bots achieve this by boosting certain hashtags and keywords, deploying targeted harassment, and sharing certain links and articles.

According to a 2017 working paper by the University of Oxford, titled “Computational Propaganda Worldwide: Executive Summary“, the people behind these bots range from small fringe groups to large political campaigns and governments.

Twitter is the most notorious platform dealing with social media bots, but these malicious bots also exist on Facebook, Reddit, Weibo, and other smaller networks.

Do Malicious Bots Support Specific Politics?

While these bots were notably used in the 2016 US election and the leadup to the Brexit referendum, they aren’t only aimed at one side of the political spectrum.

A paper published in Nature, titled “The spread of low-credibility content by social bots“, found that a common denominator found among many malicious bots is the sharing of low-credibility content—such as fake news and misinformation. This misinformation targets different sides of the political spectrum.

“Successful low-credibility sources in the United States, including those on both ends of the political spectrum, are heavily supported by social bots,” the paper says. “Since the earliest manifestations uncovered in 2010, we have seen influential bots affect online debates about vaccination policies and participate actively in political campaigns.”

While bots as a whole aren’t partisan, usually individual bot accounts will stick with one type of viewpoint to promote (such as an anti-science view).

Different Types of Malicious Social Bots

When it comes to fake social media accounts aimed at amplifying political views and sharing misinformation, there are a few different types. This depends on their level of automation and their main aims.

We take a look at the different bots and explain each type…

Standard/Full Bots

A standard social media bot is an account that is fully automated. These accounts have no human input in their daily posts and operation. Rather, they rely on algorithms and scripts to guide their posts.

These bots amplify content (retweet bots) or reply to content with certain keywords or hashtags (reply bots).

Malware Bots

Malware bots are another type of fully automated malicious bot. However, rather than focusing on misinformation, they aim to compromise the security of social media users. These accounts often focus on clickbait content, sometimes posing as an existing content publisher, to try redirect users to a malicious website.

Cyborgs

A cyborg is a partially automated or hybrid account. The ratio of bot-to-human posts on a specific cyborg account varies, but automation needs to be significant (rather than an occasional automated post).

These accounts use human input to help obscure the fact that they are bots. Human input can help guide replies, perform targeted harassment, or add more human-like behavior.

Cyborgs are not the same as human users who may use schedulers like TweetDeck for their posts. Cyborgs are fake accounts posing as a real person, with the aim of distributing information to achieve a particular goal or for targeted trolling.

How to Spot Social Media Bots

Social media bots are increasingly difficult to identify as their algorithms become more sophisticated. For example, it was often easy to tell a bot account from a real account due to the lack of original posts—only resharing of other posts or adding hashtags to existing posts. However, more and more bots are able to post original content and replies.

According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, political bots share three characteristics across all types.

“Many of these bot and cyborg accounts do conform to a recognizable pattern: activity, amplification, anonymity. An anonymous account which is inhumanly active and which obsessively amplifies one point of view is likely to be a political bot, rather than a human,” the lab says in an article on spotting social media bots.

These traits are some of the major red flags that an account is likely a bot.

A few other signs that a social media account is actually a malicious bot or cyborg include:

• A recent account creation date
• The account shows coordinated resharing and amplifying of posts between a small network of accounts
• Unrealistically fast response times to others, indicating that the account is almost always online
• Low-quality comments with limited and repetitive vocabulary
• Usernames with long, random number sequences
• Stolen profile images from real people or “patriotic” profile images (such as flags, weapons, political symbols)
• A high volume of retweeted and shared content, with limited original posts
• Limited focus on content outside of a pre-defined set of hashtags and topics.

Real people tend to tweet on multiple topics, including more mundane posts such as how their day is going. They also do not post 24 hours a day at massive volumes.

4 Tools for Finding Social Media Bots

Since it’s becoming more difficult to tell bots from humans on social media, researchers and analysts have released a number of tools to better analyze accounts.

None of these tools are fool-proof. However, along with other types of observations, these tools can definitely help users better figure out the likelihood that an account is a bot or cyborg.

These tools focus on Twitter, where malicious bots are possibly the most prolific.

1. Botometer

Formerly called BotOrNot, Botometer is a tool created by a team at Indiana University. The tool uses an algorithm to determine the likelihood of an account’s automation.

With Botometer, you can not only check a Twitter account, but also the bot ratings of an account’s followers. Since bots often work within a network, amplifying the messages of each other, this is a helpful feature.

2. BotCheck.me

BotCheck.me is a browser extension that analyzes Twitter accounts to determine if they are propaganda bots. The company’s website also includes an analysis tool.

The tool considers factors such as post frequency, retweets, and polarizing language.

A great part of the tool is the ability to report whether BotCheck has incorrectly categorized an account.

3. Account Analysis

Account Analysis is another tool that lets you analyze the activity of public Twitter accounts. Created by data analyst Luca Hammer, the tool gives insightful metrics and visualizations for account activity.

This helps you identify bot accounts that other tools might have missed. For example, in a test of a known bot account, multiple tools failed to identify the bot (due to its focus on posting tweets, lack of hashtags, and no retweets). However, the daily rhythm of the account’s posts (all day, every day) and the interface used by the account (the platform Cheap Bots, Done Quick!) confirm that the account is, in fact, a bot.

So while Account Analysis doesn’t assign a bot rating, it is still a useful tool to identify bot accounts.

4. Social Bearing

Social Bearing also provides a summary of statistics related to public Twitter accounts, similar to Account Analysis. This summary includes tweet frequency, retweets, replies, language sentiment, and more.

An overview of these statistics is incredibly useful in deciding whether an account may be a bot. Best of all, the tool is free and doesn’t require you to sign in with Twitter.

Don’t Trust It Just Because Someone Shared It

While bots are a major tool in the spread of misinformation and fake news, you also need to be wary of the information you consume outside of social media. After all, people also share and retweet fake news.

To raise your defenses against misinformation, check out our guide on how to avoid fake news by looking for its telltale signs.

Image Credit: sdecoret/Depositphotos

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The 5 Best Surge Protectors in 2019

Electrical power surges can fry your devices’ internal components in the blink of an eye. To protect yourself, you need a surge protector for your TV, a surge protector for computer, and a surge protector for some of your kitchen appliances.

Want to learn more? Here are the best surge protectors you can buy today.

Why Are Electrical Surges Bad?

Electrical surges happen when too many volts flow through your wiring. Devices aren’t designed to deal with the increased voltage, so excess heat is generated inside your gadgets. The heat can kill circuitry, warp metal components, and even melt plastic parts. Anything with a microprocessor—computers, home appliances, TVs, etc.—is especially vulnerable.

Any number of things can cause a surge. Turning on a high-powered device like a hairdryer could cause your lights to flicker briefly. At the other end of the scale, a lightning strike on nearby transformer could send thousands of extra volts rippling through an entire neighborhood, causing widespread blackouts.

Learn more about why you really need a surge protector.

1. Most Powerful Surge Protector:
Belkin 12-Outlet Pivot-Plug Power Strip Surge Protector

Belkin 12-Outlet Pivot-Plug Power Strip Surge Protector Belkin 12-Outlet Pivot-Plug Power Strip Surge Protector Buy Now On Amazon $35.09

If you’re buying a surge protector, you don’t want to end up with something that’s not robust enough to protect all your appliances. With the Belkin 12-Outlet Pivot-Plug Power Strip Surge Protector, you can be confident it won’t be an issue.

A surge protector’s defense is measured in joules. The greater the number of joules, the greater the level of surge it can protect you from. You can find protection ranging from 50 joules up to thousands of joules. This Belkin model offers the greatest amount of protection out of the five surge protectors on our list, with a rating of 4,320 joules.

Other features include a $300,000 warranty for any equipment connected to the plug and an eight-foot cord. The device is also available in a six- and eight-outlet version.

2. Best Surge Protector for a Home Office:
Tripp Lite 12-Outlet Surge Protector

Tripp Lite 12 Outlet Surge Protector Tripp Lite 12 Outlet Surge Protector Buy Now On Amazon $40.41

If you have a home office, the Tripp Lite 12-Outlet Surge Protector is a great product. It’s ideal for protecting computers, printers, scanners, routers, phones, faxes, and modems. It’s also one of the best surge protectors for TVs and monitors.

The device has a 2,880-joule surge protection rating, EMI/RFI noise filtering, and a resettable circuit breaker. It comes with an eight-foot cord.

But what makes the Tripp Lite 12-Outlet Surge Protector so good for home offices? It has a few features which help it stand out:

• AC Sockets: If you have a home office, you’ll probably have a lot of devices you need to plug in. The 12 sockets mean nothing will be vulnerable.
• Transformer Outlets: Some of the sockets have been designed to accommodate large AC adaptors.
• Data Protection: The power strip has an RJ11 and coaxial jacks to protect phone, fax, satellite, and cable lines.

Lastly, the Tripp Lite 12-Outlet Surge Protector will automatically kill the power if it degrades to a point where it can no longer protect your devices. It will prevent you from having a false sense of security.

3. Best Budget Surge Protector:
Amazon Basics 6-Outlet Surge Protector

Not everyone needs a power strip with loads of sockets and support for different types of plugs and cables. If you’d rather pick up a more basic surge protector (and save some money at the same time), you don’t need to look any further than the Amazon Basics 6-Outlet Surge Protector.

It only has a protection rating of 200 joules, so it’s not the best surge protector for your 4K TV. It is, however, more than adequate for protecting devices such as phones, lamps, and other small appliances around your home. The Amazon Basics 6-Outlet Surge Protector is also lightweight, weighing just 1.1 pounds.

If you live in an area that’s prone to power surges and you need something you can frequently throw in a bag, it’s an ideal solution. The Amazon Basics 6-Outlet Surge Protector is available in black or white.

4. Best Surge Protector for a TV and Home Theaters:
Echogear Low Profile Surge Protector

Echogear Low Profile Surge Protector Echogear Low Profile Surge Protector Buy Now On Amazon $24.99

One of the most expensive pieces of equipment in your home is probably your television. So, what’s the best surge protector for a 4K TV? We recommend the Echogear Low Profile Surge Protector. As the name suggests, the device is one of the thinnest on the market at just 1.9 inches tall. Therefore—unlike bulkier options— it’ll comfortably slide underneath TV stands and sideboards.

Of course, it’s also reliable from a protection standpoint. It has surge protection of 3,420 joules and comes with eight sockets. So, you can protect your streaming box, satellite receiver, and other home theater gadgets at the same time.

There are also three sockets with more space for larger adaptors, a five-year $25,000 warranty for all your protected equipment, a six-foot power lead, and a built-in circuit breaker switch. This surge protector is even wall-mountable.

5. Best Surge Protector for a Computer:
Furman Power Conditioner

Furman Power Conditioner Furman Power Conditioner Buy Now On Amazon $137.97

The Furman Power Conditioner does more than merely protect your equipment against power surges; it also conditions the power from your wall socket. In practice, that means the device reduces ground contamination and AC line noise to provide a purer quality of power to your devices. In the long-term, it will enhance the lifespan of their circuitry and improve their audio and video output.

As you’d expect, the extra power conditioning features come at a cost. The Furman Power Conditioner is the most expensive item on our list. However, if you have a high-spec desktop computer that you want to protect, the extra outlay is definitely worth the benefits. Other features include cable, satellite, and telecoms ports, six regular outputs, and two sockets for AC adaptors.

Which Is the Best Surge Protector?

So, which of the five products we’ve recommended is the best overall surge protector for your equipment? Much depends on where you plan to use the power strip and which devices you want to connect. However, the Tripp Lite 12-Outlet Surge Protector provides one of the best balances between price, features, and protection.

To learn more about power supply and your electronics, you may want to check out the things you need to know before buying a power supply unit.

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These 8 Sites Help Visualize the Horrors of Climate Change

The Earth is burning up. Polar bears are flocking to cities in hunt of food. The Amazon rainforest, which plays a pivotal role in maintaining our environment’s health, is on fire.

We’re unequivocally in a climate crisis. But it can be difficult to put such matters into perspective from the comfort of your home.

Therefore, if you’re still not convinced or you would like to understand how awful the situation is now, here are a bunch of websites to visualize the devastating effects of global warming and climate change.

1. NASA’s Global Climate Change Tool

NASA offers an exhaustive tool for exploring how global warming is transforming the planet.

The site hosts a treasure trove of real-time climatic data. It lets you easily visualize all that information through powerful and interactive graphics. On the home page, you’ll also find quick charts detailing the levels of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, global temperature, sea levels, and more.

Climate Time Machine is one such app. As the name suggests, the visualization allows you to understand the differences between the amount of sea ice, carbon dioxide, sea level, and global temperatures today and years ago. You can manually adjust the slider and view the changes on the map.

Similarly, there’s Earth Now, a 3D interactive web app which puts the live data from every NASA satellite at your disposal. You can animate the information by moving a slider to a custom time period and watch variations in the ozone layer, carbon dioxide levels, and others change over time.

2. Shame Plane

We don’t think about an airplane’s carbon emissions when we board a flight. But we should as air travel is one of the most environmentally damaging activities. It consumes an incredibly high quantity of fossil fuels and releases harmful gases in the atmosphere.

A site called Shame Plane helps you grasp how destructive any flight will be to the environment. You can specify the origin and destination and Shame Plane will tell you the route’s impact in a meaningful format.

So a round trip from New York to Los Angeles will result in the loss of 12.3 metric square of Arctic Ice. On top of that, you can learn the number of lifestyle alterations you will have to implement in order to compensate for a flight’s carbon emissions.

For New York to Los Angeles, even if you recycle, go vegetarian, live car-free for a year, you will still fall short. In addition, you’ll find details on how a trip stacks up against your yearly carbon emission allowance as per the Paris Agreement.

3. EarthTime’s Sea Level Rise Predictor

If ocean levels continue to rise, cities situated on the banks of oceans and seas are at the risk of being flooded.

EarthTime animates these predictions and shows you what exactly will happen to them when the temperatures hit a certain threshold. On the map, you will be able to see which areas will be submerged underwater and their at-risk population.

EarthTime has several other stories you can browse and look into.

4. The Point Of No Return

This handy website gets you up to speed with climate change’s consequences and the actions or initiatives taken to combat them so far.

Called The Point Of No Return, the project cleverly lays out the phenomenon’s timeline through charts, infographics, and interactive elements. It showcases information on contributions and funds allocated by various countries.

Plus, the site briefs you on the annual Conference of Parties (COP) reports. They provide a rundown of the themes, programs, and duties each nation has discussed and accepted.

5. ShowYourStripes

ShowYourStripes can produce a striped pattern based on a country’s average temperature in the last two centuries. It assigns a color between blue and red to a specific year depending on the place’s climate at that time.

Once all the periods are evaluated, the app stitches them together and generates the picture. Instead of picking one country, you can also set the region to Global.

The image has a resolution close to 4K and there’s a direct Download Image button. Therefore, you can even set it as your device’s backdrop or print it as a poster.

6. National Geographic

If you still haven’t been able to grasp the realities of climate change, you need National Geographic’s starter guide.

It teaches you the foundational concepts through a straightforward visual interface. The online magazine comprises of seven decks, each accompanied by animations, and concise explanations.

The guide touches upon topics such as the surge in carbon emissions through the last few years, climate-related disasters, species extinctions, depressions in animal and plant populations, and more.

7. Surging Seas Mapping Choices

This is like the EarthTime tool we discussed earlier. It enables you to visualize the effects of rising sea levels for a location.

However, Mapping Choices goes a step further by letting you compare two scenarios and their potential impact on a location. For instance, you can pick Minor Carbon Cuts and Extreme Carbon Cuts and view their results side-by-side.

Other visualization choices here are Historic Carbon Pollution, Moderate Carbon Cuts, and Unchecked Pollution. In addition, you lock in a specific sea level rise and co-relate it to carbon emission levels to understand the extent of any havoc.

8. What Will Climate Feel Like in 60 Years?

The University of Maryland’s tool allows you to imagine what the climate at a region will feel like in 60 years. Instead of directly putting up a number, it tells you where you can experience that climate today.

Let’s say you search for New York City. The site will take you to Jonesboro, Arkansas as that’s what NYC will potentially feel like in 2080.

There are a couple of filters you can take advantage of. You can set the emissions level and the level of detail to understand future forecasts.

Use Climate Change Tools to Understand Global Warming

Climate change is real, and these web apps illustrate the severity of the matter. But there’s still hope and even as individuals, we can do a lot. Here are a bunch of climate change tools to understand and fight global warming.

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How to Maximize macOS Gaming Performance: Tips and Tricks

Picture a fluid, non-stressful, and relaxing gaming session. Then the perfect dream-like experience hits a snag. Your computer suddenly can’t handle everything on the screen, and the game becomes unplayable.

It can happen much too often—you buy a game and your specs just don’t match up with the exact requirements. It doesn’t seem fair to have to suffer freezing, FPS drops, or performance dips. Why not fix this situation with some stress-relieving optimization?

If you want to play games on a macOS device without frustration, it just takes a little time and knowledge. Here are some tips and tricks to speed up macOS performance when gaming.

1. Learn to Use macOS Activity Monitor

When first learning to manage your system for gaming, it comes down to knowing your system. Gaming tends to be more CPU-bound nowadays, and it can be useful to keep track of it up close and take control. As a result, macOS’s Activity Monitor works out as an extremely useful addition.

Activity Monitor provides you with access to your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage. For gaming, CPU and memory usage serve as the most fundamentally important categories. The other categories provide additional information, but we won’t be discussing them here as they aren’t crucial. With this note in mind, let’s talk about what you really need to know.

Opening Activity Monitor

To access Activity Monitor, we’ll discuss two different approaches. You can open the program by navigating to the Go menu in the Finder and selecting Utilities. You can also open Utilities via the shortcut combination of Command, Shift, and U. Once the list of utility programs appear, click Activity Monitor.

Spotlight also opens Activity Monitor. Click the magnifying glass in the upper right-hand corner of the Finder to bring up the Spotlight search. Type in Activity Monitor to bring the program up as a result and then open it.

Once the software launches by either approach, you’re able to see the current state of your live computer.

Examining CPU Usage

When looking at the usage of your CPU, Activity Monitor breaks it down by percentage. When seeking to improve your computer’s speed, you’ll want to close the biggest resource hogs. If you see any unneeded processes, close them. Simply highlight the process and click the small x in the upper-left corner of Activity Monitor.

If you’re nervous about closing from the lost list of active items, note the user on the far right of the processes list. If the user of the process shares your username then it’s safe to close. By following this rule of thumb, you can close any programs eating too much CPU without concern about your system destabilizing or logging you out.

For quick reference, the bottom of the CPU tab breaks down the entire CPU load. If there isn’t any idle percentage, and the user percentage looks high then consider closing some items out.

If you want to continually monitor your CPU usage from the dock, you can right-click Activity Monitor and select to show CPU usage via either option.

Examining Memory Usage

After looking at the CPU, the memory tab comes next. It looks nearly identical to the CPU tab and functions similarly. Instead of a percentage amount, memory uses megabytes. Once you identify any large memory drainers, close the process via the same x button in the upper lefthand corner.

For the more visual individual, memory also utilizes color coding to showcase the health of its current state. If you’re in the green or yellow range then your computer doesn’t need any additional memory. For anyone with a red result, close some applications or consider installing some more RAM on your device.

Keeping Activity Monitor in your dock allows for easy access to these values. Once you have a solid grasp of these, optimization can continue with further tweaks.

2. Free Up More Hard Drive Space

A less remembered issue boils down to hard drive space. The image of a full hard drive typically conjures images of older devices that have spent a lifetime accumulating data. However, with increasing game data requirements and file sizes, space issues can happen much sooner.

When a hard drive gets too full, the extra stress and lack of space to write on can create slowdown. To make your computer’s life easier, always set aside some extra space. The amount needed changes based on different requirements, but it’s a good rule of thumb to keep it as free as possible.

If you run into any extra slowdown, try removing junk data and unneeded programs from your computer. You can use a third-party program like CCleaner to analyze and detect all the junk data from your applications, browsers, and system files before removing them. Additionally, uninstall applications with CCleaner to hasten your cleaning.

Learn more in our article on speeding up macOS Catalina performance.

3. Disable Startup Apps

If you’ve ever tried to immediately jump into a game after startup, it can easily go awry. An unready system consists of multiple applications vying for resources. Disabling some of these start-up programs with CCleaner can ease your burden.

Simply navigate to the Tools portion of the application and select startup. You can then delete or delay any number of programs and background utilities. If you prefer to delete programs without an app, you can also disable or delete the non-hidden varieties via System Preferences.

4. Disable macOS Notification Center

As a last resort, disabling notifications can give a small boost. To disable notification center for the day, follow these steps:

1. While holding down your Option key, click the icon at the far top right (It looks like a bulleted list icon).
2. The icon should now gray out.
3. Click the icon to open the notification center.
4. Turn on Do Not Disturb if it isn’t already.
5. You can now click off the notification center.

Enjoying Your Optimized macOS Machine

By monitoring the background parts of your Mac, you can stop any problems in advance and transition into problem-free gaming. For anyone looking to improve their gaming experience once the operating system tweaks are out of the way, consider these tips to improve your Mac gaming experience.

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