X-Industry

Meta’s decision to close its CrowdTangle division, a tool that tracks content across social media, has raised the ire of more than 100 research and advocacy groups who say it will make it harder to fight disinformation.

Groups including the Mozilla Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology and Access Now sent the social media behemoth an open letter Thursday decrying the decision to shutter the unit in August, asking Meta to, at a minimum, invest in CrowdTangle through January.  Meta a

Activity Summary - Week Ending on 6 January 2023:

• Red Sky Alliance identified 32,773 connections from new IP’s checking in with our Sinkholes
• Amazon in Singapore hit 32x
• Analysts identified 492 new IP addresses participating in various Botnets
• Red Sky Dark Web Collection for 2022
• LockBit seen twice in Top 5 Malware
• Indian Job Seeker data stolen (IR-23-005-001)
• The Meta Eire Fine
• Five Guys Burgers

Red Sky Alliance Compromised (C2) IP’s 

Impending doom looked foreseeable with Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter and began to show early on even before the billionaire completed his purchase.  From the daily tit-for-tat on his Twitter acquisition stance, it became apparent to some that that Musk’s indecisive nature foretold an ominous future for Twitter.  However, the actual chaos ensued just hours after Musk became the largest stakeholder in the bird app.  From his plan to grant a “blue tick” verification symbol to anyon

Activity Summary - Week Ending on 30 September 2022:

• Red Sky Alliance identified 31,149 connections from new IP’s checking in with our Sinkholes
• Hetzner in Bavaria Germany hit 28x
• Analysts identified 3,298 new IP addresses participating in various Botnets
• dotCMS Issues
• Meta to the Rescue
• Noberus, aka: BlackCat ALPHV
• Optus
• Industroyer

Link to full report: IR-22-274-001_weekly274.pdf

‘AI cannot be an excuse’: What happens when Meta’s chatbot brands a college professor a terrorist?  Chatbots can often be wrong.  Is there any recourse?

Marietje Schaake has had a long and distinguished career.  She has been an advisor to the US ambassador to the Netherlands and consulted with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.   For 10 years, she was a member of the European Parliament, crafting laws that covered hundreds of millions of people, focusing specifically on digital freedoms.  Sh

Our readers who are old enough to remember using walkie-talkies to talk with their friends or used them in the military will find this of interest.  A walkie-talkie, more formally known as a handheld transceiver, is a hand-held, portable, two-way radio transceiver.  It was developed during WW II to eliminate the need for wire connected combat (field) telephones.  Interesting enough that they are still being used on the precipice of WW III. 

Walkie-talkie communication app Zello https://zello.com

In separate reporting, the “metaverse” could be a serious problem for children worldwide.  If there is only one thing that technology companies, retailers, content creators and investors can agree upon, is that there is money to be made from the metaverse.  The metaverse is planned as a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer generated environment and other users.[1]  As technology CEOs try to win a market position in the still developing digital space, some psychologis

A bipartisan group of state attorneys general said on Thursday they had opened an investigation into Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, for promoting its social media app Instagram while knowing of mental and emotional harms caused by Instagram. 

As of now, 11 US states are involved in the investigation, including California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.  The Massachuset