Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks • Hacker News Board

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#101

Post by bryanrasmussen » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC

PeanutNore wrote: post #49

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

ok but what is the quality control like on all these tools to help do you illegal stuff? Better or worse than normal software. Is there any open source tools to help you do illegal stuff? Because if you can't see the source I think a good illegal tool moneymaking scheme would be to sell the tools to do illegal stuff and then blackmail the people who did illegal stuff for a part of the money. but that might also be da…

Almost all of the tools used to do legal stuff can also be used to do illegal stuff. You think scam websites are deep down built on Linux and Apache like everything else?

Sure, but the article suggested that there were tools that were written with pulling particular scams as their purpose.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#102

Post by tomjakubowski » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

kradroy wrote: post #96

jsonne wrote: post #6

I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.

8 years ago I used NLP to generate fake user profile bios for a social media company (not one you've heard of). The SEO/marketing guys went nuts over it and started using it for everything. It was super effective and they had the money to scale it. Eventually Panda came out and hosed the rankings on the blogs/domains they used it for. Around the same time I discovered https://narrativescience.com/ and read about how…

This is a stab in the dark but the pattern fits: did the social media company no one has heard of happen to be TuneWiki?

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#103

Post by FireBeyond » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 8:46 PM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #75

duxup wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a local tech event. A few folks gave talks about their products / services and their marketing. A few included people straight up talking about paying "influencers" or pod casters, or youtubers, to mention their product or service and so forth. Nobody seemed to note anything about disclosing that it was an advertisement or not. I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mentio…

> I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mention it was paid or everyone understood that was the case but me .... but it never was actually spoken about. All major social media (Instagram, Youtube, ...) require you to disclose any promotions. It's absolutely normal in "old" media. I think that it's assumed if the audience was composed of actual business people.

A lot of "influencers" (I hate that phrase so much) like to play the vague game.

"Thanks, Club Med, for a great week!"

and consider that "disclosing the paid nature of the item".

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#104

Post by JustSomeNobody » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

social_quotient wrote: post #92

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make more sense is to build a certificate system around this that news organizations can use to declare an article is Fake News Free. Might be a nice business to start riding the Fake News Boom.

Taking this idea. What would be the hypothetical flow for the recent Bloomberg chip article? I’m sure it would have been published with the cert since it’s from Bloomberg but later when it turns out to be less than true or more inflammatory than intended. Do they lose their cert? Or maybe just the article has to persist with the cert rating? I love the idea, just curious how it works logistically.

Maybe something like:

Bloomberg registers with cert auth. They publish articles and each has a pending cert item (image?) on their page that is loaded from 3rd party cert auth. The cert auth uses algos to determine if it's fake or not and published results back to the placeholder.

Edit: Forgot to mention, please do take the idea. And good luck!

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#105

Post by learc83 » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #81

learc83 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the later accusations could have been targeted smears, or they could have been true. But if Dr. Ford was intentionally lying in an attempt to smear Kavanaugh, she was laying the groundwork for her accusation all the way back in 2012. That's a pretty far reaching conspiracy.

It could have been sincere yet wrong on her part, and an urgent targeted smear by others.

Sure it could have been, which is why I said "if Dr. Ford was intentionally lying".

If you believe that she was sincere though, I think it's much more likely that Kavanaugh was lying to protect himself than it was that an assault victim randomly mixed him up with her assaulter. From her story she knew him and had fairly prolonged close contact with him. It wasn't like she just caught a glimpse of him from a distance.

The mistaken identity defense was just a way for people to say they didn't believe the story without calling her a liar.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#106

Post by learc83 » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

ch4ck wrote: post #82

learc83 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what the experts they hired told them this is example of "Telling only part of the story, showing bias, spinning things". The experts NBC hired to conduct the demonstration insisted that the rockets wouldn't matter unless fuel spilled. They also told them that the explosion was sparked by a broken headlamp, not the rockets they added as part of the demonstration. Additionally, the demonstration was designed…

Q: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery? A: In principle yes, but: it wasn't Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; it was not a car but a bicycle; he didn't win it, but it was stolen from him.

Not addressing anything I said and posting an old joke about a Soviet radio station is a valid response?

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#107

Post by learc83 » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

TranceMan wrote: post #53

rapnie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling only part of the story, showing bias, spinning things. Surely. But fake news? Examples please..

CNN Fake Iraq War Newscast Footage https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=isMtxbPdvzg

It's not fake. He was in Saudi Arabia in the back of the Saudi Arabian hotel he said he was staying at.

From the linked article: "It looked like a studio shot because they are using studio lights, outside, at night. They are standing on a raised wooden frame built especially for their reports."

https://www.metabunk.org/debunked-cnns-fake-news-broadcasts-...

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#108

Post by ryanlol » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

blinky1456 wrote: post #29

strictnein wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article itself is pretty lazy too, like it was a paid placement. It mentions "Digital Shadows" nine times.

The way theregister.co.uk works is that along with their own writers, anyone can submit articles. They pick whether to publish it it/edit then publish. Most news sites do this, even the biggest and most respected. But I think they get a larger amount of their content this way, and consequentially some of it can be a bit self-promoty.

I'm pretty sure that John Leyden works for The Register. https://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/John-Leyden

I could be wrong, but that seems exceedingly unlikely given the amount of stories he authors. Very much seems like either he or The Register got paid for this article.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#109

Post by paulddraper » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #105

paulddraper wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could have been sincere yet wrong on her part, and an urgent targeted smear by others.

Sure it could have been, which is why I said "if Dr. Ford was intentionally lying". If you believe that she was sincere though, I think it's much more likely that Kavanaugh was lying to protect himself than it was that an assault victim randomly mixed him up with her assaulter. From her story she knew him and had fairly prolonged close contact with him. It wasn't like she just caught a glimpse of him from a distance.…

There's the identification during the event, and there's the identification many, many years later (even 2012 was still 30 years after the event).

> I think it's much more likely that Kavanaugh was lying to protect himself than it was that an assault victim randomly mixed him up with her assaulter.

I agree. And if it were 1982 that would weight heavily.

On the other hand, delaying charges for multiple decades, then bringing them out within a narrow several-week window that happens to have the greatest possible maximum political effect...what are the probabilities of underlying motivation?

Unfortunately, either way there are some incredulous events.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#110

Post by paulddraper » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:59 PM UTC

whyaduck wrote: post #95

paulddraper wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thermonuclear weapons also have been the single most effective peacekeeping tool in the history of the world.

That's a remarkably confident statement that's completely unprovable. I could just as easily posit easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, and many other things as more effective than h-bombs for bringing about the relative peace of the late 20th/early 21st century. Those particular things have the added benefit that they generally don't risk the side-effect of world annihilation.

> completely unprovable

Yes, it's challenging to answer with certainty.

Though "easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, etc." were not invented at almost the precise moment that all-out large scale wars ("world wars") on Earth ended.