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X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

hindustantimes.com

61–70 of 328 posts

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#61
post #59

I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.

No need, X has already rolled the feature back. I assume because the boss didn't like what it uncovered.

No, it's live.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#62
post #2

is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign or is this really a foreign play or us people hiring ppl outside the country

> is there any technical reason why us accounts might be identified as foreign Speculation: they're resolving historical IP addresses against a current IP geolocation database. An IP which belonged to a US company in 2010 may have since been sold to a Nigerian ISP, but that doesn't mean that the user behind that IP in 2010 was actually in Nigeria.

I was going to speculate the same thing. Seems pretty likely... a lot of systems record information about when an account was created, and IP location correlations are period sensitive (at least some of them are... my college is most likely still using its /16 and hasn't moved outside the city where it was founded)

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#63
post #28

Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

I’ll take a stab: because twitter isn’t reality, it’s a microcosm. A tempest in a teapot. It’s something that if you step outside of, you realize it’s not the real world.

Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#65
post #28

Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall. Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.

I might have a very different reading of the parable of the cave to you? Can you elaborate? (At the risk of spoiling the joke)

I'm not author of parent.

My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.

If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.

I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#66

I assume the country of origin is detected based on IP address. These fakers will now create Azure VMs hosted in the US, then login to those VMs and use X from the VM. A lot of scammers disguise their location using this method.

X shows a "LOCK" icon when they are coming in VPN. To out them. Also, it shows which country's app store you installed your app. For this reason, when they use their mobile app, it will be outted that way.

Re: X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

#68
post #23
post #13

This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. The UK National Crime Agency uncovered a huge money laundering enterprise based on the kinds of crime that fly under the national security radar in most places.

> This is another piece of a mosaic that is going to reveal that grey zone warfare by Russia against the west has much larger scope than most people are aware of. Are you people ever going to let this idea go? Almost all of this activity is coming out of India, Israel, and Nigeria. Russia isn’t mentioned once in the article.

You're literally posting in the comments of an article that's about the ease of hiding geographical origin.
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