Slashdot Mirror
NSF-Funded "Dark Web" to Battle Terrorists
BuzzSkyline writes "The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on 'advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyze extremist activities online.' The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
So when they get it wrong, and the police storm my front door instead of my neighbors, will it still be "cool"?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
...to out Dan Lyons as "Fake Steve."
Other than that, I'm afraid this is the sort of technology that's only "cool" when it isn't being used on you.
They can tell that my name is Mark Foley?
GEORGE BUSH IS A POOPY HEAD!
Pretty soon, you're going to get your comeuppance. You just wait.
Not to be confused with Darknet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet which is what I immediately thought from this article title.
And yet another reason why you should lock down your wifi!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Attention, NSF: Here's a better, cheaper solution - point all those @#$@#$%ing existing VIAGRA and mortgage spambots out there at these forums you're monitoring.
Either the terra'rists give up after the spamming, or they kill the spammers. Either way, we win.
...is:
Quis custodiet, ipsos custodes
- Juvenal
akad0nric0
This sentence no verb.
Change NSF to NSA, and the summary would make just as much sense...except "terrorist" would be defined as whatever the current politicians in power decide it to mean.
Space race, nuclear power, this kind of technology. Just goes to show, if you have a good idea, find a way to use it to further the war machine and political agendas and prepare to get buried in money. Can someone please figure out a way to weaponize a cure for cancer?
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
These jerks are the "extremists on line".
...that the Bush administration's definition of 'terrorist' includes Democrats, pot smokers, vegetarians, and people with two arms and two legs.
Uh, oh... It looks like all of us Anonymous Cowards are busted.
CowboyNeal
Gah! Well whoever wrote this article is more of a computer scientist and less of a writer, because he/she obviously is good at using REDUNDANCY :(
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
For those of us (like myself) that work closely with the banking industry, the phrase "NSF-Funded" produces quite a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Instead of posting anything anonymously yourself, just tell someone else to post it. There speling errors will not be the smae as your's and their sentence structure will be different.
... but they won't be able to tie it to him unless he also posts a lot of stuff non-anonymously.
Okay, they'll be able to group all of his posting as being posted by him
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
Oh no, looks like 4chan's in trouble!
I hope to GOD they didn't take the GEP gun, for the NSF's sake.
I should have known better than to cut and paste whole postings from the jihadi discussion fora to rebut them point by point. Now if that software can't tell from semantic structure, what I said and what I quoted, I can expect some visitors, look like. May be I will post in Slashdot and display some esoteric knowledge like the plural for forum is fora and may be that will throw a monkey's wrench into their Beysian filters. Ha ha ha.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This tech could destroy Slashdot as we know it!
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release. Sorta defeats the purpose of "anonymous" doesn't it? This is a clearly an attack on websites that do anonymous posting like on imageboards. I love it when they pull out the "terrorist" or "Child Pornography" cards as the scapegoat for what their really trying to do.
They will only catch the ignorant. Spam filters can't even block all spam, and we are suppose to believe the web can be filtered to find terrorists. Please, stop with lame projects.
here.
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
Shit!
Since all this information is readily available to anyone one with internet access, I don't think it's reasonable to call it spying. Seriously, if you post information on a message board where anyone in the whole entire fucking wold can read it, maybe you should expect that government officials and corporations can look at it a well!!!
Every TCP/IP packet has a source address and a destination address.
So all that the government would need would be the addresses of the web sites (no matter where they are located) and taps on the pipelines. You can either try to catch the stuff going OUT of your country or going INTO their country (if you can't just tap the line of that website).
That will tell you who, in your country, is going there.
As long as it isn't using encryption, you'll even get what is being read/posted.
If it is using encryption, you still should have the location of the guy reading/posting. Or you can try cracking the encryption.
Once you have the location of the guy, you get a warrant and put a keylogger on his box or whatever.
There's no need for all of this crap about "darkweb". Google can already tell you what is posted on what websites. If these guys are smart enough to beat the basics, they're smart enough to know NOT to use the Internet for point-to-point communications.
One man's "terrorist" is another man's "Freedom fighter".
The likely scenario is they have a "person of interest." One way or another, they have some correspondence from this person. (think search warrant, warrant for arrest, etc) Then they go backwards through the application and associate anonymous content to the person of interest. I don't see a logical way to go at it from the another direction.
What's so awful about the whole idea is the unlikely event the evidence, or the method used to collect it is ever scrutinized.
For those of you still convinced huntin' fer terrists from an arm chair is a good thing, please consider the following. Let's pretend Mrs. Clinton is the next president. She'll have the same powers as GWB. Is it still a good thing?
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. How fucking hard is that to read? Seriously? Every comment right now is on some bullshit tangent about hunting people down or other such nonsense, or how its impossible to figure out who it is without blah blah fucking blah. What it DOES say is that they can take a large ammount of anonymous information and tie it together to a single player. Not that it gives the identity of that player, but that it can link all the things that player has done. So they are still an anonymous player, they just have their anonymous works attributed to them as an anonymous individual. Learn to fucking read people before jumping to insane conclusions.
The best thing this could do would be to tie a group of anonymous sources together as coming from one source and then hope and pray you can get enough matches between that pool from the single anonymous source to a single identified source. Let's not forget computers don't give a rats ass who they work for, so the door swings both ways on this one. It can be used to catch dissenters (bad for freedom), terrorists (good for safety), and government/media misinformation agents (good for freedom).
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Analysts are hopeful that the technology now able to identify terrorists with 95% accuracy by their word usage and sentence structure will be able to be repurposed to identify trolls and banned users with equal facility. Funding for the transition to peaceful uses is expected to come from CowboyNeal and the makers of UBBthreads.
Call it HITLER Web, and be done with the bloody business.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It sure is nice of the younger generation, assembling their own shackles.
"...automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%..."
Well who created this?
is Abdul. I come from kingdom far away and have inheriteed moneys. I give you $1,000,000 if you please give me bank account information...etc.
SPAM should be fun to sort out and/or any spammers on blog comment sections.
Sig it.
"The project relies on 'advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyze extremist activities online."
Reminds me of something..."I'm ready, man, check it out. I am the ultimate badass! State of the badass art! You do NOT wanna fuck with me. Check it out!...Independently targeting particle beam phalanx, VWAP! Fry half a city with this puppy! We got tactical smart missiles, phase-plasma pulse rifles, RPGs! We got sonic, electronic ball-breakers! We got nukes, we got knives, sharp sticks..."
Uh... Daedelus/Icarus/Helios, anyone?
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Upon seeing activities of the our illustrious Imperialistic Cabal then it does not surpise me that this sort of program or the FBI's Carnivore program in use and the wiretapping with no judicial oversight our rights are shredded. "Those Who would trade liberty for security deserve neither"
so the
NSA can Byte me.
Che Guevarra
Sure you can crawl any information source and extrapolate anything you want out of it. I'd even be willing to believe the 95% accurate analysis, whatever. That's besides the point.
You can only extrapolate data you've read properly. The simplest of encryption and/or obfuscation schemes applied to this content would effectively protect against extrapolation. Sure, Big Brother can have software scrub the Net looking for suspicious content. But can they have software scrub the Net while applying decryption measures to everything found? While analyzing every image file for obfuscated content (or even something as simple as writing your terrorist plans on a piece of paper and scanning it in as an image)? While applying rot13 to every block of text found?
I would say no. The problem becomes computationally impossible at that point. There are theoretically infinite ways to hide, encrypt, or obfuscate data. To have a system check first for unhidden, unencrypted, un-obfuscated data, then also for each of those, is simply not doable unless one makes radical limitations to the format of the data itself.
I would say instead that this "Dark Web" will be invaluable in identifying characteristics of perfectly law-abiding forum posters, slashdotters, and so forth, and that the data gleaned will fetch a good price from directed marketeers, pharmaceutical companies, spammers, government bureaucracies, and other servants of the Dark Lord.
"The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
On the face of it, this is not that different from Amazon's Statistically Improbably Phrases, which have been around for at least several years now. Every brain is unique, and it's not surprising that each brain creates writings with some sort of statistically identifiable "signature". Especially intelligent people, who have a larger vocabulary and pose more threat to a state because of their leadership potential.
Surely organizations like NSA, with orders of magnitude more money to throw at such problems, have something better and tuned to identifying anonymous authors.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Back around 1776 there were a large number (about 20% of our population) of "Loyalists" who opposed our Independence.
If you had polled England at the time, and those Loyalists, you'd understand that the "terrorists" had control of the "colonies".
If England had won, every one of those "terrorists" who had signed their little "Declaration" would have been hanged. And their would have been rejoicing in the streets of the colonies.
The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which 'automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating "anonymous" content' with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release."
It is my understanding that there are so many Arab dialects that an Algerian and Syrian have a better chance of understanding each other in a common second language than trying to under each other's local dialect. If the language is really that fragmented, that alone cuts down the search space enormously. I venture to say this is true of many older languages that developed with small quirks on different sides of the local mountain range. Throw in link analysis, cross-referenced content, etc., and this doesn't seem so extraordinary.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I doubt that any self respecting terrorist is going to
expend resources making a web page that spiders can crawl.
Here's a hint:
Terrorist #1 sets up a WIFI home network with
limited external access and **no connection** to the
internet.
Non of the terrorists really want to know each other
since that would make them easier to find if one got caught.
All the other terrorists require is a GPS location relatively
close to the hot-spot. Not even the street address.
They park, or slow down,the car at the GPS coordinates, get some instructions
via WIFI ssh, and drive on.
How's a web spider going to find that?
The authorities would be better off looking for *extra powerful*
WIFI hot-spots.
Here's another hint:
Facsimile over dual channel FRS radio. Same as above
except the interchange is FAX.
Go get em boys!!!
This Dark Web description sounds good, it even uses "semantic" technology but stop and think how little progress Google has made into the semantic web compared to what they want to do, contrasted with the talent they have hired. Considder the description of this NSF tool again. I predict there will be another /. posting in just over a year talking about how the project didn't quite work out as expected.
Catcher in the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, Holden Caulfield
They just need to pull up their own employee roster to see who's largely responsible for world terrorism.
Of course, the young recruits are probably still too busy puffing their chests smartly while humming the "Alias" theme music while quietly wishing that the NSA was the one which received the big Hollywood PR/propaganda effort to notice such sticky details as who was responsible for what. But what are a few sticky details? M's and W's all look the same.
-FL
...And the locals would have welcomed the British with open arms...
You really figure the NSF is going to blow a few million on trying to figure out who said "The President has his head up his ass!" on /. as an AC?
What for? Who cares? Sounds kind of weirdly paranoid. Or like someone has delusions of being way more important and influential than he is.
I mean, who seriously thinks that anything posted anonymously on random Internet message boards can possibly have any important political effect? As if J. Random Teenager posting from the school computer is going to suddenly have the Big Insight that connects Bush, The War on Terror, General Electric, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, and assorted Nazi schemes to achieve immortality for the elite by collecting the blood of virgins in secret Satanic rituals, and then expose the whole hideous plan for all to see on a World o' Warcraft forum. And only then will Congress, the Supreme Court, 50 state governors, and the entire mainstream media wake up. 'Cause, you know, otherwise all those grown-ups are just to damn stupid to understand the subtle connections that illuminate the Secret Evil Plan.
Sheesh. One might as well argue that the CIA is going to hunt down and secretly kill people who scrawl "BUSH SUXS!" on the doors of public bathroom stalls. Like they care. Like anyone cares.
All your base are belong to Iran.
The U.S.A. has collapsed. Your elected criminals in Washington, D.C. have decided to NOT inform you of this event.
Good luck.
Does it adhear to web standards and respect /robots.txt ?
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
Right. Meantime, if I try to translate a letter written to me by a Russian business contact, whether I'm using babelfish or whatever hip new translator app, it makes us sound like retarded 8 year-olds to each other.
I had a sucky sig.
Why bother? Why not just make a press release claiming that you can do this when you can't. Then you can (1) get government funding and (2) you might even serve a useful purpose by disrupting communications between terrorists dumb enough to believe the (false) claim.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I just ran it on various Anonymous Coward posts on Slashdot. The 5% error is easy enough to account for. Take a look, remembering that the categories are non-exclusive:
88% Linux supporters
15% Mac Zealots
01% Microsoft Shills
46% Live with Mom
32% Live with Grandma
80% iPod People
01% Brown Zunes
19% Tone Deaf
95% Male
05% Female
See how easy it is to filter out the bad data?
So, how long do you think it will take before they realize that someone wishing to avoid that type of semantic tagging will use babelfish (etc.) to translate their comments to and back from a different language so writeprint is profiling a software package?
The underlying principle behind CAPTCHAs can be used to defeat this system.
In a CAPTCHA, information is encoded in a medium that is only understandable by humans. Machines would be unable to intercept a message encoded as a CAPTCHA. This way, nothing could be collected.
A simplified example of that would be displaying the contents a forum post/thread as a rendered image instead of plain text. Of course the idea can be improved a lot, but that's the basic principle.
An anonymity wise forum software can be easily created with that in mind. If the idea spreads, there will be nothing left for the "dark spider".
Even if the CAPTCHA model is badly designed or breaks in a way that allows the "dark spider" to extract the text though some AI technique, the extraction alone would make the whole "dark web" unfeasible due to the massive computational resources that would be required (i.e. millions of pages to decode).
Also, natural language obfuscation techniques could be applied so the software is unable to pinpoint the specific pattern that ties anonymous posts to non-anonymous posts. This way, even if the spider beats the CAPTCHA model, it would still be unable to identify the anonymous poster.
Well, my conclusion is someone that is willing to spend considerable money and resources to remain anonymous (i.e. terrorists) will still be able to remain anonymous. The problem is that the average user might not have the same luck. Who would've thought!
The oft-repeated phrase is rather stupid. "Terrorist" is about methods (means) — targeting civilians. "Freedom fighter" is about goals (aims) — achieving a "freedom" of some sort or another.
There is not contradiction — one can be both in the same person's opinion. See also False Dichotomy...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Fears of the 5% error rate are overblown! If you're white, and not muslim, you have nothing to worry about!
Apparently this is a project at the "Artificial Intelligence Lab" at the U. of Arizona. Definitely a case of "artificial intelligence is for those without the natural kind" -- this lab is part of the MIS department in the School of Business and Management at the U. of A. -- it has nothing to do with science.
(I went to the U. of A., in the CS department which is part of the School of Arts and Sciences. The MIS (management information systems) program was well known as a joke and farce. Unfortunately a joke and farce with lots of money.)
SOME of the other 5% will come from (or, alternatively, maybe the FIRST 95% comes from) use of Visual Analytics:
http://www.visualanalytics.com/
Hell, just see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=visual+analytics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
The thing is, I wonder if that NY Times (I think it was NYT) reporter/columnist under bushwhack/assault for "divulging" sensitive collection techniques to the "ter'rists" knew of Visual Analytics and could have shielded himself from uncouth assault.
I am SURE that universities and various stealthy government entities have comparable capabilities or enhanced code, and some probably even work WITH Visual Analytics. It's a POWERFUL and kinda neat tool. So long as it's not abused.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The idea that you need special software and a complex AI to detect and trace terrorists or their supporters is stupid. You can easily find and trace them; they have websites that air their beheading videos and they frequently post their opinions without using any significant anonymization.
"Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona" may enjoy the funding and all the goodies and fame that comes with it, but its effectiveness in curtailing terrorism is null. The false positives generated are very worrisome. False accusations may not be important to him, but think of labeling someone HIV+ve based on a sensitive but nonspecific test. Inocent individuals have to go thru a complex and stressfull process just because of his project.
I can tell you that terrorist groups are politically and economically "stable" in the middle east, and they have no shortage of funding even from US based individuals. Their funding is not always as a direct transfer but frequently as small amounts of cash, buying an apartment or a car from a specific company, donating to a civil organization who actually funds and/or supports the families of people active in those groups, etc...
People who sympathize with these terrorist groups still go to the US. It is actually much easier for these individuals to get positions in the US since they have better connections based on their religious and political affiliations. On the other hand and not infrequently honest people get filtered by the system.
They could do a much better job in many other ways to identify and cut the funding of these groups.
Isn't creating a system to monitor the net for extremeist acts an extremest act in and of itself?
Obviously what this tool will do is link different anonymous content by the same creator.
... read it. You can *talk* anonymous all you want, about anything you want. You cannot threaten 15-year olds into blowing up their family like those "freedom fighters" in algeria did last week. And please nobody try to make the point that perhaps it was a joke.
So if the same guy posts "kill all infidels" and includes instructions on jihadforpussies.com and writes about pink ladies underwear on getithere.com and reviews "movies" at grannysvideos.com they can go track his credit records for pink underwear instead of trying to figure out what internet cafe he posted his "big boy" stuff from.
This does not mean identifying every peace of content by name, just relating stuff by author. Perhaps then we'll find bin laden is really michael jackson after *another* nosejob.
And if you put stuff online for people to read, please accept that people might, you know
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Another 'its for the children' type of maneuver.
This should scare anyone that likes their right to free speech. And yes, even terrorists should have the right to *speak*. If you restrict their right to speak, its not much of a stretch to restrict yours too.
Be afraid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah, cool, 1 in 20 of the people identified as "terrorists" by this program will not even have created the content which led to their identification as terrorists.
Of course, the linking "creating particular content" to actually being a terrorist is a much harder problem than identifying the creators of "anonymous" internet content, so the actual overall system error rate is goign to be much higher than just that 1 in 20.
I'm very disturbed that a university would think of this as something to brag about. So much for colleges as a haven for liberals...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
NSF-Funded?
Ohhhh... that NSF. I couldn't figure out how my bad cheques (Insufficient Funds) were going to fund the War on Terrorism.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
That there is a direct correlation between the slashdotters that bitch and moan about the government trying to do something about preventing terrorist attacks and the slasdotters that bitch and moan that nothing was done to prevent an attack after one happens.
Of course they will all be of the opinion that the government did it wrong. As if the CIAFBIHSO should be reading Slashdot to learn how to effectively deal with terrorists. Oh...wait....that's what most slashdotters believe.
except "terrorist" would be defined as whatever the current politicians in power decide it to mean.
The current terminology is "potential terrorist", a category that includes everyone. The implementers mean it too.
Welcome to the new Constantinople, a power without peers, knowledge without truth, laws without justice and wealth without dignity. With tools like this the current power controls the future and the past. Dissidence will be impossible and change overs will only occur by coup. Without privacy betrayal will be complete and none will be free or safe.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
(English -> Russian ->English)
Thus, how long you think they they will accept before they they achieve that someone desiring avoiding that type of semantic to mark will use babelfish (etc.) to transfer their commentaries to and rear from differently the language therefore writeprint does shape the batch of programs?
So they all came to Canada, instead! Thanks a lot for that. We've had royalty we don't care about on our strangely-coloured money ever since.
Seriously though, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The Mujahedeen (spelling?) were terrorists to the Soviets and heroes to the people of Afghanistan and to the US, which bankrolled them. Today, those same freedom fighters are now terrorists (Taliban.)
Identify this!
I took my dog to the range. He looked disappointed (and not a little unsuprised) when I shot him.
After extensive research, I have determined that the biggest nest of terrorists are all concentrated in one zip code area of the US. Sure, there are some small fry here and there, but to get the viper, you need to get the head. The area where the biggest planners and schemers get together and plot their nefarious skull dullgery is in zipcode 10005. They should concentrate all their searches there, and capture the financiers of these various terrorist networks. Their evil knows no bounds, no crime is too petty or too severe for them to not commit, they will perpetrate any act-theft, murder, assassination, genocide- anything at all, they don't care, in the name of their unholy and bloodthirsty religion, the worship of the false god mammon.
Our ideas of "cool" differ in extremely fundamental ways. Good to know. Usually someone might say something is "cool" and I might think "wow that's complete crap", but it's actually as if I have found my perfect opposite here. Congratulations.
I like music
by Anonymous Coward (probability 96% kDR_11k(778916), 4% CowboyNeal)
I, for one, welcome our new prescient overlords.
I just don't get it. Why do they keep announcing these things?! You'd think they don't want terrorists to use the Internet or something. It's either bullshit or bullshit. Otherwise these idiots are committing treason! Or does even the top spy agency prefer vaporware to working systems? Or maybe they want them to use crypto so they can easily detect their streams?? The only thing worse than security theater is when something that sounds like real security is blabbed to the point you realize something must be wrong with it.
Since terrorism at its root is a matter of ideas, concepts, worldviews, etc., any move you make against terrorism is necessarily also a move against freedom of thought, expression, privacy and justice.
are you aware of any incidents involving colonists in 1776 blowing up markets full of children?
I'm pretty sure nothing of the sort happened, but i'm willing to hear evidence to the contrary.
Those were greatly less "evolved" times, and yet, my impression is that those at the forefront of political dissent were vastly more humane in spreading their message.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I would be all cool with that 1984 stuff, if homo sapiens was at a level where the average individual was smart enough to handle this responsibly, fairly, and produce useful results out of it, versus take unfair advantage for side activities.
Which we know is laughable for the current evolutionary stage of the homo sapiens. In fact, we've apparently built and surrounded ourselves with technologies allowing us to damage ourselves far beyond what we can comprehend with our little brains.
Who is this Dark Web technology supposed to stop? The 12 year old Susie terrorist wanna-be? I wanna see them crawl past beyond a plain basic authentication dialog with an average password. Hell, it probably will even miss ROT-13 encoded text.
Will Dark Web be crawling around, brute-force attacking our servers, trying to get at out protected content? Who the hell is this good for anyway, except the contractors who will walk away richer.
makes me want to blow up... a party balloon. I mean, I really want to shoot some [kettle] one [vodka].
Analyze that sentiment, Bitches. Free speech rules!
Back in 1776, the terrorist were organized military fighting organized military. Can you seriously see no difference in fighting a war and blowing up random stranger walking down the streets hoping it is a soldier? Do you seriously think that stocking arms, ammunition, and other supplies or hiding in a church because you know the other side won't go there is comparable to fighting in the open?
I would agree if the insurgents would act in a military manor. but as of yet, they are completely happy with killing innocent people (iraqis, reporters, medical workers, people attempting to just live their lives) to show their "outrage" at the occupying forces. This isn't comparable by any means to a revolution in 1776.
Sorry for actually RTFA, I know that's frowned upon here -- but I had to call you out on your poor, exaggerated, sensationalized example.
The software in question doesn't flag people as terrorists, it merely provides info into their previous postings.
Writeprint... can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.
The actual 'flagging' of terrorists happens with their other software.
Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place.
What this means is that in 1,000,000 posters, the Dark Web's tracking software (this is NOT the software with 95% accuracy -- it's accuracy is undisclosed) will probably trawl through the forum and flag some arbitrary number of posters (not 5% flat) who may 'potentially' be terrorists based on dangerous keywords (e.g. kill, infidel), semantics and/or other criteria. Then, they will run Writeprint (THE software with 95% accuracy) to look up the previous postings of these posters, which may possibly be under separate or anonymous accounts to look for more details. They can then look over the entirety (with a theoretical 95% degree accuracy, so it will either incorrectly match one of their postings or miss one of their postings 5% of the time) of all that posters postings to see whether they actually pose a potential terrorist threat, and that is the point where you can actually get labeled a terrorist.
Thus out of 1,000,000 posters, Dark Web may not even detect a single terrorist threat, or it may detect 1,000,000 -- but you can't estimate that number because it is dependent on their "complex tracking software"/"Web spiders" (which we are given no statistics about), the actual messages contained on the forum (e.g. it probably will not flag Slashdot discussions about Free Pascal 2.2 with 100% reliability, but it may accidentally mistake Apple fanboyism for religious extremism), and follow-up by the individuals who analyze the 'flagged' messaged (which is the time when the '1. Evade Dark Web 2. Destroy Infidels 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!' plans get separated from the 'Deceptions TERRORIZE!' plans).
I'm all for criticizing authoritarian government -- but get the facts strait first and keep the sensationalism to a minimum mmm k?
This will be great for you folks crazy enough to use Gmail and think for a second you have any privacy when doing so.
It's cool when the NSF does it to monitor terrorists. When the FBI does it to monitor everyone, though, it's considered "fascist". Go figure.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
"Cultural context" is your problem.
Your idea of "military" and "terror" has some Roman_empire-medieval_knight-EuroAmerican background; I mean the idea of putting all your men on the field and combat the enemy legions.
I bet in some cultures what you call "terror" is totally acceptable as normal methods of fighting ones enemy.
The other factor is that in case of some terrorist terror is not a way of choice but the only way that could lead to their goal, as they can not compare their military potential to the potential of oppressor. How could IRA or ETA buy a squad of tanks or modern military aircraft?
It is not that I support IRA or ETA blowing up civilians; but I could imagine that is USA invaded my country (in "peace mission", "friendly aid" or whatsoever) many people would not hesitate to fight US troops in "terrorist" way - as unfortunately F18 is not in stock at every grocery. Perhaps some members of my national minority in USA would do "acts of terror" on American soil is such a case.
So what happens to Writeprint when it crawls /b/?
Yeah, you can't really cite Deus Ex yet: we're still catching up on the Nanotech plague. Once we've got a 'Gray Goo' scenario a la Eric Drexler, then yes, you'll be able to pull that one.
http://xkcd.com/313/
I think the proper way to put it is "I for one welcome our British overlords".
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I think the teh answer random crap is people will just fnord learn to modify writing style their.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Anyone who is even casually acquainted with recent papers in semantic extraction, clustering, relevance, ambiguity resolution, et al knows that a claim of 95% accuracy is utter bullshit.
But their "terrorists" as you inaccurately call them where locals, not foreigners. Our terrorists (where terrorists means groups/individuals using terror tactics) are outsiders. Your connection isn't interesting, it's wrong and most likely motivated by sophomoric partisanship.
/. equivalent of "wrong/disagree". OR put on your grown up pants and realize that there is a world outside of Bush (or at least i hope there will be!). /voted for Gore and Kerry, will vote for whichever Dem gets the nom /served my 4 years and would have done more but for a medical problem /despised Bush since 98 when i had the misfortune of living in Texass
There is a difference between a rebel and terrorist, *if* the speaker is using the terms *honestly*. Terrorism, terrorist tactics, have a specific meaning, it doesn't mean "military activity by people we dislike". Rebels generally give a stand up fight, they are a defacto army. Terrorist aim to change policy through inciting fear (terror). 9/11 is a shining example. We were terrified, and we changed our policies.... A rebel army would do things like attack a loyalist munitions depot, seize radio stations, capture real estate etc. Terrorists do things like poisoning water supplies, setting off bombs in places where people usually feel safe (bus stops, market squares, night clubs). This is not to say that rebels and loyalist types won't use terror tactics.
England couldn't have won for the same reason we can't win in Iraq. The enemy is the population, it wasn't initially, but terrorist groups and religious types made it so. Bush didn't read The Prince.
My point is that terrorist and rebel are NOT RELATIVE TERMS. *Our* revolution, *their* rebellion... those are relative. Terrorism is not relative, it has a specific meaning. It has a real and functional, objective meaning. If England called us terrorists, they would have been dishonest. If our revolutionaries were throwing pipe bombs into crowds in London, that would be terrorism. If we misuse the terms we dilute their meaning and effect. That causes ambiguity, ambiguity makes manipulation easier and communication harder.
That's why it grinds my oats when someone says "you can't have a war against terrorism because it's a tactic, not a person". That's a sophomoric claim. Terrorism refers to people in the same way that Catholicism refers to people that are Catholic. AQ is a part of terrorism, just ONE PART. "The War against Terror" (tWAt) is a war against all the groups that use terrorism. "The war against" metaphor is stupid and needs replacing. But efforts to say that terrorism is a tactic and can't be killed/beaten is misleading. Terrorism is not a monolithic unit like a government, but it still consists of people. It might be more precise to say "War against Terrorists".
But be a good little partisan and call me names like neocon, sheeple, chickenhawk or whatever will impress your friends and avoid being objective. Mod me down as troll or flamebait since that is the
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
...And the locals would have welcomed the British, opening fire with whatever arms they could get their hands on... There, fixed it for you.Seems like we'll be getting more of those. It worked in the 70s, and now they have fancy computer programs to make their "evidence" sound more scientific.
I wish that was my problem. Unfortunately it isn't. I picked puting all their men on the battlefield and going head to head only because that is what they did at the time. Even setting up sniper positions and doing smallish skirmish raids would be acceptable when the target is military in origin.
Thats the difference between terrorist and insurgents or a revolution. Terrorist who are masquerading as insurgents in Iraq aren't picking targets of military value. They are content with gassing a market because it is open and serving the people and making them look bad. They are content with blowing up muslum weddings and killing the groom or bride 2 minutes after they are married because the building was repaired by foreign workers. You have IEDs blowing up in the streets injuring or maiming innocents civilians just to have another go when emergency workers show up to help them. This is in no way a revolution. It is the attempt to impose their will by terrorizing the public into not resisting to it. If they win, you would have a captive citizenry who is afraid of their government not supportive of them.
It is common knowledge that a good portion of the problems in Iraq are from outsiders instigating the situation. Instigation in itself isn't necessarily the problem either. It is finding anyone who is content to just survive as a legitimate target that the so called insurgents are going after. If the insurgents were picking military targets and not attempting to terrorize the public into submission, I wouldn't care about them.
And to the point of our security, you don't want a world where terrorist acts are the norm for effecting political change. At some point, even the establishment who was just evicted from power would see it as an option to inflict their will. Could you imagine that philosophy in the US? The dems blow people up to get elected so the republicans do so instead of campaigning the very next election? They are already spending more to campaign then some countries spend on their entire military. Think about a world where this money is better served in buying bombs to use on people just trying to stay alive.
I would bet that is the fighting was consistantly directed at the enemy, it wouldn't be called terror. To me, terror is more about who you go after to get your political justifications then it is about your tactics. Blowing people up and saying you won't do it anymore if the government changes a law or gives more power to some political group or whatever is terror. Sticking to attacking your enemies and not using people who aren't involved in the mess as pawns in order to get the government's attention isn't a legitimate way of doing things. You wouldn't ever want it to be.
In Vietnam, they didn't have all the advanced stuff out military does. In Korea, the same could be said to some extent. But again, I would caution including innocent civilians as targets with an insurgency. There is a difference in a gorilla warfare and terrorism.
Nowadays we call them "Dubya Humpers".
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
In the scenario I described, out of a million internet users, the system turns up 50,000 only 19 of whom are terrorists, but all of whom are now under suspicion.
True; however, this might be argued as reasonable suspicion... and therefore, grounds for obtaining a warrant to take a slightly more intrusive but still covert look at them (such as a pen tap register) to get more data, which might allow for an second pass test of 99.44% accuracy (both versus false positive and false negatives). If the second test's accuracy is independent of the first, there's only around a 9% chance of any of the guilty escaping the dragnet; call it one more getting away via false negative. So, we have 18 of the original 20 terrorists, and some 280 innocent suspects. That's almost to the point where skilled human effort, instead of automated computer testing, might be worthwhile.
It's a tool, like a hammer. It can be used stupidly, isn't guaranteed to work every time, and can be abused and turned against those it was created to protect — especially by idiots for who having a hammer makes everything look like a nail. Those are real dangers. But that is a reason for caution in use, as opposed to ruling it out.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I mean sure, it sounds like a good idea, teaming up with an alien symbiote to make this "dark web" thing, but before you know it the symbiote is going to want to start running the show...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
from the article: "They can put booby-traps in their Web forums," Chen explains, "and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines." This sounds like total BS!
Browsing posts >3, no-one's read the papers.
They don't "troll the web". they ide
ntify zites that are "nown tererist angouts"
+ IRC &c, 'n wade trhough 'em.
'course, question is, who getz to 'cide who's a terrist?
'n ifn youse read them rticles, then youse'd be nowin the
gramer in thisn' msg.
Hey does anyone have some bomb making instructions so we can go after the server farms where they
operate this system from?
Me and my friends who stand in front of logging trucks trying to save the last vestiges of
natural eco-systems are already labelled certified eco-terrorists, so what is there to lose?
Me and my friends who oppose global free trade organizations before global high environmental and
labour standards are in place are already labeled dangerous anarchists.
Noam Chomsky is now a known associate of Osama Dustbin Laden, so I guess he's toast.
George Bush is a competent barbecue-steak-flipper from Texas who through the magic of
owned media, owned judges, transnational corporate power, and cultural self-hypnosis
has become the ultimate example of the Peter Principle.
I'm working on a theory that ridicule is the most effective weapon against the current
United States regime. I spit in your general direction, U.S. pig dogs. (with
no disrespect meant to pigs or dogs.)
My GPS coordinates: 38 degrees 53' 50.76"" N 77 degrees 02' 11.79"" W
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Sorry, no moral equivalence. Throwing tea into the sea is a lot different from blowing up schools and restaurants and decapitating people.
Secret services has always been and will always be doing the similar kind of work, Nixon was in-famously quoted for seeing CIA as a bunch of idiots: 'What are these 400 hundred guys doing? They just spend their days reading newspapers....' or something like that. So there always was and will be such a thing. But why was it disclosed? Ask you this, what may me the reasons? Aren't you discussing this news, giving your views and in the meantime somebody/something may be reading and analysing your responses? And not only here on Slashdot, but globally (or do you see some advantage of telling anybody openly "I am going to analyze you now, please behave as you do normally."?)