The Morning After: US officials help take down AI-powered Russian bot farm with nearly 1,000 fake X accounts
The AI tool could generate text messages as well as images.
US officials and their allies have identified and taken down an artificial intelligence-powered Russian bot farm comprising almost 1,000 accounts. These accounts were able to spread disinformation and pro-Russian sentiments across X, formerly Twitter. The Justice Department has revealed the scheme was made possible by software created by a digital media department in RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet.
According to a cybersecurity advisory from the FBI, intelligence officers from the Netherlands, and cybersecurity authorities from Canada, it centered on a tool called Meliorator, which can create “authentic appearing social media personas en masse,” generate text messages as well as images and mirror disinformation from other bot personas. For example, one account with the name Ricardo Abbott, which claimed to be from Minneapolis, posted a video of Russian President Vladimir Putin justifying Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
The Justice Department is still tracing and trying to find all 968 accounts used by the Russian actors to disseminate false information. X has shared information with authorities on all the identified accounts and has already suspended them.
— Mat Smith
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We’re liveblogging Samsung Unpacked 2024
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Samsung’s next big event kicks off in a few hours. We’ll be covering all the announcements (and testing out devices), so tune into our liveblog. We expect to see the Galaxy Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6, but their updates could be minor, as well as Samsung’s newest wearable, the Galaxy Ring. If you want some insight into what to expect, you can read up on that right here.
Apple blog TUAW returns as an AI content farm
With not-so-new content from writers who haven’t worked there in more than a decade.
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A British boarding school will make students use old Nokia dumbphones
First-year students will only be able to make calls and texts.
Eton College, the elite historic British boarding school — with famous alumni Princes William and Harry, Ian Fleming and Tom Hiddleston — has instituted a new mobile phone policy for its first-year students starting in September. Those students will have to leave their smartphones at home and bring their SIM card to school to put in an old-school Nokia cell phone with a simple number pad, which can only make phone calls and send text messages.
