• Safeguarding Drones, Robotic Cars against Cyberattacks

    Robotic vehicles like Amazon delivery drones or Mars rovers can be hacked more easily than people may think, new research finds. Researchers designed three types of stealth attack on robotic vehicles that caused the machines to crash, miss their targets or complete their missions much later than scheduled.

  • You Can Join the Effort to Expose Twitter Bots

    In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.

  • Social Media and the Populist Moment

    Many people, especially of the progressive persuasion, accept the “narrative that invokes the ‘sewer’ of social media to explain everything from climate-change skepticism to anti-immigration sentiment, portrays Russian trolls and YouTube stars as the crucial actors of the populist era,” Ross Douthat writes. Studies show, however, that because educated liberals themselves spend more time on the internet, they assume, mistakenly, that people who support populist positions are equally internet-influenced. Secondly, and more importantly, this view downgrades the obvious real-world forces driving populism’s appeal.

  • Senators Seek to Pass Russia Sanctions Bill to Deter Election Interference Before End of Year

    U.S. Senators are seeking to pass a bipartisan bill before the end of the year that would enable the imposition of new sanctions on Russia if it interferes in U.S. elections. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) said on 21 November that he is among members of the upper house of Congress who are pushing to get the sanction bill into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

  • Is It Time for a U.S. Cyber Academy?

    Cybersecurity is a critical threat to national security. American is one of the most technologically advanced, and technologically dependent, nations on Earth. Gregory Conti writes that our adversaries know and exploit this. “To change the tide, we need to create a service academy dedicated to cybersecurity and cyber operations. This idea isn’t new, but the need is critical,” he writes.

  • What Trump Really Wanted from Ukraine Was Not about Enemies

    What President Donald Trump wanted most from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had les to do with Joe Biden and everything to do with exonerating Russia from 2016 election meddling and pinning the blame on the Democrats and Ukraine, the historian Allan Lichtman writes in The Hill. “This conspiracy theory would serve the dual purpose of clearing Russian President Vladimir Putin from responsibility for intervening in the 2016 election and proving that Trump won the White House without Russia.”

  • FCC Bans Use of Federal Funds in Purchases of Chinese Telecom

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on 22 November blocked U.S. telecommunications providers from using an $8.5 billion subsidy fund – the FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) — to buy Chinese-made telecommunications gear deemed a national security threat to critical infrastructure. The U.S. said that given Huawei and ZTE’s close relationship and legal obligations to the Chinese government, their gear poses a threat to telecommunications critical infrastructure, as well as to national security.

  • The Case That Could Hand the Future to China

    What would the future look like if China leads 5G technology? We should contemplate this question because, as Mercy Kuo writes, fifth-generation cellular network technology, or 5G, will transform our daily lives with such inventions as autonomous-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and smart cities. If we want to maintain U.S. technology leadership and protect our values, we should be clear-eyed about the perilous consequences that could come with losing our unique lead.”

  • It’s Not Only Jeremy Corbyn’s Mob that Welcomes Anti-Semites. It’s the Whole Bourgeois Left

    “On a scale of one to 10, how much would it surprise you that the Labour Party’s new poster boy, the young activist featured prominently in its election campaign material, is a semi-literate anti-Semite?” Rod Liddle asks in The Times. “I think, if you’ve been watching carefully these past few years, the score is probably around the two to three area.”

  • Nazi Symbols and Racist Memes: Combating School Intolerance

    The number of Americans between the ages of 15 and 21 who saw extremist content online jumped by about 20 percent, to 70.2 percent from 58.3 percent, between 2013 and 2016, according to a new study. As more such material spills from the web to young people and into classrooms nationwide, educators increasingly find themselves under pressure to combat this new front of hate. Many educators say they feel ill-equipped to recognize what students absorb from the web, much less to address it.

  • Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies

    Scientists have been trying hard to be able to predict earthquakes, because accurately predicting an earthquake would save lives, decrease property damage, and allow people to have some measure of control over one of nature’s most frightening and unpredictable events. Scientific predictions of the location and time of specific tremors are modest in scope – which have created an opening for earthquake conspiracy theorists who “claim that they have discovered the key to accurate quake prediction, as well as the hidden secrets behind why these tremors happen,” Anna Merlan writes.

  • The “fictional narrative” that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 U.S. election “advance[s] Russian interests”: Fiona Hill

    Fiona Hill, who until July this year was the National Security Council’s top Russia adviser, on Thursday told the House Intelligence Committee that it is a “fictional narrative” that Ukraine, and not Russia, meddled in the 2016 U.S. election that Trump won. “The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016,” Hill said. “It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.” Hill pleaded with the Intelligence panel, “In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

  • Flaw in iVote System Used in Australian Election

    Flaws in the iVote internet and telephone voting system used in the 2019 New South Wales election could have made it vulnerable to undetectable voter fraud, a new report has revealed. A new report has shown how the iVote system suffers from an error in its verification process that could allow the verification of votes to be “tricked”, meaning some valid votes could be converted into invalid ones, and not counted.

  • Who's Responsible When Your Car Gets Hacked?

    In the future, when cars can drive themselves, grand theft auto might involve a few keystrokes and a well-placed patch of bad computer code. At that point, who will be liable for the damages caused by a hacker with remote control of a 3,000-pound vehicle?

  • Secure Data Transmission with Ultrasound

    Due to the Internet of Things (IoT), an increasing number of devices have learned to communicate with each other. Ultrasound communication is an entirely new method for data exchange between IoT devices and mobile phones. Researchers have now developed a first open communication protocol including an open-source development kit for ultrasound communication which makes near-field communication safer.