Tag: detected
Leaked Documents Show Russians Boasted Just 1% of Fake Social Profiles are Detected
“The Russian operators of those accounts boast that they are detected by social networks only about 1 percent of the time, one document says.”
That claim, described here for the first time, drew alarm from former government officials and experts inside and outside social media companies contacted for this article. “Google and Meta and others are trying to stop this, and Russia is trying to get better. The figure that you are citing suggests that Russia is winning,” said Thomas Rid, a disinformation scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He added that the 1 percent claim was likely exaggerated or misleading.
The undated analysis of Russia’s effectiveness at boosting propaganda on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram and other social media platforms cites activity in late 2022 and was apparently presented to U.S. military leaders in recent months. It is part of a trove of documents circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. Air National Guard technician Jack Teixeira was charged Friday with taking and transmitting the classified papers, charges for which he faces 15 years in prison…
Many of the 10 current and former intelligence and tech safety specialists interviewed for this article cautioned that the Russian agency whose claims helped form the basis for the leaked document may have exaggerated its success rate.
The leaked document was apparently prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Cyber Command and Europe Command, which directs American military activities in Europe. “It refers to signals intelligence, which includes eavesdropping, but does not cite sources for its conclusions,” the Post reports, describing the document as offering “a rare candid assessment by U.S. intelligence of Russian disinformation operations.”
The assessment concludes that foreign bots “view, ‘like,’ subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists.” And the document says a Russian center’s disinformation network — working directly for Russia’s presidential administration — was still working on improvements as recently as late 2022 and expected to improve its ability to “promote pro-Russian narratives abroad.”
After Russia’s 2016 efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, social media companies stepped up their attempts to verify users, including through phone numbers. Russia responded, in at least one case, by buying SIM cards in bulk, which worked until companies spotted the pattern, employees said. The Russians have now turned to front companies that can acquire less detectable phone numbers, the document says.
A separate top-secret document from the same Discord trove summarized six specific influence campaigns that were operational or planned for later this year by a new Russian organization, the Center for Special Operations in Cyberspace. The new group is mainly targeting Ukraine’s regional allies, that document said. Those campaigns included one designed to spread the idea that U.S. officials were hiding vaccine side effects, intended to stoke divisions in the West.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bent Light in Deep Space Reveals One of the Biggest Black Holes Ever Detected
Holy smokes. A group of astronomers have found a black hole containing (checks notes) 30 billion times the mass of our Sun. That’s more than seven thousand times the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Uranium detected in package at Heathrow Airport – counter-terror police investigate
NASA’s InSight lander detected a meteoroid impact on Mars
NASA’s InSight lander may have had its last hurrah. Researchers have learned that a marsquake the lander detected in Mars’ Amazonis Planitia region on December 24th, 2021 was actually a meteoroid impact — the first time any mission has witnessed a crater forming on the planet. Scientists found out when they looked at before-and-after pictures from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) revealing a 492-foot gash in the landscape.
The meteoroid is believed to have been somewhere between 16 and 39 feet long. It would have burned up in Earth’s skies, but it was large enough to survive Mars’ extra-thin atmosphere. The impact was violent, digging a hole 70 feet deep and tossing debris as far as 23 miles away from the crater. It also exposed subsurface ice that hasn’t been seen so close to the martian equator before now. A sound adaptation of Insight’s data (below) shows just how “loud” the event was compared to Mars’ regular activity.
It took some time to confirm the event. A Malin Space Science Systems team used two of the MRO’s cameras (the black-and-white Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager) to spot the crater in February. Pictures from the color camera helped narrow down the impact to a 24-hour window.
Separately, a group has suggested that 20 of InSight’s roughly 1,300 detected marsquakes may be signs of magma. As Gizmodoexplains, the quakes’ spectral signature hints at a comparatively soft crust in Mars’ Cerberus Fossae region. Combined with dark dust, this hints that volcanic activity might have occurred on the planet within the past 50,000 years.
The discovery could help the scientific community understand Mars’ geologic timeline by defining the rate of craters appearing on the planet. It might also prove crucial to Mars colonists and explorers who may need the underground ice for sustenance and rocket fuel. Human visitors could carry fewer supplies, or extend their stays.
There’s a bittersweetness to this news. NASA previously warned that InSight couldn’t last much longer, and now expects the lander to shut down in six weeks as accumulating dust limits the effectiveness of its solar panels. That’s better than the end-of-summer cutoff the agency predicted this spring, but it could leave the meteorite detection as InSight’s last major accomplishment.
Huge, unusually powerful explosion in space just detected by scientists
In space, things frequently go boom.
And recently, on Oct. 9, astronomers observed an extraordinarily colossal boom. NASA’s Swift Observatory, which is specifically designed to spot the most powerful known explosions in the universe today — called gamma-ray bursts — detected an extremely strong such burst. Something wildly potent must produce these jets of energy that travel through space, and scientists say they’re caused by the collapse and explosion of enormous stars, events called supernovae.
For a star to go supernova, it must be quite massive — at least eight times the size of the sun. But for a supernova to produce the strongest type of gamma-ray burst, the star must be some 30 to 40 times the size of the sun. This new powerful detection, so rare that we’ll likely only observe something of this magnitude around once a decade, came from such a mighty star.
“It’s a very unique event,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable.
Importantly, you need not worry. This terrific explosion happened in a galaxy 2 billion light-years away. At such a distance, its energy, which has been traveling and spreading through space for eons, poses no danger to us. But we can easily, with satellites, detect it.
“It’s the equivalent of getting front row seats at a fireworks show,” Cendes explained.
(Gamma rays are on the same radiation spectrum as the likes of AM and FM radio, visible light you can see, and x-rays, though gamma rays have the most energy.)
“This is incredibly, incredibly rare.”
Astronomers have never seen a gamma-ray burst in our galactic neighborhood (meaning the local galaxies around us). That’s because stellar explosions themselves aren’t too common. A star in our Milky Way galaxy will go supernova around once a century. But a huge star, the type that’s needed to make an extremely bright and long (on the order of several minutes) gamma-ray burst, only explodes about once every million years in a medium-sized galaxy like ours, noted Cendes.
“This is incredibly, incredibly rare,” said Cendes.
Gamma-ray bursts are detected far away because there are hundreds of billions of galaxies out in the deep cosmos, teeming with stars. There are relatively few opportunities for such an event to happen near us, compared to the wider universe. (What’s more, to detect it you have to be facing the direction of the “funnel” of energy radiated into space by the blast.)
Credit: NASA / ESA /. M. Kornmesser
Because these gamma-ray bursts often happen many billions of light-years away, the instruments built to detect these signals are extremely sensitive. That’s another reason this detection, which was relatively “close,” was so intense and “bright.”
“It’s like pointing a telescope at the sun,” Cendes explained. “It saturated the detectors.” The blast “ranks among the most luminous events known,” noted NASA.
You might wonder what now happens to the exploded star after such a dramatic collapse and explosion. It likely transformed into a black hole. “Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion,” notes NASA.
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Credit: NASA / Swift / A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
Black holes are incredibly curious cosmic objects. As Mashable previously reported, black holes are places where matter has been crunched down into an intensely compact area. If Earth was (hypothetically) crushed into a black hole, it would be under an inch across. Yet the object would still be extremely massive, as it would contain the entirety of our planet’s mass. This results in a place with a gravitational pull so strong, not even light can escape. (Things with more mass have stronger gravitational pulls.)
Astronomers like Cendes are now watching the aftermath of the dramatic gamma-ray burst using powerful telescopes, like the Submillimeter Array radio telescope atop Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.
So the universe rolls on. A star dies. A black hole is born. And intelligent life some 2 billion light-years away detects it all happening.