A report from December 2021 factors into the reasons political right groups pushed Elon Musk to take over Twitter and privatize it to help them silence the political left:

Politicians and commentators from all sides allege that Twitter’s algorithms amplify their opponents’ voices, or silence theirs. Policy makers and researchers have thus called for increased transparency on how algorithms influence exposure to political content on the platform. Based on a massive-scale experiment involving millions of Twitter users, a fine-grained analysis of political parties in seven countries, and 6.2 million news articles shared in the United States, this study carries out the most comprehensive audit of an algorithmic recommender system and its effects on political content. Results unveil that the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left.

In other words, a political right is operating on zero sum communication theory. When someone who disagrees with them is able to speak, the political right believes their own rights are being suppressed. Civil rights for all humans is treated as a loss to white nationalism, which rejects the idea of others having equality to them.

This helps explain the weird phenomenon where the political right get more leeway on Twitter than others to spread harm at the same time complaining that they are being over-censored. They want opponents silenced and until that happens they will argue that they are being censored by the very presence of any opposition.

If Martin Luther King were on Twitter today the political right would surely argue that until his account is completely silenced they will not be satisfied, much in the same way Tesla has told its black staff to “be more thick skinned” about abuse at work or quit.

Microsoft’s new report out on the very loud computer attacks during the Ukraine War highlight how the U.S. has been a target of aggression.

The chart above represents the geographic distribution of customers notified of all nation state threat activity, not just Russian, between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021. By June 2021, Ukraine was the second-most impacted country we observed, reflecting 19% of all notifications of nation-state threat activity that we provided to customers during that time, largely due to the ramp up of Russian activity.

When it says “by June 2021” this is in context of Russian invasion of Ukraine starting 24th February 2022 (a year later) — Internet-based attacks are linked all the way back to at least March of the prior year.

Cyber attacks may have been long-prepared ahead of time yet also came in secondary or even tertiary waves behind kinetic attempts at damage. For example Ukrtelecom fought off Russian cyber attacks at the end of March 2022. At the start of that same month a major communications tower in a civilian area of Kyiv had been fired upon with missiles.

Government and information technology services were flagged as the most targeted during Russia-aligned network intrusions or destructive attacks, although Microsoft did a weird thing by grouping Ukrainian finance, defense, transportation and more into an “Other” category… while listing Internet and defense as separate too.

Microsoft believes only a half-dozen Russian government (e.g. “sponsored”) groups launched more than two-hundred attacks against Ukraine. Thirty-seven were classified as destructive, however less than half of those were in a broad category of critical infrastructure.

More than 40% of the destructive attacks were aimed at organizations in critical infrastructure sectors that could have negative second-order effects on the government, military, economy, and people. Thirty-two percent of destructive incidents affected Ukrainian government organizations at the national, regional, and city levels.

Microsoft’s report doesn’t mention levels of capability. Elsewhere they’ve said things to the press like Russia “brought all their best actors to focus on this” without providing any real scale to measure against.

Russian attacks have been plagued with incompetence whether land, sea or air so it’s hard to tell if Microsoft is laughing at the technical ability of Russia or trying to be serious about a telco having a one-day 20% drop in service being as bad as it gets.

In other words, when people say things like Ukraine is doing better than expected, it’s probably more accurate to say Russian ability is more overblown than even a Tesla — riddled with fraud and in-fighting, a dumpster fire of the “strong man” myth (e.g. paper bear).

From an article praising the Google Pixel 6, here’s the before:

And the after:

Note the obvious contrast failure of AI (light hand vs dark hair and light straw vs dark clothing). Areas of contrast should be easiest for the algorithm to manage because the light/dark borders of a human hand classifier for example, yet they instead reveal flaws in the algorithm.

It’s important to highlight the image flaws here because the next point made in the article is that “Real Tone” is a “major rethink” about people with different complexions in order to get contrasts right (e.g. better handling of darker skin, related to an historic problem of racism in technology engineered for photography). It begs a question of why a white hand wasn’t outlined properly against dark black hair.

Also I’m just going to say that a people “eraser” leaving all the artifacts of life (cups on the table) is a very cynical filter for a “major rethink” team of engineers. They’re allegedly trying to see people more accurately while creating a feature that removes people entirely… put the two together and you get the worst chapters in history.

On the plus side perhaps the feature could generate a whole new class of “ghost” art from Pixel 6 owners to raise awareness: users who publish photos with everyone “erased” and things left behind to emphasize the horrors.

Genocide documentation comes to mind where tables set for dinner are left behind by people abruptly seized and exterminated… perhaps even Pixel could facilitate imagery for the 1838 Trail of Tears, which was initiated with house invasions at dinner time specifically so U.S. Soldiers could put as many Americans into internment camps as quickly as possible.

Also worth considering is how Google has run afoul of the Illinois privacy laws for image processing without consent, and whether more localized device processing is meant to help avoid prosecution.

Google’s face grouping tool, which sorts faces in the Google Photos app by similarity, runs afoul of Illinois’ biometric privacy law. The law requires companies to get user consent for the use of such technologies.

I’ve written here before about Civil War-era photograph manipulation, in the context of impersonation. Instead of asking the ages old question what if something you are can be faked or manipulated, Google brings forward an even older question of what if you and all your friends and family can be erased using technology.