Archive for the ‘Pepe The Frog’ Category

Miami is still far from being the Bitcoin capital of America – Fast Company

In January 2021, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez took to Twitter to declare his city the new cryptocurrency mecca. The City of Miami believes in #Bitcoin, he tweeted, and Im working day and night to turn Miami into a hub for crypto innovation.

Those werent just empty words: That same year, Suarez launched MiamiCoin, a crypto coin for the city that generated $5 million for the city since its launch. And with no state income tax and a corporate tax rate of just 5.5%, it wasnt hard to see the appeal a place thats nicknamed The Magic City might have to a still-fledgeling industry that is sometimes itself accused of magical thinking. And its sort of working: For instance, crypto giant Blockchain.com left New York City and leased a massive office in the city earlier this year.

There is an incentive for any place to be the hot new place, economist Jodi Beggs told Fast Company. If, for no other reason, then your branding city is associated with a hot new thing. And, honestly, thats kind of Miamis jam, right?

Earlier this month, at a kick-off event for Bitcoin 2022, the worlds largest Bitcoin convention thats held in Miami, Suarez was at it again. Proudly posing in front of the citys prized new art piece, a 3,000-pound statue of an android-esque bull that the Miami Herald astutely pointed out looks like a giant Transformer, the mayor exclaimed that we need to integrate Bitcoin into every aspect of our society.

But if the current state of Miamis Bitcoin integration is any indication of what a crypto city might look like, its safe to say both the concept and the city have a long way to go.

Beggs, who has previous experience in the crypto analytics space, grew up outside the city and is very familiar with the Miami ethos that has begun attracting interest from the crypto world.

There was already somewhat of a culture of, hey, were going to go do our somewhat non-traditional finance activity where the weathers nice. And I think that the finance players taking their Bitcoin business to Miami is completely within that same, she says.

Miamis flirtations with the crypto business is noticeable everywhere you look. Immediately upon entering the city from the airport, youre greeted with billboards advertising NFT lines; its not uncommon to see a Bitcoin ATM next to a regular one while driving around the city. (Beggs says that the idea of a Bitcoin ATM doesnt even make sense: The whole point of crypto is that you dont need any ATMs.)

The reality of Miamis blockchain-centric ambitions, though, doesnt live up to the hype radiating from Suarezs tweets. Miami is fifth in the country for crypto investment, according to Bloomberg. San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Albany all outrank it in terms of money generated from crypto investment deals. Also, the vaunted MiamiCoin has seen poor returns for early adopters. According to CoinMarketCap, the coin peaked at $0.05 last September. Its currently hovering around $0.002, which makes its future feel hazy at best. (Mayor Suarezs office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making matters worse, this years Bitcoin 2022 wasnt the slam dunk that many seemed to expect it to be. The convention had a lukewarm reception among some of Bitcoins biggest diehards. Mr. Whale, a cryptocurrency-tracking Twitter account with half a million followers, declared the event a complete failure. Not only were over 70% of the seats empty, but many big guests like [El Salvadors President] Nayib Bukele didnt even show up, Mr. Whale tweeted. Bitcoin is tanking, and many attendees have left very disappointed.

And Mr. Whale wasnt alone in the post-convention Bitcoin malaise. [I] dont think I can do another crypto conference for a few months, love meeting people and re-connecting with friends and partners, but it feels incredibly unproductive to have so many events all the time, Meltem Demirors, the chief strategy officer for CoinShares, tweeted over the weekend.

But there are larger issues here: A city trying to adopt Bitcoin institutionally is arguably antithetical to the very nature of cryptocurrency, where the appeal is that its not tied to any specific government. Another issue for a crypto city is that no one wants to spend their Bitcoin.

If your expectation is that your cryptocurrency is earning a return and youre using it as a speculative vehicle, youre not gonna buy [anything with it], Beggs says.

Sure enough, there wasnt much Bitcoin being spent at the Bitcoin 2022 convention. The bars, food trucks, and cafes all took credit or debit cards only. Which, of course, might not be totally surprising, considering a popular meme within the Bitcoin community is that cash is for spending, Bitcoin is for holding.

Toward the back of the convention hall, in a small bazaar tucked in the corner, people sold Bitcoin-themed art (and one person offering real, permanent Pepe the Frog tattoos) there were some satsor fractions of a Bitcoinbeing sent back and forth between vendors and customers. One artist at the convention, Susan Van Volkenburg, saysthat she had sold a few of her pieces in Bitcoin. Her pictures, which werent NFTs but rather physical paintings that paid tribute to Bitcoin (and glowed in the dark) are part of a project calls Essence Of Bitcoin. Ive had one cash sale. One Visa. Everything else has been Bitcoin, she says.

Van Volkenburg, who got into Bitcoin in 2017 and comes to Miami for Bitcoin events, says shes extremely optimistic about the Miami mayors crypto initiatives. I think the mayor of Miami is all about it, she says. I think Miami is going to be all about it. She says that she had not used Bitcoin to buy anything while staying in Miami, however.

If one wanted to find an actual use for their Bitcoin, there are a few restaurants around the city that accept it, the most notable being Bitcoin Pizza, a chain with several locations in Miami. But a Google search for Bitcoin in Miami mostly pulls up Bitcoin ATMs, which are scattered all over. Though actually finding one of the machines can be almost impossibly difficult.

On Miami Beach, heading south from where Suarez installed the Miami Bull, there were four working Bitcoin ATMs. The machines were tucked in mini-marts and check-cashing centers along Washington Avenue. Finding them is hard, but using them is even trickier.

All four ATMs on Washington Avenue required a special account and corresponding crypto wallet that matched the ATM you wanted to use. Which meant you would have to transfer your Bitcoin from the wallet you used to a new wallet before being able to buy or sell anything. Also, the majority of the ATMs didnt actually contain any cash, meaning if you did have the account and wallet needed to activate the ATM, all you could do with it is buy Bitcoin, which is something you can easily do with most crypto trading apps.

Victor, a man working behind the counter of one of the mini-marts on Washington Avenue that had a Bitcoin ATM in it, told Fast Company that it took a little while for people to start using the machine in his store, but its now around 20-30 people a week.

Theres a guy that comes from [mainland Miami] once a week and uses it, but I tell him to call the store first, Victor says. Because what happens is, when the machine gets full of money, it goes into a non-use mode. It looks like, you know, The Matrix, with zeros and ones.

Washington Avenues stretch of Bitcoin ATMs isnt in the true heart of the citys crypto boom, though. Wynwood, across the water from the neon flash of Miami Beach, is the part of the city that feels the most San Francisco-fied, complete with Lime scooters and block after block of warehouse-cum-beer gardens. All over the neighborhood, the former industrial center is being turned into Silli-coin Valley. It boasts a selfie museum, a nonprofit called Crypto Corridor, and the Blockchain Institute of Technology. But it was, one again, hard to find anyone actually engaging with Bitcoin there.

Two people working at a vape store pop-up in an open-air shopping area called Wynwood Marketplace told Fast Company they had never seen anyone ask about trying to use Bitcoin, but did say it sounded like a fun thing they could accept one day.

Google Maps lists one Bitcoin ATM near a corner on 23rd street in Wynwood and includes a picture of a store called Lucky Records in its Google listing. Though, when asked about whether or not a Bitcoin ATM was inside the premises, a man working behind the counter told Fast Company, Nah, mantheres none of that gimmicky shit here.

In fact, beyond Suarezs made-for-Twitter Bitcoin optimism, there seems to be an overwhelming kind of annoyed ambivalence from the people who actually have to live and work in Miami in between the citys endless crypto conferencesof which there are many. There are at least 15 more big crypto events in the Miami area between now and June.

A Miami Beach resident named Nicole living near the convention center housing Bitcoin 2022 last week wasnt shy about how much she disliked the citys blockchain-based transformation over the last year.

Its growing too fast right now, she told Fast Company as she walked by the convention center. And its not good because the people that live here, we are used to a certain lifestyle and all of a sudden we become California. No bueno.

She says that she thinks Suarez is pushing Bitcoin because he invests heavily in it, not because of any particular desire to see decentralized currency flourish. As of last November, Suarez said that he will receive his entire $97,000 salary in Bitcoin, though that isnt his only source of income. He also works as a lawyer.

[Crypto investors] are too full of themselves, Nicole says. They think theyre better because they have that technology and they can pay with something like its in the air. Im old fashioned, I believe in cash. So I dont believe in something that comes and goes and can disappear in seconds. Its gambling.

Link:
Miami is still far from being the Bitcoin capital of America - Fast Company

The Dumpster Fire Is Saved: 9 Positive Changes Coming To Twitter – The Babylon Bee

Brought to you by:

Elon Musk recently found some spare change in his jeans pocket and decided to buy 9.2% of Twitter. Like a loving father, Musk is helping Twitter get back on the right path. Way to go, Elon!

Here are a few of the epic changes coming to Twitter as a result:

1) A warning label will be placed on all tweets that aren't basedenough: The label will also be placed on memes that are insufficiently dank.

2) You can now choose from one of three avatarsMusk, Doge, and Pepe the Frog:This is all you need.

3) All tweets will freeze at 420 likes and 69 retweets: Nice.

4) Donald Trump will be allowed back in exchange for removing porn, terrorists, and genocidal leaders: Seems reasonable.

5) Sharing the New York Post story about Hunter's laptop is now mandatory:At least once per day. It's only fair.

6) Tweets from AOC will automatically be translated into English:We've been waiting for this feature forever!

7) The Babylon Bee will be placed in charge of all fact-checking:They are themost factual and infallible site in the world.

8) Jack Dorsey will be required to tweet "Censoring conservatives makes me an enemy of freedom" 100 times: Get writing, mister!

9) Anyone who doesn't like the changes will be offered the chance to leave and start their own social network:Conservatives are currently practicing their "smug" faces in the mirror for when they get a chance to say this.

NOT SATIRE: While Twitter's newest stakeholderfigures out the future of the social media site, subscribe to Dad Saves America to figure out the future of our kids and country.

Dad Saves America is a new channel that is on a mission to celebrate, empower, and entertain Dads, could-be Dads, and father figures of all stripes.

We deliver powerful stories, exclusive interviews, mini-documentaries, and deep dives on a weekly basis to inform and inspire as we build a movement of dads who embrace their heroic calling. Dads need their own superhero league to take on the challenges of today.

Subscribe to the Dad Saves America YouTube channel and check out our latest videos by clicking below.

Read the original:
The Dumpster Fire Is Saved: 9 Positive Changes Coming To Twitter - The Babylon Bee

Gentleman who paid $537,084 for a Pepe the Frog NFT files …

Halston Thayer thought he'd made a wise investment when he paid over a half-million dollars for an absolutely magnificent illustration of a nude Pepe the Frog bathing in a pond. After all, a one-of-a-kind Pepe NFT had recently sold at Sotheby's for $3.6 million

Pepe's creator Matt Furie, who issued the bathing Pepe NFT, implied in his advertisement for the sale that the NFT would be the only one sold through Furie's PegzDAO: "500 cards issued, 400burned, 99 will remain in the PegzDAO, and ONE is being auctioned here."

After Thayer bought the NFT, though, Furie allegedly gave away 46 identical cards for free. Now Thayer is suing Matt Furie and PegzDAO for "unfair, deceptive, untrue, and misleading advertising and wrongful actions."

The lawsuit claims that shortly after Thayer paid $537,084 (150 ETH) for the "rare Pepe" and "unique asset," Furie "released 46 of the 99 remaining Pepe NFTs, significantly devaluing Plaintiff's Pepe NFT to less than $30,000.00, hundreds of thousands of dollars less than what he paid for this purportedly 'unique asset.' Upon information and belief, those 46 NFTs were given away for free."

Furie hasn't commented about the lawsuit on Twitter but continues to advertise Pepe-themed NFTs there.

Read the original:
Gentleman who paid $537,084 for a Pepe the Frog NFT files ...

Education can help us stay ahead of the disinformation wars – University World News

GLOBAL

I dont think it says a whole lot because fake news is fake by definition. More important is that it is disinformation disinformation disguised as news and-or information. The techniques have not fundamentally altered since the days of the KGB.

But what is different, he says, is the complexity that digital communications allow and the fact that the internet reaches way more people than just handing out fliers.

The Belgium-based Atlantic Councils Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL), of which Andriukaitis is associate director, is one of several institutes devoted to exposing and debunking disinformation on the internet, and understanding the intended goals of both state and non-state actors.

Two others are the new Information Integrity Lab (IIL) housed in the Professional Development Institute at the University of Ottawa (UO) in Canada and the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, United States, which has been training 100 students each year for the past three years.

The 18 February media release announcing the IIL, Canadas first cross-disciplinary lab designed to research and expose fake news could not have been timelier. Six days later, after a massive disinformation campaign that including trumped up claims that Ukraine was mistreating ethnic Russians in the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and the Donbas (led by pro-Russian politicians), Russian President Vladimir Putins army invaded Ukraine.

According to UO President Jacques Frmont: Knowledge, facts and truth are being challenged, and challenged very aggressively. Disinformation and fake news are being used not only by individuals and organisations, but also by state actors to destabilise entire societies, to severely erode public confidence in private and public sector organisations and to attack our core beliefs in freedom, equality, the rule of law and human rights.

Frmont links the battle against fake news to the core mandate of higher education institutions: research, critical thinking and the advancement and circulation of knowledge and facts, as does Rutgers Psychology Professor Joel Finkelstein, who is chief science officer and cofounder of NCRI.

Russias three-part campaign

The disinformation campaign Russia unleashed prior to attacking Ukraine (and the one being waged today) consists of three parts.

In addition to claims about Ukraines actions in Donetsk and the Donbas, the first part of the disinformation campaign repeats Putins irredentist assertion that Ukraine does not have the right to exist as a separate country, made most famously in an essay he published last summer.

A number of websites and internet influencers parrot what Andriukaitis calls Putins mismanagement of historical facts: that Ukraine was created by Vladimir I Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union (Ukraine was one of the constituent ethnic republics of the USSR); that half of Ukraines territory was given to it by the Russians and that the Ukrainians and Russians are one people and members of the same Russian Orthodox Church, despite the Ukrainian Orthodox Church having achieved autocephaly (independence) in October of 2018.

According to Andriukaitis, not every website or post needs to repeat all of Putins overarching narrative to help support it. Botnets produce tweets that may repeat only one part of Putins fabricated story, for example, the claim about the Russians and Ukrainians belonging to one true church.

By the reverse of the process of elimination, these tweets contribute to the political imaginary desired by Putin. As defined by sociologist Craig Browne of the University of Sydney, Australia, and Paula Diehl, chair of political theory and the history of ideas at Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel in Germany, the political imaginary is the collective structure that organises the imagination and symbolism of an individuals political thought; in this case the idea that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is at best a theological error.

Its often hard to connect the dots, Andriukaitis told University World News. And its hard to know whether the actors are connected to Russia or working with it. They might be, you know, just useful idiots in the West. But if you take a step back, you see the whole thing, you can see recurring messages supported by various stories and posts.

The second part of the disinformation campaign denied that Russia was planning an invasion, despite the documented build-up of its forces around Ukraine. Andriukaitis likens this claim to those on pro-Russian websites charging the West with having started the war in Syria that began a decade ago.

One of my favourite quotes was that Russia has never started a war, which is hilarious, says Andriukaitis, who has taught personal digital security and introduction to advanced digital forensics at the College of Europe, Natolin in Warsaw, Poland.

Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 to support the pro-Russian insurgents in the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; in 2014 Russia invaded and then annexed Crimea; and on 17 September 1939, as part of the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Russia invaded Poland.

At first glance, the third part of the disinformation campaign appears to undercut the second because it identifies a casus belli. Among the items that made up this fake news is Putins claim that the Russians had to liberate Ukraine from the drug-addled Nazi gangsters who had taken control of the country.

These assertions were so outrageous that fact checkers easily debunked them, says Andriukaitis, the Nazi charge being ludicrous since Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraines president, is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust, and far-right parties poll in the low single digits.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the disinformation campaign has continued. On 5 March, for example, the day I started writing this article, CNN debunked a series of (fake) postings that purported to come from the network, one of which reported that an American had been killed in Ukraine a claim repeated a few hours later on the floor of the United Nations Security Council by the Russian ambassador to the United Nations.

Tracking code words

Code words or expressions like Hail Honkler, the visual of which is a clownish figure, is important for creating group cohesion among people who dont really operate in the real world and spend hours and hours online looking for increasingly sensational and dark material, says Finkelstein.

The seemingly edgy humour and ambiguity in Hail Honkler is intentional. Hail Honkler seems like a joke, unless you are in the know, and know that it is a way to get around restrictions on Heil Hitler on platforms such as YouTube and Reddit.

For NCRIs researchers, however, these code words and visual memes are traces that they feed into programs like Pushshift, a large-scale social media ingestion engine thats leveraged by more than 307 universities across the world.

We use data-driven machine learning analyses that take their findings and are able to sort of understand how the depth and breadth and extent of networks that we are seeing are connected, says Finkelstein. Both Finkelstein and Serge Blais, executive director of UOs Professional Development Institute, liken the tracking of code words to the way weather satellites look for weather patterns.

In its Insights Report of 1 March 2022, for example, the NCRI shows that between 1 and 23 February, the topic network, formed by over 29,000 tweets, denouncing the New World Order, and linking COVID-19 vaccines, the Great Reset (conspiracy) and the Trucker convoy, as well cryptically antisemitic framings such as [George] Soros and Globalist. (A topic network is a cloud of words connected to each other by contextual similarity and can be imagined as the idea-mapping that university and college teachers use to teach brain storming.)

This topic network, shaped vaguely like a hot air balloon, all but vanished on 24 February, the day the Russians invaded Ukraine. It was replaced by one in which Ukraine and Putin were the largest central nodes, the point at which the lines indicating relationships came together.

Popular right-wing Instagram accounts like dc_draino, the_typical_liberal and dreamrare have insinuated that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy is a crisis actor [who is] part of a deep state plot to bring about the new world order, the NCRI reported.

These linkages allow analysts like Alex Goldenberg, senior intelligence analyst at the NCRI, to understand the dynamics of these groups and what fuels their growth.

It is not possible to know precisely which of the right-wing influencers Russia supports or even, Blais told me, whether they are human as opposed to the digital expression of an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm.

Nor is it known which left-wing digital actors Russia supports, but, says the NCRI, groups that use communist emoji symbols (such as the hammer and sickle, the symbol of Communist Russia) express support for communist regimes. Bot accounts disseminated the hashtag #abolishNATO, created by @mountainchen24, which NCRI calls a communist influencer.

What is known is that the Russians are paying or supporting both the radical right and the radical left, says Andriukaitis. Further, he told me that he does not think its a coincidence that those highly pro-Kremlin, highly anti-EU and anti-NATO groups were among the most aggressive antivaxxers. I think it is part of a longer game to sow discord.

Professor Christian Luprecht, who teaches political science at Queens University and at the Royal Military College of Canada (both in Kingston, Ontario), and who has criticised the laxness of Canadas laws about foreign actors financial influence in the countrys politics, makes a similar point with reference to Project Lakhta, the Russian name for its meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, that saw Donald Trump lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College and, thus, the presidency.

The Russians may not have cared who became the president of the United States. What theyre interested in doing is throwing into question whomever is the president of the United States. For them, success is polarising American society. Its undermining the institutions or showing that they are paralysed that is the aim.

For his part, Andriukaitis thinks that the Russians wanted Project Lakhta to swing the election in Trumps favour, but not just to sow discord (as was clear from candidate Trumps statements). Rather, Putin had another goal, which Andriukaitis stated in chilling words: To show that Russia is almighty and all powerful and that Putin decides who will be president of the United States.

Case studies

One of the 50 case studies that NCRI uses to train the next generation of analysts is about the far-right Boogaloo boys in the United States and how the institutes analysis allowed police to thwart a possible blood bath in Richmond, Virginia on 20 January 2020.

A few weeks earlier, NCRIs analysts monitoring Twitter spotted a new set of memes and photos posted by the Boogaloo boys, who had not previously been on NCRIs radar.

Photos showed young men, their faces hidden by balaclavas, wearing body armour and carrying semi-automatic weapons. Some of the men wore patches with skulls on them, an in-group reference to the Atomwaffen Division (AWD).

Founded in the United States in 2013, the Nuclear War Division has recruited members from retired and serving US armed service personnel and has tried to recruit at Boston University, the University of Chicago, the University of Central Florida and Old Dominion University in Virginia. Among the AWDs goals are instigating a race war and violently overthrowing the government of the United States.

The Boogaloo boys also wore shoulder patches featuring Pepe the Frog. Developed as a comic figure by Matt Furie in 2005, Pepe the Frog was soon appropriated by right-wing groups and popularised on 4chan, an unedited discussion board, which has posts of Pepe the Frog wearing night vision goggles and holding an automatic weapon.

Using Pushshift and other software, NCRIs analysts tracked how the Boogaloo boys postings had become increasingly apocalyptic and violent. NCRIs software also identified Facebook groups that post links to sites showing how to use 3D printers to make firearms and high-capacity magazines.

We were able to combine our social media investigation engine, social media analytics, with open-source software to assess that the Boogaloo boys wasnt just a meme; it was an actual group that represented a kinetic [real world] threat, says Goldenberg of the NCRI.

NCRI gave this information to a number of police forces, and Goldenberg briefed the US Armys counterterrorism unit. Prior to the rally in Richmond, the FBI arrested a number of Boogaloo boys who planned on inciting violence by shooting into the crowd.

There were going to be thousands of people there that were heavily armed, says Goldenberg. Had the Boogaloo boys fired into the crowd, it would have been a nightmare.

Fake photos and videos

A large percentage of fake news postings include faked or mis-attributed photos and videos.

In mid-January, at the height of the supply chain disruptions, a picture purporting to be from CityNews in Toronto was posted to both Facebook and Twitter. The picture showed a woman standing before empty supermarket shelves with the words, Empty Canadian Grocery Store Shevles (sic) Could Become a Larger Problem. The caption was used in another article, superimposed on the picture.

CityNews told Reuters: Our logo is being used on a photograph that is not ours and we didnt use the photo in our news coverage either. The image, in fact, was a stock photo from Getty taken in a British supermarket.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine there has been a veritable torrent of doctored or completely faked images. One shows the American actor Steven Seagal, whom Putin gave Russian citizenship to in 2016, in the uniform of the Russian army, for example.

Organisations like CNN, IIL, DFRL and NCRI have a number of ways of authenticating photos and videos. The first is the provenance of the image; seasoned analysts know which organisations can be trusted to release a true image or video. They also know what image passes the so-called smell test.

A second analytical tool available to these organisations is a reverse image search. Essentially, this involves entering the image into a search engine that scours the internet and databases looking for the same or a very similar image. As Andriukaitis explains, if you suddenly have an image of a Russian plane being shot down, a reverse image search might find the exact same image posted 10 years ago from the war in Syria.

As anyone who has scanned a document knows, digital photos are made up of dpi (dots per square inch) and on screen by pixels. There are a number of analytical programs that can determine whether the compression rate in one part of an image differs from the rest of the image. This is a tell-tale sign of an image being photo-shopped or otherwise altered.

Satellite imagery is used to authenticate photos of, for example, buildings and other large outside structures such as bridges. If someone is showing a photo of a burning building, we can use satellite images to look and find that building on a map and see if photos taken from space on that day show whether the building was, for example, on fire, Andriukaitis explains.

On 2 March, after some confusion about which building had been hit by a Russian missile, this method was used to determine that a building of Kharkiv National University that houses the sociology department and not the police station next door had been hit. The two buildings are architecturally similar.

Addressing social media blind spot

For more than four decades, before the creation of the IIL, UOs Professional Development Institute had run about a thousand courses for both public and private organisations, training some 10,000 people annually.

Among the organisations the Professional Development Institute worked with are the New York Police Department as well as the Washington DC Police Department to help them understand what disinformation is and how to identify its nefarious or insidious purpose and how it seeks to to divide, to devise, to distort, brew up dogmatic activity, or lead to violence, says Blais.

Most police leaders will tell you that they have a bit of a blind spot as to what goes on in social media, Blais told University World News.

They understand, for example, the back alleys of the neighbourhoods they patrol. They understand what is happening on the street. They know whos out there and who to watch for. But social media has evolved rather recently, very, very rapidly and very haphazardly and doesnt fit into traditional situational analysis, he says.

Blais, whose office at UO is a few short blocks from where the truckers set up camp on 29 January and shut down the centre of Canadas capital city, pointed to the so-called Freedom Convoy as an example of the police failing to take seriously information gleaned from social media and make it part of integrated threat analyses.

To be complete, police planners have to know, Blais says, whos bullying whom on social media to see where are the hotspots, whos calling for violence, whos calling for social unrest across multiple platforms and being heard by an audience numbering into the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

As both Blais and Luprecht emphasised, the thoughts of the leaders of the Freedom Convoy were freely available on the internet or, in the parlance of the field, their plans were open-sourced.

Everybody knew, my kids knew, that the trucks were coming to Ottawa. It took them a week to get here and they posted their plans, Blais says, alluding to the fact the convoy leaders like Pat King posted videos and gave interviews in which they said the truckers were prepared to shut down Ottawa until the government reversed the mandate that truckers coming into Canada had to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

The so-called memorandum of understanding the truckers released went further. It called for the dissolution of the government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (that was re-elected last October) and its replacement by a committee that included members of the truckers leadership. Other postings threatened Trudeau directly. King, for example, posted a video on Streamable.com in which he openly said, Trudeau, someones going to make you catch a bullet someday.

For his part, Luprecht says of the truckers: They were 10 days coming right across the country. Its not like they just showed up overnight. We had open-source intelligence [that] made it clear from the beginning that they were here [in Ottawa] to stay. And from the beginning, some of them, not all of them, but some of them had some sort of seditious intent. Were here to bring down the government may not have been explicit, but they were here.

And yet, as has been widely reported, the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) as well as the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) ignored this digital information and not only failed to stop the truckers from reaching the downtown, but effectively invited them into the downtown.

The OPS later explained that based on a protest last year, they expected the truckers to remain encamped at the foot of Parliament Hill for the weekend only. The occupation of Ottawa ended weeks later, on 20 February, after the police from the OPS, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the OPP and more than 10 other jurisdictions moved in.

The dense lines in the topic network for the last week of the truckers protest contained in the NCRI Insights Report of 1 March indicate that the Russians and, likely, other state actors and non-state actors aligned with anti-Western governments, saw the truckers protest, or, to be more precise, Canadas seeming inability to deal with it effectively, as an opportunity to underscore the weakness of democratic countries.

These posts are part of the narrative advanced by the Russians, which, according to Luprecht, is that basically democracies dont work, that theyre completely dysfunctional.

Reviewing false information

When he turns to discussing fake news, Blais speaks candidly: Our role is not to counter every piece of bullshit that is out there. That would be impossible.

Blais would like to see what he calls a bottom-up effort to testify to the veracity of an image or posting. Modelled on the reviews used on, for example, Booking.com, this system would see platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube include a true or false button that viewers can use to indicate whether a posting is factual. Ideally, he says, you would be able to attach a video or other posting that counters what an individual judges to be factually incorrect.

Even this real-time system would have struggled to cope with the story of there being secret US biolabs in Ukraine that, as Ottawa investigative journalist Justin Ling showed in a series of tweets, shot around the internet on 3 March.

Having been seeded by the Russians a few weeks earlier, on 3 March it became the subject of at least one QAnon video post as well as being featured by pro-Kremlin influencers on a number of platforms before Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov mentioned it in a press conference, also on 3 March, as being close to a casus belli.

The video, which was posted to TikTok, purported to identify the location of these secret sites. A posting to Twitter by someone who calls himself Dimitri Alperovitch (but who is not the chairman of the Washington DC-based think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator) is, according to Ling, known to be linked to QAnon. This tweet presented map overlays.

The first purported to show the location of the secret laboratories that had received US funding. The second was a map of Russian airstrikes. Ling deadpans the supposed coincidence, noting that were they to exist, such labs would almost certainly be in cities, and cities are Russias primary targets.

QAnons reasoning is, he shows, backwards causation: we know that these labs exist and Russias bombing and shelling campaign proves they do because the Russians are bombing and shelling cities.

On 3 March, the pro-Kremlin disinformation channel StalkerZone, which is linked to the separatist leaders in Donetsk (which Russia formally recognised as independent three days before invading Ukraine) posted four stories.

Among the titles are: What are Secret US Biolaboratories Doing in Ukraine?, The US Has Opened Dozens of Genetics Laboratories on the Russian Border: What are they Hiding? and, echoing Putins claims about Nazis in Zelenskyys government, The Nazi Origins of US Biolaboratories.

At 12.29pm Ottawa time (EST, the same as New York), Ling tweeted: This stuff is just popping up everywhere. Two and a half hours later, Ling tweeted that Vasily Prozorov, who purports to have been a contractor with the Ukrainian security services before defecting to Russia in 2019, claimed (earlier in the day) that the Russians had liberated the US biolab in Kherson (a city that fell to the Russians that day).

About the same time that Prozorov is said to have tweeted, Sergey Sudakov, a political scientist and regular on the state-run network Sputnik, tweeted that the US was working on a deadly virus in a biolab in Kharkiv. The post had already been viewed 160,000 times by the time Ling tweeted about it.

In a press conference in Moscow, late on 3 March, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov repeated the fake news. We have data [to show] that the Pentagon is preoccupied about the chemical and biological installations in Ukraine because the Pentagon built two biological war labs and they have been developing pathogens there in Kievan [Kyiv] and in Odessa. And now they are concerned that they may lose control over these labs.

The importance of knowledge and context

Towards the end of our discussion, I ask Finkelstein and Goldenberg what professors who are not at universities with institutes devoted to fighting fake news can do.

Because the only thing thats capable of determining what is information is knowledge, we need knowledge about how to sort out what that [a meme or a piece of news on the web] is in context, says Finkelstein.

To understand information as it is packaged on social media platforms requires digital literacy and the historical context to identify misinformation. Were creating pathways for students to be exposed to a multidisciplinary mode of critical thinking that is designed to get outside the boxes, both in terms of being analysts and in terms of being outside disciplinary silos.

Perhaps because he was speaking from Vilnius, Lithuania, a scant 35km from the border of Russias only ally in Europe, Belarus, for all his faith in DFRLs analytical techniques to identify disinformation, distinguish between true and fake pictures, and understand the purpose of a disinformation campaign, Andriukaitis struck an almost fatalistic tone when I asked what he wanted to say directly to University World News readers.

Disinformation wars are happening at the moment. And I feel like they might be the prelude to bigger things.

After referring to the war in Ukraine and to the Chinese, who are now following the Russian digital disinformation playbook, he says: Information wars might be one step from actual wars, but we should not underestimate how serious disinformation wars are and how much damage they can cause.

Go here to see the original:
Education can help us stay ahead of the disinformation wars - University World News

Rare Pepe – Wikipedia

Type of crypto art

A rare Pepe or RarePepe is a type of crypto art created by various artists world wide between 2016 and 2018, based on Pepe the Frog and traded as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) recorded on the CounterParty platform.

On October 26, 2021, a rare Pepe, PEPENOPOULOS sold at a Sotheby's auction for $3.6m USD.[1]

Pepe the Frog is a cartoon green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body. The character originated in the 2005 Matt Furie comic Boy's Club,[2] and became an Internet meme in 2008, popularised through Myspace, Gaia Online and 4chan. In the 2010s, the character's image was appropriated as a symbol of the alt-right movement, and by white supremacists.[3] The Anti-Defamation League included Pepe in its hate symbol database in 2016, but said most instances of Pepe were not used in a hate-related context.[4]

In 2015, a subset of Pepe memes began to be referred to as 'rare Pepes', with watermarks such as "RARE PEPE DO NOT SAVE", generally meaning that the artist had not previously posted the meme publicly.[5] In April 2015, a collection of rare Pepes were listed on eBay where it reached a price of $99,166 before being removed from the site.[6]

In September 2016, the very first rare Pepes were mined in block 428919 on Bitcoin, pre-dating popular Ethereum based NFTs. A Telegram chat group dedicated to discussing the Counterparty NFT was created shortly after.[7][8] By 2017, a community had grown around the digital collectables,[9] spurring developers to build platforms for the purpose of cataloging and exchanging these unique images, thereby creating the first crypto art market in 2016.[10] Two components of this market, created simultaneously, both support each other to enable interaction and asset exchange among both contributors and market participants. Crypto artists used these resources to publish their work as digital tokens with a fixed circulation[9] and then issued the art to collectors who then sold, traded, or stored their collections.

"Rare Pepe Wallet" is a web-based, encrypted wallet developed to allow users to buy, sell, and store rare Pepes using a medium of exchange called PepeCash.[11] The backbone of the Rare Pepe Wallet is the Counterparty platform, which is built upon the bitcoin network.

"Rare Pepe Directory" was a directory built to catalog all known rare Pepes, with specific guidelines for submitting the images for inclusion.

Read more from the original source:
Rare Pepe - Wikipedia