Misinformation by Microsoft
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DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ According to Wikipedia, the UK and Canada Fought for Manuel Noriega and the Nazis Assisted the United States. Corporate Vandalism is More Serious.
I always correct Wikipedia vandalism when I see it and request article protection of some kind when it’s getting out of control.
The unfortunate thing is, that anyone who links to an article gets the article, in a vandalized state. Sometimes the vandalism is stupid or obvious like a bunch of random letters or saying that the Axis from World War II was involved in a military intervention of the late 1980s, and sometimes it’s a corporate PR firm from the oil and tobacco companies, Walmart, Microsoft, etc.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Russian information operation uses US celebrity Cameos to attack Zelensky [Ed: Cyberscoop and NYTimes both misrepresent Microsoft as an authority, trying to distract from Microsoft's stuff being full of holes and blaming Russia instead]
McGinley’s video message, it turns out, was part of an apparent Russian influence operation documented in a Microsoft report released Thursday. It was one of roughly a half dozen such videos in which Western celebrities sent personal messages to “Vladimir” via Cameo, a website where users can pay for personalized messages from celebrities or other prominent people. Other celebrities featured in the campaign included Elijah Wood, Dean Norris, Kate Flannery, Priscilla Presley and Mike Tyson, among others.
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EFF ☛ Meta Announces End-to-End Encryption by Default in Messenger [Ed: EFF helps Facebook lie about encryption, giving people a false sense of privacy while attacking PGP as not secure (citing HTML as 'email')]
Governments are continuing to attack encryption with laws designed to weaken it. With authoritarianism on the rise around the world, encryption is more important with each passing day. Strong default encryption, sooner, might have prevented a woman in Nebraska from being prosecuted for an abortion based primarily on evidence from her Facebook messages. This update couldn’t have come at a more important time. This introduction of end-to-end encryption on Messenger means that the two most popular messaging platforms in the world, both owned by Meta, will now include strong encryption by default.
For now this change will only apply to one-to-one chats and voice calls, and will be rolled out to all users over the next few months, with default encryption of group messages and Instagram messages to come later. Regardless, this rollout is a huge win for user privacy across the world. Users will also have many more options for messaging security and privacy, including how to back-up their encrypted messages safely, turning off “read receipts,” and enabling “disappearing” messages. Choosing between these options is important for your privacy and security model, and we encourage users to think about what they expect from their secure messenger.
The technology behind Messenger’s end-to-end encryption will continue to be a slightly modified version of the Signal protocol (the same as Whatsapp). When it comes to building secure messengers, or in this case, porting a billion users onto secure messaging, the details are the most important part. In this case, the encrypted backup options provided by Meta are the biggest detail: in addressing backups, how do they balance security with usability and availability?
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New York Times ☛ Russia’s Latest Disinformation Tactic Exploits American Celebrities [Ed: Cyberscoop and NYTimes both misrepresent Microsoft as an authority, trying to distract from Microsoft's stuff being full of holes and blaming Russia instead]
The video was recorded on Cameo, the popular, though now struggling, app where users can pay for personalized messages from famous people — in Mr. Wood’s case, starting at $340. While a genuine video, it was repurposed as part of Russia’s efforts to falsely denigrate Mr. Zelensky as a drug-addled neo-Nazi. Beginning in July, according to a report released on Thursday by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, the video and others like it ricocheted through Russian social media and were ultimately featured by news organizations owned or controlled by the government.
Update
One more:
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Microsoft: Russian disinformation campaign used celebrity videos bought via Cameo
Microsoft Corp. has uncovered a Russian disinformation campaign that made use of celebrity clips commissioned through the Cameo video sharing website. The company detailed its findings today in the latest edition of its biannual report on Russian digital threats. The report is produced by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, which tracks nation-backed hacking and influence campaigns.