(19.09.2023)
Die Suche nach den Ursachen für genetische Erkrankungen ist ein großes Unterfangen, bei dem vermehrt auch künstliche Intelligenz (KI) zum Einsatz kommt. Ein neues KI-Werkzeug von Google DeepMind kann das Krankheitsrisiko abschätzen, das von bestimmten Genmutationen ausgeht. Die entstandene Datenbank soll künftige Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der Krankheiten deutlich erleichtern.
(19.09.2023)
Google DeepMind has developed a new tool called AlphaMissense, which uses the AlphaFold human protein structure models to predict whether a sequence variant which changes one amino acid in a protein is likely to be tolerated or to impact protein function.
The Ensembl Variant Effect Predictor now integrates Google DeepMind’s new AlphaMissense Catalogue.
Google DeepMind has developed an AI system that predicts the chances that tens of millions of genetic variants will cause disease.
(22 July 2021)
For those scientists who rely on experimental protein structure determination, AlphaFold’s predictions have helped accelerate their research. For example, a team at the University of Colorado Boulder is finding promise in using AlphaFold predictions to study antibiotic resistance, while a group at the University of California San Francisco has used them to increase their understanding of SARS-CoV-2 biology.
The AlphaFold Protein Structure Database builds on many contributions from the international scientific community, as well as AlphaFold’s sophisticated algorithmic innovations and EMBL-EBI’s decades of experience in sharing the world’s biological data. DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) are providing access to AlphaFold’s predictions so that others can use the system as a tool to enable and accelerate research and open up completely new avenues of scientific discovery.
(August 10, 2023)
Staffed by senior US cybersecurity officials and executives at major technology firms like Google, the board does not have regulatory authority, but its recommendations could shape legislation in Congress and future directives from federal agencies.
(July 3, 2023)
Postscript. A few days later, Twitter implemented some SEO changes that showed the content from tweets to both Google and users, but overlayed a modal asking users to register. This allowed Google to regain access to the content for indexing and search ranking purposes.
A U.S. District Court judge is temporarily preventing White House officials from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship, arguing that such actions in the past were likely First Amendment violations.
The Tuesday injunction by Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty was in response to recent lawsuits from Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general. The suits allege that the White House coerced or „significantly encourage[d]“ tech companies to suppress free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana granted the injunction in response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. Their lawsuit alleged that the federal government overstepped in its efforts to convince social media companies to address postings that could result in vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or affect elections.
(8 June 2013)
Meanwhile, Twitter is one company which has managed to keep mum in PRISM discussions.
(7 Jun 2013)
The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims „collection directly from the servers“ of major US service providers.
Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.
Part 2 of a two-part series takes a deep dive into the history of the CIA’s central role in orchestrating news and editorial coverage in America’s most influential liberal national media outlets — and its continued hold today.
Part 1 of a two-part series takes a deep dive into the history of the CIA’s central role in orchestrating news and editorial coverage in America’s most influential liberal national media outlets — and its continued hold today.
Both the governments seemingly agree on one thing: The era of Google’s dominance in advertising technology must end. The European Commission recently joined the Department of Justice in touting a breakup as a viable remedy for the California-based tech giant’s alleged monopoly abuses. In its probe, the EU said a divestment is needed because a behavioral remedy wouldn’t stop Google from “self-preferencing.”
The European Commission last week joined the Department of Justice in touting a breakup as a viable remedy for the California-based tech giant’s alleged monopoly abuses.
(28.03.2023)
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the US Congress must vote to reauthorise by December to prevent it from lapsing under a sunset clause, allows US intelligence agencies to carry out warrantless spying on foreigners’ email, phone and other online communications.
While US citizens have some protections against warrantless searches under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, the US government has maintained that these rights do not extend to foreigners overseas, giving agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) practically free rein to snoop on their communications.
Remember: Google Stadia is dead as a doornail, and Amazon Luna, the company’s rival cloud gaming service, wasn’t doing much better.
A covert team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media have been exposed in a new investigation. The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym ‚Jorge‘. In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team explained how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking methods to access Gmail and Telegram accounts
The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.
Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.
Team Jorge, this investigation believes, works with a residential proxy provider, in order to provide its avatars with local digital identities in the form of real IPs that cannot be found by social media sites.
Team Jorge also seems to work with a cellular provider that serves AIMS in a similar manner, likely giving avatars their local numbers and supplying the infrastructure needed to grant them SMS verification.
The deliberately misleading technical infrastructure also serves to hide such actors. The process creates another layer of plausible deniability between, in this case, Team Jorge, the client and the campaign’s content, and helps them further mask the truth. Or, as Hanan put it in one presentation: „My signal is from Indonesia, the WhatsApp from Hong Kong, Telegram from Germany. And none of them are my numbers.“
From a small office building, a group of Israelis is spreading global disruption
(May 6, 2020)
Eighteen quantum computers might not sound like a lot. But given that each one is an unwieldy device chilled within a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and operated by Ph.D. researchers, it‘s actually a pretty large fleet. In comparison, Google‘s quantum computers lab near Santa Barbara, California, has only five machines, and Honeywell only has six quantum computers.
(May 6, 2020)
Eighteen quantum computers might not sound like a lot. But given that each one is an unwieldy device chilled within a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and operated by Ph.D. researchers, it‘s actually a pretty large fleet. In comparison, Google‘s quantum computers lab near Santa Barbara, California, has only five machines, and Honeywell only has six quantum computers.
Last July, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the White House was working with social media companies to identify “misinformation.” Specifically, she said, “we’re regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives, dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies.”
AFL immediately submitted FOIA requests to the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health to uncover the degree to which the CDC and the White House have been censoring content that it has deemed “disinformation” or “misinformation.” Predictably, the Biden Administration obstructed and delayed complying with their legal obligation to provide such information, and AFL sued the CDC to compel their release.
Today, after a year of work, AFL has obtained its first damning release of documents.
Am Mittwoch gab die NGO Organisation America First Legal (AFL) bekannt, dass sie dank einer Klage gegen die Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) an die Dokumente gelangt sei. Der erste Versuch, an die Dokumente über den „Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)“ über das Weiße Haus an die Dokumente zu kommen, war gescheitert.
AFL interpretiert die Dokumente nicht nur als Beweis für eine Koordinierung zwischen den privaten Konzernen und der Regierung. Es habe sich um geheime Absprachen gehandelt, um die Zensur auf den Internetplattformen zu koordinieren.
Spätestens ab Dezember 2020 und mindestens bis Juni 2021 kommunizierte die CDC mit Google, Facebook und Twitter. Die „Zusammenarbeit“ ging so weit, dass Beiträge von einzelnen Nutzern als Beispiele vorgelegt wurden, um festzuhalten, was zensiert werden muss.
Founding Members:
YouTube
Twitter
Microsoft
facebook
General Members:
zoom
tumblr
WordPress.com
JustPaste
airbnb
mailchimp
Discord
Instagram
WhatsApp
Pinterest
amazon
Dropbox
MEGA
Linkedin
YouTube
Twitter
Microsoft
facebook
(Aug 4, 2021)
We have no way of knowing whether the loophole has already been exploited: Anyone could have collected data undetected for over a decade.
We do know this is still an active threat vector – while two major DNS providers (Amazon and Google) have fixed the issue, others may still be vulnerable. As a result, millions of devices are potentially vulnerable.
(…)
After analyzing it, we learned it was dynamic DNS traffic from Windows machines that were querying the hijacked name server about itself. Dynamic DNS keeps DNS records automatically up to date when an IP address changes. It’s traditionally been used in large networks that host internal services, and use their own internal servers. In short, the traffic we received contained sensitive information that was never supposed to leave an organizations internal network.
The dynamic DNS traffic we “wiretapped” came from over 15,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, 45 U.S. government agencies, and 85 international government agencies. The data included a wealth of valuable intel like internal and external IP addresses, computer names, employee names and office locations.
(14.06.2022)
A very interesting highlight to notice here is that Google services, viz. Google reCAPTCHA, Google Cloud, and Google OAuth consumed a major portion – totaling almost 70% of the services where the secret exposure was the highest.
An eye-opening perspective regarding Phase 1 was that in spite of these domains in scope belonging to the top 1 million domains of the internet, the secret exposure was massive.
(…)
Since we majorly focused on the front-end, we anticipated that a majority of the exposures would be through the JavaScript files. Analyzing the results, we found out that almost 77% of the exposures occurred through the JavaScript files being used in the frontend code.
Since most of the JavaScript was being served through content delivery networks, we decided to map the exposures to their sources and extract out insights from our data. The highest number of exposures came from Squarespace CDN leading to over 197k exposures.
We‘re told it is potentially capable of spying on the victims‘ chat apps, camera and microphone, contacts book and calendars, browser, and clipboard, and beam that info back to base. It‘s said that Italian authorities have used this tool in tackling corruption cases, and the Kazakh government has had its hands on it, too.
On Thursday this week, TAG revealed its analysis of the software, and how it helped dismantle the infection.
Google erklärte weiter, in einigen der nun aufgedeckten Fälle mit der Spähsoftware aus Italien hätten die Hacker die Spionagesoftware möglicherweise unter Zusammenarbeit mit Internetdienstanbietern eingesetzt. Daraus könne geschlossen werden, dass die Käufer der Programme Verbindungen zu staatlich unterstützten Akteuren hatten.
(23.06.2022)
Seven of the nine zero-day vulnerabilities our Threat Analysis Group discovered in 2021 fall into this category: developed by commercial providers and sold to and used by government-backed actors. TAG is actively tracking more than 30 vendors with varying levels of sophistication and public exposure selling exploits or surveillance capabilities to government-backed actors.
(..)
In some cases, we believe the actors worked with the target’s ISP to disable the target’s mobile data connectivity. Once disabled, the attacker would send a malicious link via SMS asking the target to install an application to recover their data connectivity. We believe this is the reason why most of the applications masqueraded as mobile carrier applications. When ISP involvement is not possible, applications are masqueraded as messaging applications. (…)
We assess, based on the extensive body of research and analysis by TAG and Project Zero, that the commercial spyware industry is thriving and growing at a significant rate. This trend should be concerning to all Internet users.
These vendors are enabling the proliferation of dangerous hacking tools and arming governments that would not be able to develop these capabilities in-house. While use of surveillance technologies may be legal under national or international laws, they are often found to be used by governments for purposes antithetical to democratic values: targeting dissidents, journalists, human rights workers and opposition party politicians.
„At first, the EU Council announces the blockage of Russia from EU cloud services in the Sixth Sanction Package. Then, the EU Council edits the message, removing these references. No clarifications or explanations from the officials,“ Podoliak said on Twitter.
„We must increase the sanctions pressure, not decrease,“ the adviser to the head of the President‘s Office said.
(7. August 2021)
DNSaaS providers (also referred to as managed DNS providers) rent DNS to other businesses who don’t want to maintain and protect yet additional network resources on their own.
(…)
The Wiz researchers stated, “We found a simple loophole that allowed us to intercept a portion of worldwide dynamic DNS traffic going through managed DNS providers like Amazon and Google,”
“The dynamic DNS traffic we ‘wiretapped’ came from over 15,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, 45 U.S. government agencies, and 85 international government agencies.”
Employee/computer identities and locations and extremely sensitive data about organizations’ infrastructure, such as Internet-exposed network equipment, were among the
Block connections to pages and web resources hosted in major cloud services if the user wishes to do so. Supports blocking Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Cloudflare.
(October 21, 2019)
DoH not only encrypts the DNS request, but it also serves it to a “normal” web server rather than a DNS server, making the DNS request traffic essentially indistinguishable from normal HTTPS. This is a double-edged sword. While it protects the DNS request itself, just as DNSCrypt or DoT do, it also makes it impossible for the folks in charge of security at large firms to monitor DNS spoofing and it moves the responsibility for a critical networking function from the operating system into an application. It also doesn’t do anything to hide the IP address of the website that you just looked up — you still go to visit it, after all.
And in comparison to DoT, DoH centralizes information about your browsing in a few companies: at the moment Cloudflare, who says they will throw your data away within 24 hours, and Google, who seems intent on retaining and monetizing every detail about everything you’ve ever thought about doing.
(March 16, 2022)
“We don‘t want our best trained intel officers going straight into the hands of foreign governments for the sake of money,“ Castro said. „This discourages intelligence mercenaries and protects our national interest.“
The UAE spying operation, called Project Raven, hacked into Facebook and Google accounts and thousands of Apple iPhones, targeting activists that human rights groups say were later arrested and tortured