Software developer at a big library, cyclist, photographer, hiker, reader. Email: chris@improbable.org
25543 stories
·
228 followers

Man Planned to Use Drone With Explosive to Attack Substation, U.S. Says - The New York Times

1 Comment
Read the whole story
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
acdha
11 hours ago
reply
I wonder how many of these terrorists are waiting to see if their guy loses first
Washington, DC

A pro-Trump influencer says a Russian agent paid him $100 to post a fake voter fraud video. It wasn’t the first time | CNN Politics

1 Share

An American social media influencer said he was paid $100 by a pro-Kremlin propagandist to post a fake video of Haitian immigrants claiming to vote in the US presidential election. The payment was one of several the man said he received from the propagandist- a registered Russian agent - to post on social media in the run-up to the election.

The pro-Trump influencer, who uses the @AlphaFox78 handle on X, is an American man living in Massachusetts, CNN has learned. He agreed to speak to CNN about the posts on condition of anonymity.

The account, which has a history of posting right-wing memes in support of former President Donald Trump, was the first to post the now-debunked video that purportedly showed a Haitian immigrant claiming he would vote at least twice in Georgia for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Georgia Secretary of State said everything in that video was faked, from the actors to the ID cards, and was produced and disseminated by Russian influence actors.

In phone and text interviews with CNN over multiple days, the person behind the account, which has amassed more than 650,000 followers on X, said he posted the video without fact-checking the claims made in it.

“I don’t have any idea where it came from or anything - I’m just the guy who shared it,” he said.

The man said Simeon Boikov, a Russian propagandist podcaster known online as “AussieCossack,” offered him $100 to post the video, which he agreed to. A person with knowledge of the situation confirmed to CNN that multiple payments were sent from Boikov to the Massachusetts man.

Documents reviewed by CNN show that Boikov is a registered foreign agent for Russia in Australia, where he works for Russian state media, writing and posting online in English and Russian.

Boikov, who was recently given Russian citizenship and is seeking asylum in the Russian consulate in Sydney, has a history of posting pro-Kremlin disinformation. A previous CNN investigation found that Boikov has played a role in Russia’s disinformation campaigns, including ones targeting the 2024 US presidential election.

But his exact role and where he sits inside the disinformation network’s hierarchy, remains elusive.

The working relationship between AlphaFox and Boikov which has not been previously reported, reveals yet another means in which Russia has attempted to inject disinformation into the 2024 presidential election. US and European intelligence sources previously told CNN that Russia’s disinformation network produces staged propaganda videos that are later promoted by American social media influencers.

Much as a legitimate business would rely on a popular influencer to boost its sales, Russian operatives are also targeting online figures to leverage their highly engaged followers, according to Darren Linvill, a disinformation expert and co-director of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University.

“There is a reason marketing companies and political campaigns both use social media influencers to promote their messages, they do it because it works,” Linvill told CNN. “The digital world has become the real world, and people trust social media influencers like they trust their real-world friends.”

Boikov, and an associate based in Russia, did not respond to CNN requests for comment. AlphaFox said that Boikov explicitly told him not to speak to CNN and has since blocked him on the platform Telegram.

The FBI did not comment on the payments. The Russian and Australian Foreign Ministries did not respond to CNN requests for comment.

On their social media accounts, both Boikov and AlphaFox have repeatedly shared narratives that the US intelligence community has determined originated with a Russian disinformation network dubbed “Storm-1516.”

AlphaFox said the staged Georgia video wasn’t the first time he was paid to post content on his X account. On roughly 10 other occasions, Boikov paid him $100 to post memes and videos on the account, he said.

“It started with memes, and it seemed innocent,” he told CNN.

When Boikov’s requests then shifted to posting election-related videos, like the fake Georgia voter fraud footage, “I didn’t think anything of it,” he said.

He insisted to CNN he did not know Boikov worked for Russian state media.

AlphaFox sent CNN cropped screenshots that he said showed him questioning Boikov about the authenticity of the video before he posted it. But Boikov purportedly responded that he had no reason to doubt the video’s authenticity and that “some big accounts have posted it.”

“My guard was down because it’s just sharing memes,” AlphaFox said, repeatedly justifying his posts to CNN by saying he didn’t realize what he was getting himself into.

After speaking with CNN, AlphaFox deleted the post, which at the time had generated more than 2.6 million views.

He also admitted he was paid to post content that targeted Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, claiming that the couple had tipped off embattled musician Sean “Diddy” Combs ahead of Homeland Security raids. The US intelligence community has since determined that the claim originated as a Russian influence operation.

AlphaFox said he was remorseful for sharing Russian disinformation, and adamant that he was the one who was tricked.

“People need to be more vigilant when they share things,” he told CNN. “I never wanted to misinform anyone.”

AlphaFox believes himself to be just “the guy who shared” a disinformation video. But that role is key to Russia’s plan to disrupt the US election, according to Linvill, the disinformation expert.

“Real people have become important vehicles of Russian disinformation. It’s not all about fake accounts anymore,” Linvill said. “Storm-1516 has been successful because it takes advantage of the trust users have in influencers they have followed for years.”

While AlphaFox removed the fake Georgia video the following day, after it had been viewed more than half a million times on X, various forms of the video continue to be shared on social media platforms.

As Americans cast their ballots in the presidential race, election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have been forced to dedicate resources to knocking down disinformation like the video posted by AlphaFox.

“As Americans, we can’t let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine our faith in our institutions - or each other,” Raffensperger said in a statement calling the video “likely a production of Russian troll farms.”

Despite the foreign influence efforts, AlphaFox continues to post on X, including about the 2024 election, and the posts continue to receive significant attention, some with millions of views.

Read the whole story
Share this story
Delete

States and cities beef up security to prepare for potential election-related violence : NPR

1 Comment

Some cities and states are preparing for potential election-related violence, though so far, tens of millions of ballots have been cast without serious incident.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Friday announced the activation of some members of the state's National Guard to be on standby status in case they are asked to help local law enforcement. The governor said Guard members could be called on to protect "vital infrastructure" for elections and to "respond to any unrest" related to the election.

Guard members will be on standby status until the end of Thursday, according to the governor's order. The state's top military official is determining the number of members needed.

"This is a purely precautionary measure taken in response to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s nationwide warnings regarding threats to election infrastructure and other recent activities that have occurred in southwestern Washington," Inslee's office said in a statement.

Across the river in Portland, Ore., police said they were "increasing staffing on Election Day and the days following as a precaution." Still, they said they were not aware of any threats related to the election.

The announcements come after ballot drop boxes in Portland and nearby Vancouver, Wash., were set on fire last week. A few ballots were damaged in the Portland drop box, while the fire damaged hundreds of ballots in the Vancouver box. Authorities are still searching for the perpetrator.

In Nevada, Gov. Joe Lombardo's office said 60 National Guard members would be activated "on standby status" and stationed in Las Vegas and Carson City. He said the activation is similar to that of previous elections. Guard members could be used to help local law enforcement with traffic enforcement and building security, the governor's office said in a statement.

Lombardo echoed other officials in saying that the activation was only as a precaution.

In Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith said the police will "stand up a full activation," meaning all police would be working 12-hour shifts "and depending on what happens, maybe a little longer, to ensure that we have enough officers on the street and every corner of our city." She said the city could call in law enforcement from other jurisdictions for assistance if needed.

Other security measures have been taken throughout the city. Fencing around the White House and the Naval Observatory (which contains the vice president's residence) was increased. Some businesses near the White House boarded up windows as a precaution, local media reported.

D.C. police announced road closures around Howard University for Vice President Harris' election night watch party. Extra physical security measures are also being added to the Palm Beach County Convention Center where former President Donald Trump's campaign will hold its party, the Secret Service said.

"These enhancements are not in response to any specific issue but are part of wide-ranging public safety preparations for Tuesday's election," the agency told NPR.

Three organizations representing sheriffs across the country said in a joint statement last week that they had been preparing for the election for a year and a half. The Major County Sheriffs of America, National Sheriffs’ Association and the Major Cities Chiefs Association said they "stand ready and united to ensure that Election Day 2024 is secure, safe, and fair."

Despite the lack of widespread violence so far, many people across the country are concerned about the potential. In an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released on Monday, 72% of likely voters said they were concerned about violence as a result of the election.

Read the whole story
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
acdha
22 hours ago
reply
The “law and order” party at work
Washington, DC
petrilli
18 hours ago
Potential election-related violence from who? FROM WHO?

Coverage.py originally

1 Share

Something many people don’t realize is that I didn’t write the original coverage.py. It was written by Gareth Rees in 2001. I’ve been extending and maintaining it since 2004. This ancient history came up this week, so I grabbed the 2001 version from archive.org to keep it here for posterity.

I already had a copy of Gareth’s original page about coverage.py, which now links to my local copy of coverage.py from 2001. BTW: that page is itself a historical artifact now, with the header from this site as it looked when I first copied the page.

The original coverage.py was a single file, so the “coverage.py” name was literal: it was the name of the file. It only had about 350 lines of code, including a few to deal with pre-2.0 Python! Some of those lines remain nearly unchanged to this day, but most of it has been heavily refactored and extended.

Coverage.py now has about 20k lines of Python in about 100 files. The project now has twice the amount of C code as the original file had Python. I guess in almost 20 years a lot can happen!

It’s interesting to see this code again, and to reflect on how far it’s come.

Read the whole story
Share this story
Delete

Docling

1 Share

Docling

MIT licensed document extraction Python library from the Deep Search team at IBM, who released Docling v2 on October 16th.

Here's the Docling Technical Report paper from August, which provides details of two custom models: a layout analysis model for figuring out the structure of the document (sections, figures, text, tables etc) and a TableFormer model specifically for extracting structured data from tables.

Those models are available on Hugging Face.

Here's how to try out the Docling CLI interface using uvx (avoiding the need to install it first - though since it downloads models it will take a while to run the first time):

uvx docling mydoc.pdf --to json --to md

This will output a mydoc.json file with complex layout information and a mydoc.md Markdown file which includes Markdown tables where appropriate.

The Python API is a lot more comprehensive. It can even extract tables as Pandas DataFrames:

from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter
converter = DocumentConverter()
result = converter.convert("document.pdf")
for table in result.document.tables:
    df = table.export_to_dataframe()
    print(df)

I ran that inside uv run --with docling python. It took a little while to run, but it demonstrated that the library works.

Tags: ocr, ai, pdf, python, ibm, hugging-face, uv

Read the whole story
Share this story
Delete

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign - The Atlantic

1 Comment
Read the whole story
Share this story
Delete
1 public comment
acdha
1 day ago
reply
This sounds like the leakers are assuming a loss and trying to dodge the blame
Washington, DC
Next Page of Stories