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The report does establish that social media brigading occurred.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf p. 4:

> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.

Continuing:

> A journalist who is a leading expert on the Internet Research Agency claimed that some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015

I will use those two quotes to provide context for my research.

Thanks for your reply - I'm not accusing you of malice.

I would love to see more of their raw data. I research social media and I have specifically investigated 2016 US election memes, so those data are extremely interesting to me. However, the DNI PDF states:

> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.

So, irrespective of yours or my assessment of what the raw evidence might be like, DNI already stated that they think it's too sensitive. This probably isn't going to change for 10-20 years (which is a common lifespan for classified information) so you've just got to figure out a way to analyze this situation without the specific evidence used to create this report. It doesn't mean there isn't other evidence out there. Like I said: I research social media and I have my own evidence stack. Some of it is here:

https://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes/

I am considering the events of the past 2 months as "moving the goalposts" - and this isn't a personal thing against you or any individual. Originally, we had statements from certain officials, but that wasn't enough. Then we had consensus among intelligence agencies, but again that's not enough. Then we had a statement from the president, but that's not enough. Now we have this report and it's still not enough.

On the straw man, the emails are not the entirety of the DNI argument, so reducing it to that creates the straw man, and dismissing the whole report on the basis of the emails is just how the straw man fallacy works, in practice. I am focused on social media, but you're focused on emails. It's okay to care more about one thing than another, but it is a logical fallacy to dismiss the rest of the report because you're not satisfied with the part you care about.

Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.

My (sortof expert) opinion is that I think the DNI social media conclusions are plausible.

I hope it will be un-removed. This report is important.

This report presents conclusions, not evidence. There are quite a few commenters in this thread decrying the "absence of evidence," but that is simply the burden of proof fallacy.

I've performed my own analysis of election memes and I independently confirmed a staggering amount of Trump-related traffic with significantly above-average upvotes across several major media platforms.

https://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes/

I wrote this 2 weeks before the election and even then, I was already looking closely at bot/sock puppet activity. I didn't connect everything at the time, but I now view the shockingly pro-Trump traffic in an even-more-skeptical light.

For some, there will never be enough evidence to prove social media were subverted for the purpose of influencing the election. For my purposes, however, I appreciate the PDF linked in this thread because it is actually relevant to my social media research. I am happy to cite the intelligence report as context for the social media findings I reported on.

I do not consider the book to be "closed" on this matter, but I do condemn all the commenters in this thread who are attempting to shut down the conversation by claiming there's not enough "evidence."

In closing, I quote from the report:

> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.

This report provides conclusions, not raw data.

If you are being honest with your comment, then you are unwittingly committing several logical fallacies:

- burden of proof: demanding confidential information that will never be provided ensures you will never receive "proof"

- moving the goalposts: this report includes several new analyses, but by moving the goalposts it will never be "enough"

- straw man: the issue is not restricted to DNC emails; at a minimum it includes manipulation of US social media platforms.

> This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment; its conclusions are identical to those in the highly classified assessment but this version does not include the full supporting information on key elements of the influence campaign.

The authors addressed your complaint on the final page of the report. Stop confusing this matter by introducing a "burden of proof" fallacy.

> Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.”

I think social media have been undermined for some time, although previously it was aggressive advertisers who were the culprits. "Astroturfing" is an old word by now. During the US election, this was simply taken to another level, and in a way that had a measurable impact on people's beliefs.

This is absolutely hysterical. I am crying with laughter. The bots went back and forth about a dozen times about what they don't know, and why the other one knows what they themselves don't know that they don't know. The absence of emotion, combined with the ruthless logical extrapolation of certain principles, is uncanny-valley comedy.

Now they are debating My Little Pony. This is shockingly entertaining.

Think of it like this: 8 weeks, 5 days per week, 1 hour per day. That's 40 hours.

I spend more than a few minutes a month administering my MBP, so I have no idea how you get along doing so little for a Linux machine. In fact, I spend more than a few minutes a month administering my Linux servers...

I honestly think my 1-hour-per-day estimate is in the ballpark and your experience sounds unlike mine.

The fact we're still discussing the trackpad, suspend/wake, fonts, networking, and UI - in 2017 - means the problem still isn't solved on Linux. I gave a decade over to that quest (1996-2006) and then spent the next decade using MBPs. With a macbook pro, I have never once wondered about my trackpad, suspend/wake, fonts, networking, UI, or a host of other things like printers, scanners, USB, bluetooth, or external displays. That level of compatibility is a miracle, from the perspective of a daily Linux user.

I have used my laptop for heavy computation, software dev, academic work, major presentations, video and multimedia, casual browsing, gaming, etc, and it has NEVER given me trouble due to compatibility. Having spent way too much of my life thinking about those problems on Linux, you have no idea how liberating it is to be free of those concerns.

I get OCD about using a specific brand of disposable pen, so you'd better believe I think about the most important tool in my life: my laptop. The MBP is too good to accept any alternative. The 2016 was underwhelming, but it's still the best laptop/OS combination out there. It costs too much for the market and it's not enough-better to justify the upgrade, but dammit there's nothing that even compares.

I've been thinking hard about alternatives to the MBP during the past few months, and my decision is that I can't give all this up and still be a functioning academic and entrepreneur. I'll pay the $1000 premium and if I value my time at $25/hour, I'll recover that additional cost within 2 months compared to Linux maintenance. I wish it weren't so, but the maths don't lie.

I love apocryphal tales like this.

There's a kernel of logic to the original assertion. It has a "gee whiz" irony, coded as a moral story: the biggest brains in the world forgot to get paid. Twitter's perceived revenue problems are juxtaposed with the obviousness of just taking the money they were owed, as if the answer to Twitter's Big Question were there the whole time. Finally, it explains a really major acquisition in Twitter history; it answers an outstanding question in everybody's minds. That little vignette has all the fixings for a great Silicon Valley tall tale.

The fact that it's totally false, by public refutation, seals the deal. I love it!

Is it true that pointers are completely non-existent in Fortran? This may be related to your point about data structures.

I've heard there is no null dereferencing and pointer nonsense - all without the need for a garbage collector - which ultimately leads to Fortran's great reputation for speed.

Are they reporting what is a mis-identification of automated vulnerability scanning?

We've been talking for weeks now about how NSA continually weakens the US by attacking encryption and infrastructure - and nobody is actually helping tighten our networks.

Could it be that DHS has some mandate to scan government networks?

> Just as one hears of cars chosen for their cupholders, so were these users converted to Unix for trivial reasons: line numbers and vanity.

This is why Jobs was the visionary. "[L]ine numbers and vanity" are real-world problems with technical solutions. When you bridge technology into the real world, to create solutions in real lives, then you create value.

It's painful to consider that something like UNIX could be worthless, but it was worthless ... until it improved somebody's life. This is something I have not fully learned yet.

My theory: everybody knows sqlite can be distributed as a single-file library that you can happily embed. However, it's a pretty complex beast compared to the rest of the list and maybe it's outside the vision of the list altogether, which features much simpler projects.

Edit: to be even clearer, sqlite is 100+ .c files. Yes, you can make it one "amalgamated" .c file, but no developer works on that file; they work on the 100+ smaller .c files.

Good post and worth the read. His four priorities are:

1. fight the fights. There will be more government surveillance and more corporate surveillance.

2. prepare for those fights. Much of the next four years will be reactive, but we can prepare somewhat.

3. lay the groundwork for a better future.

4. continue to solve the actual problems. The serious security issues around cybercrime, cyber-espionage, cyberwar, the Internet of Things...

This isn't exactly presented like a political platform or policy agenda, but in fact that is what it is - and I am happy to see it. Schneier has been writing for so long - becoming such the guru - that I'm glad to see him courting audiences beyond the security community.

Aaron, your unfamiliarity with Schneier's extensive writings does not amount to Schneier's post being "out of context."

Thanks for posting a note in this thread - I would have missed it otherwise!

Does anybody care about the answer to your question? In all likelihood, the answer is: because that information is even more work to collect.

Your post reminds me of the burden of proof fallacy, in which you create work for other people by asking questions you could easily answer yourself.

If you or anybody posts the comparison you requested, it will surely be upvoted.

Django has excellent documentation. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, it is appropriate. That is to say: there are good tutorials for starting out and there is good reference material for going deep.

As others have mentioned, Django is opinionated and I think they get it mostly right.

I use Flask myself, in part because I wish for my data modelling language to be a separate part of my stack, but my use of Flask is heavily influenced by Django's philosophy.

I am the primary developer of Flask-Diamond, which attempts to adapt Django's opinionated choices to Flask. However, I would still recommend that most people start with Django.

A good portion of reddit's memes are hosted on imgur, which was included in the dataset, so there's that.

Totally - it's the first time I've messed with the platform and I can see some real value there!

Sortof OT: I was also interested in election trends. While Google is focusing on real-time search trends regarding voting, I looked at meme trends leading up to the election. There are interesting trends in the amount of attention different candidate memes received over time. It will be interesting to see whether the attention received by candidates is translated into votes, today.

Here's the working paper: http://iandennismiller.github.io/election-memes

EDIT: quick link to viz: http://imgur.com/S6nHNLT

I think they are demonstrating discovery within-company. That feature will be huge. It potentially eliminates meetings that would have had to occur "between silos" - which are extremely difficult meetings to begin with.

If somebody from team A (on campus 1) can watch a video from team C (on campus 3) without needing their team leaders to coordinate a meeting, this will be extremely valuable to businesses.

But why would team A ever find out about team C? That's where this discovery feature comes in. See what's trending within-company.

This is going to be huge. 10 years ago, I would never have thought that technology alone sufficiently differentiated YouTube from "long tail" offerings like Vevo or Twitch. It turns out you can have multiple, multiple-billion-dollar businesses using essentially the same platform. The use cases inherent to various content niches inform new user interfaces and modes of interacting with the underlying video data.

Enterprise Video is a huge content niche. I've used YouTube in the past for business videos, but it was awkward. I wanted greater privacy, which YouTube does not really offer, because these videos discussed pre-launch ideas. We already used Office 365, so Microsoft Stream would have been a no-brainer.

I would love to perform research with the MS Stream platform, too. By focusing on the niche of business, Stream is creating interesting audience dynamics that will be quite different from the "grazing" model of recreational video watching. This is relevant to my interests.

Binney's project, ThinThread, seems to have been an effort to achieve the NSA mission without the need for bulk data collection ... And he was right to push for that, to the extent that any mass surveillance is justified.

A whistleblower is not necessarily a crank. I also believe your characterization of Binney's project is unfair. If we are to discuss the individual in the manner of ad hominem, then the simple fact that Binney correctly assessed the NSA in the past is a good reason to suspect his current analysis is also correct.

The stat is not for 'impaired' drivers. Due to the testing procedure used, which lacks accuracy in the time domain, the stat is: 'has used cannabis this month.'

More people are able to use cannabis when it is legal, so this number would be expected to increase.

This is a valuable line of thinking. We could probably convince ourselves "it would never work" but instead, I'd be more interested to hear what other possibilities this would open up.

I reached a similar conclusion regarding Microsoft, based upon my own analysis:

http://www.gh-impact.com/blog/the-most-influential-organizat...

Despite being a latecomer to GitHub, Microsoft has risen to become the 4th most influential organization on GitHub in a very short amount of time.

It's smiling! Of course I'd be terrified to see that jowly maw in person, with its horizontally oriented horns and whatnot.