Day: January 9, 2020💾

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For Cuomo, familiar music with some new notes

For Cuomo, familiar music with some new notes

In 2019, however, the Democratic-controlled Legislature approved a huge chunk of these perennial proposals. That forced Cuomo to come up with an unprecedented amount of new material for his 2020 State of the State address on Wednesday.

The end result was still a very Cuomonian speech: New York, he said, needs to pass monumental pieces of progressive legislation. Particularly those that don’t make the budget soar.

I am pretty sure the same could be said about Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the Republicans, but then again, they weren't so concerned about letting the budget soar, especially back in the day. But then again, things kind of ended badly for New York with the rent strike putting the Urban Development Corporation and all of New York State at the edge by mid-1970s.

How A New Breed Of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online

Disinformation For Hire: How A New Breed Of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online

Peng Kuan Chin pulled out his phone, eager to show the future of online manipulation.

Unseen servers began crawling the web for Chinese articles and posts. The system quickly reorganized the words and sentences into new text. His screen displayed a rapidly increasing tally of the articles generated by his product, which he dubs the “Content Farm Automatic Collection System." ADVERTISEMENT

With the articles in hand, a set of websites that Peng controlled published them, and his thousands of fake social media accounts spread them across the internet, instantly sending manipulated content into news feeds, messaging app inboxes, and search results.

"I developed this for manipulating public opinion,” Peng told the Reporter, an investigative news site in Taipei, which partnered with BuzzFeed News for this article. He added that automation and artificial intelligence “can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than people.”

Map: Kelly Hollow Trail