#belfer

[modusmumbles]

The Detective Blorbo Battle is ready!

Inspired by @selfindulgentcompetition (for obvious reasons) and @autismswagsummit (cos my faves are diagnosed ND or "quirky" which is basically the same thing in my mind!)

The rules for who made it in are as such:

They're one of my faves

They help solve a crime (but don't have to be detective rank or even work for the police)

If two characters from the same show are here (I needed to make up the numbers) I have to pick a non-lead character

Polls will go up tomorrow night and will last a week cos I dont have time for updating the battle daily

This is for me but I hope yall have fun and discover some new crime dramas too! Propaganda away!! <3

[jamesbelfertananbaum]

[jamesleabelfertananbaum]

[spilladabalia]

Tuxedomoon - No Tears

[krypteiagroup]

How China built a one-of-a-kind cyber-espionage behemoth to last

A decade-long quest to become a cyber superpower is paying off for China. The “most advanced piece of malware” that China-linked hackers have ever been known to use was revealed today. Dubbed Daxin, the stealthy back door was used in espionage operations against governments around the world for a decade before it was caught. But the newly discovered malware is no one-off. It’s yet another sign…

[belinda-amy]

Contemporary Living Room (Omaha)

[girlactionfigure]

Baruch Dayan HaEmet 🔯

We are heartbroken to announce the death of Ziv Belfer (52) and Shimon Najm (54), who were murdered in today’s Hezbollah rocket attack on Nahariya, northern Israel. May their memories forever be a blessing 🕯️

[theunderestimator-2]

Crime lords: Frankie Fix (centre) and Johnny Strike (right), founding members of Crime, "SF's First and Only Rock 'N' Roll Band' along with Ricky Williams (left), original singer for The Sleepers -and former Crime drummer- as captured by James Stark at the first Sleepers show at the Mabuhay Gardens, December 25, 1977.

According the Sleepers' bio:

"The Sleepers formed in Palo Alto, California, in 1978. Michael Belfer had been trying to form a band with his friend, Tim Mooney, and Belfer had decided he wanted former Crime drummer Ricky Williams for vocals, as "he was so awesome looking". The band released a five-track 7-inch EP in late 1978, and then broke up, with Belfer playing in Tuxedomoon and Williams co-founding Flipper, from which he was fired before the band made any recordings 'for being too weird'."

(via)

[vintagelasvegas]

The Goofers at the Flamingo, July 1956. Jim the roadie (left) and band member Frank Nichols (right). Photo shared by Frances Nicolais.

Flamingo presents Gisele MacKenzie, The Goofers, Augie & Margo, Lou Basil Orchestra, Flamingoettes. A Hal Belfer production. At the Stage Bar lounge, Dave Burton & the Burton Boys, The Piccadilly Pipers & Bonnie Davis, Norma Calderón.

[mariacallous]

The Pentagon says it’s confirmed that Iran has given “a number of close-range ballistic missiles to Russia.” While Washington isn’t sure exactly how many rockets are being handed over to Moscow, the U.S. Defense Department assesses that Russia could begin putting them to use within a few weeks, “leading to the deaths of even more Ukrainian civilians.”

“One has to assume that if Iran is providing Russia with these types of missiles, that it’s very likely it would not be a one-time good deal, that this would be a source of capability that Russia would seek to tap in the future,” Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder told reporters on September 10. That same day, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in London that the new supply of Iranian missiles will allow Russia to use more of its own longer-range ballistic missiles for targets that are farther from the frontline.

To find out where the Russian-Iranian partnership is headed and what, if anything, changes in the Ukraine War with Tehran sending ballistic missiles to Moscow, The Naked Pravda spoke to Dr. Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an associate researcher with the Belfer Center’s Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Grajewski also has a forthcoming book, titled Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine.

Timestamps for this episode:

(1:54) Technical details about these ballistic missiles

(5:05) The role of sanctions and the Iran nuclear deal

(8:51) Iranian drones and ballistic missiles in Ukraine

(10:16) Russian-Iranian military cooperation

(16:07) Factional politics in Iran and Russia

[beardedmrbean]

Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts.

The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said.

A similar effort is underway in Europe. France, Germany and Poland said this month that Russia has launched a barrage of propaganda to try to influence European parliamentary elections in June.

With Donald Trump opposing U.S. aid to Ukraine and claiming that he once warned a NATO leader that he would "encourage" Russia to attack a NATO ally if it didn't pay its share in defense spending, the potential rewards for Russian President Vladimir Putin are high, according to Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund.

“Not that they didn’t have an incentive to interfere in the last two presidential elections,” said Schafer, who tracks disinformation efforts by Russia and other regimes. “But I would say that the incentive to interfere is heightened right now.”

Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that there’s “plenty of reason to be concerned” about Russia’s trying to interfere in the 2024 election but that he couldn’t discuss evidence related to it. He added: “We’re going to be vigilant about that.”

U.S. officials and experts are most concerned that Russia could try to interfere in the election through a “deepfake” audio or video using artificial intelligence tools or through a “hack and leak,” such as the politically damaging theft of internal Democratic Party emails by Russian military intelligence operatives in 2016.

The type of pro-Russia online propaganda campaigns that thrived on Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now routine on every major social media platform, though it’s rare for individual accounts to go as viral now as they once did.

Those influence operations often create matching accounts on multiple sites, which vary drastically in their moderation policies. Accounts from one pro-Russia campaign that Meta, the owner of Facebook, cracked down on late last year, an English-language news influencer persona called “People Say,” are still live on other platforms, though some are dormant.

A “People Say” account on X is still visible, but it has only 51 followers and hasn’t posted in almost a year. Its counterpart on Telegram, which has become a home for some Americans on the far right, is still actively posting divisive content and has almost 5,000 subscribers.

A perfect storm

Moscow and its proxies have long sought to exploit divisions in American society. But experts and former U.S. officials said Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the country's deepening political polarization and sharp cuts in disinformation and election integrity teams at X and other platforms provide fertile ground to spread confusion, division and chaos.

“In many ways it’s a perfect storm of opportunity for them,” said Paul Kolbe, who worked for 25 years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and is now a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “I think, for a lot of reasons, we will see the same approach, but amplified and, I think, with some of the constraints that you might have seen taken off."

In the 2022 midterm elections, Russia primarily targeted the Democratic Party to weaken U.S. support for Ukraine, as it most likely blames Biden for forging a unified Western alliance backing Kyiv, according to a recently released U.S. intelligence assessment.

In what appears to be an effort to deepen divisions, Russia has amplified the political dispute between the Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over security at the Texas border over the past month. Russian politicians, bloggers, state media and bots have promoted the idea that America is headed to a new “civil war.”

It was a quintessential move by a Russian regime with a long tradition of trying to manipulate existing political rifts, like immigration, to its advantage, experts said.

But there’s so far no sign that Russia’s disinformation operation in Texas has had any significant impact, said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council.

“So far, Russian operations targeting the U.S. have been opportunistic. They see whatever narrative is rising to the top, and they try to push it,” Brooking said. “Disinformation isn’t created in a vacuum. The more polarized a country is, the easier it is for foreign actors to infiltrate and hijack its political processes.”

The artificial intelligence threat

The bigger Russian threat to the 2024 election, Brooking and other experts said, could prove to be artificial intelligence-created fake audio.

An orchestrated deepfake or leak may not unfold on the national stage; instead, it could target a particularly crucial swing state or district, experts said. It might aim to discourage some voters from going to the polls or sow distrust about the accuracy of ballot counting.

The most likely disinformation scenario will be “hyper-personalized, localized attacks,” said Miles Taylor, a senior Trump administration homeland security official who has warned of the risks of another Trump presidency.

Deepfake audio, which is easy to create and difficult to detect, has been used in recent elections in multiple countries. In the U.S. last month, a fake Joe Biden robocall told New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the state's primary. In the United Kingdom in November, a fake audio of London Mayor Sadiq Khan called for pro-Palestinian marches.

And two days before Slovakia’s parliamentary elections in September, a fake audio clip purported to show the leader of a pro-Western political party discussing how to rig the election. The audio was eventually debunked, and it’s unclear what effect it had on the election. But a pro-Russia party opposing aid to Ukraine won the most votes.

While an emerging cottage industry claims that software can identify whether audio or video is authentic or a deepfake, such programs are often wrong.

Past Russian efforts

Alleged Russian information operations against Ukraine over the past two years open a window into some of the Kremlin’s tactics.

A study published Wednesday by the Slovakian cybersecurity company ESET found that a pro-Russia campaign has been spamming Ukrainians with false and dispiriting emails about the war with claims of heating and food shortages.

In a coordinated effort near the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022, cyberattacks temporarily knocked key Ukrainian websites offline, while residents received spam texts telling them that ATMs in the country were down.

Other apparent Russian efforts to sow division are much simpler.

Last year, celebrities who sell personalized videos on the website Cameo, including Priscilla Presley, Mike Tyson and Elijah Wood, were tricked into inadvertently recording messages that denigrated two major enemies of the Kremlin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Moldovan President Maia Sandu.

The messages were overlaid with text falsely claiming that the celebrities were calling for those leaders to step down. Representatives for Wood and Presley said the celebrities recorded the videos thinking they were helping a fan with addiction. A representative for Tyson said the videos of him were fake.

In the American mainstream

In the U.S., though, Russia’s propaganda themes are now often echoed in comments from some Republican lawmakers and pro-Trump commentators, including the portrayal of Ukraine’s government as deeply corrupt.

The adoption of Russian state rhetoric in America’s political debate is a victory for Moscow, experts said. Putin’s goal is to spread doubt and division among Americans.

“An equally nice outcome for them is just what we had last time, where a third of the country doesn’t believe the vote,” Schafer said. “Democracy is questioned; the system gets questioned. So they don’t necessarily need to see their guy win to have it be a good outcome for them.”

It remains extraordinarily difficult for a remote cyberattack to take over voting systems in the U.S. and change vote counts. The American intelligence assessment of the 2022 midterms found no indication that Russia had tried to hack into election systems or ballot counting that year.

But Kolbe, the former CIA directorate of operations official, said the Kremlin would most likely see trying to penetrate U.S. voting systems as a low-risk undertaking.

“I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t,” he said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find where they would see the risk part of the equation. It gets close to zero.”

Such interference could come with plausible deniability. On the day of the 2022 midterm elections, the Mississippi secretary of state’s website, which hosts the official polling place finder for voters in Mississippi, was knocked offline most of the day after pro-Kremlin hacktivists on Telegram called for supporters to join in a low-level cyberattack against it.

Still, U.S. officials and disinformation analysts say Russia’s ability to manipulate voters shouldn’t be overstated. When it comes to spreading disinformation and fueling distrust in election authorities and election results, the biggest threat comes from within America’s fractured, polarized society, not from the outside.

“I am very skeptical, whether it’s 2016 or 2024, that the United States political and media culture needs any push from Russia,” said Gavin Wilde, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who specializes in Russia and information warfare.

“The Kremlin has every interest in seeing an American public, or American leadership, that’s less inclined to support Ukraine, that’s less inclined to punish Russia. Those incentives are certainly there,” he said. “But we’re already doing a pretty good job of that at home. I don’t know how much of a nudge the Kremlin thinks it needs to lend it.”

[modusmumbles]

Round 1b

DI Alex Drake (UK - Ashes to Ashes)

If I got shot and transported back to 1981 I would simply curl up in a ball. Alex Drake meanwhile, not only puts up with Gross Man TM, but teaches them all to be better people in the process. Mentor to Shaz (who is also part of this poll, if they have to fight I'll cry) Cares where others don't, awesome hair, and all that too

Pawel Zawadzki (Poland - Belfer / The Teacher)

A polish teacher goes "undercover" at a school in a small town in order to discover who murdered a pupil there. In doing so he discovers multiple conspiracies and really annoys the local police force and Simply Doesn't care. He's got one goal and is delightfully sneaky in getting to the truth (billionaire landowners be dammed). He's an Arsehole in series 2 (/neg) so we don't talk about it.

[jamesbelfertananbaum]

[jamesleabelfertananbaum]

[ncfcatalyst]

From frontlines to diplomatic quagmire: two years of war in Ukraine

Feb. 26 will mark year two of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, a war that has been worth small territorial gains for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia Matters, a project launched in 2016 by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, reported that as of Feb. 6 they can confirm 130,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 10,191 civilians have been killed and…

[theblondeskywalker]

Lauren Belfer: And After the Fire

Genre: historical fiction Publication date: 2016 Number of pages: 496

Berlin, 1783: Sara Itzig Levy, daughter of one of the most influental Jewish bankers in the era and a spectacular pianist receives an unusual gift from her teacher, Johann Sebastian Bach's oldest son: a purely antisemitic manuscript, which was completely unknown. The cantata will influence not only Sara's life, but the next generations as well. Weimar, 1945: In the last days of World War II, an American soldier, Henry Sachs finds an old manuscript in an abandoned house, which he kept with himself after he accidentally shot a young girl. New York, 2010: Susanna Kessler is trying to fix her life after a stranger raped her and her marriage ended. After his uncle's, Henry Sachs death she discovers the manuscript and decides to go after its origin and give it back to its owner. But the more knowledge she gains, the more her narrative changes about her family's past and own life.

It turns out quickly that a very in-depth research was needed to write this novel, and the author totally deserves an applause. Detailed sources make the book even more authentic, not to mention how exciting it is to find out what's fiction and what isn't! Even though World War II happened more than 70 years ago, there are still many misconceptions about what happened (and how antisemitism spread all over), this book offers some sort of misunderstanding and clarity. So one thing is sure: whoever reads the novel will be richer with historical and religious knowledge. The most important is obviously the musical one... or at least it would be... but it's not easy to digest. Since majority of the book is basically storytelling as one big coherent text, oftentimes Belfer writes about these things too professionally, which made me skip a few sentence sometimes.

Despite multiple timelines Susanna was supposed to be the main character, but she didn't felt like one at all; I felt her the furthest. Even Scott, a supporting character gained more sympathy from me because his deepest thoughts were expressed. Susanna's perspective was like a documentary representation of a woman with basic human emotions. The only thing that touched me was the description of her raping story, it felt so raw and real, I wish this depth had lasted throughout the novel. Sarah was my personal favorite, her character felt more close and was actually inspiring. Several members of the Levy family play a larger role in the book, but majority of them are almost insignificant. Again, like a documentary. There's also lots of names that needs to be remembered in order to understand the story so read carefully - I didn't, sometimes I ended up being confused.

I'm not saying there weren't parts that didn't touch me or made me think, but I was expecting more emotions and excitement. I was waiting for a catharsis that didn't come, which is sad because potential was huge. It's definitely worth to read, especially if you're into classical music and history. In addition, the book raises an important question: what is more important, an artist' creation or their personal philosophy?

Overall rate: 5.5/10