Threats to Grass Roots Reporting: Astroturfing and Plagiarism

One of the greatest threats to any grass roots system is the falsification of perspective.  This means falsifying the authenticity, integrity, or credibility of a news-article, blog-post, or even status-update.  Many examples of this exist on The Internet, which shatter the fundamental ethics of journalism, such as truthfulness, objectivity, and accuracy.  I am speaking of plagiarism and astroturfing, which both drastically threaten independent news and blogging.  Plagiarism involves an individual copying a greater[or any] work, with the intent of deceiving readers into believing it is an original work of their own;  whereas astroturfing is a larger entity posing as individual perspectives, with the intent of deceiving readers into believing these are stand alone entities. Both jeopardize legitimate blogging, press, and personal value.  As defenders of grass roots, decentralized technologies, and individual rights we must call out these impostors and fakes whenever possible!

Astroturfing largely damages the value of true public opinion as it bolsters biased perspectives through falsifying grass root claims.  A great example of this is The News Hawks Review, a fake news web site that is paid to wright positive reviews of topics.  The LA times even called out a public water service for paying the Hawks Review for SEO (search engine optimization).  This is a disgusting act, as it attributes fake accolades to the public service as well as profit from reporting biased news.  As news reporters and defenders of the net, we must all call out such atrocities in public forum, such as Internet defender Michelle Marie did.

Plagiarism also destroys the value of independent news and blogs. Take for example this man, Mukesh Saini, a self asserted security professional, who had been plagiarizing and disseminating "his" writings around private security groups. The blog, security-of-cyberspace, mysteriously started up on September 7th and had since then published 54 professional articles in less than 10 day.  Many of the posts on this blog heavily plagiarized entire articles without giving credit to the original sources. He has since gone back and linked each article and given credit to each individual writer, after I had called him out in a closed professional forum.  This is exactly what we must do as a society in this age of over-information, call out the fakes! We must deroot these phony actors, and have them give real credit where it is due.

A Decentralized Solution to Certificate Authorities: Moxie Marlinspike's Convegence.io

By now, I hope most people understand that certificate authorities are not invulnerable to hacks, and putting full trust in any single source is just poor faith.  This point is only amplified when we invest full trust in multiple stand-alone authorities, such as the situation we have today. If any single one of our trusted authorities fails,then we the end users are left vulnerable. Moxie Marlinspike sums the whole situation up rather nicely in this video:

At the end of the video, Moxie announces Convergence.  Converge is a new FireFox add-on, that runs in the background, and verifies the CA's result through multiple physical channels.  This provides a decentralized perspective to aid in authentication confirmation.   Convergence was built on a white-paper entitled, Perspectives.  His solution at convergence.io also takes care of several information leaks that existed in the original Perspectives implementation.  I highly suggest user's instal this FireFox add-on!  It has several verification options which provides a huge amount trust agility, allowing user's to set their level of paranoia.  It still has some problems, but Moxie is also accepting code reviews and donations.  The point is: We need more technologies like Convergence, which harness the decentralized strength of the Internet, and protect all individual users!