Four short links: 2 June 2020
Coders on Twitch, Information Warfare, Myths of Reliability, and Policy as Code
- Coders on Twitch — Currently, livestream coding is an open secret — a flourishing subculture that’s easily overlooked. At any given moment, there are at least a dozen coders streaming, and there are hundreds of active streamers cataloged in Twitch’s Science & Technology category. Passive pair programming?
- Finding and Characterizing Information Warfare Campaigns — I present the strategic context of the information warfare that we see today, and identify and define information warfare forms of maneuver. I develop
various supervised and unsupervised methods to identify bots at four different data granularities. I present a deep learning model to classify memes as well as study
the evolution of memes within a conversation. I present a template for understanding the major components of an information campaign and develop automatic ways
to populate this template for a specific event. Finally, we present a Bot, Cyborg, and Troll Field Guide to help analysts and the general population understand these entities. - Myths of Reliability — 1. Remove the people who cause accidents; (2) document best practices and runbooks; (3) defend against prior root causes; (4) enforce procedures; (5) avoid risk; (6) simplify; (7) redundancy = better reliability.
- Policy as Code — policy staff typically write rules in English and distribute them in PDF form. Technical staff then read the complex policy rules and translate them into computer code to implement the policy in digital systems. Structuring this as a two-step process introduces lag and room for misinterpretation. Bringing technical and policy staff together to write and publish policy rules as computer code together early on improves both speed and accuracy.
