Primary source from Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
The key claim is: “Hoy tenemos evidencia de un cambio de direcciones IP de varios servidores de la Registraduría Nacional. Significa que se vulneró el software...” and then: “El único con capacidad de hacer eso en el mundo es el estado de Israel.”
In English: “Today we have evidence of a change in IP addresses on several National Registry servers. This means the software was breached...” and “The only one with the capacity to do that in the world is the State of Israel.”
To be clear, I think the accusation is absurd, but I am curious to see the reaction of the HN community.
Semitic does not refer to people nor to a race of people, but to a family of languages including Hebrew and Arabic. The man who coined the term "antisemitic" used it to describe his own views which were specifically anti-Jew.
The only erasure is the attempt to diffuse the term to include Akkadians, Amharics, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Black Israelites, adherents to the Nation of Islam, all 1.3 billions Arabs, what-have-you, when it always and only ever referred to anti-Jew hatred.
* Avisa Partners / iStrat, a French lobbying, intelligence, cybersecurity, and online-influence firm, has been accused in French investigations of information manipulation through ghostwritten articles, fake or undisclosed profiles, blogs, and Wikipedia interventions on behalf of powerful clients. Mediapart reported that Avisa was suspected of modifying Wikipedia pages for clients including French business elites and foreign powers. Wikimedia France also summarized the affair, saying Avisa or its subcontractors were suspected of numerous undeclared paid contributions to Wikipedia. Avisa has denied wrongdoing.
[1] [2] [3]
* iStrat, Avisa's predecessor, was separately linked in French reporting to fake online personas used to publish commentary about business disputes. The Avisa Partners Wikipedia summary, based on French media reports, says JDN traced fake analyst profiles and critical commentary to iStrat-era activity, while iStrat and its owners denied the claims.
[4]
* There was also a France-linked, though not company-linked, covert influence operation in Africa. In December 2020, Facebook/Meta removed networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior targeting African audiences; one network was linked to individuals associated with the French military. Meta said the operation used fake accounts, pages posing as news or military entities, and off-platform domains. Graphika and Stanford described it as French and Russian influence operations going head-to-head in Africa.
[5] [6]
* The Washington Post reported the same Facebook takedown as people affiliated with the French military using fake Facebook accounts to meddle in African politics, while noting that Facebook said it did not have evidence that the French military institution itself directed the activity.
[7]
* CLS Strategies, a Washington, D.C. communications firm, was named by Facebook/Meta in 2020 when Meta removed fake accounts and pages tied to operations in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Mexico. Meta defines coordinated inauthentic behavior as efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central. PRWeek also reported the takedown as fake accounts and pages managed by CLS.
[1] [2]
* Rally Forge, a U.S. marketing firm, was linked by Facebook to a 2020 domestic U.S. operation run on behalf of Turning Point USA, involving fake accounts and coordinated behavior. Axios reported that Facebook removed 200 accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts.
[3] [4]
* New Knowledge / Project Birmingham is another ugly example. In the 2017 Alabama Senate race, Democratic-aligned operatives experimented with Russian-style disinformation tactics, including fake or misleading Facebook activity and buying retweets. The effort was reportedly small and probably did not decide the election, but it proves the category exists inside the U.S. political ecosystem.
[5] [6]
* There are also U.S.-linked pro-Western covert influence operations. Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory analyzed accounts removed by Twitter and Meta for platform manipulation or coordinated inauthentic behavior; later reporting said the Pentagon ordered a review after fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military were taken down. Meta later attributed a campaign targeting the Middle East and Central Asia to people associated with the U.S. military.
[7] [8] [9]
* Cambridge Analytica is adjacent but not identical. It had U.S. offices and U.S. political clients, and it was part of the broader “election manipulation for hire” world, but its central scandal was data harvesting, psychographic targeting, and political ad targeting, not necessarily fake-account bot networks in the same narrow sense.
[10]
Yeah, as a non-Mormon, I agree. I think the Mormon connection is a paranoid distraction. The behavior of the police can be explained by the same kind of corrupt-small-town-police-defending-locals-from-outsiders behavior that happens across the country.
> "A horse is an extremely sophisticated biological machine, but it has no idea what makes itself tick."
To my ears, a lot of detail is hidden in "knowing what makes itself tick". The limit of human Umwelt, cognitive closure, is an arena I find fascinating.
Modern people tend to identify understanding with mechanistic explanations. Veins, glycogen, immune states, hoof pumps. These are interesting and satisfying to us. But does that kind of explanation satisfy only because we are apes with ape language and interests, leaving aside even that we live in a society that values those explanations?
If a horse-level intelligence existed, perhaps its most satisfying explanations would not be "I can inspect the venous plexus in my hoof," but something else. Maybe more proprioceptive: pressure, load, gait. Or maybe that's just still my primate prejudice poking through.
What would satisfy a horse scientists might seem opaque or insufficient to us, but maybe our biochemical account would seem equally beside the point to it?
Maybe there is no species-neutral answer to what counts as understanding what one is.
On a deeper level, I suspect that a "complete understanding" in an absolute or divine sense is infinite. Our perceptions are necessarily limited, only a model of reality. In order to understand in a way that helps us survive, we must filter out a lot of information that is not absolutely irrelevant, but is irrelevant to us. Even Funes remembered only that which is relevant to a human, that which he could perceive in the first place. He could not remember changes in magnetic fields, background radiation, subtle shifts in gravity.
For me, there is a sign-up modal overlay that prevents reading or scrolling, even though the entire article loads. How did others manage to read the article?
Indeed. Do not blow up the balloon. Just use it as a rubber pouch. If anything is still unclear, describe as detailed as you can the difficulty you're visualizing.
> One of the things I've loved most about HN is that it was real — grounded in observability, empirical evidence, not bias or feelings.
Alas, this is not my experience of HN. About neutral topics, sure. Not a lot of flaming and irrationality about e.g. C# Union Types or audio reactive LED strips or whatever.
But assert something that a large fraction of people do not want to be true and you'll get, not just downvoted, but flagged and condescension.