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by anguslong 5598 days ago
tl;dr Contractor develops psyops backend for the cloud. Creates fake persona pool. Uses anonymizer/chameleon for IP obfuscation, vmware/virtualbox instances for each persona, enables deploying to vps around the world. Uses system to age personas via social/email accounts and salt with rss, social & checkin data.

RFP: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id...
1 comments
bugsy 5598 days ago
That is a pretty &!@(&ing awesome link you pulled out there with an actual Air Force project that does just this thing.

Wow. Saved to disk in case that page vanishes without a trace.

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joelhaus 5598 days ago
Ha, saved as well... it's a gem.

I've got to believe that the social networks and Google have been thinking about way to combat this problem too. I wonder what kind of impact Google's open-source two-step authentication [1] (and other types of mobile device verification systems [2]) will have on efforts to develop meaningful persona management software. If implemented properly, mobile device verification would surely inhibit such efforts.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/ [2] http://openid.net/2009/09/09/yahoo-paypal-google-equifax-aol...

EDIT: Didn't notice before, so not sure if they just added it, but the same RFP is duplicated & linked to at the bottom of the article.

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caf 5598 days ago
I reckon if you can afford to do this, you can afford to buy one phone per puppet.
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joelhaus 5597 days ago
True, but it introduces a number of manual procedures into, what would otherwise be, an automated workflow.

Even if the only obstacle was to connect each phone to your network, it would still slow the rise of an army of zombie personas.

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