Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Yulia Navalnaya, wife of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, has addressed the European Parliament.(Reuters: Johanna Geron)
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Yulia
Navalnaya, wife of late Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny,
said her late husband's body had been abused and she was not sure if his
funeral on Friday would be a peaceful event.
Ms
Navalnaya spoke to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, 12 days after
her husband died suddenly in a Russian penal colony at the age of 47.
"The
funeral will take place the day after tomorrow and I'm not sure yet
whether it will be peaceful or whether police will arrest those who have
come to say goodbye to my husband," she told MPs, as she received
multiple standing ovations.
She
urged European politicians and officials to investigate financial flows
in the West linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies.
"Putin
is the leader of an organised criminal gang. This includes poisoners
and assassins but they're just puppets. The most important thing is the
people close to Putin — his friends, associates and keepers of mafia
money," she said.
"You
and all of us must fight the criminal gang. And the political innovation
here is to apply the methods of fighting organised crime, not political
competition. Not statements of concern but the search for mafia
associates in your countries, for discreet lawyers and financiers who
are helping Putin and his friends to hide money."
Ms Navalnaya accused Mr Putin of having her husband killed, an allegation the Kremlin has angrily rejected.
"Putin killed my husband," she said.
"On
his orders, Alexei was tortured for three years. He was starved in a
tiny stone cell, cut off from the outside world and denied visits, phone
calls and then even letters," she said.
"And then they killed him. Even after that they abused his body and abused his mother,"
Speaking
in English, her voice sometimes faltering, she described Mr Putin as a
"bloody monster" and told MPs it was not possible to negotiate with him.
She
has promised to continue his work, urging Russians to share her rage
against Mr Putin, and has met Western politicians, including US
President Joe Biden last week.
Navalny's funeral to be held on Friday
Mr Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said the funeral will be held on Friday. (AP Photo: Alexander Zemilanichenko)
The
funeral of Mr Navalny, who died earlier this month in a remote Arctic
penal colony, will take place on Friday in Moscow after several
locations declined to host the service, his spokesperson said.
Kira
Yarmysh, his spokesperson, posted on X that a service for Mr Navalny
would be held on Friday at 2pm (local time) in the Church of the Icon of
the Mother of God in the Moscow district of Maryino where he used to
live.
Mr Navalny would then be
buried at the Borisovskoye cemetery, which is located on the other side
of the Moskva River to the south, Ms Yarmysh said.
Such
services, presided over by a priest and accompanied by choral singing,
usually allow people to file past the open casket of the deceased to say
their farewell.
The chosen Russian Orthodox church is an imposing five-domed white building in a built-up suburb of southeastern Moscow.
It was not immediately clear how the authorities would ensure crowd control.
But
judging from previous gatherings of Navalny supporters — whom the
authorities have designated as US-backed extremists — a heavy police
presence is likely and the authorities will break up anything they deem
to resemble a political demonstration under protest laws.
Struggles to get funeral venues
Ms Yarmysh spoke of the difficulties his team encountered in trying to find a site for a "farewell event" for Mr Navalny.
Writing
on X, she said most venues reported they were fully booked, with some
"refusing when we mention the surname 'Navalny'," and one disclosing
that "funeral agencies were forbidden to work with us."
Ivan
Zhdanov, the director of Mr Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, said
the funeral was initially planned for Thursday – the day of Mr Putin's
annual address to Russia's Federal Assembly – but no venue would agree
to hold it then.
"The real
reason is clear. The Kremlin understands that nobody will need Putin and
his message on the day we say farewell to Alexei," Mr Zhdanov wrote on
Telegram.
YouTube Russia jails human rights advocate ahead of Navalny widow address | The World
Ms Navalnaya said she was not sure whether the funeral service would be peaceful or whether the police would make arrests.
The
Kremlin has denied state involvement in his death and has said it is
unaware of any agreement to free Mr Navalny prior to his death.
Mr Navalny's death certificate, according to supporters, said he died of natural causes.
His
mother last week accused the authorities of trying to blackmail her
into holding a private funeral for her son by initially withholding his
body, an assertion the Kremlin called absurd.
Parts of the web are now dominated by bots and junk websites designed to go unread by humans.(Getty Images: Qi Yang)
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One
morning in January this year, marine scientist Terry Hughes opened X
(formerly Twitter) and searched for tweets about the Great Barrier Reef.
"I keep
an eye on what's being tweeted about the reef every day," Professor
Hughes, a leading coral researcher at James Cook University, said.
What
he found that day surprised and confused him; hundreds of bot accounts
tweeting the same strange message with slightly different wording.
"Wow,
I had no idea that agricultural runoff could have such a devastating
impact on the Great Barrier Reef," one account, which otherwise spruiked
cryptocurrencies, tweeted.
Another crypto bot wrote: "Wow, it's disheartening to hear about the water pollution challenges Australia faces."
And so on. Hundreds of crypto accounts tweeting about agricultural runoff.
A month later, it happened again. This time, bots were tweeting about "marine debris" threatening the Great Barrier Reef.
What was going on?
When
Professor Hughes tweeted what he'd found, some saw a disinformation
conspiracy, an attempt to deflect attention from climate change.
The likely answer, however, is more mundane, but also more far-reaching in its implications.
More than a year since Elon Musk bought X with promises to get rid of the bots, the problem is worse than ever, experts say.
And this is one example of a broader problem affecting online spaces.
The internet is filling up with "zombie content" designed to game algorithms and scam humans.
It's
becoming a place where bots talk to bots, and search engines crawl a
lonely expanse of pages written by artificial intelligence (AI).
Junk websites clog up Google search results. Amazon is awash with nonsense e-books. YouTube has a spam problem.
And this is just a trickle in advance of what's been called the "great AI flood".
Bots liking bots, talking to other bots
But first, let's get back to those reef-tweetin' bots.
Timothy
Graham, an expert on X bot networks at the Queensland University of
Technology, ran the tweets through a series of bot and AI detectors.
Dr Graham found 100 per cent of the text was AI-generated.
"Overall, it appears to be a crypto bot network using AI to generate its content," he said.
"I
suspect that at this stage it's just trying to recruit followers and
write content that will age the fake accounts long enough to sell them
or use them for another purpose."
That is, the bots probably weren't being directed to tweet about the reef in order to sway public opinion.
Dr
Graham suspects these particular bots probably have no human oversight,
but are carrying out automated routines intended to out-fox the
bot-detection algorithms.
Searching for meaning in their babble was often pointless, he said.
"[Professor
Hughes] is trying to interpret it and is quite right to try and make
sense of it, but it just chews up attention, and the more engagement
they get, the more they are rewarded.
Twitter owner Elon Musk promised to "defeat the spam bots or die trying".(Reuters: Gonzalo Fuentes)
The cacophony of bot-talk degrades the quality of online conversations. They interrupt the humans and waste their time.
"Here's
someone who is the foremost research scientist in this space, spending
their time trying to work out the modus operandi of these accounts."
In
this case, the bots were replying to the tweet of another bot, which,
in turn, replied to the tweets of other bots, and so on.
One fake bot account was stacked on top of the other, Dr Graham said.
"It's AI bots all the way down."
How bad is X's bot problem?
In January, a ChatGPT glitch appeared to shine a light on X's bot problem.
For
a brief time, some X accounts posted ChatGPT's generic response to
requests that it deems outside of its content policy, exposing them as
bots that use ChatGPT to generate content.
Users
posted videos showing scrolling feeds with numerous accounts stating
"I'm sorry, but I cannot provide a response to your request as it goes
against OpenAl's content policy."
"Twitter is a ghost town," one user wrote.
A video posted on Threads by @parkermolloy showing bot accounts on Twitter.(Supplied: Threads / @parkermolloy)
But the true scale of X's bot problem is difficult for outsiders to estimate.
Shortly
after Mr Musk gained control of X while complaining about bots, X shut
down free access to the programming interface that allowed researchers
to study this problem.
That left researchers with two options: pay X for access to its data or find another way to peek inside.
Towards
the end of last year, Dr Graham and his colleagues at QUT paid X $7,800
from a grant fund to analyse 1 million tweets surrounding the first
Republican primary debate.
They found the bot problem was worse than ever, Dr Graham said at the time.
Later
studies support this conclusion. Over three days in February,
cybersecurity firm CHEQ tracked the proportion of bot traffic from X to
its clients' websites.
It found
three-quarters of traffic from X was fake, compared to less than 3 per
cent of traffic from each of TikTok, Facebook and Instagram.
"Terry Hughes' experience is an example of what's going on on the platform," Dr Graham said.
"One in 10 likes are from a porn bot, anecdotally."
The rise of a bot-making industry
So what's the point of all these bots? What are they doing?
Crypto
bots drive up demand for certain coins, porn bots get users to pay for
porn websites, disinformation bots peddle fake news, astroturfing bots
give the impression of public support, and so on.
Some bots exist purely to increase the follower counts and engagement statistics of paying customers.
A sign of the scale of X's bot problem is the thriving industry in bot-making.
Bot makers from around the world advertise their services on freelancer websites.
Awais Yousaf, a computer scientist in Pakistan, sells "ChatGPT Twitter bots" for $30 to $500, depending on their complexity.
In
an interview with the ABC, the 27-year-old from Gujranwala said he
could make a "fully fledged" bot that could "like comments on your
behalf, make comments, reply to DMs, or even make engaging content
according to your specification".
Mr Yousaf's career tracks the rise of the bot-making economy and successive cycles of internet hype.
Having
graduated from university five years ago, he joined Pakistan's growing
community of IT freelancers from "very poor backgrounds".
Bot makers advertising services on a freelancer site.(Supplied: Fiverr)
Many of the first customers wanted bots to promote cryptocurrencies, which were booming in popularity at the time.
"Then came the NFT thing," he said.
A few years ago he heard about OpenAI's GPT3 language model and took a three-month break to learn about AI.
"Now, almost 90 per cent of the bots I do currently are related to AI in one way or another.
"It can
be as simple as people posting AI posts regarding fitness, regarding
motivational ideas, or even cryptocurrency predictions."
In five years he's made 120 Twitter bots.
Asked about Mr Musk's promise to "defeat the spam bots," Mr Yousaf smiled.
"It's hard to remove Twitter bots from Twitter because Twitter is mostly bot."
AI-generated spam sites may overwhelm search engines
X's bot problem may be worse than other major platforms, but it's not alone.
A
growing "deluge" of AI content is flooding platforms that were "never
designed for a world where machines can talk with people convincingly",
Dr Graham said.
"It's like you're running a farm and had never heard of a wolf before and then suddenly you have new predators on the scene.
"The platforms have no infrastructure in place. The gates are open."
The past few months have seen several examples of this.
Companies are using AI to rewrite other media outlet's stories, including the ABC's, to then publish them on the company's competing news websites.
A company called Byword claims it stole 3.6 million in "total traffic" from a competitor by copying their site and rewriting 1,800 articles using AI.
"Obituary
pirates" are using AI to create YouTube videos of people summarising
the obituaries of strangers, sometimes fabricating details about their
deaths, in order to capture search traffic.
Authors are reporting what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon.
Google's search results are getting worse due to spam sites, according to a recent pre-print study by German researchers.
The
researchers studies search results for thousands of product-review
terms across Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.
They
found that higher-ranked pages tended to have lower text quality but
were better designed to game the search ranking algorithm.
"Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam," they wrote in the study.
Co-author
Matti Wiegman from Bauhaus University, Weimar said this rankings war
was likely to get much worse with the advent of AI-generated spam.
"What was previously low-quality content is now very difficult to distinguish from high-quality content," he said.
"As
a result, it might become difficult to distinguish between authentic
and trustworthy content that is useful and content that is not."
He added that the long-term effects of AI-generated content on search engines was difficult to judge.
AI-generated content could make search more useful, he said.
"One
possible direction is that generated content will become better than
the low-quality human-made content that dominates some genres in web
search, in which case the search utility will increase."
Or
the opposite will happen. AI-generated content will overwhelm
"vulnerable spaces" such as search engines and "broadcasting-style"
social media platforms like X.
In their place, people may turn to "walled gardens" and specialised forums with smaller numbers of human-only members.
Platforms prepare for coming flood
In response to this emerging problem, platforms are trialling different strategies.
Meta
recently announced it was building tools to detect and label
AI-generated images posted on its Facebook, Instagram and Threads
services.
Amazon
has limited authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store
each day, although authors say that hasn't solved the problem.
X is trialling a "Not a Bot" program in some countries where it charges new users $1 per year for basic features.
This
program operates alongside X's verification system, where users pay $8
per month to have their identity checked and receive a blue tick.
But it appears the bot-makers have found a way around this.
All the reef-tweeting crypto bots Professor Hughes found were verified accounts.
"It's clutter on the platform that's not necessary. You'd wish they'd clean it up," the coral scientist said.
By Middle East correspondent Allyson Horn in Jerusalem and ABC Staff in Gaza
Posted
Maryam and Abdullah were determined to get married despite living in a war zone.(Supplied)
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Maryam
Sayed Deeb and Abdullah Abu Nahl had been planning their wedding for a
year before their lives in Gaza were torn apart by war.
With
millions forced to flee their homes and find safe areas, the couple
initially put their nuptials on hold to focus on survival.
WARNING: Some readers might find the details and images in this story distressing.
But as the months dragged on with no end in sight to the ongoing Israeli bombings, the two decided to marry.
There
are few supplies left in Gaza because of a siege imposed by Israel,
which controls the entry of nearly all goods into the enclave, so the
couple could not hold formal celebrations.
Instead they exchanged vows surrounded by the people they loved most.
Maryam's father, Abed al Salam Sayed Deeb, says it provided the family with a small sliver of hope and joy.
"They were both deeply in love with each other. She loved him, he loved her," Abed says.
"They
decided to get married during the war because you can see the
situation, there is nothing to be happy about. Today, we are alive, we
might die tomorrow.
"So I thought, let me give my daughter to her husband. What was the point of postponing? We wanted them to be happy."
Maryam and Abdullah had been planning their wedding when they put it on hold because of war.(Supplied)
The pair decided to marry on February 15, the day after Valentine's Day, in a small ceremony.
"We congratulated them and we accompanied them to the chalet that was lent [to them] by their friends," Abed says.
"They settled in the chalet. Then, we left back home."
But
just two days after becoming husband and wife, Maryam and Abdullah were
killed in an Israeli air strike on Khirbet al Adas, near the southern
Gaza city of Rafah.
The air strike that tore a family apart
Nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the enclave's Ministry of Health, since the start of the war.
About 1,200 people were killed inside Israel after a Hamas-led attack on the country on October 7.
Maryam and her husband were staying in their friend's chalet when it was hit and destroyed by an Israeli air strike.
Data
collated by the non-governmental and non-profit Armed Conflict Location
& Event Data Project shows there were eight air strikes on and
around Rafah on February 17.
One
of those attacks included an Israeli warplane hitting agricultural land
hosting displaced people in Khirbet al Adas, which killed seven
Palestinians, including a woman and three children.
Maryam's father had exchanged words with his daughter only an hour before she died, after checking in to see how she was doing.
Abed says his daughter loved her husband and he saw no reason in delaying their wedding.(ABC News)
"I asked her whether she was happy. She replied 'yes, thanks to God,'" he says.
"She asked me when I will visit, to which I answered 'tomorrow.'"
But
Maryam did not see her father again. Palestinian authorities say
several other civilians were also killed in the explosion, though
recovering their bodies has been difficult.
The force of the blast was so intense that only debris and small bones remain.
The site of a chalet that was hit and destroyed by an Israeli air strike.(ABC News)
"An hour after the call, I received the news about the chalet being bombed and all the people inside are dead," Abed says.
"I
rushed to the chalet, and I could not find my daughter, nor her
husband. That's all I got, body parts. We don't know who's who."
Since
his daughter's death, Abed has returned to the area around the bomb
site, looking for remnants of his daughter's body to lay to rest.
The couple's remains are yet to be found, which means Maryam and Abdullah can't be buried.
Abed continues to search the site where his daughter was killed for her remains.(ABC News)
"My daughter has died as a martyr, that's a given. Yet, I need to see her dead corpse and hold her, kiss her goodbye," he says.
As
he speaks, he picks a piece of debris up off the ground. He turns it
over in his hand to reveal it is a piece of vertebrae from a spine.
"That's the biggest part of their bodies found so far," Abed says.
He put it in a bucket and takes it to an area a short distance away from the bomb site.
He then digs a small hole, and buries the bone.
"Why is this happening to us? Why are we all soul martyrs?" he says.
"We don't want war. We want nothing. We just want to live a life in dignity and be still alive."
But even in death, Abed can't find dignity for his daughter and his family doesn't understand why the couple were killed.
'She did not have time to be happy'
Maryam was the eldest of 10 children, and the family had fled to Rafah to escape fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
Her mother Ghalia Jomaa Mahmoud Deeb breaks down in tears as she clutches the only possessions she can find of her daughter.
Ghalia went searching for anything to remind her of her daughter and only found her phone and identification papers.(ABC News)
All that is left of Maryam is a broken phone and her identification papers.
"She did not have time to be happy. She was a bride for two days and then she died," she says.
Ghalia is now haunted by what ifs about the future her daughter might have had.
"The groom and bride what did they do? They did nothing wrong," she says.
"My daughter was an A-level student at university, and she had learned the Koran by heart.
"So many innocent civilians died. We cannot stand it anymore."
Before she was married, Maryam handed her sister, Aida Salam Deep Deip, two red roses, plucked from her simple wedding bouquet.
Aida continues to tend to the two roses gifted by her sister before she died.(ABC News)
"That's the last gift my sister bought me," Aida says.
"When she left, I hugged her [and] she was happy. She was so happy to get married."
Despite
having little drinkable water, Aida changes the water of the roses
every day, hoping to keep them alive as long as possible.
"Each time I look at the flowers, I remember her."
Maryam was the eldest of 10 children in her family and had big dreams for the future.(Supplied)
The resignation of Mohammad Shtayyeh and his government could open the door to US-backed reforms in the Palestinian Authority.(Reuters: James Oatway)
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Palestinian
Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh says his government is resigning, in a
move that could open the door to US-backed reforms in the Palestinian
Authority.
President Mahmoud Abbas must still decide whether he accepts Mr Shtayyeh and his government's resignation, tendered on Monday.
But
the move signals a willingness by the Western-backed Palestinian
leadership to accept a shake-up that might usher in reforms seen as
necessary to revitalise the Palestinian Authority.
The
US wants a reformed Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza once the war
is over. But many obstacles remain to making that vision a reality.
"The
next stage and its challenges require new governmental and political
arrangements that take into account the new reality in the Gaza Strip,"
Mr Shtayyeh said at a cabinet meeting.
Mr Abbas is expected to choose Mohammad Mustafa, chairman of the Palestine Investment Fund, as the next prime minister.
