Matthew Chapman is a video game designer who attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lives in San Marcos, Texas. Before joining Raw Story, he wrote for Shareblue and AlterNet, specializing in election and policy coverage.
On Monday, The Daily Beast documented an elaborate Middle Eastern propaganda scheme that tricked a number of right-leaning websites into publishing articles from nonexistent national security "experts."
The scheme, wrote Adam Rawnsley, included "a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon."
One such fake persona, wrote Rawnsley, was "Raphael Badani."
"As a Newsmax 'Insider' columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a 'geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer' and an 'international relations senior analyst' for the Department of Labor have given him plenty of insights about the Middle East. He’s printed those insights at a range of conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, and The National Interest. Unfortunately for the outlets who published his articles and the readers who believed them, Raphael Badani does not exist."
In addition, some right-wing personalities have promoted these articles on social media, including Students for Trump co-founder Ryan Fournier:
Here’s the truth about Qatar…
Qatar funnels money to radical Islamists
Qatar fuels anti-Semitism
Qatar buys Amer… https://t.co/96rWDIXG5g
According to the report, Twitter "suspended Badani’s account along with 15 others after The Daily Beast shared the results of its investigation into the network for violating the company’s 'policies on platform manipulation and spam.'"
Anyone who bought shares of President Donald Trump's Truth Social parent company late last week is seriously hurting right now, as they have lost roughly a third of their value in just the last five days.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, however, believes that the crash of Truth Social shares was entirely predictable given the past ways that past Trump business ventures have ended.
"Not for the first time, Trump has played his supporters for suckers," he argues in his latest piece. "In a sense, what he did with Trump Media was just a variation on what he does to his supporters every day, whether convincing them to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles and sneakers, or selling them on election lies and white nationalism."
Milbank says that Trump's fans at his recent rally in Wisconsin showed him unwavering devotion of the kind that made him believe they would happily "invest hard-earned money in a worthless company" like the Truth Social parent company.
What's more, Milbank says, Trump seems more than happy to oblige them "by selling them one self-interested swindle after another."
The column then takes a darker tone by zeroing in on Trump's rhetoric about migrants, whom he referred to as "animals" this week who are "country-changing, country-threatening and they’re country-wrecking."
As if to put a fine point on it, Trump added that migrants are "destroying our country."
This leads Milbank to conclude that hawking Bibles, sneakers, and Truth Social shares are actually the more benevolent aspects of Trump's scams.
"Watching Trump sell his swindle about migrants, it occurred to me that those suckered by the Trump Media IPO got a better deal, relatively speaking," he explained. "Those who bought 'DJT' shares lost only their shirts. But those who have been snookered into seeing migrants as diseased animals have lost part of their souls."
If you’ve looked in your utility drawer lately, you may have noticed the various shapes, sizes and types of batteries that power your electronic devices. First, there are the round, non-rechargeable button cells for your watches and small items. There’s also the popular AA and AAA cylindrical batteries for calculators, clocks and remotes. Then you have the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in your laptops and phones. And don’t forget about the lead-acid battery in your car.
The first batteries were made in the 1800s, and they were quite simple. One of the first demonstrations was a series of metal discs soaked in brine, which Italian scientist Alessandro Volta found created an electric current. The first lead-acid battery was made of a few pieces of lead in a jar of sulfuric acid. The modern versions are not that different. They’re just easier to manufacture and contain various additives to improve performance.
In all cases, batteries perform in the same manner: a voltage difference between two dissimilar electrodes produces an electric current, which can be discharged to power a device. Rechargeable batteries can then reverse this current to charge back up. Inside the battery, the electric current is accompanied by the flow of ions through a liquid, the electrolyte.
The passage of each electron in the current is accompanied by the transport of one ion through the electrolyte. Electrodes that can store more ions lead to batteries that can hold more charge and therefore last longer on a single charge. Electrodes that are engineered for faster ion storage lead to batteries that can discharge faster, for high-power applications. Lastly, being able to charge and discharge many times without degrading leads to batteries with long lifetimes.
Lead-acid batteries
The lead-acid battery was the first rechargeable battery invented back in 1859 by Gaston Plante, who experimented with lead plates in an acidic solution and found that the flow and storage of electric current could be reversed.
A lead-acid battery has to be big enough to provide enough charge to start a car. It also has to be usable in cold climates and last many years. Since the electrolyte is a corrosive acid, the external casing has to be tough to protect people and car parts from any possible harm. Knowing all this, it makes sense that modern lead-acid batteries are blocky and heavy.
Alkaline batteries
On the other hand, household devices like calculators and digital scales can afford to use smaller batteries because they don’t require a lot of charge. These are primarily non-rechargeable alkaline batteries that have been used for decades. The standardized cell sizes are AAAA, AAA, AA, C and D, as well as button and coin cells and many others. The sizes are related to how much charge they store – the bigger the battery, the more it holds – and the sizes of the devices they power.
Sometimes, you may find alkaline batteries sold in rectangular shapes, like common 9-volt batteries, but open the outer casing and you’ll find that they are simply a few cylindrical cells connected together inside. Cylindrical batteries have been around so long and used so widely that it just doesn’t make sense for the companies to manufacture anything different – it would require an investment to change their manufacturing facilities, something they’d rather not do.
Are 9-volt batteries as different from AAA batteries as you think? Take a look inside.
Lithium ion batteries
Nickel-cadmium batteries were the first widely used rechargeable batteries for household electronics and were popular through the end of the 20th century. But they had their pitfalls. Cadmium is very toxic, and the batteries suffered from a “memory effect,” which decreased their lifetime.
For many decades, lithium was studied for potential use in rechargeable batteries because of its unique properties as a lightweight metal that stores a lot of energy. Sony first commercialized the lithium-ion battery in 1991.
The company made cylindrical cells because these were the easiest to manufacture. In the 1990s, Sony was making lots of camcorders and tapes, and thus had lots of equipment for roll-to-roll manufacturing. It was natural to repurpose this equipment to produce rolls of battery electrodes, which are made by casting films on sheets of copper or aluminum and then rolling them up into a “jelly roll” cylinder.
Cylindrical batteries are made of many thin layers rolled up like a jelly roll. OpenStax/Wikimedia, CC BY
The thick casing of these cylindrical cells is mechanically strong, and to add another layer of safety they have a pressure relief valve. Very quickly, these early lithium-ion cells took over the portable electronics market, especially for laptops and cellphones, because they stored more energy and lasted longer than the nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries.
Factors that shape batteries
Batteries are made in certain sizes and shapes for reasons of cost and manufacturability, but in other cases because of legacy manufacturing processes. Market demand also plays a role.
For example, electric vehicles didn’t take off until Tesla started making cars using cylindrical lithium-ion battery cells rather than the rectangular pouch or prismatic cells other EV makers have used. Pouch and prismatic cells can be packed closely together, but because cylindrical cells were already being mass-produced for portable electronics, Tesla was able to make lower-cost EVs in the 2010s.
What shapes and sizes batteries will take in the future depends not only on how much energy they store, but also on market economics – how easy it is to make each type of cell, how much it costs to make them and what they’re used for. And those factors are a mix of innovation and history.
Facebook and Instagram giant Meta on Friday said it will begin labeling AI-generated media beginning in May, as it tries to reassure users and governments over the risks of deepfakes.
The social media juggernaut added that it will no longer remove manipulated images and audio that don't otherwise break its rules, relying instead on labeling and contextualization, so as to not infringe on freedom of speech.
The changes come as a response to criticism from the tech giant's oversight board, which independently reviews Meta's content moderation decisions.
The board in February requested that Meta urgently overhaul its approach to manipulated media given the huge advances in AI and the ease of manipulating media into highly convincing deepfakes.
The board's warning came amid fears of rampant misuse of artificial intelligence-powered applications for disinformation on platforms in a pivotal election year not only in the United States but worldwide.
Meta’s new "Made with AI" labels will identify content created or altered with AI, including video, audio, and images. Additionally, a more prominent label will be used for content deemed at high risk of misleading the public.
"We agree that providing transparency and additional context is now the better way to address this content," Monika Bickert, Meta’s Vice President of Content Policy, said in a blog post.
"The labels will cover a broader range of content in addition to the manipulated content that the Oversight Board recommended labeling," she added.
These new labeling techniques are linked to an agreement made in February among major tech giants and AI players to crack down on manipulated content intended to deceive voters.
Meta, Google and OpenAI had already agreed to use a common watermarking standard that would tag images generated by their AI applications.
Meta said its rollout will occur in two phases with AI-generated content labeling beginning in May 2024, while the removal of manipulated media solely based on the old policy will cease in July.
According to the new standard, content, even if manipulated with AI, will remain on the platform unless it violates other Community Standards, such as those prohibiting hate speech or voter interference.
Recent examples of convincing AI deepfakes have only heightened worries about the easily accessible technology.
The board's list of requests was part of its review of Meta's decision to leave a manipulated video of US President Joe Biden online last year.
The video showed Biden voting with his adult granddaughter, but was manipulated to falsely appear that he inappropriately touched her chest.
In a separate incident, a robocall impersonation of Biden pushed out to tens of thousands of voters urged people to not cast ballots in the New Hampshire primary.
In Pakistan, the party of former prime minister Imran Khan has used AI to generate speeches from their jailed leader.