Russian Advertising Infrastructure in Hungarian Pro-Government Media
Yandex holds direct advertising access to 23 Hungarian news sites. Every one is pro-government. Not one independent outlet in the sample carries a Yandex entry. This report documents the infrastructure. It establishes that the capability exists and was deliberately built.
The synthetic journalist problem
Most of the debate around AI and information manipulation focuses on deepfakes of real people. But the more significant long-term risk is not synthetic versions of real people. It is synthetic people who never existed at all. A fake journalist has no original photograph to match against. There is no thread to pull.
When AI becomes a vector for information manipulation
LLMs trained on poisoned corpora are the next frontier. What builders and researchers need to know to defend the information space before the next election cycle.
I built a comic book app for my father-in-law
Most of what I build is designed to expose something uncomfortable. So this is a different kind of post. My father-in-law has a bande dessinée collection. A serious one. At some point the question became: which albums does he already have? I built something to answer it.
How to catch influence operation domains before they publish anything
Influence operation infrastructure leaves traces at every stage: when the domain is registered, when it is parked, when the WordPress install goes live, when the first SSL certificate is issued. A heuristic is a testable hypothesis about one of those traces. The interesting work is in chaining them.
In The Open
Publishing everything is the answer to platforms that question your methodology instead of your findings, to states that adapt faster than the research community, to institutions that would prefer the data stayed private. This blog is about the work, the method, and why doing it in the open is not idealism, it is the only approach that holds.