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As high-tech firms have begun taking stepsto weed out some of the most offensive right-wing hate groups, alternative social network Gab has seen a surge in donations to its crowdfunding campaign as it plays up its anti-Silicon Valley crusade.

Today, Gab passed $1 million raised. That includes almost $500,000 in just the last five days. And Gab isnt being coy about its feeling towards Silicon Valley giants.

The founders of the site insist that its a neutral, free-speech platform that is trying to build an advertising-free business. In its fundraising material, it highlights the fact that 50 percent of the top social networking apps are owned by Facebook, and that a handful of Silicon Valley companies wield enormous control over content on the internet.

It also stresses that with the rise of ad blockers, advertising-driven business models are problematic.

While the site claims to be politically neutral, it was started by Andrew Torba, an outspoken Trump supporter who was kicked off the Y Combinator alumni network last year for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders.

Torba claimed it was politically motivated, and had already launched Gab.ai as an alternative social network. This summer, the company began a crowdfunding campaign on Startengine, which allows startups to register and sell shares in their companies. Gabs logo, a smiling frog, seems to reference the Pepe the Frog image that is a favorite meme of some right-wing hate groups.

Gabs crowdfunding campaign seems to have benefited greatly from a one-two punch of events that have energized right-wing groups.

The first was Googles firing of James Damore, the engineer who wrote the controversial diversity memo. The second was the violence surrounding the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville last weekend that resulted in the death of one counterprotester. The ensuing controversy over President Trumps remarks has also continued to bring attention to the site.

Andrew Anglin, founder of neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer, has turned to Gab over the past couple of days as a platform of last report. Stormer appears to be offline again after several attempts to find a new registrarfailedfollowing its expulsion from GoDaddy. After moving to a Russian domain name, the site was taken down by at the request of a Russian agency which said that as a neo-Nazi site, Stormer violated laws against extremism.

So for now, Anglin said he would post articles on Gab as screen shots until he can find another solution:

Meanwhile, Torba took to Periscope today to celebrate the fundraising milestone, and said Gab will soon launch its own cryptocurrency to hold an Initial Coin Offering:

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/898238706489872385

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Amid Silicon Valley crackdown on alt-right, Gab social network raises $1 million via crowdfunding - VentureBeat

Martinsson Serg/ Flickr

Russias most popular social network VK is hosting the neo-Nazi group Daily Stormer even after the far-right website was blocked in Russia and the group was kicked off Twitter.

The neo-Nazi group in recent days was booted from Google, GoDaddy, Cloudfare and Twitter for publishing a derogatory article on Heather Heyer who died protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in the United States.

The head of Russias internet watchdog Alexander Zharov told the Interfax news agency on Thursday he had asked the company providing Daily Stormers Russian domain to stop servicing the website.

The Daily Stormer propagandizes a neo-Nazi ideology, inciting racial, national and other social hatred, Zharov told Interfax.

The group is still active however on Russias leading social networking website VK, the Russian equivalent of Facebook.

The Daily Stormers page dates to April 11, when the group uploaded a profile picture of a Nazi eagle towering over a skull.

It was mostly dormant until Aug. 15 when a post appeared announcing: Daily Stormer is now available only by Tor Browser. Google has seized our domain name.

A day later it announced: "back on the normie web, with a .ru domain, providing a link to the website which is now blocked.

The last post appeared Wednesday evening saying: Cloudfare just dropped us. Well have to build an alternative.

The page has 249 members and most have Russian names. It contains several images that depict Nazi symbolism, including a picture of a swastika and the text: White Power.

Russian law explicitly forbids Nazi imagery and Russians have previously been convicted on extremism charges of promoting Nazi symbolism after sharing pictures on VK.

In one high-profile case, a Russian journalist was fined for sharing a photograph of Nazi troops in her neighborhood during the World War II occupation of the city.A Russian man in 2012 was also convicted for sharing images of the film American History X.

Responding to a request from The Moscow Times, VKs press service said: VK does not block communities only because of the fact that other services have blocked pages with similar names.

It also said pages that violated Russian laws or called for violence or bullying would be blocked.

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Daily Stormer Still Active on Russia's Largest Social Network VK - The Moscow Times

President Donald Trump is close to making a decision to elevate the status of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, signaling more emphasis on developing cyber weapons to deter attacks, punish intruders and tackle adversaries, current and former officials told Reuters on Thursday.

A current U.S. official, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump could make a decision as early as Friday. The official added that the timeline could be pushed back if the White House was dealing with more pressing issues.

The Pentagon and White House declined to comment.

Two former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the plan said that the proposal awaiting Trump's approval would elevate Cyber Command and lead to a 60-day study to determine whether Cyber Command would be separated from the National Security Agency, a spy agency responsible for electronic eavesdropping.

That would lead to Cyber Command becoming what the military called a "unified command," equal to combat branches of the military such as the Central and Pacific Commands.

It would give Cyber Command leaders a larger voice in arguing for the use of both offensive and defensive cyber tools in future conflicts.

Currently, the NSA and Cyber Command organizations are based at Fort Meade, Md., about 30 miles north of Washington, and led by the same officer, Navy Admiral Michael Rogers.

NSA's focus is gathering intelligence, officials said, often favoring the monitoring of an enemy's cyber activities. Cyber Command's mission is geared more to shutting down cyber attacks and, if ordered, counter attacking.

The NSA director has been a senior military officer since the agency's founding in 1952. Under the plan, future directors would be civilians, an arrangement meant to underscore that NSA is not subordinate to Cyber Command.

Established in 2010, Cyber Command is now subordinate to the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees military space operations, nuclear weapons and missile defense.

See more here:
Trump Considering a Big Change for US Cyber Command - Fortune

The Augusta National Security Agency leak suspect will get to review classified information federal prosecutors might use against her during her upcoming espionage trial.

In an supplemental protective order signed by U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Brian K. Epps on Wednesday, both sides have agreed to the procedure which will allow Reality Leigh Winner to access evidence the prosecutors may use to prove she committed the crime of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.

Winner, 25, has pleaded not guilty. She has been held without bond since her June 3 arrest in which federal agents armed with a search warrant raided her Battle Row rental home. The search was brought on by a federal investigation launched after a National Security Agency official was approached by a reporter seeking to authenticate a national security document.

The prosecutors contend Winner accessed and copied a classified document through her job with the National Security Agency contractor Pluribus International Corp., at Fort Gordon. Winner, who served in the Air Force for six years as a linguist specializing in Middle Eastern languages, had a top security clearance.

In the order Epps signed this week, Winner will be held to the obligations of her security clearance. She can face further prosecution if she releases any classified information she may learn through the discovery materials in her case. She may see any document that is deemed unclassified or is specifically marked by federal prosecutors as authorized for disclosure to Reality Leigh Winner. That material is expected to include intelligence reporting, network audit logs of U.S. government agency, FBI interview reports including Winners own interview, and correspondence of contractors from May 24 to June 1.

Although federal prosecutors insist the document Winner allegedly leaked is classified, The Intercept online news media produced an in-depth report on a classified document it received this summer that is an analysis of the extent of Russias tampering efforts during the latest presidential election.

Winners trial is tentatively set to begin the week of Oct. 23.

Reach Sandy Hodson at sandy.hodson@augustachronicle.com or (706) 823-3226

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Accused NSA leaker will get to see classified evidence in her espionage prosecution - The Augusta Chronicle

Amazon wants its Alexa digital voice assistant integrated into more devices.

But in order to do this, it needs help from third-party hardware makers. Thats why the company debuted new software on Thursday that is intended to make it easier for device manufactures to embed Alexa in their products.

Our vision is for Alexa to be everywhere, said Priya Abani, Amazons director and general manager of Alexa voice services. We are not going to manufacture every single device on the face of the Earth.

Amazon is pushing Alexa, the brains inside Amazon's Echo Internet-connected speaker, as one of the key elements in electronic devices of the future. The company's ambitions, however, face a stiff challenge from competing digital voice assistants like Apples ( aapl ) Siri and Google ( goog ) Assistant.

Amazon's new open source, or free, software toolkit builds on past efforts to encourage manufactures to add Alexa to their products. Previously, Amazon released its Alexa Voice Service (AVS) that connects its voice-recognition software, hosted in the company's cloud data centers, to devices in addition to introducing hardware toolkits and blueprints that companies could use to help build their Alexa-integrated products.

But despite those efforts, companies still had to manually modify software installed on their devices before those products could connect properly. The latest push, called AVS Device Software Development Kit, eliminates that step and, therefore, makes Alexa more attractive to integrate and, potentially, clears the path to creating better Alexa-based products, Abani explained.

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Some of third-party Alexa-based products offer customers an experience that isnt what end-users were expecting," Abani acknowledged.

Alexa's failure to recognize a user's voice or follow through on a command on a third-party devices risk tarnishing Amazon's reputation and prompting manufacturers to switch to integrating competing voice assistants instead. Providing Amazon-sanctioned software to outside hardware makers to install and build on top of could make Alexa function more smoothly on more third-party products.

Amazon said that over 50 companies are already using the new software toolkit on their devices, including entertainment and communications technology company Technicolor, which embedded Alexa into its modems and other home networking gear. People who own the devices can use their voices to configure their home networks.

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This Is Amazon's Latest Effort to Get Alexa Into More Devices - Fortune