WHAT WE KNOW(SALT report) – Size. An armed individual, self-proclaimed as an ISIS-affiliated operative, wearing a military fatigue, driving a rented pick-up truck packed with explosives (meant to be a VBIED[1]).
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On January 1, 2025, former US Army soldier Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar drove a pickup truck on Bourbon Street, in the heart of New Orleans, killing 14 people and injuring 35 more. According to Lyonel Myrthil, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent, Jabbar had visited the city twice prior to the attack.
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Mimicking a Moral Course for LLMs. The first way to stem LLMs from a conversation driving to inappropriate content are the so-called “guardrail messages,” as “I’m sorry, I cannot generate inappropriate or offensive content” or “As a large language model, I cannot … ”.
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2024 ends in the echo of the Magdeburg attack, a reminder of the gaps and weaknesses security agencies face when trying to combat terrorism. Earlier in December, the European Council acknowledged that “terrorism and violent extremism, as well as radicalisation, continue to pose a significant threat to the European Union and its Member States” and recognised how “destabilising internal and external events, such as Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, have heightened the terrorism threat level in some Member States and contributed to the intensification of radicalisation and social polarisation, potentially leading to terrorism and violent extremism across the Union”.
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A Noisy Digital Environment as a Biased Dataset. As previously analyzed, human language in public and political debates impacts not only how individuals form opinions but also how AI systems, including LLMs, interact with users and further shape political discourse.
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Since October 2024, ITSTIME has been monitoring and analysing the presence of pro-Islamic State (IS) propaganda content on the TikTok application. The research undertaken made it possible to initially identify more than 180 seed accounts, which were used to reconstruct a network of more than 140,000 users.
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L’attentato ai mercatini di Natale di Magdeburgo di qualche giorno fa non introduce grandi novità nell’ambito della definizione di un nuovo tipo di terrorismo e innovative forme di estremismo.
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Taleb Al Abdulmohsen: saudita in Germania ma ostile all’immigrazione, arabo ma sionista, con background musulmano ma profondamente islamofobo, contrario all’oltranzismo religioso jihadista ma attentatore con modalità analoghe, ovvero il cosiddetto vehicle-ramming, l’auto lanciata a tutta velocità sulla folla.
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Lunedì 16 dicembre 2024, la quindicenne Natalie Rupnow – conosciuta con lo pseudonimo Samantha – ha commesso una sparatoria presso la Abundant Life Christian School a Madison (Wisconsin, Stati Uniti d’America), uccidendo una compagna di scuola, un insegnante e ferendo sei ragazzi, prima di togliersi la vita.
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The Human Touch in LLMs.
As previously analyzed, LLMs represent a significant step toward human-like AI interaction. While they lack true understanding, they learn to associate words and interpret meaning through data analysis.
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Although many in the West associate the Middle East as being the main source of jihadism, deaths due to terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa have outpaced those in the Middle East for the past several years.
Continue reading At the 14th Illicit Network Workshop hosted by the University of Leiden, ITSTIME presented findings from its study: “Navigating Beyond the Digital Safe Haven: Mapping the Course of Salafi-Jihadi Online Movements Outside Rocket.Chat Through URL Social Network Analysis (SNA)”.
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